Things I like about Sorata

1. Combi drivers in the Plaza de Armas shout out their destination to
attract customers. There is, of course, only one shouted destination:
La Paz. The way they should it, with an Aymara twang, sounds like Coach
Zee. La Pa' La Paeeeiz! La Pa' La Paeerz!
2. The crazy Brit who runs the local tourist Hangout--Pete of "Pete's
Place." It would be difficult to imagine a more stereotypical
Englishman here in the periphery. Cockney accent, John Lennon glasses
and all.
3. Really good homemade yogurt for breakfast, here at "Las Piedras" hostel.
4. Beautiful views up to snowcapped peaks and down into the humid
lowlands.
5. Watching the locals' suspicious gazes turn to smiles after I greet
them.
6. Quesadillas made with Andean cheese.
7. All of the beat up Toyota Landcruisers that run as collective taxis
to the outlying communities. I want one of those. Although I would
pass on the bald tires.

Education and market incentives vs. democratic incentives

In theory, both local democracy and market-like mechanisms should generate incentives for US public schools to do a better job of educating children.

In theory, by introducing school choice and other free-market mechanisms, schools should face incentives to attract students, by providing a superior education to other schools, which will, therefore, become competitors.

On the other hand, this school choice dynamic might undermine tendencies towards local democratic accountability, in which locally-elected school boards represent the interest of parents and students. This dynamic should also, in theory, generate a superior education over time, through the efforts of parents to support the education of their students.

In theory, each of these mechanisms should work effectively.

What I wonder is if a third dynamic--a dynamic of central control--including poorly-designed legislation like "No Child Left Behind" (does anybody actually believe that standardized testing makes education better?) and restrictions on providing incentives for better teaching because of teachers' union's pressures has prevented our well-developed local democracy from doing it's job.

If these speculations are correct, it might not matter if we introduce free-market dynamics, because the root cause of the poor performance of our public education system in the states will not be effectively addressed.

Of course, this is all speculation. But I think I might have a way to test at least one of these ideas, at least in another policy area in some other countries (you won't be able go guess which!)

In lovely, lovely La Paz

It doesn't look like I'll have internet regularly here in La Paz for a
couple of days--the recent death of my battery combined with the fact
that there is no wireless here at the house means that it will probably
be a while before I'm able to get these things posted online.

Therefore, by the time you read this, I will probably have been in La
Paz for a couple of days. Left Cusco last night at about 10PM, and made
it here with only a couple of very minor hiccups along the way.

The story:

I bought a ticket with the company Ormeño in Cusco for a nonstop trip to
La Paz. When the time came to leave, however, I was evidently the only
passenger with a ticket on that bus, so they sent me with another bus
company--a Bolivian company, named (what else) Litoral. The bus ride
was pretty comfortable, though apparently Litoral doesn't provide
meals--this was one of the things I was paying a little extra for with
Ormeño. These bus rides are always longer than you think. It ends up
being about thirteen hours from Cusco to La Paz, broken up by a stop at
the border at Desaguadero.

Got a little bit of sleep on the bus (this was a pretty fancy "bus
cama," where the seats recline waaay back), and ultimately felt half
human when we arrived at the border. Bolivian government follows a
policy of "reciprocity" with US citizens, which means they charge us the
same $100 US that we charge them for a visa. The price goes up to about
$130 if you pay for it at the border (which I did). In a truly bizarre
twist, the Bolivian migrations officials will only accept the payment in
US dollars. Which was a problem for me, as I never carry US dollars,
even in the states. Of course, changing money at the border is not a
problem, but a little aggravating!

Delayed my bus a bit dealing with all this nonsense--a little
frustrating, when I'm secretly pretty sure that I could just waltz over
the border with nobody noticing. I have never yet had any authority
figure actually check to see if my passport was correctly stamped,
except when leaving a country, and as the Bolivian Migrations office
faces away from the crossing at Desaguadero... well... It's common
knowledge that a lot of smuggling goes on here. Not hard to imagine why.

