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Tuesday, June 09, 2020
Free to Move: An Interview with Ilya Somin, Part Two
JB
This is part two of a two-part interview with Ilya Somin (George Mason Law School) about his new book, Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom (Oxford University Press, 2020). Part One appears here.
JB:
How might you apply the thesis of your book to the internet? I have argued that
we need many different kinds of social media companies with many different
kinds of content moderation rules in order to protect freedom of expression.
But the central objection to what I've called "social media
federalism" is the concern that Facebook and Instagram create network
effects both for participants and for the advertisers who want to reach end
users. Moreover, Facebook's ability to gather enormous amounts of data has
given it super-competitive abilities to make predictions and attract
advertisers, and thus make enormous profits. How do your arguments about foot
voting and political freedom apply to social media?
Ilya Somin:
I don’t have your expertise on internet issues, so I may have to leave the
heavy lifting on this issue to others who know more. But I am skeptical that
Facebook and Instagram have such monopoly power that they could forestall
competition if the latter had content moderation policies that many users
preferred – and otherwise provided comparable quality of service. I’m old
enough to remember when many people claimed that Microsoft had established a
lock on the operating system market and could use it to monopolize the browser
market, as well. Those predictions were quickly falsified. The idea of
unbreakable social media monopolies strikes me as comparably dubious. At the
very least, putting up with the flaws of Facebook and Instagram and relying on
competition to curb them strikes me as preferable to having the federal
government (or, worse still, an international body like the UN), establish
moderation rules, as advocated by various people on both the right and the
left.
JB: How does your account of political freedom help us understand the current massed protests in the United States? Speech, assembly, petition and protest are often thought of as central to political freedom-- because people exercise this freedom by changing minds and by demonstrating that they and others like them disagree with the status quo. These aspects of political freedom tend to be collective rather than individual. Massed protests are exercises of political freedom, but they require collective participation. Political revolution is seen as an important act of political freedom, but revolution requires collective action rather than individual action. Political revolution can be violent, but it doesn't have to be. It could occur within the forms of politics, as we saw in the United States during the civil rights revolution and the New Deal. A critic might charge that emphasizing foot voting neglects this conception of political freedom. What do you think?
Ilya Somin:
Protests, marches, and revolutions can all potentially help improve government
policy (and also, of course, make it worse). But they provide little in the way
of real meaningful political freedom to the vast majority of people, other than
those few who have a substantial likelihood of making a decisive difference to
the outcome.
If
having a tiny chance of exercising influence was enough to have meaningful
political freedom, then we would not need democracy or protests. An absolute
monarchy where the king occasionally listens to your views on policy, then
rolls a million-sided die and implements your views if he rolls a 1, would give
you the same level of freedom of choice! Ditto for a dictator who occasionally
chooses one of her million subjects at random and then follows her policy
preferences for the next year.
Moreover,
each of these means of influence where individuals have little chance of
affecting the outcome suffers from the same problems of rational ignorance as
voting does. Protestors – like ballot box voters - often don’t actually know much about the
issues at stake, and do a poor job of evaluating the evidence they do know,
because they have little incentive to get it right. Foot voters, by contrast,
do better, because they know their decisions are actually likely to make a
difference.
Protesting
and other means of exercising “voice” over public policy by mechanisms that go
beyond voting also run into the problem that the ability to engage in them
effectively his highly unequal. Only a minority of Americans (about 25%) engage
in them at all, and only a much smaller number have more than a minimal chance
of making a difference.
Moreover,
such influence is a zero-sum game. Increasing my leverage over government
decisions necessarily reduces yours and everyone else’s, and vice versa. Even if we somehow manage to make political
influence completely equal, we still have the problem that then each person
would only have an infinitesimal chance of making a difference.
By
contrast, foot voting can be made available to a much wider range of people,
there need not be any zero-sum game, and each individual’s decisions have a
high chance of mattering.
I’m
not arguing that protesting is always a bad thing, anymore than I am saying
that in the case of ballot-box voting. Both can, at times, accomplish real
good, and both are preferable to authoritarianism. But neither offers the kind of
meaningful political freedom that foot voting does, and both often fall prey to
the dangers of rational political ignorance.
JB: Albert O. Hirschman's famous typology of exit, voice, and loyalty, which you discuss in the book, suggests that there are tradeoffs between exit and voice-- between individual and collective forms of political freedom. That is, it may be that focusing too much on foot voting undermines the remaining community's ability to exercise collective political freedoms. We discussed these collective freedoms in the last question. But there is another way of making Hirschman's point. It has to do with the idea that one of the purposes of government is to invest in public goods and maintain the quality of those public goods. Some public goods require large amounts of public investment-- to start them up, and then to maintain them over time. The claim is that exit will drain the willingness of the public to invest in public goods in the first place, and then to maintain them, because they predict that they will have to pay a larger share of expenses. That will be especially so if the people who remain are less able to pay than those who leave. I was thinking about this aspect of foot voting in the context of the coronavirus pandemic. Many affluent people have fled New York for other parts of the country, leaving less affluent New Yorkers to deal with the mess and the dangers. On the other hand, migration patterns caused by the coronavirus will probably shake up old ways of doing things and create new opportunities. How should we think about the advantages and disadvantages of foot voting for public goods?
Ilya Somin: Hirschman famously argued that exit rights
destroy incentives for people to improve institutions in their existing
communities, by exercising “voice.” Why invest in public goods (or other public
services) if you can just leave? Then, those left behind might suffer.
