Category: Political Science

An Economic Approach to Homer’s Odyssey: Part III

Published by Liberty Fund, by me, here is the third and final installment.  Excerpt:

“Below is a brief and simplified catalog of the major polities described in The Odyssey:

  • • Pylos and Sparta: Visited by Telemachus, superficially seem normal but they seem sadder on reflection and Sparta relies on intoxication to support public order.
  • • Ogygia, or Calypso: An unbearable paradise, there is no utopia.
  • • Phaeacia: Relatively well-run, inward-looking, passive-aggressive, “control freak” syndrome.
  • • The Lotus Eaters: Another unbearable “utopia.”
  • • The Cyclopes: Anarchistic, brutish, and the community is ineffective and unable to defend itself.
  • • Aeolus: A closed society, based on incest, hostile to outsiders, a more extreme and dysfunctional version of Phaeacia.
  • • Laestrygonia: Giants, they throw boulders and murder, and in some ways resemble the Cyclopes. Tendencies toward anarchy are widespread, and not confined to the Cyclopes.
  • • Aeaea (Circe): There is the bed of tyrannical but beautiful Circe, or life as a well-fed pig. Again, utopias are impossible and immortality would bore us.
  • • Cimmeria: Dark, bleak, and unloved by God. Possibly the default setting.
  • • The Underworld: Everyone is sad (and dead), yet they talk like actual humans and also tell the truth. Lesson: the living cannot escape artifice and deception.
  • • Ithaca: Usually wrapped up in war and revenge-taking, chaotic and lacking in trust and lacking in clarity about sovereignty. This is another one of the default options.
  • • Syria: Initially prosperous but wrecked by the arrival of avaricious merchants. Unstable.
  • • Crete: A diverse society of perfect trust, within a narrative of Odysseus-in-disguise, but it has no chance of existing.”

My overall goal has been to pull out the implicit “public choice” strands in Homer’s Odyssey.  It is very much a poem about politics, and the book is among other things a study in comparative politics.

Do read the whole essay, and here are parts one and two.

The political economy of Manus AI

Early reports are pretty consistent, and they indicate that Manus agentic AI is for real, and ahead of its American counterparts.  I also hear it is still glitchy  Still, it is easy to imagine Chinese agentic AI “getting there” before the American product does.  If so, what does that world look like?

The cruder way of putting the question is: “are we going to let Chinese agentic bots crawl all over American computers?”

The next step question is: “do we in fact have a plausible way to stop this from happening?”

Many Chinese use VPNs to get around their own Great Firewall and access OpenAI products.  China could toughen its firewall and shut down VPNs, but that is very costly for them.  America doesn’t have a Great Firewall at all, and the First Amendment would seem to prevent very tough restrictions on accessing the outside world.  Plus there can always be a version of the new models not directly connected to China.

We did (sort of) pass a TikTok ban, but even that applied only to the app.  Had the ban gone through, you still could have accessed TikTok through its website.  And so, one way or another, Americans will be able to access Manus.

Manus will crawl your computer and do all sorts of useful tasks for you.  If not right now, probably within a year or not much more.  An American alternative might leapfrog them, but again maybe not.

It is easy to imagine government banning Manus from its computers, just as the state of Virginia banned DeepSeek from its computers.  I’m just not sure that matters much.  Plenty of people will use it on their private computers, and it could become an integral part of many systems, including systems that interact with the U.S. public sector.

It is not obvious that the CCP will be able to pull strings to manipulate every aspect of Manus operations.  I am not worried that you might order a cheeseburger on-line, and end up getting Kung Pao chicken.  Still, the data collected by the parent company will in principle be CCP- accessible.  Remember that advanced AI can be used to search through that information with relative ease.  And over time, though probably not initially, you can imagine a Manus-like entity designed to monitor your computer for information relevant to China and the CCP.  Even if it is not easy for a Manus-like entity to manipulate your computer in a “body snatchers-like” way, you can see the points of concern here.

Financial firms might be vulnerable to information capture attacks.  Will relatives of U.S. military personnel be forbidden from having agentic Chinese AI on their computers?  That does not seem enforceable.

Maybe you’re all worried now!

