Why I Think Chris Christie is Doomed

There is no current Republican frontrunner for 2016.

People will toss out names like Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Scott Walker, and Rand Paul, but really, none is a plausible frontrunner at this time, because it is challenging to imagine how the race will shake out. Republicans have a plethora of experienced potential candidates, all of whom could make compelling cases for why they are good choices. We won't really have a good idea of who the real frontrunner is until we start seeing things like donations and debates.

But I do think that Chris Christie is doomed as a candidate.

Gambling sites tend to put Christie as the frontrunner or potential runner-up. As of late March, we can see that Christie is listing at anywhere between 17 percent and 20 percent, with only Marco Rubio consistently scoring higher. (Note: if your odds are in format A:B, the conversion of odds to percentage would be B/(A+B).) But I think this one lacks some common sense.

I think there are two useful frames through which to see the Republican nomination process:

1. The Olsen frame: Henry Olsen describes the Republican nomination process as the competition for four factions: moderates, somewhat conservatives, social conservatives, and secular conservatives, with the candidate who wins eventually seizing the "somewhat conservatives" and one other group. 

2. The sequential frame: a social conservative wins Iowa, a moderate or fiscal conservative wins in New Hampshire, and the two do battle in South Carolina to see who becomes the nominee.

In Olsen's frame, Christie would be starting from the somewhat conservatives, sweeping the moderates, and securing the necessary margins early on. Going into 2013, Chris Christie was on the John McCain-2008 path to the nomination: he had a strong brand as a straight-talker who didn't tolerate insincerity or business-as-usual politics, and he was well-liked by people in both parties. Christie's stunning, sweeping 2013 victory validated this position. In embracing Obama and hurricane relief over his role as a Romney surrogate, Christie secured his brand with "average folks" as someone who put the job over politics.

We often talk in politics about Sister Souljah moments, or moments where a presidential candidate, in trying to pivot from the base to the center, will have to take a direct shot at someone in their base. Like most of the DC establishment's pet phrases (-gate, "Hail Mary pass," etc.), it's an annoying and overused phrase, but their is wisdom in the concept, as national elections are, to some extent, about appeals to the broad middle of American politics. Christie had surpassed any need for a Sister Souljah moment, though, with his well-received response to Hurricane Sandy. Christie, in other words, had completely shored up his left flank, and would not have to worry very much about appealing to the center. Thus, he could fight for conservative policies for the first year and a half of his second term, and bludgeon the Left in the campaign... without really suffering for those actions in the general. And to the Right? Christie's case was airtight: look how conservative I've been in blue New Jersey. I won with 61 percent of the vote. I can win and be conservative.

It was like Christie was carrying a loaded gun into every primary debate saying electability. No matter what anyone accused Christie of, he was the electable candidate, the most conservative governor of New Jersey in decades, and a bona fida popular politician. He could go into every debate, parrying attacks on himself by blaming blue New Jersey and highlighting his conservative accomplishments of 2014. And a slimmed down, energetic Christie would be able to win great support in a relentless sweep across the towns of New Hampshire, doing town hall after town hall, littering YouTube with golden, spontaneous moments. It was perfect.

If we take the sequential frame as our starting point, Christie's glide path to the nomination was clear: Iowa was going to split its vote eight ways to Sunday, with Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee, Ted Cruz, and Rand Paul all getting their shares (with no one topping 30 percent). Then Christie was going to blow the doors off the world in New Hampshire, particularly with a potentially non-competitive Democratic primary leading independents to vote in the GOP contest. Christie would then use that momentum to go hard after Obama in South Carolina, would win comfortably there, and would secure the nomination early. All Christie had to do from 2013 to 2015 was not do something that would endanger his left flank. He didn't have to take any shots at the right; he just had to let sleeping dogs lie.

And then the bridge scandal happened. And then the Sandy scandal happened. And then the Port Authority stuff started leaking out. For the past few months, I have been reading up on these stories, looking for the smoking gun: what will implicate Christie directly? And so far, it hasn't come out yet. (I don't expect one to at this point.) But I have changed my mind: for the purposes of his case in the primaries, it simply does not matter if Christie was involved. There are three reasons for this:

1. The Democratic state legislature is going to spend all the time it needs and wants on inquiries, investigations, etc. Christie will not be getting any additional conservative accomplishments to highlight on the 2016 trail.

A big part of how Christie was going to appeal to the "somewhat conservative" voters was with an aggressive agenda in 2014. Although he did not win additional seats in the state legislature, he would be in a position similar to Ronald Reagan's second term: Democratic-controlled legislature, but many from pro-Christie voters who could pressure their legislators to support the executive.

But now, those Democrats know that Christie's support is weakened, so they are not politically threatened by his popularity. If anything, they will have to contend with their base wondering why some of them sold out Barbara Buono.

2. We have a pattern of stories that have damaged his left flank. Christie is no longer the tough-talking effective manager. He's just another politician now.

To be fair, you can win as "just another politician"; after all, most politicians are "just another politician." But Christie can't, because his record doesn't justify it among conservatives. If Christie is just another politician, he's not a blunt, effective leader who can take it to the Democratic nominee in 2016. He is the centrist governor of New Jersey who abandoned Mitt Romney in 2012 and pals around with Andrew Cuomo and Barack Obama. Why should conservatives vote for him?

Christie now enters those debates in 2016 with a gun in his hand that reads electability, but he has suffered the same fate as Jean-Claude in Taken: the bullets have been removed by Liam Neeson.

3. The 2016 field will be superior to the 2012 field.

This remains to be seen, considering that I thought that the 2012 field would have several capable, competent candidates (John Thune, Mitch Daniels), and it turned out to be an utter disaster. But between Scott Walker, Bobby Jindal, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Jeb Bush, etc., I suspect the Republicans will field a few viable candidates. If the 2016 field were as bad as the 2012 field, I would still give Christie a reasonable shot to overcome these issues. But it should be better. Unlike Mitt Romney, Christie probably won't be the beneficiary of "process of elimination" choices.

