“Learn to keep coding.” You’ve probably heard the line that various politicians have thrown as a bone to people put out of work in the non-tech industries: “learn to code.” Well, there’s good news for people who already do know how to code. When they get laid off, they find jobs quickly. And there’s even better news for people who have lost any kind of job, tech or non-tech. A headline in Wednesday’s (print edition) Wall Street Journal says “Axed Tech Workers Find Jobs Quickly.” The title in the on-line version is slightly different: “Laid Off Tech Workers Quickly Find New Jobs.” The news story is by Sarah Chaney Cambon and Gwynn Guilford. Here are the first 3 paragraphs: Most laid off tech workers are finding jobs shortly after beginning their search, a new survey shows, as employers continue to scoop up workers in a tight labor market. About 79% of workers recently hired after a tech-company layoff or termination landed their new job within three months of starting their search, according to a ZipRecruitersurvey of new hires. That was just below the 83% share of all laid-off workers who were re-employed in the same time frame. Nearly four in 10 previously laid off tech workers found jobs less than a month after they began searching, ZipRecruiter found in the survey.  Of course, the odds are that a substantial percentage of workers laid off by tech firms are not coders. Nevertheless, it’s good news for those of us who think that being unemployed for a long time is corrosive to one’s psyche. Notice also the last sentence of the second paragraph: Laid-off workers as a whole do even better. (0 COMMENTS)

Americans are really good at telling other countries what to do, how to run their affairs. For the past year, lots of American pundits have been ridiculing China’s Zero Covid policy. (I am one of those pundits.). There’s a general view that it’s long past time to move beyond Covid, to get back to normal. “Vaxxed and relaxed”. China has finally decided to take our advice and open up to foreign travel. So how did the US react? Did we celebrate their decision?  Here’s the Financial Times: US will require negative Covid tests for air passengers from China I predict that most of America’s media won’t even notice the hypocrisy.  We are much better at noticing China’s mistakes than our own. PS.  The fig leaf being provided is concern about a possible new mutation of the virus.  But there’s no evidence for that claim, and no plan to stop a new variant from circulating here if it did exist.   (0 COMMENTS)

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900-1944) presents an interesting dichotomy.  I would wager that most readers of these pages have enjoyed his delightful little tale, The Little Prince, about 125,000 copies of which are sold per year in the US (compared to about 300,000 in France).  Those who haven’t yet read the short book have probably heard about it.   Yet the rest of his oeuvre is largely unknown in the US (and, interestingly, in France, where every town seems to have a street or school named for Saint-Exupéry, whose face adorned the last French 50-Franc bill, before the transition to the Euro). I remember devouring his aviation memoirs when I was in college.  Southern Mail (1929), Night Flight (1931), Wind, Sand, and Stars (1939), Flight to Arras (1942), and The Little Prince (1943), all captivated my imagination with larger-than-life tales of early aviation, desert and mountain crashes, and reflections on friendship and humanity.  Like my French mother when she was a teenager (something I found out later), I kept a diary of quotations, a good portion of which were from Saint-Exupéry.  Many came from The Little Prince: And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.   -I am looking for friends. What does that mean – tame? -It is an act too often neglected, said the fox. It means to establish ties. -To establish ties? -Just that, said the fox. To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world….   Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.   To love is not to look at one another, it is to look, together, in the same direction (from Wind, Sand, and Stars). After I had devoured all of his books (except for a posthumous novel), I somehow moved on. When my mother – a freelance teacher of French literature and French as a foreign language – died unexpectedly in 2007, I found her lectures on Saint-Exupéry.  I vowed to publish them as a posthumously co-authored academic paper – but I was then a first-year assistant professor, so I wisely focused on writing the economics papers required for tenure and promotion, and put the project in a drawer.  When I got COVID during a month-long stay in Paris in February 2022, I decided to revisit the project.  I re-read Wind, Sand, and Stars with adult eyes, then dug into the life of Saint-Exupéry, through an exhibit of Saint-Exupéry’s life and sketches at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, the memoir written by his friend Léon Werth, and Stacy Schiff’s magisterial biography (Saint Exupéry:  A Biography, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1994).  