Henry

Some of the things that are most interesting to international political economy scholars such as meself are notoriously difficult to measure. To take one example, there’s a lot of muttering in the US and elsewhere about international trade, whether multilateral and bilateral trade deals are good or bad for the US economy, and so on (these debates also have close equivalents in Europe and elsewhere). But how to cut through the hype to figure out whether or not there is a real likelihood of change in the current regime or not? The usual approach is to look for an indicator variable of some variety that will allow you to track underlying processes that you can’t directly measure. I think I’ve found one – and it’s _at least_ as good as the Economist’s famous Big Mac index for figuring out shifts in PPP. My claim is that the degree of rhetorical overkill in Jagdish Bhagwati’s op-ed fulminations on trade is a very good indicator of what the free trade establishment actually thinks about the underlying risks or threats to the existing regime, and (to the extent that this establishment is politically plugged in) a plausible leading indicator of what’s likely to happen in the future. I’ll endeavour to test this hypothesis by keeping track of the Bhagwati Blood Pressure Index (or BBPI) over a period of time, and testing whether it maps well onto the expected outcomes.

Bhagwati’s piece in today’s “FT”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f24fa1c4-e92b-11dc-8365-0000779fd2ac.html is a good place to start. Those unfamiliar with his writing style might think that language such as “faintly ludicrous,” “denigration of freer trade,” “witless fear of trade,” and “disturbingly protectionist” indicates a BBPI that is alarmingly high, both for free trade and for Professor Bhagwati. Comparative analysis with previous op-eds and writings would suggest, however, that these criticisms are almost genial by historical standards; at worst they’re love taps. By my reading, the BBPI has dropped quite significantly since mid 2007 or so, suggesting that the free trade establishment believes that the current fervor over free trade is froth that will mostly disappear after the primary season. On the evidence of this article, we may expect the BBPI to drop still further if Barack Obama is elected President (one presumes that Bhagwati believes Austan Goolsbee’s representations to the Canadian government), but to rise substantially in the unlikely event that Hillary Clinton snatches the crown. Also of interest is the evidence that the article provides on the mental modelling processes that underlie these empirical predictions:

whereas Mr Obama’s economist is Austan Goolsbee, a brilliant Massachusetts Institute of Technology PhD at Chicago Business School and a valuable source of free-trade advice over almost a decade, Mrs Clinton’s campaign boasts of no professional economist of high repute. Instead, her trade advisers are reputed to be largely from the pro-union, anti-globalisation Economic Policy Institute and the AFL-CIO union federation.

Clearly then, your soundness on trade depends on the extent to which your campaign employs economists whom Professor Bhagwati approves of. I suspect that Hillary’s campaign is doubly damned because it’s supported by Paul Krugman (whom professor Bhagwati condescendingly refers to as an apostate ‘former student’). Nor had I hitherto realized that the economists of the ‘pro-union, anti-globalisation Economic Policy Institute’ were unprofessional economists of little repute; silly me.

Update: “Megan McArdle”:http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/03/a_fair_trade_index.php suggests that a basket of pundits would be preferable.

Bloggingheads have posted a dialogue I did some days ago with Cass Sunstein (I’ve embedded it below; if it doesn’t work for you, go “here”:http://www.bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/8936 instead). As “John Q.”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/01/31/the-monkey-and-the-organgrinder/ noted a few weeks ago, Cass is pretty skeptical about the virtues of Internet communication; he believes that it is quite likely to lead to political polarization and perhaps extremism, and not to the kinds of thoughtful, deliberative exchanges between left and right that he’d like to see. I suspect that he’s largely right on the empirics – but as I argue in the bloggingheads, there’s a strong case to be made that deliberation isn’t the only aspect of politics we should treasure. We should also be interested in increasing political participation. Unfortunately, there’s evidence that the two may be partly antithetical to each other – exactly the kinds of cross cutting exchanges between people of different political viewpoints that Cass wants to promote may decrease people’s willingness to participate in politics.

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“Matt Yglesias”:http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/02/poor_form.php complains that Harold Ickes shouldn’t be dishing the dirt before the Democratic primary is over. But _isn’t_ it over for all intents and purposes? Barring an act of God, it looks as though Obama has won. Matt’s co-blogger “Marc Ambinder”:http://marcambinder.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/02/we_need_to_start_with.php runs the delegate numbers and finds that:

Playing with the numbers a bit, here’s how [Hillary] could – in theory – accomplish this. If Florida and Michigan’s delegations are seated fully to her advantage, and if she wins in Ohio by 65% and wins in Texas by 65%, and all other percentages hold, she can win the nomination.

In other words, she’s the horse-race betting equivalent of a super-Yankee accumulator. Perhaps something entirely unexpected will happen (I note again that I don’t have any particular expertise in US electoral politics, and am relying on Ambinder’s calculations here), but it seems to me highly unlikely indeed that she can pull off an upset.

