International Legitimacy and the American election

There's one other thing I should say, particularly to foreign friends who may read this blog. I noted just how astonishingly lopsided the view of the election is in many other parts of the world, especially Europe. 97% of Germans would vote for Obama. In any other context you'd think this was a made-up party number from the old East Germany. How can we explain why a country with a conservative government which is getting tough with Greece can be so one-sided in its view of the GOP in the US? The same applies in most other European countries.

Europeans detested George W. Bush too, far more than can be explained by his general political stance. Bush, after all, was actually more in the Nixon mode in domestic policy terms, rather than particularly right-wing. He ran massive deficits and spending, drove through new entitlements like prescription drugs, argued for loose immigration policy with amnesty, and nation-building efforts abroad. He cut taxes, but so do many EU governments from time to time. W claimed to be a "compassionate" conservative. He was relatively left-wing in many senses.

But millions turned out to march against Bush in Europe. "US foreign policy" post 9-11 is the reason, perhaps, but Obama has surged in Afghanistan, killed Bin Laden and stepped up drone attacks.

So what is going on here? I think there is a much deeper split about the nature of international legitimacy, a rift that started with the Yugoslavian war and has only grown since with Iraq. Europe has been committed to multilateralism and pooling of sovereignty for over fifty years now. European elites believe that legitimacy flows down from international law, including human rights law and the United Nations.

So as an example, the response to the euro crisis has been an unending series of multilateral, indecisive and testy summits. The whole motivating force of the European project was to suppress individual national tendencies which could produce war.

This view is (mostly) alien to the United States, where the US constitution is almost four times older than the UN and infinitely more venerated. Legitimacy flows up from the people. The UN and international institutions have little legitimacy, and there is little domestic support for tying national freedom of action. America ( to generalize) sees no advantage in subjecting its actions to the multilateral approval of Europeans, who refuse to bear the burdens or responsibility of actions or defense spending in any case.

So on the one side, Europeans see the GOP as a horrifying cowboy-like entity which violates the most basic elements of international legitimacy. And on the other, America, especially the GOP, sees Europe as fractious, irresponsible and naive, playing internal parlor games while America has underwritten the defense needs and spending which allowed the Europeans the scope to play their children's games in the first place. America deals with China and contains Iran while the Europeans squabble amongat themselves and shout abuse offstage.

It isn't a dispute about left versus right that produces 96% or 97% support for Obama in Europe, so much as a perception he will be more sympathetic to and bound by multilateral norms which give Europe a significant veto over US actions. Romney and the GOP seem like a crazed bull which will stomp all over their most deeply cherished notions.

In fact, if there is one thing that can lead to massive wars, it is profound differences about legitimacy ( see Philip Bobitt's , The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History). Of course, that is hardly likely to happen here. But it does help explain some of the depth of feeling.

I don't have much sympathy with the European view, which naturally is self-interested in seeking restraints over US actions. We do need international institutions and flexible international law. But it cannot be wholly divorced from power or reality either.

Europeans over-read the lessons of 1945 in their own terms, as delegitimizing national institutions. America does not, and reads the Second World War as much about crazy European political excess and varieties of murderous Utopianism. And we have multilateral utopian excess today.

The differences may narrow again in the future, as the multilateral European project itself is under such strain. Euroskepticism is rampant in the UK, with talk of a referendum on EU membership. Dormant nationalisms like that of Catalonia are reigniting. The EU institutions have if anything negative legitimacy in Greece.

And even Obama, who is venerated so much in Europe, has initiated a "pivot to Asia."

Multilateralism is a wonderful dream, but Europe is prone to utopian overreach. And multilateral commitments are fragile, and sometimes utterly counterproductive. (Take the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which outlawed war, as an example. Just eleven years later the worst war in history began when Hitler invaded Poland).

Those poll numbers against Romney are more a symptom of a European fever about legitimacy than an accurate read on choices in America.

 

 

 

 

So there is an election tomorrow?

I just haven't been able to summon up any interest in the election in the last week, and changed the channel when the national media talked about it. But the day is now at hand.

The RCP average has Obama at 47.8%, Romney at 47.4%, so far within the margin of error. Pennsylvania might even be in play.

Michael Barone is calling a big Romney win in the electoral college, 315 to 223. I have a lot of regard for his knowledge and feel, as the Editor of the Almanac of American Politics. On the other hand, Intrade is pricing a 67.6% chance for Obama, and prediction markets as a rule tend to be slightly more accurate than polls.

