Category: Political Science

Ezra wins:

…the campaign against Obama has metastasized into a variant of class
warfare. It’s the resentment of the meritocracy. What the GOP realized
was that Obama did come across different than the average American, but
not so much because he was black as because he was effortless. The very
set of supercharged talents and qualities that allowed Obama to
levitate past the boundaries of race and class make him different than
those who haven’t rocketed upward on the strength of their intelligence
and charisma and charm. After all, if you’re a fumbling, struggling
individual out in suburban Ohio, how can you believe that this guy who
doesn’t look to have struggled a day in his life cares about your
pathetic problems? Obama, in other words, is elite. As in "A group or
class of persons enjoying superior intellectual, social, or economic
status." Obama isn’t an economic elite, but he is a social and
intellectual elite. And it’s that creeping sense that he’s different,
that he’s better and knows it, that McCain is trying to exploit.

The Obama campaign, similarly, has realized that McCain is an elite,
and that voters won’t believe that a guy who has so many houses that he
can’t keep track of them will care if they lose the small condo they
call home. This election, in other words, is becoming a contest to
decide which type of elite voters hate — or fear, or mistrust — more:
A social elite or an economic elite?

Here is the first Google Images entry for "mediocre."

Obama has many good qualities but this does not prevent the circulation of massive amounts of "Obama insecurity," as evidenced by some of the comments on a recent post.  (It’s not about disagreeing; note how the tone changes.)  For some people no comment on Obama, other than the purely laudatory, is anything other than a hackish right-wing attempt to forge an alliance of lies with Karl Rove and his ilk.  But an election need not be framed as a war where all remarks must be strategically proper and in line with the objective of electing a preferred candidate; a blog is a discourse first and foremost.

The mood on Obama reminds me of the response of some MR commentators to Eric Lyon on Radiohead.

I cannot imagine how devastated and hopeless the Democratic left would feel if Obama loses.  That response would be a big mistake but in part it explains "Obama insecurity."  The left is uneasy that so many of their hopes are pinned on this man and as Paul Krugman points out he is somewhat unknown.  There is a secondary fear that Obama is in fact committed to the notion of America as a center-right country or at least is unwilling to challenge that idea. 

"Obama insecurity" hurts his electoral chances and hurts the intellectual future of the left as a corrective force in American politics.  There’s not a convincing or credible path toward painting his enemies as immoral, even if that is what you believe.  Some campaign lies are painting Obama as weak, inexperienced, and non-American or even anti-American.  Responding with a dose of "Obama insecurity" only plays into the hands of those who would turn this into a race of emotions and innuendo. 

Brought to you by Aghion, Algan, Cahuc and Shleifer, this is one of the best papers so far this year.  It’s so good I’ll give you a longer than usual quotation from the opening pages:

In a cross-section of countries, government regulation is strongly negatively correlated with social capital. We document, and try to explain, this highly significant empirical correlation.  The correlation works for a range of measures of social capital, from trust in others to trust in corporations and political institutions, as well as for a range of measures of regulation, from product markets, to labor markets, to judicial procedures. 

We present a simple model explaining this correlation. The model turns on the idea that investment in social capital makes people both more productive and more civic (e.g., Coleman 1990). Compared to people who have invested in social capital, those who have not are both less productive and impose a negative externality on others when they produce (e.g., pollute).  The community (whether through voting or through some other political mechanism) regulates production when the expected negative externalities are large. But regulation itself must be implemented by government officials, who are corrupt if they have not invested in social capital. As a consequence, when production is restricted through regulation, investment in social capital may not pay off.  In this model, when people expect to live in a civil community, they expect low levels of regulation, and so invest in social capital. Their beliefs are justified, as lack of investment leads to incivility, high regulation, high corruption, and low production.  The model has two Pareto ranked equilibria.

…The model predicts, most immediately, that distrust influences not just regulation itself, but the demand for regulation…distrust fuels support for government control over the economy.  What is perhaps most interesting about this finding, and also consistent with the model’s predictions, is that distrust generates demand for regulation even when people realize that the government is corrupt and ineffective; they prefer state control to unbridled production by uncivil firms.

