On December 10, the Provost of Loyola University of New Orleans wrote the following to Walter Block. Walter is the Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar Endowed Chair and Professor of Economics at Loyola. Re: Another complaint Dear Dr. Block, I write to inform you that I am in receipt of three additional complaints against you from three different students. The key allegations are troubling and they are in clear violation of Loyola’s values, mission and policy. Indeed, the alleged actions are flagrant violations of the well-established principles of Catholic morality and in clear violation of Chapter 9 of the Faculty Handbook. These complaints were received during the course of our ongoing investigation into similar alleged conduct. The three complainants allege that your statements and commentary have included such abhorrent comments as “slavery wasn’t bad”, “women make less money because they are lazy or incapable,” “women are paid less because they don’t work as hard, and it’s the same with people of color”, and that “‘Disability Act’ shouldn’t exist.” One of the students noted that you openly expressed your racist, homophobic, transphobic and sexist statements publicly in classes, in your writings, and in your emails. This had a profoundly negative impact on the student’s experience at Loyola. These alleged actions indicate a pattern of complete disregard for Loyola’s values and mission considering the prior investigation and complaints we have received from students. Central to our Jesuit, Catholic identity is our commitment to human dignity and the whole person. I am extremely disappointed that, in spite of your written commitment to “do better”, you seem to continue to ignore your obligation as a faculty member of a Jesuit, Catholic University. You also seem to continue to create a hostile and discriminatory environment for our students. The University has an obligation under Title IX to ensure that the educational environment is welcoming, equitable and not permeated by ridicule and comments that are derogatory on the basis of gender, race or any other classification. Faculty conduct must be guided by the principles stated in our Faculty Handbook that “concern for the student as a person is central to the Jesuit educational mission.” As with prior complaints, we will investigate these additional complaints, and you will receive a written determination regarding these alleged actions. Please note, that in light of (1) the number of complaints we received regarding the substantially same alleged conduct, (2) the impact these alleged actions is having on our students, (3) Loyola’s legal obligations, and (4) your apparent continued violation of your obligations under the Faculty Handbook, Loyola may be forced to institute disciplinary proceedings under Chapter 9 of the Faculty Handbook based upon the outcome of these investigations. Sincerely, Tanuja Singh, DBA Provost and SVP of Academic Affairs cc: Michael Capella, Ph.D., Dean of the College of Business   Notice what Dr. Singh doesn’t do: she doesn’t invite Walter to respond. Instead, she writes “we will investigate these additional complaints, and you will receive a written determination regarding these alleged actions.” Wouldn’t someone who cares about the truth want to know if these alleged actions even occurred? And Walter is willing to help her find the truth. On that same day, Walter replied: Dear Provost Singh: I hereby acknowledge receipt of this letter of yours. I have recorded every session of my course this semester. Please tell me on which dates it is alleged that I made these statements. Also, the approximate time during each session I am accused of making them. I shall then respond to these complaints. Your letter appears to be a summary of three separate complaints made by three of my students in my law and econ class. Please send me, verbatim, a copy of the complaints they sent you. Whatever happened to that complaint made the first week of this semester to the effect that I likened Ghandi to Hitler, and that the Mises Institute is a Nazi organization? I responded to that in early September, and I have not heard your assessment of that complaint. Best regards, Walter Campus Reform tells some of the story here. Some students who are fans of Walter put together a letter, but it seems to be one that was written in response to similar threats some time ago. It’s here. It’s titled “Give Walter Block a Pay Raise.” I signed it and wrote the following as my explanation: Walter is a thinker who tries to get his students to think. And, from everything I can tell, he succeeds. Of course, like one of the students who complained, I was not in Walter’s class. But I have known him since attending a one-week conference with him (and with Nobel Prize winner Friedrich Hayek) in June 1975. Walter provokes in a friendly way. But he is one of the least racist people I know. I notice that Provost Singh thinks that a statement that the Disability Act shouldn’t exist is racist and/or sexist. Seriously? Is she aware that one of the groups that has been most hurt by that law is people who are disabled? The reason is that the requirement for accommodating those with disabilities makes employers hesitant to hire disabled people. But I wouldn’t accuse Provost Singh of being against the disabled because she favors a law that hurts them. She should just admit her ignorance and let professors who are opening students’ minds continue to do so. I don’t have a position, by the way, on whether Walter deserves a pay increase, although