Exit, Voice, and Liberty

There’s been some interesting, and heated, debate in the libertarian blogosphere about the importance of democracy to freedom. Will Wilkinson suggests that since charter cities (and presumably seasteads) are undemocratic, they might allow rulers of authoritarian regimes to reap the benefits of high economic growth without giving their subjects “real freedom.” I think Will’s point that charter cities may allow illiberal regimes to create market-facilitating institutions and increase economic freedom (most often good for dictators) while ignoring civil liberties (most often bad for dictators) is important.

Will seems to think that an important aspect of freedom is democracy, though, and that’s what has caused the debate. Arnold Kling argues that real freedom is exit, not voice. Charter cities and seasteading aim to make exit easier and thus remove the need for democratic voice:

The exercise of voice, including the right to vote, is not the ultimate expression of freedom. Rather, it is the last refuge of those who suffer under a monopoly. If we take it as given that the political jurisdiction where I reside is a monopoly, then perhaps I will have more influence over that monopoly if I have a right to vote and a right to organize opposition than if I do not.

The idea of charter cities (or seasteading) will be a success to the extent that it creates a viable exit option vis-a-vis government. … In fact, if we had real competitive government, then we would be no more interested in elections and speaking out to government officials than we are in holding elections and town-hall meetings at the supermarket.

Will Chamberlain and Patri Friedman expand upon Arnold’s argument at A Thousand Nations; Wilkinson responds to Arnold here. All of these posts, including the comments, are well worth reading. I’m with Arnold and the other competitive government types and I have little to add to their joint efforts.

As a side note to the debate, though, I think Wilkinson is right to suggest that exit, narrowly conceived, is not enough to produce real freedom. Seasteading aims to do more than simply make exit easier; it’s about producing the technology to lower barriers to entry in the governance market.

Most people are free to exit their jurisdictions (county, state, country) and move to another (albeit at a fairly large cost). What they are not free to do, though, is to start their own country. This is why Will’s second-guessing of Arnold’s commitment to exit as freedom on the basis that he hasn’t left his county are so off-base. A major reason for jurisdictional exit’s failure to do much to enhance freedom today is the poor selection of products in the governance market. Even with zero relocation costs, I only have the choice among some really bad autocracies and a fairly homogenous set of liberal democracies. It’s not simply freedom of movement (exit, narrowly conceived) which enhances freedom, but meaningful choice.

The only way I can see of getting meaningful choice of government is to lower the barriers to entry.  When there are literally a thousand forms of government from which to choose – and the possibility of creating your own if none are quite right – you’re surely orders of magnitude freer than you are today, even with freedom of movement and the cost of relocation remaining constant.

You think voice is important for liberty? Fine! Go somewhere with voice. I disagree, and strongly suspect that the bloated and liberty-restricting governments (relative to my standard of what a government should be, not to any actually existing governments) that we see today are pretty much an inevitable outcome of democratic decision-making. The only places to which I can currently relocate in order to get away from democracy, though, are even worse.

I don’t much care for voting and would prefer to live under a government run like an insurance firm. I think even voluntary governments run democratically will be subject to the problems of expressive voting and rational irrationality (see my somewhat related arguments here and here), and will therefore fail to satisfy people’s true preferences. If I’m right, we won’t see too many democratic seasteads survive too long: people will voice their prejudices and then exit once they realise they have to pay the cost.

The beautiful thing about competitive government is that we don’t need to argue about who’s right. I could be wrong, and maybe voting will prove to be an important part of freedom. I just don’t see, though, how one can maintain that voice is just as fundamental as exit (defined widely as freedom of movement combined with low barriers to entry in the market for governance). If you start with only the capacity for exit, you can move somewhere which gives you voice. If you begin only with the capacity for voice, there’s no obvious way to get the capacity for exit. This asymmetry is crucial: exit can give you any other freedom, including voice. Competitive government isn’t about securing any particular freedom, but giving people the freedom to choose whether or not they want other freedoms. Exit, thus conceived, is the most fundamental freedom.

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 their own failures.

2. Point C, where you believe that tradition incorporates the evolved use of information to solve problems. This position is to be very cautious about overthrowing existing institutional arrangements.

3. Point P, where you believe that expert technocrats should be in charge. You are comfortable with throwing out tradition and markets in order to cede power to experts.

