Amazon Prime’s new 4 part documentary on MLM giant LuLaRoe is a must-see for anyone interested in questions about American entrepreneurship, the history of women in entrepreneurship, and–sadly–entrepreneurship that goes wrong. Founded in 2012 by DeAnne Brady and her husband Mark Stidham, LuLaRoe used a network of independent distributors using “social retail” to sell their whimsically patterned skirts, dresses, and leggings, in at home parties reminiscent of the Tupperware parties of the 50s and 60s. Distributors spent between five and ten thousand dollars for a stock of clothing items, which they then marketed on their own. By 2017, the company had more than 80,000 distributors.  The company’s origin story is magical, particularly for those of us with a strong belief in the power of entrepreneurial vision. Young mother DeAnne Brady, who had been hosting in-home sales parties for fashions made by others, made a maxi skirt for her daughter. The skirt was so cute, she made a few more, began selling them, and had sold 20,000 skirts in six months. It’s a classic American business story. Young, struggling entrepreneur with a great idea and a lot of gumption makes good. And Brady and Stidham say all the right things. They wanted to support women. Help them achieve. Unleash the underutilized resource of mothers who wanted to help the family budget. But as LuLaRich makes clear, while they had all the right mottos, they had all the wrong morals. The bourgeois virtues were nowhere to be found at LuLaRoe. LuLaRoe’s timing, as the documentary explains, was ideal. The  economic stagnation of the earliest years of the 2010s meant that a lot of families were looking for extra income. Social media–particularly Instagram–was beginning to take off. And women, as always, were desperate to fulfill the dream of adding to the family income without taking away from time at home. That dream is what MLM companies rely on. And that dream may well have been particularly compelling within the Latter Day Saints communities in which LuLaRoe first began to take off, and some of the most heartbreaking moments of the documentary are the individual interviews with these women as they tearily discuss their interactions with the company.  LuLaRich emphasizes the appeal of that entrepreneurial dream and the way that young mothers were persuaded that selling LuLaRoe could be the key to achieving it. Film clips show former distributors praising the company as “a community,” a “sisterhood,” a society where you are “never alone” because “we got you.” The limited runs of prints and the rise of shopping during Facebook Live events drove a shopping frenzy for particularly desirable patterns, or “unicorns” that put the earlier in-home parties and “pop-ups” in the shade. The problem, of course, is that demand curves slope down. The number of LuLaRoe distributors grew incredibly quickly, and the supply of whimsically patterned athleisure rapidly outstripped demand. At the same time, the company’s unsteady underpinnings began to be revealed. Brady and Stidham had hired their inexperienced adult children to run crucial parts of the company. Warehouse inventory for the near 1 billion dollar company was managed with one shared Google spreadsheet. Meanwhile the onboarding team was pressured to bring on more and more distributors every day, and individual distributors were pressured to recruit new distributors to “grow their line,” and get bonuses for the sales of those new distributors. They were growing by 25% per month.   There were too many people. And there was too little product, and the product was getting worse.   Distributors had no ability to select the prints they wanted to carry, so they had no way to suit their stock to the tastes of their customers or to ensure that they were getting up to date prints rather than out of date products. Designers were pressured to create more and more prints, which designer EIliana Estarellas says was “like making art with a gun against my head.” She also mentions that she found the prints she was creating increasingly “tacky.” So did distributors, one of whom says “It became known to us that LuLaRoe made what I would call shit product. In fact, the uglier the better. It doesn’t matter. They don’t see it and they’re going to buy it anyway.” Zippers and seams were not put in carefully. Fabric tore or contained pinholes. Clothing was faded and sun-damaged. Product began to be delivered to distributors damaged or water-soaked or fetid, perhaps because product was often stored outside of warehouses. Distributor complaints were ignored. And the onboarding only continued. And costs were going up. The higher “up the line” you were, the more events you were expected to attend and to pay for. The bigger the company got, the splashier they wanted their events to be–like cruises and  concerts by Kelly Clarkson and  Katy Perry. Distributors were encouraged to spend wildly on dinners for prospective entrants into the LuLaRoe network, on designer fashions to create the impression of success, and even on weight loss surgery. DeAnn is on video saying she brought at least 18 LuLaRoe distributors down to Tijuana for gastric sleeve surgery. The group called themselves the “Tijuana Skinnies.” In episode three of the documentary, LuLaRoe distributors begin to talk about the life advice offered to them by the company. This began with seemingly innocuous messages like “family first” and “you can’t succeed in business if you’re a failure in the home–and culminated with DeAnn providing workplace training about how to “use your special parts” to get your husband to do what you want, and telling distributors that “all you have to do is spend five minutes on your knees every day and your husband will let you buy anything you want.” Wifely submission and obedience were advised at every turn, particularly to women who were earning well. Weirdly, this rhetoric of submission was all coupled with an insistence that wives could, and should, earn enough from LuLaRoe to allow their husbands to stop working–a tactic that many interviewed say was obviously designed to make families completely dependent on the LuLaRoe network. It is instructive and astonishing to watch LuLaRich, particularly when the documentary focuses on its two founders, who insist–while describing a classing MLM–that they did not create an MLM, and that all they wanted to do was to help women achieve. Their nephew, who worked for the firm, explicitly calls LuLaRoe a pyramid scheme. As journalist Jill Flipovic notes, “LuLaRoe says that because they exchanged goods for money, they are not a pyramid scheme. But the primary way…they are making the money is not selling the clothing.” In the end, distributors were stuck with poorly made product that they couldn’t possibly sell. Meanwhile, they were berated by the founders for complaining and whining, for failing to “work it,” and for betraying the company culture. Worse, the company often simply denied that the problems existed. Soon, the social media that had powered LuLaRoe’s rise, turned against it, as former distributors went online to talk about the company culture, show videos and photos of damaged product, and eventually, begin proceedings for a class-action suit.  