Political Identity And The Total Fertility Rate In The U.S.

It is remarkable how closely state by state total fertility rates (roughly speaking, how a point in time estimate of how many children women in the state have per lifetime) track the partisan leanings of those states.

There are a handful of departures (West Virginia and Wyoming with coal based economies are lower than expected for their partisan leaning, and so are Montana and New Hampshire), but overall, it tracks quite closely.

Total fertility rate, in turn, tends to closely track economic development, education, and religiosity, which are probably the true drivers of political identity.

Against Longevity

Individually, it isn't hard to see why someone might want to live longer. But even if we could make people live to say, 200 years old, should we?

In a democratic society, having a large share of the population that formed their core political beliefs and social norms a century ago or more is not a desirable thing. This also places friction in the way of economic and scientific innovation.

This also means that people in the roughly 30 years of their lives that have children find their needs and priorities further diluted in the political system, despite their centrality to the long term survival of the species.

And, if people live longer, are they also working longer, or are they hoping to spend 3/4 of their lives in retirement?

TFR In The EU

The replacement "total fertility rate" which is what is being described below, is 2.1 children per woman per lifetime. So far, the demographic transition towards fewer children that comes with economic development, knows no bounds.

Official statistics show Germany’s birth rate fell to 1.35 children per woman in 2023, below the UN’s “ultra-low” threshold of 1.4 — characterising a scenario where falling birth rates become tough to reverse.

Estonia and Austria also passed under the 1.4 threshold, joining the nine EU countries — including Spain, Greece and Italy — that in 2022 had fertility rates below 1.4 children per woman.

With young people reaching milestones, such as buying a house, later in life, the average age of EU women at childbirth rose to 31.1 years in 2023, a year later than a decade ago.

…Austria reported a fall to 1.32 children per woman in 2023, down from 1.41 in the previous year. In Estonia, the rate hit 1.31 in 2023, down from 1.41 in the previous year.

Birth rates have fallen across Europe — even in countries such as Finland, Sweden and France, where family-friendly policies and greater gender equality had previously helped boost the number of babies. In Finland, the birth rate was above the EU average until 2010, but it dropped to 1.26 in 2023, the lowest since the record began in 1776, according to official data.

France had the highest birth rate at 1.79 children per woman in 2022, but the national figures showed it dropped to 1.67 last year, the lowest on record.

From the Financial Times.

Foreign Born Population At Record High

Immigration was a central part of Trump's Presidential campaign. His arguments that immigration was linked to crime or terrorism or a net fiscal burden on governments or economic harm were just purely untrue. His claim that illegal immigration amounts to an "invasion" of the United States in a constitutional sense is also far outside the mainstream of legal interpretation.

But, there has indeed been a lot of immigration in the post-pandemic period (some of just replacing people who left for the pandemic and are now coming back). 

The percentage of people residing in the United States who are foreign-born is record high. It is roughly three times as great as it was when I was born (when it was at an all time low).

I'm not in the least troubled by this surge in immigration, which is on balance a good thing for the country, even the undocumented immigration, although our nation's immigration laws are definitely broken.

The combined increases of legal and illegal immigration have caused the share of the U.S. population born in another country to reach a new high, 15.2 percent in 2023, up from 13.6 percent in 2020. The previous high was 14.8 percent, in 1890.

Source: Analysis of data from the Congressional Budget Office and U.S. Census Bureau

The rate at which people immigrated to the U.S. in the last four years has also been a record high, and according to the Goldman Sachs analysis found in the New York Times article (dated today) that all of the quotations and charts in this post derive from, about 60% of net immigration in the last four years has been undocumented.

Annual net migration — the number of people coming to the country minus the number leaving — averaged 2.4 million people from 2021 to 2023, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Total net migration during the Biden administration is likely to exceed eight million people.

That’s a faster pace of arrivals than during any other period on record, including the peak years of Ellis Island traffic, when millions of Europeans came to the United States. Even after taking into account today’s larger U.S. population, the recent surge is the most rapid since at least 1850:

The numbers in the Times analysis include both legal and illegal immigration. About 60 percent of immigrants who have entered the country since 2021 have done so without legal authorization, according to a Goldman Sachs report based on government data.

The story also analyzes the reasons behind this surge in immigration:

Several factors caused the surge, starting with President Biden’s welcoming immigration policy during his first three years in office. Offended by Donald J. Trump’s harsh policies — including the separation of families at the border — Mr. Biden and other Democrats promised a different approach. “We’re a nation that says, ‘If you want to flee, and you’re fleeing oppression, you should come,’” Mr. Biden said during his 2020 presidential campaign.

After taking office, his administration loosened the rules on asylum and other immigration policies, making it easier for people to enter the United States. Some have received temporary legal status while their cases wend through backlogged immigration courts. Others have remained without legal permission.

Outside causes have also played an important role in the surge. Turmoil in Haiti, Ukraine and Venezuela caused desperate people to flee their home countries. The growth of smuggler networks run by Mexican drug cartels allowed more people to reach the U.S. border. 

But the Biden administration’s policy appears to have been the biggest factor: After Mr. Biden tightened enforcement in June, the number of people crossing the border plummeted.

Solutions To Red America's Malaise Aren't Easy

The rise of MAGA and Trump is a frustrated reaction to the failure to status quo Republican and Democratic parties to better the core based of this movement's wants and desires. Trump has presented himself as an agent of change who will tear down the system and force it to start over, which sounds good to someone disgusted with the failure to the status quo to address his complaints.

The problem is that while Trump has empathized with them and their frustrations, the policies that he does have, while they amount to trying to do "something" about their woes, are awful as genuine policies and do nothing meaningful to solve their problems. Indeed, often, Trump's policies actively make things worse. They will lead to rampant inflation, a recession driven by fundamentals, and will undermine the clout and credibility of the United States on the world stage. He echoes their grievances but has no meaningful solutions to them.

The trouble is that the Democrats and Republicans have failed to crack the nuts that cause the discontents and circumstances that are driving the MAGA base, because the MAGA based misunderstands what is driving the circumstances they are unhappy about, and because there aren't easy solutions out there.

Going back isn't an option, because the circumstances that drove what made the "good old days" of the Baby Boom era a positive nostalgic memory can't be reproduced. To do that we'd have to destroy the rest of the developed world's industrial based in a war that spares our own manufacturing infrastructure, kill off or injure proportionately as many people as World War II did, disavow the technologies that made manufacturing more efficient, convince many tens of millions of women to throw away their degrees and their careers, and impose new, unconstitutional, South African or Jim Crow style apartheid  laws (or simply legalizing private racial discrimination). These aren't viable options.

