Results for “backlash”
107 found

Immigration Backlash

In a new paper Ernesto Tiburcio (on the job market) and Kara Ross Camarena study the effect of illegal immigration from Mexico on economic, political and cultural change in the United States. Studying illegal immigration can be difficult because the US doesn’t have great ways of tracking illegal immigrants. Tiburcio and Camerena, however, make excellent use of a high-quality dataset of “consular IDs” from the Mexican government. Consular IDs are identification cards issued by the Mexican government to its citizens living in the United States, regardless of US immigration status. Consular IDs are used especially, however, by illegal immigrants because they can’t easily get US IDs whereas legal migrants have passports, visas, work authorizations and so forth. Tiburcio and Camarena are able to track nearly 8 million migrants over more than a decade.

Our main results point to a conservative response in voting and policy. Recent inflows of unauthorized migrants increase the vote share for the Republican Party in federal elections, reduce local public spending, and shift it away from education towards law-and-order. A mean inflow of migrants (0.4 percent of the county population) boosts the Republican party vote share in midterm House elections by 3.9 percentage points. Our results are larger but qualitatively similar to other scholars’ findings of political reactions to migration inflows in other settings (Dinas et al., 2019; Dustmann et al., 2019; Harmon, 2018; Mayda et al., 2022a). The impacts on public spending are consistent with the Republican agenda. A smaller government and a focus on law-and-order are two of the key tenets of conservatism in the US. A mean inflow of migrants reduces total direct spending (per capita) by 2% and education spending (per child), the largest budget item at the local level, by 3%. The same flow increases relative spending on police and on the administration of justice by 0.23 and 0.15 percentage points, respectively. These impacts on relative spending suggest that the decrease in total expenditure does not simply reflect a reduction in tax revenues but also a conservative change in spending priorities.

The main reason for this, however, appears not to be economic losses such as job losses or wages declines–these are mostly zero or small with some exceptions for highly specific industries such as construction. Rather it’s more about the salience of in and out groups:

We study individuals’ universalist values to capture preferences for redistribution and openness to the out-group. Universalist values imply that one is concerned equally with the welfare of all individuals, whether they are known or not. By contrast, people with more communal values assign a greater weight to the welfare of ingroup members relative to out-group members. We find that counties become less universalist in response to the arrival of new unauthorized migrants. A mean flow of unauthorized migrants shifts counties 0.06 standardized units toward less universalist, i.e., more communal (Panel B, Column 5, std coeff: -0.16). This result is the most direct indication that some of the shift to the political right occurs because migrants trigger anti-out-group bias and preferences for less redistribution. Although this evidence is based on a smaller subset of counties, the impact is large. The change toward more communal values is consistent with theories that hinge on out-group bias. Ethnic heterogeneity breaks down trust, makes coordination more difficult, and reduces people’s interest in universal redistribution (Alesina et al., 1999).

These results are consistent with the larger literature that finds “Across the developed world today, support for welfareredistribution, and government provision of public goods is inversely correlated with the share of the population that is foreign-born and diverse.” (Nowrasteh and Forreseter 2020). Similarly, one explanation for the smaller US welfare state is that white-black salience reduces people’s interest in universal redistribution.

Contra Milton Friedman, it is possible to have open borders and a significant welfare state but it may be true that the demand for a welfare state declines with immigration, especially when the immigrants are saliently different.

The Anti-Promethean Backlash

Brink Lindsey has a series of Substack posts on the Great Stagnation. The first two

are very good reviews and summaries of where we stand. The third discusses what Brink calls The Anti-Promethean Backlash

…the anti-Promethean backlash — the broad-based cultural turn away from those forms of technological progress that extend and amplify human mastery over the physical world. The quest to build bigger, go farther and faster and higher, and harness ever greater sources of power was, if not abandoned, then greatly deprioritized in the United States and other rich democracies starting in the 1960s and 70s. We made it to the moon, and then stopped going. We pioneered commercial supersonic air travel, and then discontinued it. We developed nuclear power, and then stopped building new plants. There is really no precedent for this kind of abdication of powers in Western modernity; one historical parallel that comes to mind is the Ming dynasty’s abandonment of its expeditionary treasure fleet after the voyages of Zheng He.

