Category: Political Science

Substitutes for the Second Amendment

by  Alex Tabarrok in

One of the purposes of the 2nd Amendment was to protect the people from government tyranny. The most important aspect of this was probably not to arm the public per se but rather to minimize the necessity and use of a standing army. Unfortunately, Americans have long gone from fearing standing armies to loving them. So isn’t it time for an additional or substitute amendment? Given the immense changes since the founding what amendments would best protect the people from tyranny today? Here are some possibilities:

  • The right of the people not to bear arms shall not be infringed (i.e. no conscription. Requiring someone to bear arms, thus taking all of their freedom, is a far worse example of tyranny than preventing them from bearing arms.)
  • If 1/3rd or more of the Supreme Court rule that a law is unconstitutional it shall be unconstitutional. (Greater protection of minority rights).
  • Congress shall pass no law abridging the right of the people to encrypt their documents and effects. (Modern supplement to the fourth amendment.)

Other ideas?

The 2nd Amendment does have an important (unique?) advantage in protecting against tyranny namely that the right is self-enforcing, it creates the conditions, an armed public, which make the right difficult to abrogate. To some extent, free speech works in a similar way but “you’ll have to take my gun from my cold, dead hands” is a bigger threat than “you’ll have to take my free speech over my objections.” Are there are other self-enforcing amendments?

Hat tip for discussion to Bryan Caplan.

Autocracy and Technology

by  Alex Tabarrok in

It’s no surprise that autocracies have not created many innovations in information technology. The autocracies, however, are quite capable of adopting and adapting IT for the own purposes. Google’s Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen argue that we are moving into a new era of autocratic IT. Here from the WSJ:

….everything a regime would need to build an incredibly intimidating digital police state—including software that facilitates data mining and real-time monitoring of citizens—is commercially available right now. What’s more, once one regime builds its surveillance state, it will share what it has learned with others. We know that autocratic governments share information, governance strategies and military hardware, and it’s only logical that the configuration that one state designs (if it works) will proliferate among its allies and assorted others. Companies that sell data-mining software, surveillance cameras and other products will flaunt their work with one government to attract new business. It’s the digital analog to arms sales, and like arms sales, it will not be cheap. Autocracies rich in national resources—oil, gas, minerals—will be able to afford it. Poorer dictatorships might be unable to sustain the state of the art and find themselves reliant on ideologically sympathetic patrons.

And don’t think that the data being collected by autocracies is limited to Facebook posts or Twitter comments. The most important data they will collect in the future is biometric information, which can be used to identify individuals through their unique physical and biological attributes. Fingerprints, photographs and DNA testing are all familiar biometric data types today. Indeed, future visitors to repressive countries might be surprised to find that airport security requires not just a customs form and passport check, but also a voice scan. In the future, software for voice and facial recognition will surpass all the current biometric tests in terms of accuracy and ease of use.

*On Politics, book one*, by Alan Ryan

by  Tyler Cowen in

I picked up these two volumes on the basis of a very favorable review reproduced on The Browser, by Noel Malcolm.  Yet the books sat around the house for months.  I figured this was another overwrought survey by a famous person, valuable mainly as an introduction for those who don’t know much about the topic.  The subtitle of volume one, by the way, is A History of Political Thought Herodotus to Machiavelli. Volume two picks up from there.

Overall I have been pleasantly surprised.  When it comes to readability, interest, and integration of the intellectual narrative with actual history, I give volume one an A or A+.  Along multiple dimensions, it would count as the very best book of the year.  I do, however, have one major reservation.  Whenever Ryan writes about a deep political philosopher, such as Plato, he makes that thinker sound prosaic and thus seem second-rate and shallow.  Not terrible, just ordinary.  Reading Ryan only, you would never know what all the fuss is about.

It is thus hard to assess the book as a whole, but I will continue with volume two.  Ryan himself is a fairly deep thinker.  Allan Bloom was a less deep thinker, and yet perhaps for that reason Bloom much better captured the depth of Plato.

The culture that is Washington

by  Tyler Cowen in

The Senate has severely scaled back the Stock Act, the law to stop members of Congress and their staff from trading on insider information, in an under-the-radar vote that has been sharply criticised by advocates of political transparency.

The changes, if they become law, will exclude Congressional and White House staff members from having to post details of their shareholdings online. They will also make online filing optional for the president, vice-president, members of Congress and congressional candidates.

The House was expected to pass a similar bill on Friday.

