Category Archives: Libertarian Thought

Profile of Ragnar Frisch

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Co-winner of the first Nobel Prize in economics. The profile, by Arild Sæther and Ib E. Eriksen, is devastating. Frisch became an ardent supporter of central planning. The authors quote him writing

The blinkers will fall once and for all at the end of the 1960s (perhaps before). At this time the Soviets will have surpassed the US in industrial production. But then it will be too late for the West to see the truth. (Frisch 1961a)

To me, the moral of the story is that you can be very confident, highly respected, and completely wrong.

Government and Scale

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Don Boudreaux writes,

– the number of citizens per each of the 50 states in the U.S. is today, on average, 6,300,000 (or more than 27 time larger than in 1789);

– the average number of citizens represented by each of the 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives today is about 724,000 – meaning that the typical member of the U.S. House today represents a number of citizens 13 times larger than was represented by his or her counterpart in 1789;

– – the average number of citizens represented by each of the 100 members of the U.S. Senate today is 3,150,000 – meaning that the typical member of the U.S. Senate today represents a number of citizens 23 times larger than was represented by his or her counterpart in 1789.

For a long time, I have made an issue of this. I believe that as government scales up, it gets worse. My recent essay offered international evidence for this. I discuss it in the widely-unread Unchecked and Unbalanced. Michael Lotus and James Bennett in America 3.0 also suggest that a country with more states, each less populous but with more governing autonomy, would be a desirable future. Almost ten years ago, I wrote We Need 250 States.

The Medical Analogy

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Michael Huemer writes,

Voters, activists, and political leaders of the present day are in the position of medieval doctors. They hold simple, prescientific theories about the workings of society and the causes of social problems, from which they derive a variety of remedies–almost all of which prove either ineffectual or harmful. Society is a complex mechanism whose repair, if possible at all, would require a precise and detailed understanding of a kind that no one today possesses. Unsatisfying as it may seem, the wisest course for political agents is often simply to stop trying to solve society’s problems.

Pointer from Bryan Caplan. Similarly, in my almost-finished book on macro, I write,

From my perspective, the conventional structure of aggregate demand and aggregate supply offers nothing but a set of just-so stories. It is the equivalent of the ancient Greek theory of medicine which holds that health is governed by the four humors of black bile, yellow bile, phelgm, and blood.

Claude S. Fischer vs. Libertarianism

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He writes,

using the Human Development Index, which measures a population’s well-being in terms of health, education, and wealth. The HDI, corrected for internal distribution (the Bill Gates-makes-all-Americans-look-rich factor), is typically higher in OECD nations where governments are relatively large.

In fact, the HDI is very highly correlated with the Fraser index of economic freedom, and in that sense it supports libertarianism. I like to group countries by population size. Take countries with population size between 5 and 10 million. Of the top ten of these countries according to the Fraser Index, seven are also in the top 21 in the HDI. The only three that are not are Jordan (ranked 100th in HDI), United Arab Ameriates (ranked 41st), and Slovak Republic (35th).

Next, consider the 18 countries with a population over 76 million. The top three in terms of the Fraser index are the U.S., Germany, and Japan, and they are ranked 3rd, 5th, and 10th respectively in the HDI.

In an earlier essay, I suggested that large countries in general have poorer governance, as measured by the Fraser index. The HDI shows the same thing. Apart from the U.S., Germany, and Japan, the next highest-ranking large country in terms of the HDI is Russia, at 55th. 10 out the 18 largest countries are ranked 101 or worse in the HDI.

In fact, the correlation between the HDI and the Fraser index is sufficiently high that I could have written my essay using the HDI as my measure of governance and shown the same results: government tends to be poorer in countries with large populations, which is consistent with a libertarian view that centralized power is a bad thing.

Turning back to Fischer, the piece is not really worth reading, unless you enjoy grinding your teeth over another attack on libertarianism that is based on the idea that dislike of government is crazy and anti-social.

Suppose instead that we say that what libertarians oppose is the use of centralized, coercive power. Does that still make us seem crazy and anti-social? To me, it seems as if progressives appear to believe that centralized, coercive power is a great boon, an endless source of social betterment. Am I being uncharitable? Do they believe something else? Alternatively, if they do wish to extol the virtues of centralized, coercive power, am I really crazy for having doubts?

The Scourge of Communism

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Freedom House reports,

Eurasia has declined to the point where its political rights scores are lower than those of any other region. Russia’s authoritarian regime committed fresh outrages in 2013…It also employed bullying tactics to discourage neighboring countries from initialing agreements with the European Union.

I looked at this report on freedom in the world in light of my essay that used the Fraser Index of economic freedom as an indicator of the quality of governance. Economic freedom and political freedom do not always coincide. Hong Kong and Singapore rank near the top in terms of economic freedom, but they are only partly free in the Freedom House measure.

I used a two-factor model to explain the Fraser Index: country size (larger countries tend to have poorer scores) and national-average IQ (higher IQ tends to be correlated with higher scores).

Looking at the Freedom House index, a third factor stands out: Communist legacy. If you want a country not to be free, regardless of size of national-average IQ, give it a Communist government or a history of Communism.

There does exist a negative correlation between political freedom and size, in that the percentage of countries ranked free is higher than the percentage of the world’s population accounted for by countries that are ranked free. However, China may account for most of that negative correlation.

My guess is that if you want to find a country without political freedom, first look for a country with a Communist legacy. After you’ve gone through those, move on to countries with low national-average IQ. Once you have done that, I am not sure that population size will matter.

