Generalizing the concept of term limits

Once you come around on term limits, the concept is uncomfortably general.

Epistemic status: An uncomfortably political one again, though thankfully nonpartisan by nature. I don’t have any more Animorphs fanfic stacked up this time, so open to suggestions on how to atone for this one.

The Concept

Let’s start with a common story about finance.

Someone notices some underexplored idea - say, that you can repackage mortgage-backed securities into tranches, improving risk-adjusted profitability. The first few people who notice this make a lot of money, leading to more and more people piling in. Eventually, all the profit to be had out of the idea is mined out by all the people chasing it. But the downsides - the added risks or unwanted side effects of the idea - only scale up, because while each individual wants to avoid them no one can avoid them completely, and they stack up. So inevitably, the downsides come to dominate and the idea has to be abandoned, often with catastrophic results and, if we’re lucky, some very quotable movies made about the whole thing.

Note that this doesn’t always end up blowing up like this. Most of Warren Buffett’s profits were driven by the realization that low-beta, high quality stocks were undervalued and that he could get high profits by high-leverage investments in them rather than his (genuinely impressive) personal skill and insight, and eventually the market caught on. This didn’t lead to any dramatic blowups, it just means there’s there’s not going to be another Warren Buffet-style billionaire anytime soon. The core insight is still reasonable, but it’s no longer useful and the story has moved on¹.

The concept (with fewer metaphors)

In 1796, Alexander Hamilton explained the concept of alpha decay to George Washington, who immediately realized the implications and resigned from office to establish the tradition of term limits.

Okay, that’s not actually what happened². But the underlying dynamic of an executive³ politician’s life cycle in office is pretty similar: They come into office with some kind of idea to solve the main problem of the day. Often this does actually address the problem, but with some side effects. As the executive stays in office, the original problem is reduced but the side effects increase, making the direction the executive is pushing in worse and worse. An ideologically motivated politician (and most of them are, especially the type elected to solve a specific problem) will keep going anyway, at least for a while, making things worse and worse.

The other consequence is that politics becomes personality-focused. As the underlying problem itself becomes less pressing, we start climbing simulacra levels, and politics becomes more about being pro or anti the movement (and the specific politicians involved) than about the problem. If the same politicians are still in power, more of the ranks of the executive get caught in moral mazes, where individuals are incentivized to do bad things for no reason because that’s a good way to signal loyalty to the cause. Things still get bad in this scenario, though in somewhat different ways than straight-up following ideology off a cliff.

This is talking about how politicians trend over time, but not why term limits are needed. If the problem ended here, we could just rely on people to vote out the old guy once he starts going too far and pick someone new.

But voting block politics don’t actually work like this. When it comes to politics, society isn’t a single intelligent agent, it’s a damped harmonic oscillator⁴. Societies take a while to cohere around deciding something is an important problem that needs to be addressed, they form partisan blocks about it (often rallying around specific political figures on it).

It’s hard to just say, after a few years “okay, we’ve mostly solved the problem and the remaining issues aren’t worth the side-effects anymore, let’s back off now”. Saying this actually isn’t a big problem is the thing your political enemies do, the assholes who are constantly dismissing your side and the real problems you point out, the guys who were proven wrong as the problem got worse and worse to the point where even they had to admit they were wrong. Saying we should avoid the problems is the sort of thing only evildoers or idiots would say.

And the same thing applies to personality-driven politics. The guys criticizing the prime minister are only saying that because they’re the opposition, they criticized him when he solved the old problem because they didn’t believe he could solve it and they were wrong then so they’re probably wrong now that they’re criticizing him on unrelated grounds.

Or, well, this is what it feels like for most individuals. People aren’t usually deeply technical about solving specific issues, and political blocks and coalitions don’t give you infinite room to maneuver even if you are⁵.

Term limits help a lot here. If there’s a nonpartisan rule that any politician can only get so long in office before having to leave, you get a chance to reset without having to force everyone to change their minds or admit they’re now wrong about something. The argument can’t be about whether you’re for or against this one guy when that guy is constitutionally barred from serving anyway. And a new guy (even from the same side or party) usually wants to have his own issues⁶, which means he can take a step back and just be sort of reasonably majoritarian about the old, currently-less-pressing issue. Instead of being stuck on an infinite oscillator, we can just hit an escape key and move on to new, better issues.

A final objection - wouldn’t the successor to a term-limited politician just keep focusing on the same issues, since they’re the ones society is talking about?

