Category: Political Science
That was then, this is now
I very much like the new Michael Khodarkovsky book The Steppe and its Empires: The Russian Empire & its Eurasian Counterparts. Excerpt:
Russia presented the most remarkable contrast to both Eurasian and Western empires. The oower of Moscovite tsars and Russian emperors seemed to be completely unconstrained by moral or ethical boundaries. Whereas religious authorities in Europe, the Islamic world, and Cjhina kept some distance from the state and had a degree of independence from the rulers, in Russia the Orthodox Church was fully behind the autocratic powers of the tsars. Ivan III was the first to adopt the title samoderzhets (a calque of a title of Byzantine emperors, literally “autocrat” in Greek), which he used in the sense of a “sovereign” ruler. It took another half century before his grandson, Ivan IV, began to use the title to signal his exceptional, universal, and unrestrained power.
And:
To begin with, each Eurasian ruler conceived of himself as the sovereign of a universal, not natinoal, empire. Such a ruler was non plus ultra; confident in his superiority over other religious or political bodies, he was destined to rule the world, if not politically, at least rhetorically, an autocrat whose subjects’ servile condition was a natural state.
Seen through the prism of a universal monarchy, the Eurasian imperial vision blurred the separation between metropolis and periphery, between the peoples within and outside the empire’s boundaries, between servitude and slavery. Whether they were elites or commoners, all were considered to be in personal servitude to an emperor and often referred to by a term interchangeable with slave.
Consequently, Eurasian societies did not develop either the notions or the institutions that could enshrine the idea of freedom…
The concept of universal monarchy allowed for little differentiation between internal and external territories.
Recommended.
My very interesting Conversation with Daron Acemoglu
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Daron Acemoglu returns for his second appearance with a new book, What Happened to Liberal Democracy?, which Tyler reads as an attempt to redefine and revitalize liberalism for our times. Where Daron’s first visit was about how states and societies contend for the narrow corridor in which liberty survives, this one asks what liberals themselves got wrong, and the answer implicates the educated elite—that is to say, you.
Tyler and Daron discuss what’s wrong with social contract theories and Rousseau’s general will, whether Acemoglu is more objectivist than Rorty, why he blames left liberalism’s own establishment power for its collapse, what standard is left once you refuse to have a book of higher values, nondomination versus noninterference, who counts as working class, why automation alone will not lead to widespread prosperity, how he can call himself a free speech absolutist while wanting to regulate social media, why he worries we’ve given up on educating Americans, whether teachers’ unions need to be reconstituted, what the life expectancy for an educated twenty year old is today, whether open-source models undercut the centralization worry, what pro-worker AI actually means, why the fertility crisis leaves him strangely close to a real business cycle position, whether AI will raise his own already prodigious paper output, why Armenia has disappointed economically, what he wants to learn next, and more.
For an excerpt, let us start from near the beginning:
COWEN: Richard Rorty had a consensus-based defense of liberal democracy. Is your view the same as his, or are there some metrics along which it’s different? Are you more objectivist in some way?
ACEMOGLU: I wouldn’t say it’s more objectivist. I think my commitment in my mind has always been that it’s impossible for us at any point in time not just to know what’s really the absolute truth, but also to have a clear map of what is the right stance. In the same way that I think many people would agree science makes gradual and sometimes uncertain progress toward some better understanding, I think morally, philosophically, we also have to have gradual uncertain evolution toward what we agree on. Objectivism, in some sense, is too strict.
COWEN: Say we’re not evolving toward greater agreement.
ACEMOGLU: No, sometimes we go back.
COWEN: Today, it seems we’re not evolving toward greater agreement, right?
ACEMOGLU: We’re not. Absolutely not. I think you can blame that on reactions to globalization, reactions to technology, better authoritarian challenges. This is the most uncomfortable part because I see myself firmly within the left liberal tradition. I think it’s partly because of the failure of left liberalism. In some sense, if you think of why did Rome fail or collapse, we can tell a story about the barbarians were really too strong. No, really, Rome collapsed because internally it had problems that opened up weaknesses against outside invaders as well as some inside problems.