I found myself especially intrigued by Saint-Exupéry’s odd 28-month exile in New York City, between the Fall of France in 1940 and the Allied invasion of North Africa in 1942.  I dedicate these reflections to my late mother.   Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger, count of Saint-Exupéry, was born in Lyon, France, in 1900.  He was tempted by a career as an illustrator or architect, but found his calling as a pilot when he was drafted into military service in the new field of aviation, in 1921.  He subsequently enjoyed a career as a mail pilot and test pilot, while writing and drawing on the side.  His first short story was published in 1926, and there followed his series of autobiographical (and philosophical) novels about life in the air, and his reflections on friendship, humanity, and life, from 30,000 feet. Flight to Arras is Saint-Exupéry’s personal recollection of the Battle of France, in which he participated as a pilot in a reconnaissance squadron.  He uses one particular flight as a synecdoche for his participation in the Battle of France, the disastrous defeat to Nazi Germany, and reflections on life, fate, war, death, and the ikigai of flying a plane.  I have chosen this book because it foreshadows the Fall of France and Saint-Exupéry’s wartime exile in New York City.  For this #ReadWithMe, I am using the 2015 edition, translated by Lewis Galantière, and published by Martino Publishing (Mansfield Centre, CT).   The book opens with the counsel of despair.  Amidst the French army’s retreat in May 1940, the observation squadrons are vastly outnumbered.  The entire French army counted a mere 50 observation crews of three men.  Of the 23 crews in Saint-Exupéry’s squadron, 17 had been decimated in the first three weeks of the war.  “Crew after crew was being offered up as sacrifice.  It was as if you dashed glassfuls of water into a forest fire in the hope of putting it out” (14).  As a professor, I have lived the absurdity of university bureaucracy:  I once wondered why we wasted precious time in monthly department meetings that could have been an email (and even that would have been a stretch) – until I realized that there was a meeting so the department chairman could report to the dean that there had been a meeting… in turn, the dean could report to the provost that all departments had held a meeting that month.  In the end, time is taken away from teaching, research, and substance – but nobody dies.  In a wartime rout, things are different:  “It’s not our fault that we feel none too cheerful.  Not the major’s fault that he is ill at ease with us.  Not the Staff’s fault that it gives orders.  The major is out of sorts because the orders are absurd.  We know that they are absurd; but the Staff knows that as well as we do.  It gives orders because orders have to be given.  Giving orders is its trade, in time of war” (18).  This is all part of a deadly dance in the theater of war.  “Handsome horsemen transmit the orders – or rather, to be modern about it, motorcyclists.  The orders ordain events, change the face of the world.  The handsome horsemen are like the stars – they bring tidings of the future.  In the midst of turmoil and despair, orders arrive, flung to the troops from the backs of steaming horses.  And then all is well – at least, so says the blueprint of war.  Everybody struggles as hard as he can to make war look like war.  Piously respects the rules of the game.  So that war may perhaps be good enough to agree to look like war” (ibid).  Observation crews are sent up to near-certain death, and for what?  “In all seriousness the Staffs issue orders that never reach anybody.  They ask us for intelligence impossible to provide.  But the air arm cannot undertake to explain war to the Staffs….Of course they take our intelligence into account, since the blueprint of war requires that intelligence officers make use of intelligence.  But even their war-by-blueprint had broken down.  We knew perfectly well that they would never be able to make use of our intelligence – luckily.  It might be brough back by us; but it would never be transmitted to the Staff.  The roads would be jammed.  The telephone lines would be cut.  The Staff would have moved in a hurry.  The really important intelligence – the enemy’s position – would have been furnished by the enemy himself” (19-20). Ever the poet and mystic, trained by Jesuits, Saint-Exupéry translates this futility into a beautiful religious experience of despair.  As he awaits another absurd and dangerous mission, he writes:  “I was for the moment like a Christian abandoned by grace.  I was about to do my job…honorably, that was certain.  But to do it as one honors ancient rites when they have no longer any significance.  When the god that lived in them has withdrawn from them” (24).  As he prepares for the mission, he laments:  “I can no longer see the cathedral in which I live.  I am dressing for the service of a dead god” (33). And then, something changes.  The pilot, through his equipment, literally becomes one with the plane: “I am attached to the plane by a rubber tube as indispensable as an umbilical cord.  