if we buy into the idea that people should be paid more for taking risk, then he probably does. The Provost arrived on campus in early 2020. She may not be familiar with a  past attack on Walter by the President of Loyola that he handled very well. Here’s my post on a previous attack. Postscript: In reading Provost Singh’s letter to Walter, I noticed something else that’s concerning. She writes “The key allegations are troubling and they are in clear violation of Loyola’s values, mission and policy.” I agree with her that allegations of racism and sexism are troubling. (As noted, I don’t agree that opposing a law that hurts disabled people is troubling.) But how can she say that the allegations “are in clear violation of Loyola’s values, mission and policy?” That would be true only if the allegations are true. Has the Provost already made up her mind? Now that would be troubling. (0 COMMENTS)

Co-blogger Scott Sumner recently responded to co-blogger Bryan Caplan’s critique of Scott’s earlier post in which Scott stated “On a list of regulatory overreaction, these mandates [on masks, vaccines, etc.] don’t even make my ‘top 100’.” Bryan agreed with Scott that the ratio of costs to benefits for many other regulations is higher than the cost/benefit ratio for Covid regulations in the United States. But, argued Bryan, the difference between costs of Covid regulation and benefits of Covid regulations was much greater than the difference between costs and benefits for the other regulations Scott referred to. Scott’s recent response meets Bryan on this territory and he argues that Bryan substantially understates the benefits of Covid regulations and overstates the costs. My view is that Bryan is closer to being right than Scott, although, like Scott, I don’t have Bryan’s confidence that he can use survey data on how people value years under Covid regulations versus years under Covid life. (By the way, a criticism Scott could have made, and maybe implicitly made, is that that’s the wrong comparison. We had “Covid life” with various degrees of regulation. I think the survey, to be useful for this discussion, should have been years of life under Covid with no regulation versus years of life under Covid with some degree of regulation. Admittedly, this is hard to get at because you’re getting not just people’s subjective valuations of life but also people’s subjective estimates of probabilities.) This will not be a complete response to Scott but here are the major areas on which I agree and disagree with Scott. I have one major agreement with Scott on his statement about risks: When I read critics on Covid caution (not Bryan), I see a lot of innumeracy.  People talk about a 1% chance of dying as if it’s a small risk. I agree and I thought that as early as March 2020. I did my Ph.D. dissertation on the economics of safety legislation in underground coal mines. In the late 1960s, if I recall correctly, the risk of dying for coal miners in underground mines was about 1 in 10,000. That’s a 0.01 percent chance of dying in a year. And we thought (and thought correctly) that coal mining was a very dangerous occupation. Not like logging, by the way. When I worked in an underground nickel mine in 1969, older fellow workers (and they were all older than me) told me never to work as a logger. So a 1% chance of dying is huge. A key number in Scott’s analysis is the infection fatality rate. Scott claims that it’s 0.6, but the number I recall (I can’t find the source offhand) over the whole U.S. population is less than half as much, at about 0.25. That’s a big difference. Another area of contention is the fatality rate for people with pre-existing conditions. Scott writes: Some talk about the risk for the under 65 group being merely people with pre-existing conditions, as if those people are sickly invalids.  But I often see pictures in the media of healthy looking cops who have died of Covid.  On closer inspection, some of them looked a bit overweight.  And of course obesity is a major a pre-existing condition.  I’m rather thin, and play tennis three times a week.  So I’m healthy, right?  Actually I’ve had crappy lungs my entire life, with several bad cases of pneumonia in my 30s. (If I’d been born before antibiotics, I doubt I would have lived to age 40.)  So am I at higher risk?  I honestly don’t know.  But I really don’t see the point of people saying Covid is only a problem for the old and those with pre-existing conditions.  Lots of people have at least one pre-existing condition.  Obesity is not exactly rare in America. Scott notes that he has a pre-existing condition, namely “crappy lungs.” But that’s just one. My reading of the Italian data in March 2020 was that disproportionately the people who died of Covid-19 were not just old but also had 2 or more pre-existing conditions. One big difference between Scott, on the one hand, and Bryan and me, on the other, is over how hard it is to be masked. Scott writes: Wearing a mask is a pain?  