Category: Political Science
What should I ask Christopher Kirchhoff?
I will be doing a Conversation with him. In case you do not know, Christopher self-describes as:
Christopher Kirchhoff is an expert in emerging technology who founded the Pentagon’s Silicon Valley office and has led teams for the President, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and CEO of Google. He recently worked special projects at Anthropic. Previously, Dr. Kirchhoff helped design and scale $1 billion in philanthropic programs at Schmidt Futures. He also founded and led the Pentagon’s Silicon Valley Office, Defense Innovation Unit X, which piloted flying cars and microsatellites in military missions and created a new acquisition pathway for start-ups now responsible for $70 billion dollars of technology acquisition. During the Obama Administration, he was Director for Strategic Planning at the National Security Council and the senior civilian advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
I very much enjoyed his new book Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley are Transforming the Future of War, co-authored with Raj M. Shah. Here is his home page. The book just received a very strong review from the FT.
So what should I ask Christopher?
PR for the UK?
I say no, we have enough European governments with proportional representation already. Should not someone allow for the possibility of more decisive action?
Estimates are suggesting that Labour won two-thirds of the seats with one-third of the vote, more or less. So that induces the usual cries of misrepresentation of the electorate (it also reminds us that virtually all electoral systems are not “democratic” in the naive sense of that term). But Britain has many serious problems, and I would rather see one party given a decisive mandate to handle them. And I write that as someone who is not in general rooting for the Labour Party — virtually all of my favorite British politicians are Tories, even if I do not like what that party has become as a whole.
Contrast the British with the recent French election. The distribution of votes was not altogether dissimilar, but the Britsh have “a landslide,” while the French have a possibly ungovernable situation.
I do love checks and balances, but the UK needs to defeat NIMBY and fix the NHS. Now it is Labour’s turn to try. Here is a broad outline of Labour’s 100-day plan. Not exactly what I would choose (see Wooldridge at Bloomberg), but if they get two or three big things right the regime still could be a success.
Note that the margins for the Labour victorious seats are extremely low, which means there is an ongoing constraint on the exercise of government power. I am not so worried about an “elected dictatorship.” If anything, it may not be decisive enough.
Another consideration is that PR for the UK could end up meaning the rise of an Islamic party of some kind, of course with minority status. I suspect that would worsen rather than improve democratic discourse in Britain, and perhaps hinder immigrant assimilation as well. I don’t want that to happen, and so it is another reason why the UK should not switch to a PR system.
What should I ask Nate Silver?
Yes, I will be doing another Conversation with Nate, based in part on his new and forthcoming book On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything (I have just started it, but so far it is very good, dealing with issues of poker and also risk-taking more generally).
Here is my previous Conversation with Nate Silver. And please note I am not looking to ask him about the election. So what should I ask?
With immigration, perceptions matter more than reality
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column. Rather than work through the argument, which requires you to read the whole column, I’ll just reproduce the most trollish part:
When I am in a foreign city and in search of interesting food, I have a trick: In which neighborhood, I ask the locals, am I most likely to get murdered? In Stockholm, Rinkeby was the answer, even though many of the people I asked had never been.
So I went to Rinkeby, which is mostly non-White and most notably Somalian. There were Yemeni, Ethiopian, Persian and other restaurants. (I had a good chicken mandi at one called Maida.) I felt safe the entire time, and saw plenty of solo women, including some blonde Swedes, walking leisurely along the main street, as well as many women with head coverings. I saw a Western Union office and a driving school, signs that people have some funds to send away or invest in a car.
I hope to write a longer post on immigration for you all soon.
13.9 percent less democracy?
