Russell Roberts's Blog, page 78

What’s Happening to Econ Teaching?

(Don Boudreaux)

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A few days ago I encountered a very nice, deeply thoughtful, and highly intelligent student pursuing a PhD in economics from a prestigious university. When I mentioned to this student, in passing, the textbook economic argument that minimum-wage legislation reduces the employment options open to low-skilled workers, this student was mystified. This student told me that he/she had never before heard this argument. After I summarized the argument for this student, he/she expressed skepticism of its validity.

Encountering from young economists skepticism of the Econ 101 argument that minimum-wage legislation helps some workers only by inflicting harm on other workers leaves me disappointed but not surprised. But encountering a PhD econ student who is unaware of the Econ 101 argument is both disappointing and surprising. The quality of both undergraduate and graduate training in economics is getting worse.

This student, of course, has no connection with GMU Econ – where both undergraduate and graduate training continue to be first-rate.

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(Don Boudreaux)

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My GMU Econ colleague Bryan Caplan talks with Princeton mathematician Sergiu Klainerman.

Arnold Kling rightly worries about naive realism . A slice:

My own stance on these issues is that I am not anti-intellectual. I am against what in philosophy is called naive realists. A naive realist believes “I see the world clearly. What I perceive to be true, is true.” In politics, if you are a naive realist, then you think more highly of your opinions on public policy than you should.

Ordinary voters suffer from naive realism. But intellectuals can suffer even worse from naive realism.

I think that the best protection from naive realism is having ideas tested in the market rather than imposed by monopoly government. The market will expose and weed out misconceptions. Government will not.

Williams College Professor of Biology Luana Maroja decries assaults on freedom of inquiry and speech in the academy. Two slices:

We each have our own woke tipping point—the moment you realize that social justice is no longer what we thought it was, but has instead morphed into an ugly authoritarianism. For me that moment came in 2018, during an invited speaker talk, when the religious scholar Reza Aslan stated that “we need to write on a stone what can and cannot be discussed in colleges.” Students gave this a standing ovation. Having been born under dictatorship in Brazil, I was alarmed.

Soon after that, a few colleagues and I attempted to pass the Chicago Statement—what I viewed as a very basic set of principles about the necessity of free speech on campus. My shock continued as students broke into a faculty meeting about the Chicago Statement screaming “free speech harms” and demanding that white male professors “sit down” and “confess to their privilege.”

…..

In psychology and public health, many teachers no longer say male and female, but instead use the convoluted “person with a uterus.” I had a colleague who, during a conference, was criticized for studying female sexual selection in insects because he was a male. Another was discouraged from teaching the important concept of “sexual conflict”—the idea that male and female interests differ and mates will often act selfishly; think of a female praying mantis decapitating the head of the male after mating—because it might “traumatize students.” I was criticized for teaching “kin selection”—the the idea that animals tend to help their relatives. Apparently this was somehow an endorsement of Donald Trump hiring his daughter Ivanka.

GMU Econ PhD candidate Giorgio Castiglia explains that human societies flourish to the extent that they encourage each person to pursue his or her individual goals, whatever these might be, in ways benefit others – and private property institutions provide such encouragement.

Pierre Lemieux explains that human societies flounder to the extent that they encourage anyone to pursue his or her individual goals, whatever these might be, by deceiving others – and political institutions provide such encouragement.

Reason‘s Eric Boehm is correct: “The GOP has hit the dead end of Trump-style personality-cult populism.” A slice:

In fact, if you want to trace the roots of Tuesday’s debacle for the GOP, a good place to start would be the 2020 Republican National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina. That’s where the top officials in GOP politics decided to dispense with the traditional drafting of a platform—the document that outlines the ideals and policy goals for which the party stands—in favor of a statement pledging allegiance to then-President Donald Trump.

It was, in essence, a codification of the evolution that the party had undergone since Trump descended from a Fifth Avenue escalator to declare his candidacy five years earlier. Personality had fully triumphed over policy.

Even before Tuesday, there were clear signals about the limits of that approach. Trump was an unpopular president who’d lost both chambers of Congress during his one term in office. His chaotic response to losing the 2020 presidential election likely cost Republicans control of the Senate for the past two years.

