Russell Roberts's Blog, page 146
May 1, 2022
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 154 of the late Richard Pipes’s excellent 2001 book, Communism: A History:
Communism failed and is bound to fail for at least two reasons: one, that to enforce equality, its principal objective, it is necessary to create a coercive apparatus that demands privileges and thereby negates equality; and two, that ethnic and territorial loyalties, when in conflict with class allegiances, everywhere and at all times overwhelm them, dissolving Communism in nationalism, which is why socialism so easily combines with “Fascism.”
April 30, 2022
Some Non-Covid Links
Johan Norberg, writing at Reason, ably defends the proposition that trade promotes peace. Two slices:
The theory of “peace through commerce” has been voiced by Enlightenment thinkers and classical liberals like Immanuel Kant, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Jeremy Bentham, Richard Cobden, Herbert Spencer, and Frédéric Bastiat, as well as modern peace activists and free traders like Norman Angell and Ludwig von Mises.
They witnessed borderlands where traders made secret peace agreements while their kings called for war. They observed that Jews, Christians, and Muslims negotiated peacefully at the London Stock Exchange and only applied the word infidel to those who went bankrupt. Some of them called the tendency of exchange to civilize people and moderate prejudice doux commerce (gentle commerce). Make money—not war.
These intellectuals proposed that international trade made it possible to get resources through nonaggressive means. Bentham and others focused on how countries’ interests converge as they become economically interdependent, making the destruction of trade partners counterproductive. Some, like Spencer, discussed how growing middle classes and businesses engaged in peaceful, international exchange acted as counterweights to imperialists and arms suppliers.
But none of these great thinkers believed that trade made war “impossible.”
The title of his 1795 essay “Perpetual Peace” might give the impression that Kant thought so, but he makes clear that the title is meant somewhat sarcastically. Rather, he writes that war is the natural state of mankind, and it would take heroic efforts just to reduce its ubiquity. Countries must use the spirit of commerce to undermine man’s normal “state of war,” but they also had to get rid of despots and develop republican institutions.
Angell, the English liberal Labour politician who admired John Stuart Mill and Spencer, had a similar view. Angell has gone down in history as a naive Edwardian writer who incomprehensibly ignored that the forces of death and destruction were amassing outside his window as he wrote. But that’s the wrong interpretation of his work.
On the contrary, the whole starting point of Angell’s book is the imminent risk of a savage war between Great Britain and Germany. His closing chapter does not express the joy in dancing your cares away but the fear that Europe’s leaders would soon be “spilling oceans of blood, wasting mountains of treasure.”
However, it’s that reference to wasted mountains of treasure that summarizes his case. Angell didn’t think that war was impossible, but that it was futile. It’s illogical and uneconomical, even from the invader’s perspective. In a modern, globalized economy, countries do not benefit from wars of conquest anymore. Countries don’t grow richer just because they have more land or a bigger military. In fact, small, peaceful countries like Switzerland and Norway were richer than mighty empires like Britain and Germany, Angell pointed out.
…..
We are in the longest stretch of peace between major powers for 1,800 years, the old archenemies France and Germany almost cozy up too much to one another, and Putin’s invasion is the first attempt to launch a major war of conquest since Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990. In a world where peace used to be just a brief interlude while everybody rearmed, something has gone right in the post–World War II era. If you want the whole story, read Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, but clearly doux commerce has something to do with it.
Proximity and interdependence are not always deterrents, especially if different groups share one pool of resources that they all want the largest share of. Additionally, not all cultures and communities are happily harmonious, and civil wars are often the most vicious. However, the general relationship between trade and peace is a strong one.
By analyzing thousands of country pairs over several decades, many researchers have found that increasing trade between two countries lowers the risk of war between them. They have also found that countries that are more dependent on international trade have fewer conflicts than self-reliant ones, which provides us all with a security interest in other countries’ global integration as well.
Here’s wisdom from David Henderson on student loans.
Eric Boehm warns of America’s growing government indebtedness. A slice:
A larger amount of debt translates into reduced economic growth in the long run, as the cost of interest payments on the debt consumes dollars that could otherwise be put to productive use. As the CBO notes, persistently high levels of debt can also put upward pressure on interest rates and make it more difficult to combat inflation.
