I’m three pages into the first chapter of Larry Bartels’ forthcoming Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age and I have questions:

My examination of the partisan politics of economic in equality, in chapter 2, reveals that Democratic and Republican presidents over the past half-century have presided over dramatically different patterns of income growth. On average, the real incomes of middle- class families have grown twice as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans, while the real incomes of working poor families have grown six times as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans. These substantial partisan differences persist even after allowing for differences in economic circumstances and historical trends beyond the control of individual presidents. They suggest that escalating inequality is not simply an inevitable economic trend— and that a great deal of economic inequality in the contemporary United States is specifically attributable to the policies and priorities of Republican presidents.

Fascinating if true! But, congress writes the laws, not the president. So why not look at the party tilt of congresses rather than presidents? Or the alignments between the party controlling congress and the part in the White House. What happens under divided government, I wonder.

This is not to say that presidents don’t have a lot of policymaking power, especially given the massive growth in the size and power of the bureaucracies under executive control. The cabinet agencies’ considerable discretion in creating and enforcing regulations and their ability to selectively apply and enforce legislated mandates should be troubling — in itself and independent of issues of partisan slant — to those, like Bartels, who start with Dahl’s “Who governs?” question.

Because growth effects, for good or ill, follow policy changes with a pretty long lag (in political time at least), I guess this effect is supposed to be largely a function of redistributive policy that can take effect within a president’s term?

I’m looking forward to reading pages 4 – n. The book looks to me like Krugman for serious people. I find that I’m completely convinced by the main premise of the Bartels/Krugman line, which is that a great deal of the increase in inequality has been an effect of Republican approaches to taxation and redistribution. I’m simply not convinced that this is pernicious. I do think economic stratification is pernicious, but that has more to do with the Democratic Party standing in the way of fundamental structural reform in education as it has to do with Republican tax cuts for rich people, doesn’t it? I have an inkling that Bartels thinks voters want more redistribution and less inequality, but aren’t getting it. I think this is half right. Many people increasingly do want less inequality, but they want that to happen primarily through increased access to decent educational opportunities. (I have seen data to this effect.) To really hit hard at nominal inequality through redistribution, we’ll need to raise taxes on the middle class a lot. But I don’t think there is unmet political demand for huge middle-class tax increases. We’ll see. Page 4, here I come!

From the always lovable Lew Rockwell:

Is everything evil along the DC subway’s Orange Line? Well, no, but they all work for the regime, or are the regime, as Former Beltway Wonk points out. Here’s his list: American Prospect; Andrew Sullivan; BATF, CATO, Homeland Security, Federal Reserve; FDA; IRS; IMF; Marginal Revolution; Matthew Yglesias; Megan McCardle; New Republic; OSHA; Pentagon (very close); Reason Magazine; State Department; Treasury Department; Volokh Conspiracy; White House; Will Wilkinson.

I am very flattered to be considered evil independent of the evil that is Cato, but, as I keep insisting, I live on the Green Line.

Anyway, the narcissism of small differences.

Today on Free Will on Bloggingheads TV, I chat with Richard Florida about his new book Who’s Your City: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where You Choose to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life.

This is a really fascinating book and I highly recommend it. First of all, it’s really important to help people realize that where you live is important, that it is a choice, and you are responsible for it. Second, the importance of agglomeration to innovation and growth is I think one of the most interesting issues there is, and Florida does a great job of covering this work. But what I found most fascinating is new work Florida reports on that shows the relationship between place and happiness and place and personality. Did you know that extraverts are more likely to live in the midwest? That New York City is the capital of neuroticism? (Of yeah, you did!) That big coastal cities are most likely to be home to people high on openness to experience? Does your personality really fit the place you live? Fascinating stuff.

I read an early version of Who’s Your City about two years ago and told Richard it would be really interesting to see if there is a relationship between place and personality. I was completely blown away reading the finished book to see that there is in fact some good data on this and also by how far Richard is pushing it. I hope the book does well, and I’m betting it does.

I agree with Jim Manzi’s position, as he lays it out in his smart reply to Jonathan Chait:

Carbon dioxide is greenhouse gas, and if you put more of it in the atmosphere, then all else equal the Earth will get warmer. The key unknown, because of the complexities of climate feedbacks, is how much warmer. The UN IPCC forecasts that Earth will get something less than 3C hotter within about a century, and further estimates that 4C of warming would cause the world to lose 1% – 5% of GDP; therefore the expected costs of global warming are on the order of 3% of GDP sometime well into the 22nd century. This is a huge amount of money, but not exactly consistent with Miami becoming an underwater theme park. Given that global consumption is projected to grow from about $6,600 per person per year today to about $40,000 per person per year over the next century, it’s pretty hard to justify massive sacrifice of wealth today for the purpose of preventing our descendants a hundred years from now being only 5.7 times, instead of 6 times, as rich as we are. The real risk is that science has radically understated the greenhouse effect. A carbon tax designed for the expected case can safely be avoided for decades, while a carbon tax high enough to ameliorate a low-odds disaster scenario would be insanely expensive. Relatively low-cost investments in specific technologies that would be useful if such a disaster scenario arose, on the other hand, are a smart insurance policy.

Why don’t more people believe something like this?

These findings have been rolling in over the last half-decade or so: democratic market cultures produce a tendency to cooperation.  Here’s more:

Researchers use economic games to investigate how people cooperate in real-life. Now a team led by Benedikt Herrmann, at the University of Nottingham, have identified striking differences in the way university students from different countries play one such game known as The Public Goods Game. Compared with students from developed Western nations, students from less democratic countries like Saudi Arabia, Oman and Belarus tended to punish not only free-loaders, but also cooperative players, with the result that cooperation in their groups plummeted.

[...]

In a commentary on the findings, published in the same journal, Herbert Gintis of the Sante Fe Institute, said the results challenge the way people have tended to view capitalist democracies. “The success of democratic market societies may depend critically upon moral virtues as well as material interests, so the depiction of civil society as the sphere of ‘naked self-interest’ is radically incorrect,” he wrote.

All this should not be surprising. People in places that got rich by doing more than finding useful stuff in the ground got that way by getting good at cooperating.