democratic politics creates difficult knowledge problems for modern societies. By granting political parties exclusive authority over the production of goods and services, by preventing voters from comparing the effects of parties’ policies, and by requiring voters to evaluate the consequences of policies without a common metric for comparing disparate goods, democratic politics exacerbates the effects of ignorance on human affairs.
Pointer from Peter Boettke. This is an issue on which progressives and libertarians talk past one another. I think that for progressives what is important is that the political process has the potential to work well, while we know that markets fail to realize the potential of perfect competition under perfect information. For example, I read Steven Teles as saying that the problem with democracy is not that it inherently faces knowledge problems but that certain institutional characteristics, such as the Senate cloture rule, are at fault.
When the issue is government vs. the market, frankly, I have a hard time giving a good account of the progressive point of view. I keep hearing it as “markets fail, therefore government works,” and I know that is an uncharitable interpretation.
I keep hearing it as “markets fail, therefore government works,” and I know that is an uncharitable interpretation.
Is “markets fail in ways that make the rich richer, therefore government as faulty as it is must regulate markets” any more charitable?
Governments fail, use government? It is the realization that markets and government are a false dichotomy, and that markets are created, established, tailored by and through government and if government is not creating a level playing field for markets, markets are creating an unlevel playing field through government.
The idea that democratic politics creates knowledge problems does seem wildly overemphasized. The main bugs for both democracy and markets are their greatest features. Democracy gains legitimacy by including stakeholders in the decision process, but this is inherently very inefficient. Markets empower individual decision making, usually leaving out related stakeholders, but this is inherently very efficient. Knowledge may be a factor, but not a primary one.
I think that a different Government structure would help with this. When the USA Government just kept the peace and defend the country the current structure was fine but with Government now doing so much more it might work better if we broke up the tasks and elected Governors by task.
A Governor of benevolence to run SS, Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, TANF etc. The elected Governor would propose a tax for this before the election
A Governor of national defense who would be the head of the military and would come with his tax and budget.
A Governor of transportation with his tax and budget.
A Governor of EPA with his tax and budget.
A President who would declare war and have some power over the others and run law enforcement.
Lord has it correct. The progressive perspective – espoused by Ha-Joon Chang, Dani Rodrik, Robert Prasch and others – hinges on a rejection of the government-market dichotomy and the idea that markets are inherently political institutions.
The progressive point of view is actually easy to articulate charitably.
Progressives tend to be verbally fluent, cooperative, and good at building coalitions based upon emotional consensus. These social abilities allow them to flourish in bureaucracies and elections.
Thus, they favor an expansive role for the government. It is an organization that favors people like them and ideals they hold.
The libertarian disfavor for government and favor for the market is similar. Mathematically gifted, competitive, and adversarial types do well in the market and badly in bureaucracies and elections. Thus they favor the market, as they believe the market advances the ideals they hold.
That’s a plausible explanation, at least.
Sam:
As Jeff R. states, your explanation of the progressive point of view is “plausible, at least”. But I suspect it is incomplete and therefore misleading. Your statement, “Thus, they favor an expansive role for the government.”, is a hint as to how it is incomplete and misleading.
In your context, “government” differs from “markets” in only one very important respect – “government” is allowed coercive powers, while “markets” are not. Markets must survive and thrive solely on the basis of applying persuasion to induce cooperation.
If “progressives” are indeed “verbally fluent, cooperative and good at building coalitions” as you assert, AND their ideas have broad merit, they should be extremely well suited to operate within the market construct – favoring and applying persuasion, rather than coercion to achieve cooperation.
Instead, “Thus, they favor an expansive role for the [coercive power of] government.” Why is that? Is it a lack of patience on the part of progressives?
I wouldn’t say it is a lack of patience on the part of progressives, I’d say that is evidence of Mr. Kling’s axes.
Progressives do not value freedom from coercion. Many of them do not see themselves as fully distinct from the group. The idea of coercion requires the idea of separate individuals who maintain separate agency.
Think of highly emotionally labile people you know, and consider their ability to trade on public markets.
A system governed by impersonal interaction between anonymous actors mediated solely through numbers is as frustrating to them as navigating a high school girl’s clique would be to us.
If progressives are more empathetic, wouldn’t that position them to be much better at predicting the effects of a lot of policy, provided you are trying to maximize positive human emotions? Like, if you say “how much redistribution is welfare maximizing?”, then you are engaged in this really fuzzy process of trying to figure out how sad taking x dollars from a rich guy makes him and how happy giving it to y poor guys makes them and how less likely is the rich guy to work now and how much more likely are the poor guys to improve their family’s human capital and etc. A strong sense of empathy and a good understanding of human emotion would be way more valuable trying to navigate all that than math skills.
Maybe progressives are more willing to tolerate large, redistributive government because they are more comfortable and better at thinking through it’s effects. More logical people throw up their hands at the fuzziness of it all and reject it as inexact. Neither is clearly right or wrong — the inability to come up with a clear answer is precisely what offends libertarian types.
I said they were driven by empathy, not mathematics.
If it makes them feel, it is important. If a celebrity dies, they cry. If a million people die, it is but a statistic.
The AR-15 is scary looking, and thus must be banned, even though it is used in almost no crime. The cheap Taurus semi-automatic is small, and thus attracts no notice.
As one of their icons said, “Don’t think, Barack, feel!”
However illogical we may find them, we must acknowledge that they are far better at spreading their message than we are. We are good at numbers, but they can raise a billion dollars for a campaign.
