Category: Political Science

Why isn’t 30 percent of the economics profession working on this problem?  Di Tella and MacCulloch tell us the following:

We find anecdotal evidence suggesting that governments in poor
countries have a more left wing rhetoric than those in OECD countries. 
Thus, it appears that capitalist rhetoric doesn’t flow to poor
countries.  A possible explanation is that corruption, which is more
widespread in poor countries, reduces more the electoral appeal of
capitalism than that of socialism.  The empirical pattern of beliefs
within countries is consistent with this explanation: people who
perceive corruption to be high in their country are also more likely to
lean left ideologically (and to declare support for a more intrusive
government in economic matters).  Finally, we present a model explaining
the corruption-left connection.  It exploits the fact that an act of
corruption is more revealing about the fairness type of a rich
capitalist than of a poor bureaucrat.  After observing corruption,
voters who care about fairness react by increasing taxes and moving
left.  There is a negative ideological externality since the existence
of corrupt entrepreneurs hurts good entrepreneurs by reducing the
electoral appeal of capitalism.

Here is the paper.  Here are non-gated versions.

Right now they do, check out this chart.  But fear not for the consilience of liberty and utility.  Kevin Hassett is citing Arrow when he should be invoking Robert Solow.  The poorer countries are playing "catch-up" by adopting Western technologies and business practices.  In the classic Solow model catch-up will give them a higher rate of economic growth but of course they still have a lower level of per capita income.  And why are those same poorer countries playing catch-up more today than they did thirty years ago?

Because they are freer.

Louis Menand, who has written a book on pragmatism, writes in response to Caplan:

In the end, the group that loses these contests must abide by the outcome, must regard the wishes of the majority as legitimate.  The only way it can be expected to do so is if it has been made to feel that it had a voice in the process, even if that voice is, in practical terms, symbolic.  A great virtue of democratic polities is stability.  The toleration of silly opinions is (to speak like an economist) a small price to pay for it.

There is much more at the link.

Addendum: Here is a good sentence from Menand: "People are less modern than the times in which they live, in other words, and the failure to comprehend this is what can make economists seem like happy bulldozers."

How many times have you heard that meme?  It turns out that political inequality is possibly at fault.  Acemoglu et. al. report:

Is inequality harmful for economic growth?  Is the underdevelopment of
Latin America related to its unequal distribution of wealth?  A recently
emerging consensus claims not only that economic inequality has
detrimental effects on economic growth in general, but also that
differences in economic inequality across the American continent during
the 19th century are responsible for the radically different economic
performances of the north and south of the continent.  In this paper we
investigate this hypothesis using unique 19th century micro data on
land ownership and political office holding in the state of
Cundinamarca, Colombia.  Our results shed considerable doubt on this
consensus.  Even though Cundinamarca is indeed more unequal than the
Northern United States at the time, within Cundinamarca municipalities
that were more unequal in the 19th century (as measured by the land
gini) are more developed today.  Instead, we argue that political rather
than economic inequality might be more important in understanding
long-run development paths and document that municipalities with
greater political inequality, as measured by political concentration,
are less developed today.  We also show that during this critical period
the politically powerful were able to amass greater wealth, which is
consistent with one of the channels through which political inequality
might affect economic allocations.  Overall our findings shed doubt on
the conventional wisdom and suggest that research on long-run
comparative development should investigate the implications of
political inequality as well as those of economic inequality.

In other words, at least from that data set, the real problem seems to be rent-seeking behavior through the political process.  Here is the link.  Here is a non-gated version of the paper.

At a time when the press failed to check a reactionary Administration,
when the opposition party all too often chose timidity, it was the
lowly and anonymous bureaucrats, clad in rumpled suits, ID badges
dangling from their necks, who, in their own quiet, behind-the-scenes
way, took to the ramparts to defend the integrity of the American
system of government.

