Bryan Caplan's Blog, page 90
November 13, 2016
The Excellent and Admirable Alex Tabarrok, by Bryan Caplan
Here's my speech delivered Friday at the fiftieth birthday of the noble Alex Tabarrok.
Today we celebrate
Alex Tabarrok's fiftieth birthday. Alas,
fifty years is far too short a time to live alongside such an excellent and
admirable hobbit!
If you're here, you're
nerdy enough to know I'm borrowing the words of Bilbo Baggins from chapter 1 of
The Fellowship of the Ring. Which is fitting, because we're all here to
celebrate a stupendous nerd. Think about
his descriptors!
Professor.
Husband of a
professor.
Father of two future
professors.
Economist.
Blogger.
Online educator.
Textbook author.
Libertarian.
Pharmaceutical
regulation expert.
Rush fan.
Still, Alex is hardly the biggest nerd I know. Once in a while I step
inside his office to remind him, "I'm a way bigger nerd than you." But while the competition is tight, Alex is
definitely the most lovable nerd I
know.
How lovable is Alex
Tabarrok? Well, I barge into his office
an average of... five hundred times a day.
Why? One time in five hundred, I
want his professional opinion on my research.
The other 499 times, however, I'm bored, and require him to amuse
me. And he always does! This man is busy being a professor, husband
of a professor, father of two future professors, economist, blogger, online
educator, textbook author, libertarian, pharmaceutical regulation expert, and
Rush fan. And he sets all ten hats
aside, dumps the pile of junk off his guest chair, and welcomes me. He welcomes me!
And what a joy his
welcome is. Alex converses insightfully
on any subject nerdy enough to fit in my head.
Better yet, he converses with unfailing good humor. When I open up my mouth and blurt my thoughts,
I don't know if Alex will think I'm right, or even sane. But I know he'll never speak an angry word to
me.
Why, though, must I
barge in on Alex five hundred times a day?
To totally misuse a textbook concept, Alex has the Winner's Curse. Tyler has repeatedly stated that out of
everyone we know, Alex is the best truth-tracker. He is, quite simply, the most likely to be
correct on any given issue. Which means,
by the Laws of Magical Thinking, that I can make anything true by convincing
Alex. Since I believe many outlandish
things, I'm lucky that he's conveniently located thirty feet away from me.
But Alex isn't just a
delightful polymath. He is my big
brother, who watches out for me and assures me everything will be okay. A few times in my life, I have been so
distraught, I didn't know where to turn.
Then I remembered that Alex was only thirty feet away, and has never let
me down.
One of my personal
rules is: Never make people bend the truth at your funeral. Alex, the economist with a heart of gold,
goes much further. He doesn't even make me
bend the truth at his fiftieth birthday party!
I love you, Alex. If you love him
half as much as I do, please raise your glass to this excellent and admirable
Tabarrok.
(1 COMMENTS)
November 9, 2016
I Win All My Election Bets, by Bryan Caplan
1. Nathaniel Bechhofer bet me 2:1 that Clinton would win the presidential election. I bet against.
2. A bunch of people bet me Gary Johnson would win 5% of the popular vote. I bet against.
3. Nathaniel Bechhofer bet me at even odds that Trump would concede by Saturday. I bet against.
I always bet my beliefs, not my wishes. So sadly, I have won all three bets, leaving my perfect public betting record intact. What about Brexit? Britain is still in the EU for now. I'll pay when it officially leaves and not a minute before. And if it's still in on January 1, 2020, I want my money.
P.S. I'm especially disappointed to lose to Bechhofer because there would be no shame in losing to a man of his tremendous intellect. Feel better, my friend.
(7 COMMENTS)
November 7, 2016
One Last Election Bet, by Bryan Caplan
(8 COMMENTS)
November 4, 2016
My Intellectual Insurance Policy, by Bryan Caplan
Very sad, but there is a silver lining: My views provide me with a strange intellectual insurance policy. The more my normative ideals lose, the more my descriptive views win. If political disaster strikes, I can claim victory for my social science. And if great policy reforms come to pass, I can claim victory for my political philosophy. Whatever happens, either I win as a scholar or I win as a human being.
