Monetary policy has important effects on both prices and employment. Thus it makes sense that the Fed’s Congressional mandate would include both of those variables. Now former VP Mike Pence has proposed replacing the Fed’s so-called “dual mandate” with a single mandate for price stability. Here’s Bloomberg: Former Vice President Mike Pence is calling for an end to the Federal Reserve’s dual mandate, saying the central bank should focus solely on fighting inflation and leave creating jobs to Congress and the president. I don’t believe that’s a good idea. When there is a negative supply shock such as the Ukraine War, it make sense to allow modestly higher prices for a period of time, rather than depress non-oil prices sharply enough to stabilize the overall price level. That’s why I favor targeting NGDP rather than inflation.If Congress wishes to give the Fed a single mandate, it should not be inflation.  Rather, it should be the thing that impacts both inflation and employment. That thing is sometimes called “aggregate demand”. But aggregate demand is too poorly defined as a concept to be included in a Congressional mandate. (Although I suppose you could say the same about inflation.) Instead, a single mandate might use a real world proxy for aggregate demand, such as national income. Here’s a possible Fed mandate: The Federal Reserve shall insure a stable path for total national income at a growth rate that is consistent with a relatively low inflation rate over time. If Congress insists on a specific figure for the average inflation rate, that’s fine. But I doubt whether Congress could agree on such a figure.With my proposed mandate, the Fed would be effectively targeting NGDP. In that case, there would be no need for specific inflation and employment mandates, as NGDP is the thing that influences both inflation and employment. (0 COMMENTS)

So far in this exploration of Randall Holcombe’s Following Their Leaders: Political Preferences and Public Policy, we’ve looked at how Holcombe views the interaction of voters and the democratic process. To briefly recap, Holcombe argues that voters have both instrumental preferences, which are about the outcomes they prefer, and expressive preferences, which are about what voters prefer to express. But expressive preferences and instrumental preferences are not always the same. Since casting a vote does not create an outcome, voters will tend to act expressively, not instrumentally, when casting their vote. Because elections aggregate expressive preferences, not instrumental preferences, we cannot make valid inferences about the outcomes voters actually prefer by referencing election results. Additionally, voter preferences tend to be anchored on a key point – a single issue, a political identity, party loyalty, a particular leader – and the vast majority of a given voter’s preference on political issues will be derived from that anchor. Someone may anchor on the identity of being a patriotic American, decide that the Republican party values patriotism more, and will then tend to adopt whatever the Republican party line is for most political issues – and if the official party line changes, they will change their opinion right along with it. But this analysis so far focuses on the typical voter. There is another group of people in democratic political systems, who face different incentives and form their preferences in different ways. These are the elites – such as politicians, policymakers, bureaucrats, and lobbyists. Unlike the typical voter, the political preferences of the elites will tend to be instrumental rather than expressive, because elites actually do influence outcomes in a way voters don’t: For reasons already discussed, their political preferences are expressive. This applies to most citizens and voters. However, an elite few individuals make public policy and can affect outcomes, so those individuals – members of the political elite – will have instrumental preferences. Holcombe argues that a relatively small group of elites are the ones who actually craft policies and influence political outcomes, with the vast majority of the population closed out from this process. He does not present this as some sort of nefarious, deliberate conspiracy among the elites to keep the masses disenfranchised. Instead, he argues, this is an inevitable part of any system of public policy, due to transaction costs: The factor that separates the political elite from the masses is transaction costs. A transaction cost is anything that stands in the way of a mutually beneficial exchange. When transaction costs are low, people are able to bargain with each other for their mutual advantage. When transaction costs are high, they prevent people from bargaining with each other even when there are exchanges that would benefit them in the absence of transaction costs. However, transaction costs are not evenly distributed for all exchanges – some groups will face higher transaction costs than others. Groups facing low transaction costs can profitably participate in a system while groups facing high transaction costs will be unable to benefit. Pollution created by a steel mill provides a good outline of how this process works: Markets make it easy for those who want to buy steel to do so from those who want to sell steel. They face low transaction costs and can maximize the value of resources to themselves. The tens of thousands of residents in the vicinity of the mills might be willing to bargain with steel mills to reduce their pollution if it were possible, but fashioning a bargain that would require