Category: Political Science
Words of wisdom
Among these changes, the most underrated is not misinformation or kooky conspiracy theories or even populism per se — it’s relentless negativity. One thing that we’ve learned from revealed preferences on the internet is that negativity-inflected stories perform better…
The impact of ultra-negativity is symmetrical in the sense that both sides do it, but it’s asymmetrical in the sense that conservatives outnumber progressives. In practice, oscillating extremism results in a right-wing authoritarian regime, not a left-wing one.
That is from the gated Matt Yglesias. The important thing is to keep a positive, constructive attitude toward what is possible. Content creators who do not do that, no matter what their professed views, are supporting the darker sides of MAGA.
So keep up the good work people!
What matters for central banks?
This study examines the drivers of inflation levels, inflation variability, and growth variability collectively representing long-term central bank performance across 37 advanced economies in the Great Moderation era. A key finding is that central bank performance is consistently linked to the overall quality of institutions, while central bank-specific factors such as independence, exchange rate regimes, or inflation targeting show no significant impact. The analysis is extended to the 2022 inflation resurgence, using pre-2022 country characteristics. The results indicate that reliance on imports from Russia (likely gas) and its interaction with post-COVID GDP growth are the primary determinants, suggesting that the inflation surge was not a reversal of the Great Moderation.
That is from a new research paper by Livio Stracca.
Black Veterans and Civil Rights After World War I
Nearly 400,000 Black men were drafted into the National Army during World War I, where they toiled primarily as menial laborers in segregated units. Leveraging novel variation from the WWI draft lottery and millions of digitized military and NAACP records, we document the pioneering role these men played in the early civil rights movement. Relative to observably similar individuals from the same draft board, Black men randomly inducted into the Army were significantly more likely to join the nascent NAACP and to become prominent community leaders in the New Negro era. We find little evidence that these effects are explained by migration or improved socioeconomic status. Rather, corroborating historical accounts about the catalyzing influence of institutional racism in the military, we show that increased civic activism was driven by soldiers who experienced the most discriminatory treatment while serving their country.
That is from Desmond Ang and Sahil Chinoy, newly accepted into the QJE. Are we so sure the postulated mechanism is the correct interpretation for the results here? Being in the military can have other intellectual influences too. Via Alexander Berger.
Who exactly is rigid again?
In an adversarial collaboration, two preregistered U.S.-based studies (total N = 6181) tested three hypotheses regarding the relationship between political ideology and belief rigidity (operationalized as less evidence-based belief updating): rigidity-of-the-right, symmetry, and rigidity-of-extremes. Across both studies, general and social conservatism were weakly associated with rigidity (|b| ~ .05), and conservatives were more rigid than liberals (Cohen’s d ~ .05). Rigidity generally had null associations with economic conservatism, as well as social and economic political attitudes. Moreover, general extremism (but neither social nor economic extremism) predicted rigidity in Study 1, and all three extremism measures predicted rigidity in Study 2 (average |bs| ~ .07). Extreme rightists were more rigid than extreme leftists in 60% of the significant quadratic relationships. Given these very small and semi-consistent effects, broad claims about strong associations between ideology and belief updating are likely unwarranted. Rather, psychologists should turn their focus to examining the contexts where ideology strongly correlates with rigidity.
That is from a new piece by Shauna M. Bowes, Cory J. Clark, Lucian Gideon Conway III, Thomas Costello, Danny Osborne, Philip E. Tetlock, and Jan-Willem van Prooijen. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
On politics and gender
I also had other opportunities to meet with conservatives in DC. With a foot in both worlds, I noticed certain social differences that stood out to me. They center mainly around the ways in which individuals perform gender and are worth reflecting on.
When I talk about differences between conservatives and liberals here, I’m talking about people in politics who hang out in Washington. They may work as campaign managers or speech writers, or have jobs in think tanks, journalism, government, or sometimes academia. The following analysis doesn’t apply to San Francisco rationalists, or Brooklyn Hipsters, or rural church folk in Kentucky. And this doesn’t even apply to all conservatives and liberals in politics, but the ones I happened to spend some time with. So the scope of this analysis is limited, but readers will recognize some of what I’m talking about in other contexts.
The women at Abundance dress business casual. I don’t have the eye for these things to be Vanessa Friedman, so I can’t give a sophisticated analysis of what people wear, but the main difference is the degree to which dress accentuates secondary sexual characteristics. Among the MAGA crowd, cleavage lines are lower and skirts higher, with pants all but unthinkable. There is more makeup and the hair is longer. None of the women wear glasses; among liberals they all have very fancy frames. You don’t have to meet many conservatives or liberals to know this. Roger Ailes famously banned female talent on Fox from wearing pants until 2017. He also of course ended up being brought down for using the workplace as a harem, which he probably would not have been able to do running MSNBC.
