Interesting little presentation.

I recall that Austrian economist and anarcho-monarchist Hans-Hermann Hoppe got into some controversy as a professor talking about time preference and homosexuality due to technical inability to reproduce (outside of adoption). The discussion of time preference is supposed to be neutral, or that is at least how Zimbardo ends his presentation. But given that so much of our culture values wealth, its generation and hoarding, we tend to assume that a future oriented perspective is "superior." Certainly Zimbardo's discussion of present hedonistic time preference among our youth as a disaster has some clear moral connotations.

Zimbardo has a book out, "The Time Paradox" that seems to fall under the "self-help" genre. I don't know what could be gotten out of the book that the video doesn't provide, as the idea itself is rather simple and easy to grasp. It's the differences in how people develop these time preferences that would offer some interest to political theorists. Anyone who doesn't plan would be unlikely to push for long term political change, or even be well equipped to respond to long term challenges.

Vincent Ocasla, a young architecture student from the Philippines, has designed the perfect city for totalitarianism in Sim City 3000 with the largest possible population that sustains itself for 50,000 years. Impressive, but pretty darn scary.

More on Vincent's creation:

There are a lot of other problems in the city hidden under the illusion of order and greatness: Suffocating air pollution, high unemployment, no fire stations, schools, or hospitals, a regimented lifestyle - this is the price that these sims pay for living in the city with the highest population. It’s a sick and twisted goal to strive towards. The ironic thing about it is the sims in Magnasanti tolerate it. They don’t rebel, or cause revolutions and social chaos. No one considers challenging the system by physical means since a hyper-efficient police state keeps them in line. They have all been successfully dumbed down, sickened with poor health, enslaved and mind-controlled just enough to keep this system going for thousands of years. 50,000 years to be exact. They are all imprisoned in space and time.

. . .

Health of the sims was not a priority, relative to the main objective. I could have enacted several health ordinances which would have increased the life expectancy, but I decided not to for practical reasons. It shows that by only focusing on one objective, one may end up neglecting, or resorting to sacrificing, other important elements. Similarly, [in the real world] if we make maximizing profits as the absolute objective, we fail to take into consideration the social and environmental consequences.

Andrew Gelman at FiveThirtyEight has a post up looking at the ideologies of both the general populace and partisans in the various states. These sorts of posts pop up from time to time and the trend is always the same. For the most part, social and economic views are correlated but not always as strongly as one might expect. But it's mildly interesting, so check it out.

Congress is preparing to take up an Obama Administration proposal to establish a Small Business Lending Fund to help meet "unmet" small business demand for credit. The problem is that there's not really a supply-side problem with credit for small businesses right now, outside of construction and real estate. So we'd basically be throwing more money at small businesses at a subsidized rate, which is just going to help those who are already doing just fine. There are industry-specific problems facing the economy that need to be addressed. Sadly, Congress seems to be looking at a "solution" for that too.

Loan guarantees for homebuilders?!

I daresay that there are homebuilders out there who deserve loans they can’t get. But the same is true of other businesses too — businesses which create the vibrant sectors of tomorrow’s economy that ideally we really want to encourage, rather than crowd out. Banks aren’t going to lend more if this bill passes: they’re just going to shunt their lending from non-guaranteed sectors to homebuilding. And that can’t be good for the long-term health of the economy.

As for the unemployment problem, there’s no doubt that we want the people who have lost their jobs in the homebuilding sector to find new jobs as quickly as possible. But do we want those new jobs to be in the homebuilding sector? Not really. If we’re going to encourage job creation, let’s try to do it in areas of the economy which will help drive exports rather than imports, and which underpin a genuinely strong economy.

Actually, the problems facing homebuilders are industry-specific and most other small businesses are having their credit needs met. I don't know if one or both of these proposals will pass so it's hard to figure out the specific impact they would have, but neither one would have a meaningful positive impact. There are clear problem in trying to respond to the ongoing economic malaise with proposals to just prop up the industries that brought us down in the first place.

The difference between Germany and Spain, when you get down to it, is that Germans work for companies which provide goods and services that the rest of the world wants. In doing so, they make good money, which they save up. That’s how they became rich. The Spanish, by contrast, have massive unemployment, and most of the country’s GDP growth in recent years has come from the construction industry. Their main export is tourism, if that counts as an export, and the main way that Spaniards have become rich in recent years is by sitting back and watching the value of their real estate grow exponentially.

The U.S., going forwards, needs to be less like Spain and more like Germany. So let’s not subsidize housing. That way lies fiscal disaster.

Richard Florida has been calling this the Great Reset and compares it to how we recovered from past periods of economic woes. Over the next thirty years American consumption habits and lifestyles will shift and we'll see new industries develop and grow. I don't think we'll go back to the system in which ever rising home values and overleveraged credit fueled a consumer craze. If we do we'll probably have another burst bubble during a time of even greater fiscal crisis. That's not a good combination.

