Contempt and the Public Sphere (A Footnote on Don Herzog's "Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders")

Like many other people, when reading the political blogosphere I am often struck by the prevalence of expressions of contempt. It is not simply that the “political public sphere” in the internet hardly corresponds to the Habermasian ideal of deliberation in which only the force of the better argument prevails; rather, expressions of contempt for the views and sometimes persons of others thoroughly pervade political argument. It is common to find claims that certain others have no (moral) “right” to speak on certain issues, or that their views should be ridiculed or ignored rather than engaged.

I am less interested in condemning this state of affairs (a pointless exercise anyway) than in trying to understand whether contempt is inextricably linked with public political argument. The thought crossed my mind while reading Don Herzog’s interesting book Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders, which I discovered via Adrian Vermeule’s Law and the Limits of Reason. Herzog’s book could be described as a look at the political blogosphere in the British Isles circa 1817; he seems to have looked at every political pamphlet, newspaper, minor novel, and even popular song published between 1789 and 1834, and examined how coffeehouses, alehouses, and hairdressers' shops functioned as sites of political debate. It’s impressive, though I do not envy the undertaking (just imagining trying to write the contemporary version of this book makes me nauseous). 

As Herzog makes clear (at sometimes excruciating length, in fact), the political public sphere of the time was as filled with expressions of contempt, or perhaps more so, than the current political public sphere. Contempt was directed towards women, blacks, Jews, workers, rich people, poor people, politicians, hairdressers, etc.; reading Herzog, in fact, one gets the impression that most political argument at the time was simply composed of expressions of contempt by contending parties. (So much for the good old days before the internet). Moreover, though Herzog stresses that contempt was tightly linked to the “conservative” project of preserving hierarchies and preventing the transformation of “subjects into citizens,” the book makes it clear that contempt was deployed both to sustain hierarchy and deference on the part of subordinate groups and to undermine such hierarchy and deference; it was not the specific property of particular parties or groups (though conservatives and radicals typically expressed contempt in different ways, and made use of it for different purposes).

What makes the book interesting, beyond its account of the historical debates that shaped the emergence of a distinctively modern “conservatism” in Britain during those decades, is the way Herzog links the question of contempt with questions about epistemic authority: who is worth listening to, and who is not, and what norms should apply to apply to political debate.

Norms of political debate are not neutral with respect to epistemic authority. The Habermasian ideal of deliberation, for example, implicitly grants all citizens equal epistemic authority: all arguments are to be judged on the merits, not with respect to any characteristics of the person making them. This may imply, among other things, that one should deploy arguments sincerely rather than strategically, be open to correction, and extend interpretive charity to the positions of others (at least ideally).

But what if one thinks that the characteristics of some people – e.g., people who are far from me politically – are useful proxies for the likelihood that their arguments are worth listening to? (Life is short, after all – do I really have to listen to what everyone has to say?) And what do we do about people who violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the norms of debate – deploying arguments dishonestly or strategically, “concern-trolling,” refusing to accept evidence, etc.? Do we engage with them or punish them through expressions of contempt etc.? (And it is not always possible to determine who is behaving strategically and who is not; what looks like trolling to some may look like perfectly reasonable argument to others). Or how about people who have more influence than their (actual, rather than perceived) epistemic authority warrants? (What if we think, for example, that particular bloggers we dislike are more influential than their arguments warrant?) Do we engage with their views sincerely, in the confidence that “the truth will out,” or try to diminish their influence by attacking their epistemic authority by other means – ridicule, contempt, ad hominem argument, etc.? (Consider here debates about climate change or creationism in schools).

Herzog’s key idea (and here I sense a criticism of Habermas, though AFAIK Habermas is not mentioned in the book) is that distinctively political debate is always in part about the distribution of epistemic authority, i.e., about who has a “right” to speak and whose views are worth being listened to. Conservatives and radicals in the England of 1817 disagreed not merely about the merits of particular proposals (about suffrage, etc.), but about whether certain groups of people were worth taking seriously. And there is no neutral standpoint to determine who can or cannot be admitted to the public sphere, no neutral view that reveals the true distribution of knowledge and indicates what the true distribution of political influence should be; political debate is always (among other things) the attempt to shape the distribution of epistemic authority, and this attempt seems to be inescapably accompanied by the deployment of contempt. (Consider, by contrast, debates where epistemic authority is relatively uncontroversial, as in some purely scientific debates: the debate is non-political to the extent that the standards for evidence and argument are widely shared among participants, and hence to the extent that there is wide agreement among participants regarding who is or is not worth listening to).

The point I am trying to get at goes beyond the observation that party boundaries in politics are typically policed by expressions of contempt, and partisanship is inescapable in democratic politics (and at any rate there are good things to be said for partisanship in the public sphere). The question is whether one can one imagine a deliberative form of politics that is not underpinned by the deployment of contempt towards those who are not considered to be worth listening to? Are judgments that some people are not worth listening to necessarily expressions of contempt? And are the sanctions that we may think are necessary to keep debate healthy necessarily contemptuous?

I do not know the answers to these questions, but I suspect that it is impossible to police any set of norms of debate without using sanctions that express contempt. To the extent that the public sphere is a political sphere, it will be pervaded by contempt (though to a greater or lesser extent), and hence the lamentations about the quality of our public discourse will always be with us. Democracy, in other words, may be structurally unsatisfying, no matter how deliberative it may be; a public sphere without contempt would be a public sphere from which politics properly has been excluded, either because of an accidental harmony of interests among its participants, or through the kind of coercion that prevents certain people from participating in it.

The Ancient Ones

R. John Parkes, a researcher at the University of Cardiff, Wales, studies microbes found in core samples collected by the Ocean Drilling Program from rocks deep below the ocean floor. “For a long time, these deep sediments were thought to be devoid of any life at all,” he says. There’s life down there, all right, but talk about slow metabolism: When Parke analyzed 4.7 million-year-old organic sediment in the Mediterranean, he estimated the average time it took for resident microbes to reproduce by cell division at 120,000 years. And he reported finding living bacteria just over a mile below the seafloor, in sediments 111 million years old and at temperatures of 140 to 212 degrees Fahrenheit.

More here.

Too many gods

The pot is a god. The winnowing fan is a god. The stone in the street is a god. The comb is a god. The bowstring is also a god. The bushel is a god and the spouted cup is a god.

Gods, gods, there are so many there’s no place left for a foot.

Quoted here, from the 12th century South Indian poet Basavanna.

Hills and Valleys in Greek Speculative History (Or, Prolegomena to a Sketch of an Anarchist History of Western Political Theory)

(Warning: 2000 words or so on the place of “hills” and “valleys” in Greek political thought).

As I mentioned in a previous post, reading Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia pointed me in the direction of thinking about the place of “hills” and “valleys,” state spaces and stateless places, in political theory. Scott claims that both Southeast Asian and Western political thought have stigmatized those hill-dwellers who have no permanent residence (p. 101), and identified civilization with the settled states of the valleys (pp. 100-101), though he also pays homage to Ibn Khaldoun’s Muqaddimah (p. 20), a work which does not stigmatize the stateless (at least so far as I remember; it’s been a while). He even notes that Aristotle famously argued that human beings were political animals, i.e., animals that live in poleis or cities, a characterization that suggests that people who do not live in cities are not fully human (p. 101 – though Scott fails to note that for Aristotle such people can be both above and below the level of humanity). I cannot speak about Southeast Asian political theory, but it seems to me that at least with respect to Western political theory the picture is a bit more complicated, even if Scott is correct overall.

