Martin Luther King Day provides an opportunity to reflect on self-defense by individuals in persecuted minorities. Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave, published a newspaper out of Rochester, NY, named the Frederick Douglass’ Paper. In 1854, another escaped slave was caught in Boston and eventually returned to his master in Virginia under the federal Fugitive Slave Act. While he was jailed, a crowd of abolitionist intent on liberating him attacked the jail and killed a US marshal trying to repel them. (Nobody was ever condemned for that.) The Frederick Douglas’ Paper of June 9, 1854 (page 2) commented with a piece titled “The True Remedy for the Fugitive Slave Bill.” Although without a byline, it was likely written by Frederick Douglass himself. The first paragraph reads (emphasis in the original): A good revolver, a steady hand, and a determination to shoot down any man attempting to kidnap. Let every colored man make up his mind to this, and live by it, and if needs be, die by it. This will put an end to kidnapping and to slaveholding, too. We blush to our very soul when we are told that a Negro is so mean and cowardly that he prefers to live under the slavedriver’s whip—to the loss of life or liberty. Oh! that we had a little more of the manly indifference to death, which characterized the Heroes of the American Revolution. The Library of Congress advises me that that “the ‘true remedy’ theme in connection with slavery is mentioned more than 30 times in various African American newspapers, from ca. 1828-1860” (email of December 28, 2022). I was alerted to Douglass’s statement by Damon Root’s interesting article “The New York Times Is Surprised To Find Public Defenders Championing the Second Amendment” (Reason, August 1, 2022). The last two sentences of Douglass’s quote above raise what is known to economists as the problem of collective action (see Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action [Harvard University Press, 1971]). If a large number of slaves (assuming they could have owned or obtained revolvers), escaped slaves, and their supporters had shot a sufficient number of slave owners and slave catchers, they would have abolished slavery. The collective action problem is who will start the action and shoot first, for they are themseves likely be killed or punished instead of being liberated. Most people are not willing to die for a cause, even just, that is likely to only benefit others. If however Douglass had succeeded instilling in a sufficient number of individuals the “determination to shoot down any man attempting to kidnap” or to shoot any slave master, slavery would have unraveled through a simple mechanism of incentives. The way to stop persecution is to increase its cost for persecutors so that they don’t derive any net benefit from it. If that succeeds, the persecutor will back off. Individual self-defense by persecuted individuals or their supporters may not be sufficient by itself to achieve that goal, but it can certainly contribute to it. (0 COMMENTS)

When Britain voted to leave the European Union in June, 2016, there was no shortage of forecasts of economic catastrophe. In the event, the catastrophe did not materialize, and when the British economy did crash it did so at the same time as everyone’s else’s as a result of COVID-19 and government responses to it. Post-Brexit, we now have a steady stream of estimates of the ‘loss’ to the United Kingdom’s economy of leaving the European Union on the terms that it did. The latest comes from the Centre for European Reform and finds that “Brexit reduced Britain’s GDP by 5.5 per cent by the second quarter of 2022.” “These estimates are based on the ‘doppelgänger’ method,” the author notes, “in which an algorithm selects countries whose economic performance closely matches the UK’s before Brexit.” This is a striking finding with striking implications: The Brexit hit has inevitably led to tax rises, because a slower-growing economy requires higher taxation to fund public services and benefits. If Brexit had not happened, most of the tax rises that then Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced in March 2022 would not have been necessary. If the UK economy had grown in line with the doppelgänger, tax revenues would have been around £40 billion higher on an annual basis (if we apply the same tax-to-GDP ratio as in 2021-2 – 34 per cent). In his March 2022 budget, Sunak announced tax rises of £46 billion. But when we look closer at this estimate, doubts emerge over its robustness. Chart 2 in the report shows mean quarterly real GDP growth for selected geographies (the United Kingdom, the doppelgänger, the United States, 22 advanced economies, G7 minus UK, France, Germany, and Italy) for three different periods (Q1 1999 to Q4 2008, Q1 2009 to Q2 2016, and Q3 2016 to Q2 2022). If we look at the United Kingdom’s performance since Brexit – the light blue bars – we see that it has done better than Italy and Germany and slightly worse than