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There is something I really like in this Ygeslias article. Whatever is causing more partisan politics it’s not the economy. We’ve done well the past few years.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/how-obama-and-trump-and-biden-beat
Macroeconomic management has been actually really good the last 15 years. Someone can argue we could have had a few million more people employed between 2010-1016, but that’s like 2% of gdp. Trump did close that gap and I’m not sure if he was brilliant or lucky but he yelled at the Fed for being too hawkish.
I like how he led with the shale Revolution. I’ve been saying this for years. Tech gets all the fan fare but if Tech was the Jordan of the economy American energy independence over this time frame was the Scottie Pippen in creating wealth for America. I think part of the reason it doesn’t get the fanfare is because it doesn’t create 12 figure networth people. Its a constant costs business versus moat building business. Of course if the businesses are not as profitable then the surplus value went to consumers in the form of lower energy costs versus companies having high margins. Also likely led to America not needing to write giant checks to the Saudis which meant our trade deficit could fund other things and those depend more on price leading to the strong dollar. People working in constant-costs businesses (farming, manufacturing, energy) tend to vote red; people working in wide moat with ability to extract economic rents or winner take all markets tend to vote blue. Someday I should write a long article on this because I have not seen anyone write about it. But the split in voting patterns makes a lot of sense based on the economics of their business. It would even make sense to have different tax regimes for these businesses but would be impossibly hard to execute. As a driver of political views it seems as powerful as male-female splits which seems a lot more talked about.
I think maga and the left like to cite American wealth not making it to the middle class etc. But honestly this much wealth creation can’t just be consumed by the 1% it pretty much has to flow to others. Perhaps, the middle class isn’t doing as well as we want them to be doing but the counter factual (Europe) would be poorer than what we got.
The GDP numbers are more pronounced because we calculate things in currencies and the cited figures were when the dollar was weak. The gap has definitely shifted in favor of the US but I do think this overstates the change.
The Tea Party seems underrated to me. They put a halt to more government spending. Less fiscal policy meant the fed could keep rates lower which basically crowded-in private investment in tech and shale and a host of things with cheap money. The current situation is the opposite of this where we increased federal spending from about 20.5% last decade to 24% now. And that’s caused a massive change in rates to get inflation close to target.
Culture Wars seem to have little to do with economic mismanagement by either side. I think the right is correct that the fall of small towns is bad but I think that largely came from economic forces (like productivity) gains that couldn’t be prevented. And there small towns have also been hurt by the people (probably like myself) who would be logical local elites moving away.
As much as national divorce or something always sound appealing it’s just going to make us all poorer. To break up economic integration would make our economy much more like Europe. We would run into something like Brussels that is ineffective at macro management and lose the economy of scale.
Shale was a major mistake by the US. Shale oil is short lived compared to conventional oil with high decline rates and is expensive to extract. The shale boom will not be a long term solution. Shale caused a 10-20 year boom which will be followed by a decline. Meanwhile, the US is missing valuable years transitioning away from fossil fuels. The world is building public transit and high speed rail at record rates, the US is investing in short term shale oil as its long term energy solution. Cheap natural gas has allowed for construction of energy inefficient buildings and a lack of investment in efficient heating/cooling systems. The US is seriously lagging behind in walkable and bikeable cities due to cheap gas. Even when it comes to electric vehicles the US is somewhat behind
As for the energy grid, the US is lagging behind in nuclear with an older fleet of reactors than Europe and only 1 of 60 reactors planned for construction in the world are in the US. The US is lagging behind in renewables, and overall investments in the energy transition
The shale boom absolutely benefited the US. However, other parts of the world have ripped of a sizeable chunk of the bandaid regarding getting off fossil fuels.
The same entities that oppose shale also make nuclear expensive and hydro and everything. While there are some genuine green activists that would be happy with decarbonization, there are many more who use that as an excuse for the real goal of de-electrification.
As someone who considers themselves a green activist, de-electrification isn't really the goal per se.
The problem is that the cut-off date for a smooth, clean and orderly transition away from using fossil fuels is the far-off future of...1974. De-electrification isn't a goal anymore than having a car stop when it runs out of gas is a goal. There's no energy source that can take the place of petroleum and fossil fuels - nothing has the massive amounts of existing infrastructure, body of knowledge, energy density and EROEI to take their place, and the costs of retrofitting our society with the technology required to maintain current living standards with the far lower energy budget that renewables provide are so massive that it would not be possible from within the constraints of the current society.
Shale in particular is a really bad idea, because it has incredibly high depletion rates, lower EROEI than regular crude and causes substantial environmental damage. Those costs might not show up on a fracking company's balance sheet, but those consequences will show up elsewhere in society, in the form of less usable farmland, medical issues, water-pollution, etc. The main reason that shale looks good at the moment is the combination of unaccounted externalities, incredibly low interest rates/money-printing and a paucity of conventional light, sweet crude. This isn't a case of the environmentalists just wanting less electricity usage because civilisation is bad, but more along the lines of pointing out that eating the seed corn is actually a bad idea rather than a brand new strategy that older people were too dumb to see the benefits of, even if you have a new accounting system which claims that there's nothing wrong with eating said seed corn.
Even if I took all of your post as sincere and true, I'd still be running into confusion as to why the environmental movement has caused nuclear to 10x in price, inflation adjusted. The confusion isn't, "why does this particular person dislike shale?" It is, "why does the general movement of people who dislike shale also dislike nuclear?"
You appear to have a specific view on shale that is far more specific and niche than 99.99% of people who oppose shale could ever express. I like shale because it is an avenue that circumvents the anti-energy caucus for now. I am in favor of all cheap energy, hydro, coal, oil, shale, etc. As long as it foils the anti-energy people, and keeps us advancing towards a day where energy is actually sustainable, I am good. The people who think they can force it via regulation are evil or naive. So called "green" energy is already overinvested, and mostly rubbish.
@Amadan
I was asked to volunteer mod/rate this post even though it was a reply to me from someone I was actively debating. I marked it as neutral, but this seems like unwanted behavior that could be ripe for abuse and I wanted to report it. (sorry for the ping anti dan)
Yeah, it's not ideal, and I want to fix it, we just haven't gotten around to it yet.
I am sort of entertained by it because it's a good way to tell if someone can separate a bad post from someone they're disagreeing with. Kind of tempted to make it more likely, not less likely.
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Actually @ZorbaTHut would be the one to ping. I don't think this is a big deal, personally - yeah, someone might occasionally get asked to volunteer-mod a post that was arguing with him, but even if you always chose "Yes, definitely bad!" you aren't the only one looking at it, and mods have final say, so there's not that much opportunity to game the system.
(fwiw, I think @anti_dan is being more hostile than necessary, with the thinly-veiled implication that you are being insincere and disingenuous, but I don't think it rises to the level of requiring a mod warning. This time.)
To be clear. I was not implying that, I was instead conveying that his viewpoint appears to be so rare in the general meatspace that it is hard to engage with unless he lays out a 10000 word manifesto explaining all his theories causes and effects, etc.
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