Who Are the World’s Poor? New overview from CGD [feedly]

Who Are the World's Poor? New overview from CGD
https://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/11/01/2019/who-are-worlds-poor-new-overview-cgd

Gisela Robles and Andy Sumner's guest post on From Poverty to Power explores what is means to be poor and where the poor live.

It sounds like a simple question: Who are the world's poor? Farmers, right? Well, yes, but not only.  In a new CGD working paper, Gisela Robles and I take a closer look at the data on global poverty to answer this question in finer detail. We find that when poverty is measured over multiple dimensions—including education, health, and standards of living—identifying the global poor reveals some important findings.

Measuring poverty

The World Bank's new global poverty line is $1.90 per day. Using this measure, there were an estimated 766 million people living in "extreme poverty" in 2013. Castañeda et al. (journal version and ungated) find those living under $1.90 a day are primarily rural, young, and working in agriculture.

But if what if we consider dimensions of poverty beyond monetary measurements by looking at things like poor schooling, ill health, and malnutrition? Does the global poverty profile change? Put another way – with the UN global goals to end poverty in mind – what needs ending and for whom by 2030?

In our paper, we present a new global poverty profile using the multidimensional poverty measure developed by Sabina Alkire and James Foster at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative. We estimate a new global poverty profile for multidimensional poverty in 2015 based on 106 countries that account for 92 percent of the developing world's population.

Here are our three main findings:

1. The world's poor are young, often children but not necessarily farmers

First, at an aggregate level, the overall characteristics of global multidimensional poverty are more or less similar to those of global monetary poverty at $1.90 per day. In both cases, poor households tend to be rural households formed predominantly by young people.

Half of the world's multidimensional poor are under 18 years of age. Yes, you read that right. And three-quarters are under 40 years old.

We find, in countries which have the data, that two-thirds of poor households have a member employed in agriculture, but surprisingly—given incomes are likely to be higher outside agriculture—one-third of poor households have no member employed in agriculture.

In other words, it turns out at least in the countries that we have data for that a significant proportion of the world's poor aren't farmers.

And a thought for those who say global poverty effects only 1 in 10 of the world's population: among the most frequent poverty deprivations, we find that undernutrition affects 1.5 billion people—double the $1.90 global poverty headcount.

2. Rural poverty is more about infrastructure. Urban poverty is more about child mortality and food

Second, at a disaggregated level, we find that poverty in rural areas tends to be characterized by overlapping deprivations in education and

access to decent infrastructure, meaning water, sanitation, electricity, and decent housing.

In contrast—and counterintuitively given the proximity, in principle, to better healthcare and economic opportunities—it is child mortality and malnutrition that is more frequently observed within urban poverty.

3. Just how multidimensional poverty is depends on where you live

Finally, the extent of the multidimensionality of poverty differs substantially by region; moreover, some deprivations frequently overlap while others do not.

The infrastructure-related dimensions of poverty—water, sanitation, electricity, and housing—often overlap with each other. No surprise there—it is easy to imagine that people who live without access to clean water, for example, might also lack access to sanitation.

What is surprising is that deprivations in health indicators overlap least frequently with other dimensions of poverty. This points towards the importance of giving health poverty direct attention in policy.

Why does it all matter?

So where do the numbers take us?  If many of the world's poor are outside of agriculture, and the urban poor experience malnutrition and child mortality despite better economic opportunities in principle, then what is going on?

First, the good news: most of the world's multidimensional poor live in countries with good growth history. In fact, three-quarters of global multidimensional poverty is in fast-growing countries (see table below).

So, no need to worry as growth will take care of poverty in due course? You'd think growth was always good for the poor, right?

Well, in a very general way, yes—but with some big caveats. In terms of monetary poverty, in up to one-third of growth episodes monetary poverty rates may not fall, as highlighted in a new book edited by Ravi Kanbur, Paul Shaffer, and Richard Sandbrook. And it seems the link between economic growth and multidimensional poverty is weaker still, as Santos et al. find (journal version and ungated).

Part of the story may be the different kinds of growth episodes. One interesting new theory is that of UNU-WIDER's Kunal Sen (journal version and ungated), who separates types of growth episodes into "growth acceleration" and "growth maintenance" and finds that the former is much less likely to benefit the poor than the latter. He argues that this is because the institutional factors that lead to growth accelerations are different from those that lead to growth maintenance.