It's a small consolation, but it's something.
(8 COMMENTS)
November 3, 2016
The Divisiveness of Cohesion, by Bryan Caplan
What's the best way to bring this cohesion about? Your all-too-human impulse is to loudly preach the value of cohesion. But on reflection, this is probably counter-productive. When members of Group B hear you, they're going to take "cohesion" as a euphemism for "abandon your identity, and submit to the dominance of Group A." None too enticing. And when members of Group A notice Group B's recalcitrance, they're probably going to think, "We offer Group B the olive branch of cohesion, and they spit in our faces. Typical." Instead of forging As and Bs into one people, preaching cohesion tears them further apart.
What's the alternative? Simple. Instead of preaching cohesion, reach out to Group B. Unilaterally show them respect. Unilaterally show them friendliness. They'll be distrustful at first, but cohesion can't be built in a day. If respect and friendliness fail, try, try, and try again. There are no guarantees in life, but human beings are born reciprocators. If you stubbornly ask to shake a man's hand, odds are he'll eventually offer his in return. Once enough people walk this path of unilateral respect and friendliness, differences fade away - and cohesion silently takes its place.
A feel-good just-so story? I think not. Consider American politics in 2016. We're basically the same people we were a year or two ago, but preachers of cohesion have achieved a new prominence. What's happened? The American public is more divided than ever. Cohesionist themes have scared out-groups, who understandably feel threatened. And they've angried up in-groups, who understandably feel spurned. This is obvious for the Trump movement, but social justice progressives preaching "inclusion" exhibit the same dynamic. "We demand inclusion" makes outsiders feel threatened and insiders feel spurned - driving them further apart.
There's an ongoing Twitter war between the hashtags #BlackLivesMatter and #AllLivesMatter. If either side really wanted to promote cohesion, they would swap hashtags. Moderates and conservatives would reach out to African-Americans and progressives with #BlackLivesMatter. African-Americans and progressives would reach out to moderates and conservatives with #AllLivesMatter. Why won't it happen? I'll outsource that to Robin Hanson.
Summing up: The first rule of promoting cohesion is: Don't talk about cohesion. The second rule of promoting cohesion is: Don't talk about cohesion. If you really want to build a harmonious, unified society, take one for the team. Discard your anger, swallow your pride, and show out-groups unilateral respect and friendship. End of story.
P.S. Next week, I'll post if any of my election bets resolve. Otherwise, I'm hoarding my words for mid-November when election tempers have cooled.
(2 COMMENTS)
November 2, 2016
The Full Hanson-Caplan Robot Debate, by Bryan Caplan
(0 COMMENTS)
November 1, 2016
Brigham Young, Pioneer Prophet: A Biography with Depth, by Bryan Caplan
John Turner, of GMU's Religious Studies Department, has produced one of the most fascinating historical works I've read in years.
Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet
(Harvard University Press, 2012) is much more than a biography of the father of modern Utah. It's a fascinating case study in the history of religion - and the malleability of human conformity. Consider: If you wanted to found a new religion today, how would you even start? And once you did, how would you persuade your converts to embrace alien customs that outrage the mainstream society that surrounds them?Turner's careful, detailed, and elegant book begins in the early years of the 19th-century. The poverty young Brigham Young endured is all the more striking when you realize that millions of European immigrants yearned to become his neighbors.
Now forty years of age, John Young [father of Brigham] once again plunged into the
rigors of building a home, clearing land, and planting crops. Despite his exertions, he never became a
successful frontier farmer. The Youngs at least occasionally went hungry and
could rarely provide their children with adequate clothing, let alone anything
resembling a formal education. "In my youthful days," Brigham later
reminisced, "instead of going to school, I had to chop logs, to sow and
plant, to plow in the midst of roots barefooted, and if I had on a pair of
pants that would cover me I did pretty well." Brigham and his siblings
learned to provide for themselves. "My sisters would make me what was
called a Jo. Johnson cap for winter," he recalled, "and in summer I
wore a straw hat which I frequently braided for myself." Brigham had ten
siblings. His sister Nabby died shortly after their move to Smyrna, but his
four brothers and five other sisters lived into adulthood.
