Category: Political Science
Bryan Caplan defends pacifism
In the real-world, however, pacifism is a sound guide to action.
And that includes an unwillingness to kill innocent civilians as collateral damage while acting in defense of one’s country. The original post is here, the defense against critics is here.
There is not enough consideration of specific times and place. Had England been pacifist in 1914, that might have yielded a better outcome. Had England been pacifist in 1939, likely not. Switzerland has done better for itself, and likely for the world, by being ready to fight back. Pacifism today could quite possibly doom Taiwan, Israel, large parts of India (from both Pakistan and internal dissent), any government threatened by civil war (who would end up ruling Saudi Arabia and how quickly?), and I predict we would see a larger-scale African tyrant arise, gobbling up non-resisting pacifist neighbors. Would China request the vassalage of any countries, besides Taiwan that is? Would Russia “request” Georgia and the Baltics? Would West Germany have survived?
And this is the best we can do? It’s much worse than the status quo, which is hardly delightful enlightenment. I don’t see these examples mentioned in Bryan’s post. There is also a Lucas critique issue of how the bad guys start behaving once they figure out that the good guys are pacifist, and I don’t see him discussing that either.
It would be a mistake to add up all the wars and say pacifism is still better overall, because we do not face an all-or-nothing choice. Many selective instances of non-pacifism are still a good idea, with benefits substantially in excess of their costs. Bryan, however, has to embrace pacifism, otherwise his moral theory becomes too tangled up in the empirics of the daily newspaper…
Which is exactly where I am urging him to go.
Why are so many Russian Jews Republicans?
I wouldn’t exactly describe my family this way, but here are some data (do read the whole article):
The most recent data, from the 2004 election, show that Russian Jews preferred Bush to Kerry by a margin of 3 to 1. Israel, national security, and the economy topped the list of concerns among Russian Jews, but there was also a cultural component to their preference; they were among the so-called Values Voters who voted Republican based on cultural wedge issues. A month before the election, 81 percent of Russian Jews supported a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages—nearly the inverse number of Jews nationally. They also expressed heavy opposition to affirmative action and showed less support for on-demand abortion, according to numbers compiled by the Research Institute for New Americans, which tracks the Russian-speaking community.
And here is more evidence. Why might this be? The stronger record of Republicans, in particular Reagan, as anti-communists is one obvious reason, but that doesn’t explain the broader conservative tendency. The Russian Jews are not anti-gay marriage because the U.S. Republicans are. The more hawkish stance of Republicans on Israel is another reason, but again that doesn’t seem to explain why the connection is such a fundamental one. It doesn’t sound as if these Russian Jews are yearning to become Democrats, if only for the Israel issue.
I would suggest that many Russian Jews, compared to American Jews, are much less hesitant to affiliate with the American brand of Christianity found in the Republican Party. Related strains of thought have been prevalent in Russia for a long time, yet for a long while their Christian nature was covered up by communist rule. Furthermore attachment to Israel, rather than a lifelong felt contrast with American Christians, or strict Judaic observance, is the source of Jewish identity for many Russian Jews. So affiliation with a fairly Christian party is not jarring for the Russian Jews and indeed it may be welcomed, especially if it dovetails with pro-Israel attitudes.
The implied prediction is that Russian Jews who assimilate more in American life, and who marry Americans, are less likely to be Republicans.
I found this part of the article interesting:
Theirs is no country-club Republicanism. Russian Jews in New York, the nation’s largest Russian-Jewish community, numbering 350,000, are largely under-employed; a majority earns less than $30,000. (These numbers do not reflect under-education. The average Russian Jewish immigrant has more higher education that his average American Jewish counterpart.)
On related questions, here is Ilya Somin. Here is another opinion:
“Russians respect power,” says Gary Shteyngart, a novelist who emigrated to New York from Leningrad at age 7. “Many immigrants give lip service to democracy but in the end they want some patriarchal white guy to run things with a strong hand. Feelings of oppression that began within the anti-Semitic confines of the Soviet Union are turned from a defensive to an offensive stance under the false perception that the Democratic Party is indistinguishable from the Communist Party of the USSR.”
