Are tradition and rigid social norms out of touch? Not according to Israeli author and computer scientist Moshe Koppel, the guest in this episode. On the other hand, warns Koppel, when you don’t like a particular tradition, you shouldn’t try to get rid of it so fast. Good social norms must evolve slowly. This conversation with EconTalk host Russ Roberts centers on Koppel’s notion of  “a Hayekian bottom-up evolution of morality versus alternatives.” The two discuss whether there should be a role for tradition in thinking about how to live. Koppel  insists that tribal norms can be a good thing; he tells a compelling story about Jewish refugees in a camp in Casablanca. Roberts allows they may play a role on solving collective action problems. So why do so many seem to bristle at them? And shouldn’t we worry about in- versus out-group effects? Parochialism? Insularity? Let’s hear your perspective on these questions. Use the prompts below and share your thoughts in the comments, or to start your own conversation offline. We love to keep the conversation going.     1- Koppel says there are four sorts of norms that are inherently tribal- norms with regard to food, sex, rituals, and transactions). Why do we need these rules like that, and what are they good for? Can you points to any such norms that are not doing what Koppel suggests they ought? Explain.   2- Roberts asks why we privilege reason over tradition, or have a tendency to see tradition as an actively bad thing? How would you answer this question? How does Koppel reply? With regard to having children, Koppel bets that the next generation of people are going to be those who got their genes from people who thought that you should have children. What do you think?   3- Robert points to the “new norm” of wokism to ask, what’s wrong with a fast-changing norm? Isn’t wokism just the next step in the cultural evolution Koppel speaks of?   4- Koppel points to four aspects of evolving norms. What are they? Do you believe each to be as significant as Koppel? Why? How does moral intuitionism work in tandem with codification to create new norms? Can traditionalism ever not be “conservative”?   5- What makes communities more adaptive than states, according to Koppel? To what extent have you found this to be true?   (0 COMMENTS)

In a previous post, I discussed the paradox that while certain cultural traits tend to be associated with the north and others with the south, when you cross from the northern part of a warm country to the southern part of its neighbor to the north, the pattern reverses. Thus, despite being further north, southern France has southern cultural features whereas northern Italy has northern cultural features. The same is true of Vietnam and China.  I provided a couple possible explanations: One hypothesis is that cultural change is gradual and continuous, and that those in northern Spain and Italy are not really like the dour and business-like northern Europeans, they only seem that way relative to their compatriots in the south. Another hypothesis is that people sort within each country, and that those who feel more comfortable with the culture of Milan or Barcelona migrate up there from the south. Tyler Cowen recently linked to a new study by Hoang-Anh Ho, Peter Martinsson and Ola Olsson that suggests my second explanation may be part of the story.  Here is the abstract (and note the final sentence): Cultural norms diverge substantially across societies, often within the same country. We propose and investigate a self-domestication/selective migration hypothesis, proposing that cultural differences along the individualism–collectivism dimension are driven by the out-migration of individualistic people from collectivist core regions of states to peripheral frontier areas, and that such patterns of historical migration are reflected even in the current distribution of cultural norms. Gaining independence in 939 CE after about a thousand years of Chinese colonization, historical Vietnam emerged in the region that is now north Vietnam with a collectivist social organization. From the eleventh to the eighteenth centuries, historical Vietnam gradually expanded its territory southward to the Mekong River Delta through repeated waves of conquest and migration. Using a nationwide household survey, a population census, and a lab-in-the-field experiment, we demonstrate that areas annexed earlier to historical Vietnam are currently more prone to collectivist norms, and that these cultural norms are embodied in individual beliefs. Relying on many historical accounts, together with various robustness checks, we argue that the southward out-migration of individualistic people during the eight centuries of the territorial expansion is an important driver, among many others, of these cultural differences. In the US, we may have sorted into “New York type people” and “California type people” in the post-WWII decades.  Indeed a new sorting may be occurring, with liberal New York types in NYC and conservative New York types in Miami.  Or liberal California types in California and conservative California types in Texas. (0 COMMENTS)