…And this is what happened as a result:

Source: J. Storrs Hall, Where Is My Flying Car?

This is a chart of U.S. energy consumption per capita, which until around 1970 showed steady exponential growth of around 2 percent a year. The author calls this the “Henry Adams curve,” since the historian was an early observer of this phenomenon. But around 1970, the Henry Adams curve met the anti-Promethean backlash — and the backlash won.

The chart comes from Where Is My Flying Car? by J. Storrs Hall. It’s a weird, wacky book that rambles all over the place; it’s also brilliant, and it changed my mind about a matter of great importance.

Before reading Hall, if I had seen this chart — and maybe I did see something like it before, I’m not sure — I would have had a completely different reaction. My response would have been along the lines of: “Wow, look at capitalism’s ever-increasing energy efficiency. We’re getting more GDP per kilowatt-hour than ever before, thanks to information technology and the steady dematerialization of economic life. All hail postmaterialist capitalism!”

But Hall argues convincingly that the plateauing of the Henry Adams curve didn’t represent the natural evolution of capitalism in the Information Age. The bending of that curve, he claims, constituted self-inflicted injury. Our midcentury dreams of future progress — flying cars, nuclear power too cheap to meter, moon bases and underwater cities — didn’t fail to materialize simply because we were lousy at guessing how technology would actually develop. They failed to materialize because the anti-Promethean backlash, aided by with loss-averse apathy, left them strangled in their cribs.

He is especially convincing on nuclear power. My prior impression was that nuclear power had always been a high-cost white elephant propped up only by subsidies, but Hall documents that back in the 1950s and 60s, the cost of new plants was falling about 25 percent for every doubling of total capacity — a classic learning-curve trajectory that was abruptly halted in the 1970s by suffocating regulation. In 1974 the Atomic Energy Commission was abolished and the new Nuclear Regulatory Commission was established. In the almost half-century since then, there has not been a single new nuclear power plant approved and then subsequently built.

The earlier age of mass migration to America also brought political backlash

Gifts of the Immigrants, Woes of the Natives: Lessons from the Age of Mass Migration (2017). JOB MARKET PAPER
Abstract: In this paper, I show that political opposition to immigration can arise even when immigrants bring significant economic prosperity to receiving areas. I exploit exogenous variation in European immigration to US cities between 1910 and 1930 induced by World War I and the Immigration Acts of the 1920s, and instrument immigrants’ location decision relying on pre-existing settlement patterns. Immigration increased natives’ employment and occupational standing, and fostered industrial production and capital utilization. However, it lowered tax rates, public spending, and the pro-immigration party’s (i.e., Democrats) vote share. The inflow of immigrants was also associated with the election of more conservative representatives, and with rising support for anti-immigration legislation. I provide evidence that political backlash was increasing in the cultural distance between immigrants and natives, suggesting that diversity might be economically beneficial but politically hard to manage.

That is from Marco Tabellini, job market candidate at MIT.

Is backlash a symptom of *insufficient* immigration?

Bryan Caplan writes:

The fact that Londoners showed little sympathy for Brexit is telling: People who experience true mass immigration first-hand tend to stop seeing it as a problem.  “Backlash,” as Tyler Cowen calls it, is a symptom of insufficient migration – the zone where immigrants are noticeable but not ubiquitous.  I know he disagrees, but I honestly can’t figure out why.

The post makes many other different and interesting points, but I’ll stick with this one.  Here goes:

1. Had the UK had much freer immigration, London would be much more crowded.  With truly open borders, people would be sleeping on the sidewalks in large numbers.  London itself would have turned against such a high level of immigration, which quickly would have turned into a perceived occupation.

2. Changes often have different effects than levels: “Where foreign-born populations increased by more than 200% between 2001 and 2014, a Leave vote followed in 94% of cases. The proportion of migrants may be relatively low in Leave strongholds such as Boston, Lincolnshire, but it has soared in a short period of time. High numbers of migrants don’t bother Britons; high rates of change do.”

