Category: Political Science
Matt Yglesias on neoliberalism and economic growth
And it’s worth asking: Is it true that since 1974, policy debate in the United States has been dominated by a “growth-at-all-costs” brand of “free-market fundamentalism”?
I don’t think that actually is true. Technically, the biggest pieces of environmental legislation passed just outside that window — the Clean Air Act in 1970, the Clean Water Act in 1972, and the Endangered Species Act in 1973. But it’s pretty clear that environmental regulation is a lot stricter in 2024 than it was in 1974. The Americans With Disabilities Act was passed in 1990. Land use regulation — which was explicitly called “growth control” when it was new — has grown dramatically stricter since the seventies.
The idea that for the last 50 years we’ve been on a manic quest for growth is confused. In reality, we’ve seen during that time period increasing levels of political influence wielded by people (mainly environmentalists and NIMBYs) who are skeptical of economic growth. It’s true, as skeptics of growth sometimes note, that internal policy disputes in the 1950s and 60s rarely featured pushback on the grounds of the necessity of focusing on economic growth. But that’s not because anti-growth sentiment was stronger in the past — it’s because back then there was almost no one in a position of power who was arguing for explicitly anti-growth policies. Degrowthers have obviously not dominated American politics since the 1970s — we have had economic growth — but growth has been slower because anti-growth ideas have gotten some real purchase over the last 50 years. The Hewlett thesis statement about this is backwards.
Here is the full post, gated but worth paying for.
My excellent Conversation with Brian Winter
Here is the video, audio, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
It’s not just the churrasco that made him fall in love with Brazil. Brian Winter has been studying and writing about Latin America for over 20 years. He’s been tracking the struggles and triumphs of the region as it’s dealt with decades of coups, violence, and shifting economics. His work offers a nuanced perspective on Latin America’s persistent challenges and remarkable resilience.
Together Brian and Tyler discuss the politics and economics of nearly every country from the equator down. They cover the future of migration into Brazil, what it’s doing right in agriculture, the cultural shift in race politics, crime in Rio and São Paulo, the effectiveness and future consequences of Bukele’s police state in El Salvador, the economic growth of Colombia despite continued violence, the prevalence of startups and psychoanalysis in Argentina, Uruguay’s reduction in poverty levels, the beautiful ugliness of Sao Paulo, where Brian will explore next, and more.
And here is one excerpt;
COWEN: What’s the economic geography of Brazil going to look like? All the wealth near Mato Grosso and the north just very, very poor? Or the north empties out? How’s that going to work? There used to be some modest degree of balance.
WINTER: That’s true. Most of the population in Brazil and the economic center, for sure, was in the southeast. That means, really, São Paulo state, which is about a quarter of Brazil’s population but roughly a third of its GDP. Rio as well, and the state of Minas Gerais, which has a name that tells its history. That means “general mines” in Portuguese. That’s the area where a lot of the gold came out of in the 18th and 19th centuries. That’s gone now, so it’s not as much of an economic pull.
You’re right, Tyler, though, that a lot of the real boom right now, the action, is in places like Mato Grosso, which is in the region of Brazil called the Central West. That’s soy country. I’m from Texas, and Mato Grosso is virtually indistinguishable from Texas these days. It’s hot. It’s flat. The crop, like I said, is soy. There’s cattle ranching as well.
Even the music — Brazil, as others have noted, has gone from being the country of bossa nova and the samba in the 1970s to being the country of sertanejo today. Sertanejo is a Brazilian cousin of country music with accordions, but it’s sung by people — men mostly — in jeans, big belt buckles, and cowboy hats. They’re importing that — not only that economic model but that lifestyle as well.
COWEN: What is the great Brazilian music of today? MPB is dead, right? So, what should someone listen to?
Recommended, interesting throughout.
The French left is now winning
This is a big surprise to many people, as in the first round the right was doing much better in terms of votes and seats. We’ll learn more soon, but in the meantime I am reminded of one of the paradoxes in the theory of expressive voting. You might want to send a protest vote, but you don’t want too many other people sending the same protest vote. For instance, some people voting for Ralph Nader didn’t really want him to win. And the same may be true for the French right. So the very show of force from the right, in the first round, may have limited their subsequent numbers. More generally, you could say that an equilibrium, when there is a lot of expressive voting, is super-sensitive to expectations about the voting behavior of others. Especially when the receives of the expressive votes come close to holding real power.
