Via Butterflies & Wheels I came across the following ludicrous and offensive argument against gay marriage from Keith Burgess-Jackson, the self-styled AnalPhilosopher :
I have said in this blog many times that the very idea of homosexual marriage is incoherent, which is why I put the word “marriage” in quotation marks. I do the same for dog “voting.” If we took our dogs to the polls and got them to push levers with their paws, they would not be voting. They would be going through the motions of voting. It would be a charade. Voting is not made for dogs. They lack the capacity to participate in the institution. The same is true of homosexuals and marriage.
Richard Chappell at Philosophy etc says nearly all that needs to be said about Burgess-Jackson’s “argument”, so I wouldn’t even have bothered mentioning it if I hadn’t been in conversation on Tuesday with the LSE’s Christian List whose article “Democracy in Animal Groups: A Political Science Perspective” is forthcoming in Trends in Ecology and Evolution . List draws on Condorcet’s jury theorem (previously discussed on CT here ) to shed more light on research by Conradt and Roper in their paper Group decision-making in animals , from Nature 421 (155—8) in 2003. Conradt and Roper have this to say about animal voting:
Many authors have assumed despotism without testing, because the feasibility of democracy, which requires the ability to vote and to count votes, is not immediately obvious in non-humans. However, empirical examples of ‘voting’ behaviours include the use of specific body postures, ritualized movements, and specific vocalizations, whereas ‘counting of votes’ includes adding-up to a majority of cast votes, integration of voting signals until an intensity threshold is reached, and averaging over all votes. Thus, democracy may exist in a range of taxa and does not require advanced cognitive capacity.
[Tiresome, humourless and literal-minded quasi-Wittgensteinian comments, putting inverted commas around “voting” etc. are hereby pre-emptively banned from the comments thread.]
Academics from Harvard University have conducted statistical tests on the output of voting machines and concluded that there is less than a 1% chance that their results could have been generated in any way other than massive voting fraud.
Of course, we shouldn’t get too excited about this right now. For one thing, their work has been called into question. And for another thing, they were talking about the Venezuelan referendum. But I’m certainly not above using cheap shock tactics to draw attention to a really interesting piece of statistical argumentation.
It’s one of those cases where there are points on both sides, and both sides have, extraordinarily, managed to treat each other with respect and not throw around “Devastating Critiques” of each other. I think that Mark Weisbrot has the best of it; his analysis of the audited “clean” sample shows the same result as the allegedly “dirty” sample. The only way that one could have got that result fraudulently would rely on a level of compromise of the Carter Centre’s random selection apparatus that seems very implausible.
But Rigobon and Hausman are correct to say that it is troubling, to say the least, that the audit sample shows a very different relationship between polling station size and the “Si” vote; I’ve been thinking about it off and on for a month and I can’t come up with any reason why that might be. If you’ve got some spare time on your hands (and if you’re a Democrat, you do), both papers are worth a read, if only to clear your palate after the crap that’s been thrown around at the Lancet study (btw, on that subject, I will post more, but in the meantime, nice one, Chris Lightfoot).
(PS: I misspell Rigobon’s name out of ignorance of how to create accents in HTML rather than any other kind)
Over the next few days, I’m going to be trying to put together an annotated list of those papers at APSA that might be interesting to CT readers. It’s a very frustrating task. APSA uses database software that generates unique session IDs. The result is that it’s simply impossible to provide stable URLs for papers in the APSA database - the URLs are session specific, and anyone else trying to use them gets booted to a page asking for login and password. This seems to me to be counterproductive. It means that it’s difficult for political scientists to spread the word about interesting papers to their colleagues. It also makes it much more difficult to get relevant papers out into the wider public debate. There are a whole lot of bloggers attending APSA this year, some of whom have quite a wide general readership. It would be nice if they were able to disseminate some of the interesting papers easily to their readers.
Spinning off from the general question of the left and third parties - what are the political consequences of the US left’s failure to create a long lasting set of social institutions independent of government? Colin Crouch, my former Ph.D. co-supervisor, gave an address which touched upon this last week, where he claimed that neither classical liberalism nor classical social democracy had much to say about society, the former obsessing about the market, and the latter obsessing about the state. He did, however, have to acknowledge that the left created a vibrant set of alternative social institutions in many European countries, which provided all sorts of social benefits to ordinary people. Usually, these networks of institutions were set up in competition with rather similiar networks that were run by the Catholic Church and Christian Democratic party. Both networks were intended to shore up political support by providing tangible goods in return. When I lived in Italy in the late 1990’s, there were a few remants of the old Leftist alternative civil society around - the Casa del Popolo (People’s Palace) in Fiesole had some of the best pizza in town, and ran a great May Day festival.
Of course, none of this really ever got going in the US. The only really active set of alternative social institutions in the US isn’t socialist, or even Christian Democratic - it’s the localized networks associated with evangelical Christianity. The Catholic church also plays a role, especially in education, but isn’t anywhere near as important as far as I can tell (I may be wrong). It seems to me as an outsider that this has shaped the US debate on the proper relationship between state and society in important ways. On the one hand, most left-wingers are virulently hostile to the idea that ‘state’ type social services should be delegated to civil society, because they see civil society as composed of religious zealots who will require that anyone who accepts their services also accept Jesus into their hearts. While this may, or may not be true, it seems to me to be associated with a certain lack of imagination on the left, a failure to think beyond the state. On the other, the enthusiasm of the conservative right for outsourcing social services to civil society is equally a product of the social dominance of religious organizations. How many of them would be keen on this, if, say, there was a thriving set of social democratic third sector institutions that could compete with religious groups to provide services (and perhaps smuggle in a bit of indoctrination along the way?) Not many, I imagine.
