Quote Of The Day

Your life was quite short, and now, you are quite dead.

- Konosuba - God's Blessing On This Wonderful World! (Episode 1).

Some Ukraine War Updates

The images below (in part, from here) recounts the situation on the ground in Ukraine as of January 20, 2025. 

The Percentage Of Russian Casualties That Are Deaths Has Surged

The most notable information is regarding the proportion of Russian casualties which involve deaths rather than injuries from the leading third-party think tank monitoring the war. The Institute for the Study of War believes that at least 150,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in 2024 alone, which is about 35% of all estimated Russian casualties in 2024 (although its primary source for this is the Ukrainian government).

This is far in excess of my previous estimates that the percentage of Russian casualties representing soldiers killed in action is up to 10%. Prior to 2024, Ukraine has probably inflicted about 300,000 casualties upon Russia, of which perhaps 30,000-60,000 involved Russian soldiers who were actually killed, suggesting that 180,000-220,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in the Ukraine War so far (which is close to the BBC estimate), and another 500,000 or so Russian soldiers have been wounded since 2022. This is relative to about 600,000 active duty Russian ground troops (who have born the brunt of the casualties in this war) and about 300,000 active duty naval and air force troops in the entire Russian military at the start of the war in 2022, which has been expanded with mercenaries, conscripts, and ethnically Russian Ukrainian separatist rebels. 

About 300 North Korean soldiers out of about 12,000 provided by North Korea to Russia, were killed and about 2700 were wounded fighting for Russia from December 14, 2024 to January 13, 2024, a number which has no doubt grown significantly in the last 9 days.

About 64,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed and about 450,000 more are missing or have been wounded or captured as well, which implies that about 13% of Ukrainian military casualties are deaths, in addition to about 13,000 civilians killed and about 30,000 civilians wounded and immense property damages since the war has mostly been fought on its territory. About 10.2 million Ukrainians are refugees or have been internally displaced. In contrast, only about 400 Russian civilians have been killed in the conflict since 2022.

The total number of deaths, military and civilian, on all sides combined, in the Ukraine War since 2022 has been about 255,000 to 295,000. More people were killed, mostly in ethnically Russian insurgency in the Donbas region, in the decade or so before the Russian invasion in 2022.

This clearly cements the Ukraine War as the third most deadly deadly war in which Russia has been involved since at least the year 1900, with second place held by World War I which killed 1-2 million Russians, and first place held by World War II which killed 27 million Russians (including 8.7 million Russian soldiers). 

The number of Russian soldiers killed in the Ukraine War also exceeds the number of U.S. soldiers killed in any of its wars since it came into existence during the Revolutionary War, other than World War II (407,316 deaths and 671,278 wounds not mortal) and the U.S. Civil War (about 698,000 deaths and about 800,000 wounds not mortal).

This higher death rate for Russian soldiers may, in part, represent the more severe and numerous Russian infantry casualties produced by Ukraine's heavier use of cluster bombs. 

This may also be a product of more casualty tolerant human wave infantry advance tactics of the Russian military in the fall of 2024, which are more similar to those of World War I and the Russo-Japanese War than of more recent conflicts. These tactics have produced some territorial gains on the Eastern Ukraine front for Russia. But those gains have still been modest, incremental, and secured at a very high cost in Russian casualties. See here and here and here.

Most of Russia's territorial gains were in the first two months of the war, which was followed by a slower, but significant roll back of those gains by Ukrainian forces, then stagnation, followed by modest Russian territorial gains this fall and winter.

Russia now controls about 18% of Ukraine's territory, a gain of about one percentage point since January of 2023, two years earlier, and a small amount of Russian territory is now controlled by Ukraine.

Russia have favored these human wave dismounted infantry tactics because drone delivered bombs, anti-armor missiles, and artillery are less effective against somewhat dispersed dismounted infantry than they are again major military systems on the front lines like tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, armored personnel carriers. Drone delivered bombs and artillery aren't as effective on the front lines in Russian operations to expand territory under its control. But dismounted infantry are easier to kill with small arms. at relative close range.

Russia's territorial gains also continue to be largely confined to parts of Ukraine that were mostly or significantly ethnically and linguistically Russian before Russia's 2014 and 2022 invasions (and hasn't even captured all of that). Very little Ukrainian territory that is less than 20% ethnically Russian has been held by Russian forces, and almost of of the 7% of Ukrainian territory Russia had gained control over by 2014 was majority ethnically Russian in the year 2001.

This ethnic mismatch in Ukraine's borders wasn't a big deal when Ukraine and Russia were both under the umbrella of the Soviet Union prior to 1989 when they were drawn, but became more meaningful when the U.S.S.R. collapsed and Ukraine became an independent country that in turn developed along a more Western European leaning trajectory than Russia did.

Cannon Artillery In Ukraine

Also, while other reports have noted that drone attacks have accounted for something like 80% of the damage that Ukraine is inflicting upon Russia in this war, Ukraine has also been making heavy use of its howitzers, which account for a significant share of the remaining major Russian military systems and bases destroyed.

