… even if refraining from destroying helps someone you disagree with. Currently, Walt Disney Corporation has a special status in Florida that allows it to avoid many regulations and some taxes and fees. Because of its special status, the Reedy Creek Improvement District, which is a 38-square-mile plot of land that includes Walt Disney World has, according to the April 16-17, 2022 Wall Street Journal, “been exempt from many state and local environmental rules, building codes, and taxes.” Disney uses this freedom to set its own rules. Disney also provides fire protection, utilities, and more than 100 miles of roads. Oh, the horror! No one that I have found addressing the issue claims that Disney uses this freedom badly by, say, polluting the air and water more than corporations in other Florida counties do. Indeed, if we look at how private owners manage their own private property, we might conclude that Disney runs thing better than other Florida corporations, hamstrung by government rules, do. Care to bet which roads are better: roads in the Reedy Creek District or roads in surrounding counties? I’ll take the bet. The explicit argument that Florida Republican legislators and Florida governor Ron DeSantis make is that Disney receives special treatment. They’re right. It does. But what if that special treatment works to produce good results? Many Republicans have favored deregulation on both ideological and  pragmatic grounds. But when a corporation comes along and its executives say things that these Republicans don’t like, suddenly the Republican commitment to deregulation or, at least, lighter regulation, vanishes. We often hear Republicans and conservatives talk about what “snowflakes” people on the left are when people criticize them. Well, Florida Republicans have discovered their inner snowflake. Last month, DeSantis stated, “As a matter of first principle, I don’t support special privileges in law, just because a company is powerful.” Fair enough. But then why did DeSantis suddenly discover this “first principle” only after Disney came out strongly against one of his favored pieces of legislation? And of course, there are two ways to get rid of special privileges. The way the Florida Republicans don’t seem to have considered is to make them less special by giving people in other counties the same flexibility. Last year I had great hope for Ron DeSantis. I now have less. Note: It shouldn’t have to be said, but I’ll say it anyway. My view has nothing to do with Disney’s opposition to a particular bill. I favor this bill and I think Disney’s chief executive Bob Chapek has been cowardly in letting himself be influenced by some Disney employees. In my view, his initial decision to stay out of it was the right decision.   (0 COMMENTS)

Read Part 1 here. Writing 200 years ago, anarchist William Godwin (1756-1836) observed that, before the publication of Thomas Robert Malthus’ (1766-1834) pessimistic Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798, most people believed that an increase in population would deliver better days. He saw “something exhilarating and cheerful” in this earlier spirit when humanity believed it could summon “the unlimited power we possess to remedy our evils, and better our condition.” Humans, Godwin observed, felt they “belonged to a world worth living in.” Malthus, on the other hand, saw little but death and ruin in any attempt to escape natural limits. Food supplies, increasing in a linear manner, would not keep up with the unchecked, exponential growth of human population. After an initial increase, every seemingly prosperous human population would hit the ecological limit of the land and crash. What is less appreciated today, however, is that Malthus became slightly less pessimistic in the second and later editions of his essay as the 1801 census and other data made his original position questionable. Indeed, most political economists had turned against him by the 1830s as did much of the general public after the 1851 Great Exhibition had shown them the wonders of the Industrial Age. As summed up in the November 18 1854 issue of The Economist: “Nobody, except a few mere writers, now troubles himself about Malthus on population… [but his] error may yet indeed linger in the universities, the appropriate depositories for what is obsolete.” As things turned out, Malthusian and other green ideas were indeed kept alive by academics, public intellectuals, and activists. To give but a few illustrations, the birth control activist Joseph Symes wrote in 1886 in the pages of The Malthusian magazine that, “no matter how large the country, in the absence of deliberate efforts to the contrary the land will be over-stocked with people,” the food supply “too scanty” and “even standing room will soon be wanting.” What was true of any country was “equally true of the world at large, the raft to which we cling in the boundless ocean of space.” Marxist theorist Karl Kautsky (1854-1938) echoed another type of fear in 1899 when he argued that American agriculture was unsustainable because it was “based on robbing the soil which it sooner or later exhausts.” In an 1902 piece titled “Windmills Must Be the Future Source of Power,” William Thomson (1824-1907), better remembered as Lord Kelvin, commented that to “predict that the world’s industrial progress will one day be halted and then rolled back in primitive methods is