Estonian edition:
After the Citizenship Act was enacted in 1992, 90% of ethnic-Estonians automatically became citizens while only 8-10% of non-Estonians gained citizenship. This is due to a law that granted citizenship to those who were living in Estonia before 1940, which was the year of Soviet annexation. [3] Because of the law, those that moved or were born in Estonia after 1940 during Soviet times had to apply for citizenship. New numbers show that ‘as of April 2012, 93,774 persons (6.9% of the population) remain stateless, while approximately 95,115 (7% of the population) have chosen Russian citizenship as an alternative to statelessness’. [4] Because many Russian-speakers have not been able to gain citizenship, this combined 13.9% of the population does not have the right to participate in Estonian democracy.
Here is more detail. I believe in 1992, during the first election, about forty percent of the resident, age-relevant population was not eligible to vote. I am not sure what the percentages are right now, but I do know the same basic system continues.
I do not per se object to these policies (fear the Russian bear), while noting I do not have enough information to assess all the trade-offs involved. Nonetheless it is interesting how much attention the Hungarian and Polish democratic “deviations” receive, relative to this one. An EU country in fully good standing around the world, on the basis of ethnicity, denies a significant portion of its longstanding residents the right to vote.
Two further points. First, you have to worry about this issue, as a Russian ethnic, unless your ancestors arrived before 1940. So the worry here is not just about recent arrivals, but it is quite possible that your grandparents were born in Estonia, maybe even great-grandparents. Second, ethnic Russians do have a path to normal Estonian citizenship, but it is difficult, especially the language requirement, which I am told is very tough.
I heard Russian a great deal walking through the streets of Tallinn, and most of all at the ballet. I have seen estimates that one-quarter of the Estonian population is ethnic Russian, and in the major city it is surely more than that.
Garett Jones, telephone!
Europe sentences to ponder
Back then, Europeans embodied environmental advocacy, self-actualization, self-expression and other values described by the University of Michigan political scientist Ronald Inglehart as “post-materialist.” Europeans actually used that term. They were proud of it. Today, European politics — and French politics above all — is crudely materialistic. The most explosive issues of the past few elections have been purchasing power, the price of diesel, the age of retirement and the shortage of housing (often taken by migrants awaiting asylum hearings). Europe’s preoccupations are closer to the 18th-century world of bread riots than to the 20th-century one of Save the Whales.
Alice Evans on Nordic gender egalitarianism
So what’s the connection between hierarchy and patriarchy? It is my contention that if everyone is equal, it is much more acceptable for women to get to the top. No one is special. ‘Leaders’ are not due unique perks, privileges or power. Queuing by the roadside, they board the bus like commoners. Since everyone is respected, it is much more permissible for (low status) women to become politicians, clerics and bosses. What’s there to envy? The status gap is meagre. The rest of society acts as a reverse dominance coalition – keeping her power, esteem and ego in check.
By contrast, in hierarchical institutions, where status gaps loom large, it would be enormously unsettling for a (low status) woman to command prestige. If men must always bow and let her first speak first, it may grate their egos. Even for men who are perfectly supportive of female employment or gender equality in abstract, it might still be uncomfortable to literally kow-tow. The larger the hierarchy, the more distressing it may be to see a woman soar…
My theory helps explain why Scandinavian countries were quick to elect female leaders and share childcare. It also explains why management and politics remain so male-dominated in hierarchical Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Russia and Nigeria.
Here is the full post, and here is Alice’s more recent post on what paintings can tell us about British patriarchy.
Economic Freedom, Even More Important Than You Think!
Economic freedom, as measured by say the Fraser Institute’s EF Index correlates highly with GDP per capita. Alvarez, Geloso and Scheck show that once you take into account the fact that dictators lie, the correlation is even higher!
SSRN: The literature connecting economic freedom indexes to income levels and growth generally points in the direction of a positive association. In this paper, we argue that this finding is a highly conservative as the data is heavily biased against finding any effects. The bias emerges as a result of the tendency of dictatorial regimes to overstate their GDP level. Dictatorships also tend to have lower scores of economic freedom. This downwardly biases any estimations of the relation between income and economic freedom. In this paper, we use recent corrections to GDP numbers — based on nighttime light intensity — to estimate the bias. We find that the true effects of economic freedom at its component on income levels are between 1.1 and 1.33 times greater than commonly estimated. For economic growth, the bias is far smaller and only appears to be relevant for some individual components such as size of government and property rights.