In other words: Christie's decisions after Sandy had set him up to be the Republican nominee, so long as he executed over the next couple of years and didn't squander the goodwill on his left flank. Regardless of whether these scandals were his fault, they have served to squander that goodwill: his brand is irreparably damaged, and this key year of his governorship will be lost to investigations and scandal reports. On top of this, Christie will not benefit from a weak slate of rival candidates. No matter what he says on TV, that's what's going to keep him from the nomination: his argument has been overcome by reality.

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Postscript: I've offered up a fairly aggressive prediction. But how would I be wrong? I would take each of my three reasons and flip them around.

1. The scandals dry up and somehow, Christie gets a few more accomplishments that he can take to the Right for 2016.

2. His poll ratings recover and centrists continue to support him. Democrats complain of "Teflon" Chris Christie.

3. The 2016 field is disappointing.

But I don't expect this to happen. I will examine in more detail, of course, if Christie does end up being the nominee.

A Defense of Federalism

A friend of mine offered an interesting observation the other day: if federalism in the United States was merely a vestigial byproduct of Britain's "haphazard" colonial policy in the early modern period, then it really cannot be defended by an appeal to its historical wisdom.

This critique is largely correct, as far as I can tell, and is in keeping with the spirit of the Fallacy of Chesterton's Fence.

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."

This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious. There are reformers who get over this difficulty by assuming that all their fathers were fools; but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease. But the truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution. If he knows how it arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes, that they have since become bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served. But if he simply stares at the thing as a senseless monstrosity that has somehow sprung up in his path, it is he and not the traditionalist who is suffering from an illusion.

British settlement of the colonies was haphazard. Colonies were granted to proto-corporations (the Virginia Company) and religious dissidents who had well-connected parents (William Penn), among others. Each colony established its own means of governance, and these established power-holders jealously guarded their prerogatives throughout the Revolutionary Era. The resulting compromises created the United States and its constitution. So my friend is on solid ground, as far as I can tell from the history: historical defenses of federalism are not enough, considering federalism's accidental origins. To be persuasive, we must dispense with the constitutional, historical argument--as much as I like them in general--and look for more modern sources of legitimacy.

So, with this discussion in mind, I have devised a list of seven reasons to support federalism whenever we can. None of these rely on the history of federalism or a tradition: they are positive arguments in favor of federalism on the merits. (All of these concepts could be expanded out into longer, more researched pieces. But for a blog post, I think this is a reasonable starting point.)

1. The states produce the Electoral College, which forces our presidential candidates to appeal more broadly.

People often criticize the Electoral College because it limits our elections to ten or twelve competitive states, rather than allowing everyone's votes to "count." After all, if you're not in Ohio, or Florida, or Virginia, or Pennsylvania, your vote is meaningless, because your state is uncompetitive.

I believe that this perspective is a case of being overwhelmed by the foreground and then losing the key background. The "unseen" element of the Electoral College is how it forces a presidential candidate to be more inclusive than she would be otherwise. Imagine a world where a candidate could spend their entire campaign simply focused on major cities. She could offer lavish housing subsidies, transit subsidies and other policies, funded on the backs of rural voters. (One could argue that we have this now, with the Democrats' focus on urban voters and the Republican focus on rural voters. But this would overstate the case substantially; Democrats still win in less urban places like Vermont and Wisconsin, and Republicans still win majorities in places like Phoenix and Fort Worth.)

The reason why is because there would be little risk in "going for broke" after any constituency; so long as you could get your 50%+1, you would win elections. But the Electoral College forces a more subtle approach. States have broader interests than narrower geographic constituencies, and thus serve as a safeguard from this sort of single-interest pandering. A full-on rural strategy for the GOP would risk current GOP strongholds like Arizona and Texas. Likewise, a full-on urban strategy for the Democrats would risk places like Vermont and Iowa. This forces the parties to create broader platforms.

Thus, campaigning in swing states rather than in target areas forces a candidate to have a broader appeal. Your vote matters as a threat if you live in one of those other states; it is the Electoral College that prevents candidates from going extremely hard for one group at the expense of all others. This is not direct representation, but for the greater good, it is probably a more useful impact than having one meaningful vote out of 130 million cast.

(Generally, I would throw this argument into one of many that I would make about the dangers of pure democracy and the importance of small-r republicanism. Democracy without safeguards is dangerous.)

2. Independent, strong states can serve as "laboratories of democracy" that offer us the chance to experiment with different methods to solve complex problems.

Louis Brandeis' famous dissent in New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann (1932), I think, covers this argument better than I ever could (for liberal ends, even!). So I'll excerpt it at length:

There are many men now living who were in the habit of using the age-old expression: "It is as impossible as flying." The discoveries in physical science, the triumphs in invention, attest the value of the process of trial and error. In large measure, these advances have been due to experimentation. In those fields experimentation has, for two centuries, been not only free but encouraged. Some people assert that our present plight is due, in part, to the limitations set by courts upon experimentation in the fields of social and economic science; and to the discouragement to which proposals for betterment there have been subjected otherwise. There must be power in the States and the Nation to remould, through experimentation, our economic practices and institutions to meet changing social and economic needs. I cannot believe that the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment, or the States which ratified it, intended to deprive us of the power to correct the evils of technological unemployment and excess productive capacity which have attended progress in the useful arts. 

To stay experimentation in things social and economic is a grave responsibility. Denial of the right to experiment may be fraught with serious consequences to the Nation. It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country [emphasis added].

Brandeis was writing about experimentation as a way out of the Great Depression, in a year before most people thought of using the federal government aggressively to combat it. But we can extend his overall logic to other issues. It is good that individual states could have the power to try new things. We don't necessarily have the answer to every problem we face, and having 50 "laboratories" to test things out will give us much more information than minimizing the potential of the states and moving closer towards one-size-fits-all centralization and standardization. If something fails, it has only affected one state rather than all of them. (This is one of many reasons why conservatives found PPACA to be so much more dangerous than Romneycare: the level of change threatened to destroy what was good in American health care, while Romneycare was quarantined to one state.)

3. As smaller entities, states have a better chance to grasp the peculiarities of their particular circumstances than a distant federal government.