It comes down to the vagaries of likely voter adjustments in the polls and turnout. It is going to be a very exciting Tuesday night.

One vote against the left

I'm going to - reluctantly - vote Romney, even though I'm not particularly enthused by him. The main reason is I detest and distrust the hard left, and the preachy zealotry and bigotry they display. Every time they indulge in shrill name-calling, or trying to trying to reduce everything to vague anti-intellectual emotions - "hate", "fear", "greed", they just turn me off.

I think many on the left simply don't see potential problems with their polices, and this makes progressive change far more difficult. I said in a previous post about Jonathan Haidt's studies of what makes people conservative or liberal:

So I think the main reason I'm a registered independent with a rightward tilt, rather than a liberal, is because I think moral capital is important. I think you can better achieve liberal goals by controlling downside risks, rather than ignoring them. I want change, but pragmatic change that works in practice and delivers better lives to people, not a romantic dream which turns into darkness.

Moral capital, in Haidt's definition, is the resources that sustain a community - that restrain selfishness and free-riding and help people pursue common goals. It is the things that make cooperative behavior possible, which liberals often fail to see or just assume will be in place. Intentions are not enough. Outcomes matter. And that makes me more socially conservative.

On economic issues, I could accept a Clinton-style economic policy. I have no sympathy for the libertarian aspects of the GOP. I think tax is a matter of technical advantage rather than a zero-sum distributional struggle, however. It is more complicated than many believe. It is a matter of dynamics , rather than comparative statics (i'll discuss that in more detail in a coming post) so that sometimes tax cuts can increase the capital stock, productivity and hence growth and income. Tax is more than simply distribution of an existing pie, but the size of the pie in the future.

I'm also fairly fiscally conservative, and think current entitlements are largely a way to transfer income from poor working families to richer older Americans. Medical costs are unsustainable. We need massive entitlement reform.

Ultimately I will vote against the left, rather than positively for Romney, because I think the left is the opposite of the things it likes to claim -I.e diverse, tolerant, open-minded. I see it as shrill, hateful towards those who have a different view, and deeply tribal and sectarian and racist in outlook. It has a deeply inadequate conception of "fairness" and "justice" and "equality" as all meaning essentially the same thing.

Leftwingers generally don't talk to conservatives about ideas, but demonize them in adolescent ways. I see the left as much more zealously dangerous than the tea party ever would be. Because the left controls so much of the universities and mainstream media and major corporations, it is a much more present danger.

Obama himself seems intelligent and capable. But he enables the liberal left. When they talk about "forward", I think of the Great Leap Forward. And you should really look before you leap. More spending won't really help the poor so much as the teachers' unions and rich retirees.

Progressive intentions and narrow notions of "fairness" can produce catastrophe, if everything is just a moralized drama of helping the "vulnerable" or hastening the irresistable march of history.

Shrill screaming romanticism and closed-mindedness is the last thing we need, and that's how I see the partisan left. Obama may be cool-minded and pragmatic, but he turned domestic policy over to Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank and Charlie Rangel in practice. And he will be beholden to the gay lobby and La Raza and union pension plans and the whole outdated "blue" model.

In any case, G is going to vote for Obama, so we will cancel each other out. And it won't make one iota of difference to New York going for Obama regardless of what we do.

 

Overheard in a New York Coffee Shop

Loud declamation in a thick Brooklyn accent:

"Maybe those MAYANS were RIGHT!!"

 

The joy of a hot shower

We keep being amazed by the smallest, most simple things since the storm. We are back in our Manhattan apartment. We cooed with awe at the elevators working, instead of climbing fifteen minutes in the dark with flashlights. The corridors are lit, which suddenly seems like an astonishing thing. We could clean the kitchen and wash out the fridge with....wait for it ... Water!

And I could turn on a stream of hot water in the shower this morning, at the flick of a tap. I stood there thinking that was something Louis XIV could not do in Versailles.

I briefly mentioned before being struck at how much more difficult daily life was in the past. Plumbing was very rudimentary at Versailles. Heat in the winter was mostly absent, as the small fireplaces were highly inefficient ways to heat large rooms.

Fernand Braudel relates in The Structure of Everyday Life that on 3 February 1695, the Princess Palatinate wrote "At the King's table the wine and water froze in the glasses." (p299). Builders later learned to use the draught in a fireplace more efficiently from around 1720 on, he says, but it is a surprisingly late development.