In the end, at least I got a nifty-looking Bolivian visa sticker in my
passport.

In La Paz, we were all escorted of the bus, and taken to a medical
clinic inside the bus terminal, where we were all checked for Swine
Flu. Apparently, the Bolivian swine flu exam consists mostly of
standing in line for two hours, then taking your blood pressure and
giving unwanted medical advice. The doctor told the French gal in
front of me that she should stop smoking.

For the moment, I'm staying with a family in La Paz--folks Emily and I
stayed with back in '06. Feels like coming home--the family is open and
welcoming, and also every bit as neurotic as my own family. So it's a
good match.

I'll probably be here for a couple of days, before I head out to my
first Bolivian case study site, which is in the Yungas--the area north
of La Paz, getting down towards the Jungle. My only other errand in La
Paz is to try to get a new battery for my laptop. The old one died in
Cusco. There is a Mac authorized dealer here in town (and it's even
fairly close), so although it seems like a long shot, I'm hoping they're
going to have a battery in stock. Otherwise, I'll make do.

Lenin: a Rational Choice Institutionalist

Over this stretch in Peru, I left a couple of books at home (like the formal modeling book I was hoping to use to teach myself about game theory), but I brought with me an old historical account of the last days of the Romanov regime in Russia from the 1960s. The book, Nicholas and Alexandra, is a long one, but a pretty interesting and entertaining account of the rule of Czar Nicholas. There's probably newer and better scholarship available out there, but for $2 at the used book store, it was a pretty good deal.

The Russian Revolution might be a "hard case" for Avner Greif's rational choice theory of institutional development and change; Greif basically argues that new institutional forms tend to be modeled on older institutional forms, because of all of the uncertainties tied up in creating entirely new institutional models. The Russian Revolution--in some ways a clean break from the Russian monarchist past

One of the interesting things that has struck me about the story is the extent to which it describes a Russian Revolution which wasn't really very revolutionary at all, at least in an institutional sense. The Russian Revolutionaries, following a particular Social Democratic or Marxist ideology essentially adopted older institutional forms--forms which had a long history in Russia or elsewhere.

In 1905, in an attempt to hang on to the throne, the Czar adopted an elected parliament--this became the focus of the February revolution of 1917. In this "revolution," power passed from an autocratic monarch to an elected legislature which had been created twelve years prior--and an institutional form which had existed in a similar form in other more democratic nations for hundreds of years.

At about the same time, a "Soviet," which was a similar elected legislature, though less well-developed institutionally and which was more democratic, in that more people were allowed to participate in its selection, sprang up alongside the Duma.

Ultimately, the Soviet (and other regional Soviets through the country, which were similar institutional structures) superseded the power of the Duma (in the October revolution), which led, ultimately, to the dictatorship of Lenin.

Although these are significant changes in terms of the way the Russian Empire was ruled, all of these changes took place along the lines suggested by Greif--that newer institutional forms effectively developed based on older institutional forms.

One might imagine, based on some of the ideologies of Russian revolutionaries, that the institutional forms of the Soviet Union might have, otherwise, developed very differently. It is theoretically possible, for example, that the Soviet government might have been formed along Anarchist, Revolutionary Syndicalist, or Communitarian lines. But the actual outcome seems to suggest that even radicals like Lenin and Trotsky rely greatly upon the past for their understanding of what the appropriate institutional response for a given situation should be.

The Power of (serving) Evil (Peruvian beer)!

Today, I was walking down a street which I hadn't often been down--walked right by the "Comedor Lex Luthor."

A comedor is a simple restaurant that caters to the locals--simple food in large portions. Normally, these local restaurants are named after Catholic saints, or after the owner. I'll let you draw your own conclusions about which one explains this particular occurrence.

Alcoholism and Capital Accumulation

One of the problems that rural Peruvians face with regard to their personal or family economic development is an issue of the accumulation of capital. If they can't save money, it's hard for them to make the investments they need to start small businesses and to get ahead, economically.

