Last year, Minnesota became one of 24 states which have legalized recreational marijuana. Research suggests that neither the horrors that opponents conjure up nor the benefits touted by supporters will, in fact, appear in a range of areas including use of other substances, health and suicides, crime, road safety, or the economy.  But the majority of the consequences of any action are unintended ones. Two papers indicate some changes the Gopher State – and its neighbors – can expect to see, as well as illustrating a pair of key concepts from Econ 101.  Sales of munchies increase. It is said that the consumption of marijuana gives the consumer a desire for ‘munchies.’ Is this true? If so, how strong is this effect? In a 2019 study titled ‘Recreational Marijuana Laws and Junk Food Consumption: Evidence Using Border Analysis and Retail Sales Data’, economists Michele Baggio and Alberto Chong collected monthly sales data from supermarkets, drug stores, and other retailers in more than 2,000 counties across 48 states covering the period from 2006 to 2016. By comparing sales figures from neighboring counties located along state borders—some where marijuana was legal and some where it was not—they were able to estimate the effect of marijuana legalization on junk-food sales.  They found that after recreational marijuana was legalized in Colorado, Oregon, and Washington, the only states for which 18 months of sales data were available, sales of ice cream rose by 3.1%, sales of cookies increased by 4.1%, and sales of crisps jumped by 5.3% in the years after the laws were passed. This is good news for Kwik Trips in Wisconsin, Iowa, and the Dakotas.    Sales of alcohol fall. If someone chooses to relax with a joint rather than a beer, we might expect sales of alcohol to decline after the legalization of recreational marijuana. Again, is this true and, if so, how strong is this effect?  In a 2018 paper titled ‘Marijuana and Alcohol Evidence Using Border Analysis and Retail Sales Data’, Baggio, Chong, and Sungoh Kwon used “retail scanner data on purchases of alcoholic beverages across US counties for 2006-2015 to study the link between medical marijuana laws (MMLs) and alcohol consumption.” They found that “counties located in MML states reduced monthly alcohol sales by 12.4 percent.” This is bad news for the liquor stores of Minnesota. Complements and substitutes. Together, these two papers illustrate a couple of basic economic concepts. First, marijuana and ice cream, cookies, and potato chips are ‘complementary goods’. As my old undergrad textbook describes them, these are: A pair of goods consumed together. As the price of one goes up, the demand for both goods will fall.  Bread and butter are the classic textbook examples, but Baggio and Chong’s research suggests that we can add marijuana and ice cream to the list.  Second, marijuana and alcohol are what is known as ‘substitute goods’. Again, from my old textbook these are: A pair of goods that are considered by consumers to be alternatives to each other. As the price of one goes up, the demand for the other rises.  Once again, thanks to Baggio, Chong, and Kwon, we can add to the classic examples of butter and margarine marijuana and beer.  This research serves a purpose more serious than simply freshening up the examples in textbooks. This substitution effect accounts, in part, for the muted effect of marijuana legalization on road safety found in the research: high drivers don’t only add to drunk drivers, they replace them as well. Econ 101, much derided, remains an indispensable grounding for sound public policy.     John Phelan is an Economist at Center of the American Experiment. (0 COMMENTS)

Given how much time I spend writing blog posts, it would be good to know if blogging has any impact on the real world.  A recent article in The Economist suggests that the answer is yes: To wangle £11bn ($14bn) out of the British government, it helps to write a blog post. “Full expensing”, which allows firms immediately to write off their spending on machinery, plant and computer equipment from their taxable profits, was the costliest part of Jeremy Hunt’s autumn statement on November 22nd. A long-standing policy in America, the idea of full expensing first wormed its way into British politics in 2017 via blog posts from Sam Dumitriu and Sam Bowman, both then of the Adam Smith Institute, a small think-tank known for its staunch neoliberalism and deranged internet memes about its Scottish namesake. A few years back, I started to see lots of blog posts advocating “YIMBY” policies, which means deregulating the construction of new housing.  More recently, many local and state governments have begun “up-zoning”, which means allowing more housing to be built in any given area: Posting influences oppositions as well as governments. YIMBYism, once a niche idea reserved for a few very-online activists, has taken over the Labour Party. Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, insists he is a builder, not a blocker. It is a bold move. In a constituency-based system, the diffuse benefits of building often come second to the concentrated inconvenience of development. Even if his specific plans are unclear, talking-points lifted straight from the posts of YIMBY activists now litter Sir Keir’s speeches . . . YIMBY versus NIMBY is now a key dividing-line at the next election. It is difficult to know exactly how much any given blog post, or even blogging in general, impacts the policy world.  Blog posts often discuss ideas that are also widespread in academia.  Even so, blogging can bring ideas to real world policymakers that lack the time or inclination to read dense academic papers. One example is the idea of using aggressive forward guidance in monetary policy when the economy is stuck at the zero lower bound.  This general idea was discussed in academic papers by people like Paul Krugman, Michael Woodford and Gauti Eggertsson.  But blogging may have made policymakers more aware of the usefulness of this approach. Although blogging is a relatively recent phenomenon, economists have always been willing to use the media to promote their policy views.  Milton Friedman’s influence on policy was partly due to his academic work, but the greatest impact may have come from his skill at clearly explaining economic concepts in outlets such as Newsweek magazine.   (0 COMMENTS)

[ANNUAL LISTENER SURVEY: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/ZGY3G9W. Vote for your 2023 favorites! Last day to vote: Feb. 1st.] Pollster and political scientist Dahlia Scheindlin has worked extensively with public opinion polls of both Palestinians and Israelis. Listen as she talks with EconTalk’s Russ Roberts about the dreams, fears, anger, and frustration of both sides. Along the way she analyzes […] The post What Palestinians Are Thinking (with Dahlia Scheindlin) appeared first on Econlib.

My brother, who is an assistant professor of economics, and I were talking one night.  The conversation went through the usual range of topics for siblings: baseball, hockey, etc.  I had made some off-handed observation about where I live and my brother said something that struck terror into my heart: “You should write that down.  I have some folks that might like to hear it.” So here we are.  An airline pilot who has never written anything more interesting than a technical manual attempting to find two creative brain cells to rub together and express an idea in a field I know nothing about.  Good thing I’m a pilot.  Where we lack expertise, we make up for it in raw, unfounded confidence. I live in Small Town Middle America(™).  You know: the kind of town that has more churches than restaurants and more gun shops than churches.  I married a wonderful woman from here whom I love dearly and, for reasons I’ll never understand, loves me, too.  Her family is locally famous: her grandfather and his brother owned several apple orchards and a successful farmer’s market/general store.  Her grandmother worked for the county archives and is well versed in the history of the place.  I love sitting around what was formerly the storage shed of the orchard listening to my wife, her aunts, uncles, and grandparents tell stories of growing up.   When her grandparents sold the market, they  also sold the orchard so they could live comfortably in retirement.  What once was a peaceful orchard is now a subdivision, filled with McMansions and every street cleverly (at least in the developer’s mind) named after varieties of apples.  Big Box Store moved in and some small businesses shut down.  You know what?  There’s a certain convenience to the big box stores.  You can get your milk, eggs, underwear, picture frames, dancing Santa statues, and fishing rods all in one place now.  Widgets and Whatsits galore.  Then other Big Boxes moved in to try and capture a piece of the pie. The phrase I said that got me into this mess was, “I love watching markets evolve.”  What I meant was this: yes, Big Box has made things more convenient, but it also took away a lot of the individuality of each aspect of the market.  Big Box has what is generously called a bakery, but all the food is prepackaged and realistically, you have very limited choice in variety.  Where did the market for specialty breads go?  Did it die?  Does it only live on in nostalgia?  For years, I was told, there were no real bakeries in town.  But then, slowly, like moss growing after a volcanic eruption, they started to show up again.  People still demanded that experience and those products.  Eventually, someone was willing to cater to that niche.   Today in town, we have bakeries full of delicious things, outdoor shops that offer specialty gear and expert advice, craft breweries specializing in the mundane but also the weird, wild, and wonderful (two weeks ago I had frankincense beer; it smelled like a funeral but tasted delicious!).  Do they pull in the kind of business that the Big Boxes do?  Not by a long shot.  They don’t need to; they fill the wants of people. To me, it’s kind of like the rainforest.  You have the big trees that soak up lots of sun, but there’s still enough room for everyone else in the ecosystem.  The demand didn’t disappear.  Suppliers just evolved to face a new reality.  I can’t help but think that Charles Darwin and Adam Smith are both somewhere shedding a tear of happiness.     Dennis Murphy is a professional airline pilot with a background in aviation safety, accident investigation, and causality. When he’s not flying 737s, he enjoys the company of his wife, their dogs, cats, and bees. (1 COMMENTS)

