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)

Arguments in favor of intellectual property (IP) boil down to innovation. If not for giving company X a monopoly on producing good Y, good Y would have never been produced, and we would be worse off; therefore, the government should enforce intellectual “property.” As persuasive as this may be to laymen, it has a hidden premise; IP provides us with new goods and no relevant cost. There is no sacrifice. The intellectual monopoly will indeed decrease production relative to the free market quantity, but if not for IP protection, there would be no free market quantity in the first place. IP protections are claimed to be a neutral policy; the underproduction relative to an unhampered market is acknowledged, but the market would allegedly not exist if not for the IP protection. It is a win-win! Admittedly, this situation is conceivable, but the cost of the protection is not simply lower production relative to a competitive market and higher prices, but foregone investment into alternative production is a cost we have no knowledge of. For example, it may be the case that developing the EpiPen would not happen in a society absent of IP protections; however, this is not a reason to support IP. The choice is not just between EpiPen and no EpiPen, it is between EpiPen and foregone alternative, the unseen. In this example, if there had been no IP protections, the EpiPen would not have been developed, but the investors and producers would not have gone home and become couch potatoes! The capital invested in EpiPen would have been directed to some other productive endeavor, perhaps the development or production of another drug or in another industry entirely. That is not something we should lament over. Producing more of another drug is certainly a good thing. If the capital is invested in another industry, it might enable the production of medical devices or food, both also potentially lifesaving. Even if the alternative investment is not in a “lifesaving” industry, it would be a life-altering industry. All business in the free market aims at the satisfaction of consumer desires. Even if the capital goes into McDonalds or a video game company, the fact remains that this may be the next best alternative investment for the available capital. Who can say that these investments are not worth it? McDonalds supplies food in foods deserts. Video game companies might produce a game that brings joy to the heart of a kid dying of cancer. Value is subjective. Certain investments will prove satisfying to some, while meaningless to others. The rate of return in terms of money is the only basis for comparing the ability of alternative investments to fulfill the individual desires. Is all lost? Are we to give up innovation? No; there is plenty of literature explaining how innovation occurs in the absence of IP protections (Against Intellectual Property and Against Intellectual Monopoly). Non-profits can innovate, too. If a group of people observe that the private sector is innovating inefficiently according to their preferences, they can form or fund a non-profit corporation that engages in research regardless of IP protections. Furthermore, for-profit companies can take a lot of measures to make sure that their formulas are not copies, such as built-in obsolescence, un-replicability, and non-disclosure agreements. These are only some ways that companies can protect their formulas. Who is to say that a company will not hire a team of scientists to innovate more in order to stay ahead of competitors? Are we to suspect that pharmaceutical companies will simply give up? Definitely not; they will just adopt a different business model. There is no way to determine a priori how a company will alter innovation in the absence of IP. Some will not be affected, some will decrease innovation, and some will innovate more. The choice of potential innovators is not always between innovating or not innovating, it is between innovating here, innovating there, or going into some non-innovative yet productive endeavor. To say that there is an underproduction of innovation at any point is to suggest that there is a better quantity of innovation that exceeds the quantity of innovation desired voluntarily by consumers. If consumers are willing and able to support a higher degree of innovation, someone will find a way to exploit that desire, thus, profiting. The claim states that there is an efficient level of innovation outside of what human actors have voluntarily demonstrated. Efficiency, determined by voluntary actions of human actors, is opposed to the IP. Ultimately, many, many people are harmed in order to provide protection for someone else’s idea in excess of the free market quantity of protection. Such a thing harms consumers generally instead of enhancing their welfare. That alone is enough to be against IP. Prioritizing one innovation over another is nothing short of arrogance. It neglects the unseen effects of government intervention and subverts the ability of the market to fulfill consumer desires. All action aims at the satisfaction of human affairs. Choosing not to innovate is a beneficial decision just like any other, and we should not make it a matter of public policy.   Benjamin Seevers is a student at Grove City College studying economics and philosophy.  (0 COMMENTS)

