Zach Weinersmith joins EconTalk host Russ Roberts for the third time to discuss why ambitions of space exploration are unrealistic and overly optimistic, the danger of all-encompassing utopianism, and why space settlement is not like buying a hot tub. Weinersmith is a cartoonist and author/co-author of many books, including Bea Wolf, Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That’ll Improve and/or Ruin Everything, and the topic of this podcast episode, A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? Weinersmith is also the author of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, a daily comic strip.   The podcast revolves around understanding space settlement as an ambition with roadblocks. Weinersmith shuts down the possibility of a settlement on the moon, for example, due to its lack of water, difficulty of extracting resources, and lack of an atmosphere. He says even though Mars is far more promising, it carries its own drawbacks: It is six months travel away from Earth and has planetary-wide dust storms. In general, humans don’t have the technological ability for long-term space settlement. Despite this, Weinersmith sees the literature on space settlement as biased towards advocacy for space exploration, regardless of the resource constraints and trade-offs. We did try to take an economist perspective, because you will often hear more physics types say, “well we can have Titanium on the moon.” But we never talk about Earth this way. I never say I can have a house because my backyard has silicon for windows and aluminum for metal, and wood is of course made of carbon and hydrogen, so I’m all good. Yet somehow, it’s okay to talk about the moon like this, as if no trade-off exists. Negative trade-offs have always impacted space missions. Weinersmith’s example is the Apollo program, which he regards as politically unpopular, feasible only once, and far too costly in terms of resources only to briefly go to the moon. But the most concerning drawback comes with the question of whether space settlement is ethical given the negative effects of space on human biology, psychology, and development. I will shortly rattle off a bunch of bad stuff that space does to you. The longest an individual has ever been consecutively in space is 437 days, so all this bad stuff is in the context of a very short period of time. Space reliably degrades muscle density especially in areas of your body you just don’t use in space like your hips. You can get renal stones because so much calcium is coming out of your system. This is what your body does when you don’t use stuff, it goes away, and that is with a huge amount of exercise and strength training. Jerry Lininger was an astronaut who went aboard Mir, the big Soviet space station, he was very proud that after something like four and a half months aboard he was able to walk when he came out. Weinersmith outlines how the political showmanship common in space exploration projects, as opposed to earnest scientific curiosity, means we know almost nothing about how space affects pregnant people and newborn children. This would make any future children born in space lab rats. To Weinersmith, all these problems make it incredibly difficult and unethical, for very little upside, prompting the response from Roberts, “What’s the appeal of this?” Roberts asks Weinersmith if it worries him that his claim of the nearly impossible difficulty of space settlement is overlooking technological innovation. After all, there are many existing technologies that were once seen as impossible, like the airplane. Weinersmith dismisses this argument, as it’s more of a hope than a legitimate retort, and the necessity of remarkable innovation points more to space settlement’s infeasibility. When you talk to space people, the classic example they’ll bring up is aviation. Of course, you don’t want to fall foul of it, but you have to be careful with this kind of reasoning. It’s very indicative that the aviation comparison in space books about the incoming imminent future of awesome space stuff was being made in the 50’s…The extent to which a particular scenario requires extraordinary developments kind of tells you something about its nature. If it requires 100 Butlers per person to go to Mars then it’s not a libertarian frontier fantasy, it’s a Star Trek fantasy. As Space X has shown, space travel can be privatized. Should the lack of technology for settlement prevent companies from attempting missions into space? Weinersmith calls this the hot tub argument, as space travel can be as private as the decision of buying a hot tub. But Weinersmith disagrees. He believes that space travel presents a risk to humankind, large enough to the point where some veto power should be given to third parties. You can imagine the spectrum from going to buy a hot tub, which basically has no third party with any right to say no, and buying a nuclear weapon where essentially everybody should be able to say no. the question becomes, where does space settlement fall on that axis? You might think, why is it not a pure aesthetic