An ongoing review of politics and culture

Christianity Isn’t the Only Thing in Crisis: A Reply to Andrew Sullivan

Andrew Sullivan has written a cover story for Newsweek (disclosure: where I also work) that I think deserves attention and scrutiny. It could not be more timely, and in many ways more needed. But even as it advances some crucial criticisms of the contemporary monstrosity that presents itself as Christianity, I think there is a lot more to be said. Specifically, I’m not sure Andrew’s political framework is up to the task of diagnosing the real crisis we face as inhabitants of Western democracy. If only things were as easy as putting a mutant political Christianity back in its cage.

I have read Andrew’s bracingly honest writing about his own faith enough to know that his Christianity is deeply considered and deeply sincere. In many ways, I sympathize with where he has ended up as a believer: a follower of Christ who wants his readers to understand the purity of Jesus’ life and moral teachings before the contaminations of worldy movements and interests, even those of Jesus’ own disciples and the early Christians who authored the New Testament. The strange, countercultural liberty of the “religion of unachievement,” is what I think moves Andrew so powerfully. Despite what I’m about to argue, I understand how this can be practiced and understood as apolitical, even anti-political.

Andrew describes Jesus’ ideas as “truly radical,” for example, “love your enemy and forgive those who harm you; give up all material wealth.” His project is to convince us that these “radical” ideas are also “apolitical,” that when salvaged from the tangle of theological and political movements that have distorted them, they are something pure, spiritual and otherworldly. Like a good liberal individualist, he reads all of these virtues as a kind of private interior experience, something I’m not sure Jesus ever intended them to mean. Jesus’ ideas are not anti-worldly in the sense that they help guard one’s inner peace against the chaos of the Internet, but in the sense that they challenge the way most human societies work. This is certainly why Jesus was executed, and why the spread of Christianity was met with bloody resistance: he claimed to have a kingdom, threatened to “destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days,” and preached a kind of forgiveness and self-sacrifice that upended and undermined established Jewish law. It is almost impossible to imagine Jesus “without politics,” as Andrew would have him, or that practicing his “pure” ideas would be anything less than an affront to an established political order—as they are invariably perceived wherever they manifest themselves.

Read the full article

David Ryan On Moar Kids

Friend of The Scene (and the artist formerly known as Tony Comstock) David Ryan has a very thoughtful and touching post on our debate of the day at The League of Ordinary Gentlemen. David comes down on my side, though that’s not why his post is touching.

From a policy perspective, the meaty part is this:

What I realized is that whatever problems we face as a species, the answers are going to come out of someone’s head, and it’s very hard to know ahead of time which problem is going to emerge as the most pressing, or who is going to have the answer. And by March of 2005, and with no more stability and normalcy in our lives (less, actually) my wife was pregnant with our second child.

But you should really read the whole thing →

A Perfect Solution To The Contraception Mandate Problem That No One Will Adopt

Women’s groups (and other groups!) should raise the money to buy the contraception patents from pharmaceutical companies and release them into the public domain so that all forms of contraception become as cheap as condoms. (Some versions of the Pill are in the public domain, but not all of them and women have different needs/physiologies.)

No one is forced to buy anything. Religious groups have their conscience intact. Women have more access to contraception.

Next question!

The Case for Optimism

I suspect most will have grown tired of the kids/freedom debate so I will read my response to David’s post under the fold.

Read the full article

Yglesias on moar kids

Matt Yglesias chimes in on the moar kids debate. I endorse his post, both the general point about empirical evidence (which I actually interpret as an appeal to informed skepticism) and the point about how it does indeed make sense that having kids is costly and so if we want to encourage kids-having making it less costly would make it easier.

Yglesias writes in response to Kevin Drum whom you can read here, though I object to Drum’s take for the reasons Yglesias cites.

Yglesias doesn’t actually endorse natalist policies and I’d be curious to have more thoughts from him on the topic, but it’s nevertheless a good addition to the discussion.

Of Kids And Freedom (cont)

The discussion about kids and freedom continues.

This Noah guy is pretty smart. I think he should write for TAS. Noah Millman joins our conversation and kids and freedom. Read the whole thing.

Noah’s quarrel is mostly with Will, and in this regard I want to endorse everything he says about freedom, particularly this:

Should the state teach evolution or not? If you say yes, then you’re having the state “indoctrinate” a new generation in values that a very significant fraction of our society consider abominable. Not a rule that “more or less everyone can affirm from within their own moral perspective.” If you say no, or if you say, “teach the controversy” then, from the perspective of those who care about the integrity of science, you’re “indoctrinating” a new generation in values that they consider abominable. Not a rule that “more or less everyone can affirm from within their own moral perspective.”

And this:

Raising a child, going to college and keeping a boat are all extremely expensive propositions. For pretty much everyone I know, the decision whether or not to raise a child is life-defining. For most people I know for whom this was a choice, as opposed to a given, or who have thought about the choice at all, the decision whether or not to go to college was life-defining. Indeed, it’s not just that they are both profound choices in and of themselves; it’s that they are gateway choices. If you don’t have children, you can’t have any of the wide range of life experiences that flow from having children. If you don’t go to college, a host of options, economic and social, will be relatively unavailable to you thereafter. People who can’t afford a child experience, in a profound way, a lack of ability to take advantage of the choices life offers. Ditto those who can’t afford to go to college. People who can’t afford a boat, not so much.