After Tuesday, there can be no more debate about the diminishing returns of that approach. Even in places where Trump’s favored candidates won—like in Ohio, where J.D. Vance was elected senator—they underperformed non-Trump candidates. Elsewhere, personality-first and policy-poor candidates in Trump’s mold, like Arizona’s Senate hopeful Blake Masters, flopped hard.

Michael Senger praises Ron DeSantis’s opposition to covidian tyranny. A slice:

Unlike some leaders such as South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, DeSantis didn’t initially see through the lockdowns. But he was one of the few political leaders to quickly and publicly recognize his error, vowing that Florida “will never do any of these lockdowns again.”

Where DeSantis really stands out, however, is in his wholehearted embrace, from that point forward, of the anti-lockdown movement in its entirety. He’s consulted and hosted roundtable discussions with prominent anti-lockdown activists and scientists including Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Martin Kulldorff, and Dr. Sunetra Gupta, and appointed Dr. Joseph Ladapo, a strong opponent of Covid mandates, as his Surgeon General.

My former Mercatus Center colleague Bob Graboyes is critical of Emily Oster’s call for “pandemic amnesty.” Two slices:

So, for disagreeing (partially) with one particular public health diktat [school closures], Oster was smeared in the basest terms—and this was standard operating procedure with the advocates of public health orthodoxy. There were campaigns of disparagement, vilification, censorship, and personal destruction against those who dared to deviate from the official line. The media, with epidemiology degrees from the University of Wikipedia, portrayed official pronouncements—the things that Oster admits were “totally misguided”—as unquestioned truths. Dissidents, no matter how highly credentialed, were accused of spreading anti-scientific falsehoods.

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In the U.S., Florida was the standout dissenter—rejecting calls to close beaches, schools, and businesses and rejecting mask and vaccine mandates. How did Florida fare? Again, reasonable people can debate that. Florida’s COVID death rate is higher than the national median. But educations, incomes, recreation, and social interactions were not demolished. How did the pandemic affect death rates in total—not just death rates from COVID? Did Floridians fare better because other areas of healthcare were less disrupted than elsewhere? Did Floridians experience less in the way of depression, domestic violence, and suicide because they still had lives? Are Florida children more resistant to respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) than those in lockdown states? Will Floridians enjoy better health in the future because their incomes and educations were not as damaged as elsewhere? My sense is that the benefits from Florida’s light touch well exceeded the costs. But, again, reasonable people can debate that question. But, once again, public discourse was not dominated by reasonable people debating. Governor Ron DeSantis was pilloried as “DeathSantis.”

Eyal Shahar makes a strong case that “[t]he greater good would have been served if normal life continued, undisrupted, throughout the pandemic.” A slice:

Shutting down countries erroneously is no small mistake that can be ignored as if it never happened. The horrifying effects of reckless, panic-triggered actions cannot be erased by changing the agenda to the count of Covid deaths, or to personal Covid stories. Countless lives have been lost and countless livelihoods have been destroyed — in vain. The world-wide death toll would have been lower, not higher, if all countries behaved like Sweden! Record-high inflation and a looming recession would have been avoided. Human rights, achieved over decades of slow progress, would not have been sacrificed in the blink of an eye. Children would not have been deprived of precious years of education.

UnHerd‘s Freddie Sayers tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

China announces change of Covid strategy:

“Identify population base of the elderly, patients with underlying diseases, pregnant women, patients with chronic diseases and other groups, and formulate health and safety protection plans for them.”

Ummm @gbdeclaration 2 years late?

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 229 of the 2021 updated version of Bjorn Lomborg’s 2020 book, False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet:

President Biden and many other politicians emphasize how green policies will lead to more jobs. That would be nice, but economic research consistently shows the net impact to be close to zero. Yes, green spending will predictably increase green jobs. But because subsidies will by paid by higher taxes on the rest of the economy, an approximately equal number of jobs will disappear elsewhere.

DBx: Indeed. Seen and unseen, reality isn’t optional, and all that.

A larger point here is that, given the fact that politicians make these and other false claims incessantly, to ask government – that is, to ask the institution run by politicians – to protect the public from misinformation is akin to asking convicted child molesters to protect school children from sexual abuse.

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Juliette Sellgren talks with Phil Magness about an increasingly rare commodity: academic integrity, and specifically about how a Duke University ‘historian’ (so-called), Nancy MacLean, is doing so much to undermine it.