Building a bridge is costly: It takes labor and machinery and raw materials that have alternative uses. Does it follow that building it is a waste? No. Waste occurs when the cost incurred exceeds the benefit attained. Cost greater than zero does not imply cost greater than benefit. Does it follow that the bridge is worth building? No again. A bridge to nowhere might be built even though it is wasteful, if the few beneficiaries don’t bear the costs themselves. To know whether a particular bridge is worth building we need to compare benefit to cost. To count benefits and costs, we observe market prices and transaction quantities. None of us has access to a god-like perspective. Consequently, for normal private goods where costs and benefits fall on producers and consumers, economists normally defer to the judgments of the market participants who actually bear the costs about whether the benefits of an activity exceed its costs. Buyers presumably value a good more than the price they pay, or they wouldn’t buy, and producers incur average costs that are less than that price, or they would exit the industry. In the case of Bitcoin, the electricity bills for proof of work are ultimately paid by Bitcoin users, just as costs of production for bread and milk are borne by buyers of bread and milk. Bitcoin users pay directly when they pay blockchain fees, and indirectly when new Bitcoin is awarded to miners, enlarging the stock of Bitcoin and diluting the purchasing power per unit compared to what it would have been with a constant stock. These are the opening paragraphs of Lawrence H. White, “How to Think Straight about Bitcoin’s Social Costs and Benefits,” Alt-M, March 1, 2022. Larry does a beautiful job of applying basic tools of Cost/Benefit Analysis to Bitcoin. Almost everything we talk about in teaching Cost/Benefit Analysis is present in his succinct post: the role of market prices, the importance of benefits exceeding costs, irrelevant externalities (pecuniary externalities) versus relevant externalities, and deferring to consumers of goods rather than to government agencies. I recommend this article as a reading on any syllabus that does Cost/Benefit Analysis because it’s such a beautiful application of the basic tools. (0 COMMENTS)

At private, religious schools like mine, students have to get a certain number of credits for attending chapel or convocation or similar events in order to register and ultimately in order to graduate. It is a credible threat: we have had students complete all their degree requirements except for convocation and have to come back the following semester to complete convocation. Their degree is deferred by a semester. One way students can get a bunch of convocation credits is by participating in a cadre, which is a faculty-led student reading group. With the generous support of the Charles Koch Foundation, I offer a cadre every semester.  My student reading groups have probably been too ambitious in terms of the amount of reading I expect. From this point forward, I’m toning it down a little bit and asking students to read fewer pages more deeply. Cadres meet for eight weeks, and I have decided that I can get three distinct cadres from Paul Heyne’s Are Economists Basically Immoral? Are Economists Basically Immoral? is one of my favorite books (I wrote an essay about it for AIER here; Russ McCullough discusses it in a Liberty Classic essay here). First, Heyne writes with crystal clarity. Second, it’s available as a $0 PDF from Liberty Fund. Third, it approaches economics, justice, and Christianity with equal seriousness.   Here is how I have chosen to split things up. Economics, Ethics, and The Idea of the University I proposed this one for Spring 2022, and it looks like I will have about a dozen students. The cadre will ask broad questions about the purpose of a liberal education and how we can use its tools and insights (like the principles of economics) to evaluate and appraise our world. We will discuss the relationships between students and faculty under ideal circumstances and under actual circumstances, and I plan to bring in some of the insights offered by Jason Brennan and Phillip W. Magness’s Cracks in the Ivory Tower: The Moral Mess of Higher Education (that’s a book I’d love to use for a faculty reading group). Here is the reading schedule; where I have assigned two chapters per meeting in the past, the cadres I plan to lead going forward will only have one chapter per meeting.   Cadre 1: The Social Responsibility of Economists Does economics assume people are horrible? Does it teach that people should be horrible? How do the assumptions we make in economic analysis and the assumptions people make in different evaluations of the nature of humanity interact, sometimes complementing one another and sometimes appearing to exist in irreconcilable tension? Chapter 1—Are Economists Basically Immoral? Chapter 2—Economics and Ethics: The Problem of Dialogue Chapter 3: Income and Ethics in the Market System Chapter 4: Can Homo Economicus Be Christian? Chapter 16: Economics Is a Way of Thinking Chapter 21: Measures of Wealth and Assumptions of Right: An Inquiry Chapter 23: What is the Responsibility of Business Under Democratic Capitalism? Chapter 26: Economics, Ethics, and Ecology   Cadre 2: Economics, Theology, and Justice This cadre gives pride of place to the theologians, albeit as read by economists. The goal in this cadre is to listen carefully both to what, for example, the US Catholic Bishops in chapter 10 are saying and how Heyne is replying. Chapter 5: Economic Scientists and Skeptical Theologians Chapter 6: Christian Theological Perspectives on the Economy Chapter 7: Controlling Stories: On the Mutual Influence of Religious Narratives and Economic Explanations Chapter 8: Justice, Natural Law, and Reformation Theology Chapter 9: The Concept of Economic Justice in Religious Discussion Chapter 10: The US Catholic Bishops and the Pursuit of Justice Chapter 12: Christian Social Thought and the Origination of Economic Order Chapter 13: Clerical Laissez-Faire: A Case Study in Theological Ethics   (0 COMMENTS)

