Category: Political Science
Very good sentences
"I’m one of the few people who went to Washington to get out of politics."
Can you guess who said it? Hat tip goes to Felix Salmon.
The elephant in the room
Paul Krugman writes:
Brad DeLong is mad at Tyler Cowen, with reason – for Cowen writes about US fiscal irresponsibility, fairly sensibly, without mentioning the elephant, and I do mean elephant, in the room: the role of the post-Reagan GOP.
Look: until 1980 or so the United States generally paid its way; the ratio of debt to GDP generally fell over time. Then starve-the-beast came to power, and fiscal realism went away. That’s the story; anyone who glosses over that, who makes it a plague-on-both-houses issue or, worse, makes it seem as if Obama is the villain, is in an essential way misleading his readers.
Brad DeLong offers further comment.
More on GaddafiGate
His resignation came as a US consultancy admitted mishandling a multimillion dollar contract with Libya to sanitise Gaddafi's reputation in the west. Monitor Group, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, organised for academics and policymakers from the US and UK to travel to Tripoli to meet the Libyan despot between 2006 and 2008, as part of a $3m (£1.8m) contract.
In a related development, the director of LSE has resigned, there is more here. Hat tip goes to Kieran Healy.
Bleeding heart libertarians
That is the name of a new and excellent blog. The writers include Andrew Jason Cohen, Daniel Shapiro, Jacob T. Levy, James Stacey Taylor, Jason Brennan, and Matt Zwolinski. They are all worth reading. Jason Brennan is perhaps not so well known in the blogosphere, but he is already one of the most important classical liberal thinkers in the world and you will be hearing more from him soon. Here is his post on neoclassical liberalism.
Very good sentences
One of my pet ideas is that people in DC spend way too much time gazing at surveys of the public's hazy opinions on issues and not enough time gazing at surveys of what the public thinks of different kinds of people.
That is from Matt Yglesias, there is more here.
How bad is the state pension funding mess?
Dean Baker says not so bad; Kevin Drum, Paul Krugman, and others seem to take his side. Josh Barro says it's bad. I side with Barro. Here is one Baker passage:
The total shortfall for the pension funds is less than 0.2 percent of projected gross state product over the next 30 years for most states. Even in the cases of the states with the largest shortfalls, the gap is less than 0.5 percent of projected state product.
Beware of the 30-year comparison I say. A lot of sums look small compared to thirty years' worth of output. I worry when I read sentences such as this:
The major reason that shortfalls exist at all was the downturn in the stock market following the collapse of the housing bubble, not inadequate contributions to pension funds.
In my house, that's what inadequate means. I also see Baker relying on a dangerous version of an equity premium argument, when I'd rather see a probability distribution of scenarios. I don't see Baker — not once — analyzing the public choice considerations of how state governments actually behave and treat their finances. Or how about how state voters hate tax increases, reasonably or not, and think their governments should be forced to actually solve their mismanagement problems? A crisis usually is an institutional crisis.
Here is a typical passage from the Barro piece:
New York taxpayers have learned about these dangers the hard way. There is a reason that the pension fixes enacted in 2009 were called “Tier V” and not “Tier II”: There had been three previous attempts to rein in the excessive cost of New York’s public-employee pensions by creating less generous pension “tiers” for newly hired employees. These reforms date back to the fiscal crisis of the 1970s, when unsustainably generous contracts with public-employee unions threatened to throw New York City into bankruptcy. Since then, though, New York’s public-worker unions have been highly successful in unwinding previously enacted pension reforms. The new Tier V is nearly identical to what Tier IV was at the time of its enactment in 1983–but Tier IV has been repeatedly, and retroactively, sweetened through increases in benefit formulas, cuts to employee contributions, and reductions in the retirement age. Similarly, by the time substantial numbers of workers actually start retiring under Tier V around 2040, this plan, too, will probably bear little resemblance to its current form.
Most of Barro's piece focuses on public choice considerations — of how state and local government institutions actually work — and thus it is the better analysis. Here is a related piece by Eileen Norcross, closer to Barro than to Baker.
