Category: Political Science
Sentences to ponder
Campaigns are built to fool us into thinking that we're voting for individuals. We learn about the candidate's family, her job, her background — even her dog. But we're primarily voting for parties. The parties have just learned we're more likely to vote for them if they disguise themselves as individuals. And American politics would work better if we understood that.
That's from Ezra Klein.
Sentences to ponder
Chilean officials have not yet informed the miners of the months they will need to endure before a rescue shaft can be drilled and a cage lowered to pull them to the surface.
The story is here. At lunch today, one topic was how the Chilean miner experience, when it is over, might revise our understanding of social science. A related question was to estimate the probability that there will be a killing before the time underground is over. How much would that chance go up if one woman were in the group? An equal number of women?
Is it unethical for us to "watch" them, talk about them, or speculate about them? If doctors tell terminally ill patients the nature of their condition, why are the Chilean authorities waiting to tell the men how long they will have to wait for rescue?
How do they "stall them" when the miners ask when are they getting out?
Addendum: Apparently the miners were just told how long it is likely to be.
What do I think of diplomacy?
Diogo, a loyal MR reader, asks:
How do you see diplomacy as a profession? If you could be nominated US Ambassador to a country, which country would you choose? What good novels are there about diplomacy and diplomats?
I see diplomacy as a stressful and unrewarding profession. A good diplomat has the responsibility of deflecting a lot of the blame onto himself, and continually crediting others, while working hard not to like his contacts too much. And how does he or she stay so loyal to the home country when so many ill-informed or unwise instructions are coming through the pipeline? Most of all, a good diplomat requires some kind of clout in the home country and must maintain or manufacture that from abroad. The entire time on mission the diplomat is eating up his capital and power base, and toward what constructive end? So someone else can take his place? And what kind of jobs can you hope to advance into?
Diplomats are in some ways like university presidents: little hope for job advancement, serving many constituencies, and having little ability to control events. Plus they are underpaid relative to human capital. They must speak carefully. They must learn how to wield power in the subtlest ways possible.
Who was it that said?: " Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice Doggie" until you can find a stick"
Presumably diplomats either enjoy serving their country or they enjoy the ego rents of being a diplomat or both. It is a false feeling of power, borrowed power from one's country of origin rather than from one's personal achievements. For the spouse the required phoniness is even worse.
For all those reasons, and more, I would not wish to be a diplomat. I also might prefer to be a diplomat to a country I did not like, rather than to a country I did like.
As for novels about diplomats, The Constant Gardener comes to mind. The Diplomat's Wife is popular, though I have never read it. I read the Ender trilogy as about diplomacy as well. (Is there more from science fiction? It seems like a good plot device to bring people into contact with alien cultures.) Carlos Fuentes was himself a diplomat, as were Octavio Paz, Lawrence Durrell, Ivo Andriæ, Pablo Neruda, and Giorgos Seferis. That's a lot of writer-diplomats and you can add John Kenneth Galbraith (ambassador to India) to the list. Galbraith was the guy who said:
"There are few ironclad rules of diplomacy but to one there is no exception. When an official reports that talks were useful, it can safely be concluded that nothing was accomplished."
David Brooks on Larry Summers
To use a fancy word, there’s a metacognition deficit. Very few in public life habitually step back and think about the weakness in their own thinking and what they should do to compensate. A few people I interview do this regularly (in fact, Larry Summers is one). But it is rare. The rigors of combat discourage it.
Of the problems that afflict the country, this is the underlying one.
The full piece is here.
Further sentences to ponder, or my Arnold Kling imitation
I am aware that not everyone is happy with Rasmussen polls, still I think this result is striking, especially the difference in perspectives:
63% of the Political Class think the government has the consent of the governed, but only six percent (6%) of those with Mainstream views agree.
Seventy-one percent (71%) of all voters now view the federal government as a special interest group, and 70% believe that the government and big business typically work together in ways that hurt consumers and investors.
The link is here, with further information, and I thank Roger Congleton for the pointer.
From the comments
From Ezra's comments, this is ctown_woody:
Ezra,
To what extent is the Fed worried about making a visible commitment and failing? If Tyler Cowen and others are right that this slump is the end of family-deficit spending, it is quite conceivable that the Fed will fail to deliver that which it promises to deliver. At that point, the institutional players in the Fed will have lost credibility, which would lead to a lose of independence from politics.
So, to what extent is the Fed acting like Peter LaFleur from Dodgeball, "If you never try anything, you'll never fail"?
Who are the interesting collaborators?
Pensans, an MR reader of uncertain loyalty, requests:
How about a really systematic exploration of other contemporary collaborators with totalitarian regimes whose propaganda you would like to tout to unsettle readers? Or, would that disturb the shocking effect of your bold free thought on your readership?
The following names come to mind as "collaborators" worth reading or otherwise imbibing:
Martin Heidegger, Pablo Neruda, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean-Luc Godard, Susan Sontag, Ezra Pound, Eric Foner, Eric Hobsbawm, and I have lost track of who exactly apologized for Castro but it is many smart people.
H. Bruce Franklin, editor of "The Essential Stalin," was a splendid teacher and he had a notable influence on me.
There's a long list of Western intellectuals and Founding Fathers who apologized for slavery and violent imperialism. Although that does not fit the word "totalitarianism" exactly, it was often a form of totalitarianism — or worse – for those who suffered under it.
