democracy

Centrism is dying in America.

pnrj core principles, current events, politics, tribal paradigm , , , , , , ,

Apr 24 JDN 2459694

Four years ago—back when (shudder) Trump was President—I wrote a post about the true meaning of centrism, the kind of centrism worth defending.

I think it’s worth repeating now: Centrism isn’t saying “both sides are the same” when they aren’t. It’s recognizing that the norms of democracy themselves are worth defending—and more worth defending than almost any specific policy goal.

I wanted to say any specific policy goal, but I do think you can construct extreme counterexamples, like “establish a 100% tax on all income” (causing an immediate, total economic collapse), or “start a war with France” (our staunchest ally for the past 250 years who also has nuclear weapons). But barring anything that extreme, just about any policy is less important than defending democracy itself.

Or at least I think so. It seems that most Americans disagree. On both the left and the right—but especially on the right—a large majority of American voters are still willing to vote for a candidate who flouts basic democratic norms as long as they promise the right policies.

I guess on the right this fact should have been obvious: Trump. But things aren’t much better on the left, and should some actual radical authoritarian communist run for office (as opposed to, you know, literally every left-wing politician who is accused of being a radical authoritarian communist), this suggests that a lot of leftist voters might actually vote for them, which is nearly as terrifying.

My hope today is that I might tip the balance a little bit the other direction, remind people why democracy is worth defending, even at the cost of our preferred healthcare systems and marginal tax rates.

This is, above all, that democracy is self-correcting. If a bad policy gets put in place while democratic norms are still strong, then that policy can be removed and replaced with something better later on. Authoritarianism lacks this self-correction mechanism; get someone terrible in power and they stay in power, doing basically whatever they want, unless they are violently overthrown.

For the right wing, that’s basically it. You need to stop making excuses for authoritarianism. Basically none of your policies are so important that they would justify even moderate violations of democratic norms—much less than Trump already committed, let alone what he might do if re-elected and unleashed. I don’t care how economically efficient lower taxes or privatized healthcare might be (and I know that there are in fact many economists who would agree with you on that, though I don’t), it isn’t worth undermining democracy. And while I do understand why you consider abortion to be such a vital issue, you really need to ask yourself whether banning abortion is worth living under a fascist government, because that’s the direction you’re headed. Let me note that banning abortion doesn’t even seem to reduce it very much, so there’s that. While the claim that abortion bans do nothing is false, even a total overturn of Roe v. Wade would most likely reduce US abortions by about 15%—much less than the 25% decrease between 2008 and 2014, which was also part of a long-term trend of decreasing abortion rates which are now roughly half what they were in 1980. We don’t need to ban abortion in order to reduce it—and indeed many of the things that work are things like free healthcare and easy access to contraception that right-wing governments typically resist. So even if you consider abortion to be a human rights violation, which I know many of you do, is that relatively small reduction in abortion rates worth risking the slide into fascism?

But for the left wing, things are actually a bit more complicated. Some right-wing policies—particularly social policies—are inherently anti-democratic and violations of human rights. I gave abortion the benefit of the doubt above; I can at least see why someone would think it’s a human rights violation (though I do not). Here I’m thinking particularly of immigration policies that lock up children at the border and laws that actively discriminate against LGBT people. I can understand why people would be unwilling to “hold their nose” and vote for someone who wants to enact that kind of policy—though if it’s really the only way to avoid authoritarianism, I think we might still have to do it. Democracy is too high a price to pay; give it up now and there is nothing to stop that new authoritarian leftist government from turning into a terrible nightmare (that may not even remain leftist, by the way!). If we vote in someone who is pro-democratic but otherwise willing to commit these sorts of human rights violations, hopefully we can change things by civic engagement or vote them out of office later on (and over the long run, we do, in fact, have a track record of doing that). But if we vote in someone who will tear apart democracy even when they seem to have the high ground on human rights, then once democracy is undermined, the new authoritarian government can oppress us in all sorts of ways (even ways they specifically promised not to!), and we will have very little recourse.

Above all, even if they promise to give us everything we want, once you put an authoritarian in power, they can do whatever they want. They have no reason to keep their promises (whereas, contrary to popular belief, democratic politicians actually typically do), for we have no recourse if they don’t. Our only option to remove them from power is violent revolution—which usually fails, and even if it succeeds, would have an enormous cost in human lives.

Why is this a minority view? Why don’t more Americans agree with this?

I can think of a few possible reasons.

One is that they may not believe that these violations of democratic norms are really all that severe or worrisome. Overriding a judge with an executive order isn’t such a big deal, is it? Gerrymandering has been going on for decades, why should we worry about it now?

If that is indeed your view, let me remind you that in January 2021, armed insurrectionists stormed the Capitol building. That is not something we can just take lying down. This is a direct attack upon the foundations of democracy, and while it failed (miserably, and to be honest, hilariously), it wasn’t punished nearly severely enough—most of the people involved were not arrested on any charges, and several are now running for office. This lack of punishment means that it could very well happen again, and this time be better organized and more successful.

A second possibility is that people do not know that democracy is being undermined; they are somehow unaware that this is happening. If that’s the case, all I can tell you is that you really need to go to the Associated Press or New York Times website and read some news. You would have to be catastrophically ignorant of our political situation, and you frankly don’t deserve to be voting if that is the case.

But I suspect that for most people, a third reason applies: They see that democracy is being undermined, but they blame the other side. We aren’t the ones doing it—it’s them.

Such a view is tempting, at least from the left side of the aisle. No Democratic Party politician can hold a candle to Trump as far as authoritarianism (or narcissism). But we should still be cognizant of ways that our actions may also undermine democratic norms: Maybe we shouldn’t be considering packing the Supreme Court, unless we can figure out a way to ensure that it will genuinely lead to a more democratic and fair court long into the future. (For the latter sort of reform, suppose each federal district elected its own justice? Or we set up a mandatory retirement cycle such that every President would always appoint at least one justice?)

But for those of you on the right… How can you possibly think this? Where do you get your information from? How can you look at Donald Trump and think, “This man will defend our democracy from those left-wing radicals”? Right now you may be thinking, “oh, look, he suggested the New York Times; see his liberal bias”; that is a newspaper of record in the United States. While their editors are a bit left of center, they are held to the highest standards of factual accuracy. But okay, if you prefer the Wall Street Journal (also a newspaper of record, but whose editors are a bit more right of center), be my guest; their factual claims won’t disagree, because truth is truth. I also suggested the Associated Press, widely regarded worldwide as one of the most credible news sources. (I considered adding Al Jazeera, which has a similar reputation, but figured you wouldn’t go for that.)