tens of thousands of people to participate would be difficult. Transactions costs are high enough to prevent a bargain from being struck. As a result, the surrounding residents bear the external costs of breathing polluted air. The value of resources is maximized for those who face low transaction costs – the steel mills and automobile producers – but not for those who face high transaction costs – the people who breath polluted air. This uneven distribution of transaction costs exists in political systems as well. Well connected political insiders face low transaction costs in bargaining with each other over public policy. Meaningful negotiation over policy being carried out by tens or hundreds of millions of individual citizens simply isn’t feasible. But though markets and politics can both have unequal distributions of transaction costs, this issue tends to be more severe in political systems by their very nature: The decentralized nature of markets makes transaction costs low for most people. Anyone can enter a Walmart, or a Toyota dealership, and make mutually advantageous exchanges that benefit the buyer and seller. The centralized nature of political decision-making creates high transaction costs for most people. Thousands of people cannot simultaneously participate in designing public policy, so by necessity public policies will be designed by a few individuals who face low transaction costs and can bargain with each other…People in the high transaction cost group are unable to enter the negotiating process. This concentration of influence among a small group of elites is often protested by populists on the left and the right. However, Holcombe argues that because this situation exists due to unavoidable transaction costs, attempts to ouster the elites through populist takeovers are almost intrinsically self-defeating: The populist message argues against elite control of government, but ultimately elites must design public policy because, if for no other reason, large numbers of people cannot all have a meaningful voice in policy design. Transaction costs are too high. So, while populist policy does not say so, it argues for replacing one set of elites with another. When populists control government, they become the political elite, almost by definition. They are the ones who design public policy. However, this does not mean that there is no division between instrumental and expressive preferences among elites. The division, however, operates differently among elites than it does with voters. While voters may show expressive preferences through voting for policies they wouldn’t actually choose if making an instrumental choice, elites will outwardly express policy ideas that don’t reflect the policies they pick when making instrumental choices: While the elite want to be cautious about expressing specific policy preferences, they have good reason to be informed about policy alternatives and the expected consequences of implementing public policies. The elite determine public policy, so their preferences are instrumental. The preferences they express are vague and oriented toward appealing to citizen feelings and emotions, but the preferences they act on are specific and well informed. The fact that voters have extremely low levels of political information has been well documented for decades. Huge swaths of voters will passionately support the Republican or Democratic political tickets yet, when questioned or tested, be utterly incapable of explaining the specific mechanisms by which their party’s policies will create desirable outcomes, or even telling which policies are associated with which party. Knowing that voters often “have only the vaguest idea about what they are supporting”, elites are deliberately vague about their intentions: Recognizing that the demand for accurate and detailed information on the part of citizens is low, parties and candidates provide very little information of this type. Platforms are deliberately vague to broaden their appeal. Citizens will find little to disagree with in a vague platform. Meanwhile, because citizens adopt political preferences that make them feel good, parties and candidates try to deliver feel-good messages. In the next post in this series, we will look at how this difference between the preferences of the elites and the preferences of voters come together to form Holcombe’s overall picture of the democratic process. (0 COMMENTS)

A sample of one proves nothing, but it can at least fail to disprove some theory and new raise questions. A fascinating but terrible Wall Street Journal report tells the story of Daniel Swift, a Navy SEAL who had deserted and died fighting in Ukraine earlier this year (“‘War Is Fun’: The Navy SEAL Who Went to Ukraine Because He Couldn’t Stop Fighting,” May 12, 2023). After deployments in Afthanistan, Irak, and Yemen, Swift was not not able to adapt to ordinary social life. “War is fun,” said a US Army veteran. In many ways, the story of Mr. Swift is consistent with the economic way of looking at individual choices including those involving violence. UCLA economist Jack Hirshleifer reminded us that there are two broad options in life: peaceful cooperation or violence. Swift’s life story confirms that some individuals have a comparative advantage in violence, whether it is biologically innate or acquired or a combination of both. A comparative advantage describes what one can do comparatively better than some others and thus specialize in. Adam Smith believed that comparative advantage was acquired: “The difference between the most