The Mercatus Center has just published an excellent new working paper by Robert Hetzel.  Here’s the abstract: In response to the pandemic, which unfurled starting in March 2020 and raised unemployment dramatically, the FOMC adopted a highly expansionary monetary policy.  The policy restored the activist policy of aggregate demand management that had characterized the 1970s.  It did so in two respects.  First, the FOMC rejected the prior Volcker-Greenspan policy of raising the funds rate preemptively to preserve price stability.  Second, through quantitative easing, it created an enormous amount of money by monetizing government debt.  In the 1970s, activist policy was destabilizing.  Reflecting the “long and variable lags” phenomenon highlighted by Milton Friedman, a temporary reduction in unemployment from monetary stimulus gave way in time to a sustained increase in inflation.  In response, the succeeding Volcker-Greenspan FOMCs rejected an activist monetary policy in favor of a neutral policy.  That policy concentrated on achieving low trend inflation and abandoned any attempt to lower unemployment by exploiting the inflation-unemployment trade-offs promised by the Phillips curve.  The success or failure of the FOMC’s activist monetary policy offers yet another opportunity to learn about what kinds of monetary policies stabilize or destabilize the economy. Hetzel has closely followed Fed policy for many decades, and has a deeper understanding of how the Fed works than almost anyone else I know.  In 2020 and 2021, Hetzel saw many warning signs in the statements made by Fed officials, which emphasized the need to run the economy hot in order to create jobs.  I initially dismissed these statements as empty rhetoric to please politicians and pundits, and instead focused on the Fed’s commitment to its new “flexible average inflation targeting” policy, which would assure an average inflation rate of 2%.  It turns out that I was wrong and Hetzel was right—the 1960s-era views expressed by Powell and other Fed officials were the real policy, and FAIT was just empty rhetoric. You might argue that lots of people saw the inflation coming, so why focus on Hetzel?  What makes Bob Hetzel so unusual is that he also correctly diagnosed the Fed’s policy errors back in 2008, a time when Fed policy was too contractionary.  Many of the people who worried about inflation in 2021 were permahawks, who were right in 2021 but totally wrong in 2008.  There are only a tiny number of people who correctly called Fed mistakes in both cases (Tim Congdon and Lars Christensen also fall into this group.)  Permahawks will be right when policy was (ex post) too easy, and permadoves will be right when policy was too tight.  Yawn. In a rational world, this record of success would lead people to take Hetzel’s views much more seriously.  I hope his paper is read by professional economists who wish to learn why they got things wrong in 2008, or in 2021.  I worry that people tend to dismiss relatively non-technical studies where the analysis is informed by a deep knowledge of monetary history. Please read the whole thing.           (0 COMMENTS)

EconTalk listeners have long known host Russ Roberts‘s fascination with Russian literature. In January, Richard Gunderman wrote an Econlib Feature Article, The Beef with Greed: Leo Tolstoy and Adam Smith, which- not-surprisingly- got Russ’s gears turning.* In this episode, Gunderman joins Russ to continue the conversation started in that piece, with a particular focus on Leo Tolstoy’s short story, Master and Man. (SPOILER ALERT: If you haven’t read the story yet, you might to read it before you continue!) The story centers on the relationship between two characters- Vasili, a wealthy businessman, and his servant, Nikita. Gunderman aptly describes how Vasili’s identity is wholly bound up in his wealth, and Roberts adds that he also revels in “keeping score” regarding how his wealth compares to others’. What does Tolstoy want us to think about Vasili? What do you think of him? Share your thoughts with us here, or use these prompts to start your own conversation offline. As always, we love to hear from you!     1- Roberts and Gunderman agree that Vasili sees himself as an exceptional person, and “operates with a sense of invincibility. Gunderman characterizes him as a zero-sum thinker. To what extent is this an apt description?   2- Gunderman argues that Tolstoy is not about showing us moral rules. So what is the moral of the story?   3- The conversation turns to Thomas Hobbes and Adam Smith.  What would each think about Vasili, according to Roberts and Gunderman? How do each philosopher’s ideas about self-interest compare with respect to Vasili?   4- Roberts tries to play a “typical” economist when he says, “People choose–whatever they do is what they prefer. And so, in a way we have no right to judge Vasili. And to do so is to be paternalistic, to impose our preference function on his. And, yet, I think the key to thinking about this in an economist’s way is to recognize the possibility of self-deception.” What right do we have to judge Vasili? How is Vasili a “master of self-deception” himself?   5- What does Gunderman mean when he says that what we (choose to) attend to is a moral act? Regarding this art of paying attention, Russ thinks there are two things going on. What are these two things, and why is the second so much harder than the first? How might “commensalism” serve as an opportunity to help us foster our ability to attend?     P.S. As a follow-up to that last question, if you make a regular practice of communal meals, we’d like to hear about them. We’d also like to hear about it if this episode prompted some communal meals. Share in the comments, or you can always reach out to us at econlib@libertyfund.org.   *Gunderman wrote a related piece, Tolstoy, Smith, and the Perils of Loneliness, at our sister site, AdamSmithWorks. (0 COMMENTS)

