I haven’t read her book yet but based on an interview with Daivd Leohardt I’d wager that Diane Coyle is the Amy Chua to my Bryan Caplan. A snippet:
There is too much cynicism about politicians, I think. Most people go into public life because they start out with the noble ambition making things a bit better for their fellow citizens. So why do they all seem to end up doing short-term pork-barrel politics?
I agree that most people go into politics to for noble reasons. However, at least is budgets are any guide, very little of what they do seems to be pork barrel projects. Moreover, many of those projects are the type of investments that Coyle seems to be supporting.
Here is sampling of some of the larger projects, taken directly from the 2009 report of Citizens Against Government Waste, a group not friendly to pork barreling.
- $4,545,000 for wood utilization research in 10 states by 19 senators and 10 representatives. This research has cost taxpayers $95.3 million since 1985. One would think that after 24 years of research all the purposes for one of the world’s most basic construction materials would have been discovered.
- $80,655,000 for 86 projects by Senate CJS Appropriations Subcommittee Ranking Member Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), including: $900,000 for fish management at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab; $800,000 for the University of South Alabama for oyster rehabilitation in Mobile; $500,000 for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for public education in Mobile; $500,000 for NOAA for the Gulf Coast Exploreum Science Center in Mobile for education exhibits; $475,000 for the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville for missions systems recording, archival, and retrieval; $400,000 for the McWane Science Center in Birmingham for education and science literacy programs; and $100,000 under the COPS program for the Talladega County Commission to make radio upgrades.
- $41,065,000 for 26 projects by Senate CJS Appropriations Subcommittee Chairwoman Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), including: $1,000,000 for the University of Maryland College Park for its Advanced Study Institute for Environmental Prediction to study climate impacts and adaptation in the Mid-Atlantic region; $1,000,000 for Coppin State University, Towson University, and the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute to partner on a program to increase the number and quality of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics teachers in the region’s public schools; $550,000 for the NOAA Chesapeake Bay office for blue crab research; $500,000 for the NOAA Chesapeake Bay office for a network of environmental observation platforms; and $500,000 to Charles County public schools for a digital classroom project
- $190,000,000 for 33 projects by Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), including: $23,000,000 for the Hawaii Federal Healthcare Network, $9,900,000 for the U.S.S. Missouri (which costs $16 for an adult to tour and receives 100,000 annual visitors), and $3,600,000 for intelligent decision exploration. That is something many members of Congress should be doing.
- $87,025,702 for 28 projects by then-Senate Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee Ranking Member Pete Domenici (R-N.M.), including: $18,000,000 for middle Rio Grande restoration; $4,757,500 for climate change modeling capability; $3,828,000 for New Mexico environmental infrastructure; $1,914,000 for Army Corps of Engineers construction of the Acequias irrigation system; $1,903,000 for the La Samilla Solar Through Storage Project; $1,903,000 for the Center of Excellence and Hazardous Materials; and $200,000 for the middle Rio Grande endangered species collaborative program.
- $73,690,000 for 35 projects by Senate Interior Appropriations Subcommittee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), including: $5,600,000 for two projects at the Golden Gate National Recreation Area; $5,000,000 for San Francisco Bay restoration grants; $1,250,000 for the Angel Island Immigration Station; $800,000 for a tunnel at Yosemite National Park; and $460,000 for the Whiskeytown National Recreation Area. In November 2008, Whiskeytown participated in the National Park Service’s Artists-in-Residence Program. Participants include sculptors, painters, land-artists, and video artists, who get to spend up to four weeks in an “artist’s cabin … to produce new works.”
That, however, isn’t even our main point of disagreement. I think the main problem with being far sighted about the future is that no one knows for sure what the future is going to be. That makes future public policy especially hard and it planning for the future especially dangerous.
What I would point towards is contingency plans, guides of the nature: When You are Engulfed in a Credit Crisis or When A Giant Tsunami Has Struck, rather than trying to chart any particular course.
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Friday ~ June 17th, 2011 at 9:39 am
Curt Doolittle
Karl -
Economics has replaced morality as the means of political coercion via rhetoric.
But the purpose of political rhetoric remains: it is to obtain power political power.
