Tag Archives: Politics

Only Trust Us

By Robin Hanson · February 28, 2010 3:25 pm · Comments (27)

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, … for the Jews, …
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak out for me.

PLoS Medicine:

While we continue to be interested in analyses of ways of reducing tobacco use, we will no longer be considering papers where support, in whole or in part, for the study or the researchers comes from a tobacco company.

Eric Crampton:

As good a [bias] case can be made … against tobacco industry funding. How many anti-tobacco public health researchers would be able to continue getting grants from Ministries of Health if their research found that smoking isn’t as bad as the Ministry might have thought?

John Tierney:

Many scientists, journal editors and journalists see themselves as a sort of priestly class untainted by commerce. … This snobbery was codified by the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2005, when it … refused to publish such work unless there was at least one author with no ties to the industry who would formally vouch for the data.  That policy … looked especially dubious after a team of academic researchers (not financed by industry) analyzed dozens of large-scale clinical trials in previous decades and reported that industry-sponsored ones met significantly higher standards than the nonindustry ones.

More:

As Gary Taubes nicely illustrates in his book, “Good Calories, Bad Calories,” scientists who disagreed with the accepted wisdom on the evils of fat in the diet were accused of being corrupted by industry grants even if they had received most of their money from government agencies that were looking — unsuccessfully — for evidence to back the fat-is-bad theory. Meanwhile, scientists who went along with the conventional wisdom on fat weren’t criticized for the corporate money they’d received from food companies.

Mr. Taubes has also found some wonderful examples of selective journalism in the dispute over sugar’s health effect: An article stressing the harms of sugar would make dissenting scientists look bad by stressing their connections to the sugar industry, whereas an article exonerating sugar would make the other side’s scientists look bad by stressing the money they received from companies making sugar substitutes. …

“Scientists were believed to be free of conflicts if their only source of funding was a federal agency, but all nutritionists knew that if their research failed to support the government position on a particular subject, the funding would go instead to someone whose research did.” … Not-for-profit advocacy groups … “are rarely if ever accused of conflicts of interest, even though their entire reason for existence is to argue one side of a controversy as though it were indisputable.”

If the new principle is that we mustn’t publish research not funded by groups committed to proving our official beliefs, how long before “our” beliefs exclude yours?  How long before interdisciplinary journals like Science or Nature refuse to publish papers by economists, known for their suspiciously right-wing leanings, unless non-economist co-authors vouch for them?  Do you really think that can’t happen?

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National Juries

By Robin Hanson · February 25, 2010 12:00 pm · Comments (51)

The reason so many bad policies are good politics is that so many people vote. … Ignorant voters … are biased towards particular errors. …

The best way to improve modern politics? … The number of voters should be drastically reduced so that each voter realizes that his vote will matter. Something like 12 voters per district … selected at random from the electorate. With 535 districts in Congress … there would be 6,420 voters nationally. A random selection would deliver a proportional representation of sexes, ages, races and income groups. This would improve on the current system, in which the voting population is skewed … the old vote more than the young, the rich vote more than the poor, and so on.

To safeguard against the possibility of abuse, these 6,420 voters would not know that they had been selected at random until the moment when the polling officers arrived at their house. They would then be spirited away to a place where they will spend a week locked away with the candidates, attending a series of speeches, debates and question-and-answer sessions before voting on the final day.  All of these events should be filmed and broadcast, so that everyone could make sure that nothing dodgy was going on.

More here.  This logic is simple and strong enough for most folks to both understand and accept.  Yet most would still prefer our current system – why?

My guess: aside from status quo bias, it just doesn’t feel like the political ideal in the back of our minds – how our nomadic forager ancestors long ago would meet every few months to make major band decisions.  All 5-15 men could talk, they wouldn’t break until they’d all had their say, decisions were by informal consensus of all, and dissenters could leave the band.

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Megan on Med

By Robin Hanson · February 12, 2010 2:10 pm · Comments (27)

How Many People Die From Lack of Health Insurance? … The most recent available study, which also had the largest sample and controlled for the most variables, found no effect at all. … The left is predictably fond of the study which got the largest number [dead], 45,000 a year.  Unfortunately, its authors are political advocates for a single-payer system, who also helped author the notorious studies on medical bankruptcies.  Those studies are very shoddily done. … The right, meanwhile, shuns the subject like the plague.  It will not do anyone’s career any good to be attached to an argument that sounds like the health care equivalent of “let them eat cake”.

