Dystopian times and places are not that far away

I have been reading Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid's Tale” and watching the TV series based on it (the picture below is from Season 3). For those who have not read or watched it, it is about the democratic US becoming Gilead, a theocratic state that subjects women to slavery, including sexual slavery for a large fraction of them. In militarized Gilead, mobility is restricted, as it is access to knowledge (it is forbidden for women to read). Children born in pre-Gilead times of rebel couples are kidnapped and given to pro-regime olygarchic families. Those that escape, flee to Canada, a free country which however is tempted to appease the totalitarian neighbour. It is one of the best stories of the dystopian genre, together with George Orwell’s 1984, although it is painful to read and watch.

Margaret Atwood has a final message in my edition of her book, in which she says that “the details in The Handmaid’s Tale don’t come from far away and long ago: they are possibilities within every society, including ours.” She mentions women and girls in Afghanistan and Iran and totalitarianism in Comunist countries, but she also says that “the West did not have to look very far back in its own past to find a state of affairs in which most women were barred from higher education, property ownership, and the right to their own children.” We could give examples from the not so distant past in Argentina or Spain. Or current examples of restrictions to mobility in Palestine. The last democratic country were women obtained the right to vote was civilized Switzerland in the 1970s.

While Trump deploys the National Guard and perhaps the Marines in California, and his European allies become stronger, the attack on knowledge and other public goods in the US, the technosurveillance, the massive corruption, the attack on immigrants and international students, the violation of regulatory independence, division of powers, and human rights… All these attacks on the rule of law, the racism, the break on climate change policies, the adoption of incompetent economic policies… These are all ingredients of a dystopian novel, except that this time, it is really happening (in the mot powerful country in the world).

In the picture (from the fictitious TV series), the statue of Lincoln in Washignton DC has been destroyed. The real statue remains in place as far as I know, but the Capitol next to it was assaulted 4 years ago by a mob that wanted to hang the Vicepresident of the country, with the blessing of a President that is today sitting again in the Oval Office.

As Rachel Bitecofer has just written in the social media reacting to violence in the streets of Los Angeles, “for those of us who’ve spend the last 6 months discussing how the Trump would use deportations to create chaos is the Blue states and then use that chaos as an excuse to declare a national emergency and seize total power, things are right on schedule”

Flick, Luis Enrique and the economic literature on managers

A recent academic article summarizing the economic literature on managers distinguishes between people managers and project managers. People managers are those adapted to a technology where individual workers can be monitored and their task and outcomes can be separately measured. Then a people’s manager main tasks are the selection of individuals and setting appropriate incentives. A project manager manages teams, where it is impossible to separate the contributions of individuals. It would be counterproductive to base incentives on individual measures.

Football (soccer) managers or coaches are clearly project managers. Their main tasks are to coordinate and motivate a team of players. Their task vector also includes player selection. The main mechanism for coordination is tactical choice. Good football coaches are rare. In general, player talent contributes much more to success than managerial talent.

But, as Peeters and Van Ours explain in a contribution to an IEB Report, those very few managers that do make a difference can be decisive, especially in contexts of great equality, usually at the top of tournaments. In the economy in general, as argued by Van Reenen and others, good managerial practices contribute a lot to explaining productivity differences among firms. 

An example that coaches usually do not make a difference is that, on average, it is imposible to distinguish the change in performance of a team that sacks the manager after a bad streak (Koeman, in the example of Peeters and Van Ours), from the performance of a team that sticks to the same manager (Valverde).

It is hard to predict who will be a good football coach for a given team. A good coach in one team may be bad in another one (ask David Moyes). In a firm, a good sales worker may not be a good plant manager. A good player may not be a good coach (ask Lampard, Rooney) as a good horse does not make a good jokey, but sometimes it could (Guardiola, Zidane). Even when statistical evidence or case studies identify clear success stories, it is difficult to explain exacty why a given manager has been successful, given the multiplicity of contributing factors and the multidimensionality of managerial tasks.

Hansi Flick in FC Barcelona and Luis Enrique Martínez in PSG are recent cases of clear contributions to team success. They inherited teams with individual players of the same quality or worse than the teams of their failing predecessors, and they improved the results significantly.

Both have several features in common, like their attacking style, the pressure of their teams on the other side of the pitch, and their long, learning careers. Flick was many years number two of the managerial staff at the German national team, before winning the Champions League as the head coach of Bayern Munich, to fail later as number one of the national team. Luis Enrique started at the second team of FC Barcelona, then failed in AS Roma, went to Celta de Vigo, coached the first team of FC Barcelona to win a Champions League (with Neymar, Messi and Suarez in their best years), and had a mixture of successes and failures with the Spainsh national team.

Both have managed to coordinate and motivate a multi-national, multi-ethnic, pluri-lingual coalition of players, including some of amazingly young age. They have put the collective before the individual stars. Both have used old ideas in new forms: systematic off-side trap, free positions (individual freedom in a collective design: what is the position of Hakimi, Démbélé or Doué?),… There are also differences: they have notably different styles in front of the media.

The future will tell if they can sustain this level of excellence for several years, or will see new examples of failing to use golden years to prepare for a sustainable era of success.