In other words, had there been higher levels of immigration into non-London parts of the UK, the backlash may well have been stronger yet.  For a careful reader of the Caplanian corpus, that is in fact a Caplanian point and I am surprised it did not occur to Bryan.

3. The highest quality and most easily assimilating immigrants will be attracted to London and the greater London area.  Packing Birmingham with London-style levels of immigration won’t give you London-style immigrants, nor will it turn Birmingham into London.

4. London already has a population pre-selected to like immigration.  Spreading London-like levels of immigration to the rest of England wouldn’t make immigration as popular elsewhere as it is currently in London, even if that immigration went as well elsewhere (which would not be the case, see #3).

5. Post 1980s, England underwent a very rapid and significant change with respect to the number of immigrants it allowed to stay in the country.  If that wasn’t fast enough for the open borders idea to avoid a backlash along the way, then perhaps the new saying ought to be “Only whiplash avoids backlash.”  But that won’t exactly be popular either.

There is a very simple interpretation of current events, including of course the Trump movement in the United States.  It is “the backlash effect against immigration is stronger than we used to think, and we need to adjust our expectations accordingly.”  When Bryan writes “I know he disagrees, but I honestly can’t figure out why”, I think he is simply afraid to stare that rather obvious truth in the eye.  In any case, it’s staring rather directly at him.

Why was the American populist backlash so long in coming?

Bob Davis asks that question.  I can think of a few hypotheses, none well-grounded:

1. It was first necessary for America to recover from recession, so people could be less scared, thus feeling sufficiently secure to go a bit crazy.

2. Rising expectations are required to sustain a backlash, and finally the economy was strong enough to deliver some of those.  This mechanism was discussed by Tocqueville in his book on the French Ancien Regime.  Of course this is a close cousin of #1.

3. Obama actually has been a towering and calming presence.  But after him…the deluge.

4. The “Great Man Theory of Trump.”  He has unique skills, and an unusual celebrity background, and the relevant variable is when he chose to actually run for President.

5. The institutional and intellectual capital of the Republican Party was finally run totally into the ground.  (But when exactly? And who perceived it as such other than Democrats?)

6. Americans have been paying closer attention to the terror attacks and refugee crisis in Europe than we traditionally might think, and thus they feel that the American system requires a radical wake-up call.

7. Traditional white males approached some kind of threshold where they realized from now on they will lose all political battles unless kind of radical rebellion is undertaken.  This hypothesis reminds me somewhat of the South’s decision to secede shortly before the Civil War.

8. Social media are more potent, and that helps populist sentiment, but populism isn’t actually any more popular these days (see Krugman, who notes Obama has fairly high approval ratings).

9. Noise.

These are just food for thought, I am not endorsing any of them.  And for the most part they are not mutually exclusive.

Backlash and secondary consequences

Hispanic activists have two words for Donald Trump — thank you.

“I think the greatest thing to ever happen to the Hispanic electorate is a gentleman named Donald Trump, he has crystalized the angst and anger of the Hispanic community,” U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce President & CEO Javier Palomarez told POLITICO in an interview. “I think that we can all rest assured that Hispanics can turn out in record numbers.”

The Swiss vote for immigration curbs: how much immigration is possible without a backlash?

Here is the news:

A narrow majority of voters in Switzerland on Sunday approved proposals that would reintroduce restrictions on the number of foreigners who are allowed to live and work in the country, a move that could have far-reaching implications for Switzerland’s relations with the European Union.

You will note:

Switzerland, which is not part of the European Union, has one of the highest proportions of foreigners in Europe, accounting for about 27 percent of the country’s population of about eight million.

In my view immigration has gone well for Switzerland, both economically and culturally, and I am sorry to see this happen, even apart from the fact that it may cause a crisis in their relations with the European Union.  That said, you can take 27% as a kind of benchmark for the limits of immigration in most or all of today’s wealthy countries.  I believe that as you approach a number in that range, you get a backlash.

