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On the topic of US politics …

There’s a perennial question thrown around by Australian and British politics-watchers (and, no-doubt, by people in lots of other countries too, but I’ve only lived in Australia and Britain):  Why do American elections focus so much on the individual and so little on the proposed policies of the individual?  Why do the American people seem to choose a president on the basis of their leadership skills or their membership of some racial, sexual, social or economic group, while in other Western nations, although the parties are divided to varying degrees by class, the debate and the talking points picked up by the media are mostly matters of policy?

An easy response is to focus on the American executive/legislative divide, but that carries no water for me.  Americans seem to also pick their federal representatives and senators in the same way as they do their president.

The best that I can come up with is to look at differences in political engagement brought about by differences in scale and political integration.  The USA is much bigger (by population) and much less centralised than Australia or Britain.  As a result, the average US citizen is more removed from Washington D.C. than the average Briton is from Whitehall or the average Australian from Canberra.  The greater population hurts engagement by making the individual that much less significant on the national stage – a scaled-up equivalent of Dunbar’s number, if you will.  The decentralisation (greater federalism) serves to focus attention more on the lower levels of government.  The two effects, I believe, reinforce each other.

Americans are great lovers of democracy at levels that we in Australia and Britain might consider ludicrously minuscule and at that level there is real fire in the debates over specific policies.  Individual counties vote on whether to raise local sales tax by 1% in order to increase funding to local public schools.  Elections to school boards decide what gets taught in those schools.

That decentralisation is a deliberate feature of the US political system, explicitly enshrined in the tenth amendment to their constitution.  But when so many matters of policy are decided at the county or state level, all that is left at the federal level are matters of foreign policy and national identity.  It seems no surprise, then, that Americans see the ideal qualities of a president being strength and an ability to “unite the country.”

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Did Toot win it for Obama?

You can file this under “Things that Democrats in America wouldn’t dream of saying out loud.”  Did Obama’s visit to his close-to-death grandmother seal his victory in the upcoming election?  Think of what it says:

  • Firstly, there is an immediate comparison to when John McCain suspended his own campaign.  That was ostensibly to find a solution to the financial crisis, but as it happens, the details of the bailout were agreed on before he ever got to Washington, the American public didn’t like it and McCain got tarred with that frustration.  Even worse, the McCain suspension looked like precisely what it was – a cheap stunt.  In comparison, Obama’s campaign suspension could not possibly be more authentic.  He is going to tend to his sick grandmother.
  • Secondly, it humanises Obama by giving people a genuine insight into the man’s personal life.  Even more, it is something that everybody in the country – Democrat or Republican – can relate to.
  • Thirdly, it emphasises the age difference between Obama and McCain.  Grandparents can get sick and (sadly) die.  John McCain is of grandparent age, while Obama is a vibrant, healthy adult.  No matter how fit McCain is, that hurts him.
  • Fourthly, it either forces the McCain campaign to stop the all-negative ads for a couple of days or, more likely, makes them look low and nasty for keeping them going.  Since all politics is relative, that raises Obama up, which brings us to …
  • Finally, it paints Obama in the colours of what the American electorate loves best: personal strength in the face of adversity.  Fortitude in the face of grief.  It is what people admire in their war-time presidents, grimly bearing witness to the coffins of the “glorious dead” and providing a symbol of a man unbowed by the ugly aspects of human existence.

Yes, okay, it’s probably fair to say that Obama was coasting to victory long before his campaign announced his intention to go to Hawaii.  But that’s not the point.  The point is that it will have helped.  Were it a close race, this may have decided it.  As it stands, it guarantees that McCain can’t claw back any of Obama’s lead during those two days, making the Republican turn-around that much less likely.

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Not-at-all-surprising events #437

The NY Times endorses Obama:

Hyperbole is the currency of presidential campaigns, but this year the nation’s future truly hangs in the balance.

The United States is battered and drifting after eight years of President Bush’s failed leadership. He is saddling his successor with two wars, a scarred global image and a government systematically stripped of its ability to protect and help its citizens – whether they are fleeing a hurricane’s floodwaters, searching for affordable health care or struggling to hold on to their homes, jobs, savings and pensions in the midst of a financial crisis that was foretold and preventable.

As tough as the times are, the selection of a new president is easy. After nearly two years of a grueling and ugly campaign, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois has proved that he is the right choice to be the 44th president of the United States.

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That’s quite a jump

Following on from observing that Obama’s fundraising (and therefore advertising) success gives Republicans an excuse for losing the upcoming election, I see the following:

In August 2008, the Obama campaign set a record for the most successful fundraising month ever for a US presidential campaign:  $66 million.

On the 29th of August 2008, John McCain presented Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential candidate.

