Category Archives: Three-Axes Model

The Task of Persuasion

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Bob Higgs writes,

once the libertarian has persuaded someone that government interference is wrong, at least in a certain realm, if not across the board, there is a much smaller probability of that convert’s backsliding into his former support for government’s coercive measures against innocent people. Libertarianism grounded on the moral rock will prove much stronger and longer-lasting than libertarianism grounded on the shifting sands of consequentialist arguments, which of necessity are only as compelling as today’s arguments and evidence make them. Hence, if we desire to enlarge the libertarian ranks, we are well advised to make moral arguments at least a part of our efforts. It will not hurt, of course, to show people that freedom really does work better than state control. But to confine our efforts to wonkism dooms them to transitory success, at best.

Pointer from Don Boudreaux. Let me re-state this in terms of the three-axis model. Using consequentialist arguments is an attempt to meet someone on their own axis. The “moral rock” that “will prove much stronger and longer-lasting” is to get someone to shift axes.

Claiming that government anti-poverty programs do not work is a consequentialist argument that is intended to meet the progressive along the oppressor-oppressed axis. Claiming that drug laws tend to increase violence is a consequentialist argument intended to meet the conservative along the civilization-barbarism axis. The advantage of these sorts of arguments is that they are easily comprehended by those you are trying to persuade. The disadvantage, as Higgs points out, is that this form of argument involves painful struggles, issue-by-issue and fact-by-fact. Arriving at the inevitable military analogy, Higgs writes

the anti-freedom forces with which libertarians must contend possess hundreds of times more troops and thousands of times more money for purchasing munitions.

Instead, suppose you try to convince people of the similarity between government and organized crime. You say that both provide “protection” backed by coercion. The advantage of this is that if you can get someone to shift to looking at issues along the freedom-coercion axis, that person will be less receptive across the board to arguments for state intervention based on the oppressor-oppressed axis or the civilization-barbarian axis. The disadvantage with this strategy is that your position is likely to be incomprehensible to most of those you are trying to persuade. To most people, drawing an analogy between government and organized crime seems crazy. It makes you sound like a very bitter, alienated person who resents the obligation to participate in society.

My guess–and perhaps Higgs would agree–is that the best strategy is to meet people along their preferred axis and to use consequentialist arguments until they begin to have doubts about the utility of government in dealing with oppression or barbarism. At that point, they may be ready to consider the freedom-coercion axis. However, if you go straight to the freedom-coercion axis and skip the step of meeting progressives with consequentialist arguments along the oppressor-oppressed axis or meeting conservatives with consequentialist arguments along the civilization-barbarian axis, then you risk getting nowhere.

Thoughts on Newtown and Political Authority

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Some thoughts on the school shooting.

1. I think that the three axes serve to predict reactions fairly well. Libertarians, concerned with freedom vs. coercion, are skeptical of adding to government power in an attempt to prevent school shootings. Conservatives, concerned with civilization vs. barbarianism, stress the derangement of the shooter. Progressives, looking for an oppressor, have identified the gun lobby. UPDATE: Russell Nieli, who I would categorize as conservative, blames absentee fathers.

2. If it is possible to build a car that is smart enough to drive itself, should it not be possible to build a gun that is smart enough to know when not to shoot? (a camera knows where the gun is pointing… software analyzes the image to determine whether it is a morally acceptable target… seems like the only kind of gun I would want in my house)

3. I think that the reaction to Newtown may tell us something about the psychological forces that incline people toward what Michael Huemer calls political authority. Huemer asks why we tolerate coercion from agents of government that we would not tolerate from private individuals. My hypothesis, based on Newtown, is that people are much more upset by danger that appears sporadically, anonymously, and unpredictably than by danger that is constant, identifiable, and predictable. So I think that one reason people accept government coercion is that it is relatively constant, the government’s leaders are identifiable, and their actions are fairly predictable.

(I have taken one pass through Huemer’s new book. I found it very stimulating, and I thought it was worth the high Kindle price. In the future, I will give a much longer analysis, not entirely favorable, of Huemer’s line of thought.)

Ideology and Views of Human Nature

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Dan Kahan writes,

Measures of ideology of the sort that I have used here have not – as far as I know; please do tell me if I’m wrong: the pleasure of learning something new will more than compensate me for the embarrassment of being shown to be ignorant — been validated as predictors of “different conceptions of human nature.” Indeed, I think the idea that ordinary members of the public have “conceptions of human nature” is extravagant—the sort of thing only someone who has never ventured outside a university campus would likely believe.