Someone named Shaun King has claimed that Elon Musk was raised in Apartheid by a white nationalist. The claim is at best questionable since we don’t know what Elon Musk’s father believed. In response, Reason writer Liz Wolfe writes: This is false on multiple counts. Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa, in 1971. His parents divorced when he was a child, and Musk lived with his father Errol, an engineer who amassed a large fortune, for several years. Musk moved to Canada in 1988 when he was 17. He and his father became estranged later on, though Musk said in 2019 that Errol contributed “10% of a ~$200k angel funding round” to Zip2, one of Musk’s early business ventures.* The oft–repeated claim that Elon Musk is a racist or an Apartheid supporter likely originatesfrom the [sic] Errol‘s claim that he owned a Zambian emerald mine in the 1980s. Many people have since used Errol’s claim to argue that the family must have profited from Apartheid, with some detractors alleging that this fortune was then funneled to Elon and used by him at the start of his career. So it’s not Apartheid in South Africa: it’s a completely different country. Wolfe continues: But this story doesn’t hold up. Errol, who has been embroiled in salacious scandals and whose own family members say is unreliable, claims he owned a stake in an emerald mine in Zambia in the ’80s, after the Musk parents divorced. The mine was in Zambia, not South Africa, and we have no evidence that whatever profits the mine produced actually was given to Elon in the late ’90s as angel funding. Nor do we have any evidence that Musk was fond of South Africa’s terrible segregationist policies, which all white South Africans benefited from, regardless of whether they supported them. Good reasoning, except for the last line. It ignores the economics of Apartheid. Not just black people, but also many white people, lost from Apartheid. The main white people who lost were employers, who were forcibly kept from hiring black people. One of the best entries in my Concise Encyclopedia of Economics is “Apartheid” by Thomas W. Hazlett. The relevant section for the issue at hand is Hazlett’s discussion of the “Colour Bar,” which was a milder version of Apartheid: The South African gold rush made the natural synergy between white-owned capital and abundant black labor overpowering. The gains from cooperation between eager British investors and thousands of African workers were sufficient to bridge gaping differences in language, customs, and geography. At first, however, the white capitalist could deal directly only with the few English and Afrikaner managers and foremen who shared his tongue and work habits. But the premium such workers commanded soon became an extravagance. Black workers were becoming capable of performing industrial leadership roles in far greater numbers and at far less cost. Driven by the profit motive, the substitution of black for white in skilled and semiskilled mining jobs rose high on the agenda of the mining companies. White workers feared the large supply of African labor as the low-priced competition that it was. Hence, white tradesmen and government officials, including police, regularly harassed African workers to discourage them from traveling to the mines and competing for permanent positions. Beginning in the 1890s, the Chamber of Mines, a group of employers, complained regularly of this systematic discrimination and attempted to secure better treatment for black workers. Their gesture was neither altruistic nor founded on liberal beliefs. Indeed, the mine owners often resorted to racist measures themselves. But here they had a clear economic incentive: labor costs were minimized where rules were color-blind. This self-interest was so powerful that it led the chamber to finance the first lawsuits and political campaigns against segregationist legislation. In short, white workers gained because they didn’t have to compete with black workers. But white employers lost. But notice that the Colour Bar and, later, Apartheid, made South African mining more expensive. So if mining in South Africa is more expensive, guess what? Mine owners in nearby countries would gain from not having as low-cost a competitor as otherwise. So Elon Musk’s father, who owned a mine in Zambia, might have gained from Apartheid. On the other hand, if he had owned a mine in South Africa, he would definitely have lost.       (0 COMMENTS)