For example, Aristotle’s famous pronouncement about the polis-nature of human beings is complicated by the fact that the polis was most certainly not an agrarian state – the “statelessness” of the polis is well known, though some of the larger poleis did eventually develop something like police forces and other aspects of statehood – and that Aristotle did not define the polis in contrast to nomadic life and in terms of settled habitation, but in contrast to the family and in terms of its purpose. Indeed, he takes pains to distinguish the polis both from the great empires of his time (which were true extractive agrarian states of the sort that Scott discusses in his book) and from mere settlements (whose focus on “mere life” did not qualify them for civilization). The barbarian empires were “uncivilized” despite their possession of large and powerful states, and the city-less are low less because they are scattered than because they have no “clan” and are “lovers of war,” i.e., because they are insufficiently social.

Thus, though Aristotle does seem to indicate that nomadic peoples are “primitive” (the Cyclops, who are traditionally represented as a nonsedentary people, appear as an instance of the “old ways” of political organization), there is no clear indication that sedentary existence per se is necessary to the polis, or that it is in itself valuable. In this Aristotle is in keeping with what I take to be the traditional Greek way of thinking, where not the physical location but the citizens constituted the city: “For the men, not the walls nor the empty galleys, are the city,” and so “Wherever you settle, you will be a polis” as Nikias tells his soldiers in a speech Thucydides either invented or recreated for his History of the Peloponnesian War. To be sure, this is still consistent with the story that Scott tells about the importance of men, rather than land, in the construction of states; but it ought to put a wrinkle in the “stigma” thesis.

But it is in Plato that we find an explicit consideration of the valence of “hills and valleys” in the sense that Scott is really concerned with. In book III of his long dialogue Laws, Plato develops the contrast between the hills and the valleys through a speculative history which he uses to isolate those factors that gave rise to politeiai (political organization) and laws, both of which are associated with the cities of the plain and the states they controlled. (Ancient speculative histories are fascinating. I suspect they functioned among ancient thinkers much as economists’ or political scientists’ models function today: as interesting simplifications with some explanatory value that isolate general reasons for action operating in particular contexts.).

The narrative is more or less as follows. The Athenian Stranger (the leading character in the dialogue) asks his interlocutors to imagine a situation where, thanks to some massive flood, the states of the plains were destroyed, leaving only a slight remnant of pastoralists high up in the hills (677a-b). This catastrophe not only radically simplified technology (most arts and sciences are lost), but also greatly reduced exposure to the various forms of greed and morally dubious competition prevalent in cities (677b-c). In fact, the catastrophe destroyed the memory of cities and politeiai and laws: the hill peoples are clearly stateless in a radical sense (678a). But laws and political life are not necessarily good; the Athenian stresses that with laws and political life properly speaking you can get both virtue and vice (and more often the latter than the former, especially in the form of warfare). By contrast, the hill peoples are naïve or artless (εὐήθεις; literally having “good habits”), not educated (or mis-educated) by urban artifice, and rather peaceful.

Indeed, war is presented in the story as an artefact of civilization (678d-e); so long as land is abundant, and the memory of catastrophe is recent (the “fear of the plain”), the hill peoples do not fight (and at any rate they do not have much of the technology and arts of war, so their fighting is not, the Athenian speculates, highly destructive). On the contrary, they welcome each other (679a) and have pleasure in each other’s company (given low population densities, they do not meet each other that often), and because their societies are less unequal than urban societies (with less of both poverty and wealth, as well as less hierarchy and subordination), they develop in an environment that ultimately makes them more courageous, moderate and just than urban peoples (679d-e). It’s an idyllic picture (and not a terribly bad description of forager/pastoralist societies in the absence of states, either, though idealized in some respects). How do laws emerge, then? What are they for?

The first step towards law and political life is made possible, in this speculative story, by the very naïveté or artlessness of the hill peoples. Because they did not have the cunning and scepticism of urban peoples (who are experienced about deception, both as agents and subjects of it), they believed any old story that they were told about “gods and men” (679c), and adopted these stories as the basis of their customs. (Note the dig here towards all mythical stories of founding and legitimation; most of these stories are simply nonsense, in the Athenian’s view). These customs were not yet laws; their orality disqualified them from this status. (The hill peoples are illiterate, 680a). But they did not need to be laws in order to regulate their social life, which was still quite self-contained.

Their self-containment could be interpreted as a form of “savagery” (680b-d), or perhaps more accurately a lack of “domestication,” as the Athenian notes by comparing such hill peoples to the mythical Cyclops described in Homer. Yet he does not himself endorse the comparison, which seems at any rate inconsistent with his previous praise of the justice and moderation of the hill peoples; the one who proposes it is Megillos, the representative of the slave-holding valley state par excellence, Sparta (680d3), which was also known for its "savagery" (cf. 666e, where the Athenian calls the Spartan system "savage"). To be civilized, for Megillos, is to become domesticated; but the metaphor of domestication is not altogether unambiguous in Plato (sheep and pigs are also domesticated, after all).

But this self-containment cannot last. As the memory of the initial cataclysm fades (perhaps an echo of a collective memory of an old fear of the cities of the plain? Fears of slave-raiding, for example, as Scott suggests in his discussion of the stories of hill peoples from Thailand and Burma? Not that Plato mentions such fears), hill peoples move down, and some turn to farming and a sedentary life (681a), coming in contact with other recent transplants from the hills. But now they need to coordinate regarding which of their various and incompatible customs (based on the random stories mentioned earlier) is to regulate their common life; and here we have the origins of legislation properly speaking (681b-d).

From here the Athenian shifts from speculating about the origin of valley states to recounting the history of the first Greek valley states, in particular the Dorian states (Sparta, Argos, and Messene), a history that would have been familiar to his two interlocutors (the Spartan Megillos and the Cretan Kleinias). This narrative is then put to use in order to understand why in some states (Sparta) the rulers were more constrained by laws than in others (Argos and Messene), despite their various similarities. This is perhaps the first systematic empirical comparison in political science, using a “most similar cases” design, but the Athenian no longer mentions hill peoples, so I shall not summarize the rest here.

This speculative history is notable in two ways. First, it marks a contrast between the natural but “naïve” or “artless” goodness of the peoples of the hills and the potential for both virtue and corruption of the cities. The hill peoples do not need “technical” or "artificial" virtue to live well; their natural virtue is enough. But cities do need such “artificial” virtue (or rather, they need real knowledge), and it is not obvious that this is not a curse, since such knowledge is exceedingly scarce. As the Athenian notes in the “historical” part of his narrative, life in most valley states seems to end in some form or another or tyranny due to a lack of knowledge and virtue; the hill peoples had it better in that respect.

But second, the narrative suggests that short of a major cataclysm, there is no going back to hill life. Indeed, the point of the Athenian’s political theory in this part of the dialogue is to find a way to realistically mitigate the evils of life in settled valley societies; and for this, he will introduce for the first time a systematic theory of the “mixed constitution” - the ancient predecessor of our theories of the “separation of powers” and “checks and balances” (though the theory is in many ways quite different from our modern equivalents; more in a future post, probably). It is precisely the possession of something like a “mixed constitution” that enabled Sparta to become a relatively law-governed state, in contrast to the situation in Argos and Messene, which degenerated, in the Athenian’s telling, into more arbitrary regimes. But this did not make Sparta perfect; on the contrary, he had criticized it earlier as an “armed camp” more than a city (666e).

One could note that the Athenian’s narrative is still valley-centric; there is no mention of flight into the hills, for example, and certainly the background fact of slavery as a requirement of the valley states is kept deep in the background. At any rate, it seems that, from the point of view of a fourth century Greek like Plato, the hill frontier had more or less closed, or had become an unrealistic option (or perhaps it was all only a thought experiment to begin with). And the full flourishing of human life does seem to go through urban life, but in Plato (in contrast, perhaps, to Aristotle’s more optimistic take later on) this is a road that is almost certain to lead to disappointment. The hill peoples had it better.