choice. Well, try to imagine, as some people have proposed, putting a million tons of metal about 70 miles high in orbit. I think most of us feel like we should have a say whether anyone is allowed to just do that. Because it creates this huge hazard, not dissimilar from detonating nuclear weapons. Our ultimate conclusion is that the hot tub argument clearly won’t do. It’s not a simple personal choice. Even if you imagine fusion drives and whatever else, having a world where private actors can put enormous amounts of high-speed metal in space is a world where humanity is endangered. It seems like there just has to be some kind of regulatory framework. Though most of the podcast is spent discussing why a city on Mars or the Moon is a fantasy which hasn’t been thought through, Weinersmith acknowledges that the will to expand human civilization into space is an understandable application of the explorer mindset of humans. He lauds the questions prompted by space advocates as fascinating and intriguing. Weinersmith is not telling his audience to stop exploring, innovating, or asking questions. Instead, he is calling for the utopianism surrounding space exploration to slow down, an acknowledgement of the tall barriers and severe risk. I would say the other thing that should give you pause is that particular fantasy tends to be more libertarian in the American sense, a conservative Frontier fantasy. But I have seen it as a leftist fantasy, like we’ll avoid capitalism when we go to space. It should make you pause when space allows every utopia to exist. Quite consistently throughout the episode, Roberts says Weinersmith’s ideas are somewhat discouraging. But I don’t think so. Weinersmith’s work acknowledges that there are no panaceas, and the attempt to create one can have disastrous consequences. Given the occasionally depressing state of the world, it is appealing to be able to start anew. Weinersmith is asking the audience to examine the costs of doing that. In my opinion, those costs begin with climate change. Space exploration is a tactic of avoidance, not a genuine solution, as is often the case with utopian ambitions. For instance, socialism is not a solution to economic inequality, social alienation, or worker maltreatment; it is a hypothetical rocket-ship to a world where the faults of capitalism don’t exist, without regard for the ethical or economic constraints of the new system. Utopianism has a high opportunity cost, namely a counter-intuitive diversion of attention away from contemporary problems. The resources which could be devoted to the innovation necessary for planetary settlement over an undetermined length of time could instead be devoted to reducing carbon emissions and expanding green energy. Utopianism isn’t feasible, but it also isn’t preferable.   Related EconTalk Episodes Zach Weinersmith on Beowulf and Bea Wolf Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith on Soonish Matt Ridley on How Innovation Works Mike Munger on Middlemen Patri Friedman on Seasteading Eliezer Yudkowsky on the Dangers of AI (0 COMMENTS)

A strange story echoed in Newsweek suggests that many people have not reflected on how democratic politics works, or perhaps they confuse politics as they wish it should be with what it actually is. The magazine writes (“Donald Trump Threatened With New Investigation,” May 11, 2024): Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, has threatened former President Donald Trump with a new investigation into his reported promises to Big Oil. The Washington Post reported this week of a deal that Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, reportedly offered to top oil executives at a Mar-a-Lago dinner last month—raise $1 billion for his campaign and he will reverse dozens of President Joe Biden’s environmental regulations and prevent new rules, according to people with knowledge of the dinner. According to the Post’s sources, Trump said gifting him $1 billion would be a “deal,” because of the taxation and regulations they wouldn’t have to worry about if he was in office. … “Put those things together and it starts to look mighty damn corrupt,” Whitehouse said. In reality, bribes, solicited or offered, are the bread and butter of politicians. They promise political goodies in return for one form of support or another, or they respond to interest groups’ support with favorable interventions. These deals represent the political form of economic exchange, which is why public choice theorists speak of the “political market.” Joe Biden openly seeks the support of trade union apparatchiks and members in return for “worker-centric” policies. Perhaps Donald Trump is just more transparent. And he plays the game on the side of different special interests—although, as any populist worth his salt, he also tries to bribe workers with tariffs imposed on consumers and on importing businesses. A qualification is needed: a political bribe aimed at extending freedom of contract to everybody equally—which we don’t see very often these days—should not be condemned; it is the system creating this necessity that is