Category: Political Science

“Flu Vaccines Abundant and Free on Capitol Hill,” is the headline in today’s on-line Washington Post.

While many Americans search in vain for flu shots, members and employees of Congress are able to obtain them quickly and at no charge from the Capitol’s attending physician, who has urged all 535 lawmakers to get the vaccines even if they are young and healthy.

I can (sometimes) see the efficiency rationale for this, but it is funny to see our Representatives try to defend their special treatment:

Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), 62, said in an interview yesterday: “I haven’t done it yet, but I want to. We’re not in the priority category” set by the CDC. “But I think the [Capitol’s] doctor makes a good case. We can pick it up and spread it” through interactions with constituents.

Here is the article.

Alan Krueger writes:

Door-to-door canvassing, though expensive, yields the most votes. As a rule of thumb, one additional vote is cast from each 14 people contacted. That works out to somewhere between $7 and $19 a vote, depending on the pay of canvassers – not much different from the cost of that three-pack of underwear. Canvassers who matched the ethnic profile of their assigned neighborhoods were more successful.

The effect of leaflets on turnout has not been evaluated as thoroughly as canvassing, but results from two partisan campaigns indicate that one vote was generated for every 66 leaflets hung on doors. In another experiment, just one vote was added for every 200 nonpartisan leaflets. Over all, leafletting costs $14 to $42 a vote. (A salutary aspect of the book is that one, two or three stars are placed next to the central findings to signify the degree of confidence the authors have in the results. This is only a one-star result.)

Direct mail is less cost-effective than leaflets. Mailing costs totaled around $60 for each additional vote cast. Telephone calling is also not highly effective, with the cost per vote ranging from $200 for heavily scripted calls to $45 for more personalized calls. Even worse, recorded messages and e-mail had no detectable impact on turnout.

Some candidates mail negative messages to their opponent’s supporters to discourage voting. Mailing a negative message depresses votes, but at a very low rate. The cost per vote diminished was about $300. (This is another one-star finding.)

Here is The New York Times link. The results are drawn from this Brookings book.

Some 600,000 to 1 million Americans live in Canada. Enough to swing an election. John Kerry has sent his sister north.

Thanks to Carolyn Tabarrok for the pointer.

The number of Palestinians who worked daily in Israel before the intifada was more than 150,000; the figure now is fewer than 35,000.

Of the 2.2 million Palestinians on the West Bank, 50 percent now live below the poverty line, compared with 22 percent in 2001; the figure is now 68 percent in teeming Gaza, with its 1.3 million people.

The percentage of Palestinians with savings declined from 70 percent to 13 percent.

Before the second intifada, some $500 million a year was provided in aid; the average annual figure for the last four years is more than $1 billion, about $310 a person, the highest per capita rate in the world.

Some 500,000 of the 3.5 million Palestinians are in dire economic straits, said David Shearer, the head of the United Nations agency’s office here. Some 40 percent now feel insecure about feeding their families; 29 percent feel severely insecure, and half of them are heavily dependent on foreign aid. Some 30 percent are watching their savings dwindle. “They are the new poor, and they are slipping down,” Mr. Shearer said.

Here is the full story.

Yet many Palestinians support the intifada, and obviously some are willing to die for it. I conclude that economists need a better theory of human irrationality. Analogies from expressive voting theory suggest that (many) Palestinians support the intifada because their voices are not decisive. The support is seen as a kind of “cheap talk,” leading to a collective insanity which perhaps no single person intended. But do individual Palestinians who support the intifada really mind that so many other people go along with them? Doubtful, the contrary is sooner true, namely that people prefer that their peers follow their position.

In my (admittedly unorthodox) view the degree of decisiveness is not the key to determining the degree of human rationality. I would sooner believe that the amount of pride at stake is what turns on the irrational part of our brains, whether we are decisive or not. Remember, Stalin was convinced that Hitler was not going to invade anytime soon.

Matt Yglesias asks MR to address whether we would prefer, all other things equal, terrorists organized into a single group, or organized into competing groups. The answer to this question will not be a priori, but here are a few relevant considerations:

1. If terrorists perform their acts for fundraising purposes, or for criminal status, you would probably rather face a monopoly opponent. They are more likely to rest on their laurels.