Here is the FT article, here are other sources.  Some officials suggested that transparency “could threaten national security,” more detail on that here.  Here are some further interesting details.

Robert Samuelson and Jeffrey Sachs on the budget

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is Samuelson:

…government is slowly growing larger while — in many basic functions — it’s being strangled. This paradox, it seems, will be Obama’s questionable legacy.

Here is Jeffrey Sachs:

President Barack Obama’s budget this week makes clear the real political equilibrium in the US. The federal government is shrinking. Discretionary spending in the new Obama budget would shrink to 4.9 per cent of gross domestic product in 2023, compared with 7.9 per cent of GDP in 2008. Both parties have signed on to this shrinkage. Neither will try to stop it.

Both over-personalize the result in the figure of President Obama.  For reasons of mood affiliation, one calls it government growth and the other calls it government shrinkage, drawing on the same numbers.  And both are basically correct.

Addendum: David Brooks weighs in on the same topic.

Rob Reich on philanthropy and what foundations are good for

by  Tyler Cowen in

From Boston Review, you will find his stimulating essay here.  Excerpt:

I believe there is a case for foundations that renders them not merely consistent with democracy but supportive of it.

First, foundations can help to diminish government orthodoxy by decentralizing the definition and distribution of public goods. Call this the pluralism argument. Second, foundations can operate on a longer time horizon than can businesses in the marketplace and elected officials in public institutions, taking risks in social policy experimentation and innovation that we should not routinely expect to see in the commercial or state sector. Call this the discovery argument.

Do note that some parts of Reich’s essay are more critical of foundations than this.  Behind the main link, the column “Forum Responses” provides numerous comments on Reich, you can find mine here.

*Worldly Philosopher*

by  Tyler Cowen in

The author is Jeremy Adelman and the subtitle is The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman.  This is the book I have looked forward to most all year and so far (p.153) it does not disappoint.  Here is one excerpt:

If there was one author who captured Hirschmann’s imagination, it was Michel de Montaigne.  The highly personal vignettes, meditations, and moral reflections shook Hirschmann to his core.  He immediately grasped the power of the essays — Montaigne questioned absolute forms of knowledge by submitting everything to the interrogating eye of the observer, starting by looking at himself, turning himself over and over to capture the multiple points of perspective or the multiple forms of the self.  “We are never ‘at home’: we are always outside ourselves,” Montaigne wrote.  “Whoever would do what he has to do would see that the first thing he must learn to know is what he is.”

I am pleased that this book has 740 pages and I am wishing for more.  Here is a WSJ review.  Here is a good UK review.  Here is a review from The Economist.

*How Revolutionary were the Bourgeois Revolutions?*

by  Tyler Cowen in

This is quite an extraordinary book, remarkably informationally dense, interesting on almost every page, though I would pass on the extended discussions of methodological Marxism.  Did the so-called bourgeois revolutions have relatively little to do with the bourgeoisie?  (This leads some readers to the further question, namely if so, how should this reshape our understanding of “neo-liberalism” today?)  What is a bourgeois revolution anyway?  This far-ranging book is a kind of esoteric blockbuster, to be worshiped by the handful of people who are familiar with Hotman’s Francogallia and its role in 1570s French politics, or who carry around in their heads some underlying sense of why 17th century Scottish and Polish feudal rule might have had significant common features.

Ideally, CrookedTimber should do a symposium on this book, though I am not sure they can find commentators who are up to the task.

Enthusiastically recommended, sort of, to some of you, maybe.

The author is Neil Davidson, a Scot, and the Amazon link is here.

Not altogether untrue

by  Tyler Cowen in

If the Tea Party is to be disparaged for anything, it is not for being too conservative, too right wing, or too libertarian, but simply too immature, quick-triggered, and impatient for final answers.  Traumatized by the collapse of the narratives that used to organize reality and armed with what appears to be access to direct democracy, its members ache for harsh, quick fixes to age-old problems, something they can really feel — as if fomenting a painful apocalypse would be better than enduring the numbing present.

That is from Douglas Rushkoff’s Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now.

How do cardinals divine the will of God?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is an older 2004 paper from J.T. Toman (pdf):

In modern times, the College of Cardinals have been locked in the Sistine Chapel with the purported aim to divine the Will of God in the election of the Pope. Between 20 and 60 percent of cardinals vote for the same candidate throughout the conclave, depending on the length of the conclave.  For those cardinals that change their voting behavior, they are influenced by both the vote counts and the nightly conversations. However, in unifying the cardinals to one winner the dominant force is the observed vote counts.
There is a good summary of the paper here, and another recommended paper here.