President Joe Biden has tried to portray his recent budget plan as fiscally responsible because it envisions a trillion-dollar reduction in the federal budget deficit, which the White House touts as the largest ever. But that’s only possible because the government is emerging from two years in which the deficit hit previously unimaginable highs due to the fiscal and monetary policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. When you put Biden’s budget plan into a larger context, it’s anything but fiscally sound—even with a planned tax on the wealthiest Americans, it projects a $1 trillion deficit this year and higher deficits in the years to come.
Tunku Varadarajan talks with John Cogan and Kevin Warsh. Two slices:
Their paper is optimistic, almost revivalist, in tone, even as it highlights the many faults with American policy. The U.S. economy, it states, “is among the most powerful forces for good in the history of humankind.” The authors credit the “micro-foundations of the economy” for having driven living standards “to heights unimaginable at the nation’s founding.”
Those foundations—Mr. Cogan’s first principles—are private property rights, the rule of law, free and competitive markets, and limited government. The last includes “subsidiarity,” meaning that no central authority should do what can be done by a more local body, and no public institution should do what can be left to private enterprise.
“When you think about what drives America’s GDP,” Mr. Cogan says, “it’s millions of individuals working, investing, saving and making allocative decisions with these microfoundations in place.”
…..
Major crises give public institutions an excuse to arrogate ever more power, Mr. Cogan says: “The 9/11 attacks created a national-security fear. The collapse in 2009 of our financial system created a profound fear that our financial institutions weren’t capable of meeting the stresses of markets.” The pandemic caused Americans to fear for their health. These three very different shocks led to a common result.
“What we know about governments,” Mr. Cogan says, “is that they continue to try to expand their roles in society. And what we find is, very often, emergencies allow government to expand its authority.” Mr. Warsh concurs, adding that with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, “a fourth shock in such a short period of time, there’s the risk that we normalize the extraordinary in the conduct of government policy. Therein lies the problem—that we’ll never go back to the equilibrium in the level of government that predated the 21st century.”
Richard Ebeling busts a prevalent economic myth.
Juliette Sellgren talks with Dartmouth’s Henry Clark about the Enlightenments.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 151 of Thomas Sowell’s 2008 book, Economic Facts and Fallacies (original emphases):
Although one person’s income may be a hundred or a thousand times greater than another’s, it is of course very doubtful that one person is a hundred or a thousand times more intelligent or works a hundred or a thousand times as hard. But, again, input is not the measure of value. Results are. In a multibillion dollar corporation, one person’s business decisions can easily make a difference of millions – or even billions – of dollars, compared to someone else’s decisions.
April 29, 2022
Once Again, Effort Is Productive Only If It Enhances Consumption
Here’s a letter to a new correspondent:
Mr. M__:
Thanks for sharing the link to Luigi Zingales’s and Bethany McLean’s recent podcast with Oren Cass. I’ll listen. But judging from the written summary, I’m pessimistic about its substance. My pessimism is fueled especially by this sentence in the summary: “A successful economy, according to him, should not be measured by consumption but by opportunities for all to be productive with a wide range of aptitudes and interests.”
Oren hits this theme often. Yet it’s a theme that reflects a failure to understand an important reality – namely, people are productive only insofar as they enhance the ability of human beings to consume. Spending time and effort to transform inputs into some output is productive only if that output satisfies more human wants than would be satisfied if that time and effort had been spent otherwise.
If you doubt me, ask how productive you’d be if you spent half your workweek digging holes in your yard and the other half of the workweek refilling those holes. Were you to devote yourself to this task, you’d indeed work – and very hard – but you’d not be productive. You’d be wasteful. You’d be of no use to your fellow human beings (and, unless the enjoyment that you personally derive from repeatedly performing this task is enormous, you’d be of no use even to yourself). And if you coerced your fellow human beings into paying you to perform this task that is of no value to them, you’d become worse than wasteful; you’d become predatorily destructive.
Therefore, to declare that “a successful economy should not be measured by consumption but by opportunities for all to be productive” is nonsense. Opportunities to be productive are necessarily and exclusively opportunities to increase the flow of goods and services available for consumption. Production means producing goods and services for consumption.
Furthermore, the only reliable way to determine if any particular outputs are of use to people is to allow people voluntarily to purchase, or not to purchase, outputs using their own money. It follows that tariffs and other government interventions of the sort that Oren advocates obstruct the market’s ability to identify and signal which activities are truly productive, and to distinguish these activities from those that are wasteful or destructive.
