Bryan Caplan's Blog, page 109

Open Borders Meetup: The Speech, by Bryan Caplan

The 2015 Open Borders Meetup went splendidly.  Seventy people attended, including Open Borders bloggers Nathan Smith, John Lee, and David Bennion.  My one regret: I had a prime opportunity to deliver a galvanizing speech, but failed to do so.  Here's the speech I wish I'd given:

I've always wanted to give a revolutionary speech from this balcony, and finally I have my chance.  I'm Bryan Caplan, your host.  Welcome to the 2015 Open Borders Meetup.  I'm pleased to report that we hail from every inhabited continent.  Some of us are American citizens.  Some are not citizens, but have legal permission to live and work here.  And, at risk of tarnishing a happy day, some of us here lack these basic human rights.  All I can say is: the American government does not speak for me.  Whatever the law says, you're welcome in my home.  It's my honor to host you all. 

I'm particular grateful, though, to the Open Borders bloggers who traveled long distances to be here.  All hail Nathan Smith, John Lee, and David Bennion.  And though he's not here, let's all give special thanks to the great intellectual entrepreneur Vipul Naik, founder of the Open Borders website.  I may have intellectually inspired him, but he's my hero.

We're gathered here today to advance a great, neglected idea: That all human beings, not just people born on the right side of national borders, should be free to live and work where they please.  If a landlord wants to rent to you, an employer wants to hire you, it is none of the government's business. 

While every existing government mandates discrimination against foreigners, they're wrong to do so.  Mandatory discrimination against foreigners is morally no better than mandatory discrimination against blacks, women, Jews, or gays.  And economically, it's folly.  Mass production is the secret to mass consumption.  Trapping most of the world's talent in less-productive regions of the world impoverishes us all.  Immigration restrictions are a grave injustice that does great harm, holding much of the world in poverty while keeping the full fruits of human talent off the world market.

Isn't it more complicated than that?  Yes and no.  There are a vast range of economic, political, and cultural objections to open borders.  Vipul Naik has patiently cataloged them on the Open Borders website, presenting them more carefully than any of their actual proponents.  In the end, though, the case for this radical reform comes shining through.  Almost-open borders built the United States - and open borders is ready to bring the blessings of freedom and prosperity to the globe if the world's governments will only let it.

The rub, sadly, is that the world's governments are hardly flouting the will of their people.  Contrary to restrictionist rhetoric, we're light-years from "open borders."  You need only look at the prices human smugglers charge to see this truth.  Yet most governments are already pushing the limits of the public's tolerance for immigration.  For open borders to move forward, we have to change a lot of minds.  It's not going to be easy, but this is our task.

Still, there's no reason to make the task any harder than it has to be by needlessly alienating anyone.  I don't hide my radicalism, but I strive to be a friendly radical.  I know quite a few of you in attendance aren't quite ready to push the open borders button.  I won't deny I'm dying to convert you, but fellow travelers are always welcome - the more the merrier. 

The same goes, of course, for everyone who defends free migration with non-libertarian arguments and rhetoric. While libertarians like myself are greatly over-represented in the ranks of open borders advocates, this is an historical accident.  Every libertarian should favor open borders - but so should every thoughtful liberal and every thoughtful conservative.  As I said in my closing statement for Intelligence Squared:

Liberals should oppose immigration restrictions in the name
of equality, reducing poverty, equal opportunity, non-discrimination, social
justice, and the global 99%. 

Conservatives should oppose immigration restrictions in the
name of freedom, free markets, small government, the work ethic, meritocracy,
and Horatio Alger himself. 

How exactly do I propose converting mankind to deeply unpopular open borders policies?  Crowdsourcing, of course.  We all have our own styles and audiences, and we should all do our part.  That said, I believe our best general approach is to focus on young elites. 

Why the young?  They've always been easier to reach than the old, and they're definitely the future. 

