Russell Roberts's Blog, page 70

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 257 of F.A. Hayek’s insightful 1957 paper “What is ‘Social’? What Does It Mean?” as this paper appears as chapter nineteen of Essays on Liberalism and the Economy (2022), which is volume 18 (expertly edited by Paul Lewis), of The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek (footnote deleted; link added):

How few there are today who understand Ortega y Gasset’s dictum that “order is not a pressure imposed upon society from without, but an equilibrium which is set up from within.”

DBx: Yes.

Put differently, the market is not disorderly chaos – not a “drunk donkey” as described by Oren Cass.

…..

Pictured above is José Ortega y Gasset.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 97 of former Caltech physics professor and provost – and former Energy Department undersecretary during the Obama administration – Steven Koonin’s excellent 2021 book, Unsettled? What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters (original emphasis):

Today, TV weather presenters have morphed into climate and weather presenters, blaming a “broken climate” for many of the severe weather events that they cover. Indeed, it has become de rigueur for the media, politicians, and even some scientists to implicate human influences as the cause of heat waves, droughts, floods, storms, and whatever else the public fears. It’s a pretty easy sell: the on-the-scene reporting is powerful – and often moving – and our poor memories of past events can make “unprecedented” quite convincing.

But the science tells a different story. Observations extending back over a century indicate that most types of extreme weather events don’t show any significant change – and some such events have actually become less common or severe – even as human influences on the climate grow.

Some Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Alberto Mingardi remembers Walter Grinder, who will be sorely, deeply missed by many, including me. A slice:

Never underestimate the role of the person who puts a good book in your hands. Particularly if he imagines you could expand your views thanks to it and perhaps use it to see the world from perspectives you did not imagine before.

Walter did precisely that to perhaps countless people, some of whom honoured his sagacity by building on his insights, becoming thoughtful academics or serious think tankers.

In the last few years, when he was already seriously debilitated by illness, Walter did that predominantly by e-mail, engaging with a younger generation of libertarian scholars and authors that he perhaps never met in person. I was privileged to be in his e-mail list. Walter was not sending around comments or reviews to show his erudition off: he was writing about works he considered important and eye-opening, to carefully assembled mailing lists of people that he thought could benefit of those. I have myself met him only once, in early 2020 (before Covid). I know he corresponded, and rather intensely, with colleagues whose faces he never knew.

Phil Magness and James Harrigan explain that Henry Clay’s “American System” was no good deal for Americans. Three slices:

Clay maintained that import tariffs could be used to give American manufacturers a leg up over European goods, while also cultivating “infant industries” that he deemed to be in the young nation’s strategic interests. Topping off the package, Clay proposed a spending spree on federally subsidized “internal improvements,” such as roads and canals to facilitate internal commerce, and a strong central bank to facilitate the financing of large government programs through the issuance of sovereign debt. In total, the program amounted to a comprehensive attempt at economic planning around the mistaken belief that trade is a zero-sum game, and countries were locked in a continuous struggle to maximize their industrial outputs by subsidizing themselves and taxing their perceived foreign competitors.

If all of this sounds vaguely familiar, it should. It’s part of the protectionist-tariff playbook we witnessed during the Trump presidency. Or maybe it’s better seen, as William Galston asserts, as representing “an effort to bring some ideological coherence to the impulses Donald Trump represents—nationalism, isolationism, social conservatism, and hostility to immigration.” Indeed, Robert Lighthizer, the former Trump cabinet official who was responsible for international trade policy, recently called for the adoption of a “New American System” based on Clay’s 1824 proposal at a speech in Washington, D.C. Henry Clay’s scheme similarly assumed center stage at the recent National Conservatism Conference in Miami, Florida, when historian Michael Lind depicted him as the true successor to the American founding, by way of Alexander Hamilton. Clay’s ideas have also found an institutional home at the American Compass, a think tank set up by Oren Cass, Mitt Romney’s former economic advisor. It would be difficult to overstate the rapid pace at which Clay’s ideas have surged out of obscurity and into political discussions on the right. Barely two decades ago, discussions of it were almost entirely relegated to the peripheral fringes of American politics. Today, Florida Senator Marco Rubio invokes Clay as a model for constructing a US industrial policy to counter the economic rise of China.