All I can say is if you think that’s a major problem, I wish I could have your life!! But that’s not analysis; that’s just Scott telling us his own subjective valuation. As I noted above, Scott rightly is skeptical of Bryan’s use of survey data to measure people’s attitudes to life under Covid. But at least Bryan had a sample size of 476. That’s 475 more than Scott’s sample size. In a comment responding to “DeservingPorcupine,” Scott says, “And when people talk about the awful suffering involved in wearing a mask, all I can do is roll my eyes.” In other words, Scott admits that he really doesn’t take seriously people’s thoughts and feelings about wearing masks. What matters is his subjective valuation. One commenter on Scott’s recent post, Mark Bahner, writes: Not only are most of the 800,000 dead old and sickly,  but many of  the deaths (approximately one-third, per the NY Times in June 2020) have occurred in nursing homes, where COVID restrictions did nothing to help them. This is a relevant point. And understated. Not only did Covid restrictions do nothing to help them, but also governors in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania actively hurt them by requiring that people with Covid be placed in nursing homes. Scott doesn’t reply to this point. Scott also seems to vacillate about what his topic is. I took it to be about both regulation and private responses to Covid. After all, Bryan was addressing Scott’s original post about regulation. But in a response to Todd Kreider, Scott writes: This has absolutely no bearing on anything in my post, as I’m sure you must know.  My post is not about government policies. And then Scott elaborates further to Todd: You still don’t get it.  You are talking about no government actions, I was talking about no attempts by the private sector to avoid Covid.  (That’s also what Bryan Caplan was talking about.) But that’s not what Bryan Caplan was talking about. He was talking about both private sector actions and government actions. Bryan referred to “America’s strange experiment in federalist dictatorship,” for example. And he mentions Scott’s earlier statement, “I’m surprised the regulations aren’t far worse.” This is a discussion of government actions.   (0 COMMENTS)

Critics of immigration often point to the fact that the post-WWII decades were a sort of golden age for American workers, with rapid growth in real wages up until about 1973. They argue that the immigration changes of the 1960s opened the floodgates, leading to much higher rates of immigration and lower wage gains for workers.Some people argue that it’s simply a question of supply and demand—more supply of workers means lower wages. Economists often reply that more people also means more demand for goods (and hence labor) so the impact on wages is unclear.  The US has lots more workers than Canada, but similar wages.Here I’d like to set aside the demand issue, and focus on the supply of workers. Is it plausible that immigration explains slower real wage gains after 1973?For this hypothesis to be correct, it would have to be true that growth in the number of workers accelerated after 1973. After all, if it’s “just a question of supply and demand”, then what clearly matters is not immigration per se, rather what matters is the total supply of workers. Immigration is just one input into that total supply; natural population increase is another. Here’s a graph of total employment in the US since January 1948: Between January 1948 and January 1973, employment grew at 1.45%/year.  From January 1973 to January 2020, employment grew at 1.38%/year.  So the supply of workers actually grew more slowly during the late 20th century immigration boom than during the post-WWII decades.  And the slowdown for non-farm payrolls was even more dramatic, as during the earlier period there was still a lot of labor moving from farms to the cities. To be clear, this doesn’t prove that immigration didn’t reduce wages, ceteris paribus.  That would require a more sophisticated study.  What is shows is that the “common sense” argument that more supply of workers obviously leads to lower wage gains doesn’t explain why wage growth slowed after 1973—some other factor must have been involved.  (I suspect that a slower rate of productivity growth was the main problem, with a lot of wasteful spending on fringe benefits such as medical care being another factor.) It is possible that immigration affected real wages in certain industries, especially the wages of less skilled workers.  If so, the US might want to consider switching to an immigration policy where the productivity of immigrants more closely matches that of the existing US population.  Because many illegal immigrants are low skilled, that would mean shifting our legal immigration toward higher skilled workers.  My own view is that low skilled immigration is fine, but politically it’s a tough sell. This post was motivated by a tweet that showed a stunning decline in US population growth, to a rate of barely over 0.1% in 2020-2021.  This is partly due to Covid, which reduced births, increased deaths, and reduced immigration.  But population growth has been slowing for decades. Some might point to the fact that a smaller labor supply during Covid has been associated with more rapid wage gains.  But it is real wages that matter most, and real wages have fallen over the past year.   BTW, the following map shows that the Covid pandemic has led to some unusual population changes: Some of these changes, such as rapid growth in Texas and Idaho and population decline in Illinois and West Virginia, have been going on for years.  But some changes are surprising, such as the decline in population in Massachusetts and DC, and the fast growth in Montana.  That might reflect people leaving dense areas for supposedly (but not really) safe low-density areas.  Or it might reflect people who work from home choosing to live where they can go hiking in the mountains.  (Or some of each.) New York and California have consistently relied on international immigration to offset domestic outmigration.  