Politics

Dan Wang’s 2020 letter on China

Joy BuchananLeave a comment

Dan Wang is a writer who currently lives in Beijing. He’s released another long letter about what is going on in China. I’ll share the part that caught my attention.

Waiting politely in line is a pretty strong norm in America. I had heard from several sources that Chinese norms for waiting in an orderly line were weak. Here’s an update on that:

And for years, Xi has emphasized following clear rules of written procedure, under the rubric of “law-based governance.”  Since then, the state has improved regulatory systems, for example in setting clear standards for license approvals and in securities and antitrust regulation. The state has removed some of the arbitrary aspects of governance, thus bringing serious enforcement actions following the passage of relatively clear regulations. That has improved facts on the ground. Companies and lawyers tell me that a decade-long effort by the State Council to ease doing business has yielded real results. Obtaining business licenses no longer requires a relentless pace of wining and dining, and has instead become close to a matter of routine. I haven’t been able to verify this fact for myself, but one of my friends told me that the office of the National Development and Reform Commission used to be ringed by some of the fanciest restaurants in Beijing, offering mostly private rooms; many of these restaurants have now closed, following the professionalization of business approvals.

The lived experience of being in Beijing has improved in parallel. I remember what a nightmare it was to buy a high-speed rail ticket for the first time years ago, which involved lots of yelling and multiple people cutting in line. Today, I purchase one on my phone, with no need to obtain a paper ticket, and the lines to board are more or less orderly.

China is changing.

Incidentally, I tried to start a company when I was about 19 in New Jersey. Applying for a tax ID number for my sole proprietorship was quick and easy. All I had to do was fill out a form and pay a small fixed fee to some government office.

One Acceptable Truth or a Million Fantasies

mdmakowsky1 Comment

Humans are soft, slow, and (to the best of my knowledge) make for fairly nutritious meals. Brains for tool-making, and the opposable thumbs for using them, are significant evolutionary adaptations, but it is our capacity to act collectively that placed us at the top of the food chain.

By the end of a standard undergraduate economics curriculum, one couldn’t be blamed for coming to the conclusion that the failures of collective action are the greatest obstacle to mankind – Oh what we could have accomplished if only we had ever found a way to just cooperate. Alas, all those externalities, Prisoners’ Dilemmas, free riders, easy riders, market failures, government failures, they just stopped us at every turn…

I’m not doubting the pedagogical value of teaching any of these obstacles, I teach them myself, but I believe we spend insufficient time reminding students that humans have been solving collective action problems with great success for thousands of years. Every national government, book club, homeowners association, and sorority has managed to produce public goods. So has every military coup and angry mob (if only sometimes for fleeting moments), but collective action is collective action, regardless of how we may feel about the outcome.

More often than not the most interesting question to me isn’t can a collective action problem be solved, but rather i) how has it already been solved and ii) how is that solution going to be threatened or hijacked? When I look to the current political landscape and the only mildly-exaggerated state of political and social polarization, I see not just rival ideologies, but alternative strategies for engendering and ensuring cooperation. On the left, I observe greater recent emphasis on purity – there is a narrow band of acceptable truth and any deviation from that, be it however accidental or benign in intent, can lead to significant punishments, including purges colloquially referred to as cancellations. On the right, I see required public professing of incorrect, often seemingly absurd, beliefs. I might talk about purity tests and purges on the left another times. What I’m interested in at the moment are the public untruths of current right wing identities (broadly conceived) and how they fit into the sacrifice and stigma theory, or club theory, of religion.**

I’ve written a lot about sacrifice and stigma theory. It has become the hammer than has left me forever searching for nails. Originally put forth by Laurence Iannaccone in 1992, it is nothing short of brilliant to my mind. A tool for solving collective problems so profound that when it shows up we barely notice it, and where it shows up tends to be the most powerful clubs shaping our societies: the religious, martial, and extremist political groups that bend the arc of history.

