If I have to, I can do anything I am strong I am invincible I am woman —Helen Reddy, “I Am Woman” Helen Reddy’s 1971 anthem captured the spirit of feminism in that era. The mood was optimistic, proud, and spirited. “Nothing can stop me,” the song seemed to say. Once doors were open to women, they would charge through and never look back. Today, the mood of feminists seems much darker. On college campuses, some seethe with resentment. They look to university administrators to fend off “toxic masculinity” and “rape culture.” They allege that free speech causes harm. They insist that schools ban words and speakers. They want “safe spaces.” It seems as though “I am strong, I am invincible” has been replaced by “I am anxious, I am vulnerable.” Joyce Benenson’s Warriors and Worriers,1 published in 2014, might explain today’s campus culture as the result of women reverting to their natural behavior, even as they have become the majority at many colleges and universities. Benenson writes that, … human males are programmed to develop traits that are associated with becoming a warrior, and that human females are programmed to develop characteristics that are related to becoming a worrier. (p. 13) I would suggest that higher education, once dominated by men, used to cater to men’s warrior nature. Today, with female students the majority, colleges and universities cater much more to women’s worrier culture. In her book, Benenson presents extensive empirical evidence for general differences in behavior and temperament between human males and females. These are differences that she and others have found in infants, toddlers, children, and adolescence. They are found in primitive cultures as well as in modern Western cultures. They are similar to traits found in other primates, including our chimpanzee relatives. In this review, I find it hard to do justice to the range of observations that Benenson makes about gender differences and the variety of sources for those observations. Taken as a whole, the empirical research that she cites seems solid. She grounds her explanation for male-female differences in evolutionary psychology. That approach always risks telling a “just-so” story, but I found it persuasive here. It is my idea to examine contemporary campus culture in terms of her warrior/worrier framework, and in doing so I certainly risk telling a “just-so” story as well. Benenson holds a Ph.D in psychology from Harvard University, and currently lectures there in the Department of Evolutionary Biology. As a developmental psychologist who has studied young boys and girls, she has found sex differences shared across many cultures, suggesting that these differences are not unique to western society. Over the past 30 years, I have come to believe that boys and girls differ in some of their basic interests and accordingly behave in different ways… boys enjoy physical fighting, find enemies captivating, and cannot beat competition for pure entertainment. Most important of all, boys want to engage in these behaviors with other boys. (p. vii) … When I see a behavior exhibited by virtually all members of one sex, but rarely by members of the other sex, it suggests that that behavior solves some basic problem for the sex that practices it. It’s not that the other sex could not learn to practice it, but they usually don’t without a lot of encouragement and learning. (p. viii) … I study children, because children allow me to observe human nature before society has exerted too much of an influence. The earlier a behavior appears in children, the more likely this behavior has some biological basis. What I have found is that girls and boys behave very differently beginning in infancy and early childhood, long before girls bear children and boys become the physically stronger sex. (p. 2) Benenson catalogues numerous differences in temperament and behavior between males and females. These include: • Boys are drawn to fight one another, and girls are not. • Boys are eager to play on their own, without the authority of teachers, and girls are not. • Girls enjoy play that involves acting out scenes of caring for a baby or a person in distress, and boys do not. • Women show higher levels of fear and anxiety and lower propensity to take risks than men do. • When evaluating same-sex individuals as potential friends or allies, men look for strength, courage, and useful skills. Women look for vulnerability and the absence of overt conflict. • Boys tend to have large groups of friends, with loose ties and shifting alliances. Girls tend to form tight cliques. • At recess, boys enjoy competitive team sports. They are concerned with formal rules and spend time negotiating such rules. I think of pickup softball games where there are only six players on a team. The rules might be “anything hit to right field is a foul ball,” or “batting team supplies pitcher, catcher, and first baseman” or some other ad hoc modification of normal baseball rules. • At recess, girls are less likely to choose competitive team sports, and they lose interest in team games relatively quickly. • Men value competition with prizes for