Jacques Chirac lambasted George W. Bush today for suggesting that Turkey should become a member of the European Union. It’s no secret that the French government would prefer, all things considered, that Turkey not become a member of the European Union, or that a fair swathe of political opinion in other powerful EU member states (such as Germany) is at best luke-warm towards the prospect. Nonetheless, if I were a betting man, I’d lay strong odds on Turkey getting the official nod as a candidate for EU membership before Christmas, and becoming a full member seven or eight years after that.
In theory, any one member state can block Turkey’s membership - new entrants to the EU require unanimous consent from all existing members. In practice, even member states that are hostile to Turkey’s candidacy, such as France, have enormous difficulty in articulating their hostility in public. And for good reason - their objections to Turkey are rooted in some pretty offensive notions about what ‘Europe’ should be (Christian, white). Whenever anyone tries to voice these opinions, they’re liable to get blasted from all sides. The result is that the opponents of Turkey’s candidacy find it difficult to justify their stance in public - therefore, they’re liable to find themselves being herded into giving their tacit assent to a decision that they would ideally prefer to oppose.
It’s an interesting case-study for international relations theory. As Frank Schimmelfennig observed in his case study of the EU’s earlier enlargement into Central and Eastern Europe, this sort of phenomenon demonstrates the limits of realist theory. Powerful states such as France may find it difficult, or even impossible, to act upon their preferences if they can’t justify their actions with reference to prevailing community norms. It could also have quite profound consequences for international politics. The prospect of EU membership has already demonstrably pushed Turkey into greater respect for civil rights, and a weakened political role for the military. Expect this to continue, and indeed accelerate if Turkey becomes a full member of the EU, just as it did in Spain, Portugal and Greece. And as John Quiggin said a few months back, a prosperous, stable, fully democratic Turkey within the EU could do wonders for the prospects of democracy in other countries in the same region.
I rather liked the discussion that followed from John’s earlier post on voting systems. So just for fun I thought I’d try a more complicated version of an example I brought up in the comments there, to see what people’s opinions are.
Imagine we have a race with four candidates, and 100 voters. The voters preferences, at least as expressed, are as follows:
46 vote ACDB (i.e. A first, C second, D third and B fourth)
45 vote BDCA
4 vote DBCA
3 vote CDAB
2 vote CDBA
Who should win? It’s a nice test case for voting systems, because the four voting systems discussed in the earlier thread say different things.
But who should win? I think B. It looks to me like there’s only two candidates with serious support, and of those B is preferred by the majority 51-49. So she wins. Now this is probably a consequence of my being brought up on STV, and always thinking about the 2-party-preferred vote, but however it came about that’s my intuition and I’m sticking to it.
By the way, despite the ‘block’ nature of the votes, the case isn’t entirely unrealistic. The overwhelming majority of voters for a party follow the party’s instructions about how to rank order the other candidates. I would guess this happens in 90 to 95% of cases, if not more. It would not surprise me to find a block of 100 votes in an election just like this, if A and B are the major party candidates and C and D minor parties.
The idea that speculative markets can be used to forecast political events hit the headlines a while ago with the furore over terrorism futures. This idea is still around and the general claim that political events can be forecast by futures or betting markets is still being pushed hard. The main source of data is at the Iowa Electronic Markets, but there’s plenty more. Reader Jack Strocchi sent me this report on a study of Australian betting markets and elections.
As it happens, I’d already looked at this and come fairly rapidly to the conclusion that the betting markets weren’t much good, so I was struck by the money quote from author Justin Wolfers
The data suggests the Australian betting market is extraordinarily efficient. And why not? There’s a huge incentive for participants to do their homework, collect reliable information and make sure the price is right.”
Looking at the report and also the Iowa studies, the evidence in support of this claim still seems very weak to me. In 2001, for example,
The night before the election, Howard [the incumbent Liberal PM] was ahead in two of three major polls ….[on Centrebet] Howard was the favorite with odds of $1.55, suggesting a 64 percent probability of his winning the election,”
That is, on the crudest possible use of the polls, two out of three suggested a Howard win, giving odds almost identical to Centrebet. In fact, I doubt that any serious analyst would have given the Labor Opposition even a 25 per cent chance by election night.
To be fair, Wolfers doesn’t put much weight on the election-night market. He says
data from Centrebet, Australia’s largest bookmaker, demonstrated the impact of current events on the betting odds throughout the nine months leading up to the election, reflecting immediately the electorate’s seesawing response to such events as leaders’ televised debates and the Sept. 11 attacks in America.
In fact, however, the betting markets reacted more slowly than the polls. In this piece written in September 2001, Wolfers and his co-author Andrew Leigh rated Labor a 55 per cent chancebased on the Centrebet data.
But enough of this ad hoc dispute. What test should we be applying here? It’s not appropriate, as nearly everyone in this field has done, to treat polls and betting markets as separate predictions. Punters in the betting markets have access to the polls. So they should do at least as well, on average, as any mechanical rule based on poll data. The test “have the markets done better than the polls” implicitly compares the actual betting strategies to the rule “at even money bet on whichever candidate is ahead in the polls”. Even compared to this simple-minded rule, the improvement shown by the markets is marginal at best.
The real issue we should consider, before rushing to embrace terrorism futures and the like, is how betting markets would perform in the absence of information from polls. You’d have to go back before World War II for this, but it’s my impression that predictions of election outcomes in this period were often way off the mark
If the situation in Iraq is going to work out, it will be because of people like these.
The photos are well worth a look. The crowds don’t look huge, but it’s awfully hard to estimate crowd size from photos on the ground. In addition, the Iraqi demonstrators had to take a serious risk of being targeted as “collaborators” if they attended. (It’s also interesting to see firsthand how much of Baghdad could be mistaken for Los Angeles or Houston.) It does the heart good to see them.