I thank Natasha, a loyal MR reader, for the pointer.
*Levant* (Smyrna, Alexandria, and Beirut)
That is the new and excellent book by Philip Mansel and the subtitle is Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean, excerpt:
The Beirut dilemma goes to the heart of the Levant. At certain times — Smyrna in the nineteenth century, Alexandria and Beirut for periods of the twentieth — Levantine cities could find the elixir of coexistence, putting deals before ideals, the needs of the city before the demands of nationalism. Like all cities, however, Levantine cities needed an armed force for protection. This could be provided by the Ottoman, British or French armies, but not by the cities’ own citizens, since they were unwilling to shoot co-religionists. No Levantine city produced an effective police force or national guard of its own. The very qualities that gave these cities their energy — freedom and diversity — also threatened their existence. No army, no city.
Game theory and the budget
Matt Yglesias writes:
…the right is big government’s best friend…You have a government set to steadily increase spending on autopilot as a result of demographic change and rising health care costs. And you have a Democratic President urging congress to enact spending cuts. But you have conservative politicians refusing to make a serious effort to reach an agreement out of some blend of taxophobia and fear of giving the President a win. The result, again, whether the right realizes it or not, is a gift to the wing of the Democratic Party that disagrees with Obama about the desirability of enacting spending cuts.
I tend to agree with this, but it’s always worth trying to solve for the case where one is wrong. The strategy of “no trade” with Obama could be rational for the Republicans if:
1. Not much will happen this time around anyway, so the Republicans are investing in credibility for a future bargain, perhaps post-2012.
2. Republicans think that prevailing economic conditions will turn public opinion in their favor, over time, and so a later bargain is preferable.
3. Republicans think that if a fiscal crisis comes, drastic spending cuts are especially easy to enact, relative to tax increases, and they are willing to risk that crisis. It’s hard to argue that this belief is true (reindexing benefits to a saner level takes a lot of time), although I would not rule out that some Republican Party politicians may hold it.
4. Wait for party leaders to move first, for political cover, and that is a dragons and ballroom dancing game (pdf).
And there is always:
5. Republican politicians are investing in the value of their non-electoral options and that implies group loyalty above other considerations.
None of us know the true model, but we all know the literature on irreversible investment and option value. If you’re not sure of the true model, wait rather than commit. Here is Jeff on deadlines. Another way to put this point is that we can’t, from current Republican inaction, infer much about the likely final outcome.
Chopin’s Sonata #2
Democrats and Republicans are joining to oppose one of the most important features of President Obama’s new deficit reduction plan, a powerful independent board that could make sweeping cuts in the growth of Medicare spending.
There is a growing move to do away with the board and that move enjoys widespread support:
Representative Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin and chairman of the House Budget Committee, called it “a rationing board” and said Congress should not “delegate Medicare decision-making to 15 people appointed by the president.” He said Mr. Obama’s proposal would allow the board to “impose more price controls and more limitations on providers, which will end up cutting services to seniors.”
Here is the article (1/20). Here is Chopin’s Sonata #2. On the brighter side, here are outlines of a budget deal under discussion.
*The Origins of Political Order*
That is the new book from Frank Fukuyama and the subtitle is From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution. A few points:
1. Every page is intelligent and reasonable.
2. It is a useful general overview of what we know about the origins of states, with full coverage given to the non-Western world, most of all China.
3. My single sentence summary would be: “I am showing you how some polities developed workable, strong states, based in accountability, and how others did not.” If that is it, I would rather that the empirical material were more focused on the “model” and less on overall general narrative. Ultimately the organization sprawls. Nonetheless, this book is an important implied revision of public choice economics, with the focus on history and the question of how strong states get built.