Ending legal abortion, banning hormonal contraceptives, legalizing marital rape, legalizing sex discrimination, making it harder to get divorced, deporting ten million plus immigrants, cutting taxes for the rich and big corporations (both of whom were extremely heavily taxed in the "good old days"), imposing high tariffs, repealing health and safety regulations, and even empowering the unions that were a defining element of the economy in that era still won't have the desired effect, even if they are attempted.

Democrats have been trying for quite a long time, in the absence of any other clear solution, to take the path of trying to establish general, good government policies. And, this has helped. Democratic administrations have created vastly more jobs than Republicans, have experienced much more economic growth, have been more fiscally responsible in controlling deficits, have imposed taxes that have raised revenue without damaging the economy, has promoted free trade and relatively open immigration that has strengthened economic growth, has regulated serious externalities that were being generated by amoral big businesses, and have promoted the predictable, accountable rule of law. They have build international allies that positioned it as a world leader. They have held back backsliding from past productive accomplishments. They have curbed some of the worst excesses of intellectual property protections. They have nurtured new technologies that are necessary for our economy and our military to become stronger. They secured majority popular vote support for their agenda in all but a couple of elections since the 1990s.

Democrats would have liked to advance that agenda further, but the outdated U.S. political system and fierce opposition to their agenda from Republicans prevented them from making more dramatic changes.

And, Democrats aren't perfect either. The handled the issue of affirmative action in higher education poorly. They overstated what unions could do. They were slow to warm to reforming land use regulation and occupational licensing. They allowed unscientific fear to get in the way to a sensible nuclear power policy. They failed to address legitimate grievances from business about the incentives created by U.S. income tax laws. They caved to far to the oil and gas lobby. They were too slow to adopt sensible, fair criminal justice reforms and bought into the "war on drugs" for too long.

The Democrats didn't govern perfectly, but they did govern in good faith and generally speaking advanced the cause of good and just government. And, it isn't as if the Republicans did any better. Indeed, they were far worse at governing and that left everyone, including the MAGA base, worse off.

It also isn't as if the Democrats or Republicans are unique on the international stage in their fairly to address the true causes of the MAGA base's frustrations. Far right movements have surged across Europe, taking power in Hungary, making gains in Poland, and increasing their clout in France and Germany, for example. South Korea's gender divides make the U.S. split over gender issues look like a polite couple's therapy session.

The Europeans have built a much stronger social safety net, but this is just duct tape holding retraining the same underlying pressures from the economy prior to their wealth redistribution efforts. These Social Democratic measures still can't force companies in a market economy to use the labor of the large percentage of workers who don't have the knowledge and attitudes to fit their needs.

Ultimately, the most effective solution has been not affirmative policies, but something akin to Social Darwinism in a modern capitalist economy.

People are moving with their feet to leave rural and Rust Belt red counties, depopulating them in search of an eventual stable bottom. Men may not be doing so quite as quickly as women, but a lot fewer people are dropping out of high school and a lot more people are graduating from college, because compensation and unemployment data are clearly rewarding that. College students are choosing majors that the economy is rewarding. Poor and working class people and teen mothers are finally having far fewer kids. As people move to cities, fewer people find it useful to own guns. More and more people are leaving religion, especially younger generations, while older people who are ill adapted to modern economic circumstances are gradually leaving the work force and then, eventually dying.

Women are being more vigilant about using effective contraception and screening potential romantic partners, taking mail order abortion drugs when they get pregnant, and crossing state lines to get abortions to overcome red state abortion bans. MAGA men are finding themselves rejected on the dating and marriage scene.

Millennials and Generation Z are less religious, less racist, less xenophobic, less homophobic, less transphobic, less misogynistic, more committed to protecting the environment, and better educated, than the generations that came before them. We are still taking a hard line towards domestic violence offenders. They are also, of course, less white and more prone to enter into interracial relationships.

In other words, we a gradually purging a MAGA old guard which is briefly ascendant with a minimal majority coalition, and replacing it with a new, more moral younger generation. Just as scientific revolutions don't triumph until all of the pre-revolutionary scientists die, the backward ideas of the MAGA movement, however, understandable, may fade away, one obituary at a time, until it is small enough to be politically irrelevant again.

Trump and MAGA may be a step backwards, but slowly but surely, if they aren't too successful at pressing their agenda and ending democracy, this could be a last gasp rather than a long term trend and permanent reversal of progress.

Red County And Blue County Realities

The realities of life in conservative leaning (red) parts of the United States are different than in liberal leaning (blue) parts of the United States. Roughly speaking, these distinctions play out not so much at the state level as at the county level. This post explores some of the differences in lived realities for people in blue counties compared to red counties that helps to explain their stark political differences in the U.S. as part of a more cohesive narrative that can help build understanding about their true causes. Of course, even this rather lengthy list is far from comprehensive.

Economic Productivity and Population Density

Per capita GDP in blue countries is roughly twice what it is in red counties. This is huge!

The population density in the inhabited parts of blue counties is much higher than the population density of red counties and "purple counties" which are evenly balanced between liberal and conservative leanings, tend to have intermediate population densities which are often suburban.

Ski resort towns and other counties with tourism based economies (e.g. greater Las Vegas) often have low population densities when crudely comparing permanent residents to the land area of the county, but have large swaths of land where no one lives with small dense resort style housing areas which house many seasonal residents in addition to permanent residents.

The link between economic productivity per capita and population density isn't accidental. One of the most consistent empirical laws of economics is that higher population density leads to greater productivity which makes it possible to pay higher wages and necessary to do so in a competitive employment marketplace. It holds true across cultures, across geographical regions, and across thousands of years. It has been true all of the way back to Jericho and Sumer and the Nile River Valley and the Indus River Valley to the present. It was true in the pre-Columbian Americas in North America, in Mesoamerica, and in South America.

Transit and Electric Vehicles

Public transportation is more cost effective and provides better service in higher population density blue counties than in lower population density red counties.

Red counties also have longer average motor vehicle trips than blue counties, because people are spread out further from each other, and longer average trip lengths (and longer peak monthly and annual trip lengths) disfavor all but the very latest electric vehicles relative to gasoline and diesel vehicles.

Housing, the Cost of Living, and Wages

The cost of living is much lower in red counties than in blue counties. This is mostly driven by lower housing costs in red counties (both renting and owning) than in blue counties relative to median wages, and by lower business real estate costs in red counties relative to blue countries that indirectly impact retail prices.

Lower housing prices in red counties mean that homelessness is much less of a crisis in red counties than in blue counties.

The pressure to increase the minimum wage is greater in blue counties where the cost of living is higher than it is in red counties where the cost of living is lower. A "living wage" in a blue county is higher than the "living wage" needed to maintain the same standard of living in a red county. 

Slower home price appreciation in red counties than in blue counties also means slower property tax increases over time.

Lower home prices in red counties also mean that red county homeowners who have owned their homes for many years have much less wealth in the form of home equity than blue county homeowners who have owned their homes for comparable periods of time.

