Keeping up with the FITs, 12/6
Robert Wright on global public goods; Matt Yglesias on state capacity and policing; Twitter, Dorsey, and speech; Bryan Caplan's deregulation platform
Robert Wright writes that many problems involve
a correlation among the fates of different countries. A low vax rate in an African country is bad not just for that country but for countries in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. A higher vax rate, similarly, is good for those countries.
This correlation of fortunes means that we’re talking about a non-zero-sum problem, a problem that can have a win-win outcome or a lose-lose outcome—depending, typically, on whether the players (nations in this case) wise up and work together on a solution.
For a number of reasons, there are a lot more “public goods” problems in modern life. We live closer together. Intangible assets create more complexity and more ambiguity with respect to ownership. (There is a forthcoming book by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake on this.) But I don’t think that we can add to state capacity simply by exhorting our leaders to rise to the occasion. Go back to my recent podcast with Russ Roberts.
Matt Yglesias also highlights the lack of state capacity for dealing with pandemics.
We were too slow to roll out tests, then too slow to make rapid tests widely available. We haven’t developed more generic tests that could be used against any virus. We invented great vaccines but couldn’t manufacture them fast enough, and it looks like we’re about to go through the same loop on anti-viral medications. All this science is really cool, but we’ve failed to bring it to bear in the highest-impact possible way.
On policing, Matt writes,
while the practice of surging cops into a high-crime area to frisk a bunch of people does seem to reduce crime, there is basically no evidence that the actual frisking plays a useful role. All the causal work in crime reduction is likely achieved simply through the officers’ presence.
Mike Solana mourns the resignation of Jack Dorsey from Twitter.
it is worth noting that Twitter has already updated its content policy in a manner that effectively makes citizen journalism impossible. Things will only get worse. There is perhaps more Jack could have done before he left, but I think we’re all about to realize just how much he was doing, quietly, in stewardship over a power he was wise enough to fear, and good enough not to use.
Matt Taibbi offers similar thoughts. I would say that in general, business founders are mission-driven. Their successors are status-driven. A founder will stand up to pressure in order to pursue his goals. A successor will cave.
Megan McArdle’s take is closer to mine.
Twitter’s stock-in-trade is misery. Mind you, that’s not the company’s exclusive line; the service does have its heartwarming moments. But the main attraction is its firehose feed of awfulness: Terrible news. Viral outrages. Mobs calling for the sacking of some distant stranger. Performative “dunking” on political enemies by people who appear to be reliving middle school.
Noah Smith claims that this is fixable. Instead, I have my own idea for how to fix it: tell everyone who tweets to go back to blogging.
Sadly, many highly-credentialed people think highly of Twitter. But Megan makes the point that it’s easier to get people addicted to rage than to get them to pay for it.
I also appreciate Megan writing this:
during the Trump era, my industry did very well off of an endless stream of outrage-of-the-day pieces. The prose might have been a little more sober, and the reporting a lot deeper, than those of the click farms, but we were feeding the same basic appetites, and not necessarily more nutritiously.
Bryan Caplan thinks someone could run on these:
A politician today could loudly promise lots of deregulation – and win. Furthermore, he could fulfill his promises – and win again. Topping the list of potentially popular deregulation:
1. An immediate end to all Covid rules. No more mask mandates – not in schools, not in airports, not on planes. No more distancing. No more Covid tests. No more travel restrictions on anyone. (The “anyone” phrasing is how you free foreigners, as well as natives, without calling attention to the fact).
2. An immediate end to all government Covid propaganda. No more looping audio warnings at airports. No more signs or stickers. Indeed, a national campaign to tear down all the propaganda that’s been uglifying the country for almost two years.
3. A radical and immediate reduction in airport security theater. End the rules that require the removal of shoes, jackets, and belts. End the rules that require you to remove electronic devices from your bags for extra screening. End the rules against travelling with liquids. Switch back to old-fashioned metal detectors instead of body scanners.
He has more. The question I have is whether Fear Of Others’ Liberty is more motivating to voters. That is, even if the people who bemoan TSA screening rules outnumber the people who appreciate them, you might suffer a net loss of votes from deregulating if the pro-screening folks feel more strongly about the issue.
The trouble with running on any deregulation campaign is that a lot of things people whine about have big differences between stated preferences and revealed preferences. One example is daylight savings, which everybody loves whines about in semiannual national ritual, but really it's no big deal and everybody just gets on with their lives.
TSA screening is also a good example. There are systems like PreCheck, Global Entry, and CLEAR that are relatively cheap and quick to get and which allow one to avoid a certain amount of the annoyance, frustration, and delay of the typical airport security experience. The cost of flights being what they are, these pay off even for people who travel by air only occasionally, and even when they place a relatively low value on the marginal gain in convenience.
And yet, in reality, only about 10 million people are signed up with PreCheck, there was hardly any rush to the program as it took six years to reach even that small fraction of the overall flying population, and while it's not quite clear, it seems that a large number of those who signed up only have it because their workplace sponsors it for them (as mine does for me), which is something the US government has been specifically lobbying its own agencies and a lot of large private employers to do for a long time, in an effort to bootstrap the popular adoption of these programs. Is there any better indicator for how strongly (i.e., weakly) people actually value avoiding some TSA security than that the government has to make constant, active efforts to encourage them to incur small costs to avoid it?
Of course one has to go through some kind of similar security experience to get in many government buildings and public events, and while people will also whine about it, there doesn't seem to be any significant pent-up demand of people who would go to these events but for the obnoxiousness of the security process. Maybe when it all just started, but now everyone has gotten used to it.
The point is that Bryan Caplan of all people should know perfectly well that you just can't take people's public complaining seriously and at face value in terms of accurately reflecting strong internal motivations that could be harnessed in some kind of electoral campaign messaging strategy.
"there is basically no evidence that the actual frisking plays a useful role. All the causal work in crime reduction is likely achieved simply through the officers’ presence."
Lol, this seems false, but if this were actually true and Yglesias really believed it, then it's probably the strongest argument *against* gun control that a progressive has penned in the last decade.
Unless you are assuming really crazy things like there would be no actual difference in the number of criminal-types carrying concealed handguns between a frisking vs. no-frisking scenario, then what you are saying is that neither the number of weapons nor the fact that people are carrying them in public in concealed ways has *any impact whatsoever* on crime levels or public safety. Even the NRA might not be so brazen.
If that was accepted as true by a court, then you couldn't even pass rational-basis review of any of the usual firearm restrictions, let alone the intermediate or strict scrutiny thresholds one usually has to meet to override Constitutional rights.