Following Brian’s post below about voting in Australia, I thought I’d mention a paper that raises some interesting questions about the relation between compusory voting and voter competence. Dan Ortiz has an article called “The Paradox of Mass Democracy,” printed in recent book called Rethinking the Vote (OUP), in which he argues that democracies are supposed to meet three conditions: (i) near universal suffrage, (ii) equality among those granted voting rights, and (iii) some degree of thoughtfulness among voters. The problem, as Ortiz argues, is that we can’t have it all:
The more we broaden political participation among equals, the less likely it is that individuals will deliberate about their political choices. The argument is that mass participation, combined with voter equality, drives down voter competence. The main reason for this effect is that individual votes matter less when more people vote. As partipation expands, rational voters therefore have less reason to educate themselves about their political choices.
Ortiz argues that the best way to deal with this trend is to neutralize the effects of voter incompetence through various structural reforms. To take a simple example, Jon Krosnick and some of his associates have shown that candidates listed first on a ballot receive a “name order bonus.” Even if this effect is minimal, say under 3%, it might still be sufficient to decide some elections. An easy solution is to rotate the names of candidates in order to cancel out the “noise” generated by unthoughtful voters. (States like Montana and Ohio already do this.) The problem with this solution, as Ortiz is aware, is that it leaves the underlying problem untouched. Rotating ballots doesn’t change the fact that lots of voters are still incompetent. Since Ortiz is skeptical about attempting to change voter behavior, he thinks that “shallow” strategies are the best—indeed, the only—way to overcome the bad effects of the democratic paradox he identifies.
But are there other solutions to the problem of voter competence that are not deeply coercive? To come back to Australia, does providing (positive or negative) incentives for voting improve voter competence? For example, how does Australia, which has compulsory voting, compare in voter competence with countries that lack incentives for voting? Does the “name order” effect hold at similar levels? (Or does Australia use rotational ballots to cancel this effect?) If increasing voter turnout drives down voter competence, other things being equal, one would expect a significant drop in voter competence.
How would paying people to vote (say, with some sort of tax credit or voucher) effect voter competence? Would people learn more about candidates—either because they feel obligated by law, or because candidates will invest more in the process of informing voters knowing that everyone must participate? Consider also the effect of incentives on two classes of voters—those who already vote, and those who would vote only under an incentive regime. First, would there be crowding out effects for people who would have voted without legal or financial incentives? In other words, would a monetary incentive for voting displace other possible motives—including those based on some sense of civic duty? And, second, how would voting incentives effect competency levels for the class of people who would not otherwise vote?
I’m not sure what to think of the “mass paradoxes” argument, in part because there seem to be lots of open questions about how voter competence is related to various ways of structuring voter participation. “Shallow” strategies may be a good way to neutralize unthoughtful voters, but perhaps these solutions can be supplemented with incentives that promote greater political deliberation.
Here are the numbers, I'll explain them all below. (Apologies in advance if the table crashes your computer.)
Country | Pub | $ | % | FL | ML | IM | PP |
Australia | 69.5 | 2224 | 8.7 | 81.8 | 76.2 | 5.7 | 2.5 |
Austria | 69.3 | 2006 | 7.8 | 81 | 75.1 | 4.4 | 3 |
Belgium | 72.2 | 2114 | 8.5 | 80.8 | 74.4 | 4.9 | 3.8 |
Canada | 70.4 | 2433 | 9.1 | 81.7 | 76.3 | 5.3 | 2.1 |
Czech Republic | 91.5 | 969 | 7.1 | 78.2 | 71.4 | 4.6 | 3.1 |
Denmark | 82.2 | 2344 | 8.5 | 79 | 74.2 | 4.2 | 3.4 |
Finland | 75.3 | 1608 | 6.9 | 81 | 73.8 | 3.6 | 3.1 |
France | 76 | 2211 | 9.3 | 82.5 | 75 | 4.3 | 3.3 |
Germany | 74.8 | 2615 | 10.6 | 80.7 | 74.7 | 4.5 | 3.2 |
Greece | 53.4 | 1516 | 9.6 | 80.6 | 75.5 | 6.2 | 4.4 |
Hungary | 78.1 | 771 | 6.8 | 75.2 | 66.4 | 8.4 | 3.1 |
Iceland | 84 | 2559 | 9.5 | 81.5 | 77.7 | 2.4 | 3.4 |
Ireland | 72.8 | 1623 | 6.2 | 79.1 | 73.9 | 5.9 | 2.3 |
Italy | 72 | 1883 | 7.8 | 82.3 | 75.6 | 5.1 | 4.2 |
Japan | 78.1 | 1852 | 7.5 | 84 | 77.1 | 3.4 | 1.9 |
Korea | 43.1 | 762 | 5.6 | 79.2 | 71.7 | 6.2 | 1.3 |
Luxembourg | 87.9 | 2685 | 6.1 | 81.1 | 74.6 | 4.6 | 2.5 |
Mexico | 49.4 | 457 | 5.5 | 76.1 | 71.2 | 24.3 | 1.4 |
Netherlands | 63.3 | 2310 | 8.7 | 80.5 | 75.3 | 5.2 | 3.1 |
New Zealand | 77.5 | 1527 | 7.9 | 80.8 | 75.7 | 5.8 | 2.2 |
Norway | 85.2 | 2550 | 8.5 | 81.1 | 75.6 | 3.9 | 2.8 |
Poland | 71.1 | 558 | 6.2 | 77.2 | 68.2 | 8.9 | 2.3 |
Portugal | 67.6 | 1469 | 8.7 | 79.2 | 72.2 | 5.6 | 3.1 |
Slovak Republic | 89.6 | 666 | 5.8 | 77.2 | 69 | 8.3 | 3.6 |
Spain | 72.1 | 1426 | 7.5 | 82.1 | 75.1 | 4.5 | 3 |
Sweden | 85.7 | 2053 | 8.4 | 81.9 | 77.1 | 3.4 | 2.9 |
Switzerland | 55.3 | 3080 | 10.7 | 82.5 | 76.8 | 4.6 | 3.4 |
Turkey | 71.9 | 301 | 4.8 | 70.2 | 65.6 | 40.3 | 1.2 |
United Kingdom | 80.5 | 1704 | 7.2 | 79.8 | 75 | 5.8 | 2 |
United States | 44.2 | 4287 | 13 | 79.4 | 73.9 | 7.1 | 2.7 |
Correlations | -0.09 | -0.25 | 0.06 | 0.02 | -0.22 | 0.19 | |
w/o Mex & Tur | -0.23 | -0.40 | -0.06 | -0.05 | -0.28 | 0.09 | |
$ Correlations | 0.84 | 0.61 | 0.69 | -0.50 | 0.31 | ||
w/o Mex & Tur | 0.80 | 0.50 | 0.63 | -0.42 | 0.10 | ||
Here's what the columns mean:
Pub - Public Expenditure on Health as a Percentage of Total Expenditure on Health
$ - Total Expenditure on Health in US$ per capita (Update 20/11: These are PPP adjusted. Sorry I should have made that clearer earlier.)
