NOT an actual email from a book author...

To be quite clear....

I did not receive the following email from any Duke colleague, or any professor of history. But I did receive the email, and I thought I would repost it.  It pretends (falsely) to be a summary of my review of Democracy in Chains. It isn't. But it is fair to say this is what the author might have said.

*********************

Thanks so much for the very positive review and affirmation of my book Democracy in Chains by my colleague Duke Professor of Political Science Dr. Michael Munger. Please find below salient extracts from Dr. Munger’s review.

Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, by my Duke University colleague, Nancy MacLean, a professor in our distinguished Department of History… is… a remarkable book. MacLean has argued persuasively throughout her career for the historical method…in this book… MacLean recounts an exchange, a conversation really, between two conservatives…intent on reverse-engineering a …political order in America…using shadowy methods and discredited theories. Democracy in Chains is a work of …historical...research underpinning …facts … from a much larger record…drawing reliable conclusions about history. 

…Democracy in Chains is a great story… of … James M. Buchanan, the winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. MacLean is able to decode the true meaning of his …writings which…sought … to bring down.. America and replace it with a plutocracy. …MacLean’s excellence as a writer,…careful sifting of evidence and respectful encounters with opposing points of view…reveal … that …Buchanan … wanted to establish a …society …for racial segregation… 

MacLean’s book…is admirably academic and careful. … MacLean …found …the attempt by segregationist forces to support vouchers. MacLean says, “The economists made their case in the race-neutral, value-free language of their discipline, offering what they depicted as a strictly economic argument—on ‘matters of fact, not values.’” MacLean … support the claim that Buchanan advocated vouchers for the purpose of achieving segregation. … Buchanan’s support for vouchers and for school choice arose from a deeply held concern for …a …repressive apartheid society where African-Americans were …murderous and … must be forcibly suppressed… MacLean has discovered a number of important documents from the history of Public Choice, and other aspects of the history of the 1960s and 1970s in academic economic circles. There is a terrific example on pp. 115–117, where the “glee” of Buchanan and others about their conspiracy, gathered around a roaring fire in the remote mountains of Virginia, is documented.

 … MacLean has…written that history, using … public documents that … destroy...the conspiracy; …that … would sweep the nation, and the world… When summarized in this way, MacLean’s thesis really does read like a … narrative thread connecting the documents and discussions that …strategize about how to win back the White House and rejuvenate the conservative movement… The contribution of Democracy in Chains, then, is to do two things…Identify James Buchanan as the focal point of the revolution, and identify the content of Public Choice research and teaching as anti-Constitutional and anti-democratic… As I hope has been clear, as a book Democracy in Chains is well-written, and the research it contains is both interesting and …illuminating…as an actual history…of the work of James Buchanan …to end democracy in America. 

My thanks to the actual author of this email, Steve Spearman. And he is right: every word of the above actually appears in my review, and in precisely this order!

More hypocritical racist derp from the WSJ

This time from Bret Stephens:

"For the rest of us, the lesson from Egypt is that democracy is a blessing for people capable of self-government, but it's a curse for those who are not. There is a reason that Egypt has been governed by pharaohs, caliphs, pashas, and strongmen for 6000 years."

As Mungo might say, Sweet Fancy Moses!

Hey Bret: what people were "self-governed" 6000 years ago? How about 1000 years ago? Heck how about 500 years ago?

Follow up question for Bret: When the age of self-governance took off, what did the great self-governing powers do? Oh, that's right, they ran Egypt as their colony.

One last question for Bret: Who allowed Hose-head Mubarak to "rule" Egypt for 30 years and destroy any and all civil institutions and civil society? Don't tell me, let me think, it's right on the tip of my tongue... Oh yeah! IT WAS US. THE GOOD OLD SELF-GOVERNED USA.

The WSJ: where racism, hypocrisy, and derp are not bugs, but rather features.

The Art of Democracy

Democracy and economic outcomes: Evidence from the superstars of modern art 

Christiane Hellmanzik,  European Journal of Political Economy,
June 2013, Pages 58–69

Abstract: This paper analyses the impact of the political environment on the value of artistic outcomes as measured by the price of paintings produced over the period from 1820 to 2007. The analysis is based on a unique dataset encompassing a global sample of 273 superstars of modern art born between 1800 and 1945, auction results of their paintings, and data on the political environment in the respective production countries. Controlling for a variety of economic and hedonic variables, there is a statistically significant, positive link between the level of democracy and the value of artistic output. Moreover, we find that democracy has a significant positive impact both on the density of superstar painters and the collective artistic human capital in a country.