Jonathan Haidt Podcast

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With Russ Roberts. An excerpt:

if you expand the moral domain as I did and you are interested in group loyalty and respect for authority and the idea of making things sacred, boy, these things don’t make a lot of sense from reciprocal altruism. But they make perfect sense if you think about tribes competing with other tribes. And if you think as Darwin did that group cohesion matters when you have intergroup competition. So, what I’m saying here is that almost all human nature can be explained without group selection. We are 90% chimps. Chimps are not really group-selected. So, as Frans de Waal says, all the building blocks of human morality can be found in chimps. And I think almost all can. So that’s the 90% chimp. But I think that, beginning with Homo heidelbergensis, which is about 800,000 years ago, beginning with that species, which is thought first to tame fire, have campsites, hunt large game cooperatively, bring it back to the campsite, butcher it–well, this group probably also, they had spears. They probably also were engaged in intergroup conflict. And it’s this species that also begins to have cumulative cultural evolutions–the first signs of culture building on previous innovations. So, that I think was our Rubicon–Homo heidelbergensis, 800-500,000 years ago. So that opens up the possibility of true group selection aided by gene culture co-evolution. Now, bees are group selected. The bee doesn’t live or die based on its ability to outcompete other bees. Bees live and die based on the hive’s ability to prevail over other hives. So that’s what I mean by we are 10% bee.

Russ chimes in:

one of the things I think libertarians sometimes miss, which is our desire to be part of something larger than our self. I think the Left romanticizes, say, our democracy or political process and takes away some of the realities of it to make it look more appealing than it actually is. But I think libertarians have no ability, almost no ability, to even appreciate the idea of the body politic or collective decision-making. And I understand the harm of it, the dangers of it. But it seems to be an important part of our humanity in lots of ways. And for some people, their political persuasion is their religion; for other people, their sports is their religion; and for some folks, their literal religion is their religion.

Russ and I are both fans of Haidt’s work. See this review essay, where I stirred Haidt’s ideas around, ultimately leading to my e-book.

Radical Federalism Watch

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The Washington Times reports,

Venture capitalist Tim Draper of Silicon Valley has filed paperwork for a November ballot measure that would divide California into six states, calling the Golden State as presently constituted “too big and bloated.

I am mulling the idea for my next book (after the macro book). I am thinking of how to implement a radical form of federalism, so that the U.S. could be broken into states the size of Singapore or Norway.

My Case for Radical Federalism

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In this essay, I document the negative relationship between the population of a country and its economic freedom.

Overall, 43 percent of the small nations are in the highest group for economic freedom. Only 20 percent of the middle-sized nations are in that group. And just 17 percent of large nations have high levels of economic freedom.

After you read that essay, you might want to look at this version, where I use a controversial measure of national average IQ as an additional variable to predict economic freedom.

Think about what it might mean to have responsibility for something like Medicare or unemployment insurance devolved to the state level. Would someone who is born in Missouri and moves to Maryland be considered a citizen of Missouri who then is a guest worker in Maryland? When would that person become a citizen of Maryland? etc.

Gold-medal Misanthropy

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Jay P. Greene writes,

I hate the Olympics. I hate everything about them… their show-casing of murderous authoritarian regimes, their graft and corruption, their promotion of obscure sports that generate little genuine interest, their hypocritical claim of being non-commercial and non-political, their subordination of athletic excellence to soap-opera story-telling… everything.

Are there libertarians out there who love the Olympics? It occurs to me that anti-Olympics misanthropy might be correlated with anti-state misanthropy. It is true enough in my case.

Social Reasoning, Continued

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I’ve been stalking Mathew Lieberman on line, looking at videos and interviews and such. Also, a commenter found this journal article. I suppose I ought to just read his book, but I find his style somewhat annoying, so I hesitate. Anyway, here is an NPR interview.

if I’m being rejected from a group, how do I need to change my behavior or what I say or think in order to not be excluded or rejected from that group? It teaches me lessons about how to behave differently in the future. And because we can imagine the future, we can also use that preemptively. We can feel social pain at the threat of being excluded from a relationship or a group.

I do think that this is a very powerful motivator. Go back to Adam Smith. People want to feel high self-regard. But your self-regard depends on how you are regarded by others. Ideally, your tribe wants to nurture and protect you, because they love you and admire you. Worst case, your tribe wants to shun and expel you.

Some thoughts on what I might call the “tribal membership motivator.”

1. It is amazingly powerful. How else to explain fans of college sports or professional sports?

2. Do we need it for social glue? If we lacked this instinct, would we be unable to follow rules? If you only followed social norms when you made a rational calculation about the costs of getting caught cheating vs. the benefits of getting away with it, we probably end up in a world of Prisoners’ Dilemma games in which everyone constantly defects.

3. But the social brain also makes us vulnerable to exploitation. Examples would include men recruited to fight for warlords, individuals pledging loyalty to crime bosses, citizens manipulated by politicians, workers manipulated by bosses, and customers manipulates by salespeople.

4. Lieberman argues that the social brain is important in primates because of the long period in which infants are helpless. We need to be able to form strong connections with parents, or else we would not survive. Note how this circles back to the way in which many institutions try to tap into this primal attraction to parents by stepping into the role of substitute parent: religious organizations, schools, governments, and business hierarchies all exploit this to some degree.

5. Even if markets are effective in some objective sense, they do not provide people with a sense of familial protection and tribal belonging. Perhaps what libertarians need to do is build up the non-governmental substitutes for familial protection and tribal belonging in order to take some of the oxygen away from government. Of course, the other tribe, those evil bastids, is doing the opposite.