In terms of behavior, left-wing women discuss their personal lives or ideas. If they flirt, it’s very subtle. Eye contact that lasts too long, a conversation that continues past the point at least one participant would have ended it under normal conditions, standing unusually close to the other party or looking for an innocent seeming pretext to see one another again. Conservative women, in contrast, flirt as their default style in loud, high-pitched voices. “Oh, you didn’t TEXT ME BACK, I’m so sad!!!” “Would you say I’m Low Human Capital? he he he he.” Of course, any particular signal shouldn’t be taken too seriously as an indicator of interest since they are like this with a lot of men.
You shake hands as a default when meeting liberal women, while with conservatives it would be strange to shake their hand instead of giving them a hug, which they will usually initiate. Liberals bring the norms of HR into social life. Anything too forward or that can be interpreted as showing sexual interest is potentially perilous. Meanwhile, with conservative women, men have the option of coming on to them, and then brushing off the rejection if they are shut down.
While not engaging in ostentatious displays of femininity, liberal women will sometimes drop these hints that subtly remind you they are still women. She might have a pixie haircut and thick glasses on, but will find a way to mention that she likes baking or the color pink. I’ve noticed that liberal women like to discuss how their sons are more aggressive than their daughters, which is the opposite of what must go on in the imaginations of many conservatives who probably picture them all bragging about their children being trans. I think that this stuff is a way to create a little room for gender expression in an environment in which feminist norms and HR culture push towards androgyny.
That is all from Richard Hanania. I too have noticed the hugging point.
*Two Paths to Prosperity: Culture and Institutions in Europe and China, 1000–2000*
By Avner Greif, Joel Mokyr, and Guido Tabellini. Due out in November, likely to be excellent.
Reading Orwell in Moscow
In this paper, I measure the effect of conflict on the demand for frames of reference, or heuristics that help individuals explain their social and political environment by means of analogy. To do so, I examine how Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 reshaped readership of history and social science books in Russia. Combining roughly 4,000 book abstracts retrieved from the online catalogue of Russia’s largest bookstore chain with data on monthly reading patterns of more than 100,000 users of the most popular Russian-language social reading platform, I find that the invasion prompted an abrupt and substantial increase in readership of books that engage with the experience of life under dictatorship and acquiescence to dictatorial crimes, with a predominant focus on Nazi Germany. I interpret my results as evidence that history books, by offering regime-critical frames of reference, may serve as an outlet for expressing dissent in a repressive authoritarian regime.
That is from a job market paper by Natalia Vasilenok, political science at Stanford. Via.
A simple metric for choosing immigrants for America
I often hear the following standards suggested:
1. Use willingness to pay for entry.
2. Take people from high IQ countries.
3. Take people from high trust countries.
4. Take people from similar countries, which I suppose means Canada and Australia?
5. Take people with graduate degrees.
I will not evaluate those one-by-one, only to note they are not the very worst standards you might apply. Instead, I have a new idea, which consists of two parts. Apply strict (but not low “n”) standards for admission and then:
6. Take people from populous countries with high cognitive variance, and
7. All other things equal, prefer people from very distant countries.
That in essence suggests taking in people from China, India, and Russia, which are indeed countries with high cognitive variance. And today that is quite possibly the right thing to do. You will note that none of those countries count as especially high trust, and India at least has very mixed IQ readings, I am not sure about Russia given the rural idiocy there.
To understand that standard in more general terms, #6 gets you geniuses and the extremely ambitious. They are the ones who can fight through your immigration thicket, and will be motivated to do so. And because they are coming from screwed up countries, many of them will be quite keen to leave. They also will be used to fighting very hard to get ahead, more so than a lot of the graduate students who might come from Sweden.
#7 recognizes that a lot of people from nearby countries will come simply because it is convenient. And because of “the gravity equation.” So you should discriminate against them somewhat. Note that because borders are somewhat porous, you are going to get a lot of them anyway. That is OK, but you can then penalize them a bit in the standards process, in essence to get the same net “tax” on entry. And because their home countries are nearby, they might be a little slower to assimilate.
To be clear this is a recipe for America in 2025. A lot of other countries might do better opting for the boring Macedonian dentist, because they will not get top talent anyway. Or America in 1770, when building out a core population, might have done well with what was in essence a version of #3, with a bit of #2 and #4. Which is more or less what we did, though not by conscious design (borders were open).