For the pointer I thank Adriano.

Realism on Infrastructure Investment

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Keith Hennessey has an excellent post on government infrastructure investment. Here are his key points:

  1. Capital investment by government often pursues multiple policy goals, some of which conflict with maximizing productivity growth. If you’re investing for long-run growth you’ll invest differently than if you also have goals to maximize short-term job creation and to change the future balance of energy sources to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (for instance). The pursuit of multiple policy goals lowers the expected economic growth benefit of public capital spending.
  2. Geographic politics distorts and often dominates government investment in physical infrastructure. Highway funds and airport funds especially are allocated in part based on which Members of Congress have maximum procedural leverage over the spending bill. Even if you could somehow get Congress to stop earmarking infrastructure spending (good luck), and even if you could rely on the Executive Branch not to allow their own political goals to influence how they allocate funds, local geographic politics would come into play at the state level, since much federal infrastructure spending flows through State governments. This is where reality most falls short of a valid theoretical starting point for increasing productivity and long-term growth.
  3. Non-geographic politics can distort government capital spending. This is principally an Executive Branch concern, as we saw with the Obama Administration’s decision to throw good money after bad to postpone Solyndra’s failure. And rent-seekers come out of the woodwork, looking to leverage their connections to government officials to win infrastructure investment contracts.
  4. Once “investment” is favored, everything gets relabeled as investment. The Obama Administration has been particularly guilty of this; almost every spending increase they propose is an “investment” of some sort. We should allow them some rhetorical leeway, and we should recognize that government has other reasons to spend money than just to maximize future economic growth. At the same time, it’s misleading when they claim that increased government spending that serves other policy goals (some quite legitimate) also increases future economic growth.
  5. There’s a difference between government investments in the commons and government spending that primarily benefits individuals.  A new airport benefits all who use it. A scientific research grant benefits the researcher and society as a whole if his research advances our understanding. A subsidized student loan is an investment in human capital, but the return on that investment accrues mostly to the student and his or her family. That’s not wrong, it’s just having a more limited effect on increasing long-term growth for society as a whole.
  6. Government investment in physical infrastructure is slow. The Administration learned this as they tried to force money out the door in 2009 for “shovel-ready jobs” that turned out not to be there. This doesn’t mean you don’t build roads and improve ports and airports, it just means the short-term fiscal stimulus argument for this type of spending is weak.
  7. Government investment in physical infrastructure is intentionally expensive because of “prevailing wage” requirements, championed by construction labor unions, that mandate the government must pay more for workers than an aggressive private firm might be able to find in the labor market.
  8. We should evaluate the marginal productivity benefits of additional investment. The President sometimes argues that building the national highway system was good for growth, therefore his specific proposal to increase highway spending is good for growth, too. But those are different investments, and we need to examine the marginal benefits (and rate of return) on the specific incremental investments he is now proposing. The transcontinental railroad definitely increased national economic growth, but that doesn’t mean the feds should subsidize a costly California bullet train with questionable growth benefits.
  9. International comparisons of government infrastructure are silly. U.S. government capital spending should be determined based on what will most increase U.S. productivity without comparison to what other countries are doing. If American ports are clogged and that is harming our trade and slowing American economic growth, then we should upgrade our ports. We shouldn’t instead improve our airports because other countries have shinier ones. We have a different geography, a different economy, and different infrastructure needs than does China, or Japan, or Dubai or France. It is crazy to suggest that the U.S. should build bullet trains because China is doing so.
  10. Government investment faces no market discipline. Capital investment in a private firm can face some of the above challenges—a CEO, for instance, might want a new facility built in his hometown rather than where it will produce the highest rate of return. Or a firm might reject an investment that would maximize its’ workers’ productivity because that investment is inconsistent with the firm’s broader strategic goals. But these firms ultimately face the discipline of the market to curb their excesses. Government does not, and in some cases policymakers are rewarded by their election markets to distort infrastructure investment even farther from its growth-maximizing ideal.
  11. Government capital investment financed by raising taxes on private capital investment will slow long-term economic growth. While in theory there probably are government infrastructure investments with very high rates of return, all of the above reasons suggest that in practice the actual rate of return on government-directed investment is going to be lower than in the private sector. If you advocate raising capital taxes (on capital gains and dividends, for instance, as Senate Democrats appear poised to do) at the same time you argue for increased government capital spending, you’re shifting capital investment from the private sector to the public sector. That will slow long-run economic growth rather than increase it.

