Bryan Caplan's Blog, page 86

See You At ISFLC 2017, by Bryan Caplan

Team Caplan is once again attending ISFLC.  I'll be in two official events.

Event #1: UBI Debate with Will Wilkinson, 3:30-4:30 PM on Saturday.

Event #2: Ask Me Anything, 5:00-5:45 on Saturday.

If you want to meet up sometime during the conference, email me.

(2 COMMENTS)

I'll Never Ever Ever Do It Again, by Bryan Caplan

One of my pet theories is that children reveal the true nature of man.  They have the same emotions as adults; they're just terrible at hiding them.  Even when their emotions are monstrous, kids either just blurt out whatever they're thinking, or bend the truth so blatantly that you know exactly what they have in mind.

A classic case: A kid does something bad.  He gets caught.  He wants to avoid punishment.  So what does he say?  "I'll never ever ever do it again."  Kids pass out this extreme promise like candy, even when the compliance cost would be astronomical.  The kid will "Never complain again"?  "Never get mad again"?  "Never ask for anything ever again"?  I've heard all these promises, and more.

What's going on?  The charitable theory is that at the moment they're speaking, the kids are sincere.  Why don't they keep their promises?  Self-control problems; though they want to stay good, it's just too hard in practice.  But the charitable theory conflicts with two ugly facts.

First, kids casually leap to their extreme promises when they sense they're in danger of punishment.  They're not forming a long-run plan to be better kids; they implementing a short-run plan to get off the hook.

Second, once the danger of punishment recedes, the kids don't struggle, then fail, to live up to their promises.  Instead, they forget their promises as casually as they made them.

But don't kids often plead lack of self-control?  Sure: "I just couldn't help myself."  But the real story isn't lack of self-control, but Social Desirability Bias: Kids say stuff that sounds good to avoid negative consequences.  In other words, they're acting just like adults, minus the subtlety.  As I've explained before:

Part of the reason why people who spend a lot of time and money on
socially disapproved behaviors say they "want to change" is that that's
what they're supposed to say.

Think of it this way: A guy loses his wife and kids because he's a
drunk. Suppose he sincerely prefers alcohol to his wife and kids. He
still probably won't admit it, because people
judge a sinner even more harshly if he is unrepentant. The drunk who
says "I was such a fool!" gets some pity; the drunk who says "I like
Jack Daniels better than my wife and kids" gets horrified looks. And
either way, he can keep drinking.

Fortunately, there's a lot more to human beings of all ages than weaseling.  Kids' love and excitement are just as transparent as their pettiness and anger.  Which makes me hopeful about the inner lives of adults as well.

(6 COMMENTS)

The Costs of Diversity: What Will I Learn?, by Bryan Caplan

As you may have heard, I'm collaborating with SMBC's Zach Weinersmith on a non-fiction graphic novel on the philosophy and social science of immigration.  Working title: All Roads Lead to Open Borders.  I'm now writing chapter 4, "Crimes Against Culture," examining the main cultural arguments against immigration. 

Since I take graphic novels very seriously, I'm sticking to my standard methods of quality control.  First and foremost: Read very widely and deeply on each topic immediately before writing.  Sometimes that means a lot of review; other times, I get lost in a completely new literature.  In coming weeks, I'll be carefully exploring a literature I mostly know second-hand: social science on the costs of diversity, especially ethno-linguistic fractionalization.

Since making clear predictions is a good way to mitigate hindsight bias, I want to publicly make a conjecture about what I'll learn.  And here it is: Almost all of the alleged "costs of diversity" can just as easily be interpreted as "costs of intolerance" or "costs of identity politics."

You'll know more when I know more.

(15 COMMENTS)

The Psychiatry Museum vs. the Reasonable Radical, by Bryan Caplan

During my last visit to LA, I visited the Psychiatry: An Industry of Death Museum.  Though I knew the Church of Scientology was heavily involved, I was still favorably predisposed.  I reject the philosophy of mind that underlies modern psychiatry, and I'm very skeptical about the net long-run benefits of psychiatric treatment.  I'm not just an explicit Szaszian; I won the 2005 Szasz Prize.  If I wouldn't appreciate this aggressively-named museum, who would?

