Category: Political Science

Scott Sumner on Nato

He titles his post What Tyler and Trump get wrong about NATO, excerpt:

I believe that both Trump and Tyler misunderstand the role of Nato. The most important aspect of Nato is not the amount it spends on the military, rather its role is to provide a mutual defense pact so large that no nation would dare to attack even its tiniest members. In that regard, it’s a smashing success.

Do read the whole post.  I agree that Nato is a relative success, but nonetheless think “pure alliance” is not enough as a model, rather it has to be backed by an actual not-solely-American-or Turkish-capability-to-defend.  One increasingly plausible risk is simply that American forces and supplies (the latter being already undersupplied) may be stretched thin elsewhere.

Another risk is that America may elect a leader who is not strongly committed to Nato, and this may even be likely.  To limit member defection ex ante, Nato membership still needs to offer some credible (non-American) protection ex post. Poland, for instance, could do a lot more to help protect Lithuania if it had some significant German military aid and assistance.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the degree of American protection is never guaranteed by a mutual protection treaty per se.  Let’s say that Russian “volunteer forces” encroached on Eastern Estonia.  How much do American voters care about this?  Exactly how strong a response would the U.S. mount, and against what or whom?  I suspect the U.S. would be far more enthusiastic about serious rather than nominal involvement if front-line Polish, German, Lithuanian and other troops are doing a reasonable share of the heavy lifting.

In sum, for the Nato alliance to be credible, including on matters of degree, the defense capabilities need to be more broadly distributed than they are at the moment.  It is odd to me that “credibility of degree” is so important in Scott’s monetary policy thinking, but not on this issue.

Well-functioning democracy for neither me nor for thee?

I have been following only snippets of the debate over whether Biden should step down as the Democratic nominee, for instance here Josh Marshall responds to Ezra Klein (NYT).  Most of all, I am struck by how little faith some of the commentators have in democratic processes.  Let’s consider a few possible arguments why Biden should not step down:

1. The Democratic Party process would not produce an electable candidate against a Republican with dozens of criminal charges against him.  Not even in an election that is supposed to have such enormous stakes.

2. The Democratic Party process would not produce a better candidate than a guy who, whatever the reality may be, is regarded by most of the American public as too old.  Not even in an election that is supposed to have such enormous stakes.

3. An open Democratic Party convention would badly embarrass itself, if it were on the television (and internet) every evening.  Remember Chicago 1968?

4. An open Democratic Party convention would be chaos, and perhaps commandeered by party extremists.

5. “Dealing” with Kamala Harris, whether that means accepting her as the nominee, or easing her out, somehow involves unacceptable consequences.

6. There are other arguments floating around too.

I am not saying these arguments are true (mostly I don’t know), I am merely reporting that I am reading and hearing them, and yes I mean from Democrats.

Most of all, I am struck by how skeptical and cynical these arguments are about democracy.  It’s not even democracy in the “can we beat the Trumpers?” sense, but democratic processes internal to the Democratic Party.

Skepticism about democracy — yet never ever explicitly voiced — is a growing problem among Democratic Party thinkers (though not Ezra).  On one hand, they wish to turn around and call people on the Right, or libertarians, “undemocratic,” or “anti-democratic,” or whatever.  On the other hand, when it comes to actual decisions of great consequence, they are the ones terrified of the democratic processes they themselves have created.  They know that, but can’t quite bring themselves to voice their doubts in those terms.

I am pleased to see that I am more positive on democracy than so many of the Democratic Party thinkers.  I don’t have any particular predictions about the 2024 cycle, but I can report that I am not short the market.  What I observe, however, is just how many people are shorting democratic processes and ideals.  Must, sooner or later, a greater consistency between theory and practice reign?  Or are professed views simply the handmaiden of political convenience, and they will, one way or another, disperse and end up blowing in the wind?

I am tired of making this point

Here Robin Hanson notes that social spending as a percent of gdp tends to rise almost universally:

 

Correlations between spouses

What should I ask Coleman Hughes?

I will be doing a Conversation with him, based in part around his new book The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America.  On Coleman more generally, here is Wikipedia:

Coleman Cruz Hughes (born February 25, 1996) is an American writer and podcast host. He was a fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a fellow and contributing editor at their City Journal, and he is the host of the podcast Conversations with Coleman.

Also from Wikipedia:

Hughes began studying violin at age three. He is a hobbyist rapper—in 2021 and 2022, he released several rap singles on YouTube and Spotify, using the moniker COLDXMAN, including a music video for a track titled “Blasphemy”, which appeared in January 2022. Hughes also plays jazz trombone with a Charles Mingus tribute band that plays regularly at the Jazz Standard in New York City.

I saw Coleman perform quite recently, and I can vouch for his musical excellence, including as a singer.  So what should I ask Coleman?

Literacy or Loyalty?

Why does schooling in much of the developing world not result in much in the way of increased skills? Maybe because education bureaucrats in these counties want obedient citizens more than literate, numerate, informed citizens.

