What exactly do Americans want the President to be efficacious at? More generally, what overall goal or goals do we want the President and the whole government to aim for?
1) Maximize mean/median happiness
2) Maximize mean/median wealth
3) Minimize wealth disparity
4) Maximize freedom from government coercion
5) Maximize freedom from private coercion
6) Maximize protection from domestic and foreign threats
If maximization or minimization of something is the goal, do we want to maximize that something for:
1) the current U.S. population
2) the U.S population 25/50/100 years from now
3) current American citizens
4) the current heritage-American population
5) me
My choice would be to maximize median happiness for the US population 50 years from now. I think focusing on a long-term goal would encourage positive expectations and reduce voters’ selfishness in choosing who to vote for.
Any thoughts?
An upper age limit?
Your suggested “maximize” options are policy questions. And, according to the constitution, those are supposed to be set by congress, not by the president.
Yes, but they are at a different level than the usual policy questions that are argued in the political realm. I thought discussion of them might lead me to some new understanding of why people hold the positions I disagree with on the usual policy questions.
I agree. In my defense, I drafted the OP at a time when there was ongoing discussion here about presidential efficacy. (http://theskepticalzone.com/wp/simplistic-thinking-about-presidential-efficacy/). And I did ask what we want “the President and the whole government to aim for?”
And however the responsibility for making policy choices was allocated under the Constitution, a modern President, for good or for ill, has significant opportunity to affect the policy choices made by the Congress.
There are a lot different spots where an age limit could be put in place in my framework, so I’m not 100% sure what you have in mind. I think referring to the population or citizenry at some point in the future covers that with less chance of provoking a “so you would abandon the elderly?” response.
Walter Kloover,
Hi Walter
What do you think a President plus the entire governmental leadership could do to maximise happiness?
Hi colewd-
That is a separate and very difficult question, particularly because happiness means different things to different people. Indeed the whole reason for the post was to see if it was possible to look at the issue from a broader perspective.
What do you want the President and the whole government to aim for? Something from my lists or something else entirely?
Walter Kloover,
It looks like the high level objective is maximising mean/median happiness. The rest of your list seems to be “the how” of this higher level goal. Am I seeing this as you intended? If so I agree with your list with the possible exception of minimising wealth disparity as that may be an impediment to maximising mean/median wealth. I would agree that some controlled reduction in disparity is warranted and may help with maximising overall wealth..
In the list of 6 possible goals, I think (2) through (6) might indeed be ways to affect happiness if happiness is chosen as the overall goal, but also might be chosen as the overall goal themselves.
What do you think about the second question-whose happiness (or whatever) to maximize?
… which leads to the more specific question. If a President is the leader of a far-right, ultranationalist, neo-fascistic movement, what should he try to maximize?
Walter Kloover,
As far as question number 2 I would choose number 2 but change US to the Global population.
“stroke of the pen, law of the land.”
Pretty much every President since Clinton..
Interesting, I didn’t consider that possibility.
Can you share your reasoning?
I would say this entire topic reminds me of Have you stopped beating your wife.
It’s not identical, but there’s a hidden and false premise that presidents have real power.
Real power is so diffuse that no individual can make positive change.
A President can make bad decisions, and they all do.
Looking back after a couple of decades, it all gets lost in noise.
That is the problem with US Americans.
petrushka,
I don’t understand how you can say that U.S. presidents have no real power to make positive change. They may not be able to make positive change with a snap of their fingers, but they do have tools.
Formally under the constitution the president has the power to veto legislation passed by Congress, to nominate individuals to be judges and justices and executive branch leaders, and to determine how the laws should be executed.
Informally, the “bully pulpit” gives the president power to direct attention to particular issues and influence the ways in which the Congress will legislate.
Ouch. You got me there.
Maybe I am too cynical in thinking that a candidate who explicitly prioritized the happiness of the global population would never be elected. I didn’t expect Bill to suggest that.
Should every country’s government try to maximize global whatever, or does the US (perhaps along with some others) have a special responsibility for that?