Globalization and the Expanding Moral Circle
In 1869 the Irish historian William Lecky (1838-1903) wrote that moral progress is about extending the moral circle.
At one time the benevolent affections embrace merely the family, soon the circle expanding includes first a class, then a nation, then a coalition of nations, then all humanity…
What is the effect of globalization on the moral circle? Does trade melt barriers and expand the moral circle or does globalization make "the other" a more salient division allowing politicians to demonize and control through xenophobia?
Two pieces of evidence, one anecdotal the other experimental, suggests that globalization expands the moral circle. The anecdotal evidence is the cover story of this month's Wired titled "1 Million Workers. 90 Million iPhones. 17 Suicides. This is where your gadgets come from? Should you care?"
Now from a rational point of view this is absurd. Put aside that the suicide rate is higher among American college students than Chinese workers at Foxconn, even odder is that the writer cares about 17 suicides but not say the million plus deaths in China due to lung disease. But no one said that the moral circle grows for rational reasons. In this case, the writer, Joel Johnson, found that the purchase of the cell phone extended his moral circle to workers who assembled the phone half a world away:
I was burdened by what felt like an outsize provision of guilt–an existential buyer’s remorse for civilization itself. I am here because I want to know: Did my iPhone kill 17 people?
What about the experimental evidence? In an excellent paper, Buchan et al. discuss results from a public good dilemma game that they ran on thousands of people in six countries around the world: Iran, South Africa, Argentina, Russia, Italy and the United States.
In each country the players could contribute to themselves, to a local group or to a world group. Local contributions were doubled and world contributions were tripled such that the world-group maximizing strategy would be for all contributions to go to the world account, the local-group maximizing strategy would be for all contributions to go to the local account and (as usual) the dominant strategy was to contribute to self only. (Local contributions also paid more to self than did contributions to the world account).
The authors find two strong effects. First, the rate of donation to the world account increased significantly with the extent of a country's globalization, as measured by a globalization index. Second, within countries the rate of donation to the world acount increased with an individual's globalization index (based on measures such as whether the individual worked for an international firm, watched foreign movies, called people abroad etc.) Thus, globalization increases the potential for global cooperation.
The authors conclude:
…not only is living in a more globalized country associated with more cooperation at the world level, but the same relationship holds as the degree of individual global connectedness increases as well. The cosmopolitan hypothesis receives clear support from our experiments.
… our findings suggest that humans' basic “tribal social instincts” may be highly malleable to the influence of the processes of connectedness embedded in globalization.
Western intellectuals and Gadhafi
Robert Putnam was once called to a meeting with Gadhafi. Here is an excerpt from his account:
Students of Western political philosophy would categorize Col. Gadhafi as a quintessential student of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: He made clear that he deeply distrusted any political group that might stand between individual citizens and the "General Will" as interpreted by the Legislator (i.e., Col. Gadhafi himself). When I argued that freedom of association could enhance democratic stability, he vehemently dismissed the idea. That might be so in the West, he insisted, but in Libya it would simply strengthen tribalism, and he would not stand for disunity.
Throughout, he styled our meeting as a conversation between two profound political thinkers, a trope that approached the absurd when he observed that there were international organizations for many professions nowadays, but none for philosopher-kings. "Why don't we make that happen?" he proposed with a straight face. I smiled, at a loss for words. Col. Gadhafi was a tyrant and a megalomaniac, not a philosopher-king, but our visit left me convinced that he was not a simple man.
Was this a serious conversation or an elaborate farce? Naturally, I came away thinking–hoping–that I had managed to sway Col. Gadhafi in some small way, but my wife was skeptical. Two months later I was invited back to a public roundtable in Libya, but by then I had concluded that the whole exercise was a public-relations stunt, and I declined.
