Despite recent attempts to reduce barriers to building in California, the housing sector remains hamstrung by excessive regulation.  Ben Christopher writing at Cal Matters says there’s one bright spot in this otherwise dreary picture: But unlike the vast majority of affordable developments that have been proposed in California in recent memory, no taxpayer dollars are allotted to build the thing. Especially in the state’s expensive coastal cities, the term “unsubsidized 100% affordable project” is an oxymoron, but Los Angeles is now approving them by the hundreds. That’s thanks to an executive order Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, signed in December 2022, shortly after being sworn into office. In the year and change since, the city’s planning department has received plans for more than 16,150 affordable units, according to filings gathered by the real estate data company, ATC Research, and analyzed by CalMatters. That’s more than the total number of approved affordable units in Los Angeles in 2020, 2021 and 2022 combined. This sort of outcome was completely unexpected: “I don’t think anybody saw this coming,” said Scott Epstein, policy director at Abundant Housing LA and one of the authors of that analysis. “When it comes to 100% privately invested projects…I don’t think we’ve ever seen anything close to the magnitude that that has been unleashed.” The key to success was reducing the regulatory burdens faced by developers of affordable housing units: The order sets a shot-clock of 60 days for the city’s planning department to approve or reject a submitted project. As long as that project meets a basic set of criteria, it must be approved. That means no city council hearings, no neighborhood outreach meetings and no environmental impact studies required. . . . Another key detail: Unlike most recent statewide laws aimed at speeding up the approval of new housing, the Los Angeles law doesn’t require developers to pay construction workers heightened “prevailing wages” — roughly equal to what unionized construction workers earn on a public infrastructure projects. In the past those barriers were so burdensome that affordable housing could not be built in LA without large public subsidies.  But the recent change unleashed a wave of new projects that are 100% privately funded. Read the whole thing. (0 COMMENTS)

In my previous post, I wrote about one of the two most important prices in the Argentine (or any) economy- exchange rates. That brings us to the other of the two most essential prices in the economy, the one that is THE most important price, the time price of money, the interest rate. Interest rates are no less distorted in Argentina nowadays than the price of the local currency compared to other currencies.  Consider the short-term liabilities of the Argentinean central bank that Mr. Caputo, the Argentine finance minister, is concerned he will be forced to monetize if exchange markets are liberalized. Do you know the nominal rate they are paying per year? An APR of 100%, or about 9% per month. In nominal terms, that seems a lot; however, when inflation is running at 25% per month, the interest rate in real terms is negative to the tune of two digits per month!  No wonder people flee those deposits the first opportunity they have… Talking about the return to the gold standard after WWI, Mr. Jacques Rueff argued that no country needs gold to resume redemption; they must be willing to pay the interest rate necessary to keep depositors invested in the countries’ currency. That century-old lesson is as valid for Argentina today as it was then. The demand for pesos is low, because any cash balance you hold in that currency is losing purchasing power at 15% a month- even if you have an interest-bearing investment! In any modern economy, there are many distortions in the price of money; Argentina is an outlier in terms of the extent of the distortions but not their existence. It is not easy to allow financial markets to reveal the actual price of capital in the middle of so many interventions, but that is not an excuse not to liberalize markets and allow them to reveal the natural scarcity of savings in the Argentine economy. The fiscal needs of the state are indeed forcing the administration to continue to crowd out private investments to carry most of the existing savings to the funding of the public deficit, if not by paying higher interest rates, by creating other regulatory costs that make the more than 15% monthly loss the least bad of the investment alternatives peso holders have. Again, to bring the interest rate to something closer to market reality, to the time preference of Argentinean society, would imply positive interest rates, that is for sure… With that, Mr. Caputo is wasting the good will with which the new administration was received in its early days thanks to the significant majority of the votes it received in the recent elections and risking the success of the Milei’s administration.   Leonidas Zelmanovitz, a Senior Fellow with the Liberty Fund, holds a law degree from the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil and an economics doctorate from the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Spain. (0 COMMENTS)

This is a link to a talk I gave last month in Carmel, California. The talk is titled “Economic Inequality: Popular Misconceptions and Important Facts.” The hosts were the owners of a house that used to be owned by actress Joan Fontaine. The sponsor was the California Arts & Sciences Institute. My talk begins at the 1:30 point and goes to the 40:44 point. Then there’s pretty lively 30-minute Q& A. One very interesting part of Q&A was our discussion of Social Security.   (0 COMMENTS)