That number will be higher when there is a frontier or a shortage of labor.  Those conditions do not generally hold in today’s wealthy countries.  Adam Ozimek reproduces data on immigration as a flow and stock relative to citizens, and as a stock Switzerland was third highest in the world with Luxembourg at over 32% and Israel over 27%.  I would say Israel does not count as their flows are largely a religious/ethnic unification from the former Soviet Union, in part with the purpose of protecting them against other potential population flows, to put it diplomatically.

The United States is 12th on the list with 12.1% foreign-born.  Referring to the flow of immigrants, Adam notes:

Instead of 1 million immigrants a year, these numbers suggest we could be letting in as many as 3 million a year and we would still not rank in the top 5.

And there I think you have the relevant range for what a more liberal immigration policy would look like or could look like.  I wonder by the way if for some reason small countries have an easier time swallowing high levels of migration, politically or culturally speaking, than do big countries.  That’s counterintuitive, but it’s what Adam’s tables seem to be suggesting.  (Is it because the small country is more culturally unified and thus somehow more secure?)  If you look at the top twelve countries in terms of receiving a flow of immigrants, only Spain is significantly above the 20 million population mark, with countries such as Iceland, Ireland, and New Zealand prominent (and I suspect a more recent measurement would boot Spain off this list altogether).  That would narrow the range of potential immigration increases even further for the United States.

One of my objections to the open borders idea is that I think it would be negative for sustainable, actually realized flows of immigration.

Addendum: Here is the distribution of voting across Switzerland, the Italian section was most anti-immigrant.  Here is Rachman on why the Swiss should not be punished.  Here is an excellent detailed analysis by Dennis MacShane.  Overall I see this as a broader political earthquake which will spread throughout Europe.

The political backlash against S&P

Political revenge may be coming, and yet the ratings agencies are considered by law a form of protected speech.

Keep in mind it was the federal government, and the regulatory state, that elevated the power of these agencies in the first place.

If all they do is take away the protected political status of those agencies, I am fine with the outcome but still I do not like the process.  That the agencies were a) often mistaken in the past, and b) lobbied the government for privileges in the past, does not appease me.  Exercising free speech rights should not lead to regulatory retaliation from Congress, even if some of the changes are good ones.

My Conversation with Fareed Zakaria

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  You can tell he knows what an interview is!  At the same time, he understands this differs from many of his other venues and he responds with flying colors.  Here is the episode summary:

Tyler sat down with Fareed to discuss what he learned from Khushwant Singh as a boy, what made his father lean towards socialism, why the Bengali intelligentsia is so left-wing, what’s stuck with him from his time at an Anglican school, what’s so special about visiting Amritsar, why he misses a more syncretic India, how his time at the Yale Political Union dissuaded him from politics, what he learned from Walter Isaacson and Sam Huntington, what put him off academia, how well some of his earlier writing as held up, why he’s become focused on classical liberal values, whether he had reservations about becoming a TV journalist, how he’s maintained a rich personal life, and more.

Here is one excerpt:

COWEN: Why couldn’t you talk Singh out of his Nehruvian socialism? He was a great liberal. He loved free speech, very broad-minded, as you know much better than I do. But he, on economics, was weak. Or no?

ZAKARIA: Oh, no, you’re entirely right. By the way, I would say the same is true of my father, with whom I had many, many such conversations. You’d find this interesting, Tyler. My father was a young Indian nationalist who — as he once put it to me — made the most important decision in his life, politically, when he was 13 or 14 years old, which was, as a young Indian Muslim, he chose Nehru’s vision of secular democracy as the foundation of a nation rather than Jinnah’s view of religious nationalism. He chose India rather than Pakistan as an Indian Muslim.

He was politically so interesting and forward-leaning, but he was a hopeless social — a sort of social democrat, but veering towards socialism. Both these guys were. Here’s why, I think. For that whole generation of people — by the way, my father got a scholarship to London University and went to study with Harold Laski, the great British socialist economist. Laski told him, “You are actually not an economist; you are a historian.” So, my father went on and got a PhD at London University in Indian history.