those who demonstrate the most skill. Women prefer that no one stand out. It could be that some of these differences are small, with the 55th percentile for a female would align with the 45th percentile for a male. (If the trait were height, this would mean that a woman who is taller than 55 percent of other women would be as tall as a male who is taller than 45 percent of other males.) Or they could be large, meaning that the 95th percentile for a female would align with the 5th percentile for a male. Benenson never quantifies differences in this way, but the words she uses suggest that the differences that she observes are large. Benenson claims that what underlies these differences is that women pay more attention to their survival as individuals, while men pay more attention to survival in group competition. In terms of evolutionary psychology, a female needs to protect her own health in order to be able to bear children and to enable them to survive to adulthood. Benenson notes that until recently in human history, 40 percent of children died before the age of two. Increasing the chances of her baby’s survival had to be a major concern for women. Men always had the option of trying to impregnate many women, so that the death of one of his babies would be less significant. Once a baby has been created, the man need not remain healthy or even alive for that baby to survive. For men, the ability to pass their genes along is relatively less dependent on their individual survival. It is relatively more dependent on the ability of their group to out-compete other groups, especially in war. Behaviors, such as paying close attention to the state of one’s body, avoiding conflicts, finding a reliable mate while excluding competitors, and investing a lot in children likely have been specifically useful in keeping women alive. Behaviors that likely have been particularly useful in keeping men alive include physical fighting, selecting friends who are strong and skilled, and competing in groups. These patterns of sex differences appear across diverse cultures and are found even in young children. (p. 7) Benenson argues that men developed behaviors and temperaments to enable them to manage large coalitions in warfare. Women developed behaviors and temperaments to enable them to ensure the survival of their children. Many of the traits that accompany interest in war, such as enjoyment of fighting, pleasure in competition, preference for allies who are strong and competent, and undying loyalty to one’s own group, are useful in government, business, and other peacetime institutions. The traits that accompany caring for vulnerable individuals over the long haul, including staying healthy and avoiding risks, maintaining relationships with families and a mate, getting rid of interfering competitors, and investing in close kin and others who can help a mother raise her children, can be used in other helping professions as well. (p. 14) For a female, every other female is a potential competitor. Women eliminate a competitor by ganging up on the unwanted woman and excluding her. The excluded woman may not have violated a formal rule, but she seems threatening for some reason. For a male, every other male is a potential ally. You may fight a man one day, and the next day you may join with him to fight a common enemy. Men want to see non-cooperators punished, but subsequently the rule-breaker might be rehabilitated. Permanent exclusion would be a bad practice. “Reading Warriors and Worriers, it struck me that males would want to establish institutions in which competition reveals and rewards people for their skills. They would not be egalitarian.” Reading Warriors and Worriers, it struck me that males would want to establish institutions in which competition reveals and rewards people for their skills. They would not be egalitarian. If college were set up that way, ability and effort would play a big role in admission and grading. Females would seek a more egalitarian culture. In contests, Benenson writes, Girls don’t want any conflict, so they try to make everyone equal. They forget who won or lost. (p. 47) Men would be less likely to feel threatened, or “triggered,” by exposure to novel or troubling ideas. They would be less inclined to want to use exclusion (“canceling”) as an interpersonal strategy. Men would be relatively inclined to see conflict as something that can be negotiated. Women would want to see conflict eliminated, and they would appeal to administrators for protection. Benenson writes, When speaking to one another, young boys issue directives, command others, insult them, tell jokes at others’ expense, ignore what someone else just said, disagree with another’s point, call one another names, brag, tell stories highlighting their own accomplishments, curse, threaten others, use direct statements, and generally behave in a domineering fashion toward one another. (p. 45) On campus these days, such behaviors are looked down on as “toxic masculinity.” The contemporary emphasis on social justice seems to me to fit with Benenson’s remark that Men feel particularly good about