The fundamental problem with this line of reasoning is that it rests on bad economic history, overlaid with the logical fallacy post hoc ergo propter hoc.

…..

Even the basic claims of this story are in error. As economist Douglas Irwin has shown, proponents of the theory that tariffs drove American economic growth “have tended to present statistics that overstate late nineteenth century US growth in comparison to other periods and countries.” After examining the empirical evidence, Irwin concludes, “It is difficult to attribute much of a positive role for the tariff because import tariffs probably raised the price of imported capital goods, thereby discouraging capital accumulation.” He accordingly rules out the theory that trade protection, the main plank of Clay’s platform, caused the United States to become a world economic power.

…..

The legislative progeny of Henry Clay’s doctrines finally came to a catastrophic head in 1930 when Congress enacted the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. The measure passed in a desperate attempt to shield special interests from the 1929 stock market crash, although its legislative origin predated “Black Monday” – October 28, 1929 – by several months. The congressional record shows that Smoot-Hawley took its direct inspiration from Clay’s doctrines. The debate on the bill commenced in the House of Representatives earlier that May. Making the case for the protectionist side, Rep. Hamilton Fish (R-NY) declared that “the Republican Party has just one viewpoint, and that is to protect American labor and American industry, not through a competitive tariff but through a tariff that actually protects.” To reinforce his point, Fish quoted “a brief extract from a speech of Henry Clay in favor of a protective tariff…which has never been improved on and has constituted the Republican tariff doctrine for the past 70 years.” After quoting Clay’s American System speech from 1824, Fish offered his rationale for adopting a renewed protectionist policy in 1929. It reads like a talking point from Oren Cass’s American Compass today….

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Scott Lincicome explains that American workers need, not more government, but more freedom. Two slices:

First, lawmakers [DBx: legislation makers] should reform interventionist policies that lower most Americans’ living standards and discourage them from changing jobs or locales. Simply moving from high-cost, heavily regulated cities such as New York and San Francisco to more affordable ones like Houston and Pittsburgh can mean a better life and more financial stability, especially for low-skilled or less-educated workers. Yet current federal, state and local policies increase Americans’ economic burdens in expensive cities, while mortgage subsidies, welfare rules and employer benefit mandates make it costlier to move or change jobs.

Next, policy makers should implement market-oriented measures on education, remote and independent work, home-based business and employee benefits to maximize worker autonomy. Surveys show that Americans increasingly value flexibility over wages and independence over employment security. Business creation and job switching have both surged. Still, many in Washington think of American workers as helpless, static and in need of government protection from cradle to grave, despite their registered preferences and the documented harms that such policies as European-style labor regulations can inflict on them and the U.S. economy more broadly.

…..

Time and again, we’ve seen that freer markets can best deliver vital goods and services, often in new and once-unimaginable ways. We’ve seen that protected, subsidized and overregulated markets, by contrast, produce higher prices, fewer choices and shortages when problems inevitably arise. And we’ve seen that through their own initiative, American workers can not only survive our disruptive and messy world but eventually thrive—if governments let them.

Inspired by a new paper by economist Michael Strain, my intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, explains that the link between worker productivity and compensation paid to workers isn’t broken.

This new collection of essays – Smithian Morals – by my GMU Econ colleague Dan Klein is excellent.

David Simon recalls his grade-school act of dissent against identity ideology.

Reason‘s Brian Doherty reports on the new research that reveals the senselessness of college covid-vaccine mandates.

And Emma Camp reports on China’s backing away from its deranged pursuit of zero covid. Here’s her conclusion:

For those in countries that have largely left pandemic restrictions behind, it is important to remember just how punishing it can be to live in a nation hellbent on controlling your every move as part of an ultimately unwinnable public health game. Zero-COVID might be on its way out, but we would be wise not to forget it.

Josh Stevenson puts data on hospital-capacity use in perspective.

