Apr 02,2013

UP Links 02 April 2013

+ Kari Kohn

For two decades, Chinese local governments have been able to ignore the problem of housing migrants, thanks to the makeshift villages and other arrangements that accommodate about 40 percent of migrants. The remainder live at factory dormitories or tents and pre-fab housing set up on construction sites.

As China’s cities and export industries boomed, cheap private housing helped keep down the cost of labor, says Li Jinkui of the China Development Institute in Shenzhen. He estimates Shenzhen would have spent 25 years’ worth of annual revenues to house the people who were renting in its “villages” in 2000 – a population now estimated at 5 million people.

Cass Sunstein on Behavioral Economists in Opposition to John Stuart Mill

When society seeks to overrule the individual’s judgment, Mill wrote, it does so on the basis of “general presumptions,” and these “may be altogether wrong, and even if right, are as likely as not to be misapplied to individual cases.” If the goal is to ensure that people’s lives go well, Mill contends that the best solution is for public officials to allow people to find their own path. Here, then, is an enduring argument, instrumental in character, on behalf of free markets and free choice in countless situations, including those in which human beings choose to run risks that may not turn out so well.

Mill’s claim has a great deal of intuitive appeal. But is it right? That is largely an empirical question, and it cannot be adequately answered by introspection and intuition. In recent decades, some of the most important research in social science, coming from psychologists and behavioral economists, has been trying to answer it. That research is having a significant influence on public officials throughout the world. Many believe that behavioral findings are cutting away at some of the foundations of Mill’s harm principle, because they show that people make a lot of mistakes, and that those mistakes can prove extremely damaging.

John McGinnis on his new book Accelerating Democracy; Transforming Governance Through Technology

But besides such specific problems, technological innovation generates more general difficulties for governance because such innovation renders the social environment more and more distant from that in which we were adapted to live. In the evolutionary era, humans inhabited small communities where members were related by sexual bonding or by blood to many other members. But as the polity moves from the tribe, to the city state, and then to the nation state, society can rely less on the fellow feeling of extended kin and ethnic groups to reach agreement and maintain stability. As a result there becomes a greater need to find solutions that can command broad consensus by virtue of their good effects.

Ilya Somin on Devolving Down and Voting with Your Feet

When we “vote with our feet” by choosing between jurisdictions in a federal system, or between products in the market, we have much stronger incentives to learn relevant information and evaluate it rationally.