Category: Political Science
New facts about the game theory of balloons
But it turns out that China’s effort has been underway for more than a decade. According to a declassified intelligence report issued Thursday by the State Department, it involves a “fleet of balloons developed to conduct surveillance operations” that have flown over 40 countries on five continents.
That is from the Washington Post. And:
Balloon operations obviously make sense for the Chinese. The United States has military bases in Japan and elsewhere from which it can launch daily flights by P-8 and other surveillance planes that fly perilously close to Chinese airspace. China doesn’t have similar options.
The frequency of these American “Sensitive Reconnaissance Operations,” or SROs, has increased sharply from about 250 a year a decade ago to several thousand annually, or three or four a day, a former intelligence official told me. China wants to push back, and collect its own signals; it wants its own version of “freedom of navigation” operations. Balloons are a way to both show the flag and collect intelligence…
Let’s look at another tit-for-tat motivation: China claims in its internal media that the Pentagon has aggressive plans to use high-altitude balloons, in projects such as “Thunder Cloud.”
It turns out the Chinese are right. Thunder Cloud was the name for the U.S. Army’s September 2021 exercise in Norway to test its “Multidomain Operations” warfighting concept, following a similar test in the Pacific in 2018, according to the Pentagon’s Defense News.
Here is my previous post on the game theory of the balloons. Worth a reread.
My Conversation with Glenn Loury
Moving throughout, here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the summary:
Economist and public intellectual Glenn Loury joined Tyler to discuss the soundtrack of Glenn’s life, Glenn’s early career in theoretical economics, his favorite Thomas Schelling story, the best place to raise a family in the US, the seeming worsening mental health issues among undergraduates, what he learned about himself while writing his memoir, what his right-wing fans most misunderstand about race, the key difference he has with John McWhorter, his evolving relationship with Christianity, the lasting influence of his late wife, his favorite novels and movies, how well he thinks he will face death, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: What’s your favorite Thomas Schelling story?
LOURY: [laughs] This is a story about me as much as it is about Tom Schelling. The year is 1984. I’ve been at Harvard for two years. I’m appointed a professor of economics and of Afro-American studies, and I’m having a crisis of confidence, thinking I’m never going to write another paper worth reading again.
Tom is a friend. He helped to recruit me because he was on the committee that Henry Rosovsky, the famous and powerful dean of the college of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, who hired me — the committee that Rosovsky put together to try to find someone who could fill the position that I was hired into: professor of economics and of Afro-American Studies. They said Afro-American in those years.
Tom was my connection. He’s the guy who called me up when I was sitting at Michigan in Ann Arbor in early ’82, and said, “Do you think you might be interested in a job out here?” He had helped to recruit me.
So, I had this crisis of confidence. “Am I ever going to write another paper? I’m never going to write another paper.” I’m saying this to Tom, and he’s sitting, sober, listening, nodding, and suddenly starts laughing, and he can’t stop, and the laughing becomes uncontrollable. I am completely flummoxed by this. What the hell is he laughing at? What’s so funny? I just told him something I wouldn’t even tell my wife, which is, I was afraid I was a failure, that it was an imposter syndrome situation, that I could never measure up.
Everybody in the faculty meeting at Harvard’s economics department in 1982 was famous. Everybody. I was six years out of graduate school, and I didn’t know if I could fit in. He’s laughing, and I couldn’t get it. After a while, he regains his composure, and he says, “You think you’re the only one? This place is full of neurotics hiding behind their secretaries and their 10-foot oak doors, fearing the dreaded question, ‘What have you done for me lately?’ Why don’t you just put your head down and do your work? Believe me, everything will be okay.” That was Tom Schelling.
COWEN: He was great. I still miss him.
And the final question:
COWEN: Very last question. Do you think you will do a good job facing death?
Interesting and revealing throughout.
Yglesias on Operation Warp Speed and the Republicans
Here’s Yglesias on Operation Warp Speed and the Republicans:
The debate over Operation Warp Speed wasn’t just a one-off policy dispute. Long before the pandemic, there was a conservative critique that the Food and Drug Administration is too slow and too risk-averse when it comes to authorizing new medications. Alex Tabarrok, a George Mason University economist, wrote about the “invisible graveyard” that could have been avoided if the FDA took expected value more seriously and considered the cost of delay in its authorization decisions.
The pandemic experience validated this criticism, which came to be embraced by some on the left as well — and it was about more than just vaccines. When it came to home Covid tests, Ezra Klein noted in the New York Times in 2021, “the problem here is the Food and Drug Administration. They have been disastrously slow in approving these tests and have held them to a standard more appropriate to doctor’s offices than home testing.”
