“I like the noise of democracy.” —James Buchanan

Now that we’re past Labor Day, get ready for a wild two-month home stretch in the 2024 presidential election race. So what can we expect? The betting markets currently rate the outcome as a coin flip. Polymarkets puts Trump ahead of Harris at 52% to 46%; PredictIt puts Harris ahead of Trump at 52% to 50%. (You can see all the bookmaker odds here.) Famed forecaster Nate Silver, who models the electoral college outcome by looking at state polls and figuring in structural modifiers like economic “drag” and convention “bounces,” last Friday boosted Trump’s odds significantly. He now puts him ahead of Harris at 63.8% to 36.0%—even though (44% to 56%) he expects him to lose in the popular vote. Because they’re so close, any of these odds could reverse at any moment.

Notice btw that the two numbers published by Silver don’t add up to 100.0%. That’s to allow for the 0.2% chance that the electoral college will tie. There are several such scenarios. Imagine, for example, that (among battleground states) Harris wins NV, AZ, and GA while Trump wins PA and MI. Poof! We’re tied at 269 to 269. That means the newly elected House of Representatives will vote by state for the winner on or shortly after January 6, 2025. Trump would be heavily favored to win such a vote, unless the Democrats enjoy a tidal victory in the House elections (which by assumption would be unlikely, since in that case Harris would have won in the electoral college).

This toss-up forecast may sound odd to any casual observer who has recently been watching the polls. After all, since the beginning of August, Harris has been in front of Trump in nearly every one of the hundred or so national polls tracked by 538 and sometimes ahead by large margins like 5%, 6%, or 7%. According to Silver, the recent moving average of national polls shows Harris ahead by +2.5%; according to 538, by +2.8%; and according to RCP, by +1.4%. And while the state polls are to be sure less accurate and less frequent, some of the recent battleground state results are enough to demoralize the most ardent Trump backer, like the +4% Harris lead over Trump in MI, PA, and WI reported a month ago by the NYT-Siena College poll (Aug 5-9). And then there’s momentum. Hands down, the Big Mo has been all on the side of the Democrats from July 21, when Biden stepped down and Harris stepped up, through the end of August—though over the last couple of weeks, it is true, the momentum has begun to shift toward Trump.

So why are forecasters hesitant to greenlight the Harris-Walz ticket? And why indeed do some (let’s flag Nate Silver) insist that Trump maintains a clear edge? There are short-term tactical reasons and long-term strategic reasons. In this essay, I’m going to examine the strategic reasons. And here we’re looking at three, which mostly tilt the playing field to Trump’s advantage: popular-electoral threshold; high-turnout skew; and partisan nonresponse bias. At the end, I’ll come back and discuss some of the tactical reasons.

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Popular-Electoral Threshold: Constitutional Design Feature

The popular-electoral threshold arises from the gap between the national popular vote and the electoral college vote. One is what “we the people” do. The other, of course, is what elects the president. And, oh, if you don’t think there should be an electoral college, don’t blame me. Direct your complaints instead to the several dozen statesmen who crowded into a certain sweltering hall in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787. They included a procedure for amendment (Article V). Good luck with that.

Ideally, we might think, forecasters should ignore the national popular vote and determine the election winner by forecasting the winning vote in each state. From there, they could simply add up electoral votes. Unfortunately, since state polls are both less frequent and more erratic than national polls, every forecaster has to derive some guidance from how each candidate is doing nationally. And that means asking the following question: Given the likely distribution of votes by state, which now favors the GOP (due to redzone dominance in most low population states), how big a margin does a Democratic candidate need in the national popular vote to gain a 50-50 chance of coming out ahead of the Republican candidate in the electoral college?

Estimates vary. Veteran Democratic advisor James Carville puts it at +3.0%. “Most quants say we have to win by three percent in the popular vote to win in the electoral college,” he says, before then warning his follow Democrats, “So when you see a poll that says we’re two up, well actually we’re one down—if the poll is correct.” Thus, if you read in this morning’s NYT-Siena College national poll that Harris is one down, she’s actually four down.

According to Nate Silver, the threshold is somewhere just under +2.5%. That, in other words, is the national popular margin Harris will need in order to win 50% of Silver’s state-by-state Monte Carlo simulations.

Overall, Silver’s tabulation gives us a good feel for the wide range of possibilities that could be triggered by any given popular vote margin: If we roll the dice again and again, needless to say, who wins any individual election is a crapshoot. Recall that in 2016 Trump narrowly beat Clinton in the electoral college despite losing the popular vote by -2.09%. Clinton would have won if she could have flipped 78K voters in PA, MI, and WI. In 2020, even more remarkably, Trump only narrowly lost to Biden in the electoral college despite losing the popular vote by -4.45%. Trump would have won if he could have flipped 43K voters in GA, AZ, and WI. And Trump wasn’t especially lucky in that election: Only three states in 2020 were decided by a margin of less than one percent—those three—and Biden won all of them by an average margin of a mere 0.4%.

On average, Carville and Silver are no doubt drawing the correct lesson about 2016 and 2020. The Democratic candidate needs a substantial popular vote edge—I’d wager somewhere between 2 and 4 percentage points—to have even odds of winning when the electoral votes are tallied in January.

If anything, Silver’s table (shown above) strikes me as underestimating the threshold.

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“Some years ago, my colleagues and I put forth the low fertility trap hypothesis. We argued that once fertility stays low for a prolonged period, a series of mutually-reinforcing mechanisms make it ever less likely that birth rates will increase again in future.” —Norwegian demographer Vegard Skirbekk (2022)

In July 2021, J.D. Vance inaugurated his (successful) run for Senator of Ohio by delivering a speech to a conservative student group, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, on declining birth rates. In the speech, Vance said that he wished to see the GOP become a pro-family party and that he wanted “to take aim at the left, specifically the childless left,” for their “rejection of the American family” and their neglect of “policies that would strengthen the family.” He added that it was probably no accident that so many of the rising leaders of the Democratic Party—here he mentioned Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, Cory Booker, and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez—were themselves childless. Conceding that some people cannot have children and that his comments were not directed at them, Vance nonetheless suggested that the raising of children was conspicuously absent from the progressives’ vision of the good life.

A few days later, on Tucker Carlson’s Fox show, Vance recapitulated his argument with a bit more edge: “The entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children.” He then went on: “We’re effectively run in this country… by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable about their own lives and who want to make the rest of the country miserable too.”