Ukraine is reportedly firing up to 3000 155mm artillery shells a day from NATO model howitzers and needs to replace more than 30 towed howitzer barrels per month (which are produced entirely at a single U.S. based plant than is struggling to produce that many). These barrels (a.k.a. M776 cannons) suffer more wear and tear when used at longer ranges, because more propellant is used, and when they are used more frequently. Worn barrels have reduced range and accuracy even before they fail completely.

Ukraine has received more than 200 towed M777 155mm howitzers from the U.S., and another 4 from Australia and 6 from Canada. At least 100 of these howitzers have been damages or destroyed in combat, although some of them may have been repaired and returned to service, or salvaged for parts.

Ukraine also has some Russian designed 152mm self-propelled howitzers with a maximum range of about 21 miles, and some domestically made 152mm self-propelled howitzers that are somewhat more accurate with a maximum range of about 24 miles. But these systems are apparently inferior to the 155mm howitzers used by NATO "in terms of range, precision, and rate of fire." 

Belarus

Outside the headlines, Russia has been quietly working towards total annexation of Belarus, even though it has contributed very little to Russia's military effort, after providing a staging ground for Russia in the very early days of the Ukraine War's re-ignition starting in February 24, 2024.

The Case For Having Political Parties Take Direct Action

I am a minor Democratic party official, a "precinct organizer" in my neighborhood. I've previously served as the county treasurer of the Democratic Party of Denver. I've waded my way through almost all parts of the Democratic party organization, attending multiple state conventions and assemblies and county party reorganizations. I've also seen the legislative process up close, as an intern in Congress in college, and as a law partner of a state legislator in a two partner law firm.

U.S. political parties are, by design, weak and historically haven't been trusted. The U.S. has one of the most candidate centered political systems in the world and pushes political parties to the side as much as possible, despite their central role in the legislative process and as organizing forces in the electoral process.

U.S. political parties have only limited control over who runs under their banner in elections. Political parties have some money that they can use to support their candidates in elections, but the U.S. campaign finance system heavily favors funding individual candidates and ballot issues, in particular elections, over campaign finance mediated by political parties. Political party platforms aren't worth the paper that they are printed upon and are almost completely disregarded by the officials holding elective office whom that political party helped to get elected. 

In many municipal elections, all candidates are non-partisan and political parties are removed from the process entirely.

Colorado's political parties are stronger than average. They play an outsized role in nominating candidates for elected office through the caucus-county and district assembly-state convention process. And,  most vacancies in state elected officers are filled by vacancy committees made up of political party officials. But, Colorado political parties still usually raise only barely enough money for their bare minimum operating expense requirements and contribute little money to getting their party's candidates elected.

Also, in Colorado, like both major political parties in almost every U.S. state, political parties engage almost entirely in a single activity - participating in electoral politics by trying to nominate good candidates with the right political agendas, and by trying to get out the vote for those candidates come election time.

This is important work. And, because it is important work, a county like Denver, with about 250,000 voters who are registered to vote as Democrats, manages to convince several hundred voters who are registered to vote as Democrats to do what it takes to get the job of trying to elect Democrats to elected office done at the grass roots.

But, like most non-legislative wings of major political parties in the U.S., a lot of that volunteer effort is squandered on long, cumbersome, bureaucratic meetings at which the party organizes itself into several layers of political party bureaucracy at the block, precinct, sub-house district, house district, senate district, congressional district, county, and state levels. Immense effort is thrown into soliciting and compiling resolutions and party platforms that are ultimately passed as an after thought and ignored by the elected officials who actually exercise power within the party. The meetings are many hours long, and become an exercise in mastery of Robert's Rules of Order, related to internal organizational matters of only marginal importance.

Some of it is mandated by state law and is unavoidable. But, much of it elaborates the required structures to a far greater extent than is required by law.

The somewhat rigid organizational structure of the party, which tracks the rather involved long ballot structure of the partisan elected offices in a typical U.S. state, also creates a situation where inevitably, some places have lots of people who want to be involved but there is a shortage of positions to utilize them, and other places have positions in the structure that go vacant or are only intermittently filled.

The focus on filling pre-ordained slots in this political structure in long, parliamentary procedure filled meetings also undermines potential resources of people who would like to be politically active in another way. Almost all people who want to be politically active care passionately about policy and changing the way that our world works for the better. But the tasks that political parties have for them to perform does little to nurture and satisfy these passions and connect the work they are doing to the larger causes that they care about.

But, while political parties must play a role in nominating candidates and even filling vacancies in political offices, nothing requires them to limit themselves to this bare minimum.

