Theory: The Political Incentives for Progressive Policy Promote Policy Failure
Thanks to Miranda for providing feedback on drafts and proofreading via the proofreading service.
I think there is an incentive problem in Leftist and progressive politics (and therefore democracy more broadly) that isn’t adequately discussed. The goal of progressive politics is said to be helping people who have been disenfranchised unfairly. Naturally, progressive policies and institutions draw much of their support from disenfranchised people. However, what happens to the base of support for these institutions and policies (which can be thought of as alive mimetically) if they actually succeed at helping people? With less disenfranchisement, one would imagine there would be less support for progressivism. Thus, progressivism may be operating under a perverse incentive structure where it is rewarded for creating disenfranchisement in society.
Things which are known to shift one’s attitudes away from progressivism and towards conservativism are getting married and having kids. One would also imagine that welfare programs would have higher support among those who use them. People getting married, having families and not needing welfare are things which are broadly considered to be good. Yet, if Leftist policies were to succeed at moving these metrics in the right direction (more marriage, more kids, less welfare recipients), they would push the policy preferences of their country to the Right.
One might argue that as the Right is incentivized to increase these things (to push people’s policy preferences to the Right), there is a fair balance in the system. However, I think this is wrong due to the asymmetric nature of creation and destruction. It is far easier and less energy intensive for the Left to implement entropic destructive policies than for the Right to implement extropic creative policies. Thus, the Left has an easy mechanism to strengthen its movement (enhancing disenfranchisement) while the Right has no similar easy mechanism.
This does not require any conscious malice by the Left. All that is required is for the Left to implement policies which fail or backfire, and then never fix them because they are rewarded electorally for the failure, rather than punished. The Right, on the other hand, needs to boost employment, wages, savings, decrease house and family starting costs and increase marriage rates in an environment where they are only in power half the time and their efforts can be antagonized by the Left all the time. Clearly, this is a very asymmetric competition. The Right rarely attempts those things, but that makes sense considering how low their chances of success would be.
Due to the nature of democracy, rather than create an imbalance in two party vote share, one would expect this incentive structure to shift the policy positions of both parties to the Left over time. As disenfranchisement grows, the Left can move its policies further Left, and as progressive policies accumulate which the Right cannot eliminate when in power, the Right will be forced to live with policy platforms which decreasingly resemble their core ideological values.
One might also argue that the Leftist voters themselves would defend against any pathological policies, since they would be hurt by them, and would punish politicians who propose or implement them. However, I don’t think this is viable in reality. Voters, broadly speaking, aren’t capable of understanding the impacts of policies, past or present, and so cannot judge or punish politicians accordingly, except for glaring mistakes. Voters go by their personal needs and beliefs at the time, and if personal difficulties make you want progressivism more (perhaps correctly at the time, on the margin), the Left can manufacture more personal difficulties.
Another factor preventing progressive voters from defending themselves against harmful policies is dependency. It is hard to punish a party for something you don’t like if you depend on them for other things you need. This means the Left is incentivized to create dependencies in voters where it can, and not remove them when it can. With simple-to-change social issues (e.g. abortion, gay marriage, Civil Rights Legislation), both parties can lock in a segment of the populace in by siding with their position. With high effort changes like complex social issues (e.g. actual minority life outcomes, not just legal rights) and economic issues, the Left is able to give benefits to people in such a way that they will be punished for defecting, while the Right has to actually solve these problems for people to increase their vote share.
A real world example of this would be rent control. Rent control is a great way for progressives to win votes in the short term and then lock them in. In the long term, it decreases development and building maintenance and raises prices elsewhere, which creates more disenfranchisement. This disenfranchisement, if this theory holds true, creates more progressive voters. An alternative policy, like that of maximal development so house prices are minimised, would be fantastic for individuals and the community, but this success would also probably make the community more conservative. So the Left won’t pursue it because of its incentives, and the Right can’t pursue it because of the difficulty of implementation. In this case, the Right’s constituency would also probably include many homeowners/appartment owners who don’t want their own house values to fall, even if it’s what’s best collectively.
If true, this paints a bleak picture of both progressive and conservative politics within democracy. The Left increases in power when the citizens are losing, and decreases in power when the citizens are winning. Fixing issues by introducing good policy is not possible, as the Left is rewarded for bad policy, and any good policy introduced by the Right would be easy to antagonize. At best, the Right can act as a brake, but it can never acquire enough real power to fight the entropy. These incentives are adequate to ensure neither party can be good.
I think this also explains where “grey tribers” are coming from. I think grey tribers are deeply frustrated that neither political party is seriously engaged in implementing the extropic, generative public policy options they know are available—policy options which are apolitical and truly aimed at growing the wealth and health of the nation. Thus, when performing an honest examination of the existing parties, the only reasonable conclusion they can draw is that both approaches are failing.
This theory depends on the relationship between support for Leftism and disenfranchisement being causal. The associations with marriage, children and income are known, but it is unclear if they are causal. For marriage and children, the common interpretation I have read is that there is a causal relationship. For income the relationship is less clear. There is a correlation, but income increases with age, and so does Rightwardness, and I imagine there would be many other confounders.
Figuring out the strength of these effects, and for what variables, seems like it would be valuable. It would show the extent to which the Left and Right are politically incentivized to create certain social outcomes. The quantitative research required for this is beyond me, but I think it would produce very interesting results were someone able to do it.
