Cheerful or not

A Big Little Idea Called Legibility || ribbonfarm

James C. Scott’s fascinating and seminal book, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, examines how, across dozens of domains, ranging from agriculture and forestry, to urban planning and census-taking, a very predictable failure pattern keeps recurring.  [He uses pictures to] graphically and literally illustrate the central concept in this failure pattern, an idea called “legibility.”

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Scott calls the thinking style behind the failure mode “authoritarian high modernism,” but as we’ll see, the failure mode is not limited to the brief intellectual reign of high modernism (roughly, the first half of the twentieth century).

Here is the recipe:

• Look at a complex and confusing reality, such as the social dynamics of an old city
• Fail to understand all the subtleties of how the complex reality works
• Attribute that failure to the irrationality of what you are looking at, rather than your own limitations
• Come up with an idealized blank-slate vision of what that reality ought to look like
• Argue that the relative simplicity and platonic orderliness of the vision represents rationality
• Use authoritarian power to impose that vision, by demolishing the old reality if necessary
• Watch your rational Utopia fail horribly

The big mistake in this pattern of failure is projecting your subjective lack of comprehension onto the object you are looking at, as “irrationality.” We make this mistake because we are tempted by a desire for legibility….

The deep failure in thinking lies is the mistaken assumption that thriving, successful and functional realities must necessarily be legible.

Why We’re Losing: How free market ideas suffer from being counterintuitive || Reason

People don’t understand the private sector. They don’t like it. Intuitively, it seems selfish. Most people are busy trying to run their own lives. They’re grateful to politicians who want to take charge. It seems intuitive to think that a smart group of planners concerned about the collective good can accomplish more than free people pursing their own interests individually in the private sector. But history is filled with examples of how the solutions politicians propose create new problems without solving the old. Urban renewal wiped out entire neighborhoods without improving cities, mortgage subsidies created a damaging financial bubble, the war on drugs created a prison-industrial complex while barely taking a dent out of drug abuse. The list goes on and on.

The few politicians who manage, often against overwhelming odds, to successfully expand the sphere of private action rarely get rewarded for their trouble. Margaret Thatcher saved Britain—and got thrown out. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) may get recalled for trying to cut the budget and push back against public sector unions. Hong Kong went from Third World to First World in just 50 years because it had economic freedom. But when I went to Hong Kong and interviewed people, they didn’t know why they were prosperous. They just talked about their problems and how government should solve them….

Liberty is counterintuitive. It takes hard work to overcome the brain’s attraction to simple-sounding solutions. It’s not easy to convince people that sometimes the best way for governments to address a problem is to do less, not more. It’s easier to admire the activist or politician who talks about helping the less fortunate than it is to cheer on a hustler who wants to get rich by selling you stuff. Those of us who see expanding the private sphere as the best way to help the most people have an uphill battle in making our case….  Most people see a world full of problems that can best be tackled via wisely applied laws. They assume it’s just the laziness, stupidity, or indifference of politicians that prevents the problems from being fixed. But government is force, and government is inefficient. The inefficient use of force creates more problems than it solves….

Economics is complicated. That’s one more reason to be grateful for the Constitution: With its relatively simple rules, it helps keep government within bounds. Some Tea Party activists understand that, and it’s one reason they call for a return to constitutional, limited government. 

But getting the majority of America to sign on to these ideas might require an impending crisis. Looking around the world, the next flashpoint after Greece will probably come elsewhere on the periphery of Europe or in Japan. The populations of those countries are graying—young workers are shrinking relative to the retirees they’ll need to support—faster than America’s. Watching their problems, we will get an advance look at the financial poison we are foisting on America’s young people.

But I’m not sure voters will pay attention. If Americans didn’t learn the folly of central planning from the collapse of the Soviet Union and the stagnation of socialist economies around the world, they may not learn about the danger of unsustainable budgets from the catastrophes in Greece, Spain, and Japan….

There is nothing that government can do that we cannot do better as free individuals—as groups of individuals, working together voluntarily, not at the point of a gun or under threat of a fine. Without big government, our possibilities are limitless.

But it’s a hard sell. Things continue to get better in a free society, but nobody is out in front of the camera saying, “Yay for the marginal improvements that come with free markets!” It’s not as compelling or newsworthy as a report on someone who goes bankrupt because he got sick. If we are to foster prosperity, we must find better ways to promote the virtues of liberty.

