That’s what economist Benjamin Powell is doing at the Freeman, where he notes that Western observers who refer to Somalia’s “failed state” status generally overlook the importance of Xeer, the customary law system that holds clan-based society together none too badly.

As for piracy?

Although they are a concern, this is not merely a symptom of a “failed state,” as many media reports make it out to be. In one sense, that the piracy is committed against passing foreign vessels is a tribute to the internal effectiveness of Somali customary law. The pirates are well-armed and obviously not hesitant to use violence. Yet they do not plunder Somali ships. What’s more, they interact peacefully with other Somali when they are on land. Although the total number of pirates is small, it has been estimated that 10,000 to 15,000 people are employed by the pirates indirectly in related industries such as boat repair, security, and food provision. (Other enterprising Somalis have set up special restaurants to cater to the hostages.) That pirates use voluntary market transactions to purchase goods and services on land, rather than pillage, provides some evidence that Somali law is fairly robust if even these otherwise violent people respect it when conducting their internal affairs.

It’s an interesting essay that breaks from the tired twin narratives of Somali piracy and anarchy. And it leads to a very interesting empirical question: which is worse for human security in relative terms, the absence of a functioning central government or the presence of an abusive central government? History suggests people generally prefer order to anarchy, even if that order comes at a price – the Taliban were wildly popular in the early 1990s for this very reason. But Powell’s keen to measure this empirically, using development indicators like telecommunications infrastructure, infant mortality and the like. He finds that Somalis are not doing badly compared to other Africans, state or no state. But he hasn’t controlled for the presence of the humanitarian sector in the country (which is often good for things like infant survival) or for the fact that Somaliland actually has a functioning government, stability and relatively favorable indicators – might this account for Powell’s findings?

Even if so, the effort to empirically measure what has herewith been an argument by assertion about human security and failed states is a valuable one.

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John Styles, via Chris Blattman:

About a week after the earthquake, economist Tyler Cowen wrote that Obama looked like the “Haiti president”:

Obama will (and should) do something about this situation … Yet he will have a festering situation on his hands for the rest of his term … Obama now stands a higher chance of being a one-term President. Foreign aid programs are especially unpopular, especially relative to their small fiscal cost … Just as it’s not easy to pull out of Iraq or Afghanistan, it won’t be easy to pull out of Haiti.

But it’s now clear that Haiti won’t affect Obama’s political future in any significant way. In part, this is because the worst fears about the earthquake’s aftermath weren’t realized; Haiti didn’t descend to utter lawlessness. Still, it faces extraordinary challenges. The problem is that these are largely invisible in American news and thus among American voters, who are therefore less likely to hold Obama accountable for Haiti’s struggles.

In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, my co-blogger Galrahn repeatedly argued that this was a key moment for the Obama presidency. Failing to formulate a competent foreign policy response to the earthquake would result in a diplomatic and humanitarian disaster that would affect US standing in the hemisphere and, quite possibly, generate waves of refugees on American shores.

This disaster appears to have been avoided; things are hardly great in Haiti, but the state hasn’t completely collapsed, and relief efforts have in general been considered successful. The response of the USN in particular has been extraordinary. Haiti will not, as Cowen and Styles suggest, dominate the Obama presidency. It’s worth noting, however, that Styles and Galrahn might offer different explanations for why the effect of the Haiti earthquake will not endure. Styles argues that Americans simply don’t care about Haitians; if relief operations had failed to forestall a greater disaster, Americans would have taken little note (except perhaps insofar as the refugee crisis would directly impact Gulf communities). Galrahn, I suspect, would suggest that Haiti has ceased to be a story because relief operations have been so successful. No one remembers disasters that don’t occur, or recalls waves of refugees that never show up.

These explanations aren’t mutually exclusive. Styles is certainly correct to argue that the American public is less than fully attentive to disasters that happen to brown people. However, I think that Galrahn is also right, and that there’s a very serious dilemma in this story for advocates of good governance. Sensible, responsive, well-staffed, well-funded governance tends to prevent horrible things from happening. When horrible things do happen, authorities respond quickly and effectively. Crisis prevention and effective crisis response, however, are inherently less interesting and less attention-getting than failed crisis response. If the 9/11 hijackers had been captured prior to conducting their attacks, very few people outside the intelligence community would have much recollection of a crucial policy victory. If the Bush administration had conducted adequate preparation for Katrina and responded effectively, there’d be relatively little shared memory of the disaster.