Matt Ridley’s "The Rational Optimist" is out and although its sitting on my desk I haven't managed to find the time to start reading it yet. But I find Mike Gibson's review of the book a good place to start on reflecting about Ridley's underlining premise of the book that trade and specialization are the key factors in prosperity. But here I've often pointed out that trade and specialization will only get you so far, you also need innovation and new ideas. You need creativity. And these are two different things. The case behind trade, specialization, division of labor, and the greater economic wealth it creates is pretty solid. But the case behind what creates creativity and innovation is weaker because we haven't pinned down what makes one society more creative than another and how that translates into innovation and economic growth. Some can argue that it's cultural tolerance, but that's still a weak case that is only starting to build a movement behind it.

On the other hand, perhaps the case that trade and specialization are limited is overdone. Yglesias notes that the "miracle" that is China's economy is still largely attributed to specialization and changes in the economy that don't depend on innovation.

The basic story is that living standards ultimate derive from productivity, and there are two ways for an undeveloped country like China to obtain productivity growth. One is to simply shift people out of a low-productivity sector (like farming in China) and into a higher productivity sector (in China, factory labor). Another would be to actually raise the in-sector productivity by getting better at farming or manufacturing or what have you. In the specific case of China, it’s crucial to note that the productivity wedge between sweatshops and rice paddies is enormous which strongly suggests that a huge amount of what China’s achieved has been achieved through the former method. And with agriculture still employing over 35 percent of the Chinese labor force, there’s a great deal more China can achieve through this path. And it’s not a path I think should be slighted. Growth achieved through this method isn’t mythical—the higher living standards are very real. What is mythical, however, is the sense of the miraculous. For the reasons Krugman lays out, there’s nothing miraculous about this and there are real limits to how far you can go with it.

I don't think there's any rational explanation of Israeli's behavior of the last few years. Demographic trends in Israel have fostered a radically xenophobic, racist, and nationalist right-wing approach to politics and an overly militant and aggressive treatment of the Palestinians. They are beyond the pale of reason. It would be utterly ridiculous if it weren't so deadly. It's like watching a nation run by Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, but with the oppression and violence of apartheid South Africa--and worse.

Over the last few decades, Israel has been allowed to live by its own set of rules because it was seen as a bastion of western liberalism and democracy in the Middle East. An oasis in the desert, if you will. Israel's noncompliance with the NPT undermines the Obama Administration's efforts to discourage Iran from developing nuclear weapons and avoid a domino of Sunni regimes like Egypt or Saudi Arabia developing nuclear capabilities as well. Israel's defense, unchanged for years, is that it is the region's only democracy, which I guess puts Turkey in Europe and downgrades whatever success Iraq has made in recent years.

Israel is still operating with the Cold War mentality that it can do whatever it wants, like developing a secret nuclear weapons pact with apartheid South Africa. But in Europe and the United States, the Jewish diaspora has embraced the values of liberalism and equality to an extent that they no longer agree with a simple nationalist or Zionist defense of Israel. American Jews lean left, tend to be secularists, and support a more consistent application of human rights than a simple "Israel Good, Everyone Else Bad." Peter Beinart has chronicled this shift in his recent work that represents just the iceberg of changes in American Jewish about Israel.

Beinart himself represents not only this shift, but a shift in some of the "Organizational Kids" that David Brooks wrote about in analyzing trends in the types of people who get appointed to the Supreme Court.

About a decade ago, one began to notice a profusion of Organization Kids at elite college campuses. These were bright students who had been formed by the meritocratic system placed in front of them. They had great grades, perfect teacher recommendations, broad extracurricular interests, admirable self-confidence and winning personalities.

If they had any flaw, it was that they often had a professional and strategic attitude toward life. They were not intellectual risk-takers. They regarded professors as bosses to be pleased rather than authorities to be challenged. As one admissions director told me at the time, they were prudential rather than poetic.

Beinart has had a similar career background. As a supporter of the Iraq War and a general liberal-leaning hawk during the Bush Administration, he was the sort of centrist liberal that was supposed to be respectable under the conventional wisdom that had developed over the previous decades. But what has actually happened with Beinart? He's become increasingly disillusioned with the conventional wisdom that was handed down about what was necessary for America to be tough and strong on national defense. His latest book is a history of American hubris. How many other ruling elites today even think about America having hubris?

The conventional wisdom regarding Israel is being overturned, aided by Israel's own ever more extremist actions. Today, any opponent of actions by Israeli's right-wing government is cast as anti-Semitic. Any expression of support for the 1.5 million Palestinians living in poverty in Gaza is attacked as coddling terrorist Hamas. All of this doesn't bode well for Israel to survive as a democratic state.

Chris Bowers at Open Left presents a possible (potentially plausible?) scenario for Hillary's comeback.

That's right. Ever since she became Secretary of State, her favorables have soared into the mid-60's, putting her well clear of any other statewide officeholder in the country. The only national figures who are viewed as favorably as Clinton are Michelle Obama, Colin Powell, and David Patraeus. However, they have never run for office, which invariably lowers your favorables.

