Special interests must yield to the public interest. Individual interests are special interests. Thus, individual interests must yield to the public interest. This means, in practice, that individuals must be prevented by force from acting against the public interest. This widely shared conclusion is invalid. Used this way, the “public interest” is an undefined and undefinable expression. It’s an incantation. If, as we are expected to believe, the “public interest” is the interest of the public, it does not exist, because “the public” is made of different individuals who each have his (or her, of course) own interest and tries to maximize his own utility (as he sees it). The public interest would literally only exist if all individuals were identical, that is, had the exact same preferences and values, and found themselves in the same particular circumstances. Those who invoke the “public interest” are obliged to retreat in defining it as what a democratic political system decides. That does not make it the interest of the public but the interest of the numerical majority who consciously and knowingly vote for it. Aggregating the opinions of all voters in such a way that each one has an equal say and the result is coherent is a well-known mathematical impossibility, under certain reasonable conditions. The “public interest” typically turns out to be the outcome of political horse-trading and what politicians or bureaucrats put on the political agenda in the first place. In other words, the “public interest” is what is decided by those who have the power to impose their decisions on others. (See my “The Impossibility of Populism,” The Independent Review, Vol. 26, No. 1 [2021], pp. 15-25.) Another way to rescue the “public interest” is to view it as the churning of private interests in the state’s cauldron. The state will give privileges to A at the expense of B, and then to B at the expense of A or C. Often, the state will simultaneously give to A and take from A, and the same for B and C. This churning will, on net, decrease the utility of everybody. For a recent example (they are not difficult to find), see a piece of Financial Times columnist Rana Foroohar, who generally falls in love with any proposed government intervention that, she assumes, will not harm her: “How to make free trade fairer,” October 30, 2023. Her column, about what she calls “fair” trade, is best summarized by its subtitle: It’s time to change settlement dispute systems that favour multinationals over countries — and their public interest. So “countries” have “their” public interest? All the same public interest or a different one for each country? Isn’t any corporation and even multinational corporation a legal resident of one country? Aren’t the interests of its owners part of that country’s public interest? Or are they part of the world’s public interest? And how does Foroohar weigh the interests of the corporation’s owners (or its workers or customers) against the interests of some others in the country or in the world? She can only answer such questions in an arbitrary and authoritarian fashion. For another recent example, consider Vice-President Kamala Harris speaking in London in front of a large slogan: “Artificial Intelligence: In Service of the Public Interest” (see “US Upstages Rishi Sunak with AI Regulation Plan,” Financial Times, November 1, 2023). Since the public interest does not exist, Ms. Harris in fact wants to impose by force her conception, or her tribe’s conception, or the current US government conception’s, of that dangerous unicorn. I recently gave another example in my EconLog post “The Arbitrariness of the ‘Public Interest’.” The only conceivable public interest resides in the common interest of all individuals to be equally free to each pursue his own interests within broad rules—which usually take a negative form, such as “Thou shall not kill.” This is the classical liberal ideal that James Buchanan and Friedrich Hayek* have explored. On this essential distinction between the common interest and the confused “public interest,” the last chapter of Geoffrey Buchanan and James Buchanan’s The Reason of Rules is enlightening, if sometimes disquieting. They argue that we can only speak of the public interest if and when some individuals voluntarily accept to support the costs of the collective action necessary to reform a state that does not correspond to the requirements of a unanimous social contract or the common interest of all individuals (see notably p. 163). —————————————————- * I provide an introduction to Friedrich Hayek’s social and legal thought in my separate reviews of the three volumes of his trilogy Law, Legislation, and Liberty: Volume 1, Rules and Order; Volume 2, The Mirage of Social Justice; and Volume 3, The Political Order of a Free People. (0 COMMENTS)

What, to Hazony, separates true conservatism from Enlightenment liberalism, and why is the former superior to the latter? To answer this, Hazony looks to the writings of major conservative thinkers in centuries past, such as John Fortescue, Richard Hooker, John Seldon, and Edmund Burke.  What unites these thinkers is their support for what Hazony dubs historical empiricism, and their distrust of universalist, rationalist theories founded on abstract reason. Quoting John Seldon, Hazony says of historical empiricism that by “this view, our reasoning in political and legal matters should be based upon inherited national tradition. This permits the statesman or jurist to overcome the small stock of observation and experience that individuals are able to accumulate during their own lifetimes (‘that kind of ignorant infancy, which our short lives alone allow us’) and to take advantage of ‘the many ages of former experience and observation’ which permit us to ‘accumulate years to us, as if we had lived even from the beginning of time.’ In other words, by consulting the accumulated experience of the past, we overcome the inherent weakness of individual judgment, bringing to bear the many lifetimes of observation by our forebears, who wrestled with similar questions under diverse circumstances.”  This is distinguished from the thought of the political philosopher John Locke, a key figure in the Enlightenment liberal tradition. Hazony identifies Locke as a rationalist and a universalist, whose approach to political philosophy stands in stark contrast to the historically grounded and experience-based vison of conservatism. Hazony explains: “Rationalists have a different view of the role of reason in political thought, and in fact a different understanding of what reason itself is. Rather than arguing from the historical experience of nations, rationalists set out by asserting general axioms that they believe to be true of all human beings and that they suppose will be accepted by all human beings examining them with their native rational abilities. From these, they deduce the appropriate constitution or laws for all men.” Perhaps Locke’s most famous work, his Second Treatise on Government, demonstrates this process in action. Locke’s approach is not an “effort to formulate a theory of the state from an empirical standpoint. Instead, it begins with a series of axioms that are without any evident connection to what can be known from the historical and empirical study of the state…From these axioms, Locke then proceeds to deduce the proper character of the political order for all nations on earth.”  As with all deductive reasoning, Locke’s axiomatic-deductive approach is only as strong as the assumptions on which it rests. But, Hazony says, “there is no reason to think any of Locke’s axioms are, in fact, true.” And in claiming the universal validity of these axioms and the systems deduced from them, rationalists recklessly seek to overthrow generations of accumulated experience in favor of something grounded in little more than their own armchair thought experiments. For if this axiomatic-deductive reasoning, untethered from experience, successfully “reveals to all the universal laws of nature governing the political realm, then there will be little need for the historically and empirically grounded reasoning of men such as Fortescue, Hooker, Coke, Selden, and Hale. All men, if they will just gather together and consult with their own reason, can design a government that will be better than anything that ‘the many ages of experience and observation’ produced in England. On this view, the Anglo-American conservative tradition—far from having brought into being the freest and best constitution ever known to mankind—is in fact shot through with unwarranted prejudice, and an obstacle to a better life for all.” Conservatives reject the universal claims of rationalist liberals. It is simply beyond the powers of the human mind to create, from whole cloth, a universally valid system of rights, or a universally valid political order, equally applicable in all times to all peoples. However, one must be careful not to overstate this point. The conservative thinkers Hazony cites, along with Hazony himself, do admit that universally correct answers exist. For example, Hazony says while “there are certainly principles of human nature that are true of all men, and therefore natural laws that prescribe what is good for every human society,” the true nature of “these principles and laws are the subject of unending controversy.” Elsewhere Hazony reiterates the point: “Conservatives do believe there are truths that hold good in all times and places, but given the extraordinary variety of human opinions on any given subject, they are skeptical about the capacity of the individual to attain universal political or moral truths simply by reasoning about them.”  