Category Archives: Politics

On Freedom of Speech

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Fredrik DeBoer writes,

undermining rights works both ways. This is going to happen: sooner or later, some CEO or sports team owner or similar is going to get ousted because he or she supports a woman’s right to an abortion, or the cause of Palestinian statehood, or opposes the death penalty. It’s inevitable. I can easily see someone suggesting that, say, Israel is an apartheid state, and watching as the media whips itself into a frenzy. And when that happens, the notion that there is no such thing as a violation of free speech that isn’t the government literally sending men with guns to arrest you will be just as powerful, and powerfully destructive, as it is now. So what will these people say? I don’t have the slightest idea how they will be able to defend the right of people to hold controversial, left-wing political ideas when they have come up with a thousand arguments for why the right to free expression doesn’t apply in any actual existing case. How will Isquith write a piece defending a CEO’s right to oppose Israeli apartheid? A sports owner’s right to do the same? I can’t see how he could– unless it really is just all about teams, and not about principle at all.

Read the whole thing. The piece came up in comments on this post.

Perhaps it is the case that generically certain forms of speech are being declared “unacceptable” by mobs, either on the right or the left. That is what concerns DeBoer.

Another possibility, raised in the comments on my earlier post, is that the progressive “elect” is confident of its moral superiority and its dominance of the media. Hence, it does not have any worries about becoming a victim of speech suppression by the mob.

Going back to Joseph Bottum’s thesis, I think it is a fair worry that politics has become infused with religious meaning. His thesis is that progressives, as the heirs to mainline Protestantism, hold the upper hand in this religious contest. So even if I am correct, and there is an element of religiosity in all political outlooks, the religion that most threatens to become the established church in this country is progressivism.

I hope that America’s historical resistance to an established church asserts itself in this case. That is, I hope that the backlash against the religious conformity of the progressive movement will prove ultimately to be more powerful than the movement itself.

Daniel Kahan Discovers Expressive Voting

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He said,

Look: What an ordinary individual believes about the “facts” on climate change has no impact on the climate.

What he or she does as a consumer, as a voter, or as a participant in public debate is just too inconsequential to have an impact.

No mistake she makes about the science on climate change, then, is going to affect the risk posed by global warming for him or her or for anyone else that person cares about.

But if he or she takes the “wrong” position in relation to his or her cultural group, the result could be devastating for her, given what climate change now signifies about one’s membership in and loyalty to opposing cultural groups.

Kahan advises climate worriers to try to engage in public discussion in ways that are less “culturally assaultive.” This assumes that climate worriers care more about climate policy than about asserting their moral and intellectual superiority over conservatives. The most charitable I can be is to say that I am willing to wait and see whether that is the case.

Setting National Priorities, Revised Version

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Again, the inspiration is an old Brookings Institution series, called Setting National Priorities. The idea is to create a web document, with a lot of cross-references, that works top-down from a few high-level objectives down to specific administrative/regulatory and legislative changes. Schematically, it might be:

  1. Ultimate Objective I
    1. Intermediate Objective IA
      1. Administrative/regulatory initiatives
        1. Administrative/regulatory initiative ARIA1
        2. Administrative/regulatory initiative ARIA2
      2. Legislative initatives
        1. Legislative initiative LIA1
        2. Legislative initiative LIA2
    2. Intermediate Objective IB
    3. …
  2. Ultimate Objective II
    1. Intermediate Objective IIA
    2. …

At each level in the outline, there would be a single member of the Administration who is the “owner” responsible for execution. That is, there must be an organization chart corresponding to the outline. I will have more to say about the organization chart in future posts.

Here is a more specific example of a high-level objective and the lower breakdown.