After the Harris oppo research team discovered and pulled this segment three weeks ago, the Harris campaign naturally broadcasted it, triggering a hue and cry among Democratic politicians like Hillary Clinton and celebrities like Jennifer Aniston and Whoopi Goldberg. Vance’s comments, they charged, reveal how the GOP wants to blame us, control our bodies, and invade our private lives. Even European progressives were outraged. Indeed, several conservative pundits questioned Vance’s sanity. “You want me to pay more taxes to take care of other people's kids?” replied Dave Portnoy (leader of the very Trumpian “barstool Republicans”). “We sure this dude is a Republican? Sounds like a moron. If you can't afford a big family don't have a ton of kids.”

Vance has appeared on Megyn Kelly and other shows to walk back his comments—a bit. He admits that his comments were “sarcastic” (not to say snide and snarky and, well, catty) and that he did not intend to criticize individuals. But he has doubled down on his overall argument: that falling fertility is a serious national challenge and that Republicans, in their policy views and their family behavior, are doing a lot more to meet this challenge than Democrats. What he wants is for Republicans to adopt, and run on, an explicitly family-friendly national agenda.

On the gap between Republicans and Democrats in their views and behavior, Vance is largely correct: Redzone and bluezone voters do show a clear divide in how many children they have, in their views about family life, and (yes) even in their ownership of cats. I’ll come back to these numbers later on. Before I get there, let me address a few other questions.

Fertility Decline… What Me Worry?

We might ask, for starters, whether Vance is right to worry about fertility decline. Well, I think so. In 2023, the US total fertility rate weighed in at 1.62, which is 23% below the replacement rate. If our TFR continues to fall at the same rate that it has since the GFC (2007)—that is, if we join in the decline that now seems to be prevalent in most of the rest of the high-income and emerging-market world—it would hit 1.25 a decade from now, in 2033. That would be not much higher than where China is today, and China (according to the UN’s constant-fertility population projection) is on track to lose 75% of its working-age population between now and the end of this century.

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“I say violence is necessary. Violence is part of America’s culture. It is as American as cherry pie.” —H. Rap Brown (1967)

To paraphrase Lenin, there are years in politics when nothing happens. And then there are weeks when years happen. We’ve just lived through a few of those weeks—and they may not be over yet.

On June 27, most people tuned in to the Biden-Trump debate expecting to see something similar to the rancorous shouting match they may have recalled watching in 2020. Instead they saw Joe Biden struggle and often fail to put together a coherent train of thought, while Donald Trump stayed disciplined (meaning shutting up when it wasn’t his turn to speak) and kept on-message. For the next two weeks, Democratic leaders wrung their hands in distress, pondering whether or how they should persuade Biden to give up his nomination.

Then came the hail of bullets in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13 that came close to ending Trump’s life, but instead inspired the fist pump and the war whoop that gave Trump’s 2024 campaign its iconic moment.

Then came the four-day GOP nominating convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, from which emerged a seemingly united and enthused MAGA leadership. With good reason. The polls were breaking in Trump’s direction.

But the story wasn’t over. On Sunday, another dam burst. President Biden, besieged by both his party’s leaders and the mainstream media, threw in the towel and announced (not in person, tellingly, but in a post on X) that he would “stand down.” There is no historical precedent for an incumbent president quitting the race so soon before the next election. Presumably, the selection of a new Democratic candidate will be decided by a vote among party delegates at their nominating convention in Chicago four weeks from now. But even this will turn heads, because it has been decades (before the introduction of the all-primary nominating system in the late-1960s) since these delegates have ever had to decide anything. Their presence is supposed to be only for show.

At this point, it seems a near-certainty that Vice President Kamala Harris will inherit the candidacy. (Futures markets are backing me up here!) She has the endorsement of President Biden, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and just about every Democratic governor, senator, and representative. She stands solidly with the progressive core of her party, which makes her an easy pick for delegates (who tend to be a bit left of the typical Democratic voter). Some say she already has endorsements from a majority of the delegates. A quick start will help her rev up party enthusiasm among core believers after Biden’s abrupt departure.

As for Team Trump, well, they say they’re locked and loaded for “Laughin’ Kamala.” But there was nothing humorous about the attack line suggested by senior Trump advisor Jason Miller a couple of weeks ago. “Joe Biden is known for weakness and incompetence, while Kamala Harris is known for weakness, incompetence and radical liberal ideology.” Nikki Haley blasted Harris from a different angle: “Let me remind you that Kamala had one job. And that one job was to fix the borders. Now imagine her in charge of the entire country!”

Harris and her team will no doubt return fire by hauling up all the heavy rhetorical howitzers that genteel Joe never thought to use. They won’t describe Trump’s America as a mere “threat to democracy.” They will paint it, in poignant and lurid detail, as a combination of 1984, Hunger Games, and The Handmaid’s Tale. And they will equate Trump himself with mobsters like Scarface. To get back into the race and overcome the Democrats’ current passion gap, they will call upon ordinary Americans to rouse themselves and their neighbors before censorship, civil-service purges, and jackboots descend across the land. I can already see the poster. It shows a closing dungeon door, with the message: Vote. You May Never Get Another Chance. Anything that raises adrenaline will be fair game—talk of breaking the glass, going to Defcon Five, alerting the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

In the note that follows, I intend to discuss the big turning points of the last few weeks—namely, the Biden-Trump debate, the attempted assassination of Trump, and the Republican convention. Yet along the way I want to point out how mood and language of both violence and populism have begun to permeate our politics. As you will learn, there is a good reason for this. The historical track record shows that populism and violence each tends to justify the other. This track record also shows that, past a certain point, there is no going back. That is when the vulnerability and insecurity generated by an atmosphere of threatened violence pushes the public to favor more threatened violence in order to restore order.

There are indeed weeks when years happen. And we may be seeing more such weeks soon.

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Growing Shadow of Violence: Who’s to Blame?

When I heard that a would-be assassin’s bullet came within maybe an inch or two of killing Donald Trump (Trump himself says “a quarter of an inch,” but who’s counting?), I thought back to how many close calls we’ve seen on the lives of American leaders over the past few years. There was the delusional attempt on the life of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. There were the uncovered plots to kill Supreme Court justices Brett Kavanaugh and Sonia Sotomayor—leading Sam Alito, at one point, to fear his own assassination. There was the rifleman who unloaded sixty rounds at a baseball field on which GOP congressmen and staff were practicing.

Senators and House members, now besieged by rants and threats (in letters, in email messages, and on social media), are spending vastly more than they used to on personal security, over and above what the Capitol Police can deliver. Of course, they have to worry; they’ve got the lives of their families on the line. Meanwhile, each time an attack happens, most Americans just breath a sigh of relief and figure, well, I guess we dodged another bullet. We must still be a divinely favored nation. Either that, or we’re just damned lucky—enjoying what Otto von Bismarck is said to have called God’s “special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.”

