Category: Political Science

Read this, the headline is "Obama: I’m no V.P.".  That’s not just the biased framing of the journalist, it captures Obama’s words.  My unsolicited advice is this: if you are a political candidate, proclaiming "I am not X" is not much better than admitting "I am X."  Either way it frames the debate.  And avoid phrases like "If I’m not ready [for the Presidency]…"  Why not punch back with: "A President needs to do at least two things.  First, read the will of the voters.  Second, figure out which country in a region is winning the race for influence and which country is coming in second.  This kind of talk is a sign that Hillary Clinton can do neither.  I’m running for President, while she is busy failing arithmetic."

I know I promised, way back when, no candidate blogging, but alas every now and then some things just bug me.

It seems the Barack Obama campaign is distancing itself from Austan Goolsbee, who is indeed a first-rate economist.  Samantha Powers, who wrote a highly intelligent and heart-rending book on genocide, was dismissed last week for speaking her mind about Hillary Clinton.  Of course no one doubts that such actions may be necessary, given that a Presidency can function only with some amount of message discipline.  But think about the economics of message discipline.  How many people are receiving the message?  300 million, plus some number abroad as well.  What kind of messages do these people desire?  What must be done to make these messages understandable and then to show that the promise behind the message has been met?  Which kinds of advisors will flourish best in a "message consistency" environment?  Independent and critical minds, able and willing to speak the truth to power?

Here is my question for the left-wing bloggers: How good would The Wire be, if it had to appeal to 300 million plus viewers?  While it is obvious that politics is a form of mass culture, this point is not made with sufficient frequency for my taste.

Addendum: Arnold Kling comments.  And Matt Yglesias responds.

Guess.  This metric offers a clear first pick.

I want to link to two posts I liked, here, and here.  Here too.  Think of this post as my equivalent of expressive voting.  No, I’m not feeling rage but my calmness in such matters is probably just my personal defect and general lack of manliness when it comes to politics.

Kevin Drum wonders why Clinton and Obama supporters get so worked up at each other.  Any fan of Dr. Seuss will know that policy similarity hardly matters.  The two candidates represent two diametrically opposed portraits of the relationship between aesthetics and politics.  Should we expect beauty, grace and universality, or should we derive our feel-good sentiments about politics from righteousness, confrontation, and sheer dogged persistence and feelings of ultimate desert?  Given his desire for partisan confrontation, Paul Krugman is quite consistent in his skepticism about Barack Obama.  The far more conservative but also far more aestheticized Andrew Sullivan is quite consistent in liking and indeed at times almost loving Obama.  There really is a lot at stake in the Democratic primary; it’s our current sense of the aesthetic, and of desert, that drives what our substantive policy views will be twenty or thirty years from now.  Given the high turnout (never an accident), in an odd way there may be more at stake in the Democratic primary than there would be in a Clinton vs. McCain general election.

As an outsider, the dilemma is whether to side with the values you admire or whether that is a kind of fool’s gold.  If nothing else, we have Hillary Clinton to thank for reminding us (again) this week that politics is ultimately about power.

Reading Matt Yglesias, I couldn’t help but wonder.  Assume the candidate was intelligent and had a responsible temperament.  What would it actually be like?  Presumably such a President would limit or cut off aid to Israel and directly support a Palestinian state.  (We might keep some aid for purposes of leverage.)  In the Arab world we would probably take some different sides, and more specific sides, than we do now.  I fear we would end up embroiled in a Muslim religious civil war in the Middle East.  When needed, we would likely intervene to help out Muslims in the Balkans or in Kuwait.  Might we get more free trade?  After all most Muslims live abroad and would like to sell their goods here.  The President could try to up the immigration quotas from Muslim countries but I doubt if Congress would accede.  Public and Supreme Court support for the separation of church and state would go up, not down.  Haven’t Muslim black nationalists, historically, had a big interest in prison reform?  Would our President give the bomb away to Muslim nations?  Would it be easier to find Koranic recital CDs in Borders?  Would the President pressure the Fed to drive nominal interest rates close to zero, thereby implementing Milton Friedman’s optimum quantity of money?

We discussed this question over a group dinner Tuesday night.  I opined that none have held up particularly well, mostly because they underestimated the robustness of the modern world and regarded depravity as more of a problem than it has turned out to be.

By stipulation, this universe of books does not include Milton Friedman or pure economics.  It does include Russell Kirk, John Flynn, Richard Weaver, Robert Nisbet, and William F. Buckley, among many others.  You can nominate grumpy Brits and Europeans who settled in the United States, so yes Road to Serfdom is a contender, even though its main empirical point (socialism leads to loss of political freedom) would seem to be refuted.  You can try Albert Jay Nock or Eric Voegelin but Rothbard and Rand do not count as conservatives.  Your answer cannot come before the 20th century, so no Federalist Papers and no Tocqueville.

Leave your answer in the comments and also say why.  At some point I’ll offer up my pick as well.