So while I agree with 99% of most of Noah’s post, at the end of this post he comes to his critique of me, and (spoiler) I don’t agree. Noah writes:

As for PEG, I have to say, that perspective is historically un-French. France is notable within Europe for having a lower population density than its major neighbors (half as dense as Germany or the UK, for example). This disparity is not of recent vintage, and relates to a longstanding disparity in fertility rates. I don’t think I’m going out on a limb to say that the historically high quality of life in France relates in part to an appreciation precisely of that quality – and to an appreciation that, contra PEG’s contention, stuff is not people; rather, people appreciate stuff, but stuff has an independent existence, and if you have lots more people some kind of stuff will be harder to appreciate, or will even cease to exist. The historic French relationship with the land is in part a product of that relatively low population density. That relationship is very different from the American relationship – which is also related to historically low population density – but it’s also very different from the relationship in, say, the Netherlands.

I live in Brooklyn. I’ve obviously got no problem with living in a very dense space. And there is a unique kind of freedom that one experiences in a big city. But it is not the only kind of freedom. India is a less-free society with over a billion people than it would be if it had only three hundred million, even if per-capita income was the same – simply because there’s less room to stretch out, which is a very basic form of freedom from constraint.

My first instinct is to say that only a non-French person could have such a disarming perspective on what seems French or not.

To start with, I would actually attribute France’s lower population density to the denominator: France is the largest country in Europe (ex-Russia) by land area. It has roughly the same population as the UK and Italy and twice the land area, so obviously its density is going to be lower.

And I attribute France’s large land area to France’s military success over the centuries, which was itself the result of France being the most populous nation in Europe. Indeed, France’s demographic slide starts after the Napoleonic War and this is when France loses its status as the preeminent Western power, a status we’ve been trying to regain since. So the French relationship with population size/growth seems to go in the other way than Noah suggests. Conversely, at least one reason why Germany is a denser country than France is because in 1945 Stalin pushed Germany’s eastern border several hundred miles to the west and deported all the ethnic Germans on the eastern side to the western side. Is this indicative of a particular historic German relationship to density?

Noah seems to be saying that France has decided to privilege its quality of life over its birth rate by deciding to have a lower density. Given that France has one of the broadest and most generous natalist policies in the world (and has had it for over a century—and as someone who just had a child, I can say it is awesome) and today has the highest fertility rate in Western Europe that seems a strange notion. After having been immersed in French culture for 25 years, it’s the first time I’ve encountered the idea.

As to the “historic French relationship to the land”, I’m not sure what to say. Terroir is certainly a part of French identity, but then again in almost every country there is an irrational romantic attachment to notions of land, farmers, etc. (with often disastrous public policy consequences). I might argue that attachment to terroir means attachment to a particular type of land as opposed to attachment to land in general. To look at another metric, rates of homeownership are lower in France than e.g. in the UK, which seems like it wouldn’t be if there were a particular “historic French relationship to the land”.

(And finally, given that I write here and have explicitly affiliated myself in the previous post as someone who identifies politically/ideologically with the American conservative movement, one might suspect than many of my perspectives are un-French. I’d been led to believe up until now that my outspoken support for natalist policies was one of the few characteristically French aspects of my outlook.)

Moving on, Noah’s second point is that more kids leads to density, and density is bad for freedom, or at least some kinds of freedom, like the freedom to live in a space that’s less dense.

I mean, I guess that’s correct. But I guess I would just say it’s like Noah’s freedom to have a boat: kind of a good idea in theory, but not something we should care too much about.

I just vehemently deny this: “India is a less-free society with over a billion people than it would be if it had only three hundred million, even if per-capita income was the same”

India is a freer society because it has more people. First of all, it wouldn’t have the same per-capita income if it had three hundred million people. But even granting this, it would have less writers, less scientists, less monuments, less teachers, less movies (and thank God for Indian cinema!) which would be unavailable to experience. It would be poorer, in every meaningful sense of the word.

And I would argue that the billions of people clustering in cities are voting with their feet for my freedom to expand their opportunities against Noah’s freedom to stretch out.

As to the important freedom to “stretch out”, well, this is the enormous density problem the Earth faces:

That’s right, the world is packed so tight that if we were all to live as densely as Paris (a city that’s not dense at all on an absolute basis, with a grand total of one skyscraper), we would merely cover three American states. (We can argue about the resource question, but Noah is talking specifically about density here.)

Relative to land area, Earth is positively deserted. In this sense, saying that if we have more kids we might have less freedom to stretch out is sort of like saying that people shouldn’t breathe in too hard or we might run out of air.

Moar kids = moar freedom

Rick Santorum recently came out with a WSJ op-ed that tries to include pro-family and pro-kids policy as part of an “economic freedom” agenda.

Predictably and intelligently, Will Wilkinson denounced this gambit in The Economist as an attempt at social engineering and, therefore, incompatible with economic freedom.

At National Review, TAS Overlord Reihan responds that, while rewarding people for having kids might not be conducive to economic freedom per se, it might still be conducive to higher economic growth and therefore might be sensible policy. Having children can be viewed as making an investment in human capital. Almost every country tries to encourage investments in other kinds of capital through tax policy, but human capital is also important.

Later at Big Think, after drawing a distinction between economic freedom and maximizing GDP growth, Will Wilkinson pursues his line of argument further.

After drawing a distinction between economic growth and economic freedom, Will tries to submit the spend-on-kids-for-growth idea to a reductio ad absurdum: if the goal of rewarding people for having kids is to boost growth, then we should reward people even more for having high-IQ kids, and punish those who have low-IQ kids. But the pro-kids people would doubtlessly be squeamish at the implications of that. And so the economic growth argument is just a fig leaf for social engineering. And so any pro-kids policy must be rejected.

