In high school, Ayn Rand convinced me that moral relativism was a grave social problem.  Not in the weak sense that, “If everyone were moral relativists, there would be bad consequences,” but in the strong sense that, “Moral relativism has terrible consequences already.”  Soon afterwards, I read Paul Johnson’s Modern Times, and he reinforced my Randian belief.  In Johnson’s words: At the beginning of the 1920s the belief began to circulate, for the first time at a popular level, that there were no longer any absolutes: of time and space, of good and evil, of knowledge, above all of value. Mistakenly but perhaps inevitably, relativity became confused with relativism. Johnson then proceeds to interpret the world from the 1920s to the 1980s through the lens of moral relativism.  Moral relativism leads to Marxism-Leninism, fascism, Nazism, and World War II, as well as the barbaric wars of “national liberation” and the subsequent petty tyrannies. Over time, however, I’ve almost completely changed my mind.  While I definitely think that moral relativism is false, I no longer think that moral relativism has grave geopolitical consequences.  Instead, I say that the horrors that Johnson describes were heavily driven by what I call moral fanaticism.  And the same goes for our contemporary political landscape.  The vast majority of liberals and conservatives are much closer to moral fanaticism than moral relativism. What exactly is moral fanaticism?  Like moral relativism, moral fanaticism is a meta-ethical theory – a theory about moral facts and moral reasoning.  Moral relativism says, roughly, that there are no moral facts, and moral “reasoning” is just thinly-veiled emoting.  Moral fanaticism, in contrast, affirms that there are moral facts, but pretends that thinly-veiled emoting is ironclad moral reasoning.  The predictable result is that moral fanatics hold bizarre moral views with immense confidence.  They’re like people who use love to solve math problems. Consider Nazism.  Leonard Peikoff notwithstanding, moral relativism had near-zero influence on the Nazis.  The Nazis didn’t think the truth of their moral position was a matter of opinion.  They totally thought they were right.  They believed that Aryans were the master race, and that as the master race they had the right to treat lesser people as slaves or vermin.  That’s the kind of self-righteousness you need to murder millions.  What made them fanatics?  The way they reached these conclusions.  They didn’t try to stay calm.  They didn’t test their moral positions against hypotheticals.  They didn’t invite intelligent people who disagreed to check their work.  They didn’t ponder Bayes’ Rule, or study cognitive biases.  Instead, they adopted the moral positions most compatible with their own power-hunger and hate. Basically the same goes for Johnson’s entire rogues gallery.  Marxists-Leninists also totally thought they were right – and had the kind of self-righteousness you need to murder millions.  And while their writing style was obviously very appealing to the highly-educated, their reasoning process was fanatical.  In their writings, neither Marx nor Lenin try to stay calm.  They make near-zero effort to find and respond to intelligent critics.  They virtually never wonder if they’re just plain wrong.  Instead, they preach to the choir – with a subtext of fire and blood.  The anti-colonialist movement was obvious more varied.  But almost none of the prominent proponents of “national liberation” seriously wondered if their struggle against foreign oppression would unleash homegrown tyranny.  Questions like, “War is hell, so does it really make sense turn to violence to obtain independence?” were thought crimes.  Yes, even Nelson Mandela was such a moral fanatic – even according to his falsified autobiography which lies about his long-standing membership in the South African Communist Party. The best case for my original position is that moral relativism enables moral fanaticism.  In the words of Bertrand Russell: “The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent full of doubt.”  If reasonable people had the courage of their convictions, they would have proudly crushed Marxism-Leninism, Nazism, and other expressions of moral fanaticism before they became severe threats.  If you search carefully, you can definitely find statements consistent with this story.  Here’s what the great historian Carlton Hayes had to say about the Soviet Union in 1924: Nevertheless, some order was emerging from the Russian chaos.  The world had failed to overcome Bolshevist Russia, and Bolshevist Russia had failed to overcome the world.  The Russian Revolution was left to work itself out as a great political and social experiment.  Already it stood forth in history as a most significant outcome of the Great War, and it promised to command the attention and interest of the whole world for many years to come. In the end, however, these relativistic sentiments are throw-away comments.  A few casual words in a career.  When push comes to shove, almost everyone treats their political views as undeniable.  Take a look, for instance, at Hayes’ A Brief History of the Great War.  