Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Donald Trump's election as President of the United States in November 2016 may have changed the nature of the political game in several ways, not least by its demotion of the importance of Big Money. Big Money is receding from the scene, leaving a vacuum, and Big Data is poised to fill that space. The people who worry about Big Money in politics - as well as the people who shrug and accept it - have agreed in recent decades that the key connection between such money on the one hand and electoral success on the other is advertising: especially broadcast advertising Yet the Hillary Clinton campaign spent a good deal more than Trump's campaign did on advertising. In the first two months of general election political advertising (mid-June to mid-August), her campaign spent $61 million on broadcast ads, while allied independent groups spent another $43 million in her cause. Trump's campaign didn't spend a dime on broadcast ads during that period, and its independent...

This is my first post-Labor Day post, so we'll write about the subject that comes to mind. Desi Arnaz. It is a fact, to be condemned or welcomed at your leisure, that labor unions represent a shrinking portion of the labor market pie. Despite (or because of?) the protection of union activity in the private sector, the role of unions there has been in decline for decades. In the 1950s one in every three private sector employees was a member of a union. By 2011, only 6.9%, roughly one out of every 14 were union members. Here's a link for that 6.9% figure, in case fact checkers are reading. I think reporter Greenhouse rather buried his lede, though: that critical figure doesn't appear until the fifth paragraph . Anyway: some conservatives talk about this decline almost as if it is karma. Unions are, in their view, inherently suspect operations, and they are shrinking because of their own cosmic badness. I disagree. Further, I'd like to tell a stor...