  Don’t Just Sit There: Undo Something I’ve been trying to think about what the days after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine remind me of. And I have. They remind me of the days after 9/11. Like over 90 percent of Americans, I was angry at the terrorists who murdered almost 3,000 people in one day. And like some similarly high percent of Americans, I’m upset at an evil man, Putin, who attacked another country. In the days after 9/11, though, I didn’t agree with what so many people were advocating: the USA PATRIOT Act, which took away a lot of our financial privacy and some of our liberties, and the invasion of Afghanistan, to name two. I wanted to keep our civil liberties and our already diminished financial privacy intact and I thought that U.S. Special Forces could get Osama bin Laden without the U.S. government overthrowing the Afghan government. And, of course, it turned out that it was U.S. Special Forces who got Osama bin Laden, not in Afghanistan but in Pakistan. While I’ve been loving watching brave Ukrainians take to the street with guns, make fun of Russian tank drivers, and show fellow Ukrainians how to operate a Russian tank, I’m against hurting millions of innocent Russians by taking down Russian banks’ ability to use SWIFT and I’m against the U.S. government getting in another war. The foreign policy analyst I’ve paid most attention to for the last few decades, one reason being that he never gets stampeded or bullied into favoring wars that the U.S. can easily stay out of, is Doug Bandow. He has a great article at antiwar.com today laying out why the U.S. government should stay out of this one. Now, if I could contribute $1,000 to someone in Ukraine to help fight the Russians, I would. Of course, I would want to make sure it gets to the right cause. But my understanding is that long-standing U.S. law has made this illegal. No way do I want the U.S. government to get into another war in Europe. There are three things I would like the U.S. government to do: lay off Iran, as co-blogger Scott Sumner has argued well and succinctly, so that the Iranians could increase oil output, bringing down the price; sell some oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, bringing down the price and doing a little to reduce the huge federal budget deficit; and deregulate oil exploration and production. The first two would have an immediate impact on the output and price of oil, and the last would have a long-term impact. These previous 3 are instances of an approach I’ve taken for a long time. Given how much governments in the United States meddle in people’s lives, I’ve had a saying since about 1990: Don’t Just Sit There: Undo Something. In other words, look for the regulations, taxes, and spending programs that the government can eliminate or reduce where doing so would help the situation at hand. Postscript: Even the Swiss are getting into the act. And check out this statement from the same NY Times news story: Switzerland said it was departing from its usual policy of neutrality because of “the unprecedented military attack by Russia on a sovereign European state,” Unprecedented? Has this government official heard of Stalin and his 1939 invasion of Poland?   (0 COMMENTS)