What separates empiricist conservatives from rationalist liberals is how to go about discovering what these universal laws are. Rationalist liberals believe they can be derived through human reason, and once known these universal laws can be applied to consciously construct a universally valid political order. Empiricist conservatives believe human reason can only provide an understanding that is very limited and partial, and it’s only through long periods of experience and trial-and-error, built up across generations, that we can attempt to more closely approximate these ideals in practice.  Further, the discoveries made through this evolved and experienced-based process will not be universally applicable. They will be shaped into different forms by the differing characters, experiences, constraints, and histories of each nation, and may manifest in different, often incompatible, but equally useful ways. Again quoting Seldon (whom Hazony ranks as the greatest of conservative thinkers), Hazony writes “no nation can govern itself by directly appealing to such fundamental laws, because ‘diverse nations, as diverse men, have their diverse collections and inferences, and so make their diverse laws to grow to what they are, out of one and the same root.’” But these laws and traditions of different nations, despite growing from “out of one and the same root” may be incompatible with each other, says Seldon, who writes that what “may be most convenient or just in one state may be as unjust and inconvenient in another, and yet both excellently well framed as governed.”  An analogy might be drawn by referencing an archery target. Suppose the middle of the target, a perfect bullseye, represents the “principles of human nature that are true of all men” and the “natural laws that prescribe what is good for every human society.” Rationalist liberals believe one can create a social order through human reason that operates squarely on the bullseye. But empiricist conservatives see it differently. Human reason is far too feeble a guide to accomplish this. Different peoples and different nations, through trial and error and hard-earned experience, can try, over time and bit by bit, to move closer and closer to the bullseye. One nation may end up in a spot six inches above the center, while another ends up six inches below, with a third six inches to the left and a fourth six inches to the right. Each of these nations have developed systems and institutions that are equally close to correct, yet the institutions and traditions of each will be in many ways different from or incompatible with each other. Additionally, they didn’t end up where they were through sheer chance. Where each nation ended up had its own path-dependent logic based on its own unique history and circumstances. So even though the customs and institutions for each may be equally valid in a sense, they won’t be universal or interchangeable. What works at the northern-most point won’t work as well in the western-most point, and so on.  Because of this, Hazony writes, conservatism does not attempt to reach beyond its borders, or attempt to influence or interfere with other nations. “Each nation’s effort to implement the natural law is in accordance with its own unique experience and conditions. It is therefore wise to respect the different laws found among nations, both those that appear right to us and those that appear mistaken, for different perspectives may each have something to contribute to our pursuit of the truth.” There is no similar basis for such tolerance or respect in Enlightenment liberalism. For if the correct laws can be known through simply consulting universal human reason, and the validity of these reason-derived laws are always and everywhere valid, we have no more reason to respect the experience and character of other nations than we do to respect the accumulated experience of the past within our own society. If they seem contrary to what you can determine through reason, we can freely dispense with them. In the next post, I will review Hazony’s views on conservatism and nationalism, and why he sees these ideas as necessarily connected.  (0 COMMENTS)

Don’t Ignore One Large Wild Card. A recent issue of the NBER Reporter, No. 3, September 2, reports the following: In the fourth paper, David Altig, Laurence J. Kotlikoff, and Victor Yifan Ye calculate how retiring at different ages will affect Social Security benefit amounts, taking into account taxation and other benefits. They find that virtually all individuals aged 45 to 62 should wait until age 65 or later to maximize their Social Security benefits. Indeed, 90 percent would benefit from waiting until age 70, but only 10 percent do so. I waited until age 67 and, for my friends who ask, I recommend the same strategy, even if they have good health and, therefore, a long life expectancy. I looked at the NBER study underlying this chapter. It’s by David Altig, Laurence J. Kotlikoff, and Victor Yifan Ye and is titled “How Much Lifetime Security Benefits are Americans Leaving on the Table,” NBER Working Paper #30675, November 2022. As far as I can tell, the authors assume no changes in the system over the next 20 or so years. Why is that a problem? Because the system will run out of money in about 10 years. We don’t know how politicians will adjust. We can be pretty sure that they will adjust. Among the plausible candidates are giving, say, a 10% haircut to everyone; giving a 5% haircut to lower-income people and a 20% haircut to higher-income people; indexing Social Security benefits to the same index that’s now used (and it’s not the Consumer Price Index) to adjust federal tax brackets; and other measures. The first 3 measures, if anticipated now, give people an incentive, all else equal, to start taking benefits at age 67. It’s possible, of course, that the likely adjustments won’t change the authors’ recommendations. But Larry Kotlikoff has made a lot of money with his software that tells people when to start taking their SS benefits. (I remember paying $40 back in 2017 when I was deciding. It gave me the answer I had come to on my own, but $40 was rounding error on the cost of a mistake.) It’s disappointing that he doesn’t consider any of these adjustment scenarios and run his numbers accordingly. (0 COMMENTS)

James Buchanan This is Part II of a two-part essay: The Past, Present, and Future of Public Choice: Part I The Past, Present, and Future of Public Choice: Part II As mentioned in the previous essay, the rise of Politics, Philosophy, and Economics (PPE) programs since 2013 has been significant, including the establishment of a professional society with annual meetings in 2017. A professional journal devoted to this area of research was founded in 2002, and a book series at Oxford University Press was established in 2020. I urge scholars in PPE to revisit James Buchanan’s 1949 article, in which his basic point is that one cannot do public finance without postulating a theory of the state.1 It was this simple point, once recognized, that meant that one could not proceed as a technical economist without examining the state itself. Public choice analysis comes from this very recognition, as does the discussion of endogenous rule formation mentioned in the previous essay. As Buchanan points out in The Demand and Supply of Public Goods, the economist cannot be content with only postulating the institutional environment and examining the activities within that environment. He or she must also use the tools of economic reasoning to derive the institutional environment itself, its evolution, and its functioning. In Buchanan’s work, this effort is captured in his social contractarianism, but in the hands of others such as F. A. Hayek before him, and Elinor Ostrom after him, we can see the use of economic reasoning to explain the formation of the rules of governance from the bottom up. They rely more on evolutionary processes for the selection and persistence of rules over time than on a reflective equilibrium of the constitutional bargain to represent the core theoretical contribution of a genuine institutional economics. If social cooperation under the division of labor is the thing we seek to explain, then the processes by which individuals are cajoled to pursue productive specialization and alerted to mutual gains from