Why the elite?  First, they're already relatively sympathetic to philosophy, economics, and cosmopolitanism, so persuading them is in the realm of possibility.  Second, even democracies seem to put extra weight on elite opinion.  And third, elite opinion tends to slowly trickle down to the rest of society.  Converting the elite may not be enough.  But then again, it may.

Won't this be an endlessly frustrating task?  That's up to us.  I don't expect to win anytime soon, but I'm delighted to be part of our vibrant and cheerful intellectual community.  Not all of us here were lucky enough to be born in the First World.  But we're all lucky to be part of this movement and circle of friends.  And with your effort and can-do attitude, our movement and circle of friends will keep growing until the ideal of free migration for all human beings is a reality.

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How Evil Are Politicians?, by Bryan Caplan

I think politicians are, by and large, evil people.  When I shared my verdict with a journalist friend, he strongly objected.  He rightly pointed out that he's had ample personal interaction with politicians.  In his experience, politicians of both parties generally want to do the right thing.  Whatever their intellectual errors, their virtue is intact.  My mental image of villainous politicians is at odds with the facts.

I'm happy to grant that my journalist friend's first-hand experience with politicians far exceeds my own.  But I'm confident that if I saw what he saw, my doleful verdict would stay the same.  Why?  Because my standards of moral conduct are much higher than his, in two main ways.

First, virtuous people can't just conform to the expectations of their society.  Everyone has at least a modest moral obligation to perform "due diligence" - to investigate whether their society's expectations are immoral.  And whenever their society fails to measure up, virtuous people spurn social expectations and do the morally right thing.

Second, anyone in a position of political power has a greatly elevated moral obligation to perform this due diligence.  Yes, with great power comes great responsibility.  If you're in a position to pass or enforce laws, lives and freedom are in your hands.  Common decency requires you to act with extreme moral trepidation at all times, ever mindful of the possibility that you're trampling the rights of the morally innocent.

Note: Neither of these principles claims that politicians have to share my libertarian philosophy in order to be decent human beings.  They're procedural.  They require every human being to seek out and seriously consider the main moral critiques of the status quo.  And they enjoin politicians to make this intellectual hygiene their top priority.  Until they calmly recuse themselves from their society and energetically weigh a wide range of moral arguments, they have no business lifting a political finger.

At this point, the iniquity of practicing politicians should be clear.  How much time and mental energy does the average politician pour into moral due diligence?  A few hours of year seems like a high estimate.  They don't just fall a tad short of their moral obligations.  They're too busy passing laws and giving orders to face the possibility that they're wielding power illegitimately.

Such negligence is scarcely surprising.  After all, what's in it for the politicians?  Political systems reward them for seeming good by conventional standards.  If we're lucky, this spurs leaders to do what most people consider good.  More likely, it spurs leaders to spin control - packaging even their worst actions in conventional moral garb.  If there's a political system that affirmatively rewards politicians for conscientiously questioning mainstream moral standards, I've never heard of it.  Politicians have no excuses for their shameful behavior, but like almost all wrong-doers, they have reasons.

Admittedly, if it turned out that our society's conventional moral standards were basically right, our politicians' vice would be harmless.  That's a much bigger question.  But whatever the whole truth about morality might be, politicians - including the Americans politicians my journalist friend defends - are almost invariably guilty of pervasive gross moral negligence.  Politicians, repent! 

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Straw Men Rule, by Bryan Caplan

Yesterday I was on a panel on drug policy with a Virginia state senator.  As you'd expect, I made the case for full drug legalization.  And as you'd expect, he objected.  What's striking, though, is how he objected.  His top arguments for roughly sticking with the status quo:

1. Hard drugs should be banned because they cause serious health and safety problems.  Yea, so does alcohol, but the Prohibition era shows that banning alcohol was a bad idea. 

2. The people of Virginia think that illegal drugs should be illegal, but they don't think that alcohol should be illegal. 

3. There have to be boundaries.  Our boundary is that alcohol is legal for 21-year-olds, but illegal drugs are illegal for all ages. 

