National

Although many of us feel like we’ve discussed the recent election as much as we care to, we’re going to try to approach the election aftermath from a bit of a different perspective next week.

There has been a strong reaction from the Democrats/Liberals/Progressives (choose your preferred label) in the wake of the election, with questions such as:

• What went wrong and who’s fault was the Democrats’ loss?
• How should Democrats react to a Trump Administration with both houses of Congress controlled by Republicans?
• What adjustments to the Democrats’ efforts to appeal to voters should be undertaken (which issues to emphasize, constituencies to target, etc.)?

Here’s some food for thought:

1. Mike Wolf’s link to the “You Are Still Crying Wolf” slatestarcodex.com post.
2. An opinion piece in Friday’s New York Times entitled “The End of Identity Liberalism.” As of this writing, the piece prompted over 2460 comments. If 2400+ comments is more than your attention span will accommodate, you might want to focus on the “Readers’ Picks” (1475 comments) or “NYT Picks” (42 comments).
3. Another opinion piece from today’s New York Times, written in response to End of Identity Liberalism, entitled “Identity Politics and Its Defenders.”

If you don’t have a New York Times subscription, here are links to those articles in PDF form:
20161118-the-end-of-identity-liberalism-the-new-york-times
20161121-identity-politics-and-its-defenders-the-new-york-times

Have more related stuff? Make a comment to this post with a link to it.

Having (perhaps) whetted folks’ appetites with my quick reading of Harvard Econ professor Greg Mankiw’s “The Economy is Rigged, and Other Presidential Campaign  Myths,” we’ll turn to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (Good or Bad for the U.S.) next week.

You’re obviously free to do your own research. But here’s another piece by Mankiw on the subject:

Economists Actually Agree on This: The Wisdom of Free Trade

Think I’m only selecting one side? Here’s a bit of a rebuttal, courtesy of Google:

Greg Mankiw is Everything That’s Wrong with Economists

Who is this Greg Mankiw?

As you know, I always like to do a bit of research on my sources, and Wikipedia is a good start. As I mentioned on Monday, he’s well known for his activity on the Bush Council of Economic Advisors and his authorship of an introductory Economics textbook that is in very wide use today—so his is a very familiar name to recent college grads who’ve taken Econ.

I like to follow him mostly because he’s articulate, funny, thoughtful and accomplished. But I also admit that I tend to agree with him a lot (whether that’s because he’s convincing or because we just see the world in similar ways is a subject for future debate).

A few weeks ago, we touched on the upcoming Presidential election and our participants’ preferences for the various candidates. Bob Sargent has expressed an interest in devoting a meeting in the near future to the 2016 Presidential Election. We can discuss:

• The candidates
• The key issues (at least as articulated (or avoided!) by the candidates)
• Media coverage of the electoral process

There should be plenty to discuss! Perhaps next week?