Category: Political Science

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.
                                                                         H.L. Mencken

My colleague Bryan Caplan explains today in the Wall Street Journal.

When special interests talk, politicians listen and the rest of us suffer. But why do politicians listen? Social scientists’ favorite explanation is
that special interests pay close attention to their pet issues and the rest of
us do not. So when politicians decide where to stand, the safer path is to
satisfy knowledgeable insiders at the expense of the oblivious public.

This explanation is appealing, but it neglects one glaring fact.
"Special-interest" legislation is popular.

Keeping foreign products out is popular. Since 1976, … Americans who
"sympathize more with those who want to eliminate tariffs" are seriously
outnumbered by "those who think such tariffs are necessary." Handouts for
farmers are popular. A 2004 … Poll found that 58% agree that "government needs
to subsidize farming to make sure there will always be a good supply of food."
In 2006, … over 80% of Americans want to raise the minimum wage. … These
results are not isolated. It is hard to find any "special interest" policies
that most Americans oppose.

Clearly, there is something very wrong with the view that the steel industry,
farm lobby and labor unions thwart the will of the majority. The public does not
pay close attention to politics, but that hardly seems to be the problem. The
policies that prevail are basically the policies that the public approves. …
To succeed, special interests only need to persuade politicians to swim with the
current of public opinion.

Why would the majority favor policies that hurt the majority? … The
majority favors these policies because the average person underestimates the
social benefits of the free market, especially for international and labor
markets. In a phrase, the public suffers from anti-market bias.

Thoma excerpts more.

Yes Sarkozy is on the verge of winning, but will there be much change?  It is worth reading Grant McCracken:

This may be the only Western culture in which the phrase "creative destruction" is fully paradoxical.  All of us balk for a moment at the phrase, but the French, I think, must just shake their heads and say, "no, it’s creative or it’s destructive."  This is a culture that approaches perfection, and for a world like this all of the things that make other Western economies go, innovation, responsiveness, competition and innovations, these, in France, are wrong.  These contradict the the French style of life.   

The English could invent punk because there wasn’t very much to keep them from the aesthetic violence it required.  The Germans could rebuild the nation state because all it demanded of them was that they tear down a place stinking of cabbage and soft coal.  Americans could push us all down the bobsled of post modernity because all it meant was surviving the bouleversement of Silicon Valley in the late 1990s. 

But the French, for them change must feel lapsarian, a fall from an exquisitely accomplished grace.  The rest of us blunder from a uncertain present into the maw of a chaotic future, but then as one of my French respondents said, "it’s not like you’ve got very much to lose."  The French, you see, pay dearly for change, and sometimes they just can’t bring themselves to budge. 

We don’t generally do candidate blogging, but many readers may find of interest Bruce Bartlett’s "Conservatives for Hillary," a movement to which Thomas Sowell probably does not belong.

When I see the worsening degeneracy in our politicians, our media, our
educators, and our intelligentsia, I can’t help wondering if the day
may yet come when the only thing that can save this country is a
military coup.

That is via Matt Yglesias, who now is a columnist for Atlantic Monthly.  The title of Sowell’s piece is "Don’t Get Weak: Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene".

History matters, once again:

This paper analyzes the roots and implications of variations in de facto institutions, within a constant de jure institutional setting.  We explore the role of rent-seeking episodes in colonial Brazil as determinants of the quality of current local institutions, and argue that this variation reveals a dimension of institutional quality.  We show that municipalities with origins tracing back to the sugar-cane colonial cycle – characterized by a polarized and oligarchic socioeconomic structure – display today more inequality in the distribution of land.  Municipalities with origins tracing back to the gold colonial cycle – characterized by an overbureaucratic and heavily intervening presence of the Portuguese state – display today worse governance practices and less access to justice.  Using variables created from the rent-seeking colonial episodes as instruments to current institutions, we show that local governance and access to justice are significantly related to long-term development across Brazilian municipalities.

Here is the paper.  Hat tip to Leonardo Monasterio, who now has his own blog.

Singing together, working together against tangible adversaries, melds us into one whole: we become members of the community, embedded in place.  By contrast, thinking–especially thinking of the reflective, ironic, quizzical mode, which is a luxury of affluent societies–threatens to isolate us from our immediate group and home.  As vulnerable beings who yearn at times for total immersion, to sing in unison (eyes closed) with others of our kind, this sense of isolation–of being a unique individual–can be felt as a deep loss.  Thinking, however, yields a twofold gain: although it isolates us from our immediate group it can link us both seriously and playfully to the cosmos–to strangers in other places and times; and it enables us to accept a human condition that we have always been tempted by fear and anxiety to deny, namely, the impermanence of our state wherever we are, our ultimate homelessness.  A cosmopolite is one who considers the gain greater than the loss.  Having seen something of the splendid spaces, he or she (like Mole [in The Wind in the Willows]) will not want to return, permanently, to the ambiguous safeness of the hearth.

That is by Yi-Fu Tuan, discussed by Virginia Postrel.

I’ll let the firearms debate be played out elsewhere.  What other factors might matter?

American youth have different attitudes toward life and death than do
youth in other countries.  The authors cited a World Health Organization
study, which reported that American youth are more likely to believe
it’s appropriate to kill to protect their property than were youth in
Estonia, Finland, Romania, and Russia.  Similarly, the cited study noted
reports that adolescents in the United States are more likely to
approve of war than were youth in any of those countries.

Here is more.  Here is the U.S. trend over time, plus a comparison with Europe.  I see weaker social and family constraints, whatever their other benefits, as having dangerous effects on the psychotic outliers.