In practice, this doesn’t seem to happen. As a social narrative, a new face tends to attract new conversations even if it’s the face of a designated successor (see e.g. the difference in how Bush sr. isn’t really talked about as a cold warrior despite being a pretty direct heir to Reagan). And the politicians themselves typically don’t feel enough loyalty to the old paradigm to double down on it instead of looking for their own direction - or if they do, they’re usually worse salesmen for the idea⁷ and don’t manage to get elected for it on their own merits.

Examples that play this straight

This line by Chen Yun

Had Mao died in 1956, his achievements would have been immortal. Had he died in 1966, he would still have been a great man but flawed. But he died in 1976. Alas, what can one say?

The best example might be Hitler. He entered in time where the real problems facing Germany - economic slowdown, loss of investor confidence, loss of national pride - actually were problems solvable by a high-profile new-style leader shouting about national pride and doing massive secret off-balance-sheet quantitative easing. By 1939 the problems facing the median german⁸ were doing a lot better, with low unemployment and a resurgence of national pride. But then, of course, Hitler didn’t stop, because momentum, the downsides of a surge in national pride and government military investment came about, and things famously ended quite poorly for Germany⁹.

Hugo Chavez is another case whose details I will leave to the scottpost. So is Juan Peron¹⁰. All the indians I talk to say the same about Modi - he came in pushing to solve problems in a way India genuinely needed to be pushed, but by his third term he’s just started looking to pick new fights in ways that are increasingly bad. Bibi Netanyahu had some brilliant economic reforms early in his career, but by 2022 Israeli politics devolved into pro- and anti-Bibi camps, sliding down the simulacra levels to the point they weren’t even talking about outcomes anymore. Xi Jinping at first did at least some addressing of problems and introducing new ideas from the other wing of the party, but by his third term smart chinese people are increasingly worried about him¹¹. Nancy Pelosi’s control over congressional democrats was incredibly effective at pushing back against Bush or pushing Obama’s 2008-2010 agenda through congress, but by the 2020s her leadership led to a gerontocratic rudderless party torn apart by sectarianism. The list goes on¹².

The Generalization, and examples that play to them

So that’s the direct thing. Object-level politics isn’t usually very interesting though¹³. The more interesting question is, what’s the right level of generalization?

There’s something here about political systems more broadly having some problems they solve, and some new problems they give rise to, until people start being more concerned about the new problems than the old problems and switch systems. I don’t think there’s a way to force term limits on a system level (although it would be interesting to have a constitution with a set expiration date, after which you explicitly have to call for a new constitution in whatever way seems good at the time).

Or to quote Romance of the Three Kingdoms

The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been

The Roman empire survived the centuries by doing this, switching from the roman republic, to the early empire ruled by emperors in Rome, to the late empire fragmented between Byzantium and Ravenna, to the eastern empire going on on its own¹⁴.

Currently, there’s a poorly-defined thing called the neoliberal consensus, and another partially-overlapping poorly-defined thing called the postwar or rules-based international order. Some tenets of this (not a comprehensive list):

• Representative liberal democracy with protection for individual rights is the one true and good way to run a country

• Free trade is broadly good.

• Racism and other forms of discrimination are very bad and should be actively pushed back against.

• Wars of conquest are bad and illegitimate and if one happens anywhere the entire global community should push back against them.

• Inequality in any form is broadly a bad thing.

• State religion is mostly bad, and ethnostates are bad. States that have historically been ethnostates should stop, or at least pretend to.

• Almost any form of sex-based discrimination is bad, and actively fighting for feminism is important.

Most of these statements are consensus seen as clear positives, though I suspect the average person will find one or two they’d at least like to push back on. I will avoid the object-level judgement of which ones (if any) actually should be pushed back on, but as a descriptive prediction, I think the longer these are consensus, the more of the negative side effects we’ll see and the more pushback we eventually see. This does, to be clear, take time.

Also to be very explicit, just because I expect to experience pushback based on real meaningful issues doesn’t mean the new system necessarily does any better. Hitler was a pushback against the post-WW1 European consensus, and that didn’t end up well for Europe at all.

But what if this actually is the end of history?

Consider Singapore.

Singapore has been ruled by the PAP for its entire existence. Until last year, it had only ever been ruled by Lee Kuan Yew or his handpicked successors (the second of which was his son). Nonetheless, the PAP seems weirdly immune to going down any slippery slopes, and the governance seems to only lead to a stable, prosperous, and flexible Singapore. Does this mean there actually is a stable endstate?

