Category Archives: Politics

Some Gurri nuggets

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From Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Public, to be released on Nov. 13, with a forward by me.

In business, as in nature, most new trials fail. This is true of every sphere of human activity. Most new government policies fail to meet their intended goals, for example. Most educational reforms fail. Most scientific hypotheses fail. The trial part of trial an error entails mostly error, unless the set of trials is large and competitive enough to produce a possible success, and the system is smart and agile enough tp recognize success and reward it.

Authority has always fostered an illusion of inevitability. For obvious reasons: if an expiration date were stamped on the Federal government, defection from its mandates would begin today.

our species tends to think in terms of narrowly defined problems, and usually pays little attention to the most important feature of these problems: the wider context in which they are embedded. When we think we are solving the problem, we are in fact disrupting the context. Most consequences will then be unintended.

If [Paul] Ormerod is right, most democratic contests today are fought over phantom issues, and democratic politicians, to get elected, must promise to deliver impossibilities. If, in truth, they have displayed excessive partisanship, it may be because team play between political organizations–the tally of wins and losses–retains a reality to which they desperately cling. . .

The nihilist benefits prodigiously from the system he would like to smash. He’s not marginalized–not a street person, not a foresaken soul, not a persecuted minority. . .a radical ingratitude describes the feeling that makes the nihilist tick.

p. 206, 215, 253, 256, and 285-287, respectively. All are even more interesting when spelled out in context.

Book Recommendation

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Martin Gurri’s Revolt of the Public is now available for pre-order. The release date is a few weeks away.

I raved about the first edition of the book. But this edition is bigger and much better. I contributed a brief forward to this edition, but that is not what makes it better. About 20 percent of the book is an entirely new final chapter that interprets recent events.

Because I wrote the forward, I receive an advanced copy. On page 87, he writes,

The fall of the mediators, all other things being equal, means the end of the regime’s ability to rule by persuasion.

This tightly-packed sentence makes a key point. “The fall of the mediators” means in this case the dispersion of power over information as we move from the broadcast era to the Internet era. Governments could mold the narrative with broadcast media. Governments could convey the impression that their authority was legitimate and respected. With the Internet, too much information leaks out about the failings of governments. Thus, they are unable to “rule by persuasion” and are increasingly reduced to relying on sheer force. As a provocative example, Gurri believes that the Chinese government now is more dependent on force than it would be without the Internet.

The book is a masterpiece, in my opinion.

P(Bayesian) = ?

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Scott Alexander writes,

I asked readers to estimate their probability that Judge Kavanaugh was guilty of sexually assaulting Dr. Ford. I got 2,350 responses (thank you, you are great). Here was the overall distribution of probabilities.

1. A classical statistician would have refused to answer this question. In classical statistics, he is either guilty or he is not. A probability statement is nonsense. For a Bayesian, it represents a “degree of belief” or something like that. Everyone who answered the poll (I did not even see it, so I did not answer) either is a Bayesian or consented to act like one.

2. A classical statistician could say something like, “If he is innocent, then the probability that all of the data would have come in as we observed it is low, therefore I believe he is guilty.”

3. For me, the most telling data is that he came out early and emphatically with his denial. This risked having someone corroborate the accusation, which would have irreparably ruined his career. If he did it, it was much safer to own it than to attempt to get away with lying about it. If he lied, chances are he would be caught–at some point, someone would corroborate her story. The fact that he took that risk, along with the fact that there was no corroboration, even from her friend, suggests to me that he is innocent.

4. But that could very well be motivate reasoning on my part, because I was in favor of his confirmation in the first place. By far, the biggest determinant of whether you believe he is guilty or not is whether or not you wanted to see him confirmed before the accusation became public. See Alexander’s third chart, which shows that Republicans overwhelmingly place a high probability on his innocence and Democrats overwhelmingly place a high probability on his guilt. That is consistent with other polls, and we should find it quite significant, and also depressing.

Not the libertarian moment

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My latest essay is on the confusion of the libertarians. The theme is that the left is no longer reliably libertarian on social issues and the right is no longer reliably libertarian on economic issues. For example,

The most ardent progressives now look upon a Haidt or a Pinker as at best suspect and at worst unacceptable. Their traditional liberalism, like libertarianism, is anathema to the contemporary progressive.

Possibly related: Daniel Klein argues that Libertarian Party candidates reduce liberty by drawing votes away from Republicans.

But, frankly, recent events have reinforced in me a deeper feeling that the Democrat Party is a left-wing party in an illiberal sense that spans generations and continents. The concern goes beyond sizing up positions on the issues; it reaches to broader norms of honest government, civility, and fair play, norms upon which liberty depends.

I feel surer than ever before that the Libertarian Party reduces liberty.

Good news

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Morris P. Fiorina writes,

the Fox viewing audience is about one percent of the eligible electorate while news shows on MSNBC fall short of that. Sean Hannity’s is the highest-rated political show on cable television with an audience of about 1.5 percent of the eligible electorate. On the other end of the spectrum Rachel Maddow gets a bit over one percent. Anderson Cooper 360 draws in a paltry 0.4 of one percent.

If he is correct, then the people that you see sharing political posts on Facebook and Twitter are a small minority.

He also makes this interesting point:

Under current practices in 2045 the Census Bureau will record the children of Senator Ted Cruz’ daughters as Hispanic even if they are only one-eighth Hispanic by that point. Inter-ethnic and inter-racial marriages have dramatically risen, producing increasing numbers of children of mixed-race or ethnicity.

Timothy Taylor on corporate social responsibility

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He writes,

It seems to me that many discussions of the “social responsibility” of firms do not pay sufficient attention to these gains from pleasing customers and paying workers and suppliers. Such gains should not be taken for granted.