Lee Fang tweets:

Strict school lockdowns severely increased learning loss, w/low income students losing on average 3 semesters of reading and math skills. Twitter shut down debate on these policies by shadow banning Stanford Professor Jay Bhattacharya, according to internal Twitter docs.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 340 of F.A. Hayek’s October 1973 Wincott Memorial Lecture – titled “Economic Freedom and Representative Government” – as the text of this lecture appears as chapter 24 of Essays on Liberalism and the Economy (2022), which is volume 18 (expertly edited by Paul Lewis), of The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek:

It is a curious consequence of giving the representative assembly unlimited power that it has largely ceased to be the chief determining agent in shaping the law proper, but has left this task more and more to the bureaucracy.

The Libido for the Superficial

(Don Boudreaux)

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My latest column for AIER is inspired by H.L. Mencken’s 1927 essay “The Libido for the Ugly.” A slice:

I thought of Mencken’s essay recently when I heard on NPR a “report” that claimed that among the “contributors” to child poverty is the so-called “gender-pay gap.” Forget that what appears superficially to be a gender-pay gap is, in fact, a gap explained by differences in productivity, which is to say differences in pay are explained not by bigoted discrimination against women, but instead by healthy market forces that bring worker pay into close alignment with worker productivity. Instead, ask: why would such a pay gap contribute to child poverty?

The NPR “report” itself is surprisingly unhelpful at revealing an answer. I suspect that both the NPR reporter and the activist being interviewed both unthinkingly take for granted that because a disproportionately large number of American children living in poverty are in households headed by a single mother, if the “gender-pay gap” were closed, single working moms would earn more income and, thus, fewer children would be in poverty.

But this conclusion is superficial. Of course it’s true that if single working moms were to receive higher real incomes they’d have more resources for their children. Yet this “fact” is mere arithmetic; it tells us nothing interesting about reality. Why do a large number of single moms have meager work skills? Are there institutional barriers that prevent or discourage many women from acquiring more-remunerative work skills? And what are the likely consequences of government trying to close the gender-pay gap by diktat, say, by allowing “underpaid” women to sue employers for higher pay?

These are only some of the many substantive, interesting questions to ask about the poverty of children who live with single working moms. Yet no such questions are asked or answered in the NPR report, which as a result is nothing but superficial babbling. I conclude, therefore, that both the reporter and her interviewee have a strong preference for the superficial. Intelligent people without such a preference would not have babbled on as frivolously as they did.

Once the reality of a libido for the superficial is admitted, many phenomena are better understood.

It’s easy to understand, and excuse, intellectually unengaged people falling for protectionist fables. And there’s certainly no mystery as to why business executives and politicians often endorse protectionist policies: protective tariffs and subsidies swell the wallets and purses of the executives, and enhance the electoral prospects of the politicians. But it’s always baffled me that protectionism is championed by so many learned and intellectually active people who have nothing personally to gain from protectionism.

After all, the argument against protectionism is, as they say, not rocket science. Indeed, it can be grasped by a reasonably alert eighth grader: because the very essence of protectionist policies is to forcibly reduce the supplies of goods and services available in the home country, protectionism reduces the quantity of goods and services available, on average, for each citizen of the home country to consume. Protectionism makes people in the home country poorer than they would be otherwise.

Although the argument against protectionism is simple, some intellectual effort is required to understand the fact that imports do not increase overall unemployment in the home country. A few moments of cogitation are necessary to grasp the reality that imports are not gifts, but instead represent foreigners’ demands for our exports or to invest in our country. Some thought deeper than the surface must be made to understand that when we import more, we either export more, or we witness the capital stock of our country growing larger than otherwise, and both of these outcomes create jobs to offset the jobs that are “destroyed” by imports.

These additional thoughts about the employment consequences of international trade are hardly difficult. I wasn’t exaggerating when I wrote that this line of reasoning can be managed by an eighth grader. But apparently for many people it’s much more enjoyable to reason like a kindergartner. Tracing through the employment consequences of international trade requires digging a bit beneath the surface, a task that anyone with a libido for the superficial will, of course, resist doing. Such a person’s senses are gratified by his or her focusing exclusively on the superficial. The prospect of thinking about trade even a bit more deeply seems to such a person to be distasteful, probably in much the same way that eating a pizza topped with anchovies seems distasteful to someone who dislikes fish.