In September 2008, the Obama campaign blows their August fundraising figure out of the water, this time managing over $150 million.

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Power proportional to knowledge

Arnold Kling, speaking of the credit crisis and the bailout plans in America, writes:

What I call the “suits vs. geeks divide” is the discrepancy between knowledge and power. Knowledge today is increasingly dispersed. Power was already too concentrated in the private sector, with CEO’s not understanding their own businesses.

But the knowledge-power discrepancy in the private sector is nothing compared to what exists in the public sector. What do Congressmen understand about the budgets and laws that they are voting on? What do the regulators understand about the consequences of their rulings?

We got into this crisis because power was overly concentrated relative to knowledge. What has been going on for the past several months is more consolidation of power. This is bound to make things worse. Just as Nixon’s bureaucrats did not have the knowledge to go along with the power they took when they instituted wage and price controls, the Fed and the Treasury cannot possibly have knowledge that is proportional to the power they currently exercise in financial markets.

I often disagree with Arnold’s views, but I found myself nodding to this – it’s a fair concern.  I’ve wondered before about democracy versus hierarchy and optimal power structures.  I would note, however, that Arnold’s ideal of the distribution of power in proportion to knowledge seems both unlikely and, quite possibly, undesirable.  If the aggregation of output is highly non-linear thanks to overlapping externalities, then a hierarchy of power may be desirable, provided at least that the structure still allows the (partial) aggregation of information.

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Obama’s spending gives Republicans an excuse

So Barack Obama is easily outstripping John McCain both in fundraising and, therefore, in advertising.  I’m hardly unique in supporting the source of Obama’s money – a multitude of small donations.  It certainly has a more democratic flavour than exclusive fund-raising dinners at $20,000 per plate.

But if we want to look for a cloud behind all that silver lining, here it is:  If Barack Obama wins the 2008 US presidential election, Republicans will be in a position to believe (and argue) that he won primarily because of his superior fundraising and not the superiority of his ideas.  Even worse, they may be right, thanks to the presence of repetition-induced persuasion bias.

Peter DeMarzo, Dimitri Vayanos and Jeffrey Zwiebel had a paper published in the August 2003 edition of the Quarterly Journal of Economics titled “Persuasion Bias, Social Influence, and Unidimensional Opinions“.  They describe persuasion bias like this:

[C]onsider an individual who reads an article in a newspaper with a well-known political slant. Under full rationality the individual should anticipate that the arguments presented in the article will reect the newspaper’s general political views. Moreover, the individual should have a prior assessment about how strong these arguments are likely to be. Upon reading the article, the individual should update his political beliefs in line with this assessment. In particular, the individual should be swayed toward the newspaper’s views if the arguments presented in the article are stronger than expected, and away from them if the arguments are weaker than expected. On average, however, reading the article should have no effect on the individual’s beliefs.

[This] seems in contrast with casual observation. It seems, in particular, that newspapers do sway readers toward their views, even when these views are publicly known. A natural explanation of this phenomenon, that we pursue in this paper, is that individuals fail to adjust properly for repetitions of information. In the example above, repetition occurs because the article reects the newspaper’s general political views, expressed also in previous articles. An individual who fails to adjust for this repetition (by not discounting appropriately the arguments presented in the article), would be predictably swayed toward the newspaper’s views, and the more so, the more articles he reads. We refer to the failure to adjust properly for information repetitions as persuasion bias, to highlight that this bias is related to persuasive activity.

More generally, the failure to adjust for repetitions can apply not only to information coming from one source over time, but also to information coming from multiple sources connected through a social network. Suppose, for example, that two individuals speak to one another about an issue after having both spoken to a common third party on the issue. Then, if the two conferring individuals do not account for the fact that their counterpart’s opinion is based on some of the same (third party) information as their own opinion, they will double-count the third party’s opinion.
…
Persuasion bias yields a direct explanation for a number of important phenomena. Consider, for example, the issue of airtime in political campaigns and court trials. A political debate without equal time for both sides, or a criminal trial in which the defense was given less time to present its case than the prosecution, would generally be considered biased and unfair. This seems at odds with a rational model. Indeed, listening to a political candidate should, in expectation, have no effect on a rational individual’s opinion, and thus, the candidate’s airtime should not matter. By contrast, under persuasion bias, the repetition of arguments made possible by more airtime can have an effect. Other phenomena that can be readily understood with persuasion bias are marketing, propaganda, and censorship. In all these cases, there seems to be a common notion that repeated exposures to an idea have a greater effect on the listener than a single exposure. More generally, persuasion bias can explain why individuals’ beliefs often seem to evolve in a predictable manner toward the standard, and publicly known, views of groups with which they interact (be they professional, social, political, or geographical groups)—a phenomenon considered indisputable and foundational by most sociologists

[emphasis added]

While this is great for the Democrats in getting Obama to the White House, the charge that Obama won with money and not on his ideas will sting for any Democrat voter who believes they decided on the issues.  Worse, though, is that by having the crutch of blaming the Obama campaign’s fundraising for their loss, the Republican party may not seriously think through why they lost on any deeper level.  We need the Republicans to get out of the small-minded, socially conservative rut they’ve occupied for the last 12+ years.