A lower cost of living also places less pressure on red county residents to set aside savings that build wealth, than blue state residents who know that they need to save money to be able to afford a security deposit or down payment for a home, to afford education for their children which is critical for a blue county child's future income, and to afford other major purchases. Of course, lower incomes also make it harder to save money.

But with little home equity if they sell their homes, and less savings, and a higher cost of living in blue counties relative to incomes for less educated and less skilled worker wage premiums in blue counties, many residents of red counties are basically trapped there. They can't afford to move to a blue county even if they'd like to do so. The jaws of the trap are even tighter for red county residents with no blue county residents who are no longer working and are on fixed incomes.

Blue counties have higher housing costs because their populations tend to grow faster than the housing supply as people move their for their larger number of jobs that pay better than in red counties. 

About half of red counties, if not more, are losing population while their housing stock remains more or less the same, and even those red counties that have growing populations are growing slower than blue counties, so it is easier for the construction industry to increase the supply of housing enough to keep up with the slowly growing population. Moreover, in many red counties, populations have been declining, stagnant, or at least below the national average, relentlessly, for decade after decade pretty much starting in 1960s and almost every decade since in the last sixty years. Indeed, the percentage of the population engaged in farming has declined for almost every single decade from the 1790s until into the 2000s. These long slow declines undermine even hope for an eventual recovery or stabilization.

Since housing prices in red counties seem likely to fall, or at least only keep up with inflation, this also makes investing in maintaining and improving homes in red counties a bad investment. In contrast, in blue counties with every soaring real estate prices, keeping a home well-maintained and up to date with renovations and improvements can yield disproportionate returns, causing the existing housing stock in blue counties to be in better shape and more up to date.

More educated and skilled workers make much more income in blue counties than in red counties, which more than makes up for the higher cost of living there. Less educated and skilled workers also make more income in blue counties than in red counties, but not enough to make up for the higher cost of living there.

Tighter economic circumstances and economic stagnation in a community, also fosters zero sum game thinking, and eats away at empathy as taking care of your own becomes your priority. All potential forms of competition, from international trade, immigration, female workers competing with male workers, and non-white workers competing with white workers, all starts to look like a threat in this mindset, whether or not this is true. And, older white men without college educations, in particular, who are the core of the MAGA movement have seen their demographic's economic prosperity decline in relative terms to lots of other groups (even if it has not actually meaningfully declined even after adjusting for inflation and their own costs of living are low), through events taking place mostly in their own lifetimes.

Fertility

It is more expensive to raise children in a blue county with its higher cost of living, than in a red county. So, families in blue counties are smaller, with fewer children in response to those realities. Blue county children are also more likely to need and benefit from expensive higher education (which red county voters don't want to support funding for since higher education confers a much smaller benefit to them than it does to the children of their blue county peers).

The expansion of economic opportunities for women also greatly increase the opportunity costs for all women, in blue counties and red counties alike, of having more children. This opportunity cost has caused the number of children per woman per lifetime to fall particularly fast for less educated women who previously weren't qualified to be teachers or nurses, and had few options other than being house wives, but can now work in a variety of less skilled jobs previously held predominantly by men.

This has made the "trad wife" ideal unattainable for most families, but especially those consisting of non-college educated couples with lower incomes who need two incomes just to support themselves and one or two kids. But when women are less economically dependent upon their husbands and often have steadier and better paying work than their husbands, then families are less tight economic glue holding them together, and a provider man's position as "head of the household" is undermined.

Nostalgia

In a red county that has been stagnant or in decline for half a century or more, nostalgia for the "good old days" can be intense. High school educated people used to have incomes proportionately much closer to those of college educated workers and managers, even if the absolute buying power of those workers hasn't actually fallen, and this has gotten steadily worse since the early 1970s. In contrast, blue county college educated men have seen uninterrupted prosperity (and a lot more men have college educations now than in the 1970s). Women have seen their access to higher education and to more remunerative employment in non-traditional professions soar. Minority members are much less shut out of the top levels of the career ladder than they were in the 1960s even if they haven't reached parity, improving in relative terms. High school educated men have stagnated, in part, because of the structure of the economy (it is important to recognize that the two and a half decades after World War II were a remarkable one time only exception that can't be reproduced for the most part, and not the norm), and in part, because the average was being pulled up by smart, socially functional men who had no access to college educations then and now have gained college educations leaving their less bright and more difficult peers behind in a new economy. 

Civil rights aren't a zero sum game, but it is easy for a high school educated man prone to feeling aggrieved for economic reasons to see it that way, and women and minorities have secured a lot of civil rights that they once lacked. 

Smaller and less stable families for all but billionaires or near billionaires, it seems, has also undermined and narrowed the role of men as fathers of many children, something was was commonplace for middle class men in the Baby Boom era (although people forget that this time period was also one with much higher poverty rates than those of today until the "War on Poverty" rebalanced the status quo a bit).

The patriarchy has weakened, and they are the heirs of the patriarchy. So, of course, they yearn for the good old days, even though that was facilitated by key factors that can't be recreated with new policies.

Unions

The union narrative of the left is that unions brought us the weekend, the 40 hour work week, overtime, workplace safety, employer provided health care, and more. And, this isn't wrong. But it is incomplete.

Unions facilitate turning the economic power of workers into concrete economic gains for them in an efficient manner. But this facilitation and negotiation and political action related role only works at times when the demand for the labor of the unionized workers is great and the supply is smaller.

When there is a glut of less skilled, less educated workers, because the economy has been transformed to be less labor intensive, through automation, for example, and because other countries long ago restored the manufacturing capacity that was destroyed in World War II and no longer need to import manufactured goods to the same extent, unions don't provide workers with much in the way of concrete benefits because they don't have much to negotiate with. 

Likewise, part of the shortage of workers during the Baby Boom was because women left the work force en masse to have kids (a desire deferred during the Great Depression and World War II which were times of great scarcity), reducing the supply of workers and leaving the men who  re-entered the work force after World War II in greater demand with more economic power. This also won't recur. The many men who died or were seriously injured in World War II also shrunk the supply of able bodied adult male workers in the U.S., which is certainly not something we would like to repeat.

This, in a nutshell, is why private sector labor unions have declined steadily until just a few years ago (when worker economic power and demand was near a prolonged record high also accompanied by prolonged record low unemployment). For decades they couldn't deliver. And, since the labor market is weaker in the less productive red county economies, unions are even less effective in red counties than they are in blue counties.

Employers never like unions, but in red states, there isn't an intense worker desire to protect unions because they provide minimal benefits there, so the legal balance has tipped against unions in red states with things like "right to work laws", while in blue states, where the strong economy gives workers more power and unions more to bargain with, the balance between unions and management legally and politically has been more stable, because unions in blue states can deliver more to workers who therefore have a more intense desire to support them politically against employer attacks.