The plane is plugged into the circulation of my blood.  Organs have been added to my being, and they seem to intervene between me and my heart” (38-39). “I am an organism integrated into the plane” (46).  Although the mission may be futile, the pilot’s ikigai is heavy with meaning.  “For me, piloting my plane, time has ceased to run sterile through my fingers.  Now, finally, I am installed in my function.  Time is no longer a thing apart from me.  I have stopped projecting myself into the future.  I am no longer he who may perhaps dive down the sky in a vortex of flame.  The future is no longer a haunting phantom, for from this moment on I shall myself crate the future by my own successive acts.  I am he who checks the course and holds the compass at 313*.  Who controls the revolutions of the propellor and the temperature of the oil  These are healthy and immediate cares.  These are household cares, the little duties of the day that take away the sense of growing older.  The day becomes a house brilliantly clean, a floor well waxed, oxygen prudently doled out…” (44).  The absurdity, futility, and despair in the briefing room have given way to the joy of a craft well practiced: “It came to this, that I was working at my trade.  All that I felt was the physical pleasure of going through gestures that meant something and were significant unto themselves.  I was conscious neither of great danger (it had been different while I was dressing) nor of performing a great duty” (48).  Naturally, Saint-Exupéry then turns back to mysticism:  “At this moment the battle between the Nazi and the Occident was reduced to the scale of my job, of my manipulation of certain switches, levers, taps.  This was as it should be.  The sexton’s love of his God becomes a love of lighting candles.  The sexton moves with deliberate step through a church of which he is barely conscious, happy to see the candlesticks bloom one after the other as the result of his ministrations.  When he has lighted them all, he rubs his hands.  He is proud of himself” (48-49).   Questions  What does moral philosophy dictate in a situation of absurdity, futility, and danger?  Are we still called to do our duty – and find meaning in it?  Do we trust the hierarchy, our superiors, and “the system”?  Or is it morally permissible to shirk a futile duty? I have often wondered if there was truly something different about World War II – or if this is my bias because it is more recent – or because my French grandparents lived through the Occupation of France (1940-1944), and my American grandfather was an officer in the Navy support teams for Operation Torch and Operation Neptune.  I wonder if, say, the Franco-Prussian War and World War I were just big-power geopolitical struggles – still war, with its horror and heroism, but not an existential struggle for Western values.  Saint-Exupéry refers to “the battle between the Nazi and the Occident” (48)   Nikolai G. Wenzel is the L.V. Hackley Chair for the Study of Capitalism and Free Enterprise, and Distinguished Professor of Economics, Broadwell College of Business and Economics, Fayetteville State University (Fayetteville, NC). (0 COMMENTS)

  As noted above, the argument against central planning is even more general than the argument about prices. It also applies to government policy during a pandemic. Among the important factors that governments do not have nearly enough information about are people’s health, their resistance to disease, their attitudes to risk, or their financial circumstances to decide which industries, which jobs, or which sectors of the economy to shut down or limit. Health, for example, varies widely, as do people’s attitudes to risk. Governments cannot take all these factors into account when making overall plans for an economy. This is true whether the central planning is by federal governments, state governments, or local governments. Although Hayek argued that even if there were no problem of incentives under socialism it would not work, there are in fact major incentive problems under socialism, which Hayek never denied. And the massive incentive problems with central planning to deal with COVID-19 became apparent early on. This is from David R. Henderson, “The Abject Failure of Central Planning During COVID,” in Donald J. Boudreaux, COVID-19: Lessons We Should Have Learned,” Fraser Institute, 2022. It was published online earlier this month. Another excerpt: It’s this kind of experimentation that was not allowed in most states or in any provinces or territories. One might think that allowing such freedom would put at risk people who are afraid of the virus. It would. But they are free to isolate themselves. Which is better? Isolating everyone by force or the threat of force, or letting people choose whether to isolate or not? Moreover, when individuals and firms make decisions to deal with COVID, they can take account of local information. They also have better incentives: if their plans don’t work well, they bear a substantial portion of the