Category: Political Science

Profile of Larry Lessig

By Christopher Hayes.  Lessig is now determined to fight the influence of money in politics, a possibly Quixotic quest.  Whether you think his program is either possible or desirable is a major question of politics.  Excerpt:

"There’s a speech that Reagan gives in
1965," Lessig says, "where he talks about how democracy always fails
because once the people recognize they can vote themselves largess, they
just vote themselves largess and the fiscal policy is destroyed. Well,
Reagan had it half-right. It’s not as if it’s the poor out there who
have figured out how to suck the money out of the rich. It’s exactly the
other way around."

Libertarian heresies

Here is a good report on my libertarian heresies, summarizing a talk I gave at the Institute for Humane Studies a few weeks ago.  Excerpt:

Russia, he pointed out, is failing as a free society not because it
is poor – Putin’s shrewed management of high commodity prices has put
paid to much Russian poverty – but because Russians tend to privilege
their friends and contacts above all else, leading to epic levels of
corruption. Corruption, of course, is a signal rule of law failure.

He then asked, somewhat rhetorically, if liberty was confined (and
defined) by culture: ‘We should not presume that our values are as
universal as we often think they are’. What happens, he asked
rhetorically, if – in order to enjoy the benefits of liberty and
prosperity – societies have to undergo a major cultural transformation,
including the loss of many appealing values? Cowen focussed on Russian
loyalty and friendship, but there are potentially many others. Think,
for example, of the extended family so privileged throughout the
Islamic world, or the communitarian values common in many indigenous
societies.

So You Think You Can be President? Revisited.

Last year, I argued that instead of debates presidentidal candidates should have to compete in a series of games.  The problem with debates is that most of the time voters don’t know what a good answer is.  Thus…

…what we need is a way of conveying information to uninformed,
unsophisticated voters in a way that is entertaining yet produces
information about politicians that is correlated with real skills.

I suggested a game show, So You Think You Can be President?, which with different segments would test the candidates ability to solve real problems.

The idea seems to be catching on, as this piece in the NYTimes illustrates.  Frankly, the segments I suggested plus the many excellent comments from MR readers were quite a bit better than those in the Times but it’s good to see that the idea is going mainstream.

David Brooks, in a nutshell?

Wunderkind Ben Casnocha summarizes a talk:

David Brooks, columnist, New York Times:

  • "I’ll be brief because many of you are academics, and you’re not here to hear me talk, you’re here to hear yourselves talk."
  • He likes Edmund Burke.
  • People learn when there’s an emotional connection.
  • All factions of conservative movement united around distrust of government – this ain’t enough.
  • Obama’s perceptiveness / self-awareness / stability is striking.
  • McCain’s morality is based on honor, not morality. #1 trait is aloofness – somewhat detached personality.
  • Conservatism shouldn’t have permanent policies (like tax cuts): don’t get moral about a situational policy issue.
  • Conservatism is about not knowing much; modest about what we can know/do.
  • Conservatism is philosophy first, policy second. Liberalism is policy first, philosophy later.
  • Conservatism values social mobility more than equality.
  • Top issues in the election: bipartisanship, immigration, healthcare.
  • People aren’t solely self-interested economic rational creatures.
    If this were the case, why would 30% of students drop out of high
    school even though it’s econ ruinous to do so?
  • What’s the point of being a democrat if you can’t play the class card?
  • Bush seems 40 IQ points smarter in private than in public.

Here’s a QuickTime version of Brooks’ speech.

I agree with many of these, although I am not sure that conservatism puts philosophy first.  Does it not put experience first?  Also, I think the main issue in the election is George W. Bush.

The Post-American World

The American political system has lost the ability for large-scale compromise, and it has lost the ability to accept some pain now for much gain later on.

That is from Fareed Zakaria’s The Post-American World, a book remarkably full of common sense.  It’s #7 on Amazon and a good overall guide to globalization and why it matters that America no longer dominates the world, either economically or culturally.

Can we learn anything from the Democratic spat?

Between Clinton and Obama, that is.  One thing we learn is just how unpleasant a politics of confrontation can be and that’s no matter what your political point of view.  Most voters don’t define their views along the distinctions set down by the policy wonks.  So if you wish to start a political conflict to get your way on the wonky issues, that means you also end up starting a war — possibly unintended — on identity politics and also power politics.  Furthermore at least one of the sides in that war will care more about winning and seizing/keeping power than about policy per se.  Over time that’s the side most likely to get its way.

