Category: Political Science
Some game theory of Greenland
It is commonly assumed that the U.S. “acquiring” Greenland, whatever that might mean, will result in greater U.S. control of the territory. Along some dimensions that is likely. But it is worth pondering the equilibrium here more seriously.
I observe, in many locations around the world, that indigenous groups end up with far more bargaining power than their initial material resources might suggest. For instance, in the United States Native Americans often (not always) can exercise true sovereignty. The AARP cannot (yet?) say the same. In Mexico, indigenous groups have blocked many an infrastructure project.
One reason for these powers is that, feeling outmatched, the indigenous groups cultivate a temperament of “orneriness” and “being difficult.” Some of that may be a deliberate strategic stance, some of it may be heritage from having been treated badly in the past and still lacking trust, and some of it may, over time, be acquired culture as the strategic stance gets baked into norms and behavior patterns.
Often, in these equilibria, the more nominal power you have over the indigenous group, the more orneriness they will have to cultivate. If you only want a few major concessions, sometimes you can get those better as an outsider. A simple analogy is that sometimes a teenager will do more to obey a grandparent than a parent. Fewer issues of control are at stake, and so more concessions are possible, without fear of losing broader autonomy.
So a greater American stake in Greenland, however that comes about, may in some regards end up being counterproductive. And these factors will become more relevant as more resource and revenue control issues come to the table. For some issues it may be more useful having Denmark available as “the baddie.”
It is worth thinking through these questions in greater detail.
The Borda Count is the Best Method of Voting
It’s well known that the voting methods we use are highly defective, as they fail to meet fundamental criteria like positive responsiveness, the Pareto principle, and stability. Positive responsiveness (monotonicity) means that if a candidate improves on some voters’ ballots, this should not reduce the candidate’s chances of winning. Yet, many voting methods, including runoffs and ranked-choice voting, fail positive responsiveness. In other words, candidates who became more preferred by voters can end up losing when they would have won when they were less preferred! It’s even more shocking that some voting systems can fail the Pareto principle, which simply says that if every voter prefers x to y then the voting system should not rank y above x. Everyone knows that in a democracy a candidate may be elected that the minority ranks below another possible candidate but how many know that there are democratic voting procedures where a candidate may be elected that the majority ranks below another possible candidate or even that democratic voting procedures may elect a candidate that everyone ranks below another possible candidate! That is the failure of the Pareto principle and the chaos results of McKelvey–Schofield show that this kind of outcome should be expected.
Almost all researchers in social choice understand the defects of common voting systems and indeed tend to agree that the most common system, first past the post voting, is probably the most defective! But, as no system is perfect, there has been less consensus on which methods are best. Ranked choice voting, approval voting and the Borda Count all have their proponents. In recent years, however, there has been a swing towards the Borda Count.
Don Saari, for example, whose work on voting has been a revelation, has made strong arguments in favor of the Borda Count. The Borda Count has voter rank the n candidates from most to least preferred and assigns (n-1) points to the candidates. For example if there are 3 candidates a voter’s top-ranked candidate gets 2 points, the second ranked candidate gets 1 point and the last ranked candidate 0 points. The candidate with the most points overall wins.
The Borda Count satisfies positive responsiveness, the Pareto principle and stability. In addition, Saari points out that the Borda Count is the only positional voting system to always rank a Condorcet winner (a candidate who beats every other candidate in pairwise voting) above a Condorcet loser (a candidate who loses to every other candidate in pairwise voting.) In addition, all voting systems are gameable, but Saari shows that the Borda Count is by some reasonable measures the least or among the least gameable systems.
My own work in voting theory shows, with a somewhat tongue in cheek but practical example, that the Borda Count would have avoided the civil war! I also show that other systems such as cumulative voting or approval voting are highly open to chaos, as illustrated by the fact that under approval voting almost anything could have happened in the Presidential election of 1992, including Ross Perot as President.
