The Sumner Political Wheel

At this point, several people have shared and discussed Scott Sumner’s division of the political landscape into six groups, and a lot of people like it.

I started as positively pre-disposed to it myself. I have a few questions about it though. I feel most at home in the upper-right orange, between pragmatic libertarian and idealistic progressive. But there’s something weird about being there, because I don’t feel like I’m especially an idealist. I feel a lesser identification with the dark red group (see my caveat on the narrowness of this idea of a “corrupt progressive” below) and the yellow “minimal state” group, each of which emerges more on some points than others. There’s something very odd about this arrangement, though. Notice there is no:

1. Pragmatic progressive
2. Pragmatic conservative
3. Dogmatic progressive
4. Dogmatic conservative
5. Corrupt libertarian, or
6. Idealistic libertarian

Why? Sumner suggests that by “corrupt” he doesn’t mean “taking bribes”, he just means abandoning principles to please people. But that’s an extremely narrow way of thinking about the reasons for flexibility in an ideological perspective. Sumner allows for pragmatic libertarians and considers himself one. Why? Presumably because he doesn’t think he’s “abandoning principles” for someone – he’s simply pragmatically recognizing where principles are good guides and where they are less good guides. He sees principles as broad sketches or frameworks for approaching problems not divine laws. He is, in short, a pragmatic libertarian.

But don’t progressives and conservatives act flexibly for precisely this reason as well? Most progressives and most conservatives aren’t in power and aren’t seeking votes, so they’re clearly not maintaining a flexible outlook to “please special interest groups”. Even many progressives and conservatives in power aren’t doing this to “please special interest groups”. There is a good reason to push for tort reform – the Republicans aren’t just kowtowing to the doctors. Clinton didn’t work on welfare reform to cater to a segment of the political spectrum, he largely did it because it needed to be done! This complete lack of pragmatism on the progressive/conservative side of Sumner's schema and complete lack of a “corruption” group on the libertarian side says a lot about Sumner.

He has some strange points here too. Dogmatic libertarians and idealistic conservatives revere the original intent of the Constitution? That this sentence was written by a libertarian is blatantly obvious. A progressive would say that it’s the dogmatic libertarians and idealistic conservatives that are putting their own modern spin on the Constitution. But of course the very idea that this is even a contested point is foreign to many libertarians and conservatives. They simply assume that progressives have knowingly and proudly written off the founders!

There’s also something very odd going on when Scott Sumner and Will Wilkinson both put themselves pretty darn close on this mapping to where I put myself (we seem to just be on different halves of the same segment). I imagine a lot of progressives and a lot of libertarians are all putting themselves in that segment. What good is this schema if that’s where everybody in the discussion puts themselves? I imagine anarcho-capitalists are going to put themselves in the yellow area rather than the very light purple area. When a centrist Keynesian and an anarcho-capitalist are adjacent to each other something’s a little off, I think.

I don’t like that old diamond model much, personally – but even over the course of writing this post I’m starting to think that is better than this.

Libertarians and Ideological Cross-breeding

Xenophon shares a great link from the blog Really, Libertarians?, about whether libertarians should form alliances with liberals or not. The blogger starts by affirming the libertarians shouldn't attempt to place themselves on the political spectrum. But he goes on to emphasize that that doesn't mean there shouldn't be substantial interchange between the left and libertarians (presumably there has already been such interchange between the right and libertarians).

The discussion is very interesting. I have a few thoughts:

1. First, I find it interesting that he thinks about the "liberaltarian" phenomenon as liberals turning more libertarian and not libertarians turning more liberal. Empirically, I have no clue what direction of conversion dominates. Anecdotally, I can say that I personally moved from libertarian to what I guess you'd call "liberal".