themselves in domains such as athletic ability, appraisal of their personality, and overall satisfaction or happiness with themselves. Women in contrast rate their behavioral and moral conduct as more socially acceptable to their societies than men do. In other words, men just feel good about who they are, whereas women feel good about being moral. (p. 76) Overall, it seems to me that the culture of higher education has become increasingly feminized. This coincides with, and seems to me to be caused by, the increase in the proportion of female students. For more on these topics, see “The Boys Under the Bus,” by Arnold Kling. Library of Economics and Liberty, Dec. 5, 2022. From the shelf with curator Arnold Kling: Of Boys and Men with Kay Hymowitz and Bryan Caplan. YouTube, 1/11/23. Roy Baumeister on Gender Differences and Culture. EconTalk. “Sermons from Evolutionary Biologists,” by Arnold Kling. Library of Economics and Liberty, Nov. 1, 2021. Benenson writes, For thousands of years, males have constructed the rules that underlie religions, governments, economic systems, businesses, educational structures, and of course judicial courts and the military. Since ancient times, games with rules created by boys and men have predominated all over the world. (p. 78) As a more feminized culture spreads outward from college campuses, we may be engaged in an experiment to do without the institutional approaches that have persisted “for thousands of years.” Footnotes [1] Joyce F. Benenson, Warriors and Worriers: The Survival of the Sexes, with Henry Markowits. Oxford University Press, 2014. *Arnold Kling has a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of several books, including Crisis of Abundance: Rethinking How We Pay for Health Care; Invisible Wealth: The Hidden Story of How Markets Work; Unchecked and Unbalanced: How the Discrepancy Between Knowledge and Power Caused the Financial Crisis and Threatens Democracy; and Specialization and Trade: A Re-introduction to Economics. He contributed to EconLog from January 2003 through August 2012. Read more of what Arnold Kling’s been reading. For more book reviews and articles by Arnold Kling, see the Archive. As an Amazon Associate, Econlib earns from qualifying purchases. (0 COMMENTS)

It is not rare that a top politician wants the good people to believe that a time of disaster preceded his rising to power and immediately followed his descent from the throne. How could the politician or his accomplices not see that this is a lie? Trump is not the only one to live in a lie, but he has special talents in that department: elect me and I’ll make America great and stop foreign collectivities from “taking advantage” of us collectively? In New Hampshire on January 28, he gave other examples (“‘I’m More Angry Now’: Trump Returns to Campaign Trail for 2024 Race,” Financial Times, January 28, 2023): We handed Biden a great economy, the fastest economic recovery ever recorded . . . but now families are being crushed. My 2020 Regulation review of that great economy provides an antidote. Trump also declared (“Trump Kicks Off 2024 Campaign Travel With New Hampshire, South Carolina Visits,” Wall Street Journal, January 28, 2023): The 2024 election is our one shot to save our country and we need a leader who is ready to do that on day one. What is perhaps more troubling is how many of the governed seem to believe in the political thaumaturge, whether it be Trump or somebody else. It is true that a politician can do a lot of damage in four years. But he can only do only limited good in that time frame. If he does  much good, it is likely to be only for a few people at the detriment of others. (0 COMMENTS)

Last week I wrote a critique at Defining Ideas, a Hoover Institution publication, of the views of Paul Krugman and Olivier Blanchard. Blanchard (pictured above) wrote a brief note defending himself and I wrote back. It went a few rounds. To recall, I had one critique of Krugman and two critiques of Blanchard. My critique of Krugman was that he was unwilling to admit that the “incomes policy” he seemed to favor was really a system of wage and price controls. My critique of Blanchard was that he talked about inflation without mentioning the growth of the money supply and that he got causation reversed: it doesn’t go from slow the economy to reduce inflation; instead it goes from reduce the growth rate of the money supply to reduce inflation and an effect of that is often a slowing of the economy. Here’s my back and forth with Blanchard: Blanchard: Incomes policies, Wikipedia definitions not withstanding, have nothing to do (at least in Europe) with wage and price controls.  They have to do with social partners trying to come to an agreement on how to deal with a particular issue. On monetary policy.  Yes, in general, it can be the source of the conflict, and thus of inflation.  