I’ve been adjacent to two literatures for much of my academic career: public choice and govt efficiency. The public choice literature tries to use econ theory to explain govt choice of policies, while the
Simple hypothesis: Sounds good and is good are anticorrelated because we're selecting for such questions. Places where is good also sounds good are uninteresting and govt and others do many good sounding actually good things. If we actually checked all govt actions or choices we'd see high positive correlation.
I don't think I'm selecting for them in the above. I'm looking at the biggest things govt goes, and estimating their efficiency. The 20 items above add up to a huge overall effect.
There are many policies that sound bad and are bad, that no one thinks about. Eg "imprison everyone named John", or if you demand laws that have existed anywhere in history "make it illegal to have beards".
Is good /sounds good in some ways selects for things that are cheap. My local government is really good at building playgrounds, but it doesn’t take up much of the budget.
Is bad / sounds good feels like a “subsidize demand/restrict supply” trap where there very fact that it doesn’t work means that more and more money goes into the unsolvable problem.
If you want to get rich in government you need a nice sounding impossible problem. If there were a solution then you would solve it and then you can’t ask for more money.
They are selected for in the sense that there is political pressure to do them (perhaps because they sound good), which is why they are big. There are lots of things the government could do that would be terrible, but they don't do them because they also sound bad or have some other political hurdle.
So maybe the anti-correlation is just driven by the fact that not doing much is usually good, but sometimes sounds bad.
You can just go down the list of what govt does, starting with the biggest impact, evaluating each one. I don't see how process that has a selection effect.
I think another big factor is that it's rare for government departments to build up so much rot they collapse. Instead, they just get more funding or do a worse job. In the private sector, it's common for firms to fail to adjust to new situations and lose market share or even go under. In nature, it's common for species that fail to adapt to shrink in population or even go extinct. But the Department of Education or Department of Defense have no competitors who could take their lunch if they are inadequate. Sometimes a government department's funding is reduced, but rarely is their authority to credential or regulate reduced
It used to be the case that sufficiently dysfunctional governments would lose wars and have their territory seized, but that has become much less common more recently.
And when someone does come in and dismantle the Department of Education the orange line dc libertarians all line up to defend their fellow DC social circle from market forces.
Government cannot be inefficient, just as the positive experiences of life cannot be described, as you note in a recent post. This is because government is not a thing in the way you all reference it.
Yes, there is an organized crime racket manipulating circumstances that involve segments of society. That is not government. That is a mob.
Government, more properly called governance, happens in real time and is negotiated by those immediately affected. Why Caplan’s theory (and everyone else’s) don’t match reality is because you are referencing two entirely separate things as if they were one.
If you seek answers, I recommend you cease founding your model on the world as it is, as if that is in any way indicative of the realm of possibility.
Would not a better option be for the USA to pay poorer countries to police areas? In some places, a billion dollars might buy you a significant number of policemen or coastguard.
One problem with certain government solutions is that they do not scale. So that they are 'big and bad' are not independent features -- they are bad because they got so big. A small part of why this happens is that human beings are very much interested in 'making sure that things are fair' and perhaps even more interested in 'going after things that are unfair'. You end up with a huge amount of expense to try to keep people from profiting from gaming the system. Which they do anyway. But what also selects for the sort of people who delight in making choices for other people and forcing them to abide by those choices.
I was struck by how many people hated the investigation, because the ability to dictate who gets what food when, and where, and what is fair was something they didn't want to relinquish. Letting the food banks choose what they wanted in an artificial market was unacceptable, not because the results were bad but because the results were chosen. A system where everybody was better off that they were before was hated because some groups of people benefited more than others did.
>A system where everybody was better off that they were before was hated because some groups of people benefited more than others did.
Well, this is the essence of the left's hatred of capitalism in general. It makes everybody better off, but some much more than others. Universal poverty is more fair, thus more appealing to these sorts.
I think the anti-correlation between what sounds good vs what is good is driven by the fact that political salience requires disagreement, and that policy makers have two types of incentives: an incentive to do things that sound good, and also an incentive to do things that are good.