In the 19th century, political parties also routinely engaged in various forms of direct action. They sponsored newspapers. They had "ward healers" who went out in the community to help people, often immigrants, who might otherwise fall through the cracks because they didn't understand how to access government programs or because there were no government programs that directly addressed certain needs in the community. They helped unemployed people find jobs. They helped grieving families with no money conduct funerals for a deceased family member. They connected people who had legal claims to lawyers who could enforce those rights. They connected disgruntled workers with union organizers and helped elected officials identify work place problems that legislation could solve in way more organic and effective that modern "town meetings" that are often held only for show. They connected people who had various needs to government and charitable programs that addressed those needs, that the people in need were unaware of. They helped people deal with recalcitrant bureaucrats and red tape with the assistance of elected officials from the party in what is now known as "constituent service" and is usually mediated directly through elected officials. They did all manner of favors to directly address people's needs and in exchange won the loyalty of people in their communities.

In places like Denver, we are already very good at keeping turnout high and reliably in favor of Democratic candidates for public office, and for vetting those candidates. And, the demographic makeup and underlying attitudes of people in a large central city mean that even when the party is run in a mediocre manner, its candidates are still going to win elective office. It may be very inefficient and squander potential volunteer efforts and enthusiasm, but it has a base of party members large enough that it can achieve its core purpose despite its outdated, cumbersome, and inefficient structure.

But, it could do better. It could streamline the bureaucratic processes to a bare minimum, dispensing with some of the generic and unnecessary parts of Robert's Rules of Order based proceedings by tailoring them to its narrow task. It could centralize the level at which volunteer efforts are organized so that excesses of volunteers in places where they are available could more naturally be diverted to the places where their efforts are needed the most. For example, rather than organizing at the precinct level, it could make the based level of its organization the house district and have house district level party officials, collectively, carry out the tasks of precinct organizers for the entire house district.

But beyond that, county and state political parties could engage in more direct action and coordination. It could develop corps of modern day "ward healers" to help people who have trouble navigating complex bureaucratic governments or just fall through the cracks. It could arrange regulate meetings between those ward healers who have encountered the problems people are facing on the front lines in their daily lives with elected officials and constituent service staffers for them who have the power to address through problems from positions of power over government workers and through new legislation, if necessary. It could arrange meetings between ward healers and other charitable organizations and people like immigration and personal injury lawyers to help them know where to turn when people have particular needs that government doesn't currently address.

The most acclaimed Democratic Party political leader in recent times, President Obama, got his start as a community organizer. And, every county Democratic party political organization should follow his example and have community organizers, who might also be ward healers, who help communities come together to identify problems that can be solved, in part, through direct action, in part, through legislative action, and then help those communities to solve the problems that the community identifies.

Maybe in a county where this is needed, that may mean helping women who aren't aware of what is available, learn about and gain access to reproductive health providers like Planned Parenthood. 

Maybe a community needs help finding ways to put young men who aren't in school and are unemployed find paths for themselves that don't involve gangs and crimes (something that has been identified as the main problem driving the COVID era crime surge that was often attributed to police brutality protests instead).

Maybe a community needs to organize to protect tenant's rights, or to help people re-entering the community from incarceration to get government issued IDs, or to locate legal representation for low income people with immigration issues.

These are volunteer opportunities that would be snapped up by people who care deeply about policy issues and want to make a difference, and would make it worth the while of those volunteers to also devote some time to the unavoidable minimum of bureaucracy and the bureaucratic process.

And, these volunteers would also be energized by the opportunity to share what they have learned from their direct action, directly with elected officials in a way that so often is reserved for paid lobbyists in the status quo.

Actions speak louder than words, and this kind of activity would also dramatically increase the credibility of the Democratic party with people who accuse the party of conspiring with Republicans on behalf of monied interests insure that change doesn't happen, when in reality, they are thwarted by gridlock in a system designed to strongly favor the status quo over political change most of the time due to the other party's ability to stymie their efforts, especially at the federal level which is most visible.

Political tactics like widespread incorporation of direct action, community organizing, and facilitating the flow of information between common people on the front lines and elected officials, could help the party achieve a level of dominance and effectiveness that few people today imagine could even be possible, just as the political machines of the 19th century did using similar tactics.

Of course, I'm not advocating a return to the cheating, corruption, and political violence that 19th century political machines used to achieve their ends. But none of those things are inseparable from the concept of having political parties do more than play a supporting role in an electoral process that is fundamentally designed to be candidate driven.

Also, if this kind of direct action could increase the credibility of political parties generally as constructive and positive contributors to the political process. Public opinion might grow more favorable towards giving political parties are larger role in selecting their own candidates and in funding their campaigns for public office.

What Right Wing Authoritarianism Looks Like IRL

We know what right wing authoritarianism looks like in real life and democracy is better.

I was democracy-pilled by reading biographies of Franco and Salazar. The Iberian countries in the 1930’s were what every right-wing authoritarian fantasizes about: vigorous young conservative dictators firmly in charge of a country, liberals totally defeated and out of power. Both were able to stay in power for decades.

The result? 

For a while they owned the libs but eventually their countries just stagnated. Badly. To stay in power, Franco and Salazar had to systematically defang any organization that could in theory threaten their rule. Yes this meant left-wing universities and pro-democracy groups, but it also meant the church, the military, etc. 

Salazar in particular tried to trip these of power and resources so they could never threaten his rule. 