That is Christoper Hayes.   I call it The Paradox of Accountability.  Bureaucrats are, in many cases, not very accountable.  That same quality makes them ideally suited to impose accountability on other parts of government, most of all leaders.  The downside is that the Smithsonian expense reimbursement scandal can go on for so long.  Note also there cannot be the same overseer for every part of government; that ovedrseer would itself not be accountable.  (Was it Brecht who, a’la Bryan Caplan, wanted to call an election and institute a new set of people?)  At the same time no part of government is insulated from accountability either; the paycheck must come from somewhere.  Nodes of accountability and unaccountability more often evolve than are chosen, yet we have only a murky sense of what the optimal filters might be…

Henry Farrell has the scoop.  Excerpt (the post has much more):

…will national parliaments get an effective veto over decisions made at the EU level [?].  The constitutional treaty provided them with a warning role which I suspect would have amounted in fact to an effective veto power (it would be politically difficult to ignore their recommendation) – at the moment, there is a proposal on the table to enhance this further.  This seems to me to be an excellent idea.  National parliaments have been losing clout in the EU – a lot of their business now involves either rubber stamping or making minor modifications to legislation that is drafted at the EU level.   With a couple of exceptions, they don’t play much of a role at all in discussing how governments should negotiate on European legislation.  Providing them with an effective veto at the end of the process would mean that they would have to be consulted earlier, and would perhaps become over time a key partner in the legislative process.  This would mean increased inefficiencies in getting things done (the addition of another veto player), but would also mean a lot more democratic legitimacy.  At the moment, governments are able to get away with a lot of stuff at the EU level that they couldn’t get away with domestically.

My personal view is to keep the extra roadblocks yet deny the extra legitimacy.  Ultimately I would have the EU be more like a huge free trade area and "bribe Eastern Europeans to be freer" society.  I agree that Henry’s wishes for a more active EU would be good for the short run (elites can be smart), but in the longer run I fear the destabilizing consequences of organizing so many political decisions around institutions which will never connect with voters in any single country or linguistic group.

…we find that those on the right (left) of the political spectrum adapt to status (income) but not to income (status).

Here is more.

Yesterday, Bush headlined a fundraiser for the New Jersey state GOP,
where donors could pay $5,000 to pose for a photo with the Commander in
Chief.  Expensive photo op, right?  Well, that’s actually cheaper that
what donors paid just a year ago for a grip and grin with Bush.  Last
summer, GOP officials around the country charged at least $10,000 a pop
for presidential photo op, a bargain compared to the $25,000-a-flash
Bush commanded during some Republican National Committee fund-raisers
back in 2000 and 2004.

Here is the link.  The pointer is from Leslie Katz.

Michael Hiscox of Harvard reports:

We examine new survey data on attitudes toward international trade showing that women are significantly less likely than men to support increasing trade with foreign nations. This gender gap remains large even when controlling for a broad range of socio-economic characteristics among survey respondents, including occupational, skill, and industry-of-employment differences that feature in standard political-economy models of individuals’ trade policy preferences. Measures of the particular labor-market risks and costs associated with maternity do not appear to be related at all to the gender gap in trade preferences. We also do not find any strong evidence that gender differences in non-material values or along ideological dimensions have any affect on attitudes toward trade. The data do clearly reveal that the gender gap exists only among college-educated respondents and is larger among older cohorts. We argue that differences in educational experience – specifically, exposure to economic ideas at the college level – appear to be most plausible explanation for gender differences in attitudes toward trade. The findings suggest the possibilities of a renewed theoretical and empirical focus on the political roles played by ideas, not just among policymakers but also among the broader electorate. In practical terms, there are also implications for trade policy outcomes in different contexts and for how debates over globalization contribute to broader gender divisions in politics.

I considered titling this post "Your girls’ minds are being poisoned," but I’ve learned repeatedly that a big chunk of you don’t know when I am joking.  I don’t however, see selective education as the relevant difference.  Perhaps education is correlated with a female (and often male) decision to adopt a self-identity as a "caring person."  Given the difference between the seen and unseen, a’la Bastiat, and the imperfect state of economics education, that makes those people critics of globalization.

Bryan Caplan writes:

Venezuelan policy was bad in the past for the same reason it’s really bad now: In Venezuela, bad policy is good politics because it’s popular.

