What is real education? What can colleges provide their students? Pano Kanelos, president of the new college-to-be in Austin, UATX, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the nature of education, what the Great Books can teach us, and how we should rethink college education in today’s world. The post Pano Kanelos on Education and UATX appeared first on Econlib.

Reagan’s famous quip is a bit of a contradiction, but nonetheless gets at something important about life. We cannot live effective lives without some level of trust, but blind trust can be quite counterproductive.In a book entitled Trust, Francis Fukuyama showed that a certain type of social cohesion is associated with greater economic success. Corporations tend to do better in societies where people are willing to work with strangers, whereas the private sector in low trust societies often fails to evolve very far beyond small family-owned firms.  Governments are also more effective in high trust countries.I’ve met people who told me that they weren’t getting vaccinated because they didn’t trust the vaccines (and by implication the authorities that recommended vaccines), and were instead relying on a drug not recommended by experts—ivermectin. This got me wondering if this was a general pattern or just the people I happened to meet. In Europe, there is a vast gap between vaccination rates in the east and the west.  (This is from November 2021): While 75.6% of European Union citizens are fully vaccinated, the share in Bulgaria is 26.2% and 39.6% in Romania. In countries outside the EU, the numbers are even bleaker. Only 20.2% of Ukraine’s population, and 36.3% of Russia’s, is fully vaccinated. What is wrong with Eastern Europe? In a word: disinformation. The region is awash in it, a legacy of the breakdown of public trust in governmental institutions after communism. Feverish conspiracy theories have gripped these countries like the coronavirus’s shadow. A Ukrainian doctor recently summed up the situation in her country: “Fake stories have spread widely, making people believe in microchips and genetic mutations … Some Orthodox priests have openly and aggressively urged people not to get vaccinated, and social networks have been filled with the most absurd rumors. Ukrainians have learned to distrust any authorities’ initiatives, and vaccination isn’t an [exception].” In contrast, ivermectin is extremely popular in that region: Veterinarians have seen a rush on doses of ivermectin meant for large animals as people battle to get hold of doses meant for humans, while black markets cash in and a fervent media campaign pushes inconclusive research. The Czech Republic now allows its off-label use, while Slovakia imports tens of thousands of doses. Promising research on the drug’s potential to treat and prevent coronavirus, combined with desperation over rising case numbers and deaths and a tidal wave of disinformation, has led to use of the drug skyrocketing in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as Latin America and South Africa. . . . The bombshell arrived on December 8, when U.S. physician Pierre Kory spoke before a Senate hearing on early outpatient treatment for coronavirus. Ivermectin, alongside other medicines such as vitamin C, zinc and melatonin, could “save hundreds of thousands of people,” he testified, citing more than 20 studies. . . . Kory’s appearance reverberated across the globe. . . . Many miles away, in South Africa, a black market for ivermectin soon emerged. In Romania, stocks of ivermectin at both human and veterinary pharmacies were reported to be depleted in January.  Ivermectin has become so popular in places like Peru that it is increasing difficult to find enough non-users to do a clinical testy: [C]linical trials in Latin America have struggled to recruit participants because so many are already taking it. “Of about 10 people who come, I’d say 8 have taken ivermectin and cannot participate in the study,” says Patricia García, a global-health researcher at Cayetano Heredia University in Lima and a former health minister for Peru who is running one of the 40 clinical trials worldwide that are currently testing the drug. “This has been an odyssey.” Interestingly, Peru has the highest official rate of Covid deaths in the world, roughly 650 per 100,000.  But official death tolls can be misleading, and many believe that excess deaths are a far more accurate measure of Covid mortality.  The Economist reports that 11 of the 12 highest excess death rates are in Eastern Europe: Bulgaria’s excess death rate (nearly 1% of its population) is particularly shocking.   BTW, excess death rates in a few countries with extremely low Covid mortality were actually negative; as social distancing resulted in fewer cases of the flu than would normally occur.  So even the excess death data may undercount the true death toll for Covid itself.  Also note that while the US excess death rate (337 per 100,000 in mid-February) is below that of Eastern Europe, it is far higher than in Western Europe and Canada (and higher than the official figures).  