As soon as pigmentation trumps argumentation, we're all in trouble.

From Four Thoughts on Trump's "Mexican" Judge Remarks by Charles Lipson. Lipson's first three points are the obvious ones such as ethnicity has no place in the discourse of ideas and pursuit of truth.

He finishes with the fourth point which I think is part of the circumstances which has brought Trump so far. Our corrupt political class has too long been firmly in the thrall of our bankrupt public intellectuals out of the Frankfurt school with their postmodernism, critical theory, critical race theory, gender theory etc.

It is rich -- truly rich -- to see the same people who have turned the country into a festival of divisive identity politics shocked, shocked to see their arguments used against them. For years, they have mocked our country’s ideal of a "melting pot," sneered at our country's motto, "E Pluribus Unum."

Fashionable academics have been drum majors in this dismal parade. It began with a critique of Western scholars who study the Middle East. Only Muslims from the region, the critics asserted, can truly understand its politics and how hateful the West truly is. They likened serious, thoughtful scholars to colonial oppressors, saying Westerners didn’t have the right identity or credibility to comment on “their issues.”

One hears the same about whites discussing social and political issues affecting the problems of our urban cores, as if the social pathologies are too obscure to understand or somehow impolite for outsiders to notice. The same arguments have been used to exclude men from discussing issues of sex discrimination and assaults against women. Of course, personal experience can enrich and deepen one's understanding of complex issues. Sharing those experiences can help others understand them, too. But the conversation should be open to everyone, subject to the usual rules of evidence and argumentation. Nobody owns exclusive rights to discuss these questions. Nobody.

As soon as pigmentation trumps argumentation, we're all in trouble. That’s exactly where we are now, sinking in the quicksand of divisive identity politics. Donald Trump's noxious comments illustrate the problem. They should teach us the pernicious effects of judging people -- and presuming their views -- based on who they are, not on what they say and do.

The vested interests, ideological mutants and crony elite wish to shut up the citizenry to keep them from pointing out the nonsense being mooted about by the academy and the advocacy groups. It is all incompatible with both the culture, the tradition and the ethos of the United States. The coercive elite is being pushed back by the governed who no longer consent to put up with the tendentious nonsense.

Four years ago the system provided us with the choice of a decent man with notable and exceptional accomplishments in personal and public life, exceptionally generous and civic minded, family life above fault, intelligent, experienced. We would have to go back to the founding of the Republic to find someone of such capability and qualification. But the worst political class ever, the vested interests, crony capitalists, corrupt advocates and authoritarian ideologists in the press and in Washington managed to shield the child of the inner beltway and turned away the possible Cincinnatus.

The electorate has turned, Gozer-like, on the political class and their enablers in the media and academy and said, as in the original Ghostbusters, "Choose! Choose the form of the Destructor!" The electorate has presented the insiders with the Destructor from their own id, Trump. The destructor who cares not a whit about the niceties of convention, civility, and ideological protocols. Who is unbound by the forms and customs of the coercive postmodernists. Who speaks the unspeakable. What a Destructor.

The last cycle we had the opportunity to choose an accomplished, honest paragon whose mere rectitude threatened the comfort of the political class, media, and academy. Provoked, the electorate in its best Gozer impersonation has now unleashed the Voluble Destructor on the system of privileges and immunities shielding the insiders. We can only hope the benefit of disrupting and sidelining the authoritarian ideologues, postmodernists, critical race theorists, crony capitalists, vested interests, etc. will outweigh the chaos of Trump.

And this too shall pass.

Large pools of isolated knowledge and perspective

We think of the world as incredibly connected. A corollary is that, with all that connection, information spreads like oil and inaccurate information will get vetted quickly. That logical assumption is daily undermined by tired old advocacy memes that were never true in the first place but which, zombie like, stagger on spreading carrion and disgust.

A couple of days ago, I came across a striking example of the discontinuousness of information dissemination. From Facebook Appears To Think This Picture Of A Horse Is Porn And Won’t Let Us Share It by Ryan Broderick and Jules Darmanin. The example hinges on a fairly bizarre picture.

Nominally the story is about a bizarre internet meme based on a weird picture that Facebook is censoring.

Yesterday, we wrote about this viral horse picture. If you’ve been on the internet in the last few years, chances are you’ve seen a tweet or a Tumblr post or SOMETHING about this horse picture.

Before yesterday, here’s what we’ve knew about it: It’s French and it’s super fucking weird.

