a fascinating new paper in The Journal of Democracy suggest[ing] that liberal democracy is losing ground even at home, in the West. Political scientists Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk review data from recent World Values Surveys and observe some truly remarkable trends, especially among young people. Young people often reject the traditions of their elders; that’s nothing new. What they seem to be rejecting nowadays, though, in increasing numbers, is the tradition of liberalism itself.
For example, the percentage of people in Western Europe and the United States who say it is “essential” for them to live in a democratically-governed country has declined dramatically across generations. In the United States, less than one-third of millennials—defined as people born since 1980—say it is essential for them. Think about that: More than two-thirds of American young people say democratic government is not a crucial factor in where they would want to live.
According to Foa and Mounk, these numbers do not reflect growing indifference to liberal democracy, but growing opposition. In the surveys, young people increasingly express openness to authoritarianism—especially young people who are rich. An astonishing 35 percent of wealthy young Americans say it would be “a ‘good’ thing for the army to take over” the country! This is a profound change from prior generations, in which “affluent citizens were much more likely than people of lower income groups to defend democratic institutions.”
…The surveys reveal that younger Americans value civil liberties, such as free speech, less than their parents did. For example, only 32 percent of millennials say that civil rights are “absolutely essential” in a democracy, a steep drop from previous generations.
There are criticisms of democracy,[ref]For example, I look forward to reading the newly-published Against Democracy by Jason Brennan.[/ref] but the increasing support for authoritarianism and censorship[ref]The latest Freedom in the World report found that global freedom has declined for the 10th consecutive year.[/ref] is rather frightening.
Most research on the effects of immigration focuses on the effects of immigrants as adding to the supply of labor. By contrast, this paper studies the effects of immigrants on local labor demand, due to the increase in consumer demand for local services created by immigrants. This effect can attenuate downward pressure from immigrants on non-immigrants’ wages, and also benefit non-immigrants by increasing the variety of local services available. For this reason, immigrants can raise native workers’ real wages, and each immigrant could create more than one job. Using US Census data from 1980 to 2000, we find considerable evidence for these effects: Each immigrant creates 1.2 local jobs for local workers, most of them going to native workers, and 62% of these jobs are in non-traded services. Immigrants appear to raise local non-tradables sector wages and to attract native-born workers from elsewhere in the country. Overall, it appears that local workers benefit from the arrival of more immigrants.
Extreme poverty worldwide has been declining over the past few decades (unbeknowst to most Americans) with the chance of eradicating it by 2030. Organizations are testing new anti-poverty programs, including a 10-year experiment with guaranteed basic income in Kenya. One program titled Graduation “included 10,495 households in Ethiopia, Ghana, Honduras, India, Pakistan, and Peru. Almost half of the families in the study lived on less than $1.25 a day.” The results of this experiment were published last year:
The specifics of Graduation varied by country, but the basic premise was the same. All the Graduation programs gave families some kind of “productive asset,” such as sheep, goats, seed corn, bees, or small shops. They all provided training on how to build a business using the assets, and gave food or cash aid to the families for up to a year, in part to discourage them from eating or selling their “productive asset.” The programs also gave families access to a savings account, and some programs required that families contributed to the account regularly.
One year after the program ended, researchers found that Graduation families bought more, owned more, spent more time working, were more politically active, and missed fewer meals than similar families who hadn’t enrolled in the program. The changes were all statistically significant, but, the researchers note, not very large.[ref]”The exception was Honduras,” the author writes, “where families didn’t consume more one year after the end of Graduation (though they did immediately after the program ended). The driving factor there was likely that most Hondurans chose chickens as their productive asset, and most of the chickens died of illness a year after Graduation finished[.]”[/ref]
Admittedly, the program “is expensive, costing between $3,000 to $6,000 per household, depending on the country. But in five out of the six countries the researchers studied, Graduation provided a slight positive return on investment because households in those countries ended up consuming more — thus paying more money into their local economies — than it cost to aid them.”