Turner provides a gripping tour of Brigham Young's early intellectual "shopping" in the bazaars of Protestant enthusiasm. But of course Young eventually meets Joseph Smith and becomes a loyal Mormon leader. Mainstream America's abuse of the early Mormons was no joke; they experienced the moral equivalence of exclusion and exile first hand.
Leaving his wife and children behind in Kirtland, Brigham Young
headed for Missouri... In 1836,
a citizens meeting had insisted that the Mormons leave Clay County, where the
expelled Jackson County Mormons had taken refuge across the river. Residents of
neighboring Ray County did not want Mormon refugees within their borders, but
state legislation carved two counties -- Caldwell and Daviess -- out of
northern Ray County. Caldwell County would be a new home for the Missouri
Mormons, who quickly bought out the few non-Mormon settlers, laid out a city
(Far West), designated a site for a temple, and held the county's political
offices.
After Smith's murder, as we all know, Young assumed command and led his people west to Utah in one of history's most notable "start your own country projects." This soon led to standard murder and robbery of the native population, though Turner convincingly argues that it could have been a lot worst. Mormon theology restrained Mormon brutality, but brutality there was:
[I]n late 1848 some Mormon settlers called for violent reprisals
against the prior occupants of the land. Young initially rejected such calls.
"A many Elders have prayed to be among the Lamanites," he complained,
"and now they want to kill them." He reminded his restless followers
that "they [the Indians] are the Children of Abraham, the descendents of
Israel ... the remnants of Israel." As he would frequently repeat over the
next three decades, he also told the settlers that they should not hold the
Indians to white standards of morality in cases of theft. After several more
months of cattle theft, Young changed his mind. In February 1849, several
Mormon scouts met with Little Chief, one of the leading Utah Valley Utes.
Little Chief complained about former members of his band who stole Mormon
cattle and encouraged "the big white Capatan [Young] to send up some men
and kill those ... mean Ewtes." Little Chief's motivations are unclear.
Perhaps he aimed to use the Mormons against his own enemies, or perhaps he
simply wanted to curry favor with the leaders of the rapidly growing Mormon
population. In any event, he warned the Mormon scouts that inaction would only
breed more thieves. Prompted by this suggestion, Young dropped his previous inhibitions
about killing Indians. He authorized an early March expedition that tracked the
Indians and, after they refused to surrender, killed all of the party's men
save one sixteen-year-old boy.
Back east, Mormon polygamy fueled Americans' doubts about state's rights, better known as popular sovereignty:
Church leaders hoped that the Democratic Party's doctrine of
popular sovereignty would shield Utah's domestic institutions from federal
interference... The next month, Congress passed the
Kansas-Nebraska Act, which overturned the Missouri Compromise and opened the
territories of Nebraska and Kansas to slavery should their residents so choose.
In shepherding the bill through Congress, however, the Mormons' political ally
Stephen Douglas inadvertently opened up unbridgeable sectional divides in both
of the two major parties. Southern Whigs abandoned their party to support the
expansion of slavery, whereas many anti-slavery northern Democrats found the
Missouri Compromise's repeal a pill too bitter to swallow. Out of that
political chaos, an assortment of Know-Nothing nativists, Whigs, and
anti-slavery northern Democrats coalesced into a new Republican Party. In 1856,
the Republican platform linked slavery and polygamy together as the "twin
relics of barbarism," the unholy fruit of popular sovereignty.Democrats, however much they disliked polygamy, correctly
understood the Republican position on polygamy as a backdoor attempt to
regulate territorial slavery. Thus, many southern Democrats opposed
anti-polygamy efforts. If Congress could declare territorial polygamy a crime,
why could it not prohibit slavery's further expansion? According to Utah
congressional delegate John Bernhisel, Douglas expressed his opposition
"to any interference with any local or domestic institution, for the
reason that if the principle were once recognized it would apply everywhere, to
all religious sects, slavery, etc." At the same time, though, the
Democrats recognized that any perceived support for the Mormons would imperil
the party's doctrine of popular sovereignty. Indeed, in order to discredit
Douglas's political creed, in 1857 an abolitionist newspaper mocked the Mormons
as "freaks of popular sovereignty."
