Washington’s new bill will “increase housing unit inventory by removing arbitrary limits on housing options.” In plain English, what that means is that groups of people who aren’t family will be allowed to live together. Washington is one of many states with old laws on the books prohibiting such living arrangements — a vestige of zoning regulations aimed at prioritizing the nuclear family and limiting the availability of affordable housing through boarding houses. In their zeal, however, such laws put an end to a useful urban housing model: affordable dwellings shared by strangers, a form that’s perfect for today’s housing-stressed cities. This is from Diana Lind, “A Centuries Old Idea That’s Making Cities More Affordable Today,” June 11, 2021. HT2 Tyler Cowen. The Washington referred to above is Washington state. Later she writes: Boarding houses and SROs [single room occupancy] used to be very common in the United States. In the 1800s an estimated one-third to one-half of urban residents either hosted boarders or were boarders themselves. This style of housing accommodated a quadrupling of the American population over the 19th century, and enabled people to live affordably enough in walking distance of daily needs and amenities. But throughout the second half of the 20th century, these housing types gradually disappeared as a result of zoning that prioritized single-family housing, and explicitly made these housing types illegal. While racist practices like redlining prevented people of color from buying homes in white neighborhoods, policies banning group living were likewise intended to keep white, single-family neighborhoods out of reach of certain groups: people of color, lower-income extended families, groups of friends, or single laborers. It didn’t help that the only SROs or boarding houses that continued to operate were often in disinvested urban areas. I had experience with both SROs and boarding houses in the early 1970s, both quite positive. In late May 1970, after graduating from the University of Winnipeg, I hitchhiked from Winnipeg across Canada to Vancouver and down to Los Angeles, stopping along the way to visit existing friends and new friends. (One of my friends called this my “libertarian pilgrimage.”) The new friends tended to be libertarians I had heard about or read. In  San Francisco I didn’t know anyone and I thought that asking one libertarian woman I met if I could sleep on her couch was too forward. So I found a divey San Francisco hotel and paid $5 or $6 a night for my own room without a bathroom: the bathroom was a shared facility down the hall. I did the same in Los Angeles. In the summer of 1973, after I had spent one year in the Ph.D. program at UCLA, I was a summer intern in Nixon’s Council of Economic Advisers, working under Herb Stein. I wanted to save as much money as I could to help pay for living expenses at UCLA. I had heard about a Harvard undergrad named Larry Siskind who was heading something called the “Libertarian Task Force.” He, the people who worked under him, and a few other libertarians and conservatives (one worked as an intern for columnist Jack Anderson and one worked in Vice-President Agnew’s office) were renting a divey house on East Capitol Street. I asked if I could join them and pay a modest rent. Larry accepted and I shared a room with a guy named Steve Beckner. It was cheap housing and lots of fun. Allowing such housing would help a lot of people who want to move to a city and take a new job. (0 COMMENTS)

Years ago I was on a flight out of Monterey and, as is my wont, I struck up a conversation with the passenger beside me. She was a local and somehow we got talking about the local daily newspaper, the Monterey Herald. I told her that because of its price relative to value, I had dropped it a few years earlier but that I thought I was missing important local news and was thinking of resubscribing. “Oh, you should,” she said. “Why?” I asked. “I admit I’m biased,” she said, “my husband is one of the reporters.” I asked her his name and she told me. I recognized it. He had had a fairly snarky attitude in some of his reporting, especially on issues having to do with libertarian or conservative causes. Not always, by the way, and maybe not even often, but often enough for me to notice. I could have launched into a critique of her husband. But what would have been the point? It might have led to an uncomfortable flight for both of us. So I went a different route. I told her something I liked about  him. I told her about my favorite piece he ever wrote in the Herald. I had clipped it and it had burned in my office fire but I remembered it well. He had written an op/ed about his own experience decades earlier as a reporter for a different newspaper in the central California valley. It was during Jerry Brown’s first 2 terms as governor, sometime between January 1975 and January 1983. Brown was looking for someone to fill a judge slot and in order to satisfy a particular constituency, he thought he had to choose someone of Greek descent. So he and his people looked around to find someone to fill the slot. This reporter had happened to follow the story closely and was struck by how the people making the choice seemed to put zero or close to zero weight on anything about the potential appointee other than his Greek heritage. Would he be a good judge? They didn’t seem to care. This reporter concluded the Herald op/ed by stating his hope that this is not how government works and that what he saw was rare. I told his wife that I had concluded, based on my experience and reading, that what her husband had seen was in the normal range. Government officials just didn’t have strong incentives to make good decisions. I told her that I wished he had written more articles in which he delved into how government actually works. (0 COMMENTS)

