Driverless Cars This Fall: Regulations and Questions

Another three months has gone by in this almost $1 trillion area of investment and future promise.  What has happened on the government and commentary side?

On September 19^th, the U.S. Department of Transportation released its first set of what could be called guidelines on semiautonomous and fully self-driving vehicles.  In an apparent attempt to guide the technology’s progress without putting up roadblocks, this federal agency named 15 points just short of formal laws.  Per Cecilia Kang in The New York Times the next day, they were sharing data on accidents with regulators, defining privacy expectations for drivers, manufacturers getting safety algorithms validated by others, hacking prevention, effective capability to move control back and forth from systems to drivers, ensuring damage to cars from accidents would be no worse than to today’s ordinary meatmobiles, operation education, a technological-improvement certification requirement, preventing dangerously damaged driverless cars from operating before repairs, ability to follow local traffic laws but being able to violate them in order to prevent a crash, attention to the ethical issues of vehicles protecting their occupants or others first, proof of operational testing and validation, ability to respond to normal and abnormal driving situations, assessing the driver’s fitness to take control, and adequate technology validation including simulations, test-track and road testing.  These make up a comprehensive set of areas to be addressed, and, especially when framed as strong suggestions rather than laws, seem truly positive to me, with one exception.  The idea that, as Kang put it, “any software updates or new driverless features must be submitted to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration,” could be a recipe for bureaucratic backlogs, and, with the developers of these vehicles knowing far more than federal regulators, would be better replaced with something more cooperative, along the lines of corporate technologists making cases to their managements for upgrades or implementations with quick, perhaps emailed, approvals or requests for more information.  Otherwise, government’s attitude toward self-driving capability seems excellent, with President Barack Obama saying, in a Pittsburgh newspaper editorial also that Monday, that such vehicles could save tens of thousands of lives a year, and that the guidelines above were “flexible and designed to evolve with new advances.”  In all, Washington, in contrast with its response to many other things, hit the right notes here.

Two weeks later, the Times editorial staff, in “Ushering in a Safe, Driverless Future,” took a more regulatory and less positive view, saying that self-driving cars would scare people, with “those fears… made all the more real by a fatal crash involving a Tesla Model S that was traveling on autopilot in May.”  Although the piece tipped its hat to the 35,000 auto accident fatalities last year, at which rate there have been over 20,000 since this last driverless one, it said that “automakers and technology companies might resist mandatory rules, but they shouldn’t,” as that would reassure all that “companies are not using them as crash test dummies.”  I was disappointed to see advocacy of stricter standards than what the Department of Transportation seems to intend, and think that the potential for slow regulatory approval could cost many more lives than one in seven months. 

Eleven weeks after the announcement above, Bill McGee’s “Driverless cars for travelers:  More questions than answers” appeared in USA Today.  The December 7^th piece presented many queries, mostly answered already as above by the Department of Transportation, but with more emphasis on driver training and how to avoid excessive distraction.  It also brought up enough follow-on issues for an entire speculative book, such as the effect on auto insurance, determination of who or what is responsible for mishaps, taxation impacts, and even what might happen to the travel industry. 

The most negative response I saw, though, was from Jamie Lincoln Kitman, again on the New York Times op-ed page.  December 19^th’s “Google Wants Driverless Cars, but Do We?” was a compendium of the worst anyone could say about self-driving technology, ranging from its most doubtful, extreme, and uncommonly touted advantages (lower harmful emissions?  no airbags?), to allegedly required enormous infrastructure improvements, job losses by “millions of truck and taxi drivers,” the idea that it will cause mass transit to go away, and even questioning federal accident statistics.  Some of his concerns have validity, but the piece was strangely one-sided.  It was especially odd to see someone connected with the driving-related press, in this case “the New York bureau chief for Automobile Magazine,” with this attitude.  There is a story behind this article, but unfortunately I don’t know what it is.

Many technical and organizational things have also happened in the past three months – they will be the subject of next week’s post.  In the meantime, you and your family have a great Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or whatever your brand may be! 

The Backlash on Globalization: It’s Real, But What Will Be Put into Law?

