If Mayors Ruled The World
Here’s a fascinating new talk given by Benjamin Barber at the Long Now Foundation on the city as the ideal political unit for democracy. From the intro:
Democracy began in cities and works best in cities. Mayors are the most pragmatic and effective of all political leaders because they have to get things done….Most of humanity now lives in cities, and cities worldwide connect with each other more readily than any other political entity. By expanding on that capability, Barber suggests, “Cities can make themselves global guarantors of social justice and equality against the depredations of fractious states. And they can become, as the polis once was, new incubators of democracy, this time in a global form.”
If Angels Were To Govern Men…Wait, What About Devils?
In the Atlantic, “The Startling Accuracy of Referring to Politicians as ‘Psychopaths‘”:
Psychopathy is a psychological condition based on well-established diagnostic criteria, which include lack of remorse and empathy, a sense of grandiosity, superficial charm, conning and manipulative behavior, and refusal to take responsibility for one’s actions, among others. Psychopaths are not all the same; particular aspects may predominate in different people. And, although some psychopaths are violent men (and women) with long criminal histories, not all are. It’s important to understand that psychopathic behavior and affect exist on a continuum; there are those who fall into the grey area between “normal” people and true psychopaths.
The question, then, is whether it is reasonable to believe that people with serious abnormalities in the way they interact with the world can be found running for (and winning) office. However unsettling as this may be, the answer seems to be yes. It’s possible for psychopaths to be found anywhere — including city hall or Washington, D.C. Remember, psychopaths are not delusional or psychotic; in fact, two of the hallmarks of psychopathy are a calculating mind and a seemingly easy charm.
Aware of the dangers of vaulting ambition mixing with power, James Madison famously wrote:
Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.
I wonder if, in the future, there were a neurological test for psychopathy, would this be an acceptable “auxiliary precaution” to filter out candidates for office?
Why worry about political labels?
Governing systems are an important element of the infrastructure for human progress. Your short-term personal well-being turns out to heavily depend on which side of imaginary political boundary lines you live on. Invisible lines also seem to matter significantly for long-term technological innovation.
So designing better governing systems is a passion of mine, and designing better ecosystems for the growth and experimentation with governing systems is even more important.
That’s why I worry about political labels and even made up a new one, “Structuralism”. Labels, despite their bad reputation, are useful. They can be used to frame political debates and determine which issues are treated with urgency and importance.
For example, one of the most heated American political debates in the last decade is the question of whether the top marginal income tax rate should be 35% or 39%. From the way partisans talk about it, you would think a 4% tax rise an event of importance on par with the barbarian sack of Rome, with the roles of axe-wielding barbarian and last guardian of civilization switched between 35-percenters and 39-percenters depending on which area of the country you live in. I have no doubt that other countries have their own urgent trivia.
The use of traditional political labels like “liberal”, “conservative”, or “libertarian” keep political energy focused on bloody partisan trench warfare and online reputation management over tiny policy differences. No energy is left for the far more important task of improving the political infrastructure. New labels can change that.
Shaking Things Up in New Orleans
When hurrican Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005 much of the city was wiped out. In the chaos following the disaster the population dropped in half. Even in 2012, the city is only back to 80% of its former size.
But there was a bright spot in all the bad news. The city was decimated, but so was the city government. This provided an opportunity for the government to improve, as predicted by Mancur Olson’s theory of institutional sclerosis.
Olson’s theory predicts that governments affected by a disaster will develop better institutions afterwards and prosper for awhile. The mechanism behind this effect is “institutional sclerosis”. As a political unit is stable over time, it accumulates more laws and institutions designed for the benefit of special interests at the expense of the general interest. Gradually, economic growth is choked off as public resources are siphoned to special interests. Furthermore, the problem becomes harder to fix over time, since more people reaping benefits from bad laws means a larger population incentivized to fight reforms. Disasters function like pushing a giant reset button, giving political units a chance to change their calcified institutions as old interest groups are thrown into disarray.
The New Orleans school system was a typical failing impoverished inner city district prior to the hurricane. Following the hurricane, the city government was hard pressed to find staff to keep the schools open. So they outsourced school management to charter school companies, tearing up the old school union contracts and firing thousands of tenured incumbent school teachers in the process. The results have been encouraging:
Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Sunday that 2005’s Hurricane Katrina was “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans,” since it forced the failing school system to start over from scratch.
“I think the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina,” Duncan said. “That education system was a disaster, and it took Hurricane Katrina to wake up the community to say that ‘we have to do better.’ And the progress that they’ve made in four years since the hurricane is unbelievable. They have a chance to create a phenomenal school district.
80% of students now attend charters in New Orleans, by far the largest experiment in charter schools in the country. The rate of “failing” schools in the district by state standards has fallen in half, from over two-thirds to under a third. Graduation rates have improved by 20%. And test scores are up:
“The share of students proficient on state tests rose from 35 percent in 2005 to 56 percent in 2011; 40 percent of students attended schools identified by the state as “academically unacceptable” in 2011, down from 78 percent in 2005.”