That is Megan at her blog.  More from her in the Atlantic:

Ezra Klein declared that Senator Joseph Lieberman, by refusing to vote for a bill with a public option, was apparently “willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands” of uninsured people. … In the ensuing blogstorm, … few people addressed the question that mattered most: …  If we lost our insurance, would this gargantuan new entitlement really be the only thing standing between us and an early grave?  Perhaps few people were asking, because the question sounds so stupid. Health insurance buys you health care. Health care is supposed to save your life. So if you don’t have someone buying you health care well, you can complete the syllogism. …

The possibility that no one risks death by going without health insurance may be startling, but some research supports it. Richard Kronick of the University of California at San Diego’s Department of Family and Preventive Medicine, an adviser to the Clinton administration, recently published the results of what may be the largest and most comprehensive analysis yet done of the effect of insurance on mortality. He used a sample of more than 600,000, and controlled not only for the standard factors, but for how long the subjects went without insurance, whether their disease was particularly amenable to early intervention, and even whether they lived in a mobile home. In test after test, he found no significantly elevated risk of death among the uninsured. … Continue Reading "Megan on Med" »

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Coordination Is Hard

By Robin Hanson · February 2, 2010 8:50 am · Comments (36)

When we tell our limited-government friends that we have written a book … about how government can better accomplish what it sets out to do, the reaction is often horror.  “I don’t want to make government work better, I want it to go away” … This way of thinking is deeply misguided. … This is not to disparage the argument that government is too large, for which the case is strong. But holding government in sneering contempt is a misinformed corruption of that sentiment.

More here.  Will Wilkinson agrees, as do I.  Two ideological attitudes are common, but insensibly stupid:

  1. All government activity is bad, no matter what it does.
  2. The only reason to oppose a government program with a purported goal is because that goal is bad; program opponents must oppose its goal.

The key thing to understand is: governance is hard, especially in a democracy.  Fundamentally, this is because coordination is hard.

It can be very hard for even a single owner to coordinate with a dozen subordinates that each coordinate with a dozen employees in an ordinary firm to achieve a simple clear goal like making and selling a simple product at a profit. Organizations fail at this task all the time, and for thousands of different reasons.  Most new organizations attempting this fail, and most that are succeeding now will fail in a few decades.  When they fail, they will fail so badly that it will not be worth trying to save them; better to throw them away and start anew.

Once one appreciates the difficulty of coordinating even small organizations, and that bigger coordination is harder, one can see why it can be extremely difficult to manage the vaster coordination required by government.  How can ordinary citizens continue over centuries to coordinate to support interest groups that coordinate to support politicians who coordinate to approve and manage policies that empower agency heads to coordinate to manage thousands of agency employees to achieve the vague incoherent goals of many millions of citizens?

Types of government activities vary both in how valuable are their possible impacts, and it how difficult is their coordination task (both relative to private coordination and to doing nothing).  If your politics were about policy, and you were reasonable, then you’d support programs with high value impacts and easy coordination, and oppose programs with low value impacts and difficult coordination.  Ideologues who oppose all government programs no matter how valuable or easy, or who support all programs with laudable goals no matter now difficult their coordination task just don’t get it.  That might signal their values and blind faith or hatred in leaders, but not their reason.

One can more reasonably disagree about the value of possible impacts, and about the coordination difficulties of particular programs.  But reasonable people should also admit others may hold different values, and that coordination techs continue to improve, both in and out of government.  New ways to coordinate government can make its programs more reasonable, and new ways to coordinate private action can make once-reasonable government programs obsolete.  We should also keep trying new programs, just to see.  The devil, as always, is in the details.

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Come The Em Rev

By Robin Hanson · February 1, 2010 9:30 am · Comments (30)

China on Friday unveiled a shake-up of the way land is seized for redevelopment. … Land seizures over the past decade have been central to the rapid modernization of hundreds of Chinese cities, which in turn has been one of the main drivers of the nation’s economic growth. But they also have been the source of often-violent conflicts, especially in the past year, as huge volumes of stimulus funds have gone into building projects.  Post

Rich stable nations, comfortable and safe on top of the global game, feel little inclination to consider big disruptive changes.  The price they pay for internal peace is the steady accumulation of Olsonian veto groups, who can block big changes.  Stable inflexible institutions seem acceptable when change is slow and life seem good enough.

This frustrates rich-nation would-be-rebels like me who see our business, legal, political, etc. institutions as far from optimal.  Such rebels want to explore big changes, but must either: 1) accept only tinkering around the edges, 2) move to a place more willing to make changes, or 3) wait for crises where larger changes might fly.