The true USA and Europe

People in Africa, Latin America and Asia may look at the moral side of the discussion between Trump and his opponents in the USA and Europe with some skepticism.

Many of us feel comfortable believing that this is a battle of Trump against democracy, and that democracy is synonymous with Europe and even with the true American values, which Trump is betraying. The American Revolution was the first political application of the European-born Illustration and its protagonists were descendants of Europeans.

But the betrayal of the supposed American values of freedom and democracy took place much before the arrival of Trump. Racial discrimination, support of human rights violations, political corruption, are phenomena that did not have to wait for Trump.

What is true is that what is happening now is a serious step back in time in all fronts, and a very serious threat to democracy and public goods in general, from the quality of public servants to the promotion of science. But I think that the argument that Trump is betraying American values will not find many sympathizers beyond the USA and even among some sectors in the USA, such as the black or native American population.

Something similar could be said about “European values.” I am tempted to say that we score better on democracy and human rights, at least since the creation of the European Union and its predecessor institutions. But the economic development of Western Europe was built at least in part from colonialism and slavery. Even these days, the behavior of our leaders on issues such as immigration and refugees, or the genocide in Gaza and apartheid in the West Bank, is in contradiction with any positive moral values.

If we have to oppose the Trump administration on moral grounds, and we have to, we must be aware of our imperfections.

Where are the enlightened capitalists?

We are seeing the richest democracy in the world being subject to an attempt to transform it into an autocracy. How this will end is not clear and will depend on the opposition, the economy and the checks and balances. It is an attempt surrounded by corruption and incompetence. Although events and decisions have a random component, Trump has reached power for the second time with the support of powerful interests.

The conservative columnist of the New York Times David Brooks argued that “It’s time for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement.’ (I miss churches in that list). But will business leaders participate in a massive uprising?

Political scientist Steve Levitsky said: “If we’re going to mobilize, it’s going to be the most prominent, the most well-endowed, the most privileged and protected of us in civil society who have to take the lead.” Levitsky believes that the biggest threat to aspiring despots may come from other elites rather than from mass protest below.

Stuat Kirk in the Financial Times says that “The silence of CEOs in the face of Donald Trump’s tariff chaos is one of the biggest failures of leadership in corporate history. Where are they when we need them? In the corner shuffling their shoes.”

But it is not only the tariffs. In the recent decades, enlightened capitalists in the US organized themselves (for example, around the Bussiness Roundtable)  to promote the idea of a responsible market economy were companies would have a social purpose, fighting extreme inequality, corruption and climate change. Trump 2.0 is built under the assumption that all this is a concession to wokism. 

Some business leaders have politely complained about tariffs, but not much about the demolition of public goods, the violation of human rights or the destruction of democratic international alliances. What is their broader view of capitalism then?

Capitalism has been compatible with very different political regimes over history. Most of Europe and America are capitalist and democratic today, but Spain under Franco or Chile under Pinochet were also capitalist. Are business leaders indifferent between these options? It is important for the other democracy participants to know, because we may wait for them or not.

Some business leaders could argue that what is happening is not their responsibility, except that it is, because many of them made it possible with their lobbying and their donations.

The worst ignorant against the best universities

One thing that truly makes America great is its universities, both public and private.

Trump threatening Harvard University to cut its financing unless it accepts to lose its independence, and Harvard saying no to authoritarianism, shows that when the current President says “Make America Great Again,” he in fact has in mind a very narrow and sectarian view of his country.

The Trump administration will freeze over $2 billion in federal funds because Harvard refused to comply with a list of demands that threatened its independence. Harvard leaders believed saying no was worth the risk. The University’s President has said it clearly: “The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.”

In Europe, we have always felt envious of the American universities –and tried to benefit from them, sending there our best future scientists and academics. And we watch amazed this act of national self-harm. Italian journalist Michele Serra has said in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica on April 17th that

"The social rancor of the ignorant who detest culture does not allow a shadow of doubt about the theory and practice of Trumpism. Culture is something that money cannot buy, not even the billions of Trump and his friends, and this makes it particularly unbearable to people who consider any human being for sale. Learning is more difficult than commanding. Destroy everything you cannot have, everything you cannot be: this is Trump."

Her colleague on the same page, Concita de Gregorio, adds: “Dictatorships write textbooks, burn books, dismiss academics.”

Although Harvard and other universities may win in Court, the Trump administration will push further for cuts in their funding. In the long run, only the electoral defeat of Trump and Maga will ensure the survival of this global public good, the US university system.

This is part of Trump’s campaign against science. The smell of Macarthism cannot be hidden behind the obsession with wokism and the hypocritical accusations of anti-semitism (mostly code for students criticizing another neo-fascist government, Netanyahu’s). In the fight against trumpism, the resistance of universities will be an important building block.

Is there a better model to explain Trump?