1. “Falling Slowly” from “Once”*
2. “Happy Working Song” from “Enchanted”
3. “Raise It Up” from “August Rush”
4. “So Close” from “Enchanted”
5. “That’s How You Know” from “Enchanted”

Discuss.

Here is the story, by Noam Scheiber of TNR, hat tip to Greg Mankiw.  Excerpt:

Like Bill Clinton in 1992, Obama’s campaign boasts a cadre of credentialed achievers. Intellectually, however, the Obamanauts couldn’t be more different. Clinton delighted in surrounding himself with big-think public intellectuals–like economics commentator Robert Reich and political philosopher Bill Galston. You’d be hard-pressed to find a political philosopher in Obama’s inner wonk-dom. His is dominated by a group of first-rate economists, beginning with Goolsbee, one of the profession’s most respected tax experts. A Harvard economist named Jeff Liebman has been influential in helping Obama think through budget and retirement issues; another, David Cutler, helped shape his views on health care. Goolsbee, in particular, is an almost unprecedented figure in Democratic politics: an academic economist with a top campaign position and the candidate’s ear.

This topic does not die easily:

Dr Wilson and Dr Storm restricted their study to white, Protestant
teenagers, in order to eliminate confounding variables. However, their
volunteers came from two different traditions–Pentecostal, which tends
to the conservative, and Episcopalian, which tends to the liberal.

The researchers conducted the study by giving each volunteer a
beeper that went off every two hours or so. When it beeped, the
volunteer answered a questionnaire about what he was doing at that
moment, and how he felt about it.

Dr Wilson and Dr Storm found several unexpected differences between the
groups. Liberal teenagers always felt more stress than conservatives,
but were particularly stressed if they could not decide for themselves
whom they spent time with. Such choice, or the lack of it, did not
change conservative stress levels. Liberals were also loners, spending
a quarter of their time on their own. Conservatives were alone for a
sixth of the time. That may have been related to the fact that liberals
were equally bored by their own company and that of others.
Conservatives were far less bored when with other people. They also
preferred the company of relatives to non-relatives. Liberals were
indifferent. Perhaps most intriguingly, the more religious a liberal
teenager claimed to be, the more he was willing to confront his parents
with dissenting beliefs. The opposite was true for conservatives.

Here is Storm’s doctoral thesis, a source for some of the material.  This Wilson blog post is a useful summary; nonetheless it emphasizes the weaker part of the results, namely the claim that conservatives are more conformist.

Surely someday we will make progress on this question; it is unlikely that any two non-random groups will have exactly the same personality traits.  But what is the correct comparison?  By looking only at religious Protestants, we are holding some factors constant, but perhaps choosing atypical members of each political ideology.  For instance maybe all we are doing is comparing Pentecostals to Episcopalians.

That’s the title they gave my latest NYT column.  Excerpt:

To put it simply, the public this year will probably not vote itself
into a much better or even much different economic policy. To be sure,
the next president – whoever he or she may be – may well extend health
care coverage to more Americans. But most of the country’s economic
problems won’t be solved at the voting booth. It is already too late to
stop an economic downturn. Health care costs will keep rising, no
matter who becomes president or which party controls Congress. China is
now a bigger carbon polluter than the United States, so don’t expect a
tax or cap-and-trade rules to solve global warming,
even if American measures are very stringent – and they probably won’t
be, because higher home heating bills are not a vote winner. A
Democratic president may propose more spending on social services, but
most of the federal budget
is on automatic pilot. Furthermore, even if a Republican president
wanted to cut back on such mandates, the bulk of them are here to stay.

Yes, the election does matter. Even small differences on
economic issues affect millions of Americans. But the record of the
Bush administration should prove sobering to all those who expect the
American political economy to turn around in the next four years.

Many
conservative and libertarian economists supported President Bush,
thinking they would be getting policy drawn from the work of Milton Friedman
and Martin Feldstein, two respected market-oriented economists.
Instead, in economics, the Bush years have brought an increase in
domestic government spending, and some poorly-thought-out privatization
plans. For all the talk of an extreme right-wing revolution, government
transfer programs like Social Security and Medicare have continued to grow. And despite big mistakes involving the Iraq war, Mr. Bush wasn’t punished by voters in 2004.

There is much more, and it is a more political column than I usually write.  My final conclusions:

And if you’re still worrying about how to vote, I have two pieces of
advice. First, spend your time studying foreign policy, where the
president has more direct power, and the choice of a candidate makes a
much bigger difference. Second, stop worrying and get back to work.

And there are points I could not cover for reasons of space, such as the constraining need to provide an AMT fix, or the ability of a party to sound more intelligent when it is out of power.

Addendum: Here is coverage from Mark Thoma and commentators; do they support or contradict Mark’s last sentence?  And here is commentary from John V.

