I saw recently that my current state of residence, Minnesota, will be banning employers from using non-compete agreements as terms for employment. Full disclosure – while I signed such a non-compete agreement myself when joining my current employer, I am not impacted by this law for a couple of reasons. For one, it doesn’t go into effect until July 1st, 2023, and all non-competes established before that date are still considered valid. Second, it only applies to employers based in Minnesota, and while I live here, the agency that employs me is not based in Minnesota, so that too prevents me from being impacted. That said, I am very much opposed to this ban, and believe it will do much more harm than good.  I’m not of the opinion that non-compete clauses are a universal good, of course. Like most things in life, they have upsides and downsides, and whether the costs outweigh the benefits will be different for different individuals facing different circumstances and trade-offs. The costs are fairly obvious – they put up a barrier to finding new employment after one departs their current job. So, what are the benefits?  One benefit is increased wages. Employers must offer higher wages to prospective new employees to make them willing to accept a non-compete as part of their terms of employment. To see this, just engage in a bit of introspection. Imagine you had two job offers from two different employers. Imagine that everything about the job offers was the same – the type of work, hours, paid vacation, family leave policy, and so forth. The only difference between them was that Company A requires to you sign a non-compete, while Company B does not. Immediately, that makes Company B seem more attractive, all else equal. In order to overcome that, you’d require Company A to offer you higher wages than Company B. Or more vacation, better working conditions, longer paid family leave – there are multiple margins that can be adjusted. But the point is that you’d need something about Company A’s offer to improve relative to B, to make you willing to accept that extra restriction. Are those offsetting benefits “worth it?” The answer for that will be different for everyone. In my case it was, but unlike the legislators and governor of Minnesota, I don’t consider myself fit to determine a single, one-size-fits-all answer to be imposed on everyone else. Non-competes also provide benefits to employers. Using my own circumstances as an example, as part of my employment, I’ve taken training and acquired certifications for electronic medical records systems, in order to both more effectively perform my job and increase the number of clients I can assist. This training and certification process was sponsored and paid for by my employer – and it’s not a simple or cheap process. There are benefits to employers in investing in the skills, training, and certification of those they employ. But the willingness of employers to do so will be diminished with the prospect that they might sink the resources into providing an employee that training, only to have that employee immediately jump ship to a competitor, sticking them with the cost while their competitor gets a better trained and credentialed employee free of charge. In the absence of non-competes, employers will be less willing to invest in providing their employees with the kind of training and support that will help them advance their careers long term – so employees will bear some of this cost too.  Again, I’m not saying that non-competes are universally worth it. Some people will find them their best option, others will prefer options without a non-compete. But legislation like this is likely to be either useless or harmful in any given case. If an opportunity involving a non-compete isn’t a given worker’s best option, according to that worker’s own preferences and values regarding the trade-offs involved, then the new legislation is useless because the worker wouldn’t have signed the non-compete anyway. And if an opportunity involving a non-compete is the best option for a worker, the legislation will be harmful because it’s taking away that worker’s best available option and forcing them into an arrangement they find less beneficial. There is no one-sized-fits all answer for things like non-compete agreements – regardless of what the legislators and the governor of Minnesota dictate. (0 COMMENTS)