One of the common solutions advanced for this is micro-credit. This often seems to be an effective solution, but fails to address what sometimes seems to be one of the root causes of this failure to accumulate capital, which is the over-consumption of alcohol, a really serious problem in rural Peru.

Although there may be some deeper, culturally-sensitive solution to this problem (which sometimes seems to be brought on by the tendency of Peruvian indigenous people on place a high value on communal festivals and feasts, often organized around the Catholic ecclesiastical calendar and older Andean religious traditions), government may play a strong role in promoting the accumulation of capital at a community level, through the levy of taxes and the re-investment of those taxes into infrastructure and the promotion of productive activities.

In short, I think what I'm suggesting is that, although private investment may be a more efficient solution, communitarian socialism may be an effective solution to the problems of poor communities and rural social malaise such as these problems of alcoholism.

Heading to Bolivia

I leave Cusco tonight on an overnight bus to La Paz. In theory, I should arrive at about 11AM tomorrow, though I've never been on a long distance bus (in any country) that's been exactly on time.

The bus should arrive at the Border in Desaguadero, near the southern end of Lake Titicaca, just as the border opens, thus saving us time waiting in line. Though again, this is a little questionable.

I don't know what my internet access situation will be like, either in La Paz or in my next case study site (which I think will be Sorata, in the Yungas--a pleasant place that has improved in terms of forestry outcomes significantly over the last several years, evidentally), but I have a couple of blog postings pre-scheduled for the next couple of days, all about Peru and other assorted topics. Keep an eye peeled.

Sad to leave the family here--I've spent so much time with Ricardo and Lucy here in Cusco that it really feels like I'm leaving home, but I'm happy to be moving on, as well. I have a lot of work to do over the next couple of weeks, and I'm also looking forward to being one step further to getting back to Emily and the states.

Rooster Sauce

Zane will be interested to see his favorite condiment covered in the NYTimes here.

The end of the preferential vote (hope hope!)

Apparently, the APRA leaders of the Peruvian congress are reading my blog, because as I suggested yesterday in my posting about Peruvian constitutional reform, they've decided to take up the issue of doing away with the preferential vote. If I understand correctly, were this to pass, it would mean the country would be adopting a straight proportional representation electoral rule.

For you non political scientists out there, what this means is that voting districts are big and have more than one representative, and within each big district, congressional seats are allocated to parties based on the percentage of the vote they win. So, for example, the APRA wins 20% of the vote, it gets 20% of the seats, and if the Peruvian Nationalist Party wins 48% of the vote, they get 48% of the seats. Party leaders get to pick who takes a seat in congress, out of their long party list.

This is basically the same as what they do now, except that they have this "preferential vote" thing, in which voters get to indicate on their ballots who they would prefer to be seated from a given party. This sounds like a good idea (more democratic, etc.) but basically means that parties can't hold their representatives responsible for... well... anything, from breaking with the party line in an important vote to accepting bribes or selling government property for personal profit. This is because one of the things that party leaders can do to punish you is just not seat you in congress if they don't get enough votes.

"Sorry, Jaime. You voted against us on the budget, and you've been taking kickbacks on government contracts, and you're accepting narco-cash. So we're going to let somebody who's a little more reliable take your seat."

With the preferential vote, politicians don't need to listen to their party leaders, they just need to get a lot of votes at election time.

The end result is that systems like the one Peru uses now tend to be more corrupt than other systems. They also tend to be more wasteful, but that's a whole other bag of Pirate's Booty.

All of this still doesn't fix the ridiculous local electoral rules, but whatever. These reforms probably won't pass, anyways, but it would be a step in the right direction.

Peruvian Constitutional Reform

The Peruvian congress, today, is debating a series of constitutional reforms, including (probably most importantly) the introduction of a bicameral congress (there is only one house, presently) as well as a couple of other reforms, including when the members of the national bank are elected.

You can read about it (in Spanish) here.

