Post Iraq

Faith

Friday, January 28th, 2005

I’ve been meaning to write an essay much like Robert Wright’s Op-Ed in today’s New York Times for a few years.

Mr. Bush doesn’t grasp the liberating power of capitalism, the lethal effect of luring authoritarian regimes into the modern world of free markets and free minds.

Interventionists, in particular George Bush, talk a lot about freedom and liberty. So did the last century’s communists. Neither had or has any faith in actual freedom as their actions forcefully demonstrate. Read Wright.

[Via Chris Sciabarra.]

While on the subject of faith I must point to the Church of Reality. “If it’s real, we believe in it!” Ah do buhleeve!

Posted in Economics, Iraq, Peeves, Politics | 4 Comments »

A lie halfway fulfilled

Thursday, January 27th, 2005

Excerpt of Bush adds $80 billion to wars’ costs Afghanistan, Iraq tally would pass $300 billion if OKd from yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle:

Before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, estimates of the war’s cost were $50 billion, with assurances from administration officials that Iraqi oil revenues would pay for much of the effort.

Asked Tuesday how the administration’s estimates could be so far off, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said, “you have to be prepared for the unexpected, and you have to be flexible enough to adapt to circumstances on the ground. And it’s important that you give the commanders on the ground the flexibility they need to adapt to changing circumstances. And that’s what we will always do. That’s how you are able to succeed and complete the mission.”

As I’ve noted previously, this happens with every war. There’s nothing unexpected in things going not according to plan in war. There’s nothing unexpected in politicians underestimating costs by an order of magnitude as they make a hard sell for war (or whatever).

We’re near the halfway mark. Expect U.S. taxpayers to be on the hook for one half trillion dollars plus interest by the time the U.S. government declares victory, goes down to ignominious defeat, or otherwise winds down fighting in Iraq.

When an experienced programmer gives you an estimate on a routine software project, double the estimate. When a politician estimates the cost of a pet project, multiply by ten, then double that number (in order to be prepared for the unexpected).

[Via Thomas Knapp.]

Posted in Economics, Iraq, Peeves, Politics | 5 Comments »

Becker-Posner for Perpetual War

Monday, December 6th, 2004

The esteemed Gary Becker and Richard Posner begin their new publishing venture with poor rationalizations of perpetual war for perpetual peace.

Becker‘s very first sentence sounds suspect:

Combating crime mainly relies on deterrence through punishment of criminals who recognize that there is a chance of being apprehended and convicted-the chances are greater for more serious crimes.

Mainly? What of prevention (locks, alarms, guards and the like), social pressure and economic growth? I’m skeptical, but that’s another argument.

Fundamentally Becker argues that because weapons are more powerful and more available, the putative good guys must be less cautious about attacking suspected bad buys. In other words, 9/11 changed everything, a view which I’ve always thought doubly naive. First, proliferation of massive destructive power is inevitable, and anyone who didn’t think of that before 9/11 just wasn’t thinking. Secondly, and more apropos to this argument, it is not at all clear that lashing out at suspected enemies is a cost minimizing strategy in such an environment.

I just love this gem from Posner, which attempts to dismiss cost-benefit analysis of war:

But the appropriateness of thus discounting future costs is less clear when the issue is averting future costs that are largely nonpecuniary and have national or global impact.

Please! Perhaps the discount rate would be different, but it would exist. Time preference is fundamental to economic analysis, which is certainly not limited to financial concerns. Incredibly disingenuous coming from someone who certainly knows better.

But Posner can’t resist cost-benefit analysis anyway and sets up a scenario in which a preventive attack would, supposedly, be cost-justified:

Suppose there is a probability of .5 that the adversary will attack at some future time, when he has completed a military build up, that the attack will, if resisted with only the victim’s current strength, inflict a cost on the victim of 100, so that the expected cost of the attack is 50 (100 x .5), but that the expected cost can be reduced to 20 if the victim incurs additional defense costs of 15. Suppose further that at an additional cost of only 5, the victim can by a preventive strike today eliminate all possibility of the future attack. Since 5 is less than 35 (the sum of injury and defensive costs if the future enemy attack is not prevented), the preventive war is cost-justified.

This strikes me as a highly unrealistic scenario. Governments invariably overestimate the benefits of their actions and understimate the financial cost of war by a factor of ten. Did the overthrow of Saddam Hussein eliminate the threat of terrorists based in or sponsored by Iraq? Hardly. Given the rose-colored glasses worn by government planners, in Posner’s scenario above I’d expect a preventive attack to cost 50 and not change the expected damage from a terrorist attack. 70 is greater than 35, war is not cost-justified.

Posner makes many more assumptions in an alternative history example:

A historical example that illustrates this analysis is the Nazi reoccupation of the Rhineland area of Germany in 1936, an area that had been demilitarized by the Treaty of Versailles. Had France and Great Britain responded to this treaty violation by invading Germany, in all likelihood Hitler would have been overthrown and World War II averted. (It is unlikely that Japan would have attacked the United States and Great Britain in 1941 had it not thought that Germany would be victorious.) The benefits of preventive war would in that instance have greatly exceeded the costs.

Why would Hitler have been overthrown in all likelihood had France and Great Britain invaded? Unless they were dead set on regime change is isn’t hard to imagine Hitler surviving. We don’t have to look back far to see a dictator surviving an invasion and military defeat — Saddam Hussein in 1991.

