Category: Political Science
Arnold Kling’s proposal for regulatory reform
To improve our agencies’ performance, we need to think about restructuring the federal bureaucracy itself.
I propose we do so by creating two positions within the executive branch that operate in tension with each other. The first would be the chief operating officer, charged with managing the administrative agencies. The second would be the chief auditor, charged with leading a watchdog agency that monitors the administrative state for effectiveness and abuses of authority. Both the president and Congress would oversee the balance of power between the two positions.
Much like that of a private firm, the chief operating officer (COO) of the regulatory state would direct the operations of the entire executive branch, including independent agencies like the FDA, the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Reserve Board, and the Patent and Trademark Office. The COO’s charge would be to maximize operational effectiveness. He would have the authority to make decisions without the approval of the president.
Unlike presidents, who tend to enter the Oval Office without having supervised anything larger than a Senate staff, the COO should come into office with strong organizational-management experience — ideally based on having led a large, private-sector firm. This person should be familiar with the challenges of improving incentive systems, streamlining organizational processes, planning, budgeting, facilitating coordination among disparate units, articulating objectives, and aligning organizational efforts toward those objectives. He should have the authority to put this experience to work within the regulatory state.
To unravel the tangle of agencies that are the legacy of so many congressional bills, the COO should be empowered to re-organize, restructure, merge, or eliminate any existing agencies, refine their missions, and appoint their directors.
And:
With a COO in charge of managing government agencies, the roles of Congress and the president would adjust accordingly. Congress would act more like a board of directors with respect to the agencies, and the president would act more like a board chairman. The COO would assume the responsibility of presenting a plan and budget to Congress for approval, while the president would have the authority to hire and fire the COO at will. In a spirit of conservative incrementalism, we could first apply the COO model to one functional domain, such as domestic infrastructure, before extending it to the others.
The second new position — the chief auditor (CA) — would lead a powerful audit agency that provides independent evaluations of agency performance.
Solve for the Eastern equilibrium
Russia’s sabre-rattling in Ukraine has reignited the debate in Finland as to whether the Nordic country should join Nato, defying demands from Moscow that seek to limit expansion of the military alliance in Europe.
Both president Sauli Niinisto and prime minister Sanna Marin used their new year addresses to underscore that Finland retained the option of seeking Nato membership at any time.
“Let it be stated once again: Finland’s room to manoeuvre and freedom of choice also include the possibility of military alignment and of applying for Nato membership, should we ourselves so decide,” Niinisto said.
Here is more from Richard Milne at the FT.
Dan Wang’s 2021 letter
Here it is, one of the better written pieces of this (or last) year. It is mostly about China, manufacturing, and economic policy, but here is the part I will quote:
But Hong Kong was also the most bureaucratic city I’ve ever lived in. Its business landscape has remained static for decades: the preserve of property developers that has created no noteworthy companies in the last three decades. That is a heritage of British colonial rule, in which administrators controlled economic elites by allocating land—the city’s most scarce resource—to the more docile. Hong Kong bureaucrats enforce the pettiest rules, I felt, out of a sense of pride. On the mainland, enforcers deal often enough with senseless rules that they are sometimes able to look the other way. Thus a stagnant spirit hangs over the city. I’ve written before that Philip K. Dick is useful not for thinking about Hong Kong’s skyline, but its tycoon-dominated polity: “governed by a competent but fundamentally pessimistic elite, which administers a population bent on consumption. Instead of being hooked on drugs and television like in PKD’s novels, people in Hong Kong are addicted to the extraordinary flow of liquidity from the mainland, which raises their asset values and dulls their senses.”
