Category: Political Science
Joseph Walker on Australian migration (from my email)
I argued a few days ago that attacks on less skilled immigration might spill over and through contagion effects cause negative attitudes about immigration more generally. At which point I received the following from Joseph:
Australia, I think, shows the contagion effects are a big deal.
We have one of the most skill-biased immigration programs in the world and also one of the most successful approaches to cultural integration in the world.
A significant chunk of our net migration comes in the form of overseas students, who can be put on a pathway to permanent residence and citizenship after completing their degrees. (This program was introduced in 2001, largely to slow our population ageing.)
The international students cross-subsidise the domestic ones, and education is now Australia’s third biggest export after coal and iron ore.
Like the rest of the Anglosphere, our housing market is broken, but this can’t mostly be blamed on international students, since they don’t add to demand for the kinds of housing people are concerned about.
And yet the discourse has soured completely on migrants, especially international students.
A lot of Australian influencers copy and paste US anti-immigration talking points, even though they don’t really map over.*
(As it happens, I’ll be interviewing one of the key architects of Australia’s modern migration system in a live salon in January: https://events.humanitix.com/joe-walker-podcast-abul-rizvi.)
*To be sure, there are valid criticisms of Australian migration policy. Most notably, net migration was mismanaged and unsustainably high over the past two years, driven by a post-pandemic surge in students. In 2022-23, it exceeded 500,000 people (for context: this number is unprecedented and about double pre-pandemic levels). There has also been exuberance and an erosion of academic standards in the university sector. But these mistakes are being addressed, and the broader negativity I’m observing seems unlikely to be appeased by fixing them.
When should DOGE scream in public and push for maximum transparency?
Here is a tweet from Elon, I won’t reproduce it directly on MR. Suffice to say it is strongly worded on the visas issue. Here is a summary of that debate. Much of it is about who should rise or fall in status (duh).
I have some simple, to the point free advice for the DOGERs — the public is not always with you. Making your fight more public, and putting it more on social media, is no guarantee of victory, and indeed it often boosts the chance you will lose or be stymied.
Right now there is an anti-immigration mood, for better or worse, in many countries. But how many voters (former immigrants aside) know what these different types of visas mean, or how many o1s are given out in a year? Yet a lot of influential tech people, and tech donors, know this information pretty well.
So in a non-public fight, you have a big advantage. Trump could maintain or up the number of o1 visas, or make other changes to please the tech people, and few MAGA voters would be very aware of this. But when you scream about this issue, and make it A BATTLE, suddenly it becomes “your pro-immigration sentiment vs. the anti-immigration sentiment of the voters.”
And that is a fight which is very easy to lose. It becomes “The Current Thing,” and everyone is paying attention to the new status game.
So please develop a better sense of when to keep your mouths shut and work behind the scenes.
Is there an intermediate position on immigration?
It is a common view, especially on the political right, that we should be quite open to highly skilled immigrants, and much less open to less skilled immigrants. Increasingly I am wondering whether this is a stable ideological equilibrium.
To an economist, it is easy to see the difference between skilled and less skilled migrants. Their wages are different, resulting tax revenues are different, and social outcomes are different, among other factors. Economists can take this position and hold it in their minds consistently and rather easily (to be clear, I have greater sympathies for letting in more less skilled immigrants than this argument might suggest, but for the time being that is not the point).
The fact that economists’ intuitions can sustain that distinction does not mean that public discourse can sustain that distinction. For instance, perhaps “how much sympathy do you have for foreigners?” is the main carrier of the immigration sympathies of the public. If they have more sympathies for foreigners, they will be relatively pro-immigrant for both the skilled and unskilled groups. If they have fewer sympathies for foreigners, they will be less sympathetic to immigration of all kinds. Do not forget the logic of negative contagion.
You also can run a version of this argument with “legal vs. illegal immigration” being the distinction at hand.
Increasingly, I have the fear that “general sympathies toward foreigners” is doing much of the load of the work here. This is one reason, but not the only one, why I am uncomfortable with a lot of the rhetoric against less skilled immigrants. It may also be the path toward a tougher immigration policy more generally.
I hope I am wrong about this. Right now the stakes are very high.
In the meantime, speak and write about other people nicely! Even if you think they are damaging your country in some significant respects. You want your principles here to remain quite circumscribed, and not to turn into anti-foreigner sentiment more generally.
Full-length documentary on the life and legacy of Rene Girard
Very well done.
