Category: Political Science

Here is my response to Brian Doherty’s CatoUnbound essay, and here is opening bit:

Brian Doherty asks: "Did this libertarian movement . . . actually accomplish anything of unquestionable significance?"

Yes: Bigger government.

Or try this:

The old formulas were “big government was bad” and “liberty is
good,” but these are not exactly equal in their implications.  The
second motto – “liberty is good” – is the more important.  And the older
story of “big government crushes liberty” is being superseded by
“advances in liberty bring bigger government.”

Libertarians
aren’t used to reacting to that second story, because it goes against
the “liberty vs. power” paradigm burned into our brains.  That’s why
libertarianism is in an intellectual crisis today.

A loyal MR reader asks:

[Please discuss] Latin American politics. Why do our politicians ****?

A few points:

1. I’m not convinced they are worse than average, once you adjust for per capita income.  If East Asia looks better, perhaps the quality of the bureaucracy is more important than the relative quality of the elites.

2. Combining parliamentary, proportional, and presidential systems, as much of Latin America has done, is a recipe for disaster.  Read Ljiphart and others on this topic.  It is too easy to block reforms, there is too little accountability, and there is no coherent ruling coalition.  If you are going to have a strong presidential role, try to restrict the number of major parties to two.  Or if you want many parties, make the president directly accountable to a coalition. 

3. The charismatic traditions in these cultures do not make for responsible politicians.  Visit Eva Peron’s grave in Buenos Aires if you need to be convinced.

4. It is difficult to rule a country with significant ethnic divisions.  This covers many Latin countries, though not Argentina or Chile or Uruguay.

5. Latin tax systems are underdeveloped, so distortionary policies are needed to collect sufficient revenue.  Citizens then become cynical about government, and consider it illegitimate.  Tax evasion is rampant.  The spiral worsens and again no one can govern well.

The bottom line: If they put me in charge of a Latin country, I don’t think I could deliver superior growth performance.  At best I would avoid some of the really stupid mistakes, but I couldn’t turn the country around.

This post is #02 in a series of 50 (?).

Addendum: Bryan Caplan adds comment, but I think he is just proving my point.

Here are a few views:

1. Economizing hand motions is the key, so just leave it "as is" when done.  It might be needed in that same position again.

2. Such matters should be arranged to please your wife.  It is signaling and a symbolic recognition of her value.  The only question is what you get in return, but if you get anything at all it is worth it.

3. Avoiding midnight surprises is the key, which means always leave it down.

4. Many women don’t like the idea that guests could show up and see the insides of their toilet bowls. 

#2-4 all point in the same direction, and I don’t give a damn about #1.  But somehow I, like many other men, fail to optimize on this question.  The more interesting question is why this remains a issue.  Here goes:

1. Women keep it an issue, rather than delivering decisive argumentation, to test their men and their sense of commitment.

2. Men cannot help but rebel against the female ethic of caring, especially when it concerns something so infantile as a toilet seat.

3. Existential freedom.  I once had a European roommate, and it drove me crazy that he closed all the doors around the apartment. Perhaps an occasional open seat is a quixotic demand that our universe show true randomness and openness.

4. Men prefer to focus more intensely on a smaller number of issues and this isn’t one of them.  But obviously that explanation can no longer apply to me.

Addendum: Mikhail directs my attention to this paper.

Matt Yglesias writes:

As a general matter, I tend to think parliamentary systems as seen in Britain or Canada are superior to our method of government.  A system like that puts less formal restraint on the head of government in terms of his ability to act, but also makes it much easier to dump a head of government whose policies have failed and whose leadership is widely considered inept.

Totally maybe.  Parliamentary systems do work better for small countries with well-educated populations.  Accountability is higher, and voters enforce some discipline upon government.  The openness of the economy imposes other constraints.  See this paper.

But when the country is large and diverse, I see more reason to favor the American Constitution or in general a more pluralistic system.  Why trust voters as the major source of constraint, and what do "the voters" want in any case?  Furthermore the American system offers a decent chance of divided government and thus greater limits on the executive.  Parliamentary systems often allow the Prime Minister and cabinet to manipulate the legislature by offering intra-party perks and promotions.  There is plenty of gerrymandering, and bringing down a government is an extreme option which is not very easy to exercise in political equilibrium.  If nothing else the rebelling party faces the danger of many of its members — including the rebels — being kicked out in a new election.  Elections can be called at strategic times, and so on.  The Prime Minister is hardly a captive of the voters or the legislature.

Federalism is another issue.  If so much of policy is decided in decentralized fashion, as it must be in a large nation, maybe the federal/national part of those policies should be decided on grounds in rough concordance with a federalistic system.  That will mean a division of powers.  I also worry that as the nation becomes big enough, and states matter more, that there is not enough party unity to sustain a Parliamentary system.

