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What Constitutes a Despotic Government?

What is the worst kind of despotism that can arise from a demographic government?  George Will has some interesting thoughts on these questions in a thought-provoking speech he gave last month (here are Peggy Noonan's thoughts on the speech).  In the talk, Will quotes Tocqueville, and in the process sums up a lot of what I think is wrong with the thinking of the food police (it also reminds me a bit of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal  Fascism).  

Here is Tocqueville in Democracy in America (published in French in 1835):

It would seem that if despotism were to be established among the democratic nations of our days, it might assume a different character; it would be more extensive and more mild; it would degrade men without tormenting them.

It won't be like the old tyrannies:

I think, then, that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything that ever before existed in the world; our contemporaries will find no prototype of it in their memories. I seek in vain for an expression that will accurately convey the whole of the idea I have formed of it; the old words despotism and tyranny are inappropriate: the thing itself is new, and since I cannot name, I must attempt to define it.

Here is the new despotism:

Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?
Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things;it has predisposed men to endure them and often to look on them as benefits.
After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

The next time you hear that the government should nudge us toward making better decisions, remember Tocqueville's warning of a government that doesn't shatter your will but rather one in which your will is "softened, bent, and guided."  What are we to make of a government that perceives its citizens as needing a shepherd?  It must be one that thinks of its citizens as sheep.  

Who Will be the Paternalist for the Paternalists?

With lawmakers seemingly still struggling to come up with solutions to the fiscal cliff dilemma (now only a day away from the cliff), I am reminded of this paper I ran across a while back by Niclas Berggren in the Review of Austrian Economics.  Here is the abstract:

This study analyzes leading research in behavioral economics to see whether it contains advocacy of paternalism and whether it addresses the potential cognitive limitations and biases of the policymakers who are going to implement paternalist policies. The findings reveal that 20.7% of the studied articles in behavioral economics propose paternalist policy action and that 95.5% of these do not contain any analysis of the cognitive ability of policymakers. This suggests that behavioral political economy, in which the analytical tools of behavioral economics are applied to political decision-makers as well, would offer a useful extension of the research program. Such an extension could be related to the concept of robust political economy, according to which the case for paternalism should be subjected to “worst-case” assumptions, such as policymakers being less than fully rational.

That is precisely the problem with much of the behavioral economics research which advocates for policy action.  This research typically finds people are not perfectly rational and then the researchers make a logical deduction that a paternalistic policy can make "irrational" people better off.  But the vast majority of these studies never actually test how the people (for whom paternalism is supposedly needed) will respond to the choices or nudges made on their behalf or how political influences might affect the best-laid nudging plans.

I will note that for over a year now, I've been working on a couple papers with Bailey Norwood and Stephan Marette, which summarize the results of some experiments we ran in the US and France looking at how people respond to paternalistic food choices made for them.  I'll write more about these studies when the papers are accepted for publication.  For now, I'll reveal one finding, which isn't terribly surprising: people value the freedom to make their own choices.

In Food We (Dis)Trust

This blog post by Chef Michael Formichella describes one of the key outcomes he learned from some focus groups conducted among frequent consumers of grass-fed beef.  He learned that (emphasis his):

There were several notable comments passed by all three groups that I wanted to expound upon. It revolves around trust.

He hit the nail on the head with this one.  Although it is rarely discussed in this way, our modern “food wars” almost all disseminate over the issue of trust.  People (sometimes for good reason) distrust agribusinesses, and as a consequence, the technologies they develop.  This leads to calls for things like organic food – which people then distrust because it turns out that organics are not all they are often touted to be.  Much of the local food movement can, in my opinion, be explained by an effort by some to interact more closely with those they believe are more trustworthy. 

What bothers me about the folks I’ve called the food police or the food elite is that they have fostered, and even encouraged, this atmosphere of distrust to promote their own books, restaurants, and political agendas.  I do not deny that some of the distrust of modern production agriculture is deserved, but as someone who has grown up around “large” farmers and people working in agribusinesses, the caricature that is painted of them cannot withstand close scrutiny.  I strongly suspect that the guys running 5,000 acre farms are no more or less “trustworthy” than the muckraking journalists who vilify them.      

Economists don’t much talk about it, but trust is perhaps the linchpin in the engine of economic growth.  It allows specialization and development of comparative advantage.  It facilitates trade.  It creates environments in which there is some reasonable expectation that success from investments in research and technology will be rewarded.  (There is a really nice podcast between Russ Roberts and David Rose on Econ Talk on this and related issues if you want more).     

So, when I hear and read people implicitly saying “don’t trust any farmer but your local farmer” or “don’t trust anything developed by Monsanto or Cargill or ADM” or “don’t trust the research from Land Grant Universities” or “don’t trust supermarkets,” I take pause. 

You’re setting yourself up for a pretty meager existence if the only person you can trust is yourself.  Locavores are willing to extend that trust to the few people who happen to live in close proximity to them.  But, I’m hoping for more because the more people you can trust, the better your life is going to be.  I happen to believe in the power of firms trying to maintain a reputation, the power of consumers acting with their wallets and feet, the threat of litigation, and sometimes plain self interest tempered by market forces to help foster a climate of trustworthiness.  Clearly, not everyone agrees.  But, what I’d like to see is less inward-looking thinking (i.e., trust only your neighbor) and more thinking on how production agriculture can appear to be (and actually become) more trustworthy.

           

Peak Farmland

There was an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal last week describing some research on land use and agricultural productivity ( the original research is posted here).  

Here are some snippets from the WSJ article:

Globally, the production of a given quantity of crop requires 65% less land than it did in 1961, thanks to fertilizers, tractors, pesticides, better varieties and other factors. Even corrected for different kinds of crops, the acreage required is falling at 2% a year.

and

Yet the amount of farmland in the world was still rising until recently. The reason is that increased farm productivity has been matched by rising demand for food, driven by population growth and swelling affluence. But the effects of these trends are waning.

and

Even with these cautious assumptions, the researchers find that over the next 50 years people are likely to release from farming a land area "1½ times the size of Egypt, 2½ times the size of France, or 10 Iowas, and possibly multiples of this amount."

in conclusion:

Predictions of peak oil have repeatedly proved wrong. But the factors that made them wrong—productivity and technology—are essentially the ones that make a prediction of peak farmland likely to be right.

I agree - so long as we don't demonize or overly regulate the use of technologies that lead to increased productivity in food.  I have faith in our innovative abilities, but I worry about the messages being sent by the foodie cultural elites.