cost. So, for example, if a hairdresser in California had been allowed to stay open (for the first many months they were not so allowed), she and her clients could learn from experience just how risky the transactions were. Many customers would be paying close attention and, especially with modern technological innovations like Yelp, many potential customers would have paid attention also. And finally: It never makes sense, in a world of millions of goods and services, to try to minimize one thing, in this case, COVID infections and deaths. Tradeoffs are huge and important. To analogize to the case of socialist central planning, it would be as if an economy’s central planners decided to maximize the amount of bread—and forget about eggs, other foods, home heating, transportation, clothing, and health care. Read the whole thing. The picture above is of Anthony Fauci. He wasn’t literally a central planner because he had little power. But for at least the first few months of COVID, most governors in the United States followed his and Deborah Birx’s advice, shutting down major parts of the economy and regulating other parts of the economy. (0 COMMENTS)

Inflation can be measured in a number of different ways. There is no “correct” measure of inflation, rather the utility of various inflation indices depends on the question being asked. Consider the following FT story: On both sides of the Atlantic, hawks insist “core” inflation (excluding food and energy) remains too high. But consumers face the overall not the core price level. The claim must be that falling headline inflation will not bring core inflation down, even though rising headline inflation is what pulled core inflation up. It is misleading to say that rising headline inflation is what pulled the core rate up, rather it was primarily excessive NGDP growth that pushed core inflation higher.  But I’m more interested in the other claim, that consumers face the overall inflation rate, not core inflation. It’s true that consumers are hurt more by high headline inflation than by high core inflation.  But that truth obscures another important fact.  Monetary policymakers can help consumers more by stabilizing core inflation than by stabilizing headline inflation. Did I just contradict myself?  Read the two claims carefully, and consider an example such as the case where headline inflation is much higher than core inflation due to soaring oil prices.  In that case, consumers will probably be worse off, as wages tend to track the (lower) core inflation rate.  But there’s nothing the Fed can do to prevent consumers from suffering from a fall in living standards due to a rise in the relative price of oil.  A high relative price of oil is a problem for consumers, but it is not a problem that can be fixed by monetary policymakers.  The overall macroeconomy will be more stable (and consumers will be better off), if the Fed stabilizes core inflation rather than headline inflation.   The same is true of wage inflation.  Obviously, the public prefers higher wages to lower wages, other things equal.  But when it comes to the effect of monetary policy on wages, other things are not equal.  A monetary policy that drives nominal wages higher will also lead to higher price inflation.  The FT article seems to miss this point: Wage “inflation” due to people getting more productive jobs in more productive companies is surely not harmful inflation. Higher productivity should itself be disinflationary for prices. Yet this possibility seems far from the minds and certainly from the words of central bankers. . . .  But from the gold standard era to today, they [central banks] have also been accused of something worse: of always taking capital’s side in a distributive battle against the working class. They should be wary of proving their critics right. Again, higher wages are better for workers, ceteris paribus.  But higher nominal wages generated by expansionary monetary policy will generally make the public worse off, at least in the long run.   Workers care about real wages. Productivity growth has been very slow since 2004, and there is no reason to assume that this trend will change in the near future.  Thus a monetary policy that leads to fast nominal wage growth will also generate high inflation.  When the central bank then tries to slow inflation with a contractionary monetary policy, there’s a danger the economy will fall into recession.  It is better to avoid the excessive stimulus in the first place, rather than try to clean up the mess without triggering a recession.  In order to achieve 2% inflation in the long run, wage growth must be held down to roughly 3%, on average.  The extra 1% represents productivity growth. (0 COMMENTS)