2. And the reason why I made that conversion is important. Libertarian insights in a lot of ways are basic, Econ 101 insights about the efficiency of free contracting writ large and converted into norms or political values. In other words, I think one of the most essential libertarian fallacies is building a politico-ethical system around positive social science findings (and, I want to stress, basic and introductory social science findings at that). It's kind of an odd way of going about formulating a politico-ethical system. We don't adopt Nietzschean super-man ethics because of evolutionary biology, and we shouldn't simply adopt libertarianism because of these insights. I want to be clear - my point is not that you have to mix up normative and positive findings to come to libertarianism. My point is only that it's possible to get everything there is to get out of libertarianism simply by improving people's knowledge of social science. This is only to say that it's not entirely clear to me what should be important here: teaching people more social science, or sharing libertarianism.

3. But even that isn't entirely satisfying - after all, the reason why I abandoned libertarianism was because I kept learning social science. Yes, the market is efficient and the price mechanism leverages decentralized knowledge. But if institutions don't or can't internalize costs and benefits social scientific insights start to militate against the efficiency of markets. Uncertainty and imperfections ensure that market forces, as fantastic as they are, are going to remain sub-optimal. I haven't abandoned any of the introductory insights in adopting these views - the complement the introductory insights that I still use. I still have a relatively contractarian view of human relations. I still take a fairly atomized, individualist view of things. I still come down on Hayek and Mises's side of the socialist calculation debate. But I can't call myself a libertarian. So, if what we really want is to get people to take the implications of social science more seriously, then its not clear that that would move people towards libertarianism either.

4. This all reminds me of something that's been bugging me lately about the way libertarians talk. I recently got Marginal Revolution on my blogroll. I know, I know - that sure took a while. Anyway, the blog uses this language "market-oriented economists" a lot. At first it confused me - Cowen wrote something about how no "market-oriented economists" think the minimum wage raises employment. My response was "haven't you ever heard of Card and Krueger?!?!? It's a little much to say that no market-oriented economists think this". Later it dawned on me - what he meant was "libertarian economists". I think this gets to the point of my feelings on this particular blog post. A lot of libertarians have a pretty twisted view of what non-libertarians think, and the idea that if you're not a libertarian you're not "market-oriented" or "pro-market" is high on the list. I think this sort of thing is completely unproductive. If I were more cynical, I might just as easily turn the epithet on libertarians. I've said before that the market is a lot like a tool in the sense that it works for certain jobs and not for others. You use the right tool for the right job. If you saw someone banging on a screw with a hammer, your reaction wouldn't be "wow - that guy has a deep respect for hammers". Quite the opposite. That's how I see libertarians and markets. I could go around referring to people that see things my way as "market oriented economists", but that would confuse things, just like Cowen and other libertarians that use this phrase as a synonym for "libertarians" confuses things. The fact is there are fundamental differences of opinion - let's leave it at that and stick to the clear terminology when we talk. [Mises.org does this all the time with "pro-liberty" too. It can be very confusing if you don't know what the code-words mean].

This is starting to get a little farther afield, but I think the point I want to make is simply that (1.) the link that Xenophon shares is a very good one and the impulse is very good, but (2.) the guy clearly has blinders on and that limits the usefulness of his more fundamental insight. This is fine. We all have blinders on. I'm providing a few counter-arguments here to help take those blinders off, and people should take them how they will.

Personally I, like the blogger, don't see a lot of use for these ideological spectrums. Mostly I just feel like a non-descript moderate, often I feel like a liberal, sometimes I feel conservative, on occasion I feel downright leftist, and fairly regularly I do feel like a libertarian. The center of gravity for me is probably what you'd call "center-left" but the point is spectrums are often a dumb way to think about this stuff, and even distinct ideologies like "libertarianism" is a dumb way to think about this stuff. It is convenient, though - and convenience matters.

Think Tanks: The Lay of the Land

This is a very interesting post by Evan. I've heard a lot of good stuff about "Shop Class as Soul Craft", and I'm particularly interested in the role think tanks play in society - not just because I work at one, but because I have to interact with and react with other "think tanks" on a daily basis. Some of these interactions are positive, and some less so.

