Free COMMUNITY COLLEGE as disruptive innovation

One of the great issues in the 2020 election among Democratic candidates is whether college should be tuition free.

What is usually meant by that is that public universities should be tuition free.

There are examples in the USA of free public higher education.

For example, since 2005, graduates of the public schools in Kalamazoo, Michigan have been awarded private scholarships to attend Michigan's public universities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalamazoo_Promise

The Kalamazoo Promise is a pledge by a group of anonymous donors to pay up to 100 percent of tuition at any of Michigan's state colleges or universities for graduates of the public high schools of Kalamazoo, Michigan.^[1] To receive the minimum 65% benefit, students must have lived within the Kalamazoo School District, attended public high school there for four years, and graduated. To receive a full scholarship, students must have attended Kalamazoo public schools since kindergarten.

A WSJ podcast explores the outcomes of this program.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/free-college-is-already-here-11561759950

College attendance rates soared as soon as the program was initiated in 2005. Also, the hemorrhaging of Kalamazoo's population has been reversed during this time.

There were unanticipated outcomes. For example, one consequence of the program is that affluent white students from Kalamazoo attended more prestigious public universities in Michigan than they would have because it is now cheaper for them. This was not the intended purpose of the program.
Many low income and minority students who did go to college thanks to the program almost immediately dropped out. This type of student is unprepared for college, doesn't understand college, and has a whole world of problems and burdens that typical college students cannot even imagine (e.g., taking care of drug-addicted family members).

The silver lining is that when these working-class students did drop out, they did not have a mountain of student debt hanging over their heads, so they sometimes were able to start businesses, which has helped to fuel urban renewal in Kalamazoo.

Disruptive innovation in higher education

It has been stated that higher education is resistant to disruptive innovation. For example, online learning has yet to shake up the halls of academia.

Language learning in human infants might explain why online learning cannot be disruptive to higher education.

Human infants enter a babble stage in which they randomly enunciate all sorts of sounds (phonemes) produced in human speech. After a while, they limit their babbling to only those sounds which are reproduced by other people in their environment. This can limit later facility in a foreign language.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babbling

One might think that if one left the radio or television on a foreign station, then the child would develop his or her ability to speak those foreign speech sounds, but this is not the case. The child needs face-to-face interaction to learn which sounds to reproduce. So as pragmatist educational philosophy might suggest, the social context of the learning environment is central.

It might be true as well in the realm of higher education that there is no replacement for f2f learning. The real disruptive force on higher education, then, might be community college. Online learning might be better suited to those who are already educated (comparable to videos of lectures by professors that so many retirees subscribe to).

In an interview in the journal The Presidency, the legendary UC system president Clark Kerr claimed that community college was originally envisioned to be the first two years of actual academic college, but community colleges were hijacked by the their local communities and turned into vocational training centers. The question today is how to improve community colleges to fulfill that academic mission without turning community colleges into stationary cruise ships the way that their four-year counterparts have been Disney-fied in order to attract and retain students in a winner-take-all university competition for ranking and money.

To some extent, however, if society wants to send more people to college, college becomes more expensive. Take the growth of student services, for example. In the 1950s, at most 25% of students graduated from high school and less than 10% graduated from college. Back then, college was only for the most brilliant or the wealthiest students, and they did not really need student services (aside for library cards). Today, colleges host all types of students who have all sorts of needs. For example, in contrast with an earlier era, on campus today there are transgender students and military veterans with brain injuries, and these students require counseling, attention and medical care. Students and professors complain that university presidents have become highly paid CEOs and that tuition has gone through the roof, but this is precisely because universities have swollen in size and complexity and become small, super-advanced cities.

The question for community colleges is how to add needed services like advising for students whose parents did not go to college without indulging in luxury that would drive up costs.

Clark Kerr argued that students whose parents did not go to state universities should pay no tuition, effectively bypassing the affirmative action controversy. Community college is perfect for that.