Here’s a question for you – should libertarians reject moral degeneracy?  (For now, let’s just table the object-level discussion about what specifically constitutes degeneracy, and focus on the meta-level discussion instead. Bob may think homosexuality constitutes moral degeneracy and should be rejected, but alcohol use is fine, while Bill may think alcohol use is morally degenerate and should be rejected, but homosexuality is fine. For the purposes of this discussion, Bill and Bob agree on the meta-level question that moral degeneracy should be rejected, even though they disagree at the object level about what behaviors are morally degenerate.) I ask this because out there on the wild world of Twitter, a fellow libertarian Tweeted out the following: “Libertarians shouldn’t accept degeneracy!” If you truly believe this you don’t know what libertarianism is. Libertarianism is a philosophy regarding the political/legal order, nothing more. Moral degeneracy is not an issue of the political/legal order, unless you believe that the state exists to make us moral. And if you believe that, you are categorically NOT a libertarian. Certainly there are some thinkers out there who believe there is a role for the state to make us moral, and I share this person’s distrust for that idea. But I still don’t think his Tweet quite works, for a few reasons.  Let’s accept that libertarianism has nothing to say beyond the political/legal order, and thus it offers no prescriptions about how what people ought to believe or how they ought to act beyond that specific realm. Even so, it doesn’t follow from this that there is nothing else libertarians ought to believe, accept, or reject. For example, I would say that “libertarians shouldn’t accept Holocaust denial.” Note that in making this statement, I am not calling for government-imposed censorship to silence people who deny the Holocaust. To say, “you shouldn’t accept X” is not the logical equivalent of “X should be banned by the state.” Also, remember not to equivocate between accepting something, and merely tolerating it – while I do believe libertarians should tolerate Holocaust denial on free speech grounds, you can disapprove of something while still tolerating it.  Holocaust denial is not strictly speaking an issue of the political/legal order, but libertarians should still reject it, because it’s not true. That is, the reasons that exist to reject Holocaust denial still obtain independently of libertarian political philosophy. Everyone should reject Holocaust denial for those reasons – including libertarians. Libertarians should also reject the geocentric model of the solar system. Geocentrism doesn’t run afoul of libertarian arguments regarding the political/legal order, but nonetheless libertarians shouldn’t accept it – because there are sound arguments against it.  Similarly, I know Christian libertarians who believe the state should have no role in mandating or compelling religion. Yet, they also believe that libertarians (and everyone else) should accept Christianity – because they believe Christianity is, in fact, true. And while I disagree with them at the object-level, I agree with them at the meta-level – if Christianity is true, then libertarians should accept it, as should non-libertarians. To say “libertarians shouldn’t accept Christianity because libertarianism is simply about the political order, nothing more” seems, well, obviously wrong. And for the same reason, if there are sound arguments that moral degeneracy is a real phenomenon, and is bad, and ought not be accepted, then it seems almost trivially true that libertarians should reject moral degeneracy. One can believe this without believing the state is therefore mandated to make us moral. So, the Tweet above contains a few confusions, as I see it. It seemingly conflates whether or not one ought to accept or reject certain beliefs or modes of behavior as implying that the state should mandate or forbid those beliefs or modes of behavior. It also seems to imply that the sole reason libertarians have for accepting or rejecting anything must come from libertarian arguments about the political order – and if libertarian arguments about the political order don’t touch on moral degeneracy, then libertarians have no reason to reject moral degeneracy. But who says the arguments of libertarian political philosophy are the sole basis on which we ought to evaluate ideas, or decide what we should accept or reject?  I prefer the more holistic approach reflected by Adam Smith, particularly in his The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Smith does say that a person who simply keeps his hands to himself has done pretty much all that he can justly be compelled to do – “We may often fulfil all the rules of justice by sitting still and doing nothing.” (That is, simply refraining from violating the negative rights of others.) But Smith’s vision was broader than this. He still believed there were ways we ought to behave, and behaviors we ought to reject, over and above the merest requirements of what can be justly forced. Fulfilling all the rules of justice was a necessary condition for a civilization to grow and thrive and flourish – but by no means was it the sole and sufficient condition. Smith spoke extensively about the desire not just to be praised but to be praiseworthy, and the desire to avoid not just being blamed but to be blameworthy. This entails that there are modes of behavior that in fact deserve to be praised, and other modes of behavior deserving of blame, and that we ought to engage in the former and avoid the latter. How is this meant to work if we speak as though the sole criteria for what we ought to accept or reject is simply what is established by the political order?  