And yet, just as the invisible graveyard was becoming seen and the debate was being won and just as a historical public-private partnership had sped vaccines to the public and saved millions, the Republicans abandoned the high ground:
…it’s not surprising that Democrats are comfortable with the bureaucratic status quo and hesitant to ruffle feathers at federal regulatory agencies. What’s shocking is that Republicans — the traditional party of deregulation, the party that argued for years that the FDA is too slow-footed, the party that saved untold lives by accelerating vaccine development under Trump — have abandoned these positions.
At the cusp of what should have been a huge policy victory, Republicans don’t brag about their success, and they have no FDA reform legislation to offer. Instead, they’ve taken up the old mantle of hard-left skepticism of modern science and the pharmaceutical industry.
It’s been painful to see all that has been gained now being lost. Libertarian economists and conservatives argued for decades that the FDA worried more about approving a drug that later turns out to be unsafe than about failing to approve a drug that could save lives; thus producing a deadly caution. But now the FDA is being attacked for what they did right, quickly approving safe vaccines. I hope that he is wrong but I fear that Yglesias is correct that the FDA may now get even slower and more cautious.
The irony of the present moment is that there is substantial backlash to the FDA’s approval of vaccines that haven’t turned out to be dangerous at all.
That’s only going to make regulators even more cautious. Right now the entire US regulatory state is taking essentially no heat for the slow progress on the next generation of vaccines, and an enormous amount of heat for the perfectly safe vaccines that it already approved. And the ex-president who pushed them to speed up their work on those vaccines is not only no longer defending them, he’s embarrassed to have ever been associated with the project.
Like I said, it’s a comical moment of Republican infighting. But it’s a very grim one for anyone concerned with the pace of scientific progress in America.
Rasheed Griffith on the need for a Caribbean think tank
Worth another link! Here is one bit:
In my opinion, the first priority for a Caribbean think tank or program should be to advocate for the implementation of dollarization, which involves the replacement of all existing Caribbean currencies with the United States Dollar (USD) as the sole currency. This idea is based on the numerous fiscal and monetary shortcomings exhibited by Caribbean governments. The benefit of this proposal is its widespread latent approval and straightforward nature, making it easier to garner support and understanding among the Caribbean people…
The domestic money of Caribbean countries are only useful in the tiny land area of the earth where they are issued. For example, Barbados is 166 square miles and the Barbados Dollar (BBD) only has value in that small space. Why exactly should people be forced to exchange their labour for money that has such a limited use?
You might say that they can easily exchange the Barbados Dollar (BBD) for USD. But that is untrue. Barbados maintains strict capital controls because it cannot allow people to exchange too much BBD for USD as that would cause a crisis for the fixed exchange rate. This is a kafkaesque policy since virtually everything imported into and exported from Barbados is priced and invoiced in USD.
Moreover, the government abuses its position as the issuer of money. Primarily to finance its spendthrift operations by arbitrarily creating new money. This is the evident across the region. In Trinidad & Tobago, the government limited citizens to only a $250 USD allotment for international purchases on credit cards. This forced the black market rate to unprecedented levels, with everyone desperate to acquire USD. It came to a point where some services would give discounts if you pay in USD.
Basic point: Caribbean people are severely disadvantaged by being forced to use money that has no global acceptance. Caribbean governments will perpetually mismanage their domestic money to the detriment of citizens.
The manifesto covers many other issues, interesting throughout.
Why was I bored by the Twitter files?
I mentioned that a short while ago, and a few people wrote and asked me to explain. The answer is simple: I have the Vietnam War and Pentagon Papers as formative political memories. In those days, it was simply taken for granted that the government twisted the arm of news media. It also never stopped, and “government” and “CEOs” talk to each other all the more these days. Solve for the equilibrium, and thereby you also can learn how it is so hard to stop. To be clear, I am quite against such interference with the media, outside of a few well-specified cases (“please don’t report where the troops are massing for D-Day,” and so on.) On any gray area I am going to side against the government, if only for slippery slope reasons. By its nature such communications are inevitably coercive, even if a transcript of them might sound entirely friendly and non-threatening. There was a paranoia to those earlier times (ever watch the Coppola/Gene Hackman movie The Conversation?) that turned out to be justified.
If you have been “pilled” on this issue by Elon and the discovery process, great. But for me it was like reading about waste inside the Pentagon…
Who is locally influential these days?