If you think that the attack on the Capitol was even remotely acceptable, you must think that their claims of a stolen election were valid, or at least plausible. But every credible major news source, the US Justice Department, and dozens of law courts agree that they were not. Any large election is going to have a few cases of fraud, but there were literally only hundreds of fradulent votes—in an election in which over 150 million votes were cast, Biden won the popular vote by over 7 million votes, and no state was won by less than 10,000 votes. This means that 99.999% of votes were valid, and even if every single fradulent vote had been for Biden and in Georgia (obviously not the case), it wouldn’t have been enough to tip even that state.

I’m not going to say that left-wing politicians never try to undermine democratic norms—there’s certainly plenty of gerrymandering, and I just said, court-packing is at least problematic. Nor would I say that the right wing is always worse about this. But it should be pretty obvious to anyone with access to basic factual information—read: everyone with Internet access—that right now, the problem is much worse on the right. You on the right need to face up to that fact, and start voting out Republicans who refuse to uphold democracy, even if it means you have to wait a bit longer for lower taxes or more (let me remind you, not very effective) abortion bans.

In the long run, I would of course like to see changes in the whole political system, so that we are no longer dominated by two parties and have a wider variety of realistic options. (The best way to do that would of couse be range voting.) But for now, let’s start by ensuring that democracy continues to exist in America.

Russia has invaded Ukraine.

pnrj core principles, current events, politics, public policy, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , ,

Mar 6 JDN 2459645

Russia has invaded Ukraine. No doubt you have heard it by now, as it’s all over the news now in dozens of outlets, from CNN to NBC to The Guardian to Al-Jazeera. And as well it should be, as this is the first time in history that a nuclear power has annexed another country. Yes, nuclear powers have fought wars before—the US just got out of one in Afghanistan as you may recall. They have even started wars and led invasions—the US did that in Iraq. And certainly, countries have been annexing and conquering other countries for millennia. But never before—never before, in human history—has a nuclear-armed state invaded another country simply to claim it as part of itself. (Trump said he thought the US should have done something like that, and the world was rightly horrified.)

Ukraine is not a nuclear power—not anymore. The Soviet Union built up a great deal of its nuclear production in Ukraine, and in 1991 when Ukraine became independent it still had a sizable nuclear arsenal. But starting in 1994 Ukraine began disarming that arsenal, and now it is gone. Now that Russia has invaded them, the government of Ukraine has begun publicly reconsidering their agreements to disarm their nuclear arsenal.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has just disproved the most optimistic models of international relations, which basically said that major power wars for territory were over at the end of WW2. Some thought it was nuclear weapons, others the United Nations, still others a general improvement in trade integration and living standards around the world. But they’ve all turned out to be wrong; maybe such wars are rarer, but they can clearly still happen, because one just did.

I would say that only two major theories of the Long Peace are still left standing in light of this invasion, and that is nuclear deterrence and the democratic peace. Ukraine gave up its nuclear arsenal and later got attacked—that’s consistent with nuclear deterrence. Russia under Putin is nearly as authoritarian as the Soviet Union, and Ukraine is a “hybrid regime” (let’s call it a solid D), so there’s no reason the democratic peace would stop this invasion. But any model which posits that trade or the UN prevent war is pretty much off the table now, as Ukraine had very extensive trade with both Russia and the EU and the UN has been utterly toothless so far. (Maybe we could say the UN prevents wars except those led by permanent Security Council members.)

Well, then, what if the nuclear deterrence theory is right? What would have happened if Ukraine had kept its nuclear weapons? Would that have made this situation better, or worse? It could have made it better, if it acted as a deterrent against Russian aggression. But it could also have made it much, much worse, if it resulted in a nuclear exchange between Russia and Ukraine.

This is the problem with nukes. They are not a guarantee of safety. They are a guarantee of fat tails. To explain what I mean by that, let’s take a brief detour into statistics.

A fat-tailed distribution is one for which very extreme events have non-negligible probability. For some distributions, like a uniform distribution, events are clearly contained within a certain interval and nothing outside is even possible. For others, like a normal distribution or lognormal distribution, extreme events are theoretically possible, but so vanishingly improbable they aren’t worth worrying about. But for fat-tailed distributions like a Cauchy distribution or a Pareto distribution, extreme events are not so improbable. They may be unlikely, but they are not so unlikely they can simply be ignored. Indeed, they can actually dominate the average—most of what happens, happens in a handful of extreme events.

Deaths in war seem to be fat-tailed, even in conventional warfare. They seem to follow a Pareto distribution. There are lots of tiny skirmishes, relatively frequent regional conflicts, occasional major wars, and a handful of super-deadly global wars. This kind of pattern tends to emerge when a phenomenon is self-reinforcing by positive feedback—hence why we also see it in distributions of income and wildfire intensity.

Fat-tailed distributions typically (though not always—it’s easy to construct counterexamples, like the Cauchy distribution with low values truncated off) have another property as well, which is that minor events are common. More common, in fact, than they would be under a normal distribution. What seems to happen is that the probability mass moves away from the moderate outcomes and shifts to both the extreme outcomes and the minor ones.

Nuclear weapons fit this pattern perfectly. They may in fact reduce the probability of moderate, regional conflicts, in favor of increasing the probability of tiny skirmishes or peaceful negotiations. But they also increase the probability of utterly catastrophic outcomes—a full-scale nuclear war could kill billions of people. It probably wouldn’t wipe out all of humanity, and more recent analyses suggest that a catastrophic “nuclear winter” is unlikely. But even 2 billion people dead would be literally the worst thing that has ever happened, and nukes could make it happen in hours when such a death toll by conventional weapons would take years.

If we could somehow guarantee that such an outcome would never occur, then the lower rate of moderate conflicts nuclear weapons provide would justify their existence. But we can’t. It hasn’t happened yet, but it doesn’t have to happen often to be terrible. Really, just once would be bad enough.

Let us hope, then, that the democratic peace turns out to be the theory that’s right. Because a more democratic world would clearly be better—while a more nuclearized world could be better, but could also be much, much worse.

Capitalism isn’t bad for the environment

pnrj public policy , , , , , , , , ,

Sep 27 JDN 2459120

There are certainly many legitimate criticisms to be made against capitalism, particularly unregulated, unfettered capitalism. But many of the criticisms the left likes to offer against capitalism really don’t hold water, and one of them is the assertion that capitalism is bad for the environment.

The world’s most polluted cities are largely in India and China. In fact, as China has opened up to world markets and become more capitalist, it has become more ecologically efficient, in the sense of producing far less greenhouse emission per dollar of GDP.

Indeed, the entire world has been getting more efficient on this metric: We now produce about twice as much GDP per ton of CO2 emitted than we did in 1990.