condemnable. Political bribing also occurs when a politician offers a certain class of voters to favor their interests or opinions or sentiments—and they are often the same thing—in exchange for their support for his own interest in the perks of power. Bribing is at the core of majoritarian politics. The consequences for public and private ethics, and for the survival of a free society, are far from insignificant. The more power the state has, the more widespread such legal corruption becomes. A defining characteristic of the classical liberal and libertarian tradition has been to argue against state power, democratic or not. James Buchanan, the 1986 Nobel laureate in economics, proposed one way of solution through the “constitutional political economy” that developed on the foundations of public-choice economics. The solution revolves around constitutional limits on day-to-day politics and is precisely meant to stop the negative-sum game of redistribution and exploitation of political losers by political winners. Buchanan and his collaborators argued that it is only at the level of constitutional rules unanimously accepted in a virtual social contract that political exchange can be non-exploitative; at this level (the “constitutional stage”), he argues, politics resembles an economic exchange in everybody’s interest. It is not exploitative because, in theory, any individual can oppose his veto to a system of rules that would have larger costs than benefits for him. (See his The Limits of Liberty, his seminal The Calculus of Consent with Gordon Tullock; and his The Reason of Rules with Geoffrey Brennan; the links are to my reviews of these books.) The most radical and subversive attack against majoritarian politics from an avowedly liberal viewpoint can be found in the writings of another economist and political philosopher, Anthony de Jasay, including in his appropriately titled book Against Politics (link to my review). If we wish to round up the picture of the main strands of liberal political philosophy in the 20th century, we might add Friedrich Hayek’s critique of majoritarian democracy. In pursuit of expediency (cost-benefit analysis writ large), democratic politics destroys the traditional rule of law that generated an auto-regulated social order. (See notably his Rules and Order and The Mirage of Social Justice; links to my reviews.) (1 COMMENTS)

Spontaneous order is one of those ideas you can find in all areas of life once you understand it. But equally interesting is witnessing people noticing the phenomenon who have never studied the subject but find examples of it in seemingly obscure domains. I found an example of a video game reviewer and journalist noticing spontaneous order at work in a video essay posted to YouTube. The subject? How video games use color to convey ideas. He opens by saying: As you can probably tell from my dress sense, I don’t place a lot of importance on color. But I do find it interesting that, with no apparent discussion or collusion on the subject, video games have developed their own unique color language. Isn’t it interesting how, in the world of live-service gear grinding, that green means uncommon, purple means rare, and orange means super rare? Why is that always the case? Who decided that? I don’t remember participating in a vote. But this is just scratching the surface. Interface designers have long been able to employ specific colors to instantly convey certain concepts to the player with no additional explanation required. He goes on to list out various colors and what they are often used to convey. Part of what makes this a good example of a spontaneous order can be found in his above comment. These systems and conventions around color occurred “with no apparent discussion or collusion on the subject,” without anyone so much as “participating in a vote.” That is to say, the patterns he identifies have emerged as the result of human action but not of deliberate human design. But there are a few other elements of spontaneous order on display here.  First, a spontaneous order can often seem messy and even contradictory at first glance. For example, when he discusses how video games have used the color green, he notes that what green conveys can be “all over the place.” It’s often associated with health and healing in games, but at the same time it can be used to the opposite effect to signal poison. On other occasions, it can be used to indicate elemental damage, sometimes signaling “poison, acid, plant, and even wind” based damage. As someone with many years of gaming experience, I can think of examples of all of these. And what’s curious is that despite green being used to indicate a wide variety of different and even contradictory things, I’ve never once been confused about what it was meant to signal in any specific context. That is, I never once came across something green in a game thinking it would restore health only to find, to my surprise, that was poison instead. This is because color is just one of a number of ways ideas are conveyed, and other points of a game’s context make it clearer what “green” is supposed to mean in a given case. Yet I doubt I could specifically articulate exactly what these other factors are and in what combination they are used to precisely indicate what green means in this specific case. I just know I when I see it. The information used is not the kind of information that is easily articulated and categorized into discrete rules.  