Political philosophy is related to economics (and even less stealthily to older political economy) for a simple reason: the economist cannot recommend a government policy without making a value judgment. At least he must agree that the policy is morally acceptable, that is, within the ethically acceptable functions of government. Some of the great economists of our time have also been great political philosophers. I am especially thinking of Friedrich Hayek, James Buchanan, and Anthony de Jasay. The latter is not as well known as the two others, both Nobel laureates and members of the academic corporation, but I believe he was as important a thinker—albeit a more radically dissenting one. De Jasay defined himself as both a (classical) liberal and an anarchist. On Econlib, I very recently reviewed his 1997 book Against Politics: On Government, Anarchy, and Order. A quote from my review explains why I titled my review “Princess Mathilde and the Immorality of Politics”: Princess Mathilde, a niece of Napoléon Bonaparte, expressed a hedonistic-egoistic view of the state when she defended her late uncle by saying that, “without that man I should be selling oranges on the wharf in Marseilles.” Government, de Jasay argues, is essentially a redistribution mechanism, which some, like Princess Mathilde, use very effectively for their own purposes. Politics helps some to the detriment of others. This, he explains, is as true, or even truer, in a democratic system, where the majority defines what is the “common good” or “public interest.” Glued to the zeitgeist of our time, most people will reject this thesis (I have some objections myself). But it is not possible to rationally reject it without first understanding it. This book is a good way to do this. As a collection of articles, it does not have the unity of de Jasay’s 1985 book The State but, on the other hand, offers a choice between more and less technical discussions. Many of the chapters are a must-read. De Jasay provides interesting critiques of both Buchanan and Hayek. I conclude my review: Yet, Against Politics is a must-read for any political philosopher as well as for any economist interested in the philosophical implications of what he or she is doing. The book may become even more urgent for our descendants to read. ****************************** DALL-E’s rather creative vision of Princess Mathilde (your humble blogger helped with the orange), supposedly after an 1861 portrait by Édouard Dubufe: (0 COMMENTS)

Thomas Sowell frequently emphasizes the importance of thinking beyond the immediate and obvious impact of some economic policy and thinking through the larger implications. He actually wrote an entire book dedicated to this idea – Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One. A similar and useful exercise to evaluate an idea is to really try to work out not what will unfold next, but what that idea, if true, should imply for the present situation. Here are two common examples where this would come in handy. First, some people believe that all the value a business generates for consumers and stockholders is generated by the workers. Meanwhile, the owners of the business don’t create or contribute value – they merely siphon off the value created by the workers, while paying the workers less than the value they generate. If this was true, this has a pretty clear implication – business owners should be incentivized to hire as many workers as possible! After all, by this understanding, workers generate more value than they are paid, which means maximizing the size of your workforce is a surefire way to maximize the money you can make. The very last thing a greedy business owner would want to do is fire his workers – because if workers generate more value than they paid, cutting jobs means the business owner will necessarily lose more than he gains. Yet, we’re often told that cutting jobs is itself motivated by greedy business owners trying to increase their profits – which would be mathematically impossible in a world where all value is created by workers. The idea that greedy business owners pay workers less than the value they generate and the idea that greedy business owners cut jobs to increase their profits contradict each other – yet both ideas seem to fit comfortably into many heads at the same time.  Another common belief is that some particular groups of people are discriminated against when trying to get auto loans or mortgages. Sometimes this is buttressed with references to studies that say, in effect, “We used our data and controlled for these seventeen different confounding variables, and found that all else equal, freckled people with identical financial credentials were less likely to get approved for a mortgage than non-freckled people.” Does this mean that freckled people are being discriminated against? Maybe. Or maybe there are other relevant confounding variables the study fails to take into account. But if you hold the belief that freckled people are being discriminated against, there’s a clear implication for the present situation. We should expect to find that freckled people have unusually low rates of payment delinquency or default. After all, the claim is that freckled people need to be disproportionately financially secure compared to non-freckled people to be approved for equivalent loans, which necessarily means the loans granted to freckled people should be at a disproportionately low risk of delinquency. Meanwhile, if there’s a group that reliably has a disproportionately high risk of delinquency or default, that would imply getting approved for a loan is actually disproportionately easy for that group, all else equal. The idea that there are groups of people who must be disproportionately well-qualified to get a loan but are also at disproportionately high risk of default are also contradictory to each other. Yet these ideas, too, are often held in tandem by people.  What are some other examples you can think of?  (0 COMMENTS)