  I had never heard of Kelsey Piper before but she does a fantastic job of interviewing Tyler Cowen on a wide range of issues, starting with Effective Altruism and Artificial Intelligence. It gradually turns into a conversation in which Piper holds her own. She has a lot of energy and enthusiasm and of course Tyler does too. I recommend listening at 1.25 speed. By the way, the subtitles are horrible but also not necessary. Both of them speak clearly. A few highlights. 13:00: What we can do better in future pandemics. This was the part where I was most critical. The things we can do better are virtually all government things. I agree with Tyler, at least in most cases that if government did things better, things would be, well, better. But he doesn’t specify any set of incentives that would get us there. He still won’t criticize lockdowns, for example. 15:23: Here I was pleased to see that Tyler went as far as he’ll probably ever go to admitting that the Great Barrington Declaration and its authors should be part of the conversation. I think Tyler has real trouble saying he’s sorry or even that he was wrong. This is about as close as he’ll come, I think. 20:00 (I’m rough on the time here; this is from memory): Interesting discussion of the Russia/Ukraine war. He says that we shouldn’t put all the blame on Putin. I think this is Tyler’s way of saying that the U.S. and NATO did indeed provoke Putin even if that doesn’t justify his invasion. And it doesn’t justify his invasion. His mention of Joseph Brodsky is interesting. My favorite part, which happens relatively late in the interview, is Tyler’s criticism of the conflict between the Pentagon and the Chinese government. It scares the hell out of me and I’m glad to see that he’s not pleased with it either. He even says a couple of times that he’s not sure who’s the bad guy. If I gave more highlights, I would almost be repeating everything. Tyler is at his best, making pithy comments and in many cases making points that I had never thought of that, when I hear them, cause me to say, “Of course.” I was also pleased and surprised early on–I can’t remember when in the interview–that Kelsey Piper said she has kids and wants to have six kids. At various points, Tyler gives the kind of advice I give to young people: play to your strengths and what you enjoy rather than saying something like “The world needs more computer programmers so I should be a computer programmer.” (That’s actually an example that Kelsey gives.) Also, Tyler says “think on the margin” in various contexts. I do that too, when trying to help people do a little better, be a little better. One last point, on drinking. Tyler says we should be like Mormons and forswear alcohol. I had my first drink when I was 21 and didn’t drink regularly until I was in my 40s. I love drinking and I have between 2 and 5 drinks a week. (I have about 10 drinks a week when I’m at my cottage.) I probably won’t go Mormon but I finally understood Tyler’s point. It’s not just that we should quit drinking for ourselves; by quitting drinking we will support people around us who don’t do as well with booze. I’m not saying I’ll change, but I might change the situations in which I drink.   (0 COMMENTS)

Here are your favorite episodes of 2022 from our Annual Survey. 10th most popular or enjoyed in your voting was a four-way tie: Michael Munger on Industrial Policy Vinay Prasad on the Pandemic Marc Andreessen on Software, Immortality, and Bitcoin Matti Friedman on Leonard Cohen and the Yom Kippur War Number 9: Nassim Nicholas Taleb on the Nations, States, and Scale Number 8: Dwayne Betts on Beauty, Prison, and Redaction Number 7: Russ Roberts and Mike Munger on Wild Problems Number 6: Devon Zuegel on Inflation, Argentina, and Crypto Number 5: Annie Duke on the Power of Quitting Number 4: Amor Towles on A Gentleman in Moscow and the Writer’s Craft Number 3: Tyler Cowen on Reading Number 1, a two-way tie: Roland Fryer on Educational Reform Penny Lane on Loving and Loathing Kenny G Feel free to go back and listen to some of those if you missed them or to enjoy them again. I want to remind listeners that we are also on YouTube. I want to remind viewers that we are also at EconTalk.org and any place where audio podcasts are heard. I also want to just mention that we have many, many more downloads on the audio than we have views on YouTube. So, those numbers on YouTube are not representative. We will get about–listeners, we will get about 100,000 to 120,000 or sometimes more downloads of an episode on audio; and videos on YouTube are getting somewhere usually under 1,000–although there are exceptions, as this week’s [May 8, 2023] episode with Eliezer Yudkowsky is quite popular on YouTube. [Editor’s Note: This Extra was originally published on June 20, 2023.] (0 COMMENTS)

Bloomberg has an article on Canadian immigration that raises a number of important issues. Canada is an especially interesting case, as its rate of immigration is now much higher than in the other G-7 nations: A country about as populous as California has added more than all the residents in San Francisco in a year. Last week, Canada surpassed 40 million people for the first time ever . . . Nearly one in four people in Canada are now immigrants, the largest proportion among the Group of Seven nations. At the current pace of growth, the smallest G-7 country by population would double its residents in about 26 years, and surpass Italy, France, the UK and Germany by 2050. The biggest challenge faced by Canada is housing.  