I’m excited about these experiments and the future of evidence-based policies and programs. I’ve often complained (privately) over the years about the “solutions” to poverty by both the American Right and Left. To generalize in a rather cynical way, the Left assumes that if you throw money at the problem, it will go away. The Right, on the other hand, just thinks the poor should “pull themselves up by their bootstraps.” To soften it a tad, the Left believes in providing the poor with resources/capital. The Right believes that to truly rise out of poverty requires proper incentives, behaviors, and work. Programs like the one above might demonstrate that “the true answer to poverty requires a little bit of everything: Teaching people how to fish, giving them fishing nets, and giving them the fish too.”
There is another pharma scandal in the news over the astronomical increase in EpiPen’s price. Yet, before we begin to blame and denounce the abstraction “capitalism” for all our woes, it might be useful to recall my post on the Shkreli/Daraprim scandal and its discussion of healthcare regulations. This new case appears to be incredibly similar and the site Slate Star Codex has an excellent post contrasting the way the drug industry operates compared to the chair industry:
when was the last time that America’s chair industry hiked the price of chairs 400% and suddenly nobody in the country could afford to sit down? When was the last time that the mug industry decided to charge $300 per cup, and everyone had to drink coffee straight from the pot or face bankruptcy? When was the last time greedy shoe executives forced most Americans to go barefoot? And why do you think that is?
The answer?:
The problem with the pharmaceutical industry isn’t that they’re unregulated just like chairs and mugs. The problem with the pharmaceutical industry is that they’re part of a highly-regulated cronyist system that works completely differently from chairs and mugs.
If a chair company decided to charge $300 for their chairs, somebody else would set up a woodshop, sell their chairs for $250, and make a killing – and so on until chairs cost normal-chair-prices again.
And in his final act, he drives the point all the way home (worth quoting at length):
Imagine that the government creates the Furniture and Desk Association, an agency which declares that only IKEA is allowed to sell chairs. IKEA responds by charging $300 per chair. Other companies try to sell stools or sofas, but get bogged down for years in litigation over whether these technically count as “chairs”. When a few of them win their court cases, the FDA shoots them down anyway for vague reasons it refuses to share, or because they haven’t done studies showing that their chairs will not break, or because the studies that showed their chairs will not break didn’t include a high enough number of morbidly obese people so we can’t be sure they won’t break. Finally, Target spends tens of millions of dollars on lawyers and gets the okay to compete with IKEA, but people can only get Target chairs if they have a note signed by a professional interior designer saying that their room needs a “comfort-producing seating implement” and which absolutely definitely does not mention “chairs” anywhere, because otherwise a child who was used to sitting on IKEA chairs might sit down on a Target chair the wrong way, get confused, fall off, and break her head.
…Imagine that this whole system is going on at the same time that IKEA spends millions of dollars lobbying senators about chair-related issues, and that these same senators vote down a bill preventing IKEA from paying off other companies to stay out of the chair industry. Also, suppose that a bunch of people are dying each year of exhaustion from having to stand up all the time because chairs are too expensive unless you’ve got really good furniture insurance, which is totally a thing and which everybody is legally required to have.
And now imagine that a news site responds with an article saying the government doesn’t regulate chairs enough.
Economist Bryan Caplan–himself not a utilitarian–argues that a utilitarian case can be made against abortion. His four main arguments are:
“Almost everyone is glad to be alive. The unwanted infant may have a below-average quality of life, but below-average is usually excellent nonetheless.”
“There is a long waiting list – hence excess demand – to adopt healthy infants, so birth mothers need not raise their unwanted children.”
“Due to the endowment effect, unwanted children often become wanted by their birth mother once they’re born – as many would-be adoptive parents discover to their sorrow.”
“Women who just miss the legal cutoff for abortion seem to quickly recover emotionally. Pregnant women who think “A baby will ruin my life” are, on average, factually mistaken.”
Utilitarianism isn’t my favorite approach to ethics, but it can yield some fruitful insights.
