NEWSWIRE: 11/4/19

  • The U.K. is experiencing an unprecedented amount of voting volatility, with nearly half of voters changing parties in the 2010, 2015, and 2017 elections. A new study credits the volatility to “electoral shocks” like Brexit, which make it difficult to predict what’s in store as the region gears up for another general election. (Financial Times)
    • NH: On December 12, the Brits are going to the polls once again. Prime Minister Boris Johnson was finally granted his wish by the House of Commons--to take the impasse over Brexit "back to the people" and let them decide. Pollsters concede that no one really knows the outcome of this election. Most of the uncertainty comes from the tectonic realignment of political parties over the last five years. Some, too, come from the multitude of smaller parties running in this election.
    • Let's deal with the realignment first. Over nearly the entire postwar period (and perhaps earlier), voter identification in the UK was pretty settled: "Labor" was the party of less-educated working classes, leaned toward socialism and protectionism, and stood for a larger welfare state. "Conservative" was the party of more-educated professionals and property owners, leaned toward capitalism and global markets, and stood for a smaller welfare state.
    • Rising populism and the bitter fight over Brexit have upset this alignment. The shift started in 2014, when UKIP (under Nigel Farage's leadership) won large out-of-nowhere victories in local elections and in the EU Parliamentary election, which ultimately forced Prime Minister David Cameron, in the 2015 national election, to promise to hold a referendum on leaving the EU. Cameron won the election. The referendum was held. And the surprise victory of Leave witnessed a sizeable "split" on Brexit within both major parties. The split reached crisis dimensions after PM Theresa May's disappointing performance in the 2017 national election, her subsequent failure to negotiate an acceptable Brexit deal, and--most of all--the smashing victories of the Brexit Party (favoring Brexit) and the Liberal Democrats (favoring Remain) in the 2019 EU Parliamentary election. Both of these two "minor" parties captured a larger voter share than the two major parties, Labor and Conservative.
    • A recent survey shows that vastly more UK voters now say they identify with Leave or Remain (over 40%) than with the traditional parties (less than 10%). See the first chart below. Back in the early postwar era, the share of UK voters who changed their party allegiances from one election to the next generally ran in the mid-teens. Since 2010, it has been in the low-30s to low-40s. See the second chart below. From 2015 to 2017, the Conservatives lost lots of "Remain" voters who defected to Labor and the Lib Dems; and they picked up lots of "Leave" voters who defected from Labor and UKIP. See the third chart below.
    • In demographic terms, the class-and-income advantage once held by the Tories has disappeared. In the 2017 election, class and income were pretty much equally distributed across both major parties. A recent YouGov poll finds that the educational gradient has steeply reversed: The less educated you are, the more likely you are to vote for the Tory or Brexit parties. As for age, this remains as steeply correlated with voting preference as it was in 2017: Under age 25, only one-quarter of voters intend to go with the Tory or Brexit parties; over age 60, two-thirds intend to go that way. Gender, on the other hand, seems to make little difference. See the next three charts.
    • So, who's going to win next month? I think BoJo has a really good shot. Most importantly, he's doing well in the polls. At 37% according to the FT poll of polls, the Conservatives are 12 percentage points ahead of Labor--the second-most popular party. Rather than fighting the new Brexit populism as May did, Johnson is running with it. As a result, he is retrieving a lot of the voters who left for the Brexit Party and he is spotlighting the deep ambivalence in the Labor leadership (starting with Jeremy Corbyn) over their position on EU membership. As a result, voter support for Labor has flatlined over the past few months.
    • Johnson's odds are further helped by UK's first-past-the-post voting system. To win a seat, you don't have to win a majority in that locality. You just have to win more than any other party candidate. So the more voters split their votes among parties other than Conservative or Labor--that share of voters is now 39%--the easier it is for Johnson to pick up seats with well under half the vote. Historically, the median seat is won by 53% of the vote and very few seats are won with less than 40%. But in 2019, according to one think tank, the median seat may be won by 39% of the vote and as many as 15 seats could be won by only 30%. That, of course, would be a glorious outcome for the Conservatives. It would enable them to win over a large number of Labor seats in the Midlands--which would more than make up for any losses in Scotland and around London. 
    • There remain three big open questions.
    • First, could the Brexit Party hurt the Conservatives by running its own candidates? This weekend, Brexit leader Nigel Farage--who has accusing Johnson of "betraying" Brexit with the withdrawal agreement plan he just negotiated with Brussels--threatened to do exactly this. Brexit candidates could eliminate the Conservatives' margin of victory in many constituencies. But many suspect that Farage is using this threat to bargain for a favorable alliance agreement with the Tories. Johnson doesn't want to be seen as caving to Farage. But if some sort of agreement is reached, that would surely help him.
    • Second, will the Remain side make their own agreements to minimize vote-splitting?. The Lib Dems, the Greens, and Plaid Cymru (a Welsh independence party) are actively negotiating an agreement that would allow all three to run only one candidate per district. That would help the Remainers. Unfortunately, what the Remainers really need is an alliance between Labor and the Lib Dems, which threaten to split the pro-Remain vote in half. And that seems unlikely. The social and ideological divide between the Lib Dems and Labor is larger than the divide between the Conservatives and Brexit. After all, the Lib Dems can hope someday to replace Labor as the dominant "progressive" party. The Brexit Party has no realistic aspirations of replacing the Conservatives.
    • Finally, will Labor and the Lib Dems succeed in reframing Johnson's plan to quit the EU as a plan to join the United States? Such questions are already being raised. Will the UK become a vassal of America? Is BoJo becoming Donald Trump's poodle? There may be a clever way for the Remainers to turn around Johnson's people-versus-Parliament argument. After a US-UK trade deal, frets on artist quoted in the FT, "We’ll be at the mercy of bleached food and synthetic strawberries." Oh my, those Yanks!
    • Stay tuned. In just five weeks, we'll know what happens.

