Support U.S. troops by paying attention to their views on the presidential candidates and voting accordingly.
Ron Paul has received the most donations from people identified as current and retired military personnel of any presidential candidate, followed by Obama and McCain. That suggests withdrawal from Iraq may be more popular with the military than it is with other voters. McCain’s strength might be a response to his military experience and/or his opposition to torture. (HT Andrew Sullivan).
Politics
I’ve occasionally heard claims about Africa being poor because it was exploited by Europeans and Americans, and I’ve dismissed those claims because they were clearly based on superstitions.
Recently I’ve come across some scholarly writings on the effects of interactions between these cultures.
A paper on Colonial legacies and economic growth confirms my suspicions that areas which were colonized for longer times have higher economic growth.
As I mentioned recently, the book The Bottom Billion shows a connection between poverty and sale of natural resources, but explains several mechanisms by which the revenues could make bad governments more likely, independent of whether the buyers of those resources exploit the sellers. This suggests it’s not easy to resolve claims that such exploitation caused harm.
The most interesting study is The Long-Term Effects of Africa’s Slave Trade (via Freakonomics and Andrew Sullivan), which demonstrates that slave trade between Africa and other continents between 1400 and 1900 is significantly correlated with poverty now. The paper presents a good argument that the causal connection was mainly increased violent conflict due to rewards for enslaving people from neighboring villages (as opposed to prior forms of slavery which resulted from conquest by ethnic groups from somewhat farther regions). This caused social and ethnic fragmentation and corruption. I have doubts about whether the details of the paper’s causal model are correct, but they appear to be approximately correct.
Book review: The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It by Paul Collier
This very eloquent and mostly thoughtful book about the world’s poorest countries will offend ideologues of all stripes. Collier’s four different explanations for poverty traps (war, presence of natural resources, bad neighbors blocking trade routes, and corruption) clearly place him as a fox rather than a hedgehog without being complex enough that they can rationalize any result (although they can probably rationalize more results than an ideal set of explanations would). He blames both villains in poor countries and thoughtless voters in wealthy countries.
Collier sees that globalization has benefited most nations, but provides plausible mechanisms by which globalization can harm some (e.g. through enabling capital flight).
Collier mostly thinks like a good economist, but his prior work for the World Bank biases him to be overly optimistic about improving such institutions. He recognizes the incentives that cause bureaucrats to be too risk averse, but then makes a cryptic claim that the British government understands the problem and is spending money to fix it. He vaguely implies that this is a venture capital-like fund, but fails to say whether they replicated the key venture capital feature of providing unusually large rewards to employees who produce unusually good results. His silence on this subject leads me to suspect that he’s asking us to blindly trust institutions that have a long track record of avoiding results-oriented incentives.
He also shows misplaced faith in authority when he tries to calculate the value to the world of rescuing a failed state by using George Bush’s calculation that the benefits of installing a good government in Iraq exceeded the expected $100 billion cost. That might be a good argument if Bush had been spending his own money to help Iraq, but his willingness to spend other peoples’ money doesn’t say much.
Collier says it is “surely irresponsible” to leave Somalia with no government. Yet most evidence I’ve seen says Somalia improved by most standard criteria such as life expectancy when it had no government. I don’t know how reliable that evidence is, but Collier’s apparent assumption that we don’t need to look at the evidence makes his opinion suspect.
The book’s biggest shortcoming is the absence of anything resembling footnotes. Collier implies this is too make the book more readable, but he could have put a section of notes at the end referencing individual pages without altering the main text in any way. Instead he only gives a fairly large list of papers he’s written. But I can’t tell without tracking down and reading a large fraction of them which of them if any support his controversial claims (e.g. that giving money to the poorest countries helps them a bit but that doubling it would reach a limit beyond which further money would be wasted).
But his advice is good enough that its value doesn’t depend much on those controversial claims being right. Following his advice to condition aid on results (e.g. sending money to countries when they stop wars, cutting it off if they have a coup or resume war) would provide incentives that would make aid beneficial.
I had previously suspected that large countries have tended to escape poverty more easily in the past few decades because “aid” organizations had enough money to prop up small corrupt governments but not enough to affect a government such as India’s. Collier presents a good alternative theory: being a large country pretty much guarantees access to the sea, and by increasing the number of neighbors, increases the chance of having a neighbor which is open to trade.
Another good tidbit is this point on Fair Trade: farmers “get charity as long as they stay producing the crops that have locked them into poverty.”
One way to find evidence concerning whether a politicized theory is being exaggerated or being stated overconfidently is to look at how experts from a very different worldview thought about the theory. I had been under the impression that theories about global warming were recent enough that it was hard to find people who studied it without being subject to biases connected with recent fads in environmental politics.
I now see that Arrhenius predicted in 1896 that human activity would cause global warming, and estimated a sensitivity of world temperature to CO2 levels that differ from current estimates by about a factor of 2. The uncertainty in current estimates is large enough that they disagree with Arrhenius by a surprisingly small amount. This increases my confidence in that part of global warming theory.
