Category: Political Science
Greater Bias Toward Transgender People Compared to Gay Men and Lesbian Women Is WEIRD
The greater acceptance of gay, compared with transgender, people in Western countries may be a result of a specific trajectory—where queer rights was centered by and around White, middle class, gender-conforming gay men—and may not generalize to other places. Two surveys of respondents in 23 countries (Ns∼ = 500 or 1,000 per country) showed that bias toward gay and transgender people is lower in Western (vs. non-Western) countries, but that the relative bias changes as a function of region: there is greater acceptance of gay (vs. transgender) people in most Western countries, whereas the reverse is true in most non-Western countries. Analyses of legal frameworks (N = 193) show that recognition of same-gender unions is prevalent in Western countries but virtually nonexistent elsewhere, whereas recognition of gender marker changes is prevalent throughout the world. Overall, in the most intolerant places, transgender people are relatively more accepted than gay people.
Here is the recent article by Jaimi L. Napier. Via a loyal MR reader.
The revival of socialism is an example of negative emotional contagion
That is the theme of my latest Free Press column. Rather than present the argument again, let me move directly to the trolling part of the piece:
Even the Soviet Union had some positive and forward-looking elements to its socialist doctrine. The stated goal was to overtake the United States, not “degrowth.” You were supposed to have kids to support the glory of communism, not give up on the idea because the world was too dreadful. Socialist labor was supposed to be fun and rewarding, not something to whine about. Furthermore, there were top performers in every category, including in the schools. Moscow State University was a self-consciously elite institution that intended to remain as such. However skewed the standards may have been, there was an intense desire to measure the best and (sometimes) reward them with foreign travel, as in chess and pianism. In an often distorted and unfair way, some parts of the Soviet system respected the notion of progress. For all the horrors of Soviet communism, at least along a few dimensions it had better ideals than some of those from today, including the undesirability of having children, and a dislike of economic growth.
There is much more at the link.
Economic literacy and public policy views
From a recent paper by Jared Barton and Cortney Rodet:
The authors measure economic literacy among a representative sample of U.S. residents, explore demographic correlates with the measure, and examine how respondents’ policy views correlate with it. They then analyze policy view differences among Republicans and Democrats and among economists and non-economists. They find significant differences in economic literacy by sex, race/ethnicity, and education, but little evidence that respondents’ policy views relate to their level of economic literacy. Examining heterogeneity by political party, they find that estimated fully economically literate policy views (i.e., predicted views as if respondents scored perfectly on the authors’ economic literacy assessment) for Democrats and Republicans are farther apart than respondents’ original views. Greater economic literacy among general survey respondents also does not result in thinking like an economist on policy.
Sad!
What should I ask Anne Appelbaum?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with her. From Wikipedia:
Anne Elizabeth Applebaum…is an American journalist and historian. She has written about the history of Communism and the development of civil society in Central and Eastern Europe. She became a Polish citizen in 2013.
Applebaum has worked at The Economist and The Spectator magazines, and she was a member of the editorial board of The Washington Post (2002–2006). She won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 2004 for Gulag: A History. She is a staff writer for The Atlantic magazine, as well as a senior fellow of the Agora Institute and the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University .
But she has done more yet, including work on a Polish cuisine cookbook. So what should I ask her?
*Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future*
The objectivity of Community Notes?
We use crowd-sourced assessments from X’s Community Notes program to examine whether there are partisan differences in the sharing of misleading information. Unlike previous studies, misleadingness here is determined by agreement across a diverse community of platform users, rather than by fact-checkers. We find that 2.3 times more posts by Republicans are flagged as misleading compared to posts by Democrats. These results are not base rate artifacts, as we find no meaningful overrepresentation of Republicans among X users. Our findings provide strong evidence of a partisan asymmetry in misinformation sharing which cannot be attributed to political bias on the part of raters, and indicate that Republicans will be sanctioned more than Democrats even if platforms transition from professional fact-checking to Community Notes.
Here is the full paper. I guess it agrees with Richard Hanania…
Who in California opposes the abundance agenda?