According to the BLS, TV prices (olive green line) fell by 94.5% between 1997 and 2015: A TV set that cost $200 in 1997 cost $11 in 2015.  Today the price would presumably be even lower.  Try to imagine visiting your local BestBuy and asking to look at their $11 TV sets. Of course, what’s actually going on here isn’t so much that people are spending less money of TV sets, rather that they are getting better TV sets when they spend $200 at the local retailer.  But how much better?  The BLS estimate suggests that a $200 TV set purchased in 2015 was 18.2 times better than a $200 set purchased in 1997.  But what does that mean? Does it mean the screen is 18 times larger?  Does it mean that George’s foibles on Seinfeld are 18 times funnier on the 2015 TV set?  Is a 9th inning home run in Yankee Stadium 18 times more thrilling on the 2015 TV set? When I’ve raised this issue in the past, commenters have occasionally suggested that “revealed preference” provides some sort of objective way of ascertaining the subjective value of TV quality improvements.  But that view is based on a misunderstanding of concepts like “willingness to pay” and “consumer surplus”. For many decades, the TV market has generated a large amount of consumer surplus.  People spend a lot of time watching TV, and would be willing to pay a fairly large sum for TV sets if they had to.  But they don’t have to, because supply has increased sharply due to technological progress, and also because the industry is pretty competitive, with many sellers to choose from.  So the price that people actually pay for a TV set doesn’t tell us how much value they derive from the set (except at the margin). A slightly more sophisticated argument is that if one set sells for 10 times more than another set, then consumers must derive 10 times more value for the fancier set.  Again, this is wrong.  The people buying expensive TV sets are different from those who choose to buy cheaper sets.  Why wouldn’t Bill Gates want to get the best TV set at almost any reasonable price? Let’s say the average TV set is $200 (call it set A), and then manufacturers come out with a fancier set (B) that sells for $1000.  Some people then (wrongly) assume that set B is viewed as 5 times better than set A.  Eventually, the price of set B falls to $200.  At that point, manufacturers come out with even fancier set C, which sells for $1000.   Set C is (wrongly) viewed as 5 times better than set B, and by inference 25 times better than set A.  Over time, the price of set C falls to $200.  Now the BLS says that the price of TVs has declined by 96%, to only 1/25th of their original price. The problem here is that the fact that set B sells for 5 times more than set A does not mean that it is 5 times better.  For instance, my current TV set cost $7000.  And yet I don’t view it as being 7 times better than a $1000 TV set.  So why did I buy it?  Because I do view it as being at least $6000 better than a $1000 set.  Thus my maximum willingness to pay for a big $7000 OLED might well have been $107,000.  And my maximum willingness to pay for a ordinary $1000 big screen might have been $100,000.  In that case, even if I regarded the OLED as being only 7% better than an ordinary TV set, I’d prefer it at a price of $7000 over an ordinary TV selling for $1000. The older I get, the less confident I am that we have any objective way to measure utility.  Keynes (1936, Ch. 4) had the same view: But the proper place for such things as net real output and the general level of prices lies within the field of historical and statistical description, and their purpose should be to satisfy historical or social curiosity, a purpose for which perfect precision — such as our causal analysis requires, whether or not our knowledge of the actual values of the relevant quantities is complete or exact — is neither usual nor necessary. To say that net output to-day is greater, but the price-level lower, than ten years ago or one year ago, is a proposition of a similar character to the statement that Queen Victoria was a better queen but not a happier woman than Queen Elizabeth — a proposition not without meaning and not without interest, but unsuitable as material for the differential calculus. Our precision will be a mock precision if we try to use such partly vague and non-quantitative concepts as the basis of a quantitative analysis. BTW, Is there anything worse than an economist mocking the public for being consistently “biased” in their forecasts of inflation, as if economists have some sort of scientific way of ascertaining the “true” rate of inflation?  Should we really be scolding the public for not understanding that since 1997 the price of a brand new $200 TV set has fallen to $11? PS.  On the other hand, the nominal aggregate expenditure on TVs is a relatively objective concept, and does have real meaning. PPS.  After his comments on the price level and real output, Keynes suggested that what we should actually be focusing on is the money value of income/output, and also the total level of employment.  I agree. (0 COMMENTS)