In recent years, the Republican Party has been drifting toward authoritarian nationalism. The globalists within the party are moving toward retirement, and younger people who are deeply skeptical of the previously dominant neoconservative wing of the party are replacing them. I am also skeptical of neoconservativism, but do not believe that authoritarian nationalism is the answer. Consider the sort of rhetoric that is becoming increasingly widespread: Republican leaders in Congress are torn over what to do with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene after the congresswoman spoke at a weekend event organized by a white nationalist who marveled over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as the crowd erupted in chants of “Putin!”House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy called the congresswoman’s speech on the same stage “unacceptable.” Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said “there’s no place in the Republican Party for white supremacists.” Clearly there is a place within the GOP for white nationalists, although Greene is certainly an extreme case. But much more influential figures use rhetoric that is almost as inflammatory: The House of Representatives has passed legislation aiding three U.S. allies: Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. Senator Mike Lee, the Utah Republican, has called this “the warmonger wishlist pushed through by Speaker Johnson.” I wonder how Senator Lee would have felt about the US providing aid to countries defending themselves against Hitler.To be clear, I have no problem with people arguing against providing aid to Ukraine.  Perhaps it will end up being a waste of money.   But Lee goes too far when he suggests that those helping a small country fight for its survival are somehow “warmongers”.  Putin is the one who launched the invasion. You hear similar views expressed by influential pundits: Tucker Carlson is not a Republican Party official, but he is an influential Trump supporter, and Carlson has often echoed Russian propaganda. At least once, he went so far as to say he hoped Russia would win its war against Ukraine. Last month, Carlson aired a two-hour interview with Putin in which Putin made false claims about Ukraine, Zelensky and Western leaders with little pushback from Carlson. In a separate video recorded inside a Russian grocery store, Carlson suggested life in Russia was better than in the U.S. And the single most influential figure within the GOP is clearly ambivalent about Putin: Trump has also avoided criticizing Putin for the mysterious death this month of his most prominent domestic critic, Aleksei Navalny, and has repeatedly praised Putin as a strong and smart leader. In a town hall last year, Trump refused to say whether he wanted Ukraine or Russia to win the war. All of this has echoes of the “America First” movement in the lead up to the US entry into WWII.  One important difference is that back in 1940, neither major party nominated Charles Lindbergh to run for president. Where did the nationalist wing of the GOP begin to lose its way?  I don’t believe the problem is in their rejection of neoconservatism—American foreign policy has made a number of serious mistakes in attempting to remake the world in our image.  Rather they seem to have misinterpreted the nature of Putin’s regime.  Conservative fans of Putin often point to his opposition to woke forms of liberalism, such as gay rights.  He is seen as someone who defends traditional (religious) values.  But Putin is not merely opposed to left wing forms of liberalism; he rejects all forms of liberalism, including classical liberalism.  Republican fans of Putin don’t seem to understand that he also opposes liberal values such as pluralism, freedom of speech and assembly, and free elections. They are making the classic mistake of assuming that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.   (0 COMMENTS)

A commenter on a recent Pierre Lemieux post wrote: The only shot Trump has (and had) at the Presidency is due to the arcane system used in America to elect Presidents (why not use direct presidential elections like the rest of the world? … it is so much clearer and easy to understand! … even France abandoned electoral colleges in 1962!!) The commenter could be right about the presidency of other countries. I don’t know enough to know. But if he extends it to Prime Ministers, he’s wrong. The Parliamentary system I grew up with, as a Canadian, eh, is one in which the Prime Minister is the one who’s head of the party with a majority of the members of Parliament. (Or, if it’s a coalition government, the Prime Minister is the head of the party that has put together a coalition that contains a majority of Parliament. That’s the case with Justin Trudeau in Canada, whose coalition depends on having NDP members.) Britain, New Zealand, and Australia have similar parliamentary systems. It’s very similar to an electoral vote system. Your party can get fewer votes than the other major party, but if they’re distributed right, you can get a majority of the seats in Parliament or, at least, more seats than the other major party. That actually happened in Canada twice in the last 10 years. In the September 2021 election, if the candidate whose party won the most votes had become Prime Minister, we would be referring to Erin O’Toole as Prime Minister O’Toole. In the October 2019 election, if the candidate whose party won the most votes had become Prime Minister, we would have referred to the Prime Minister in late 2019 as Prime Minister Andrew Scheer. I wrote about this in 2021. One commenter made a very good point. I’ll quote the parts I agree with: A popular vote for President comes with its own problems. 1. You incentivize corruption in your strong holds. For example, Democrats in California don’t need to cheat to win California. But if adding 100k votes could be meaningful generally, then why not? This isn’t dem specific; Republicans in Republican strongholds would face the same incentive. 2. You would need uniform voting rules. Far from obvious that is ideal. If you don’t have uniform voting rules, then in a real sense the popular vote isn’t the popular vote. 3. How do you deal with recounts on a national stage if the vote is close? Note: The pic above is of Parliament Hill in Ottawa. (0 COMMENTS)