Labor unions are one of the culprits, environmental groups are another:
Hours of explosive state budget hearings on Wednesday revealed deepening rifts within the Legislature’s Democratic supermajority over how to ease California’s prohibitively high cost of living. Labor advocates determined to sink one of Newsom’s proposals over wage standards for construction workers filled a hearing room at the state Capitol mocking, yelling, and storming out at points while lawmakers went over the details of Newsom’s plan to address the state’s affordability crisis and sew up a $12 billion budget deficit.
Lawmakers for months have been bracing for a fight with Newsom over his proposed cuts to safety net programs in the state budget. Instead, Democrats are throwing up heavy resistance to his last-minute stand on housing development — a proposal that has drawn outrage from labor and environmental groups in heavily-Democratic California.
Here is the full story, via Josh Barro. To be clear, I am for the abundance agenda.
My excellent Conversation with Austan Goolsbee
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
A longtime professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School and former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Obama, Goolsbee now brings that intellectual discipline—and a healthy dose of humor—to his role as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
Tyler and Austan explore what theoretical frameworks Goolsbee uses for understanding inflation, why he’s skeptical of monetary policy rules, whether post-pandemic inflation was mostly from the demand or supply side, the proliferation of stablecoins and shadow banking, housing prices and construction productivity, how microeconomic principles apply to managing a regional Fed bank, whether the structure of the Federal Reserve system should change, AI’s role in banking supervision and economic forecasting, stablecoins and CBDCs, AI’s productivity potential over the coming decades, his secret to beating Ted Cruz in college debates, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: Okay, if the instability comes from the velocity side, that means that we should favor a monetary-growth rule to target the growth path of a nominal GDP, M times V, right?
GOOLSBEE: [laughs] Yes, and now you’re going to get me in trouble, Tyler. Here’s the thing I’ve known —
COWEN: You can just say yes. You’re not in trouble with me.
GOOLSBEE: I’m not going to say yes because, remember, I don’t like making policy off accounting identities. There’s no economic content in accounting identity. If you are trying to design a rule, that rule may work if the shocks are the same as what they always were in previous business cycles. I called it the golden path.
When we came into 2023, you’ll recall the Bloomberg economists said there was a 100 percent chance of recession in 2023. They announced it at the end of 2022. That’s when I came into the Fed system, the beginning of ’23.
That argument was rooted in the past. There had never been a drop of inflation of a significant degree without a very serious recession. Yet in 2023, there was. Inflation fell almost as much as it ever fell in one year without a recession. If you over-index too much on a rule that implicitly is premised on that everything is driven by demand shocks, I just think you want to be careful over-committing.
COWEN: I’m a little confused at the theoretical level. On one hand, you’re saying M times V is an identity, but on the other hand, it drives inflation dynamics.
GOOLSBEE: It’s why I started back from the . . . I bring a micro sentiment to the thinking about causality and supply and demand. I sense that you want to bring us to a, let’s agree on a monetary policy rule, and I’m inherently a little uncomfortable. I want to see what the rules say, but I fundamentally don’t want us to pre-commit to any given rule in a way that’s not robust to shocks.
COWEN: Now, you mentioned the post-pandemic inflation and the role of the supply side. When I look at that inflation, I see prices really haven’t come back down. They’ve stayed up, and I see service prices are also quite high and went up a lot, so I tend to think it was mostly demand side. Now, why is that wrong?
GOOLSBEE: There’re two parts to that. I won’t say why it’s wrong, but here are my questions. If you’re firmly a ‘this-all-came-from-demand’ guy, (A) you’ve got to answer, why did inflation begin soaring in the US when the unemployment rate is over 6 percent? Or we could turn it into potential output terms if you want, but output is below our estimate of potential. Unemployment is way higher than what we think of as the natural rate, and inflation is soaring. That already should make you a little questioning.
COWEN: I can cite M2. You may not like it. M2 went up 40 percent over a few-year period, right?
GOOLSBEE: Two, the fact that the inflation is taking place simultaneously in a bunch of countries of similar magnitudes that did not have the kind of aggregate demand, fiscal or monetary stimulus that we had in the US is also a little bit of a puzzle.
Then the third is, if you don’t think it was supply, then you need to have an explanation for why, when the stimulus rolls off, everything about the stimulus is delta from last year. We pass a big fiscal stimulus, we have substantial monetary stimulus that rolls off, the inflation doesn’t come down. Then in ’23, when the supply chain begins to heal, you see inflation come down. Those three things suggest there’s a little bit of a puzzle if you think it was all demand.