If I were an staunch opponent of drug legalization, I would have yearned to decry the senator's arguments as straw men.  The rejoinders are all too obvious, starting with:

1. Alcohol and tobacco cause more harm than hard drugs.  And the negative side effects of modern drug Prohibition have been more serious than the negative side effects of historical alcohol Prohibition.

2. Virginians are wrong about a great many things; why not this?

3. You can say, "There have to be boundaries" about every stupid law on Earth, past and present. 

Strictly speaking, though, none of the senator's arguments count as straw men.  Why?  Because he wasn't attacking bad arguments for a view he opposed.  He was giving bad arguments for a view he accepted.

The senator was a smart, articulate, experienced man.  Why then didn't he present decent arguments for his position?  The best explanation is also the simplest: He doesn't know any decent arguments for his position.  How is that possible?  Because the vast majority of people who favor drug prohibition don't know any decent arguments for their position, either.  No one has to foist "straw man" arguments on the mainstream; the mainstream owns those crummy arguments.

Of course, the fact that few supporters of X know any good argument for X doesn't prove they're wrong.  But it should at least make us very suspicious about the validity of X.  And this holds even if some rare bird crafts high-quality arguments for X.  As I've explained before:

Suppose I'm right that almost everyone initially supports
populist policies for inane reasons.  If some of these people grow up to
be sophisticated intellectuals, what do you think they're going to do
when they realize that the arguments that originally convinced them are
just plain stupid?  Are they going to dispassionately put aside the
worldview that inspired them to become intellectuals in the first place,
then calmly weigh the intellectually serious arguments for and against
every feel-good policy on the books?  Or are they going to act like
defense attorneys - to use their powerful intellects to zealously defend
the populist policies they've always loved?

In any case, my meeting with the senator underscored what I've long maintained: In democracies, straw men rule.  Politicians don't calmly search for the best possible policies.  They don't even calmly search for intellectually impressive arguments for popular policies.  Instead, they present popular arguments for popular policies - intellectual merit be damned.

P.S. The senator also quipped something along the lines of, "If you don't like my policy positions, run against me in the next election!"  This is directly analogous to a professional wrestler saying, "If you don't like my policy positions, let's wrestle for it!"  Winning an election, pinning a man, and being right are three very different things.

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Wars of Negligence, by Bryan Caplan

I'm a pacifist because I think that you shouldn't kill innocent people unless you're reasonably sure that such killing will have very good consequences.  Occasionally I meet a thoughtful hawk who ably disputes my skepticism.  For the most part, though, hawks are so eager to kill that they barely consider the long-run consequences of their killing.  In The Atlantic, Dominic Tierney documents that the U.S. government ignored the long-run consequences of Iraq War II, and will probably do the same in the war against ISIS. 

The case of Iraq War II:

Back in March 2003, Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense, told
Jay Garner, who was in charge of postwar reconstruction in Iraq: "I
haven't given you the time I should have given you. Quite frankly, I
just have been so engulfed in the war that I just didn't have time to
focus on everything that you're doing." Rumsfeld saw the stabilization
of Iraq as separate from, and secondary to, "the war"--when this goal
should have been the whole focus of the military plan. Similarly, Jeb
Bush recently suggested
that the United States achieve a "total victory" over ISIS, "and then
you need to forge political consensus to create a stable Syria and a
stable Iraq." Notice the "and then." Shoot first, then worry about politics.

What responsible hawks would have to figure out this time around:

Who, for example, will govern
the territory captured from ISIS? You break the caliphate, you own the
caliphate. Stabilizing Syria and Iraq is a truly daunting task. It may
require a decade-long humanitarian and peacekeeping effort. The United
States will need to play a key role in this endeavor, which will very
likely involve a commitment of American ground troops. If ISIS is pushed
out of key cities, the insurgents won't sign surrender documents like
Japan did in 1945. Instead, they'll wage a brutal campaign of terrorism
to reclaim the caliphate. Are those fighting ISIS prepared for a wave of
suicide bombings, kidnappings, and torture? Is the international
community ready to invest billions of dollars in humanitarian aid and
economic development? How will the U.S. and its allies win over Sunni
Muslims to their cause rather than ISIS's?