There is a danger of sliding from “even though we should reject X there shouldn’t be a law against it” to thinking “since there shouldn’t be a law against X, we shouldn’t reject it.” Theodore Dalrymple worried about this in his book In Praise of Prejudice: The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas, where he argued the latter view, in practice, “ends up increasing the  power of government over individuals” by “destroying all moral authority that intervenes between individual human will and governmental power. Everything that is not forbidden by law is, ipso facto, permissible. What is legally permissible is morally permissible…This, of course, makes the law, and therefore those who make the law, the moral arbiters of society. It is they who, by definition, decide what is permissible and what is not.”  I worry that the above Tweeter, and many other libertarians, sometimes fall into this mode of thinking. In the Tweet that inspired this post, it was suggested that there were apparently only two options – either you think the state must be mandated to become the moral arbiter of society, or you must accept moral degeneracy. This is accepted with delight by many social conservatives before throwing down the reverse-card – while the libertarian above suggests that since the state shouldn’t be a moral arbiter libertarians shouldn’t reject moral degeneracy, some conservatives argue that since we shouldn’t accept moral degeneracy, we need to make the state a moral arbiter.  I reject both side of that coin. In my view, we don’t want the state to be a moral arbiter and this makes it all the more important that we recognize there are behaviors we ought to accept and reject independently of what the political order requires. Edmund Burke was right when he said, “Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.” And if libertarians are keen to ensure as little control as possible comes from without, it’s all the more important to cultivate it from within.  Or at least that’s how it seems to me. If you disagree (or even if you agree, I suppose), do by all means say so in the comments! I’d love to hear your thoughts, dear readers!    (0 COMMENTS)

“I am ready to serve,” said Kamala Harris. Shouldn’t we be surprised to hear politicians begging to serve? There are places for that. One can get a job at McDonald’s. If one is more of an altruist, one can serve as a nurse or in a private charity. (See “Kamala Harris Says She Is Ready to Serve as Biden Faces Age Scrutiny,” Wall Street Journal, February 12, 2024.) If Ms. Harris were to serve at McDonald’s, she would soon discover a big difference. There, nobody is obliged to pay for or eat what he has not personally ordered. What is served must be what each one wants. A student of human affairs may suspect that this is precisely what Ms. Harris wants in “serving” politically: to force half the population to eat what she serves. In other words, as she later prudishly admits, what she wants is not to serve, but “to lead”: Everyone who sees her on the job, Ms. Harris said, “walks away fully aware of my capacity to lead.” Am I overdoing my point? The standard economic objection is that, in a free society, the state and its agents serve in the sense that they produce “public goods,” including public services, that everybody wants but cannot be produced on the market. In that sense, politicians do “serve” in the big McDonald’s of political society. They produce services such as the enforcement of contracts and the rule of law, public security, and territorial defense, instead of Big Macs. But this is not the humble role that politicians long for in a democratic regime with totalitarian pretensions. Moreover, public choice analysis has demonstrated the explanatory power of the hypothesis that politicians (and bureaucrats) are motivated by the same self-interestedness as ordinary people. The problem is that instead of serving other people while pursuing their own interest like a McDonald’s employee does, politicians actively work against the interests of those who are not essential to their election. This is clear in a majoritarian democracy. We may admit that the rulers of Anthony de Jasay’s “capitalist state,” whose only function would be to make sure that the state is not taken over by people intent at “governing” (that is, of favoring some at the cost of harming others), would be worthy of some special esteem. More generally, politicians who would try to maintain a free society with equal liberty for all might properly deserve the gratitude of everybody who benefits from such a regime—which must be virtually everybody, at least in the long run. But this is obviously not the sort of humble servants we have. (0 COMMENTS)