This one is sort of a truism, but I'll propose it anyway: different states are different. The needs of Minnesota differ dramatically from the needs of New Mexico, which differ from the needs of New Hampshire, which differ from the needs of Florida. If we accept this proposition, then there are two ways to address these differences: either have federal employees and the Congress determine what is fair and appropriate for each state, or have the states decide themselves. Broadly speaking, I think we are more likely to serve the needs of those states by delegating the control of those issues and the setting of priorities to the individual states.

This comes up for me all the time living out in Oregon: it really is different out here, and I find it staggering that someone in Washington, DC, living 2,800 miles from here, can possibly be qualified to make many decisions about the daily lives of Oregonians. Even representatives from the state, if they serve for any length of time, will lose touch with a state like Oregon. It is just too difficult to fly out here on weekends. (Perhaps it is different if you live in Delaware, or Virginia, or somewhere near the Beltway. But Oregon is just SO far away.)

4. Increasing the scope of the central government means that it is more likely to struggle to do key functions well.

Every time we expand the role of the federal government, another piece of paper hits the president's desk. His day, however, does not get longer. It remains the same length. There are only three ways a president can address this problem:

- Sleep less.
- Spend less time on every problem.
- Delegate less important tasks to staffers/Cabinet.

All of these things can result in governance problems. If President Obama's only job in 2013 was to deal with the Syria crisis, is it likely that he would have mucked it up as badly as he did? Impossible! If Obama could have managed the development of the PPACA website full-time, could it have failed so spectacularly? Doubtful.

In my judgment, a big reason for executive failures over the last couple of decades has been because presidents have been expected to do and manage so many different things. The more we increase their responsibilities, the more potential failure points exist: the day remains 24 hours long, and we really need more than 6 hours of sleep to function effectively. Limiting the role of the federal government to the things that we think are truly important will decrease the time problem. Delegating more duties and responsibilities to the states is one such way to do this.

5. People prefer to help a friend than a stranger.

I recently saw something very horrible happen to an animal while I was driving in town. It was incredibly sad, and the image stuck with me for several weeks. And yet I eat meat six days per week and think little of the treatment of the animals that I eat. (That treatment is inhumane, almost invariably and inexorably. In theory, I could purchase meat from humane farmers, but even that treatment--and the harvesting of living beings for food--is a fraught, difficult idea.)

I liken this to our public posture in dealing with the disadvantaged. Most of us would help out close family members with money if we knew that it was the difference between their life and death, or their being homeless or in a warm bed. We might even help our neighbors or friends out. But we are unlikely to help people out in other parts of the country, and almost never will help out people living in other countries. (If we are all rationally concerned about welfare maximization, we would give almost all of our money to people in the world's poorest countries, where it would go a lot further. We don't.)

This seems to be a fact of human nature: we support those who are closest to us, and provide less support to those who are furthest away, even if their circumstances are substantially more horrifying. So we should work with that reality: if we aim to be humane and decent to those around us who struggle, we are more likely to have broad support if we localize our charity. The more local our donations are, the more that the donors can see the suffering and the impact of their donations. Bringing things to the local level would convince more people to support programs to assist those in great need. We should appeal to people's instincts to help those who are near, rather than appealing to their intellects to help people who are far away. This is more likely to be successful at the state level than at the federal level, where programs make the victims seem distant by definition. Federalism gives us more opportunities for this sort of local program and community engagement.

6. In a true federal system, states that struggle at governance will see a depletion of their revenues as people and businesses relocate.

Although much discussion of federalism hinges on the "laboratories of democracy" argument, the real strength of federalism is much like the real strength of capitalism: competition allowing for failure. States don't compete for profits, though; they compete for tax dollars. Michael Greve has more on what he calls competitive federalism:

This federalism relies on exit and mobility—of capital, and of labor—as a means of disciplining government. Very roughly, competitive federalism is the federalism we had from the Founding to the pre-New Deal period. Its general theory and contours are straightforward. Matters that are genuinely national should be committed entirely to the federal government. National defense, the regulation of network industries (such as airlines or the internet), and perhaps large-scale redistribution (such as Social Security) are the classic examples. The assignment should be exclusive, so as to avoid the regulatory duplication, gamesmanship, and intergovernmental collusion that characterize our federalism. On the other side, lots of things should be left exclusively to the states—exclusive of any federal regulation, and exclusive of any federal funds. This principle limits the federal government and, more importantly, forces state competition. Each state’s citizens will have to tax themselves for whatever level of public services and redistribution they want. When a state offers a lousy mix of taxes and services, productive citizens and businesses move to a more hospitable jurisdiction. Over time, one hopes, states that don’t give citizens their money’s worth will learn their lesson. 

Greve's broader argument is that we have moved away from competitive federalism towards something called cartel federalism, which could also be Potemkin federalism. In cartel federalism, the federal government actually suppresses the type of competition that federalism should actively promote with its policies of conditional grants and mandates. But that does not mean we should discard federalism entirely; it means we should get back towards a competitive environment.

If a state's policy environment is bad, people and businesses can move out, depriving those state governments of potential revenues. Thus, those state governments are incentivized to establish better environments. (Even a place like California, which has a pretty miserable public policy regime, survives, in my estimation, because the conditions are so great in terms of weather and lifestyle that the costs of bad governance are accepted by residents. North Dakota, for example, could not survive under similar governance.) The power of exit is essential in terms of human freedom and flourishing. America allows for free travel between states, with no papers, as Captain Ramius informs us in The Hunt for Red October. But if the states are all uniform, such freedom is less tangible and meaningful. True "exit" from the policy regime then requires things like visas, passports, and learning a new language. Thus the federal government has no comparable competition as do state governments; we can say that we're "moving to Canada" when the election doesn't go our way, but in reality, that's difficult. It is much easier to move from New Jersey to Pennsylvania.

Moreover, again, much like in the case of the Electoral College, the benefits of this particular feature are somewhat unseen. Even poorer people who cannot afford to relocate would benefit from the effects of the competition between governments, if government becomes more efficient. (And the federal government could, in theory, assist this process with relocation assistance for the long-term unemployed.)