Whatever you think about Young's divine inspiration, his poor grasp of economics was all-too-human. Apologists will whisper of the political externalities of immigration, but it's all jumbled together with textbook sophisms and misanthropy
...Young
worried that the railroad's impending arrival would bring a host of non-Mormon
settlers to Utah and bolster the economic power of non-Mormon merchandizing
houses. Young considered most non-Mormon merchants at least tacit supporters of
the political and military clique that sought the overthrow of Mormon political
and economic supremacy. Economic carpetbaggers, they were "[m]issionaries
of evil" and the church's "avowed enemies." On at least one
occasion, Young singled out Jewish merchants as the particular target of his
contempt. "There are Jews here," he warned in the spring of 1869.
"They are not our friends. Do not trade with them. They do not Believe in
Jesus Christ.Young expected non-Mormons
merchants to pursue their own self-interest, but he believed that the
territory's Mormon merchants also valued mammon more highly than the welfare of
the church and its members. Like leeches, they drained an industrious and
righteous citizenry of its economic blood, charging the highest possible prices
for the goods they imported or otherwise obtained. "They will get
sorrow," Young warned in 1864, "the most of them will be damned."
Three years later, Young noted that one of the earliest of Joseph Smith's
revelations instructed a merchant to "sell goods without fraud," a
commandment Young accused the city's Mormon merchants of breaking by selling
merchandize at inflated prices. Young's criticisms were not unusual in
post-Civil War America. As the railroad extended the sway of city-based
wholesalers and bankers across the Great West, many Americans in the western hinterland
concluded that merchants and bankers profited at their expense through corrupt
and cruel practices.Knowing an economic battle loomed, Young made plans to hold as
much ground as possible. The first prong of his response was a boycott of
non-Mormon merchants, announced in 1865. While many Mormons failed to comply
with this directive, enough toed the line to persuade twenty-three Gentile
merchants to offer their stock to the church. Even so, non-Mormon trading
houses continued to thrive. Walker Brothers, the territory's largest
merchandizing operation and run by former Mormons, annually cleared upwards of
a half-million dollars by the end of the decade.
Turner closes with some fascinating thoughts on leadership and political slack:
I read many books on obscure topics, but rarely cover-to-cover. But once I started Brigham Young, Pioneer Prophet, I had to hear the whole story. At root, this book isn't about Mormons. It's about humanity's capacity for weirdness - and the bedrock of normality on which the weirdest weirdness rests. (0 COMMENTS)Over the course of the twentieth century, Mormonism became
super-patriotic, more fully reconciled to American capitalism, and in
occasional partnership with politically conservative evangelicals. Once
regarded as notorious sexual deviants by most other Americans, the Latter-day
Saints eventually became vocal defenders of heterosexual monogamy. Especially after
the church began excommunicating persons for practicing polygamy in the early
1900s, some Mormons formed splinter churches that retained what they saw as key
articles of the faith as expressed by Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, including
polygamy. Many fundamentalist Mormons also adhered to Young's identification of
Adam as God, which Young's successors gradually rejected. Most of Young's
ecclesiastical descendents, however, found it necessary to move away from the
aspects of his vision that could not peacefully or prosperously exist within
the United States.The rapid evolution of the church after Young's death provides an
ironic testimony to the strength of his leadership. George Q. Cannon later
revealed that some of his ecclesiastical associates complained that Young had
"ruled with so strong and stiff a hand" that they "dare[d] not
exhibit their feelings to him." Furthermore, they alleged "that the
funds of the Church have been used with a freedom not warranted by the authority
which he held."