If members of the public do not have conceptions of human nature, then what makes you think they have ideology? Of course, they can answer survey questions on issues, and their answers can be highly correlated with one another in a way that looks like ideology. That is what I believe is shown by the empirical analysis Kahan provides in his post.

By the same token, my guess is that by asking the right sorts of survey questions one could uncover empirical measures of the conceptions of human nature just as interesting as the empirical measures of ideology. In fact, George Lakoff may already have done this. He talks about conservatives believing in “strict father morality” that is based on a much darker view of human nature than the “nurturant parent” morality of liberals. However, I do not remember whether any of Lakoff’s analysis is empirical rather than merely conjectural.

Suppose that we set aside the issue of whether ordinary people think like academics. Take the set of people who you believe have an ideology and have a conception of human nature. Are ideology and conceptions of human nature related? I believe so.

I think that conservatives tend to hold the most pessimistic view of human nature. That is, they think that everyone is prone to barbarism in the absence of the constraints provided by the civilizing forces of family, religion, civil society, and government.

I think that progressives hold a more optimistic view of human nature. Most people are good, but some people are bad. The bad people are oppressors, and the challenge of political life is for the good people to overcome the bad people.

I think that libertarians hold the most optimistic view of all. For example, embedded in Michael Huemer’s new book advocating anarcho-capitalism is a view of human nature that is “basically rational.” In particular, if left to themselves, most people are able to calculate that initiating violence is a bad idea. My concern is that too much of his argument depends on this concept of human nature, and this will prove to be a stumbling block in reaching conservatives and progressives with his vision.

Reader Questions on the Three Axes

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Taken from the comments on this post.

Are Stalinists and Nazis nothing but progressives and conservatives who are willing to use extreme coercion to get rid of oppressors or barbarism, respectively?

My initial inclination is to leave Stalin and Hitler out of the three-axis model. It might be best to limit that model to the Anglo-American political tradition.

Your leanings are libertarian *now*. When they weren’t, how did you view the world then?

When I was in high school and on the left, I was all about the oppressor-oppressed narrative. Majoring in economics in college helped to change that. Also reading David Halberstam on Vietnam. He was a fierce opponent of the war, but he never took the view that the war was an outgrowth of capitalist oppression, which was the standard line of the New Left in those days. I would now say that I lost my faith in the oppressor-oppressed axis, although I do not think I could have articulated my views that way at the time.

Today, I would say that my three-axis model has made me somewhat skeptical of everyone–progressives, conservatives, and libertarians. Or, more positively, I think that at least sometimes the progressives get it right (oppression is the right issue on which to focus in some cases) and conservatives get it right (barbarism is a legitimate worry). Often, I think that the libertarian focus on the dangers of government power is the most useful framework. But I think that the worst thing is to be so stuck along one axis that you do not even realize that you are stuck there.

Exaggeration in Political Stereotypes

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Jonathan Haidt’s latest.

The ideological “culture war” in the U.S. is, in part, an honest disagreement about ends (moral values that each side wants to advance), as well as an honest disagreement about means (laws and policies) to advance those ends. But our findings suggest that there is an additional process at work: partisans on each side exaggerate the degree to which the other side pursues moral ends that are different from their own. Much of this exaggeration comes from each side underestimating the degree to which the other side shares its own values. But some of it comes, unexpectedly, from overestimating the degree to which “typical” members of one’s own side endorse its values.

Pointer from Kevin Drum, via Tyler Cowen.

This is consistent with what I think happens in my “three axes” model. That is, I would expect progressives to view themselves as particularly sympathetic to the oppressed and to view others as on the side of oppressors. I would expect conservatives to view themselves as particularly sympathetic to the civilized and to view others as on the side of barbarism. I would expect libertarians to view themselves as particular sympathetic to freedom and to view others as on the side of coercion.

Let me emphasize that I am not using “three axes” to try to explain what different people believe. It is not a theory of why people believe what they believe. Rather, it is a way of organizing their beliefs. It is a way of predicting how different partisans will communicate their beliefs, how they will interpret issues, and how they will interpret the views of those who disagree.

Haidt is a major influence on my thinking. However, there are limits as to far I want to go in the direction of relating ideological beliefs to personal psychology. As Jeffrey Friedman has taught me, trying to explain why person X believes something is often an effort to avoid treating X’s beliefs with respect. It is really hard, perhaps even impossible, to psychologize about someone else’s political beliefs in a way that is not demeaning.

The goal of the three-axes model is to enable people to see how others might arrive at a different viewpoint on a particular issue. My own leanings are libertarian. However, I would hope that anyone, whether progressive, conservative, or libertarian, could use the three-axes model to better appreciate that others’ views have some justification.