7. The major weakness of federalism has been (appropriately) addressed by the federal government.

I think now that we have addressed the most grievous legal racial inequities in this country, we should support federalism on other issues even more strongly, in that its key weakness was its inability to address longstanding racial prejudice, with a particular emphasis on states with a long history of slavery. The federal government has established that it has an important role to play in the enforcement of legal equality in the realm of race relations. This was a good, necessary change to our federal structure. And while structural and social racial inequities probably still exist, these are less likely to be responsive to government intervention than was a direct change in the legal regime.

The Domain of Relational Value

A few hypotheticals, for the sports inclined:

- If every pitcher in baseball were as good as Matt Harvey, pitching would not be a big deal.
- If every quarterback were as good as Peyton Manning, excellent quarterbacking would not be how football teams won.
- If every goalie in hockey were as good as Tuukka Rask, goaltending would be unimportant.

A couple more, for the less-sports inclined:

- If everyone carried a Coach bag, Coach would not be a distinctive brand.
- If everyone could study to get every question right on the SAT, the SAT would be useless.

These are somewhat counterintuitive at first, but they make a lot more sense when you think about them: their value is (almost) entirely derived from their exclusivity. Peyton Manning is so valuable because no one is as good as he is. But if other quarterbacks were as good as he is, his value would decline, because its main value is in having a skillset that others do not. Football would turn on offensive scheme, defensive personnel, etc. much more than it does in today's league.

I would argue that all of those things--quarterbacks, pitchers, luxury accessories--are best described as existing in a "domain of relational value." But the domain exists even in more prosaic parts of everyday life. For example, politicians often toss off the bromide that we want everyone to go to college. But if college's main benefit is in signaling, then the more we fund college and promote people's higher education, the more we dilute the effect of the signal.

So, here is a typology: which programs and concepts have intrinsic value, and which ones have relational value?

Domain of Intrinsic Value

- Literacy
- Critical Thinking
- Agricultural knowledge
- Trade/vocational education (for skill-building)

Domain of Relational Value

- Education (signaling/credentialism)
- Trade/vocational education (for salary)
- Interview skills
- Plastic surgery
- Across-the-board wage hikes
- Fashion
- Accessories

We all benefit from increases in literacy and critical thinking skills, in terms of increased potential innovation, quality of life, etc. It's the same with scientific research to increase food yields; there is a social benefit to that, in terms of feeding the hungry and reducing the price of food.

But we do not all benefit from mandatory job interview courses or standardized test training. If everyone learned the "five key tricks to acing this job interview!" those tricks would no longer work, and job interviewers would have to look to other things to distinguish between their candidates. (Incidentally, I think this phenomenon--that humans adapt and often change their context rapidly--is the fatal problem of social science. Human nature may remain stable, but the context changes so much that our models seldom hold up.) A more trivial example would be in fashion: if everyone has the same style of dress, then that style of dress is no longer distinctive. Some things only have value because they serve as methods of distinction.

Now, you may argue that people who have those advantages do not deserve them (and in many cases, I would agree!). But what happens is that when we pursue funding and universality in an area where there is a relational value problem, the beneficiaries are not the targets of the plan; the beneficiaries are the rent-seekers who end up making a living off of the program. (A substantial portion of academia, sadly, is in this category right now, particularly in school administration.) The targets of the plan get their credential or their benefit just as the credential loses its value. By then, society has moved on, and we're all poorer for it. (I don't have any evidence of this to present here, but my suspicion is that a lot of programs that the government tailors for the disadvantaged run into this problem.) Rent-seeking is everywhere, of course, but at least when there is a social benefit, we are getting the benefit for our troubles.

My plea here, then, is to keep the relational value problem in mind when proposing something. Is some perceived benefit a benefit solely because of its exclusivity? Who will benefit from its proliferation? Will the people we most want to help actually be helped? There are lots of things we try to do with public policy; we should try to keep them away from the domain of relational value as much as we possibly can.

Paul Ryan and the Liar Leitmotif

Since the 2012 campaign, I have noticed that many on the Left portray Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) as "dishonest" or a "liar." I jokingly have noted that the critique comes from a central, all-controlling hand on the Left, who demands that all criticisms match up. This person offers short, staple critiques of figures on the Right--almost like Wagnerian leitmotifs, if you will--and then all criticisms of that figure need to work off of that leitmotif. Here are a few:

• George W. Bush - stupid
• Dick Cheney - evil
• Paul Ryan - liar
• Michelle Bachmann - crazy
• Sarah Palin - all of the above

I was thinking about this in conjunction with an article that emerged in The Fiscal Times, with the inflammatory headline of "Economics Say Paul Ryan Misrepresented Their Research." The author, Rob Garver, originally wrote that one economist whose research Ryan cited, Jeffrey Brown, noted that "while the [Ryan] paper cites the study accurately in a literal sense, it ignores the caveat that ‘there may also be other factors that would continue to limit the size of the private market even if Medicaid was reformed.'” Jeffrey Brown refuted this:

Speaking of “misrepresentation,” I take issue with your portrayal of my email communication to you as suggesting that Congressman Ryan incorrectly cited my work with Amy Finkelstein of MIT. You provided me the quote from his report and asked me if it was accurate, noting that another academic suggested it may not be. My exact response to you was: “That quote is an accurate representation of our work. My only caveat would be that although Medicaid has this effect, there may also be other factors that would continue to limit the size of the private market even if Medicaid was reformed.” The caveat was provided to help you – as the reporter – to understand the context for the citation in case you wanted to explore the policy implications of our work further and to help you understand why another academic might have felt the quote was inaccurate. But I did not suggest nor do I hold the view that Congressman Ryan “ignored” the caveat, as implied by your writing. Nor, as implied by the title of your piece, do I believe Congressman Ryan “misrepresented” my research. His citation was appropriate. Obviously, the interactions of Medicaid and long-term care are complex, and a full discussion would go far beyond the small summary they provided. But that is true of any summary - indeed, even our own abstract of the paper does not provide that caveat due to word count constraints. In short, I do NOT believe that my work was misrepresented in the Ryan document. Rather, I believe my email was misrepresented in your article.