Groups produce what we call “club goods” i.e. public goods only accessible to members of the group. What Iannaccone demonstrated was that a group could actually increase their production of club goods by burdening its members with completely unproductive costs. Why do religious groups require clothing, behavior, or language that could stigmatize their members in broader society? Why are members required to sacrifice their resources at the literal or figurative altar of the group? Because if you impair members’ private productivity, or if the fruits of that private production are skimmed away, they will invest more of their resources into the group. If all group members face these same altered incentives, guess what, you’ve solved the collective action problem!

When I see educated women and men declaring the earth is 5,000 years old, that evolution isn’t real, that climate change is a hoax, or that Donald Trump is a brilliant human being, what I see is public profession of beliefs that might limit social or even occupational opportunities and, in turn, further commit them to a specific subset of affiliations. In the constellation of beliefs that might end up as political shibboleths, of course, there stand to be some more costly than others. In fact, there might even be beliefs that impose negative externalities on others, such antipathy towards vaccines or mask-wearing during a pandemic. Excessive burden might hurt the group, of course – remember, club membership must to be a net gain to persist. In a polarized society, however, vitriol created in rival factions by the externality-generating belief could actually intensify the commitment of group members. The liberals hate real-Americans like me so much now, they’d never accept me as anything but a dumb redneck, so the rational thing to do is double down on my commitment to the only group that will have me. Beliefs that reduce private productivity, increase group productivity, and create long-run antipathy in rival groups can serve to create something incredibly valuable to the group: a captured membership. If there is one thing that is evolutionarily hard-wired into human beings it is the knowledge that isolation is death. A member so stigmatized by past public behavior that rival groups would never accept them stands to be very committed to the group going forward.

The vulnerability of sacrifice and stigma born of public adherence to false beliefs, however, is the capacity of leaders to incept preferred false beliefs into the dogma. This is one way that minority groups can become scapegoated, the carbon costs of fossil fuels denied, quack remedies pedaled, or the reliability of electoral institutions undermined. Religious texts exist (mostly) unedited for long periods of time for a very important reason: core rules of behavior, methods of tithing, and sets of beliefs must be inoculated against opportunistic actors who would hijack the club goods they produce.

Sacrifice and stigma through club-specific false beliefs is a dangerous strategy for political parties for the simple reason that without the constraints of fact or scripture, leaders will feel the pull of their own preferences. Far more dangerous however, is the megalomaniacal conman that any political party institutionally designed to demand cognitive dissonance of its members will eventually attract. Political parties need to solve collective action problems, yes, but they also need immune systems. One might point to social norms, both within and outside the group, as key means of protection. Recent years, however, would seem to suggest that norms are not sufficiently robust in the long run. The US court system has held up well, and has in many ways served as the nations constitutional immune system. Perhaps the major political parties should consider updating and reinforcing their own constitutions, and put in place mechanisms to protect themselves from the next inevitable invasion.

American political parties need to update and upgrade their immune systems.

Inspiring research:

Iannaccone, Laurence R. “Sacrifice and stigma: Reducing free-riding in cults, communes, and other collectives.” Journal of political economy 100.2 (1992): 271-291.

Aimone, Jason A., Laurence R. Iannaccone, Michael D. Makowsky, and Jared Rubin. “Endogenous group formation via unproductive costs.” Review of Economic Studies 80, no. 4 (2013): 1215-1236.

**Note: this is not to suggest that left-wing identity affiliations don’t utilize sacrifice and stigma mechanisms. There is no shortage of what I suspect are completely ineffective, but highly visible, ostensibly pro-environment behaviors that are demanded. But the “headline” mechanisms of herding left-of-center identities under the progressive banner look more like threats of exile than sacrifice and stigma.

Logrolling: An Efficient Institution

Jeremy HorpedahlLeave a comment

Along with the colorful phrase “pork barrel” spending, logrolling is a term used to describe the process of vote trading in elected legislative bodies. The process has long been maligned by political scientists, pundits, and the general public. It’s also come up in the debate about the proposed Budget/COVID Relief Bill.