Arrhenius disagreed with modern theorists about how fast CO2 level would rise (he thought it would take 3000 years to rise 50% or to double, depending on whether you believe Nature or Wikipedia), and about whether warming is good. That slightly weakens my confidence in forecasts of CO2 levels and of harm from warming (although as a Swede Arrhenius might have overweighted the benefits of warming in arctic regions).
Book review: Black Rednecks And White Liberals by Thomas Sowell.
Thomas Sowell is a pretty smart guy. It’s unfortunate that he wastes his skills on reinforcing peoples’ existing political opinions. Much of what he says in this book is right, but the new ideas it offers don’t seem like they ought to change the political opinions of anyone who has thought much about racial politics. And the old but wise arguments are written in a style that seems designed to turn off anyone who isn’t already a fan of Sowell’s ideas.
He presents interesting evidence that the culture of black ghettos came from parts of Britain that were uncivilized at the time its bearers moved to the southern U.S. This is the kind of subject where it’s virtually impossible for most readers to tell whether he’s being objective or selecting evidence to fit his biases. More importantly, it’s hard to tell why it matters. Some people pay lip service to the authenticity of black culture, but I find it hard to believe that the origins of the culture several centuries ago plays an important role in peoples’ choice to adopt the culture.
One interesting aspect of Sowell’s story is that the large migration from the rural south to the urban north after WWII did not result in the usual assimilation of the migrants into the culture of the area they moved to. How much of that was due to the number of migrants, to their culture, or to their race? Sowell ignores this subject.
Sowell’s argument that western civilization was responsible for the nearly worldwide abolition of slavery seems mostly right, but I’m disturbed by his exaggerations. He misleads readers into thinking that the first abolitionists were western, but a quick web search told me that Cyrus the Great wanted to abolish slavery worldwide two millennia earlier.
There are several places in the book where he makes confident, unsupported assertions as if they were certain, when I doubt anyone has enough evidence to make anything better than a rough guess. For instance, he thinks George Washington couldn’t have gotten a prohibition on slavery into the constitution without driving the south out of the union (plausible, but it depends on hard-to-verify assumptions about his powers of persuasion), and that slavery would have lasted longer without the union (a controversial enough claim that abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison seemed to reject it, claiming the north would be a better haven for runaway slaves if it seceded and repealed the Fugitive Slave Law). There are probably some leftists who unfairly attack Washington for failing to accomplish more than he could possibly accomplish, but I don’t see signs that they get respect from anyone who would listen to Sowell.
I’m quite suspicious of Sowell’s claim that Hitler’s pretenses of having been provoked into military action were intended only to fool people in Germany. Even if people in other countries had enough information to know Hitler was lying, it’s easy to imagine that a fair number of them were looking for a way to rationalize neutrality, and that Hitler was helping them to fool themselves.
Book review: Why Not?: How to Use Everyday Ingenuity to Solve Problems Big And Small by Barry Nalebuff and Ian Ayres.
This is a very entertaining and somewhat thought-provoking book. I’m uncertain whether it had much effect on my creativity. It certainly demonstrates the authors’ creativity, and gives some insights into how their creative thought processes work. But it’s probably more valuable as a collection of interesting ideas than it is as a recipe for creativity.
While they focus more on presenting interesting ideas than on evaluating how well they would work, the do a decent job of anticipating problems and understanding the relevant incentives.
Possibly the most important idea is mandating anonymity of political campaign contributions (see also the book Voting with Dollars) as an alternative way of ensuring that it’s hard for contributions to influence politicians votes, with plausible suggestions about how to ensure that it’s hard for donors to evade the anonymity rule.
Their examples often leave me wondering why the ideas they describe are so little known (e.g. the anonymity requirement has been tried in 10 states for judicial elections – why hasn’t that been reported widely?).
Another interesting idea is how tests of black boxes in cars (similar to those in planes) cause drivers to drive much more safely (20 to 66 percent declines in accident rates – “Fear of getting caught may be a more powerful motivator than fear of getting killed”).
I am disappointed that it doesn’t have an index.
Book review: How to Spend $50 Billion to Make the World a Better Place, edited by Bjorn Lomborg.
This book makes plausible and somewhat thought-provoking claims about how an altruist ought to spend money to provide the most benefit to the needy. It concludes that high priorities should include control of HIV, malaria, malnutrition, and trade barriers.
It appears to come close to being a good book. It addresses fairly good questions about important issues. Unfortunately, it has been simplified for readability to such an extent as to prevent it from accomplishing much. Its arguments aren’t sufficiently detailed or backed by references for me to evaluate them. So they were probably intended to be accepted as a result of the authors’ authority. But their credentials leave plenty of room for doubt about how much deference their authority deserves.
So I’m left unsatisfied, and highly uncertain whether I ought to read the more detailed version of this book (Global Crises, Global Solutions).
The ideas I recently described about the similarities between abolishing slavery and debtors prisons have got me thinking about the similarities between no-fault divorce and the ease with which an employer can dismiss employees.