During my recent interview with Andrew Sullivan, he repeatedly accused me of being totally oblivious to the realities of human nature.  In his view, I hew to an absurdly economistic view of what people are really like.  In reality, people care about culture, identity, and community at least as much as they care about material consumption.  Indeed, this is how practically everyone describes themselves, right? False humility aside, I maintain that my understanding of human nature is far deeper than Sullivan’s.  Indeed, my understanding of human nature is nothing short of profound. Like Sullivan, I am well-aware aware that human beings routinely claim to place supreme value on culture, identity, community, and so on.  Unlike Sullivan, however, I refuse to take such hyperbolic claims at face value. Actions really do speak louder than words.  And the vast majority of people who claim to place supreme value on culture, identity, or community show otherwise with their deeds. In the interview, I presented Sullivan with a simple hypothetical.  What do you say about a Christian who insists, “My religion is the most important thing in my life,” yet never goes to church?  I say this is mighty evidence that this self-styled Christian dramatically overstates her religious commitment.  “Most important thing”?  More like, “Thing of marginal importance at most.”  Sure, she could change my mind if she read the Bible for ten hours a week, or habitually discussed religion on social media, or spent Sundays knocking on neighbors’ doors to ask them to adopt Jesus as their personal savior.  But when sometime puts little effort into something they claim is extraordinarily important to them, we should conclude that their self-description is false. Why would a human being say such falsehoods?  Sometimes they’re consciously lying; more often, they’re just too intellectually lazy to check their words for accuracy.  Either way, their underlying motive is to say things that sound good – to yourself and other people.  Why bother?  To feel good about yourself – and persuade other people to feel good about you.  Saying what sounds noble, and doing what feels pleasant: Now that’s human nature. What does this have to do with culture, identity, or community?  Simple.  If you passionately care about such things, you will pay a lot of time and money to get a heavy dose.  If you are passionate about being Irish, for example, you will pay a sizable premium to live in an Irish community.  If you are passionate about patriotism, you will be an active member of groups like the American Legion.  If you are passionate about your community, you’ll regularly volunteer to beautify it.  Yet as we know, only a tiny minority of people do anything in this ballpark. Yes, I know that humans are heterogeneous.  People who voluntarily live in communes show by their actions that their community is deeply important to them.  Yet the vast majority of people who don’t voluntarily live in communes ipso facto show a lower level of commitment, with the median just a little above zero. Can’t we just express our deep commitments via voting?  Absolutely not.  In any real-world election, the probability that you change an electoral outcome is near-zero.  For practical purposes, then, voting is talk, not action.  Voting is on par with threatening to leave the country because your side loses an election.  To count as action, you would actually have to follow through with your threat.  Hardly anyone does. You could reply, “Bryan, if you really had a profound understanding of human nature, you would keep your mouth shut about all this, because you’d realize that people hate hearing these ugly truths and aren’t going to reform.”  Rebuttal: Normally I do keep my mouth shut about all this.  I share my profound understanding of human nature with the rare minority of people who are genuinely curious about the social world.  Self-selected folks like you, dear EconLog readers. (1 COMMENTS)

It is not totally impossible that, despite diminishing economic freedom and near-zero free speech, the Chinese economy will continue to grow at high rates. That these rates will reflect genuine economic growth, that is, increased production that responds to consumers’ demand. That some other way than free markets will be discovered to express consumers’ demand. That industrial policy will coerce businesses into efficiently satisfying consumers’ demand. That the centralized Chinese state will find a solution to the central planner’s information problem—what individuals prefer, which trade-offs each is willing to make, and what are all the production functions and all local conditions in the economy. That a dictatorial central government will erase the experience of two millennia of Chinese empires stifling liberty and economic growth. That Chinese businesses will out-compete free Western entrepreneurs (assuming that the latter still exist), and that the fears of American statists that China will (in some real sense) overcome America will be realized. Perhaps three hundred years of economic analysis have been wrong. In a Popperian way, we must view our current beliefs as conjectures that have not been proven wrong. It is however much more likely that the current Chinese state is a giant with clay feet and that the country’s economy will suffer the effects of strengthened authoritarianism. The suspicion that a Wuhan laboratory accidentally released SARS-CoV-2, if it turns out to be true, and the incident at the Taishan nuclear power plant last week are consistent with the hypothesis of a fragile economy run by an inefficient central planner. The Chinese government wants to make China “great” again—as it was under Mao and the preceding two millennia