Things heated up when the bonus structure changed and bonus checks got cut in half, or more. LuLaRoe also began a “buyback” program, where they committed to buy back any unsold merchandise from distributors for 100% of the wholesale cost. Taken together the two policies spurred a mass exodus from the company by many longtime distributors. But LuLaRoe exploded when, shortly after creating the 100% buy back policy, they yanked it, stranding distributors with thousands of dollars of unsold and unsellable product. Dozens of lawsuits have been filed against the company for defective products and copyright infringement. But the biggest suit came from a clothing manufacturer saying that LuLaRoe owed them 49 million dollars that they had never expected to be able to pay. By their 2018 convention, there were 20 lawsuits against LuLaRoe. In 2019 the state of Washington filed a suit against them for operating a pyramid scheme. That suit is still open, and as Robert FitzPatrick, and MLM expert notes, until this entire field of business is re-examined cases like this are mostly political theater.  LuLaRich sits at a very complicated intersection of American culture. It touches on cultural expectations for women, the history of women in the workplace, ideas about what kind of work women should do, the dream of owning a business, the culture of entrepreneurship, and the long, long history of good old American flim-flam. I recommend it, without reservation, to anyone with an interest in any of those topics and in the complicated ways they interact.   But maybe buy your leggings elsewhere. [Editor’s note: If you enjoyed this review, don’t miss Sarah’s earlier series on the Theranos scandal. Timely!] (0 COMMENTS)

There’s a lot of recent discussion about how the country has become increasingly polarized. One way of getting at the issue is by looking at the opposite question: Why weren’t we polarized in the past? Here it will be useful to consider the mid-1960s and the late-1980s, two periods in which political polarization might have occurred, but didn’t.  Furthermore, I’ll argue that the reason polarization did not occur in the 1960s is entirely different from the reason it did not occur in the 1980s. For a period of several years after the Kennedy assassination in 1963, progressive views were considered much more respectable than conservative views.  During what has been called “the liberal hour”, the views of anti-government conservatives like Barry Goldwater and segregationist southern politicians were viewed as quite disreputable.  So why wasn’t there more polarization back then? The big difference between the 1960s and today is that the two parties were much more ideologically diverse.  Within both the Democratic and Republican parties there was substantial support for civil rights laws, but also substantial opposition.  While there were differences of opinion on civil rights and Vietnam, the public did not segment into two “tribes”.  The political figure in 1968 that most resembled Trump was probably George Wallace, who was a Democrat.  In addition, the landslide victory of LBJ in 1964 made the steady march of progressive ideas seem almost inevitable. By the late 1980s, the two political parties had become much more ideologically distinct.  So why wasn’t the country much more polarized at that time?  Why wasn’t Reagan the Trump of the 1980s?  To understand that period, you have to look at the problems that progressives encountered after the 1960s in at least four areas: 1.  In the 1960s, progressives tended to be anti-anti-communist.  To sneer that someone was an “anti-communist” was a sort of insult. 2.  In the 1960s, public policy became “soft on crime”. 3.  In the 1960s, the welfare state expanded. 4.  In the 1960s, public policy aimed to lower unemployment with rapid growth in aggregate demand. Over the next few decades, a number of changes occurred that tended to discredit the progressive view on those issues: 1.  Writers like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn exposed the horrors of communism.  Pol Pot’s atrocities became better known. 2.  The murder rate in America skyrocketed higher during the late 1960s and early 1970s, despite a booming economy.  Poverty no longer seemed to be the “root cause” of crime. 3.  After 1970, economic progress in the African-American community slowed sharply.  People like Charles Murray persuasively argued that the welfare state was not having the intended effect. 4.  The breakdown of the Phillips Curve led many economists to reject a policy of persistent demand stimulus, and adopt Friedman’s “Natural Rate Hypothesis.” By the late 1980s, many progressives came to the conclusion that on some issues the conservatives had been correct.  Democratic politicians became “tough on crime”, or in favor of “ending welfare as we know it”.  Inflation targeting came into vogue.  The collapse of communism was seen as a vindication of Reagan’s tough stance. For all these reasons, the two parties remained unpolarized.  They still had their disagreements over specific issues, but it was within the “reasonable people might disagree” framework.  The Whit Stillman film “Barcelona” nicely captures how conservatism was respectable at that time. In the 21st century, the GOP lost many of its key issues.  Failures in the Middle East discredited neoconservatism.  The Great Recession made neoliberal economic policies less popular.  Some of the GOP’s best ideas were adopted by the Democrats.  In response, the GOP turned to a set of ideas that might be called populist authoritarian nationalism.  Things like the Muslim travel ban and “birther” theories.  Challenges to the legitimacy of the 2020 election.  To progressives, these views seemed more than misguided, they seemed disreputable, unacceptable, in a way that is fundamentally different from GOP views on tax cuts or Supreme Court picks. Conversely, as the left became increasingly “woke”, conservatives felt treated as second-class citizens, unable to freely speak their minds. Thus the political disputes of the 2010s became much more personal than the disputes of the late 1980s.  Each side saw the other as not just misguided, but as evil.  That’s a formula for polarization. Reagan won 49 states in 1984 (as did Nixon in 1972).  What are the odds of either party winning 49 states in 2024?     (0 COMMENTS)