4. In its scope and method, this book feels late 19th century.
5. I am not convinced by the discussion of why earlier China did not progress, found in the range of 51% on Kindle. Fukuyama seems to suggest they simply weren’t interested in doing better. I would be happier if so much did not rest on that question.
6. One implication of the analysis is that we should not be very optimistic about the current revolutions in the Middle East.
7. Try this sentence: “The very lateness of the European state-building project was the source of the political liberty that Europeans would later enjoy.”
8. The section on biology could use a major dose of Robin Hanson.
Here is one useful review. Here is a review from The Economist.
Acemoglu appointment seems to be a false rumor
It had been reported:
An ethnic Armenian, Daron Acemoglu, was nominated as the new Turkish Ambassador to France, a source in the Turkish Foreign Ministry told PanARMENIAN.Net.
Here is more. It then changed to an OECD appointment and Acemoglu rejected all offers, expressing an interest in pursuing his academic career. There are further reports and revisions here. One Armenian source claims it was all a PR trick from the Turkish government, to win favor from Armenians. Interpret all reports on this topic with caution.
Debunking Bartels on the Democrats
Larry Bartels has an oft-cited that Democratic Presidents are better for the economy. Andrew Gelman has a nice presentation of the skeptical take of Jim Campbell. For instance:
Jim Campbell recently wrote an article, to appear this week in The Forum (the link should become active once the issue is officially published) claiming that Bartels is all wrong–or, more precisely, that Bartels’s finding of systematic differences in performance between Democratic and Republican presidents is not robust and goes away when you control the economic performance leading in to a president’s term.
Here’s Campbell:
Previous estimates did not properly take into account the lagged effects of the economy. Once lagged economic effects are taken into account, party differences in economic performance are shown to be the effects of economic conditions inherited from the previous president and not the consequence of real policy differences. Specifically, the economy was in recession when Republican presidents became responsible for the economy in each of the four post-1948 transitions from Democratic to Republican presidents. This was not the case for the transitions from Republicans to Democrats. When economic conditions leading into a year are taken into account, there are no presidential party differences with respect to growth, unemployment, or income inequality.
File under “Was never convincing in the first place.” Read the comments to the post also.
Ahem, a lot of the spending cuts are frauds
Via the cool-minded Kevin Drum (I have added no extra indentation, it is Kevin and then the AP, and then Kevin again, not me):
Here’s AP reporter Andrew Taylor digging into the $38 billion in spending cuts that Republicans agreed to and finding that an awful lot of it is smoke and mirrors:
Instead, the cuts that actually will make it into law are far tamer, including […] $2.5 billion from the most recent renewal of highway programs that can’t be spent because of restrictions set by other legislation. Another $3.5 billion comes from unused spending authority from a program providing health care to children of lower-income families.
….The spending measure reaps $350 million by cutting a one-year program enacted in 2009 for dairy farmers then suffering from low milk prices. Another $650 million comes by not repeating a one-time infusion into highway programs passed that same year. And just last Friday, Congress approved Obama’s $1 billion request for high-speed rail grants — crediting themselves with $1.5 billion in savings relative to last year.
About $10 billion of the cuts comes from targeting appropriations accounts previously used by lawmakers for so-called earmarks….Republicans had already engineered a ban on earmarks when taking back the House this year.
Republicans also claimed $5 billion in savings by capping payments from a fund awarding compensation to crime victims. Under an arcane bookkeeping rule — used for years by appropriators — placing a cap on spending from the Justice Department crime victims fund allows lawmakers to claim the entire contents of the fund as budget savings. The savings are awarded year after year.
And this report from CBS News notes two other phantom cuts: $1.7 billion left over from the 2010 census and $2.2 billion in subsidies for health insurance co-ops that are going to be funded anyway via the healthcare reform bill. This stuff alone adds up to $27.4 billion, all of it money that wouldn’t have been spent anyway. I suppose you can argue that some of it might have gotten reallocated if it hadn’t been removed legislatively, but I doubt that the tea party true believers are in a mood to buy that. If these reports are correct, the bill contains only about $11 billion in hard cuts. Basically, it looks as if the tea partiers may have gotten snookered by their own side.