It’s been viewed more than a million times on Imgur, and it’s all over Reddit, like here and here.

[snip]

This weird French horse is everywhere and no one knew where it came from!

Well, BuzzFeed France was able to get a copy of the original book the picture came from, which is called L’imagerie du poney et du cheval or Images of Ponies and Horses. It was published by a company called Fleurus. It was part of a collection of children’s books.

Well, yes. All pretty weird.

But here was what caught my attention vis-a-vis the discontinuity of information flow in a near universally connected world.

The book was published in 1998 and it’s sold about 20,000 copies every year and it was even rereleased in France in 2013. AND NO ONE EVER MENTIONED HOW FUCKING WEIRD IT IS. The publisher told BuzzFeed that no one ever even sent a letter about it.

“Obviously, we never wanted to shock our readers with that drawing,” a Fleurus spokesperson told BuzzFeed.

“We publish educational books and make realistic or explanatory illustrations. In that case, our goal was to make the child visually comprehend that the bone structure of the horse and the human being are similar,” they said. “Putting them in the same position makes the likening more understandable and concrete.”

“If this picture can be misinterpreted and thus be shocking, we will change it for the next reprint of the book, scheduled for next September,” the spokesperson said.

Holding aside the psychology that immediately sees the lewd in a children's book illustrating the bone structure (and yes, I see how people can view it that way), there is another matter that is the striking thing to me. The book has been in circulation in France for nearly twenty years, has been rereleased once and is scheduled to be rereleased a second time, sells 20,000 copies a year and it elicits not a single comment to the publisher in its home country. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, it circulates far and wide, for much of that time generating laughter and mockery.

That means that for some perhaps five or ten years, there was some large population, likely in the millions, laughing at the illustration while there was another large population, also likely in the hundreds of thousands or millions, viewing the same image from an entirely different, educational perspective, and in all that time, those two Venn diagrams never materially intersected. At least, did not intersect to the point of someone from one Venn circle raising the alternate view to those in the other Venn circle.

Yes, people's world views are notably disinclined to change. Yes, this is a Buzzfeed article and therefore has a reasonably low journalistic quality quotient. Yes, perhaps the French publisher spokesperson might be exaggerating in saying that no one ever brought the picture to their attention.

Still, I suspect that there is enough true here to prompt speculation. I have read a reasonable amount of research about the connectedness of the internet, six degrees of connection, network theory, etc. I can't call to mind ever having read any research on the dynamics that keep pools of knowledge isolated from one another. We just assume, or at least I do, that with the potential for connection, actual connection will naturally flow. This example suggests that that assumption might be ill-founded.

What are the circumstances and dynamics which keep accessible knowledge pools with many members from connecting?

Knowledge - Descriptive ecologists and prescriptive engineers

An interesting observation from Economics and the Pretense of Knowledge by David S. D’Amato.

Following journalist Greg Ip, Kling categorizes economists into two groups: “ecologists” and “engineers.” The engineers try to “steer” the economy by employing mathematical models as tools. The ecologists, by contrast, are skeptics; they are reluctant to generalize from discrete data sets and mathematical equations. As Friedrich Hayek put it in his Nobel Prize lecture “The Pretense of Knowledge,” these economists are distrustful of the tendency of their discipline to “imitate … the procedures of the brilliantly successful physical sciences.” For this reason, the ecologists are less inclined to try to steer the economy.

It may not be immediately obvious why economics shouldn’t imitate the physical sciences. Given the remarkable advancement of scientific methods, the processing power of our computers, and the ostensibly boundless sophistication of our mathematical models, we might believe that central bankers, armed with latest economics research, are capable of treating economic infirmities.

But Hayek recognized something few economists understand today: that what we misleadingly call “the economy” is infinitely more complex than any machine or edifice human beings could ever design or build. The economy is in fact a living, changing, moving web of disparate actions and entities, each of which is composed of multiple, subjective judgments and motivations.

This is a difficult notion for economists who have been trained to regard themselves as practitioners of a “hard” science such as physics. The problem is that, unlike physicists, economists can’t come even close to controlling conditions in their laboratory — the economy — making it difficult, if not impossible, to isolate the causes of a given economic outcome. For this reason, Kling argues, economists must rely instead on “hard-to-verify interpretive frameworks.” These are the sets of philosophical ideas and normative claims that inform our judgments about the events we observe.

