Daily Archives: December 15, 2016

Brexit and Trump victories are not just about economics

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From Project Syndicate

According to exit polls, Trump won 53% of white male college graduates, and 52% of white women (only 43% of the latter group supported Clinton); he won 47% of white Americans between the ages of 18 and 29, compared to 43% for Clinton; and he beat Clinton by 48% to 45% among white college graduates overall. These Trump supporters do not fit the stereotype at the center of the economic narrative.

Meanwhile, more than half of the 36% of Americans who earn less than $50,000 annually voted for Clinton, and of the remaining 64% of voters, 49% and 47% chose Trump and Clinton, respectively. Thus, the poor were more favorable toward Clinton, and the rich toward Trump. Contrary to the popular narrative, Trump does not owe his victory to people who are most anxious about falling off the economic ladder.

A similar story unfolded in the UK’s Brexit vote, where the “Leave” campaign asserted that the EU’s supposedly burdensome regulations and exorbitant membership fees are holding back the British economy. This hardly amounts to an agenda to fight economic inequality and exclusion, and it is revealing that rich businessmen wrote the largest checks to support Leave.

(Emphasis added). There’s no one single explanation for the two upheavals.

Will climate change data be safe under Trumplethinskin?

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This is interesting — and scary:

Alarmed that decades of crucial climate measurements could vanish under a hostile Trump administration, scientists have begun a feverish attempt to copy reams of government data onto independent servers in hopes of safeguarding it from any political interference.

The efforts include a “guerrilla archiving” event in Toronto, where experts will copy irreplaceable public data, meetings at the University of Pennsylvania focused on how to download as much federal data as possible in the coming weeks, and a collaboration of scientists and database experts who are compiling an online site to harbor scientific information.

“Something that seemed a little paranoid to me before all of a sudden seems potentially realistic, or at least something you’d want to hedge against,” said Nick Santos, an environmental researcher at the University of California at Davis, who over the weekend began copying government climate data onto a nongovernment server, where it will remain available to the public. “Doing this can only be a good thing. Hopefully they leave everything in place. But if not, we’re planning for that.”

As the old joke goes, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you. If I were a climate scientist I would share these concerns. After all, Trumplethinskin has appointed a climate-change denier as head of the EPA.

Hacking, disinformation and democracy

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My take (in Prospect magazine) on Russian interference in the US election.

The CIA has concluded that Russia intervened in this year’s presidential election to help Donald Trump win. Speaking on Fox News the beneficiary of these alleged subterranean efforts retorted, “I think it’s ridiculous. I think it’s just another excuse. I don’t believe it.” And his transition team issued a dismissive statement. “These are the same people,” it stated, “that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history. It’s now time to move on and ‘Make America Great Again.’”

Ponder this for a moment. American intelligence agencies have concluded with “high confidence” that Russia acted covertly in the latter stages of the presidential campaign to harm Hillary Clinton’s chances and promote Trump’s. They based that conclusion, in part, on finding that the Russians hacked the Republican National Committee’s computer systems as well as the Democratic National Committee’s network, but did not release whatever information they gleaned from the Republican networks.

That, of course, doesn’t prove that the Russian intervention was decisive in enabling Trump’s victory (though, in the end, the verdict of the Electoral College depended on 80,000 votes). But in a way it doesn’t matter. What matters is that a foreign adversary intervened covertly but adroitly in an American presidential election; that the outcome was the victory of a candidate who seems less belligerent towards Russia than his predecessor; and that the new president is contemptuously dismissive of the analysis of the intelligence services that he is soon to lead…

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