Heh

Blame America First?

No!

Drain America First! (see the comments)

Authoritarians

I always get a kick out of the uber-pedantic tone of robertdfeinman's comments on various econ-related forums. He is one of those I describe as practicing the ideology-free ideology: he, among all of us, has somehow managed to purge himself of all bias and has become the unbounded rationalist. After getting some attention from similarly unbiased Mike Huben for an article which dissects Masonomists such as Tyler Cowen, Alex Tabarrok, and Bryan Caplan by pointing out that they must be wrong because - ready? - their institution received funding from Charles Koch [1], Mr. feinman has discovered a new whipping boy: Bob Altemeyer.

Bob Altemeyer is a professor of psychology and author of a book, freely available over the internet, called The Authoritarians. It's definitely worth a read. This is a mostly even-handed book about people who have authoritarian tendencies. It includes a quiz which becomes the basis for a wide variety of experiments to test what authoritarians will do. He calls the quiz score the "Right Wing Authoritarian (RWA)" scale.

Curiously, by "right-wing", he doesn't mean "Republican". At times, I get the impression that he may actually be a Republican who happens to resent the takeover of that party by religious conservatives (except that he's Canadian and would therefore be something altogether different, eh?). And he cautions readers to avoid conflating "conservative" with "Right wing authoritarian"; he says

Authoritarian followers usually support the established authorities in their society, such as government officials and traditional religious leaders. Such people have historically been the "proper" authorities in life, the time-honored, entitled, customary leaders, and that means a lot to most authoritarians. Psychologically these followers have personalities featuring:

1) a high degree of submission to the established, legitimate authorities in their society;
2) high levels of aggression in the name of their authorities; and
3) a high level of conventionalism.

Because the submission occurs to traditional authority, I call these followers right-wing authoritarians. I'm using the word "right" in one of its earliest meanings, for in Old English "riht" (pronounced "writ") as an adjective meant lawful, proper, correct, doing what the authorities said.

In North America people who submit to the established authorities to so you can call extraordinary degrees often turn out to be political conservatives, them "right-wingers" both in my new-fangled psychological sense and in the usual political sense as well. But someone who lived in a country long ruled by Communists and who ardently supported the Communist Party would also be one of my psychological right-wing authoritarians even though we would also say he was a political left-winger. So a right-wing authoritarian follower doesn’t necessarily have conservative political views. Instead he's someone who readily submits to the established authorities in society, attacks others in their name, and is highly conventional. It's an aspect of his personality, not a description of his politics. [emphasis added]

Indeed, in his 1996 book, The Authoritarian Specter, he includes a chapter on Left-Wing Authoritarianism (LWA). It is perhaps best to understand the RWA in the context of what he has to say there:

When I began talking about "right-wing" authoritarianism (RWA, p.152), I was not using the phrase in an economic or political sense. Instead I was (brazenly) inventing a new sense, a social psychological sense that denotes submission to the perceived authorities in one's life. In many instances, the established authorities tend to be people who hold right-wing economic and political views -- but not always. In Communist countries, the established authorities in society held a decidedly left-wing economic philosophy, but after so many tears in power, the party leaders had become the Establishment. So I predicted persons who scored highly on the RWA scale in the USSR would support the Communist leadership and oppose democratic reforms (EOF, p. 264), and by thunder they did.

Revolutions such as those in eastern Europe call off all bets for a while. But the situation in stable countries seems more predictable. Psychological right-wingers (by definition) support the perceived established authorities in society, and psychological left-wingers [emphasis in the original] (as I am using the term) oppose them.

I am not assuming anything about what the "opposers" stand for. Some may simply want society reformed so that disadvantaged groups can share more of the power. The African National Congress and civil rights groups in the united States come to mind. But others may want to seize all the power themselves, from either the far reaches of the political left (Communists) or the political right (Nazis, the Posse Comitatus, Lyndon LaRouche's National Caucus). Such extremist groups, while submissive to their own perceived "legitimate authorities," would be psychological [emphasis in the original] left-wingers on a societal level during their opposition to the Establishment. But should their movement attain power in the flash of a revolution, their strong submission to the new societal authority would make them psychological right-wing authoritarians on that level, as they became in Germany and Russia.

In other words, when robertdfeinman conflates "conservative" with "RWA", he dramatically misinterprets Altemeyer's work. An RWA is someone who supports The Establishment. Given that robertdfeinman and his allies enthusiastically support The Establishment, and that even Dani Rodrik says, "The real revolutionaries are the libertarians," I think it quite funny that robertdfeinman uses Altemeyer's work to accuse libertarians of being RWAs [2]. One wonders why the Libertarian Party would have contracted with Altemeyer to measure authoritarianism in the US if they were in favor of it. But those are questions that fall outside the ideologically-free ideologue's scope when "considering all sides".

That said, I don't understand why Altemeyer keeps coming back to statements that imply RWAs tend to be found in the Republican Party. No doubt, he can support this by his own empirical evidence. However, in my opinion the test he uses is based upon highly charged words that naturally select right-wing (political sense) biases toward those aspects of "traditional authority" which were traditional in, say, the 1950s or earlier. Were he to test RWA with biases toward the authority that has become traditional since then, I have little doubt that he would discover high correlation with RWA in the Democratic Party.

What do I mean?

• Why does statement 4 in his test state "Gays and Lesbians are just as healthy and moral as anyone else?" Politically right wing people are going to perceive the subject of the statement as both anti-establishment and politically let-wing. What would happen if you were to substitute, for example, "Homeschoolers". Homeschoolers are perceived by the left-wing as both anti-establishment and right-wing. See how Huben reacts on David Friedman's Ideas blog.
  
• Why does statement 5 use the phrase "rabble-rousers" in "It is always better to trust the judgment of the proper authorities in government and religion than to listen to the noisy rabble-rousers in our society who are trying to create doubt in people's minds"? That's a standard reference to anti-establishment left-wingers. What would happen if you subsituted "libertarians"?
• Statement 6 puts up atheists against regular church-goers. What if you put up anarchists against regular voters? In each case, you have anti-establishment vs. establishment, but one appeals to politically right-wing, the other to politically left-wing.
  
• Statement 8 asks you to pass judgement on nudist camps. What if it were Seasteading? Think that such utopian adventures would be ignored by the left? You would be wrong.
  
• In 10, why is it "perversions eating away at our moral fiber and traditional beliefs" instead of "runaway greed eating away at our moral fiber and traditional beliefs"? Surely I jest.
  
• In statement 12, the use of "old-fashioned values" is slanted at political right-wingers. What if "democratic values" had been substituted?
• In 13, the changes included abortion rights, animal rights, and abolishing school prayer. What if they had been natural gas deregulation, vouchers, and abolishing tariffs? In both cases, you are asking about their reaction to change of the status quo, but in one set you include changes favored by the political left, and in the other, changes favored by the political right.
• In 14, what if you ask whether the strong leader should crush greed and corruption instead of evil? Evil is a moral judgment favored by the political right, greed and corruption are moral judgments favored by the left.
• In 15, instead of "Some of the best people in our country are those who are challenging our government, criticizing religion, and ignoring the 'normal way things are supposed to be done,'" suppose it was "Some of the best people in our country are those who are challenging our government, criticizing corporations, and ignoring 'business as usual'"?
• In 16, instead of "God's laws about abortion, pornography and marriage must be strictly followed before it is too late, and those who break them must be strongly punished," what if it were, "Democratic laws about trusts, outsourcing and pollution must be strictly followed before it is too late, and those who break them must be strongly punished."?
• In 18, instead of "A 'woman's place' should be wherever she wants to be. The days when women are submissive to their husbands and social conventions belong strictly in the past," how about "A businessman's social responsibility should be whatever he wants it to be. The days when people are submissive to the government and social conventions belong strictly in the past"?

And so on. In other words, Altemeyer's framing appears to combine both psychologically and politically right-wing frames. I suggest combining psychologically right-wing and politically left-wing frames; I predict that you would find that the Progressives, Democrats, and (surprisingly or not) the non-ideological ideologues (collectively, progdemoniis) will get a high RWA score.

In fact, it is surprising that Altemeyer hasn't seen this himself. In the quoted section above, he notes that politically left-wing groups would shift (psychologically) from being left-wing to right-wing upon winning a revolution. Given that the progdemoniis were the revolutionaries 100 years ago, and have been the Establishment since then, and given the rabid defense that some of them make (spend an hour or so perusing the posts and comments on Daily Kos, Making Light, Crooked Timber, Mark Thoma blogs to see whether "rabid" is an unfair characterization) for the state, it seems remarkable that he didn't note this already. While Republicans are busy fighting for God and Country, Democrats argue for the existing State and Social Control. In each case, they are really defending their religion and traditions, respectively, where religion is "that which is taken on faith (the facts be damned)" and traditions are "that which we do because we always have".

