Ideology and high demanders

Ideology could be what winds up killing Campbell Live, but it could save it too.

To recap: Twitter's been a-buzz with speculation that there some vast right wing conspiracy within TV3 that's out to get John Campbell. If it were true, I expect I'd be called up for comment on TV3 a lot more than the ... almost never... that happens now. Richard Meadows' take over at Stuff is likely the right one: it's just ratings.

But that doesn't necessarily mean that ideology doesn't matter.

Fox News went from zero percent market share to almost half the market in about two years because all the other media outlets sat a bit to the left of centre: a big chunk of the potential audience wasn't being served. On the other side, if you go a bit too far out in advocacy journalism of a certain bent, you're left with a tail of potential viewership consisting of a lot of people who don't seem much interested in watching live TV. I don't mean that in any derogatory sense - John Campbell seemed about the only person able to help anybody in a fight with EQC during the Christchurch quakes. But the crusading-activism television has a limited, albeit intense, audience.

And so being a bit too far on an ideological fringe can hurt viewership while ensuring a very deep and committed loyalty among those who do view and among those who are just happy it exists. That is not a model consistent with advertising-based funding, unless the committed viewership are also an especially advertising-targeted demographic. But it does sound like something that could be funded by an annual subscription fee among supporters.

I wonder why nobody who's launching petitions has instead considered trying a PledgeMe campaign. It wouldn't have to cover all of the costs of Campbell Live, just the difference between what MediaWorks would get from Campbell Live and what it would get from the better rating alternative.

Seems a more effective thing to try than internet petitions and speculations about whether the guy who owns the network is evil. I wonder how much each of the 60,000 petitioners would need to pledge to make this work.

Partisan heritability

I spend a week toward in my grad public choice class on correlates of political preferences.

Suppose Don Wittman is right that politics basically gives the median voter what she wants. And suppose further that Bryan Caplan is right that the best way of modeling voters is to model a normal person, and then to take away reason and responsibility. Where crazy political preferences come from then starts mattering - there's no necessary link between "what the median voter says she wants at the ballot box" and what the median voter would actually prefer if given a decisive choice.

We then hit onto some of the evidence on the heritability and policy and party preferences. Settle, Dawes and Fowler showed that identical twins are much closer in political ideology than are fraternal twins and suggested then that half the variance in strength of partisan attachment comes down to genes. Alford, Funk and Hibbing showed reasonable evidence of political orientation heritability, also using twins. Attitudes towards school prayer, property taxes, the "moral majority"*, capitalism, astrology, the draft, pacifism, unions, Republicans, socialism, foreign aid, X-rated movies, immigration and more were pretty strongly heritable. See Table 1 of their linked APSR paper. Jason Collins also maintains a great reading list on economics and evolutionary biology.

Hatemi, Dawes et al have a rather nice new paper forthcoming showing that these findings haven't been artefacts of particular datasets. But while they've found very strong evidence of heritability, they've also shown that links to particular genetic markers are fragile. Markers associated with ideology in one dataset don't show up in another - which is about what I'd expected. If you've thousands of genetic markers to choose from and you're searching in one dataset for ones that will correlate with preferences, you're bound to get some spurious correlations that will then fail to replicate in other datasets.

The ScienceNordic summary probably overstates things a bit - there's a pretty extensive prior literature on heritability of ideology, including many pieces by some of the authors of this one. But I will be adding the new piece to my graduate public choice reading list.

As I ask my grad students: now that you know that a reasonable part of your political views are basically set by your genes, how should you update the weight you attach to your own political views' correctness?

A few other obvious implications:

• Assortative mating has gotten a lot easier with online dating websites allowing people to screen out bad ideological matches. This will lead to stronger partisan attachment, higher variance in political ideology, and greater bifurcation over time.
• Where migration also pushes towards ideological assortment (liberals move to Boston, conservatives move to Texas), we get stronger regional heterogeneity over time. This suggests to me that more redistribution should be handled at the state rather than the federal level. 
• Bryan Caplan's right: don't bother trying to push your kids towards your ideology. Instead, if it matters to you, choose your spouse carefully and the rest will take care of itself. 