One reason the Borda Count performs well is that it uses more information than other systems. If you just use a voter’s first place votes, you are throwing out a lot of information about how a voter ranks second and third candidates. If you just use pairwise votes you are throwing out a lot of information about the entire distribution of voter rankings. When you throw out information the voting system can’t distinguish rational from irrational voters which is one reason why the outcomes of a voting system can look irrational.
Eric Maskin has an important new contribution to this literature. Arrow’s Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives (IIA) says that if no voters change their rankings of x and y then the social ranking of x and y shouldn’t change. In other words, if no voter changes their ranking of Bush and Gore then the outcome of the election shouldn’t change regardless of how Nader is ranked (for the pedantic I exclude the case where Nader wins.) The motivation for IIA seems reasonable, we don’t want spoilers who split a candidate’s vote allowing a less preferred candidate, even a Condorcet loser to win. But IIA also excludes information about preference intensity from the voting system and throwing out information is rarely a good idea.
What Maskin shows is that it’s possible to keep the desirable properties of IIA while still measuring preference intensity with what he calls modified IIA, although in my view a better name would be middle IIA. Modified or middle IIA says that an alternative z should be irrelevant unless it is in the middle of x and y, e.g. x>z>y. More precisely, we allow the voting system to change the ranking of x and y if the ranking of z moves in or out of the middle of x and y but not otherwise (recall IIA would forbid the social ranking of x and y to change if no voter changes their ranking of x and y).
Maskin shows that the Borda Count is the only voting system which satisfies MIIA and a handful of other desirable and unobjectionable properties. It follows that the Borda Count is the only voting system to both measure preference intensity and to avoid defects such as a spoilers.
The debates over which is the best voting system will probably never end. Indeed, voting theory itself tells us that multi-dimensional choice is always subject to some infirmities and people may differ on which infirmities they are willing to accept. Nevertheless, we can conclude that plurality rule is a very undesirable voting system and the case for the Borda Count is strong.
The Greenland debates
I would say we have not yet figured out what is the best U.S. policy toward Greenland, nor have we figured out best stances for either Greenland or Denmark. I am struck however by the low quality of the debate, and I mean on the anti-U.S. side most of all. This is just one clip, but I am hearing very much the same in a number of other interchanges, most of all from Europeans. There is a lot of EU pearl-clutching, and throwing around of adjectives like “colonialist” or “imperialist.” Or trying to buy Greenland is somehow analogized to Putin not trying to buy Ukraine. Or the word “offensive” is deployed as if that were an argument, or the person tries to switch the discussion into an attack on Trump and his rhetoric.
C’mon, people!
De facto, you are all creating the impression that Greenland really would be better off under some other arrangement. Why not put forward a constructive plan for improving Greenland? It would be better yet to cite a current plan under consideration (is there one?). “We at the EU, by following this plan, will give Greenland a better economic and security future than can the United States.” If the plan is decent, Greenland will wish to break off the talks with America it desires. (To be clear, I do not think they desire incorporation. This FT piece strikes me as the best so far on the debates.)
Or if you must stick to the negative, put forward some concrete arguments for how greater U.S. involvement in Greenland would be bad for global security, bad for economic growth, bad for the U.S., or…something. “Your EU allies won’t like it,” or “Trump’s behavior is unacceptable” isn’t enough and furthermore the first of those is question-begging.
It is time to rise to the occasion.
p.s. I still am glad we bought the Danish West Indies in 1917. Nor do I hear many Danes, or island natives, complain about this.
My podcast with Reason
With Liz Wolfe and Zach Weissmueller:
The link here contains the YouTube video, text description, and links to audio versions at reason.com: https://reason.com/podcast/2025/01/10/tyler-cowen-why-do-we-refuse-to-learn-from-history/
Youtube page for embedding is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-Kpyg2mFU8
Lots of about libertarianism and state capacity libertarianism, and The Great Forgetting, food at the end…interesting throughout!