Incidentally, it should be noted that my own RWA score was 40. It would have been lower, but I tended to be less radical whenever I thought the question was ambiguous. For example, if the question was "Atheists and others who have rebelled against the established religions are no doubt every bit as good and virtuous as those who attend church regularly," I see where the anti-authoritarian answer would have been strong agreement, but only if you also agree that regular church attenders are good and virtuous, or that atheist rebels like V. I. Lenin are in any way good or virtuous. I believe a person's claimed religious views may be completely independent of their goodness and virtuosity, but I didn't see a way to map that into the question as posed.


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[1] ad hominem:

The person presenting an argument is attacked instead of the argument itself. This takes many forms. For example, the person's character, nationality or religion may be attacked. Alternatively, it may be pointed out that a person stands to gain from a favourable outcome. Or, finally, a person may be attacked by association, or by the company he keeps.

For a longer list of variants on the theme, there is Dean and Marshall VanDruff's Conversational Terrorism: How NOT to talk. For a rule of thumb, try not to think of your opponent as DIE: Dumb, Insane, or Evil. And of course you want to avoid the Devil Shift.

[2] Judge for yourself how easily rdf's statements fall into the DIE regime of ad hominem argument. It might help to realize that Evil is an extreme description of corruption, Insane is the opposite of psychological health, and Dumb is an extreme form of ignorance:

First, are those who owe their livelihood to these corporate backers. ...

Second, are the unaffiliated libertarian or "free market" ideologues. These are the "faith based" people implied above. Like all ideological followers their need for a coherent picture of the world governs their belief system. It's a psychological thing.

Then there are the liberals who think that since their environment is a meritocracy and a bit anarchic that this must be true of their opponents as well. They tend to doubt that that can actually be a quasi-secret cabal behind the entire movement. It seems so un-American and unlikely.

National vs. Social

As if you haven't noticed, I've been giving lots of attention to the Jonah Goldberg thingy. It happens to be an interest of mine.

One of his comments on the interview with Glenn and Helen Reynolds was something like "Nationalizing and socializing mean exactly the same thing: When we talk of socializing health care, we mean nationalizing, and when someone talks of nationalizing the oil industry, they mean socializing it."

Well, yes and no. Goldberg is right when he says the two are the same, but they shouldn't be and they weren't always.

This gets down to what Marx said and meant in theory, and how his theories have been taken up in practice. Marx saw the final stage, the one succeeding capitalism, as being a thoroughly democratic society in which institutions like private property would give way to community property. Thus, factories would be socialized, the opposite of privatized. However, he also saw that the state, the mechanism by which the capital-owning class controls the workers, would also whither away. Thus, socialized industry or socialized health care meant something completely different to him than what we mean by that today.

Today, socialization of an industry means ownership becoming controlled by the state, i.e. nationalization. Marx's successors have adopted his vision for everything except the state and have substituted the state for the community. And in this regard, we find that the state-loving left is the more nationalistic.[1]

Nationalism is frequently conflated with extreme patriotism or jingoism. When using the term to describe a characteristic of fascism, that's a red herring. A fascist's nationalism is not primarily about which state is better, it is about the proper scope of the state. Mussolini's prescription was, "All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state." And so it is when people speak of those things which are "too important to be left to the market," such as education, energy, health care, transportation, and so on. For each new field of endeavor into which the state enters, the state becomes that much stronger and more important (and the realization of Marx' state-free vision that much farther off). And as I have written in other contexts, no matter which party favors and clamors for the increase in state authority, the other is happy to exploit it for their own ends when they are in power. That is one reason it is a one-way ratchet. At some point, the scope of the state's authority will enter into every realm of personal life: that is what they meant by "totalitarian". For Mussolini, it was an explicit goal, enthusiastically sought; for today's neocons and takes-a-villagers, it is a "necessary evolution," driven by their concerns for physical and economic security, "market failure"[2], and the misfortune of "living in a second best world."

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[1] Yes, they are quick to blame America for the world's ills, but note how easily the left will forgive and forget their own when committing the same atrocities. The Blame America First tactic is merely cover for a Blame Republicans First strategy. World War I and II? Democrats. Viet Nam? Democrats. Only president to use a nuclear weapon? Democrat. President in power for both the first World Trade Center bombing and the initial planning for the second WTC bombing and thus responsible for America's poor image in the world? Democrat.

[2] Check it out: Quasibill catches the neocons explaining -- in terms of market failure -- why the state must pay for the economic security of Big Air under the guise of paying for the physical security of the passengers.

More Goldberg

After listening to the interview with Glenn and Helen Reynolds, I'd have to say that the Sadly, No gang's fisking is not illuminating (the Crooked Timber takes are even less useful, since they are literally judging the book by its cover). Take this exchange, keeping in mind that one of Goldberg's themes is that the proto-fascist socialists were pro-military:

JG: There is confusion over Nazi attitudes about homosexuality.
S,N: No there isn't. They wanted to kill them.
JG: Some Nazis were gay.
S,N: Duh, of course; good help is hard to find. [EH: What happened to wanting to kill them?]
JG: They killed Rohm not because he was gay but rather because he was more radical, desiring a second revolution.
S,N: Aha! By radical, you mean more socialist! [EH: Perhaps homosexuality is not the only reason the Nazis killed?]

Sadly, No then goes on to provide a link which yielded the following quote:

The SA, led by Ernst Rohm, included control of the Reichswehr (the army) in the program of the second revolution.

The more radical/socialist members of the NSDAP wanted to control the military? It's hard to see how this doesn't support Goldberg's thesis. Instead, we get lots of side track comments from the Sadly, No author that are self-contradictory.

This next tidbit is a common problem in any analysis of the Nazi relationship to socialism, broadly understood. The standard reaction to any mention of Hitler's obsession with health is that Goldberg -- or anyone else pointing this out -- is using this syllogism:

Hitler was a vegetarian.
Vegetarians are leftists.
Therefore, Hitler was a leftist.

Since they have dropped almost all of the context, it's hard to say where Goldberg was going with his discussion, but it seems much more likely that he's developing a line of argument that has to do with connecting certain lifestyles with morality, and morality with the state, and thus the idea that the state can and should strictly regulate diet, exercise, and other habits (smoking). As Russell Wardlow and others point out on Steve Sailer's site (excellent comments), some people are unable to refrain from going to that simple strawman syllogism and therefore overlook the bigger point. The bigger point is that the Nazis wanted to regulate health habits because they thought it was every citizen's duty to provide the state with fit workers. [1]

Then we have this line from another post:

Starting wars simply to demonstrate national strength is about a billion times more fascist than some namby-pamby bureaucrat telling you not to super-size your fries.

By comparing nanny-state bureaucracy to something that arguably more fascist [2] and declaring that it pales in comparison, the author concludes that it can't be fascist. I'm sure that's a named fallacy. But even if I can't be bothered to look up the name of that fallacy, I recognize the attitude: it's the Banality of Evil.

Speaking of Hannah Arendt, the same post contains a floating quotation (no context again) about the relationship of Wilson and FDR to the French Revolution, which Goldberg identifies as fascist. The commenters are mystified, but they wouldn't be had they ever pulled themselves through a copy of Arendt's On Revolution. It's actually quite funny, since the commenters point out that the Jacobins were radicals, i.e. proto-progressives. Indeed they were. And the result? The Committee on Public Safety, under the leadership of Robespierre, commenced the Reign of Terror. I'd like to know in what way they find that significantly different from fascism.

In another post, they attempt this argument, which the uncritical commenters accept:

In fact, we must stare in awe as Jonah accuses Margaret Sanger of "nasty racism" for her era-appropriate belief in eugenics

I asked, in response,

I wonder if you'd also characterize the antisemitism of He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named as "era-appropriate"? Surely, if such ideas are bad, they are bad in any era, regardless of the identity of the person who thinks those thoughts?

Nobody has answered. If those ideas were so era-appropriate, how does one explain people like G. K. Chesterton who were opposed to eugenics? Could it be that the era-appropriateness hinged on the acceptance of the idea among H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Woodrow Wilson, and other progressives?

It is surely funny that the Sadly, No writer lampoons some of Goldberg's sources but then relies on The History Channel's National Socialism archives. Still, I wonder if he would consider it fair game if portions of that worked against him?

The roots of National Socialism, however, were peculiarly German, grounded, for example, in the Prussian tradition of military authoritarianism and expansion; in the German romantic tradition of hostility to rationalism, liberalism, and democracy; in various racist doctrines according to which the Nordic peoples, as so-called pure Aryans, were not only physically superior to other races, but were the carriers of a superior morality and culture; and in certain philosophical traditions that idealized the state or exalted the superior individual and exempted such a person from conventional restraints.