of stifling imperial government. (On imperial China compared to the West, the recent books of Joel Mokyr and Walter Scheidel are worth reading.) In a Regulation article three years ago, I wrote: As the Chinese government has veered back toward authoritarianism, the prospects for continuing growth have dimmed considerably, even if this does not yet show in economic statistics. Those who, often for invalid protectionist reasons, fear the economic growth of China can relax. The main danger is that, in order to hide its failures and keep its grip on its subjects, the Chinese Leviathan would excite the latter’s nationalist emotions and lead the world into war. Freedom of speech is as important for economic efficiency as it is in the search for truth. In their 2012 book How China Became Capitalist, a title that now looks more like an optimistic prediction, Ronald Coase and Ning Wang prudently wrote that “without a free and open market for ideas, China cannot sustain its economic growth.” The intimidation and closing of the last anti-government newspaper in Hong Kong further point to where the system is heading (Elaine Yu, “Honk Kong’s Apple Daily Newspaper Prints Last Edition as Free-Press Era Ends,” Wall Street Journal, June 23, 2021). One question can still be raised for the future: Is it possible that, past a certain point, a tightly regulated and crony “capitalist” economy could become less productive than an economy dominated by an openly tyrannical government that allows for some limited and closely monitored economic entrepreneurship by state corporations? (0 COMMENTS)

John McAfee died in a Spanish prison today from a suspected suicide (“John McAfee, Software Pioneer Turned Fugitive, Dies in a Spanish Prison,” New York Times, June 23, 2021). He had just lost a legal battle to avoid extradition to the United States after being prosecuted for tax evasion. He was also sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission. I don’t know which, if any, among the offenses he was suspected of over the years, the eccentric entrepreneur was actually guilty of.  It would not be overly surprising to discover that it is getting riskier to be eccentric in our over-regulated societies. McAfee was the Libertarian Party’s presidential candidate in 2016; I suspect it did not help the party. (Not that you should hold that against me, but he was one of my Twitter and Facebook followers!) In On Liberty (1859), John Stuart Mill wrote about eccentricity: Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. … I would hypothesize it is also proportional to the level of entrepreneurship. McAfee’s last tweet, dated June 16, said: The US believes I have hidden crypto. I wish I did but it has dissolved through the many hands of Team McAfee (your belief is not required), and my remaining assets are all seized. My friends evaporated through fear of association. I have nothing. Yet, I regret nothing. Regarding the charge of tax evasion, it is interesting to note that in Switzerland, tax evasion—“forgetting” to declare income, for example—is not a crime, but an administrative infraction. Only “tax fraud,” with involves using falsified documents, is criminally prosecutable. One would think that if the income tax is claimed to be voluntary, such a rule would be natural. (0 COMMENTS)

Opportunism versus Identifying Opportunities In a recent email, a friend who basically shares my political views wrote: If your solutions to the “problems of capitalism after COVID” are the same as those you were advancing to the “problems of capitalism” before COVID, I suspect COVID has had no bearing on your thinking other than to advance your opportunism. I told him that I thought this was not the slam-dunk argument he thought, and he actually agreed with me and asked me not to quote him by name. But I am quoting the thought because I’ve heard a similar thought expressed over the years by people of various political persuasions. During the financial crisis of 2008-2009, for instance, I advocated getting rid of deposit insurance or at least reducing the amount of a deposit on which people could get insurance, along with getting rid of various other government restrictions (such as the ratings cartel set up by the feds) that had contributed to the financial crisis. The person I was talking to–I forget who–said “I see so many people of your persuasion advocating things they advocated before the crisis and not advocating anything they didn’t already advocate.” He said this as if he thought this was a winning argument against the reforms I advocated. I replied that the reforms I advocated would help make things better and were relevant and that, moreover, if they had been implemented well before the financial crisis, the financial crisis would have been less bad. So, I said, the fact that I advocated them well before the crisis should give me more credibility, not less, because I could connect some of the bad things that happened with the absence of those reforms. I think that the “this crisis hasn’t caused you to change any of your views” argument is a poor one. Maybe it shouldn’t cause you to change any of your views. It’s always better, if your goal is the truth, to analyze the measures being advocated whatever the time line of your advocacy. Go back to the original quote above. Notice the charge of opportunism. It could be opportunistic; I don’t know the people my friend is talking about. But it could also be identifying an opportunity to make a point against capitalism when the person identifying it sincerely believes that capitalism made the particular crisis worse. Again, the best way to handle this, if truth is your goal, is to ask the person to explain how capitalism contributed to the Covid disaster if, indeed, that’s what the person is saying.   (0 COMMENTS)