How Brexit Has Blown Up UK Party Loyalties. NewsWire - Nov 3 chart2

How Brexit Has Blown Up UK Party Loyalties. NewsWire - Nov 3 chart3

How Brexit Has Blown Up UK Party Loyalties. NewsWire - Nov 3 chart4

How Brexit Has Blown Up UK Party Loyalties. NewsWire - Nov 3 chart5

How Brexit Has Blown Up UK Party Loyalties. NewsWire - Nov 3 chart6

How Brexit Has Blown Up UK Party Loyalties. NewsWire - Nov 3 chart7

How Brexit Has Blown Up UK Party Loyalties. NewsWire - Nov 3 chart8

How Brexit Has Blown Up UK Party Loyalties. NewsWire - Nov 3 chart9

  • Between 2011 and 2017, the death rate from heart failure among U.S. adults surged 20.7% and is expected to keep rising. A new study reports that the aging population, along with high rates of obesity and diabetes among adults of all ages, has substantially slowed decades of progress reducing deaths from heart disease. (JAMA Cardiology)
    • NH: Over the last several decades, falling mortality from all forms of heart disease (HD) has been one of the big success stories of changing lifestyles and improving medical care--not just in the United States but throughout the high-income world. Unlike death rates from major forms of cancer, which have stubbornly resisted improvement, the age-adjusted death rate from HD has dropped dramatically. (See "Leading Cause of Death in High-Income Countries: Cancer, Not Heart Disease.")
    • Starting around 15 years ago, however, the U.S. HD mortality decline began to decelerate. This bad news was not due to anything wrong happening among the elderly (their HD death rate has continued to fall), but rather among the nonelderly. The HD death rate for midlife adults age 45 to 64 has actually been rising since 2005. (See "Death Becomes Us... Mortality Increases.")
    • What's happening? Apparently, the positive effects of less smoking and better medical treatment (statins and anti-hypertension drugs) are now fully reflected in lower death rates, especially among the elderly. On the other hand, the negative effects of higher rates of obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, and physical inactivity are beginning to age in with later-born cohorts. The rising midlife death rate coincides with late-wave Boomers and early-wave Xers hitting their late-50s and early-60s. This alarming rise in cardiovascular mortality among the nonelderly, brought to widespread public attention by the recent deaths of actor Luke Perry (at age 52) and film director John Singleton (at age 51), has attracted ample media coverage.
    • What's new in the JAMA Cardiology article is the finding that the rise in the age-adjusted HD death rate is being driven by heart failure rather than by coronary heart disease (which often manifests itself in sudden "heart attack" deaths). Heart failure is a chronic condition that develops slowly, is highly correlated with obesity and diabetes, and sometimes afflicts those who have survived heart attacks due to such interventions as heart bypass surgery. See charts below on age-adjusted death rates by HD type.