According to Richard Reeves and Dimitrios Halikias at the Brookings Institution, “the movement of less-skilled workers to higher-growth areas has not risen in recent years, a break with the historical pattern[.]” It seems that regulation is the culprit. “The number of court cases mentioning “land use” (an innovative measure of regulation used in a Hutchins Center working paper by Peter Ganong and Daniel Shoag) has risen steadily:”
“The Hutchins paper,” the authors continue, “complements earlier economic analyses, including a study published last year by Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti which estimates that the U.S. economy is 14 percent smaller as a result of constraints on housing development…By using local government powers to zone out lower-income families, upper middle class Americans protect the value of their homes. (Federal policy helps, of course, by regressively supporting richer home owners through mortgage interest deductions.)” Zoning acts as a kind of “opportunity hoarding,” even when it comes to elementary education:
According to Jonathan Rothwell, there is a strong link between zoning and educational disparities. Homes near good elementary schools are more expensive: about two and half times as much as those near the poorer-performing schools. But in metropolitan areas with more restrictive zoning, this gap is even wider. Loosening zoning regulations would reduce the housing cost gap and therefore narrow the school test-score gap by 4 to 7 percentiles, Rothwell finds.
Some of the most effective things are also some of the most mundane.
Among 17 Republican appointees who responded to Journal inquiries, none said they supported Mr. Trump. Six said they did not support Mr. Trump and 11 declined to say either way. An additional six did not respond to repeated messages. Among the 21 Democrats who responded to the Journal, 14 said they supported Mrs. Clinton, none said they opposed her and seven declined to say either way. One Democratic appointee didn’t respond to messages.
Check out the full article to see what the economists are saying.
As of now, both major presidential candidates oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. Trump’s position isn’t all that surprising, while Clinton’s is a complete flip-flop.[ref]It’s odd to find that Democrats are moresupportive of free trade than their supposedly capitalism-loving Republican opponents.[/ref] With trade openness being challenged in both American politics and abroad, it’s important to review what scholarship says about free trade. For example, a new IMF report demonstrates the benefits of trade liberalization. After speaking favorably of TPP, the authors explain,
Past multilateral trade liberalization rounds have helped boost productivity, so these recent agreements—albeit not global—could do the same, given their broad geographic coverage, both as a percentage of total world GDP and total world trade. Policymakers, however, need to be mindful of the distributional effects of open trade and take steps to mitigate the impact on those displaced to realize the full potential of lower trade barriers on productivity and economic well-being.
As shown below in Chart 1, even in advanced economies, which have already liberalized tariffs in the past, further reductions in nontariff/regulatory barriers to trade and FDI offer scope for additional productivity gains.
The authors then cite the “wide consensus that liberalization of trade and FDI [foreign direct investment] can lead to improved resource allocation across firms and sectors, boosting productivity and output. For instance, existing evidence suggests that more-productive firms tend to gain market share at the expense of less-productive firms. But two specific effects of liberalization additionally enhance productivity:
Increased competition: Lower trade and FDI barriers on final goods can strengthen competition in the liberalized sector(s). This can help firms exploit economies of scale, improve efficiency, absorb foreign technology, and innovate.
Enhanced variety and quality of available inputs: Trade liberalization can also boost productivity by increasing the quality and variety of intermediate inputs used in final goods production.”
There are substantial gains in productivity to be had with the lowering of tariff barriers:[ref]This doesn’t even tell the whole story: “The analysis of productivity gains that would follow from tariff liberalization is only an illustration of how trade liberalization more broadly could bring about even larger gains in productivity. Indeed, our estimated productivity gains from tariff liberalization should be viewed as lower bounds because they do not account for the gains that would arise from reallocation of resources across industries, that is, from more efficiently capitalizing on each country’s comparative advantage or, most importantly, from a reduction of non-tariff barriers” (italics mine).[/ref]
In summary,
Our findings provide a case for further liberalization to raise productivity and output in advanced economies. That the estimates vastly understate potential gains by overlooking the much larger economic benefits of easing non-tariff barriers makes the case all the stronger.
While compensation programs may be in order for those who suffer job loss or wage reduction due to increased trade (something the authors acknowledge and suggest), this should not distract us from the massive gains that trade liberalization brings. Those seeking to be the “Leader of the Free World” take note.
