GlennReynolds.com

• June 11, 2004 | 10:31 AM ET

Dan Drezner continues as guest blogger for Glenn.

It's trendy to lament that the country is more politically polarized than ever before.  However, this trend actually has some empirical evidence.  Wonkette links to a Washington Post story that reports, "Republicans have come to distrust the media in greater numbers since President Bush took office."  Last Saturday, David Brooks summed up the state of the political science literature on the topic of partisanship, finding: 

[P]arty attachment is more like attachment to a religious denomination or a social club. People have stereotypes in their heads about what Democrats are like and what Republicans are like, and they gravitate toward the party made up of people like themselves....

The overall impression one gets from these political scientists is that politics is a tribal business. Americans congregate into rival political communities, then embrace one-sided attitudes and perceptions. That suggests that political polarization is the result of deep and self-reinforcing psychological and social forces.

Even conservative humorist P.J. O'Rourke has grown tired of conservative talk radio:   

Arguing, in the sense of attempting to convince others, has gone out of fashion with conservatives.  The formats of their radio and television programs allow for little measured debate, and to the extent that evidence is marshaled to support conservative ideas, the tone is less trial of Socrates than Johnnie Cochran summation to the O.J. jury.  Except the jury -with a clever marketing strategy-  has been rigged.  I wonder, when was the last time a conservative talk show changed a mind?  

This rise in partisanship leads to an interesting question:  does the blogosphere encourage genuine debate across the political aisle, or does it merely foster the cyberequivalent of people screaming past each other? 

Scholars are just beginning to hash this out.  Fittingly enough, to date the best single thing that I've read on the topic is a blog post by Jack Balkin from January of this year.  Balkin thinks that bloggers are different:

[M]ost bloggers who write about political subjects cannot avoid addressing (and, more importantly, linking to) arguments made by people with different views. The reason is that much of the blogosphere is devoted to criticizing what other people have to say....  These links are the most important way that people travel on the Web from one view to its opposite.  (And linking also produces a good check on criticism because you can actually go and read what the person being criticized has said.) 

That's not to say the blogosphere is always a model of civility.  In the past ten days I've found myself accused of ignoring women as a group  (click here for my response), and equated with "the business elite who dealt with Hitler" (click here for my response).  It's veeerrryy tempting right now to say that Balkin is wrong.

The thing is, I still think he's right.  The act of blogging -- and interaction with smart bloggers I disagree with -- has forced me to develop, hone, alter, buttress, or refine my own views on a regular basis.  In other words, blogging has led me to engage in more -- and hopefully better -- argumentation.  I have no idea whether I've persuaded anyone, but I'd like to think I've forced my readers to think as well. 

In my very first post as a blogger, I quoted Jonathan Rauch's Kindly Inquisitors as follows:  "We can all have three new ideas every day before breakfast: the trouble is, they will almost always be bad ideas.  The hard part is figuring out who has a good idea."  For Rauch, the liberal scientific enterprise was the way to separate good scientific ideas from bad.  For me, the blogosphere is now a vital part of separating good ideas from bad in the world of politics.

Before I relinquish the floor back to Glenn, two follow-ups to my previous posts here.  First, the Bureau of Labor Statistics just came out with a new report on jobs lost due to offshore outsourcing.  You can find my summary of it here.  Second, while the U.S. economy as a share of total world output has increased since 1980, the increase was not nearly as large as Niall Ferguson suggested. 

• June 9, 2004 | 1:36 PM ET

Dan Drezner continues as guest blogger for Glenn.

The biggest thing that stands out in the blogosphere's reflections on Ronald Reagan's passing is his generational effect.  As the personal reflections of Virginia Postrel, Robert Tagorda, Tacitus, and Andrew Sullivan demonstrate, Reagan's leadership inspired many in Generation X and Generation Y to embrace his mixture of free-market conservatism and optimism about the future.

What were the foundations of Reagan's optimistic character?  Postrel argues that Reagan was a true Californian -- but Kevin Drum points out that Reagan was also a transplanted Midwesterner, and it is this mixture of California's "famously vibrant openness to new ideas" combined with "the down-to-earth heritage of its Midwestern roots" that let Reagan be Reagan.

That is a matter for historians and biographers to debate.  Indeed, over the next decade, we are likely to witness a rush of Reagan hagiographies, followed closely by revisionist takedowns of his legacy (or, if Mickey Kaus' famous Feiler Faster Thesis is correct, we'll experience all of it in the next ten days). 

None of this will alter Reagan's greatest achievement -- he changed the national mood of the country.  After two decades of notable failures -- Vietnam, Watergate, the energy crisis, the hostage crisis, stagflation, Soviet belligerence -- Reagan altered the domestic and foreign perceptions of the United States.  Americans started believing in America again, and other countries began to respect us as well.  (This perception was translated into reality -- as Niall Ferguson points out in his latest book Colossus, in 1980, the U.S. economy was equal to only 10% of total global output -- a low point for the 20th century.  By 2002, that figure had risen to 31%.)

