The Volokh Conspiracy

Economist Robin Hanson has a blog post discussing a recent study showing that most people tend to limit conversations about politics to those who agree with their views. This is not just a matter of people tending to have friends and acquaintances who have similar views. Even when there are people in our social circle who have divergent political views, the study shows that we are far more likely to talk about politics with those we agree with. Much previous research reaches similar conclusions. Moreover, we see the same pattern in people’s choices about the media they follow on political issues. Conservatives are likely to watch conservative TV channels, and read conservative newspapers, magazines, and blogs. Liberals have the opposite pattern. If you are a regular VC reader, you are far more likely to to be a libertarian or a conservative than not. If you regularly read a liberal political or legal blog, chances are that you’re a liberal yourself.

When people do encounter opposing arguments, they tend to evaluate them in a highly biased way, in effect holding them to a much higher standard than they apply to arguments that support their own views. Moreover, as Diana Mutz shows, most of these tendencies are especially pronounced among people who are most interested in politics and have the most strongly held political views.

Perhaps the avoidance of political talks with people we disagree with is in part driven by a desire to avoid social awkwardness. But that can’t explain the avoidance of opposing media. Moreover, conversations about politics with those we disagree with are awkward at least in part because people tend to be intolerant of opposing views.

All of this is highly irrational if the goal of reading and talking about politics is to seek out the truth. As John Stuart Mill famously put it, a truth-seeker should make a special effort to seek out opposing viewpoints, and try to evaluate them in an unbiased way:

He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion… Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them… [H]e must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.

The evidence is less puzzling if truth-seeking is not the main goal of most political conversations or most people’s efforts to read about politics. Rather, many people enjoy having their preexisting views reinforced and like the experience of associating with their fellow “political fans” who support the same side as they do. Because the chance that your vote in an election will be decisive is infinitesmally small, there is little payoff for seeking out political truths just so you can be a better-informed voter. And most nonexperts have few other incentives to seek out the truth either. Being exposed to opposing arguments is often emotionally unpleasant, and giving them a fair hearing can be even more painful – especially if you are strongly committed to your own opinions. And the payoff for all that pain is usually very small, so why bother? Unfortunately, while such ignorance and close-mindedness is individually rational, it can cause terrible collective outcomes.

That’s not to suggest that people deliberately embrace political views they know to be false. But it’s easy to be cognitively lazy about seeking out opposing arguments and controlling your biases against them when you do run across them. Obviously, most people are not completely indifferent to opposing evidence on political issues. Sometimes the evidence against you is so obvious and overwhelming that it’s hard to ignore even if you want to do so. When Germany lost World War II, many Germans who had supported Hitler were forced to admit that he had led them to disaster. On most political issues, however, the evidence is much less stark and therefore it’s much easier to insulate yourself from possible challenges to your beliefs. Such insulation is not always impossible to overcome. Otherwise, no one would ever change any of their strongly held political views, except in the aftermath of WWII-like disasters. But it is often extremely difficult.

This semester, I am once again teaching Constitutional Law II: The Fourteenth Amendment. I often tell my students in this class that there are three issues on which most people are particularly resistant to rational persuasion: abortion, the death penalty, and affirmative action. And it so happens that the course covers all three.

Actually, there is a general tendency of to discount opposing arguments on a wide range of political issues, not just these ones. It’s a consequence of our general lack of incentive to think rationally about politics. But the problem is worse on some issues than others, and these three strike me as among the worst offenders.

Why are people more close-minded on some issues than others? One factor is intensity of commitment. Obviously, these are issues on which many people have strongly held views. But that doesn’t differentiate them from a lot of other policy disputes. Think of the many people who have intensely held views on health care, taxation, gun rights, and so on. More important, I think, is that these are issues where most people believe that your stance derives directly from your fundamental values, rather than disagreements about empirics. Either you believe that abortion is like murder or you don’t; either it’s inherently wrong for the state to execute people or it’s not; affirmative action is either overdue compensation for historic injustices or it’s a form of invidious racial discrimination. By contrast, most people recognize that disputes over issues like taxes or health care are at least in part driven by differences over empirical questions rather than values. In reality, of course, empirical questions do matter to disputes over affirmative action and the death penalty. How effective are affirmative action programs? How much does the death penalty deter murder? How many innocent people are likely to be executed? But most people don’t think about these issues in such terms. They assume that the real source of disagreement is values rather than facts.

Finally, these three issues are ones on which it’s hard to find a coherent compromise position. You can tell a persuasive story about why tax rates should be higher than conservatives say, yet lower than what liberals want. But it’s hard to explain why we should adopt a policy that’s somehow in between a strong pro-life position and a strong prochoice view. The same goes for affirmative action and the death penalty.

I have not seen any systematic research comparing the degree of close-mindedness on these issues relative to others. So it’s possible that attitudes on these three issues are not as hidebound as I think, or that things are worse on other issues than I imagine. For what it’s worth, I myself have changed my views on two of these three over the years (less pro-choice than I used to be, and less hostile to affirmative action). But I think those changes happened at least in part because I don’t care about these two issues as much as many other people do, and therefore was less emotionally invested in my views about them.

Nineteenth century phrenologists believed that they could discern a great deal about your abilities and personality by studying the shape of your skull. Today, phrenology is long-discredited. But many voters think they can judge candidates by making similar inferences from their attractiveness and other physical traits. Libby Copeland of Slate has an interesting article summarizing the growing body of research documenting this:

In presidential politics, does it help to look like Mitt Romney? Or, put another way, how much does Newt Gingrich’s face hurt him?

The answer will be disappointing to those who believe in the myth of the rational voter. Looks do indeed matter. But they don’t matter in exactly the way we thought—it’s not attractiveness alone that counts, but a cluster of traits people believe we can read into faces. It appears that voters, particularly those who aren’t paying much attention, don’t know much about politics, and don’t have strong partisan affiliations—which is to say, a solid number of Americans—operate like 19th-century phrenologists, believing on some not-quite-conscious level that that they can read a politician’s character by glancing at things like his eyebrows and jaw line.

Unfortunately, there is no reason to believe that voters are any better at discerning candidates’ likely performance in office from their faces than phrenologists were at predicting character traits based on skull patterns.

As Copeland notes, voters with low political knowledge levels are the ones most likely to base their decisions on candidates’ appearance. Unfortunately, relatively ignorant voters are extremely common. In this 2009 post, I described how appearance-based voting is a part of the broader problem of political ignorance and irrationality.

In his new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, Charles Murray argues that a new elite class has emerged that is much more ignorant about the lives of ordinary Americans than were the elites of earlier generations:

As the new upper class increasingly consists of people who were born into upper-middle-class families and have never lived outside the upper-middle-class bubble, the danger increases that the people who have so much influence on the course of the nation have little direct experience with the lives of ordinary Americans, and make their judgments about what’s good for other people based on their own highly atypical lives…

Many of the members of the new upper class are balkanized. Furthermore, their ignorance about other Americans is more problematic than the ignorance of other Americans about them. It is not a problem if truck drivers cannot empathize with the priorities of Yale professors. It is a problem if Yale professors, or producers of network news programs, or CEOs of great corporations, or presidential advisers cannot empathize with the priorities of truck drivers. It is inevitable that people have large areas of ignorance about how others live, but that makes it all the more important that the members of the new upper class be aware of the breadth and depth of their ignorance.

If Murray is right, this kind of elite ignorance is the flip side of the general public’s political ignorance. Public ignorance is dangerous because it reduces the quality of voting decisions; elite ignorance because it reduces the quality of the decisions made by elites once they get into positions of power.

To illustrate his point, Murray includes in the book a 25 question quiz that is intended to test readers’ knowledge and exposure to mainstream non-upper middle class culture (he assumes that most of the readers are members of the upper middle class elite). I managed a middling 37 on his 0-99 point scale.

As Murray recognizes, one can easily quibble about the details of many of the questions. For example, I not only have “attended” a Rotary Club meeting, but actually gave a speech at one when I was 17. Maybe I should get extra credit for the latter. I would also have achieved a higher score if there were more sports-related questions. Other readers will have different complaints. Even so, there is no reasonable version of this test on which I would have come out looking like a Man of the People. More generally, Murray is surely right that there is a culture gap between the new upper middle class and the rest of the public, and that the former is often ignorant about the lives of the latter.