Would destroying Hitler have averted World War II, and not only the one we know? Who knows what set of events an invasion of the Rhineland may have set off? It could be now seen as a the beginning of a tragedy that led to a communist revolution in Germany, the ascendancy of still-credible fascism and anti-semitism in France and Great Britain, the inevitable Fascist-Communist worldwide conflict, and the U.S. pulled mightly to adopt one or the other, leading to mass slaughter and the extinction of freedom worldwide. Strange things happen. See World War I.

Hindsight is wonderful, eh? Unfortunately there’s no reason to expect it to be 20-20 unless we hold nearly everything constant. Foresight is even harder. We desperately need tools that provide better estimates of the impact of policy than bogus intellectual handwaving and self-serving bureaucratic guesstimation. Conditional futures, which I’ve mentioned here and here may be one such tool. I don’t think conditional futures is quite the term of art, but see Robin Hanson’s page on policy markets for a good explanation and his pages on the Policy Analysis Market and idea futures for far more in depth treatment.

Posted in Economics, Iraq, Peeves, Politics, Prediction Markets | 4 Comments »

Disunion Hopes

Monday, November 29th, 2004

Today’s paper San Francisco Chronicle page 1 headline:

Ukraine crises raises fear nation will split in 2

Continuation headline on inside page:

Ukranian standoff raises disunion fears

Excerpt from related article comcerning U.S. government reactions:

Secretary of State Colin Powell took a stand Monday against any breakup of Ukraine, telling President Leonid Kuchma that it was important to keep the crisis-mired country intact.

In a telephone call to Kuchma, Powell said he was disturbed about reports of a possible splintering of Ukraine amid a volatile election dispute. He told reporters he asserted the U.S. stand on the country’s territorial integrity and his hope Ukraine would find a way to resolve its problems.

[…]

At the White House, presidential spokesman Scott McClellan called on the international community to unite in support of a peaceful, democratic process in Ukraine “and of Ukraine’s sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity.”

Why should anyone care whether Ukraine remains a single state? The election result map below makes it clear that if split, something like two thirds of voters would obtain their preferred outcome, versus half or less if the state’s “territorial integrity” is upheld.

Map from Wikipedia Ukrainian Presidential Election 2004 article.

An opinion piece in the Kyviv Post argues against a split:

Have autonomy and separatism brought peace, stability and prosperity to Transdniester, Ossetia and Abkhazia? The answer, obviously, is no.

Those regions haven’t achieved de jure autonomy. If Moldava and Georgia set the regions free rather than agitating against separatism there would be hope for peace.

It’s time to stop thinking of nation states as sacred and inviolable entities that must be held together with violence in opposition to the wishes of inhabitants, and instead as service providers that must peacefully change and differentiate to best meet the needs of inhabitants.

There are many other nations, mostly artifacts of imperialism, that probably ought to split up, Iraq, Nigeria, and Sudan being “in the news” examples.

So long as freedom to live and work in all parts of the formerly unified state is maintained for all citizens of the smaller states, there need be no negatives for individual citizens, apart from a loss of irrational nationalistic feeling for the unified state, which will eventually transfer to the smaller states in those with the need for such feelings. I’d be happy to see the U.S. split into fifty separate countries under such terms.

Addendum: Mark Brady writes So what if Ukraine split?, citing some real gems from European “unity of the state” moralizers. Yushchenko, the supposed democrat:

Those people who will raise the issue of separatism will be held criminally responsible under the Ukrainian constitution.

EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana:

[T]he unity of Ukraine is fundamental.

Fundamental to what? Nato Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer:

The sense of belonging to one nation is very important and on that basis a solution should be found.

I disagree, and the point is irrelevant anyway. If Ukraine split those in the west and north could enjoy a sense of belonging to a smaller but more Ukrainian Ukraine while those in the south and east could enjoy a sense of belonging to Cossackia, Black Russia (cf Bealrus AKA White Russia, and the Black Sea, tee hee), or Russia proper.

Brady ends with:

I am reminded of the peaceful dissolution of Czechoslovakia into the Czech republic and Slovakia on January 1, 1993. Does anyone believe they should now be forcibly reunited?

Why no, that would further confuse the poor Czechs’ and Slovaks’ sense of belonging to one nation!

Posted in Iraq, Peeves, Politics | 8 Comments »

Kerry for temporary dictator

Sunday, October 31st, 2004

I have voted for the Libertarian Party’s hopeless presidential candidates every four years starting in 1988, the first year I could vote. I am willing to again this year, but only if a LP voter in a swing state agrees to vote for Kerry in exchange. Contact me or register with VotePair.

George W. Bush [vote-against rel added] has governed, putting it charitably, as a big government conservative. Precisely my opposite — and that’s when I’m feeling terribly moderate. I’m rooting for the murderer and probable mass murderer over the actual mass murderer.

Unlike many I have little feeling toward Bush.

The last words of the Frontline documentary The Long Road to War (emphasis mine):

But in the end, only one man’s decision will really matter. The next days will be a time of testing for George W. Bush. The men closest to his father are warning about the consequences. Waging war is always uncertain. Getting bogged down in Baghdad would be a disaster. Long-time allies are leaving America’s side.

But the insiders who helped define the “Bush Doctrine” are determined to set a course that will remake America’s role in the world. They believe the removal of Saddam Hussein is the first and necessary act of that new era. And that fateful decision to take the nation to war now rests with the president of the United States.

I vehemently disagree with the decision Bush made, and even moreso that it was up to him — or any executive. We must drastically curtail the prerogative of the imperial presidency. Until then, we must dispatch each new “commander and chief” who expands on the crimes of the last at first opportunity offered by the system. May Bush’s stint as temporary dictator end on January 20, 2005.

Posted in Iraq, Peeves, Politics | 7 Comments »

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