Category Archives: Politics

A Provocative Op-Ed

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In the WaPo.

Last spring, when I heard Donald Trump say that Caitlyn Jenner could use whatever bathroom she wanted at Trump Tower, I breathed a sigh of relief. There weren’t many things Trump and I agreed on, but this was one. Surely, I hoped, if he became president, he would extend the same courtesy to my 7-year-old daughter, Henry.

…The first time we knew that Henry was different, she was 2. When she found her cousin’s Barbie doll, she lit up like a Christmas tree. “The hair, Mama,” she cooed. “Look at her looong hair!” Henry continued to show us, in every way she could, that she wanted to live as a girl. This was new territory. What do you say when your 3-year-old boy asks to be Rapunzel for Halloween? In our house, you say yes.

If you go to a family beach, you will see girls aged 8-10 practicing cartwheels, handstands, backbends, and the like. Well, I loved to do that when I was 9. If trans-gender had been such a hip thing among my parents back then, that would have been my label. I don’t think it turned out to be the correct one.

The op-ed says,

Bathrooms are a big deal for Henry, a point of clear anxiety and worry.

Bathrooms were a huge worry for me at age 7, also. I was traumatized by having to sit on a toilet in a school bathroom in a stall that had no front door. But I’m over it. My guess is that many non-trans children at that age have trouble handling nudity and proximity to others when performing bodily functions.

The author describes the support she receives from local authorities. President Trump did not take away any of that support. He just decided that the Federal government does not belong in the bathroom.

Using your 7-year-old child as a political mascot does not win my admiration.

Paul Bloom Against Empathy

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The entire podcast with Russ Roberts is fantastic, but I especially like the last 10-12 minutes.

Bloom and Roberts are dismayed by what they see as a cultural change in which politicians focus on the individual case to tug at emotions. (Think of President Reagan starting the tradition of spotlighting someone at the State of the Union address.) It made me think of this WaPo op-ed, which offended me on several levels, and which I will discuss more later this week. Compare this culture with the way that America’s Founding Fathers were able to operate at a more abstract level.

Bloom hopes for a reversal of the cultural trend away from rational thinking about public policy. But my thought is that the battle is lost. Somewhere along the way, the most highly educated people, who you would ordinarily count on to get beyond emotion-driven policy views, have instead turned out to be very tribal and simplistic in their outlook.

Republican-free Zones

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Christopher Caldwell writes,

Washington, D.C., with its 93-to-4 partisan breakdown, is not that unusual. Hillary Clinton won Cambridge, Massachusetts, by 89 to 6 and San Francisco by 86 to 9. Here, where the future of the country is mapped out, the “rest” of the country has become invisible, indecipherable, foreign.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

These statistics, while not surprising, are staggering. Some thoughts:

1. It is easy to understand why the Washington Post is the way it is. It has to satisfy its market.

2. 60 percent is a landslide. 85 percent is a bubble.

3. In the past, the heavy DC vote for the Democrat would have been written off as a reflection of what was twenty years ago a heavily black population. That “excuse” no longer holds.

4. Perhaps much of the “resistance” to the Trump Presidency was inevitable, and it would have erupted with any Republican winner. If you and all of your friends are Democrats, it is hard to credit a Republican with legitimacy. And in the age of social media, it is easy to mobilize demonstrations.

Timothy Taylor on Capital Allocation

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He writes,

I’m not opposed to spending more money on fixing up roads and bridges and other physical infrastructure–indeed, it’s often an investment fully justified by cost-benefit analysis–but I am dubious that 21st century economic growth is going to be based on fewer potholes. When talking about investment to drive economic growth, I’d like to see more focus on expansion of research and development spending.

I will go a step further and say that I am opposed to more infrastructure spending as carried out by the Federal government. Politicians are fond of allocating capital to themselves, and my guess is that as flawed as the private sector may be, it will spend an additional dollar more wisely than the politicians.

So when the infrastructure bandwagon rolls through town, leave me off.

I have influence with Steve Bannon

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Apparently.

he was indeed reading “The Best and the Brightest.”

Read the whole article, by Marc Tracy in the NYT. No, there is no indication that I had anything to do with Bannon’s choice of reading. Tracy makes this point:

If “The Best and the Brightest” is a brief against the East Coast meritocracy, though, its proposed alternative is not pure ideology. It is expertise.

Time and again, in Mr. Halberstam’s telling, lower-level government officials who understood Vietnamese politics, sentiments and even geography assessed reality accurately and offered correct policy recommendations to the major characters — who shunted them aside.

Well, in hindsight, the lower-level officials who raised doubts about the Vietnam commitment were experts. But there were other lower-level officials who argued the other way, and in hindsight they look like fools, or like toadies saying what they thought the senior policy makers wanted to hear.

