Along with Tom Palmer, Gene Healy, Don Boudreaux and distinguished non-blogging others, I’m off to Quebec City for the Cato University seminar on the “Art of Persuasion.” Blogging forecast: 65% chance of light blogging; 35% chance of none. Depends on the hook up in le Château Frontenac.

Tom, being a St. John’s man, has been revisting the classics of rhetoric. I, not being a St. John’s man, have been revisiting Rodney Stark on conversion, George Lakoff on political mental models, and the social network and diffusions of innovations literature. I promised Tom I wouldn’t give a talk that sounds like it ought to have a title like “Prolegomena to a Hermeneutics of Meme Exchange,” and I won’t!, but it’s been a real challenge distilling all this stuff into something engaging and accessible. Wish me luck!

My provocatively titled essay about Professor Cornel West and the dangers of “free-market fundamentalism” is up at TCS. Enjoy.

And don’t forget to listen to clips of West’s “Sketches of My Culture,” which is a “watershed moment in musical history.”

I wholeheartedly endorse Jim Henley’s endorsement of the Libertarian Party candidate, who just happens to be Michael Badnarik, for what it’s worth. Radley and Megan must explain (”must explain” in the sense of “need to explain in order to satsify Will Wilkinson’s curiousity”) why Jim is wrong.

I especially like Jim’s point about the direction of causation for the LP: not lack of votes because of lack of good candidates, but lack of good candidates because of lack of votes.

Thank God for Matthew Yglesias, sage of 10th St., for his frank admission that what really matters is a John Kerry victory, procedural legitimacy be damned!

Rather than take the political theory bait here, I’ll just cop to hypocrisy. The people who I want voting are the people who will vote for John Kerry. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! Democracy has an instrumental value and there’s no fact of the matter about what really is and is not a legitimate leadership-selection process. If I thought Kerry would be a terrible president and that Bush was a good one, I’d be applauding efforts to intimidate likely Kerry voters. But Kerry will be a good president and Bush will be a terrible one, so I condemn such efforts insteads.

Now, that’s refreshing!

I do agree that democracy has only instrumental value, but I think part of that value consists in social stability conferred by the widespread acceptance of the legitimacy of elections. (However, perception of legitimacy is, I say emphatically, not to be confused with actual legitimacy.) So I am not really, as Matt says, “continuing [my] contrarian scolding of Democratic love of democratic principles.” Rather, I seem to have landed in a contrarian spot, strangely enough, by insisting that voter fraud is as big a problem, in terms of democratic principles, as voter suppression, and that I think we should only expect to see both the Democrats and Republicans be vigilant in their defense of democracy.

The quandary is that both kinds of vigilance feeds into a kind of semi-intended corruption that has a de-legitimizing effect on the election. It all looks to me like a game of chicken where each side accuses the other side of primarily intending the semi-intended corrupt side-effects, and demands that the other side swerve. But if one side swerves, they lose. But if neither swerves, they crash. If they crash, (changing metaphors, sorry) we end up shining too bright a light on the cockroach nest of actually-existing democratic procedures. As we watch the repulsive insects scatter among the hanging chads, the invalidated ballots of the dead, the walking around money, and the intimidated no-show voters, the legitimacy of the election is called into question, no matter who gets the better of the crash, and we’ve lost some of the instrumental stabilizing qualities of democracy.

But, anyway, way to go, Matt!

Julian does a bang up job warning us of the dialectical chamber of horrors that awaits us in the overrated pages a Benjamin Barber book.

I believe I fixed the comments glitch. Somehow I had told MT-Blacklist to force into moderation any comment that included the string “tp:”, and that would be basically everything.

Will somebody please try commenting below to make sure it’s working?

A thought: Could it be that the sort of person likely to be “intimidated” out of voting isn’t in general the sort of person who you want to be voting?

A lot of the coverage, both formal and informal, of the forthcoming apocalypse in Ohio strikes me as implicitly accepting a really quite stupid bit of democratic romanticism: that it is better that 100 illegitimate votes be counted than to let one legitimate vote go uncounted.

The implicit picture is that voting is a sort of magical expression of citizenship that mystically confers “legitimacy” upon democratically decided results. If some citizens vote, but have their votes tossed out, or if some citizens decide it is too much hassle to get to the polls, then each lost vote is a drop drained from the bucket of legitimacy.