A recent article in the NYT criticizes Larry Summers, who correctly predicted that economic policy in 2021 was too expansionary. This caught my eye: Mr. Summers has been focused on a different story, warning that government spending could increase inflation. With prices rising at the fastest rate in 40 years, he has been lauded for making the right call. “Does the WH owe Larry Summers an apology?” Politico asked last November. The problem with this reading is that the economy hasn’t really overheated. Real gross domestic product and employment are still lower than prepandemic projections, according to government statistics. Yes, consumer spending patterns have shifted from services to goods, but that began two years ago; the fact that our supply chains still cannot adjust reflects a bigger problem with how they were designed. It is frustrating to see respectable outlets like the NYT repeatedly make EC101 level mistakes.  Economic overheating has nothing to do with real GDP; rather it represents excessive growth in nominal spending.  And nominal GDP has risen to well above the pre-pandemic trend line.  The economy is clearly overheating to some extent. In 2008, real GDP in Zimbabwe was sharply depressed.  Would anyone claim their economy was not overheating at a time when inflation reached a billion percent? The NYT has a wealth of talented reporters.  I am convinced that they try to be accurate, at least most of the time.  That’s why I find this sort of story to be so maddening. I also blame the economics profession.  If the top economists in America (who mostly share the NYT’s ideology) were more critical of its reporting of economic issues, then it would face pressure to clean up its act.  Conservatives might not believe this, but the NYT does care about elite opinion.  Instead, we repeatedly see this sort of sloppy reporting. It doesn’t seem to be getting better. PS.  If the NYT hired a competent economist to proofread their economics stories, they could weed out dozens of mistakes each month, making it a better paper.  Why don’t they do that—they have lots of money?  (Yes, they have editors, but I’m talking about proofreaders with knowledge of economics.) Off topic, I really like this Matt Yglesias tweet: If you want more than a tweet, check out this article.   (0 COMMENTS)

Mike Huemer has yet another great thought experiment: Suppose you learned that there was a school staffed mainly by right-leaning teachers and administrators. And at this school, an oddly large number of lessons touch upon, or perhaps center on, bad things that have been done by Jews throughout history. None of the lessons are factually false – all the incidents related are things that genuinely happened and all were actually done by Jewish people. For example, murders that Jews committed, times when Jews started wars, times when Jews robbed or exploited people. (I assume that you know that it’s possible to fill up quite a lot of lessons with bad things done by members of whatever ethnic group you pick.) The lessons for some reason omit or downplay good things done by Jews, and omit bad things done by other (non-Jewish) people. What would you think about this school? I hope you agree with me that this is a story of a blatantly racist and shitty school. It would be fair to describe the school as promoting hatred toward Jewish people, even if none of the lessons explicitly stated that one should hate Jews. I hope you also agree that no parent or voter should tolerate a public school that operated like this. Now, what if the school’s right-wing defenders explained that there was actually nothing the slightest bit racist or otherwise objectionable about the school, because it was only teaching facts of history? All these things happened. You don’t want to lie or cover up the history, do you? I hope you agree with me that this would be a pathetic defense. Huemer’s target is Critical Race Theory, but his insight generalizes nicely.  If you spend your life making one-sided true complaints about markets, it is fair to call you “anti-market.”  If you spend your life making one-sided true complaints about the rich, it is fair to call you “anti-rich.”  If you spend your life making one-sided true complaints about men, it is fair to call you a “man-hater.”  If you spend your life making one-sided true complaints about rare risks, it is fair to call you a “fear-monger.” Granted, there’s no shame in being “one-sided” about things that are, on balance, terrible.  But if that’s your position, you should be prepared to defend it, not hide behind the misleading claim that you’re “just teaching the facts.” Thus, as you may have noticed, I habitually complain about voters and politicians.  But my method is not to sift out all the good that voters and politicians do, then share the bad stuff that’s left.  Rather, I explicitly argue that, on balance, voters are severely irrational and politicians are deeply evil.  I’m not trying to trick readers into these conclusions with a selective reading of the evidence.  Indeed, I go out of my way to argue that what most people like about voters and politicians is actually bad, so the “offsetting good” mostly just compounds the bad. If you take Huemer’s thought experiment to heart, you will realize that mainstream media is scarcely better than bona fide “fake news.”  Epistemically speaking, the purpose of one-sided true complaints and full-blown lies is the same: to spread false beliefs about the Big Picture.  The news doesn’t have to be propaganda, but in practice, it almost always is. Reminder: This is my last day blogging for EconLog.  Starting tomorrow, March 1, look for my posts on the all-new Bet On It, brought to you by the Salem Center for Policy at the University of Texas. (1 COMMENTS)