Covering immigration is a mixed bag
This paper investigates the effect of media coverage on immigration attitudes. It combines data on immigration coverage in French television with individual panel data from 2013 to 2017 that records respondents’ preferred television channel and attitudes toward immigration. The analysis focuses on within-individual variations over time, addressing ideological self-selection into channels. We find that increased coverage of immigration polarizes attitudes, with initially moderate individuals becoming more likely to report extremely positive and negative attitudes. This polarization is mainly driven by an increase in the salience of immigration, which reactivates pre-existing prejudices, rather than persuasion effects from biased news consumption.
That is by Sarah Schneider-Strawczynski and Jérôme Valette, and here is the AEA-gated link, here are less gated copies. You can even see this effect in the MR comments section and also on Twitter. People are not persuaded by good arguments, rather they just think about the issue more, which in many cases leads them into further error and negative contagion.
Some Jimmy Carter observations from the 1970s
Usually I am reluctant to criticize or even write about the recently departed, but perhaps for former Presidents there is greater latitude to do so.
I never loved Jimmy Carter, and I saw plenty of him on TV and read about his administration on a daily basis in The New York Times.
I fully appreciate his legacy of deregulation, which far exceeded that of the Reagan administration. Plus Carter appointed Volcker and stood by him. He was honest right after the Watergate scandals, and Camp David was a major achievement and furthermore it has stood the test of time in Egypt. Those are some significant accomplishments, and at the time I felt he was a decent President.
But I did not like his overall vibes, and for a President that is important.
He struck me as a pious moralizer who did not have a great sense of the differences between good and harmful altruism. Somehow morality had to be packaged with some strange form of gentlemanly, southern, cloying self-abnegation.
He sent his daughter Amy to an inferior public school in Washington, D.C., instead of to a top-quality private school.
He went on TV in a sweater and told us to think in terms of privation rather than opportunity. The Cowen family did indeed turn down the thermostats.
He confessed to lusting after women in his heart in a sincere manner that made him sound absurd and out of touch.
Unlike Ronald Reagan, he was not able to moralize effectively about the Soviet Union and its role as evil empire. Yet I always felt he was lecturing me.
He emphasized “human rights” as important for American foreign policy. I am not opposed to that approach, but he made it sound so preachy and unappetizing. Nor was he able to realize that vision, so the country and its leadership simply became more hypocritical.
He seemed to have exactly the wrong temperament for confronting the various crises in Iran.
His voice grated on me, perhaps because I identified it with a particular kind of unself-conscious, preachy moralizing? I do understand we might do well to have some of that moralizing back. Still, I am not going to like it.
Was he ever funny?
I much preferred Ford, and even the evil Nixon and Clinton, not to mention Reagan. It’s a good thing Carter had some major pluses on his record.
Joseph Walker on Australian migration (from my email)
I argued a few days ago that attacks on less skilled immigration might spill over and through contagion effects cause negative attitudes about immigration more generally. At which point I received the following from Joseph:
Australia, I think, shows the contagion effects are a big deal.
We have one of the most skill-biased immigration programs in the world and also one of the most successful approaches to cultural integration in the world.
A significant chunk of our net migration comes in the form of overseas students, who can be put on a pathway to permanent residence and citizenship after completing their degrees. (This program was introduced in 2001, largely to slow our population ageing.)
The international students cross-subsidise the domestic ones, and education is now Australia’s third biggest export after coal and iron ore.
Like the rest of the Anglosphere, our housing market is broken, but this can’t mostly be blamed on international students, since they don’t add to demand for the kinds of housing people are concerned about.
And yet the discourse has soured completely on migrants, especially international students.
A lot of Australian influencers copy and paste US anti-immigration talking points, even though they don’t really map over.*
(As it happens, I’ll be interviewing one of the key architects of Australia’s modern migration system in a live salon in January: https://events.humanitix.com/joe-walker-podcast-abul-rizvi.)
*To be sure, there are valid criticisms of Australian migration policy. Most notably, net migration was mismanaged and unsustainably high over the past two years, driven by a post-pandemic surge in students. In 2022-23, it exceeded 500,000 people (for context: this number is unprecedented and about double pre-pandemic levels). There has also been exuberance and an erosion of academic standards in the university sector. But these mistakes are being addressed, and the broader negativity I’m observing seems unlikely to be appeased by fixing them.