One of the few bright spots in the 2022 Economic Report of the President is the section on occupational licensing. Here are two key paragraphs (from pages 152-153): Occupational licensing policies are often introduced to ensure safe, high-quality services from professionals, like dentists and electricians, whose safety and quality are difficult for consumers to ascertain themselves. These policies frequently establish minimum standards for workers’ human capital investments—such as by mandates to acquire specific credentials or to pursue continuing education. Kleiner and Soltas (2019) show that these standards induce workers who enter these occupations to invest more than they otherwise would, especially in occupation-specific forms of human capital such as vocational associate degrees and master’s degrees. However, occupational licensing can make it more difficult for workers to enter fields or move to places where their human capital would be more productive by increasing the cost of mobility in terms of fees for obtaining a license or time to complete required training or other licensing requirements. Research finds that licensing requirements decrease employment and churn within an occupation (Blair and Chung 2019; Kleiner and Soltas 2019; Kleiner and Xu 2020). On the positive side, licensing increases wages and wage growth within licensed occupations (Kleiner and Krueger 2010, 2013; Gittleman, Klee, and Kleiner 2017; Kleiner and Soltas 2019; Kleiner and Xu 2020). One analysis suggests that the magnitude of the licensing wage premium is comparable to the premium associated with union membership (Kleiner and Krueger 2010). Though licensed workers may benefit from higher wages, other similarly skilled workers who lack the resources to acquire a license may be prevented from moving into jobs where they would be more productive and better paid. There is also evidence that occupational licensing reduces interstate migration (Johnson and Kleiner 2020), making it more difficult for workers to relocate and deploy their human capital where it would be most beneficial for them. This especially affects mobile populations such as military spouses, who are 10 times more likely to have moved across State lines in the last year than their civilian counterparts and experience persistently high unemployment due to relocations (U.S. Department of the Treasury and U.S. Department of Defense 2012). Not bad. I’ll highlight and comment on a few things, in order of their appearance. Occupational licensing policies are often introduced to ensure safe, high-quality services from professionals, like dentists and electricians, whose safety and quality are difficult for consumers to ascertain themselves. There’s actually very little evidence, at least that I know of, that this was an important purpose of occupational licensing. It was an important stated rationale, but that’s different. Typically, the people lobbying for occupational licensing are the existing members of the occupation. They make the safety/quality argument, but if safe, high-quality services were the main goal, one would expect to see consumers, at least occasionally, pushing for licensing. It’s true that a given consumer does not have much incentive to do so, but organizations like Consumers Union do, if they regard this as a problem. Also, although “safety and quality are difficult for consumers to ascertain themselves,” this is true only in a narrow sense; they can ascertain quality if they rely on various certifiers, certifiers that already exist and that would be more numerous if licensing didn’t exist. Think of Underwriters Laboratories for many products, for instance, or the Physician’s Desk Reference, which guides doctors on pharmaceuticals. Kleiner and Soltas (2019) show that these standards induce workers who enter these occupations to invest more than they otherwise would, especially in occupation-specific forms of human capital such as vocational associate degrees and master’s degrees. That’s true, and it’s probably not good. The very next sentence is: However, occupational licensing can make it more difficult for workers to enter fields or move to places where their human capital would be more productive by increasing the cost of mobility in terms of fees for obtaining a license or time to complete required training or other licensing requirements. True, but there shouldn’t be a “However.” It’s the very fact that occupational licensing induces workers to invest more than they otherwise would that’s a problem. That’s why occupational licensing makes “it more difficult for workers to enter fields or move to places where their human capital would be more productive by increasing the cost of mobility in terms of fees for obtaining a license or time to complete required training or other licensing requirements.” Research finds that licensing requirements decrease employment and churn within an occupation (Blair and Chung 2019; Kleiner and Soltas 2019; Kleiner and Xu 2020). Yes. On the positive side, licensing increases wages and wage growth within licensed occupations (Kleiner and Krueger 2010, 2013; Gittleman, Klee, and Kleiner 2017; Kleiner and Soltas 2019; Kleiner and Xu 2020). Hmmm. That’s like looking at the local-government-sponsored cable monopolies in the United States before there were competing alternatives and saying, “On the positive side, regulation to limit competition increases the amount of money earned by cable companies.” The CEA shouldn’t celebrate monopoly rents. One analysis suggests that the magnitude of the licensing wage premium is comparable to the premium associated with union membership (Kleiner and Krueger 2010). I think this is their subtle way of saying, “Don’t take our previous sentence as indicating anything other than monopoly power due to government restrictions.” Though licensed workers may benefit from higher wages, other similarly skilled workers who lack the resources to acquire a license may be prevented from moving into jobs where they would be more productive and better paid. Ok. Now they really seem to be telling the reader not to regard the higher wages to licensed workers as an unmitigated benefit. There is also evidence that