In short, the policies that Oren supports as a means of making American workers more productive will necessarily make these workers less productive. And workers under his scheme will be protected from feeling useless and contemptible – from suffering shame for being socially destructive – only because they are blinded by the same economic misunderstanding that blinds Oren.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 113 of the 2015 Fourth Edition of Dartmouth economist Douglas Irwin’s superb book Free Trade Under Fire:
It is sometimes said that free trade is right in theory but wrong in practice. Actually, the opposite is true. Any clever graduate student in economics can quickly come up with half a dozen reasons why free trade fails as a theoretical proposition. In theory, lots of things can happen. In practice, the economic benefits of trade and the costs of protection are tangible.
DBx: The large blue machine pictured here transforms American-grown grain into automobiles for Americans to drive. Why is the marvelous ability of this machine not more appreciated?
Some Covid Links
Given the rising cost of containing the Omicron variant, this is a risky macroeconomic bet. As of Monday, 45 cities with 373 million people, representing 40% of China’s gross domestic product, were under partial or full lockdown, according to Nomura estimates. More cities and counties are under “static management,” a euphemism for quasi-lockdown.
Yet Mr. Xi’s logic is primarily political, not economic. To abandon the policy would require the Communist Party to countermand an order that it has repeatedly and unequivocally given for more than two years. This not only would be an admission of failure, it would badly delegitimize Mr. Xi’s carefully constructed hero-cult. The Chinese people have become accustomed to life with zero Covid. If Mr. Xi lifts the policy now, he could be seen as personally responsible for every death that follows. To revise the policy would therefore be an unacceptable risk for Mr. Xi ahead of the Party Congress.
…..
The history of the Great Leap Forward illustrates the worst-case scenario of what can happen when a Chinese leader insists that a pest be eliminated at any price. In 1958, Mao launched the “eliminate sparrows campaign,” arguing that birds were stealing grain from farmers’ fields. For every million sparrows killed, Mao promised, there would be food for an additional 60,000 people. More than three million people were mobilized in Peking alone. Schoolchildren banged pots and pans day and night to keep the birds from sleeping. Middle-school girls were organized in rifle regiments and given shooting lessons. Ordinary people climbed trees and strangled chicks in their nests.
Within a year, China’s sparrow population had collapsed. The result was a swarm of locusts that attacked crops. The annual harvest had already been badly damaged by collectivization. Massive statistical errors from the overreporting of harvest data convinced central planners that China actually enjoyed a “super-abundance” of grain, when in fact production was contracting. Tens of millions of Chinese died in the resulting famine.
Also writing about Beijing’s “Lord of Lockdowns” is Wall Street Journal columnist James Freeman. A slice:
More than two years after the communist regime pioneered the practice of shutting down entire cities and sadly exported it to the world, the Chinese people are still subject to such measures at the whim of the government. Eugene Kontorovich and Anastasia Lin recently wrote for the Journal:
When Western nations were confronted with Covid-19, they seemed to believe the Communist Party’s unproven claims about the efficacy of lockdowns. In the end, every other country got some variant of the virus and some variant of China’s official response. The world has learned to live with the former, as politically accountable leaders found they couldn’t maintain draconian restrictions forever. The people of China will be forced to endure the latter indefinitely.
Sometimes the scenes have bordered on the surreal.
One video posted on Monday showed young children arriving at school clad in all-encompassing white hazmat suits of their own. They lumbered through the school gate in unwieldy fashion, like tiny Michelin Men, waving awkwardly at the camera.
This is the face of China’s extraordinary — and barbaric — zero-Covid policy. For many of Shanghai’s residents, the draconian lockdown has lasted more than three weeks. Countless numbers have been confined to their homes, under strict government instruction to isolate even if they don’t have the virus.
Neighbourhoods are divided into three categories based on the risk of transmission. Those in the first category endure the strictest Covid-19 controls and have just been hit with heightened measures. The 2 m-high green fences now block entrances to residential housing in many of these areas.
It appears they are designed to stop those living inside a complex that has a reported Covid case from leaving their homes — whether or not they have the virus. Under China’s unbending controls, anyone over the age of seven who tests positive — even if they are asymptomatic or have a mild infection — must be isolated in centralised quarantine facilities.
