Seriously, via my John Locke Institute Summer School colleague Lord Dan Hannan: Over the summer I participated in teaching in a school, appropriately called the John Locke Institute. Rather like what the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Birmingham was describing in his home city, it tries to teach young people the idea of what the administrators of the course call “generous listening”. It is a lovely phrase. Generous listening means not waiting, patiently or impatiently, for the other person to stop speaking so that you can jump in. It means properly trying to engage with where they are coming from. If they use a loose word, do not pounce on it. Do not engage with their weakest argument; engage with their best argument. The Oxford Union organised something they called “ideological Turing test debates”, where young people would be given a topical debate—should statues come down, should private schools be abolished—and you had to guess whether they really meant it. In other words, they had to master the other point of view well enough that they would have passed the Turing test and people would not have been able to tell whether they believed what they were saying. Is that not the sort of thing that all our schools and universities should be doing, in order to equip people to function in modern society? I fear that, when they do the opposite and say, “The most important thing about you is that you are female, white” or whatever it is, instead of teaching those countercyclical truths, they are teaching procyclical tribalism. Background on the Ideological Turing Test here, here, and here.  I wonder if this means Wikipedia will reinstate the excellent-yet-deleted article on the ITT? Dan Hannan’s is possibly the best public speaker I’ve ever seen in person.  Full video of his speech: HT: Martin Cox (0 COMMENTS)

At least in Italy, every day the media are full of pandemic news, and hence it is becoming more and more difficult to stumble upon something genuinely interesting. Yet this article by Adam Grant for the New York Times certainly is. It deals with the sort of communication governments pursued during the pandemic. My main takeaway is the following sentence: Fear generally works best for motivating one-time acts, especially those that feel risky. Last year, fear was probably an effective way to motivate people to get their first vaccine. But it tends to be less effective for driving repeated behaviors such as getting a second dose and a booster. Whatever we think of the merit of their decisions and the measures they took, experts and governments just assumed that scaring people was the thing to do. Even today, with the Omicron variant, more and more European governments are doing just that. The problem, Grant suggests, is that fear-based communication is not sustainable; what happens with the passing of time is that we end up in “the boring apocalypse” (the title of his piece). He writes: Since 2020, scientists have made astonishing strides in learning how to prevent and treat Covid-19. Health authorities should be applying the same scientific discipline to communications about Covid. Some promising approaches include informing people that a shot has been reserved for them, inviting them to do their part in reciprocating the enormous sacrifices of health care workers and inquiring about what would motivate them to consider a vaccine. Public health experts can also improve how the message is delivered. It’s not helpful to keep defaulting to what some vaccine skeptics dismiss as “fear porn” about Covid-19, or trying to neutralize fears of immunization with blanket statements that vaccines are safe and effective (How safe? How effective — and for whom?). Experiments show that communications become more convincing when they address counterarguments and acknowledge uncertainty. A more persuasive and honest message is that of course vaccines have risks, but the best available evidence suggests that the risks of Covid-19 are both far more likely and far more severe. While Grant’s piece is original and worth pondering, it also makes you wonder why, with all the experience we have with communications, and with the constantly growing body of research on the subject (which is likely to be more familiar/more accessible to decision makers than immunology literature is), governments tended to screw up communicating about Covid-19, and now flirt with vaccine mandates without considering the downside. I may be influenced by the terrible communication we had in Italy, where the pandemic was moralised and became a battlefield for politicised scientists. (0 COMMENTS)

