Entering the Labor Market in a Recession: Some Findings and Advice

Trying to get a job during a period of recession and high unemployment is hard for everyone, bit for those just entering the labor market for the first time it can leave scars on their lifetime earnings and even their personal health. Till von Wachter discussed the evidence from past recessions--and offers some advice for those currently living through this experience, in "The Persistent Effects of Initial Labor Market Conditions for Young Adults and Their Sources." Journal of Economic Perspectives, 34:4, pp. 168-94). In describing the longer-term effects of entering the labor market in a recession, he writes: 

Over the last 15 years, an increasing number of studies have analyzed the short- and long-term effects on individuals entering the labor market in a recession, and this article will take stock of the core empirical methods and findings from this literature. On average, individuals entering the labor market in a typical recession (a 3–4 point rise in unemployment rates) experience a reduction in earnings of about 10–15 percent initially---somewhat smaller for college graduates, somewhat larger for high school graduates, and a particularly large reduction for nonwhites. Estimates for college graduates suggest that during recessions, workers tend to start jobs at less prestigious occupations and smaller- and lower-paying firms. For some groups, such as PhD economists and possibly MBA graduates, an initial occupation choice permanently affects career outcomes. An early-career economic shock has the potential to be disruptive beyond strictly economic outcomes, too. An increasing number of studies document that adverse labor market entry has effects on health and other outcomes like marriage, divorce, and women’s fertility and can affect socio-economic outcomes, health, and mortality in middle age. ...

As he digs down into the evidence and models, a basic insight here is that early jobs often set the stage for the later jobs. Many workers in their 20s switch jobs a number of times before settling into what feels like a good fit for at least the medium term. But when dealing with limited options for employment, finding that employer who is a a good fit for the long-term is harder, and switching between jobs may be harder, too. Von Wachter offers some advice: 

The crisis in the labor market triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic has given this line of research increased urgency and has made it relevant to the 4 million or so young individuals graduating from college or high school in the summer of 2020.  Some useful lessons emerge from the research reviewed here:

1. Your first job out of school may not be what you had expected, but that’s OK. Being flexible in your choice of, say, occupation or where you live will give you more options.
2. Your career will take longer to develop than that of luckier peers. Do what you can to avoid being locked into that first job by continuing to accumulate general skills and looking for opportunities to move to other jobs.
3. If things are going slow, remember, it is hard for everyone. At the same time, all findings discussed here are for averages and do not necessarily apply to you—you have agency in shaping your life and career. 
4. You may need to save a higher percentage of income early in life to meet long-term wealth goals.
5. Your desired patterns of marriage and fertility may take more effort to achieve. 
6. Take particular care to develop and maintain a healthy lifestyle and be kind to yourself, in part because it will help you weather difficult initial labor market conditions. 

(N.B. I should add that I'm the Managing Editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, and thus in all likelihood personally biased in thinking that the articles therein are of considerable interest.) 

Fall 2020 Journal of Economic Perspectives Online

I am now in my 34th year as Managing Editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives. The JEP is published by the American Economic Association, which decided about a decade ago--to my delight--that the journal would be freely available on-line, from the current issue all the way back to the first issue. You can download it various e-reader formats, too. Here, I'll start with the Table of Contents for the just-released Fall 2020 issue, which in the Taylor household is known as issue #134. Below that are abstracts and direct links for all of the papers. I will probably blog more specifically about some of the papers in the next week or two, as well.

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Symposium: How Much Income and Wealth Inequality? 