The global happiness derby || Robert J. Samuelson (Washington Post)

We ought to leave “happiness” to novelists and philosophers — and rescue it from the economists and psychologists who think it can be distilled into a “science” and translated into pro-happiness policies. Fat chance. Government can often mitigate sources of unhappiness (starvation, unemployment, disease), but happiness is more than the absence of misery. If we could manufacture happiness, we could repeal the “human condition.”

Somehow this has escaped the social scientists who want to make happiness the goal of government. They argue that economic output (gross domestic product) doesn’t measure everything that’s important in life — family, friends or religion, for example. True, but it doesn’t follow that “happiness” can be targeted as an alternative. No matter. Their latest brief is the “World Happiness Report,” which ranks countries by their “subjective well-being” (the technical label for happiness) as recorded by public opinion surveys….

All these [top] countries share one common characteristic: They’re small in population and, except Canada and Australia, land mass. Small countries enjoy an advantage in the happiness derby. They’re more likely to have homogeneous populations with fewer ethnic, religious and geographic conflicts. This minimizes one potentially large source of unhappiness. Among big countries, the United States ranks first.

The irony is that Europe, where the happiness movement is strongest, generally registers lower happiness….

All rich societies already try to balance economic growth with social justice, security and environmental progress. The happiness movement would merely impose more intervention. It “boils down to having zealous politicians regulate the rest of us into their version of happiness,” argues Marc De Vos of the Itinera Institute, a Belgian think tank.

Creating an impossible goal — universal happiness — also condemns government to failure. Happiness depends on too much that is uncontrollable. For starters, personality. We all know people who seem blessed — stable marriage, healthy children, successful job — who are restless, grumpy and sometimes depressed. Meanwhile, others plagued by misfortune — sickness, shaky finances, family disappointment — persevere and remain upbeat.

Welfare and Private Charity || Cato @ Liberty

A new policy paper … analyzes the growth in the American welfare state and concludes that “throwing money at the problem has neither reduced poverty nor made the poor self-sufficient.” Michael makes an important point that—in my experience—most journalists don’t seem to appreciate:

In addition, whatever the intention behind government programs, they are soon captured by special interests. The nature of government is such that programs are almost always implemented in a way to benefit those with a vested interest in them rather than to actually achieve the programs’ stated goals… Among the non[-]poor with a vital interest in antipoverty programs are social workers and government employees who administer the programs and business people, such as landlords and physicians, who are paid to provide services to the poor. Thus, anti-poverty programs are usually more concerned with protecting the prerogatives of the bureaucracy than with actually fighting poverty.

That’s one reason why you have federal officials actually celebrating the fact that more and more Americans are signing up for food stamps. Sure, adding millions of people to the food stamps roll is good for the Department of Agriculture’s budget, but is it good for the country? Perhaps if one thinks that government bureaucracies are ideally suited to provide for the less fortunate. However, that’s a tough claim to make given the fraud, abuse, and wasteful bureaucratic overhead costs associated with the government model. And let’s not forget that the government is not a charity; rather, it must resort to compulsion and force in order to carry out its politically-inspired objectives.

Instead of celebrating government dependency, we ought to be celebrating those private charities that are effectively meeting the needs of the less fortunate through voluntary donations.

Britain weighs proposal to allow greatly increased Internet ‘snooping’ || Washington Post

Under daily observation from thousands of surveillance cameras mounted everywhere from street corners to taxicabs to public parks, Britons rank among the most-watched people on Earth. But a new government plan is poised to take the gaze of this nation’s security services dramatically deeper: letting them examine the text messages, phone calls, e-mails and Web browsing habits of every person in the country.

The “snooping” proposal set to be presented in Parliament later this year is sparking an uproar over privacy in Britain, fueling a debate over the lengths to which intelligence agencies should go in monitoring citizens — a debate that has resonance on both sides of the Atlantic.

What to Do on the Day After ObamaCare || Wall Street Journal

The country can have a vibrant market for individual health insurance. Insurance proper is what pays for unplanned large expenses, not for regular, predictable expenses. Insurance policies should be “guaranteed renewable”: The policy should include a right to purchase insurance in the future, no matter if you get sick. And insurance should follow you from job to job, and if you move across state lines.

Why don’t we have such markets? Because the government has regulated them out of existence.

Most pathologies in the current system are creatures of previous laws and regulations. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli explained as much in his opening statement to the Supreme Court: “The individual market does not provide affordable health insurance,” he noted, “because the multibillion dollar subsidies that are available” for the “employer market are not available in the individual market.”

Start with the tax deduction employers can take for their contributions to group health-insurance policies—but which they cannot take for making contributions to employees for individual, portable insurance policies. This is why you have insurance only so long as you stay with one employer, and why you face pre-existing conditions exclusions if you change jobs….

