Monthly Archives: August 2017

G. Mark Towhey on Populism

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He writes,

Almost by mistake, this bloc of typical citizens—overstressed, under-informed, concerned more with pragmatic quality of life issues than idealistic social goals—has become a powerful political movement. And we didn’t see them coming. Conventional political leaders seem to completely misunderstand them, and even their own champions often appear to disrespect them. They do so at their peril.

Towhey sees these voters as concerned with practical solutions, not ideology. I hope that does not mean that they just want the trains to run on time.

Is cosmopolitan libertarianism practical?

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William Wilson writes,

[Jason] Kuznicki himself is a representative of a currently fashionable sort of cosmopolitan libertarianism that has never existed in governmental form, and which I suspect is the least likely form of government ever to exist. What if a practical politics that took account of human frailty implied a world formed from a combination of cosmopolitan but illiberal city-states, unified but homogeneous nation-states, and sprawling empires that vacillate between centrifugal and centripetal tendencies? In fact, this is the world that has existed for most of recorded history. Perhaps the real ideological blinders are those which tell us that we have transcended this condition and can replace it with something else.

Read the whole essay. I agree with much of it, but I am not sure about this paragraph. Today, where are the city-states, other than Singapore, and is Singapore less liberal than other states? The homogeneous nation-states would include Japan and Denmark. What is the dividing line between a homogeneous nation-state and a sprawling empire? Can I assume that China, Russia, and the U.S. are all sprawling empires? What about Canada? Switzerland?

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

The Original Internet Architecture

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Tyler Cowen writes,

It remains the case that the most significant voluntary censorship issues occur every day in mainstream non-internet society, including what gets on TV, which books are promoted by major publishers, who can rent out the best physical venues, and what gets taught at Harvard or for that matter in high school. In all of these areas, universal intellectual service was never a relevant ideal to begin with

The original Internet architecture was “smart ends, dumb network.” The smart ends are the computers where people compose and read messages. The “dumb network” is the collection of lines and routers that transmits the bits.

Suppose you create a message, such as an email, a blog post, or a video. When your computer sends the message, it gets broken into packets. Each packet is very small. It has a little bit of content and an address telling where it is going. The Internet’s routers read the address on the packet and forward it along. In Ed Krol’s metaphor, the Internet routers and communication lines act like the Pony Express, relaying the packet to its final destination, without opening it up to see what is inside. The dumb network transmits these packets without knowing anything about what is in them. It does not know whether the packet is an entire very short email or a tiny part of a video.

When your computer receives a message, it consists of one or more packets–usually more than one. The computer opens up the packets and figures out how to put them together to form the message. It then presents you with the email, the blog post, the video, or what have you.

A connection between one end and the other end stays open only long enough to send and receive each packet. To transmit any given message, I may receive many packets from you, but those packets could come over different paths of the network, and thus each packet uses a different end-to-end connection. Think of end-to-end connections as being intermittent rather than persistent.

Some consequences of this “smart ends, dumb network” architecture:

1. The network cannot identify spam. It does not even know that a packet is part of an email message–if it did, spam could be deterred by charging email senders a few cents for each email unless the recipient waives the charge.

2. The network does not know when it is sending packets that will be re-assembled into offensive content. Otherwise, it would be easier to implement censorship.

3. The network does not know the identity of the sender of the packets or the priority attached to them. In that sense, it is inherently “neutral.” The network does not know the difference between a life-or-death message and a cat video.

I get the sense that this original architectural model may no longer describe the current Internet.

–When content is cached on the network or stored in the “cloud,” it feels as if the network is no longer ignorant about content.

–Many features, such as predictive typing in a Google search, are designed to mimic a persistent connection between one end and the other.

–When I use Gmail, a lot of the software processing is done by Google’s computers. That blurs the distinction between the network and the endpoints. Google is performing some of each function. Other major platforms, such as Facebook, also appear to blur this distinction.

The new Internet has advantages in terms of speed and convenience for users. But there are some potential choke points that did not exist with the original architecture.