exchange must be central to our explanatory task. Also consider the flip side of Buchanan’s 1949 point about the need for economists to postulate a theory of the state before proceeding. Similarly, political philosophers must provide an account of how the various goods and services they envision the state to be responsible for providing will in fact be produced, who will pay, and to whom they will be distributed. In short, political theory cannot do without a worked-out theory of public finance and public economics. Once again, the opportunities in PPE literature are endless for scholars in economics and politics to pursue. But there is in my mind a bigger issue that lies at the intersection of these disciplines which represents great opportunities for intellectual advancement of the research program in public choice. George Akerlof (2020) published a paper in the Journal of Economic Literature on “Sins of Omission and the Practice of Economics” that highlights the errors that result in economic science due to limitations of the methodological straitjacket we economists are all too willing to wear. As the great physicist Richard Feynman liked to stress, scientists should never fear asking questions that cannot be answered, they should only be weary of those who offer answers that cannot be questioned.2 A better slogan than ‘trust the science’ is ‘trust the process’—the process of contestation that constitutes true science. More recently, W. Brian Arthur (2023) has published a very important essay, “On Economics in Nouns and Verbs.”3 Economics in nouns—the standard practice—is about defining states; it is about a description. Maximizing and equilibrium theorizing is notoriously unable to address questions of processes and paths of adjustment within the confines of formal theory. Thinkers using these models as heuristics can tell a plausible story, or provide an appreciative theory, but it is outside the strict confines of the scientifically acceptable presentation of the model. Arthur argues that for economic science to progress, we must reorient ourselves to doing economics with verbs, i.e., activity and processes of adjustment and adaptation. Such a methodological move would open the intellectual space for one of the core principles of public choice analysis—politics as exchange—in a way that would be a much more natural fit than the standard textbook model of equilibrium optimality. As Buchanan stressed in “What Should Economists Do?”, economics is about exchange and the institutions within which exchanges relationships are formed and transactions are conducted. That is an activity. As Ludwig von Mises put it in his treatise Human Action (1949), the market is not a place or a thing, the market is a process. The point I want to make is simple and straightforward, scholars in public choice should embrace this message because it was their message from the beginning. Again, revisit Buchanan’s “What Should Economists Do?” or read the early work of Vincent Ostrom on polycentric governance and The Intellectual Crisis of American Public Administration. These relatively new developments within PPE and the critical methodological reflections of the state of economics science represent opportunities for new growth, not challenges to economic science. The ironic message that F. A. Hayek conveyed in his Nobel Lecture4 was that in the sciences of human action and society, the methods that appear the most scientific are in fact the least, while the methods that appear least scientific are in fact the most. Deirdre McCloskey has hammered home a similar message in her recent books Beyond Positivism, Behavioralism and Neo-Institutionalism in Economics (2022) and Bettering Humanomics (2022). We should listen to her. We would practice a better economics if we did, and as such was would practice a better economics of politics and political economy if we did. The opportunities presented by studying institutions, ideas, and their interaction, as well as the development of new fields such as historical political economy, PPE and Humanomics do not appear out of the blue. We should not just be listening, because these represent new and novel ideas that were unheard of by those who gathered at the initial Public Choice Society meeting 60 years ago. They are new to most economists, especially those trained in the 21st century, but they should not be to those of us who have been attracted to the public choice tradition. McCloskey, like Buchanan before her, is recreating the Smithian political economy project for our day informed by the subsequent scientific and practical history of the 20th century. Adam Smith still speaks to us today because his work remains part of our “extended present”, just as Hayek’s work and Buchanan’s work does. These new literatures are recent ventures into this conversation, but the conversation we are joining is centuries old, and it reflects the best the disciplines of economics, political economy and social philosophy have to offer. “The world out our window still throws up serious puzzles and paradoxes for us to revolve using the tools of economic reasoning.” The world out our window still throws up serious puzzles and paradoxes for us to revolve using the tools of economic reasoning. The principles of economics, as James Buchanan liked to stress, are able to raise an ordinary individual who has been trained properly in their use to the height of an observational genius, while a genius unaided by the tools of economic reasoning is too often reduced to a gibbering idiot who mistakes noise for sense. In David Levy and Sandra Peart’s brilliant origin story of public choice, Towards an Economics of Natural Equals (2020), they reproduce G. Warren Nutter’s letter to Ronald Coase, attempting to entice Coase to join them at the University of Virginia. Nutter says in that letter that the school had a group of economists who all learned their lessons in economics well at Chicago under Frank Knight. That lesson is the observational power of the principles of economics in the hands of the properly trained economist. Often forgotten among the students of Frank Knight is the brilliant Kenneth Boulding. Boulding was the 2nd John Bates Clark Medal winner after Paul Samuelson. But even from the beginning of his career, he resisted the Samuelsonian methodological transformation of economics. He had roughly the same misgivings as Buchanan. Boulding would pursue his own path—I was very fortune to have him as my teacher—but that path has many parallels to public choice. Like all economists he understood the logic of choice within constraints, but he also understood that choice is more open-ended than deterministic, and the constraints are more subject to our choosing than just fixed and given—again, an intellectual move very familiar to anyone who has studied Buchanan carefully.5 Boulding also was worried about different modes of governance and the faces of power relationships in society, and how to understand their operation on the one hand and counteract them on the other. One of his main concerns was how to establish a stable peace. And to achieve that ,he asked us to consider the examination of the various “cultures of peace” that we experience in our daily lives as we resolve conflicts small and large without recourse to violence or the threat of violence. To conclude, I think this line of research on cultures of peace, which my colleague Chris Coyne (2023) has embarked upon on the heels of developing an extensive research program in defense and peace economics (see Coyne 2007; 2013; Coyne and Hall 2018; 2021), represents a great opportunity to tie up all these areas I have referenced—institutions, ideas, and their interaction; development, historical political economy, and PPE—to address the serious social problems we face today with increased divisions in society, with the resurgence of populism on both left and right, and a general loss of faith in the possibility of progress. In founding the Thomas Jefferson Center, Buchanan argued that economists must learn the technical principles of price theory to be able to assess the impact of alternative institutional arrangements of the ability of individuals in those societies under examination to pursue productive specialization and realize peaceful social cooperation. But he also said that the political economist must also be willing to ask the philosophical questions that such analysis of comparative institutions raise related to liberty, peace, prosperity and “goodness”. These are what the founders of public choice sought to encourage in the dialogue among economists, political scientists, philosophers, and historians at those early meetings. Furthermore, as the arguments developed in the subsequent decades Buchanan repeatedly asked us to think about whether we can avoid falling prey to the Hobbesian jungle—in short can we find freedom in constitutional contract. While deeply sympathetic to that exercise, Vincent Ostrom nevertheless repeatedly asked us to contemplate if we can in fact successfully manage this Faustian bargain we are compelled to make. Remember in the play, Faustus does not repent, though he has several opportunities to do so, and the play ends with Faustus being dragged off to Hell by demons. For more on these topics, see Public Choice, by William F. Shughart II. Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. Peter Boettke on Elinor Ostrom, Vincent Ostrom, and the Bloomington School. EconTalk. “The Role of the Economist in a Free Society: The Art of Political Economy,” by Pete Boettke. Econlib, Sep. 2, 2019. Our task today, I would argue, is the same as what Hayek was led to raise after his debate with John Maynard Keynes and the market socialists in the 1930s and 1940s as he turned his attention from technical economics within a given institutional framework of law, politics and society, to his political economy analysis of the institutional framework itself in works such as The Road to Serfdom (1944), The Constitution of Liberty (1960), and Law, Legislation and Liberty (1979) due to the general neglect of the framework in mid-20th century social science. Hayek asked before the founding of public choice whether the liberal principles of justice and the principles of political economy be restated for the current generation in a way that resonates with the best and the brightest, captures their imagination, excites their curiosity, and marshals their compassion in an effective direction so we can have some hope that we can repair a broken world. If we cannot do that, we run the risk of cease being theorist of political economy and instead will become historians of decline as the 21st century will repeat the odious social experiments of the 20th century, once more driven by war, depression, ideological delusion, and destruction. It is in our power to resist this trend and to instead practice the grand and honorable tradition of political economy as passed down to us from Smith to John Stuart Mill, from Carl Menger to Hayek, and from Knight to Buchanan. Footnotes [1] James M. Buchanan, “The Pure Theory of Government Finance: A Suggested Approach.” Journal of Political Economy. 57(6), 1949. [2] As a side note, at least in my experience with Buchanan as my teacher, he ended each class with a question for us to ponder over the next week, never a declarative statement for us to accept or reject. And some of these questions were not just difficult to answer, but perhaps unanswerable. When pressed once for clarification, Buchanan responded with a genuine sense of curiosity, ‘if I knew the answer, I would not have asked the question.’ [3] W. Brian Arthur, “Economics in nouns and verbs.” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. January, 2023. [4] F. A. Hayek, “The Pretense of Knowledge.” Available online at https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1974/hayek/lecture/. NobelPrize.org, December 11, 1974. [5] As an intellectual history project a contrast and comparison of Buchanan and Boulding would be a very fruitful exercise. Boulding’s The Image is every bit as subjectivist in is orientation as Buchanan’s Cost and Choice, and his Three Faces of Power seeks to understand the governing dynamics of different context in the same way Buchanan wrestles with different power balances in The Limits of Liberty. Both heavily influenced by Knight, but also fearless independent thinkers. *Peter J. Boettke is University Professor of Economics & Philosophy, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA 22030. Adapted from an address Pete Boettke gave at the Public Choice Society’s annual meeting on March 17, 2023. For more articles by Peter J. Boettke, see the Archive. As an Amazon Associate, Econlib earns from qualifying purchases. (0 COMMENTS)

Societies that have finished moulding themselves according to the patrilineal principle have indeed experienced a long and slow tragic cycle. After having invented everything—writing, the state… the first economic globalization, in the Bronze Age—they got bogged down. This great inertia, which we then see in China and India, and in Africa… is one of the great mysteries of history…. My own explanation is that it resulted from the lowering of the status of women. —Emmanuel Todd, Lineages of the Feminine: An Outline of the History of Women,1. p. 104 Emmanuel Todd’s Lineages of the Feminine discusses the status of women throughout history and across cultures. Todd often interprets modern cross-cultural differences in terms of the kinship patterns that first appeared in various societies. I can react to the book, but I cannot truly review it. The topics range too widely, and Todd’s anthropological terminology is too confusing to me (perhaps this is confounded by the fact that I am reading Lineages in translation). In examining sex roles, anthropologists have often classified ancient societies by looking at family patterns. What sorts of marriages are encouraged or forbidden? Does the newly married couple live closer to the husband’s family or the wife’s family? Who inherits property when parents die? Todd uses these sorts of questions to infer the status of women historically. From a modern perspective, two questions stand out in my mind: 1. To what extent are certain high-status occupations predominantly male or female? 2. To what extent are social customs and laws designed to restrict the sexual conduct of one sex or the other? I take away from Lineages three phases illustrating how the Western world has answered these questions. The first phase, from roughly 1500 to 1950, was a patriarchy. The second phase, from roughly 1950 to 2000, was women’s liberation. The third phase, still ongoing, Todd sees as headed toward matriarchy. Under the patriarchy, high-status occupations were predominantly male. In the United States, women were rarely found in leadership positions in business, politics, or the judiciary. In writing for newspapers, they were often confined to the fashion or society pages. In higher education, they were mostly confined to service-oriented fields at second-tier institutions. Also under the patriarchy, women’s sexual freedom was restricted. Premarital and extramarital sex were taboo. Abortion was illegal. Female sexual desire was ignored or denied. Of course, under this regime men’s sexuality was also repressed. But the legal and religious codes were written and enforced by men, without female input. Evolutionary psychology provides an explanation for how patriarchy would arise. Joyce Benenson’s Warriors and Worriers, for example, says that prehistoric males learned to organize and cooperate though fighting, which would have made them temperamentally suited to forming and leading corporations and government institutions. Todd seems unfamiliar with evolutionary psychology. But as an anthropologist, concerning males’ role in hunting in ancient cultures, he writes, This is the most extraordinary map of the distribution of a social trait that I have ever contemplated in my life: there is no variation. It is the men who hunt…. The level of homogeneity for hunting is staggering. p. 118-119 “Todd argues that the sexual division of labor in prehistoric societies is undeniable. But he also sees it as anachronistic.” Todd argues that the sexual division of labor in prehistoric societies is undeniable. But he also sees it as anachronistic. The economy has progressed far beyond hunting and gathering, as it moved to agriculture, then to manufacturing, and now increasingly to services. Evolutionary psychologists predict that men will want to control the sexual behavior of women, in order to assure paternity. A man does not want to risk providing resources to a woman to support another man’s child. Again, Todd ignores this theory. He sees sexual repression as an anachronism. He links the shift toward sexual freedom since 1950 to the advent of better birth control, notably the pill, and to Christianity’s rapid decline. By the 1960s, the patriarchy is giving way to women’s liberation. Under women’s liberation, male-dominated occupations are opened to women. Premarital sex becomes tolerated. Extramarital sex and divorce lose some of their stigma. Women’s sexual desire is acknowledged. Over the last two decades, Todd sees a new phase in the cultural evolution of sex roles. Now, any high-status occupation that is still male-dominated is suspected of suffering from unwarranted discrimination against women. The expectation is that such bastions must fall. But no questions or doubts are raised as women become dominant in other high-status fields and obtain an ever-larger majority of college degrees. Sexual norms, as embodied in the #MeToo movement, for example, give women the power to dictate sexual conduct to men. Today, it is men’s sexuality that is repressed by women. Todd refers to the 21st-century trend as “antagonistic feminism” or the onset of matriarchy. For the record, my preference would be for all occupations to be open to women, but if a particular organization or niche becomes mostly male, that should not require