On Twitter, I made several arguments in response, and Will asked me to blog them, so here I go.

First of all, while Will is right that economic freedom and economic growth are not the same thing, Will argued eloquently elsewhere that the reason why economic growth is desirable in the first place is because it expands choices. And so while the two are not the same thing, they are interrelated. One leads to the other and vice versa.

Secondly, Will’s reductio is wobbly. It’s almost impossible to know whether a kid will be a successful adult, and thank God for that. For example, from studies I’ve seen, entrepreneurial success is uncorrelated with IQ above a certain level, so subsidizing little geniuses would not necessarily subsidize the Steve Jobses of the future. And really, it’s perfectly consistent to simultaneously believe we should be subsidizing kids because they’ll boost growth but believe that subsidizing only the high-IQ (or those who pass the Marshmallow Test or whatever) ones would be morally reprehensible, and if some of the money will be wasted, so be it.

More importantly, there are (to me) obvious ways in which a pro-kids and pro-family policy can boost not just economic growth, but economic freedom and social welfare.

An important thing to note is that a market economy is made possible not only by formal rules but by the underpinning of these formal rules by a set of social norms of trust and expected behavior etc., which cannot be mandated and mysteriously accrete in a society over many generations. If you give a society without these underlying norms the institutions of a modern liberal democracy, you get Russia in 1993 or Iraq in 2005.

With that in mind, most people tend to agree that reams of studies show that generally and on the whole, stable families have better odds of producing better-adjusted, happier folks who will integrate and perpetuate such social norms better. Policies that successfully reward producing more of these sorts of outcomes would, therefore, not just promote general welfare, but also promote economic freedom over the long run by strengthening the social norms that make it possible at all to begin with.

I say this in all sympathy with Will’s argument, because I do agree with him that too often social engineering is presented under economic/budgetary fig-leafs that are really masks for value judgements. I’ve argued so about so-called sin taxes.

But just because such fig-leafs exist sometimes doesn’t mean that being pro-kids isn’t being pro-freedom. About sin taxes, I argued that it’s fine if sin taxes don’t provide all the economic benefits that boosters allege, because it’s fine to say “We disapprove of this, and therefore we’ll tax it.”

As someone who identifies most closely with American conservatism (and as a libertarian fellow-traveller), I am a proud heir of an intellectual tradition that has taught me to be highly skeptical of social engineering. But being highly skeptical is not the same thing as being always and everywhere an opponent. As Reihan notes, it’s impossible for the tax code not to be a social engineering tool, as people’s behavior will be nudged in certain ways no matter what you end up deciding to tax. (Will disagrees, but doesn’t really say why.) And so I’m fine with supporting some kinds of social engineering. So when Will says “This isn’t about economic growth/freedom at all, therefore it’s social engineering, therefore it’s bad”, I’m unmoved. I say “It is about economic growth and freedom, and it is also social engineering, and that’s fine.”

But even more broadly, and this is something I should have written up sooner, my defense of moar kids from a freedom and human welfare perspective is this: stuff is people. Not just Soylent Green. Everything. Corporations are people, my friend. Not in the sense that they have human rights. But in the sense that they are a framework through which people collaborate. Likewise, cities are not a geographical location and building, they’re people. Even stuff is people. Your iPhone is people. It’s Steve Jobs, it’s Jony Ive and it’s plenty of Foxconn workers. An iPhone is not a thing, it is a few moments of thousands of people’s time. Culture is people. Books is people. Everything we cherish, everything that makes life worth living, is people. More people means more of everything.

More kids boosts freedom, because each person is an infinite amount of new choices to be made, and it obviously boosts welfare, because the world is people and more people makes the world richer.

EDIT: Reihan has his own rejoinder to Will, which is very much worth your time. I guess Reihan is slightly less pro-kids than me, which I guess is fair enough given that I find it hard to imagine how one could be more pro-kids than me.

Uncertainty In The Wild

During the depths of the recession, a meme took hold among Republican politicians and a number of conservative wonks about “uncertainty.” The idea was that regulatory uncertainty—that the people who run businesses couldn’t tell which regulations and taxes they’d have to face in the future—was depressing business investment and therefore prolonging the recovery.

This idea was soundly and almost unanimously mocked on the Left. Aren’t our Galtian overlords supposed to be great risk-takers? Isn’t this how they derive the legitimacy of their wealth? Isn’t there always regulatory uncertainty? To many on the Left, the “uncertainty” meme was simply a whole-cloth fabrication.

At the time, I took a frustratingly middle-of-the-road view: on balance and all else being equal, I think, regulatory uncertainty can depress investment and therefore economic growth. That said, in a massive demand-driven recession like the one the US experienced, it’s highly unlikely that this is the main cause of the slough.

Now it’s Morning Again In America and so nobody’s arguing about “uncertainty” anymore. And the progress of the recovery seems to validate lefty arguments that the whole “uncertainty” thing is made up out of whole cloth.

Well, I found an example of uncertainty working as advertised in the wild.

I recently had dinner with a friend who’s an investment banker who often advises on LBOs—debt-fueled buyouts of companies by private equity funds—who tells me most if not all plans for LBOs in France have been frozen. Why? Because François Hollande, the Socialist Party’s presidential candidate and the favorite of the election, has promised a surtax on debt used to finance buyouts. So private equity funds have decided to sit on their hands until the election in May to see what exactly they’ll be socked with and plug it into their models so they can see if the deals they’re contemplating work under the new regime or not. (While presumably vigorously lobbying against any tax at all, I’m sure.)