With the flow of foreign migrants sharply reduced by Covid, their populations declined significantly. PS.  Montana does have a slightly lower death rate from Covid than Massachusetts (but much higher than DC).  But after the initial wave in the spring of 2020, Montana has been hit harder than Massachusetts.  So fleeing to low-density areas doesn’t seem to make much difference.   On the other hand, the difference between states may be partly behavioral, so if cautious Massachusetts migrants to Montana continue their safe practices in their new home, they might be safer after all.   PPS.  Reduced immigration is a factor in the current labor shortage, as this Washington Post story illustrates: Helen Muradyan, a second-year resident physician, stopped working last month. Not because her skills aren’t needed. To the contrary: The Southern California community hospital and health clinic that employed Muradyan struggle to find staff even during normal times. The pandemic worsened their staffing shortages. “At one point we were operating at 150 percent of capacity,” Muradyan told me. “We worked day, night. We worked without breaks or anything, without seeing our loved ones, without seeing our family.” But Muradyan, an immigrant from Armenia, had to stop working — because the U.S. government couldn’t be bothered to process her application to renew her work permit. Eventually, her existing work permit expired, and her employers had to terminate her. (0 COMMENTS)

The Italian antitrust body has fined Amazon for $ 1.3 billion, a very substantial amount considering that the company’s net income in 2020 was $21.3 billion. I’ve written on the matter for Project Syndacate. The Italian antitrust authority: …fined Amazon as a marketplace, on the grounds that it requires sellers who want to benefit from its Prime service also to enroll in its own logistics service, Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA). Because Prime subscribers receive free shipping and rapid delivery of packages for select goods, many merchants will pay Amazon to ensure that their products fall into this category (which includes being showcased in promotions like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Prime Day). It is not surprising that Amazon would tether these two services together. To keep its promise to Prime subscribers, it must ensure timely deliveries, and the best way to do that is to have direct control of the logistics. This approach is hardly unique to the digital economy or Big Tech. Amazon is dealing with a basic issue of commercial distribution. A company can promise you express delivery only insofar as it thinks it can keep that promise. Otherwise, its business model would be at the mercy of variables beyond its control, such as the reliability of vendors or the efficiency of the postal service. …A marketplace’s success depends on its reputation, and Amazon has staked its platform’s reputation on reliability. A record of reliability takes a long time to build, and it inevitably sets the bar higher for new market entrants. By declaring the relationship between Amazon’s Prime service and its logistics infrastructure to be an abuse, the Italian trustbusters are implying that the two can be unbundled. On the theory that Amazon is killing competition from independent (though presumably less reliable) couriers, it has ordered the company to allow merchants into Prime without requiring them to enroll in FBA. What surprised me the most, reading the ruling (which is a pretty interesting detailed description of how marketplaces work), was the absence of any worry in terms of consumer welfare. Antitrust scholars have been busy in burying the approach to such matter influenced by the Chicago school for years now, so that should not be surprising. But the fact that even lip service is not paid to those kind of worries is, I think, telling. Those who are interested in restoring a more balanced approach to competition policy have loads of work to do, like our forerunners in the 1960s and 70s. (0 COMMENTS)

A recent opinion poll by the Wall Street Journal reveals that 50% of Americans support President Biden’s Covid-19 vaccine requirements for private-sector employers, while 47% oppose them. Other opinion polls over the past few decades and perhaps especially over the past few years have suggested, although perhaps not unambiguously, that American opinion has been shifting away from individual liberty and towards more power to political authority (see also my Econlog post “Many Americans Don’t Like Free Speech”). Are we observing bumps in fickle public opinion about politics or instead witnessing a shift in long-term “opinion” taken in the more abstract sense of what the general public considers just? Like many classical liberals, Friedrich Hayek considered opinion in this last sense to be the justification and limitation of political authority. In volume 1 of Law, Legislation, and Liberty, published five decades ago, Hayek wrote (I am quoting from the University of Chicago Press new consolidated edition under the editorship of Jeremy Shearmur): In this sense all power rests on, and is limited by, opinion, as was most clearly seen by David Hume. That all power rests on opinion in this sense is no less true of the powers of an absolute dictator than of those of any other authority. As dictators themselves have always known, even the most powerful dictatorship crumbles if the support of opinion is withdrawn. This is the reason dictators are so concerned to manipulate opinion through information which [it] is in