Success and failure in crisis response, consequently, have asymmetric political effect. The Obama administration’s response to the Haiti earthquake, in my view, has been a resounding success for responsible, capable governance. No one will remember that in six months. Bush’s response to Katrina will endure in the political memory for decades. On the one hand this is (politically) good for progressives, given that conservative efforts to gut governance tend to result in horrible disasters. On the other hand, because policy and execution failures stick in the mind longer than successes, it’s difficult to convince the general public of the importance of a responsible approach to government. In the rhetoric of anti-statist nutjobs, Katrina actually becomes an argument against adequate government, while success in Haiti fades from history.

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Given that some recent posts have dealt with the contrast between central and local control over violence, this from Jason Sorens is interesting:

In 1927, local revenue decentralization (LRD) still stood at 73%, nearly twice the level it is today. By 1932, near the nadir of the Depression, that had fallen to 68%. Under “that man in the White House,” the pace of centralization accelerated, as within two years LRD was at 59%, dropping further to 49% by 1940, not far from where it is today. To be fair, state politicians like Huey P. Long deserve some share of the blame or credit, depending on one’s perspective, for their attempts to set up state-level mini-New Deals. The federal role in centralization largely has to do with the expansion of federal grants to state and local governments, reducing the importance of autonomous revenue sources. The point is that within the space of about a dozen years, the U.S. political economy was transformed from one of extensive decentralization and robust local autonomy to one of federal dominance.

The remaining centralization episodes include the periods between 1940 and 1946 (-3% LRD), 1961-1969 (-6% LRD), 1971-1977 (-5% LRD), and 1991-1995 (-3% LRD). The latter two periods are probably associated with state supreme court decisions mandating state aid to local public schools, which in states like New Jersey and Vermont have been associated with noticeable jumps down in LRD. The escalation of the War on Drugs under Nixon, with its concomitant federal grants to local police departments, might also account for the 1970s trend. The 1960s centralization almost surely has to do with the expansion of the federal welfare state, which partly crowded out the pre-existing safety nets set up by local governments.

This describes a remarkable shift in terms of the balance of power between the federal government and localities (and it’s unclear exactly how Jason is defining “local” here). It’s intriguing to think of how this has played out in terms of control over legitimate use of violence; in most cases this seems largely to have stayed in the purview of localities, although state and federal policing certainly increased over the course of the twentieth century, as did mechanisms for influence on and oversight of local policing organizations.

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It’s a sad fact that voters have very short memories and they also don’t care about good governance except for the very moment when bad governance affects them. While we should always be extremely dubious of any material coming out of Third Way hacks, it’s hard to deny there’s some truth to the fact that Democrats got creamed in Virginia in part because of the school closures that saved lives but robbed people of their free child care.

What was the first thing you told your partners after you got done with the groups — what was your big takeaway?

I was surprised by how dominant education was in this election. I was also struck by how much it was this place for all of these frustrations for these suburban voters, where they could take out their Covid frustrations in one place.

So if you’re advising a Democratic client running in 2022, what do you tell them?

I would tell them that we have a problem. We’ve got a national branding problem that is probably deeper than a lot of people suspect. Our party thinks maybe some things we’re saying aren’t cutting through, but I think it’s much deeper than that.

What is that branding problem, in a nutshell?

People think we’re more focused on social issues than the economy — and the economy is the No. 1 issue right now.

So what can Democrats do going into the midterms?

A big part of the problem was that people didn’t feel they knew enough about McAuliffe and what he had done. Governors, in particular, during Covid were on TV all the time, talking to people about Covid. So it’s all anybody knows of what they’ve done. So you need to tell your story about what you’ve been doing, to the press and in paid communications, outside of Covid. And that applies to members of Congress, state legislators, everyone on down.

Again, take anything from Third Way with entire salt licks. But there are two big issues here. First, lots of possible Democratic voters are super racist and therefore if they think Democrats are talking more about the inequalities rooted in our horrible history instead of the economy (whatever that actually means in reality), they are quite likely to say “I’m pretty cool with destroying democracy since Critical Race Theory makes me scared.” Second, all the good governance in the world that saved countless lives may in fact lead to electoral doom.

What we do about any of this, I’m not sure. But these things seem pretty true to me.

The post Voters Don’t Care About Good Governance appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.