Second, once rules and conventions have emerged through this process, sticking to them becomes important, because common knowledge allows people to reliably know what to expect in their environment. When game developers ignore the established order about what colors convey, they end up confusing the gamer. Watching the above mentioned video triggered the memory imp in my brain to dig up an old essay from years ago discussing an example of exactly that issue. In this case, the issue was red barrels. In a video game with a heavy focus on shooting, if you see a barrel that is red, there is a 100% chance that shooting the barrel will make it explode, causing massive damage to nearby enemies. (And in video games, the bad guys are usually sporting enough to ensure their base of operations is just littered with these barrels because…reasons?) The “exploding red barrel” is among the oldest clichés in video games. One game developer tried to break free of the cliché by making their exploding barrels green instead of red: A representative of the Bulletstorm design team, known as Arcade, blogged about the process that went into making the exploding barrels in the game. They initially wanted to go with green barrels to counter the red stereotype. In the heat of the action, however, they discovered players largely ignored the barrels; they would see a flash of green while running and it didn’t register as “explosive.” In this case, the team rightly decided that conveying an instant message was more important that making a style statement.  This is a trivial but real example of how the conventions established by a spontaneous order, even if they are seemingly arbitrary, are still valuable because they help communicate important information and coordinate behavior and establish expectations.  Lastly, the full set of rules and ideas embedded in a spontaneous order can’t be fully categorized. This comes across in the video towards the end, when a suggestion is made for people in the comments to “mention any video game color associations I missed.” There are plenty of examples to be found in the comments, and I could think of a few more myself. This reflects how any attempt to identify the rules that emerge from a spontaneous order will always be limited and partial – not being the deliberate design of any human mind, they can’t be fully reduced to a system of explicit, articulated rules by a human mind. This doesn’t make it pointless to attempt to tease out what those rules are, of course. But we should always bear in mind that no attempt will every fully capture all the relevant information. (1 COMMENTS)

Over time, ideologies can evolve in unforeseen ways. Consider the following four public policy developments:1. The Biden administration has attempted to forgive many student loans for college education.2. Several cities in California have imposed rent controls.3. Florida recently banned lab grown meat.4. North Carolina is attempting to ban mask wearing in public. While the first two examples are often views as progressive legislation and the other two are viewed as populist initiatives, they all share something in common. In each case, the legislation can be seen as a perversion of an earlier form of the ideology in question. Let’s start with progressivism.  At the beginning, this ideology was heavily motivated by flaws (real or imagined) in laissez-faire economics.  Progressives worried that unrestrained capitalism might lead to abusive monopolies and a highly unequal distribution of income.  This led to policy initiatives such as regulation of rates charged by utilities and redistribution programs such as the earned income tax credit. Over time, however, progressivism became increasingly associated with the means, and not the ends of legislation.  Thus to be a progressive meant to favor “regulation” and “redistribution”, regardless of whether it achieved the original goals of the movement. Obviously, the case for rent controls in markets with thousands of individual landlords is far weaker than the case for price controls when there is a single monopoly provider of water or electricity.  And it is equally clear that the case for redistributing money from the general taxpayer to college educated Americans is far weaker than the argument for redistributing money to low wage workers.  But the progressive movement is dominated by younger Americans.  This group is disproportionately comprised of recent college grads living in apartments in expensive coastal cities. The recent wave of populism was at least partly motivated by resentment against the perception that elites were forcing the public into undesirable changes in their lifestyle (such as mask wearing during pandemics) and unpopular climate change initiatives (such as the discouragement of meat consumption.)  