% - Total Expenditure on Health as a % of GDP
FL - Female Life Expectancy at Birth in Years
ML - Male Life Expectancy at Birth in Years
IM - Infant Mortality - Deaths per 1000 Live Births
PP - Practicing Physicians per 1000 population
The figures in italics are from 1998, the others are from 1999, the last year for which complete statistics are available.
The lines in bold are the correlation coefficients between the first column (% of the health care system that is government funded) and the others. And it suggests there is a positive correlation between government involvement and (a) life expectancy and (b) number of physicians, and a negative correlation between government involvement and (a) health care costs and (b) infant mortality. The correlations with life expectancy are obviously very weak. Turkey and Mexico are outliers, so I took them out to see what difference it made. And the weak correlation with higher life expectancy goes away, but the other results are unchanged.
The last two lines are the same correlations, but now with absolute expenditure rather than government involvement as the baseline. The results are pretty striking. Throwing money at health care really produces positive results. And that holds up even if you remove the two outliers.
I'm sure someone has a more convincing version of this, but I think the prima facie case that increasing government involvement in the health care system, because it produces budgetary savings without harming the community's health, is pretty strong. But I'm sure plenty of people will have objections. Here are my answers to the most obvious ones.
Haven't other people looked at this in more depth? Why are you bothering with this?
I'm a blogger - it's my business to write about things I'm uninformed about. Besides, these numbers are pretty striking. I had always believed that government funded health systems are better in many respects, but I never thought there would be such a simple argument to that effect.
Isn't correlation a really crude measure to use here?
Sure. If someone has a less crude measure showing government involvement is financially or medically bad, it could easily overturn this. But it's certainly a pointer, and it's pretty unambiguous which direction it points in. (Besides, I'm a philosopher, we're not quantitatively trained!)
Aren't there good theoretical arguments showing that government is bad for you?
Well, there are arguments, but it's questionable how good they are. In any case, given a choice between theory and data I'll take the data 11 times out of 10. In Australia for a while the term 'economic rationalist' was being used for free-market true believers. I always thought there was a market opening for 'economic empiricist', because that's pretty much what I am.
Could there be some other explanation of the correlations?
Obviously there could be. It could just be the climate that explains why infant mortality in Iceland is so low, for instance. But note that the negative correlation between government funding and absolute funding removes the most obvious external explanation. If there was a positive correlation here then of course you'd expect there to be a positive correlation with good things like doctors and live babies. That the correlation remains despite the big government countries spending less money is remarkable.
Have you just cherry picked the data?
Perhaps unintentionally, but these were the only numbers I looked at. The only manipulation I did was to check the numbers without the two outliers, which actually weakened my case a little. (Not that correlations of the order of +/-0.06 mean much at all anyway.)
Does this support single-payer or single-provider or something else?
It's neutral. The data only measure how many government dollars go in, not whether they go to private or public institutions.
I know this isn't conclusive, but next time someone says government involvement in health care is bound to lead to budget blowouts, enormous queues, death, plague, or any other horseman of the apocalypse, I'll ask them to find some data to show that before I believe them.
Thanks to a commentator on Matthew Yglesias's blog for the link to the OECD site.
Brian Leiter and Larry Solum have been posting about the political compass test. Brian finds the rightist bias of law professors depressing and expresses hope that more of the blogosphere’s philosophers will take the test (including me). So here goes. And yes, unsurprsingly, there I am in the bottom left-hand quadrant . I’m not sure about the company I’m keeping, though. George Orwell, Tom Paine and even Joseph Stiglitz and the Dalai Lama I can live with, but Naomi Klein and Tariq Ali? This chart needs another dimension.
I’ve spent the past couple of days at the second of a series of conferences with the title “Priority in Practice” which seek to bring political philosophers in contact with more gritty policy questions. It was good fun, there were some good papers and I learnt a fair bit. One of the interesting papers was by John O’Neill from Lancaster who discussed the controversial question of “contingent valuation”, which is a method by which researchers engaged in cost-benefit analysis attempt to establish a shadow value for some (usually environmental) good for which there is no genuine market price, by asking people what they’d be prepared to pay for it (or alternatively, and eliciting a very different set of answers, what they’d need to compensate them for its loss).