The popularity of Donald Trump among Republican voters tells something about their naivety before a presidential candidate who wants the president to enjoy “total immunity” against criminal prosecution. How can we explain that what was the party of law and order closes ranks behind a guy facing 91 criminal charges in four different trials, even admitting that some of the charges are questionable? Perhaps a reflection by 54-year-old Jocelyn Kanan, a New Hampshire fan of Trump who works for an industrial building company, points to one of the factors at play (quoted from “Trump’s Legal Woes Splinter GOP Unity,” Wall Street Journal, January 21, 2024): “All of us at some point we did something. Nobody is an angel,” Kanan said. In the United States 8% of adults have a felony conviction, that is, are felons for life (except for expungements, which depend on state laws and have many exceptions). This 8% is composed of 23% in the black population and 6% among the non-blacks. More than 1 American adult on 12 you meet in the street is a convicted felon. Moreover, one-half of black males have been arrested at least once before they reached adulthood, and 39% of white males too. (Sarah K. Shannon et al., “The Growth, Scope, and Spatial Distribution of People With Felony Records in the United States, 1948-2010,” Demography, vol. 54 [2017]. The data quoted above are for 2010.) Not “all of us” but very many “at some point we did something” very bad according to some law. This is due to the criminalization of so many actions by so many laws. Some of those who “did something” are husbands or sons but also wives or daughters of other people, which adds up to lots of individuals. Many ordinary individuals have been continuously bullied by the powers in place. Who would be surprised that so many people are furious with the system? Significantly, Mr. Trump does not advocate against the criminalization of minor youth errors and trifles of ordinary people; he wants “total immunity” for himself. (0 COMMENTS)

Princeton’s Matthew Desmond Gets Everything Wrong About Poverty’s Root Causes Aaron Brown, Reason, January 23, 2024 Excerpt: Desmond gets more specific about what doesn’t cause poverty. He dismisses cultural explanations, such as single-parent households and declining marriage rates. He quickly dismisses the idea that the welfare state traps people in cycles of dependency, claiming that these arguments rely on anecdotal evidence, even though there’s a vast systematic literature on the subject. Desmond doesn’t take up political scientist Charles Murray’s basic challenge to explain why it is that between 1949 and 1964 the American poverty rate dropped by 22 percentage points before the government did practically anything to help. After President Lyndon Johnson launched his war on poverty, the decline leveled considerably. Desmond approaches his firsthand investigations with the preconception that poverty is a byproduct of capitalist exploitation. Prices aren’t set in a competitive marketplace, in his view; they’re just a projection of greed. It’s “tempting,” he writes, “to blame rising housing costs on anything other than the fact that more than a few of us have a god-awful amount of money and are driving prices higher and higher through bidding wars.” A chapter on the real estate market titled “How We Force the Poor to Pay More” argues that it’s twice as profitable to be a landlord in the inner city. Desmond doesn’t bother explaining why even more unscrupulous people don’t tap into this lucrative business opportunity.   The Truth About Tariffs by Phillip W. Magness, Law & Liberty, January 24, 2024 In his rendering, Marshall comes across as something of a skeptic of comparative advantage who allegedly “chastised the Ricardians” for their theories about trade. To argue his point he excerpts a passage wherein Marshall allegedly condemned comparative advantage for having “laid down laws with regard to profits and wages that did not really hold even for England in their own time.” Turning to Marshall’s original text, we quickly discover that Cass has either misread or misrepresented the economist’s words. The passage in full reads: And though this did little harm so long as they were treating of money and foreign trade, it led them astray as to the relations between the different industrial classes. It caused them to speak of labour as a commodity without staying to throw themselves into the point of view of the workman; and without dwelling upon the allowances to be made for his human passions, his instincts and habits, his sympathies and antipathies, his class jealousies and class adhesiveness, his want of knowledge and of the opportunities for free and vigorous action. They therefore attributed to the forces of supply and demand a much more mechanical and regular action than is to be found in real life: and they laid down laws with regard to profits and wages that did not really hold even for England in their own time.