Category Archives: Politics

Media and Political Engagement

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In a 2005 paper, Markus Prior wrote,

the decreasing size of the news audience is not necessarily an indication of reduced political interest. Interest in politics may simply never have been as high as audience shares for evening news suggested. A combined market share for the three network newscasts of almost 90% takes on a different meaning if one considers that people had hardly any viewing alternatives. It was “politics by default” (Neuman 1996, 19), not politics by choice…. Avoiding politics will never again be as difficult as it was in the “golden age” of television.

Thanks to Clay Shirky for the pointer. The divide between politically engaged elites and what is called “the low-information voter” has been understood since a classic 1964 paper by Philip Converse. The Internet has made the elites more engaged (and perhaps more polarized), but the diversity of entertainment media makes it easier for the less-engaged to tune out. Note that it is the latter who are the “swing voters” who, in effect, determine electoral outcomes.

UKIP and Xenophobia

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The Washington Post reports,

Its best-yet showing in a national race has, nevertheless, thrust into the national limelight a political movement that is part of a wave of anti-immigrant populism surging across Europe. The outcome of the Feb. 28 vote, coupled with national polls showing UKIP support at an all-time high, seemed to terrify Britain’s three traditional parties.

I thought the UK Independence Party was about opposition to being governed by Brussels. Is the reporter’s characterization of the party as virulently anti-immigrant correct? Or is this an attempt on the part of those who side with Eurocrats to demonize their opponents?

Purity: It’s Not Just for Conservatives

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John Cochrane writes,

This weekend’s New York Times brought the interesting story of AquaBounty’s genetically modified salmon, which are genetically engineered to grow twice as fast as normal Salmon.

To make a long story short, they first applied to the FDA for approval to sell the product in 1993, and to this day the FDA is still soliciting comments. Jonathan Haidt portrays conservatives as having a stronger “purity” focus than people on the Left. I think this is a counter-example.

Some Perspective on Budget Cuts and Austerity

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Employment, in thousands:

Category 2000 2006 2012
Private sector employment 111,101 114,155 111,820
Government employment 20,790 21,975 21,915

Source: FRED graph, establishment survey. Private sector employment increased less than 1 percent from 2000 to 2012, while government employment (Federal, state, and local) increased more than 5 percent.

Spending, millions of dollars:

Category 2006 Q4 2012 Q4
Total GDP 13584.2 15851.2
Government Expenditures 4325.9 5704.9

Source: FRED graph, national income accounts. Government spending (again, including state and local government) is up 32 percent since 2006.

In my view, these facts can provide some perspective on the issue of spending cuts and austerity. Draw your own conclusions.

As an aside, two documents that usually come out in February were not available when this was written (on March 6th, scheduled for posting March 8th). One is the President’s Budget. The other is the Economic Report of the President. I wonder if they are being planned for release at “news graveyard” time, which is late afternoon on a Friday.

Two Essays on the Modern Political Elite

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1. Megan McArdle on Mandarinization. Read the whole thing. Trying to excerpt is frustrating, but I’ll use this:

And like all elites, they believe that they not only rule because they can, but because they should. Even many quite left-wing folks do not fundamentally question the idea that the world should be run by highly verbal people who test well and turn their work in on time. They may think that machine operators should have more power and money in the workplace, and salesmen and accountants should have less. But if they think there’s anything wrong with the balance of power in the system we all live under, it is that clever mandarins do not have enough power to bend that system to their will. For the good of everyone else, of course. Not that they spend much time with everyone else, but they have excellent imaginations.

This is an issue that I have been mulling for quite some time, and my thinking is very similar to hers. I believe that our modern elite is more insulated than American elites from the past. The movie Lincoln portrays a President much more exposed to contact with ordinary people than a modern President. And I believe that Franklin Roosevelt really understood how he differed from the typical citizen, so that he could talk with people rather than talking down to them. In contrast, Barack Obama strikes me as an elite liberal bubble-person.

Like Megan, I believe that I am more familiar with the Mandarin class than I am with the rest of America. But I still think that somehow I am less insulated than the elite pundits and policy makers.

But perhaps the biggest difference that Megan and I have with the Mandarins is that we are skeptical of the wisdom of the Mandarins. I am no populist. But looking at the elites close up, I see a lot of blemishes.

Another issue is the desire to affiliate with power. If a Mandarin encounters a powerful person, the Mandarin’s instinct it to ingratiate himself or herself. My instinct is to try to knock the person down a notch. That is in fact one of my most deeply-ingrained personality characteristics, one which I had to consciously stifle when I worked in organizational settings.

