Thinking of a very loose coalition as an organism with a single heart, mind, & will makes you stupid. Or, at least, it makes your audience stupid to the extent that they believe you—& for some malevolent actors, that is what they want. If you think “Congress doesn’t care” about ICE murderings, you’ve already lost the plot. The story that matters is about specific legislators, specific incentives, and a Republican Party that (largely) has a Party Line and punishes Line Wobbles far more effectively than its Democratic rival. This is of broad applicability—I see this most often in the difference between Democratic professional economists who are economists first, and Republican professional economists who are Republicans first. But right now we see it at work all across the entire American spectrum of American governance…
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Hoisting this from SubStack Notes <https://substack.com/profile/16879-brad-delong/note/c-199669299> up to the main Grasping Reality feed, because it is important:
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The extremely sharp Krenik writes:
Krenik: <https://substack.com/@macrothinking/note/c-199507887>: ‘‘“Democrats” is just a collective term for a group of people who tend to vote the same way and also those people who they elect. There is no organisational structure that can decide what Democrats should or should not do. To ask “what can Democrats do?” is a category error, similar to asking “what can Nebraskans do?”. This gets to the heart of the failure of American politics. Power is distributed to individuals, not parties, and there is no way to get them to agree on things because there is no consequence for defection. Ditto for Republicans…
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I 100% agree with his main point: Krenik has this right: There is no Central Committee for the Democratic Party that sets out a Party Line, and enforces it by imposing consequences on those who engage in Line Wobbles. So to say “Democrats”, as if it is a unified anthology intelligence with a single position, a single rationale, and a single will is to commit a grave category error. When it is made by people, they are either (a) engaged in making themselves stupid, or (b) malevolently misinforming their audiences. You can excuse people, on the grounds that we are all hair-trigger primed to attribute human-level consciousness, intellect, and intention to things that do not have it—to individual lions or to the collectivity of a prey species or to the goddess of the hunt or to the thunderstorms. And this extends to collections of us East African Plains Apes, whether Uma’s band, the Imperial Japanese Empire, the Knights Templar, or rthe Democratic Party. But when you do this attribution you need to be very careful, because it is a significant failure mode of human reasoning.
And I would double down on my claim that when people do it, they are either:
For example, something that annoyed me yesterday. The shape Steve Vladeck claiming that their is an organization called “Congress” with a single mind, will, and intention that is fine with ICE’s murderings and does not actually care:
Steve Vladeck: <https://substack.com/@delongonsubstack/note/c-199259864>: ‘It would take a two-word amendment to 42 U.S.C. § 1983 to subject ICE agents and other federal law enforcement officers to the same liability for constitutional violations that local and state officers currently face. If Congress actually cared about what it's seeing, it could pass that overnight…
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My knee-jerk intemperate response: May I say that every time somebody makes the pathetically stupid—when it is not malevolently disinformational—intellectual-cognitive error of writing about “Congress” as if it were a single animal with a single unified mind and set of goals, I really want to puke? Steve Vladeck is smarter than this. Or, at least, I had thought he was <https://substack.com/@delongonsubstack/note/c-199259864>.
Let me expand:
There are Democrats in Congress who do care, but are powerless. There are some Republicans in Congress who care, and who could join with Democrats to get it done, but who fear the consequences for their careers—and, quite possibly, for their and their families personal safety, not being rich enough to be able to afford intensive private security. And there are Republicans in Congress and outside who are absolutely fine with ICE’s murderings. But there is no single entity “Congress” that does not actually care. And Steve Vladeck is making himself and his audience stupider by claiming that there is.
My old teacher Mancur Olson would, at this point, tell me that I am putting it too strongly. He would start talking his book about The Logic of Collective Action, and the importance of selective incentives in turning a heterogeneous collection of East African Plains Apes going every which-way into at least a somewhat unified group pointing in the same direction that can, for some purposes, be usefully modeled as an anthology intelligence with a single consciousness, point of view, and intention. But, as Krenik observes, “ask[ing] ‘what can Democrats do?’ is a category error…. [With] individuals… there is no way to get them to agree on things because there is no consequence for defection…”
And yet, you say, isn’t there a sense in which, if there isn’t an entity “Congress” that does not care about ICE’s murderings, there is an entity “Republicans” that doesn’t care? Can you find me a single Republican who cares, and so who wants to amend 42 U.S.C. § 1983 to subject ICE agents and other federal law enforcement officers to the same liability for constitutional violations that local and state officers currently face?
I cannot find any such who will say this in public. Yet I will still say no, there isn’t any single entity “Republicans” that does not care.
I would say that there is a group, “Republicans”, that is right now undertaking actions that cannot be easily distinguished from what an anthology intelligence that did not care would undertake. But you have to immediately qualify this with the phrase in public—in private, a surprisingly large number of them are horrified, or claim to be horrified when talking in private to Democrats.
So why do these shut up in public? As Mancur Olson would say: because there are selective incentives here. Krenik is substantially wrong when he says “Ditto for Republicans” with respect to the existence of “consequences”, and thus the tendency for them all to fall in line.