Would an AI simulation of your dead loved one be a blessing or an abomination? And if you knew that after your own death, your loved ones would create a simulation of you, how would that knowledge change the way you choose to live today? These are some of the questions psychologist Paul Bloom discusses with EconTalk’s Russ Roberts as we stand on the threshold […] The post Seeking Immortality (with Paul Bloom) appeared first on Econlib.

Five Fiscal Truths by Ryan Bourne, Cato at Liberty, April 18, 2024. Excerpt: The recorded federal deficit from 2023, at $1.7 trillion (or 6.3 percent of gross domestic product, or GDP), was 23 percent higher than in 2022, but even that was pushed artificially downward by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) recording the Supreme Court’s cancellation of Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan as a one‐​off spending cut. The underlying figure was around $2 trillion, or 7.4 percent of GDP. This is easily the largest deficit recorded outside wars or acute emergencies since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Figure 1 shows the CBO’s budget deficit projections for the next 10 years. It estimates, on current policy, that annual deficits will grow to $2.6 trillion per year by 2034. This likely understates the scale of red ink. It assumes that large portions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act will be allowed to simply expire, that no other large spending programs will be introduced after the next presidential election, and that no unexpected shocks or recessions will hit in the interim. The feds are simply borrowing vast amounts, especially given today’s sanguine macroeconomic conditions.   America’s New Regulation Busters by Andy Kessler, Wall Street Journal, April 14, 2024. Excerpt: Most venture capitalists invest and help startups with new strategies and hiring a team. Mr. Churi describes what he does as “trench warfare,” fighting with regulators and incumbents deal by deal. He notes that “we have built houses the same way for 1,000 years—with sticks and bricks.” A startup, ICON, hoped to create homes for the homeless in Texas using a giant 3-D printing machine that deposits layers of concrete. It can “print” a 500-square-foot home in 24 hours. For $4,000. Game changing. Then came the regulators. Mr. Churi says that for homes, international fire safety codes say, “ ‘You’ve got to put the wooden joists like this.’ But there are no wooden joists. The whole thing is inherently fireproof—it’s concrete.” As for regulators, “they’re like, ‘You’ve got to put the wooden joists like that. See it says it right here on the page.’ ” They grappled with fire-code permitting bodies. “New language got passed. It took two years.” There’s so much I LOVE about this article. I remember David Friedman, in his first book, The Machinery of Freedom, quoting H.L. Hunt’s statement “If this country is worth saving, it’s worth saving at a profit.” I don’t literally agree with that statement and I bet David doesn’t either. But I think he quoted it because it’s getting at a good point: if people can make a profit by increasing freedom, they’ll be more likely to increase freedom than if they can’t. IRS’s Most Wanted: The $200,000 Man by the Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal, April 2, 2024. Excerpt: The most recent data suggests the IRS is still focused on the middle class. As of last summer, 63% of new audits targeted taxpayers with income of less than $200,000. Only a small overall share reached the very highest earners, while 80% of audits covered filers earning less than $1 million. Don’t forget to save those charitable-giving receipts. My comment: In 2021, the last year for which the IRS gives the relevant data, those with AGI of $682,577 or more were in the top 1 percent. [See Table 4.1.] So devoting 20% of audits to the less than 1% of taxpayers with income over $1 million does constitute focusing on high-income people. I am NOT defending the IRS. I’m defending numeracy and the importance of not misleading readers.   Crime Rates, Not the Number of Crimes, Are a Better Way to Judge Immigrant Criminality by Alex Nowrasteh, Cato at Liberty, April 17, 2024. Excerpt: Cuccinelli’s statement that crime rates don’t matter, that only the number of crimes matters, says nothing substantive about the potential danger that immigrants pose to Americans. Let me give an example. Under Cuccinelli’s interpretation, a city with 100 murders is twenty times more dangerous than a city with five murders. But if the city with 100 murders has a million residents and the city with five murders has only 100 residents, then the city with fewer murders is far more dangerous to the residents. The city with one million residents and 100 murders has a homicide rate of 10 per 100,000. The city with 100 residents and five murders has a homicide rate of 5,000 per 100,000, which is 500 times as great as the larger city with 20 times the number of murders. This is an extreme example, but an example necessary to explain why crime rates are more important to understand relative to criminality and danger than the number of crimes. Which city would you want to live in? My comment:  Alex makes a good point. There’s a further point. In any large group of people, some are going to be criminals. If the group is big enough (and assuming that we’re not talking about people who are in prison or on trial for crime), the vast majority are not criminal in the usual sense. (I defer to Harvey Silverglate’s point in his book with the highly exaggerated title Three Felonies a Day.) I think Alex could have made the point even more strongly. There are tradeoffs. Whether the population at issue is born in America or born elsewhere, there is a risk of crime. That’s a cost. There are also benefits. We get their labor and their contribution to our culture. It’s not enough to say that the pool of immigrants contains criminals. It also contains very productive people, and their number is a multiple of the number who are criminals. You can’t do a cost/benefit analysis by considering only the costs. As my friend and fellow economist Alan Reynolds once said, that’s single-entry bookkeeping. (0 COMMENTS)