a change. My preference would be for sexual restraint to be encouraged for both sexes, but not insisted upon. And a male who makes an awkward pass should not be punished with ostracism. Lineages is filled with Todd’s observations, some of which he supports with statistics and others which he does not support at all. The rest of this essay will offer a sample of these. Note that I disagree with many of them. Todd is scornful of contemporary uses of the terms patriarchy and gender: I would be tempted to say that the real reason for the choice of the word ‘gender’ rather than sex… is a latent form of puritanism. With gender, it’s not so much that we are introducing the social; rather, we are repressing the image of the genitalia. p. 41 Todd speculates that men are naturally more communitarian than women: deep down in human history… men specialized in the collective of the local group and women specialized in the individuality of the family. p. 130 He speculates that Christianity in the Middle Ages was protective of women: Gestation and childbirth… have certainly killed many more women in human history than war or car accidents have killed men… … we can understand why many women adhere to the Christian rejection of sexuality. p. 136 Concerning the social effects of the birth control pill, he writes: … it makes procreation a female decision. The loss of male power is total here… it is now the woman who decides whether or not to have a child. p. 146 On the trend toward more women completing college: [In France as of 2018] Among those aged 35-44, 38.6% of women but only 24.7% of men have had higher education. Among the 25-34-year-olds, it’s 36.1% of women and 29.6% of men… The student population is predominantly female. p. 149 On the paradox of female progress: … we are seeking to explain the rise of an antagonistic vision of relations between the sexes, even though so many objective indices reveal a massive improvement in the situation of women… they have arrived en masse on the labour market, including in positions of responsibility…. Could it be that the rise of a negative vision of the male sex is partly a result of this new freedom for women, generating a soft anomie, a new kind of dissatisfaction, as much as it produces freedom? p. 163-164 Against this, he notes a sense in which the sexual division of labor has not changed. In Sweden… 93% of nurses, 87% of those who take care of the elderly, 84% of social workers, 83% of assistants or secretaries and 82% of those working with children are women. Finally, 80% of kindergarten teachers are female. Conversely, masons, carpenters, and electricians are 98% male. Among metalworkers and mechanics, the proportion of men is always above 95%. The massive entry of women into employment therefore most often conceals a strong and almost complete resistance on the part of the sexual division of labor. Women specialize in trades which seem to be the salaried counterparts of their tertiary functions in the family of hunger-gatherers…. p. 166-167 Todd uses his picture of women as individualistic to throw this wild punch: Between 1980 and 2020, the Western world was submerged by a neoliberal ideology and a set of policies that stubbornly persist despite their obvious failure. The standard of living is falling, free trade has destroyed our factories… But there has been no massive, industrialist and protectionist collective reaction… ask ourselves if the feminist revolution is not also contributing to our inability to act collectively. p. 175-176 On the impact of women on academic research: When I joined INED [The Institute for Demographic Studies] in 1984, it was a world of men, dominated by polytechniciens implementing an elegant mathematical approach to population issues… The institute is now 61.4% female as far as researchers are concerned, with a peak of 91.7% among 20-29-year-olds…. The reversal of the sex ratio was accompanied by a change in research orientations at INED. The mathematical heart has atrophied. Its psychological-sociological periphery has welled in proportion, obviously including an interest in ‘gender’. p. 192 On the disconnect between the feminism of the upper middle class and the needs of society at large: In the working classes, where couples’ relations are already destabilized by unemployment and a remnant of hypergamic aspiration, the antagonistic model is disastrous in its psychological effects. The world of single-parent families does not need more confrontation between the two sexes, but more trust. p. 195 On female dominance in the judicial system in France: … in 2017, 66% of judges were women, a proportion that rose to 84% among judges aged 30-34. p. 211 On trends against freedom of expression: … we have passed, in the West, into a matridominated ideological system. However, we are immersed in an ever-expanding world of mental and verbal prohibitions… not to examine the possibility of a connection between the two phenomena would be sociologically negligent. p. 212 On sexual preference becoming an identity: The Christian West has been negatively obsessed with sex for two millennia. But if we turn sexual orientation into the central element of personal identity, isn’t that still maintaining an obsession with sexuality? p. 240-241 For more on these topics, see “Persistent Differences in Gender Temperament,” by Arnold Kling. Econlib, Feb. 6, 2023. “The Boys Under the Bus,” by Arnold Kling. Econlib, Dec. 5, 2022. Alison Wolf on Women, Inequality and the XX Factor. EconTalk. Again, I include these quotations to give the flavor of the book, not to indicate agreement. What I took away from Lineages was narrower and may differ from what the author intended. Footnotes [1] Emmanuel Todd, Lineages of the Feminine: An Outline of the History of Women. *Arnold Kling has a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of several books, including Crisis of Abundance: Rethinking How We Pay for Health Care; Invisible Wealth: The Hidden Story of How Markets Work; Unchecked and Unbalanced: How the Discrepancy Between Knowledge and Power Caused the Financial Crisis and Threatens Democracy; and Specialization and Trade: A Re-introduction to Economics. He contributed to EconLog from January 2003 through August 2012. Read more of what Arnold Kling’s been reading. For more book reviews and articles by Arnold Kling, see the Archive. As an Amazon Associate, Econlib earns from qualifying purchases. (0 COMMENTS)

Economic analysis as a way of thinking can be understood as both a science and an art. As a science, economic analysis takes as its analytical starting point that human beings are striving to do the best that they can, given their particular circumstances of time and place. The art of economic analysis is to understand, or render intelligible, what it means for individuals to be doing their best at a particular place and time, given the constraints as they themselves perceive it. The “trade” of the economist as a social scientist is to understand the emergence of spontaneous order in terms of systematic generalizations of cause and effect, the cause being the purposes and plans human beings attach to their action, and the effect being a consequence of individuals attempting to realize their goals through action with the means available to them. The “world” of the economist, as James Buchanan puts it, is one of “coordinated conflict” ([1966] 1979, p. 118), but the art of understanding how conflicting goals become coordinated requires that economics as a science “must be preoccupied with meanings” (Storr 2013, p. 25). “[M]y driving experience in the Washington, D.C. area is not filled with horns honking, tailgating, cursing, or other offensive hand gestures to which I had become accustomed in New York.” One of the best examples to illustrate this notion of economics as a science of meanings, to understand how coordinated conflict emerges, is the observation of car traffic patterns. From a helicopter view, the tranquil beauty of the pattern itself appears as if car traffic had been designed by an individual, yet if one has ever driven in the New York City metropolitan area, it would appear that the situation on the ground is more akin to conflict rather than coordination. Indeed, as someone who had grown into adulthood in the New York City area, and having now lived a decade in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, I am too often told how angry, impatient, and most importantly for my point here, downright disrespectful drivers in and around New York City (NYC) can be, even from other native New Yorkers who now reside elsewhere. Indeed, my driving experience in the Washington, D.C. area is not filled with horns honking, tailgating, cursing, or other offensive hand gestures to which I had become accustomed in New York. This being said, given the growing traffic and congestion that has marked the Washington, D.C. area, my experience living in both areas has given me a new perspective—one that has even surprised me—that has led me to conclude the very opposite. When