their power to control. Opinion is important for maintaining a free society: And in a free society in which all power rests on opinion, this ultimate power will be a power which determines nothing directly yet controls all positive power by tolerating only certain kinds of exercise of that power. One conclusion of Hayek’s economic-legal theory is that a free society cannot long survive outside a context of classical-liberal opinion. That it is worse in many other countries provides only a meager consolation. Hayek’s more general thesis is that, in a free society, the only exercise of power allowed by opinion is the enforcement of abstract, impersonal, and non-discriminatory rules of conduct, as well as the administration of government subject to those rules (except for the special power of levying taxes). Note that justifying government intervention by omnipresent externalities is not consistent with this sort of society (see my “The Threat of Externalities,” Regulation, Fall 2021, pp. 18-24), even if Hayek’s explanations on that front may not be totally satisfactory (see pp. 130-133 and 137 ff. in the Shearmur edition). It is anyway worth reading Hayek, who was one of the most challenging thinkers of the 20th century, and not only challenging for conservatives and progressives. (1 COMMENTS)

Youngkin, Virginia’s new governor-elect plans to end the state-level mask mandate, but will not impose a mandate ban on localities: After his inaugural ceremony on Jan. 15, Youngkin said he will not mandate masks and vaccines but–unlike some Republican governors–he will not attempt to block localities from implementing their own requirements. “Localities are going to have to make decisions the way the law works and that is going to be up to individual decisions but, again, from the governor’s office, you won’t see mandates from me,” Youngkin clarified in a one-on-one interview over the weekend. However, Youngkin has also promised to end the teaching of Critical Race Theory throughout Virginia’s public schools. Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin said Saturday that if he is elected the commonwealth’s next governor he will “ban” the teaching of critical race theory on his first day in office. In other words, he’s not leaving it up to localities. Which raises a big question: Why trust local governments to make the right decisions on masks, but not the curriculum? The obvious rationale for the CRT ban is that you don’t trust local governments to make the right choice because they’re somehow dominated by left-wing ideologues.  Either local leaders are themselves ideologues, or they’re so beholden to teachers’ unions that they might as well be. But if that’s what you think, why on Earth would you trust localities to make the right choice on masks?  If local leaders are left-wing ideologues, or so beholden to teachers’ unions that they might as well be, then localities will mandate masks almost regardless of the objective risks. The cynical explanation is that Virginia voters clearly oppose CRT in schools, but not masks in schools.  Which also fits with Youngkin’s support for long-standing vaccine mandates, but not a Covid vaccine mandate…   (2 COMMENTS)

One of my favorite economists at Harvard is Edward Glaeser, who has done outstanding work on cities and on housing. Earlier this year, I gave a positive review of Conor Dougherty’s Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America. In that book, Glaeser is one of the heroes who recognizes that, as my title put it, the solution to expensive housing is more housing. One reason I’m particularly fond of Glaeser is that he’s an activist. In my review, I wrote: While many academics who come up with powerful results simply move on to the next interesting area, Glaeser believes in publicizing his results. Writes Dougherty, “He started blogging about housing costs and writing op-eds about housing costs and becoming the subject of various newspaper profiles where he called the advent of strict zoning the most important shift in the U.S. housing market since the adoption of the automobile.” In Econ Focus, a publication of the Richmond Federal Reserve Bank, interviewer David A. Price, who generally does excellent interviews, does a nice interview of Glaeser. Asked about the future of small towns after the pandemic, Glaeser says it’s a tale of two towns.  The good news: If you are a small town like a college town, a place with high levels of amenities and beautiful scenery where rich people want to go, I think that the combination of the ability to do work remotely and perhaps some enduring pandemic fears means that you are as strong as you’ve ever been, if not more so. These places are poised to benefit. Take your Silicon Valley startup with 15 smart, hungry young people. Do we truly think in five years these people are just going to be Zooming it in from their suburban bedrooms? That sounds totally implausible to me. That sounds like a totally different work model that will lack all the energy and high quality in-person connections you get from being in the same room as one another. But on the other hand, are these 15 people going to decide, “Well we all love skiing, we’re tired of paying Silicon Valley prices, should we relocate to Vail?” Or say, “We don’t want to pay taxes, let’s relocate to Austin.” Or, “We want better surfing, let’s relocate to Honolulu.” That feels entirely plausible to me. The technology supports the mobility en masse of these groups to some different area. Places they’re most likely to relocate to are