Monthly Archives: March 2016

How Can Both Left and Right Believe that they are Losing?

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Tyler Cowen writes,

the new book by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, and the subtitle is How the War on Government Led Us To Forget What Made America Prosper. It is well written and will appeal to many people. It is somewhat at variance with my own views, however. Most of all I would challenge the premise of a “war on government,” at least a successful war.

This reminds me of a puzzling phenomenon that I have noticed. If you read narratives of recent history from the perspective of the left and the right, each side believes it is losing. One could dismiss this as marketing strategy. If our side is winning, then why is it urgent to read my book or donate to my organization?

But I think it is possible for the each side to sincerely believe it is losing.

The left presumes that government can solve problems. We have problems. Therefore, we must be losing!

The right presumes that the government causes problems. We have problems. Therefore, we must be losing!

Heartwarming Libertarian Story

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From Bretigne Shaffer.

Essentially, the DTMC [Detroit Threat Management Center] has done what libertarians like Murray Rothbard and David Friedman have long been saying could be done: They have turned the provision of public safety into a profitable business model, and they have done it in some of the worst neighborhoods in the country. The results have been incredible: According to Brown, crime has dropped dramatically in the areas where they work, and all without the loss of life to their staff or anyone else.

My Political Fortune Cookie

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I got it from taking this quiz, which said that the conservative thinker who most fits my views is Russell Kirk.

You are a traditionalist conservative. You emphasize tradition, order, the moral imagination, and the “permanent things.” Although you are alert to the threat of big government, you are also critical of atomistic individualism, as you emphasize man’s spiritual and social nature. As such, you are skeptical of finding much common ground with libertarians.

I prefer to frame things in terms of my three-axes model. I am certainly not a progressive, because I cannot think of a single issue that I view through the lens of the oppressor-oppressed axis. To the extent that I come out libertarian on issues, it is not so much because I frame them in terms of the freedom-coercion axis. More often, it is because I believe that people over-estimate the effectiveness of the political process and under-estimate the effectiveness of the market process.

I admit to thinking often these days in terms of the civilization vs. barbarism axis. I am old enough to be entitled to that as a natural inclination. But how can one not? Are Islamic radicals not barbaric? Does this year’s Presidential election give one confidence that our civilized values are securely in place? Are our college campuses reinforcing our civilized values? Do we believe that if there is a radical direction taken in American politics, that we will be happy with how that turns out?

Four Forces Watch

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Shelly Lundberg, Robert A. Pollak, and Jenna E. Stearns write,

We argue that college graduate parents use marriage as a commitment device to facilitate intensive joint investments in their children. For less educated couples for whom such investments are less desirable or less feasible, commitment and, hence, marriage has less value relative to cohabitation. The resulting socioeconomic divergence has implications for children and for future inequality.

Question from a Commenter

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The question is

How much of the decline in labor market fluidity is driven by the decline in geographic fluidity, and how much of the decline in geographic fluidity is driven by 2-income households? Especially when the two incomes are in different industries, the problem of trying to match 2 people in a new geographical location gets tough and the opportunity cost of 1 person requiring several months to find a new fit in a new location is large.

Intuitively, this would seem to be a big factor. I wonder what the trend is like in faculty mobility. I believe that there has been a large secular rise in the number of two-professor households, and unless at least one is a superstar, my guess is that mobility options are quite limited.

Overconfidence and Ideology

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This theory predicts that overconfidence in one’s own beliefs leads to ideological extremeness, increased voter turnout, and stronger identification with political parties. Our predictions find strong support in a unique dataset that measures the overconfidence, and standard political characteristics, of a nationwide sample of over 3,000 adults. In particular, we find that overconfidence is the most reliable predictor of ideological extremeness and an important predictor of voter turnout in our data.

One of the most important cognitive biases is to over-weight your own experience and to under-weight the opinions of others who have different experiences. In a post last week, I talked about how I used to interview job candidates. One commenter correctly pointed out that people tend to over-estimate what they learn by interviewing job candidates relative to other sources of information.

I believe that overconfidence gets strongly rewarded in the realm of politics and punditry. Admitting that you might be wrong seems to hurt your credibility. Insisting that the other side is wrong is the best way to gain a following.

The Plunge in Manufacturing Jobs in the U.S.

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Mark Muro and Siddharth Kulharni write,

globalization, offshoring, and automation have since 1980 liquidated nearly 7 million manufacturing jobs in U.S. communities—more than one-third of U.S. manufacturing positions—as manufacturing employment plunged from 18.9 million jobs to 12.2 million. Moreover, as the chart depicts, while the trend is longstanding, it actually accelerated in the 2000s.

The role of China’s expansion in this process is the subject of a Russ Roberts podcast with David Autor.

See comments by four of us here.
My comments on the podcast are below the fold. Continue reading →

And Another from the Monkey Cage Blog

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Wendy Rahn and Eric Oliver write,

Of course, authoritarians and populists can overlap and share dark tendencies toward nativism, racism and conspiracism. But they do have profoundly different perceptions of authority. Populists see themselves in opposition to elites of all kinds. Authoritarians see themselves as aligned with those in charge. This difference sets the candidates’ supporters apart.

Once again, I recommend the whole post.

I think of populism as a dangerously self-negating approach to politics. The problem is that the people attach themselves to a charismatic leader, and that leader is bound to have the sort of arrogance that populists supposedly resent.

Still Another from the Monkey Cage Blog

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Neil A. Abrams and M. Steven Fish write,

Scholars often treat the rule of law as a prerequisite for market-oriented economic policies such as liberalizing prices and trade and eradicating wasteful subsidies. They’re getting it backward. Instead, first eliminate the subsidies and purge the compromised bureaucrats who stand in the rule of law’s way. This is hard to do. It will provoke tremendous resistance from those who profit from the status quo. But it’s far more realistic and effective than simply encouraging countries to adopt the rule of law.

Read the whole thing. To me, one implication is that massive foreign aid is likely to hinder the appearance of the rule of law. To me, the poster child for that is the West Bank and Gaza. The once-entrepreneurial Palestinian society was replaced by criminal gangs, because there was more profit to be found in getting control over the distribution of aid than in business.

Guess the Axis

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David French writes,

I grew up in Kentucky, live in a rural county in Tennessee, and have seen the challenges of the white working-class first-hand. Simply put, Americans are killing themselves and destroying their families at an alarming rate. No one is making them do it. The economy isn’t putting a bottle in their hand. Immigrants aren’t making them cheat on their wives or snort OxyContin. Obama isn’t walking them into the lawyer’s office to force them to file a bogus disability claim.

Call it the civilization-vs.-barbarism hypothesis to explain the increase in labor immobility. Pointer from Mark Thoma, who I am sure looks at this from the standpoint of a different axis.

French is commenting on a piece by Kevin Williamson. More coverage here.

“It is immoral because it perpetuates a lie: that the white working class that finds itself attracted to Trump has been victimized by outside forces,” the NR roving correspondent writes. “[N]obody did this to them. They failed themselves.”