You need only one customer. I posted back in August about the Canadian federal government’s subsidies to newspapers. I pointed out that this is a threat to press freedom. But it’s beyond a threat. It’s a per se decline in press freedom. The essence of freedom of the press is that people are free to write what they want using their own resources or the resources of those who voluntarily fund them. But the federal government forcibly takes money from people and uses it to fund newspapers. So freedom of the press is less than if the federal government refrained from doing this. I’m not the only one who has noticed. About the same government subsidy program I reported on, Peter Menzies, in an article titled “The Growing Number of Canadian Journalists Who Are Funded by the Feds,” C2C Journal, December 11, 2021, writes: To me, that changes everything. If that’s a story paid for with my (and your) hard-earned tax dollars, and it’s being fed at government expense across the country into the Toronto Star and heaven knows how many other outlets, whether it’s journalism or activism is now my business, your business and probably Coastal GasLink’s business too. The story he was referring to was this one in a government-subsidized publication called The Narwhal. Menzies lays out an obvious effect of government funding: Tom Korski is co-founder of the subscription-based Blacklock’s Reporter, which focuses on digging out exclusive stories of Parliament Hill/federal government behaviour, frequently using Freedom of Information requests. A fierce critic of government journalism funding, Korski sees the issue as straightforward. Such publications will have even less financial incentive to care about what their readers think because henceforth, the veteran reporter says, “You only need one customer and that’s the [federal] Minister of Heritage.” In short, government funding will make publications less integrated with their local communities.   (0 COMMENTS)

Some wisdom from Chris Freiman, reposted with his permission. Somewhat related to my recent piece on motivated reasoning about deterrence. I’ve noticed a bunch of suspiciously convenient asymmetries in influence lately. That is, people tend to believe that they are influential when that would produce the results they want and believe that they aren’t influential when influence would produce results they don’t want. Two examples: 1) People think the example they set by voting or eating vegan will cause a bunch of others to follow suit. But they don’t think the example they set by drinking or speeding will influence others. 2) Academics will respond to the accusation that they indoctrinate students by noting that they can’t even get students to read the syllabus. Fair enough, but if we can’t even get students to read the syllabus, it’s hard to see how higher education is going to help enrich and illuminate the lives of our students. (1 COMMENTS)

The problem of lawlessness can be solved by the rule of law. Now, “rule of law” seems redundant, since laws are a kind of rule. But the point is that the “rule of law” is juxtaposed against “rule of men,” in which the judgements of the judge, and the privileges of the disputants, determine the outcome. Sir Edward Coke famously said, “Magna Charta is such a fellow, that he will have no “Sovereign” in debate in the House of Commons in 1628. The point being that even the king is bound by the law, rather than the king having sole discretion to decide what the law says. Edward Coke and Magna Carta I know that prerogative is part of the law, but “Sovereign Power” is no parliamentary word. In my opinion it weakens Magna Charta, and all the statutes; for they are absolute, without any saving of “Sovereign Power”; and should we now add it, we shall weaken the foundation of law, and then the building must needs fall. Take we heed what we yield unto: Magna Charta is such a fellow, that he will have no “Sovereign.” I wonder this “Sovereign” was not in Magna Charta, or in the confirmations of it. If we grant this, by implication we give a “Sovereign Power” above all laws. (Debate in the House of Commons, May 17, 1628) The advantages of “rule of law” are obvious: the rules are consistently applied and enforced, without privilege or exemption. As F.A. Hayek put it, the purpose of the rule of law “is to limit coercion by the power of the state to instances where it is explicitly required by general abstract rules which have been announced beforehand and which applied equally to all people, and refer to circumstances known to them (F.  A.  