dissimilar characters, between a philosopher and a common street porter,” Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations, “seems to arise not so much from nature, as from habit, custom, and education.” One problem is how, in a free and civilized society, some accommodation can be reached with violence-prone people. One way is to punish them when they are found guilty of unjustified violence. Another one is to bribe them with consumption opportunities if they stay peaceful. Whether Mr. Swift was attracted to the special forces because he already had a comparative advantage in violence or whether he mainly acquired it there, I do not know. Regarding the other army veteran already quoted on the fun of war, the Wall Street Journal also reports: Civilian life, he added, didn’t offer the same camaraderie or sense of purpose: “War is easy in many ways. Your mission is crystal clear. You’re here to take the enemy out.” But what did people like him and Mr. Swift learn in school? Didn’t they learn in some way that life is more complicated than camaraderie in ordered missions? Looking at the memoirs Swift self-published under a pseudonym after his desertion (and available on Amazon), it’s not clear that he learned anything else than sports and wrestling in high-school—although his book is engaging. The dysfunctional families in which he and many of his childhood friends lived certainly did not help. He wants to have us believe that his wife did not either, but it’s easy to understand that long deployments are difficult for everybody in the family. After Swift came back from his last deployment, he faced what psychologists call “adjustment disorder.” He was arrested for domestic violence and charged with false imprisonment, children endangerment, and domestic battery. His wife obtained a protective order and was awarded a large part of his salary. He could not see his four children, which he seemed to love, although perhaps gauchely. In his book, he denies the charges of violence. A felony conviction would have ended his military career, which is the only thing he knew. He deserted before his trial. Another reflection is in order, which is often neglected in pacifist circles. Men who have some comparative advantage in violence are useful to protect others against unjust violence. Unjust violence will always exist. Protecting even imperfect liberty has a value. And, of course, soldiers are not all, and should not be, violent brutes (“killing machines,” as Trump proudly said of “our boys” from the depth of his wisdom). But even when a (defensive) war and its methods are just, it remains a difficult challenge in a free (or more or less free) society. (1 COMMENTS)

Robert Lucas When I closed the deal to write the Wall Street Journal obit of Robert E. Lucas, I had limited time. I hit a new personal best: I wrote it in just under one hour. That necessarily meant, though, that I couldn’t do as thorough a research job as I do for the October Nobel Prize award, when I have more like 6 hours. So I hadn’t recalled his Nobel speech, or possibly I had never read it. Here’s an excerpt: Your Majesties, Ladies and Gentlemen, As you all know, Alfred Nobel did not choose to establish a prize in Economics. This prize was established in the 1960s, as a memorial, through the generosity of the Bank of Sweden. Generosity and, I would say, wisdom, as the establishment of a Nobel Prize in Economics has had a very beneficial effect on my profession, encouraging us to focus on basic questions and scientific method. It is as if by recognizing Economics as a science, the Bank of Sweden and the Nobel Foundation have helped us to become one, to come close to realizing our scientific potential. Now in 1995 this great honour is given to an economist who maintains that central banks should focus exclusively on the control of inflation, that they must be resolute in resisting the temptation to pursue other objectives, no matter how worthwhile these objectives may be. It would be understandable if people at the Bank of Sweden were now thinking: “Why don’t we tell this man to take his theories to the Bundesbank, and see how many kronor he can get for them over there?” But this is no occasion for ill-feeling. It is not the time to criticize central bankers or anyone else. When Voltaire was dying, in his eighties, a priest in attendance called upon him to renounce the devil. Voltaire considered his advice, but decided not to follow it. “This is no time,” he said, “to be making new enemies”. In this same spirit, I offer my thanks and good wishes to the Bank of Sweden, to the Nobel Committee, and to everyone involved in this wonderful occasion. I lied. This is not an excerpt. This is the whole speech. I can just imagine the twinkle in Bob’s eye as he gives credit to a central bank for helping make economics a science. HT2 Timothy Taylor, aka, The Conversable Economist. (0 COMMENTS)

