Category: Political Science
Kindle pre-order for *The Complacent Class* is now possible
Here is the link, and my previous extra book offer still stands (for now!).
Inconvenient questions
Statement: I think it is more than appropriate and indeed imperative to raise and indeed investigate questions about the suspicious ties between the Trump candidacy and Putin’s Russia.
Question: Given what is now an extensive and proven history of Communist spies in the United States government from 1933 to 1945, was it also appropriate for Joseph McCarthy to raise such questions about (lower-level) political officers in his day? If you insinuate or make the charge outright that Trump and/or staff might be Russian agents on the basis of incomplete evidence, not yet demonstrated in a court of law, shall we downgrade you or upgrade McCarthy? Or both?
Statement: I think it is more than appropriate to raise questions about whether Trump’s rather cavalier attitude toward the U.S. Constitution disqualifies him from the Presidency on those grounds alone. I consider myself a fairly strict Constitutionalist, most of all for the Bill of Rights.
Question: Do you feel the same way about FDR’s court-packing scheme and internment of Japanese-Americans? Were the Democratic Congressmen — wasn’t that just about all of them? — who stood with FDR on the latter issue better or worse than Paul Ryan for standing with Trump today? If FDR had offsetting virtues as President, because he did in fact “get a lot done,” and you in general support him for that, are Trump supporters allowed to have a similar belief today about their candidate, viewing him in the lineage of FDR? On the basis of this one FDR data point, is it possible that presidential achievement is positively correlated with presidential oppression? Or is that sheer coincidence and all Trump supporters ought to believe as such?
Question: To paraphrase Bill Easterly, if you agree that defeating Trump is a national emergency, do you also think the Democrats should be compromising more on actual policies? Raise your left hand if you have come out and said this. See in addition Ross Douthat’s column.
Statement: During the 1930s, a large number of New Deal Democrats admired the fascism of Mussolini’s Italy, and less commonly but still sometimes Hitler’s Germany in its earlier years.
Question: Does this history cause you to have a more positive view of Trump and his supporters? Or do you instead significantly downgrade your sympathy for the Democrats of the New Deal era, now that you have lived through the Trump phenomenon? Does the Trump phenomenon now seem to you more in accord with traditional and historic American values? (I haven’t even mentioned slavery or race until now, nor Nagasaki nor Native Americans. And oh — did I mention that the New Deal coalition signed off on a lot of bigotry and segregation to keep the party together and get the core agenda through? Or how about the forcible repatriation of perhaps up to 2 million Mexicans, without due process of law, and many being American citizens, during the 1930s?)
Final question(s): Would American history have taken a better or worse course if none of our Presidents had had significant authoritarian tendencies? Or do you insist that is the wrong question to ask, instead preferring to stress the issue of “our authoritarians” vs. “their authoritarians” and stressing the relative virtues of the former and the evils of the latter? And if that is indeed the case, do you now understand why Trump has come as far as he has?
File under: Nothing New Under the Sun, That was Then This is Now, Authoritarianism for Me but Not For Thee, Why We Can’t Have The Good Things in Life, Asking for a Friend, other.
There is a thirty percent chance Ray Fair rises considerably in status
The weak Friday gdp report reminded me of this March column by Jeff Sommer (NYT):
Professor Fair has been tracking and predicting elections in real time since 1978 with a good deal of success, using an approach that continues to be provocative. He ruthlessly excludes nearly all the details that are the basic diet of conventional political analysts — items like the burning issues of the day, the identities, personalities and speeches of the candidates and the strength of their campaign organizations. In fact, his model pays no attention whatsoever to the day-to-day fireworks of the political campaigns.
Instead, he considers only economics, finding that economic factors usually correlate well with political outcomes…
In November 2014, he did his first projection for the 2016 election and found that the odds favored the Republican candidate — whoever that may be. The Republican side has been leading consistently ever since, and the margin has increased as he has fed in new data.
Here is Reihan Salam on Trump and pessimism.
The youth culture that is Poland
The young are more hostile to refugees than their parents: over 80% of Poles aged 18-34 oppose taking them in, compared with 52% of those over 65. They are also more in favour of border controls within the EU. Many of the teenage pilgrims in Krakow say they fear a wave of “Islamisation” or “secularisation” from western Europe. (Oddly, they sometimes conflate the two.) The Pope is “great on faith but not on politics”, says a young street sweeper from Nowa Huta, an industrial area of Krakow.
That is from The Economist, the article is interesting more generally. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: the important European thinkers of the next generation will be religious, not left-wing and secular.
Ireland fact of the day
Philadelphia Story
Inside, two stocky men could be heard debating the merits of the different ambassadorships they hoped to earn under Mrs. Clinton. Even a low-ranking posting meant having “ambassador” on a child’s wedding invitation, the two agreed, and would be helpful in wrangling invitations to sit on corporate boards.