France. Relatively speaking, this is not a catastrophe. If we look at the red bars we see that, in the period before the referendum, the United Kingdom did better than Italy and France and slightly worse than Germany: in other words, not much different. Of course, the paper does not compare the United Kingdom’s post-Brexit economic performance to post-Brexit performance of these other countries but to the post-Brexit performance of its constructed doppelgänger. We see the economic impact of Brexit, it argues, in the comparison between the two left most light blue bars. And what a gap it is. But compare the doppelgänger’s post-Brexit performance with the others. It does better than all three of Italy, Germany, and France, something the actual United Kingdom didn’t manage in either of the preceding periods (the dark blue and red bars). Not only that, but the doppelgänger also does better post-Brexit than the United States, something else the actual United Kingdom failed to manage in either of the preceding periods (the dark blue and red bars). In other words, this report is claiming that, without Brexit, the United Kingdom’s economic growth would, post-2016, have suddenly launched onto a much higher path than it had been on previously. Is this possible? Yes. Is it likely? Not very. Given the similarity of the United Kingdom’s growth record pre and post Brexit relative to other economies, the various estimates of a ‘Brexit loss’ all have to posit a counterfactual where its economy performed much better than it actually did, not only relative to its own post-Brexit performance but to its performance pre-Brexit also. Was the British economy in early 2016 really a tightly coiled spring ready to unleash its own ‘Tiger’? I’m skeptical and we should be skeptical of any estimates of a ‘Brexit loss’ which are based on such an assumption.     John Phelan is an Economist at Center of the American Experiment. (1 COMMENTS)

A group of classical liberals whose email list I’m on got into an interesting discussion recently about the role of, and need for, heroes and heroism. The best comment I saw was by Todd Zywicki, a law professor at George Mason University, who gave me permission to quote him. Here’s Todd, with a little chopping by me: Yes—[classical] liberalism can bring out those virtues to people. But, he is saying, the liberal thinkers of his time—and I would say our time—as a matter of actual practice and argument do not explain to people how one can be heroic in the liberal order. And one cannot simply assume that people will find these virtues when left to their own devices. Nor can those impulses simply be waved away as irrational, irrelevant, or whatever. I think it is interesting, for example, that one of the appeals of Ayn Rand’s novels is she makes ordinary life heroic. And I think this explains much of Jordan Peterson’s appeal—he makes the task of day-to-day living heroic. Doing your duty, bearing your burden, tending to your family and community, raising good kids, making the world around you better on a day to day basis is a moral duty. I could elaborate, but that’s not the point. Strauss’s point seems to be, “You really need to recognize this is part of human nature and you better take it seriously and figure out how to meet this impulse through the liberal order. Because if you don’t, people are going to look for it somewhere else.” How that’s done is a task for the liberal thinkers. So Strauss’s argument, as I understand it, is not that the liberal order cannot meet those demands of human nature. It is that human nature makes those demands and liberal thinkers better figure out how to meet those demands if they want the liberal order to survive. This discussion reminded me of a good point made by Charles Murray in one of his books in the 1990s whose name I’ve forgotten. Murray talked about how the welfare state makes it harder for normal average people to be heroic by helping those around them. It also reminded me of the segments on CBS’s Sunday Morning that I like best: those done by Steve Hartman. Here’s his latest, from last Sunday, that’s one of his best. I desperately wanted heroes when I was growing up. The pic above is of The Lone Ranger, one of my heroes when I was young. We didn’t have TV then, but I saw him in the movies. I think we need not only to have heroes, but also to be heroic. At least I do. (0 COMMENTS)