We also learn that the American public polarizes along undesirable fault lines, observes a fight and puts a pox on both houses, and in general becomes more cynical about politics.  Think about this before pursuing polarization and quasi-class warfare.

The implication, however, is not that you always should stay put.  After all, today’s status quo is a) highly imperfect, and b) the result of the ugly identity wars inherited from the past and surely that is not sacred either.

Nonetheless constructivist attempts to remake America will, by political debate, be reshaped along traditional fault lines.  That means your good idea — be it libertarian, progressive, or whatever — had better be pretty robust to mangling by the stupid, the emotional, the cynical, and the ill-informed.  It also means your policy analysis had better start with a good understanding of the relative strengths and weaknesses of the United States and try to build in a sustainable direction with the weights and the angles favoring what you wish to accomplish.  Tocqueville, Montesquieu and Madison look smarter and smarter all the time.

A while ago the progressives told us that we needed to fight a battle against the Republicans to reshape America.  Now there is a prior battle within the Democratic Party itself, noting of course that the hedge fund managers are sending most of their donations that way.  And even Paul Krugman and Ezra Klein can’t agree on which candidate is the real progressive.  How many steps further backward will be taken?  We haven’t even gotten to the point of trying to write progressive legislation or get it through Congress.

Resist the temptation to put the backward steps into the category of "the utopian should."  Such a move runs as follows: "OK, we didn’t do that, we should have done that.  I never predicted we would do that.  I just should we should have."  (Libertarians I might add often commit a similar vice.)  That response is non-falsifiable and so you can hold on to it all you want, but you’d get further by embracing the evolutionary yet non-Panglossian tradition in political thought.  Similarly, libertarians should take more seriously the idea that Sweden should build on its current strengths as well.

I’ll be frank: I’m not rooting for Hillary Clinton.  But that’s not for any instrumental reason or for that matter for any quasi-libertarian reason or not even for the many reasons you’ll find outlined by Andrew Sullivan.  It’s for purely subjective and arbitrary reasons and I won’t say more than that (though I could).  Maybe I’d drop that dislike if she’d wave around a copy of Fredric Bastiat but in the meantime there you go.  Note also that I am hardly the most biased person evaluating this political race and that I didn’t feel this way a year ago.

The bottom line is this: real world political debate is not fundamentally a macro-cosm of the thought processes of a smart person, or of one smart person debating another.  The politics of confrontation usually turn ugly. 

Seasteading

A small but passionate minority is deeply dissatisfied
with current political systems.  These people seek the autonomy to live
under and experiment with different political, social, and economic systems
than currently exist. It is this search for sovereignty, for the freedom of
self-government, which is the fundamental motivation for seasteading.

That’s Patri Friedman (son of David, son of Milton) and Wayne Gramlich in their seasteading manifesto. In interesting news, The Seasteading Institute has secured funding of $500,000 from PayPal founder Peter Thiel to help make the idea a reality.

Long-term trends are somewhat favorable for seasteading because with a cell phone and internet access more and more people could live on a seastead and make a living.  Cruise ships are already floating cities with few regulations or taxes.  Harold Berman argues that the rise of the West was due to competitive lawHomeowner’s organizations, hotels and condos are private governments (for more see my edited book The Voluntary City.).

Competitive law appears to increase efficiency but it’s less clear that competition among governments gives rise to a libertarian world.  Homeowner associations, for example, often impose stricter zoning regulations than cities.  You could say that the system as a whole is more libertarian, but no one lives in the system as a whole.

Maybe liberty comes not from choice of government but from forcing people who are unlike to live together.  Isn’t the real reason the First Amendment has any force not that people agree on the value of freedom of speech but rather that they disagree on who they want to shut up?  Is religious freedom a product of agreement on the value of religious freedom or is it a product of disagreement on who is going to hell?      

Still I hope for the best and congratulate Patri.  Seasteading has come a long way.

Questions that are rarely asked, a continuing series

Why do affluent, middle-class, and poor voters all seem so exquisitely sensitive to election-year income growth for the wealthiest families?

