Why Do You Believe What You Do? | Talking Points Memo

Why Do You Believe What You Do? | Talking Points Memo: "Do our beliefs form the basis of our partisan and ideological affiliations? Or is it vice versa?

There's been a lot of recent evidence not only that Republicans disproportionately disbelieve the evidence for man-made global warming but that their skepticism is growing. I think that trend is fairly classed under the general heading of Republican/conservative hostility to science. But the other point interests me no less.

There are pro-life Democrats. And there are a substantial number of voters who are Democrats to a substantial degree because the party is the bulwark of pro-choice political power in the country. But I've never thought that this explains the strong partisan division on this question in the country as a whole. For many Dems, I suspect they're pro-choice in some measure just because it's part of the Democratic or progressive package -- not as a conscious decision but through a process of group association and osmosis.

Now lest I be misunderstood, I'm definitely not saying the pro-choice stance is unimportant or poorly thought out. I think the same applies on this issue on Republican side in the other direction and on numerous other issues as well -- in social policy, tax policy, foreign policy and a lot else. How obvious is the connection between your beliefs on tax policy and foreign policy?

Another way of looking at this is that in our politics and society, group association seems to give certain beliefs or policy positions a mutual 'stickiness' even if they do not seem to be connected together in any logical or consistent way, or any way that would make sense out of the context of our culture and society. (There is a lengthy technical literature on these questions in the history of science, sociology of knowledge, etc.)"

Liberty versus Efficiency

Some bizzare consequences of cost-benefit analysis and economic efficiency:

Liberty versus Efficiency: "Robin endorses an endless list of bizarre moral claims. For example, he recently told me that “the main problem” with the Holocaust was that there weren’t enough Nazis! After all, if there had been six trillion Nazis willing to pay $1 each to make the Holocaust happen, and a mere six million Jews willing to pay $100,000 each to prevent it, the Holocaust would have generated $5.4 trillion worth of consumers surplus.

Let’s consider another example. Suppose the only people in the world are Hannibal the millionaire, a slave trader, and 10,000 penniless orphan slaves. The slave trader has no direct use for his slaves, but likes money; Hannibal, on the other hand, is a ravenous cannibal. According to Robin, the “optimal outcome” is for Hannibal to get all 10,000 orphans and eat them.

If you’ve ever taken a class in moral philosophy, you’ve probably heard weird examples like these before."

Subsidyscope.com — Transportation: Analysis Finds Shifting Trends in Highway Funding: User Fees Make Up Decreasing Share

Subsidyscope.com — Transportation: Analysis Finds Shifting Trends in Highway Funding: User Fees Make Up Decreasing Share: "The way America's roads are funded is changing. Revenues that predominantly come from users of roads (“user fees”), including fuel taxes, vehicle registration fees and tolls, pay for a decreasing share of road costs. Taxes and fees not directly related to highway use (“non-user fees”) are making up the difference.

Using Federal Highway Administration statistics, Subsidyscope has calculated that in 2007, 51 percent of the nation's $193 billion set aside for highway construction and maintenance was generated through user fees—down from 10 years earlier when user fees made up 61 percent of total spending on roads. The rest came from other sources, including revenue generated by income, sales and property taxes, as well as bond issues.

Source: Highway Statistics, forms HF-10 and HF-210, Federal Highway Administration.

Going back further, the trend is more pronounced. Forty years ago, user fees amounted to 71 percent of revenues spent on roads. Today, user fee revenue as a share of total highway-related funds is at an all-time low since the Interstate Highway System was created in 1957. A complete data set of highway revenue by source is available for download. In 2007, non-user revenues contributed $70 billion to the highway system. By comparison, this contribution totaled $26 billion in 1967 (in 2007 dollars).

Not all user fees collected are made available for highway purposes. Of the 18.4 cent per gallon federal tax on gasoline, 2.86 cents are allocated specifically for mass transit projects. Another 0.1 cent per gallon is used to pay for environmental cleanup resulting from leaking fuel storage tanks. From 1990 to 1997, the federal government also set aside a portion of taxes on gasoline, diesel and other fuels to reduce budget deficits.