To be clear, I do not believe Ivermectin directly causes more Covid mortality.  Most experts believe it has little effect, while a few claim that it is beneficial.  Rather, I suspect that a third factor—low social trust—explains both the high use of ivermectin and the very low vaccinations rates in Eastern Europe.   But there is also a risk that the people I met are not an exception; there’s a risk that many people around the world are avoiding vaccines because they view ivermectin as a substitute.  In other words, a risk that ivermectin is crowding out vaccination. If so, that would be very unfortunate: Derived from a compound discovered in a soil microbe in Japan, ivermectin has been called a “miracle drug” and “the penicillin of COVID” by Pierre Kory, a critical care physician in Madison, Wis. Kory is president of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC), a group of physicians and scientists who champion ivermectin, along with other drugs and vitamins with dubious efficacy against COVID. The organization, along with two others called the British Ivermectin Recommendation Development (BIRD) Group and America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLDS), have drawn criticism from many other physicians and scientists. Yet treatment protocols, links and videos from these groups are sweeping through social media, promoted by vaccine skeptics. The notion that ivermectin is a miracle medicine gives people who reject vaccines a false sense of security, says Daniel Griffin, a physician and infectious disease researcher at Columbia University and Chief of the Division of Infectious Disease at the company ProHEALTH. A recent poll by the Economist and YouGov indicated that a total of about 56 percent of people who believe ivermectin is effective against COVID either do not plan to get vaccinated or are unsure about the vaccine. But unlike the data supporting vaccines, Griffin says, the evidence behind that use of ivermectin is questionable and unclear.  [My hypothesis works better for Eastern Europe than for Peru, which has a good vaccination rate.  The vast majority of deaths in Peru occurred before vaccines were widely available. In contrast, Covid death rates in Bulgaria remained very high even after vaccines were widely available.] Back in March 2020, the experts told the public that masks were not effective. I did not believe them.  That wasn’t because I had expertise in the area; rather it was because their rationale made no sense.  We were told that the masks were desperately needed by doctors treating Covid.  I though to myself, “Well, if masks are ineffective, why do we need to reserve them for doctors?”  We were also told, “Don’t rub your nose”.  The best way to stop me from touching my nose when it itches is with a mask.  That’s what I mean by, “Trust, but verify.”  I trust that the widespread use of masks by medical personnel probably occurs for good reasons.  But I also verify the pronouncements of authorities by considering whether their recommendations make sense. Subsequent studies showed that masks are modestly effective at reducing Covid among the general public (mostly protecting others, not the mask wearer), and the experts have now come around to my view. One reason I trust the authorities on vaccines is that I’ve done my own look at the data and found that areas with low vaccination rates tend to have much higher Covid death rates, especially in the period after vaccines were available. (Obviously not in 2020.)  On average, the views of experts on a technical issue will be superior to the views on non-experts.  Thus my default position is to trust the experts more than I trust my own intuition.  But I never stop there.  Where possible, I also look at the evidence to see if it makes sense. The mistake some people make is to reflexively distrust experts and instead trust random people on the internet that are telling them what they want to hear. PS.  My read of the ivermectin data is that a lot of low quality studies say it’s effective and several high quality studies say it is not.  Given my general view of the biases in scientific research toward positive results, that’s not a very promising picture.  (This also makes me skeptical of the vast majority of published economic research.)  Overall, I am agnostic on ivermectin’s effectiveness, and believe it might or might not have a modestly positive effect. But evidence in favor of other generic drugs seems stronger than for ivermectin, so I personally would not take it without seeing further evidence of its effectiveness. PPS.  Interestingly, Uruguay seems to have the lowest Covid death rate in South America.  It also has a relatively high level of social trust by Latin American standards. (0 COMMENTS)