Hayek,  The  Political Ideal of the  Rule  of Law. Cairo: National  Bank  of  Egypt Printing  Press,  1955; p. 34). But note that there is an implicit assumption (even Hayek does it, in the quote above) that the rule of law involves a monopoly, single body of law, provided by a monopoly, single entity, the state. The rationale is the Hobbesian-Weberian story that the state is violence, and violence is required to enforce contracts. As Hobbes put it, in Book II of Leviathan: For the laws of nature, as justice, equity, modesty, mercy, and, in sum, going to others as we would be done to, of themselves, without the terror of some power to cause them to be observed, are contrary to our natural passions, that carry us to partiality, pride, revenge, and the like. And covenants, without the sword, are but words and of no strength to secure a man at all. Defenders of liberty often want to define anything private as “voluntary” and anything done by the state as “coercive.” But that’s not right; violence or coercion in support of promises (“covenants”) we want to agree to is not only useful, but actually essential to being able to make enforceable agreements. Market entities and other private associations require recourse to coercion, so long as the terms under which coercion is employed are voluntarily agreed upon in advance. The problem is not violence; the problem is monopoly! The key distinction, and the necessary condition for liberalism to work, then, should be made between artificial monopoly and negotiated, free-entry competition for controlling coercion. Allowing people to cooperate in many different ways, and encouraging the creation of alternative forms of adjudication of disputes over breach of agreements, and imposition of damages for failure to keep promises solves the Hobbesian problem, and treats all of us as equals before the law. The Hobbesian solution was more plausible in a world where there were prohibitive costs of keeping track of identity and reputation, and the ex ante contracting costs of anticipating ways of resolving disputes. It is no longer necessary to create a vast monopoly entity capable of unanswerable violence; all that is necessary is that citizens adopt a set of institutions that instantiate a presumption that we are all equal before the law. Some libertarians (including John Hasnas) have claimed that the “rule of law,” at least in terms of a coherent, stable political law, is nonsense. What Hasnas wants people to recognize is that for liberalism to be an actual alternative to the Hobbesian model that concludes state monopoly contract enforcement, liberalism has to accept the logic of its own position: people must be able to negotiate rules of laws, for their own agreements. The relevant equality is not that we all are the same before “The Law” (singlular, one size fits all, spoken of with reverence), but that we all have an equal opportunity to negotiate the laws. The alternative solution to the problem of Hobbesian “war of all against all,” then, is “common law liberalism.” As John Hasnas has pointed out, in an argument many people might find shocking, the key distinction is not “markets=liberty” and “state=coercion.” In fact, there is (and should be!) coercion in all systems. The ability to coerce a contract partner to carry out their promises is a key aspect of liberty, without which contracts would be unenforceable. As Hasnas puts it: The position that I now hold, which I perhaps inaccurately refer to as common law libertarianism or common law liberalism, is consistent with the arguments against the monopolistic state provision of services without implying an absence of all morally legitimate coercive regulation of human activity. The state suffers from not only incentive problems but also a knowledge problem. One system of law cannot possibly answer the needs of all persons, in all settings. Nevertheless, it is at least possible to begin to address this problem by having multiple competing systems of “law,” or traditions of dispute resolution and contract enforcement, and to allow the selection of adjudication and enforcement regimes to be negotiated along with the other terms of contracts. Price, delivery date, and the flavor of enforcement protocol we agree on are all parts of our voluntarily negotiated deal, and all are enforceable for that reason. The “rules of laws” requires that individuals be able to act on their perceptions that different systems of law and different arrangements of adjudication of disputes can be desirable.   Michael Munger teaches at Duke University and is Director of the interdisciplinary program in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) at Duke University. He is a frequent guest on EconTalk. Read more of Michael Munger’s writing at Archive. (0 COMMENTS)

I was called by KCBS yesterday afternoon while watching the San Francisco 49ers game and asked to come on to discuss inflation. This is the result. It goes only 4 minutes and 17 seconds. For more on inflation, see Lawrence H. White, “Inflation,” in David R. Henderson, ed., The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, Liberty Fund, 2008. (0 COMMENTS)