Worth a ponder. These questions are underdiscussed. I am not sure this proposal is the best idea, but it occurred to me it never has been presented before.
My excellent Conversation with David Commins
Saudi Arabia and the Gulf are the topics, here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
David Commins, author of the new book Saudi Arabia: A Modern History, brings decades of scholarship and firsthand experience to explain the kingdom’s unlikely rise. Tyler and David discuss why Wahhabism was essential for Saudi state-building, the treatment of Shiites in the Eastern Province and whether discrimination has truly ended, why the Saudi state emerged from its poorer and least cosmopolitan regions, the lasting significance of the 1979 Grand Mosque seizure by millenarian extremists, what’s kept Gulf states stable, the differing motivations behind Saudi sports investments, the disappointing performance of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology despite its $10 billion endowment, the main barrier to improving its k-12 education, how Yemen became the region’s outlier of instability and whether Saudi Arabia learned from its mistakes there, the Houthis’ unclear strategic goals, the prospects for the kingdom’s post-oil future, the topic of David’s next book, and more.
And an excerpt:
COWEN: Now, as you know, the senior religious establishment is largely Nejd, right? Why does that matter? What’s the historical significance of that?
COMMINS: Right. Nejd is the region of central Arabia. Riyadh is currently the capital. The first Saudi empire had a capital nearby, called Diriyah. Nejd is really the territory that gave birth to the Wahhabi movement, it’s the homeland of the Saud dynasty, and it is the region of Arabia that was most thoroughly purged of the older Sunni tradition that had persisted in Nejd for centuries.
Consequently, by the time that the Saudi government developed bureaucratic agencies in the 1950s and ’60s, the religious institution was going to recruit from that region of Arabia primarily. Now, it certainly attracted loyalists from other parts of Arabia, but the Wahhabi mission, as I call it — their calling to what they considered true belief — began in Nejd and was very strongly identified with the towns of Nejd ever since the late 1700s.
COWEN: Would I be correct in inferring that some of the least cosmopolitan parts of Saudi Arabia built the Saudi state?
COMMINS: Yes, that is correct. That is correct. If you think of the 1700s and 1800s, the Red Sea and Persian Gulf coast of Arabia were the most cosmopolitan parts of Arabia.
COWEN: They’re richer, too, right? Jeddah is a much more advanced city than Riyadh at the time.
COMMINS: Somewhat more advanced. Yes, it is more advanced, it is more cosmopolitan than Nejd. There is the regional identity in Hejaz, that is the Red Sea coast where the holy cities and Jeddah are located. The townspeople there tended to look upon Nejd as a less advanced part of Arabia. But again, that’s a very recent historical development.
COWEN: How is it that the coastal regions just dropped the ball? You could imagine some alternate history where they become the center of Saudi power and religious thought, but they’re not.
COMMINS: Right. If you take Jeddah, Mecca, and Medina — that region of Arabia, known as Hejaz, had always been under the rule of other Muslim empires. They were under the rule of other Muslim powers because of the religious value of possessing, if you will, the holy cities, Mecca and Medina. From the time of the first Muslim dynasty that was based in Damascus in the seventh and early eighth centuries, all the way until the Ottoman Empire, Muslim dynasties outside Arabia coveted control of that region. They were just more powerful than local resources could generate.
Hejaz was always, if you were, to dependency on outside Muslim powers. If you look at the east coast of Arabia — what’s now the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf — it was richer than central Arabia. It’s the largest oasis in Arabia. It is in proximity to pearling banks, which were an important source for income for residents there. It was part of the Indian Ocean trade between Iraq and India. The population there was always — well, always — for the last thousand years has been dominated by Bedouin tribesmen.
There was a brief Ismaili Shia republic, you might say, in that part of Arabia in medieval times. It just didn’t have, it seems, the cohesion to conquer other parts of Arabia. That’s what makes the Saudi story really remarkable, is that they were able to muster and sustain the cohesion to carry out a conquest like that over the course of 50 years.
COWEN: Physically, how did they manage that? Water is a problem, a lot of transport is by camel, there’s no real rail system, right?
Recommended, full of historical information about a generally neglected region, neglected from the point of view of history at least rather than current affairs.