Here’s Part 1 of Huemer’s last word on Knowledge, Reality, and Value. Many thanks to Bryan Caplan for the extensive, thoughtful, and interesting discussions over the course of this Book Club. Thanks also to all the readers who contributed their thoughts. I found the discussion very high quality and serious. Bryan’s comments below, preceded by “BC”, followed by my replies. 1) On consequentialism vs. deontology in the history of ethics: BC:      Why doesn’t the Ring of Gyges thought experiment count? At least one common interpretation of the debate is that we should practice justice as an end in itself, not because of its consequences. … As I read it, Socrates is arguing over what is good, not over whether one should maximize the good. Note that holding that justice is intrinsically good doesn’t challenge consequentialism (though it does challenge utilitarianism), because it’s consistent with holding that you should maximize the good. To see what Socrates/Plato thought about consequentialism, you’d have to look at whether they thought it was okay to commit one injustice to prevent two similar injustices. 2) On the probability of the BIV hypothesis: BC:      Lower, definitely.  But why “low”?  In fiction, after all, the main use of the Brain in a Vat is to simulate reality. I still say that everything hinges on the high prior probability of the Real World story relative to all alternatives. Let’s distinguish two skeptical hypotheses: G-BIV (generic BIV hypothesis) posits only that our experiences are explained by scientists stimulating a brain. S-BIV (the specific, stipulative BIV hypothesis) adds to G-BIV the assumption that the scientists stimulate the brain in exactly the same way that a typical brain in the real world would be stimulated. If G-BIV and RWH (the real-world hypothesis) have comparable initial probabilities, then G-BIV is going to have a much lower posterior probability in the light of our evidence. Equivalently: S-BIV has a much lower prior probability. This is because in the absence of evidence, we start from the principle of indifference, and the vast majority of the ways of stimulating a BIV would not result in a perfect replication of normal, real-world experiences. Perhaps a better way to think of it is to consider hypotheses about the capabilities and motives of the scientists. Only a tiny range of possible capabilities and motives, out of all the possible ones that a troop of BIV-owning scientists could have, result in their producing a perfect simulation of a normal, average life. Regarding fiction: The reason why fictional stories (e.g., The Matrix) invoke perfect simulations of normal life is not that that is likely (even conditional on having a BIV or similar apparatus), but simply that that makes for a good story. 3) About recognizing shapes made by intelligent agents: BC:      Not heart shapes specifically. I’m thinking of the independent knowledge that so far, things that look like carvings have always been man-made. If that sounds circular, I say it’s just the problem of induction all over again. “Looks like a carving” sounds to me like it presupposes a sense of what kinds of things are likely to have been created by intelligence, vs. what things are likely natural – that sense is what the Argument from Design proponents are invoking, which I took you (Bryan) to be rejecting. Not sure what you’re suggesting about the problem of induction. Maybe that circularity is okay because a circular response to the problem of induction is okay? I would deny that circularity is okay, even with respect to the problem of induction. See my paper on induction, which gives a non-circular solution: http://www.owl232.net/papers/explanation.pdf. BC:      How about a sphere?  It’s awesomely “ordered.”  Perfectly symmetrical… It is ordered, but it’s a simple order, so it’s not hard to imagine simple, unintelligent mechanisms that bring it about. Like the force of gravity, or surface tension. Here is a better example of something that looks artificial (but isn’t): I recently learned that there is a giant hexagon on Saturn, made of atmospheric gases. The hexagonal shape makes it much weirder than if it were simply round. Scientists aren’t sure why this exists, but there are some theories. It’s pretty weird, but it’s still a much simpler order than, say, a living organism. 4) About setting the parameters of the universe: BC:      Well, we’ve looked around the universe a lot, and never seen anyone “setting its parameters.” We haven’t even found a securely locked control panel with a “parameters of the universe” label. And the very idea sounds totally fanciful, so we should assign it an ultra-low prior probability. About the prior probability: I think the “sounds totally fanciful” reaction is specific to atheists. The vast majority of people have thought that there were supernatural beings with all kinds of awesome powers. Most today believe in a creator of the universe. I don’t have a lot of data on their psychology, but I suspect that most find it intuitively plausible that someone created the universe. About the evidence: If there was such a creator, I don’t think we’d particularly expect to see that person doing His work, since we wouldn’t be around until after He created the universe. I don’t think we’d expect to find a control panel either, even if we looked around a lot. I also don’t think we’ve really looked around the universe a lot. We’ve looked around the Earth a lot (and even then, mostly just the surface), but the observable universe is about 400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times larger than the Earth, to say nothing of the unobservable parts of the universe, if such there be. We’ve also been around for perhaps one 46 thousandth of the age of the observable universe. I think there’s lots that we don’t know, especially about questions like the origin of the universe. 5) On the “Made by God” example: BC:      My bad, I missed the latter stipulation.  But then it’s practically circular, because anything that’s a “consequence of the laws of nature” is by definition not human-made (or even alien-made). I don’t see a circularity problem. The example is just an illustration of a point about the Fine Tuning Argument. The example shows that you could have cases in which you should conclude that (aspects of) the laws of nature were designed by an intelligent (non-human) being. It’s okay that the example stipulates that the thing we observe is something we know humans couldn’t do, because that is also true of the evidence in the actual Fine Tuning argument. I gave this example because some of the objections to the FTA actually imply that even in the “Made by God” example, even with the stipulation that the observed evidence is a consequence of the laws of nature, you still would have no reason to believe in God, or any other form of intelligent designer. This is a reductio of those objections. 6) On the improbability of a life-supporting universe: BC:      It’s only “extremely improbable” if you think the parameters of the universe could have been “set differently.”  And as I said, that seems totally fanciful to me.  