Progressive authoritarianism is turning Gabrielle Bauer – writing today in the Wall Street Journal – against progressivism that she long embraced. A slice:

As the [U.S. election] night wore on, the source of my unease became unmistakable: I couldn’t bring myself to sign up for today’s prevailing liberal movement, which has taken over, both in my homeland of Canada and in the U.S., the left-leaning parties I aligned with since my youth. It’s a movement I call the “new left.”

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the new left championed policies that jettisoned our most fundamental civil liberties. Whether the measures “slowed the spread” was beside the point: They threatened the foundational principles of liberal democracy and deserved public scrutiny. The new left was in no mood for scrutiny, though. Anyone who questioned its pandemic policies was branded a sociopath and a troglodyte.

Long before Covid, the American Civil Liberties Union understood the hazards of creating an emergency state. “The threat of a new pandemic will never subside,” the ACLU wrote in a 2008 white paper on pandemic preparedness. “If we allow the fear associated with a potential outbreak to justify the suspension of liberties in the name of public health, we risk not only undermining our fundamental rights, but alienating the very communities and individuals that are in need of help and thereby fomenting the spread of disease.”

Thirteen years later, in a remarkable about-face, the ACLU positioned universal vaccine mandates as necessary to civil rights: “By inoculating people from the disease’s worst effects, the vaccines offer the promise of restoring to all of us our most basic liberties.” The message comes straight from the new left’s playbook: Your rights aren’t inalienable, they’re conditional on jumping through government-dictated hoops.

My wariness with the new left goes beyond its Covid policies. For the past decade, I’ve witnessed the movement’s increasingly rigid ideology, which seeks not to understand dissent but to muzzle it. Examples abound. In early 2021, law professor Jason Kilborn was barred from his University of Illinois Chicago campus for citing slurs in an exam question about a race- and sex-discrimination lawsuit—even though he expurgated the offending words with blank space after the initial letters. A few months later, Reuters data scientist Zac Kriegman was fired for questioning whether police shootings fall along racial lines.

Writing at UnHerd, Johan Anderberg argues that “Sweden is Ron DeSantis’s trump card.” A slice:

On the 16th March 2020, Donald Trump entered the White House’s cramped press room. He stood at the podium and looked out over the assembled journalists who were sitting apart in the room, each divided by a couple of chairs.

“I’m glad to see that you’re practising social distancing, that looks very nice,” the President said. With him on the podium stood Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx and others who had advised Trump on the measures he was about to announce: “very talented people,” he called them. “We’ve made the decision to further toughen the guidelines and blunt the infection now,” Trump said.

From that moment, the U.S. government recommended school closures. Citizens were also advised to avoid gatherings of more than 10 people and to wean themselves off pre-pandemic social habits. The strategy was summarised on a sign positioned behind the President: “15 days to slow the spread”.

We now know that those 15 days turned into months, then well over a year. The fear of reopening society deprived children and young adults of in-person education all around the world, perhaps hitting the U.S. most: at its peak, the closures affected at least 55.1 million students in 124,000 public schools across the country.

We also know that the actions taken by the Trump White House were heavily influenced by the infamous report from Imperial College London.

A month and a half after his press conference, Trump doubled down on his lockdown position. In a tweet on April 30, he wrote: “Sweden is paying heavily for its decision not to lock down… The United States made the correct decision!”

In Florida, however, Governor Ron DeSantis took a deeper interest in the Swedish policy of keeping schools open and resisting sweeping lockdowns. Later in the summer, he even hosted a three-hour roundtable with two Stanford scientists, Jay Bhattacharya and Michael Levitt, as well as Swedish epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff. According to official transcripts, the word ‘Sweden’ came up 21 times.

Michael Shellenberger decries the “imperialism of the apocalypse.” A slice:

Celebrities and global leaders say they care about the poor. In 2019, the Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle, Prince Harry’s wife, told a group of African women, “I am here with you, and I am here FOR you… as a woman of color.” Why, then, are they demanding climate action on their backs?

George Will looks back on the now-half-century-old effort to ratify the thankfully still-unratified Equal Rights Amendment. A slice:

Although the ERA (“Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged … on account of sex”) has long been dead as a doornail, it is a useful cadaver. Progressives toiling to resurrect it are expending energy they might otherwise devote to achievable mischief. And they are reminding the nation how aggressively they will traduce constitutional, rule-of-law and democratic norms to achieve their goals, however frivolous.