Why are hawks so much more eager to start killing than answer these questions?  Tierney suggests a harsh but fair answer:

These hawks may be neglecting the endgame because they fear that long-term thinking will deter
the United States from escalating the campaign against ISIS. They are
eager to obliterate the Islamic State, and they don't want to be
distracted by tough questions about, say, how Syria can be reconstructed
from the ruins of war. Look too hard before we leap, and we might
decide not to jump at all.

Or to put it more strongly, once you factor in how poorly the West is likely to handle the peace, the case for war is weak.  As I put it back in 2007:

Given the way that public
opinion works, though, intelligent hawks ought to think again.  Last year, Rumsfeld warned against "the dangers of
giving the enemy the false impression that Americans cannot stomach a tough
fight."  The study of public opinion
suggests that this is exactly the impression the Iraq War is likely to
leave. 

Next time around, intelligent hawks need to ask
themselves: "Does it really serve the national interest to take
advantage of the rally-round-the-flag effect to start a war, if public opinion
will reverse long before the war can be won?"  It's a democracy, after all; once public
opinion reverses, policy will not be far behind.

My main quarrel with Tierney's piece is that he talks as if Roosevelt and Churchill carefully planned for the post-WWII era.  If so, they apparently planned to leave half of Europe and all of China in Communist hands.  The real sordid story is that Roosevelt and Churchill, like Bush and Obama, were too obsessed with beating their current foes to focus on the aftermath.  In so doing, they set the stage for World War III, an apocalypse mankind managed to avoid only with a healthy dose of good luck.

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What Was Balkanization?, by Bryan Caplan

Here's how Dominic Lieven's The End of Tsarist Russia dissects Balkan politics in the years right before World War I:

Here Macedonia remained the key focus of instability.  The commitment of the new regime in Constantinople to centralization and Turkish nationalism made conflict in the province even sharper than before 1908... Within Macedonia, Muslims (mostly but by no means only Albanians), Greeks, and Slavs were often in conflict.  Grigorii Trubetskoy wrote that the great majority of Macedonian Slavs were currently neither truly Bulgarian nor truly Serbian.  Which direction their identity took would depend on whether the Bulgarian or Serbian government and intelligentsia came to control the region.  This gave an added twist to the rivalry of the regimes in Sofia and Belgrade.  All the governments in the region were nationalist through and through.  This was the source of their legitimacy and of most local politicians' sense of their own personal identity.  Where governments did try to show statesmanship and moderation, however, they could rely on being denounced by wide sections of their country's intelligentsia.  Worst of all, the officer corps of all states in the region were shot through with extreme and aggressive nationalist assumptions and loyalties.

On the surface, Lieven is solidly in the "realist" camp that traces war to conflicts of national self-interest.  (See also here and here).  Read closely, however, Lieven's definition of "national self-interest" is so psychological - so intertwined with being a people - that objective interests count for almost nothing.  Russians didn't fight World War I for Russia.  They fought World War I for Russianness. 

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Dying of Humiliation, by Bryan Caplan

Lieven's The End of Tsarist Russia subtly proposes a novel theory of Russia's disastrous entry into World War I: Millions died to spare Russia's elites from feelings of humiliation. 

First, Lieven sets the stage:

Revolution at home had undermined the Russian war effort against Japan in 1905 and forced the government to sign a humiliating peace.

And:

Europeans operating outside their continent might be rivals, but they shared a strong sense of racial and cultural superiority over natives they were suppressing.  But the Slavs living on what Vienna perceived as its semicolonial periphery had a great-power Slav protector in Russia, which often identified with them in cultural terms, and was likely to see their humiliation as its own.