It never was one world, and it may be splitting up even more.

The perception that the world might be getting less flat hit the press well before Donald Trump’s unexpected presidential election victory.  On September 6^th, Martin Wolf’s Financial Times column “The tide of globalisation is turning” went back to 2008, citing a study showing that “the ratios of world trade to output” had been much the same since that year, with “cross-border financial assets” and direct foreign investment not only leveling off but peaking around then.  He showed in a chart that trade between countries, as a percentage of gross domestic product, went up irregularly but clearly from about 24% in the early 1960s to 59% in the late 2000s, where, after a 2008 to 2010 dip and recovery, it was through at least 2013.

That same day, Robert Reich’s “The reality of free trade deals – they don’t benefit all” appeared in Salon.  Reich pointed out that only 35% thought free trade benefited most Americans, and, although he is an economist, blamed increasing income inequality along with “unraveling” safety nets.

On the Sunday after the election, The New York Times published author and Morgan Stanley global strategist Ruchir Sharma’s “When Borders Close” comparing 2016 to 1914, when the forces underlying the outbreak of World War I “ended an extraordinary four-decade period of rising migration and trade.”  Movement of goods between countries was to fall from 30 percent of world GDP that year to 10% in 1933, three years after the American Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act caused what Sharma described as “a global trade war.”  Per his article and Wolf’s chart, it would be 60 years before intercountry trade matched that 30%.  He also mentioned a rise in protectionist legislation since 2008, and, along with Wolf, named that year as globalization’s high-water mark, and, in step with Reich’s conclusions, noted the increase in income inequality, specifically the share going to the top 1%, as greatly widening during the time of freest trade.  He finished by saying that “deglobalization” has proved itself to be as natural, and as long-lasting, as its opposite.

Adrian Wooldridge, in The Economist’s late-November “Bolshiness is back,” reached similar conclusions, saying that “this golden age is coming to an end” with “the first shots” coming from the political right, those backing Brexit in Great Britain and Trump in the United States.  He implied that we might also have equivalents of Hitler and Mussolini, and also cited higher top-end income concentration.

All of this may well be happening – if the next administration makes it reality.  As credited to Reagan-era journalist Helen Thomas, war makes strange bedfellows, and we have that now.  Concern about income inequality, jobs moving to other countries, accumulation of corporate money overseas, and wishes for trade restrictions, all historically liberal viewpoints, are now being addressed by Republicans.  Yet that could be more of a party shift than an ideological one, when, arguably, the Democrats as represented by Hillary Clinton are now pro-establishment and therefore conservative, and the Republicans at least purport to support common people as Democrats did for so many decades.  That means it should have been no surprise to see Salon, usually well to the left of even the major eastern newspapers, publishing, four days ago, Les Leopold’s “This is how you stop jobs from leaving American soil:  A game plan to fight outsourcing,” containing eight suggestions, ranging from a good use for unions (making lists of companies planning to move jobs out of the US), one bad idea (passing laws to stop outsourcing; the way to do that is through tax penalties), and on to pressuring Trump to take action, protesting, lobbying, and finding ways to “encourage allies to join the fray.”  If they can succeed and our president-elect turns this piece of his campaign rhetoric into reality, we can say that this is how the country is changing.  If not, we may be looking at 1930s Germany, in which Hitler went from speaking strongly and respectfully of workers to instituting the permanent-record Work Book, to make employers “once again the master of the house.”  That would be even worse than protectionism, which benefits the few at the expense of the many.  But I don’t know which it will be, and you don’t either.   

A Six-Month Miscellaneous Jobs Round-Up

Many articles pertinent to American employment reach my desk, and not all of them are on subtopics, such as self-driving cars, Uber-Lyft-Airbnb, robots, or the minimum wage, which can support an entire post.  Still, they are important, and any of their subjects could, as the driverless vehicles did last year, grow into a booming and attention-getting area.