As war in Gaza rages on, in this episode, EconTalk host Russ Roberts welcomes Israeli journalist Haviv Rettig Gur for an historical look at antisemitism, the Holocaust, and “the long twentieth century.” Gur offers a deep dive into anti-Semitism, particularly in the European context, before turning to the present day conflict. Gur’s account starts in 1880 with the assassination of Russia’s Czar Alexander and the rise of industrialization. He emphasizes the bottom-up nature of the “mass popular pogroms” in the Southern Russian Empire related to the expanding railway network. While the Jews, says Gur, tended to see such incidents as evidence of regime-based action, historians now agree that this was a mistake. Rather, “The people around them, around whom they had lived, really wanted them gone and really wanted them tortured and dehumanized until they understood the point.” As Jews left the Imperial lands by the millions, many fled westward toward the Austro-Hungarian and German empires, who in turn blamed the Russian regime dumping their “Jewish problem” on them. Thus was anti-Semitism in the early 20tgh century both a bottom-up and a top-down phenomenon. Gur argues this fundamentally reshaped the Jewish world both mentally and geographically. “And that is the beginning of 60 years of the steady, not just emptying out of Europe of its Jews, but the conscious, willful, purposeful, systematic making of Europe uninhabitable to Jews. ” This historical background Gur says can help us to better understand the Arab-Israeli conflict today. We’d like to hear how your understanding was affected by this episode, and we hope you’ll consider sharing your thoughts with us today.     1- Roberts and Gur discuss the massive wave of immigration to US 1880-1920. How does the experience of Jewish immigrants differ from that of other, particularly European, immigrants of the time? How might this help us understand the position of Israel today?   2- Roberts and Gur have a long discussion of the Holocaust, from which I learned a great deal. Perhaps what most struck me, however, was Roberts’ assertion that, “all authoritarians need help to oppress.” What does he mean by this, and who are among those he and Gur suggest “helped” the Nazis carry out their plan? Are there any among these that surprised you? Why? How did the existent of such “helpers” lead to the rise of modern Zionism?   3- How does Gur compare “the Jewish experience” to the Western moral discussion of the Holocaust? What was the “new kind of Jew” that emerged after World War II, and how does Gur characterize their post-war “liberation?” How did the experience of World War II change the nature of Zionism?   4- How does Gur characterize the problem of Palestine, particularly with respect to Britain? How does the anti-colonialist mindset of the Palestinians compare to that of Israelis; how are the are the two groups engaged in a zero-sum game? How is Hamas using Algeria as a model, according to Gur, and why does he suggest that such a strategy will not work against Israel?   (0 COMMENTS)

No city epitomizes the strengths and weaknesses of the US economy more than San Francisco.  The strengths are obvious; it’s a leader in the most important industry of the 21st century—artificial intelligence.  But the weaknesses are just as obvious.  Here’s Reason magazine: In October 2022, San Francisco raised eyebrows when the city budgeted $1.7 million for a single-stall public restroom in the city’s Noe Valley neighborhood. The high price tag, according to city officials, was due to the steep price of construction in San Francisco, as well as remaining supply chain issues. But the state stepped in shortly after, scrapping the planned bathroom after outrage spread over its high cost to taxpayers. Fifteen months later, the public plaza where the restroom was originally planned still doesn’t have a place to pee—and it doesn’t look like it will get one any time soon. I read this article while on vacation in Tanzania, which has good quality toilets in its public parks.  Why is a country with a per capita GDP of $1327 ($3595 PPP) better at building toilets than a city with a $144,600 per capita GDP?  According to Reason, San Francisco cannot afford them. Obviously, I’m not using “afford” literally, the city could certainly afford to build these toilets.  Rather I am using “afford” in the conventional everyday sense of the term, as when I say I cannot afford to stay in a certain luxury hotel.  Given the high cost, it doesn’t make sense.  Even so, why does San Francisco face a situation where the price is so high that it’s not worth doing, when they have more than 100 times more resources than Tanzania? I suspect that that answer is that Tanzania’s toilet building productivity is far more than 100 times higher than that of San Francisco.  I suspect that Tanzania could build a perfectly fine single stall toilet for less than $17,000.  But why is that?  Isn’t it easier to build toilets than large language models? Reason magazine suggests that the problem is a set of regulations, such as rules requiring approval from busybody design experts and radical environmentalists, and mandating the use of union labor: San Francisco has the most expensive construction costs in the world—and it’s hardly surprising. In order to build a public bathroom in Noe Valley, at a location that already had the necessary plumbing to add a restroom, builders would have to pass a dizzying number of regulatory stops. These include seeking approval from the Arts Commission’s Civic Design Review committee, passing review under the California Environmental Quality Act, and getting the go-ahead from the city’s Rec and Park Commission and San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors. If that isn’t enough, the project would also be subject to a period of “community feedback.” Even after gaining approval, the city wouldn’t be free to simply find the cheapest acceptable bathroom—likely a pre-fabricated option—and connect it to city plumbing. According to a 2022 San Francisco Chronicle article, pre-fabricated bathrooms violate the city’s Public Labor Agreement. Adding to costs, the city would also be required to use union labor to construct the bathroom. In contrast, the construction of LLMs is largely free of city regulation. The toilet example may seem rather trivial, but it is indicative of a much larger problem.  