Now, it is possible that canonical thinkers like Plato and Aristotle were not representative of the tenor of Greek political thought on the question of the valence of hills and valleys. One probably would have to scour a much larger sample of writings, and our sources are often fragmentary and biased. And though the “anarchism” of the early Stoics and Cynics is reasonably well attested, as well as the antipolitical attitudes of the Epicureans (or at least as well attested as the meagre fragments of their texts that survive allow), these attitudes clearly soften in later thinkers identified with these schools (and more from these later people survive). Moreover, the evidence of etymology supports the “stigma” thesis; the word asteios, for example, which originally meant something like “urban” in a neutral sense, eventually came to mean something like “good.” At any rate, canonical thinkers like Plato clearly tend to be unrepresentative; that is part of the reason why their thought can be continuously re-appropriated by later generations, and why it remains interesting beyond the narrow context in which it emerged. But still, in general it seems that there was more ambivalence about the identification of states and civilization in Greek political theory than Scott suggests, and this ambivalence does not simply die off. Beyond Plato to Augustine to Rousseau there is a strand of Western political theory that is willing to call most states “bands of robbers” and has difficulty making its peace with them; and as with Rousseau, this strand sometimes comes close to saying that a stateless existence would be better, even if they also acknowledge its impossibility in a world where the valley states are dominant.

Footnotes on things I've been reading: James C. Scott's "The Art of Not Being Governed"

I’ve been reading James C. Scott’s latest, The Art of Not Being Governed: an Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, which had been highly recommended to me by a number of people. All I can say is, what are you waiting for? Go read it! It’s great!

Scott starts from a couple of observations that are obvious when you think about them but are illuminating when stated explicitly and applied systematically. First, the vast majority of the subjects of pre-modern states (in all parts of the world, not just Southeast Asia) have been unfree – slaves, bondsmen, serfs, etc. In fact, the pre-modern state (a problematic term, but let’s let that pass for the moment) was basically a technology for coercively extracting surpluses from sedentary agricultural laborers. Second, for most of human history the geographical reach of any state was sharply limited by the characteristics of the terrain, especially elevation (moving grain by oxcart quickly becomes prohibitively expensive over relatively long distances or as the elevation increases, for example).

Going up (or into swamps or other inaccessible terrain) thus meant going out of what Scott nicely calls “state space.” It is worth stressing that stateless spaces do not imply a lack of sociality, or a horrendous Hobbesian "state of nature." Stateless societies tend to be relatively egalitarian, small, mobile, and based more on gift exchanges than on the coercive extraction of resources – just like the forager bands that dominated human history for most of the 100,000 years or so since Homo Sapiens Sapiens emerged as a distinct species of primate. In comparison to many pre-modern states, the stateless hill societies Scott describes had a more varied diet and more leisure, and in general they could be said to be far “freer” (less hierarchy and subordination, not to speak of taxes, corvée labor, strict gender roles, and the like). Leaving the state has not been a very bad thing for most people for most of human history, pace Hobbes.

Thus, so long as terrain imposes significant limits to state-building projects, you get a situation where many “subjects” of the state can and often do exercise their “exit” option: they can move to the hills. And state-makers, in turn, try to prevent them from moving, especially since under the typical conditions prevailing in most of human history (e.g., limited military specialization) manpower is identical with power. The primary project of pre-modern state-building has been to “sedentarize” people – to keep them near at hand to the ruler so that they can be mobilized for his purposes and his glory. (The “problem” posed by people leaving – for state-makers, not for the emigrants themselves - is not confined to pre-modern states; the communist regimes went to great lengths to try to prevent people from leaving as well, and like pre-modern states, they collapsed when they could not manage to keep them in.)

One might think that one way of preventing people from leaving would be to produce good government. And indeed, Scott notes how the desperate need for people of most Southeast Asian rulers produced a great deal of “social mobility” in what are otherwise highly hierarchical societies, and a certain amount of redistribution of material resources: slaves quickly became regular exploited peasants, for example, and there was lots of redistributive feasting. And there were some attractions to being near the culture of the court. But when there are always other petty tyrants busy trying to build their own tiny empires (full of "cosmologial bluster" about universal rule), there is a strong incentive for each of them to steal other people’s people. Pre-modern warfare (not only in Southeast Asia, but also in the Mediterranean world) is thus often indistinguishable from pure slave-raiding.

Moreover, producing good government is often actually contrary to the interests of the ruler. The ruler is interested less in the total amount of production (GDP) than on the total amount of accessible resources – men and storable crops; and these were often (and are often) very different things. While the farmer might want to plant root crops (which are not easily visible to the state officials), practice less labor-intensive swidden (“slash and burn”) agriculture, and in general have a more varied diet and life, the ruler would prefer that he stick to planting rice, which is easily surveyed and seized. (This continues a theme of Scott’s other great book, Seeing like a State; state-making has been historically concerned above all with making things visible to state officials so that they can be more easily controlled and seized). Indeed, rice made states in Asia; no rice, no states. (I wonder if the fact that Australia is and has been pretty dry explains why it was, until extremely recently in historical time, basically a stateless area; concentrated agriculture of the kind that can make states was probably not worth the trouble, and so political entrepreneurs intent on creating durable hierarchies simply did not have the sorts of resources necessary for the task).

Thus, at least in Southeast Asia, people often had both the incentive and the opportunity to escape states. But the availability of exit didn’t necessarily produce “good government,” though it might have mitigated petty tyrannies occasionally, and it certainly produced states that where cultural assimilation was possible and often quick. Competition between state-builders did not produce good Tiebout effects but rather a lot of what Weber called “booty capitalism” (and, it seems, a lot of misery; the history he tells is at bottom a dismal chronicle). More importantly for Scott, this dynamic also led to the formation of hill societies that were extremely concerned with avoiding the state. I haven’t gotten this far yet, but from the earlier sections it seems clear that Scott argues that, far from being “primitive,” many features of these societies – their forms of agriculture, their social structures, even their orality – are basically designed to prevent their incorporation into valley states – to become less legible and less controllable. The culture of the hills is the art of not being governed.

Yet I suspect that Scott makes too much of the “primitive”/ “civilized” dichotomy; the art of not being governed seems suspiciously like the art of living like a forager band, even if the hill societies he is interested in are not necessarily foragers (they practice swidden – “slash and burn” – agriculture, for example).

A couple of things I was thinking as I was reading. First, how far could you go in refining and formalizing Scott’s implicit model of statemaking? Scott is a classical “thick description” scholar, distrustful of simplified models, but I’m an unreconstructed theorist, and would like to understand more about the parameters governing the significance of exit and voice in the development of tolerable or bearable states. Maybe “voice” (e.g., democracy) only becomes a significant possibility once the possibility of exit is foreclosed yet production technologies are such that states cannot simply survey and seize productive resources at will?

And what about the significance of different technologies? Scott argues that his analysis does not apply today, when “distance destroying technologies” – helicopters, all-weather roads, etc. – make extending state spaces easier than ever, but those who wish to avoid the state are not standing still either; one thinks of the many ways in which financial technologies serve to take production away from the reach of the state, even as at the same time newer military technologies make the state less dependent on manpower and so less intent on "fixing" people in place.

I was also thinking about the hill/valley relationship in political thought. Scott notes how Ibn Khaldoun’s great work, the Muqaddimah (which is great, by the way!), is basically concerned with the complex dialectical relationship between state and non-state spaces, the Bedouin and the “civilized;” but he basically claims that for the most part political thought has simply reiterated the basic dichotomy of hill and valley (or civilized and barbarian, “raw” and “cooked,” and so on), valuing the valleys and dismissing the hills. This may be true in the aggregate, yet I kept thinking of the speculative histories of the origin of the state in Plato, especially the Laws, with its complex and by no means one sided evaluation of the virtues of the hills and the vices of the cities. (More on this later).