Now this doesn’t really keep me up at night. From a business perspective, if you can’t make that deal you’re contemplating work without leverage, you probably shouldn’t do it. From a policy perspective, while the LBO boom has probably been a net positive for the economy, putting a brake on LBO activity isn’t the most damaging thing a socialist president could do. Let’s call it mostly-harmless populism. It is, of course, the wrong solution to the wrong problem: the overuse of debt by corporations is encouraged across the economy by the corporate income tax (because debt payments are deductible from the corporate tax) which should just be done away with, but that’s an idea that’s even more politically infeasible in France than it is in the US. (And, of course, one should note that Mr Hollande has an objective interest in depressing and deferring business investment until he becomes President, although I’m sure that doesn’t figure into his calculations. Really. The economy is doing crappily enough without him.)

Anyway: while this tax and the response to it aren’t going to keep me up at night, we do have here a real-life example of real regulatory uncertainty depressing real business activity and investment that would have occurred absent said uncertainty. So “uncertainty” can and does occur.

So there you go, kids: while it’s probably foolish to believe that Obama-led “uncertainty” is responsible for most of the economic morass we’ve experienced over the past few years, it’s equally foolish to dismiss out of hand the idea or the possibility of uncertainty depressing business investment.

This Is Your Head On Blog

At last! I’ve lost my Bloggingheads virginity. I want to thank Reason’s very gracious Matt Welch for doing it. And hopefully if the Bloggingheads people and/or viewers like it, I’ll be able to do more with more people.

In this one, we cover (mostly) the Eurocrisis and the US presidential election from a European perspective. Watch here.

PEG Leads, Peter Thiel Follows?

Peter Thiel has a big interview with Francis Fukuyama in The American Interest. One thing I’ve noted is that he seems to be inclined toward giving kids the vote, or at least lowering the age barrier.

As frequent readers will know, I’m a big fan of Thiel’s and giving kids the vote is one of my hobby horses so I’m feeling excited today.

The whole interview is worth reading and interesting throughout even for people already familiar with Thiel’s worldview. There’s some new stuff and illuminating reflections/explanations of the old stuff.

Best Practices In Education

Most of us remember that (a+b)^2 = a^2 + 2ab + b^2

But why?

Via François Taddei comes this wonderful video:

I’m willing to bet none of us were taught it like that, and yet once you see it it’s so obvious. It’s one of those “A-HA!” type moments.

It reminds me of reading about KIPP schools in Work Hard, Be Nice and reading that the schools had turned the multiplication tables into sing-song ditties that the entire class sings, which of course makes it much easier for children to remember. (I still remember the torture it was to learn multiplication tables as a child, and I still don’t know them. If you ask me what 4×8 is, I do the math in my head.)

There’s of course an important policy point to be made about all this: I’m willing to bet all the money in my pocket that if a fry cook at McDonald’s comes up with a faster way to make a Big Mac, his manager will notice, who will get his team to use it, and the information will trickle up to his manager and so on, and then trickle down and a year later all McDonald’s fry cooks around the world will be using the new, faster Big Mac cooking technique.

Such are the virtues of the competitive sector. Not all private sector companies are like that. Much has been written in the business literature about kanban kaizen the process of continuous incremental improvement which was so instrumental in the trouncing of US automakers by Japanese automakers. Elsewhere, I’ve described bureaucracies as “Institutions which do not see themselves as being under competitive pressure.” In the case of Toyota vs GM, GM became a bureaucracy because it forgot it was under competitive pressure, while Toyota was very aware that it was competing with GM and so the impetus to innovate and then broadly apply best practices was felt throughout the organization.

Forgive me for thinking this is precisely a feature public educational systems lack.

Why Voting On "The Issues" Is Stupid And It's Fine If Voters Are Uninformed

There are tropes popular among elite watchers of electoral contests that are treated as self-evident and that I think are self-evidently wrong and portray a misunderstanding of how democratic elections and governments work.

The first is the idea that voters should vote based on “the issues” and that voting for/against a candidate based on her character is silly.

The ideal voter, in this scheme, would print out all the 10-point plans on the various candidates’ websites, read them, and then make an informed decision as to which policies she likes more. Conversely, she should utterly disregard attack ads pointing out that this guy is a philanderer and that guy is a hypocrite.

This is completely backward to me, and here’s why: what determines policies enacted by a head of government are her political coalitions and managerial/political skills, not her position papers.

Remember when Barack Obama stood apart in the Democratic primary by coming out with a mandate-less healthcare plan? And we ended up with a healthcare law that includes a mandate? It’s not that Barack Obama is a “flip-flopper” or had a change of heart or what have you, it’s that the healthcare plan that ended up being enacted was a function of political debates and coalition-building in the Congress. Conversely, whatever differences there might have been to a plan enacted under President Rodham Clinton would not have been due to the differences in whatever was on her campaign website, but to her managerial/political skill at navigating Congress and public opinion. And the reason why there was a universal healthcare bill to begin with was that the liberal/progressive movement had been chomping at the bit for decades for political circumstances that would allow for such a bill. What mattered was not any candidate’s “issues”, but the political context and the managerial/political skills of the chief executive. And anyone who expected otherwise betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of how American (indeed, democratic) government works.

“The issues”, in other words, are merely positional signaling, ie marketing, ie akin to the TV ads that sophisticated political watchers so disdain.