Pollution in the Soviet Union was horrific; even today, many of the world’s most polluted places are in the former Soviet Union. Much of the ecological damage was hidden while the USSR was still in place, but once it collapsed, the damage that Soviet policy had done to the environment became obvious.

If you sort countries by their per-capita greenhouse emissions, the worst offenders are Kuwait, Brunei, Qatar, Oman, and Bahrain—small, oil-producing countries in the Middle East. The US and Canada also do pretty badly, and are certainly quite capitalist; but so do Libya, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan, not exactly known for their devotion to free markets.

I think this in fact too generous to socialist countries. We really should adjust for GDP per capita. It’s easy to produce zero pollution: Just let everyone starve to death. And if that sounds extreme, consider that millions of people literally did starve to death under Stalin and Mao. It’s a fair question whether we really need the high standard of living we have become accustomed to in the First World; perhaps we could afford to cut back. But clearly some kind of adjustment is necessary: A country is obviously doing better if they can produce more GDP for the same carbon emissions.

Therefore, let’s see what happens when we rank countries by kilograms of CO2 emissions per dollar of GDP. The highest polluters are then the Central African Republic, Belize, Libya, Gambia, Eritrea, Niger, Grenada, Palau… not a First World country among them. CAR produces a horrifying 126 tons of CO2 per $10,000 of GDP. The US is near the world average at about 3.0 tons of CO2 per $10,000 of GDP, and as usual Scandinavia Is Better with about 1 ton of CO2 per $10,000 of GDP. China does worse than the US, at about 4.0 tons of CO2 per $10,000 of GDP. Russia and most of the former Soviet Union does substantially worse, generally around 5.0 tons of CO2 per $10,000 of GDP.

Then again, these figures use production-based accounting; perhaps we should be using consumption-based accounting, so that First World countries can’t simply offshore their emissions. The data is less complete and probably less reliable, but it’s still pretty clear that the highest per-capita emissions are in small oil-exporting countries in the Middle East, like Qatar and Brunei.

Moreover, on consumption-based accounting, the highest emissions per dollar of GDP are in Mongolia, Namibia, Ukraine, South Africa, and Kazakhstan. The US actually does better at 2.6 tons of CO2 per $10,000 of GDP, while Scandinavia is still at about 1 ton of CO2 per $10,000 of GDP. China closes the gap, but still does worse than the US, at about 3.0 tons of CO2 per $10,000 of GDP.

No matter how you slice it, the US just isn’t the world’s worst polluter, and we only look like we are in the top 10 because we are so fabulously rich. If it were generally true that higher wealth always comes with proportionally higher pollution, then perhaps capitalism could be blamed for producing all this pollution—though then we’d have a difficult tradeoff to make between reducing pollution and increasing wealth. But in fact there is wide variation in the ecological efficiency of an economy; nuclearize your energy grid like France did and you can cut your emissions in half. Do whatever Scandanavia does and you can do even better.

Now I suppose it would be fair to say that France and Scandinavia are less capitalist than the United States; they certainly have much stronger social welfare states (including universal healthcare) and more redistribution of wealth. But they’re still quite capitalist. They have robust free-market economies, thousands of for-profit corporations, and plenty of billionaires. France has 41 billionaires among 65 million people, just a slightly lower rate of billionaires-per-capita than the US. Sweden has 31 billionaires among 10 million people, a substantially higher rate of billionaires-per-capita than the US. It may be that the optimal level of capitalism for environmental sustainability is not 100%; but it doesn’t seem to be anywhere near 0% either. National Review overstates the case a little (I mean, they are National Review), but I don’t think they are wrong when they say that socialism is bad for the environment.

Indeed, it seems quite important that France and Scandinavia are democratic (by some measures the most democratic places in the world), while China and Russia are authoritarian. It’s not hard to see why democracy would be good for the environment: It solves the Tragedy of the Commons by including the interests of everyone who is impacted by pollution. Policies that produce really catastrophic pollution tend to get leaders voted out.

The rather surprising result is that empirically there doesn’t appear to be a strong effect of democracy on environmental sustainability either. There’s some evidence that it helps, but it seems to depend upon a lot of factors, and on some measures democracy may actually make matters worse. I honestly don’t have a good explanation for this; I would have expected a really strong benefit, since the theoretical argument is quite strong: Voters have strong reasons to want clean air and water, while dictators don’t (especially water, which they can easily pay to import).


Perhaps capitalism is bad for the environment, but democracy is good, and the two sort of cancel out? But there isn’t even much reason theoretically to think that capitalism would be worse for the environment. Private ownership yields private stewardship, and poisoning your employees and customers is not good business. Yes, some forms of pollution spread out far enough that they become a Tragedy of the Commons; but it’s actually hard to find clear examples where pollution spreads far enough to be a Tragedy of the Commons for a corporation but doesn’t spread far enough to be a Tragedy of the Commons for a whole country. Some multinational corporations are large enough that they probably have more reason to care about the environment than many small countries—Walmart’s total revenue is nearly 15 times higher than Brunei’s total GDP. Indeed, one of the few upsides of concentrated oligopolies is that they are less likely to pollute!

I can understand why it’s tempting to blame capitalism for the degradation of the environment. Indeed, if the argument could stick, it would be a really compelling reason to dismantle capitalism—we simply cannot continue to degrade the environment at the rate we have been for much longer. But empirically it just doesn’t work; whatever determines a country’s ecological sustainability or lack thereof, it’s something subtler than capitalism versus socialism—or even democracy versus authoritarianism.

Failures of democracy or capitalism?

pnrj core principles, current events, public policy , , , , ,

May 24 JDN 2458992

Blaming capitalism for the world’s woes is a common habit of the left wing in general, but it seems to have greatly increased in frequency and volume in the era of Trump. I don’t want to say that this is always entirely wrong; capitalism in its purest form certainly does have genuine flaws that need to be addressed (and that’s why we have taxes, regulations, the welfare state, etc.).

But I’ve noticed that a lot of the things people complain about most really don’t seem to have a lot to do with capitalism.

For instance: Forced labor in Third World countries? First of all, that’s been around for as long as civilization has existed, and quite probably longer. It’s certainly not new to capitalism. Second, the freedom to choose who you transact with—including who employs you—is a fundamental principle of capitalism. In that sense, forced labor is the very opposite of capitalism; it spits upon everything capitalism stands for.

It’s certainly the case that many multinational corporations are implicated in slavery, even today—usually through complex networks of subsidiaries and supply chains. But it’s not clear to me that socialism is any kind of solution to this problem; nationalized industries are perfectly capable of enslaving people. (You may have heard of a place called the Gulag?)