(emphasis added) We accordingly find that Marshall’s grievance is not with Ricardian comparative advantage, but rather Ricardo’s other writings on the economics of labor and the conditions of the working classes in early nineteenth century England. Indeed, when Marshall penned a more detailed work on trade economics in 1919, it offered a conventional Ricardian account of comparative advantage.   Thomas Piketty’s Motte and Bailey by Vincent Geloso, City Journal, January 18, 2024 Excerpt: Whenever Piketty and his collaborators are confronted with these criticisms, they retreat to a motte position, arguing that there is such a thing as too much inequality and that inequality is higher now than in the 1970s. Both statements are defensible; they are also uncontroversial. Feds Will Try Backpage Co-Founder Michael Lacey for a Third Time by Elizabeth Nolan Brown, January 24, 2024 Excerpt: The first trial, back in 2021, was declared a mistrial after prosecutors and their witnesses couldn’t stop suggesting that Lacey and his co-defendants were charged with child sex trafficking. They were not, and efforts to suggest as much could have seriously prejudiced a jury.   Apportionment & Immigration: 95 Percent of Noncitizen Growth Went to GOP States Since 2019 by David J. Bier, Cato at Liberty, January 24, 2024 No, the data are equally clear: recent immigration trends are benefiting Republicans in states where they control the legislature and manage redistricting. About 62 percent of the three‐​million increase in the total immigrant population from March 2019 to March 2023 has occurred in GOP states, according to the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement.   Unions: Facts and Fluff by Timothy Taylor, Conversable Economist, January 25, 2024 Remember that during this “banner year for labor actions and unions,” the share of US workers who actually belong to a union was shrinking–and has been shrinking for decades, including last year and in fact during the entire presidency. It’s true that in general, public attitudes seem more supportive of unions. But some of the union successes in the last few years, like the first success in unionizing an Amazon warehouse (on Staten Island), have since become mired in controversy and seem in danger of failing. But [Suresh] Naidu also points to an even more fundamental issue that US unions face: they need to organize one company at a time. In a dynamic US economy, where some companies are always shrinking or going out of business, this means that unions are running on a treadmill: they need to keep organizing new unionized companies just to offset the typical year-to-year loss of previously organized companies.     https://feedly.com/i/entry/yz8OnKgEHTt6OIkH/U1FnhKMojac9MbQokcC+g8YWxU=_18d43cf6a8a:2cb99b:33ffab25 (0 COMMENTS)

In an episode of Jeopardy last week, one of the categories was “One-Term Presidents.” Here was the “answer:” Britannica: He “was blaming the depression on events abroad & predicting” his foe’s win” would only intensify the disaster”; it didn’t. The question that Jeopardy was looking for was “Who was Herbert Hoover? The Jeopardy fact checkers were arguably wrong. The depression did intensify under FDR. Unemployment reached its peak of 25% in FDR’s first term. Of course, you could argue that with lags in the effect of policies, this was on Hoover. That argument seems reasonable because FDR was elected on November 8, 1932 and inaugurated on March 4, 1933. But one of the big things people wondered about during those 4 months, given that bank failures were a huge part of the story, was whether FDR would take the United States off the gold standard. He wouldn’t answer. Here’s what Gene Smiley writes in his entry “Great Depression” in David R. Henderson, ed., The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics: The Fed’s expansionary monetary policy ended in the early summer of 1932. After his election in November 1932, President-elect Roosevelt refused to outline his policies or endorse Hoover’s, and he refused to deny that he would devalue the dollar against gold after he took office in March 1933. Bank runs and bank failures resumed with a vengeance, and American dollars began to be redeemed for gold as the gold outflow resumed. As financial conditions worsened in January and February 1933, state governments began declaring banking holidays, closing down states’ entire financial sectors. Roosevelt’s national banking holiday stopped the runs and banking failures and finally ended the contraction. It is true that output started picking up in the second quarter of 1933, as Smiley elaborates. But then FDR’s National Industrial Recovery Act, which cartelized hundreds of U.S. industries, slowed things down and caused the Great Depression to last longer than otherwise. So if “intensify the disaster” means make the depression deeper, Jeopardy is not clearly right or clearly wrong. But if “intensify the disaster” means make the depression last longer, indeed, much longer, then Jeopardy is clearly wrong. (0 COMMENTS)

