Category Archives: Three-Axes Model

Paranoia Along Three Axes

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Cass Sunstein writes,

The first is a wildly exaggerated sense of risks — a belief that if government is engaging in certain action (such as surveillance or gun control), it will inevitably use its authority so as to jeopardize civil liberties and perhaps democracy itself. In practice, of course, the risk might be real. But paranoid libertarians are convinced of its reality whether or not they have good reason for their conviction.

He lists five signs of libertarian paranoia. I expected to hate the article, but I agree with it more than I disagree. In the three-axis model, paranoia means seeing others as representing the “bad” end of your preferred axis. So when a libertarian thinks that conservatives and progressives are merely out to crush liberty and expand coercion, that is a paranoid libertarian.

Similarly, when a conservative thinks that progressives and libertarians are merely out to tear down civilization and replace it with barbarism, then that is a paranoid conservative. Finally, when a progressive thinks that conservatives and libertarians are merely out to help the oppressors keep down the oppressed, then that is a paranoid progressive.

Treating Conservatism as a Personality Defect

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My latest book review.

In Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us, author Avi Tuschman interprets political attitudes in terms of human evolutionary strategies. Conservatives have personalities that align with one set of strategies, and liberals have personalities that align with another. It is an intriguing analysis, but one to which I have a number of objections.

Tuschman’s thesis is that conservatism is fundamentally about marrying within the tribe (endogamy). Liberalism is fundamentally about exogamy.

In my own Three Languages book, I try not to demand and oversimplify ideological views. I talk about the three axes as languages that are used to achieve closure on issues and demonize those who disagree. However, I assume that people arrive at their views via reason.

Tuschman does not credit people with reason. However you rationalize your beliefs on immigration or gay marriage, if you are antagonistic it is because you are inclined toward endogamy and if you are favorable it is because you are inclined toward exogamy.

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.

Three Axes the Minimum Wage, and Fair Trade

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A reader writes,

However, progressives cannot understand that business owners will reduce staffing when labor costs more. It’s incomprehensible to them. They keep talking about the emotions of those who are making low salaries.

From a three-axes perspective, the problem is pretty simple. A profitable firm pays low wages to workers, either at home or overseas. The firm is presumably able to “afford” to pay workers more, so should it not be pressured to do so? In this context, the firm looks an awful lot like an oppressor, and the workers look an awful lot like the oppressed.

The libertarian (or economist’s) counter is that the workers may end up worse off as a result of a “fair trade” boycott or a higher minimum wage. If these measures cause layoffs, then the workers who lose their jobs are certainly not better off.

I think that the hard part is getting progressives past the intuition that firms can “afford” to pay more. One of the reasons that I try to have my class go through the exercise of planning a simple start-up business is so that they can see that profit is not something that automatically accrues to any business. In general, I think that it is important to get people to think about issues from the standpoint of an entrepreneur, rather than simply treat business as “the other” and the enemy.

The Minogue Litmus Test

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My review of The Servile Mind is available. I do not think liberaltarians or bleeding-heart libertarians will be comfortable with Minogue’s swipes at cultural decadence. My conclusion:

Overall, I would say that for libertarians Minogue’s book provides a litmus test. If you find yourself in vigorous agreement with everything he says, then you probably see no value in efforts to work with progressives to promote libertarian causes. The left is simply too dedicated to projects that Minogue argues undermine individual moral responsibility, and thus they are antithetical to liberty. On the other hand, if you believe that Minogue is too pessimistic about the outlook for freedom in today’s society and too traditional in his outlook on moral responsibility, then you would feel even more uneasy about an alliance with conservatives than about an alliance with progressives.

Brad DeLong Makes an Omission

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He writes,

So what do economists have to say when they speak as public intellectuals in the public square? As I see it, economists have five things to teach at the “micro” level–of how individuals act, and of their well-being as they try to make their way in the world. These are: the deep roots of markets in human psychology and society, the extroardinary [sic] power of markets as decentralized mechanisms for getting large groups of humans to work broadly together rather than at cross-purposes, the ways in which markets can powerfully reinforce and amplify the harm done by domination and oppression, the manifold other ways in which the market can go wrong because it is somewhat paradoxically so effective, and how the market needs the state to underpin and manage it on the “micro” level.

Pointer from Mark Thoma.

The phrase “the ways in which markets can powerfully reinforce and amplify the harm done by domination and oppression” locates Brad on the three-axis model, doesn’t it? You can read his post and see whether his examples prove his point. I tend to think not, but I do not want to focus my post on this issue.

What is absolutely missing in Brad’s list is any mention of public choice. Thus, we are left to take the enchanted view of the state as the cure for all of the market’s problems. Is he saying that economists are not qualified to speak about the flaws in government processes? Or is he saying that even though we know something about incentive problems and institutional weaknesses of government, we should shut up about it?

If Brad were to employ this gambit in a debate on economic philosophy, I think he would be dead out of the opening, as a chess player would put it.