I think something like this would be the best framework within which to think about policy, but I think it only works as a descriptive model of actual beliefs for a small subclass of people: those with both a decent knowledge of the social sciences and a broadly consequentialist worldview. Politics as it’s practised on the ground isn’t a competition between alternative coherent worldviews, but competing myths, symbols, and identity groups.

The difference between Arnold’s description and political reality is most obvious in the case of conservatives. Hayekian conservatism is certainly a reasonable argument against the reformist zeal of either libertarians or progressives, but most self-identified conservatives surely don’t base their preference for existing institutions and norms on arguments from institutional evolution. They see existing institutions and norms as right – not merely stable equilibria which it would be unwise to mess with.

Arnold is talking about policy, but politics is an entirely different thing.

Customer-Owned Protection Agencies

I suggested yesterday that protection agencies which credibly commit to not joining any nascent cartel are likely to attract more customers than those which don’t, potentially nullifying Cowen and Sutter’s critique of market anarchism. One obvious possibility is customer ownership of protection agencies. Cowen makes this suggestion in the final paragraph of his 1992 paper:

In the above scenarios, the network becomes a government because network shareholders are able to exploit successfully conflicts between network profit maximization and the interests of network consumers. If consumers are sufficiently far-sighted, they may prefer dealing with agencies that precommit to never becoming collusive or coercive. Consumers may attempt to control the network by owning the member firms; under this scenario, the protection agencies would become mutuals or cooperatives. Protection agencies could then be bound by democratic procedures, according to consumer vote. Collusion could not occur unless approved by agency customers (shareholders).

He expands a little in a footnote:

In mutuals, the corporation’s customers are also its owners. A mutual life insurance company, for instance, is owned by its policyholders, who serve as residual claimants. If the company makes money, the profits are refunded in the form of lower premiums; conversely, losses imply higher premiums. (Not all of the mutual’s profits are rebated to customers, however, as managers retain perks for themselves.) In so far as mutual shareholders succeed in controlling their company, their dual roles as owners and customers diminish conflicts of interest. Policies that deliberately defraud customers, for instance, would not be approved by mutual shareholders. Shareholders of traditional corporations, in contrast, will maximize profits at the expense of consumer interests, when possible. Cooperatives and nonprofit organizations are other possible organization forms for protection agencies. Although these forms differ from mutuals with respect to many details, they also eschew direct profit-maximization and allow managers to maximize the flow of perks, although subject to different institutional constraints.

Customer ownership of protection agencies is probably the simplest and most effective way of avoiding a despotic cartel emerging from libertarian anarchy. The problem with such arrangements, though, is that they introduce many of the same problems which currently plague democratic politics.

Customer-shareholders need some way of making sure management acts in their best interests. The most obvious way of doing this, as Cowen suggests, is to have shareholders periodically vote for the CEO, or directly vote whenever particularly important decisions arise. As in any firm, this won’t entirely prevent managers from exploiting their position, but it will place fairly tight limits on the extent of corruption.

Whenever a moderately large group of people vote to decide some course of action, no individual is faced with a genuine choice of which path to take. They can express their preference, but, except in the case of an otherwise tied election, the outcome will be unrelated to their choice. This means that nobody has an incentive to think carefully about their decision, and have every incentive to vote expressively and indulge their irrational biases. This has been well-documented with respect to ordinary democratic politics, but is relevant to any large-group voting situation.

This doesn’t seem to be particularly important in ordinary shareholder voting (though as far as I know, nobody has looked into it and I can imagine it having some effect), presumably because voting rights are allocating by the share rather than the person – giving those with the most at stake the most say – and because the activities of corporations don’t tap into expressive preferences or cognitive biases to the same extent as democratic politics.

Unfortunately, collective choice within customer-owned protection agencies more closely resembles political than shareholder voting in this respect. While customers with more expensive premiums may be given extra votes, the inequality of voting power will be nowhere near that of an ordinary corporation. Further, law enforcement and the definition of rights seem like areas in which expressive preferences are likely to dominate.

Expressive shareholders will not only make protection agencies run inefficiently, they will also be more likely to violate the rights of others and engage in destructive conflict. People are more bigoted and bloodthirsty when freed of cost considerations. These are problems we live with under democratic rule today, however, and it’s hard to see why they would get worse under anarchy. While anarchy with customer-owned protection agencies will be far from perfect, it should be considerably better than centralized government.

