Samsplaining Kayfabe

The idea is not original to me, but I have bothered myself to reject the null hypothesis that I am not primarily responsible for the specific neologism "political kayfabe." I like the term because what it represents is immediately obvious to anyone even casually familiar with the many tropes of pro wrestling and with a layman's interest in political science. It's delightful shorthand for all the bluster and bravado on the pinewood stage of Congress, and it subsumes nicely some of the more important conclusions of both the median voter theorem and Duverger's Law (sorry, I can't find an ungated link to Riker's '82 paper). It's also a good way of capturing the spirit of playacted audience participation. Kayfabe is chiefly characterized by feigned sincerity, particularly applied to rivalry. Ever-so-slight differences in opinion are greatly inflated in both importance and magnitude to the public, while backroom deal-making, bedfellowship, logrolling, and mutual backscratching is writ in Congressional ink along the dotted lines of each bill that squirms out of appropriations.

Kayfabe is not:

• Baldfaced lying. The audience won't buy anything that threatens their willing suspension of disbelief.
• Scapegoating. Kayfabe artistes conspire to create scapegoats, but only as a by-product. It's not essential to the practice.
• Conspiracy. Well, not conscious conspiracy anyway. Kayfabe can arise naturally as a result of the incentives of a winner-take-all electoral process.
• Insincerity. Not necessarily. Kayfabe demands the delicate craftsmanship of paring slight, legitimate differences of opinion, exposing and magnifying tiny fissures. It's the art of re-scaling the Y-axis, so to speak. 
• Sincerity. Not necessarily. The ultimate ends of kayfabe practitioners (be it soon parting a fool from his money or encreasing the dominions of the sovereign) tend towards sincerity, but typically in the narrow, limited sense of self-interest. Much of the difficulty in parsing political speech is that it can be difficult to distinguish between a skilled kayfabe practitioner and an honest believer. Fear the latter more than the former.
• Propaganda. Propaganda can be a tool of kayfabe, but it's also a tool of tyrants and totalitarians. 
• Coercion. Kayfabe knocks on your door. Tyranny kicks it in.

Kayfabe is:

• A means to an end. Strategic behavior suffuses politics. Particularly in the short run, budgets are fixed, and artlessly attempting to claim a portion of a fixed asset is doomed to failure. Without wheedling, conning, and fast-talking, without spirit, bravado, and a touch of derring-do. would-be politicians end up filtered out pretty early on in the selection process.
• Participatory. Axiom: you can fool some of the people most of the time; you can fool most of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time. Lemma: unless they want you to. In The Power of Glamour, Virginia Postrel makes a very careful distinction between glamour and charisma. Glamour is good for winning elections; charisma is good for getting your way. They are separate but related skills. Kayfabe is related to both. Charming your audience [constituents|potential constituents] is valuable, as is charming your colleagues. However, charm fades quickly when folks refuse to play the game. Kayfabe can only persist when it's mutually felicitous. 
• Durable. Probably. This is a more tenuous claim, but audiences enjoy being in on a shared deception. We all know that Penn and Teller aren't actually shooting each other in the face, just like we all know that there's scarcely a dime's difference between the dominion we labor under either Team Red or Team Blue, but if someone (not unironically someone like Penn or Teller) pulls the lid off the lie that is partisan politics, you can probably rest assured that either someone will hastily restore its integrity or will find a near-identical replacement (see Ch. 4 of Hinich and Munger for more).
• Entertainment. One of the more tiresome (if accurate) neologisms that happened in my lifetime is "infotainment." Yes, I read Cracked.com regularly, I even watch clips from The Daily Show from time to time. I'm also aware of "edutainment" as illustrated by the gloss-magazine character of the modern university textbook (including even my favorites). If we're being thorough, we've also have coined "polititainment" and noted its prestigious lineage from Cicero's grandiloquent orations through the Fireside Chat, Nixon's "sock it to me" mugging, Clinton's sax, and the entirety of Rick Santorum's public career. Politics minus governance equals polititainment. And just like the Solow residual, that's where the lion's share sits.

Kayfabe on its own is neither harmful nor harmless. Its harm in the intents of the practitioners and the outcomes of their policies. It's deadly fun, and exposing it is as dangerous as it is futile. But it's a term that has a meaning, even if its true nature is difficult to scrutinize, even if it's an eyeball attempting to gaze upon itself. I urge you to use it, but to use it correctly.

Cross-posted at Sweet Talk.

Accidents of Conformity

What's in a name? A classic paper in the labor econ literature is Bertrand and Mullainathan's 2003 field experiment in which they mailed out resumes to firms. The only substantive difference between the matched clusters of resumes were the names: some had stereotypically Caucasian-sounding names; others had stereotypically African-American-sounding names.

They were able to reject the null hypothesis that randomly-selected HR professionals (in Chicago and Boston) used no race-based selection heuristics to screen preliminary job applicants.

It is not my purpose here to comment on the method they used, nor shall I worry you with how their results have been improperly extrapolated among interested parties. Instead, let's accept that, indeed, the results are what they say on the tin: Emily and Greg are indeed more employable than Lakisha and Jamal. Given that this is true, is the decision to foist a disadvantageous name upon a child who does not know any better a euvoluntary one?

