Category Archives: Political theory

Why do libertarians support conservative parties?

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In a piece for the Sunday Age, Chris Berg says progressives think conservatives are heartless because they “don’t realise the right has a different and legitimate moral framework.” Perhaps so, but what about libertarians?

Berg draws on Jonathan Haidt‘s moral foundations research. Haidt argues that moral judgments are largely intuitive and rest on six foundations – care/harm, fairness/cheating, liberty/oppression, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion and sanctity/degradation.

Haidt and his colleagues have found that progressives (liberals) rely almost entirely on the first three foundations when making moral judgments. In contrast, conservatives rely on all six.

In many ways libertarians are like progressives. “We found that libertarians look more like liberals than conservatives on most measures of personality” Haidt wrote in his recent book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. However:

Where they diverge from liberals most sharply is on two measures: the Care foundation, where they score very low (even lower than conservatives), and on some new questions we added about economic liberty, where they score extremely high (a little higher than conservatives, a lot higher than liberals).

So if progressives are wrong about conservatives, could they be right about libertarians? In a recent paper, a group of researchers including Haidt reported that libertarians reject the morality of altruism “as well as all other moralities based on ideas of obligation to other people, groups, traditions, and authorities.”

Interestingly, the research suggested libertarians may be less satisfied with their lives than either progressives or conservatives. The researchers reported that “libertarians may be less happy in part because they care less about others and (most likely) bond less with others, particularly close others.” Libertarians seem to rely less on emotion and more on abstract reasoning.

Given their lack of interest in conservative values, why do American libertarians consistently favour the Republican party? According to Haidt:

People with libertarian ideals have generally supported the Republican Party since the 1930s because libertarians and Republicans have a common enemy: the liberal welfare society that they believe is destroying America’s liberty (for libertarians) and moral fiber (for social conservatives).

There is always potential for tension between conservatives and libertarians. As I argued in a 2008 article for Policy magazine – ‘Defusing the American Right‘ – the alliance comes under stress when conservatives enlarge the size and scope of government in order to pursue their values. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the war on drugs were areas of tension under the Bush administration.

But perhaps not all libertarians lack concern for people who are poor and marginalised. Recently a number of libertarian thinkers have gathered together at the Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog. Some of them are even talking about social justice.

Social justice is about more than redistribution

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In a recent book on social justice, former Labor politician Gary Johns argues for “a major reconsideration of social justice as a rationale for the welfare state”. In his essay ‘When too much social justice is never enough’ Johns suggests that social justice is primarily about the redistribution of wealth and income while egalitarianism is the pursuit of a more equal distribution of material resources.

Johns also implies that advocates of social justice and equality are opposed to democracy. As he writes in the Australian: “In a democracy, achieving a just distribution of society’s wealth requires permission to take money from some to distribute to others. Often, those others do not agree to hand over the money.” In his essays and articles Johns misconstrues social justice and egalitarianism as well as the relationship of these ideals to democracy.

People fight for equality when they feel they are being bullied or dominated, writes psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Haidt argues that social justice movements not only urge compassion for the poor and disadvantaged, they also “call for people to come together to fight the oppression of bullying domineering elites”. On this view social justice is not fundamentally about an equal distribution of wealth or income, it’s about freedom.

Continue reading →

Giving to the wealthy

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I’m not much of a fan of giving to wealthy causes. Like private schools for the well healed. I was asked to attend an interview to see if I’d go on the Council of my daughter’s private school – which I said I would. I was then asked if I was Jewish (it’s an Anglican School) and said that I wasn’t but that I was a bit shocked to be asked. I didn’t bore the Principal with the details of my religious status as a lapsed atheist. Anyway with that apparently smoothed over I was invited to an evening which turned out to be hard core fund raising.

A donation of 20K seemed in order, but was not forthcoming. And for whatever reason my candidature didn’t proceed any further. (I also opined on a tour of the campus that I thought it would be a pity if they ripped out the only remaining grass covered oval and replaced it with synthetic grass, no matter how much truer it made they hockey balls travel.)

Today I got an invitation to give money to Ormond College where I spent a year. It was cleverly crafted – written to me by someone in my year with a personal note to me. This was my chance to make a difference for the next generation. I could contribute to allowing someone hard of means to attend the College. Well that’s better than contributing to someone easy of means I guess. Anyway it transpired that to qualify, this person who was hard of means had to be someone whose parents had attended Ormond. And yes, they might have been hard of means, but then they might just have been good at minimising their income. I decided to pass.

Beyond Vox Pop Democracy: Deepening democracy in the internet age

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Herewith the text of my talk on Ockham’s Razor this morning. It is from a longer essay which you can find here, boiled down so that it could be read in the 12 minutes or so one gets on Ockham’s Razor.

I.

Shortly after Barack Obama became the first US president to build his campaign around online social media, his new Administration held an online ‘brainstorming’ session seeking ideas for making government “more transparent, participatory, and collaborative”. Participants in the Online brainstorming felt unconstrained by these terms and pursued their own pet ideas, and/or voted others ideas up or down a ladder of popularity.

With a rerun of the Great Depression in the offing, what was uppermost in the public mind? Legalising marijuana topped the pops on the brainstorming site followed by releasing Barack Obama’s birth certificate.

Welcome to Vox Pop democracy. The tendency is intensifying with ‘shock jocks’ spreading a culture of narcissistic entitlement and the internet hosting ideological echo chambers where people nurse their resentment and hostilities to their ideological opponents.