What did author and Washington Post columnist Tamar Haspel learn from her quest to eat at least one thing she’d grown, caught, or killed every day? For starters, that just-caught fish always tastes better (unless you’ve caught a false albacore). That all it takes to build a coop is the will and the right power […] The post Tamar Haspel on First-Hand Food appeared first on Econlib.

Before reviewing some lessons from the “sanctions against Russia,” we should realize how misleading this expression is. They are not, properly speaking, sanctions from “Western nations” against “Russia,” but from Western countries’ states against residents of Western countries who trade with Russian government rulers and entities. They will hit Russians because they hit Americans (and other individuals in the West) first (See my previous posts on this general point). And they will hit ordinary individuals in both the West and Russia. One lesson of the current sanctions is that they are quite certainly preferable to World War III. They do involve discrimination against individuals and companies (who are made of people) in our own countries, but it is a safe assumption that virtually all the individuals hit would prefer the sanctions to actual war. My formulation tries to avoid the standard cost-benefit approach in favor of the constitutional-economics approach proposed by James Buchanan: which general rules would individuals unanimously accept ex ante? Note, however, that the sanctions may themselves provide another casus belli to the autocrat and authoritarians who rule the Russian state. Putin has been showing his nuclear teeth. Heightened tensions increase the probability of a mistake. A cornered tyrant is not necessarily less dangerous than an unchallenged one. Difficult game. Anther lesson, it seems to me, is the following: the situation illustrates how dangerous a world government would be. Observe the enormous power that a cartel of states (in this case: NATO, the G10, the European Union or, more fuzzily, states sharing the Western culture) can wield to “cancel” individuals and groups by crippling them economically and making them international pariahs (to use Joe Biden’s terminology). This power rests on the power of each government to control its citizens’ or subjects’ assets and economic transactions. In the normal course of things, thanks God, a national government’s power to cancel an individual or group is limited by the decentralization of political authority in the world. Individuals can, at some cost, escape a too powerful state. I agree on the necessity of making Vladimir Putin an international pariah, but a world government would have the power to do the same against any individual or group as a matter of course anywhere on earth. It could “disconnect” a rebellious individual or group of individuals from even a nominally private payment system (as illustrated by the partial disconnection from SWIFT that we are witnessing). (0 COMMENTS)

Tomorrow is Bryan Caplan’s last day as a blogger on EconLog. I will sorely miss him. There’s so much I’ll miss: his clear thinking, his frequent insights, many of which are surprising, and his positive attitude to life. I could highlight a lot of his blog posts, but then this tribute would turn overly long. Instead, I’ll highlight two major things that I’ve learned from his blogging. The first is the importance of the Social Desirability Bias. I’m someone who speaks my mind on pretty much any issue, no matter how much pressure there is not to do so. So it was hard for me to grok why I was so often alone even though people would come up to me at an event, look furtively around, and tell me in low decibels that they basically agreed with what I had just said. Now I do understand: it’s Social Desirability Bias. They are afraid to come out openly and say what they think. The second is the Ideological Turing Test. Not very many people in economics come up with terms that are widely used. I’m still working for people to refer to the part of the capital gains tax on the inflation component of capital gains as a “tax on phantom gains.” So far no takers. I’ve made only a little progress in getting people to be understood by non-economists when they want to discuss rent seeking. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with rent seeking, if you keep the full economic meaning of “rent.” I want to call it “privilege seeking,” which is more apt. But Bryan, well before age 50, has introduced the term “Ideological Turing Test” and it is often used. It’s a great term. In that sense, he’s kind of like my mentor Harold Demsetz, who coined the term “Nirvana approach,” which has morphed into the widely used “Nirvana Fallacy.” Good on ya, Bryan bro. (0 COMMENTS)