Post Politics

North Korea Time Warp

Tuesday, December 14th, 2004

My impression is that North Korea as the ultimate Stalinist freakshow really only entered western consciousness in the last few years as the Kim Jong-Il regime acquired nuclear weapons and long range missiles. Well known emblems of the freakish regime range from mass tragedy (famine), brutality (escapees strung together with a wire through their noses), to monumental failures and the amazing (a human video billboard). My personal favorite is a full page color ad placed in the New York Review of Books a few years ago for a book exalting Kim Jong-Il as the greatest human to walk the earth and then some (perhaps the book was Kim Jong-Il, A Brief History, brief indeed compared to the 2,161 page Complete biography of the Great Leader Kim Il Sung). The layout of the ad was sub-amateur and the hyperbolic language clearly written for a captive audience. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a more hopeless advertisement in my life.

However, if two recent columns by Andrei Lankov are accurate, western perception may be trailing reality. December 7th’s Cracks in North Korean ‘Stalinism’ and December 14th’s Welcome to capitalism, North Korean comrades paint a picture of a regime that has lost control of the people’s minds and no longer runs the economy. Cheap used VCRs and transistor radios smuggled from China and soap operas broadcast from South Korea have helped, but the largest factor seems to be a total collapse of the state run economy over the last decade, leaving even the ultimate Stalinists bereft of carrots for party members and sticks for everyone else.

Total control of the economy is a rather impossible goal, though mere dictatorial political control should be no problem. However, Lankov argues that the regime’s myths are dissolving …

Perhaps few North Koreans believe that every South Korean family has its own car (even if it really is the case). But there is no doubt that it is dawning on them that the South is not exactly a land of hunger and desperation. This is certain to have political consequences in the not too distant future, since the myth of South Korean poverty has been fundamental to the survival of the North Korean state. Pyongyang has always based its claims for legitimacy on being a better type of Korean government, supposedly delivering the quality of life that would be unavailable in the “exploited” and “impoverished” South. If the North Korean populace learn about South Korean prosperity, then the Pyongyang government is in deep trouble – as the fate of the much more successful East German government demonstrated: the economic gap between North and South Korea is much greater than was once the case in Germany. According to current estimates, the per capita gross national product (GNP) in the South is 10 to 20 times higher than in the North.

… perhaps leading to a collapse not unlike that seen in Lankov’s native Soviet empire, and just as unexpected by most.

There are far more interesting observations in Lankov’s above columns and his Korea Times series on “Another Korea.”

While I have little stomach or interest in the most brutal atrocities of oppressive regimes, I find attempted total economic control perversely interesting. Here’s one illustrative quote from Lankov:

Unlike governments of other communist countries, until the late 1980s the North Korean government did not even allow its farmers to cultivate kitchen gardens – the individual plot was limited to merely 20-30 square meters, hardly enough to grow enough chili pepper. This was done on purpose. In many other communist countries, farmers had bigger plots and made their living from them, ignoring their work obligations to the state-run cooperative farms. Without their own plots, farmers would work more for the state – or so believed the North Korean government. In the utopia constructed by Kim Il-sung, every single man or woman was supposed to work for the state, and was rewarded for his and her efforts with officially approved rations and salaries.

This reminds me of a claim I once heard that tiny personal gardens made a substantial contribution, far out of proportion to space used, to the Soviet table, as gardeners had de facto property interest in production from such gardens, and no other production. If I ever recall and confirm details I may post them here.

[Welcome to capitalism, North Korean comrades link via the Mises Economics Blog.]

Posted in Economics, Politics | 1 Comment »

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 »

Logic of Collective Action

Saturday, November 20th, 2004

Notes on Mancur Olson‘s Logic of Collective Action, an apparent classic first published in 1965, which I read in September:

The basic argument is set forth on page 2 (emphasis in orginal):

Unless the number of individuals in a group is quite small, or unless there is coercion or some other special device to make individuals act in their common interest, rational self-interested individuals will not act to achieve their common or group interests.

