Election night reminded me once more what a crazy, wonderful country I live in.  Barack Obama gave an incredible, uplifting victory speech to match his great accomplishment.  John McCain’s concession speech was literally jaw-dropping.   His eloquence, graciousness, and humility were inspiring; a few more performances that good and he may not have had to concede!  For him, on the very night of the election, to refer to his opponent as “my president”, after an ugly campaign this year and such divisive elections in 2000 and 2004, blew my mind.

It made me think of just how unusual our political system is.  Our presidents and presidential candidates have, again and again, given up the most powerful office in the world without coups, civil wars, violence.  This is not how human beings naturally work.  That we do so is an awesome achievement of our constitutional system, culture, and continued vigilance.  John McCain did one better, giving up not only without violence, but without hard feelings.

In a democratic society, though, we cannot depend only on having great leaders; they will not emerge except from a great people.  Ordinary Americans, using the latest greatest American technology, give the best showing of supporting democracy and being kind-hearted.

I give you 52 to 48/48 to 52, with love!

As I filled out my absentee ballot, I found myself deeply ambivalent- both about the local races I know nothing about, and the Presidential race I’ve been reading about for months and could talk about for hours.  I wonder whether all these things I know about the candidates reflect what they know about themselves and their real plans; and further how future events will intervene to make the candidates act in ways they themselves don’t anticipate.

But the problem is bigger than uncertainty about the future; it is more a fundamental inability to judge people.  I lack the experience, knowledge, and confidence to say that one person is better than another unless the evidence is overwhelming.  College taught me how to evaluate position papers and speeches, but some time working HR, or working anywhere, would have taught me to evaluate people with more confidence (if not knowledge).

So why do I say that college taught me how to vote, if it left me unable to choose candidates?  Easy, there’s more than names on a ballot!  There are questions, direct questions about single issues.  That’s exactly the kind of thing college is good for; these questions could blend into an exam in political science, philosophy, or economics.  Except they’re easy; it is pretty straightforward to see which groups are hurt or helped economically, and how a single proposition fits with your political philosophy.

The ironic part of all this single-issue preparation is that while I feel I’ve learned well how to vote as a senator, I’m left clueless about how to vote for a senator.

It’s real hard to know exactly when we hit rock bottom, but after enough free-fall its a pretty safe bet that the big splat is near.  If you’re in to speculation, now seems like a great time to get into commodity and currency markets; say, buying some oil futures high and holding Icelandic kronas.

For some speculation safe enough to resemble investing more than gambling, the major stock indices are hard to beat.  Every time the Dow has fallen this far this fast, it was way up within a year; the only exception is the Great Depression, and even then it was back within 5 years.  I might even bet on this one with my own money.  That, or buy most of Iceland.

My own thoughts echoed with hyperbole in The Guardian.

“Clubs are such insufferable dungeons of misery, the inmates have to take mood-altering substances to make their ordeal seem halfway tolerable. This leads them to believe they “enjoy” clubbing. They don’t. No one does. They just enjoy drugs.”

Certainly if a critical mass of people decide something is cool, their dream becomes a reality, regardless of how far-out it may have been in the first place.  Of course by breaking such a taboo, however silly, the author declared himself a loser to nearly his entire London peer group.  He should flee the inevitable rejection sooner rather than later, and go crawl under a rock in Wales.

Freidrech Hayek’s 1945 essay in AER was decades ahead of its time, long pre-empting much of the economics profession on the importance of dispersed information.  It also showed why Communism was doomed to failure, though it took many poor and deadly decades before the experiment was admitted to have confirmed his theory.

When I tell people I’m studying economics, many respond with something like “thats great, I wish I knew more about handling money” or even more directly “now you can tell me what to do with my money!”.

Of course, as an economist I have no special knowledge about this.  A financial economist could give them narrow advice, about how to maximize returns on their savings; but only after people have made their own choices about their risk preferences and time values of money.

Traditional economics sees people as rational agents, each maximizing their own utility- that is, doing the best they can for themselves, with no need for help from economists.  The only domain where economists presumed to give advice based on their own special knowledge was macroeconomics, studying how all these individually rational decisions add up.  And on this scale, economists can be pretty arrogant: Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter describes how economists and ordinary people disagree about issues like trade and unemployment- and concludes that since ordinary people don’t believe what economists do they must be irrational.