It's not easy to alter the national mood -- even for a sitting president.  Reagan was able to do this in large part because he was correct in believing that capitalism would triumph over communism.  Just as important, however, was that Reagan excelled in delivering his message.  He was not just an empty vessel parroting what speechwriters fed him.  As one of his former speech writers observed in recalling the drafting of Reagan's 1987 speech in front of the Berlin Wall: 

There is a school of thought that Ronald Reagan managed to look good only because he had clever writers putting words into his mouth. (Perhaps the leading exponent is my former colleague Peggy Noonan, who while a Reagan speechwriter appeared in a magazine article under a caption that said just that: "The woman who puts the words in the president's mouth.") There is a basic problem with this view. Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, George Bush, and Bob Dole all had clever writers.  Why wasn't one of them the Great Communicator?

Because we, his speechwriters, were not creating Reagan; we were stealing from him.  Reagan's policies were straightforward--he had been articulating them for two decades.  When the State Department and the National Security Council began attempting to block my draft by submitting alternative drafts, they weakened their own case. Their drafts lacked boldness. They conveyed no sense of conviction. They had not stolen, as I had, from... Ronald Reagan.  

• June 6, 2004 | 11:41 PM ET

Guest blogging for Glenn this week is Daniel Drezner, Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago.

Seeing as how I'm only guest-blogging for a week, I'll try to stay on a noncontroversial topic to post about.... like offshore outsourcing.

I wrote something a few months ago on how claims about outsourcing stealing American jobs away have been greatly exaggerated.  Since then, however, Forrester Research has revised its oft-cited estimate of jobs lost due to outsourcing upwards.  By the end of 2005, 830,000 white-collar jobs are estimated to leave these shores -- up from an estimate of 600,000 jobs made two years ago. 

Sounds ominous -- except that numbers like this need to be put in perspective.  First, consider the recent spate of official employment data.  Despite media claims of massive numbers of jobs lost due to outsourcing, the U.S. economy has actually created over a million new jobs since January of this year.  Here's a link to the Bureau of Labor Statistics breakdown of job growth by occupation.  Funny thing -- in the service sectors thought to be most vulnerable to offshore outsourcing (financial activities, professional and business services) the number of payroll jobs are currently at 52 week highs.  Even if some jobs are lost due to offshore outsourcing, they pale in comparison to the jobs created by a robust American economy.  Indeed, one recent study showed that outsourcing in IT leads to a net creation of U.S. jobs. 

How can this be?  Many of the numbers thrown around about job losses due to offshoring are vastly overstated.  First off, the overwhelming majority of U.S. firms are not going offshore.  A recent survey of chief financial officers found that 70% of them had no plans to engage in offshoring of any kind. 

Detailed research at the state and local level is starting to bring these exaggerations about outsourcing to light.  For example, in Colorado, two universities are sponsoring research into the number of IT jobs affected by offshore outsourcing.  One of the principal investigators has provided these startling findings:

More than 60 percent of the companies report that they are engaged in some form of international outsourcing, such as owning a subsidiary in India, working with a U.S. company that outsources to international locations or doing business with a foreign-owned outsourcing company. But for most companies in this study, IT outsourcing operations represent only a small part (1 percent to 5 percent) of their business, whether measured in terms of overall employment, employment in the IT department, IT budget, revenues generated or projects conducted.

While these numbers may change as I get more returns from other companies, the preliminary results show that the current employment impact of IT offshoring on Colorado's high-tech sector is smaller than what previous media reports may have led us to believe. 

The Detroit Regional Chamber recently co-sponsored a study on the effect of offshore outsourcing's effect on the Michigan economy.  Their conclusions? 

[T]he true extent of offshoring and its implications for workers in Michigan and the U.S. have been overemphasized, receiving more blame for the current state of manufacturing employment than truly is warranted....

Taking into account cost savings, imports by destination countries, repatriation of profits, taxation of domiciled firms, and value created by the redeployment of labor resources, we found that Michigan is able to recapture $114 for each $100 that is offshored.

Naturally, the media coverage of this report led with the estimated number of job losses -- burying the gains in the 25th paragraph. 

It's also worth pointing out that outsourcing cuts both ways.  Take aircraft.  U.S. airlines have started to outsource basic maintenance overseas.  At the same time, insourcing has also taken place.  United Airlines now does maintenance work for Air China, Korean Air, and Air Canada.  Insourcing helps create American jobs. 

Finally, outsourcing is about more than jobs -- it's about saving taxpayer money.  The state of California provides a perfect example of what happens when barriers are placed on offshore outsourcing.  Because government procurement laws require the purchase of domestic steel, the state could be forced into paying an extra $400 million to repair the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.

There are many economic problems that require a serious debate -- the budget deficit, education, and health care for starters.  Offshore outsourcing is not one of those problems.

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