As Hennessey notes and as I second this is not a denial that “smart government capital investment can increase productivity and contribute to faster long-run economic growth.” Instead, it’s an argument for caution but also for more thought about how to make government investment smarter. See also Tyler’s related comments.

Different framings when people agree

by  Tyler Cowen in

Let’s take two cases, namely higher infrastructure spending for the United States today and looser monetary policy for the eurozone.  I favor both, but often I am left discomforted by the endorsements I see, in part because I wish to see those issues framed differently.

On infrastructure spending, I prefer to start with a frustration with current and recent infrastructure spending.  It doesn’t seem very well allocated.  It takes too long.  We just spent a huge chunk through ARRA and couldn’t even clear up the backlogs at LaGuardia and Kennedy airports, the major gateways to America’s #1 city.  We don’t seem able to build up nuclear power as significant protection against climate change.  High-speed rail doesn’t seem like a good investment in the places where it is going through.

One can favor more infrastructure without thinking that “the point” is simply to demand and then get more spending.  “The point,” in my view, is to improve the quality of our decision-making and our processes of implementation.  If it were one or the other, I would rather improve the long-run quality than get the extra $$ today.  So that is the issue people should talk and write about more often, and it seems odd to me to bring up the current $$ issue without insisting on the broader and more important point about massive institutional failure.  It’s almost as if the writers don’t want to weaken their case for the extra $$ to be spent.

Alternatively, I would put it this way: I would like to be able to favor more infrastructure spending than I do (which is still to favor an upgrade).

(I also get nervous when I read 2013 claims that infrastructure spending will significantly boost employment.  I doubt if it will make any more than a very small difference in long-term unemployment, the core of our remaining employment problem.)

Ultimately, I think that these differences in framing are more important than any agreement over the conclusion, although of course both should be reported.

On eurozone monetary policy, I prefer to start by understanding the roots of poor ECB policy.  I don’t ascribe it to bad macroeconomic theory, for the most part, although it is never hard to find examples of bad macroeconomic theorizing, including in the policy community and in speeches.

I ascribe it to the desires of European voters, most of all in the wealthier northern countries.  Very often they have protected professional and service sector jobs and a privileged insider status, for both private sector and public sector reasons.  Four to six percent inflation, to them, means something close to a four to six percent real wage cut.  They won’t be able to renegotiate their way back to the previous real wage because deep down they sense — correctly — that today we live in a different world.   So they hate inflation and prefer to hold on to their insider rents.

So much of eurozone economic policy, and indeed the entire underlying structure of EU interest groups, is based on the desire to protect inside workers from possible real wage cuts.  It therefore should come as no surprise that those same forces have such a stranglehold over monetary policy.  A lot of creditor financial institutions don’t like inflation either.  Nor do old people like inflation, in part because not all of them understand indexing and in part because indexing may be imperfect for the portfolio decisions of the elderly.  The elderly are a major swing voting bloc in many countries.  In the past I have referred to “gerontocratic deflation.”

Now I don’t mind people fulminating against bad (read: tight) eurozone monetary policy per se.  But in my view it misses or at least buries the lede.  The real story here is that a “dysfunctional to begin with” set of EU interest groups have now, due to changing circumstances, become much more dysfunctional.  The core lesson here, in my view, is that governments devoted so obsessively to rent protection won’t be able to make a lot of required tough decisions.  And yes, I become frustrated when I see the whole mess somehow blamed on Austrian economics, the Austerians, or related ideas.  At best that is superficial and at worst misleading or downright false.  It’s mostly a way to score debating points, at the expense of a fuller picture of what is going on.

I don’t like the meme “it’s the xxxx, dummy,” but I’ll try it in modified form: “it’s the interest groups, mein Freund.”

So there we have a story: “entrenched EU interest groups — including labor and the elderly — hinder easy money.”  Much of the left doesn’t like to stress the former factor and much of the right doesn’t like to stress or even admit the relevance of easier money, and so you have an under-reported story.

The bottom line is this: I am happy to read that there is a “sensible middle” position on both infrastructure and monetary policy.  I am happy to hold some version of that position.  But I am unhappy when that broom is used to sweep some very important underlying issues under the carpet.  The insistence on a sensible middle position, while true, is very often a cloak for partisan reframing of the issue itself and a somewhat Orwellian forgetting of what is really going on.  If we could get the underlying issues right, better policy would have a greater chance of coming to pass.  And we would understand the world better.  It also would be harder to score points in written or televised debate.