The Prussian thing, the Romantic thing, and the Aryan thing are tied together in Fichte, Herder, and several others who also influenced Hegel and through him, Marx. Stir in some Plenge, Spengler, and Chamberlain, add a dash of George Bernard Shaw's Nietzche's Superman, and you have the National Socialist German Worker's Party philosophical stew made almost exclusively from the same philosophers who influenced the era's leading progressives, Fabians, and socialists.

Consider what Richard Pipes has to say:

Was the Fascist Party a "right-wing" party?
Mussolini's party was a right-wing party but only to some extent, just as the Nazi party. These were not conservative parties. They were radical, radical nationalist parties, which in the programs very much maintained the socialist ideals [emphasis added]. For example, Mussolini's corporate state workers participated in the decision making in the business enterprises. They had as much say in some respects, as did the owners of factories.

Mussolini did shift to the right gradually because I think he was afraid of the power of the communist and the socialists, and since he was a dictator and wanted dictatorial power he felt that one has to suppress these parties and they were suppressed.

...

Are Communism and Fascism totally different things, completely opposed to one another?
Well, the notion that Communism and fascism are diametrically opposed is something that was fostered by the Communist party, by the Communist International. In the 1920s, basically the International defined fascism as any anti-communist movement. If you were anti-communist, it doesn't matter what platform, you were automatically fascist. So that even the western democracies were called fascist. This is a meaningless term. I use the term Fascism concretely, to apply only to the Italian fascist party and the Nazi to the Nazi party.

The idea that fascism as a far-right ideology was a creation of the Comintern is something Goldberg makes reference to in the interview linked above. And if you doubt the extent to which the Comintern would go to paint their fellow-traveller rivals as reactionary, I'd recommend that you pick up a copy of Orwell's Homage to Catalonia.

In the interview, Goldberg says something to the effect of, "I bet that if you were to remove the war and antisemitism from the Nazi program, most of these modern progressives would endorse their policies." That does seem to occur among the commenters in the form of "if free education was all that nazism did, I would be in favor of it," as if you could separate things so easily -- what part of "totalitarian" don't they understand? Via Matt Zeitlin, I did come across something that approached a thoughtful critique at Spencer Ackerman's TooHotforTNR (worth reading), in which he asserts that "a government that makes a lot of poor and invidious policy choices, many of dubious constitutionality, but still leaves power following a democratic election isn't fascist." Does that mean that the NSDAP was not fascist until the Reichstag fire? Or that they wouldn't have been fascist had Hitler counterfactually stepped down in elections in 1940? Does it mean that Lenin and Stalin were fascist?

This debate hinges on the definition of fascism. Most common definitions start from the standpoint informed by the post-WWII propaganda effort that painted Nazis, Italian fascists, and other groups into the right by way of contrasting them to the Communists, socialists, and Democrats. [3] As usual, I'm no fan of the overly simple, one-dimensional, left-right model of politics. Anything that pretends to pit Hitler and Stalin as polar opposites is nearly useless. If I find the time, perhaps I may make an attempt at developing a definition of fascism.

Most critics of Goldberg's book seem to think that he is making the definition so broad that it would encompass every country and political movement in history. Possibly: I don't have the book and the Amazon version isn't searchable, so I don't have Goldberg's definition. It seems likely, based on the little I have seen, that they are being intentionally obtuse. They are preferring to argue on the differences in degree in the components and refusing to see the difference in kind in the system taken as a whole. Take Ackerman's response to one passage in the book:

JG: Fascism is a religion of the state. It assumes the organic unity of the body politic and longs for a national leader attuned to the will of the people. It is totalitarian in that it views everything as political and holds that any action by the state is justified to achieve that common good. It takes responsibility for all aspects of life, including our health and well-being, and seeks to impose uniformity of thought and action, whether by force or through regulation and social pressure. Everything, including the economy and religion, must be aligned with its objectives. Any rival identity is part of the "problem" and therefore defined as the enemy.

SA: Fascist regimes do not impose their wills by force "or" through regulation and social pressure. They systematize violence.

Is this a deliberate misrepresentation of both Goldberg's claim and of fascism? He skips past the "religion of the state" part and the definition of totalitarian, going right for a minor point about regulation and social pressure. And on that point, he is wrong. Fascist states famously used social pressure as leverage to get people to report their neighbors. It is so well known that it has entered our language in the form of phrases like "little Eichmans" and "Good Germans"; it has been famously studied in the Milgram, Stanford prison, and Asch conformity experiments.


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[1] Today, the primary argument for state intervention in these matters has not been our own health or the state's right to our labor, but rather the cost which unhealthy citizens are placing on state healthcare programs. Which is absurd when you think about it - the state creates a program to shield people from risk and then is shocked to find people using it? The rejoinder to this from the left is most likely to be a moral argument, i.e., individuals should sacrifice their personal pleasure (smoke, consumption of transfats) for the common good. Sounds like ... ?

[2] First, Nazi Germany did not start a war to demonstrate their national power, they started it because they felt they had an obligation to look after the welfare of "ethnic Germans". Thus, they reclaimed the Rhineland, pulled the Austrian and Sudetenland Germans back into the fold, and then started expanding east (Poland) in order to start realizing his goals of autarky, a closed economic system which could provide its own food , manufactured goods, and markets for both. They did this because they perceived the lesson of WWI was that imperialism did not work. Hitler went to war with France and England as a pre-emptive measure, and against Russia because he felt he also needed some of the land which the Soviets had grabbed for farm production.

Another reason for qualifying war as only "arguably" more fascist is that England, France, and Kaiser-era Germany were all basically fighting over their imperialist aspirations in WWI, and the Soviet Union and China also started a few wars. Were they fascist? Using this aspect of the Sadly, No author's definition of fascism, it might be difficult to find a country which would not qualify. Can anyone state the significance of the United States, Mexico, and 1848 in this context? Anyone? Bueller?

[3] These are over-represented in the Wiki articles thanks to the efforts of Chip Berlet and a few self-identified Marxist editors. I found that if I attempted to mitigate some of their more eggregious errors, my edits were promptly removed without explanation. When I started a wholly new section, they moved it to someplace completely unrelated and then watered it down. They view their sources as unassailable while claiming that the Austrian school of economics is too marginalized to be taken seriously. Wikipedia is like politics: a small special interest group or a majority can introduce and enforce errors.

Local, Action: Issues of Scale

In a recent debate hosted by Cato, Peter Leeson argues

In a recent study I compared Somali welfare under anarchy to welfare under government using all key development indicators for which data allowed comparison. According to the data, of the eighteen development indicators, fourteen show unambiguous improvement under anarchy. Life expectancy is higher today than was in the last years of government's existence; infant mortality has improved twenty-four percent; maternal mortality has fallen over thirty percent; infants with low birth weight has fallen more than fifteen percentage points; access to health facilities has increased more than twenty-five percentage points; access to sanitation has risen eight percentage points; extreme poverty has plummeted nearly twenty percentage points; one year olds fully immunized for TB has grown nearly twenty percentage points, and for measles has increased ten; fatalities due to measles have dropped thirty percent; and the prevalence of TVs, radios, and telephones has jumped between three and twenty-five times.
...
Should we conclude from Somalia's stateless improvement that it is a nice place to live? Of course not. But Somalia's pre- and post-government performance highlights an important point about the desirability of anarchy. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it is simply not true that any government is always superior to no government. If state predation goes unchecked, government may not only fail to add to social welfare, but can actually reduce welfare below its level under statelessness. Such was the case with Somalia's government, which did more harm to its citizens than good.

Dani Rodrik responded

I do not have any trouble with the idea that self-enforcing agreements (what Leeson calls "anarchy") can sometimes substitute for third-party (i.e., government) enforcement. Such self-enforcing agreements are maintained through the force of repeated interaction ("if you cheat me now, I will cheat you in the future,") through reputational mechanisms ("see, I am not the cheating kind of guy"), and collective punishment schemes ("if you cheat me, I will bring the wrath of my colleagues on you"). The literature is replete with examination of such informal institutions. See for example Avner Greif's work on medieval merchant guilds, John McMillan and Chris Woodruff's work on commercial dispute settlement in Vietnam, Marcel Fafchamps' work on firms' relations with their suppliers in Africa, and Elinor Ostrom's work on the management of common property resources around the world [1]. Leeson's own account of how pirates have developed self-enforcing arrangements to elicit cooperation fits squarely in this larger literature.

The problem with self-enforcing agreements is that they do not scale up. One of the findings from Elinor Ostrom's extensive case studies is that self-enforcing arrangements to manage the "commons" work well only when the geographic scope of the activity is clearly delimited and membership is fixed. It is easy to understand why. Cooperation under "anarchy" is based on reciprocity, which in turn requires observability. I need to be able to observe whether you are behaving according to the rules, and if not, I have to be able to sanction you. When the size of the in-group becomes large and mobility allows opportunistic behavior to go unpunished, it becomes difficult to maintain cooperation. Imagine that the pirates numbered in the millions and they could easily jump ship to join competing groups mid-voyage; would the arrangements Leeson describes have been sustainable?