not a very daring prophecy when the conditions are studied closely,” by which he meant that  the “world’s supply of coal will have been exhausted.” Ten years later, the eugenicist Edward Isaacson argued that “the time must come when the countries which now export food will be filled up to the point where they will need all they produce for themselves, and can no longer supply the over-populated countries at any price.” Although emigration had acted as a safety valve in the past, this could only be done “so long as there is a place for it; but what then?” In 1923 the distinguished American plant geneticist and eugenicist, Edward Murray East (1879-1938), opined in his influential Mankind at the Crossroads that the “facts of population growth and the facts of agricultural economics point… to the definite conclusion that the world confronts the fulfillment of the Malthusian prediction here and now.” Humans stood at “the parting of the ways, with the choice of controlling [their] own destiny or of being tossed about until the end of time by the blind forces of the environment in which” they found themselves. There was no comfort in looking at past failed predictions and happy developments, he argued, as the “present age is totally unlike any previous age” with inventions like the telephone, the telegraph, the steamboat, the locomotive and the motor-car. Thanks to such advances, he wrote, “the world as a whole is more of a single entity than were some of the smaller kingdoms of Europe in the fifteenth century” and “the pros and cons of fifty years ago are as obsolete as the spinning-wheel.” Collapse had only been averted by the opening of new lands to modern agricultural production technologies. In short order though, agricultural production wouldn’t keep up and “[f]ood exportation from the younger countries will sink rapidly, as it did in the United States during the decades before the [First World] war, so rapidly that overpopulated countries will have the greatest difficulty in adjusting themselves to the change.” He also speculated on the state of the world at the end of the twentieth century if population and economic growth remained the order of the day. Describing the result as “not a pretty picture,” he pointed to China and India as an accurate reflection of “the world of to-morrow when the world as a whole reaches the same population status.” As he imagined things, in the late twentieth century: [f]ood exportation had ceased some thirty years before, except for the exchange of specialties; all temperate regions had then reached the era of decreasing returns in agriculture. The tropics are being populated as fast as their submission to the hand of man makes it possible. Gradual reduction in population increase has occurred, due to the intensity of the struggle; yet there are 3,000 million people in the world. Migration has ceased; the bars have been put up in every country. Those nations where there is still a fair degree of comfort wish to retain it as long as possible. Food is scarce and costly. Man works from sun to sun. When crops are good there is unrest but no rest, there is privation and hardship; when crops are bad there is mass starvation such as China and Russia had experienced long before. Agricultural efficiency has risen 50 per cent during the past half-century through the pressure of stern necessity, yet the food resources of each individual are smaller than ever before. Where war occurs, it is war of extermination, for only by extermination can the conquerors profit; where peace remains it is under the shadow of a struggle as grim as war. In an address given the following year, another Harvard eugenicist and Dean of the Graduate School of Education Henry Wyman Holmes (1880-1960), suggested it was the educator’s duty to “favor every wise measure for the conscious control of population” because “[s]tudents of population and the means of subsistence do not hesitate to tell us that the problem is becoming continuously more acute.” Achieving his educational and eugenicist ideal was otherwise impossible “in a society that has not learned to control its own numbers in view of the means available for maintaining its chosen standards of living.” The New York Times Moscow reporter Walter Duranty (1884-1957), a man now mostly remembered for parroting Soviet propaganda and for denying the Holodomor (the Terror Famine that killed millions of Ukrainians in the early 1930s) as it was happening, perhaps best summed up the perspective of many generation of elitist environmentalists when he wrote in the 1930s that “[p]eople upon the worlds, are like maggots upon an apple. All forms of life bred upon the worlds are in the nature of parasites.” By and large, however, environmentalism remained an elite concern until the end of the Second World War. From then on though, a string of best-selling books and pamphlets would pave the way to the first Earth Day in 1970. This will be the subject of our next column. Pierre Desrochers, is Associate Professor of Geography, University of Toronto Mississauga. (0 COMMENTS)