The great monarchs of European history spent the winter wrapped in fur or under layers of blankets.

One of our big problems as human beings is the hedonic treadmill. We very quickly get used to and take for granted good things, so they become routine and not a source of particular pleasure.

But every now and then we are reminded what a daily miracle ordinary life in a modern city is. Central heating. Hot water. Refrigeration. Light. TV and stereo for entertainment, and Internet for connectivity and all the world's knowledge. The outward form of dwellings may be much less grand than the houses of the rich in the past. But apart from hurricanes and other catastrophes, wine doesn't freeze over in our glasses at home.

 

Economic forecasts

We're looking at Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't, starting here.

One other area which has experienced consistent failure is economic forecasting. I cite what Silver says here with a certain amount of glee. Of course, I know this as background information, but to see the hard facts marshalled together is striking. Take a survey economic forecasts in 2008, for instance.

As I mentioned, the economists in this survey thought that GDP would end up at about 2.4 percent in 2008, slightly below its long-term trend. This was a very bad forecast: GDP actually shrank by 3.3 percent once the financial crisis hit. What may be worse is that the economists were extremely confident in their bad prediction. They assigned only a 3 percent chance to the economy’s shrinking by any margin over the whole of 2008.15 And they gave it only about a 1-in-500 chance of shrinking by at least 2 percent, as it did.

Nor was this a once-off occurrence because of a freak once-in-a-lifetime crisis.

In fact, the actual value for GDP fell outside the economists’ prediction interval six times in eighteen years, or fully one-third of the time. Another study,18 which ran these numbers back to the beginnings of the Survey of Professional Forecasters in 1968, found even worse results: the actual figure for GDP fell outside the prediction interval almost half the time. There is almost no chance that the economists have simply been unlucky; they fundamentally overstate the reliability of their predictions.

Aggregate forecasts tend to be more reliable than individual forecasts, however. This has been bad news for in-house corporate economists, who were mostly eliminated in the 1990s. Bluechip or Consensus Forecasts are better.

My research into the Survey of Professional Forecasters suggests that these aggregate forecasts are about 20 percent more accurate than the typical individual’s forecast at predicting GDP, 10 percent better at predicting unemployment, and 30 percent better at predicting inflation. This property—group forecasts beat individual ones—has been found to be true in almost every field in which it has been studied.

Perhaps the new availability of computers made forecasters particularly overconfident in the 1960s and 1970s, he says - the age of the massive economic forecasting model. But ultimately you have to have some theoretical understanding or you will sink into mere data mining, he says.

The idea that a statistical model would be able to “solve” the problem of economic forecasting was somewhat in vogue during the 1970s and 1980s when computers came into wider use. But as was the case in other fields, like earthquake forecasting during that time period, improved technology did not cover for the lack of theoretical understanding about the economy; it only gave economists faster and more elaborate ways to mistake noise for a signal. Promising-seeming models failed badly at some point or another and were consigned to the dustbin.

Economics has inherent limitations on theory, however. One of the decisive intellectual impacts on me in college was learning about the Lucas Critique, which says people's behavior may change when policy changes, so you cannot rely on large-scale econometric relationships. I lost interest in econometrics and forecasting.

The economics profession has mostly responded to this problem by searching for policy-invariant microfoundations. It tries to model individial choice, far below the level of economic aggregates. In practice, this mostly entrenches naive rational-choice mathematical optimization even further.

A better answer to this is deeper knowledge of history. At least some people in the central banks note that we are fortunate that Ben Bernanke was an acknowledged expert in the history of the Great Depression, rather than, say, real business cycle models.

 

Overfitting models

We're looking at Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't, starting here. Silver discusses some of the inherent problems and mistakes people make with statistical models.

One of the most important is overfitting.

The name overfitting comes from the way that statistical models are “fit” to match past observations. The fit can be too loose—this is called underfitting—in which case you will not be capturing as much of the signal as you could. Or it can be too tight—an overfit model—which means that you’re fitting the noise in the data rather than discovering its underlying structure. The latter error is much more common in practice.

It can lead to serious problems.

 

As obvious as this might seem when explained in this way, many forecasters completely ignore this problem. The wide array of statistical methods available to researchers enables them to be no less fanciful—and no more scientific—than a child finding animal patterns in clouds.* “With four parameters I can fit an elephant,” the mathematician John von Neumann once said of this problem. “And with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.” Overfitting represents a double whammy: it makes our model look better on paper but perform worse in the real world. Because of the latter trait, an overfit model eventually will get its comeuppance if and when it is used to make real predictions.