Religion

Being religious provides few economic and educational benefits to college educated upper middle class people, and can be a hinderance. And, it provides only modest economic and educational benefits to working class girls. But it provides great economic and educational benefits to working class boys (both black and white).

Religiosity is also strongly associated with uncertainty in life, especially economic uncertainty. Less educated people, on average, are at much higher risk of unemployment and prolonged unemployment during their working years. Farmers and fishermen are also subject to great uncertainty in their economic prospects due to factors like weather and the availability of fish from year to year than even "middle skilled" workers in blue counties and "urban farmers" (who work in truck gardens or indoor marijuana grows).  So, people in red counties are more likely to see religion as more important in their lives even controlling for whether they are religiously affiliated or not.

Red counties (especially in the South, in Utah, and in other Mormon dominated counties) have a far greater percentage of Christians with far less denominational variation than blue counties. Red counties are far fewer religious non-Christians (e.g., Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and Buddhists) than blue counties do. So, religious diversity is not part of the everyday experience of residents of red counties.

Family Stability

The same economic instability and uncertainty, and lack of economic prosperity that makes red county residents more religious also dramatically influences their family stability.

The biggest predictor of whether a cohabiting couple will not marry, or whether a married couple will divorce, in basically every culture, is whether the woman in the couple earns more in the cash economy than the man. And, men without college educations, who make up a disproportionate share of men in red counties, are much more likely to have sustained periods of unemployment and to have mediocre earnings that have been stagnant, adjusting for inflation, for decades, than men with college educations (or even "mid-skilled jobs" and some college) in blue counties.

Also, high school educated women who leave the work force to have kids for a while receive few, if any, economic penalties to their earning capacity when they return to the work force, while college educated women who do that see their earning capacity when they return to the work force plummet. And women in red counties are much more likely to obtain some level of post-high school education than men. Indeed, programs to help women improve their education and skills often succeed in improving the economic well being of women, while programs to help men do the same rarely attract interest from men or have much of an impact.

As a result, couples with high school educations are failing to marry (the average high school educated couple has a child two years before getting married while the average college educated couple has a child two years after getting married and does so at an older age), and getting divorced when they do marry, at unprecedented high rates (in white couples echoing trends that started to appear with black couples without college educations in the late 1960s, as discussed for example, in the Moyihan report at the time).

In these breakups and divorces, where the inability of the man in the couple to be the stronger economic provider in the relationship is a key cause of the breakup, the man also has little if any ability to pay child support and alimony, or to provide a significant property division settlement (i.e. the legal rights a woman gains from being married).

The economic struggle that high school or less educated couples have to stay employed and earn a decent income after decades of wage stagnation for high school educated workers, also makes these families much more vulnerable to situations where they neglect or abuse their children, often resulting in a termination of parental rights or just child protective service intervention.

Both unstable couples, and neglect/abuse situations, means that many red county children often grow up without their father as part of the household for prolonged periods of time (echoing the experience of African-American children half a century earlier).

These trends are also exacerbated by the trend towards assortative marriage. There are fewer marriages in which one member of a couple is college educated and higher earning and the other is not college educated and has lower earning capacity. In part, this is because people have long tended to marry people of similar IQ, but now higher IQ women obtain college educations, while historically, this was much less common.

So, red county families are vastly more fragile than blue county families. This has led to a perennial state of moral panic in red counties about masculine identity and "family values" which when viewed as a moral problem prompts an attack on perceived sources of immorality and lost of masculine identity, which has led red county men to try to express their insecurity about their masculinity by trying to display that in ways other than being an economic providers, and by scapegoating LGBT people.

In contrast, college educated couples, who are much more common in blue counties, are much more likely to marry before having children, and have divorce rates that are falling to levels not seen since the 1960s.

Higher Education

In blue counties, higher education programs at all levels from certificates to associate's degrees to four year college degrees greatly increase your earning potential and pay for themselves in as little as a year or two, and usually in less eight years for all but the least qualified students in the least technical programs.

In red counties, higher education programs other than four year college degrees are a net money loser even at low community college tuitions when living at home, and even a four year degree can take as much as twenty-four years to pay for itself with higher earnings.

This is fundamentally because urban areas with healthy economies have productive ways to utilize the skilled and abilities developed in college, while rural and small town economies don't have jobs that productively utilize what someone learns from a college education.

See here and here.

Immigration

Blue counties have greatly disproportionate shares of immigrants and, in particular, disproportionate shares of immigrants who are settled residents of their communities rather than migrant workers living semi-nomadic lives. Due to their familiarity with immigrants in their daily lives, residents of blue counties are much less afraid of immigrants, who they know from experience to be good community members (at least to the same extent or more than native born members of the community) and who they know from experience are not disproportionately likely to commit crimes.

Red countries have a disproportionately smaller share of immigrants, who are often limited primarily to medical professionals and migrant farm workers. Due to their lack of familiarity with immigrants and the lack of a healthy economy, red county residents are much more likely to fear immigrants. Attitudes towards immigrants and globalization is also influenced by the reduced likelihood of red county residents to have had any higher education (as discussed above), or to have travelled abroad or to have lived in very different places within the United States (as discussed below).

Travel and Migration

Residents of red counties are much less likely to have a passport or to have traveled abroad than residents of blue counties. They are also less likely to have spent significant amounts of time living in places in the United States other than the vicinity of the place that they grew up, and even when they have lived elsewhere are likely to have lived somewhere else quite similar to the place that they grew up.

Studies of cousin marriage have shown that people in cousin marriages are less economically successful on average, primarily as a consequence of being less likely to leave the community where they grew up to move to larger cities.

Race

Some counties are overwhelmingly white, and those counties tend to be red counties that are rural or small town settings, especially in Appalachia, the rural Midwest, and much of the mountain states. The main exceptions are in New England (e.g. rural and small town areas in Vermont and Maine and Western Massachusetts) and counties defined by college towns.

Counties that are majority non-white tend to be blue counties even if they are similar to red counties in other respects, these include most of New Mexico and parts of Southern Colorado, counties with Indian Reservations (from Oklahoma to Arizona to North Dakota), and much of rural Hawaii and Alaska.

Quite a few red counties, however, are biracial. They have a white majority, and a non-white minority, usually black in the South and the Rust Belt, usually Hispanic in the Southwest, and sometimes Native American in countries near Indian Reservations and in Alaska (in the case of Alaska Natives) that don't actually have Indian Reservations or Alaskan Native communities. Few red countries, in contrast, and many blue counties, are genuinely multiracial, with significant numbers of people from more than two races or ethnicities.

Age, Health Care, Disabilities, and Credit

Residents of red counties tend to be older than residents of blue counties (except that Mormon dominated red counties tend to have younger residents).