It may or may not surprise you to discover that not all countries are as lax as the US when it comes to naming children. I still recall my shock and horror when I found that Lithuania (to give an example near and dear to my heart) maintains a ledger with state-approved first names (surnames, too, but that's another issue). If you try to name your kid "Samuel" in LT, your application for a birth certificate (hence, passport) will get bounced. Or at least that's how it was ca. 2001. Maybe they've changed the statues since. My Lithuanian isn't good enough to track it down. Point is, we Yankees may have a propensity to take our liberty in naming our kids for granted in a way that might bemuse the rest of the world. And strict prudence would predict that given the Bertrand & Mullainathan results, some of the entries on the top 1000 list of baby names for 2012 (SSA) would probably have to be seriously reconsidered (how does "Xzavier" make the list at #614? Have you ever met a "Xzavier"?). But prudence doesn't rule. Only the starchiest of economists would assume that it does. Loyalty matters. Group identity matters. Pride matters. Heck, even plain-jane "coolness" matters (if I thought I could get away with it, I'd name my next kid "Banjo Mechasplosion Firenado Charterplane Lionstrangler In The Great Vast Expanse of Outer Space Wilson, Esq."). Methodological individualism loses no analytical power (and may indeed gain quite a bit) from acknowledging these simple, ordinary psychological observations.

And I think most regular folk acknowledge these observations. At least here in the states, there's a pretty strong presumption of liberty when it comes to naming your kids, even when it runs the risk of harming them. I do then wonder how and why it is that the same culture that suffers a kid to be saddled with a name yanked out of a popular TV show will suffer rubbish like a staged playground kidnapping in the name of protecting kids from a virtually non-existent threat (h/t L. Skenazy).

"Won't somebody think of the children?" Good idea. Start with your own, demonstrate a journeyman's understanding of everyday Bayesian reasoning, and then maybe we can have a little chat about whether or not you're adequately qualified to lecture others on their own hazard assessment. A sensible precautionary principle demands nothing less.

Pronunciation Reminder

How to pronounce "euvoluntary," a quick reminder.

Say the following out loud:

1. Turn
2. U-Turn

Easy enough. Now try:

1. Voluntary
2. Euvoluntary

I know it looks silly like this, but I chronically mess up terms I only ever see in print. I was just shy of 30 before I learned how "coiffed" is pronounced. And just this last weekend, I heard alternate pronunciations of "Hobbesian." So, you know, I shouldn't make assumptions about how others might endeavor to utter a new word.

It's a Metaphor, Andy

Economics is an impossible subject. I don't mean that it's merely hard and given enough computing power or thought, it's a game with a solution the way Chess is. I mean it's impossible to "solve" the calculation "problem". I use the quotes because I don't really see productive human activity as a puzzle in need of a solution. In other words, I (mostly) reject that metaphor.

You might not, and that's fine. Economics becomes more tractable once you deal with its impossibilities in metaphorical terms. The selection of your metaphor informs the sorts of questions you find interesting and supplies the basis for the sorts of policies you find useful. If your metaphor for economics is machinery, you might see policy-makers as either mechanics or saboteurs, depending on affiliation. If your metaphor for economics is agrarian, you might see policy-makers as shepherds or wolves or whatever. If your metaphor is bureaucratic, it's hierarchies, hierarchies everywhere.

A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History

If you're into the Mad Max metaphor, you'll be prone to finding violence wherever you look. To be sure, none of these are necessarily a priori wrong, but some metaphors may be more useful, more functional than others.

If you're a regular enough reader of my flightier posts, you've probably already identified that I'm a big fan of mixed metaphors. I do this quasi-intentionally. I'm just Platonic enough to agree that there's probably an invisible larger truth that we're grasping towards and that trying to get at this truth demands the courage to be cognitively experimental. At the same time, I'm just inattentive enough to occasionally forget which metaphor I've most recently deployed. Epistemology ain't easy, people. Anyone who tells you otherwise is blowing smoke up your banana-stuffed tailpipe. Not all experiments yield useful results, but that's no reason to stop experimenting, right? There's bound to be a dog at the end of at least one of these chains.

So yes, I agree that confused, confusing mixed metaphors can be maddening, but even within the relatively narrow topic of euvoluntary exchange, there's a lot of room for interpretation, a lot of lenses we can swap into our spectacles as we ski down the slopes of moral intuition towards the kangaroo pouch of understanding. As with moral dimensionality, I urge you to consider metaphor choice as informing folks' beliefs and values. There's bound to be some intersection and interaction between the two. Keep your own mind limber enough to play hopscotch as you pirouette from point of view to point of view. You don't have to set up shop in anyone else's metaphor, but being able to visit can help you burnish your own ideas.

And what can be more euvoluntary than an exchange of ideas?

Elite Language, Online Dating

Pardon my playing a little fast and loose with history in this post, but since this will be mostly conjectural, I hope you'll grant me a little latitude. If I've convinced you that the way Americans use formal language influences the relationship between the hoi polloi and political elites, then I'll call that a success.

First, a little linguistic history...

