Category: Political Science

Hail Mark Steckbeck, for sending me such content:

US elected officials scored abysmally on a test measuring their
civic knowledge, with an average grade of just 44 percent, the group
that organized the exam said Thursday.

Ordinary citizens did not fare much better, scoring just 49 percent correct on the 33 exam questions compiled by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI).   

Here’s one detail:

Asked about the electoral college, 20 percent of elected officials incorrectly said it was established to "supervise the first televised presidential debates."

Here is the clincher:

The question that received the fewest correct responses, just 16
percent, tested respondents’ basic understanding of economic
principles, asking why "free markets typically secure more economic
prosperity than government’s centralized planning?"

This one is a little tricky:

Forty percent of respondents, meanwhile, incorrectly believed that the US president has the power to declare war, while 54 percent correctly answered that that power rests with Congress.

I’m not sure if those last few numbers are for the officials or for everyone, though it doesn’t much seem to matter.  The quiz itself is here.  Here is more on the results for the non-officials.

Matt Yglesias opines (the piece is interesting throughout):

… the larger problem is that libertarianism, even at its very best, tends to suffer from an impoverished set of ideas about how
corporate domination of the public policy space might be prevented. The
political left has, by contrast, the tradition of community organizing,
a set of public interest advocacy organizations, allies in the trade
union movement, efforts to improve the quality and independence of the
civil service, and various notions about changing the methods by which
campaigns are financed in the United States. This is hardly a perfect
toolkit, and it can be enhanced in some ways by drawing on libertarian
insights, but it’s something. And libertarians tend to be either
indifferent or hostile to it, campaigning against public financing,
strong labor unions, and the civil service.

In practice, libertarianism seems to have little to say about how to
bring about political change except to work hand-in-hand with business
lobbies when the interests of business and free markets are aligned, or
else when business interests are masquerading as libertarianism.

Here is Will’s response.  In my view at the margin it would be better to have both less corporate privilege and less labor union privilege.  Maybe we have no good theory (much less a strategy) for how to get there, but surely some marginal improvements are possible and who knows maybe more.  Chile is much less corporatist than it used to be and the relatively free economy of New Zealand was never that corporatist in the first place.

"Libertarianism in practice" will be excessively pro-corporate but so are most ideologies.  Rahm Emanuel, for instance, served on the board of Freddie Mac and earned $16 million in a two-year stint at an investment bank. Wall Street has been the single biggest backer of his political career.  He won’t be pushing to destroy this sector but I don’t take those facts to be some great refutation of Obama as a President. 

Sometimes the left-wing tactics, especially supporting labor unions, are exactly what lead to greater corporatism.  Look at the forthcoming GM bailout.  Or consider France, which has strong labor unions but arguably it is also more corporatist than is the United States.

But let’s say that turning America over to the labor unions would in fact limit corporate power.  It’s still difficult to get the unions more anti-corporate power, just as limiting corporate statism is difficult.  And these two tasks are difficult for more or less the same reasons.  The bottom line is this: ultimately the "feasibility objection" may cut against very radical change, but it doesn’t cut against change in one particular direction more than the other.

Compared to the U.S. economy, the Chinese economy has fewer automatic stabilizers, such as welfare programs and unemployment insurance.  That implies their fiscal policy should, if possible, be especially countercyclical, compared to what is called for in most richer countries.

Chinese leaders view volatility as serially correlated and increasing from the source outwards.  Given Chinese history, they expect that shocks grow and spread rather than dampening down.  So when a shock comes, the demand to hold and indeed hoard very safe assets increases rather than decreases.  Chinese fiscal policy ends up being pro-cyclical rather than countercyclical.  And it is hard to succeed with fiscal policy in the first place.

Fortunately, I’m just making that model up.  Why should we expect lots of mistakes to be made? 

We can’t not cover this topic, so here is Andrew Gelman with the bottom line.  The main result, it seems, is that the electoral gap between the young and the old increased by quite a bit.  Hat tip goes to Mark Thoma.

Addendum: Brad DeLong comments.