Blue counties have more specialized and higher quality medical care available, and more medical professionals per capita than red countries which have a greater need for medical care due to their older populations. Blue states also tend to have fewer people who are uninsured since unlike some red states, they don't intentionally turn away free federal funds for Medicaid expansion and mostly don't provide state funding for health care beyond the federal minimum contribution. 

Red county residents have less interaction with medical professionals, especially medical doctors, than blue county residents, and a greater proportion of medical doctors in red counties are foreign born than in blue counties, which can impair the quality of doctor-patient interactions and communication.

Red county residents are less likely to have good health care outcomes following trauma incidents and strokes than blue county residents since they are less likely to reach a trauma center or top quality hospital during the "golden hour." More generally, red county residents have less first hand experience with what top quality modern health care can accomplish, on average, than blue county residents.

Red county men in the work force are much more likely to be employed in jobs with highly elevated rates of occupational injuries (like farming, fishing, timber work, mining, and construction) than blue county men in the work force.

A greater proportion of workers in red counties have physically demanding jobs that make it far more common for these workers to become disabled or forced to retire at younger ages than in blue counties.

Higher percentages of the population that are uninsured, and general lower levels of economic security among high school educated people who are more common in red counties also mean that average credit ratings are much lower in red counties than in blue counties, and that a very substantial proportion of the population in red counties have money judgments outstanding that can cause their wages and bank accounts to be garnished and their property seized, which can build animosity towards the legal system, and distrust of law enforcement officers who enforce judgments and of financial institutions in red counties. In blue counties where economic prosperity is more often uninterrupted and adequate health insurance is more common, in contrast, credit ratings are higher, money judgments are much more rare, and trust in the civil courts and financial institutions is much greater. Lack of health insurance also breeds justifiable fear of interactions with the medical establishment which can lead to financial ruin for many red county residents, while it rarely has that effect for blue county residents.

Self-Respect and Fragile Self-Esteem

The non-college educated white men at the core of the MAGA movement have taken immense blows to their self-esteem in many cases, and if they haven't have seen friends and neighbors who have.

The fact that they didn't go to college or went and didn't graduate brands them as a failure. They have failed to be reliable and prosperous economic providers. They have often failed to hold together intimate relationships and marriages. They have often failed to fulfill the expectations of society for fathers. They are often reliant on government payments, perhaps disability payments or SSI or Social Security, even if they earned them, rather than earning money from meaningful work.

In the MAGA heartland of West Virginia, 20% of the state's entire GDP consists of federal spending in the state less federal taxes paid from the state, and this is true of basically every county. Even if some of this is subtle, like Medicare and Medicaid provided health coverage, or a Social Security disability pension that was someone's only option to survive, a disabled man of working age who worked in physical labor all of his life, still sees receiving this support as a blow to his sense of self-respect which leaves his self-esteem as something fragile to prop up by means other than being an economic provider. Receiving government aid can feel bad even when you need it and it makes you better off because it is a constant reminder of your own failures.

Cursing the federal government and claiming you can be independent of it, reality be damned, can help compensate for the blow to one's self-esteem and self-respect that flows from being dependent upon it, even though it is counterproductive (at least in the short term) to do so.

Veterans, Hunters, Dangerous Animals, Law Enforcement Response Times, Firearms, And Crime News

Men in red countries are much more likely to be military veterans, than men in blue counties.

Men in red counties are much more likely to have engaged in recreational hunting than men in blue counties.

The higher proportion of men in red counties who are military veterans and/or have engaged in recreational hunting, means that men in red countries are much more likely to be gun owners than men in blue counties, and in particular, are much more likely to own firearms other than handguns.

Due to lower population densities in rural America, where the vast majority of counties are red counties, the average red county resident is a much greater distance from the average law enforcement responder than the average blue county resident, and as a result law enforcement response times to 9-1-1 calls are longer in red counties than in blue counties. Encounters with dangerous wildlife are also much more common in red counties than in blue counties. These circumstances creates a greater perceived need to own firearms for self-defense and the defense of others in red counties than in blue counties.

Also, while blue county news reporting typically covers a whole metropolitan area, resulting in a constant stream of news about violent crime, red county news reporting is typically hyperlocal, covering only a portion of the county around a small town, resulting in fewer reports of violent crimes near the people reading it, even though their crime rates per capita are actually higher. So, red counties tend to be perceived as less crime ridden than they are, while blue counties tend to be perceived as more crime ridden than they actually are. This interferes with the ability of people in red counties to see the connection between their high rates of firearm ownership and lax gun control enforcement and the rates of suicide and homicide and police use of firearms that they experience. In contrast, the connection seems stronger than it is in blue counties, because there is so much crime to cover in a populous metro area that only the most serious violent crimes which often involve firearms, receive news coverage, creating the perception that this is the most typical kind of crime in blue counties even though this isn't the case.

Plan A & Plan B

The best predictions of the election outcomes in the U.S. show a coin flip for the results in the Presidential race and control of the U.S. House, with the marginal states and congressional districts respectively at fraction of percent margins.

Republicans will almost surely narrowly control the U.S. Senate, with 51-52 GOP seats.

Plan A-1

If Harris wins the Presidency and Democrats win the House, we have a very different future. This would be not all that different from the present, which isn't all that bad. A strong economy, record low crime, and the U.S. not actually fighting any major wars. Trump will be headed to prison or at least house arrest, and more criminal prosecutions will await him. The January 6 criminals will not be pardoned. 

Harris won't be able to pass major legislation righting the political balance with a Republican Senate in the first two years, but will probably be able to get a couple of Republicans in the Senate to back necessary appointments and budget legislation, at least. Mitch McConnell, the currently minority leader in the Senate and soon to be the majority leader in the Senate has pretty much indicated he'd prefer a Harris Presidency to a Trump Presidency, so he'd probably cooperate enough with Harris to keep the government functioning.

Looming would be the issue of how do deprogram the deluded 48% who backed Trump after the lies that they have swallowed, and how to address their fear of the Democratic policies that are aimed at helping them. Each election also weakens their demographic base.

Plan A-2

A Harris wins with Republicans controlling both houses of Congress is possible. This would be worse, but the veto power would afford us some protection from Republican excess. Biden has managed to deal with a small Republican majority in the House so far, and due to unreliable Senators elected from his own party who subsequently left the Democratic Party, has limited power in the Senate anyway.

The Republican MAGA movement would also eventually have Trump facing the consequences of his criminal acts and too old and losing cognitive capacity too fast to run again in 2028 at the age of 82, that could deflate the movement and demographic change eats away at it.

Plan B-1

If Trump wins the Presidency and Republicans win the House, we have one future, where Trump is essentially unchecked by Congress or the Courts. This could be grim indeed. It might very well mark the end of our nation's nearly 250 year old run as a democracy, and replace it with fascism.