Unfortunately, Psychiatry: An Industry of Death was a big disappointment.  I was pleased to see multiple video clips of the great Thomas Szasz.  I was fascinated by the gruesome tools of early psychiatry.  But I can't imagine any normal American finding the museum remotely persuasive.

Why not?  First and foremost, because the museum defends a radical position without admitting that it's radical!  This is a bad strategy even when your audience is a blank slate; if you manage to pique their curiosity, they'll still quickly discover that you were misrepresenting controversy as consensus.   But if your audience is already familiar with the standard story, defending a radical position without admitting it's radical is rhetorically disastrous.  You instantly sound like a brainwashed cultist, too caught up in your own weirdness to even comprehend the standard view.  And that's precisely how Psychiatry: An Industry of Death sounds.  Since almost every American adult takes the disease model of mental illness for granted, you can't credibly start with the flat-out denial of that premise.

Instead, the reasonable radical must take a circuitous path. 

Step 1: Fairly describe the conventional view - and grant that it is the conventional view. 

Step 2: Make many common-sense observations inconsistent with the conventional view. 

Step 3: Show that your radical view explains these anomalous observations.

Step 4: Now, double back and start pointing out deeper flaws in the conventional view.

Step 5: Consider and address counter-arguments.

Step 6: Tirelessly but calmly return to Step 2.



Take my writings on mental illness. 

Step 1: I unambiguously acknowledge that I'm criticizing the standard view that most people take for granted. 

Step 2: I make common-sense observations such as (a) alleged symptoms of mental illness are usually responsive to incentives, (b) delusions and even hallucinations aren't generally considered symptoms of mental illness as long as they're part of an established religion, (c) many strange lifestyles (e.g. extreme mountain climbing) aren't classified as mental illnesses, even when they're more self-destructive than other strange lifestyles (e.g. heroin addiction) that are classified as mental illnesses.

Step 3: Present my alternative view that mental illness largely (though perhaps not exclusively) amounts to extreme, socially stigmatized preferences; in other words, that the label is a moral judgment masquerading as a medical judgment.

Step 4: Cover topics like how psychiatrists "discovered" that homosexuality wasn't really a mental illness.

Step 5: Consider hard cases like visual hallucinations.

Step 6: Keep arguing - and keep listening.

You could object that I fail to live up to my own standards; I'm not the "reasonable radical" I claim to be.  But either way, my larger point holds.  If you want to sell a radical position to normal people, you have to meet them where they stand.  You have to admit that their incredulity is understandable.  And you, the radical, must assume the burden of proof.  Otherwise, you just sound crazy.



(8 COMMENTS)

Final Reply to Dolan on the UBI, For Now, by Bryan Caplan

Here's one last reply to Ed Dolan on the UBI:

...As for more recent evidence, the CBO working paper
that I cited is the most comprehensive literature review I have been
able to find. The CBO review reaches the following conclusions regarding
labor supply elasticities:

Among men and single women, substitution elasticities appear to
have increased and now range from 0.1 to 0.3. Income elasticities still
appear to be smaller in absolute value than substitution elasticities
and remain in the range of -0.1 to zero.

Labor supply elasticities of married women--historically much
higher than the elasticities of men and unmarried women--have fallen
substantially in the last three decades, although they are still higher
than elasticities of men and unmarried women. The substitution
elasticity of married women appears to range from 0.2 to 0.4, and their
income elasticity appears to range from -0.1 to zero.

This is news to me.  I'd have to spend a week or so reading to evaluate this, but thanks for alerting me to this evidence. 

My other big concern is that behavioral economics is highly relevant here.  The disincentives you get after removing all inconvenience and most stigma will probably be larger than we get under the current regime.

[...]

Caplan: Even if you're right, you're ignoring my central point:
The UBI unambiguously hurts incentives for the vast population that's
currently ineligible for most government benefits.

Sorry if I've ignored this point, because it is a sound one. Isaac Schapiro makes
a similar point in a report from the Center for Budget and Policy
Priorities, to which I replied at length in an earlier post. To both you
and Schapiro, I say, yes, the elasticities argument for a UBI is
stronger for households that face high effective marginal tax rates than
for those who face lower EMTRs because they receive no benefits. In the
extreme case, they are exposed to the full income effect and get no
help at all from the substitution effect.