People who distinguish “human costs” from “economic costs” are either making an ideological statement or don’t understand what economic theory usefully calls a cost. Just to quote one example: a Financial Times columnist mentioned, as if it goes without saying, the “economic, military and human costs” of further confrontation with the Iranian rulers (“Israel Has No Good Choices on Iran,” April 16, 2024). In economic theory, a cost is the sacrifice of something scarce (if only one’s time) to pursue a desired outcome or avoid an undesired one. (Note that in both cases, the cost is an opportunity cost: avoiding an undesired outcome implies a more desired alternative; and what is sacrificed for a desired outcome is scarce because it, or the resources to produce it, could be used for some other purpose.) Desired and undesired outcomes only concern human individuals and are evaluated in individual minds. Economic theory is the result of a few centuries of scientific efforts, by some of the most brilliant minds among mankind, to understand cost, benefit, and value in a logically consistent way, and understand what is going on in society. The ideological reason for distinguishing “human costs” from “economic costs” may be virtue signaling. It amounts to saying, “Look, I am concerned with human costs, while my opponents are only concerned with costs on Sirius, nine light-yers from humans”; or  “Here is my badge of honor for membership in the bien-pensant society.” A Martian landing on Earth might think that singling out “human costs” (as if there were anything else than costs to humans) is necessary to distinguish them from animal costs. To lighten the atmosphere, we might think of the cost a bear has to incur for his beer consumption. (See the featured image of this post.) Back to humans, there is no epistemological objection to labeling a cat a dog, and a dog a cat, provided everybody understands which animal is referred to. There is no deep epistemological objection to calling “human costs” only those costs that do not fall on shunned or hated individuals—social pariahs, bad capitalists, or individuals whose pension funds are invested in capitalist enterprises. But such a distinction is a moral one at best, a morally arbitrary one at worst, and is useless for understanding how society (interindividual relations) works. The distinction between human and economic costs echoes subliminal advertising for very questionable ideologies. One objection to my claim is that “economic and human costs” is a just a standard way of speaking that everybody understands. But my point is precisely that “everybody” wrongly understands it as implying that economic costs are not all human costs. And there are ways in which an economically literate newspaper could tweak the standard expression without loss of rhetorical benefit. For, example, one could say “economic costs, including costs of life and limb” or “economic costs, including of course all sorts of human costs.” In the Financial Times quote at the beginning of this post, the “military” is redundant except in such constructions as “economic costs, including of course military costs and costs of life and limb.” My fear is that most writers at the Financial Times, like in other media, do think that there are two sorts of costs: the costs to bad or unpopular people, and human costs. ****************************** The featured image of this post, a collaboration between your humble blogger and DALL-E, shows a bear paying for its beer, suggesting that costs than human costs exist. That’s news for the checkout girl. (0 COMMENTS)