That whole generation of Indians who wanted independence were imbued with . . . There were two things going on. One, the only people in Britain who supported Indian independence were the Labour Party and the Fabian Socialists. All their allies were all socialists. There was a common cause and there was a symbiosis because these were your friends, these were your allies, these were the only people supporting you, the cause that mattered the most to you in your life.

The second part was, a lot of people who came out of third-world countries felt, “We are never going to catch up with the West if we just wait for the market to work its way over hundreds of years.” They looked at, in the ’30s, the Soviet Union and thought, “This is a way to accelerate modernization, industrialization.” They all were much more comfortable with the idea of something that sped up the historical process of modernization.

My own view was, that was a big mistake, though I do think there are elements of what the state was able to do that perhaps were better done in a place like South Korea than in India, but that really explains it.

My father was in Britain in ’45 as a student. As a British subject then, you got to vote in the election if you were in London, if you were in Britain. I said to him, “Who did you vote for in the 1945 election?” Remember, this is the famous election right after World War II, in which Churchill gets defeated, and he gets up the next morning and looks at the papers, and his wife says to him, “Darling, it’s a blessing in disguise.” He says, “Well, at the moment it seems very effectively disguised.”

My father voted in that election. I said to him, “You’re a huge fan of Churchill,” because I’d grown up around all the Churchill books, and my father could quote the speeches. I said, “Did you vote for Churchill?” He said, “Oh good lord, no.” I said, “Why? I thought you were a great admirer of his.” He said, “Look, on the issue that mattered most to me in life, he was an unreconstructed imperialist. A vote for Labour was a vote for Indian independence. A vote for Churchill was a vote for the continuation of the empire.” That, again, is why their friends were all socialists.

Excellent throughout.  And don’t forget Fareed’s new book — discussed in the podcast — Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present.

What should I ask Fareed Zakaria?

Here is Fareed’s home page, here is Wikipedia:

Fareed Rafiq Zakaria…is an Indian-American journalist, political commentator, and author. He is the host of CNN‘s Fareed Zakaria GPS and writes a weekly paid column for The Washington Post. He has been a columnist for Newsweek, editor of Newsweek International, and an editor at large of Time.

He was managing editor of Foreign Affairs at age 28, briefly a wine columnist for Slate, and much more.  His new book Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present is very classically liberal, and in my terms “Progress Studies”-oriented.

So what should I ask him?

Avoiding Repugnance

Works in Progress has a good review of the state of compensating organ donors, especially doing so with nudges or non-price factors to avoid backlash from those who find mixing money and organs to be repugnant. My own idea for this, first expressed in Entrepreneurial Economics, but many times since is a no-give, no-take rule. Under no-give, no-take, people who sign their organ donor cards get priority should they one day need an organ. The great virtue of no-give, no-take is that it provides an incentive to sign one’s organ donor card but one that strikes most people as fair and just and not repugnant. Israel introduced a no-give, no-take policy in 2008 and it appears to have worked well.

In March 2008, to increase donations, the Israeli government imple­mented a ‘priority allocation’ policy to encourage more people to sign up to donate organs after their deaths. Once someone has been registered as a donor for three years, they receive priority allocation if they themselves need a transplant. If a donor dies and their organs are usable, their close family members also get higher priority for transplants if they need them – ​which also means that families are more inclined to give their consent for their deceased relatives’ organs to be used.

In its first year, the scheme led to 70,000 additional sign-ups. The momentum continued, with 11.1 percent of all potential organ donors being registered in the five years after the scheme was introduced, compared to 7.7 percent before. According to a 2017 study, when presented with the decision to authorize the donation of their dead relative’s organs, 55 percent of families decided to donate after the priority scheme, compared to 45 percent before.

Trump’s threat to let Putin invade NATO countries

I don’t usually blog on “candidate topics,”or “Trump topics,” but a friend of mine asked me to cover this.  As you probably know, Trump threatened to let NATO countries that failed to meet the two percent of gdp defense budget obligation fend for themselves against Putin (video here, with Canadian commentary).  Trump even said he would encourage the attacker.