At the same time, I am skeptical that the gap is much greater than it was fifty years ago. Murray claims that the elite of the early 1960s was much more in touch with mainstream culture than today’s upper middle class (which he defines, roughly, as people in various professional occupations who are in the top 5% of the income distribution). He only offers a modest amount of evidence to support that claim, and on some points his evidence cuts the other way. For example, one of the differences between the upper middle class and the mainstream that Murray cites is that the former are much more likely to engage in foreign travel. But that gap was even greater in 1960, when foreign travel was much more an elite preserve than it is today, in the age of relatively cheap jet flights.

More importantly, I am far from certain that the kind of knowledge Murray describes is actually important in improving the quality of public policy. Yes, elites who make policy that affects the lives of truck drivers should have some knowledge of “their priorities.” But it’s not clear to me that knowledge of TV shows, foods, preferred sports, etc., of truck drivers is all that useful to understanding those priorities. Even the experience of living with a low income or working at a job where your body hurts at the end of the day (both stressed by Murray s especially important) may be overrated. You don’t have to do either to realize that poverty imposes substantial constraints on your life, or that physical pain is extremely unpleasant. I actually did qualify for the points you get from having had a job where the body hurts at the end of the day. But I doubt that my attitude towards manual labor would be much different if I hadn’t. Overall, I’m not convinced that a political elite composed of people who scored a 99 on Murray’s test would do much better by the truck drivers than one composed of people who scored 19 or 29. At the very least, Murray offers little if any proof of it in the book.

To be sure, there is an important sense in which elite ignorance reduces the quality of public policy. In a complex society where people have a wide variety of preferences, not even the most knowledgeable elite experts can really have enough information to impose efficient paternalistic regulations that preempt individual choice. But this problem would persist even if all our elites had a deep and extensive knowledge of non-elite culture. The solution is not so much an elite that is better-informed about the culture of the masses, but an elite whose power over those masses is more limited and decentralized.

That said, I’m certainly open to the possibility that diminishing some types of elite ignorance would improve our society. But I’m skeptical that what we need to have a better elite is the kind of knowledge Murray emphasizes.

Although it has been pushed out of the US headlines by the New Hampshire primaries, radical Islamist parties just won the lion’s share of the vote in the final round of the Egyptian elections.

I wrote about why this sort of development was a likely and dangerous possibility in several posts going back to the very beginning of the “Arab Spring” (see here and here). If the Islamists consolidate power and make serious progress towards implementing their agenda, Egypt 2011-12 could easily join Russia 1917, Cuba 1959, and Iran 1979 as a classic historic example of a case where a bad regime was overthrown only to be replaced by one that is much worse. Obviously, the future course of events is far from certain. It is not yet clear how much power the Islamist parties will actually get to wield, and the larger of the two may be internally divided about its agenda. But developments to this point have been far from positive.

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Jonah Lehrer has an article arguing that political ignorance makes democracy work better, and may even be essential to its survival. Much of the article is based on extrapolations from a dubious study of fish behavior, which I criticized here. Lehrer takes the argument a step further by claiming that excessive political knowledge may have been a big factor in facilitating the Nazis’ rise to power in 1930s Germany:

If every voter was well-informed and highly opinionated, then the most passionate minority would dominate decision-making. There would be no democratic consensus—just clusters of stubborn fanatics, attempting to out-shout the other side. Hitler’s rise is the ultimate parable here: Though the Nazi party failed to receive a majority of the votes in the 1933 German election, it was able to quickly intimidate the opposition and pass tyrannical laws.

That the Nazis succeeded because German voters were too knowledgeable would have come as news to Adolf Hitler, who wrote in Mein Kampf that “[t]he receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous.” As a result, he advocated taking advantage of political ignorance by using crude and simplistic propaganda:

All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to. Consequently, the greater the mass it is intended to reach, the lower its purely intellectual level will have to be. But if, as in propaganda for sticking out a war, the aim is to influence a whole people, we must avoid excessive intellectual demands on our public, and too much caution cannot be extended in this direction…..

Once understood how necessary it is for propaganda in be adjusted to the broad mass, the following rule results:
It is a mistake to make propaganda many-sided, like scientific instruction, for instance….

[A]ll effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan. As soon as you sacrifice this slogan and try to be many-sided, the effect will piddle away, for the crowd can neither digest nor retain the material offered.

This kind of propaganda was an important part of the Nazis’ electoral success under the Weimar Republic, when they eventually managed to get over one third of the vote, making themselves the single most popular party. If the average German voter was “well-informed,” it would have been much harder for the Nazis to achieve so much electoral success. For example, a well-informed German electorate would have been skeptical of absurd Nazi claims that Germany’s political and economic crisis was caused by the tiny Jewish minority. They might also have rejected the Nazis’ crude zero-sum view of the world economy, which posited that Germany could only achieve prosperity by conquering other nations. It isn’t possible to list here all the different ways that the Nazis benefited from voter ignorance. But the bottom line is that a more knowledgeable German electorate would not have been to their advantage.

Lehrer also presents a distorted view of what happened after the Nazis took control of the government in early 1933. They did not “intimidate the opposition” by being “the most passionate minority,” as may have occurred in the fish study. Rather, they did so by the more conventional method of banning all opposition parties, imprisoning their leaders, and inflicting severe punishment on anyone who resisted. Absent these measures, it is unlikely that they would have been unable to crush the opposition so completely. There is no reason to believe that an electorate composed of “opinionated and well-informed” voters would necessarily give in to the most “most passionate” minority absent the use of force. Indeed, the more opinionated and well-informed you are, the less likely it is that you will change your mind about an important issue merely because a “passionate minority” loudly claims that you are wrong. As Hitler recognized, crude propaganda is usually most effective with ignorant audiences.

I don’t deny that there can be unusual situations where political ignorance is actually beneficial. But the rise of the Nazis is one of the last places to look for evidence that ignorance leads to bliss.

The Wall Street Journal recently published an article on widespread public ignorance about federal spending [HT: Andrew Varcoe]:

Many Americans have strong opinions about policy issues shaping the presidential campaign, from immigration to Social Security. But their grasp of numbers that underlie those issues can be tenuous.

Americans vastly overestimate the percentage of fellow residents who are foreign-born, by more than a factor of two, and the percentage who are in the country illegally, by a factor of six or seven. They overestimate spending on foreign aid by a factor of 25, according to a 2010 survey. And more than two-thirds of those who responded to a 2010 Zogby online poll underestimated the part of the federal budget that goes to Social Security or Medicare and Medicaid.

“It’s pretty apparent that Americans routinely don’t know objective facts about the government,” says Joshua Clinton, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University.

Americans’ numerical misapprehension can be traced to a range of factors, including where they live, the news they consume, the political rhetoric they hear and even the challenges of numbers themselves. And it isn’t even clear how much this matters: Telling people the right numbers often doesn’t change their views.

These are not new findings. I wrote about earlier survey data with similar results here and here. Despite the growing fiscal crisis that has emerged over the last few years, most of the public knows very little about federal spending.

The article suggests that this ignorance may not matter much because the majority of survey respondents don’t change their minds about policy priorities even when presented with correct information. It is certainly true that people are slow to change their minds about political issues, often even rejecting outright any data that conflicts with their preexisting views. In general, however, people with higher levels of political knowledge have much different views on many issues than those with low levels, even after controlling for partisanship, race, gender, income, and many other background variables. Knowing one key fact about the budget may not change your mind. But being generally knowledgeable about federal spending may well lead you to have different views from otherwise similar people who are mostly ignorant about it. Moreover, on some key issues where the balance of political power is close, there could be important effects on policy even if only five or ten percent of voters change their minds.

In this case, the public’s failure to understand that entitlements and defense constitute the lion’s share of federal spending probably makes them more reluctant to consider cuts in these areas. Conversely, the belief that foreign aid and payments to illegal immigrants are much greater than they actually are lead voters to focus their ire on these issues far more than is warranted.

In every election year, politicians and pundits routinely attack negative campaigning, claiming that it is somehow inappropriate or harmful. This year, Newt Gingrich has been complaining about it especially loudly. But many others have said similar things.

As I see it, negative campaigning is just as useful and just as legitimate as the positive kind. In assessing candidates for public office, we need to know about their weaknesses as well as their strengths. When an employer chooses who to hire for a job, it would be foolish for him to consider only the fact that a given applicant is intelligent and knowledgeable, while ignoring evidence showing that he or she is, say, lazy and unreliable. The same goes for the process of hiring people for powerful political offices, which is ultimately what elections are all about.