I would make two points here. The first is empirical. I'd like to see
a count of how many poor households or individuals get no benefits. Is
it a "vast" number, or a relatively small one? And what kind of people
are they?

I deliberately said "ineligible for most benefits," not all.  What kind of people do I have in mind? Healthy, childless (or non-custodial) adults, aged 18-64.  Labor force participation for this group is already shockingly low for people without college degrees.  I can easily see it going far lower under a UBI.

[...]

Caplan: Even if we followed your proposal to the letter, the
highest income floor you say we can afford is far lower than almost any
non-libertarian would accept. This isn't surprising, because you waste
so much money on the able-bodied.

First, I agree, there are some non-libertarians who want a UBI high
enough to let everyone live a comfortable middle-class life without
working at all. That is particularly the case with some who write about
the UBI in the context of an imagined automated utopia in which no one
at all has to work. I say, pie in the sky. But let's not get off topic.
This is a debate about why libertarians might take a UBI seriously. I
don't have to worry that my $4,500 UBI is too stingy. I have to make the
case that it is not too high.

My point: If the UBI you propose is lower than most people would accept, then you, too, should be worried that if we get a UBI, it will be fiscally disastrous.  My challenge: Instead of coming up with a bold, new idea that could easily end very badly, why not join me in simply pushing for austerity within the current system?

Second, I think when you write that my version of the UBI "wastes so
much money on the able bodied," you haven't really thought through the
whole program. Again and again, I have emphasized that in order not to
"waste money on the able bodied," a viable UBI I must replace not just
welfare for the poor, but "middle-class welfare" as well--much of which
comes in the form of tax expenditures.

Both the status quo and your proposed reform waste hundreds of billions on the able-bodied.  But given the massive cuts you propose, it's not clear that you're wasting more money on the able-bodied than the status quo does.  My point, again: If we're going to be reformists, why push a bold, new idea that retains the basic flaws of the status quo, instead of just calling for less wasteful spending?

Caplan: But where do you see "excessive" conditions in the U.S. welfare state?

Example: Subjecting welfare recipients to drug tests. Example:
Conditions that restrict interstate mobility, as is often the case with
programs administered at the state or municipal level, and which would
be intensified with some GOP proposals for "block granting" everything.
Example: Provisions that unnecessarily add to the red tape of getting
benefits, as with disability programs (see below).

Each of these has an obvious rationale.

a. Drug tests. If people want taxpayer help, they should be trying to make themselves employable, not getting high. 

b. Residency requirements.  These reduce incentives for welfare tourism, a classic perverse incentive of redistribution.

c. Red tape. If moderate inconvenience deters you from seeking benefits, you probably don't really need them.

Caplan: The American disability system's whole problem is that
it's gradually moved away from the principle I suggest. It used to be
hard to go on disability; now it's easy. We should blame the unintended
consequences not on standards, but lack of standards. Reformist
libertarians should be pushing to restrict benefits to the truly
disabled, not extending them to everyone regardless of need.

I know I have been remiss in not dealing with disability at length,
and I keep promising to do so. Be patient. Meanwhile, just one point:
The real problem, as analyzed by Autor and others, is not that it is too easy to get on disability, but that it is too hard to get off.

A fair point, but it's fully consistent with my claim that the problem is lack of standards.  People with conditions that occasionally get better should have to periodically prove continuing disability.  They should be subject to audits.  There should be credible penalties for fraud.  And so on.  If you were running a voluntary charity to help the disabled, these measures would be common sense.  Involuntary charity should be held to at least as high a standard.

(3 COMMENTS)

Rejoinder on UBI, by Bryan Caplan

Here's my reply to Ed Dolan, point-by-point.  He's in blockquotes, I'm not.

First of all, thank you, Bryan, for the civil, cogent,
and detailed response.

Likewise.