Um…um…uh-oh:
Who do people think are influential in their own community? This question is important for understanding topics such as social networks, political party networks, civic engagement, and local politics. At the same time as research on these topics has grown, measurement of public perceptions of local influence has dried up. Years ago, researchers took active interest in the question of community influence. They found that most ordinary Americans could identify a person who they thought had influence in their community. Respondents usually named business leaders. Where does the public stand today? In three different ways, we ask respondents who has local influence. The vast majority of respondents today cannot think of anyone. Those who do identify someone as influential rarely choose a businessperson. This article aims to reintroduce the public opinion of community influence and situate findings in related scholarship.
Here is the new article by Joshua Hochberg and Eitan Hersh. David Brooks, telephone! Don’t even ask how the “religious leaders” fare in the polling…
Ethnic Remoteness Reduces the Peace Dividend from Trade Access
This paper shows that ethnically remote locations do not reap the full peace dividend from increased market access. Exploiting the staggered implementation of the US-initiated Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) and using high-resolution data on ethnic composition and violent conflict for sub-Saharan Africa, our analysis finds that in the wake of improved trade access conflict declines less in locations that are ethnically remote from the rest of the country. We hypothesize that ethnic remoteness acts as a barrier that hampers participation in the global economy. Consistent with this hypothesis, satellite-based luminosity data show that the income gains from improved trade access are smaller in ethnically remote locations, and survey data indicate that ethnically more distant individuals do not benefit from the same positive income shocks when exposed to increased market access. These results underscore the importance of ethnic barriers when analyzing which locations and groups might be left behind by globalization.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Klaus Desmet and Joseph F. Gomes.
The game theory of geoengineering
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
Imagine a world in which one consortium of governments proceeds with a climate plan — spraying sulfate aerosols into the air, brightening cloud cover over the oceans, maybe even dumping iron fillings into the ocean. Assume those policies are at least partially effective. Some other set of nations will respond by slowing down their costly transitions from dirty energy.
It’s not that these nations don’t care about the future of the planet. But successful geoengineering will induce them to lag in their more constructive efforts. Why go through a costly transition if the problem is being addressed? These nations might also conclude that the more they slow down, the more geoengineering the virtuous nations will undertake.
Our climate future is thus one of game theory. A nation such as Russia might go further yet and sabotage geoengineering efforts, perhaps with its own environmental tinkering. Even if such actions were seen as acts of war — well, these days that hardly seems beyond the pale.
In any case, such drastic responses are hardly needed for game-theory problems to come to the fore. It is easy enough for less conscientious nations simply to do less, once they observe that some successful geoengineering is in progress. Even within nations, states, regions and political parties are unlikely to agree how much geoengineering is appropriate, which could lead to inconsistent national policies over time.
And this:
None of this is an argument for banning geoengineering. In fact, humankind has been engaged in geoengineering for centuries — by pumping huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. And even if the world’s No. 1 scientific power (that’s the US, to be clear) rejects all intentional geoengineering, it is unlikely that all other nations will follow suit. Does the world really want to leave geoengineering in the hands of the Chinese? There is no choice but to try to make this messy situation better.
All worth a further ponder.
Powell: The Fed is Independent but for that Reason Must be Limited
An excellent and forceful speech by Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. He defends the Fed’s independence but clearly and directly argues that the only way that deal can be credible is if the Fed stays out of big political issues.
…the case for monetary policy independence lies in the benefits of insulating monetary policy decisions from short-term political considerations.1 Price stability is the bedrock of a healthy economy and provides the public with immeasurable benefits over time. But restoring price stability when inflation is high can require measures that are not popular in the short term as we raise interest rates to slow the economy. The absence of direct political control over our decisions allows us to take these necessary measures without considering short-term political factors. I believe that the benefits of independent monetary policy in the U.S. context are well understood and broadly accepted.2
…It is essential that we stick to our statutory goals and authorities, and that we resist the temptation to broaden our scope to address other important social issues of the day.4 Taking on new goals, however worthy, without a clear statutory mandate would undermine the case for our independence.
…Addressing climate change seems likely to require policies that would have significant distributional and other effects on companies, industries, regions, and nations. Decisions about policies to directly address climate change should be made by the elected branches of government and thus reflect the public’s will as expressed through elections.
At the same time, in my view, the Fed does have narrow, but important, responsibilities regarding climate-related financial risks. These responsibilities are tightly linked to our responsibilities for bank supervision.6 The public reasonably expects supervisors to require that banks understand, and appropriately manage, their material risks, including the financial risks of climate change.
