Scratch a progressive, and you sometimes reveal a protectionist. Progressive journalist Robert Kuttner writes: China has begun selling cheap electric cars in the U.S. These are deeply subsidized, when you count all the government subsidies to China’s auto industry, the oppressed labor, and China’s protectionism. These cars include the Polestar, made by China’s Geely Auto Group, and the K27 made by China’s Kandi—with a sticker price of $17,499. That’s less than half the cost of the cheapest U.S.-made electric vehicle. His August 18 piece is titled “How China is Grabbing Our Electric-Car Market.” He makes clear that he thinks this is bad. He goes on to write: The EV tax credit is industrial policy and energy policy. The Biden administration hopes to convert the U.S. to all-electric cars, and to restructure the U.S. auto industry accordingly. But at this rate, the prime beneficiary will be China. He then concludes: We can’t duck this issue: Industrial policy is China policy. We need to bite this bullet and limit the credit to cars made in the USA—and address all the other ways that China’s mercantilism challenges the future of U.S. industry and technology, as well as our national security. What’s wrong with his thinking? A lot. Take the first quote, the one about China’s subsidies. If it’s true that the Chinese government is forcing people to work to produce these cars, then yes, it is implicitly making workers subsidize production and, therefore, consumers, whether here, in China, or wherever the cars are sold. And that is wrong. I wonder if it’s true. I don’t know. I bet Kuttner doesn’t either. It’s also wrong for the Chinese government to tax its own people to subsidize auto production, just as it’s wrong for the U.S. government to tax us to subsidize EV production. But let’s be clear who the victims are. It’s not U.S. consumers; we gain. It’s Chinese taxpayers. Should we decline to receive this foreign aid? I don’t think so. And it’s hard to see how China’s protectionism amounts to a subsidy to Chinese-produced cars. If the protectionism is on inputs into car production, then China’s protectionism is a tax on Chinese-produced cars. Now look at the next quote. The prime beneficiary is not China; it’s buyers of Chinese cars worldwide. As Kuttner himself points out in the first quote, these cars are priced way below U.S. EVs and so we in the United States, and probably elsewhere, gain. Kuttner’s last quote is a real stretch, and deeply ironic as well. If he’s right about the subsidies, then he’s right that China’s policy is mercantilist. It does challenge certain domestic industries but more than makes up for it by subsidizing U.S. consumers. It’s hard to see why changing the mix of EVs to include more Chinese cars threatens our national security. And the irony? To deal with the Chinese government’s mercantilism, Kuttner advocates subsidizing only U.S.-built EVs. In other words, mercantilism. (0 COMMENTS)

In some ways the nations of the world have never had it so good.  With a few exceptions, sovereignty is more secure than at any other time in world history.  In other respects, however, most nations are rapidly losing sovereignty, a trend I expect to accelerate over time. For most of human history, the normal state of affairs was for countries to attack their neighbors, often annexing territory of the weaker foe.  For various reasons, this state of affairs changed after 1945.  In the past 50 years we’ve seen a few successful forcible annexations (Goa, Crimea) and a few failed attempts at annexation (the Falklands, Kuwait, East Timor).  But for the most part countries have refrained from an activity that was the norm throughout all of recorded history.  We should celebrate that fact! This may be partly due to the hegemonic influence of what I’ll call “the blob”, a huge group of countries with defense treaties with the US.  NATO is the most important part of the blob, but the US also has important links with Japan, Korea, Australia, and New Zealand, as well as more informal links with places like Israel and Saudi Arabia. [As an aside, I don’t entirely agree with claims that the US spends a lot of money defending our allies.  The relevant counterfactual is how much we would spend if we were on our own, without all of these alliances.  In that case, the world would be a far more dangerous place.  It’s true that we spend a lot on defense (and other countries free ride), and it’s also true that we intervene heavily in many different wars all over the world.  But (AFAIK) over the past 65 years we’ve spent essentially zero dollars defending members of the blob against actual attacks.  The deterrent effect of the blob has been sufficient to prevent wars of annexation against our formal allies.  If the troops weren’t stationed in Korea and Germany, they’d probably be stationed in the US.  We do spend too much.  But that’s another issue, for which we cannot blame NATO free-riders.] People are so used to this state of affairs that I think they tend to overlook the overwhelming power of the blob.  The US alone spends more on defense than the next 9 countries combined.  The blob also includes most of the other top ten industrial powers, including two (or three) other nuclear powers.  The only other geopolitically important entities are China and Russia, each of which has a pathetically small system of alliances (basically North Korea and Belarus, respectively.) We (rightly) worry about their power and intentions, but from their perspective the blob must seem like a very intimidating entity. In my view, we are near the end of wars of annexation.  