Category Archives: Politics

What I’m Re-reading

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Alone, the second volume of William Manchester’s biography of Churchill, The Last Lion. If I were to sum up Manchester’s view of the 1932-1940 period in British history in two paragraphs, they would be:

1. The British ruling class was rotten. The British Prime Ministers of that era were dull-witted and feckless. Traumatized by the first World War and frightened of Bolshevism, they came up with an endless list of excuses not to confront Hitler. The role played by the media during this period was dreadful–covering for Hitler and suppressing the views of Churchill until very late in the game.

2. Churchill was, in many ways, more out of touch with the twentieth century than were other members of the ruling class. However, he had the strength and intelligence that the leading politicians lacked. And unlike most others of his class, he saw Hitler with clarity.

It is very tempting to draw parallels between the highly-educated classes in this country today and the upper-class twits of Britain in the 1930’s. Indeed, at one point I suggested such a parallel during the discussion of the future of democracy, prosperity, and freedom.

So, as usual, I wrote the foregoing and scheduled it ahead. Meanwhile, there was the Islamist’s attack that killed four marines in Tennessee.

A casual reader of the Washington Post could be forgiven for blaming the attack on conservatives and the National Rifle Association. The lead Post story said that this was “the latest eruption of gun violence in the United States.” The print newspaper also provides a second front-page story, headlined “Shooter grew up in conservative family.” [The online version says “middle-class Muslim family.”]

I read every word of the second story, looking for the basis for terming the family “conservative.” Did they have a Romney bumper sticker on their car? A subscription to National Review? Perhaps they flew a Confederate flag? Were active in the Tea Party?

Instead, there are only two references to the attacker’s parents. One says that his father was briefly put on the terrorism watch list but was later removed from that list. The other quotes someone familiar with one of the daughters of the family:

“I got the sense [her parents] were very religious,” Harper added. “I got the sense they wanted to pick who she would marry.”

I would love to know how the Post determined on the basis of the content of the story that the best adjective to describe the family was “conservative.” Getting back to the 1930s comparisons, I do not want to equate Muslim radicals with Nazis, because I think that there are important differences. What I am getting at here are the similarities between the British media in the 1930s and what we find in the U.S. today.

As for the American educated in class in general, consider Harry Painter’s analysis of summer reading lists for college students.

Upon browsing the list, one might conclude that all of humanity’s best books are about minorities fighting and ultimately overcoming the oppressive constrictions of Western, male-dominated society.

My guess is that no college is going to suggest that students read Alone.

The Iran Deal

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Speaking of things I am not qualified to say much about. . .

1. The key dynamic is the coalition of countries sanctioning Iran. That was a difficult coalition to assemble. It is a difficult coalition to hold together. My guess is that one of the factors that helped hold it together was that Russia, as an oil exporter, probably was happy to see Iran hampered in its ability to sell oil. But in general, you expect these sorts of coalitions to break down, for well-known cartel game-theoretic reasons.

2. To the extent that you believe that the sanctions coalition could not hold together, you would tend to support almost any deal. In other words, if the coalition was fragile, then Iran was in a strong bargaining position. I have not seen any analysis that makes this point. Again, knowing nothing but the game theory of cartels, I am inclined to think that Iran was in a strong bargaining position. Of course, we are not going to hear the Administration say, “This is as good a deal as we could get, because the sanctions coalition was starting to unravel.”*

3. Of all of the technical details of the deal, the one that will interest me the most is Iran’s obligation to get rid of some its enriched uranium. It takes a lot of time and effort to enrich uranium. If much of the enriched uranium will be handed over to other parties that will take it out of Iran and not give it back, then I think that pretty clearly reduces Iran’s ability to produce a bomb in the short run. As to Iran’s ability to produce a bomb in 5 or 10 years, the effect of this deal depends on what you think the alternative was. Again, I am not very optimistic about what the alternative was.

4. Even if the deal sets back Iran’s nuclear program, it could be that the situation in the region will be worse a year from now than it would have been had the sanctions coalition held together longer. It is hard to anticipate the consequences of these things.

5. I am not sure what Congress has to do with anything at this point. They cannot put the sanctions coalition back together.

6. What would Iran have to do to encourage the sanctions coalition to get back together? My guess is that it would take some really major, flagrant violations of the agreement, and perhaps not even those would be sufficient.

*As usual, I wrote this post more than 24 hours ago and scheduled it for this morning. Meanwhile, it turns out that President Obama at his news conference said something quite close to this.

Brink Lindsey on Progressive Deregulation

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He writes,

Despite today’s polarized political atmosphere, it is possible to construct an ambitious and highly promising agenda of pro-growth policy reform that can command support across the ideological spectrum. Such an agenda would focus on policies whose primary effect is to inflate the incomes and wealth of the rich, the powerful, and the well-established by shielding them from market competition. A convenient label for these policies is “regressive regulation”—regulatory barriers to entry and competition that work to redistribute income and wealth up the socioeconomic scale. This paper identifies four major examples of regressive regulation: excessive monopoly privileges granted under copyright and patent law; restrictions on high-skilled immigration; protection of incumbent service providers under occupational licensing; and artificial scarcity created by land-use regulation.

