Category: Political Science

Slugfest of the classical liberals.  Dan stresses he wrote these comments off the top of his head, which is how most criticism of colleagues should be done.

Perhaps the most interesting discussion is whether Bryan has identified the key biases in voter behavior.  Bryan identifies anti-foreigner, make-work, pessimistic, and anti-market biases.  Like Dan, I see pro-conformity biases as essential, and as shaping the form that other biases will take, including the biases of high-status academics.   I also don’t think that voters are pessimistic per se; on many issues (Iraq, global warming) they have seemed quite cavalier and willing to ignore pending problems.  It is fairer to say that voters either ignore or overestimate low probability events, depending on framing, rather than getting it right.

My list of the essential biases in voter (and human) behavior are: feel good about oneself bias, conformity bias, and anti-foreigner bias.  Robin Hanson might cite signaling bias.  The remaining biases are numerous and important, but they will flow from how these initial deeply rooted biases interact with the social environment.  Among other things, this means that people can be too biased toward Bryan’s point of view and that we can’t always trust academics over the common person.

I often joke with Bryan that the time has come for him to accept the consensus of what the experts in moral philosophy (or atonal music) tell us (him) to do.

Attacking conservatism, Greg Anrig writes:

I think it’s fair to equate Heritage with the conservative movement…the whole unitary executive concept about executive power began to be
formulated in the Reagan Justice Department.  Those guys were pretty
much all conservatives, wouldn’t you say, Tyler?

I find the clarity here extraordinary, namely how much Anrig focuses upon labeled individuals and groups of individuals.  Conservatism (yes, the concept, truly understood, includes some well-known liberals) stresses that institutions and ideas are what matter, not which group of people is in power.  When institutions are bad, and the general tenor of public ideas is off base or depraved, it is not better to be governed by "conservatives," and arguably it is worse.  Of course conservatives, once they achieve power, will view political matters in terms of people just as Anrig does ("we can’t let those guys back into Treasury"), if only because natural political selection eliminates those conservatives who do not. 

That is one reason why conservatives so often act against conservative ideas, and why conservative politicians so often lie.  In fact the better a conservative politician sounds to conservative listeners, the more inconsistent those ideas will be with the actual process of governing.

If you are a conservative looking to improve the world, one option is to improve the quality of religion in society.  You should consider politics an inherently corrupting activity for conservative ideas; yet this fact, taken alone, does not prove it is better to follow left-wing ideas.

Addendum: Here is a link to Matt and Ezra on same.

Chapter one: Politicizing the government, and lowering the quality of governance, should not be considered conservative ideas.  The incompetence of Bush, a self-professed conservative, doesn’t make this so.  The Founding Fathers cared about governance, and there have been plenty of bad Democrats.  Furthermore when the Clinton administration improved FEMA, it was praised at George Mason and very vocally. 

Chapter two: The Unitary Executive.  No way is this a true conservative idea.  No way.  Checks and balances is a fundamental conservative idea.

Chapter three: Iraq.  I’ll leave this aside for the sake of keeping the comments thread manageable.  You’ll have a chance to comment on this soon, but not today.

Chapter four: Tax cuts for the rich.  Even if you think these were a bad idea, don’t blame conservatism.  The standard conservative idea is Milton Friedman’s nostrum that the real burden of government lies in the level of spending (and how it is spent), not the level of taxation per se.

Chapter five: State tax-and-spending limits.  The Colorado plan for spending limits really didn’t work out so well and Anrig scores major points in this chapter.  Major, major points.  If you have a revisionist take on this, please do tell us in the comments.

Chapter six: "Smart" regulation.  The regulatory burden has grown, for better or worse, with each administration.  Anrig criticizes John Graham and his ilk, but his points boil down to disagreement with the conservative view rather than an indictment of what has been tried.  We’d all like to have better regulation, and we can all admit it is very hard to get there procedurally.

Chapter seven: School choice and vouchers.  The available evidence — see for instance Caroline Hoxby — suggests that vouchers are an improvement, albeit much overrated by conservatives and libertarians.  However that hardly makes the idea bankrupt.

Chapter eight: Health savings accounts and malpractice reform.  Health savings accounts are another tax break for savings and they won’t much improve U.S. health care.  The malpractice crisis is overrated as a cause of high health care costs.  Anrig scores points here, but mostly against wheel-spinning.  It is worth stressing that "the right" doesn’t really have much of a health care plan at all, and that can count as an indictment.

Chapter nine: Social security privatization.  I’ve argued that the Bush plan was just bad economics, even from a conservative or libertarian point of view.  We already had private accounts in the form of Merrill Lynch, so why put a government-engineered, jerry-rigged structure on top of that?

The bottom line: Two strong points that can be scored against conservatism or market-oriented ideas, as opposed to the Bush Administration.  First, state-level tax and spending limits haven’t worked out.  Second, "the right" doesn’t (yet?) have a coherent health care plan.  But the biggest problems faced by conservatism or libertarianism are along the lines of "won’t ever be tried," not "we just tried it and it failed."

Addendum: Anrig responds.