This book-length expression of absolute moral certitude in Wilson’s crusade to make the world safe from democracy starts with the dedication: To those students of his who loyally left their books and proudly paid the supreme sacrifice in the cause of human solidarity against international anarchy the author inscribes this book. A true believer mentality infuses the entire book.  None of the sordid history of the origins or aftermath of World War I even faze Hayes.  (Though to his credit, Hayes later wrote a book-length critique of moral fanaticism called Nationalism: A Religion).  And while he’s obviously just one man, he’s an archetype. If moral fanaticism rules the world, though, why aren’t violent conflicts much more common?  Not because of moral relativism, but because of political pragmatism.  Even most moral fanatics realize that trying to impose their dogmas on the entire world would end in disaster.  For their own power-hungry selves.  They combine absurd confidence in their own moral rectitude with reasonable doubts about their ability to bring a world of enemies to their knees.  So life goes on. (0 COMMENTS)

An article I read for yesterday’s Monetary Theory and Policy Class referenced a section of Ludwig von Mises’s magnus opus, Human Action. I had read the whole thing cover to cover in 1970-71, the year I took off to study economics on my own, but had read only small parts since. But, as happens when I read one small part of Human Action, I start noticing other parts that are interesting. I liked Mises’s take on Keynes’s famous statement that gold is a “barbarous relic.” Here it is: Men have chosen the precious metals gold and silver for the money service on account of their mineralogical, physical, and chemical features. The use of money in a market economy is a praxeologically necessary fact. [DRH note: if you wonder why, Google, Bing, or Brave “double coincidence of wants.”] That gold–and not something else–is used as money is merely a historical fact and as such cannot be conceived by catallactics. In monetary history too, as in all other branches of history, one must resort to historical understanding. If one takes pleasure in calling the gold standard a “barbarous relic,”* one cannot object to the application of the same term to every historically determined institution. Then the fact that the British speak English–and not Danish, German, or French–is a barbarous relic too, and every Briton who opposes the substitution of Esperanto for English is no less dogmatic and orthodox than those who do not wax rapturous about the plans for a managed currency. *The footnote references “Lord Keynes in the speech delivered before the House of Lords, May 23, 1944.” (0 COMMENTS)

President Joe Biden is planning a multi-trillion-dollar infrastructure and jobs package to spur transformative change to the economy. Unfortunately, the infrastructure component of his plan will fail to significantly improve the nation’s roads, bridges, and the like because it ignores the vast inefficiencies in current transportation policy that greatly reduce benefits from infrastructure spending. Let me take you on the journey of a dollar of government spending intended to improve, for example, travel conditions on a highway. This dollar will have a long, perilous trip and encounter many dangers enroute that will divert it from its correct destination and take large, wasteful chunks out of it. By the time it reaches the wrong destination, it will fund much less than a dollar’s worth of highway improvements. The dangers it encounters include inefficient road pricing and investment policy, inflated input and project costs, misallocation of highway revenues, and the slow adoption of technological innovations. This is from Clifford Winston, “How Federal Infrastructure Dollars Get Nickeled and Dimed,” Barron’s, March 24, 2021. I highly recommend the whole piece. Actually, everything I’ve ever read by Cliff has been at least good and usually great. (0 COMMENTS)

Many people seem to think that that “public health” is a scientific white knight. For sure, many medical experts in the public health movement do have real scientific knowledge, but the science stops there. The rest is essentially a political movement. The Reason Foundation just published my primer on public health: “Public Health Models and Related Government Interventions: A Primer.” A few excerpts: “In many respects,” says a major textbook of public health, “it is more reasonable to view public health as a movement than as a profession.” With its wide definition, ideology, and scope, public health is as much as, or more of, a political movement than a field of scientific inquiry. Elizabeth Fee agrees with “the idea that public health is not just a set of disciplines, information, and techniques but is, above all, a shared social vision.” This  hared social vision is not founded on the respect of the preferences of all individuals and an attempt to find social institutions that can best reconcile them, but on the idea that some experts, or perhaps a democratic majority that agrees with them, should impose their values and trade-offs on other individuals in society. The progress of public health appears closely tied to the collectivist ideologies that developed in the 19th century. At the beginning of the 20th century, medical educator Harvey Jordan of the University of Virginia