President Grant tried to stop logrolling. He failed.

What’s bad about logrolling? I think there are two general lines of argument. First, it just seems immoral. Citizens can’t legally trade their votes, and many see any attempt to do so as wrong. You get one vote, and one vote only. For someone to have more votes than others rubs our intuitions the wrong way, similar to the ability for wealthy individuals or corporations to essentially have more votes by influencing politicians through campaign contributions.

More pragmatically, logrolling gets a bad name because it could lead to wasteful spending, particularly the “pork barrel” type that Americans really hate (unless it is coming to their district, of course). If you vote for my bill, I will vote for yours, even though I might not care about your bill. Maybe even I think your bill is kinda bad, but I think my bill is really good, so I am willing to hold my nose and vote for your bill, if it gets me what I want.

Buchanan and Tullock (1962) turned this logic on its head. Logrolling is efficient because it allows members to express their preferences, specifically the intensity of their preferences. Moreover, it allows legislative bodies to get things done that are beneficial for society, even if none of those things would pass in a simple referendum.

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Invasion of the Cooperation Snatchers

mdmakowsky1 Comment

If you can tolerate a moment’s grandiosity, there’s no more important application of game theory than the evolutionary transition from prokaryotic cells to eukaryotic cells. All due deference to every game theorist ever, but the solution to the Prisoner’s Dilemma is literally in our DNA. One day cells were swimming around the primordial soup competing with each other in a zero-sum fight to the death for resources, the next they’re bonding together to form tissues to jointly acquire them. A couple billion years later and you’ve got hyper-specialization to the point of which cellular differentiation remains a bleeding-edge subject of biological research.

But this isn’t a post about the miracle of a body when it’s functioning perfectly. It’s about what happens when a cell goes rogue. When it defects on its neighbors and a cooperative strategy literal eons in the making. It starts gobbling up resources and reproduces at rates that threaten the whole enterprise, growing into a terrible little tumor of defection. The cooperative strategy in question moved passed simplicity countless generations ago: tissues employing Tit-for-Tat disaggregated back into the soup the first evolutionary round through. No, the strategy now is so fine-tuned it hasn’t had to deal with a major defector in eons of its collective evolutionary memory. If it is to succeed, it will have to selectively cut out those defecting cells without abandoning its core strategy, and do it fast, before it’s too late.

Which naturally brings me to the Republican party.

Political parties succeed based on two achievements. 1) They solve the collective action problem and, in doing so, achieve a scale of cooperation and exceed some critical mass threshold sufficient to self-perpetuate through the electoral process. The number of parties that can succeed at once, and the critical mass necessary to get to that point, are determined by the governing political institutions. 2) They maintain their cooperation at a scale sufficient to thwart the emergence of an alternative rival party.

Staying a dominant party is much easier than becoming one, but that doesn’t mean continued success is guaranteed. The weakness(es) of a party will depend on how it got there in the first place. The strategies for solving the collective action problem of this scale will be far more complicated than Tit-for-Tat or “Walk Away” and similar solutions distilled to the point of abstraction. They will involve all the solutions employed by cartels, religious groups, military forces, and every other collective dependent on high-levels of persistent cooperation. With that complexity comes weaknesses. Fault lines and backdoors that are typically guarded through a variety of social and legal barriers.

And they must be guarded, because the combination of scale and success will never cease to attract defectors. Those roaming cells, ostracized and cast out, always met with a wary eye, looking for a way in. Just imagine you are that rogue cell and you come across a population trained to always cooperate no matter what so long as it is deemed a member of the group. They seems so naïve! So vulnerable. But that’s how we succeeded! Always cooperate within the group. How big might your greed grow knowing you could defect and defect for all eternity, growing fatter and fatter off this suddenly maladapted globule of political ambition that can’t help but tear itself to shreds while giving you everything you ever wanted? It’s not just about the weakness of the party, but the kinds of agents these prospects are likely to attract.