Sports markets are not as efficient as financial markets. Nonetheless, the concept of market efficiency does have important implications for sports. Consider how the NBA has evolved in response to the three point shot. Teams gradually learned that the best strategy was to take lots of three point shots (long shots) and layups (relatively easy 2 point shots.) A recent article in The Ringer describes how defenses have adjusted to this optimal strategy so that “quality shots” are now more difficult: In a league that has spent the past decade learning the mathematical advantage of a layups-and-3s offensive philosophy, every indication should be that Houston would be shooting more efficiently and thus playing better than Brooklyn. And yet, anyone paying attention to the standings would know that the opposite is the case: The 7-16 Rockets rank 22nd in effective field goal percentage (eFG%), while the 16-7 Nets rank sixth. For a long time across the NBA, a team’s shot distribution could reasonably predict its offensive success: Take good shots, enjoy good results. Simple. But that relationship, which had declined each season for the past half-decade, is now gone—and may not be coming back. Shot quality doesn’t matter anymore—and both team-building and on-court strategies might have to shift their focus as a result. I recall when there was a major inefficiency in professional football.  I often used to be secretly pleased when the opposing team punted on 4th and 1 at midfield.  But why should the decision of the opposing coach make me happy?  His job is to make me unhappy.  My intuition was telling me that NFL coaching was bad.  With the advent of “analytics”, football coaching has improved in recent years, and teams go for it on 4th down more often than in the past.  But for each strategy change there is a response: For teams wanting to retain an analytical edge, it’s on to the next market inefficiency. Sports are less efficient than financial markets because there is no easy way for most informed observers to profit from market inefficiencies.  Only a few people, such as coaches on other teams (say Bill Belichick) could take advantage of bad coaching.  Nonetheless, sports efficiency does gradually improve over time. With apologies to Martin Luther King, the arc of sports strategy is long, but it bends toward efficiency. Of course efficiency in sports can be boring, and hence it makes sense to occasionally change the rules when smart coaches and players figure out boring but effective strategies.  What about moving the three point line in basketball back a bit?  And would professional tennis be more fun for fans if the net were three inches higher?  Would there be a greater variety of shots?   (0 COMMENTS)

Physiologist Jared Diamond’s 1997 Guns, Germs, and Steel. The Fates of Human Societies is a rare publishing phenomenon. An ambitious yet accessible study on the development of human civilization, it won a Pulitzer Prize, sold over a million copies, was translated into 36 languages, turned up on college reading lists everywhere, and was eventually made into a 3-part National Geographic TV series. What impressed many reviewers was, in the words of the National Geographic narrator, Diamond’s “highly original theory that what separates the winners from the losers is the land itself – geography. It was the shape of the continents, their crops and animals that allowed some cultures to flourish while others were left behind.” Yet, as illustrated by the fact he buried his discussion of prior writings on this idea in the book’s endnotes, Diamond was well aware that geographical or environmental determinism had a long and often appalling history of justifying social or racial superiority and colonial enterprises. Not surprisingly, he has ever since been at pains to defend his very different take on the subject. In a nutshell, proponents of environmental determinism maintain that people and cultures are the way they are because they have been shaped by their physical environment. Needless to say, some environments and climates are more conducive to success than others. Aristotle famously commented in his Politics that “those who live in a cold climate and in [northern] Europe are full of spirit, but wanting in intelligence and skill; and therefore they keep their freedom, but have no political organization, and are incapable of ruling over others.” In the more torrid parts of the Middle East, the “natives of Asia” proved “intelligent and inventive, but they are wanting in spirit, and therefore they are always in a state of subjection and slavery.” Luckily, the “Hellenic race, which is situated between them, is likewise intermediate in character, being high-spirited and also intelligent. Hence it continues free, and is the best-governed of any nation, and, if it could be formed into one state, would be able to rule the world.” Other environmental determinists put more weight on the benefits of adverse conditions. Montesquieu observed in his The Spirit of Laws that the “barrenness of the earth renders men industrious, sober, inured to hardship, courageous, and fit for war: they are obliged to procure by labour what the earth refuses to bestow spontaneously.”  