The subtitle is “Low-hanging fruit guarded by dragons,” by which he means that “the interest groups that benefit from the status quo are politically powerful, well organized, and highly motivated.” For me, it is clear that concentrated political power can explain why three of the four regressive regulations persist. The book publishers and incumbents in the entertainment industry want infinite copyright protection, and patent lawyers want powerful patent laws. Hair braiders and interior decorators want occupational licensing. Owners of developed property want land-use regulation.

The one I don’t quite get is high-skill immigration. Employers want it, and the high-skilled workers who might be threatened by it do not have a formidable lobbying organization.

I do not follow the issue closely, and I could be wrong about this, but I believe that Democrats do not want any legislation passed on immigration that is not comprehensive, and the Republican base does not want comprehensive immigration legislation that includes a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. The high-skilled immigration question is caught in the middle.

Desired Causes and Actual Causes

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Joseph Heath writes,

Often when we study social problems, there is an almost irresistible temptation to study what we would like the cause of those problems to be (for whatever reason), to the neglect of the actual causes. When this goes uncorrected, you can get the phenomenon of “politically correct” explanations for various social problems – where there’s no hard evidence that A actually causes B, but where people, for one reason or another, think that A ought to be the explanation for B. This can lead to a situation in which denying that A is the cause of B becomes morally stigmatized, and so people affirm the connection primarily because they feel obliged to, not because they’ve been persuaded by any evidence.

Pointer from Alex Tabarrok. Heath, borrowing an off-hand joke from Robert Nozick, calls this “normative sociology.” But it is by no means limited to sociology. Think of people blaming snowstorms on global warming. Or blaming the financial crisis on “an atmosphere of deregulation.” Or blaming inequality on the decline in labor unions.

We can also find this normative analysis among libertarians. Blaming terrorism on blowback for foreign intervention.

Or we can find it among conservatives. Blaming the financial crisis on loose monetary policy.

Educated to be Irresponsible

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The Washington Post writes,

Heavy drinking is one of the most significant predictors of sexual assault in college, according to the poll of 1,053 current and recent college students. Analysis of the results found that women who say they sometimes or often drink more than they should are twice as likely to be victims of completed, attempted or suspected sexual assaults as those who rarely or never drink. Several male victims also pointed to alcohol’s role in their assaults.

Long-time readers will know that I am angry about how colleges treat drinking. When my daughters were in college, I sent only two communications to school officials. Both of these were suggestions for taking a more pro-active approach to drinking. One suggestion was to tell admissions officers to try to admit more students with a lower propensity to drink, in order to change the culture at a small college. The other suggestion was to encourage arrest and prosecution of a repeat-offender drunken vandal.

The students are not treated as adults, in that they are not held accountable for the crimes that they commit when drunk, including vandalism and assault. On the other hand, they are not treated as children, in that the schools enforce no rules against drinking.

Sometimes I think that the main point of college is not to teach critical thinking. It is to teach that there is no such thing as individual responsibility or accountability. “Alcohol” is responsible for bad behavior. The person drinking the alcohol is not responsible. The administrator condoning the drinking is not responsible.

In a larger sense, students are taught mindless sociology, in which group identity is everything, and individual responsibility is nothing. Individual effort plays no role in affluence–it is all a matter of “privilege.” Individual shortcomings play no role in poverty–it is all a matter of oppression.

In fact, there is a lot of truth to sociological views of power and group status. However, to treat this as the only truth about human relationships is to go to far.

What is odd is that I do not know anyone who deep-down believes in the pure sociological story. That is, I do not know any parent who tells their children, “Everything is determined by your group identity. You are not responsible or accountable for anything you do in life.”

If the higher education industry were more entrepreneur-friendly, I would start a college for students who want a low-cost, high-quality education and not a party school. Right now, most colleges act as if this is not a large target market. My hypothesis is that such colleges are missing an opportunity.

Thoughts on Hatred and Persecution

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In a post called Fearful Symmetry, the pseudonymous Scott Alexander draws parallels between the mentality of the Social Justice Warrior and his or her opponent.

The social justice narrative describes a political-economic elite dominated by white males persecuting anybody who doesn’t fit into their culture, like blacks, women, and gays. The anti-social-justice narrative describes an intellectual-cultural elite dominated by social justice activists persecuting anybody who doesn’t fit into their culture, like men, theists, and conservatives.

My thoughts:

1. He is describing two distinct forms of persecution. Persecuting people for being black, woman (or man), or gay is hating them for who they are, for something that they cannot change. Persecuting people for being a conservative or theist is hating them for what they believe, and by implication you will stop hating them if they change their beliefs.

2. Historically, Jews have experienced both forms of hatred. As I understand it, the Inquisition sought to change their beliefs. The Holocaust was existential hatred.

3. It is not clear to me which form of hatred is “better.” Both forms can lead to violence and extreme forms of inhumanity.