Protection agencies will initially behave like lots of little governments, with all the inefficiency and bigotry we see in politics today. The crucial difference, though, is the option of exit. A thousand nations will bloom and efficient protection agencies – those managing to minimize the harm of foolish voters and corrupt managers – will gain more customers than inefficient ones. This could result in many small agencies which give each customer a significant voice, or agencies with supermajority rules and other limits on strict majoritarianism. Of course, the potential for innovation will be lower than in a market with entrepreneurs making profit-seeking decisions. People will flock to efficient agencies, but agencies’ decision rules will be unresponsive to consumer demand.

There may be ways for an ordinary shareholder firm to credibly commit to avoid a cartel, and the market would provide every incentive entrepreneurial discovery. I can’t think of any entirely plausible way, but that doesn’t mean one doesn’t exist. We might see a customer-ownership equilibrium eventually give way to a shareholder equilibrium once commitment mechanisms are devised.

I do have some niggling concerns over collective action problems (one shareholder-only firm would be more efficient than its competitors, would have no peers with which to form a cartel, and would therefore be attractive to customers when all other firms are customer-owned), but it seems that customer-owned anarchy would be preferable to the status quo, and would improve over time.

This is why I am now a tentative anarchist.

Economists and Sociologists

Fabio Rojas at Orgtheory asks: if sociology sucks, why do economists keep doing it? He cites Weber, Parsons, Becker, Levitt, Akerlof, and Caplan as examples of economists who “regularly dine at our restaraunt,” yet constantly complain about the service. I’d add Douglass North, Timur Kuran, and many of the contemporary Austrian School to the list of economists doing important work on sociological topics.

I’m neither a proper economist nor a proper sociologist, but I have undergraduate majors in both. To me, it seems that while many economists are doing work on traditionally sociological topics, very few are using the insights or methodology of sociologists. Commenter Gordo at the Orgtheory post nails it:

You seem to suggest that sociology is the “restaurant” and the “customers” are economists who enjoy the restaurant’s food. I think the more appropriate metaphor might be that of people sneaking food (economics) into a stadium baseball game (interesting topics) because the food there is so bad (sociology).

That seems to be the general consensus among economists: sociological questions are interesting, but sociologists are not rigorous enough to be of any use in answering them. There doesn’t seem to be any inconsistency in economists sneaking within sociological borders while badmouthing the natives.

I don’t quite agree with that apporach, howver, as I think the work of many sociologists would be useful for economists, particular those studying politics, to consider.

Recent work by Brennan & Lomasky, Caplan, and Kuran demonstrates that we can’t think of political behaviour simply in rational choice terms. This means we need to think about collective behaviour, symbolism, and social conformity – things sociologists have seen studying for a long time and on which they have had many interesting insights.

I think there are huge potential gains from economists taking this body of work seriously, while maintaining a critical stance towards some of the methodological weaknesses in the field. There’s some bad sociology out there, but there’s also a lot of very bad economics.

Moral Argument and Political Force

I agree heartily with this from Wendy McElroy:

One danger of arguing for or against a position is that everyone thinks you are saying, “there ought to be a law.”

Take the issue of discrimination on the basis of sex or gender as an example. If you argue against it, people assume you want to prohibit discrimination. If you argue for the right to discriminate, they assume you want to return to Jim Crow laws and force women back to the kitchen.

“There ought to be a law” is the unspoken message underlying much of public discourse. And that message makes people reluctant to listen impartially because agreement might lead to yet another regulation.

On most of the issues I address, my underlying message is “there ought not to be a law.” This is because the issues involve personal ethics, not public policy. The difference: Personal ethics involve moral decisions concerning the use of your own body and property — that is, virtue and vice. Public policy involves those actions that threaten or violate the rights of others — that is, crime.

The problem with politics, of course, is that people use it to express moral distaste, even if they don’t really think the activity they wish to ban should be punishable. When someone says ‘there ought to be a law’ they often don’t mean to say ‘there ought to be a punishment,’ but a punishment is what the political system produces anyway. Democracy, sheesh!

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 increased fastest in the states where gay rights were already relatively popular in the 1990s.