But should you be?

Whatever problems American computer owners might face, Chinese computer owners will face too.  And the most important Chinese computer owner is the CCP and its affiliates, including the military.

More likely, Manus will roam CCP computers too.  No, I don’t think that puts “the aliens” in charge, but who exactly is in charge?  Is it Butterfly Effect, the company behind Manus, and its few dozen employees?  In the short run, yes, more or less.  But they too over time are using more and more agentic AIs, perhaps different brands from other companies too.

Think of some new system of checks and balances as being created, much as an economy is itself a spontaneous order.  And in this new spontaneous order, a lot of the cognitive capital is coming outside the CCP.

In this new system, is the CCP still the smartest or most powerful entity in China?  Or does the spontaneous order of various AI models more or less “rule it”?  To what extent do the decisions of the CCP become a derivative product of Manus (and other systems) advice, interpretation, and data gathering?

What exactly is the CCP any more?

Does the importance of Central Committee membership decline radically?

I am not talking doomsday scenarios here.  Alignment will ensure that the AI entities (for instance) continue to supply China with clean water, rather than poisoning the water supply.  But those AI entities have been trained on information sets that have very different weights than what the CCP implements through its Marxism-swayed, autocracy-swayed decisions.  Chinese AI systems look aligned with the CCP, given that they have some crude, ex post censorship and loyalty training.  But are the AI systems truly aligned in terms of having the same limited, selective set of information weights that the CCP does?  I doubt it.  If they did, probably they would not be the leading product.

(There is plenty of discussion of alignment problems with AI.  A neglected issue is whether the alignment solution resulting from the competitive process is biased on net toward “universal knowledge” entities, or some other such description, rather than “dogmatic entities.”  Probably it is, and probably that is a good thing?  …But is it always a good thing?)

Does the CCP see this erosion of its authority and essence coming?  If so, will they do anything to try to preempt it?  Or maybe a few of them, in Straussian fashion, allow it or even accelerate it?

Let’s say China can indeed “beat” America at AI, but at the cost of giving up control over China, at least as that notion is currently understood.  How does that change the world?

Solve for the equilibrium!

Who exactly should be most afraid of Manus and related advances to come?

Who loses the most status in the new, resulting checks and balances equilibrium?

Who gains?

Should OneQuadrillionOwls be worried?

IMO this is one of the more compelling “disaster” scenarios — not that AI goes haywire because it hates humanity, but that it acquires power by being effective and winning trust — and then, that there is a cohort of humans that fear this expansion of trust and control, and those humans find themselves at odds with the nebulously part-human-part-AI governance structure, and chaos ensues.

It’s a messy story that doesn’t place blame at the feet of the AI per se, but in the fickleness of the human notion of legitimacy. It’s not enough to do a good job at governance — you have to meet the (maybe impossible, often contradictory) standards of human citizens, who may dislike you because of what you are or what you represent in some emotional sense.

As soon as any entity (in this case, AI) is given significant power, it has to grapple with questions of legitimacy, and with the thorniest question of all — how shall I deal with people who are trying to undermine my power?

Here is the relevant Reddit thread.  Change is tough!

The Ukraine peace deal

The information environment is so soiled right now, it is especially difficult to assess such matters.  And I, like many others, am upset about the rhetoric and methods that have been applied from the American side.  Nonetheless I think this may be a better deal than its current press indicates.  Let me note a few features at the margin, rather than trying to assess the entire situation comprehensively:

1. I don’t know what those mineral rights in Ukraine are worth, but past some level of corruption there is a resource curse (though not for Norway).  So losing half of that revenue may not be as bad for Ukraine as it sounds.  Was all that oil and gas wealth so good for Russia?

2. For better or worse, the mineral rights deal will, de facto, be renegotiated many times.  Read your Williamson and Tirole!  So whatever your opinion of what ends up being put on paper this week, think more about solving for the equilibrium over the longer run. The American incentive and willingness to give future aid is now somewhat higher than it would have been, without a mineral rights deal.

3. Since this is Trump’s deal, the Trumpist American right will now have a strong stake in making the deal work.  That is significant.