Olson writes on page 64 that self interest is not a requirement for this outcome. Even rational altruistic individuals will not act to further group interests if they realize that their efforts, as one of many, will have no perceptible effect on the outcome.

Olson says several times that groups by definition act in the interests of members, though he admits to potential in-fighting and capture by leaders in footnotes. However, if coercion must be involved (the success of other special devices such as exclusive contributor services is downplayed), what is to prevent a rather permanent state of affairs in which members are forced to act against their own interests? I use the word state in the preceding sentence advisedly.

A very long and curious note on page 48 (note 68 of chapter I “A Theory of Groups and Organizations”) begins and ends with (middle elided):

There is one logically conceivable, but surely empirically trivial, case in which a large group could be provided with a very small amount of a collective good without coercion or outside incentives.
[…]
total costs of the collective good wanted by large groups are large enough to exceed the value of the small fraction of tht total benefit that an individual in a large group would get, so that he will not provide the good. There may be exceptions to this, as to any other empirical statement, and thus there may be instances in which large groups could provide themselves with (at most minute amounts of) collective goods through the voluntary and rational action of one of their members.

This quote is typical of Olson’s insistence that public goods just don’t get produced without coercion or individually excludable inducements, which he notes shift the individual’s indifference curve to the left or right respectively.

In 2004 the above quote cries out for a response of “professor, what about open source?” However, I suspect that Olson thoroughly underestimates in general the extent to which private efforts motivated by private returns produce positive externalities, thus reducing the need for coercion. As I previously mentioned in an aside, the extent of private and public good co-production(?) is a crucial if unstated aspect of nearly any policy debate.

When applied more narrowly to private associations Olson’s argument is fairly compelling, though not novel, as perhaps it seemed in 1965.

Olson seems somewhat congruent with public choice economics. While I like to summarize a key insight of the latter as “concentrated interests trump diffuse interests”, Olson emphasizes the great difficulties groups face when pursuing a common goal, e.g., attempting to trump diffuse interests via “special interest” lobbying. Perhaps it isn’t such a bad thing that groups have a difficult time acting to achieve group interests, that is when group interests may be furthered by stealing rather than production.

Posted in Books, Economics, Open Source, Politics, Public Goods | 7 Comments »

Bush good for terrorist stocks

Tuesday, November 2nd, 2004

Here’s an election day update of my post on conditional futures. What do the markets say about stock returns, nuclear weapons use and terrorist attacks in the U.S., contingent upon the winner of the temporary dictator election?

Unfortunately not much of anything. The market cited below doesn’t use real money and trading is very thin. Consider the answers below meaningless, just for fun (as is this post’s title).

The Economists’ Voice published Experimental Political Betting Markets and the 2004 Election a few weeks ago, which describes a real money contingent betting experiment. Unfortunately the claims aren’t very interesting — they aim to capture the potential effect of events on the election outcome (e.g., one expects that the capture of bin Laden would give Bush a tremendous boost). I’m interested in how people expect the election outcome to effect future events.

Noise follows:

bid ask last
/  /   /
46 57 47 http://www.ideosphere.com/fx-bin/Claim?claim=Bush04

Bush may not win.

41 47 43 http://www.ideosphere.com/fx-bin/Claim?claim=Stocks
25 28 50 http://www.ideosphere.com/fx-bin/Claim?claim=GBStok

50/.47 = 106 < 43 Bush win means much higher stock returns? However, bid and ask are much lower than last, so this must be the anomalous result of a very thin market. Taking the average of bid and ask: 26.5/.47 = 56 < 43 Bush win still means higher stock returns. 40 49 41 http://www.ideosphere.com/fx-bin/Claim?claim=GBNuke
40 51 44 http://www.ideosphere.com/fx-bin/Claim?claim=JKNuke

41/.47 = 87 < 44/.53 = 83 Bush win means slightly higher chance of US getting nuked? 70 72 71 http://www.ideosphere.com/fx-bin/Claim?claim=Terr10
30 69 30 http://www.ideosphere.com/fx-bin/Claim?claim=GBTerr

30/.47 = 64 > 71

Bush win means very slightly lower chance of terrorist attack in US?