Why has “character” become such a polarizing word in the world of education? According to Angela Duckworth, the guest in this episode, we’re teaching character in schools no matter what. And that’s partly why she started Character Lab a decade ago. She joins host Russ Roberts to talk about her quest to unite teachers, parents, and science to make character education more intentional and less accidental. So how did the notion of character become so out-of-fashion, and what are we missing in schools today if we don’t attend to it? School remains the place where young people spend the most time, so how can we make the most of it? As always, now we’re interested in your thoughts.     1- What do you think the most compelling arguments are for keeping character education out of schools? How does what Duckworth means by character (think Aristotle and Martin Luther King) differ from the way we usually hear character [education] referred to? What should be the role of schools in young people’s character development?   2- Russ asks Duckworth what will be different about the 21st century. How does she respond, and why is she so hopeful about what’s to come? To what extent has she convinced you?   3- A question on which there may not have been as much resolution as listeners may have liked: Is character fixed? Can a person really build character? What does Duckworth have to say? What do you have to say?   4- Roberts was keen on the idea of a lab. Are schools character labs in the way he suggests? Explain.   5- Duckworth speaks at length about grit as a character trait, and her efforts at trying to “reverse-engineer” achievement and effort. How is grit different from productivity? What role does “toggling” play in achievement, and how might grit contribute to an individual’s happiness (think alignment, harmony, and/or flourishing)?   Bonus Challenge: Russ opines that it would be hard to put Duckworth’s’ message on a bumper sticker. But we bet you might be able to do it. So give it a whirl, and share your ideas. You just might get some EconTalk swag in return…   (0 COMMENTS)

In the Summer 2018 semester, I taught my first college-level course. The course was Economics for the Citizen. Economics for the Citizen is an introductory course for non-majors. My students were a mix of domestic and international students, and the international students were Chinese nationals. I began the semester’s first lecture with an allusion to the Garden of Eden and the Fall of Man, the opening story of the Biblical book of Genesis, Chapters 1-3. In that story, God creates humankind in the form of Adam and Eve. God then places them within the Garden of Eden, where they will want for nothing. The only restriction is that Adam and Eve do not eat from the Tree of Knowledge. Eve is tempted by a serpent and disobeys this restriction, and she shares the fruit with Adam. When God finds out, He kicks them both out of Eden to the barrens where they would know pain, toil, and hunger. This reference to Eden was to frame the economic problem of scarcity. There was no economic problem in Eden, where there was no want, where anything could be had without sacrifice. But since Adam and Eve were cast out, they had to struggle and toil to live. They faced the economic problem: they had indefinite wants but only limited means. They would have to make choices and face costs. In the lecture, I did not tell the story of Eden, and I referenced it without detail. After the class, I gave a quiz. On that quiz was a short-answer question to explain why Adam and Eve in Eden did not face the economic problem. When grading the quizzes, I noticed something peculiar: there was a stark contrast between the American students and the Chinese students: all the Chinese students got the question about Eden incorrect. In contrast, the American students all got the question right! The grade differential immediately set off a red flag in my mind: how could I explain this problem? I would have an answer the next day. Before class, one of the Chinese students pulled me aside. She told me my allusions in class were lost on the Chinese students. Eden is a standard reference to Americans, but it does not exist in the same way in many Asian cultures. Consequently, the Chinese students had no clue what I was talking about. Once she pointed it out to me, it became apparent: my teaching style was failing the Chinese students in my class! What was causing me to fail in my duties was a simple tacit assumption I had made; one I was not even aware I had made: Eden is a universally known story. Though a crucial assumption, it was never articulated nor even known by me to be a significant factor in my decision-making. In short, it was not a conscious choice I made, but a choice nevertheless that affected the output. Such tacit assumptions impact our thinking on ways too innumerable (and inarticulable) to list. Often, as is the case here, we may not even know we are making them. One of the merits of the concept of “checking your privilege” is to remember that our experiences shape our tacit assumptions. Everything we do or think is shaped by many factors, many of which we do not know. Another