using the Human Development Index, which measures a population’s well-being in terms of health, education, and wealth. The HDI, corrected for internal distribution (the Bill Gates-makes-all-Americans-look-rich factor), is typically higher in OECD nations where governments are relatively large.
In fact, the HDI is very highly correlated with the Fraser index of economic freedom, and in that sense it supports libertarianism. I like to group countries by population size. Take countries with population size between 5 and 10 million. Of the top ten of these countries according to the Fraser Index, seven are also in the top 21 in the HDI. The only three that are not are Jordan (ranked 100th in HDI), United Arab Ameriates (ranked 41st), and Slovak Republic (35th).
Next, consider the 18 countries with a population over 76 million. The top three in terms of the Fraser index are the U.S., Germany, and Japan, and they are ranked 3rd, 5th, and 10th respectively in the HDI.
In an earlier essay, I suggested that large countries in general have poorer governance, as measured by the Fraser index. The HDI shows the same thing. Apart from the U.S., Germany, and Japan, the next highest-ranking large country in terms of the HDI is Russia, at 55th. 10 out the 18 largest countries are ranked 101 or worse in the HDI.
In fact, the correlation between the HDI and the Fraser index is sufficiently high that I could have written my essay using the HDI as my measure of governance and shown the same results: government tends to be poorer in countries with large populations, which is consistent with a libertarian view that centralized power is a bad thing.
Turning back to Fischer, the piece is not really worth reading, unless you enjoy grinding your teeth over another attack on libertarianism that is based on the idea that dislike of government is crazy and anti-social.
Suppose instead that we say that what libertarians oppose is the use of centralized, coercive power. Does that still make us seem crazy and anti-social? To me, it seems as if progressives appear to believe that centralized, coercive power is a great boon, an endless source of social betterment. Am I being uncharitable? Do they believe something else? Alternatively, if they do wish to extol the virtues of centralized, coercive power, am I really crazy for having doubts?
The tendency of the Progressive paradigm to concentrate on power imbalances means that people get put into categories, based on their supposed power level. From this paradigm, for instance, the level of wages a worker at Wal-Mart gets is mostly a product of their lack of negotiating power compared to Wal-Mart’s.
I have seen Progressive descriptions of the health care problem that were highly informed and deep, but the solution always goes to single payer, because they have a greatly oversized notion of the importance of the size and power of the negotiating parties.
Anyway, regarding your post, politics is kind of the definition of the sphere of human activity that is actually defined by factions and their individual size and power. So, politics is where Progressives feel comfortable.
In our non-political lives, our negotiating power is relatively unimportant most of the time. As a customer at Wal-Mart, I get the same price as Bill Gates and the homeless guy on the corner. But, in politics, you really can change the price of something by gathering the bigger mob.
Lately I have been thinking about a simple quadrant that maps out the forms of organizational behavior that people prefer.
One axis would be market/non-market interactions. Progressives don’t like market interactions and libertarians do. The other axis would be centralized/de-centralized organizations.
Both prefer decentralized organizations\, but are willing to make compromises on this with regards to the other axis.
For a liberal the highest form of organization is decentralized non-market, which is why they like activism so much and flocked to Occupy Wall Street. Libertarians prefer decentralized market interactions, which is why go gaga over Bitcoin.
But both groups are squeamish about crossing the market/non-market divide. This is why libertarians come off as forgiving of large corporate behavior because they think it’s better than large government behavior. And it’s why lots of liberals are a little salty towards Bitcoin because they think it chips away at the welfare state. At the end of the day it’s better to be centralized and non-market than decentralized and market……even if it prevents the current banking center from being reformed.
Spot-on post Dr. Kling. The paper sounds like data was massaged until he got the result he wanted.
I really enjoyed the previous post on population size and economic freedom. Got me thinking and I tinkered a bit with some data. Thought it might be interesting to put together a dashboard using the Heritage Foundation Economic Freedom Index data (it already included data on population size), also looked at Transparency International’s Corruption Index. Seems like there may be a relationship there between population size and both indices.
http://public.tableausoftware.com/views/EconomicFreedom-PerceptionofCorruption/Dashboard1?:embed=y&:display_count=no
interesting graphics
I don’t grind my teeth at irrational people. What has government actually done that is so wonderful?
My guess is that the irrational peoples’ claim boils down to “if you don’t believe the promises, you must hate the goal.”
Richer countries can also afford larger government and the nonsense that comes from it. Just as richer counties can better deal with natural disasters in general.
There is a lot behind this observation.
It applies to states too. California’s government is mindbogglingly large because California is such a great place to live and work. The state simply skims as much of that consumer surplus as it can get away with.