Along these lines, it has been pointed out that the real diversity in higher education is at community colleges. If you walk through the parking lot of an elite university or state university, you will notice that the cars are quite similar. In contrast, if you walk through the parking lot of a community college, you will find every possible type of car, ranging from brand-new, high-end luxury vehicles to ancient, dilapidated economy cars. There are plenty of Asian and Hispanic students at Stanford, but they are the sons and daughters of doctors, lawyers, engineers, professors. The real diversity is at the community college and in the military. The more advanced a university, the more fake its diversity.

Vacant home tax?

Oakland, California has instituted a vacant property tax.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/networth/article/Oakland-s-vacant-property-tax-takes-effect-13563273.php

Oakland voters in November approved a tax that applies to any privately owned property in the city — including residential, commercial and empty lots — that is not “in use” for more than 50 days in a calendar year starting in 2019. The annual tax is $6,000 per parcel for most properties, regardless of size or value. The tax for condo or duplex units or ground-floor commercial space is $3,000 per year. There are 10 possible exemptions.
The tax will be added to annual property tax bills starting with the one that goes out next year. It will continue for 20 years. 

Oakland’s City Council put Measure W on the ballot, saying it would raise $10 million annually, which can only be used for homeless services, affordable housing, programs to fight blight and illegal dumping, administer the tax and defend any possible lawsuits. Measure W passed with 70 percent of the vote.

Now that it is law, it has become complicated.

The City Council could, by ordinance, restrict the tax to certain zones within the city, but has not done so. 

In December, the city’s Finance Department sent a letter to owners of 25,000 non-owner-occupied properties warning them about the tax should their property be deemed vacant. The letter set off alarm bells for some owners.

One issue is that undeveloped land, and not just unoccupied residences, are deemed vacant. So many people did not see that coming.

The measure exempts owners “who can demonstrate that exceptional specific circumstances prevent the use or development of the property.” But most owners won’t know if they qualify for this or any exemption until the Finance Department writes rules implementing the measure and the City Council adopts them. 

Building a home or apartment building on raw land is not easy or cheap, and some vacant lots are in areas prone to landslides and wildfires.

Even supporters of the tax qualify their support.

SPUR, a Bay Area urban planning think tank, said in its voter guide that it supports the idea of a vacant parcel tax, as a way “to help move vacant land into active use and eliminate blight,” but it opposed Measure W because it would be very difficult to implement fairly. “The definition of what constitutes vacancy is very broad,” it said, and “the exemptions are also very broadly defined,” such as a “demonstrable hardship that is not financial.” It also said a flat tax may disproportionately affect small property owners.

One objection to a vacant home tax is that people should be able to do what they want with their property as long as it does not create "negative externalities", that is, hurt other people. The counter-argument to this would be that vacant homes drive up the cost of housing and create homelessness.


One interesting fact is that putting property into an LLC can triple both the cost of insurance and the property tax. That is, both governments and businesses make a distinction between property that is both a home and an investment, on the one hand, and real estate that is purely an investment (and an investment in status in terms of having bragging rights about owning a second home in a glamorous area).

Mail-in voting & participation (less room for mistakes)

There is a hope among many progressives that voter turnout can be improved by so-called "home voting" or mail-in voting. However, the idea that mail-in voting increases political participation might be like the proverbial tail that wags the dog.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/opinion/the-end-of-the-polling-booth.html

Home-voting states have high turnout. But that doesn’t prove home voting is the cause. It could be that states with a stronger culture of voting are more likely to institute such reforms.

In places where there is poor voter turnout, mail-in voting might not help. In fact, mail-in voting might make voter engagement worse in places with low voter turnout. Who knows?

There is a documentary on steroid abuse and body building in which an interviewee claims that in his experience, steroids make aggressive people more aggressive and nice people more nice. The documentary asserts that while there might be good reasons to strictly regulate steroid use by athletes, the government marshals very little medical evidence in its persecution of steroids. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bigger,_Stronger,_Faster*

Christopher Bell on steroid regulation: "If you look at all the laws in our country, and at how and why things get banned, they don’t actually fit into that category: They’re not addictive, they don’t actually kill people. I don’t condone the stuff, but after three years of researching this, it seems like we should take another look."