Naturally, people often react with fury or distaste to the suggestion that they assign a monetary value to something like the preservation of an ecosystem. They think that just isn’t an appropriate question and that it involves a transgression of the boundaries between different spheres of justice or value. John had a nice quote to show that researchers have been asking just this sort of question (and getting similar tetchy responses) for rather a long time:
Darius, after he had got the kingdom, called into his presence certain Greeks who were at hand, and asked- “What he should pay them to eat the bodies of their fathers when they died?” To which they answered, that there was no sum that would tempt them to do such a thing. He then sent for certain Indians, of the race called Callatians, men who eat their fathers, and asked them, while the Greeks stood by, and knew by the help of an interpreter all that was said - “What he should give them to burn the bodies of their fathers at their decease?” The Indians exclaimed aloud, and bade him forbear such language. (Herodotus, Histories , III).
In today’s FT, Samuel Brittan reviews John Gillingham’s European Integration, 1950-2003 : Superstate or New Market Economy?. One interesting snippet, which I knew about but deserves wider publicity:
Readers may be more surprised to find the name of Frederich Hayek given as the source of the alternative neoliberal interpretation. For most of today’s self-proclaimed Hayekians view everything to do with the EU with intense suspicion. Indeed I was sufficiently surprised myself to look up some of Hayek’s writings on the subject. Although he played no part in the post war institutional discussion, he had written at some length on the problems of federalism in the late 1930s. Hayek was among those who believed that some form of federalism, whether in Europe or on a wider basis, was an important step towards a more peaceful world. In a 1939 essay, remarkably anticipating the EU Single Market Act, he argued that a political union required some elements of a common economic policy, such as a common tariff, monetary and exchange rate policy, but also a ban on intervention to help particular producers.
Following the good advice on conference going from various parties, I’m off myself for the next couple of days to the annual American Political Science Association conference, where I’ll be sharing a panel with Dan Drezner. Intermittent blogging in the meantime, dependent on access to Internet, and on whether I’m enjoying myself too much to blog (yes, you can have a good time at political science conferences).
If you’re interested in the relation between deliberative democracy and social choice theory, which Henry has just written about, then you might want to read an interesting and constructive paper by two of my new colleagues here at the RSSS, John Dryzek and Christian List. The paper, “Social Choice Theory and Deliberative Democracy: A Reconciliation” [pdf] just appeared in the British Journal of Political Science. Here’s the abstract:
The two most influential traditions of contemporary theorizing about democracy, social choice theory and deliberative democracy, are generally thought to be at loggerheads, in that the former demonstrates the impossibility, instability or meaninglessness of the rational collective outcomes sought by the latter. We argue that the two traditions can be reconciled. After expounding the central Arrow and Gibbard-Satterthwaite impossibility results, we reassess their implications, identifying the conditions under which meaningful democratic
decision making is possible. We argue that deliberation can promote these conditions, and hence that social choice theory suggests not that democratic decision making is impossible, but rather that democracy must have a deliberative aspect.
It’s a good introduction to why results from social choice theory pose a challenge to what we think democracy can do, and also a useful corrective to the idea that these results should just make us chuck the whole idea of democracy out the window.
A puff for one of my other collaborative projects: Imprints. The latest issue is now out and contains much of interest. The online content this time is an interview with Michael Walzer which ranges over many issues: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the morality of humanitarian intervention, Israel and Palestine, anti-Semitism, memories of Rawls and Nozick, the permissibility of torture, blocked exchanges and commodification, the narcissism of Ralph Nader, and much more. Read the whole thing - it is both enlightening and provocative.
Tyler Cowen has a couple of posts suggesting that there is a serious libertarian argument against initiatives like the US government ‘do-not-call’ list for telemarketers. His argument is that government shouldn’t be in the business of restraining peoples’ spontaneity.
(warning: lengthy argument follows)
To quote the core of Cowen’s argument:
Take those people who have put themselves on the list. Do they really not want to be called? Maybe they are afraid that they really like being called. That they will buy things. That they will be impulsive. Arguably those people have a rational controlling self, and an impulsive buying self, to borrow some language from Thomas Schelling. Why should we assume that the rational controlling self is the only one who counts (do you really want a life devoid of spontaneity?)? Why should our government be in the business of altering this balance in one direction or the other? Isn’t the market a better mechanism for balancing the interests of the conflicting selves? How many of you out there will be consistent? How about a government list for people who do not want to be allowed into casinos? Do not want to be allowed to buy cigarettes at the local 7-11? Do not want to be allowed to order dessert?
Cowen seems to have gotten a lot of email from people who argue either _a_ that telemarketers are evil (which is self evidently true, but beside the point), or _b_ that they themselves never buy from telemarketers. But this doesn’t address Cowen’s two main claims. First, he suggests that the government shouldn’t favour our propensity for self control over our propensity for spontaneity. Second, he states that the market likely provides a better mechanism for balancing spontaneity and rationality than the government. Even if he’s advancing these arguments half in jest, they’re worth thinking about, as they involve some tricky questions for political theorists, philosophers, economists, and others who pontificate on such matters.
Turning to the first point. For starters, no libertarian I, but it seems to me that when Cowen (correctly) argues that people aren’t consistent in their preferences, he’s jumping up and down on some very thin ice for libertarians. Ideas about individual autonomy, and how it’s best expressed through free choice in certain political and economic contexts, usually rest on the implicit claim that there is an individual there, who knows more or less consistently what she wants. If you start positing different ‘selves’ within the individual, with different ideas of what they would like and how to get it, you’re coming dangerously close to saying that people don’t really know what they want. And this, in effect, is what Cowen is arguing. If we want to “balance” rationality and spontaneity, then we want to limit the circumstances under which we can make rational long term choices that constrain us, and prevent us from behaving spontaneously in the future. In short, some kinds of choice should (sometimes) not be open to individuals, even if those choices are likely to harm no-one but the individual herself (and, even then, these choices will only ‘harm’ one aspect of the individual, her spontaneous self as opposed to her rational, controlling self). This seems to me to be a rather tricky argument for a libertarian to make, and to sustain. In fact, it’s the reverse image of some of the arguments made against libertarians - for example that addictive drugs should be illegal, because once we start shooting up, we may not be able to stop. Anti-libertarian arguments of this sort appeal to our long term self-interest as opposed to our short term, ‘spontaneous’ interest in getting high. Cowen’s argument does the reverse, suggesting that our ability to make long term choices should be limited lest it constrain our spontaneity. But, as should be apparent, the two arguments aren’t that far off each other - they both state that we should ‘limit’ one form of choice, in order to facilitate the other. And I suspect that they’re both, in the end, antithetical to libertarianism.
