The universe, points out economist Noah Smith, is always trying to kill us, whether through asteroids hurtling through space or our every-few-hours hunger pains. Why, then, should we expect anything but a gravitational pull toward poverty? Listen as Smith explains to EconTalk’s Russ Roberts why he believes that poverty will always be our “elemental foe,” […] The post The Ever-Present Challenge of Escaping Poverty (with Noah Smith) appeared first on Econlib.

  The list this week is quite short. It reflects only slightly less reading. Mainly, it reflects less thinking about what I’m reading because I’m dealing with some personal issues. Top Five US Commercial Partners by Timothy Taylor, Conversable Economist, July 29, 2024. Now to the excerpt: In discussions of US international economic ties, it sometimes feels a bit as if the only other country worth mentioning is China. Daniel Hamilton at the Brookings Institution put together a list of US international economic ties in a short essay “Who is America’s top commercial partner? (Hint: It’s not China.)”(March 21, 2024). Here’s a table from his article: If you’ve managed not to notice the picture, then before clicking on the link or reading below, make a guess about which country is the United States’ #1 trading partner.       Timothy goes on to point out that, measured in goods traded, the top 4 in 2022, in order, were the EU ($904.1 billion), Canada (793.1 billion), Mexico ($779.1 billion), and China (690.3 billion). The numbers are exports added to imports.   What Aspiring Economists Aren’t Being Taught by Steven E. Landsburg, Wall Street Journal, August 2, 2024. Excerpt: Price theory seems to be fading from the economics curriculum. Surveying the course offerings of the top few dozen economics departments, I see a lot more coursework offered in theoretical microeconomics and a lot less in price theory than I did five years ago. I’ve talked to many economists who have noticed the same thing. I’m not sure why this is happening. Maybe it’s driven by students who demand courses in which they can succeed by memorizing the textbook rather than learning how to think. But if economics majors aren’t learning how to think about economics, then who will? This fits nicely with recent discussions about teaching economics on this site. See here and here.   (0 COMMENTS)

Interest rates are important, but not in the way that most people assume. To see why, it might be helpful to start with an analogy. Why does inflation matter?If you ask the average shopper, they’ll tell you that inflation is obviously bad because the public has to pay more for the stuff they buy. But if you pick up any economics textbook, nowhere do they mention this factor as a “cost of inflation”. That’s because when people spend more on goods, other people earn more selling those goods. By themselves, higher prices are a zero sum game.That doesn’t mean high inflation is not a problem—I believe it’s a very serious problem. But it’s not a problem for the reason that most people assume its a problem.The same is true of interest rates. Most people (wrongly) think that low interest rates are good for the economy. Stock traders know better, and indeed stocks fell sharply on Friday, even as longer-term interest rates plunged.  As with inflation, interest rates can be important—but not for the reasons that you might assume. I suspect that most people make the same mistake that shoppers make with inflation, reasoning from personal experience. Thus they might imagine how lower rates might make it easier to buy a house or car. But interest rates are a zero sum game. When one person pays more interest, another person receives more interest.  I suppose you could argue that a change in interest rates might cause some sort of “redistribution”, although it’s hard to say exactly how.  When rates are low, the media complains that big banks benefit and retired folks with savings accounts are hurt.  When rates are high, the media complains that credit card holders suffer and big banks benefit.  But even if falling interest rates were to redistribute money to lower income people, that doesn’t mean it would help the economy.  Low rates also tend to reduce velocity, as people have more incentive to hoard cash.  As always, it depends on why interest rates change.  Consider the following two claims: 1. It’s nonsense to speak of how interest rates affect the economy.  It would be like talking about how a change in oil prices affects the oil market. 2. It makes a lot of sense to speak about how monetary policy affects the economy. If both are true, then obviously interest rates cannot be monetary policy.  So what is monetary policy? 3. Monetary policy is a set of actions taken by central banks that impact the supply and demand for base money, often with the goal of impacting macro aggregates such as prices, employment and/or NGDP. So then what do interest rates have to do with monetary policy? 1. Prior to 2008, the Fed targeted the fed funds rate by instructing its open market desk to buy and sell Treasury securities.  This policy directly impacted the supply of base money, and indirectly affected interest rates. 2.  After 2008, the Fed continued to change the supply of base money (via QE), but also used the tool of interest on bank reserves to impact the demand for base money. 3. The Fed also impacts the demand for base money by affecting the expected growth rate of NGDP.  