The task isn’t remotely difficult; it’s easily accomplished. But many people simply don’t wish to accomplish it.

Grasping the reality of a libido for the superficial makes the world much more comprehendible. Having now grasped this reality, I will be less surprised at encountering intelligent people arguing passionately that minimum-wage legislation is an unalloyed boon for poor workers, or that locavorism is good for both the environment and the economy. Likewise, I finally understand why so many advanced-degree-possessing intellectuals defend, and even praise, Nancy MacLean’s simplistic fictional account of the work and influence of my Nobel-laureate colleague, the late James Buchanan. Compared to embracing the truth about Buchanan, embracing instead MacLean’s cartoon version is so much more fun!

The Moral Case for Recycling Only When Directed To Do So by the Market

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a follow-up letter to the student at Oregon State:

Mr. S__:

Thanks for your follow-up e-mail in response to my note on recycling. You write that I

put extreme faith in market prices. The market may fail to realize the true social value of recycling household plastic containers and cardboard. That’s why the moral case for recycling is of huge importance.

You’re correct that the market is never perfect. At any time, the market underprices some goods, services, and activities as it overprices others. Yet nearly all of these errors are profit opportunities. If the market really is underpricing, say, recycled household plastics, then you can earn a profit by paying households enough to entice them to set aside their plastic items for recycling – items that you’ll then collect and profitably transform into new outputs.

Now if you’re like me, you have no talent for earning profits in this way. But earth is home to eight billion other people. If recycling household plastics truly conserves resources – meaning, is profitable – it’s highly unlikely that not one of these billions of creative individuals will detect this fact and profitably act on it.

The larger point is that, while we can never know whether any particular prevailing price is ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect,’ in economies as open as is America’s the best – indeed, the only – concrete information we have about relative resource scarcities is the prevailing pattern of market prices. So while there’s a positive chance that today’s price for recycled household plastics is too low, there’s a far higher chance that this price is correct. It follows that if you spend time and effort recycling your household plastics, the probability that you are thereby wasting rather than conserving valuable resources is high.

This reality implies that what you call “the moral case for recycling” is a mirage. If the moral course of action is not to waste resources, then there’s nothing moral about making people feel guilty if they don’t recycle items for which there is no existing market (save that which might have been created artificially by political diktat).

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

Some Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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My former Mercatus Center colleague Adam Thierer busts prevalent myths about industrial policy. Two slices:

In the race for global tech supremacy, the United States will not beat China by becoming China, as many pundits today effectively argue it will. America should instead re-embrace and extend the innovation culture that made our nation’s information-technology sector a global powerhouse: open markets, skilled workers, vibrant capital markets, and flexible public policies that reward bold entrepreneurial endeavors.

…..

Writing in the American Conservative recently, Wells King of American Compass offers a concise articulation of this new thinking. Channeling President Barack Obama’s infamous 2012 “you didn’t build that” speech, King decries the so-called “founding myth” of the information-technology sector, and claims that “Silicon Valley was the product of aggressive public policy” and enlightened technocratic design. He also rails against the idea that America’s digital-era ethos of “permissionless innovation” had anything to do with the success of the internet, insisting instead that the system’s Cold War–era origin as a government-subsidized network constitutes “a remarkable success of industrial planning.”

This is revisionist history of the highest order. Science writer Matt Ridley calls this sort of thinking “innovation creationism,” or the notion that it basically takes a village to raise an innovator. Supporters of grandiose industrial-policy planning and splashy public-spending programs ignore all the inefficiencies, cost overruns, cronyism, and bad bets on economic-development gambits that were almost doomed to fail from the start. Revisionists such as King prefer instead to cherry-pick a few stories in which government seems to have helped, and then suggest that the economy be reorganized according to a grand new top-down blueprint, specifying which types of innovation will get public support.

While King blithely claims that, “The customer is always right—especially when the customer is the Pentagon,” in a great many cases the military-industrial complex has chosen badly when betting on future technologies. The three-decade, $1.7 trillion F-35 Joint Strike Fighter project managed to incur billions in cost overruns, while in the realm of space, the International Space Station’s price tag ballooned from the $17 billion to $74 billion.