The first, from June 23, is on a subject on which I have written several times, that of a guaranteed citizen’s stipend.  In “Basic Income Revisited” (Project Syndicate, June 23), Robert Skidelsky, a British emeritus political economy professor, doesn’t revisit as much as introduce it, naming ever-increasing inequality from automation as a possible future cause, saying that “unless we change our system of income generation, there will be no way to check the concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich and exceptionally entrepreneurial.”  As we will see, he’s hardly the only observer seeing that.  I maintain that the perceived problem with inequality, which indeed will not go away by normal means, is actually one of insufficient resources for ordinary people, which can be resolved in a variety of ways, including guaranteed income.

In Forbes, George Anders, a grade-school friend of mine many decades ago who, like me, loved chemistry but ended up in business instead, wrote July 26^th’s “Is Tech Killing U.S. Jobs?  The Actual Data Is Surprising.”  He correctly pointed out that relatively few people even now are employed in information technology, but that many more have jobs connected with business-related services much less used a couple of decades ago, such as surveys, planning events, and graphic design.  He acknowledged that computers had ended many positions, such as executive secretaries (down from 1,130,000 to 666,000 from 2010 to 2015), and yet that, Expedia and the like notwithstanding, there were still 67,000 American travel agents.  His points seem to be that jobs come and go in unexpected places, and that the effect on information systems on employment has been neither great nor horrendous but somewhere in the middle.  I think the time we spent together poring over 1966 baseball cards helped him learn how to understand numbers, as it did for me, and it shows here.

In a counterpoint to last year’s press on the intensity of their jobs, we found out from the late Scott Eric Kaufman in Salon on August 29^th, in “Amazon to test full-time, full-salaried 30-hour work week” that the online retailing behemoth will try something I’ve recommended for years.  Although that company’s management’s intentions may be good, I see no chance that their managers will truly end up working that little.  The trap they are falling into is similar to that of eliminating performance reviews, which does not end employee assessment and selection for promotions but merely pushes it underground.  As they are knowledgeable enough to be aware of that, I can’t take their effort seriously.

A new set of temporary employees, “Migrant Workers in Recreational Vehicles,” made the pages of The New York Times on October 21.  Author Christopher Farrell described “modern-day nomads” who move around the country, working seasonal opportunities.  They may take difficult physical jobs, such as bringing in agricultural harvests, but are hardly poor, with many old enough to get pension, retirement account, and Social Security income as well.  There are now millions of over-50 Americans with similar work and life characteristics, who in decades past would have been either fully retired or still in their earlier careers, forming a growing set of gig workers providing another way for companies to fill jobs without expensive full-time employees.  That is only one more effect of the permanent jobs crisis.      

In Harvard Business Review on the same date, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox asked “What Happens When Careers Last 20 Years Longer?”  The article didn’t match the title, a good thing since while lives are getting longer careers are not, and addressed how companies might deal with those in different stages of life, from emerging adults not ready for permanent full-time work to the mushrooming count of those over 60 starting businesses.  She made a good common-sense point rebutting those avoiding nepotism, that “it may prove a lot easier to manage dual career couples which they both work for you.”  When I was at AT&T two decades ago, 13% of company employees were married to another one, and that did, indeed, help them continue professionally and stay together personally.

Should we be optimistic or pessimistic about technology and innovation?  The Economist’s October 22^nd Schumpeter column, “Techno wars,” surveys both sides and how they both get confused about productivity as opposed to jobs, progress as opposed to lifestyle improvement, and cash income as opposed to unquantified free resources unavailable scant years before.  These are all different things, and this page-long piece could be expanded to a book in which the author would keep them straight. 

Two November 27^th articles, “Q&A:  Political economist Eberstadt on men without jobs” in Fox Business and “Jobless by choice – or pain?” from Robert J. Samuelson in The Washington Post, addressed the issue of fewer men in the workforce, which I documented in Work’s New Age almost five years ago.  Nicholas Eberstadt additionally told us that over three times as many men aged 25 to 54 are “neither working nor looking for work” for every one officially unemployed, and that the United States has “had by far the worst drop in male workforce participation.”  Samuelson also seemed to be just discovering things he could have read in my 2012 book, such as “the work ethic is such a central part of the American character that it’s hard to imagine it fading” and that those out of the workforce “spend about eight hours a day… watching TV, playing video games or just hanging out.”  Though he added the depressing news that “nearly half of male dropouts report taking pain pills every day,” he, and Eberstadt, are behind the curve.