Readers of this blog know that I’ve been warning about the dangers of nationalists such as Vladimir Putin. Recent events have some disturbing parallels: Recall this history: September 1938:  Germany demands German speaking areas of Czechoslovakia March 1939:  Germany takes all of Czechoslovakia September 1939:  Germany invades Poland And recent events: February 2014:  Russia demands Russian speaking areas of Ukraine March 2022:  Russia invades all of Ukraine April 2022:  Russia announces its intention to invade Moldova People who suggest that, “If we just give Putin what he wants then we can have peace”, might wish to ponder the lessons of 1938.  Putin won’t stop until he’s been stopped. To be sure, Putin is not exactly like Hitler, who was a unique figure in world history.  There are many important differences between the two situations.  But one thing that does not change is that militaristic nationalistic fascists are a unique threat to world peace.  There are other threats out there, but WWIII is likely to begin in the “bloodlands” of Eastern Europe. PS.  I strongly recommend Tyler Cowen’s excellent Bloomberg piece on the nuclear threat. (0 COMMENTS)

The Origin [The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State by Karl Marx] is like Yuval Noah Harari’s blockbuster Sapiens (2014) but written by a 19th-century socialist: a sweeping take on the dawn of property, patriarchy, monogamy and materialism. Like many of its contemporaries, it arranged societies on an evolutionary ladder from savagery to barbarism to civilisation. Although wrong in most ways, The Origin was described by a recent historian as ‘among the more important and politically applicable texts in the Marxist canon’, shaping everything from feminist ideology to the divorce policies of Maoist China. Of the text’s legacies, the most popular is primitive communism. The idea goes like this. Once upon a time, private property was unknown. Food went to those in need. Everyone was cared for. Then agriculture arose and, with it, ownership over land, labour and wild resources. The organic community splintered under the weight of competition. The story predates Marx and Engels. The patron saint of capitalism, Adam Smith, proposed something similar, as did the 19th-century American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan. Even ancient Buddhist texts described a pre-state society free of property. But The Origin is the idea’s most important codification. It argued for primitive communism, circulated it widely, and welded it to Marxist principles. This is from Manvir Singh, “Primitive communism,” Aeon, April 19, 2022. The problem is, according to Singh, that primitive communism was largely wrong: Compared with the Aché, many mobile, band-living foragers lay closer to the private end of the property continuum. Agta hunters in the Philippines set aside meat to trade with farmers. Meat brought in by a solitary Efe hunter in Central Africa was ‘entirely his to allocate’. And among the Sirionó, an Amazonian people who speak a language closely related to the Aché, people could do little about food-hoarding ‘except to go out and look for their own’. Aché sharing might embody primitive communism. Yet, [Kim] Hill admits, ‘the Aché are probably the extreme case.’ Singh concludes: More important than its simplicity and narrative resonance, however, is primitive communism’s political expediency. For anyone hoping to critique existing institutions, primitive communism conveniently casts modern society as a perversion of a more prosocial human nature. Yet this storytelling is counterproductive. By drawing a contrast between an angelic past and our greedy present, primitive communism blinds us to the true determinants of trust, freedom and equity. If we want to build better societies, the way forward is neither to live as hunter-gatherers nor to bang the drum of a make-believe state of nature. Rather, it is to work with humans as they are, warts and all. HT2 to the excellent Cyril Morong, who also writes that the above article reminded him of the following passage about the Kwakiutl from Ruth Benedict’s book Patterns of Culture: The tribes of the North-West Coast had great possessions, and these possessions were strictly owned. They were property in the sense of heirlooms, but heirlooms, with them, were the very basis of society. There were two classes of possessions. The land and sea were owned by a group of relatives in common and passed down to all its members. There were no cultivated fields, but the relationship group owned hunting territories, and even wild-berrying and wild-root territories, and no one could trespass upon the property of the family. The family owned fishing territories just as strictly. A local group often had to go great distances to those strips of the shore where they could dig clams, and the shore near their village might be owned by another lineage. These grounds had been held as property so long that the village-sites had changed, but not the ownership of the clam-beds. Not only the shore, but even deep-sea areas were strict property. For halibut fishing the area belonging to a given family was bounded by sighting along double landmarks. The rivers, also, were divided up into owned sections for the candlefish hauls in the spring, and families came from great distances to fish their own section of the river.   (0 COMMENTS)