In the particular case of the US today, I think fiscal policy is more to blame. Henderson: Dear Professor Blanchard, Thanks for your note. When I checked the web, what I found is that pretty much every incomes policy was designed to affect prices and wages, usually with controls. Of course, you know Europe better than I do. Your brief comment was a little too brief. What specifically were incomes policies in Europe? Also, you refer to “social partners.” I’m not sure what that means. Could you explain? Regarding inflation, do you think it would have been nearly as high as it has been if the Fed had not monetized much of the increase in debt? Best, David Blanchard: Don’t trust the web. 😊 Incomes policies in europe are tripartite negotiations between labor, business, and the government.  Most celebrated agreements are Wassenaar in the Netherlands, Moncloa in Spain.  And, for a long time, negotiations in the context of the French plan to assess the desirable path for the economy, the appropriate rate of growth of nominal wages and so on. (Agreement on the path of wages is not price-wage controls.  Distortions come when there are constraints on price adjustment) On monetary policy.  I believe that the effect of QE has been to decrease long rates by about 100 bps [DRH note: basis points], which is not negligible, but is far less, in terms of effects on aggregate demand than the various fiscal plans, especially the ARP [DRH note: Biden’s America Rescue Plan]. Debt has not been monetized.  The Fed has bought long bonds, and issued short maturity, interest paying, reserves.  This does not change total debt, and has a minimal effect of interest payments. Best. Henderson: Thanks for your quick reply. May I use this in a follow-on blog post? Best, David Blanchard: Sure.  Always happy to educate Hoover 😊 Henderson: Lol.   I will probably have more thoughts on his monetary policy point. I think he’s wrong but I’m not sure. Also note that the only transmission mechanism he conceives of from monetary policy to aggregate demand is through interest rates.. And notice that he didn’t reply to my claim that he mistakenly reversed the causation between slowing the economy and reducing inflation. Maybe I’ve educated MIT. I’m happy to do so.   (0 COMMENTS)

[ANNUAL LISTENER SURVEY: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/EconTalk2022Fav. Vote for your 2022 favorites!] According to neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris, rationality is the key to safeguarding everything we cherish, and its only true enemy is dogmatic inflexibility. Harris speaks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the views that have made Harris famous, teasing out the often mind-blowing subtleties of his […] The post Sam Harris on Meditation, Mindfulness, and Morality appeared first on Econlib.

During the month of February, I’ll have the pleasure to coordinate a Virtual Reading Group on Bruno Leoni’s Freedom and the Law. I will write some rather impressionistic blog posts on the book, which I have read and read again over the years. Freedom and the Law is a short work, which emerged out of lectures that Leoni gave at Claremont College, thanks to Arthur Kemp, who was a good friend of Leoni. My American acquaintances are often surprised to know that the book, published in the United States in 1961, was translated and published in Italy only in 1995. Leoni was by no means unknown in his own country; he chaired the department of political science in Pavia, was a prominent lawyer, was friends with some of the most important scholars of his time, wrote regularly for the newspaper 24 Ore and was connected to the Liberal Party. But he died suddenly and unexpectedly at age 54, in 1967, and his memory was soon neglected. Leoni died right before the fateful year of 1968 and none of his students, including the most brilliant one, had either his worldview or his panache. Mario Stoppino, the one who had the strongest intellectual bond with him, published a collection of his essays in 1980, but that was for years the only publishing endeavor bearing Leoni’s name on the cover. After 1967 comes 1968 and though we tend to remember some of the most colorful and harmless offspring of the students’ movement, those years weren’t easy ones in Italy if you didn’t align with the left. Never forget that in Italy communist terrorism was a real thing: the Red Brigades succeeded in kidnapping and killing former prime minister Aldo Moro, in 1978. The publishing houses, in Italy, were typically courting the left (where most of the readers are, anyway) and academia began to falter too. So, Leoni was forgotten until, in a much quieter Italy, Raimondo Cubeddu, one of the true liberals in Italian universities, took a personal interest in Leoni and began to promote him with great vigour. In this regard, Italians of a classical liberal persuasion are greatly indebted to the Liberty Fund, which republished Freedom and the Law in 1991, thus giving a second life to the book (the original publisher was Van Nostrand/ the Volcker Fund). For libertarians joining our discussion group, it may be worth considering the relationship between Leoni and F. A. Hayek. Hayek expressed ins admiration in a beautiful obituary for Leoni. The picture of Leoni that comes out, vividly, is one of a tireless mind but also of a tireless man, who tried to put his tremendous energy to the service of the