occupational licensing reduces interstate migration (Johnson and Kleiner 2020), making it more difficult for workers to relocate and deploy their human capital where it would be most beneficial for them. This especially affects mobile populations such as military spouses, who are 10 times more likely to have moved across State lines in the last year than their civilian counterparts and experience persistently high unemployment due to relocations (U.S. Department of the Treasury and U.S. Department of Defense 2012). Good for them for pointing this out. They could also have pointed out that in 2019, the Arizona state government “became the first state to recognize all out‐​of‐​state occupational and professional licenses.” They didn’t mention this. Is this because the legislation in Arizona that did so was passed by a Republican-majority legislature and signed by a Republican governor? One of the links in the above two quoted paragraphs from the Economic Report of the President is to Morris M. Kleiner and Evan J. Soltas, “A Welfare Analysis of Occupational Licensing in U.S. States,” October 2019. Kleiner is the guy when it comes to analysis of occupational licensing. Soltas is a staff economist at the Council of Economic Advisers, on leave from MIT where he is getting his Ph.D. in economics. I’ve been around the blogging world enough to remember that people were citing his work when he was a precocious high schooler. Here’s the abstract of the Kleiner/Soltas study: We assess the welfare consequences of occupational licensing for workers and consumers. We estimate a model of labor market equilibrium in which licensing restricts labor supply but also affects labor demand via worker quality and selection. On the margin of occupations licensed differently between U.S. states, we find that licensing raises wages and hours but reduces employment. We estimate an average welfare loss of 12 percent of occupational surplus. Workers and consumers respectively bear 70 and 30 percent of the incidence. Higher willingness to pay offsets 80 percent of higher prices for consumers, and higher wages compensate workers for 60 percent of the cost of mandated investment in occupation-specific human capital.     (0 COMMENTS)

[This was written before I read Pierre Lemieux’s recent post on this topic, which makes some related points.] There’s a famous old saying (by John Marshall?): The power to tax involves the power to destroy. Subsidies are essentially the same as taxes, when viewed from a certain angle. Not surprisingly, it’s also true that the power to subsidize is the power to destroy.Suppose you are a libertarian, and you oppose government subsidies to farmers. A new president is elected in 2024 and he announces that henceforth any farmer caught criticizing the president on social media will no longer receive government farm subsidies. How should you feel about that?Some people might think to themselves, “This new provision will make the bad farm subsidy program smaller, and hence it’s a good thing.” I would focus on the way the new policy inhibits free speech, and oppose the policy.In a recent post, David Henderson correctly pointed out that in trying to punish Disney for speech they didn’t approve of, Florida’s legislators were ending a very useful public policy. I agree. But I’d go even further. I would oppose this action even if I thought Disney’s special status was a bad policy. (And perhaps it’s not so special, given that Florida has 1844 such “special” districts.)   Even when government policies are bad, they should not be selectively dismantled if the change is being used as a bludgeon to go after speech of which they don’t approve.  If we go down this road, we’ll end up like Viktor Orban’s Hungary.   Years ago, Hayek pointed out that expanded government control over our economy threatens our liberty.  This is why policies such as replacing the public school system with education vouchers are so important.  If Florida Republicans were serious about liberty, rather than merely looking for weapons in the culture wars, they’d abolish the public school system and let parents decide what sort of education their children would have.   Unfortunately, it’s becoming increasing clear that many conservatives are no more serious about liberty than are the extremists on the left. PS.  Fortunately, Florida’s punishment of Disney is likely to be ruled unconstitutional.  However, other forms of implicit censorship are harder to police. PPS.  National Review has a good article on the broader issues involved here: On one side, there are those on the right who see conservatism as a set of clear and timeless principles that should be consistently adhered to, regardless of whether they lead to preferred short-term outcomes in every circumstance. Those on the other side of that line may be sympathetic to many of the same principles, but they believe that any principle that gets in the way of achieving their preferred outcomes should be discarded without remorse. . . .  [I]f we look at the battles on the right that in recent years have ended friendships, severed institutional relationships, and pitted long-time conservative allies passionately against each other, they all, at their core, come down to the same disagreements over the proper approach to politics. PPPS.  FWIW, I don’t think Florida’s state government should be policing the curricula of local schools and I don’t understand what this poorly written law was supposed to accomplish.  Should legislators incapable of writing a law in plain English be lecturing school teachers on how to teach? (0 COMMENTS)