October 26, 2016
Yet Another Reply to Huemer on the Ethical Treatment of Animals, by Bryan Caplan
My main reactions:My argument may not change the minds of people who are convinced that factory farming is unacceptable, but I think it's very useful at (a) changing the minds of people who are genuinely undecided, and (b) clarifying the views of people who have modest doubts about conventional treatment of animals.
I. The argument from insects has too many controversial assumptions to
be useful. We should instead look more directly at Bryan's theoretical
account of how factory farming could be acceptable.
Disagree on both counts; see below.
II. That theory is ad hoc and lacks intrinsic intuitive or theoretical plausibility.
III. There are much more natural theories, which don't support factory farming.
I.
To elaborate on (I), it looks like (after the explanations in his latest post), Bryan is assuming:
a. Insects feel pain that is qualitatively like the suffering that, e.g., cows on factory farms feel.
b. If (a) is true, it is still permissible to kill bugs
indiscriminately, e.g., we don't even have good reason to reduce our
driving by 10%.(a) and (b) are too controversial to be good
starting points to try to figure out other controversial animal ethics
issues. I and (I think) most others reject (a);
You might be right about how many people believe (a), but I suspect my view is actually more common. Pain has great evolutionary value. So why wouldn't bugs feel pain?
I also think (b) is very
non-obvious (especially to animal welfare advocates).
As my original post noted, even conscientious people like Mike put little mental effort into investigating whether bugs feel pain. Which to me strongly suggests they find (b) pretty obvious.
Finally, note
that most animal welfare advocates claim that factory farming is wrong
because of the great suffering of animals on factory farms (not just
because of the killing of the animals), which is mostly due to the
conditions in which they are raised. Bugs aren't raised in such
conditions, and the amount of pain a bug would endure upon being hit by a
car (if it has any pain at all) might be less than the pain it would
normally endure from a natural death. So I think Bryan would also have
to use assumption (c):
I haven't investigated how horribly bugs suffer when humans accidentally kill them. But it seems entirely possible that humans condemn trillions of bugs to excruciating, drawn-out deaths every year. My moral theory implies there's little need for me to investigate this issue. But if you really doubt (b), it's a vital question. And since animal welfare advocates put little time into investigating (b), I infer they probably tacitly agree with me.
c. If factory farming is wrong, it's wrong
because it's wrong to painfully kill sentient beings, not, e.g.,
because it's wrong to raise them in conditions of almost constant
suffering, nor because it's wrong to create beings with net negative
utility, etc.
I could be wrong, but I think most people - regardless of their views on the ethical treatment of animals - would see little difference between these moral theories. Either you find them all plausible, or you find none plausible. Hence (c) is barely at issue.
II.
What
would be more promising? Let's just look at Bryan's account of the
badness of pain and suffering. (Note: I include all forms of suffering
as bad, not merely sensory pain.) I think his view must be something
like what the graph below depicts.
As your intelligence increases, the moral badness of your pain increases. But it's a non-linear function. In particular:
i. The graph starts out almost horizontal. But somewhere between the
intelligence of a typical cow and that of a typical human, the graph
takes a sharp upturn, soaring up about a million times higher than where
it was for the cow IQ. This is required in order to say that the pain
of billions of farm animals is unimportant, and yet also claim that
similar pain for (a much smaller number of) humans is very important.
ii. But then the graph very quickly turns almost horizontal again. This
is required in order to make it so that the interests of a very smart
human, such as Albert Einstein, don't wind up being vastly more
important than those of the rest of us. Also, so that even smarter
aliens can't inflict great pain on us for the sake of minor amusements
for themselves.Sure, this is a logically possible (not
contradictory) view.
Your graph accurately describes my view.
However, it's also very plausible to me that the gap in intelligence between cows and the average human is so enormous that even a linear value function would yield similar results. This is trivially true on a conventional IQ test, where all bugs and cows would score zero. But it seems substantively true for any reasonable intelligence test: Bugs' and cows' ability to evaluate or construct even simple logical arguments stems from their deficient intellects, not inability to communicate. Or at least that seems clear to me.