A California legislature idea would force large companies with more than 500 employees to reduce the work week to 32 hours or four days (before overtime) without a pay reduction (“California Considers the Four-Day Workweek,” Wall Street Journal, April 15, 2022). This is a bad idea from any viewpoint, except if the goal is to reduce the number of large corporations operating in California. The basic economic problem is that if people in California produce less, they cannot consume more. The only way some Californians can produce less and consume as much is by consuming their capital (savings) or by forcing others (shareholders or taxpayers), in California or elsewhere, to subsidize them. One standard objection is that employees who work less actually produce more. If that is true, we can count count on greedy corporations to identify those employees. And the greedier the corporations, the more incentives they have to do so. There is no reason to believe that politicians and bureaucrats can do better in these entrepreneurial calculations. The greedier the politicians and the bureaucrats (greedier for power and perks), the less it will work. It is possible that greedy corporations have not yet discovered how to obtain from some employees the same productivity for less work and the same salary, thereby making those employees happier at a zero cost. We cannot object to firms and their consultants exploring such paths. But is another thing for politicians and bureaucrats to force it on all big-bad corporations. The proposed scheme is equivalent to a tax on labor for large corporations. As a consequence, they would hire fewer people or pay them few hours (than they would otherwise do). A firm does not need a predetermined amount of labor known to some government bureaucrat or politician. The firm will hire labor up to the point where the productivity of new hires (or further hours) is above their market salaries. Higher salaries decrease labor productivity and the firm’s demand for labor. An indication (not a proof) is that, after two decades of mandated 35-hour workweeks for most employees in all firms (but not in managerial positions), France still shows an employment rate double that in the USA. There is no reason for allowing the state to discriminate against large corporations and their employees. More generally, there is no reason why the state should tax or subsidize either work or leisure in a society of free individuals. Everyone makes his own decision of where to work and when to play. Production is not a government fairy tale. (0 COMMENTS)

I still love flying, although the mask rule has substantially reduced the love to “like.” No, this isn’t about masks. This is about something I thought of after reading Bryan Caplan’s excellent post titled “The Madness of Air Travel Regulation.” I had a wonderful experience about 10 years ago. I was leaving Indianapolis one early morning to fly to Detroit to visit a friend. Because I had flown United from Monterey to Indy, and United didn’t fly direct to Detroit, I flew from Indy to Chicago ORD and from ORD to Detroit. I was sitting in the Indy airport early that morning when it was announced that those of us who wanted to could get to Chicago an hour early by taking a plane that was deadheading to Chicago. There would be no drinks served but we could sit wherever we wanted. Six of us took the offer. As we were coming into ORD, I notice that the 2 flight attendants were talking to each other and they didn’t bother to announce anything about seat belts, tray tables, or electronics. Nevertheless, I did what I knew they wanted me to do and my impression was that the other 5 passengers did too. When getting off the plane, I said to one of the flight attendants, “Thank you so much for treating us like responsible adults. That’s the first time that’s happened in my adult lifetime.” Her jaw dropped. “Oh, my God,” she said, “we totally forgot. Please don’t tell anyone.” “I won’t,” I said. Well, I just did but because I don’t remember the year or month I don’t fear too much that it will bite or her colleague in the behind. Being treated like an adult was glorious. P.S. A funny memory about seat belt announcements from spunky Morris Air. (1 COMMENTS)

In July 1933, FDR implemented the National Industrial Recovery Act by ordering firms to cut weekly hours from 48 to 40, while keeping nominal wages unchanged.  This effectively boosted nominal hourly wages by roughly 20%, almost overnight. The stock market crashed on the announcement. Between March and July of 1933, industrial production had soared by 57% under the influence of FDR’s dollar devaluation program.  After July 1933, industrial production started declining due to the high wage costs imposed by the NIRA.  When the program was repealed in May 1935, industrial production was actually lower than in July 1933.  Immediately after the NIRA was repealed, industrial production began rising extremely rapidly.  You don’t get more clearcut policy experiments. But many California legislators seem unaware of the NIRA’s history.  Alex Tabarrok directed me to this WSJ article: A bill moving through the Legislature would shorten California’s normal workweek to 32 hours from 40 for companies with more than 500 employees. Workers who put in more than 32 hours in a week would have to be paid time-and-a-half. And get this: Employers would be prohibited from reducing workers’ current pay rate, so they would be paid the same for working 20% less. That’s very similar to the failed NIRA policy of 1933. (0 COMMENTS)