Taking the average of bid and ask:

49.5/.47 = 105 > 71

Bush win means greater chance of terrorist attack in US?

Addendum 2004-12-07: I just noticed that David Schneider-Jones posted a deeper analysis of the Nuke-related contracts above on November 1.

Posted in Economics, Politics, Prediction Markets | 8 Comments »

Major Party Vote Trading

Tuesday, November 2nd, 2004

Vote trading this year (e.g., VotePair, which I registered with) and in 2000 (“Nader Traders”) attempts to mitigate the damage done to a major party candidate by minor candiates vaugely of the same stripe. However, there just aren’t many third party voters out there. From an email sent by VotePair yesterday:

We are very sorry that in the end, we were not able to pair every registrant, and hope that you nonetheless feel that your participation has been worthwhile. As we explained in an email to you last week, we received thousands more registrations from Democrats in safe states than from third-party supporters in swing states.

How about trading votes across offices and major parties. Specifically, Democrat voters agree to vote for a Republican congressperson when paired with Republican voters who agree to vote for the Democratic presidential candidate. This sort of trading would appeal to a less partisan and perhaps much larger segment of voters than single office major-minor schemes.

If (gargantuan if) large numbers participated the effect could be salutory. Keep that idea for the next time it makes sense.

Posted in Politics | 2 Comments »

Temporary Dictator Election Prediction

Tuesday, November 2nd, 2004

My prediction for today’s temporary dictator election:

Kerry: winner of popular and electoral votes
Bush: loser
Nader: < 1 million votes
Badnarik: < 300,000 votes
Cobb: < 200,000 votes
Peroutka: < 100,000 votes

Year 2000 results.

2004 results, when available.

Posted in Politics | 1 Comment »

Approval Voting

Tuesday, November 2nd, 2004

At least two people on my blogroll approve of approval voting. Time for me to get with the online program.

To the very minor extent I care about electoral reform, I wholeheartedly endorse approval voting. One simple change (vote for as many candidates as you like) eliminates many of problems with and for minor candidates. I don’t understand why anyone likes complicated and problematical alternatives with terrible user interfaces.

Posted in Politics | 6 Comments »

The futility of [un]voting

Monday, November 1st, 2004

In October posts Peter Saint-Andre makes the case that real reform comes from outside the system and that by contrast voting is futile. I’m completely on board with the former and sympathize with the latter (though I am voting this time). However, Saint-Andre errs in imagining that purposefully not voting or “unvoting” is anything but futile:

As far as I can see, the only moral option remaining to me is to withdraw my sanction and consent, in as explicit a manner as I can. Only about 40% of eligible voters turn out to vote in American elections. What if that number were 30%, or 20%, or 10%? What if the number of unvoters were greater than the number of voters? What if twice as many people unvoted as voted? Wouldn’t that expose the fact that this government (no matter which monkey is in charge) does not have the consent of the governed?

No.

  • Voter turnout is already as low as ten percent in local elections, and that’s among registered voters. I have never heard anyone complain that their local government is illegitimate because it was elected by a tiny minority of potential voters — possibly only a few percent.
  • Low voter turnout can be interpreted in many ways, including disaffection, apathy, and even contentment.
  • Not voting has never changed anything — a record even less impressive than voting. Why expect unvoting to suddenly become relevant? But what if many of those non voters became explicit unvoters? Indeed, what if! Pure fantasy as far as I can see.

Voting may be futile, but so is imagining that not voting is an effective vote against the system.

Along similar lines, from a post that appeared as I wrote this one:

One man can change the world. And he doesn’t need to vote to do it.

He also doesn’t need to not vote. I have a feeling that advocates of non-voting overestimate the relevance of voting.

Posted in Economics, Politics | 1 Comment »

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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