Horology. Did you know what that was before listening to this episode with author, watchmaker and restorer Rebecca Struthers. I know I didn’t! And now I’m completely fascinated. Host Russ Roberts welcomed Struthers to talk about her new book, Hands of Time, but as usual the conversation spanned much, much more. I learned that there are not enough restorers to meet demand (the market for repairs repairs is fine), and that watchmakers exemplify the blurry distinction we like to think of between  competition and cooperation. And while I’ve seldom paid much mind to watches as more than a fashion accessory, I would now love to visit the basement room in the British museum filled with them. What treasures! (I also loved Struthers’ characterization of museums as like icebergs.) Now we’d like to hear what you have to say. Join us in the comments, or use the prompts below to start your own conversation offline.     1- Struthers describes for Roberts how John Harrison solved the longitude problem. What was the problem, and why was it so difficult to solve? (Hint: it may have involved cats!)   2- Roberts describes Adam Smith’s pin factory for Struthers and asks her to relate it to the history of watchmaking. Struthers described how Dutch watch forgers revolutionized production, availability, and price. Why didn’t Smithian style division of labor take off in the Netherlands? What happened in the United States instead? To what extent does this contradict Smith’s account that the workers involved in a production process are the most likely to find opportunities for greater specialization? How did the Swiss usher in yet another new wave of division of labor by choosing not to fight against American mass production (as did the British)? How did this Swiss revolution change the fashion of watches?   3- How has the history of watches changed the way we think about time? Do you regard these changes as net positive or negative? Explain.   4- Roberts reads another quote from Smith, this time from The Theory of Moral Sentiments, before he and Struthers discuss the famous watch created for Marie Antoinette. What do you think? Are watches “mere trinkets of frivolous utility?” What do you think Adam Smith would have said?   5- How has this episode changed the way you think about watches? Why do you think Struthers chose not to restore the watch that survived the World War II plane crash? How can you relate this to the case of the Elgin marbles as discussed in this earlier episode with Tiffany Jenkins? Should the watch in question have been restored? Why or why not? (0 COMMENTS)

One of the interesting things about the methodology of the so-called “Bloomington School” founded by Vincent and Elinor Ostrom was their reluctance to use broad imprecise terms when describing various institutions such as “markets” or “government.” Vincent’s research on water rights in the Los Angeles area and Lin’s work on common pool resources made them both understandably leery of applying over-arching, black and white terms that missed much of the nuance of actual policy making and problem solving in the real world. People interested in reality frequently live in reality, and reality is messy and difficult to simplify.  I was thinking about their approach as I listened to a podcast from the Indianapolis Business Journal on the creation of a park in the Indianapolis suburb of Zionsville. The story behind the new park is very much a tale of the private and public spheres overlapping, but it raises questions about the possibility of competing, and perhaps conflicting “public” goals and incentives. It begins with Jim and Nancy Carpenter, owners of the nation’s largest franchised purveyor of wild bird feed, feeders, and other backyard equipment to attract birds for the purposes of bird watching. Jim Carpenter described himself as “an unemployed bird watcher” who very laudably turned his passion into a successful business.  The story of the new park, Carpenter Nature Preserve, began when the Carpenters purchased a privately owned 200+ acre golf course and then allowed the land to return to its “natural state”. They focused on keeping the cart paths accessible as hiking trails and let the natural plants and animals slowly reinhabit the course. But rather than keep the newly minted park private, they had a different goal in mind.  The Carpenters’ ultimate plan was to sell the property to the city of Zionsville. Once purchased from the Carpenters at approximately a million dollar discount from its assessed value, the city agreed to convert the land into a park and maintain it. The land has a diverse set of habitats and a wide variety of wildlife within its boundaries. Essentially the Carpenters were giving the city a sale price, asking the city to internalize the maintenance costs and thus permanently take the land out of private hands codifying their preferred use of the property.  The city purchased the park using some local money but also approximately 3 million dollars worth of federal grants designed for such projects. Thus, both the city and the national government are footing the bill and assuming that most citizens would approve of the expenditure and prefer a park to a golf course. Of course, someone else could have made a higher bid on the course when it was for sale and repurposed it into apartments or some other project, but presumably no one else did. The 6 million dollar assessed value is a bit unclear.  We are seeing an increasing blurring of the lines between for profit and “non-profit” ventures in the United States and elsewhere. The story is similar to the one told in the recently released film Wild Life in which the former CEO of Patagonia clothing dedicated his life to buying huge tracts of land (cultural reference fully intended!) in Southern Chile and creating a large nature reserve that was eventually “donated” to the Chilean government in exchange for agreements to maintain the park.  The question to me isn’t whether or not private individuals can or should purchase land for parks and reserves. The answer to that question is, absolutely. The more important question is whether they should then ask government officials to assume the cost and responsibility they don’t wish to have and impose those costs and their personal preferences onto other citizens. This was land that in private hands was producing tax revenue. Now it will be a tax burden. What’s more the land wasn’t donated – it was sold, albeit at a discounted price. But that process again assumes the overall preferences of “the public” are for a park and paying for such a park. Instead it looks very much like the preferences here are of a business owner who prefers bird watching to playing a leisurely 18 holes of golf.  Bright lines are tough to draw in the real world and increasingly what is “out of bounds” (to borrow a golf term) is tough to determine. I hope the citizens of Zionsville and their elected officials enjoy the new green space, but I also hope they realize there is no such thing as a free park. (0 COMMENTS)