But with the recent shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, that complacency may be running dry. While there remain many older journalists who recall how the country came together after the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan in 1981 or the actual assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, few expect that to happen again in 2024. Instead, the shooting reminds most Americans that all the red-blue partisanship and polarization that they have tried not to think about since the last election is going to burst forcibly again into our lives over the next few months.

Attacks on national office-holders, after all, are just the tip of the iceberg. Bomb threats are now regularly forcing the evacuation or closure of state capitols. State judges report being doxed and “swatted.” Nearly one in five state and local elected officials say they have been threatened recently. Many more say they are insulted or harassed and that, as a result, they are considering stepping down.

The bullet that pierced Trump’s ear did not interrupt the growing specter of violence that now shadows American politics. It merely punctuated it. The Sunday NYT headline gets it about right: “An Assassination Attempt That Seems Likely to Tear America Further Apart.”

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Did you feel the political thermometer rise after the Trump conviction? When I heard the news, and the partisan reaction to it, the air seemed to tingle like after a lightning bolt. Once again, Americans had to pry their eyes open and feel both anger and anguish at the sight of the precipice they’re moving toward. We still can’t make ou…

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Last week, I delved deep into the campus protests over the Gaza War. I looked at who is organizing and joining the protests, what really motivates them, and how they compare with earlier generations of protesters. (See “(1/3) What Americans Really Think about the Israel-Hamas War.”)

This week, I’m going to delve again, this time into an even deeper topic: what all Americans think about the Gaza War specifically and about the Israel-Palestinian conflict in general. How much do they care or know about it? Whose side are they on? How do they expect it will turn out? How do their opinions break out by subgroup—for example, by race/ethnicity, education, political party, or religious affiliation? Also, near the end, I’ll look at how Americans’ opinions of the conflict differ by age group or generation.

One of my first findings, as you will soon find out, is that most Americans don’t rank the war very high in their list of “important” issues and thus don’t follow it closely. But just because most Americans don’t care much about this war (or about the Russia-Ukraine war), that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t care about it. Americans rarely care about foreign conflicts that don’t directly affect them. History shows, however, that such hostilities often furnish the sparks of global conflagrations. Not many Americans, it turns out, cared much about Japan’s invasion of China in 1936 or Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939. And we all know where that led.

What’s more, even if most Americans don’t follow the war closely, a great many have strong beliefs about it—strong enough, perhaps, to affect the outcome of the 2024 election. Think of this essay as an exploration of these beliefs, in all of their multi-layered complexity.

I cite many opinion surveys in this piece. Two excellent surveys will come up several times, so let me call them out in advance: the Pew Research Center report released on March 21 (which I’ll call the Pew 2024 survey); and the Harvard-Caps Harris poll released on May 20 (which I’ll call the Harris 2024 survey).

So let’s take a deep breath—and dig in.

• For most Americans, the Israel-Hamas war is not an important issue.

This is an important level-setter. According to Gallup’s most recent poll, only 2% of Americans say this war is America’s “most important” issue (compared to 28% for immigration, 11% for inflation, or 6% for poverty/homelessness). When allowed to mention multiple issues as important, the Harris 2024 survey still reports the war coming in at 13th place (at 7%). In the Quinnipiac poll, only 7% of registered voters rank international conflicts in general as “the most urgent issue facing the country today.” Which issues “affect me personally”? Asked this question by the Harris 2024 survey, 42% of Americans mentioned inflation, 11%. crime, 8% climate change, and 3% (dead last, in 9th place) the Israel-Hamas war.

These results shouldn’t surprise us: For better or worse, few Americans have ever paid much attention to a foreign war until it directly affects their lives or their pocketbooks. Campus protests or not, this was the case in Korea, in Vietnam, and even in our more recent post-9/11 wars in the Mideast. But not here. Not yet, anyway.

• Accordingly, a large share of Americans (especially of young Americans) don’t follow news about the war and don’t know much about it.

According to the Pew 2024 survey, 43% of Americans say they follow the war not too much/not at all. Only 22% follow it extremely/very closely. Among Americans under age 30, the not-too-much share rises to 58%; the very-closely share falls to 14%. Among seniors, by contrast, the numbers are reversed: 22% not-too-much and 35% very closely. The Harris 2024 survey reports comparable numbers.

And yes, as you might imagine, knowledge about the war follows a similar pattern. Those who care, get informed. Pew gave respondents a rather easy multiple-choice test consisting of three questions: Who is the Prime Minister of Israel? Who attacked Israel on October 7? And which side has thus far incurred a higher death toll—the Israelis or the Palestinians? Of all Americans under age 30, only 31% could answer all three questions correctly. Of all seniors, 54% could do that (nearly on par with four-year college graduates of all ages).

Given all of the campus protests, this age gap in interest and knowledge points to a remarkable fact:

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The campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza have recently fixated the attention of the big media. Thus far, the toll stands at protests at 80 schools, with roughly 2,500 arrests and several cancelled graduations. As antiwar protests go, they are not a big deal—hardly comparing, as we shall see below, with the protests against the Vietnam War.

Still, they are not without consequences. They are dividing the Democratic Party and uniting the Republican Party over an issue—support for allies abroad—that earlier worked the other way (uniting Democrats and dividing Republicans). They reveal a remarkable contrast in attitudes toward Israel by generation: Older voters are much more pro-Israel than younger voters. And they could affect the outcome of a close presidential election, negatively for Joe Biden.

If the protests do tip the election, it won’t be because most Americans care deeply about the Israel-Hamas war—they plainly don’t—but rather because Biden has failed to exercise leadership by presenting any compelling vision of what American interests are in the Mideast and why America has extended or should extend (as he claims) an “ironclad commitment to the security of Israel.” After seven months of war, most Americans remain supportive of Israel. But another large share, especially of younger Americans, remains “unsure” why we are involved. That failure rests on the President.

So this is what I want to discuss: What do Americans really think about the Israel-Hama war? I’m going to proceed in three installments. First, in this installment, I’m going to discuss the campus protests, not because these protests are representative of public opinion (they are not), but because they differ from Vietnam-era antiwar protests in remarkable ways that the media have largely ignored.

Next week, in the second installment, I’ll move on to discuss the opinions of Americans in general about the conflict—by party, religion, race, gender, and age. Finally, in the third installment, I’ll conclude with some observations on the President’s failure to clarify why America should be, or should not be, supportive of Israel in its campaign against Hamas.