But without explicit congressional legislation, it would be inappropriate for us to use our monetary policy or supervisory tools to promote a greener economy or to achieve other climate-based goals.7 We are not, and will not be, a “climate policymaker.”
How long does a Roman emperor last for?
Of the 69 rulers of the unified Roman Empire, from Augustus (d. 14 CE) to Theodosius (d. 395 CE), 62% suffered violent death. This has been known for a while, if not quantitatively at least qualitatively. What is not known, however, and has never been examined is the time-to-violent-death of Roman emperors. This work adopts the statistical tools of survival data analysis to an unlikely population, Roman emperors, and it examines a particular event in their rule, not unlike the focus of reliability engineering, but instead of their time-to-failure, their time-to-violent-death. We investigate the temporal signature of this seemingly haphazardous stochastic process that is the violent death of a Roman emperor, and we examine whether there is some structure underlying the randomness in this process or not. Nonparametric and parametric results show that: (i) emperors faced a significantly high risk of violent death in the first year of their rule, which is reminiscent of infant mortality in reliability engineering; (ii) their risk of violent death further increased after 12 years, which is reminiscent of wear-out period in reliability engineering; (iii) their failure rate displayed a bathtub-like curve, similar to that of a host of mechanical engineering items and electronic components. Results also showed that the stochastic process underlying the violent deaths of emperors is remarkably well captured by a (mixture) Weibull distribution.
That is from a new paper by Joseph Homer Saleh. Via Patrick Moloney. And here are new results on why Roman concrete was so much more durable than the emperors.
How happy are Americans (and Danes) anyway?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
Two economists, David G. Blanchflower of Dartmouth and Alex Bryson of University College London, have come up with a new and more intuitive way to measure well-being. The results are striking. If you consider US states as comparable to countries, 16 of the top 20 political units in the world for well-being are in the US — including the top seven.
Many happiness surveys ask individuals how satisfied they are with their lives. That is one way of phrasing the happiness question, but it has its biases. It tends to favor nations where people have a strong sense of self-satisfaction — or, if you want to put a more negative gloss on it, where the people are somewhat smug. Those are some of the studies in which Finland and Denmark come in first.
The genius of this most recent study is that it considers both positive and negative affect, and gives countries (and US states) separate ratings for the two. In other words, it recognizes there is more than one dimension to well-being. It lists four variables as part of negative affect: pain, sadness, anger and worry. Positive affect consists of four measures: life satisfaction, enjoyment, smiling and being well-rested. So life satisfaction is only one part of the measure.
One interesting result is that nations that avoid negative affect are not necessarily the same as those which enjoy the highest positive affect. Some countries — including the US — have a lot of extremes. Americans tend to go to the limit on both the upside and the downside.
Bhutan is an extreme contrast along these same lines. Measured only by positive affect, the Bhutanese are No. 9 in the world, an impressive showing. But for negative affect they rank No. 149 — in other words, they experience a great deal of negative emotion, perhaps due to the extreme hardships in their lives. Considering both positive and negative affect, they come in at No. 99, not a bad showing for such a poor country (better, in fact, than the UK’s 111.)
Denmark’s positive affect puts it only at No. 71, befitting the popular image of a country where not everyone is jumping for joy. Arkansas has a better positive affect, coming in at No. 67. But Denmark rates higher overall (38, to Arkansas’s 72) because Arkansas shows higher negative affect (87, to Denmark’s 66).
Measuring both positive and negative affect, the 10 happiest political units in the world are, in order: Hawaii, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Taiwan, Alaska and Wisconsin. Of the top 50 places, 36 are US states (I include the District of Columbia, No. 16). China is No. 30.
Here is the original study. The Danes are #111 for smiling!
Zero-Sum Thinking and the Roots of U.S. Political Divides
We examine the causes and consequences of an important cultural and psychological trait: the extent to which one views the world in zero-sum terms – i.e., that benefits to one person or group tend to come at the cost of others. We implement a survey among approximately 15,000 individuals living in the United States that measures zero-sum thinking, political and policy views, and a rich set of characteristics about their ancestry. We find that a more zero-sum view is strongly correlated with several policy views about the importance of government, the value of redistributive policies, the impact of immigration, and one’s political orientation. We find that zero-sum thinking can be explained by experiences of an individual’s ancestors (parents and grandparents), including the amount of intergenerational upward mobility they experienced, the degree of economic hardship they suffered, whether they immigrated to the United States or were exposed to more immigrants, and whether they had experiences with enslavement. These findings underscore the importance of psychological traits, and how they are transmitted inter-generationally, in explaining current political divides in the United States.
