The root causes of Trump

The Republican Party of the USA will select Donald Trump as their presidential candidate in November’s election. Trump has dominated the news for so long that we should pause to take in the incredulity of this choice. At least he has not yet been elected president, but we should not be complacent about that either, no runner in a two horse race starts without hope and his opponent is vulnerable.

Trump is almost the antithesis of a credible president. He lacks integrity, gravitas, knowledge, experience or humility. For his entire career he has been a narcissistic bully. Given a $200 million loan to start his business by his Dad, he cannot hope to empathise with the lives of everyday Americans.

A strange thing has happened in serious news media. Journalists do not know how to balance their distaste and disrespect for Trump with their obligation to be objective, and many have broken ranks and become openly hostile. David Brooks and Michael Gerson, both generally leaning towards Republican arguments, have both described him as unfit.

Yet the bandwagon continues to roll and the wheels may stay on as far as the gates of the White House. It is worth trying to understand how this could possibly come about. Perhaps there are lessons to learn and not just tears to shed.

As I often find with this type of analysis, it is hard to separate proximate causes from root causes. I tried to write a list and to group it and to place genealogy lines to connect them. In the end I came up with three strands of argument, although they certainly overlap.

The proximate cause from the first strand is the appalling quality of the Republican field of candidates. There were seventeen, so it was hard for any to stand out without pandering to primary colour stereotypes. At one stage Ben Carson, who appears to possess no coherent relevant political thought whatsoever, was leading the field.

How could they be so bad? Apart from the fringe players, there were the tea party evangelical types and the establishment types. I can hardly be unbiased about the tea party types, but on this occasion they surpassed themselves by coalescing around as obnoxious a guy as I can imagine, Ted Cruz. Usually the wacky tea party guy will survive a long time in the process thanks to conservative core voters, but on this occasion he became the last man standing besides Trump, thereby giving Donald a free pass to the finish line, at a time when almost anyone vaguely literate and likeable could have stopped him at the last fence. This happened because the establishment field were out of touch and cancelled each other out and were generally pathetic.

How could this happen? Well, one strand of argument searches back through the US political system. The Republicans are a broad coalition of groups. Money and lobbying power matter a lot more than policy or competence. Acceptance from the more extreme end of the coalitions requires weaselled positions. Many voters in primaries are extremists, and career politicians must pander because the gerrymandered constituencies mean the risk to an incumbent comes from his own extreme flank. So in the end most become remote from the electorate, and sacrifice all principle to stay in power, which requires ever larger dollops of money from groups with vested interests and more extremists.

One ultimate cause of this is a two-party duopoly with huge barriers to being overturned. This trail ultimately leads back to the founding fathers bequeathing a system with unintended consequences. The leverage of the Supreme Court and the massive geographical disparity across the land entrench the duopoly, while the president has little direct domestic power, so must either be unduly cautious or some sort of bully. Theodore Roosevelt called it the bully pulpit, and Trump certainly has one necessary quality for that. What a shame that this trait can only spell disaster for foreign policy.

The second strand also starts with the pathetic candidates, but traces back towards a root cause of the Republican policy platform. There isn’t one, really. They have the social extremist agenda from anti-abortion, anti-LGBT and pro-gun wings. There is a paralysing commitment never to raise any tax – thereby condemning any necessary rebalancing or investments while forever growing the deficit. And there is vilification of democrats. They won the mid-terms on the simple platform that Obama was a despicable villain (and, sotto voce, black) and Obamacare a catastrophe, just because it includes the word Obama.

This lack of platform stifles any debate and more or less excludes authentic candidates. It has also sown the seed for Trump in another way. The Republican electorate is right to feel let down. The establishment politicians fail to act on anything substantial, talk mostly about archaic social irrelevances, pander to special interests and allow the economy to become ever more unequal. If I am a Republican, the Democrats cannot be the answer because Obama is the devil and Clinton some sort of witch. But my own lot seem to have let me down too. Time to support someone who is anti-establishment and who plays to my deeper nativist fears. What else is there?

Readers of this blog will be aware that I end up blaming Thatcher and Reagan for nearly everything, and here I go again. The absence of a coherent Republican platform springs directly from Reagan. The end of progressive taxation, the rise of greed and lobbying and the ballooning of debt started with Ronnie. He got lucky with the Cold War, and is now untouchable, even to centrists. The result is no credible Republican policy – and Trump.

The third strand has a proximate cause of celebrity culture. In the new world of social media and short attention spans, entertainment trumps fact or thought, and Trump is an undoubted master at playing this culture, lies and all. One specific part of this culture is the death of real news. TV news is now designed as an entertainment program, while radio news is little more than propaganda, so most Americans are not really exposed to any thoughtful portrayal of their country or the wider world, a vacuum ideally suited to Trump.