Second, let’s look at the claim that governments provide an inferior means of balancing spontaneity and long term interests than markets. There seem to me to be two claims; one implicit and one explicit. The first doesn’t hold, as far as I can see, and Cowen doesn’t actually provide any evidence in support of the second.
The first more or less implicit claim, is that the do-not-call list is problematic because it’s the government that is organizing it. This seems to me to be a non-starter. The government isn’t constraining choice here, it’s enabling it. More precisely, it is offering a new choice to consumers which they previously didn’t have - of telling telemarketers not to call them. If the government is “altering the balance,” it is doing so by opening up choices rather than shutting them down - i.e. it isn’t restricting the kinds of liberties that libertarians get het up about. It’s not coercing consumers to sign up. The only people who are being coerced are the telemarketers, who are being coerced only to respect the right of others to choose not to be called by them. To put it another way; would libertarians find the scheme objectionable if it was being run entirely by private actors? Say, for example, if the Direct Marketing Association had put together a really workable do-not-call list (rather than the half-arsed effort that it had). I suspect that libertarians would see this as laudable evidence of market forces at work. But the effects on individual consumer choice would be precisely the same.
The second claim that Cowen makes is that markets are a better way of balancing our controlling selves and our spontaneous selves than governments. He doesn’t adduce any real arguments or evidence for thinking that this is likely to be so, and I suspect that he’d have trouble in finding them. 1 In order to evaluate the respective merits of different means to balancing, you’d really have to have some valid and convincing metric for “deciding” the appropriate balance between the different claims of long term enlightened self interest, and short term spontaneity. And damn me if I know of any way of doing this in an intellectually defensible way. I suspect that Cowen’s claim, if you look at it closely, boils down to something like the following. “Markets are more likely than not to favour spontaneity over long term rationality. By and large, I prefer free scope to be given to spontaneity, rather than careful long term planning, when the two come into conflict. Therefore I, and people like me, should prefer markets over government.” Which is all very well and good, but isn’t going to convince people with dissimilar preferences.
Now this is a rather lengthy response to a throwaway argument, but I think there are some interesting issues buried in here. How well does libertarian claims about social order work, if you assume that people are subject to certain kinds of inconsistency? My suspicion, as articulated above, is that they don’t work well at all. How do libertarians deal with individual forms of choice that are deliberately meant to foreclose future choices that the individual might make? Surely, some libertarian, somewhere, has dealt with this set of problems. The only person I know who has done serious work on this is erstwhile analytic Marxist, current day unclassifiable leftie, Jon Elster. Two of his books, Ulysses and the Sirens and Ulysses Unbound, show that these problems are endemic to many important forms of choice.
1 Broader efficiency claims for markets rest, of course, on assumptions about the consistency of preferences, which Cowen has junked at the beginning of his post.
Update: Ogged has further criticisms.
Addendum: Reading over Cowen’s post again, it strikes me that precisely the argument that he’s making over the do-not-call list can be made with regard to the sale of pension plans on the market. Pension providers, by giving us the choice of signing up to schemes where we put away a chunk of our disposable income every month, are altering the balance between our rational controlling selves and our spontaneous selves. As already noted, the actual nature of the provider (government in Cowen’s example; a private firm in mine) is a red herring - the important bit for the argument is how their provision of something affects individual choice.
Addendum II - David Glenn emails to point to this very interesting paper by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, which starts from similar arguments about limitations in human rationality and consistency, to argue on behalf of a “libertarian paternalism.” Good, thought-provoking stuff.
Friedrich Blowhard has discovered public choice economics a la Buchanan and Tullock, and decided that he quite likes it.
What a gas to see a group of smart people take many of my private musings of the past decade and set them out with more clarity than I ever gave them. I actually read a webpage outlining some of the notions of public choice while literally laughing out loud to see that I wasn’t the only lunatic in the insane asylum.
Friedrich is especially impressed with public choice’s description of how government tends to get captured by special interest groups, who gorge themselves at the expense of the public purse. He also suggests that public choice provides some interesting alternatives to the current political system.
Actually, it gives me more than hope, it gives me an idea. Isn’t it time for virtuous people everywhere to start thinking seriously about a system of governance that works better than democracy (or at least how American representative democracy is practiced in 2003?
Specifically, Friedrich points to various market-based or locality based means that are proposed by public choice economists as ways of limiting the redistributive elements of politics.
Now I’ve blogged in the past about my dislike for public choice economics. As far as I can see, the ideology usually drives the economic models, rather than vice versa. There are some exceptions (see below) but public choice usually starts from a bias. As is made clear by Charles Rowley, editor of the flagship journal, Public Choice, who has defined the approach as a “program of scientific endeavor that exposed government failure coupled to a programme of moral philosophy that supported constitutional reform designed to limit government.” But then, Rowley has also claimed that political scientists like myself, who have failed to embrace public choice methodologies, are “scholars who had rendered themselves dependent on the subsidies of big government and whose lucrative careers in many instances were linked to advising … agents of the compound republic.” In plain words, Rowley is claiming that social scientists who disagree have been bought off; we have our snouts stuck into the same trough as the special interest groups.