Anyway, there’s much more to it (I’m not finished with it yet), and it’s well written to boot. (I love the term “cosmological bluster,” for example). I'm considering assigning it to my honours seminar in political theory, even though it's not really a political theory text; yet it really makes you think about the nature of states from a "universal history" perspective that is too often obscured in the usual texts and debates on power and the state in contemporary political theory. 

Hermes, Lord of Robbers (Homeric Hymn #4)

As a picture book. Nancy found it in the public library, and we read it to our daughter. It is a fairly complete (and very nice) translation of the short fourth Homeric Hymn (to Hermes, Lord - or Leader - of Robbers - or Thieves), with some truly lovely illustrations. Some bits and pieces are missing (stuff about sacrificial meat that would be hard to explain in any book, an episode about Hermes' invention of fire that is incomplete in the original), but I suspect it is all the better for it (the original hymn lacks some thematic unity).

Hermes is born and the first thing he wants to do is steal Apollo's cattle, which he succeeds in doing that very night. He is clever and thus makes the cattle walk backwards, so that they leave tracks that point in the wrong direction, but he is seen by an old man, so Apollo quickly learns who stole his cattle. He goes to seek Hermes and accuses him, and some funny banter ensures (Hermes: "I was only born yesterday! My feet are soft, and the ground is hard!"). Apollo is not amused, and wants to beat Hermes up. Hermes appeals to Zeus, who laughs at his fibs and tells him to go get Apollo's cattle ("Dad, I really didn't do it. Zeus: ok, now go get the cattle"). They go (big brother and little brother: Apollo and Hermes are sons of Zeus) but Apollo discovers that Hermes has slain two of his cows (this is a bit abrupt in the picture book, since the stuff about sacrifice is omitted), so he gets really mad again and wants to beat Hermes up. But Hermes is clever again, and soothes him by playing music - and giving Apollo the lyre he had fashioned out of a turtle's shell. Apollo, grateful for the music, decides to let the matter go, and gives him a staff and tells him that he shall always be known as the prince of robbers - and so given the tribute and recognition he had craved since he was born (the day before). Hermes promises never to steal anything from Apollo's house. (I don't tell the story well enough. It really is charming, in a cheerfully amoral way, and the illustrations in the book are beautiful).

The hymn depicts a world that is truly different from our own - a world where Hermes' excellence lies in his ability to steal Apollo's cattle and then charm him so that Apollo does not beat him up, where political authority - including the authority of Zeus - is at best the authority of mediators, not enforcers, where population densities are low and the natural world is intensely present; it's a world closer to the world of nomadic foragers than to the world of farmers and cities of later antiquity. (This is a very old piece of poetry, a survival in writing of an even older oral tradition; one can apparently learn much from Homer's epic poetry and the Homeric hymns about Bronze-age society). Hermes is praised as the prince of cattle-raiders, not condemned; he is excellent because his cleverness is beautiful, not because he is a good boy. (There is something in Nietzsche about this, I think - which I am probably misremembering). We quite enjoyed it, though I can see why Plato thought the Homer-heavy popular culture of his time was very corrupting; the poem reminds me a bit of Roald Dahl's tales.

Fun with visualizations 2: Growth and Democracy

William Easterly recently had a post on the "mystery of the benevolent autocrat" that illustrated the fact that non-democratic countries seem to have a higher variance in growth rates than democratic countries. Since I've been playing with visualization software, I thought I'd try to replicate his analysis and produce some pretty graphs that I could use in my dictatorships class. The results are here (make sure to click - the full-screen versions are much prettier than the embedded versions below, and the software has some nice features that make it easy to explore the data).

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The first view replicates Easterly's scatterplot, but using data from the Penn World Table from 1950-2007. (At least, I think it does. My econometric skills are obviously much worse than those of a former World Bank economist, so take that with a grain of salt). It adds, however, a color for the Polity2 score - greener is more democratic here - and the size of each dot is proportional to the number of years of data available for the comparison (some countries have only a few years of data available, others have more than 50). I use the same transformation of the Polity2 score that Easterly uses - Polity2/(11-Polity2). As you can see, countries that have been on average autocratic have a higher growth variance - some have had very large growth rates over the period in question, others have had very low rates. Democracies, however, seem to be clustered towards the average growth rate of the world economy - around 2.5% per year or so or so.

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The second view shows the same scatterplot, except using the average of the raw Polity2 score rather than Easterly's transformation. The greatest amount of variance seems to be found in the countries that have an average Polity2 score between 1 and -5 or so - the more autocratic "anocracies" (many of them "hybrid regimes") rather than the full "autocracies" of Polity's classification (though of course a scatterplot is not a statistical analysis).

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The last view shows the data on a map, where the size of the dot corresponds to the average (geometric mean) of the growth rate over the period in question, and the color corresponds to the average Polity2 score - green is more democratic (at least in the Polity2 scheme).

Why do non-democracies seem to have greater growth variance than democracies? I suspect the incentives of leaders in democracies prevent large policy changes (both good and bad), whereas more autocratic systems may have greater variance in the quality of leadership and in the incentives they provide to these leaders. (Maybe I will try a more fine-grained visualization using data on types of political regime to see what comes out - later).

Changes small and large: Epistemic Arguments for Conservatism II

One epistemic argument for conservatism (or rather, gradualism) goes more or less like this. We have grave epistemic limitations that prevent us from understanding the consequences of institutional change, and the bigger the change, the more these limitations apply. All things considered, it is harder to predict the consequences of major institutional change than of minor institutional tinkering. Moreover, even when we are in error about the consequences of minor change, the potential damage to our social life from such errors is also likely to be minor and easily contained, whereas when we are in error about major changes, the damages may be devastating. Hence we should try to avoid wholesale change to our institutions.

The key idea is that ex ante we have a better idea of the risks of small changes than we do of the risks of large changes, and ex post we can contain the damage of small changes better than the damage of large changes. Given reasonable loss aversion in the face of genuine uncertainty, this implies that we should be more careful about larger than about smaller changes to our institutions. Note that the argument is not that major changes will have bad effects, but that we should be more uncertain about the effects of major changes than about the effects of minor changes, and that this asymmetric uncertainty should make us more cautious about undertaking these larger changes.

There is a whole question here about how to define “small” and “large,” but let’s let that slide for the moment, since there are clearly some cases where the argument seems to make sense. Something like it forms part of Burke’s case against revolution: there are many potential bad consequences from trying to completely change an entire form of life, but given our epistemic limitations we can hardly know which major changes will be on balance good and which will be on balance bad. And today we might see this argument deployed to justify less action than some economists might like on restarting the global economy, or less action on climate change than some environmentalists might like, though whether the argument works in these cases depends in part on our estimates of the costs of inaction, estimates that may also be subject to our epistemic limitations. (A full formal investigation of the problems here would presumably use Bayesian analysis. But here I reveal my on epistemic limitations – I do not know enough to use it).

This is a sort of “selection” argument for conservatism, though it does not look like one at first sight. In order for this argument to justify gradualism, however, rather than rigid immobility, we have to assume that small deleterious changes are either eliminated quickly or else that they cannot accumulate and interact in collectively very harmful ways. For example, a firm that produces bad products should go bankrupt without affecting the ability of other firms to operate too much, and small regulatory changes that do not work must be quickly identified and eliminated through some explicit mechanism (e.g., litigation, as in some defences of the common law). Whenever there is no selection mechanism to get rid of such minor but potentially harmful changes (and there may not be one, especially if the changes are only truly harmful in connection with many other changes), they can accumulate until they reach a kind of threshold (when they become really bad). The point is that if our epistemic limitations are binding with respect to the consequences of large “revolutionary” changes, they are also binding with respect to the consequences of collections of small changes that interact in complex ways with one another. Thus, in the absence of knowledge about the interactions of many small changes, the argument would seem to justify rigid immobility, not gradualism.