“A Dilemma for Humanity:  Stark Inequality or Total War.”  What a title!  It’s from The New York Times on December 6^th, on a piece in which Eduardo Porter interviewed history professor Walter Scheidel, whose January book, The Great Leveler, will argue that only something as extreme as “all-out thermonuclear war” can stop our increasing inequality.  That echoed my second-to-last Work’s New Age paragraph, in which I warned that “if we maintain the idea that any decent person has the opportunity to work” we would choose between various disastrous consequences, including “vast numbers of our countrymen without hope, health, or possessions.”  I disagree with the implication here that equality should be our goal, and don’t understand why guaranteed income, to name just one possible comprehensive solution, would not be effective.  Maybe that will be in Scheidel’s book.

Two more pertinent articles came out only Wednesday, but both can be addressed quickly.  Dylan Love’s NBC News “Is Universal Basic Income the Answer to an Automated Future?” is a short overview of that idea, punctuated by recent automation-related news.  Samuelson’s Washington Post “What’s really to blame for the productivity slowdown” starts with “our thinking about productivity is cockeyed,” which it is, if we refuse to realize that so many of our new positions are in areas such as restaurants, retail, and home health care where employers don’t get even $25 per hour value from their workers. 

I’ll end on a more forward-going note by mentioning “Luxembourg boldly goes into asteroid mining” (Financial Times, May 5^th).  There is almost unimaginable mineral wealth on those things between Mars and Jupiter, and if you see science fiction writer Larry Niven’s Future History series, you will get an idea of the prosperity, the culture, and, yes, the jobs that harvesting it could create.  Full marks to little Luxembourg with its second-in-the-world GDP per capita, which, if they get somewhere with that, will become even richer.  If they’re not big, at least they can think big – and so can we.

November: Unemployment and AJSN Both Down, Latter Showing a Shortage of 16.9 Million More Jobs

It was another good, steady, positive month on the employment front. 

The marquee number of seasonally adjusted joblessness will take the headlines this morning, and well it should, since it fell 0.3% to 4.6% to reach the lowest level since December 2006.  The unadjusted figure matched that with a drop to 4.4%.  The next best was the count of those working part-time for economic reasons, or keeping shorter-hours positions while seeking full-time ones, down 200,000 to 5.7 million.  The number of people officially unemployed for 27 weeks or longer was also off, 100,000, reaching 1.9 million.  There were 178,000 net new nonfarm jobs created, below a published estimate of 208,000 but continuing its steady trend of coming in at more than needed for incoming people.  The employment to population ratio remained at 59.7%, and the labor force participation rate worsened, down 0.1% to 62.7%.  The poorest news was in average private nonfarm hourly earnings, which, following a 13-cent gain in October, fell back 3 cents to $25.89. 

The American Job Shortage Number or AJSN, which shows in one non-seasonally-adjusted number how many more positions we could fill if getting one were quick, easy, and routine, hit another post-recession low, though its change was not as extreme as in the unemployment percentages.  That was because while the count of people officially unemployed fell almost 400,000, and those wanting work but not looking for it during the previous year was off a surprising 331,000, those improvements were offset somewhat by gains in those discouraged, people claiming no interest in a job, and the “other” category of those wishing to be employed but having a specific reason why that was not possible now.  Overall, the AJSN was off 455,000 from October, as follows:

Compared with November 2015, the AJSN is down 347,000, with demand from those counting as unemployed showing a 456,000 improvement, but with that from other statuses, particularly the number of expatriates, the Other category above, and those wanting work in general but now in school or training, working against that.  We would need to go back to 2008 to find any month at all with a lower AJSN. 

Overall, despite the small negatives and lack of truly large job creation, November gets a thumbs-up.  Our incoming presidential administration will have its hands full improving further.  I hope those responsible for understanding our need for more employment opportunities know that less than 38% of them, even after disregarding those filled by people working already, would go to those officially jobless.  Meanwhile, the turtle, once again, took a modest but unmistakable step forward.   