But behavioral economics, for all its wonderful insights, opens the door to a whole new level or arrogance.  Before, it was only public policy that people were asked to leave to the experts.  But when the assumption that people behave rationally gets thrown out, their whole lives are now open to criticism.  Thaler and Sunstein’s Nudge is only the beginning.  Behavioral economics is likely to reveal more and more areas in which people seem to act irrationally in their daily lives, and economists and policy makers will be more and more tempted to intervene, telling people how to live their lives “for their own good”.  We of libertarian disposition must be vigilant lest this nudge become a strongarm.

As cynical Americans, we hardly expect our politicians to do in office what they promised to do on the campaign trail.  But many presidents end up doing just the opposite of what they promised, speeding away from their original platform like an Olympian diving off the 10 meter- though rarely with such purpose or grace.

Woodrow Wilson was reelected in 1916 on the slogan, “He kept us out of war.”  Within five months, he was asking Congress to declare war against Germany.

Franklin Roosevelt called President Hoover a profligate spender and promised to balance the budget and reign in spending.  But once in office he quickly surpassed Hoover, increasing government spending and defecits to peacetime records.

On the campaign trail in 2000, then-Governor Bush criticized Clinton and Gore for their attempts at “nation-building”, and said he would never do such a thing.  Less than a year after he was elected, President Bush had decided to give nation-building a try in Afghanistan, soon followed by a larger and less necessary attempt in Iraq.

Were these men simply lying to get elected?  I don’t think its so simple; I suspect all of them, especially Bush, intended to follow through on their rhetoric.  They changed their minds in response to changing circumstances- like unrestricted German submarine warfare, a persistent depression, or the Sept 11th attacks.  There is a least a modicum of honesty and legitimacy in these actions.

But the fact remains that these men were given power by an electorate because of what they promised to do.  Some of those who voted for Bush in 2000 in hopes of a less activist foreign policy were deeply dissapointed with his change of heart; some Floridians especially must have been driven to despair knowing what their hand had helped to wreak.

But what can we do as voters?  How can we know what a presidential candidate would really do, when they may not even know themselves?  Given the history just cited, it almost seems as if the best bet is to vote for the candidate with the beliefs most nearly opposite one’s own.  But really, it is probably best to roll the dice given the information we have.  Looking at the records and speeches of Obama and McCain, we can gain a little information.  It may not cover everything; it may be contradictory already; it will almost certainly be contradicted later.  But voters too must take the plunge, and hope the pool we are aiming for turns out to be where we think it is.

I have immense respect for a man who can go through ten years of hell and come out a kinder, more generous, more courageous, and more articulate person.

Here’s to a great man and great writer.

From The Gulag Archipelago:

“So let the reader who expects this book to be a political expose slam its covers shut right now. If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil. Socrates taught us: Know thyself! Confronted by the pit into which we are about to toss those who have done us harm, we halt, stricken dumb: it is after all only because of the way things worked out that they were the executioners and we weren’t [p. 169].”

Edmund Burke, the 19th century British statesman and writer, is something of a patron saint to conservative intellectuals- the same people who spent countless hours arguing about whether the war was a good idea, the same people who largely decided that it was. So I was quite surprised to realize that I’ve never heard this question asked before.

Burke’s most celebrated book, Reflections on the Revolution in France, put forward the most basic conservative idea- that human institutions have evolved as they have for good reasons, and even seemingly unjust and arbitrary institutions should be changed gradually rather than completely overthrown. It is not obvious why overthrowing a government and trying to rebuild a country from the ground up is a better idea in the Iraq of 2003 than it was in the France of 1789. There are arguments to be made, of course, for why this time is different; but, by and large, they were not made. The problem was ignored.

Less famously, Burke was a leading anti-imperialist of his time, advocating a lighter hand in Ireland and India, and supporting the American revolutionaries. He was not a man to easily support the occupation of another nation.

This is the problem with having dead heroes. When they would agree with you, you take comfort in the fact and proclaim it. But when their condemnation should ring loud and clear, we do our best to silence their nagging voice.  When people we claim to respect cannot speak with their own voice, we must remember their words, whether they are convenient for us or not.  This sort of intellectual honesty, practiced widely, could have made for some very different recent history.

Brain output is quite variable, presumably because brain input is similarly variable.

So when is it that you think best?

For me, its in math classes.  My brain recognizes the diffuculty of the problems being presented, calls up the reserve power, then proceeds to apply it to any problem except the one being presented.  I should really just hang out in math classes all day without taking them and their associated grades.