  1. Increase the employment/population ratio by three percentage points. This objective will be owned by the chief of domestic government operations.
    1. Reduce for businesses the cost of compensation by 20 percent for workers earning less than $30,000 per year. This objective will be owned by the project manager for reducing the cost of compensation.
      1. Regulatory Changes
        1. Rewrite regulation X to say ____. This initiative will be owned by the head of the agency responsible for regulation X.
      2. Legislative Changes
        1. Pass legislation modifying employer-paid payroll tax rules to _____. This initiative will be owned by the project manager for the payroll tax legislative package.
    2. Reform safety-net programs and tax code in order to limit the total of implicit and explicit marginal tax rates for workers earning less than $80,000 per year to no more than 35 percent.
      1. Regulatory changes
        1. Rewrite eligibility rule Y to say ____. This initiative will be owned by the head of the agency responsible for eligibility rule Y.
      2. Legislative changes
        1. Enact legislation to change safety-net program Z to ____. This initiative will be owned by the project manager for the safety-net reform program legislative package.
        2. Enact legislation modifying employee-paid payroll tax rules to ____. This initiative will be owned by the project manager for the payroll tax legislative package.
    3. Replace anti-competitive occupational licensing rules with sensible consumer protection in health care and other services…[regulatory and legislative changes]

This is still very sketchy, but I hope it gives readers a better idea of the sort of thing I have in mind.

Science and Cultural Wars

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Ezra Klein profiles Dan Kahan.

Consider the human papillomavirus vaccine, he says. That’s become a major cultural battle in recent years with many parents insisting that the government has no right to mandate a vaccine that makes it easier for teenagers to have sex. Kahan compares the HPV debacle to the relatively smooth rollout of the hepatitis B vaccine.

Actually, the HPV vaccine is not a guarantee against becoming stricken by HPV. It does not protect against all of the viruses in the family. Although I believe that there is still a case for this partial vaccination, I think that the advocates make it sound much better than it is. They make it seem as if getting vaccinated frees you to have relations without fear of getting the virus, and that is just plain not true.

Jonah Goldberg has a saying that “The left is the aggressor in the culture war.” I think that statement has some merit, looking Hobby Lobby or Brendan Eich or this example.

Tyler Cowen liked the article. I confess to being a bit disappointed. If you are going to write an article about “how politics makes us stupid,” then the article should be about how politics makes us stupid. Instead, this article is about how politics makes them stupid. It focuses solely on examples where the science is allegedly on the side of the left, and the right is culturally obtuse.

As an aside, the article says that climate-change deniers misuse scientific arguments. I think that this, too, is more of a two-way street.

An SNP Project?

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The Brooking Institution used to put out a grandiose document called Setting National Priorities. It was sort of a “shadow” budget document. I looked for a recent version, but I did not find one.

Anyway, I am in the midst of noodling over various possible projects. One idea is to try to produce a version of SNP that would be designed with a Republican Administration in mind.

I like the idea of a pyramid model. That is, there should be a few high-level objectives, and then below that would be initiatives that feed into those objectives, and below that would be components of those initiatives, and so on. There should be between three and five high-level objectives.

For example, a high-level objective could be to revive the economy by unleashing entrepreneurship in nonfinancial business, including education and health care.

Another high-level objective could be to put fiscal policy on a sustainable path.

Another high-level objective could be to align regulatory missions and policies to 21st-century technological reality in energy and telecommunication.

One can imagine this being presented in WIKI format. Comments on the pros and cons of that for this project are welcome.

I realize that I need to do a lot more to flesh out this idea. Assuming it has some appeal (to others, but most of all to me), I will post more about it as it evolves.

Evaluating Program Effectiveness

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One of the themes of Why Government Fails So Often, the new book by Peter Schuck, referred to by David Henderson, is that government programs should be evaluated for their effectiveness. The 2014 President’s Economic Report, which Greg Mankiw spotted, includes an entire chapter called “Evaluation as a tool for improving Federal programs.” It begins,

Since taking office, President Obama has emphasized the need to determine what works and what does not in government, and to use those answers to inform Federal policy and budget decisions…Today, evaluating Federal programs and interventions to understand their impact, and developing the infrastructure within agencies to support a sustained level of high-quality evaluations, remains an administration priority. By rigorously testing which programs and interventions are most effective at achieving important goals, the government can improve its programs, scaling up the approaches that work best and modifying or discontinuing those that are less effective.

The idea of shifting focus from intent to results is laudable. Ironically, however, all I can see from this effort is intent without results.