Ralph Peters sounds like David Halberstam

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Peters writes,

It really comes down to that blood test: What will men die for? The answer, were we willing to open our eyes, is that more Afghans will volunteer to die for the Taliban than for our dream of a “better” Afghanistan. Nor could the Taliban have survived without support among the population. This is Mao 101.

The entire column is in that vein. It sounds very similar to Halberstam’s diagnosis of the Vietnam tragedy.

Frederick W. Kagan makes the case for staying in Afghanistan. An excerpt:

to prevent al Qaeda and ISIS from regaining the base from which al Qaeda launched the 9/11 attacks and from which both would plan and conduct major attacks against the US and its allies in the future. He [President Trump] also described the minimum required outcome: an Afghan state able to secure its own territory with very limited support from the US and other partners. This outcome is essential to American security and it is achievable.

My guess is that the call that the President has to make concerning Afghanistan is a close one, but I am more inclined to agree with Peters. I have no military experience or any other basis for expertise, but for what it’s worth, here are a couple of my thoughts:

1. I am leery of blaming the problems of the Afghan government on corruption. In a limited-access order (borrowing the terminology of North, Weingast, and Wallis), what we call corruption is the only way for a government to remain in power. More generally, if victory depends on our capabilities for nation-building, then I have doubts about the mission.

2. If the Taliban took over, we might be able to convince them not to allow Al Qaeda a safe haven there. If deterrence works, then that would be cheaper than war.

David Brooks on what moderates believe

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He wrote,

Politics is a limited activity. Zealots look to the political realm for salvation and self-fulfillment. They turn politics into a secular religion and ultimately an apocalyptic war of religion because they try to impose one correct answer on all of life. Moderates believe that, at most, government can create a platform upon which the beautiful things in life can flourish. But it cannot itself provide those beautiful things. Government can create economic and physical security and a just order, but meaning, joy and the good life flow from loving relationships, thick communities and wise friends. The moderate is prudent and temperate about political life because he is so passionate about emotional, spiritual and intellectual life.

I like the entire column, but especially this paragraph. I care more about my family and folk dancing than I do about politics. And I think that if everyone cared mostly about their relationships and their hobbies, the world would be a better place.

Note that I schedule my posts several days in advance. I think that this makes me write more moderately than I would if I were racing to give my immediate reaction to things.

Some questions about Google

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Salil Mehta writes,

On Friday afternoon East Coast Time by surprise, I was completely shut down in all my Google accounts (all of my gmail accounts, blog, all of my university pages that were on google sites, etc.) for no reason and no warning.

A couple years ago, Tyler Cowen linked to one of Mehta’s blog posts, and I linked to it also.

Mehta received a form letter from Google saying that he had violated its terms of service.

My questions:

1. If I search the terms of service for “terminate account,” I only find a reference to copyright infringement and “repeat infringers.” Otherwise, the terms of service do not appear to list any specific reasons for terminating someone’s account. What other offenses, if any, can lead Google to terminate accounts?

2. What is Google’s policy with respect to giving warnings prior to terminating accounts?

3. Google’s terms of service state that

We believe that you own your data and preserving your access to such data is important. If we discontinue a Service, where reasonably possible, we will give you reasonable advance notice and a chance to get information out of that Service.

I guess this refers to Google generically terminating a service for everyone, as they did with their blog newsreader. But what happens when an account is terminated? Does the individual have any way of recovering old blog posts, emails, and email contact lists?

[UPDATE] 4. As usual, I schedule posts in advance, and in the interim professor Mehta’s accounts have been restored. That raises the question of what prompted this decision (and the other three questions still remain unanswered).

Is trickle-down mostly local?

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Sam Wetherell writes,

the fifty largest metropolitan areas house just 7 percent of the world’s population but generate 40 percent of its growth. These “superstar” cities are becoming gated communities, their vibrancy replaced with deracinated streets full of Airbnbs and empty summer homes.

The high concentration of wealth in a few metro areas is a surprising phenomenon, given that the Internet was supposed to herald the death of distance. Possible explanations:

1. Talent tends to concentrate. So productivity is higher in the superstar cities than elsewhere.

2. Consumption externalities and network effects are powerful. So people who earn high incomes flock to cities that have what they enjoy.