Campus Protests… Then and Now

In their coverage of the campus protests, both the protest leaders and the media make frequent references to the last time a significant antiwar movement gripped American campuses, the Vietnam War demonstrations at the end of the 1960s. In fact, many of the protests seem like deliberate cosplay, with kids re-enacting the “Vietnam Summer” of 1967: Activists mark off “liberated zones,” chant invectives against colonialism, dress like indigenous freedom fighters, and issue vast and defiant manifestos.

Enough, already. Let’s identify a few clear contrasts between now and yesteryear.

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Last year, the CDC issued an alarming report showing that the US rate of maternal mortality had risen by an incredible 89% between 2018 and 2021: from 17.4 to 32.9 per 100,000 over just three years. What’s going on? Could it be that 2021 was just a terrible outlier? Apparently not, because when CDC looked at the longer-term trend, the rate had more than doubled over the last twenty years: from 9.65 in 1999-2002 to 23.9 in 2018-2021. Maternal mortality, by the way, is the death of a woman due to her pregnancy—that is, “while pregnant or within one year of the end of pregnancy from any cause related to or aggravated by the pregnancy.”

These findings gave rise to scary media headlines. The WP: “America Has a Maternal Mortality Crisis. Biden Push Aims to Change That.” And the NYT: “What We See in the Shameful Trends on U.S. Maternal Health.” The AMA issued an “alarming” press release as well, and suggested in a follow-up press release that the growing peril of giving birth in America constituted one more reason to protect the relatively safer option of abortion.

Now comes a study by twelve health scholars in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology showing that this entire rise is illusory. The perceived rise, they conclude, originated in a new “pregnancy checkbox” that the CDC added to the death certificate in 2003. Some coroners checked this box, while others didn’t—causing confusion about whether pregnancy in fact caused the death and in any case creating a discontinuity in the data over time. The scholars retabulated all the data using only the prior method (that is, ignoring the check box) and found almost no growth in the death rate. The recalculated rate turns out to be 10.2 in 1999-2002 and 10.4 in 2018-2021. See this excellent Rutgers summary of the research as well as this longer account in Science about the controversy—and the counterblast by the CDC—that it unleashed.

Not all the news in this study is good. While the researchers find that deaths directly related to labor and pregnancy have fallen over time (pointing to improvements in medical treatment), they also find that this decline was canceled out by a rise in deaths related to pre-existing conditions like hypertension and diabetes (pointing to less healthy lifestyle behaviors). The researchers show that the death rate for Blacks has fallen over the last twenty years. But they also show that it remains much higher than for Whites or Hispanics (23.8 versus 8.22 or 7.46, respectively).

Nor, it must be added, does the US maternal mortality rate compare favorably with most other high-income countries. We may be doing a bit better than Portugal (12) and Canada (11). But take a look, for example, at maternal deaths per 100,000 capita in France (8), South Korea (8), Italy (5), Japan (4), Australia (3), or Norway (2). In maternal mortality, as in so many other health performance indicators, America achieves mediocrity—if you squint your eyes.

Colorectal Cancer Rising Among Millennials

As a general proposition, age is not good for your health: As people grow older, their incidence rate and mortality rate for most diseases—including cancer—rises along an exponential arc. Over time, we westerners have come to expect that improvements in lifestyle, public health, and medical treatment will steadily bring that arc down proportionally for all age groups.

Well, something novel has happened over the last couple of decades: Those rates of disease and death are still declining for the elderly, but they have reversed direction and are beginning to rise for the under-65 set, and especially for the under-50 set. Why is US life expectancy lower today than it was back in 2014? Not due to higher mortality among the elderly—they’re still getting healthier—but rather due to higher mortality among the nonelderly. I have written variations on this theme many times: See “Adults Under Age 65 Driving Decline in US Life Expectancy,” “Breast Cancer Mortality Rates are Rising Among Women Under 40,” “Millennials at Higher Risk for Obesity-Related Cancers,” “Strokes Rising Among the Young,” “Millennials’ Worsening Health Indicators,” and so on.

Now add this to the list: The trend, highlighted by the American Cancer Society’s “Cancer Statistics, 2024” report (see NYT summary here), toward steadily higher incidence rates and mortality rates for colorectal cancer among young adults. Specifically, Millennials born around 1990 have twice the risk of colon cancer (and four times the risk of rectal cancer) as Boomers born in the 1950s had at the same age. Back in 2019, we reported on a JAMA study of Canadians that pointed out rising colorectal cancer incidence among young adults. Now we have a lot more data, and more recent data, on US residents. In 2021, in response to this rising incidence, the US Preventive Services Task Force recommended screening for colorectal cancer starting at age 45 rather than 50.

What’s driving this trend? Most health experts point to the same shifts suspected to be driving other adverse Millennial health trends: more obesity, diabetes, and untreated hypertension; more stress; less exercise and less sleep. And specifically for colorectal cancer, we can also point to adverse changes in diet: more red meat, more ultra-processed foods, and more sugary drinks. Some experts suspect rising reliance on NSAID painkillers (like Ibuprofen) and proton-pump inhibitors for treating heartburn (like Omeprazole). “Forever chemicals” in the environment (like PFAS) have also been implicated. No one is certain.

What Works Better to Boost Birth Rates: Policy or Culture?

Here is another incisive and elegantly illustrated story by John Burn-Murdoch in the Financial Times. His thesis is two-fold. Number one: Expensive pronatalist policies that attempt to bribe people into having kids (cash payouts, tax subsidies, free childcare, and so on) don’t work very well. This is hardly news to most demographers. But his graphic speaks a thousand words.

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The return pattern of the newly-included S&P 500 member changes magically and quickly. It begins to move more closely with its 499 new neighbors and less closely with the rest of the market. It is as if it has joined a new school of fish.
—Jeffrey Wurgler, “On the Economic Consequences of Index-Linked Investing”

It’s official. As of year-end 2023, according to Morningstar, passive assets overtook active assets as a share of total assets in all US mutual funds and ETFs—including US equity funds, bond funds, and international equity funds.

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For US equity funds alone, the Investment Company Institute says passive overtook active in 2021. Today it probably stands at around 60%.

To be sure, these are very fuzzy numbers. I’m aware of all the disclaimers that many investment pros insist upon, especially those who represent the big ETF triopoly—Blackrock, Vanguard, and State Street. ETFs, they say, can facilitate an active investment strategy, if by “active” you mean algorithmically complex. We now have “smart” ETFs (like the familiar “smart beta”) which can, in a nanosecond, sift through any number of parametric “factors” (hence, factor trading). The pros also remind us that all of these funds, passive and active, comprise less than a third of all shares outstanding. All the other shares, they imply, are still actively traded.