Moreover, it’s important to remember that elections are comparative evaluations. We don’t just want to know how good Candidate A is. We want to know how he or she compares to opponents B, C, and D. In making such comparative judgments, negative information is just as important as the positive. Perhaps you think that Republican front-runner Mitt Romney has only modest strengths. But you might still vote for him as a lesser evil if you think his leading rivals are all truly awful. The same goes for the general election choice between the GOP nominee and Obama. You could end up preferring one of them to the other primarily because they seem to be a lesser evil than the alternative.

Obviously, negative campaign ads are sometimes inaccurate or misleading. But the same is true of positive ones. Candidates routinely exaggerate their supposed virtues and achievements. The reality of widespread political ignorance often allows politicians to get away with making false or misleading claims. But negative claims are no worse in that respect than positive ones.

Another common criticism of negative campaigning is that it leads voters to have a more negative view of the political process and to distrust government. Experts disagree about whether and to what extent this is true. But even if it is accurate, it may not be a bad thing. If voters have a more negative view of politicians and government, it might lead them to be more hesitant about entrusting those same politicians with ever-greater power. The dubious nature of most politicians is one of the reasons why it is important to restrict the size and scope of government.

UPDATE: I should mention political scientist John Geer’s 2006 book finding that negative ads actually give voters more useful information about candidates’ issue positions than positive ads do [HT: VC reader Joshua Spivak, who wrote a nice 2010 Forbes article describing some of the benefits of negative campaign ads].

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a summary of an interesting recent study that uses an experiment conducted on fish to try to claim that there are underappreciated benefits to political ignorance [HT: VC reader John Perkins]:

A team of researchers led by a Princeton University biologist has now studied that question and concluded that without all our know-nothing fellow citizens, things might be even worse.

The team, led by Iain D. Couzin, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton, carried out its work with a type of fish known as golden shiners. The group trained some of the fish to associate food with a blue target and trained a smaller number of the fish to associate food with yellow, a color the fish more naturally prefer.

Placed together, most fish pursued yellow targets, suggesting the smaller group’s more intense desire for yellow overwhelmed the larger group’s numerical advantage, Mr. Couzin reported. But as fish without any training were added, the group increasingly favored the blue target, he said.

“A strongly opinionated minority can dictate group choice,” the research team wrote in its report, published in Thursday’s edition of the journal Science. “But the presence of uninformed individuals spontaneously inhibits this process, returning control to the numerical majority.”

The behavior of golden shiners demonstrates “the role of uninformed individuals in achieving democratic consensus amid internal group conflict and informational constraints,” wrote the research team….

In a separate commentary in the same issue, two authors from the University of Washington at Seattle, Carl T. Bergstrom, an associate professor of biology, and Jevin D. West, a biology research associate, said they agreed the work by Mr. Couzin’s group showed that “uninformed agents can promote democratic outcomes in collective decision problems.”

The study is cleverly designed. But I don’t think it actually proves that political ignorance is beneficial. Few doubt that a large majority of ignorant voters can sometimes get its way against a more knowledgeable minority. But that’s precisely why political ignorance is a problem: Other things equal, a more ignorant electorate is likely to make worse decisions than a more knowledgeable one. Under such conditions, the more “democratic” (in the sense of more majoritarian) outcome isn’t necessarily better. Indeed, the more influence the ignorant majority has, the greater the negative impact of their ignorance.

In some situations, the paper’s authors claim, the uninformed are a minority, but they gravitate towards the majority among the rest of the group, thereby making a majoritarian outcome more likely. This, assumes, however, that their ignorance does not itself bias them towards one side of a dispute or the other. This may be true among fish, but is often false among human electorates, where ignorance does not prevent people from holding political opinions and also makes them vulnerable to manipulation. Indeed, ignorance tends to increase the effectiveness of the latter. And relatively ignorant voters can still be highly biased “political fans.”

Even if a more majoritarian outcome is always preferable to a less majoritarian one, that is still consistent with the notion that majoritarian decisions by a relatively well-informed electorate are likely to be better than those made by a more ignorant one. And, regardless of what happened in the case of the fish, a knowledgeable majority in the real world is at least as likely to get its way in real-world democratic processes as a relatively ignorant one.

Furthermore, ignorance sometimes enables a narrow interest group to get its way at the expense of the general public, because the latter is unaware of what is going on. In this article, I explain how this happened in may states that adopted post-Kelo eminent domain reforms. The fish study doesn’t take account of this possibility because there is no body of knowledge known to one group of fish that is unknown to the other that allows the former to exploit the latter for their own benefit.

This is not to deny that there are some cases where political ignorance can have beneficial effects. Consider, for example, a highly knowledgeable electorate with extremely evil values (e.g. – a racist electorate whose primary goal is the desire to oppress some racial minority as much as possible). These voters would be able to choose policies and leaders that achieve their evil objectives more effectively than an equally evil electorate that was more ignorant.

There are also a few other scenarios where political ignorance might turn out to be (relative) bliss; I may discuss some of them in a future post. This study, however, doesn’t shed much light on any of them.

UPDATE: I have made a few minor revisions to this post.

Regarding Eugene Volokh’s post below about an NYU L. Rev. article, “The People” of the Second Amendment: Citizenship and the Right To Bear Arms. I just scanned the article, and there appears to be only a single footnote which directly cites any state statutes from before 1800. Note 125, accurately cites standard statutory compilations from Massachusetts and Connecticut for laws against selling firearms to Indians. Although the author is apparently unaware that by 1661 (Connecticut) and 1688 (Massachusetts) the laws were changed to allow gun sales (and even gun carrying in towns) by friendly Indians. The article suffers very severely from its near-exclusive reliance on secondary sources for the pre-1800 period, especially since some of those sources are highly tendentious.

To summarize the information from Chapter 3 of my forthcoming textbook Firearms Law and the Second Amendment: Regulation, Rights, and Policy (Aspen Publishers, available in late Jan. 2012) regarding American law pre-1800:

Women: No restrictions. Of course they did not serve in the militia. Laws requiring “householders” (whether or not they were in the militia) to have arms were common, and these usually included a woman who was the head of the house (e.g., a widow).

Free blacks: Some states had no restrictions, some states had bans on their owning guns. Free blacks served in some state militia, not in some other states, and in some states policies changed depending on military necessity. They were excluded from the federal militia by the Second Militia Act of 1792.

Slaves: Several states banned gun ownership, or allowed ownership only with the master’s permission.

Poor whites: To claim that they were excluded from gun ownership or from militia service is absurd. There were absolutely no property or wealth restrictions on gun ownership, nor on service in the militia. To the contrary, many states had programs to supply poor people with guns (“public arms”) for militia service, if they could not afford their own. Further, the laws requiring householders to be armed often required that the household provide arms to adult male servants. State laws also required that when an indentured servant finished his or her term of service, the master must provide the former servant with “freedom dues” so that the servant could begin independent life. The freedom dues were specified set of goods; in Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, freedom dues for male servants included a firearm. In short, the state laws of the 17th and 18th centuries in America were generally prescriptive about gun ownership by poor people, and the prescriptions were to put guns into the hands of the poor.

The author of the NYU article asserts that “arms bearing was considered congruent to voting, holding public office, or serving on juries.” That’s incorrect for “bearing” in the sense of carrying a gun for personal use, since there were no wealth, sex, age, or citizenship restrictions on carrying. And the claim is even more incorrect if “bearing” is meant in the restrictive sense of “bearing for militia service.” Militia laws always mandated service by all males (except, sometimes Blacks or Indians) in a certain age range. Period. The only exemptions were for specified professions (e.g., clergy). Militia duty was generally required starting at age 16 or 18 (which was before voting eligibility). Indeed, during the end of the 18th century and the early 19th century, one of the standard,successful, arguments for broadening the franchise by eliminating the property requirement for voting was that anyone who served in the militia deserved to vote. E.g., “Let every man who fights or pays, exercise his just and equal right in their election.” Thomas Jefferson letter to Samuel Kercheval, July 12, 1816.

Catholics: In Maryland, temporarily barred from gun ownership during the French & Indian War.

Dissenters: During the Revolution, there were plenty of instances of confiscating guns (sometimes with compensation) for militia use from people who would not take a loyalty oath to the new nation, or who would not serve in the militia (this included plenty of religious pacifists in Pennsylvania). During the early theocratic days in Massachusetts, 75 supporters of the religious dissident Anne Hutchinson were disarmed.

