Tag Archives: Politics

Is Paper Low Status?

By Robin Hanson · November 6, 2012 4:00 pm · Comments (48)

“Virginia has a lot of electronic voting and in general has an election system where it’s very hard to get recounts,” says Dill. “So I might worry about Virginia, depending on how close it is.” … It’s a lot easier to modify electronic records than to modify paper records which is why banking and a lot of other critical activities like that still rely on paper when there’s an ultimate disaster and electronic records are lost or corrupted. (more)

When I voted this morning in Virginia I noticed a line of 6-8 people waiting to use the electronic voting machines, but one could vote immediately on paper. Yet paper voting is less corruptible. I asked Alex Tabarrok and he said he puzzled over the same thing when he voted: why is paper voting so unpopular?

A fb comment noted that it is mostly old folks voting on paper. And that was true at my place as well. Which leads me to suggest that this is a status effect – people stand in line to vote less securely in order to signal that they aren’t old folks scared by or incompetent at electronics. Yes, it seems surprising that people are willing to spend an extra few minutes just to look hip to strangers. But what other explanation is there?

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Lean Pork

By Robin Hanson · October 29, 2012 10:00 am · Comments (12)

If their representatives don’t bring home the bacon, Americans are free to fire them on Election Day. But what if members of Congress didn’t run for reelection in their home districts but were randomly assigned to run somewhere else? A 2011 paper, “Randomizing Districts for Reelections: A Thought Experiment,” tried to find benefits in a legislature divorced from geography. Under such a system, “legislators cannot focus their attention upon pleasing a geographically-concentrated special interest while neglecting the broader national interest.” (more)

A cute idea, but it would hurt incentives for info specialization, where representatives learn their district’s issues, and voters learn their incumbent’s record. I think my 17-year-old proposal would work better:

Congressfolk seeking re-election seek, among other things, concrete benefits they can bring to their district, which they can claim clear credit for. Thus they focus on getting dams, grants, etc. directed to their district, and seek tariffs or subsidies for industries especially concentrated in their district. They tend to give only lip-service for issues, like say health-care reform, which might benefit everyone in the nation, and which lots of congressfolk would be involved in developing — the benefits and the credit to be claimed are both diffuse and unconcentrated. …

So my simple proposal is to allow federal tax rates to vary by congressional district. Given this, taxes would suddenly become a concentrated benefit. Incumbents could brag about how much lower taxes were in their district, and challengers could complain how high they were. Incumbents would have clear incentives to trade votes to get taxes lowered in their district, and the credit would be clear – who else would want to push for lower taxes in that district? (more)

Admittedly, while excess local pork is a problem, it may not be the main problem our political system faces at the moment.

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Alms is not about alms experts

By Carl Shulman · October 16, 2012 10:06 pm · Comments (22)

In September Robin suggested that there might be an Alms Expert Opening:

Today the three spending categories of medicine, school, and alms make up ~40% of US GDP, a far larger fraction than in 1800. …

Today, two of these three classic charities have very powerful associated “professions”: doctors and teachers. These professions are powerful because they are seen as representing the good in those causes – doctors are our official authorities on what is good for patients, and teachers are our official authorities on what is good for students…

The missing group here is alms experts: we have no strong profession of those who specialize in helping the poor, crippled, etc.

Are alms experts punching below their weight, given the large fraction of GDP spent on alms? I think not, because alms spending mostly bypasses the work of alms experts.

Medical spending mostly goes to pay doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals, or to provide facilities and equipment that supports their work: there were over 7.5 million technically skilled healthcare workers in 2011. In education elementary school, high school, and post-secondary teachers added up to over 4.4 million people, with other spending going to school buildings, principals, utilities, libraries, and so forth.

But consider the largest alms program in the United States, the Social Security Administration, which makes cash payments to the elderly, the disabled, and surviving family members of certain deceased. Its budget request projects that in 2013 it will pay out some $873 billion to beneficiaries while spending less than $12 billion for operations, with only 80,000 state and federal employees.