COWEN: No, I don’t think it was all demand, but you mentioned other countries. Switzerland and Japan — they import a lot. They were more restrained on the demand side. They had much lower rates of price inflation. That seems to me strong evidence for being more demand than supply.
GOOLSBEE: Wait a minute.
COWEN: I’m waiting.
GOOLSBEE: You’re going to bring in Japan?
COWEN: Yes.
GOOLSBEE: And you’re going to try to claim that Japan’s low inflation is the result of something in COVID? Japan had lower inflation all along, for decades before. They were going through deflation.
COWEN: But if it was mostly supply, a supply shock would’ve gotten them out of the earlier deflation, right? A demand shock would not have.
Recommended.
How constrained is the NYC mayor?
I thought to ask o3, here is the opening of its answer:
New York City has a “strong-mayor / council” system, but the City Charter, state law and an array of watchdog institutions deliberately fragment power. In practice the mayor can move fastest on implementation—issuing executive orders, running the uniformed services, writing the first draft of the budget, and appointing most agency heads—yet almost every strategic decision runs into at least one institutional trip-wire.
He does appoint all police commissioners and has direct control over the police. The mayor also has line item veto authority, although that can be overriden by the City Council. The entire response is of interest. More generally, who will and will not feel welcome in the city after this result?
The Effects of Ranked Choice Voting on Substantive Representation
Ranked choice voting (RCV) is an increasingly popular electoral institution that has been posited by reformers and media outlets to produce transformative effects on electoral outcomes and representation. However, there is little social scientific evidence available that evaluates these claims. I test the effects of RCV on municipal fiscal outcomes and the ideological composition of city councils. I also estimate RCV’s effects on these outcomes relative to public opinion — in other words, whether RCV narrows the gap between outcomes and mass policy preferences. This article finds no empirical support for the proposition that RCV changed fiscal outcomes or the ideological composition of city councils — both on absolute terms and relative to mass opinion. Furthermore, the roll-call based ideal points of legislators serving before and after RCV did not change, and the relationship between city district opinion and city legislator ideology is unchanged post-adoption. Taken as a whole, this article does not find evidence that RCV has produced the types of transformative political effects that reformers have postulated.
Here is the full paper by Arjun Vishwanath. Source.
What should I ask Nate Silver?
Yes, I am doing another Conversation with him, in honor of the paperback edition of his highly engaging book On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything. Here is the last installment of a CWT with Nate, here was my first Conversation with Nate.
So what should I ask him?
The tech right and the MAGA right
The contrasts there are the theme of my latest column for The Free Press. Excerpt:
The MAGA crowd, starting with Trump and including J.D. Vance, Stephen Miller, and Steve Bannon, has a different set of beliefs. Again, the actual views here are diverse. (After all, Trump himself can hold multiple views in the course of a single paragraph.) But if I had to summarize the doctrine, I would take the slogan “Make America Great Again” very literally—with an emphasis on again.
Their desire is to bring back an America that was more nationalistic, had a more cohesive elite, was less infatuated with globalization, was more masculine and less feminized, and had a stronger manufacturing base, among other things. That also means fewer immigrants—especially immigrants who don’t come from Europe, which the MAGA crowd views as the font of American civilization.
It is not my purpose to debate these views one by one, but I will note that these have not been the natural trends of our time. Due to birth control, the influence of feminization has risen, because women are taking on increasingly important roles in the workplace, politics, and education. Due to automation and foreign competition, manufacturing employment has declined. The rise of Asia has propelled globalization, and many of the most talented students at U.S. universities are no longer Americans. And because of proximity, mobility, and instability in many Latin American countries, immigration, both legal and illegal, has been rising.
The MAGA recipe thus requires ongoing and quite serious government intervention, in both the economic realm and in culture. Otherwise MAGA is doomed to fail, as its desired ends will be swept aside by the broader currents of history, which favor the tech right. Since the America of earlier times had a much smaller government than today, MAGA advocates, if they are to implement their desired ends, have to war against libertarian tendencies, and thus MAGA is unlikely to end up evolving in libertarian directions.