  Technopopulism by Christopher J. Bickerton and Carlo Invernizzi Accetti is a very interesting book. Different than most, the two authors consider populism and technocracy as faces of the same coin, political sensibilities which share a common root. Both strains consider politics a matter of technical solutions, rather than a battlefield of values and ideas. I’ve reviewed the book for City Journal. Here’s a bit: The current debate resembles an older tradition, which claimed that ideologies have come to an end. In the mid-twentieth century, some theorists celebrated the disappearance of ideological politics with relief, as it implied the disappearance of the risk of a totalitarian involution of the West. For these thinkers, such as Raymond Aron or Daniel Bell, the end of ideology was a good thing, since it marked the retreat of fanaticism. Bell was convinced that “the tendency to convert concrete issues into ideological problems, to color them with moral fervor and high emotional charge,” would eventually end. Aron celebrated the fact that “neither Marxism-Leninism, nor fascism, nor liberalism awake the faith which moves mountains any more.” Since ideology had meant a politics concerned with perfecting human beings at gunpoint (and eradicating the imperfect ones), it’s understandable that its alleged death was met with relief. But Bickerton and Invernizzi Accetti see the end of ideology having different implications today. They reason that “politicians claiming to stand for an unmediated conception of the common good are less likely to recognize the democratic legitimacy of their opponents, compared to politicians claiming to represent a particular interpretation of it.” Polarization and reciprocal delegitimization are common traits of liberal democracies in our allegedly post-ideological times. The demise of organized systems of ideas has not eradicated fanaticism; it has simply given it new clothes. The perfectionism of old ideologies that strove to shape man in their image gave way to a quest for solutions no less ambitious—promising to solve such global problems as climate change and inequality—but focusing on power-holders rather than ideas. Bickerton and Invernizzi Accetti suggest that polarization in liberal institutions owes not to the intensity of political passions but rather to the weakening of political institutions. Technocracy and populism thrive on the exhaustion of political parties, while the authors of Technopopulism would like to revitalize parties by increasing competition within them. This should allow for parties to internalize conflicts that would otherwise burst out into society, and perhaps to attract people who would otherwise challenge them from the outside. Declining but alert establishments always seek to embrace their adversaries before they become lethal enemies. It could be argued that something similar happened in Spain, where traditional parties succeeded in surviving a populist outburst. In the Anglo-Saxon world, instead of being besieged by populists, traditional parties welcomed them. The results of such a strategy are not always uplifting, however. I recommend Technopopulism. It is a book you may find puzzling but it offers you a different, seldom heard, perspective on current affairs. (0 COMMENTS)

When the Fed was created in 1913, the US was still on the gold standard. Under that policy regime it made no sense to think in terms of ideas such as inflation targeting. In the long run, the price level under the gold standard is determined by global factors, well beyond the Fed’s control. (Although even then the Fed had some ability to control prices in the short run.) In March 1968, the US adopted a fiat money regime. At first the Fed did not know how to operate the regime, sort of like giving a sports car to a 14-year old boy. By the 1980s, they mostly figured out how to keep inflation relatively low and stable, at least on average over several years. (They still know how in 2022, but for some inexplicable reason have simply chosen not to do so.)I have a new paper in a Cato Institute book entitled Populism and the Future of the Fed, edited by James Dorn.  In this paper, I argue that the Fed’s mandate should be clarified to address new issues raised by the zero interest rate environment.  Here are a few points: 1. The Fed’s so-called “dual mandate” is actually a triple mandate, with the call for “moderate long-term interest rates” often overlooked.  We should take this mandate seriously and avoid any policy target that would lead to the ultra-low interest rates that we see in countries such as Japan, Germany and Switzerland.  That means the inflation target should be higher than zero in a world with ultra-low real interest rates (i.e., this world.) 2. Congress needs to clarify the Fed’s role in macroeconomic stabilization during periods of zero interest rates.  Is a large balance sheet appropriate?  Should the Fed do whatever it takes to stimulate the economy at zero rates, or should they defer to fiscal policy?  Which assets should the Fed be allowed to buy?  These issues never came up during 1968-2008, as no one envisioned a situation where the Fed would have to do QE to achieve its inflation target. 3.  The zero rate environment also makes the argument for level targeting much stronger than before.  NGDP level targeting would be great, but even flexible average inflation targeting (which is similar to NGDPLT) would be fine.  