Juliette Sellgren, the daughter of two economists and an economics undergraduate economics major at the University of Virginia, does regular podcasts in which she interviews mainly economists about issues that they and she find interesting. She’s an amazing interviewer. Even though some of us interviewees go long and, in listening to this interview I realize that I went a little long, it’s often a conversation and Juliette is a good conversationalist. Her podcast is titled “The Great Antidote.” Juliette contacted me to see if I wanted to talk about various economists I’ve written about who died and/or won the Nobel Prize. The podcast with me is titled “David Henderson on Economists’ Nobels, Obitz, and More.” Of course I recommend it. Here are some highlights, including two places where I made an error. Times are approximate. 1:40: The most important thing people in her generation should know. 2:40: How I got to do Nobel Prize write-ups in the Wall Street Journal, starting in 1996, based on an idea I had in 1992. 5:15: My math error. I missed 6 years, 3 because I was traveling, 2 because I didn’t know enough about the winners’ work, and 1 because I thought the winner didn’t deserve it, but wasn’t sure enough of that to state it. 6:10: My tweak on John Cochrane’s advice. 6:57: Bob Lucas. 11:30: Harold Demsetz. 13:20: My second mistake. The 1967 article by Demsetz titled “Towards a Theory of Property Rights” is not the one that a committee found to be one of the 20 most important articles in the American Economic Review. That honor goes to his 1972 article on the theory of the firm, co-authored with Armen Alchian. 15:00: Armen Alchian. 16:00: Universal Economics. 17:00: What to do as a teacher if you can’t answer a student’s question. 19:00: Mirrlees and his idea that the top marginal tax rate should not exceed 20 percent. 22:30: Vickrey on toll roads and how to collect. 23:50: Demsetz came up with the tragedy of the commons before Hardin, but just didn’t call it that. 25:00: Stigler’s Law. 25:15: Wait a minute. 28:05: Coase on blackboard economics. 29:00: Coase on economists thinking about horses. 32:45: Lucas, Barro, and smoking. 34:20: The use of mathematics in economics and Alfred Marshall’s advice. 35:00: Rigor with words. 36:00: Why I hate the word “intuition.” 37:00: Investment vs. consumption and how Juliette used to be like Bill Clinton. 38:00: Equipment vs. parrot. 39:00: Where economics is going. 40:00: Juliette’s future. 42:20: Two views I had on which I changed my mind: (1) Hayek’s tone in The Road to Serfdom, and (2) case for limited government, cute lion cub becomes a lion. (0 COMMENTS)

In this episode of EconTalk, Russ Roberts hosts Lars Peter Hansen, Professor of economics at the University of Chicago and a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics. Roberts and Hansen discuss the validity, shortcomings, and use of economic models in understanding systemic financial risk. Hansen reminds us that it is irresponsible to place 100% confidence in models to solve economic problems. Roberts mentions F. A. Hayek’s 1974 Nobel Address “The Pretence of Knowledge”, in which Hayek argued that attempts to model the economy give the illusion of science. Hansen agrees with Hayek that overconfidence in quantitative modeling is dangerous, but argues that models are useful in understanding our economic system and guiding policy if they are used sensibly.     1- To what extent do you agree with Hansen that it is irresponsible for lawmakers and government officials to place their full trust in models to solve economic problems? Do you agree with Hayek’s view that attempts to model the economy create a false illusion of science, or do you agree with Hansen’s opposition that models are useful in understanding economics and guiding policy? Why? Where do you think the line should be drawn between using qualitative and quantitative analysis to understand economics and make policy decisions?   2- Roberts and Hansen concur that politicians have a tendency to embrace economists who share their viewpoints. Hansen views this as problematic, as it leads politicians to advocate for economic policy based on their opinions rather than on data. How can politicians lacking education and work experience in economics legislate economic policy in a way that reflects data rather than their personal biases?   3- Roberts argues that in a financial setting, it is possible that quantifying risk could deceive financial professionals into thinking that risky financial practices are safer than they actually are. Removing quantification in the financial sector could lead to reliance on theory for risk management procedures. Hansen argues that fully relying on theory to measure financial risk would eliminate useful parameters in decision making that economic models provide. Should financial professionals rely on quantitative or qualitative factors in measuring risk? If both quantitative and qualitative factors can provide useful parameters in measuring financial risk, which should be prioritized, and why?   4- Hansen proclaims that economic models are always wrong in some sense, meaning that there will always be some uncertainty. Hansen contends that in spite of the uncertainty that models fail to overcome, they are able to estimate probabilities of what can happen in the future, and can always be improved upon.  