Category Archives: Politics

Conservatives in a Ghetto?

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Megan McArdle writes,

I’m not blaming liberals for the rise of the conservative-media ghetto.

…There was certainly no liberal media conspiracy, just an iterative process controlled by no one: Being human, liberals naturally prefer the work of folks who agree with them, so those are the folks they tend to hire and promote. As they became increasingly dominant in the media, the trend became self-reinforcing. Fewer conservatives wanted to enter the castle in the first place, and few were allowed to.

This could describe academia as well.

The conservatives that she points to in mainstream media are what people in the mid-1960s days of civil rights called “token Negroes.” There are one or two, and they are put on prominent display, but the underlying prejudice remains. Everyone knows that George Will is on the WaPo editorial page to show that that the newspaper is supposedly balanced. What no one sees is that all of the reporters and editors who put together the news pages are on the left.

I am not saying that anyone should feel sorry for conservative intellectuals. The people you should feel sorry for are the people in the left-wing echo chamber who are dumbing themselves down, the students on college campuses who suffer from low-quality education, and ordinary citizens who suffer from bad policies.

Japan, Culture, and the Economy

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A commenter asks,

how do you view post-war Japan economy and society? I remember in the 1970s – 1980s the Japan Inc. being the ultimate economic machine and now today they look like a society of Grandpa Simpsons? The Japanese culture did not suddenly turn completely 180 degree different on January 1, 1990.

I think that the conventional view of the Japanese economy is that it was well-structured for “catch-up growth” but unable to adapt when that ran out. At its best, it combined a dynamic sector of large manufacturers with stagnant retail and service sectors consisting of small firms protected by regulation. Then other catch-up countries, notably South Korea and China, started to eat into manufacturing, and things went down hill. That is much clearer in hindsight, of course, but I have no reason to second-guess that story.

More generally, I want to speculate that for economic purposes, culture has two important dimensions, which are somewhat in tension with one another. One dimension is trust, and the other dimension is receptiveness to innovation.

One way to read McCloskey, and perhaps also Mokyr (I have just started his book) is that they see the Enlightenment as creating receptiveness to innovation. The conventional story would suggest that in the 1990s Japan’s economic performance came to be dominated by the sectors where there was resistance to innovation.

Trust is valuable because when people are confident that others will follow norms, this helps to lower transaction costs. Seeing markets and government as legitimate is an element of trust.

Innovation tends to lower the status of some people relative to others. That in turn tends to breed distrust among those whose status is lowered.

So I think that societies have to navigate a trade-off. Too much innovation might lead to a breakdown in trust. Too little innovation leads to stagnation. Japan appears to have erred on the side of protecting the status of small business people but suffering stagnation. The U.S. appears to be having a hard time avoiding a breakdown in trust.

Interventionism

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Noah Smith writes,

economists were more likely than the public to support the U.S. auto bailouts, by 58.6 percent to 52 percent. They were also more likely to support President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus bill, by 52.8 percent to 43.4 percent. More economists — over 97 percent — were in favor of tax hikes, and fewer supported school-voucher programs.

He cites a paper by Sapienza and Zingales.

On a related note, Barry Eichengreen praises capital controls.

It’s fair to say that the vast majority of economists are deeply skeptical about (if not downright hostile toward) their imposition. Yet it is not hard to find evidence in international financial markets of the kind of distortions that are likely to lead to imperfect information and, as a result, to economically inefficient and socially undesirable outcomes.

Pointer from Mark Thoma.

In a related essay, Smith argues that the current debate in economics is between the center-left and the radical left.

The New Center-Left Consensus is attractive to academics and policy wonks. It draws on an eclectic mix of mainstream economic theory, empirical studies and historical experience. It refuses to assume, as many conservatives and libertarians do, that free markets are always the best unless there is a glaring case for government intervention. It’s more willing to entertain all kinds of ways that government can improve the economy, from welfare to infrastructure spending to regulation, but it also recognizes that these won’t always work. . .