And yet, to most higher-educated politics watchers, a voter who had said “Well, I’ve read Clinton and Obama’s position papers on healthcare, and I’m going to vote for Clinton/Obama because I’m for/against a mandate” would have been applauded as sober and reasonable, while a voter who had said “Well, I’m going to vote for Obama because he seems more, put together, you know, more charismatic” would have been the subject of Twitter snark. But it strikes me as a much sounder basis for choosing a chief executive to point to their level-headedness and charisma—character traits that one assumes useful to running a government—than any 10-point plan, which is by definition a list of things that won’t happen.

Beyond broad strokes (are they “conservative” or “moderate” or “progressive”—in other words, what kind of coalition will they put in charge of the executive?) and a handful handful of litmus tests (it’s completely reasonable to refuse to vote for someone who advocates something you find abhorrent, whether that’s bank bailouts or foreign wars or what have you) “the issues” are useless in picking a candidate.

As I’ve written before, 99% of what presidents do is appointing and firing people who do the actual work of government. The remaining 1% is the most intangible and the most important—the Cuban-missile-crisis-type decisions, the do-we-go-to-war-with-Iraq-type decisions.

For determining who’s better at either of those, “the issues” are useless. And character, on the other hand, that thing that we are told should be irrelevant, is (nearly) everything. It’s very hard to judge a person’s character, but looking at their biography, their public appearances and so forth is going to give you a better indication than “the issues.”

Famously, George W. Bush campaigned on a “humble” foreign policy, and gave us anything but. Is it because “Bush lied and people died”? Of course not. It’s because 9/11 happened. If you cared about foreign policy, the relevant question wasn’t “Do I agree more with Bush/Gore/McCain?” but “Who has the character to respond more intelligently and competently to the unknown crises that are bound to happen?”

Deciding that based on TV ads, campaign appearances, little details like whether they seem honest, and so forth, is highly imperfect. But it’s a heck of a lot more reliable than “the issues.”

This brings up the broader question about whether voters should be “informed”. Yes, they should be!, we are told. A popular “contrarian” view we see once in a while is that uninformed and apathetic voters should just stay home if they can’t bothered to make an “informed” choice. But, again, this seems to me to miss how democracy works.

Democracy, as a political regime, is worthwhile because it has given us over the long run much superior policy and economic outcomes than alternative regimes. Yes, Singapore is better run and richer than Greece, but on the whole and over the long term, democracies tend to be freeer and more prosperous than non-democratic regimes.

The main reason for that is quite simply the following: leaders who deliver bad outcomes get fired, no excuses. That’s it. It’s the only regime we know where, at regular intervals, if most households feel that things are getting worse, whoever runs the government is out. The “no excuses” part is important, too. What matters is how implacable it is.

In the corporate world, e.g. Cisco CEO John Chambers has been given a free pass for over a decade by supposedly sophisticated investors for not lifting the company’s stock price because he came in during the tech bubble and so has to deal with circumstances out of his control. Supposedly unsophisticated voters, meanwhile, are much too clever to grade on a curve. It doesn’t matter that you “inherited the recession from Bush”—fix it, and fix it now, or you’re out.

This is a wonderful spur to providing good outcomes, and on the long run, in most cases, it works. If we could invent a regime that chose leaders any other way but had the crucial bad-performance-gets-you-fired feature, it would deliver superb outcomes over the long run. (Arguably, this is what the Chinese Communist Party is trying to build, at least if they’re smart.) People talk about a “democratic deficit” in Britain because the constituency, first-past-the-post system “underrepresents” some parties in Parliament and causes a relatively low number of swing voters in key constituencies to decide the fate of the country, but the system works nearly flawlessly: there was an economic crisis under Labour, and now Labour is out, and if the Conservative-LibDem coalition doesn’t fix it, they’ll be out in the next election, as they are well aware. Same thing with the Electoral College in the US.

Therefore, the only question you need to be able to answer when voting in an election is this: Do I feel better now than I did last time I voted? That’s it. You don’t need a PhD. Heck, you don’t even need to be 18. It’s the famous Reagan appeal.

Over the long run, it’s probably better to have a more informed polity, as many political decisions need to be made with the assent of the governed and it helps that the governed have good ideas/notions, but for the specific duty of voting for a president/governing party, these things really don’t matter. Not to mention the fact that being “educated” correlates with positions on social and other issues that are moral/aesthetic/tribal and have on the merits nothing to do with how educated one is, and the fact that the highly educated tend to have a bias toward believing that other highly educated people should run things, a bias which in my view the last decade has thoroughly debunked (in this sense, I would much rather be governed by the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty).

So, in sum, I hope I’ve disabused you of a few notions and convinced you of the following:

• Don’t vote on the issues, vote on character.
• Don’t complain that fellow voters are uninformed, it means the system’s working.

Of CEOs, Private Equity Titans and presidents

Jim Manzi has had an excellent discussion on the relation between Mitt Romney’s professional background and what he might be like as a president. Megan McArdle has also been discussing this at length.

I’ve made no secret that I think Mitt Romney should not get the GOP nomination, as now looks inevitable, and should not be the next President, as looks likely if the economy does not improve over the next year (but, on this score, I’ll probably be lucky).

I believe that the fundamental and egregious dishonesty that has characterized every step of his political career to date ought to disqualify him from city dogcatcher, let alone wielding the launch codes.

All that said, I think the background of a Harvard JD/MBA, private equity investor and occasional turnaround CEO is great for running the executive branch.

The job of a President is basically two-fold: getting his agenda through the legislative branch, and running the executive branch. The former mostly requires political skill.