How Brexit Has Blown Up UK Party Loyalties. NewsWire - Nov 3 chart10

  • In recent months, the phrase “Ok boomer” has taken off among Homelanders and late-wave Millennials as a way to brush off criticism from older generations. It isn’t meant to describe age, but an attitude: condescension from those who complain about young people and dismiss the issues they care about. (NBC News)
    • NH: All their lives, Boomers have been the generational aggressor. When Boomers were young, they raged against their parents' authoritarian "mindset," their mindless "conformity," and the vacuity of their "soul crushing" civic accomplishments. Having dispensed with the G.I. and Silent Generations, Boomers later on began to turn their sites on younger generations. In the 1980s and 1990s, they sometimes made Gen X their target--telling them, no, they really weren't "worthy." But Gen Xers took care to stay off anyone's radar screen, and when attacked, replied so viciously ("Die, yuppie scum!") that most Boomers kept their distance.
    • More recently, Boomers have started to lay into Millennials--ridiculing these coddled and precious "snowflakes" for everything from participation trophies and adulting classes to safe spaces and avocado toast. For the most part, the Millennial response is to stay polite and change the subject. Any direct rebuttal seems futile since Millennials have learned that Boomers simply never tire of arguing. Sure, some Millennials do get nasty. But most figure that so many Xers (and even Boomers themselves) have started to blast away at Boomers that following suit themselves would just be piling on.
    • So instead of direct and passionate rebuttal (that's just so Boomer!), what Millennials have perfected is the art of parody, satire, and classy off-beat humor. Think of the "Old Economy Steve" meme that circulated back at the depths of the Great Recession, making fun of Boomers for how few economic obstacles they have faced in their lives. Or all the Millennials who delight in mimicking opinionated Boomers on Facebook. (See "Millennials Parodying Boomers Online.") And now here comes a new meme emerging on TikTok--"ok, boomer"--as if to say (with an eye roll), have it your way. You win the argument. You always win the argument.
    • In its own commentary on the new trendlet, the NYT opines that "‘OK Boomer’ Marks the End of Friendly Generational Relations." But I think this misses the point. Millennials have learned to deflect and defuse Boomer aggression without becoming unfriendly. (Homelanders may become even better at this than Millennials.) And that's something that Boomers themselves were incapable of doing when they were kids.
  • Economist Charles Blahous recently released an extensive rebuttal of Elizabeth Warren’s plan to reform Social Security. Warren wants to increase benefits across the board, but Blahous argues that the reasoning behind her case is fundamentally flawed. (Manhattan Institute for Policy Research)
    • NH: There are at least two big things to admire about Elizabeth Warren. She isn't afraid to propose aggressive national solutions to America's most dysfunctional and wasteful institutions--healthcare and education, for example. And she isn't afraid to lay out specific blueprints for how she would go about fixing them. Until recently, Warren was heavily criticized for not being more specific about how she would raise money for her Medicare-for-All plan. She addressed this deficiency last week with (yes) one more detailed plan.
    • On the other hand, Warren can be faulted for laying out costly new solutions without offering any accounting of how the marginal cost justifies the marginal benefit. (What exactly is the payoff on her $3 trillion-over-a-decade climate change plan?) She also tends to clutter her plans with arbitrary prohibitions and diktats. Her climate plan would ban nuclear and fracking. So how is that going to end coal mining sooner? Her education plan would ban for-private charter schools, regardless of their efficacy. Huh?
    • Sometimes, Warren lays out aggressive plans that suffer heavily from both flaws. Take her proposal to "reform" Social Security by raising benefits and taxes. In this measured but blistering critique, pension expert (and former public trustee of Social Security) Chuck Blahous takes her plan to pieces.