The author’s thesis is that illegal aliens and legal non-resident aliens should be allowed to own guns. Part of his argument is to construct and then criticize the supposedly historical “gendered,and class-stratified understanding of persons permitted to own guns.” The author could have made a stronger historical argument for his position if he had accurately described the gun laws of 17th and 18th century America.

Bryan Caplan has a interesting post on George Orwell’s portrayal of democracy in his classic work Animal Farm. As Bryan notes, the initially egalitarian and democratic regime established by the animals gets subverted in large part because of political ignorance. Like Bryan, I would be interested to know more about Orwell’s view of real-world democracy. Did he believe that the problem of political ignorance could be overcome by education or some other means? Or perhaps he thought that the problem of ignorance was irremediable, but democracy was still the best form of government. Given that he remained a socialist to the end of his life, Orwell obviously could not adopt my and Bryan’s preferred solution of limiting and decentralizing government in order to mitigate the problem.

It’s also interesting to note that Orwell’s portrayal of democracy at Animal Farm was actually far more positive than the Soviet history he based the novel on. Unlike Animal Farm, the USSR was a brutal totalitarian state from the start and was never democratic. Opposition parties (including even left-wing socialist ones) were suppressed from the beginning, and there were never any free elections or any direct democracy of the kind Orwell depicts.

I’m not sure whether Orwell deviated from Soviet history on this point in order to make a statement about democracy or because he was in thrall to the view (common among anti-Stalinist Western leftists in his day) that the Soviet experiment only went awry under Stalin. His modestly favorable portrayal of Snowball – the pig who serves as an analogue to Trotsky – is compatible with the latter idea, though Snowball is not a completely positive figure in the novel. Some degree of rot is evident even in the “pre-Stalinist” era at Animal Farm, though the animals are described as “happy as they had never conceived it possible to be” during this period. In reality, large-scale totalitarian repression began under Lenin, not Stalin. And the real Trotsky was almost as bad as his rival, in some ways even a little worse.

Back in January, I expressed the fear that the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak’s dictatorship in Egypt might lead to a new regime that is as bad or worse than the old. I gave two reasons why this could happen: Illiberal forces in Egypt, especially radical Islamists, are much better organized than liberal democrats, and majority public opinion in Egypt is also highly illiberal, which creates the possibility of Islamists coming to power by democratic means.

The first round of the recent Egyptian elections, where Islamist parties got over 60% of the vote, at least partially substantiates these concerns. To be sure, two thirds of that went to the Muslim Brotherhood, the more “moderate” of the two Islamist parties. However, Islamist hardliners have more influence in the Brotherhood than more moderate “reformers.”

If the Islamists come to power and adopt repressive policies, it’s possible that they could be voted out in a future election. But this assumes that they will allow continue to hold competitive elections and allow opposition parties to operate freely. Unfortunately, it is all too likely that a radical Islamist regime would use the powers of the state to suppress opposition and ensure that it could never be voted out, as has happened in Iran. A democratically elected Islamist government could easily end up as a political system where there is “one man, one vote, one time.”

It is far from inevitable that Egypt will end up with a radical Islamist government. Perhaps the still-powerful Egyptian military will prevent it, or perhaps more liberal forces within and outside the Muslim Brotherhood will get stronger. The early indications, however, are not very positive.

Virginia was one of several states that enacted a strong eminent domain reform law after the Supreme Court ruled in Kelo v. City of New London that it was permissible for government to take private property and transfer it to other private individuals in order to promote economic development. Supporters of the Virginia law are now trying to incorporate it into the state Constitution. But, as the Washington Times reports, they are beginning to encounter resistance from local governments, which have a vested interest in keeping their eminent domain authority as broad as possible [HT: VC reader James Taylor]:

A state constitutional amendment to expand Virginia’s eminent domain laws is meeting local resistance, with the city of Alexandria agreeing to contribute as much as $5,000 for a lobbying firm to help fight the legislation.

The amendment, sponsored for the 2012 General Assembly session by Delegate Rob Bell, Albemarle Republican, attempts to change the Virginia Constitution by updating a law enacted in 2007 that says private property can be taken only when the public interest dominates the private gain, among other conditions.

“The goal is to put [the amendment] into the constitution so that it can’t be tinkered with,” Mr. Bell said….

The amendment passed with wide support during the 2011 General Assembly session, with help from Mr. Bell. It cleared the House by a vote of 83-15 and the Senate by a vote of 35-5.

But to amend the state constitution, the measure must pass again in the assembly before going to the public as a voter referendum on the 2012 ballot.

Despite the broad support, Mr. Bell said, amendment supporters are girding a fight.

“We are not taking anything for granted,” he said….

Mr. Bell said, the impetus was to protect property owners.

“The local governments were certainly opposed to the original statute and claimed it would bring along the end of the world,” he said. “Of course, it hasn’t.

When it comes to property rights, Virginia’s present constitution is one of the least protective in the country. Article I, Section 11 gives the state legislature virtually unconstrained authority to “define” what qualifies as a “public use” that justifies taking property by eminent domain. Essentially, the legislature can license the condemnation of property for virtually any reason it wants. Few if any other state constitutional rights are left so completely to the mercy of the very state officials they are supposed to protect us against. It would be as if the legislature had total discretion to determine what kind of speech can be censored or when police are authorized to search your home.

In the short term, it doesn’t matter much whether eminent domain in Virginia is constrained only by strong statutory restrictions or by a constitutional amendment. But in the long run, a constitutional amendment would be a vital safeguard against the gradual erosion of property rights. Effective post-Kelo reforms like that in enacted in Virginia are the product of an unusual upsurge in public attention focused on eminent domain issues. Most of the time, the vast majority of “rationally ignorant” voters pay little or no attention to the subject. Even in the immediate aftermath of Kelo, many states enacted ineffective laws in part because voter ignorance makes it difficult for the electorate to tell the difference between genuine reforms and those that only pretend to constrain economic development takings.

As Kelo recedes into the past, public attention will understandably focus on other matters, and influential interest groups can lobby state legislators to gradually roll back post-Kelo reforms. The public might not even notice what is happening, just as most of them were unaware of the prevalence of Kelo-style takings in many states before the Supreme Court focused a national spotlight on the issue in 2005. A state constitutional amendment can help forestall this kind of gradual erosion of property rights. Unlike some other state constitutions, the Virginia Constitution is relatively difficult to amend. Thus, it will be much harder to roll back a constitutional reform than a purely statutory one.

UPDATE: Richmond Times-Dispatch columnist A. Barton Hinkle has a good column about the proposed Virginia amendment here.

Last year, Zeljka Buturovic and economist Dan Klein published an article showing that political liberals were more likely to be ignorant about several economic issues than libertarian and conservative survey respondents. The study got a lot of media and internet attention.

At the time, I noted that its results were interesting, but also pointed out a possible flaw:

[A]s Buturovic and Klein themselves point out, the Zogby survey they relied on didn’t ask questions about issues where conservative rather than left-wing positions are likely to be at odds with basic economics. For example, I expect that many more conservatives than liberals deny that the War on Drugs creates black markets and violence, believe that immigration is a zero-sum competition for jobs between immigrants and natives, and deny that laws banning prostitution and gambling have various negative economic side-effects (black markets; domination of these activities by organized crime, etc.). Thus, the study doesn’t really allow us to say whether liberals or conservatives are the ones who with the greatest levels of economic ignorance. Survey data shows that ignorance about politics is widespread on both sides of the political spectrum. The same thing is likely to be true of economic ignorance….

People have a strong tendency to reject out of hand any information or argument that cuts against their preexisting political views, and this is especially true of those most committed to their ideology or political party. Unfortunately, voters have strong incentives to be both ignorant about public policy and irrational in their evaluation of the information they do know.

To their credit, the authors conducted a follow-up study that includes questions that challenge conservative and libertarian preconceptions. On those issues, conservative and libertarian respondents do indeed display higher levels of ignorance than liberals, just as I would have predicted. The net result, as Klein explains in this Atlantic article, is that “Consistently, the more a [factually accurate] statement challenged a group’s position, the worse the group did.”

Like political ignorance, economic ignorance is common on all sides of the political spectrum.

UPDATE: In the original post, I accidentally forgot to include a link to Daniel Klein’s new article in the Atlantic. I have now corrected the mistake. Thanks to Klein himself for bringing it to my attention.