Here is another possibility. Perhaps it is not the cities per se that are attracting wealth. Perhaps it is just the case that wealth is so concentrated that if you happen to have a city with a handful of the wealthiest people living in it, wealth will trickle down locally. The super-rich will put some of their wealth into the non-profit sector, and they will put significant chunks of their donations into local institutions. This raises incomes in the area.

I would put this possibility of local wealth trickle-down as one possible factor, probably a small one, as we attempt to explain the tendency for high incomes to be concentrated in a few cities.

Internet hopes, disappointed

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1. The death of distance. Supposedly, the Internet was going to reduce the importance of location. Instead, the economic importance of a few key cities seems to have increased.

2. Many of us foresaw the tebirth of highly decentralized markets, in which the small entrepreneur could compete on a level playing field with corporate giants. Instead, the Internet is dominated by key “platforms,” such as YouTube and Amazon, which rake in revenue. Those of us who try to use those platforms to earn our own living are more like Uber drivers than like entrepreneurs in charge of our own destinies.

3. A libertarian moment. The Internet would be a model of decentralized, unregulated human activity. Instead, we see corporations and governments discovering the ability to exert control. As I noted previously, the censorship that we thought was impossible 20 years ago is a reality today.

Thoughts on Internet censorship

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Tyler Cowen Alex Tabarrok writes,

When Facebook and Twitter regulate what can be said on their platforms and Google and Apple regulate who can provide a platform, we have a big problem. It’s as if the NYTimes and the Washington Post were the only major newspapers and the government regulated who could own a printing press.

1. Back in the 1990s, two cliches were “Nobody owns the Internet” and “the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

These are no longer applicable. For people who rely on smart phones for access, Google and Apple own the Internet. In addition, Google owns a major domain name server.

Although I do not have a confident understanding of the technology and business environment, it would seem to me that today censorship on the Internet is feasible. I infer that when I hear of web sites being “shut down” because of the hateful thoughts that they convey.

Reversing the company’s previous stance on not censoring content, founder and CEO Matthew Prince wrote in an internal email that he “woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet. It was a decision I could make because I’m the CEO of a major Internet infrastructure company.”

2. I wonder how there can be overlap between the people and organizations that champion regulations intended to impose “net neutrality” and those that want to see hateful web sites shut down. I believe that such overlap exists, but it is hard to take those as intellectually consistent positions.

3. I would like to see those who provide Internet infrastructure refrain from censorship. But having government enforce non-censorship would not be a very libertarian way of going about it. I would rather see non-censorship as a social norm that has sufficient compliance to make an uncensored Internet available to everyone who wants it.

4. For those of us who don’t like Nazis, jihadists, etc., I recommend expressing solidarity with their intended victims and support for efforts to prevent and punish acts of violence. I do not see shutting down web sites as doing much to prevent violence. I see it as more of a futile gesture, akin to confrontational counter-demonstrations.

5. My generation is aging out, and the “snowflake generation” is coming into its own. Once the anti-censorship social norm starts to break down, my guess is that it will not stop with just a few fringe Nazi sites being shut down.

A notewriter on public choice

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He or she writes,

Unlike providing pure public goods or setting generally applicable laws, the more widely accepted function of the state, the direct provision of goods and services can impact on people’s personal wealth and satisfaction in much more pressing ways. . .

. . .producers previously used to competing, albeit imperfectly, under an open market regime, will now set their eyes very carefully on the people tasked with commissioning their services: the public officials. Rather than competing for customers directly, in this new higher-stakes game, they will have to aggressively lobby officials for public contracts or employment. The result is that the same behaviour in the same sector of the economy that produces relatively efficient outcomes under market rules, produces inefficient, even predatory outcomes under democratic rules.

Pointer from Mark Thoma.

The really pure public choice view is that in the market and in politics, the same human motives are operating. They just operate under different institutional rules in each case. The less doctrinaire view would say that social norms also may differ between the market realm and the political realm. In theory, it is possible for the norms of political behavior to attenuate the tendency toward inefficient and predatory outcomes. How well this works in practice is certainly debatable.