One could respond to this in an equally ad hominem fashion (a quick glance at Rowley’s resume suggests that he’s not averse himself to hogging out on grants from right wing foundations). But this would distract from the interesting and important questions that Friedrich raises. Does public choice, as propounded by Rowley, Tullock et al., provide a good understanding of how government works? And does it provide an appropriate set of solutions to the problems of majoritarian democracy?
I suggest that the answer to the first question is a qualified yes, and to the second is a more-or-less unqualified no. There’s no doubt that the phenomena described by public choice - rent-seeking, capture of the political process by special interest groups etc - happen, and indeed are endemic to democracy. And the US has a particularly bad case of this, thanks in large part to its lax rules on the financing of politics. It’s also interesting to note that Tullock and his crowd are in perfect agreement with lefties like political scientist, Charles Lindblom, about the corrupting intersection between big business and government. The problems identified by public choice are real ones.
But the proposed solutions propounded by characters like Buchanan,Tullock and Rowley have their own, very considerable flaws. Public choice economists propose that government should be replaced, insofar as is possible, by market-type mechanisms. They argue that the kinds of choice permitted by free markets are inherently superior to the kinds of choice permitted by majoritarian democracy. Some argue, quite simply, that politics is all a horrible mistake, and should be replaced by so-called “incentive compatible mechanisms.” But they don’t have very good grounds for so doing. First of all, proposals for the replacement of politics by economic mechanisms arguably fail on their own terms: economic theory suggests that they remain inescapably politicized.* Second, public choice theory itself suggests that while majoritarian democracy is flawed, so too is any means of aggregating collective choices. Nobel prizewinner Kenneth Arrow showed this in his “Impossibility Theorem,” perhaps the single most important result in social choice and public choice theory. The theorem shows that no means of making social choices - democracy, market or any reasonable alternative to either- can be perfect - they all necessarily involve important tradeoffs.
What this suggests to me (and, indeed to Arrow, who’s a committed social democrat), is that simplistic prescriptions of “all markets, all of the time” don’t work. Majoritarian democracy has its problems; so too do unbridled free markets. Which isn’t to say that there’s no scope for reform. However, economic theory provides pretty well as much support for certain kinds of lefty retrenchment, as it does for the kinds of change that public choice economics (and Friedrich) would like. But that’s a subject for another post.
.* On this, read Miller, Gary J. and Hammond, Thomas. Why Politics is More Fundamental than Economics: Incentive-Compatible Mechanisms are Not Credible. Journal of Theoretical Politics. 1994; 6(1):5-26. Miller’s book, Managerial Dilemmas: The Political Economy of Hierarchy (Cambridge University Press, 1992) provides a slightly different version of this argument, and is also the most accessible introduction to these questions that I know of.
I was daydreaming earlier today about a moment in my adolescence. It is 1974 and I’m with my French exchange partner playing a pinball machine in a cafe on the banks of the Dordogne. The radio is on, and the news comes that President Giscard has just sacked his Prime Minister, Jacques Chirac.
Fast forward to 2003 (29 years later) and Giscard is presiding over the European constitutional convention and Chirac is President of the Republic. Chirac had first entered the cabinet in 1968. Not that it is just the right. Michel Rocard, whose party, the PSU, had some prominence in 1968 cropped up in the news the other day. And Mitterrand (b. 1916) held his first ministerial post in 1947 and finished up being President from 1981 to 1995 before popping his clogs the following year.
Look at the British political class and the picture is completely different. There’s no-one left from 1974, let alone 1968. A few politicians have a good run: Major Healey, Quintin Hogg - but it is nothing compared to the dominance of the French political scene by a few dinosaurs. In fact I can’t think of any democracy with where politicians last as long as in France. A few in the US, perhaps (Thurmond, Mayor Daley) but not ones who ever formed the core of a national administration. Explanations? Counterexamples?
À Gauche
Jeremy Alder
Amaravati
Anggarrgoon
Audhumlan Conspiracy
H.E. Baber
Philip Blosser
Paul Broderick
Matt Brown
Diana Buccafurni
Brandon Butler
Keith Burgess-Jackson
Certain Doubts
David Chalmers
Noam Chomsky
The Conservative Philosopher
Desert Landscapes
Denis Dutton
David Efird
Karl Elliott
David Estlund
Experimental Philosophy
Fake Barn County
Kai von Fintel
Russell Arben Fox
Garden of Forking Paths
Roger Gathman
Michael Green
Scott Hagaman
Helen Habermann
David Hildebrand
John Holbo
Christopher Grau
Jonathan Ichikawa
Tom Irish
Michelle Jenkins
Adam Kotsko
Barry Lam
Language Hat
Language Log
Christian Lee
Brian Leiter
Stephen Lenhart
Clayton Littlejohn
Roderick T. Long
Joshua Macy
Mad Grad
Jonathan Martin
Matthew McGrattan
Marc Moffett
Geoffrey Nunberg
Orange Philosophy
Philosophy Carnival
Philosophy, et cetera
Philosophy of Art
Douglas Portmore
Philosophy from the 617 (moribund)
Jeremy Pierce
Punishment Theory
Geoff Pynn
Timothy Quigley (moribund?)
Conor Roddy
Sappho's Breathing
Anders Schoubye
Wolfgang Schwartz
Scribo
Michael Sevel
Tom Stoneham (moribund)
Adam Swenson
Peter Suber
Eddie Thomas
Joe Ulatowski
Bruce Umbaugh
What is the name ...