Conservative columnist Rich Lowry has an interesting piece on Herman Cain’s ignorance about major public policy:

At a meeting with the editors of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Cain was asked whether he agreed with Pres. Barack Obama’s handling of Libya. You would think he had been asked who is the president of Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan, Cain’s joshing description of a prototypical gotcha foreign-policy question. What ensued was the longest five minutes of an editorial-board meeting ever.

Cain paused. Then he asked for a lifeline by trying to confirm with his questioner that President Obama supported the Libyan uprising. He started to say why he disagreed with Obama, but stopped after realizing, “No, that’s a different one.” He hesitated again. “Got all this stuff twirling around in my head,” he explained.

Cain hadn’t been asked about an obscure conflict or one distant in time. We’re not talking the War of Jenkins’s Ear or the Second Peloponnesian War. He seemed to all but have missed that there had recently been a Libyan War that had taxed the capacities of NATO, created an intense conflict with Congress over presidential war powers, teetered on the brink of failure, and divided conservatives….

His typical answer on national-security questions is that he would consult the experts, a thinly disguised dodge. What if the experts are wrong (as they often are) or disagree (as they often do)? Because Cain has no independent knowledge base or bearings, he would be entirely a creature of others on foreign policy.

It’s not as though he’s a wonk on domestic policy, either. He’s tied himself in knots on abortion, contradicted himself on an electrified border fence, and demonstrated an unfamiliarity with the basics of Medicare policy. Even on his signature issue, 9-9-9, he relies on repetition and assertion more than detailed argument.

It’s easy to find examples of Democratic politicians who demonstrate comparably egregious ignorance. But that does not excuse Cain. If you want to be president of the United States, you should have at least a basic knowledge of the issues the office is responsible for.

One can argue that Cain will simply bone up on the issues after taking office. But any such expectation is highly unrealistic. Presidents work under tremendous time pressure, especially early in their tenure, which is when they have the greatest chance of implementing major changes in policy. There is little time for study at that point. Most of the public policy knowledge a president uses in office is knowledge he brought there with him.

Cain’s defenders could also claim that his ignorance is irrelevant because, once in power, he can just rely on the advice of experts. Obviously, every president must rely on advisers to a great extent. But in order to make effective use of those experts, a president needs to have at least a basic understanding of what they’re talking about. That’s especially true in the many cases where experts disagree and the president has to decide whose advice to follow.

Cain’s shortcomings in this respect are reminiscent of Sarah Palin’s troubles in the 2008 election. There is, however, a crucial difference. Palin didn’t know that she was going to be nominated for VP until shortly before it was announced. Before 2008, she had little incentive to study national issues; as governor of Alaska and mayor of Wasilla, she only needed to be familiar with local and state policy, which by all accounts she knew reasonably well. By contrast, Cain has been running for president for many months, and presumably knew that he was going to enter the race months before then. Moreover, he also ran for a Senate seat back in 2004. So he has had far more opportunity than Palin did to study up on the basics of national public policy issues. The fact that he hasn’t chosen to do so is telling.

As in the case of Palin, there is an important difference between ignorance and stupidity. Cain is a successful business executive, and clearly has more than enough intellectual ability to understand the basics of public policy, including Obama’s Libya policy. The problem is not lack of ability, but lack of effort.

In a recent post, I cited evidence suggesting that the new Egyptian government is degenerating into a military dictatorship at least as bad as the Mubarak regime that was overthrown earlier this year. Jeff Jacoby compiles some additional relevant points:

[T]he “spirit of Tahrir Square’’ has ushered in neither liberal democracy nor a rebirth of tolerance for Egypt’s ancient but beleaguered Christian minority.

One of the country’s leading liberal reformers, Ayman Nour, said Monday that with the latest bloodshed, the military has lost whatever goodwill it accrued last spring. The ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces almost surely doesn’t care. In the eight months since Mubarak’s ouster, the military has tried and convicted some 12,000 Egyptian civilians in military tribunals, often after using torture to extract confessions. The country’s hated emergency laws, which allow suspects to be detained without charge, not only remain in force, but have been expanded to cover offenses as vague as “spreading rumors’’ or “blocking traffic.’’ And just as Mubarak did, the generals insist that government repression is all that stands between Egypt and social chaos.

As for Egypt’s Coptic Christians, their plight has gone from bad to worse. Post-Mubarak Egypt has seen “an explosion of violence against the Coptic Christian community,’’ the international news channel France 24 was reporting as far back as May. “Anger has flared up into deadly riots, and houses, shops, and churches have been set ablaze.’’

With Islamist hardliners growing increasingly influential, hate crimes against Christians routinely go unpunished. Copts, who represent a tenth of Egypt’s population, are subjected to appalling humiliations.

As Jacoby notes, the violence against the Coptic minority appears to enjoy substantial public support. That reality reinforces my longstanding concern that prospects for liberal democracy in Egypt are undercut by the intolerant nature of majority opinion in that country, as well as the superior ruthlessness and organization of antiliberal forces.

When the revolution that eventually overthrew Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak began, I warned that the end result could easily be a government as bad or worse than Mubarak’s was. In a revolutionary situation, liberal democratic forces often get outmaneuvered by more ruthless and better-organized opponents – even if majority public opinion would prefer a liberal regime. In Egypt, I pointed out, the establishment of a repressive regime is made more likely by the fact that public opinion is in may ways extremely illiberal. Unfortunately, this fear has so far been justified by events. As Thanassis Cambanis explains in the Atlantic, the new Egyptian government is well on its way to becoming a military dictatorship in some ways more repressive than Mubarak’s regime:

It’s hard to escape the feeling that Egypt’s January 25 Revolution is being eaten alive. It’s too soon to write it off, and too soon to predict that a full-fledged military dictatorship will rule the country for the foreseeable future; but that grisly outcome now is a solid possibility, perhaps as likely an outcome as a liberal, civilian Egypt or an authoritarian republic.

Eight months after a euphoric wave of people power stunned Egypt’s complacent and abusive elite, it’s possible to see the clear outlines of the players competing to take over from Mubarak and his circle, and to assess the likely outcomes. The scorecard is distasteful. The uprising — it can’t yet be fairly termed a revolution — forced the regime to jettison its CEO, Hosni Mubarak, in order to preserve its own prerogatives.

In the last two months, that regime has made clear how strong it feels. In September, in quick succession the military extended the hated state of emergency for another year, effectively rendering any notion of rule of law in Egypt meaningless; unilaterally published election rules that favor wealthy incumbents and remnants of the old regime, and that disadvantage new, post-Mubarak competitors; indefinitely postponed presidential elections, and refused any timetable for handing over authority to a civilian; reinstated full media censorship, threatening television stations and imposing a gag order on all reporting about the military; and the country’s authoritarian ruler, Field Marshal Mohammed Hussein Tantawi, unleashed a personal public relations campaign on state television odiously reminiscent of Mubarak’s image-making. Furthermore, the government advanced its investigation of “illegal NGOs” that allegedly took foreign money, including virtually every important and independent dissident organization.

Taken together, these moves show a military junta fully confident that it can impose measures of control as harsh — or, in the case of widespread military trials for civilians, harsher — than those employed by Mubarak.

As Cambanis recognizes, the new military rulers have not yet fully consolidated their power. So a more liberal outcome is still possible. But its likelihood is gradually diminishing. Moreover, many of the military government’s opponents are far from being liberal democrats themselves. Some of them are radical Islamists who, if they prevail, would establish a significantly more oppressive government than the generals – especially with respect to women and religious minorities.

Some dictatorships are so bad that their overthrow will almost always be a net positive. The new regime can hardly avoid being a lesser evil than the old when the latter is a totalitarian state and/or engaging in mass murder. Consider such cases as Adolf Hitler or Pol Pot. Mubarak, however, was basically a run of the mill despot who repressed political opponents but was not a totalitarian and did not commit mass murder. The overthrow of that kind of regime often leads to the establishment of a worse one. Such an outcome is also a real danger in Libya, where radical Islamists are among the leaders of the victorious anti-Gadhafi rebels.

Co-blogger David Bernstein is skeptical of reports that fundraisers for Mitt Romney are losing out on Republican Jewish donors because some of the latter are giving to Michele Bachmann instead, based on a mistaken impression that she is Jewish. The reports could well be false or exaggerated. But I am less skeptical about them than David.