The English that most modern speakers would find comprehensible rose from the Norman influence brought to England in 1066. Until the middle of the 12th Century, Late Old English was the tongue of the land. By then, the French influence had spread through the estates (though it may be harder to track the development of the language among the peasantry). Middle English stuck around until shortly before the discovery of the New World (and, as luck might have it, the Reformation and the establishment of the Anglican Church). Early Modern English is what Shakespeare wrote in, and is found in the script of the King James Bible. All of those "thee"s and "thou"s and "yon"s and suchlike that caricatures archaic English can be found in Early Modern English and many of them are holdovers from the Norman invasion.

Among other delightful innovations the Normans brought the English, they transported a bureaucratic court system to set atop the relatively flatter manorial system that already existed (the cheap distinction between manorialism and feudalism is that manorialism defines the relationship between landowners and feudalism defines the relationships among political elites). Courtly language can still be found in standard spoken Romance languages: French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese all have formal versions of second person pronouns. Highly inflected languages often sport this feature: Lithuanian uses six noun cases and has pronouns for each (and yes, it's as infuriating as it sounds), with social rules circumscribing when to use formal or informal pronouns for address.

And this isn't limited to pronouns. Early American elites, following the insights of (esp.) Paine and others of the Scottish Enlightenment that the Divine Right of Kings was Grade-A bunkum, shrugged off title and courtly deference as an affront to the dignity of man. If you're feeling snarky, it's fair enough to qualify it as the dignity of white, majority-age, landowning man. Still and all, 'tis a matter of Article 1, Section 9 of the US Constitution that:

No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.

So, starting in earnest in 1789, a Google Trends search for instances of "your majesty" would show a decline on this side of the pond. This was a small linguistic nudge that held hands with a deeper philosophical shove that pushed down the trappings of power. We still see keen differences between the ornamentation of the House of Windsor and the Office of the President of the United States of America. It's still sort of scandalous when a royal shacks up with a commoner, but the Fifth Unspoken Law of American Electoral Politics is that if you don't sell yourself as a by-the-bootstraps Horatio Alger figure, you better have a fair dose of luck or brand-name recognition behind you. There's a good reason the elaborate set piece of Crawford, TX was built before the 2000 election, and it owes a root or two to the de facio egalitarianism of American political philosophy and language.

None of this is to imply that political elites are any less influential in the US than anywhere else in the world. Indeed, it might very well be easier to erode constitutional barriers when the median voter retains some sense that elected officials are not fundamentally different from her. It may be that the important difference between, say, England and the US is in the initial endowment of individual liberty. Flattened language may well have been a correlate of Enlightenment thinking, but partially a cause of falsely legitimized paternalism.

So what does this have to do with euvoluntary exchange? Um, well, this is sort of a straight political economy idea, but euvoluntaryists should be sensitive to justifications for paternalistic policy. There's a sense in which the median voter might be too willing to vest political elites with moral authority under the mistaken assumption that these elites are one of us. This idea may be at least in part supported by both formal and informal institutional characteristics, including misleading second person pronouns and the absence of formal title. These effects may be minor, but they're also pretty well embedded in the basic framing of the electorate.

This post dedicated to Sarah Skwire and Deidre McCloskey.

Please again excuse the title. I'm fishing for more spambots. They're hilarious.

Wants, Needs, BATNA

Perhaps it's my training in economics, but I tend to flinch when I hear the word "need". A careful consideration of the nature of opportunity cost renders "need" pleonastic. Its use seems to imply unacceptable consequences of failure to trade. Our pal in the desert needs water in that failure to strike a bargain with Jorge will result in death. I need sandbags for my front door or else my basement will flood. Absent a new anchor, Locke's sea captain founders in heavy weather--he needs that hunk of bent iron.

But daaa-aaad, you don't understand... I neeeeeed an iPhone.

To the economic tin-ear, "wants" are frivolous or selfish; "needs" are simply the unfortunate consequences of this grievous life. Children grasp this and employ the word artlessly, a source of much gentle snickering among the world's parents. Grown adults grasp this too, employing the word with a bit more art, a source of much exasperation among the world's economists. Workers need a living wage, the environment needs stewardship, "we" need to "invest" in "public" infrastructure. The word "need" in many of these cases nixes useful conversations about opportunity cost. Yes, perhaps all these things are useful, desirable, good, but by classifying them as "needs" implies that the consequences of failing to divert resources to them are simply intolerable. End of discussion.

The potential for semantic abuse is clear. Using "need" implies non-euvoluntarity, lending credibility to third-party intervention, whether or not it might be justifiable using careful cost-benefit analysis.

So how to respond to its use? I'm not really sure. it's sort of a trigger word for me. I directly challenge people when I hear it, but I'm a social knobbthicke. Maybe there's a better way to bring considerations of opportunity cost back into discussions. Please share any ideas you might have in the comments section.

I also see it as my parental duty to carefully explain the idea of cost to my daughter so on those occasions when "need" might be warranted, she will know how to use it appropriately. If I end up teaching, it will probably also be part of the first few lectures of the semester.

As for the rest of the time, beware cries of "need". Someone's usually trying to sell you a free lunch.