classical liberal cause. The Austrian school strongly influenced Leoni: he read and admired Mises, interacted extensively (also because of the Mont Pelerin Society) with Hayek and he even appreciated a young Murray Rothbard. In an essay he wrote on monopoly, he built on Rothbard’s Man, Economy and State. The issues of the relationship between Leoni and Hayek have been at the center of scholarly attention. The most recent contribution is by Antonio Masala, a foremost scholar and intellectual biographer of Leoni, who writes on the exchanges between the two thinkers and the journal Il Politico, which Leoni established and filled, in those years, with essays from his classical liberal friends. Masala’s paper is aptly published in Il Politico. Of Hayek’s scholars, the one who has paid more attention to Leoni is Jeremy Shearmur (see his Hayek and After). It is important to see that Leoni wanted to correct what he thought were Hayek’s misconceptions, on the nature of the law. He took issue with some of Hayek’s Cairo lectures and wanted to convince his friend that he needed to focus his own ideas better. As Todd Zywicki puts it, it was Leoni that introduced Hayek to the common law, which then became the heart of LLL. In so doing, of course, Leoni also introduced Hayek to his distinctive interpretation of the common law, rather than the modern realist-positivist view. Indeed, the novelty of the focus on the common law in LLL is striking: up until that time, the common law gets very little mention in either The Road to Serfdom or The Constitution of Liberty, both of which focus on the formalist Rechstaat notion of the rule of law. Then, the common law appears full-blown in LLL, with virtually no prior mention, and with a distinctive similarity to Leoni’s version. Libertarians joining our VRG may then easily find themselves at home and recognized in Freedom and the Law concepts and ideas that migrated in subsequent literature. Others may anyway discover a most creative and original legal theorist. (0 COMMENTS)

When I see examples of ChatGPT in action, I am reminded of the answers that college students provide on test questions. Yesterday, I finally got around to asking my first Chat question. I decided to test the famous AI with a question that students usually get wrong.  Chat got the question wrong. (And no, the “ceteris paribus” qualifier doesn’t help, at all.)  I then did a follow-up in the hope that clarifying the question would nudge Chat in the right direction. As you can see, on the second question Chat is hopelessly confused (if you’ll excuse me for anthropomorphizing a machine.).  Chat has some ideas about price and quantity demanded, price and quantity supplied, and the concept of equilibrium, but doesn’t know how to put them together in a coherent fashion.  In other words, Chat is a B student in a college economics course. This post is not about ChatGPT.  This new technology is actually quite impressive, and it seems likely that future versions will be even more impressive.  Rather this post is about the state of economics.  Suppose I claimed that “reasoning from a price change” is very widespread in the field of economics.  How could I justify this claim to a doubter?  I suppose I could dig up an example of reasoning from a price change in a news article, or even an academic journal.  But that would represent merely a single anecdote, not proof of a widespread problem. ChatGPT formulates answers by searching over a vast field of economics documents.  Thus its answers in some sense represent the consensus view of people who write books and articles on the subject of economics.  I’ve come to believe that most people don’t actually understand supply and demand, and the Chat response reinforces this view.  If I am correct, if Chat is like a mirror that reflects both the strengths and weaknesses of our understanding of economics, then I should be able to predict its failures.  And I believe I can do so.  I followed up my “reasoning from a price change” question with a set of questions aimed at exposing our weak understanding of the relationship between monetary policy and interest rates: See how easy it is to trick ChatGPT?  After 35 years of teaching thousands of students, I can predict how a typical student would answer the three questions above.  I know that their answers will not be entirely consistent.  And it does no good to claim there’s a grain of truth in each answer.  There is.  But ChatGPT doesn’t just give yes and no answers; it tries to explain the various possibilities.  Is this string of answers likely to be helpful to a college student?  Or would it further confuse them?  If Chat actually “understood” this stuff, it would give an answer pointing to the complexity of this issue. Again, this post is not about AI. Others have documented the fact that Chat often gives inadequate answers.  That’s not what interests me.  Rather I see Chat as a useful tool for diagnosing weaknesses in the field of economics. It allows us to peer into the collective brain of society. The questions that Chat gets wrong are the questions that most of our students get wrong.  