Stanford University’s information technology community produced, and then hid, a document entitled “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative.” Stanford didn’t adopt the EOHLI document. The fact that Stanford has not directly rejected this document and the ideas expressed within it, however, strongly suggests that this widely ridiculed document aligns with some deep-seated views pervading the campus. As two people with ties to Stanford, we will explain, using techniques and principles that Stanford used to champion, why this document is so wrong. Some people criticize the document because they see it as a means of exerting control over others. That may well be true. But dismissing any proposal by speculating about people’s motives is not a legitimate way to argue. People can support bad ideas based on bad or good motives, and good ideas based on bad or good motives. If you object to the ideas, you need to say why, not attack assumed motives. By providing reasons for their conclusions, the document’s authors implicitly claim that they are logical. So it makes sense to analyze their arguments. And when we do so, we find that their reasoning is faulty.  The EOHLI document fails in the following ways: distinctions, costs/benefits, alternatives, and the big picture. These are the opening paragraphs of David R. Henderson and Charles L. Hooper, “Stanford Fails to Master Clear Thinking,” American Institute for Economic Research, December 26, 2022. Charley and I drew on some of the principles for making good decisions that we laid out in our book, Making Great Decisions in Business and Life, Chicago Park Press, 2007. An editor at another publication turned it down last week on the grounds that we were naive because we didn’t seem to understand the motives of those who push these bad ideas. That’s why we rewrote it to include the second paragraph above. Put yourself in the other person’s shoes. If you are attacked for your motives when you propose a policy and, moreover, when you’re attacked for those alleged motives by someone who doesn’t even know you, my guess is that it upsets you. It upsets me when it happens to me, one of the main reasons being that the person ascribing motives to me is almost always wrong. For example, I was recently attacked my someone on email who claimed that my criticism of the FDA in another article was based on my financial incentive. I replied that the small amount I was paid to write that piece was hardly much of an incentive to change my view. But even if it had been a large number, that large number could explain why I wrote the piece but not the content of the piece. Moreover, the alleged payer, Big Pharma, was not a payer. The payer was a think tank that was strapped for cash. Back to the article. Read the whole thing. It’s short. (0 COMMENTS)

In March 2009, with the British economy in freefall, the Bank of England under Chairman Mervyn King embarked on a program of Quantitative Easing (QE) where the Bank would ‘print’ money and use it to buy assets from financial institutions whose balance sheets had been ravaged by the collapse of mortgage-backed securities. The purchases were originally limited to British government bonds but were later expanded to include high quality commercial bonds. Some worried that this would cause inflation, even hyperinflation. Indeed, this money printing expanded the United Kingdom’s monetary base by 126 percent between March 2009 and February 2010 as the reserve balances component increased from 49 percent of the total to 76 percent. But inflation failed to materialize, at least on the scale of the gloomier forecasts. In the 129 months from March 2009 to December 2019 – the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic – Britain’s annual rate of Consumer Price Inflation broke 5 percent in just two of them. What happened? When financial institutions swapped their bonds for the Bank of England’s cash, they did not use the new cash as the basis for new lending. Instead, they ‘sterilized’ these inflows, in much the same way that inflows of gold were sometimes ‘sterilized’ under the gold standard. This is shown by the data for Retail M4, the British equivalent of M2, a broader measure of the money supply, changes in which are more closely tied to changes in inflation. While the monetary base expanded by 126 percent between March 2009 and February 2010, Retail M4 only expanded by 14 percent. To put it another way, in March 2009 each £1 of ‘narrow money’ – the monetary base – supported £18.45 of ‘broad money’ – M4: by February 2010 this had fallen to £10.01. The mass printing of money with no apparent inflationary consequences prompted some to think that we had found the philosopher’s stone of economics, the fabled ‘free lunch’. In Britain, the Labour Party proposed ‘People’s Quantitative Easing’ in 2015, arguing that if you could print money for the bankers you could print it for ‘the people’. In 2016, 35 economists wrote to the Guardian saying that: …the money [created by the Bank of England] could be used to fund either a tax cut or direct cash transfers to households, resulting in an immediate increase of household disposable incomes. More likely perhaps, the economists also proposed that: …a fiscal stimulus financed by central bank money creation could be used to fund essential investment in infrastructure projects—boosting the incomes of businesses and households, and increasing the public sector’s productive assets in the process.   