Based on the correlations I discussed in the beginning, one would expect elites to be very Right wing. However, the opposite is true. The voting-income correlations show that the poor are predominantly progressive, with Rightism increasing with income (taking over at roughly the median income) and the trend reversing at very high incomes, with the economic elites being Leftist. Cultural elites are also overwhelmingly Leftist. My theory for this is that: if economic elites tried to individually fight the entropic forces in the system, they would lose, so they go along with them instead and use them to their advantage. Laws around banking deregulation, free trade (leading to global manufacturing), pharma laws controlling generics manufacturing and bankruptcy proof university loans have all been rigged in such a way that the system becomes more entropic as a whole, but confers benefits to a small subset of elites. For cultural elites I think the story is simpler. I think they are largely dependent on the existing political structures for funding and status, and so if these structures are always moving Left, they are incentivised to follow.
Tldr; The Left may be incentivized to implement bad policies which produce bad outcomes, because bad outcomes generate more disenfranchisement among voters, and this may increase the progressive vote share. This is easy for the Left to do – just enable entropy. This is hard for the Right to stop or reverse – they can never acquire enough power in a democratic system of government to halt the entropy or implement extropic policy. The actual strength of these incentives is unclear to me and would require research to illuminate. If true, this would mean it is unlikely that many of our problems can be solved by introducing good policy into the current system, as neither political side is able to (the Right) or incentivised to (the Left) pull it off.
I think there is some added detail needed here about short vs long-term outcomes. In the long run, progress does seem to be winning out. Trade liberalization may be temporarily on the retreat, but the long-term trend remains. Regarding zoning, some progress has been made. Modern rent-control schemes tend to be less draconian than past ones (allowing for higher rents on new development, for example).
Mostly this probably conflicts with the claim
Which mistakes are considered glaring changes over time. As we gradually raise the sanity waterline, obviously bad policies are easier to reject. There is also a bit of learning-by-doing. During the 2008 recession, many people bought into the claim that the Federal Reserve simply couldn’t do much about low inflation. During the 2020 recession, the Federal Reserve acted much more aggressively to stimulate demand. Similarly, it’s hard to imagine India retreating back into the License Raj or China returning to a Command-and-Control economy.
Do you mean progress in the good sense or the progressive political sense? I am arguing this is so in the political sense, but not neccessarily the good sense. So of course trade liberalisation would continue, because it is politically progressive, but not actual progress for many people in Western countries.
If rent control schemes are still taken seriously anywhere, is that not still a massive defeat? This theory would predict that a massive amount of energy could be poured into moving housing policy in the right direction, but only make a small amount of progress because politicians aren’t incentivised to solve housing policy, which I think corresponds with reality. What I’m getting at with housing policy is that progressive politicians may literally have no or negative incentives to fix it, and therefore the energy to do it has to be entirely public, which is a bad political design.
The Fed is not a democratic institution. China is not a democracy either. India I know little about. I don’t see how these examples are relevant to my point that in a democracy, left wing parties aren’t electorally incentivised to solve people’s problems, so we shouldn’t be surprised when they don’t, or make them worse.
I wonder whether 50 years ago, the same argument would be made the other way round, something like: Religious people are more likely to vote Right. If you make bad policies, people will live in fear and need strong social networks, which are traditionally provided by religion, therefore more votes for the Right. If you make good policies, people wil relax and think independently, become less religious, and vote Left. Sadly, because destruction is easier, the Right will keep growing more and more powerful. How well would such prediction work?
The assumption that people frustrated by the system will vote Left also seems dubious. Didn’t many people vote for Trump because they felt that the system was somehow stacked against them? It can go either way.
The right can definitely exploit jingoism for support to some degree. But I don’t think the economic case is symmetrical. What is an actual lever, as powerful as welfare, which the Right could pull (even in other eras) to increase its support?
Re Trump, what matters is the overall incentive. If it’s a 55⁄45 trend, lots of people are going to buck the trend but it still exists. Trump couldn’t run on a platform of welfare and government spending cutbacks, to the policies are also winning independent of the politicians.
A few comments:
-The disenfranchised (bottom quintile in income) vote at 20% lower rates in the US compared to more wealthy people so increasing disenfranchisement is not necessarily as strong a path to get more votes as other tactics would be, such as making it easier to vote through mail-in voting and automatic voter registration or making election day a national holiday
-People do learn from past policy mistakes and do vote in the future based off of those, so policies that lead to negative outcomes do make it less likely to elect those politicians in the future
-Those with college degrees vote left at very high rates so promoting education which is a good is more likely to promote future leftist voters than more disenfranchisement. The past disenfranchised who are know better off I would think are more likely to vote left as they understand what it takes for improvement and how easily people can slide back to disenfranchisement with worse govt policies.
-Rent control is basically all in NY/NJ/CA which are very blue and I haven’t seen research showing that it leads to disenfranchisement
-In a utopia where all possible progress was achieved then yes a “conservative” approach where things shouldn’t be changed makes sense, though the current right-wing politics in the US is more about helping elites and lower taxes (while relying on Christian Evangelical voting base) than it is not having anything change.
-Also progressives are often wealthier liberals while poorer liberals tend to have more moderate views though they do still vote overwhelmingly Democrat
Thanks for your comments.
Good points.
I disagree, but I think your view is more supported by others than mine. I think experts learn, but very few voters do.
I think this is also perverse and causal. Universities have very one-sided incentives with regard to who it makes sense for them to support politically.
Rent control prevents the market from working and building more stock, which harms everyone else.
I agree. Our right wing politics is mostly a grift.
Agree. Incentives are very different for rich and poor, and poor might be motivated by dependency whereas rich are not.