Jefferson’s DOGE (that was then, this is now)
Jefferson swiftly undid twelve years of Federalism. He allowed the Sedition Act to expire and adopted a more catholic naturalization law. He reduced the federal bureaucracy — small even by today’s standards — particularly in the Treasury Department (a slap at Hamilton, who had been Secretary under Washington), slashing the number of employees by 40 percent and eliminating tax inspectors and collectors altogether. He cut the military budget in half, which was then 40 percent of the overall federal budget. He eliminated all federal excise taxes, purging the government of what he called Hamilton’s “contracted, English, half-lettered ideas.” Reluctantly he kept the First Bank of the United States, but paid off nearly half the national debt. “No government in history,” the historian Gordon S. Wood has observed, “had ever voluntarily cut back on its authority.”
That is from the new and very good book Martin van Buren: America’s First Politician, by James M. Bradley. Later things were different:
Martin van Buren went into office deermined to avoid Andrew Jackson’s fateful staffing mistakes. The backbiting and intrigue wasted two years of Jackson’s presidency. This van Buren could not afford.
And a wee bit later:
Then the voters had their say. The November elections in New York were an absolute bloodbath for the Democrats. There were 128 elections for assembly in 1837, and the Whigs won 101 of them.
The book is well-written.
The show so far, DOGE edition
Round one is over, and so far no progress and indeed steps backwards:
President-elect Donald Trump’s last-minute demands for a congressional funding package were rejected by dozens of Republicans this week, foreshadowing the legislative challenges he could face next year — even with unified GOP control.
The Republicans also revealed they are not willing to shut down the government, and they do not have such a stable coalition in the House, and that is even before they lose some number of seats.
The package that passed the House includes more than $110 billion in disaster aid and a one-year farm bill extension but is stripped of Trump’s demand: a debt limit extension.
There was not an actual substantive win in the final outcome. Not surprisingly, the Democrats are touting it as a win for the Democrats.
And here Vivek concedes the loss.
I very much hope DOGE makes progress on its key issues — excess regulation and spending — but political change is tough and requires some highly unusual and idiosyncratic skills. Keep also in mind that while Trump has a mandate to attack Woke and secure the border, voters seem far less excited by cutting back on government spending and regulation (if anything the opposite?). Government spending is what “makes Washington go round,” and Reps love it, no matter what they may say in some of their more manufactured moments. So DOGE strategy will need to adjust accordingly.
Incarceration sentences to ponder
My analysis reveals a significant change in political beliefs since being incarcerated. There is an increased effect of changing political beliefs for women and people of color incarcerated. The effect reveals that people of color are becoming, either for the first time or further aligned, with the Republican Party since being incarcerated.
That is from researcher Hope Martinez. And here is the explanation for the mechanism:
The experience of violence and abuse while incarcerated extends the tools of white supremacy in the prison system by influencing feelings of shame, hopelessness, and cultural inferiority, further aligning vulnerable groups to conservatism and whiteness.
Via tekl.
*The Triumph of Politics*
The author is David A. Stockman, and the subtitle is Why the Reagan Revolution Failed. This is for me a re-read, all DOGErs and aspiring DOGErs should give this book an initial read, as it covers why the Reagan attempts to pare back government largely failed. Excerpt:
But I hadn’t recoked that there would be so much opposition on our side of the aisle. I was shocked to find that the Democrats were geting so much Republican help in their efforts to keep the pork barrel flowing and the welfare state intact. I had been worried because the votes didn’t add up, not the economic plan.
I had also come to realize that in my haste to get the Reagan Revolution launched in February, we had moved too fast. There were numerous loose ends. The spending reductions needed to pay for the tax cuts had turned out to be even bigger and tougher than I had originally thought.
And:
Over the next eight months, the President’s pen remained in his pocket. He did not veto one single appropriations bill, all of which combined came in $10 billion [sic] over the line. Come to think of it, he did use his pen — to sign them.
Stockman of course was what you might call the DOGE leader of the early 1980s. His final take is that the Reagan Revolution failed because it misunderstood what the American people truly want from their government. For better or worse, they want privilege and also protection from misfortune, not efficiency or maximum economic growth.
Essential reading, for some of you.
Jennifer Pahlka on DOGE
An excellent piece, one of the best I have read all year. Here is the concluding paragraph:
We can wish that the government efficiency agenda were in the hands of someone else, but let’s not pretend that change was going to come from Democrats if they’d only had another term, and let’s not delude ourselves that change was ever going to happen politely, neatly, carefully. However we got here, we may now be in a Godzilla vs Kong world. Perhaps we’re about to get a natural experiment in which Elonzilla faces off with Larry ElliKong. One of the things we need to be ready to learn is that Elonzilla could lose. Or worse, since Elon and Larry are friends, the expected disruptive could get co-opted. And what would that say about the problem? Conjuring Elon is not bringing a gun to a knife fight. It was never a knife fight.