For over half a century, Earth Day has brought about strident warnings about the dire consequences of overpopulation and overconsumption that ranged from the fear of running out of valuable resources to the inability of nature to absorb our polluting emissions. In more recent times though, a few defenders of economic growth have used this opportunity to point out the abysmal predictive record of environmental activists in the last two generations and the undeniable progress, be it in terms of improved human health and greater resource abundance to cleaner air and water and a greener planet, that has been accomplished since then. Humanity’s achievements are even more remarkable in light of how many more of us there are today and how much wealthier we are than our ancestors. Suffice it to say that 70,000 years ago Homo sapiens’ numbers were in the thousands. This figure grew to about 4 million individuals at the dawn of agriculture 10,000 years ago. Mainstream estimates now suggest there might have been as few as 73 million people 4,000 years ago, 230 million individuals 2,000 years ago and 500 million individuals 500 years ago. Humanity first broke the billion mark two centuries ago. There are now nearly eight billion of us, the majority of whom live in urban areas. Needless to say, in the last two centuries real income in many industrializing countries increased by a factor of 10, 30, or 100 while poor people in developed economies now live better than 18th-century European monarchs. One thing that didn’t change much over this time period, however, is the conflict between  prophets of environmental doom, including human-induced catastrophic climate change, and their opponents. As resource economists Harold J. Barnett and Chandler Morse wrote six decades ago, “Man’s relationship to the natural environment, and nature’s influence upon the course and quality of human life, are among the oldest topics of speculation of which we are aware. Myth, folktale, and fable; custom, institution, and law; philosophy, science and technology – all, as far back as records extend, attest to an abiding interest in these concerns.” What follows is a short sampling of ancient “green” ideas that are still very much us today. Population growth, deforestation and soil erosion form the main backdrops of the oldest known written story, The Epic of Gilgamesh. In another ancient Mesopotamian epic, the Atrahasis, the gods deem the Earth too crowded and unleash plagues, famine, droughts and a gigantic flood to address the problem. Confucius (551-479 B.C.E.) and some of his followers argued that excessive population growth may reduce output per worker, lower standards of living and create strife. Plato (427-347 B.C.E) warned that “exceed[ing] the limit of necessity” and the “unlimited accumulation of wealth” would trigger expansionary wars, especially in light of the populace’s fondness for meat that would create struggles over pastureland. His solution was a vegetarian diet. He also lamented that Athens’ backcountry, whose hills had once been “covered with soil,” the plains “full of rich earth,” and the mountains displaying an “abundance of wood,” had been turned, after years of abuse, into a landscape that could “only afford sustenance to bees,” because all the “richer and softer parts of the soil [had] fallen away” and only the “mere skeleton of the land” was then left. Writing at the turn of the third century, the theologian Tertullian (c. 155-c. 220 AD) observed that what “most frequently meets our view” and “occasions complaint” was “our teeming population.” Human numbers had become “burdensome to the world, which can hardly supply us from its natural elements.” Worse, “our wants grow more and more keen, and our complaints more bitter in all mouths, while Nature fails in affording us her usual sustenance.” In this light, “pestilence, and famine, and wars, and earthquakes have to be regarded as a remedy for nations, as the means of pruning the luxuriance of the human race.” Another important figure in the early Church, Saint Jerome (c. 342/347-420 AD), later commented that “the world is …full, and the population is too large for the soil,” a problem he believed best addressed through the creation of monasteries. In the early sixteenth century, Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) observed that “when every province of the world so teems with inhabitants that they can neither subsist where they are nor remove elsewhere, every region being equally crowded and over-peopled,” and when “human craft and wickedness have reached their highest pitch,” the world would purge itself through either floods, plagues, and famines so that men, “becoming few and contrite, may amend their lives and live with more convenience.” While many people blamed problems on overpopulation, the first catastrophist theorist on the subject is generally acknowledged to be the Italian Giovanni Botero (1540-1617). Nearly two centuries before the better known Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834), Botero argued that human population would increase to the maximum extent permitted by human fertility, that the means of subsistence could only increase slowly and wouldn’t keep up, and that the unavoidable result would be poverty, starvation, war, diseases, and population crashes. Another writer who anticipated Malthus was the Danish cleric Otto Diederich Lütken (1713- 1790). As he put it in 1758, some of humanity’s most significant problems were the incontrovertible facts that the “circumference of the globe is given and does not expand with the increased