Two Weeks of Turmoil, And Trump Won’t Be President for Eight More

A mere fortnight since our country chose Donald Trump, and about everything’s been happening, showing that if he were a Dungeons & Dragons monster he’d have a classic “chaotic” alignment.  Here are some observations, which should be good for at least a few hours after this post comes out.

First, almost day by day Trump has been walking back his campaign blather, moving him ever closer to what might be his only solid convictions, against immigration, especially if illegal, and for protectionism.  The New York Times was actually critical of his changing his mind about things like prosecuting his unsuccessful opponent Hillary Clinton and advocating less torture in suspected terrorists’ interrogations, but we need less of this garbage, not more. 

Second, it’s become clear that the modern partisanship split is not conservative against liberal, but Democrat versus Republican.  If you’re not sure, notice how few bad things conservative politicians and commentators say about him, even when he advocates ideas to the left of the Democratic platform.  That will cause problems if Trump becomes more worthy of impeachment than Bill Clinton was for lying under oath about his sexual affairs, since with both the House and Senate controlled by his party, they probably won’t.

Third, he is on track, if that expression has any meaning when talking about him, to do some good things.  We can certainly use what his strategist Steve Bannon called a “trillion-dollar infrastructure plan,” if, counter to what Times columnist Paul Krugman claimed in his recent “Build He Won’t,” it will materialize.  Arranging for large companies’ money supplies to be held here instead of overseas would be positive, as would tax-code changes favoring American jobs.  We can also stand to take some edge off political correctness in general.  There is more, but I’m too cautious about him overall to sing his praises, since, after all, Adolf Hitler built hospitals.

Fourth, I’m not looking forward to seeing constant criticism of everything Trump does.  Those attacking him should pick their battles, and cut back on snide comments when he only acts the same way he did during his ultimately successful campaign.  We have enough to worry about with our constitutional rights, his finger on the button, and his capability for other extreme destruction to fuss about what he said about a Broadway musical.  Even if the BBC, which asserted this morning that his early-morning tweets represent “the real Trump,” is correct, that’s not how his presidency will be measured.

Fifth, protectionism, now fashionable for little reason beyond faulty evaluation of solutions for the permanent jobs crisis, will prove objectively destructive.  Vastly more Americans are helped by lower-priced foreign products than could ever get jobs making them here, and the amounts of money involved are also enormously greater.  If such nutty ideas as 45% tariffs for Chinese and Mexican products came to pass, we would have a recession or worse along with the slashed prosperity, which would more than offset any employment improvement. 

Sixth, with that said Trump will come under pressure, to the extent that his own party is willing to apply it, to create jobs.  That could take any number of good forms, and we have plenty of reason to be hopeful, even if we’re short of sufficient justification.

Seventh, we will probably see the left-leaning major media, headed by the Times and the Washington Post, become the coordination center for anti-Trump civil disobedience.  That has already started, with articles suggesting ways of resisting and protesting.

That’s all for today.  I wish I could say more about what Trump will mean for jobs, but about him I feel like the policeman who said he didn’t believe anything he heard and only half of what he saw.  He may not even last long in the office, ending up, as columnist David Brooks predicted, gone within a year through impeachment or truly voluntary resignation.  In the meantime, the Chinese curse has hit all of us:  we are living in interesting times.

Pitfalls on the Way to Getting a Job – Bad Recruiters, Information Gobbling Interviewers, and Excessively Urgent Job Offers – and One Set of Countermeasures

Three articles on dangers on the way to being hired have come out.  The first was from top employment writer Liz Ryan of Forbes, this past weekend.  Titled “Ten Ways Lousy Recruiters Use Fear To Keep Job-Seekers In Line,” it reports on the problem of headhunters, who work in the gaps between employers and the prospective employed, acting as if they have all the power in relationships with the latter.  It outlines ways that some of these recruiters intimidate those looking to be hired, seeking “to keep candidates feeling fearful and desperate,” by insisting on collecting “personal financial information,” threatening to drop them if they don’t cooperate with unreasonable requests, telling them their credentials are commonplace and marginal, and pushing them to accept any offers immediately.  Ryan points out that top-flight candidates are rarely common, even in an employer’s market, and that even bad headhunters would not submit anyone for positions for which they were not solidly qualified. 