What that study, the new book, and our own findings point towards is that it's a good time given the global goals on ending poverty to take a much closer look at when growth goes right and wrong for the poor, and why.

 

Where do the multidimensionally-poor live? The global distribution of multidimensional poverty by growth history of country, 2015.

GDP per capita, PPP   (constant 2011 international $), average annual growth, 1990–2016	Number of countries	% of global   multidimensional poverty
<1% per capita/year	25	13.4%
1% – 2% per capita/year	22	11.1%
>2% per capita/year	59	74.8%
No data	5	0.7%
Total	111	100.0%

Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators 2018 for GDP per capita growth rates and population figures; Robles and Sumner (2018) for MPI data. Note: Includes 111 low- and middle-income countries with populations above 1 million people.

 

 

 

Andy Sumner is Global Policy's Deputy Executive Editor and a Reader in International Development in the Department of International Development at King's College London. He has fifteen years' international research experience using both qualitative and quantitative methods and has published extensively, including ten books. His most recent books are Global Poverty (2016, OUP) and Development and Distribution (2018, OUP).

Gisela joined the Oxford GBD Group as a Global Burden of Disease Researcher in 2018, where she supports efforts to estimate the burden of antimicrobial resistance worldwide and inform public health decision-making at the local and international levels. In the last three years, Gisela has collaborated with the Lancet Noncommunicable Diseases and Injuries (NCDIs) Poverty Commission by profiling risk factors to NCDIs across the poorest populations in the World, applying methodologies utilised by the Institute of Health Metrics (IHME) in its ongoing Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study. Gisela has also served as a Data Analyst at Oxford's Clinical Trials Service Unit and Research Officer at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI)

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Re: Bernstein: more on Blanchard on public debt and interest rates; also: thanks, MMTers! [feedly]

forgot last sentence.....but clearly, economic growth is mandatory, otherwise simple population growth will lead to depression

On Fri, Jan 11, 2019 at 8:29 AM John Case <jcase4218@gmail.com> wrote:

This argument from Blanchard's research: As long as the growth rate --- presumably a rate larger than simple population growth -- exceeds debt interest rate, borrowing (for a large country with its own currency) is a low cost proposition.

My interest is primarily in how socialists might manage the capitalist sectors of a mixed economy to maintain both sustainable growth, productivity and higher standards of living. I know some would prefer to dismiss 'capitalism' by decree. But commodities -- and capitalism -- will not be denied as long as there are scarce values produced for exchange.

The difficulties in measuring labor productivity in services and intangibles may make the 'GDP' numbers too error-ridden to rely upon. But, clearly, GR

Blanchard on public debt and interest rates; also: thanks, MMTers!
http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/blanchard-on-r/

There's a deservedly nice bit of buzz about a new paper by tony economist Olivier Blanchard. My WaPo piece today takes you through the argument, along with a heavy dose of my own interpretation, one familiar to OTE readers.

"The key points are disarmingly simple, and they're ones I have written about before in this column. Part one is this: When a country's growth rate is higher than the interest rate on its debt, the fiscal costs of sustaining its debt levels are somewhere between zero and low. The reason is that even if the government does not raise taxes to offset its higher debt, the ratio of debt to gross domestic product will decrease rather than explode over time. Part two: For most of the period covered by Blanchard's research (1950-now in the United States), g>r, i.e., the GDP growth rate has exceeded the interest rate (same with the U.K., the euro area and Japan)."

I then discuss a nuanced aspect of the work. Because private capital accumulation is diminished in higher public debt scenarios, the return on capital investment must also be part of this cost/benefit analysis. In my interpretation, this leads to a conclusion that regardless of how low the interest rate on debt is, we still need to distinguish between the utility of borrowing what I call "good debt" and "bad debt."

Here, I'd like to briefly discuss two thoughts I left out of the Post piece.

The first is in regard to the political economy implications of Blanchard's findings. In a better world, these findings would lead fiscal policy makers to think more realistically about public debt. But in the real world, where every idea becomes a weapon in the arsenal of partisan politics, deficits are largely a political, not an economic tool.