Back in the early 1980s, the Fed tried to gradually squeeze high inflation out of the economy, so as to avoid a bout of high unemployment. They failed. But it was not a failure to control inflation; it was a failure to bring inflation down gradually. Inflation fell much faster than almost anyone anticipated, and as a side effect the unemployment rate soared to a peak of 10.8% in late 1982.   This convinced many that reducing inflation was costly, and that it was best not to allow the inflation genie out of the bottle in the first place. [To be sure, there is more evidence for this claim that just the 1982 recession.  Anti-inflation programs also led to recessions in 1921, 1957, 1970 and 1991, to name just a few examples.  But 1982 was a particularly dramatic case.] So what did we learn from the 1982 experience?  Did this show that gradualism doesn’t work?  Not exactly, as a necessary precursor for gradualism never occurred.  The 1982 recession showed that gradualism is not easy to implement, but it provided no evidence on whether it would work if implemented. So what is the necessary precondition for gradualism to work?  The central bank must engineer a gradual slowdown in the growth rate of NGDP. That’s the only reliable method for achieving a “soft landing”.   A few weeks back, Tyler Cowen wrote a Bloomberg piece criticizing the economics profession for its failure to explain the economy’s surprising strength in 2023.  And  some of those who correctly saw that we might avoid recession had previously advocated models where inflation could not be brought down without high unemployment.   It’s a very good article, but Tyler fails to mention the fact that 2023 is a strong piece of evidence in favor of one particular approach—gradualism.  For instance, look at the modest slowdown in 12-month NGDP growth from 7.1%.in late 2022 to 5.8% late 2023: When presented with this argument, many people complain that I’m engaged in a tautology.  “Growth slowed gradually because growth slowed gradually.”  Those making that complaint are confusing nominal GDP with real GDP, a completely unrelated concept. The fear has always been that sharply slowing inflation would be costly in terms of falling real GDP and high unemployment.  When economists use the term ‘growth’, they are referring to real GDP, not nominal GDP. Thus there is nothing tautological in a claim that a recession might be often be associated with slow growth NGDP.  For instance, in 2008, Zimbabwe’s real GDP fell even as its NGDP rose more than a million-fold.  The two are radically different concepts, which do not always move in the same direction. On the other hand, because of wage/price stickiness, short run movements in NGDP and RGDP are often highly correlated in the US.  Thus in late 1982, NGDP growth plunged from a peak of 14% to less than 4%, triggering a significant fall in RGDP and high unemployment.  While it’s much too soon to declare victory, there’s a real possibility that Jay Powell’s Fed will successfully implement the gradualism program that Volcker’s Fed tried and failed to implement.  [In fairness, Powell was dealt a far easier hand, as by the early 1980s inflation expectations were stuck at double-digit levels and the Fed had lost credibility with the public.  This time around, long-term inflation expectations remained fairly low.]  In his Bloomberg piece, Tyler made the following observation: Krugman has lately further explained his position — complete with unironic headline — suggesting that the untangling of broken supply chains had helped lower the rate of inflation. That point, too, is correct. He didn’t mention that there also has been a massive negative shock to aggregate demand: High rates of M2 growth became slightly negative rates of M2 growth. Fiscal policy peaked and then retreated. The Fed raised interest rates from near-zero levels to the range of 5%, and fairly rapidly. It also sent every possible signal that it was going to be tight with monetary conditions. I did an Econlog post criticizing his claim that there was a massive negative shock to aggregate demand: [I]f you’d told economists in late 2022 that we’d have 6% to 7% NGDP growth in 2023, I doubt that very many would have predicted a recession.  So the events of 2023 in no way refute the assumption that a sharp slowdown in AD will generally trigger a recession—we failed to have a sharp slowdown in AD. Notice that I’m equating “aggregate demand” and NGDP growth.  Not everyone defines AD in that way, indeed some people derisively call it a “tautological” definition.  