Here is the full NYT story, by Nick Confessore, and no I am not suggesting this is worse under one party than another. That is via Mark Leibovitz and Henry Farrell.
Can we shame people into better voting?
I see a number of proposals for inducing less well informed voters to make better choices:
1. Educating them better.
2. Boosting the rate of sustainable economic growth, which tends to persuade people to support better policies.
3. “Buying” voters with one-off transfers, in the hope they will show more support for the better sides of the system.
4. Shaming voters away from making mistakes.
5. Actually giving them control over electoral outcomes, say by having the elites copy the voting choices of the less informed.
Most of us prefer the first two options, but they are relatively hard to accomplish. What is striking is how much attention #3 gets relative to #4 and #5.
It all depends on the margin, but my view of human nature makes me relatively skeptical of #3. It is either ignored, or viewed as a kind of insult, or it induces people to simply up their demands and expectations. That is especially likely to happen for voters who express potentially “nasty” electoral preferences. I think it is less of a problem for say how a single mother responds to food stamps for her kids, but of course we could debate that. (By the way, if you are wondering, the main difference between Brazil and Denmark boils down to #2, not #3.)
I can’t recall anyone endorsing #5, yet of course the elites recommend an inverse version of #5 for the less informed voters, namely they should copy the elites. Hmm. The version of #3 we offer is actually more like “#3 but no way #5,” and I believe it is processed and understood as such, no matter how “under-informed” those voters may be. They’re not under-informed about that!
#4 is under-discussed. Take the less informed voters who voted for the better candidates in the 1960s. Why did they do that? Note that many of those people believed some pretty terrible things, including about race and about the suitability of George Wallace for higher office. I believe shame is part of the answer — they did not want to feel the shame of deviating from the preferences the elites wanted them to express.
Perhaps it is hard to re-bottle that genie, but there are plenty of historical examples where shame cultures go away and then return, consider for instance the United States after the 1920s.
There is a literature on shame and voting behavior, though from what I can tell most of it concerns participation per se rather than the quality of electoral choice. Here is one striking sentence:
Pride motivates compliance with voting norms only amongst high-propensity voters, while shame mobilizes both high- and low-propensity voters.
Hmm.
I believe in the last two years I have read at least five hundred times that elites should somehow do more for less informed voters, not only for efficiency or distribution reasons but also to improve the quality of our democracy. The efficiency and distribution claims are at least defensible, maybe more, but the electoral claims are remarkably unsupported. At the same time, shame barely comes up and I take that to be a reflection of the myopic nature of contemporary times.
Now, maybe elites think there is something wrong with shaming. But when I watch what elites do, including but not only on Twitter, they spend a great deal of time and effort trying to shame each other. If anything, that seems to drive them further apart and make a good solution less likely.
It might have been a better situation when the elites, acting with some joint collective force, directed more of their energies to shaming the less elite voters than to shaming each other.
And with that claim I am seeking to shame…the elites.
We should give more thought as to how we can get the advantages of shame cultures, without also taking on all of their disadvantages. Is it good or bad that shame, like many other aspects of American life, seems to be more income-segregated than before?
Would a Clinton administration pursue Occupy Wall Street ideas?
Here is perhaps the least analytical paragraph in what is mostly an analytical piece by Gideon Lewis-Kraus (NYT). It is however the paragraph easiest to excerpt:
Joseph Stiglitz is a short, oracular man with gray hair and gray stubble trimmed to equal length, which gives his head the round softness of a late-stage dandelion. His minimal-cognitive-load uniform is a blue sportcoat, an open-necked blue dress shirt and roomy gray trousers over thick-soled black sneakers; I saw him wear this unvarying attire to work in his vast personal complex at Columbia University, meetings at the Ford Foundation, a public Roosevelt colloquy with the Black Lives Matter activist Alicia Garza and Hill briefings. His clothes, along with his trundling gait, give him the appearance of a curmudgeonly but twinkle-eyed shtetl tailor, come to dispense wisdom about structures of international trade-dispute arbitration as he fits the bar mitzvah boy for a suit. He has a dry wit but seems not entirely sure when jokes have been received as such, and so, as if someone once told him that he should soften his fearsome intellect by smiling more, he punctuates his speech with a randomized distribution of grins.
There is much on the Roosevelt Institute, Mike Konczal, and how the Left tries to copy the Right, among other topics, recommended.
Josh Marshall on the Coasian model of politics
Here is one bit, there is more analytical political science at the link:
5. Trump’s foreign policy advisor on Russia and Europe is Carter Page, a man whose entire professional career has revolved around investments in Russia and who has deep and continuing financial and employment ties to Gazprom. If you’re not familiar with Gazprom, imagine if most or all of the US energy industry were rolled up into a single company and it were personally controlled by the President who used it as a source of revenue and patronage. That is Gazprom’s role in the Russia political and economic system. It is no exaggeration to say that you cannot be involved with Gazprom at the very high level which Page has been without being wholly in alignment with Putin’s policies. Those ties also allow Putin to put Page out of business at any time.