If economic models are always wrong in some sense, to what extent can they reasonably be relied upon to make market predictions and mitigate risk? Are economic models or existing empirical data a better means of analyzing and predicting the future of the economy? Do you think that existing economic models adequately hypothesized the recent failures of Silicon Valley Bank, First Republic Bank, and Signature Bank?   5- Hansen claims that the Dodd-Frank Act initiated a new government practice of designating which firms and businesses are systemically important. Hansen fears that when firms have been designated as systemically important, they are incentivized to take more substantial risks. Hansen concludes that when firms fear the risk of failure, they behave better. With reliance on government bailouts, have some firms been given an unfair advantage and been incentivized to take unnecessary risks? Are some firms and industries so essential to our economy that they should be protected by the government from failing under any circumstances? If so, which ones, and why? If no, why not?   Kyle Fowler is a student at Indiana University studying Accounting and Finance and is a 2023 Summer Scholar at Liberty Fund. (0 COMMENTS)

Do dumb people hold dumb ideas? I’d say not necessarily. There are a host of issues where my views are probably closer to the view of the typical dumb person than to the views of a sophisticated reader of the New Yorker magazine. And even where I disagree with the views of dumb people, it’s quite possible that they are correct and I am wrong. So dumb ideas =/= the ideas held by dumb people. Nonetheless, there is one area where I believe that dumb people do tend to hold dumb ideas. I believe that are too quick to equate bad things with things that should be banned, and good things with things that should be mandatory. Obviously, there are lots of bad things that should be banned. Robbing a bank should be banned. My view as to the appropriate punishment of bank robbers is probably closer to that of the typical dumb person that to the view of the typical New Yorker reader. (At least five years in prison, not one year because criminals are “oppressed by society.”) I can think of all sorts of things that are bad or at least seem bad to many people: Flag burning. Pornography. Drugs. Prostitution. Really high interest rates on credit cards. Paying workers very low wages. Very high rents on low quality apartments. Imported goods that result in American workers losing their job. A $5 fee to use an ATM. My hunch is that dumb people are more likely to support banning those things, because they seem bad. This is not because I think that dumb people are left wing or right wing; the “ban bad things” view is held by people on both sides of the political spectrum. So is making certain “good things” mandatory, whether it be the Pledge of Allegiance or school mask wearing. Tyler Cowen linked to a recent article that made the following claim: Meanwhile, people with high measured cognitive ability are also more likely to support economic conservatism (and cultural liberalism). Note that that people with economically conservative and culturally liberal views would tend to oppose the bans discussed above. The same cannot be said about right wingers or left wingers. I suspect that dumb people are too quick to favor banning things that are seen as bad. That is, they are less likely to understand that these are two very different questions: 1.  Is X a bad thing? 2.  Should X be allowed? They are less likely to be aware of the unintended consequences of government bans and mandates. Those consequences don’t always make bans and mandates a bad idea, but if you tend to overlook those consequences when forming your views, then your political opinions will be biased in a very specific direction—too much statism. (0 COMMENTS)

Silvio Berlusconi passed away on Monday. His state funeral (a beautiful ceremony in Milan’s Cathedral) took place on Wednesday. Not many foreign dignitaries attended: basically, the only one of note was Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban, not a darling of the West these days. Yet former Spanish prime minister José Maria Aznar had some nice things to say about Berlusconi and French President Emmanuel Macron, too. The tone of international obituaries was sharply different than the ones in Italy, however. Foreign observers at first feared Berlusconi as a media mogul who wanted to manipulate voters through his media empire. That was when he first entered politics, in 1994. In later years, his womanizing was the true news item. Just Google “Berlusconi” and “bunga bunga”. And yet Berlusconi should not be treated as a joke. He was a great showman, but also a revolutionary entrepreneur. As a politician, he never delivered the “free market revolution” he promised at the beginning of his career. But he established a political party anew and won three elections (half-won another, that he lost by 30,000 votes in a country of 60 millions), becoming the longest serving Italian prime minister (2001-2005) in a country where a government on average last 14 months. Watching his funeral on the Internet, his uniqueness was apparent. Inside the Church, you had political dignitaries, TV celebrities, business leaders, soccer champions: politics, entertainment, business, and sports may be contiguous fields, but you seldom met somebody who was a central figure in all of them. Berlusconi was that rare case. Outside the Church, some 15,000 people camped to say goodbye to a man they admired, a fair chunk of them being soccer fans of AC Milan. For once, (part of) the elites and the people shared admiration and affection and gratitude for the same man. That says something. As a free marketer, I thought Berlusconi was a disappointing prime minister, as I remember in this obituary for the Daily Telegraph. But though this was a tragedy for Italy, this was not central in an incredible life, which would be wrong to remember just for some gross and undignified moments (which were there, of course). I tried to reflect on that in this piece for the Independent Institute’s The Beacon. (0 COMMENTS)