4. At least potentially, Ukraine is now in some funny way “U.S.-certified” by the presence of the mineral rights deal.  I do understand the moral hazard problems here, but perhaps the alternative was a slow loss of the war, due to manpower problems of the Ukrainian side.

5. Many people are in denial about how much the current Ukrainian regime, whether justly or not, is unpopular with both Democrats in Congress and with the U.S. deep state.  There are far fewer courses of action than many deal critics would like to believe, and it is a mistake to think of all of this as coming from Trump.  How exactly would it go trying to push another major Ukraine aid package through Congress?

6. I am not sure what European defense efforts will amount to, but we do see various promises in a constructive direction.  Overall I am skeptical, but still there is some motion here.

7. As the prospects for the deal have approached, the Ukraine government bond market has been pretty happy.

So I am hoping for the best, and I consider these views as very subject to rapid revision.

An Economic Approach to Homer’s Odyssey: Part II

My three-part essay for Liberty Fund continues, here is the opener:

In the previous article, I outlined what an economic approach to reading Homer’s epic, The Odyssey,1 might look like. I also noted that what most strikes me about The Odyssey is Homer’s treatment of comparative political regimes. Looking at the wide variety of regimes Odysseus encounters is the focus of this article.

Given that human behavior, at least in The Odyssey, can be understood in terms of the non-standard assumptions described in my previous essay, what are then the possible states of affairs? Which polities might we look to for arranging human interactions and maintaining political order? Utopia is not readily achieved, not only because of material constraints, but also because human behavior is too restless and too desirous of alternative states of affairs. A straightforward order based on political virtue is also beyond human grasp, again because it clashes with the nature of human beings as we understand them. What then might fit with a vision of humans as restless, intoxicating, deceiving, and self-deceiving creatures? The travel explorations of The Odyssey can be understood as, in part, an attempt to address this question.

I will now consider the major and some of the minor polities described by The Odyssey, roughly in the order they appear in the story.

The discussion starts with Pylos and Sparta…

Reforming the NIH

It seems the Trump proposal to simply cut overhead to fifteen percent will not stand up in the courts, at least not without Congressional approval?  Nonetheless a few of you have asked me what I think of the idea.

My preferred reforms for the NIH include the following:

1. Cap pre-specified overhead at 25 percent, down from a range running up to 60 percent.

2. Encourage more coverage of overhead in the proposals themselves, where the researchers are accountable for how the overhead funds are spent.  Severely limit how much the “overhead” cross-subsidizes other university functions, as is currently the case.

3. Fund a greater number of proposals, with the money coming from overhead reductions, as outlined in #1 and #2.

4. Set up a new, fully independent biomedical research arm of the federal government, based on DARPA-like principles.  In fact this was seriously proposed a few years ago, with widespread (but insufficient) support.

I would note a few additional points, which have been covered in earlier MR posts over the years:

5. The NIH could not get its act together during Covid to make fast grants with sufficient rapidity during a time of crisis.  They performed much worse than did say the NSF.

6. A while back the NIH set up a program to make riskier grants.  The program did not in fact make riskier grants.

7. The NIH killed the idea of an independent DARPA-like biomedical research agency, fearing it would limit the size and influence of the NIH itself.

8. The submission forms, their length, and the associated processes are absurd.  Whether or not the costs there are high in an absolute sense, it is a sign the current NIH is far too obsessed with process, as happens to just about every mature bureaucracy.

At this point it is obvious that the NIH cannot reform itself.  It is also obvious that a slower, technocratic approach just gives the interest groups — in this case it is “the states” most of all — time to mobilize to protect the current NIH.  There are universities in many Congressional districts and a fair amount of money at stake.

I do not per se favor a move to fifteen percent overhead, as I do understand the associated costs on scientific research.  Nonetheless I take very seriously the possibility that a radical “thoughtless” cut now stands some chance of getting us to where we ought to be in the longer run, especially since subsequent administrations will get further cracks at this problem.  They can up overhead to 25 percent, and set up the new DARPA-H.  I just don’t see why that is impossible, and it may not even be unlikely.  So what exactly is your discount rate and risk aversion here?