I didn’t know the movie “Afterimage” (available, at least in Italy, on Amazon Prime). It is a powerful work by Polish director, Andrzej Wajda. The movie is set in Łódź, Poland, where the painter Władysław Strzemiński lived. You can find his biography here. The movie is about one crucial line in that brief biographical presentation: “in 1950 Strzeminski was stripped of his position at the SHSVA by decision of the Ministry of Culture and Art for failing to respect Socialist Realist doctrine”. Wajda achieved two things, both of paramount importance, with the movie. First, he conveys magnificently the feelings of a formerly celebrated artist, a local glory, whose fortune suddenly collapses and he is left struggling in his new condition of a pariah. The Ministry of Culture was ruthless with Strzemiński: they took his day job (he was a teacher at the State Higher School of the Visual Arts), they destroyed his work, they made him persona non grata throughout the city. Second, Wajda showed how that was possible precisely because of the structure of a command-and-control economy. One telling scene sees Strzeminski trying to use the few bucks he has left to buy a few tubes of paint. He is refused the possibility, “in a shop where I bought my colors for thirty years”, because his artist’s license has been taken away. Without a special license, not only were you forbidden to work; you could not even get hold of the “factors of production” you needed for your creations. I cannot properly review a movie, besides saying I liked it, so here is a more competent and critical review. It could well be that the movie makes of the painter a kind of Ayn Rand-esque hero, though ultimately crushed by the regime. Another element in the movie I have found telling is how it portrays people under socialism. They are as miserable, greedy, and cowardly as they are under other social systems. Perhaps the regime provided some of them an opportunity to punch people they were envious of. Certainly underdevelopment and poverty made them less altruistic, as in a powerful scene when Strzemiński’s maid pours him some soup and then she pours it back in the pot, after the artist tells her he can no longer pay her. Strzemiński then licks the dregs left in his plate. (0 COMMENTS)

During the last two years, I’ve personally met quite a few people who loathe the woke movement.  They complain about it incessantly and see its wicked influence everywhere.  If the woke are for it, they’re reflexively against it. If the woke movement did not exist, all of these people would obviously be doing something else.  They’d probably still be obsessive and negative, but they wouldn’t be daydreaming about wiping woke ideology off the surface of the Earth.  Should we therefore say that such people constitute a “backlash” to wokism?  Should we conclude that the woke movement is sowing the seeds of its own demise?  Would the woke movement have been more successful if it had pursued the path of moderation? My answer: No on all counts.  Yes, the woke movement has sparked resistance.  Virtually every movement does.  But so what?  The momentous question is rather: Has the woke movement sparked enough resistance to make the entire movement self-defeating?  The answer, of course, is: What used to be called “political correctness” is succeeding by leaps and bounds.  Not just on the news; even the most apolitical people I know have been dragooned into cultish on-the-job struggle sessions (via zoom, of course). Still, there’s a fair follow-up: Has the woke movement sparked enough resistance to even make the movement’s marginal efforts self-defeating?  And the answer to this is at most a definite maybe.  Yes, going after Dr. Seuss might be a bridge too far; the woke movement is indeed stirring up a hornet’s nest.  But even this petty tyranny could well work out for them.  Fear is one of the woke movement’s chief weapons – and successfully toppling a harmless and popular cultural icon is a fine way to spread fear.  How many people witnessed this moral panic and shivered, “If they can cancel Seuss, they can cancel me“? While you could just define even the slightest resistance as “backlash,” that makes the whole concept trivial.  Alternately, you could equivocate between the trivial and momentous definitions to confuse the weak-minded (possibly yourself included).  The wise route, however, is to decide how bad the woke movement really is.  And if you think it’s bad enough, strive to transform mere resistance into full-blown backlash. (0 COMMENTS)