The ERA rocketed toward ratification: Seven states approved it the first week, 19 within three months, mostly without hearings because it was rightly regarded as a constitutional nullity, a “consciousness-raising” gesture: What would it add to the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of “equal protection of the laws” for all “persons”? But by 1975, the momentum to clutter the Constitution with pointless verbiage stalled. So, the amendment’s supporters began their now 47-year, ever-more-sophistical campaign to rig the ratification process.

Although decades later they would assert — without evidence, of which there is none from the Constitution’s text or history — that ratification deadlines are unconstitutional, they got Congress to extend the deadline. Congress, whose members are sworn to “support and defend” the Constitution, extended it 39 months — by a simple majority vote. This, even though the deadline was a component of the amendment, which had to pass both houses of Congress with two-thirds majorities. And even though 30 of the 35 states that had ratified it by January 1977 had referred to the seven-year deadline in their ratification resolutions.

The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board applauds a U.S. federal-court ruling declaring unconstitutional Biden’s autocratic ‘forgiveness’ of student-loan debts. A slice:

Covid is a national emergency, the Administration claims, so it can waive the obligation to repay federal loans across the board. This is doubtful, Judge [Mark] Pittman writes, noting that Mr. Biden declared only weeks after his loan cancellation announcement that the “pandemic is over.”

Judges have often deferred to administrative agencies’ interpretation of their statutory authorities under the Court’s Chevron precedent. “In recent years, however, the Supreme Court has chipped away at Chevron—giving back ‘the benefit of doubt about the meaning of an ambiguous law to the individual’ instead of the government,” Judge Pittman writes.

He adds: “The most recent example of Chevron’s fall is the crystallization of the long-developing major-questions doctrine in West Virginia. v. EPA (2022).” This doctrine requires a federal agency to point to “clear congressional authorization” when resolving a question of major political and economic import, which the loan write-off clearly is.

Because the Administration could not, Judge Pittman held it violates the separation of powers and vacated it. The Justice Department will no doubt appeal. Meanwhile, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals is considering a challenge by GOP states to the write-off. Let’s hope one or both reach the Supreme Court.

Writing in the Telegraph, Allister Heath notes about Tuesday’s U.S. election what should by now be obvious to everyone who looks at the results. A slice:

Yet the much-hyped Republican “red wave” never materialised, and the party must now face up to the reality that Trump poses an existential threat to its conservative vision for America. Far from providing The Donald with a launchpad, these elections mark the end of the Trump era. He is finished, even if he is too egotistical to admit it, and will take the Republicans down with him if they allow him to.

The party’s greatest defeats were of the Trump-backed candidates, those closest to him in terms of style and rhetoric, and who, abominably, deny the validity of the 2020 election. Mehmet Oz was defeated in Pennsylvania, Tudor Dixon and Kristina Karamo were beaten in Michigan and it is looking grim for Kari Lake and Blake Masters in Arizona. In Georgia, the mainstream Republican was elected governor, but Herschel Walker, the Maga senate candidate, is trailing.

Trump would almost certainly be routed by any semi-competent Democrat, and could even be defeated by Biden, himself an appalling farce of a president who is wreaking untold damage on America and the world. Yet Trump may be too selfish to care: politics for him is a form of self-aggrandisement, a substitute for showbusiness.

“He who seeks revenge digs two graves.“

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 22 of F.A. Hayek’s 1973 essay “Liberalism” as this essay appears as chapter one 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:

The liberal conception of freedom was therefore necessarily one of freedom under a law which limited the freedom of each so as to secure the same freedom for all. It meant not what was sometimes described as the ‘natural freedom’ of an isolated individual, but the freedom possible in society and restricted by such rules as were necessary to protect the freedom of others…. It was a freedom within a domain circumscribed by known rules which made it possible for the individual to avoid being coerced so long as he kept within these limits.

On Moving Beyond Covid

(Don Boudreaux)

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In my latest column for AIER I make a point with which many of you will perhaps disagree – namely, there should be no attempts to impose criminal or civil liability on lockdowners for their calamitous policy decisions.