In 1995, support for gay marriage exceeded 30% in only six states: New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, California, and Vermont. In these states, support for gay marriage has increased by an average of almost 20 percentage points. In contrast, support has increased by less than 10 percentage points in the six states that in 1995 were most anti-gay-marriage–Utah, Oklahoma, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Idaho.

Here’s the picture showing all 50 states:

I was stunned when I saw this picture. I generally expect to see uniform swing, or maybe even some “regression to the mean,” with the lowest values increasing the most and the highest values declining, relative to the average. But that’s not what’s happening at all. What’s going on?

Gelman offers two possible explanations: First, gays are more likely to come out of the closet in liberal states, and so the average person in these states knows more openly gay people. Second, politicians in tolerant states have electoral incentives to argue for the liberal position, thus pushing public discourse in that direction.

I suspect both of these factors have some influence, but I think another may be more important. I suspect that public opinion on highly salient issues with strong signalling value tends to be self-reinforcing. A useful framework for thinking about this is Timur Kuran’s model of preference falsification.

Kuran distinguishes between an individual’s public opinion – the views he openly expresses on a particular issue – and private opinion – the way he privately feels about this issue. Since there are social costs to expressing unpopular views, public opinion will be systematically biased towards the social consensus compared to the underlying distribution of private opinions. There is social pressure for those in Utah to express opposition to gay marriage, while there could well be social pressure to express support in New York. If few people share your opinion, you’re more likely to keep quiet or actively falsify your view. Via this mechanism, social pressure leads to homogeneity in public opinion, but leaves private opinion unchanged.

If we think socialization matters in creating private opinion, though, preference falsification will also affect private opinions. When there seems to be a strong consensus on some issue, social learning will bias the underlying distribution of private opinions towards the consensus view relative to the situation without preference falsification. This is obviously pretty closely related to the psychological phenomenon of group polarization.

The preference falsification view is pretty close to Gelman’s hypothesis that liberal states encourage gays to come out of the closet. Social environments which reduce the costs of coming out as gay also reduce the costs of coming out as gay-tolerant. Beyond some threshold, the social payoff from expressing gay-tolerant attitudes becomes positive, which means we’re likely to have closeted bigots rather than closeted liberals. This pro-gay preference falsification will then reinforce pro-gay private opinion, accelerating the liberalization of attitudes in already liberal states.

I heartily endorse Gelman’s call for further study:

We can look at other issues, not just on gay rights, to see where this sort of divergence occurs, and where we see the more expected uniform swing or regression-to-the-mean patterns.

My guess is that issue salience would be a good predictor of divergence. It would also be informative to try and break things down to areas smaller than states. If the preference falsification explanation works, opinion converges within social networks. County or town data should show a stronger effect, as people are more likely to interact with those geographically close to them. Social networking sites could provide some pretty awesome data if you could get entire tightly interconnected networks to share their opinions.

The Boy-Racer Moral Panic

The New Zealand government is cracking down on those anti-social youths:

“Images of young people using their cars to race, intimidate, make excessive noise, generally threaten the public, are an unwanted feature of many communities in this country.” [Prime Minister John Key] says. He says his government will not watch by without trying to combat it.

Key says he makes no apologies for the harsh consequences either. (…)

Transport Minister Steven Joyce, who introduced the Enforcement Powers Bill, said illegal street racing was a national problem.

“As well as threatening public safety, illegal street racers cause excessive noise, disruption and intimidation.” (…)

“The Government and the public have lost patience with drivers who use their vehicles in an anti-social manner.”

The Vehicle Confiscation and Seizure Bill will:

-Allow vehicles to be seized and destroyed as a new penalty for illegal street racing
-Allow vehicles repeatedly used by people with overdue traffic fines to be seized and sold to pay those fines
-Enable Police and Courts to target illegal street racers who commit offences in another person’s vehicle

The Land Transport (Enforcement Powers) Amendment Bill will include provisions to:

– Allow local authorities to create bylaws that prevent vehicles repeatedly “cruising” city streets
– Allow the compulsory impoundment of vehicles involved in illegal street racing
– Introduce demerit points for noise offences, licence breaches and registration plate offences. This will ensure repeat offenders will lose their licenses, rather than just accrue fines.

I find the focus on ‘intimidation’ and ‘anti-social’ driving rather troubling. The legislation is pandering to the same sort of bigoted public sentiment which fueled prior panics over rock & roll, punk, etc.