Apart from general technology trends, does anything else lie behind this third strand? Well, Hollywood and TV give the public what they want, and what the public wants is partly driven by their level of education. It surprises me how few Americans are able to see beyond bumper sticker portrayals, or have any curiosity to learn more.

How could this happen? Well a conspiracy theorist might suggest that this suits the elites and the military and other special interests (like whites), but I am not quite so cynical. Maybe generations of prosperity have made educators and parents lazy and complacent. Maybe also there is some denial and guilt at play – denial so that people don’t have to think too hard about their unsustainable, greedy lives and guilt about the legacy of racism and other national sins. For a nation of churchgoers, this is remarkable indeed, but the Church leaders have largely succumbed to big money too.

One deeper root cause for all of this might be what is called American exceptionalism. Lazy leaders pander to a thoughtless portrayal of the USA as somehow superior, and people feel good about that and don’t want to delve too deeply in case the image loses its gloss. Perhaps only an empire held together by tribal types of creeds could be so one-eyed, be so careless over education and allow its curiosity and humility to slide. The curse of empires runs deep – the UK hasn’t shaken it off yet, as evidenced by the crass stupidity of potential Brexit.

So we have three linked strands, each feeding the others. The entrenched system, the follies of Reagan and the curse of exceptionalism between them have led us to Trump. One benefit of root cause analysis is that it often signals antidotes – if these things caused Trump, maybe they can also cure us of him.

I am not optimistic. Both parties will shake the system and their coalitions after the disastrous 2016 campaigns, but there is insufficient momentum for change. It may take another generation for Republicans to move on from their beatification of the Gipper. Empires crumble slowly and painfully, and the last ones to notice and respond are always the subjects of those empires.

There is one other antidote to Trump, and that is Trump himself. We see it in Europe, when the fascists gain power they usually mess up and lose some allure. Even a near-Trump presidential experience might be enough for the next Sanders to break through. We can only but cross our fingers and hope, especially that Trump messing up might not include nukes. Or next time we could end up with president Kardashian.   

Lessons from Leicester

Everyone seems to be trying to draw lessons from the remarkable victory of minnows Leicester City in the English Premier League. So I’ll try too.

Firstly, what a triumph and vindication this is for sport and sports fans everywhere. Success against the odds warms the heart and offers hope. It is especially good to note that the fans themselves probably made the difference for Leicester, creating a unique atmosphere in their stadium worth a “twelfth man”. I’ve supported West Ham United for fifty years, during which time the line from the club song “Fortunes always hiding” has invariably been apt. Yet every so often fate shines kindly on us, and the joy makes it worth the wait, and indeed I would wager is deeper joy than fans of big clubs ever experience. West Ham have offered plenty of joy in the season just ending, thanks in part to the brilliance of Dmitri Payet on the field and Slaven Bilic off it. I love watching sports, I love supporting clubs in sports, and I recommend it heartily to all sports sceptics.  Go Mets, Patriots, Hammers and all my other teams!

The next message is about bookmakers. Leicester were priced at 5000-1, which means that they thought that the league could have been played with just twenty teams every year from Moses until the present and Leicester would have won it just once. Isn’t that ridiculous? Even half way through the season, when Leicester were already in the leading bunch, odds of 1000-1 were offered. I did some simplified maths. For a team to have a one in five thousand chance of winning the league, their probability of relegation at the start of the season would need to be about 40%. If relegation odds were about 4-1, then odds to win the league should be 500-1 or so. At the start of the season, no team that is not in operational disarray should have relegation odds much above 4-1. So the bookies made a mistake. My lesson is that this happens, so very occasionally betting is not such a mugs game as usual. Unfortunately, they won’t make that particular mistake again, so we have to look out for the next one.

Another message is about noting the factors that were important in the win. Ranieri did a good job, but without denigrating him at all, actually managing the spirit of a group that is winning is much easier than when the team is losing – that is the main value of momentum. For me, one team that really earned their success was the medical team. Leicester have a small and shallow squad, and had phenomenal good fortune with a lack of injuries through the season. Do their medical team have any secrets beyond good luck? It would be worth trying to find out.

Leicester is a great example of finding different ways to win, and how styles need to continuously adapt. Most of the top teams try to win by dominating possession, a style perfected by Barcelona. But Leicester do almost the opposite. They are happy to let opponents have the ball and set themselves up as a fortress to defend. Then when they finally win the ball they counter-attack with pace, while the opponents are out of defensive alignment. It is a brilliant use of the resources available, and no doubt in future seasons many will attempt to emulate this style.