Could this have happened through gradual reform of the old system? Experience tells us that it’s not very likely. Entrenched bureaucracies are effective at fighting reforms that threaten their interests .
While the future looks bright for New Orleans schools, in an ideal world we wouldn’t have to wait for horrible, deadly disasters to make beneficial changes to political structures. That’s why I seek ways to inject more dynamism into political meta-systems, and I advocate the introduction of benign, artificial instability by shaking up traditional boundary lines to prevent the gradual sclerosis of stable political systems.
The Great American Decoupling
Location, location, location–an emerging trend in the American labor market is the increasing pull cities have, particularly for high-skilled workers. As the cost of employing people in a city rises, you might think it would make more sense to relocate to a relatively inexpensive location to lower costs. Over time, incomes and productivity across the country would converge. But nowadays for companies that rely on creativity and networks, density matters more and more. You need access to deep pools of talent and capital. You need new ideas born in the crucible of a city’s churn.
We are starting to see more dynamic hubs decouple from the rest of country. Convergence becoming a thing of the past. Writing at Bloomberg, Virginia Postrel has a good piece on what this means and how housing policies have played a harmful role:
The key to convergence was never just mobile capital. It was also mobile labor. But the promise of a better life that once drew people of all backgrounds to rich places such as New York and California now applies only to an educated elite — because rich places have made housing prohibitively expensive. (Shoag and Ganong visualized these changes in a series of excellent animated graphics.)
The states with the highest incomes also used to have the fastest-growing populations, as Americans moved to the places where they could earn the most money. Over time, that movement narrowed geographic income differences. In 1940, per-capita income in Connecticut was more than four times that in Mississippi. By 1980, Connecticut was still much richer, but the difference was only 76 percent. In the two decades after World War II, Shoag and Ganong find, migration explains about a third of the convergence of average incomes across states.
But migration patterns changed after 1980. “Instead of moving to rich places, like San Francisco or New York or Boston, the population growth is happening in mid-range places like Phoenix or Florida,” Shoag says. Lower-skilled people, defined as those with less than 16 years of education, are actually moving away from high-income states…
As I have argued elsewhere, there are two competing models of successful American cities. One encourages a growing population, fosters a middle-class, family-centered lifestyle, and liberally permits new housing. It used to be the norm nationally, and it still predominates in the South and Southwest. The other favors long-term residents, attracts highly productive, work-driven people, focuses on aesthetic amenities, and makes it difficult to build. It prevails on the West Coast, in the Northeast and in picturesque cities such as Boulder, Colorado and Santa Fe, New Mexico. The first model spurs income convergence, the second spurs economic segregation. Both create cities that people find desirable to live in, but they attract different sorts of residents.
This segregation has social and political consequences, as it shapes perceptions — and misperceptions — of one’s fellow citizens and “normal” American life. It also has direct and indirect economic effects. “It’s a definite productivity loss,” Shoag says. “If there weren’t restrictions and you could build everywhere, it would be productive for people to move. You do make more as a waiter in LA than you do in Ohio. Preventing people from having that opportunity to move to these high-income places, making it so expensive to live there, is a loss.” That’s true not only for less-educated workers but for lower earners of all sorts, including the artists and writers who traditionally made places like New York, Los Angeles and Santa Fe cultural centers.
Attack of the Hipsters for Competitive Governance
Okay, that’s not the exact title. But the Boston Phoenix implies in its headline that our very own Zachary Caceres is a “conservative,” which is odd, given how radical and revolutionary our mission is. But, hey, pretty funny article and insight into how progressives interpret our philosophy:
If anyone knows the polarizing attributes of politics, it’s Zachary Caceres. As a progressive libertarian, the 23-year-old Brooklynite represents one of the smallest, most misunderstood political groups of all.
“I have sort-of progressive goals, but I’m deeply skeptical of the ability of large institutions, including government, to accomplish those goals,” he says.
A jazz guitarist with screamo hair, Caceres grew up conservative in a small town in Maryland. When he got to NYU to study political science, he started questioning his beliefs. “I became a lot more skeptical,” he says. “There’s a dichotomy between small government and not caring about people and an interventionist, overweening government. I naturally started reading some libertarians, and I found out that it was the most plausible way to meet my political goals and my progressivism.” He pauses. “But there’s a lot of baggage.”
These days, he says, he identifies as a “progressive libertarian,” not a conservative. But that just means he encounters even fewer like-minded people.
“It can definitely be a challenge socially,” he says. “On the one hand, I find myself in a position where I’m agreeing with a lot of people around me — but it’s half-agreement. Then I find myself completely alienated.”