Right, and I’m pointing out that while empathy is bad for some public policy problems (those with a lot of established and counterintuitive facts, like gun control) it’s good for others (those where there are a lot of unknown or unknowable facts related to human nature and human feeling, like redistribution). A logical person without much empathy will reject as unsolvable some problems an empathetic person can work through very easily, and vice versa. This is obviously true, and I’m just saying it’s also true in the public policy realm. Sometimes there aren’t enough stats or good enough models to base a conclusion off of, but where a coldly rational person would say “then an educated conclusion is impossible,” a more empathetic one might say, “nah, I’ve got a pretty good sense of how people will feel about and react to this policy. It’ll work!” And a lot of times, for the same reason they can solve the “how to be elected to homecoming court” problem but the less empathetic person can’t, they’ll be right!
You are saying “liberals are more empathetic” but only wanting to focus on how that makes them worse than you (“they adopt some policies that feel good but which we know are bad”). I think the ways it makes them better than you are much more profitable to explore, because we are playing the “take the most charitable view” game. And the most charitable view of liberal empathy is “the empathetic person’s ability to organize, work with, and understand large groups of people may give them correct public policy intuitions I can’t see along with all the dumb ones I can refute.” So, as a concrete example liberals tut-tutted at the advice free market economists gave soviet politicians in the early 90’s, namely to privatize first and as soon as possible, worry about institutions second, and deal with distributive issues third. In retrospect, the liberal’s gut instinct that that would lead to a corrupt kleptocracy proved pretty correct. I can look at that and say that even a blind hog finds a few acorns or, more profitably, I can look at that and say that 1. I should be more agnostic about my views on free markets and 2. I should be more willing to listen to liberals. The second road is more profitable!
sam:
Again, a very good, very plausible explanation. Your, “Think of highly emotionally labile[?] people you know, and consider their ability to trade on public markets.” statement was perfect – emotion-biased investment/trading does not generally end well. (I might add that emotion-biased legislation doesn’t generally end well either.)
What remains a curiosity is that emotional (empathetic, compassionate) folks are not absent reasoning power, any more than reasoning folks are absent empathy and compassion. Progressives I’ve exchanged ideas with (good naturedly) seem to think reasoning folks are indeed absent capacity for empathy/compassion – that the two traits are mutually exclusive. Puzzling.
The uncharitable view of liberal empathy is that humans did not evolve to feel empathy in order to solve problems; empathy exists because it helped our ancestors build and strengthen coalitions and outcompete other coalitions to ascend the status hierarchies of their tribal/feudal world.
There are two kinds of empathy: cognitive empathy (being able to gauge others’ thoughts or perspectives) and affective empathy (being able to gauge others’ emotions and attitudes). Cognitive empathy helps us guess what our adversaries are thinking and perhaps anticipate their actions; it is this capacity which made Robert E. Lee a great military leader and Boris Spassky a great chess player. It has tremendous value in the modern economy for entrepreneurs and managers, helping them predict what new products and services consumers (many of whom will have much different tastes and preferences from their own) might want to buy and how much they’d be willing to pay for them.
Affective empathy isn’t actually very useful for solving problems of any real complexity. It’s primary usefulness is enhancing group cohesion. We praise people who demonstrate affective empathy merely because we recognize that they’d make a good and loyal ally, and we want to signal to our existing allies that they should empathize more with us. Affective empathy is thus reduced to a crude Machiavellian tool for attaining (and retaining) power and social status. Liberals have much of this latter kind of empathy and somewhat less of the former.
Yes? No? I just cranked that out in order to give myself an excuse not to do any more work so late on a Friday afternoon. Sounds good, though, doesn’t it?
Thanks, Jeff R. for stickin’ around late on a Friday afternoon – your explanation aided my understanding.
Gotta say though, from your descriptions, the affectatious form of empathy you described sounds pretty much like fraud. Particularly so when it is the basis for applying coercive (rather than persuasive) methods to induce cooperation.
How about “there is evidence that both markets and governments have problems and sometimes fail. For any given policy, which is the lesser of two evils is an empirical question on which we disagree.”
…but which only government can decide.
Right, which is why we want to try to create a government that incentivizes answering the question correctly vs a government that has our preferred but possibly wrong answer baked into it, if that makes sense. What I mean is that where rational people disagree about something other than fundemantal values, creating a government that works out the right answer is enormously better than forcing the answer we think is right onto the government. That’s why I think libertarians should focus less on reforms that limit how government can answer policy questions and more on reforms that improve the government’s ability to answer questions (prediction markets, say).
That may work for individual conversations (though not necessarily: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Aumann's_agreement_theorem).
But if most folks were genuinely calm, empirical, and informed, I think it’s unlikely that disagreement would be so similar across policies.
Making a government that rewards answering policy questions correctly doesn’t depend on everyone being logical, anymore than making a market that rewards pricing wheat correctly depends on everyone being logical. It just depends on trying to, as much as possible, incentivize enacting good policy.
Which is obviously very hard, but I am still convinced, for example, that across a range of policies democracy, which weakly incentivizes good policy by tying it to reelection, does a better job than you or I could. We are just imagining which policy we personally think is correct, we have even less incentive than politicians to get the right answer and don’t have access to the wisdom of crowds. Democracy has both, albeit neither works nearly as well as we would like or as a market would. I just wish more market oriented people took “democracy doesn’t function as well as a market” to mean “let’s use the market to make more political decisions, then” which follows, rather than “well then let’s always favor smaller government when making political decisions,” which doesn’t.
Sorry, Dan, I just realized you were responding to my first comment, not my second one.
Yes, people aren’t logical, but taking the most positive view of those who disagree, especially when we are disagreeing with large groups, means picking out the smartest and most logical arguments people in the group are making.
“…in the long run the aggregate of decisions of individual businessmen, exercising individual judgment in a free economy, even if often mistaken, is less likely to do harm than the centralized decisions of a government; and certainly the harm is likely to be counteracted faster.”
— John Cowperthwaite, Hong Kong financial secretary,
1961-1971