Or what about corporate welfare, the trillions of dollars in subsidies we give to the oil and coal industries? Well, that’s not very capitalist either; capitalism is supposed to be equal competition in a free market, not the government supporting particular businesses or industries at the expense of others. And it’s not like socialist Venezuela has any lack of oil subsidies—indeed it’s not quite clear to me where the government ends and PDVSA begins. We need a word for such policies that are neither capitalist nor socialist; perhaps “corporatist”?

And really, the things that worry me about America today are not flaws in our markets; they are flaws in our government. We are not witnessing a catastrophic failure of capitalism; we are witnessing a catastrophic failure of democracy.

As if the Electoral College weren’t bad enough (both Al Gore and Hillary Clinton should have won the Presidency, by any sensible notion of democratic voting!), we are now seeing extreme levels of voter suppression, including refusing to accept mail-in ballots in the middle of a historic pandemic. This looks disturbingly like how democracy has collapsed in other countries, such as Turkey and Hungary.

The first-past-the-post plurality vote is already basically the worst possible voting system that can still technically be considered democratic. But it is rendered far worse by a defective primary system, which was even more of a shambles this year than usual. The number of errors in the Iowa caucus was ridiculous, and the primaries as a whole suffered from so many flaws that many voters now consider them illegitimate.

And of course there’s Donald Trump himself. He is certainly a capitalist (though he’s not exactly a free-trade neoliberal; he’s honestly more like a mercantilist). But what really makes him dangerous is not his free-market ideology, which is basically consistent with the US right wing going back at least 30 years; it’s his willingness to flaunt basic norms of democracy and surround himself with corrupt, incompetent sycophants. Republicans have been cutting the upper tax brackets and subsidizing oil companies for quite some time now; but it’s only recently that they have so blatantly disregarded the guardrails of democracy.

I’m not saying it’s wrong to criticize capitalism. There certainly are things worth criticizing, particularly about the most extreme free-market ideology. But it’s important to be clear about where exactly problems lie if you want to fix them—and right now we desperately need to fix them. America is in a crisis right now, something much bigger than just this pandemic. We are not in this crisis because of an excessive amount of deregulation or tax-cutting; we are in this crisis because of an excessive amount of corruption, incompetence, and authoritarianism. We wouldn’t fix this by nationalizing industries or establishing worker co-ops. We need to fix it first by voting out those responsible, and second by reforming our system so that they won’t get back in.

Privatized prisons were always an atrocity

pnrj core principles, current events, ethics, public policy, Uncategorized , , , , , , , ,

Aug 4 JDN 2458700

Let’s be clear: The camps that Trump built on the border absolutely are concentration camps. They aren’t extermination camps—yet?—but they are in fact “a place where large numbers of people (such as prisoners of war, political prisoners, refugees, or the members of an ethnic or religious minority) are detained or confined under armed guard.” Above all, it is indeed the case that “Persons are placed in such camps often on the basis of identification with a particular ethnic or political group rather than as individuals and without benefit either of indictment or fair trial.”

And I hope it goes without saying that this is an unconscionable atrocity that will remain a stain upon America for generations to come. Trump was clear from the beginning that this was his intention, and thus this blood is on the hands of anyone who voted for him. (The good news is that even they are now having second thoughts: Even a majority of Fox News viewers agrees that Trump has gone too far.)

Yet these camps are only a symptom of a much older disease: We should have seen this sort of cruelty and inhumanity coming when first we privatized prisons.

Krugman makes the point using economics: Without market competition or public view, how can the private sector be kept from abuse, corruption, and exploitation? And this is absolutely true—but it is not the strongest reason.

No, the reason privatized prisons are unjust is much more fundamental than that: Prisons are a direct incursion against liberty. The only institution that should ever have that authority is a democratically-elected government restrained by a constitution.

I don’t care if private prisons were cleaner and nicer and safer and more effective at rehabilitation (as you’ll see from those links, exactly the opposite is true across the board). No private institution has the right to imprison people. No one should be making profits from locking people up.

This is the argument we should have been making for the last 40 years. You can’t privatize prisons, because no one has a right to profit from locking people up. You can’t privatize the military, because no one has a right to profit from killing people. These are basic government functions precisely because they are direct incursions against fundamental rights; though such incursions are sometimes necessary, we allow only governments to make them, because democracy is the only means we have found to keep them from being used indiscriminately. (And even then, there are always abuses and we must remain eternally vigilant.)

Yes, obviously we must shut down these concentration camps as soon as possible. But we can’t stop there. This is a symptom of a much deeper disease: Our liberty is being sold for profit.

The “market for love” is a bad metaphor

pnrj core principles, critique of neoclassical economics , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Feb 14 JDN 2458529

Valentine’s Day was this past week, so let’s talk a bit about love.

Economists would never be accused of being excessively romantic. To most neoclassical economists, just about everything is a market transaction. Love is no exception.

There are all sorts of articles and books and an even larger number of research papers going back multiple decades and continuing all the way through until today using the metaphor of the “marriage market”.

In a few places, marriage does actually function something like a market: In China, there are places where your parents will hire brokers and matchmakers to select a spouse for you. But even this isn’t really a market for love or marriage. It’s a market for matchmaking services. The high-tech version of this is dating sites like OkCupid.
And of course sex work actually occurs on markets; there is buying and selling of services at monetary prices. There is of course a great deal worth saying on that subject, but it’s not my topic for today.

But in general, love is really nothing like a market. First of all, there is no price. This alone should be sufficient reason to say that we’re not actually dealing with a market. The whole mechanism that makes a market a market is the use of prices to achieve equilibrium between supply and demand.

A price doesn’t necessarily have to be monetary; you can barter apples for bananas, or trade in one used video game for another, and we can still legitimately call that a market transaction with a price.

But love isn’t like that either. If your relationship with someone is so transactional that you’re actually keeping a ledger of each thing they do for you and each thing you do for them so that you could compute a price for services, that isn’t love. It’s not even friendship. If you really care about someone, you set such calculations aside. You view their interests and yours as in some sense shared, aligned toward common goals. You stop thinking in terms of “me” and “you” and start thinking in terms of “us”. You don’t think “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine.” You think “We’re scratching each other’s backs today.”

This is of course not to say that love never involves conflict. On the contrary, love always involves conflict. Successful relationships aren’t those where conflict never happens, they are those where conflict is effectively and responsibly resolved. Your interests and your loved ones’ are never completely aligned; there will always be some residual disagreement. But the key is to realize that your interests are still mostly aligned; those small vectors of disagreement should be outweighed by the much larger vector of your relationship.