Like the US, Canada has “Nimby” policies that make homebuilding very difficult.  When combined with high rates of immigration, the result is soaring house prices: Those type of real estate shocks risk eroding support among Canadians for immigrants, said David Green, a professor at the University of British Columbia’s Vancouver School of Economics.  “We’re opening the door to the same kind of problems that we see in other countries,” Green said. “The hard-right wing is going to pick this up and run with it, and at least a modicum of what they’re going to say on the housing market strains is going to be true. That’s going to give credence to the rest of their narrative. This is a very dangerous game.” So far, immigration has remained extremely popular in Canada, partly due to the fact that they have avoided the huge waves of illegal immigration seen in the US: But if the housing problem isn’t fixed, then Canadian public opinion will eventually turn against immigration. Some libertarians advocate creating a free market paradise in a place beyond the reach of government regulation, such as a “seasteading” platform.  Perhaps a better solution would be to convince an indigenous tribe of the virtues of laissez-faire.  In Vancouver, indigenous tribes control several pieces of land in booming Vancouver.  Normally, this land would be extremely difficult to develop.  Some of the sites, however, are not constrained by Vancouver planning rules, and thus the tribes can build whatever they like.  As a result, they plan to erect a series of massive developments with dozens of high-rise residential towers.  After many years and steep legal bills, the Musqueam First Nation reached a landmark settlement with the B.C. government in 2008, for the return of some of its traditional territory. Now the Musqueam are using some of those lands near the University of B.C. to provide badly needed housing for the broader community and generate economic prosperity for their Nation. . . . The Leləm̓ community is just one of several major real estate developments in the pipeline from Vancouver-area First Nations, who have emerged as powerhouse developers in a region desperate for solutions to a housing shortage. Postmedia analyzed eight major projects involving the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations, both individually and together under their MST Development Corporation joint venture. Their plans cover nearly 1.1 square kilometres of property in Vancouver, Burnaby and the North Shore, promising more than 25,500 homes. I find it ironic that in 2023, the only way to observe the true potential of a free market economy is within an Indian reservation.  In a recent interview, California Governor Newsom lamented that his state had lost its ability to build things: California has become notorious not for what it builds but for what it fails to build. And Newsom knows it. “I watched as a mayor and then a lieutenant governor and now governor as years became decades on high-speed rail,” he said. “People are losing trust and confidence in our ability to build big things. People look at me all the time and ask, ‘What the hell happened to the California of the ’50s and ’60s?’” (High-speed rail is one of the rare cases where the Nimbys are correct.) Perhaps it would be better if California lost a few lawsuits to our Native American tribes, and had to turn over some of our urban land in compensation.  It would be doubly ironic if a pro-environment policy of California densification were enacted as a result of Yimby Native Americans beating Nimby environmentalists in the political arena.    (0 COMMENTS)

Zach Weinersmith is an American cartoonist and author. He is the creator of the webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. On this episode of EconTalk, Russ Roberts welcomes Zach Weinersmith to talk about his new children’s book, Bea Wolf which is based on the famous Old English poem, Beowulf. Roberts and Weinersmith consider the different avenues of interpretation for Beowulf, and the inspiration behind Weinersmith’s new adaptation, along with the power of poetry generally.   1- Roberts and Weinersmith discuss David Whyte’s interpretation of Beowulf as a metaphor for how people must confront their demons. Whyte proposed that Grendel is a representation of one of our darkest problems, while his mother is the source of all demons which must be confronted. How do you read Beowulf in terms of its moral lesson? What makes the ‘mother’ of our issues so difficult to confront?   2- Weinersmith defines ‘kennings’ as unique, metaphorical riddles. Kennings were often used in Norse and Old English poetry. Two examples mentioned in the podcast are ‘sea wood’- boat and ‘battle swept’- blood. Are there any other kennings you know of that are particularly impressive? What kennings can you create? What modern works could benefit from the use of kennings?   