Category: Political Science

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.

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.

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.

Federal spending is lower in areas where there is less press coverage of the local members of congress.

Here is much more, ungated here; there is a claim of causality and the paper is interesting throughout.

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.

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.

Brendan Nyhan notes that if you use the Keith-Poole methodology for congressional ideology you get the conclusion that John McCain has the most inconsistent record of anyone in the Senate. They write in Congress and Ideology that their model has the least predictive power when it comes to McCain…

Here is the link, here is the Brendan Nyhan post, and here is Virginia Postrel on McCain.

This new NBER working paper (ungated here) argues that media criticism of the U.S. war effort in Iraq leads to more U.S. troops being killed:

Are insurgents affected by information on US casualty sensitivity? Using data on attacks and variation in access to international news across Iraqi provinces, we identify an "emboldenment" effect by comparing the rate of insurgent attacks in areas with higher and lower access to information about U.S news after public statements critical of the war. We find in periods after a spike in war-critical statements, insurgent attacks increases by 5-10 percent. The results suggest that insurgent groups respond rationally to expected probability of US withdrawal. As such counterinsurgency should consider deterrence and incapacitation rather than simply search and destroy missions.

Might Fox News be right after all?  Still I am not yet convinced.  First, I fear that the measurement of satellite TV access of different Iraqi districts is a proxy for some other measure of district quality and that the TV programs have no causal role in driving killings.  Is news access across Iraq really so different?  Can’t one district simply send an email to another district: "now is time to kill some more of them?"  Second, I worry that the authors decided not to include Baghdad in the results.  Still, if you want a jolt to your system, right now this paper is the place to go.

Read this, the headline is "Obama: I’m no V.P.".  That’s not just the biased framing of the journalist, it captures Obama’s words.  My unsolicited advice is this: if you are a political candidate, proclaiming "I am not X" is not much better than admitting "I am X."  Either way it frames the debate.  And avoid phrases like "If I’m not ready [for the Presidency]…"  Why not punch back with: "A President needs to do at least two things.  First, read the will of the voters.  Second, figure out which country in a region is winning the race for influence and which country is coming in second.  This kind of talk is a sign that Hillary Clinton can do neither.  I’m running for President, while she is busy failing arithmetic."

I know I promised, way back when, no candidate blogging, but alas every now and then some things just bug me.

It seems the Barack Obama campaign is distancing itself from Austan Goolsbee, who is indeed a first-rate economist.  Samantha Powers, who wrote a highly intelligent and heart-rending book on genocide, was dismissed last week for speaking her mind about Hillary Clinton.  Of course no one doubts that such actions may be necessary, given that a Presidency can function only with some amount of message discipline.  But think about the economics of message discipline.  How many people are receiving the message?  300 million, plus some number abroad as well.  What kind of messages do these people desire?  What must be done to make these messages understandable and then to show that the promise behind the message has been met?  Which kinds of advisors will flourish best in a "message consistency" environment?  Independent and critical minds, able and willing to speak the truth to power?

Here is my question for the left-wing bloggers: How good would The Wire be, if it had to appeal to 300 million plus viewers?  While it is obvious that politics is a form of mass culture, this point is not made with sufficient frequency for my taste.

Addendum: Arnold Kling comments.  And Matt Yglesias responds.

Guess.  This metric offers a clear first pick.

I want to link to two posts I liked, here, and here.  Here too.  Think of this post as my equivalent of expressive voting.  No, I’m not feeling rage but my calmness in such matters is probably just my personal defect and general lack of manliness when it comes to politics.

Kevin Drum wonders why Clinton and Obama supporters get so worked up at each other.  Any fan of Dr. Seuss will know that policy similarity hardly matters.  The two candidates represent two diametrically opposed portraits of the relationship between aesthetics and politics.  Should we expect beauty, grace and universality, or should we derive our feel-good sentiments about politics from righteousness, confrontation, and sheer dogged persistence and feelings of ultimate desert?  Given his desire for partisan confrontation, Paul Krugman is quite consistent in his skepticism about Barack Obama.  The far more conservative but also far more aestheticized Andrew Sullivan is quite consistent in liking and indeed at times almost loving Obama.  There really is a lot at stake in the Democratic primary; it’s our current sense of the aesthetic, and of desert, that drives what our substantive policy views will be twenty or thirty years from now.  Given the high turnout (never an accident), in an odd way there may be more at stake in the Democratic primary than there would be in a Clinton vs. McCain general election.

As an outsider, the dilemma is whether to side with the values you admire or whether that is a kind of fool’s gold.  If nothing else, we have Hillary Clinton to thank for reminding us (again) this week that politics is ultimately about power.

Reading Matt Yglesias, I couldn’t help but wonder.  Assume the candidate was intelligent and had a responsible temperament.  What would it actually be like?  Presumably such a President would limit or cut off aid to Israel and directly support a Palestinian state.  (We might keep some aid for purposes of leverage.)  In the Arab world we would probably take some different sides, and more specific sides, than we do now.  I fear we would end up embroiled in a Muslim religious civil war in the Middle East.  When needed, we would likely intervene to help out Muslims in the Balkans or in Kuwait.  Might we get more free trade?  After all most Muslims live abroad and would like to sell their goods here.  The President could try to up the immigration quotas from Muslim countries but I doubt if Congress would accede.  Public and Supreme Court support for the separation of church and state would go up, not down.  Haven’t Muslim black nationalists, historically, had a big interest in prison reform?  Would our President give the bomb away to Muslim nations?  Would it be easier to find Koranic recital CDs in Borders?  Would the President pressure the Fed to drive nominal interest rates close to zero, thereby implementing Milton Friedman’s optimum quantity of money?

We discussed this question over a group dinner Tuesday night.  I opined that none have held up particularly well, mostly because they underestimated the robustness of the modern world and regarded depravity as more of a problem than it has turned out to be.

By stipulation, this universe of books does not include Milton Friedman or pure economics.  It does include Russell Kirk, John Flynn, Richard Weaver, Robert Nisbet, and William F. Buckley, among many others.  You can nominate grumpy Brits and Europeans who settled in the United States, so yes Road to Serfdom is a contender, even though its main empirical point (socialism leads to loss of political freedom) would seem to be refuted.  You can try Albert Jay Nock or Eric Voegelin but Rothbard and Rand do not count as conservatives.  Your answer cannot come before the 20th century, so no Federalist Papers and no Tocqueville.

Leave your answer in the comments and also say why.  At some point I’ll offer up my pick as well.

1. “Falling Slowly” from “Once”*
2. “Happy Working Song” from “Enchanted”
3. “Raise It Up” from “August Rush”
4. “So Close” from “Enchanted”
5. “That’s How You Know” from “Enchanted”

Discuss.