When should DOGE scream in public and push for maximum transparency?
Here is a tweet from Elon, I won’t reproduce it directly on MR. Suffice to say it is strongly worded on the visas issue. Here is a summary of that debate. Much of it is about who should rise or fall in status (duh).
I have some simple, to the point free advice for the DOGERs — the public is not always with you. Making your fight more public, and putting it more on social media, is no guarantee of victory, and indeed it often boosts the chance you will lose or be stymied.
Right now there is an anti-immigration mood, for better or worse, in many countries. But how many voters (former immigrants aside) know what these different types of visas mean, or how many o1s are given out in a year? Yet a lot of influential tech people, and tech donors, know this information pretty well.
So in a non-public fight, you have a big advantage. Trump could maintain or up the number of o1 visas, or make other changes to please the tech people, and few MAGA voters would be very aware of this. But when you scream about this issue, and make it A BATTLE, suddenly it becomes “your pro-immigration sentiment vs. the anti-immigration sentiment of the voters.”
And that is a fight which is very easy to lose. It becomes “The Current Thing,” and everyone is paying attention to the new status game.
So please develop a better sense of when to keep your mouths shut and work behind the scenes.
Is there an intermediate position on immigration?
It is a common view, especially on the political right, that we should be quite open to highly skilled immigrants, and much less open to less skilled immigrants. Increasingly I am wondering whether this is a stable ideological equilibrium.
To an economist, it is easy to see the difference between skilled and less skilled migrants. Their wages are different, resulting tax revenues are different, and social outcomes are different, among other factors. Economists can take this position and hold it in their minds consistently and rather easily (to be clear, I have greater sympathies for letting in more less skilled immigrants than this argument might suggest, but for the time being that is not the point).
The fact that economists’ intuitions can sustain that distinction does not mean that public discourse can sustain that distinction. For instance, perhaps “how much sympathy do you have for foreigners?” is the main carrier of the immigration sympathies of the public. If they have more sympathies for foreigners, they will be relatively pro-immigrant for both the skilled and unskilled groups. If they have fewer sympathies for foreigners, they will be less sympathetic to immigration of all kinds. Do not forget the logic of negative contagion.
You also can run a version of this argument with “legal vs. illegal immigration” being the distinction at hand.
Increasingly, I have the fear that “general sympathies toward foreigners” is doing much of the load of the work here. This is one reason, but not the only one, why I am uncomfortable with a lot of the rhetoric against less skilled immigrants. It may also be the path toward a tougher immigration policy more generally.
I hope I am wrong about this. Right now the stakes are very high.
In the meantime, speak and write about other people nicely! Even if you think they are damaging your country in some significant respects. You want your principles here to remain quite circumscribed, and not to turn into anti-foreigner sentiment more generally.
Full-length documentary on the life and legacy of Rene Girard
Very well done.
Jefferson’s DOGE (that was then, this is now)
Jefferson swiftly undid twelve years of Federalism. He allowed the Sedition Act to expire and adopted a more catholic naturalization law. He reduced the federal bureaucracy — small even by today’s standards — particularly in the Treasury Department (a slap at Hamilton, who had been Secretary under Washington), slashing the number of employees by 40 percent and eliminating tax inspectors and collectors altogether. He cut the military budget in half, which was then 40 percent of the overall federal budget. He eliminated all federal excise taxes, purging the government of what he called Hamilton’s “contracted, English, half-lettered ideas.” Reluctantly he kept the First Bank of the United States, but paid off nearly half the national debt. “No government in history,” the historian Gordon S. Wood has observed, “had ever voluntarily cut back on its authority.”
That is from the new and very good book Martin van Buren: America’s First Politician, by James M. Bradley. Later things were different:
Martin van Buren went into office deermined to avoid Andrew Jackson’s fateful staffing mistakes. The backbiting and intrigue wasted two years of Jackson’s presidency. This van Buren could not afford.
