Consumer and voter identity

Bill at Groping Towards Bethlehem talks about identity as a form of commitment. The person who thinks it unethical to eat meat might waver in any particular instance because no particular meal would ever be the one that resulted in an animal having been killed; being vegetarian brings commitment. He's here treading some of the ground previously covered by Cass Sunstein in Solidarity in Consumption.

I note some of these issues in my Public Choice classes when we cover expressive voting. When we're making decisions as shoppers, our consumption decisions are often bundled with all kinds of expressive considerations and identity issues. But there's no reason to expect these to be at all suboptimal in any overall sense. We weigh up the expressive benefits from certain consumption choices and weigh them against the opportunity costs - the extra amount of real resources we have to forego in making that choice. We can have problems, surely, where because we've bundled some aspects of consumption into our identities we might take too long to switch from a suboptimal path after a relative price change, but because we're individually bearing those costs, the losses can't be spectacularly large. Otherwise we'd switch.

When we flip over to the political realm, identity and expressiveness choices are individually costless. Now that isn't always true - some folks get so wrapped up in it that it surely imposes real costs on themselves and others. But on the whole, you don't really need to weigh up the real external costs imposed by your expressive and identity choices in policy. If it makes you happy to believe that you're a good person who's affiliated with good people and voting for the kinds of things that good people vote for, then it really doesn't matter much if those policies actually do harm in the real world. There's no feedback loop from individual choice to individual consequence at the ballot box. And so we get the political world we live in.

I say politics is the mindkiller. Andrew Coyne puts it a bit more bluntly:

In short, partisans are morons: mindless, mouthbreathing automatons.
— Andrew Coyne (@acoyne) December 4, 2012

Enjoy your identity and affiliations when shopping. But, if you can (and only metaphorically), grab an icepick, jam it up into the part of your brain that connects identity and affiliation to politics, and stir it around a bit.

Economist Irrationality

Boy is S.M. at The Economist's "Democracy in America" blog having to engage in contortions to defend the rationality of voting.

Launching off from Katherine Mangu-Ward's really excellent summary of the case against voting, S.M. invokes Gelman's argument that large N elections both reduce the probability of decisiveness and increase the potential benefits from winning.

The mathematics are convoluted, but the message is simple: even with a one in 10m chance of casting the decisive vote, the stakes are high. In fact, the lower the odds are of influencing the vote, the higher the stakes. This is because everything scales linearly and more people will bear the brunt—or enjoy the benefits—of a country led by candidate X rather than candidate Y. So your vote in Ohio, Wisconsin or another tipping-point state is worth $60,000 to your fellow citizens. That’s a pretty good return on the investment of the hour or so it takes to vote.

Except that the very fact of your decisiveness in the election proves that half of all voters disagree about whether you're making the world a better or a worse place! You can only be decisive by making or breaking a tie. That happens when half the voters think you're rather wrong. And, unless you are in an epistemically privileged situation relative to other voters (and why would you think you are!), you can't know whether you're on the right side or the wrong side. Gelman's a great statistician, but I've never liked his argument here.

Worse, S.M. pulls a pretty shonky Kantian move.

This misses the point of the Kantian argument for voting. The idea is not that one person’s decision to forgo voting would crash the system—how would that possibly happen?—but that it is immoral to act on a maxim that we cannot imagine everyone else acting on. So if I consider adopting Ms Mangu-Ward’s proposed maxim—I will abstain from voting because the costs of voting outweigh the benefits—I will first need to see if the maxim passes a test implicit in Kant’s categorical imperative. I ought not act in accordance with the maxim if it fails the test.

So let’s see: can I universalise the non-voting maxim? Can I imagine living in a world in which every eligible voter opts for a nap or a game of Temple Run in lieu of going to the polls? No. The logic of American democracy does not support such a universalised principle. No one votes, no one is elected, a moment of constitutional failure brings an emergency convention in which unelected delegates draft a new constitution calling for an alternate system of specifying leaders that doesn’t involve the public. The franchise, and America as we know it, disappears. Since the logic of the system cannot be sustained were everyone to adopt the nap-over-voting maxim, I am morally bound not to act on it.