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Russia, Georgia, the Caucasus

Inspired by this piece in the FT by Martin Wolf …

“I am feared; therefore I am.” This is more than a restatement of Machiavelli’s celebrated advice that, for a ruler, it “is much safer to be feared than loved”. Vladimir Putin, the latest in the long line of autocratic Russian rulers, would agree with the Italian on that. But the war in Georgia is not just a re-assertion of Machiavelli’s principles of statecraft; it is a renewal of Russian national identity. It is yet again feared. In the eyes of its rulers, therefore, it exists.

… a friend asked why, if Georgia started this whole thing, we’re necessarily viewing Russia as the bad guys.  This was my attempted reply:

First the background. The area of the Caucasus (Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia and bits of southern Russia) is viewed as generally important for a few reasons:

  • Geographically, it represents the land-bridge between the Caspian sea to the east and the Black sea (which connects to the Mediterranean sea through the Bosphorus (the body of water that splits Istanbul in half)).
  • Economically, it is traditionally a very important trade route between Europe and the east. In today’s world, that means that oil pipelines run through the area (the Bosphorus is the world’s busiest stretch of water for oil (the English channel is the busiest overall)).
  • Politically, it has been a focal-point of conflict for centuries, since it represented the junction of the Russian, Ottoman (Turkish) and Persian (Iranian) empires. Since World War I for sure and arguably before, the area has been seen as Russia’s “backyard” – the equivalent of Mexico and central America to the USA.
  • Militarily, the three previous reasons join to give it enormous strategic value. Commanding the Caucasus enables you to project power all over the Middle East and eastern Europe.

All of this is complicated by the fifth point:

  • Culturally, the area is enormously diverse and filled with distrust. The various national boundaries are really pretty arbitrary and only loosely represent the various ethnic, religious and linguistic groupings. Note, in particular, that the Armenians were on the receiving end of an intensely brutal killing spree by the Turks back when the Ottoman empire was coming apart. Asking whether or not to call that event genocide is a good way to get people’s tempers from perfectly calm to screaming rage in milliseconds.

On to recent history:

Given that Russia had “owned” the area for the best part of a century, it was enormously shameful to them to lose it when the Soviet Union broke up in the early Nineties. It was, in a way, the ultimate demonstration of their descent (however temporarily) into mediocrity as a world power. Imagine if not just Cuba, but the entirety of Central America had switched to Soviet-inspired communism over the space of two or three years in the late 1980s. America would have shat itself.

From the point of view of the rest of the world, though, the move to independent statehood for the three little countries represented a victory over Soviet communism and a triumph for (hopefully democratic) liberalism. That is the backdrop to the Georgia conflict. It’s Russia-at-the-core-of-the-Soviet-death-machine that is seen as the bad guy and Putin as the ex-KGB nutjob that’s pulling the strings and taking Russia back to the Bad Old Days ™.

To a certain extent, this is partially the West’s fault. When the Soviet Union fell, we didn’t do the sportsmanlike thing of offering them our hand to help them stand up. We kicked them while they were down. The Shock Therapy that we foisted on them through the voice of Jeffery Sachs might arguably have helped the Soviet satellite states like Poland and the Czech Republic, but in Russia itself it really only served to cause massive unemployment, the dismantlement of healthcare and other forms of state aid and worst of all, the pillaging of anything of economic value by the now-infamous oligarchs. On top of that, Nato simply started marching east. Russia was admitted to the G8 only grudgingly, was ignored utterly in Kosovo and has never been recognised as a grown-up on the post-Cold War stage.

Telling Georgia that they could ultimately join Nato just after Russia had finished bludgeoning Chechnya into submission with a nail-studded bat was the equivalent of deliberately spilling red wine on Russia at a fancy dinner party and then saying loudly so everyone could hear “Oh dear, and that’s your only suit. Well, I’m sure you can scrub it out in the kitchen” before turning your back on them to talk to the Austrians about how their music was always so much more inspired than that brutish Russian peasant noise.