That is somewhat devastating. When I read that, my thoughts drifted to Megan McArdle's new book about failure, The Up Side of Down. McArdle writes:

While it's undoubtedly true that some reporters consciously repress facts that threaten their prior ideological beliefs, I don't think that's really the issue in most cases. What bias does--in science, in media, in any situation where information is gathered--is affect what questions you ask. (pg. 151)

I love McArdle's framing here, and it allows us to accept that bias is pervasive and real without becoming conspiratorial. It seems very difficult to dispute that Garver was asking questions and looking for information to prove the leitmotif--that Ryan is dishonest. Garver was trying to add to "the pattern," thought he had found something, and went to press. (To his great credit--or to his editor's credit--Garver corrected it rather quickly. But that correction does not refute my point about leitmotifs as anchors or prisms for evaluation.)

I eagerly went to present this example of my leitmotifs theory being validated (confirmation bias is a danger here as well!) to my wife. While I was rambling about this on March 5, I saw this tweet from a liberal on Twitter named Mike Cohen:

@baseballcrank maybe he can break his own record for shameless lying set in 2012!
— Mike Cohen (@mcohen2) March 6, 2014

Note that he immediately goes to the "liar" meme. So I think there is something to this. Somewhere, somehow, "Paul Ryan is a liar" became the chosen line of attack from the Left. Thoughtful liberal commentator Jonathan Chait, I think, got part of the way to the reality when evaluating the emergence of the "Paul Ryan liar" leitmotif. He wrote,

A week ago, Paul Ryan’s political assets included — alongside his chiseled torso, plainspoken Midwestern demeanor, and the unshakable loyalty of the entire Republican Party — a firm reputation for honesty among the mainstream media. That reputation has suffered a massive, swift erosion. News stories about his speech at the Republican National Convention focused on its many rhetorical sleights of hand. Over the weekend, the revelation that he dramatically misstated a marathon time added a crucial, accessible piece of evidence to the indictment. Now liberals are calling him “Lyin’ Ryan” — a nickname that, a few weeks ago, would have seemed silly, like “Wimpy Palin.” Now mainstream pundits are defending Ryan with versions of the “well, all politicians fib” defense. Given that this constituency was once portraying Ryan as unusually honest, this represents a huge retreat for his political brand. 

[snip]

The thing about Ryan is that he has always resided in a counter-factual universe. He is a product of the hermetically sealed right-wing subculture. Many of the facts taken for granted by mainstream economists have never penetrated his brain. Ryan burst onto the national scene with a dense, fact-laden attack on the financing of Obama’s health-care bill that was essentially a series of hallucinations, pseudo-facts cooked up and recirculated by conservative apparatchiks who didn’t know what they were talking about or didn’t care. His big-think speeches reflect the influence of fact-free conservatives and collapse under scrutiny.

One of my tenets of this blog is that I am trying to be like Arnold Kling, and to take the most charitable view of people with whom I disagree. I reject most of Chait's contentions here, but buried beneath the criticisms is a good point, in my judgment.

Prior to the 2012 campaign, Ryan's political brand--his "homestyle," if you will--was "serious" and "thoughtful." The media latched onto this, because Ryan presents himself a certain way, and also, because President Obama offered the same appraisal. Way back a million years ago, in early 2010, Obama noted, "You don't get a lot of credit if I say, "'You know, I think Paul Ryan is a pretty sincere guy and has a beautiful family.' Nobody is going to run that in the newspapers." (One could argue that Obama's comments established something of a "permission structure" on the Left and in the media for acknowledging Ryan as "sincere" or "well-intentioned." Such a concession could easily be construed as an argument against interest.)

In the heat of a tough campaign, however, that sort of thing goes away. The minute Ryan was chosen as the GOP nominee for vice president, "sincere" was not going to hold up. Paul Ryan is not John McCain: a war hero with an incredibly strong, well-established national brand as a "maverick" that wasn't going to be impeached by political attacks. Ryan was well-known among the politically engaged, but was relatively obscure otherwise. (Note: McCain lost in 2008 because no Republican was ever going to win as the incumbent party in the middle of a financial crisis brought about by banks. Jay Cost's appraisal from October 2008 still strikes me as the best read of how that played out.)

Ryan, then, enters the arena with a style of sincerity and thoughtfulness... but premises that are almost universally disputed by the Left. Liberals like Jonathan Chait call them "hallucinations" and "pseudo-facts," but if we strip that down to its core, it is essentially that the Right and the Left argue from very different core principles and premises.

As befitting his style, Ryan's speeches are somewhat policy-heavy. He presents math and "facts" in a way that is difficult to ridicule as "stupid," because he is articulate. Here's a classic example from his 2012 convention speech (more on the criticisms of the convention speech and fact-checkers in a later post):

You see, even with all the hidden taxes to pay for the health care takeover, even with new taxes on nearly a million small businesses, the planners in Washington still didn't have enough money. They needed more. They needed hundreds of billions more. So, they just took it all away from Medicare. Seven hundred and sixteen billion dollars, funneled out of Medicare by President Obama. An obligation we have to our parents and grandparents is being sacrificed, all to pay for a new entitlement we didn't even ask for. The greatest threat to Medicare is Obamacare, and we're going to stop it.

This was an argument that was floating around on the Right for a while, but the mainstream media did not really pick it up. So hearing it from Ryan--thundering from the stage in Tampa--as fact, was galling. The reaction to this claim was uniform on the Left: Ryan is just making this up! Let's work through some specific responses, just to this particular claim. Here's Talking Points Memo:

Obama did use those Medicare savings -- in the form of targeted cuts in payments to providers, not in benefits to seniors -- to pay for the health care law. Ryan's budget calls for using them to finance tax cuts for wealthy Americans, and deficit reduction. But by now calling to restore that spending commitment to Medicare, Ryan and Romney are pledging to hasten Medicare's insolvency by many years.