Here's the universalisable version. Two weeks before the election, flip a coin. If it comes up heads, flip it again. If it comes up heads, flip it again. If it comes up heads a third time (a 12.5% chance), study hard about the policy options, decide which candidate is best, and then go vote. If everybody does that, there's a non-trivial chance of being decisive (maybe we'd need four heads in a row to be more sure) and so you've an instrumental reason to get out and vote - and to vote more sensibly. At current levels of turnout, it's clear that everybody else is failing to play the universalisable Kantian "vote at low probability" rule, so a good rule of thumb is then "Don't vote unless turnout looks low enough; if turnout is low, run the coin flips."

The simplest and most plausible way of squaring voting with rationality is simply to recognize that people like doing it for its own sake. We don't try to come up with stories about how onanism increases reproductive fitness; it's done for its own sake. Same with voting. Unfortunately, that breaks most of the normative desirability of median voter outcomes.

Investing to please and anger others [updated]

I love Amihai Glazer's little model claiming that voters are motivated by the desire to anger or please others through their vote. The model explains a few anomalies that are otherwise hard to explain, like that voters pay more attention to national election contests than local ones even though the probability of decisiveness in the latter more than makes up for the smaller stakes.

Expressiveness considerations of this sort should not matter in investment markets; expressiveness there gets expensive. And yet we have ethical investment funds for investors who care about that sort of thing. And, yet we have this one.

Moa Beer has been carving out a little niche in getting free publicity by being outrageously blokeishly offensive. When Wellington proposed putting up a Wellywood sign (tacky in the extreme), Moa promised a beer bounty to anybody who knocked it over. They sponsored the Great Easter Bunny Hunt. Gay rights groups haven't been pleased with some of their marketing campaigns. And they've been a bit cute around ASA guidelines regarding swearing in ads. And the Pakistani cricket team isn't pleased either.

Moa's now heading for IPO. Here's their prospectus. If you're running an investments course, this is one to keep on file. They've advertising for Beretta shotguns inside the prospectus, among other things. The Herald has some highlights:

The 132 page blurb channels a mix of the Mad Men TV series and up-market men's magazine FHM, featuring black and white shots of Moa's all-male board and management striking macho poses in sharply cut suits, while attractive women in black skirts, white blouses and ties fondle cigars and bottles of Moa.

A section headlined "Investment Highlights" appears beside one such full page photograph, while in another, Moa general manager Gareth Hughes taps out a cigar into an ashtray a model is holding above her head.

Advertisements in the prospectus include plugs for Aston Martin sports cars and Beretta rifles, while a naked woman on a horse promotes Ecoya scented candles, which Ross floated on the NZX in late 2010.

The prospectus seems designed for those who get expressive benefits from their investment decisions. So, then: will expressive bias against them in the IPO from those who are angered by their strategy be outweighed by expressive bias in their favour?

I'm not considering investing. The University sends a hefty chunk of my pay cheque over to the NZ University Superfund for my retirement; I don't try picking stocks. But if you were a value investor, would you expect that expressive investors would unduly bid up the price, and so you'd be inclined to stay away, or would you expect that IPO-avoidance by ethical types would make this a nice play? I'd lean towards the former.*

I expect that Moa will wind up doing well. Their beer is pretty decent and they're pretty shameless. That's not a bad niche. A small brand can afford to have half the world hate it so long as it gets a few people who love it.

Update: The most obvious model of what's going on is that they're trying to select for investors who like the current marketing strategy so the shareholders won't get mad when they do outrageous things in future. It'll be interesting to see what happens at IPO.

Update 13 November: Their IPO was oversubscribed. Good for them!

* Not investment advice; I've only skimmed the prospectus; form your own judgments, etc.

Planning for gypsys

Mark Pennington over at Pileus analyzes the expulsion of the Roma Irish Travellers [who I had mistakenly thought had had a link long back with the Roma] from an illegal camp site at Dale Farm in Essex. Honestly, I'd not paid much attention and had just figured that they were camped out on public land or on somebody else's property. But that was wrong. Here's Mark:

There is no doubt in my mind that the decision to evict the Gypsies from the site was the correct one under the terms of British law and land use planning law in particular. There is, however, equally no doubt in my mind that UK law in this regard is oppressive and provides a prime illustration of what happens when private property rights are over-ridden in the name of third party ‘community interests’.

As I understand it, the Dale Farm residents bought the property from whence they were evicted, but they acted illegally in erecting a campsite which had not been granted planning permission. As noted in previous posts on this site development rights in the UK are nationalised – if you own a piece of land you have no right to develop it as such – merely a right to request permission to do so from a local government planning authority which purports to represent ‘the community’. As a consequence, all land use decisions are fundamentally politicised and this typically results in the triumph of local ‘nimbyism’.