But it is very odd and (to me) hard to believe. It
isn't obvious to begin with why IQ makes a difference to the badness of
pain. But assuming it does, features (i) and (ii) above are very odd. Is
there any explanation of either of these things? Can someone even think
of a possible explanation? If you just think about this theory on its
own (without considering, for example, how it impacts your own interests
or what it implies about your own behavior), would anyone have thought
this was how it worked? Would anyone find this intuitively obvious? As a
famous ethical intuiter, I must say that this doesn't strike me as
intuitive at all.
Then we have a deep clash of intuitions. My bug hypotheticals were meant to overcome such clashes. But if those seem lame to you, we are at an impasse.
Now, that graph might be a fair account of most people's implicit attitudes. But what is the best explanation for that:
1) That we have directly intuited the brute, unexplained moral facts that the above graph depicts, or
2) That we are biased?
I think we can know that explanation (1) is not the case. We can know
that because we can just think about the major claims in this theory,
and see if they're self-evident. They aren't.
Again, the idea that the well-being of creatures of human intelligence is much more morally important than the well-being of cows or bugs seems quite self-evident to me. And it also seems self-evident to the vast majority of creatures capable of comprehending the idea.
To me, explanation
(2) thrusts itself forward. How convenient that this drastic upturn in
moral significance occurs after the IQ level of all the animals we like
the taste of, but before the IQ level of any of us. Good thing the
inexplicable upturn doesn't occur between bug-IQ and cow-IQ (or even
earlier). Good thing it goes up by a factor of a million before reaching
human IQ, and not just a factor of a hundred or a thousand, because
otherwise we'd have to modify our behavior anyway.And how
convenient again that the moral significance suddenly levels off again.
Good thing it doesn't just keep going up, because then smart people or
even smarter aliens would be able to discount our suffering in the same
way that we discount the suffering of all the creatures whose suffering
we profit from.
I don't see how your case for alleged bias is any stronger than the standard utilitarians' claim that affluent First Worlders are too biased to see their moral duty to give all their surplus wealth to the global poor. The same goes for numerous other onerous-and-implausible moral duties, like our duty to create as many children as possible, or perhaps the duty to adopt as many needy orphans as possible.
In all of these cases, I admit, we should calmly reflect on our potential bias. I've genuinely tried. But even when I bend over backwards to adjust for my alleged bias against animals, I keep getting the same answer: They barely matter.
[...]
Imagine a person living in the slavery era,
who claims that the moral significance of a person's well-being is
inversely related to their skin pigmentation (this is a brute moral fact
that you just have to see intuitively), and that the graph of moral
significance as a function of skin pigmentation takes a sudden, drastic
drop just after the pigmentation level of a suntanned European but
before that of a typical mulatto.
One of my strongest intuitions is that mental traits have a large effect on moral value, while physical traits do not. You really don't share this intuition?
III.
A more natural
view would be, e.g., that the graph of "pain badness" versus IQ would
just be a line. Or maybe a simple concave or convex curve. But then we
wouldn't be able to just carry on doing what is most convenient and
enjoyable for us.I mentioned, also, that the moral significance of
IQ was not obvious to me. But here is a much more plausible theory that
is in the same neighborhood. Degree of cognitive sophistication matters
to the badness of pain, because:1. There are degrees of consciousness (or self-awareness).
2. The more conscious a pain is, the worse it is. E.g., if you can
divert your attention from a pain that you're having, it becomes less
bad. If there could be a completely unconscious pain, it wouldn't be bad
at all.
3. The creatures we think of as less intelligent are also,
in general, less conscious. That is, all their mental states have a low
level of consciousness. (Perhaps bugs are completely non-conscious.)