Meanwhile, the internet only blossomed after its commercial opening in the early 1990s. Before that, businesses and the public were not allowed on the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), the predecessor to what would become the internet. The network was a closed, insular club of academics, engineers, and government bureaucrats. A 1982 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) handbook for students warned them that “it is considered illegal to use the ARPAnet for anything which is not in direct support of government business,” and that sending private messages “can offend many people, and it is possible to get MIT in serious trouble with the government agencies which manage the ARPAnet.”

The network only became socially and economically valuable once government got out of the way. Thanks to a series of wise policy decisions in the 1990s, policy-makers essentially firewalled off digital technologies from the old Analog Age planning mindset and corresponding set of agencies and regulations. That, more than anything else, gave entrepreneurs, workers, and investors the incentive to go forth and revolutionize the modern economy.

The revisionists instead prefer to believe that someone high up in government was carefully guiding this decentralized innovation. In the new telling of this story, deregulation had almost nothing to do with it. King also downplays the role venture capitalists played in fueling America’s remarkable digital-technology triumphs, instead insisting that federal spending programs such as the Small Business Innovation & Research (SBIR) program “filled critical funding gaps for early-stage tech firms, investing where even the boldest venture capitalists would not.”

But nothing could be further from the truth.

Joel Mokyr reviews Brad DeLong’s new book, Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century. (HT David Henderson) A slice from Mokyr’s review:

The concept of utopia is a major focus of the book. Somehow, DeLong notes with sadness in his concluding chapter, utopia has eluded us despite the huge increase in material resources; humanity had an opportunity to bring it about and failed. Yet the concept seems less than fully developed. The complex and volatile relationship between the West and the Soviet world in the Khrushchev era is summarized in a typical two-line paragraph: “And so, the world entered a stable, well-shy-of-utopia equilibrium, so you had to squint hard to see it” (p. 331). Clever, but not all that enlightening. The triumph of the West at the end of the cold war, says DeLong, may have proven that the West’s economic system was “better or at least less bad” than communism, but he then adds a warning: “be not proud” —the Western system was not so much “more utopian than less dystopian” (p. 337). Few have ever believed that the economic systems that emerged in the post-1945 mixed free market economies had serious pretension to provide a utopia; but they did provide a reasonable standard of living, access to education, and economic security to a large and growing segment of the population, and in the most successful cases (sadly not including the United States) they all but eliminated poverty. Perhaps the greatest transformation was evident in the (approximate) doubling of life expectancy across much of the world and the spectacular decline in infant and child mortality, which the book barely mentions. That may not have been utopia, but it was pretty good.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, warns of reckless legislation that very well might be enacted by the lame-duck Congress. A slice:

The first looming budget buster is the maintenance of discretionary spending at the exorbitant levels we saw during the pandemic, rather than a return to much lower—as in 20 percent lower—pre-pandemic spending. It might make sense during emergencies for Congress to increase spending. However, after the emergency passes, temporary programs—or temporary expansions of previously existing programs—should be allowed to expire and spending should fall back to where it was. Unfortunately, that’s not what Democrats want, and when it comes to spending more taxpayer money, they always find Republicans willing to join in.

GMU Econ alums Nikolai Wenzel, Hannah Mead Kling, and Julia Norgaard expose “the misguided economics of Pope Francis.”

Arnold Kling reflects on some of the work of the late Jeffrey Friedman.

Here’s the Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board on Beijing’s retreat from its deranged pursuit of zero-covid. A slice:

The easing appears to be substantial given the heavy-handedness of zero-Covid over the past three years. Authorities will no longer be able to cast whole city blocks into lockdown limbo at the first hint of a positive Covid test in the neighborhood, and Chinese citizens finally are free of expensive and intrusive frequent testing as they go about their daily lives or travel domestically.

Yet the new rules merely create a Covid regime equivalent to the regulations that Western countries largely abandoned a year ago. Those who test positive may still be required to self-isolate at home—an improvement on the hospital quarantines they faced—and international travelers remain subject to quarantine requirements when they enter China. Many countries have long since abandoned the rules Beijing now is implementing because even the looser regulations proved economically and socially unworkable.