As war approached:

The Russian press coined the unhelpful phrase "diplomatic Tsushima" to describe Russia's surrender to German and Austrian pressure at the climax of the Bosnian crisis.  The phrase was an exaggeration, but it reflected the mood of Russian public opinion and its acute sensitivity to further defeat and humiliation.  This was the most important legacy of the Bosnian crisis...  At the very outset of the crisis, the Russian foreign minister, Serge Sazonov, stressed to the German ambassador in Petersburg, Count Pourtales, that Russia sought peace and was very open to compromise, but the one thing it would never again tolerate was being faced with ultimatums or having its back forced to the wall as in 1909.  Both Pourtales and the Austrian ambassador, Count Douglas Thurn, believed Sazonov and made this reality very clear to their governments.  Thurn repeated on numerous occasions during the Balkan crisis that although the Russia leadership sought and badly needed peace, it would accept even a nearly hopeless war rather than face further humiliation: "The defeat of 1909 has left far too deep a legacy here for any Russian government, however peacefully disposed, to be able to survive any repetition of this event."  Nothing had changed by July 1914, when Russia faced the choice between war and surrender to an even more peremptory and humiliating Austro-German challenge.

Nicholas de Basily, deputy head of Russia's foreign ministry, is particularly explicit:

To back down in the face of this challenge [the July 1914 crisis] would, he wrote, have been "cowardice" and "a humiliation."  The Austrian military attache Prince Franz Hohenlohe was a personal friend.  Shortly after the assassination of the Austrian heir, Hohenlohe said to Basily that fear of revolution must surely dictate to Russia's rulers the avoidance of war.  Basily answered that "you commit a serious error of calculation in supposing [that] the fear of revolution will prevent Russia from fulfilling its national duty."

All this raises to a broader question: Was dread of national humiliation limited to Russia?  If not - and it's hard to believe it was - then Lieven inadvertently suggests a novel theory of World War I itself.  Namely: It was fought for leaders' emotions, not nations' interests.  Any of the major participants could
have unilaterally saved their countries - and Europe itself - by swallowing their pride.  But none were willing to efface their egos to spare millions of lives.



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The Center Will Hold: My 10:1 Bet Stands, by Bryan Caplan

Despite much gruesome Schadenfreude on Twitter, I stand by the terms of my 10:1 bet that no European country that was not Communist in 1988 will have a civil war resulting in 10,000 or more fatalities by December 31, 2045.  While I am microscopically less sure than I was when I made the bet, I left myself a comfortable margin of error.  The dust will settle, and the center will hold.

If you think that makes me a dogmatic fool, accept my terms and await my inevitable impoverishment and humiliation.  And no, Francois Hollande's statement that "France is at war" doesn't prove me wrong.  I bet on numbers - not rhetoric - for a reason. 

I am markedly more worried that I will lose my related bet with Raphael Franck that "The total number of deaths in France from riots and terrorism will be less than 500 between May 28, 2008 and May 28, 2018."  But I still think my odds of winning are 80%, down from the 93% or so I initially believed.

I never mean to be insensitive, but if we abandon numeracy, the terrorists win.

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Iraq: Disaster By Popular Demand, by Bryan Caplan

Here's my April, 2007 op-ed on voter irrationality that never found a home.

"Power
to the people" - war protestors have been saying it for decades.   The more you study public opinion, though,
the more peculiar this slogan seems.  When
fighting started in Iraq,
the American public backed the war by three-to-one.  So in all honesty, isn't it "the
people" who got us where we are today?

True,
some support stemmed from our leaders' deceptive advertising.  But we can still fault the public for being gullible;
this is hardly the first time our leaders have bent the truth to enter a
war.  In any case, leaders don't have to
lie to get the public behind them.  Almost
every war begins with strong public
support.  Public opinion researchers call
this the "rally-round-the-flag" effect.  Strange as it sounds, simply entering a war makes the war popular - for a while.

