A Musing on Trumpian Fantasies of What the Economy Is: Shovel-Ready Self-Delusions

Start from a deeply deluded place about what the economy is & you are playing a stupid game. & so to the extent that Trump is not stopped and removed from all levers of power immediately, America...

Start from a deeply deluded place about what the economy is & you are playing a stupid game. & so to the extent that Trump is not stopped and removed from all levers of power immediately, America is going to do nothing but win some very stupid prizes indeed…

---

A pirate’s miner’s life for me? Trump dreams of a shovel-dug coal-fueled America has not existed for nearly a century—and never will again. False dreams of muscular labor make policy making about creating economic prosperity very difficult indeed. And so we have yet another poster child for the ever-repeated lesson that it is really stupid and counterproductive (for everyone except rich people who care about tax cuts) to elect Republicans.

The choice to sell illusions rather than manage change has been a constant for all except the pro-New Deal faction of Republicans since the days of Herbert hoover. And muscular, dangerous work was never glorious—only necessary. Technological change, global market dynamics, and environmental necessity have moved the American economy far from the pick-and-shovel jobs Trump lionizes. The real insult to American workers lies not in acknowledging change, but in pretending it can be reversed and that the world of 1920 with 800,000 coal miners with picks and shovels is one that we miss. Serious adult conversations technological transformation and how to do it are, as they have been since 1870 if not 1780, urgently needed. And Republicans, unanimously, do all they can to block them from taking place.

Virginia Postrel writes:

Virginia Postrel: Wanted: Manly Jobs for Manly Men <https://vpostrel.substack.com/p/wanted-manly-jobs-for-manly-men>: ‘Or at least for manly men who don't have their acts together: Behind much of the MAGA economic agenda lies a concern with restoring manly jobs. Coal miners want to mine! says Donald Trump. “They’re good strong guys,” he says. “That’s what they want to do. They love to dig coal, that's what they want to do. They don't want to do gidgets and widgets and wadgets. They don’t want to build cell phones with their hands, their big, strong hands.”…

J.D. Vance argued that the U.S. needed to crack down on illegal immigration so that businesses would have to pay high wages and hire the seven million prime-age American men who’ve dropped out of the labor force. Some… he acknowledged, might be “struggling with addiction,” but employers shouldn’t give up on their fellow citizens.

I’m sympathetic with… Richard Reeves…. That said, there is a lot wrong with the MAGA story about manly jobs, starting with the desirability of mining coal. Although conditions have improved over time, coal mining is a terrible job…

And she cites what is perhaps the greatest passage ever written, by George Orwell:

I cannot resist quoting much more than she does:

George Orwell: The Road to Wigan Pier <https://archive.org/details/roadtowiganpier00geor>: ‘The cutter has undermined the coal to the depth of five feet, so that if the seam of coal is three or four feet high, each man has to cut out, break up and load on to the belt something between seven and twelve cubic yards of coal. This is to say, taking a cubic yard as weighing twenty-seven hundredweight, that each man is shifting coal at a speed approaching two tons an hour. I have just enough experience of pick and shovel work to be able to grasp what this means.

When I am digging trenches in my garden, if I shift two tons of earth during the afternoon, I feel that I have earned my tea. But earth is tractable stuff compared with coal, and I don't have to work kneeling down, a thousand feet underground, in suffocating heat and swallowing coal dust with every breath I take nor do I have to walk a mile [underground] bent double before I begin….

In order that Hitler may march the goosestep, that the Pope may denounce Bolshevism, that the cricket crowds may assemble at Lord's, that the Nancy poets may scratch one another's backs, coal has got to be forthcoming…. But we seldom or never remember what coal-getting involves. Here am I, sitting writing in front of my comfortable coal fire. It is April but I still need a fire. Once a fortnight the coal cart drives up to the door and men in leather jerkins carry the coal indoors in stout sacks smelling of tar and shoot it clanking into the coal-hole under the stairs. It is only very rarely, when I make a definite mental effort, that I connect this coal with that far-off labour in the mines….

The miner… [is] the type of the manual worker…work… so exaggeratedly awful… vitally necessary… so remote from our experience… invisible… [so] we are capable of forgetting it as we forget the blood in our veins…. It is… humiliating to watch coal-miners… raises in you a momentary doubt about your own status as an ‘intellectual’ and a superior person…. At least while… watching [you see] that it is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior. You and I and the editor of the Times Lit. Supp., and the Nancy poets and the Archbishop of Canterbury and Comrade X, author of Marxism for Infants — all of us really owe the comparative decency of our lives to poor drudges underground, blackened to the eyes, with their throats full of coal dust, driving their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles of steel…

(She—or, rather, some earlier editor—has Bowdlerized that last sentence in her quotation: in the original it is not her “the poets and the Archbishop of Canterbury and Comrade X…”, but rather “the Nancy poets and the Archbishop of Canterbury and Comrade X…” Is this omission an attempt to erase our knowledge of what we once were, and now hope to be better? Or is this omission an attempt to avoid being an agent of microaggressive disharmony? My view: almost always better to keep a marker to the original (N—— poets) and drop a footnote.)