UPDATE: Jason Richwine heads his latest post “The White House’s Standard for Social Programs: Hints of Success Are Good Enough”

Peak Political Psychology

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Chris Mooney gives a careless, almost entirely uncritical review of two books that I recently read: Predisposed, by John R. Hibbing, Kevin B. Smith, and John R. Alford; and Our Political Nature, by Avi Tuschman. Mooney writes,

Liberals and conservatives, conclude Hibbing et al., “experience and process different worlds.” No wonder, then, that they often cannot agree. These experiments suggest that conservatives actually do live in a world that is more scary and threatening, at least as they perceive it. Trying to argue them out of it is pointless and naive. It’s like trying to argue them out of their skin.

Note that it is conservatives who Mooney characterizes as intractable. The implicit assumption is that progressives have it right. Political psychology helps to explain the persistence of the wrong-headed view.

Mooney waxes enthusiastic about the genetic/psychological explanations for political differences. The authors of both books are careful to point out that the correlations between personality traits and political beliefs are, while statistically significant, not overwhelmingly large. They explain much less than half of the variation in political beliefs.

Mooney leaves readers with the impression that psychologists explain a larger share of political differences than they themselves claim to explain. In contrast, my guess is that they explain less. These are the sorts of studies that tend to suffer from publication bias (20 studies are tried, one out of 20 passes the “significance test” of having a 5 percent probability of being true by chance, and that study gets published). In these sorts of studies, attempts at replication sometimes fail completely, and even when successful the effects are smaller than in the original published study.

In fact, my guess is that we are approaching peak political psychology. I would bet that ten years from now the links between political beliefs and psychological traits will be regarded as a very minor field of inquiry.

For me, the main problem with this research is that it is almost impossible to reconcile with well-established findings on voting behavior. In my own review of Tuschman’s book, I wrote,

Consider, for example, the fact that Jews and blacks vote predominantly for liberal Democrats. According to Tuschman’s model, this must mean that Jews and blacks are less ethnocentric than other voters (notwithstanding the apparent tribal solidarity of their voting behavior), as well as more Open and less Conscientious. That seems doubtful.

In his conclusion, Mooney advocates tolerance for other political points of view. That is generous of him. Others who have thought that their political opponents had psychological issues came up with idea of the Gulag.

Want more fun? Read Ethan Watters on the germ theory of political beliefs.

he is certain that the most effective way to change political values from conservative to liberal is through health-care interventions and advances in providing clean water and sanitation. “That is clearly the conclusion that the bulk of evidence supports,” Thornhill says. “If you lower disease threats in countries they become more liberal, and that is true for states in this country. The implication is that if you effectively target infectious diseases then you will liberalize the population.”

That explains why Japan liberalized earlier than England. It explains why Germany turned to Hitler. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this theory before. Pointer from Tyler Cowen, who is not buying it, either.

This is not charitable, but what I want is a psychological explanation for why progressives need to make disagreement with their outlook a pathology. I want to know why their capacity for critical thinking disappears when they read studies that make them feel better about being on the left.

What 5 Policies Would Help Millenials?

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Dylan Mathews makes an attempt at answering. The question is probably stupid, because the answers do not seem so smart. I think that the biggest problems for millenials are the high fixed cost of hiring workers and the big generational imbalance embedded in government budgets. However, millenials are likely to benefit at some point from very rapid technological progress.

Some policies that might help:

1. Decouple health insurance from employment.

2. Legalize catastrophic health insurance coverage, as opposed to mandating comprehensive coverage. In other words, undo Obamacare.

3. Eliminate the corporate income tax, taxes on saving and employer payroll taxes. Millenials are going to need all the saving and all the work they can get. What that leaves you with is a consumption tax.

4. We also have to cut spending. Carefully means-test Social Security, Medicare, and get rid of the millionaires on Medicaid. Get rid of all Federal grant programs except for those from the NIH and NSF. No export-import bank, no energy subsidies, no education grants, etc.

5. No agriculture subsidies, no housing subsidies of any kind.

Hey, I didn’t say that any of this was going to be feasible politically.

Noah Smith’s Crazy Utopian Idea

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He writes,

I want to move back toward a society where the hard work of an unskilled laborer is considered worthwhile in social interactions, regardless of how many dollars it brings home. I want to move back toward a society where being a good parent or a friendly neighbor earns as much respect as making a hundred million dollars on Wall Street.

In other words, I want our “democracy” back. We need to redistribute respect.

Pointer from Mark Thoma. To realize this utopia, the mainstream media would have to respect people who belong to the tea party. That is why the idea struck me as crazy.