Thomas Schelling meets LLMs?
Drawing on political science and international relations literature about escalation dynamics, we design a novel wargame simulation and scoring framework to assess the escalation risks of actions taken by these agents in different scenarios. Contrary to prior studies, our research provides both qualitative and quantitative insights and focuses on large language models (LLMs). We find that all five studied off-the-shelf LLMs show forms of escalation and difficult-to-predict escalation patterns. We observe that models tend to develop arms-race dynamics, leading to greater conflict, and in rare cases, even to the deployment of nuclear weapons. Qualitatively, we also collect the models’ reported reasonings for chosen actions and observe worrying justifications based on deterrence and first-strike tactics.
That is from a new paper by Juan-Pablo Rivera, et.al., via the excellent Ethan Mollick. Do note that these recommended tactics are for the U.S., so perhaps the LLMs simply are telling us that America should be more hawkish.
Accelerating India’s Development
What will India look like in 2047? Combining projections of economic growth with estimates of the elasticity of outcomes with respect to growth, Karthik Muralidharan in Accelerating India’s Development reports:
Even with a strong GDP per capita growth rate of 6 per cent, projections for 2047 paint a sobering picture if we maintain our current course. While India’s infant mortality is projected to halve from 27 per 1000 births to 13 in 2047, it will still be well above China’s current rate of 8. Child stunting will only decrease from 35.5 to 25 per cent, which is only a 10.5 percentage point or 30 per cent reduction in nearly 25 years. In rural India, 16 per cent of children in Class 5 will still not be able to read at a Class 2 level, and 55 per cent of them will still not be able to do division at the Class 3 level.
Bear in mind that this is assuming an optimistic 6% growth rate in GDP per capita. Even more telling is that if growth increased to 8%, infant mortality would only fall to 10 per 1000 (instead of 13). Growth is great. It’s the single most important factor but it’s not everything. If India can double the elasticity of infant mortality with respect to growth, for example, then at the same 6% growth rate infant mortality would fall to just 6 per 1000 by 2047–that’s millions of lives saved. The big argument of Muralidharan’s Accelerating India’s Development is that India can get more development from the same level of growth by increasing the total factor productivity of the state.
There are many “big think” books on growth–Landes’ Wealth and Poverty of Nations, Acemoglu and Robinson’s The Narrow Corridor, Koyama and Rubin’s How the World Became Rich–but these books are primarily historical and descriptive. The big think books don’t tell you how to develop. Create institutions to strike “a delicate and precarious balance between state and society” isn’t much of a guide to development. Accelerating India’s Development is different.
“Accelerating” opens with two excellent chapters on the political economy of politicians and bureaucrats, outlining the constraints any reforms must navigate. It concludes with two chapters on the future, including ideas like ranked choice voting, representing its aspirations. It’s in-between the constraints and the aspirations, however, that Accelerating India’s Development is unique. I know of no other book that offers such a detailed, analytical, and comprehensive examination and evaluation of a country’s institutions and processes.
Muralidharan’s recommendations are often based on his own twenty years of research, especially in education, health and welfare, and when not based on his own research Muralidharan has read everyone and everything. Yet, he offers not a laundry list but a well-thought out, analytic, set of recommendations that are grounded on political and economic realities.
To give just one example, India’s bureaucracy is far over-paid relative to India’s GDP per capita or wages in the private sector. With wages too high, the bureaucracy is too small–a reflection of the concentrated benefits (wages to government workers), diffuse costs (delivering services to citizens) problem. Lowering wages for government workers is a non-starter but Muralidharan argues persuasively that it is possible to hire new workers from local communities at prevailing wages on renewable contracts. The Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), for example, is India’s main program for delivering early childhood education. There are 1.35 million anganwadi centers (AWCs) across India and typically a single anganwadi worker is responsible for both nutrition and pre-school education but they spend most of their time on paperwork!
