“ I would not look to the United States Constitution if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012.”
— Ruth Bader Ginsburg
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Posts tagged with institutions
“ There is almost no voting fraud in America. And none of the lawmakers who claim there is have ever been able to document any but the most isolated cases. The only reason Republicans are passing these laws is to give themselves a political edge by suppressing Democratic votes.”
— The New York Times (via wisconsinforward)
Does Wisconsin Require Apple Pie to Be Served with Cheese?
Nope. But…
The 1935 Laws of Wis., ch. 106 came close; it required serving a small amount of cheese and butter with meals in restaurants (effective from June 1935 to March 1937). … that was the first Wisconsin law with a sunset provision, i.e. a legislated ending time.
BTW, Apple pie and cheddar cheese is awesome.
A Working Government
It’s not clear why we should judge the system by whether it is faithful to its original design rather than suited to its current challenges. The credit-rating agencies, the bondholders, the climate, the economy, the jobless and the deficit are certainly less interested in our system’s design than in its results. We should follow their lead. If this is our system working precisely as intended, then it is time to start thinking — as we have during many previous periods of reform in our history — about making it work better.
Yes yes yes.
People don’t actually care about institutions, they care about outcomes.
Against Democratic Representation
David Wessel (or some guy as Gruber might say) summarizes a National Academy of Sciences lecture from Paul Romer:
Congress should tie its own hands more often, retaining power to investigate and vote proposals up or down but avoiding the detailed crafting of legislative provisions that influence the flow of money.
To Romer, good institutions are created and maintained by philosopher kings. See him here on charter cities. But I’d offer up the continual wrangling over the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as a case study in how semi-autonomous insulated from Congress institutions actually get built. A creation reality that Romer might find less than appealing.
Filed under normative economics (WSJ link via Met’s Fan #1).
Inside the Beltway
Greg Sargent:
Presidents have plenty of influence in Washington. So does the leadership of the House majority party. Senators, too, are important – each individual Senator can sway policy all by herself, and while majorities in that body can do some things, Senators in the minority party matter too.
After that…well, a lot of other people in and out of Washington have quite a lot of say over public policy. Bureaucrats, judges, and lobbyists all have their influence. Eventually, as you go down the chain of influence, you get way down to the level of cab drivers with their indispensable folk wisdom and headwaiters who legend has it give the best tables to the powerful. And just below them, just above intern coordinators at think tanks, that’s where you find Members of the House who belong to the minority party.
Still, I’m sure most of our problems today are Nancy Pelosi’s fault and related to her choice of suits or hair style.
“ If you’re not afraid, you haven’t been paying attention.”
— Tyler Cowen on US and Euro political economy, 7/17/2011
More As, More Problems
Felix Salmon is horrified by the number of bonds that are rated as AAA. Best line:
On a micro level, triple-A securities are safer than any other securities. But on a macro level, they’re much more dangerous, precisely because they’re considered risk-free.
Two things strike me.
Why does anyone still listen to ratings agencies? Do they (could they ever?) add information to a consumer past the market price? If there was one thing that could make me crack open the finance literature it would be this puzzle.
The persistence of the ratings agencies and the increasing rate of AAA debt strikes me as analogous to grade inflation and the persistence of the university as a credentialing mechanism for job-seekers.
Link via MR (probably, thanks Instapaper) which btw makes me wonder what lessons for private licensing Alex Tabarrok would find in the ratings agencies historical and recent performance.
“ But the resistance to change is often both emotional and powerful.”
— Rob Neyer on Major League Baseball and the possible scenarios under consideration for league realignment
Courting the Supreme
Damon W. Root defends the value of judicial review for Reason:
Democracy can be a wonderful thing, but it also has its limits.
Of course the usual example of civil rights requiring the the antidemocratic powers of the Court is artfully wielded.
But so what? People don’t care about institutions. People care about outcomes. Liberals don’t like the Court today because they correctly see it as a conservative counter-weight to their legislative accomplishments. And of course, you don’t hear Republicans complaining so loudly about activist judges these days. You can’t take any institutional critique at face value, they are almost always arguments for policy preferences cloaked in the rhetoric of democratic theory. See also the Filibuster.
Link via Munger on the Twitter and if he wasn’t the one who first taught me that he could have been.