In that case, the biggest question is how much damage will be done before 78 year old Trump (who isn't particularly healthy) dies or has his already apparent dementia advance to the point that J.D. Vance replaces him. If so, what happens next? Can democracy be restored? J.D. Vance seemed like an O.K. guy before he blatantly did a MAGA turnabout for political gain and it is unclear what he would be like outside of Trump's shadow but still needing the MAGA base for political support. 

State governments and their prerogatives would limit a total immediate shift. There is also the related question of how the state law criminal cases against Trump would proceed.

Liberal and moderate federal judges could delay the process. Trump has threatened to purge the civil service, but that can't be done overnight. Serious legislation would require abolishing the filibuster, which would probably be done, but might again delay the process.

Is it better to fight, or is flight the right option?

Plan B-2 

A Trump Presidential win with a narrow Democratic majority in the House is possible. This outcome is better than a Republican trifecta, but still pretty bad. One can do lots of mischief with the Presidency even without new legislation, if the ultra-conservative Supreme Court backs you up and the Senators from your party let you appoint whomever you want to executive post spots and to the courts. 

It will be one constitutional crisis after another, but perhaps it would not be quite as impossible to overcome.

How Urban Are U.S. States?

This map from 2010 shows the percentage of the population of each state that is urban. Some of the results are odds with our intuition. While it isn't a full explanation, a lot of the red state, blue state divide is a rural-urban divide.

This in turn, sheds light on the use of transit in different places in the U.S. The West has lots of empty space. But the places with people in them are often urban and high density.

The Dawes Act Hammered Native Americans

In contrast to earlier United States policies of open war, forcible removal, and relocation to address the “Indian Problem,” the Dawes Act of 1887 focused on assimilation and land severalty — making American Indians citizens of the United States with individually-titled plots of land rather than members of collective tribes with communal land. Considerable scholarship shows that the consequences of the policy differed substantially from its stated goals, and by the time of its repeal in 1934, American Indians had lost two-thirds of all native land held in 1887 (86 million acres)—and nearly two-thirds of American Indians had become landless or unable to meet subsistence needs. Complementing rich qualitative history, this paper provides new quantitative evidence on the impact of the Dawes Act on mortality among American Indian children and adults. Using 1900 and 1910 U.S. population census data to study both household and tribe-level variation in allotment timing, we find that assimilation and allotment policy increased various measures of American Indian child and adult mortality from nearly 20% to as much as one third (implying a decline in life expectancy at birth of about 20%) — confirming contemporary critics’ adamant concerns about the Dawes Act.

Grant Miller, Jack Shane & C. Matthew Snipp, "The Impact of United States Assimilation and Allotment Policy on American Indian Mortality" NBER Working Paper #33057 (October 2024).

It turns out that suddenly switching from a communal land ownership regime to an individual land ownership regime is just as deadly as socializing individual land ownership.

The U.S. Approach To A Hypothetical Invasion Of Taiwan

Size comparison

The United States military is acutely aware of the possibility that the People's Republic of China on the mainland (the PRC), might try to invade and conquer Taiwan, something that the PRC has repeated threatened to do, although a military conflict with between the Philippines and the PRC in which the U.S. might become embroiled seems more likely in the short term and has resulted in more incidents of low intensity warfare in the last two or three years. I've also explained, elsewhere, why the PRC's reliance on international trade in a wide variety of goods and services to support its economy makes an invasion of Taiwan a much more costly option for it, than a globally unpopular war would be for Russia, whose international exports are dominated by oil and gas, or North Korea, which is very isolated economically from the rest of the world. Further background is available below.

Indeed, the threat of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is the single largest rhetorical justification used by the U.S. Navy, and to a lesser but still great extent by the U.S. Marine Corps and U.S. Air Force, for U.S. military expenditures.

The U.S. Strategy

The U.S. doesn't have any major military bases in Taiwan, unlike its military bases in Japan, South Korea, Hawaii, Alaska, three U.S. territories in the Pacific, and a smaller U.S. military base in the Philippines (which was once a much larger presence), presumably, in order to formally honor its "One China" policy.

But the U.S. has sold a lot of sophisticated U.S. military equipment to Taiwan, and together with its allies, can marshal considerable naval and air forces in the region.

Basically, the plan is for the U.S., Taiwan, and its allies to direct large numbers of anti-ship missiles and when the opponents are very close, Taiwanese artillery and allied naval gun shells at invading Chinese ships and boats, deployed from land, from surface ships at sea, from every manner of aircraft from long range stealth and conventional bombers, to carrier and land based fighter aircraft (some making the trip with the help of aerial refueling), to maritime patrol aircraft, to C-130 and C-17 military transport planes carrying missile launching cargo, to long range drones, to nuclear attack submarines, with the nuclear attack submarines also launching torpedoes. It would use U.S. satellites, high altitude spy planes, surveillance drones, and U.S. signals intelligence resources to identify targets (as well as any human intelligence resources within China available to the U.S. or its allies). Containerized anti-ship missile batteries will soon make it possible for cargo ships, amphibious transport ships, and merchant ships to also carry and deliver anti-ship missiles with ranges in the hundreds of miles.

Long range bombers, maritime patrol aircraft, C-17s, and fighter aircraft that use aerial refueling tankers, can travel thousands of miles and make the trip in about 12-13 hours from Hawaii. The trip from based in Japan or South Korea or Guam or American Samoa or the Northern Marina Islands would be shorter. Surface ships and submarines not already in the area can take several weeks to arrive, rendering them almost irrelevant in a fast developing naval battle, without a great deal of advance warning from satellites and other intelligence that she China mobilizing.

The aircraft and ships and ground batteries firing anti-ship missiles don't have to get particularly close. The aircraft can stay at high altitudes. Even the shortest range fighter and helicopter carried anti-ship missiles have a range of 18-20 miles. Most have ranges from 100 to 600 miles, and the aircraft can get just within range and turn around if the risk of air defenses is great. Modern torpedoes have a range of about 24 miles, although a longer range provides a target a greater opportunity to evade it.

The U.S. and its allies could deposit of small force of mostly light ground troops in the lead up to an invasion and during an invasion, but for the most part, Taiwan would have to rely on its own troops and reserves, and pre-placed equipment for its ground forces, to repel any Chinese troops that managed to cross the Taiwan strait by sea or by air.

The mission of Taiwan and its allies is easier. It need only destroy or mitigate the harm from incoming ships, aircraft, drones, missiles, and naval gun shells (the Taiwan strait is too wide for cannon artillery or all but the longest range artillery missiles on the mainland to cross) with a mix of anti-ship and anti-aircraft weapons. They don't need to board ships of the People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN), and don't have to deliver troops or their equipment in an amphibious invasion. PLAN submarines are effective ways to deny access to the ships of Taiwan and its allies and merchant ships bound to Taiwan, but most are fairly short range coastal submarines that have almost no effectiveness against the aircraft of Taiwan and its allies, and pose only a manageable threat to surface warships of Taiwan and its allies that are not in the Taiwan strait or too close to the island of Formosa.