Indeed, even many economists are too quick to equate falling interest rates with an expansionary monetary policy.  ChatGPT points to the areas where our educational system needs to do better.  PS.  You might argue that in my first monetary question I forced Chat to pick one direction of change.  But when the question is more open-ended, the answer is arguably even worse: PPS.  In the oil market example, one could argue that Chat is reacting to the fact that the oil market is dominated by supply shocks, making the claim “usually true”.  But it gives the same answer when confronted with a market dominated by demand shocks, where the claim is usually false: This gives us insight into how Chat thinks.  It does not search the time series data (as I would), looking for whether more new houses are sold during periods of high or low prices, rather it relies on theory (albeit a false understanding of the supply and demand theory.) (0 COMMENTS)

I’ve never been accused of being hesitant to nitpick (and if anyone ever did make that accusation, I’d nitpick it apart!), but sometimes what seems like a nitpick is actually an important point. Economists often make what seems like a nitpicky point to the non-economist. It usually takes a form like this: “Actually, Tesla’s recent price reductions won’t increase the demand for Tesla vehicles – it will increase the quantity demanded.” Or, we might say that the recent spike in egg prices doesn’t reduce demand for eggs, it only reduces the quantity of eggs demanded. (Insert obligatory “all else being equal” clause here, and please mentally carry it forward for the remainder of the post! It will save me a lot of keystrokes.) Increases or decreases in demand mean the demand curve has shifted right or left. The same is true for changes in supply. Increases or decreases in quantity demanded (or supplied) means moving up (or down) the curve, without shifting its position. We could also speak of the change in elasticity of supply and demand, which changes how steep the curves are, but for now we can ignore that complication. Let’s just stick with those two ideas – shifting the curves and moving along the curves. I’ve been told that a sign you’ve mastered learning a new language is when you experience and understand people speaking that language in your dreams. I wouldn’t know – I lived in Japan for an extended period, and I only learned to say about four words of Japanese that whole time. But in that spirit, a sign that you’ve fully absorbed and understood the importance of this seemingly nitpicky distinction is this – the phrase “building new houses doesn’t increase the housing supply” doesn’t sound even slightly odd to you. Let me try to unpack that. Demand, roughly, means how much we want something. A spike in egg prices will lead people to buy fewer eggs, but that’s not quite the same as saying people want eggs less than they used to. It only means people are less willing (or able) to buy as many eggs at the current price compared to before. Their demand for eggs hasn’t changed, but the quantity demanded has. The demand curve remains unmoved. Demand increases (or decreases) when we want something more (or less). Supply, roughly, means the capacity to produce something. Sticking with the example of eggs for now, a wave of avian flu has decreased egg production capacity – the supply curve has shifted to the left, reflecting the reduced capacity. If demand for eggs were to sharply decrease, that is, if people were to find eggs less desirable than before, perhaps due to sudden widespread health concerns about eggs or increased adoption of plant-based diets, the demand curve would shift left and the equilibrium price would fall, but the supply curve would stay put. If this happens, the quantity of eggs supplied would also drop, but the supply curve would stay put. The capacity for egg production wouldn’t have changed, but suppliers aren’t willing to produce as many eggs at the new lower price. This basic idea leads to a common confusion I see from NIMBYs about the effects of building new housing. Increasing the supply requires shifting the supply curve – or, in other words, increasing our capacity to build new housing. That’s not the same as merely building more housing in and of itself. Imagine a place where, due to tight regulations, the supply of housing is fixed. Your first impulse might be to think this means no new housing can be built, but that’s not quite right. It just means that the supply curve cannot shift. With a fixed supply curve, the quantity supplied can still increase. When the demand curve shifts further to the right and the supply curve stays fixed, quantity supplied can increase – but the equilibrium price will increase along with it. This means that in places where the supply curve is so tightly constrained as to be effectively fixed, new houses will only be built only when demanded by people willing and able to pay top dollar for them – that is, the rich. This means that despite new housing being built, the supply of housing hasn’t increased. For this place to increase the housing supply, as opposed to merely increasing the quantity of