The recent death of Robert Lucas marks the end of an era. Others have done a nice job describing his immense contributions to the field of macroeconomics. (See, for example, David Henderson and Tyler Cowen.). Here I’ll focus on a few personal observations, as Lucas probably influenced my career more than any other economist. When I was just starting out, I assumed that economics was about ideas—that developing good ideas was the key to success.  Over time, I became increasingly disillusioned with the field.  There seemed to be too much focus on technique and too much weight put on credentials, reputation, connections, etc.  One exception was Robert Lucas, who seemed genuinely interested in figuring out which ideas make the most sense.  Back in the late 1980s, Steve Silver and I wrote a paper on what would now be called “the fallacy of reasoning from a price change”.  The paper was rejected from a prestigious journal for reasons that made no sense.  We pointed this out to the editor, who then sent it out for a second review.  This time it was accepted.  Most editors would have replied to us with a letter saying something like “I see there’s a disagreement with the referee, and we must defer to his/her judgment.”  In this case the editor was Robert Lucas, who actually took the time to evaluate our arguments and saw that we were correct.  He didn’t discount the importance of our paper merely because it didn’t use any techniques more sophisticated than a simple regression. Lucas was also the chair of my dissertation committee.  My research was on currency hoarding and the underground economy, a topic that was completely unrelated to his much more cutting edge work on money and business cycles.  Nonetheless, he was quite supportive of a project that I probably would have had difficulty getting approved by famous economists at almost any other top program.  All of the statistical work was done on a 1970s-era pocket calculator.  He found the ideas to be interesting, and that was enough.  He was an idealistic economist. Looking back on my career, the four economists that most shaped my thinking on macroeconomics were Irving Fisher, Milton Friedman, Bob Lucas and Bennett McCallum.  Lucas was the only one of the four that I took classes from, and without his encouragement it is unlikely that I would have ever made it into academia.   PS.  John Cochrane also found Lucas to be very supportive when he was just starting out.  (0 COMMENTS)

According to a recent CNBC survey, pessimism regarding the American economy is at an all-time high, with 69% of the public having a negative view.  The leading reason is inflation in a weak economy. The latest report this week shows that inflation remains persistently high at near 5%, eroding slower-growing average weekly earnings year-over-year for 25 straight months. The Federal Reserve recently raised its federal funds rate target for the 10th meeting in a row to 5.25%–the highest since August 2007. While these rate hikes were anticipated in light of ongoing inflation, they could have been avoided. But excessive government spending and money printing during the “boom” led to this government-failure bust, the effects of which we’ll feel for months and even years to come. The sluggish economic growth has been rough on Americans, but inflation has been a killer. The survey also noted, “Just 5% say their household income is growing faster than inflation, 26% say it’s keeping pace, and 67% report they are falling behind.” This is devastating lower-income households’ standard of living.  The trend of declining real wages is particularly harmful to low-income Americans. But even the wealthy feel the effects, as more than half of higher-income Americans surveyed report spending less on eating out and entertainment. This has contributed to the anemic annualized economic growth of just 1.1% in the first quarter of 2023 after rising by only 0.9% from the fourth quarter of 2021 to the fourth quarter of 2022.  As prices increase, businesses spend more on production, making it more difficult to raise workers’ wages while remaining profitable. Employees who can’t be paid enough to fund costly goods like childcare and groceries, which have risen by 7.1% over the last year, spend less on other things or fall behind on their bills. Businesses earning less revenue will invest less, and so goes the vicious downward cycle.  Another hit on Americans has been the cost of shelter, which was up 8.1% over the last year even as there are signs that housing prices are cooling across the country. Still, housing prices have been “eclipsing the inflation rate by 150% since 1970.” This means many Americans can’t afford to own a home, and that’s getting further out of reach as mortgage rates have soared.  What’s to be done about inflation threatening Americans’ livelihoods? Legendary economist Milton Friedman had some advice about addressing sky-rocketing inflation that is valuable today.  There is one and only one basic cause of inflation: too high a rate of growth in the quantity of money—too much money chasing the available supply of goods and services,” he argues. “These days, that cause is produced in Washington, proximately, by the Federal Reserve System, which determines what happens to the quantity of money; ultimately, by the political and other pressures impinging on the System, of which the most important are the pressures to create money in order to pay for exploding Federal spending and in order to promote the goal of ‘full employment.’ Despite raising its target interest rate to fight inflation, the Fed has a bloated balance sheet of nearly $9 trillion, which is too high for disinflation to its target of an average 2% rate. When the Fed engages in excessive money printing compared with the supply of goods and services, inflation is the result, as Friedman described.  While it was appropriate for the Fed to raise its target rate, the ongoing increase to its balance sheet is just continuing to distort productive economic activity. And Congress must restrain spending. The national debt is nearly $31.5 trillion, with net interest payments on the debt set to exceed $1 trillion soon.  