Hat tip goes to Monkey Cage and ultimately, the fabled Daniel Lippman. But that's not all — Benjamin Barber also had some visits to meet with the Libyan leader, here is his account:
Written off not long ago as an implacable despot, Gaddafi is a complex and adaptive thinker as well as an efficient, if laid-back, autocrat. Unlike almost any other Arab ruler, he has exhibited an extraordinary capacity to rethink his country's role in a changed and changing world.
And:
Surprisingly flexible and pragmatic, Gaddafi was once an ardent socialist who now acknowledges private property and capital as sometimes appropriate elements in developing societies. Once an opponent of representative central government, he is wrestling with the need to delegate substantial authority to competent public officials if Libya is to join the global system. Once fearful of outside media, he has permitted satellite dishes throughout his country, and he himself surfs the Internet.
Libya under Gaddafi has embarked on a journey that could make it the first Arab state to transition peacefully and without overt Western intervention to a stable, non-autocratic government and, in time, to an indigenous mixed constitution favoring direct democracy locally and efficient government centrally.
Here is Barber's piece on Libya from 2011. It starts like this:
I offer my views about Libya here not just as a democratic theorist and HuffPost regular, but as a member of the International Board of the Gaddafi International Charity and Development Foundation until this morning, when I resigned.
The Big Society, from England
Here is Wikipedia on The Big Society. Here are my impressions:
1. It is nice to have a conservative movement which is pro gay rights and reasonably socially liberal, while still fiscally conservative.
2. Their person in charge of naming should be fired and sent to study Orwell. The words "Big" and "Society" make each other sound much worse. I would have preferred "The Small Non-Society," "The Small Society," or "The Big Non-Society," or "The Medium-Sized Hook-Up," among other options.
The only worse name I can think of is Big Society Bank.
3. From a distance, it seems that almost everyone in the UK hates the program.
4. Most of the important market liberalizations in the Britain have come through expressions of centralized political power, but for market liberal ends. Margaret Thatcher is the classic example, but you could go back to the repeal of the Corn Laws or for that matter the abolition of slavery. The Big Society pretends to have found a new formula for British liberalization and I suspect they are simply misguided.
5. John Kay put it well: "The Big Society might in the end mean no more in practice than the encouragement of volunteers to supervise public libraries, just as stakeholding ended up only as the name for new tax breaks for private pensions. If an emphasis on hybrids is to make the transitions from sound bite to political philosophy to practical policy, the largest group of questions that need to be answered concerns the closely related issues of hybrid capital structure and governance. Faced with opportunities to review these issues in the establishment of new regimes for hospitals, schools or railways, the Treasury resisted giving answers, because to do so would make the transfer of autonomy to the newly established bodies real."
6. The Big Society may create lots of decentralized power structures with the worst aspects of the private and public sectors, and those structures may in the longer run thwart true liberalizing reforms.
7. Admittedly this is from a critical source, but I don't think it is a terribly biased article. Doesn't this make it sound…lame?: "The initiatives being championed include a local buy-out of a rural pub, efforts to recruit volunteers to keep museums open, support to speed up broadband supply, and giving residents more power over council spending."
8. Since they presumably have read both Bryan Caplan and Matt Yglesias, why would they push for direct election of police chiefs? Is there any good argument for that practice?
9. I hate local councils. Might the disproportionate reasonableness of the British population be partially related to the fact that they don't spend so much time in local politics?
10. The cutting and consolidating of benefits is the best part of the whole scheme. It is long overdue.
11. The real UK economy is in any case badly ailing, and for reasons which have nothing to do with the current government. Finance is a far iffier venture than in times past, the tax haven gains for London will persist but may not be a source of future growth, British manufacturing has long been weak, their fossil fuels have not so bright a future, and British pharmaceuticals seem to have hit a dry spell. What do they make? The economy is in for a tough time no matter what, and the policies done in the meantime will receive a bad name, whether they deserve it or not.
12. England probably has the worst health care policy in Western Europe. Still, whatever payoff will come from the proposed NIH reforms probably will take quite a few years, even if all goes as planned. It is difficult to drag a health care system out of its established pathologies. In the meantime the system will cost more and make the preexisting faults of the British health care system, including its inequities, more visible.