One of the most interesting passages in Edward Nelson’s new book on Milton Friedman concerns wage and price controls as a tool for reducing inflation. Throughout history, economists have generally opposed price controls. Then around 1970, many prominent Keynesian economists suddenly began supporting the policy. Why? Here’s Ed Nelson (Vol. 2, p. 258): Indeed, what is remarkable about events during 1970 is the extent to which mainstream US macroeconomic thinking on inflation moved toward the position on inflation previously associated with Galbraith and with economists in the United Kingdom.  In the course of that year, pure cost-push views became prevalent among major US economists and policy makers.  Increasingly, major Keynesian academic economists, economists in government and business, and policy officials were judging that market power of labor and government had so altered the United States’ wage- and price-setting mechanisms that, instead of merely responding inertially to economic slack, inflation now did not respond to negative output gaps at all. A few pages later he names names: In contrast [to Friedman], the freeze was applauded not only by Burns and Galbraith but also by leading Keynesian economists like James Tobin, Walter Heller, Arthur Okun, and Gardner Ackley . . . One of the most prominent supporters was Paul Samuelson.” Today, a progressive might say, “Good, Keynesians finally shook off neoliberal orthodoxy.”  But there’s a problem with that optimistic view.  The wage/price controls clearly failed.  And after they failed the Keynesian camp went back to their traditional stance of opposing wage-price controls. So what can we learn from this bout of intellectual “temporary insanity”? 1. In 1970, Keynesian economists were still working with the wrong macro model of the economy.  They thought there was a “trade-off” between inflation and unemployment.  So when both inflation and unemployment were high in 1970, they assumed there was some sort of mysterious new phenomenon called “cost-push inflation”, which could only be addressed with wage-price controls.  They had not yet absorbed Milton Friedman’s Natural Rate Hypothesis.  (Although just a few years later Friedman’s theory did become widely accepted by Keynesians. 2.  In addition, Keynesians made a mistake that I see many economists make even today.  They went with their intuition, not with decades of hard economic analysis and solidly established economic theories.  For a brief period, it seemed like price controls were a good idea.  Today, we see many economists rejecting long established theories such as the idea that free trade is good, or that minimum wage laws are bad, or that wealth taxes are bad, or that persistent large budget deficits are bad, or that unemployment compensation reduces the incentive to work, or that fiscal policy is not a good stabilization tool.  They are going with their gut, not with hard economic analysis involving incentives and budget constraints. Does this mean that we cannot trust the experts?  Yes and no.  We cannot have complete trust in experts; but what is the alternative?  I have no doubt that if you polled economists today on the issue of rent controls, you’d find a few individuals in support of the policy.  But if you polled all of the residents of NYC and LA, you find millions in support of rent controls.  So yes, the experts goofed on the Nixon wage/price controls, but the public also supported the policy.  Indeed I’m not sure the public ever learned the lesson that they don’t work.  At least economists learned from their mistake. Here’s Matt Yglesias: Most historians whose work I’m familiar with seem to broadly agree with the thesis of Binyamin Applebaum’s book The Economists’ Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society. Which is to say they don’t deny that economists have some useful technical knowledge or that some economists are very insightful, but they think that the large and growing role of economists in American public life in the last quarter of the twentieth century was basically bad. They think economics as a discipline entrenches a kind of neoliberal worldview, and the elevation of economics over other social sciences was a bad thing. In fact, the neoliberalism of the final quarter of the 20th century was by far the best thing that ever happened on this planet, producing an astounding decline in global poverty. Yglesias adds a very astute comment: I mention this because I often think that what people mean when they invoke “listen to the experts” is basically that people should agree with the aggregate political opinions of people with advanced degrees. In other words, be very progressive. A particularly comical example of this came recently when Democracy asked a bunch of prestigious law professors to write a new constitution from scratch and they decided there should be a constitutional provision requiring a two percent wealth tax. These law professors are experts, in the sense that they are professors, and professors love Elizabeth Warren and Elizabeth Warren loves the wealth tax. But most tax experts do not like this idea at all. It really depends on whether progressives have a pre-existing opinion that they hold dearly.  They did not have strong views on masks, travel bans, and lockdowns, and hence progressive opinion shifted on a dime in the spring of 2020 in response to sudden shifts in expert opinion on those issues.  But they do have strong opinions on rent controls and wealth taxes, and resent being told by economic experts that rent controls and wealth taxes are a bad idea. PS.  Of course progressives also have dearly held views on gender, sex, and race (some of which I agree with, some I do not), but that’s a topic for another blogger.  Check out Yglesias if you want to see an example involving IQ. PPS.  There are two types of economists.  Those who have read Nelson’s new book and those who have not.  David Henderson linked to an Atlantic article interviewing someone who clearly has not: The new consensus on Friedman’s work among economists has essentially reversed Summers’s verdict from 2006. “Almost nothing remains of his intellectual legacy,” according to Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs. “It has proven to be a disastrous misdirection for the world’s economies.” Sigh . . . (2 COMMENTS)