I’ll save you the suspense: I think it is. Drug company Merck is suing Medicare. What’s its beef? Merck claims that certain changes in the way Medicare will pay for drugs are coercing Merck, forcing it to sell drugs at bel0w-market prices. But Cato health economist Michael F. Cannon disagrees. He says that there is no coercion whatsoever. Indeed, Michael’s post is titled “Medicare Is Not Taxing or Coercing Merck, Just Reducing Its Government Subsidies.” At first I agreed with him. And then I read his post more carefully. Read it too–it’s not long–if you want to understand my objections. Michael starts with an argument I agree with and I was pleasantly surprised to see him being so radical on the issue of Medicare. He writes, “The price Medicare should pay for all medical goods and services is $0.00.” In other words, he’s saying that Medicare should not exist. You can be sure that if it paid $0.00 for every medical good and service, its budget would be zero. Then the tax that people pay for Medicare, 1.45 percent of all “earned” income for employees and the same tax for employers (and a higher tax for higher-income people) could be zero. Most workers below the age of 40, who are years away from ever getting Medicare benefits, would probably be thrilled. The key issue, though, is whether Merck and other drug companies are free to say no and not sell drugs to Medicare. If that were so, then Michael would be right. But my understanding of the law is that it’s not so. Michael links to a very long document from the Center for Medicare that explains the process. I didn’t have the patience to work my way through it, but I’ll accept that Michael has summarized it accurately. He boils it down to 4 steps: If Medicare selects a Merck drug for price negotiation, Merck has until October 1 to enter into an “agreement” to negotiate a “maximum fair price.” Medicare’s opening bid must be at least 25 percent less than the current price. If Merck does not enter into an “agreement” by October 1, “a noncompliance period would begin” that could result in “excise tax liability” for Merck. If Merck enters into an “agreement,” it must sell the drug to Medicare at whatever price Medicare negotiates/​dictates or pay an “excise tax.” Merck may terminate the “agreement” for any reason, but the termination does not take effect until 11–23 months after Merck announces it. In the meantime, Merck must continue to sell the drug to Medicare at the price Medicare negotiated/​dictated. To his credit, Michael puts “agreement” in quotation marks because it’s not an agreement. The crucial issue, as I noted above, is whether a drug company is free to engage. Bullet #2 above says that it’s not. A company that refuses to enter an agreement is designated by Medicare as being noncompliant and is taxed for being noncompliant. The tax, by the way, is very heavy. So how does Michael claim that the drug company is not coerced? He writes: First, Both Merck and the government are wrong to describe those “excise taxes” as taxes. Merck’s own lawyers admit, “the excise tax is suspended if the manufacturer has no relationship with Medicare or Medicaid.” Taxes are compulsory; these “taxes” are optional. Ergo, it’s not a tax. The correct way to think of those payments is that Merck would be rebating to the government a portion of the subsidies it receives from taxpayers through Medicare and Medicaid. In essence, those rebates are an across‐​the‐​board reduction in the prices Medicare and Medicaid pay for Merck’s products. No one is taxing Merck, just reducing their government subsidies. Since those “excise taxes” are not taxes, the government is not compelling Merck to enter an “agreement.” Merck is free to decline. If the resulting rebates Merck must pay mean its government “book of business” is unprofitable, it can walk away from federal health programs. If Merck and other drug companies really were free to decline, then he would be right that they’re not coerced. But there’s a big wrinkle and Michael addresses it in his next paragraph, writing: Not even the 23‐​month period that Merck would have to continue selling the drug to Medicare at the Merck‐​unfriendly price is coercive. Merck has received plenty of notice of that condition. Merck was aware of that provision as Congress debated the law in 2021. And when Congress passed it. And when President Biden signed it in August 2022. And when Medicare announced in March 2023 how it would be implementing these provisions. Merck has had and will continue to have plenty of opportunities to avoid those conditions. It could have avoided them at any time from when Congress began debating them in 2021 until now. It could avoid them today. It could avoid them by refusing to enter into an “agreement.” At any of these points, Merck could avoid these conditions of Medicare participation without coercion. Excuse me? Merck received plenty of notice? Yes, that provision was debated and there was reason to think that Joe Manchin (D-WV) would stand his ground and that the Inflation Reduction Act would be defeated. Merck was supposed to anticipate that Larry Summers would convince Manchin that it was a good bill that he should vote for? Really? Once Biden signed it, then, yes, Merck could see the writing on the wall. But let’s do some basic math. August 2022, when Biden signed it, was 10 months ago. So if Merck was already selling drugs to Medicare, it was stuck. 