For wise and helpful feedback on an earlier draft, I thank Doug Allen, Scott Atlas, and Martin Kulldorff. They, of course, are not responsible for any errors of reasoning or judgment that might continue to mar my column. Here’s a slice:

From the start I vigorously opposed COVID lockdowns and protested the hysteria that lures people to tolerate such tyranny. Although I wasn’t the most eloquent of lockdowns’ critics, I – like Scott Atlas, David Henderson, Phil Magness, Toby Young and the team at the Daily Skeptic, and the heroic authors of the great Great Barrington Declaration – never wavered from this opposition. Not for a nanosecond did I as much as toy with the idea that lockdowns might be worthwhile. Every impulse within me, from my marrow to my mind, confidently informed me that lockdowns were destined to unleash Orwellian oppression, the terrible precedential consequences of which will plague (pun intended) humanity for decades.

Given all that we’ve learned since early 2020, I’m sad to say that my – and the relative handful of others’ – opposition to lockdowns and other COVID diktats was fully justified.

My blood still boils at the thought of lockdowns, and my anger at those persons who imposed them is as intense a sensation as I have ever experienced. It continues to be so.

I relate my early, unequivocal, and unending opposition to lockdowns not to applaud myself. I do so, instead, to put into context the case that I’m about to make in opposition to any and all calls for attempts to impose formal liability or sanctions on those individuals who inflicted lockdowns on humanity, or who were prominently positioned to encourage their use. I believe that attempts to hold lockdowners personally accountable by imposing on them formal punishments would create yet another terrible precedent, one that would only compound the troubles that we’re destined to suffer from the precedent that was set in March 2020.

Before explaining my opposition to attempts at imposing formal punishments on lockdowners, I note that my argument isn’t about forgiveness. While a case can be made to forgive lockdowners, that’s not the case that I’ll make here. Forgiveness, being personal, is beyond my capacity to recommend or to oppose. To forgive or not is exclusively your call. My argument here is simply a plea to my fellow anti-lockdowners not to call for, or even to wish for, the imposition of state-imposed sanctions on prominent lockdowners.

Nor do I oppose formal hearings that aim to expose the truth about the COVID-era actions of government officials. While I worry that such hearings will, like COVID policies themselves, be infected with excessive politics and misunderstanding of science, as long as such hearings threaten no formal punishments or sanctions on officials found to have acted wrongly, the likelihood that such hearings will unearth and publicize important truths is high enough to warrant their occurrence.

No Formal Penalties

Perhaps ironically, one reality that leads me to oppose formal efforts to sanction lockdowners for their infliction of harm is a reality that plays a prominent role in my opposition to the lockdowns themselves – namely, political action is inherently untrustworthy. Summoning government today to penalize officials who imposed lockdowns is to call for action by the very same political institution, if not the same flesh-and-blood officials, that imposed the lockdowns. The danger is too great that a government agency or commission empowered to sit in judgment of individuals who were in office during the two years starting in March 2020 will abuse its power. The risk is too high that the pursuit of justice will descend into a hunt for revenge. No such agency or commission will act with the requisite objectivity to make its decisions just. To suppose that any such formal inquiry into personal guilt or liability would be adequately apolitical is as fanciful as supposing that lockdown-happy officials in 2020 were adequately apolitical.

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GMU Econ alum Wayne Crews reports that, under Biden, regulations imposed by the U.S. government increased substantially.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy is no fan of subsidies to farmers (or, for that matter, to anyone or anything else). A slice:

There’s something maddening about the belief that food production would be more abundant and efficient—and the results healthier and less expensive—with even more subsidies for relatively well-off farmers and agribusinesses. Indeed, there is lots of evidence that farm subsidies stifle innovation, make producers less competitive, reduce incentives to boost efficiency and consume less water and fewer pesticides, and shift the focus from farming crops to chasing subsidies. As a result, many farmers end up doing less with more, and people end up paying more for less.

Adding insult to injury, farm subsidies often lead to overproduction, which in theory should reduce the price of farm products and reduce farmers’ profits. That is, if the government did not appease this powerful lobby by buying its excess production. In other words, taxpayers pay for subsidies or loan guarantees, and then for the resulting production surplus, and then for storage.

Gary Galles reminds us of John Adams’s greatness.

I’m eager to read Empowering the New American Worker.

Arnold Kling reviews Michael Gibson’s Paper Belt on Fire.

The market is disciplining Facebook; no need for antitrust.