This is one of the great stories of financial markets. People are forever trying to come up with the equivalent of quantitative alchemy to transform historical data into gold. It is quite easy to tune a model so it performs very well on past data, and marches undulations with surprising precision. And it is amazingly easy to lose your shirt when the model goes awry when used to predict where the market will go next.

 

Foxes and Hedgehogs

I'd started talking about Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't, starting here. He is very controversial right now, immediately before the election, because of his prediction of a much higher chance of an Obama victory than the headline polls indicate. So he will be seen by many in partisan terms.

The book is not partisan, however, so it deserves a fair look by people who might fight over his NY Times articles. After all, Silver argues for skepticism about expert predictions as a general rule.

I've mentioned Philip Tetlock's work on political prediction before. Tetlock found that most prediction by political or international relations experts is terrible. As Silver puts it,

Tetlock’s conclusion was damning. The experts in his survey—regardless of their occupation, experience, or subfield—had done barely any better than random chance, and they had done worse than even rudimentary statistical methods at predicting future political events. They were grossly overconfident and terrible at calculating probabilities: about 15 percent of events that they claimed had no chance of occurring in fact happened, while about 25 percent of those that they said were absolutely sure things in fact failed to occur. It didn’t matter whether the experts were making predictions about economics, domestic politics, or international affairs; their judgment was equally bad across the board.

But Tetlock also found one distinction that pointed to more successful forecasts. Isaiah Berlin had revived the ancient distinction between hedgehogs, who know one big thing, and foxes, who know many small things. I've mentioned it many times. Silver puts it nicely:

Hedgehogs are type A personalities who believe in Big Ideas—in governing principles about the world that behave as though they were physical laws and undergird virtually every interaction in society. Think Karl Marx and class struggle, or Sigmund Freud and the unconscious. Or Malcolm Gladwell and the “tipping point.” Foxes, on the other hand, are scrappy creatures who believe in a plethora of little ideas and in taking a multitude of approaches toward a problem. They tend to be more tolerant of nuance, uncertainty, complexity, and dissenting opinion. If hedgehogs are hunters, always looking out for the big kill, then foxes are gatherers. Foxes, Tetlock found, are considerably better at forecasting than hedgehogs.

Hedgehogs have more trouble seeing what is there without predispositions.

Foxes may have emphatic convictions about the way the world ought to be. But they can usually separate that from their analysis of the way that the world actually is and how it is likely to be in the near future. Hedgehogs, by contrast, have more trouble distinguishing their rooting interest from their analysis. Instead, in Tetlock’s words, they create “a blurry fusion between facts and values all lumped together.” They take a prejudicial view toward the evidence, seeing what they want to see and not what is really there.

Hedgehogs are vey good at coming up with stories and narratives that validate their positions - and turn out to be wrong.

The foxy forecaster recognizes the limitations that human judgment imposes in predicting the world’s course. Knowing those limits can help her to get a few more predictions right.

I am, as you might imagine from reading this wide-ranging blog, a fox to the core. I like to take ideas from different disciplines, and recombine and synthesize. So of course I like this argument. Hedgehogs often suffer from serious blind spots, and are prone to fanaticism.

One issue I haven't seen addressed anywhere, though, is what makes people foxes or hedgehogs. Part of it must be personality, although it's difficult to see a direct link to the big five theories of personality. There is some evidence that liberals tend to have higher openness to experience, but in my experience liberals are if anything more prone to ideological narrowness than conservatives. Conservatives often have a skepticism about systems and experts and theory which might make at least some less prone to hedgehog temptation. But one can find ideologues and zealots across the political spectrum. It is a sensibility rather than a particular political conviction.

Some of it must be a matter of education and styles of learning. And some must be a reflection of the incentives we set up. As Tetlock says, you are likely to be a more successful TV pundit by making overconfident big pronouncements than being nuanced.

In any case, Silver's point is that hedgehogs tend to be worse at prediction, not necessarily worse in general. Some of the most gifted people are hedgehogs by nature. As I've said before, Plato was a hedgehog, Aristotle a fox ( which may explain why I've become so interested in Aristotle). Dante was a hedgehog, Shakespeare a fox. Systems have their place. But we do need a feel as a society for the boundaries and limits and clashes of systems.

People like to believe in more certainty than there really is.