R's shout about them when they rise on the D's watch and ignore them on their own watch. Because D's have long been too sensitive to accusations of fiscal profligacy and R's just don't care about any of that, this has led to austerity in years when we needed the fiscal stimulus and visa versa now, or what I call "upside-down Keynesianism." I go through the numbers/evidence here.

I don't expect Blanchard's evidence to change these dynamics because they're not about fiscal costs, they're about political posturing. But that doesn't mean nothing will change!

A lot of the fear-mongering and deficit attention disorder is driven by deficit scolds outside of government. The pressure from MMT'ers (my next point), Blanchard's analysis, similar historical work I cite from Kogan et al, and, most importantly, the lack of crowd-out or other predicted economic distortions from deficits, all make it harder for the austerians to be taken seriously by neutral observers. See, for example, David Leonhardt, a evidence-based columnist known for pitching it down the middle, in today's NYT.

As I (and Blanchard) argue, this doesn't mean deficits don't matter. Again, see my GD/BD discussion. But this feels a bit like the minimum wage debate in the early 1990s when Card and Krueger came out with Myth and Measurement, their path-breaking work disproving the widely assumed connection between minimum wages and pervasive job losses. About 10 years later, the reality of their findings became broadly accept knowledge and the result has been much better policy in this space.

Thus, if progressive/empirical economists keep pushing on this more nuanced, realistic view of public debt, perhaps policy will be smarter in 10 years. Sorry if that's a wait, but given the stickiness of lame ideas, you either play the long game or no game.

Next, I didn't say anything about MMT but much of the discussion around the Blanchard buzz makes the correct point that the MMT'ers played an important, admirable role in elevating these issues. I've raised some questions about their model and Josh Barro's new piece provides an excellent take on their perspective at this interesting moment in fiscal thought.

Much of the analysis shows that MMTers are advocating Keynesianism with a few wrinkles, like their argument that if fiscal stimulus does generate overheating, the Congress should reduce price pressures with a tax increase, which leads most of us to ask, "what's plan B?"

But their relentless hammering against mindless deficit reduction has been a key force in the ongoing, salutary rethink of these relations, for which we should all thank them!

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

--

John Case
Harpers Ferry, WV

The Enlighten Radio Player Stream, 

Sign UP HERE to get the Weekly Program Notes.

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Bernstein: more on Blanchard on public debt and interest rates; also: thanks, MMTers! [feedly]

This argument from Blanchard's research: As long as the growth rate --- presumably a rate larger than simple population growth -- exceeds debt interest rate, borrowing (for a large country with its own currency) is a low cost proposition.

My interest is primarily in how socialists might manage the capitalist sectors of a mixed economy to maintain both sustainable growth, productivity and higher standards of living. I know some would prefer to dismiss 'capitalism' by decree. But commodities -- and capitalism -- will not be denied as long as there are scarce values produced for exchange.

The difficulties in measuring labor productivity in services and intangibles may make the 'GDP' numbers too error-ridden to rely upon. But, clearly, GR

Blanchard on public debt and interest rates; also: thanks, MMTers!
http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/blanchard-on-r/

There's a deservedly nice bit of buzz about a new paper by tony economist Olivier Blanchard. My WaPo piece today takes you through the argument, along with a heavy dose of my own interpretation, one familiar to OTE readers.

"The key points are disarmingly simple, and they're ones I have written about before in this column. Part one is this: When a country's growth rate is higher than the interest rate on its debt, the fiscal costs of sustaining its debt levels are somewhere between zero and low. The reason is that even if the government does not raise taxes to offset its higher debt, the ratio of debt to gross domestic product will decrease rather than explode over time. Part two: For most of the period covered by Blanchard's research (1950-now in the United States), g>r, i.e., the GDP growth rate has exceeded the interest rate (same with the U.K., the euro area and Japan)."

I then discuss a nuanced aspect of the work. Because private capital accumulation is diminished in higher public debt scenarios, the return on capital investment must also be part of this cost/benefit analysis. In my interpretation, this leads to a conclusion that regardless of how low the interest rate on debt is, we still need to distinguish between the utility of borrowing what I call "good debt" and "bad debt."