The relatively small role for administration recurs elsewhere, e.g. the food voucher program SNAP disbursed $76 billion in 2011 with administrative costs of $6.9 billion and the Earned Income Tax Credit disbursed $59.5 billion with direct administrative costs of less than one percent. Staffing can be higher for programs involving social workers and foreign assistance, but less is spent on these than the large formula-driven programs.

Since alms employees are relatively scarce, they can directly deliver fewer votes or political contributions than teachers or medical workers. And since their role in the provision of alms is so much less central, it is harder for others to see them as “representing the good in those causes.” Instead, organizations of recipients can take on the role of defenders of the alms they receive. For alms influence and status, look to the 38 million members of the AARP, not 80,000 Social Security workers.

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Info Ideology

By Robin Hanson · October 11, 2012 8:30 am · Comments (19)

What is a political “ideology”? You might think your ideology is your set of core pivotal beliefs, the few beliefs that most influence your many other political beliefs. For example:

Political ideologies have two dimensions:
Goals: how society should work
Methods: the most appropriate ways to achieve the ideal arrangement.
… Typically, each ideology contains certain ideas on what it considers to be the best form of government (e.g. democracy, theocracy, caliphate etc.), and the best economic system (e.g. capitalism, socialism, etc.). … Ideologies also identify themselves by their position on the political spectrum (such as the left, the center or the right), though this is very often controversial. (more)

But in fact, political ideologies seem more to be the beliefs that most consistently divide us:

For the most part, congressional voting is uni-dimensional, with most of the variation in voting patterns explained by placement along the liberal-conservative first dimension. … since the 1970s, party delegations in Congress have become ideologically homogeneous and [more] distant from one another (a phenomenon known as “polarization.”) … [These] scores are also used by popular media outlets … as a measure of the political ideology of political institutions and elected officials or candidates. … [These] procedures … have also been applied to a number of other legislative bodies besides the United States Congress. These include the United Nations General Assembly, the European Parliament, National Assemblies in Latin America, and the French Fourth Republic. … Most of these analyses produce the finding that roll call voting is organized by only few dimensions (usually two): “These findings suggest that the need to form parliamentary majorities limits dimensionality.” (more)

It is a remarkable fact that a single dimension so well summarizes political opinions, especially given the range of topics relevant to politics. This, however, is not plausibly explained by saying that we mainly disagree about one core key belief, such as how much redistribution is fair. It instead seems to reflect how political coalitions form – groups tend to form alliances more with closer groups, against more distant groups, until two main alliances form, divided by their one strongest division, whatever that might be.

To the extent that the main political dimensions are associated with policies, they are mostly associated with lots of particular policies, instead of a few key principles. And this makes sense given that most voters seem incapable of comprehending and reliably applying most proposed political principles.

But if there really were sensible pivotal principles, and if the relevant political population could understand and apply them, then it would make sense to focus our political arguments on them. By aggregating info on a few key principles, we would more efficiently aggregate info on lots of specific policies.

So do sensible and pivotal political principles exist? To me, principles like maximize liberty or minimize inequality seem pivotal, but not very sensible. I’m more fond of the principle of economic efficiency, but it is pretty hard for ordinary voters to see what more specific policies this principle implies.

To me, the most sensible pivotal principles are at the meta level — they are about how exactly we should aggregate info on the efficiency, and other consequences, of policies. For example, I think decision markets can go a long way toward giving us better info on the effects of policies. I also think we should do a lot more randomized policy experiments. And I support more and better cost benefit analyses, though it is admittedly hard for ordinary voters to evaluate their objectivity.

Now these positions might be wrong, but whatever are the right answers, the question of how to best aggregate info on policy effects seems a pivotal core issue, with strong implications for many specific policies. Amid audiences that can understand them, these are the core issues about which we should argue. Info ideologies would be the best ideologies.