Indeed, an awareness of this problem seems to have led most classical political thinkers to a position that is in a sense the reverse of the Burkean “gradualist” position, i.e., willing to contemplate major changes to institutions under some limited circumstances (when the legislator has good knowledge) but extremely wary of small changes that might accumulate and interact in unexpected ways (since the presence of knowledgeable individuals capable of understanding their effects in the long run cannot be assumed). Plato, for example, while quite willing to recommend radical institutional innovation in cities (e.g., equal education for men and women, major censorship, new religious institutions, etc.) insisted that a city must be very careful about changing its “educational” laws, in part because the deleterious effects of any minor changes would not be visible until many years later, and they could easily accumulate in destructive ways. Similarly, Aristotle was not shy about recommending large institutional changes to political communities, but nevertheless urged cities to be vigilant about institutional drift, the minor changes that seem harmless individually but may collectively lead to the destruction of a politeia.

The point is not that they believed that major change was epistemically “safe” while gradual change was not; they thought both major and minor change was epistemically problematic. (Plato’s insistence on the need for knowledge in politics is grounded precisely on an extreme distrust of normal human epistemic capacities; we would only need philosopher kings if we were effectively incompetent in political matters). But they did not think gradual change was any less exempt from the problems caused by human epistemic limitations than revolutionary change, since they did not think that there were appropriate “selection mechanisms” able to weed out deleterious gradual institutional change under normal circumstances (other than “state death,” which is of course not especially ideal from the point of view of the state in question; as Josiah Ober has noted, whereas bankruptcy may be the consequence of “failure” in a market economy, “state death” in the classical world typically implied the death or enslavement of much of the population). From this point of view, major but planned institutional change had a slight “epistemic advantage” over unplanned, gradual change, at least so long as gradual changes could accumulate and interact in deleterious ways that could not be easily identified either at the time or in advance. 

Fun with visualizations 1

I've been playing around in the last few days with free visualization software, trying to think of ways to create interesting visualizations for my dictatorships and revolutions class next year. Some of it is quite impressive but few free packages seem to be able to do a temporally animated map (where color values for a country change year by year, for example, according to regime type), at least not in a way I can easily figure out. I eventually found this free alternative (openheatmap) that is easy to use and renders fast, though it has few options.

Here's a map of authoritarian regime types, 1946-2002, using data from Jennifer Gandhi's book "Political Institutions Under Dictatorship" (thanks to Prof. Gandhi for kindly sharing her dataset):



(Click here for a larger version. Yellow means "civilian dictatorship," red means "military dictatorship" and blue means "monarchy.")

The map isn't perfect: you need to code the Soviet Union as Russia and East Germany as Germany, for example. I suppose with professional GIS software and a good set of shapefiles you could have the borders move as well, but hey, this is free and fast.

Now, what I would really like to see is a map of regime types that displays a little picture of the dictator as it plays and a little flash (accompanied by a sound of guns, perhaps?) when there is a coup.

Any suggestions for free visualization software able to do animated maps?

Epistemic Deference and Epistemic Arguments for Conservatism I

A couple of months ago, there was a very interesting debate between Jim Manzi and others on the question of whether social science knowledge was sufficiently well established to warrant radical policy innovations. Manzi argued in a widely blogged article that the methodological limitations of the social sciences – in particular, the impossibility of appropriately measuring the counterfactuals of policy interventions through, for example, randomized experiments – implied that the findings of social science should normally not “outweigh settled practice and even common sense” when we are thinking about changing existing practices or institutions. His critics argued, among other things, that social science can provide evidence that overturns such settled practices, since, after all, the status quo is typically the result of power struggles, not rational discussion; why should we give it more credence than the findings of social science, which emerge from a process that at least approximates rational debate?

We might put the general point thus: Manzi thinks that, where the complexity of social reality makes full scientific knowledge all but impossible, it makes better sense to give “epistemic deference” to settled practice; his critics think that the practices of “social science” as a whole (not necessarily a single random study) often have more “epistemic authority” than settled practice. This sort of division about the locus of epistemic authority also maps into a political division between “conservative” and “non-conservative” positions, with the “conservatives” granting some settled practices or institutions the bulk of epistemic authority, while the “non-conservative” position insists that some other person or institution, usually of more recent vintage, should be given greater epistemic deference than settled practice. Is there any way of adjudicating under what conditions are these positions likely to be right?

The conservative position is typically defended by arguments about the “limits of reason.” The classic statement is in Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France:

We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages. Many of our men of speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them. If they find what they seek, and they seldom fail, they think it more wise to continue the prejudice, with the reason involved, than to cast away the coat of prejudice and to leave nothing but the naked reason; because prejudice, with its reason, has a motive to give action to that reason, and an affection which will give it permanence. Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision skeptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man's virtue his habit, and not a series of unconnected acts. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature.

As Burke puts it, the comparison makes sense; individual reason (or, for that matter, the individual social science study) is highly limited in its epistemic power in comparison to settled social practice. There is typically some reasonable basis for even highly perplexing social practices; and individual reason is likely to be highly misleading in many circumstances. Individually, we suffer from so many cognitive biases and defects that it is a wonder we get up in the morning; and even highly trained experts are often wrong, even in their own fields. (I read somewhere that most peer-reviewed research is eventually overturned). 


But as an argument the comparison is flawed; the relevant comparison should not be that between settled practice and individual reason, but between settled practice and some alternative social practice (e.g., the social practice of science, with its various self-correction mechanisms), or between settled practice and some other collective judgment (e.g., the collective judgment of an assembly or a market). Moreover, the “general bank and capital of ages” is often a “depreciating asset,” as Adrian Vermeule puts it, especially insofar as later people make no contributions to it. From this point of view, Burkean concerns about the limits of individual reason cut much less deeply; the question is about the relative “epistemic power” of different social practices, institutions, or processes. 

Yet I think there is often something to these “epistemic” arguments for conservatism. In later posts, I want to try to investigate under what conditions epistemic arguments for conservatism make sense. (This blog is mostly my scratch research notes, so read at your own risk). As a starting point, I think we might divide these arguments into three kinds: selection arguments (where the epistemic power of settled social practices comes from the operation of a selection filter that is not found in alternative social practices), computational arguments (where the epistemic power of settled social practices comes from the way in which they organize expertise and information), and resilience arguments (where settled social practices are found to be preferable to alternatives because they are adapted to a wide variety of circumstances, even if not optimal for any particular one of them). (Resilience arguments are really a subtype of selection arguments, but I want to think about them separately). More on each of these later.


[update 2:35: edited a few words for clarity].

Footnotes on things I've been reading: Adrian Vermeule's "Law and The Limits of Reason"

Adrian Vermeule, Law and the Limits of Reason (2009).

I read this book for somewhat hazy reasons; perhaps I found the title in a footnote of some paper and it seemed interesting, perhaps I ran across it by doing a search in our library catalog for something else and remembered that someone had once recommended  to me another one of Vermeule’s books. But at any rate, I’m glad I did read it, even though the main topic of the book is something that would normally not interest me very much.

The book is basically an attack on the “constitutional” common law, written primarily for (USA) legal scholars. As I reconstruct it, the basic problem is as follows. 200 and some years ago a few very smart people wrote a constitution for a country. (We’ll leave the name of the country blank, since the problem is pretty general; and I want to move away from any particularities of the American situation). Conditions at the time were very different from conditions today, however; so the problem arises as to whether, and how, to adapt the constitution to current circumstances. Should we change the constitution, and if so, who should change it?