important takeaway from this story is that the dialogue between people drew such implicit assumptions to the fore. By “challenging” my expertise, the student forced me to articulate my point in a more informative manner. She (and the other students) became more informed once I explained my allusion (and altered my teaching style to accommodate their needs). Additionally, I became more informed of my decision-making process and the students’ needs. Overall, the information available to the participants increased, and everyone was made better off. Such knowledge generation could not have occurred if such dialogue was forbidden or discouraged. This story is simple but points to an essential part of Information Choice Theory. Challenges to experts incentivize them to reveal more information (in theory, the equilibrium result from such challenges is full information revelation). As more information is revealed, the experts become more aware of their tacit assumptions. Likewise, the nonexperts become more aware of their tacit assumptions. These challenges can be friendly (such as the student challenging me), or they may be adversarial (such as in a common-law courtroom). Regardless, the act of challenge, the dialogue, brings out the assumptions and increases information. Information (especially tacit) revelation does not occur without these dialogues, and we are worse off, information-wise. Experts must be meaningfully challengeable. Jon Murphy is a PhD candidate in Economics at George Mason University and Visiting Fellow at the Institute for an Entrepreneurial Society at Syracuse University. (0 COMMENTS)

In the last 20 years, there have been a lot of good economics books in niche areas such as housing, health care, immigration, and business economics, to name just four. But Rhoads’ book is special for two reasons. First, it gently teaches readers the basic concepts of economics, such as opportunity cost, marginalism, and incentives. It then applies those concepts to a wide range of government policies, showing how economists think about them and why many of them — and not just the libertarian ones — believe so many government policies are destructive. Rhoads, a political scientist, shows economics and economists at their best. Second, it challenges economists about their views on preferences and on the workings of the political system. His discussion here is better than in the 1985 edition. I was stunned, for example, by his quotes from economists I have respected about how people’s preferences should inform government policy. This is the second paragraph of David R. Henderson, “A Wide-Ranging Book for Non-Economists and Economists,” Regulation, Spring 2022. Another excerpt: The chapter on incentives is as good as the ones on opportunity cost and marginalism. Rhoads points out that taxes on pollution or a system of tradable emissions permits would lead to a given reduction of pollution at least cost. With a tax on each unit of pollution, polluters that can reduce emissions for a cost less than the tax will do so; those whose cost of reducing pollution exceeds the tax will keep polluting. If the resulting level of pollution is deemed to be too high, the tax can be increased until the desired emission level is reached. Tradable permits lead to the same result: those that have a high cost of reducing pollution will buy permits from those that can reduce pollution at a low cost. To the charge that such a system gives people “licenses to pollute,” Rhoads answers the way economists would respond: allowing any amount of pollution implicitly gives polluters a license to pollute up to the limit. Read the whole thing, especially if you wish me to respond to your comments.   (0 COMMENTS)

One of the underlying assumptions about college admissions departments is that they provide a certain amount of value to the college’s bottom line. Admissions departments add an increased likelihood of cultural diversity, the allure of selectivity, and/or the money from students whose families can pay full tuition. However, individual rationality can sometimes lead to collective irrationality. There’s a (mostly) fixed number of students planning to go to college, and there’s no magic wand that increases the number of high-income, underrepresented, high-scoring students so that every college can achieve its goals. In an important sense, the money spent on admissions is mostly wasted in competition with other colleges to net students who will be assets to their community. If every college jointly decided to expend less money searching for ideal students and simply admitted students on test scores and ability to pay, most colleges as a whole would be better off in terms of resources spent. A zero-sum worldview of admissions may not be the complete picture, since some distributions of college students may be better than others. For instance, Harvard may wish to trade some diversity in exchange for greater financial returns. Yale might be willing to sacrifice selectivity in favor of a wider variety of undergraduate majors. Such sorting may be preferable to a situation where the chips fall as they may. This coordination goes beyond the realm of academic affairs. Coordination between various universities is also important for managing finances and collective reputation. For instance, admissions standards act as a lever against specific colleges from trying to poach desirable students from other colleges. For example, If Penn decided that standardized tests and GPA cutoffs prevented them from making progress on their goals of wealthy and diverse college majors, and they scrapped them, this may result in them being ranked lower, making them less desirable to future students.  