Who
am I to second-guess public opinion? 
Fortunately, I don't have to. 
Another well-established pattern is that, given time, the public
second-guesses itself.  The rally-round-the-flag effect doesn't last
forever.  As political scientist John
Mueller documents, after a year or so of foreseeable troubles, public support
for wars steadily drops.  The remarkable
fact about the Iraq
war is that it already unpopular, even though, by the standards of Korea or Vietnam, casualties
remain low.

Now
think about the incentives that the public gives its leaders.  The rally-round-the-flag effect means that,
for any semi-plausible war, decision-makers can count on a burst of popular
support.  It also means that Doubting
Thomases who express reservations at the outset of a conflict are risking their
careers.  In short, public opinion gives
leaders an incentive to start wars, cross their fingers, and hope things work
out - and skeptics an incentive to keep their criticism to themselves until it
is too late to do much good.

It
gets worse.  If you give the public a year,
some casualties, and some scandals - all of which are practically inevitable -
public support drops off.  But this hardly
compensates for earlier bad incentives. 
Before the majority grows disillusioned, the politicians who planned the
war have frequently been reelected.  Yes,
the swing in public opinion gives opponents - and even friends - of the current
regime incentives to reverse course.  But
public opinion gives them these incentives whether or not continued support for
the war has become the lesser evil.  Would-be
critics who were cowed by public opinion during the early phase of the war now
have an incentive to pander - to paint withdrawal as a virtual free lunch.

Considering
the incentives that politicians face, we should be grateful that fiascos like
the Iraq
war are so rare.  Leaders could  be a lot less
responsible without forfeiting public support. 
If the public greeted plans for war with hard questions instead of flag-waving,
politicians would be a lot more cautious - and we would be a lot less likely to
get in over our heads.

In
the eyes of some observers, admittedly, the main thing to be cautious of is
caution itself.  Dangerous times call for
decisive action.  As Kennedy advisor Dean
Acheson once told a skeptical professor: "You think the President should
be warned. You're wrong.  The President
should be given confidence."

If the
rally-round-the-flag effect lasted forever, the Achesons of the world might be
right.  I'm skeptical, but it's
possible.  Given the way that public
opinion works, though, intelligent hawks ought to think again.  Last year, Rumsfeld warned against "the dangers of
giving the enemy the false impression that Americans cannot stomach a tough
fight."  The study of public opinion
suggests that this is exactly the impression the Iraq War is likely to
leave. 

Next time around, intelligent hawks need to ask
themselves: "Does it really serve the national interest to take
advantage of the rally-round-the-flag effect to start a war, if public opinion
will reverse long before the war can be won?"  It's a democracy, after all; once public
opinion reverses, policy will not be far behind.

During the 2008
election, candidates are sure to tell us a great deal about "what the
American people want."  Every
candidate proudly claims to have a hand on the pulse of the nation.  But in truth, it is pretty easy to find out
what Americans want.  A vast quantity of
high-quality public opinion data on virtually every political topic is only a
mouse click away.  If the candidates
cared about good policy half as much as they care about getting elected, they
would ask a different - and harder  - question:
"Do the policies that the American people want actually make sense?" 

Bryan Caplan is an Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason
University, and the
author of The
Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies (Princeton
University Press).

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Open Borders Meets the Writers Workshop, by Bryan Caplan

The staunchly anti-immigration US Inc. invited me to present my case for open borders.  Here's what I told them.



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Meta-Crisis, by Bryan Caplan

Whenever new shocking news breaks, I remember what Robert Higgs wrote back in 1987:

[W]e do know something - at least abstractly - about the future.  We
know that other great crises will come.  Whether they will be occasioned
by foreign wars, economic collapse, or rampant terrorism, no one can
predict with assurances.  Yet in one form of another, great crises will
surely come again... When they do, governments almost certainly will
gain new powers over economic and social affairs... For those who
cherish individual liberty and a free society, the prospect is deeply
disheartening.

The constant miracle, to my mind, is that so much liberty endures...

P.S. Hope to see you at the Open Borders Meetup this weekend.  Email me for details.

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