It’s a pity that the Fed recently abandoned FAIT. I offer several recommendations: 1. Congress could tell the Fed to confine its asset purchases to Treasuries when interest rates are positive, but allow the Fed to buy as many assets as necessary to achieve a stable monetary policy when rates are stuck at zero. 2.  Congress could explicitly allow the Fed to pay negative IOR if necessary, although the policy goal should always be positive interest rates.  Any use of negative IOR should be directed at raising longer-term nominal market interest rates. 3.  The Fed should focus on stabilizing inflation and employment, and not adopt additional goals in areas such as financial market stability, inequality, and the environment.  As Carola Binder and Christina Skinner recently explained, mission creep has become a big problem at the Fed.     (0 COMMENTS)

The 2022 Economic Report of the President is finally out. It was released on April 14, the latest ever. Here’s an interesting passage from page 42 of the ERP: Official estimates for the year 2021 will not be released until late 2022, but in 2020, the poverty rate fell to 9.6 percent from 11.8 percent in 2019, according to the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which accounts for the resources that many low-income households receive from the government (Fox and Burns 2021). Declines in poverty were even larger for particular racial and ethnic groups, with the supplemental poverty rate among Black and Hispanic Americans falling by 3.7 and 4.9 percentage points, respectively (figure 1-8). Accompanying it is the table at the top of this post. The paragraph quoted above is accurate. But notice what they don’t say. They don’t talk about the huge drop in black and Hispanic poverty from 2017 on. I think part of the reason is the 2017 tax cut. But whether you agree with me or not about the cause, the point is that they focus only on the part that they can arguably attribute, at least in part, to the huge federal subsidies in 2020. (0 COMMENTS)

Read Part 1 and Part 2. Discussions of the modern environmentalist movement typically begin with Rachel Carson’s (1907-1964) indictment of synthetic pesticides in her best-selling book Silent Spring (1962), Garrett Hardin’s (1915-2003) essay The Tragedy of the Commons on the unavoidable depletion of resources available to everyone and the pollution of freely accessible environmental sinks (1968), Paul Ehrlich’s (1932 -) neo-Malthusian The Population Bomb (1968) and the Club of Rome’s sponsored Limits to Growth report that predicted an impending shortage of critical resources (1972). Left out of most accounts, however, is that these authors are more remarkable for their popular success than their originality. For instance, much of Rachel Carson’s research for Silent Spring was based in part on the previous work and long-standing connections of prominent organic food activists. As noted by several commentators, Ehrlich’s Population Bomb is best understood as “climaxing and in a sense terminating the debate of the 1950s and 1960s” for “throughout the sixties, it appears that everybody was concerned about overpopulation.” (Actually, The Population Bomb sales only truly detonated after Ehrlich appeared on the Tonight Show in 1970.) Hardin revived the overexploited commons metaphor from political economist William Forster Lloyd (1794–1852) to illustrate, as the Malthusian Lloyd had done over a century and a half earlier, the necessity of population control. And the team hired by the Club of Rome echoed countless pessimistic reports published since at least William Stanley Jevons’ (1835-1882) The Coal Question; An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal Mines (1865) Another fact not widely known outside of specialist circles is that much of the infrastructure created to promote (neo)Malthusianism in the post-World War II era was built upon a dubious legacy. As economist Jacqueline Kasun (1924-2009) and many others have documented, eugenicists, whose movement had been discredited by Nazism, regrouped, “renaming their organizations, forming new ones, and, above all, burrowing into the councils of power.” By the early 1960s their movement had re-emerged in various organizations and campaigns devoted to checking the population explosion. Some key figures in this transition include the sociologist and demographer Kingsley Davis (1908-1997), a man who, like one time vice-president of the American Eugenics Society Garrett Hardin, fathered several children while advocating limitations on childbearing worldwide. Davis commented in 1945 that “in the long-run, Earth’s population has been like a long, thin powder fuse that burns slowly and haltingly until it finally reaches the charge and explodes.” In their 1947 book Human Breeding and Survival: Population Roads to Peace or War, sociologist Elmer Pendell (1894-1992) and Director of the American Eugenics Society Guy Irving Burch (1899-1951) argued that the land was already full “while our population is large and rapidly growing.” By 1951 one could see “forming for the American people, a future marked by conditions like those which prevailed in the times of scarcity and want which Europe used to know so well in past centuries and under which it now suffers.” As their title implied, overpopulation would again result in war. Peace, on the other hand, would only be secured through mandatory and systematic population reduction policies. Post-war neo-Malthusianism really took off with the publication of two books in 1948. The first was Road to