None of this is really what Peru needs. I'm not sure what the perceived problem with unicamerality is... Not sure it really makes that much of a difference. What they really need to do down here is adopt a closed-list proportional representation system, or a first past the post system, either to generate some sort of long-term party discipline (and thus, party stability) or limit the choices of people in each election district, to make it a little easier to pick someone who will do a good job for them.

The adoption of a nationwide FPTP system would be particularly helpful, over the long term, at the local level, if it would narrow the number of parties competing in local elections, thus making it easier for mayors to win a majority of the vote (or something near a majority), and allowing voters to get their way. Usually, under the current system, mayors win with about 20% of the vote (80% having voted against them), and their party assumes control of the municipal council as well (they automatically get 50% +1 seat in the municipal councils).

This means that there isn't much in the way of checks and balances.

If the country adopted a FPTP system, and the number of parties narrowed to something near two (in each district), mayors would need to earn something near 50% of the vote to assume office. This would mean that it would be less likely for mayors following a clientilist strategy (trying to buy 20% of the district's vote, for example) would be successful. The result would be that more mayors would follow a median voter strategy, which suggests less corruption...

Another way to achieve the same objective (and probably a more direct way) would be to adopt normal, proportional rules for the election of municipal councils, which would force mayors to work with a coalition of municipal council members in making policy.

But this constitutional reform shows the misperception that most policy-makers (and citizens) have about the importance of different levels of policy. They tend to think that national level politics are the most important (and that the structure of congress, etc. makes a great deal of difference). In fact, however, to the extent that there is a state presence in much of Peru, that presence typically comes in the form of local government, which means that a focus on local government structure has the potential to do much more to help the average citizen than any national government reform.

This is also true, I think, in the states.

Moral of the story? Know your local government politicians and candidates, and vote in local elections.

Regional Strike

The Peruvian congress has recently passed a bill that will permit the central government to charge for the use of water, including water delivered by local irrigation systems. This despite the fact that many of these systems have been communal property (and managed effectively by local communities) for, often, hundreds of years. If I understand the issue correctly (and I might not), I think this is another example of radical market fundamentalism--the government seems to believe that the introduction of a pricing mechanism will solve the problem of water under the current system.

What the problem is, I'm not sure--the absence of irrigation infrastructure and rural public investment in general seems to be a much bigger issue than the fact that the peasants get their water for free.

This seems to be a story about electoral politics as well. The APRA (party of the current president) doesn't get much support in the rural sierra, where these things will hit the peasant population hard. But they might have much to gain, economically, by charging for the use of this water.

I'm a fan of markets, but this is probably not the way to introduce them, in places so poor that every dollar spent on water will be a couple days' worth of food lost for the kids.

So the peasants are striking and blocking the roadways. Sometimes, these things fail to materialize, but it sounds like there will be a regional transportation strike today and tomorrow. So I'll be in Cusco for a while yet. I'm itching to get going, but I suppose if I have to be caught somewhere, it might as well be here, in the bellybutton of the world.

Wasn't me!

I don't think that the claim that the crisis was our fault is going to stick...

My new favorite environmental nonprofit...

...here.

What better way to take advantage of the strong incentives wildlife face to protect their own habitat?

Torture memos and prison photos

The primary argument against the release of these photos of captured enemy combatants is that it will inflame public opinion against the United States. This seems, to me, a simply bizarre argument, given that the people of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq are, by now, intimately familiar with the kinds of tragedies that can take place at times of military conflict. For example, with US airstrikes killing many innocent civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan, will pictures of US soldiers treating Afghani men shamefully really do much more to harm our international image?

I suspect that, in fact, the people of those places--Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and many other places around the world--already know what happens when another country--even a democratic one--intervenes militarily on your soil. The outcomes aren't good. Arguments that the release of disturbing images will endanger US lives abroad seem strange to me when, in fact, we are engaged in the activity of using military force--with all the nastiness that implies--in these countries, and, I believe, the vast majority of the residents of those countries have some sort of fairly accurate idea of what that consists of.