Do you know the apocryphal story of the economics department that wanted to decide, unanimously, to vote 18-3 on the tenure case of a junior professor? That was not allowed, and so everyone voted in favor.
I wonder what this all means for a possible Democratic mini-primary!?
What should I ask Christopher Kirchhoff?
I will be doing a Conversation with him. In case you do not know, Christopher self-describes as:
Christopher Kirchhoff is an expert in emerging technology who founded the Pentagon’s Silicon Valley office and has led teams for the President, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and CEO of Google. He recently worked special projects at Anthropic. Previously, Dr. Kirchhoff helped design and scale $1 billion in philanthropic programs at Schmidt Futures. He also founded and led the Pentagon’s Silicon Valley Office, Defense Innovation Unit X, which piloted flying cars and microsatellites in military missions and created a new acquisition pathway for start-ups now responsible for $70 billion dollars of technology acquisition. During the Obama Administration, he was Director for Strategic Planning at the National Security Council and the senior civilian advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
I very much enjoyed his new book Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley are Transforming the Future of War, co-authored with Raj M. Shah. Here is his home page. The book just received a very strong review from the FT.
So what should I ask Christopher?
PR for the UK?
I say no, we have enough European governments with proportional representation already. Should not someone allow for the possibility of more decisive action?
Estimates are suggesting that Labour won two-thirds of the seats with one-third of the vote, more or less. So that induces the usual cries of misrepresentation of the electorate (it also reminds us that virtually all electoral systems are not “democratic” in the naive sense of that term). But Britain has many serious problems, and I would rather see one party given a decisive mandate to handle them. And I write that as someone who is not in general rooting for the Labour Party — virtually all of my favorite British politicians are Tories, even if I do not like what that party has become as a whole.
Contrast the British with the recent French election. The distribution of votes was not altogether dissimilar, but the Britsh have “a landslide,” while the French have a possibly ungovernable situation.
I do love checks and balances, but the UK needs to defeat NIMBY and fix the NHS. Now it is Labour’s turn to try. Here is a broad outline of Labour’s 100-day plan. Not exactly what I would choose (see Wooldridge at Bloomberg), but if they get two or three big things right the regime still could be a success.
Note that the margins for the Labour victorious seats are extremely low, which means there is an ongoing constraint on the exercise of government power. I am not so worried about an “elected dictatorship.” If anything, it may not be decisive enough.
Another consideration is that PR for the UK could end up meaning the rise of an Islamic party of some kind, of course with minority status. I suspect that would worsen rather than improve democratic discourse in Britain, and perhaps hinder immigrant assimilation as well. I don’t want that to happen, and so it is another reason why the UK should not switch to a PR system.
What should I ask Nate Silver?
Yes, I will be doing another Conversation with Nate, based in part on his new and forthcoming book On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything (I have just started it, but so far it is very good, dealing with issues of poker and also risk-taking more generally).
Here is my previous Conversation with Nate Silver. And please note I am not looking to ask him about the election. So what should I ask?
With immigration, perceptions matter more than reality
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column. Rather than work through the argument, which requires you to read the whole column, I’ll just reproduce the most trollish part:
When I am in a foreign city and in search of interesting food, I have a trick: In which neighborhood, I ask the locals, am I most likely to get murdered? In Stockholm, Rinkeby was the answer, even though many of the people I asked had never been.
So I went to Rinkeby, which is mostly non-White and most notably Somalian. There were Yemeni, Ethiopian, Persian and other restaurants. (I had a good chicken mandi at one called Maida.) I felt safe the entire time, and saw plenty of solo women, including some blonde Swedes, walking leisurely along the main street, as well as many women with head coverings. I saw a Western Union office and a driving school, signs that people have some funds to send away or invest in a car.
I hope to write a longer post on immigration for you all soon.
13.9 percent less democracy?
Estonian edition:
After the Citizenship Act was enacted in 1992, 90% of ethnic-Estonians automatically became citizens while only 8-10% of non-Estonians gained citizenship. This is due to a law that granted citizenship to those who were living in Estonia before 1940, which was the year of Soviet annexation. [3] Because of the law, those that moved or were born in Estonia after 1940 during Soviet times had to apply for citizenship. New numbers show that ‘as of April 2012, 93,774 persons (6.9% of the population) remain stateless, while approximately 95,115 (7% of the population) have chosen Russian citizenship as an alternative to statelessness’. [4] Because many Russian-speakers have not been able to gain citizenship, this combined 13.9% of the population does not have the right to participate in Estonian democracy.