Second, last month and also by Ryan, addressed companies bringing in people for job interviews only to collect information that would help them solve problems.  That is a common potential concern, as answers to questions assessing applicants’ skills may reveal ways of doing things better than the organization has known previously, and is hard to completely avoid.  Yet there is a point at which such gathering becomes not only primary but even the exclusive reason for the interview.  Per Ryan, that may have been reached if “your interviewer has very detailed questions for you, and takes notes on everything you say” but will not share much about their own situation, if queries about the rest of the hiring process and the job itself elicit no substance, and if the interviewer generally seem to be more interested in the candidate’s specific methodology than in how they might fit in.  She suggested, logically enough, that someone being treated as a consultant should act like one, giving only general ideas and even offering a contract. 

Third, by J.T. O’Donnell in Inc. in March, dealt with an “ugly recruiting tactic,” also called “the exploding offer,” one which expires in 48 hours or less.  (I’m not sure that two days is an insufficient time, but requiring an answer sooner than the end of the next business day would clearly qualify.)  O’Donnell saw these short deadlines as a pure pressure tactic, indicating not only an urgent need but fear that longer amounts of time would precipitate losing the potential employee.  She advised against that device, not only since it could encourage workers to leave later, but would cause “employer shaming” on online forums.     

How can jobseekers defend themselves against measures like these?  One way, described by Ryan on October 30^th, is being willing to leave a job interview in progress.  That may seem taboo to people in a process where the other side is known to hold most or even all of the cards, but it’s not as simple as that.  Sometimes in these meetings things can happen that mean the end of any future there.  They would include a long impersonal set of interview questions followed by a refusal to talk about the job itself; a bait-and-switch replacement of the position with something less desirable; a requirement to pay for office equipment, office supplies, or the likes of background checks or drug testing; a need to sell products to friends and family members; or a need to work unpaid for a day or more as part of the hiring process.  If such information comes to light, Ryan advocated politely standing up and saying something like “it’s been wonderful to meet you, but I’m very conscious of the demands on your time and it’s clear we don’t have a good match.  I’ll get going now, and let you get on with your day.  Thanks very much for your time!”

As I have written before, the hiring process will always be an adversarial situation where each side tries to get the other to make mistakes.  New ideas there, and revived old ones, pop up all the time.  And, despite the permanent jobs crisis, a jobseeker is not, as Ryan put it, “a desperate beggar,” but has personal and professional value along with choices.  That thread runs through this entire post.  If you are looking for work, don’t let yourself be conned out of that.      

Trump’s Been Elected – Where Do We Stand Now?

This outcome, accurately described by one columnist as “cataclysmic” and accompanied by incoming Republican majorities in both the House and Senate, held me to an hour’s sleep last night.  And judging by the number of pieces published since Hillary Clinton conceded at 2:30am, I wasn’t the only one. 

Presidents usually have a remarkably small effect on people’s lives, but this one threatens to be an exception.  Thinking about that is what kept me up.  Here is what I mean.       

First, I’ll get the old expressions out of the way.  Be careful what you wish for.  Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.  In a democracy, people get the government they deserve.  All of these are trite, but are fully appropriate now.

Next, many people have explanations for what shocked offshore sports books as well as pundits and prognosticators – you or I could have quintupled money by betting on this candidate on www.sportsbook.ag as recently as yesterday morning – and I will add only one.  Ever since this actor’s escapade with a 16-year-old made his career go up, up, and away, I have invoked, and found other examples of, what I named the “Hugh Grant Rule” – any publicity is good publicity.  For at least a year and a half Trump got incredible amounts of coverage, especially about unpleasant statements he had made, and that, sadly but truthfully, helped him more than it hurt.    

So where are we now? 