1. You say that I acknowledge elsewhere that the incentives are
theoretically ambiguous,income effect vs.substitution effect and all
that. Fine, but you give the wrong link. The place where I discuss that
issue in detail is in the two-part series that starts here.
Part 1 of that post deals with theory, and shows that although there is
some ambiguity, it requires very special and implausible assumptions
for the income effect to outweigh the substition effect. Part 2 looks at
the empirical literature, and concludes that the overwhelming weight of
evidence suggests that a UBI improves work incentives relative to any
means tested program.

My apologies for neglecting your Part 2.  Well-done; I encourage everyone interested to read it.  But I'm puzzled that you describe the evidence you summarize as "overwhelming."  It seems fairly weak overall to me.  And my understanding of the empirical consensus is that, in general, income effects are at least as large as substitution effects.  I'd put more weight on that standard finding than experiments from decades ago.

Even if you're right, you're ignoring my central point: The UBI unambiguously hurts incentives for the vast population that's currently ineligible for most government benefits.

2. You are very right to zero in on the "done properly" proviso as
critical. I completely agree that tacking a UBI onto the existing system
would not work. I also strenuously object to the line you get
from some conservatives that a UBI should replace welfare for the poor,
but leave all tax and transfer goodies intact for the rent-seeking
middle and upper classes. What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the
gander. Does that make a UBI a hard sell politically? Maybe. I'm a lowly
economist. As the song says, "If the rocket goes up/who cares where it
comes down?/That's not my department/says Werner von Braun."

My point is stronger: Even if we followed your proposal to the letter, the highest income floor you say we can afford is far lower than almost any non-libertarian would accept.  This isn't surprising, because you waste so much money on the able-bodied.

3. Taxpayers have right to attach conditions to public charity. I
don't dispute that. Whether pragmatic considerations might lead them to
avoid excessive or silly conditions is another matter.

I'm against "silly," too.  But where do you see "excessive" conditions in the U.S. welfare state?  Wherever I look, I see only profligacy.

4. "You shouldn't get aid unless you are poor through absolutely no
fault of your own." Yes, that argument has some moral force. However,
pragmatically, it is hard to pull off since it requires a huge welfare
bureaucracy to decide who qualifies, and the very effort to decide has a
Heisenberger-like way of changing the nature of the phenomenon you are
trying to evaluate. Exhibit A is our disability system, which tries to
follow the principle you suggest, but ends up with massive unintended
consequences (UBI vs. disability is subject of a forthcoming post.)

The American disability system's whole problem is that it's gradually moved away from the principle I suggest.  It used to be hard to go on disability; now it's easy.  We should blame the unintended consequences not on standards, but lack of standards.  Reformist libertarians should be pushing to restrict benefits to the truly disabled, not extending them to everyone regardless of need.

(2 COMMENTS)

UBI: Ed Dolan Responds, by Bryan Caplan

Ed Dolan responds to me on the UBI in the comments.  Complete text:

First of all, thank you, Bryan, for the civil, cogent,
and detailed response. I think we might even find common ground--I might
eventually be able to get you to concede that libertarian sympathizers
should "take a UBI seriously" (that is not the same as drinking the UBI
Kool-aid, after all) and in return I will concede that a UBI is not a
magic bullet, but nonetheless is worth serious consideration.

A couple of specifics:

1. You say that I acknowledge elsewhere that the incentives are
theoretically ambiguous,income effect vs.substitution effect and all
that. Fine, but you give the wrong link. The place where I discuss that
issue in detail is in the two-part series that starts here.
Part 1 of that post deals with theory, and shows that although there is
some ambiguity, it requires very special and implausible assumptions
for the income effect to outweigh the substition effect. Part 2 looks at
the empirical literature, and concludes that the overwhelming weight of
evidence suggests that a UBI improves work incentives relative to any
means tested program.

2. You are very right to zero in on the "done properly" proviso as
critical. I completely agree that tacking a UBI onto the existing system
would not work. I also strenuously object to the line you get
from some conservatives that a UBI should replace welfare for the poor,
but leave all tax and transfer goodies intact for the rent-seeking
middle and upper classes. What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the
gander. Does that make a UBI a hard sell politically? Maybe. I'm a lowly
economist. As the song says, "If the rocket goes up/who cares where it
comes down?/That's not my department/says Werner von Braun."