Modern Monetary Theorists wrote of “the prevailing era of too-low inflation”, arguing that: …the macro policy implication should be obvious: We the people presently have far more fiscal space than the deficit scold, pay-for crowd preaches. In early 2020 COVID-19 hit and something very much like these policies was pursued. The British government borrowed huge sums, handing it to individuals and businesses shut down to stop the spread of the virus. To keep borrowing costs down, the Bank of England opened a direct line to the Treasury, monetizing British government debt. The financial system, which had sterilized much of the previous bouts of QE, would be bypassed. The monetary base expanded but at a slower rate than in 2009-2020, by 61 percent from March 2020 to February 2021 as opposed to 126 percent, but the expansion of Retail M4 was much the same, 16 percent compared to 14 percent. In March 2020, each £1 of ‘narrow money’ was supporting £4.73 of ‘broad money’: by February 2021, this had fallen to £3.21. This fall was smaller both absolutely and in percentage terms – -32 percent vs -49 percent – than the decline in 2010. This time the newly printed narrow money fed faster growth in broad money, and this drove inflation (Figure 3). The monetarist explanation of inflation fits this episode rather well. Figure 1: Retail M42 and CPI, % change from a year ago, M2 leading by 15 months Source: Bank of England and Office of National Statistics QEs are not created equal. Giving newly printed money to battered financial institutions was always likely to have different macroeconomic consequences to handing it to individuals and businesses to spend. MMTers, advocates of People’s QE, and others might argue that a pandemic was an inauspicious time to test their theories. On the contrary, there was rrely more “fiscal space” than when the economy was reopening and unemployment was 5.2 percent in late 2020. Britain’s current high levels of inflation are teaching the painful lesson that free money can be awfully expensive. There remains no such thing as a free lunch.   John Phelan is an Economist at Center of the American Experiment. (0 COMMENTS)

Chattel slavery involves the ownership by one person of another. This entry focusses on the operation of that labor system in the United States. Although chattel slavery dates back to the dawn of civilization, in the area that became the United States it first emerged after the importation of Africans to the Virginia colony in 1716. Prior to the American Revolution, all British colonies in the New World legally or informally sanctioned the practice. Nearly every colony counted enslaved Africans among its population. Only during and after the Revolution did the northern states abolish the institution or begin to implement gradual emancipation. But slavery was more economically entrenched in the southern states and became more so over time. By the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, slaves constituted one-third of the total slave-state population of 12.3 million. Slavery has captured the attention of economists since at least the eighteenth century. Two basic questions have remained intertwined throughout the history of economic thought regarding this ancient institution. First, was slavery profitable? And second, was slavery efficient? Was it profitable to individual slaveholders, in the sense of offering a reasonable prospect of monetary return (or some other material reward) comparable to what they could earn from other enterprises? Efficiency refers to overall economic gains. Did the exploitation of slave labor allocate and use resources in ways that fostered aggregate wealth and welfare, regardless of how unfairly it distributed wealth? Did it produce goods and services as abundant and valuable as alternative labor arrangements could have? Often economists and historians have reached identical answers to both questions, concluding that either slavery was both unprofitable and inefficient or both profitable and efficient. These are the opening paragraphs of Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, “U.S. Slavery and Economic Thought,” in David R. Henderson, ed. The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. It’s the latest addition to the on-line encyclopedia. It’s very long but well worth reading. Another excerpt: Strictly speaking, economists usually and most broadly employ the term “efficiency” as a measure of welfare rather than of output. Thus, while economic historians now agree that antebellum slavery marginally increased the output of cotton and other products, it still could have diminished total welfare. In measuring efficiency, economists have no precise unit to compare the subjective gains and losses from involuntary transfers. But because most coercive transfers in the Old South were from poor slaves to rich slaveholders, to assume unrealistically that such transfers were a wash in which slaveholder gains equaled slave losses is to bias the analysis in favor of slavery. Thus, if welfare losses still exceed gains, even with this bias present, one can be certain that slavery was inefficient. Hummel, in his dissertation, “Deadweight Loss and the American Civil War” (2001, updated 2012), integrated previous work into a systematic challenge to slavery’s efficiency.