The largest 31 county economies made up 32% of national GDP in 2018. From Bloomberg:

A Third of America’s Economy Is Concentrated in Just 31 Counties

I grew up in South Louisiana, where the legacy of Huey Long populism still casts a shadow.  So perhaps I’m not as surprised at the connections between corruption and a certain type  of populism.  Reform is always possible but it never seems to happen in these situations.  The promise to take down the corrupt establishment seems to usually just result in a replacement of the old corrupt with the new corrupt.  A good article from Nikkei Asian Review on the state of things in Duterte’s Philippines.

Crony capital: How Duterte embraced the oligarchs

President Rodrigo Duterte promised to destroy the Philippines’ elite. Instead, he chose his own

Another economist I like reading.  I am forever grateful for Paul Krugmans writings before, during and after the 2008 financial crisis.  While he is an unapologetic leftie, he is also very data oriented, which maybe makes you a liberal these days.  His recent article takes on falling life expectancy in the US, as a red state / blue state phenomenon.

Ok, clearly just voting one way or another shouldn’t change a regions (or an individuals) life expectancy, but there is something going on here.  To his credit Krugman doesn’t dive into the whys and wherefores.  It could be something as simple as lack of hospitals in rural America.  Or just the idea that poverty in America is bad for your health.  I would like to see this correlated maybe to wealth / income rather that chunked into states.

An article in Washington Post from Paul, — sorry, Robert Samuelson.  Lots of good facts, but published under “Opinion”, as it probably should be.  I like Samuelson’s articles but I’m not so sure about some of his conclusions.  For instance, expensive healthcare is great for the people that work in that field.  He also doesn’t say much about the causes or possible solutions. I have to add, I used to confuse Robert Samuelson with Nobel prize winning economist Paul Samuelson. I guess I still do sometimes.  Anyway, the upshot is that Americans are spending more and more on healthcare, and that isn’t counted in lots of economic stats.  It would seem to be a very large chunk of middle class decline in the last few decades.  Not then only cause, though.

Yes, Americans are feeling the squeeze. It’s coming from health care.

Starting to use DuckDuckGo as my search engine.  It doesn’t track you and provides lots of privacy safeguards other search engines do not.  I suspect sometimes there won’t be a substitute for (ok, I’ll call them out by name) Google, but for now my default search is DuckDuckGo.

A long article about neo-feudalism in American Affairs.  Lots of good facts, but the article seems to suffer from a huge hole at it’s center.  It is trying to discuss a political trend in America without discussing American politics.  At it’s core, Feudalism is a Conservative system, almost by definition.  Still, worth a read.

America’s Drift toward Feudalism

From the UK Guardian.

Sticky or magnetic? Which US states attract people and which do they leave?

Only one in four residents of Nevada were born there, while 78% of people in Louisiana are natives

From the UK newspaper the Guardian:

Republicans tried to rig the vote in Michigan – but ‘political novices’ just defeated them

After a Republican bragged about cramming ‘Dem garbage’ into certain districts, a grassroots campaign has given the power to redraw political maps to the people

From the Atlantic:

The Dark Psychology of Social Networks

Why it feels like everything is going haywire

With the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was not much mention of the Czech Velvet Revolution from around the same time period.  My connection to this involves the music of Frank Zappa.  His music was a sort of catalyst for the revolution.  The band Plastic People of the Universe, named for the Zappa song, became a rallying point that eventually led to the overthrow of the Czech communist regime.

The first Czech president after the revolution, and friend of Frank Zappa, was the playwrite Vaclav Havel.  I recently ran across his essay, The Power of the Powerless.  A bit long but the first half is eye opening and about they way the former Soviet Union controlled people by controlling access to information and enforcing a certain conformity.  I found a copy of the essay available on Amazon for $44 (for the eBook!).  Below is a link to the Time Machine version, badly scanned but still readable.

Václav Havel: The Power of the Powerless