Survival by ornithologist William Vogt (1902-1968), a book that remained the biggest environmentalist best-seller of all time until the publication of Silent Spring. Vogt argued that humans had behaved worse than parasites whose destructiveness “is limited by the absence of intelligence,” as they had used their brains to “tear down” nature and compromised their very survival in order to enrich themselves. He deemed “drastic measures… inescapable” in light of worldwide environmental destruction. “Above all else,” humans needed to reorganize their thinking, especially “all thought of living unto ourselves” for, in a “direct, physical sense,” humanity forms “an earth-company, and the lot of the Indiana farmer can no longer be isolated from that of the Bantu.” As he saw it, an “eroding hillside in Mexico or Yugoslavia affects the living standard and probability of survival of the American people.” Neither past beliefs in progress nor admonitions to be fruitful and multiply could provide useful guidance for the postwar era for such ideas, while “magnificent in their days,” had now become “millstones about [human] necks” and would most certainly turn out to be “idiotic in an overpeopled, atomic age, with much of the world a shamble.” Agricultural mechanization had been “of dubious value to the land, as it is more purely extractive than older methods,” had brought lesser quality land under cultivation, was too dependent on rapidly dwindling petroleum reserves and triggered a drift away from rural to urban areas, thereby reducing “the effectiveness of the self-contained rural population as an economic shock absorber” during future recessions. Vogt had no qualms about devising and implementing coercive policies such as linking foreign aid to population reduction provisions. As he saw things, “irresponsible breeding” made improvements of the conditions of the Greeks, the Italians, the Indians and the Chinese “difficult, if not impossible.” He predicted imminent petroleum shortages and famines in the next three decades in countries such Great Britain, Japan and Germany. He also considered public health measures unadvisable and even argued that the “flank attack on the tsetse fly with DDT or some other insecticide” carried out by “ecologically ignorant sanitarians, entomologists, and medical men” was going to make things worse because there was no “kindness in keeping people from dying of malaria so that they could die more slowly of starvation.” In the end, the road to survival could only be built on two foundations:  1) that renewable resources be used to produce as much wealth as possible on a sustained-yield basis; 2) that demand be adjusted to ‘natural’ supply, either by accepting less per capita (lowering living standards) or reducing population. The other 1948 best-selling eco-catastrophist book was Henry Fairfield Osborn Jr’s (1887-1969) Our Plundered Planet in which imminent environmental collapse was considered “eventually [more] deadly” than the Second World War, for “man’s destructiveness has turned not only upon himself but upon his own good earth – the wellspring of life.” In this context, man’s “avoidance of the day of atonement that is drawing nearer as each year passes” implied that he had to quickly learn “to work with nature in understanding rather than in conflict.” Failure to change would not only “point to widespread misery such as human beings have not yet experienced,” it would also, in the end, threaten “even man’s very survival.” Humanity had “now arrived at the day when the books should be balanced.” Osborn cautioned that the “miraculous succession of modern inventions” made it difficult to conceive “that the ingenuity of man will not be able to solve the final riddle – that of gaining a subsistence from the earth.” Yet the “grand and ultimate illusion” was that “man could provide a substitute for the elemental workings of nature.” For instance, “technologists may outdo themselves in the creation of artificial substitutes for natural subsistence,” but chemical fertilizers could never be thought of as “substitutes for the natural processes that account for the fertility of the earth” because, in the long run, “life cannot be supported… by artificial processes.” Both Vogt’s and Osborn’s books became mandatory readings in several institutions of higher education where they shaped the thinking of a whole generation, including Paul Ehrlich and Al Gore. Their influence was perhaps best summed up in 1977 by progressive journalist Allan Chase who lamented that every “argument, every concept, every recommendation” made by Vogt became “integral to the conventional wisdom of the post-Hiroshima generation of educated Americans.” As he put it: The postwar population explosion hysteria initiated by Guy Irving Burch and Elmer Pendell…, injected by Burch and Vogt into the body of Fairfield Osborn’s benignly intentioned books on natural conservation, and carried to full intellectual fruition by [William and Paul Paddock’s 1967 book Famine 1975], Ehrlich and Hardin, succeeded far beyond the wildest hopes of the oldtime eugenicists who started it all. Out of it came not only mass movements, such as Zero Population Growth, Inc., with chapters of active members in many American cities, but also new causes for older conservationist societies, such as the venerable Sierra Club. Another influential individual at the time was industrialist Hugh Everett Moore (1887–1972), who, profoundly influenced by Vogt’s book, wrote, published (over one and a half million copies) and publicized a short pamphlet titled The Population Bomb in 1954 whose title Ehrlich’s publisher eventually borrowed with permission. Pierre Desrochers is Associate Professor of Geography, University of Toronto Mississauga. (0 COMMENTS)