This is an utterly bizzare way of looking at democratic legitimacy, but seems to be part of the civics course democracy catechism, about which journalists especially pretend to be devout. This is why we hear cries of lament if there is low voter turnout. How can democracy be the people’s authentic voice if the people refuse to speak! How can we frolic in the sparkling waters of democracy if the bucket of legitimacy is but half full?

The strange thing is that the press seems to treat illegitimate votes as a kind of noise, a kind of tolerable if unfortunate democratic static, while intimidated no-shows are a travesty against all that is holy. Yet, and this should be obvious, in terms of the aggregative democratic procedure, an unnoticed illegal vote for one guy (in a two horse race) is EXACTLY EQUIVALENT to scaring off a voter for the other guy.

If somebody’s dog manages to vote for John Kerry, then, in effect, Velma Thompson (or whomever) failed to vote for that nice man, George W. Bush, even though she tried. Whiskers cancels out Velma. Here’s another way to make the same point. Each Bush vote is paired with a Kerry vote and they’re both thrown away. The winner is the one who has votes left on the table after all the other guy’s votes have been chucked. Pairing legitimate voters with voting felons, dogs, corpses, and Frenchmen has precisely the same effect on the outcome as shooting legitimate voters before they can get in the door of the high school gym.

Republican vigilance about keeping illegal voters from voting is democratically equivalent to Democratic vigilance against Republican attempts to suppress the legal vote. Republican vigilance has the semi-intended side-effect of suppressing likely Democratic votes. And huge Democratic registration and GOTV drives have the semi-intended side-effect of canceling out a large number of Republican votes with illegal ballots. I bet I can tell from your party affiliation which you think is worse.

The press, as far as I can tell, seems to think Republican vigilance is worse. If one has the popular magical view of democratic legitimacy, Velma’s participation itself sprinkles a bit of fairy dust of legitimacy on the entire proceedings. Voting dogs, lacking the relevant legal status, have no fairy dust to contribute, but their votes don’t take any fairy dust away. Velma expressed herself, that’s what matters, and you can’t take that away! Because we want the MAXIMUM AMOUNT OF DEMOCRATIC FAIRY DUST, we shouldn’t complain if a huge turnout, and a huge amount of fairy dust, also entails a sizable turnout of the dead, canine, and alien. And, anyway, why shouldn’t their votes count?

I had missed Deidre McCloskey’s great little essay in the WSJ. Take a look, if you haven’t seen it. Like everything our favorite gender-bending economic historian writes, it’s worth reading.

If you’re trying to comment here on The Fly Bottle, chances are your comment is getting kicked into MT-Blacklist moderation. I don’t know why this is. If this happens to you, don’t worry, I’m checking frequently and will approve your comment. The way to get around moderation is to open a Typekey account, which allows my blog (and anyone else with a MovableType blog) to know who you are and automatically OK anything you have to say.

Eric Alterman’s series on the devious, conspiratorial funding of “right wing” organizations is a great example of the left’s misguided retardo-Marxist cui bono obsession. It absolutely mystifies me why the left spends so much energy tracking down funding sources of the right. I always detect in these things a ostrich-like refusal to seriously engage the fact that the left has for the last 20 years been getting its ass handed to it intellectually.

This is so noxious to the left’s self-image that they can do nothing but go deep into denial, and complain incessantly about, what? . . . Just how smart those the right-wing plutocrats are? Concede relative strategic incompetence in order to preserve the illusion of the moral/intellectual high ground? I really don’t get it. What, really, is the point of this stuff?

(I mean, think about it this way: if I was paid to kick Eric Alterman’s ass, but I had very much wanted to kick Alterman’s ass anyway, and I proceeded to kick Alterman’s ass, Alterman’s pointing out that I was paid to kick his ass neither shows that I wouldn’t have kicked his ass if I hadn’t been paid, nor that his ass wasn’t, in fact, kicked, nor that Alterman could have kicked my ass if only he had been paid. So why bring it up? Does it make him feel better? [By the way, I do not, in fact, have any desire to kick Alterman's ass.])