The good news?  School-associated homicides are less than one percent of all homicides involving students.  And this:

…trends throughout the 1990s show that the number of school homicides
has been declining.  Yet within this overall trend, homicides involving
more than one victim appear to have been increasing.

One politically incorrect interpretation is simply to note that American youth are becoming more ambitious and more "productive," not just in hi-tech.  Note also:

…the overall risk of violence and injury at school has not changed substantially over the past 20 years…

Here is an article which suggests the U.S. rate of youth violence is not so out of the ordinary, although it does take different and sometimes larger-scale forms.  Here is a more pessimistic (but more statistically selective) picture.  Here are further international comparisons.

“The French government has always been very good at making things where government support is critical,” like trains, nuclear power plants and airplanes, Mr. [Joel] Mokyr says.  “But the French are not terribly good at creating Googles or Microsofts, where private action is central.”

The French engineering company, Alstom, after all, is the world market leader in high-speed trains.  But a well-informed person would be hard-pressed to name a leading French information technology company.  Indeed, many of France’s best computer brains work in Silicon Valley.  These Franco-geeks, who number in the thousands, even have two associations, SiliconFrench and DBF.

“The French business system is constraining for individuals while supportive of scientists and engineers working on large, rigid systems that actually benefit from top-down decisions and slow change,” says Jean-Louis Gassée, a former Apple executive who helped organize DBF and is a partner at Allegis Capital in Palo Alto, Calif.

Here is more.  Looking toward culture, the French are relatively strong in cinema and contemporary classical music, but weak in painting and rock and roll.  Contemporary fiction you could argue either way, though I incline toward the negative.  I am not sure if these patterns fit into the broader thesis above, though perhaps health care would.

A loyal MR reader asks:

Is authoritarianism excusable or permissible – for any length of time – if it is justified by a need for economic growth/reform (e.g. Lee Kwan Yew, Pinochet, Park Chung Hee)?   

"Compared to what" is the first question.  At the margin, individuals favoring democratization did the right thing in opposing those dictators.  More democratic versions of those regimes would have been better.  That said, I don’t think absolute majoritarian democracy in Singapore, from day one, would have been better than the reign of Lee.  It would have led to ethnic voting and the quick end of democracy, in destabilizing fashion.  Yet now Singapore, a successful and well-established country, can and should become more democratic.  When it comes to Pinochet, we should condemn part of the regime and praise some of the parts concerning economic policy.  Viewing Pinochet purely as an individual moral agent, he was quite wrong to act the way he did.  If you ask "would I be willing to endanger the good economic reforms by eschewing torture to enforce the rule of the regime," the answer is yes I would want to immediately end the torture and take that risk.

#43 in a series of 50.

So asks Chris in the comments.  Right now I don’t have favored candidates in any of the parties, either here or abroad.  Furthermore I will deliberately resist developing such favorites, and insofar as I can’t help having them, I won’t tell you who they are.  I don’t mean this in a libertarian "they are all crooks" sort of way, though that may be true.  It still really does matter who governs, and so we should take this process of candidate evaluation seriously.  It is just that I don’t want to be part of it.

As a blogger rather than decision-maker I am allowed my small space for protest.  I wish to protest our excessive tendency to choose sides with one group of people rather than another.  I wish to protest excess partisanship, and in particular excess partisanship motivated by the construction of "imaginary good" and "imaginary bad" political personalities.

As biological creatures we are programmed to respond to faces, voices, names, and identities.  We praise them, follow them, condemn them, figure out what side they are on, just like good ol’ East African Plains Apes.  Who is not excited to see a President of the United States attending a Wizards game in a nearby box?  I know I was, and I didn’t even vote for him.  Chimps will give up bananas, just to be able to gaze at photos of high-status other chimps.

I would like for my posts on MR to be one small space where these necessary but ignoble human tendencies toward personalization are resisted and sometimes even criticized.  I am biased, just as you are.  But for aesthetic reasons I would rather my biases be played out in the realm of ideas, rather than directed at people.  And at the margin, some of you should be just a little more like me.

Here goes:

The Iraqi government should institute a draft of all Iraqi men between the
ages of 18 and 35.  This is the demographic most responsible for the violence. 
The removal of these 3 million men from the cities and countryside to army
barracks would likely bring an immediate end to Iraq’s horrific nightmare.  Any
men older than 35 suspected of involvement in terrorist or insurgent acts would
also be enlisted…The role of the enlarged Iraqi army would not involve bearing arms or
training in the use of arms. Rather the role would be to reconstruct the
country.

Were the United States to pay 3 million Iraqi soldiers $10,000 yearly, the
bill would be $30 billion.  This is a small amount relative to the savings it
would accrue from leaving the country.  It would also make service in the Iraqi
army highly desirable…

It is called a draft, but I think of it as an allowance to go play in the sand, a’la Coase.  Here is more.

House Democratic leaders, in an effort to upstage Republicans on the issue of tax cuts, are preparing legislation that would permanently shield all but the very richest taxpayers from the alternative minimum tax, which is likely to affect tens of millions of families as early as next year if it is left unchanged.

Here is more.  Of course this rather non-egalitarian policy, very costly in terms of revenue, is the Democratic attempt to reward their wealthy urban and suburban supporters.  One response — common in the contemporary blogosphere — is to press the Democrats to become more and more "progressive."  Another response, more popular on MarginalRevolution.com, is to accept modest aspirations for politics and look to entrepreneurship, trade, and productivity growth for progressive gains.

It was ugly what years and years of power did to the Republican Party.  The particular interest groups will differ, but I do not understand why the progressives expect anything better from the Democrats.