A carrier with F-35C fighter aircraft, for example, need only be close enough for its fighters to fly to the edge of their 700 (non-nautical) mile combat radius which in turn must be within 150 to 700 (non-nautical) miles of the target of their anti-ship missiles. So, the carrier can strike a ship in the Taiwan strait that is 850-1400 miles away from its, for example, from the vicinity of the Northern Marina Islands, or Tokyo, or South Korea, or the southern most islands of the Philippines. 

A carrier group at that distance would also have a decent chance of intercepting long range missiles bound towards it from mainland China, and the range of these anti-ship missiles is greater than all but the most potent anti-aircraft missiles in China's arsenal and would have to be timed to strike the aircraft delivering the missiles only just as the aircraft is about to launch its air to ground missiles or is just returning from doing so. And, of course, if an F-35 is hit by a Chinese anti-air missile, only one pilots life, at most, is lost, and there is a decent chance that the pilot could eject and be recovered by a search and rescue team. The number of Chinese ground troops killed every time a Chinese warship or worse yet, a Chinese troop carrying ship, is sunk, would be profoundly greater.

Certainly, Chinese troops that do manage to reach the Taiwanese shore by sea, or by helicopter or transport plane or as paratroops, as elite soldiers in an massive all volunteer military of professional Chinese soldiers are, on average, going to be better trained and more skilled soldiers, than Taiwanese ground troops at the vanguard of a massive but not terribly ready or elite reserve force. But the Taiwanese troops know their territory, have the support of the locals, have been training for this mission and this mission only, are fighting to protect their homes, and will locally outnumber the modest number of Chinese troops that manage to cross the strait at least at first, if the efforts to Taiwan and its allies to destroy incoming troop carrying ships and transport aircraft is reasonably successful.

Also, in an era of Chinese demographics where one child families are the norm, even in this nation of 1.4 billion people, the lives of young men serving as soldiers in the PRC's military are no longer cheap and expendable. And, China has not fought any actual hot conflict in which its any significant number of its soldiers and sailors have lost their lives in the living memory of the vast share of the Chinese people. They haven't had much of a chance to come to see these losses as a necessary price to meet its geopolitical objectives, which it has mostly achieved with trade, aid, and diplomacy.

For all of China's bluster, one can seriously doubt whether China really has the stomach to lose the lives of hundreds of thousands of young men, most of its navy, a substantial share of its air force, and many of its coastal military resources, when it can already extract much of what it wants Taiwan for economically as opposed to culturally or politically, through trade. 

China has nuclear weapons, but those too are less potent of a threat in a Taiwan invasion. Using on nuclear weapon on the island of Formosa pretty much defeats the purpose of conquering it and would make it an international pariah. But missile defenses are effective enough that ICBMs aimed to the U.S. or its allies might be completely or almost completely thwarted, with any successes threatening massive nuclear retaliation against it.

The Historical And Geopolitical Context And Background

The island of Formosa is about 100 miles from mainland China across the Taiwan Strait. 

A typical naval warship can make the trip in about four hours, a very fast one might make it in two or three hours. A helicopter or slower drone could make it in forty-five minutes or less. A subsonic missile or fighter jet or military transport plane can make the trip in ten to fifteen minutes. A supersonic jet fighter can make the trip in five minutes. A hypersonic missile can make the trip in less than two minutes.

The PRC claims the island of Formosa upon which Taiwan is situated is a rebel province which is part of its territory, along with the strait between Formosa and the mainland, despite the fact that the regime has never had any control or authority on the island, and the fact that no mainland Chinese regime has had any control or authority on the island since 1895. The modern Chinese state dates only to the revolution in China in 1911.

Meanwhile, Taiwan, even more laughably, claims to be the legitimate government in exile of mainland China, a territory it lost any remnant of authority or control over from its inception when its regime retreated there after losing the civil war in China that persisted from the end of World War II in 1945 which left a power vacuum there, until the victory of the Maoists and defeat of the Nationalists in 1949, 75 years ago. The Kuomintang party abandoned its claim to be the sole government of mainland China in 1991 in the same year that it ended "emergency rule".

Imperial China ruled the island of Formosa from 1662 when it ousted the Dutch and large numbers of people from mainland China migrated there, until 1895 when the island was conquered by the Japanese Empire. The Japanese ruled it for half a century until the end of World War II in 1945. 

After World War II, there was a civil war in China between the Maoist Communists and the Chinese Nationalist Party led by Chiang Kai-shek. The non-communist Chinese Nationalist Party eventually lost that civil war and relocated to the island of Formosa in a mass migration of its remaining loyalist in 1949 (the same year that the Maoist PRC regimes was declared by Chairman Mao), filling the post-World War II power vacuum caused by the collapse of Imperial Japan's rule there. The following year, in 1950, now 74 years ago, the PRC conquered Tibet.

Chiang Kai-shek ruled Taiwan as a de facto dictator for twenty-six years until 1975, with U.S. backing against expansion of the Communist PRC as part of the Cold War, running the economy on a capitalist model.

The PRC claimed the island as its territory, even though no mainland Chinese government had ruled there since early 1895, and in 1971, after three-quarters of a century in mainland China had no control or authority there, and despite the fact that the PRC regime had never had control or authority there, in 1971, the U.N. recognized the PRC's claim to the island and expelled Taiwan from the U.N. The PRC terminated its diplomatic relationship with Taiwan in 1978. Today, following the U.N.'s lead, only 13 countries, including the U.S., have formal diplomatic ties with Taiwan. The PRC and Taiwan had their first formal talks with each other again in 2014, thirty-six years after breaking off diplomatic relations but have not reestablished diplomatic ties. Per the BBC link below:

Today, only 12 countries (plus the Vatican) officially recognise Taiwan. The US decision to switch diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979 was the turning point. And a richer, more powerful China exerts pressure so more countries do not recognise Taiwan or lend it support. But America remains the island's strongest ally, sells arms to it and has vowed to help in case of a Chinese attack.

The U.S., however, continued to be a strong ally to Taiwan and its military guaranteed its independence from the PRC, and under its influence, Taiwan eventually reformed itself, carrying out land reform to address the feudal era inequalities that led to the Maoist revolution on the mainland, instituting universal public education, modernizing its agricultural and industrial economies, and finally, step by step becoming a democracy. Martial law was lifted in 1987 after 38 years. Four years later in 1991, four decades of "emergency rule" was ended. And, five years after that in 1996, Taiwan had its first direct Presidential election, which the Kuomintang party, the successor to the original Chinese Nationalist Party that had controlled Taiwan for forty-seven years since 1949, won. 