A commenter recently asked me about my criticism of Fed policy during 2021. During that year, I was not particularly critical of Fed policy. So is it fair for me to now suggest that Fed policy was too expansionary during 2021?  The answer is yes, but clearly that requires some explanation. When the Fed announced its new policy of flexible average inflation targeting (FAIT) back in August 2020, I saw the policy as an improvement over the previous “let bygones be bygones” approach to inflation targeting.  I still believe that to be the case.  It would have been an improvement, and indeed (as St. Louis Fed President Jim Bullard once suggested) this sort of policy would be close to NGDP level targeting. But the Fed never implemented FAIT.  Even worse, in 2021 they knew that they had no intention of implementing FAIT, at least as most people understand the term.  I mistakenly assumed that the Fed intended to keep the average inflation rate close to 2%, by offsetting near-term inflation overshoots with longer run periods of below 2% inflation.  I assumed they intended inflation to average roughly 2% during the 2020s.  But that’s not the way the Fed looked at things.  The Fed only intended to make up for inflation undershoots, not overshoots.  This asymmetric policy led to the wildly overly expansionary monetary policy of 2021-22. Can the Fed’s mistake be excused by the “flexible” part of FAIT?  No.  The Fed might argue that the flexible aspect of the policy allows them to refrain from offsetting supply side driven inflation.  But the rapid growth in NGDP (to a position well above trend) makes it clear that supply shocks were not the primary problem—the Fed allowed far too rapid growth in aggregate demand.  If there are not even willing to offset demand overshoots, then “average” inflation targeting means nothing. Economists like Bob Hetzel and Tim Congdon correctly saw that the Fed had no intention of giving up discretion, and was engaged in an overly expansionary monetary policy.  I naively assumed that they were sincere about targeting the average inflation rate. You might wonder if it is important to determine why I was wrong about Fed policy.  The point is not to allocate reputation points—I lose points there regardless of why I was wrong.  The point is to learn from mistakes and improve policy going forward.  Thus suppose the Fed had adopted the policy I favored, and then things turned out poorly.  In that case, I might want to begin advocating a different approach to monetary policy.  But that’s not what happened here.  The Fed refused to adopt average inflation targeting, and it made a serious policy error precisely because it failed to do average inflation targeting.  The events of 2021-22 make me even more firmly convinced that FAIT would be a big improvement over discretionary inflation targeting.  It’s a pity it was never tried.  (NGDP level targeting would be still better.) People often ask me whether I favor higher or lower interest rates.  I’m not in the business of guessing where interest rates should be, and prefer that rates be set by the market.  Unfortunately, the Fed has decided to use short-term interest rates as an instrument of monetary policy.  In that case, the Fed uses rate cuts as a signal of expansionary intent, and rate increases as a signal of contractionary intent.  In that environment, I might occasionally suggest a rate change when policy is obviously off course.  But I don’t have any overall view on where interest rates should be.  I’m in the business of offering advice on monetary regimes, not interest rate setting. If the Fed has a proper monetary regime in place (as I wrongly assumed they had in 2021), then you probably won’t find me criticizing the Fed’s interest rate setting.  In the case of 2021, my fundamental error was not in misjudging where interest rates should be, it was in assuming that the Fed was targeting the average inflation rate.  For that reason, “Monday morning quarterbacking” on my part is entirely appropriate.  The Fed should have done better.  Under an actual policy of flexible average inflation targeting, the big inflation overshoot of 2022 would never had occurred, as markets would have preemptively pushed up long-term interest rates in 2021. As an analogy, consider two types of errors that a ship captain might make.  First, they might set the steering wheel at a position that leads the ship to miss its target port–say New York.  Second, the captain might be secretly steering the ship toward Boston when they were supposed to be aiming for New York.  In 2021, the Fed made the latter error.  It wasn’t so much that they set rates at the wrong level to achieve 2% inflation during the 2020s, the deeper problem is that they abandoned the commitment for inflation to average 2% during the 2020s.  I’m in the business of suggesting the proper port to aim for, not second guessing how the captain should handle the steering wheel. (0 COMMENTS)