"The Rise of Income and Wealth Inequality in America: Evidence from Distributional Macroeconomic Accounts," by "Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman

This paper studies inequality in America through the lens of distributional macroeconomic accounts—comprehensive distributions of the aggregate amount of income and wealth recorded in the official macroeconomic accounts of the United States. We use these distributional macroeconomic accounts to quantify the rise of income and wealth concentration since the late 1970s, the change in tax progressivity, and the direct redistributive effects of government intervention in the economy. Between 1978 and 2018, the share of pre-tax income earned by the top 1 percent rose from 10 percent to about 19 percent, and the share of wealth owned by the top 0.1 percent rose from 7 percent to about 18 percent. In 2018, the tax system was regressive at the top-end; the top 400 wealthiest Americans paid a lower average tax rate than the macroeconomic tax rate of 29 percent. We confront our methods and findings with those of other studies, pinpoint the areas where more research is needed, and describe how additional data collection could improve inequality measurement.
Full-Text Access | Supplementary Materials

"Business Incomes at the Top," by Wojciech Kopczuk and Eric Zwick
Business income constitutes a large and increasing share of income and wealth at the top of the distribution. We discuss how tax policy treats and shapes how businesses are organized and how they distribute economic gains to owners, with the focus on closely held and pass-through firms. These considerations influence whether and how labor and capital income is observed in economic data and feed into research controversies regarding the measurement of inequality and the progressivity of the tax code. We discuss the importance of these issues in the United States and highlight that limited evidence from other countries suggests that they are likely to be important elsewhere.
Full-Text Access | Supplementary Materials

"Growing Income Inequality in the United States and Other Advanced Economies," by Florian Hoffmann, David S. Lee and Thomas Lemieux
This paper studies the contribution of both labor and non-labor income in the growth in income inequality in the United States and large European economies. The paper first shows that the capital to labor income ratio disproportionately increased among high-earnings individuals, further contributing to the growth in overall income inequality. That said, the magnitude of this effect is modest, and the predominant driver of the growth in income inequality in recent decades is the growth in labor earnings inequality. Far more important than the distinction between total income and labor income, is the way in which educational factors account for the growth in US labor and capital income inequality. Growing income gaps among different education groups as well as composition effects linked to a growing fraction of highly educated workers have been driving these effects, with a noticeable role of occupational and locational factors for women. Findings for large European economies indicate that inequality has been growing fast in Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom, though not in France. Capital income and education don't play as much as a role in these countries as in the United States.
Full-Text Access | Supplementary Materials

Symposium: Economics and Epidemiology

"An Economist's Guide to Epidemiology Models of Infectious Disease," by Christopher Avery, William Bossert, Adam Clark, Glenn Ellison and Sara Fisher Ellison
We describe the structure and use of epidemiology models of disease transmission, with an emphasis on the susceptible/infected/recovered (SIR) model. We discuss high-profile forecasts of cases and deaths that have been based on these models, what went wrong with the early forecasts, and how they have adapted to the current COVID pandemic. We also offer three distinct areas where economists would be well positioned to contribute to or inform this epidemiology literature: modeling heterogeneity of susceptible populations in various dimensions, accommodating endogeneity of the parameters governing disease spread, and helping to understand the importance of political economy issues in disease suppression.
Full-Text Access | Supplementary Materials

"Epidemiology's Time of Need: COVID-19 Calls for Epidemic-Related Economics," by Eleanor J. Murray
The COVID-19 pandemic has catapulted scientific conversations and scientific divisions into the public consciousness. Epidemiology and economics have long operated in distinct silos, but the COVID-19 pandemic presents a complex and cross-disciplinary problem that impacts all facets of society. Many economists have recognized this and want to engage in efforts to mitigate and control the pandemic, but others seem more interested in attacking epidemiology than attacking the virus. As an epidemiologist, I call upon economists to join with us in combating COVID-19 and in preventing future pandemics. In this essay, I attempt to provide some insight for economists into how epidemiology works, where it doesn't work, and the much-needed answers that economists can help us obtain. I hope this will spur economists towards an epidemic-related economics that can provide a blueprint for a healthy economy and population.
Full-Text Access | Supplementary Materials