Yet, coordination can overcome individual stigma.  During the pandemic, most colleges removed test scores from their requirements, allowing them to select for students on other bases. Other examples of coordination are the hollowing out of need-blind admissions, which allowed colleges to explicitly select for family wealth. The question remains about which economic model of coordination best explains the goal of college admissions. Gale and Shapley, argue that college admissions are about trying to get the best ‘fit’ between students and colleges, similar to coordinating marriages. Colleges can’t accept all qualified students because not all students would accept, nor would they necessarily be the students those administrators want. Qualified students may want to go to a specific program but are limited in their ability to express preferences. Deferred admissions, and the creation of the waitlist can provide better information, allowing actors to better coordinate. Challenging this ‘marriage model’ is the effort of elite colleges to bring their admissions below double-digits. Many colleges mail students recruiting information only to later reject them. This behavior suggests that some colleges have a desire to signal prestige and exclusivity, rather than merely trying to find students most fitted to their campus. Behaving in this way creates an arms race among students, who in order to stand out, become involved in oftentimes expensive and time-consuming activities to demonstrate their unique value to campus. Other colleges take the strategy of accepting almost everyone who applies. Admissions data is  puzzling. To this day, certain aspects of the process are shrouded in secrecy.  It’s convenient for admissions offices that it isn’t clearly known which coordination problems affect admission, which makes it hard to judge whether the decisions made by admissions officers are adding value to the university, or taking it away.   Isadore Johnson is a campus free speech advocate, an economics and philosophy student, and regional coordinator for Students for Liberty. (0 COMMENTS)

  Was the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus so dangerous to so many people that extreme government lockdowns were justified? Did the fatality rate from COVID differ substantially according to people’s age and presence of co-morbidities, and did governors and other policymakers systematically take account of those differences? Did it make sense to close schools to in-person attendance for anywhere from a few months to over a year? Was mask-wearing indoors, even by people who had no COVID symptoms, an important contributor to slowing the spread of the coronavirus? And what really went on at those meetings of the Trump White House’s Coronavirus Task Force? Specifically, were the members carefully reading the numerous studies that were being published in the United States and around the world and adjusting their advice accordingly? Did it make sense for governors and other policymakers to focus only on COVID and ignore the major costs — including the costs to health — from lockdowns? Dr. Scott Atlas, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, addresses all of those questions and more in his book A Plague Upon Our House. (Full disclosure: I am also a Hoover fellow and know Atlas professionally.) But he does so much more than that. He lays out how dysfunctional both the task force and the White House were in dealing with the coronavirus. Based on my own experience at interagency meetings in Ronald Reagan’s administration, I find Atlas’s many reports of people on the task force “going with the flow” completely plausible. It’s true that we have to take his word for what went on, but based on my experiences with him at Hoover, I do. Beyond making his case with many facts, Atlas is a passionate man, and his book reads as if it were written in anger and frustration. Some readers might find that off-putting. I like it because he almost never lets his passion override his respect for facts and reasoned argument. Indeed, his passion is largely based on his view that lockdowns led to many deaths, destroyed millions of livelihoods, and caused needless suffering — a case he makes well. These are the opening paragraphs of David R. Henderson, “Atlas’s Case Against