There is an ongoing battle today between conservatives who want to use government’s power to enforce morality and libertarians. The former believe that the nation’s moral decay is a product of classical liberal policies that allowed or even encouraged immorality. It is not. It is a product of a half century of expanding government policies dedicated to ameliorating pain. My father-in-law worked with patients suffering from Hansen’s Disease – leprosy. One of the terrible symptoms of the disease is that people lose their sense of feeling. We tend to think of pain as an enemy, but, as my father-in-law observed, pain is “the best friend no one wants.” Imagine putting your hand on a hot stove and not realizing it until you smell your flesh burning. We need feedback mechanisms to keep us alive and in one piece. Government can create a sort of moral leprosy by weakening or even destroying the feedback loops that make it possible for people to know when their actions are destructive or self-destructive. People learn by acting and then observing and bearing the consequences of their actions.   Private Charity Government-based welfare also helped to de-moral-ize society by shifting the locus of charitable giving and work away from local communities and toward Washington. Marvin Olasky’s, The Tragedy of American Compassion, documents the tens of thousands of lodges, charities, mutual aid societies, missions, civic associations, and fraternal organizations that existed across the country in the 19th and early 20th Centuries.  These organizations helped pull people out of poverty by addressing individual causes – ignorance, addiction, or simply bad luck.  Thanks to the power of the free market and organizations like these, the poverty rate plummeted from 80% of the population in 1800, to about 15% in the 1960s. Unfortunately, the government stepped in with its “Great Society” programs and displaced private charitable organizations.  After nearly 60 years of effort and trillions of dollars in spending, the poverty rate has dropped only a few more percentage points. The government is very good at writing checks, but while that helps to make the poor more comfortable in their poverty, it does little to address the unique issues that keep them in poverty. That takes compassion. Real compassion isn’t feeling pity for the less fortunate, it’s climbing into the foxhole with them and sharing and understanding their individual problems. Central planning proponents often admit that free markets deliver the goods but argue that governments distribute them more fairly. They point to people who, because of age or disability, are incapable of producing anything. The government must control the economy, they claim, so that it can redistribute goods to these few. But rewarding need yields more of it, adding those who will not produce to those who cannot. And taxing demonstrated ability yields less ability demonstrated. By taking from each according to his ability and giving to each according to his need, government produces more need. By contrast, under the free market, need does not pay, production does, so need declines and production grows. The choice between government control and the free market is the choice between government coercively combating growing need amid growing poverty and individuals voluntarily combatting shrinking need amid growing wealth.   Conclusion When they are allowed to work, free markets reward the “bourgeois values” of thrift, honesty, persistence, hard work, prudence, tolerance, and civility. At the same time, markets punish profligacy, dishonesty, sloth, and bigotry. The solution is not to add more layers of government control – layers that can be used and misused by the next set of politicians elected to office – but to restore freedom.   Richard Fulmer worked as a mechanical engineer and a systems analyst in industry. He is now retired and does free-lance writing. He has published some fifty articles and book reviews in free market magazines and blogs. With Robert L. Bradley Jr., Richard wrote the book, Energy: The Master Resource. (0 COMMENTS)

There are many reasons to learn economics, preferably in formal courses and preferably at an age where learning new things is easy. I count at least four. The first reason is that economics is essential to understand the social universe. Basic economics is necessary to understand how prices are determined by supply and demand, if only on black markets when regular markets are prevented from working. (My EconLog post “A Frequent Confusion and the Yo-Yo Economic Model” can be thought of as short and incomplete introduction.) There is more than that in the social universe. Without some knowledge of economics, one will have problems reading many books of political philosophy or with major political and social implications—say, philosopher Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia, an academic best-seller of the mid-1970s, or Anthony de Jasay’s The State.  