It’s the same with left liberalism. I think it became quite influential throughout much of the Western world and some of the emerging economies as well over the last 70, 80 years. It did not use that establishment power just in the right way, creating its own weaknesses that made it much more vulnerable to outside attacks. That’s why I think we are now going back because we are at an interregnum period in which ideas are battling again. In some sense, it’s just like the early 19th century where you had all these very different ideas and they were trying to get a toehold in the imagination of people. I think we are going through a period like that, except that there are really many more confusing ideas out there.
COWEN: Say when we’re not evolving toward greater consensus, what’s the external standard you introduce to judge which are the correct ideas and which not? Like Rorty, you need one, though.
ACEMOGLU: I don’t have one.
COWEN: Then why believe in what you believe?
ACEMOGLU: Okay. I think what I believe is, first of all, not as an external standard—I don’t know whether external standard or internal standard is the right word—but that we have to defend some degree of individual freedom because everything starts from that, both in terms of our meaningful lives, but also any kind of improvement in the human condition requires individual initiative, and that individual initiative is impossible without some amount of freedom, a meaningful freedom, not just saying, “Okay, you have the freedom to pray, but you cannot express that idea with others or you cannot turn it into action.” Some meaningful freedom.
That is the only starting point that we need to have. Around that, we need to build things with some sort of consensus within society. That’s what I think liberalism has to recognize, that you have to enshrine those rights, but then give enough elbow room to people to form their own community-level agreements.
COWEN: You present some different values in the book. One is nondomination. Another is noninterference. There’s others. When they clash, what’s the metric you introduce to decide how to resolve that clash?
ACEMOGLU: I wish I had a perfect answer for that. I don’t.
COWEN: You have an imperfect answer.
ACEMOGLU: I have an imperfect answer. I think noninterference by itself isn’t enough because, at least as read or as interpreted by some philosophers and economists, it is just about being left alone from higher authority or typically state-level authority, although it could be some other authorities as well. We do also need opportunities and some way of actualizing our intentions and our freedom. That’s what the idea of nondomination, which goes back to Roman Republican times, recognizes.
It is not, in my mind, an extremely interventionist philosophy. It doesn’t say the state knows it best or that the state should always have an opportunity to override individual or group-level decisions. It does emphasize that providing people some amount of protection against those who have much greater physical or other power relative to them is something that cannot be done at the individual level. It has to have a community-level component.
COWEN: That’s a good answer, but is it an answer to the question? If we’re Sidgwick, we might say, when values clash, we look to utility, or maybe it’d be cost-benefit analysis to decide which gets priority. You’re not willing to say that, so why not? What’s wrong with that answer?
Very much interesting throughout.
What makes people happy?
Measuring politically sensitive attitudes in authoritarian settings is difficult because expressions of political support may reflect repression and social pressure as much as genuine belief. We propose a complementary approach: using responses to questions that are not themselves politically sensitive to provide indirect evidence about politically sensitive attitudes. Using subjective well-being (SWB), we ask whether within-person changes in life satisfaction, after accounting for changes in material and personal circumstances, can provide evidence of incorporation into a wartime national project. Drawing on more than a decade of panel data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (2013–2024), we find that life satisfaction rises significantly following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Gains are initially larger among ethnic Russians and smaller in Moscow and St. Petersburg, consistently larger in military-industrial regions, and sharply lower among those nearest the front. This theoretically patterned heterogeneity is difficult to reconcile with generalized social-desirability bias and is consistent with differentiated wartime incorporation. By 2024, rising non-response and attenuating subgroup differences suggest that the informational value of SWB may deteriorate over time.
That is from recent research by Sinikka Parviainen and William Pyle. Via Pippa Norris.
Who enters Congress?
