Russell Roberts's Blog, page 1529

The Many Voices of Voice

Here's a letter to the Baltimore Sun:

I object to the sentiment conveyed by the title of Andrew Yarrow's op-ed "Vote now or forever hold your peace" (Sept. 8).  There might be good reasons for voting; either prudence or ethics, or both, might suggest it to a citizen as a sound practice.

But because rights are not created by government – because people are indeed "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights" – the non-voter retains his or her right to speak out in defense of those...

Larry White on the 'German Economic Miracle'

My GMU Econ colleague, the great monetary theorist and historian Larry White, has this splendid op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal.  In it, Larry explains that the post-WWII "German economic miracle" resulted from economic liberalization – and that Germany's economy slowed down when that liberalization was reversed. Here's the heart of Larry's essay:

Germany's new Social Democratic Party wanted to continue...

Crumbling Infrastructure?

Here's some evidence that America's transportation infrastructure isn't "crumbling."  (HT Aaron Merrill)

Note to the commentors who accuse me of being a mindless ideologue: because nearly all of what most people think of as "infrastructure" (things such as roads, bridges, harbors) are built and maintained by government, a true mindless libertarian ideologue would have no interest in defending the current state of infrastructure against the now-incessant charge that that infrastructure is...

Whose fault was it?

Paul Krugman and Robin Wells writing in the New York Review of Books (HT: Brad DeLong) criticize Raghuram Rajan for believing that government policy bears a lot of responsibility for the housing crisis:

In the world according to Rajan, a professor of finance at the University of Chicago business school, the roots of the financial crisis lie in rising income inequality in the United States, and the political reaction to that inequality: lawmakers, wanting to curry favor with voters and...

Educational "reform"

Robert Samuelson points out that since 1971, there has been virtually no change in educational scores in reading and math at the national level. Then he gives some very useful facts to remember:

Standard theories don't explain this meager progress. Too few teachers? Not really. From 1970 to 2008, the student population increased 8 percent and the number of teachers 61 percent. The student-teacher ratio has fallen sharply, from 27-to-1 in 1955 to 15-to-1 in 2007. Are teachers paid too little...

Some Links

George Will's wisdom on self-styled 'environmentalists' and the recent evaluation thereof by Walter Russell Mead.

Check out the highlighted passage in this recent Economist article on Canada's health-care system. (HT my friend from Toronto Ed Barr)

EconLog's David Henderson on government intervention into health-care markets.

The Multi-Dimensionality of 'Efficiency'

Here's a letter to the New York Times:

EPA Assistant Administrator Gina McCarthy explains that her agency is designing a new and improved fuel-economy label for (mandated) placement on all new cars sold in the U.S. (Letters, Sept. 7).

Taking Ms. McCarthy's advice, I visited the EPA's website and examined each of the proposed new labels.  I was disappointed to find that a vital piece of information related to fuel economy is missing from both labels – namely, the increased risk of traffic...

War is bad for children, other living things, and the economy

Paul Krugman (HT: John Papola) calls on history to justify more government spending:

From an economic point of view World War II was, above all, a burst of deficit-financed government spending, on a scale that would never have been approved otherwise. Over the course of the war the federal government borrowed an amount equal to roughly twice the value of G.D.P. in 1940 — the equivalent of roughly $30 trillion today.

Had anyone proposed spending even a fraction that much before the war, people...

Succeeding by Failing

Here's a letter to the New York Times:

The presumption is now widely shared that America's infrastructure is "crumbling" (Letters, Sept. 6).  Frankly, while I hardly believe that infrastructure in the U.S. is in ideal shape, I doubt that its condition is as dire as so many people now think it to be.  But let's grant the truth of the presumption.

Apart from supplying national defense, policing, and courts of law, there's no duty that people believe to be more central to the core role of...

Investment and Consumption

Bob Higgs explains the wrongheadedness of focusing on consumption as a driver of the economy.  Here are key passages:

As every student of the business cycle learns early on, the most variable part of aggregate expenditure is private investment. When real gross private domestic investment peaked, in the first quarter of 2006, it was $2,265 billion, or 17.5 percent of GDP. When it hit bottom in the second quarter of 2009, it had fallen by 36 percent to $1,453 billion, or 11.3 percent of GDP...