we understand the meaning and purposes attached to the actions of drivers around the NYC area, we realize that what appears to be anger and impatience directed to one driver is the act of paying great respect to other drivers by facilitating “coordinated conflict” as Buchanan refers to it. Simultaneously, I’ve come to conclude that drivers in the Washington, D.C. area are in fact acting very disrespectfully. My point here is not to imply that being impolite to other drivers is necessarily a good thing, nor that this phenomenon is unique to the NYC area. Anyone driving in, for example, Guatemala City or Palermo will see a similar phenomenon. Rather, it is to suggest that before we can pass any normative judgements regarding the means that individuals utilize to achieve their goals, we must first understand their goals as the individuals themselves perceive them and how they are conducive to facilitating the coordination of conflicting goals without command. As Virgil Storr states this point, “we cannot figure out the meaning of an action without some knowledge of the context and the actor’s motivations” (2013, p. 11). As absurd as this conclusion may seem, the basis for this conclusion can be found in Harold Demsetz’s seminal paper, “Toward a Theory of Property Rights” (1967), in which Demsetz argues that “the main allocative function of property rights is the internalization of beneficial and harmful effects” (1967, p. 350). The fact that the roads in the NYC area and the Washington, D.C. area are neither privately owned nor priced (except where there is tolling by EZ-Pass, which arguably are not market prices), there are high transaction costs associated with internalizing the harmful effects of traffic, such as reducing the reliability of expectations regarding the time to travel from one distance to another. Given the absence of formal definition in private property over roads, and therefore the ability to price and exchange the use of roads to individuals that value it at a particular time and place the most, we can conclude that if roads are public property, then no one owns the road in the appropriate sense of bearing the full costs and benefits of their decision-making. What economic analysis teaches us is that, in a world of positive transaction costs, non-price mechanisms of coordinating conflict emerge, including custom, habits, and norms to create reliable expectations regarding social interaction. From a property rights standpoint, then, we can understand that the meaning attached to the actions of drivers in the NYC area, which an external observer perceives to be disrespectful, is actually an emergent culture, or pattern of meanings, that reduces the transaction costs associated with defining property rights over roads. Stated succinctly (and perhaps in a blunt NY tone?), since you don’t own the road, what right have you to hold up traffic by being indecisive when switching lanes, not moving immediately when the traffic light turns green, or driving slowly in the passing lane? Thus, drivers in the NYC are like all human beings are doing the best they can, given the circumstances they face, but the manner in which they are doing their best must be understood in terms of the meanings they attach to their actions. For more on these topics, see Michael Munger on Traffic. EconTalk. “Sell the Streets,” by Benjamin Powell. Econlib, May 4, 2009. A Conversation with Harold Demsetz. Intellectual Portrait Series. Intro by Amy Willis. Liberty Fund video. “Snow Jobs,” by Fred S. McChesney. Property rights after blizzards. Econlib, Oct. 15, 2001. Perhaps, more importantly, traffic in the NYC area would be far worse if such attitudes and habits did not emerge, given the absence of private property in roads. The implication here is that private property is indeed the basis for catallaxy, or catallactic competition as Ludvig von Mises phrases it, and its absence prompts the emergence of other informal institutional arrangements to coordinate conflict. Therefore, if we are to understand how coordinated conflict emerges, we must first understand that economic is a science of meanings attached to human action, the art of which is to understand such meanings attached to action as the individuals on the ground perceive them. So, the next time you get on the road, remember: pay the utmost respect to your fellow drivers by not driving as if you own the road. References Buchanan, James M. 1966 [1979]. “Economics and Its Scientific Neighbors.” In What Should Economists Do? Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, pp. 115–142. Demsetz, Harold. 1967. “Toward a Theory of Property Rights.” The American Economic Review, vol. 57, no. 2, pp. 347–359. Storr, Virgil Henry. 2013. Understanding the Culture of Markets. New York: Routledge. * Rosolino Candela is a Senior Fellow in the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, and Program Director of Academic and Student Programs at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Acknowledgements: I thank Peter Boettke, Christopher Coyne, and Dominick Mellusi for comments and feedback. Any remaining errors are entirely my own. For more articles by Rosolino Candela, see the Archive. (0 COMMENTS)

A Book Review of All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism, by Kevin Vallier. 1 Integralists are on the march. The ideas of a small group of mainly American but also British and Austrian Catholic scholars who identify themselves as integralists have received considerable attention over the past ten years. Now, an entire book has been written about them. In All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism (2023), political philosopher Kevin Vallier has provided us with a systematic analysis of a political movement that posits itself as a radical alternative to liberalism. The book’s primary purpose is to help readers understand the nature of integralism in the present and past, and its relationship to liberalism in our time. By “liberalism,” Vallier does not mean what Americans usually associate with the term: i.e., those who favor widespread intervention in the economy and/or have broadly liberal social views. Rather, liberalism encompasses anyone—whether on the right or left, religious believer, agnostic or atheist—who holds to things like liberal constitutionalism and rule of law. In this regard, liberalism need not mean the insistence that people’s religious faith may have no role whatsoever in how they behave as citizens in the public square (though some self-described liberals do hold that position). It does imply, however, that 1) religious institutions do not exercise direct or indirect authority in the secular realm by virtue of their ecclesial status and should not seek to do so; and 2) religious authorities should not call on state authorities to address, for example, problems of heresy among adherents of a given faith. At the heart of integralism is opposition to these two precepts. Though integralists do not agree about everything, they do believe that the Catholic Church and its hierarchy enjoy an indirect authority to compel secular officials towards the realization of specific spiritual goals. This includes the punishment of those who are apostates from the Catholic faith or who have embraced heretical views. Politically and constitutionally speaking, the integralist model is a dyarchy in which church and state rule together in predominately Catholic societies, and in which the claims of canon law and civil law are distinct and yet overlap and reinforce each other. Vallier himself is not an integralist. Much of the book’s second half focuses on critiquing integralism’s theoretical premises and practical implications. Vallier does, however, want to explain what he considers to be integralism’s internal coherence. In doing so, he establishes himself as the preeminent scholar of integralism writing from “outside” this political and religious tradition. One reason for this is Vallier’s willingness to invest time in actually reading what integralists say and write. He doesn’t, for example, dismiss them with tired bromides like “you can’t legislate morality,” which deny the obvious fact that even the most seemingly innocuous of laws have some type of a moral grounding and structure built into them. For Vallier, integralism cannot be dismissed as the frantic cogitations of a tiny group of eccentric intellectuals aghast at the relativism that plagues modern Western societies or the disarray into which many Christian confessions are mired. Integralism, Vallier illustrates, has a clear and developed structure of ideas about the relationship of religious faith and the ecclesial realm to the political and legal order, and vice versa. Moreover, Vallier points out that there were periods of history—most notably, Medieval Christendom—in which “High Integralism” was the dominant political system, even if the phrase was not used at the time. Vallier goes to some lengths to illustrate that contemporary integralism is not a monolithic