Category Archives: Three-Axes Model

The WaPo and the Train Terror Incident

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Yesterday, they put the story on page 7. They could not bear to move the story about the Cuban sustainable farmer off the front page to make room for it.

Today, they put it on the front page, with the headline “Train Suspect Known to be a Risk.” They focused their page one coverage on this aspect, and waited until the end of the story on the jump page to discuss the Americans and a Brit who overcame the terrorist.

I can only conclude that anything that smacks of Civilization vs. Barbarism is just too much for WaPo editors, or perhaps their readers, to bear.

Speaking of which, whether this “known risk” slipped through or not depends on the denominator. I mean, how many names are on this list of “terror risks”? Are we talking about 100, or are we talking about 10,000? If it’s 100, then, yes, the security forces should be able to keep tabs on them and not leave it up to unarmed heroes. On the other hand, if it’s 10,000, then the list has no tactical value, but it gives you an idea of what you are up against.

Playing the Status Game

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Tyler Cowen writes,

So much of debate, including political and economic debate, is about which groups and individuals deserve higher or lower status. . .

I hypothesize that an MR blog post attracts more comments when it a) has implications for who should be raised and lowered in status, and b) has some framework in place which allows you to make analytical points, but points which ultimately translate into a conclusion about a).

My comments:

1. Lowering another group’s social status is the most powerful message of all. It is more powerful than raising the status of those who one likes.

2. It would be an interesting exercise in honesty for everyone who uses social media for political discussions to say, “My main purpose is to lower the status of the following three groups. . .” What would my answers be? MIT economists would be high on the list. Also progressives. And people who align entirely on one of the three axes.

3. How much of writing in the social sciences and the humanities (can you broaden this to other academic disciplines?), including research papers and journal articles, is motivated and made popular by the way that it affects relative group status?

You can take man out of tribal society, but you cannot take tribal society out of man.

Hipster Politics

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Greg Ferenstein writes,

Today, on every recent major issue that divides the Democratic Party, the side favoring highly-skilled workers has won over labor union opposition

Pointer from Tyler Cowen. Ferenstein says that the Democrats’ Silicon Valley constituency favors public charter schools, high-skilled immigration, Korean Free Trade, and Uber, while opposing the Keystone Pipeline. Unions have taken the opposite side, but at least in Congress the Democrats are going against the unions.

The article is interesting throughout. My thoughts:

1. I don’t think that the tech crowd is enthusiastic about the oppressor-oppressed axis. And yet they still consider Barack Obama to be cool. I doubt that Elizabeth Warren or Bill de Blasio do much for them. Or Hillary Clinton, for that matter. As far as I can tell, Silicon Valley does not have a dog in the Democratic race for President.

2. From the tech crowd’s perspective, Republicans are better on education and on Uber. In both cases, Republicans are more supportive of entrepreneurialism.

3. Still, I do not expect the tech crowd to defect from to the Republican Party. There will emerge some issue that makes the tech crowd hard-core Democrats. In the past, abortion rights played that role among many of my friends. They are not techie types, and they hold conservative views on some economic and foreign-policy issues, but for them Republican opposition to abortion rights was always considered a show-stopper. So what issue will play that role today in among the tech crowd? Gay marriage? Immigration?

Greece and Representative Negotiation

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John Cochrane writes,

So, the Drachmaized Greece that I see is not the cleanly devalued newly competitive powerhouse that some on the left seem to envision. Instead I see a two-currency economy. Pensioners and government workers and anyone unlucky enough to still have a Greek bank account get Drachmas. Hotel owners, restaurant owners, and exporters get euros, above or under the table.

My comments:

1. I agree with John that nothing real changes with a new currency. Instead, it is a way of arranging the government’s default. In addition to defaulting to bondholders, the government will default to other claimants, including pensioners. But the way it will default to the latter is by paying them in lower-valued currency.

2. I continue to believe that we will see an opaque bailout. What is happening now is pre-concession posturing on the part of the other European nations.