I think that people place corporate wealth in a mental category that is used for natural resources, like water or minerals. If you control such resources, then you must be rich, and you must recognize an obligation to share them. When you think in terms of endowments of resources, you don’t think in terms of corporations creating wealth or competing just to survive.

Maybe I should expand on that thought. Meanwhile, read the rest of Taylor’s post.

Lilliana Mason watch

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1. Paul H. P. Hanel, Natalia Zarzeczna, and Geoffrey Haddock write,

We directly compared the variability across moderate-, left-, and right-wing groups. Our findings suggest that the values of more extreme (left-wing or right-wing) supporters are usually more heterogeneous than those with more moderate views. We replicated this finding for politics-related variables such as attitudes toward immigrants and trust in (inter)national institutions. We also found that country-level variables (income, religiosity, and parasite stress level) did not moderate the pattern of value variability. Overall, our results suggest that endorsing the same political ideology is not necessarily associated with sharing the same values, especially in the case of common citizens holding extreme political attitudes.

That is from the abstract. I could not find an ungated version of the actual paper. Depending on the exact nature of the analysis, this might confirm the view that polarization is more a matter of hating the other team than it is about substantive differences.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

In a separate post, he passes along a chart showing that hatred of each party has gone up four-fold since 1980. Stare at the chart. Right now, I don’t think there are nearly as many rabid Republicans or rabid Democrats as there are rabid anti-Democrats and rabid anti-Republicans.

Love them out of their cult?

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Here is a recent conversation between Dave Rubin and Eric Weinstein. You will find yourself agreeing with some of what they say and disagreeing with some of it.

I did not find Eric persuasive when he compared opening a border to immigrants to allowing a dinner guest to stay in your house forever. I don’t own the land where immigrants reside. They are not my guests to throw out.

I think that we lack the will to enforce immigration law because from an individualistic perspective it feels wrong to do so. When they work for what they get and obey other laws, it’s hard to feel good about throwing them out of the country.

Suppose that we do not think of land in this country as something that we as citizens own collectively. Instead, land is owned by individuals. An immigrant is going to pay rent to an individual landlord. Throwing out that immigrant means that the state breaks a voluntary contract between two individuals, the landlord and the tenant. There may be justifications for doing that, but I don’t think you arrive at those justifications through a metaphor of a guest over-staying.

Eric also said something that was counterintuitive when he said “We need to love them out of their cult.” He supported Bernie Sanders, but he thinks that Sanders has some bad economic ideas. Weinstein says that in general progressives have adopted some bad ideas, but they have good intentions. If we can love their intentions, then perhaps we can coax them away from their bad ideas.

This approach appeals to me. One of my favorite children’s fables is the one about the sun and the wind competing to get a man to take off his coat. The wind blows hard and cold, but that only makes the man pull his coat tighter. The sun bathes the man in warmth, and he removes his coat. I think there is a lesson there for those involved in political conflicts.

But I think that there are complicating factors. Most important, I worry that political anger is fueled by emotional needs, not good intentions. The anger comes from internal demons, a sort of bitterness (self-hatred?) that the individual projects outward.

Suppose that there is a spectrum of personal contentment. At one end of that spectrum there are people who are happy with their lives and comfortable in their skins. They feel gratitude. Many of the conservative and libertarian intellectuals that I regularly follow fit in this category. The folks I know at Reason, at National Review, or in the GMU economics department. At the other end of the spectrum are young men who are so frustrated and angry that they become serial killers.

The politics of anger falls somewhere in between. At the extremes, it might be close to the serial-killer end of the spectrum.

How does anger on the left compare with anger on the right? The following is very speculative.

Think of life contentment as normally distributed, with an upper tail of people who are very grateful and a lower tail of people who are very bitter. Now imagine graphing two distributions of life contentment, one for well-educated, articulate people on the political left and one for well-educated articulate people on the political right. My sense is that while the two distributions would overlap, the distribution of the people on the left would be shifted to the bitter side relative to the people on the right. Again, I am limiting this to the well-educated and articulate.

Getting back to Eric’s idea, my worry is that by the time someone has become bitter and has translated that bitterness into political activism, it is too late to love them out of it. Ideally, one could find a way to prevent or overcome such bitterness in the first place. Failing that, it is important to find a way to channel that bitterness toward areas where it is least destructive. Video games or something.

Yoram Hazony receives pushback

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1. From Yuval Noah Harari. Without referring to Hazony, Harari writes,

All attempts to divide the world into clear-cut nations have so far resulted in war and genocide. When the heirs of Garibaldi, Mazzini and Mickiewicz managed to overthrow the multi-ethnic Habsburg Empire, it proved impossible to find a clear line dividing Italians from Slovenes or Poles from Ukrainians.

This had set the stage for the second world war. The key problem with the network of fortresses is that each national fortress wants a bit more land, security and prosperity for itself at the expense of the neighbors, and without the help of universal values and global organisations, rival fortresses cannot agree on any common rules. Walled fortresses are seldom friendly.

Good point. But then he writes this:

Creating a mass global identity need not prove to be an impossible mission. After all, feeling loyal to humankind and to planet Earth is not inherently more difficult than feeling loyal to a nation comprising millions of strangers I have never met and numerous provinces I have never visited. Contrary to common wisdom, there is nothing natural about nationalism.

Harari recognizes that in order to scale up our tribal instincts we seem to require a common enemy. But he thinks that such an enemy could be something impersonal, such as climate change. Uniting all of humanity against impersonal enemies strikes me as a hope with little basis in experience.

2. From Alberto Mingardi, who writes,

One can agree with Hazony that it is naive to assume that “political life is governed largely or exclusively on the basis of the calculations of consenting individuals.” But to assume that governments are just bigger families is the oldest trick of the apologists for interventionism. “Paternalism” never goes with limited government.