Not at the end, as attacks on Taiwan and Ukraine are possible.  But at some point the status of those two places will be resolved, borders will be locked in place, and geopolitical competition will almost entirely switch to an alternative track. Indeed the shift is already occurring.  Sovereignty is eroding rapidly, due the increasing ability of four great powers to shape affairs in other nations.  Those four powers are the US, the EU, China and Russia.  Each of those four entities are “bullies”, but they are not at all equal in other respects, with China and Russia being essentially illiberal and the US and EU being much more liberal (albeit far from perfect.) Here’s Tyler Cowen: I still largely agree with most of the hawk worldview: America can be a great force for good in the world, the notion of evil in global affairs as very real, America’s main rivals on the global stage are up to no good, and there is an immense amount of naivete and wishful thinking in most of those who do not consider themselves hawks. This is certainly a defensible claim, but I worry that the (hawkish) foreign policy establishment is too complacent about our moral virtue, just as they are usually too optimistic about what US military intervention can accomplish.  Consider the following: A resolution to encourage breast-feeding was expected to be approved quickly and easily by the hundreds of government delegates who gathered this spring in Geneva for the United Nations-affiliated World Health Assembly. Based on decades of research, the resolution says that mother’s milk is healthiest for children and countries should strive to limit the inaccurate or misleading marketing of breast milk substitutes. Then the United States delegation, embracing the interests of infant formula manufacturers, upended the deliberations. American officials sought to water down the resolution by removing language that called on governments to “protect, promote and support breast-feeding” and another passage that called on policymakers to restrict the promotion of food products that many experts say can have deleterious effects on young children. When that failed, they turned to threats, according to diplomats and government officials who took part in the discussions. Ecuador, which had planned to introduce the measure, was the first to find itself in the cross hairs. The Americans were blunt: If Ecuador refused to drop the resolution, Washington would unleash punishing trade measures and withdraw crucial military aid. The Ecuadorean government quickly acquiesced. Just to be clear, I have no problem with the US voting against this resolution.  But I do have a problem with the US threatening trade sanctions again Ecuador just because they have a different point of view on a (mostly symbolic) UN resolution. It hard for me to see much difference between this threat to Ecuador and some of China’s recent bullying, such as their trade sanctions against Australia in reaction to that country’s call for an investigation of the lab leak hypothesis. This is not at all to suggest that the US and China are morally equivalent.  With all our flaws, we are usually promoting a more liberal world order, whereas China favors a less liberal world.  That’s a fundamental difference, and that’s presumably what Tyler is referring to in the quote above.  On the other hand, power is easily abused and the US has far more ability to bully other nations than does China. China wields essentially one powerful tool—trade.  Russia has essentially one tool—its military.  The EU has essentially one tool—trade.  The US has three extremely powerful tools, all of which are used quite aggressively: trade, banking and military force.  And we do not just use these tools against our foes.  We threaten Canada and Mexico on trade, we threaten sanctions against Germany over the Russia pipeline, we threaten countries like Switzerland over bank secrecy, we threaten Latin American countries over their drug policies, and there are innumerable similar examples.  In some cases, I agree with our ultimate objectives while in others I do not.  But there is no doubt that the US is by far the most aggressive country in the world in terms of forcing outside countries to bend to our will.  (Of course the EU is very interventionist regarding countries within Europe, but much less so outside the organization.) In my view, the EU represents the future of the world.  Large and powerful hegemons will increasingly demand that smaller countries adopt policies that conform to the wishes of great powers.  Sovereignty will steadily decline.  With a tiny number of exceptions, countries no longer need fear military invasion.  Instead there will be economic pressure to conform to the wishes of the four great powers.  The recent move toward an international agreement on minimum corporate tax rates is a sign of where things are going.  Global warming policies may be next. PS.  There’s been a lot of recent nonsense written on the supposed loss of US “credibility” due to the pullout from Afghanistan.  I’ve even seen comments comparing our troop presence there to South Korea and Germany.  But in the latter two cases we have commitments to protect the countries from outside invasion, not internal revolution.  