But over time, the lifestyle issues gradually came to displace the “freedom” aspect of populism.  Opposition to mask mandates morphed into simple opposition to masks.  Resentment that elites were trying to impose a certain lifestyle was replaced by attempts to ban the undesired lifestyle.  This is the natural evolution of populism.  It begins as an attempt to free the public from oppression, and ends up imposing another form of oppression once the populists gain power. One could cite many more such examples.  The college free speech movement of the 1960s was originally focused on allowing students to express far left political views.  By the 2000s, the freedom aspect was forgotten and college activists had begun trying to mandate that students express left wing views. Similarly, right wing opposition to woke excesses began as an attempt to allow more free speech on campus, but in at least some places has evolved into an attempt to ban certain left wing ideologies. The civil rights movement began as a crusade for a colorblind society.  While the initial focus was on outlawing discrimination against minorities, over time the emphasis shifted toward mandating discrimination in favor of minorities.  (Those “reverse discrimination”policies may have had unintended side effects, such as making employers reluctant to hire workers that they might be unable to fire at some point in the future.) Feminism began as an attempt to stop society from treating people differently because of their gender, but has evolved into an ideology demanding that people be treated differently because of their gender. Why do ideologies continually lose their bearings?  I suspect the problem reflects the fact that very few people are committed to broad principles such as freedom or utility maximization.  Instead, they have “special interests”, and use these various ideologies as a convenient cudgel to attack their opponents and achieve their actual policy goals. PS.  Matt Yglesias has a very good post discussing some of the same issues. (0 COMMENTS)

If you didn’t have to work to enjoy material abundance, would you do it anyway? If an algorithm or a pill could achieve better results, would you bother shopping or going to the gym? These are the kinds of questions we’ll need to ask ourselves if AI makes all human labor and other traditional ways […] The post Purpose, Pleasure, and Meaning in a World Without Work (with Nicholas Bostrom) appeared first on Econlib.

We should be careful about words, expressions, and catchphrases, especially those political hyperboles that buttress the statist zeitgeist of our time. You are a product of greedy corporations. The author of the May 16 Economist newsletter “The World in Brief” says it in passing: Walmart’s ad operation is much smaller than that of Amazon, which is ahead in e-commerce and video streaming. But Walmart has the advantage in the ground war. In its 10,000 stores advertisers can buy access to customers on signs, screens and in-store radio. Next time you browse a supermarket for products, remember that you are a product too. It is not clear what exactly the journalist is referring to. To verify, I went to my usual Walmart but I did not see a single third-party ad—except of course for the brand names and slogans of the products on the shelves. I didn’t see any screen or hear any advertisement.  The retailer does sell advertising to third-party sellers on its Walmart Marketplace website, though. What is the problem anyway with Walmart selling advertising? Information related to your possible interest in exchanging is part of living in any society above the tribe or command society, especially in a prosperous society. Such information is quite certainly more beneficial for most people than state propaganda. Does private advertising mean that you are a product? Are you even a product of Google when it sell data that you give away by using its free services? According to Merriam-Webster, a product is “something (such as a service) that is marketed or sold as a commodity.” A slave would be a product. A free person of course is not. Even in a figurative way, you cannot be a slave of sellers whose proposals you are free to decline without any threat of punishment. Referring to their concept of “slavery of wage labor,” Marxists would say that Walmart workers are slaves, which does not make sense: at any time, they can walk away and work for somebody else or for themselves. If Walmart employees are not slaves, it is even more obvious that its customers are not, even if they are exposed to advertising when they choose to visit the company’s physical or virtual sites. ****************************** The more abstract the topic you try to represent with DALL-E’s cooperation, the more difficult it is to obtain zir cooperation. It is not surprising because an AI bot does not think. The featured image of this post is the best I was able to obtain after a large number of instructions that were not understood. A “product” in the process of grocery shopping, by DALL-E and PL (0 COMMENTS)

