How Europe became wealthy

Joel Mokyr, a professor of economics and history, tries to answer the question of why, starting around 1500 CE, “In a time of great powers and empires, just one region of the world experienced extraordinary economic growth”. He looks at various factors that might have contributed and points to two major features. One is that the area we now call Europe was fragmented into many different political entities that competed with each other.
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The other swing voters

The public radio program On The Media had an excellent interview with Ibram X. Kendi about how the media is obsessively focusing on the wrong swing voters, and because of that error, party establishment Democrats are trying to persuade people who are unlikely to switch back to them, at the cost of ignoring those voters who previously voted Democratic but either did not vote in 2016 or voted third party. He says that these latter voters are far more persuadable to vote Democrat this time and should be the primary focus of the campaigns.
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Bye, bye, Chris Matthews

The veteran TV personality on MSNBC has announced his retirement from his show Hardball effective immediately. I for one am not sorry to see him go, because in addition to his highly problematic treatment of women and his virulent antipathy towards progressive ideas in general and Bernie Sanders in particular, he was a terrible interviewer, constantly interrupting his guests and not letting them finish their thoughts. This last behavior seemed to happen more frequently when his interview subjects were women or people with ideas he disagreed with.

The veteran MSNBC host Chris Matthews announced his immediate retirement from Hardball, citing his inappropriate comments about women and a conversation with network executives.

“The younger generation” is “improving the workplace” with “better standards than we grew up with, fairer standards,” Matthews said.

Matthews said “compliments on a woman’s appearance” that some men, himself included, once “incorrectly thought were OK, were never OK.”

I hope other TV personalities take note. The times, they are a changing.

Bernie Sanders and black voters

The South Carolina primary results in which Joe Biden won easily with 48% of the vote, with Bernie Sanders trailing far behind with just 20%, was a boost to those in the political and media establishment who have been in a panic over Sanders’ earlier successes. The establishment especially took heart from the fact that black voters, a major constituency of the Democratic party, overwhelmingly supported Biden over Sanders by a margin of 61% to 17%. The only group that Sanders won was black voters under 30. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, James Carville, and Terry McAuliffe gloated over this result, arguing that this lack of black support alone should doom the Sanders candidacy. But does it?
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And then there were four: Amy Klobuchar drops out

The South Carolina primary seems to be having a major impact on the Democratic presidential race. Amy Klobuchar, the senator from Minnesota, has announced that she is leaving the race, joining Pete Buttigieg and Tom Steyer. She has endorsed Joe Biden.

I had thought she would stay in at least until tomorrow because her home state of Minnesota votes on Super Tuesday and she had been endorsed by a major newspaper there and she could go out having at least one victory to her name. But maybe her internal polling had shown that she would lose badly an so she decided to leave now so that she can continue to argue that she is a proven winner in her state.

This leaves just Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, and Michael Bloomberg still in it.

This pruning of the field will undoubtedly please the political and media establishment who seem to think that many candidates were splitting the anti-Sanders vote and that the supporters of the people who have dropped out will flock to Biden or Bloomberg and one of them will become their sole standard bearer and beat Sanders.

Where this leaves Warren is not clear.

What is also not clear is what this means for early voting practices. Those who had already voted for the three candidates who dropped out may be regretting their decision to do so.

Was Jeffrey Epstein working for the FBI?

Jeffrey Epstein, who died in prison while awaiting trial for pedophilia, had earlier received an extraordinarily lenient plea deal for charges related to sex with minors, with one of the federal prosecutors who negotiated that deal, U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta, ending up as a cabinet member for Donald Trump. Questions had been raised as to why Epstein off so easily and most answers were that he had used his money to buy favors from influential people.
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Bye, bye Pete

Pete Buttigieg has announced that he is dropping out of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, joining Tom Steyer who dropped out yesterday.

Pete Buttigieg has ended his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. Two campaign sources confirmed the news to the Guardian and said the former candidate was on his way back to South Bend, his home town in Indiana, where he would speak later on Sunday night.
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John Oliver on Medicare For All

He does an excellent job of explaining what it is and addresses the three main criticisms that opponents make against it: that it will cost too much, that it will increase wait times, and that it will eliminate choice. He also makes the important point that that while Bernie Sanders calls it Medicare For All, his proposal is actually much better than Medicare now, covering eyeglasses and dental needs and not requiring any premiums.

This is something that everyone should see so that they can better argue against those who criticize the proposal or pretend, like Pete Buttigieg, who claim that they have a better one, whose faults Oliver points out.

Medicare For All is generally popular

Despite Bernie Sanders coming a distant second to Joe Biden in South Carolina, his signature proposal of Medicare For All did well there, winning majority support, making it four in a row. Why it did not translate into votes for him in that state is unclear since Sanders’s landslide win in Nevada was boosted by the popularity of Medicare For All. It will be interesting to see what role it plays in the Super Tuesday contests.

In Nevada, as in both Iowa and New Hampshire, about 6 out every 10 voters in both entrance and exit polls said they supported eliminating private insurance and creating a single-payer system like the one Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren both support. Among Nevadans who supported a single-payer plan, according to entrance polls from Edison Research, 49% said they were backing Sanders — more than three times that of any other candidate. Even as the leaders of the powerful Culinary Union, the state’s largest, opted to publicly oppose Sanders’ Medicare for All plan without endorsing another candidate, he won 34% of caucus-goers from union households, and crushed other candidates among culinary workers specifically.

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