* A right wing Christian American lobby group.

The scar

Kevin Vallier over at Bleeding-Heart Libertarians asked whether a non-ideological political philosophy is possible. And Will Wilkinson gave his answer; I bolded the especially good bit.

It's mostly personal epistemic virtue, but the content of belief helps too. I think a moderate general Pyrrhonism plus conceptually savvy empiricism plus pluralism plus a socially deliberative/procedural bent (not just democratic but also scientific) adds up to something close to non-ideological -- as close one is likely to get, at any rate.

I stopped calling myself a libertarian in part because I thought my many marginal disagreements added up to something really substantive and categorical. Mostly, though, because ideological self-definition inwardly encourages a spirit of community and camaraderie and partisanship that is one of the blessings of life, but which also makes true philosophy next to impossible. I struggle daily with the possibility that I have made the wrong decision, and that belonging, even on the basis of shared error, is more important than truth. Where my label was, there is a scar.

I read that, and I thought about the new Church of Atheism.

I instead choose multiple churches. Pluralist libertarian consequentialist rationalist attempted-truth-seeker contractarian sometimes-anarchist. So long as I don't think too hard about the weightings on the different parts, I don't think that forces too strong a commitment to any bit of it. I choose the hat to fit the setting as needed, trying to keep the truth-seeker one closest to the scalp. That doesn't give me the same shared-community benefits as pure identification could give, but the Economics Department here at Canterbury is a pretty good alternative source of such benefits for pluralist libertarian consequentialist rationalist attempted-truth-seeker contractarian sometimes-anarchists.

HT: @AdamGurri

Ladies and Gentlemen... the Greens' would-be Finance Minister

Russel Norman, recently ruled out as Finance Minister in any Labour-Green coalition by Labour, tweets from the Finance Committee:

Sitting in Finance Cttee listening to Treasury officials describe tax as a 'burden'. Right wing political ideology runs deep in Treasury!
— Russel Norman (@RusselNorman) September 17, 2013

Tax is price we pay to live in a civilised society. If Treasury thinks it's a 'burden', perhaps they'd suggest abolition of public health.
— Russel Norman (@RusselNorman) September 17, 2013

Taxes are a bad, public services are a good. Saying the first doesn't mean denying the second.

More importantly, economists use the word 'burden' in a particular way. A few useful notes about Principles-level (maybe intermediate) economics for someone who thinks himself qualified to be finance minister:

• 'Burden' measures the total cost of a tax. The 'excess burden' is the amount by which the cost of a tax exceeds the amount collected. Treasury tends to reckon that excess burden is around 20%: it costs us about $1.20 to raise $1.00 in tax. The $1.00 raised is a transfer from the public to the government; the $0.20 is pure loss due to distortions in economic activity consequent to increases in our current mix of taxes.
• Tax incidence theory is important: it tells us who bears the burden of any particular tax. Suppose we wanted to add another 5% compulsory Kiwisaver contribution. The 'burden' of the tax would fall on both workers and on employers with the precise mix depending on how employers and employees change their labour demand and labour supply with changes in wages: it doesn't much matter whether we say that employers have to pay it or whether employees have to pay it. Regardless of statutory incidence, economic incidence - the burden - will remain the same. Meteria Turei understood this when she said that the accommodation supplement paid to tenants is largely a subsidy for landlords. Alas, public understanding of such things is imperfect, allowing for shenanigans where measures imposing burdens on one group are framed as costing somebody else instead.
• If a genie appeared able to provide public health services, for free, this would be a good thing, right? It's impossible, but it would be good. The services paid for by taxes are good, the taxes are bad. We need to be sure that the value delivered by services are greater than the burden imposed by the tax. At current measures of excess burden, a project must return at least $1.20 for every dollar in spending. 

Russel Norman suggests only "right wing" economists talk about tax burden. Here is a JSTOR search on "tax burden". There are 61 pages of search results with 100 results per page. Item number 177 on a date-sorted list is famous Right Wing Economist John Maynard Keynes discussing the Colwyn Report on Natinoal Debt and Taxation. Item 398 is rabid right-winger Nicholas Kaldor's call for wage subsidies to reduce unemployment (1936).