Likewise, there is the concept of the "criminal personality" in psychology (discussed in "The Sopranos"). Therapy might help ordinary people, but for the so-called criminal personality -- characterized, for example, by extreme nostalgia and sentimentality and self-righteousness, but with an absence of basic ethics and empathy -- therapy only makes them more clever and efficient at manipulation. Again, something that might work with good people makes things worse with bad people.

If home voting encourages greater democratic participation in places that already are politically engaged but might have no effect in places that are disengaged politically (or even make things worse in those areas with voter fraud), then what can be done to improve voter turnout? 

Several things that do track for high voter turnout are age, income and education. 

Could voter turnout be improved by increasing the general societal level of wealth, education and life expectancy? 

Wealth, education and life expectancy have historically increased over time in the US, and this has indeed correlated with increased voter turnout -- up until the 1940s, when voter turnout plateaued at around 40% in presidential elections. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_the_United_States_presidential_elections#Turnout_statistics

That 40% mark is, interestingly, about where college graduation rates have plateaued. Also interesting is that 40% roughly corresponds with the golden ratio (38.2%).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_United_States

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio

Another question is why anyone would even want to increase voter turnout. In Australia, voting is mandatory and voter turnout is therefore never below 90%. Perhaps because of this, Australian politicians can easily be described as a "basket of deplorables". 

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/13/climate/adani-australia-carmichael-mine.html

Some societal reforms don't work, and they may even make things worse. Sometimes, the best reform is personal, and that may involve changing one's own address. In a world in which low-density areas are increasingly at a disadvantage over high-density areas, it might make sense to move someplace with a larger, denser population -- but not too far out of one's comfort zone. Likewise, rather than owning a big house in a suburb far from the urban core, it might be more prudent to live in a modest abode in a place with better public schools. In those places, public policy decisions are a little bit more on the plausible side.

This brings up another topic: In the modern world, there is less wiggle room for mistakes. When economies first modernize, there is a high growth rate (for example, the US up until the 1970s, Japan until the 1990s, then South Korea and, up until recently, China), but over time the economy "matures" and the growth rates slows (which confounds elderly politicians who imagine that red-hot growth is normal). Along these lines, jobs increasingly require greater levels of sophistication and education, and although this brings with it higher levels of compensation, a segment of the population loathes complexity. Likewise, it is frequently asserted that the economic fortunes of rural America can be revived by expanding rural broadband internet, but the way that provincial areas actually utilize the internet is not always encouraging.

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/20/us/small-town-gossip-moves-to-the-web-anonymous-and-vicious.html

Everyone makes mistakes, and workers spend much of their day quietly fixing their own mistakes. Managers, in contrast, seem to spend most of their time sitting around tables drinking coffee and not doing much work. But when a manager makes a mistake, the company can lose millions of dollars and then the manager gets fired, so managers make fewer mistakes and spend all their time worrying (even in their sleep). In the modern world, it's like like everyone has been moved up into management and has become more unhappy. Democracy in particular is scary because ordinary people have so much of a say in the management of society. 

Sometimes it seems like most of society (61.8%?) is resistant to improvement and that in the 21st century the stakes are higher and there is less wiggle room for bad decisions. For these reasons, it falls upon the individual to move to a better place in order to survive. It also means that educated, responsible suburbs might need to secede from perpetually dysfunctional counties. 

Fortress Japan? (fuel cells, Ghosn)

On the ousted Nissan executive Carlos Ghosn:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/30/business/carlos-ghosn-nissan.html

The Establishment of Japan seemed to have rejected him the way a body might reject an organ implant.