phenomenon. Among its ranks are numbered thinkers like the distinguished British philosopher and historian Thomas Pink. He has focused explicitly on intra-Catholic arguments about the meaning of Vatican II’s 1965 Declaration on Religious Freedom Dignitatis Humanae: On the Right of the Person and of Communities to Social and Civil Freedom in Matters Religious2 (to give the declaration its full title) and what it means for the Church’s relationship to the secular political order. Pink has shown no particular interest in pushing specific political and economic programs like the corporatism typically favored by integralists. His primary concern is ad-intra (to use a Latin phrase used during discussions at Vatican II): that is, his attention is overwhelmingly upon the Church’s self-understanding and then what that means for the Church’s relationship with the state. By contrast, the priority of integralists like the Harvard professor of constitutional law Adrian Vermeule is ad-extra. Such integralists are often cagey, Vallier observes, about the precise theological-political roots of their agenda. They are not, however, shy about working towards the realization of very specific political, constitutional, legal, and economic programs in the world outside the Church in ways that go far beyond anything proposed by Pink. These invariably involve rigorous use of state bureaucracies like the administrative state to reshape society in non-liberal directions. These arrangements and goals—such as those associated with the corporate state—are largely antithetical to those which characterize the United States Constitution. If the changes desired by integralists were to be realized democratically, it would require 1) the mass conversion of a majority of Americans to Catholicism 2) plus the conscious decision of these Catholics to embrace integralism, and then 3) overcoming the presumed opposition of millions of non-Catholic Americans to integralism. “The parallels between progressives and integralists cannot be understated.” The sheer unlikeliness of this progression makes an alternative approach more probable: that is, integralists doing what progressives have been doing since the 1900s—working to subvert the Constitution via creative reinterpretation of the Constitution and building bureaucracies that gradually neutralize the influence of political institutions identified in the Constitution. The parallels between progressives and integralists cannot be understated. Much of Vallier’s explorations of these two faces of integralism involve him systematically defining the key aspects of integralist thought and showing how the different parts fit together. In several places, this takes the form of the type of models beloved of many political scientists—the utility of which, I will confess, I remain skeptical of. In the case of contemporary ad-extra integralists, Vallier’s analysis involves sifting out the implications of various writings and commentaries mostly penned by Vermeule. He shows how these add up to a theory and praxis for state capture. Given that Vermeule goes a long way to cover his tracks to all but the few who understand the full meaning that he invests in expressions like the common good, Vallier makes crystal clear what this leading integralist has in mind for America. Here it is important to note that Vallier demonstrates the degree to which ad-extra integralists draw upon the thought of Carl Schmitt and his precise approach to the theological-political problem. Schmitt is famous for his overt political authoritarianism, his view of all secular political philosophies as covert theologies, and his famous friends-enemies distinction as critical to grasping the essence of modern politics. The extent to which some integralists rely upon Schmittian premises illustrates just how antagonistic ad-extra integralism is to both institutional liberal arrangements and liberalism per se. Exploring the implications of ad-extra integralism for politics takes Vallier into discussions of the integralists’ significance for contemporary American political debates. That integralists are intent upon a radical reshaping of American conservative politics is no secret. Despite the relatively small number of integralist intellectuals, integralist ideas and language have worked their way into the rhetoric and stated priorities of parts of the New Right. But Vallier also demonstrates that realizing integralism in the conditions of a country like America would not only be mathematically challenging (even among run-of-the-mill orthodox Catholics like myself, integralists constitute a telephone-box minority). More significantly, Vallier argues, such a transition would involve grave and intentional damage to the common good that integralists claim to be trying to realize. In light of Catholicism’s famous insistence that there is never a good reason to do evil, ad-extra integralists could well find themselves violating their church’s own moral teaching. To my mind, however, the deeper significance of Vallier’s book is its analysis of the history and development of Catholicism’s approach to the temporal realm. The importance of this discussion goes far beyond the specifics of Catholicism insofar as it also touches upon the wider question of religion’s relationship to liberal order. The idea held by many people today that religion is a strictly private affair is, Vallier points out to his readers, “peculiar” (p.1). For one thing, this idea has not been the norm in history. Second, human beings seem to be inherently religious creatures. At some point of their life, every person wonders 1) if there is a God; 2), if yes, then how we know this Being; 3) what this Being has revealed about himself; and 4) the significance of this revelation for our private and public actions. At a minimum this indicates that trying to push religion and religious believers out of the public square is a sure-fire recipe for the very type of internal social and political conflict that liberalism ostensibly seeks to moderate. These facts make integralism seem far less strange than we often suppose it to be. It does, after all, provide clear answers to the question of how the spiritual realm relates to the temporal realm. That particular question emerges directly from the radical step that Christianity took in making a distinction between the spiritual and the temporal that was incomprehensible to pagan Greek and Roman minds that invested the polis with divine qualities. The pagan position achieved a type of apotheosis with the ascription of divine-like qualities to the Roman Emperor. Distinction and separation, however, are not the same thing. Moreover, how the Church works through the implications of this distinction occurs within human history and that process is thus subject to the vicissitudes of historical change. Absent, for example, the Roman Empire’s gradual implosion in fifth century Western and Southern Europe and the need for some type of authority to fill the gap, would Catholic bishops have found themselves having to take on essentially temporal political functions? And yet the Church is clear that historical change cannot somehow displace revealed truth: most especially, truths about the Church itself. That raises the question of whether integralism is in fact much more than a reflection of historical conditions that are no longer in play. Put another way, is true Catholic doctrine on the relationship between the spiritual and the temporal essentially integralist? Vallier’s broad conclusion is that this seems to be the case. He is more convinced by the argument of integralists like Pink that Dignitatis Humanae represents a change in church policy towards the state, than those who maintain that Dignitatis Humanae is what is known as a “development in doctrine.” Among other things, development means “change” and “growth” in a doctrine that does not involve contradiction of previous teaching. The most well-known modern expostulator of this idea was John Henry Newman in his An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, written before Newman converted to Catholicism in 1845.3 This is surely where the discussion about integralism needs to go. There is not presently, Vallier notes, a single Catholic bishop in the world in full communion with Rome who embraces (at least openly) integralism in any form. But if Dignitatis Humanae is what Pink suggests it is, then a policy switch back towards a more explicitly integralist position on the part of the Catholic Church sometime in the future is at least conceivable. In this sense, Pink’s challenge to the widely accepted understanding of Dignitatis Humanae is ultimately more important than the agenda being pursued by the ad-extra integralists. For if Pink is right, then those integralists whose focus is ad-extra will be able to insist that they are working on the basis of solid doctrinal foundations. By contrast, if Pink is mistaken, and Dignitatis Humanae does constitute a legitimate development of doctrine in the way that it