housing supplied, the housing market would need to be deregulated in a way that increases the capacity to build housing above what it was before. This can take the form of removing restrictions on multifamily units or limits on how tall apartment buildings can be, or eliminating minimum lot sizes, or streamlining a laborious and expensive approval process to build housing. If these kinds of measures were to be taken, then we can say that the housing supply has increased even prior to any new construction. Missing this seemingly nitpicky distinction is the source of the common confusion among many of the NIMBY types I mentioned before. They might see a place where housing is expensive (due to restricted supply), but they also notice that new housing is still being built. But this new housing, far from making housing more affordable, is almost exclusively expensive housing, only affordable by the rich. This, in their mind, undercuts the argument that increasing the housing supply will lower housing prices – because they don’t comprehend the difference between “increasing the housing supply” and merely “building more housing” – that is, the difference between an increase in supply and an increase in the quantity supplied.   Kevin Corcoran is a Marine Corps veteran and a consultant in healthcare economics and analytics and holds a Bachelor of Science in Economics from George Mason University.  (0 COMMENTS)

Play the hand you’re dealt. This morning I rewatched a fun ESPN “30 for 30” show about the tuck rule and the role it played in the New England Patriots’ (aka “The New England Economists” according to my University of Western Ontario mentor, economist John Palmer) 2002 playoff victory over the Oakland Raiders. In the show Tom Brady and Charles Woodson sit on Brady’s couch and watch the key play with 1:40 left in the 4th quarter. Oakland is ahead 13-10 and if Brady’s loss of the ball  due to Woodson’s tackle is a fumble, Oakland wins. But the refs look at a replay and decide that the tuck rule applies. The Patriots go on to win and make it all the way to Brady’s first Super Bowl win. I could tell you all about the fun interaction between Brady and Woodson where at times they act like 14-year-old boys. But I want to make a point about sunk costs. Many of the Oakland defense players felt, understandably, cheated by a bad call. It wasn’t a bad call; it was good call to enforce a screwy rule. One player admits that because they felt cheated, they lost their intensity. A New England Patriot player who is interviewed, Tedy Bruschi, I believe, makes the point that Patriots coach Bill Belichick was always good at getting the players to accept the hand they were dealt, put it way, and play from there. Belichick, in short, recognized that sunk costs are sunk. Extra credit: What subject did Belichick major in when he attended Wesleyan College? (0 COMMENTS)

Over the last two decades, socialism has been galloping into the mainstream of policymaking and youth culture. College students flirt with the idea so much that almost 40% show some form of positive bias toward socialism. This bias is linked to increased taxes, more regulation, and the implementation of social policies to protect minorities. Yet it seems that the Left has not been able to reconcile itself with a particular issue- charity. Charity is the voluntary action of donating, giving, or even gifting capital to another person without the expectation of profiting from such action. Although it is a simple concept at first, its existence implies that there are ways for the private sector to solve specific issues without the need for governmental intervention. This fact is counterproductive for some political agendas related to resolving social problems through state intervention. If we assume that people can solve problems through charity, why would we require the welfare system? The moderate progressives would say that socialism is perfectly compatible with philanthropy as long as the welfare state sufficiently covers the poor. One of the most cited case in this regard is when the government of Cuba sends doctors abroad to help other countries with natural disasters or diseases like the COVID-19 pandemic. On both of these occasions, the Cuban administration sent doctors abroad without expecting to receive anything in exchange. Even when the island is under a commercial embargo, the Cuban regime can still help alleviate other nations’ harsh circumstances. Although Cuba sends doctors abroad, this is far from “charity.” Cuba generated 11 billion dollars in revenue from the export of its medical services. Indeed, this perfectly illustrates that more than socialized philanthropy, sending doctors abroad is a business. Moreover, the conditions Cuban doctors work under are abysmal. They only receive 5 to 20 percent of the money Cuba makes from their labor. The government is profiting and exploiting its employees more than doing charity. On practical grounds, it is simply outrageous to call this philanthropy. Governments, by definition, are incapable of charity. Government’s existence implies coercion; therefore, any course of action