…We take evidence on the demand for regulation as supportive of causality running from distrust to regulation.  To test the reverse causality, we look at the experiment of transition from socialism, which we interpret as a radical reduction in government regulation in low trust societies.  Our model predicts that such a reduction should lead to 1) a reduction in output, 2) an increase in corruption, 3) an increase in demand for government control at a given level of trust, and 4) a reduction of trust in the short run.

Many of the supposed "heroes" of the past were liars, frauds, and butchers to varying degrees.  The association of fame with entertainers, for all its flaws, departs from earlier concepts of heroic brutality and martial virtue.  Most of today’s famous people have had to persuade consumers to offer their allegiance and their dollars.  Nowadays fame is attained through a high-stakes game of pursuit and seduction, rather than a heroic contest or a show of force in battle.  The shift in fame to entertainers is a modern extension of the Enlightenment doux commerce thesis that the wealth of the market civilizes morals and manners and supports an ethic of bourgeois virtue.

…Modern politics emphasizes images, rumor, negative campaigning, and a circus-like, mass media atmosphere.  Leaders lose their stature and become another set of celebrities.  We talk about them and use them for entertainment.  Yet contrary to the views of many critics, these developments are by no means wholly negative.

Commercial society has brought the taming of fame to politics…

That is from my 2000 book What Price Fame?

Finally I have something new to report on Barack Obama:

Prior to the 2008 Democratic Presidential Primary, Barack Obama was endorsed by Oprah Winfrey, a celebrity with a proven track record of influencing her fans’ commercial decisions. In this paper, we use geographic differences in subscriptions to O! – The Oprah Magazine and the sale of books Winfrey recommended as part of Oprah’s Book Club to assess whether her endorsement affected the Primary outcomes. We find her endorsement had a positive effect on the votes Obama received, increased the overall voter participation rate, and increased the number of contributions received by Obama. No connection is found between the measures of Oprah’s influence and Obama’s success in previous elections, nor with underlying local political preferences. Our results suggest that Winfrey’s endorsement was responsible for approximately additional 1,000,000 votes for Obama.

That is work by Craig Garthwaite and Tim Moore and here is the full paper.

There is talk of a state funeral for Margaret Thatcher, for when that sad day comes.

Not everyone agrees:

"Thatcher should only be allowed a state funeral if the contract is put
out to compulsory competitive tender and awarded to the lowest bidder.
Any offers?" was one of the more polite responses from readers.

Within a given country, people who have been victims of the same kind of crime (here, a burglary) tend to be more vengeful, but not if they have been victims of a different crime, like mugging.

Of course the basic idea comes from Adam Smith.  Here is the full story, which features commentary by GMU economists.  Here is my previous post on the topic.

…shorting requires a [margin] deposit at zero interest rate, that is the key here…

That’s my email answer to the question I receive most frequently these days.  Who can state the question?

I have a simple model of how some people — but by no means all — process political issues.  Occasionally the real force behind a political ideology is the subconsciously held desire that a certain group of people should not be allowed to rise in relative status.

Take the so-called "right wing."  I believe that some people on the right do not like those they perceive as "whiners."  They do not want these whiners to rise in relative status.  That means they must argue against the whining and also they must argue against the presuppositions behind the whining.

If the whiners say that times are bad, the rebuttal is that times are pretty good or times will become better again.  But if the whiners want to increase government benefits (perhaps there is a victim to whine about), we hear about the need to tighten our belts and all the talk about good times is, at least temporarily, muted.  Fiscal discipline is now in order.

Take the so-called "left wing."  Some of these people favor a kind of meritocracy.  They feel it is unfair that money so determines access in capitalist society and they do not want the monied class to rise in relative status, certainly not above the status of the smart people and the virtuous people.  It is important to fight for the principle that the desires of this monied class have a relatively low priority in the social ranking.  Egalitarianism is the rhetoric of the day, and readjusting the status of other Americans to the status of this monied class often receives more attention than elevating the very poorest in the world to a higher absolute level.