At one extreme we can find the pure originalist position: the constitution should never be changed by anyone. This position is not as crazy as it may look at first glance. Assume that the constitution has survived intact for 200 years (and it has not been ignored during this period). It may then be that the very fact that the constitution has enabled the country to survive for 200 years implies that current constitutional rules are “resilient” – that is, they are broadly adapted to all kinds of circumstances, even if not optimal for any of them. They have been tested by time, with its varied challenges, and come out relatively well. Though different constitutional rules might have produced better outcomes at some points during those 200 years, no other set of rules we could design today would have plausibly produced a better outcome overall. We could perhaps temporarily achieve better outcomes (however defined) by adjusting the rules today, but then we could not be sure that the new rules would be optimal for other, as yet unforeseen circumstances, and we would have to adjust them again and again. And given some assumptions about the likelihood and costs of error, the relative wisdom of the framers versus our current wisdom, and our estimates of the rate of environmental change, it might be that it would never be worth our while to try to change these constitutional rules. We can think of this argument in terms of a trade-off between the benefits of adaptation to current circumstances and the benefits of resilience in changing conditions, given the limits of reason. If our estimates of the benefits of adaptation are low enough, of the resilience of current rules high enough, and of the uncertainty involved in formulating “perfect” rules for current circumstances high enough, perfect conservatism is entirely reasonable. (The earliest version of this argument I know of goes back to Plato’s Statesman, which I discuss extensively here. We also see something like this trade-off in nature: an organism can be too well adapted to its environment to survive drastic changes there. “Generalists” may thrive in changing circumstances, while “specialists” die since they cannot adapt quickly enough to these changes).

But suppose that we do not agree with the pure originalist position. (Few people do). The framers may have been very wise, but they did not foresee everything; and we may have a clearly good idea about how to improve existing constitutional rules (e.g., emancipating the slaves). But the problem still remains, since not every potential change is good: when should constitutional rules be changed, and by whom? The constitutional common lawyers argue that the constitution should (normally) not be changed by legislative assemblies or the “explicit” amendment mechanisms indicated in the constitution itself; instead, it should be changed gradually via the decisions of judges, just as proponents of the “regular” common law argue more generally that law should be changed not via legislative codification but rather through the gradual decisions of judges. Common-law constitutionalism thus tends to be associated with arguments for robust forms of judicial review and a general conservatism on matters of constitutional change, the key assumption being that the limits of reason are less binding on judges than on legislatures or the public, though still quite important.

Vermeule subjects this position to withering (though sometimes repetitive) scrutiny, arguing instead for a position that might be called “Benthamite” or “Thayerian” (as he labels it). On this view, legislatures face fewer epistemic constraints than courts in deciding to adapt constitutional rules to current circumstances, and hence courts should in general defer to them. (Note that this argument does not say much about incentives: it may be that legislatures face fewer epistemic constraints than judges in constitutional matters, but have worse incentives, and it is not clear which constraints would be “binding” in that situation). I am less interested in his ultimate conclusions, however, which are a bit too US-centric (including a plea for including at least one non-lawyer in the Supreme Court for interesting reasons having to do with the virtues of diversity in deliberative groups), than on his general approach to the problem of the limits of reason in politics and law, which is all about trying to figure out how "collective" mechanisms affect those limits.

Vermeule identifies two basic “epistemic” arguments for the constitutional common law position. On one view, the constitutional common law is better than the constitutional law created by legislatures or other explicit mechanisms because it combines the judgments of many judges over time to produce a judgment that is somehow better than the judgments of any individual judge (for reasons having to do with the Condorcet jury theorem, for example, though other mechanisms might be imagined). We can call this the “aggregation” argument. On the second view, which is associated with Hayek and his followers, the constitutional common law is better than the “explicit” constitutional law of legislatures because the process through which it is produced includes a selection “filter” that weeds out bad rules (the litigation and appeals process, for example) in ways that are not possible for explicitly created constitutional rules. We can call this the “selection” argument.

I am not going to discuss in detail all the considerations Vermeule deploys against these arguments. At any rate, it seems to me that the book is written very much like a lawyer’s brief: the constitutional common-law position is attacked from every possible perspective, some of which are less convincing than others. But a couple of points he makes are quite interesting. First, he argues that the “aggregation” arguments tend to suffer from a “nirvana” fallacy, where the benefits of aggregation are assumed to apply only to judge-made law. But in fact laws that are made by legislatures with many people should also benefit from considerations about aggregation (at least assuming equal incentives for information acquisition and sincere voting, which Vermeule discusses in some detail, though not always satisfactorily). And the kind of aggregation over time postulated by common-law constitutionalists may also suffer from informational cascades and epistemic “free-riding”: judges that defer to past decisions at a later time do not add any new information to the law, leaving the first few judges as the real legislators, for example. (“Epistemic free-riding” may also be a problem in legislatures, especially if the legislature is large, since then incentives for information acquisition are smaller. But this is more or less balanced – under some conditions, at least – by the greater epistemic diversity of legislatures, which should improve the quality of their decisions). Second, drawing on some interesting-looking work by Andrei Schleifer, he suggests that there is no plausible “selection” mechanism for the constitutional common law (though he is agnostic on the regular common law) that ensures bad rules get weeded out. Taken together, he is basically arguing that the limits of reason bind judges at least as much, if not more than, as they bind legislators; there are no special advantages to common-law constitutionalism over other forms of constitutionalism, and many apparent disadvantages.

Anyway, this is probably not a work for everyone (even if it is not particularly difficult to read); but I’m rather interested in “epistemic” arguments for conservatism, and this book offered a good overview of how Burkean arguments about the “wisdom of the past” and Hayekian arguments about the wisdom inherent in decentralized systems can be used or misused. 

On the flu, and a tale of two earthquakes

Apologies to my (very few) readers for the lack of blogging. Last week we got the flu - first my daughter, then me, then my wife - and we have been basically out of commission for 10 days (only now getting back to normal). Some of the flu viruses are wily antagonists, cleverly hijacking the body's cellular machinery to replicate themselves prolifically, and it seems to take a lot of the body's considerable resources to get rid of them (with much collateral damage in the form of large amounts of inflammatory cytokines, it has to be said).

In the meantime, there was a large earthquake in Christchurch, about 400km from where we live: 7.1 magnitude in the Richter scale. (It probably was what woke me up at 4:30am on Saturday morning, though I didn't consciously feel anything and in my state at the time it could have been anything). We don't know many people in Christchurch, but thankfully there seem to have been few casualties and no deaths as a direct result of the quake. Lots of damage, yes, but even then few building collapses. Yet compare this with the outcome of Haiti's January earthquake in Léogâne, measuring 7.0 magnitude in the Richter scale (a bit less than the Christchurch one, and also centered close to the surface): the estimates for deaths directly attributable to the quake range from 92,000 to 230,000 people; hundreds of thousands of people remain living in tent camps; the capital city remains shattered. Why the difference?

The time of the day the shaking happened may have made a difference (at least according to the useful summary in the wikipedia page on the Christchurch earthquake, which was up a day after the event). Yet I'm not sure I can see a clear causal story for how this is supposed to work: in Christchurch the earthquake happened when most people were sleeping inside buildings, in Haiti when most people were out and about; you would think the wee hours of the morning, when lots of people are basically unconscious under potentially falling objects, are the most dangerous time for an earthquake, but apparently not. Anybody care to enlighten me?

There is also the fact that most houses in New Zealand are timber framed, which means they bend a bit with the shaking, rather than quickly breaking or pancaking on top of their occupants, whereas most houses in Haiti are not, and that New Zealand has a strong building code that is actually enforced. But ultimately the factors that make the biggest difference seem to be the level of development and the quality of institutions of accountability. From the abstract of a recent (2005) paper by Matthew Kahn (gated):

Using a new data set on annual deaths from disasters in 73 nations from 1980 to 2002, this paper tests several hypotheses concerning natural-disaster mitigation. Though richer nations do not experience fewer natural disasters than poorer nations, richer nations do suffer less death from disaster. Economic development provides implicit insurance against nature's shocks. Democracies and nations with higher-quality institutions suffer less death from natural disaster. Because climate change is expected to increase the frequency of natural disasters such as floods, these results have implications for the incidence of global warming.