In the US, the conjunction of big money from the top and the bottom up power of the internet is making things worse. In 2000 leading Republican candidates for president paid lip-service to the scientific consensus on global warming. This year the Tea Party has marginalised such views and the remaining candidates wear their intransigence on action against climate change as a badge of honour. Continue reading →

Herding Part Two: Superstars

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This wasn’t supposed to be the theme of part two (Part One is here) but Jessica Irvine’s recent and timely column on superstardom and One Direction prompted me to add my two cents’ worth – well someone else’s two cents’ worth but at least inserted by me.

First; highlights from Jessica’s column:

US labour market economist Sherwin Rosen in his 1981 paper ”The Economics of Superstars” identified two preconditions that lead to superstardom. First, every customer in the market must want to buy the good supplied by the best producer. The second condition for the birth of a superstar is that the good provided must be able to be distributed cheaply to all customers in the market. You don’t see superstar plumbers, because their services are only available to one geographic area.

Rosen’s theory of superstardom as an efficient outcome of the market was challenged by another US economist, Moshe Adler, who pointed out that whether people preferred one singer over the other was not necessarily determined by how talented they were. There is, after all, no standard unit to measure increments of talent. The key thing about groups like One Direction, according to Adler, is not that they are the most talented – for such a thing can never be measured – but that they are simply the most popular.

According to Adler, consumer desires are not innate preferences – as standard economics assumes – but are influenced strongly by society. We desire the same art, culture and music that is desired by other people.

To which I would only add the graph below which features in Paul Ormerod’s forthcoming book. In a controlled experiment with people listening to music if they were not ‘networked’ which is to say they didn’t know what other people thought was good, there was a fairly big inherent difference between songs. If they were networked, they ‘herded’ strongly.

Typical outcome of the music download experiments; number of each of the 48 songs downloaded over the course of an experiment, participants only know the names of the song and band and can listen to songs before deciding whether or not to download. The average number of downloads is set equal to 100 for comparative purposes

Same experiment as before except the participants know the number of previous downloads of each of the songs before they decide themselves

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Of course the upshot of this is that we’re all madly herding from one place to another, but the extent to which there’s signal in the noise of our herding is greatly attenuated.  Further; large amounts of rent are being expended trying to get people’s attention with marketing to get into people’s headspace and win the battle for the next hit.

Fair trade and inefficient do-gooding: what’s good about it?

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Here’s an extract from a book on fair trade that I had occasion to look up. In what circumstances is fair trade a good thing? If we dig into our pockets to buy something at a higher price than necessary in order to engage in ‘fair trade’, then we know a few things.

  • The sacrifice we made paying a higher price could have purchased more good for the beneficiaries if we’d given them our money – usually a whole lot more. In other words in terms of helping it’s inefficient – often hugely so. Often the exchange rate back to the people one is putatively helping is less than 25 cents to the intended beneficiaries for every $1 we invest.
  • Even without this diluting, if people are producing a product for a price that’s inflated against world prices, they’re entering a new kind of dependency – on us. Perhaps they’d be better off adjusting to the unfair price and (hopefully) producing something else which has a less ‘unfair’ price. Presumably in many cases the there’s nothing much else the producers can produce, but this is a hard thing to know.

In any event, I’ve always been hugely ambivalent about fair trade, but it’s a subset of what might be called ‘inefficient do-gooding’.  The same issue turns up in a different guise in environmental policy where we reduce waste to landfill and increase kerbside recycling. Usually this reduces greenhouse gas emissions (though sometimes even that isn’t true), but we could do a lot more environmental good, if that’s what we want to do, by just spending the money on the environment directly – say with a stand of carbon sequestering trees, rather than spending the money on kerbside recycling.

On the other hand there is an argument that a lot of human do-gooding is not focused on utilitarian efficiency. Kristina Keneally supports the still-birth foundation because she has been touched by still birth. It’s arguably not the most ‘efficient’ use of her time in terms of alleviating human suffering, but it’s something she wants to do. By the same token maybe people don’t want to make an ‘efficient’ contribution to the environment, they want instead, (maddeningly as far as I’m concerned) to reduce their carbon footprint. So what – O Troppodillians – can we say about this?

You pay peanuts . . .

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Troppo’s patron saint Adam Smith put it thus (note the generous assumption about human nature):

The liberal reward of labor, as it encourages the propagation, so it increases the industry of the common people . . .. Where wages are high, accordingly, we shall always find the workmen more active, diligent, and expeditious, than where they are low.

Here’s a more modern restatement.

The Multi-Dimensional Effects of Reciprocity on Worker Effort: Evidence from a Hybrid Field-Laboratory Labor Market Experiment
Date: 2012-03
By: Kim, Min-Taec (University of Sydney)
Slonim, Robert (University of Sydney)
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp6410&r=exp
We examine the gift exchange hypothesis on both the quantity and quality of output using a hybrid field-laboratory labor market experiment. We recruited participants to enter survey data for a well-known charitable organization. Workers were paid either a high or low wage. We find that although the total number of surveys entered did not vary with the wage, high wage workers made fewer errors and entered more surveys after controlling for errors. We further find that for low costs associated with errors, offering the low wage maximizes profits, but for higher costs paying the higher “gift exchange” wage maximizes profits.