John E. Roemer has an old article, “Why the poor do not expropriate the rich” that, in my view, gives the best explanation of modern right-wing national-populism. In a democracy, given the distribution of income in any country, the median voter is poorer than the voter with average income: as a consequence, the median voter, the one that decides elections if there is only one dimension of voting under some assumptions, should be pro-redistribution. If the only concern of voters was material welfare, majority voting would yield strongly distributive policies, in the extreme the expropriation of the wealth of the rich. However, although at the beginning democracy was associated with the expansion of the welfare state, national democracies are today compatible with high levels of inequality.

There are several reasons for this paradox, most of them listed in a review article by Adam Bonica and others. But most of them go back to the answer that Roemer gave to the question in the title of his article: the poor do not expropriate the rich because the latter mobilize policy dimensions (cleavages) other than income and wealth, such as religion, ethnicity, "values" or scandals. In some cases, these dimensions correlate with income (South Africa) and redistribution is inevitable, but in many cases the poor majority can be divided across ethnic or religious lines, and that breaks the pro-distribution coalition. In addition, if there are winning coalitions for ethnic or religious reasons, these can be easier to mobilize because they include at least part of the rich, who have more resources to invest in politics (time, media, money). Modern right-wing national-populism is just the adaptation of this strategy to modern technologies and constraints. Here, there is no dilemma between "economic" and "cultural" explanations to populism: both are integrated in the same conceptual framework.

As Dani Rodrik has explained, when inequality increases (for example, in times of macroeconomic shocks), the incentive of economic elites to mobilize other cleavages increases: “as economic inequality increases in society, a party representing the rich is more likely to invest in strategies that appeal to identity and culture. Greater inequality means the median voter grows more distant from the rich in terms of where they stand on economic policy interests. For the party of the rich, there is now higher return from a political narrative that catalyzes identity around issues such as racial resentment, gay marriage, women’s rights, and immigration, all of which can give low-income voters a reason to vote against their purely material interests.”

Of course, reality is much more complex than a simplified model, but good models are useful because they can pose meaningful questions and test precise hypotheses. Roemer’s explanation can be enriched to incorporate irrationality (Trump’s, for example), in a world of trial and error by boundedly rational agents, where gains for particular groups are the result of selection and adaptation.

Fascism as an extreme case, when the powerful interests fail by democratic means, can be incorporated to the same model. Instead of focusing on income and wealth distribution, a sufficient part of the relatively poor focus on interethnic redistribution, and scapegoats, foreigners or ethnic minorities can be targeted. In all these cases, it is understandable that a lot of attention is paid to the political (typically pathological) leader, but there are powerful underlying forces behind his emergence.

Thinking about these theoretical issues may be seen as a luxury and a waste of time in dramatic moments. But it can also be seen as a way to think about how best to react. If the powerful compete in a multidimensional policy framework, the relatively poor majority must also become competitive in the battle for the dominant cleavages, in a way that will be different in different political contexts.

Democracy is not a spectator sport

I participated yesterday in the demonstration of the Democrats Abroad in Barcelona against Trump 2.0. It took place in Plaça Sant Jaume, the “political” square of our city, where many demonstrations take place, and where the City Hall and the main building of the Catalan government (or Generalitat) are located, one in front of the other. As an activist reminded me, not being a US citizen, I cannot join Democrats Abroad, but I could join in the chants and show my solidarity. The organizers claimed that they were more than the first time some weeks ago, and they will be even more next time. I hope that more locals join, although yesterday I was not alone in that category either. Journalists that are based in Catalonia and that are symbols of the fight for freedom were there, such as Siscu Baiges and John Carlin.

One of the demonstrators was showing a placard saying “Democracy is not a spectator sport.” This message is very important these days. Some progressives all over the world may feel some intimate satisfaction at seeing the US seeing how their democracy is attacked (what the Germans call “schadenfreude”), because many democracies have been attacked in the past by US governments and interests. But that would be unfair and unwise. Most US citizens are victims of Trump, and would not have approved of violations of human rights in other parts of the world.

It is also true that the erosion of democracy does not happen for the first time, and even in the US it didn’t start now. The concentration of power in private hands is not something new. But the acceleration of destruction under Musk and Trump 2.0 is very serious and costly: for science, for peace, for freedom. We Europeans should have been worried a long time ago (actually, many were worried already), but increased concern is totally justified.

What to do? The Supreme Court and courts in general may stop, perhaps, some of the worst steps of the autocrats. Markets are also important, and are a disciplinary device, but only of economic missteps, not necessarily of human rights violations. Federalism and the diversity of institutions in the US cannot be all destroyed at the same time. But learn from Latin America: their military dictatorships were defeated in many countries because people mobilized and made enormous sacrifices. Regime change is fought by collective action: wait and see has never been an option, in spite of the individual risks, which understandably each one should manage as well as possible.

In Europe we can do many things, to defend ourselves and to show solidarity. The example of the Colegio de México comes to my mind, the institution that was created after the Spanish Civil War in Mexico to attract intelectuals that came from exile escaping the Franco dictatorship, and that kept reminding the world of the atrocities of that dictatorship. It is not enough to attract individual scientists and academics in our existing institutions, they will miss too many things. New instituions will be needed. Trump’s is not a military dictatorship, but is demolishing democracy nonetheless. He will not be stopped if we do nothing.