Category: Political Science

Median voter theorem.

It's my first-cut account of a lot of what is going on in the newspaper headlines.  Yet somehow I rarely see it mentioned, even when I read very prominent social scientists commenting on current policy.

I thank Garett Jones for a useful conversation behind this blog post.

Ryan Avent has a good post and I agree with much of it (and read him as expressing a good deal of agreement with me).  I do, however, disagree with one part:

…if Waxman-Markey is a bad bill, then it is a bad bill largely because
the minority party has an energy plan that scarcely recognises the
threat of climate change as a problem. This guarantees that the vote
will be close, which guarantees that Democrats will have to wheel and
deal and wheel and deal to get the votes they need–the last Democrat to
be converted can name his price. It's a little silly to complain about
the imperfect bill Democrats have crafted, when the Republican minority
has basically forced them to build a law that every last Democrat can
accept.

I don't mean to pick on Ryan but I am seeing this idea growing in influence and I wish to push on it a bit.  (By the way, here is his follow-up post.)  A few points:

1. Negative claims about Republican politicians are, in fact, usually true.  I don't wish to defend them or make you dislike them less.

2. If a policy idea cannot survive the opposition being partisan and also lying about it, I submit the policy idea is not such a good one.  You can blame the opposition with all the justice in the world on your side, but still the idea has major, major problems.

3. The notion of a "minimum winning coalition" is commonplace in political science.  Maybe the idea isn't as universal as its early proponents claimed, but still it is an important force in shaping political equilibria.  If a policy idea cannot survive being turned into a "minimum winning coalition" version of itself…well…see #2.

4. Both the Republicans and the Democrats share some common problems and they are known as voters.  And special interest groups.  If your plan cannot survive the influence of voters, and special interest groups…well…see #2.

5. Many government programs can in fact survive all of these negative influences and still emerge as good ideas.

6. The Democrats do in fact rule by more than one seat in both houses of Congress.  So maybe the marginal Democratic legislators don't have so much bargaining power after all.  You can cite 60+ in the Senate but of course this is endogenous to what the Democrats themselves think public opinion will bear.  There is a reason why the Democratic establishment does not, as Matt Yglesias so often recommends, abolish the 60+ requirement.  Often they prefer inaction, combined with the ability to blame the Republicans for such.  See #4.  The often-sad truth is that the Democrats as a whole prefer to tailor policy to pander to their "worst" members.

7. If indeed "the revolution is over" it is a question of critical importance, for progressives, what lessons to take away from the experience.  I'm not yet sure what are the correct lessons, from a progressive point of view (Robin Hanson and I have been chatting about this and I hope to blog it more soon).  Deep in my bones, however, I feel that if the main takeaway were "the Republicans were at fault," that a significant learning opportunity will have been missed.

Megan McArdle writes:

There's a lot of sadness on liberal blogs these days.  What happened to
Hope and Change?  Climate change is coming sometime next year, maybe. 
Financial regulation also isn't coming anytime soon, and what's
proposed is the minimum set of politically feasible propositions rather
than a sweeping overhaul.  And health care? 

There is more at the link and I suspect it is mostly or fully correct.  Here is Ezra on health care reform and the very big chance that it might fail.  I'd just like to repeat a simple question I asked at the beginning of the Obama administration: which would you rather have, the fiscal stimulus or $775 billion in public health programs?

Even better, how about $300 billion in stimulus — the immediate stuff like aid to state governments — and $475 billion in public health programs?

At the time no one except a few progressives thought such a question was particularly relevant.

Note that the economy has seemed to stabilize, more or less, and well under ten percent of the stimulus money has been spent to date.  Moving forward, if no further major programs will be put into place, how would you like to spend the rest of that cash?

Seriously.

And I don't mean this post as a poke at Democrats in particular.  Conservatives, libertarians, etc. all commit their own versions of this error, at least if they find their way to power.  The basic mechanism is simply that policy advocates underestimate the opportunity costs of the measures they propose, as they tend to see those measures as more "win-win" than others are willing to believe.

From The Economist, there is an entire symposium.  Here is my bit and it closes as follows:

I thought these sentences from Mrs Romer’s piece were excellent: "As
someone who has written somewhat critically of the short-sightedness of
policymakers in the late 1930s, I feel new humility. I can see that the
pressure they were under was probably enormous."

That's the
bottom line. With Mrs Romer's piece we have one of the world’s great
macroeconomists, yet not quite being allowed to play that role.

In part I was referring to this:

I am least happy with the sentence: "By coupling the expansion of
coverage with reforms that significantly slow the growth of health-care
costs, we can dramatically improve the long-run fiscal situation
without tightening prematurely." So far we have every reason to believe
that Congress–and indirectly the American voter–will not allow the
growth of health-care costs to be slowed. Mrs Romer's sentence could
have been rewritten: "Congress is unlikely to significantly slow the
growth of health-care costs, so we cannot dramatically improve the
long-run fiscal situation without tightening prematurely."

If you're wondering, all that talk of "Mrs Romer" is a Britishism added by The Economist (should I have offered her a "lovely biscuit" as well?).  I get a kick out of seeing myself having "written" that, but being from New Jersey what I sent in was simply "Romer"; next in line would have been "Professor Romer," "Ms. Romer," or even "Mrs. Romer."

Of the total loans, Bt500 billion will be earmarked for mega projects under the jurisdiction of the Bhum Jai Thai Party. The remaining Bt300 billion will be shared by the Democrat and the Chart Thai Pattana parties.