And then on Mozart:
Among these three works, Figaro is the most perfect and Don Giovanni the greatest. But I believe that Cosi is the best. Cosi is Mozart’s most strange and subtle opera, as well as his most dreamlike. If the Magic Flute might be considered a loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s Tempest—given their themes of darkness, enchantment, and salvation—then Cosi ought to be Mozart’s take on A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Donald Tovey called Cosi “a miracle of irresponsible beauty.” It needs to be qualified with “irresponsible” because its plot is, by consensus, idiotic. The premise is that two men try—on a dare—to seduce the other’s lover. A few fake poisonings and Albanian disguises later, each succeeds, to mutual distress. Every critic that professes to love the music of Cosi also discusses the story in anguished terms. Bernard Williams, for example, noted how puzzling it has been that Mozart chose to vest such great emotional power with his music into such a weak narrative structure. Joseph Kerman is more scathing, calling it “outrageous, immoral, and unworthy of Mozart.”
I readily concede that the music of Cosi so far exceeds its dramatic register.
Recommended! There is much more at the link, substantive throughout. Though I should note I am less bullish on both manufacturing and China than Dan is. I fully agree about Bleak House, however, and at times I think it is the greatest novel written…
Don’t F*ck with Big Sugar
In Modern Principles, Tyler and I analyze the economics and politics of the sugar quota which raises the US price of sugar to about twice the world level. Doug Irwin points us to a revealing passage in John Boehner’s memoir, On the House:
Sugar was never really my fight, but I always thought it was a little silly that the sugar industry has all this power in Washington. But I liked to spend my time on issues I might actually be able to change, and I knew the chances of winning a fight with Big Sugar was basically zero.
At one point in the mid-1990s, I got fed up and decided to yank their chains anyway. I was on the Agricultural Committee and were getting ready to put together the 1996 farm bill. I walked into my office while this was going on and found a sugar lobbyist hanging around, trying to stay close to the action. I felt like being a smart-ass so I made some wise-crack about the sugar industry raping the taxpayers. Without another word, I walked into my private office and shut the door. I had no real plan to go after the sugar people. I was just screwing with the guy.
My phone did not stop ringing for the next five weeks….I had no idea how many people in my district were connected to the sugar industry. People were calling all day, telling me they made pumps or plugs or boxes or some other such part used in sugar production and I was threatening their job. Mayors called to tell me about employers their towns depended on who would be hurt by a sugar downturn. It was the most organize effort I had ever seen.
And that’s why don’t fuck with sugar.
The real conspiracy theory
Read it here. No, this was not a conspiracy in the strictest, most intentional sense (it didn’t need to be!), but it did kill thousands of people and manipulate our politics…
C’mon, people, let’s not be afraid to admit this one.
Mary C. Daly understands the median voter theorem
Ms. Daly…has shifted her tone particularly dramatically in recent weeks…
As recently as mid-November, she had argued that the Fed should be patient in removing its support, avoiding an overreaction to inflation that might prove temporary and risk unnecessarily slowing the recovery of the labor market. But incoming data have confirmed that employers are still struggling to hire even as consumer prices are rising at the fastest clip in nearly 40 years. Rising rents and tangled supply chains could continue to push up inflation. And she’s running into more people like that woman in Walgreens.
“My community members are telling me they’re worried about inflation,” Ms. Daly said last week.
Here is the NYT story, and note she is not the most right-leaning member of the FOMC. This, in a nutshell, is why I think inflation will converge to a reasonable level, albeit with a possibly high degree of pain along the way.
Freddie on worry porn
Bogost’s piece is an absolute classic, maybe the classic, in a particularly strange form of worry porn that progressives have become addicted to in the past half-decade. It’s this thing where they insist that they don’t want something to happen, but they describe it so lustily, imagine it so vividly, fixate on it so relentlessly, that it’s abundantly clear that a deep part of them wants it to happen. This was a constant experience in the Trump era – liberals would imagine that Trump was about to dissolve Congress and declare himself emperor, they’d ostensibly be opposed to such a thing, but they were so immensely invested in the seriousness and accuracy of such predictions that they’d clearly prefer for it to happen. I wrote about Chris Hayes and his bitter yearning for Trump last week, and he’s a good example, someone who ruminates on Trump and the dystopian future he might bring about with such palpable emotional pathology that it’s clear that, on some level, he needs it to happen, so that he can say “I was right.” And so with Bogost here; that level of anxious catastrophizing always carries with it the quiet, throbbing need for the bad dream to come true. Covid is already bad, very bad. I am always so confused that so many people seem desperately to want it to be worse.
