Scenes from a Moral Panic

From Craig Reinarman and Harry G. Levine (1997), The Crack Attack: Politics and Media in the Crack Scare. On September 5, 1989, President Bush, speaking from the presidential desk in the Oval Office, announced his plan for achieving “victory over drugs” in his first major prime-time address to the nation, broadcast on all three national [...]

The Political Power of Bad Ideas: Networks, Institutions, and the Global Prohibition Wave

That’s the title of  a forthcoming book by Mark Schrad, which looks very interesting. I’ve read a paper on this topic by the author, which has been very useful to the chapter I’m currently writing of my thesis (basically analyzing the consequences of  what Schrad calls “bad policy ideas” on constitutional effectiveness). I really wish the [...]

Private Policing I Find Disturbing

Some residents of New Brighton, Christchurch are sick of the police failing to control crime and have taken to patrolling the streets. I would be all for that were these guys not a bunch of white supremacists. A “white pride” group, Right Wing Resistance (RWR), claims to be patrolling New Brighton streets that “the police and the [...]

Illiberal Anarchy

John Humphreys critiques the paper Eric Crampton and I are writing on the effect of meddlesome preferences in market anarchy. His argument is that we’re talking about outcomes we don’t like but aren’t really unlibertarian, and that we overestimate the sway crazy bigots could exert under real anarchy. Eric responds here. See also the comments on [...]

Quote of the Day: Mises Edition

Another from the “I want to make a note of this for future reference and a blog post seems like the easiest way to do it” files. From Theory and History, chapter 7: In the world of reality, life, and human action there is no such thing as interests independent of ideas, preceding them temporally and [...]

Coherence versus Political Reality

Arnold Kling tries to categorize current attitudes towards markets and state intervention as combinations of three points on an ideological triangle; Libertarian, Conservative, and Progressive: 1. Point L, where you believe that markets are effective at processing information and solving problems. This position is to take a radically pro-market view, and to let markets fix [...]

Smoking Bans and Norms

Henry Farrell has an excellent post at Crooked Timber on smoking bans and public norms: I haven’t seen any research on this (if someone knows of any, let me know in comments), but my best guess in the absence of good evidence would be that the success of the ban reflected instabilities in previously existing [...]

Preference Falsification and Support for Gay Marriage

Andrew Gelman is stunned that support for gay marriage has increased more in states with already liberal attitudes: In the past fifteen years, gay marriage has increased in popularity in all fifty states. No news there, but what was a surprise to me is where the largest changes have occurred. The popularity of gay marriage has [...]

Kuran on the Collective Nature of Public Opinion

Timur Kuran has a great response to Robert Wright at Cato Unbound: Wright’s three claims contain many grains of truth. Moreover, there is no doubt that changing Muslim and Western perceptions concerning their interactions with one another would diminish interreligious tensions, facilitate solutions to various global crises, and make it easier to generate effective responses [...]

Understanding Economic Change: The Impact of Emotion

An interesting looking paper in Constitutional Political Economy by Roberta Patalano. Abtract: In this paper we aim to conceptualize the involvement of emotion in the processes of institutional emergence and change. The starting point of our proposal is the theory of change that has been developed by Douglass North since the 1990s and has recently culminated [...]