Category: Political Science
Bryan Caplan responds to criticisms of libertarianism
He makes many points, here is one of them:
E&O might be right that cynicism about government perversely increases support for government. But if so, libertarians shouldn't attack the public's justified cynicism. Instead, they should help people see the logical anti-government conclusion of their cynicism. Academics who are cynical about government generally are anti-government; see for yourself at the Public Choice Society meetings. Why not teach laymen to make the same connection?
I worry when I read this. Most of all, it is surprisingly meliorist; I once read a book that suggested voters were doomed to irrationality (albeit to varying degrees). If voters can be taught the correct sophisticated mix of cynicism and pro-liberty sentiment, can they not be taught to support good policies, thus making democracy a well-functioning system of government? The E&O criticism strikes at the heart of an important tension in libertarian thought. Outcomes which might be described as "good libertarian" also require important public goods to be produced at the level of overall public sentiment; there's no getting around that.
Admittedly, being pessimistic about public sentiment under democracy does not a priori mandate being pessimistic about the ability of public sentiment to support and maintain more libertarian settings. (You might for instance think that the public good can be produced under some settings but that democracy per se corrupts public opinion, because of its internal workings, electoral pandering, etc.) Nonetheless, I've yet to see good, well-fleshed out arguments to support the split claim Caplan is proposing, namely that public sentiment can be produced to support good libertarian outcomes but not good democratic outcomes.
Addendum: Caplan responds.
*The Cleanest Race*
This is a very interesting book about the ideologies behind North Korea. The author is B.R. Myers and the subtitle is How North Koreans See Themselves — and Why it Matters. Excerpt:
One searches these early works in vain for a sense of fraternity with the world proletariat. The North Koreans saw no contradiction between regarding the USSR as developmentally superior on the one hand and morally inferior on the other. (The parallel to how South Koreans have always viewed the United States is obvious.) Efforts to keep this contempt a secret were undermined by over-confidence in the impenetrability of the Korean language and the inability of all nationalists to put themselves in a foreigner's shoes. The Workers' Party was taken by surprise, for example, when Red Army authorities objected to a story about a thuggish Soviet soldier who mends his ways after encountering a saintly Korean street urchin — another child character symbolizing the purity of the race.
I liked this bit as well:
The lack of conflict makes North Korean narratives seem dull even in comparison to Soviet fiction. Rather than try to stimulate curiosity about what will happen next, directors and writers try to make one wonder what has already happened. Films introduce characters in a certain situation (getting a medal, say), then go back and forth in time to explain how they got there. Nowhere in the world do writers make such heavy use of the flashback. But we should beware of assuing that people in the DPRK find these narratives as dull as we do. The Korean aesthetic has traditionally been very tolerant of convention and formula. (South Korean broadcasters rework the same few soap-opera plots every year). According to refugee testimony, however, most North Koreans prefer stories set either in the "Yankee colony" or in pre-revolutionary times, with real villains and conflict.
I also recommend the new book Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, by Barbara Demick. Excerpt:
North Koreans have multiple words for prison in much the same way that the Inuit do for snow.
From the WSJ, here is a joint review of the two books.
How Haiti could turn things around
I'm not suggesting that the future gains will, in moral terms, outweigh the massive loss of life and destruction, but still the future Haiti might have a higher growth rate and a higher level of gdp per capita. Here's how.
In the previous Haitian political equilibrium, the major interest groups were five or six wealthy families and also the drug trade, plus of course the government officials themselves. None had much to gain from market-oriented, competitive economic development. The wealthy families would have lost their quasi-monopolies and the drug runners would have been pushed out or lost some rents. The wealthy families are not that wealthy and their economic projects are relatively small, at least by the standards of the outside world.
Enter the rebuilding of Haiti. Contract money will be everywhere. From the World Bank, from the U.S., from the IADB, even from the DR. That contract money will be significant, relative to the financial influence of either the main families or the drug trade.
There exists (ha!) a new equilibrium. The government is still corrupt, but it is ruled by the desire to take a cut on the contracts. Ten or twenty percent on all those contracts will be more money than either the families or the drug runners can muster. The new government will want to bring in as many of these contracts as possible and it will (maybe) bypass the old interest groups. Alternatively, the old interest groups will capture the rents on these contracts but will be bought off to allow further growth and openness.