The main argument for a mandate before the Supreme Court was that people of modest means can fail to buy insurance, and then rely on charity care in emergency rooms, shifting the cost to the rest of us. But the expenses of emergency room treatment for indigent uninsured people are not health-care’s central cost problem. Costs are rising because people who do have insurance, and their doctors, overuse health services and don’t shop on price, and because regulations have salted insurance with ever more coverage for them to overuse.

If we had a deregulated, competitive market in individual catastrophic insurance, that market would be so much cheaper than what’s offered today that we would likely not even need the mandate.

Meanwhile, staggeringly inefficient markets for health care itself need a thorough, competition-focused deregulation. Americans will know there’s a healthy market when hospitals post prices on their websites, and when new hospital and health-care businesses routinely enter to challenge the old ones. Here too regulations keep competition at bay….

Group health plans in today’s system may appear reasonable enough—they seem to resemble “buyers’ clubs,” where people pool together to get good deals from providers. But in a real buyer’s club, each buyer still pays his own bill—you don’t go into a Sam’s Club and haul off whatever you can with only a fixed $20 copayment. And real buyer’s clubs don’t depend on where you work. Real buyers’ clubs for health services could be a useful way to get competition going and revive the cash-and-carry market for individuals.

A deregulated health-care and health-insurance market can work. We can at least start by removing the obvious elephants in the room: all the legislation, regulation and interventions that needlessly keep prices up, keep competition and innovation out, shelter people from the economic consequences of their decisions, and prevent the emergence of real insurance that follows you from job to job and from health to illness and back.  

It's Time to Clean House || The Atlantic

America is mired in a tarpit of accumulated law. Reformers propose new laws to fix health care, schools, and the regulatory system, but almost never suggest cleaning out the legal swamp these institutions operate in. These complex legal tangles not only set goals but allocate resources and dictate the minutest details of how to meet those goals. Most are obsolete in whole or part.

Nothing important can get fixed without remaking a coherent legal framework.

The flaw is not one that can be solved by deregulation. Almost no one, for example, would disagree about the need to provide education for disabled children. But special education law, enacted in 1975, was structured as an open-ended mandate, and soon spun out of control. Today, special ed consumes 20 percent of the total K-12 budget in America. Programs for gifted children get less than half of one percent, and pre-K education gets almost nothing. Is this a sensible allocation of education dollars? No one is even asking the question.

Congress treats most laws as if they were the Ten Commandments — except they’re more like the 10 million commandments. Most legislative programs do not codify timeless principles of right and wrong. They are tools of social management. These laws allocate social resources — almost 70 percent of federal revenue in 2010 was consumed by three entitlement programs enacted a half century or more ago. Congress almost never goes back to rationalize these programs. Running government today is like trying to run a business using every idea every manager ever had….

The problem of obsolete law is not theoretical. It’s concrete, affecting daily choices across the country. It adds to cost, and slows productive activity to a crawl.

Uncle Sam: If It Ends in .Com, It’s .Seizable || Threat Level @ Wired

When U.S. authorities shuttered sports-wagering site Bodog.com last week, it raised eyebrows across the net because the domain name was registered with a Canadian company, ostensibly putting it beyond the reach of the U.S. government. Working around that, the feds went directly to VeriSign, a U.S.-based internet backbone company that has the contract to manage the coveted .com and other “generic” top-level domains.

EasyDNS, an internet infrastructure company, protested that the “ramifications of this are no less than chilling and every single organization branded or operating under .com, .net, .org, .biz etc. needs to ask themselves about their vulnerability to the whims of U.S. federal and state lawmakers.”

But despite EasyDNS and others’ outrage, the U.S. government says it’s gone that route hundreds of times. Furthermore, it says it has the right to seize any .com, .net and .org domain name because the companies that have the contracts to administer them are based on United States soil, according to Nicole Navas, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman.

Full Civic Literacy Exam

Are you more knowledgeable than the average citizen? The average score for all 2,508 Americans taking the following test was 49%; college educators scored 55%. Can you do better?

I scored 32 out of 33 correctly — 96.97 % (but I am so incredibly geeky about US government. You have no idea)

Senate Democrats’ 1,000 Days of Debt and Disappointment || Jeff Sessions & Paul Ryan

[Today marks] a sad milestone in the history of the United States Senate: the 1,000th day since Senate Democrats last offered a budget plan to the American people. Senate Democrats abandoned their official duty to prioritize Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars and tackle our nation’s most pressing economic challenges — dealing a painful blow to fiscal progress that may be felt for some time.