But there’s a second strain of progressive economic thinking that is gaining attention and strength. This alternative could be called the New Heterodox Explosion. It’s basically a movement to purge mainstream economics from progressive policy-making and thought.

Smith and the left dismiss those of us who favor free markets as outmoded and simple-minded. So the real debate is between economists who believe that elite mainstream economists know best how to fix the economy and others who believe that complexity theorists or evolutionary economists know best how to fix the economy.

I think that he accurately portrays the state of the discussion. I cannot think of a period in my life when market-oriented economists had less respect, unless it was the early 1960s when “fine tuning” had yet to be discredited.

Cosmopolitan Axis Update

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Andrew McGill writes,

40 percent of Donald Trump’s likely voters live in the community where they spent their youth, compared with just 29 percent of Hillary Clinton voters. And of the 71 percent of Clinton voters who have left their hometowns, most—almost 60 percent of that group—now live more than two hours away.

I suspect that the cosmopolitan vs. anti-cosmopolitan axis is quite important. It might be interesting to create an index of cosmopolitanism that is based solely on a person’s location history: how much geographic variation in where they have lived and where they have vacationed. My guess is that such an index would be quite predictive of some sorts of political views and even perhaps economic success.

Assessing the Obama Presidency

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Greg Mankiw points to the views of various Harvard faculty.

I think that assessing his presidency is a very difficult task.

1. We do not know how the next 8 years will make the Obama Presidency look. If the next President is embarrassingly bad (and Mr. Trump, Mrs. Clinton and even the unlikely Mr. Johnson seem quite capable of that), then he will look better than he does today. On the other hand, if there is a “chickens coming home to roost” event (such as a government debt crisis), he will look worse than he does today.

2. Compared to what? Ken Rogoff writes,

Monday-morning quarterbacks seem to forget just how close we came to a second Great Depression.

I think that the notion that the stimulus saved us from another Great Depression is baloney sandwich on two levels. First, I do not think we were at risk of another Great Depression. Second, I do not think that the stimulus had any net positive effect on employment. But if you agree with Ken, then you have to give President Obama a lot of credit.

Or, consider Obamacare. Compared to what? Compared to some optimal health care reform? Bound to look bad, obviously. But compared to leaving the existing system in place? You have to admit that Obamacare increased the number of households with health insurance. On the other hand, given that health insurance and health outcomes are not closely linked, is that such an achievement?

So the question comes down to, spending a lot of money to get more people health insurance–compared to what? From a health outcomes perspective, the money might have been better spent trying to understand and solve the drug abuse problem. But if the money had not been spent on implementing Obamacare, it might have been spent (either by the private sector or by government) on even less worthy items.

With those caveats, my own views on the Obama Presidency are largely negative (Charles Krauthammer, not surprisingly, also has a negative assessment). I do not believe that Obamacare or the stimulus or Dodd-Frank were good policies. I think that Syria is the most calamitous American foreign policy since Vietnam (among other things, the refugee crisis has caused great stress in Europe). Perhaps President Obama’s defenders want to consider Syria to be a consequence of the invasion of Iraq and to blame President Bush. That may be the right perspective, but if so it reinforces the hazards of trying to assess a Presidency until all of the consequences have played out.

An interesting issue is the relationship of Obama to polarization. His defenders see him as a victim of polarization. His critics see him as a contributor. People are polarized on the subject, as it were.

I see him as a contributor to polarization. I do not think he ever stepped out of his sociology-faculty-lounge mindset, in which conservativism is a pathology. In fact, once he leaves office, I expect him to voice this view quite forcefully.

Instead of seeking genuine compromise with Republican legislators, he offered the attitude that “If you were decent and rational, you would do things my way.” He often had the backing of mainstream media in his confrontations with Republicans in Congress, so that the Republicans, rather than he, were always labeled as obstructionist and usually had to back down. I realize, of course, that from the left’s perspective, Republicans were not decent and rational, and, if anything, President Obama did not get his way often enough.