Here is more detail. I believe in 1992, during the first election, about forty percent of the resident, age-relevant population was not eligible to vote. I am not sure what the percentages are right now, but I do know the same basic system continues.
I do not per se object to these policies (fear the Russian bear), while noting I do not have enough information to assess all the trade-offs involved. Nonetheless it is interesting how much attention the Hungarian and Polish democratic “deviations” receive, relative to this one. An EU country in fully good standing around the world, on the basis of ethnicity, denies a significant portion of its longstanding residents the right to vote.
Two further points. First, you have to worry about this issue, as a Russian ethnic, unless your ancestors arrived before 1940. So the worry here is not just about recent arrivals, but it is quite possible that your grandparents were born in Estonia, maybe even great-grandparents. Second, ethnic Russians do have a path to normal Estonian citizenship, but it is difficult, especially the language requirement, which I am told is very tough.
I heard Russian a great deal walking through the streets of Tallinn, and most of all at the ballet. I have seen estimates that one-quarter of the Estonian population is ethnic Russian, and in the major city it is surely more than that.
Garett Jones, telephone!
Europe sentences to ponder
Back then, Europeans embodied environmental advocacy, self-actualization, self-expression and other values described by the University of Michigan political scientist Ronald Inglehart as “post-materialist.” Europeans actually used that term. They were proud of it. Today, European politics — and French politics above all — is crudely materialistic. The most explosive issues of the past few elections have been purchasing power, the price of diesel, the age of retirement and the shortage of housing (often taken by migrants awaiting asylum hearings). Europe’s preoccupations are closer to the 18th-century world of bread riots than to the 20th-century one of Save the Whales.
Alice Evans on Nordic gender egalitarianism
So what’s the connection between hierarchy and patriarchy? It is my contention that if everyone is equal, it is much more acceptable for women to get to the top. No one is special. ‘Leaders’ are not due unique perks, privileges or power. Queuing by the roadside, they board the bus like commoners. Since everyone is respected, it is much more permissible for (low status) women to become politicians, clerics and bosses. What’s there to envy? The status gap is meagre. The rest of society acts as a reverse dominance coalition – keeping her power, esteem and ego in check.
By contrast, in hierarchical institutions, where status gaps loom large, it would be enormously unsettling for a (low status) woman to command prestige. If men must always bow and let her first speak first, it may grate their egos. Even for men who are perfectly supportive of female employment or gender equality in abstract, it might still be uncomfortable to literally kow-tow. The larger the hierarchy, the more distressing it may be to see a woman soar…
My theory helps explain why Scandinavian countries were quick to elect female leaders and share childcare. It also explains why management and politics remain so male-dominated in hierarchical Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Russia and Nigeria.
Here is the full post, and here is Alice’s more recent post on what paintings can tell us about British patriarchy.
Economic Freedom, Even More Important Than You Think!
Economic freedom, as measured by say the Fraser Institute’s EF Index correlates highly with GDP per capita. Alvarez, Geloso and Scheck show that once you take into account the fact that dictators lie, the correlation is even higher!
SSRN: The literature connecting economic freedom indexes to income levels and growth generally points in the direction of a positive association. In this paper, we argue that this finding is a highly conservative as the data is heavily biased against finding any effects. The bias emerges as a result of the tendency of dictatorial regimes to overstate their GDP level. Dictatorships also tend to have lower scores of economic freedom. This downwardly biases any estimations of the relation between income and economic freedom. In this paper, we use recent corrections to GDP numbers — based on nighttime light intensity — to estimate the bias. We find that the true effects of economic freedom at its component on income levels are between 1.1 and 1.33 times greater than commonly estimated. For economic growth, the bias is far smaller and only appears to be relevant for some individual components such as size of government and property rights.
Thomas Schelling meets LLMs?
Drawing on political science and international relations literature about escalation dynamics, we design a novel wargame simulation and scoring framework to assess the escalation risks of actions taken by these agents in different scenarios. Contrary to prior studies, our research provides both qualitative and quantitative insights and focuses on large language models (LLMs). We find that all five studied off-the-shelf LLMs show forms of escalation and difficult-to-predict escalation patterns. We observe that models tend to develop arms-race dynamics, leading to greater conflict, and in rare cases, even to the deployment of nuclear weapons. Qualitatively, we also collect the models’ reported reasonings for chosen actions and observe worrying justifications based on deterrence and first-strike tactics.