The same sort of regulations apply to housing—America’s most important industry, which is just another way of saying the industry that has the greatest effect on living standards. This is America in a microcosm.  When free of intrusive regulation, we are the most productive society in human history.  But in heavily regulated sectors we are often unable to rise to the level of third world countries like Tanzania.  It would be nice to have a place to pee while we await the arrival of our future AI overlords. (0 COMMENTS)

Yesterday, I gave talks to two classes at the Naval Postgraduate School. Both are classes taught by my good friend Ryan Sullivan. The talks were both titled “How Economists Helped End the Draft.” This has become an annual event in his class and one I look forward to. As I always do, I drew an upward-sloping curve to show how, when the government institutes a draft and pays less, it causes people who have supply prices that are below the wage that would have been paid in a volunteer military, but above the wage paid in a military with a draft, not to volunteer. (I pointed out that when I looked at every one of the many bills proposed by someone in Congress in 1980 or 1981–I’ve forgotten which–I found that each of them reduced first-term pay, sometimes drastically.) This means that some of these people will be replaced by people with even higher supply prices, people who would not have volunteered even for a volunteer military. I gave dramatic examples of people who likely had very high supply prices during the draft era, Exhibit A being Elvis Presley. Then I gave less-dramatic examples: someone who knew at age 18 that he wanted to be a doctor, someone who wanted to start a business or get a job, etc. In Q&A, one student asked if keeping the volunteer military means that there is more income inequality than otherwise. I said no and that the opposite was the truth. I was thinking of all the relatively low-paid people who would still volunteer but would get regular military compensation (which includes room and board) that was 20% to 50% lower than they would have got if they had been in a volunteer military. Afterwards, the student came up to explain his point. He was thinking about the Elvis Presleys of the world and of the less dramatic examples of people who had high supply prices because they had high opportunity costs. Their pay would be cut. I was thinking of the 70% of first termers (my guess) who would volunteer at the draft-era wage but would have earned more under an an all-volunteer wage. I hadn’t thought of his point and readily admitted it: it means, combined with my point, that the effects on income inequality are ambiguous. But there’s a reason I didn’t think of his point. I keep thinking that many good-willed people who worry about income inequality are really worried about relatively low-income people. This example reminds me that many people who worry about income inequality really are focusing on income inequality and don’t care whether certain steps taken to reduce it hurt both high-income and low-income people. I’m not saying that this student is in that category. He may not have thought of my point. This is yet another example of the perversity of focusing on reducing income inequality. (0 COMMENTS)

In my previous post, I described what I consider to be the two most important prices in the Argentine- or any!-economy. Having indulged in such extended preliminaries, let us address  what is going on in Argentina nowadays. Soon after the inauguration of Javier Milei as the new president of Argentina, his government devalued the official rate of the local currency from about 400 pesos per US dollar to about 800 pesos per dollar. That brought the “multilateral real exchange rate index” (ITCRM), which compares the real purchasing power of the local currency in comparison with the purchasing power of other relevant trade partners from an index of 75 (December 2015 = 100) to above 150, reflecting the effect of devaluation.  I say the “official” rate, but perhaps it would be better to say the “reference” rate, since there are many “official” rates. Now, about six weeks later, the reference rate is about 830 pesos, and the ITCRM is down to an index of 125, showing the appreciation of the reference exchange rate thanks to inflation of 25% per month as measured by the consumer price index. Mr. Milei came to office with the promise of dollarization for Argentina’s economy. His libertarian agenda was much broader than that, but that was what captured the imagination of many voters. However, Mr. Luis Andrés Caputo, his finance minister, has decided against dollarization, at least for now, and the reasons he gives  are two: first, the negative position of foreign exchange reserves of the Argentinean central bank, and secondly, the short-term obligations of the bank with the banking system. If money holders are allowed to exchange their pesos for dollars, there would not be enough dollars for available, fears Mr. Caputo. If money holders are allowed to exchange pesos per dollar, the (very short) time deposits in the banking system, the counterpart to the short-term obligations of the central bank, it is feared, will collapse, and the central bank would be forced to monetize them. Those seem to be very odd objections to offer, though. Nowadays, in Mr. Milei’s Argentina, the peso is not just a “legal” tender; it is a “forced” tender.  