It is not an acceptable exit for a reader who cannot understand such books to say that the author is wrong. The second (related) reason to learn economics is that it is otherwise impossible to think in an organized way about public policy or the fundamental issues underlying it, whatever your final opinion will be. For example, suppose that a cost-benefit analysis realized by the government shows that the cost of expropriating low-rent apartment buildings on a given urban block will be $1 million, mainly reflecting the trouble of poor renters forced to move, while the benefits will be $2 million in profits for the owners of the mall to be built there. How can we say that this is a good policy or a bad policy? Can we really compare these costs with these benefits, and if not, why not? Another example of question one cannot seriously answer without some economic reasoning is, What happens if the expected punishment for shoplifting (expected fine or jail term multiplied by the expected probability of being caught) decreases? Gary Becker, laureate of the 1992 Nobel prize in economics, contributed much to the analysis of this sort of issue. (See Becker’s Nobel lecture; see also Jason L. Riley, “San Francisco Has Become a Shoplifter’s Paradise,” Wall Street Journal, October 19, 2021.) In fact, economics, which is a method of analysis, is as useful to study “social” as “economic” issues. We can relate this to an important point made by James Buchanan, who received the 1986 Nobel prize in economics “for his development of the contractual and constitutional bases for the theory of economic and political decision-making,” as the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences summarized its decision. In his book Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative, Buchanan stressed the importance of understanding “simple principles of social interaction”: Institutionally, classical liberalism depends critically upon the workings of markets, and without either a generalized understanding of basic economics or a widespread willingness to defer to the warnings of those wo do understand, maintenance of any liberal order becomes impossible. The third reason to learn economics is that it opens a door to the realm of knowledge. Any science or theory-laden field of study opens a door to knowledge because everything is related to everything in some way. One has the choice of which door to use. However, economics is one of the best entrances as it is closely related both to social phenomena we observe daily around us, and to other important fields of social study such as philosophy, political science, history, and statistical analysis. I would also say that economics is closely related to the realm of aesthetics not only because learning is beautiful, but also because the commercial adventure of mankind has been magnificent. Economics explains how markets liberated individuals from societies based on stifling customs or coercive commands. On this, you may want to read A Theory of Economic History, a small book by John Hicks, another Nobel economist, which also provides an introduction to economic reasoning. A fourth reason why one should learn economics is that it helps earn a living better than many other fields of knowledge. Some analysts, including George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan, have argued that the main if not the only practical benefit of a college degree (at least outside narrow technical fields such as accounting or nursing) is to signal to potential employers that the new graduate is patient, disciplined if not submissive, and hard-working, not that he actually learned anything useful. But an economics graduate (at least from a good college) do learn something about the “real world,” even if he may not immediately realize it. He or she has acquired useful tools of analysis that help them think about any social (including political, narrowly “economic,” and financial) phenomenon. The economically literate person cannot easily utter just any social nonsense.  Perhaps this should count as a fifth reason to learn economics. My short EconLog post “Logical and Praxeological Impossibilities” gives some simple examples. It is true that learning economics has a cost: the time, mental energy, and other resources one spends on studying economics cannot be used to pursue other interesting or lucrative activities. This observation points to one of the first lessons of economics, a lesson that becomes more obvious after one progresses in the field. The lesson is that resources (labor, capital, land, time) and what is produced with them are scarce compared to unlimited human desires. It follows that useful or desirable things or activities have what is called an “opportunity cost.” The opportunity cost of something lies in the other opportunities one has to forego to get it or do it. Producing or consuming more of something means that less of something else will be produced or consumed. There is much more to discover. (0 COMMENTS)

The pay to state legislators varies dramatically from state to state. In one state, it’s zero and in another state it’s $100 per year. At the high end, it reaches $119,702 per year. Do we get better governance from legislatures in which the politicians are paid more? The quick answer is no. If anything, it’s the other way around. The two legislatures in which politicians are paid the most are arguably the states that are among the worst governed. And a number of the states where politicians are paid modestly or very little have some of the best governance. The National Conference of State Legislatures reports all the data here. These are the opening paragraphs of my “Does Higher Pay to Legislators Lead to Better Governance?” TaxBytes, Institute for Policy Innovation, January 11, 2023. Another excerpt: On the other end, New Mexico legislators are paid zero. Instead, they get a per diem of $202 per day. By far the lowest paid legislators, when you include per diems, is New Hampshire: Legislators’ base pay is $100 for the year and their per diem is zero. Their only monetary pay is 58.5 cents per mile for driving to and from the state capital in Concord. And what do people in New Hampshire get in return for this low pay? Let’s see. They pay no sales tax and no income tax. That sounds like a good deal to me. Read the whole thing, which is short.   (0 COMMENTS)