The people who don't know what happens--because the US mainland has not been invaded since 1812, and because life in the United States is overwhelmingly peaceful and secure--are the Americans. Giving them a glimpse of what it means to have sent troops to Afghanistan through these pictures is one way of acquainting the US public with the reality of military conflict. Only when people have such information can they make informed choices as voters and citizens in this democracy, about the way they would like their government to act abroad.

Maureen's going to like this one...

The always forward-thinking Subcommandante here.

My European Party Preference

Checked out the EU profiler here. It tells you how closely your political preferences match a range of political parties throughout Europe. Looks like the closest match in Europe is the Hungarian Socialist party. And I'm about mid-way between the Labour Party and the Lib Dems in the UK. How far my political preferences have shifted!

Is Political Science useful?

Over at "The Monkey Cage," they're arguing about the utility of Political Science, still talking about an editorial that ran in the NY Times a couple months ago.

At the end of the day, I think they're giving this too much attention--anyone who thinks that a journalistic conversation with three people (to reference the Times editorial) is more useful in understanding US politics than rigorous social science research, or thinks that political scientists only get in contact with non-academics when they "make a trip to Bed, Bath, and Beyond" hasn't been reading much (any?) political science research, or spending any time talking to political scientists.

Maybe somebody should tell the journalists that they should make some effort to do their homework before they start running their mouths. Just like the undergrads.

Mankiw and Postmodernism

When Greg Mankiw argues that we can't know what would have happened in the absence of X policy (for example, Obama stimulus policy) because "we only have one economy," and it's impossible to know what would have happened in the absence of any other series of events, as he does here, he is essentially arguing against counterfactual analysis in a rather postmodern vein. That is, he's arguing that we can never make predictions about what would have happened in the presence of another series of events, since we can't actually observe these events.

I think it's pretty clear that he's also arguing against all social science, which is founded on the notion that if some cause doesn't happen (or happens differently), some effect won't happen (or will happen differently.

Interesting that he's never made this claim about his own economic predictions before, to my knowledge. And interesting that he only seems to be bringing up this (questionable) claim about a policy he doesn't support.

Admittedly, at the bottom of the post, he specifically targets the absence of macroeconomic indicators that can measure the effects of the stimulus. This is a legitimate point. But it's a long step from saying, "we don't yet know how to measure the effects of fiscal stimulus" to saying "the effects of fiscal stimulus are unknowable." Isn't this the kind of stuff that economists do for a living?

Anti-trust policy and "too big to fail"

Mankiw worries about an active anti-trust policy here.

This seems like a truly bizarre thing for us to be worried about these days. Hasn't the crisis taught us that "too big to fail" isn't desirable? And that to be "too big to fail" doesn't even necessarily mean that you're big enough to manipulate markets in an anti-competitive way?

The libertarian in me thinks that the problem behind the crisis is that the government didn't break up these huge financial firms five years ago, before they got "too big to fail." If we had 75 medium-sized banks instead of 10 huge ones, would the government really need to step in and bail out the failures in order to prevent economic collapse? Over the long run, a more active anti-trust policy might mean smaller government.

Maybe I don't understand, though. I've never claimed to be an economist. I often wonder, though, if they've had "government is bad" beaten into them so often that they can't separate themselves from it, even when it doesn't on its face, appear to make much sense.

Pakistan and Harold Lasswell

At the risk of losing everyone as soon as they see the title...

There's been a lot of coverage of Pakistan and Afghanistan in the last couple of weeks. Obama visits, Taliban makes gains, nuclear weapons are safe, etc. etc... I don't know much about South and Central Asia, but out Central Asian policy seems pretty incoherent. I'm not sure that we really know what we're trying to do over there.

What should our goals be? Stopping the Taliban? Preventing terrorism? Promoting democracy? Nation building? Balancing Pakistan against India and China? I don't think we've defined a series of clear goals at all.

I would propose that perhaps, given the difficulty of state building, the political problems with military involvement inside Pakistan, and the low probability that we will be able to defeat the Taliban decisively, maybe we should focus on (1) attempting to prevent anti-US terrorism and (2) promoting long-term economic relations with South Asia in a way that may tend to permit long-term economic growth. It seems unrealistic to believe that we could decisively end this conflict that has, after all, been going on since at least the late 1970s in Afghanistan in Pakistan, but it also seems irresponsible not to attempt to undermine anti-US terrorism in the region.