That is from a new paper by Sahil Chinoy, Nathan Nunn, Sandra Sequeira, and Stefanie Stantcheva. The paper has many interesting particular results, here is one:
Respondents living in Utah exhibit the least zero-sum thinking, on average, and respondents living in Montana, Oklahoma and Mississippi exhibit the most. Importantly, there is no significant geographic clustering and the geographic distribution of zero-sum beliefs is not obviously correlated with that of political leanings.
And this:
If a respondent was born outside the U.S., then they tend to have a less zero-sum view of the world.
African-Americans have more zero-sum thinking than average, and also this:
Zero-sum thinking is also associated with more liberal [TC: the wrong word, right here the misuse is especially glaring!] economic policies and a political alignment with the Democratic Party rather than the Republican Party.
Recommended.
Is ChatGPT moving toward the median voter?
1. ChatGPT no longer displays a clear left-leaning political bias. A mere few weeks after I probed ChatGPT with several political orientation quizzes, something appears to have been changed in ChatGPT that makes it more neutral and viewpoint diverse. 🧵https://t.co/bbrXWhWaWa pic.twitter.com/JHznag2Nve
— David Rozado (@DavidRozado) December 23, 2022
Why The United States Should Open New Consulates in India
A good piece by Michael Rubin in the National Interest:
India will likely become the most populous country on Earth this year, and, yet, outside of the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, there are only four State Department consulates in the country of 1.4 billion. That is fewer consulates than the State Department operates in France and fewer offices than the U.S. Embassy services in Spain. The Canadian province of Quebec, whose population totals less than nine million, merits two consulates in the State Department’s view.
…The United States computer and tech industry rests disproportionately on the labor and intellectual contributions of America’s vast Indian-American community. If Silicon Valley is the center of America’s computer industry, then Bangalore is its equivalent in India. The interaction between the two is significant. And yet, while India maintains a consulate in San Francisco, the United States has no equivalent in Bangalore; the closest American post is more than 200 miles away in Chennai. It need not be an either/or decision, but at the very least the State Department should explain why maintaining an investment in Winnipeg, Canada is more important than nurturing the relationship between two of the largest tech hubs in the world.
… if U.S. diplomacy is to be effective, it needs to adjust to twenty-first-century realities rather than nineteenth-century ones.
With more consulates might we not also cut the ridiculous and embarrassing time it takes to get a US visitor or business visa? When I was last in Delhi I met with one of the economic officers at the American Embassy. His job was to drum up business between India and the US–how can anyone do that when business visas are so difficult to acquire? Talk about the land of red tape!
Hat tip: Ben.
*Crack-Up Capitalism*
That is the new book by Quinn Slobodian. Slobodian is very smart, and knows a lot, but…I don’t know. I fear he is continuing to move in the Nancy McLean direction with this work.
This is a tale of how libertarian and libertarian-adjacent movements have embraced various anti-democratic and non-democratic positions. So you can read about seasteading, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Hong Kong as a charter city, and “decentralization” plans for Ciskei, South Africa.
You won’t hear about the highly successful SEZ reforms for the Dominican Republic, or how the European Union was partly rooted in Hayek’s postwar piece on interstate federalism. In that essay, Hayek was explicit about how much would be done by treaty, rather than direct vote, and that is (mostly) how the European Union has turned out. With reasonable success, I might add. Do only the nuttier episodes of “less democracy” count?
Question one: Is the word “plutocratic” ever illuminating?
Question two: Is this a useful descriptive sentence for Milton Friedman? “He [Patri] had a famous grandfather, perhaps the century’s most notorious economist, both lionized and reviled for his role in offering intellectual scaffolding for ever more radical forms of capitalism and his sideline in advising dictators: Milton Friedman. The two shared a basic lack of commitment to democracy.”
Here is a YouTube clip of Friedman on democracy. Or I asked davinci-003 and received:
Yes, Milton Friedman did believe in democracy. He was an advocate of democracy and free markets, believing that economic freedom would advance both economic and political freedom. He argued that government should be limited in size and scope and that the free market should be allowed to operate with minimal interference.
Or how about engaging with the academic literature on Friedman’s visit to Chile? And more here. Was Friedman, who was elected president of the American Economic Association and won an early Nobel Prize, really “notorious”?
There is valuable content in this book, but it needs to cut way back on the mood affiliation.