Mortgage Brokers and the Three Axes

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Susan E. Woodward and Robert E. Hall write,

Untrained, inexperienced borrowers interact with specialist mortgage brokers in the mortgage origination market. Brokers earn two kinds of compensation, explicit charges the borrower pays in cash and a commission the lender pays based on the spread between the coupon rate the borrower agrees to and the par mortgage interest rate. Both types of broker compensation seem to confuse borrowers. The wholesale lender’s commission is determined by financial dynamics understood by a tiny group of professionals, and the rate sheet that summarizes the possible payments is never shown to borrowers.

…With respect to policy changes that might help achieve a more efficient equilibrium, we believe in evidence-based design. Disclosure law has historically been in the hands of lawyers, who designed dense forms that may help absolve their clients of blame for consumer error, but which did little to help consumers find better deals. A new movement to design disclosures that are proven to be helpful, through field experiments, may result in some progress. Whether these forms can overwhelm the persuasion of skilled expert salesmen remains to be seen. We are inclined to believe that simple admonitions, such as “mortgage brokers are salesmen and the only way to get a good deal is to shop and bargain” and “you are more likely to get a good deal if you shop for no-cost loans” are more likely to yield improvements than, for example, trying to teach borrowers enough financial economics to understand the tradeoff between cash and the interest rate.

(Note that the quote is from the published version, which is subscriber-only. The link goes to an earlier version.)

This can be viewed through the oppressor-oppressed narrative. Mortgage brokers can earn more money by luring borrowers into more expensive mortgages (usually, “more expensive” means a present-value cost to the borrower of $1000 or so, but it can be higher than that). Note, however, that as Woodward and Hall point out, this does not make mortgage brokers rich. The brokers operate in a highly competitive environment, and while they over-charge as many borrowers as they can, profits are competed away in marketing expenses used to try to lure those borrowers.

This also can be viewed through the civilization-barbarism narrative. This sort of business does not exactly attract and reward caring, conscientious sorts of people. I think of mortgage brokers as slick and deceptive salesmen, prone to sports cars, bling, and other signs of conspicuous consumption.

Of course, from the standpoint of the freedom-coercion narrative, nobody forces you to take a loan from a mortgage broker, and it is a highly competitive industry. However, I think you have to be at least in the 99th percentile for sophistication in legal and financial calculations in order to be able, as a consumer, to use the competition to your advantage and to get the best possible deal.

I am pessimistic that consumer education or rules-based regulation can prevent consumers from being exploited in these situations. I think that the best chance is with principles-based regulation. That is, rather than designing the disclosure form, introduce the principle that disclosure should enable the consumer to understand and compare fees from different lenders.

Saving, Taxation and the Three Axes

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Suppose that Lois Lender and Sammy Spender work at identical jobs, earning identical incomes. However, Sammy spends all his earnings, while Lois saves 20 percent of hers. Do you think that Lois should pay more in taxes than Sammy, as happens when we treat interest, dividends, and capital gains as income?

Along the conservative civilization-barbarism axis, the answer is clearly “no.” Lois is deferring gratification and is entitled to consume more as a result. Sammy is enjoying instant gratification and should not be given favored treatment for doing so.

Along the libertarian freedom-coercion axis, it is hard to say. From this perspective, all taxation is theft. One libertarian argument might be that you want to permit the government to tax as few activities as possible in order to hold down theft. But does that argument provide a rationale for making capital income, rather than labor income, excluded from taxation? Ultimately, I think that a lot of libertarians would fall back on the conservative rationale against taxing capital.

From the progressive’s oppressor-oppressed axis, Lois becomes an oppressor. I realized this when this Douglas Hopkins essay was emailed to me by the author. Hopkins argues for taxing capital income at the same rate as labor income, rather than at a lower rate (remember that the conservative position would be that capital income should not be taxed at all).

Who would have believed that a society governed by majority vote would over-burden its working middle class in order to provide tax preferences to its privileged elite? But that is exactly what we do when we offer preferential tax treatment to investment income. …Reducing the marginal tax rate on earned income and putting more discretionary income in the hands of laborers would be a far more effective method of stimulating savings where we most need it – than continuing to siphon money from the middle class into the hands of current wealth-holders.

Since Hopkins emailed the essay to me, I tried to open his mind to other narratives about capital taxation. Not surprisingly, in his email responses he would not budge. I thought that his responses just recycled the same rhetoric, in which those who accumulate capital are oppressors and those who only have labor income are oppressed.