2. If you think that terrorists are deterrable, at least in principle, you would prefer an easily identifiable monopoly opponent.

3. If you think that terrorists are likely to engage in internecine warfare with each other, you would prefer the more competitive set-up. (I’ll predict that if anyone kills, or has killed, bin Laden, it is one of his own people.) This is especially true when the terrorists are far away from you; they can fight without major spillover effects on your citizenry.

4. Perhaps the production of terrorist attacks involves significant economies of scale. In that case you would prefer the smaller competing groups. Nuclear weapons probably involve such economies, but suicide bombings can be organized on quite a small scale.

My guess: In Iraq you would prefer a smaller number of groups, since there is some chance of striking a deal with them. And there we are more worried about the suicide bombers than a loose nuclear device, so economies of scale do not overturn this conclusion. We are less likely to ever “trade” with al Qaeda and its offshoots, so in that case I would prefer splintering. Furthermore al Qaeda has a greater long-run nuclear potential, so it is more important to deny them potential economies of scale. I suspect we do not much mind if western Pakistan becomes a scene for terrorist infighting, whereas such conflicts could scuttle reconstruction in Iraq.

…conservatism as we have known it is now over. People like me who became conservatives because of the appeal of smaller government and more domestic freedom are now marginalized in a big-government party, bent on using the power of the state to direct people’s lives, give them meaning and protect them from all dangers. Just remember all that Bush promised last night: an astonishingly expensive bid to spend much more money to help people in ways that conservatives once abjured. He pledged to provide record levels of education funding, colleges and healthcare centers in poor towns, more Pell grants, seven million more affordable homes, expensive new HSAs, and a phenomenally expensive bid to reform the social security system. I look forward to someone adding it all up, but it’s easily in the trillions. And Bush’s astonishing achievement is to make the case for all this new spending, at a time of chronic debt (created in large part by his profligate party), while pegging his opponent as the “tax-and-spend” candidate. The chutzpah is amazing. At this point, however, it isn’t just chutzpah. It’s deception. To propose all this knowing full well that we cannot even begin to afford it is irresponsible in the deepest degree. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the only difference between Republicans and Democrats now is that the Bush Republicans believe in Big Insolvent Government and the Kerry Democrats believe in Big Solvent Government. By any measure, that makes Kerry – especially as he has endorsed the critical pay-as-you-go rule on domestic spending – easily the choice for fiscal conservatives. It was also jaw-dropping to hear this president speak about tax reform. Bush? He has done more to lard up the tax code with special breaks and new loopholes than any recent president. On this issue – on which I couldn’t agree more – I have to say I don’t believe him. Tax reform goes against the grain of everything this president has done so far. Why would he change now?

That’s Andrew Sullivan, and I think I am headed out to The Crying Bar.

Of 384 studied members of the European Parliament, only 12 appear to favor free trade for Europe on a consistent basis. The Swedish representatives appear to be the most free market, the French appear to be the most protectionist. There is one Spanish woman who has voted for free trade every time.

Here is the study.

Thanks to Mit dem Kopf voran (an excellent German-language blog) for the pointer.

No, but a Republican Congress might:

My AEI colleague Eric Engen and I [Kevin Hassett] just completed a detailed analysis of the Kerry spending proposals. To perform the analysis, we combed through Kerry’s web site and public statements to assemble a list of every spending promise he has made, and then dug through the public record to find third-party cost estimates for each of his proposals. When necessary, we adjusted the period for the existing score to the 10-year budget window using standard techniques. When we could not find such cost estimates, we relied on numbers that were supplied by the Kerry campaign. When the Kerry campaign did not provide cost estimates, we set the score for that promise to zero.

Even with that generous accounting, the Kerry spending promises add up to an extraordinary amount of money. Our best estimate is that Kerry’s proposals will add up to between $2 trillion and $2.1 trillion over the next ten years. Since the revenue from his tax proposals relative to the current baseline is actually negative, this implies that the Kerry proposal would increase the deficit by perhaps as much as $2.5 trillion over the next ten years.

On August 3, 2004, the Kerry campaign responded to criticisms such as this with a revised budget plan. The main difference between the first and second plans is that the campaign now claims to be able to save about $300 billion from eliminating corporate welfare. Even if we include this rather implausible savings in our estimate, the net increase in the deficit associated with Kerry’s proposals is on the order of $2.2 trillion.