Recommended.
The Effects of Gender Integration on Men
Evidence from the U.S. military:
Do men negatively respond when women first enter an occupation? We answer this question by studying the end of one of the final explicit occupational barriers to women in the U.S.: in 2016, the U.S. military opened all positions to women, including historically male-only combat occupations. We exploit the staggered integration of women into combat units to estimate the causal effects of the introduction of female colleagues on men’s job performance, behavior, and perceptions of workplace quality, using monthly administrative personnel records and rich survey responses. We find that integrating women into previously all-male units does not negatively affect men’s performance or behavioral outcomes, including retention, promotions, demotions, separations for misconduct, criminal charges, and medical conditions. Most of our results are precise enough to rule out small, detrimental effects. However, there is a wedge between men’s perceptions and performance. The integration of women causes a negative shift in male soldiers’ perceptions of workplace quality, with the effects driven by units integrated with a woman in a position of authority. We discuss how these findings shed light on the roots of occupational segregation by gender.
That is all from
Tetlock on Testing Grand Theories with AI
Testing grand theories of politics (or economics) is difficult because such theories are always contingent on ceteris paribus assumptions but outside of a lab, all else is rarely the same. The great Philip Tetlock has run multi-decade forecasting experiments but these are time and resource consuming. Tetlock, however, now suggests that LLMs could speed the process of testing grand theories like Mearsheimer’s neo-realism theory of politics:
With current or soon to be available technology, we can instruct large language models (LLMs) to reconstruct the perspectives of each school of thought, circa 1990,and then attempt to mimic the conditional forecasts that flow most naturally from each intellectual school. This too would be a multi-step process:
1. Ensuring the LLMs can pass ideological Turing tests and reproduce the assumptions, hypotheses and forecasts linked to each school of thought. For instance, does Mearsheimer see the proposed AI model of his position to be a reasonable approximation? Can it not only reproduce arguments that Mearsheimer explicitly endorsed from 1990-2024 but also reproduce claims that Mearsheimer never made but are in the spirit of his version of neorealism. Exploring views on historical counterfactual claims would be a great place to start because the what-ifs let us tease out the auxiliary assumptions that neo-realists must make to link their assumptions to real-world forecasts. For instance, can the LLMs predict how much neorealists would change their views on the inevitability of Russian expansionism if someone less ruthless than Putin had succeeded Yeltsin? Or if NATO had halted its expansion at the Polish border and invited Russia to become a candidate member of both NATO and the European Union?
2. Once each school of thought is satisfied that the LLMs are fairly characterizing, not caricaturing, their views on recent history(the 1990-2024) period, we can challenge the LLMs to engage in forward-in-time reasoning. Can they reproduce the forecasts for 2025-2050 that each school of thought is generating now? Can they reproduce the rationales, the complex conditional propositions, underlying the forecasts—and do so to the satisfaction of the humans whose viewpoints are being mimicked?
3. The final phase would test whether the LLMs are approaching superhuman intelligence. We can ask the LLMs to synthesize the best forecasts and rationales from the human schools of thought in the 1990-2024 period, and create a coherent ideal-observer framework that fits the facts of the recent past better than any single human school of thought can do but that also simultaneously recognizes the danger of over-fitting the facts (hindsight bias). We can also then challenge these hypothesized-to-be-ideal-observer LLM s to make more accurate forecasts on out-of-sample questions, and craft better rationales, than any human school of thought.
Gender Composition and Group Behavior
Evidence from city councils:
How does gender composition influence individual and group behavior? To study this question empirically, we assembled a new, national sample of United States city council elections and digitized information from the minutes of over 40,000 city-council meetings. We find that replacing a male councilor with a female councilor results in a 25p.p. increase in the share of motions proposed by women. This is despite causing only a 20p.p. increase in the council female share. The discrepancy is driven, in part, by behavioral changes similar to those documented in laboratory-based studies of gender composition. When a lone woman is joined by a female colleague, she participates more actively by proposing more motions. The apparent changes in behavior do not translate into clear differences in spending. The null finding on spending is not driven by strategic voting; however, preference alignment on local policy issues between men and women appears to play an important role. Taken together, our results both highlight the importance of nominal representation for cultivating substantive participation by women in high-stakes decision making bodies; and also provide evidence in support of the external validity of a large body of laboratory-based work on the consequences of group gender composition.