We all know that Bryan blames bad policy on irrational voters,  I sometimes worry he is too quickly identifying irrationality with stubbornness.  An irrational voter might be very easy manipulated by a politician, just as many Venezuelan voters have had their incipient populism mobilized by the rhetoric of Chavez.  Were so many Cubans communist before Castro?  Of course to the extent irrationality and its content are endogenous, we must move away from a simple "blame the voters" story.

In the past Bryan has blogged that many voters are too stupid or too irrational to respond even to propaganda.  But political rhetoric sometimes works on some of the people and perhaps that is enough.  (Technical point: I doubt if the Caplan-postulated irrationality is evenly distributed along a Downsian spectrum in such a way to support quasi-dictatorial rule by the median voter.)  Irrationality is likely to make the political spectrum sufficiently complex and multi-dimensional as to have some easily manipulated levers.  In that case electoral competition is not aiming at a simple mid-point of dominant public opinion.  Social choice theory then tells us that even a small amount of preference manipulation or agenda-setting can have a huge effect on final outcomes.

Under one plausible view (not Bryan’s as far as I know), politicians have good fundraising and coalition-organizing reasons to persuade voters to accept an essentially one-dimensional political scale.  Mankind’s biological tendencies toward prejudicial alliances, combined with the forces of spontaneous order, support the same.  Political irrationality results, much as Caplan suggests, but the apparently-in-charge voters are as much a shadow play as a unique cause or fulcrum. 

Tristan Tzara!

Addendum: Here is the critical Christopher Hayes review of Bryan’s book.

My grad school officemate, friend, and co-author Michael Munger (better known as the Chair of Duke’s Political Science department and North American editor of the journal Public Choice is running for Governor of North Carolina). Sadly for Mike, when he chose among the many parties clamoring for him to be their standard bearer, he chose the Libertarian Party, which is not even on the ballot in the state!

Actually Mike is running to get the Libertarian Party back in the long term political debate in NC and is engaged in a signature drive to get the party on the ballot. Although I doubt that any libertarians read MR, I thought I’d give Mike a shout out and see if any supporters might emerge (NC natives for signatures and votes and true friends of liberty anywhere for $$$). 

By the way, Mike’s previous elected offices include being President of the Wash U. economics grad student association (which I’m pretty sure he rigged. I know for sure he rigged the election of his successor because I had massively stuffed the ballot box for a candidate who didn’t win) so he may well be OVER-qualified for the post he seeks.

C’mon people, we can’t let this happen:

They all seem to think so, but I’ve long found this fear puzzling.  These states could solve many of their fiscal problems by either cutting taxes/spending a few percentage points, or by moving to complete dual benefit status (read: non-whites receive less money).  No matter what you think of those ideas, they would stave off fiscal crisis.

The trick is that Americans and many of the Nordics have such different senses of what counts as a major political problem.  For better or worse, we are used to tolerating waste and disorder.  They fall apart if even a single piece of the machinery of government is out of order.  (Similarly, the Japanese are aghast over tiny tears in the fabric of social order.)  So if someone is collecting benefits "who shouldn’t be," it threatens their entire basis of social and legal organization.  I, as a New Jersey-bred American think "too bad, but big deal, what else is new?"

Would it help them to be more like me?  Can they simply overlook these instances of immigrant abuse?  Maybe not.  If they were more like me, they wouldn’t be them in the first place. 

And that is why so many Nordics think their welfare state is in such danger from immigrants.  Often the countries most able to handle problems are — for that same reason — the most worried about those problems.  It is their own vigilance which makes them so vulnerable to exceptions and scattered loose ends.

But if they could be more…um…Hegelian…their future would be brighter.

Slate.com lists some of the obvious suggestions, which try to inject greater intellectual content.  I would prefer to see the following:

1. Allow all candidates to watch a short debate of experts — with a fraud or two thrown in — and ask them to evaluate what they just heard and why they reached the conclusion they did.

2. Test candidates for the ability to spot liars.

3. Give each candidate a substantive message and then give each two minutes to turn it into pure fluff.  This tests communications skills, plus we can see the meat grinder in action.

4. Require each candidate to conduct an orchestra.  Watch to what extent each candidate defers to the players, and to what extent he prefers "panache."

Your ideas?

"If 5% of trains are running late it is a political problem."

Here is the source, check out the readers’ comments on why the Danes say they are so happy.