When the executive and legislature are unified, as under a Parliamentary system, the Supreme Court, or its equivalent, will be weaker.  No one will trust a hand-picked court, with no major obstacles to confirmation, with so much power.  Yet weakening judicial review in America would worry me; it also also one step toward eliminating a written constitution altogether.

A final question is whether the USA — the country most likely to use nuclear weapons — needs a President with a certain amount of autonomy and secrecy for a fixed time period.  In general I favor a constrained executive, but that one is harder to call.  Can you imagine a Parliament debating nuclear strategy?

Jane Galt writes:

The post below also applies to behavioural economics, which the left
seems to believe is a magical proof of the benevolence of government
intervention, because after all, people are stupid, so they need the
government to protect them from themselves.  My take is a little subtler
than that:

1)  People are often stupid
2)  Bureaucrats are the same stupid people, with bad incentives.

There are few subfields in economics that have not been fleshed out with every possible combination of mechanisms, but this is one of them.  Yes, it is hard to come up with generalizable results about the psychological and behavioral biases of bureaucrats, but that hasn’t stopped many other areas in economics (like, um…behavioral economics) from taking off.  In fifteen years someone will write a JEL survey on Behavioral Public Choice, and you will regret not having written at least one of the early papers in the field.

I might add that Behavioral Public Choice gives us a better sense of when government programs actually work.  When morale is high, many people in government will "feel they matter," even if they do not, and do a very good job.  So Behavioral Public Choice is not just government-bashing, although there is a place for that too.  Behavioral factors also help account for why corruption becomes the norm in some settings but not others; psychological propensities are one way to narrow the set of possible equilibria.

Here is my short essay on Hayek, which I wrote about twenty years ago.  I am still largely in agreement with it, although I cannot decide whether I am answering the title question of this post with a "yes" or a "no"…

Was it Megan Non-McArdle who said that women are judged by their looks from day one to the grave?  Royal would make a good character on Lost, so I see a few possible political effects:

1. French men will swoon, roll over, and play dead while she passes further protectionist measures.

2. Other women will never trust her.

3. Men, at the meta-level, know that beautiful women trick them all the time, so they will never trust their trust in her.

4. She needs to prove she is tough, and that implies hawkish, nationalistic behavior.  She will be especially constrained.

5. She provides a national and global public good, but the Modigliani-Miller theorem holds and each part of her persona is evaluated separately, and accurately.

6. She will be an especially effective diplomat on the world stage.

7. No one cares, or is influenced by looks.

8. If the median voter model were true, the President would be so beautiful every election.  Some other model must hold.

We haven’t had many beautiful top female leaders, so most of the data is for attractive male leaders; I doubt if the two cases are symmetric.  Overall I opt for #8, with a dose of #4 and a bit of #3 and #2.

Wikipedia notes: "For the recent campaign for the Presidential nomination she changed
from wearing dull clothing to stylish suits and reportedly had work
done on her teeth."

I am always disappointed by public meetings.  We hold public meetings for people to give us comment, and we never get the kind of comment I hope for.  I keep hoping some guy will stop in and say “Why, that problem looks like one we solved for a tricky transportation issue!  You might not think so, but I think the underlying structure is the same.  Have you thought about this algorithm, which worked for us?” And then I would say, “That just might work!  Maybe you could show me how you derived it over dinner tonight.”  And he would say “Only if I can take you out for dessert after, so we can talk about other potential applications.  But it will have to be in Midtown, because I rode my bike here.”  And then I would start blushing and fanning myself, because I would be thinking impure thoughts.

That is from Megan Non-McArdle.  Her politics are not mine, but if you scroll down her blog for the last few days, you’ll find some of the best posts on regulation in all of Blog Land; here is her post on how regulation can go wrong. 

From my angle:

1. Government regulations have a very large aggregate net benefit relative to their costs; rules for clean gas, taken alone, might be more valuable than all the other regulatory costs we bear.  If you don’t believe me, try visiting Mexico City in November.  I’ve also been to Delhi.

2. Many government regulations are simply unnecessary.

3. No one has come up with a good algorithm for weeding out the bad regulations from the good ones.  Nonetheless cost-benefit analysis, for all its philosophic flaws, can serve this function.  You don’t have to take CBA very seriously for this to be true.  It will reject towing in icebergs from the Arctic to supply water in New Zealand, and for the right reasons.  A deeper question is whether throwing darts at the Federal Register, as a means of eliminating new excess regulation, will bring a positive expected return.

4. In many areas the difference between "government regulation" and "government protecting property rights" is not well-defined.  Reread #3.

5. The costs of regulation sometimes involve intransitivities.  Many small regulations, examined individually, might be said to bring zero net harm, but taken collectively they tax innovation.  It is simply very hard to run a business and deal with extensive regulation; attention and effort are scarce.  More people on the left should take seriously the political conversion of George McGovern to a pro-business stance, after he tried running a business himself. 