I did not come away from the book thinking that the main conflict is between ideology and expertise, although I think that is a plausible reading. Instead, I came away from it thinking that the major conflict was between “can-do” overconfidence and sensible skepticism. The political process prefers the overconfident individual promising to solve problems, and so power accrues to people with “solutions,” even if those turn out to have dreadful consequences.

It did not take an expert to sense that there was something wrong with getting involved in Vietnam. On p. 181, Halberstam writes,

Thruston Morton was assigned to inform Senator [Richard] Russell of the Armed Services Committee that the President would be sending an estimated 200 men to South Vietnam as well as funding the country. Russell answered that it was a mistake, it would not stay at 200, it would eventually go to 20,000 and perhaps one day even as high as 200,000. . .

“I think this is the greatest mistake this country’s ever made,” Russell said.

That was during the Eisenhower Administration. A few years later, Russell and others advised President Kennedy against expanding the commitment, but at the same time other powerful figures argued for an even stronger U.S. buildup. This was to be the case throughout the war, and neither Kennedy nor Johnson were decisive enough to either limit the commitment on the one hand or to undertake the most aggressive military actions on the other.

As I pointed out in a previous post, Eisenhower deserves credit for staying out of a war in Vietnam. Halberstam writes (p. 178-179),

Eisenhower was in no mood for unilateral action, and in 1954 his manner of decision making contrasted sharply with that of Lyndon Johnson some eleven years later. Whereas Eisenhower genuinely consulted the Congress, Johnson paid lip service to real consultation and manipulated the Congress. Eisenhower’s chief of staff had made a tough-minded, detailed estimate of what the cost of the war would be; eleven years later an all-out effort was made by almost everyone concerned to avoid determining and forecasting what the reality of intervention meant. In 1954 the advice of allies was genuinely sought; in 1965 the United States felt itself so powerful that it did not need allies, except as a means of showing more flags and gaining moral legitimacy for the U.S. cause. Eisenhower took the projected costs of a land war to his budget people with startling results; Johnson and McNamara would carefully shield accurate troop projections not only from the press and the Congress but from their own budgetary experts. The illusion. . .that bombing could be separated from combat troops, which was allowed to exist in 1965, was demolished in 1954 by both Ridgway and Eisenhower.

The lessons that Mr. Bannon might take away from this are to consult widely on decisions, pay attention to pessimistic estimates of potential costs and adverse consequences, and above all encourage honesty from subordinates. Beware of those who tell you what they think you want to hear, and instead encourage those who give you their honest analysis.

Prestige and Social Change

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Vera L. te Velde asks

which cooperative norms are chosen to be enforced and how does this come about?

Pointer from Tyler Cowen. Read her whole post.

Joseph Henrich, in The Secret of our Success, emphasizes the role of prestige. I can think of some examples. Joel Mokyr points out that prestigious scientists, particularly in the UK, were able to change the way people approached many issues during the Enlightenment. Another example would be the way that prestigious people, particularly in arts and entertainment, were able to quickly change attitudes about homosexuality in the United States. Another example would be the way that prestigious people, again particularly in arts and entertainment, began in the 1960s to use four-letter words in public with increasing frequency, leading to the breakdown of the norm against doing so. Another example would be racism and eugenics, which were popular among intellectuals one hundred years ago and became very unpopular more recently.

Another source of changes in norms is general upheaval, in which many people lose wealth or status. I am thinking of the changes in norms that took place in Germany after the first World War, producing political street violence and

Still, it is exceptional for social norms to change rapidly. Many attempts to change social norms are not successful. And I think that you have to allow for a lot of idiosyncratic factors.

A good example to keep in mind is the emergence and influence of the Beatles. I think it is a mistake to view every aspect of that phenomenon as if it were pre-ordained somehow. Beatle haircuts? Quite accidental, if you ask me.

Sure, maybe somebody else comes along and combines gritty R&B instrumentation with vocal harmonies, but do they go to India? Turn drug use into a high-status activity?

Finally, to say that people with prestige determine which norms get enforced invites the question: how do certain individuals or classes of people come to have high prestige?

Some of it has to do with their idiosyncratic abilities. Lennon and McCartney had a gift for cultivating pop stardom. Samuelson had a gift for making other economists feel like lesser mortals.

Some of it also has to do with where individuals fit in the entire status cosmos. Lennon and McCartney benefited from disc jockeys and others trying to raise their own status in the nascent world of teenagers listening to transistor radios. Samuelson benefited from young mathematically-oriented economists eager to raise their status within the profession.

In short, I would recommend studying the issue of how people obtain high prestige and how that in turn enables them to affect the larger society.