  Sen. Tammy Duckworth on Thursday blasted a proposal being pushed by Sen. Kyrsten Sinema that could alter how much training a pilot needs to fly a commercial aircraft, saying lawmakers will have “blood on your hands” if they support the changes she is seeking. “Now is not the time to put corporate profits ahead of the lives of our constituents who may want to board a commercial flight in the future,” said Duckworth (D-Ill.), an Army veteran helicopter pilot who chairs the Senate subcommittee in charge of aviation. “A vote to [change the training rules] for pilots will mean blood on your hands when the inevitable accident occurs as a result of an inadequately trained flight crew.” This is from, Irie Sentner, “‘Blood on your hands’: Duckworth blasts Sinema for pilot training proposal,” Politico, June 15, 2023. Actually, Senator Duckworth has it exactly wrong. If she and her colleagues in the Senate stop this change, they will be the ones with figuratively blood on their hands. To understand why, we need to look at the proposed change. Christian Britschgi  of Reason nicely lays out some of the facts in this June 16 article. Before a 2009 Colgan Air crash in upstate New York, which was blamed on pilot error, killed 50 people, aspiring pilots had to log 250 hours of flight time. After that crash Congress six-tupled the requirement, raising it to 1,500 hours. Britschgi writes: Safety regulators haven’t found any relationship between the hour cap and safety. Airlines say the 1,500-hour rule is contributing to a worsening pilot shortage. Remember how dangerous it was to fly before 2009? Me neither. Flying is one of the safest things we do and it was one of the safest things we did before 2009. When I tell someone I’m flying somewhere and get the almost-inevitable “Have a safe flight,” I reply, “That’s the safest thing I’ll do that day.” The proposal that Senator Sinema backs would not repeal the 1,500 hour requirement. Rather, it would allow aspiring pilots to count up to 250 hours of simulator training toward the 1,500 hours. The current number that can be applied is only 100 hours. This change will make things safer. The reason is that simulator training is so much more effective than simply flying. When pilots fly, really bad things rarely happen and so they don’t know much about how to react. They could easily go 1,500 hours without any really bad thing happening. When they train on a simulator, by contrast, they get hit with situations to which they have to react. That’s the whole point of a simulator. A friend of a friend is a retired Boeing 747 pilot who trains pilots on simulators. He recently told my friend that he has pilots who come to Miami, where he is, on Alitalia and other airlines and on the simulator, they quickly fly it into the ground. He gives them a bad thing to respond to in each training session and they learn how to respond. So substituting 150 hours on a simulator is worth way more than the foregone 150 hours on an actual flight. QED. So it’s people like Tammy Duckworth who are block this change who will have blood on their hands. (0 COMMENTS)

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)