Well, definitions are tautological, but that doesn’t mean they are not useful.   A few days after I did this post, Tyler posted the following: Any “very heavy” reliance on real shocks to explain the macro of the last two years has to account for why 2021 had high growth rates, in spite of supply chains then being quite tangled.  And why prices haven’t gone back down to their original levels?  And what happened to aggregate demand, once the Fed turned its attention to the problem?  There simply was a huge, negative AD shock in recent times, at least under any non-tautological definition of aggregate demand.  Why didn’t that crush us?  Any account needs to address these issues. Tyler doesn’t mention my name, but given that a few days earlier I had argued that he was wrong about the existence of a “massive negative shock to aggregate demand”, and used the assumption that AD equals NGDP to back up my claim, I felt like his remark might have been directed at my post.  After all, “non-tautological definition of aggregate demand” isn’t a phrase you hear every day. (BTW, I’m inclined to equate “non-tautological definition” with “so vague as to be useless”.) Over at Marginal Revolution University, Alex Tabarrok summarizes the definition of aggregate demand used in Cowen and Tabarrok’s superb textbook: You can think about spending growth another way, too. It’s actually the equivalent of nominal GDP growth. If nominal GDP growth is 5%, an AD curve shows all of the possible combinations of inflation and real GDP growth that add up to 5% nominal GDP growth. Likewise, if nominal GDP growth is 7%, the AD curve will show all of the possible combinations of inflation and real GDP growth that add up to 7%, and so on. Increases in the growth rate of nominal GDP shift the aggregate demand curve outwards, whereas decreases shift it inwards. That sounds pretty tautological to me.   And just to be clear, I don’t believe that 2023 saw a massive negative demand shock even using a non-tautological definition of AD. More than a decade ago, Tyler started a blog post as follows: Without meaning to take sides in the controversy, I got a kick out of this sentence, which describes the attitudes of contemporary macroeconomists: Even something anodyne like “demand might also play a role” would come across like the guy in that comic who asks the engineers if they’ve “considered logarithms” to help with cooling. The blog post, by JW Mason, is interesting throughout. If you follow the link, JW Mason has a long post, which begins as follows: People often talk about aggregate demand as if it were a quantity. But this is not exactly right. There’s no number or set of numbers in the national accounts labeled “aggregate demand” Actually, there is—NGDP. Mason continues: Rather, aggregate demand is a way of interpreting the numbers in the national accounts. (Admittedly, it’s the way of interpreting them that guided their creation in the first place). It’s a statement about a relationship between economic quantities. Specifically, it’s a statement that we should think about current income and current expenditure as mutually determining each other. Now we are back in the world of tautologies: Gross domestic Income = Gross domestic Expenditure = Gross domestic product Seriously, when people tell me something is inexpressible, a sort of way of thinking about the world, I’m likely to assume they are referring to some sort of eastern mystical religion, not a branch of economics that is supposed to explain prices, output and employment.  Aggregate demand is either total nominal spending, or it’s nothing at all, at least nothing of any use to economists.  Given that Mason thinks AD is not NGDP, I can’t criticize him for treating AD like a big joke.    Economics is already full of hard to measure entities, such as the natural rate of interest or the natural rate of unemployment.  Let’s not make things needlessly obscure by acting as if AD is not a specific number that can be easily measured.  In the long run, aggregate demand (NGDP) does not matter at all.  In the short run, it’s the most important macro variable—explaining almost everything we care about.  Why have we had a soft landing so far?  Because NGDP growth has slowed gradually.  Why has NGDP growth slowed gradually?  Because the Fed raised its interest rate target up close the the economy’s natural rate, without overshooting (as it had done so often in the past.). How were they able to do that?  I wish I knew.  Probably a mix of luck (30 years of Fed credibility plus some positive AS shocks such as a surge in immigration) and skill (more sophisticated reliance of financial market signals and a deeper understanding of the process based on learning from past mistakes.). But that’s just a guess, and we are not even sure there won’t be a recession in 2024.  But there is one thing I can predict with confidence—the performance of the economy in 2024 will be largely determined by the NGDP growth rate.  If it’s around 4% by yearend, then we’ll have a soft landing.  If it’s around 2%, we’ll have a recession.  If it’s around 6%, we’ll have resurgence in inflation.  Looking out over the next few decades, NGDP won’t matter much at all—the performance of the economy will depend on real factors such as the impact of AI.  HT:  Commenter JP reminded me of the Cowen and Tabarrok textbook. (0 COMMENTS)