AFAIK, the US broke no significant commitments to the Afghan government. PPS.  Some might question my claim that Chinese bullying is mostly economic, citing their recent actions in the South China Sea and the mountain border with India.  But those examples are of trivial importance relative to the US military interventions in dozens of countries all over the world.  After all, Taiwan is also a bully in the South China Sea and no one cares.  We only pay attention to China’s actions there because we have a geopolitical rivalry with China due to other factors. In contrast, Taiwan is not a threat outside the South China Sea.  Even a mid-level power like France is more likely to militarily intervene in foreign countries than is China (at least since 1980.)  That would change if China were to invade Taiwan, which is probably my biggest single foreign policy worry other than accidental nuclear war.  But as of today, China mostly relies on its economic power to bully other nations. PPPS.  While Russia and China share an interest in promoting illiberal values, they differ in certain important respects.  Because Russia has a disappointing record in terms of economic development, they are less interested in the stability of the global economy.  Putin is basically what people on the internet call a “troll”, and sees Russia benefiting from global chaos.  China benefits from a well functioning global economy, albeit with much less liberalism than the West would prefer.  Xi Jinping is confident that China’s power will grow over time as its economy expands and its market becomes increasingly important.  China knows that it will have increasing ability to intimidate other nations.  Putin knows that Russia’s influence is almost entirely due to its military power.  “Bangladesh with nukes”. (0 COMMENTS)

I think traditionally people kind of  considered, well, you know, kids aren’t going to get that sick with this. It [sic] more than 400 children have died of COVID-19. And right now we have almost 2,000 kids in the hospital, many of them in ICU, some of them under the age of four. So anybody who tries to tell you, well, don’t worry about the kids, the virus won’t really bother them, that’s not the evidence. And especially with delta being so contagious, kids are very seriously at risk. And it’s up to all of us to do everything we can to protect them, as well as we’re trying to protective everybody else at the same time. This is Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health, being interviewed by Chris Wallace of Fox News on Sunday, August 15. 400 children have died of COVID-19 in 1.5 years. Compare that to overall fatalities. As Don Boudreaux points out at CafeHayek, this is “a paltry 0.76 percent of the total number of children deaths in America (52,672) over the same time period.” Chris Wallace did not follow up with any question, let alone a skeptical question. That’s more forgivable because we expect our news people to be innumerate. But it’s shocking for a leading health professional, for whom data should be his bread and butter, to stir fear where little is justified. Look at this part of his bio from the NIH site: Dr. Collins is an elected member of both the National Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in November 2007, and received the National Medal of Science in 2009. In 2020, he was elected as a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (UK) and was also named the 50th winner of the Templeton Prize, which celebrates scientific and spiritual curiosity. That curiosity was certainly not on display in this interview. The picture above is of Collins. (1 COMMENTS)

Do you consider yourself to be “free market”? If so, what does that mean? Can you be a fan of the free market, but not necessarily its results? Maybe sometimes you feel like arguing for free markets is like choosing the prettiest pig. Perhaps you’ve always been uneasy with the idea of free markets. Do you know why? In this episode, EconTalk host Russ Roberts welcomes back Mike Munger to work through these questions. For Munger, the argument for for markets is not about their perfection. ‘No; it is that division of labor is a way of fostering specialization. “The argument for free markets is that you can break out of the small command economy into a system where I don’t need to know the person that I’m buying things from.” In the words of Munger’s mentor, Douglass North, markets are for reducing the transaction costs of exchange. Now we’d like to hear what you took away from this episode. Have you become a greater or lesser fan of free markets? Has the way you define free markets changed at all after this episode? Share your thoughts in the comments, or use the prompts below to start your own conversation offline. As always, we’re eager to continue the conversation.   1- Compare Roberts’ and Munger’s definitions of the free market. How do they differ, and what prompts Munger to quip, “economists are always talking about economic freedom as if it were freedom,” and what might it mean to advocate for a “presumption in favor of liberty” instead?   2- Munger makes the perhaps surprising claim that comparative advantage is an idea whose time has passed. Roberts says that David Ricardo‘s contribution has overshadowed Adam Smith‘s more important one. Explain what each means, and the extent to which you agree.   