In the coming weeks I’ll revisit this and ramble more about discuss some of the specific strategies employed by political parties, and the kinds of invasive agents and strategies they should expect. I’ll also speculate on how groups might institutionally respond and better protect themselves from both invading sociopaths, as well as their own hubris.

Inspiring articles:

Aimone, Jason A., et al. “Endogenous group formation via unproductive costs.” Review of Economic Studies 80.4 (2013): 1215-1236.

Aktipis, C. Athena, et al. “Cancer across the tree of life: cooperation and cheating in multicellularity.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 370.1673 (2015): 20140219.

Allocating the vaccines: central planning or the free market?

Jeremy Horpedahl5 Comments

In the short term, there are only a few million doses of the COVID vaccines available, but well over 100 million adults in the US that want to take the vaccine if offered for free to the consumer. There are also billions worldwide that would like the vaccine.

So who should get it first? In practice in the US, the allocation method has already been determined politically: the federal government will allocate vaccines to the states, and states will allocate them to individuals based on a priority list: health workers and the most vulnerable first, then teachers, etc. The NY Times has a tool that shows you your probable place in line.

But essentially the allocation method being used is central planning.

John Cochrane has proposed a “free market” solution: sell the vaccine to the highest bidder. Or at least, sell some doses to the highest bidder.

As an economist, there is always some appeal in thinking about a free market solution. But there is a problem in this case: there are positive externalities from taking the vaccine. It not only benefits me, but it also benefits others. My willingness to pay only reflects the benefit to me, the private benefit. The social benefit is mostly ignored by a simple auction, and in the aggregate for a vaccine most of the benefits are likely to be social benefits. But positive externalities don’t imply we need to use central planning!

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Locals react to new condos

Joy Buchanan1 Comment

My local Facebook community group is a treasure trove of unfiltered NIMBY and YIMBY sentiments. I’m creating a “nimby” tag for blogs I write about them.

This FB post went up last week about some proposed townhouses that would be built on what is currently an ugly empty paved area of land on the side of a highway.

There were 40 “likes” and only 5 angry face reactions. Given some of the vitriol I have seen against building previously, I was surprised at how many people reacted positively. This can’t be treated as a scientific poll, but the fact that so many people bothered to say they approve was interesting to me.

Most of the land in our city is zoned for single-family detached houses, meaning most of it looks more like what people call suburbs.

Here’s what people said in the comments:

“I like the look. I also like Chaise’s term ‘vibrancy’.”

“ I wish they weren’t going to be so tall.” (Note that they are not tall. Most of this town used to be one-story 1-bathroom ranch houses, and there is a lot of nostalgia for those tiny houses.)

“Why are we junking up our downtown with condos.” (That one got 8 likes, and someone replied “because they sell.” Isn’t it astounding that someone would call this “junking”?)

“Almost Anything built in that location is a step in the right direction.” (8 likes)

Some people complained that this is not adding “affordable housing” to our city because these units are expensive. I might post more explicit debates over affordable housing in the future.  

Apparently, currently, there isn’t much opposition to developing an empty lot on the side of the highway with a few expensive units. There has been a WAR for the past year after a proposal to increase the density of housing closer to downtown. Anti-development types are angry that the city council is not doing more to block new building.

The prospective developer for this empty weed lot needs approval from the city council. Our city elections last month became rather contentious. It was, in part, a struggle between people who want to preserve curbs and doors just as they were in 1970 versus newer younger residents who are more pro-development.

Twitter flags versus censorship

Joy Buchanan1 Comment

Throughout this semester, I have asked some students in my data analytics class to think about how data is relevant to current events. Undergraduate Jack Brittle wrote this article about data and election news.

Sometimes public attention moves on quickly after an election is over. Today, on November 15th, voting and messaging is still being debated. It was a month ago on October 14th that Twitter locked up the digital platform of the New York Post, a right-leaning newspaper.