high-amenity places that will appeal to them along one of these dimensions. But, he continues: On the other hand, if you’re talking about small towns in relatively low-amenity places, places that are low density, farmland, low levels of education, these places have been declining for decades, and I see little reason why the decline would be reversed anytime soon. His answer on subsidies to housing came as a surprise, though. Glaeser says: Take housing. You really don’t need to subsidize the production of low-income housing in most of Texas, because they have an unfettered market that does a great job of providing lots of low-cost housing to middle-income residents. If you have Detroit, you don’t want to produce more low-cost housing, because they’ve got an abundance of low-cost housing there. But on the other hand, there’s probably a good case for doing something about low-cost housing in San Francisco or New York or Boston. That suggests to me, at least, that you want policies like the low-income housing tax credit that subsidizes new housing construction. You want that to be spatially limited. You want it to go in areas where there’s a genuine dearth of low-income housing. At the same time, you could have more housing vouchers in the areas where housing supply is elastic. You can have the right policy for the right place, which is something that America has traditionally found very difficult to do. But it’s just basic economics. I would have thought he would recognize, based on his own excellent work, that the thing to do in San Francisco, New York, or Boston is what they are starting do in San Francisco, namely, allow more housing. To his credit, he does propose that later in the interview, but simply allowing more housing would likely be more effective than subsidizing low-cost housing. (0 COMMENTS)

The big news over the weekend was Senator Manchin’s decision to oppose President Biden’s new fiscal package, which was expected to cost roughly $1.75 trillion. The economists at Goldman Sachs responded to this news by reducing their forecast of real economic growth in the first quarter of 2022 from 3% to 2%. Oddly, however, there doesn’t seem to have been any significant change in 10-year Treasury bond yields: I see a couple of possibilities here: Perhaps Goldman Sachs is wrong in assuming that fiscal policy has a big impact on growth. Perhaps slower growth (both real and nominal) has no impact on long-term bond yields. Perhaps the market believes that Manchin will reconsider, and agree to support a slightly different package. I am very skeptical of the second possibility, but am open to both the first and third options. Any thoughts?   (1 COMMENTS)

David, I thought of you recently and I just typed the phrase “Though I had only one class with him and he was my thesis advisor, I learned more from him than [from] any man I know.” The context was instruction for my niece, who is graduating with a Master of Science in Applied Nutrition, and is entering the world without a single course in any type of economics. In addition to a lot of other nuggets, examples, and calculators, I have included your Ten Pillars of Economic Wisdom, as I use the first seven almost every day in one way or another. (Honestly, I had to look the others up!) Though I was your student for a relatively small portion of my life, it remains true that what you taught me has so many applications that it is likely the most valuable knowledge I possess. And I am getting old enough to drop people a note whenever I think of them! Best, Gill I received this note as a private message on Facebook yesterday from a former student whom I taught at the Naval Postgraduate School. He gave me permission to give his name: Miguel O’Hara. Here are the 10 Pillars of Economic Wisdom, with which I opened each course I taught at NPS for about the last 20 to 25 years of my teaching there: 1. TANSTAAFL: There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. 2. Incentives matter; incentives affect behavior. 3. Economic thinking is thinking on the margin. 4. The only way to create wealth is to move resources from a lower-valued to a higher-valued use. Corollary: Both sides gain from exchange. 5. Information is valuable and costly, and most information that’s valuable is inherently decentralized. 6. Every action has unintended consequences; you can never do only one thing. 7. The value of a good or a service is subjective. 8. Creating jobs is not the same as creating wealth. 9. The only way to increase a nation’s real income is to increase its real output. 10. Competition is a hardy weed, not a delicate flower. It’s heartening to receive appreciative notes from students I had taught between 5 and 20 years ago. It’s even more heartening to see that they’re applying some of the most important things I taught. Note on picture above: Liberty Fund encourages bloggers to include pictures or illustrations with each post. I couldn’t find a good picture of a pillar and I couldn’t find a picture of me teaching. So I used the cover of my book The Joy of Freedom: An Economist’s Odyssey because Chapter 2 of that book contains an early version of the 10 Pillars of Economic Wisdom. (1 COMMENTS)

More than we need rules, argues Michael Munger, we need rules about the rules. So does the United States need a new Constitution? Listen as the Duke University economist and political scientist talks to host Russ Roberts about public choice, consenting to coercion, and whether constitutions matter. The post Michael Munger on Constitutions appeared first on Econlib.