the Covid Lockdowns,” Regulation, Spring 2022. Another excerpt: Atlas’s other major policy disappointment was on schools. What was well known by the summer of 2020 was the harmful effects that school closings and remote learning were having on children, especially those in poorer families. Yet, notes Atlas, no one at the task force meetings, other than him, ever talked about the huge downsides of school closings. As noted above, the data showed clearly how safe young people were in school and, by the summer of 2020, how children rarely passed the virus on to adults. Therefore, argued Atlas at one of the meetings, schools should be opened without testing and masks. He writes that no one at the meeting, including Birx and Fauci, mentioned contrary data. Instead, Birx answered, “There is a bell curve of epidemiologists, and you are on the fringe.” Pence then asked Redfield, whose CDC was responsible for issuing guidance, what he thought about the risks of opening schools. Redfield replied, “Let’s just say, the jury is still out.” Read the whole thing. (0 COMMENTS)

Two contemporary books of political economy and political philosophy that any student of public affairs must absolutely read are Anthony de Jasay’s The State and James Buchanan’s Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative. Anthony de Jasay defined himself as both an anarchist and a (classical) liberal; I have suggested that “conservative anarchist” might be a better description, but perhaps it should be “conservative-liberal anarchist.” Buchanan, a man of the Enlightenment, was squarely a (classical) liberal, but not an anarchist. I review Buchanan’s Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative in the current (Spring 2022) issue of Regulation. I explain: Buchanan was a radical liberal, but he was not an anarchist. He believed that a limited government and the rule of law are necessary for the maintenance of a free society. The more men are angels (to use Madison’s terms) — that is, the more they follow an ethics of reciprocity — the less government is needed. The less ethical they are, the more they need government (up to the breaking point where the politicization of everything reduces both public and private morality). Private ethics and government controls are thus substitutes. Perhaps libertarians (including the present author) have tended to underestimate the importance of private ethics and to reject notions of fairness too easily. One major point on which Buchanan and de Jasay agreed is that there is no “public interest” defined in a utilitarian way, that is, by comparing and adding utility across individuals as cost-benefit analysis aims to do. In my review, I highlight Buchanan’s point as follows: The idea of a general interest individually defined illustrates his constant striving to define all values only in terms of individual values, with all individuals being equal. Nobody can define values for others; only the consent of all individuals is acceptable. In this approach, the arbitrary aggregation of individual utility into some concept of social welfare can only produce an arbitrarily defined “public interest.” … He persuasively argues that only such an integrating normative ideology can win against the soul or “animating principle” of socialism. We must see policy proposals “in the larger context of the constitution of liberty rather than in some pragmatic utilitarian calculus.” We can add that many economists, often brilliant ones, accept simple utilitarianism without reflecting on its philosophical foundations and its implications. They notably ignore that interpersonal utility comparisons — weighing the benefits of some against the costs imposed on others — lack any scientific grounding. (0 COMMENTS)

In the days after Russia invaded Ukraine, there was a lot of talk about how America needed to stand shoulder to shoulder with Ukraine, supporting them any way that we could short of direct military action. That mood doesn’t seem to have lasted very long.  Today, politicians in America seem obsessed with shielding consumers from the impact of high oil prices. For instance, Maryland and Georgia recently paused their gasoline tax.It’s difficult to think of a more counterproductive policy at this moment in time, even putting aside the impact on global warming. High gasoline prices are not a problem; they are a solution to the scarcity of oil created by the war in Ukraine. Tax cuts on gasoline have the effect of boosting global oil prices, which hurts almost everyone except the major oil exporters. Higher crude oil prices put money right into the pocket of Vladimir Putin, which helps to cushion the blow from economic sanctions.   PS.  California has its own plans: Californians could receive $400 per vehicle for a maximum of $800 for two vehicles. Eligibility would be based on vehicle registration, not tax records, to be sure the money reaches those who don’t file tax returns. Electric vehicle owners would be eligible. The money would come on debit cards, and would cost $9 billion total. Newsom would pause part of the sales tax imposed on diesel fuel and an annual inflation adjustment to the gas and diesel excise tax this year. Is this the best possible use of $9 billion? (0 COMMENTS)