In a discrete choice experiment in which bureaucrats in education were asked to make trade-offs between foundational literacy, completion of secondary school, and formation of dutiful citizens, respondents valued dutiful citizens 50% more than literate ones. For many policy makers, the goal is not the production of knowledge, but the fostering of nationalism.

This may sound like an odd set of priorities, but both European and Latin American countries had similar priorities when they expanded their education systems to serve more than a small elite around the turn of the 20th century. The goal was not to produce scientists or entrepreneurs but to inculcate a reliable workforce that would support the state.

…Developing-country schools are trying to achieve much the same ends. Students learn to memorize, to obey, and to not question — but they do not particularly learn to read or write. But then again, that was never the goal — developing countries are following the path trod on by developed countries. Just like developed countries, they will try to “teach ordinary people obedience, respect for the law, [and] love of order.”

I am reminded that if you want to predict which countries invest a lot in education, look at which countries invest a lot in government owned television stations.

Religion and the ideological gender gap

Did the Trump tariffs help the heartland?

No, but they did get him some votes there:

We study the economic and political consequences of the 2018-2019 trade war between the United States, China and other US trade partners at the detailed geographic level, exploiting measures of local exposure to US import tariffs, foreign retaliatory tariffs, and US compensation programs. The trade-war has not to date provided economic help to the US heartland: import tariffs on foreign goods neither raised nor lowered US employment in newly-protected sectors; retaliatory tariffs had clear negative employment impacts, primarily in agriculture; and these harms were only partly mitigated by compensatory US agricultural subsidies. Consistent with expressive views of politics, the tariff war appears nevertheless to have been a political success for the governing Republican party. Residents of regions more exposed to import tariffs became less likely to identify as Democrats, more likely to vote to reelect Donald Trump in 2020, and more likely to elect Republicans to Congress. Foreign retaliatory tariffs only modestly weakened that support.

That is from a new NBER working paper by David Autor, Anne Beck, David Dorn, and Gordon H. Hanson.

From the beginning, “neoliberalism” was an obnoxious term

It was meant as an insult, implying that Mises – a marginalist – was trying to salvage 19th century liberal economics from the collectivist attacks of the Marxist left and the Nazi right, hence the “neo” moniker being attached.

One of the main promoters of this use was Othmar Spann, a rival of Mises on the University of Vienna faculty. Spann was a prominent proto-Nazi intellectual. In 1924 he added a disparaging chapter on “neoliberalism” to the new edition of his economics textbook.

By the time Mises arrived in Paris in 1938 for the CWL gathering, he had endured a decade and a half of simultaneous disparagement as a “neoliberal” by Nazis and Marxists. It should be no surprise that he was not keen to adopt the label himself.

Here is the full Phil Magness tweet storm.

Alice Evans on the ideological gender divide

“I suggest,

  1. Men and women tend to think alike in societies where there is
    1. Close-knit interdependence, religosity and authoritarianism, or
    2. Shared cultural production and mixed gendered offline socialising.
  2. Gendered ideological polarisation appears encouraged by:
    1. Feminised public culture
    2. Economic resentment
    3. Social media filter bubbles
    4. Cultural entrepreneurs.”

Here is the full piece, currently the best piece on this topic.

What happened in 17th century England (a lot)

East India Company founded — 1600

Shakespeare – Hamlet published 1603

England starting to settle America – 1607 in Virginia, assorted, you could add Harvard here as well

King James Bible – 1611

The beginnings of steady economic growth – 1620 (Greg Clark, JPE)

Rule of law ideas, common law ideas, Sir Edward Coke – 1628-1648, Institutes of the Laws of England, four volumes

Beginnings of libertarian thought – Levellers 1640s

Printing becomes much cheaper, and the rise of pamphlet culture

John Milton, Aeropagitica, defense of free speech, 1644

King Charles I executed – 1649 (leads to a period of “Britain without a King,” ending 1660)

Birth of economic reasoning – second half of 17th century

Royal African Company and a larger slave trade – 1660

General growth of the joint stock corporation

Final subjugation of Ireland, beginnings of British colonialism and empire (throughout, mostly second half of the century)

Discovery of the calculus, Isaac Newton 1665-1666

Great Plague of London, 1665-1666, killed ¼ of city?

Great Fire of London, 1666

John Milton, Paradise Lost, 1667

Social contract theories – John Locke 1689

Bill of Rights (rights of Parliament) — 1689

Birth of modern physics – Newton’s Principia 1687

Bank of England — 1694

Scientific Revolution – throughout the 17th century, places empiricism and measurement at the core of science

The establishment of Protestantism as the religion of Britain, both formal and otherwise, throughout the century, culminating in the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

London – becomes the largest city in Europe by 1700 at around 585,000 people.

England moves from being a weak nation to perhaps the strongest in Europe and with the strongest navy.

Addendum: Adam Ozimek adds:

…first bank to print banknotes in Europe, 1661

Discovery of the telescope 1608

First patent for a modern steam engine 1602

What are the actual dangers of advanced AI?

