| | | | Why the Alabama Polls Are All Over the Place: Silver | | The polls ahead of Tuesday's Senate race in Alabama are all over the place. Part of that is down to the uncertainty over how much the allegations against the controversial Roy Moore will impact a race taking place in a usually solidly Republican state. Another big factor? What kind of phone voters have, writes Nate Silver for FiveThirtyEight.
"Slightly more than half of American adults don't have access to a landline, according to recent estimates by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which also found a higher share of mobile-only households in the South than in other parts of the country. Moreover, voters with landline service are older than the voting population as a whole and are more likely to be white — characteristics that correlate strongly with voting Republican, especially in states such as Alabama," Silver writes.
"Some automated firms have also begun to supplement their landline samples with online panels in an effort to get a more representative sample. Still, cell-only and landline voters may be differentiated from one another in ways that are relevant for voting behavior but which don't fall into traditional demographic categories — cell-only voters may have different media consumption habits, for instance. If nothing else, failing to call cellphones adds an additional layer of unpredictability to the results." - Another thing that makes the race hard to predict? The conventional wisdom about what motivates many Republicans might be all wrong, Fareed suggested in a recent Take.
"What if people are actually motivated far more deeply by issues surrounding religion, race and culture than they are by economics?
"There's increasing evidence that Trump's base supports him because it feels a deep, emotional, cultural and class affinity for him. And while the tax bill is being analyzed by economists, Trump picks fights with black athletes, retweets misleading anti-Muslim videos and promises never to yield on immigration. Perhaps he knows his base better than we do."
Watch Fareed's full Take here
| | The Pentagon's Troubling Secrecy | | There has been a "massive expansion" in the global war on terror, although you might not have noticed, writes Emma Ashford for Cato at Liberty. One reason? The US military's troubling secrecy about deployments, especially in Africa.
"US troops are currently engaged in counterterrorism and support missions in Somalia, Chad, Nigeria, and elsewhere, deployments which have never been debated by Congress and are authorized only under a patchwork of shaky, existing authorities," Ashford writes.
"The fundamental problem is simple. With only limited knowledge of where American troops are, and what they are doing there, we cannot even have a coherent public discussion about the scope of US military intervention around the globe. We should be discussing the increase in US military actions in Africa or the growth in US combat troops in the Middle East, but that discussion is effectively impossible—even for the relevant congressional committees—with so little information."
| | Global Arms Sales Are Rising. Thank America (and South Korea) | | Global arms sales last year rose for the first time since 2010, according to a new report, thanks largely to an uptick in sales by US companies.
"Sales of arms and military services by the world's largest arms-producing and military services companies…totaled $374.8 billion in 2016," according to the latest annual report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
The report also noted that arms sales by Western European companies remained stable, while Russian arms sales continued to grow, although at a slower pace due to "major economic difficulties" in the country.
In the emerging arms producers category, South Korea saw a 20 percent jump in sales on the year before. "Continuing and rising threat perceptions drive South Korea's acquisitions of military equipment, and it is increasingly turning to its own arms industry to supply its demand for weapons," SIPRI's Siemon Wezeman said. "At the same time, South Korea is aiming to realize its goal of becoming a major arms exporter." "The US remains the global leader in terms of manufacturing arms (57.9 percent of the top 100 producers' revenue accrues to US firms) and buying them (36 percent of the total). But buying trends are a sign of the slowly fading role of the US as global policeman. In 2007, the US accounted for 61 percent of defense industry sales and more than 41 percent of the defense spending. Now, the non-Western world is spending more to protect itself," Bershidsky says.
"During the Cold War, the arms race was between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Soviet bloc. The focused nature of the competition made it easier to deescalate and shrink weapons stockpiles when the Soviet Union fell apart. Now, it's everyone for themselves."
| | Why the Arab World's Influence Is Slipping Away | | President Trump's decision last week to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital was widely condemned by Arab leaders. But his move underscored an emerging reality – Arab nations wield a lot less power than they used to, suggests Walter Russell Mead in the Wall Street Journal. Thank America's booming energy industry – and tumbling oil prices.
"The shining cities that rise where the desert meets the Gulf may be in for harder times. The sheikhdoms' glassy skyscrapers, gleaming malls and opulent apartment complexes were conceived for a world in which runaway energy demand and limited sources (remember 'peak oil'?) led to inexorably rising prices. These fragile and artificial economies require hothouse conditions that a weakened OPEC can no longer provide. Now the great Gulf Bubble seems set to slowly deflate," Mead argues.
"There's more. The staggering affluence of the Gulf countries during the OPEC era concealed the Arab world's failure to develop states and economies capable of competing effectively in the 21st century. As their dream of revival through oil riches fades, they are waking to a new era of weakness and dependency."
| | Is Free Trade Making People Obese? | | Free trade skeptics might have something else to add to their list of complaints against trade deals like NAFTA, at least according to some nutritionists, report Andrew Jacobs and Matt Richtel in the New York Times. Soaring obesity rates in countries including Mexico.
"Mexico began lifting tariffs and allowing more foreign investment in the 1980s, a transition to free trade given an exclamation point in 1994, when Mexico, the United States and Canada enacted the North American Free Trade Agreement. Opponents in Mexico warned that the country would lose its cultural and economic independence," they write.
"But few critics predicted it would transform the Mexican diet and food ecosystem to increasingly mirror those of the United States. In 1980, 7 percent of Mexicans were obese, a figure that tripled to 20.3 percent by 2016, according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. Diabetes is now Mexico's top killer, claiming 80,000 lives a year, the World Health Organization has reported." | | | | | | |
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