But there might be a bigger story. Japan is trying to exploit methane found in ice on the sea floor around Japan.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20181119-why-flammable-ice-could-be-the-future-of-energy

Buried below the seabed around Japan, there are beds of methane, trapped in molecular cages of ice. In some places, the sediment covering these deposits of frozen water and methane has been eroded away, leaving whitish mounts of what looks like dirty ice rearing up out of the seafloor.

Take a chunk of this stuff up to the surface and it looks and feels much like ice, except for a give-away fizzing sensation in the palm of your hand, but put a match to it and it doesn’t just melt, it ignites. Large international research programmes and companies in Japan, among other countries, are racing to retrieve this strange, counter-intuitive substance – known as fiery ice – from beneath the seafloor to use its methane for fuel. If all goes to plan, they may even start extraction by the end of the next decade.

This methane from ice might be the source of hydrogen that Japan is trying to secure for its national fuel cell development initiative.

https://www.meti.go.jp/english/press/2019/0312_002.html

There are technical reasons that make fuel cells appealing to Japan.

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/in-hydrogen-japan-sees-the-next-lng#gs.gawc1s

With respect to renewables, Japan’s geography poses a challenge, as the country has just one time zone and an effectively islanded grid. Political relations may need to warm considerably before Japanese internet titan Softbank’s vision of an Asian super grid spanning Russia, China, Japan and South Korea can materialize. 

A still bigger challenge is that the grid in eastern Japan runs at 50 hertz, while the grid in western Japan runs at 60 Hz, making it difficult for the two halves of the country to trade power; transmission capacity between the grids is limited to 1.2 gigawatts. Where Europe and North America benefit from continent-scale grid integration, Japan is partitioned between two grids.

This stranger-than-fiction reality stems from Tokyo purchasing generators from Germany in 1895, and Osaka, Japan’s second-largest city, choosing generators from General Electric shortly thereafter. Long-running stalemates aren’t unusual in Japanese business. While the VHS vs. Betamax standards battle resolved itself relatively quickly, by 1895 domestic soy sauce manufacturers Yamasa and the forerunners of Kikkoman had already spent a quarter of a millennium in commercial competition.

Fuel cells are not an environmentally friendly technology, despite the propaganda.

https://cleantechnica.com/2019/01/02/the-hydrogen-fuel-cell-scam-from-george-w-bush-the-big-3-to-toyota-honda-japan/

Now back to the arrest of Carlos Ghosn for undeclared income. It has been speculated that the real issue was Ghosn's efforts to incorporate Nissan into Renault, which is partly owned by the French government.

https://cleantechnica.com/2018/11/21/carlos-ghosn-greed-stupidity-or-a-coup/

This raises the question of why this theatre of taking down a Japanese national hero was enacted — taking him into custody when he landed in Japan for a meeting with the Governor of Tokyo. For irregularities like these, you send a questionnaire to his lawyer or at most a subpoena — you don’t surprise him with a public arrest without any prior warning. The press being on site for this spectacle makes this a carefully staged event.

The Financial Times mentions another reason. For months, there have been talks about closer ties between the Alliance partners. I wrote about it half a year ago. While Nissan is very grateful to Renault and Ghosn for saving it nearly two decades ago, the company considers itself to now be the healthier, bigger, superior partner in the Alliance. Renault owns 43% of Nissan stock, giving it much control, while Nissan has just 15% non-voting stock in Renault, making Nissan essentially a very junior partner, which hurts the company leadership’s pride. A merger with Renault and Mitsubishi is likely felt as a French takeover.

But there might be another reason. Japan is unprepared for the shift to electric vehicles, a shift that might disrupt and destroy most of its automotive industry.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/09/business/japan-electric-cars.html

FUJI, Japan — At a factory near the base of Mount Fuji, workers painstakingly assemble transmissions for some of the world’s top-selling cars. The expensive, complex components, and the workers’ jobs, could be obsolete in a couple of decades.

The threat: battery-powered electric vehicles.

Their designs do away with the belts and gears of a transmission, as well as thousands of other parts used in conventional cars. Established suppliers are nervous, especially in Japan, where automaking is a pillar of the economy — and where industrial giants have been previously left behind by technological change.