Higher levels of economic development and higher quality institutions make it possible to draft and enforce building codes in a relatively uncorrupt way, for example. And good institutions of accountability put the fear of their constituents into politicians, who may become very responsive to their needs in the aftermath of a disaster. Furthermore, in open societies information flows relatively freely and in generally useful ways: consider how Twitter was used to quickly aggregate information - and some misinformation - about the quake soon afterwards, particularly through the hashtag #eqnz; it's almost enough to make me rethink my principled avoidance of the service. Of course, this is itself only possible because the Internet backbone links and the electrical power supplies were not too badly damaged or were quickly repaired, and worked fine to begin with, something that economic development itself makes possible. It's another case of the unfairness of country borders: nature is harsher when you are born in a poor country (or in a non-democratic, not very accountable regime). By the same token, the best insurance against the destructiveness of nature seems to be economic development and democracy.

Using CiteULike for Teaching

I recently rediscovered CiteULike, a free web service for bibliography management. I know I had used it in the past (I still had an account, though I had not logged in for four years) but stopped using it in favor of Zotero and Endnote (because of the latter's integration with Word). But then I stopped using Zotero, partly because it tied me to Firefox (I now use Chrome almost exclusively, and love it), and partly because it was often slow and occasionally crashed (I think it's better now - it even has word processor integration! - but I had one too many bad experiences).

Anyway, there's no software to install with CiteULike and no browser dependencies - it's just a bookmarklet - and you can easily transfer your data to and from Endnote and BibTex. (Incidentally, LaTex is great for Greek-heavy writing on Ancient philosophy with one of the Betacode packages. It's too bad most of the places I submit my work to tend to demand Word files, and that converting a file from LaTex to Word can be such a pain). But it also occurs to me that something like CiteULike would be great for teaching as well.

I typically maintain a large bibliography of recommended works and suggested readings for the essays in my courses, and it's a bit of a pain to add new entries to it and make sure the new entries appear in all the appropriate places and are appropriately organized and formatted (partly this is just the fault of the Blackboard course management system we use at Victoria - which, despite some good points, is still a pretty cumbersome piece of software). So, for example, for my POLS 209 course on Dictatorships and Revolutions I might have some recommended readings on Venezuelan politics (which I suggest the students consult before writing an essay on the relevant topic in the course), or a set of readings on the comparative economic performance of dictatorships vs democracies (for students who are writing on the topic, or might want to learn more). But every time I need to add a new reading, I have to change things in four or five different places, and manually add links and other things. Moreover, though students can add items to the general bibliography (it's maintained in an internal wiki - though the Blackboard wiki tool is terrible) they may add things formatted in odd ways, or in the wrong categories, and they cannot easily download the sources to a bibliography manager.

But with CiteULike I can maintain the entire course bibliography in one place, and then provide links to specific topics using tags (you can even subscribe to the whole thing or to specific tags using RSS, if you want to keep up with the latest additions). Readings on Venezuelan politics? Here! Or I might tag some readings as recommended for the first week of the course, or some particular lecture, and post the link in the course outline and in the appropriate place in Blackboard. And students can of course download the citations to the citation manager of their choice, click on the handy links to read the actual articles (the point of the exercise, after all), or simply copy and paste the plain text of the citations they used to their bibliographies when they finish writing their essays (too much student time is, I think, spent worrying on minor details of bibliography formatting rather than actually reading the sources).

Moreover, students who create an account with CiteULike can easily contribute readings to the common course pool, perhaps with their own review notes (I can always tag them appropriately); they just have to join the class group. (I already incentivize this sort of thing in the course outline - adding to the course bibliography in appropriate ways, or contributing to the course blog/discussion board/wiki, are all things that help students get points in my courses). In fact, that's the part I'm most interested in: I keep trying to foster collaborative research in the classroom, and if students are easily able to contribute sources to the common pool of readings, they can basically help each other in constructive ways. And they can help me as well - I have found some very interesting sources for the course (even whole new literatures) in essays that students have written in the past - sources which sometimes end up in the course bibliography (you really do learn lots from your students).

I am actually considering requiring my honours students (in POLS 401, a course on contemporary political thought) to actually create a CiteULike account and contribute readings to it periodically, perhaps with some review notes. (I tried something like this once with a wiki, but the wiki is too cumbersome for this). To be sure, there's some upfront investment on their part (I probably will have to demonstrate how to use the software in the first few classes, or write a detailed handout with an explanation and pictures) but once they learn, I imagine it could be helpful to them (both in this and other courses).

Has anybody else done similar things? What potential problems am I missing?

Sunday Extremophile Blogging: The ARMAN and Thermoplasmatales archaea

ARMAN archaea, orange circles, with an arcaheon of the thermoplasma order, below them. The small orange particles are viruses. Nobody knows what the needle-like things do. Credit: Luis R. Cronolli/LBNL via ScienceDaily 

The ARMAN archaeon is a mysterious one (mentioned in the previous instalment of Sunday extremophiles). For one thing, it is found only in highly acidic pools of an abandoned mine in Northern California (pH < 1.5 or so; the water there is more like concentrated sulphuric acid. Related organisms are found in other acidic pools, according to Wikipedia), and it has one of the smallest genomes of all free-living organisms (that is, not parasites). Indeed, it is so small that it seems to be at the size limit for metabolic, non-parasitic life (some viruses -no metabolism, so no "life" in a sense- are bigger), with a correspondingly tiny genome (1 million base pairs, compared to hundreds of billions for complex organisms) and few ribosomes. And yet of this small genome (1 million base pairs), about 45% seems to be genes that are not found anywhere else. ARMAN could thus be the "minimal" metabolic organism - with the smallest set of genes necessary for metabolism, though it apparently interacts in some unknown way with other acidophilic archaea, perhaps to get some extra nutrition (the thermoplasmatales, among which are found the most acidophilic organisms known, thriving in pH 0.06 environments). 

I find these weird niches - far removed from human possibility - really fascinating. Are there any limits to the environments in which life can thrive, ultimately? ARMAN lives in an environment extremely hostile to most forms of life - yet even there, it is not alone (in fact, it is possible that life started in similar environments, so perhaps ARMAN's lineage is very old). Endless forms most beautiful indeed.

A Puzzle about Character and Democracy

Elections in modern democracies function as mechanisms of both selection and discipline. With a multiplicity of candidates competing for office, elections should in theory enable voters to select the person who they believe would do the best job of governing them (e.g., the most virtuous candidate), and to discipline incumbent candidates who have failed to do what they want by not re-electing them (assuming re-election is possible), instead electing someone else. Ideally, these two functions of elections would complement each other: voters would select candidates whose characters they trust and whose promises can be determined to be credible, and then credibly discipline them if they do not perform appropriately.

We have some evidence that elections as "disciplinary" institutions really do produce better performance from political leaders, at least in purely economic terms: politicians who are in danger of losing their jobs unless they deliver results that are satisfactory to a large number of people tend to deliver policies that are at the very least not very bad (see, for starters, here and here, though the literature, both theoretical and empirical, is vast, and there are some circumstances under which elections appear to worsen economic performance). Indeed, the literature on the comparative economic performance of democracies and non-democracies typically shows that democracies are at least no worse, and often better, than non-democracies in this respect, contrary to some popular beliefs (as Dani Rodrik notes). I like to show the students in my dictatorships and revolutions class this density plot to illustrate the point:

(Solid line for democratic country-years, dotted line for non-democratic country-years. The data on democracy is taken from the Polity project; we take democratic years for a given country as those where the country scores more than zero in the Polity autocracy+democracy measure, which is only barely democratic, given the coding criteria, but indicates real electoral competition. The data on growth come from the Penn World Tables. The period covered is 1950-2007, with data for most countries with population over 500,000 people. Basically, the plot says that "autocratic" countries with less political competition tended to have a smaller median growth rate but a higher variance in that rate over this period – more miraculous years but also more disastrous years).