3. Taxpayers have right to attach conditions to public charity. I
don't dispute that. Whether pragmatic considerations might lead them to
avoid excessive or silly conditions is another matter.

4. "You shouldn't get aid unless you are poor through absolutely no
fault of your own." Yes, that argument has some moral force. However,
pragmatically, it is hard to pull off since it requires a huge welfare
bureaucracy to decide who qualifies, and the very effort to decide has a
Heisenberger-like way of changing the nature of the phenomenon you are
trying to evaluate. Exhibit A is our disability system, which tries to
follow the principle you suggest, but ends up with massive unintended
consequences (UBI vs. disability is subject of a forthcoming post.)

Thanks again, anyway. I'd love to have a live debate on this.

(7 COMMENTS)

UBI: Reply to Dolan, by Bryan Caplan

Ed Dolan thoughtfully replies to my Universal Basic Income challenge on the Niskanen blog.  Here's my point-by-point reply.  Dolan's in blockquotes, I'm not.

Here are three kinds
of libertarians who might take a UBI very seriously indeed.

Libertarian pragmatists

...By some calculations,
the government already spends enough on poverty programs to raise all
low-income families to the official poverty level, even though the
poverty rate barely budges from year to year. Wouldn't it be better to
spend that money in a way that helps poor people more effectively?

Sure, holding spending constant.

A UBI would help by ending the way benefit reductions and "welfare cliffs" in current programs undermine work incentives.. A UBI has no benefit reductions. You get it
whether you work or not, so you keep every added dollar you earn (income
and payroll taxes excepted, and these are low for the poor).

But, wait, you might say. Why would I
work at all if you gave me a UBI? That might be a problem if you got
your UBI on top of existing programs, but if it replaced those programs,
work incentives would be strengthened,
not weakened.

This is a serious overstatement. 

First, as Dolan acknowledges elsewhere, the disincentives are theoretically ambiguous.  Yes, the UBI encourages work via the substitution effect - if you get paid more per hour after taxes, work is more attractive.  But it also discourages work via the income effect - if you get more free money, work is less attractive.

Second, as I emphasize in the piece to which Dolan is responding, existing welfare states make it hard for prime-age, healthy, childless citizens to get free money.  For the vast population in this category, a UBI is a clear addition to existing programs, because they're currently ineligible for most existing programs.

Or, you might say, a UBI might be
fine for the poor, but wouldn't it be unaffordable to give it to the
middle class and the rich as well? Yes, if you added it on top of all
the middle-class welfare and tax loopholes for the rich that we have
now. No, if the UBI replaced existing tax preferences and other programs
that we now lavish on middle- and upper-income households. Done properly, a UBI would streamline the entire system of federal taxes and transfers without any aggregate impact on the federal budget.

I urge the friends of UBI to click on the "Done properly" link.  In it, Dolan crunches a lot of numbers to estimate the maximum feasible UBI if (a) taxes stay the same, and (b) we abolish a vast array of government programs.  His answer: $4452 per person per year.  I say this confirms the obvious: A UBI high enough to be politically appealing would be utterly unaffordable because it wastes so much money on the non-poor.

Classical liberals

Not all of those with libertarian
sympathies are anarcho-capitalist purists. Many classical liberals, even
those whom purist libertarians lionize in other contexts, are more open
to the idea of a social safety net as a legitimate function of a limited government.

Indeed.  But even moderate classical liberals have traditionally tempered this concession with elevated concern for scarcity, disincentives, desert, and long-run fiscal stability.  Concern for scarcity makes them ask, "Shouldn't we target anti-poverty resources on the very poor, instead of helping everyone?"  Concern for disincentives makes them ask, "What about the UBI's effect on prime-age, healthy, childless citizens?"  Concern for desert makes them ask, "Shouldn't we target anti-poverty resources on people who genuinely can't help themselves, like children and the severely handicapped?"  Concern for long-run fiscal stability makes them ask, "Shouldn't we get our fiscal house in order before we contemplate massive new spending programs?"  I'm not saying that libertarians should oppose the UBI because it's inconsistent with anarcho-capitalism.  I'm say that libertarians should oppose the UBI because it's even more oblivious to our many well-founded reservations about the welfare state than the status quo.