Later in the essay, Rodrik concludes, "There is no example of a society that has become prosperous without a state machinery." He doesn't appear to be thinking about the fact that many societies that have not become prosperous in his sense (high GDP) have been sustainable over hundreds of years -- sustainable by definition.

In contrast to Leeson's note that it is not true that any government is better than no government, Rodrik arguees that more government is equivalent to good government. In fact, he is all but saying that state capitalism is the best option we have.

Unlike in pirate societies or pre-colonial Angola, modern economies require an elaborate and ever-evolving division of labor -- among owners of firms, managers, and their employees, among producers up and down the value chain, and between producers and providers of supporting services such as finance, accounting, and legal services. The complexity, fluidity, and geographic non-specificity of these activities leave too much room for opportunistic behavior for self-enforcing arrangements to work well. They require an external backstop in the form of government-enforced rules.
...
Which is why the scatter plot below, showing the relationship between per-capita GDP and the size of the public sector, should not be a surprise. There is a strong, statistically highly significant, and positive association between countries' income levels and the share of their economy that the government consumes. This highlights the complementarity between markets and the state. Those societies in which markets work best are the ones where the reach of the state is longer -- not shorter.

Alas, Rodrik seems committed to conflating the quality of governance to the size and scope of it, as he switches back from size to operation: "Prosperity is achieved when states are effective in setting and enforcing the rules of the game, not when they wither away."

I welcome Rodrik's entry to the blogosphere. So far, he is proving very valuable as a source of material showing that defense of state capitalism is something to which both the Chamber of Commerce Right and Crolyist Left agree. [2] It's a fight between two sides of the same coin, the one side saying that we need government to rationalize the entire economy (by which I mean, "to coordinate everything in accordance with a central plan") while ignoring the side effects (increasing concentration of wealth and power), while simultaneously claiming that it is the other side that is doing this. The other side claims to defend free markets while actually defending the businesses and people benefiting from state policies.

And, in the present essay, Rodrik provides a generous amount of material to help me with the third installment of the Local, Action series. In the first two essays, I explored local commerce and associational activity. In this one, I am more interested in discussing localism as a preferred method for governance. I will gladly concede that dividing the world into loose confederations of local or regional sovereignties will result in a lower rate of growth, but I will simultaneously assert that the median person will not necessarily be worse off, that the least well off will be much better off, and that the society will likely be much more sustainable than the existing system which Rodrik prefers.

It is well-known that interpersonal communications scale poorly with the number of people involved. The most effective means of communication is direct conversation; we evolved to convey and to receive a great deal of information via non-verbal means (gestures, facial expression, voice timbre). People cannot handle the cognitive load of more than a few other people. Anthropologist RIM Dunbar posits

there is a cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships, that this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size. The predicted group size for humans is relatively large (compared to those for nonhuman primates), and is close to observed sizes of certain rather distinctive types of groups found in contemporary and historical human societies. These groups are invariably ones that depend on extensive personal knowledge based on face-to-face interaction for their stability and coherence through time. I argued that the need to increase group size at some point during the course of human evolution precipitated the evolution of language because a more efficient process was required for servicing these relationships than was possible with the conventional nonhuman primate bonding mechanism (namely, social grooming). These arguments appear to mesh well with the social intelligence hypothesis for the evolution of brain size and cognitive skills in primates.

(hattip: Life With Alacrity blog, at which this is an interesting and related post)

Dunbar calculated that humans could effectively socialize in groups of about 150 people. He also notes that modern military organizations are limited to no more than 200, a limit arrived at by trial and error over several centuries.

Once language and then writing was developed, we had the means to communicate to but not with a wider group. Writing can allow one person to reach more people, it is more precise and can possibly unload some of the emotional content, allowing a more rational conversation, but it isn't interactive. Personal relationships maintained by physical interaction are closer than impersonal relationships maintained by broadcast, a difference of kind, not degree. In Human Scale, Kirkpatrick Sale cites research from sociology and anthropology to argue for two types of naturally sized community: the neighborhood, roughly limited to 500 people, and the community of 5,000 to 10,000, roughly corresponding to the two types of communication. A Pattern Language makes similar arguments for the optimal size of regions, towns, neighborhoods in political, economic, and architectural terms.[3]

Not being able to communicate with many people effectively means that our ability to find out about their activities and intents is limited. We might forgive someone for making a mistake if we understood their motivations. We might also allow a mistake to pass if we knew that person was usually very conscientious. So contract breaches can be handled in a very cost-effective way when we have personal knowledge of the deliverer, but contracts become much more costly to enforce as our physical, mental, and emotional distance from the other party increases.

Thus, reputation and other features of self-enforcing contracts are difficult to scale up because it becomes difficult for people to directly observe compliance and to sanction the non-compliant. Rodrik does not seem to be aware, however, that the same problems stalk state enforcement of its own regulations. [4] Not only can the state not monitor everyone, but citizens can not effectively guard the guardians the further removed they are from them. It is difficult (costly) to hold politicians to their promises, to know the content of laws, and to know the quality and activities of the bureaucrats charged with enforcing the regulations. Laws may therefore work to the advantage of the wealthy and powerful, they may not be enforced effectively, or they may be enforced selectively, giving rise to corruption.

Locally, citizens can engage more freely and more securely in give-and-take. One day, the majority may agree to something that puts some at a disadvantage. We all know it and can confirm it personally. Later, we can agree to do something that compensates the victim(s). We have a better handle on who is getting the shaft and who is getting more than their fair share, and when the numbers are small, we are capable of keeping a running balance sheet on the externalities of our collective actions. [5]

In From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State, David Beito describes at length the activities of review committees sent to the homes of the covered. Their direct observation was not only an effective way of weeding out the fakers, but also provided stronger credibility for legitimate cases, so strong that when requesting special grants for hard cases, lodge members gladly forked over. After all, they weren't giving to charity, they were contributing to a mutual fund, one which they themselves might need to draw against one day.

Mancur Olson addresses the scaling issue in The Logic of Collective Action. He argues that small groups are able to use moral and social pressure to maintain group cohesion. The larger the group gets, the more costly it becomes to maintain cohesion. In large numbers, the group must offer some kind of tangible, excludable good in order to maintain he necessary cohesion. Because of the difficulty of herding large numbers to a common goal, small but focused groups may come to dominate the larger groups.

Scaling is the same argument that Tyler Cowen offers against the local food movement (sorry, no link). Sure, it may be possible for a few (usually wealthy or eccentric) individuals to obtain their food locally, and it should be of higher quality, but it becomes more difficult to attempt to feed entire cities from local farms. The Northeast corridor is unlikely to return to self-sufficiency in its current state, though this is interesting.

I would extend the arguments of the local food movement to the state: if you think that government is a good thing, local is better. Just as you can produce inexpensive food products by mass production techniques by giving up nutritional value, loading the environment with pollutants, and allowing national brands to push out local flavor, you can also mass produce your law by giving up legislative quality, loading the legal environment with barriers to entry and regulatory sclerosis, and allowing one-size-fits-all regulations to push out local custom. When your food is produced far away, you have little idea what ingredients or processes are being used. Just so, you have little idea how earmarks are getting into legislation or who stands to benefit from each 30,000 page bill. Transparency does not scale well, publicly or privately.



-----------------------------
[1] Let's also add Lisa Bernstein's study of the diamond industry and Jacob Loshin's delightful piece on how innovation and secrets are kept in the magic industry without Intellectual Property law.

[2] Need evidence of that fact? Check out this blurb for a book advertised on Max Sawicky's site:

In his new book, economist Dean Baker debunks the myth that conservatives favor the market over government intervention. In fact, conservatives rely on a range of "nanny state" policies that ensure the rich get richer while leaving most Americans worse off.

I found it on a post arguing in favor of one of Rodrik's Crolyist, pro-industrial policy posts. Irony was not intended. When I pointed it out, Sawicky nominated me for a Blogalympics Long Jump medal, apparently oblivious to the obvious.

[3] Were the 300 M inhabitants of the US divided into towns of that size (say, 6667), there would be 45,000 such towns. Using Sale's calculation of one square mile per town (admittedly, he only had 5,000 inhabitants) and a 15 square mile green belt around each town, this would require about 720,000 square miles, which he calculated to be less than one-fifth of the nation's total land and less than one-half of the area given over to cropland at that time.

[4] Actually, that's not entirely true. Rodrik himself characterizes federal policies as "targeted on a loosely-defined set of market imperfections that are rarely observed directly, implemented by bureaucrats who have little capacity to identify where the imperfections are or how large they may be, and overseen by politicians who are prone to corruption and rent-seeking by powerful groups and lobbies." So, he seems to recognize it, or perhaps he is just using arguments he has encountered but not really understood or accepted for rhetorical effect?