As I
explain in the book, Hirschman’s argument has several limitations and flaws. It
only applies in the special case where 1) the people who choose to exit would
otherwise be able to force beneficial reforms in local policy that others could
not push through in their absence; and (2)
those people nonetheless prefer to exit rather than exercise voice despite the
likelihood that their use of voice will be successful, and 3) those left behind
lack exit options of their own. Thus, the argument does not apply to the many
people who have too little political influence to effectively use voice to
improve the provision of public goods (or other services). It also does not apply in many situations
where the better solution is not to force the relatively influential people to
stay but to improve exit options for others.
Even when
the Hirschman argument is applicable, it overlooks the ways in which strong
exit rights actually foster better provision of public services rather than
undermine it. Exit rights enable people to more effectively “sort” themselves
into those communities that best fit their needs and preferences. With more
options, more people can find a community that is a good “fit” - perhaps even one they truly love. The
stronger your affinity for a community, the more likely you are to invest in
maintaining and improving it.
As I
describe in the book, social science research bears out this point. For
example, political participation is actually better in small suburbs that are
subject to strong exit options, than bigger jurisdictions that are more costly
to leave. It’s also worth noting that Hirschman-like reasoning was previously
used to justify arranged marriages and laws that make it hard to divorce. If you
have little or no choice about who to marry, you are, by this reasoning, more
likely to invest in maintaining the one relationship you are allowed to have!
Yet, as noted in the book, greater freedom of choice in marriage actually
increases partners’ investments in the relationship.
Finally,
exit rights strengthen investment in public goods because of the competitive
pressure they put on institutions. Local governments – and also private planned
communities – know they are likely to lose taxpaying residents and investors if
they provide poor public services. That incentivizes them provide better ones.
Social science research finds that this dynamic actually works well in the
policy area that apparently inspired Hirschman to develop his theory: school choice.
Far from leading to the degradation of public schools, school choice
programs that enable students to use
vouchers to transfer to private schools actually lead to improvements in public education in
their area, because public schools are forced to compete to retain students. By
contrast, simply increasing funding for traditional public schools without
increasing choice does little or nothing to improve education. I cite relevant
studies in Chapter 6 of the book, where I address the Hirschman argument in
more detail.
In
addition to these practical considerations, there is also a moral reason why it
is wrong to force people to stay in a jurisdiction, so that other residents
thereof can benefit from their labor (or in this case, their tax payments and political
clout). Such reasoning is inimical to the idea that individuals own their own
labor, and that it is not the property of the government or other members of
the community. This is a problem with the oft-expressed view that international
migration should be curtailed to curb “brain drain” or to ensure that people
fulfill their supposed duty “stay home and fix their own countries” (both
discussed in Chapter 5 of the book). But it is also a flaw in the Hirschman
rationale for constraining internal foot voting, at least in so far as it is
seen as justifying coercing people into staying, as opposed to merely exhorting
them to do so.
JB: What is the role of family members and children in your story? Children don't themselves exercise political freedom when their parents vote with their feet. And spouses and dependent family may lack effective choice-- unless we postulate that the decision is made equally by all members of the family who are affected. In other words, is your account of political freedom really the freedom of heads of households? Or should it be the collective freedom of members of families who are equally involved in the decisive choice? If all family members are not equally involved in the choice, can we say that they are politically free under your theory?
Ilya Somin: It’s
true that spouses often constrain each other’s foot voting choices. But spouses
usually have far more ability to influence each other’s decisions about where
to live or what private-sector services to use than they do of influencing any
outcome in the political process. My wife has vastly more influence over my
choices – and I over hers – than either of us has over government policy, even
though we are both in professions where we likely have much more political
influence than the average voter.
Moreover, the dating and marriage market –
itself an important form of foot voting! – allows people to select spouses
whose preferences on such matters are relatively similar to their own. At least
as a general rule, people tend to marry partners with similar views. Certainly,
there is, on average, much more agreement among spouses than between either of
them and the electorate as a whole, which is generally much more diverse in its
preferences.
Influence
within the family is rarely perfectly equal. But the same is true of influence
in even the most democratic political system. Indeed, those systems typically
feature far greater inequalities than families do. A relatively small elite of
activists, politicians, and others have vastly greater influence than the
average voter, in many cases by an order of magnitude or even more.
Of course,
in a patriarchal society, wives often have less clout relative to their
husbands. But in such societies, women also have less political influence than
men. And whereas government policy (in a democratic society) is likely to be
dominated by the views of the median voter and the political elite (who, in
this scenario, are likely to be highly sexist), individual women making foot
voting decisions can try to seek out relatively egalitarian spouses and
relatively egalitarian jurisdictions in a federal system. In Chapter 2 of the
book, I describe how exactly these sorts of dynamics helped play a role in
increasing women’s rights in the nineteenth century, as Western states began to
adopt relatively more egalitarian policies in order to attract women.
Children,
of course have far less influence over family decisions than adult spouses do.
But even here, they probably have more influence over their families than they
do over the political process. After all, in the vast majority of
jurisdictions, those under the age of 18 are not allowed to vote, and have
little if any ability to participate in politics in other ways. In Chapter 2, I
explain why children’s political clout probably won’t increase very much if we
adopt proposals to lower the voting age to 16, as some jurisdictions have done
(and which I have a degree of sympathy for).
Even if we go as far as lowering the voting age to six, as British
political scientist David
Runciman has proposed, the new child voters would still face the same
limitations as their adult counterparts: the low significance of any individual
vote, and the resulting incentives for rational ignorance.
I address the issue of families and children
in more detail in Chapter 2 of the book.
Posted 10:30 AM by JB [link]
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