There’s no sign that a cosmic control panel exists. This is one of the objections that implies that, even in the “Made by God” example, you still have no reason at all for believing in any form of intelligent design; you should just shrug your shoulders and say, “That’s just the way it is.” Any such objection must be mistaken. In this case, the mistake is the assumption that, in order to assign (non-extreme) probabilities to propositions about the laws of nature, one has to first be convinced that the laws were set by someone (or something?), or can be changed. One need not assume either of those things merely to have a non-trivial probability distribution. 7) On what is “fantastical”: BC:      What distinguishes all these cases? (a) We only hear about the fantastical stuff from unreliable sources or in fiction; the other stuff we either see first-hand or hear about from reliable sources. (b) The fantastical stuff appeals to the human emotion of wonder; the other stuff is boring by comparison. This would be an apt response to arguments based on testimony about miracles. The unreliability of the sources would be a reason not to accept those arguments. But I don’t think it’s a reason to deny the existence of God; rather, it means that the testimony is merely, at worst, irrelevant. Regarding the emotion of wonder, I think that could be a reason for discounting some stories that have been handed down – they could have been transmitted because of the desire for amazing stories, even if they were not true. It might also be a reason for discounting intuitions of people who have a particular passion for wonder, because that passion could be biasing them. However, none of this is actual evidence against the existence of an intelligent designer; it just means one should discount some putative reasons in favor. I also don’t see how it shows that the prior probability is low. As a conceptual matter, if you’re citing evidence, then you’re talking about a posterior probability, not a prior probability. About the Fine Tuning Argument: fortunately, it doesn’t rely on unreliable testimony. The empirical premises come from modern astrophysics. The fact that some other people who are unreliable also support a somewhat similar conclusion for very different reasons doesn’t count as evidence against this argument being correct. I would say, by the way, that whatever the origin of the universe is, I think it is bound to be something strange and amazing. The standard Big Bang theory is amazing already, as are many things in modern physics. 8) Do incentives affect your degree of free will? BC:      By the logic of your alcoholic story, it seems like the more money we offer the condo owner, the “less free” he is to turn it down. That seems bizarre to me. I say you are fully free to reject a billion-dollar offer on your condo. And the alcoholic is totally free not to drink. The alcoholic has a psychological compulsion or other disorder, which is normally not present in a condo owner considering a purchase offer. The condo owner, in the normal case, also won’t have any of the other sorts of psychological conflicts that would reduce freedom. So for the condo-owner, it’s plausible that he’s fully free regardless of the incentives. To make the alcoholic analogous to the condo-owner, we’d have to add some stuff to the condo story. Like he’s got some kind of psychological compulsion to accept all purchase offers. Or maybe he’s got a conflict between immediate inclinations and his rational judgment. Or something like that. In that case, I think it is plausible that he’s going to be less free for some larger offers than for a ridiculously low offer. But this example is now so similar to the alcoholic case that I don’t expect it to help resolve the issue for anyone – you’ll either intuitively agree with me about both cases, or intuitively disagree about both cases. (0 COMMENTS)

Warren Coats, who earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman, sent me a reminiscence of Gordon Tullock and mentioned Armen Alchian. He wrote: I loved your discussion of your [DRH note: and Steve Globerman’s] new book on EconTalk. As someone who knows my Chicago background more than almost anyone you might enjoy the following remembrances. From Chicago I joined the faculty of UVa (1970). This was just after Ronald Coase had left. As our last names are a bit similar I was actually confused for him once or twice (such an honor).  While at UVa I wrote the teachers guide for their correspondent econ class for using Alchian and Allen’s University Economics (a truly great book). As a Californian I spent my summers at home in Bakersfield and was allowed to take the Chicago Core Exam at UCLA proctored by Sam Peltzman (an acquaintance from his earlier Chicago Libertarian days). When our little DC/VA group (which met at Henry Manne’s apartment) discussed Peltzman’s seat belt, padded dash article, Gordon Tullock offered that the most cost effective devise for safe driving would be a dagger in the middle of the steering wheel pointed at the driver. Then Warren wrote a correction: A correction due to my poor memory but due also to the close link between Paul Heyne’s The Economic Way of Thinking and Alchian and Allen’s University Economics. It was the former I wrote the work book for. I replied that I had heard Tullock’s legendary proposal and that I was glad to see that it came after Sam Peltzman’s work. Peltzman’s work, incidentally, led my economist friend Jennifer Roback Morse to refer to him as “Seatbelt Sam.” Then I added: By the way, a funny story about Alchian and Heyne that Alchian told me in the late 1990s: Paul Heyne had contacted Alchian and told him that his and Allen’s book was great but too difficult for beginning undergrads. He asked Alchian if Alchian minded Heyne’s trying his hand at an easier version of the Alchian and Allen book. Alchian told Heyne that that’s not how it works: you don’t need a competitor’s permission to compete. And thus was The Economic Way of Thinking born. Note: The updated version of University Economics is Universal Economics, which Liberty Fund sells at a very low price. (0 COMMENTS)