But the real kicker here is that Donald Trump—of course—and his acolytes, grifters, and marks have no idea of what they are talking about. No idea of the historical context. The number of coal miners in the United States peaked around 1920, when we had 800,000 coal miners. We have been eliminating coal mining jobs ever since, as automation and the shift out of Appalachia to places like the Powder River Basin has proceeded. We were down to 500,000 in 1950, and then came the major collapse down to 140,000 by 1970. 70,000 in the year 2000. And by the time Hilary Clinton ran for president in 2016 (and got bashed for saying “we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business”), we were already down to only 60,000 coal miner jobs. Today we have 40,000 coal miners.

Today we have 25,000 coal miner jobs in Appalachia producing 160 million tons of coal per year—6,400 tons per worker per year. Today we have 6000 coal miner jobs in Wyoming and Montana producing 270 million tons of coal per year—45,000 tons per worker per year. Appalachia, though less efficient, has been hanging on because its legacy sunk costs have been amortized and because its metallurgical coal is good in blast furnaces.

But, IIRC, the US has only five blast-furnace complexes currently running—Gary, Thomson, Burns Harbor, Indiana Harbor, and Middletown—and no prospect of getting more.

Thus 75% of Appalachian metallurgical coal is exported.

And Trump's trade war has just killed Appalachian coal mining stone dead. Retaliatory tariffs may well be coming. And even if Trump never pulls the trigger on high tariffs, the fact that he might and thus trigger retaliatory tariffs is leading every user of coal abroad to begin the process of breaking their links with the US and start to negotiate new long-term contracts with foreign producers to get them to build capacity to mine metallurgical coal. The stakes are too high for them to accept the risk of Trumpian chaos-monkey disruption for what is a relatively small cost savings.

---

It is worth stepping back and comparing coal mining in the Powder River Basin today:

to coal mining in Appalachia a century ago:

And of the 40,000 coal miners today, only 5,000 have the Manly Man jobs of operating bulldozers, excavators, and similar machinery. The other 35,000 are pressing buttons, shifting boxes on forklifts, and such. They may well be “good strong guys… with… big, strong hands”, but that is not what the work entails. Donald Trump say that “they don't want to do gidgets and widgets and wadgets. They don’t want to build cell phones…” But their jobs are normal jobs for America, ones that rarely involve using your testosterone-fueled back and thigh muscles as a key competence. Your typical American coal miner today does much less in the way of Manly Man activity than did George Orwell in the 1930s when he did his gardening, “digging trenches… shift[ing] two tons of earth [with a shovel] during the afternoon… feel[ing afterwards] that I have earned my tea…”

So Virginia Postrel is wrong: coal mining today—provided you wear your mask when the coal dust flies—is not a terrible job. And not an especially “manly” one—save for the proximity to big loud machines doing machiny things and explosions exploding:

Ed Conway: Material World <https://archive.org/details/material-world-the-six-raw-materials-that-shape-modern-civilization>: ‘I was standing on the edge of a precipice looking down into the deepest hole I had ever seen. At the bottom was a group of people in hard hats, or at least so I was told; they were much too far to make out with the naked eye. In the ground near them were hundreds of pounds of high explosive. This was enough, I was informed, to demolish a city block. In front of me was a metal panel with two buttons, and next to me was a man with a walkie-talkie…. I had been told to press the two buttons simultaneously when the countdown reached zero. The charge from the detonator would take a split second to reach the bottom of the pit, at which point a football pitch-sized square of the Nevada dirt would evaporate before our eyes.

‘You’ll feel the shockwave first,’ said the man with the walkie-talkie. ‘Then you’ll see the earth going up, then you’ll hear the explosion. In that order. It’s kinda weird.’…

It had taken some months for my producer to persuade…Barrick Gold Corporation, to open its doors, and a few days to get there from London. The Cortez mine is not the kind of place you happen upon accidentally. In our case it took two flights and a four-hour drive west across the salt flats of Utah, followed by another two-hour car journey with Barrick’s minders…. The process of mining is comparatively simple… albeit at a gargantuan scale. The rocks are blasted out of the earth, crushed… ground into a fine dust… mixed with… cyanide .. [to] separate out the gold… reducing vast quantities of rock into granules and chemically processing what remains…. As I looked down into the pit I could just about make out some trucks on the bottom, but only when they emerged at the top did I realise that they were bigger than three-storey buildings; the tyres alone were the size of a double-decker bus.

