Results for “small group theory” 49 found
What do the Iraqi insurgents want?
Rather than employing the classic rebel tactic of provoking the foreign
forces to use clumsy and excessive force and kill civilians, [the Iraqi rebels] are
cutting out the middleman and killing civilians indiscriminately
themselves, in addition to more predictable targets like officials of
the new government. Bombings have escalated in the last two weeks, and
on Thursday a bomb went off in heavy traffic in Baghdad, killing 21
people.
More generally, the insurgency does not appear to have put forward any program or unifying vision; read more here.
I have no particular expertise on the empirics, but from a game-theoretic point of view I can think of seven possible "strategies" at work:
1. Chaos is seen as a path to a new Sunni dictatorship.
2. The goal is not to impose a particular solution on Iraq, but rather to punish the U.S. for intervening, by making matters look bad.
3. The attacks are fundraising events, just as one might hold a cocktail party for donors. They help the rebels attain focality and make the headlines; the attacks are not domestic political tactics per se.
4. Deliberate amorphousness is the best strategy against a determined and powerful United States. U.S. public opinion must not be able to identify a discernible enemy. Perhaps the U.S. is most likely to quit Iraq if we view the Iraqis as "crazy," or "not deserving of freedom." We are less likely to stop thinking about a visible opponent, such as bin Laden.
5. Unlike Bob Lucas’s modeled rational expectations agents, Iraqi insurgents do not hold the "true economic model" in their heads. Young men at war are notoriously overconfident. Just as some al Qaeda members thought the U.S. was a weaker opponent than the Soviet Union, the Iraqi insurgency has some similarly crazy view of the world. What we perceive as failure simply does not deter them much.
6. The insurgency is smaller than we think. The violent actions we observe are the "noise" of a minority within a minority. There is no rational explanation, but we had underestimated how much havoc a small group can wreak.
7. The insurgents are simply mad (how’s that for high-powered game theory?), read Jane Galt.
Unfortunately, all of these are possible, and in various combinations. Nor do they point to any common direction in terms of policy recommendations for a response.
Sex and the single woman
Women living with their male partners are more likely to give birth to boys than are single women. The “marriage effect” (strictly speaking cohabiting effect) is small (51.5% boys in the cohabiting group versus 49.9% in the single group) but statistically significant. The marriage effect combined with an increase in the number of single mothers may be large enough to explain the decline in male births observed in many developed countries.
The cads versus dads theory had predicted the opposite result. Cads should have more sons than dads because big cads, by their very nature, have good male genes that are ideally passed on to little cads.
Earlier Steve noted that high status parents are more likely to have sons which makes evolutionary sense because succesful males are more likely to have children than unsuccesful ones while females are likely to have children regardless, so you want to specialize in boys when times are good and in girls when times are bad. The “marriage effect” could be an expectational consequence of the same logic. If women “know” that their male partners are unlikely to be around they know that they are more likely to have low-status in the future and thus should have girls.
I have not read the original research but it is easy to go wrong. Since girls cause divorce (and presumably also separation) it is critical to measure cohabitation before conception in order to distinguish “cohabiting causes boys” from “girls cause separation.” The research claims to measure cohabitation before “birth/conception” but retrospective bias could easily cause mothers to say that the father left before the birth (or before the child’s sex was known).
Here is an article from The Economist, here is a New Scientist piece that emphasizes different factors and here is the original research ($)
Bootleggers and Baptists
The Arizona Daily Star reports that Nogales, Arizona will be opening a new state-of-the-art truck inspection station:
The governor touted the new Motor Carrier Inspection Station as a state-of-the-art facility that will improve homeland security while not slowing down international traffic between the United States and Mexico.
It gives state and U.S. federal officials a one-stop shop to inspect drivers’ immigration papers, the safety of their semi-trucks, and the quality and safety of cargo crossing into the country.
But a legal challenge hangs over the new facility:
Attorneys about to argue a federal lawsuit against the NAFTA plan allowing Mexican trucks into the United States aren’t satisfied. They will plead their case before the the U.S. Supreme Court on April 21.
The problem with the new station: It isn’t required to check emissions on incoming trucks.