Advice to the American Left

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From Venezuelan Andrés Miguel Rondón.

a hissy fit is not a strategy.

The people on the other side — and crucially, independents — will rebel against you if you look like you’re losing your mind. You will have proved yourself to be the very thing you’re claiming to be fighting against: an enemy of democracy. And all the while you’re giving the populist and his followers enough rhetorical fuel to rightly call you a saboteur, an unpatriotic schemer, for years to come.

Rondón’s piece in last Sunday’s WaPo focuses on an analogy between Hugo Chavez and Donald Trump. What that analogy glosses over is the fact that the Americans who hate Trump loved Chavez, at least initially.

Calling Chavez a Trumpian populist is a way for the American left to disown the fact that it supported Chavez. It is not clear to me that Rondón is aware of this, but my guess is that the WaPo readers will take away from the article that Chavez was bad because he was a populist, not because he was a socialist. And that will be all that they take away from the essay. I doubt that they will take the passages I quoted to heart.

Iraq and Vietnam

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A commenter asks,

Could you write more about this? Vietnam is really remote to someone like me. I guess Iraq would be the closest experience for most people, but it seems different.

I would describe Iraq as a very costly Type II error. Let us stipulate that Iraq did not have Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), but we could not be sure of that prior to invading. All that we knew was that Iraq was defying the UN resolution requiring the government to submit to international inspections.

A Type I error would have occurred if we had not gone to war and they in fact had obtained and subsequently used WMD. Policy makers assumed that this would be a costly error.

A Type II error occurred when we went to war and they had not obtained WMD. Policy makers assumed that this sort of error would have low cost. In fact, some thought that it was not an error at all. A neocon I know who was never an official in the Bush Administration gave me this rationale early on. Not long after Saddam was killed, this fellow told me that soon Iran would be surrounded on two sides by working democracies–in Afghanistan and Iraq. I thought to myself, “Oh, dear [euphemism], if Bush believes that, we’re in trouble.” It was the cost of the attempt at nation-building, and the consequences of the failure of that attempt, that make the outcome of the Iraq war so ugly.

I believe that the fundamental reason for the bad outcome in Vietnam also was our doomed attempt at nation-building. None of the governments that we supported in South Vietnam had a strong popular base, so that the enthusiasm for fighting the war came from us, not from the South Vietnamese.

In hindsight, the big puzzle about Vietnam is why we fought a war there in the first place. President Eisenhower was offered a war in Vietnam in 1954, when the French were defeated there, and he declined. In hindsight, Ike seems to me to have been one of our great Presidents.

There was nothing strategically or economically valuable about Vietnam. Rather, the Kennedy Administration foreign policy team talked themselves into seeing it as a test of their determination and tactical dexterity in containing Communism in the Third World. They managed to show a fair amount of determination. Tactical dexterity, not so much.

The consequences for us? Eventually, the United States gave up on the war. The Communists took over, and that had zero cost to us strategically. But before that, we had lost tens of thousands of Americans killed, and many others wounded physically and psychologically.

I think that if you want to understand how badly the war wounded American culture and where today’s Left came from, it would help to delve into some of the history of the campus activism of the 1960s.

So how should you do that? Hmmm. Maybe for starters look up people like Jerry Rubin and Tom Hayden on Wikipedia, and also click on links there that look interesting.

There are some movies that reflect the period. Easy Rider; The Strawberry Statement; Zabriskie Point; Alice’s Restaurant

If you prefer reading, The Strawberry Statement was originally a book. Also The Whole World is Watching (not the newer book of that title by a different author). Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night is recommended. I avidly read and re-read it when it came out.

Vietnam created political divisions that have still not healed. The war either fostered or brought to the surface a sentiment of anti-Americanism on the left, and that sentiment continues to be a major factor in polarization. It explains why “make America great again” was such a potent and divisive slogan. Since Vietnam, the left has decreed that America never has been great. Incidentally, many libertarians are on the left on this issue, and I believe that you can trace this to Murray Rothbard during the Vietnam era.

Patriotism has become something that President Trump’s supporters believe in and something that the left abhors. [UPDATE: Let me clarify. If you ask Trump supporters, “Are you patriotic?” they will answer “Of course!” If you ask people on the left, they are likely to look at you suspiciously and say, “Define patriotism.” They might be happy to call themselves patriotic if you are willing to define patriotism as support for social justice, but they will abhor the patriotism of the Trump supporter.] For the left, America can only be great when it helps the oppressed. President Trump’s order on refugees went against that, and you can see the reaction. But I think that the order went down well with people who are more traditionally patriotic, and I have seen some stories giving polling data that bears bear me out.

As economists, we tell the story of the end of the draft as a triumph for Milton Friedman and economic efficiency. But it is significant that the draft ended during the Vietnam War. As a political matter, it allowed the left to opt out of military service, which reinforced the division over patriotism.