We trace the family origins of Members of Congress (MC) born between 1830 and 1950, linking each MC, their parents, and their brothers to the complete-count censuses. Future MCs have always been economic outliers. By 1940, close to 60 percent of MCs aged 18–40 held a college degree, against under 5 percent of comparable young men outside Congress. In the 19th-century censuses, MCs as adults held roughly three times the wealth of demographically matched controls. They also come from economically elite families: their fathers earn more, attain more education, and hold more wealth. The brothers of future MCs sit between the population and the MCs themselves. Across the socioeconomic measures we compare, we calculate that roughly half of an MC’s adult premium is shared with his brother and the other half is his own. Even as the American economy and political system have changed, the family background gap has widened over the last century and a half. Wealth, household servants, and four separate occupation-based scores all show the gap holding or growing across cohorts. We study four Progressive-Era reforms in a triple-difference design—women’s suffrage, the secret ballot, direct primaries, and the direct election of senators—and none produce detectable shifts in who reaches Congress. Our results document a Congress drawn from the most fortunate families in American society in every cohort we observe.
That is from a new NBER working paper by
Do Faculty Affect Student Partisanship?
We study whether Democratic college professors make their students more liberal. We link voter data to salary records from 33 state flagships and show that faculty skew Democratic, especially in the humanities and social sciences. We then use student transcripts from one flagship to estimate causal effects. Students become more liberal during college regardless of major and sort toward ideologically similar instructors. Exploiting plausibly random variation in when instructors teach courses, we find no effect of faculty partisanship on student partisanship. Text analysis shows exposure to liberal topics reflects student demand rather than instructor supply, leaving little room for indoctrination.
That is from a new paper by Micah Baum, Joaquín Endara, and Annaliese Paulson. Via Jay Fan Bavel.
My excellent Conversation with Julia Ioffe
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is from the episode summary:
Julia joined Tyler to discuss why so many of Russia’s great constructivist painters were women, why the tsarist government established women’s medical courses in 1872, changing attitudes towards abortion and birth control in the 20th century, why the Soviet regime turned prudish, how Khrushchev’s plan to “replace the dead” institutionalized single motherhood, Russian superwomen, why Jewish men were a prized commodity amid rampant antisemitism, the cultural significance of flowers, why a few Russian names still dominate, why Russian women think Western feminists have their priorities backwards, how gender attitudes and autocracy feed into each other, three underrated Russian novels, what she wants to write about next, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: I’m sure you’ve noticed that quite a few American men will marry Russian or Soviet women, but not so many American women want to marry Russian or Soviet men. It’s a kind of market test, right? Why exactly are the men so bad? Why are they such louts? Maybe that’s a rude way to put it, but surely in one’s mind, one asks that question, right?
IOFFE: It’s a question that a lot of us who were living in Moscow in the late aughts and the teens were asking that all the time. I remember a friend of mine, a male Western TV correspondent, saying, “The women are so gorgeous here, but the men are so ugly and unfashionable.” He had lived all over the place and worked all over the place, and he said, “I’ve never seen such disparity,” and it was true.
The women like me, Western women who were living and working in Moscow at the time, said, “We’ll just wait till we get home.” I think it’s because of what I talked about before, or what you and I talked about before, which is that so many men were killed in the first half of the 20th century, and so few demands were placed on them because they were seen as an endangered species, in general. They were a resource to be fought over and protected.
In 1968, when the West was undergoing a sexual revolution, and women were fighting for more rights, more equality, the Soviets were talking about saving the men, protecting the men, and saying, “We’ve done enough for the women, but our men die young.” That’s after a lifetime of alcohol abuse, smoking, being largely irrelevant in the home, and obviously politically, because it’s a totalitarian system, so let’s work on protecting them.
Soviet men, and then Russian men, became these coddled, spoiled children essentially, where on one hand, so little was asked of them that it’s the bigotry of low expectations. So little was asked of them, and very little was expected of them, and they rose to meet those very low expectations.