Long-time MR readers will know I am not fond of Trump, either as a president or otherwise.  (And I am very fond of NATO.)  But on this issue I think he is basically correct.  Yes, I know all about backlash effects.  But so many NATO members do not keep up serious defense capabilities.  And for decades none of our jawboning has worked.

Personally, I would not have proceeded or spoken as Trump did, and I do not address the collective action problems in my own sphere of work and life in a comparable manner (“if you’re not ready with enough publications for tenure, we’ll let Bukele take you!” or “Spinoza, if you don’t stop scratching the couch, I won’t protect you against the coyotes!”).  So if you wish to take that as a condemnation of Trump, so be it.  Nonetheless, I cannot help but feel there is some room for an “unreasonable” approach on this issue, whether or not I am the one to carry that ball.

Even spending two percent of gdp would not get many NATO allies close to what they need to do (and yes I do understand the difference between defense spending and payments to NATO, in any case many other countries are falling down on the job).  I strongly suspect that many of those nations just don’t have effective fighting forces at all, and in essence they are standing at zero percent of gdp, even if their nominal expenditures say hit 1.7 percent.  Remember the report that the German Army trained with broomsticks because they didn’t have enough machine guns?  How many of those forces are actually ready to fire and fight in a combat situation?  It is far from obvious that the Ukraine war — a remarkably grave and destructive event — has fixed that situation.

The nations that see no need to have workable martial capabilities at all are a real threat to NATO, and yes this includes Canada, which shares a very large de facto Arctic border with Putin, full of valuable natural resources.  Even a United States led by Nikki Haley cannot do all the heavy lifting here.  What if the U.S. is tied down in Asia and/or the Middle East when further trouble strikes?  That no longer seems like such a distant possibility.  And should Western Europe, over time, really become “foreign policy irrelevant,” relative to the more easternmost parts of NATO?  That too is not good for anybody.

With or without Trump’s remarks, we are likely on a path of nuclear proliferation, starting in Poland.

People talk about threats to democracy in Poland, and I am not happy they have restricted the power of their judiciary.  But consider Germany.  The country has given up its energy independence, it may lose a significant portion of its manufacturing base, its earlier economic strategy was to cast its lot with Russia and China, AfD is the #2 party there and growing, and the former east is politically polarized and illiberal, among other problems.  Most of all, the country has lost its will to defend itself.  That is in spite of a well-educated population and a deliberative political systems that in the more distant past worked well.  You can criticize Trump’s stupid provocations all you want, but unless you have a better idea for waking Germany (and other countries) up, you are probably just engaging in your own mood affiliation.  On this issue, “argument by adjective” ain’t gonna’ cut it.

The best scenario is that Trump raises these issues, everyone in Canada and Western Europe screams, they clutch their pearls and are horrified for months, but over time the topic becomes more focal and more ensconced in their consciousness.  Eventually more Democrats may pick up the Trump talking points, as they have done with China.  Perhaps three to five years from now that can lead to some positive action.  And if they are calling his words “appalling and unhinged,” as indeed they are, well that is going to drive more page views.

The odds may be against policy improvement in any case, but by this point it seems pretty clear standard diplomacy isn’t going to work.  I am just not that opposed to a “Hail Mary, why not speak some truth here?” approach to the problem.  Again, I wouldn’t do it, but at the margin it deserves more support than it is getting.  Of course it is hard for the MSM American intelligentsia to show any sympathy for Trump’s remarks, because his words carry the implication that spending more on social welfare has an unacceptably high opportunity cost.  So you just won’t find much objective debate of the issues at stake.

If you’re worried about Trump encouraging Putin, that is a real concern but the nations on the eastern flank of NATO are all above two percent, Bulgaria excepted.  Maybe this raises the chance that Putin is emboldened to blow up some Western European infrastructure?  Make a move against Canada in the Arctic?  I still could see that risk as panning out into greater preparedness, greater deterrence, and a better outcome overall.  Western Europe of course has a gdp far greater than that of Putin’s Russia. they just don’t have the right values, in addition to not spending enough on defense.

