Day: January 5, 2017

Still a bit shocked

On By Derek DanielsIn How I see the worldLeave a comment

I’ll admit it, I’m still baffled by the Trump win. In hindsight, the polling that was coming in in the last few days looked pretty bad for Clinton. Her numbers slipped and his rose after the Comey letter. Folks like Nate Silver made the point that looking at those numbers in isolation was a mistake, and that earlier numbers should stay included in the model. That seemed reasonable at the time, but we now see that the newer numbers were actually reflective of the outcome, and Clinton lost in the states that mattered, by a very slim margin.

I know it’s been almost two months, and I’m honestly not one of those people who is refusing to accept the outcome, signing off with the #notmypresident hashtag, but it doesn’t mean I’m over it, and it doesn’t mean I’m not still shocked by the outcome (and by the president-elect’s behavior since the election).

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Capitalism first, a hybrid economic perspective from a woefully amature economist

On By Derek DanielsIn Economy, How I see the world, society3 Comments

I’m not a scholar of economics, so I probably have no business writing about this at all, but here goes anyway. I’ve spent time, probably too much time, thinking about socialism and capitalism and the ways that we’ve been told that capitalism is good and socialism is bad, and how to reconcile the socialism in our society that we love with the capitalism in our society that we hate. It’s not an easy task, and the most simple and easiest answer to the clear discrepancy is that people are stupid. This seems to be the fallback too often these days. Why did people who benefit most from government vote for smaller government? Because people are stupid. Why did people who have insurance thanks to Obamacare vote for a candidate who ran to repeal Obamacare? Because people are stupid. I’m not saying I disagree with that response entirely, but it’s too easy, and too simplistic. I think there’s more to ponder here, which is what I plan to do with the next few hundred or so words.

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