predicted that in light of eugenics and “the general change from individualism to collectivism,” medicine would be transformed into public health, and that physicians would upgrade from “doctors of private diseases” to “guardian of the public health.” One factor in the drift of public health toward total government care has been a non-scientific conception of society. The ideological content of the public health movement is visible there: a priori, they believe the issue is a matter of collective choice, that is, of imposing a politically determined opinion and behavior on those who don’t agree, instead of leaving it to individual choices. There is no recognition of the existence of two distinct facets of human activity: it is one thing for science to determine (at least provisionally) what are the health consequences of different actions; it is another thing to impose one course of action on those individuals who would make different trade-offs. In the perspective of this paper, truth is a matter of scientific inquiry; choice is a matter of individual preferences (with some exceptions). Few economists should fail to see how anti-scientific this ideological movement is in matters relating to society, politics, and economics. (0 COMMENTS)

Most skilled American workers are now at least somewhat afraid to criticize fashionable left-wing views.  They feel quite fearful to do so on the job, and fairly fearful to do so on social media.  One tempting way to quell this high anxiety is to pass new laws against political discrimination.  Washington, DC already has such a law: [T]he District of Columbia Human Rights Act prohibits all employers in the District from refusing to hire, terminating, or otherwise discriminating against any individual with respect to his or her “compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment” on the basis of the individual’s political affiliation.  D.C. Code § 2-1402.11. Before passing a new law, however, one should always ask, “Can we accomplish the same end by repealing – or liberalizing – an existing law?”  And in this case, the answer is clearly yes. But first, let’s back up.  Why are high-skilled employers almost uniformly eager to enforce left-wing fashions, such as adopting an official “anti-racist” philosophy?  Sincere commitment is part of the reason, but far from the whole story.  Political philosophy is too variable to explain such uniform workplace policies.  A better story, in my view, is that almost all employers – left, right, and in-between – fear race and gender discrimination lawsuits.  And since their inception, such lawsuits have been sliding down a slippery slope. The slippery slope looks something like this: 1. The law initially bans conscious decisions by employers to base hiring, promotion, or compensation on race or gender. 2. Discrimination gradually gets reinterpreted to include “unconscious” behavior with similar effects. 3. The next step is to blame employers for saying “the wrong thing,” even if there’s no discernable effect on workers’ objective career outcomes. 4. Then you blame employers for failing to deter their employees from saying “the wrong thing” to each other.  This is when workers go from looking over their shoulder before they say something negative about a specific person, to looking over their shoulder before they say anything that would upset their most hypersensitive colleague. 5. Finally, you blame employers for failing to induce employees to say “the right thing” loudly and often.  In other words, for failing to build a “culture of inclusion.” Why has the slope been so slippery?  Because if you’re doing less to “fight discrimination” than other firms, you worry that you might be perceived as “soft on discrimination” and get sued.  (And if you do more to “fight discrimination” than other firms, even better). You definitely don’t want to loudly announce, “We’ve gone far enough.”  Such words are financially dangerous.  As I’ve said before: Imagine what would happen if a firm’s top brass loudly declared that, “Discrimination simply isn’t a problem here” – and routinely fired complainers for contradicting the party line.  Picture a firm blanketed in propaganda telling workers to “Be color-blind,” “Laugh it off,” and “No one likes a tattle-tale.”  A small business in a conservative area might get away with this for a few years, but a Fortune 500 company that stuck to its right-wing guns would go down in flames. You could argue that employers still overreact to the risk of lawsuits.  I’m sympathetic; contrary to what you’ve heard, even hiring by IQ is fairly safe.  But there’s no need to resolve this debate here, because what I’m going to propose is similarly good at defusing both justified and unjustified fear. My proposal: 1. Amend discrimination law to explicitly state: “Political speech by employers or employees, on or off the job, shall never be considered a form or indicator of ‘discrimination.’  ‘Political speech’ includes the expression of any allegedly racist or sexist views.” 2. For further teeth, add: “Any employee who lodges any formal complaint – internal or external – about a co-worker or employer’s political speech forfeits any right to sue that employer for discrimination for any reason whatsoever.”  