So on this one Trump is indeed the Shakespearean truth-teller, and (I hope) for the better.

Is El Salvador special?

But Bukele copycats and those who believe his model can be replicated far and wide overlook a key point: The conditions that allowed him to wipe out El Salvador’s gangs are unlikely to jointly appear elsewhere in Latin America.

El Salvador’s gangs were unique, and far from the most formidable criminal organizations in the entire region. For decades, a handful of gangs fought one another for control of territory and became socially and politically powerful. But, unlike cartels in Mexico, Colombia and Brazil, El Salvador’s gangs weren’t big players in the global drug trade and focused more on extortion. Compared to these other groups, they were poorly financed and not as heavily armed.

Mr. Bukele started to deactivate the gangs by negotiating with their leaders, according to Salvadoran investigative journalists and a criminal investigation led by a former attorney general. (The government denies this.) When Mr. Bukele then arrested their foot soldiers in large sweeps that landed many innocent people in prison, the gangs collapsed.

It would not be such a simple story elsewhere in Latin America, where criminal organizations are wealthier, more internationally connected and much better armed than El Salvador’s gangs once were. When other governments in the region have tried to take down gang and cartel leaders, these groups haven’t simply crumbled. They have fought back, or new criminal groups have quickly filled the void, drawn by the drug trade’s huge profits. Pablo Escobar’s war on the state in 1980s-90s Colombia, the backlash by cartels to Mexican law enforcement activity since the mid-2000s, and the violent response to Ecuador’s government’s recent moves against gangs are just a few examples.

El Salvador also had more formidable and professional security forces, committed to crushing the gangs when Mr. Bukele called on them, than some of its neighbors. Take Honduras, where gang-sponsored corruption among security forces apparently runs deep. That helped doom Ms. Castro’s attempts to emulate Mr. Bukele from the start. In other countries, like Mexico, criminal groups have also reportedly managed to co-opt high-ranking members of the military and police. In Venezuela, it has been reported that military officials have run their own drug trafficking operation. Even if presidents send soldiers and police to do Bukele-style mass roundups, security forces may not be prepared, or may have incentives to undermine the task at hand.

Here is more from Will Freeman and  (NYT), interesting throughout.

Some observations on universities and recent outrages

1. I feel stupid and unnecessary simply piling on with the usual observations and criticisms.  Nonetheless they are mostly deserved, for a varying mix of administrators, faculty, and students.

2. The real black-pill is to realize that the structural equilibria behind the outrages also play a role in more usual affairs.  Ultimately these cannot be entirely “segregated” incidents.  Through invisible hand mechanisms, there is too much bias and too much groupthink conformity, even in the evaluation of ordinary scientific propositions.

3. This is true for the economics profession as well, though few will tell you this.  They won’t tell you because they are the ones doing it, though often unintentionally or with genuine motives.  They are laying bricks in the edifice of intellectual conformity, if only through what they do not talk about.

3b. I don’t think GMU economics differs in kind here, so politically speaking the situation is symmetric with respect to bias.  Nonetheless mainstream policy views are far more prevalent than GMU-type policy views, so the actual net bias in practice is very much in the [fill in the blank ] direction.  (What should I call it?  The “Democratic Party direction”?  That doesn’t seem quite right, but it is the closest descriptor I have found.  Perhaps “the Democratic Party direction but passed through some intellectualizing filters”?)  If you really think there are enough checks and balances in place to prevent this bias and conformity and lack of self-awareness from arising, I hope the recent outrages have black-pilled you just a bit.

4. Those who perform the outrageous acts of commission or omission are not usually evil people, just as most Irish-American IRA supporters in America were not evil people.  Very often their failings stem from a mix of narcissism, mood affiliation, and fail to think through their professed views (perhaps they are indeed evil from a Randian point of view?).  They frame political issues in personal, emotional terms, namely which values ought to be elevated (e.g., “sympathy for victimhood”), and that framing determines their response to daily events.  Since their views on the personal and emotional side are held so strongly, it simply feels to them that they are right, even when they are glorifying groups and cultures that currently are failing badly and also performing some very bad and evil acts.  They get caught up in such glorifications, including through the medium of apologetics, and through the other twists and turns they need to make to sustain their intellectual positions, even if they are not fundamentally malevolent as human beings.