[5] One way of looking at this is to consider the costs to obtaining consensus and the cost of externalities arising from the decisions. A dictator has nearly zero (0) cost of reaching a decision, but the externality cost is likely to be very high. On the other hand, it would be extremely costly to obtain a 100% consensus of a large group, but there would be no externalities. Given methods of reaching a decision, like log-rolling, the externalities of the final decision may be expensive. The larger the group, the higher the cost of reaching a decision, and given Olson's observations about the ability of small, focused groups to dictate to large, dispersed groups, the cost of obtaining and the external costs grow as the group grows. This is an insanely abbreviated version of one line of analysis in The Calculus of Consent.

Can you poke a hole in this argument?

Yes.

I came across this in the comments to a Scott Adams blog post. People are awed by it. The author asks people to poke holes in the argument. Everyone who references it implies that holes can't be poked in it. Usually, they are people who don't really want to poke holes in it. It's Taleb's round-trip problem: "no evidence of holes" has become "evidence of no holes".

The argument revolves around this chart:

Warming \ Action	Yes	No
False	Cost & Global Depression	8~)
True	Cost	Catastrophes - Econ - Political - Social - Environmental - Health

The hole: The upper left corner should be identical to the lower right corner, in the generalized sense it is presented.

Argument: Recall what happened during The Great Depression (and other similar experiences).

• Economic: Collapse, 25% unemployment, people selling apples and pencils, people resorting to subsistence farming. In the Soviet Union, millions died during state-imposed famines, while in China and Cambodia, people resorted to cannibalism during the massive shifts of the Great Leap Forward and the Khmer Rouge ruralization. As he correctly notes in a follow-up, the Great Depression wasn't triggered by abnormally high government spending (the rest of his comments regarding state involvement in that period strike me as naive). However, note that he changes his own rules of debate at this point: in the beginning, he was inviting us to imagine the *worst* possible outcome. Now, he's saying that we're going to compare the worst possible outcome of that which he would like to avoid (climate change) with the mildest outcome of that which he's willing to accept (unecessary expense incurred when climate change turns out to be false). Also, note the fundamental differences between something like Manhattan or Apollo project to which he is comparing, where the costs were limited to a relatively small scope within the economy, and his proposed project, which is a large scale transformation of the economy. He wants you to think this is a difference of degree when in fact it is so great as to be a difference in kind.
• Political: The Rise of Totalitarianism (Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, arguably the era prior to the Supreme Court shoot-down of Roosevelt's corporative NRA). The Vichy French were easily persuaded to become a German satellite. After the war, Eastern Europe easily gave in to the Communist model. States tend to expand during crises, and the people are only too willing to accept or even ask for it.
• Social: Germany, 1933. Italy, 1925. Read Zinn's accounts of the Depression, too. We came this close ---||--- to following the European models, especially the Communist model. Remember, his rule was to imagine the worst that could happen.
  
• Environmental: The Climate Change believers want so badly to believe that they are ready to accept anything whose justification is reducing global warming. They believe that if everyone said, "Yeah, let's do it," the outcome will be wholesale development and acceptance of sustainability laws. Unfortunately, politics is a little more complex. What we are likely to get is laws like those that subsidize ethanol production, followed by the planting of corn on marginal lands, necessarily accompanied by more petroleum-based fertilizers, irrigation, pesticides, and GM crops, and also accompanied by rises in the price of corn, followed by protests and socio-political unrest in places like Mexico. Further, compare the environment in the Communist Bloc to that in Western Europe: despite absolute state control, indeed because of it, they were far more wasteful and polluting. But, you protest, the modern US is different! Go back and read the short summary of our ethanol policy. Additionally, you might look around at the number of dams created during the Depression, or consider how the REA killed the nascent wind generation industry, etc. What seemed like a good idea then has turned out to be an environmental disaster today.
  
• Health: Health and income are closely related. People living in wealthier nations are more healthy than those in poorer nations, and wealthier people in a nation are healthier than poorer people in that nation. The science teacher in the video is willing to give up a little wealth; he just doesn't know or concede that is an implied concession of health.
  

In the general terms and using his own rules, the two blocks should be equal. In more specific terms and using something a little more realistic, we will be intentionally accepting more state intervention but possibly averting a more severe environmental outcome by taking the action he prefers. The question, which rides on discount rates and probabilities, is how much of one should be accepted to avoid the other. I believe the answer cannot be calculated.

There are additional problems which lie outside his argument.

• When should we take action? The theory implicit in his argument (made more explicit in one of the follow-ups) is that if we take action now, we avoid costs later. However, that leaves aside the important point that we will have more resources in the future with which to take action: more wealth, more knowledge, more technology. Thus, action taken later may actually be less costly.
  
• What about actions that are already underway? Some of them are being taken by the state, others by private actors. What he is really demanding is drastic, collective action, taken almost exclusively by the state. He explicitly asks you to support "policies" rather than goals; it is not apparent whether he understands how drastic they need to be.
  
• What is the optimal climate? It may be slightly warmer than the current one.
  

My response to his third installment, is located here. The bottom line: yes, climate scientists seem to be largely in agreement about AGW. But his argument that we are not qualified to judge whether or not climate change is occurring disqualifies the physical scientists from making policy recommendations since those fall to social scientists.

The entire series of videos is very entertaining, I would recommend the original and second response (linked above). I especially like his emphasis on civil debate.

Talk radio

I drive a lot, and when I get bored with NPR (which I support; I have even been in the StoryCorps ... ah, "studio") I will listen to AM talk radio. That's about once or twice a week, rarely the same show, so I've heard all of these people, but not frequently. I've been meaning to do this for a while, but haven't figured out how to organize it. I am also finding myself in conflict with The Pledge. So what follows is a quasi-random set of observations to which I hold no particularly strong affinities (i.e. you could convince me I'm wrong):

• Bill O'Reilly: Very opinionated, very populist, fairly informed, sometimes contrarian, but succumbs easily to confirmation bias. I've mentioned his economic illiteracy before. I'm not sure why he has a co-host - she's worse than Ed McMahon.
  
• Michael Medved: incredible memory for political, legal, and historical fact, but condescending and occasionally uses the loaded question trick [1]. I think he gets contrary views more often than others, though they are sometimes not very bright. He also brings on contrary guests, which is very fair. I was convinced he was gay when I first started listening; I'm not convinced now that he is not.
  
• Rush Limbaugh: occasionally funny but frequently whiny and obtuse. Too bad he hasn't learned his lesson about The War on (Certain People who Use Certain Kinds of) Drugs. The bumper commercials and satire are great and we need a left-wing version of them, but once a month is enough to catch up on the latest satires. His concept of the "drive-by media" is accurate; that should be resonant with everyone, no matter what part of the political space you occupy. I used to like Walter Williams' guest host spots, but he seems to cover the same material every time.
  
• Sean Hannity: maddeningly single-minded. I would totally believe that he gets a talking points memo every morning. Uses the loaded question trick almost exclusively when he has a caller who disagrees. I do a great impression of him.
  
• Dr. Laura: My father used to apologize to the radio if he accidentally let her on. I don't understand why anyone would subject themselves to the humiliation of calling in. "Hi, Dr. Laura, I'm a lesbian who is living with both my lover and the father of my child. They don't seem to be getting along, and I'm afraid my son is caught in the middle, so I was wondering: should I ask my mom to move in with us so she can help keep the peace while I run my Teenangel Tattoo and Tanning business?"
• Jim Villanucci: A local in Albuquerque, I think he's on after Rush and therefore instead of Hannity (thank God). Interesting, entertaining, sometimes very contrarian.
  
• Dr. Dean Edell: Although he has that "I'm a highly trained doctor, so you're probably not going to understand this huh-huh-huh" attitude, he is generally very good. The entertainment value, though, is mostly in the things that people call in with and make you think, "yeah, what is the deal with that?!"
  
• Michael Savage: Completely unpredictable. I used to think badly of him, now I think he's laugh-out-loud funny (not always intended on his part). One day he may be defending Bush as the defender of borders, language, and culture against the "depraved commies" who defend the Islamonazis, the next day he may be ripping him as the Amnesty President and then go off and listen to some rockabilly music or talk about birds in the park. If Hillary is elected, I plan to buy a radio, tune it to Savage, turn it up, and break the dials off so I can answer the koan, "What does a supernova sound like?"
  
• Michael Reagan: Just some guy, really. Not entertaining at all.
  
• Mark Levin: The Worst One. Like Sean Hannity but louder and without the wit and charisma. I do a great impression of him.
  
• Alan Colmes: Could be better, but he seems to be playing beneath himself. Even when he's winning the argument, sometimes he goes to the loaded question almost gratuitously.
• Laura Ingraham: Okay, but too populist and pandering.
  