Burden is just the term used by economists to describe the cost of the tax and to help sort out the difference between statutory and economic incidence. Like "While X writes the cheque to IRD, the burden of the tax falls on Y and Z." That's it. It's the standard term used in the main texts to describe this thing. Richard Musgrave (centre, maybe centre-left) uses it. James Buchanan (right) uses it. Pick a random public finance text, you'll find "tax burden" or "excess burden" somewhere in it.

Update: egads, it gets worse. Lance Wiggs tries explaining that it's just a word we use. Russel Norman replies:

@lancewiggs Taxes do change behaviour. To call it a burden or distortionary does buy in to general equilibrium model w all its problems
— Russel Norman (@RusselNorman) September 18, 2013

Update 2: this is way too funny. A Twitter correspondent points me to two press releases by Russel Norman.

First:

"It's not fair to expect income-earning New Zealanders to carry a disproportionate share of the tax burden while some of New Zealand's wealthiest individuals pay none," said Green Party Co-Leader Russel Norman.

Second:

Unlike the National Government that has chosen to shift the tax burden on to the lowest paid New Zealanders, our tax changes would focus on those not currently paying their fair share.

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.

Academic centrefolds

Public Choice has to get in touch with Randall Munroe right now. They need to get a licence to reproduce this as a centrefold in the next available issue.

DW-Nominate tracks Congressional ideology [and here] back to the start. What a beautiful way of illustrating it.

Dogmatism and memory constraints

Jeff Ely shows how dogmatism can be the consequence rather than the circumvention of rational thinking. We may process information rationally, arrive at a position, discard the workings that got us to the position to save memory space, then move on to the next area for rational deliberation.

So what you optimally, rationally, perfectly objectively do is allow yourself to forget everything you know about A including all the reasons that justify your strongly-held views on A and to just make an indelible mental note that “The right-wing position on A is the correct one no matter what anyone else says and no matter what evidence to the contrary should come along in the future.”

The reason this is the rational thing to do is that you have scarce memory space. By allowing those memories to fade away you free up storage space for information about issues B, C, and D which you are still carefully collecting information on, forming an objective opinion about, in preparation for eventually also adopting a well-informed dogmatic opinion about.

I do this all the time. It's actually one of the reasons I blog: to keep track, in easily searchable and keyword-indexed format, of the reasons that led me to hold positions. It's surprising how often I've found myself searching back through the archive to remind myself of what I'd concluded about something, and how often I curse myself for having arrived at some position before I started blogging.

But I do enjoy that rather a few of you come along for the ride.

HT: @Nonicoc

Party positions - I don't believe it edition

Political Compass placed NZ political parties on a two-dimensional left/right, authoritarian/libertarian chart. (HT: Bryce Edwards)

1. The left-right economic axis seems about right. It's odd that Labour this year, running on a $15 minimum wage, capital gains tax, and a fairly dirigiste programme, ranked right of centre, but the relative positions seem roughly correct.


2. The authoritarian-libertarian axis does not seem right. ACT, which mused about marijuana legalization, is ranked more authoritarian than Labour, which would have imposed pretty severe alcohol regulations. ACT is also ranked as more authoritarian than Maori, who seek to ban the sale of tobacco. Many of ACT's candidates were explicitly libertarian. Putting them as more authoritarian than Labour requires putting a fair bit of weight on their crime & punishment stance and mapping views on indigenous rights / individual rights onto a libertarian / authoritarian axis. The party positioning for ACT might be right for the post-election result, with John Banks as the only ACT MP. But not pre-election. Brash was the most libertarian candidate we've had in ages; it's a shame he didn't win in '05 (conditional on his having had an equivalent to Heather Simpson keeping the details in order).


3. They're right that the Greens aren't tons more socially liberal than Labour. Yes, they take a relatively libertarian position on gay marriage / adoption, copyright, freedom of speech, and marijuana policy. But they also take a relatively authoritarian position on "nanny state" issues. I don't think the Greens, Maori, and ACT aren't as far apart on social liberalism as here made out; those three parties were regularly the ones who voted liberal on social issues in the last couple of Parliaments. 