Editor’s note: Subscribers to our No Due Date book club have been enjoying Deirdre McCloskey and Art Carden’s Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich. In addition to receiving a monthly book selection, subscribers have access to private events. These events include a monthly virtual salon with host Pete Boettke. Pete also has a knack for inviting authors and/or related thinkers to bonuc “coffee chats.” Carden participated in one such event recently. Below he shares his responses to Boettke’s questions. Q1: Tell us a bit about the origins of this project and working with Deirdre McCloskey The book actually has an interesting backstory–or at least, I think it has an interesting backstory. Deirdre McCloskey and I go back about twenty years, when I was a second-year graduate student at Washington University in Saint Louis and the Economic History Association had its annual conference there. Not long before my dissertation proposal, in 2005, my advisor John Nye asked me if I would pick her up at and then take her back to the airport when she visited Wash U to present a version of The Bourgeois Virtues, which would appear in print the following year. I read the entire 500 hundred-ish page manuscript in the week leading up to her seminar even though narrow prudence would have suggested working on my dissertation proposal. We traded emails and saw each other at conferences regularly over the next few years, and in Spring Semester 2009 she visited Rhodes College (where I was on the faculty at the time). The Friday of her trip, we drove down to Oxford, Mississippi together, and she gave a seminar at the University of Mississippi that lasted for three hours because of the quality and intensity of the discussion before we finally all agreed to call a time out and go to dinner. Fast forward to October 2012. I had just joined the faculty at Samford University, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute asked me to contribute to their “I, Pencil” movie project. We agreed that I would go to Chicago for filming since their crew would be there to film Professor McCloskey for the same series, and I sent her an email asking if she wanted to go to lunch while I was in town. We met, and after she treated me to lunch, she mentioned that she was looking to write a sort-of-popularization of the Bourgeois Era trilogy and asked me to come aboard. When a scholar of Deirdre McCloskey’s stature asks you to participate in a project like that, you renegotiate whatever you have to renegotiate so you can say “yes.” It took a lot longer than we had hoped it would (as projects like this usually do), and it went through a lot of edits and rewrites. In November 2018, I was a little despondent over the referee reports but was inspired while leading an Institute for Humane Studies Weekend Discussion Colloquium at Faulkner University with Jason Jewell, who directs their Great Books program: we needed to write it so that it was short enough and clear enough for students to read the entire thing for an IHS Weekend Discussion Colloquium. We finally finished it in 2019 and it appeared in print in October 2020. The paperback edition will be out this Fall. I’m under no illusions about being the one making breakthrough contributions here; in a lot of ways, I’m like Stephen Dubner, the journalist who co-wrote Freakonomics with the economist Steven Levitt. For the kinds of things I find interesting and important and for the kind of institution I’m at, however, it was an ideal project as I moved into the middle of my career.   Q2: Does the past have a useful economics? And what do you see as the relationship between economic history and economic development? The past absolutely has useful economics (and for that matter, economics has a useful past, but that might be another discussion). First, I’m reminded of one of the mantras from Battlestar Galactica: “all of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again” and the verse in Ecclesiastes: there is nothing new under the sun. Things that look unique are actually pretty common across space and time. Slavery is just one example: as we argue in the book, if slavery per se could cause a Great Enrichment by financing industrialization with the spoils of exploitation, the Enrichment would have happened somewhere else a very long time ago. We agree with the historian Niall Ferguson here: imperialism was actually the least original thing Europeans did after 1492. First, studying history and especially economic history helps us understand how to approach things that aren’t as unique as they might at first appear. We still study the Peloponnesian War, and not just to show that we’re erudite and cultured. Second, it helps us understand how we got to where we are as a species–and what our prospects are for trying to start over at Year Zero (twentieth-century experiments with communism show us they’re not good). These are also recurring themes in Thomas Sowell’s historical work, particularly his trilogy Race and Culture, Migrations and Cultures, and Conquests and Cultures.   