3- Why does Munger argue we should distinguish between moral communities and moral orders? How does it follow from this that socialism should be considered a moral anarchy? How could rule-based utilitarianism (as opposed to discretion) be better employed to solve conflicts in markets and politics? (Hint: remember the Munger-ism, Every flaw in consumer is worse in voters.)   4- Roberts asks Munger if he believes in any agencies that restrict markets and trade, as Roberts does. (Roberts admits he favors pollution regulations from the EPA, while also admitting he believes the current iterations to be poorly designed.) How does Munger respond? What does Munger mean when he says perhaps the greatest problem with bureaucracy is not corruption in the public choice sense, but a certain kind of self-interest?   5- Munger insists that many people think markets are what happen when the state does nothing. That’s not right, he says. Markets are what happens when the state does the right kind of nothing. What does he mean by this, and how does he answer Roberts’ question with regard to the dominance of Big Tech firms such as Google and Facebook? (0 COMMENTS)

Two sorts of diversity must be distinguished: one that develops on the market and in other forms of free interpersonal relations in response to the different preferences, values, and discoveries of individuals; and another one, decreed by a government, public institution, or public authority, representing a majority or a minority of voters, on the basis of what it thinks that diversity should be. A decree, of course, is not a pious wish: everybody must legally comply. “Be diverse, or else!” An example of the second sort is illustrated by a news item in The Economist (“Business This Week,” August 14, 2021): America’s Securities and Exchange Commission approved a controversial requirement by the Nasdaq for companies that list on its markets to disclose statistics on the diversity of their boards and to have at least two “diverse directors”, or explain why they do not. One director must be a woman and the other from a racial or sexual minority. It is important to realize that, probably since Franklin D. Roosevelt, exchanges such as today’s Nasdaq are not private associations, but organizations that enforce state controls and decrees and, as we see in this case, must have their policies explicitly or implicitly approved by their real boss, Big Brother himself. It is apparently part of a general trend whereby the federal government indirectly imposes measures that would be constitutionally forbidden or doubtful if imposed directly. One point that is perhaps not crystal clear in The Economist‘s blurb is that it is indeed the “gender” composition of boards, not its sexual composition, that is targeted: anybody may self-identify as a man, a woman, or a non-binary. Membership in the racial or ethnic groups, as well as in the sexual LGBTQ+ group, is also largely self-identified. I would defend the idea that everybody is or should be free to identify as what he wants, provided he does not force others to recognize or reward his self-identification. (You may self-identify as a Great Turkey, but I am not obliged to treat you as such.) But in a free society, it would be unacceptable to force people to identify with the groups in which some authority wants to imprison them. More precisely, the Nasdaq proposed regulation that was was approved by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), as published in the Federal Register, obliges any Nasdaq listed company to have, or explain why it does not have, at least two members of its board of directors who are Diverse, including at least one Diverse director who self-identifies as Female and at least one Diverse director who self-identifies as an Underrepresented Minority or LGBTQ+. Pursuant to proposed Rule 5605(f)(1), ‘‘Diverse’’ would be defined to mean an individual who self-identifies in one or more of the following categories: (i) Female, (ii) Underrepresented Minority, or (iii) LGBTQ+. Also pursuant to proposed Rule 5605(f)(1), ‘‘Female’’ would be defined to mean an individual who self-identifies her gender as a woman, without regard to the individual’s designated sex at birth; ‘‘Underrepresented Minority’’ would be defined to mean an individual who self-identifies as one or more of the following: Black or African American, Hispanic or Latinx, Asian, Native American or Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, or Two or More Races or Ethnicities; and ‘‘LGBTQ+’’ would be defined to mean an individual who self-identifies as any of the following: Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or as a member of the queer community. Each corporation listed on Nasdaq now has to publish a Board Diversity Matrix providing the number of board members who self-identify with each of the regulatory categories and subcategories, as well as the number of individuals who declined to be fitted into these group identities. The SEC’s Order (reminder: it’s an order, not a loving wish), which was also published in the Federal Register of August 12, also explains the purported usefulness of this new regulation: The Commission finds that the Board Diversity Proposal would provide widely available, consistent, and comparable information that would contribute to investors’ investment and voting decisions. … The reduced cost and improved efficiency in collecting, using, and comparing such information could enhance investors’ investment and voting