The essay complains about economists failing to get the oppressor-oppressed narrative. I only wish that were the case. In fact, there is a whole army of economists ready to talk about income and wealth inequality in oppressor-oppressed terms. When the U.S. experiences a sovereign debt crisis, I predict that wealth confiscation will be put on the table as a solution. Why cut spending on the oppressed when there is so much wealth concentrated among the oppressors that could be used to pay down the debt?

I expect that the demonization of “the rich” and “the one percent” will gain more and more traction as the level of government spending ratchets ever upward. And, yes, I am mostly on the libertarian axis on this issue.

The Three Axes and the Middle East

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I have been suggesting that a model of three axes helps to organize ideological differences. Conservatives emphasize the civilization-barbarism axis. Progressives emphasize the oppressor-oppressed axis. And libertarians emphasize the coercion-freedom axis.

Consider the relationship between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs. To conservatives, the Arab tactics, such as suicide bombing and firing rockets from civilian homes into civilian areas, are barbaric. Conservatives tend to be pro-Israel.

Progressives are inclined to view the Palestinians as the oppressed in the oppressor-oppressed narrative. As Secretary of State Clinton put it recently,

the Israelis need to do to demonstrate that they do understand the pain of an oppressed people in their minds.

George Gilder, in The Israel Test, excoriates progressives for this view. He argues that Palestinian Arabs are helped by Jewish success, not oppressed by it. He points out that economic gains for Palestinian Arabs were greatest during the 30 years between the 6-day war and the launching of the intifada. Gilder’s book is a celebration of the positive-sum nature of markets and a condemnation of the oppressor-oppressed narrative. Israel is almost beside the point–it performs for Gilder the same function that risque scenes did for Ayn Rand. Rand lured teenagers into reading pro-capitalist lectures, and Gilder wants to lure Zionistic liberal Jews down the same path.

Although he is pro-market, Gilder does not speak to libertarians, and he certainly does not speak for them. Libertarians generally do not concern themselves with the Middle East, other than to suggest that the United States stay out of it and stop providing foreign aid. However, one strand of libertarian thinking assigns substantial blame to Israel for being ethnocentric and coercive. My guess is that this comes from Murray Rothbard, and it is part of his “revisionist” analysis that argued that the Cold War was the fault of the West, with Soviet Policy defensive. I do not find the revisionist view persuasive. I think that what we now know of the history of Eastern Europe suggests that the Soviets were very pro-active in their “defensive” maneuvers. In an alternative history, suppose that the United States makes no effort to create NATO or express an interest in Europe. According to Rothbardian vision, as a result Western Europe would have been left alone and Eastern Europe would have been freed. I think that the former is doubtful and the latter is certainly false.

Similarly, I doubt the Rothbardian vision that Palestine without a Jewish state would become a secular bastion of individual rights. There are indeed many Arabs who have that as an ideal. But they do not seem to hold sway anywhere. The Middle East strikes me as mired in ethnocentrism, coercion, and I daresay barbarism. I understand that Zionism is not a libertarian ideology. But that does not make me particularly excited by anti-Zionism.

The Three Axes and the 1960s

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Paul Rahe writes,

Liberty requires a responsible citizenry, and the sexual revolution (very much like the drug culture, which was and is its Doppelgänger) promotes irresponsibility of every kind. It promotes dependence, and it fosters an ethos in which those who exercise the virtues fostered by the market are punished for doing so and in which those who live for present pleasure are rewarded.

This is the way conservatives tend to view the cultural legacy of the 1960s. Along the civilization-barbarism axis, they view it as a slide from civilization toward barbarism.

Of course, progressives see it entirely differently. Along the oppressor-oppressed axis, they view the cultural changes as favorable, because women were liberated (a conservative would put scare quotes around “liberated”).

Along the libertarian’s coercion-freedom axis, the picture is mixed. On net, did the cultural changes lead to more or less government coercion? It is hard to say. For example, in the area of Civil Rights, I would argue that getting rid of Jim Crow laws reduced government coercion. (Note that in the early 1960s, prominent libertarians tended to take the states’ rights position, which strikes me as misguided.) However, there is a sense in which today government is overly intrusive on matters of race. (You may be happy with that if your concern is with the oppressor-oppressed axis, and you believe that government is helping the oppressed.) I would prefer that government model treating people as individuals by refusing to classify people by race (You may be very unhappy with my suggestion if you think that the oppressor-oppressed model is significant).

What to think of the unwed mother? To a conservative, she represents a slide down the slope away from civilization. To a progressive, she represents the oppressed “single mom.” To a libertarian, she represents someone who has made a choice. I think that conservatives and libertarians would agree that the state should not be the substitute father. However, it is quite a stretch to suggest that undoing the cultural revolution ought to be on the libertarian agenda.