Arguably the new regime in Haiti will operate much like the federal states in Mexico. Corrupt and a mess, but oriented toward a certain kind of progress, if only to increase the returns from corruption.
You will see this in how the port of Port-Au-Prince is treated. Previously the rate of corruption was so high that the port was hardly used. If the port becomes a true open gateway into Haiti (if only to maximize contracts and returns from corruption), that means this scenario is coming true.
The surviving Haitians, in time, might be much better off. Virginia Postrel lays out some theory.
The wisdom of Garett Jones, a continuing series
The key to controlling spending is permitting more earmarks (sic).
The link to his tweet is here. Can you guess at Garett's underlying model?
The “spending freeze”
There's not much to say in terms of the economic issues, the real lesson is that politics is more constrained than many people think. Berating Obama for his lack of courage or his "failure to get tough" is simply denying or postponing this fundamental realization.
All policy recommendations need to be analyzed within this framework. How will your preferred policy (this includes deregulation and the like, by the way; I am not aiming this barb in any particular direction) play out when, in the middle of the action, government turns out to be extremely constrained in a way you do not like.
If you are surprised by this Obama announcement, that is indirect evidence that some of your other policy preferences are incorrect.
Why Bernanke should be reconfirmed
Jim Hamilton nails it. Excerpts:
Please permit me to suggest that intellectual stamina is the most important quality we need in the Federal Reserve Chair right now.
And:
How could there possibly be an alternative whom Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Jim DeMint (R-SC) would both prefer to Bernanke?
Elsewhere I have to strongly differ with the Johnson-Kwak proposal that Paul Krugman be selected. I don't intend this as a negative comment on Krugman, if anything I am suggesting he is too dedicated to reading and writing and speaking his mind. The Fed Chair has to be an expert on building consensus and at maintaining more credibility than Congress; even when the Fed screws up you can't just dump this equilibrium in favor of Fed-bashing. What lies on the other side of that curtain isn't pretty. Would Krugman gladly suffer the fools in Congress? Johnson and Kwak are overrating the technocratic aspects of the job (which largely fall upon the Fed staff anyway) and underrating the public relations and balance of power aspects. It's unusual that an academic will be the best person for the job.
I also have to put the kibbosh on plans which postulate Bernanke as failing to receive reconfirmation but staying on the Board and letting Donald Kohn slide into the de fact #1 slot and everyone working together as before. That's just not how things work. Bernanke would more likely leave, plus outsiders would not know who was in charge or what the default was if the cooperation should break down. The resulting reputational equilibrium would again prove unworkable or at least highly disadvantageous.
Overall when I read these discussions I realize that my theories of public choice are very, very different from those of some of the other commentators.
The “health care betrayal” and Waxman-Markey
If there's one lesson from the health care debacle, it is that Waxman-Markey was and is a dead end. Many of us objected to the bill on the grounds that it supports a lot of phony offsets for twenty years, imposes lots of costs and regulation in the meantime, and then never really does much to help climate change, given the difficulties of political precommitment. I believe that people with these objections, such as myself, were viewed as "obstructionists" by many or as people who were simply looking for an excuse not to support the bill. But the idea that Congress was just playing around, and had no real will to address the problem, should now be much, much more credible. For all the talk about Waxman-Markey as a "framework," I see plenty of reasons — all the more now — to think Congress never meant to follow through.
The advantage of a carbon tax is that it forces Congress (and others) to demonstrate a certain amount of seriousness up front. A good rule of thumb for a climate change bill is whether a representative voting for it can and will say: "This will raise the price of gasoline in the next six months and that's the whole point."
Megan McArdle predicted all along, even after Ben Nelson folded, that the health care bill will fail because Congress isn't very interested in enacting unpopular policies. That's very good prophecy. It's no accident that she also is skeptical of Waxman-Markey, for reasons related to those expressed above.
I believe the health care debacle should cause all of us to rethink our positions on preferred paths, sequences, and strategies. No matter what your opinion of the health care bill, it's not a pretty picture.
“Why is there so little money in U.S. politics?”
