Category Archives: Politics

Jay Winik on the President’s Erratic Style

Posted on by

He writes,

Often he acted not by following any grand design but by sheer instinct, hastily improvising. . .He deliberately fostered disarray among his own people. . .Disorder, delays, and muddle were frequently the watchwords; problems were met principally by improvisation, not long-term strategy.

He is referring, of course to FDR. FDR was also a wealthy man who was highly regarded by non-affluent voters. He used new media effectively (radio was new at the time). And some of his political opponents really, really hated him.

The book is 1944.

Economists and Mr. Trump

Posted on by

Justin Wolfers writes (not Justin Fox, as I mis-typed earlier) that at the recent American Economics Association meetings,

Over three days of intense discussions, I didn’t encounter a single economist who expressed optimism that Mr. Trump’s administration would be good for the economy. The optimists were those who thought Mr. Trump would not have the energy to actually implement his agenda; the pessimists’ thoughts veered toward disaster.

Pointer from Mark Thoma.

It is possible that they are correct. However, I doubt it. While I disagree with Mr. Trump on immigration and trade, and I condemn his interventions with individual business decisions, I think that these will cause relatively little harm. This harm could be more than offset by reining in regulations, replacing Obamacare, and/or tax reform.

What is true is that Mr. Trump and the professoriate have an adversarial relationship. Mr. Obama takes his world view from the faculty lounge of the sociology department, and he very much respected academic credentials. Mr. Trump is the opposite.

I think that credentialed economists deserve a bit more respect than what we receive from Mr. Trump, but much less than what many American Economics Association members seem to think we are entitled to. I think that Justin Wolfers’ colleagues are fantasizing about a scenario in which Mr. Trump causes an economic disaster so that the status of academic economists shoots up. But I do not think see this as a very likely scenario.

On the generic topic of academic expertise in government, Tyler Cowen writes,

when it comes to the nuts and bolts of governance, typically I would prefer to be ruled by the Harvard faculty, even recognizing the biases of experts. They understand the importance of applying expertise to complex problems, and they realize many issues do not respond well to common-sense fixes. The citizenry usually cannot make good decisions, or for that matter expert appointments, when technocracy is required.

I tend to focus on what I call the knowledge-power discrepancy. Joe Citizen may have less knowledge than Professor Jones, but Professor Jones could be more dangerous. That is because Professor Jones may over-estimate his suitability for telling other people what to do.

Compared with academics, business executives and military leaders have more experience with the challenge of implementing ideas. A good business executive would not take it for granted that a web site is going to work. A good general would emphasize all of the difficulties and risks of trying to shape the Middle East.

“Normalizing” President Trump

Posted on by

In various places, I am encountering people who say that one should not say anything positive about Mr. Trump, because doing do will “normalize” him. I am trying to come up with a scenario under which this anti-normalization strategy pays off. How about this:

Suppose that Trump is hell-bent on becoming a tyrant.

Suppose that he will go about the process of dismantling democratic institutions gradually, because to do so suddenly would raise alarms.

Suppose that “normalizing” Mr. Trump helps him to take these gradual steps, because people do not mobilize now, while we still have some democratic institutions in place.

etc.

This is either (a) a reasonable concern or (b) the paranoid fantasy of moral narcissists. I vote for (b).

If I am correct, then the anti-normalization strategy will only serve to marginalize those who live by it. It may preclude Mr. Trump from having any success with bipartisanship, which in turn could make his Presidency more ideologically conservative than it might otherwise be.

In any case, I cannot resist evaluating Mr. Trump as I would any other politician. That is, I am more likely to express myself when I disagree than when I agree. But when he does well, as I believe he has done in his appointments of Price for HHS and DeVos for Education, I am not going to keep my mouth shut for fear of “normalizing” Mr. Trump.

Martin Gurri on the Current Media Environment

Posted on by

He writes,

Democratic institutions, as currently structured, require a semi-monopoly over political information. To organize the application of power, democratic governments, parties, and politicians must retain some control over the story told about them by the public. The elite fixation with “fake news,” like the demand that Trump drop out of Twitter, are both a function of the fact that institutional politics live and die by gatekeeping.

Read the entire post. I am skipping the WaPo watch this week–busy with other things. But one way to interpret the WaPo’s behavior is that it is reacting to its loss of gatekeeper function by trying to exert even more control over the narrative. Neither Gurri nor I think that it is likely to succeed.

The Psychology of Politics

Posted on by

Maria Konnikova surveys some of the literature.

Lord and his colleagues asked people to read a series of studies that seemed to either support or reject the idea that capital punishment deters crime. The participants, it turned out, rated studies confirming their original beliefs as more methodologically rigorous—and those that went against them as shoddy.

This and other studies serve to highlight confirmation bias, which helps to reinforce tribalism in politics.

I would like to point out that this form of confirmation bias is a very important problem in academia. That is why I think that studies should be evaluated methodologically before the results are known. A referee should be asked whether the study is capable of producing results that influence someone to change their minds. Could the results turn out to be against your prior beliefs? If so, would that influence your prior beliefs?