Walter Kloover,
Ultimately public service is service. Proper service should take the long term view IMO.
Doing the best for your citizens that you have jurisdiction for should benefit those outside your responsibility. I am in Canada right now for almost a month stay. I realise Canada is doing well at least in the Alberta province. Nice places to eat clean parks beautiful sights and nice families with friendly people who seem basically content. With all this we see the drug problems in the inner cities as we have in the US. They are using technology not necessarily invented in Canada but are benefiting from that technology.
One on the ideas developed in the US in the 80s they have embraced is local brew pubs that serve outstanding food and beer at very reasonable prices. Seeing people happily socialise up here is quite nice.
Same here. Especially since he is supporting an administration with a clear ultranationalist agenda. He may want to explain the discrepancy.
Well, the current USA administration has dismantled USAID, terminating thousands of humanitarian efforts. This is IMO nothing short of criminal. But to be fair here, other governments, including my own, have also been drastically reducing foreign aid. I believe that we, as human beings, have a responsibility to help people in need, to protect vulnerable minorities and to support human rights. It is also my conviction that this will benefit my nation in the long run, as it increases political stability abroad, increases national reputation and provides diplomatic leverage . This definitely affects my voting preferences.
ETA: legibility
Brew pubs were invented in the US? We sure live and learn.
I agree 100% with all of this.
Americans Are Leaving the U.S. in Record Numbers
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/americans-leaving-the-us-migration-a5795bfa
Now let’s hear from colewd how WSJ is biased leftist propaganda.
colewd, to Walter:
If you’re concerned for the well-being of the global population, why do you support a president who is actively harming the rest of the world as well as his own country?
Corneel:
It is criminal. The USAID cuts will result in an estimated 14 million preventable deaths by 2030. I’ve mentioned this multiple times here with nary a peep from Bill. Bill doesn’t care about the global population any more than he cares about the national debt, political violence, the healthcare system, the poor people in this country, or any of the other principles he has pretended to care about until his Dear Orange Leader violated them, at which point they became non-issues.
Given your supposed concern for the global population, Bill, do you think it isn’t worth 0.5 percent of the federal budget in order to save 14 million lives? That’s how much money those USAID cuts saved. 0.5 percent. Trump doesn’t give a shit about those 14 million people because saving their lives doesn’t benefit him personally.
Charities are supposed to be limited to something between five and fifteen percent for overhead.
USAID flipped this on its head.
Prove me wrong. Show me the audits. Show me one USAID project where 90 percent of the original tax dollar went to an audited service that saved lives.
I think you will find it all but impossible to find a straight path.
Do you have a reliable source for this?
Where does this “something between” 5-15% limit on overhead expenses come from?
My browser says:
If the formatting is weird, I apologize.
My understanding is that 90 percent of aid goes for military and political causes, and only ten percent for humanitarian assistance. And this ten percent does not go directly for food and medicine. It goes to other agencies that have overhead.
My post deals only with Afghanistan, but I suspect it’s representative.
I do not KNOW that my claims are true and representative.
But if you are going to claim 14 million people died, I think you should be able to show how the money was spent in previous years. I’d think this would have been published already.
My source from months ago is partisan. I would be more skeptical, but I haven’t seen the basic claim refuted, that most of the money goes into the pockets of administrators, or into nation building. Meaning politics.
Fixed it for you (I think).
I would say it is misleading to treat military and political programs as overhead on humanitarian programs as you seem to have done in the initial post on this topic.
I expect the spending on nation-building and the military would be higher in countries where we are fighting an actual war seeking to establish a friendlier government. Therefore I doubt the Afghanistan experience was representative.
If you are concerned about money wasted in Afghanistan, I would look at the $2+ trillion spent by the Defense Department.
USAID is a subsidiary of the CIA and supports American foreign policy, which includes supporting favored regimes and occasional color revolutions.
This is not a right wing conspiracy theory. it was long shouted by Chomsky.