And of course, there can come a time when that is no longer the case. Obviously, there is domestic abuse, which should absolutely be a deal-breaker for anyone. But there are other reasons why you may find that a relationship ultimately isn’t working, that your interests just aren’t as aligned as you thought they were. Eventually those disagreement vectors just get too large to cancel out. This is painful, but unavoidable. But if you reach the point where you are keeping track of actions on a ledger, that relationship is already dead. Sooner or later, someone is going to have to pull the plug.

Very little of what I’ve said in the preceding paragraphs is likely to be controversial. Why, then, would economists think that it makes sense to treat love as a market?

I think this comes down to a motte and bailey doctrine. A more detailed explanation can be found at that link, but the basic idea of a motte and bailey is this: You have a core set of propositions that is highly defensible but not that interesting (the “motte”), and a broader set of propositions that are very interesting, but not as defensible (the “bailey”). The terms are related to a medieval defensive strategy, in which there was a small, heavily fortified tower called a motte, surrounded by fertile, useful land, the bailey. The bailey is where you actually want to live, but it’s hard to defend; so if the need arises, you can pull everyone back into the motte to fight off attacks. But nobody wants to live in the motte; it’s just a cramped stone tower. There’s nothing to eat or enjoy there.

The motte comprised of ideas that almost everyone agrees with. The bailey is the real point of contention, the thing you are trying to argue for—which, by construction, other people must not already agree with.

Here are some examples, which I have intentionally chosen from groups I agree with:

Feminism can be a motte and bailey doctrine. The motte is “women are people”; the bailey is abortion rights, affirmative consent and equal pay legislation.

Rationalism can be a motte and bailey doctrine. The motte is “rationality is good”; the bailey is atheism, transhumanism, and Bayesian statistics.

Anti-fascism can be a motte and bailey doctrine. The motte is “fascists are bad”; the bailey is black bloc Antifa and punching Nazis.

Even democracy can be a motte and bailey doctrine. The motte is “people should vote for their leaders”; my personal bailey is abolition of the Electoral College, a younger voting age, and range voting.

Using a motte and bailey doctrine does not necessarily make you wrong. But it’s something to be careful about, because as a strategy it can be disingenuous. Even if you think that the propositions in the bailey all follow logically from the propositions in the motte, the people you’re talking to may not think so, and in fact you could simply be wrong. At the very least, you should be taking the time to explain how one follows from the other; and really, you should consider whether the connection is actually as tight as you thought, or if perhaps one can believe that rationality is good without being Bayesian or believe that women are people without supporting abortion rights.

I think when economists describe love or marriage as a “market”, they are applying a motte and bailey doctrine. They may actually be doing something even worse than that, by equivocating on the meaning of “market”. But even if any given economist uses the word “market” totally consistently, the fact that different economists of the same broad political alignment use the word differently adds up to a motte and bailey doctrine.

The doctrine is this: “There have always been markets.”

The motte is something like this: “Humans have always engaged in interaction for mutual benefit.”

This is undeniably true. In fact, it’s not even uninteresting. As mottes go, it’s a pretty nice one; it’s worth spending some time there. In the endless quest for an elusive “human nature”, I think you could do worse than to focus on our universal tendency to engage in interaction for mutual benefit. (Don’t other species do it too? Yes, but that’s just it—they are precisely the ones that seem most human.)

And if you want to define any mutually-beneficial interaction as a “market trade”, I guess it’s your right to do that. I think this is foolish and confusing, but legislating language has always been a fool’s errand.

But of course the more standard meaning of the word “market” implies buyers and sellers exchanging goods and services for monetary prices. You can extend it a little to include bartering, various forms of financial intermediation, and the like; but basically you’re still buying and selling.

That makes this the bailey: “Humans have always engaged in buying and selling of goods and services at prices.”

And that, dear readers, is ahistorical nonsense. We’ve only been using money for a few thousand years, and it wasn’t until the Industrial Revolution that we actually started getting the majority of our goods and services via market trades. Economists like to tell a story where bartering preceded the invention of money, but there’s basically no evidence of that. Bartering seems to be what people do when they know how money works but don’t have any money to work with.

Before there was money, there were fundamentally different modes of interaction: Sharing, ritual, debts of honor, common property, and, yes, love.

These were not markets. They perhaps shared some very broad features of markets—such as the interaction for mutual benefit—but they lacked the defining attributes that make a market a market.

Why is this important? Because this doctrine is used to transform more and more of our lives into actual markets, on the grounds that they were already “markets”, and we’re just using “more efficient” kinds of markets. But in fact what’s happening is we are trading one fundamental mode of human interaction for another: Where we used to rely upon norms or trust or mutual affection, we instead rely upon buying and selling at prices.

In some cases, this actually is a good thing: Markets can be very powerful, and are often our best tool when we really need something done. In particular, it’s clear at this point that norms and trust are not sufficient to protect us against climate change. All the “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” PSAs in the world won’t do as much as a carbon tax. When millions of lives are at stake, we can’t trust people to do the right thing; we need to twist their arms however we can.

But markets are in some sense a brute-force last-resort solution; they commodify and alienate (Marx wasn’t wrong about that), and despite our greatly elevated standard of living, the alienation and competitive pressure of markets seem to be keeping most of us from really achieving happiness.

This is why it’s extremely dangerous to talk about a “market for love”. Love is perhaps the last bastion of our lives that has not been commodified into a true market, and if it goes, we’ll have nothing left. If sexual relationships built on mutual affection were to disappear in favor of apps that will summon a prostitute or a sex robot at the push of a button, I would count that as a great loss for human civilization. (How we should regulate prostitution or sex robots are a different question, which I said I’d leave aside for this post.) A “market for love” is in fact a world with no love at all.

Fighting the zero-sum paradigm

pnrj development economics, ethics, heuristics and biases, inequality, public policy, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Dec 2 JDN 2458455

It should be obvious at this point that there are deep, perhaps even fundamental, divides between the attitudes and beliefs of different political factions. It can be very difficult to even understand, much less sympathize, with the concerns of people who are racist, misogynistic, homophobic, xenophobic, and authoritarian.
But at the end of the day we still have to live in the same country as these people, so we’d better try to understand how they think. And maybe, just maybe, that understanding will help us to change them.

There is one fundamental belief system that I believe underlies almost all forms of extremism. Right now right-wing extremism is the major threat to global democracy, but left-wing extremism subscribes to the same core paradigm (consistent with Horseshoe Theory).

I think the best term for this is the zero-sum paradigm. The idea is quite simple: There is a certain amount of valuable “stuff” (money, goods, land, status, happiness) in the world, and the only political question is who gets how much.

Thus, any improvement in anyone’s life must, necessarily, come at someone else’s expense. If I become richer, you become poorer. If I become stronger, you become weaker. Any improvement in my standard of living is a threat to your status.