A damning incident in the Franco biography was that near the end of Franco’s rule his Prime Minister was assassinated by Basques and Franco couldn’t find a replacement for him. A country of tens of millions of people and nobody qualified to be PM. That’s what decades of suppressing the production of new elites does. To a dictator, any young ambitious person is a potential threat and must not be allowed to blossom too much.

Democracy has many flaws but having rival teams of elites is something you don’t appreciate until you lose it.

From here.

Observations

* While the modern era in many countries is quite technologically advanced, we still lag in adopting new technologies that make sense. Many good, economically sensible ideas that would work are never adopted in almost every industry and walk of life.

* In policy determined by politics, while there is not one correct answer, there are many incorrect answers that are objectively, or at least, intersubjectively, clearly wrong. 

* Many popular beliefs about policy and science and medicine and technology are profoundly wrong.

* While the term is become somewhat hackneyed, "opinion leaders" do greatly influence what the general public thinks is good policy. It is not just a one way street with the views of the masses (who often don't have any meaningful views on something) driving the decisions of politicians. Politicians and judges shape what the public considers right and wrong at least as much as they respond to public opinion.

* Uninformed and misinformed voting can increase public confidence in the system, but it doesn't lead to better choices. But, people who have no vote, systemically get shafted by the decisions that are made by politicians, while the desires of people who vote reliably are far more likely to come out on top when decisions are made.

* It is very common for people, both ordinary people and more sophisticated people, to be aware of a problem but to be greatly mistaken about the cause of that problem. Conventional wisdom about what causes things to happen is often wrong.

* Smart people make different kinds of mistakes than stupid people.

* Only a modest minority of people will change their beliefs when presented with facts and evidence that are contrary to their beliefs. Changing people's views is to a great extent a social process and a function of experience.

* People who are knowledgable about something greatly underestimate how little everyone else knows about what they know.

* People tend to underestimate the capacity of technology to improve and to cause social change, and tend to overestimate the capacity of societies to change non-technologically.

* If people seem to be acting in an economically irrational manner, this usually means that the people observing them don't understand their situation in important respects.

* If you see businesses acting in what seems to be an odd or inefficient way, it is most often some strategy to engage in price discrimination.

* Every law and regulation exists for a reason and you should understand why it was put in place and what effect it had (which may have worked in an unintended way) before committing to changing it. But many laws and regulations nonetheless no longer make sense, especially in a rapidly changing world.

* The folkways and norms of a culture in a particular region often persist long after they have become dysfunctional for current conditions.

* Religion thrives when it protects threatened cultures, it withers when the culture of which it is apart is dominant and secure.

* Most people are more rigid about adopting new languages or language innovations, new religious beliefs, new cultural norms, and new political views once they are past a formative period which is often in their 20s or younger.

* Our society is neither ruled by an elite cabal of a few dozen or hundreds of billionaires and elite politicians, nor by widespread grass roots democratic decision making. Most real decision making is made by perhaps several of thousand to several million people, although some important decisions (especially economic decisions) are more decentralized.

* It is harder to figure out viable paths to improve the status quo than it is to know what a better world would look like.

* Many intelligent people who accurately state the facts and the problems propose bad solutions based upon that knowledge.

* One of the important functions of politics is to prioritize problems vis-a-vis each other. It isn't uncommon for problems that are known to exist and have clear solutions to go unsolved because they aren't ultimately very important to solve yet.

* Demagogues are incredibly harmful to society and hard to regulate.

* Our political system and business firms do a poor job of screening out psychopaths and demagogues from positions of power.

* The most important factor that distinguishes the economic success of capitalism v. communism, and the private sector v. the public sector, is that the capitalist private sector shuts down failing firms and activities more quickly.

* Political power is more concentrated than economic power.

* Small organizations can change themselves more rapidly than big ones, and big organizations broken up into many small ones can change all of them more rapidly than the one big organization can, most of the time.

Off Road Vehicles Don't Have To Be Slow

1987 Paris-Dakar truck class winner Jan de Rooy, secured a dominant victory winning the class by over eleven hours and finishing an impressive eleventh overall, at the wheel of his DAF Turbo Twin II truck. It weighed 11 tons, but had a speed of 130 miles per hour. It wheels didn't prevent it from attaining high speeds on sandy, off road terrain.

Quote of the Day

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief.
Do justly now,
love mercy now,
walk humbly now.
You are not obligated to complete the work,
but neither are you free to abandon it.

- Rabbi Tarfon in Pirkei Avot 2:16 (Ethics of our Fathers).

Nesting

In many cases, the best response to a situation is nesting, i.e. staying inside your well-stocked house and not going anywhere. 

Nesting is a good response to situations including:

Blizzards, deep snow, deep freezes, heat waves, hail, intense rain, high winds, thick fog, tornados, flying or jumping bugs everywhere, infectious diseases in the community, bad air quality, downed power lines, wild animals on the prowl, and violent people in the neighborhood who aren't specifically out to get you (a.k.a. "shelter in place").