The best I can do for Alterman is to see him indirectly prodding left-wing plutocrats to give more money to people like Eric Alterman. Alterman seems fairly non-plussed that Charles Murray gets so much money from the Bradley Foundation. If only Eric Alterman could be paid so well!

But, of course, one Charles Murray is worth a dozen Altermans in intellectual terms, no matter how much you pay him. The fascinating thing about a guy like Murray is just how independent a mind he is. He’s very much his own man. He’s too libertarian for conservatives; he’s too conservative for libertarians. His concern for the poor and the conditions necessary for a meaningful life are deep, genuine, remarkably sensitive and, yes, relatively non-ideological. By comparison, a guy like Alterman is an ideologue you can set your watch by. The point being, that you can’t explain much about Charles Murray by looking at the signatures on his paychecks. The signatures tell you rather more about the tastes of the folks who sign them.

I’m reminded of Michael Novak’s characterization of the left’s reaction to The Bell Curve:

the message cannot be true, because much more is at stake than a particular set of arguments from psychological science. A this-worldly eschatological hope is at stake. The sin attributed to Herrnstein and Murray is theological: they destroy hope.

The thing to remember is that there is more than one faith-based community. Alterman’s assumption is that he who has the funding, he who controls the media, controls political reality. The “right-wing” foundations and tanks have been using their power to replace our theology for theirs. So we’ve got to understand how they do this, how the right constructs reality, so we can beat them at their game. Because we know in advance that it can’t be the arguments. Charles Murray couldn’t possibly be right.

Because I felt incredibly terrible yesterday, I wasn’t able to attend the Cato debate on the War. Do check out, however, Raimondo’s account of the event, and Chris Sciabarra’s smart attempt to defend Rand against her defenders.

Via Gene Healy, this Regulation article by John C. Mueller, “A False Sense of Insecurity,” is one of the most important and enlightening things I’ve read in months, although it has a rather simple point. Mueller’s point is that all things considered terrorism is not an enormous threat, and we should just calm down and get a grip.

Even with the September 11 attacks included in the count, the number of Americans killed by international terrorism since the late 1960s (which is when the State Department began counting) is about the same as the number of Americans killed over the same period by lightning, accident-causing deer, or severe allergic reaction to peanuts.

Mueller goes on to argue persuasively that we are in grip of a very costly and very likely unproductive hysteria about terrorist threats.

Mueller’s view needs to be disseminated:

* Assessed in broad but reasonable context, terrorism generally does not do much damage.

* The costs of terrorism very often are the result of hasty, ill-considered, and overwrought reactions.

A sensible policy approach to the problem might be to stress that any damage terrorists are able to accomplish likely can be absorbed, however grimly. While judicious protective and policing measures are sensible, extensive fear and anxiety over what may at base prove to be a rather limited problem are misplaced, unjustified, and counterproductive.

This is right. And people won’t like it.

I remember getting into a spat with an ex-girlfriend about the Beltway Sniper at the time of his (their) reign of terror. She was nervous about going shopping in Northern Virginia. I told her that given the population of the area, and the range over which the sniper was sniping, her chances of being shot were many many times smaller than her chances of dying in a car accident on her way the store. She denounced me for my rationalistic insensitivity to her fear. Such is the nature of our problem.

This is the sort of annoying my-party-is-pure-as-the-driven-snow their-party-stinks-of-sulfur attitude that I was complaining about below.
Lindsay bitches about GOP voter suppression in Ohio. I don’t believe I remember her complaining (correct me if I’m wrong) about DNC voter suppression (successful or not) in every state in which they tried to cripple democracy by sueing Nader off the ballot. (If I ever hear high-toned democracy rhetoric from Larry Tribe, I’ll throw up a little in my mouth.) Second, Lindsay simply assumes that stationing people in polling places to challenge fraudulent voters from voting is an ploy to suppress Democratic votes. But why not assume instead, or in addition, that the huge Democratic voter-registration drives really were riddled with malfeasance. Indeed, I assume both. The Democrats have been signing up dead people, felons and non-citizens in an attempt to steal the vote. The Republicans want to stop Democrats from stealing the vote, and so want to guard against dead and illegal voters, and, as a bonus, to suppress the legitimate Democratic vote–in an attempt to steal the vote.