I feel the defenses of the NIH I am reading do not take the entire broader analysis seriously enough.  They do not take sufficiently seriously that the writers themselves have failed to adequately reform the NIH.  And over time, without serious reform, the bureaucratic stultification will only get worse.

How should government disclosure be done?

That is my recent Bloomberg column on this all-important topic.  Here is one part:

The risk is that Trump would hoard the most sensitive information and disclose selectively, to manipulate the news cycle or to distract attention from other events. It also could give him more political weapons to use against what he calls the “deep state.” The president himself is hardly a model of transparency, whether the questions concern his tax returns, his medical exams or the possession of classified documents after leaving office.

But again, the issue is governmental disclosure, and so far, Trump’s record is 0 for 1. Before assuming office, he suggested that the US military knew more than it was letting on about the drones that had been sighted above New Jersey and other Northeastern states. Then, after Trump took office, his press secretary said only that they were “authorized” by the government “for research and various other reasons.” There has been no subsequent attempt to clarify matters. Personally, I am more confused than I was a month ago.

Perhaps there are good national security reasons for this silence. The point is that it is foolish to expect full and open disclosure from the president, no matter what his executive order says or what he has earlier promised.

One way to improve the process would be to appoint some independent auditors on a bipartisan basis, perhaps selected from Congress. Ex post, those auditors could judge whether disclosure, with transparent explanations, had actually occurred. They could grade the degree of disclosure, but they would not have the power to prevent it. Otherwise, there is a risk that — to choose an example not quite at random — evidence favoring the “two gunmen” hypothesis for JFK’s assassination is released, but conflicting evidence for the “lone gunman” hypothesis is suppressed. The auditors would issue a report saying whether disclosure was unbalanced or unfair.

And this:

Another problem with the task force is that it is authorized for only six months. Bureaucracies are by nature slow-moving, and can be even more so when they wish to be. A six-month deadline creates incentives to wait things out. Trump could threaten to extend the mandate, and perhaps he will. But then the disclosure campaign would turn out to be just a bargaining chip, rather than a genuine attempt to bring the truth to light.

Definitely recommended.

What should I ask Jennifer Pahlka?

Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with her.  From Wikipedia:

Jennifer Pahlka (born December 27, 1969) is an American businesswoman and political advisor. She is the founder and former executive director of Code for America. She served as U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer from June 2013 to June 2014 and helped found the United States Digital Service. Previously she had worked at CMP Media with various roles in the computer game industry. She was the co-chair and general manager of the Web 2.0 conferences. In June 2023, she released the book Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better.

Recently she has been working on the Niskanen Institute state capacity project.  So what should I ask her?

The Effect of European Monarchs on State Performance

We create a novel reign-level data set for European monarchs, covering all major European states between the 10th and 18th centuries. We first document a strong positive relationship between rulers’ cognitive ability and state performance. To address endogeneity issues, we exploit the facts that (i) rulers were appointed according to hereditary succession, independent of their ability, and (ii) the widespread inbreeding among the ruling dynasties of Europe led over centuries to quasirandom variation in ruler ability. We code the degree of blood relationship between the parents of rulers, which also reflects “hidden” layers of inbreeding from previous generations. The coefficient of inbreeding is a strong predictor of ruler ability, and the corresponding instrumental variable results imply that ruler ability had a sizeable effect on the performance of states and their borders. This supports the view that “leaders made history,” shaping the European map until its consolidation into nation states. We also show that rulers mattered only where their power was largely unconstrained. In reigns where parliaments checked the power of monarchs, ruler ability no longer affected their state’s performance.

By Sebastian Ottinger and Nico Voigtländer, from Econometrica.  Here are less gated versions.  Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.

USPS as a failed sovereign wealth fund

The U.S. government has a direct stake in natural resource wealth, collecting royalties from the extraction of minerals on federal land. In a good year, these royalties (which are dispersed to states) total around $20 billion, although the historic annual average is closer to $10 billion.