The CPI inflation figures announced today were not much different from market expectations, but 10-year T-bond prices rose about 1% and yields declined to below 3.5% on the news. Why was the inflation report bullish for the bond market?  I suspect it has something to do with the figures for shelter inflation, which came in at 0.8% month-over-month.  But first a bit of perspective. In July 2009, I did a post arguing that price indices should include “spot rents”, which are the rental cost of newly leased apartments.  If the index includes rents on existing contracts, then the CPI will lag well behind actual changes in the price level.  Here’s what I said in 2009, a period when house prices were falling rapidly: At this point you may be wondering how the government could be so stupid as to think house prices have risen 2.1% over the past year.  Well they may be stupid, but not THAT stupid.  They are trying to measure something called the “rental equivalent” cost of housing.  Yet by all accounts even monthly rents are falling rapidly.  So why do they show 2.1% inflation of housing prices?  I’m not sure; perhaps someone can answer these two questions: 1.  Do they factor in the effect of deals that include one or two months of free rent?  I don’t think they do.  These are much more common during a downturn, and are disguised price cuts. 2.  Do they survey all apartments, or just newly rented units?  I hope it is the latter, as rents on older leases are not true prices at all, and should definitely not be included in any price index.   They are analogous to monthly payments on a mortgage. It turns out that the CPI is biased in just the way that I feared back in 2009; it relies on the average rent under existing contracts, not just new contracts. More recently, this message seems to have filtered down to the Federal Reserve.  This is from a Bloomberg article published about three weeks ago: The cooldown in US housing should show up in official inflation data next year, according to a new index that aims to capture changes in rental markets without the usual lag.  Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland and the Bureau of Labor Statistics built a gauge that’s based only on the leases of tenants who recently moved in, and compared it with another that measures the average of rents for all tenants. Not surprisingly, the index on rents for new tenants is a leading indicator of future CPI inflation: The results, according to a paper this month, show the new-tenant index is now dropping fast, from a peak around 12%. The researchers found that their new-tenant data tends to run ahead of BLS housing measures in the consumer price index by about one year, while for the all-tenant measure the gap is about one quarter.   So why was the 0.8% rise in housing costs good news?  After all, that’s almost a 10% annual rate.  The goods news can be broken down into two components: 1. Housing now explains almost all of the core CPI inflation. 2. In the spot market, housing inflation has already slowed sharply from its peak in mid-2022.  This will show up in lower overall housing inflation later this year. The overall figure for core inflation was 0.3% in January.  Since housing is roughly 40% a third of the core CPI, the 0.8% rise in shelter prices suggests that almost all of the 0.3% core inflation in December was caused by housing.  The rest of the index barely changed. At first glance, it looks like I’m making a classic error—becoming optimistic about inflation by disregarding the fastest rising component of the CPI.  People who did this during the 1970s (and 2021) ended up being consistently wrong.  They’d say, “Yes, but if you take out the effects of X and Y, then inflation wasn’t so bad.”  That’s faulty reasoning, as an average will always be lower if you take out the components that are above average.  If there’s an underlying inflation problem, then some other component will take the lead in the next period. I’m not discounting rental inflation because it’s higher than average, I’m discounting it because it’s being measured with a long lag.  It’s the spot rents that matter when trying to figure out where housing inflation is headed going forward.   I still may end being wrong, but it won’t be because I’m making the classic mistake of discounting an unfavorable component, it will be because the rate of inflation in spot rents begins to re-accelerate.  