Hillary Clinton will turn 69 in in the final week of the 2016 campaign, which makes her slightly younger than Ronald Reagan when he first was elected in 1980. Also, as Secretary of State, a major presidential candidate, a U.S. Senator, and First Lady, she is also probably more credentialed than any other potential Presidential candidate, too. There is even talk she may become the next Secretary of Defense, further adding to her credentials.

Some have said that, in choosing Joe Biden as Vice-President, Barack Obama did not pick a successor to lead the Democratic Party. However, that needs rethinking. Because Barack obama made her Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton remains remarkably well-positioned to run for President in 2016, even more so than she was in 2008.

Pundits throughout the 2008 Democratic primary noted that the Obama-Clinton clashes were just the most recent incarnations of the inter-party battles between more upscale liberal activists and the downscale base of working class voters in the party. Unlike, say, the Kennedy-Carter or Hart-Mondale or Tsongas-Clinton or Bradley-Gore clashes of the past, Obama was able to tap into the African-American constituency that tended to affiliate with other working class Democrats to tip the scale narrowly in his favor. Up against anyone else, Hillary might be able to seize the nomination, despite the growing demographic trends in favor of the upscale faction.

Or maybe the advantage to Hillary is that eight years of Obama's corporatist compromises will so discourage liberal activists they won't even mount a serious effort for the nomination in 2016?

I have almost no doubt that if the Republican Party nominates someone with strong Tea Party appeal in 2012, such as Sarah Palin, and is defeated (which I think is almost certain), the party will almost certainly work toward compromise with the status quo. And I can't think of a Democratic candidate that would symbolize the continued communitarian trends within the party than Hillary Clinton. A showdown between Hillary and a moderate, corporatist Republican in 2016 would be the crowning achievement of the status quo's march toward a pink police state.

Tonight, the Senate Armed Forces Committee approved an amendment to begin an end to the military's infamous "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy. Only one Democrat, unfortunately Jim Webb of Virginia, opposed the amendment. Only one Republican, Susan Collins of Maine, supported the amendment. In the other chamber, the House of Representatives approved a similar measure to be attached to its annual defense authorizations bill to 234 to 194.

I noted both today and in the past that we are entering a communitarian phase of our ongoing culture war because of the heavy influence of government.

Is federal funding of abortion in a new government program a question of fairness and equity, or forcing taxpayers to support something they morally object to? Isn't not funding abortion in the new program a form of social engineering and restricting meaningful access to reproductive choice?

Or what about guns on National Parks? Does the 2nd Amendment compel the government to adopt a lenient policy, or should the government pick whatever policy they feel is best like any other property owner would?

Creationism or intelligence design in public schools? What about abstinence only education? Or sex education? Multicultural studies?

The common theme is that these are questions brought about by other government programs, be they public lands, social services, or public education. In each the government has to make a decision because it's providing a service or a good. Without our existing framework there is no option for the government to somehow stay neutral by not making a decision. And so libertarians will be divided between those who argue that the government shouldn't favor a certain perspective, such as evolution in the classroom, and those who argue that if the government is going to provide these services at all they should at least embrace science.

It is going to get nasty over the next few years, if not decades, as the older generation of predominately white Christians gives way to a less-white and less-Christian population.

I personally affiliate with much of the liberal, secular agenda of the Democratic Party. But in understanding the difficulties created by our communitarian politics I haven't wanted to push the issue--too much. Ending "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" isn't one of those times. Yes, the conservatives opposed to equality in the military claim it's social engineering. And I respect that argument--sometimes. Not this time.

This vote shows that while you can criticize the Democrats for failing to reverse all of the neoconservative agenda that was pushed under Bush, from the erosion to civil liberties to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, you can at least count on them to cling to a degree decency on some issues of social equity and fairness. It's not much, but it's worth celebrating nevertheless.

Update: The vote has been posted online. Key notes. The Republicans who voted for the amendment: Biggert of Illinois, Cao of Louisiana, Djou of Hawaii (the newest member!), Paul of Texas, and Ros-Lehtinen of Florida (of anti-Castro and pro-embargo fame).

Of the Democrats who voted against only one, Costello of Illinois, had voted against renewing the Patriot Act and in favor of an exit strategy in Afghanistan. The rest are the usual suspects of conservative Democrats.

You remember him, the libertarian Republican? This guy. Ever wonder what happened to him? Well here's an update.

Of Otter's GOP challengers, the two best known were Ada County Commissioner Sharon Ullman and former elk rancher Rex Rammell from Rexburg. Both courted voters from the tea party movement, making hay of Otter's failed 2009 push to raise Idaho's gas tax.

Imagine that. The libertarian Republican Governor pushing for an increase in the gas tax and facing off against Tea Party opposition. Oh how times have changed.

By focusing on a range of issues from regulatory capture to collective action, I try to highlight over and over again that the problem with democracy isn't to blame irrational and uneducated masses (a response that smacks of the elitism of the 19th Century Mugwumps that I just blogged about) but the need to change the incentives in the institutions that are failing to govern. I just added the blog "Let a Thousand Nations Bloom" to the links on the right and several of the posts there touch on this subject. For example, this take down of public choice theorists who just think that education will solve all of democracies problems.