Recommended reading for your final exams in public choice. Do read it all.
Are mass shootings contagious?
Maybe I already covered this, but it is worth re-upping this Michael Rosenwald piece from March:
A man had just gone on a shooting rampage in Kalamazoo, Mich., allegedly killing six people while driving for Uber. Sherry Towers, an Arizona State University physicist who studies how viruses spread, worried while watching the news coverage.
Last year, Towers published a study using mathematical models to examine whether mass shootings, like viruses, are contagious. She identified a 13-day period after high-profile mass shootings when the chance of another spikes. Her findings are confirmed more frequently than she would like.
…Studies have shown that the aircraft hijackings of the 1970s were contagious. Product tampering — also contagious. So is highway speeding, rioting and even military coups. Contagion is especially pronounced in suicides.
Do read the whole thing. It is related to my recent Bloomberg piece about macro and political and financial contagion across borders. And here is Michael’s very latest piece on the Munich shootings.
*CEO, China: The Rise of Xi Jinping*
That is the new and excellent book by Kerry Brown. Almost all books on China are either bad or mediocre, but this one is the best book I ever have read on the exercise of power in contemporary China. Every page is good, here is a short excerpt:
More important than a cabinet in the Western system of government, yet ostensibly separate from day-to-day decision making, the Politburo owns the crucial function of dispensing ideological, spiritual and political leadership. This description means it covers nothing and everything. It has the broadest framework within which to operate, which means it can wander into every area of administrative and governmental life in the country. But like the ideal city described in Plato’s Republic, in a strange way China is really run on the model of philosopher kings.
Definitely recommended, one of my favorite non-fiction books of the year so far. I can readily imagine re-reading it.
My talk yesterday at Hudson Institute/The American Interest
I had a bit of a cold, but I covered why the world seems to be falling apart, what the hell is wrong, why inequality isn’t really the problem, why Steven Pinker might be wrong about peace, which aspects of globalization might be the most problematic, whether the world is becoming less free, and how Joe McCarthy has these days ended up underrated.
Here is the link.
A new and somewhat different economic theory of the Trump movement
Yes, globalization, immigration, and wage stagnation are all factors, not to mention the cultural issues. But there is another culprit: inadequate savings. This, by the way, helps explain why so much of the Trump support comes from relatively old people. Here is one bit from my Bloomberg View column today:
Social Security is already the primary source of income for retired Americans, yet Social Security benefits for the elderly average only $16,000 a year, and traditional private-sector pensions have dwindled in importance.
When it comes to comparative retirement security, in an international comparison the United States finished 19th for three years in a row. Even relatively optimistic assessments suggest that only about 28 percent of American households will be able to maintain their pre-retirement living standards.
…As for today’s 45-to-69-year-olds, only 36 percent claim to be engaging in net savings. And only 45 percent of all people earning $75,000 to $100,000 a year claim to have net positive savings, as measured in 2012. That helps explain why the typical Trump voter in the Republican primaries earned a relatively high income of about $72,000 a year and still worried about his or her economic future.
We all know that falling incomes often have more political salience than low incomes. Furthermore this weakness of the American economy does not show up in either gdp or unemployment statistics. My conclusion is this:
Trump is himself often portrayed as impetuous. It is less commonly remarked that he may be in part the result of a broader and larger impatience that has plagued American society for decades.
Do read the whole thing.
Addendum: Here is commentary from Kevin Drum but I do not think he rebuts the estimates that consumption levels will be declining, often significantly, for a big chunk of this population.
Polarization of political talk is definitely going up
Matthew Gentzkow, Jesse Shapiro, and Matt Taddy have a new NBER paper Measuring Polarization in High-Dimensional Data: Method and Application to Congressional Speech.
We study trends in the partisanship of Congressional speech from 1873 to 2009. We define partisanship to be the ease with which an observer could infer a congressperson’s party from a fixed amount of speech, and we estimate it using a structural choice model and methods from machine learning. The estimates reveal that partisanship is far greater today than at any point in the past. Partisanship was low and roughly constant from 1873 to the early 1990s, then increased dramatically in subsequent years. Evidence suggests innovation in political persuasion beginning with the Contract with America, possibly reinforced by changes in the media environment, as a likely cause. Naive estimates of partisanship are subject to a severe finite-sample bias and imply substantially different conclusions.
It seems this move toward polarization starts around the time of Newt Gingrich and the Contract with America, and it starts with the Republican Party. It remains an open question, however, how much this corresponds to greater polarization in more concrete terms. To some extent symbolic polarization may substitute for the ever-diminishing ability of politicians to disagree about how to allocate discretionary spending. Let them eat ideology!
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.