The ecologist’s skepticism is not global or unqualified; it’s not as though economics is entirely outside the realm of human understanding. The point, rather, is that we can know very little about this infinitely complex thing we call “the economy” at any given time. For that reason, we should hesitate to inflict our ignorance upon it.

Indeed. I have elsewhere described human systems (including the economic system) as complex, dynamic, homeostatic, non-linear, chaotic systems. There is much useful knowledge to be acquired about such systems but too often we fail to acknowledge the fragility or limits of that knowledge.

I like D'Amato's two classifications and I would elaborate on them. We have descriptive ecologists who wish to understand a complex system and by describing it, hope to improve their predictions by some small margin but who know that whatever they learn has a half-life. We have the prescriptive engineers who think they understand a system without comprehending how complex and chaotic it is and how contingent is the body of knowledge. They think and act as if they know. We also call such prescriptive engineers totalitarians, utopians, authoritarians, Marxists, politicians, ideologues, and advocates.

The habits, values, behaviors and actions that create wealth are what lead to good life outcomes.

That's interesting information. From Wealth, Health, and Child Development: Evidence from Administrative Data on Swedish Lottery Players by David Cesarini, Erik Lindqvist, Robert Östling and Björn Wallace. A very clever use of a natural experiment created by participation in national lotteries. From the abstract.

We use administrative data on Swedish lottery players to estimate the causal impact of substantial wealth shocks on players’ own health and their children’s health and developmental outcomes. Our estimation sample is large, virtually free of attrition, and allows us to control for the factors conditional on which the prizes were randomly assigned. In adults, we find no evidence that wealth impacts mortality or health care utilization, with the possible exception of a small reduction in the consumption of mental health drugs. Our estimates allow us to rule out effects on 10-year mortality one sixth as large as the cross-sectional wealth-mortality gradient. In our intergenerational analyses, we find that wealth increases children’s health care utilization in the years following the lottery and may also reduce obesity risk. The effects on most other child outcomes, including drug consumption, scholastic performance, and skills, can usually be bounded to a tight interval around zero. Overall, our findings suggest that in affluent countries with extensive social safety nets, causal effects of wealth are not a major source of the wealth-mortality gradients, nor of the observed relationships between child developmental outcomes and household income.

Wealth does not create good life outcomes. The habits, values, behaviors and actions that create wealth are what lead to good life outcomes.

This is common cultural knowledge but inimicable to the core Marxist assumptions of all totalitarians which is that good outcomes in the world as we know it are strictly the result of luck.

This Swedish research goes to Reynold's Law.

The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.

More succinctly, "Subsidizing the markers of status doesn’t produce the character traits that result in that status; it undermines them." Wealth doesn't produce the desired outcomes, the behaviors that produce wealth also produce other desired outcomes.

Charles Murray also highlighted this idea in his findings from Coming Apart, particularly in his Third Law. The three laws he derived from that study were:

Law 1: The Law of Imperfect Selection

Any objective rule that defines eligibility for a social transfer program will irrationally exclude some persons.

Law 2: The Law of Unintended Rewards

Any social transfer increases the net value of being in the condition that prompted the transfer.

Law 3: The Law of Net Harm

The less likely it is that the unwanted behavior will change voluntarily, the more likely it is that a program to induce change will cause net harm.

Summer Youth

Working hard against some deadlines this weekend. I live inside Atlanta, very near the city center. Fortunately my home, and home office, face a forty acre nature preserve so, despite being only 15 minutes from any City event, I feel like I am in the country.

My work has had me focusing on AI, the internet, technology trends, how it is affecting society, politics and individuals, etc. Fascinating but not infrequently troubling stuff. Particularly the trends around government, corporate and mob censorship and free speech repression.

But while I sit at my desk in my office, wrestling with these weighty matters and periodically looking out at the woods, there have been two visual points of reassurance this weekend. First on Saturday and then on Sunday, two different pairs of young boys, perhaps 8-12 years old, go cycling by with disarticulated fishing poles strapped to their backs.

Good for them. Living a hot Georgia summer day going fishing in the local creek. I doubt they will catch much but that's an American summer childhood. Very reassuring. Norman Rockwell, we need your reinvigorating spirit.

Height and IQ in Indonesia

Interesting. Height and Cognition at Work: Labor Market Productivity in a Low Income Setting by Daniel LaFave and Duncan Thomas. From the abstract.