Josh Hammer, speaking at the November 2021 National Conservatism Conference, said “Every important political issue in the year 2021 is a ‘cultural’ issue. ‘Fusionism’ and libertarianism are impotent, in light of this reality. Only national conservatism will suffice.” Hammer is hardly an isolated voice. Natcons generally are reacting to what they see as the failure of “fusionism,” the always fraught alliance between libertarians and conservatives.  Many have written about fusionism, but my own go-to source is Stephanie Slade, of Reason, who wrote this OLL piece and also this article. Jonathan Adler had this piece on fusionism as federalism. One definition of fusion is that  American-style conservatism has a dual mandate to preserve both liberty and virtue. Trading off between them is an impoverishment of the ideals of the American founding and, indeed, a rejection of the ideals of Western civilization itself. On the other hand, if one must choose, virtue is the more essential value. That kind of “why not both?” priority is a recipe for tension, at best. Conservatives are more likely to hold to some notion of virtue, based on cultural tradition, the application of right reason, or revelation of the sacred, and if virtue requires coercion so be it. Libertarians are more likely to hold to some notion of virtue as being defined by the individual and for the individual, so that values start with my own beliefs, and if we disagree that difference can never be a basis for coercion or force. The Frank Meyer synthesis in fusionism was the claim that the two notions of virtue and liberty cannot be separated. This is hardly a new idea; in The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu clearly had the same idea: It is true that, in democracies, the people seem to act as they please; but political liberty does not consist in an unlimited freedom. In governments, that is, in societies directed by laws, liberty can consist only in the power of doing what we ought to will, and in not being constrained to do what we ought not to will. (Book 11, Chapter 3) The problem with any view of America other than national conservatism, according to natcons, is that fusionists would say that all those value judgments that should properly animate the nation are consigned to the private sphere, left to the individual and his (or her) conscience. I don’t always use the “or her” addition, but since Hammer actually calls fusionism “effete, limp, and unmasculine,” it seems appropriate. Hammer is clear about what must be accomplished: the goal is to fight, and win, the culture war, using all possible means of gaining and controlling political power. The only way for the American right to [win] is to prudentially wield that power in the service of pursuing our ideal of the substantive good, and to reward friends of our just regime and punish enemies of our just regime within the confines of the rule of law…[which will] necessarily entail the institutional solidification of the political sovereigns equipped to achieve them, the bolstering of the bedrock social unit, the family, and the defeat of cultural wokeism and restoration of cultural sanity by partial means of the return of overt public religiosity. This made me think of one of the key conflicts in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. (To be fair, everything else also makes me think of Tolkien, so it’s not that surprising). When Frodo has run away from the others in the Fellowship, Boromir comes up to Amon Hen, the “Seat of Seeing,” to talk about power. Frodo believes (with Lord Acton) that the absolute power of the Ring will corrupt the person who wields it; Boromir desires the Ring, but genuinely believes that he can use that power for good. “The world is changing… [You say] Minas Tirith will fall, if the Ring lasts. But why? Certainly, if the Ring were with the Enemy. But why, if it were with us?” “Were you not at the Council?” answered Frodo. “Because we cannot use it, and what is done with it turns to evil.” Boromir got up and walked about impatiently. “These elves and half-elves and wizards, they would come to grief perhaps. Yet often I doubt if they are wise and not merely timid. But each to his own kind. True-hearted Men, they will not be corrupted. We of Minas Tirith have been staunch through long years of trial. We do not desire the power of wizard-lords, only strength to defend ourselves, strength in a just cause. And behold! in our need chance brings to light the Ring of Power. It is a gift, I say; a gift to the foes of Mordor. It is mad not to use it, to use the power of the Enemy against him. The fearless, the ruthless, these alone will achieve victory. What could not a warrior do in this hour, a great leader? The Ring would give me power of Command. How I would drive the hosts of Mordor, and all men would flock to my banner!” The “elves and wizards” are those limp, unmasculine libertarian fusionists, folks. All we need to do is hand over the ring of power to the natcons, finally admitting that the strictures of the Constitution enable our enemies but fetter our own actions, we can win. Once the real conservatives are allowed retake our birthright, by wielding unlimited extra-constitutional power, but for good, all men will flock to their banner. (0 COMMENTS)