Consider the 4 possible policy idea categories:
1. Is good + sounds good: Nobody disagrees, no reason to fight, is not politically relevant.
2. Is bad + sounds bad: Nobody disagrees, no reason to fight, is not politically relevant.
3. Is bad + sounds good: There is a reason to fight! policy makers who are reacting to the incentive to govern well will fight against policy makers who are reacting to incentives to sound good.
4. Is good + sounds bad: There is a reason to fight! policy makers who are reacting to the incentive to govern well will fight against policy makers who are reacting to incentives to sound good.
One might object that this only explains the is good/sounds good anti-correlation between *politically salient* policy questions, but I think that is a feature rather than a bug. After all, it probably is good that regular people can quit their job whenever they like, and that murder is illegal, etc. These are so uncontroversial that we don't even register them as policy choices.
I also think this is why populism is generally associated with bad governance, and why activists are so often wrong. It might also have implications for whether or not making people angry is a good political strategy (increases political engagement, makes people pay attention).
Heisenberg Uncertainty strongly prohibits brain emulation, as well as any useful form of brain preservation. The chances are not ">10%". They are zero percent.
Simple reasoning. The brain is in constant motion. To unfreeze it, you would need to return every particle to its prior position and velocity. To emulate it, you would need to capture a snapshot of every particle's position and velocity. Heisenberg Uncertainty tells us this cannot be done.
>The brain is in constant motion. To unfreeze it, you would need to return every particle to its prior position and velocity. To emulate it, you would need to capture a snapshot of every particle's position and velocity.
Sure, but we don't actually want a perfect emulation of the brain the physical object, we want to instantiate a copy of a mind which that brain encoded. We currently have no idea what level of abstraction is sufficient for that (if any), but it seems plausible that getting everything exactly right down to the quantum level isn't necessary.
> we don't acywant a perfect emulation of the brain the physical object
Of course you do, what else could you possibly want? Dualism isn't true. The mind IS the brain. The brain is not a computer that executes the mind like a CPU running a program. They are one and the same. The quantum problem is real, and insurmountable.
A program is data supplied to the CPU, which is solid-state. The two are separable. A mind cannot be supplied to a brain to run because they are not separable. The brain physically embodies the mind and is not solid-state (it undergoes durable changes as it works).
It's really, really important to learn how computers work at a low level of this topic is of interest to you. The non-validity of the brain-as-CPU analogy will become intensely obvious if you do so.
School is not for students. It is for parents. It is subsidised child care. Parents can then get on with more productive things. It is a wealth transfer. The childless pay through taxation, and those with children benefit. Many have children, so it's a vote winner.
Isn't the lesson of immigration that if you allow more immigration than what the electorate finds palatable, then you summon a party/movement that is anti-market even from the right?
“And if scholars are able to see which policies are inefficient, why can’t they communicate what they know to voters?”
I can’t answer the rest of your questions, but I can address this one.
Most scholars and most of the communications media are biased to the left, which means they are biased towards the policies advocated by leftists, most of which are inefficient as economists understand that term.
Leftist scholars and the leftist media have every incentive not to communicate which policies are inefficient to voters.
One of the many reasons that leftist policies are inefficient is because they are explicitly designed to be about more government intervention - the oft-stated purpose for why leftists should be elected to hold political power.
For some of these I think the hesitation to adopt market-based solutions is a matter of control. If the gov't controls something, then as a citizen I imagine I could have some say in its future direction. But once it's sold to the highest bidder then I have no say.
Take your gov't lands example. It would certainly be more efficient if the United States were to, say, auction off its national parks. But what would this mean for me, someone who enjoys visiting national parks? I can absolutely imagine Mark Zuckerberg buying Yosemite and turning it into a private residence.
National parks make up a small percentage of government-owned land, representing approximately 3.7% to 11.3% of federal land, depending on the source and how "national parks" are defined (e.g., including only areas designated as "national parks" or the broader "national park system"). For example, the National Park System manages about 84 million acres, which is about 3.7% of the nation's total land.