By contrast, the “fertility of a country gives ease, effeminacy, and a certain fondness for the preservation of life.” A few decades later John Stuart Mill argued along similar lines that “neither now nor in former ages have the nations possessing the best climate and soil, been either the richest or the most powerful; but (in so far as regards the mass of the people) generally among the poorest, though, in the midst of poverty, probably on the whole the most enjoying.” Part of the problem, Mills argued, was that “[h]uman life in those countries can be supported on so little, that the poor seldom suffer from anxiety, and in climates in which mere existence is a pleasure, the luxury which they prefer is that of repose.” The fact that technological achievements in a particular location are profoundly affected by the local physical geography is obviously indisputable. After all, one does not fault the past inhabitants of Switzerland or the Tibetan plateau for having contributed little to maritime technology, nor past Inuit people for failing to develop agriculture. Yet, the evidence pointing to the profound impact of geography and climate on political institutions and human achievements has always been extremely thin. As critics have long observed, the dominant culture at different points in time (e.g., Mediterranean or northern European) is always said to be the beneficiary of the best physical geography. The key problem, however, is that a constant factor is used to explain very variable outcomes over time. One of the best short essays against environmental determinism is Voltaire’s entry on the “climate” in his Philosophical Dictionary. One of his targets was his contemporary Jean Chardin, according to whom in Persia the climate was so warm that it “enervates the mind as well as the body, and dissipates that fire which the imagination requires for invention.” “In such climates,” Chardin wrote, “men are incapable of the long studies and intense application which are necessary to the production of first-rate works in the liberal and mechanic arts.” And yet, Voltaire commented, “Chardin did not consider that Sadi and Lokman were Persians,” nor did he “recollect that Archimedes belonged to Sicily, where the heat is greater than in three-fourths of Persia.” He also forgot that “Pythagoras formerly taught geometry to the Brahmins.” Another problem for the likes of Chardin and Montesquieu, Voltaire wrote, was that “[e]verything changes, both in bodies and minds, by time” when the “climate has not at all changed.” One need only look at the changing political fortunes and intellectual achievements in Egypt, Greece, Rome and England to see the truth of this statement. Indeed, in his Misopogon, the Roman Emperor Julian commented nearly a millennia and half earlier that what “pleased him in the Parisians was the gravity of their characters and the severity of their manners.” Observing his contemporaries, Voltaire couldn’t refrain from observing that “these Parisians, without the slightest change of climate, are now like playful children, at whom the government punishes and smiles at the same moment, and who themselves, the moment after, also smile and sing lampoons upon their masters.” Climate, Voltaire wrote, “has some influence, government a hundred times more; religion and government combined more still.” In the end though, perhaps the most pithy jibe against environmental determinism is the fact that, in the words of development economist Peter Bauer, the “weather tends to be bad in centrally controlled economies.” Climate activists who are steering us in this political direction in the name of “building back better” should ponder these words.   Pierre Desrochers, is Associate Professor of Geography, University of Toronto Mississauga. 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When I was touring Mexico last year, my family stayed at a virtually vacant hotel on a vast estate.  The hospitable staff, with little to do thanks to Covid, gave us a grand tour of the grounds.  Along the way, they pointed out a bunch of minor Mayan artifacts.  And in hushed tones, they asked us not to alert the authorities.  If the government of Mexico knew they had artifacts, they might be legally seized.  Or worse. Nor is Mexico especially harsh.  Around the world, governments claim ownership of archeological finds on private property.  And the result is predictable: Archaeology lives in chains.  People have little incentive – or even a negative incentive – to hunt for artifacts.  As a result, the glorious patrimony of humanity stays in the ground. Admittedly, there is a black market, but it’s tiny compared to what could have been.  After all, one of the main reasons to buy artifacts is to publicly display them – and it’s dangerous to publicly display evidence of criminal complicity. Wouldn’t legalizing the market lead to trespassing and theft?  Almost surely.  