2. Angelo Codevilla on the court party vs. the country party.

Thus by the turn of the twenty first century America had a bona fide ruling class that transcends government and sees itself at once as distinct from the rest of society – and as the only element thereof that may act on its behalf. It rules – to use New York Times columnist David Brooks’ characterization of Barack Obama – “as a visitor from a morally superior civilization.” The civilization of the ruling class does not concede that those who resist it have any moral or intellectual right, and only reluctantly any civil right, to do so. Resistance is illegitimate because it can come only from low motives.

Codevilla’s essay is mostly about the inability of Republican leaders to forsake the court party. Actually, I think that one should be skeptical of Codevilla’s framing. It is empty to complain that “the people” are not represented by party leaders. That is true of all parties, at all times. I do not think that those of us with strong libertarian or conservative leanings are going to be saved by a populist uprising. Instead, we fact the daunting prospect of attempting to change the dominant views among the elite.

A Defensive Question

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The IGM expert panel is asked whether they agree with

Because all federal spending and taxes must be approved by both houses of Congress and the executive branch, a separate debt ceiling that has to be increased periodically creates unneeded uncertainty and can potentially lead to worse fiscal outcomes.

Almost nobody disagrees, so I will not argue. Instead, let me propose a defensive question. Ask the experts to agree or disagree with the following:

Because the ratio of debt to GDP cannot keep growing indefinitely, the failure of the executive branch and the Senate to offer a sustainable long-term Budget creates unneeded uncertainty and can potentially lead to worse fiscal outcomes.

I would venture to suggest that this is a more serious source of uncertainty and political friction than the debt ceiling.

I also would venture to offer this guide to budget politics: those who maximize the symbolic significance of short-term budget controversies do so in order to avoid acting on the long-term problem.

Can Experts Be Trusted?

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Dan Kahan reports on a study by Brendan Nyhan, Jason Reifler, and Peter Ubel.

Two groups of subjects got a news article that reported on false assertions by Sarah Palin relating to the role of “death panels” in the Obamacare national health plan. One group received in addition, though, a news story that reported that “nonpartisan health care experts have concluded that Palin was wrong.” They then compared the perceptions of the two groups.

…As subjects became more pro-Palin in their feelings, high political knowledge subjects did not merely discount the “correction” by a larger amount than low political knowledge ones. The effect of being exposed to the “nonpartisan experts say Palin wrong” message on high knowledge subjects actually made those with pro-Palin sentiments credit her initially false statements even more strongly than their counterparts in the “uncorrected” or control condition!

My reaction:

1. Just to be fair, I would like to see a study done in which two groups of subjects get a news article reporting on a study that purports to show that a higher minimum wage does not reduce employment. Yes, I know that Krueger and Card did such a study. Then have the experimental group be exposed to the statement that later studies contradicted the Krueger-Card finding (which is what happened). My guess is that, once again, strong partisans would credit the Krueger-Card study even more strongly in the experimental condition.

2. One of the implications of the theory of motivated reasoning and political cognition, which Kahan is discussing here and which I agree is important, is that the correlation between partisanship and knowledge is very high. Therefore, the term “nonpartisan expert” is nearly an oxymoron.

3. If “non-partisan expert” is an oxymoron, then it would make sense for people to view the use of the term with suspicion. It may in fact be rational to react to the statement “non-partisan experts believe X” by reducing your belief in X. Perhaps the experimental subjects intuitively understand the theory of motivated reasoning. They may think, “The article is telling me that some highly motivated reasoners believe X. But it is not giving me any new evidence for X. If there were actual evidence to convince me of X, the article would have shown the evidence, instead of just giving me the views of motivated reasoners. So I should be even more skeptical about X than I was before.”

4. What one seeks in an expert on a politically-charged issue is someone who is a political ignoramus but an expert in the subject at hand. That may not be easy to find.

5. What is most informative is a statement by an expert who is politically motivated one way but who offers testimony in the opposite direction. In fact, when such statements are encountered we give them particularly high credibility.

James Kurth on Conservatism

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He writes,

The economic and fiscal thinking of the Tea Party movement had much in common with that of traditional American conservatism, and with theorists such as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. It had much less in common with the economic and fiscal thinking of reinvented conservatism, and with theorists such as Friedman and the monetarists. Indeed, the thinking of the Tea Party movement was largely the same as that of the libertarian movement, which had long been a marginal element within the Republican Party.