And that will depend on two other factors (which are closely related), nominal wages and nominal GDP. Ultimately, rents are likely to follow the path of wages and NGDP.  Rents rose fast during 2022 because wages and NGDP rose fast.  To make permanent progress on rents we need to have permanently slower NGDP and nominal wage growth.  (As an aside, of course more housing construction would be good and rent control would be bad, but the key to reducing (nominal) housing inflation is controlling NGDP growth.)  To summarize, I suspect the bond market was not particularly surprised by the 0.3% core inflation figure.  Instead, I believe traders were pleasantly surprised to see that almost all of the core inflation was housing.  Since we already know from the spot market that measured housing inflation is likely to slow later in 2023, the bond market treated this information as good news.  But to make permanent progress against inflation, we still need to slow NGDP growth and nominal wage growth.  There’s still more work to be done.  PS.  Bloomberg provided this helpful graph: (0 COMMENTS)

Ideas Have Consequences  Various bloggers and article writers have done an excellent job of laying out the many mistakes of Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich, whom CBS recently devoted a segment to on “60 Minutes.” So I won’t bother to repeat their cogent criticisms. Yesterday I went to the Wall Street Journal to see a letter by my friend and economist colleague Francois Melese in which he took on Ehrlich. It’s an excellent letter. Then I read one of the other letters and felt profoundly sad for the writer, Kenneth Emde of Woodbury, Minnesota. Emde wrote: I was a college student when I read Mr. Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb.” I took it to heart and now have no grandchildren, but 50 years later the population has increased to eight billion without dire consequences. I was gullible and stupid. The picture above is of Paul Ehrlich. (0 COMMENTS)

In the previous post in this series, I described Friedman’s definition of naive realism, along with some of the problems with this worldview when applied to technocratic policymaking. But what are the consequences of naive realism? One consequence is political polarization. If all four types of technocratic knowledge can be intuited as self-evident truths, there can be no scope for reasonable disagreement. Nonetheless, disagreement undeniably persists, therefore disagreement is proof the other party is unreasonable, if not outright malicious: “If we favor what is self-evidently desirable, then our opponents necessarily favor what is self-evidently undesirable.” This conviction is… …the product not of a dispassionate investigation of the opponents’ motives, but of the naive political realist’s incomprehension of the very possibility of sincere disagreement in the case at hand. Since the naive realist cannot fathom real disagreement – given the self-evidence (to her) of the truths with which her opponents disagree – she cynically dismisses their apparent disagreement with her as “fake.” This cynicism may pass for a clear-eyed rejection of sentimentalism. But in fact, it is only as realistic as the underlying assumption: that the truth is self-evident. As mentioned in the first post in this series, by Friedman’s definition, a “citizen-technocrat” is an advocate of technocratic policies who believes that technocratic knowledge is obvious. Thus, citizen-technocrats can include politicians and policymakers as well as voters – the defining characteristic of the citizen-technocrat is their belief in the level of epistemic complexity. This assumption has a few key effects on citizen-technocrats. It creates a “a ‘bias’ for technocratic action…this bias—whether or not it is justified—would be entirely rational given the assumption of self-evidence.” This assumption also leads people to adopt what Friedman calls a “simple-society ontology.” This, too, reinforces the belief that policy disagreement and unsolved social problems can only be the result of bad faith and bad actors: First, a simple-society ontology implies that political actors of goodwill, who genuinely intend to solve social problems, will be able to do so without counterproductive consequences (which are not contemplated), such that good technocratic outcomes will follow from good intentions. Second, if social problems nonetheless persist, an explanation suggests itself: namely, political actors with bad intentions, that is, people who do not want the problems solved; political actors who are selfish, not sociotropic. Political survey data shows this line of thinking playing out: The primary basis for most respondents’ endorsement of a candidate or party was the perception that the candidate or party intended to benefit people who deserved to be helped: a good intention. And the primary basis for most respondents’ antipathy to the other candidate or party was the perception that that party or