[9] He identified three sources of deadweight loss: output inefficiency, classical inefficiency, and enforcement inefficiency. And an excerpt on the New History of Capitalism: By the twenty-first century the slavery debates among economists had become quiescent. One major subsequent contribution is Olmstead and Rhode’s “Biological Innovation and Productivity Growth in the Antebellum Cotton Economy” (2008). They found that average daily cotton-picking rates quadrupled between 1801 and 1862, mainly due to new cotton varieties. But among historians, those describing their own work as part of a “New History of Capitalism” now claim that slavery was the primary source of overall U.S. economic growth in the antebellum period. Two of their major works are Beckert’s Empire of Cotton (2014) and Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told(2014). [15] While embracing the finding that slavery was productive, these historians otherwise largely ignore all previous work of economists. Yet the idea that slavery was essential for cotton production, which drove national growth, is belied by the fact that just five years after the Civil War’s end the physical amount of cotton produced was approaching its prewar peak, mainly because of increased acreage devoted to cotton cultivation, despite the fall in southern real income. Baptist went so far as to ignore Olmstead and Rhode’s explanation for the increase in cotton-picking rates, attributing it instead to a whipping regime of calibrated torture, steadily increasing over sixty years. Horrendous as torture is, the claim that it could account for productivity continually increasing for more than half a century is implausible on its face. Ignorance of national income accounting and Baptist’s double counting led him to attribute almost half of U.S. economic activity in 1836 to cotton production. Although cotton was the largest U.S. export, it never exceeded 5 percent of GDP. Olmstead and Rhode (2018) offers a comprehensive and scathing critique of the New History of Capitalism’s works on slavery.[16]         (0 COMMENTS)

Economic historian Judge Glock talks to EconTalk host Russ Roberts about zoning and the housing market. Glock argues the impact on zoning on housing affordability is small and that we should learn to love property taxes as long as they’re administered properly. The conversation includes a discussion of the environmental impact of urban sprawl–Glock argues sprawl […] The post Judge Glock on Zoning and Local Government appeared first on Econlib.

With the First Click of Christmas, My True Love Gave to Me a link to an XKCD.   With the Second Click of Christmas, My True Love Gave to Me Two Gigs of spam And a link to an XKCD.   With the Third Click of Christmas, My True Love Gave to Me Three Thumbs Up Two Gigs of spam And a link to an XKCD.   With the Fourth Click of Christmas, My True Love Gave to Me Four Banking Scams Three Thumbs Up Two Gigs of spam And a link to an XKCD.   With the Fifth Click of Christmas, My True Love Gave to Me Five Stupid Memes! Four Banking Scams Three Thumbs Up Two Gigs of spam And a link to an XKCD.   With the Sixth Click of Christmas, My True Love Gave to Me Six Honey Badgers Five Stupid Memes! Four Banking Scams Three Thumbs Up Two Gigs of spam And a link to an XKCD.   With the Seventh Day of Christmas, My True Love Gave to Me Seven misspelled comments Six Honey Badgers Five Stupid Memes! Four Banking Scams Three Thumbs Up Two Gigs of spam And a link to an XKCD.   With the Eighth Click of Christmas, My True Love Game to Me Eight Requests for Re-Tweets Seven misspelled comments Six Honey Badgers Five Stupid Memes! Four Banking Scams Three Thumbs Up Two Gigs of spam And a link to an XKCD.   With the Ninth Click of Christmas, My True Love Game to Me Nine Ladies Dancing (SFW!) Eight Requests for Re-Tweets Seven misspelled comments Six Honey Badgers Five Stupid Memes! Four Banking Scams Three Thumbs Up Two Gigs of spam And a link to an XKCD.   With the Tenth Click of Christmas, My True Love Game to Me Ten Email Forwards Nine Ladies Dancing (SFW!) Eight Requests for Re-Tweets Seven misspelled comments Six Honey Badgers Five Stupid Memes! Four Banking Scams Three Thumbs Up Two Gigs of spam And a link to an XKCD.   With the Eleventh Click of Christmas, My True Love Game to Me Eleven Facebook Flame Wars Ten Email Forwards Nine Ladies Dancing (SFW!) Eight Requests for Re-Tweets Seven misspelled comments Six Honey Badgers Five Stupid Memes! Four Banking Scams Three Thumbs Up Two Gigs of spam And a link to an XKCD.   With the Twelfth Click of Christmas, My True Love Game to Me Twelve Hours of Surfing Eleven Facebook Flame Wars Ten Email Forwards Nine Ladies Dancing (SFW!) Eight Requests for Re-Tweets Seven misspelled comments Six Honey Badgers Five Stupid Memes! Four Banking Scams Three Thumbs Up Two Gigs of spam And a link to an XKCD. (0 COMMENTS)