Articles

"A 30-Year Perspective on Property Derivatives: What Can Be Done to Tame Property Price Risk?" by Frank J. Fabozzi, Robert J. Shiller and Radu S. Tunaru
The housing sector is the largest spot market in the world without a developed derivative contract to serve the risk management needs of market participants. This paper describes the evolution within a wider economic context of property derivatives in the United States and worldwide. We review various economic arguments presented in the literature to highlight the advantages of these financial instruments to society. The paper also provides a critical perspective on the principal obstacles hindering the development of property derivatives based on real estate prices—especially housing prices—and what can be done to overcome these difficulties. The issues discussed can serve as a guide for designing property derivatives capable of hedging real estate risk that has resurfaced time and time again in financial crises.
Full-Text Access | Supplementary Materials

"Welfare Analysis Meets Causal Inference," by Amy Finkelstein and Nathaniel Hendren
We describe a framework for empirical welfare analysis that uses the causal estimates of a policy's impact on net government spending. This framework provides guidance for which causal effects are (and are not) needed for empirical welfare analysis of public policies. The key ingredient is the construction of each policy's marginal value of public funds (MVPF). The MVPF is the ratio of beneficiaries' willingness to pay for the policy to the net cost to the government. We discuss how the MVPF relates to "traditional" welfare analysis tools such as the marginal excess burden and marginal cost of public funds. We show how the MVPF can be used in practice by applying it to several canonical empirical applications from public finance, labor, development, trade, and industrial organization.
Full-Text Access | Supplementary Materials


"The Persistent Effects of Initial Labor Market Conditions for Young Adults and Their Sources," by Till von Wachter
Unlucky young workers entering the labor market in recessions suffer a range of medium- to long-term consequences. This paper summarizes the findings of the growing empirical literature on this subject and uses it to assess economic models of career development. The literature finds large initial effects on earnings, labor supply, and wages that tend to fade after ten to fifteen years in the labor market, and that are accompanied by changes in occupation, job mobility, and employer characteristics. Adverse initial labor market entry also has persistent effects on a range of social outcomes, including timing and completed fertility, marriage and divorce, criminal activities, attitudes, and risky alcohol consumption. There is also evidence that early exposure to depressed labor market lowers health and raises mortality in middle age, patterns accompanied by a reopening of earnings gaps.
Full-Text Access | Supplementary Materials


"Retrospectives: Regulating Banks versus Managing Liquidity: Jeremy Bentham and Henry Thornton in 1802," by John Berdell and Thomas Mondschean
At nearly the same moment, Jeremy Bentham and Henry Thornton adopted diametrically opposed approaches to stabilizing the financial system. Henry Thornton eloquently defended the Bank of England's actions as the lender of last resort and saw its discretionary management of liquidity as the key stabilizer of the credit system. In contrast, Jeremy Bentham advocated the imposition of strict bank regulations and examinations, without which, he predicted, Britain would soon experience a systemic crisis—which he called "universal bankruptcy." There are strong parallels but also dramatic differences with our recent attempts to reduce systemic risk within financial systems. The Basel III bank regulatory framework effectively intertwines Bentham's and Thornton's diametrically opposed approaches to stabilizing banks. Yet Bentham's and Thornton's concerns regarding the stability of the wider financial system remain alive today due to financial innovation and the politics of responding to financial crises.
Full-Text Access | Supplementary Materials

"Recommendations for Further Reading," by Timothy Taylor
Full-Text Access | Supplementary Materials

The Dam Removal Problem

One of the many highlights of my fatherhood experience was when one of my children was assigned a paper on the Hoover Dam. This meant that for a couple of weeks I could ask during family dinnertime conversations: "How is the dam paper going? Is the dam first draft ready yet? What are you learning from your dam school project?" Years later, my children still wince about the experience. Well, the dam topic is back again. 

Researchers at Resources for the Future have been looking at the issue of old and outdated dams. The National Inventory of Dams (NID) from the US Army Corps of Engineers counts 91,500 dams in the United States with an average age of 57 years. Some of the dams continue to serve useful purposes: carbon-free power generation, flood protection, drinking water supply, irrigation, creating bodies of water for recreation, and so on. But many others are both no longer useful and  "high-hazard," meaning that there is risk to human life if/when they fail. For these dams, removal will often be a better option. Margaret A. Walls and Vincent Gonzales provide a readable overview of the work in "Dismantling Dams Can Help Address US Infrastructure Problems" (Resources, October 2020). For more details, their longer report is "Dams and Dam Removals in the United States" (RFF Report 20-12, October 2020).

