what is Iraq but a middle east NAFTA? substitute terrorism for illegal immigration. we are going to defeat terrorism with globalism. johnny jihadi will be so happy working at starbucks baghdad he won't want to be a terrorist.
of course, it doesn't work. elites on both sides get rich, the problem supplying country is worse off and the problem recieving country has a bigger probem: illegal immigration and terrorism have gone up not down.
the solution to illegal immigration is to punish employers who hire them and to put massive security at the border. but it's mean and nativistic and politically impossible. same with iraq. we need to pull out of the middle east and abandon all our so called allies, but it's mean and not politically possible. success is not politically possible under the religion of globalism
Peter
I think I’m missing something.
The Mexican farmer, confronted with declining corn prices, and realizing that strawberries or other substitute crops would not make up the difference, and that the only way he could support his family was to go north, made the rational decision to go north.
Apparently the officials in Mexico City and Washington felt that this would not be a rational decision for the farmer and planned differently.
That they were wrong in predicting what the basic Mexican farmer would consider rational behavior does not change the fact that the farmer made a rational economic decision.
If on the other hand if the decisions makers in Mexico City and Washington had based there decision on the assumption the Mexican farmer would act irrationally they would have been just as wrong or more so.
Given that there were many inadvertent irrational decisions or rational decisions that did not take into account unpredicted future events, I do not see how an intentional policy of irrational decision in Mexico City and Washington, or assuming that the farmers and workers on both sides of the border would act irrationally in there situation with their level of knowledge, would have improved the situation?
Perhaps you could explain?
Peter writes:
"Quite simply, as the scholarship of most of the contributors of this blog (and a large number of our friends and colleagues) has shown, identity and therefore rationality are social constructs that depend on rules of legitimacy. . . .
"And, perhaps some of the social scientists out there who continually trumpet theories and policies based on those theories that assume a Rational Actor should take a time out and really think about the consequences of what they're doing."
Rather, one wonders why identity theorists aren't able to anticipate these sorts of theoretical and policy errors, support their conclusions with empirics, and have a better impact on policy-making themselves. Indeed, even saying that the rationalists are embedded in existing power and other normative structures doesn't seem to get around the fact that sociological IR theorists ought to be better at this game than they seem to be.
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It's not clear to me what the alternative rule for making policy is if creating incentives is sine qua non of a "flaw of rationality assumptions." As indicated by previous posts in this thread, there are rational explanations for what happened wrt NAFTA. That the outcomes weren't anticipated by policymakers isn't an indictment of the rationality assumption, that's too big a leap to take. More generally, I don't see how a sub-optimal outcome is evidence against rational choice theory which doesn't say that optimal outcomes will be the case in all interactions of rational actors. You said that government leaders and farmers ask, " 'Who am I?' and what do I do now?" As a social scientist trying to say something about the world, do you then say, "This is who I think you are, and this is what you should do." Or do you say, "here is a way to increase the size of the pie, it is likely to be a benefit to both parties, let's negotiate the terms." If you could explain what I'm missing in your criticism, then I might have a better idea of what an answer to my questions in a previous post on this blog "empiricists of the world...") might look like.
It also seems to me that this begs the question of social scientific theory's role in policy making. Looks like a pretty bad match in general, actually.
submitted humbly
Am I a thread killer or what?
When applying rational theory to policy it is important to remember it is probabilistic not deterministic.
If rational choice theory says someone should do something it means they are MORE LIKELY to do it, not that THEY ABSOLUTELY WILL do it.
Even rationality has an error term.
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