4. They correctly place no major party in the right/libertarian quadrant. Even ACT ought only have made it onto the zero line for 2011. This remains a bit puzzling as NZES data shows there are at least as many voters would count as social liberal / fiscal conservative as there are true conservatives. The classical liberals who have supported ACT will have to think hard about whether ACT remains the best vehicle; they know John Banks better than I do.


5. I wonder where the dot for NZ First would have landed. North-centre?


6. I wish they would release density maps of survey respondents by country. Sure, it's a self-selected sample. But I'd still be curious how many respondents from NZ wound up in the purple quadrant.

Chinese communism

William Watson points to the latest Pew survey on global attitudes to free markets.

China tops the scale in support of the free market. Germany also beats the United States. As does Brazil. And France is only one point behind the US.

And while 93% of Chinese surveyed say trade is a good thing, only 66% of Americans agreed.

If they ever re-make Red Dawn with China invading the US, which side do we cheer for?

Frum moves on

On Tuesday, I posted David Frum's very nice op-ed warning the GOP about being taken over by the loonier parts of its base.

Thursday's Washington Post brings Anne Applebaum to second Frum's warnings.

And now, my fellow disappointed conservatives, former conservatives and disgusted conservatives, it is time for all good Republicans to come to the defense of David Frum, and to endorse his critique of radical right-wing talk-show rhetoric. If you've left the party in disgust, then call up your friends who are still members and get them to do it for you.

I am not writing this because David Frum is my friend, although he is. I am writing this because I was recently in London, where I got a close-up look at the state of the British Conservative Party, once the intellectual motor of free-market economics in Europe and the rest of the world. After almost two decades in power, the British conservatives lost, in 1997, to Tony Blair's slicker, smoother, Labor Party -- a party that had accepted the basic premises of Thatcherism and then moved on.

At the time, the Tories reckoned they would be in opposition for a couple of years at most: All they had to do was return to their basic principles and declare them with greater fervor and more self-righteous anger than ever before. They knew what the British people really wanted, they told one another, and ran two angry campaigns that reeked of xenophobia. The result: The Tories have been out of power since 1997. Thirteen years.

And now Frum's been fired from AEI. AEI always seemed the DC conservative think tank most worried about keeping its folks on-message, so it shouldn't come as particular surprise.

Update: Tunku Varadarajan weighs in, arguing there was no possible compromise so staying pure had no downside. I'd buy this if the GOP ever had been pure on health care, but when Krugman called them out asking the GOP to say where they'd make cuts to make Medicare sustainable, I didn't hear much.

In fact, conservatives have backed away from spending cuts they themselves proposed in the past. In the 1990s, for example, Republicans in Congress tried to force through sharp cuts in Medicare. But now they have made opposition to any effort to spend Medicare funds more wisely the core of their campaign against health care reform (death panels!). And presidential hopefuls say things like this, from Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota: “I don’t think anybody’s gonna go back now and say, Let’s abolish, or reduce, Medicare and Medicaid.”

So the status quo level of state intervention in health care was somehow a morally pure position that needed defending against Obama's increased level of state intervention in health care? Hmm.

The dangers of demagoguery

David Frum writes thoughtfully on Obama's health care bill:

At the beginning of this process we made a strategic decision: unlike, say, Democrats in 2001 when President Bush proposed his first tax cut, we would make no deal with the administration. No negotiations, no compromise, nothing. We were going for all the marbles. This would be Obama’s Waterloo – just as healthcare was Clinton’s in 1994.

Only, the hardliners overlooked a few key facts: Obama was elected with 53% of the vote, not Clinton’s 42%. The liberal block within the Democratic congressional caucus is bigger and stronger than it was in 1993-94. And of course the Democrats also remember their history, and also remember the consequences of their 1994 failure.

This time, when we went for all the marbles, we ended with none.

Could a deal have been reached? Who knows? But we do know that the gap between this plan and traditional Republican ideas is not very big. The Obama plan has a broad family resemblance to Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts plan. It builds on ideas developed at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s that formed the basis for Republican counter-proposals to Clintoncare in 1993-1994.