If you let people make money selling corn, this encourages people to sneak onto cornfields and steal corn.  Yet at the same time, it encourages people to protect their cornfields.  Compared to the gains of private property rights, the costs of trespassing and theft is a rounding error. The main problem with my proposal is that the government has already seized a lot of the most archaeologically promising land.  So just respecting private property rights isn’t enough.  Instead, governments need to privatize this land forthwith.  Have some big auctions and pay down their national debt. Wouldn’t foreigners swoop in and win the auctions?  To a large extent, yes.  And that’s good.  It’s called foreign investment, and it’s the best-known way to spread prosperity from the First World to the Third.  Because foreign investment is not just know-how, and it’s not just technology.  It’s leadership. Wouldn’t this be a return to the bad old days of colonialism?  Well, colonial powers did many bad things, but allowing a largely free market in antiquities was not one of them.  The 19th-century was a golden age of archaeology.  If modern laws had been enforced back then, much – perhaps most – of the best stuff in modern museums would remain undiscovered.  The idea that artifacts rightfully belong to “the nation as a whole” is classic flowery socialist rhetoric, with classic dismal socialist results. In any case, even if you cling to the ideal of collective property, there is a keyhole solution: Instead of banning the sale of artifacts, just tax it.   This allows “the nation as a whole” (i.e. the government) to capture much of the surplus, without crippling the industry. Is any country rich in archeological treasure likely to take this free-market route?  As usual, no.  Though perhaps my friends in Guatemala could manage to make something good happen.  Right now, Guatemala is full of barely-excavated Mayan sites; they don’t have the funds to do much more than maintain what they’ve already got.  Legalizing the market – and auctioning off government-owned sites to the highest bidder – really could transform the Guatemalan economy – and bring riches to many of their poorest communities. Yes, let Disney buy Tikal.  Only nationalist and socialist demagoguery stands in the way. P.S. While we’re at it, we still need to privatize Lenin. (0 COMMENTS)

Mustafa Akyol has a most interesting article for Cato on the Turkish economic situation. Inflation is galloping, as Pierre Lemieux reported in his thoughtful post a few days ago. In short, “in 2012, 1 U.S. dollar equaled 1.8 Turkish liras. Today, after an accelerating downward spiral of the Turkish currency, 1 dollar equals 13.7 liras.” Pierre explains that Erdogan is “defending his own intuitive economic theories … Erdogan believes that interest rates cause inflation. It is useful for a dictator to have some knowledge of economics or sufficient wisdom to hire or believe advisors and officials who do. Erdogan has been firing all those—including three central bank governors in less than years—and replaced them with blindly loyal and ignorant yes men”. Akyol adds that Erdogan’s views are rooted in “Muslim economics”, which he explains as following: This ideological construct, which appeared in the mid 20th century with unmistakably Marxist influences, is different from the 14‐centuries‐old economic experience of Islamic societies, which, especially in the beginning, reflected a vibrant and pioneering commercial capitalism. (Surely, interest was a problem also in this pre‐modern Islamic capitalism, as the Qur’an strongly condemned riba, or “usury.” But some jurists distinguished “excessively exploitative” moneylending from “reasonable” interest rates, allowing the “cash foundations” in the Ottoman Empire, which functioned as pre‐modern banks. More importantly, as historian Timur Kuran has noted, the concern with riba was never taken as the basis of a distinct economic system, until the rise of “Islamic economics,” which itself was a component of the modern‐day Islamist movement.) Erdogan, a veteran of Turkey’s Islamist movement, seems to be committed to this ideological construct, which he apparently cannot distinguish from being a pious Muslim Seeing things quite at a distance, my perception was that, at the beginning, Erdogan was quite successful in moving the Turkish economy out of an economic slump. But that was 2002: Erdogan has been serving *that* long either as prime minister or president (but always in firm command of the country). My sense is that typically any kind of leadership, even the most illuminated one, if prolonged basically forever tends to move towards cronyism. Akyol’s point is far more interesting and points to the ideological underpinning of Erdoganomics and the current setback.   P.S. Readers might also enjoy Akyol’s recent Liberty Matters feature, Liberty Was Islam’s First Call at the Online Library of Liberty.   (0 COMMENTS)