If foreign aid were primarily in the form of food and medical services, it would be possible to enumerate the humanitarian services and compare their costs to market prices.
petrushka:
USAID was not a subsidiary of the CIA. It was used on occasion to support the CIA, but that’s it.
Foreign aid comes in different forms, not all of which was administered by USAID. The humanitarian stuff was USAID’s focus.
You’re coming up with some odd and motivated criteria to evaluate the claims regarding USAID cuts, including mentions of market prices and percentage overhead, but those don’t address the actual question, which is whether the cuts are going to cause millions of deaths. It’s clear that you want the answer to be no and that this is influencing where you get your information.
Relying solely on partisan sources is a bad idea, particularly when your sources are flogging batshit ideas like the notion that USAID was a subsidiary of the CIA. By contrast, the 14 million figure comes from a study published in The Lancet, which is nonpartisan and one of the top four medical journals.
The claim isn’t that 14 million people have died, it’s that 14 million additional people will die by 2030 due to the aid cuts, and that projection is based on historical data.
I will make a small wager that this doesn’t happen.
The actual distribution of humanitarian aid is driven by warlord politics, not by money.
Betting on other people’s lives isn´t that hard, is it?
petrushka:
Here’s something better to bet on: if you end a bunch of programs that are saving lives and you don’t replace them with anything, then the lives that would have been saved will no longer be saved.
Trump ended those programs and didn’t replace them. Millions of people will die as a result. He’s fine with that, because those lives have no value in his eyes. He didn’t set up the programs, so he wasn’t getting the credit.
The lives that he supposedly saved through his peace efforts? Those lives mattered, because he was hoping that they would earn him a Nobel Prize. It’s all about Donald. The people whose lives are at stake are just pawns in his self-aggrandizement efforts.
A perfect example was when the US gave food aid to help Gazans who were starving under the Israeli onslaught. A normal, compassionate person would have been glad that the US could help save those lives. Trump whined about how no one had thanked him:
It’s all about Donald.
I’ll repeat my question to Bill: if you’re concerned about the well-being of the global population, why do you support a president who couldn’t care less about it? One who is actively hostile toward the rest of the world, particularly toward our staunchest allies, like Canada?
Speaking of Canada, I recently spent several weeks there, where my California license plates sparked a lot of “You’re pretty far from home, eh?” conversations. Everyone I spoke to, including one separatist, considered Trump to be an adversary. The separatist wanted Alberta to secede and join the US, but even he thought Trump was an untrustworthy bully. “You can’t believe a thing he says,” he remarked.
I think that when a politician tells the truth, it’s due to an adventitious alignment of interests. Trump is exceptional not because he lies, but because he’s crude.
If I appear to be soft toward Trump, it’s because I like presidents to have an adversarial relationship with the press. I hate it when reporters like a president.
I first encountered this sentiment with Jules Feiffer, the cartoonist.
petrushka:
You have a soft spot for a guy who’s causing millions of unnecessary deaths and is fine with that? Being an asshole makes reporters (decent ones, anyway) dislike him, so that makes you look upon him more favorably?
Personally, I prefer good presidents to bad ones, and I’m undeterred by the fact that people (including reporters) tend to like good presidents. That’s a feature, not a bug.
You are soft toward lies. Everything you said about USAID was so fundamentally wrong that you should have known it. Everything from ground up, what it is, where it fits in the political system (foreign aid is not a charity and does not go under charity laws – and you’re very wrong about charities too), how it operates… Just like Trump, nothing you say is right, yet you love saying it and repeating it, thus you love lies.
Yet you don’t love all lies. You are very touchy when Democrats lie. But when Repubs do it, you accept the lie with the excuse that Democrats lie too. So you love partisan hypocrisy above all.
About the topic: The problem with the role of the president of USA is that it is partisan (and the election system ensures just two parties) and at the same time unlimited in power except by the term limit. In such a situation, the president’s goal is whatever the president imagines it to be. Trump imagines the president’s goal to be self-enrichment, and demanding unconditional worship like emperor or god. Clearly nobody is stopping him, so that’s what it is, unlimited power, limited only by Trump’s own imagination.