A simple, scalable way to improve early childhood education is to add a second worker to AWCs to focus on preschool education….In a recent study, my co-authors and I found that adding an extra, locally hired, early-childhood care and education facilitators to anganwadis in Tamil Nadu doubled daily preschool instructional time…we found large gains in students’ maths, language and executive function skills. We also found a significant reduction in child stunting and malnutrition…We estimate the social return on this investment was around thirteen times the cost….the ECCE facilitators typically had only a Class 10 or Class 12 qualification and received only one week of training, and were still highly effective.
The example illustrates Muralidharan’s methods. First, the recommendation is based on a large, credible, multi-year study run in India with the cooperation of the government of Tamil Nadu. Second, the study is chosen for the book because it fits Muralidharan’s larger analysis of India’s problems, India has too few government workers which leads to high potential returns, yet the workers are paid too much so these returns are fiscally unachievable. But hiring more workers on the margin, at India’s-prevailing wages, is feasible. India has lots of modestly-educated workers so the program can scale–this is not a study about adding AI-driven computers to Delhi schools under the management of IIT trained educators, a program which would be subject to the heroes aren’t replicable problem. The program is also politically feasible because it leaves rents in place and by hiring lots of workers, even at low wages, it generates its own political support. Finally, note that India’s ICDS is the largest early childhood development program in the world so improving it has the potential to make millions of lives better. Which is why I have called Muralidharan the most important economist in the world.
One of the reasons state capacity in India is so low is premature load bearing. Imagine if the 19th-century U.S. government had attempted to handle everything today’s U.S. government does—this is the situation in India. When State Capacity/Tasks < 1, what should be done? In premature imitation, Rajagopalan and I advocate for reducing Tasks–an idea best represented by Ed Glaeser’s quip that “A country that cannot provide clean water for its citizens should not be in the business of regulating film dialogue.” Accelerating India’s Development focuses on increasing State Capacity but without being anti-market. In fact, Muralidharan proposes making the state more effective by leveraging markets more extensively.
Indian policy should place a very high priority on expanding the supply of high-quality service providers, regardless of whether they are in the public or private sector.
Hence, Muraldiharan wants to build on India’s remarkably vibrant private schools and private health care with ideas like vouchers and independent ratings. Free to choose but free to choose in an information-rich environment. My own inclinations would be to push markets and also infrastructure more–we still need to get to that 6% growth! But I have few quibbles with what is in the book.
Accelerating India’s Development is an exceptionally rich and insightful book. Its comprehensive analysis and innovative recommendations make it an invaluable resource. I will undoubtedly reference it in future discussions and writings. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding and improving life in the world’s largest democracy.
Claims about Africa and its politics
From Ken Opalo:
A common misperception economic policies in African states tend to be statist, far-Left, or anti-market. This is not supported by the data (see examples of Kenya, Nigeria, Cote d’Ivoire, and South Africa below). In actual fact, most governments in the region tend to be eager adopters of allegedly apolitical “best practices” that are essentially center-right economic orthodoxy. If you add to this their social policies, the modal African government is essentially Center-right. What these countries often fail on is implementation (partially because said policies are seldom useful in context and/or due to weak state capacity).
And this:
Third, the lack of governing experience and decades of state repression have led to a perversive anti-statist discourse and politics on the African Left. Among Leftist intellectuals, the colonial origins of the African state has been used as a reason to perpetually delegitimize state-building (many of the same intellectuals suffered state repression). In this rendering, the African state can never overcome the original sin of colonial origin; and should be abolished and replaced with a Pan-African state (which presumably would be better at deploying coercion and providing public goods and services). At the same time, many economically-ascendant Africans who are broadly sympathetic to Leftist politics harbor anti-statist sentiments when it comes to the economy and tend to overstate the statist origins of African economic underdevelopment — this partially reflects the ideological hold of economic orthodoxy in the region. The reality, of course, is that African countries are terribly under-governed. Data on security and law enforcement, registration of births and deaths, education attainment, taxation, expenditure absorption, economic regulation, etc. all point to the fact that the contemporary African state is too small and too weak to meet the challenges of modern economics and politics.