These figures pale in comparison to what is arguably America’s largest commercial endeavor: the U.S. Postal Service (USPS). The USPS relies on its vast network of land, buildings, trucks, and processing machines to generate about $80 billion in revenue per year. The obvious problem is that, unlike with Norway and Saudi Arabia’s black gold, the USPS can’t turn a profit on its large asset holdings. The agency lost $9.5 billion on net in FY 2024, and has burned through $100 billion over the past fifteen years…

To sum up: the U.S. isn’t Norway nor Saudi Arabia. Our largest asset-rich enterprise is really bad at making money and channeling investments to productive uses. And, it is for lack of trying; the USPS can do a far better job generating a return on assets such as property.

Here is the full Substack by Ross Marchand.

“By your culture, we shall know ye”

From President Trump:

At my direction, we are going to make the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., GREAT AGAIN. I have decided to immediately terminate multiple individuals from the Board of Trustees, including the Chairman, who do not share our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture. We will soon announce a new Board, with an amazing Chairman, DONALD J. TRUMP! Just last year, the Kennedy Center featured Drag Shows specifically targeting our youth — THIS WILL STOP. The Kennedy Center is an American Jewel, and must reflect the brightest STARS on its stage from all across our Nation. For the Kennedy Center, THE BEST IS YET TO COME!

Here is the link, and I will keep an eye on what happens there and report back.

“Can America Win the AI War with China?”

A long video chat, with Geoffrey Cain, who is more hawkish than I am.  Bari Weiss moderates.  One argument I make is that America may prefer if China does well with AI, because the non-status quo effects of AI may disrupt their system more than ours.  I also argue that for all the AI rival with China (which to be sure is real), much of the future may consist of status quo powers America and China working together to put down smaller-scale AI troublemakers around the rest of the world.  Interesting throughout.

What should I ask Sheilagh Ogilvie?

She is a Canadian economic historian at Oxford, here is from her home page:

I am an economic historian. I explore the lives of ordinary people in the past and try to explain how poor economies get richer and improve human well-being. I’m interested in how social institutions – the formal and informal constraints on economic activity – shaped economic development between the Middle Ages and the present day.

And:

My current research focusses on serfdom, human capital, state capacity, and epidemic disease. Past projects analysed guilds, merchants, communities, the family, gender, consumption, finance, proto-industry, historical demography, childhood, and social capital. I have a particular interest in the economic and social history of Central and Eastern Europe.

Here is her Wikipedia page.  Her book on guilds is well known, and her latest is Controlling Contagion: Epidemics and Institutions from the Black Death to Covid.  Here are her main research papers.

So what should I ask her?

Trumpian policy as cultural policy

The Trump administration has issued a blizzard of Executive Orders, and set many other potential changes in the works.  They might rename Dulles Airport (can you guess to what?).  A bill has been introduced to add you-know-who to Mount Rushmore.  There is DOGE, and the ongoing attempt to reshape federal employment.

At the same time, many people have been asking me why Trump chose Canada and Mexico to threaten with tariffs — are they not our neighbors, major trading partners, and closest allies?

I have a theory that tries to explain all these and other facts, though many other factors matter too.  I think of Trumpian policy, first and foremost, as elevating cultural policy above all else.

Imagine you hold a vision where the (partial) decline of America largely is about culture.  After all, we have more people and more natural resources than ever before.  Our top achievements remain impressive.  But is the overall culture of the people in such great shape?  The culture of government and public service?  Interest in our religious organizations?  The quality of local government in many states?  You don’t have to be a diehard Trumper to have some serious reservations on such questions.

We also see countries, such as China, that have screwed-up policies but have grown a lot, in large part because of a pro-business, pro-learning, pro-work culture.  Latin America, in contrast, did lots of policy reforms but still is somewhat stagnant.

OK, so how might you fix the culture of America?  You want to tell everyone that America comes first.  That America should be more masculine and less soft.  That we need to build.  That we should “own the libs.”  I could go on with more examples and details, but this part of it you already get.

So imagine you started a political revolution and asked the simple question “does this policy change reinforce or overturn our basic cultural messages?”  Every time the policy or policy debate pushes culture in what you think is the right direction, just do it.  Do it in the view that the cultural factors will, over some time horizon, surpass everything else in import.

Simply pass or announce or promise such policies.  Do not worry about any other constraints.