I think about twenty percent of “the outrageous ones in academia” genuinely have evil, malevolent views, the rest are victims of their narcissistic mood affiliation.

4b. Keep in mind the eighty percent often have a deeper sense than you do of the humanity and vividness of the groups and cultures that currently are failing badly.  That makes them all the more convinced that they are right and you are wrong.  They can indeed feel that you do not “know what is going on.”  In the meantime, you should try to acquire that deeper sense.  As it stands, there is a pretty good chance you don’t have it, and that means you are deficient too.  That is your own brand of narcissistic mood affiliation.

5. If you hear someone proclaiming a strong distinction between their “scientific views” and their “personal views,” usually they are in effect saying they don’t want their underlying “actual views on net” much challenged.  It is fine to proclaim agnosticism about areas you don’t do research in, but then you should actually be agnostic about the areas you don’t do research in.  I have never met such a person.  Unwillingness to recognize these bad practices is a fundamental problem in academic economics discourse today.  It cloaks so many of the current vices under the ostensible mantle of science.

6. The current backlash against academia is likely to remove or dampen the most egregious commissions and omissions on display, as we recently have been witnessing them, but without improving the underlying incentive structure more generally.  Academics will more likely put on a better face, but without much reducing their biases on net.  It might end up that such biases become more invisible and harder to detect and root out.

Have a nice day!

Diogo Costa on Brazil

From my email, via Gonzalo Schwartz:

The country ranks third globally in consuming information via digital platforms, a landscape that cultivates distrust in public institutions and ignites social unrest. This has fostered a rise in right-wing populism, including the election of former president Jair Bolsonaro, intensifying what Martin Gurri describes as a ‘crisis of authority.’  Efforts to counter this crisis, however, further destabilize Brazil’s democracy. 

Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes exemplifies this turmoil with his controversial measures, including arbitrary digital content removalousting elected officials, and implementing unprecedented surveillance. Moraes and his peers have been criticized for investigating entrepreneurs and freezing assets over alleged anti-democratic private messagesprobing executives from Google and Telegram for supposed disinformation campaignsrevoking passports of foreign-based journalists, and censoring a film about then-president Jair Bolsonaro. 

The government’s endorsement of these measures amplifies the crisis. It has established a “National Attorney’s Office for the Defense of Democracy” to combat disinformation, while introducing a contested “fact-checking” platform. The Federal Prosecutor’s Office recently requested user data from followers of former President Jair Bolsonaro across major social media platforms to aid their investigation into anti-democratic activities. 

Two key anti-corruption figures, Senator Sergio Moro, an ex-judge, and Representative Deltan Dallagnol, a former prosecutor, are under increased political assault. Accused of colluding in past investigations, they now face political retribution. Dallagnol has already been ousted from Congress by Brazil’s electoral court, and many speculate that Moro will follow suit. Their plight was summed up by President Lula’s statement, “I will only feel well when I f*ck with Moro”. 

These high-profile cases are emblematic of a broader collapse of Brazil’s anti-corruption efforts. Initiatives like Operation Car Wash, which reclaimed R$3.28 billion out of R$6.2 billion in misappropriated funds, are now being undermined by political backlash. This underscores the urgent need for robust institutions that can effectively combat corruption without succumbing to political pressure. 

Brazil’s circumstances resonate regionally due to its leadership role. As Ian Bremmer recently stated, commenting on the Supreme Court making former president Jair Bolsonaro ineligible for the next eight years, “Brazil [is] setting the standard for U.S. democracy”. This political meddling could influence other countries, potentially eroding the rule of law in other democracies. 

Strengthening Brazil’s commitment to the rule of law transcends national borders — it’s a regional imperative. The advantages span from curbing corruption to advancing large infrastructure projects unimpeded by interference, as well as bolstering economic relationships given Brazil’s significant role in regional trade.