prior probability

We want to bring to your attention this strange yet fascinating essay by our colleague and friend Adrian Vermeule, a professor at Harvard Law School. Among other things, his essay explores several “pathologies” of contemporary political liberalism, including the following three puzzles:

Puzzle #1: our fetish for “change”–or in the words of Professor Vermeule: “Why … is it possible to encounter people … who say patently incoherent things like ‘I’m working for change’—as though change by itself were good? By the same token, why are the heroes and canonized saints of liberalism invariably agents who have produced social or political ‘change,’ rather than those who have, say, fended off ‘change’?”

Puzzle #2: the futility of change; in other words, no matter how much progress we might make eradicating racism or sexism or homophobia or whatever, there is always more work to do, or as Professor Vermeule himself puts it: “Whatever the question, whether race relations, women’s rights, gender identity, or what have you, the good liberal says ‘we have made some progress, but there is a long way to go.’ But of course, even after more progress is made, the goal never seems to have come any closer.”

Puzzle #3: change for me but not for thee, or the selective amnesia problem–or, again, in Professor Vermeule’s own words: “why do liberal institutions and intellectuals react so much more aggressively towards Poland, Hungary, and Brexit than to Saudi Arabia or China, when the latter must be far worse on any measurable dimensions of interest to liberalism?” Latin America provides another textbook example of this liberal selective amnesia: General Pinochet in Chile is condemned by the liberal crowd, while Comandante Fidel in Cuba is considered woke and gets a pass.

A signifciant fraction of persons, i.e. greater than 10%, who voted for socialist Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Party primaries voted for Donald J. Trump in the 2016 general election? Samuel Scheffler writes in The Boston Review: “… some of the people who voted for Sanders in the primaries—12 percent according to two surveys—voted for Trump in the general election, and their influence was especially significant in the crucial states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Trump was, one might almost say, Bernie Sanders’s evil twin.” Mr Scheffler, however, does not provide links to the “surveys,” so we have no way of assessing their reliability. In any case, given Trump’s not unprecedented electoral success (cf. Silvio Berlusconi’s rise and fall in Italian politics), will the number of dangerous demagogues in the USA continue to rise, or will this number level off or even decline?

Why is the Island of Cuba still a Communist military dictatorship, while in nearby Puerto Rico, the duly-elected governor Ricardo Rossello decided to resign after several weeks of massive public protests? Our friend and colleague Adrian Vermeule sums up Thomas Schelling’s influential strategic model of political rebellion in this excellent essay as follows:

Imagine a silent, currently unorganized (super-)majority that is passive due to coordination problems. If all members of the (super-)majority, or some critical mass, could agree to rebel against the ruler, the rebellion would succeed by sheer force of numbers, but … if only a subgroup rebels, the ruler will prevail. The problem, in other words, is to overcome the regime’s divide-and-conquer tactics. What is necessary for this widespread coordination to occur is a salient focal point, such that it becomes common knowledge among the critical mass or (super-)majority that a trigger has been activated.

In the recent case of Puerto Rico, that focal point or triggering event was the so-called #RickyLeaks or #ChatGate scandal of July 2019–the mysterious release of a secret trove of profane text messages on a private group chat among the governor and his closest political cronies. In the Island of Cuba, by contrast, the government is quick to suppress or contain any act of rebellion, no matter how small or futile. In any case, the supreme irony of this particular Puerto Rican rebellion, however, is that the protestors did not demand to see the private text messages of all of their political leaders.

Photo credit: Dennis M. Rivera Pichardo/AP

Have you ever wondered why debates about politics, constitutional law, and philosophy can go on and on without end? More generally, why do people like to argue over such pointless matters? Even yours truly recently fell into this trap on Twitter, where Jonathan G. Harris (@jgharris7) and I debated the question, what is the optimal level of regulation? (The entire thread is available here.)

As it happens, our friend and colleague Bryan Caplan explains here why certain types of arguments resemble a Prisoner’s Dilemma:

If your opponent keeps arguing, you want to keep arguing so it doesn’t look like you’ve run out of arguments.

If your opponent stops arguing, you want to keep arguing to emphasize that your opponent has run out of arguments.

As a result, both sides have an incentive to argue interminably.  Which, as you may have noticed, they usually do.

In other words, there are times when making an argument is like the “defection” strategy in the Prisoner’s Dilemma, while maintaining silence is tantamount to cooperation! Do you agree with Professor Caplan’s analysis?

This is one reason why I decided long ago to delete the email app from my iPhone. I don’t like being reminded of the ever-growing number of unopened emails in my cluttered inbox, especially during my summer break.

That is the title of my latest paper (sans exclamation point), which will be published in the next issue of The Journal of Strategic Contracting and Negotiation. The subtitle is “Bargaining and Betrayal in Breaking Bad,” and you can read it here (via SSRN) or here (via Dropbox). In this fun paper, I introduce the rules of a strategic bargaining game called “So Long Sucker” to help business school instructors convey strategic concepts and impart good negotiation skills to their students. (FYI: To give you some idea of how sinister this game is, it was originally called “Fuck Your Buddy.”) In addition, to further bridge the gap between negotiation theory and strategic reality, my paper identifies many commonalities between the game So Long Sucker and the strategic interactions in the critically-acclaimed TV series Breaking Bad. (Warning: the paper is full of spoilers, so don’t read it unless you have already seen the TV series.) Enjoy!

What do law professors and most academics do during their “summer vacations”? Ironically, the last thing most of us do is go on vacation. Instead, freed from the toils of committee meetings and teaching duties, we work–we do massive amounts of reading, write every day, and generally devote ourselves to our scholarly projects. By way of example, I am looking forward to reading the following newly-created scholarly works on constitutional originalism this weekend, all of which popped up in my Twitter feed earlier this week:

1. Josh Blackman, “Originalism and Stare Decisis in the Lower Courts” (14pp.);
2. Saul Cornell, “Reading the Constitution, 1787–91: History, Originalism, and Constitutional Meaning” (25pp.); and
3. John Mikhail, “Is the Constitution a Power of Attorney or a Corporate Charter?” (34pp.).

Image credit: Ji Sub Jeong/HuffPost