• Al Franken: Way below his potential. It would be worthwhile to let him get ripped and then go on the air just to see how it went. I think that he's too close to his subject, and he tends to think that his best subjectivity passes for objectivity. Maybe he peaked with Stuart Smalley.
• Rusty Humphries: Why?
• Coast to Coast: Are they serious? They certainly sound that way.
  

[1] The loaded trick question works extremely well in the talk format. It works like this: the caller asks the host a question about something he has been pontificating on, to which the host responds by asking a related but heavily loaded question. For example, an exchange might go like this:

Caller: Hi X, long time listener and first time caller.
Host: Thanks for calling.
Caller: I've been listening to you and I guess I disagree with your stance on GitMo. I mean, we're Americans and the rest of the world looks up to us and expects us to do the right thing, but this just doesn't seem right. How can you support freedom and the right to a fair tri...
Host: Oh, I see where your coming from. Well, answer this, my left wing friend, if you could save a million people by torturing a terrorist, wouldn't you do it? I mean [at this point, the host reiterates what he has been saying for 45 seconds while the caller is turned down] so wouldn't you torture a terrorist to prevent a nuke from going off in downtown New York?
Caller: ... but that's ...
Host: I see, so you won't answer the question? [at this point, the host reiterates what he has been saying for 45 seconds while the caller is turned down] so wouldn't you torture a terrorist to prevent a nuke from going off in downtown New York?
Caller: ... okay, I'll answer your question, but first you answer ...
Host: Oh, no, we're not going to play that game, my friend. You answer my question first. Why won't you answer?
Caller: ... but it's a loaded ...
Host: C'mon, what's it going to be, 4 million innocent children or the terrorist's "right" to a trial? What about the rights of 4 million children?
Caller: ... but tortured people just tell you what you want to hear and how do we know he's really a terrorist ...
Host: These points are lib'ral straw men, but just to humor you and to show you how fair I am, I'll address your questions, but I want you to stop ducking mine. Let's say that I get the world's most accomplished interrogator and we definitely know the guys a terrorist. Now what's it going to be - 4 million innocent little virgins or an islamofascist with a nuke?
Caller: Okay, fine, if you're going to load the dice like that ...
Host: Just like I thought, you're not going to answer the question, thanks for calling, let's go to a break.

I'll generally listen to someone who is reasonable even if I disagree with them because I might learn something. The loaded question trick is so maddening and transparent that I turn off right away when it starts. At least NPR is a little more nuanced in overlaying their frames on the news; maybe I'll do something similar on those shows one day (Fresh Air, Car Talk, etc.).

Shilling for plutocrats

It is frequently charged that libertarians are shills for plutocracy because they oppose the taxes and government regulation which keep criminals, corporations, and other problems in check. Some of these criticisms are not only entertaining, they are valid and enlightening: wishing for a world in which large multinational corporations are unfettered by regulation is not only inconsistent because corporations rely on the state for their existence, but also dangerous precisely because it fails to recognize the source of their size and scope. A more consistent approach would start with the recognition of the problems created at the state-corporate nexus and then proceed to dismantle it and them. The libertarians who criticize government without this recognition are labeled "vulgar libertarians" by Kevin Carson, and rightly so. The rest of us classical liberals should be as much opposed to them as to the anti-libertarians.

Although anti-libertarians' claims of shilling by libertarians are generally strawmen, there is an element of truth to them both because of the vulgar libertarians and because of the plutocrats who don liberal clothing [1]. I offer as a typical example this essay. In comments on various blogs, the author has been making the claim that because Charles Koch supports the GMU Economics program, then they must be shilling for him. Among other unsupported (and mostly unsupportable) assertions, the author has also been lumping libertarians in with neo-cons and Objectivists and claiming that the super wealthy are libertarian.

I'm not going to make a point-by-point refutation to his numerous claims. I have long been fascinated by the belief that libertarian=rich and vice versa. I'm sure Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, John Kerry, John Edwards, and Ted Turner would be surprised to hear about their libertarian leanings. Further, there is a high correspondence between voting patterns and the areas in which wealth congregates (New York, California). Yes, there are contrary claims, but the point is that "libertarian" and "wealthy" are not synonymous. Further, an unusually high number of classical liberals are academics, further disrupting the wealth link, but most academics are not libertarian.

Many such anti-libertarians have a strange propensity to vigorously defend even the most indefensible government policy. The only point of contention seems to be whether a "D" or an "R" should follow the name of the Chief Executive. Whether Charles Koch has any real power is a matter of debate; whether the government has any power is not. So I'm pretty sure that defending every action of the government is the definition of "shilling for plutocracy".

Beware when you see statements like this:

The simple fact is that iodized salt has been known to solve goiter for decades, but that's not enough for markets to solve the problem. Why? well, we can speculate a whole bunch, but frankly I'd just point out that it's a historical fact that markets don't solve certain problems well, and that government solves those problems better. Defense, roads, iodization, social insurance, etc.

Note the list at the end, which smuggles plutocratic policies in the same package with public goods. Defense is a clear public good, one that even anarchists will agree is a tough problem [2]. Roads were once provided privately, but in the state-capitalist era they have become publicly provided. The need to do so is dubious; it is largely an populist over-reaction to the excesses of previous eras of such tinkering and in part a subsidy to the oil, trucking, and automobile industries. Iodized salt has been privately provided for nearly a century in the developed world and for decades in parts of the developing world. In some cases it has been prescribed by state authorities, in others it has been over-prescribed. In India, state mandates concerning salt are very controversial due in part to the inherent symbolism of tyranny. In other places, the "market" consists of a state-granted monopoly to manufacture salt. Claiming that "government solves those problems" is a substantially oversimplified and mostly incorrect statement, failing to recognize the complex legal, economic, and social environment in which government policies are carried out. Social insurance is a mixed bag, though it mostly does not benefit plutocrats directly. However, the fact that the government is involved does not mean that private social insurance never existed. It could be argued that the government does a better job now than they did then, but that does not mean that the private institutions that it has displaced would not have improved. A serious comparison will show that private poverty relief programs, being less bureaucratic and more personal, will be better suited to a wide variety of problems. The quoted list discusses none of these issues in the hopes that the reader will accept the idea that since the government claims to deliver those goods, that it (1) does, and (2) should. Beware of such lists being used to smuggle invalid conceptual frameworks under the cover of scoring minor debate points. Remember what they are implicitly arguing for as well as what they are arguing against.


--------------------------------------------------
[1] "Liberal" in all of its senses: the powerful can show sympathy with all manner of politics in order to get where they are going, whether that be to the boardroom, the White House, or the dacha. That doesn't mean that they are actually progressives or classical liberals.

[2] That doesn't mean that the existing military-industrial complex is actually a defensive system.

Public employee unions

Why is it that public employee unions are virtually the only growth area for unions, and that they consistently send a majority of cash to Democratic candidates [1]? The answer to the first part runs completely counter to traditional explanations of unionism, the answer to the second runs counter to traditional explanations of public policy creation.

The traditional explanation of unionism is that the companies they work for and their owners/managers are only interested in profit. They therefore exploit their workers in various ways (underpay, exposure to unsafe conditions and chemicals, fire them just before they are eligible for pension, etc.). But the government is supposedly not motivated by profit. The government lavishes pay [2], benefits, and lifetime employment upon its employees.

The traditional explanation of policy creation is either that we elect a set of policies or that we elect people who promise to enact those policies. The politicians then enact legislation that is carried out by a selfless group of employees (public servants) dedicated to seeing out the public's desire. But then why would those same employees want to influence the outcome?

I propose that neither of the traditional explanations are very complete or useful. Taken together, it would seem that the public employee unions serve the purposes of their own members in a way that is contrary to the public interest. To the extent that they are successful at affecting the policies, the government is not acting in the interest of the electorate. However, I am implicitly defining the public interest as the state of affairs without public employee union lobbying, a not entirely fair assessment since they, too, are members of the public. But it does seem that public employees have more influence over policy because they have both direct and indirect influence: direct by choosing what to carry out and how strongly, indirect by buying representation.

Are we experiencing the same effect in governance that Berle and Means warned about with respect to corporations? Their warning was that public corporations were gaining control over more of the nation's wealth, that ownership was becoming too diffuse for any one or any small number of owners to influence the activities of the corporation, and therefore the management was gaining more control over the direction of the corporation and by extension the nation's wealth. With respect to the state, there appear to be three similar trends: the state's authority is constantly expanding, while the control we the owners have over the state is constantly diminishing, and the career public employees are therefore gaining more influence over the state, and by extension, over the lives of the rest of us.

This is not intended to argue that the same is true of all unions; many serve very useful purposes that are both in their own and the public interest.

This is old hat; why should anyone care?