Lifestyle libertarians

The libertarian sympathies of still others arise from the conviction that all people should be able to live their lives
according to their own values, so long as they don't interfere with the
right of others to do likewise. These lifestyle libertarians are drawn
to a UBI because of its contrast with the nanny state mentality that
characterizes current policies. Why should social programs treat married
couples differently from people living in unconventional communal
arrangements? Why should welfare recipients have to undergo intrusive
drug testing? Why should food stamps let you buy hamburger and feed it to your dog, but not buy dog food?

Simple: Because people on welfare are interfering with taxpayers' right to live their lives according to their own values.  It's entirely appropriate, then, for taxpayers to impose conditions on (a) who gets the money, and (b) what they have to do to get it.  This principle is widely accepted even for voluntary charity: If you want to sleep on my couch and eat my food, you have to follow my rules.  This applies even more clearly for involuntary charity: If you're living off my money without my consent, you have a grave responsibility to spend my money prudently and strive to become self-supporting.

Writing for Reason.com,
Matthew Feeney urges libertarians to stop arguing in principle against
the redistribution of wealth. Instead, he says, "scrap the welfare state
and give people free money." Feeney sees a UBI as an alternative that
"promotes personal responsibility, reduces the humiliations associated
with the current system, and reduces administrative waste in
government."

This neglects a middle path for libertarians: Arguing for limits on the redistribution of wealth.  What kind of limits?  "You shouldn't get money unless you are absolutely poor through no fault of your own" isn't just great place to start.  It also has great intuitive appeal for non-libertarians.

(5 COMMENTS)

A Surprising Supply of Communist Dupes, by Bryan Caplan

When I was first learning economics, I was surprised by how pro-communist many economics textbooks were.  I don't mean, of course, that economics textbook ever said, "Communism is good."  What I mean, rather, is that textbooks were very positive relative to communism's historical record.  Indeed, many seemed deeply ignorant of actual communism, basing their assessment on second-hand information about communists' stated intentions, plus a few anecdotes about inefficiencies.  Many textbook authors were, in a phrase, communist dupes: Non-communists who believe and spread a radically overoptimistic image of communism.

At least that's what my admittedly flawed memory says.

This homeschool year, I'm prepping my sons for the Advanced Placement tests in Microeconomics and Macroeconomics.  Our primary text is Cowen and Tabarrok, which includes accurately horrifying details about life under communism.  But we're also working through all the test prep books.  And while skimming the Princeton Review's Cracking the AP Economics, bad textbook memories came flooding back to me.  It's mostly a normal econ text, but here's what it tells us about communism:

Communism is a system designed to minimize imbalance in wealth via the collective ownership of property.  Legislators from a single political party - the communist party - divide the available wealth for equal advantage among citizens.  The problems with communism include a lack of incentives for extra effort, risk taking, and innovation.  The critical role of the central government in allocating resources and setting production levels makes this system particularly vulnerable to corruption.

Is this passage really so awful?  Yes.  Let's dissect it sentence-by-sentence.

Communism is a system designed to minimize imbalance in wealth via the collective ownership of property. 

Communist regimes generally had low measured inequality, but collective ownership of property was never primarily a means of "minimizing wealth imbalance."  The official communist line was that collective ownership would lead to high economic growth - and ultimately cornucopia.  And in practice, communist regimes made collective ownership an end in itself.  Just look at their repeated farm collectivizations that caused horrifying famines in the short-run, and low agricultural productivity in the long-run.  You wouldn't keep doing this unless you valued collective ownership for its own sake.

Legislators from a single political party - the communist party - divide
the available wealth for equal advantage among citizens. 

What actually happened under communism was rather different.  Communist regimes began with mass murder of their political enemies, businessmen, and their families.  Next, they seized the peasants' land, leading to hellish famines.  In time, they launched major "industrialization" campaigns, but obsessively focused on building up their militaries, not mass consumption.  And no communist regime has ever tried to "divide wealth for equal advantage."  Bloodbaths aside, communist regimes always put Party members' comfort above the very lives of ordinary citizens.

The problems with communism include a lack of incentives for extra effort, risk taking, and innovation. 