Playing devil's advocate for a moment: The national parks constitute the biggest opportunities for windfall revenue and ongoing opex savings. Surely they would be at the top of the list for improving gov't economic efficiency re: land use.
The point I'm trying to make is there is more to these things than simple economic efficiency. It doesn't do much good to say "gov't sux, people are dumb" when the real problem is you've looked at things in a too-simple way.
"Why exactly are voters typically so very wrong about which policies are good? In fact, the correlation between what is good and what sounds good to voters may actually be negative!"
Solution: Unpopular democracy! The people vote, and the government does the opposite of what they want.
More seriously: The natural response to this is to say, Well, what we need then is obviously EXPERTS! We'll turn the decisions over to big government agencies that hire people from our best universities. Socialism! Or, if they turn out to be incompetent at running businesses by Hegelian dialectic, we'll delegate some responsibility to business leaders: Fascism!
If voters are so wrong, why aren't socialism and fascism better? How can democracy and its opposite both be the worst?
a) Remove all barriers listed under 'too little', greatly increase the expenditures (so not including government lands and licensing), under 'too much'
b) Remove some barriers listed under 'too little', remove some expenditure under 'too much'
Simple hypothesis: Sounds good and is good are anticorrelated because we're selecting for such questions. Places where is good also sounds good are uninteresting and govt and others do many good sounding actually good things. If we actually checked all govt actions or choices we'd see high positive correlation.
I don't think I'm selecting for them in the above. I'm looking at the biggest things govt goes, and estimating their efficiency. The 20 items above add up to a huge overall effect.
There are many policies that sound bad and are bad, that no one thinks about. Eg "imprison everyone named John", or if you demand laws that have existed anywhere in history "make it illegal to have beards".
Is good /sounds good in some ways selects for things that are cheap. My local government is really good at building playgrounds, but it doesn’t take up much of the budget.
Is bad / sounds good feels like a “subsidize demand/restrict supply” trap where there very fact that it doesn’t work means that more and more money goes into the unsolvable problem.
If you want to get rich in government you need a nice sounding impossible problem. If there were a solution then you would solve it and then you can’t ask for more money.
They are selected for in the sense that there is political pressure to do them (perhaps because they sound good), which is why they are big. There are lots of things the government could do that would be terrible, but they don't do them because they also sound bad or have some other political hurdle.
So maybe the anti-correlation is just driven by the fact that not doing much is usually good, but sometimes sounds bad.
I'd be surprised if it was high correlation, but I would accept higher correlation if the selection bias was less prominent.
+ Berkson's Paradox: https://brilliant.org/wiki/berksons-paradox/
You can just go down the list of what govt does, starting with the biggest impact, evaluating each one. I don't see how process that has a selection effect.
Yeah this sounds like: “we can heap 1 million non controversial dogcatcher-like decisions together and compare them to the one decision to keep
~$2.5 trillion annual wealth transfer payments to boomers therefore good choices are popular” and that doesn’t seem correct
How does that apply in this case?
Policies that we talk about are some combo of:
* sound good
* actually good
Picture those as the two axis in the image linked here:
https://brilliant-staff-media.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/tiffany-wang/1Mvt8RPtlU.png
The space of policies is vast and:
Polices that are low on both, no one considers or talks about them
Policies that are high on both are super obvious so we don't talk about them
I think another big factor is that it's rare for government departments to build up so much rot they collapse. Instead, they just get more funding or do a worse job. In the private sector, it's common for firms to fail to adjust to new situations and lose market share or even go under. In nature, it's common for species that fail to adapt to shrink in population or even go extinct. But the Department of Education or Department of Defense have no competitors who could take their lunch if they are inadequate. Sometimes a government department's funding is reduced, but rarely is their authority to credential or regulate reduced
It used to be the case that sufficiently dysfunctional governments would lose wars and have their territory seized, but that has become much less common more recently.
Ukraine is the first real reversal
And when someone does come in and dismantle the Department of Education the orange line dc libertarians all line up to defend their fellow DC social circle from market forces.