...

We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat.

There were leaders who knew better, who would have liked to deal. But they were trapped. Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal-making was rendered impossible. How do you negotiate with somebody who wants to murder your grandmother? Or – more exactly – with somebody whom your voters have been persuaded to believe wants to murder their grandmother?

I’ve been on a soapbox for months now about the harm that our overheated talk is doing to us. Yes it mobilizes supporters – but by mobilizing them with hysterical accusations and pseudo-information, overheated talk has made it impossible for representatives to represent and elected leaders to lead. The real leaders are on TV and radio, and they have very different imperatives from people in government. Talk radio thrives on confrontation and recrimination. When Rush Limbaugh said that he wanted President Obama to fail, he was intelligently explaining his own interests. What he omitted to say – but what is equally true – is that he also wants Republicans to fail. If Republicans succeed – if they govern successfully in office and negotiate attractive compromises out of office – Rush’s listeners get less angry. And if they are less angry, they listen to the radio less, and hear fewer ads for Sleepnumber beds.

So today’s defeat for free-market economics and Republican values is a huge win for the conservative entertainment industry. Their listeners and viewers will now be even more enraged, even more frustrated, even more disappointed in everybody except the responsibility-free talkers on television and radio. For them, it’s mission accomplished. For the cause they purport to represent, it’s Waterloo all right: ours.

(emphasis added)

If the analysis I've seen on the bill is right, it's a bit depressing. The best coverage combination - pay for things yourself by negotiating prices while carrying coverage for catastrophic care - is now illegal in the United States. Although, of course, we could just have achieved that via a sneakier route: the $2000/year fine for having no insurance coverage effectively being the premium for catastrophic coverage. Then, buy the insurance once you've discovered that you need something costly.

It's also interesting that the Stupak Amendment, which I'd thought might well kill the deal, was artfully negotiated around by Obama promising that money from the bill wouldn't be used for abortions.

It's a lot easier to stay calm about the Americans doing harm to their health care system when you're a thirteen hour flight away.

The government health care system here provides quality of service probably only slightly worse than Medicaid in the States (my estimate: better than Medicaid on the small stuff, worse on cancer treatment); high deductible catastrophic care insurance is cheap ($100/month for the three of us); paying privately for regularly scheduled maintenance is relatively cheap and simple.

The real downside in New Zealand is that we benefit greatly by free-riding on American medical innovations. As costs balloon under the new US system and eventual cost-control mechanisms knock innovation back a few pegs, we'll have a harder time doing that.

But Frum's right. It's a shame that the monster-shouters formed the negotiating bottom line rather than the opening position.

Vowles on the 2008 NZ General Election

Liberation points to a chapter by Jack Vowles on the 2008 New Zealand election.

In the 2008 general election, half of voters (51%) thought there were only ‘minor differences’ between the parties during the campaign, while only 38% thought there were actually major differences between the parties. Furthermore, when survey respondents were asked to place the parties on the left-right spectrum, ‘A third could not place Labour or National’. These findings from the New Zealand Election Survey surely reflects the policy convergence of the parties, and are detailed in Jack Vowles’ new academic chapter about the election.

But in the 2005 NZES, 18.9% of respondents said "don't know" when asked National's ideology (with a further 6.7% leaving the question blank); similar proportions had problems identifying Labour's ideology. 23% of respondents either answered "don't know" or left the question blank for both of National and Labour. A further 11 percent of the sample placed National to the left of Labour (among those who did not answer either "don't know" or leave a blank for either National or Labour). So, a third of the 2005 sample could not place National relative to Labour. I wonder what proportion of the 2008 respondents placed National left of Labour....

He goes on to argue that the shifting of the parties to the center opened up room for valence issues. I certainly agree that 2008 was far less ideologically charged than 2005. For 2008, Vowles reports (on a left-right spectrum where 0 is left and 10 is right) that voters placed Labour at 3.7 and National at 6.7. But those registering an answer in 2005 didn't answer that much differently: Labour scored a 3.6 and National a 7.1. So the average gap closed from 3.5 points to 3 points. But if we look at individual respondents' reported distance between National and Labour in 2005 (for those registering an answer), the standard deviation of that difference variable is 4.8. Is a half point closing of the ideological gap really then significant?