“If the world went all-E.V. today, it would kill my business,” said Terry Nakatsuka, chief executive of Jatco, the company that owns the transmission factory, using a shorthand term for electric vehicles.

Japanese prefer to stick with old technology and upgrade it continuously and incrementally (every Japanese household and business still owns and uses a fax machine), which is much less disruptive technologically and socially. This attachment to otherwise forgotten technology is also true in automotive engineering, despite the futuristic patina of fuel cells.

The Japanese government has made managing the shift to next-generation vehicles a priority, but critics say its approach lacks focus. It has bet big on hydrogen fuel cells, an alternative technology to plug-in rechargeable batteries that is struggling to win widespread support.

The fear is that once again, Japan will miss a big technological shift.

“What really puts Japan on the defensive is the idea that the tech revolution is coming to the car industry,” said James Kondo, a visiting professor at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo who has worked with technology companies in the United States and Japan.

It has been pointed out that the billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have a view of the future rooted in the popular science fiction of the 1970s. Fuel cell technology is likewise seen by non-Japanese as yesterday's antiquated vision of tomorrow.

Their focus has instead been on developing cars that extract energy from onboard hydrogen fuel cells. Enthusiasm for that technology has faded in other countries, in part because it would require huge and expensive new infrastructure for delivering hydrogen to drivers.

Japan is becoming an increasingly isolated hydrogen booster.

Toyota displayed a new fuel-cell prototype at the show alongside its plug-in model. And the government remains committed to pouring money into transformative “hydrogen society” projects, with plans to build 320 hydrogen stations for cars by 2025.

“The trend toward electric vehicles is growing, and sales are increasing, but we can’t suddenly jump to E.V.s,” Hiroshige Seko, Japan’s industry minister, said in September, defending the government’s commitment to hydrogen.

Not all of Japan’s carmakers have been avoiding electric vehicles. Nissan was an early advocate of battery-only cars, introducing its Leaf all-electric model in 2010.

At Nissan, Ghosn was a realist who championed electric vehicles and was openly skeptical about the prospect of fuel cell vehicles.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-drive/news/trans-canada-highway/fuel-cells-are-a-far-off-fantasy-says-nissans-ghosn/article15543471/

Crucially, electric vehicles can be exported to countries with recharging networks, whereas aside from parts of California, fuel cells have no such recharging stations. This would mean that Japanese automobile companies face the prospect of selling automobiles only in Japan if the national plan is to indeed shift to only fuel cell vehicles. Astonishingly, there seems to be no public outcry to a plan that would mean suicide to Japanese automotive exports -- one of the few remaining manufacturing sectors in Japan that still does export -- and the collapse of most of the industry. Importantly, this is a national plan drafted by the Japanese government (METI) with what seems to be the full approval of Japanese industry and labor. This might suggest that Ghosn was perceived not just as a threat to the independence of Nissan by its Japanese executives, but as a threat to Japanese national security by the Japanese state.

The choice would be seem to be between economic dynamism, with all of its attendant disruptions to the social fabric, and a harmonious if impoverished self-sufficiency.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autarky

Autarky is the characteristic of self-sufficiency; the term usually applies to political states or to their economic systems. Autarky exists whenever an entity can survive or continue its activities without external assistance or international trade. If a self-sufficient economy also refuses all trade with the outside world then economists may term it a closed economy.

There is a famous precedent for this in Japanese history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sakoku

Sakoku (鎖国, "closed country") was the isolationist foreign policy of the Japanese Tokugawa shogunate (aka Bakufu)[1] under which relations and trade between Japan and other countries were severely limited, nearly all foreign nationals were barred from entering Japan and common Japanese people were kept from leaving the country for a period of over 220 years. The policy was enacted by the Tokugawa shogunate under Tokugawa Iemitsu through a number of edicts and policies from 1633 to 1639, and ended after 1853 when the American Black Ships commanded by Matthew Perry forced the opening of Japan to American (and, by extension, Western) trade through a series of unequal treaties.