The Dale farm residents and other gypsies are unfortunate victims of this nimbyism. Though they were wrong to break the law in erecting an illegal site, the reason that they did so was that it is so difficult for them to legitimately build sites anywhere in the country – even on land that they themselves own. Whenever they apply for permission this is typically refused owing to the hordes of local nimby’s pressuring the local authorities and indeed the national government to keep out what are seen as ‘undesirable residents’.

Mark notes the irony of that those protesting the eviction also favour the democratization of all property use, ensuring the politicization of all land use decisions and the repression of folks who scare the median local voter. As Jennifer Roback points out* racism is cheaper at the ballot box than in the market.

* I love this article, which anticipates some of the arguments that came in the Brennan and Lomasky work on expressive voting and in Caplan's Rational Irrationality model.

Expressive voting

Hamlin and Jennings survey the expressive voting literature. It's a nice piece, and I like how they've brought Kuran's preference falsification arguments. I'll quibble on two points, mostly because I like the word quibble and need excuses to use it. They write:

Caplan is careful to distinguish between [rational irrationality and expressive voting]: 'In expressive voting theory, voters know that feel-good policies are ineffective. Expressive voters do not embrace dubious or absurd beliefs about the world ... In contrast, rationally irrational voters believe that feel-good policies work.'

Therefore, a further condition would need to be fulfilled in order to judge a vote to be expressive of true preferences rather than rationally irrational ones; we would need to check how well informed the voter is. One suspects that this issue may be similar to social pressure. If voting is both expressive and 'rationally irrational', making information available might be expected to result in a rapid and significant shift in the political equilibrium. If, by contrast, voting is an expression of truly-held expressive preferences, the political equilibrium will be much more stable.

I doubt that Caplan would argue that rationally irrational voters need only be provided more information in order to improve outcomes. If information provision were the sole problem, voters wouldn't be openly hostile to the provision of information with which they disagree. And the rise of the Econoblogosphere would have quickly led to substantially better economic policy.

Here would be a rather better test of Caplan's rational irrationality model. I've not seen it conducted, but more experimental economics applications have been melding voting and markets. Here goes. Set up an experimental double-auction environment framed in a salient way - buyers and sellers of labour, for example. Run a few rounds of the experiment as baseline. Then, let folks vote on whether they'd like to make a change to the trading environment: policy changes that either improve or reduce overall efficiency. A price floor, for instance - a minimum wage. Set treatment groups that vary in individual expected decisiveness: the odds that any player's vote will determine the trading structure for the next round, with the sum of all player odds being less than or much less than one. Then run a few rounds with the (potentially) changed trading environment before offering other votes - some which augment and some which attenuate efficiency, with varying expressive framing. If traders make better choices when more decisive, that would be consistent with rational irrationality. It wouldn't distinguish between expressive voting and rational irrationality, but I'm more interested in testing the broader concept anyway.

Hamlin and Jennings later discuss the implications of expressive voting for constitutional choice. Brennan and Hamlin worried that constitutionalism exacerbates expressive voting problems and suggested that constitutional questions be left to small but statistically representative groups in order to avoid the Veil of Insignificance. They write:

Perhaps these proposals should be decided by small (but representative) groups, which might be more likely to take an all-things-considered view. Crampton and Farrant make explicit the potential problem that such a small group might design institutions that enrich themselves if they are not fully representative in a relevant sense. Therefore, a trade-off may exist between the problem of expressiveness, on the one hand, and allowing too much room for the narrow self-interest of unrepresentative groups, on the other.

It's probably semantics (a lot can be packed into "in a relevant sense"), but our main worry (ungated) was that the perfectly statistically representative group would have, by virtue of being the constitutional committee, a newly granted interest in enriching the members of the committee. If the group is small enough to overcome expressiveness problems, it may also be small enough to solve internal collective action problems and set itself up as effective dictator post the constitutional phase. The only way of breaking past the Veil of Insignificance is by reintroducing the problem that constitutional political economy in the Buchanan sense was meant to solve: separating individuals at the constitutional level from their particular interests in order that the constitution foster the general interest. Absent the Veil of Insignificance, the constitution serves the general interest of those writing the constitution.

Paper gated permalink below:

Expressive Political Behaviour: Foundations, Scope and Implications

Alan Hamlin and Colin Jennings (2011).

British Journal of Political Science,
Volume 41, Issue 03, July 2011 pp 645-670

http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0007123411000020