DRAFT: The Democratic Party Is too a Party Dedicated to Securing for the Workers by Hand & Brain the Full Fruits of Their Industry
Behind the paywall, because this is not yet ready for prime time. Daron Acemoglu thinks that is not what we are, & that we are instead the party of "digital disruption, globalization, large...
Behind the paywall, because this is not yet ready for prime time. Daron Acemoglu thinks that is not what we are, & that we are instead the party of "digital disruption, globalization, large immigrant flows, and 'woke' ideas”. I disagree. So, in reply to his rather injudicious and unfair rant denouncing “élites”, I have a counter-rant…
A rant I find rather puzzling from the very sharp Daron Acemoglu:
Daron Acemoglu: ‘This is not Trump’s win. It is the Democrats who have lost this election. Dems have ceased to be the workers’ party long ago, owing to their support for digital disruption, globalization, large immigrant flows, and “woke” ideas. The transformation is really striking, as I have argued before: now it is the highly educated, not manual workers that vote for Democrats, and if the center-left does not become more pro-worker, it and democracy will suffer… <https://x.com/DAcemogluMIT/status/1854796409792303426/>
It goes on, and on.
But I read it. And I immediately stop short.
I stop short because these are my immediate thoughts:
Where is the Democrat (besides Matthew Yglesias) who wants a large increase in unskilled immigration?
Where is the Democrat who ever said that “globalization” was to be unequivocally endorsed rather than something that could be promising if well-managed?
Ditto for unequivocal endorsement of “digital disruption”—isn’t that Effective Accelerationist movement a quantum-mechanical gluon ball of Randites, Republicans, Extropians, and Transhumanists with next to zero Democrats in it?
What are these “woke” ideas that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz endorsed that drove away “workers”?
And who are these “workers”, anyway"? Do you have to be white, male, and have only a high-school diploma to be a worker, or can others be workers too?
I don’t think Daron’s rant is ready for prime time. But, looking at my counter-rant, I do not think mine is ready for prime time either. Hence: paywall:
For one thing: How am I to distinguish what Daron Acemoglu is saying from what would be written by someone who really wanted to hint that the right response is to be more sympathetic to those who are “flustered” by the fact that people look at them funny when they tell rape jokes? What would it mean to be, somehow, more respectful of their viewpoints and grievances? What, concretely, would that involve? It’s clear it involves sneering at élites. But sneering at them for what? For not understanding that “when you’re a star… you can do anything. Grab 'em by the pussy!” has its proper place in public discourse?
I think Daron is off the rails here. But I do sympathize. From my perspective, half of the impulse behind what he writes is an angry rant against fate and the situation. And I am down for that. But the other half: Is there a way to read it other than as a belief that the Democratic Party’s office-holders, policy-planners, and idea-generators are the parodies whom Fox News presents nightly? I am definitely not down for that.
Daron’s piece is, explicitly, a follow up to a Project Syndicate piece of his from last year.
Daron Acemoglu (2023): What Anti-Trumpism Is Missing: ‘Trump supporters have legitimate grievances…. Real (inflation-adjusted) earnings among men with only a high-school degree or less have declined since 1980…. Meanwhile, incomes for Americans with college degrees and specialized skills (such as programming) have risen rapidly…. Reasons for this labor-market transformation… are rooted in economic trends that establishment politicians and the media long sold as benefits to workers. The wave of globalization that was supposed to lift all boats has stranded many. The automation that was supposed to make US manufacturing more competitive and help workers is the biggest factor in declining earnings among workers without a college degree. Meanwhile, labor unions, minimum-wage laws, and norms protecting low-pay workers have weakened….
Many workers who have suffered from these trends also sense that they have lost ground socially… Changes that have helped previously disadvantaged groups (minorities, women, the LGBTQ+ community) have flustered others. In the process, many Americans have grown resentful as they feel their viewpoints and grievances are being ignored by the mainstream media and the educated, technocratic elite.
Ilyana Kuziemko, Nicolas Longuet-Marx, and Suresh Naidu document a divide…. Ordinary workers have a strong preference for minimum wages, job guarantees, protections against trade, and stronger unions, [while] elites oppose such programs as unwarranted interference with the market. The Democratic Party’s preferred method for helping the less advantaged has been to push for redistribution via the tax and transfer system….
Reversing this trend requires changes not just to… specific policies… but also to… language…. It also may require proactive efforts to promote workers to leadership positions within parties, rather than letting highly educated elites capture most top positions… <https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/trump-2024-democrats-must-return-to-working-class-priorities-policies-by-daron-acemoglu-2023-11>
My reaction to that at the time was: I have to protest.
As a former card-carrying left-neoliberal, I do not remember anybody on my team saying “globalization… lifts all boats”. I do remember us saying that trying to stop globalization will significantly impoverish the country relative to the counterfactual, but that globalization must be delicately and successfully managed so that it does lift all boats if it is going to be a net plus. Plus I do not remember blanket claims like “automation… is the biggest factor in declining earnings among workers without a college degree” coming with any kind of reasonable and well-specified counterfactual to make it credible—and when I try to set one up, I find that weakened labor unions, lower relative minimum wages, and slack demand play much larger roles even when we restrict our attention to relative wages (for absolute earnings have not declined).
Plus there is Acemoglu’s claim that less discrimination have “flustered” people—presumably the workers—who now “feel their viewpoints and grievances are being ignored by the mainstream media and the educated, technocratic elite”. The viewpoints that are being ignored are… what exactly? Are the grievances things like the fact that people now look at you funny if you tell rape jokes?