Faster NGDP growth trends to reduce the real demand for base money. Note:  These three effects do not all work in the same direction! This is the key point that so many people miss, even many economists overlook this problem.  (If you are familiar with the recent debate, the first two mechanisms are emphasized by Keynesians, and the third has implications related to NeoFisherianism.) Because monetary policy affects interest rates in a complex and often contradictory fashion, it’s not possible to look at changing interest rates and make any inferences about the stance of monetary policy.  I suspect that the reason why America has never had a mini-recession (defined as unemployment rising 1% to 2%, and then falling) is because our central bank has often been confused about the relationship between interest rates and monetary policy.  When the economy tipped into a small recession, the Fed initially makes things worse by tightening monetary policy—creating a bigger recession.  They wrongly assume they are not tightening policy because they reduce their target interest rates.  But lower rates are not easier money—especially if the natural rate is falling even faster. Suppose that central banks are gradually becoming aware of this mistake.  Then, if my hypothesis is correct, the US should begin experiencing minirecessions.  These will occur instead of normal recessions because the Fed will no longer be fooled by an obsession with interest rates.  The Fed will begin to focus more on a wide variety of financial market indicators, and also be more willing to adopt a “whatever it takes” approach to stabilizing market expectations of future aggregate demand (NGDP.) It would take many decades of improved performance to be confident that it was not merely luck, so I won’t be around to see if my prediction comes true.  Indeed I don’t even know if the Fed has begun to see past the fallacy that interest rates are monetary policy, a necessary precondition for any improved performance.  It’s also possible that they could reduce the severity of the business cycle through a different policy reform, say the adoption of level targeting. I’d guess that there is a greater than 50% chance that we are entering our first minirecession.  If so, I think it is likely that this period does not get labeled a “recession” by the NBER.  In that case, it would be our first ever soft landing.  And closely related to these points, it would be our first violation of “Sahm’s Rule”. Alternatively, we might have a full-blown recession.  Either way, the next 12 months will likely be far more interesting than the past 12 months.  Here are my (highly unscientific) guesstimates: 1. Boom:  Unemployment peaks at 4.3%  — 5% chance 2. Minirecession: Unemployment peaks between 4.4% and 5.3% — 65% chance 3. Recession: Unemployment rises above 5.4% — 30% chance I’d be interested in what readers expect—feel free to add to the comment section.  As an aside, these are my definitions; the NBER uses different criteria for defining recessions.  I define soft landing as at least three years of continued expansion without triggering high inflation, even after unemployment has fallen near cyclical lows.  We’ve never done that.  That would be a far more impressive national goal than repeating the 1969 moon landing in the 2030s. PS.  This is kind of a cool graph:   (0 COMMENTS)

In my Defining Ideas article last month, “The Draft Is Still a Bad Idea,” I made the case against a traditional draft to obtain military manpower. A related proposal is for a universal draft of young people, male and female, that would give them a choice between military and civilian service. That kind of draft is also a bad idea. Some of the arguments against such a draft are the same as the arguments against a military draft. The distinctive features of a universal draft also bring other issues into play. The bottom line, as I shall show, is that a universal draft is even more objectionable than a limited military draft. A universal draft, like a military draft, would violate young people’s freedom to choose their occupations and would take no account of the losses to these young people. In addition, a universal draft would, by definition, take away the freedom of many more young people than a military draft would. Also, as some officials in the military have recognized, a universal draft could make it more difficult for the military to get its desired amount of high-quality first-term manpower.   These are the opening paragraphs of my latest piece for the Hoover Institution, “Forced National Service: Worse Than The Draft,” Defining Ideas, August 2, 2024. Another excerpt: The suggestion of harsh measures for young people wasn’t unique to William James. In the famous December 1966 conference on the military draft, a conference that attendee Milton Friedman saw as a turning point towards opposition to the draft, noted anthropologist Margaret Mead called for drafting women as well as men. She recognized that there was a special problem with women that didn’t exist for men: women can get pregnant. (It’s too bad that Mead wasn’t around to explain that fact to Supreme Court justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who, in her confirmation hearing, said that because she was not a biologist, she could not give a definition of a woman. Anthropologist, not biologist, Margaret Mead had no such difficulty.) Read the whole thing.   (1 COMMENTS)