So when happiness research indicates that money brings more happiness only up to a point, this is a popular result.  That perspective lowers the status of this monied class by showing they really aren’t that happy.  When happiness research indicates that conservatives are relatively happy, however, or that many redistributions don’t make the beneficiaries much happier (in some accounts the money-happiness relationships flattens out at a pretty low level), suddenly happiness research isn’t talked up so much.  Inequalities which do not raise the status of this monied class, such as inequalities in the sphere of beauty or teenage sex, don’t come under so much criticism.

Some on the right wing will stress "individual responsibility" as a value when it lowers the status of the whiners (why whine when it was the victim’s own fault?).  Some on the left wing will stress "individual responsibility" when it is time to punish corporate wrongdoers and thus lower their status.  Not everyone applies (or rejects) this value consistently.

Given this difference in rhetoric, the right wing will be identified with the monied class, even when the left often has more money.  And the left wing will be identified as the whiners, even though the right at times whines as much or more.  You might say that both sides are monied, high human capital whiners, on the whole.  And if you compare them to Burmese rice farmers, the two sides seem somewhat alike.

For the people caught up in these intellectual traps, it all boils down to which groups of whiners they find most objectionable.  And once they choose sides, the wisdom of that choice becomes increasingly clear with time.

Fortunately not everyone has these subconscious motivations.  But even if more people did, it’s not something I would want to whine about.

Jonah Berger, Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School of
Business, conducted a terrific study where he demonstrates that where people vote affects how they vote.
Essentially, people whose voting booth is located in a church are more
likely to put more weight into social issues, people voting in fire
houses care more about safety, and people voting in a school tend to
put more weight on things like education.

Admittedly there is a problem here of isolating causation.  Perhaps you go to the polls whose location you know, and if you have kids you know how to find the school, if you are religious you know how to find the church, and so on. 

Auren Hoffman, whom I will see next week in Quebec City, concludes:

Your gut might be much better at telling you what not to do than giving
you good direction on what to do. If your gut tells you something is
wrong with someone, than you probably do not want to entrust your kid
with her. But a positive gut-check often does little good (at least for
me).

According to this line of thinking, which has adherents…focusing on the tactical questions surrounding such an operation — how much of Iran’s nuclear program can Israel destroy?  how many years can a bombing campaign set the program back? — is a mistake.  The main goal of a hit would not be to destroy the program completely, but rather to awaken the international community from its slumber and force it to finally engineer a solution to the crisis…any attack on Iran’s reactors — as long as it is not perceived as a military failure — can serve as a means of "stirring the pot" of international geopolitics.  Israel, in other words, wouldn’t be resorting to military action because it is convinced that diplomacy by the international community cannot stop Iran; it would be resorting to military action because only diplomacy by the international community can stop Iran.

That is Shmuel Rosner in the 30 July The New Republic.  Personally I do not think that Israel will attack Iran, but since I had never heard this argument before I thought I would pass it on.

Do read Greg Mankiw on this topic.  The list of policies favored by economists includes support free trade, oppose farm subsidies, leave oil companies and speculators alone, tax the use of energy [does he mean carbon-based energy?], raise the retirement age, invite more skilled immigrants, liberalize drug policy, and raise funds for economic research.

I don’t disagree that there is a consensus on retirement age but it was news to me to read that.  My informal impression had been that many economists on the left felt this would place undue burdens on people with physically demanding jobs.  And personally I would sooner subsidize hard science than economics; I don’t think we’ve earned our keep lately!

Or maybe Greg is just saying that it would win economists’ votes.  Like Alex, I wonder if economists vote on a more rational basis than do other people.  If I meet a French economist, I suppose that his views are more shaped by his being a Frenchman than by his being an economist.  I’d like to see a poll of Canadian economists on health care reform.

Robin Hanson summarizes one case for it.  I don’t know much about the technologies but my worries are mainly political.  Won’t the Russians benefit greatly from a warming world, both because they are a bit cold and because they will access a warmer Arctic?  Would the UN Security Council approve climate engineering?  Probably not.  If the United States did it on its own, could that be perceived as an act of war?  If geo-engineering is cheap (which is part of its very promise), and unilateral action is acceptable, don’t other countries also get to take their shot at influencing the environment and moving us toward an optimal climate?  What does the resulting equilibrium look like?  Who moves last?  How would we feel if someone changed the U.S. climate to make many parts of the country colder?