I’ve been too busy with teaching responsibilities the last several days to link or respond to various posts that other people have put up on taxes, collective goods, and related questions, so I’m going to declare intellectual bankruptcy, and just tell you to read “Laura McKenna”:http://11d.typepad.com/blog/2008/02/more-on-the-tax.html, “Will Wilkinson”:http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2008/02/22/moral-duties-in-contexts-of-partial-compliance/ and “Russell Arben Fox”:http://inmedias.blogspot.com/2008/02/taxation-and-democracy-101-on-lucky.html. But I also wanted to point to some interesting stuff that’s been happening in Germany, which is sort of related to this question. The _Financial Times_ has been running stories for the last week or so about a disgruntled former employee of a Liechtenstein bank, who has sold a list of the beneficial owners of various trusts in Liechtenstein to the German tax authorities for several million dollars.
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The “NYT obituary”:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/27/business/media/27cnd-buckley.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin is here.

Update: “Rick Perlstein”:http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/why-william-f-buckley-was-my-role-model writes that William F. Buckley was his ‘role-model.’ It’s an interesting piece.

I’m hard on conservatives. I get harder on them just about every day. I call them “con men.” I do so without apology. And I cannot deny that William F. Buckley said and did many things over the course of his career that were disgusting as well. I’ve written about some of them. But this is not the time to go into all that. My friend just passed away at the age of 82. He was a good and decent man. He knew exactly what my politics were about—he knew I was an implacable ideological adversary—yet he offered his friendship to me nonetheless. …

Then came a very nice column. The passage from my book he reproduced quoted a “liberal” reporter on Goldwater: “What could such a nice guy think that way?”

Why did I love WFB? Because he never would have asked such a silly question. The game of politics is to win over American institutions to our way of seeing things using whatever coalition, necessarily temporary, that we can muster to win our majority, however contingent—and if we lose, and we are again in the minority, live to fight another day, even ruthlessly, while respecting our adversaries’ legitimacy to govern in the meantime, while never pulling back in offering our strong opinions about their failures, in the meantime. This was Buckleyism—even more so than any particular doctrines about “conservatism.”

Nice people, friends, can disagree about the most fundamental questions about the organization of society. And there’s nothing wrong with that. We must not fantasize about destroying our political adversaries, nor fantasize about magically converting them. We must honor that some humans are conservative and some humans are liberal, and that it will always be thus. …

Buckleyism to the end: friendship, and adversarialism, coinciding. All of us who write about politics, may that be our role model.

Update 2: See “Brad DeLong”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2008/02/a-historical-re.html and “Patrick Nielsen Hayden”:http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/009999.html#009999 for different perspectives.

Hilzoy, “rejoicing the departure”:http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2008/02/ding-dong-the-w.html of the truly odious William J Haynes II, provides this mind-squirbling story from Haynes’ earlier career.

In this amazing brief, Haynes argued that bombing a nesting site for migratory birds would benefit birdwatchers, since “bird watchers get more enjoyment spotting a rare bird than they do spotting a common one.” Moreover, he added, the birds would benefit as well, since using their nests as a bombing range would minimize “human intrusion”. The judge’s comment on this novel line of argument: “there is absolutely no support in the law for the view that environmentalists should get enjoyment out of the destruction of natural resources because that destruction makes the remaining resources more scarce and therefore more valuable. The Court hopes that the federal government will refrain from making or adopting such frivolous arguments in the future.” (pp. 27-8)”

I once voiced my suspicion that Fafblog had retired because nothing, not even an entity with the godlike powers of the Medium Lobster, could out-lunatic Norman Podhoretz. I was wrong. William J Haynes II could out-lunatic Norman Podhoretz without raising a sweat. Sadly, the Medium Lobster isn’t even in the race.

“Dani Rodrik”:http://rodrik.typepad.com/dani_rodriks_weblog/2008/02/mr-kristol-you.html catches up with Bill Kristol a couple of decades later …

I have waited a really long time to do this, and I am happy that Bill Kristol finally gave me an opportunity with his column in today’s New York Times. … he was my dreaded instructor long ago in two of the classes that I took as a Harvard undergraduate … In each course, we had to write short papers once every couple of weeks. I can say that my performance on these papers, which Kristol graded, was fairly consistent. The essay on Machiavelli? Here is a C-. The essay on the Federalist Papers? Here is a C. John Stuart Mill? Well, how about, yes you guessed it, another C. You can say that Kristol did his best to discourage me from pursuing a career in political science.