CBS offers a similar take:

The Romney campaign points to a CBO report showing that if the health care law was repealed, spending for Medicare would increase by an estimated $716 billion from 2013-2022. The president's health care reform law is indeed paid for in part by reducing Medicare's expected rate of growth between now and 2022. According to data from the Kaiser Foundation, however, the reductions come primarily from cuts to Medicare Advantage plans, as well as in hospital reimbursements and in payments to other providers. The Obama administration casts them as savings that would streamline the system, reduce waste and fraud, reinforce the Medicare trust fund and extend its lifeline. It does not limit access to benefits for Medicare recipients, and actually offers new preventative care benefits, as well as increased prescription drug coverage. Republicans, however, argue it creates disincentives for hospitals and doctors to accept new Medicare patients.

Here's the NY Times:

The $716 billion cut to Medicare that President Obama made would reduce payments to health maintenance organizations, hospitals and many other health care providers.

And the Washington Post:

Under the health-care law, spending does not decrease in Medicare year after year; the reduction is from anticipated levels of spending in future years. Moreover, the “cuts” did not come at the expense of seniors. The savings mostly are wrung from health-care providers, not Medicare beneficiaries — who, as a result of the health-care law, ended up with new benefits for preventive care and prescription drugs.

Almost an echo chamber effect, no? To these fact checkers, the facts are not that PPACA reduced spending to Medicare Advantage. The facts are that those were "targeted cuts" to health care providers. There were several similar claims in Ryan's speech, which was a laundry list of arguments that had floated around on the Right. The Left rejects those arguments as invalid, and cannot see why any intelligent person would believe them. But Ryan is seen as intelligent. There are, then, two conclusions you can draw from those facts:

• Public policy is complicated, and there are many ways to look at the same sets of facts. Politicians will attempt to present those facts in a way that is most favorable to their own positions.
• Ryan is a liar.

As a pejorative, "liar" fits him well. Ryan certainly presented the facts in a way that was most favorable to his side. Thus the easiest rebuttal is to claim that Ryan is willfully misrepresenting the truth, not that he is a politician trying to make a political argument.

Whether you agree with the policy or not, the Affordable Care Act reduced funding to Medicare Advantage. That's a (narrow) fact. One can dispute whether this was a good idea, whether this constitutes "raiding Medicare," whether reducing payments to providers results in reduced benefits to customers, and a whole bevy of other issues. But it cannot be a "lie" to say, as Ryan did, that Obama cut Medicare to finance a new entitlement. Ryan is failing to paint both sides, but he is not lying. Here's another example of a politician speaking like a politician:

Today, women make up about half our workforce. But they still make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns. That is wrong, and in 2014, it’s an embarrassment. A woman deserves equal pay for equal work. She deserves to have a baby without sacrificing her job. A mother deserves a day off to care for a sick child or sick parent without running into hardship – and you know what, a father does, too.

President Obama is not at all lying here. He is not presenting the opposing case, which would complicate his number greatly, but he is not lying: it is perfectly reasonable to believe that there is a persistent wage gap brought about by overt and structural discrimination, and there is social science research pointing to the 77 cent figure. You could also reject much of his conclusion, as Reihan Salam does. Note Salam's takeaway, though:

In discussing the gender gap, the president has (a) oversimplified and misdiagnosed the underlying problem, (b) obscured the gains that have been made by women in the marketplace, and (c) made claims regarding what public policy can achieve that are unrealistic and potentially counterproductive.

Salam's opinion of the president's argument is that it is unpersuasive. But he doesn't call it a lie; to Salam, it's just a bad argument.

There is no difference between the veracity of those two arguments. Yes, according to a study, on average, women make 77 cents for every dollar men make. Yes, the ACA moved money away from Medicare Advantage. On their own, those facts are meaningless. What you draw from those facts depends on your premises, context, and worldview. (For its part, Politifact rated the President's claim as "mostly true" and Ryan's as "mostly false." Unsurprising.)

Politicians should be given a great deal of latitude to make their arguments, and people should be willing to accept that politicians will slant the truth. But once a narrative is established, the media will anchor to it and work tirelessly to confirm it. Paul Ryan is no different than anyone else, but the narrative must go on.

"Upskirting" and the Rule of Law

A few days ago, the Massachusetts Supreme Court set off a political/rhetorical brushfire with a ruling on the legality of taking "upskirt" photographs. CNN reported it as follows:

Massachusetts' highest court ruled Wednesday that it is not illegal to secretly photograph underneath a person's clothing -- a practice known as "upskirting" -- prompting one prosecutor to call for a revision of state law. 

The high court ruled that the practice did not violate the law because the women who were photographed while riding Boston public transportation were not nude or partially nude.

Its rationale was nitpicky, to say the least.

Contrary to the Commonwealth's view, § 105 (b ) does not penalize the secret photographing of partial nudity, but of "a person who is ... partially nude" (emphasis added). "Is" denotes a state of a person's being, not a visual image of the person. Moreover, this person who is partially nude should be defined with reference to the other category of person included in the same sentence, namely, "a person who is nude." See 2A N.J. Singer & J.D. Shambie Singer, Statutes and Statutory Construction § 47:16, at 352-353 (7th ed.2007) ( "ordinarily the coupling of words denotes an intention that they should be understood in the same general sense"). See also Commonwealth v. Brooks, 366 Mass. 423, 428 (1974) ("words in a statute must be considered in light of the other words surrounding them"). Just as "a person who is nude" is commonly understood to mean a person who is not wearing any clothes, [FN13] so, in this context, we understand "a person who is ... partially nude" to denote a person who is not wearing any clothes covering one or more of the parts of the body listed in the definition of that term, specifically, "the human genitals, buttocks, pubic area or female breast below a point immediately above the top of the areola." G.L. c. 272, § 105 (a ). 

In sum, we interpret the phrase, "a person who is ... partially nude" in the same way that the defendant does, namely, to mean a person who is partially clothed but who has one or more of the private parts of body exposed in plain view at the time that the putative defendant secretly photographs her.

Needless to say, such a ruling caused a public outcry. The text of this ruling could be fodder for late night comics and sarcastic news show hosts, as we picture old judges reading about "human genitals" and the "pubic area."