Here is much more. I am not sure how much the left- vs. right-wing framing applies to Africa at all — sometimes I think the better category is “prioritizes things going well, or not,” as part of the author’s remarks would seem to indicate.
What is Newsworthy? Theory and Evidence
We study newsworthiness in theory and practice. We focus on situations in which a news outlet observes the realization of a state of the world and must decide whether to report the realization to a consumer who pays an opportunity cost to consume the report. The consumer-optimal reporting probability is monotone in a proper scoring rule, a statistical measure of the amount of “news” in the realization relative to the consumer’s prior. We show that a particular scoring rule drawn from the statistics literature parsimoniously captures key patterns in reporting probabilities across several domains of US television news. We argue that the scoring rule can serve as a useful control variable in settings where a researcher wishes to test for bias in news reporting. Controlling for the score greatly lessens the appearance of bias in our applications.
That is a new paper from Luis Armona, Matthew Gentzkow, Emir Kamenica, and Jesse M. Shapiro. I take this to mean the actual bias is more toward surprising news than negative news per se? Via Paul Novosad.
My Conversation with Velina Tchakarova
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Founder of the consultancy FACE, Velina is a geopolitical strategist guiding businesses and organizations to anticipate the outcomes of global conflicts, shifting alliances, and bleeding edge technologies on the world stage.
In a globe-trotting conversation, Tyler and Velina start in the Balkans and then head to Russia, China, North Korea, and finally circle back to Putin’s interest in the Baltics. She gives her take on whether the Balkan Wars still matter today, the future of Bulgarian nationalism, what predicts which Eastern European countries will remain closer to Russia, why China will not attack Taiwan, Putin’s next move after Ukraine, where a nuclear weapon is most likely to be used next, how she sources intel, her unique approach to scenario-planning, and more.
Here is one excerpt on a matter of great importance:
COWEN: Maybe we’ll come back to Bulgaria, but let me try some questions about the broader world. Why is it you think China will not attack Taiwan? They claim it as theirs, and arguably, in five to ten years, they’ll be able to neutralize our submarine advantage from the US with underwater drones and surveillance of our submarine presence. At that point, why don’t they just move on Taiwan and try to take it?
TCHAKAROVA: Well, I do understand that there is a lot of analysis coming out right now, especially on behalf of the military experts, not only in the United States but also in other parts of the world, pointing to this realistic scenario that we may see a military attack by China on Taiwan not later than 2027. And why 2027? Because it is being anticipated as the year when China will be able to catch up militarily with the United States.
I do not share this assessment. I just don’t see why China will have to take such a big risk in achieving something that it can achieve in a much smarter and more efficient way. What do I mean by that? I call this approach “death by a thousand cuts.” That would mean that China could spend a little bit longer in a slow but steady political, social, economic, and societal penetration of Taiwan. We could argue it’s the old Soviet playbook. It could be done in a more subtle way, using plausible deniability.
Taiwan is still the most successful democracy in the Indo-Pacific. That means, also, it is vulnerable to this kind of penetration, where you can practically use agents provocateurs on the ground. You can buy up a lot of institutional or individual players. You can start doing all this subversion process in a longer timeframe, but it could bring about bigger success than actually risking military intervention, which is not giving you, I would say, even a 50–50 chance of success.
The terrain of Taiwan, if we compare it with the most sophisticated war that’s going on right now, is much more difficult. You have a very, very limited window to attack. In the case of Taiwan, this window of opportunity is probably limited only to two periods in the whole year, which, of course, is also known by everyone in the region. That particularly means the defense of Taiwan. You have a window of opportunity in April and then in October, so you cannot attack at any time in the year.