number of its inhabitants,” no one had invented “travel to other planets thought to be inhabitable and the “earth’s fertility” could not “be extended beyond a given point.” As such, the proposition that “the world’s inhabitants will be happier, the greater their number’ was indefensible, because as soon as the number of humans exceeded “that which our planet with all its wealth of land and water can support,” they would eventually “starve one another out.” Lütken challenged the notion that a greater number of individuals might be desirable because it was the dominant opinion at the time. As many Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers saw things, more people not only meant more manpower for armies, but also more hands to work and more brains to think of new solutions. The British political economist Sir William Petty (1623-1687) thus suggested it was more likely that “one ingenious curious man may rather be found out amongst 4,000,000 than 400 persons.” The German alchemist Johann Joachim Becher (1635-1682) observed that through the “increase of population come increased facilities for subsistence, and through the latter comes influx of people; this in its turn causes further increase of population, and so on in an everlasting circle.” In 1771, the French economist and cleric Nicolas Baudeau (1730-1792) summarized the thoughts of many by suggesting that the “productiveness of nature and the industriousness of man are without known limits” because production “can increase indefinitely” and, as a result, “population numbers and well-being can go on advancing together” (my translation). Despite optimistic thinkers being repeatedly vindicated in the following decades, however, many segments of the Western elites would become ever more pessimistic as to humanity’s prospect. This topic will be discussed in another post.       (0 COMMENTS)

I’ve been in a discussion on Facebook in the last few days on the topic of John Kenneth Galbraith. In the 1960s and early 1970s, the three economists that were most well-known were Galbraith on the left, Paul Samuelson on the center left, and Milton Friedman on the libertarian end. The discussion was mainly about civility and about how Galbraith had some. It reminded me of something that happened shortly after Galbraith died. I remember getting an email, on a Sunday morning in April 2006, from Tunku Varadarajan, op/ed editor at the Wall Street Journal asking me if I “do” Galbraith. Galbraith had died the previous day. What Tunku was asking was whether I knew enough to write an op/ed on Galbraith. I said I did. I wrote it and it ran the next day, if I recall correctly. I made no errors that I know of in the piece. I still like it. But in the process of researching my subject, I had found interesting nuggets in his autobiography, A Life in These Times, nuggets that I didn’t have space to discuss. So I started reading that book and some of his other work in my leisure time. After a month or two of reading, I contacted Sheldon Richman and asked him if I could write a longer piece for The Freeman, of which he was the editor at the time. Sheldon was surprised. “You want to write an appreciation of Galbraith?” he asked. I said that I did but that there would also be heavy elements of criticism. Sheldon knew my work, trusted me, and gave me the green light. The result was David R. Henderson, “John Kenneth Galbraith: A Criticism and an Appreciation,” The Freeman, December 2006. An excerpt: Most free-market economists, including me, have had little use for the vast bulk of Galbraith’s writing and thinking. This is understandable, given that the main work by which he was judged, and by which he appeared to want to be judged, was weak, both theoretically and empirically. But a more-complete assessment of Galbraith’s writing leads me to conclude that we free marketers have been somewhat uncharitable to Galbraith. He had remarkable insights, especially about government bureaucracy and war, insights that would not have surprised a Ludwig von Mises, an F. A. Hayek, or a Robert Higgs. Moreover, in his opposition to war and his attempts to stop it, Galbraith showed some real courage. A criticism: Other mainstream economists, such as Scott Gordon and Robert Solow, also pointed out fundamental problems with his conclusions—problems Galbraith never seriously grappled with. Instead he focused on the witty epigram. As one critic pointed out, Galbraith’s main form of argument for key assumptions in his model of the economy was “vigorous assertion.” It’s not hard to see why. In his autobiography, A Life in Our Times, Galbraith wrote that he learned a deep skepticism about statistics from a Harvard colleague, statistician William L. Crum. Galbraith wrote: “In my adult life I have occasionally been criticized for inadequacy in statistical or econometric method. Crum is responsible; from him I early formed the impression that no figure and no calculation was really valid and that it was foolish to expose one’s self by citing one.” What an incredible overconclusion. No figure or calculation was really valid? How would he know, except by presenting contrary figures or corrections in calculations? And if he judged the invalidity based on these contrary figures or calculations, wouldn’t he be accepting their validity? Indeed, Galbraith backed up his skepticism with a follow-up example: an incorrect data-based prediction of an Alf Landon landslide over Roosevelt in the 1936 presidential election. Of course, Roosevelt won, a fact that Galbraith acknowledges—which means that Galbraith must have trusted, within a certain margin, the actual data on presidential voting. An appreciation: What else is impressive about Galbraith?  