In normal countries with normal constitution (which USA is not), the roles of a president and prime minister are vested in different persons, and president as a rule is not a partisan role. In normal countries, if the president or prime minister wants to gain dictatorial or autocratic powers, he’d have to go through a series of changes of constitution before he can do it. For example, Weimarrepublik was a normal country and Hitler needed to arrange extraordinary parliamentary elections and pass (with some rigging) the Ermächtigungsgesetz and suspend the constitution to gain the power he became known for. Not so in USA. Despite the impeachment clause (which never once worked with any president) autocracy is embedded in the original constitution of USA.
You claim millions of unnecessary deaths will occur because a CIA project has been defunded.
Emphasis on the future tense.
I deny your future facts. Your projected deaths will not happen. Starvation is caused by warlords and corrupt politicians, not by lack of American funds.
And even if you are correct that these funds are needed, there are numerous ways adjustments can be made. The amounts actually distributed to the end recipients are trivial in the context of world budgets.
The United States has always meddled in foreign politics, particularly in the Americas.
I regret not being smart enough or informed enough to judge whether the net effect has been good or evil, but the net effect has always a product of American intervention.
I’m so old I remember Nixon’s disastrous tour of South America. Gunboat diplomacy has been a thing since Madison. Tom Lehrer wrote a song about it.
Physical gunboats have largely been replaced by foreign aid, but the hegemony is the same in effect.
And Trump is not the first to meddle in Iran. The Iranian governments have all been installed by foreigners. All the boundaries in the Middle East were set by Europeans.
I have no problem with hating Trump, but don’t pretend he is something new.
And don’t pretend the corruption he exposes doesn’t exist.
I lived near the ocean and often watched the tide come in.
One time I dreamed that the tide continued to rise all night, and I woke up to a water world, completely surrounded on all sides by ocean.
The dream shaped how I look at projections from current trends.
Most trends are cyclical, ether because the underlying phenomenon is cyclical, or because they trigger some sort of counter force.
I’ve seen this quite a few times in politics. I’ve seen parties generate their opposition.
petrushka:
USAID was an agency, not a project, and it administered hundreds of projects and programs. It was not an arm of the CIA. Stick your nose out of the fetid right-wing echo chamber. The air is fresher out here.
Of course. Aid cuts don’t retroactively cause deaths. The past is fixed. Causality runs in the other direction: effects come after their causes, not before. So when we’re talking about the consequences of aid cuts, we’re talking about the future, not the past. That’s normal — when we make decisions, we’re thinking about how the future will be affected by the choices we make. It would be nonsensical to ignore the future when the whole point of making good decisions is to produce desirable future outcomes and avoid undesirable ones.
Also, I should note that part of that future has already happened. The USAID cuts were made back in early 2025 and deaths have been occurring ever since. More on that in a future comment.
Denials are easy. Demonstrations are harder. Give the latter a shot.
Assertions are easy. Demonstrations are harder. Give the latter a shot.
First, starvation is caused by a lack of food, and warlords and corrupt politicians are not the only cause. Drought, for example, has been observed to affect the food supply. Apparently plants need water, or something.
Second, even if warlords and corrupt politicians were the sole cause, it wouldn’t follow that we shouldn’t help the victims. We (used to) help refugees, regardless of the fact that we didn’t cause their refugee status. Why should it be any different for starving people?
Third, food aid was only a fraction of what USAID provided. Far more was spent on health and other programs. Pretty sure the warlords didn’t create and spread the Ebola and HIV viruses.
Reagan, the Bushes, Clinton and Obama didn’t shutter USAID. Trump did, and millions of people will die as a result. I have a problem with that. You have a soft spot for the guy.