As to the latter, which is incredibly important in our era of the Imperial Presidency, a widely spread idea is that in the private sector you learn “management skills” and how to “get things done”. That’s the President-as-Jack-Welch meme. I think that’s largely an illusion for three reasons:

• The public sector works very differently from the private sector;
• The Federal government of the United States is immensely more complex than any private sector business;
• Most “management skills”, at least as taught in business schools, are largely a crock.

CEOs actually have much more leeway in terms of management than do presidents. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos famously spends a few weeks each year working in Amazon warehouses to get a better understanding of that side of the business and improve it. President Romney isn’t going to intern in the Patent Office for two weeks to see how applications could be streamlined. A CEO can decide to spin off, merge, or shut down departments. If President Romney (or Perry) wants to shut down the Commerce Department, he’s going to need an Act of Congress.

99% of the work the President does as manager of the executive work is the following: – Setting priorities – Hiring and firing

The other 1% are the Big Decisions, that are the least frequent but also the most important. It’s the part that can’t be taught and where the background is irrelevant.

In other words, the President behaves much more like an “executive chairman” of a company who has a hand over major strategic decisions than a CEO who runs it day to day.

This is also very similar to what a private equity investor does in a buyout: analyze the business, decide on a strategy and hire, retain (and fire) managers. He should have a “nuts and bolts” understanding of the business, but he’s not going to go into the factory to make widgets or tell the factory manager how to make widgets.

In other words, to reprise Ronald Reagan’s excellent phrase, to be a good manager of the executive branch, a President should know who to trust, and how to verify. These are also the skills a (good) private equity investor has in spades. Mitt Romney has decades of experience analyzing stuff and then hiring, holding to account and firing people.

Of course, when someone who is also a fundamentally dishonest liar with obvious contempt for his fellow citizens has these excellent skills, it’s an additional argument AGAINST nominating them to the position where they would have the power to detain fellow citizens indefinitely, appoint judges to the federal bench, and start wars.

But the question of whether Mitt Romney would make a good president is distinct from the question of whether a co-founder of a successful private equity firm, as such, would be suited to managing the executive branch.

Romney & Bain: Intention versus Method

Yuval, Avik Roy, Ramesh, Michael Walsh and Jonathan Last at The Weekly Standard, among many others, have all written perceptively about the relationship between Mitt Romney’s work at Bain Capital and our political economy.

I think that this paragraph from Jonathan Last gets to the nub of the issue:

Romney’s work at Bain differs in some important ways from how he has characterized it thus far. When Romney says that his goal at Bain was to “create jobs,” that’s not entirely true. As a private equity firm, Bain’s goal was to maximize return on investment (ROI) for a small group of high net worth investors. Sometimes that meant giving seed money to a promising start-up. Sometimes it meant rescuing a company and turning it around. Sometimes it meant finding revenue streams a company hadn’t realized—including government bailouts. Sometimes it meant off-shoring a company’s jobs. And sometimes it meant finding a company whose component parts were worth more than the whole—and dismantling it.

Without respect to the electoral politics and messaging for a moment, the predominant form of “bad” capitalism in contemporary America is created by the joining of a capitalist enterprise with the coercive power of the state, not by the impurity of the motivations of the capitalist. This distinction is crucial for defenders of free enterprise.

This perversion of capitalism normally arises in one of two ways: (1) the crony capitalism of state-backed enterprises, or (2) the implicit violence of lawbreaking by dishonest capitalists. The root problems that need to be addressed in finance in the U.S. are things like Fannie / Freddie, too-big-to-fail, government bailouts of specific companies and so forth, on one side, and Madoff-type scandals, on the other. No real political economy is ever textbook-pure, so there will always be some of both of these, but they ought to be reduced from their current levels.

But requiring that businesspeople make decisions based on some putative idea of altruism, even if such a stricture could be defined and enforced, would be a terrible idea. Capitalists should not be restricted as to intention, but as to method. As a rough-and-ready rule, they should be forbidden from using force. The government may also choose to place additional regulations on them (weights and measures rules, minimum wage laws, non-discrimination laws, etc.). While any given regulation is debatable, some formal regulation is required for real markets, and capitalists should have to obey the law. Further, real markets depend to some extent on informal norms – e.g., general commercial honesty, an ethic of a “deal’s a deal,” and so on. This last point can obviously get somewhat fuzzy, but is still important.

Within these constraints, we should generally want capitalists to pursue their self-interest in business dealings. This is not some falling short of humanity, but the way we grow the material wealth of the society as a whole over time. This is the meaning of Adam Smith’s famous aphorism that:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own neccessities but of their advantages.

The valid criticism of Romney as a capitalist would be that he worked government angles to seek advantage for himself, or broke laws or crucial norms. Seeking to make more money within the rules is a good thing, not a bad thing, for a capitalist to do. That is, Romney’s immediate goal was almost certainly to make money, not to “create jobs.” But the effect of Romney’s actions was to do this – though most of these jobs were created indirectly. This is Adam Smith’s famous “invisible hand.”

Romney was working to “create jobs” only in the sense that if you believe in this, you can have confidence that you are doing your part to increase overall material well-being of society by acting as a self-interested capitalist. More precisely, if all capitalists act this way, then over time, society will advance materially. Tracking your indivudal contribution, or even knowing if it was positive or negative, is a fool’s errand. This is why the very act of trying to count the jobs created at Staples, assessing how many would have been created had Mitt Romney not agreed to take the job running Bain Capital instead of somebody else, estimating how many of these Staples jobs need to be netted against other jobs that therefore were not created at other business supply stores, and so forth is so self-defeating. If we could accurately calculate things like that, we would have much less need for markets in the first place.