The fear and accusations of voter fraud have almost become a staple of U.S. presidential elections. Granted, other countries require some form of identification to vote, which seems to genuinely be about fraud prevention versus some kind of bigotry as is often claimed here in America. Nonetheless, just as the stories about racist voter ID proponents are likely exaggerated, so are the concerns over voter fraud. As Reason‘s Ronald Bailey explains,
Voter impersonation fraud appears to be almost non-existent. In the wake of 2000’s ballot-counting fiasco, the Help America Vote Act of 2002 created the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to improve voting systems and voter access. In 2007, the commission issued its Election Crimes report, which reviewed what data there was and analyzed numerous anecdotes about voter fraud. The report noted that many experts “asserted that impersonation of voters is probably the least frequent type of fraud because it is the most likely type of fraud to be discovered, there are stiff penalties associated with this type of fraud, and it is an inefficient method of influencing an election.” The penalties include $10,000 in fines and up to five years in prison.
The New York Times reported in 2007 that a five-year Department of Justice crackdown on voter fraud had yielded just 86 convictions. In 2014, Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, reported finding just 31 cases of voter impersonation fraud out of 1 billion ballots cast between 2000 and 2014. Politifact calculated in 2015 that you are 13 times more likely to be struck by lightning than to stumble across an instance of in-person voter fraud in Texas.
Yet, could voter ID laws potentially be used to–ironically–rig elections? The evidence is mixed, but interesting. Some studies found an increase in voter turnout following strict voter ID laws among particular groups, while others found a decrease in voter turnout. Overall, the effects of voter ID laws seem to be insignificant according to most studies. However, the most recent research has
challenged the weak consensus that strict voter ID requirements do not appear to have significant disenfranchising effects. Trying to account for all sorts of demographic, partisan, ideological, and ethnic variables, the researchers examined what happened to voting patterns before and after states adopted strict voter ID requirements. Their analysis focused on individual voter turnout data from 2006 to 2014 derived from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study.
…When they take partisan and ideological differences into account, they estimate that Democratic turnout drops by 8.8 percentage points in general elections and even Republican turnout drops by 3.6 points. Interestingly, strict photo ID requirements result in a drop in turnout for strong liberals of 7.9 percentage points, but among strong conservatives turnout increases by 4.8 percentage points. “Strict voter ID laws appear to diminish the participation of Democrats and those on the left, while doing little to deter the vote of Republicans and those on the right,” they observe.
In short, voting fraud isn’t really a problem, but voter ID laws could potentially be (though the consensus still holds that the effects are nilch). Perhaps we should all calm down.
University of Chicago, Harper Library. Photo by Rick Seidel. (CC BY 2.0)
Let me give you some background: I’m one of those guys who is very skeptical of the impact of contemporary social justice activists[ref]The more common term is “social justice warrior,” but I’m not using it because it’s intentionally pejorative.[/ref] on free speech. One of the most-read posts I’ve ever published to Difficult Run was my manifesto on the topic: When Social Justice Isn’t About Justice. I stand by it.
So when news broke that the University of Chicago had sent out a letter to students warning them that there’d be no “safe space” or “trigger warning” shenanigans, you might think that I’d feel a little sense of triumph, or at least relief. And don’t get me wrong, it is (for the most part), a good letter! For example:
[O]ne of the University of Chicago’s defining characteristics is our commitment to freedom of inquiry and expression… Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called “trigger warnings,” we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual “safe spaces” where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.
Second, and this is what I want to focus on, is the broader context. And the broader context is that “thoughtful” and “principled” sadly do not describe the most prominent voices who have been critical social justice activists. Consider Breitbart, which has long been on the vanguard of combating the social justice activists and is becoming the focal point of the alt-right movement. Well, kudos to Breitbart for getting that right, but they also happen to be deeply in the pocket of Donald Trump (Breitbart CEO Steve Bannon just came on board as the new campaign manager) and have a penchant for catering to the least thoughtful and least principled audience on this issue.[ref]I’ve recently written about that as well.[/ref]
To some extent, this is unavoidable. Although it’s a war fought with words and reputations rather than a war fought with bullets and lives, it’s still a very nasty fight. Truth–especially as it relates to nuance, moderation, or context–went out the window a long time ago as far as the mos zealous combatants are concerned. I’ve watched first-hand as people who entered this arena with the noblest of intentions were radicalized by the vicious attacks (often directed not only at thems and their livelihoods, but their spouses and children) to the point where they now engage in the same kind of spiteful attacks that they used to decry. It’s been so sad to watch. There’s a feeling of tragedy to it all. I’m not being judgmental. I don’t know if–had I lived through the stresses that they faced–I could have done any better.