Or for that matter, consider the pod shop model of a hedge fund. Hedge funds used to be driven by visionary founders with a specific idea, rise when those ideas worked and then crash or decline when the market changed and those ideas got priced in or reverted. But now all the major hedge funds run as pod shops, where a bunch of small independent pods build signals for the fund to aggregate into a broad mixed strategy. This seems a lot safer and more sustainable - is this model just going to be stable forever, with a thousand years of Citadel dominating the financial world?

There’s a point about why these two have been so unusually stable, and two arguments about how or why they might eventually fail.

For stability: The PAP and pod shop hedge funds share the property of being unideological and flexible. Lee’s governing philosophy was to do what works, regardless of where the idea comes from, and to shift the party to cover a broad centrist coalition at all times. Pod shop hedge funds have long lists of ideas to mix, and hire, defund or fire pods based on who does well, which lets them shift their balance better as times change. So both of these really are examples of unusually stable systems.

The first counterargument is that there might be a meta-axis along which they’re still biased, driving towards problems in the longer term. In Singapore there’s potential long-term issues with the culture becoming complacent and unambitious, or just unhappy¹⁵. Pod shops are exposed to subtle correlations that might cause them all to blow up at once - Citadel and Millennium and Jane Street all hire from roughly the same pool of people, so they end up with pretty similar cultures in their pods and can end up all making the same mistakes even if the pods within each company try to avoid being correlated.

The second argument is out-of-context risk. Maybe the real problems that crash current stable-seeming systems aren’t ones actively caused by the system’s downsides, they’re just the ones the system is blind to or can’t actively solve. Singapore's biggest issue is the one all of east asia (and every rich country except Israel) is suffering from - low fertility and population decline. I doubt that’s caused by the PAP (it’s a global problem), but if the PAP’s approach is fundamentally incapable of solving it, eventually something else will replace it that has to.

This isn’t quite the same dynamic. But it is correlated.

1. Bryne Hobart explored the typical lifecycle of investment ideas in more detail here. This chart just about covers the typical cycle

2. Probably

3. Why doesn’t it apply to legislators? Legislative bodies are composed of large numbers of people who turn over over time, so (assuming normal retirement rates), the body as a group can be more responsive to shifts than any single member.
This can noticeably become a problem if legislative bodies are aging and overly dominated by a few aging long-serving members, though.

4. The great advantage of free-market systems is that, in situations where they work as intended, they turn society back into a coherent intelligent agents by devolving decisions to the level of agents (either as individuals or corporations). See also this example of the Ukrainian military using this to improve drone procurement, which is getting off topic but is kind of neat.

5. This isn’t the main issue here so it’s reduced to a footnote, but people aren’t single-issue voters and coalitions exist. Consider the question of “should we be tougher or less tough on crime”. Say a politician gets elected saying he’ll be tough on crime, toughness goes up and crime goes down, and in response society goes from 60-40 for being tough on crime to being 60-40 against it. those 40% are still a majority of the elected guy’s party, but the other 20% who supported him are also part of his coalition (both in that it influenced them on other issues and in that they influenced it on issues and personnel), and it’s harder for them to just shift their vote based on this one issue. Friction is a thing!

6. Politicians tend to have an ego problem. Except for Ulysses S Grant, who as far as I can tell seems weirdly humble and would probably have never become president in normal circumstances.

7. Because of mean-reversion

8. “Median” Is doing a lot of work here, since plenty of germans were already having a list of new problems back then.

9. There’s an interesting note here that prior to Hitler, Germany wasn’t especially a hotbed of antisemitism - it was on the rise all over europe but not in Germany in particular (Jews were more worried about France). Which goes with the momentum model - the problems caused by nazism weren’t the ones people were worried about before the rise of Hitler, so pushing back against them took a long time to become part of the discourse.

10. I think. Nobody actually knows what peronism is. Oxford Reference describes it as “An ill‐defined Argentinian political ideology”.

11. If you can get them to talk about it, which they’re generally reluctant to do.

12. Trump is intentionally not on this list. He’s not done yet, so this might change, but so far most of the downsides of his policies are directly the goals he declared from the start, not unexpected side effects that grew over time.
The exception to this is the growth of the anti-vax movement (especially on the right), which was genuinely unexpected and not especially pushed by Trump himself.

13. Unless it can get us more trains

14. The rise of Christianity also probably had some effect on the nature of roman institutions, but the details of this are beyond my knowledge.

15. Are singaporeans unhappy? self-reported happiness seems to be about average for high-income countries, which isn’t terrible but you still vaguely feel like a country that functional should be doing better, and I’ve heard worse anecdotes from other sources. The complacency seems real.