That means they aren’t being held to the same standards as U.S. trucks and will only worsen air quality standards, said John Weissglass, the San Francisco-based attorney representing the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in the lawsuit. In 2002, the Teamsters, watchdog group Public Citizen, and environmental groups sued the U.S. Department of Transportation to stop the NAFTA plan, citing environmental concerns, which eventually forced the government to conduct a $1.8 million study looking at the plan’s environmental impact.
They say politics makes strange bedfellows, but the Teamsters and Public Citizen? Bruce Yandle of Clemson explains it with a theory he calls Bootleggers and Baptists. The bootleggers like prohibition because it gets rid of competitors. But a politican who wants to listen to the bootleggers needs a more high-minded cause to sell to the public. The Baptists give the politicians cover with the argument that drink is from the devil–it leads to social unrest, unemployment, higher social costs and so on. Same with Mexican trucks. Who can justify keeping out lower cost Mexican trucks just to keep the wages of Teamsters high. Enter Public Citizen. This isn’t about greed. It’s about keeping American air clean.
The appeal of self-righteousness partnering with self-interest also explains why companies often support regulation of their industry. They’ll claim a concern for safety or the environment but often such regulations fall more heavily on smaller competitors and will drive them out of business.
There’s nothing wrong with politicians having both high-minded and low-minded motives. The real problem is that the bootleggers always push the form of the regulation to create higher profits.
NAFTA was supposed to allow Mexican truck companies to compete in the US. We’re still waiting. Before the environmental issue, the alleged worry of the Teamsters was safety. My take on that claim is here.
Is deliberative democracy a good idea?
Richard Posner says no. The deliberative democracy idea is pushed by such scholars as Bruce Ackerman and James Fishkin. They call for the following:
In our soon-to-be-released book, we offer a new way of thinking about democratic reform, proposing a new national holiday–Deliberation Day. It would replace Presidents’ Day, which does no service to the memories of Washington and Lincoln, and would be held two weeks before major national elections. Registered voters would be called together in neighborhood meeting places, in small groups of 15 and larger groups of 500, to discuss the central issues raised by the campaign. Each deliberator would be paid $150 for the day’s work of citizenship. To allow the business of the world to carry on and as many as possible to participate, the holiday would be a two-day affair. If Deliberation Day succeeded, everything else would change: the candidates, the media, the activists, the interest groups, the spin doctors, the advertisers, the pollsters, the fundraisers, the lobbyists, and the political parties. All would have no choice but to adapt to a more attentive and informed public. When the election arrived, the people would speak with a better chance of knowing what they wanted and which candidates were more likely to pursue the popular mandate.
Posner responds with his usual aplomb:
Reform does not well out of deliberation, but reflects passions and interests. Abolitionism, the suffrage movement, the civil rights movement, the opposition to the war in Vietnam, the rise of free-market ideology, welfare reform, and the gay-rights movement were not the product of discussion among voters debating on the model of the academic seminar (the implicit model, naturally, of academic reflection on the political process by the proponents of deliberative democracy, academics all). They were the product of moral and political entrepreneurs tapping into wells of discontent among minorities and eventually getting the attention of the politicians…
I have difficulty suppressing the uncharitable thought that there may be an element of bad faith in the deliberative-democracy movement generally (I do not mean in Ackerman and Fishkin particularly). I think that what motivates many deliberative democrats is not a love of democracy or a faith in the people, but a desire to change specific political outcomes, which they believe they could do through argument, if only anyone could be persuaded to listen, because they are masters of argumentation. I infer this secret agenda from the fact that most proponents of deliberative democracy advocate aggressive judicial review, which removes many issues from democratic control; are coy about indicating what policies they dislike but would accept; and are uncommonly fond of subjecting U.S. citizens to control by international organizations of questionable, and often of no, democratic pedigree. I sense a power grab by the articulate class whose comparative advantage is–deliberation.
My take: I would expect deliberative democracy to lead to greater conformity and a less efficient aggregation of information. Crowds can talk themselves into bad ideas very readily. The main purpose of democracy is to prevent very bad ideas and very bad leaders. We are more likely to resist such dangers in private, and through periodic and gradual evaluations, rather than in open public forums. I award the debate to Posner.
Thanks to www.politicaltheory.info for the link.