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Scott has a new post on AI and money in politics. I'd like to take a step back and talk about how we got here.
In 2010, the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United that there are essentially no constitutional limits on political spending and advertising. At the time, it was widely anticipated that this would turn American politics into the wild west of corruption, crony capitalism, and corporate propaganda. But in the years after the decision, the feared corporate catastrophe failed to materialize. Trump didn't win in 2016 because of corporate support. In the primary, he bragged that he was self-funding his campaign and so wasn't beholden to special interests. On the Democrat side, Bernie Sanders got a lot of milage out of constantly reminding people that he didn't have a SuperPac.
In 2019, Scott wrote the prophetic Too Much Dark Money in Almonds, in which he pointed out that wealthy actors are probably underspending on politics and then brainstormed ways to turn money into political influence. By 2022, we started to see serious attempts at using previously-unheard-of amounts of money to systematically affect the political process. Sam Bankman-Fried was too-clever-by-half donating money he didn't technically own, but Elon Musk's aquisition of Twitter ended wokeness overnight and likely won Trump the 2024 election. If Scott is to be believed, the cryptocurrency and AI industries are well on their way to fulfilling SBF's dream of rooting the state.
Why did it take 10+ years for this to happen? My hypothesis: cultural inertia (and shame).
Despite being purported as the main beneficiaries of Citizens United, big corporations weren't really trying to spend large sums of money on politics. Exxon Mobil didn't park an oil tanker full of cash in the Chesapeake waiting for the signal to shower Washington in oil money as part of their dastardly plan. That just wasn't how buisinesses operated. It took time to develop both a theoretical framework for how to turn an abritrarily large amount of money into political power (it's a lot more complicated than simply buying ads), and to develop a philosophical framework for why this isn't cartoonishly evil.
It always amused me how comically small the bribes American politicians took in exchange for compromising their integrity, but perhaps that reflected that it was a buyer's market. Paying tens of thousands to influence the spending of billions has a ROI that no legitimate investment could ever match.
Er, those two sentences contradict one another. If the bribe has incredible ROI, that means the seller (the politician) is in control, and you'd expect to see much larger bribes.
The real explanation is that the competent companies and politicians don't need to bother with illegal bribery. There are subtler ways for companies to "reward" loyal politicians that are near-impossible to outlaw. (For instance, revolving-door sinecures.)
By definition, ROI is a fraction with "return" in the numerator and "investment" in the denominator. It being high could mean returns are high OR bribes are cheap, but either way that means it's a buyer's market. You're essentially arguing that if potatoes are cheap and a great deal for shoppers then farmers can charge more money for potatoes. But if there's tons of potato farmers around and not many people buying potatoes then anyone who tries to raise prices will get outcompeted by their rivals.
Ok, @crushedoranges made an easy-to-understand mistake, but you're specifically trying to be a pedant and correct my correction. You really should have taken a few minutes to think this through first. (And this from an account called "MathWizard"? Really?)
If ROI is high, then more people will want to buy. That's what makes it a seller's market. In an ideal marketplace, prices rise to equilibrium (where perceived value = price). Your example is incoherent - in an efficient market, potatoes being "a great deal for shoppers" is not compatible with "not many people buying potatoes."
To use a pithy example, if we're selling $100 bills for $1, then the ROI for customers is 100, ridiculously high. If the guy next to me has 10 to sell, and I have 10 to sell, and I foolishly decide not to listen to a "MathWizard" and to sell them at $2 instead ... do you think I'm going to have trouble finding buyers?
You are assuming that demand is infinitely elastic. It is quite possible that there are just not many marginal new buyers of potatoes even if they are a great deal. Demand being inelastic would not free the farmers from competition and allow them to raise prices.
What did I do to deserve this thread? Yes, Generic Economic Trope #1 is that markets aren't always efficient. That's why I, y'know, explicitly said "efficient" in my post. It's irrelevant to the main point. "ROI being high makes it a buyer's market" is factually incorrect. The effect goes in the exact wrong direction. You don't get to say that "if my product becomes more valuable, I'm less capable of raising prices, because something something INELASTICITY."
Market efficiency generally refers to pricing correctness. I don’t think it has much to do with elasticity of demand or supply.
“If ROI is high then more people will want to buy,” is generally true, but it’s not a priori true. We have to know something about the demand curve as well. Most of the time, it will generate a sellers market and allow sellers to raise prices, but it doesn’t have to happen immediately. In the case of political bribes, the market is intensely opaque and potential buyers might not realize how to make a purchase or may not want to buy for silly reasons like honor. Over the long run I would expect more buyers to clue in, but it wouldn’t surprise me if bribes could remain really high ROI for a long time without changing market conditions much. Certainly I wouldn’t expect it to move as fast as oil futures.
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