Back in May 2023, co-blogger Kevin Corcoran posted on Randy Holcombe’s discussion of how people form preferences on  government policies. Kevin quoted Randy as follows: These are voters whose beliefs about free trade were simply a derivative preference, derived from their anchor preference of identification with the Republican party. When the Republican party advocated free trade, so did they. And when the Republican party turned away from free trade, so did they. In the same way, after Trump’s rise to prominence in the Republican party, support for free trade among Democrats shot up dramatically, to significantly higher levels than Republican support for free trade during the presidency of George W. Bush. This quote is from Randall G. Holcombe, Following Their Leaders: Political Preferences and Public Policy, Cambridge University Press, 2023. Kevin wrote: These are voters whose beliefs about free trade were simply a derivative preference, derived from their anchor preference of identification with the Republican party. When the Republican party advocated free trade, so did they. And when the Republican party turned away from free trade, so did they. In the same way, after Trump’s rise to prominence in the Republican party, support for free trade among Democrats shot up dramatically, to significantly higher levels than Republican support for free trade during the presidency of George W. Bush. I don’t disagree with this reasoning. I think there’s lot to it. But I do want to point out a counterexample. Back in 2021, Trump revealed to his supporters that he got a booster for the COVID-19 vaccine. A fair number of them booed. So they didn’t adjust their views based on the guy that many of them seemed to love. Of course you could argue that they can’t adjust their views instantly. It’s quite conceivable that many of them thought that Trump wouldn’t get a booster and thus, in their view, be “on their side.” So they might have booed out of surprise. Still, a fair number of them had to know that he had done Operation Warp Speed to get the original vaccine produced quickly. If they had adjusted their views of the vaccine to what they must have thought his view was, they would have been in favor. But a fair number of members of the audience, going by the volume, saw him as being wrong on this.   (0 COMMENTS)

Your mileage may vary, dear reader, but I’ve never been much of a fan of bundled goods. In theory, you might find a bundle that includes exactly what you want, and only what you want, and comes at a lower price than all the individual components. But it’s never worked out that way for me. My cell phone plan, for example, lists out 20 different bundled “features” that are all included in my bill. But there are only about three or four things on that list I actually care about, want, or use. For example, my cell phone plan has included, among other things, a cloud backup service run by Verizon. This is a completely redundant service for me, as I already have cloud backup with iCloud and Google services – Verizon just also happens to run a pretty terrible knock-off version of those platforms. I doubt much of anyone would pay for it if it was only a standalone service. Hence, the best way to get more and more people to pay for their low-quality services it is to mandate bundling them with their high-quality services.  But, unfortunately, selecting a less expensive plan that includes fewer of these (to me) worthless add-ons also just so happens to cut back on the services provided with the features I actually do care about, resulting in lower data speeds and diminished (or eliminated) mobile hotspot abilities. There’s simply no option to choose a plan that includes only a high-end version of those few features I do want and cuts out all the rest. Boo.  For the same reason, I stopped getting any kind of cable TV service years ago. I’m not much of a TV guy – at any given time there are maybe two or three shows I might even aspire to keep up with, assuming I have the time. But unfortunately, there was never an option to only get the few channels I might actually want to access. In order to get them, I would have to get a whole bundle that included hundreds of additional channels of content I had absolutely no interest in watching or paying for. Luckily, streaming options have allowed me to largely bypass this particular annoyance.  Anyway, all of that was just a meandering framing for another kind of bundling I like even less – political bundling.  