Nod to Kevin Lewis

Whatever happened to the 22nd Amendment?

Is it just me or does it really seem like George Bush is now in his 4th term as president?

He finally got 99% of his tax cuts made permanent. Warrantless wiretapping is proceeding full speed ahead. We are still running huge deficits. Drones use continues to rise.

Hell there's even a natural disaster where people are mad about the lack of a government response!

I just don't see how conservatives get all tied up in knots about president O. After all, despite some differences in style and tone, he's pretty much one of them.

Stuck in the middle with you?

Duncan Black's median voter theorem is a classic result in voting theory. Anthony Downs extended the results to electoral competition.

In a nutshell, if there are two candidates competing for election in a one dimensional policy space, and voter preferences over the policy space are single peaked, the candidate that is positioned closest to the position of the median voter will win.

Heuristically, we might think that over the course of a campaign, candidates' positions might move toward that of the median voter.

But look at this amazing chart from Henry Farrell John Sides (clic the pic for an even more counterintuitive image):

What is up? Anthony Downs, you got some 'splainin' to do!

Possibilities:

1. Candidates take non median positions to win primary, then are "trapped" at or near that position in the general election.  Perhaps, but these guys appear to be moving AWAY from the mean.

2. Voter preference distribution is not symmetric so average  does not equal median. Maybe, but it's hard to believe the median would be either more conservative than Romney or more liberal than Obama.

3. The policy space is multi-dimensional. This is my cherished view, on which I've written exactly one paper that only got published in a special issue of Public Choice that I edited (though it has been cited a few times at least. I always get bashed over the head with the Poole-Rosenthal work claiming that politics really is one dimensional.

****************UPDATE************

4. Negative ads work. Black & Downs never conceived of the modern world of political attack ads.


Other thoughts? Tell me in the comments.

Should Democracy Decide Everything?

My first video at LearnLiberty.  They did a good job with it, very nice.  But it was the last video we filmed, and I was really tired (it was a 10 hour day!).  Reading a bit mechanically....ick!  Still, they did a really good job with the graphics, and making me look better than I am.

 

What do the European elections mean for the Euro?

People, it's another beard vs. beard situation as Lebron takes the pessimistic view while PK says the results may be good news for the Euro.

The bottom line is that electorates in the PIGS (so far Ireland is resolute in taking its medicine) are unwilling to tolerate the Troika policies. Their only unilateral alternative is to exit the Euro, and they all seem unwilling to take this step.

So, I guess the "optimistic"view is that these results scare Germany enough to get them to pay more for their southern neighbors and to throw their weight behind the ECB significantly raising the Eurozone inflation rate.

A travesty of justice

Shout it from the rooftops!

Simply fantastic essay in The Atlantic by Teju Cole. A must read.

Here's a nice bit:

Joseph Kony is no longer in Uganda and he is no longer the threat he was, but he is a convenient villain for those who need a convenient villain. What Africa needs more pressingly than Kony's indictment is more equitable civil society, more robust democracy, and a fairer system of justice. This is the scaffolding from which infrastructure, security, healthcare, and education can be built. How do we encourage voices like those of the Nigerian masses who marched this January, or those who are engaged in the struggle to develop Ugandan democracy?

Hat tip to Bill Easterly

People Aren't Smart Enough for Democracy

It is interesting that progressives think citizens are much too stupid to make their own choices in the grocery store.  But somehow, people get a lot smarter when they enter the voting booth.    Um....no, they don't, actually. 
The problem, as I argued in a recent paper about "self interest," is that people have pretty good incentives to learn about which apples taste good. But Santorum vs Perry? Ooooh, I like his tie. Here is an excerpt from my paper:

There are three parts to the Public Choice Theory “citizen as private actor” story. First, the citizen is motivated to seek his own self-interest. Second, the citizen has limited information. Third, political elites know this, and use advertising and simple slogans to attract votes.