The uncontested rule of Chiang Kai-shek's dominant Kuomintang party finally ended in the year 2000, when the leader of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party won the Presidential election, only for the Kuomintang party to regain the Presidency from 2006 to 2016, when the Democratic Progressive Party regained the Presidency, in part, over concerns that the Kuomintang party was to friendly with China and might jeopardize Taiwan's independence. The Democratic Progressive Party still holds the Presidency today. China has gradually stepped up its saber rattling towards Taiwan since the Kuomintang Party lost the Presidency in 2016.

Taiwan is now a first world country with a high standard of living in an advanced stage of demographic transition of 23.6 million people (compared to about 1,400 million people in the PRC which is about 59 times a large). Taiwan's economy is best known for its advance computer chip manufacturing which is the global state of the art. Indeed, according to the BBC, "By one measure, a single Taiwanese company - the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company or TSMC - has over half of the world's market."

Despite a lack of formal diplomatic relations, 21% of Taiwan's imports are from the PRC and 26% of its exports are to the PRC.

About 70% of the Taiwanese people are Han Chinese, another 25% or so are from another Southern mainland Chinese ethnicity, about 2-3% of the Taiwanese people are indigenous Formosans who speak sixteen different languages once of which is the ancestral language of the Austronesian family of languages spoken from Easter Island and Oceania, to Southeast Asia, to Madagascar, with a small percentage of people of other ancestries. Mandarin Chinese, and two other Chinese topolects (one of which has several dialects) are the predominant languages of Taiwan. But even Chinese languages like Mandarin which are present in both Taiwan and the mainland have developed distinct Taiwanese accents that are perhaps as distinct from their mainland counterparts as American and Canadian English dialects, in their spoken versions, in the non-logographic written versions of them, and in subtleties of meaning and pronunciation of their shared Chinese characters. 

Over the last thirty years or so, however, the people of Taiwan have increasingly come to identify themselves as Taiwanese, or as both Taiwanese and Chinese. About two-thirds identify as Taiwanese only. Almost a third identify as both, and only one or two percent now identify only as Chinese.

Taiwan's religious makeup reflects the pre-Maoist religious mix of China, with 42% adhering to Chinese folk religion (a close cousin of Japanese Shinto practice), 27% identifying primarily as Buddhist, 13% identifying as Daoist, 7% identifying with East Asian "new religions", 6% as Christian, and the remainder as non-religious agnostics, although these religious movements are not nearly so mutually exclusive as Western religious denominations and sects.

Taiwan controls a territory of about 13,900 square miles, while the PRC controls about 3.7 million square miles, which is about 2660 times as large.

Critically, the PRC of today is not the PRC of 1949. While the PRC doesn't adhere fully to the extreme version of capitalism found in the United States and has high levels of state involvement in the economy, its record economic growth for many decades has been made possible only through market based economic reforms, soft recognition of property and contract rights, and sufficient openness towards ideas from the world outside of China to allow it to gain the scientific and technological knowledge necessary for it to rapidly catch up to the developed world. 

The assimilation of Hong Kong into China has meant even more growing pains for both sides. 

China is still astoundingly authoritarian, but it is also not the raw, unpredictable cauldron of violence that it experienced in the 1970s during the Cultural Revolution. 

Despite being nominally communist, China has its fair share of billionaires and there is a great deal of overlap between its political elites and its economic elites. In other words, China's rules are also among the very wealthiest people in the entire country, which makes a return to an extremely leveling brand of communism that eats the rich unlike to recur there, even if it is quite a dangerous thing to be a billionaire or centi-millionaire in China that can lead to your untimely demise in a usually not officially acknowledged manner if the cross the wrong people or offend the sensibilities of leaders in the Chinese Communist Party.

So far, China has liberalized economically in a gradual manner, rather than all at once as the Soviet Union did in what turned out to be a chaotic and sudden mess that transformed the country from Soviet style communism or crony capitalism run by oligarchs in less than a quarter of a century, with intense societal and governmental pain along the way. This lesson schools Chinese Communist Party leaders to be cautious in their reforms, and had discouraged a relaxation of its authoritarian political model. 

But the expectations of continuous fast economic growth that they have developed for themselves puts pressure on them to adopt policies that work to continue that as much as possible and at some point, China's authoritarian rule will have to be relaxed to sustain that, particularly as China starts to have to rely on new innovations of its own, rather than copying proven global economic and technological models to achieve new economic growth. Also, non-economic freedom is, to some extent, one of the luxuries that people in economically prosperous societies crave and desire. The more affluent the Chinese people become, the more they are going to be willing to face significant personal risk and sacrifice and economic resources to escape authoritarian rule. And, there are enough wealthy Chinese people who have traveled abroad to less authoritarian counties, or who have access to less censored international media, that they can know that it is possible to leave in a freer and more democratic world (and the people of Hong Kong have demonstrated that this can work even for ethnically and culturally Chinese people), that it is an enjoyable and desirable intangible luxury to have, and that there are ways of achieving and sustaining it that they can learn and copy as they did less political foreign technologies. It isn't clear how smooth or rocky the path to that end will be, and in the near term, transitioning from China level authoritarianism to Singapore level authoritarianism, or something like it, may be an intermediate step. But it is hard to see a trajectory in which China becomes more insular and authoritarian, rather than less so, in over the next several decades.

This is all to say, then, that it an invasion of Taiwan can be discouraged for a sufficiently long period of time, that eventually mainland China may eventually catch up with Taiwan (which has only enjoyed more or less full democracy and social freedoms for thirty years or so itself), at which point a merger of the PRC and Taiwan might not be so problematic anymore.

Military Capabilities

Taiwan is quite militarized, with 169 thousand active duty military personnel, 1,657 thousand reserve troops, and a defense budget of $16.2 billion. But this is dwarfed by the PRC's 2,035 thousand active duty military personnel, 650 thousand reserve troops, and $242.4 billion USD defense budget. Taiwan has 26 surface warships of frigate class or larger and 4 military submarines and many smaller naval and coast guard vessels. China has 92 surface warships of frigate class or larger and 59 military submarines and many smaller naval and coast guard vessels and is expanding its fleet rapidly. Taiwan's air force has 405 jet fighters. China has more than 1,628 jet fighters. Taiwan has 650 tanks. China has 4,800 tanks.

Most of the information above is drawn from a BBC background piece and the 2024 World Almanac (hard copy).

Unlike the United States and Russia, which have large "blue sea Navies", China's ships rarely venture more than 400 miles from its Pacific Coast (although China has deployed as many as a dozen naval ships to suppress pirates in the Indian Ocean right up to the Persian Gulf and Red Sea, and has an ample merchant and fishing fleet that is sometimes pressed into paramilitary service), and Taiwan's navy stays even closer to home.