I’m no car enthusiast myself (I drive an ’83 Corona, for what it’s worth) and in no way condone dangerous driving. But we already have laws against dangerous driving and street racing, and it’s not clear to me the penalties are too light. My main problem with the law, though, is that it does more than simply crack down on dangerous driving. Being able to lose your driving license for having your car stereo too loud seems ridiculous, as does allowing councils to stop drivers from ‘cruising’ city streets.

This legislation is not primarily about road safety, but the moral distaste many people have for spiky-haired hoodlums in loud and garish cars. I, for one, think it’s a bigoted piece of populist crap.

Asthma and the Limits of Public Choice

Jason Kuznicki wonders why politics has robbed him of an effective asthma treatment:

My old CFC albuterol inhaler is much more effective than my new non-CFC inhaler. The medicine is the same, but the delivery system is awful.

I’m dreading the day that my old inhaler runs out. Yes, I follow the directions on the new one, and I know that it’s used differently. I know about priming and cleaning and all that. It doesn’t matter. The old inhaler works. The new one, if it works at all, may take around twice as many applications. (…)

But enough about asthma per se. The public choice aspect of the problem seems to run counter to the usual, doesn’t it? Here we have a concentrated group of people taking a huge utility loss. Being unable to breathe is one of the most unpleasant experiences you could possibly imagine. The old inhalers fixed it instantly. That’s what was lost.

The gain from this legislation is tiny, hard to notice, and literally diffused among all the people of the entire world — There are slightly fewer CFCs in the atmosphere. (CFCs are a problem, yes, but CFCs from inhalers were never a serious problem when considered alone.)

Why should it be that in this one case, the tiny, diffuse benefits win out over the large, concentrated ones?

I think it’s because the ban on CFC inhalers is not at all the result of classic public choice dynamics. This nicely demonstrates the limits of public choice theory in understanding politics. As Caplan and Stringham show, most inefficient policies are not the result of concentrated interests having their interests served against the preference of a powerless majority. Policymakers are tightly constrained by public opinion, and cannot normally simply accept bribes in exchange for creating unpopular rules to enrich special interests. We have bad policy because that’s what voters want. The public gets warm fuzzies from banning CFCs, and doesn’t much think about the costs (thinking about costs is, afterall, a downer).

Public choice theory in general and The Logic of Collective Action in particular has opened our eyes to many important aspects of the political process. The good old tyranny of the majority, though, remains of paramount importance. Democracy requires that politicians pander to the whims of the majority, even when there is strong pressure from concentrated interests to do otherwise. Interest groups do have an effect on political outcomes, but can only operate in the cracks of majoritarian democracy. Small, well-organized interest groups can achieve their goals when issue salience is low and voters will not punish politicians; when there is a compelling moral or public-interest argument to accompany their preferred policy; or when there are already legislators in favour of their preferred policy (which obviously depends on a significant constituency) whose legislative efforts they can subsidize. When these factors are absent, the majority will prevail even when there are huge utility losses to a minority.

The upshot of this is that anyone wishing for social change should focus on preferences at least as much as incentives.

Libertarianism and Democracy

Will Wilkinson has a fantastic post on the anti-democratic tendencies of libertarians. Will says many things I agree with, and some I disagree with.

Which brings us to Theil’s boneheaded quip about women’s suffrage. Extending the franchise to women is, in my estimation, one of the great triumphs of the American classical liberal tradition. Like the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage was rooted in the rejection a shameful tradition of paternalism that held that some classes of people are less than fully able to govern themselves. I cannot see how anyone who accepts basic liberal assumptions about freedom and equality can see the establishment of equal political rights as anything but an unequivocal good… unless he rejects the legitimacy of politics in principle. I think this is were Theil was coming from.

But if politics is in-principle illegitimate, it was illegitimate before women got the vote, so why bring it up?

I certainly agree that women’s suffrage was a great victory for libertarian ideals: political equality is a core liberal value and any political system which denies some people a voice in political decision-making based on anything as superficial as genitalia is indeed shamefully illiberal. As I’ve said, I do think Thiel’s words were poorly chosen, but I don’t see anything illiberal about him pointing out that female suffrage did in fact lead to policies libertarians disagree with. I’m not sure why he brought it up (it was a throwaway remark, and wasn’t at all central to his argument), but I don’t think he deserves the large helping of scorn he has received from those who incorrectly inferred he wished to return to the good old days of male-only suffrage. To point out a negative consequence of something is not to condemn it in its entirety. I see Will’s point, but I think he’s being too harsh.