What would he spend the money on? According to our analysis, roughly half of this additional spending is attributable to Senator Kerry’s health care proposals that would add more than $900 billion in federal outlays. Education expenditure accounts for nearly one quarter of Kerry’s new spending, with almost $500 billion added over ten years. A $400 billion expansion of military personnel and benefits for veterans comprises most of the remainder of Kerry’s spending plans, with the balance distributed among numerous social programs and increases in international aid.

I have not been through these numbers, but Kerry has not exactly been running on a platform of spending cuts. Most of all, I’d like to see a further analysis, weighting each number by the probability it will pass into law.

Thanks to TCS for the link.

The Bush team apparently has announced its economic priorities for a second term. The general vision speaks of an “ownership society,” here is one sketchy summary. Partial social security privatization stands at the center of the plan. Brad DeLong wonders where the money will come from. Rather than pursuing this issue, I have wondered what the vision should look like. Here are a few ideas:

1. Eliminate all farm subsidies, tariffs, quotas and price supports.

2. Tell Western Europe it is paying for its own defense from now on.

3. Admit that the Medicare drug prescription bill was a mistake. Repeal it, and consider a revenue-neutral benefit that does not discriminate against prescription drugs. Introduce means-testing for Medicare to stop that program from bankrupting us. I would rather cut this benefit than repeal the tax cuts [tax shifts, correctly, though spending discipline could turn them into real tax cuts.] The long-run benefits of greater capital accumulation remain significant.

4. Negotiate bilateral free trade agreements as rapidly as possible. Start with Japan, the second largest economy in the world.

5. Strengthen America’s commitment to science. This will have implications for educational policy, immigration policy, and regulatory policy. Don’t restrict stem cell research. Hope that science comes up with affordable and politically sustainable solutions for global warming and clean energy independence. You might have libertarian objections to science subsidies, but the realistic alternative today is more government intervention.

6. Strengthen early warning systems against infectious diseases. Increase research into cures, vaccines, immunity, and the like. We don’t want the world to lose fifty million people to avian flu or some other malady.

7. Take in more immigrants, but demand higher levels of skills and education. At the very least, take in any revenue-positive immigrant.

8. Abolish the Department of Education.

9. Abolish the Department of Energy.

10. Repeal all corporate welfare.

11. Repeal the corporate income tax. Repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax. Admittedly these are “ifs,” depending on fiscal considerations.

12. Get on TV and tell the nation that a free economy is a critical source of our strength. Tell them you mean it, and then mean it. Economic growth is the greatest long-run gift we can give to the world.

What I liked about Bush, way back when, was that he seemed willing to talk tough truths and then follow through. Where has that gone?

Daniel Drezner remains on the fence, concerning the next Presidential election.

He writes about supporting Bush, Kerry, or perhaps a third party candidate (unlikely). But why should he restrict himself to “pure strategies”? Why can’t he support some candidate with some positive probability? How about, for instance, “I support Bush with p = 0.63.” Or “I support Kerry with p = 0.57”, and so on. That way we would know how strong (or weak) his current view is.

We could interpret those p’s in several ways. First, it could be Dan’s current estimate of where his final support will end up. Second, it could be a general measure of expected relative enthusiasm for the candidates.

It is not enough to make up your mind, you should also give the world some sense of your confidence in such judgments. And “Bush with p = .50000001” is a very different story than “Bush with p = .997”. (As an aside, note a potential paradox of voting. How many meta-rational voters, aware of their own fallibility, can justifiably believe that their error-prone participation will improve the final outcome?)

Then a question arises. Once you are playing around with these p’s, you don’t need to have a final point of view at hand. You will have some “p” right now.

Dan writes: “This year I can’t muster even the tiniest amount of enthusiasm for any candidate.” Fair enough, but why not give us a number?

What about me?

Alex is precluded by the Constitution, so can I go with “Dan with p = 0.73”? He is photogenic, and could handle both economics and foreign policy.

Addendum: I enjoy asking people the mischievous question “with what probability do you believe in God?” It is amazing on one hand what strong opinions people have on religion, and on the other hand how ill-prepared they are to come up with an actual number.