Taller workers earn more, particularly in lower income settings. It has been argued that adult height is a marker of strength which is rewarded in the labor market, a proxy for cognitive performance or other dimensions of human capital such as school quality, a proxy for health status or a proxy for family background characteristics. As a result, the argument goes, height is rewarded in the labor market because it is an informative signal of worker quality to an employer. It has also been argued that the height premium in the labor market is driven by occupational and sectoral choice. This paper evaluates the relative importance of these mechanisms that potentially underly the link between adult stature and labor market productivity. Drawing on twelve waves of longitudinal survey data collected in rural Central Java, Indonesia, we establish that height predicts hourly earnings after controlling education, multiple indicators of cognitive performance and physical health status, measures of family background, and sectoral and occupational choice. The height premium is large and significant in both the wage and self-empoyed sectors indicating height is not only a signal of worker quality. Since adult stature is largely determined in the first few years of life, we conclude that exposures during this critical period have an enduring impact on labor market productivity.

There is an associated graph that reinforces the point.

When I was at grad school for my MBA (Wharton), I was probably surrounded by the highest concentration of very smart and accomplished people in my lifetime. It was a topic of discussion way back then, that it was also notable how tall that population was.

Over my thirty odd year career, I have had later occasions to observe the same correlation between height and IQ among consulting firm and law firm partners, C-level executives, etc.

With any human system, there are all sorts of complicating variables. I know that general childhood health is also highly correlated with both height and IQ so there is that co-variable to sort out.

Anyway, just interesting to see the same phenomenon being reported in other countries/cultures with different populations and circumstances.

Writers are always selling somebody out

From the preface of Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion.

My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.

Unsustainable luxury versus sustainable frugality

An interesting example of how the same information can be viewed multiple ways to different effects. From Best-Run States Are Heavily Republican, Study Finds by John Merline.

At the beginning of the week, The Mercatus Instititute produced a report, Ranking the States by Fiscal Condition by Eileen Norcross and Olivia Gonzalez. I like maps, I am interested in government finance, I read the article.

A new study for the Mercatus Center at George Mason University ranks each US state’s financial health based on short- and long-term debt and other key fiscal obligations, such as unfunded pen­sions and healthcare benefits. This 2016 edition updates the version the Mercatus Center pub­lished in 2015. Using the approach pioneered in 2015, the 2016 edition presents information from each state’s audited financial report in an easily accessible format, this time including Puerto Rico to provide a benchmark of poor fiscal performance.

Growing long-term obligations for pensions and healthcare benefits continue to strain the finances of state governments, highlighting the fact that state policymakers must be vigilant to consider both the short-term and the long-term consequences of their decisions. Understanding how each state is performing in regard to a variety of fiscal indicators can help policymakers as they consider the consequences of policy decisions.

Here is the accompanying map.

In perusing the map, it is easy to see an obvious pattern. States with the best finances tend to be more conservative and traditional. The states whose financial precariousness routinely put them in the news (New Jersey, California, Connecticut, Illinois, etc.) have deep histories being run by liberals and Democrats. No particular new news there, just a bit of visual confirmation of an established knowledge.

Merline takes exactly the same data and punches home the message in a far more striking and therefore effective way. Partly its his punchy headline - Best-Run States Are Heavily Republican, Study Finds. Partly it is his presentation of the data. In addition to the map, he uses a table to show the ten best run and ten worst run states, along with their political affiliation.

I think the issue is much more complicated than Merline's presentation suggests. Defining Best run states solely in financial terms is probably too limiting. Best should presumably include other factors including, for example, morbidity, mortality, labor force participation, education attainment, etc. That said, the list might not change all that much with those other factors included.

My primary point though is that Merline provides an interesting example of how the same information can be used so effectively to make a point simply by changing how the information is presented.

The other take away I had from the original Mercatus article is about sustainability. Forget the partisan issue about who manages state finances the best. Think of this in terms of sustainability. Which states are best positioned to absorb unanticipated shocks or to continue their current lifestyle into the future?

The Mercatus map is not just showing which states have the best financial position. It also shows which states are best positioned to sustain their current lifestyle and policies.

This goes to a deeper point that I see all the time when people are arguing for and against policies or strategies. It is very easy to take an issue at a point in time and point to just how well it is working without ever examining whether it is in fact sustainable over time. The Sweden I grew up in the early 1970s had extremely generous social policies ranging from work to family to school and beyond. It worked, to a degree, substantially because Swedes are highly productive individually and collectively and because Sweden was culturally homogenous.