A decent person in Trump’s position would work to reduce fraud and waste without causing millions of unnecessary deaths. Trump simply abolished the entire agency, because he doesn’t give a shit about the lives of the people that USAID was helping. He is a horrible, bottom-of-the-barrel human being.
I imagine that the Trump administration did not dismantle USAID because it is a “CIA project” (WTF?). If their reasoning is anything similar to that of the far-right parties here, they thought this money should be spent on US citizens instead: Their reasons were of a nationalist nature.
In order to get back OT, could you answer Walter’s question and tell us whether you think your government has any responsibility to increase welfare outside of the US?
Every empire has a self-evident duty to at least try to project some humanitarian effort in order to counterbalance the imperial evils that they commit. They normally understand this duty without question (coupled with utter hypocrisy) at least since the age of discovery/colonialism, so it’s some shock to the entire first world that Trump has simply abolished USAID.
It’s been several days, and no one has attempted to enumerate what percentage of USAID is actually spent on food and healthcare.
Transferring funds to yet another agency with a nice sounding name does not count.
The only thing that counts is food delivered to the individuals who consume it, or treatments delivered, or money paid public sanitation workers.
I could be wrong, but my instincts tell me the reason these numbers are not easy to find is they would be embarrassing.
You chimed in with this:
The first claim is false and the second is not even false. You never supported the first with any evidence (obviously, because there is nothing to support it with). As to the second, USAID is foreign aid, distinct from charity.
If you cared about facts and evidence – which you obviously don’t – you would read the report in question. The report says why and how with numbers. But you will not read the report even now when I linked to it, because you do not give a damn. You love Trump the pedo rapist insurrectionist corrupt insane liar war criminal and this is all that matters to you.
petrushka:
True, but why would we? The question is whether Trump’s USAID hatchet job is going to cause millions of deaths, and the Lancet study examined that question and concluded that it will. You’ve given us no reason to doubt the study.
There’s a significant credibility gap:
1. A team of people who study this professionally have done a detailed analysis and concluded that the USAID cuts will cost 14 million lives (including 4.5 million children under the age of 5). Their paper was accepted and published by one of the top four medical journals in the world.
2. A random guy on the internet — one who has a soft spot for Trump and who fell for right-wing propaganda about USAID being an arm of the CIA — tells us that “Your projected deaths will not happen” without offering any evidence.
Do you see why we find #1 more credible than #2?
If USAID transfers money to an NGO, and the NGO uses that money to save lives, it counts. If USAID is gutted and that money no longer flows to the NGO, resulting in people’s deaths, it counts. It’s cause and effect in both cases.
Your instincts also led you to fall for the right-wing propaganda about USAID being a subsidiary of the CIA. Time to shop for some new instincts, or at least to stop giving so much credence to the existing ones.
Truth matters when lives are at stake. Your desire to reach a predetermined conclusion does not outweigh the desire of millions of people to remain alive.
The CIA is untethered. This is a non partisan observation. As is the observation that aid is a tool of foreign policy.
A the observation that funds are managed by malignant organizations.
You keep evading the question of what percentage reaches rather sick and the hungry.
In the Florida I grew up in, every dollar of public health funds found be traced to a specific action at the level of individuals. This was before computers.
There are no excuses.
petrushka:
Yes, for the same reason I keep evading the questions of the melting point of vanadium and the Dodgers’ on-base percentage in 1967. Those three answers, whatever they are, don’t change the fact that Trump’s USAID cuts are causing millions of deaths and that he doesn’t give a shit.
USAID is not the CIA. This is also a nonpartisan observation.
Yes, aid is a tool of foreign policy. It’s not pure altruism — the US benefits from it in a number of ways which Trump is too stupid to appreciate. So what? The aid saved lives. Those lives are no longer being saved.
Funds are managed by both malignant and benign organizations.
Now back to the actual question: You say the Lancet is study is wrong and that the projected deaths won’t happen. Why? Hint: “You haven’t cited the percentage of aid that reached the sick and hungry, therefore the aid cuts won’t cause millions of deaths” is faulty reasoning.