4. Probably both forms can be traced to the xenophobia that is in human nature. Coincidentally, I have just received a review copy of Nature, Human Nature, & Human Difference: Race in Early Modern Philosophy, by Justin E. D. Smith. Perhaps this book will shed more light on these topics.

5. Just because you can find one example of somebody on the other side who explicitly argues for persecuting your group does not mean that your group is necessarily persecuted. Before you become paranoid, make sure that everyone really is out to get you.

6. It seems easy to go from “I am a member of a persecuted group” to “I therefore have a license to persecute.” I think that it would be helpful if we could refrain from making that move. If you took away the “license to persecute” aspect, then I think that people would find grievance politics and persecution narratives less attractive.

Greg Mankiw on Ex-Im

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He writes,

One of the other speakers–this one a politician rather than a nerdy academic like me–spoke about the need to reauthorize the Export-Import Bank. (I won’t mention the person’s name, since the event is off the record.) What struck me is how weak the arguments were.

He goes on to list and to refute those arguments. This reminded me of a couple of things I recently wrote about.

1. The WaPo frames the story of the Ex-Im bank as a struggle between right-wing Tea Party crazies and sober centrists.

2. I still would think a lot more highly of left-leaning economists if they, too, would speak out against the Ex-Im bank.

The WaPo Frames a Story

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Robert McCartney writes,

Gov. Larry Hogan’s imminent choice about the Purple Line will play a large role in defining whether his first year in office steers his Maryland Republican Party toward the middle or gives Democrats a cudgel to beat him as an anti-spending ideologue.

…Hogan’s continuing doubts about the project’s cost and benefits show he still shares some anti-transit views that he and his conservative supporters have long championed.

So, if you are not on board with the view that the benefits of this project exceed the costs, then you are “anti-transit” and an “ideologue.”

In general, I find the WaPo’s front page to be more loaded with left-wing rhetorical framing than is its editorial page. And I find that its Metro section is more loaded with left-wing rhetorical framing than its front page.

One of my pet peeves is the metro section’s constant reference to the “excellent reputation” of Montgomery County schools. What the schools have is a reputation for having an excellent reputation, but (and I have pointed this out in emails to Wapo reporters) the test scores for Montgomery County schools are close to the median for all counties in the state, even though Montgomery County spends way more than the median on a per-student basis.

In fact, if you plot the percent of students that perform well on tests against percent of students not on free and reduced meals, Montgomery County schools fall right in line. Statewide, the percentage of non-FARMs students is what drives school outcomes, and spending per student makes no difference. The null hypothesis wins again.

Two Views of the Ex-Im Bank

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Dana Milbank says that it shows that the Republicans have gone crazy.

Conservative groups howling about corporate welfare and big government have, for the moment, bested the corporate interests that have previously co-opted grass-roots conservatives.

And he thinks that this is a bad thing.

Meanwhile, Tim Carney writes,

So why would Ex-Im agree to subsidize exports that had already been made, shipped, and installed? This seems odd if Ex-Im was trying to support U.S. jobs at Solyndra. It makes sense if Ex-Im was trying to change the financing of an existing export, so as to shore up Solyndra’s financing. In other words, Ex-Im may not have helped Solyndra make a sale (which is what it is supposed to do), but it may have slowed down Solyndra’s cash-flow trainwreck — a crucial objective for the Obama administration, which had stuck out its neck holding up Solyndra as the poster company for the new subsidized green economy.

Ex-Im seems to me to be another one of those issues, like housing policy, on which conservative economists have it right and the prominent left-leaning economists are silent.

Because Milton Friedman is Dead

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Noah Smith writes,

almost all of the most prominent economists in the public sphere — Paul Krugman, Summers, Thomas Piketty, and the rest — lean to the left, and lean significantly more to the left than in years past. Conservative economists are largely hiding out in academia, emerging only to write the occasional Wall Street Journal op-ed. That suggests that they are not optimistic about how their ideas would be received by the general public.

Pointer from Mark Thoma.

Actually, I cannot remember a time when conservative economists were important in the public sphere. Name another one apart from Milton Friedman. Are you thinking Greg Mankiw? Tell me what policy he influenced. Are you thinking Arthur Laffer? He influenced Reagan’s tax cut, but then he disappeared from the public sphere, leaving behind only one drawing on a napkin. Alfred Kahn? Very influential, did not disappear right away, but he was a Carter appointee. Alan Greenspan? I suppose a lot of lefties will say he was the prominent villain in creating the atmosphere of deregulation and outbreak of greed that they say caused the financial crisis. Trouble is, the substantive evidence is not really consistent with that narrative. And Greenspan, like Laffer, never had any academic cred.

Currently, I can name a number of policy areas where conservatives are more likely to be correct than liberals. Housing policy, obviously. Entitlements and the long-term budget. Education reform. Capital taxation policy. On those issues, the prominent economists in the public sphere are largely silent.

Instead, the prominent economists focus on macroeconomics and inequality. Those are two areas where one can smugly advocate policies on the basis of the intention heuristic, comfortably protected from any evidence of efficacy.

My bottom line is that Smith is correct that the battle for mainstream media prominence has been won by the left. One possibility is that they have earned it. But there are other possibilities.