The Future of the Libertarian Party (and the others)

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On Facebook, Max Marty asked what Gary Johnson could have done differently. He also asks what one thinks of Randy Barnett’s argument that if the Libertarian Party did so poorly this year, it has no hope.

I always thought that Johnson’s only shot was if Mrs. Clinton became non-viable, so that Democrats staring at the prospect of President Trump would try to join with leading Republicans and endorse Johnson. But the Democrats stuck to Mrs. Clinton like glue, and so the Republicans viewed endorsing Johnson as throwing the election to her. Johnson did not get the sort of endorsements he needed in order to seem viable. But I’m not sure he did anything wrong.

As to the permanent irrelevance of the Libertarian Party, although strange and unpredictable things happen, I just cannot come up with a scenario in which the party gets anywhere.

The best hope I can see for small-l libertarianism in this country is in particular states. Utah? New Hampshire? Texas?

However, what is the future of the Democratic Party? In four years, Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders will be four years older, and they are not exactly spring chickens now. Elizabeth Warren will still be polarizing. Tim Kaine will have to defend a dubious record, Barack Obama having left his successor with potential crises in foreign policy, the budget, and health care policy.

And what is the future of the Republican Party? The proportion of the electorate that is white, non-urban, and born before 1960 continues to shrink. The Trump vs. anti-Trump division will not necessarily heal.

Another indication that the future is volatile is that young people are particularly unhappy with both major party candidates.

From the Right-Wing Conspiracy Wing Nuts

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For example, the FDA assures the public that it is committed to transparency, but the documents show that, privately, the agency denies many reporters access—including ones from major outlets such as Fox News—and even deceives them with half-truths to handicap them in their pursuit of a story. At the same time, the FDA cultivates a coterie of journalists whom it keeps in line with threats. And the agency has made it a practice to demand total control over whom reporters can and can’t talk to until after the news has broken, deaf to protests by journalistic associations and media ethicists and in violation of its own written policies.

This comes from that notorious conservative outlet, Scientific American.

Tonight’s Debate

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I’m guessing that the people most motivated to watch will be those who already have made up their minds which of the two they are voting for. I have already made up my mind, not to vote for either one of them. And I will not watch. (Note: Peggy Noonan has encountered a lot of people who are undecided. That goes against my experience, but I don’t deny living in a bubble. I remember in previous elections Jonah Goldberg wondering who the heck these undecided voters were. I sympathize with his befuddlement.)

Also, I think that Gary Johnson deserves to be in the debate. The threshold of 15 percent in the polls may have been appropriate when the two major parties were nominating acceptable candidates. However, that is not the case this year. Simply being on the ballot in every state should qualify Johnson to be in the debates in a year when the majority of people have a negative view of both Mr. Trump and Ms. Clinton. I think that the threshold for keeping Johnson out of the debates should be that the polls show that the unfavorability ratings for the other candidates should be less than, say, 40 percent.

While I am on the topic of the election, Tyler Cowen recommends David Brooks. Brooks writes,

We have an emerging global system, with relatively open trade, immigration, multilateral institutions and ethnic diversity. The critics of that system are screaming at full roar. The champions of that system — and Hillary Clinton is naturally one — are off in another world.

There is a strong case to be made for an open world order, and a huge majority coalition to be built in support of it.

In the nearly twenty years since Brooks wrote Bobos in Paradise, coining the expression “bourgeois bohemians,” have the Bobos achieved the status of a “huge majority coalition”? My guess is that Peggy Noonan, based on her conversations with potential voters, would have doubts.

The guardians of the open world order helped encourage a revolution in Syria that became a civil war. The guardians of the open world order were unable to stop this civil war. The guardians of the open world order have yet to convincingly demonstrate that they can cope with the refugee problem created by this civil war.