And the purpose of political power is to gain control over the lives and properties of others using law, money and violence.
The popular discourse in the US is a set of proxy arguments over the transfer of social status and political power from one group to another, and the impact of that transfer over the long run.
From that perspective, the arguments you criticize are not temporally logical, but in the long term they are strategically rational.
The difference between social classes, if not the economic classes, is one of time preference – shorter and longer time horizons.
1. The aristocracy (or rather, it’s remnants) are highly concerned about long-term group persistence and the retention of geographical boundaries. (conservatives) They are naturally skeptical about the future.
2. The commercial classes are concerned about the intermediate future. (republicans and libertarians). They are pragmatic about the future.
3. The public intellectual, priestly, and proletariat classes are only concerned abut the relative present. (democrats and socialists) They are either inconsiderate of, or faithfully optimistic about the future.
And the error that we live with every day, is that we are still a relatively homogenous nation of small business people (farmers), with a constitution for small business people, where all of us have the similar interests of small business people. And instead we are disproportionately a nation of un-landed urban dwellers, who work in private or governmental bureaucracies and therefore insulated from the market, while the minority of entrepreneurs carries the full burden of the entire market system, while we all are operating under the illusion of similar interests that we had as small business, landed, farmers.
Friday ~ June 17th, 2011 at 1:11 pm
Eric Morey
“while the minority of entrepreneurs carries the full burden of the entire market system”
That sounds heroic, but its as realistic as superman.
Friday ~ June 17th, 2011 at 3:05 pm
Curt Doolittle
Eric.
I am making an argument to illustrate human political behavior in an effort to demonstrate that Karl’s rather scientific analysis ignores the equally scientific reality of human political behavior.
On the other hand, I am not sure it’s as unrealistic as you suggest. That is, unless you can provide some data to support your opinion, then it’s simply just another political statement that is rational but non-factual.
There is nothing novel or contrary to the literature. This is pure Hayek and Schumpater. And it’s supported by the data: people in urban environments discount costs because they live in a world of low opportunity costs, and people in rural environment inflate costs because they live in a world of high opportunity costs. People almost universally desire access to the market as consumers, but they attempt to escape market participation whenever possible by seeking jobs in bureaucracies where they do not have to take personal risk with their own money given their own forecasts in the market. These bureaucracies exist in the private sector, in the public sector, in the military sector, and in the charitable sector. Furthermore small business people do not have access to lobbyists…
Friday ~ June 17th, 2011 at 3:22 pm
Curt Doolittle
@Eric,
And I am separating entrepreneurs from the category of people you would probably call ‘bankers’ who are speculating with public money, and privatizing wins and socializing losses in the process. An entrepreneur is speculating with his own money. I am pretty sure that’s the appropriate use of the term.
And I suspect that under that analysis, my statement above remains valid – from a political perspective.
The point being that the corruption of ‘Corporatism’ is a function of bureaucracy and ability to circumvent the market, just as ‘Government’ is a function of bureaucracy and an ability to circumvent the market. Leaving only the people who are outside bureaucracies and selling labor, and people who are outside bureaucracies and behaving entrepreneurially.
Curt
Saturday ~ June 18th, 2011 at 1:36 am
Rick Russell
We have national organizations dedicated to identifying and sustaining quality research projects, distributing funds and monitoring performance. NASA, the NSF, the NIH, and other grant funding organizations have extensive peer review and monitoring in place to make sure cash goes to quality research.
The problem with pork-barrel projects is that they have no controls, no monitoring, and more importantly, other basic research must remain unfunded because these items were earmarked. Some of it is certainly good science, but the the problem is that good science is *not* the fundamental criterion that is being used to make the decision.
Sunday ~ June 19th, 2011 at 1:47 am
joeedh
Politicians have far less freedom then we think. Activist groups control pretty much everything. A political party is a network of quasi-tribal groupthinks binded together by blind loyalty–the tendency is to limit the discretion of politicians as much as possible.
Paul Ryan is an extremely centrist guy–whose been forced to sell his ideas by tacking to the hard right. He is one of the few politicians creative enough to find ways to promote his own ideas, and not simply repeat what other people tell him to. If I remember right, Steny Hoyer is a similar example among the Democrats.