However, even if those funds were fully devoted to highways, total user fee revenue accounted for only 65 percent of all funds set aside for highways in 2007"

Matthew Yglesias » Spending Trends in Afghanistan

Matthew Yglesias » Spending Trends in Afghanistan:
Something that I think gets underplayed in coverage of the Afghanistan debate is the extent to which our commitment to Afghanistan has already escalated substantially in the recent past. In his recent report for the Carnegie Endowment, Gilles Dorronsoro cites this data from Amy Belasco’s classic September 2009 Congressional Research Service page-turner “The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11″ (PDF):

One point here is that we now seem to be looking at the consequences of a penny-wise, pound-foolish approach to Afghanistan. Maybe if we’d just been spending $30-$40 billion a year from the get-go the situation never would have deteriorated to the point where we’re looking at appropriations of $170 billion and rising. Another point is that it’s a little bit odd that the big escalation debate is happening now, since any further increases in expenditures will probably be smaller than the increase that already happened back when nobody was paying attention.

Size-Maximizing Bureaucrats

Matthew Yglesias » Special Ops Commanders Want Large Deployment to Afghanistan:

The military decided that it would like more money, resources and power for overseas wars.

One thing I think this highlights is the limits of conducting this kind of debate more-or-less entirely within the four walls of the military. After all, why wouldn’t the special ops guys want to see as much resources as possible put into Afghanistan? At the end of the day to get a real debate going about the wisdom of going big you need someone in the room who represents a competing claim on the resources at hand. Does it make sense to sustain tens of thousands of soldiers in Afghanistan at a cost of tens of billions of dollars a year in order to protect America from a group with “several hundred to several thousand members” and no heavy weapons? Well, I think that depends on what alternative uses of the resources are available. If the meeting also includes someone who needs to worry about the budget deficit, or about health care, or about child nutrition, or preventing bridges from collapsing then maybe this doesn’t look like such a great deal.

Matthew Yglesias » Parliamentary Procedure Counterfactuals

Matthew Yglesias » Parliamentary Procedure Counterfactuals: "Precisely because sophisticated observers understand that these “desire” promises aren’t really promises, interest-groups and voters who have strong feelings about these things don’t need to act on those feelings during a campaign. Consequently, candidates can make unrealistic promises to interest-groups or ideologues without fully facing the wrath of the other side. Ultimately, I think this not only breeds worse policy, but it breeds an unnecessarily childish political debate. If we knew in advance that election-winners would be basically able to implement their agendas, then it would be more necessary for party leaders to campaign on agendas that they think are compatible with electoral victory and governing success. One thing you see in Britain is that opposition parties with a realistic chance of winning tend to put forward relatively modest platforms full of explicit commitments to not change certain aspects of the policy status quo. Precisely because you can have wild swings in policy, leaders who want to win can’t just kinda sorta promise their base that they’ll get everything they want"

Deficit Financing of Wars

Matthew Yglesias "By far the fastest way to end the war in Afghanistan would be to ask General McChrystal’s staff to produce a plan to make it deficit neutral and find sixty votes in the senate for his financing plan."

Tax Subsidies Are Subsidies

Matthew Yglesias:

Kevin Drum observes that “most people simply refuse to view tax breaks as the equivalent of federal subsidies.” It’s true and quite perverse. Ultimately the long-run level of taxation is determined by the level of federal spending, so simply creating some new tax deduction or tax credit doesn’t do anything to reduce the overall tax burden. Rather, it represents a shift of the tax burden and the creation of a new subsidy.

But people don’t look at it this way. If you said “we should create a federal program to give gold bars to people who own homes, and people with higher incomes or more expensive houses will get more gold” everyone would regard that as completely insane. Instead we have a tax deduction.