Will continues:

By bringing it up as a reason why democratic progress is hopeless, Theil does make it sound like he the problem’s not democratic politics per se, but democratic politics without good prospect of producing the right answer. But liberalism starts from the recognition that free and equal people don’t agree about the right answer but need to find a way to live together anyway. The secessionist instinct does seem illiberal insofar as it’s based in the frustration that resonable pluralism fails to generate consensus on the right answer — even when the content of the right answer is a radical version of liberalism. And Theil’s comment seemed to imply that political recognition of the fundamental equality of persons is not only tangential to the right answer, but might even get in the way at arriving at it, which is just screwed up.

Liberalism does start from the recognition of reasonable disagreement and the need to avoid the conflict this could potentially cause. If you’re not an anarchist (which I’m not), you think that some collective decisions are required. The results of these decisions can be better or worse from a libertarian perspective, but we need to be mindful of the procedural justice of the decision-making rule. Male-only suffrage is horribly unjust, even if it produces our desired result on other issues.

Any reasonable conception of liberalism, though, should also aim to ensure that when reasonable disagreement is allowed to persist without being the object of collective decision whenever possible. Nobody thinks we should vote on what type of shirt we should wear and all be bound by the result of the collective decision. Libertarians don’t think we should vote, for example, on how we should educate our kids or what substances we ingest for recreational reasons. The question is not how collective decisions should be made – I certainly want them made by some sort of democratic procedure – but what decisions should be made collectively.

One problem with democracy is that is that the scope of collective choice is endogenous. New issues can be brought to the agenda and voted upon. This is a big problem if, like me, you think that political behaviour is more about signalling what values you hold and what sort of person you are than it is about rationally and impartially deciding on what things should be subject to government intervention. Skilled political entrepreneurs can win votes by politicizing issues people care about. Don’t want your kids taking drugs? Let’s ban them altogether! What better way to show your disapproval?

I tend to say a lot of nasty things about democracy. In my own case, this is partly because most people say so many moronically nice things it. It may be the best system we’ve ever tried. It may even be the best system we’re ever going to have. This does nothing to alter the fact that an immoral act does not become moral just because 50% + 1 of voters are in favour of it. The tyranny of the majority can, and frequently does, severely fuck over minorities.  The fact that a decision was democratically reached is not a trump which puts it beyond moral questioning.

A democratic system constrained by proper constitutional limits could potentially solve these problems. Unfortunately, it’s not clear whether government can be prevented from performing acts which a majority of people demand in the voting booth. This is why people like Thiel want to escape politics altogether: democracy may be the best government we can hope for, but it is still pretty bad. I completely understand this desire.

Support for the Draft among Draftable Males

Paul Walker asks an interesting question in the comments about men being more supportive than women of a military draft:

Any age breakdown on that. I would have thought that those men in the draftable age group would be against.

I replied by saying:

I’ll have a look at that, but my suspicion is that men of draftablle age would still be more in favour than women of draftable age. The rational/instrumental voter hypothesis doesn’t hold up empirically in a number of cases. I wouldn’t be surprise if draftable men were more in favour than nondraftable men. If political beliefs are expressive than instrumental, it could be that young men would want to be careful not to be seen as the sort of coward who would avoid fighting for their country.

I just had another look at the GSS, and it seems I was right that draftable men are still more in favour of the draft than women of the same age, but wrong in my speculation than draftable men might be more in favour than nondraftable men. The age of the draft has varied over time in the US, so here’s the data broken down into a few age groups:

So while draftable males, whether you suppose the maximum draft age would be 25, 30 or 45, are more likely than women of the same group to support the draft, older males are even more likely to be in favour. The level of support among men aged 18-30 is less than that of women of all ages. These results are all statistically significant at p<.001 (shown in a different window of GSS’s data analysis tool, and I’m too lazy to download the data to make my own tables). Of course, there could be sampling bias – there are certainly more females than males answering the survey which should lead us to be somewhat suspicious.