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Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 17 of the late, great UCLA economists Armen Alchian’s and William R. Allen’s Universal Economics (2018; Jerry L. Jordan, ed.); this volume is an updated version of Alchian’s and Allen’s magnificent and pioneering earlier textbook, University Economics (original emphasis):

Don’t be misled by statements that private property rights put rights of property over rights of people. Private property rights are rights of people over uses of goods they own.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 11 of the 2021 updated version of Bjorn Lomborg’s 2020 book, False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet:

One of the great ironies of climate change activism today is that many of the movement’s most vocal proponents are also horrified by global income inequality. They are blind, however, to the fact that the costs of the policies they demand will be borne disproportionately by the world’s poorest. This is because so much of climate change policy boils down to limiting access to cheap energy.

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Unsurprisingly, George Will’s take on the results of Tuesday’s U.S. elections is as wise as it is eloquent. A slice:

The nation’s immediate predicament is more banal. Republicans cannot win with former president Donald Trump defining them or inflaming their nominating electorates to select preposterous candidates. Democrats cannot win without invoking Trump’s specter to stifle debates about some of their policies (“no cash bail”; “greed” causes inflation) that stroke their base’s erogenous zones.

In this centennial of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” recognize Trump as “dry sterile thunder without rain.” When, however, he is scrubbed from the public square — an entertainer with a stale act is as perishable as vaudeville — this cleansing will be welcomed by an exhausted electorate but will be discomfiting to both parties. Republicans will be forced to articulate an agenda beyond retrospective grievances and prospective pugnacity, and Democrats will be at first speechless, then forced to defend their agenda.

Also unsurprising is the wise take, on the election results, of my intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy. Two slices:

First, I was always hoping for a divided government — an outcome achieved by the GOP takeover of the House. Second, I had misgivings about a Republican Senate majority made of candidates who stand for who-knows-what and others who decisively embrace protectionism on steroids along with other destructive populist policies. Third, I feared a red wave would energize former President Trump and his MAGA followers. Last night’s results should be a wake-up call that it is time to move on from Trump. Of course, it may not turn out this way because the former president, in his megalomania, seems utterly without common sense. This was always going to be a good night for him, according to him, since he had announced that if his candidates had a good night, he should get the credit, and if they didn’t, he shouldn’t be blamed.

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Finally, it seems that the Republican move away from a free-market, limited-government agenda toward an open embrace of big government economic policies has not paid off. Maybe the lesson here is that one overtly statist party is enough.

Also among the wise is the Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board, which identifies as the “Republican party’s biggest loser” Donald Trump. A slice:

Since his unlikely victory in 2016 against the widely disliked Hillary Clinton, Mr. Trump has a perfect record of electoral defeat. The GOP was pounded in the 2018 midterms owing to his low approval rating. Mr. Trump himself lost in 2020. He then sabotaged Georgia’s 2021 runoffs by blaming party leaders for not somehow overturning his defeat. That gave Democrats control of the Senate, letting President Biden pump up inflation with a $1.9 trillion Covid bill, appoint a liberal Supreme Court Justice, and pass a $700 billion climate spending hash.

Now Mr. Trump has botched the 2022 elections, and it could hand Democrats the Senate for two more years. Mr. Trump had policy successes as President, including tax cuts and deregulation, but he has led Republicans into one political fiasco after another.

Continuing with the wise: Boston Globe‘s columnist Jeff Jacoby writes the the biggest winner of Tuesday’s election was incumbents. A slice:

Americans routinely tell each other how fed up they are with their politicians — Gallup reported in June that Congress’s approval rating had dropped to a near-microscopic 16 percent — but they never do anything about it. A lopsided majority of the public is convinced that the country is on the wrong track, most voters have an unfavorable view of both parties on Capitol Hill, and neither the current president nor his predecessor is regarded with respect or affection by most Americans. But it doesn’t matter. Nothing changes. Election after election, roughly 9 out of 10 members of Congress who run for reelection are returned to office. Nearly as high is the reelection rate for governors. Voters ignore the apocalyptic rhetoric that so mesmerizes the chattering classes and let officeholders hang onto power for as long as they like.

Vanishingly few American politicians can bear the thought of giving up the power with which voters cloak them. And voters, to their discredit, are almost never prepared to take it away. If you thought 2022 was going to be the year that would change, you were fooling yourself. For all the huffing and puffing, “democracy” wasn’t on the ballot, incumbents were. As usual, they won.

Despite the electoral victory of the economically ignorant J.D. Vance, Reason‘s Stephanie Slade explains that, on Tuesday in America, “the new right had a bad night.”