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US Politics Of Medicine

By Robin Hanson · September 28, 2012 10:20 am · Comments (30)

After presiding over an economy with a record disappointing performance, which usually gets incumbent presidents fired, Intrade puts Obama’s chance of re-election at 79%! I attribute an important part of this to the politics of medicine. Here’s recent US medical politics in a nutshell:

Seniors vote a lot more, and they love their free medicine, so US politicians have long written them a blank check, leading to rapid cost increases. Wonks have long said “something must be done” about costs, and the left has long wanted to expand the number with health insurance. So Obama pushed through a law requiring such an expansion, and declaring an intention to do something about costs. Later. But something, they swear.

This created a vague unease among seniors that their free medicine might get cut. Vague because seniors don’t really get how exactly costs might be cut. But still, cuts! Which created an opening for a Republican to get elected president by promising to never cut senior medicine. Except that the frontrunner Republican candidate was someone who had implemented a similar program when he was governor. And then he made a “bold” move to pick a running mate with a bold plan to turn Medicare into a voucher system. Which Romney thought would give him credit for taking problems “seriously.”

Bad move. Voters don’t really like “bold” politicians. Since seniors have a better idea of what “vouchers” mean, and how exactly they lead to cuts, that let Obama more effectively attack Romney as planning to cut seniors’ free medicine. Which is sticking, because although everyone says “something must be done”, seniors don’t actually believe that their free medicine needs to be cut. So seniors in key swing states move toward Obama, and he gets re-elected.

And after the election, there’s pretty much no chance Obama will let senior medicine get cut, at least in any way they could trace back to him. Nor will the next president after him. Maybe we’ll go into more debt, or raise taxes, or cut military spending. But no way will they stop writing medical blank checks to seniors, and letting costs rise as they will.

Here’s the recent data fleshing out this public opinion story: Continue reading "US Politics Of Medicine" »

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Inequality /=> Revolt

By Robin Hanson · September 21, 2012 11:10 am · Comments (21)

Famous historical revolutions were not consistently caused by high or rising income inequality:

[French income] inequality during the eighteenth century was large but decreased during the revolutionary period (1790-1815). … When industrialisation began about 1830, inequality increased until sometime in the 1860s. (more)

In 1904, on the eve of military defeat and the 1905 Revolution, Russian income inequality was middling by the standards of that era, and less severe than inequality has become today in such countries as China, the United States, and Russia itself. (more)

In 1774 the American colonies had average incomes exceeding those of the Mother Country, even when slave households are included in the aggregate. … American colonists had much more equal incomes than did households in England and Wales around 1774. Indeed, New England and the Middle Colonies appear to have been more egalitarian than anywhere else in the measureable world. Income inequality rose dramatically between 1774 and 1860, especially in the South. (more)

So why do most people so confidently believe that revolutions were caused by high or rising inequality? I’d guess its because it feels like a nice way to affirm your support for the standard forager value of more equality.

Added 24Sept: OK, I see that the French data isn’t so relevant to my point.

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How To Vote

By Robin Hanson · August 28, 2012 7:45 pm · Comments (61)

I’m a professor of economics who has published on politics, and in ten weeks the US will elect a president, and congress-folk. So a reasonable test of my supposed specialized knowledge is: do I have anything clearly useful to tell ordinary folks about how to vote in this election?

Well first, I have said that politics isn’t about policy, i.e., that we quite reasonably care more about how our political views make us look to our associates than how they effect policy outcomes. I’ve also said a lot about overconfidence, which applies in spades to politics. Being overconfident usually looks better, even it leads to less accurate judgements. So in general I can recommend: just confidently take positions that look good to your associates; forget about policy outcomes.

But what if you were to insist on trying to figure out which US presidential and Congressional candidates to vote for based on expected policy outcomes? And what if you were to further insist on avoiding overconfidence, seeking as much as possible to avoid relying on your own likely-overconfident judgements. Perhaps, for example, the image you want to project to your associates is of fair-minded broad concern, and well-calibrated rationality.