Despite evidence that the Omicron variant is less deadly than the original strain, China persists in its leader Xi Jinping’s determination to eradicate the virus completely — a policy that is now devastating its economy, and has even prompted Western stock markets to tumble.
(DBx: Never forget that the lockdowns imposed by Xi’s authoritarian regime are admitted by Neil Ferguson as being the inspiration for western lockdowns. Never forget this fact about the reckless, arrogant, and hypocritical Neil Ferguson.)
This was a complex political and cultural event to which the Democratic response was Pavlovian: Throw money and expect gratitude.
What the Democrats did—first the $2 trillion 2021 Covid relief bill followed by the attempt to pass $4.6 trillion more with Build Back Better—was an exercise in political grandiosity wholly out of sync with a public that had turned inward. Even now, as the pandemic ebbs in an election year, people are preoccupied with either rebuilding their lives or restructuring careers.
Those limitations suggest that the total number of infections may be higher than the CDC’s estimate. The Times reports that “some scientists said they had expected the figures to be even higher, given the contagious variants that have marched through the nation over the past two years.” If the gap between reported cases and total infections is bigger than the CDC’s results suggest, that would imply a lower overall IFR.
In any case, a nationwide IFR estimate for a particular period of time obscures factors that have a big impact on the danger posed by COVID-19. In light of those factors, any single IFR estimate is apt to be misleading. Instead of trying to estimate the one “true” IFR, it makes more sense to recognize that there are many IFRs, contingent on time, location, and demographic variables.
Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson are studying the three legs of the U.K. government’s covid response. A slice:
Misuse of PCR underpinned the whole narrative. Its very high sensitivity and robotic acceptance as a gold standard created the illusion of many more cases (i.e. active infections) than were really present and prompted long quarantines, disrupting society and lives.
Therefore, the first leg of the stool is unstable, made worse by the absolute refusal to link PCR results to the reporting of viral load estimates, which could (coupled with accurate history and thorough epidemiology) give a likelihood of infectivity.
The second leg, attribution of death, was affected by bureaucratic bungling and PCR misuse. We discovered that UK public health bodies had 14 different ways of attributing the role of SARS-CoV-2 to a death. Some totals included deceased who had tested negative. Post-mortem examinations were uncommon, as was independent verification of causes of death. So aggregate attribution of mortality figures was questionable – the second leg started teetering too.
We are currently analyzing the last leg of the stool: hospital capacity. Hospital episodes take time to reconstruct, but they are also underscored by PCR misuse, poor definitions, and confusing messaging. A coherent dataset is unlikely to exist, so we have to piece the puzzle together.
We reported our findings in a series of web reports for a charity and the mainstream media, the only avenues that evade some censorship.
Vinay Prasad continues to write insightfully about covid and covid policies. A slice:
Finally, we continue to be obsessed with masks. Masking kids, preschoolers, and possibly restoring mask mandates in the Fall, if cases rise. This rhetoric belies the deep truth: we know very little about when and if community mask mandates slow the spread.
Moreover, in a country where any adult who wishes to get vaccinated for the last year could get vaccinated, the purpose of mandatory masks, even if they work (like tight fitting n95s), seem pointless. Sars cov 2 will eventually infect nearly everyone on earth, a fact acknowledged by Anthony Fauci. Delaying this inevitability while stoking political anger seems a foolish proposition.
“The ‘pandemic’ is over — let NYC toddlers breathe!”
gatito bueno looks at the math on school closures.
Julia Donaldson worries about what covid lockdowns have done to children. A slice:
Donaldson, 73, has spoken previously of her concern about the effects of lockdowns on children – an issue The Daily Telegraph has also highlighted in its Campaign for Children. “I feel it is criminal to stop people singing, particularly children, and I worry that there would be some children who grow not able to sing,” she said last year. Earlier this year, she argued that masks in schools were “dystopian” and should “not be considered normal”.
Does she feel that children suffered disproportionately from the pandemic restrictions? “I think we’ll have to wait and see,” she says. “There has been some talk about whether [their social skills will be affected] because they have had fewer social interactions, especially because of the masks. But it’s very hard to generalise and I think we just don’t really know yet.”