“Vote now for the 2025 AEA election”
I have now received this email for the seventh (?) time:
If you have not already done so, I encourage you to take a few moments to cast your vote in the AEA 2025 Election. Paper ballots will not be mailed this year. Voting will be closed at 11:59 pm EDT, September 30, 2025. To access your official ballot and candidate biographical information, please click on the following personalized link…
Janice C. Eberly is the only candidate running for AEA president, and I have no idea what she stands for. (In fairness to the AEA, there is some choice for the vice-presidents, you can pick two out of four). Here is her statement of purpose:
Statement of Purpose: Economics brings powerful tools to understand and analyze issues in social science. To live up to that promise, we need to attract and retain talent, develop data and analytics, and engage students. The AEA mission to advance the field is dynamic and challenging. As economists, we rely on collaborators, students, researchers, and a host of academic, public and private resources. In a changing field, the AEA needs to be correspondingly resilient. We can apply our tools to evaluate our progress and experiment with new initiatives. As president-elect, I would focus particularly on data access and opportunities for young scholars, plus attention to emerging issues. Economics cannot thrive without growing young scholars – who are often the first to experience new challenges. The AEA consistently supports data innovation through its committees and journals and continues to advise public and private data resources.
I do not disagree, but where does she stand on the possibly contentious issues? How about a platform of turning over all AEA intellectual property, including published papers and referee reports, to the major AI companies to aid in the purpose of producing truly great economics AI models? That is what I favor, does she? It would be nice to use elections to settle matters of substance, that is what they are for, right?
Polarization, purpose and profit
Or a theory of how Silicon Valley once was? Or maybe still is? I am not sure!
We present a model in which firms compete for workers who value nonpecuniary job attributes, such as purpose, sustainability, political stances, or working conditions. Firms adopt production technologies that enable them to offer jobs with varying levels of these desirable attributes. Firms’ profits are higher when they cater to workers with extreme preferences. In a competitive assignment equilibrium, firms become polarized and not only reflect but also amplify the polarized preferences of the general population. More polarized sectors exhibit higher profits, lower average wages, and a reduced labor share of value added. Sustainable investing amplifies firm polarization.
That is from a recent paper by Daniel Ferreira and Radoslawaa Nikolowa. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
My Hope Axis podcast with Anna Gát
Here is the YouTube, here is transcript access, here is their episode summary:
The brilliant @tylercowen joins @TheAnnaGat for a lively, wide-ranging conversation exploring hope from the perspective of insiders and outsiders, the obsessed and the competitive, immigrants and hard workers. They talk about talent and luck, what makes America unique, whether the dream of Internet Utopia has ended, and how Gen-Z might rebel. Along the way: Jack Nicholson, John Stuart Mill, road trips through Eastern Europe, the Enlightenment of AI, and why courage shapes the future.
Excerpt:
Tyler Cowen: But the top players I’ve met, like Anand or Magnus Carlsen or Kasparov, they truly hate losing with every bone in their body. They do not approach it philosophically. They can become very miserable as a result. And that’s very far from my attitudes. It shaped my life in a significant way.
Anna Gát: I was so surprised. I was like, what? But actually, what? In Maggie Smith-high RP—what? This never occurred to me that losing can be approached philosophically.
Tyler Cowen: And I think always keeping my equanimity has been good for me, getting these compound returns over long periods of time. But if you’re doing a thing like chess or math or sports that really favors the young, you don’t have all those decades of compound returns. You’ve got to motivate yourself to the maximum extent right now. And then hating losing is super useful. But that’s just—those are not the things I’ve done. The people who hate losing should do things that are youth-weighted, and the people who have equanimity should do things that are maturity and age-weighted with compounding returns.
Excellent discussion, lots of fresh material. Here is the Hope Axis podcast more generally. Here is Anna’s Interintellect project, worthy of media attention. Most of all it is intellectual discourse, but it also seems to be the most successful “dating service” I am aware of.
The politics of depression in young adults
From a recent paper by Catherine Gimbrone, et.al.:
From 2005 to 2018, 19.8% of students identified as liberal and 18.1% identified as conservative, with little change over time. Depressive affect (DA) scores increased for all adolescents after 2010, but increases were most pronounced for female liberal adolescents (b for interaction = 0.17, 95% CI: 0.01, 0.32), and scores were highest overall for female liberal adolescents with low parental education (Mean DA 2010: 2.02, SD 0.81/2018: 2.75, SD 0.92). Findings were consistent across multiple internalizing symptoms outcomes. Trends in adolescent internalizing symptoms diverged by political beliefs, sex, and parental education over time, with female liberal adolescents experiencing the largest increases in depressive symptoms, especially in the context of demographic risk factors including parental education.
Here is the link. This is further evidence for what is by now a well-known proposition.