Political bundling is something I’ve touched on before in my multi-post review of Randall Holcombe’s book Following Their Leaders: Political Preferences and Public Policy. To recap very briefly, Holcombe argues that in politics, people have both anchor preferences and derivative preferences. As he puts it, “Anchor preferences are those that define people’s political identities. They define how people see themselves, and how they want others to see them.” Derivative preferences, as the name suggests, derive from the anchor: “Most policy preferences are derivative preferences, derived from the preferences associated with the person’s anchor. People’s political identity forms an anchor, and most of their policy preferences are derived from that anchor.”  According to this model, much of the (past) support among Republican voters for free trade did not come about because of a measured consideration of the issue by those voters. They supported free trade because they were Republicans, and Republicans support free trade. But being a Republican was, for many, the anchor point, and support for free trade was simply derivative from that. Hence, as Holcombe put it, “The Republican party, at least since Ronald Reagan’s presidency, supported free trade, but after President Trump won on a protectionist platform aimed at China, Mexico, and other countries, most Republicans did not push back and argue that Trump’s protectionist policies were out of step with the party’s values.” Instead, most rank-and-file Republicans simply switched their position on free trade. Now, support for free trade among Republican voters has plummeted, not because of a measured consideration of the issue by those voters, but because they are Republicans and Republicans don’t support free trade.  Holcombe argues that since in America there are effectively only two choices for political party at the national level, there are also at any given time effectively only two bundles of policies available to voters. Voters will vote for whichever bundle happens to align with their anchor preference, whether that is their political identity (I’m a Republican!) or some specific issue (We need more gun control laws!). Because all the other policies come along with the bundle, voters just adopt those other policies as preferences wholesale. Michael Huemer has made similar observations, writing “This is part of why I say ideology isn’t about ideas. If people actually cared about ideas, a party couldn’t just radically shift its positions and still have pretty much the same people supporting them and the same people opposing them.” All that said, what I’ve been noticing more lately is how political bundling is being wielded outside of the policy space and into public argument. People will try to bundle unrelated issues together, arguing that you can only truly support X if you also support Y, even when X and Y are completely independent issues. To give a concrete example, I was recently puzzled by seeing some pro-Palestinian protestors marching with a banner saying, “Reproductive Justice Means Free Palestine!” This seemed like a very strange position to take. For one, these are completely unrelated issues. For two, it’s been pointed out that abortion is illegal in Palestinian controlled territories, while it’s generally legal in Israel. Why on Earth would anyone insist on tying these two issues together? Logically, this seems like a very counterproductive line for those protestors to take.  I think what drives this is an attempt at political bundling. If, say, someone strongly supports the Palestinian side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and wants to shore up support for that issue, one way to do that is to try to make a focused argument on the relevant issue. Or a way to sidestep that process is to instead try to bundle that issue with another issue you know people might feel strongly about – if you can just convince people that the abortion issue is somehow bound up the issue of Gaza, you can get people into the latter cause based on their support for the former without that irksome need to provide any real arguments.  Or, if someone’s political view is heavily anchored on the oppressor-oppressed axis Arnold Kling describes in his The Three Languages of Politics, then convincing that person that Israel represents oppression and Hamas represents the oppressed will lead them to bundle support for Hamas in with their other views as well. Hence you can have Judith Butler, one of the most high-profile feminist philosophers of the 20th century, saying that “understanding Hamas, Hezbollah as social movements that are Progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left, is extremely important.” In general, it’s wise to be wary of people who try to sell you on a specific positions by means of political bundling. I’m not here to take a stand on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But I will say that for this issue or any other, the more one side tries to drum up support by bundling it with, or relabeling it as, reproductive justice, or climate justice, or any other issue other than the specific issue at hand, the more skeptical I become.     (0 COMMENTS)