Here, I'd like to briefly discuss two thoughts I left out of the Post piece.

The first is in regard to the political economy implications of Blanchard's findings. In a better world, these findings would lead fiscal policy makers to think more realistically about public debt. But in the real world, where every idea becomes a weapon in the arsenal of partisan politics, deficits are largely a political, not an economic tool.

R's shout about them when they rise on the D's watch and ignore them on their own watch. Because D's have long been too sensitive to accusations of fiscal profligacy and R's just don't care about any of that, this has led to austerity in years when we needed the fiscal stimulus and visa versa now, or what I call "upside-down Keynesianism." I go through the numbers/evidence here.

I don't expect Blanchard's evidence to change these dynamics because they're not about fiscal costs, they're about political posturing. But that doesn't mean nothing will change!

A lot of the fear-mongering and deficit attention disorder is driven by deficit scolds outside of government. The pressure from MMT'ers (my next point), Blanchard's analysis, similar historical work I cite from Kogan et al, and, most importantly, the lack of crowd-out or other predicted economic distortions from deficits, all make it harder for the austerians to be taken seriously by neutral observers. See, for example, David Leonhardt, a evidence-based columnist known for pitching it down the middle, in today's NYT.

As I (and Blanchard) argue, this doesn't mean deficits don't matter. Again, see my GD/BD discussion. But this feels a bit like the minimum wage debate in the early 1990s when Card and Krueger came out with Myth and Measurement, their path-breaking work disproving the widely assumed connection between minimum wages and pervasive job losses. About 10 years later, the reality of their findings became broadly accept knowledge and the result has been much better policy in this space.

Thus, if progressive/empirical economists keep pushing on this more nuanced, realistic view of public debt, perhaps policy will be smarter in 10 years. Sorry if that's a wait, but given the stickiness of lame ideas, you either play the long game or no game.

Next, I didn't say anything about MMT but much of the discussion around the Blanchard buzz makes the correct point that the MMT'ers played an important, admirable role in elevating these issues. I've raised some questions about their model and Josh Barro's new piece provides an excellent take on their perspective at this interesting moment in fiscal thought.

Much of the analysis shows that MMTers are advocating Keynesianism with a few wrinkles, like their argument that if fiscal stimulus does generate overheating, the Congress should reduce price pressures with a tax increase, which leads most of us to ask, "what's plan B?"

But their relentless hammering against mindless deficit reduction has been a key force in the ongoing, salutary rethink of these relations, for which we should all thank them!

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Blaming Workers Again [feedly]

Blaming Workers Again
https://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/2019/01/07/blaming-workers-again/

Working-class people often get blamed for their troubles. They should have planned better, been less demanding, or just been smarter. Those are just some of the judgments that surfaced again in the weeks after General Motors' announcement late in November that it would close five plants in the U.S. and Canada, leaving thousands of workers without jobs.

While some expressed concern for the soon-to-be displaced autoworkers, many were quick to point fingers. One person commenting on the Washington Post's story about the announcement wrote that the autoworkers, many of whom had voted for Trump, "deserve what they get.  To fall for the simplemindedness and con-man character of a Trump makes sympathy hard to muster." Callers on National Public Radio's 1A wondered why GM workers hadn't realized that their jobs were not secure. How could they be so foolish? Others complained that the workers should have been better prepared. Why hadn't they gone to college or pursued training for some other kind of working-class job?

That blame extended to working-class communities: why hadn't distressed rust belt and rural communities diversify their local economies, as Pittsburgh or Cleveland had done so successfully? Others suggested that workers should move to where the jobs are. As Eduardo Porter suggested in a  New York Times op-ed about how to address the decline in rural communities, instead of trying to save dying towns, the government should implement policies to help people move to cities with better economic opportunities.

After two decades of tracking both the social costs of deindustrialization and American discourse about the working class, we found all of this beyond frustrating. In the Youngstown area (where we live part of the year), workers at the nearby GM Lordstown plant knew that their jobs were at risk, because the company had already laid off two shifts. But they remained hopeful. While some may have believed President Trump, who told his supporters in Youngstown that the jobs lost when GM laid off its first shift in January 2017 that those jobs would be coming back. "Don't move. Don't sell your house," others thought that GM had an obligation to American taxpayers and to its workers. GM is profitable today because of a Federal bailout and state tax abatements, not to mention union concessions that lowered labor costs.