If this belief were true, it would justify, or at least rationalize, all sorts of destructive behavior: Any harm I can inflict upon someone else will yield a benefit for me, by some fundamental conservation law of the universe.

Viewed in this light, beliefs like patriarchy and White supremacy suddenly become much more comprehensible: Why would you want to spend so much effort hurting women and Black people? Because, by the fundamental law of zero-sum, any harm to women is a benefit to men, and any harm to Black people is a benefit to White people. The world is made of “teams”, and you are fighting for your own against all the others.

And I can even see why such an attitude is seductive: It’s simple and easy to understand. And there are many circumstances where it can be approximately true.
When you are bargaining with your boss over a wage, one dollar more for you is one dollar less for your boss.
When your factory outsources production to China, one more job for China is one less job for you.

When we vote for President, one more vote for the Democrats is one less vote for the Republicans.

But of course the world is not actually zero-sum. Both you and your boss would be worse off if your job were to disappear; they need your work and you need their money. For every job that is outsourced to China, another job is created in the United States. And democracy itself is such a profound public good that it basically overwhelms all others.

In fact, it is precisely when a system is running well that the zero-sum paradigm becomes closest to true. In the space of all possible allocations, it is the efficient ones that behave in something like a zero-sum way, because when the system is efficient, we are already producing as much as we can.

This may be part of why populist extremism always seems to assert itself during periods of global prosperity, as in the 1920s and today: It is precisely when the world is running at its full capacity that it feels most like someone else’s gain must come at your loss.

Yet if we live according to the zero-sum paradigm, we will rapidly destroy the prosperity that made that paradigm seem plausible. A trade war between the US and China would put millions out of work in both countries. A real war with conventional weapons would kill millions. A nuclear war would kill billions.

This is what we must convey: We must show people just how good things are right now.

This is not an easy task; when people want to believe the world is falling apart, they can very easily find excuses to do so. You can point to the statistics showing a global decline in homicide, but one dramatic shooting on the TV news will wipe that all away. You can show the worldwide rise in real incomes across the board, but that won’t console someone who just lost their job and blames outsourcing or immigrants.

Indeed, many people will be offended by the attempt—the mere suggestion that the world is actually in very good shape and overall getting better will be perceived as an attempt to deny or dismiss the problems and injustices that still exist.

I encounter this especially from the left: Simply pointing out the objective fact that the wealth gap between White and Black households is slowly closing is often taken as a claim that racism no longer exists or doesn’t matter. Congratulating the meteoric rise in women’s empowerment around the world is often paradoxically viewed as dismissing feminism instead of lauding it.

I think the best case against progress can be made with regard to global climate change: Carbon emissions are not falling nearly fast enough, and the world is getting closer to the brink of truly catastrophic ecological damage. Yet even here the zero-sum paradigm is clearly holding us back; workers in fossil-fuel industries think that the only way to reduce carbon emissions is to make their families suffer, but that’s simply not true. We can make them better off too.

Talking about injustice feels righteous. Talking about progress doesn’t. Yet I think what the world needs most right now—the one thing that might actually pull us back from the brink of fascism or even war—is people talking about progress.

If people think that the world is full of failure and suffering and injustice, they will want to tear down the whole system and start over with something else. In a world that is largely democratic, that very likely means switching to authoritarianism. If people think that this is as bad as it gets, they will be willing to accept or even instigate violence in order to change to almost anything else.

But if people realize that in fact the world is full of success and prosperity and progress, that things are right now quite literally better in almost every way for almost every person in almost every country than they were a hundred—or even fifty—years ago, they will not be so eager to tear the system down and start anew. Centrism is often mocked (partly because it is confused with false equivalence), but in a world where life is improving this quickly for this many people, “stay the course” sounds awfully attractive to me.
That doesn’t mean we should ignore the real problems and injustices that still exist, of course. There is still a great deal of progress left to be made.  But I believe we are more likely to make progress if we acknowledge and seek to continue the progress we have already made, than if we allow ourselves to fall into despair as if that progress did not exist.

Stop telling people they need to vote. Tell them they need to cast informed votes.

pnrj education, ethics, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Feb 11 JDN 2458161

I just spent last week’s post imploring you to defend the norms of democracy. This week, I want to talk about a norm of democracy that I actually think needs an adjustment.

Right now, there is a very strong norm that simply says: VOTE.

“It is our civic duty to vote.” “You are unpatriotic if you don’t vote.” “Voting is a moral obligation.” Etc.

The goal here is laudable: We want people to express the altruistic motivation that will drive them to escape the so-called Downs Paradox and actually go vote to make democracy work.

But the norm is missing something quite important. It’s not actually such a great thing if everyone just goes out and votes, because most people are seriously, disturbingly uninformed about politics.

The norm shouldn’t be that you must vote. The norm should be that you must cast an informed vote.

Best if you vote informed, but if you won’t get informed, then better if you don’t vote at all. Adding random noise or bias toward physical attractiveness and height does not improve electoral outcomes.

How uninformed are voters?

Most voters don’t understand even basic facts about the federal budget, like the fact that Medicare and Social Security spending are more than defense spending, or the fact that federal aid and earmarks are tiny portions of the budget. A couple years ago I had to debunk a meme that was claiming that we spend a vastly larger portion of the budget on defense than we actually do.

It gets worse: Only a quarter of Americans can even name all three branches of government. Almost half couldn’t identify the Bill of Rights. We literally required them to learn this in high school. By law they were supposed to know this.

But of course I’m not one of the ignorant ones, right? In a classic case of Dunning-Kruger Effect, nobody ever thinks they are. When asked to predict if they would pass the civics exam required to obtain citizenship, 89% of voters surveyed predicted they would. When they took it, only 17% actually passed it. (For the record, I took it and got a perfect score. You can try it yourself here.)

More informed voters already tend to be more politically engaged. But they are almost evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, which means (especially with the way the Electoral College works) that elections are primarily determined by low-information voters. Low-information voters were decisive for Trump in a way that is unprecedented for as far back as we have data on voter knowledge (which, sadly, is not all that far back).

To be fair, more information is no panacea; humans are very good at rationalizing beliefs that they hold for tribal reasons. People who follow political news heavily typically have more distorted views on some political issues, because they only hear one side and they think they know but they don’t. To truly be more informed voters we must seek out information from reliable, nonpartisan sources, and listen to a variety of sources with differing views. Get your ideas about climate change from NPR or the IPCC, not from Huffington Post—and certainly not from Fox News. But still, maybe it’s worth reading National Review or Reason on occasion. Even when they are usually wrong, it is good for you to expose yourself to views from the other side—because sometimes they can be right. (Reason recently published an excellent article on the huge waste of government funds on building stadiums, for example, and National Review made some really good points against the New Mexico proposal to mandate college applications for high school graduates.)