Given widespread political ignorance, it would not be surprising if there were many Jews (and non-Jews) who misjudged Bachmann’s ethnicity based on her last name, which does indeed sound vaguely Jewish. In my experience, many Americans (including many Jews) are confused about which names are likely to be Jewish and which ones are not. Many people also underestimate the extent to which non-Jews often have stereotypically Jewish names. For example, many probably don’t realize that there are non-Jewish Rosenbergs, such as the notorious Nazi leader Alfred Rosenberg.

My own last name, Somin, is Jewish in the sense that a Somin is much more likely to be Jewish than the bearer of a random Eastern European name. But there are nonetheless a number of non-Jewish Somins, including one I found on the internet who is an anti-Semitic Russian nationalist. Many people don’t realize that Somin is a Jewish name at all. Some of those who do know tend to assume that all Somins must be Jewish.

To be sure, as David suggests, an experienced Republican Jewish donor is unlikely to be confused about Bachmann. But the Romney campaign, which has an extensive organization that dates back to the last election cycle, could well be reaching out to smaller donors who are not as knowledgeable. They may include first-time contributors who only recently became interested in Republican politics. Given strict contribution limits of $2500 per person, many campaigns try to find small donors who can give a few hundred dollars each. Such people are often not as well-informed as longtime activists and major donors, and could easily be confused about Bachmann’s background because of her name.

In the wake of a massive hurricane that has caused considerable damage and loss of life in several states, it’s worth asking how well democratic governments handle natural disasters. In this recent post, I summarized evidence showing that democracies generally handle disasters much better than dictatorships (even after controlling for a society’s wealth). Elected office-holders know that a large loss of life might lead to retribution at the polls, and act accordingly. Dictators have much weaker incentives to protect their people in such situations.

However, I also explain how political ignorance makes disaster policy less effective than it might be otherwise. “Rationally ignorant” voters over-reward disaster relief spending and under-reward disaster prevention spending, even though the latter is demonstrably more effective. They also give politicians insufficient incentives to prepare for very rare but extremely devastating disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina and the massive earthquake that hit Japan earlier this year.

In 1980, one of the major party presidential nominees opened his general election by delivering a speech in a small town in the Deep South that just by coincidence happened to be the national headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan. That same candidate had previously complained about federal housing policies which attempted “to inject black families into a white neighborhood just to create some sort of integration.” He argued that there was “nothing wrong with ethnic purity being maintained.” That candidate was President Jimmy Carter, the Democratic nominee.

Carter kicked off his general election campaign with a speech in Tuscumbia, Alabama. Although the Klan’s headquarters were located in that small town, Carter was not appealing to the Klan vote, but was instead hoping to win the votes of the more than 40,000 people who saw him speak at the town’s annual Labor Day fair. Perhaps Carter chose to start his general election campaign in rural Alabama because he recognized that Reagan might take away some of the southern states that had been crucial to Carter’s win in 1976. As things turned out, Carter was right to be concerned; he ended up losing Alabama by 1%.

After the Republicans nominated Ronald Reagan in Detroit in July, he gave his first post-convention speech in New Jersey, near the Statue of Liberty. While the informal opening date of the general election campaign is traditionally Labor Day, Reagan continued to campaign during August, and on August 3, 1980, spoke at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi. The Neshoba Fair is large and popular, which probably explains why Democratic Senator John Glenn campaigned there in 1983, when seeking the presidential nomination, and why Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis spoke there during the 1988 general election campaign, shortly after being nominated by the Democratic Convention.

Seven miles away from the fairgrounds is the town of Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. Unfortunately, it would be difficult to find many places in Alabama or Mississippi which are not within seven miles of the scene of some infamous past act of racial violence, such as a lynching.

Reagan’s Neshoba speech was 33 paragraphs, consisting almost entirely of remarks about economics and jokes about Jimmy Carter. In the middle of the speech, he discussed his experience with welfare reform as Governor of California. He began by rebutting the idea that people on welfare are lazy and don’t want to work. To the contrary, said Reagan, they were just trapped by bureaucracy. Welfare, education, and other programs would work better for their beneficiaries if they were managed by state and local governments, rather than federally:

“I don’t believe stereotype after what we did, of people in need who are there simply because they prefer to be there. We found the overwhelming majority would like nothing better than to be out, with jobs for the future, and out here in the society with the rest of us. The trouble is, again, that bureaucracy has them so economically trapped that there is no way they can get away. And they’re trapped because that bureaucracy needs them as a clientele to preserve the jobs of the bureaucrats themselves.

“I believe that there are programs like that, programs like education and others, that should be turned back to the states and the local communities with the tax sources to fund them, and let the people [applause drowns out end of statement].

“I  believe  in  state’s  rights; I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level. And I believe that we’ve distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the constitution to that federal establishment. And if I do get the job I’m looking for, I’m going to devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there.”

A rather mainstream sentiment, even if some devotees of federal centralization might disagree with it. Indeed, the bipartisan welfare reform law signed by President Clinton carried out Reagan’s vision, by returning much of the control of federal welfare programs to the states.

Some ignorant people claim that “state’s rights” is just a euphemism for racism. The phrase certainly has been sometimes been misused that way, but it is false to claim that the phrase is necessarily racist. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) introduced the “States’ Rights to Medical Marijuana Act” in the 107th, 108th, and 109th Congresses.

Reagan ended up winning Mississippi by 1.4% of the vote. Both Reagan and Carter were politically smart to take the opportunity to speak before large audiences in the rural South in states where the election would be close. It would be false to say that Carter was appealing to racists because he kicked off his campaign in a town that was the current home of the Ku Klux Klan, and it would be equally false to say that Reagan was appealing to racists because he mentioned his lifelong theme of state’s rights at a county fair several miles away from the site of an infamous crime 16 years earlier. Today, columnists and commentators who tell you that the ”kick off” for Reagan’s general election campaign was an appeal to racists are demonstrating that they don’t bother to check the facts before they make extreme allegations. People who are making coded appeals to racism don’t tell their audience that the “stereotype” of welfare recipients is wrong,  and that “the overwhelming majority” of them want to work.

The recent controversial acquittal of Casey Anthony has stimulated efforts in many states to enact “Caylee’s Law” as a response. The law would require parents to report a missing child to the authorities within 24 hours, and the death of a child within 1 hour. If they fail to do either, they would be guilty of a felony (a federal one if the law is enacted by Congress).

Radley Balko has a good column explaining the many shortcomings of this idea. As he points out, high-profile criminal cases often stimulate demands for ill-advised laws, even when the case in question is extremely atypical:

Laws named after crime victims and dead people are usually a bad idea. They play more to emotion than reason. But they’re disturbingly predictable, especially when they come after the death of a child. ….

There are myriad other problems with the one-hour requirement. What if a child dies while sleeping? When would you start the clock on the parent’s one-hour window to report? From the time the parent discovers the child is dead, or from the time the child actually dies? If it’s the former, can you really believe what a parent tells you if he knows a felony charge hinges on his answer? What if a parent or babysitter missed the deadline because she fell asleep at the time the child was playing outside and suffered a fatal accident?…

The portion of the bill that requires a parent to report a missing child within 24 hours is just as fraught with problems. When does that clock start? From the time the child actually gets abducted, gets lost, or is somehow killed, or at the time the parents noticed the child was missing? How do you pinpoint the time that they “noticed”?….

The law and the attention it attracts could also cause problems of overcompliance. How many parents will notify the authorities with false reports within an hour or two, out of fear of becoming suspects? How many such calls and wasted police resources on false alarms will it take before police grow jaded and begin taking note of missing child reports, but don’t bother investigating them until much later? How many legitimate abductions will then go uninvestigated during the critical first few hours because they were lost in the pile of false reports inspired by Caylee’s Law?

This is not the first time that a highly unusual but much-publicized case has led to this kind of overreaction. Consider the dubious “zero tolerance” policies enacted after Columbine or Megan’s Law, enacted in reaction to a rare case of child rape by a stranger.

Why are these laws so popular with voters? Part of the explanation is an understandable sympathy with the victims. But a logical and knowledgeable electorate would still ask serious questions about the potential costs and benefits of the proposed laws before supporting them – especially if, as in this case, the proposed law might actually undercut crime-fighting efforts by wasting law enforcement resources. The very rare parents who deliberately kill their children and then try to cover up the evidence are unlikely to report what happened merely because of this law. A conviction for murder is a much greater threat than a conviction for violating Caylee’s Law, unless the punishments for the latter are going to be truly draconian (which would be problematic in its own right). On the other hand, lots of innocent parents will probably file reports just to avoid even a slight risk of prosecution, thereby burdening law enforcement agencies with lots of useless paperwork and false leads.