13. Unlike David Leonhardt and some other commentators, I don't blame fiscal austerity for their output and adjustment problems; their monetary policy has been fairly expansionary and they are not in a liquidity trap. Scott Sumner is the best commentator here.
As it stands, I don't see the whole thing ending well. It's not targeting what are actually their biggest micro problems, which are increasingly polarized labor market outcomes, a paucity of competitive export sectors, and some deteriorating educational institutions, at multiple levels. I don't much care whether a citizens group shows up and feigns a Tocquevillian approach to running the local library.
State tax revenue fact of the day, or “the new normal”
GDP has now recovered to pre-crash levels, but how about state revenue?
On average it has returned to 89% of peak levels. In Louisiana it is about 72 percent of peak levels, the lowest figure in the group. In North Dakota it is over 110 percent. Only New Hampshire and North Dakota are above 100 percent of peak levels.
I take these numbers to be one measure (not the only measure) of how much we had been overvaluing our actual wealth, pre-crisis.
Here is the on-line version of the WSJ article, it does not reproduce all of the information in the paper edition, pp.A6-7.
What are the incentives here?
Although inmate labor is helping budgets in many corners of state government, the savings are the largest in corrections departments themselves, which have cut billions of dollars in recent years and are under constant pressure to reduce the roughly $29,000 a year that it costs to incarcerate the average inmate in the United States.
Senator John Ensign, Republican of Nevada, introduced a bill last month to require all low-security prisoners to work 50 hours a week. Creating a national prison labor force has been a goal since he went to Congress in 1995, but it makes even more sense in this economy, he said.
Not that this could ever affect parole or imprisonment decisions… I prefer a situation where each prisoner costs the state government a good deal.
The full story is here.
How to think about refugee policy
Dave Bieler, a loyal MR reader, asks:
I see that you've provided some commentary on Marginal Revolution about refugee situations, but I'm curious to know what you think about refugee policies – i.e. what is the role of government? What is the role of private insitutions? How can different types of institutions and organizations improve or make worse various situations? Do you have any thoughts or links to articles or books? I think it would make for an interesting blog post!
This question may be more relevant soon, although Muslim refugees from the Middle East do not have the best chances of getting into America. I have read that one small town in Sweden has taken in more Iraqi refugees than has the entire United States. Here is Wikipedia on refugees. I hold a few views:
1. Refugees are deserving of migration toleration when possible, but they are not more deserving than equally destitute non-refugees.
2. Refugees nonetheless capture the imagination of the public to some extent, albeit for a very limited period of time. Their beleaguered status provides a useful means of framing, to boost migration for humanitarian reasons. When it comes to private institutions, refugee issues may be a useful way of raising funds, again for humanitarian aid, although again refugees should not be privileged per se, relative to other needy victims.
3. Legal treatment of refugees is inevitably arbitrary and unfair. There is not and will not be a clear set of rational standards for who gets in and who doesn't. There are better and worse standards at the extreme points, but don't expect this to ever get rigorous, not even at the level of ideal theory.
4. There always exists some pool of refugees who will help the migration-accepting country, even if you do not believe that about all pools of refugees. Let's take in some Egyptian Copts, who possibly are in danger now. Some groups of African migrants have done quite well in the United States and we can take in more oppressed women from north Africa. In other words, "immigration skepticism" may redirect the direction of refugee acceptance, but it need not discriminate against the idea of taking in refugees.
5. Optimal refugee policy is most of all an exercise in public relations, as ruled by the idea of the optimal extraction of sympathy. Explicit sympathy from the public cannot be expected to last very long. In the best case scenario, sympathy for the refugees is replaced by fruitful indifference, so as to avoid "refugee fatigue."
See my earlier remarks on sovereignty. Here is an argument against admitting refugees; I don't agree with it.