In this case, if you guess that your relevant information is roughly average or worse than average, you have an obvious solution: don’t vote. But, perhaps you want to signal a bit more confidence and concern than this suggests.

Another simple strategy is to search for an immediate associate who both clearly shares most of your interests, and who seems better informed than you. Then just copy their vote. But perhaps you don’t want to appear very submissive to this person. So let us assume that you want to signal that you are informed and autonomous, while still creating good voting outcomes, and continue.

Alas, we still don’t have presidential decision markets, that estimate important policy outcomes, such as GDP, unemployment, oil prices, etc., conditional on who becomes president. It would only take a few tens of thousands of dollars for someone to create these, at say Intrade. And then I could offer great simple clear robust advice – vote for whomever markets rate better. But, ok, this system failing is not your problem, so let’s continue.

The thing you probably know best is your own life. So a good simple strategy is to vote “retrospectively,” i.e., for incumbents if your life goes well, and against them if your life goes badly. The more voters who do this, the stronger incentives incumbents have to make most lives go well.

For life quality extremes this advice is clear, but what if your life is near the middle? What should be the cutoff between a good and bad life? One simple reference is how you expected your life to go when incumbents were elected – reelect them if your life has gone better than expected.

Now you might do a little better if you could broaden your judgment to how life has gone for more people you care about. But if you care about a lot of distant folks, you’ll face the problem that you know a lot less about how distant folk lives are going. I could just tell you that most experts agree that the US economy has done worse than experts expected when Obama was elected. But to rely on that, you might have to trust me.

You could also do a bit better if you focused on the outcomes where particular incumbents are most responsible. For example, US presidents have more influence on foreign policy, while Congress has more influence on domestic policy. US politicians have more effect on what happens in the US than in Europe. Politicians have less influence on earthquakes or hurricanes. And so on. You might also substitute the initial expectation you should have had, for the one you did have, if you can figure out that. But you have to know more than most people do to implement such corrections well, and they only moderately improve incumbent incentives.

So, as a professor of economics who has studied politics, my advice is to not vote if you know an average amount or less, to copy a better informed close associate if you are willing to appear submissive, and otherwise to just reelect incumbents when your life goes better than you expected. And if you care a lot more about the outcome than most do, help create presidential decision markets, so other info-seekers will have a better place to turn.

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Is World Government Inevitable?

By Robin Hanson · July 31, 2012 11:30 pm · Comments (68)

Several sources lately incline me to think of world (or solar) government as very likely in the long run. First, I read Betrand Russell, in a 1950 essay The Future of Mankind, advocating violence to make a world government:

Before the end of the present century, unless something quite unforeseeable occurs, one of three possibilities will have been realized. These three are:

I. The end of human life, perhaps of all life on our planet.
II. A reversion to barbarism after a catastrophic diminution of the population of the globe.
III. A unification of the world under a single government, possessing a monopoly of all the major weapons of war. …

A world government is desirable. More than half of the Amerian nation, according to a Gallup poll, hold this opinion. But most of its advocates think of it as something to be established by friendly negotiation, and shrink from any suggestion of the use of force. In this I think they are mistaken. I am sure that force, or the threat of force, will be necessary. …

The governments of the English-speaking nations should then offer to all other nations the option of entering into a firm alliance, involving a pooling of military resources and mutual defense against aggression. In the case of hesitant nations, … great inducements, economic and military, should be held out to produce their cooperation. … When the Alliance had acquired sufficient strength, any Great Power still refusing to join should be threatened with outlawry, and, if recalcitrant, should be regarded as a public enemy. The resulting war … (more)

Russell was right that Americans then favored a world government:

In March 1951, nearly half (49%) of Americans thought the United Nations should be strengthened to make it a world government with power to control the armed forces of all nations, including the United States, while 36% thought it should not. (more)