… He walked into the classroom and his first words were: “Hello, my name is Mr. Kristol.” To underscore the point that he was that, and not Bill or any other friendly appellations by which we students may have chosen to address him, he went to the board and wrote “Mr. Kristol.” I may have been a poorly adjusted Turk in my first year in the U.S., but this still struck me as odd. … Well, Mr. Kristol’s column today takes aim at Barack (and Michelle) Obama, and does so quite unfairly in my view. … What caught my attention was this passage: [where Kristol says that in almost every empirical respect, American lives have in fact gotten better over the last quarter-century.] … Really? … for a high-school graduate, the odds that his compensation would have fallen by more than 10% is 50-50. Note that even college graduates have not seen any income gains since around 2000. … some groups have definitely been left worse off–not just in relative but also in absolute terms. So statistics aside, who do you think has a better sense of what has happened to “regular folk” since 1980? Michelle Obama or Mr. Kristol?

Megan McArdle “responds”:http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/02/tax_me_more.php to my earlier “post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/02/16/revealed-preferences/ on taxes and revealed preferences and really makes a bit of a mess of things. More detailed discussion below the fold. [click to continue…]

My GWU law school colleague Dan Solove has persuaded Yale University Press to let him put his new book, _The Future of Reputation_ “online under a non-commercial CC license”:http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2008/02/the_future_of_r_3.html. Good stuff: I hope to be reviewing the book here at CT one of these days soon as well as John McGowan’s _ American Liberalism: An Interpretation for Our Time_ (which I am half way through – it’s very good) and a fantasy blockbuster that Matt Lister has sent me, but tenure stuff has seriously cut into my writing-longish-essays time (normal service will be resumed shortly).

Belle, “at her and John’s other place”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2008/02/nasty.html, describes the argument of a quite startlingly horrendous post at NRO’s _The Corner._

The truly beautiful thing about this is that it incoherently wavers between two poles of repulsive slander: is it Communist Negroes having sex with our white women? Or are Communist Jewesses subverting black Americans who, patriotic though modestly ill-treated, would have been able to resist had the party not offered them the tempting fruits of miscegenation?

Unfortunately, I imagine that this is only the start …

“Mark Schmitt”:http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=02&year=2008&base_name=the_pete_rose_of_politics#104506 on another of those principles that John McCain only “‘bends or breaks out of desperation and with distaste'”:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/17/opinion/17kristof.html?hp.

We now have the exact language of John McCain’s “second loan,” and it is a legal masterpiece, albeit an ethical travesty … rather than pledge his existing certification for matching funds as collateral for the loan, which would bind him to the system and thus the spending limits, McCain carefully pledged to seek to re-enter the system later, and to use a non-existent future certification as collateral. And while the system is “voluntary,” McCain essentially traded away for cash his right to choose whether to participate in the system, and even his right to drop out of the presidential race, allowing the bank to force McCain “to remain an active candidate” in order to reapply for and qualify for funds. He was betting the spread (10 points) on his own primary performance!

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say this is a promise to perpetuate a fraud on the American taxpayers: if he no longer intended to seek the presidency, he made a legally-binding promise to pretend to remain in the race just long enough to collect public money to repay the loan. … Is this illegal? Who knows. … What we know is that McCain found a way to use the public funds as an insurance policy: If he did poorly, he would use public funds to pay off his loans. If he did well, he would have the advantage of unlimited spending. There’s a reason no one’s ever done anything like this. It makes a travesty of the choice inherent in voluntary public financing, between public funds and unlimited spending.

Or how I can’t resist linking to Lee Siegel complaining on _The Daily Show_ about how the market is making the Internets into teh Stupid.

Via Robert Farley“Scott Lemieux”:http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/2008/02/economics-writers-should-understand.html, I see that “noted economist”:http://marcambinder.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/08/dont_panic_megan_mcardle_is_he.php Megan McArdle “is arguing”:http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/02/tax_me_more_fund_raises_little.php that the fact that Virginians haven’t voluntarily contributed to a fund increasing government revenues implies that people don’t want higher taxes. [click to continue…]

“Moira Whelan”:http://www.democracyarsenal.org/2008/02/ohanlon-and-thi.html speculates on Mike O’Hanlon and ‘think tank sociology.’

Think tanks in DC are traditionally known as refugee camps for the out-of-office team of foreign policy wonks. There’s an expected turn over when new administrations come on as each team goes about grabbing “the best and the brightest” to fill their ranks. O’Hanlon has by now gotten the message that he’s burned his bridges with his Democratic friends. Those that like him personally even agree that he’s radioactive right now thanks to his avid support of Bush’s war strategy. So what’s a wonk to do? … one option is pre-positioning yourself for the future. By getting out there and going after the leading Democrats—people that some of his closest colleagues are actively supporting—is he lining himself up to say that he was critiquing the next Administration before it was cool? That would be worth it, because as I’ve mentioned before, there are three forms of currency in the think tank world that make you a valuable player: bringing in money, getting press, and getting called to testify. This strategy could certainly pay off in those categories over the next few months.

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