This last point has many lessons for businesses. First, there are many ways to win, don’t just copy the crowd or perceived good practice. Next, fit your strategy to your available resources, and pursue it relentlessly (though taking account of competition). Finally, be careful with KPI’s. Time of possession is measured in soccer as a useful indicator, but Leicester would have finished almost last in the table if it were a flawless predictor of results. KPI’s are useful, but need constant questioning.

My main point is also relevant to business, and it is about diseconomies of scale. I have long held the view that in most sectors outside manufacturing, scale beyond a certain size brings more burdens than benefits. I’ll try to use Leicester as an example.

Even ten years ago, soccer clubs were hopelessly unprofessional. The team tactics and training were OK (at least once Wenger started the revolution of fitness and no alcohol and so on), but what lay behind the team was run on a shoestring except in a tiny minority of clubs. Scouting was often a part-time job of an ex-player with few relevant skills or training, sometimes given the job as a favour. Few games were watched, and use of statistics was minimal (credit where it’s due, Sam Allardyce was one of the first to see this opportunity).

Apart from traditionalism, the main factor behind this was money. Only Man U and a few others could afford to dedicate any resources to things like scouting; even those others who were good enough could not dream of attracting established good players on their budgets anyway. In this age of unprofessionalism, scale was a clear advantage.

In the last twenty years, that has all changed. TV money means every top-flight club can afford to be professional in all aspects of running a club. Not all have actually taken the opportunity yet, but increasingly many have. For those (like West Ham) who have become smarter, this has levelled the playing field to some extent. Outside the very top rank of player, who still gravitates to the exorbitant money of the top few, West Ham now has a chance of spotting talent and persuading it to join.

So the first team of Man City will still be better (in talent terms) than West Ham’s, but nowadays the top teams play so many European matches that they need two teams, and their second batch will be no better than ours. If we are lucky with injuries, for most games there won’t be much of a gulf.

Then, does talent always perform? In a tight-knit set up, it often will, week after week, as both West Ham and Leicester have proven, they have spirit and teamwork and momentum. Too many players in the top teams are either not getting enough football, or are getting two much ego-stroking and not enough sweat. Look at Nasri or Walcott, usually injured or moaning or show-boating or generally failing their teams. And the poor chief coach has to manage these egos as well as the relentless media and the labyrinthine layers of power within his club, so it is no surprise that the tactics against some mediocre team are sometimes inadequate.

All of this shows that scale as far as professionalism is of benefit, but subsequent scale can be counter-productive. This year the top teams have all had a degree of dysfunction, while three or four less fashionable teams have played to their true potential – Southampton are another good example.

The top teams are not doomed to lose, indeed they will usually win, since they still have a monopoly of the very top talent. But I suspect it will become more common for surprises to occur, though perhaps not again of the scale of Leicester’s amazing triumph. Look at the Champions League qualifiers over the next few seasons, I predict there will be one surprise per year on average. The game is all the better for it, and the joy of being a sports fan will never die even if I’m wrong.  

Maths at School

I was amused by a recent back page article in the Guardian Weekly arguing that too much maths is pushed at too many children at school. According to Simon Jenkins, it has become a bit of an obsession to keep up with other nations in the PISA rankings, and more and more effort is expended on getting kids close to the high level of Chinese and other Asian kids. Maths is chosen for focus because it is easy to measure and seems to have some relation to the sort of careers that determine competitiveness. But for many kids maths is a torture, and for most the maths taught at school will have little practical benefit in later life.

The article was amusing, and so were the letters published the following edition. Three were chosen, doubtless from many, all of them against the proposal. The first took the traditional view that maths, even where not directly practical, was excellent brain training. The second had the stronger argument that maths is the basis for many practical things, notably engineering. The third simply sneered that Jenkins was probably rubbish at maths.

I find the article useful because it made me think about something in a new way. I had sailed through maths at school, almost at prodigal level, and did not really exercise much thinking in choosing the subject for college. At college, a few things happened. First, I started failing. That was partly because I had never had to think about maths before and did not take well to working through struggles. Next, the syllabus caught me out, because, before it was possible to specialise, many courses assumed some knowledge of the branches of maths associated with science, knowledge that I was lacking due to prior choices, and a lack of interest or talent. Lastly, I started wondering what the point was, in a subject that had long ago discarded anything as simple as numbers and where each concept only seemed to serve the next, even more obscure, concept. We spent half of one term proving that if you had three infinite parallel lines and moved your pencil from the top one to the bottom without a break, you were sure to cross the middle one. Now who would have guessed that! I left college wishing that I had had the courage to transfer at some point to Economics.