Since the 1990s the policies of the three major players (Taiwan, China, and the United States) have become unstable in many ways.  The possibility of a miscalculation by any participant with respect to the two others is quite high.  China thinks that Washington will not sacrifice Los Angeles for Taiwan, the United States that Beijing will not sacrifice twenty or thirty years of development for Taipei, and Taiwan that it can confront Beijing with a fait accompli and not suffer the consequences.  Those are three dangerous mistakes.

That is from Therese Delpech’s fascinating Savage Century: Back to Barbarism.  This book made a splash in France but has been virtually ignored in the U.S.  There haven’t been many reviews but here are some endorsements.

Two of the book’s major themes are a) don’t be fooled, the barbarisms of World War II and 20th century totalitarianism are not really behind us, and b) don’t expect Asia to be stable in the 21st century.  Highly recommended and yes it did remind me of John Nye.

Speaking of John, here is a Reason dialogue with John, covering his new book and also his description of GMU lunches.

Henry Farrell writes:

…there’s plenty of survey evidence (Jonathan Chait discusses this in his recent book) that journalists tend to have somewhat right-of-center views on economic issues.

From my experience:

1. Journalists are likely to be far more cosmopolitan (pro-free trade, pro-immigration) than is the general public.

2. Journalists are more likely to be suspicious of corporations and indeed more likely to be suspicious in general.  People lie to them every day, repeatedly and often without shame.

3. Journalists are more likely to think that "good government" is in fact possible, if perhaps difficult to achieve.  If they were complete cynics, they would not become underpaid journalists. 

4. If anything, it is the odd mix between cynicism and idealism that defines the journalistic political point of view.

5. Most journalists work in a declining sector — newspapers or TV — and this does not augur well for their belief in progress and the virtues of economic growth.  They are not well-positioned to enjoy "creative destruction."

6. Not many top journalists are "far left Democrats."  But most are Democrats.  I also do not think many journalists would endorse the economic proposals of the rational wing of the Republican Party, say Greg Mankiw or Martin Feldstein.  Journalists are likely to think those proposals do not show enough concern for the poor.

7. Journalists tend to favor visible stories and neglect invisible opportunity costs and invisible hand mechanisms, which often but not always puts them against the side of the market.

8. Chait cites evidence that journalists are more likely to support cuts in Medicare and Social Security.  This comes on p.142 though it does not seem to be matched to a particular footnote.  I am willing to hear more but I am not convinced.  I wouldn’t be shocked if a Pew survey showed such responses, but when push comes to shove the self-image of "defender of the downtrodden" is more important to many journalists than "advocate of fiscal responsibility."

In sum, the left-right spectrum is not the best way to understand the economic views of journalists.  But, when it comes to economic issues, it is hard for me to put journalists on the right side of that line.

Addendum: I am indebted to Russ Roberts for a useful conversation on this topic, though of course he is not responsible for these views.

Less than a month before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Saddam Hussein signaled that he was willing to go into exile as long as he could take
with him $1 billion and information on weapons of mass destruction,
according to a report of a Feb. 22, 2003, meeting between President Bushand his Spanish counterpart published by a Spanish newspaper yesterday.

Here is the story; admittedly it is hard to judge the truthfulness of this report but in probabilistic terms it does not raise my estimate of whether the Coase theorem applies to President Bush.

This one is crude, but it cannot be dismissed:

Putin doesn’t run a country, he runs a corporation. He is the ugliest mixture of Karl Marx and Adam Smith. He is not interested in restoring the Russian influence, he’s just interested in Gazprom’s and Rosneft’s influence. Actually, Putin is destroying the Russian state. If we look at the functions of the state, they are gradually transferred to the state companies: now the Duma voted that Gazprom and Rosneft can have its own armies. These so-called state companies are run by Putin and his KGB-buddies – him being a sort of "capo di tutti capi". And for those doing business with KGB Inc., I  remind them that the KGB shareholders are very active shareholders.

That’s Garry Kasparov, here is one commentator summarizing:

In Kasparov’s view, the main goal of Russian foreign policy is to raise the oil price, no matter what – that’s why the tensions in the Middle East are so important to Putin…

We live in a nice world, no?  Megan McArdle ponders life or death incentives in the former Soviet Union.  Here is the excellent New Yorker article on Kasparov.

The International Crisis Group (ICG) says some
Zimbabweans are in favor of a retirement package, which would be
attractive enough for President Robert Mugabe to step down.

More here.

Do read Matt Yglesias’s interesting post (and here), but supply-side thinking simply isn’t that influential anymore.  To show this, the entry on supply-side economics from Conservapedia is neither fleshed out nor current.  Conservapedia is not a reliable source but it is a information aggregator of sorts for what is an influential idea on the right.

Here is their painful (but also obsolete and undernourished) entry on the Laffer Curve.  This claim boggles the mind: "In the Reagan era, the Laffer Curve demonstrated that tax cuts lead to a near doubling of federal tax reciepts ($500 billion to $900 billion)."  Might Reagan’s huge tax increase have had something to do with that?