The National Inventory of Dams tries to include all dams in the US that meet "at least one of the following criteria:

1. High hazard potential classification - loss of human life is likely if the dam fails,
2. Significant hazard potential classification - no probable loss of human life but can cause economic loss, environmental damage, disruption of lifeline facilities, or impact other concerns,
3. Equal or exceed 25 feet in height and exceed 15 acre-feet in storage,
4. Equal or exceed 50 acre-feet storage and exceed 6 feet in height.

These are the relatively big dams. A fuller count of smaller dams from a couple of decades ago suggests that there might be 2.5 million dams in the US as a whole. 

The Stanford National Performance of Dams Program also provides useful background information. As their 2018 report on "Dam Failures in the U.S." points out, there was a major surge in dam-building after World War II, which has then slowed to nearly a halt in the last couple of decades. 

The Walls and Gonzales report digs into the data from the National Inventory of Dams and reports: 

[A] hazard rating is a classification that conveys the consequences should the dam fail or be operated improperly and release water. It is highly dependent on the location of the dam—that is, whether it is located near heavily populated areas—and the size of the reservoir. Seventeen percent of dams in the NID have a high hazard rating, 12 percent are rated as a significant hazard, 65 percent are considered a low hazard, and 5 percent have an undetermined hazard rating. Of the high-hazard dams, private entities own the largest share, at 43 percent. Comparing this with private ownership of dams as a whole, however, which is 62 percent, private entities appear to have fewer of the high-hazard dams than do other owner types. Local governments, for example, own 20 percent of all dams but 29 percent of high-hazard dams, and the federal government owns only 4 percent of all dams but 9 percent of high-hazard dams.

As they point out, removing dams can both reduce the risks of a collapse, and also offer other potential benefits: 

Removing an obsolete or deteriorating dam can often be a better option than repairing it. In many cases, removal is less costly than repair, and if the dam no longer provides services of sufficient value, spending money on repairs makes little sense.

Removing a dam can have many environmental benefits. Dam removal restores a river’s natural function, improving water quality and conditions for aquatic habitat by increasing flows and reducing water temperatures, and provides passage to and from the ocean for anadromous fish species such as salmon. ... 

The removals have ranged from very small dams, such as the 81 dams removed from the Cleveland National Forest in Southern California, to large dams with removal costs in the tens of millions of dollars, such as the 106-foot-tall San Clemente Dam in California and the Elwha and Glines Canyon Dams in Washington. On the East Coast, removals of dams such as the Edwards Dam on the Kennebec River in Maine and the Embrey Dam on Virginia’s Rappahannock River have benefited oceangoing species such as American shad, alewife, blueback herring, and American eel (a catadromous species that lives in freshwater and returns to the ocean to breed).

Dam removal also can create new river recreation opportunities by providing unimpeded boat passage and restoring whitewater conditions. The removal of three dams on the Cuyahoga River in Ohio was motivated by concerns over water quality, but removing the dams actually spurred growth in the local outdoor recreation economy by producing Class 5 rapids in downtown Cuyahoga Falls. The final dam slated to come down on the Cuyahoga River, the 60-foot-tall Gorge Dam, is expected to reveal a buried 200-foot natural waterfall.

The removal of certain kinds of dams can improve river safety. Low-head (or “run-of-the-river”) dams, which lie across the width of a river or stream and typically form only a minimal reservoir, create underwater circulating hydraulics that have caused hundreds of drowning deaths. After six deaths in one summer at low-head dams in Iowa, the state launched the Water Trails and Low-head Dam Mitigation Program, which focuses on removing and reengineering low-head dams around the state while providing canoe and kayak trails to enhance river recreation.