The outcry made sense, actually; "upskirting" is particularly heinous. Unlike most crimes, the victims of "upskirting" can be unwitting, never realizing that their privacy has been so violated. This makes us feel deeply uneasy, with women feeling doubly so. The idea that "upskirters" could have already succeeded in obtaining photographs of one's body is horrifying, and the outrage that followed was understandable.

Buoyed by the intensity of the reaction, the legislature worked swiftly, passing a bill to clarify the original statute. The Boston Globe reports:

Two days after the state’s highest court sparked outrage when it ruled that state law allows people to take such photos, Governor Deval Patrick signed a bill today to ban the practice, known as “upskirting.” 

The legislation sailed through the House and Senate Thursday, a day after the Supreme Judicial Court ruled that the state’s voyeurism law did not specifically prohibit people from secretly photographing under a woman’s clothing. It was a rare act of swift action in a Legislature often known for its glacial approach to making laws.

The Court ruled on the law the way it was written; the legislature immediately followed with a legislative clarification, and "upskirting" is now a crime in Massachusetts.

Although it would have been better if "upskirting" had already been illegal, this is exactly how public policy should be made. The Court interpreted the law as it was written, not as it should have been written, or how it could have been written, or what the legislature intended. Laws mean what they say, not what we want them to mean. The alternative to a the laws are merely sentiments, rather than language designed to explain to people what is expressly prohibited. (I am stealing this construction from George Will, who is entirely right on this point, in my opinion.)

The language of the statute was unclear on the issue of "upskirting," and the failure in drafting gave the defendant a strong, compelling case for the dismissal of the charges against him. The executive--in running its operation--was attempting to govern by the sentiments of the law. The judiciary (correctly) demanded clearer text.

A major reason why we have this sentiment-driven enforcement of the law is because legislators across the country have opted to neglect their responsibility to pass detailed laws. The legislature demands that we have strict financial regulation (in Dodd-Frank), but ultimately delegates all of the implementation to the executive, which then promulgates tens of thousands of pages of regulations. Legislators want government to do many things, but they do not have the ability, time, consensus, or expertise to pass all the statutes that would be required. So they outsource their responsibilities to the executive and the judiciary.

Moreover, Congress's incentives are almost entirely skewed against detailed passages of laws. Detailed laws give opponents ways to criticize incumbents; vague laws that outsource the policymaking to the executive are harder to attack. And even long statutes--like the 2,500 page ACA--give great discretion to the executive branch. Representatives and senators want to take their legislative accomplishments back to their constituents, but they do not want to deal with the negative consequences of their bills. So they pass sentiments, give them great titles, and allow the executive to do what it will.

Unfortunately, this inevitably leads to inconsistent application of the laws. We would be better off if everyone consistently forced legislatures and Congress to do their jobs:

• Courts should more often be willing to call out legislatures for their drafting failures, and force them to get back to work. From this perspective, the Supreme Court's ruling in Shelby County v. Holder was exactly right. (The ruling there was that a 50-year old formula for determining which states were subjected to preclearance was unconstitutional; preclearance itself, with a better formula, would be constitutional.)
• As much as it flies in the face of their incentives, in the long-run, executives should exercise less discretion in implementing laws. (In general, I think lower levels in executive branches should have more discretion, and high-level officials should have less discretion, but that's a different argument.)
• The public should pressure their representatives to act swiftly and explicitly in addressing failures. "Gridlock" is no excuse; if something is sufficiently popular, it will pass, or the legislators will be voted out.

Limited government and human liberty depends on the law explaining exactly what it means, rather than relying on the interpretation of the executive and the judiciary to enforce the legislature's sentiments. As seedy as "upskirting" is, its perpetrator has rights, and because the law was not clear, the perpetrator was rightfully acquitted. That's what happened here. For the law to be fair, sometimes, the morally guilty must be legally innocent.

In this case, the system worked in Massachusetts. The Court identified a drafting failure, the public demanded a response, and the legislature passed a law. The next person who is caught "upskirting" will face the full weight of the state of Massachusetts, and will deserve every bit of it, thanks to the work done here. This time, at least, no one in government deserves our opprobrium--except the legislators who failed on this in the first place. And, on balance, we should praise Massachusetts for the implementation of justice here.

On Causal Density

The most useful concept I have encountered in engaging with public debate and public policy over the past decade is the notion of "causal density." It provides us with a framework for evaluating almost any given subject.

I first encountered the concept in Jim Manzi's excellent book, Uncontrolled: The Surprising Payoff of Trial-and-Error for Business, Politics, and Society. Manzi posits that causal density is a measure of the potential number of factors that could be the root cause of a given phenomenon. In areas of low causal density, causality is (comparatively) easy to determine. In areas of high causal density, causality is elusive, because there are so many potential factors that could be affecting your subject matter. Or, as Arnold Kling puts it, "causal density is a bear."

Academic disciplines can be characterized quite neatly using causal density. Randall Munroe hit on this, perhaps inadvertently, in a wonderful xkcd comic.

(Image taken from xkcd.)

Although Munroe is arranging his fields by "purity," you could just as easily replace purity with "causal density" and you'd have roughly the same chart. Math in its purest form has extremely low causal density. Admittedly, I am not a mathematician, but it is very easy, when dealing with numbers, to determine which inputs changed whatever outputs changed. As you work your way from right to left on his comic, it gets progressively harder to discern causality. Physics is comparatively easy, in that sense (and perhaps that sense alone!); we can control environments and variables very effectively. Chemistry is perhaps a bit more complicated. Biology, which deals with the interaction of living systems, is more difficult still. The further to the left you are in Munroe's comic, the more slippery causality becomes.

The toughest nuts to crack in the causality world are what academia identifies as the liberal arts. Below is my mental model, put together with the greatest of care (read: very sloppily) in the GIMP Image Editor on Ubuntu. I would be willing to reconsider some of the placements here, but I had a reason for each of them.

Admittedly, some of this is a product of ignorance; I don't know all of these fields. But that (sloppy) chart is basically how I view the disciplines. The further to the right, the more probable that explanations of causation are correct. The further to the left, the less probable.