A non-economist friend emailed me yesterday and asked me to explain the proposal for a $1 trillion platinum coin. The proposal is that the Treasury mint a coin with a face value of $1 trillion and sell it to the Federal Reserve for $1 trillion. That way the Treasury gets an additional $1 trillion without the federal debt going up at all. It’s a way around the ceiling on the federal debt. According to Paul Krugman, who advocates such a coin, this provision of the law makes it legal. But it’s a bad idea. Why? Because we don’t have only specific restrictions on what government can do. We have unstated, but widely understood, norms. One of them is that the government shouldn’t do this. It should play by the norms and, if the executive branch can’t persuade Congress to raise the debt, then it shouldn’t try to get around it with such stratagems. Bit by bit, such measures wittle away the constraints on government. And government, remember, is the entity we need most to constrain. I remember during the Bush I administration (I think it was that one) that various conservative economists were urging the U.S. Treasury to, by regulation, tax only the part of a capital gain that was true capital gain by indexing asset prices to inflation. So, for example, if someone bought a stock for $100 in year x and in year x + 10 sold it for $200, but in year x + 10 the inflation-adjusted value of the original purchase price was $180, the tax should be only on the $20 real gain and not on what I have called the $80 phantom gain. I opposed this idea. I think that indexing asset prices so that the tax is only on a true capital gain is a great idea. I don’t know whether the Treasury could find some weaselly language that allowed it to do this, but the proposed measure violated a norm: Congress gets to decide the tax code. I think the same principle applies to the debt ceiling. We see this norm breaking a lot lately and it’s very disturbing. When people of both sexes followed a female U.S. Senator into a bathroom and taunted her, that was disgusting. When President Biden was asked about it, he stated: I don’t think they’re appropriate tactics, but it happens to everybody,” The only people it doesn’t happen to are people who have Secret Service standing around them. So, it’s part of the process. If Biden had settled for the first 6 words, that would have been too faint but not terrible. But his “it’s part of the process” was disgusting. He should have gone further and denounced the tactic in no uncertain terms. Wasn’t he the guy who argued that the previous president violated norms of simple decency? (0 COMMENTS)

I break unjust laws all the time.  Though I’m proud of my law-breaking, I don’t claim to be especially courageous.  News flash: I’d rather live on my knees than die on my feet.  After all, I’ve got a lot to live for. Why then do I choose to be a righteous scofflaw?  Because the expected punishment for breaking the kinds of laws I break is very low. Government enforcement is rare, and even if I get caught, the sanction will probably be mild. Which raises a puzzling question: Why are so many laws backed by such trivial punishments?  If politicians think that a law is worth passing, why don’t they automatically conclude that it’s worth assiduously enforcing? You could just blame noise: Sometimes government sets punishments too high; other times it sets punishments too low.  But once government sees widespread violation of a law, why don’t they rush to adjust punishment upward?  The kinds of laws that I break have had token expected punishments for as long as I can remember. You could insist that enforcement costs are often too high to induce obedience.  But as Becker pointed out long ago, you can compensate for low detection probabilities with draconian punishments.  Indeed, if the draconian punishments are hefty monetary fines, the fiscal cost of enforcement is typically negative. So what’s really going on?  Well, suppose the government announces that it will seize people’s homes if they failed to follow a new regulation: “Obey or lose your home.”  And then the government actually follows through.  You watch the news and see the government seizing a little old lady’s house.  Even if the regulation saved a million lives, people would despise the politicians responsible.  “Seizing homes saves lives” simply sounds bad; if it’s true, it is an ugly truth.  And as the research on Social Desirability Bias reveals, people hate ugly truths.  They don’t like to say them, and they don’t like to believe them. When I discuss Social Desirability Bias, I normally focus on its bad effects.  It is Social Desirability Bias that leads government to look at every social problem and say “Something must be done!” – even though the best remedy is usually to leave well enough alone.   Still, I have to admit: Social Desirability Bias also loosens the shackles that it places upon us. Social Desirability Bias prevents business from building new homes: “Horrors, these greedy fatcats want to destroy the character of the neighborhood!”  But Social Desirability Bias also prevents government from crushing homeowners who illegally improve their properties.  If you want to add a bathroom without proper permits, just go for it.  You’ll almost certainly won’t be caught – and even if the government finds out, they probably won’t do much about it.  So why not?  Because deploying effective enforcement techniques – surprise home inspections to detect, home seizure to punish – sounds very ugly. Social Desirability Bias prevents immigration: “This is our country, our culture, and our economy – and we intend to keep it that way.”  But Social Desirability Bias also prevents government from ending illegal immigration once and for all.  East Germany shows that strict border control is totally possible.  Don’t just build a wall; build a wall with self-firing machine guns.  Once you combine this Wall of Death with surprise home inspections and long prison sentences for anyone who employs illegal immigrants, violations will practically disappear. So why not?  Because these brutal measures – the very measures you need to earnestly enforce your immigration laws – sound monstrous.  Instead, we combine absurdly restrictive laws with loopholes as massive as they are bizarre.  Jose Antonio Vargas has publicly declared himself “undocumented.”  He’s easy to locate.  But even Trump didn’t try to deport him, because even Trump didn’t want to look like such a monster. The same naturally goes for Covid regulations.  Social Desirability Bias yields absurdly strict laws: “If it saves just one life.”  Yet Social Desirability Bias also prevents the merciless enforcement necessary to achieve compliance with these absurd laws.  Recently at the airport I saw ample unmasked faces.  If the government had picked out a random scofflaw and hauled him off to prison, the whole airport would have kept their masks on.  If the government arrested a hundred such people nationwide and held a press conference vowing to hand out a thousand years of prison time to these “mask criminals,” every airport in America would approach 100% compliance.  But that ain’t gonna happen. And let’s not forget tax evasion.  Social Desirability Bias is the foundation of popular “tax the rich” policies.  Yet taxpayers have countless ways to fudge the numbers (can you say, “Self-Employment,” children?), and to stop this fudging the IRS would have to get medieval.  As a result, persecution of the rich co-exists alongside quiet yet ubiquitous defiance. Key caveat: For real crimes like murder and rape (as well as a few fake crimes like drug-dealing), strict enforcement is almost as crowd-pleasing as the laws themselves.  For this subset of offenses, “Lock ’em up and throw away the key” prevails.  And of course as social media reminds us, the government occasionally enforces a random regulation with Kafkaesque determination. Normally, however, we are freer than the law admits.  Demagogic policies surround us, but no true demagogue enforces them strictly.  The result: As long as you don’t call too much attention to yourself, you can pick and choose which laws to follow at surprisingly low cost.  So, I ask you, why not follow your conscience?   (0 COMMENTS)