10 is less than 11 and is way less than 23. Interestingly, Michael makes the point that Medicare announced in March 2023, just 3 months ago, how it would implement those provisions. I think Michael is saying that there was some ambiguity. If so, then Merck had, not 10 months, but 3 months. So it’s really stuck. 3 is less than 11 and is way less than 23. But whether the right measure is 3 months or 10 months, would Michael apply this to other government measures? What if Congress passed a law today, and Biden signed it today, stating that anyone currently working for the federal government could be shipped to Ukraine to fight or serve in some other capacity within the next 11 to 23 months? Would Michael then say that those government workers are not being coerced? Would he go further and say that those workers should have anticipated that provision because it had been debated months and months ago? I don’t think he would. But if so, what’s the difference in principle? HT2 Charley Hooper for helpful discussion. (0 COMMENTS)

A recent Financial Times report (“India Drops Evolution and Periodic Table from Some School Textbooks,” June 6, 2023) adds to the bad news we have been hearing from India: India has dropped Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and the periodic table of elements from some school textbooks, part of a widening campaign by the Hindu nationalist government that has prompted warnings from educators about the impact on teaching and the country’s vital tech sector. … It said the new textbooks were a transitional solution that would apply only to the current 2023-24 academic year. … While evolution would still be taught in grades 11 and 12, [Aniket Sule, a professor at the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education in Mumbai] noted, many Indian pupils chose not to study science or maths beyond grade 10. “You are depriving this knowledge for the bulk of students,” he said. … I asked my friend Neera Badhwar, a professor of philosophy at the University of Oklahoma and a native of India, if she thought this piece of news was significant. She replied: It’s very disturbing. I don’t believe the claim that it’s temporary, although the fact that evolution hasn’t been banned from the upper grades does hold out some hope. And [Indian Prime Minister Narenda] Modi is desirous enough of foreign adulation that he may be persuaded not to do anything that destroys science in India. To which extent the erosion of the teaching of evolution and the periodic table will apply to all high schools in the country is not clear. In any event, I want to focus mainly on some underlying ideology that seems on the rise. The Financial Times notes: In 2018, Satyapal Singh, then-India’s minister of state for human resource development, dismissed the theory of evolution as “scientifically wrong” and called for it to be removed from school and college curricula. No one “saw an ape turning into a man”, he said in remarks quoted by the Press Trust of India, a news agency. That nobody has ever seen a man descending from an ape made me think of another famous scholar and political friend of Narenda Modi, Donald Trump. The latter defended a historical plaque on his golf course in Sterling, Virginia, which claims that a Civil War battle nearby transformed the Potomac into a “river of blood.” The problem is that historians apparently believe that the said battle never happened. Contradicting the historians’ opinion, Trump declared: How would they know that? Were they there? Of course, biology, history as a discipline, or any field of organized knowledge tries to explain events that were not witnessed or to critically examine observers’ testimonies and interpretations. If we had to base our knowledge on the testimonies of people who “were there” or reported what the latter told them, we would know very little—close to nothing, in fact. The experience of one human being is extremely limited. To know what happened and to find causes, we need to observe facts and study the theories that help interpret them. Nobody has ever seen a dinosaur or, with his own eyes, a black hole. Nobody has seen a demand curve elsewhere than in an abstract theory or an econometric estimate. Reviewing a recent book by Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman (The Age of the Strongman), I echoed what he believes as do many other observers: Although India is known as a democratic country—the largest democracy in the world—its supporting institutions have weakened under Modi’s Hindu ethnicism and nationalism. All that teaches us something about superstition and the state. What’s happening in India parallels the apparent retreat from rationality that we observe in the West. It may very well be true, as most classical liberal thinkers believed, that the state was necessary for mankind to culturally evolve from the tribe to the “Great Society,” to use Friedrich Hayek’s terminology. (It is worth reading Hayek’s last book, The Fatal Conceit.) But it was not any kind of state that could come close to that ideal, which is obviously still imperiled. It had to be the constitutionally limited classical liberal state, now challenged by the rise of right and left populism and nationalism. In political regimes that are not sufficiently constrained and liberal—the state naturally supports and fuels the mob’s superstitions instead of protecting individuals against them. (1 COMMENTS)