Seems they still favored it in 1993:

In a [1993] telephonic survey financed by the WFA, 58% of 1200 adult American citizens polled thought that to have practical law enforcement at home and abroad, a limited, democratic world government would be essential or helpful (with 35%) disagreeing). For effective enforcement of laws, 66% of those questioned felt there should be a world constitution, more than double the number who disagreed. … 82% of respondents felt the UN Charter should be amended to allow the UN to arrest individuals who commit serious international crimes, and 83% felt that leaders making war on groups within their country should be tried by an International Criminal Court. (more)

In 2007, much of the world also agreed:

A total of 21,890 people were interviewed between July 2006 and March 2007 [in 19 nations: US, Mexico, Argentina, Peru, Armenia, Ukraine, Russia, Poland, France, Pales. Terr., Israel, Australia, S. Korea, Thailand, China, Indonesia, India, Philippines, Iran.] …

■ Large majorities approve of strengthening the United Nations by giving it the power to have its own standing peacekeeping force, regulate the international arms trade and investigate human rights abuses.
■ Most publics believe the UN Security Council should have the right to authorize military force to address a range of problems, including aggression, terrorism, and genocide. (more)

Finally, the history of China suggests that, once started, “world” government becomes hard to stop:

This study explores the ways in which the Chinese imperial system attained its unparalleled endurance. … I do not pretend to provide a comprehensive answer. … Rather, I shall focus on a single variable, which distinguishes Chinese imperial experience from that of other comparable polities elsewhere, namely, the empire’s exceptional ideological prowess. As I hope to demonstrate, the Chinese empire was an extraordinarily powerful ideological construct, the appeal of which to a variety of political actors enabled its survival even during periods of severe military, economic, and administrative malfunctioning. …

Centuries of internal turmoil that preceded the imperial unification of 221 BCE … were also the most vibrant period in China’s intellectual history. Bewildered by the exacerbating crisis, thinkers of that age sought ways to restore peace and stability. Their practical recommendations varied tremendously; but amid this immense variety there were some points of consensus. Most importantly, thinkers of distinct ideological inclinations unanimously accepted political unification of the entire known civilized world—“All-under-Heaven”—as the only feasible means to put an end to perennial war; and they also agreed that the entire subcelestial realm should be governed by a single omnipotent monarch. These premises of unity and monarchism became the ideological foundation of the future empire, and they were not questioned for millennia. (more)

Even if a world (or solar) government is inevitable, it is still probably best to not start it too early, before we are able to coordinate sufficiently well.

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Death of a Salesman

By Robin Hanson · May 6, 2012 9:55 pm · Comments (57)

A recent NYT article intrigued me:

Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” … is the most devastating portrait of punctured middle-class dreams in our national literature. … [It] has consolidated its prestige as an exposure of middle-class delusions. … Mr. Miller later wrote …. that he had hoped the play would expose “this pseudo life that thought to touch the clouds by standing on top of a refrigerator, waving a paid-up mortgage at the moon, victorious at last.” … Mr. Miller remembered worrying in 1949 that “there was too much identification with Willy, too much weeping, and that the play’s ironies were being dimmed out by all this empathy.” … Miller’s outrage at a capitalist system he wanted to humanize has become our cynical adaptation to a capitalist system we pride ourselves on knowing how to manipulate. (more)

I didn’t remember the play offering a critique of capitalism, but looking around I see this view is common:

Critics have maintained that much of the enduring universal appeal of Death of a Salesman lies in its central theme of the failure of the American Dream. Willy’s commitment to false social values—consumerism, ambition, social stature—keeps him from acknowledging the value of human experience—the comforts of personal relationships, family and friends, and love. … Some commentators perceive the play as an indictment of American capitalism and a rejection of materialist values. … Willy’s … penchant for blaming others has been passed onto his sons and, as a result, all three men exhibit a poor work ethic and lack of integrity. Willy’s inability to discern between reality and fantasy is another recurring motif. (more)

So I just re-read the play. And it does contain critiques of status, ambition for status, and self-delusion to gain status. It is indeed sad to see a success-driven man unwilling to admit his failure, or to accept charity from friends, choose instead to kill himself. But I see no further critiques of materialism or capitalism in the play.