Soencer Ackerman asks,
"Remember in 2003 and 2004, when there was all this talk about how the
Democrats were in danger of no longer being a national party?" I do
remember that. I also remember how Democrats had to get religion if
they ever wanted to be competitive again. I also remember how they had
to appeal to the white heartland by nominating candidates more
culturally recognizable to rural voters. Instead, they went in the
opposite direction, running a candidate who was recognizable to the
majority coalition Democrats hoped to have in 10 years. It seems to
have worked out pretty well. It’s almost as if pundits don’t really
know what they’re talking about.

Here is the link.

First time, ever.

Addendum: By the way, it took me less than 3 minutes (I was surprised) and I got a free coffee at Starbucks. Not bad on instrumental or expressive grounds.

Most of what you do is for expressive value anyway, so you shouldn’t feel guilty about voting, if indeed you vote.  The people who think they are being instrumentally rational by not voting are probably deceiving themselves more.  They are actually engaged in an even less transparent form of expressive behavior (protest against the voting system) and yet cloaking that behavior under the guise of instrumental rationality.  The best arguments against voting are simply if you either don’t like voting or if you don’t know which candidate is better.  High-status people hardly ever offer the latter justification, even though the split of opinions among high-status people suggests that not all high-status people can in fact know which candidate is better.

In other words, both voting and not voting are motivated by the thought that you are better than other people.  I am glad that we have an entire day devoted to this very important concept.

This paper, "Attitude-Dependent Altruism, Turnout and Voting," is from Julio Rotemberg, one of my favorite economists:

This paper presents a goal-oriented model of political participation
based on two psychological assumptions. The first is that people are
more altruistic towards individuals that agree with them and the second
is that people’s well-being rises when other people share their
personal opinions. The act of voting is then a source of vicarious
utility because it raises the well-being of individuals that agree with
the voter. Substantial equilibrium turnout emerges with nontrivial
voting costs and modest altruism. The model can explain higher turnout
in close elections as well as votes for third-party candidates with no
prospect of victory. For certain parameters, these third party
candidates lose votes to more popular candidates, a phenomenon often
called strategic voting. For other parameters, the model predicts
"vote-stealing" where the addition of a third candidate robs a viable
major candidate of electoral support.

Here is an ungated version.

My evidence from Uganda suggests that, when coerced, children are the
most likely to be indoctrinated and disoriented, and so are the least
likely to escape.

Here is much more, from Chris Blattman, interesting throughout.

Economists often argue that voting is a waste of time, since the chance that your vote will influence the election outcome is virtually nil.  Maybe, but after watching this fear impels me to the polls. 

Thanks for the Scrooge treatment go to loyal reader and GMU student Adam.  If anyone knows of something similar for other candidates I will post an addendum.

If a smattering of libertarian ideas can bring it [the system] all down, then the problem isn’t really libertarian ideas, is it? If the integrity of the economy in your preferred model requires a high level of ideological conformity, you might think to reconsider the wisdom of harnessing it so thoroughly to democratic political institutions meant to accomodate pluralism.

That’s not the part where he is really upset.  He’s also upset here and here.

Arnold Kling weighs in:

We got into this crisis because power was overly concentrated relative to knowledge. What has been going on for the past several months is more consolidation of power. This is bound to make things worse. Just as Nixon’s bureaucrats did not have the knowledge to go along with the power they took when they instituted wage and price controls, the Fed and the Treasury cannot possibly have knowledge that is proportional to the power they currently exercise in financial markets.

He refers to Paulson as "the American Mussolini."

Is this a race to the top or a race to the bottom?

“The Europeans not only provided a blueprint, but forced our hand,” said Kenneth S. Rogoff, a professor of economics at Harvard and an adviser to John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee. “We’re trying to prevent wholesale carnage in the financial system.”

Here is much more on today’s events.  In the current version of globalization the equilibrium seems to be that non-guaranteed banking systems are swiftly penalized and turned into zombies.  This suggests, by the way, that undoing current bank guarantees, when recovery comes, won’t be as easy as we might have thought.

Addendum: Here are the opinions of many economists.

There is a new InTrade.com contract, this one on whether oil futures and the Democratic President contract move in the same direction on Election Day.  Right now it’s running at about 50 percent, which means an Obama victory won’t on average bring a higher price of energy.  Mark Thoma directs us to this interesting article on the bursting of the Green bubble, most of all among the Democrats.