Brickbat: Robot’s Day of Rest by Charles Oliver, Reason, May 10, 2024. Excerpt: A German court has ruled that the robots at the Tegut supermarket chain must be given Sundays off, just like human workers. Under German law, retail stores must close on Sundays and Christian holidays in order to give employees a day of rest. Tegut has gotten around that law by fully automating its stores, and it gets 25–30 percent of its sales on Sunday. A union that represents shop workers filed suit to force the stores to close on Sundays, saying it fears the company’s success could undermine support for the nation’s blue laws. My comment: A good reminder of one the many ways that the United States doesn’t suck. Free Trade with Free Nations by Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution, May 14, 2024. Excerpt: Alec Stapp points out that Canada is the only NATO country that has a free trade agreement with the United States. That’s quite remarkable if you think about it. NATO allies are bound by mutual defense commitments, support for military cooperation, and a dedication to democratic principles. Despite these shared commitments, the U.S. still enforces tariffs and quotas on our NATO allies including France, Germany, the UK, Denmark, Portugal, and Spain. This is like getting married and not having a joint checking account. If they are good enough partners to commit to their defense then surely NATO allies are good enough partners to commit to free trade? (bold added)   Biden Offers to Turn U.S. Military Personnel Into Saudi Royal Bodyguards by Doug Bandow, The American Conservative, May 9, 2024. Excerpt: Biden took office talking of his commitment to human rights and determination to turn MbS, as the crown prince is known, into a “pariah.” Now the administration is proposing to turn the U.S. military into a modern Janissary corps, a bodyguard for the thousands of royal princes who rule over their countrymen. It is well past time to stop deferring to the KSA. And: For years American policymakers justified their fixation on the Mideast on the importance of protecting Israel and importing oil. Israel, however, has become a regional military superpower, threatened more by its brutal mistreatment of Palestinians and bitter internal political struggles than outside attack. The oil market has diversified, and supplies are limited mostly by American sanctions, which could be liberalized or lifted at any time. Terrorism is a problem of endless and disastrous U.S. military intervention. Growing Chinese and Russian activity in the region is a diplomatic challenge, not a threat warranting increased military commitments. Today, as my Cato Institute colleague Jon Hoffman explained, “What Washington needs from the region on” issues traditionally central to the Saudi relationship, most notably oil, stability, and terrorism, “is quite limited and simple to achieve.” Any support for Riyadh is difficult to justify. Saudi Arabia is one of the world’s worst dictatorships. According to Freedom House, the Kingdom is more repressive than Russia, China, and Iran: “Saudi Arabia’s absolute monarchy restricts almost all political rights and civil liberties. No officials at the national level are elected. The regime relies on pervasive surveillance, the criminalization of dissent, appeals to sectarianism and ethnicity, and public spending supported by oil revenues to maintain power.” MbS’s misrule was highlighted by the gruesome murder and dismemberment of the journalistic critic Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey. More than five years later, the official coverup continues.   All Is Not Quiet In the Library Catalogs by Anonymous, Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, May 15, 2024. Excerpt: Traditional cataloging practice requires the cataloger to describe the book as objectively as possible; there are even specific guidelines reminding catalogers not to select subject headings (those hyperlinked topic descriptors in the record) based on their own values and beliefs. One of the first questions I was asked in my hiring interview was to confirm that I would agree to catalog materials that I, personally, found offensive. After all, libraries—and, by extension, catalogers—are supposed to be guardians of free speech and intellectual freedom. We do not know who will be looking for the materials and for what purpose, and so we have to be fair, accurate, and objective in order to make it  easier for the material to be found. But it seems that now the overriding duty of the cataloger is to  protect the patrons from the harm that the records (not even the materials!) may cause them. In the discussions I mentioned above, fellow catalogers were unabashedly stating that certain marginalized groups should get to decide how a book should be labeled. If a cataloger who is a member of a marginalized social group believes the book in question is harmful or offensive, he is fully in the right to add a note in the catalog stating his beliefs. Thus we now have four books in the international catalog (used by libraries worldwide) with the label “Transphobic works”. Several books that are critical of the current gender affirmation care model now have the subject heading “Transphobia”. These books are not about transphobia, so the subject heading is likely being used as a way to warn the reader of the record (and potentially the librarian choosing which books to order for the library) that these are “bad books” and should not be read or purchased.   