Now, I want to emphasize that I don’t think any of these shenanigans even approaches the seriousness of the DNC’s effort to make it impossible for American citizens to vote for a candidate who represents their views.

I happen to be watching The Insider, which is, apparently, an organ of the John Kerry for President campaign. It’s one long blowjob. We’ve got Brad Pitt’s “passionate stump speech” at the University of Missouri; fawning Edwards interview in Iowa; heroic clips from Going Upriver; Christopher Reeves hot wife; inside a Kerry campaign bus with Chris Heinz. Words from Bush supporters? Yup. Laura Bush saying that John Edwards is “pretty cute!” Check out the Edwards family photo album on the homepage. Sinclair ain’t got nothin’ on this!

The left likes to wax elegaic about the “sanctity of democracy” and the “integrity of the democratic process,” especially when Republican schemes to supress the minority vote are afoot. Yet, in terms of the sanctity of democracy, the Democrat’s concerted assasination of the Nader campaign is no better than stationing a Klansman, an INS officer, and and a dozen Nazi alsatians at the door of each polling place.

But I’ve yet to encounter anyone on the mainstream left who is even a skoche guilty about this utter travesty of democracy. Fuckers. The notion that Nader votes belong to the Democrats is so obnoxiously offensive that I can only wish that Nader voters who, thanks to the Democrats, are unable to find Nader on their ballot, vote instead for Michael Badnarik, constitutional scholar, and champion of the people. Or, to put a fine “fuck you” on it, George W. Bush.

. . . for preventing the horror of all Boston/Houston, Kerry/Bush comparisons. Otherwise I might have been forced put my face through plate glass.

And congratulations to the Next Great City of the World.

I just discovered that my pal, Duke Poli Sci chair, and Social Change Workshop faculty member Mike Munger has a blog. He appears to be doing a fantastic job as the voice of reason in Duke’s l’affaire de Kurian, which David Bernstein is heated up about over at the VC.

Check it out(I’m pretty sure that’s a photo of Buchanan & Tullock in his header). Mike is wickedly smart, thinks he’s real funny, and is a mensch of a good-ol-boy.

I think Bainbridge’s article on efficient markets vs. behavorialism is good. Now, because of my fairly Hayekian/Coasian sensibility, I can’t buy the ECMH in it’s strict formulation. Indeed, I agree with most behavioralist findings, although I often disagree with behavioralists about the upshot of those findings. Now, I do find it intriguing that Thaler puts his money in index funds, just like you would if you thought the ECMH was true. And it is what I would do if I wasn’t so poor I had to beg for money on my blog. Indeed, it looks like the ECMH does a good job of approximating the real world (or the other way around), despite the falsity of a number of its underlying assumptions. So how does it do this? Well, in the gap between idealized behavioral assumptions and actual approximately efficient markets is entrepreneurship. There are folks and firms out there gathering intelligence, keeping their eyes open, trying to cash in on ephemeral assymetries in information, and thereby moving prices to what they ought to be.

The interesting thing about efficiency-enabling entrepreneurship is that it is NOT a built-in assumption of the theory. There are institutional antecedents — legal, moral, cultural — to an effective climate of intelligent, creative proift-seeking. So, despite the fact that Thaler is right about the quirks and foibles of human decision-making, our institutions, both formal and informal, are good enough to induce behavior that reasonably approximates neo-classical efficiency, making it right for Thaler to invest as if the ECMH were true.

The way I see it, the interesting questions are the questions about the way various institutional structures, formal and informal, facilitate efficiency-approximating behavior. We know way too little about this. And here’s a connection to so-called “libertarian paternalism,” discussed below. Will Baude says he liked the Sunstein/Thaler paper. I didn’t dislike it, exactly. But, like Klein, I found the idea of libertarian paternalism needlessly confusing (and perhaps even willfully and strategically confusing). The interesting thing about framing effects, cognitive biases, and so forth, is that boundedly rational agents like us are not necessarily indifferent between formally equivalent institutional designs. So, if this is true, its pretty obvious that insofar as we’re picking institutional designs (as often we must) we should pick the ones under which we’re more likely, given our psychological constitution, to satisfy some normative standard, whether it be efficiency, public health, or whatever. Great. Are S & T saying anything more interesting than that, true though it may be? But according to S&T’s idiosyncratic usage James Madison is among history’s great paternalists. Yet I don’t think that’s why we call him a founding “father.”