Several decades of neoliberal economic reforms brought about the greatest global reduction in poverty ever achieved, by far. But success brings laziness, and many countries began to take their achievements for granted. Even successful policies fail to eliminate all economic problems, and because neoliberalism was the dominant strategy from the 1980s to the 2000s, pundits began to (wrongly) blame neoliberalism for the remaining economic problems. Reform momentum slowed, and policies moved back in a more statist direction. Nonetheless, when countries get into serious economic difficulty, their policymakers remain aware that neoliberalism is the only regime that is reliably effective. Here’s the FT: They include most prominently Turkey, Argentina, Egypt, Nigeria and Kenya, and they carry some weight. All five of these reforming countries are in the 40 largest emerging economies, so their turn for the better is reinforcing the global economic recovery as well. Battered by high inflation, debt and deficits, their foreign exchange coffers were emptying when global interest rates rose sharply in 2022. As higher borrowing costs drove their debts deeper into distress, they had no choice but to change. Their leaders — who in Argentina, Kenya and Nigeria were newly elected with a mandate for reform — don’t quite say so out loud, but their plans came straight from the pages of the old and much-maligned Washington consensus. Budget discipline and heeding market forces are the only policy choices that work when a nation runs out of money. Statism is a luxury that bankrupt countries cannot afford to engage in. (0 COMMENTS)

Co-blogger Pierre Lemieux writes: Whatever one thinks of the criminal prosecutions and state “civil” suits against Donald Trump (and there are good reasons to question many aspects of them), they represent the powerful state that he has not disavowed, except perhaps in occasional and incoherent baby talk, as long as he was running it. And there is something special about the way he sells this sort of state, provided he runs it, to his followers. America was in terminal decline before him, in four years he made it great again, it’s not great anymore since the election was stolen from him, but he will quickly make it great again if the election is not rigged. There are two ways to disavow a powerful state: with words and with actions. I favor the latter. The former is, literally, just talk. It’s true that Donald Trump didn’t disavow the powerful state with words. And, in many, many ways, he didn’t do it with actions. But he did do it one important way with non-action. Recall that in the 2016 campaign, when he would even mention his opponent Hilary Clinton, some of his most zealous supporters would yell, “Lock her up.” I don’t know if Trump said it back, although I wouldn’t be surprised. But those are words. What did he do to Hilary Clinton after he became President? Nothing. He didn’t appoint a special prosecutor, although he certainly had grounds to do so. What did his 2020 opponent, Joe Biden, do after he became President? Appointed an Attorney General with an ax to grind, who did appoint a special prosecutor to go after Donald Trump. Donald Trump is, in so many ways, a person to whom it’s hard to be sympathetic. But Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, Joe Biden, Merrick Garland, and Juan Merchan, to name five, have made me sympathetic to him. They are going so far beyond what is fair and appropriate, in a way that Donald Trump never did. The pic above is of Judge Juan Merchan. (0 COMMENTS)

Whatever one thinks of the criminal prosecutions and state “civil” suits against Donald Trump (and there are good reasons to question many aspects of them), they represent the powerful state that he has not disavowed, except perhaps in occasional and incoherent baby talk, as long as he was running it. And there is something special about the way he sells this sort of state, provided he runs it, to his followers. America was in terminal decline before him, in four years he made it great again, it’s not great anymore since the election was stolen from him, but he will quickly make it great again if the election is not rigged. Exactly as he sees elections, he will only think the trial jury is fair if it renders the right verdict. He says it with no shame (“Jury for Donald Trump’s Hush-Money Trial Takes Shape: An Oncology Nurse, a Software Engineer, a Teacher,” Wall Street Journal, April 16, 2024): After court, Trump headed up to a Harlem bodega for a campaign event. Asked by reporters about the jurors that have been selected, the Republican nominee said, “I’ll let you know in about two months.” Politicians and rulers are typically ordinary Joes with more dangerous incentives, and I don’t want to propose any other as a Platonic model. But on the probability distribution, there is something special in Mr. Trump’s character and the way he deals with truth and reality, as an article in the current issue of The Economist would suggest (“Truth Social Is a Mind-Bending Win for Donald Trump,” April 18, 2024). Just the article’s artwork (much better than mine with DALL-E) is worth the detour. Three excerpts from the article: Since shares in Donald Trump’s media firm began trading publicly on March 26th, their value has slid by more than half. … The performance of Mr Trump’s stock [in his media firm] so far represents the purest demonstration of his power not just to bend reality, but to convert illusion into reality—and also, maybe, of how Americans are coming to confuse the two. … What Mr Trump has called “truthful hyperbole”, and others call lying, has been central to his success. When he built Trump Tower it had 58 floors, but in numbering them he skipped ten to claim 68 instead. This tactic has occasionally caught up with him, most severely in the $355m penalty imposed on him in February after a New York judge found Mr Trump had lied for years to secure loans and make deals—trebling the size of his penthouse apartment, for example, and valuing his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida based on its potential for residential development, though he had surrendered the rights to develop it as anything but a club. ****************************** By Pierre Lemieux and DALL-E (0 COMMENTS)