The government must borrow to finance the deficit when it spends more than it makes, driving up interest rates. Higher interest rates increase the cost of borrowing for businesses, leading to lower investment, which reduces the supply of goods and services. Add in the Fed buying the debt that increases the money supply with less supply of goods and services, resulting in more inflation.  House Republicans passed a debt ceiling bill that would return spending to 2022 levels and limit spending to just 1% growth over the next decade while eliminating other bad policies. Negotiations between the two parties continue, while a June 1 deadline looms. If they don’t reach agreement, it will make the debt issue an ongoing concern as defaulting on the debt nears, further raising interest rates that weaken the economy.  This means we can expect a deeper, longer recession. The Fed and Congress have a duty to stop flawed policies of excessive printing and spending, respectively. High inflation harms Americans, and the Fed and Congress must address this. If they don’t take action soon to address these government failures, the erosion of the American dream will continue. The future of America depends on sound, pro-growth, pro-liberty policies instead that will let people prosper.     Vance Ginn, Ph.D., is founder and president of Ginn Economic Consulting, LLC, chief economist or senior fellow at multiple think tanks across the country, and is host of the “Let People Prosper” podcast. He previously served as the chief economist of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, 2019-20. Follow him on Twitter @VanceGinn. (0 COMMENTS)

Robert Lucas Keynesianism had taken some lumps by the early 1970s, but it was still the dominant school in macroeconomics. Then Robert E. Lucas Jr. came along. The longtime University of Chicago economist died Monday at 85. In a famous 1972 article, Lucas made a crucial observation. He noted that virtually every macroeconomic model erroneously assumed, implicitly or explicitly, that government officials who made economic policy could essentially fool people into making irrational decisions. Microeconomics assumed people were rational. Why shouldn’t macroeconomics make the same assumption? For this and other insights he was awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize in Economics. This is from David R. Henderson, “Robert E. Lucas Brought Rationality to Macroeconomics,” Wall Street Journal, May 15, 2023. (May 16 print edition.) I learned yesterday morning from John Cochrane that Bob Lucas died yesterday. I approached my editor at the WSJ and he gave me the green light. This is the quickest article I’ve ever written: just under one hour. I liked the way the editor changed my opening paragraph and my closing paragraph. I still like my title though: “The Accomplishments of a Towering Yet Humble Economist.” My favorite parts are near the end about his insight that development economics is growth economics and his famous quote, which I can quote because it’s out there in the literature: Is there some action a government of India could take that would lead the Indian economy to grow like Indonesia’s or Egypt’s? If so, what,exactly? If not, what is it about the “nature of India” that makes it so? The consequences for human welfare involved in questions like these are simply staggering: Once one starts to think about them, it is hard to think about anything else. I’ll post the whole thing when 30 days are up. (0 COMMENTS)

You’ve probably heard the phrase, “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” What has it meant to you in the past, and might there be a way to apply this caution to the way we approach politics? That’s what this episode is about. It’s fan favorite Mike Munger’s 44th appearance on EconTalk, and one of my favorites yet. The conversation starts with Munger describing his 2008 run for Governor of North Carolina, and the lessons he learned based on constituents’ response to his education platform. (It involved vouchers…) There’s a lot to dig into here as always, so let’s get right to it. We’d like to hear more of what you think related to this episode. Please use the prompts below to share your thoughts in the comments. Or use them to start your own conversation offline. We’re here for it.     1- How does Munger describe the difference between directionalists and destinationists? Which one better characterizes you? Explain. (Bonus: In a recent episode of the Great Antidote podcast at AdamSmithWorks, host Juliette Sellgren and guest Mark Calabria discuss the question, “Should people who care deeply about increasing freedom work for the government?” How would you answer this question, and how do you think this relates to directionalists versus destinationists?)   2- Munger says, “It may be that the reason we can’t have nice things is that my side has constantly–that is the directionalists–have constantly conceded the moral high ground.” What does he mean by that? Which do you think are more effective- consequentialist or moral arguments? Is the distinction between the two any more than just intellectual golf? Explain.   3- Roberts reminds us of Milton Friedman‘s policy proposals in Capitalism and Freedom, now nearly 60 years ago, saying Friedman’s arguments were more pragmatic than moral. How successful were Friedman’s policy prescriptions? What about the minimum wage? Do you agree with Munger that “we” have effectively never tried to argue against a minimum wage on moral grounds? What would a compelling moral argument of this kind look like, and how successful do you think such an argument could be?   4- Russ asserts, “I think, the number of people who believe in the value of liberty for its own sake in the United States is larger than ever as a proportion of the population [today].” To what extent do you agree? Who are all these people on “our side,” and how do they find themselves there? To what extent do principles stands proliferate in politics today? (You might want to read this Kevin Corcoran post at EconLog on anchor versus derivative preferences. Then consider, who are the people whose anchor preference is liberty, and how and where do we find them?)   5- Roberts asks Munger if he’s ever read a book that–written in the last 100 years–made the moral case for capitalism and that was persuasive to an open-minded skeptic? What do you think of the books Roberts and Munger note in this regard? How would you answer that question?         (0 COMMENTS)