decision-making processes, and enhance investors’ ability to make informed investment and voting decisions. Because the proposal would make such information widely available on the same basis to all investors, the proposal would also mitigate any concerns regarding unequal access to information that may currently exist between certain (likely larger and more resourceful) investors who could obtain the information and other (likely smaller) investors who may not be able to do so. Accordingly, the Commission finds that the proposal is designed to promote just and equitable principles of trade, remove impediments to and perfect the mechanism of a free and open market and a national market system, and protect investors and the public interest. We see in action the principle that if you give Leviathan one inch, he will take a mile. The New Deal securities laws were justified by the goal of providing more information to investors. This information is now deemed to include the gender, sexual (“LGBTQ+”), racial, and ethnic composition of the Nasdaq-listed companies’ boards. One question is, in how many years will the government and its minion organizations impose discrimination mandates instead of mere information requirements? For now, an actual or potential board member will be able to self-identify as belonging to any group on the list. A non-Diverse white male board member or candidate thereof could identify as a black woman. It is not totally inconceivable that a company wanting to show good PC statistics could exert gentle influence on a board member to check the right box. But these incentives may be muted, if only because a man who identifies as a woman “just for my career” might get objections from his wife or girlfriends. What is sure is that the price of the members of the favored groups on the list (that is, their compensation) will increase on the market for board members, compared to the price of non-favored board material. What sort of discrimination is popular today may shift in the future. Now, just think how this kind of board diversity order would have been useful to bigots in the Jim Crow South by ratting on corporations with too many black directors. At another level, what’s a better way to advance collectivism than to have government incentivize individuals to identify with a group? At any rate, it is pretty clear that the new regulation will further intensify the politicization of corporations and fuel the flames of race and identity wars. Changes in the official list of privileged groups have already been proposed. Marx believed that capitalism would break down under its own contradictions. This fate is more likely to hit its degenerate, woke, crony fake. (0 COMMENTS)

  In the early 1960s, the parents of one of the authors left him [David R. Henderson, for those who are wondering], his brother, and his sister a lot. Such situations, with one pre-teen (the author) and two teenag- ers, can lead to a lot of conflict. On one issue, the three siblings figured out how to reduce conflict to zero by defining property rights. The family had a corn popper and all three liked popcorn. But there was a problem. Even when the three agreed on who was to pop the corn and who was to wash the resulting dishes (leaving no unwashed dishes was a strict household rule), each of the three had an incentive to eat quickly out of the common popcorn bowl so that he or she would get the popcorn ahead of his or her siblings. After only a few times in which all three ate popcorn more quickly than they ideally wanted to, they devised a solution. They poured the popcorn from the corn popper in equal amounts into three bowls. Then each had a bowl that was his or hers and each could take his/her sweet time eating. Problem solved. Tragedy of the commons averted. Harold Demsetz would have been proud. When and why do property rights come about? It’s an important ques- tion but it was relatively unstudied by economists before the UCLA School got its hands on the issue. A pathbreaking article that gave an answer was Harold Demsetz’s 1967 “Toward a Theory of Property Rights” published in the American Economic Review. Although economists are known to make unjustified fun of anthro- pologists, Demsetz took them seriously and read their literature. The specific area Demsetz studied was the development of property rights, or the lack of their development, among Aboriginal Canadians and native Americans. Anthropologist Frank G. Speck, wrote Demsetz, had “discovered that the Indians of the Labrador Peninsula had a long-established tradition of property in land.” The Speck article that Demsetz cited had been published way back in 1915. His finding was at odds with what anthropologists knew about Indians in the American Southwest. Anthropologist Eleanor Leacock, noting that dif- ference, inquired further into the situation of the Labrador Indians and wrote up her findings in 1954. According to Demsetz, “Leacock clearly established the fact that a close relationship existed, both historically and geographically, between the development of private rights in land and the development of the commercial fur trade” (1967: 351). Reading Leacock’s article gave Demsetz his “aha” moment. He noted that although the factual basis of the correlation was solid, no theory that he knew of had related private property in land to the fact of the fur trade. But to Demsetz it seemed obvious. And in laying out his insight, Demsetz made a further contribution: he analyzed the tragedy of commons a full year and a half before the famous Science article, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” by biologist Garrett Hardin. The Hardin article had introduced the concept of the tragedy of the commons. The core idea is that if a commons, that is, an area that no one owns, is unmanaged, people will overuse it. If, for example, no one owns land on which cattle graze, and no one manages the land, cattle owners will overgraze the land and reduce its value. The Hardin article is one of the most-cited Science articles ever. These are the opening paragraphs of “When Do Property Rights Come About?