It was preceded by a period of largely unrestricted trade and widespread piracy when Japanese mariners travelled Asia and official embassies and envoys visited both Asian states, New Spain (now Mexico), and Europe. This period was also noted for the large number of foreign traders and pirates who were resident in Japan and active in Japanese waters. 

Carlos Ghosn might be seen by the Japanese Establishment as a kind of pirate who endangers Japanese sovereignty.

Social cohesion comes at a price, and it can backfire. In order to prevent being colonized by the West in the 17th century, Japan isolated itself to such a degree that it fell behind economically and technologically -- a condition which actually made Japan vulnerable to the outside world and required a strenuous program of catching up with the outside world. In the 21st century, such a program of reaching economic parity with other great powers might not be possible for Japan, as it is already struggling despite possessing the advantages of advanced development.

In the USA, a pseudo-socialist left-wing calls for equality of condition and a pseudo-fascist right-wing demands restrictions on immigration and trade. These policies would promote social cohesion, as they do in Japan. However, these policies might have the same stultifying and counterproductive effects in the USA as they do in Japan (e.g., 30 years of economic stagnation with no end in sight, with the real possibility of serious economic contraction.) 

(Mild) REFORM: Senate proportional representation & the seniority system

A proposal on how to impose proportional representation on the US Senate:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/heres-how-fix-senate/579172/

The title says it all: "The Path to Give California 12 Senators, and Vermont Just One". That's a radical overhaul of the current arrangement of two senators per state, but the proposed reform addresses a radical problem when a state like California has 67 times the population of a state like Wyoming. In 1790, Virginia had a population almost 13 times greater than Delaware, so while there was imbalance in the past, it was not as extreme as today.

Start with the total U.S. population, then divide by 100, since that’s the size of the current, more deliberative upper chamber. Next, allocate senators to each state according to their share of the total; 2/100 equals two senators, 3/100 equals three, etc. Update the apportionment every decade according to the official census.

Using 2017 census estimates as a proxy for the official one coming in 2020, the Rule of One Hundred yields the following outcome: 26 states get only one senator (having about 1/100 of the population or less), 12 states stay at two, eight states gain one or two, and the four biggest states gain more than two: California gets 12 total, Texas gets nine, and Florida and New York get six each. This apportionment shows how out of whack the current Senate has become.

The article recognizes the legal obstacles to Senate reform toward proportional representation.

The obvious reply is, “This is impossible! The Constitution plainly says that each state gets two senators. There’s even a provision in the Constitution that says this rule cannot be amended.” Indeed, Article V, in describing the amendment process, stipulates that “no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.”

First, consider that Article V applies only to amendments. Congress would adopt the Rule of One Hundred scheme as a statute; let’s call it the Senate Reform Act. Because it’s legislation rather than an amendment, Article V would—arguably—not apply.
Second, the states, through the various voting-rights amendments—the Fourteenth, Fifteenth, Nineteenth, Twenty-Fourth, and Twenty-Sixth—have already given their “consent” by directing Congress to adopt legislation to protect equal voting rights, and this delegated power explicitly applies to “the United States” as well as the states. The Senate Reform Act would simply shift seats according to population. No state or its citizens would lose the franchise.

The article also recognizes the political obstacles to Senate reform when small, rural, conservative states would face the prospect of their political (over-)representation being drastically diminished.

The immediate political likelihood for passage of the Senate Reform Act is not great, in large part because it’s not only more democratic than the status quo, but more Democratic, too. Taking the Trump electoral victory map of 2016 as a template, and applying it to the 110 senators created under the reform, yields a gain of plus-eight senators for Democrats and plus-two for Republicans. From a political point of view, then, Democrats should favor the reform—and one can imagine it passing in some alternative future, even if some Democratic senators from small states would have to vote in favor of fairness and principle rather than parochial and racial privilege. Republicans in large states might also be hard-pressed to vote against their own citizens’ prospects for fairer and broader representation.
If a Democratic wave continues into 2020, then who knows, a Senate Reform Act could make America a democracy again.