University of Rochester economic historian Stanley Engerman died on Thursday, May 11. When I got to Rochester as an assistant professor in 1975, I had already heard of him because of his 1974 book on slavery with Robert Fogel, Time on the Cross. I had first heard about the book not in academic circles–I was a Ph.D. student at UCLA at the time–but from a column on the book in the Wall Street Journal. I would bet it was by my favorite WSJ editor at the time, Lindley H. Clark Jr.. But later in various UCLA seminars his book was discussed. Although I don’t remember the full context, I distinctly remember the late Axel Leijonhufvud disagreeing with someone’s assertion about the Fogel/Engerman findings. Axel said, “The data in that book are shot through with incentives.” Axel’s point, which he took from F/E, was that even with slavery, slave owners often had to give incentives such as extra food in order to get slaves to produce more output. That matters for the story I’m about to tell. Mark Skousen has a nice remembrance of being a research assistant for F/E while they were working on the book in 1971. HT2 Tyler Cowen. I have my own memory of an interaction with Stan. In the spring of 1977 (I think), I was teaching a short course titled “Labor Market Institutions” in the U. of R. Graduate School of Management. There were about 18 to 20 students in the class, 4 of whom were black. The main two books for the class were Thomas Sowell’s Race and Economics and Gary Becker’s The Economics of Discrimination. I used these because the professor who had taught it before me, Ron Schmidt, told me that they had worked well for the course. He was a master teacher and so I followed his lead. (I also added a fair number of articles and a segment on Black Codes from W.E.B. Dubois, Black Reconstruction in America.) Over the break before the class started, I read the books cover to cover. I worked through Becker’s math and liked his book a lot, but I loved  Sowell’s book. I got so excited that I wrote a long letter during the break to a friend in which I quoted some of the highlights from Sowell. In working my way through both books, I realized that one of the themes that emerged was that government at all levels–local, state, and federal–had shafted black people and that the “shafting” had by no means ended with the end of slavery. So in my introduction on the first day of class, I told the students that that was one of the sub-themes and that, in light of that, I wondered why more black people weren’t libertarians. I quickly had 4 students paying attention to everything I said. The second week of class, when we were covering some of the early chapters of Sowell’s book, I took issue with something Sowell wrote about slavery. I don’t remember Sowell’s exact point, but the F/E findings on marginal incentives contradicted it. I got pushback from a lot of the students but especially from all 4 black students. I had the sense that some of them even thought I was downplaying the horror of slavery even though I wasn’t. I could feel the good will in the class slipping away and I wanted to get it back. So I walked across campus to visit Stan in the economics department. We had seen each other in seminars occasionally and he had always been friendly. I told him of my predicament and asked if he would come and give a 30-minute talk on the findings in Time on the Cross that related to the issue the students and I had discussed. Stanley was a very affable guy and so I thought I should warn him. I said that there was a chance that the students would transfer some of their hostility from me to him and that, actually, I was hoping they would. He laughed and said that he would come and give the talk. So he did and it went well. There was some hostility but it gradually dissipated during his talk as he showed his expertise and handled all the questions. I still remember one of his answers. One of the students had asked, “You said you studied the records of plantations that had slaves. How many plantations did you study?” Stanley answered, “80” and, as he saw the dismissive look on the face of the questioner, he added, “Which is 79 more than the number of plantations that most other scholars studied.” I left the U. of R. in 1979 and never kept in touch with Stanley. I wish now that I had written him to thank him again.   (0 COMMENTS)

Economist Tyler Cowen of George Mason University talks with EconTalk’s Russ Roberts about the benefits and dangers of artificial intelligence. Cowen argues that the worriers–those who think that artificial intelligence will destroy mankind–need to make a more convincing case for their concerns. He also believes that the worriers are too willing to reduce freedom and empower […] The post Tyler Cowen on the Risks and Impact of Artificial Intelligence appeared first on Econlib.