The Stickiness of Poverty: Highly-skilled Workers Exit; Poor Low-Skilled Workers Don’t
I’ve been reading The New Geography of Jobs by Enrico Moretti, which provides a good snapshot of the long-term trends in the labor market. Moretti’s research confirms that the world is in fact not flat, but spiky: talent accumulates in cities, forming positive feedback loops in which knowledge spillovers and proximity increase the productivity of everyone. Density begets productive density and so on.
One section focuses on mobility and the willingness to move. Here are some facts worth mulling over:
- “Today about half of American households change addresses every five years, a number that would be unthinkable in Europe, and a significant number relocate to a different city. About 33 percent of Americans reside in a state other than the one in which they were born, up from 20 percent in 1900.” (pg. 156)
- “Almost half of college graduates move out of their birth states by age thirty. Only 27 percent of high school graduates and 17 percent of high school dropouts do so.” (pg. 157)
- Notre Dame economist Abigail Wozniak found that among those who entered the labor market during recessions, “a large portion of the college graduates relocated to states with stronger economies, while the majority of high school graduates and high school dropouts did not move.” (pg. 158)
It is worth speculating why unemployed, less educated people tend to stick around even as conditions deteriorate, as in Detroit. Perhaps it’s a lack of information about opportunities or online medical assistant programs. The Grapes of Wrath scared way way too many people. Or it could be that it’s simply because they do not have the resources to move. But it appears that even in areas with high per capita income among high school graduates, less educated people tend to be homebodies. (One surprising stat in Moretti’s book is that high school graduates in cities like Stamford, CT, make more on average than college graduates in Portland, OR.)
Europeans, despite their relative wealth, tend to stay put. 82 percent of Italian men between the ages of eighteen and thirty live at home with their parents. Even when they do move out, they tend to remain in the same neighborhood or even the same city block. To be sure, this stickiness has its benefits. Children become caregivers for their parents. Grandparents can help with childcare. But it also has a macro-downside. The more people stay rooted, the worse economic conditions become as unemployment increases, debt accumulates, and governance decreases in quality.
Moretti proposes “relocation vouchers” to encourage low-skilled people to move more quickly from unproductive cities to more productive economies. This would press down the accelerator on exit over voice, a good move in general. The parallels with education come to mind, and while my biases are against subsidies, I’d be willing to support some experiments here. The key and not unreasonable assumption is that these same people will become productive in their new homes. But whether this is politically feasible is another question. After all, politicians would have to campaign on a promise to move their constituents out of their district, a very unlikely scenario given the incentives of office.
The Case for the City-State
“This is Sparta!!” Not a cry for austerity, but for the city-state.
In the Wall St. Journal, Marcia Kurapovna argues for a return to the city-state as the primary political unit in Europe:
The current discussion of how Greece and Italy can overcome their economic devastation will have little effect until these countries finally decide to stop faking their own existence. Neither country has functioned as a centralized state since their unification movements of the mid-19th century, the result of ideals more romantic than realistic. Since that time, Greece and Italy have been kept afloat by tourism, agriculture and—in Italy’s case—a knack for turning out practical products of great design.
Contrast this situation with the wealth and influence the ancient Greeks and Renaissance Italians achieved. One characteristic shared by these older societies makes all the difference: their embrace of the city-state as a political-economic model.
In both ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy, democracy was not incompatible with aristocracy. Even their oligarchies were not necessarily illiberal. Yet the real strengths of the Greek and Italian city-states lay in their economic and social dynamism.
Hat tip to Andrea Marchesseti.
Three professors offer a skeptical and negative take on seasteading in the Antipode. From the (preprint) abstract:
Political actors have long drawn on utopian imaginaries of colonizing marine and island spaces as models for idealized libertarian commonwealths. A recent inheritor of this tradition is the seasteading movement, which seeks to “further the establishment and growth of permanent, autonomous ocean communities [by] enabling innovations with new political and social systems” on semi-stationary, floating platforms. Fueled by a cocktail of ideologies (techno-optimism, libertarian secession theories, and strains of anarcho-capitalism), seasteading is touted as the newest “frontier” in creative, entrepreneurial, and social engineering. Inherent in the project, however, are buried ideals about the nature of ocean space, the limits of sovereignty, and the liberatory role of technology and capitalism in the drive for social change and individual freedom. We explore these notions through an examination of seasteading’s broader philosophical and economic underpinnings, and their deployment through multiple structural, legal, and social frameworks. Although seasteading is a highly speculative, and even fanciful project, it reflects attempts to resolve contradictions within capitalism: between, on the one hand, the need for order and planning, and, on the other hand, the desire to foster and lionize individual freedom.
I help run the 20 Under 20 Fellowship for the Thiel Foundation. This is not directly related to the philosophy of competitive governance, except in the loose sense of supporting radical ideas that may improve the lives of (hopefully) millions of people. I thought some readers here might be interested in the two episode documentary CNBC has created on the final round of this year’s fellowship application process. It airs on August 13th and 14th at 10pm eastern time. Here’s a trailer:
Let A Thousand Nations Bloom 