Argentineans are forbidden from using any other currency to denominate contracts, to make regular payments to each other, and to save. They do all of that, of course. Argentina is one of the most “de facto” dollarized countries globally, but they cannot do that legally. Mr. Caputo could allow people to contract in US dollars without committing the central bank to redeem a single penny in dollars from its reserves. One thing has nothing to do with the other.  It is true that to allow payments in dollars and not in its equivalent in local currency, a change in the Civil Code would be necessary, but if there were only one exchange rate freely determined by the market with freedom of entry and exit, payment in local currency would be indifferent to the traders.  What is impeding  Argentineans from using the dollar as a medium and as a rudder for their trades is not the need to change the Civil Code, but the fact that the government continues to impose different exchange rates, none of them a freely established one.  By revoking the “forced” tender status of the peso and giving “legal” tender status to other currencies, the Milei government could provide Argentineans with the monetary tools they need to cooperate and prosper. That would, marginally, I concede, reduce still more the demand for pesos, and that is perhaps why Mr. Caputo has advised against that. An alternative would be to unify and liberalize the official exchange rate, allowing it to float freely, as I have just mentioned. Again, fearing that reducing the demand for pesos would trigger hyperinflation seems to paralyze Mr. Caputo. Of course, I would not like to be in his shoes, but the ghost of hyperinflation will not fade away until confidence that pesos have a stable value, something that would motivate people to exchange dollars for pesos tomorrow as much as today; and most importantly, that holding pesos is not a money losing proposition. The peso, however, is appreciating fast, if measured by the “reference” exchange rate, distorting relative prices of tradable goods and leaving in place the same incentives for corruption that so markedly Mr. Milei campaigned against. The exchange rate is the second most important price in the economy precisely because of that. The information that a market exchange rate gives is the gauge by which Argentineans can compare prices in the domestic market with prices abroad. Considering the relatively small size of the Argentinean economy (about 0,5% of global GDP) as previously mentioned, trying to do rational economic calculations without such information is very damaging to the economy.  In my next and final post, I will discuss the role of the MOST important price in the Argentine economy- the interest rate.   Leonidas Zelmanovitz, a Senior Fellow with the Liberty Fund, holds a law degree from the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil and an economics doctorate from the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Spain. (0 COMMENTS)

Co-blogger David Henderson recently posted about how political partisanship makes people more disposed to ignore or deny basic facts in a way that sports partisanship does not. I agree completely with what he says. In fact, I would say what he describes shows how many – perhaps most – people talk about politics in a way I will describe as political noncognitivism. To unpack what I mean by that, indulge me for a moment with a digression into metaethics.  In metaethics, noncognitivism is a metaethical theory that differs from realism, antirealism, and subjectivism. Moral realists believe that moral statements assert propositions, and these propositions can be objectively true or false – that is, true or false independent of the attitudes of any subject. Moral subjectivists believe moral statements assert propositions that are subjectively true or false – that is, the truth or falsity of the statement depends on the attitudes of a subject. Moral antirealists believe ethical statements assert propositions, but those propositions are always objectively false, because there are no moral facts or moral properties. Noncognitivists argue that moral statements are neither true nor false, because moral statements don’t have any propositional content. Noncognitivism generally comes in two flavors – expressivism, and prescriptivism. The former says that what seem like propositional statements about morality really just express attitudes. To the expressivist, when someone says “It’s wrong to murder” what they are really saying is “Boo for murder!”, which does not assert a proposition, and is neither true nor false. Prescriptivists says that what seem like moral propositions are actually just commands, so when you say “it’s wrong to murder” what you’re actually saying is “Don’t murder!”, which is also neither true nor false and does not assert a proposition.   