So whereas the tech right wants freedom to build, MAGA wants the government to manage the building in some very specific directions—like rekindling manufacturing as a core part of the economy, for instance—and to prevent some kinds of globalized building altogether.
Recommended.
Annie Lowrey on ranked choice voting as a form of democracy
Seeing a no-name upstart attempt to upset a brand-name heavyweight is thrilling. But the system has warped the political calculus of the mayoral campaign. Candidates who might have dropped out are staying in. Candidates who might be attacking one another on their platforms or records are instead considering cross-endorsing. Voters used to choosing one contender are plotting out how to rank their choices. Moreover, they are doing so in a closed primary held in the June of an odd year, meaning most city residents will not show up at the polls anyway. If this is democracy, it’s a funny form of it…
Whether Cuomo or Mamdani wins this month, New Yorkers might have another chance to decide between them. After this annoyingly chaotic primary, we could have an annoyingly chaotic election: If Mamdani loses, he might run in the general on the Working Families Party ticket. If Cuomo loses, he might run in the general as an independent, as will the disgraced incumbent, Eric Adams. At least, in that election, voters won’t be asked to rank their favorite, just to pick one.
Here is the full piece. I do not myself see a big advantage from this system.
My 2018 Politico piece on whether we are descending into fascism
In 2018 I published an article in Politico, arguing that fascism would not come to America. In part that is because of our very long democratic traditions (much longer than Weimar!), and in part because American bureaucracy has become unmanageable, thus limiting the power of the executive. DOGE in particular has been a quite vivid representation of the latter point, as I made it in 2018 — “The net result is they simply can’t control enough of the modern state to steer it in a fascist direction.”
A few people have asked me to revisit that prediction, and frankly I think it is looking great. (I do not doubt, however, that the Trump administration represents a major increase in blatant corruption, and a deterioration of norms of governance, most of all in the areas of public health and science but not only. I think of America as evolving back to some of its 19th century norms, and often bad ones, not fascism.)
Noah Smith wrote recently:
Trump is cosplaying as a dictator. But so far he’s backed down on: * tariffs * ICE sweeps * Abrego Garcia * Greenland/Canada/Panama * Ukraine aid * DOGE He does care about public opinion, a lot.
Here is Noah’s longer essay.
Here is a recent NYT headline: “Trump Loses Another Battle in His War Against Elite Law Firms.” The judiciary has stood up to Trump firmly, and he has backed down. The Army parade, by the way, was mostly pathetic and hardly served as a call to fascist arms. The Kennedy Center is not the new Haus der Kunst.
It was some while back that Trump pulled the nomination of Stefanik to be UN ambassador, on the grounds that the Republican margin in the House was extremely thin. All I can say is that Hitler would have done it differently.
Updating our views of nuclear deterrence, a short essay by o3 pro
I asked o3 pro how very recent events should update our perspectives on Schelling’s work on nuclear deterrence. I asked for roughly 800 words, here is one excerpt from what I received:
…Deterrence models that ignore domestic legitimacy under‑predict risk‑taking.
6. The United States is both referee and participant
American destroyers shooting down Iranian missiles create a blended deterrence model: extended defense. That blurs the line between the traditional “nuclear umbrella” and kinetic participation. It also complicates escalation ladders; Tehran now weighs the prospect of an inadvertent clash with the U.S. Fifth Fleet every time it loads a Shahab‑3. The war thus updates Schelling’s idea of “commitment” for the 21st‑century alliance network: digital sensors, shared early‑warning data, and distributed interceptors knit allies into a single strategic organism, reducing the freedom of any one capital to de‑escalate unilaterally.
7. Lessons for non‑combatant nuclear states
New Delhi and Islamabad will notice that an opaque Israeli arsenal backed by high‑end defenses delivered more bargaining power than Iran’s half‑finished program. Pyongyang may conclude the opposite: only a tested, miniaturized warhead guarantees respect. Meanwhile European leaders should ponder how much of their own deterrent posture rests on aging U.S. missiles whose effectiveness presumes no adversary fielding Israel‑grade intercept layers. The Israeli‑Iranian conflict is therefore less a regional exception than a harbinger.
Here is the full “column.”