And a wee bit later:
Then the voters had their say. The November elections in New York were an absolute bloodbath for the Democrats. There were 128 elections for assembly in 1837, and the Whigs won 101 of them.
The book is well-written.
The show so far, DOGE edition
Round one is over, and so far no progress and indeed steps backwards:
President-elect Donald Trump’s last-minute demands for a congressional funding package were rejected by dozens of Republicans this week, foreshadowing the legislative challenges he could face next year — even with unified GOP control.
The Republicans also revealed they are not willing to shut down the government, and they do not have such a stable coalition in the House, and that is even before they lose some number of seats.
The package that passed the House includes more than $110 billion in disaster aid and a one-year farm bill extension but is stripped of Trump’s demand: a debt limit extension.
There was not an actual substantive win in the final outcome. Not surprisingly, the Democrats are touting it as a win for the Democrats.
And here Vivek concedes the loss.
I very much hope DOGE makes progress on its key issues — excess regulation and spending — but political change is tough and requires some highly unusual and idiosyncratic skills. Keep also in mind that while Trump has a mandate to attack Woke and secure the border, voters seem far less excited by cutting back on government spending and regulation (if anything the opposite?). Government spending is what “makes Washington go round,” and Reps love it, no matter what they may say in some of their more manufactured moments. So DOGE strategy will need to adjust accordingly.
Incarceration sentences to ponder
My analysis reveals a significant change in political beliefs since being incarcerated. There is an increased effect of changing political beliefs for women and people of color incarcerated. The effect reveals that people of color are becoming, either for the first time or further aligned, with the Republican Party since being incarcerated.
That is from researcher Hope Martinez. And here is the explanation for the mechanism:
The experience of violence and abuse while incarcerated extends the tools of white supremacy in the prison system by influencing feelings of shame, hopelessness, and cultural inferiority, further aligning vulnerable groups to conservatism and whiteness.
Via tekl.
*The Triumph of Politics*
The author is David A. Stockman, and the subtitle is Why the Reagan Revolution Failed. This is for me a re-read, all DOGErs and aspiring DOGErs should give this book an initial read, as it covers why the Reagan attempts to pare back government largely failed. Excerpt:
But I hadn’t recoked that there would be so much opposition on our side of the aisle. I was shocked to find that the Democrats were geting so much Republican help in their efforts to keep the pork barrel flowing and the welfare state intact. I had been worried because the votes didn’t add up, not the economic plan.
I had also come to realize that in my haste to get the Reagan Revolution launched in February, we had moved too fast. There were numerous loose ends. The spending reductions needed to pay for the tax cuts had turned out to be even bigger and tougher than I had originally thought.
And:
Over the next eight months, the President’s pen remained in his pocket. He did not veto one single appropriations bill, all of which combined came in $10 billion [sic] over the line. Come to think of it, he did use his pen — to sign them.
Stockman of course was what you might call the DOGE leader of the early 1980s. His final take is that the Reagan Revolution failed because it misunderstood what the American people truly want from their government. For better or worse, they want privilege and also protection from misfortune, not efficiency or maximum economic growth.
Essential reading, for some of you.
Jennifer Pahlka on DOGE
An excellent piece, one of the best I have read all year. Here is the concluding paragraph:
We can wish that the government efficiency agenda were in the hands of someone else, but let’s not pretend that change was going to come from Democrats if they’d only had another term, and let’s not delude ourselves that change was ever going to happen politely, neatly, carefully. However we got here, we may now be in a Godzilla vs Kong world. Perhaps we’re about to get a natural experiment in which Elonzilla faces off with Larry ElliKong. One of the things we need to be ready to learn is that Elonzilla could lose. Or worse, since Elon and Larry are friends, the expected disruptive could get co-opted. And what would that say about the problem? Conjuring Elon is not bringing a gun to a knife fight. It was never a knife fight.
Recommended.