That is from a new NBER working paper by
Trump City
Donald Trump wants to create Freedom Cities. It’s a good idea. As I wrote in 2008, the Federal Government owns more than half of Oregon, Utah, Nevada, Idaho and Alaska and it owns nearly half of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Wyoming. See the map (PDF) for more [N.B. the vast majority of this land is NOT parks]. Thus, there is plenty of land to build new cities that could be adopted to new technologies such as driverless cars and drones.
Mark Lutter review the history and motivation and has a good suggestion:
Our favorite possibility is Presidio National Park. Though much smaller than Guantanamo Bay or Lowry Range, its location is ideal. San Francisco is the world’s tech capital, despite its many problems. The federal government can help San Francisco unleash its full potential by developing Presidio. With Paris-level density and six-story apartment buildings, a developed Presidio would add 120,000 residents, increasing San Francisco’s population by 15 percent. Further, given the city’s existing talent density, a Presidio featuring a liberalized biotechnology regime would quickly become a world innovation leader in this sector. America deserves a Bay Area that can compete; turning Presidio into a Freedom City could be an important step in that direction.
I would add only one suggestion let’s call this Trump City.
Austin Vernon on drones (from my email)
The offensive vs. defensive framing seems wrong, at least temporarily. It should be motivated vs. unmotivated, with drones favoring the motivated.
A competent drone capability requires building a supply chain, setting up a small manufacturing/assembly operation, and training skilled operators. They need to manage frequencies and adjust to jamming. Tight integration of these functions is a necessity. That favors highly motivated groups with broad popularity (recruiting skilled talent!) even if they are nominally weak.
Conversely, it can be challenging for overly corrupt or complacent organizations to counter. They are also more likely to fracture and lose cohesion when under attack.
We’ve seen HTS, Burmese rebels, and Azerbaijan all have a lot of success with drones. Ukraine went from hopelessly behind in drone tech to leading Russia in innovation in many niches.
It seems reasonable that the barriers to entry for a motivated drone “startup” will go up. The US military has effective, expensive interceptors like Coyote Block II to counter small attacks in locations like Syria. Fighting larger entities requires pretty absurd scaling to match enemy numbers and the low per-flight success rate – Ukraine claims they might produce millions of drones this year. Hamas had initial success attacking Israel on Oct. 7 but didn’t have the magazine depth to defend themselves.
AI targeting, the necessity of specialized components to defeat electronic warfare, and cheaper drone interceptors are all factors that could upset this balance. Entities that have the scale to deploy an AI stack, true factories, and specialized components should gain the advantage if the rate of change slows.
My excellent Conversation with Stephen Kotkin
It was so much fun we ran over and did about ninety minutes instead of the usual hour. Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler sat down with Stephen to discuss the state of Russian Buddhism today, how shamanism persists in modern Siberia, whether Siberia might ever break away from Russia, what happened to the science city Akademgorodok, why Soviet obsession with cybernetics wasn’t just a mistake, what life was really like in 1980s Magnitogorsk, how modernist urban planning failed there, why Prokofiev returned to the USSR in 1936, what Stalin actually understood about artistic genius, how Stalin’s Georgian background influenced him (or not), what Michel Foucault taught him about power, why he risked his tenure case to study Japanese, how his wife’s work as a curator opened his eyes to Korean folk art, how he’s progressing on the next Stalin volume, and much more.
And here is one excerpt:
COWEN: What did you learn from Michel Foucault about power, or indeed anything else?
KOTKIN: I was very lucky. I went to Berkeley for a PhD program in 1981. I finished in 1988, and then my first job was at Princeton University in 1989. In the middle of it, I went for French history, and I switched into Habsburg history, and then finally, I switched into Russian Soviet history. I started learning the Russian alphabet my third year of the PhD program when I was supposed to take my PhD exams, so it was a radical shift.
Foucault — I met him because he came to Berkeley in the ’80s, just like Derrida came, just like Habermas came, Claude Lévi-Strauss, the anthropologist, came through. It was California. They were Europeans, and there was a wow factor for them. Foucault was also openly gay, and San Francisco’s gay culture was extraordinarily attractive to him. It was, unfortunately, the epoch of the AIDS epidemic.
One time, I was at lunch with him, and he said to me, “Wouldn’t it be amazing if somebody applied my theories to Stalinism?” I’m sitting there, okay, I’m 23 years old. Imagine if you had traveled to Switzerland in the late 19th century, and you went up in those Engadin mountains, and you were at some café in the mountain air, and there’s this guy with a huge forehead and hair up in the air sitting there, and you went and introduced yourself. You said, “Hello, I’m Tyler,” and he said, “Hello, I’m Friedrich Nietzsche.” You would say, “Well, geez, this is interesting. I should have more conversations with you.”