If we believe (as I do) that the growth of Islamic extremism is fundamentally a problem driven by economic underdevelopment and the long term absence of democracy, it seems apparent that the most important goals over the long term are to promote democratization and economic growth. But, because democratic transitions can often be fertile ground for violence and instability (the apparent democratic transition Pakistan's experiencing right now seems to be a good example of that), we should be careful about the ways in which we choose to promote democracy--probably, shying away from the kinds of extreme policies we've undertaken in Iraq is a good idea.

At the same time, it seems unlikely that we will be able to promote the kind of long-term stability the Pakistani people need (for economic growth, if nothing else) through the Pakistani state. Although, again, I'm no Central Asian scholar, it seems clear that the state doesn't control the situation on the ground in many parts of Pakistan (Waziristan, Balochistan, etc.), and if we seek to promote our interests in those parts of the country through the Pakistani state, we're bound to fail. Seems kind of like asking the Taiwanese government to solve our problems with mainland China. Should we be seeking relationships with the people that control the situation on the ground? Are we doing this?

Obviously, we face significant problems in developing relationships with people in the region, but it seems as though seeking to develop relationships with the tribal and feudal groups in the frontier regions of Pakistan through our intelligence apparatus may be more fruitful, over the long term, than our current apparent focus on airstrikes and airborne intelligence-gathering.

I worry that our current policy is driven by an inappropriate focus (under the circumstances) on the nation-state (Pakistan seems to be neither a nation nor a state) and an ignorance of the individual- and community-level dynamics that are driving the rise of the Taliban in the region.

Hammond on Conservation

From Chips from the Chopping Block:

"It is on this ground of conservation that i fail to find solid footing in the camp of those who term themselves political conservatives. At one time I naively felt that because of the common word root, a true conservative would, like Teddy Roosevelt, embrace conservation over uninhibited exploitation. Instead, most who deem themselves conservatives today scoff at concern over environmental issues like land and water abuse, global warming, endangered species, and population excess."

I, like Hammond, have often felt that a conservationist philosophy fits better with a true Burkean conservative philosophy than does aggressive philosophies towards development and against conservation. It seems to me that the conservative recognition that the world is complex, and therefore slow change is most desirable, fits in with our uncertainty about a range of political-environmental issues, including uncertainty around the costs of global warming, public health threats due to economic development, and various and sundry other concerns.

Edmund Burke, the conservative philosopher, it seems to me, would have also been an environmentalist.

Hammond on Political Ecology

A hundred years ago, nature was viewed as something that was to be used by people, as a source of wealth and resources, or to be done away with if it only represented a hindrance to some subjective measure of human progress.

Thirty years ago, nature was viewed as something to be locked away and preserved--to be kept as separate from people as possible. National parks and wilderness areas resulted from this kind of impulse.

However, people are inseparably intertwined with "nature," in all its forms. This is a truth that indigenous people in Peru and elsewhere understand, but gringos, who don't spend much of their time outdoors, don't really get. The result is that environmental problems, caused by human interaction with nature, are viewed as engineering problems without a human element. Attempts to solve such problems without addressing the human elements tend to fail.

Something that Hammond also understood:

"Animal activists cite a balance-of-nature theory that suggests animal populations will find an equilibrium on their own if man stops interfering. Certainly nature's balance has too often been set awry when man jams his heavy thum on the scale. Should hunters and trappers then be removed from the equation? I don't think so. Eliminate hunting and trapping and you can bet game populations will severely decline, since the people most concerned with their well-being are virtually the only ones paying the price through hunting tags and license fees that help assure healthy habitats and game numbers. until animal rights advocates are willing to pick up that tab they should work with, rather than against, those who wish to see our wildife resources sustained."