That 25 year period of prosperity (post war economic boom) was unsustainable. Sweden (and the other Scandinavian social democracies) fell on hard times when the "free" money of boom times dried up. There were currency runs, budget cuts, etc. The Scandinavian countries are still wonderful places but looking at their social policies compared to the utopian sixties and seventies, they seem almost right wing.

It is similar in California, New York, Connecticut, Illinois, etc. It is easy to look good so long as you are borrowing against future anticipated productivity increases to cover your current consumption. You can add museums, libraries, generous pensions, healthcare, vanity construction projects, etc. But if, at some point, people stop lending because they cease to believe that the future productivity increases will occur, then the bubble bursts.

Looking good on borrowed money is a fleeting vanity. Living frugally within your means can seem small minded, constrained, unimaginative, risk averse but it is viable. The latter strategy is sustainable whereas the former is not.

An aggregation of subtle word choices makes an indictment

Ann Althouse loves to explore the nuances of words. She is a law professor so there is some consilience between avocation and occupation. In her post, "If Clinton wants to become the president of the United States, she needs to explain how she could make such a reckless decision" she explores word choices in a USA Today editorial. Referencing her blog post title (a quotation of the editors):

Say the editors of USA Today, after detailing the 4 separate warnings Hillary ignored that her home-based email system was threat to national security.

I don't really understand what explanation is possible. She's already said it was a mistake. What we can see now is that she had to know she was doing something that threatened national security and yet she continued to do it. What explanation could make the facts appear any better? I can only think of explanations that would make it worse. So I assume we'll never hear more from her about this.

It is a fair and incisive point. Clinton knew the rules, she issued memos to others telling about their need to comply with the rules, she fired some who failed to comply with the rules and she was reminded numerous times that she needed to comply with the rules. It seems as if this is a reasonably open and shut case at this point. Every one of her factual assertions in that press conference nine or twelve months ago has now been shown to have been false.

Althouse's point is a little more subtle than the factual litigation. She is exploring the editor's the language and cognitive processes behind the editor's word choices. There is a sotto voce hint at hidden biases. Althouse's argument seems strong. There is now no longer any explanation for Hillary Clinton's actions. She did what she did for her own reasons and in conflict with the plain regulations of which she was repeatedly reminded and for which she was responsible. If there were a non-insidious explanation, it would have been made by now. An implication of Althouse's observation is that since there is no remaining innocent explanation conceivable, the editors are consciously deflecting attention from the gravity of the transgression by falsely holding out the expectation that there is an innocent explanation still available.

This is such a subtle point that it is easy to dismiss it as entirely insubstantial. But I think the cumulative impact of multiple instances of perceived partisan bias is partly behind the public's deep distrust of the media and likely these nuanced, and possibly unconscious, framings are a material part of that lost trust.

So Althouse's initial point is, I think, an interesting and clever observation. But she's not done. She makes a second point about wording choice from the same editorial.

But the USA Today editors clearly refrain from opining about criminal law, presumably because the FBI is still working on that:

While Clinton is under potential criminal investigation by the FBI for the mishandling of classified material sent through her email.... It's already clear that, in using the private email server, Clinton broke the rules. Now it remains to be seen whether she also broke the law.

How can you be under a potential criminal investigation? That's an odd way to put it. Also, it's odd to make the distinction between breaking the rules and breaking the law.

Great points. We know she is under investigation (both e-mail and Clinton Foundation corruption) because the FBI has said so. Not potential investigation, actual investigation.

We also know from her own admission that she broke the regulatory rules which have the force of law and for which people are routinely punished and imprisoned. So it is not about rules, but the law.

You can see why conservatives have such a deep distrust of the mainstream media. I always follow Occam's Razor and assume ignorance, incompetence, and laziness as the most likely explanations for bad reporting and editorializing but some of this seems subtle but blatant in aggregate.

In this instance, Althouse makes a strong case that in a single editorial, the editors of USA Today mislead their readers by implying

* That there remains an innocent explanation for uniformly and only using your own personal home-rigged email system in obvious contravention of both past practice and current transparent and repeatedly communicated law.

* That Clinton might not be under FBI investigation.

* That the laws broken can be recast as less obligatory "rules."