Author’s Note: This post originally appeared on my (now defunct) personal website as a blog post on January 23, 2019.  Since I took down my website, I have had several requests for this post.  Econlib has been kind enough to allow me to repost it here.  I have made minor modifications for grammar and style, but otherwise the post remains identical.  The original version is available through the Wayback Machine here.   In his 1987 Economic Review article detailing the history of optimal tariffs, Thomas Humphrey writes: [The optimal tariff model] assumes unrealistically (1) that foreign countries will not retaliate with tariffs of their own, (2) that elasticities of supply and demand in foreign trade are not so large in the long run as to render the tariff ineffective, (3) that the optimum tariff rate can be precisely identified and skillfully administered, and (4) that politicians can resist pressures to raise tariff rates above the optimum level. All four of these objections of the optimal tariff model are difficult to overcome when addressing the model as a policy procedure.  I have written on some of these other points before (as have many people far smarter than I).  However, I want to focus on point #2 and I’ll try to keep this not wonky. That the optimal tariff model depends on elasticities of supply and demand is not controversial.  Indeed, that is how the calculation of the tariff works.  However, given condition (2) above, we can see the optimal tariff is, at best, a short-run policy.  This follows from the Law of Demand. Most people tend to think of the Law of Demand in its common form: all else held equal, an increase in the price of a good will reduce the quantity demanded of that good.  But there is a second Law of Demand: the longer a price remains relatively high, the more elastic the demand for a good becomes.   Given that the goal of a tariff is to increase the relative price of a good, then as long as the tariff remains in place, the more elastic demand for that good becomes.  Indeed, if the tariff remains in place and, again, everything else held equal, over enough time, the tariff could cause the demand curve for a good to become perfectly elastic.  A perfectly elastic demand curve would indicate no consumer welfare gains from the trade.  The elimination of consumer welfare would then mean that the tariff is a net welfare loss for the country in question.  So, an optimal tariff cannot persist in the long run, only in the short run given the Second Law of Demand.   Some might object by saying: “But wait, Jon, you sly and handsome devil!  That would just mean the optimal tariff would need to be reduced.  There’s no reason to think the tariff would eventually become a net welfare loss.”  Indeed, it may very well be that some benevolent government can milk the tariff for everything it’s worth by constantly adjusting the optimal tariff as the elasticities change.  However, this is where public choice comes into play.  As Gordon Tullock discussed in 1975, government support of firms is very difficult to remove.  Domestic producers have capitalized on the gains the tariff has provided them.  To remove the tariff is not to eat up “extra normal” profit for monopolizing firms, but rather to eat into normal profit for them.  These firms are legitimately harmed, profit-wise, by the removal or alternations of these protections like an optimal tariff.  Any adjustment to an optimal tariff, even if demanded by the economic scenario is likely to be fought tooth-and-nail by affected firms.  The resulting stagnation will likely result in an optimal tariff that is too high!  Any short-run gains from the optimal tariff (assuming all the above conditions are met) would likely be eaten up by this un-optimal tariff that results from the changing elasticity and lack of change in the statutory tariff.   In a general-equilibrium theoretical framework, an optimal tariff makes perfect sense.  But, once time and public choice enters the fray, the reasonableness of an optimal tariff goes out the window.  And, as GMU economist Garett Jones likes to say: in a knockdown fight between general equilibrium and public choice, public choice wins every time.   Jon Murphy is an assistant professor of economics at Nicholls State University. (0 COMMENTS)

The Subcommittee on Antisemitism and Anti-Israel Bias of the Jewish Advisory Committee at Stanford University issued a 128 page report on May 31, 2024.  The 12 members–faculty, staff, graduate and undergraduate students, an alumnus, and two rabbis–deserve high praise for their work. The Subcommittee presented a surprisingly bold recommendation in a section titled Rethinking Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.  It challenged one of Stanford’s most important objectives underpinning its academic mission:  Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.   Stanford’s commitment to Diversity began decades ago, more recently morphing into DEI, the acronym for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.  DEI programs have focused on, and continue to emphasize, the recruitment of BIPOC  (Black, Indigenous, People Of Color) faculty and staff, and the enrollment of BIPOC undergraduate, graduate, and post-doc students.  DEI programs culminated in IDEAL, Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity in a Learning Environment, which provided new slots to increase BIPOC programs on campus.  The number of DEI faculty and administrators at Stanford increased from 80 in 2021 to 177 in 2024.  