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We remain disappointed in the Senate Democrats’ decision to give up on an essential responsibility of governing, and we sincerely hope 2012 will not mark the third consecutive year that Senate Democrats skip the budget process altogether. Nor will it be credible or acceptable for them to present a phony budget plan that pretends to make changes but in reality merely keeps spending on its current trajectory. Real reforms, real spending control, and a real change in the status quo are the minimum obligations of elected leaders in these times of uncertainty and distress.

How Copyright Industries Con Congress || Cato @ Liberty

Believe it or not, though, it’s actually even worse than that. SOPA, recall, does not actually shut down foreign sites. It only requires (ineffective) blocking of foreign “rogue sites” for U.S. Internet users. It doesn’t do anything to prevent users in (say) China from downloading illicit content on a Chinese site. If we’re interested in the magnitude of the piracy harm that SOPA is aimed at addressing, then, the only relevant number is the loss attributable specifically to Internet piracy by U.S. users.

Again, we don’t have the full LEK study, but one of Siwek’s early papers does conveniently reproduce some of LEK’s PowerPoint slides, which attempt to break the data down a bit. Of the total $6.1 billion in annual losses LEK estimated to MPAA studios, the amount attributable to online piracy by users in the United States was $446 million—which, by coincidence, is roughly the amount grossed globally by Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel.

So in a fantasy world where U.S. movie pirates don’t just circumvent blockage with a browser plugin, and SOPA actually stops all online movie piracy by American users, we get a $446 million economic benefit to the United States in the form of movie revenues, and presumably comparable benefits in music and software revenues? Well, no. Remember our old friend the Broken Window Fallacy. It’s true that some illicit U.S. downloads displace sales of legal products. But what happens to the money the pirates would have otherwise spent on those legal copies? They don’t eat it! As that same GAO report helpfully points out:

(1) in the case that the counterfeit good has similar quality to the original, consumers have extra disposable income from purchasing a less expensive good, and (2) the extra disposable income goes back to the U.S. economy, as consumers can spend it on other goods and services.

As one expert consulted by GAO put it, “effects of piracy within the United States are mainly redistributions within the economy for other purposes and that they should not be considered as a loss to the overall economy.”

Pentagon to Unveil Revised Defense Strategy || Aviation Week

A review of U.S. strategic interests that will guide Pentagon budget cuts in coming years is expected to propose keeping fewer troops in Europe and abandoning the goal of maintaining a force that can fight and win two wars simultaneously, administration officials say.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta will unveil the results of the eight-month strategic review Jan. 5 at a joint news conference with Army General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Pentagon said Jan. 3.

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The review is also expected to include a recommendation that the U.S. abandon its long-held goal of being able to fight and win two wars simultaneously, the first administration official said.

Instead, the U.S. should aim to fight and win one major war while being able to meet and “spoil” any aggressive designs by a second adversary, said the official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity ahead of Thursday’s news conference.

The review was initiated by former Defense Secretary Robert Gates after President Barack Obama asked defense officials to cut some $400 billion in planned spending over 12 years without jeopardizing the country’s strategic interests.

OWS Should Ask for Less Government || Veronique de Rugy

… However, they seem to miss the elephant in the room. Yes, corporations have influence over decisions made in Washington. Yes, it has led to many awful consequences for the economy as a whole. However, the real source of the problem is government intervention in the private sector — the bloated state’s ability to distribute rents, tax breaks, tax credits, and bailouts to its private-sector friends or to special-interest groups. To the considerable extent that the housing bubble was at the center of the recession and the financial crisis, government bears a large responsibility (think about the mortgage-interest deductions, incentives to increase the number of homeowners, and the perpetuation of sub-market interest rates).

Special-interest-group politics (which includes regulatory capture and crony capitalism) is bad for consumers, taxpayers, and the overall economy. It isn’t exactly corruption, but it is terrible, because it creates bad incentives, moral hazards, and often inefficient outcomes (such as the “too big to fail” mentality that underwrote TARP and the industrial policy that underwrote Solyndra). It leads to privatized benefits and socialized loses. It leads to a destruction of the private profit-and-loss system that should be guiding companies’ decisions about how to run their business.

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The way to get rid of special-interest politics is not to tie the hands of corporations. On the contrary, it is to reduce the size of government. It’s important that people are finally complaining about corporate influence on Washington, but it will remain fruitless if the policies designed in response don’t restrain the size of government and in particular its ability to pick winners and losers and redistribute money, influence, and favors.