Government cannot be inefficient, just as the positive experiences of life cannot be described, as you note in a recent post. This is because government is not a thing in the way you all reference it.
Yes, there is an organized crime racket manipulating circumstances that involve segments of society. That is not government. That is a mob.
Government, more properly called governance, happens in real time and is negotiated by those immediately affected. Why Caplan’s theory (and everyone else’s) don’t match reality is because you are referencing two entirely separate things as if they were one.
If you seek answers, I recommend you cease founding your model on the world as it is, as if that is in any way indicative of the realm of possibility.
Would not a better option be for the USA to pay poorer countries to police areas? In some places, a billion dollars might buy you a significant number of policemen or coastguard.
One problem with certain government solutions is that they do not scale. So that they are 'big and bad' are not independent features -- they are bad because they got so big. A small part of why this happens is that human beings are very much interested in 'making sure that things are fair' and perhaps even more interested in 'going after things that are unfair'. You end up with a huge amount of expense to try to keep people from profiting from gaming the system. Which they do anyway. But what also selects for the sort of people who delight in making choices for other people and forcing them to abide by those choices.
I was at a public economics lecture where we were discussing Samuel Altmann's investigation of the NGO 'Feeding America'. You can read the paper titled "Choice, Welfare, and Market Design: An Empirical Investigation of Feeding America’s Choice System" here: https://www.parisschoolofeconomics.eu/en/publications-hal/choice-welfare-and-market-design-an-empirical-investigation-of-feeding-americas-choice-system/ (It is a neat paper, do read especially if you are not in the USA and tempted to think that this must therefore not be for you.)
I was struck by how many people hated the investigation, because the ability to dictate who gets what food when, and where, and what is fair was something they didn't want to relinquish. Letting the food banks choose what they wanted in an artificial market was unacceptable, not because the results were bad but because the results were chosen. A system where everybody was better off that they were before was hated because some groups of people benefited more than others did.
>A system where everybody was better off that they were before was hated because some groups of people benefited more than others did.
Well, this is the essence of the left's hatred of capitalism in general. It makes everybody better off, but some much more than others. Universal poverty is more fair, thus more appealing to these sorts.
Exactly. I suppose it was naive of me to expect more of a group of mostly economists.
The main problem here is that "good" is itself a subjective measurement resting on one's policy preferences.
I think the anti-correlation between what sounds good vs what is good is driven by the fact that political salience requires disagreement, and that policy makers have two types of incentives: an incentive to do things that sound good, and also an incentive to do things that are good.
Consider the 4 possible policy idea categories:
1. Is good + sounds good: Nobody disagrees, no reason to fight, is not politically relevant.
2. Is bad + sounds bad: Nobody disagrees, no reason to fight, is not politically relevant.
3. Is bad + sounds good: There is a reason to fight! policy makers who are reacting to the incentive to govern well will fight against policy makers who are reacting to incentives to sound good.
4. Is good + sounds bad: There is a reason to fight! policy makers who are reacting to the incentive to govern well will fight against policy makers who are reacting to incentives to sound good.
One might object that this only explains the is good/sounds good anti-correlation between *politically salient* policy questions, but I think that is a feature rather than a bug. After all, it probably is good that regular people can quit their job whenever they like, and that murder is illegal, etc. These are so uncontroversial that we don't even register them as policy choices.
I also think this is why populism is generally associated with bad governance, and why activists are so often wrong. It might also have implications for whether or not making people angry is a good political strategy (increases political engagement, makes people pay attention).
Heisenberg Uncertainty strongly prohibits brain emulation, as well as any useful form of brain preservation. The chances are not ">10%". They are zero percent.
Source?
Simple reasoning. The brain is in constant motion. To unfreeze it, you would need to return every particle to its prior position and velocity. To emulate it, you would need to capture a snapshot of every particle's position and velocity. Heisenberg Uncertainty tells us this cannot be done.
>The brain is in constant motion. To unfreeze it, you would need to return every particle to its prior position and velocity. To emulate it, you would need to capture a snapshot of every particle's position and velocity.