You can’t get a flu shot but you can get a “Flu Shot.”

Check out Dan Klein’s excellent response to Sunstein and Thaler’s “Libertarian Paternalism is not an Oxymoron” paper. Dan basically calls bullshit and accuses S&T of arriving at a provocative title by fudging the meanings of ‘libertarian’ and ‘paternalism’. Sunstein’s reply to Klein is pretty pathetic, as Klein notes.

S&T strike me as holding the utterly dull and correct position that the design of institutions, insofar as they are going to be designed, ought to take into account the effects that they have on human well-being, and so if people are likely to do better under one of two non-coercive institutional schemes, pick the one under which they will do better. How this principle is patricularly libertarian or paternalistic is beyond me, and Klein too.

Luka points me to this LAT article on the possibility of Badnarik as spoiler. NPR Morning Edition also discusses this tantalizing possibility.

Now, to repeat, the fact that Badnarik, despite his nuttiness, is in any position whatsoever to screw Bush simply highlights how much the LP botched it this year.

In other news, Jeff Jarvis recommends that sane libertarian bloggers take over the LP. Good idea!

But don’t forget to vote for Badnarik.

Glen Whitman has created a button that members of the reality-based community can proudly display on their weblogs and personal interweb pages. But I must register my protest, as black marble and san-serif cyan letters evoke nothing so much as a hyperspace mausoleum, which, if you asks me, rather smacks of unreality. Maybe it’s just me. Better would be a picture of a foot kicking a stone.

Oh no. I missed Jim Henley’s birthday yesterday! Well, happy birthday, Jim! I don’t know how old Jim is. Older than me, which I guess makes him pretty old. But he looks like a million bucks!

I’m delighted to see that Alan Hollinghurst has been awarded the Booker Prize for his new book The Line of Beauty. Hollinghurst is one of my favorite authors, his Swimming Pool Library being one of the most exquisitely written novels I’ve ever read. I hadn’t known he had a new novel out, and I’m excited to read it.

[NB: If you buy Hollinghurst novels from Amazon, Amazon will infer that you like "gay" novels. Not that there is... you know.]

[Link via Marginal Revolution.]

Chris Betram offers a meditation on the downside of Condorcet, which Will Baude calls “disturbing,” and I guess it might be if you had inflated expectations for democracy. Funny thing about Condorcet talk, though, is the notion that there is something like a “correct” answer to the presidential election.

The probability that each voter will give the correct answer, essential to the formula, obviously requires the existence of a correct answer. Now it is conceivable that there may be some correct answer, relative to some broadly accepted standard of evaluation, on the question of which of two competing policies is better. And so perhaps there is a correct answer on the question of which of two competing packages of policies is correct. We might then think of each candidate as representing a package, and that the correct answer to the election amounts to choosing the guy who represents the correct policy package.

But there are complications. Candidates lie. Candidates sometimes don’t have an articulated policy on this or that issue, and often they avoid articulating one. Historical contingencies (e.g., 9/11) can cause an unpredictable but fundamental shift in policy. Etc. And those are just some of the problems about knowing what a candidate actually stands for, or would likely do in office. There is also the reasonable idea that political values are plural and incommensurable, and so there just may be no such thing as the correct answer in certain cases.

With candidates as close together in policy as Bush and Kerry, I think it is in principle impossible to pin a probability on answers to the question of who will leave us better off overall. Unintended consequence are usually unintended because unforseen, and they are often unforseen because unforeseeable. The way policies interact with a dynamic economy, technological innovation, cultural change, and so forth, makes it such that democratic choices tend to be choices under conditions of uncertainty (where it is impossible to sensibily assign probabilities) and not risk. We either get lucky with our leaders or we don’t. So, it’s not clear what, if anything, the Condercet Theorem could have to do with the election.

Now, that said, I happen to know that the correct answer to the election is, naturally, Michael Badnarik. And Badnarik’s infinitesimal electoral returns will be just about what we’d expect given the Condorcet theorem, and a realistic assumption of voter competence.