This was an important development in the debate about whether tech companies have the authority to censor posts written by users.

Twitter initially said that linking to the Post stories violated the social-media company’s policies against posting material that contains personal information and is obtained via hacking. As the story broke, Twitter began preventing users from tweeting the stories. Twitter locked the Post’s account, saying it would be unlocked only after it deleted earlier tweets that linked to the stories.” (Wall Street Journal). Twitter suspended a major American newspaper. This move is viewed by some as a direct threat to the freedom of the press. Twitter and other major tech companies came under fire for their ability to manipulate and control media. After major pressure and backlash, Twitter released the account back to the New York Post. “Twitter on Friday unlocked the New York Post’s Twitter account, ending a stalemate between the social-media company and the newspaper stemming from the latter’s publication of stories it said were based on documents obtained from the laptop of Hunter Biden. “We’re baaaaaaack,” the Post’s Twitter account tweeted on a Friday afternoon, just minutes after Twitter said that it was reversing its policies in a way that would allow the Post to be reinstated.” (Wall Street Journal).

It seems that Twitter backed down in that instance. The fundamental question has not been resolved. Should Big Tech censor material on their platforms?

First, there is a school of thought that believes Twitter has the right to control the flow of information on its platforms. Companies like Twitter are not breaking any laws by doing this. Do they not have the right to support and defend certain social causes? By only allowing users to see certain opinions and facts, Twitter can choose to support different policies. It’s not laws but our expectation of media that leads to controversy. Twitter should allow a free flow of information in order to create an open marketplace of ideas.

However, a new difficulty arises because of “fake news”. Now more than ever, media can be manipulated to create certain storylines by nefarious users. According to studies, “fake news” spreads nearly six times faster across digital platforms that real news stories. This leaves Twitter between a rock and a hard place. Do they control information spreading on their site and risk censoring the wrong material, like some consider to be the case of the New York Post article? Or do they take a hands-off approach, allowing all stories to have a place in the arena?

These giant tech firms have unprecedented power. Not only are they gaining massive amounts of data about people and firms, they also have the unique ability to shape their users’ outlook on a variety of ideas and events. These data giants are struggling with how to manage these capabilities and will no doubt continue to update and reform policy.

A example of evolving policies is the treatment of President Trump since November 3rd. Since election day, Donald Trump, has tweeted challenges to official vote counts. Trump has not only claimed voter fraud but also claimed he has won states where vote counts favor Joe Biden. Twitter has since developed a flagging system that adds a note on any tweet that Twitter deems misleading. Instead of censoring the president by locking the entire account, there are flags warning about disinformation. This system seems to be an improvement over previous ways Twitter has handled misleading information. It allows users to see all information but also be warned about potentially questionable information. I expect these policies to continue to evolve as tech companies grapple with the difficult task of managing the flow of information.

When will computers accurately predict elections?

Joy BuchananLeave a comment

Why can computers beat humans at chess but not predict election outcomes with great precision? Experts in 2020 mostly forecasted that Biden would win by a large enough margin to avoid the kind of quibbling and recounts we are now seeing. I don’t write this as a criticism of the high-profile clever Nate Silver, or any other forecaster. I’m thinking through it as a data scientist.

First, consider a successful application of modern data mining. How did AlphaZero “learn” to play chess? It generated millions of hypothetical games and decided to use the strategies that looked successful ex-post. AlphaZero has excellent data and lots of it.

If we think about actual election outcomes, there aren’t enough observations to expect accurate forecasts. If each presidential election is one observation, then there have only been about 50 since the founding hundreds of years ago. No data scientist would want to work with 50 data points.

You can’t say “in the years when ‘defund the police!’ was associated with Democrats, the GOP presidential candidate gained among married women”. There has only ever been one presidential election when that occurred. Judging by what I have been observing of the DNC post-mortem on Twitter in the past week, that might not happen again. See this tweet for example:

I know very little about political analysis. Only from what I know about data science, I would imagine that computers will get better at predicting the outcomes of races for the House of Representatives.

