Category: Political Science

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.

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.