The classic example of pre-concession posturing is the labor union strike. One theory of strikes is that they take place because the union leaders are ready to make a deal, but they need to convince their membership that the union leaders bargained really hard. Going out on strike sends that message. Similarly, for the European leaders, engaging in table-pounding and other theatrics will help convince their constituents that they were really tough on the Greeks. Meanwhile, in the background, an opaque bailout will be arranged.

This theory of representative negotiation also holds for the nuclear negotiations with Iran. The theory predicts that there will be a deal, but in the meantime the negotiators will posture to indicate that they are being very tough with their opponents.

Speaking of Iran nuclear issues, I read Michael Oren’s new book about being Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. I found Oren credible, although for my taste he squeezes too much melodrama out of his experience. One of Oren’s points about the Obama Administration is that it has very tight message discipline, and I believe that we can see that in some of the negative reviews of Oren coming from Obama-linked writers.

Oren’s description of Obama amounts to saying that he operates using the oppressor-oppressed axis, which strikes me as accurate. Even so, it still requires some mental contortions to treat the leadership in Iran as oppressed, rather than as oppressors.

Uncharitable Behavior on Twitter

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James Poulos says much with which I agree.

Twitter is a megaphone for the worldview wars. It fosters constant competition among our claims that everyone should care and act as we do.

Read the whole thing. I would like to thank a commenter who told me about “unfollowing,” which is one of many useful but hidden options on Facebook. I have been unfollowing friends, left and right, who use Facebook only to post political views.

I think of myself as anti-elitist. But I am even more anti-mobist. When the mob emerges, I cease to be libertarian and instead become ultra-conservative. There is no phenomenon more barbaric than the mob.

Unwinnable Arguments and Normative Sociology

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Young African-American males experience a high incarceration rate. Progressives, conservatives, and libertarians each have a
desired cause for this.

Progressives: racism in the criminal justice system
Conservatives: high propensity of young African-American males to commit crimes
Libertarians; the war on drugs

Progressives prefer the oppressor-oppressed axis, which makes racism the desired cause. Conservatives are most comfortable with the civilization-barbarism axis, which makes criminal behavior the preferred cause. Libertarians prefer the freedom-coercion axis, which makes the war on drugs the preferred cause.

I claim that trying to argue that one of these is the cause is an unwinnable argument. Each of these causal forces has an element of truth, or at least plausibility. The chances are slim of coming up with an empirical analysis that decisively rules in favor of one cause and rules out all other causes.

In general, an unwinnable argument about causality is any argument in which one tries to affirm that X is the sole cause of Y or that X is not at all a cause of Y under circumstances of high causal density.

For example, arguments about the role of financial deregulation in the financial crisis of 2008 tend to be unwinnable. The case for seeing financial deregulation as the sole cause is compelling only to people who are inclined to espouse it. The case for seeing financial deregulation as not a factor at all is compelling only to those of us who are inclined to emphasize other causes.

Some further claims:

1. When there is a desired cause (meaning a cause that fits well with one’s political axis in the three-axes model, chances are the issue involves an unwinnable argument.

2. If your objective is to win an unwinnable argument, then you will tend to engage in normative sociology. To turn your desired cause into the cause, you have to filter out evidence that might support another causal factor and only discuss evidence that supports your desired cause.

It hardly requires saying that I think that it is counterproductive to try to win an unwinnable argument. It is almost as counterproductive to try to reason with someone who is convinced that they can win an unwinnable argument.

I am not saying that it is counterproductive to try to make an argument for or against something being a causal factor. However, I think that it does help to keep in mind that when a desired causal factor is involved it is challenging to remain objective in assessing the evidence.

There is a Cowen-Hanson paper Are Disagreements Honest? that you should read if you have not done so already. One of the reasons that disagreements can persist is because the protagonists engage in normative sociology.

Desired Causes and Actual Causes

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Joseph Heath writes,

Often when we study social problems, there is an almost irresistible temptation to study what we would like the cause of those problems to be (for whatever reason), to the neglect of the actual causes. When this goes uncorrected, you can get the phenomenon of “politically correct” explanations for various social problems – where there’s no hard evidence that A actually causes B, but where people, for one reason or another, think that A ought to be the explanation for B. This can lead to a situation in which denying that A is the cause of B becomes morally stigmatized, and so people affirm the connection primarily because they feel obliged to, not because they’ve been persuaded by any evidence.