Nesting isn't a good response to everything. It is a bad response to:

Wild fires, nearby structure fires, floods, landslides, sink holes, natural gas leaks, poisonous gases, violent people who are specifically out to get you, and seismic events like earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions.

Coincidentally, most of the things that nesting is a bad response to are most common, in even urbanized areas, in California and/or Florida.

Anti-Tank Warfare And Attrition In Ukraine

Tanks really only make sense against adversaries who don't have anti-tank weapons, and they aren't very useful as anti-tank weapons themselves. 

Heavy armored formations and mechanized units engineered for dispersed, yet “linear” attacks to penetrate and hold enemy territory are not likely disappearing anytime soon as a critical element of modern Combined Army Maneuver, yet there is little question that the warfare in Ukraine is re-defining certain key ground-war tactics in favor of lightweight, de-centralized, agile and ground-fired anti-tank weapons used by dispersed, dismounted forces and fast, light tactical vehicles. When combined with precise overhead surveillance, unmanned systems and some measure of effective networking, Ukrainians armed with shoulder-fired anti-armor weapons continue to exact a devastating toll upon Russian assault platforms.

A significant Army Intelligence Report called the “The Operational Environment 2024-2034 Large-Scale Combat Operations.” (US Army Training and Doctrine Command, G2) says that Russia’s entire active duty tank force has been destroyed in its war with Ukraine.

“Ukrainian Armed Forces have used vast quantities of man-portable air-defense systems (MANPADS), antitank guided missiles, and FPV UAS—combined with fires—to great effect. As of July 2024, Russia has lost 3,197 main battle tanks—more than its entire active-duty inventory at the outset of conflict—and 6,160 armored fighting vehicles, forcing them to pull increasingly obsolescent systems from storage,” the text of the report from 2024 states.

From Warrior Maven.

As I noted in a previous post, Russia has lost more than 2/3 of its major military systems and is on track to have lost about 3/4 of them by the third anniversary of the war on February 24, 2025. 

Ukraine has the clear advantage when it comes to replacing major military systems. The U.S. and other NATO countries are giving Ukraine large amounts of modern major military systems. Russia has only feeble domestic industrial capacity to build such systems in quantity, in contrast, and is pretty much limited to what it can buy from Iran and what North Korea will give it. China hasn't shut out Russia entirely but isn't arming it either. Ukraine's domestic war production has also been impressive. For example, it has built and used at least 1.2 million armed drones.

As many of 750,000 Russian troops (including their North Korean allies) may have died, been injured, or captured by that time, a number which already exceeds 600,000. Russia's active duty military personnel at the start of the war numbered 900,000, of which 300,000 to 500,000 were navy and air force personnel. Russian casualties equal or exceed the total number of ground forces that it had at the outset of the war.

The best estimates are that 11,000-12,000 North Korean troops have joined the fight. But multiple thousands of them are already casualties in their first few weeks in action. Apparently, North Korean troops are being used as cannon fodder in mass human wave attacks reminiscent of World War I and the Russo-Japanese War - tactics that were discredited a century ago.

Russia has the advantage when it comes to replacing casualties with new conscripts and forces like mercenaries and North Korean soldiers, because it has a much larger population than Ukraine and Ukraine's allies are not yet lending it troops. But neither combatant has any significant capacity to replace seasoned military officers who are lost in the conflict in the short term.

College Application Season Is Over

I have a nephew and the daughter of a close family friend who have been applying to colleges this academic year. 

The latest application deadlines for almost all of the even remotely selective institutions for fall admission (some non-selective institutions have rolling admissions) are on January 15 (some are earlier). So, now, all of the applications are out and they are waiting to see if they get thick envelopes or thin envelopes in the mail in a few months.

Perceptions Of Crime

Crime going into the 2024 election was at the lowest level since 1969. But Republicans and independents didn't know that, because their political leaders lied to them and third-parties weren't emphatic enough and trusted by them enough to counteract that.

Also from Kevin Drum: "The 2020 Murder Spike Was COVID all along."

Who Is At Fault?

An interesting take on the failures that led to this mess. I would put Joe Biden lower. I would put assign some non-SCOTUS judges some blame. I would assign the Democratic Party some blame, although far down the list.

All I know is that the following people are responsible for where we are today. In ascending order of importance:

1. Joe Biden, who defeated Trump in 2020 but due to a combination of hubris, age, and ego stayed in the 2024 race far too long, stacking the deck against anyone who challenged Donald Trump;
2. Merrick Garland, who took way too long to mobilize any serious Justice Department investigation into Trump’s myriad felonies;
3. The Supreme Court of the United States, who repeatedly, persistently evinced zero interest in applying any legal or constitutional constraint on Donald Trump. As a result, no future president will feel constrained in any way whatsoever by the Emoluments Clause, Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment, or, as it turns out, pretty much any law that might otherwise restrict the President of the United States;
4. Mitch McConnell, who could have tipped the scales on Trump’s second impeachment (and made it pretty clear afterwards how he felt about Trump) but, in the end, did not vote to convict;
5. Congressional Republicans, who acted and sounded pretty goddamn terrified when the rioters attacked on January 6th. If they had all decided to jump at once and vote to impeach and then convict Trump, his political power would have evaporated. Instead, scared of their own partisans, they capitulated to Trump;
6. Donald J. Trump, who whipped his supporters into a frenzy, attempted to organize slates of alternate electors, refused to recognize the results of any election that he has lost, and has promised to pardon those who violated laws to serve his interests. And finally.
7. The American people, who had plenty of opportunities not to vote for Trump again. In early 2024, Republicans could have gone to the polls and selected a Trump clone who had not committed multiple felonies. In November 2024 voters could have gone to the polls and selected a different candidate who, to repeat a theme, had not committed multiple felonies. And yet, in the end, a plurality voted for the toddler.

From Dan Drezner.

U.S. Political Theory Musings

Federal Constitutional Law

Would state boundaries have been adjusted, and would state divisions and mergers, have been more common but for the state-centric structure of the Electoral College and the U.S. Senate? As it is, splitting a state, or merging two states, changes the political balance. Perhaps the best guidance would be to look at how county boundaries within states have changed over time.

Would there have been less resistance to granting statehood to D.C., Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and Guam, but for the state-centric structure of the Electoral College and the U.S. Senate? This would still dilute the power of the existing states in Congress and (apart from D.C.) in Presidential elections, but only modestly.

Would a constitutional amendment to give D.C., Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and Guam (and any subsequent new territories that are not U.S. states), the same representation in the U.S. House that they would have if they were U.S. states be politically viable? While giving territories that are not U.S. states seats in the U.S. Senate are barred from even being constitutional amendments, the same limitation does not apply to the U.S. House.

A constitutional amendment to directly elect the President would have wide support in every, or almost every state, even small states that benefits from the status quo.

A constitutional amendment weakening the U.S. Senate vis-a-vis the U.S. House would presumably be constitutional, since no state would be deprived of its equal representation in the U.S. Senate. For example, what if legislation that was passed in the U.S. House, but not passed in the U.S. Senate within eight months, could become law if it was readopted in the U.S. House with a 60% majority and signed by the President? What is approval of Presidential appointments and treaties was transferred from the U.S. Senate to the U.S. House? What if a Presidential veto could be overturned by voting to override the veto in both houses by majority vote?

Congress could, by statute, authorize or mandate proportional representation in elections for the U.S. House within each state, eliminating gerrymandering.

Why didn't the Founders have Congress, sitting in joint session, elect the President, rather than having a separate electoral college? It would have had the same political balance between U.S. states. It would have left voters with a single thing to vote on in federal elections prior to the direct election of Senators. It would have avoided national election recounts. It probably would have made the President more responsive to Congress. Better yet, what if the President could be replaced by a vote of a joint session of Congress at any time, in lieu of impeachment.

A constitutional amendment to reduce the number of Senators from 2 to 1 per state, or from 2 to 3 per state (with one elected every two years) would be constitutional, and either approach would make more sense, except that it would unbalance the electoral college (which an increase in the size of the U.S. House could fix).

Presidential Ballot Access

24 candidates were listed on the ballot in at least one state and over 100 candidates were registered as a write-in candidate in at least one state.

Third-party and independent candidates received 2.13% of the vote in the 2024 election, totaling over three million votes. This is slightly more than the 2020 United States presidential election, when third party candidates received 1.86%.

Green Party nominee Jill Stein received the most votes of any third-party candidate, receiving 868,945 votes (0.56%). She received 1.09% of the vote in Maryland, her best state by percentage. Stein also received over one percent of the vote in Maine and California. This was also the first election since 2000 that the Green Party finished third nationwide, and the first since 2008 that the Libertarian Party failed to.

Withdrawn independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. received 757,371 votes (0.49%). Kennedy's 1.96% in Montana was the highest statewide vote share of any third-party candidate. Kennedy also received over one percent of the vote in Alaska, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Vermont, Washington, and West Virginia.

Libertarian candidate Chase Oliver received 650,120 votes (0.42%). He was the only third-party candidate to be on the ballot or a registered write-in candidate in every state + D.C. Oliver received 1.69% in North Dakota, his best state by percentage. Oliver also received over one percent of the vote in Utah and Wyoming.

No other candidate reached one percent of the vote in any state. "None of these candidates" received 19,625 votes (1.32%) in Nevada.

Party for Socialism and Liberation nominee, Claudia De la Cruz received 167,772 votes (0.11%). 

From Wikipedia.

Trump's popular vote margin was 1.5 percentage points, which was less than the percentage of votes cast for third-party candidates. None of the third-party candidates came anywhere close to winning even a single electoral vote.

It would be possible to greatly shorten the Presidential ballot without unduly impacting the ability of any candidate with a meaningful chance of winning even a single electoral vote or influencing the ultimate outcome in any state, making ballots for voters simpler.