The University has established departments, centers, institutes, and degree programs in every racial and ethnic category on campus. In Rethinking Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, the Subcommittee writes:  In the longer-term, we make a different recommendation.  We believe that this identity-driven approach to belonging and inclusion is anathema to the University’s educational mission, and that it ultimately works to the detriment of the very groups it seeks to aid.  Among other things, these DEI programs tend to propagate oversimplified histories and promulgate ideologies about social justice without subjecting them to the critical inquiry that is a core aspect of a university education.   In other words, the Subcommittee has been charged with how to counter antisemitism and anti-Israel bias within a fundamentally flawed system, and thus has been unwittingly tasked with recommending how to fix the very system that has failed our Jewish and Israel community members, among many others.  In that spirit we offer the radical proposal of moving from DEI programs as presently constituted to a pluralist framework that benefits individuals from all backgrounds…  (pp. 106-07) To summarize, DEI is a fundamentally flawed system, anathema to the University’s educational mission, and has failed the Jewish community on campus. Apart from the writings of several scholars at the Hoover Institution who have criticized DEI, the Subcommittee report is the first serious internal challenge to Stanford’s DEI policy. The Subcommittee’s report  will be filed in the Stanford Archives and largely forgotten.  But it’s a start, however small, in recommending corrective action.   Alvin Rabushka is the David and Joan Traitel Senior Fellow, Emeritus at the Hoover Institution. (0 COMMENTS)

Fed meetings occur every 6 or 7 weeks and the fed funds target is adjusted in quarter point (25 basis point) increments. In the past, I’ve argued that this procedure is inefficient. I don’t favor interest rate targeting. But if the Fed insists on that policy tool, I’ve suggested that the rate be adjusted much more frequently. One idea I’ve discussed would have the fed funds target adjusted daily, to the nearest basis point. Rather than long periods of almost no change interrupted by abrupt changes, the rate would move up and down based on new information, like a market price. I’ve suggested that the rate could be set each day at the median vote of the FOMC.Today’s Financial Times provides a good indication of why I believe this approach makes more sense: US bond yields tumbled following the jobs data as investors flocked to the safety of Treasuries and bet that the Federal Reserve — which held interest rates steady on Wednesday — will be forced to respond to a weakening economy with rapid cuts in borrowing costs.The US 10-year yield sank 0.18 percentage points to 3.79 per cent, the lowest since December. Investors now expect the Fed to lower borrowing costs by a full percentage point by the end of the year, implying it will have to deliver an extra-large half-point cut at one of its three remaining meetings.“The Fed rolled the dice one more time on Wednesday and they’ve been proved wrong,” said Steven Blitz, chief US economist at TS Lombard. Friday’s jobs numbers “don’t spell recession, but the Fed has to act, and a 0.5 percentage point cut in September is now firmly on the table. They could even move sooner, before the meeting,” he added. Instead of “rolling the dice” with an outdated nineteenth century model, where bankers might have arrived in town after a long journey on horseback, how about a 21st century policy regime, where policy adjusts rapidly and smoothly as new information comes in. The Fed likely won’t adopt my proposal.  But I suspect that right now Jay Powell privately wishes it were in place.  It’s an unusually long 7 weeks until the next meeting.  A lot can happen in seven weeks. (0 COMMENTS)

In his excellent post titled “To Fix Economics, Try Teaching Economists,” Alex Salter does a nice survey of the some of the best books for teaching introductory economics, intermediate microeconomics, and advanced economics. I largely agree with his evaluations but I have a few differences on the introductory economics and intermediate economics categories. Introductory Economics My favorite text for teaching introductory economics, which Alex doesn’t mention, is The Economic Way of Thinking by Paul Heyne, Peter Boettke, and David Prychitko. I have a few minor criticisms of the book, but only a few. I’ve succeeded with it in teaching U.S. Navy officers in a distance-learning course of an Executive MBA. Of course, I added a number of readings but Economic Way of Thinking was the key. I’ll also note that you don’t necessarily have to use or assign the new edition. Textbooks change very little from edition to edition and not always for the better. One thing I did for my students was recommend that they buy used copies of editions that were two before the current edition. That way they saved a lot of money. Intermediate Microeconomics I agree with Alex that Steven Landsburg ‘s Price Theory and Applications is excellent. As an economist, I liked David Friedman’s Price Theory: An Intermediate Text a lot. And certainly the price, given that David has provided it free on line, is a strong selling point. But as a teacher, I didn’t like it as much as Landsburg’s text. Here’s why. When we teach economics, one of the things we do that can open students’ eyes is show them something that is counterintuitive but makes absolute sense. Every good textbook does some