I know that I—as one of the “élites” that Acemoglu is so eager to denounce—have always seen labor unions as very useful sources of countervailing power, and believed in high minimum wages as a self-enforcing redistributive mechanism that should be balanced with a high EITC as a redistributional policy. I have not viewed them as unwarranted but rather highly warranted “interference”—a word I really do not like when used in this context—in the market.
I admit I will give Daron the points that I have always seen tariffs and non-tariff barriers and job guarantees as things that, except in very special and delicate cases, produce little distributional gain for large aggregate productivity losses.
But I am right to see them so.
Plus, in addition to believing in transfer policies like the EITC, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, I believe in strongly progressive and high personal income, corporate income, and wealth taxes. And this somehow makes me guilty of something as someone who “prefers” the tax and transfer system, as policies that experience teaches us work (as opposed to policies that are unlikely to do so)?
And I know I would love a world in which there were many more union leaders and community organizers who could make credible runs as candidates for congress. But I do not see how to turn the world we are in into that world. And we are not hearing very many good ideas as to how to do this from Daron, are we?
Thus this piece—both the social-media thread and the earlier Project Syndicate column—seem profoundly off to me. Both seem, to me at least, composed of two things: (1) an angry rant against fate and the situation, and (2) a belief that the Democratic Party’s office-holders, policy-planners, and idea-generators are the parodies whom Fox News presents nightly (and are, perhaps, some of the MIT humanities faculty who are weaponizing social difference in an attempt to climb to the top of the crab barrel in a time of enormous perceived academic job scarcity in the humanities.) The first—I understand: I am there as well. The second—I do not.
Look at the candidates we ran.
Look at what they said.
Then come back, and think.
I don’t think Daron’s rant is ready for prime time. But, then, I do not think that mine is ready for prime time either.
References:
Daron Acemoglu. 2024. ‘This is not Trump’s win…”. Twitter, November 8. <https://x.com/DAcemogluMIT/status/1854796409792303426/>
Daron Acemoglu (2023): “What Anti-Trumpism Is Missing”. Project Syndicate. November 29/ <https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/trump-2024-democrats-must-return-to-working-class-priorities-policies-by-daron-acemoglu-2023-11>.
Kuziemko, Ilyana, Nicolas Longuet Marx, & Suresh Naidu. 2023. "Compensate the Losers? Economic Policy and Partisan Realignment in the US." SSRN Electronic Journal. Elsevier BV. <https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4609864>.
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I think there is more truth to Acemoglu than Brad cares to admit. Now mostly it is mis or dis-information. When bosses wish to negotiate lower wages, they will cite external factors, such as regulations, globalization, automation and such. These are mostly gross exaggerations, but it is what workers constantly hear. It lets the greedy employer off the hook. Perception beats reality every day, and twice on Sunday. The Democrats problem is that they have been ineffective in countering the extensive mis-information.
This also plays on the sorts of fears Trump exploits, economy, inflation, crime, rate of illegal border infiltration. Its mostly mis-information, combined with if-it-bleeds, it leads style journalism. Only the near elite intellectuals actually look at the data, and it seems to be almost impossible to educate the median voter.
I have no use for comments such as those by Acemoglu. Congrats on a Nobel Prize but he should just stick to doing econ work. Even our lauded St. Barack of Obama lost the thread on more than one occasion. Why were no banks penalized following the financial meltdown? Why was Facebook allowed to buy Instagram? Why was Google allowed to buy YouTube? Numerous other examples could be cited here.
Professor DeLong asks about large scale immigration of the "unskilled" (whatever that means) I can only note from my area of Bethesda, MD that virtually all lawn and garden care workers are Latino. Probably 80% of all construction workers are Latino (and we have multiple high-rise buildings under construction now and for the foreseeable future. Many small businesses in the Mid-West employ "unskilled" immigrants in all sorts of jobs (pity the poor Haitians of Springfield who are probably on the top of the list to be deported). These are NOT jobs that are going to be replaced by AI or the latest invention from the Musk laboratories. Plumbers, HVAC techs, appliance installers, handymen who paint and do drywall repairs (in this case we always had Latino workers when we still lived in our house), electricians, etc. are all jobs that will continue to be with us. Some of these jobs pay well and others not so much. However, they all have an interest in a robust economy with low inflation.
The college elite Dems (and yes I'm one of them) for the most part don't get why this large group of workers moved to the Rep column. It's as simple as Occam's Razor: inflation hurts them far more than it does the brie and Chablis group (though neither of these appeal to me). They are worried about making it from paycheck to paycheck and maybe have a good bit of credit card debt at a usurious interest rate (just look at your monthly statement to see how high this might be!!). Has Trump addressed their concerns? Not one bit, and they will be filled with disappointment and buyer's remorse as they see another large tax cut to the rich and nothing in a Trump economy that has a positive impact on them.
This is what economists should be focusing on and figuring out why the tangible benefits of the last four years did not "trickle down" (yikes, what an awful term!!!). We could debate whether there was a level of misogyny Tuesday (that's what Nate Silver alluded to on his podcast, "Dems should have run a male candidate against Trump"). However, that's a minor point. The Great Carvile's key, that still resonates, "it's the economy stupid" remains the best explanation. It did not impact me but it certainly did impact all of those who shifted over to the Old Orange Head team.