We have just elected, as president and presumed nuclear and other best-in-the-world military resources decision-maker, someone who almost every commenting observer considered dispositionally unfit.  Trump managed only about a half-dozen major newspaper endorsements – fewer than Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson – nationwide, and precipitated several outlets not normally publishing them saying  he was totally inappropriate.  Thus, he is scheduled to become the least popular president with the media in any of our memories, and has at times suggested that the free press, and the First Amendment along with it, be stifled.  He has made few consistent campaign promises, which, given his enormous number of documented lies, is not so relevant, but except for his opposing immigration and free trade we have little reason to know where he stands on anything.  In a field where the most successful practitioners can hardly go to the john without working with others, he, overall, already has an air of considering himself a superior being who need not involve anyone, except various females in certain activities, with anything.  If you want more along these lines, find almost any endorsement for anyone else, including mine, which is at http://worksnewage.blogspot.com/2016/09/gary-johnson-for-president.html.  

Between Trump and the thinking that brought his victory, the American social fabric has already been badly torn.  As another columnist put it, we are putting ourselves in two separate tribes much like Muslim Sunnis and Shiites, divided on ideology.  Since his awful behavior did not stop him from winning, we need to wonder if it will become more acceptable in other circles to lie, offend, boast, retaliate in petty ways, and insult people’s sex and ethnicity.  And last night on Facebook I saw what I’m afraid is the first of many views that whites in general are responsible not only for his election but by extension for whatever damage he ends up doing.  That sort of thing is high on the list of what America does not need.

As for the next several years, since Trump is so unpredictable, we don’t know much at all about what they will be like.  We could have a recession or even a depression, whether caused by his actions or not.  The chance is certainly higher now, and in fact, as the returns came in last night and this morning, after-hours trading dropped the Dow Jones Industrial Average as much as 800 points.  As I have not thought about any presidential candidate since I followed the 1968 campaign in detail, he has a real chance of becoming a dictator.  His administration may well extinguish what is left of foreign admiration of America – I heard Rush Limbaugh yesterday claiming and expressing disappointment about our respect abroad deteriorating during Obama’s terms, but foreign reactions to Trump, with the expected exception of Russia’s, have been consistently much more negative.  I have already been insulted once by a foreigner accusing me of supporting Trump, and, with my amount of international travel, I expect more.  Further statements along the line of those he has made about other countries can only damage our ability to cooperate with them, and, ultimately, hurt or eliminate our standing as perceived leader of the free world.  And, even more tragically, his election, showing those in positions of power what can happen if uninformed and uneducated people choose presidents, could actually be the beginning of the end of the 250-year-old American experiment.  Overall, while a worst-case scenario for Hillary Clinton might have been being pushed out of office like Richard Nixon, with little permanent damage to the country, that might be one of the best for Trump.   

     

We already know that the domestic political scene has profoundly changed.  Since Trump is not a conservative, the Republican Party, which had not won a presidential election since 2004, can no longer be considered to consistently support that philosophy.  That leaves conservatives without a political party of their own, which they may remedy over the next few years. 

What can we do?  Most important is for those in his inner circle to find the courage to contain him enough to stop or forestall at least his worst destructiveness.  The rest of us need to watch for signs of totalitarianism.  The Soviet and Nazi governments did not reach their worst for years after they were installed, and ours would not either.  For that, we must know our constitution, and not only the First and Second Amendments – if you don’t have a copy, it’s at  http://www.usconstitution.net/const.pdf and prints out to only 21 pages. 

This Donald Trump presidency may not be a disaster after all.  He may precipitate enough good things, such as his briefly proposed infrastructure project, to more than offset what could, if we are lucky, add up to no more than the behavior of a jackass.  If he does not finish this term, his incoming vice president Mike Pence has proven himself to be a reasonable man who would serve with dignity.  (He is too conservative for many, but it’s almost quaint now to worry about those suddenly mild differences.)  But as it comes to dealing with totalitarian regimes, we are soft.  Except for those who served in the armed forces, were in Holocaust camps, and some others, we know about the worst governments only secondhand.  Doing so would be the greatest challenge of most of our lives.  We need to stay vigilant – much more than ourselves may depend on that.