ground the right of religious liberty of individuals and communities squarely upon 1) natural law and 2) a return to older Catholic sources on the topic (such as several Church Fathers), then integralists have a problem. For if the interpretations of Dignitatis Humanae offered by figures like Joseph Ratzinger, John Finnis, Martin Rhonheimer, and, further back, by the Swiss theologian and Cardinal Charles Journet (a far more important figure in Vatican II’s debates about Dignitatis Humanae than John Courtney Murray, S.J.) are right, the ad-extra integralists’ theological-political principles and agenda are in deep tension with Catholic doctrine. Quite where all this will end is unknown. It is tempting to review integralism and ad-intra and ad-extra integralists as a passing reaction to arguments going on inside the American conservative movement and the Catholic Church, as well as frustration with the state of the West. For more on these topics, see “The Revanchist Right,” by Arnold Kling. Econlib, Sep. 4, 2023. Political Catholicism Reborn? Symposium on Kevin Vallier’s All The Kingdoms of the World. Law and Liberty, Sep. 21, 2023. Anthony Gill on Religion. EconTalk. Yet as some integralists have correctly observed, major changes in the political, social, and economic order have often come about because of the work of a small cadre of dedicated intellectuals and activists. Early twentieth century progressives or Lenin’s Bolsheviks come to mind as prominent examples. Thanks to Kevin Vallier, however, we have a comprehensive outline of the ideas and agenda that motivate those integralists who have chosen to act in an analogous manner. As the saying goes, forewarned is forearmed. Footnotes [1] All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism, by Kevin Vallier. [2] Available from the Vatican archive online at “Declaration on Religious Freedom: Dignitatis Humanae: On the Right of the Person and of Communities to Social and Civil Freedom in Matters Religious”. [3] Available online at “An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine,” by John Henry Newman. NewmanReader.org. * Samuel Gregg is Distinguished Fellow in Political Economy and Senior Research Faculty at the American Institute for Economic Research. He has written and spoken extensively on questions of political economy, economic history, monetary theory and policy, and natural law theory. He is the author of sixteen books, including On Ordered Liberty (2003), The Commercial Society (2007), Wilhelm Röpke’s Political Economy (2010); Becoming Europe (2013); Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization (2019); The Essential Natural Law (2021); and The Next American Economy: Nation, State and Markets in an Uncertain World (2022). As an Amazon Associate, Econlib earns from qualifying purchases. (0 COMMENTS)

I have travelled through many of Mainland China’s provinces, and recently landed in Taiwan for the first time.  In this post, I’ll argue that Taiwan is China’s best province.  But first I need to consider whether Taiwan is actually Chinese.  Here are a few points in favor: 1. Both the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of China officially regard Taiwan as a Chinese province.  A small portion of the Republic of China is part of Fujian province, but Taiwan is the main part of the Republic of China.  It’s odd to call your country “China” if it’s not China. 2. I flew to Taipei on China Airlines, the official airline of Taiwan.  Why does it have that name? 3. I visited the Palace Museum, which holds the very greatest treasures of Chinese civilization.  It would be odd to locate such a museum in a non-Chinese country.  I saw schoolchildren learning about “their history”. 4.  On Taiwan they still use the traditional Chinese script.  Thus by one measure Taiwan is the province that adheres most closely to Chinese culture. Of course there is an alternative view—Mainland China is controlled by the CCP and Taiwan is controlled by a rival government.  Over time, it has diverged from Mainland China in many ways. Even so, I think that in most respects Taiwan is Chinese, in the same sense that East and West Germany were both Germany, and North and South Korea are still both Korea.  So in that respect I might be seen as being in sympathy with Mainland Chinese nationalists. But Mainland Chinese nationalists also must reckon with the fact that Taiwan is China’s best province, and not by a small margin: 1. It has the best political system, with democracy and human rights.  In some respects it’s even superior to other East Asian democracies. 2.  It has the best economic system, much more productive than other Chinese provinces.  It relies more on the free market. 3.  It has the best culture.  Even Mainland Chinese tourists typically acknowledge that visiting Taiwan is a pleasant surprise.  The service is friendly and many aspects of the culture are quite charming.  Mainland China has its appeal, but the service can be brusque and the rules are often excessively burdensome.  Things feel much freer in Taiwan. 4.  Urban planning seems better in Taiwan.  The big cities are not structured with wide streets and large walled-off compounds, as in Mainland China.  On the mainland, even college campuses are walled off like high security military bases. 5. The air seems cleaner than on the mainland. 6.  Taiwanese achievements in the arts are especially notable, with Taiwanese film directors being world leaders from the 1980s to the 2000s. 7.  There are many other advantages:  Uber > > > Didi, Taiwan’s internet works far better, etc. Taiwan seems so far ahead in so many dimensions that its superiority is not even up for debate.  The only question left is what to do about it.  I see three possible options: 1. Mainland China adopts Taiwan’s political system, its economic system, and its cultural practices.  This seems far and away the optimal outcome.  One China, with a Taiwanese system. 2.  The status quo is maintained.  This is the best option if Mainland China refuses to adopt Taiwan’s system. 3. Mainland China invades Taiwan.  I wonder if Chinese leaders understand how big a mistake this would be.  Not in the sense that they would lose the war (I have no expertise on that issue), rather as a public relations disaster.  Taiwan is increasingly seen by outsiders as a cute and lovable place.  For a giant country like China to come in and crush the system would be seen as being deeply unfair—far more so than the recent takeover of Hong Kong. Mainland China’s government is too proud to publicly embrace the first option.  But it’s not too late for them to begin quietly edging their system in the Taiwanese direction.  As the two systems become more similar, it becomes easier to solve the problem. Ill-informed people often claim that democracy is incompatible with Chinese culture, citing 4000 years of Chinese history.  Taiwan shows that this is not true.  Ill-informed people often claim that the Chinese are copiers, not innovators, ignoring the fact that many key Western technologies first came from China.  And Taiwan shows this is still the case, with ethnic Chinese firms in Taiwan having the most sophisticated chip making plants on the planet. When you think about all that has been achieved by 24 million Chinese people in Taiwan, just imagine what could be achieved if 1.4 billion mainlanders had the same freedom to innovate.  A win-win for the entire world. PS.  Here’s a picture I took of Taipei.   “Pei” means north, and is the same word as “bei” in Mandarin—i.e. Beijing is “northern capital”.  Taipei is on the north of the island.  Taichung is in the center, and Tainan is in the south.  On the mainland, chung is spelled zhong.  Thus the Chinese call their country Zhongguo—“central country”.   (0 COMMENTS)

That the innocent, though they may have some connection or dependency upon the guilty (which, perhaps, they themselves cannot help), should not upon that account suffer or be punished for the guilty, is one of the plainest and most obvious rules of justice. In the most unjust war, however, it is commonly the sovereign or the rulers only who are guilty. The subjects are almost always perfectly innocent. Whenever it suits the conveniency of a public enemy, however, the goods of the peaceable citizens are seized both at land and at sea; their lands are laid waste, their houses are burnt, and they themselves, if they presume to make any resistance, are murdered or led into captivity; and all this in the most perfect conformity to what are called the laws of nations. This is from Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. One of my goals, in traveling to and from the Mont Pelerin Society meetings in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, was to get through at least 200 pages of The Theory of Moral Sentiments. I’m reading it through for the first time, in preparation for an OLLI talk I’m giving in Monterey in December. Although I found it hard slogging at first, after a while, I found a rhythm. That guy was sharp.   (0 COMMENTS)