And of course even those of us who are well-informed obviously have lots of other things we don’t know. Given my expertise in economics and my level of political engagement, I probably know more about politics than 99% of American voters; but I still can’t name more than a handful of members of Congress or really any state legislators aside from the ones who ran for my own district. I can’t even off the top of my head recall who heads the Orange County Water District, even though they literally decide whether I get to drink and take a shower. I’m not asking voters to know everything there is to know about politics, as no human being could possibly do such a thing. I’m merely asking that they know enough basic information to make an informed decision about who to vote for.

Moreover, I think this is a unique time in history where changing this norm has really become viable. We are living in a golden age of information access—almost literally anything you could care to know about politics, you could find in a few minutes of Google searching. I didn’t know who ran my water district, but I looked it up, and I do now: apparently Stephen R. Sheldon. I can’t name that many members of Congress, but I don’t vote for that many members of Congress, and I do carefully research each candidate running in my district when it comes time to vote. (In the next California state legislature election, Mimi Walters has got to go—she has consistently failed to stand against Trump, choosing her party over her constituency.)

This means that if you are uninformed about politics and yet still vote, you chose to do that. You aren’t living in a world where it’s extremely expensive or time-consuming to learn about politics. It is spectacularly easy to learn about politics if you actually want to; if you didn’t learn, it was because you chose not to learn. And if even this tiny cost is too much for you, then how about this? If you don’t have time to get informed, you don’t have time to vote.

Voting electronically would also help with this. People could, in the privacy of their own homes, look up information on candidates while their ballots are right there in front of them. While mail-in voter fraud actually does exist (unlike in-person voter fraud, which basically doesn’t), there are safeguards already in widespread use in Internet-based commerce that we could institute on electronic voting to provide sufficient protection. Basically, all we need to do is public-key signing: issue every voter a private key to sign their votes, which are then decrypted at the county office using a database of public keys. If public keys were stolen, that could compromise secret-ballot anonymity, but it would not allow anyone to actually change votes. Voters could come in person to collect their private keys when they register to vote, at their convenience weeks or months before the election. Of course, we’d have to make it user-friendly enough that people who aren’t very good with computers would understand the system. We could always leave open the option of in-person voting for anyone who prefers that.

Of course, establishing this norm would most likely reduce voter turnout, even if it did successfully increase voter knowledge. But we don’t actually need everyone to vote. We need everyone’s interests accurately represented. If you aren’t willing to get informed, then casting your vote isn’t representing your interests anyway, so why bother?

False equivalence is not centrism

pnrj core principles, ethics, public policy , , , , , , , ,

False equivalence is not centrism

Feb 4 JDN 2458154

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

~ W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming


 Centrism is not very popular these days, but I believe this is because neither its alleged adherents nor its alleged opponents actually have a clear understanding of what centrism is supposed to be. Most of what is called “centrism” in this polarized era (the US is now more politically polarized than it has been in decades) is actually false equivalence.

Most people who express pride in their “centrism” adopt a heuristic which basically amounts to taking the two positions that are most loudly proclaimed in public and averaging them. One side says “Kill all puppies”, the other side says “Don’t kill puppies”, and they proudly and self-righteously declare that the only sensible policy is to kill precisely 50% of the puppies. Anyone who says “the two parties are the same” or “liberals deny science too” is guilty of this false equivalence—and it’s all too common.

But this is not what centrism is supposed to be. A good centrist isn’t someone who looks at their existing Overton Window and chooses the mean value. A good centrist is someone who understands and appreciates Horseshoe Theory. Horseshoe Theory says that the political spectrum is not actually a straight line from left to right; it’s more of a horseshoe shape, where the far-left and the far-right curl down and toward one another. A good centrist is someone who values the top of the horseshoe, more strongly than they value whatever particular policies might move you toward the left or the right edge.

What does the top of the horseshoe represent? Democracy.

A good centrist is someone who really, truly believes in defending democracy.

What the far-left and the far-right have in common is authoritarianism:

For those on either edge of the horseshoe, people who disagree with (the collectivization of all wealth/the superiority of my master race) aren’t simply wrong, they are evil. Persuading them to vote my way is a waste of time. Freedom of speech is dangerous, because it allows them to spread their evil ideas. It would be better to suppress freedom of speech, so that only people who know the truth (read: agree with me) are allowed to speak.

Along similar lines, Slate Star Codex recently published an excellent blog post on how people seem to separate into two very broad political worldviews: There are Mistake Theorists, who think that most of the world’s problems are due to honest ignorance and error; and there are Conflict Theorists, who think that most of the world’s problems are due to the malign influence of evil enemy factions. The far-left and the far-right are overwhelmingly composed of Conflict Theorists. A good centrist is a Mistake Theorist through and through.

Being a good centrist means fighting to defend the institutions that make freedom possible. Here is a whole list of policies that neither the far-left nor the far-right particularly values that we as centrists must:

  1. Voting rights: We must fight against voter suppression and disenfranchisement wherever it occurs. We must stand up to defend the principle “one person, one vote” wherever necessary.

  2. Equality under the law: We must protect the rights of everyone to have equal representation and equal standing as citizens—including, but by no means limited to, women, racial minorities, LGBT people, and people with disabilities.

  3. Election reform: We must find ways to undermine gerrymandering, the Electoral College, and the campaign finance system that allows corporations and wealthy individuals to exert disproportionate influence.

  4. Freedom of speech: We must protect the right of everyone to speak, including those whose views we find abhorrent. Our efforts should be focused most on those who have the least representation in our discourse.

  5. Individual privacy: We must fight against the creeping rise of the surveillance state and the use of extra-legal means of intelligence gathering, particularly in domestic spying. We should be outraged that the House of Representatives voted to extend the NSA’s warrantless wiretap authority after what Edward Snowden revealed about the NSA.

  6. Demilitarization and deincarceration: We must fight to contain or reverse the expansion of military and penal force that has given the United States not only a military larger than the next ten countries combined, but also the world’s highest rate of incarceration.

On some of these issues we might find agreement with the left or (less likely) the right—but even when we don’t, we must press forward. In particular, the goal of equality under the law often aligns with the goal of left-wing social justice—but there are cases where it doesn’t, cases where hatred of White straight men or a craving for vengeance against past injustice drives the left to demand things that would violate this principle. And the atavistic joy of punching Nazis in the face must never overwhelm our sacred commitment to the principles of free speech.

This doesn’t mean we can’t also adopt detailed policy views that align with the left or the right (or both). I for one support single-payer healthcare (left), progressive taxation (left), renewable energy (left), open borders (left), zoning reform (right), reductions in corporate taxes (right), free trade (right, or so I thought?), and a basic income (both—yet strangely we can’t seem to make it happen).