I know one can find cites to supply-side economics by Giuliani, McCain and others, but the "starve the beast" theory — rightly or wrongly — is far more popular with the Right these days.  Many people will use Laffer Curve claims to hide their real agendas but that is distinct from the Laffer Curve having much influence.

p.s. I do recognize that these Conservapedia entries may change very soon but they were underdeveloped when I went to visit them.

Addendum: Here is the former Jane Galt on said topic.

Here is Anil Hira:

This article examines more carefully the oft-made hypotheses that (1) "technocrats" or politicians with an economics background are increasingly common and (2) that this "improvement" in qualifications will lead to improvements in economic policy. The article presents a database on the qualifications of leaders of the world’s major countries over the past four decades. The article finds that while there is evidence for increasing "technification," there are also distinct and persistent historical patterns among Asian, African, Middle Eastern, and Latin American leaders. Using statistical analysis, the article finds that we cannot conclude that leadership training in economics leads to better economic outcomes.

Here is the (only temporarily non-gated) link, thanks to Bill Evers for the pointer.  There is also an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on this work, I am told.  The natural defense of economists, which I will not attempt, is to cite selection effects for which economists achieve public office, and what they must do to rule. 

I am happy to admit that governing is most of all about building viable coalitions (more than having good policy knowledge, at many margins), and that we economists are not especially good at that.  So I don’t find this result a surprise.

It is a thrilling, if repulsive, dream.

For more, here is Will Wilkinson on whether we are entering a new populist era.

This new book by Alan Krueger, full of first-rate empirical work, punctures many myths about terrorism.  For instance poverty does not breed terrorism, once you look at the data.  Here is the book’s home page.

My only complaint is that the book does not deliver on its title; it tells me what doesn’t make a terrorist, but I still don’t know what does make a terrorist.  (Don’t even mention Islam in the comments unless you have something new — and analytical — to say; citing the Koran on jihad isn’t going to solve the puzzle.)

My crude view sees terrorism as meshed with three factors:

1. The belief that it is justified to kill innocent people for sufficiently important political ends.  Of course people who support the fighting of WWII hold this view too.

2. False positive beliefs about how the world works.  Osama bin Laden probably doesn’t know the Alchian and Allen theorem, the make-work fallacy, the Heckscher-Ohlin results, nor does he realize that his Islamic Caliphate would not work very well.

3. Some third factor(s), rooted in human psychology.

Most non-terrorists have more of #1 and #2 than is good for the world.  And I expect that terrorists have a special excess of #1 and #2.  I nonetheless think that the third factor is the key to understanding "what makes a terrorist."  You could start your reading here, and here, good luck.  Is it "narcissistic rage"?  Authoritarian or submissive personality types?  Freudian mumbo-jumbo at work?

By the way, the difficulty of pinning down the third factor(s) has policy implications.  We should adopt policies which are robust toward not understanding the strategies or game-theoretic solution concepts of the terrorists.  Complicated signals are unlikely to communicate the appropriate information in practice.  However bad is our model of the terrorists, I suspect that their model of us is even worse.

Maybe not:

Eight months after Democrats vowed to shine light on the dark art of
“earmarking” money for pet projects, many lawmakers say the new
visibility has only intensified the competition for projects by letting
each member see exactly how many everyone else is receiving…

The earmark frenzy hit fever pitch in recent days, even as the Senate passed new rules that allow more public scrutiny of them.

Far
from causing embarrassment, the new transparency has raised the value
of earmarks as a measure of members’ clout. Indeed, lawmakers have
often competed to have their names attached to individual earmarks and
rushed to put out press releases claiming credit for the money they
bring home.

Here is the full story.  A simple model is that such transparency imposes a large, one-time cost on lawmakers and a public relations hit.  But once this hit is taken, the new marginal calculus still brings lots of earmarks.  The "good" news is this:

…the Democratic totals are less than half  the record set by Republicans when they controlled Congress in 2005, but they are far higher than the levels just 10 years ago.

Here is a typical smart person’s thought about the IMF; the intro to the article reads:

When the IMF was a monitor of borrowers’ policies, dominance of the IMF
Board by creditor countries was natural, but an institution whose main
role is to facilitate global consultations and arbitrate currency
disputes needs a more balanced shareholder structure.

I again find myself drawn into a "public choice" response rather than an "optimization" response.  I read the above sentence as stating the problem the IMF faces, not stating a solution.  The U.S., Western Europe, and Japan support the IMF in large part because they control it.  For the U.S. in particular the IMF has been a relatively good deal.  You don’t have to think the IMF is especially effective (I don’t), but the institution allows for pre-arranged contributions to bailouts and pre-arranged coordination.  Having a dominant hand in a multilateral institution works better for U.S. policymakers than having to assemble consortia on the spot, or explaining to some countries on a nation-to-nation basis that they won’t get any help. 

If China and India had a significant voice in the IMF, what would they want?  It’s not clear, and that is part of the problem.  The U.S. isn’t about to stop paying its "country club dues," but when new upgraded members might someday form a blocking coalition, I’m not sure America will step up its contribution either.