I think a lot about think tanks can be predicted based on how they're financed. In my policy think tank world, financing primarily comes from donations/endowments, private foundations, and the government. The "safest," most objective think tanks are actually those that rely largely on government funding. A lot of people may find this ironic, but it makes sense. Power in Washington shifts quite regularly, and despite the bad rap they get, the ubiquitous "bureaucracy" that manages these contracts is quite non-partisan and focused on very specific problems, which requires very specific research. Often the subject matter itself is dictated by political forces (i.e. - "home ownership" research replaced "low income housing tax credit" research during the Clinton-Bush transition), but the conclusions are not affected by changing political winds. Government contracts undergo a great deal of scrutiny - significantly more than grants from private foundations. If either the agency or the think tank involved in a contract were guilty of bias, it wouldn't take long at all for their competitors to identify that bias. These contracts also often require external panels and working groups to review the products before release to the public. Panels are usually composed of people from universities and other think tanks, and they also won't countenance a product that isn't objective.

Think tanks that operate using endowments and donations are ironically the least objective. These are organizations like the libertarian Cato, liberal Economic Policy Institute, or conservative Heritage Foundation. It's not that they produce bad analysis. They are simply more normative publications, and I feel that they regularly leave out important counter-arguments or findings. These sorts of "think tanks" are usually easy to identify because they regularly use ideological language (libertarian, "progressive", and conservative, respectively for those examples), and challenge or "call out" individual politicians. I think these groups are best thought of as advocacy groups that do research, rather than true research institutions.

A middle ground is funding by private foundations. Private foundations lie on a spectrum of ideological intensity. Usually, a think tank that is recognized as being objective isn't going to be budged by the ideological imperatives of a private foundation they get money from - and I'd say almost all of these types of grants give researchers final editorial sign off on content and conclusions.

The unfortunate thing is that the less objective a funding source is, the more interesting it is for researchers (because it usually means a freer hand). The government decides what questions get answered when they sign a contract with a think tank. Private institutes accept unsolicited proposals from think tanks, which provides somewhat greater freedom. Endowments provide complete freedom for researchers to pursue the questions they're interested in. So it's a mixed bag. I think a combination of these three funding sources is the best way to ensure that a think tank is objective, nimble, and can target research questions that are the most interesting to answer.

Think tanks have a range of missions. Some are pure government contractors - very objective, very focused and concrete, and very non-partisan. Others, like Urban, have a general goal of "understanding policies that support low income families", but because of their substantial government contracting, they approach these questions in a more or less non-partisan way. The final group, which I described above, are really just advocacy groups that publish research reports. They often employ smart people and put out interesting stuff - but I put about as much stock in them as I do other purely advocacy groups.

What's rarest is a think tank that blends practical and abstract/empirical and theoretical research the way a university department would, with considerable independence from government contract work, nevertheless maintaining a strong reputation for objectivity. That's a very hard balance to strike, and there are only a few that I think can do it. The Brookings Institution is one. The Council on Foreign Relations and the American Enterprise Institute are others (although AEI has a much clearer ideological bent than Brookings or CFR, but I don't think they "assume their own conclusions" the way Cato, EPI, or Heritage seem to). So is the Woodrow Wilson Center (although the Wilson Center does rely on government money, my understanding is that it is direct Congressional funding, not more constraining research contracts with executive agencies). Eventually I'd love to work at one of these types of organizations - essentially a university environment without the teaching or tenure, and strong connections to policymakers without being mere contractors. The Urban Institute comes quite close to this atmosphere, so I'm satisfied. But it's still somewhat of a Brookings Institution/government contractor hybrid.

Think tanks are very important for policy-makers. Universities are simply too insular and overburdened with teaching and academic research to be the sole source of policy research. But it's very important to understand what differentiates different policy shops. Heritage is no Abt Associates, and neither of these companies are comparable to Brookings. You just have to understand the lay of the land before you believe everything you read.