That is the focus of my latest Bloomberg column, 2x the normal length.  I cannot cover all the points, but here is one excerpt:

The larger theme is becoming evident: AI will radically disrupt power relations in society.

AI may severely limit, for instance, the status and earnings of the so-called “wordcel” class. It will displace many jobs that deal with words and symbols, or make them less lucrative, or just make those who hold them less influential. Knowing how to write well won’t be as valuable a skill five years from now, because AI can improve the quality of just about any text. Being bilingual (or tri- or quadrilingual, for that matter) will also be less useful, and that too has been a marker of highly educated status. Even if AIs can’t write better books than human authors, readers may prefer to spend their time talking to AIs rather than reading.

It is worth pausing to note how profound and unprecedented this development would be. For centuries, the Western world has awarded higher status to what I will call ideas people — those who are good at developing, expressing and putting into practice new ways of thinking. The Scientific and Industrial revolutions greatly increased the reach and influence of ideas people.

AI may put that trend into reverse.

And on arms races:

If I were to ask AI to sum up my worries about AI — I am confident it would do it well, but to be clear this is all my own work! — it might sound something like this: When dynamic technologies interact with static institutions, conflict is inevitable, and AI makes social disruption for the wordcel class and a higher-stakes arms race are more likely.

That last is the biggest problem, but it is also the unavoidable result of a world order based on nation-states. It is a race that the Western democracies and their allies have to manage and win. That is true regardless of the new technology in question: Today it is AI, but future arms races could concern solar-powered space weapons, faster missiles and nuclear weapons, or some yet-to-be-invented way of wreaking havoc on this planet and beyond. Yes, the US may lose some of these races, which makes it all the more important that it win this one — so it can use AI technologies as a counterweight to its deficiencies elsewhere.

In closing I will note for the nth time that rationalist and EA philosophies — which tend to downgrade the import of travel and cultural learning — are poorly suited for reasoning about foreign policy and foreign affairs.

How and why do legal codes differ across red and blue states?

Polarization in the traditional sense is not very important:

…this study examined the criminal codes of the six largest deep red states and the six largest deep blue states – states in which a single political party has held the governorship and control of both legislative bodies for at least the past three elections. It then identified 93 legal issues on which there appeared to be meaningful difference among the 12 states’ criminal law rules. An analysis of the patterns of agreement and disagreement among the 12 states was striking. Of the many thousands of issues that must be settled in drafting a criminal code, only a handful – that sliver of criminal law issues that became matters of public political debate, such as those noted above – show a clear red-blue pattern of difference.

If not red-blue, then, what does explain the patterns of disagreement among the 12 states on the 93 criminal law issue? What factors have greater influence on the formulation of criminal law rules than the red-blue divide?

The Article examines a range of possible influences, giving specific examples that illustrate the operation of each: state characteristics, such as population; state criminal justice characteristics, such as crime rates; model codes, such as the ALI’s Model Penal Code; national headline events, such as the attempted assassination of President Reagan; local headline cases that over time grow into national movements, such as Tracy Thurman and domestic violence; local headline cases that produced only a local state effect; the effect of legislation passed by a neighboring state; and legislation as a response to judicial interpretation or invalidation.

In other words, not only is the red-blue divide of little effect for the vast bulk of criminal law, but the factors that do have effect are numerous and varied.

That is from a new paper by Paul H. Robinson, Hugh Rennie, and Clever Earth.  Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.

Social improvements that don’t create countervailing negative forces

Let us say you favor policy X, and take steps to see that policy X comes about.

Under many conditions, people who favor non-X will take additional countervailing steps to oppose X.  And in that case your actions in favor of X, on average, will lead to nothing.  In the meantime, you and also your opponents will have wasted material resources fighting over X.

This argument is hardly new, but most people do not like to consider it much.  They instead prefer to mood affiliate in favor of X, or perhaps against X.  They prefer to be “fighting for the right things.”

Perhaps visible political organizing is most likely to set this dynamic in motion.  Everyone can see what you are doing, and perhaps they can use their actions to fundraise for their own side.

That is one reason why I am not so thrilled with much of that organizing, even if I agree with it.  Of course there are other scenarios here.  Your involvement on behalf of X might just be flat-out decisive.  Or perhaps the group against X is too resource-constrained to respond to your greater advocacy.  That said, those descriptors (and others) might apply as well to either side of the dispute, your side included.  Scaling up the fight over X might cause you to be the one who simply flat out loses the struggle.

It is worth thinking which kinds of “small steps toward a much better world” do not produce such countervailing effects.

How about “being positive and constructive”?  Does it generate an equal and offsetting amount of negativity?

How about “trying to get people to be more reasonable, yet without offering a substantive political commitment bundled with that”?  Does that in turn motivate the crazies to work harder at making everyone go insane?  I am not sure.

What else might be effective, once these strategies are considered?

Does “refuting people” fit into this category?  Yes or no?

Which activities should you be abandoning altogether?  Or perhaps trying to do in secret, rather than publicly?