Donaldson herself was deprived of contact with her nine grandchildren, aged between one and 11, but saw them as often as was possible and permissible, putting on shows with them when such a thing was allowed, and, when it wasn’t, hosting Zoom quizzes for them, from the home near Steyning in West Sussex she shares with her husband Malcolm, a retired consultant paediatrician.
TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.)
Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer report on what Sweden got right about covid. (HT Phil Magness) A slice:
In this intolerant atmosphere, Sweden’s “light touch,” as it is often referred to by scientists and policy makers, was deemed a disaster. “Sweden Has Become the World’s Cautionary Tale,” carped The New York Times. Reuters reported, “Sweden’s COVID Infections Among Highest in Europe, With ‘No Sign Of Decrease.’” Medical journals published equally damning reports of Sweden’s folly.
But Sweden seems to have been right. Countries that took the severe route to stem the virus might want to look at the evidence found in a little-known 2021 report by the Kaiser Family Foundation. The researchers found that among 11 wealthy peer nations, Sweden was the only one with no excess mortality among individuals under 75. None, zero, zip.
That’s not to say that Sweden had no deaths from COVID. It did. But it appears to have avoided the collateral damage that lockdowns wreaked in other countries. The Kaiser study wisely looked at excess mortality, rather than the more commonly used metric of COVID deaths. This means that researchers examined mortality rates from all causes of death in the 11 countries before the pandemic and compared those rates to mortality from all causes during the pandemic. If a country averaged 1 million deaths per year before the pandemic but had 1.3 million deaths in 2020, excess mortality would be 30 percent.
There are several reasons to use excess mortality rather than COVID deaths to compare countries. The rate of COVID deaths ignores regional and national differences. For example, the desperately poor Central African Republic has a very low rate of fatalities from COVID. But that’s because it has an average life expectancy of 53. People in their 70s are 3,000-fold more susceptible than children to dying of COVID, and even people in their 20s to 50s are far less likely to die than the elderly. So, it’s no surprise that the Central African Republic has a low COVID mortality rate despite its poverty and poor medical care. The U.S., by contrast, with its large elderly population (and general ill-health compared to most wealthy countries), was fertile soil for the coronavirus.
Excess mortality is the smart, objective standard. It includes all deaths, whether from COVID, the indirect effects of COVID (such as people avoiding the hospital during a heart attack), or the side effects of lockdowns. And it gets rid of the problem of underlying differences among countries, allowing a direct comparison of their performance during COVID.
Using data from the Human Mortality Database, a joint project of the CDC and the Max Planck Institute in Germany, Kaiser compared mortality during the five years before the pandemic and mortality in 2020, the first year of the pandemic. Sweden had zero excess mortality in 2020 among people younger than 75. In other words, COVID wasn’t all that dangerous to young people.
Even among the elderly, Sweden’s excess mortality in 2020 was lower than that in the U.S., Belgium, Switzerland, the U.K., the Netherlands, Austria, and France. Canada, Germany, and Australia had lower rates than Sweden among people over the age of 70—probably because Sweden failed to limit nursing home visits at the very beginning of the pandemic.
“Union College Sophomore Gets Expelled for Refusing Booster Shot, Despite Her Doctor Saying Her Getting Booster Is ‘Ill-Advised’.” (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 297 of my colleague Peter J. Boettke’s 2021 paper “Liberalism, Socialism, and Our Future,” as this essay appears in Pete’s 2021 book, The Struggle for a Better World:
[image error]The main lesson of economics is the mutual gains from trade and the peaceful social cooperation under the division of labor that a modern commercial society engenders.
DBx: Yes. Or rather, this lesson should be the main one taught by economics. Unfortunately, outside of George Mason University and a handful of other schools, far too many economists today do not really understand the process by which prosperity is created by peaceful social cooperation and the division of labor. For many economists, prosperity simply happens; its creation is treated as being close to automatic. (For an extreme but popular example, see economist Thomas Piketty’s economics-free 2014 book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century.) Too many economists today, when not solving pointless puzzles, gather and gaze at highly processed data with unknowing eyes – eyes so unknowing that they don’t know that they don’t know.
This data processing and gazing, unguided by any real understanding of market processes, then typically prompts these economists to fancy themselves to be social engineers. Tweak this, re-engineer that, alter this other thing over here and attach a new device over there – schemes abound for crafting a more-perfect economic machine. Yet all of this scheming is done in ignorance of the nature of the inconceivably complex processes that are mistaken to be a machine simple enough to be mastered by the human mind.