Sure, but we don't actually want a perfect emulation of the brain the physical object, we want to instantiate a copy of a mind which that brain encoded. We currently have no idea what level of abstraction is sufficient for that (if any), but it seems plausible that getting everything exactly right down to the quantum level isn't necessary.
> we don't acywant a perfect emulation of the brain the physical object
Of course you do, what else could you possibly want? Dualism isn't true. The mind IS the brain. The brain is not a computer that executes the mind like a CPU running a program. They are one and the same. The quantum problem is real, and insurmountable.
>The brain is not a computer that executes the mind like a CPU running a program.
Why not?
A program is data supplied to the CPU, which is solid-state. The two are separable. A mind cannot be supplied to a brain to run because they are not separable. The brain physically embodies the mind and is not solid-state (it undergoes durable changes as it works).
It's really, really important to learn how computers work at a low level of this topic is of interest to you. The non-validity of the brain-as-CPU analogy will become intensely obvious if you do so.
It is actually shocking that someone with my views tries to understand other peoples views?
School is not for students. It is for parents. It is subsidised child care. Parents can then get on with more productive things. It is a wealth transfer. The childless pay through taxation, and those with children benefit. Many have children, so it's a vote winner.
Childcare could be much more cheaply organized though, if the "education" ruse is dropped. Of course, it's one of those "good, but sounds bad" ideas.
Isn't the lesson of immigration that if you allow more immigration than what the electorate finds palatable, then you summon a party/movement that is anti-market even from the right?
“Medicine is on average quite ineffective at improving health.”
Do you mean at the margin? Are vaccines medicine?
“And if scholars are able to see which policies are inefficient, why can’t they communicate what they know to voters?”
I can’t answer the rest of your questions, but I can address this one.
Most scholars and most of the communications media are biased to the left, which means they are biased towards the policies advocated by leftists, most of which are inefficient as economists understand that term.
Leftist scholars and the leftist media have every incentive not to communicate which policies are inefficient to voters.
One of the many reasons that leftist policies are inefficient is because they are explicitly designed to be about more government intervention - the oft-stated purpose for why leftists should be elected to hold political power.
It’s really not more complicated than that.
For some of these I think the hesitation to adopt market-based solutions is a matter of control. If the gov't controls something, then as a citizen I imagine I could have some say in its future direction. But once it's sold to the highest bidder then I have no say.
Take your gov't lands example. It would certainly be more efficient if the United States were to, say, auction off its national parks. But what would this mean for me, someone who enjoys visiting national parks? I can absolutely imagine Mark Zuckerberg buying Yosemite and turning it into a private residence.
National parks make up a small percentage of government-owned land, representing approximately 3.7% to 11.3% of federal land, depending on the source and how "national parks" are defined (e.g., including only areas designated as "national parks" or the broader "national park system"). For example, the National Park System manages about 84 million acres, which is about 3.7% of the nation's total land.
Playing devil's advocate for a moment: The national parks constitute the biggest opportunities for windfall revenue and ongoing opex savings. Surely they would be at the top of the list for improving gov't economic efficiency re: land use.
The point I'm trying to make is there is more to these things than simple economic efficiency. It doesn't do much good to say "gov't sux, people are dumb" when the real problem is you've looked at things in a too-simple way.
"Why exactly are voters typically so very wrong about which policies are good? In fact, the correlation between what is good and what sounds good to voters may actually be negative!"
Solution: Unpopular democracy! The people vote, and the government does the opposite of what they want.
More seriously: The natural response to this is to say, Well, what we need then is obviously EXPERTS! We'll turn the decisions over to big government agencies that hire people from our best universities. Socialism! Or, if they turn out to be incompetent at running businesses by Hegelian dialectic, we'll delegate some responsibility to business leaders: Fascism!
If voters are so wrong, why aren't socialism and fascism better? How can democracy and its opposite both be the worst?
On balance, which option would you take:
a) Remove all barriers listed under 'too little', greatly increase the expenditures (so not including government lands and licensing), under 'too much'
b) Remove some barriers listed under 'too little', remove some expenditure under 'too much'