It seems likely that political ignorance is an important part of the story here. The public sees the high-profile case, and has a knee-jerk desire to “do something about it.” Most voters don’t realize how rare such cases are, and also know very little about the potential downsides of proposals like these. And, because political ignorance is rational, few will take the time and effort to investigate the evidence and deliberate carefully before forming an opinion. For their part, politicians hungry for votes and activists hungry for media attention are more than willing to cater to the public’s demands.

It’s unrealistic to expect rationally ignorant voters to devote significant time and effort to studying proposals like Caylee’s Law. But they should at least adopt Ted Frank’s Law as a helpful heuristic:

My rule of thumb is a strong presumption that any law named after a victim is poor public policy enacted by legislators who confuse voting against a law with voting against an innocent person…

Ted’s rule isn’t perfect. Once in a blue moon, a law named after an atypical but highly publicized crime victim really will do more good than harm. But it’s likely to be correct a lot more often than not. Indeed, Frank’s Law is so logical and simple that one wonders why most voters haven’t adopted it already. Sadly, the answer may be that it’s rational for ignorant voters to do a poor job of evaluating the information they do have. In the wake of a terrible tragedy, it’s much more emotionally satisfying to call for decisive action to save the next Caylee Anthony than to hold back on the grounds that there may be nothing we can do.

UPDATE: Ted Frank has some thoughts of his own on Caylee’s Law here.

UPDATE #2: Maia Szalavitz of Time has some further information on the flaws of Caylee’s law and the harm caused by past laws enacted under similar circumstances.

Inspired by Bryan Caplan’s ideological Turing Test, atheist blogger Leah Libresco proposes a religious Turing test to measure the extent to which Christians and atheists understand the arguments of the other side [HT: Bryan Caplan]:

Just like Caplan, I’d like to put my money where my mouth is and play in an ideological Turing Test against a Christian blogger. We could both answer a selection of questions posed by Christians and atheists or we could each write an argument for and against the side we support and then briefly rebut the two arguments the other one had produced. I’m flexible and open to suggestions.

Debates over religion have many parallels to political debates. Public ignorance about religion is almost as widespread as political ignorance. And most people react in a highly biased way to evidence and arguments that go against their position on either subject.

A religious Turing test, however, poses challenges that a political one does not. Liberalism, conservatism, and libertarianism are rough equivalents of each other in as much as all of them are ideologies that try to delineate the appropriate role of political power in society. Atheism on the other hand isn’t really an equivalent of Christianity in the same sense. Atheism is just denial of the existence of God; it is not a comprehensive moral system. That’s why thinkers as divergent as Ayn Rand and Karl Marx could both be atheists. By contrast, Christianity goes far beyond merely asserting that God exists. It also incorporates many other theological doctrines (e.g. – that Jesus Christ is the son of God), and various ethical commands. The same goes for Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and many other religions. Thus, simulating a Christian who is well-informed about the arguments for his religious views is a tougher challenge than simulating an atheist who is comparably knowledgeable about atheism. Christianity covers a much wider range of issues than atheism does.

Nonetheless, last year’s Pew survey of public knowledge of religion suggests that atheists and agnostics are, on average, more knowledgeable about religious doctrine than theists. Atheists and agnostics (an average of 6.7 correct answers out of 12) even outscored Christians (6.0) on questions that specifically tested knowledge of Christianity. Though it’s also fair to note that some subsets of Christians such as Mormons (7.9) and white evangelicals (7.3) did better than the atheists and agnostics did. Mormons (20.3 correct answers out of 32) also achieved a statistical dead heat with atheists (20.9) on the overall survey, as did Jews (20.5). I speculated on the reasons for these groups’ relatively high knowledge levels here.

Knowledge of basic facts about religion is not the same thing as knowledge of more detailed arguments for and against various religious claims. I think I understand the most basic tenets of Christianity (the kind of information covered in the Pew survey). But I know very little about the arguments for them that Christian theologians have developed (with the partial exception of arguments for the existence of God). Libresco’s proposal might give us some evidence on the extent to which atheists and Christian’s understand their opponents’ more in-depth arguments; though obviously it would be a mistake to generalize too much from one small-N study. She reports that at least two Christians have expressed interest in participating in her experiment. So stay tuned.

UPDATE: Libresco describes the details of her experiment in this follow-up post.

UPDATE #2: Obviously, as in the case of political ideologies such as liberalism and libertarianism, there is a good deal of internal diversity among Christians. For example, there are significant theological differences between Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox Christians, and also between theological conservatives and liberals within each of these groups. That further complicates the the task of the Turing simulator. There is also some diversity among atheists as well, though perhaps less than among Christians because atheism, as such, covers fewer questions than Christianity does.

Reactions to my attempt to take Bryan Caplan’s ideological Turing test by simulating liberal arguments varied widely. But, on the whole, more people thought I missed the mark than that I hit it. What caused this relative failure?

Part of the problem was that it wasn’t a true Turing test at all. In the original version of the test, a computer tries to fool people into thinking that it’s actually human. The test audience doesn’t know ahead of time that they’re dealing with a computer. In this case, the audience did know ahead of time that I’m a libertarian, and so were more on their guard. It would be interesting to repeat the experiment under controlled conditions that do allow a true Turing test.

Second, I did not employ much of the aggressive rhetoric against libertarians and conservatives that many actual liberals use. For example, I didn’t say that free market advocates are mostly just apologists for corporate interests, or that the market itself is just a tool for the rich to exploit the poor. Instead, I tried to outline standard, moderately sophisticated, liberal arguments for why government intervention is needed to solve major social problems such as market failures, poverty, and injustices against women and minority groups. The rhetorical style I employed was pretty similar to that which I use in my posts defending my own views. My approach to defending libertarianism is closer to David Friedman’s than Murray Rothbard’s. Aggressive rhetoric mostly appeals to those who already agree with your argument, and tends to turn off those who don’t. The degree of rhetorical aggressiveness that bloggers use varies within ideologies more than across them. Some liberal bloggers are relatively restrained in their rhetoric; others are not. The same goes for conservatives and libertarians.

For similar reasons, I spent a significant part of my post forestalling standard objections to the position I was defending. I do the same thing in most of my pro-libertarian posts. You can’t defend a position effectively if you don’t deal with obvious objections. And since part of the goal of the exercise was to demonstrate my understanding of liberal arguments, I needed to also demonstrate my understanding of their responses to opposing views.

Be that as it may, willingness to use tough rhetoric against opponents is one of the hallmarks of a true believer in any ideology. A writer who avoids it is less likely to be viewed as authentic. Not everyone with strong views is also rhetorically aggressive. But, on average, the stronger and more deeply felt your ideological commitments, the more likely you are to engage in rhetorical attacks – or even to see these attacks as reflections of a deeper truth rather than rhetorical excesses.

Third, one can certainly question whether I made the right choice of issues. I chose market failure, poverty, and discrimination in large part because of the importance of these questions, and their centrality to modern left-wing thought. But I admit that I also chose them in part because I think they are issues where the left has a relatively strong case, though still one I largely disagree with. For example, I focused on absolute poverty rather than income inequality in part because I think the liberal argument on the former issue is a lot stronger. Obviously, many liberals might disagree with my judgment on what issues are most important, and where the liberal case is at its strongest. Indeed, they disagree about these matters among themselves as well as with me.

Finally, my post did not do justice to the different varieties of liberal thought. In framing my arguments, I implicitly channeled a liberal with a significant utilitarian streak, and one who is knowledgeable about and receptive to mainstream economics. In other words, a liberal who is in many respects similar to economist Paul Krugman, who kicked off this discussion. Utilitarian consequentialism and mainstream economics are important elements of modern liberal thought. But they’re not the only elements, and there are many liberals who reject them in whole or in part.

It’s also fair to observe, as some commenters did, that my implicit liberal is also the type most similar to me. I too have a significant utilitarian streak, and draw a lot on mainstream economics. I could have tried to simulate a liberal with radically different values and methodological assumptions (e.g. -a left-wing communitarian who thinks that mainstream economics is vastly overrated). But I admit it would have been a tougher task. Nonetheless, it would be wrong to assume that the liberal I simulated was just a slightly more left-wing version of me. Although we may share some common values and methodological assumptions, he still favors a vastly larger role for government than I do. It’s roughly the difference between a society where government spending and regulation accounts for about 10% of GDP and one where the state spends 50% or more and regulates a much wider range of activities.