they proceed to is policymaking, not charity. Moreover, because most of the government’s revenue comes from taxes acquired through coercion, it is easy to say that the money is charity even when the payer didn’t have an option. Charitable donations must come voluntarily from private individuals themselves. Thus, no charity can occur under a purely socialist regime. Firstly, charity throughout history has largely been provided by thee groups of people: the most affluent, associations, and churches. These three were outlawed and prohibited in the USSR and most of the communist countries of the twentieth century. According to Julia Rubin: “Communism not only outlawed private and church charities, but it also left psychological scars that hamper charities now.” Every private association and every church was strictly banned, and everyone caught in philanthropic activities was imprisoned. If private property does not exist in communism, there is no way charity could exist since the premise of charity is the voluntary donation of capital owned by individuals or groups thereof. However, in the mainstream view, social democracy or democratic socialism could be compatible with altruism; after all, the USSR was not necessarily practicing “real communism.” Consequently, “light” forms of socialism could be consistent with the free market. This is wildly inaccurate when it comes to theory.  Robert Nozick solved this distribution debate 48 years ago. According to Nozick, and the logic of his Wilt Chamberlain analogy in Anarchy, State and Utopia, if the state would like to achieve a particular pattern of the distribution of wealth or income, it would have to intervene to such a degree in society that the government would impose a dictatorship. Nozick argues that all transactions can distort the wealth pattern; thus, commerce would have to be regulated and prevented altogether. Now, Nozick was referring to for-profit transactions, where it was expected that people could benefit from the fruits of their labor. However, the same case applies to charitable exchanges, where one party gives capital away without expecting anything back. Charity, then, can and will affect the wealth pattern. So, if the Left insists that free-market transactions would not exist under socialism, it is the same for charity. Charity is now on that long list of things that would be prohibited under socialism, along with profits and free speech. In that system, where social care is purported sufficient for everyone to be secure, altruism and philanthropy would be ignored or outlawed. Or, as Murray Rothbard said, “It is easy to be conspicuously ‘compassionate’ if others are being forced to pay the cost.” This might be a reminder of how much freedom is lost with such tyrannical policies.   Carlos Martinez is a Cuban American undergraduate student attending Rockford University. He is pursuing a BS in financial economics. Currently, he holds an Associate of Arts degree in economics and data analysis. (0 COMMENTS)

Immigration critic Steven Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies, recently seemed to challenge the idea that more immigration would reduce inflation. One would think that more immigration would reduce inflation, based on the simple fact that more immigration would lead to more output. With more output, a given amount of money chases a higher amount of goods and services. Or, if you want to think, more accurately, about rates of growth, with increased immigration you get a higher growth rate of real output while immigration is increasing, and for a given rate of growth of the money supply, inflation falls. Inflation still may be positive but it falls. So how does Camarota rebut this straightforward argument? He doesn’t. You might think he argues that few of the immigrants work, but he takes pains to point out that many of them work. Indeed, that appears to be one of his main upsets. He enters more promising territory for his case when he mentions other factors that cause inflation, writing: Congressional overspending, the Federal Reserve’s low interest rates, international supply-chain disruptions and pent-up demand during COVID are all almost certainly bigger inflation drivers than wage growth. Workers, particularly less-educated ones, account for far too small a share of economic output to play much role in inflation. He could be right that these are bigger factors, although my money is on money or, more exactly, the growth of the money supply. But so what if he is right? More workers means more output and now all we’re talking about is relative magnitudes, not whether increasing immigration would reduce inflation, as his sentence above seems to admit. What’s left? He could blame the headline writer. Authors rarely get to choose their own titles for articles and nowhere in his article does Camarota say that more immigration won’t reduce inflation. So we have two choices: (1) Camarota believes that more immigration won’t reduce inflation and he’s wrong or (2) Camarota believes that more immigration will reduce inflation but only by a little and he might be right. HT2 Don Boudreaux. (0 COMMENTS)