Does it give me second thoughts? Does it make me reconsider whether my own position–very, very suspicious of social justice activism and it’s impact on free speech and also on actual social justice–is warranted? Yes, it does. But then I read a piece like this one from Vox: UChicago’s anti-safe spaces letter isn’t about academic freedom. It’s about power. In it, Kevin Gannon baldly defends the practice of students rising up to protest unpopular speakers:
To move from the hypothetical to the real, the Virginia Tech students who protested their university’s invitation to Charles Murray to deliver a lecture weren’t some sort of intellectual gestapo, they were members of a community calling out other members’ violation of the community’s ethos.
Well no, in fact, calling Murray a “racist charlatan” and characterizing his career as being centered on “social Darwinist assertions that certain ‘races’ are inherently inferior to others” (as Gannon writes in his piece) is exactly what I’d expect from an “intellectual gestapo.” Murray is controversial, of course. Some of my most vivid memories are from my sophomore high school English class where we analyzed an article-length version of his most controversial book, The Bell Curve. Was it comfortable to focus on the theory that there are persistent racial differences in IQ? No. And, I should note, our teacher was an African American woman. But I learned more from her in that classroom than from any other teacher I’ve ever had. She taught me that confronting uncomfortable arguments is what education is all about. If that’s not part of your “community’s ethos”, then your campus needs a new community ethos.
The logic of conflict is brutally simplistic: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. The temptation to go along to get along is highest when there’s some noble ideal (like free speech!) apparently hanging in the balance. But it’s a temptation to avoid.
I really wish I had a side I could join a side without reservation. I’d love it if the conservatives were the good guys and the liberals were the bad guys. At this point, I’d love it almost as much if I could have one of those road to Damascus political conversions and decide that the liberals were the good guys and the conservatives were the bad guys. But it’s just not so, and that’s never been more clear than in these days of fear-mongering, nativist ignorance of the Trump candidacy.
As a writer, I always want to have a clever ending. I want to wrap up a post with a keen and penetrating insight that will impress people. But I don’t have one of those for you today. Sometimes the truth is banal, and the trick lies not in discovering it, but rather in implementing it. So here’s my conclusion: please, be decent. Stop turning political ends into justification for hostility towards people who believe differently than you do. Stop using principles as rationalizations to be uncharitable or to shade the truth. Stop making ideals into excuses.
We’re never going to all get along. We’re never going to all agree. We’re never going to find the ultimate compromise that makes everyone happy. It’s always going to be a struggle, living with each other down here on Earth, but it doesn’t have to be as nasty as it is today. It won’t be perfect. But it could be a little bit better.
a fascinating new paper in The Journal of Democracy suggest[ing] that liberal democracy is losing ground even at home, in the West. Political scientists Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk review data from recent World Values Surveys and observe some truly remarkable trends, especially among young people. Young people often reject the traditions of their elders; that’s nothing new. What they seem to be rejecting nowadays, though, in increasing numbers, is the tradition of liberalism itself.
The specifics of Graduation varied by country, but the basic premise was the same. All the Graduation programs gave families some kind of “productive asset,” such as sheep, goats, seed corn, bees, or small shops. They all provided training on how to build a business using the assets, and gave food or cash aid to the families for up to a year, in part to discourage them from eating or selling their “productive asset.” The programs also gave families access to a savings account, and some programs required that families contributed to the account regularly.
…Imagine that this whole system is going on at the same time that IKEA spends millions of dollars lobbying senators about chair-related issues, and that these same senators vote down a bill preventing IKEA from paying off other companies to stay out of the chair industry. Also, suppose that a bunch of people are dying each year of exhaustion from having to stand up all the time because chairs are too expensive unless you’ve got really good furniture insurance, which is totally a thing and which everybody is legally required to have.
Economist Bryan Caplan–himself not a utilitarian–argues that a 