Well, first, that I think it shows that bureaucrats do, on average or in the aggregate, act in their own self-interest and second, that this is not a good thing. They literally thwart the public will, as traditionally understood.

Ah, well, it's for our own good, I suppose. Just ask them.


---------------------------------------
[1] Both assertions are easily proved with the Statistical Abstract and a glance through the relevant sections at OpenSecrets.org.

[2] No, not at the executive level, so don't compare Bill Gates to the POTUS.

Models of models

I understand now why Tyler likes Megan: she is contrarian without being a jackass.

Megan says,

First, your model of the individual is very likely based on you. It is possible that everyone acts just like you, and also that you can accurately predict your own behaviors and motivations. But that is far from certain. When you argue for a policy that would work best for a country of people who are just like you, you should have some reason to believe you are the right model of the individual.

Interesting - is this a self-recursive model? Is your model of the modeling individual "someone who models individuals based on themselves" because *you* model modellers based on your modeling?

Progressives are seduced by this because they like to think conservatives are armed, beer-swilling, uneducated rednecks; libertarians are intelligent middle class white male plutocrats; and progressives are cosmopolitan altruists. Thus, in their narrative, conservatives want to base policies on NASCAR commercials, libertarians want to base policies on intelligent middle class white male plutocrats who can make complex decisions for themselves, and progressives want policies that balance complex issues in favor of multiple outliers in intelligence, culture, race, capability. This ignores basic problems, like the fact that academia is dominated by intelligent middle class white males -- self-identified as progressives -- who largely search for novel arguments in defense of the status quo (state capitalism). Or that many of the policies favored by libertarians are more accessible and democratic than those that involve the selection and navigation of politicians, policies, agencies, and rules to create the required balance.

I'm sure it is tempting for libertarians and others for similar, mirror-image reasons. Libertarians think of conservatives roughly the same way as progressives, except perhaps with more respect for their belief in moral values; of progressives as people who have a propensity to place more weight on intent than outcome and to signal their own morality by spending other people's money; and of themselves as economic literates with a deep sense of the morality inherent in freedom. Thus, in their narrative, conservatives want to base policies on what "everyone" knows from Sunday morning sermons, progressives want to base policies on things which perpetuate the state, and libertarians want to base policies on whatever lets people find the best answer for themselves (emphasis on private action, but accepting state action where it is the least worst solution).

Conservatives think of themselves as highly moral people, of progressives as possibly insane but definitely immoral, and of libertarians as the same, only worse. In their narrative, conservatives want to base policies on what is best for everyone, progressives want to base policies on the worst in man, and libertarians don't want any policies standing between themselves and complete debauchery.

The discussion also begs the question - what should the model of the individual be? When we assume that it should be people of average intelligence and capability, and then make policy decisions on that, we are largely eliminating the needs of both the most and least capable. That's politically palatable because we can speak for the least capable without actually speaking with them, and the most capable will find work-arounds.

It's part of care

I originally thought to title this, "I'll show you strict father."

While perusing this Ron Paul video linked by DistributedRepublic, I noted this other video featuring George Lakoff. Only partway through what I hoped to be an illuminating experience did I start to take notes on what I realized might have to come forth as a post. The block-quoted, italicized material is what he was saying; I use quotation marks where I actually bothered to run it back and forth to obtain an accurate quote, just one of the many Potteresque sacrifices I make for the greater good:

Four things that conservatives want to stop government from doing:

1. regulation
2. tax
3. workers rights
4. lawsuits

Which seems essentially correct. It doesn't apply equally well to us classical liberals, but since Lakoff can only think in one dimension and therefore chucks us liberals in with the conservatives, I suppose I'll have to selectively respond to him. He does not seem to find anything on which to criticize "progressives", unless it is to think too much like conservatives.

Apparently, "progressives" think differently about these issues. It's not just that they are in favor of all of those things: it's that they really care.

• Regulations are protection from negligent corporations [caution: trying to combine two terms is a Lakoff alarm-ringer: it means that he is trying to cement "negligent" and "corporation" together in your mind]
• Taxation means protection and empowerment - the government builds highways!
• The internet was ARPAnet, built by the government.
• Satellites were built to help NASA.
• The banking system was created by government.
• The court system was created by government.
• The stock market is held together by the SEC.
• And of course, there's education.
  

And progressives support these things because it's "part of 'care'."

Which is also essentially correct: people styling themselves "progressives" actually think in those terms. And they believe that if you can think of it in this way, it must work this way. I'm going to use the same phrase I did in reaction to Skocpol: Plausibility is not all. Actual motives and actual outcomes count for something, too.

Now, don't be nasty little gits and point out that regulations were requested by corporations to protect themselves from competitors, or that private highways once dominated the transportation system and the public highway system underlies our oil-based culture and were originally promoted as efficient means of carrying out war preparations, or that ARPAnet was a contractor-designed mechanism for letting physicists in MIT and Cal State design nukes on high performance computers for the purpose of punishing the USSR and not anywhere near the MCI- and Cisco-backboned system that exists today, or that NASA is a waste of money whose raison d'etre was to demonstrate that we had the power to nuke the Soviets with our massive phalli without actually nuking them, or that banking, markets, and school have all existed at one time or another without the SEC, Fed, or federal Department of Education. I'll almost concede that the government created courts when Lakoff can explain to me which department invented them, as his phrasing implies.

In religion, the two frames emphasize a strict versus a nurturing God

I doubt both versions - any being sufficiently that far advanced would be more interested in the act of creation and does not need the resulting creatures either fearing or trying to please the creator, nor does that creator take an interest in the fortunes of individual talking monkeys. If God exists, God is an engineer, not a brittle politician.

Foreign policy: strict American-centered vs. nurturing "you care"

I disagree with both - foreign policy should be conducted the same as any person conducts business with other adults: I'm going to do some things that don't concern you, you can do whatever you want that doesn't concern me, let's cooperate where it works to both of our advantage, and I will defend myself if you do anything aggressive (and I should not be surprised if you react similarly when I am aggressive toward you). At first glance, this seems uncaring, but when you consider the number of ways that American foreign and other policy harms, for example, grain and cotton farmers in Africa, then I propose that they will be better off. Furthermore, I believe they gain much more from the aid contributed by individual Americans than from the USAID handouts that front as more farm subsidies, or mechanisms for bending foreign governments to our will. The best example of Lakoff's nurturing foreign policy: Victoria's Britannia, saving the savages from themselves. They had a flag, you see.

Education - "progressives are adopting conservative views because they've heard them so much." Strict - "we're going to tell you what's right and you're going to learn it," v. progressive "you're going to develop as a person." First is punitive, we're going to punish students and schools. Production view of education, consumer model which comes from strict father view. Other view says education is not just a business. Finding this more and more among progressives.

That's a lot to parse.

• There must be both to some extent (rote memorization and developmental encouragement) plus better critical thinking (why are things this way and what aren't they telling me?).
  
• If leftists are accepting that paradigm frame, why don't they take more credit for having authored NCLB instead of laying the whole thing at George's feet? "Progressives" aren't interested in holding schools accountable per se; they are interested in holding schools accountable as a means of centralizing the control of them.
  
• Public schooling has been more about how to mold them into consumers and voters who accept one or the other branch of the one true religion. This has been the emphasis of both the left and right.
  

Lakoff's view of business strikes me as very immature. Apparently, production and consumption is "strict father" thinking. So, how does "nurturing parent" industry work? I suppose the model of production is that we are going to take these inputs (ore and energy) and encourage them to develop as goods, steel for example, or lollipops. And we aren't going to consume them, we are going to encourage them to develop them as final products: the steel could become a refrigerator, or it could become an ice cream bar if that's what it wants to do. In the end, we won't consume the ice cream, we nurture it into a fully developed Mr. Hankey. Isn't that beautiful?

Seriously, though, it's clear that Lakoff's view of business and production is not well thought-out. Going back to his earlier view about markets "deciding" is the same as markets "punishing", it says that his model of consumer/business interaction is win/lose. I would point out to him that markets are (a) not people (who is engaging in anthropromorphism now, Dr. Lakoff?) and (b) mechanisms for coordination and encouragement. Even Marx understood this when he talks about the "socially necessary" amount of labor: some producers are better at using their resources and talents, and the markets tend to reward them, i.e. nurture them, while simultaneously encouraging their competitors to do the same, i.e. develop.

Idea of energy independence came out of environmental view: We should have alternative forms of energy. Other view [conservative], "we have coal, we have ethanol." Conservative view is anti-ecological. Comes to be accepted by progressives and then press.

Again, lots of stuff bundled together that needs parsing:

• He does not explain why ecologists wanted alternative forms of energy to begin with. Was it not perhaps because their efforts to punish mainstream energy producers were not successful? Or is it because their efforts to promote mainstream energy consumption were too successful?
  