On materialism, Willy Loman and his similar son Happy mainly want to be liked and respected. Sometimes they care about money, but mainly to keep score, and get respect. When they want luxury goods, such as stockings or fancy drinks, it is mainly to get women to sleep with them. In contrast, Willy’s other son Biff wants “to be outdoors, with [my] shirt off.” Perhaps those other women are materialistic, but not these men.

On capitalism, the play might hold critiques of failing to save for hard times, or of success based on who you know, good looks, and likability. But these are not intrinsic to, or even obviously correlated with, capitalism. For example, North Korea today is nothing like capitalism, yet it has strong status differences, people who struggle for status, in part to gain sex, and success based in part on good looks and who you know. A story about an old self-deluded status-seeking North Korean failure would make just as much sense as Willy Loman’s story.

This seems to me a common situation – things said to be critiques of capitalism are often just critiques of humanity. Humans vie selfishly and self-deludedly for status. Some succeed, while others fail. The struggle, and the failures, aren’t pretty. Yes capitalism inherits this ugliness, but then so does any other system with humans.

It is interesting to note that, compared to most occupations, the world of Miller the playwright was especially like the salesmen Miller described:

For a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. … He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back—that’s an earthquake. … A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.

Like salesmen, playwrights succeed when others like them. Even though most fail, most self-deludedly think they will be the exceptions, and can be crushed when they eventually learn otherwise. But few playwrights lament this, or blame it on capitalism. Why?

I suspect this is because playwrights see even failed playwrights as high status, and successful salesmen as low status. A hidden message of the play is “Poor Willy can’t see that even if he sold a lot, he’d still be a failure in our eyes.” Which is part of why it bothered Arthur Miller that his audiences empathized so much with Willy. Audiences thought Willy could have high status.

Some key quotes from the play: Continue reading "Death of a Salesman" »

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Votes Are Nearer Than Vote Talk

By Robin Hanson · April 29, 2012 9:15 am · Comments (1)

Bob Sutton on an ’09 near-far paper:

A traveler preparing to leave for a vacation to Cancun the following morning is more likely to process information about speedy check-in for international flights – a low-level, concrete piece of information that is related to the feasibility of the vacation, as opposed to information about the quality of sunsets on the East Coast of Mexico – a high-level, abstract piece of information that is related to the desirability of the vacation. …

They used this kind of logic to design a series of laboratory experiments where subjects were exposed to vague versus concrete messages from hypothetical U.S. Senate candidates and asked them to evaluate how positively or negatively they viewed the candidate. The key manipulation was whether the election was far off (six months away) or looming soon (one week). As predicted, abstract messages were more persuasive (and promoted more liking) when the election was six months away and concrete message were more persuasive when it was one week away.

This study has some fun implications for the upcoming elections. Let’s watch Obama and Romney to see if they keep things vague and abstract until the final weeks of the campaign, but then turn specific in the final weeks. But I think it also has some interesting implications for how leaders can persuade people in their organizations to join organizational change efforts. The implication is that when the change is far off, it is not a good idea to talk about he nuts and bolts very much — a focus on abstract “why” questions is in order. But as the change looms, specific details that help people predict and control what happens to them are crucial to keeping attitudes toward the change and leaders positive. (more; HT Hendrick lee)

Another implication: even those most political rhetorical is about abstract far principles, actual votes tend more to be based on concrete near considerations. This is a reason democracies aren’t as bad as you’d think looking at typical voter opinions and election rhetoric. The paper also says:

[This] effect was observed primarily among inexpert respondents, who are more likely to correspond to swing voters.

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