Grand Game: Libertarian Alamo Edition

This is a truly remarkable article.  Apparently Ami has not only never actually read anything written by a libertarian, he appears not even to be able to define the word.

In particular, it appears that he believes that Oklahoma is ideologically the apotheosis of libertarian thinking.  Oklahoma is many things, and I admire some of those things.  But Libertarian?  Ami, please.

Anyway, have a read, and then Grand Game it up, folks.

Context, Context, Context

Wow. Some folks over at Daily Kos have themselves all upset. They quote me, from a debate in 2009.

“The United States is not a democracy and shouldn’t be,” said Michael Munger, Duke University’s Political Science Department chairman and a 2008 Libertarian gubernatorial candidate attacking it at a League of Women Voters forum. “There is NO moral force in the majority. It is just what most people happen to think.”
The Corporatists/Christianists/CU have NOW spoken what and why many of us 99% are fighting against. They said that we, the 99% Have NO MORAL (christian values???) force. We don't know how to pick and choose between good and bad LEADERS?

Um....some context, folks.

1. It was a DEBATE. The League of Women Voters wanted a debate, with one side arguing FOR the Electoral College and one arguing AGAINST. I drew "for" the EC, and argued it. I could just as easily have argued "against." I am actually agnostic on the question of the Electoral College. But for the sake of a debate, I was willing to argue the case for the Electoral College. That's not a policy paper I did, it's a DEBATE. Quoting those claims and attributing them to me is pretty dumb, even by the standards of Daily Kos.  It would be just as wrong to have attributed to me the claims I would have made if I had drawn the "against" position.  IT. WAS. A. DEBATE.

2. I do stand by the "majority does not define morality" point. Two examples:

• First Amendment to the US Constitution. Just because the majority happens to be Christian doesn't mean that the majority gets to impose Christian prayers in schools. Morality has to stay separate from Majority.
• Second example: Roe v. Wade. Suppose a state has a majority that wants to outlaw abortion. Roe v. Wade says they don't get to. Roe v. Wade says, "No democracy on this question. It is an individual rights question."  There are lots of other examples.  But presumably the Daily Kosoids actually agree in those two instances that majorities should be prevented from forcing their will on the rest of us.  That's the American system.  We are NOT a democracy, because of the Bill of Rights.  Majorities cannot trample the rights of individuals.

So....it was a DEBATE.  I don't care much one way or the other about Electoral College, but as an intellectual assigned to a debate position I am capable of arguing either side, to help the audience make up their own minds.  That's the tradition of debate.  And the idea that majorities are not always right is enshrined in the 1st Amendment, and in the Roe v. Wade decision.

Let's just assume this was a simple misunderstanding....

As in medicine, so in development?

Jonah Lehrer has a great article in Wired documenting the difficulty of truly understanding causal forces.

Here is a representative section:

The story of torcetrapib is a tale of mistaken causation. Pfizer was operating on the assumption that raising levels of HDL cholesterol and lowering LDL would lead to a predictable outcome: Improved cardiovascular health. Less arterial plaque. Cleaner pipes. But that didn’t happen.

Such failures occur all the time in the drug industry.


To recap. HDL is the "good" cholesterol and LDL the "bad". Pfizer found a drug that did what the quote describes, but it turned out to kill subjects in the phase III trial and ended up costing the company billions in market capitalization.

In my opinion, much of macro development advice has worked the same way.

Experts observe that successful countries exhibit qualities A, B & C. Developing countries are advised, subsidized, threatened to emulate the successful countries on these attributes. But the patients do not improve!

Education, Institutions, "getting the prices right", openness to trade, the list goes on of macro advice given and to a surprising extent taken by the developing world, without the implicitly promised results.*

The only real difference in the medical and developmental analogy is that Pfizer lost billions of dollars due to their misreading of cause and effect, while the World Bank just chugs on and on with an ever growing size and budget, producing a new World Development Report every year and acting as if the past had never happened.

That is to say, there is little to no accountability for bad advice or improper diagnoses among the IFIs compared to pharmaceutical companies.



* In our 2007 JDE paper, Robin and I show that school enrollment rates, government spending, openness to trade, political constraints on the chief executive,bureaucratic quality, corruption, and overall law and order are all converging over time.