On top of that, the idea of what made a man a manly man in Russia is he’s physically strong, but he dies a young death, or he dies an early death. He drinks a lot, he smokes a lot, he’s reckless, he’s careless, and takes a lot of risk, and that usually means an early death. If you have fewer men to begin with, and as a Russian woman, you see them dying early, and you’re fighting over them, what is the impetus for men to take care of themselves, to act better, be better, if there’s always going to be a beautiful, super competent woman to take him if you don’t want him?
COWEN: These points you’re raising, historically, do you feel it’s been quite different for Soviet and Russian Jews or the same?
IOFFE: I think it’s a little bit different. The caveat is, and I hate that I have to say this, Jews are people too, and subject to the same social forces that everybody else is, but culturally, Soviet Jews were more educated as a rule, more urban, and culturally came from a very family-centric tradition. Russian women, actually, for all the intense antisemitism in the Soviet Union, in Russia, Jewish men were actually a prized commodity for Russian women.
COWEN: With ethnic Russian women?
IOFFE: Yes. Ethnic Ukrainian women, you name it, because the cultural stereotype was that Jewish men don’t drink, they don’t hit you, they are family-focused, family-oriented, they’re involved fathers, they bring their money home, they don’t waste it at the bar or on bottles of vodka with their buddies. That’s the kind of man you would want as a husband. Ironically, the same polls that will tell you that Russians would want their daughters to marry a Jew will tell you that they don’t want their president to be a Jew.
One of my favorite episodes of the year, interesting throughout, and I very much enjoyed Julia’s book Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia.
Will U.S. cities face a knock-on fiscal crisis from the feds?
Federal money flows to cities in three flavors: direct transfers, indirect transfers, and what we call fiscal dark matter. Direct transfers are exactly what they sound like — money sent directly from the federal government to various localities. These include funds disbursed through programs like the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG), which supports things like public infrastructure and neighborhood services.3 In 2022, direct transfers like the CDBG totaled $146.3 billion.4 That’s significant, but actually the smallest of the three categories.
Less visible are the indirect transfers. These monies are initially awarded to state governments, which then allocate funds to municipal-level programs and services in accordance with state prerogatives. The cleanest example is probably K-12 education, which receives federal Title I dollars to pay for teachers and programs, but federal highway dollars work essentially the same way. All told, in 2022, the federal government handed down $1.1 trillion to state governments. That amounted to 36% of overall state revenue for that year and, depending on the individual state, ranged from roughly 22% to 50% of state revenue. How much of that ultimately flowed down to cities is hard to say, which is itself a problem: it’s difficult to even establish how exposed local governments are to a pullback in federal support of state budgets.
The third category – our fiscal dark matter – is all the federal money spent into local communities that never shows up in a local budget. This includes housing subsidies like the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) and Section 8. It also includes food support programs like SNAP and even some direct funding for local food banks.
Rightfully or not, when the flow of federal money in this category starts to dry up, the resulting problems will fall squarely on the mayor’s desk. After all, the median voter is never going to see increasing numbers of homeless encampments and think to blame the head of HUD.
Here is the full piece by Jeff Fong.
*Redefining Global Health in the 21st Century*
While donor-driven programs undoubtedly saved millions of lives, they also created unintended distortions in national health priorities. Many governments in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia actually scaled back domestic health investments, as donor program filled key gaps in HIV/AIDS, maternal and child health, and infectious disease control. In some cases, domestic health budgets shrank in real terms, even as external funding increased. This phenomenon, often referred to as “fiscal substitution,” led to national health systems that were heavily donor-dependent, externally managed, and vulnerable to funding shocks. Notably, this reliance emerged despite countries pledged to allocate at least 15% of their national budgets to health. More than two decades later, only a handful has met this target.
That is from the new and useful book by Michael John Alastair Reid and Eric Paul Goosby. But $150 for a not so thick volume!? If the authors believe in aid, as they should, perhaps they could consider giving this book away for free rather than turning it over to Elsevier…?
The wisdom of Eli Dourado
How do “international efforts” work? Unlike most of the signatories of the letter, I have been a State Department advisor and have participated in multiple treaty negotiations. I have also been a member of technical committees for UN technical agencies.