It is a sophisticated military attack that cannot be conducted on the whole of the island. Even though China is catching up militarily right now, I think that the mindset of this Chinese leadership — the way the Chinese leadership is actually conducting strategy — does contradict such risky endeavor, again because time is on China’s side. China only needs to really prepare this sum of minor actions in a longer period of time. At least, this is what I would actually do as a strategist, which would promise a much better percentage of success than, like I said, an adventurous military attack.
Now, we may argue that under unanticipated circumstances for the political leadership — think of a situation where the political stability in China is shaken, where the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, is somehow put into a corner to take a very, let’s say, ad hoc decision on the matter because of certain circles of the hawks, of the military hawks. Of course, we have this possibility as well. It could be a black swan event, something that has happened in China, and this makes him take this decision in order to draw the attention away from internal problems.
Foreign policy adventures are always gathering public support. It’s not 100 percent to be excluded, but in my scenario, I would actually point to, as I explained, this death-by-a-thousand-cuts approach rather than a military attack on Taiwan.
COWEN: Are we now in a world where the laws of war are basically obsolete?
It is worth repeating that issues of foreign policy are very much the most important issues. And here is Velina on Twitter.
Does visiting South Africa make you more right-wing or more left-wing?
Perhaps “both” is the correct answer?
The right-wing tendencies are easiest to explain. South Africa is obviously much wealthier than the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, and of course Westerners play a larger role in its history and also in its present. You can put different glosses on that, but a variety of those paths lead to right-wing conclusions. The left-wing lessons are more novel to ponder, here are a few:
1. Following the removal of apartheid, a black middle class and upper class arose fairly quickly. That testifies to the importance of environment, opportunity, and circumstance. Of course most of the blacks in South Africa still lack adequate opportunity, most of all because of poor education and also sometimes because of poor location within the country, a legacy from segregated apartheid times. Overall, visiting the country causes one to upgrade the importance of opportunity, and to recognize that bad circumstances for talented people can continue for a very long time.
2. Post-apartheid economic performance has been disappointing, and economic inequalities have risen not declined. That suggests more capitalism can exacerbate economic inequality, even as political inequalities are eased.
3. Apartheid was enforced with a remarkably small number of police, per capita much less than most Western countries at the time. That might suggest a kind of Marxian and Foucauldian view that oppressive systems take on a force of their own, through norms and expectations, and are harder to dismantle than an analysis of simple coercion might indicate. The disappointments of post-apartheid South Africa hardly refute that suggestion, as those earlier norms and expectations are by no means entirely gone.
4. In the new, non-apartheid South Africa, sometimes class appears to be far more important than race per se. A certain number of blacks have been slotted into the upper classes, through their business successes, but the all-important role of class continues very much as before. Tthat point appears more Marxian than contemporary leftist, but Marx still is on the left.
5. You can see how much of South African history has been shaped by the roles of gold and diamonds in their economy. That again points in Marxian directions, more than today’s left. In South Africa, the means of production really mattered.
6. What is the ideal of color-blindedness supposed to mean there, after so many centuries of color mattering so much and in so many formal ways? They even still call one group “Coloureds.” Would it be so wrong to suspect SA color-blindedness advocates of somehow missing the point, and asking for something that is both illusory and unobtainable?
I am not sure how much I agree with all of these, only that they are ways I can imagine visiting South Africa and coming away more rather than less left-wing.
What else?
Are Older People Aware of Their Cognitive Decline? Misperception and Financial Decision-Making
We investigate whether older people correctly perceive their cognitive decline and the potential financial consequences of misperception. First, we show that older people tend to underestimate their cognitive decline. We then show that those experiencing a severe decline but unaware of it are more likely to suffer wealth losses. These losses largely reflect decreases in financial wealth and are mainly experienced by wealthier people who were previously active on the stock market. Our findings support the view that financial losses among older people unaware of their cognitive decline are the result of bad financial decisions, not of rational disinvestment strategies.
That is from a newly published JPE paper by Fabrizio Mazzonna and Franco Peracchi. Here are some less gated versions of the paper.