So, comparing the ultimately unsatisfactory experiences of Jenkins, a mathsophobe, and of me, a mathsophile, what lessons can we draw?

First, I don’t buy the argument at all about mind training. Sure, maths does train the mind to think logically, to follow steps, and things like disproving by counter-example, all of which have common application in everyday life. In the same way learning Latin helps the mind understand sentence structure, tenses and declensions, and even the origin of some common everyday words. But that does not mean we should still all learn Latin. Surely we should all learn modern languages instead, which have the same mind benefits and might actually be used to converse with real people on planet earth. There must be practical maths applications with the same combination, if our starting point is everyday use rather than something ethereal.

The argument about engineering has more dimensions. The world surely needs engineers and scientists, and engineers do require strong knowledge of much of the maths we learn at school. Trigonometry and calculus are two sub-disciplines that are essential. To reach a level in these disciplines that is good enough to become an effective engineer requires a large set of more basic skills. Perhaps as much as half of the school maths curriculum could be seen as a primer for engineering.

But while the world needs many engineers, it does not follow that everyone needs the knowledge that engineers have. For people who are not engineers or in science and technology, that same curriculum has little or no everyday value. Most people would be better off being taught basic DIY skills. I was never going to be a scientist or engineer, and indeed those branches of maths were a lost opportunity for me. It was especially wasteful at college to reintroduce topics that I had already dropped at school. How disheartening it was to sit through a three-hour exam and finish useful input after five minutes!

It would be possible to divide up the subject somehow. Perhaps maths for maths, maths for science and engineering, maths for business and economics, and maths for living would be a good segmentation. Maths for maths would prove things about parallel lines and ultimately lead to more research and more maths, for brilliant specialists. Maths for business and economics would have focus on cash flows, cost types, statistics and probability – all topics I would have retained passion for and have used extensively in later life. Maths for living would be compulsory, and focus only on things that most people could benefit from, such as budgeting, probability, percentages, loans and so on.

To a small degree this happens. Pure maths is sort of maths for maths, applied and applicable the other specialities. But it is all too little too late, and maths for living would be a big step forward from the sort of courses taught to the majority in most schools, especially if it filtered back into junior schools. Probability is a big challenge for many at high school, but is a key life skill, and perhaps starting earlier would help.

What stops this happening? Well, I see three blockages. One is the sort of traditional thinking about training the mind and beating the Chinese. The second is the practical challenge of managing many parallel streams with limited teaching resources. And the third is the requirement for kids to make choices before they are mature enough to do so – did I really know at eleven that I would lean towards business and not science or research?

The first blockage is lazy, and Jenkins does a good job at exposing. This is the one that leads to pointless torture of generations of kids, failing at subjects they have no talent or passion for and will never find need for after school. The second blockage is where technology can make a step change. Once we all learn partly in classes and partly from computers, much more flexible curricula become feasible to manage.

The third blockage is more problematic. In Germany and the Netherlands, kids are streamed into completely different schools at eleven, some groups prepared for college and others more vocationally. I have always been against this system, because it is very young to essentially condemn kids along a particular path, especially considering all the contextual factors involved like family background and aspiration. But I am coming to see the merits of the approach, so long as tracks to deal with exceptions are available. The vocational group could all take maths for living, with a small dose of science or business thrown in for some depending on talent and ambition. The academic group could be further split at some point between researchers, engineers, business people and non-mathematicians like linguists or historians. With the help of technology, it is all very possible.

Such thinking could have spared the Jenkins much torture in his teens, and me a lot of wasted education in my early twenties. Might we have chosen the wrong path too soon and thereby blocked our own path? Possibly, but that risk has to be weighed against the massive benefits of targeted education. My own path towards Economics would have seemed far less of a leap had my school maths been focused on maths for business.

It is a shame that traditionalists and trade unions conspire to prevent education moving forward s quickly as it could. Such tailoring might not beat the Chinese at PISA tests but would surely lead to happier kids and ultimately competitive advantage. The same thinking could apply to many other subjects and the balance between subjects. For example, modern languages are still sadly neglected in the English-speaking world, due to a mixture of arrogance and the fact that languages are less about academic research than practical value. I was lucky enough to start French early and have good teachers, and somehow my French is still much better than my other languages despite all sorts of later-life efforts. This leads me to wonder if the brain finds language easier at a younger age.

Thank you, Simon Jenkins. Our talent profiles are so very different, but you helped me think about a subject in a broader way. I can only hope that some of the people designing education systems have open minds and not just PISA targets.