This preserves firms’ right to handle offensive speech internally; they can still fire you for singing Hitler’s praises on the job.  But it also gives firms a free hand to handle these internal complaints as it sees fit, without fear of legal blowback or second-guessing.  In fact, it gives firms an incentive to urge employees to voice their complaints internally to ensure that the firm won’t have to deal with such complaints in court. Most people, I suspect, will object that these legal changes go too far.  Since I think discrimination laws do little to reduce genuine discrimination, I obviously disagree.  But I’m unlikely to persuade such people here. On the other hand, many who share my concerns about freedom of expression will object that my proposed legal changes don’t go far enough.  Under my system, stridently left-wing employers can continue to impose a rigid orthodoxy.  Toning down the fear of lawsuits only changes the behavior of employers who were motivated by fear in the first place. Fair enough, but I maintain that my proposal strikes a reasonable balance. Reducing the threat of lawsuits will restore variety by reviving competition.  Strident left-wing workplaces aren’t a big deal as long as we unbelievers can take our labor and go elsewhere at reasonable cost.  And yes, strident left-wing employers have rights, too.  If they want to spend every Friday doing struggle sessions, they should be free to do so. Other employers, however, shouldn’t lose sleep over lawsuits if they offer their workers a more hospitable experience.  While I’m not sure, I predict that my proposed revisions of existing discrimination law would lead to robust competition between employers to create workplaces where no one walks on eggshells.  Since worker preferences vary, we will witness a wide range of options.  But since only a few fanatics savor stifling left-wing dogma, we’ll no longer witness much of that. I for one have already seen enough stifling left-wing dogma to last a lifetime. (0 COMMENTS)

In January 2019, co-blogger Bryan Caplan wrote: The theory of market failure is a reproach to the free-market economy.  Unless you have perfect competition, perfect information, perfect rationality, and no externalities, you can’t show that individual self-interest leads to social efficiency.*  And this anti-market interpretation is largely apt.  You can’t legitimately infer that markets are socially optimal merely because every market exchange is voluntary. Contrary to popular belief, however, market failure theory is alsoa reproach to every existing government.  How so?  Because market failure theory recommends specific government policies – and actually-existing governments rarely adopt anything like them. What we also often see and, depressingly, even usually see, is that economists who are pro-government intervention to fix market failures have a much lower standard for the government than they have for the market. So the odds are that avoiding the specific government policy being proposed would get us closer to the optimum than implementing the government policy. A case in point is Paul Krugman and his views on the recent $1.9 trillion spending bill. In Benjamin Wallace-Wells, “Larry Summers versus the Stimulus,” March 18, 2021, Wallace-Wells makes that point, although I’m not sure that that’s his intention. Wallace-Wells, describing a recent debate between Krugman and Larry Summers about the Biden spending plan, writes: Krugman asked, rhetorically, which elements of the package Summers would cut. Not the public goods, like vaccination and funds for school reopening, and surely not the needed income support. What was left was the part that members of Congress had most vociferously demanded: the aid to state and local governments (which Krugman agreed probably exceeded the fiscal need) and the checks to people who had not much suffered. Krugman said, “The checks, which are the least-justifiable piece in terms of standard economics, are also by far the most popular, and I don’t think we can entirely disregard that.” Put aside the fact that the funds for school reopening are almost certainly not justified because the risks to students and teachers are so low. Notice what even Krugman admits. First, that the aid to state and local governments is too much, even by his standards. Second, the checks to people who hadn’t suffered much, which are a huge part of the package, are the “least-justifiable piece in terms of standard economics.” And what’s Krugman’s justification for those payments? That they are “by far the most popular” and, for that reason, we can’t “entirely disregard that.” In short, in order to get hundreds of billions in spending that Krugman thinks are justified, he is willing to have the government spend other hundreds of billions for things that are not justified. Such is the nature of many, perhaps most, economists’ advocacy of government policy. Note: The picture above is of a Rube Goldberg machine, which is what I think a lot of government policy is like. There is one difference. The Rube Goldberg machine always worked. (0 COMMENTS)