April 28, 2022
Some Non-Covid Links
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recently signed legislation that strips Walt Disney World of its independent, special-district status after the company objected to the state’s new law regarding discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity in classrooms. While the motive behind this action is problematic, some of its supporters argue that there is nothing to fret about, since it was time to revoke a cronyist privilege granted to Disney 50 years ago anyway. But if this is really a fight against cronyism, the legislation goes about it the wrong way.
Cronyism is the unhealthy alliance of business and government. It takes the form of government officials at the state, local, and federal levels granting special privileges to particular companies or industries. These privileges can include special tax breaks, government loans, direct subsidies, or—as in Florida—so-called “special districts.” I spend a great deal of my work hours researching the harm cronyism causes to citizens. That’s because, as my colleague Matthew Mitchell wrote a decade ago, “Whatever its guise, government-granted privilege [to private businesses] is an extraordinarily destructive force. It misdirects resources, impedes genuine economic progress, breeds corruption, and undermines the legitimacy of both the government and the private sector.”
If imports were a drag on growth, we should expect to see some connection in the real world between the change in imports and economic growth. If anything, the correlation seems to run in the opposite direction from what the media imply. In recent decades, stronger economic growth has tended to correlate with a rising U.S. trade deficit (as Griswold found in this Cato study.) In the first three years of the Trump administration (2017–19), as GDP growth reached a respectable annual average of 2.5 percent and a total of 6 million net new jobs were added, the overall goods deficit increased by $115 billion, or 15.7 percent. In 2021, the first year of the Biden administration, the U.S. economy expanded 5.6 percent as it shook of the Covid shutdown while the trade deficit grew 18.4 percent from the year before.
Finally, the “trade deficit as a drag on growth” narrative falls even under its own Keynesian logic. The same news stories that repeat the mantra that imports dampen growth routinely note that what drives the rise in imports is rising domestic demand. For example, Axios reported this morning, “Trade subtracted 3.2 percentage points from overall GDP growth, as exports fell sharply and imports soared. This reflects a U.S. economy with significantly stronger domestic demand than the rest of the world” (emphasis ours).
Inspired by the late, great Leonard Read, here’s Barry Brownstein. A slice:
This notion that it is always someone else rather than one’s self who is in need of improvement is based on several false assumptions. It denies any extension of understanding to the one person on earth on whom one has the greatest influence— himself. It stamps the speaker as thinking of himself as a finished intellectual product, as all-wise. And, finally, it ignores the idea of truth as an object of infinite pursuit. This notion asserts a type of egotism in the presence of which learning cannot take place. It is death to the spirit of inquiry.
Today’s “Notable & Quotable” in the Wall Street Journal is from David Henderson:
Economist David Henderson, a fellow at the Hoover Institution, writing at EconLib.org, April 25:
The 2022 Economic Report of the President is finally out. . . . Here’s an interesting passage . . .:
“Official estimates for the year 2021 will not be released until late 2022, but in 2020, the poverty rate fell to 9.6 percent from 11.8 percent in 2019, according to the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which accounts for the resources that many low-income households receive from the government (Fox and Burns 2021). Declines in poverty were even larger for particular racial and ethnic groups, with the supplemental poverty rate among Black and Hispanic Americans falling by 3.7 and 4.9 percentage points, respectively.” . . .
The paragraph quoted above is accurate. But notice what they don’t say. They don’t talk about the huge drop in black and Hispanic poverty from 2017 on. I think part of the reason is the 2017 tax cut. But whether you agree with me or not about the cause, the point is that they focus only on the part that they can arguably attribute, at least in part, to the huge federal subsidies in 2020.
I’ve met hundreds of such students. Here’s what they typically tell me.
As you’d expect, they’re GMU fans because we say so much that differs from what their official professors tell them.One major difference is ideological: GMU professors are a lot more libertarian than their official professors.Another major difference is sheer iconoclasm. Official professors respect – or at least fear – current political orthodoxy. GMU professors don’t agree with every thoughtcrime (who does?!), but we’re happy to at least entertain almost any forbidden idea.Then there’s breadth: GMU professors care about much bigger and more interdisciplinary questions than their official professors.Finally, students detect big gaps in curiosity and enthusiasm. Most official professors, they aver, are boring and narrow. When a student asks them questions, their goal is to swiftly end the conversation and get back to work. GMU economists, in contrast, love, savor, relish, adore, and hunger for intellectual conversation.That’s what our student fans say. What, though, do the official professors say when students ask them about GMU econ?