Despite these success stories, as of January 2020, only an estimated 1,700 dams have been removed in the United States. Numbers are on the rise—nearly half of the removals have taken place in the last ten years—but are low relative to the total number of dams. Moreover, a mere five states account for half of all removals: Pennsylvania (343), California (173), Wisconsin (141), Michigan (94), and Ohio (82).

There are lots of reasons for why outdated and high-hazard dams aren't removed. There's an up-front cost. Those who would benefit from the dam removal may not even know that they would do so. The regulators who in theory are overseeing the dams are stretched thin. Margaret Walls discusses these issues and how they have been overcome in various states in "Aligning Dam Removal and Dam Safety: Comparing Policies and Institutions across States" (RFF Report 20-13, October 2020). 

Older, outdated, and high-hazard dams are situation where the most useful infrastructure spending can involve removal, not rebuilding.  

Max Weber: "He Who Lets Himself in for Politics ... Contracts with Diabolical Powers"

As Election Day approaches, I find myself mulling over some comments from the century-old essay by Max Weber on "Politics as a Vocation" (1919, available various places on the web, like here). Weber discussed the connection from good intentions to ultimate results in politics, and offers some warnings that politics is not a morality play where good intentions always lead to good results, or vice versa.  For example, he writes: 

[T]he world is governed by demons and that he who lets himself in for politics, that is, for power and force as means, contracts with diabolical powers and for his action it is not true that good can follow only from good and evil only from evil, but that often the opposite is true. Anyone who fails to see this is, indeed, a political infant.

More broadly, Weber argues that there are broadly speaking two types of rules for ethical conduct: an "ethic of ultimate ends" and an "ethic of responsibility." These both have a role to play, and exist in tension with each other. But Weber seems to emphasize that even when focused on ultimate ends like justice or fairness, one still has some responsibility to take account of the likely and foreseeable results of given actions. Weber writes: 

[A]ll ethically oriented conduct may be guided by one of two fundamentally differing and irreconcilably opposed maxims: conduct can be oriented to an 'ethic of ultimate ends' or to an 'ethic of responsibility.' This is not to say that an ethic of ultimate ends is identical with irresponsibility, or that an ethic of responsibility is identical with unprincipled opportunism. Naturally nobody says that. However, there is an abysmal contrast between conduct that follows the maxim of an ethic of ultimate ends--that is, in religious terms, 'The Christian does rightly and leaves the results with the Lord'--and conduct that follows the maxim of an ethic of responsibility, in which case one has to give an account of the foreseeable results of one's action.

For context, here's a fuller quotation from the "the world is governed by demons ..." passage. 

My colleague, Mr. F. W. Forster, whom personally I highly esteem for his undoubted sincerity, but whom I reject unreservedly as a politician, believes it is possible to get around this difficulty by the simple thesis: 'from good comes only good; but from evil only evil follows.' In that case this whole complex of questions would not exist. But it is rather astonishing that such a thesis could come to light two thousand five hundred years after the Upanishads. Not only the whole course of world history, but every frank examination of everyday experience points to the very opposite. The development of religions all over the world is determined by the fact that the opposite is true. The age-old problem of theodicy consists of the very question of how it is that a power which is said to be at once omnipotent and kind could have created such an irrational world of undeserved suffering, unpunished injustice, and hopeless stupidity. Either this power is not omnipotent or not kind, or, entirely different principles of compensation and reward govern our life--principles we may interpret metaphysically, or even principles that forever escape our comprehension This problem--the experience of the irrationality of the world--has been the driving force of all religious evolution. The Indian doctrine of karma, Persian dualism, the doctrine of original sin, predestination and the deus absconditus, all these have grown out of this experience. Also the early Christians knew full well the world is governed by demons and that he who lets himself in for politics, that is, for power and force as means, contracts with diabolical powers and for his action it is not true that good can follow only from good and evil only from evil, but that often the opposite is true. Anyone who fails to see this is, indeed, a political infant.