William Easterly on Technocratic Elites and Democracy

Posted on by

He writes,

The problem occurs when some people turn out not to share those enlightened values and insist on challenging them. Technocrats, in these situations, don’t know what to say because they can’t rely on evidence to make their case. So when technocrats are all we have to defend democracy, fights over fundamental values become embarrassingly one-sided.

The piece is mostly how the elites are right in their outlook but weak in their messaging. I disagree with a lot of it. In the past, Easterly has pointed out how elites are wrong in their outlook, in that they over-estimate the value of centralized control.

In this essay, Easterly interprets the Trump election as a revolt against elite values of equality and inclusion. However, he could have interpreted as a revolt against elite arrogance. I think that there is at least as much to be said for the latter as for the former.

Economic Indicators to Follow in the Trump Era?

Posted on by

Tyler Cowen gives three.

if the worst predictions about Trump turn out to be true, the negative consequences ought to show up in some of the world’s most fragile spots.

He suggests following an index of Baltic stocks, an index of Taiwan stocks, and the exchange value of the dollar. On the later, he writes,

Many emerging-economy companies are running up alarmingly high dollar-denominated debts, and a strong dollar increases that debt burden in real terms. More generally, the dollar remains the primary source of liquidity in the global economy, especially if the eurozone sees continuing troubles. A more expensive dollar implies a greater scarcity of liquidity, and there is increasing evidence this may herald or cause global financial and economic volatility.

What about domestic policy? I would suggest looking at an indicator of where the highest-income counties are located. For now, Terrence P. Jeffrey writes,

The four richest counties in the United States, when measured by median household income, are all suburbs of Washington, D.C., according to newly released data from the Census Bureau.

It would be nice to have incomes go up more in the rest of the country than in the DC area.

Tyler Cowen Talks with Joseph Henrich

Posted on by

Self-recommending. A couple of excerpts from Henrich.

Humans really don’t think as individuals. We don’t innovate as individuals. We innovate as groups. Groups that, for whatever reason, are able to create more social interconnections produce fancier tools and technology, and they’re able to maintain larger bodies of know-how.

and

Much of behavioral economics, at least at the time, was based on running experiments on undergrads. It’s actually mostly American undergrads that are studied.

The point is that these studies may not replicate, because they are limited to people who are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic–WEIRD.

Recall that I based a lot of my essay on cultural intelligence on Henrich’s book.

The interview with Cowen is lively and interesting throughout.

Martin Gurri on the post-election Media

Posted on by

He writes,

Far more consequential, in terms of failed objectivity, is the journalistic tone of moral contempt for politicians, officeholders, and the democratic process in general. News is a rhetorical style, a form of persuasion: and the rhetoric of political coverage pours out toxic levels of cynicism and distrust. People in politics are assumed to be liars and cheats. As long ago as 1992, when Thomas Patterson asked “several of the nation’s top journalists” why they chose to portray the presidential candidates as liars, the usual response was “Because they are liars.” Candidates are depicted as making promises they never intend to keep. They say things that are incredibly ignorant or insensitive – often self-detonating by means of the dreaded “gaffe.” Elections are decided by money rather than a gullible electorate, in any case. Elected officials, the wise consumer of news must conclude, are pawns to powerful but unaccountable interests.

Read the whole post. I do not entirely agree. I think that the press in dealing with President Obama was quite far from “toxic levels of cynicism and distrust.” However, the Obama case may be an anomaly.

Most of his essay is on the “fake news” issue. He adopts the view that social media works to correct and filter out fake news. I am not so sure. I think that whether or not fake news has an effect gets caught up in the larger issue of political cognition, and I am not confident that anyone understands that very well.

The WaPo’s Chris Cillizza writes,

In the general election, 77 percent of the coverage of Trump was negative as compared with 64 percent of the Clinton coverage. (For the entire campaign — including the primary — Clinton had the more negative coverage — 62 percent to 56 percent.)

He cites a Harvard study. But how this coverage affected political cognition is not clear. For example, suppose that the public’s (unstated) baseline assumption is that the Republican candidate will receive 60 percent negative coverage and the Democratic candidate will receive 40 percent negative coverage. Relative to those hypothetical expectations, the coverage of Mrs. Clinton may have actually come across as the worst of the two candidates.

Note that the Harvard study looks at positive and negative content of stories, not at whether the stories were biased. As Cillizza points out, if Mr. Trump was genuinely bad, then negative coverage by the Harvard study definition does not indicate bias. Instead, it might indicate the antagonism toward politicians that Martin Gurri discusses.

The State of Arab Youth

Posted on by

From a UN development report press release.

Today, youth in the region are more educated, more connected and more mobile than ever before.

Pointer from Timothy Taylor.

We know from Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Public that this is a mixed blessing. Indeed, also from the press release:

increasing levels of armed conflict are destroying the social fabric of the Arab region, causing massive loss of life not only among combatants, but also among civilians. Conflicts also are also reversing hard-won economic development gains by destroying productive resources, capital and labour, within a larger territory neighbouring countries where they are fought. Between 2000–2003 and 2010–2015, the number of armed conflicts and violent crises in the region have risen from 4 to 11, and many of them are becoming protracted in nature.