The key argument made by critics of “financial capitalism” that can be construed as consistent with all of this relates to the idea of informal norms. In simplified and illustrative terms, this argument would be that by doing something like breaking a norm against laying people off after age 50, these firms create value for themselves, but at the expense of the long-term degradation of society, and therefore the transfer of wealth from almost everyone else to themselves. This is a huge subject that will not be resolved in a blog post, but the key problems that critics of leveraged buyouts seem to point to are layoffs and moving production offshore. Restraining business from doing either of these things is a terrible idea for long-run wealth (and job) creation, and goes to the heart of the creative destruction inherent to real free enterprise.

Obviously there are shades of gray, and as I said all markets require regulation, but we need to be grown-ups about the choices we face. Enjoying the growing wealth created by free markets without the pain, uncertainty and risk that they involve is a fairy tale for an advanced economy.

To end with a word on the politics, I agree with Yuval that this implies that Romney’s work at Bain is only a partial preparation for high political office. On one hand, it would presumably help him to see the economy in a more practical light; but on the other, participating in a capitalist economy is a very different task than regulating it. I have no idea how the politics of this will play out, what is the best way for a Romney campaign to communicate these ideas, or even if they should be communicated at all. But I am convinced that “de-politicizing” our now much politicized economy is very important for America’s future growth and prosperity.

(Cross-posted to The Corner)

Win, Place, and Show

Apropos of a couple of pieces linked to by Andrew Sullivan about the future of GOP Presidential politics beyond this year, let me just say this: the race for second place matters, empirically, quite a bit. And the best evidence is this election season.

The GOP has a strong penchant for nominating whoever has next “earned their turn.” And very frequently, the way they tell who earned it is by looking at who came in second last time around.

In 1976, Ronald Reagan gave President Gerald Ford a run for his money. In 1980, he was the nominee.

In 1980, George H. W. Bush won the Iowa caucuses, and came in second to Ronald Reagan in the primary contests. He was selected as Reagan’s VP, became his heir apparent, and got the nomination for President in 1988.

In 1988, Bob Dole, who had been Ford’s VP nominee in 1976, won the Iowa caucuses, and looked like a formidable contender for the nomination. After losing New Hampshire, he faded, but he still came in second to Bush. In 1996, he became the nominee.

The 2000 election was something of an exception to the above rule. George W. Bush had never come in second running for President before. Second place in 1996 went to Pat Buchanan; third place to Steve Forbes. Buchanan was unacceptable to a broad spectrum of Republican leaders, and was effectively drummed out of the party after 1996; he wound up running an independent campaign in 2000. Forbes would have been acceptable ideologically but was obviously absurd as a candidate. So the field was genuinely open – there was nobody who was obviously “next.” George W. Bush didn’t so much earn the blessing of the establishment as inherit it; it was his “turn” on the basis of primogeniture. It didn’t hurt him that the other major candidate, John McCain, ran against the establishment when he was unable to lock up its support.

But, interestingly enough, that opposition to the establishment in 2000, and his flirtation with the Democrats out of pique in the wake of the 2000 election, were not enough to prevent McCain, who came in second in 2000, from winning the nomination in 2008.

And, finally, Mitt Romney, who is overwhelmingly likely to be the nominee this year, has earned that position primarily by coming in second in the 2008 primary contest. I don’t think anybody is deluded into thinking he is a particularly strong candidate. But he ran last time, came in second (in total votes and states won, that is; Huckabee actually came in second in the delegate count), and his full-time job since then has been lobbying for establishment support. That’s how he earned the nomination.

If Romney gets the nomination and loses, whoever hangs in and fights him for the nomination over the long haul, assuming they aren’t wildly unacceptable to the party establishment, will automatically be in contention for 2016. Ron Paul is wildly unacceptable to the party establishment; Gingrich, for different reasons, probably is, too. But Huntsman, Santorum and Perry aren’t. No one should assume that if they lose this time around, they are gone. That’s not the way the GOP works.

Of course, a historical trend is just that – a trend; it doesn’t guarantee anything at all. But Republican Party history suggests that the race to be the “not-Romney” is far from irrelevant, even if Romney winds up as the nominee.

90% Of Life Is Not Dropping Out

So the winner of the “Not Romney” caucus turns out to be a pro-life, hawkish, Midwestern, blue-collar, has-been politician in a non-threatening sweater vest who was polling in the single digits – not just nationally but in Iowa – until mid-December. If Tim Pawlenty isn’t on suicide watch yet, he should be.

Seriously, though, and I’m not a Pawlenty nostalgist – I’m overwhelmingly likely to be supporting President Obama in November, and no Republican actually running was likely to change my mind about that – but let’s look at the handful of things Santorum has going for him that the other “Not Romneys” didn’t. Everybody in the party doesn’t hate him, the way they hate Gingrich. He’s capable of at least remembering his own talking points, unlike Rick Perry, apparently. He’s not an obvious amateur, like Herman Cain, or an obvious crazy person, like Michele Bachmann. He’s not challenging core GOP positions, like Ron Paul is (on foreign policy, the drug war, civil liberties, etc.). His blue collar roots lend credibility to his economic message, whatever it is. He’s a Midwesterner, not a Southerner or a Texan. Every one of these attributes applies to Tim Pawlenty as well.