A related reform of Congress would involve ending the seniority system which assigns powerful seats to members who have been there the longest. 

The obituary of a senator from Mississippi, the poorest state in the USA:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/30/obituaries/senator-thad-cochran-death.html

Thad Cochran, a courtly Mississippi Republican who cultivated his constituents for 45 years as a congressman and United States senator with traditional catfish fries, Southern charm and billions of dollars in federal pork-barrel largess, died on Thursday in Oxford, Miss. He was 81.

Mr. Cochran derived most of his power from 37 years on the Senate Appropriations Committee, which has jurisdiction over all discretionary government spending, and from several terms as its chairman. Those perches gave him enormous authority to allocate funds and to bring home special projects for his state, often called pork-barrel spending.

In some ways, he seemed like a Cold War liberal.

He occasionally made national headlines. After Donald J. Trump became president in 2017, Mr. Cochran recommended a military spending appropriation of $581 billion for fiscal 2018 — $15 billion more than Mr. Trump’s request — and $65 billion for overseas contingency operations. He also urged action to avert government shutdowns and to provide relief for regions hit by hurricanes and wildfires.

In other ways, he seemed like a typical politician. Indeed, prior to 1967, he was a Democrat, and he had the "aroma" of a stereotypical Irish American politician.

But the appropriations that made news back home were those that counted with the electorate — money that, through his influence, went to Mississippi’s Gulf Coast ports, universities, public schools, agriculture, airports, highways, bridges, health centers, fire and police departments, and more, including catfish research.

In Mr. Cochran’s rarefied world of discretionary spending, billions moved like nickels. It is hard to estimate the vast sums he helped funnel into his state over decades. His Senate biography notes that in 2005 he “spearheaded the effort to provide more than $87 billion in supplemental assistance to Mississippi and Gulf Coast states devastated by Hurricane Katrina.”

In 2010, a Mississippi watchdog group, Citizens Against Government Waste, called Mr. Cochran the “King of Earmarks,” saying he had pushed $490 billion in pork-barrel projects, the most in the nation. In public finance, earmarks are items in an appropriations bill that direct funds to a specific recipient, circumventing competitive, merit-based allocation processes.

“The longer I’ve been there, the more I appreciate the seniority system,” Mr. Cochran said at a rally in Jackson, the capital, during his last hurrah in 2014. “It has benefited our state in a lot of ways.”

Because of the Senate's distortion of proportional representation, patronage disproportionately goes to poorer, rural, conservative states.

So while Trumpists talks about a "Marshall Plan for rural America",  federal policies have already been precisely that. 

Traditional Republicans lament government largess as a "socialist" policy of redistributing income, but more than any other faction of government it is the Republican Party in rural areas that is redistributing the USA's resources to poor rural areas (prior to the 1970s, these same Republicans were Democrats). Perhaps the biggest pork-barrel, socialist program of them all is the US military (e.g., all those military bases down South). 

And maybe that is a good thing. Political patronage is all that rural states have, aside from catfish farming (Mississippi) and chicken farming (Arkansas).

In all societies, the primary purpose of government is to dampen social conflict. This often involves channeling huge amounts of money into things that are economically dysfunctional, but the alternative to such policies is not rational, productive investment but rather civil strife or  even societal collapse. 

The so-called Yellow vests movement in France is a warning. The uprising was triggered when the Macron government raised taxes on diesel fuel, and after a speed limit reduction on country roads was enacted. From a strictly technical point of view in terms of reducing green house gases and traffic accidents, this was the right thing to do, but it makes life unbearable for those who are wedded to a quasi-rural life that involves long commutes to work. From an economic point of view, their lifestyle is irrational, but the reality is that people are quite irrational and will not change. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_vests_movement

Radically reforming the Senate in terms of proportionality and the seniority system is therefore a terrible idea in terms of the crushing impacts it would have on already distressed rural areas and the political backlash that would ensue. 