He brought an independent mind to some of the biggest issues of the twentieth century, those involving war and peace. For all his refusal to look at evidence, Galbraith did some of his most important work on the effect of Allied bombing of Germany during World War II.  As a director of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey he went to Germany immediately after the European war and headed a team to do an overall economic assessment of the German mobilization and the effect of the bombing on that mobilization.  Galbraith’s team included economists Burton H. Klein, who made his reputation with his work on that team, Nicholas (later Lord) Kaldor, E.F. Schumacher (later author of Small Is Beautiful), Tibor Scitovsky, and Edward Dennison. What they found was devastating.  Galbraith wrote wittily, “Nothing in World War II air operations was subject to such assault as open agricultural land.”   Successful attacks on war-production plants were much rarer.  Whereas in 1940, 1941, and 1942, average monthly production of Panzer vehicles was 136, 316, and 516, respectively, in 1943 (when the bombing had begun in earnest) and 1944, monthly Panzer production was up to 1,005 and 1,583, respectively.  They found similar results for airplane production.  Galbraith’s boss, George Ball (later undersecretary of state under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson), found something equally disturbing about the firebombing of cities.  The RAF’s bombing of central Hamburg, for example, destroyed many lives and many businesses in the central city—restaurants, cabarets, department stores, banks, and more.  What were the newly unemployed waiters, bank clerks, and entertainers to do?  That’s right: seek jobs in the war plants on the edge of the cities “to get the ration cards that the Nazis thoughtfully distributed to workers there.” Moreover, the effect of the bombing was to shift control of production from the incompetent Goering and the Luftwaffe to the far-more-competent evil genius, Albert Speer.  In other words, the incredible destruction that the British and air forces wreaked on Germany, with the high loss of human life, didn’t even have the intended effect of slowing Germany ‘s war-production machine.  Galbraith had to fight hard to have his report published without it being rewritten to hide the essential points.  “I defended it,” he wrote, “with a maximum of arrogance and a minimum of tact.” In my experience as a senior economist with President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers, I found tact to be strongly overrated.  To prevail, Galbraith probably needed about as little tact as he used. And my little sadness: Finally, I confess some sadness.  In November 1981 I was the warm-up speaker for Galbraith at an event held by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations.  We had a short, friendly interaction, but I went into it knowing virtually nothing about Galbraith’s keen observations on war and peace.  How much different our conversation and my speech might have been had I paid Galbraith the respect that was his due. Read the whole thing.   (0 COMMENTS)

  Bruce Caldwell has published the transcripts of the founding meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society. It is an invaluable book, largely made by records of F. A. Hayek’s Secretary, Dorothy Hahn (by the way, Frank Hahn’s wife) plus some drafts of the paper presented at the first Mont Pèlerin conference. Published by the Hoover Institution with a preface by John Taylor, the book is superbly edited, and I ran into quite a few surprises. The thing I was most surprised by was Bertrand de Jouvenel, the French journalist and sociologist with “a colorful checkered past”, proposing psychologist Carl Jung and theology Karl Barth as potential members. The discussions of those days are often surprisingly relevant to ours. The passage I was most struck by is the following, from the session on religion and Christianity, opened by Frank Knight. It came from Trygve J.B. Hoff, a Norwegian writer and economist. His Economic Calculation in the Socialist Society is published by Liberty Fund. For a nice introduction to him, see this short and informative piece by Lars Peder Nordbakken. So Hoff commented: It seems to me that the decline of liberalism has something to do with what we call the cultural crisis. Majority of men in the western world have lost their faith in God. And few have the ability to be agnostics. Then there is a tendency for people to become converts to secular religions, Nazism, Communism, etc. Trevor pointed out yesterday that liberalism has no mystique. I agree. And this is a handicap in the fight against secular religions. If we are going to diagnose the causes for decline of liberalism: the need for faith, the will to believe, and the need for group feeling. I don’t know Hoff’s work so I don’t know if he made something of this observation. But it seems to me very profound and relevant today as well. In particular, I find the words “the ability to be agnostics” amusing and particularly adept. (0 COMMENTS)