But being a good centrist means that these detailed policy prescriptions are always less important to you than the core principles of democracy itself. When they find out that the rest of the country is against them on something, a leftist or a rightist starts looking for ways to undermine the public will and get the policy they want. A centrist accepts that they have been outvoted and starts looking for ways to persuade the majority that they are mistaken.

Centrism is about defending the guardrails of democracy. False equivalence is not centrism; it is an obstacle to centrism. It prevents us from seeing when one side has clearly damaged those guardrails much more than the other. So let me come out and say it: At this historical juncture, in the United States, the right wing is a far greater threat to the core principles of democracy than the left. This is not to say that the left is inherently incapable of threatening democracy, or never will do so in the future; but it is to say that right here, right now, it’s the right wing we should be worried about. Punching Nazis will never be as threatening to the core of freedom as warrantless wiretaps or the discrediting of the mainstream press.

Did the World Bank modify its ratings to manipulate the outcome of an election in Chile?

pnrj current events, development economics, ethics, inequality, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Jan 21 JDN 2458140

(By the way, my birthday is January 19. I can’t believe I’m turning 30.)

This is a fairly obscure news item, so you may have missed it. It should be bigger news than it is.
I can’t fault the New York Times for having its front page focus mainly on the false missile alert that was issued to some people in Hawaii; a false alarm of nuclear attack definitely is the most important thing that could be going on in the world, short of course of actual nuclear war.

CNN, on the other hand, is focused entirely on Trump. When I first wrote this post, they were also focused on Trump, mainly interested in asking whether Trump’s comments about “immigrants from shithole countries” was racist. My answer: Yes, but not because he said the countries were “shitholes”. That was crude, yes, but not altogether inaccurate. Countries like Syria, Afghanistan, and Sudan are, by any objective measure, terrible places. His comments were racist because they attributed that awfulness to the people leaving these countries. But in fact we have a word for immigrants who flee terrible places seeking help and shelter elsewhere: Refugees. We call those people refugees. There are over 10 million refugees in the world today, most of them from Syria.

So anyway, here’s the news item you should have heard about but probably didn’t: The Chief Economist of the World Bank (Paul Romer, who coincidentally I mentioned in my post about DSGE models) has opened an investigation into the possibility that the World Bank’s ratings of economic freedom were intentionally manipulated in order to tilt a Presidential election in Chile.

The worst part is, it may have worked: Chile’s “Doing Business” rating consistently fell under President Michelle Bachelet and rose under President Sebastian Piñera, and Piñera won the most recent election. Was that the reason he won? Who knows? I’m still not entirely clear on how we ended up with President Trump. But it very likely contributed.

The World Bank is supposed to be an impartial institution representing the interests of global economic development. I’m not naive; I recognize that no human institution is perfect, and there will always be competing political and economic interests within any complex institution. Development economists are subject to cognitive biases just like anyone else. If this was the work of a handful of economic analysts (or if Romer turns out to be wrong and the changes in statistical methodology were totally reasonable), so be it; let’s make sure that the bias is corrected and the analysts involved are punished.

But I fear that the rot may run deeper than this. The World Bank is effectively a form of unelected international government. It has been accused of inherent pro-capitalist (or even racist) bias due to the fact that Western governments are overrepresented in its governance, but I actually consider that accusation unfair: There are very good reasons to make sure that your international institutions are managed by liberal democracies, and turns out that most of the world’s liberal democracies are Western. The fact that the US, France, Germany, and the UK make most of the decisions is entirely sensible: Those are in fact the countries we should want making global decisions.

China is not underrepresented, because China is not a democracy and doesn’t deserve to be represented. They are already more represented in the World Bank than they should be, because representing the PRC is not actually representing the interests of the people of China. Russia and Saudi Arabia are undeniably overrepresented. India is underrepresented; they should be complaining. Some African democracies, such as Namibia and Botswana, would also have a legitimate claim to underrepresentation. But I don’t lose any sleep over the fact that Zimbabwe and Iran aren’t getting votes in the World Bank. If and when those countries actually start representing their people, then we can talk about giving them representation in world government. I don’t see how refusing to give international authority to dictators and theocrats constitutes racism or pro-capitalist bias.

That said, there are other reasons to think that the World Bank might actually have some sort of pro-capitalist bias. The World Bank was instrumental in forming the Washington Consensus, which opened free trade and increase economic growth worldwide, but also exposed many poor countries to risk from deregulated financial markets and undermined social safety nets through fiscal austerity programs. They weren’t wrong to want more free trade, and many of their reforms did make sense; but they were at best wildly overconfident in their policy prescriptions, and at worst willing to sacrifice people in poor countries at the altar of bank profits. World poverty has in fact fallen by about half since 1990, and the World Bank has a lot to do with that. But things may have gone faster and smoother if they hadn’t insisted on removing so many financial regulations so quickly without clear forecasts of what would happen. I don’t share Jason Hickel’s pessimistic view that the World Bank’s failures were intentional acts toward an ulterior agenda, but I can see how it begins to look that way when they keep failing the same ways over and over again. (I instead invoke Hanlon’s razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”)

There are also reports of people facing retaliation for criticizing World Bank projects, including those within the World Bank who raise ethical concerns. If this was politically-motivated data manipulation, there may have been people who saw it happening, but were afraid to say anything for fear of being fired or worse.

And Chile in particular has reason to be suspicious. The World Bank suddenly started giving loans to Chile when Augusto Pinochet took power (the CIA denies supporting the coup, by the way—though, given the source, I can understand why one would take that with a grain of salt), and did so under the explicit reasoning that an authoritarian capitalist regime was somehow “more trustworthy” than a democratic socialist regime. Even in the narrow sense of financial creditworthiness that seems difficult to defend; the World Bank knew almost nothing about what kind of government Pinochet was going to create, and in fact despite the so-called “Miracle of Chile”, rapid economic growth in Chile didn’t really happen until the 1990s, after Chile became a democratic capitalist regime.

What I’m really getting at here is that the World Bank has a lot to answer for. I am prepared to believe that most of these actions were honest mistakes or ideological blinders, rather than corruption or cruelty; but even so, when millions of lives are at stake, even honest mistakes aren’t so forgivable. They should be looking for ways to improve their internal governance to make sure that mistakes are caught and corrected quickly. They should be constantly vigilant for biases—either intentional or otherwise—that might seep into their research. Error should be met with immediate correction and public apology; malfeasance should be met with severe punishment.

Perhaps Romer’s investigation actually signals a shift toward such a policy. If so, this is a very good thing. If only we had done this, say, thirty years ago.