    • Ostensibly, Warren is reforming Social Security because its benefit level is so low that it is impoverishing retirees. But Blahous points out that Warren misinterprets Social Security's benefit level: It is not 41% of pre-retirement pay (an often-quoted number), but rather 55% for an average-earning worker and 70% for a low-earning worker. (70%, it turns out, is the level that Warren deems would be fair!) Seniors have the lowest poverty rate and the highest household net worth of any age bracket. How exactly are we defining fair, anyway?
    • Warren claims that "Congress hasn't increased Social Security benefits in 50 years." This of course is ludicrous: Under current law, annual initial benefit hikes and COLA adjustments are automatic. She would juice up the annual COLA with a new and faster-rising CPI (called the "CPI-E") which most economists believe overstates inflation. She also hands out a freebie to retired government workers by repealing the Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP) and the Government Pension Offset (GPO), which prevents them from double-dipping by getting full Social Security benefits after paying into the system for only a few years.
    • Warren even suggests that her reforms make Social Security generationally more equitable. Really? By handing out bigger across-the-board benefits to Boomer and Silent retirees while requiring today's employers and Millennial workers to pay more? By pushing investment-oriented outlays out of the federal budget? And for spending more instead on a retirement system that crowds out personal savings? All on behalf of a pay-as-you-go public system that adds nothing to national saving?
    • As always, Blahous is worth the read.
  • Fully 38% of Americans consider politics a source of stress, blaming it for lost sleep, depression, and other physical and mental problems. Mental health professionals say that politics-related stress has worsened considerably since the 2016 election—most strongly among those with personal concerns, such as people who fear deportation. (The Wall Street Journal)
    • NH: According to an online survey published in PLOS, 18% of Americans say they have lost sleep because of politics. Some 20% say political differences have damaged a lasting friendship. And 27% say politics has led them to hate some people. By most estimates, the emotional toll of political polarization has been rising over time. OkCupid says that e-daters are starting to prioritize politics over sex--and increasingly rule out dating anyone with opposing political views.
    • Pew Research, which presents a broader data set in a recent report, comes to a similar conclusion: Personal political partisanship has risen sharply since the spring of 2016, when (I suppose) it was already pretty high. A growing share of both Republicans and Democrats give a "cold" emotional rating to the other side. By overwhelming majorities, both sides say that partisan divisions are becoming stronger. They are more inclined to say that the other side has "few" or "almost no" good ideas. They also agree that the two sides "cannot agree on basic facts," much less on policy recommendations.
    • As we might expect, the feelings of partisanship are strongest among Boomers--and weakest among Millennials and late-wave Xers. What's more interesting is that, among the least educated, GOP partisans are more likely to demonize the other side than are Democratic partisans. But among the most educated, the reverse is true: The Democratic partisans are more rabidly "partisan" than the Republicans. 
    • When Pew expands its focus to include the feelings of independent voters, it finds that most independents "lean" to one party or the other. And these leaners, while less positive than party members about the party they lean toward, are just about as cold as party members toward the other side. Independents, in sum, don't really improve the picture much.
    • It is often said that Internet "echo chambers" reinforce growing partisanship by restricting people's access only to the views they agree with. Listening more to the other side, therefore, might bring us together. That view may be simplistic. In a recent experiment, when partisans were required to view a steady stream of social media from the other side, the opposite happened: They became more, not less, partisan. (Other researchers suggest, on the other hand, that personal interaction with people on the other side may be more beneficial.)
    • Oh, and one more finding of the Pew study: Half of partisans on both sides are "very worried"--and another third are "somewhat worried"--about what the growth of partisanship means for America's future. So here's one thing that both sides can agree on.