A few points on this:

- I would separate "predictive theories of history" from the historical discipline more broadly, and the comparative method in history more narrowly. When history is merely trying to chronicle the past, it is less prone to causality issues that some of the other liberal arts, which are attempting to explain how humans operate, rather than how they once operated. Also worth noting is the comparative method. Comparison is an explicit attempt to discern causality, by trying to find similar cases and then to identify the asymmetries between them. The method has its limitations, and the causal density is still incredibly high. But it is a way to combat our knowledge problems. It is the theory of history--Hagel, Marx, etc.--that has the highest causal density, because it is essentially an attempted synthesis of all human knowledge and experience. And it is, then, the most problematic of the disciplines, from a causal density perspective.

- One of the challenges of the human-focused disciplines is the ever-changing nature of the subject. Human nature may be unchanging--and to a large extent, I believe it is--but the changing context has such an impact that models that make sense in one situation can become completely useless due to small changes. We just don't see that type of external shock to the "core laws" in the hard sciences.

- Causal density and complexity are not synonymous, at least in the discourse. The "harder" subjects often have lower causal density. This is because the "easier" subjects allow us to get away with more rhetorical and intellectual "hand-waving." The complexity of physics--a field of low causal density--should give us pause. Our experimental method gets us pretty close to The Truth that underlies reality, and that truth is massively complicated. (When I say "The Truth," I mean "the actual causes of given events." Such causes clearly exist, but they are difficult to determine accurately.) Political science is so much more complicated that our models barely scratch the surface of true understanding of causation.

- Many of the models in social science end up getting the correct answer via approximation. But we shouldn't equate that periodic "success" with the Truth, and we should be aware that the Truth may change in the future.

- I believe that many of our political disagreements are because politicians assume that we live in environments of low causal density. But the real world and human interaction is an area of extremely high causal density, and thus we should adopt lower confidence in our beliefs.

This reliance on causal density justifies, in my mind, certain deeply-held views:

- Tinkering with an economy is largely a fool's errand, because it is so difficult to get a handle on all the pieces. (On this, Hayek is completely right, in that the curious task of economics should be to demonstrate to men--and women--how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.)

- Trying to standardize medicine--to change it to "paint by numbers" style diagnosis and treatment--will probably cause problem.

- Decentralization is very often better than centralization, because we are prone to error in areas of high causal density, and reduced size reduces the scope of the error.

- Trial and error is more useful than theorizing.

- "Culture"--as a catch-all for "collective ways of seeing the world" or "stories we tell ourselves," as a friend from school described it--is a useful fiction, at the very least, because it encompasses potential causes that we cannot disaggregate. This implies that we should respect "cultures" that have been successful and do our best to preserve them; oftentimes, in pushing for a change, we may be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. (I don't intend for this to imply that we should always support the status quo.)

A good shorthand for this is to think in terms of potential external inputs into a system. The more possible inputs, the more complicated determining causation can get.

My overall point here: Discerning causality in public policy is incredibly difficult, because people are incredibly complicated, and complex, dynamic systems are very difficult to fully understand. But with that said, we shouldn't hesitate to create grandiose historical theories, or theories of politics or sociology. They are entertaining and stimulating, at the very least, and they can help shape the way we see the world. But we shouldn't accept those theories without great skepticism, and if we do employ these ideas, we need to find ways to limit our downside and limit the degree of potential errors. (This is what I would call a Talebian posture.)

Back to the Blog

I am not new to blogging, but I don't think I was ever particularly good at it.

I've written at a handful of web sites in my life. I had a Livejournal for part of my high school career that was largely a chronicle of the day-to-day. In college, I periodically blogged on the Livejournal site. I wrote a baseball blog, then for several different baseball sites (one of which really took off after I left, actually). I set up a politics blog late in college to spare my friends annoying Livejournal posts. I periodically wrote a column on international affairs that felt somewhat bloggish for the Gettysburgian, the school newspaper of my alma mater. With hindsight, a lot of that writing was uneven. Some things I just find misguided. Some naive. Some just poorly written. Many poorly argued.

So I've been writing for years, though perhaps not well. Now, a half decade older and hopefully wiser, I aim to write again (sometimes), using this mainly as a place to expand on some things that I hammer on my Twitter feed. I might write some politics, but I am less interested in the proverbial horse race than I was back in 2008, and I think getting stuck in the weeds is too easy if you follow it too closely. These days, my intellectual interests are in argumentation, persuasion, and uncertainty. How, in other words, should we live, talk, and argue in a world that we really don't understand?

I've titled this blog The Skeptical Servant. As a skeptic, I find myself disagreeing with most of the elite consensus. You probably could have called me something of a technocrat in my earlier years; that was based on a fundamental faith in intelligence, which I think comes naturally to good students who find themselves frustrated by the outside world. That went away in college, and the events of 2007 and 2008 solidified my disdain for social elites. Much of what I will be writing here will be, in some ways, standing athwart what I believe is a misguided elite consensus on a particular issue.

But I also see myself as a servant. In my non-writing career, I work as a public servant, and I take the notion of responsibility to the taxpayer very seriously. I should also state that I found religion a few months back. Many things that never made sense to me about my Catholic faith all of a sudden clicked, in what I can only describe today as a sudden, unexpected moment of spiritual clarity that has lingered for these past several months. Many things that made me uneasy about my childhood faith began to make sense in ways that are hard to describe, and those things have pushed me towards a deeper notion of service: to God, to country, to people in general. As a servant, then, I try to be humble, which means I will try my best to avoid taking potshots. If I ask a question, it will be because I genuinely want to know how someone reconciles something that I don't understand. I will avoid accusing people of malice or stupidity; and I would like to be called out on it if I slip. Most importantly, I will write here in an effort to improve my own understanding and level of engagement with the world. We are always learning, and there is always much to learn. And, as my early blogging demonstrates to me, even bad writing is useful; it reminds us of who we were, and how far we've come.

Lastly, I don't expect to change any minds writing here, and I'm frankly not after converts to my way of thinking. (Though if you're interested in Catholicism, I'm happy to help out on that front.) Still, I'd like to think that by periodically writing here, I can provide examples of a specific worldview in a way that is respectful and decent, rather than inflammatory and frustrating. If I do that, I'll be satisfied.