The evidence that Lewin (1991) offers bears only on the first step. But if we change the motivational assumption to its most extreme form, “Citizens only want to act in the public interest,” the cost of information and the value of simple political messages as persuasion are unchanged. From Marx to Downs to Buchanan and Tullock, the costliness of information and of collective action has been a constant theme. Motivational assumptions are nearly inconsequential for the PCTist. What matters is the aggregate consequences of individual action.

Do voters have the information they need to make accurate decisions? The very literature to which Lewin refers provides a resounding “no” answer. Very few citizens are aware of even the most basic political facts, and they have only cursory knowledge of how government works (Page and Shapiro 1992, Table 1.2; Somin 1998). Less than half can name their congressional representative, much less identify her voting record or issue positions. Even fewer can give a coherent attribution of their own political ideology in terms of its specific policy implications (Converse 1964; Feldman and Conover 1986, 1984, 1982, and 1982). The rationally ignorant public-interest voter is essentially indistinguishable from the rationally ignorant self-interest voter. Rationality need not imply self-interest, but it clearly does, as an empirical matter, imply that voters have very little idea of how policy works and what candidates will do once they are in office.

For reasons I cannot understand, Lewin (1991, 107) denies this in terms that can only be called naïve:

While proponents of the self-interest hypothesis centre their hopes on setting satisfactory prices through market mechanisms, the representatives of the public-interest hypothesis believe in cooperation as a method to escape the “prisoner’s dilemma.” Both camps maintain that their particular world—the market and politics, respectively—is the more transparent, i.e. the one characterized by a minimum of unintended consequences. Although this may be true of the way the market functions ideally as a model, however, faulty information, limits on competition, and other imperfections are quite evident in real-life economies. Politics, by contrast, because of its combination of collective organizations and public debate, is probably easier to predict even in reality.
Yet Public Choice scholars have never claimed that politics is unpredictable. In fact, it is all too predictable, precisely because people can be counted upon to act in their self-interest. A legislative séance of the sort Prof. Lewin envisions for the public sector, groping toward some seraphic group wisdom, would indeed be unpredictable, and (by his lights) not transparent. But the Public Choice argument is that one can project the decisions of a group with high precision if one knows the goals of each individual and the decision rule that will be used by the group.

Lewin argues for the superior competitiveness and informational abundance of the public sector. The information problem I have already discussed: buying a car is a private good, and I have solid reasons to learn about cars. Voting for a candidate is a public good, and information about it will be underprovided by private action. The fact that voters have public-interest intentions at the first stage, the motivation stage, is essentially irrelevant, since they have private interest reasons to free ride and can thus be influenced by operatives whom Downs called “persuaders,” who have their own reasons to distort information. 

As always, happy to send a PDF if you are interested. Just contact me at munger at duke dot edu

Venezuelan politics is so awesome

The president of the Venezuelan congress and likely replacement for Hugo Chavez if Hugo's health does not permit him to run is Diosdado Cabello!

Yes, you read that right and no, it's not a nickname. The man's first name is "God-given" and the man's last name is "hair".

"Mitt" Romney has to be kicking himself at this point, thinking "that should be MY name".

If Mitt is the real Diosdado Cabello (and he is, just look at Diosdado's actual cabello, it's pathetic), what are some good Spanish names for the rest of our politicians?

Tell me in the comments!

Democracy

An astonishing number of folks have jumped on the "he said the US is not a democracy! kill him!" wagon. here, and here, and et cetera.

Look, I did explain. And I have explained before, at greater length. And, it was a DEBATE, not an attack.

There is even a video, for the Daily Kos folks, with your gnat-length attention spans.


But perhaps this explanation is better. (Do click for a more democratic image)

Democracy without rule of law is simple tyranny. You bed-wetters all claim to hate capital punishment. Me, too. It's state murder. Why do we have it? Majority rule. Why would you expect rectitude in the bloodthirsty multitude? Majority is not morality, it's just what most people happen to think.

Hashtag of the day

People, check out the tweets at #ronpaultroofs

Here's one I especially liked:

"Ron Paul gave George Washington Carver his first peanut." 

and another:

"If you smoke like Ron Paul smokes, then you're high, like, every day."

Congo Election Correction

In my earlier post about politics in the Congo, I may have said that there were 32 presidential candidates. That of course is ridiculous; there are only 12! 11 men, 1 woman, and two of the 11 men are the sons of previous dictators, one of which, incumbent Uncle Joe Kabila, is the likely winner.