The international sector is unbelievably dysfunctional. Every single treaty or international agreement is an opportunity for every participant to manipulate the much broader policy environment. Often the participants don’t care about the object of the agreement, and are instead trying to use the agreement as leverage for something else. I have seen countries use their limited leverage in multilateral agreements to try to kneecap American industry, get around sanctions, create a pretense of international justification for domestic illiberalism, or steer technology in an authoritarian direction.
The damage from this dysfunction is limited by the fact that there are zero major countries (and not that many smaller countries) who will actually bind themselves in meaningful ways that they don’t narrowly want. If a previously signed treaty turns out to be inconvenient, it is often subtly ignored or reinterpreted.
In addition, treaty delegations working on industrial issues generally reflect the full spectrum of special interests involved in an issue. A US AI treaty delegation might be led by a State Department ambassador, but he will be advised by representatives of the interagency, major labs, other major tech companies, tech investors, civil society, etc.
“International efforts,” therefore, is not a reassuring answer to the governance problem; it is the name of another enormous, unresolved governance problem.
Here is the full tweet.
What should I ask Jared Diamond?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him. His whole career is fair game, though many of my questions will cover his forthcoming book Profits, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings (When) Do Leaders Matter?
From the Amazon summary: “Now, in Profits, Prophets, Coaches and Kings, he studies leaders throughout time to answer the question: do the actions of individuals truly influence history? Or is humanity subject to larger historical, technological, cultural, geographical forces, far beyond the influence of individuals, no matter how powerful they may seem?”
So what should I ask him?
The AEA presidential election
AEA is the American Economics Association, and a new president is needed, here is the candidate and likely winner:
PINELOPI (PENNY) KOUJIANOU GOLDBERG, William Nordhaus Professor of Economics and Global Affairs, Yale University.
Statement of Purpose: I am honored to stand for President of the American Economic Association. Economics has long contributed powerful tools to understand human behavior, markets, institutions, and public policy, but the environment in which we conduct research, teach, and engage with society is evolving rapidly. New technologies, especially artificial intelligence, are reshaping research methods, classroom instruction, and the evaluation and dissemination of scholarship. These changes create exciting opportunities, but they also raise difficult questions about the future of peer review in our journals, transparency, incentives, and research and teaching standards more generally. The profession also faces broader challenges: maintaining rigorous, credible, and independent research, supporting young scholars in an increasingly uncertain academic environment, and ensuring that economics remains open to diverse perspectives, methods, and global talent. If elected, I hope to use my research, teaching, policy, and editorial experience to help address these challenges, while promoting the core values of our discipline.
Here is the link. Hilarious as always that there is only one candidate allowed (which model predicts this as optimal?), but for the first time I have seen a meaningful statement of purpose that I also like. That said, I would like to see her endorse my core proposal, namely turning over all submissions, referee reports, and revisions (anonymized is fine) to the major AI companies for use as training data. After all, such an act would further the mission of the AEA, right?
*Liberal Worlds: James Bryce and the Democratic Intellect*
A very good book, here is one excerpt that bears directly on a conversation I was just having:
He [Bryce] regretted the low quality of the Indian Civil Service: they were hard-working and motivated by a desire to promote the welfare of the Indian people, but ‘rather wanting in imagination and sympathy, less inspired by the extraordinary and unprecedented phenomena of the country than might have been expected.’ He went on: “Since the unhappy so-called Ilbert Bill there has been a marked change in the attitude of Europeans to natives, especially in Bengal; and the natives complain bitterly that the civilians as well as the military & the planters, treat them with arrogance & make them feel their social inferiority as well as political subordination.” He continued by saying that all he had seen made him certain that he had made the right decision in not pursuing a career in the Indian Civil Service.