Here is the full essay.
What should I ask Sebastian Mallaby?
Sebastian Christopher Peter Mallaby (born May 1964) is an English journalist and author, Paul A. Volcker senior fellow for international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), and contributing columnist at The Washington Post. Formerly, he was a contributing editor for the Financial Times and a columnist and editorial board member at The Washington Post.
His recent writing has been published in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Atlantic Monthly. In 2012, he published a Foreign Affairs essay on the future of China’s currency. His books include The Man Who Knew (2016), More Money Than God (2010), and The World’s Banker (2004).
I am also a big fan of his new and forthcoming book on venture capital, namely The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of a New Future.
So what should I ask him?
Which search engine does the most to limit conspiracy theorizing?
Web search engines are important online information intermediaries that are frequently used and highly trusted by the public despite multiple evidence of their outputs being subjected to inaccuracies and biases. One form of such inaccuracy, which so far received little scholarly attention, is the presence of conspiratorial information, namely pages promoting conspiracy theories. We address this gap by conducting a comparative algorithm audit to examine the distribution of conspiratorial information in search results across five search engines: Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo and Yandex. Using a virtual agent-based infrastructure, we systematically collect search outputs for six conspiracy theory-related queries (“flat earth”, “new world order”, “qanon”, “9/11”, “illuminati”, “george soros”) across three locations (two in the US and one in the UK) and two observation periods (March and May 2021). We find that all search engines except Google consistently displayed conspiracy-promoting results and returned links to conspiracy-dedicated websites in their top results, although the share of such content varied across queries. Most conspiracy-promoting results came from social media and conspiracy-dedicated websites while conspiracy-debunking information was shared by scientific websites and, to a lesser extent, legacy media. The fact that these observations are consistent across different locations and time periods highlight the possibility of some search engines systematically prioritizing conspiracy-promoting content and, thus, amplifying their distribution in the online environments.
Here is the full paper by Aleksandra Urmana, Mykola Makhortykhb, Roberto Ulloac, and Juhi Kulshrestha. Of course it is also worth investigating which search engine does the most to “censor” true conspiracy theories. Are there any?
Via Aleksandra Urman.
Many heads are more utilitarian than one
Highlights
Collective consensual judgments made via group interactions were more utilitarian than individual judgments.
Group discussion did not change the individual judgments indicating a normative conformity effect.
Individuals consented to a group judgment that they did not necessarily buy into personally.
Collectives were less stressed than individuals after responding to moral dilemmas.
Interactions reduced aversive emotions (e.g., stressed)associated with violation of moral norms.
Here is the full article by Anita Keshmirian, Ophelia Deroy, and Bahador Bahrami. Via Michelle Dawson.
Is Atlas Shrugged overstated or understated?
Pelosi, asked today if lawmakers and their spouses should be barred from trading stocks, gave a firm “no”: “This is a free market, we are a free market economy; they should be able to participate in that.”
Here is the link, via a loyal MR reader.
Israel fact of the day
The prevalence of consanguineous marriage among the Arab population in Israel increased significantly from 36.3% to 41.6% in the decade from 2007 to 2017. First-cousin and closer marriages constituted about 50% of total consanguineous marriages in the two periods surveyed. Consanguinity was found to be significantly related to religion and place of residence. Thus, the prevalence of consanguineous marriage remains high among the Arab population in Israel, similar to other Arab societies.
Here is the research paper, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Do we live in a “post-outrage” world?
From David Siders at Politico:
“I wish we lived in a world where outrage mattered. But I think we live in a post-outrage world, and voters today are affected only by that which directly affects them, which is why the economy, affordability and cost of living is such a major issue for so many people. While a lot of people will express sympathy for that 12-year-old girl in Texas who got raped but no longer can terminate her pregnancy, it’s not what motivates them to go to the polls, sadly.”