Well, I remain unconvinced. To begin with, the most heavily used ETFs remain pretty dumb: as in, dump my money, pro rata by market cap, into every ticker on this list. Yes, there are such things as smart ETFs, but smart does not mean active. To borrow from Keynes’ beauty contest metaphor, an algorithm is entirely focused on outguessing the beauty choices of other algorithms. Only an active human investor is able to evaluate whether, at the end of the day, somebody somewhere is likely to end up with a beautiful girl. Absent human judgment, active investment is impossible—since it is fundamentally (so to speak) untethered. Once “prices are set by the interaction of the passive sector’s mechanistic rules and trading algorithms, rather than the emotions and analyses of biological brains,” writes Vince Deluard at StoneX Financial, “the passive sector is creating the reality it was designed to mirror.”

Moreover, while passive algorithms can’t be active, that doesn’t mean that active traders can’t be passive. Far from it. If you take a look at all those “active” funds out there, you will find a growing share that are managed like tremulous index-tracking algorithms—humans in effect “mirroring” machines, to use Deluard’s turn of phrase. Not many Americans will long tolerate seeing their 401-k lag more than a few percent behind the Magnificent Seven.

And as for all those other, non-fund shares the Big Three pros like to talk about, most of these are low turnover; they are held by family offices, insurance companies, sovereign wealth funds, and such. They’re pretty passive—even inert—in most cases. To be sure, hedge funds and primary dealers are supposed to be active contrarians, and many are. But equity assets held by hedge funds and primary dealers represent less than 6% of all shares outstanding. And even the doughtiest hedge fund managers, after looking at their industry’s growing net withdrawals, have to think twice before embarking on some brazenly “uncorrelated” market strategy.

My bottom line is this. It doesn’t matter that we can’t assign an exact number to passive investing (as in: these funds are all active and these others are not). What matters is that a rising share of households are plowing their savings into index funds according to mechanical pro-rata allocation rules and that, in response, even active investors have started to behave as though passive investing rules the market—which of course means that it does in fact rule the market.

The Economist recently offered a couple data points highlighting this shift from active to passive. Over the last decade, the number of active funds that primarily trade large US firms has declined by 40%. And since 1990, despite a 9X growth in the market cap of the S&P 500, the number of analysts covering these firms has dropped by 15%. These declines, the Economist suggests, “means fewer value-focused soldiers guarding market fundamentals.”

From Active to Passive—How We Got Here

What structural forces have been pushing US markets toward passive investing over the decade or two—especially since the GFC? One force is Americans’ near-universal acceptance of the efficient market hypothesis, popularized by Harry Markowitz’s dictum that “diversification is the only free lunch in finance” and advertised by all of the early indexed mutual funds, especially Vanguard. By becoming a passive investor, you become a free rider, benefitting from the value-setting work of others, in the same way that I am a free rider every time I go into a grocery store and grab the first quart of milk I see, confident that some others shoppers are making sure that it doesn’t deviate more than a few pennies from its value. What can be more efficient than having someone else do the work for you? Who doesn’t love being a free rider?

On its own, the allure of market-efficiency probably would not be enough to tilt the markets so heavily toward passive investing. So now let’s add another structural force: The well-understood tendency of passive investing to “pile on value” to large market incumbents (because the largest firms are included in the most indexes and also because large firms are favored within indexes) combined with Americans’ growing belief that sheer size enhances a firm’s economic return and survivorship.

Whence this growing belief in the efficacy of size? From the evidence all around us. Larger size confers greater pricing power and higher markups in industries ranging from banking and airlines to food processing and pharmaceuticals. In technology, size holds out the promise of infinite returns to scale in winner-take-all markets. In our new era of industrial policy, favored by both political parties, big firms (and yes, big labor) garner the biggest political favors. And as for our growing dependence on the fiscal and monetary backstopping of market downturns, the words “too big to fail” pretty much sum it up. If you invest in AAPL, MSFT, and AMZN, and they drop by 50%, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell will be right there at your side with an emergency-powers press conference. If you invest in any three random members of the Russell 2000, and they go bust, it’s unlikely anyone at the Fed will even notice.

One further force pushing us in the direction of passive investing is generational. Back in the 1990s and 2000s, the rising young investors were Gen Xers—who made great active investors because they were natural contrarians. They grew up assuming that no one cared about them and that the future for most of them sucked, so they embraced taking big risks (in start ups and investing) by doing something different than most of their peers. That’s how they sought to beat the odds.

Since the GFC, the rising young investors have been Millennials. Their group motivations are very different. They grew up assuming that pretty much everybody cared about them and that they would be guaranteed at least a decent future. Their biggest FOMO worry is not being on the big train, ticket punched and fare paid, with all of their peers. So they have became avid “herd” investors, autopaying a (now default) share of their biweekly paycheck into every manner of passive index-tracking formulae, especially the vaunted “target date fund.”

I think Millennials understand perfectly well that, in our current Fourth Turning era, you need to belong to a large community to be safe. And the larger the community, the safer. By all investing (more or less) in an identical SPY portfolio, they either all prosper together or all go bust together. Either way, they won’t be envying each other. And better still, in the event they go bust, they can be confident that the nation will have to do something big—perhaps rewrite the rules of the game—to bail them out. After all, America can’t just stand by while nearly 100 million 20- and 30-somethings lose their life savings.

Xers once figured they’d be better off paddling their life rafts in separate directions. Millennials prefer to tie all their life rafts together. Millennials are surely on to something. Think about it. Who is most likely to get eventual relief: The student who himself (or whose parent) borrowed to put him through college, or the student who joined millions of others in borrowing from the federal government. The analogy to passive investing is obvious. There is safety in numbers—not just economic safety, but political safety.

Are We Close to the Tipping Point?

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[Note: This essay is too long to appear fully in certain e-mail providers. If you got this by e-mail, please click on the title to read the entire post on Substack. -NH]

The NYT ran a darkly whimsical story in January about a 30something Jewish woman living in Brooklyn who joined the March for Israel on the DC National Mall to show her support for the Jewish state in its war against Hamas. On the front of her sign, she wrote, “Bring Them Home,” referring to the hostages. But on the back she wrote, “Who’s Coming Home With Me? #MakeJewishBabies.”

That’s the fetching lede for a discussion of reports that many Jews in the global diaspora are considering making more babies in response to their new sense of vulnerability after the October 7 Hamas attack.