One plausible threshold for ballot access would be to require candidates for the Presidency to affiliate with a political party having at least one elected official in federal, state, or local elected office. Most of the candidates would be eliminated that way, but none of the viable candidates would be, nor would the Green Party or Libertarian party candidates who did best of all of the third-party candidates who were still running on election day.

Another plausible threshold for ballot access would be to require candidates to have previously held a statewide elective office (for state or federal office) or as Vice President, or a cabinet post, or to have served as a general in the U.S. military. Trump, when first elected, is the only President ever to have failed to meet this threshold.

Congress could pass legislation overcoming the SCOTUS nullification of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment's ban on insurrectionists holding political office in the U.S. (which was a horrible decision not supported by the language of the constitution or its structure or many past precedents).

It would make sense to have a uniform set of candidates for President nationally, although the mechanics could be tricky. The current Presidential primary system isn't optimal, is long, and deprives lots of people in lots of states of any meaningful say in the process.

State and Local Politics

State legislatures have been required as a matter of U.S. constitutional law to apportion seats in their state house and state senate in the same way since the 1960s. Why has only Nebraska shifted to a unicameral system?

Why hasn't even a single state deviated from the single member district system in any house of its state legislature? Some form of proportional representation could eliminate gerrymandering, isn't prohibited by the U.S. Constitution or federal law, and could be put in place by citizens initiative even if the two major political parties were opposed to it?

Why does essentially every U.S. state have the same political parties for federal office as it does for state and local offices? Only a handful of U.S. states have roughly a 50-50 balance between the two major political parties. But almost all of them would be close to 50-50 if each state had its own state political parties for state offices. This would give voters in states that lean strongly left or right from the national political balance much more meaningful choices. What would that look like in Utah or Wyoming or California or Massachusetts?

In theory, states have a lot more freedom to enact tax policies than the federal government does. For example, while there is reason to doubt that a federal wealth tax would be constitutional, a state wealth tax faces no obvious constitutional barrier.

Abortion Legality By Jurisdiction In 2025

A brief recap, since there has been a lot of change in the legality of abortion in the U.S. since the June 24, 2022 decision in Dobbs.

From Wikipedia.

It is also informative to place this in an international perspective.

From Wikipedia.

The Case For Borda Count Voting

Alex Tabarrok makes the case that "The Borda Count is the Best Method of Voting" at the Marginal Revolution blog.

The Borda Count has voter rank the n candidates from most to least preferred and assigns (n-1) points to the candidates. For example if there are 3 candidates a voter’s top-ranked candidate gets 2 points, the second ranked candidate gets 1 point and the last ranked candidate 0 points. The candidate with the most points overall wins.

This approach seems crude, but the proof is in the pudding. He notes that:

It’s well known that the voting methods we use are highly defective, as they fail to meet fundamental criteria like positive responsiveness, the Pareto principle, and stability. Positive responsiveness (monotonicity) means that if a candidate improves on some voters’ ballots, this should not reduce the candidate’s chances of winning. Yet, many voting methods, including runoffs and ranked-choice voting, fail positive responsiveness. In other words, candidates who became more preferred by voters can end up losing when they would have won when they were less preferred! It’s even more shocking that some voting systems can fail the Pareto principle, which simply says that if every voter prefers x to y then the voting system should not rank y above x. Everyone knows that in a democracy a candidate may be elected that the minority ranks below another possible candidate but how many know that there are democratic voting procedures where a candidate may be elected that the majority ranks below another possible candidate or even that democratic voting procedures may elect a candidate that everyone ranks below another possible candidate! That is the failure of the Pareto principle and the chaos results of McKelvey–Schofield show that this kind of outcome should be expected.

Almost all researchers in social choice understand the defects of common voting systems and indeed tend to agree that the most common system, first past the post voting, is probably the most defective! But, as no system is perfect, there has been less consensus on which methods are best. Ranked choice voting, approval voting and the Borda Count all have their proponents. In recent years, however, there has been a swing towards the Borda Count.

Don Saari, for example, whose work on voting has been a revelation, has made strong arguments in favor of the Borda Count. . . .

The Borda Count satisfies positive responsiveness, the Pareto principle and stability. In addition, Saari points out that the Borda Count is the only positional voting system to always rank a Condorcet winner (a candidate who beats every other candidate in pairwise voting) above a Condorcet loser (a candidate who loses to every other candidate in pairwise voting.) In addition, all voting systems are gameable, but Saari shows that the Borda Count is by some reasonable measures the least or among the least gameable systems.

The Borda Count also has the arguable virtue of resolving elections in a single vote and in being relatively simple to implement.

A say "arguable" because the problem with any system that considers second or greater choices in a single round is that it places a greater burden on voters to be familiar enough with all of the candidates to rank them, as opposed to permitting them to only know which one is their favorite. Multi-round voting systems allow voters whose first choice is eliminated in the first round to gather more information about the remaining contenders allowing voters to make a more informed choice about second and subsequent choices. More generally, demanding more research from voters reduces voter turnout.