That said, let’s start with something readers of this blog likely already know – the general public is wildly misinformed about issues of basic economics. And as Bryan Caplan has pointed out, the errors the public makes in their economic beliefs are not random, but systemic – they tend to lean in a very anti-market direction. A recent paper examining the phenomenon of “lay economic reasoning” points out one striking example of the gap between what is commonly believed and reality – “The general public believed the average profit margin made by American corporations to be 46.7%, while the actual average that year was just 3%.” That is, a typical member of the public believes that profit margins for corporations are over fifteen times higher than they actually are. This is not a small error.  Over the years, I’ve encountered mistakes like this in conversations about economics many times. And I’ve noticed a consistent pattern in how people respond to the information. They might say “Corporations are making too much in profits!” Then, you ask them what they think corporate profit margins are, and what they should be. They respond by saying that corporations are making over 40% profit margins, and they think that a “fair profit margin” would be 5%. Now, suppose they discover profit margins are in fact 3%. What response would you expect?  One response is to deny the basic facts, as David Henderson correctly points out. But that’s not the only response I’ve seen. Some people, when shown the data, will in fact admit they were wrong and that corporate profits are nowhere near as high as they initially believed. Now, if a person’s political views were meant to describe what they believed the facts were, the response consistent with their stated beliefs and the facts should be to decide that corporate profits are actually too low. After all, corporate profits, it turns out, are 40% lower than what they just declared was a fair rate! Yet I’ve seen this happen precisely zero times in my life. It’s a similar story with taxes. Often I’ve heard people say something like “The top 1% doesn’t pay their fair share of income taxes!” Ask them what percentage of income taxes are paid by the top 1% and what percentage they think it should be, and they might say something like “the top 1% only pays 10% of income taxes and they should pay 25%.” And if you point out to them that actually, the top 1% pays over 40% of total income taxes, significantly higher than the amount they just said it should be, you see the same pattern. There is a zero point nothing percent chance they will say this means they top 1% are actually overtaxed, because it turns out the top 1% are paying significantly more in taxes than what they had just declared would be the “fair” rate. They will still go on insisting that the amount paid by the top 1% should be higher.  I think this shows that a lot of people are political noncognitivists. People will say “corporate profits are too high” or “the top 1% doesn’t pay their fair share” without any reference to what those numbers actually are or even what they themselves think those number should be. When sports fans talk about how a game went down, they are asserting propositions, which makes what they say responsive to facts. But when political partisans say “corporate profits are too high” they aren’t really trying to assert specific propositions about the current state of the world and some alternate state they think would be better. This is why if it turns out the actual state of the world is superior to their stated goal by their own standards, they don’t cheer with victory – they simply move the goalpost while sticking with the original slogan. All the slogan was really meant to communicate is “hooray for the Blue Tribe!”  I pointed to a similar way this thinking can manifest in a previous post where I was critiquing Yoram Hazony’s book on conservatism. Hazony claimed that free trade has reduced America’s manufacturing capabilities – and I pointed out that while America’s manufacturing employment has fallen, America’s manufacturing capabilities have risen, in the same way and for the same reasons that American agricultural capacity has risen even though agricultural employment has fallen. In both cases, technological improvements allow for much greater output to be produced with fewer workers. As I said in that post, “If the loss of manufacturing employment is truly Hazony’s concern, he’s unduly focused on what amounts to a trivial factor in that regard – he should be spending far more time attempting to put an end to technological progress itself. If, however, Hazony is concerned with manufacturing capabilities, as he says, then he has one less thing to worry about – America’s manufacturing capabilities have only been increasing.” Yet, the people who think American manufacturing is dying will often continue to say so even when they become aware that American manufacturing capacity is greater than ever. Claims about what manufacturing is currently like or how it should be are not what is actually meant by many people who express this concern – what they really mean to say is “hooray for the Red Tribe!”  As a metaethical theory, noncognitivism is hopelessly muddled (and thankfully, not taken seriously by most moral philosophers these days), but I think there is a significant element of noncognitivism in most people’s political speech. People rarely update their stated political beliefs in light of new facts because their stated political beliefs were never meant to express propositional beliefs about the state of the world. They are simply a form of political, expressive noncognitivism – a declaration of attitude and alignment to a tribe.  (0 COMMENTS)