Recently, our parent organization, Liberty Fund, embarked on a series of programs aimed at our local (Indianapolis, Indiana) community. The first topic we endeavored to explore was the future of cities. One of the programs we hosted was a virtual “town hall,” in which I was privileged to interview former EconTalk guest and urban planner Alain Bertaud. I asked Bertaud what a city like Indianapolis, whose goal is to attract and retain talented young professionals, ought to focus on, as well as why we might not want our city planners to have a “vision” for the future. Here’s the video of our conversation:   (0 COMMENTS)

Summary: On price formation theory in Sabiou M. Inoua and Vernon L. Smith Economics of Markets To suppose that utility maximizing individuals choose quantities to buy (sell) contingent on given prices is to pose a consumer demand and supply problem without a price-determining solution. This neoclassical problem formulation imposes (1) exogenous prices, (2) price-taking behavior, and (3) the law of one equilibrium-clearing price on markets, before prices can have formed. Hence, unexplained prices are presumed to exist before consumers arrive in the market. If conditions (2) and (3) are hypothesized to characterize markets, the theoretical challenge is to show that they follow from a theory of how markets function. Hence, neoclassical economics did not, because it could not, articulate a market price formation process.   The classical economists suffered none of these inconsistencies. (see for example Adam Smith, 1776, book 1, chapter VII) They articulated a coherent theory of price formation and discovery based on operational pre-market assumptions about the decentralized information that buyers and sellers brought to market, their interactive market behavior in aggregating this information, and simultaneously determining prices and contract quantities in the market’s end state. Buyers (sellers) were postulated as having pre-market max willingness to pay, wtp (min willingness to accept, wta) value (cost) for given desired quantities to purchase (sell) that bounded the price at which each would buy (sell) as they sought to buy cheap (sell dear). We articulate a mathematical theory of this classical price formation process, its connections with Shannan information theory, and the unexpected role of early experiments in using designs and reporting results consistent with classical theory: Individuals go to market with pre-market max wtp (min wta) reservation values (costs) for discrete (integer) units Arriving, they bring aggregate WTP (WTA) conditions governing price bounds, and motivation to buy cheap (sell dear). Any trial (bid/offer) price, P, if too low, tends to rise; if too high, tends to fall. Hence, in classical price adjustment, the “law of demand and supply”, is dynamic. Formally, price change and excess demand, e(P), have the same sign: e(P) ΔP/Δt > 0, if e≠ 0; price changes if excess demand is not Short side rationing: If any (bid or offer) trial price, P, is too low, the units bought (demanded) are limited by the supply quantity; if P is too high, the units sold (supplied) are limited by the demand quantity. Hence, quantity traded is the minimum of quantity supplied and quantity demanded, or formally, min[s(P), d(P)]. From 2., let V(P) = integral (sum) of -e(P) [namely excess supply, s(p)-d(p)]; for discrete values 𝑉𝑉(𝑝𝑝) = � |𝑣𝑣 − 𝑝𝑝 | + � |𝑐𝑐 − 𝑝𝑝 |, 𝑣𝑣≥𝑝𝑝                      𝑐𝑐≤𝑝𝑝   where the notation means summation over all values, v ≥ p, and all costs, c ≤ p, to assure that no goods trade at a loss. Define (the market center of value), C = arg Min V(P), which includes market clearing, with C = P* (“equilibrium” price), but is more general, by including important cases like constant cost industries where the exchange quantity is determined by demand.   Notice that V(P), a Lyapunov function, measures the distance between price and the traders’ reservation values in profit space. At any P we have, ΔV/Δt = ─e(P)ΔP/Δdt ≤ 0 where t is transaction number. Hence, V changes non-positively as transactions increase, a parameter-free law of classical market convergence. To get convergence speed, a quantitative result, we would need institutional parameters relating transactions to calendar time. For a smooth “large market”, where we let the number of agents increase without bound (infinite), 𝑉𝑉(𝑝𝑝) =  𝑝𝑝 𝑆𝑆(𝑥𝑥)𝑑𝑑𝑥𝑥 +   ∞ 𝐷𝐷(𝑥𝑥)𝑑𝑑𝑥𝑥                  ∫0                                    ∫𝑝𝑝   and dV/dt = -e(P)dP/dt ≤ 0.   Here is a chart illustrating the above equations for large markets in which all “motion” is in terms of transactions, t ≥ 0 , not time, and is therefore a qualitative dynamics. (0 COMMENTS)

New York magazine has a good article on Covid-19: “Basically, going back to January, they’d be like, ‘China’s not going to control it; 80 percent of the population is going to get it; all efforts to contain it are going to fail; we have to learn to live with this virus; contact tracing and testing make no sense; this is going to be everywhere; right now we need to build up hospitals’ — which they didn’t even do. But they really didn’t think it was stoppable,” she says. “And then all of a sudden you started to see, in February, South Korea stopping it, Taiwan stopping it, and China stopping it. Then, in March, New Zealand. And then Australia. And then there’s this realization of, ‘Oh, wow. Actually, it is controllable.’” At the beginning of March, South Korea was averaging more than 550 new