So what crises loom?  In the US we can expect the long foreseen budget “train wreck” within a decade or two.  This must be addressed by huge tax increases, spending decreases, or both.  Foresighted politicians are positioning their blame and solutions for that crisis.  Since we spend so much on military and medical benefits, I’ve wondered if we’ll consider “Med is a waste, cut it way back” or “Let the world defend itself, cut our military.” Alas, neither seems likely.

In two to five decades, the US will probably start to take seriously global competition from big fast growing nations like China or India.  The US might then consider adopting policies credited with growing those nations fast, though national pride may block that.  Foresighted advocates will position their credit and solutions for that crisis.

But if you lust after huge institutional change in long-rich nations, if you long to say “come the revolution,” you might wait three to fifteen decades for the “em rev“, the whole brain emulation revolution.  The em rev is my best guess for the next “singularity” scale change, like the farming or industrial revolutions, each of which sped world growth rates by more than a factor of a hundred, within less than a previous doubling time.  We now double in fifteen years, so within a few years an em-econ could double monthly! Continue Reading "Come The Em Rev" »

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Shallow Voter Cures

By Robin Hanson · January 26, 2010 2:30 pm · Comments (52)

I wrote:

To the extent that some [voters] have a natural tendency to believe whatever the majority of ads they hear on such topics tell them, such shallow folks are in effect offering to believe whatever the most monetarily-eager advertisers want them to believe.  For such shallow folks, money-wise the loud can indeed drown out the less loud. …

If corporations are silenced … not only would that hinder non-shallow voters from getting info from corporations, the total distortion by shallow voters is not obviously reduced! … Mechanically, it would be straightforward to limit the franchise by age, income, IQ, education, knowledge test scores, etc. … Shallowness can vary with person, topic, and context. If it is rare, we can ignore it, but it is more common than not we need to seriously revise who can vote on what.

Now shallow voters, who just believe whatever a majority of ads say, are probably not a big problem.  After all, campaign spending seems remarkably ineffective.  But we could benefit from better informed and more attentive voters, so it’s worth considering reforms to get that.  Reducing who can vote is only one of many options:

  • Juries – randomly select a small jury of voters to participate in each election.  Each juror chosen would know they have a much better chance of making a difference, and so would pay more attention.
  • Rotation – rotate voters across years and offices, so that they do not always vote on everything.  This would also focus voter attention because they would know they made more of a difference.
  • Topic – divide policies into topics, and let each voter pick their specialty topic.  Votes among topic specialists would somehow set policy on that topic.
  • Jury Foremen – randomly group citizens in each neighborhood into juries of thirteen, and have each jury, well in advance, elect a foreman to vote in the general election.  They’d elect smart foremen, little constrained on how to vote.
  • More ideas?

Why are all those folks, so very concerned that firms with free speech might manipulate shallow voters, so uninterested in these options?

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Dissing Citizens

By Robin Hanson · January 24, 2010 10:00 am · Comments (36)

Imagine a “democracy” where citizens could technically vote for anyone, but where authorities strongly recommended particular candidates for each office, and those who voted for others were given extensive psychiatric treatment, out of concern for their welfare, and taken away from their jobs and families, out of concern for the welfare of others.  Technically, this could make sense — maybe there really is always a clear best candidate, and only crazy folks would think otherwise.

But this situation could also easily describe strong repression, and it seems to dis voters by restricting their control.  People like democracy in part because it raises their status, by making them seem in control.  But if so, voter status must fall as that appearance of control is restricted by law — there is an essential tension between democracy and regulation that overrules voter beliefs.

While we have many kinds of regulations supported by many kinds of rationales, one very common rationale is bias, that people make bad choices, bad not just for society as a whole, but bad for each particular choosing person according to their own preferences, holding constant all other decisions.  Such rationales are commonly offered regarding product safety, professional licensing, and financial regulations, and in legal and election procedures.

It may well be that many people do often make such mistakes, and that they are furthermore stubborn enough not to listen to advice telling them about their mistakes.  So it might well require government force to keep folks from hurting themselves via unwise choices.  But there is a real conflict between telling voters they are wise enough to run the government, and using force to keep them from acting on many of their beliefs.

Consider: which voters are in charge of the policies that keep voters from acting on their beliefs – can these two groups of voters really be the same?  Yes, citizens may realize they are error-prone and intend to use government to keep them from making mistakes.  But then voters would only need to be advised by the government of their mistakes, not forced to follow government advice.  And voluntary deals with private orgs could achieve the same outcome.  Yes perhaps a majority of voters tries to keep a minority of voters from their mistakes, but if so why is such force applied to all voters?