Meanwhile, China is left with the mechanisms of political and social control the Communist Party developed during the pandemic, such as the use of smartphone apps to monitor and regulate every citizen’s movement. Don’t imagine for a minute the Communist Party will give up those surveillance tools now that Beijing’s propagandists have declared the pandemic emergency over.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 450 of F.A. Hayek’s brilliant April 1982 Journal of Economic Affairs paper, “Two Pages of Fiction,” as this paper is reprinted as chapter 30 of Essays on Liberalism and the Economy (2022), which is volume 18 (expertly edited by Paul Lewis), of The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek:

How the market brings about an adaptation to a multitude of circumstances which in their totality are not known to anyone is precisely the process which the science of economics has to explain.

DBx: Yes – although too few economists these days are trained well-enough to understand this core task of their discipline. Far too many economists today fancy that they’re doing science whenever they process lots of data using their razzling-and-dazzling ‘advanced’ econometric methods.

The unfathomable complexity and vastness of the details of modern economies – each detail that, in almost all cases, is and can be known only to one or handful of individuals (and, hence, cannot be captured by statistical methods) – make literally impossible any attempts to ‘plan’ an economy centrally, or even to centrally ‘plan’ any large part of it. (Impossible, that is, as long as humans are denied god-like access to knowledge.) Unfortunately, this inescapable reality doesn’t prevent people – politically left and right – from fancying that the simple, happy economic outcomes that they can imagine are able to be engineered into existence by the state. Such images are always of outcomes; they never include recognition of the deep unseen, detailed, and churning processes necessary to generate these outcomes in ways that are sustainable.

…..

Pictured above are Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 185 of F.A. Hayek’s April 1938 Contemporary Review essay, “Freedom and the Economic System,” as this essay is reprinted as chapter eight of the 1997 collection, edited by Bruce Caldwell, Socialism and War (footnote deleted):

The decision on the relative importance of conflicting aims is necessarily a decision about the relative merits of different groups and individuals. [Economic] Planning [by government] becomes necessarily a planning in favour of some and against others.

Recycle – When It’s Not Wasteful To Do So

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to a junior at Oregon State University who plans to write a long paper next semester on recycling:

Mr. S__:

Thanks for your e-mail.

You ask where I “stand on recycling.”

My answer is easy: I’m all for recycling when it doesn’t waste resources. Trouble is, most of what is today called “recycling” is wasteful and, thus, I counsel against it. I recycle only when it’s worthwhile to do so.

As I write to you I’m wearing clothing that I’ve worn before; I recycled my jeans and underwear in the recycling machines at my home known as “washers and dryers.” I recycled the shirt and jacket now on my back by bringing them a few days ago, after previous wearings, to a recycling service known as a “dry cleaner.” Likewise, the dishes and silverware in my home are regularly recycled with the help of a machined called “electric dishwasher.”

I live in a home that’s been recycled. Its original owner did not discard it when she moved to another town; instead, she refurbished it a bit and then sold it to me. Likewise, whenever I buy a new car, I recycle my older one by sprucing it up and then selling it to a willing buyer.

The above are examples of recycling that is not wasteful. The cost to me of recycling my clothing by washing them is lower than would be the cost to me of always wearing never-before-worn clothing.

But I don’t recycle the likes of paper, plastic, or cans. My time and labor are scarce resources. If the value of recycled paper, plastic, and cans were high enough to justify my spending my time and labor to recycle these items – as I spend my time and labor to recycle my clothing and cars – the market would price these items in such a way as to compensate me for recycling them. But the market price for recycling such items is virtually zero. This fact assures me that the value of such recycled items is less than is the cost of recycling them – meaning that time and effort spent to recycle such item are worth more than the result. Recycling such items, in short, wastes resources.

If recycling the likes of paper, plastic, or cans gives you gratification, by all means do so. But recognize that the market for those recycled items is signaling to you daily that there is very little value of your recycling to your fellow human beings.

By the way, as John Tierney recently reported, even Greenpeace has finally admitted that recycling of plastic is – to use Tierney’s descriptor from an earlier piece of his on recycling – garbage.

Good luck with your paper, and have a great holiday and 2023.

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