I know this best and in most detail in economic policy. So consider my old teacher, the late Marty Feldstein:
Marty Feldstein got into immense trouble in the 1980s with respect to his position as a Republican Grandee of economic policy. Why? For not shutting up over 1982-1984 about the likely damage that the Reagan deficits would do to the economy.
Now Marty was right about the damage. But that he was right cut no ice with respect to his standing as a Republican Grandee of economic policy:
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The Reagan deficits diminished investment in America by pushing up interest rates, began the substantial erosion of American’s midwestern manufacturing communities of engineering practice via their high-dollar consequences, produced significant headwinds for economic growth, prolonged the productivity slowdown of the 1970s for an extra decade—until Bill Clinton and all of his spear-carriers, both those of us in the administration and the Democratic congressional caucuses, fixed it in the early 1990s. (And then George W. Bush 43, his spear-carriers (I’m looking at you and many others, Greg Mankiw; and at you, Alan Greenspan, for unlike Marty you did not dare try to get in their way), and the Republican congressional caucuses broke it again in the early 2000s.
But, as I said, that he was right cut no ice.
Instead, his being right may have made the consequences for Marty more severe, with respect to his standing among Republican politicians and lobbyists and even Republican economists—fairly serious consequences, sufficient that, because he wanted to still be a player, he never dared to be brave again.
And so when Jeb Bush back in 2015 demanded that the Republican economists working for him produce a forecast of faster long-run economic growth rate, the Republican economists—including, alas!, Marty, but I give him a bye because he was very brave once—turned out to be not professional economists but Professional Republicans: he had said “frog”, and they hopped as high as they could.
Josh Barro had one take on one of the stories, back in the day, although the stories explicit text was substantially defanged by the New York Times editors:
Josh Barro (2015): How Economists Forecast Growth Under Jeb Bush? By Guessing <https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/15/upshot/how-economists-forecast-growth-under-jeb-bush-by-guessing.html>: ‘Jeb Bush says he wants to make the American economy grow at 4 percent a year, or nearly 2 percentage points faster than the Congressional Budget Office expects in the long run. The goal has been greeted with skepticism, but last week, four prominent conservative economists predicted his tax-cut plan would get him a good portion of the way there…. John Cogan, Martin Feldstein, Glenn Hubbard and Kevin Warsh… did not run Mr. Bush’s tax plan through an economic model…. Voters should remember that we have been burned before by economists’ guesses on taxes, including guesses by the very economists who wrote the letter backing Mr. Bush’s plan. For example, in August 2001, Mr. Hubbard, who was then serving as the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, wrote for The Wall Street Journal about the first round of George W. Bush tax cuts under the headline “Tax Cuts Won’t Hurt the Surplus.” He said: “The recently enacted tax cut fits naturally into a growth-oriented agenda. Lower taxes reduce fiscal drag on the economy in the short term. Lower marginal tax rates provide longer-term incentives for work, savings, risk-taking and innovation. In this way, the current fiscal policy helps to provide for the future of Social Security.” That guess turned out to be both wrong and expensive…
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Howard Schneider and Steve Holland had another take:
Howard Schneider & Steve Holland (2015): How an off-the-cuff remark shaped Jeb Bush’s economic vision for U.S. <https://www.yahoo.com/news/off-cuff-remark-shaped-jeb-bushs-economic-vision-051011801--business.html>: ‘There were no fancy economic models or forecasts when former Florida Governor Jeb Bush first tossed out the idea that 4 percent annual growth should be the overarching goal for the U.S. economy. But what started as a casual suggestion during a 2010 conference call with advisers… has now become the central economic idea of Bush's developing run for the White House…. Asked by Reuters during a campaign-style stop in New Hampshire on Thursday how he had arrived at the figure, Bush said: "It's a nice round number. It's double the growth that we are growing at. It's not just an aspiration. It's doable."…
That ambitious goal was first raised as Bush and other advisers to the George W. Bush Institute discussed a distinctive economic program the organization could promote, recalled James Glassman…. We were looking for a niche and Jeb in that very laconic way said, 'four percent growth.' It was obvious to everybody that this was a very good idea."…
By April 2011 there was a conference in Dallas and subsequent book of essays, "The 4% Solution," in which Nobel economists like Robert Lucas and Edward Prescott dissected what it might take…. The problem, [Barry] Bosworth said, is that the goal is "disconnected to reality"…. The average since World War Two has been just over 3…. Current models… at the Fed… [see] just over 2…. Stanford University economist John Taylor… said 4 percent growth was possible if one melded the best of… Reagan and Clinton… [then] the economy was at or above 4 percent at least half the time, and “that is evidence that things could be like that again”…
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Do note that it is not just Cogan, Warsh, Hubbard, and Feldstein who hopped when Jeb Bush said “frog”.
It was Lucas, Prescott, and Taylor as well. Prescott, at least, did work hard to make sure the his endorsement came accompanied with a caveat that the “maintainable” rate of growth was 3%/year (itself a substantial highball estimate).
Taylor and Lucas did not.
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#self-inflicted-stupidity#collective-action
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