So, that’s the experience I had. I had read Foucault in seminar because it was very fashionable to do so, obviously, especially at Berkeley, especially in a culture that tilts one way politically, and I think you’ll guess which way that might be. But I didn’t understand what he said, so I went up to him as a naïf with this book, Madness and Civilization, which we had been forced to read, and I started asking him questions. “What does this mean? What does this mean? What is this passage? This is indecipherable.”
He patiently explained to the moron that I was what he was trying to say. It sounded much more interesting coming from him verbally, sitting just a few feet away, than it had on the page. I was lucky to become the class coordinator for his course at Berkeley. He gave these lectures about the problem of the truth-teller in Ancient Greece.
It was very far removed from . . . I had no classical training. Yes, I had Latin in high school because I went to Catholic school, and it was a required subject. I started as an altar boy with the Latin Mass, which quickly changed because of what happened at Vatican II. But no Greek, so it was completely Greek to me. Forgive me, that wasn’t planned that I was going to say that. It just happened spontaneously.
Anyway, I just kept asking him more questions and invited him to go to things, and so we would have lunches and dinners. I introduced him to this place, Little Joe’s in Little Italy, part of San Francisco, which unfortunately is no longer there. It was quite a landmark back then, and then he would repair after dinner to the bathhouses in San Francisco by himself. I was not part of that. I’m neither openly nor closeted gay, so that was a different part of Foucault that I didn’t partake in, but others did.
Anyway, I would ask him these things, and he would just explain stuff to me. I would say, “What’s happening in Poland?” This is the 1980s, and he would say things to me like, “The idea of civil society is the opiate of the intellectual class.” Everybody was completely enamored of the concept of civil society in the ’80s, especially via the Polish case, and so I would ask him to elucidate more. “What does that mean, and how does that work?”
He told me once that class in France came from disease in Paris — that it wasn’t because of who was a factory worker, who wasn’t a factory worker, but it was your neighborhoods in Paris and who died from cholera and who didn’t die from cholera. A colleague of ours who was another fellow graduate in Berkeley ended up writing a dissertation using that aside, that throwaway line.
I was able to ask him these questions about everything and anything. What he showed me — this is your question — what he showed me was how power works, not in terms of bureaucracy, not in terms of the large mechanisms of governance like a secret police, but how all of that is enforced and acted through daily life. In other words, the micro versions of power. It’s connected to the big structures, but it’s little people doing this. That’s why I said totalitarianism is using your agency to destroy your own agency.
That means denouncing your neighbors, being encouraged to denounce your neighbors for heresies, and participating in that culture of denunciation, which loosens all social trust and social bonds and puts you in a situation of dependency on the state. You’re a gung-ho activist using your agency, and the next thing you know, you have no power whatsoever. So, those are the kinds of things that I could talk to him about.
After he passed away from AIDS in the summer of 1984 — it was the AIDS epidemic, horrific. He passed away, and we had a memorial for him. I was still a PhD student, remember. I didn’t finish until ’88. There was this guy, Michel de Certeau, who wrote a tribute to Foucault in French that he was going to deliver at the event. It was called “The Laughter of Foucault.” I had these conversations with de Certeau about his analysis of Foucault and the pleasure of analytic work, which had been a hallmark of Foucault.
De Certeau taught me a phrase called “the little tactics of the habitat,” which became one of the core ideas of my dissertation and then book, Magnetic Mountain, about this micropower stuff. Even though Foucault was gone, I was able to extend the beginning of the conversations with Foucault through de Certeau.
I learned how power works in everyday life, and how the language that you use, and the practices like denunciation that you enact or partake in, help form those totalitarian structures, because the secret police are not there every minute of every day, so what’s in your head? How are you motivated? What type of behavior are you motivated for?
We say, “Okay, what would Stalin do in this situation?” Many people approach their lives — they’ve never met Stalin; they’ll never meet Stalin — but they imagine what Stalin might do. That gets implanted in their way of thinking; it becomes second nature. I learned to discuss and analyze that through Foucault.
I have to say, I didn’t share his analysis that Western society was imprisoning, that the daily life practices of free societies were a form of imprisonment in its own way. I never shared that view, so it wasn’t for me his analysis of the West that I liked. It was the analytical toolkit that I adapted from him to apply to actual totalitarianism in the Soviet case.
Excellent throughout.