State-level political polarisation

Andrew Gelman points to some really neat data work by a colleague of his, Boris Shor (jointly with Nolan McCarty) on ideological positions of US State legislators. How does he put them on a common scale? By exploiting that many members of State assemblies go on to Congress where they then get an ADA score. So long as the state legislator's ideology doesn't change in the move from state legislature to Congress (or, more importantly, doesn't exhibit any changes that are specific to any legislators coming from that state), we then have some fixed reference points in each state legislature.

Gelman provides this picture from Shor:

Some things aren't that interesting to me. Of course New York, Connecticut and Maine have both Democrats and Republicans far to the left of the Congressional averages. What's more interesting is the gaps between the parties. In Utah, Indiana, Wisconsin and California (and a couple others), there is no overlap between the Democratic range and the Republican range. In Rhode Island, there's no overlap but only a tiny difference in means. In lots of other states, there's substantial overlap between the two parties' positions. I wonder what drives that kind of state by state variation. Open versus closed primaries? Something else?

Capitalism versus the Free Market

Recent surveys that have tried to gauge Americans' opinions about capitalism reveal either a public terribly confused about it, or remarkably perceptive about differences between its theory and its American manifestation. In the dark days of December 2008, as General Motors careened toward bankruptcy, a poll by Rasmussen Reports found 70% of voters endorsing a "free market" over any economy steered by government. A subsequent poll, just months later, found only 53% endorsing "capitalism" over socialism, while a third, around the same time, found that two out of three Americans believe government and big business collude in ways that hurt consumers and investors. "The fact that a ‘free-market economy' attracts substantially more support than ‘capitalism' may suggest some skepticism about whether capitalism in the United States today relies on free markets," said pollster Scott Rasmussen, trying to square the results. Americans seem to believe in free markets; they're just not sure they're getting them.

From today's National Post. The skeptics are right...

Ticking boxes

• Extroverted? Moderately.
• Disagreeable? Decidedly.
• Conscientious? Reasonably.
• Stable? Rather.
• Open? Moderately.

It seems I fit the profile.

A compelling recent paper by Alan Gerber and co-authors shows that personality and ideology are closely linked. Liberals are markedly higher in Openness and lower in Conscientiousness. Gerber et al's real contribution, though, comes when they distinguish social ideology from economic ideology. (It's almost as if they were inspired by the World's Shortest Political Quiz!)

For social liberalism, they once again find that it is associated with higher Openness and lower Conscientiousness. For economic liberalism (in the American sense of lower support for free-market policies), though, they get a much more thorough profile. Economic liberals are less Extroverted, more Agreeable, less Conscientious, less Stable (i.e. more Neurotic), and more Open. Or if you flip the perspective, free-marketeers are more Extroverted, less Agreeable, more Conscientious, more Stable, and less Open.

Assorted updates

I warned that crises are fuel for both poles. Richard Metzger at BoingBoing cries Marx was right!.

I see this as a test between Naiomi Klein and Bob Higgs. Klein says economic crisis is exactly what the elites need to help push us to further deregulation, weakening the state in favour of markets. Higgs warns rather that crisis is the health of the state. He provides a wealth of historical evidence making his case. The only real world case that might fit a Klein story is New Zealand in 1984; of course, she has the sign wrong on the normative aspect. Higgs is right today. Why a banking insolvency crisis turns into crackdowns on tax havens makes sense in a Higgs story. Think the G-20 Cartel is worried about the productive squirreling off their resources onces the bill comes round to pay for the the cartel's profligacy? For more on international tax competition, read Veronique de Rugy's work on the topic (at Cato and Mercatus).

If we're in an Atlas moment, Wesley Mooch and Fred Kinnan are winning. And there is no John Galt. If Sergei Brin and Larry Page disappear and later emerge on some Seastead built by Patri Friedman and protected by some Google-developed missile-defense system, I'll re-evaluate.