That's the title of a famous paper by Stephen Ansolabehere, John de Figueireido, and James Snyder. The abstract of the non-gated version (other versions here) reads as follows:
Thirty years ago, Gordon Tullock posed a provocative puzzle: considering the value of public policies at stake and the reputed influence of campaign contributions in policy-making, why is there so little money in U.S. politics? In this paper, we argue that campaign contributions are not a form of policy-buying, but are rather a form of political participation and consumption. We summarize the data on campaign spending, and show through our descriptive statistics and our econometric analysis that individuals, not special interests, are the main source of campaign contributions. Moreover, we demonstrate that campaign giving is a normal good, dependent upon income, and campaign contributions as a percent of GDP have not risen appreciably in over 100 years – if anything, they have probably fallen. We then show that only one in four studies from the previous literature support the popular notion that contributions buy legislators' votes. Finally, we illustrate that when one controls for unobserved constituent and legislator effects, there is little relationship between money and legislator votes. Thus, the question is not why there is so little money politics, but rather why organized interests give at all. We conclude by offering potential answers to this question.
The bottom line is that today's Supreme Court decision probably matters less than you think. You should see my Twitter feed.
A simple theory of political jobs, with respect to the health care debate
Political jobs would be torture for most people. You have no freedom. You are underpaid and over-bugged. You lose a lot of your privacy. You have to stop writing emails or saying what you think. You don't get to read many good books or go for many quiet walks. It's hard to be a non-conformist. And so on.
Yet it's really hard to get top political jobs. So who gets them? People who truly, deeply love the power.
Plus "doing what the voters want" very often feels like, or can be described as, "doing the right thing."
So what happens when those people perceive their power as threatened? You see it.
One implication is that paying politicians more, and giving them more privacy, would lead to less craven behavior. (Although I personally don't like the current bill, the D. refusal to pass it is sheer cowardice.) There would then be less selection for the "power addiction" and perhaps more principled behavior.
Paul Romer doesn’t think a charter city in Haiti can work (now)
The post is here, excerpt:
Contrary to what some have suggested, a charter city in Haiti is simply not an option at this time. A charter city can only be created through voluntary agreement. Under the current conditions, the government and people of Haiti do not have the freedom of choice required for any agreement reached now to be voluntary.
He has another idea:
There are clear limits on the number of Haitian immigrants that nearby jurisdictions are currently prepared to accept. But if nations in the region created just two charter cities, they could accept the entire population of Haiti as residents. There are many locations close to Haiti where these new cities could be built, but for now, Haiti itself is the one place we should not consider.
Here is an offer for repatriation to Senegal:
Presidential spokesman Mamadou Bemba Ndiaye told reporters that Mr Wade had shared his plans with senior aides, and they involved offering voluntary repatriation and plots of land to any Haitian who wanted “to return to their origin”.
“Senegal is ready to offer them parcels of land – even an entire region. It all depends on how many Haitians come. If it’s just a few individuals, then we will likely offer them housing or small pieces of land. If they come en masse we are ready to give them a region,” he said.
The political economy of earthquakes
Here's a paper by Nejat Anbarci, Monica Escaleras, and Charles Alan Register:
In our theoretical model, we show that as per capita income decreases and the level of inequality increases, different segments of society are less likely to agree on the distribution of the burden of the necessary collective action, causing the relatively-wealthy simply to self-insure against the disaster while leaving the relatively-poor to its mercy. We then evaluate 269 large earthquakes occurring worldwide (1960-2002), taking into account other factors such as an earthquake's magnitude, depth and proximity to population centers. Using a Negative Binomial estimation strategy with both random and fixed estimators, we find strong evidence of the theoretical model’s predictions.
I haven't read it yet but wanted to pass it along; here are varying drafts, go through JSTOR (gated) and Journal of Public Economics for the final version. By the way, the model predicts bad news for Haiti.
For the pointer I thank the excellent Daniel Sutter, who has done a good deal of work on the economics of natural disasters.
Geopolitical speculations about Haiti
Haiti is about the size of Maryland and a big chunk of the population lives in or near Port-Au-Prince, maybe a third of the total, depending on what you count as a suburb. So the collapse of Port-Au-Prince is a big, big deal for the country as a whole. It's a dominant city for Haiti. Plus Jacmel seems to be leveled. From the reports I have seen, my tentative conclusion is that the country as a whole is currently below the subsistence level and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Hundreds of thousands of people have died, the U.N. Mission has collapsed, the government is not working (was it ever?), and hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of people are living in the streets without reliable food or water supplies. The hospitals and schools have collapsed. The airport is shut down. The port is very badly damaged. The Haitian Penitentiary has collapsed and the inmates — tough guys most of them – are running free for the foreseeable future. There is no viable police force or army.