of this. In my view, David Friedman’s book does too much of this. The one that was a show-stopper for me and persuaded me to use Landsburg’s text instead of Friedman’s, was David’s section titled “Application: Housing Prices—a Paradox.” He shows that once you’ve bought a house, you are better off if the price rises but also better off if the price falls. See if you can figure out why before checking that section of the book. That one application convinced me that I would have to spend so much horsepower on driving that point home that I would have less time for other things. Moreover, it’s true only in a narrow sense: you buy a house to consume “housing services.” So he is implicitly that you’re consuming all the housing services that the house provides. But what if you buy one house to live in and another to speculate with? His argument falls apart. And so, if you convince the students that he’s right, you will convince them of a narrow point but miss a broader point that is probably the way they think and is right. Twenty-five years ago, a student who was in our program at the Naval Postgraduate School told a colleague the following story. Starting as an Ensign fresh out of the Naval Academy, she invested in housing. When she had made enough money on one house, she borrowed on it and bought another house. Ultimately she starting buying duplexes. Then four-plexus. Rinse and repeat. By the time she was in our program, she had a net worth of $6 million. She benefited big time when the prices of housing rose. I say, with some trepidation, that David’s wrong. When I first met David, at a conference at Columbia University in the fall of 1971, I learned, from both of his talks, things I had never thought of. So maybe he could convince me on this one. I doubt it though. (2 COMMENTS)

One of the many difficulties that come with trying to use polling data to gauge “public opinion” (whatever that means) is that you can get wildly different answers by simply rephrasing a question. This comes into play with economic policy as well – people will respond very differently to a policy based on how it’s phrased, even if the policy itself is the same. Recently, J. D. Vance has found himself under scrutiny for saying families with kids should pay lower taxes than families without kids. On Twitter, this was phrased by one progressive account as a claim that Vance argued “childless adults should pay a higher tax rate than those with children.” Of course, as others have already pointed out, the basic idea Vance is describing isn’t a call to change the tax code – it’s already part of the tax code. There is already a child tax credit in effect, so it’s already the case that, to use Vance’s hypothetical, someone who makes $100,000 a year and has three kids pays a lower tax rate than someone who makes the same money and is childless. For now I’ll ignore the debate about whether or not the child tax credit is a good policy. My interest here is the way the policy is framed. If you ask people, “Should childless adults pay higher taxes,” I suspect you’d find many people oppose that policy. But if you ask people, “Should adults raising children get a tax credit,” I suspect that would turn out to be pretty popular. Indeed, it is pretty popular. I’d bet that if you asked a thousand people the first question, then six months later asked them the second question, you’d find a pretty big overlap of people who said “no” to the first but said “yes” to the second. But saying “people with children should get a tax credit” and saying “people without children should pay higher taxes” amounts to saying the same thing. Both policies are equivalent. And indeed, many people on the left who are pontificating about Vance’s comments also strongly support the child tax credit and push for it to be expanded. If you think the child tax credit should be expanded, that’s tantamount to saying the existing tax rate gap between childless adults and those with children isn’t big enough. So why do people respond so differently to identical policies if they’re phrased differently? I think the main reason is people aren’t really responding to the content of the policy. What they are really reacting to is what they perceive to be the intention of the person proposing the policy. And Vance certainly did his part to make undesirable intentions attributable to him – in the above mentioned video, Vance uses the tax credit as an example of how the state should use tax policy to “reward the things we think are good and punish the things we think are bad.” So when someone says “we should expand the tax credit to help support parents and children” they sound like a nice person who wants to help struggling parents, whereas Vance’s proposal sounded rooted in a belief that childless adults are “bad” and should be “punished.” The policy proposals are the same, but the first one sounds like it’s motivated by a good intention and the second one sounds like it’s motivated by a bad intention, and many people are responding not to the specifics of the policy, but on what they deem to be the good or bad motives of those proposing the policy. This is perhaps another manifestation of what I’ve elsewhere called “political noncognitivism” – the idea that most people’s support for policies are a way for them to express their attitudes, and not to evaluate propositions or make factual claims about reality. Stepping outside of politics for a moment, consider the case where a few months back there was some furor over reports that the fast-food chain Wendy’s was considering adopting a “surge pricing” model, where prices would adjust based on demand at specific times of the day. Thus, menu items would be more expensive during the lunch rush, and less expensive at mid-afternoon. This upset many people – but perhaps a simple shift in framing would have changed people’s opinions. The policy was generally described as “you’ll get charged more for going when it’s busy,” which sounded bad to most. But what if instead it was simply rephrased as “you get a discount for coming when it’s slower”? Logically, the two policies are equivalent, but the first one makes people feel like they’re being taken advantage of, while the second one makes people feel like they’re getting a bonus.  