Who cares about engine and light bulb efficiency?

I was irked by this segment on NPR news today. The energy bill recently passed by the Senate mandates higher efficiency for car engines and light bulbs, among other things. My gripe is that, even if consumers are buying too much gas and electricity (given negative externalities from carbon), what if the specific strategies mandated by this bill are not the best way to reduce consumption? Ideally, we would want to raise the price of energy, so that carbon and other environmental issues are accounted for, and then let each consumer decide the best course of action for himself/herself.

Professional Voting: A Proposal for Democracy Reform

I have a new article called Professional Voting: A Proposal for Democracy Reform that expands on and modifies an idea I posted about earlier this year to create a class of Professional Voters, who are paid to become well informed about issues in an effort to solve the problem of voter ignorance

The Professional Voting scheme would monitor how well informed individual voters are by giving voters a test right before they vote, which would measure their knowledge of political facts and arguments. To ensure that Professional Voters would be representative of the population at large, they would also be given a demographic survey, which would ask about their income, race, gender geographic location and any other factors which would be likely to shape a voter’s perspective and values. Then, after they vote, voters would be given a relatively large payment (perhaps about $10,000) based on how well they did on the political test and based on how representative they were of underrepresented demographics. The initial voting result would then be statistically corrected so that the final election outcome would be representative of the population at large and to model how voters would have voted if everyone had done very well on the test. This corrected voting result would be used as the final outcome of the election. The body responsible for creating and administering the test and demographic survey would be a proportionally elected Electoral Council, the subject of the next section, which would be elected in a normal election by non-professional voters.

 Comments and criticism are always welcome.

Psychology and Experimental Economics

The Monkey Cage’s Lee Sigelman points to an article, Psychology and Experimental Economics: A Gap in Abstraction (unfortunately gated), that discusses the differences between how experimental psychology and experimental economics approach the same phenomena and how the two fields might converge.

The paper is short but quite interesting, and it covers some experimental research on altruism and on gender discrimination.

Strangely, the authors twice refer to utility maximization as a normative theory not a positive theory.

For economists, these elements are derived from their general normative theory—that behavior is driven by utility maximization.

I thought that was odd.

Quote of the day

Whenever a politician mentions a government policy and jobs as a measure of its success or lost jobs as a measure of its failure, put your hands over your ears and say “LaLaLaLa, I can’t hear you” really loud. (John Whitehead)

Whether a policy helps or hurts workers, it probably will not affect employment very much.

Incentives apply to journalists too

Dan Bartlett, former White House communications director says this about the motivations of journalists,

I’ve found that most of them are not ideologically driven. Do I think that a lot of them don’t agree with the president? No doubt about it. But impact, above all else, is what matters. All they’re worried about is, can I have the front-page byline? Can I lead the evening newscast? And unfortunately, that requires them to not do in-depth studies about President Bush’s health care plan or No Child Left Behind. It’s who’s up, who’s down: Cheney hates Condi, Condi hates Cheney.

Whenever people complain about the left wing bias or the right wing bias of the media, I note that people respond to incentives. If the media is biased it is because that bias is popular. People want to consume that biased content. If people generally wanted totally unbiased media, that’s what they would get. It is difficult to complain about this because it is hard to see how it could be different.

I should also note that different media institutions have different biases. The media is not monolithic.

Via Matt Yglesias

The motives of political actors and self selection

In response to my last post, Jim Dew expresses the intuition that politicians are self selected for the desire for power and control, and so we should expect politicians to seek power and control more than other people. This is an excellent point.

Here is how I think about it now:

We can think of all jobs as providing compensation along to dimensions: the opportunity to exert control over people and resources, and all other forms of compensation (mostly money, benefits etc.).

Political jobs, whether elected or unelected, offer comparatively more compensation in the form of opportunity to exert control over people and resources than other jobs, even those which offer the amount of ‘total’ compensation. This is especially true because many political jobs don’t pay very much.

We should expect those who find relatively more utility in exerting control over people and resources to prefer political jobs because they see political jobs as providing more total compensation than other jobs they can get.

We should also expect to see relatively more such people in political jobs because they will be willing to spend more resources to get those jobs. People who value control over people and resources relatively more than others, will spend more time and effort to cultivate the skills to get political jobs than others.

The net result is that people who have self selected to become politicians will be more motivated to exploit the opportunities to exert power and control over people and resources than others. I think that this same logic also applies to the desire to implement ideology, which I mentioned in my last post, because there are very few opportunities to implement ideology outside of government. Therefore we should expect politicians to be more motivated to advance their ideology than others.