In other news, I'd recently discussed the economics of ticket scalping. James Swofford points me to a recent article in which he discusses how the scalping equilibrium may be optimal from the artist's perspective when a dynamic revenue function is considered. That argument corresponds to some of the arguments in the comments section about bands being able to maintain fan base by pricing concerts below market clearing.

A reply to Swofford by Spindler notes that scalpers may make artists better off by facilitating closer to perfect price discrimination where the artist is constrained against doing so, even where there aren't side-payments from scalper to artist (which Reznor discusses). Swofford's rejoinder argues that the artists still suffer a reputational loss from the existence of scalpers, which then hits their dynamic revenue function, and consequently the artists and ticket agencies lobby for anti-scalping rules.

This remains inconsistent with that scalping could be eliminated at relatively low cost by requiring photo ID and named tickets. It seems more likely to me that the artists and ticket agents lobby for anti-scalping laws to maintain the veneer of being against scalping while ensuring that they can profit from this side-market and its side-payments without suffering a hit to the dynamic revenue function.

An Atlas moment?

10 April 2009 Note: check updated results here!

Lots of chatter on the libertarian blogs about whether we're in an Atlas moment, how sales of Atlas Shrugged are peaking, and how folks finally might be coming round to rejecting the moochers and embracing their inner Galt.

Here's some fun, courtesy of Google Insights.

"Ayn Rand" versus "Karl Marx"


The two lines show us search trends over the last 12 months on the terms "Ayn Rand" (red) and "Karl Marx" (blue). Scales are normalized as a proportion of all searches, with 100 being the largest number of searches. Marx is by far the more popular search term.

Where are folks most interested in each? Well, Google's Search Insight tells us that too. Maps below show search intensity on Karl Marx (in blue) and on Ayn Rand (in red).


So, in lots of the developing world, we're seeing lots of searches on Marx and very little on Rand. Rand only registers in the Philippines. In the US, Rand beats Marx by a small margin; same in India. In Canada, Marx beats Rand; same in Norway and New Zealand and ... pretty much every country that makes the top ten in searches on Ayn Rand. The green bars show searches for "Atlas Shrugged". Only in the US and India do searches on Rand beat searches on Marx.

Search Insights is powerful enough for us to drill down onto country-specific searches. So, we find in Canada, that Rand beat Marx from mid June 08 through August 08, but Marx wins just about the rest of the time. This one shocked me: the proportion by which Marx beat Rand in Ontario matched that in Alberta. Only in British Columbia, Canada's "loonie left coast", did Rand beat Marx. In Manitoba, ancestral home of Barbara Branden, Rand didn't show up at all.

We can drill down even further. Marx beats Rand by a larger majority in Edmonton than in Calgary; Edmonton is the seat of government and sometimes is disparaged as Redmonton. Turns out it's just a matter of degree.

In book sales, Atlas beats Das Kapital. The paperback edition of Atlas is currently #29 in Books at Amazon; Capital is at #5,213. I'd love to know what the rank movement is since a year ago, but I don't know how to access historical Amazon data. Sales of both certainly seem to be up, but I can't compare trends without a decent handle on base rate sales from a year or two ago.

So, Randians, be a bit careful about calling this a Randian moment. Economic crisis seems to intensify interest in alternatives at both poles, at least as evidenced by Google search trends. You can, of course, object that maybe all the searches on Marx are to find out just how Marxist Obama really is: it's Objectivists doing the searches. There certainly are a lot of searches on Marx + Obama, but I can't evaluate the searchers' normative assessments of any such link. I've tried adding a few disambiguating terms like evil or bad to add to the searches; doesn't seem to affect much. If you can think of better ways of disambiguating, I'd love to see the results!

Other fun searches: Capitalism and Communism are about neck and neck in the search races, with very collinear time series: massively parallel movements since November. And "Objectivism" doesn't garner enough searches to much show up anywhere, at least not in comparison with either capitalism, communism or socialism.



HT: Many thanks to Hal Varian for telling me about Google Search Insights! It's pretty awesome.