candidate intended to benefit those who did not deserve to be helped: a bad intention. Year after year, policymakers announce new initiatives and programs to tackle all kinds of social problems. Wars on drugs, crime, and terrorism, thousands upon thousands of pages of laws and regulations to fix the healthcare system, poverty alleviation, support for the homeless – if you can think of social problem, odds are the government has passed tens of thousands of pages of legislation and spent hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars trying to alleviate it. Still, these problems persist – and many of them are worse than before the initial attempts to fix them. To some, this might suggest that effectively solving such problems is something the government simply doesn’t know how to do. But to the naïve realist, the idea that government isn’t well suited to solve social problems is never considered. It’s not that the government can’t fix some problem – which must mean the government simply won’t fix the problem: Conversely, as Hibbing and Theiss-Morse show with focus-group and survey evidence, disillusionment and anger can follow from the perception that government is failing to act. The authors’ angry, disillusioned respondents did not allow that inaction might be caused by arguments about which actions will succeed or what their effects might be, let alone that such arguments might be justified. On the contrary: they seemed to agree that, as one put it, all it would take to solve the extant problems is for the two parties’ leaders to get together and say to each other, “There’s a problem. We won’t leave this room until it’s fixed.”…The respondents’ chronic dissatisfaction with elected officials was due, it would seem, to the conviction that the officials had bad intentions, not inadequate knowledge, such that they deliberately, willfully declined to solve problems they knew how to solve. This belief among citizen-technocratic voters is reinforced by the rhetoric of citizen-technocratic politicians. During a presidential nomination debate, Tim Ryan objected to Bernie Sanders that Sanders couldn’t know that Medicare for All would have the outcomes Sanders was describing. Sanders’ immensely popular response was “I do know it. I wrote the damn bill!” To Bernie Sanders, all that’s required to know desirable results will be achieved is for the relevant legislation to be written by Bernie Sanders. During the same campaign, Elizabeth Warren’s theme was to assure voters that for any given worry – health care, student loan debt, wages, trade – she had a plan for it. To the naive realist, the simple fact that Senator Warren had plans for all these issues ensured that the desired outcomes would be reached. The fact that unsatisfactory outcomes currently exist in these areas, despite all of them having been subject to immense government planning for decades, only showed that previous planners were not as well intentioned (or perhaps just not as intelligent) as Elizabeth Warren. There is no deeper lesson to be learned, in the mind of the naive realist. Friedman suggests that the combined forces of naive realism, simple-society ontology, and the bias for technocratic action also explains Donald Trump’s appeal to many voters: Trump’s disinclination to ever back down in any controversy may have demonstrated to some voters, in deed – far more effectively than Clinton could demonstrate about herself, in words – that he would not let anyone get in the way of his determination to act. His continuous attack mode may likewise have signaled a propensity for action; so, too, his disparagement of Clinton for lacking “stamina,” of Mitt Romney for having “disappeared” from the battle for the presidency at the end of the 2012 campaign, and of Jeb Bush for his “low energy.” To critical observers of Trump, his comical ignorance of public policy (and so much else) was a clear disqualification for the presidency. But citizen-technocrats who tacitly adhere to a naive technocratic worldview would have no reason to recognize that an ignorant politician might lack knowledge not only of civics trivia but of policy effects—inasmuch as they assume that such effects are self-evident to those who sit down and think about them. Hibbing and Theiss-Morse’s respondents, who made that assumption, logically concluded that the reason social problems persist is that elected officials have “the ability but not the will to take care of the nation’s problems.” The ability was, for them, the easy part, or so it seems; the hard part was the will. For such citizen-technocrats, Trump’s bullheaded willfulness alone may have signaled his qualification for the office of citizen-technocrat in chief. Why is it that what seems obvious is so frequently unreliable? Can citizen gain knowledge in a way which overcomes the problems of naive realism and makes a workable technocracy likely, or at least possible? That will be the topic of the next post.   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)