The ‘Heart’ of Alvin Bragg’s Case Against Trump Is Misdirection by Jacob Sullum, Reason, May 15, 2024. Excerpt: “This was a planned, coordinated, long-running conspiracy to influence the 2016 election, to help Donald Trump get elected through illegal expenditures, to silence people who had something bad to say about his behavior,” lead prosecutor Matthew Colangelo said at the beginning of Trump’s trial last month. “It was election fraud, pure and simple.” Contrary to Colangelo’s spin, there is nothing “pure and simple” about the case against Trump. To begin with, Trump is not charged with “conspiracy” or “election fraud.” He is charged with violating a New York law against “falsifying business records” with “intent to defraud.” The Scandalous Science Behind Nuclear Regulation by James Broughel, Reason, May 15, 2024. Excerpt: Nuclear power could be a game-changer for energy affordability, grid reliability, and carbon reduction. However, it’s been stifled for decades based on one deeply flawed scientific model: the linear no-threshold (LNT) model. The theory underlying this model suggests that any exposure to ionizing radiation, no matter how small, increases cancer risks and that risks rise in a linear way with exposure levels. It’s not true. The roots of LNT’s dominance are more political than scientific. Its influence traces back to Hermann Muller, a geneticist and 1946 Nobel Prize winner. Muller’s research in the 1920s and ’30s claimed to show that radiation induces mutations in fruit flies, with no safe threshold. He became an ardent evangelist for the idea that even tiny radiation doses could cause hereditary defects. However, it appears Muller may have deliberately misled his followers. For example, Muller falsely claimed in his 1946 Nobel acceptance speech that there was “no escape” from the conclusion that any radiation is harmful, despite being aware of evidence to the contrary.   (0 COMMENTS)

In his book Minority Report, H.L. Mencken writes: “The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.  Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve.  This is true even of the pious brethren who carry the gospel [sic] to foreign parts.”   With a little rewriting, we can update the quote for protectionism: “The urge to defend the nation is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.  Power is what all protectionists seek: not the chance to serve.” National defense is a common justification for protectionist tariffs, and it has been driven to absurd extremes: clothespins, sugar, and baby food have all been described as vital to national defense and subject to tariffs.   In a particularly goofy example, Senator Rick Scott of Florida has called for a ban on Chinese-grown garlic on the grounds it threatens national security.  Now, perhaps if we were a nation of vampires, this claim would make sense.  But it’s hard to see how garlic, even garlic that is potentially tainted, is a threat to national security.  Scott argues that the garlic poses a potential health threat, but that is not the same as a national security threat. What is weird about the argument Scott is putting forth is that he does not need to ban Chinese garlic as a national security threat if it is as dangerous as he claims.  We already have a food safety program here in the US, and foreign goods are also subject to it.  If Chinese garlic is a public health threat, the FDA has the authority to act by issuing recalls and otherwise effectively banning the tainted product if it poses a threat to human or animal health.  It’s unclear why Senator Scott’s act is needed. To go back to a theme I have been harping on in recent posts, any intervention needs to be justified beyond just some hypothetical musing.  Simply showing that some intervention could accomplish some desired outcome does not mean the action is justified or desirable.  We need to examine the current state of laws and legislation to see if the intervention is actually justified, or if it is just rank corruption hiding behind a false-face.  One question Senator Scott (or others who defend this intervention) must answer is: why is the current legislation inadequate?  It is already illegal to sell tainted food in the US.  If Chinese garlic is such a threat, why hasn’t the FDA shut it down? National defense is one of those justifications that people don’t seem to think about that much.  It is invoked and simply not questioned.  Indeed, this is probably why “national defense” is such a successful false-face to rent-seek: few look too closely at the mask.  Perhaps, like the partygoers at Poe’s masquerade in the Masque of the Read Death, the people who support spurious national defense claims are afraid to see what lies beneath that mask.   Jon Murphy is an assistant professor of economics at Nicholls State University. (0 COMMENTS)