How much earth do you have to remove to produce a gold bar?… For a standard gold bar (400 troy ounces) they would have to dig about 5,000 tonnes of earth… nearly the same weight as ten fully laden Airbus A380 super-jumbos…. Perhaps you already knew this is how gold is mined… that it doesn’t come out of the earth in nuggets or as a rich seam forged by Mother Nature…. [but] it is instead the product of a chemical reaction involving one of the most toxic cocktails known to humankind… extracted… by tearing down entire mountains…. To obtain enough gold for a typical wedding ring… might take between 4 and 20 tonnes of rock….

The countdown reached zero. ‘Firing shot one, Cortez Hills,’ said the

man into the walkie-talkie, and pointed at the buttons…. There was a momentary pause – a second or so. Then a wave of pressure hit us – nothing dramatic, more like a waft of air. Then the ground was shaking and I looked down hundreds of feet towards the bottom of the pit where the earth had turned to liquid. The explosion rippled along the base of the mine, casting dirt and smoke up into the air. Only then did we hear the rumble. It boomed and echoed around the valley for what felt like minutes…

There is something very wrong in their lack of contact with anything approaching real reality of Trump’s phalanxes of easily grifted morons.

But you knew that already.

---

Plus a word about Hillary Rodham Clinton:

I have thought—and said so very publicly—since 1993 that we have much better managers and much better politicians to serve as high governmental officials and the public faces and standard bearers of the Democratic Party. And this is so even though she is, as B ob Reich says, truly a “lovely, great-hearted, very smart and hard-working person”. But the trashing her for we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business was unfair and malevolent, and spread only by people with no ethics plus the easily grifted morons who do so much to enable them. The “we” referred to America as a whole—that this was a decision that the country was making. And the point she was making was that we as a country needed to take responsibility for the consequences of implementing that decision:

Hillary Rodham Clinton: ‘[We need a] policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country. Because we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business, right, Tim (ph)? And we’re going to make it clear that we don’t want to forget those people. Those people labored in those mines for generations, losing their health, often losing their lives to turn on our lights and power our factories.

Now we’ve got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels, but I don’t want to move away from the people who did the best they could to produce the energy that we relied on. So whether it’s coal country or Indian country or poor urban areas, there is a lot of poverty in America. We have gone backwards. We were moving in the right direction. In the ’90s more people were lifted out of poverty than any time in recent history. Because of the terrible economic policies of the Bush administration, President Obama was left with the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, and people fell back into poverty because they lost jobs, they lost homes, they lost opportunities, and hope.

So I am passionate about this, which is why I have put forward specific plans about how we incentivize more jobs, more investment in poor communities, and put people to work…

It strikes me that this was a good and serious answer to an important problem generated by two big things that are happening:

• The first is global warming: you know better than I do that New Jersey now has the climate that Maryland had when you were a child. In the northern hemisphere, the climate is now marching north at a rate of about 3 miles a year due to ongoing global warming from our carbon energy use pumping of extra carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to serve as a blanket trapping heat. On our current trajectory of global warming, Miami and the Florida Keys will be underwater by 2150. And you can see that this global warming is already causing significant problems, even though New Jersey is one of the regions least affected in a negative way by this—Sandy and Ida killed 70 people, after all, and in your childhood cyclonic storms of hurricane strength hit New Jersey once a century, not once a decade. It would be a good thing to move to power systems that did not cause global warming, if we could do so cheaply and affordably.

• The second is that we can do so—in fact, we will do so whether or not we take action to try to slow and diminish the extent of global warming. Solar technologies are making amazing strides, and will continue to make many many more. We will move away from coal faster if we do the math, and do the transition sensibly taking account of the costs of global warming. But we will do so. We will do so no matter what happens in American politics.

• Thus the problem with HRC was not that she was “too far to the left” or “disrespectful”, but rather that she talked to American voters about a serious issue as an adult would. Changing power technologies, global warming, and how to manage ongoing economic adjustment within the energy sector is not by its nature a "left" or a "right" issue. It is, rather, a sensible-policy vs. moron-denial issue.

• And so to beat up on HRC for this is to act to bring about a world in which politicians treat voters even more like children and suckers to be lied to and deceived than they do—in fact, to glory in the lying and the deception.

• Thus I ask those of you who beat up on HRC for attempting to talk to American voters like adults: do you really prefer a world in which politicians did not attempt to deal with issues like grown-ups? And in which politicians treated voters like children rather than like adults? Silly question.

If reading this gets you Value Above Replacement, then become a free subscriber to this newsletter. And forward it! And if your VAR from this newsletter is in the three digits or more each year, please become a paid subscriber! I am trying to make you readers—and myself—smarter. Please tell me if I succeed, or how I fail…