How Brexit Has Blown Up UK Party Loyalties. NewsWire - Nov 3 chart11

How Brexit Has Blown Up UK Party Loyalties. NewsWire - Nov 3 chart12

How Brexit Has Blown Up UK Party Loyalties. NewsWire - Nov 3 chart13 

  • Co-living complexes are popping up all over Los Angeles, thanks to residents who say the community feel is just as attractive as the prices. The hostel-like atmosphere of communal housing options like PodShare and Eddy is drawing scads of young adults who’d rather not be alone. (Los Angeles Times)
    • NH: Once again, in big coastal cities with sky-high rentals, Millennials are finding new ways to trade privacy and space for a lower price. Several years ago, starting in Seattle, we saw the rise of micro-apartments (see "Micro-apartments are a Macro Hit"). Then we saw the spread of cargo container parks in Oakland and New York ("Tiny Homes Up for Sale on Amazon"). More recently, we saw the re-invention of "rooming" and "boarding" houses in Atlanta--marking a comeback for yet another crowded living arrangement that had been mostly zoned out of existence in the early postwar era. And now, we see "podshares" in Los Angeles. These are beautiful three-bedroom apartments in LA renting for just under $1,000 a month per person. But there's a twist: Each single-sex room houses four to six persons, each sleeping in a pod the size of a bathtub.
    • For Millennials, price isn't the only driver. Believe it or not, many of the interviewed young adults prefer the tight sense of community.
  • American Dream—the most expensive U.S. mall ever built, complete with a theme park, indoor ski hill, and 40 water slides—is now open in New Jersey. It’s the first mall to devote more space to entertainment than shopping, a formula that developers hope can breathe new life into the industry. (The Wall Street Journal)
    • NH: We started writing about the collapse of the U.S. shopping mall back in the depths of the Great Recession. (See "Is the U.S. Shopping Mall Fated for Extinction?") And we've been writing about hopeful plans for a mall revival ever since. (See "Say Hello to 'Smart Malls'"; "Mall Landlords Double Down on Renovations"; "Could Teens Save the U.S. Shopping Mall?")
    • I do agree that there is limited room for upscale investment and expansion in the upper-A tier malls (those with the highest $/sq foot). And much of this could involve "experiential" fare--like high-end restaurants, night clubs, gyms, health spas, and boutiques with in-person digital or concierge assistance. Sure, maybe a mini-golf course and rock climbing wall make sense. Incorporating apartments into or next to the mall (as in now happening in Tysons Corner, Virginia) could also complement the mix.
    • But a massive destination theme park? Something that pretends to compete with Disney? I just don't get it. What does Six Flags have in common with Gucci and Cartier? Successful theme parks require expertise in family entertainment branding and marketing, crowd management, and on-site family engagement--skills not possessed by many mall managers. The owners plan to bring in rich people from the Hamptons in two chartered Rolls Royces and a helicopter pad. Really?
    • I'd hate to be holding the debt on this hybrid idea. It just doesn't work for me.
  • The tracking apps parents once used to watch their kids are now following them to college. Users of Life360, a popular tracking app, report mixed experiences: Many young adults say they don’t mind being tracked for safety purposes, but this scenario can easily go awry in the hands of controlling parents. (The Washington Post)
    • NH: God help us. As we have written (see "The Rise of 'Total Tech'" and "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism"), it makes little sense for Americans to worry about China's Social Credit System when they are voluntarily implementing "360 surveillance" in their own country. Leading the way, some colleges are beginning to introduce facial recognition technology.
    • Generationally, this trend makes perfect sense and I have been monitoring it for years. Today's midlife Gen-X parents, who themselves grew up as neglected throwaway kids, are hovering over their "attachment children" with a vigilance that could win awards from the East German Stasi. Sure, Gen Xers talk a good game about how they want their kids to grow up with "grit" and "resilience." But in the end, most Xers recall just how painful it was to acquire those qualities--and end up opting for control. Easy prediction: This trend will reach its maximum as Homelanders age into their 20s.
    • Meanwhile, just to keep us from going overboard, I heartily recommend that every Xer parent read Free-Range Kids: How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children by Lenore Skenazy.

        DID YOU KNOW?

        Shackled by Student Debt. In Q2 2019, the amount of student debt held by Americans reached an eye-popping $1.6 trillion—more than twice the total a decade earlier. And according to a new survey from Morning Consult, borrowers aren’t just delaying life milestones as a result. They’re also putting off activities that could hurt their ability to remain healthy. When researchers asked adults with and without student debt if they’ve delayed major life decisions due to their finances, the largest spread was over owning a home. Fully 50% of those with student debt have put off homeownership, compared to 34% of all adults who say the same. Borrowers are also more likely (by, in all cases, a margin of at least 10 percentage points) to have avoided having children, quitting their jobs, starting a business, and seeking medical and dental care. While student debt is an issue typically associated with Millennials, large debt loads weigh heavily on Gen Xers and Boomers as well.