This tension becomes especially strong when voters are prevented by force from acting on their political beliefs.  Consider legal limits on which candidates voters may elect to public office, limits on policies candidates may advocate, or limits on advisors voters may hear on candidates and policies.  Such limits should detract from the status of being a voter in control of government – these limits seem to publicly declare that voters cannot be trusted on certain of their beliefs, and that the elites who set and maintain such limits (e.g., court judges) are the rightful higher-status rulers over such foolish lower-status voting rabble.

But what is clear to me may well not be clear to most voters.  Voting is done in an especially thoughtless sort of far mode, where a great many contradictions remain unnoticed.  But with time, this conflict may become more obvious – how then will voters resolve it, by demanding fewer limits on their actions, or by limiting the vote to a smaller subset of less obviously foolish citizens?

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Microecon of Media

By Robin Hanson · January 23, 2010 5:35 pm · Comments (68)

Many have expressed concerns that corporations with free speech may “drown out” other voices.  This view seems to vastly misunderstand modern communications media.  For their benefit, and yours, let us then review the basics of modern media.

First, reader/viewer/listeners today can choose among many many sources.  There are hundreds of TV and radio channels, thousands of newspapers, magazines, and journals, and millions of web pages.  Most readers track many of these, and try new ones often. Readers return more to the sources they see as more valuable.  So sources who want to attract and retain readers must make such readers feel they are getting value, relative to reader time, money, and other costs.  Reader values obtained include info, image, status, fun, and morbid curiosity.

Complaints about corporate political speech often give analogies to street corners or bathroom graffiti, places where the loud can literally drown out the quiet.  Early radio was like this too; radio stations with big transmitters could drown out weak stations.  But the vast majority of media today are tunable; if you choose a particular TV station, magazine, or web page, that is the source you will get – there is little chance you’ll accidentally hear a different station.

So today, the main way some sources take readers away from others is by out-competing them — offering readers more net value.  If your message is not eagerly consumed by readers, your complaint should be with how readers estimate value, not with other sources that offer better value according to reader estimates.  You can of course offer meta-messages, to persuade them they are making mistakes in how to estimate value.  But again, if readers also neglect those meta-messages, your primary complaint is with readers, not with other sources.

Now it does seem that many folks are willing to hear ads instead of paying higher cash prices for media access.  To the extent that some such folks have a natural tendency to believe whatever the majority of ads they hear on such topics tell them, such shallow folks are in effect offering to believe whatever the most monetarily-eager advertisers want them to believe.  For such shallow folks, money-wise the loud can indeed drown out the less loud.

But again, your primary complaint here should be about those shallow voters, not the advertisers.  If you believe that some voters care so little about political outcomes that they are willing to sell their political beliefs to the highest advertising bidder, you should believe that such folks have no business voting!  After all, preventing some folks from directly buying political ads may have little net effect – those folks may buy ads indirectly, or find other ways to buy voter beliefs.  The key problem is that some voters care way too little about political outcomes.

If there are only a few such shallow voters, we can probably just ignore this problem.  If many voters are shallow about politics, however, it seems wiser to restrict the voting franchise to folks whose beliefs are less easily distorted.  The opinions of shallow folks who are easily swayed should have almost no additional information value – why let such them make a mess of how we determine policy?

Added 10:20p: Many folks mistakenly assume that distortions from shallow voters stop if corporations are silenced.  But not only would that hinder non-shallow voters from getting info from corporations, the total distortion by shallow voters is not obviously reduced!  Shallow voters who believe whatever side shows the most ads would either be bought by corporations more indirectly, or by other deep pockets more directly.  And the many other kinds of shallow voters, who believe whoever has the funniest ads, or the coolest spokesfolks, or the prettiest candidates, would still cause distortions.

Mechanically, it would be straightforward to limit the franchise by age, income, IQ, education, knowledge test scores, etc.  Yes such changes seem unpopular now, but that’s no excuse for ignoring them.

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Shut Up Or Else

By Robin Hanson · January 18, 2010 1:40 pm · Comments (44)

The overwhelmingly liberal tilt of university professors has been explained by everything from outright bias to higher I.Q. scores. … A pair of sociologists think they may have an answer: typecasting. … The academic profession “has acquired such a strong reputation for liberalism and secularism that over the last 35 years few politically or religiously conservative students, but many liberal and secular ones, have formed the aspiration to become professors,” they write in the paper, “Why Are Professors Liberal?” That is especially true of their own field, sociology. … To Mr. Gross, accusations by conservatives of bias and student brainwashing are self-defeating. “The irony is that the more conservatives complain about academia’s liberalism,” he said, “the more likely it’s going to remain a bastion of liberalism.”