To be blunt, the official professors are not kind. True, most are aware that we’re alive. That’s a big implicit compliment; after all, as Hollywood knows, the only thing worse than being talked about is… not being talked about. But what the official professors explicitly say is decidedly uncomplimentary:
“Ideologues.”
“Just ideologues.”
“Just a bunch of ideologues.”
“They don’t do real research.”
Also:
“Ideologues.”
Are the official professors correct? Let’s start with the “ideologue” charge.
If an “ideologue” is anyone who accepts some Big Ideas, then GMU economists are clearly ideologues. But then again, virtually every professor accepts some Big Ideas. You might think that being a moderate Democrat isn’t a Big Idea, but of course it is. Almost everyone throughout human history would have strongly disagreed with most of what moderate Democrats believe. To be a moderate Democrat is to say that you’re right, and the rest of humanity is wrong. Possibly true, but definitely big.
If an “ideologue” is anyone who accepts some Big Ideas dogmatically, then the label seems unfair. GMU economists are very familiar with other views, we value conversation and debate with people who disagree with us, and we produce what at least appear to be actual arguments. No one’s perfect, but we at least try to start with broadly acceptable premises and see where they lead. Not to be unfriendly, but a large share of non-GMU-econ academics are dogmatic slumberers by comparison.
Speaking of Liberal Values
For the past three centuries, in places infused with Enlightenment values, the norm for the discovery and dissemination of knowledge has been persuasion rather than compulsion. Nicolaus has a new idea about the circulation of planets. William has a new idea about the circulation of blood. Adam has a new idea about the circulation of goods and services in commerce. How are we to know if these ideas have merit? Simple: We allow these ideas to be articulated without obstruction, and we allow other people – any other people – to join in the discussion. If Adam wants me to accept his idea, he’s not allowed to club me over the head or seize my property if I reject his idea. He must talk to me (or write; same thing really). He must persuade me.
There’s something else Adam isn’t allowed to do. He’s not allowed to stop Karl, or Maynard, or Donald, or Bernie, or Alexandria, or anyone else from talking to me. Adam, being human, would perhaps prefer to be able to muzzle the mouths or clog the keyboards of those who express ideas that contradict his own. That way it would be so much easier for him to persuade me that his ideas really are the best. But an invisible and impartial spectator perched on Adam’s shoulder informs him of a reality that, ironically, comes as close as any in this vale to being a Truth: No idea is so surely complete or correct that it might not be improved, or even discredited, by encountering different and better ideas.
Here’s something else Adam, if he is wise, knows: If his ideas are worthy, he doesn’t need to force them on other people with coercion. Their worthiness gives these ideas a pretty good advantage naturally. Adam, being wise, gives a knowing thumbs-up to H.L. Mencken’s terse observation that “The kind of man who demands that government enforce his ideas is always the kind whose ideas are idiotic.”
Of course, because we humans are imperfect, it’s possible that Adam’s excellent ideas will nevertheless be widely rejected in favor of ideas that Adam and his many wise and well-read friends fervently believe to be inferior. But in a society that rejects coercion as a means of promoting ideas, wise Adam knows also that, over time, if his ideas really are the best available, they will at least always enjoy the prospect of one day being accepted.
There’s yet another piece of knowledge – one especially crucial – known to wise Adam, which is this: If he were today to resort to coercion to press his ideas, he’d thereby pave the path for Karl or Alexandria, when they gain positions of power, to use coercion to impose ‘acceptance’ of their ideas. And not only does Adam wisely fear that particular outcome, he understands that he would then have no standing to object to Karl’s or Alexandria’s resort to coercion as the means of achieving ‘acceptance’ of their ideas.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 162 of Will Durant’s 1944 volume, Caesar and Christ:
The constitution of man always rewrites the constitution of states.
DBx: Hayekian that I am, I believe that – for better or worse – this reality is inescapable. Thus arises the enormous importance of doing all we can to ensure that the constitution of man and woman be as disposed as is humanly possible to liberalism. This task is not easy. It is also not optional for those who cherish liberal civilization.
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