Revoking the disproportionate political power that rural America has through the political system might only channel frustration into more dangerous forms of expression. The USA has a very limited history of terrorism compared to Europe. In fact, in the aftermath of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people, the journalist Jimmy Breslin wrongly claimed that it must be the work of foreign terrorists because Americans don't do these kinds of things to each other. But if rural America falls apart even faster than it is currently eroding, it might be surprising how bad things could get.

Almost a thousand years ago, the Chinese government paid Mongol nomads a huge annual ransom to avoid conflict. Ultimately, the Chinese could not bear the insult of paying off nomads as their price kept rising because the Chinese saw China as the center of the world and their emperor as the "son of heaven". Going to war with the Mongols restored Chinese pride, but from a practical point of view, it was one of the greatest mistakes in human history. Sometimes you just gotta pay, no matter the cost.

Mild reforms

Reforming the Senate mildly toward greater proportional representation would involve keeping the current system of two senators per state, but would add a few further senators -- ten senators, to be exact. The senators would represent overlapping regions that would have the same population size -- sixty million voters, to be precise. For example, California would have two new senators, one representing the region of the southwest and one representing the west coast (including Alaska and Hawaii). This added system of regional senators would be modeled on at-large representation. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-large

Legally, this system would not challenge current Constitutional arrangements because it would simply tag on a new, smaller system. This would be much the way that new amendments can be added to the Bill of Rights without overhauling the Constitution. Politically, this would be a mild reform to promote somewhat greater fairness that would not make smaller states feel threatened. (California would get two new regional senators, but so would Wyoming.)

Reforming the seniority system in the Senate mildly would only slightly alter the current system, but it would hopefully be a rejuvenating force.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seniority_in_the_United_States_Senate

United States senators are conventionally ranked by the length of their tenure in the Senate. The senator in each U.S. state with the longer time in office is known as the senior senator; the other is the junior senator. This convention has no official standing, though seniority confers several benefits, including preference in the choice of committee assignmentsand physical offices.

The United States Constitution does not mandate differences in rights or power, but Senate rules give more power to senators with more seniority. Generally, senior senators will have more power, especially within their own caucuses. In addition, by custom, senior senators from the president's party control federal patronage appointments in their states. 

Seniority is a conventional arrangement that has no official standing, but it lessens conflict between politicians by having an established system of selecting leadership that will eventually benefit currently marginalized junior legislators (if they can survive in the meantime). The pragmatic aspect of the system should be recognized and not undermined.

The mild reform of the seniority system would entail that, as a principle, every third year power would be invested (for that year) in the second most senior leader at hand. For example, every third year, the post of president pro tempore would pass to the second most senior member of the majority party. 

The president pro tempore of the Senate is traditionally the most senior member of the majority party.

Likewise, every third year, seniority on a committee would pass to the second most senior member of the committee in the majority party. 

Senators are given preferential treatment in choosing committee assignments based on seniority. Seniority on a committee is based on length of time serving on that committee, which means a senator may rank above another in committee seniority but be more junior in the full Senate. Although the committee chairmanship is an elected position, it is traditionally given to the most senior senator of the majority party serving on the committee, and not already holding a conflicting position such as chairmanship of another committee. The ranking member of a committee (called the vice-chairman in some select committees) is elected in the same way.

Some things should remain as they are now.

• Greater seniority enables a senator to choose a desk closer to the front of the Senate Chamber.
• Senators with higher seniority may choose to move into better office space as those offices are vacated.
• Seniority determines the ranking in the United States order of precedence although other factors, such as being a former president or First Lady, can place an individual higher in the order of precedence.

This might help to break the monopoly on patronage and address the tendency for elites to gradually fall out of touch with reality. (In the case of the seniority system discouraging retirement, senior senators like Strom Thurmond sometimes literally become out of touch with reality.)