3- Weinersmith and Roberts speak of their love of the power of poetry. They discuss whether students should be asked to memorize poetry to be able to encounter its meaning more fruitfully. What is it about memorization that could produce a more fulfilling interaction between the reader and the poem? What poetry has been impactful for you in terms of its beauty or its morals?   4- Weinersmith and Roberts allude to the lack of attention span required to consume popular media today. There is power in focusing on one thing, like poetry. What is rewarding to us about experiences that require great focus to master or learn something from? To what extent have we lost touch with the value of virtues like patience, humility, and grit? What have you done that required a great deal of focus and was both particularly challenging and extremely rewarding?   5- One lesson in Weinersmith’s new book Bea Wolf, is living well in knowing that living will end. Weinersmith was surprised at the great reception of his book from all ages, but he acknowledges that he was being too cynical about the world in his expectations. What is the value of living well each day knowing that everything is temporary? Are you able to cultivate living well while also making ends meet? Roberts says that we are all children of old works of art, how valuable is Weinersmith’s expression of art given that it is inspired by both Beowulf and his young daughter? (0 COMMENTS)

In “Why It Seems Everything We Knew About the Global Economy is No Longer True,” New York Times, June 18, 2023, Patricia Cohen, who covers the global economy, serves up a mishmash of truth, falsehood, and confusion. This won’t be comprehensive but I do want to point out where I think she is wrong, occasionally right, and confused. The highlighted sections are hers. The others, starting with DRH, are mine. The economic conventions that policymakers had relied on since the Berlin Wall fell more than 30 years ago — the unfailing superiority of open markets, liberalized trade and maximum efficiency — look to be running off the rails. DRH: Notice that she’s not questioning whether free trade works; rather, she’s saying that we don’t have it. She’s right. Free trade has retreated. But in her piece, she seems to mix that fact in with a claim, sometimes explicit but usually implicit, that there’s good reason to question free trade. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the ceaseless drive to integrate the global economy and reduce costs left health care workers without face masks and medical gloves, carmakers without semiconductors, sawmills without lumber and sneaker buyers without Nikes. DRH: Does she think that lockdowns had nothing to do with this? Is she aware of how many industries were shut down or at least hobbled by central planning by U.S. governors and, in other countries, central planning by the heads of those countries’ governments? I wrote a piece early in the lockdowns titled “Covid V. Capitalism,” Defining Ideas, April 8, 2023 that answers some of her points. We saw before the pandemic began that the wealthiest countries were getting frustrated by international trade, believing — whether correctly or not — that somehow this was hurting them, their jobs and standards of living,” said Betsey Stevenson,a member of the Council of Economic Advisers during the Obama administration. DRH: Notice how Stevenson hedges, leaving open the possibility that people who had that belief might have been mistaken. Associated economic theories about the ineluctable rise of worldwide free market capitalism took on a similar sheen of invincibility and inevitability. Open markets, hands-off government and the relentless pursuit of efficiency would offer the best route to prosperity. DRH: I believed that second sentence. Is Cohen really saying that that was the dominant consensus? I don’t remember having that much company. The favored economic road map helped produce fabulous wealth, lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and spur wondrous technological advances. But there were stunning failures as well. Globalization hastened climate change and deepened inequalities. DRH: I’m not sure whether it hastened climate change, but it certainly reduced global inequality. Is she unaware of that? If she is unaware, she should read the first paragraph in the above quote. That’s the main reason that global inequality has fallen. It turned out that markets on their own weren’t able to automatically distribute gains fairly or spur developing countries to grow or establish democratic institutions. DRH: Why would one expect markets to “distribute” gains in line with her concept of fairness, which, by the way, she doesn’t bother to state. “Capitalist tools in socialist hands,” the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping said in 1992, when his country was developing into the world’s factory floor. China’s astonishing growth transformed it into the world’s second largest economy and a major engine of global growth. All along, though, Beijing maintained a tight grip on its raw materials, land, capital, energy, credit