Scott Alexander has a long post discussing why we build modern buildings that are ugly, rather than the sort of beautiful older buildings that were constructed in previous centuries. Tyler Cowen laments the fact that modern American residential neighborhoods are much less attractive than older residential neighborhoods. At first glance, the two pieces might seem similar. But Cowen actually likes the sort of edgy modern architecture that Alexander dislikes. Here I’ll argue that Alexander is mixing up a bunch of issues that seem related, but are actually quite distinct. Here are my claims: 1. Modern architecture can best be understood by considering three categories: single family home, mid-sized non-profit, and corporate buildings (including skyscrapers and Apple stores.) The mid-sized non-profit sector is where you see most of the “ugly” architecture that people dislike. As with all other art forms, the best architects have advanced to the point where average people can no longer appreciate their creations. It’s no different in serious novels, painting, classical music, poetry, art films, etc. There are a few “ugly” modern houses and “ugly” modern skyscrapers, but most individual people and for-profit corporations won’t pay for what they view as ugly.  Edgy architects need the non-profits. 2. New residential construction in conservative towns is uglier than new construction in more liberal towns. Liberal Laguna Beach has nicer new construction than conservative Newport Beach. The difference is large, and is unrelated to whether the new houses are contemporary or traditional. This claim is based on hundreds of hours of observations. When I travel, my favorite activity is walking through random residential neighborhoods, looking at houses. Today, you can easily verify my claim using Zillow.  Here is a modern home in Laguna Beach: 3. Most new houses in the modern style are more attractive than most new houses built in traditional styles. Modern architecture is not being foisted on the public. Rich people who build a new home along the ocean in La Jolla or Laguna Beach or Malibu have enough money to build an English Tudor, or a Georgian or a Gothic style house, but they usually prefer a modern design. It looks better. The best looking houses in Palm Springs are mid-century modern: 4.  I’m going to sound like an insufferable snob, but richer people have better taste, on average.  The fact that new $3 million homes are more attractive than new $600,000 homes is partly about the budget, but not entirely.  Ugly $600,000 McMansions contain lots of awkward features like misplaced Palladian windows that actually add to the cost.  It’s not all about the budget.  America’s spectacular economic success has created a vast number of semi-rich people with bad taste.  (Which is good!) 5. Alexander mixes up several unrelated issues in comparing modern architecture with older styles, such as buildings with and without lots of ornament, and edgy vs. graceful. Graceful modern buildings differ from edgy modern buildings in a way that has nothing to do with a lack of ornamental features such as intricate stone carving.  There are lots of ugly older buildings that are full of ornament, and there are lots of beautiful modern buildings with a sort of classical simplicity. (And of course vice versa is true.) Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram building: 6. Skyscrapers are a sort of special case. Because of their scale, traditional styles don’t generally work very well. Chicago’s (gothic) Tribune Tower is fine, but China tried to build skyscrapers topped with traditional Chinese motifs and they were almost universally ugly. Art deco is a transitional style between traditional and modern. New York’s great art deco skyscrapers are beautiful, but today people want bigger windows. Would another Chrysler building plunked down in Miami have been better than Hadid’s new (post-modern) tower? What else are Miami architects supposed to build?  (The little art deco hotels in Miami Beach are wonderful, but do they scale?) 7. The elite vs. masses framing is not useful, as there are actually three important groups; the elite, the educated, and the uninterested. I’ll use an analogy from painting to illustrate my point. Let’s say that 1% of the public appreciates the paintings of de Kooning. Assume 10% like Van Gogh (that’s 33 million Americans).  And assume that 90% don’t care enough about painting to even visit an art museum. What then? Which art is “popular”? If you show everyone in the world a pretty painting by Bouguereau and a self-portrait of Van Gogh, most people will say the Bouguereau is better. But if you bring a Van Gogh exhibit to your local art museum, then 10 times as many people will show up as to an exhibit of Bouguereau. So which artist is “more popular”? That’s not even a question, as there is no clear definition of “popular”. Popular with everyone, or popular with people who look at paintings? As an art form progresses, it gets more and more difficult for average people to appreciate the art works. That’s not a problem for painting, which the public can easily ignore. It is a problem for the Boston City Hall, which Tyler Cowen can appreciate but most people cannot. It’s in your face. It’s not one of the graceful “classical” examples of modernism. To my eyes, brutalist architecture is more difficult that post-impressionism, but not as difficult as de Kooning.  Maybe roughly as difficult as Jackson Pollack or Mark Rothko.  Not a lot of individuals or corporations will choose difficult architecture, but a few will.  Most often, it’s non-profits that go for this stuff, as with MIT’s decision to hire Frank Gehry to do one of their buildings: To summarize, people struggle with this issue because they don’t realize that it’s actually multiple issues.  For skyscrapers, the international style is the only thing that really meets our modern needs.  When it comes to residential houses, it’s simply wrong to suggest that modern architecture is ugly.  Modern style houses being built today are quite attractive, and the ugly houses being built today are mostly McMansions that try but fail to ape traditional styles of architecture.  Some good traditional-styled houses are being built, mostly in liberal areas.  Mid-sized buildings put up by non-profits are what most people visualize they think about “ugly” modern architecture.  