That is from a new paper by Juan-Pablo Rivera, et.al., via the excellent Ethan Mollick. Do note that these recommended tactics are for the U.S., so perhaps the LLMs simply are telling us that America should be more hawkish.
Accelerating India’s Development
What will India look like in 2047? Combining projections of economic growth with estimates of the elasticity of outcomes with respect to growth, Karthik Muralidharan in Accelerating India’s Development reports:
Even with a strong GDP per capita growth rate of 6 per cent, projections for 2047 paint a sobering picture if we maintain our current course. While India’s infant mortality is projected to halve from 27 per 1000 births to 13 in 2047, it will still be well above China’s current rate of 8. Child stunting will only decrease from 35.5 to 25 per cent, which is only a 10.5 percentage point or 30 per cent reduction in nearly 25 years. In rural India, 16 per cent of children in Class 5 will still not be able to read at a Class 2 level, and 55 per cent of them will still not be able to do division at the Class 3 level.
Bear in mind that this is assuming an optimistic 6% growth rate in GDP per capita. Even more telling is that if growth increased to 8%, infant mortality would only fall to 10 per 1000 (instead of 13). Growth is great. It’s the single most important factor but it’s not everything. If India can double the elasticity of infant mortality with respect to growth, for example, then at the same 6% growth rate infant mortality would fall to just 6 per 1000 by 2047–that’s millions of lives saved. The big argument of Muralidharan’s Accelerating India’s Development is that India can get more development from the same level of growth by increasing the total factor productivity of the state.
There are many “big think” books on growth–Landes’ Wealth and Poverty of Nations, Acemoglu and Robinson’s The Narrow Corridor, Koyama and Rubin’s How the World Became Rich–but these books are primarily historical and descriptive. The big think books don’t tell you how to develop. Create institutions to strike “a delicate and precarious balance between state and society” isn’t much of a guide to development. Accelerating India’s Development is different.
“Accelerating” opens with two excellent chapters on the political economy of politicians and bureaucrats, outlining the constraints any reforms must navigate. It concludes with two chapters on the future, including ideas like ranked choice voting, representing its aspirations. It’s in-between the constraints and the aspirations, however, that Accelerating India’s Development is unique. I know of no other book that offers such a detailed, analytical, and comprehensive examination and evaluation of a country’s institutions and processes.
Muralidharan’s recommendations are often based on his own twenty years of research, especially in education, health and welfare, and when not based on his own research Muralidharan has read everyone and everything. Yet, he offers not a laundry list but a well-thought out, analytic, set of recommendations that are grounded on political and economic realities.
To give just one example, India’s bureaucracy is far over-paid relative to India’s GDP per capita or wages in the private sector. With wages too high, the bureaucracy is too small–a reflection of the concentrated benefits (wages to government workers), diffuse costs (delivering services to citizens) problem. Lowering wages for government workers is a non-starter but Muralidharan argues persuasively that it is possible to hire new workers from local communities at prevailing wages on renewable contracts. The Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), for example, is India’s main program for delivering early childhood education. There are 1.35 million anganwadi centers (AWCs) across India and typically a single anganwadi worker is responsible for both nutrition and pre-school education but they spend most of their time on paperwork!
A simple, scalable way to improve early childhood education is to add a second worker to AWCs to focus on preschool education….In a recent study, my co-authors and I found that adding an extra, locally hired, early-childhood care and education facilitators to anganwadis in Tamil Nadu doubled daily preschool instructional time…we found large gains in students’ maths, language and executive function skills. We also found a significant reduction in child stunting and malnutrition…We estimate the social return on this investment was around thirteen times the cost….the ECCE facilitators typically had only a Class 10 or Class 12 qualification and received only one week of training, and were still highly effective.