A Voice of Social Conservatives

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I review Robert P. George’s Conscience and Its Enemies. My conclusion:

I think that libertarians will find George’s book to be well-reasoned. He usually anticipates the sorts of arguments and concerns that libertarians would raise about his positions as a social conservative. On the whole I think that libertarians will continue to disagree with his views on some of the central issues. However, his book has made me aware that the more aggressive moves by the Left in the culture war are putting liberty of conscience at risk.

Three Axes Meets Average is Over

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William Galston sees things along the oppressor-oppressed axis.

There’s nothing we can do, says Mr. Cowen, to avert a future in which 10% to 15% of Americans enjoy fantastically wealthy and interesting lives while the rest slog along without hope of a better life, tranquilized by free Internet and canned beans…He seems not to have considered the possibility that his depiction of our future might fill [us] with justified revulsion.

Patrick J. Deneen chimes in along the civilization-barbarism axis.

Thus, a philosophy that places in the forefront a theory of human liberty arrives at the conclusion that certain historical, technological, and economic forces are inevitable, and it is futile to resist them. One might bother to ask the Amish if this is true, but they didn’t go to Harvard. Clearly, they don’t value human freedom, since they are not on the historical merry-go-round to inevitable human liberty—and degradation.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

Civilization vs. Barbarism Watch

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A reader points me to a story in Wired.

The prevalence of gun crimes in Chicago is due in large part to a fragmentation of the gangs on its streets: There are now an estimated 70,000 members in the city, spread out among a mind-boggling 850 cliques, with many of these groupings formed around a couple of street corners or a specific school or park. Young people in these areas are like young people everywhere, using technology to coordinate with their friends and chronicle their every move. But in neighborhoods where shootings are common, the use of online tools has turned hazardous, as gang violence is now openly advertised and instigated online.

My guess is that this sort of story will freak out conservatives. But my guess, and this is somewhat supported by anecdotes in the story, is that social media will not turn out to be a long-run boon to the forces of barbarism.

Note that much of the description of gang behavior favors Mark Weiner, not Michael Huemer.

CR Symposium on John Zaller

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It’s all gated, but Critical Review is worth a subscription. I found Zaller’s own entry the most interesting. Some excerpts (each paragraph is plucked at random–they are not a sequence):

An ideology is a set [of] policy positions recommended by informal coalitions of political pundits, intellectuals, and interest-group representatives…The purpose of ideology is to persuade citizens at large, and espectially the more politically active segment of the populace, of what ought to be done in politics…different people are attracted to liberalism and conservatism for different reasons…what Conover and Feldman call symbolic attachments–e.g. disliking “Big Business,” liking “Women’s Liberation”–are more closely associated with evaluations of liberalism and conservatism than are policy preferences.

If there is one thing that my “political education” over the last 20 years has taught me, it is that one cannot tell a sensible story about public opinion and democracy in the United States without ascribing a central role to interest group and activist policy demanders.

Parties offer policies that are acceptable to their policy-demanding activists and calculate to appeal to particular voting blocs. There is no expectation that parties…will offer policies simply because voters want them. Nor does the median voter’s position…play a significant role. Majorities obtained through any means consistent with the agendas of policy demanders are what parties care about.

According to [Larry M.] Bartels’ analysis, each term in office (after the first) [for one political party] offsets 1.29 percentage points of Q14/Q15 growth [in real disposable income in the spring and summer of the Presidential election year].

The Bartels model raised a number of interesting questions to me. As I read the chart in Zaller’s paper, a first-term-for-the-party incumbent is likely to be re-elected as long as real disposable income does not fall the spring and summmer of the election year. That seems like a low bar. The finding that the bar gets higher the longer the incumbent party has been in office could be due to a combination of two things. One is that the voters get tired of the incumbent party, regardless of what the other party does. The other possibility is that the longer a party is out of power, the more desperate it comes, and the more willing it is to adapt in order to win. I think of those two possibilities as having rather different implications.

The vast amount of government policy-making…that is beneath the radar for most voters…is ceded to the demands of interest groups and activists…Where does the sending of cues by partisan leaders fit into this model of respresentation? It doesn’t have a primary role. Its secondary role is to increase political harmony within coalitions by gaining the assent of members for the common agenda.

My three-axis model would describe part of the cueing process. A politician who wants to send a “cue” to progressives can talk about issues along the oppressor-oppressed axis. A politician who wants to send a “cue” to conservatives could talk in terms of civilization vs. barbarism. A politician who wants to send a “cue” to libertarians would talk in terms of freedom vs. coercion.

Note that Republicans have a more complicated problem, because they want to send cues to conservatives and libertarians.

Note that all of the exercises in mobilizing voters, whether using group-identity or three-axis cues, or other means, are simply for the purpose of winning elections. Once in power, politicians primarily serve interest groups. That is why an ideologically committed voter always feels keen disappointment with how little is accomplished when his or her preferred politicians win.

In 1971, President Richard Nixon [imposed] emergency wage and price controls…[in] a survey of Republican activists…Support for price controls was 37 percent before the speech but 82 percent afterwards

My guess is that a survey of Democratic activists on NSA snooping would show a similar before-and-after. That is, before it was revealed that the NSA was snooping on Americans on Obama’s watch, a small percentage of Democratic activists would have favored such snooping. Now, I conjecture, a much larger percentage of Democratic activists favors such snooping.