Most diaspora Jews feel a strong affinity with Israel. In America, a third of practicing Jews have lived in Israel or visited Israel more than once; half have visited there at least once. Eight in ten say that caring about Israel is an important part of being Jewish. One third (including nearly all Orthodox Jews) agree that “God gave the land that is now Israel to the Jewish people.” Eight in ten regard the statement “Israel has no right to exist” as antisemitic. What’s more, even before the October 7 attack, most of these diaspora Jews (three-quarters of U.S. Jews) believed that antisemitism in their country had been rising in recent years. Since the attack, this perception has risen further, with two-thirds feeling “less secure than a year ago”—on social media, at work, on campus, and in public places (especially in European cities, the staging ground for massive pro-Hamas rallies).

In response to perceived threats, behavior is changing. According to a recent American Jewish Committee survey, nearly half of U.S. Jews report changing their daily habits, such as “not wearing something that would identify them as Jewish or avoiding certain places.” Other diaspora Jews are taking more active measures. Many are buying guns and getting firearms training—following the lead of large numbers of Israeli civilians after October 7. Others are deciding to migrate to Israel, especially (according to some reports) those living in diaspora countries that report the sharpest rise in antisemitic incidents.

But having more children? During the early postwar era, many Orthodox Jews recommended that families have an extra “Holocaust child,” one more than they were otherwise planning. We don’t have much quantitative proof that this happened back then. Similarly, the NYT story provides only anecdotal evidence that this is happening today.

We don’t need proof, though, to imagine why this response would make sense. Jews may be the only ethnic group to understand that, in historical time, they have been targeted for global extermination—and that, in recent decades, the survival of their homeland has come to depend upon prevailing demographically over their regional enemies. Repeatedly, Israel has been compelled to fight major wars against these enemies. And repeatedly, Israelis have found that they had to overcome not only the enemies’ overwhelming numerical superiority, but also the widespread perception, even among allies, that this superiority rendered their nation a hopeless cause. Just before the 1956 Suez Crisis, relates historian Martin Gilbert, President Eisenhower openly mused that there seemed to be little point in selling arms to 1.7M Jews since they couldn’t possibly prevail against 40M Arabs.

So yes, numbers matter. And so long as they do, births matter.

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Hello from Mexico. I’ve been on the road for speaking events in the past few weeks. Here are three developments that have attracted my attention recently:

1) EU Parliament Set to Shift Rightward in 2024

The EU’s legislative branch is a curious hybrid of two bodies. One, the Council of the European Union, consists simply of representatives from EU governments. (Imagine that the US Congress had another body consisting of delegates from all of the 50 state governments.) The other, more familiar to Americans, is the EU Parliament, whose members are elected popularly by all EU citizens every five years.

This EU Parliament (which meets both in Strasbourg and in Brussels) is no mere cog in the grinding Eurocracy. It is a linchpin of the entire European Union system. No EU executive (the President of the EU Commission) can take office without the EU Parliament’s approval. The EU Parliament can force the current President to resign. The EU Parliament can amend or reject any of the Commission’s new policy initiatives. What’s more, political leaders in every member nation hold their breath whenever the EU Parliament conducts a new election—since it’s often a wake-up call for exhausted national coalitions (like the current German Ampelkoalition, headed by Olaf Scholz) that no longer enjoy public support.

Well, guess what? The last EU-wide election was in 2019. The next will be held less than four months from now, in June 2024. And, according to a new report by the European Council on Foreign Relations, this upcoming election will likely push the EU Parliament into “a sharp right turn.” The council bases its forecast on a detailed model that looks at historical voting patterns in each country in light of the most recent polling trends.

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[Note: This essay is too long to appear fully as an e-mail. If you got this by e-mail, please click on the title to read the entire post on Substack. -NH]

In my last column, I introduced readers to the fast-growing ideological gender divide among America’s young adults—especially late-wave Millennial youth, roughly age 18 to 29. (See “What’s Up with Millennial Voters?”) We went through a lot of the recent data. But we left a lot of the biggest questions unanswered: Why is this happening now? How might it play out in the U.S. 2024 election? Where is it happening outside America? And what is the long-term prognosis—that is, how might this gender divide evolve over the next decade or two?

In this column, we can try to find some answers.

Why now?

Let’s start with this fact: Over the last 15 years, red-blue tribalism has come to encompass alternative and polarized gender ideologies. (Back in 2004, Michael Barone wrote a prescient if tendentious book about this trend: Hard America, Soft America: Competition vs. Coddling and the Battle for the Nation’s Future.) The red zone banner, emphasizing traditional values, has done better than average among married voters, both men and women, over the last several elections. The blue-zone banner, emphasizing social protection for the vulnerable, has recently done better than average among unmarried voters. While the blue-zone banner slightly outperforms among single men, it vastly outperforms among single women—most of whom count themselves as vulnerable and who have recently voted for the Democratic Party by margins of 25 to 35 percentage points.

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[Note: This essay is too long to appear fully as an e-mail. If you got this by e-mail, please click on the title to read the entire post on Substack. -NH]

Two trends in the political leanings of youth are worth keeping an eye on. They both apply broadly to Millennials, which I tentatively define as all Americans born between 1982 and 2005. Late-born Millennial cohorts are often called Generation Z, a term (as readers of my books will know) I avoid because it presumes without evidence that successive generations are each getting shorter than the last. OK, so much for my definitional preamble.

The first trend is this: Over the last year or so, more than any other generation, Millennials are responsible for improving the odds that Trump’s GOP will win the White House in 2024. Millennials as a whole will still probably vote for Democratic candidates, but right now it looks like they will do so by a smaller margin than they did in 2022, 2020, or 2016. For most Millennials (as for most voters of all ages), it’s not so much that they are enthusiastic about Trump; it’s more that a growing share no longer prefer Biden over Trump.

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[Note: This essay is too long to appear fully as an e-mail. If you got this by e-mail, please click on the title to read the entire post on Substack. -NH]

Over the centuries, moralists have observed that there are two kinds of people: optimists and pessimists. Optimists see the glass as half-full; pessimists see the glass as half-empty. Over the last decade or two, social scientists have refined and updated this notion. They now divide humanity into positive-sum thinkers and zero-sum thinkers.

What’s the difference? Reflect on how you typically think about your interaction with a new person or a new group. Do you focus mostly on how you and they could work together for mutual benefit—that is, in a way that benefits both of you? Or do you focus more on how they could hurt you by taking something you already have—or, alternatively, how you could take something they already have?

The first approach is called positive-sum thinking or PST, and it typically arises where there is an abundance of social trust which extends easily to strangers. PST assumes that people can reliably negotiate beneficial agreements on their own according to general rules of fairness. It is optimistic and oriented toward abundance. It prioritizes equal relationships between individuals. And it imagines that both the individual and society can become better off over time.