Oddly, the voting of lower-income voters is relatively insensitive to their own election-year incomes.  One option is that media reporting is biased toward coverage of the rich and famous.  Another option is that we, as voters, are biased toward considering our pleasure or displeasure with the strength of the high-ranking members of our tribe.

That question is from Larry Bartels’s Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age.

Here is a previous installment in the series.

From the comments: “America the Beautiful”?

I’m always one for airing grievances:

Tyler, Common among economists and some among the autisitic spectrum is the tenedency to belive the map is more real than the landscape, the model complete and accurate and that everything you were taught in econ seminars came donw on tablets. The Candide, America love it or leave it attitude is a tad tiresome. There are problems out there big guy and the Solow model or the Romer Model don’t mean shit.

Here is a compendium of my anti-American attitudes:

1. The number of Americans in prison remains an underreported scandal, as well as the conditions they face.

2. Problems of race relations are underestimated, to this very day.

3. For whatever reasons, smart American women seem to be more insecure than are Western European women.  Yes that’s a vulnerable overgeneralization and I will take some lumps for it in the comments but I still think it’s basically true.

4. I could not live in rural America and be happy.

5. America faces a massive current and future problem resulting from the apparent uneducability of a large chunk of its citizens.  While I do favor school choice, it’s not just government education which is at fault; many better school systems around the world are government-run.

6. Gun owners may well be happy, but it is not a culture I relate to.

7. The American culture of individual freedom is closely linked to the prevalence of mental illness and gun-based violence in this country.  We can’t seem to get only the brighter side of non-conformity.

8. America is the worst offender when it comes to factory farming and the treatment of animals.

On the brighter side, America has a decent economic track record, the Solow model does matter (try living and earning in countries with poor Solow indicators), America remains the world’s leading innovator, and most Americans — at least those not in prison or on drugs — can expect a bright future.  It’s not as if I’m pushing the future economic prospects of Suriname. 

I also believe (contra the blogging progressives) that America is fated (for better or worse, but in my view not worse) to remain predominantly captured by corporate interests and that America does a better job absorbing and elevating immigrants than perhaps any other country. 

Many Europeans fear deep down that America will have a permanently higher growth rate and that the European way of life will, sooner or later, be forced to disappear.  Right now I would bet against this proposition, as I see a new Europe revitalized by intra-EU immigration.  But there is still, say, a 30 percent chance it is true and polemics against Uncle Sam are in part a reflection of that deep insecurity.   

Very small countries

Here is James Surowiecki on the economic problems of Iceland.  Google tells me that Iceland has about 316,252 people.  Fairfax County is over three times more populous but it hardly receives any out-of-state attention.  Of course Fairfax County has neither its own language nor its own culture (apart from a lunch tradition, that is) but for economic questions that should not matter much.

One question is whether we should be trading asset claims to the future creditworthiness of very small units.  Let’s say there were tradeable shares in the future prospects of assistant professors.  A low share price wouldn’t do much for your mid-contract review and maybe not for your mortgage prospects either.  It seems that noise traders can wreak more havoc on small units, if only because volatility relative to retained earnings may be larger.  Maybe the real problem is when the small units cannot self-insure; imagine the public uproar if the Icelandic government were caught selling itself short.

Bittergate

You’ve probably already read or heard the remarks but here goes:

"It’s not surprising that they get bitter, they cling to guns or
religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant
sentiment or anti-trade sentiment."

There you have it: some truth, some correct implicit moralizing, elitist scorn and condescension, some false implicit time series (guns and religion do not closely track economic decline), and some totally unpopular cosmopolitan sympathies.  The "they" is the clincher, a hypostatizing and vaguely offensive generalization, yet one which we are all prepared to make in different contexts.

By the way, here is John Lott meets Barack Obama, worth reading for the scene of the encounter.

I think increasingly that Obama is very much a rationalist, in both the good and the bad senses of that term. 

If I think about what makes me bitter, it is highway and roadway construction and bad airports and the attendant delays.  You can decide for yourself what that makes me cling to.

Larry Bartels, and how Republican Presidents drive income inequality

He writes:

In any case, the largest partisan differences in income growth, by far, occur in the second year of each administration.

The link, by the way, answers many objections to his basic thesis.  View this graph if you don’t already know the argument.  The core claim is that Republican Presidents are better for the rich and Democratic Presidents are better for the poor, and to a striking degree. 