As for the argument that workers should have pursued training so they would be prepared to move to new jobs, blue-collar workers in deindustrialized communities know from decades of experience that retraining programs often fail. Amy Goldstein documented this powerfully in Janesville: An American Story, her award-winning book about how the 2008 closing of the GM plant affected that Wisconsin community. And despite evidence that college graduates earn more over their lifetime than those without degrees, numerous reports make clear that a college degree is no guarantee of a good job. Nor is college an affordable or manageable option for many workers, especially those who work full-time.

The notion that smaller rust belt communities like the Youngstown-Warren area haven't tried to diversify their economies reflects basic ignorance. Mayors, economic developers, and business leaders in these communities have done almost nothing but try to attract new industries, but – not surprisingly – they have a much harder time doing that than their larger neighbors, which began the battle for economic recovery with major universities, hospitals, and corporate headquarters already in place. And of course, the popular narrative that cities like Pittsburgh and Cleveland are booming ignores the continuing struggles of many in those areas and surrounding towns.

Those who suggest that people should simply leave these communities have also not been paying attention. People have been leaving these areas for decades, starting during the early 1980s when the steel industry closed dozens of plants. As Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson noted in their 1985 book, Journey to Nowhere: The Saga of the New Underclass, deindustrialized spurred a significant migration of industrial workers, many headed to places like Houston in search of new jobs in the oil industry. Since 1970, Youngstown's population has dropped by about 85,000 people. Trumbull County next door, where the Lordstown plant operates, lost about 30,000 people.

Given the long-term economic struggles of the region, we might expect those numbers to be higher, but many people stayed despite the area's limited opportunities. Why? Because along with deep roots, they have friends and family who help each other get by in hard times, and a poor economy keeps the cost of living low. For many, their most significant economic assets – their homes – are not portable or worth enough to make selling worthwhile. In the Mahoning Valley, people can often get by on part-time jobs and the informal economy of barter and DIY.

But our frustration isn't simply about judgment and misinformation. It's about how blaming working-class people distracts us from the larger problem the GM shutdown reflects: a global economic philosophy that deepens inequality, creating prosperity for some at a cost to many others. As Thomas Friedman noted in a recent New York Timescolumn, a "liberal global order" based on "free markets, free people and free ideas" has spread "prosperity around the world" No doubt, global capitalism has improved the economic conditions, if not the political power, of many of the poorest workers around the world, even as many workers are losing ground. While Friedman acknowledged this, it doesn't seem to have occurred to him that a growing inequality gap ought to raise questions about whether the free market works all that well. But inequality is baked into capitalism, and its effects have been exacerbated by technologies, policies, and corporate-centered ideologies. While many commentators blamed workers for not being savvy enough to succeed in a struggling economy, few questioned GM CEO Mary Barra's upfront statement that her primary focus was on "maintaining shareholder value."

Blaming the working class has long been a default move for elite and middle-class people. Some have faith in the cultural myth of meritocracy. They see their success as a matter of effort and talent and assume that working-class people just don't have enough of either. For others, judging workers is a way to displace their own anxieties about the uncertain economy. Both project their biases onto the working class and reassure themselves that they deserve their economic privileges.

No wonder working-class people are rejecting mainstream politics, embracing populism, and, increasingly, taking to the streets.

John Russo and Sherry Linkon

 

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Shelter from the Storm in 2019 [feedly]

Shelter from the Storm in 2019
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/prospects-for-2019-economic-financial-political-stability-by-barry-eichengreen-2019-01

In thee coming year, global economic, financial, and political stability will depend on outcomes in four areas. And what happens on one front is likely to affect the prospects for positive outcomes on all the others.

BRUSSELS – What would have to happen for this to be a tranquil year economically, financially, and politically? Answer: a short list of threats to stability would have to be averted.


First, the trade war between the United States and China would have to be placed on hold. In November and December, financial markets reacted positively to each hint of a negotiated settlement and negatively to each mention of renewed hostilities – and for good reason: tariffs that disrupt trade flows and supply chains do global growth no good. And, as we know, what happens in financial markets doesn't stay in financial markets: outcomes there powerfully affect consumer confidence and business sentiment.