Yet politicians as a class are not typically held in high esteem: most people in democracies do not seem to think that politicians are people of good moral character when considered as a group. The complaint about the need for "better" leaders, and the disappointment over actual leaders, seem nearly universal (and go back a long way, to Plato: typically, the praise of the political class always applies to the past, to the ancestors who were better, as in Cicero). I admit, the evidence I have for this proposition is fragmentary, but consider for example this Gallup poll question on how US residents evaluate the "honesty and ethical standards" of different professions:

Though the low ranking of senators and members of congress in this figure is presumably driven in part by bad economic news in late 2009, I do not think it is very atypical. Other polling data also tends to show voters in the US being much more dissatisfied with Congress as a whole than with their own congressman or senator (who tend to be re-elected at an astonishing rate), which suggests that they have a low opinion of the political class as a whole even though they may have a good opinion of their own representative. And the pattern in other countries seems similar: in Italy, politicians are routinely referred to as a "caste" who enjoy immense and undeserved privileges, even as some of them (including, inexplicably, Berlusconi) remain relatively popular; complaints about the quality of the political class in India (where many members of the Lok Sabha have criminal convictions) are extremely common; and distrust of politicians in Venezuela (my native country) seems to be quite general, even if some politicians (like Chavez) are very popular. (I should look up NZ data, but I'm too lazy for that right now). I am sure most people have heard or expressed views about how most politicians are "crooks," and not only the politicians of the "other side" (whatever side one does not support) but also those of one's own side – how they are spineless, too concerned with their electoral fortunes and their image, hypocrites, quarrel too much, etc. When was the last time you heard people praise the overall character of politicians?

Yet this is somewhat puzzling. Voters presumably prefer higher-quality characters among politicians: so why are "virtuous" politicians not being elected, or, if they are being elected, why is this fact not being recognized among the electorate? (Assuming, of course, that the evidence of voter discontent with the political class noted above holds more generally, and reflects a more or less accurate judgment of the character of politicians; it could also be that voters are simply mistaken about the character of politicians as a whole, though that fact would itself demand explanation). Moreover, it's not as if politicians are a low-status group of people; buildings are named after them, resources are expended on ceremonies for them, we address them with honorific titles, and so on, but this makes the disparagement of their character as a class even more puzzling, since their high status presumably biases many judgments of their character upwards rather than downwards, especially for those politicians who are commonly thought to be successful. Politicians are both the occasional subjects of hagiographies and yet are held to have bad moral character when considered as a group.

More precisely stated, the puzzle is that given an implicit preference for high-quality politicians (in terms of character), and a competitive electoral system, voters do not elect more politicians they think actually have high-quality characters, i.e., "virtuous" politicians (for some plausible conception of virtue). What could account for this?

I suspect that there are two basic answers to this question, though they are not necessarily incompatible. The first, and most obvious, blames supply problems. Perhaps there are extremely few virtuous politicians out there, and they do not want to rule (though they occasionally rule; hence the hagiographies). This is the Socratic argument in the Republic; hence philosopher kings must be forced to rule, since they would not naturally want to. Stated differently, perhaps the rewards of political office are more appealing to the non-virtuous than to the virtuous (given some plausible definition of virtue), leading to a pool of candidates heavily weighted towards the non-virtuous (though wouldn't one expect that the virtuous, who would want to help their fellows, would also disproportionately run for office?). Or perhaps the typical political environment of modern democracies disadvantages the virtuous vis à vis the non-virtuous. This is the Machiavellian position, suitably adapted to the 21^st century: if those campaigners capable of using virtuous and vicious tactics (e.g., dishonest lying, duplicity, etc.) are more successful than those who are only capable of using virtuous tactics, then the former will tend to be elected more often than the latter. This answer leads to a different sort of position, however, which attributes the problem less to the actual supply of virtuous politicians than to the epistemic constraints on voters who must distinguish between virtuous and non-virtuous politicians.

From this point of view, there are also a number of possibilities. A Platonic answer is that voters cannot distinguish between virtuous and non-virtuous politicians because they do not know what virtue is; they elect the non-virtuous while believing that they are electing the virtuous, and the non-virtuous do not even have to deceive them about this fact very much. But this answer does not work for us right now, since it implies that voters would be satisfied with the character of politicians they actually elect, but they are not.

Perhaps the problem then is that the epistemic demands of "selection" are higher than those of "discipline." In order to discipline a politician, the voter only needs to know his own situation: if he or she thinks that his life is going well, he can vote for the incumbent, whereas if he does not think so, he can vote against the incumbent (contrast with ancient methods of discipline, which, given term limits, were always quasi-judicial and placed more stringent epistemic demands on citizens). Even if the voter substantially misallocates responsibility for his or her material situation to the political class (perhaps the country's economic performance is substantially affected by factors not under the control of the political class), the incentives created by this sort of behaviour might still induce politicians to, on average and over the long run, provide relatively good policy (or at least operate as a kind of selection filter, so that even if politicians provide policy more or less at random, only relatively successful policies get rewarded). 


By contrast, in order to select a politician properly, the voter needs a lot of information that is not readily available, or that is easily subject to falsification or concealment (by the candidates themselves, among others), especially in large-scale societies where voters cannot know their leaders on a personal basis. (Thus Aristotle's distrust of large political communities, where he thinks selection institutions cannot work well because citizens can never really know each other's characters). 


More specifically, if the pool of candidates includes more non-virtuous than virtuous candidates, but voters cannot easily distinguish between them, they will tend to select the non-virtuous at a higher rate. Since, moreover, when the voter decides whether to punish the incumbent he or she has to also decide whether to take a risk on the challenger's character being bad, the voter might decide to live with leaders with bad characters but who deliver acceptable performance rather than take a chance on untested candidates who may both have bad character and deliver bad performance, knowing that his or her ability to distinguish between good and bad characters is not very good. From this point of view, disciplinary concerns about performance would normally dominate selection concerns about character, and voters would learn to live with rulers whose character they despise (at least in the aggregate), even though they care about both character and performance. (I think there arguments along these lines, though more technically expressed, in Tim Besley's Principled Agents. I really need to read that book and learn some game theory). However, this seems not to account for the phenomenon "congress is bad but my congressman is great" that we sometimes see in the US.

Two other possibilities that seem to me to be less plausible are the following. One is that character is simply too malleable. So voters elect people of good character, but such people quickly become bad upon gaining political power. Voters are thus constantly disappointed: they think they are selecting the best leaders (and in fact, they do) but these people easily become corrupted. I suspect, however, that we should see more incumbent turnover under this hypothesis than we actually see: people would learn that politicians quickly become corrupt, and hence that the best way of dealing with the problem is to turn the out of office quickly, or to impose term limits (as a kind of paternalistic policy, preventing themselves from being tempted to re-elect corrupt people simply because they provide good performance), though perhaps voters evaluate a tradeoff between competence and corruption potential and decide that good performance is worth a certain amount of corruption, as in the previous argument (except that voters in this model are always able to distinguish the corrupt from the virtuous: the difference is that the virtuous turn corrupt at a high rate). 


Finally, I suppose that the puzzle could simply be attributed to partisan biases. On this view, disagreements about policy would be easily translated into attributions of character: only people with bad characters could support the policies the opposition supports! Since even in two party systems around half the population supports positions one does not support, and elects politicians accordingly, this might result in the feeling that most of the political class is worthless. But this theory would seem to imply that politicians would be more despised in multiparty systems than in two-party systems; though I have no data on this question, I suspect this is not the case. Moreover, people often despise politicians even from their own party; they like their policies, but dislike their characters.

Other possibilities? Perhaps the disparagement of the characters of politicians results from human ambivalence about domination? What other ideas are there? (Or perhaps this is a pseudo-puzzle?)