Communist regimes did provide poor incentives to produce consumer goods for ordinary citizens.  But they provided solid to excellent incentives in the sectors they really cared about: the military, secret police, border guarding, athletics, space programs, and so on.

The critical role of the central government in allocating resources and
setting production levels makes this system particularly vulnerable to
corruption.

Talk about praising with faint damnation.  Never mind mass murder, famine, pathological militarism, and state-mandated favoritism for Party members.  What's really telling is that communism was "particularly vulnerable to corruption."

A defender of Cracking the AP Economics could protest, "It's talking about the idea of communism, not the practice of Communism."  But re-read the passage.  There's nothing in the idea of communism that makes it "vulnerable to corruption."  This is clearly a complaint about how communism really worked - and it leaves students with the impression that corruption was communism's chief defect.

A more reasonable response would be, "This passage is terrible, but unrepresentative.  I dare you to find five similarly credulous evaluations of communism in other textbooks."  I strongly suspect I can meet this challenge; plenty of textbook authors, past and present, were probably communist dupes.  But for now, I'm too busy to meet this challenge.  Feel free to share evidence - or counter-evidence - in the comments. 

(8 COMMENTS)

How to Sell YIMBY to California and New York, by Bryan Caplan

Housing is strangely expensive in California and New York.  Economists routinely blame their unusually strict regulation of land use and construction.  Political observers, in turn, routinely blame unusually strict regulation on NIMBYism - current residents' "Not In My BackYard" mentality.  Strict regulation of construction is so entrenched that only recently has the opposing view even found a name.  YIMBY - Yes in My BackYard - is finally a thing.

But how on Earth can YIMBY gain political traction - especially in the big, liberal, high-rent states of California and New York?  Publicizing astronomical economic benefits seems unlikely to make converts, especially when leftists can demagogue against deregulation and greedy developers.  To animate liberal Californians and New Yorkers, you probably need to somehow connect the high cost of housing to their hated enemies, the Republicans.  Given Republicans' marginal role in Sacramento and Albany, this seems like a tall order.

But wait.  Remember how Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, but lost the election?  The reason, of course, is that she won by huge margins in states like... California (30 points) and New York (22 points).  For Democrats, these margins are probably counter-productive in the short-run, and clearly counter-productive in the long-run.

In the short-run: If more of the nation's Republicans lived in CA and NY, Clinton might have won big swing states like Wisconsin, Michigan, or Pennsylvania - without endangering her hold on CA or NY.

In the long-run: If more people - of any party! - from solidly Republican states moved to CA and NY, Democrats could count on more electoral votes.

The short-run partisan effect, admittedly, is debatable.  Perhaps the Pennsylvanians most likely to move to New York and Michiganders most likely to move to California are disproportionately Democratic.  The long-run effect, however, is clear.  If CA and NY sharply increased their population, the states would remain solidly Democratic but sharply increase their electoral vote tally.  Since electoral votes are zero-sum - five more for CA and NY means five less for the rest of the country - this is even better for Democrats than it sounds.

Going forward, then, here's how I'd sell YIMBY to California and New York.

1. We need more electoral votes to beat the Republicans.

2. The only way to get those votes is to to grow our population.

3. The only way to do that is to build a ton of new housing.

4. YIMBY!

What about Republican migrants ruining liberal enclaves?  That's when you harp on the Democrats' enormous margins.  In fact, given current patterns, CA and NY Democrats should actively hope for mass Republican migration.  Imagine turning CA into the west-coast version of Florida, drawing in millions of Republican retirees with cheap housing.  Every Republican who moves to CA or NY enhances Democratic power in America.

Couldn't Republican states use exactly the same strategy?  Yes, but far less effectively.  The states with big Republican margins of victory already have pretty cheap housing and pretty light housing regulation.  But sure, there's always room for a little more YIMBY.

Liberal states are vocally resisting Donald Trump, but it's unclear that they're hurting his re-election prospects, much less paving the way for a less Republican future.  YIMBY policies could conceivably tip the scales against Trump even in 2020, and would plausibly devastate Republicans in the long-run.  And since almost all housing regulation is state and local, California and New York can start the great liberal YIMBY conspiracy today.



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