Hammond on Veto Players

As I mentioned in my last post, I'm reading former Alaska governor Jay Hammond's second book, Chips From the Chopping Block. There, he presents an instinctive understanding of the political science concept of "Veto Players" or "Veto Points," the rough idea being that the number of independent players, and the difference in their preferences, determines how easy it is to change rules.

Back in the early days of Alaska statehood, Hammond, who was unwilling to vest fish and wildlife policy in a single individual, wanted the responsibility spread out over a wider range of individuals and groups (each with their own constituency), so policy would be harder to change, and therefore, more stable. As a legislator, he proposed the creation of a fish and game board, each member of which would be appointed by the governor. The board would then select a commissioner. Because of the role of fish and game interests in lobbying for these slots, each member of the board would represent a slightly different constituency, and would hold slightly different preferences.

Then governor William Egan wanted direct control over fish and game policy, and thus wanted to be able to directly appoint (and remove) the fish and game commissioner.

"In arguments with Egan I pointed out that even with a board, it was still possible for him to get rid of a commissioner that he didn't want. 'Since the board serves at your pleasure, should you wish to can the commissioner, all you have to do is reconstitute the board with members who feel as you do."

"Egan was aghast: 'But that would be political suicide!'"
"'Precisely,' I responded"

What is going on in my life...

...that in the same day, I get an e-mail from my mom promising unlimited babysitting if I ever have kids, and I get advice from a friend that "you should only have kids if you're willing to give up your career ambitions for four years"?

Hammond on Outhouses

From Chips from the Chopping Block:

"High time someone enshrined the outhouse in Alaska's archives. Perhaps no institution has contributed more to our democratization and development than this humble structure. Caring nothing for creed, skin color, or social status of those who seek solace within its portals, one moment it accommodates the gnarled nates of a trail-toughened bushrat; the next, with equal magnanimity, the billowing buttocks of one to the manor born."

I am, personally, a fan of the humble outhouse. I've spent more time than most shivering out back at 20 below. Fought hard to get my folks to keep the outhouse that they had on their property in Connecticut for thirty-five years. They tore it down--it had been grandfathered in, but Connecticut is no Alaska. Now that it's gone, it's gone for good. A shame. Next thing, they'll pave the road!

Forget the Starbucks to Wal-Mart ratio. Hammond's comments suggest a new measure of economic status and inequality--the pit latrine to indoor plumbing ratio. Sadly, even this may be too high-end for much of rural Peru, which hasn't even reached the pit latrine stage of development.

Arlen Specter and the Right

I know that I've ranted about the rightward drift of the Republican party before, so forgive my self-indulgence, but this issue seems very topical with the recent switch of Arlen Specter to the port side of the spectrum.

On one hand, I sympathize with Specter, and the electoral calculus he's dealing with. I mean, how can you lose to a guy named "Toomey"?

Still, I don't like the fact that Specter switched, not because I feel like he's got any need for loyalty to the GOP, but because his switching parties, by altering the institutionally-structured balance of the senate (if I understand this stuff correctly), has the potential to pull policy to the left. I've always favored a moderate policy in general, and I would like to see a situation in which any major policy changes are the result of negotiations between representatives of all parts of the political spectrum--the end result would then tend to be closer to the center.

If, by switching parties, Specter puts the power to dictate policy into the hands of the Democratic Party, policy will tend to move farther to the left, I think, than I'm comfortable with. I'm okay with a moderate leftward shift in general--policy has clearly pulled us too far to the deregulatory right in recent years, but is it too far to go to exclude Republicans altogether?

On the other hand, maybe this sort of thing will be the kind of incentive the Republican party needs to get its head on straight and figure out that it can't be competitive if it doesn't move back to the center. I would like the New England Republican ethos back. Sadly, that appears to be unlikely for the present.

I don't think any Americanists read my blog. If they did, I would ask for opinions.

If you're going to worship the virgin...

...it might as well be a virgin that appeared on a grill in a Mexican restaurant. Check out the story here. At the risk of being offensive, I won't attempt to put a name on this virgin, but I'm sure you can come up with your own.