And some details:
Interviews with more than a dozen Democratic strategists, pollsters and officials reveal skepticism that the court’s decision will dramatically alter the midterm landscape unless — and perhaps not even then — Roe is completely overturned. Privately, several Democratic strategists have suggested the usefulness of any decision on abortion next year will be limited, and some may advise their clients not to focus on abortion rights at all.
Some of that thinking is colored by Virginia’s gubernatorial race earlier this year. After the Supreme Court allowed a law banning abortion after six weeks of pregnancy to take effect in Texas, the party was so sure abortion would resonate with voters that Democrat Terry McAuliffe made it a centerpiece of his campaign, saying “it will be a huge motivator for individuals to come out and vote.”
By the time ballots were cast, just 8 percent of voters listed abortion as the most important issue facing Virginia, according to exit polls. Even worse for Democrats, of the people who cared most about the issue, a majority voted for the Republican, Glenn Youngkin.
Cancellations up, outrage down — model that!
My Conversation with the excellent Ruth Scurr
A fine discourse all around, here is the transcript and audio. Here is part of the CWT summary:
Ruth joined Tyler to discuss why she considers Danton the hero of the French Revolution, why the Jacobins were so male-obsessed, the wit behind Condorcet’s idea of a mechanical king, the influence of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments during and after the Reign of Terror, why 18th-century French thinkers were obsessed with finding forms of government that would fit with emerging market forces, whether Hayek’s critique of French Enlightenment theorists is correct, the relationship between the French Revolution and today’s woke culture, the truth about Napoleon’s diplomatic skills, the poor prospects for pitching biographies to publishers, why Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws would be her desert island read, why Cambridge is a better city than Oxford, why the Times Literary Supplement remains important today, what she loves about Elena Ferrante’s writing, how she stays open as a biographer, and more.
And an excerpt:
COWEN: Is there a counterfactual path where the French Revolution simply works out well as a liberal revolution? If so, what would have needed to have been different?
SCURR: In terms of counterfactuals, the one I thought most about was, What would have happened if Robespierre hadn’t fallen at Thermidor and the relationship between him and [Louis Antoine Léon de] Saint-Just had continued? But that’s not the triumph of the liberal revolution. That would have merely been a continuation of the point they had gotten to. For a triumph of the liberal revolution, that would have needed to be much, much earlier.
I think that it was almost impossible for them to get a liberal constitution in place in time to make that a possibility. What you have is 1789, the liberal aspirations, the hopes, the Declaration of Rights; and then there is almost a hiatus period in which they are struggling to design the institutions. And that is the period which, if it could have been compressed, if there could have been more quickly a stability introduced . . .
Some of the people I’m most interested in in that period were very interested in what has to be true about the society in order for it to have a stable constitution. Obviously when you’re in the middle of a revolution and you’re struggling to come up with those solutions, then there is the opening to chaos.
Definitely recommended. And I am again happy to recommend Ruth’s new book Napoleon: A Life Told in Gardens and Shadows.
How Texas is processing its past
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
That [the Texas approach] may feel like dodging crucial questions about historic injustice, but consider Texas’s recent record of job creation and inward migration. The Texas approach has passed a market test by attracting and keeping significant numbers of minorities. By one measure, people of color account for 95% of Texas’s population growth since 2010. That too is a kind of restitution.
A visitor to Texas also can’t help but ponder questions about land rights. It is now common practice for universities and companies, especially in blue states, to make “land acknowledgements,” decrying the thefts of their current real estate from indigenous tribes. Yet there is rarely serious talk about giving those lands back — never mind giving indigenous peoples a share in Harvard’s hedge fund income or Microsoft’s dividends. This supposed acknowledgement mocks the powerlessness of those victimized groups while displaying the arrogance of power.
The Texas approach is more honest. Implicitly at least, the state recognizes that none of its land will be returned to indigenous peoples — but it offers the descendants of those groups the opportunity to shape its future and share in its prosperity, if only by working or owning property there.
Recommended.