Posited in those simpler terms, it makes the USA Today editorial seem much more biased. Althouse has a sharp eye, because none of these single items on their own particularly rises to the level of consciousness but, in aggregate, they seem much more deliberate and conniving.

The rest of the country doesn't care about this permanent war of ideas and worries more about holes in the road

A nicely succinct summary from Elites ignored concerns of voters by Clive Crook.

Today the United States is riven by two kinds of political divide. In addition to the familiar left-right kind, with Bernie Sanders at one end and Ted Cruz at the other, there's a divide between people who live for politics and people who are sick of politics. Civic as opposed to ideological polarization, call it. On both axes, the moderate middle has been hollowed out.

Liberals and conservatives who make a living from politics, or love it as an end in itself, pronounce tirelessly on liberty and social justice and the deep constitutional principles at stake in federal bathroom policy. The rest of the country doesn't care about this permanent war of ideas and worries more about holes in the road, what's going on in the schools, depleted retirement savings, and the latest hike in health-insurance deductibles.

The two divides are linked. Ideological polarization has shut Washington down, separating it from the concerns of many if not most citizens and rendering it useless in their eyes. That's driven new extremes of civic polarization, with the politically engaged talking exclusively to and past each other, leaving the disenchanted to seethe in silence about their smaller concerns. The result is Trump.

I could never vote for the man. He isn't a would-be dictator, and even if he were, the Constitution would stop him. But he has some unusually bad ideas, and in foreign policy, he'd have more freedom of action. He seems totally uninformed, intellectually unanchored, and completely unpredictable. Who knows what he might do or try to? It's a frightening prospect. The view that you can safely vote for Trump because things really couldn't be any worse is just wrong. He's the man to prove they could be.

Believing otherwise, however, doesn't make his supporters idiots or racists. As to whether politics as usual has failed the country and something needs to change, I'd definitely start paying attention to those people. On that important point, they're absolutely right.

My one caveat is the degree of certainty about whether Trump would be a bad president. The most unlikely candidates can turn out well and some of the most promising can turn out disastrously.

I anticipated that Obama, having a virtually blank track record of accomplishment of anything other than getting elected, would perform poorly overall as a president but took solace in the thought that he would deliver on elements of his platform that I valued such as more transparency in government, reduced subservience to lobbyists, stopping the revolving door between government and business/advocacy groups, more collaborative treatment of allies, more focus on the improvement of the functions of government, setting aside the harmful rhetoric of racial divisiveness, etc. Solace betrayed.

And we don't have to go that far back in history to see the reverse example where low expectations were exceeded. Harry S. Truman was widely mocked and reviled in his time. Former farmer, failed haberdasher, machine politician and compromise VP candidate, he was largely unknown on the national stage, completely overshadowed by FDR. There were few reasons to expect much from him as president. He was so isolated from the inner circles that he was unaware of the atomic bomb until immediately after FDR's death and just before he had to make the decision to use the two weapons on Japan.

Expectations were low and his performance was much criticized at the time. However, with passing decades and subsidence of political passions, Truman is now viewed much more highly as both an ethical man and as an effective president in times of massive change, uncertainty and challenge. The integration, under his watch, of the armed forces, set the stage for later civil rights legislation in the sixties. The Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine (containment of communism over confrontation), creation of NATO and the UN, recognition of the new state of Israel, the Berlin airlift all occurred in his presidency. Truman dismissed the immensely popular General MacArthur at the height of the Korean War, reinforcing the fundamental doctrine of civilian control of the military. Politically unpopular at the time, it caused Truman immense trouble but is now seen as having been absolutely critical.

The upshot is that people are unpredictable. Some dramatically exceed expectations and some dramatically fail. And no one has a reliable mechanism for predicting either outcome. Trump looks like a bombastic opportunist of dubious integrity and validity. Members of the political establishment and the self-anointed better classes recoil in revulsion at his crudity. Fair enough. But their revulsion does not mean he will fail and indeed, their revulsion is some element of his popularity.

The political and business establishment that has brought us to our current pass of governmental ineffectiveness, intrusiveness, corruption, debt, operational incapacity, financial precariousness, etc. has shown the instincts and judgment that should be rejected. The more they flail at Trump, the more of an endorsement that seems to the ninety percent of the patient electorate who have been waiting for the establishment to reform itself.

Perhaps Trump will surprise in a positive way. He is concerning but the post-war track record gives us no confidence in our capacity to forecast who will be and who will not be an effective president.