There is some reason to think the second framing would be well received because we already see it in the form of happy hours. Many bars and restaurants have happy hours where drinks and menu items are available at a substantial markdown – and happy hour is almost always the time that’s slowest for the bar, after lunch and before dinner. Because happy hour has always been framed as “you get a discount if you come in early” rather than “you’ll pay more if you come in late,” nobody gets angry about it in the way people were angry about Wendy’s possible use of surge pricing, despite the logical equivalence of the policies.  What do you think, dear reader? Are there any policies you favor that you think would be better supported if only they were framed in a different way in public discourse? Or are there any policies you once supported (or opposed), but changed your mind when you heard them framed in a different way?  (0 COMMENTS)

You can find the best argument for the feasibility of private financing of public goods in Anthony de Jasay’s 1989 book Social Contract, Free Ride: A Study of the Public Goods Problem (Clarendon Press). As a bonus or a malus, you will also find there an argument against social contractarianism à la Buchanan. De Jasay’s book is a technical book, not necessarily easy to read and not without flaws. I summarized the argument and offered a critique in a recent Regulation article (see pp. 60-62). In a few words, let the individuals who don’t want to risk being deprived of a public good contribute to its financing and let free riders enjoy their free ride. (After all, aren’t we “inclusive”? Equal liberty for everybody!) An Economist article just provided an illustration of partial private financing in the most difficult case of public goods: territorial defense. The story is about the development shoebox-size listening stations that detect the sounds of attacking objects, analyze them with smartphones or microcomputers, and transmit the results to Ukrainian air-defence operators (“How Ukraine’s New Tech Foils Russian Aerial Attacks, The Economist, July 27, 2024): Kyivstar, a telecoms firm, installs Zvook’s kit on its cell towers, handles maintenance and transmits data all free of charge. … A far bigger acoustic-detection network has been developed by a secretive Ukrainian outfit called Sky Fortress. It consists of several thousand listening stations, with thousands more planned. Though its initial listening stations captured and processed sound with Android smartphones, the network, like Zvook’s, now uses dedicated microphones and microcomputers. Data are fed into a Ukrainian command-and-control system known as Virazh. Like ePPO and Zvook, Sky Fortress is mostly funded by donations, an astonishing development for air defence. Few outside experts are privy to Sky Fortress’s workings. One of them is Riki Ellison, founder of the Missile Defence Advocacy Alliance (MDAA), a non-profit in Alexandria, Virginia. Sky Fortress has become so extensive and “so damn good”, he says, it now detects most Russian munitions that fly low into Ukraine. Russian units have begun to muffle or otherwise alter their drones’ acoustic signatures, but the detection algorithms promptly adapt. “This is AI at its best,” says Mr Ellison. The crucial sentence is the last one of the second paragraph quoted above: “Like ePPO and Zvook, Sky Fortress is mostly funded by donations, an astonishing development for air defence”—even if the restrictive “mostly” suggests that public financing is also involved. The Economist’s article does not say whether the voluntary contributors are Ukrainians or their supporters elsewhere in the world, which would further inform us on the general possibility of financing public goods privately. Ukraine is not the rare bird called a free society, but it is certainly freer (or less unfree) than, say, Russia—free enough that we can see how independent innovation and private action is making a difference. Note that a public good for some is not necessarily a public good for others, like for the invading army in the present case. This observation further supports the general idea of letting individuals in ordinary social life free to each finance what he wants if he thinks it is worth it for himself (whatever his motivations). Note also that even in the freest of free societies, defense against international tyrants and thugs would be required—as I tried to illustrate with a fable in a recent post (“From the Fourth Millennium, A Tale for Libertarians”). I am not claiming that these ideas necessarily solve all the problems of politics. But they cannot be ignored. Acoustic detection of air attacks in Ukraine, with artistic license and AI glitches (0 COMMENTS)