(For those not familiar with the term, the Upanishads are an ancient Sanskrit text, written from about 800 BC to 200 BC, that laid out some of the central principles of Hinduism.)

And here a fuller quotation for the ethic of ultimate ends and ethic of responsibility passage: 

We must be clear about the fact that all ethically oriented conduct may be guided by one of two fundamentally differing and irreconcilably opposed maxims: conduct can be oriented to an 'ethic of ultimate ends' or to an 'ethic of responsibility.' This is not to say that an ethic of ultimate ends is identical with irresponsibility, or that an ethic of responsibility is identical with unprincipled opportunism. Naturally nobody says that. However, there is an abysmal contrast between conduct that follows the maxim of an ethic of ultimate ends--that is, in religious terms, 'The Christian does rightly and leaves the results with the Lord'--and conduct that follows the maxim of an ethic of responsibility, in which case one has to give an account of the foreseeable results of one's action. You may demonstrate to a convinced syndicalist, believing in an ethic of ultimate ends, that his action will result in increasing the opportunities of reaction, in increasing the oppression of his class, and obstructing its ascent--and you will not make the slightest impression upon him. If an action of good intent leads to bad results, then, in the actor's eyes, not he but the world, or the stupidity of other men, or God's will who made them thus, is responsible for the evil. However a man who believes in an ethic of responsibility takes account of precisely the average deficiencies of people; as Fichte has correctly said, he does not even have the right to presuppose their goodness and perfection. He does not feel in a position to burden others with the results of his own actions so far as he was able to foresee them; he will say: these results are ascribed to my action. The believer in an ethic of ultimate ends feels 'responsible' only for seeing to it that the flame of pure intentions is not quenched: for example, the flame of protesting against the injustice of the social order.

Bertrand Russell: Thoughts on Politics, Passion, and Skepticism

In Bertrand Russell's essay “On the Value of Scepticism” (from in his 1958 book The Will to Doubt), he suggests that when opinions are expresses with great passion, including political opinion, it is often because the rational grounds for those opinions are limited.  Russell wrote: 

When there are rational grounds for an opinion, people are content to set them forth and wait for them to operate. In such cases, people do not hold their opinions with passion; they hold them calmly, and set forth their reasons quietly. The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holder's lack of rational conviction. Opinions in politics and religion are almost always held passionately.

Russell also offered an interesting working definition of skepticism in a world where may topics have a small-ish experts who have considered the issue at length, and then the rest of us. 

There are matters about which those who have investigated them are agreed; the dates of eclipses may serve as an illustration. There are other matters about which experts are not agreed. Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. Einstein's view as to the magnitude of the deflection of light by gravitation would have been rejected by all experts not many years ago, yet it proved to be right. Nevertheless the opinion of experts, when it is unanimous, must be accepted by non-experts as more likely to be right than the opposite opinion. The scepticism that I advocate amounts only to this: (1) that when the experts are agreed, the opposite opinion cannot be held to be certain; (2) that when they are not agreed, no opinion can be regarded as certain by a non-expert; and (3) that when they all hold that no sufficient grounds for a positive opinion exist, the ordinary man would do well to suspend his judgment.

Is Political Polarization a Rise in Tribalism?

What if our political differences are not first-and-foremost about different policies or priorities, but instead are about increased feelings of attachment to a political tribe? Jonathan Rauch put forward this thesis in "Rethinking Polarization" (National Affairs, Fall 2019):

Assuredly, Democrats and Republicans are much more purely left-wing and right-wing, respectively, than they were 50 years ago. Certainly, Republicans are more hostile to government than are Democrats. Ideologically, the parties stand on opposite shores. But they still are far from internally coherent in any philosophical sense. Democrats are divided between market-oriented technocrats and self-declared democratic socialists. Republicans are in the grip of a populist takeover that defies the relatively libertarian, internationalist orthodoxy of their heretofore dominant Reaganite wing. Are the Democrats center-left or socialist? Both. Are the Republicans populist or libertarian? Again, both. We are not seeing a hardening of coherent ideological difference. We are seeing a hardening of incoherent ideological difference.