The second approach is called zero-sum thinking or ZST, though in practice it often leads to negative-sum outcomes since mutual suspicion or hostility often leaves both parties worse off than they were before. It typically arises where there is a dearth of social trust, and no one feels they can rely on those outside their own circle. ZST assumes that people can only negotiate as agents of a group. It is pessimistic (or realistic, if you will): It assumes scarcity—of resources, of talent, of everything. It is resigned to hierarchical dominance along with favor seeking and protective patronage. And it imagines that people find more meaning in community membership than in personal improvement.

PST and ZST comprise a spectrum. None of us thinks all one way or all the other. What’s more, there’s no right or wrong here. It depends upon the circumstances. In one historical situation, a PST approach may enrich and empower both you and your entire society. In another, it may leave you destitute, your family oppressed, and the strangers who betrayed you gloating. Some situations are so ambiguous that people may wait until the last minute to choose their approach. When a 10th-century Viking raiding fleet pulled up to your coastal village, they might kill you or they might trade with you—the choice usually depending on which course of action seemed to them, at that moment, easier and cheaper. Things may turn out better if they first see you all holding swords rather than plows.

I am introducing this PST-ZST dichotomy for a reason. It provides an excellent perspective for understanding our contemporary world.

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Populism, conspiracy thinking, partisan tribalism, and support for authoritarian leadership are today on the ascendant across the globe—and they are very conspicuously ascendant in high-income countries like our own. What do these social movements have in common? The conviction that one group, favored by the elites, is running the world at the expense of all the rest of us. Maybe it’s the Davos globalists, or the godless pedophiles, or the white supremacists, or the deep state, or the woke antiracists, or the illegal immigrants, or our duplicitous “trading partners,” or well-armed foreign autocrats. Whoever it is, the paranoia is amplified by the cratering of public trust in the system’s fairness and by the yearning for a strong and dominating leader who will set things right.

Groupthink, distrust, pessimism, and top-down leadership are all, as we have just seen, hallmarks of ZST. Many nations are preparing for war (if not already engaged in one), and war is of course ZST in its purest form. What’s more, domestic partisan politics are increasingly assuming the tone and manner of war—and, depending on the country in which you live, such partisanship is increasingly driven by tribal markers like race, religion, language, or nationality. Even economic policies are shifting in this direction: from protective tariffs and “buy at home” industrial regulations to the growing use of trade embargos and bank account sanctions. High-income electorates everywhere want their governments to spend more than they tax because future generations lie way beyond their low-trust ZST time horizon.

All around the world, people are thinking less about how I can get ahead, fairly and within the rules—and more about how me and my team can get ahead, unfairly if necessary, to compensate us for some grievous wrong. The mood of “ressentiment” runs strong today, a mood that Friedrich Nietzsche once described as “a whole tremulous realm of subterranean revenge, inexhaustible and insatiable in outbursts” and that, according to Pankaj Mishra (author of Age of Anger), has given rise to the ghastliest volcano of collective scapegoating since the 1930s.

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In my column a week ago, I summarized the polarizing trend in the public’s response to recent events at home and abroad. And I concluded that the national mood is one of profound pessimism and that the tribal energy among bluezone and redzone supporters has grown so desperate and Manichaean that it could easily break the nation apart.

Did I paint too dark a picture of where America finds itself right now? I don't think so, if recent polling is any indicator of how people are feeling. This is where I want to go in Part 2. Let me offer a sense of where we stand by drawing on several recent opinion surveys (from Pew Research, PRRI, and the UC Davis Violence Prevention Research Program, among others).

First, on national pessimism. When I reported, in my recent book, Pew's assessment of Americans’ confidence in their nation’s long-term future as of 2019 and 2020, I thought it couldn’t get any worse. I was wrong. It has gotten worse.

OK, now for more detail. When people say they have less confidence in America’s future, we may want to know—confidence in what, exactly? Well, let’s take a look at the following four questions. I would say the outlook is gloomy indeed.

Below are the responses to an alternative set of right track-wrong track questions asked by the PRRI. Note that the PRRI has asked the question about the 1950s eleven times since 2011. This is the highest “mostly changed for the worse” response rate it has ever registered. Especially striking to my eyes: 48% of Black Protestants agree that American culture and way of life has changed for the worse since the Eisenhower years. Keep this in mind: The 1950s ended three years before MLK Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech and four years before the Civil Rights Act put an end to the era of Jim Crow.

Pew has recently been fielding a similar question, asking Americans to compare life in America today to the way it was “50 years ago for people like you.” (So in this case we’re comparing circa 2020 to circa 1970.) From 2016 through 2021, Pew’s most pessimistic reading came in 2016, when 43% said worse and 35% said better. In Pew’s latest reading, taken in the spring of 2023, 58% said worse and only 23% said better.

As for the PRRI’s “best days” question, this elicits a surprisingly clear generational rift (though PRRI doesn’t crosstab these results by age). If you’re old enough to recall the Reagan-era slogan, “America’s best days are still ahead,” you may have been blindsided by 38-year-old Vivek Ramaswamy’s frosty with-all-due-respect comeback to 64-year-old Mike Pence during the first GOP candidate debate: “It’s not morning in America. We live in a dark moment. We have to confront the fact that we’re in an internal sort of cold, cultural civil war.”

Any expectations that Ramaswamy's “cold civil war” could turn hot? The UC Davis research team has an answer to that question. In the spring of 2022, according to VPRP, just over 50% of US adults agreed at least somewhat that “in the next few years, there will be a civil war in the United States.”

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Over the last month, the single question that readers have most often asked of me—and this is in explicit reference to my recent book—is whether I think the current Fourth Turning will climax around internal or external conflict. In Chapter 7 of The Fourth Turning Is Here, these scenarios appear under the rubric of “Civil War” versus “Great Power War.” Looking at the historical track record, I emphasized that both threats typically overlap and rise together over the course of the Fourth Turning and that we often have few clues about which way events will fall until the climax or Ekpyrosis is near.

Look around at the events of the last four or five weeks. They point toward just this pattern. External or internal? I think the risks of each have risen pretty much in tandem, like two racehorses accelerating while pulling out of the far bend.

Let’s look first at what’s happening in the world.

With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the world took a big step toward its current polarization into Western and anti-Western camps. In the wake of that invasion, four dictatorships that previously had only casual ties with each other—Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea—gathered together into something close to an axis of mutual cooperation and support, dedicated to rallying other nations with grievances against America and its allies.