and labor, as well as the movements and speech of its people. DRH: Score one for Cohen. Note, though, that this tightening grip has reduced the growth rate and will continue to keep the growth rate lower than otherwise. The new reality is reflected in American policy. The United States — the central architect of the liberalized economic order and the World Trade Organization — has turned away from more comprehensive free trade agreements and repeatedly refused to abide by W.T.O. decisions. Security concerns have led the Biden administration to block Chinese investment in American businesses and limit China’s access to private data on citizens and to new technologies. And it has embraced Chinese-style industrial policy, offering gargantuan subsidies for electric vehicles, batteries, wind farms, solar plants and more to secure supply chains and speed the transition to renewable energy. DRH: True. “Ignoring the economic dependencies that had built up over the decades of liberalization had become really perilous,” Mr. Sullivan, the U.S. national security adviser, said. Adherence to “oversimplified market efficiency,” he added, proved to be a mistake. DRH: Blinken doesn’t understand that economic dependency, all else equal, creates less peril, if by peril we mean war. And, by the way, what’s Blinker’s economic training? HT2 Cyril Morong for alerting me to the NYT item. Note: After I wrote this, I noticed that John Cochrane covered some of the same ground.   (0 COMMENTS)

A declaration of President Joe Biden about Juneteenth helps us reflect on political speech. Biden declared (as quoted by James Freeman, “A Day for Liberty,” Wall Street Journal, June 16, 2023): So Juneteenth, as a federal holiday, is meant to breathe new life into the very essence of America—(applause)—to make sure all Americans feel the power of this day and the progress we can make as a country; to choose love over hate, unity over disunion, and progress over retreat. What is “the very essence of America” and especially how can “we”  do something “as a country”? Choices are ultimately made by individuals and according to their preferences, even if within government officialdom or through other political processes. Invoking a big imaginary social being does not help make fuzzy choices. What does it mean “to choose love over hate, unity over disunion, and progress over retreat”? Hate is sometimes more natural, more understandable, and more morally justifiable than love. We might, for example, approve of, and argue for, hating—not loving—Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden, even if the degree of hate must vary among these targets. In the case of the last two, Trump and Biden, the classical-liberal and Enlightenment value of tolerance provides a better orientation than raging emotions such as love and hate, although tolerance has limits somewhere. Slavery was despicable and certainly deserved hatred.* Disunion is often preferable to unity: it depends on which set of individuals we are referring to. Disunion within a slave-owning or other criminal group is good. For somebody to be disunited from hate groups is desirable. Disunion of thought is better than groupthink. That progress is better than retreat means nothing until you know what you are progressing toward and what you are retreating from. For example, progress in eugenics, which the early 20th-century progressives advocated, is not preferable to retreat from this barbarian policy (which lasted in the law books of certain states even into the second half of the century). Between 1907 and 1980, 65,000 women were forcibly sterilized in America. (See Paul Lombardo, Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell [John Hopkins University Press, 2008]; and Thomas Leonard, Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics & American Economics in the Progressive Era [Princeton University Press, 2016].) Morally and economically, the progress was in the retreat. At best, Mr. Biden’s cheesy declarations are meaningless. There are costs in saying something that has no clearly ascertainable meaning, if only the risk for the speaker of being misunderstood to his detriment. Another opportunity cost is that the speaker could instead spend his mental energy on thinking or meditating or even dreaming poetry. A plumber, a mechanic, a businessman, an economist, or a philosopher (except perhaps in continental Europe) will typically try to avoid meaningless statements because they don’t help earn a living. For the politician, however, the costs of uttering meaningless statements are typically low and the benefits high; the net benefit for him is very often positive. (I review other cases in my post “The Economics of Political Balderdash,” April 3, 2017.) Few voters will spend time and other resources identifying and remembering the politician’s meaningless statements—although the reduction in the cost of stocking and retrieving information has certainly increased the