Matt Weiner
Will Wilkinson
Jessica Wilson
Young Hegelian
Richard Zach
Psychology
Donyell Coleman
Deborah Frisch
Milt Rosenberg
Tom Stafford
Law
Ann Althouse
Stephen Bainbridge
Jack Balkin
Douglass A. Berman
Francesca Bignami
BlunkettWatch
Jack Bogdanski
Paul L. Caron
Conglomerate
Jeff Cooper
Disability Law
Displacement of Concepts
Wayne Eastman
Eric Fink
Victor Fleischer (on hiatus)
Peter Friedman
Michael Froomkin
Bernard Hibbitts
Walter Hutchens
InstaPundit
Andis Kaulins
Lawmeme
Edward Lee
Karl-Friedrich Lenz
Larry Lessig
Mirror of Justice
Eric Muller
Nathan Oman
Opinio Juris
John Palfrey
Ken Parish
Punishment Theory
Larry Ribstein
The Right Coast
D. Gordon Smith
Lawrence Solum
Peter Tillers
Transatlantic Assembly
Lawrence Velvel
David Wagner
Kim Weatherall
Yale Constitution Society
Tun Yin
History
Blogenspiel
Timothy Burke
Rebunk
Naomi Chana
Chapati Mystery
Cliopatria
Juan Cole
Cranky Professor
Greg Daly
James Davila
Sherman Dorn
Michael Drout
Frog in a Well
Frogs and Ravens
Early Modern Notes
Evan Garcia
George Mason History bloggers
Ghost in the Machine
Rebecca Goetz
Invisible Adjunct (inactive)
Jason Kuznicki
Konrad Mitchell Lawson
Danny Loss
Liberty and Power
Danny Loss
Ether MacAllum Stewart
Pam Mack
Heather Mathews
James Meadway
Medieval Studies
H.D. Miller
Caleb McDaniel
Marc Mulholland
Received Ideas
Renaissance Weblog
Nathaniel Robinson
Jacob Remes (moribund?)
Christopher Sheil
Red Ted
Time Travelling Is Easy
Brian Ulrich
Shana Worthen
Computers/media/communication
Lauren Andreacchi (moribund)
Eric Behrens
Joseph Bosco
Danah Boyd
David Brake
Collin Brooke
Maximilian Dornseif (moribund)
Jeff Erickson
Ed Felten
Lance Fortnow
Louise Ferguson
Anne Galloway
Jason Gallo
Josh Greenberg
Alex Halavais
Sariel Har-Peled
Tracy Kennedy
Tim Lambert
Liz Lawley
Michael O'Foghlu
Jose Luis Orihuela (moribund)
Alex Pang
Sebastian Paquet
Fernando Pereira
Pink Bunny of Battle
Ranting Professors
Jay Rosen
Ken Rufo
Douglas Rushkoff
Vika Safrin
Rob Schaap (Blogorrhoea)
Frank Schaap
Robert A. Stewart
Suresh Venkatasubramanian
Ray Trygstad
Jill Walker
Phil Windley
Siva Vaidahyanathan
Anthropology
Kerim Friedman
Alex Golub
Martijn de Koning
Nicholas Packwood
Geography
Stentor Danielson
Benjamin Heumann
Scott Whitlock
Education
Edward Bilodeau
Jenny D.
Richard Kahn
Progressive Teachers
Kelvin Thompson (defunct?)
Mark Byron
Business administration
Michael Watkins (moribund)
Literature, language, culture
Mike Arnzen
Brandon Barr
Michael Berube
The Blogora
Colin Brayton
John Bruce
Miriam Burstein
Chris Cagle
Jean Chu
Hans Coppens
Tyler Curtain
Cultural Revolution
Terry Dean
Joseph Duemer
Flaschenpost
Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Jonathan Goodwin
Rachael Groner
Alison Hale
Household Opera
Dennis Jerz
Jason Jones
Miriam Jones
Matthew Kirschenbaum
Steven Krause
Lilliputian Lilith
Catherine Liu
John Lovas
Gerald Lucas
Making Contact
Barry Mauer
Erin O'Connor
Print Culture
Clancy Ratcliff
Matthias Rip
A.G. Rud
Amardeep Singh
Steve Shaviro
Thanks ... Zombie
Vera Tobin
Chuck Tryon
University Diaries
Classics
Michael Hendry
David Meadows
Religion
AKM Adam
Ryan Overbey
Telford Work (moribund)
Library Science
Norma Bruce
Music
Kyle Gann
ionarts
Tim Rutherford-Johnson
Greg Sandow
Scott Spiegelberg
Biology/Medicine
Pradeep Atluri
Bloviator
Anthony Cox
Susan Ferrari (moribund)
Amy Greenwood
La Di Da
John M. Lynch
Charles Murtaugh (moribund)
Paul Z. Myers
Respectful of Otters
Josh Rosenau
Universal Acid
Amity Wilczek (moribund)
Theodore Wong (moribund)
Physics/Applied Physics
Trish Amuntrud
Sean Carroll
Jacques Distler
Stephen Hsu
Irascible Professor
Andrew Jaffe
Michael Nielsen
Chad Orzel
String Coffee Table
Math/Statistics
Dead Parrots
Andrew Gelman
Christopher Genovese
Moment, Linger on
Jason Rosenhouse
Vlorbik
Peter Woit
Complex Systems
Petter Holme
Luis Rocha
Cosma Shalizi
Bill Tozier
Chemistry
"Keneth Miles"
Engineering
Zack Amjal
Chris Hall
University Administration
Frank Admissions (moribund?)
Architecture/Urban development
City Comforts (urban planning)
Unfolio
Panchromatica
Earth Sciences
Our Take
Who Knows?
Bitch Ph.D.
Just Tenured
Playing School
Professor Goose
This Academic Life
Other sources of information
Arts and Letters Daily
Boston Review
Imprints
Political Theory Daily Review
Science and Technology Daily Review