In high school and college, I soaked up the anti-American view of the Vietnam war. You can still see the anti-American, anti-capitalist view expressed in this more recent review of Mailer’s book, but I came to discard the Chomsky “blame the capitalists” thesis.

I gradually went from being anti-American and anti-capitalist. Instead, I became anti-elitist. As I have pointed out often, a major turning point for me was reading David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Even apart from the historical context, it offers many insights into bureaucratic infighting and organizational dysfunction. And the lesson that smart people can do something monumentally stupid is terribly important.

I often sense that my temperament is similar to that of David Brooks, but his sympathy for elites creates fundamental differences in our political views. He is younger than I am, and the Vietnam War and the protest movement were less salient to him. Perhaps if our ages were reversed, our attitudes toward elites would be reversed, also.

My distrust of elites continues to color my views. I see many events in Vietnam terms. For me, 2008 was a financial Vietnam, for both bankers and regulators. I tend to think of Obamacare as a domestic policy Vietnam, with its architects showing the same overconfidence and the same inability to listen to dissenting voices. And, for that matter, the same denial of the need for fundamental re-thinking (during Vietnam, the Administration was constantly saying that there was “light at the end of the tunnel,” and they were constantly putting out statistics that said that the policy was working).

The Irrational Voter Decides

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Jacob T. Levy writes,

The 2016 election exposed grave vulnerability and fragility in the American party system. One major party was successfully hijacked by an extremist outsider in the face of initial opposition from a huge portion of the party’s elites and elected leaders. The other party came surprisingly close (if still not objectively very close) to meeting the same fate

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

My thoughts:

1. I would suggest that the Democratic Party was hijacked by an outsider in 2008.

2. It appears that being hijacked by an outsider works to a party’s advantage, at least in the short run. If the Republican elite had succeeded in putting in their candidate (Rubio?), the Republicans probably would not have picked up the Rust Belt states that went for Mr. Trump. In this alternate history, Mrs. Clinton becomes President. Given that Levy laments the weakening of the Republican Party elite, he implicitly prefers this alternate history. I do not. Yet.

3. As Levy points out, partisanship is high.

89% of Democrats voted for Clinton, 90% of Republicans for Trump. Those figures are down a touch from 2012—both major parties lost more voters to third parties than in 2012—but considering the year of headlines about how unpopular both candidates were, the result is stark.

Also, partisanship is correlated with knowledge.

4. What this means is that a Presidential election is “swung” by a tiny number of voters who are only weakly partisan. My guess is that swing voters probably have the least ability to articulate a connection between the policies of their candidate and the outcomes that they desire. I would guess that if you interviewed voters in the counties that “flipped” from Obama to Trump, you would not be very impressed with their rationales behind either choice.

5. Pause and consider just how random this is. A few yahoos switch their votes, and this causes about half the country to be somewhat pleased and the other half to be bummed out of their minds.

6. What Levy seems to want to do is strengthen the parties, so that the elites can choose the candidates. He is nostalgic for the era of “the party decides.” Going back to that era would presumably produce candidates who rely less on personal charisma and more on the ability to get along well with party leaders.

7. If we go back to “the party decides,” one result would be to limit the potential impact of “swing” voters. The worst that they could do is pick the “wrong” establishment candidate, as opposed to going for an unreliable novice.

8. The outsider Obama leaves behind an unusually weak Democratic Party. It is not hard to imagine something similar happening to the Republicans under President Trump.

9. If you believe Martin Gurri, then the currents at work weakening the insiders are much deeper than nomination rules or other party mechanics.

The Deplorables Heuristic

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Chris Dillow writes,
I was being tribal: I didn’t want to be part of a tribe that had a disproportionate number of people I despised. I was using a form of the social proof rule of thumb. I was allowing the numbers of others making their choices to guide mine. The fact that decent people tended to favour remain (with of course counter-examples on both sides) strengthened [m]y support for the cause.

Pointer from Mark Thoma.

The heuristic that Dillow followed was this: he saw many Brexit supporters as racists, therefore he would not support Brexit.

On Facebook, one of my friends posted that although she wanted to attend the anti-Trump march, she was troubled by some of the positions espoused by leaders of the march. So, although I assume that she broadly sympathizes with the marchers, she was having doubts because of this particular heuristic.

For any cause, there are some supporters who are deplorable. I am sure that Chris Dillow could find some prominent Remainers for whom he has animosity, although they are not as numerable as those on the Leaver side.

I think that a heuristic that says “Do not associate with a political cause if you find a fair number of its supporters deplorable” would leave you unwilling to support any political cause.

And that might not be a bad thing.