Here are the 12:

Les candidats à l’élection présidentielle 2011:

Jean Andeka Djamba (ANCC)
Etienne Tshisekedi (UDPS)
François Joseph Nzanga Mobutu (Udemo)
Vital Kamerhe (UNC)
Kengo wa dondo (UFC)
Nicephore Kakese (URDC)
Joseph Kabila (Indépendant)
Oscar Kashala (UREC)
Antipas Mbusa Nyamwisi (RCD-K/ML)
Adam Bombole (Indépendant)
Ngoy Mafuta (Indépendant)
Ismaël Kitenge (MRC-PTF)

Democracy is Overrated

(Update: This did come from a public speech. The laughter/applause is real, though of course undeserved. It is on YouTube; just click on bottom right of the embedded image, or use this link...

I had no role in making the video, which is nearly 3 years old. It was created by Libertyfizz from a speech I gave permission to use. Libertyfizz may or may not choose to identify him/herself; that's not for me to decide. But whatever claim or credit you want to give, it is Libertyfizz's, not mine. If you are interested in the text of the speech...this is pretty close.)



Some little stories... I was hoping to be funny, but I still want to be serious.

Tocqueville rocks, by the way.

Unions Oppose Choices for Workers, and Win!

Sen. Wyden's "free choice" vouchers would have provided some alternatives for workers. Perhaps not surprisingly, unions would have none of that. And they killed it. Not clear free choice vouchers were a good deal, economically, for the nation. But that's not the point. Unions actually opposed vouchers, because it reduced their control over workers and gave the workers INDEPENDENCE from union bosses.

Sen. Reid held the knife. Why would anyone believe that private union bosses want to help workers?

For that matter, why would anyone believe that democracy helps citizens? Mencken had it right:

I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing. Does it exalt dunderheads, cowards, trimmers, frauds, cads? Then the pain of seeing them go up is balanced and obliterated by the joy of seeing them come down. Is it inordinately wasteful, extravagant, dishonest? Then so is every other form of government: all alike are enemies to laborious and virtuous men. Is rascality at the very heart of it? Well, we have borne that rascality since 1776, and continue to survive. In the long run, it may turn out that rascality is necessary to human government, and even to civilization itself - that civilization, at bottom, is nothing but a colossal swindle. I do not know: I report only that when the suckers are running well the spectacle is infinitely exhilarating. But I am, it may be, a somewhat malicious man: my sympathies, when it comes to suckers, tend to be coy. What I can't make out is how any man can believe in democracy who feels for and with them, and is pained when they are debauched and made a show of. How can any man be a democrat who is sincerely a democrat?

ATSRTWT

A mob of his own

As protests continue, Hosni Fubarak invests in his own shock troops by announcing a 15% pay raise for all government employees.

That should help keep them out on the streets punching Anderson Cooper!

All Hail Robert Kagan

This to me, really nails it:

"There’s no way for us to go through the long evolution of history without allowing Islamists to participate in democratic society."

“What are we going to do — support dictators for the rest of eternity because we don’t want Islamists taking their share of some political system in the Middle East? We’ve got to put our money where our mouth is."

“Obviously, Islam needs to make its peace with modernity and democracy. But the only way this is going to happen is when people speaking for Islam take part in the system."

serial double dippers

Ah Peru, is there anything you won't do? Fresh on the heels electing Alan Garcia (perhaps the worst ex-president who got to return to his country ever!) in 2005, comes word that the front-runner in this year's presidential election is Alejandro Toledo??

Really! I am not making this up.

The latest poll results have Toledo leading the field at 30.7%. Yes, this is the same Toledo who left office in 05 with a single digit approval rating despite solid economic growth rates.

The Peruvians are a wily bunch though. If Toledo falters (and how can he not?), they still have Keiko Fujimori, daughter of jailed ex-strongman Alberto in the race, currently polling at 20.3%, waiting in the wings.

talk like a Egyptian

Via Salon, here's a truly excellent post about how NOT to talk about events in Egypt.

My favorite faux pas: "I loved Sadat".

(Sadat WAS Mubarek with a worse hairdo)

Relatedly, Bill Easterly describes the double standard for democracy that seems to be operating.