“, Chapter 4 of David R. Henderson and Steven Globerman, The Essential UCLA School of Economics, Fraser Institute, 2021. The pic above is of Harold Demsetz. Here is his bio in David R. Henderson, ed., The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. (0 COMMENTS)

Except for a few heroes or fanatics, nobody wants to be the last one to fight when his comrades (or perhaps foreign allies) have stopped shooting, abandoned their position, or surrendered. And every soldier knows that every one of his comrades is having the same thought about where his self-interest lies. So when they think the wind is about to turn, it has already turned and the whole battalion or army lays down its arms. This explains Afghanistan last week. The perspective of 72 virgins in the afterlife counts of course, but more mundane incentives too. Game theory has formalized this sort of problem as the famous Prisoner Dilemma. It may be in the common interest of all to continue fighting, but if every individual thinks it is in his own interest to stop, he will. It’s standard economics. In his book Bureaucracy (Liberty Fund, 2005), Gordon Tullock analyzed individual incentives in the military (which is a sort of bureaucracy) and gave numerous examples of their importance. (0 COMMENTS)

I’ve only recently watched the HBO mini-serie on Chernobyl and I can’t but recommend it highly. The cast is superb and the series is quite effective in conveying a sense of what happened in those terrible days. It is also a commentary on the Soviet regime, and a rather effective one. The main point it raises is that the Soviet Union was an inextricable web of lies. It is not only that those responsible for the nuclear disaster were lying about what they did or did not do: that would be understandable and I suppose it would happen almost anywhere. When faced with the possibility of a life sentence, your relationship with the truth becomes all of a sudden more flexible. The series does not pretend that human beings were different under the Soviet regime than they are under Putin, or Biden, or Mario Draghi. In fact, the series is a catalog of remarkable and brave individuals, who put their own lives in jeopardy for the sake of saving others’ lives. Yet the system is begotten by lies. It is not only that, in a bureaucracy, incentives for career advancement are such that people become overtly “flexible” with the truth, reporting only the good things and avoiding responsibility for the others. Once again, something similar may happen in non-socialist regimes too- think about life in a big corporation. The system’s most striking feature is the existence of an “official truth”, which everybody knows has little resemblance with the actual truth and yet it is there, and it influences peoples’ behavior. Once the official truth is in the book, it cannot be openly challenged. Once some information is erased from the books, no decision can be taken on its basis. The KGB enforces lie upon lie, for the sake of national greatness. This comes even to the point of censoring scientific papers, making it impossible to the scientific community to work as it should. In the ongoing discussion on meritocracy, we sometimes are tempted to see the USSR as a meritocracy. In a sense, it was. Think about sports or arts: only the promising people could practice them (an essential element of a free society is that people can try to pursue what they want, even if they’re not particularly good at it). On paper, a bureaucracy is a meritocratic system, particularly when it accords such an important role to research, science and technology. But if everything is founded upon lies, then it is built on thin ice. Anyway, besides my ramblings, do yourself a favor and watch the series. (0 COMMENTS)

Journalist and author Nicholas Wapshott talks about his book Samuelson Friedman with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Milton Friedman and Paul Samuelson were two of the most influential economists of the last century. They competed for professional acclaim and had very different policy visions. The conversation includes their differences over the work of Keynes, their rivalry in their columns at Newsweek, and a discussion of their intellectual and policy legacies. (0 COMMENTS)

Journalist and author Nicholas Wapshott talks about his book Samuelson Friedman with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Milton Friedman and Paul Samuelson were two of the most influential economists of the last century. They competed for professional acclaim and had very different policy visions. The conversation includes their differences over the work of Keynes, their rivalry […] The post Nicholas Wapshott on Samuelson and Friedman appeared first on Econlib.