With the Hamas attack on Israel last month (on October 7, 2023), the world took a further big step in the same direction. The Israel-Hamas war has many losers: It will result in misery and death for thousands of Israelis and Palestinians; it will result in the destruction of most Hamas leaders and (likely) exile for the rest; it will result in renewed instability for the unstable pro-Western monarchs and autocrats who rule the Arab world. But it also has many winners, first and foremost Iran, who stands to win no matter what happens to Hamas. By daring to take action, Iran has inspired its proxy allies throughout the Mideast, from the Houthis in Yemen to Hezbollah in Lebanon. By rousing the Arab street, it has thrust a giant wedge between America and the conservative Arab states that had so recently been gravitating toward an alliance with Israel. And by glorying in Hamas’s bloody massacre, it humiliated the Biden administration, which had been laboring for years to buy Iranian goodwill.

The good news for Iran, moreover, has been rippling outward into yet more welcome developments within the broader anti-Western camp. With Putin and Xi embracing Hamas delegates in Beijing and Moscow, Russia and China are now using the Palestinian cause to open up a whole new anticolonial front against America in the Mideast and Africa. And maybe even further, among Muslim suburbs in Western Europe or even among Ivy League American campuses. Relieved that the Western spotlight has moved away from Ukraine and Taiwan, both leaders are amping up antisemitic social media campaigns at home while getting back to work supporting anti-Western insurgents in the Sahel or harassing pro-Western governments just beyond the second island chain.

Back just before the pandemic when the West waged war against ISIS—it seems so long ago!—both Putin and Xi still lent the Western cause at least nominal support. They did so, perhaps, for no other reason than to tell America to mind its own business when they brutally suppressed their own terrorists (Chechens or Uyghurs). No longer. The pretense of universal standards of conduct that transcend the divide between West and anti-West is rapidly disappearing altogether.

As nations increasingly sort themselves into one or another of these two camps, we may expect, as happened during the 1930s, that it will become ever harder to remain uncommitted. Like wavering magnets, heretofore neutral nations may have no other choice but to flip one way or the other. In the wake of the Israel-Hamas war, the direction of two middling powers will be of special interest: Turkey (which under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan appears to be pulling toward Hamas) and India (which under Narendra Modi appears to be pulling toward Israel).

OK, so much for the global outlook. Now let’s look at what’s happening at home.

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I hope you had a happy Labor Day. In deference to the vacation spirit, I will (try to) keep this note short. Besides, I am using this holiday to move my family to a new location: from the DC exurbs in Virginia to the mountains of West Virginia. I will be busy. Wish me luck.

Meanwhile, now that we’ve had a day off, let’s spend some time really thinking about labor.

Labor—and the seemingly inexhaustible supply of it—appears to be the common theme in all macro commentary over these last several months. In Q1 and Q2 of 2022, the U.S. economy underwent two massive shocks. The monetary shock was Fed chairman Jerome Powell’s boosting of the Fed Funds interest rate, its steepest vertical ascent since the chairmanship of Paul Volcker 43 years ago. The fiscal shock was the lapsing of the U.S. Treasury’s various pandemic stimulus programs, causing the federal deficit to shrink by 12 percentage points of GDP in a mere three quarters. You’d have to go back even earlier, to 1946 (the demobilization following World War II), to find a precedent for this hit.

Either shock alone, economists thought, should be more than enough to push the economy into recession. The two together? It was a dead cinch.

As if to oblige the economists, most of the long-term recession indicators began blinking red later in 2022: the yield curve inverted badly; M2 and credit plunged YoY; consumer expectations and small business optimism sunk. Early this year, many of the medium-term indicators have also gone critical, especially in the manufacturing, housing, and construction sectors.

Nevertheless, as we’ve all seen, the economy keeps chugging ahead—economists be damned. And the explanation seems to be an endless supply of employment. Every month, it seems, more workers get hired, those workers spend, firms make money, and the next month those firms hire yet more workers. Who knows where it may end? For Q3, the Atlanta Fed is forecasting a blistering annualized GDP growth rate of nearly 6%. Absent some productivity miracle, that means (you guessed it) yet more workers are coming on stream.

While I don’t think we can say that the recession indicators have been proven wrong, it is fair to say that they haven’t worked as rapidly as most economists last year thought they would. And that’s because we’ve been able to hire so many people. In 2021, U.S. employment grew by an astonishing +6.21M. Then in 2022, it grew by another +3.16M. And then in 2023, by another +2.24M.

Which should prompt us to ask a rather simple question: Where are all these new workers coming from?

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The gingham dog went “Bow-wow-wow!”
And the calico cat replied “Mee-ow!”
The air was littered, an hour or so,
With bits of gingham and calico
—“The Duel,” by Eugene Field

When I was a child, I recall listening to Field's poem. It was about a gingham dog and a calico cat who so detested each other that one night they “ate each other up”—leaving not a trace of either to be found the next morning. Years later I read the climactic scene in “The Final Problem,” in which the detective Sherlock Holmes and the evil Dr. Moriarty, embracing each other in mortal combat at the edge of Reichenbach Falls, both fall to their deaths. Still later I marveled at the teachings of the great dualist prophets, who preached that at the end of time lightness and darkness would simply annihilate each other.

Now once again, as I contemplate the next U.S. election, I’m in the mood to put on the robes of Mani and be brave. Is the end of world nigh? Are you looking forward to seeing Biden-Trump 2024, the Rematch?

If you're like most Americans, you’re not. In April, according to NBC News, 70% said that Biden should not run for re-election and 60% said Trump should not run either. Another poll in July put these shares at 59% and 61%, respectively.

No one can recall two candidates who inspire such limited enthusiasm. In June, an astounding 36% of Americans viewed neither candidate favorably. Among registered voters who had an definite opinion, 21% viewed both candidates negatively—which, so far as we know, is a record. The runner-up may have been 2016, when 16% viewed both Trump and Clinton negatively. In 2020, the figure was only 5%. In 2012 (Obama v Romney), only 3%. And remember, these historical numbers were measured just before the election, after voters had been saturated with attack ads. So the recent 21% figure may climb a lot higher in the year to come.

We all know why voters are so negative. One candidate appears unfocused and infirm, the other self-obsessed to the point of derangement. One seldom appears in public lest he stumble while telling us what he believes. And the other will soon enter courtrooms swearing he really does believe things that judges, pollsters, state officials, and most of his own advisors repeatedly told him were untrue—something close to a plea of insanity.

Nonetheless, even while we avert our gaze, there appears to be no stopping the rematch scenario.

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