I think this theory is much more believable and less ad hoc than
Bryan's theory. Point 2 strikes me as independently intuitive (unlike
the brute declaration that IQ matters to badness of pain). Points 1 and 3
strike me as reasonable, and while I wouldn't say they are obviously
correct, I also don't think there is anything odd or puzzling about
them.
What's odd/puzzling to me is (3). Why would bugs or cows would be less conscious of their pain than we are? If anything, I'd think less intelligent creatures' minds would focus on their physical survival, while smart creatures' minds often wander to impractical topics.
This theory does not look like it was just designed to give us the
moral results that are convenient for us.
Of course, the "cost" is
that this theory does not in fact give us the moral results that are
most convenient for us... But it just isn't plausible that the
difference in level of consciousness is so great that the human pain is a
million times worse than the (otherwise similar) cow pain.
I fear we're at an impasse. But let me say this: If Mike convinced me that animal pain were morally important, I would live as he does. I'd stop eating meat and wearing leather. I'd desperately search for a cruelty-free way to get dairy; but if I couldn't, I'd even give up ice cream. I understand Mike.* What I don't understand is people who claim to agree with him, but don't repent and live a cruelty-free life.
* Well, almost. If I thought like Mike, I would also evangelically focus my intellectual career on the ethical treatment of animals, and spend thousands of hours reading biology journals to learn more about which animals feel how much pain. I know Mike hasn't done the former, and doubt he's done the latter. And I don't understand why he hasn't.
October 25, 2016
Robert Tollison, 1942-2016: We're All Part of the Equilibrium, by Bryan Caplan
My former colleague Robert Tollison has passed away. I still remember the tour of Carow Hall he gave me when I was interviewing in 1997. Though we only overlapped at GMU for one year, he was an unforgettable personality. My strongest memory: At a Liberty Fund in Bozeman, Montana in the summer of 1997, someone expressed despair at economists' inability to improve the world. Tollison responded with this aphorism, which I've repeated ever since:"We're all part of the equilibrium."His point: It's a huge world, so no individual can reasonably expect to make a visible difference. But each of us pushes the world just a smidge in his desired direction - and our small efforts add up. In the end, Tollison inspired my paper on how economists can (and do) change the world.
Farewell, Bob. I'll miss you.
(0 COMMENTS)
October 24, 2016
Elections Are Surveys: The Case of AIP, by Bryan Caplan
For a comic illustration of this insight, see this fascinating story about registration for the American Independent Party (AIP) in California. From the LA Times:
With nearly half a million registered members, the American
Independent Party is bigger than all of California's other minor parties
combined. The ultraconservative party's platform opposes abortion
rights and same sex marriage, and calls for building a fence along the
entire United States border...
But a Times investigation has found that a majority of its
members have registered with the party in error. Nearly three in four
people did not realize they had joined the party...
What went wrong? Voters treated their party registration forms about as seriously as any other survey:
Voters from all walks of life were confused by the use of the word
"independent" in the party's name, according to The Times analysis.
Residents of rural and urban communities, students and
business owners and top Hollywood celebrities with known Democratic
leanings -- including Sugar Ray Leonard, Demi Moore and Emma Stone -- were
among those who believed they were declaring that they preferred no
party affiliation when they checked the box for the American Independent
Party.[...]
Of the 500 AIP voters surveyed by a bipartisan team of pollsters, fewer
than 4% could correctly identify their own registration as a member of
the American Independent Party.
How is this different from product confusion on, say, Amazon? Two big ways. First, customers have an incentive to check their work, because ordering the wrong product is selfishly costly. Second, customers can easily check their work, because they directly experience their purchase once it arrives in the mail. When voters face the choice to go AIP, in contrast, they have no selfish incentive to review their order. And since each voter is just a grain of sand on the beach of politics, they can overlook their error indefinitely - or at least until the LA Times comes calling.
P.S. The AIP registration expose also neatly illustrates the principle that rare survey answers tend to be even rarer than they look. If a survey found 2% of Americans favored abolishing the minimum wage, for example, we should suspect that many of those who said "abolish" misunderstood the question or misspoke.
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