Q3: Your book does an outstanding job demonstrating progress over time.  Why do you think pessimism sells? Speaking of things we’re still reading and acknowledging the fact that Deirdre McCloskey held an appointment in the Department of English at the University of Illinois-Chicago, I think Shakespeare’s Hamlet has something interesting to say here in this passage: “To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that dread of something after death, The undiscovered country from whose bourn, No traveler returns, puzzles the will, And makes us rather bear those ills we have, Than fly to others that we know not of?”   We can learn from the experience of the past (see the answer to Q2!), and when we look back at the past we can see how things turned out okay enough for us to be here. There’s no guarantee that we will continue to “get it right,” as Douglass North explains in Understanding the Process of Economic Change. Moreover, the world is a very complex place filled with people making decisions we don’t understand and don’t have incentives to consider in great depth or detail and that might just appear arbitrary and irrational. Think about how airlines board planes. I used to wonder why they had assigned seats and boarding groups when it would have been much more efficient either to board the plane from back to front or to do what Southwest does, with no assigned seating. Then, as the opportunity cost of my time increased, I came to understand the value of knowing I won’t have to gate-check a carry-on bag and being able to get some work done because I’m in an early boarding group. Airline and hotel status isn’t about people thinking you’re fancy, and if I’m looking to my Delta Silver Medallion status to solve my existential puzzles and give my life transcendent meaning, I either need to talk to my pastor or my psychiatrist. In short, the world is a confusing place, and we all lack the local, context-specific knowledge–knowledge of what Hayek called “the particular circumstances of time and place”–to know just how people will solve the problems they confront.   Q4: What is the most difficult argument from your book to communicate to critics and which continues to keep you up at night thinking of better and more persuasive ways to communicate? Friendly critics like the book but aren’t convinced the Great Enrichment was caused by a change in ideas and rhetoric in part because it doesn’t fit the model-and-measure methods of the social sciences and in part because economists are wired to look for changes in relative prices when trying to explain social phenomena. “Ideas and rhetoric” look to some like a deus ex machina rather than rigorous, serious science. I have a lot of sympathy for this, as so much of my time is spent trying to persuade students and others that incentives matter. We haven’t gotten a lot of direct criticism on this point, but I’ve heard from a friend who assigned the book that a few students were put off by our claims about how the tree of western prosperity wasn’t watered with blood shed by our ancestors through slavery, imperialism, colonialism, and killing (S.I.C.K.). I have a lot less sympathy for this position because I think there’s overwhelming evidence against it and because at best it will lead us down blind alleys with respect to the policies we make and the history we write. I lose sleep thinking about how to better communicate a lot of things. Since the last time I taught Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, I’ve come to believe that my listening and reading skills are bigger problems. I’m trying to read a lot more carefully, generously, sympathetically, and appreciatively: I know how frustrating it is to hear people brush off centuries of carefully-thought-out economic wisdom by saying something like “the problem is that economics assumes people are rational” or something like that; I wonder where I’m doing the same thing with other disciplines. Real conversation isn’t possible if people are just waiting for their turn to talk instead of listening actively, so instead of mentally prepping my detailed response to someone holding forth at a dinner party about the economic and social consequences of immigration, I’m trying to listen a lot more carefully so I can ask better questions. Art Carden is Professor of Economics & Medical Properties Trust Fellow at Samford University, and he is by his own admission as Koched up as they come: he has an award named for Charles G. Koch in his office, he does a lot of work for and is affiliated with an array of Koch-related organizations, and he has applied for and received money from the Charles Koch Foundation to host on-campus events. (0 COMMENTS)