The example illustrates Muralidharan’s methods. First, the recommendation is based on a large, credible, multi-year study run in India with the cooperation of the government of Tamil Nadu. Second, the study is chosen for the book because it fits Muralidharan’s larger analysis of India’s problems, India has too few government workers which leads to high potential returns, yet the workers are paid too much so these returns are fiscally unachievable. But hiring more workers on the margin, at India’s-prevailing wages, is feasible. India has lots of modestly-educated workers so the program can scale–this is not a study about adding AI-driven computers to Delhi schools under the management of IIT trained educators, a program which would be subject to the heroes aren’t replicable problem. The program is also politically feasible because it leaves rents in place and by hiring lots of workers, even at low wages, it generates its own political support. Finally, note that India’s ICDS is the largest early childhood development program in the world so improving it has the potential to make millions of lives better. Which is why I have called Muralidharan the most important economist in the world.
One of the reasons state capacity in India is so low is premature load bearing. Imagine if the 19th-century U.S. government had attempted to handle everything today’s U.S. government does—this is the situation in India. When State Capacity/Tasks < 1, what should be done? In premature imitation, Rajagopalan and I advocate for reducing Tasks–an idea best represented by Ed Glaeser’s quip that “A country that cannot provide clean water for its citizens should not be in the business of regulating film dialogue.” Accelerating India’s Development focuses on increasing State Capacity but without being anti-market. In fact, Muralidharan proposes making the state more effective by leveraging markets more extensively.
Indian policy should place a very high priority on expanding the supply of high-quality service providers, regardless of whether they are in the public or private sector.
Hence, Muraldiharan wants to build on India’s remarkably vibrant private schools and private health care with ideas like vouchers and independent ratings. Free to choose but free to choose in an information-rich environment. My own inclinations would be to push markets and also infrastructure more–we still need to get to that 6% growth! But I have few quibbles with what is in the book.
Accelerating India’s Development is an exceptionally rich and insightful book. Its comprehensive analysis and innovative recommendations make it an invaluable resource. I will undoubtedly reference it in future discussions and writings. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding and improving life in the world’s largest democracy.
Claims about Africa and its politics
From Ken Opalo:
A common misperception economic policies in African states tend to be statist, far-Left, or anti-market. This is not supported by the data (see examples of Kenya, Nigeria, Cote d’Ivoire, and South Africa below). In actual fact, most governments in the region tend to be eager adopters of allegedly apolitical “best practices” that are essentially center-right economic orthodoxy. If you add to this their social policies, the modal African government is essentially Center-right. What these countries often fail on is implementation (partially because said policies are seldom useful in context and/or due to weak state capacity).
And this:
Third, the lack of governing experience and decades of state repression have led to a perversive anti-statist discourse and politics on the African Left. Among Leftist intellectuals, the colonial origins of the African state has been used as a reason to perpetually delegitimize state-building (many of the same intellectuals suffered state repression). In this rendering, the African state can never overcome the original sin of colonial origin; and should be abolished and replaced with a Pan-African state (which presumably would be better at deploying coercion and providing public goods and services). At the same time, many economically-ascendant Africans who are broadly sympathetic to Leftist politics harbor anti-statist sentiments when it comes to the economy and tend to overstate the statist origins of African economic underdevelopment — this partially reflects the ideological hold of economic orthodoxy in the region. The reality, of course, is that African countries are terribly under-governed. Data on security and law enforcement, registration of births and deaths, education attainment, taxation, expenditure absorption, economic regulation, etc. all point to the fact that the contemporary African state is too small and too weak to meet the challenges of modern economics and politics.
Here is much more. I am not sure how much the left- vs. right-wing framing applies to Africa at all — sometimes I think the better category is “prioritizes things going well, or not,” as part of the author’s remarks would seem to indicate.
What is Newsworthy? Theory and Evidence
We study newsworthiness in theory and practice. We focus on situations in which a news outlet observes the realization of a state of the world and must decide whether to report the realization to a consumer who pays an opportunity cost to consume the report. The consumer-optimal reporting probability is monotone in a proper scoring rule, a statistical measure of the amount of “news” in the realization relative to the consumer’s prior. We show that a particular scoring rule drawn from the statistics literature parsimoniously captures key patterns in reporting probabilities across several domains of US television news. We argue that the scoring rule can serve as a useful control variable in settings where a researcher wishes to test for bias in news reporting. Controlling for the score greatly lessens the appearance of bias in our applications.
That is a new paper from Luis Armona, Matthew Gentzkow, Emir Kamenica, and Jesse M. Shapiro. I take this to mean the actual bias is more toward surprising news than negative news per se? Via Paul Novosad.