House representatives serve 2-year terms. There are over 400 House elections every 2 years.

Think about this over one decade of American history. There are actually more than 400 representatives in the house, but let’s imagine a “Shelter” of Reps with 400 members for ease of calculation.

In one decade, there are usually two presidential elections. That means we get 2 observations to learn from. In the same decade, there would be 400×5 “Shelter” elections. That yields 2,000 observations, which is considered respectable for the application of data mining methods.

One application of such a forecasting machine would be to determine which slogans are the most likely to lead to success.

Huge Prison Population in the U.S.

Scott BuchananLeave a comment

During some general reading on finance, I ran across the following two information-rich graphics from Hoya Capital on the U.S. prison population. On the first graph, the blue areas show the absolute numbers, and the green line shows the percent incarceration rate. A rate of 0.5% comes to 500 prisoners per 100,000 population.

This graph shows a huge rise in the state and federal prison population between 1980 and 2000. There seems general agreement that much of that increase in the prison population is due to mandatory sentencing laws, which require relatively long sentences. In particular, “three strikes and you’re out” laws may demand a life sentence for three felony convictions, if at least one of them is for a serious violent crime. Another factor was the increased criminalization of drug use (possession), in addition to drug dealing.

The graphic below shows the particular classes of crimes of which inmates of the state and federal prison systems have been convicted. The largest single category is violent crimes, but other types are significant, such as drug and property crimes, and “public order” crimes. Public order crimes include activities such as prostitution, gambling, alcohol, child pornography, and some drug charges. This graphic also includes the large number of people in local jails, most of whom are imprisoned awaiting trial or sentencing.

The total number of people under legal supervision in the U.S., including probation and parole, is over 6 million:

Source: Wikipedia

The U.S. has by far the largest official prison population in the world, and the highest incarceration rate. The following graph from Wikipedia depicts incarceration rates for several countries or regions as of 2009:

Most developed countries have incarceration rates of around 100-200 per 100,000, which is where the U.S. was in about 1970. The relatively high rate for Russia is attributed in large part to strict “zero tolerance” laws on drugs.

Again, the main driver for the high rates in the U.S. is the long sentences, driven by mandates. Wikipedia notes that there are other countries, including some in Europe, which have higher annual admissions to prison per capita than in the U.S. However, “The typical mandatory sentence for a first-time drug offense in federal court is five or ten years, compared to other developed countries around the world where a first time offense would warrant at most 6 months in jail… The average burglary sentence in the United States is 16 months, compared to 5 months in Canada and 7 months in England.” 

Policy debates on this topic continue. Obviously, we want to protect society from dangerous predators, but the direct and indirect costs to society for this level of incarceration are high. It seems like an area which is ripe for reform of some kind, though I do not claim to have a novel proposal.

Strange overnight switch in 2020 election betting markets

Joy BuchananLeave a comment
https://twitter.com/MattBruenig/status/1324005469560705026

I share this tweet because it provides a good visual of a strange event last night. As results were coming in at night in the US, there was a sudden huge reversal. For months the markets had predicted a Biden win. Throughout the night there was some wild speculation in which some buyers were willing to bet Trump would win. Around the time respectable people start waking up in the US, the market flipped again. I hear some people saying on Twitter that they regret no buying during the night. Near 5am Eastern Time that Trumps chance of winning went back down under 50%. That is also when new information came in showing that Biden would likely win Wisconsin.

At the time I write this, votes are still being counted. It is expected that the ballots still to be counted will mostly give votes to Biden. The “blue wave” did not materialize in 2020. If Joe Biden wins the presidential election, it will not be with the overwhelming mandate that some expected.

Economists often promote using betting markets to get predictions of the future. There are lots of applications beyond politics. These high profile elections bring attention to betting markets. Maybe people will begin relying more on them in other fields. I think betting on temperature increases and rising sea levels would be interesting and useful.