The Levy Institute’s Marshall Auerback writes that Ron DeSantis’s resounding victory on Tuesday in Florida reflects the wisdom of DeSantis’s refusal to keep Floridians locked down during covid.

GMU Econ alum James Broughel argues that the key division today among Americans “is between those who trust individuals to run their own lives and those who think technocrats know better.” Three slices:

While I agree with [Tyler] Cowen that the American right has undergone a transformation in recent years, I disagree that classical liberalism does not itself exhibit strong “anti-elite” tendencies. In fact, classical liberalism has a long tradition of being skeptical of intellectuals, who represent a certain class of elites, so much so that to dispense with that skepticism is arguably to abandon classical liberalism altogether. In this sense, the “anti-intellectualism” of the “New Right” is nothing new, it has some undeniably positive characteristics, and it possibly even represents a kind of revival of the older classical liberal tradition.

In fact, my worry about the trajectory of American politics is nearly the opposite of what Cowen seems concerned with. That is, I worry not about anti-elitism or anti-intellectualism on the American right, but rather about how many on both the left and the right put too much faith in the abilities of intellectuals to guide the evolution of human progress. Our tendency to overestimate our own abilities is not benign: As history has shown, it has the potential to lead to disastrous consequences, and these consequences can likely be avoided only by constraining the worst impulses of intellectuals through strong institutions.

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The idea that classical liberals would put considerable faith in “elites” is, to be honest, puzzling. One of the most important articles in the classical liberal canon is “The Intellectuals and Socialism” by F.A. Hayek, which details the allure of socialism to the intellectual class. In his book “The Road to Serfdom,” published a few years later, Hayek expounded on the idea, blaming intellectuals for contributing to the rise of the Nazis in Germany and Communists in the Soviet Union.

Cowen chastises the New Right for castigating elites as “evil and pernicious,” but if any intellectual worldviews are evil and pernicious it is these. Moreover, consider this: The neoconservative foreign policy positions that created the conditions for the Iraq War have now been significantly downgraded in the Republican Party, and we have largely the New Right to thank for this.

Hayek himself would unkindly refer to intellectuals as “second-hand dealers of ideas,” and he argued this class of individuals, which includes “teachers, journalists, and media representatives,” not only tends to be attracted to unsound economic principles but also constitutes a threat to civilization itself. In fact, a pillar of classical liberalism is arguably what one might roughly label “anti-intellectualism”: It is anti-intellectual not in the sense of being against ideas or against scientific progress, but in the sense of recognizing and opposing the more destructive tendencies of the intellectual class.

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The real schism in modern politics is not between classical liberals and the New Right, but rather between those who seek expert management of the economy and those who believe in individual freedom. The technocratic position is extremely attractive, even to right-wing intellectuals, because it claims to be on the side of science and progress. The problem with this philosophy, again, lies in whether the institutions are aligned with achieving those objectives.

Unlike in the market, where unprofitableness drives a company out of business, regulators can keep producing rules, academics can keep authoring reports and journalists can keep writing flattering news columns about socially fashionable policies, all without any consequences to them personally if things don’t go as planned. In the words of the economist Thomas Sowell, “It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”

Jay Bhattacharya tweets:

Why do so many ‘progressive’ faculty at fancy universities object to the idea that people who disagree with them are speaking with each other on campus? I’ve never encountered a more illiberal bunch.

Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson decry the censoring of science during covid. A slice:

A recent publication on censorship and suppression and its tactics and countertactics drew our attention. The study was based on interviews with established scientists “who were censored for their heterodox views on COVID-19”.

Participants reported 12 censorship and suppression tactics used by the medical establishment and the media due to their critical or unorthodox positions on COVID-19. Our analysis is that these fall into three broad categories: Silencing and Censorship, Denigration and Discrediting of an individual and Complaints and Intimidation.

John Tamny writes insightfully about the arrogance and dangerousness of lockdowners. A slice:

As I argue in my 2021 book When Politicians Panicked, historians will marvel at the shocking stupidity of politicians, experts, and unrestrained authoritarians. They really and truly thought that the suffocation of personal and economic freedom was the virus-mitigation answer. And they still haven’t apologized. Our reward will be history, and history will not be kind to the nail-biters. This includes, but is not limited to Xi and his crowd.