Comments to the post also note that the name is just horrible from a marketing perspective, and that it greatly inflates the votes of voters who rank more candidates in total. Unlike majority rule, adding irrelevant alternatives can change society's choice. Apart from being a problem in its own right, this opens the door to gaming the set of policies on the ballot. Although the Borda count captures some sort of preference intensity, it still does so in a very crude way. Multiple commentators disagree that it isn't easy to game.

Another comment argues that:

Voting should be an error minimization. We want to minimize the total difference between people's preferences and what happens.

Approval voting will do this. The candidate that will minimize the sum error (that is the number of people that approved of him - those that didn't approve) will be the the candidate that has the most approval votes. Approval voting can also be used for parliaments where people vote for parties.

Also, Borda count focuses on the winner of an individual race, but may or may not bring a proper balance of political parties in a multi-body legislature. Another comment notes that: "until we get rid of the electoral college and the ability of state governments to gerrymander congressional districts, any voting system will just be nibbling at the corners."

How Stable Is The Wealth Elite?

The ranks of very most wealthy people in the U.S. show considerable churn, but remain highly biased in favor of the descendants of previous members of its ranks.

Is the top tail of wealth a set of fixed individuals or is there substantial turnover? We estimate upper-tail wealth dynamics during the Gilded Age and beyond, a time of rapid wealth accumulation and concentration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Using various wealth proxies and data tracking tens of millions of individuals, we find that most extremely wealthy individuals drop out of the top tail within their lifetimes. Yet, elite wealth still matters. We find a non-linear association between grandparental wealth and being in the top 1%, such that having a rich grandparent exponentially increases the likelihood of reaching the top 1%. Still, over 90% of the grandchildren of top 1% wealth grandfathers did not achieve that level.

From a new NBER working paper by Priti Kalsi and Zachary Ward.

U.S. Income Tax Rates On Billionaires

Billionaires do pay taxes, but at a lower rate than typical working class and middle class families. This estimate, made in 2021, doesn't include the full effects of Trump's tax cuts for corporations and the rich which took effect in 2018.

In this analysis, we used publicly available data to estimate the average Federal individual income tax rate paid by America’s wealthiest 400 families, using a relatively comprehensive measure of their income that includes income from unsold stock. In our primary analysis, we estimated an average tax rate of 8.2 percent for the period 2010–2018. We also present sensitivity analyses that yield estimates in the 6–12 percent range.

From Whitehouse.gov.

Too Awful

The political news is so bad, I don't know where to begin. One horror after another sparking up and in the works.

State Attempts To Ban Online Porn Associated With Backwardness

Attempts to limit access to online porn are exclusively found in states that are morally, economically, and politically backward (via CNN).

Americans Aren't Geniuses But They Aren't As Illiterate As Claimed

This meme is floating around on Facebook:

These kinds of dubious statistic are thrown out there to unjustly discredit public education and push for things like vouchers and home schooling, and to attack K-12 educators, by creating a "moral panic."

The ranking is, as noted, grossly inaccurate - there is a huge difference between 36th place and 125th place in a world with 195 countries. This flaw should undermine the credibility of the entire meme.

The definition used is also problematic.

What is the "6th grade level"? The 54% read below the 6th grade level figure is surely not referring to the reading level of the median 6th grader, which would be 50% in 6th grade, as the term would naively imply without a definition.

The high school graduation rate is 87% and 61% of adults over age 25 have some college. While many people don't improve a whole lot in reading ability between 6th grade and 12th grade, or after graduating from high school and then going to college but not graduating, more than 4% of people, for example, people who were slightly below average in 6th grade but ultimately graduate from high school and then go to college for a year or so, improve at least beyond the level of the median 6th grader in their next six to nine years of formal education after the 6th grade.

The statistics claiming that 54% of adults read below the 6th grade level also can't be squared with other data showing that 20% of adults read below the 5th grade level uncritically quoted by some advocated in the same breath (which is about the reading level at which general public oriented regional newspapers like the Denver Post are written). The literacy acquisition curve is not a mesa that gets super steep for one year and then almost completely flattens out. Other studies claim that the average American reads at the 8th or 9th grade level, a statistic which shares the same definition issues but less acutely.

The 54% read at the 6th grade level statistic must really based on measuring what some overoptimistic education researcher believes a 6th grader should be able to read that is divorced from reality. It is probably closer to the median reading level of 9th graders which is commonly used as a benchmark for functional literacy.

Also, the true literacy rate in the U.S. is well over 90%. Almost all adults (even those who are legally developmentally disabled) know the alphabet and can read street signs, children's books, etc. in their native language. "Functional literacy" set at a level needed to function reading things like medicine labels and tax forms and instructions for purchases that adults sometimes need to know is shared at a lower rate (and is about the reading level of the median 9th grader).

Yes, the average person is less functionally literate than the average functionally literate person believes, and yes, it would be better if more people had a higher level of literacy. But we aren't nearly as far gone as this meme implies.

Gridlock

This is the biggest problem with the U.S. political system. 

It takes nine out of ten Americans to agree on a policy in order for it to have a 50% chance of being approved. (Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America)

- From here.