Eichengreen on the crisis

Barry Eichengreen's essay is here. Effectively, he argues that the primary cause of the crisis was an ideology (a socially-constructed mental model?) that underestimated the risks of business self-regulation, etc...

He also argues that the age of deductive economics based on abstract theoretical models is over, and the age of inductive economics is beginning.

This is an important point--it's a shame it's buried at the end of the article. With deduction, you've got theory. Maybe, you've got elegant, compelling theory, but theory is only theory, not reality. Theory only should be accepted as something resembling reality when it includes evidence. This comes from inductive analysis. Looking at the real world, through data or otherwise.

And, although I'm getting a little simplistic, I think we in the social sciences sometimes forget that theory is only one part of the scientific method. You've got to have theory, hypothesis, and observations that confirm those hypotheses. Models are only models--and where many economists (and political scientists!) go wrong is that they assume that their models are reality, even when they're based on unrealistic assumptions about human behavior.

My Political Idol

I've finally gotten around to reading Jay Hammond's second book, Chips From the Chopping Block.

For those of you who don't know of the venerable Jay Hammond, he is the (now deceased) former governor of the State of Alaska who, among other things, presided over the creation of the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend--the big check Alaskans get every year, which is a piece of the revenues of the Prudhoe Bay oil bonanza.

Hammond was a canny pragmatic politician, a Republican moderate with an instinctive understanding of some of the theoretical models that Political Scientists now use to model political behavior, and more than any other politician who I've ever heard of, the individual whose personal political philosophy matches my own.

Jay was a fiscal conservative who was also a conservationist. Also a bush pilot, big game hunter, amateur body builder, and all around smartass.

The creation of the Permanant Fund Dividend was a particularly brilliant political move. Hammond, a moderate, hoped to conserve Alaskan wilderness, but knew that staving off oil development on the North Slope was impractical, mostly because of the huge revenues it was likely to bring into the state. He was worried, however, not only about the ecological impact of the Alaska Pipeline project and other oil-related infrastructure, but he was concerned about the influxes of huge amounts of cash on Alaska's tiny economy. In a nutshell, he felt that politicians would face strong incentives to spend as much money as they could as quickly as possible. The result would be big infrastructure projects that the state would be faced with maintaining long after the oil began to run dry (as, in fact, it now is).

In order to prevent the money from being used in an irresponsible way, he created the permanent fund, and started paying out dividends based on the interest on investments made with permanent fund revenue.

The result was to create a political constituency (Alaskans who receive checks every year) who would fight tooth and nail to protect the fund. Politicians, from time to time, attempt to dip into the money, and voters force them to back off.

The result is that the fund has gotten quite large, and the state is in reasonably good financial straits. The problem is that they also have no state income or sales tax, which is another story...

But for the meantime, the permanent fund

Workers of the World, Unite!

Okay, so it would take some pretty torturous rhetorical twisting to make me a "worker." Still, I've always said that, although I think revolutionary Socialist ideologies are typically misguided in our era of legal and effective labor unions, if I was going to be a revolutionary, I think the most realistic and compelling revolutionary creed is revolutionary syndicalism. Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).

Here's what's so great about the IWW:
1. No violence (unless the capitalists provoke it)--the only "revolution" is a general strike.
2. Capitalists capitulate because they can't get the workers to go to work.
3. The union--the IWW--takes over and runs things from there. Replaces exploitative capitalist puppet governments with union structures and worker self-management. Everybody holds hands and sings about Joe Hill. No need for a "vanguard party" or a "dictatorship of the proletariat."
4. We don't learn this in history class, but there were actually some near-miss union syndicalist general strikes in history, including a couple in US History (Lowell/Lawrence general strike and the Seattle General Strike). Workers actually struck, shut down city governments, and managed the governments themselves. It worked until police and the military got nasty. The biggest problem was that the union itself was poorly organized, so couldn't carry the strike to other places.

Okay--why am I writing about this? It's May Day--International Labor Day. Happy May Day!