How's that for a way to break through parliamentary logjams?  Just give the money to the parties themselves, they'll find ways of spending it.  The full story is here and for the pointer I thank Air Genius Gary Leff.

Democrats on three House panels continue to meet privately to seek consensus on a single plan. Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee said they were trying to decide whether to finance coverage of the uninsured with one broad-based tax, like the value-added tax, or a combination of smaller taxes.

The article is here.  I wasn't expecting that for years to come.  From my distant perch out here in Fairfax (and Arlington), I believe this means health care reform is falling apart.  It means the unions won't let them tax health insurance benefits and the CBO won't let them punt on the issue of finance.

But they do understand that price may signal quality; the price was raised from $500,000 to $1.5 million:

A former Khmer Rouge official photographer has put on sale for 1.5
million dollars what he claims to be Pol Pot's clothes, sandals and
toilet, along with thousands of photographs and other artifacts he
collected during the genocidal regime's 1975-79 rule. "I will sell Pol
Pot's sandals, toilet, his uniform and cap, thousands of photographs
and the two cameras I used during the Khmer Rouge period," said Nhem
En, who was recruited to take photographs of detainees when they
arrived at Tuol Sleng torture prison in Phnom Penh.

Forgive me if I am skeptical that the government is going to show GM
how to streamline its bureaucracy.  Nor do governments historically
have a good record as cutting-edge auto designers.

All the government can give GM is money.  Our money.  Perhaps we should change the name to American Leyland.

Here is more, from Megan McArdle.

I saw the political bigwigs here give public speeches.  Normally they go to great care to promote the use of the Catalan language, including by legal means if necessary.

Yet when speaking here in their own Barcelona, in front of the King of Spain, those same bigwigs use the Spanish language, albeit with random Catalonian sentences thrown in or used to close the talk.

Apparently they do not wish to displease the King or force him to wear a translation headset.

If I apply some very naive versions of signaling theory and coalition-building economics, I arrive at the prediction that these people do not intend to secede.

First, I agree with Will Wilkinson that a seasteading community would likely evolve back to non-libertarian political visions. 

Second and more fundamentally, I am for the seasteading idea.  There are today many oil derricks, owned and run by energyl companies.  There are many cruise ships, with more or less autonomous legal governance.  More and bigger cruise ships would be better and if some of them moved more slowly that would be fine too.  But when I step on to a cruise ship (well, actually that's the sort of thing I don't do; personally I hate cruise ships), I don't feel I am moving from an inferior political order to a superior political order.

I've wondered whether I should retire on to a cruise ship of the future, but I'm not attracted per se by the "politics" I would get there.  I would expect more freedom in the Lockean sense but less of the positive freedom that comes from living in a larger, more diverse, and yes also a more stupid society.  I wouldn't live on the Mensa cruise ship either.  I'll take some of the stupidity of modern society (the landlubbing version) to get the diversity and the greater number of open niche spaces and free possibilities. 

On a smaller scale, I live under different kinds of corporate, non-profit and university governance all the time.  That's great, but I don't view their totalized extension as my preferred utopian path.

I'd like people to be smarter, more thoughtful, more tolerant, and more loving of liberty, yet in ways which do not drain away the diversity of the United States, which I feel is the best available foundation to build upon.  No matter how good a seasteading charter may sound, any given venture just can't be that credible until it has succeeded for a very long time.  History and precedent matter and by the way have you checked in on Estonia lately? 

Addendum: Here is Alex on seasteading.

Here is my latest column.  Excerpt:

It’s not that anyone is behaving illegally or unconstitutionally,
but rather that Congress seems to want to be circumvented and to
delegate more power to the executive branch as well as to the Fed, at
least temporarily.

While Congressional leaders are consulted on
the major policies, Congress is keeping its distance, perhaps to
minimize voter outrage. This way, Congress can claim credit if a
recovery comes, but deny responsibility if the price tag ends up higher
than advertised or if banks seem to be receiving unfair benefits from
the government.

The Fed and the FDIC have become the major tools for enhancing executive power and working around Congress:

The traditional division of labor among policy makers was that the Fed
determined the quantity of money in the economy – it set monetary
policy – and Congress decided precise government expenditures – it
handled fiscal policy. These new programs blur that distinction and, in
essence, the Fed is running some fiscal policy.

The FDIC issues guarantees under the expectation that Congress will have to ratify them ex post but ex ante the executive branch is calling the shots.

Is this all good or bad?  For any single choice, it is probably good.  Congress does not, in general, improve the quality of economic policy, relative to the executive branch.  But it is also a kind of deficit spending on the quality of future governance.  The more Congress is accustomed to being allowed to punt, the worse Congress will become in the longer run.  The executive branch will overreach more and also voters will apply successively more cynical standards to evaluating Congress, leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

To put it more concretely, this Congress shies away from accepting responsibility for the various bailouts, yet we think it will somehow solve far tougher problems?  I, for one, am worried.

Rep. Maurice D. Hinchey (D-N.Y.) vowed to force the White House to accept delivery of a new
presidential helicopter Obama says he doesn't need and doesn't want.
The helicopter program, which cost $835 million this year, supports 800
jobs in Hinchey's district. "I do think there's a good chance we can
save it," he said.

Here is much more.  The Congressional Democrats don't like Obama's proposed "cuts" in spending.