6. In Megan’s area — water policy — property rights are especially likely to be poorly defined and the scope for regulation (or is that "enforcement of property rights"?) is especially likely to be strong.

Our colleague, Walter Williams, is truly famous.

I believe we are programmed to favor political stories with relatively clear moral lessons, and stories which suggest we can improve the world as we might like to.  As a result, you won’t hear the following claims too many times:

1. We already have wrecked our environment with global warming; the truth is, it is simply too late to do anything about it.

2. The U.S. economy is being riveted by forces which will increase inequality dramatically.  These forces are so strong we had better surrender to them and learn how to live with that inequality.  This may involve less political power for the downtrodden.

3. A polity wracked with inequality can’t last very long as a free society.  Philosophic worries about inequality are mostly bunk, but we need to move toward greater equality to appease the masses and even to appease some of the elites.

Please note (all you blogs which quote selectively and out of context), none of those are my views.  But they are not less plausible than many of the other opinions thrown around in these debates.  Yet they remain, for obvious reasons I think, quite unpopular.

Can you think of other (plausible) stories which you don’t hear too often?

Queried here, I will simplify and make it books, period, but restrict it to fiction, not counting philosophy.  My list of five:

1. Shakespeare’s Henriad, a no-brainer at #1, if you count it as more than one book it still should take up as many slots as it needs.  Psychology is primary and stands above politics, and libertinism is by no means unrelated to power.

2. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, vanity, pride, and self-deception are the keys to understanding political behavior, plus Swift shows an understanding of "the rules of the game."

3. Montesquieu, Persian Letters, yikes, have you ever seen that Monty Python skit "Summarize Proust"?

4. Sophocles, Antigone, the claims of the family vs. the claims of the state continue to plague Iraq and many other places.

5. Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad, the former is not just a good tale but also a profound comparative study of regimes, the latter is the brutal truths of war.

Interestingly none of these are proper novels.  I read Kafka’s The Trial as more about theology than worldly affairs.  As for politics as a profession, the source from The Economist recommends "Primary Colors", C.P. Snow’s "The Corridors of Power", and "All the King’s Men".

It is less fruitful and less fun to guess at the best novels about business and economics, perhaps because the relevant truths seem banal in a fictional context.

The Illinois lottery may be up for sale.  The current status is discussed in yesterday’s NYT.  The state hopes to get $10 billion.  The lottery had $630 million in profits last year on sales of $2 billion.  The buyer would get all profit for 75 years.

Here is the source.  Larry Ribstein remarks: "Yet more evidence that a hedge fund is no match for a politician when it comes to short-term thinking."

Young, good-looking, and available for around 150 euros
(£100), more than 300 would-be protesters are marketing themselves on a
German rental website.

They feature next to cars, DVDs, office furniture and holiday homes.

Here is the story, and thanks to both Divya, Michael Flynn, and Tim Fowler for the pointers.  Here is what they do in India.

Mr. Mancuso also put Mr. Uribe [the president of Colombia] in the spotlight by saying that militias
pressured people to vote for the president in 2002, when Mr. Uribe was
first elected…a document rumored to exist in recent weeks was published in the daily
newspaper El Tiempo on Friday.  It describes a secret pact in 2001
between Mr. Mancuso, other paramilitary leaders and 11 congressmen, two
governors and five mayors, in which those present agreed to work
together to forge “a new social contract,” largely in order to protect
private property rights.

Here is the full story, which further explains why this nation does not have peace.  The paramilitaries are interest groups and traders, not just guys with guns.  I believe we are seeing just the beginning of these revelations…

Buckley was the first person I ever read on politics.  Now he is writing:

A geographical division of Iraq is inevitable.  The major players are obvious.  It isn’t plain how America, as an outside party, could play an effective role, let alone one that was decisive, in that national redefinition.

I take it he means other than for the Kurds, whom we can continue to protect.  Jane Galt offers her mea culpa on Iraq, and questions who was really the smarty-pants.  I wrote in her comments:

While I too was "tricked" about WMDs, that was not my key mistake.  My key mistake was to think that if we could lead a regime change in a country as messed-up as Haiti without touching off a civil war, that we could do the same in Iraq.  These power transitions seemed to have worked OK numerous times in the past (though Haiti hasn’t gotten better it would have gotten worse), but of course it didn’t go very well this time.

Dan Drezner surveys his own mistakes.  Matt Yglesias gives perhaps the best ongoing coverage of the U.S. political situation.

Regardless of what Victor Davis Hanson tells us we should do, it seems obvious what we will do, namely a near-complete pull-out with a buffer reserved for the Kurds and some bases and perhaps the selective use of air power.  The next question is this: if the new Iraq really is a breeding ground for terrorists who will strike abroad, as many anti-war critics have suggested, under what conditions would we later re-up our military involvement, and for how long?  I don’t have a good answer, and perhaps I "don’t deserve to be listened to" on this, but I would like to hear what the superior predictors have to say.