Edge: John McCain, as scored by Ben Muse.  Ben has now moved all of his trade posts to a new blog, The Custom-House, recommended.  And here’s Virginia Postrel, with some negative comments on McCain.

You should be.  Right here.  C’mon people, turn your TVs off and go crash the InTrade servers, making sure you pay homage to Hayek and Robin Hanson along the way.

Mark Thoma writes: "I’m getting pretty tired of Democrats caving in on important issues rather than standing up and fighting for their core principles…"  The lesson is that politicians’ core principle is reelection and pandering, not promoting the ideas of Mark Thoma or Paul Krugman or for that matter Milton Friedman or Tyler Cowen. 

I find the (former) support for John Edwards to be one of the most striking features of the primary season.  Although Edwards ran an explicitly progressive campaign, a great deal of his (meager) support came from Democrats in lower socioeconomic strata.  They were voting their demographic, or perhaps their feelings of victimization, rather than their ideology.  (Here is Chris Hayes on John Edwards, worth reading.)  There is no large-scale progressive movement coalescing around stagnant median wages and the inequities of skill-based technical change.  Instead we have Hillary Clinton insulting Barack Obama, and maybe it is working. 

The lesson is this: democracy is a very blunt instrument.  Especially as it is found in the United States, democracy just isn’t that smart or that finely honed or that closely geared toward truth or "progressive" values.  (NB: Democracy in smaller, better educated, ethnically homogeneous nations is, sometimes, another story.)

But unlike one of my esteemed colleagues, I believe that we should revere democracy as one of the modern world’s greatest achievements.  We should step off a British Airways flight with a tear in our eye, in appreciation for all that country has done to promote democratic government (sorry, former colonies, but perhaps you are democratic today).  This is no exaggeration or blog tease: I want to see you crying at Heathrow.  The future is far more likely to have "too little democracy" than "too much democracy."  I do believe in checks and balances, but within a broadly democratic framework, such as we have in the United States.

That all said, we should not demand from democracy what democracy cannot provide.  Democracy is pretty good at pushing scoundrels out of office, or checking them once they are in office.  Democracy is also good at making sure enough interest groups are bought off so that social order may continue and that a broad if sometimes inane social consensus can be manufactured and maintained.  We should expect all those things of democracy and indeed democracy can, for the most part, deliver them.

But democracy is very bad at fine-tuning the details of economic policy.  Democracy is very bad at bringing about political solutions which are not congruent with the other sources of economic and social influence in a country.  The solution is not to be less democratic, but rather to appreciate democracy for what it is good for.  And the excesses of democracy should be fought with ideas, albeit with the realization that not everyone will be convinced.  Those are the breaks, as democracy needs all the friends it can get.

Just as I love democracy, so do I love Chiles in Nogada.  But I do not ask that Chiles in Nogada can solve most of the world’s problems or for that matter get me to work in the morning.  Social democrats and progressives often view democracy as a potential instrument of control, and as a way of giving us "the best policies."  I do not, and that includes for my own economic views as well.

Here is Matt Yglesias on libertarianism and democracy.  Here is a Hilton Root review of the new Michael Mandelbaum book praising democracy.

Matt Yglesias writes:

…these would be my sober-minded, non-psychic points about John McCain and the economy:

• He’s not good at projecting empathy.
• His major political theme about the need to "serve a cause greater than self-interest" is not well-suited to projecting empathy.
• McCain’s background is in the military, his first political work was military-related, and his strong political issues involve national security.
• McCain says he doesn’t understand economics.
• McCain really doesn’t appear to understand economics:
  • He thinks interest rates should be zero (but why?)
  • He thinks spending cuts will stimulate the economy.
• He has a tendency to flip-flop not on specific economic policies, but on broad economic themes like whether or not inequality is a problem.
• His constituents in the elite press are weirdly obsessed with the idea that public policy should force average people to endure economic pain.

All of this leads me to conclude that John McCain would not govern very well on economic policy issues…

On policy, I am heartened if he realizes he does not understand economics.  Are the other Republican candidates equally self-aware? 

I don’t put much weight on what the Republican candidates say about economics one way or the other.  In the current situation a Republican should favor whichever candidate would be most popular in office.  That candidate would have the best chance to check a Democratic Congress or perhaps put forward some alternative agenda.  Furthermore national interest-minded Presidents tend to favor better economic policies than does Congress, especially if that President is of your party persuasion.  A Democrat should favor, on economic issues at least, whichever Republican is most vain and most likely to seek fame in office.  That means lots of legislation passed and working with a Democratic Congress on issues such as health care. 

Two points: a) I don’t have strong views on which particular candidates fit these descriptions, and b) foreign policy is in any case more important for evaluating a candidate overall. 

Here Matt discusses McCain’s economic advisors.  Here is Dave Leonhardt on McCain and the economy.  I assume, by the way, that McCain’s invocation of Kemp and Gramm is an attempt to build a right-wing coalition, not an actual statement of his preferences.