• He does not at this point explain how "conservative view is anti-ecological" though I might be inclined to agree if he did. No does he admit that it was "progressives" who first started and then continued to support ethanol (unless he'd like to argue that Jimmy Carter and Tom Daschle are conservatives).
  
• In one sense, this is a fabricated difference between the "let's grow our own for the planet" and the "let's grow our own to screw foreigners." Both left and right have long been anti-import, this is nothing new, so this allows each Bootlegger to be the other's Baptist. In another sense, so long as people are doing this on their own dime, I'm all in favor of growing our own and defunding the state oil companies in Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Venezuela.
  
• And come on, Dr. Lakoff, aren't the conservatives just nurturing those other fuels (coal, ethanol)? Gosh, I'm getting the hang of this spinning framing thing.
  

Illegal immigration is the wrong frame; it should be a gratitude deficit.

I must not be a conservative because I agree with him on illegal immigration - there should be a debate about gratitude deficit. Oh wait, there is. For lols, though, we might extend it: where's the gratitude deficit for oil companies, who are after all only providing you with the fuel you want at a price below that which you are willing to pay?

Incidentally, the phrase "conservative frames" comes up over and over, as if he were trying to get us to think that only non-progre ... ah, I get it! A quick pair of googles results in the following:

"conservative frame" lakoff - 654 hits
"progressive frame" lakoff - 362 hits

So, conservatives actively frame, while the poor, innocent, honest, straight-talking progressives never do. I got it.

Our job is "Not just changing a slogan".

Except that he should know this is how Democrat politicians intend to use the idea. Incidentally, if true, why does he never use "Democrat", "liberal", or "left", but always uses "progressive"? This sounds to me like the non-ideological ideologue's belief system.

Taxes don't cause literal, physical pain, only metaphorical, financial pain. To understand this, you have to have conservative view. Progressives say, "[taxes] are there for protection and empowerment. You can't live in a country like this without them. They allow you to do all the things that your do. They allow businesses to exist and to function. then you can't have tax relief. Not only that it would be like saying we want democracy relief, we want freedom relief."

"Taxation is empowering business."

Incidentally -- "strict father" vs. "nurturant parent"? Is that not the most awkward phrase ever? An audience member with an accent finally asks the obvious:

[Why isn't it strict father vs. nurturing mother?] "You seemed to have framed it yourself to leave the female aspect out of it."

"Well, one of the interesting things about America [talking down to the audience member who had a foreign accent], is that it became the nurturing parent probably in the Roosevelt administration. But in a way it's been there for a long time. These values, If you go back in the history and read the early documents by the founding fathers, you see lots of nurturing views applied to government. It had nothing to do with men and women. ..."

In progressive families, fathers are expected to be equally nurturing.

Any data to back up any of that? That was the worst non-answer of the session.

Toward the end, with respect to war powers, Lakoff is on the same sheet of music as Ron Paul:

Congress is the Decider.

Then this diatribe:

"There are some people who call themselves conservatives all over the country who are progressive Christians who believe that really you should feed the hungry you should heal the sick and that's what the country should be doing, very very different from conservative Christians.

"You have people who call themselves conservatives but are progressive business people. But they don't think of themselves as such. They turn out to be honest, they treat their employees well, they would never harm the public. They are basically progressive businesspeople but they don't think of themselves as being that.

"There are people who call themselves conservatives but want to live in progressive communities. What's a progressive community? Where you have leaders who care about people and are responsible and where you have people who care about each other and are responsible to and for each other and who do community service. All over this country there are people who want to live in those communities."

This is an incredibly dishonest discourse. Anyone who calls themselves a conservative but doesn't do the wrong thing is not a conservative by definition -- Lakoff's definition. He basically assumes away the honest, kind, conservatives on the basis that anyone who is good is a "progressive" and anyone who is malicious is a conservative. Nice frame job.

"Our job is the democratization of knowledge."

If we accept his frame, then the opposition is obviously in favor of the plutocratization of knowledge. But who controls knowledge? Whose job is that? The mainstream media? Academia? Federal agencies (the FDA comes to mind)? What are the political leanings of those institutions?

I also recommend reading Jesse Walker's article at Reason and a synopsis of the Lakoff vs. Pinker debate at MixingMemory blog for background on Dr. Lakoff.

Random things about the lecture that just strike me oddly:

• The false dilemma between this or that frame. No third frame? Jesse Walker points out one possible alternative to the daddy state and the mommy state: the state in which we are all treated as adults. I illustrated that in a post a few days ago.
  
• The father v. parent. Seems artificial as well as being a false dilemma.
• I think what he really means is the Old Testament vs. the New Testament paradigm. Old Testament is "punish evil", New Testament is "love everyone". Punish evil means both God punishes evil (that's where poverty and disease come from) and people punish evil (through stoning and shunning). Love everyone is nihilism. It works well if you happen to be God in the form of man, though. Well, until you piss off the wrong people and they decide to nail you for it.
  
• It's a false frame since strictness could be a necessary component of nurturing. You could recast the strict father as the protective father who keeps away bad guys or keeps his kids from doing what will obviously harm them, or the tough father who encourages them to stand up to bullies and learn to stand on their own. You could recast the nurturing parent as a negligent father who allows bad guys to run roughshod over them, the nurturing parent who sets no boundaries (they might be limits to growth), the nurturing parent who shields the kid from the real world? The metaphor is simply dishonest.
  
• The strict father/nurturing mother dilemma seems artificially intended to divert attention away from the fact that and steps toward authoritarianism have been identified as the "nanny state" and most of the worst authoritarian governments have been explicitly "progressive" in the Lakoffian sense. Uncle Joe doesn't want to punish; he sent you to a correction camp (gulag) so you can mend your ways and be a more productive citizen. Chairman Mao wants you to confess your class guilt before your peers and undertake our own re-education so you can become a better, more productive citizen.
  
• The conservative v. progressive.
• Another false dilemma. Even the Rockridge pamphlet points out the uselessness of a linear theory of politics. And "progressive" is the most self-aggrandizing term I've ever heard. As I've argued before, people calling themselves by this term are generally very conservative: mention vouchers and watch them froth at the thought of changing the perfect educational system.
• The idea that only conservative frames need to be changed. It seems miraculously fortunate that Lakoff and his fellow travellers have no misleading and possibly unhealthy misconceptions about the world.
  
• The supposition that because he understands something about the brain and linguistics, that he therefore has something to say about economics and politics. The entire speech and his own description of his books come across as the work of a political advisor like Dick Morris or James Carville. "We figured out this about the brain, therefore everyone who doesn't agree with me is a liar, therefore Hillary should be president." Dr. Lakoff, I think maybe you need to work on the middle and last part.
  
• The fact that many of these issues can be cast in either frame, depending on what you are talking about. Statists may want to help guide the behavior of corporations; they do so by establishing strict fines and other penalties so the government can punish them! President Bush only wanted to invade Iraq to help the people there to grow as free Sunnis and Shias. Etc.
  
• The fascination with framing as if this were a new idea. It is not: we used to call it "paradigm" and "spin", and before that they called it "state of mind" and "lies told by The Man". There's a reason that, since the 1970s or 80s, we haven't had a pro-abortion/anti-abortion debate but rather we've had a pro-choice / pro-life debate. The reason is that people long ago figured out that it was better to cast their own agenda as positive, pro-something in order to imply the other guy is negative and anti-something. The esoterica of the physiological, psychological, and neural science may be new, but the rest of it is an ad man's game.
  
• There is an underlying theme, shared by people like Anne Coulter, that the other side is not dealing honestly. To adopt his methodology, in Lakoff's metaframe, there are people who deal in dishonest frames which they force on the honest people. But he doesn't believe that his own explanation is an obvious straw man, and neither do his disciples. In order for the explanation to make sense to them, they have to believe that the other side believes in something that nobody would accept if they knew what it really was, so they had to conceive of a brilliant lie to get others to accept it. Thus, the other side is good at promoting their bad ideas because they cannot actually have any good ideas. It apparently never enters the heads of Dr. Lakoff or Anne Coulter that the world is more complex than either the good frame (Lakoff's or Coulters) or the bad frame (anyone with whom he or she disagrees). This is a problem with some libertarians, too. That's why I try to promote the idea that one should refrain from thinking of one's opponents as stupid, insane, or evil.
  

Bottom line: the anti-liberals are all out of arguments if this is their new approach. Apparently they've decided to resort to better marketing. Which is pretty much what they've been doing since their experiments in Russia, Germany, and the United States have all fizzled.

Rockridge Institute's Thinking Points Chapter 4

The background is Jesse Walker's article at Reason, The Man Who Framed Himself.

The chapter is entitled, "Nation as Family".









Childish, yes, but in context it makes for a succinct review.

(Foxit is an open source pdf reader that doesn't require 743 MB and 2.3 minutes to load - it's not perfect, but I like it better than Acrobat. hattip: J. Mazzetta)