The author is H.S. Jones, and I also learned a good deal about Bryce’s work on behalf of Armenia, a topic I had known nothing about. I am a big fan of Bryce’s The American Commonwealth book as an analysis of democracy, though of course I do not agree with all of the particulars. Bryce also was an early NIMBY proponent (even then), and played a large role in debates over the humanities, basically defending liberal education. He served as ambassador to the U.S. as well. His long (overlong?) Modern Democracies is in my Kindle queue to read.
The demand for human enhancement technologies
When a new technology promises large private benefits but may impose social costs that markets do not price, demand need not reveal how citizens want it governed. We examine this using a nationally representative U.S. survey experiment (N=5,556) on human enhancement technologies (HET). The experiment randomizes benefit domain, mechanism, heritability, purpose, and risk across vignettes; for each respondent’s assigned vignette, we elicit stated adoption, preferred regulation, and ethical and societal concerns. Overall, about 53% would adopt. Framing the technology as enhancing rather than restorative lowers adoption by about five percentage points, as much as a severe side-effect profile. About 28% would not adopt at any benefit. This refusal is driven overwhelmingly by the enhancing framing rather than by risk, consistent with a non-compensatory constraint for a substantial subgroup. Most who would adopt still favor strict regulation, and most who would never adopt do not wish to forbid others from doing so. Productivity enhancement generates the most ethical concern of any attribute but attracts the least regulation, and respondents favor subsidizing rather than taxing its adoption, consistent with a concern about access rather than safety. Private demand is therefore an unreliable guide to the governance citizens want, and the divergence we document provides a basis for regulators seeking to align the direction of technical change with societal values and priorities.
That is from a new NBER working paper by . And I will repeat this segment: “Productivity enhancement generates the most ethical concern of any attribute…” Do note of course that the last sentence of the authors is completely unwarranted, and is a classic example of underidentified political bias in academic reasoning.
The common sense of Fareed Zakaria
This is one of the best Op-Eds you will read this year, though it deliberately deemphasizes the personal (no one is attacked) in a manner that will result in less attention. Better to write the truth! Excerpt:
Why has this [voter discontent} happened? Some of it is economic. Expensive housing, stagnant incomes and widening inequality have fueled public anger. But economics is only part of the story. America has enjoyed stronger growth than most other advanced economies. France under President Emmanuel Macron has lowered unemployment, and it has attracted more foreign investment projects than any country in Europe for seven straight years, according to an Ernst & Young analysis. South Korea is an economic success story. Japan was experiencing a comeback. Yet democratic governments almost everywhere are unpopular.
The larger explanation is that we are living through one of history’s great technological revolutions. And these transformations always produce deep anxiety and fear.
The last technological transformation on this scale came between roughly 1880 and 1920. Electricity, the telephone, railroads, the automobile and movies overturned entire industries and ways of life. Millions left farms for cities. Global trade disrupted local economies. New fortunes appeared overnight, while old occupations disappeared. In this turmoil, frustration and anger found political pathways. The left turned to communism, the right to fascism. What followed were new mass movements, cultural upheavals and world war.
Do read the whole thing. You can be a victim of these processes, or keep your wits about you. The choice is yours.
A natural experiment in economics
To study whether and how academics respond to political pressure, we exploit a natural experiment: the publication in early 2025 of a “blacklist” of words flagged by the U.S. government. We find that the release of this list led to a sharp reduction in the use of these flagged words among economists at universities that rely heavily on federal funding, relative to scholars from institutions that are less dependent on federal funding or based in the UK. The drop is driven by content related to gender, race, and environment. We show that changes are not simply semantic but reflect actual paper content and that neither the individual funding status nor time-invariant author characteristics are driving the effects. We also document interesting heterogeneous effects by department quality and author gender and ethnicity. Our findings are consistent with the idea that scholars respond strongly to political pressure.
That is from a new paper by Dominic Rohner, Oliver Vanden Eynde, and Philine Widmer. I should note that the authors frame their results in terms of “Science under threat,” which indeed is in the title of their paper. I do see some of that in operation, but I also see a lot of “removing incentives for pandering.” Your own weights here may vary.