daily confirmed cases, compared with just 53 in the U.K. At the end of the month, South Korea had 125; the U.K. was at 4,500 and climbing. “In the UK we have had nine weeks to listen, learn and prepare,” Sridhar wrote angrily in the Guardian, berating the British regime for failing to establish basic systems for supplies, testing, and contact tracing. Later they point out that things are not quite that simple: Francois Balloux, an infectious-disease epidemiologist and computational geneticist at the University College of London, goes further. “It’s not obvious that different measures taken in different places have clearly led to different outcomes,” he says. “There’s a lot of idiosyncrasy, and I think it’s simplistic to say that the countries that have controlled or eliminated the virus did things extremely differently. If you just list, for instance, the interventions that places like New Zealand or Australia have implemented, they’re not drastically different — in stringency nor duration — than in some other places. The country that had the strictest lockdown for longest in the world is Peru, and they were absolutely devastated. I think the slightly depressing message,” Balloux says with a sigh, “is that there is not just a set of policies that will bring success and can just be applied to any place in the world.” So how can we reconcile these two conflicting narratives?  First we need to distinguish between public policy and behavior.  I suspect that the relatively low level of Covid deaths in some areas of the US (Washington, Oregon, Utah, Northern New England and even the SF Bay area of California) has more to do with culture than public policy.  People behave differently in different parts of the US.  If death rates in the Pacific Northwest and northern New England are similar to those in Canada, is it so far-fetched to believe that their culture also resembles Canada more than it does much of the rest of the US? But the big international differences may require an additional explanation.  Reading the article, I was immediately reminded of the global recession of 2008-09.  I’ve argued that the recession was caused by tight money policies, especially in the US and Europe.  But why was Australia able to avoid a recession?  Their central bank didn’t do any QE, and didn’t even cut interest rates to zero. In fact, what to the average person looks like an “easy money” policy is often the exactly opposite.  It’s precisely because Australia had a more expansionary policy early in the recession that they were able to avoid some of the more “reactive” policy measures employed elsewhere during the 2010s.  Similarly, the US was a bit more (proactively) aggressive than the ECB during 2009-10, and as a result the ECB ended up being forced to do aggressive (reactive) QE and negative interest rates in the middle 2010s. So if you see news stories of positive interest rates in Australia during the global recession of 2008-09, do not conclude that easy money is not stimulative.  And if you see news stories of restaurants being open in Taiwan, Australia and New Zealand during the Covid pandemic, do not conclude that social distancing is not helpful.  Rather the positive interest rates are a sign that Australia took proactive steps to prevent a deep fall in NGDP growth, and the open restaurants are a sign that they got on top of the pandemic early on, with an aggressive policy aimed at driving Covid rates down close to zero. There’s another interesting comparison between Covid and the 2008-09 recession.  In both cases, bloggers were often ahead of the experts in diagnosing the problem and recommending appropriate policies.  Bloggers pointed out that the Fed’s October 2008 decision to begin paying interest on reserves would have a contractionary effect.  Today, that criticism is widely understood as being correct.  Indeed in his memoir, Ben Bernanke acknowledges that monetary policy was too tight after Lehman failed.  Similarly, bloggers like Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen have been consistently right in their criticism of the public policy response to Covid. PS.  The US is currently at 1670/million Covid deaths.  Canada is at 595/million, or halfway between Utah and Oregon.  Here are the lowest 7 states: Note:  The 15 highest Covid death rates are in both northern and southern states, as well as both urban and rural. (1 COMMENTS)

Academia has been good to me so far.  For as long as I’ve been a professor, I have tried to speak politely, thoughtfully, and candidly –  privately as well publicly.  From where I’m sitting, the system treats me quite well. Perhaps, however, I’ve simply been lucky.  Or perhaps the system is swiftly decaying right before my unperceiving eyes. In case either of these pessimistic scenarios turn out to be correct, I am now making a precommitment.  Namely: I will never apologize for politely saying or writing anything that seems reasonable to me… except under extreme duress. So if I ever do so apologize, please assume extreme duress. P.S. If I politely say or write something that seems reasonable to me, but later conclude is false, I will acknowledge and correct my mistake.  But as long as one has applied this due diligence, error is not blameworthy and warrants no apology. (3 COMMENTS)