politician’s risk, especially over the past few decades. Add that a good politician will be able, in retrospect, to propose the most favorable interpretations for his previous meaningless utterances. Politicians’ actions and speech can be quite easily decoupled from their obscure and inextricable consequences, especially as time passes. The politicians’ incentives to say nothing meaningful at best, and at worst to lie, can be largely explained by the citizen’s rational ignorance and political apathy that follow from his infinitesimal (individual) influence on public choices. Joseph Schumpeter’s reflection his Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1950) applies probably more widely in the political realm than he even thought: Thus the typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his own interests. He becomes a primitive again. No wonder the necessary radical reform of the place of politics in our lives is so difficult. (0 COMMENTS)

Civilization and the pleasantness of everyday life depend on unwritten rules. Early in the 20th century, an English mathematician and government official, Lord Moulton, described complying with these rules as “obedience to the unenforceable”–the area of personal choice that falls between illegal acts and complete freedom. Listen as economist Michael Munger talks with EconTalk’s Russ […] The post Michael Munger on Obedience to the Unenforceable appeared first on Econlib.

In an increasingly polarized society, issues tend to be defined in partisan terms. In fact, many of our most important issues do not break on party lines. For instance, anti-Chinese attitudes are widely held in both political parties.The Nimby vs. Yimby debate is also bipartisan. And this is not a minor political issue; it’s far more important for the future of America than are most of the culture war issues that people obsess over on Twitter.  Here’s Ezra Klein: The Biden administration is pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into decarbonization. And it wants to make sure it gets a return on that money. So it’s making states compete for federal grants, and one way it’s judging them is on whether the state has made it easy to build. That has become an issue for California. Governor Newsom is pushing for an extremely modest set of measures to speed the permitting process, and is running into intense opposition from environmentalists: Adding to Newsom’s problems is that California’s recent surpluses have turned to deficits. He needs federal money, and lots of it, to make good on his climate promises. If California falls shorts on those grants, it falls short of its goals. “We’re going to lose billions and billions of dollars in the status quo,” he told me. “The state can’t backfill that. And we’re losing some of it to red states! I’m indignant about that. The beneficiaries of a lot of these dollars are red states that don’t give a damn about these issues, and they’re getting the projects. We’re not getting the money because our rules are getting in the way.” As a result, most of the federal dollars are going to states with less restrictive building rules, such as Texas.   Many people are locked into epistemic bubbles because they consume only one sort of media.  Within these bubbles, the other side is demonized as loony environmentalists or rapacious corporate polluters.  The reality is much more complex, and much more interesting. The right is split between free market proponents of deregulation and conservatives who wish to preserve the status quo (including zoning).  The left is split between environmentalists who wish to construct clean infrastructure and environmentalists who favor regulations that make it almost impossible to build any new infrastructure.     Twitter is full of debates about questions like what sort of books should be provided in school libraries.  I’m not suggesting that those debates are completely unimportant, but don’t let the shiny object distract you from the issues that will actually determine what sort of country we have in the year 2050. (0 COMMENTS)

My father’s passing when I was in my 40s caught me by surprise. His death was not surprising. My reaction to it was. I felt more of a loss than I would have thought possible, given my tenuous relationship with him throughout almost all my life.  