Anonymous Libertarian

In honor of Pete Buttigieg's apparent victory in the Iowa Caucus (though I believe, in terms of delegates, Sanders tied him), I thought I'd write some thoughts on the concept of electability, though only partially my own. Greg Mankiw wrote a blog post months ago ( http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2019/04/bayes-likes-mayor-pete.html ) in which he argued, more or less, that Pete Buttigieg appeared to be the most electable Democratic candidate. Admittedly, he didn't use that word, but I think he implied this. Basically, Buttigied had the highest conditional probability of winning the general election given that he won the primary. Later, Andrew Gelman criticized the post in his blog, though mainly because he didn't think using betting odds as genuine, stable probabilities of winning an election was a good idea. But it was in the comments section that there was a discussion of what I think was a more interesting point: even if the betting odds are correct, they still are not ...

Recently Ed Dolan had a post on his blog on Medium arguing that small government was not in fact conducive to prosperity ( https://medium.com/@dolanecon/does-the-government-that-governs-least-really-govern-best-142106728cba ), as libertarians often argue. Specifically, he shows that the size of government is actually negatively correlated with measures of prosperity, freedom, and quality of government; on the other hand, quality of governance was positively associated with per capita GDP. I came across this post, I should note, when Tyler Cowen linked to it on his blog as evidence for “state capacity libertarianism.” But there’s a problem with Dolan’s analysis, or at least the interpretation he provides of it with respect to the role of government size in economic prosperity. It may seem pedantic to repeat the old canard that ‘correlation does not equal causation,’ but the problem is more than that: there is an equally plausible explanation for the correlation he observes in wh...