More here.  ”Shut up about this imbalance or it’ll be worse.”  Can you imagine a sociologist recommending this response to a huge imbalance elsewhere, say a [disapproved] gender, ethnic, or sexual preference imbalance among executives, top colleges, country clubs, or political offices?   But when it comes to imbalances in their own profession, …  HT Tyler.

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States Sting Status

By Robin Hanson · January 13, 2010 9:45 am · Comments (35)
We usually take control as a strong marker of status; those who give orders have higher status than those who take orders.  So, for example, bosses are reluctant to oversee better paid subordinates, and teens chafe under the control of their parents and teachers, even when their lives are otherwise comfortable.
People care about the form of government they live under not only because different forms of government have different chances of leading to peace, prosperity, etc.  People also care about how governments more directly influences their status.  For example, in addition to or setting aside our beliefs about which forms of government lead to which other outcomes, I suspect most of us prefer:
democracy to autarchy, as it gives us more illusion of control.
proportional representation, as gives more control over the person we pick
equal votes per person, as otherwise others have more votes than you
the state to be controlled by a group we identify with, so we seem in control
stigma be attached to welfare given to groups we don’t identify with
more regulation of competing high status, to bring them down to us
more support of affiliated high status, to bring us up with as they rise
laws not treat us like children or fools, as that degrades us
I suspect such status issues drive our actual choice of government forms more often than we like to admit.
Thinking along these lines, I was wondering about the status effects of something like futarchy — what if every time the government considered a policy, you had the option to bet for or against that policy, and such bets influenced policy?
Yes, you might still have to suffer the status-reducing indignity of being ruled by foolish policies chosen by clueless folks who in a just world would be considered your inferiors.  But you would always know that you had the option to have a large influence, via bets, on those policies, an influence far out of proportion to your fraction of the population.  You would also know that you could, via bets, arrange to be paid lots of money when those policies went badly, just as you had predicted.  Would this raise your status, relative to only influencing policy via your tiny fractional vote, and then just having to live with the consequences?
Setting aside whether this betting system would actually choose good policies producing peace, prosperity, etc., the question I’m asking in this post is if this betting system might substantially shrink the status sting of the state.  Yes this would not fully assuage a libertarian’s outrage at being subject to policies he did not (recently) choose, but would it be a substantial step in that direction?

We usually see control as a marker of status; those who give orders have higher status than those who take orders.  So, for example, bosses are reluctant to oversee better-paid subordinates, and teens chafe under the control of parents and teachers, even when their lives are otherwise comfortable.  People also hate or love their governments in part because how it makes them feel controlled by others, or in control of others.

More generally, people care about the governments they live under not only because different types of government have different chances of leading to peace, prosperity, etc. People also care about how governments more directly influence their status. For example, in addition to wanting governments that induce other outcomes like peace or prosperity, I suspect most of us prefer:

  1. governments with forms like those of recent high status regimes,
  2. to be part of large rich powerful empires, since those are high status,
  3. democracy over autarchy, as it gives us more illusion of control,
  4. proportional representation, as we then more control who represents us,
  5. equal votes per person, as otherwise others have more votes than us,
  6. states controlled by groups we identify with, so we seem in control,
  7. stigma attached to assistance given groups we don’t identify with,
  8. more regulation of competing high status folks, to bring them down to us,
  9. more support of affiliated high status folks, to lift us as they rise, and
  10. laws that treat them but not us like children, as that degrades folks.

Such status issues may drive our choice of government forms more often than we like to admit.  So when trying to design good government, we need to take such status affects into account, so that our designs can be attractive and stable.  Thinking along these lines, I was wondering about the status effects of something like futarchy — what if every time the government considered a policy, you had the option to bet for or against that policy, and such bets influenced policy?

Yes, you might still have to suffer the status-reducing indignity of being ruled by foolish policies chosen by dimwits who in a just world would be considered your inferiors. But you would always know that, via bets, you had the option of a large influence on those policies, far out of proportion to your fraction of the population.  You would also know that you could, via bets, arrange to be paid lots when those policies went badly, just as you had predicted.  Would this raise your status, relative to only influencing policy via your tiny fractional vote, and then just having to live with the consequences?

Setting aside whether this betting system would actually choose good policies producing peace, prosperity, etc., the question I’m asking in this post is if this betting system might substantially shrink the status sting of the state.  Yes this would not fully assuage a libertarian’s outrage at being subject to policies he did not (recently) choose, but would it be a substantial step in that direction?

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