…American conservatism is now split between two tendencies: (1) a partially-discredited reinvented conservatism, which nevertheless continues to dominate the leadership or “establishment” of the Republican Party because it corresponds to the economic interests of the party’s elites and big donors, and (2) a partially-revived traditional conservatism, which is a significant insurgent force within the Republican Party, because it corresponds to the economic interests of much of the party’s base and many of its core voters.

It is a long essay, which I recommend reading even though I disagree with a fair amount of it. Some thoughts:

1. What is the plural of post mortem? It seems to me that we have seen a lot of them after the election. I had a traumatic experience after 2008, in which I made the case that the U.S. was going to turn into a one-party state. Bryan Caplan challenged me to a bet, which I lost when the Republicans won the House in the 2010 mid-terms. Still, I may have been correct, at least in terms of national politics. But it is interesting that so many states are in Republican hands.

2. Kurth’s history of conservatism has traditional conservatives favoring free markets, while what he calls “reinvented conservatism” comes across as cronyism. He associates “reinvented conservatism” with Milton Friedman and Ronald Reagan, which I am sure will annoy fans of those two icons.

3. As those of you have read Not What They Had in Mind know, I disagree with Kurth’s narrative in which banks fought for and achieved deregulation, leading to the financial crisis. First, this ignores the role played by housing policy and capital regulations. Second, it ignores the views of regulators, who did not think that they were loosening up the reins but thought that they were in fact exercising better control and fostering an environment of reduced risk-taking by banks. There is a huge hindsight bias in claiming that the regulators were intentionally easing up.

4. Kurth summarizes the current state of affairs as follows:

The core voting groups for the progressive coalition and the Democratic Party are (1) blacks, (2) Hispanics, and (3) workers in the public sector. Conversely, the core voting groups for the conservative coalition and the Republican Party are (1) economic and fiscal conservatives; (2) Evangelical or Bible-believing Protestants; and (3) white male workers in the private sector

…there remains one immense independent or swing group, and that is white women. A substantial majority of these now vote for Democratic candidates, with economic issues being primary for working-class women and social issues being primary for middle-class women. If these women continue to vote for the Democratic Party in the future, the prospects for the Republican Party to win most presidential and senatorial elections will remain bleak.

5. I think that what potential factor that could shape up electoral politics is the government debt problem. Will it cause continued political friction, as I predict? And will voters perceive the problem as unsustainable progressive programs or Republican recalcitrance? Keep in mind that objective reality, even assuming that it is knowable, may play little or no role in public perceptions.

My Election Post-Mortem

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In this essay, I attempt to channel Winston Churchill.

Romney’s campaign was cautious and uninspired, with no chance of glory in either eventuality. Had he instead said in plain terms that our government is broke and offered specific, bold steps to eliminate activities and reform entitlements, perhaps the result would have been a resounding loss. But it would have been an inspiring defeat, one that would have positioned the Republican Party to gain favor as the United States heads toward fiscal crisis, just as Churchill’s long record of warnings about the Nazis positioned him to gain favor when Hitler launched his blitzkrieg.

Defeatism and Appeasement

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Peter Berkowitz writes,

In these circumstances, conservatives must redouble their efforts to reform sloppy and incompetent government and resist government’s inherent expansionist tendencies and progressivism’s reflexive leveling proclivities. But to undertake to dismantle or even substantially roll back the welfare and regulatory state reflects a distinctly unconservative refusal to ground political goals in political realities.

Former Bush officials Bradley Belt and Philip Swagel join Jared Bernstein and William Gale in proposing a compromise on the “fiscal cliff.”

Our proposals are explicitly temporary. We propose a one- year, $200 billion tax refund to support household spending, with rebate checks of about $1,200 for a couple and an additional $600 a child sent out in the first half of 2013. As with a similar measure enacted with bipartisan support in 2008, the tax rebates would phase out for higher-income households, focusing the cash on low- and middle-income households.

We would add $50 billion for spending to rebuild roads, repair and modernize public schools, and fund scientific research. We see a need for a sustained increase in infrastructure spending, even in the face of the long-term fiscal adjustment. This amount is meant as a start, and in recognition that only so many high-quality projects can be initiated in 2013.

Thanks to Reihan Salam for the pointer.

While Berkowitz, Belt, and Swagel are all reasonable individuals, I reject their approach. I think that defeatism and appeasement are the wrong response to the election and to the Orwellian media environment, in which the definition of fiscal responsibility has been reversed from what I know it to mean.

I may be committed to being charitable to those with whom I disagree, but my disagreement with progressives is profound. I will articulate my views whether or not other people come around to them. I see nothing to be gained by pandering in order to win public support.