It’s not, however, just that these tax subsidies are real subsidies but that they also tend to be a really bad way of subsidizing things. If you want to subsidize something with a formal spending program, then you can target the spending at the truly needy or else hand it out to everyone. But with a tax deduction, you’re actually providing a larger subsidy to richer people while doing little or nothing for those facing economic hardship.

public goods

DeLong:

Felix Salmon: Sky News is using YouTube to host their entire “News Corp will block Google” interview with Murdoch...

I keep on thinking that there is something powerful and important to be written about Google's success and the elective affinity between non-rival commodities and advertising. In order to charge people who buy things money, you have to make the commodity excludable. As long as the commodity is rival--as long as only one person can use it at a time--setting up technological or legal barriers that also make it excludable adds significantly to its value. You can be secure in your enjoyment in a way that you could not possibly be if the commodity were rival and yet non-excludable.

A bicycle with a lock is thus much more valuable than a bicycle without.

But once commodities become non-rival, making them excludable by legal or technological processes reduces their use value--as I am reminded every time something goes wrong with the FT's automatic authentication system and it claims that I do not have a subscription.

Thus advertising is bound to be a second-best way of obtaining a revenue stream for rival commodities, and similarly likely to be a first-best way of obtaining a revenue stream for non-rival commodities.

The coming of a decent micropayments infrastructure may change this--iTunes, for example. But my father reminds me that dividing the number of songs purchased on iTunes by the number of iPods produces a number like 30

Matthew Yglesias » America’s Largest Retailer

Matthew Yglesias

Ezra Klein notes that in terms of number of outlets it’s the United States Postal Service:

Rep. Stephen F. Lynch (D-Mass.), chairman of the subcommittee on the federal workforce, Postal Service and the District of Columbia, noted that Postmaster General Jack Potter, who wasn’t at the hearing, likes to point out that the agency has more retail outlets than McDonald’s, Starbucks and Wal-Mart combined.

One approach you could take to the Postal Service’s problems, of course, would be to privatize it. Repeal their legislative monopoly on delivery of “ordinary” mail, repeal their legislative universal service obligation, and sell the thing to private investors. As run by the government, the USPS loses money, but I bet it would have significant value on the market. And the USPS’ massive real estate portfolio would be one of the key reasons. The politics of the situation make it basically impossible to manage these holdings in an economically rational way—nobody wants to see their local post office closed or relocated to someplace less convenient even if that’s what makes the most sense to do. And you see something similar with the controversy over halting Saturday delivery. Right now congress wants to make the USPS financially self-supporting, but doesn’t want to let USPS be managed the way an entity that’s actually financially self-supporting would be managed. Which is fine if you think that daily delivery of paper mail is a critical public service—critical public services shouldn’t be managed as profit-maximizing entities—but in 2009 does the delivery of paper mail really count as a critical public service?

Reconstruction for the USA

Ryan Avent notes that one year of defense spending could build a nationwide network of high speed rail. More realistically, we could build it in 10 years by diverting 10% of defense spending.

Matthew Yglesias: "Something worth noting is that for a hegemonic power suffering from slow-but-steady (but very slow) relative decline, wasting money on national security expenditures actually erodes our hegemony. Meaningful U.S.-Chinese security competition is a generation or two away. By that time, money that was spent in 2009 on fighter planes or nuclear submarines or transportation infrastructure in Afghanistan isn’t going to be doing us any good. By contrast, spending money on preschool in 2009 does improve the U.S.-Chinese balance of power in 2049—investment in early childhood education pays enormous dividends, but it takes a long time to turn tiny babies into productive adults. And transportation is just the same. The construction of heavy rail mass transit in Boston, New York, Chicago, and Washington was extremely expensive but has paid consistent dividends for decades and if properly maintained will continue to do so forever.

I can’t vouch for the authenticity of the quote, but someone told me he heard a Chinese official tell him “over the past decade you’ve spent $1 trillion on Iraq and Afghanistan, we’ve spent $1 trillion building the future of China.” I don’t really think we should view that contrast in a paranoid light, but if you do want to take a paranoid view of the American national security situation it makes a lot more sense to worry about that than to worry that someone in a cave might build a bomb."