The Pippi Longstocking essay and gay adoption in Sweden
Thanks to Jayme Lemke, it has fallen into my clutches; the previous summary reference was here. The essay by Henrik Berggren and Lars TrägÃ¥rdh, is interesting throughout. It has useful insights on Sweden, statism, how collectivism and individualism interact, what architecture reflects, and why many things are not always as they seem. Here is one good passage with a different slant than what I already covered:
While it is obviously true that gay marriage remains a highly controversial issue in the US, what is often over-looked is that adoption of children by gays is not prohibited but indeed rather common. In Sweden the opposite is true: gay marriage or partnership is today relatively uncontroversial (although an opposition of course exists there as well), where the adoption of children by single or couples gays remains a problematic issue.
One way of understanding this difference is to see that while in the US marriage is a highly public matter, and the family a sacred institution, children are by and large seen as a kind of private property, or something to which every adult individual has a right. In Sweden, on the other hand, the family is a private matter, while it is the child who is the public matter.
Can Swede readers attest to this? This short BBC bit seems to confirm. Gay adoption was legalized in Sweden in 2002, but in 2000 16 children were put up for adoption in Sweden. As in the Netherlands, it seems that Swedish gays are not always encouraged to adopt abroad, given that the source countries often object. There is now a Swedish film comedy about gay adoption.
You can find the essay in this unorthodox and stimulating book.
Labor history bleg
C.R., a loyal MR reader, writes to me:
I'm writing with a small favor, I was wondering if you could recommend (or ask for recommendations on MR) for a good history of labor unions in the US. I know a lot has been written especially from the left labor economists, but I don't have the knowledge to sort out the good from the bad. I'm interested in it from a historical perspective (origins and accomplishments) and a current political analysis perspective (what are reasonable claims about the costs&benefits of modern union membership). The case in Wisconsin has really grabbed my attention and I'm curious about unions as a case study of the creation, growth and changes of institutions.
I know where to go for the standard economics of labor unions, if you wish start with the surveys in Journal of Economic Perspectives (on-line and free) and then go to the Handbook of Labor Economics. But what about labor history? What is the best way to approach this often controversial topic?
What can parents influence?
I had been meaning to pen a longer response to Bryan Caplan (he is the one with "a theory of everything" in this area, not I, his theory just happens to have few variables), but I'll focus on two of his claims, as they are indicative of the larger disagreement:
Parents strongly affect what you say your religion is, but have little long-run effect on your intrinsic religiosity or observance. I don't discuss language, but it's pretty clear how a twin or adoption study would play out: You can make your kid semi-fluent in another language with a lot of effort.
Both claims are false, at least at many commonly available margins.
Take Jews. If a group of children are born to Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, or liberal parents, their later religious observance will be predicted by both peers and parental upbringing. (Perhaps genes are a factor too.) An Orthodox Jewish boy, with Orthodox parents, growing up in an otherwise non-Orthodox Jewish community of peers, is more likely to stay Orthodox than a Reform Jew from the same community is likely to become Orthodox. And that of course correlates with levels of observance. I have no formal study to cite, but can I just stamp my feet and scream this is true? Because it is. You can imagine numerous variants on this tale, even if it isn't true for all religious denominations.
Bryan has a tendency to concede environmental factors by noting something like "Of course parents can lock a kid in the closet and affect him that way." He is less likely to admit that a lot of less extreme influences can matter too and that those influences are missed by twin adoption studies, for whatever reason.
Or take language. Yana speaks Russian. She learned Russian from Natasha (her mother, and it wasn't hard for her to speak Russian at home), and note that Yana left Moscow before she was two years old. This is again a common pattern. The parents matter, even though in most American families you won't see enough cross-sectional variation (most people speak English at home) to always pick this up. Travel around India for more examples of this phenomenon.
Presumably the twin studies have in their data sets Jews and possibly some Russian immigrants as well. And yet the twin studies, with their ultimately macro orientation, miss micro mechanisms such as these. Parents can matter more than the studies suggest.
By treating those studies as an epistemic trump card, Bryan is led to make claims which are indefensible on the face of it. I stick by my earlier points. The evidence Bryan is citing for twin adoption studies is simply…the studies themselves. Where is consilience when you need it?