*City on the Edge*
The author is Mark Goldman and the subtitle is Buffalo, New York. I loved this book. It is a splendid portrait of twentieth century America, the connection of industrialism and the arts, the decline of manufacturing and the resulting urban casualties, an applied study of the wisdom of Jane Jacobs, and on top of all that it is the best book I've read on how excess parking helped destroy an American downtown. I recommend this book to all readers of serious non-fiction.
Strange North Korean headlines
"Talks about Talks Yield No Talks"
Yet somehow it all makes sense. For the pointer I thank Peter Komarek.
*Seeds of Destruction*
That's the new tract by Glenn Hubbard and Peter Navarro; the subtitle is Why the Path to Economic Ruin Runs through Washington, And How to Reclaim American Prosperity.
Beyond the usual market-oriented prescriptions, the book defends a price floor for oil imports, price indexing of social security benefits, it is anti-fiscal stimulus, anti-easy money, for job training programs, and for health care it advocates eliminating the tax deduction, removing state-level barriers to competition, and malpractice reform. The authors also devote special attention to criticizing Chinese protectionism as a reason why American job growth hasn't been better.
I take Hubbard to be a (the?) future "kingmaker" for economic policy within the Republican party, with possible competition from Douglas Holtz-Eakin. If you wish to know where those debates and proposals are headed, this is the book to pick up.
How economists (and how many) advise the President
Keith Hennessey serves up a first-rate post; to excerpt it would diminish the impact. Read the whole thing.
*Winston’s War: Churchill 1940-1945*
The author of this book is Max Hastings. Although this topic may seem like well-trodden ground, this is so far one of my favorite non-fiction books of the year. Excerpt:
It was remarkable how much the mood in Washington had shifted since January. This time, there was no adulation for Churchill the visitor. "Anti-British feeling is still strong," the British embassy reported to London, "stronger than it was before Pearl Harbor…This state of affairs is partly due to the fact that whereas it was difficult to criticize Britain while the UK was being bombed, such criticism no longer carries the stigma of isolationist or pro-Nazi sympathies." Senator Allen Ellender of Louisiana declared sourly there "there was little point in supplying the British with war material since they invariably lost it all."
Among other things, it is an excellent book for communicating how military alliances actually work and how much humiliation a nation feels if it keeps on losing military battles or is unable to fight in response. I also had not realized what a folly British policy toward Singapore was. Definitely recommended. Here is one review of the book. Here is an excerpt.
Not everyone in Australia likes Max Hastings.
View of Jimmy Carter and his Presidency
That was a reader request. Matt Yglesias offers some background, as does Kevin Drum. On the plus side there was airline deregulation, support for Volcker and disinflation (later), willingness to lose the Presidency to see disinflation through, and he didn't push for a large number of Democratic ideas that I would disagree with, though he did create the Department of Education. Recall that he came from a party of McGovern and Kennedy and you can think of him as a precursor of the better side of the Clinton administration. Price controls on energy were a big mistake and that idea is hard to justify.
I'll call his support for the Afghan rebels a plus, because it helped down the Soviet Union, but I can see how you could argue that one either way. His conservation efforts could be called mamby-pamby but still they were a step in the right direction. He gave amnesty to Vietnam draft dodgers, a plus in my book, as was giving away the Panama Canal and bribing Egypt into better behavior.
At the time I thought Carter was a reasonably good President and it was far from obvious to me that the election of Reagan would in net terms boost liberty or prosperity.
I do understand that he was a public relations disaster and he shouldn't have fired his entire Cabinet and that he botched the Iran invasion.
Still, I think of Carter as a President with some major pluses and overall I view his term as a step in the right direction. He also seems to have been non-corrupt — important so soon after Watergate — and since leaving office he has behaved honorably and intelligently, for the most part.
Bruce Cumings and what he deserves
Many of you are objecting to my post on his book, either in the form of comments or emails. You are objecting to his ideology and objecting that he does not denounce the North Korean regime with sufficient fervor and with sufficient recognition of its true awfulness, though he does denounce it, using the word "reprehensible."
On these points I (mostly) agree with you, the critics. Yet it is still a good book and it should open many people's eyes to the history of the Korean War and the not always pretty American role in that war. I haven't seen good comments or reviews finding fault with the book itself (but if I do I will pass them on). The book, by the way, does not allege that South Korea started the war.
Keep in mind how many history or foreign policy books or essays are written by people who are essentially toadies to power or apologists for the U.S. government, or for some other foreign regime. It is expected that we accept those problematic inclinations and affiliations without comment or condemnation. In contrast to many of the works by establishment historians, Cumings is a breath of fresh air.
Overall I seek to narrow rather than widen the following category: "cannot be praised without accompanying symbolic denunciation." If it turns out that, in the process, Cumings reaps more relative status than he deserves (and I am not very influential in shaping the reputations of historians), I'm not especially troubled by that.
In fact maybe I'm happy to see you squirm a bit.
One of my major purposes in writing this blog is to nudge people away from judging political issues, or for that matter books, by asking which groups or individuals rise or fall in relative status.
Wyclef Jean for President of Haiti?
Here is one response:
A sad day for Haiti. No experience. No plan. No education. Can’t speak the language let alone proper English plus a history of not being able manage his own personal affairs based on foreclosures, IRS tax liens and his nonprofit scandal.
Here is another:
Wyclef Jean owes the IRS 2.1 million dollars, had his house sold at auction and stole money from his own Haiti ‘charity’.
Those points would appear to be well-taken, but as an economist so often does, I would rephrase the question in terms of "how much" rather than "whether." What is the probability that the "added media scrutiny and international attention" effect will create benefits which outweigh his other deficiencies for the job? I say about ten percent.