You don’t even have to do them!

They don’t even all have to be legal!  (Illegal might provoke more discussion.)

They don’t all have to persist!

You create a debate over the issues knowing that, because of polarization, at least one-third of the American public is going to take your side, sometimes much more than that.  These are your investments in changing the culture.  And do it with as many issues as possible, as quickly as possible (reread Ezra on this).  Think of it as akin to the early Jordan Peterson cranking out all those videos.  Flood the zone.  That is how you have an impact in an internet-intensive, attention-at-a-premium world.

You will not win all of these cultural debates, but you will control the ideological agenda (I hesitate to call it an “intellectual” agenda, but it is).  Your opponents will be dispirited and disorganized, and yes that does describe the Democrats today.  Then just keep on going.  In the long run, you may end up “owning” far more of the culture than you suspected was possible.

Yes policy will be a mess, but as they say “man kann nicht alles haben.”  The culture is worth a lot, both for its own sake and as a predictor of the future course of policy.

Now let’s turn to some details.

In the first week, Trump makes a huge point of striking down DEI and affirmative action (in some of its forms) as the very beginnings of his administration.  The WSJ described it as the centerpiece of his program.  Take origins seriously!

Early on, we also see so many efforts to make statements about the culture wars.  Trans issues, for instance trans out of the military.  No more “Black History Month” for the Department of Defense.  There are more of these than I can keep track of, use Perplexity if you must.

It is no accident that these are priorities.  And keep in mind the main point is not to eliminate Black History Month, though I do not doubt that is a favored policy.  The main point is to get people talking about how you are eliminating Black History Month.  Just as I am covering the topic right now.

How is that war against US AID going?  Will it be abolished?  Cut off from the Treasury payments system?  Simply rolled up into the State Department?  Presidential “impoundment” invoked?  I do not know.  Perhaps nobody knows, not yet.  The point however is to delegitimatize what US AID stands for, which the Trumpers perceive as “other countries first” and a certain kind of altruism, and a certain kind of NGO left-leaning mindset and lifestyle.

The core message is simply “we do not consider this legitimate.”  Have that be the topic of discussion for months, and do not worry about converting each and every debate into an immediate tangible victory.

What about those ridiculous nominations, starting with RFK, Jr.?  As a result of the nomination, people start questioning whether the medical and public health establishments are legitimate after all.  And once such a question starts being debated, the answer simply cannot come out fully positive, whatever the details of your worldview may be.  People end up in a more negative mental position, and of course then some negative contagion reinforces this further.

JFK and UAP dislcosure?  The point is to get people questioning the previous regime, why they kept secrets from us, what really was going on with many other issues, and so on.  It will work.  The good news, if you can call it that, is that we can expect some of the juicier secrets to be made public.

I think by now you can see how the various attempts to restructure federal employment fit into this picture.  And Trump’s “war against universities” has barely begun, but stay tuned.  Don’t even get me going on “Gaza real estate,” the very latest.

Finally, let’s return to those tariffs (non-tariffs?) on Canada and Mexico.  We already know Trump believes in tariffs, and yes that is a big factor, but why choose those countries in particular?  Well, first it is a symbol of strength and Trump’s apparent ability to ignore and contradict mainstream opinion.  But also those are two countries most Americans have heard of.  If Trump announced high tariffs on say Burundi, most people would have no idea what it means.  They would not know how to debate it, and they would not know if America was debasing itself or thumbing its nose at somebody, or whatever.

Canada and Mexico gets the cultural point across.  Canada, all the more so, and thus the Canadian tariffs might be harder to truly reverse.  At least to many Yankee outsiders, Canada comes across as exactly the kind of “wuss” country we need to distance ourselves from.

To be clear, this hypothesis does not not not require any kind of cohesive elite planning the whole strategy (though there are elites planning significant parts of what Trump is doing).  It suffices to have a) conflicting interest groups, b) competition for Trump’s attention, and c) Trump believing cultural issues are super-important, as he seems to.  There then results a spontaneous order, in which the visible strategy looks just like someone intended exactly this as a concrete plan.

In a future post I may consider the pluses and minuses of this kind of political/cultural strategy.