Attitudes about whether the breakup of a romantic relationship indicate that someone was at fault have influenced how easy it is to end such relationships. In subcultures I see here in Silicon Valley where it isn’t expected that people will assign any blame when a relationship ends, there is less cost to breakups (the people involved are more likely to remain friends). This means there is probably more trial and error in picking relationships (possibly at the cost of each individual relationship being valued less than in cultures where people are expected to make a marriage last a lifetime).
Silicon Valley also has a culture which attaches little importance to an employee leaving a job, and I suspect this extends to employees who get fired as well. The relatively high turnover means more acceptance of trial and error by both employees and employers, less damaging disputes when an employee leaves, and ease of a former employee getting a new job. This contributes to Silicon Valley’s success at enabling startups. (These comments are loosely based on my recollection of Annalee Saxenian’s book Regional Advantage).
Are these two sets of phenomena symptoms of one underlying attitude?
Is the casual attitude toward romantic relationships producing advantages similar to the advantages that Silicon Valley produces for startups?
Can a better understanding of these similarities help spread the Silicon Valley attitude toward employment to other regions?
The jury system in the U.S. originated in times when most communities were small enough that jurors were likely to feel close enough to defendants to have tribal/friendship/etc desires not to convict someone without cause, and to be sufficiently at risk from a defendant’s future crimes to take some care not to acquit the guilty. But today, those motives have broken down in many urban and suburban places, and trials are often decided by those who are too dumb to get off jury duty.
I don’t have good ideas for ensuring that jurors are chosen so that they feel like they’re part of the same small community as the defendant, so I’m hoping instead to create new incentives for jurors to care about verdicts.
Simply increasing the pay for serving on a jury would help to avoid the problem of jurors being selected for low intelligence, but I can’t tell how much of the problem that would solve.
I propose a additional ways of rewarding jurors based on results. If the jurors acquit, the jurors could get some large payment in 5 or 10 years if the defendant commits no crimes during that time, but no further payment if the defendant commits a crime. If the jurors convict, the jurors could get some large payment in 5 or 10 years unless the defendant has been exonerated or the conviction reversed on appeal.
The size of the payments would need to be carefully calibrated so that the average award is the same for juries that convict as it is for those that acquit.
Since it would take forever for the government to work out all the details needed to translate these ideas into a fair and predictable system, I’m wondering whether a private charity could implement them. Presumably there are significant legal obstacles to many kinds of payments to jurors, since it’s easy for such payments to be intended to serve the interests of one party to the trial. I can’t tell whether the relevant laws are broad enough to prohibit desirable incentives, or if so whether it’s feasible to relax those restrictions.
Jeff Hummel recently gave an interesting talk on the subject of how the law should treat a contract that involves one person becoming enslaved to another. The title made the talk sound like a quaint subject of little importance to present day politics, and I attended because Hummel has a reputation for being interesting, not due to the title of the talk. But his arguments were designed to apply not just to the status that was outlawed by the 13th amendment, but also to military service (not just the draft, but any type where the soldier can’t quit at will) and marriage.
Hummel argues that instead of asking whether slavery ought to be illegal, we should ask what a legal system ought to do when presented with a dispute between two people over enforcement of a contract requiring slavery.
Some simplistic notions of contracts assume that valid contracts should always be honored and enforced at all costs, but the term efficient breach describes exceptions to that rule (if you’re unfamiliar with this subject, I recommend David Friedman’s book Law’s Order as valuable background to this post).
In the distant past, people who failed to fulfill contracts and had insufficient assets to compensate were often put in debtors prisons. That was generally abolished around the time that traditional slavery was abolished, and replaced with a more forgiving bankruptcy procedure. Hummel suggests that this wasn’t a random coincidence, and that a slave breaching his promise to his master ought to be treated like most other breaches of contracts. If bankruptcy is the appropriate worst case result of a breach of contract, then the same reasoning ought to imply that bankruptcy is the worst result a legal system should impose on a person who reneges on a promise to be a slave.
Hummel noted that the change from debtors prisons to bankruptcy happened around the time that the industrial revolution took off, and suggested that we should wonder whether the timing implies that we became wealthy enough that we could afford to abolish debtors prisons, and/or whether the change helped to cause the industrial revolution. Neither he nor I have a good argument for or against those possibilities.
If this rule were applied to military service, unpopular wars would become harder to fight, as many more soldiers would quit the military. As far as I can tell, peer pressure kept soldiers fighting in any war I think they ought to have fought, so I think this would be a clear improvement.
The talk ended with some disagreement between Hummel and some audience members about what should happen if people want to have a legal system that provides harsher penalties for breach of contract (assume for simplicity that they’re forming a new country in order to do this). Hummel disapproved of this, but it wasn’t clear whether he was doing more than just predicting nobody would want this. I think he should have once again rephrased the question in terms of what existing legal systems should do about such a new legal system. Military/police action to stop the new legal system seems excessive. Social pressure for it to change seems desirable. It was unclear whether anyone there had an opinion about intermediate responses such as economic boycotts, or whether the apparent disagreement was just posturing.