Sentences to make you angry (or not)
In a recent paper, James Lindgren of Northwestern reports:
…compared to anti-redistributionists, strong redistributionists have about two to three times higher odds of reporting that in the prior seven days they were angry, mad at someone, outraged, sad, lonely, and had trouble shaking the blues. Similarly, anti-redistributionists had about two to four times higher odds of reporting being happy or at ease. Not only do redistributionists report more anger, but they report that their anger lasts longer. When asked about the last time they were angry, strong redistributionists were more than twice as likely as strong opponents of leveling to admit that they responded to their anger by plotting revenge. Last, both redistributionists and anti-capitalists expressed lower overall happiness, less happy marriages, and lower satisfaction with their financial situations and with their jobs or housework.
Further, in the 2002 and 2004 General Social Surveys anti-redistributionists were generally more likely to report altruistic behavior. In particular, those who opposed more government redistribution of income were much more likely to donate money to charities, religious organizations, and political candidates. The one sort of altruistic behavior that the redistributionists were more likely to engage in was giving money to a homeless person on the street.
This is much more to this paper. For instance, at the U.S. national level, racists tend to be pro-income redistribution on net. Anti-capitalist attitudes are associated with higher levels of intolerance. I thank an MR reader for the pointer, I am sorry that I have lost the identifying email.
The wit and wisdom of Garett Jones
Questions that are rarely asked
By email, from Joshua Miller:
Do you think there is an audience for a public policy game show? The idea would be to ask contestants to solve policy problems instead of asking them to navigate obstacle courses or eat spiders.
Much of my research is on deliberative democracy and civic engagement, but though Obama used that rhetoric in his campaign there haven’t been any major policy moves to increase civic engagement. So I wondered:
If you have any comments, I’d appreciate them. I don’t imagine this as some sort of televised town hall meeting; rather, I envision judging contestants’ policy choices according to realistic projections of their impact.
Here is Alex’s proposal for, So You Think You Can Be President?
Will the government shut down?
Here are the Bookmaker’s odds:
Will the U.S. Congress reach an agreement on the federal spending cut bill for the rest of the fiscal year before March 4th?
YES -140 58%
NO -110 47%[The +/- Indicates the Return on the Wager. The percentage is the likelihood that response will occur. For Example: Betting on the candidate least likely to win would earn the most amount of money, should that happen.]
For the pointer I thank Samuel Arbesman. Why is there no InTrade.com market?
Addendum: InTrade now shows a 39 percent chance of a shutdown before the end of June.
Haiti fact of the day
At the time the United States intervened in Haiti in 1994, the U.S. defense budget of $288 billion was 20 times the entire gross domestic product of Haiti.
[TC: And yet we still did not quite achieve our war aims.] That is from the new and interesting book by Sarah E. Kreps, Coalitions of Convenience: United States Military Interventions After the Cold War.
Here are music videos by Sweet Micky, the new President of Haiti. I’ve seen him in concert three times and it was always enjoyable.
Libya and our budget
From Ezra Klein’s Wonkbook:
The war in Libya is making defense cuts less likely, reports Carrie Budoff Brown: “For once, the unthinkable in Washington seemed within reach. From liberals to tea party conservatives to a defense secretary who served in a Republican administration, all agreed — it was time to begin reining in the Pentagon budget. Then along came Libya. Just as the debt debate ramps up on Capitol Hill, the lead role the United States is playing in the military action against Libya threatens to scramble an emerging consensus over the need to trim defense to reduce the deficit…The airstrikes are already being used by some in the Republican establishment to blunt momentum in favor of the cuts, long considered heretical in a town in which defense contractors constitute a formidable lobby and members of Congress view the Pentagon budget as a jobs program and fear being tagged as unpatriotic.”