Notice that a liberal or conservative trying to simulate a libertarian would face similar challenges. Should he model a deontological natural rights advocate like Robert Nozick or a consequentialist who thinks that free markets are better than government at maximizing utility (e.g. David Friedman)? Should he choose an Austrian economist who rejects mainstream economics or a neoclassical scholar who accepts it? Whichever decision the simulator makes, there will be some libertarians who can argue that he didn’t represent their views correctly.

For all of the above reasons, and perhaps others, my attempt at the ideological Turing test wasn’t especially successful. But I think it was still a useful exercise. Future attempts can avoid the mistakes I made by doing a true Turing test, and by specifying more precisely what kind of ideological opponent they are trying to simulate.

In this post, I’m going to take Bryan Caplan’s ideological Turing Test, which requires me to “simulate” an advocate of an ideology I oppose. In this case, I’m going to simulate an advocate of liberalism and focus on issues where liberals and libertarians disagree. And I’m going to try simulate an advocate who is reasonably intelligent and reasonably knowledgeable about the relevant issues. Anyone can caricature an opponent who is ignorant or stupid.

Here goes:

The free market is well and good in its proper place. But libertarians and many conservatives are wrong to advocate total laissez-faire. They indefensibly ignore or downplay market failures, the plight of the poor, and historic injustices against women and minorities. Let’s take each of these points in turn.

I. Market Failures.

A pure free market might work well in a world where there was perfect competition, perfect information, and zero transaction costs. In the real world, however, we have market failures such as public goods problems, externalities, asymmetric information and monopoly. Contrary to what some libertarians and conservatives seem to think, we progressives don’t claim that government can correct all such market failures. But it’s foolish to deny that it can correct some of them, perhaps a great many. For example, the evidence clearly shows that the Clean Air Act has greatly reduced air pollution, which the market could not have done on its own because clean air is a classic example of a public good. There are many similar cases.

It’s true that government will sometimes do a poor job of addressing market failures, or even make the situation worse. But that’s why we have the democratic process. If political leaders are failing at correcting market failure, the voters can “throw the bums out.” That’s what they did to the Republicans in 2008, after the GOP allowed market failures to cause a terrible financial crisis. Sometimes, the voters make mistakes out of ignorance (e.g. – in 2010). But in the long run, they are fairly effective at incentivizing political leaders to do a good job of correcting the deficiencies of the market. And democracy would work even better if we had stronger campaign finance laws to prevent the will of the people from being overriden by corporate lobbying and campaign contributions.

Where necessary, we can rely on judicial review to correct some of the flaws of the democratic process, and ensure that everyone has a right to participate. We need some structural safeguards to keep the “tyranny of the majority” from oppressing unpopular minority groups and violating basic rights. In general, however, democratic government is the best answer to market failure.

II. The Problem of Poverty.

In a free market, your ability to acquire goods and services is ultimately determined by your wealth. Money talks. This puts the poor at a serious disadvantage. They don’t have nearly as much purchasing power as the rich. The very poorest often have trouble even acquiring basic necessities. Private charity helps matters somewhat. But there’s far too many poor people for it to even come close to solving the problem. If we want to give the poor a minimally decent life, government-imposed redistribution is the only way to do it.

It may be true that a poorly designed welfare system will incentivize able-bodied people to stay on the dole rather than work. But the right is wrong to assume that we can only solve this problem by abolishing the welfare state or severely limiting it. We should instead make work attractive by subsidizing the working poor through policies such as the earned income tax credit, the minimum wage, and government-provided health insurance. That way, those able to work will still have incentives to get a job, even with generous welfare provision for the unemployed. Ultimately, however, it’s more important to save the poor from misery and starvation than to have a perfectly efficient labor market for low-income workers. A society as wealthy as ours can easily afford this trade-off.

III. Addressing Historic Injustices.

The case for the free market would be stronger if we did not live in a world where some groups are handicapped by massive historic injustices such as the legacy of slavery, segregation, and centuries of sexism that reduced women to the status of second-class citizens. As Lyndon Johnson put it, “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.” Programs like affirmative action are needed to compensate women and minority groups for the effects of centuries of oppression and discrimination.

Moreover, sometimes we need large-scale government intervention simply to stop the oppression in the first place. Very little progress was made in ending discrimination against African-Americans until the federal government passed the civil rights legislation of the 1960s and began to enforce it aggressively. Similarly, extensive federal regulation such as Title VII and Title IX was needed to begin to curb discrimination against women. Today, we need continued regulation to guard against the racism and sexism that still remains, and to eliminate the harm caused by homophobia.

OK, I think that’s enough channeling of my inner liberal for one post. How did I do on the Turing Test?

UPDATE: Some of the commenters seem to be misunderstanding what I was doing here. I was trying to outline the arguments of a reasonably knowledgeable and intelligent liberal on several key issues. I was not trying to simply imitate liberal political talking points or sound bites. That’s why I tried to make substantive arguments and respond to opposing views, instead of simply repeat slogans. Krugman’s original point, after all, was that opponents of liberalism don’t understand liberal arguments, not that they can’t repeat liberal rhetoric. Other commenters object to the use of terminology from economics, such as “market failure,” which they see as somehow biased towards libertarianism. In reality, however, the majority of economists are liberal Democrats, and terms such as “market failure” were introduced by left of center economists to explain why various forms of government intervention are needed. Finally, some people complain that I omitted various issues and arguments (e.g. – income inequality in addition to absolute poverty). That’s true enough. I could have written a much longer post that covered many more points. However, turning a blog post into a lengthy article is rarely a good idea.

In a recent interview, Paul Krugman argued that liberals generally understand conservative arguments better than vice versa:

A liberal can talk coherently about what the conservative view is because people like me actually do listen. We don’t think it’s right, but we pay enough attention to see what the other person is trying to get at. The reverse is not true. You try to get someone who is fiercely anti-Keynesian to even explain what a Keynesian economic argument is, they can’t do it. They can’t get it remotely right. Or if you ask a conservative, “What do liberals want?” You get this bizarre stuff – for example, that liberals want everybody to ride trains, because it makes people more susceptible to collectivism. You just have to look at the realities of the way each side talks and what they know. One side of the picture is open-minded and sceptical. We have views that are different, but they’re arrived at through paying attention. The other side has dogmatic views.

Bryan Caplan responds:

In a Turing Test, a computer tries to pass for human….

According to Krugman, liberals have the ability to simulate conservatives, but conservatives lack the ability to simulate liberals….

It’s not a perfect criterion, of course, especially for highly idiosyncratic views. But the ability to pass ideological Turing tests – to state opposing views as clearly and persuasively as their proponents – is a genuine symptom of objectivity and wisdom….

There are important caveats….. we should compare liberal intellectuals to non-liberal intellectuals, and liberal entertainers to non-liberal entertainers, not say Krugman to Beck….

If we limit our sample to Ph.D.s from top-10 social science programs, I don’t see how Krugman could be right. You can’t get a Ph.D. from Princeton econ without acquiring basic familiarity with market failure arguments and Keynesian macro. At least you couldn’t when I was a student there in the 90s. In contrast, it’s easy to get a Ph.D. from Princeton econ without even learning the key differences between conservatism and libertarianism, much less their main arguments… And frankly, it shows….

Indeed, I’ll happily bet that any libertarian with a Ph.D. from a top-10 social science program can fool more voters than Krugman. We learn his worldview as part of the curriculum. He learns ours in his spare time – if he chooses to spare it.

I tend to agree with Bryan. On average, non-liberal scholars and intellectuals know more about liberalism than their liberal counterparts know about libertarianism and conservatism. That’s because the non-liberals are usually surrounded by people with liberal views, and those views are extensively covered in the curriculum of nearly all top colleges and graduate schools. By contrast, it’s easier for liberal intellectuals to ignore non-liberal arguments or at least devote little time and effort to understanding them.

Outside the intellectual world, both liberals and non-liberals often have little knowledge of their opponents’ arguments. But that’s just part of the more general problem of widespread political ignorance. Indeed, a close-minded attitude to opposing views is a general facet of the way most people approach politics. It’s not a problem unique to either liberals or their adversaries.

But, as Bryan says, the proof is in the pudding. In my next post, I will take the ideological Turing test myself, and readers can judge how I do.