Three accounts of modern liberalism
I have a review essay on that topic in the latest TLS. Excerpt, on Philip Pilkington:
Pilkington’s sense of numbers, history and magnitude is sometimes off. He writes that “liberalism is forming broken, atomized people who are unable to pass on their genes to a future generation”, apparently oblivious to the fact that fertility rates are falling in many non- liberal countries as well – in Russia, for example – where they are lower than in the US. In China, fertility is lower still. Is the liberal goal really to “replac[e] the family with the state”? That sounds more like the non-liberal visions we find in western thought, running from Plato to the more extreme forms of communism in which children are encouraged to report on the supposed crimes of their parents.
We are told that “deindustrialization eviscerated American industry”, yet US manufacturing output is now barely below its pre-financial crisis peak, and service sector jobs tend to pay more on average today than do manufacturing jobs. Pilkington also promotes strange theories of trade imbalances, as presented by the non-economists Oren Cass and Michael Pettis but rejected by virtually all serious researchers in the area. Their view is that a huge economic restructuring is needed because China and Germany keep running trade surpluses while the US is in perpetual trade deficit. But in reality this arrangement seems as stable as any other macroeconomic state of affairs could be. It is Pilkington’s prerogative to disagree with the consensus, but we are never told why everyone else might be wrong. Overall, there is too much sloppiness here in service of the agenda of carping about liberal societies.
And on Robert Kagan:
An alternative and less neat vision of American history shows how liberalism has often relied on illiberalism, and not just accidentally. Lincoln was a significant abuser of civil rights, including on habeas corpus. The North’s campaigns in the Civil War killed many thousands of innocent civilians, not all of them in the service of legitimate military ends. You can argue that this may have been necessary, but liberal it was not. As for FDR, he tried to pack the Supreme Court and sought a significant expansion of executive power, making his administrations a methodological precursor of Trump. He did fight the Second World War on the side of liberalism, but he did not always use liberal means (eg the firebombing of Tokyo), and indeed a full respect for the laws of warfare might not have secured victory.
Once we see American history as a union of liberal and illiberal forces, we can relax a little about the current situation. Certainly, we are returning to some bad and illiberal behaviours of the past, and it is right to be concerned. Yet this seems to be more a feature of the ebb and flow of American politics than a decisive turn away from liberalism. Illiberalism has been prominent in the mix most of the time, and that is both the good news and the bad.
Interesting throughout, recommended, I believe it is the Sept.1 issue.
A few remarks on Fed independence
Trump has made various sallies against the idea of an independent Fed, including lots of rhetoric, firing Lisa Cook, aiming to have a CEA chair on the Fed board, and more. Probably the list is longer than I realize.
To be clear, I see no upside to these moves and I do not favor them. That said, I am not surprised that markets are not freaking out.
People, the Fed was never that independent to begin with!
Come 2008, the Fed, Treasury, and other parties sat down and worked out a strategy for dealing with the financial crisis. The Fed has a big voice in those decisions, but ultimately has to go along with the general agreement.
Circa, 2020-2021, with the pandemic, the same kind of procedure applied.
You may or may not like the particular decisions that were made (too little inflation the first time, too much inflation the second time), but I don’t think there is a very different way to proceed in those situations.
And given recent budgeting decisions, fiscal dominance may lie in our future in any case. The Fed is not immune from those pressures.
The Fed is most “independent” when the stakes are low and most people are happy with (more or less) two percent inflation. That is also when the independence matters least.
The real problem comes when the quality of governance is low. Then encroaching on central bank independence simply raises the level of stupidity. Some of that is happening right now.
A non-independent central bank can work just fine when the quality of government is sufficiently high. New Zealand has had a non-independent central bank since the Reserve Bank Act of 1989 (before that it had a non-independent central bank in a different and worse way). There is operational independence, but an inflation target is set in conjunction with the government. You may or may not favor this approach, but it has not been a disaster and it helped to lower Kiwi inflation rates significantly and with political cover.
Way back when, Milton Friedman used to argue periodically that Congress should set the rate of price inflation and take responsibility for it. I think that is a bad idea, especially today, but it should cure you of the notion that “independence” is sacrosanct. Every system has some means of accountability built in, and indeed has to.
I know all those scatter plot graphs that correlate central bank independence with lower inflation rates. In my view, if you could insert a true “quality of government” extra variable, the correlation mostly vanishes. Plus I do not trust the measures of independence that are used.
As Gandhi once said — “Central bank independence, it would be a good idea!”
Addendum: I also find it a little strange that many critics of the Trump actions earlier had been calling for higher inflation targets, say three or even four percent. That is maybe not an outright contradiction, but…the Fed isn’t just going to move to that on its own, right? Central bank independence for thee but not for me?