In other words, it's not just a matter of offering extra food aid for two or three years.
Very rapidly, President Obama needs to come to terms with the idea that the country of Haiti, as we knew it, probably does not exist any more.
In what sense does Haiti still have a government? How bad will it have to get before the U.N. or U.S. moves in and simply governs the place? How long will this governance last? What will happen to Haiti as a route for the drug trade, the dominant development in the country's economy over the last fifteen years? What does the new structure of interest groups look like, say five years from now?
Is there any scenario in which the survivors, twenty years from now, are better off, compared to the quake never having taken place?
Why is Haiti so poor?
I'm not interested in talking about Greg Clark or making comparisons to the West; if need be compare it to other black Caribbean nations, such as Jamaica or Barbados. It's much worse and in terms of social indicators it is also worse than many places in Africa. Why? Here a few hypotheses (NB: I don't endorse all of them):
1. Haiti cut its colonial ties too early, rebelling against the French in the early 19th century and achieving complete independence. Guadaloupe and Martinique are still riding the gravy train and French aid is a huge chunk of their gdps.
2. Haiti was a French colony in the first place and French colonies do less well.
3. Sugar cane gave Haiti some early characteristics of "the resource curse," dating back to the 18th and 19th centuries.
4. Haiti was doing OK until the Duvaliers destroyed civil society, thus putting the country on a path toward destruction. It is a more or less random one-time event which wrecked the place.
5. Hegel was correct that the "voodoo religion," with its intransitive power relations among the gods, was prone to producing political intransitivity as well. (Isn't that a startling insight for a guy who didn't travel the broader world much?)
6. For reasons peculiar to the history of the slave trade, Haitian slaves came from many different parts of Africa and thus Haitian internal culture has long had lower levels of cohesion and cooperation. (The former point about the mix is true, but the cultural point is speculation.)
7. Haiti has higher than average levels of polygamy (but is this cause or effect?)
8. In the early to mid twentieth century, Haiti was poorly situated to attract Chinese and other immigrants, unlike say Jamaica or Trinidad. It is interesting that many of the wealthiest families in Haiti are Lebanese, such as the Naders.
Overall I don't find this set of possible factors very satisfactory. Is it asking too much to wish for an economics profession that is obsessed with such a question?
If you are looking for some cross-sectional variation to ponder, consider the fate of Haitians in Suriname (they make up a big chunk of the population there), Haiti vs. Santiago, Cuba, pre-Castro of course, or why early Haitian migrants to Montreal have done better than later migrants to Miami and Brooklyn.
Response on the Chait-Manzi debate
My original post is here. In the comments, "some guy" offered this perceptive comment/quotation:
1. For this debate, "levels" are more important than growth rates.
8. Countries have to start from where they're at.
Anybody else see a problem?
I'll add this:
1. Canada is big on the map but most of it is empty and the population is clustered on the border of you-know-where. Canada also has no legacy of slavery and requires stronger educational and professional credentials from its immigrants.
2. Matt asks me to come right out and say that Manzi was wrong. TC: "Manzi was wrong." That said, many of the other debate contributors made false or misleading statements as well. I deliberately tried to write my post to avoid remarks directed at raising or lowering the relative status of the commentators, a good overall habit (which I don't always follow and which hardly any commentators on other blogs seem to follow).
3. I would genuinely like to know whether the U.S. or Europe has supported more beneficial immigration over the last twenty years. The answer is not obvious to me, when you consider the Italians who move to Switzerland, the Greeks who move to Germany, and so on, not to mention the Algerians who move to France and the Turks who move to Germany.
4. For this debate, "levels" are more important than growth rates. I'm still not seeing that admission in the secondary commentary and note that "levels" provide an initial advantage to the United States, though Europe might fight back with security and leisure time. If growth rates mattered more, that would mean China is the place to copy and it isn't. By the way, in a lot of simple models, the poorer Europe should be enjoying "catch-up" growth and growing at rates higher than that of the United States, as many other countries are doing.
Levels, levels, levels. Here is the Ducktales moon level song played backwards.
Addendum: If you do wish to look at growth rates, adjusted for the relevant variables, here is one place to start. Overall it's consistent with my point about levels.
Peter Leeson update
He is now the North American editor of Public Choice, replacing Michael Munger and of course we all congratulate him. I have a modest proposal for how he should referee submitted papers, let's see if he uses it.