Russia has been handing out Russian passports to anybody old enough to hold them in South Ossetia for years so they could declare that they were simply defending their citizens. They’ve been sort-of-almost occupying the region for a while anyway under the guise of peacekeeping, but that role was never recognised by the UN or any other country in the region. Formally, South Ossetia and Abkhazia are part of the sovereign nation of Georgia. Their declarations of independence were – it’s widely believed – to have been encouraged, if not actually orchestrated, by Russia in an attempted loose parallel to Kosovo.

The West in general and the USA in particular had told Georgia that they had their backs. Georgia had troops in Iraq fighting with the Americans. The Georgians, stupidly it turns out, thought they were genuine allies of America. When Georgian troops started going into South Ossetia and triggered this whole mess, it demonstrated two things. First, that the USA under the Shrub [*] administration had really, really dropped the ball in its international relations. That the Georgians managed to get the idea that the US would rush to direct war with Russia over the Caucasus really says that the State and Defence departments screwed up badly. Second, that Russia was staggeringly well prepared for the Georgian move. They just happened to have an enormous mass of troops just over the border waiting to leap to the Ossetian’s defence? No. This was a trap laid by Russia and Georgia walked into it.

[*] Little bush.

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Ken Livingstone to work for Hugo Chavez

This piece in The Independent is short enough to quote in full:

Former London mayor Ken Livingstone has agreed to help Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez improve urban planning.

While he was in office Mr Livingstone made a deal with Mr Chavez to exchange cheap Venezuelan fuel for British buses for London’s advice to mayoral candidates in Caracas.

But the current mayor Boris Johnson cancelled the deal when he came to office.

Mr Livingstone said he will personally advise officials and candidates to ensure that the country gets the “advice that we promised”.

A spokesman for the Mayor of London, said: “Boris Johnson made it clear during his election campaign that he did not want to be on the payroll of Hugo Chavez and did not believe a poor South American country should be subsidising one of the wealthiest cities in the world.

“He has kept that promise to the people of London. Ken Livingstone is free, as a private individual, to offer his advice and services to whomever he wants.”

Of course, the last time Mr Livingstone made the news was only a couple of weeks ago, that time on the generosity of the Chinese government:

When Livingstone and his Trotskyist cronies were given a multi-million pound payoff from city hall I wondered how much they would be giving away to good causes. As it happens it’s Livingstone and his aide John Ross who have been reviving charity – from the Chinese government.

As Andrew Gilligan reports in today’s Evening Standard these champions of the working person stayed at a £1,100 a night hotel in Beijing and were given VIP seats for the opening ceremony. No wonder he told the Today programme that the Chinese regime was not a police state and was going in the right direction on human rights. Tell that to HIV Aids campiagner Hu Jia.

Apparently, the Chinese invited Livingstone because they saw him as someone “who might have some influence in the future”. Senior Labour figures closely involved with the ill-fated Livingstone campaign are now tearing out their hair out at the former mayor’s increasingly unpredictable behaviour since he lost the election. The sooner the Labour Party finds a decent candidate for 2012 the better.

Hmmm.

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ORLY?

Dear Michael Medved (who wrote the article and who graduated from Yale) and Professor Greg Mankiw (who linked to the article and teaches at Harvard),

I’m willing to accept that Michael’s argument represents some of the reason why Harvard and Yale graduates represent such a large fraction of presidential candidates if you are willing to accept that it is almost certainly a minor reason.

Ignoring your implied put-down of all of the other top-ranked universities in the United States, not to mention the still-excellent-but-not-Ivy-League institutions, the first thing that leaps to mind is the idea of (shock!) a third event that causally influences both Yale/Harvard attendance and entry into politics.

Perhaps the wealth of a child’s family is a good predictor of both whether that child will get into Harvard/Yale and also of whether they get into the “worth considering” pool of presidential candidates?

Perhaps there are some politics-specific network effects, with attendance at your esteemed universities being simply an opportunity to meet the parents of co-students?

Perhaps students who attend Harvard/Yale are self-selecting, with students interested in a career in politics being overly represented in your universities’ applicant pools?

Perhaps the geography matters, with universities located in the North East of the United States being over-represented in federal politics even after allowing for the above?

For the benefit of readers, here is the relevant section of the article:

What’s the explanation for this extraordinary situation – with Yale/Harvard degree-holders making up less than two-tenths of 1% of the national population, but winning more than 83% of recent presidential nominations?…

Today, the most prestigious degrees don’t so much guarantee success in adulthood as they confirm success in childhood and adolescence. That piece of parchment from New Haven or Cambridge doesn’t guarantee you’ve received a spectacular education, but it does indicate that you’ve competed with single-minded effectiveness in the first 20 years of life.

And the winners of that daunting battle – the driven, ferociously focused kids willing to expend the energy and make the sacrifices to conquer our most exclusive universities – are among those most likely to enjoy similar success in the even more fiercely fought free-for-all of presidential politics.