I view the statistical significance of the Bartels result as stemming from monetary policy.  Republicans are more willing to break the back of inflation and risk an immediate recession.  Alternatively, it could be said that central bankers expect enough support for tough, anti-inflation decisions only from Republican Presidents.  (Note that Jimmy Carter, who did support Volcker, is in fact the single Democratic outlier.)  Note that without the monetary policy effect, only a few data points, mostly from very recent times, support the basic claim.  Without the monetary policy effect, I do not think that statistical significance would remain.  Furthermore other plausible channels for income inequality effects, such as tax and regulatory decisions, would not be concentrated in the second year of each administration.  Monetary policy decisions would be.  A recession, by generating more unemployment, hurts the poor the most in proportional terms.

So what does this all mean?

Inflation is good for the poor in the short run, since many poor are debtors.  But inflation is bad for the poor in the long run.  Just ask anyone who lived through the New Zealand inflation of the 1970s.

So Bartels could have entitled his key graph: "Democratic Presidents live for the short run and we need a Republican President every now and then."

Addendum: Even Paul Krugman wonders about the basic mechanism driving the result.

Hayek Doesn’t Stop at the Water’s Edge

In the miasma (here and here) of people explaining why they got the war wrong here is Jim Henley explaining why he got it right.

I wasn’t born yesterday. I had heard of the Middle East before
September 12, 2001. I knew that many of the loudest advocates for war with Iraq
were so-called national-greatness conservatives who spent the 1990s arguing that
war was good for the soul. I remembered Elliott Abrams and John Poindexter and
Michael Ledeen as the knaves and fools of Iran-Contra, and drew the appropriate
conclusions about the Bush Administration wanting to employ them: it was an
administration of knaves and fools…

Libertarianism. As a libertarian, I was primed to react
skeptically to official pronouncements. “Hayek doesn’t stop at the water’s
edge!” I coined that one. Not bad, huh? I could tell the difference between
the government and the country. People who couldn’t make this
distinction could not rationally cope with the idea that American foreign policy
was the largest driver of anti-American terrorism because it sounded to them too
much like “The American people deserve to be victims of terrorism.” I
could see the self-interest of the officials pushing for war – how war would
benefit their political party, their department within the government, enhance
their own status at the expense of rivals. Libertarianism made it clear how
absurd the idealistic case was. Supposedly, wise, firm and just American
guidance would usher Iraq into a new era of liberalism and comity. But none of
that was going to work unless real American officials embedded in American
political institutions were unusually selfless and astute, with a lofty and
omniscient devotion to Iraqi welfare. And, you know, they weren’t going to be
that….

What all of us had in common is probably a simple recognition: War is a big
deal. It isn’t normal. It’s not something to take up casually. Any war you can
describe as “a war of choice” is a crime. War feeds on and feeds the negative
passions. It is to be shunned where possible and regretted when not. Various
hawks occasionally protested that “of course” they didn’t enjoy war,
but they were almost always lying. Anyone who saw invading foreign lands and
ruling other countries by force as extraordinary was forearmed against the lies
and delusions of the time.

More here.

The reasons why I opposed the war are given here.

Hat tip to Brad DeLong for the link.

*Public Choice*, on the web

The journal that is, and for free.  Really.  Until April.  Here.  The pointer is from Henry Farrell, who notes that the January 2008 issue contains a symposium on blogging which he co-edited with Dan Drezner.

Here is a paper on the economics of open access publishing.  Here is Daniel Akst on the same.  For Cowen and Tabarrok on the same, well…you are here already.

Henry also asks what it would take to make researchers switch to a free access system.  I don’t envision the free access system as the status quo but free.  Papers would be ranked directly in terms of status and popularity rather than ranked through the journals they are published in.  Ultimately there wouldn’t be journals and this would make a big difference as journals are the current carrier of selective incentives and status rewards.  It would be easy to refuse to referee, since you wouldn’t fear being shut out of publication of that journal; I suspect refereeing might die.  And if status were attached to the individual paper rather than the journal, who would bother to become an editor?  It would be a very different world and in some ways more like (academic) blogging than its proponents may wish to think.

In other words, the partial monopolization of for-fee journals makes it possible to produce status returns to motivate both editors and referees.  Returning to the free setting, refereeing will survive insofar as writing detailed referee comments on other people’s work helps with your own research; it is interesting to ponder in which fields this might hold.