I am not joining the anti-Bobos here. But I do think that one should not over-estimate the Bobo vote, and where Mrs. Clinton needs help is with people who are not Bobos. If you talk to them about an “open world order,” they are likely to want to know where the “order” part is going to come from.

As a final point, I endorse the view that democracy works best when elections do not matter much. Let us all hope that this election does not matter much, and that the system is robust enough that we can get through the next four years regardless.

An Approach to Policy Change?

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Referring to George Soros’ bid to influence elections for local prosecuting attorneys, Scott Bland writes,

His money has supported African-American and Hispanic candidates for these powerful local roles, all of whom ran on platforms sharing major goals of Soros’, like reducing racial disparities in sentencing and directing some drug offenders to diversion programs instead of to trial.

This is not my area of expertise. But if we have a huge surplus of laws on the books, then perhaps electing prosecutors who will selectively enforce the laws that you like is a powerful way to influence policy. Am I wrong about that?

Trump Explanation to Flatter the Right

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William Voegeli writes,

When Trump says political correctness cripples our ability to think, talk, and act against terrorism, he’s signaling that our response to terrorism is severely compromised by Islamophobia-phobia—the closed-minded, contrived, overwrought, unwarranted, misdirected, counterproductive fear that accurate threat assessments and adequate self-defense might hurt a Muslim’s feelings. “Public sentiment is everything,” said Lincoln of a republic’s political life, which means that those who mold public sentiment are more powerful than legislators and judges, because they make “statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed.” Our molders of public sentiment have made citizens more worried about accusations of bigotry than they are determined to report possible terrorism. A man working near the San Bernardino shooter’s home, according to one news account, “said he noticed a half-dozen Middle Eastern men in the area” before the attack, “but decided not to report anything since he did not wish to racially profile those people.”

The essay is long, but I recommend all of it. Along the way, Voegeli quotes Megan McArdle approvingly and refers to Bryan Caplan disparagingly.

Voegeli links Trump’s surge in popularity to the high-profile attacks by Islamic terrorists. While I believe that those helped him, and that another one could hand him the election, I am inclined to believe that he would have obtained the nomination even if those attacks had not taken place. If my guess is correct, then by seeing Trump support primarily as a reaction against political correctness, Voegeli is overly uncharitable to the left and he is overly flattering to the right.

Voegeli sees Trump as comparable to Senator Joseph McCarthy. Voegeli sees each as a champion of a good cause, which they ultimately discredit with their idiosyncratic and erratic behavior. My thoughts:

1. McCarthy’s cause was anti-Communism. His enemies complained of anti-Communist hysteria. I am so steeped in David Halberstam that I am not ready to concede that McCarthy discredited anti-Communism or to concede that the anti-Communists had it right. What discredited anti-Communism was the Vietnam War, which the anti-Communists got wrong.

2. I think that Voegeli somewhat mis-characterizes Trump’s cause. Trump does not want to slay the dragon of Islamic radicalism. In my reading, Trump’s cause is anti-cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitans see the world through the eyes of an affluent tourist. Foreign countries are places that take Visa, with interesting foods and friendly people speaking accented English. Anti-cosmopolitans might see the world through the eyes of an American soldier sent to Iraq or Afghanistan. Foreign countries are places where barbarians lurk. Even when we succeed for a while at protecting ordinary people from these barbarians, the people are neither grateful to us nor inspired by us to keep the barbarians from returning.

The anti-cosmopolitan motto might be “Keep the U.S. out of the Middle East, and keep the Middle East out of the U.S.” The conservative establishment is heavily invested in keeping us in the Middle East. The liberal establishment is heavily invested in allowing Middle Easterners to come here. Perhaps it was inevitable that the champion of anti-cosmopolitanism was an outsider with many off-putting personality traits. But it could be that a loss by Trump will only discredit Trump, and anti-cosmopolitanism will, for better or worse, remain a force that affects American policy going forward.