Pointer from Alex Tabarrok. Heath, borrowing an off-hand joke from Robert Nozick, calls this “normative sociology.” But it is by no means limited to sociology. Think of people blaming snowstorms on global warming. Or blaming the financial crisis on “an atmosphere of deregulation.” Or blaming inequality on the decline in labor unions.

We can also find this normative analysis among libertarians. Blaming terrorism on blowback for foreign intervention.

Or we can find it among conservatives. Blaming the financial crisis on loose monetary policy.

Michael Strong Asks a Question

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He asks,

Has Romer “thought seriously” about a large scale government that can put people in jail? Not to mention ubiquitous police abuse and civil rights violations.

Apparently, Paul Romer is skeptical of private police forces.
My thoughts:

1. Suppose I were to fly to Honduras for a vacation, and I encounter individuals in uniforms who have the power to enforce laws, including putting me in jail. Would I prefer that those individuals be employed by elected officials or by a private corporation? It is not obvious to me that I should place more confidence in the former.

Actually, I think that most people are like Romer in that it does appear obvious to them that police accountable to elected officials will be more trustworthy than private police. This could be a self-fulfilling equilibrium. If people believe that their voice gives them status under a state, they may be more inclined to obey the laws of that state. When people confer legitimacy on the police and the state, the police need to employ less violence in doing their jobs. This reinforces the trust that people place in the state.

2. FOOL rules. I think that the issue of the power to put people in jail illustrates the importance of Fear Of Others’ Liberty. When one thinks of it as “the power to put me in jail,” it seems hard to trust anyone with that power. But when one thinks of it as the power to put an incorrigibly destructive person in jail, one wants someone to have that power. For example, I bet that if you took a public opinion poll after the non-stop television coverage of riots in Baltimore, the support for police incarcerating those involved would have been overwhelming.

Because of FOOL, I think that most people are willing to tolerate the existence of police and of punishment, including incarceration. I think that once you accept that those institutions will be present in a society, the best one can hope for is that laws are just and that they are justly enforced. I do not think that we can reach an ideal in practice, but I would like to see competitive forces at work. It seems to me that if we had competitive government with free movement of people and businesses, then perhaps places where laws are unjust or enforced capriciously would tend to lose population. Or perhaps one might see a pattern where different laws are considered just by different cultures.

3. If you think about how people actually choose where to live, they tend to place a high priority on avoiding areas with reputations for a lot of crime. This tends to produce a population distribution in which some areas are safe and affluent, while other areas are relatively dangerous and also poor. Police work in the former is relatively simple, and police work in the latter is relatively difficult.

4. As an aside, note that the three-axes model has predicted the reactions to the events in Baltimore among progressives, conservatives, and libertarians with uncanny accuracy.

Joseph Heath on the Roots of Conservatism

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He writes,

There is of course a much-observed tension between the cultural-evolutionary and the free-market versions of conservatism, particularly since the untrammelled free market is the most effective device for destroying traditional institutions that has ever been devised by man. Most of what cultural conservatives and religious fundamentalists hate about the modern world – the rootlessness, hedonism, crass commercialism, loose sexual morality, anti-authoritarianism, and general lack of discipline – is either a direct product of the market, or is a tendency that is dramatically amplified by it. What brings the cultural and the market conservative together is the conviction that these unplanned processes are better than the alternative, which is “social engineering” in the rationalist style.

Read the whole thing. I arrived at it starting from Alex Tabarrok’s link.

Thinking about the quoted paragraph in terms of the three-axes model, I would say that there is a tension about markets in the civilization vs. barbarism axis. A conservative would view productive work as civilized, and markets encourage productive work. However, a conservative would worry that consumer tastes are barbaric, and markets work to satisfy consumer tastes.

Another way in which the market process is civilized from a conservative perspective is that businesses fail. Failure builds character because it reinforces humility. It keeps us from developing too high an opinion of ourselves as individuals or of humanity as a whole. (David Brooks’ latest book, The Road to Character, which I have started reading, seems to stress humility.) In contrast, progressives seem to see government as a tool to eliminate all forms of failure.