And his negatives? He has no money to compete nationally, no organization, no support from the party leadership (even Pawlenty wasn’t quite as bad off). He’s an exceptionally annoying person to listen to (call this one a tie). He lost his Senate reelection bid by 18 points (Pawlenty won his, narrowly). And he’s transparently an extremist on both foreign policy and social issues, and even if some GOP voters are thrilled to have a “full-spectrum” conservative to support, transparent extremism isn’t usually considered an asset in a general election. Call Pawlenty what you like, “transparent extremist” isn’t what you’d call him.

All of which goes to prove simply that winners don’t quit, and quitters don’t win. Pawlenty was a pretty uninspiring candidate. But with the exception of Ron Paul, who inspires a relatively narrow slice of the electorate but inspires it a great deal, nobody running is particularly inspiring. Heck, most of the folks running inspire some combination of dread and disgust. Rick Santorum would be a terrible general election candidate. Worse, even, than Mitt Romney. But he earned his hour to strut and fret upon the stage, by refusing to leave it.

Re: Gene to Phene

John, good to see you posting too, and Merry Christmas!

You say this:

Surely it will not be “the fact of our ignorance in this area” that “is likely to be very important to thinking about public policy in the upcoming decades”: rather it will be our increasing understanding in this area. The fact of our ignorance was, after all, around from the beginning of time up to 1953.

Our understanding of both genetics and the biological basis of behavior is proceeding rapidly, and I assume will continue to do so for some time. This has led to many extravagant claims for knowledge that we do not have, i.e., a “gene for depression.” Such claims have obvious policy relevance, and I think that subjecting such claims to rigorous scrutiny will become increasingly important in future decades, because there will likely be many more of them.

Then you ask the following:

And what does this mean: “We do not have the practical ability to understand why person X has normal psychological make-up Y based on analysis of his or her genome”? Do you mean to say this is a thing we metaphysically cannot understand? What is the evidence for that? The name Auguste Comte mean anything?

I know of no metaphysical reason (that I am certain is true) for why we could not ultimately understand this scientifically. We don’t understand it yet, though.

Comte is a great illustration of several kinds of errors, many of which center on unfounded claims to knowledge. You link to one example of this: his claim that we could never know the chemical composition of stars. But Comte is usually thought of as the founder of sociology: a discipline that he saw as scientifically modeling human social organization based on mathematical laws (per a recent set of Corner exchanges, Hari Seldon anyone?). He and Saint-Simon were called out by Hayek as key intellectual figures in building belief in the current (not possible at some future date) capacity to predict and therefore plan society. A key intellectual task of Hayek, Popper and the other mid-20th century libertarian thinkers was to point out the pseudo-scientific nature of these claims.

It may be that someday we will be able to use knowledge of the genome to predict human social behavior sufficiently to rationally plan our political economy, but we are not there yet. We should rigorously scrutinize claims of the reduction of non-pathological human mental states to scientific phenomena, in part because of the potentially profound political implications of such findings. More precisely, all scientific claims should be subjected to rigorous scrutiny, but we should challenge the sloppy popularization of such claims unless and until they are really scientifically validated, because any such popularization may tend to create an unfounded intellectual climate hospitable to the erosion of political and economic freedom.

(Cross-posted to The Corner)

What a Ron Paul Victory Would Mean

He hasn’t won yet, of course, and if he does we won’t get a terribly accurate picture from his supporters of why they gravitated toward him. But in my own wildly speculative view:

- Contra David Frum, Ron Paul is not the candidate of “indifference” to the economic situation. Indeed, I strongly suspect that the main substantive reason why Paul is getting more traction this time than last time around is precisely the economic crisis, and popular fury about it. Paul’s policy prescriptions are, in my view and in Frum’s (and in Andrew Sullivan’s, for that matter), insanely wrong – certain to badly exacerbate our plight, not to ameliorate it. They are reactionary, anti-modern, rooted in ignorance not knowledge. But they are an authentic response. Paul is not saying everything was fine in 2007. His is a deep and radical critique of business as usual. But a vote for him will not mean “I don’t care about the economic crisis.” It’ll mean, “I am convinced that Washington has no idea how to resolve the economic crisis, and, as a consequence, I am open to extremely radical and dangerous alternatives to the status quo.”

- I also don’t think Paul is getting much support because of his radical opposition to the foreign policy consensus. But I agree with Daniel Larison that if Paul wins, the fact that he will have won in spite of flouting that consensus is significant. Andrew Sullivan says his priority is “remaking” the GOP on foreign policy by opening up debate. Paul himself cannot make that debate happen – because he’s a rigid ideologue and his opponents are mostly behaving like thugs and hysterics. A debate of that sort isn’t really a debate at all. But if Paul wins Iowa, and does well in New Hampshire, he’ll have established that, in a post-9-11 world, there is room not to toe the line on foreign policy questions, room for someone with pragmatic views more like Dick Lugar’s (or Mitch Daniels’s) to run and not do what Romney and Huntsman have been doing. To a much lesser extent, I think the same thing can be said of civil liberties concerns.

- But it probably won’t mean anything at all. Mike Huckabee won in 2008. I haven’t noticed that the GOP field this year has been tripping over itself to win Huckabee’s support. Pat Buchanan nearly tied Bob Dole in 1996, but after that the party moved away from him, not towards him, on basically all his issues. Pat Robertson’s constituency has only gotten more important since 1988, but he himself probably reached the peak of his influence that year, and his constituency has remained important in part because it has proven to be domesticable – they have not demanded a radical change in much of anything in exchange for their votes. If Paul’s voters turn out to be similarly domesticable, one can debate how important they will turn out to have been. If not, I find it doubtful that the GOP will consider changing much to win them over.