Second, the US economy will have to grow by at least 2%, the consensus forecast incorporated into investor expectations. If growth comes in significantly lower – whether because the sugar high from the December 2017 tax cuts wears off, the Federal Reserve chokes off the expansion, or for some other reason – financial markets will move sharply downward, with negative implications for confidence and stability.

Third, China will have to avoid a significant intensification of its financial problems. Successfully managing a corporate-debt load of 160% of GDP requires not just selectively restructuring bad loans, but also increasing the denominator of the debt-to-GDP ratio. With infrastructure investment weak and manufacturing production declining, China is increasingly unlikely to achieve the authorities' 2019 target of at least 6% growth. In that case, slow growth and mounting debt problems will feed on one another, dragging down economic performance in China and much of the emerging-market world.

Fourth, voters in the European Parliament election in May will have to prevent the victory of a right-wing nationalist majority hostile to European integration. Europe needs to move forward in order to avoid falling back; the existence of the euro leaves it no choice. For now, moving forward means creating a common deposit insurance scheme for its banks, introducing at least a modest euro-area budget, and augmenting the resources of its rescue fund, the European Stability Mechanism. But if the common currency's travails during the past decade have taught us one thing, it is that such measures cannot be force-fed to the European public by the elites. Durable integration requires grassroots support. And that support must be evident at the polls.

All of these happy outcomes are of course far from assured. But if some of them materialize, they will increase the likelihood of others. For example, if US President Donald Trump ends his trade war, the growth outlook in the US and China will brighten. Robust growth there would create a more favorable external environment for Europe, brightening its own economic outlook and bolstering the electoral prospects of mainstream parties and politicians.


Conversely, a poor outcome on one front will dim the prospects on others. Disappointing growth in the US, for example, would cause Trump to seek a scapegoat. If not Fed Chair Jerome Powell and his colleagues, that someone will likely be Chinese President Xi Jinping. In that case, the trade war will be back on, and growth and financial stability in China would suffer accordingly. This combination of US and Chinese economic woes would then drag down growth in other parts of the world, fanning the populist backlash against the political establishment in Europe and elsewhere.

Similarly, if the negative shock is slower growth in China, the authorities in Beijing will almost certainly respond by depreciating the renminbi. This, too, would incite further trade conflict, with negative repercussions all around.

A final prerequisite for a tranquil year is a limited outcome for US Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into misdeeds by Russia's government and the Trump family circle. This conclusion might seem odd. If the US president's erratic personality, disruptive tweets, and counterproductive policies pose such a serious threat to stability, then surely a scathing indictment by Mueller and his team, leading the House of Representatives to draft articles of impeachment, is the most direct route to removing this danger.

But if the Mueller report implicates Trump's children – Donald Trump, Jr., Eric Trump, and Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner – or the president himself, Trump will lash out, as he does whenever he feels the need to defend himself. The likely targets include not just Mueller and the Democratic majority in the US House of Representatives, but also the Fed, China, Mexico, and the countries of Central America and Europe, as Trump lays down an economic smokescreen to cover his political misdeeds. This will roil financial markets and depress investor confidence. And there will be no obvious end to the disruption, given the low likelihood that the Republican-controlled Senate will vote to convict Trump.

Rather than pursuing impeachment, the Democrats should focus on how to beat Trump in the next presidential election. That means crafting an agenda and agreeing on a candidate. In the meantime, we can only cross our fingers and hope for the best. November 2020 is still a long way off.


BARRY EICHENGREEN

Writing for PS since 2003
124 Commentaries

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Barry Eichengreen is Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former senior policy adviser at the International Monetary Fund. His latest book is The Populist Temptation: Economic Grievance and Political Reaction in the Modern

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Elizabeth Warren and Her Party of Ideas [feedly]

PK on Warren, this time with text :)

Elizabeth Warren and Her Party of Ideas
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/opinion/elizabeth-warren-policy.html

Almost 40 years have passed since Daniel Patrick Moynihan — a serious intellectual turned influential politician ­— made waves by declaring, "Of a sudden, Republicans have become a party of ideas." He didn't say that they were good ideas; but the G.O.P. seemed to him to be open to new thinking in a way Democrats weren't.