He had the grit to graduate from college in the depth of the Great Depression, but he drank to the point of stupors most days—and was never there as the father I needed (which explains why I spent my youth in an orphanage, gratefully). His death marked the end of the past. Well, maybe. It was, at least, a time of coming to grips with the past—and of forgiveness for his not being there that I did not think possible. I am sure that there are millions of sons who have had wayward dads, but still have faced the void I felt when he was no longer there. I am also certain I share with them the void every Father’s Day, as I tried to explain to my children in the early morning hours the day after he died in 1985:   Dear Children, My father died last night. That’s been an event that has caused me to reflect and to write this morning about his life. It is times like these that I wish you could have known my father better. There is much about his life that prevented you from getting to know him as a grandfather or, for that matter, my getting to know him as a father. I could dwell here on the things that caused us to know him less than we would have liked, but those things don’t seem to matter at this very early hour. Let it suffice to say that there is something very poignant about his death, coming, as it did, one day short of Father’s Day. He never had much. By our standards, he made his way through life in the lap of poverty. Over the past decade he had everything imaginable go wrong with him. He was sick most of the time, in the hospital much of the time, and probably at death had no expendable organ. He had to suffer his pains in a four-room house that had to be carefully heated in winter with wood and was never cool in the summer. I suspect that his biggest worry in life was having enough wood to heat the house through winter. But he always had enough wood neatly stacked in the back of the house to last several winters. He proved that if you are poor, you don’t have to be trashy in the way you stack your wood and keep your house. He never had indoor plumbing until a decade ago and only installed an indoor toilet when the city made him in the early 1970s. The stove in the kitchen was wood, the walls were single boards running floor to ceiling, side by side, and there were no doors between the rooms. The house, which sat on stacked bricks, was old, small, but neat in a neighborhood that, at its best, was decrepit. There is much that he didn’t have. But what seems important at this moment is what he did have. Despite all that went wrong in his life, I can never remember his complaining about what he didn’t have. He marveled at the luxury I lived in, but it was all marvel, no envy toward me, or others. Instead, he bragged about what he had, what he could make with his hands, how he could still paint signs, and make a shed from scrap wood. He worked hard at what he did, when he could work, and was proud of what he could do, not what he couldn’t. There is something to learn from the way he lived that part of his life. In his last years, he was crippled with medical problems, and on those rare occasions I saw him, he would tell me about them. But he never complained like a lot of old people who have fewer pains than he had. He could laugh about what his doctor could take out of him and still keep him ticking, and he could brag, as he had for years, about how he could take down his sons, how he fought Joe Louis in his early years in an exhibition match (which he truly believed he did), and how he gave the nurses at the hospital fits when he was in their care. There is much to be gained from a man who lived the way he was able to live from the simplest of means. Then there was the non-stop laughter and jokes. He was always in his jokes, the butt of them, and ready to enjoy them. There is much to be learned from someone who dared to call collect only to announce in a slur and in his deepest voice, “This is the governor speaking,” an announcement always followed by an ear-splitting laugh. I think he enjoyed living more than many of us ever will.  I never knew him very well. There were times I wanted to do so very badly, but couldn’t. I suppose I couldn’t see him more often because of some memories that I could not shake, but I suppose it was also easy not to see him more. In the end what has counted most over the years is that he was the one, the only one, who came to my high school graduation. There were those who said they cared as they placed my brother and me in an orphanage, and repeatedly reminded me of how bad my father was. However, it was my Dad, not they, who saw me graduate. In the end I know he was proud of me. In the end I know he loved me. In the end I loved him very much. In the end I wish I could have, would have, told him that one more time. I leave this morning for his home to help my stepmother, but more importantly to pay respect to a man who lived a long and painful life largely camouflaged with humor, who taught me some things about living I hope to absorb someday. There is much that I would have liked to have changed about the way he lived, but not the person he was at his core in his later years. That is a point worth remembering on this Father’s Day.   ­­­­­­­­­­­­­­ Richard McKenzie is the Gerkin Professor of Economics, Emeritus in the Merage School of Business at the University of California, Irvine. This Father’s Day tribute is excerpted, with minor revisions, from the author’s memoir, The Home: A Memoir of Growing Up in an Orphanage (1996, reissued in 2022). His latest book is Reality Is Tricky: Contrarian Takes on Contested Economic Issues (2023). (0 COMMENTS)