Some of this is in fact ugly, whereas in other cases it’s just difficult art that goes over the head of most people.  Sometimes over my head.  Time will tell. I don’t entirely disagree with Alexander.  Indeed, I actually have rather conservative taste in art, which might surprise readers of this post.  I prefer Richardson, Sullivan and Wright to Gehry and Koolhaas.  I often prefer older buildings.  And I even like homes like the one below, which looks like 16th century Tuscany, but is actually 21st century Irvine, CA. I just think it’s more complicated than simply old architecture is good and new architecture is bad. PS.  Here’s another example of how Alexander’s framing doesn’t work.  We are told that modern music is ugly for most listeners.  Not like the greats of the past.  OK, would the average person prefer to listen to a composition by someone like John Williams or Andrew Lloyd Webber, or would they prefer to listen to one of Beethoven’s last three piano sonatas? The problem with modernism is not necessarily what you think it is. PPS.  To head off accusations of hypocrisy, I do live in a modern style home, but previously lived in a traditional style home.  I just want my home to be attractive and useful. (0 COMMENTS)

Casey has gone and done it again and I learn something new about James Tobin. His solution was radical: he actually read the bills. Mulligan printed out the relevant section of one highly touted Medicare for All bill and carried it around so that he could disabuse fellow Trump administration officials who thought he exaggerated. One person who listened was Donald Trump. When Trump publicly claimed that Medicare for All would ban private insurance, CNN’s White House correspondent attacked him for lying. But Trump kept it up and by January 2019, CNN, without apologizing, acknowledged the fact. Indeed, notes Mulligan, CNN even asked candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination about the prohibition. This is an excerpt from David R. Henderson, “Economic Savvy in the White House,” Defining Ideas, October 8, 2020. It’s my review of economist Casey B. Mulligan’s book You’re Hired: Untold Successes and Failures of a Populist President. It turns out that Casey has done it again. He actually read every page of the $3.5 trillion, 2,465 page budget bill before Congress. And, as comes out in this 45-minute interview he did with Hoover’s John Cochrane, he paid particular attention to incentives and disincentives within the bill. Some highlights follow with approximate times. 9:45: The biggest item in the bill is the expansion of ObamaCare along with increased disincentive to work. 10:40: Cochrane makes the point that the limit on rent for subsidized housing of 30% of income makes for an implicit 30-percent tax on each additional dollar of income for those who are rent-subsidized. (That’s already there, even without this bill.) 11:10: Casey says that food stamps are essentially an unemployment program. 16:30: The child care tax credit in the bill doesn’t require you to work. DRH comment: That seems counterintuitive, but that’s if you care about people working. 21:00: Employers who have 5 or more employees must fund an IRA for their employees. State governments get to decide what the IRA can be invested in. 26:30: $10 per day fine if you don’t enroll your employees in an IRA. Per employee not enrolled? He doesn’t say but I think so. 27:00: $220 billion for affordable housing. 27:45: Casey’s comment on the subsidies for housing: “Here, you can have this as long as you remain poor.” 32:20: Casey estimates the value of the housing subsidy to tenants at about 30 cents on the dollar. 33:40: Somewhat good news on transportation. Casey finds that the spending is about 20% of the amount he expected based on Biden’s promises during the campaign. 34:20: $30 billion for rail; $30 billion for mass transit, which, Cochrane points out, is for things like the commuter rail that goes by Stanford every day almost empty. 35:18: $150 billion in spending for climate. This does not count tax credits. For things like climate-resilient housing and USPS purchase of electric trucks. 36:40: Given the amount of carbon reduction the climate subsidies will lead to,  they are way overpaying. 37:40: Pro tip: if you’re thinking of buying an EV, then wait. This bill just might pass. 38:50: Family medical leave. Government will pay for some. Unclear to what extent employers will be reimbursed by feds if they already provide it. 43:20: New taxes on marriage. Casey points out that the late James Tobin of Yale University, who was a member of President Kennedy’s Council of Economic Advisers, was critical of government programs that discouraged marriage. Tobin’s comment: We’re subsidizing desertion. (Here’s my bio of Tobin for The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.)   (0 COMMENTS)

In the City Journal, I have a short piece on the “Madrid model” in managing the pandemic. The region of Madrid has been quite exceptional because, during the second wave, it kept activities relatively more open than elsewhere in Europe. It did so not so much by taking a “wait and see” approach, which is what others tend to criticize and fear whenever a more libertarian minded take on the pandemic is hinted to, but by proactively hunting the virus, particularly through a system of wastewater screening to identify the hotspots of the infection. The local government bounded itself to a clear policy goal: keeping the region as open as possible. In order to meet this goal, it perhaps did more in terms confronting the virus, than those who chose to flatten the curve by locking down. At the very beginning of the piece, I write: The Covid-19 pandemic heralded for many, particularly in Europe, the “return of the state.” Nation-states were supposedly the natural and proper level for pandemic policymaking, as they supplied most of the subsidies keeping economic activity afloat during lockdowns. Early on, the most intense debates concerned which national response was best: the Italian model, the closest thing to a Chinese lockdown that a liberal democracy could manage; or the Swedish model, an almost laissez-faire approach. Few paid attention to how cities and regional governments responded. In Spain, however, it’s at the regional level that the pandemic’s most interesting and useful lessons may be found. This is probably true elsewhere too. We spent a lot of time arguing over different “national” models, but there were nuances, and slowing contagion down was ultimately up to local government institutions. Perhaps in the next few years we will have more studies of how regions and cities actually coped with these challenges, and less on supposedly national approaches. In the US of course this is more apparent than in Europa. (0 COMMENTS)