But that was a long time ago. Today's G.O.P. is a party of closed minds, hostile to expertise, aggressively uninterested in evidence, whose idea of a policy argument involves loudly repeating the same old debunked doctrines. Paul Ryan's "innovative" proposals of 2011 (cut taxes and privatize Medicare) were almost indistinguishable from those of Newt Gingrich in 1995.

Meanwhile, Democrats have experienced an intellectual renaissance. They have emerged from their 1990s cringe; they're no longer afraid to challenge conservative pieties; and there's a lot of serious, well-informed intraparty debate about issues from health care to climate change.

You don't have to agree with any of the various Medicare for Allplans, or proposals for a Green New Deal, to recognize that these are important ideas receiving serious discussion.

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The question is whether our media environment can handle a real party of ideas. Can news organizations tell the difference between genuine policy wonks and poseurs like Ryan? Are they even willing to discuss policy rather than snark about candidates' supposed personality flaws?

Which brings me to the case of Elizabeth Warren, who is probably today's closest equivalent to Moynihan in his prime.

Like Moynihan, she's a serious intellectual turned influential politician. Her scholarly work on bankruptcy and its relationship to rising inequality made her a major player in policy debate long before she entered politics herself. Like many others, I found one of her key insights — that rising bankruptcy rates weren't caused by profligate consumerism, that they largely reflected the desperate attempts of middle-class families to buy homes in good school districts — revelatory.

She has also proved herself able to translate scholarly insights into practical policy. Full disclosure: I was skeptical about her brainchild, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. I didn't think it was a bad idea, but I had doubts about how much difference a federal agency tasked with policing financial fraud would make. But I was wrong: Deceptive financial practices aimed at poorly informed consumers do a lot of harm, and until President Trump sabotaged it, the bureau was by all accounts having a hugely salutary effect on families' finances.

And Warren's continuing to throw out unorthodox policy ideas, like her proposal that the federal government be allowed to get into the business of producing some generic drugs. This is the sort of thing that brings howls of derision from the right, but that actual policy experts consider a valuable contribution to the discussion.


Is there anyone like Warren on the other side of the aisle? No. Not only aren't there any G.O.P. politicians with comparable intellectual heft, there aren't even halfway competent intellectuals with any influence in the party. The G.O.P. doesn't want people who think hard and look at evidence; it wants people like, say, the "economist" Stephen Moore, who slavishly reaffirm the party's dogma, even if they can't get basic facts straight.

Does all of this mean that Warren should be president? Certainly not — a lot of things determine whether someone will succeed in that job, and intellectual gravitas is neither necessary nor sufficient. But Warren's achievements as a scholar/policymaker are central to her political identity, and clearly should be front and center in any reporting about her presidential bid.

But, of course, they aren't. What I'm seeing are stories about whether she handled questions about her Native American heritage well, or whether she's "likable."

This kind of journalism is destructively lazy, and also has a terrible track record. I'm old enough to remember the near-universal portrayal of George W. Bush as a bluff, honest guy, despite the obvious lies underlying his policy proposals; then he took us to war on false pretenses.

Moreover, trivia-based reporting is, in practice, deeply biased — not in a conventional partisan sense, but in its implicit assumption that a politician can't be serious unless he (and I mean he) is a conservative, or at most centrist, white male. That kind of bias, if it persists, will be a big problem for a Democratic Party that has never been more serious about policy, but has also never been more progressive and more diverse.

This bias needs to be called out — and I'm not just talking about Warren. Consider the contrast between the unearned adulation Ryan received and how long it took conventional wisdom to recognize that Nancy Pelosi was the most effective House speaker of modern times.

Again, I'm not arguing that Warren should necessarily become president. But she is what a serious policy intellectual looks and sounds like in 2019. And if our media can't recognize that, we're in big trouble.

Paul Krugman has been an Opinion columnist since 2000 and is also a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on international trade and economic geography. @PaulKrugman

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PK: Elizabeth Warren and Her Party of Ideas [feedly]

Krugman on Warren

Elizabeth Warren and Her Party of Ideas
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/opinion/elizabeth-warren-policy.html

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