Chicago’s population is down about 25% from its peak back in 1950. That statement might conjure up images of empty blocks of homes, as you see in Detroit. In fact, Chicago remains quite crowded. I cannot find the article, but I recall reading that Chicago now has more households than ever before. Average household size has shrunk dramatically since 1950, due to factors such as fewer children and more independent living for young adults and the elderly.The OC Register reports some seemingly odd data for California. Its housing stock has grown since 2020, its population has shrunk, and yet home prices have soared. This has led to dark conspiracy theories that there are lots of empty houses in California held by speculators, and that this is boosting prices. Not so. If California’s population is well off its peak, and developers keep on building housing, why does the cost of living in the Golden State remain lofty? . . . Start with the basics: California had 38.2 million residents living in households last year – that’s down 375,800 since 2020, or a 0.9% loss. In the same timeframe, California’s housing stock grew to 14.8 million residences – a 432,700 improvement since 2020, or 3% growth. The puzzle can be resolved if we consider the nearly 4% decline in average household size: The average number of Californians living in an occupied housing unit was 2.75 last year – that’s down from 2.86 in 2020. That’s not an insignificant change across 39 million residents. Why did it occur? There’s the pandemic effect of people wanting larger living quarters, often shunning roommates. Others got historically cheap mortgages in 2021-22 and won’t move, no matter how oversized their residence is for their needs. Some of this trend may be adult children leaving the parents’ home – with destinations both in and out of state. Young families frequently exited for other states, too. Or it’s older residents losing a spouse. No matter the cause, smaller households gobble up housing supply. In addition, birthrates are declining. I believe that Kevin Erdmann was the first to document the fact that a booming economy in a housing constrained market (such as LA) leads to population loss, as working class families move to cheaper states and are replaced by younger childless professionals.  Selfish empty nesters like me live in houses that are far too big for our needs.  (I recall back in the 1990s driving a Chinese visitor around one of the nicer neighborhoods in Newton, Massachusetts.  The awestruck lady asked how many families lived in each house. I gave my wife the “Who’s going to tell her” look.)   PS.  Although Chicago remains relatively “full” despite a 25% population decline; there are rust belt cities that are much worse off.  Detroit, Cleveland and St. Louis have seen population declines of 60% to 70%, and thus do have vast areas that are emptying out. (0 COMMENTS)

Charging extra for specific preferences, such as a seat selection on a flight, enables lower basic prices, increasing access to no-frills options for lower-income customers, while allowing businesses to customize their services to individual customers’ preferences. Airlines unbundle in-flight food and checked bags, for example, leading to more profit opportunities and lower base fares. Yes, “price discrimination”—charging various customers different amounts for the same product—can sometimes be harmful to customers on net. But banning such unbundling when consumers put wildly different values on certain services can price out poorer consumers and compel others to pay for services they neither want nor need. Likewise, overdraft fees from banks help disincentivize costly behavior. Banks incur costs and face heightened risks when customers overdraw their accounts. Overdraft charges help deter this behavior in a well-targeted way, by imposing charges on those customers whose accounts become overdrawn. Capping or constraining overdraft fees doesn’t eliminate these costs and risks; it just means someone else must be charged for them in a different way. Banning overdraft charges thus means higher prices for some other subset of a bank’s customers. This is from Ryan Bourne, “Abolishing ‘Junk’ Fees Would Be Junk Policy,” in Ryan A. Bourne, The War on Prices: How Popular Misconceptions About Inflation, Value, and Prices Create Bad Policy, which was released this week. There’s actually some other content between these two paragraphs. As I said in the blurb on the book this is one of my favorite chapters. Specifically, I wrote, “Particularly good are the chapters on rent controls, price controls on oil and natural gas, and so-called junk fees, which are really fees to solve problems that would exist without them.” Bourne quotes President Biden’s attack on “junk fees.” I get the impression, given Joe Biden’s low or close to zero understanding of economics, that Biden thinks that eliminating junk fees won’t cause any prices to rise. (0 COMMENTS)