At long last, here’s my final entry! Rejoinder to Huemer’s Response, Part 4 Suppose A does not consent. A wants you to perform only the action that benefits him while harming B; he won’t consent to the action that harms him while benefitting B (not even conditional on your doing the other action simultaneously). Now what? It looks to me like we still have the original problem. How is this different from a person who foolishly refuses to consent to a vaccination, even though he admits that the benefit of the vaccine greatly exceeds the pain of the needle?  As you explain in The Problem of Political Authority, we have no right to benefit him given his explicit refusal to consent. BC:      If true, this is probably the best consequentialist argument against alleviating world poverty. After all, most poor people are happy to be alive. If saving the lives of the most miserable of the world’s poor causes their total population to greatly shrink, how is that a win? Because the living standards will be higher. That’s why I said “greatly” shrink.  I see why a consequentialist would favor slightly lower population and massively higher happiness per person.  But I’d also think a consequentialist would favor massively higher population and slightly lower happiness per person. Consider: If you had the chance to go back in time and somehow sabotage the industrial revolution, so that Europe and America (etc.) would never have industrialized and never have become fabulously wealthy as we are today, would you do it? Before answering, note that our population today would probably be much larger, though also more miserable. Unlikely.  Without the Industrial Revolution, we couldn’t support a modern-size population.   Rejoinder to Huemer’s Response, Part 5 Bryan gives the example of building a swimming pool, and in the process causing a den of mice to “horribly suffer”. Why are the mice horribly suffering instead of just running away? I guess for some reason they can’t get away, and somehow they get tortured by the bulldozer rather than dying quickly. Apparently, we’re supposed to think that this would be fine. But, again, I think that’s obviously wrong. If I were building the pool, I would certainly take the trouble to move the mice first. No vegan would hesitate to say the same thing. None of them would answer as in Bryan’s imagined dialogue. The scenario that I’m picturing is that the mice lose their home due to your pool construction, then slowly die of starvation and exposure while they hunt for another home.  And it’s hard to “move the mice” because finding dens of mice on a pool-sized construction site is challenging.  These seem like totally realistic premises to me.  And unless you’re doing a “No True Vegan” thing, I really doubt that even many vegans would actually consider this a morally strong reason not to build a pool. Bryan cites the permissibility of killing banthas and the impermissibility of killing Ewoks. But the issue I raised was about pain and suffering, not killing. So change it to “it’s okay to torture banthas.” All vegans would say that it is not permissible to torture banthas for minor reasons. Furthermore, I bet lots of other Star Wars fans would agree. The word “torture” has strong negative connotations.  But if people consider a creature OK to kill, they also normally consider it OK to cause it a lot of pain for minor benefits.  And reasonably so.  “Causing a healthy creature severe pain for a week is less bad than actually killing it” is highly intuitive. BC:      “The suffering of beings who will normally develop intelligence is much more morally important than the suffering of beings who will never develop intelligence, though probably not as important as the suffering of beings who are already intelligent.” [emphasis Bryan’s] This, again, strikes me as arbitrary and obviously false. Gee, it makes perfect sense to me.  Does it even slightly reduce your confidence to learn that only 10% of respondents to this survey say that I’m definitely wrong? "The suffering of beings who will normally develop intelligence is much more morally important than the suffering of beings who will never develop intelligence, though probably not as important as the suffering of beings who are already intelligent." — Bryan Caplan (@bryan_caplan) September 30, 2021 The way to philosophical truth does not start with impugning your interlocutor’s sincerity, or otherwise starting a debate about their psychology. Those things virtually never help. As I think you’ll agree, almost nothing helps resolve deep-seated philosophical disagreements.  And whenever there is a deep-seated philosophical disagreement, at least one side is not “on the way to philosophical truth.”   What then is the least bad way to get moving in the right direction?  Perhaps the psychological route is not so ineffective compared to the alternatives.  Consider your chapter on “The Psychology of Authority” in The Problem of Political Authority.  It’s one of the strongest parts of a very strong book. Attacks on sincerity seem more futile, but how about a direct appeal to sincerity, a la my Argument from Conscience? (7) Jefferson Caplan We’re back in the slavery era. Thomas Jefferson is against slavery; Jefferson Caplan is pro-slavery. They talk about it: As you might guess, I find this thought experiment unpersuasive.  Since we’re at a severe impasse, let me switch from the futile goal of changing your mind to the more reasonable goal of helping you understand how things seem to me (and, I think, most non-vegans). Imagine a conversation between you and someone who believes in the rights of plants.  You tell him, “Plants don’t feel pain,” and he says, “That’s an arbitrary difference.  Plants are still alive.  They have interests, and we shouldn’t do immense harm to their interests to slightly advance our own.”  You probably consider this an obtuse position – and I agree. My point?  To me – and virtually every non-vegan – the moral difference between humans (and Vulcans, Ewoks, etc.) and other animals seems almost as vast and blatant as the moral difference between animals and plants seems to you.  I know that must be frustrating – if not horrifying – for you, but that’s where things stand. It turns out that spontaneous abortion (where the embryo dies of natural causes, usually due to failure to implant in the womb) is much more common than medically induced abortion. In fact, that’s what happens to most embryos. But pro-life activists aren’t going around worrying about all the embryos that die in this way. They’re not, e.g., campaigning for medical research to figure out how to stop it. This proves that the pro-life people are lying: they don’t really think embryos are people, and they don’t really care about the lives of the unborn. When I heard that, I thought it was terrible. I don’t find it plausible or helpful to suggest that pro-lifers don’t believe their position. The argument is overstated, but still seems probative to me.  If you really think that embryos are human, why aren’t you interested in saving them from accidental death? (0 COMMENTS)