And that is really the essence of what feels like a growing division in our country. In 2017, Pew's polling found that blacks' political attitudes have not diverged significantly from whites' since 1994, or women's from men's, or college graduates' from non-college graduates'. Even across lines of age and religious observance, political attitudes have diverged only modestly. But the attitudinal gap between Democrats and Republicans has risen from 15 percentage points in 1994 to a whopping 36 points in 2017. In other words, the growing, and now gaping, divide in Americans' political values is specifically partisan. And the growth in partisanship does not reflect a clear or clean ideological divide. First and foremost, the increase in partisanship reflects, well, an increase in partisanship.

Here we reach an interesting, if somewhat surreal, question. What if, to some significant extent, the increase in partisanship is not really about anything? To put the point in a less metaphysical way, what if tribalism as such, not ideological disagreement, is behind much or even most of the rise of polarization? What if emotional identification with a partisan team is driving ideology, more than the other way around? To understand and assess this peculiar proposition, we need to expand our toolkit beyond classical political science and into social and cognitive psychology. ...

It's not so much that we like our own party as that we detest the other. In fact, Eric Groenendyk, of the University of Memphis, finds evidence that people hate the other party partially because they are disappointed in their own party. "[T]hey appear to be rationalizing continued identification with their party in the face of this ambivalence by reporting even more negative feelings toward the other party," he writes. "In other words, they seem to be engaging in the 'lesser of two evils' identity defense." By protecting their sense of belonging, intense partisan animosity performs what Groenendyk has called emotional rescue. The fevered view of President Obama proffered by people like Dinesh D'Souza may have been absurd, but it did serve the purpose of making every Republican leader look better by comparison. If Donald Trump is the devil incarnate, then you had better support whatever mediocre Democrat is on offer.

In any case, an implication of negative partisanship is that partisans are not so much rallying for a cause or party they believe in as banding together to fight a collective enemy — psychologically and politically a very different kind of proposition, as we see when we look at the literature on what tribalism does to the brain.

Social patterns like this don't really have a "solution," but Rauch suggests that one approach is "civic bridge-building," by which he means broader participation in all the groups that to some extent cut across partisan lines--and thus in indirect ways break down lines of tribal partisanship. It seems to me not purely a coincidence (although of course a number of factors are at work) that 2020 is a time both when many activities of civic bridge-building have been on hold by the pandemic and partisan political tensions are running high.

 

Henry Adams: "Politics ... Had Always Been the Systematic Organization of Hatreds"

The great historian Henry Adams had a US President as a grandfather and also as a great-grandfather: John Quincy Adams and John Adams. His 1907 autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams is written from an outside perspective, as if his older self was a separate person watching his younger self grow up.  Some of Adams's description of the political climate in which he grew up as a boy in the 1840s had some resonance for me as the 2020 election season draws to an end: 

The atmosphere of education in which he lived was colonial, revolutionary, almost Cromwellian, as though he were steeped, from his greatest grandmother's birth, in the odor of political crime. Resistance to something was the law of New England nature; the boy looked out on the world with the instinct of resistance; for numberless generations his predecessors had viewed the world chiefly as a thing to be reformed, filled with evil forces to be abolished, and they saw no reason to suppose that they had wholly succeeded in the abolition; the duty was unchanged. That duty implied not only resistance to evil, but hatred of it. Boys naturally look on all force as an enemy, and generally find it so, but the New Englander, whether boy or man, in his long struggle with a stingy or hostile universe, had learned also to love the pleasure of hating; his joys were few.

Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, had always been the systematic organization of hatreds, and Massachusetts politics had been as harsh as the climate.

Of course, this comment raises the question of whether politics needs to be a systematic organization of hatreds, and if not, how people can help themselves to be both politically active, fervent, and committed while in no way fostering or giving in to hatred of their opponents.