This point is obvious once you think about it. It’s basic economics. It’s just that I had never thought about it. It is also worth noting that talk radio in the 1980s was a much more ideologically diverse industry than it is today, with many hosts from both the political left and right. Contrary to conservative talk radio hosts who explain their dominance by the existence of a silent majority of average Joe listeners, ironically it was the federal government that boosted right-wing dominance of talk radio. As historian Brian Rosenwald argues, left-wing talk radio hosts had to compete for listeners with government-subsidized, center-left NPR affiliates, while right-wing hosts had a clearer competitive field. Station owners could guarantee a larger audience to advertisers simply by picking right-wing instead of left-wing talk radio programs. Talk radio’s conservative bent is the unintended product of the government’s halfhearted attempt to create a nationalized broadcasting system in the 1970s. (Though I wouldn’t expect a “Rush was Made Possible By Listeners like You” slogan to appear on a complimentary NPR tote bag any time soon.) From Paul Matzko, “The Fairness Doctrine Was the Most Deserving Target of Rush Limbaugh’s Rage,” Reason.com, February 19, 2021.   (0 COMMENTS)

Among non-economists and politicians, the minimum wage is one of the most misunderstood issues in economic policy. President Biden and almost all Democrats and some Republicans in the US Congress advocate increasing the federal minimum wage from its current level of $7.25 an hour to $15 an hour over four years. They argue that many of the workers earning between $7.25 and $15 will get a raise in hourly wage. That’s true. But what they don’t tell you, and what many of them probably don’t know, is that many workers in that wage range will suffer a huge drop in wages—from whatever they’re earning down to zero. Other low-wage workers will stay employed but will work fewer hours a week. Many low-wage workers will find that their non-wage benefits will fall and that employers will work them harder. Why all those effects? Because an increase in the minimum wage doesn’t magically make workers more productive. A minimum wage of $15 an hour will exceed the productivity of many low-wage workers. This is from David R. Henderson, “The Opportunity-Killing Minimum Wage,” Defining Ideas, February 18, 2021. Another excerpt: Employers don’t hire workers as a favor. Instead, employers hire workers to make money. They hire people only if the wage and other components of compensation they pay are less than or equal to the value of the worker’s productivity. If an employer pays $10 an hour to someone whose productivity is $15 an hour, that situation won’t last long. A competing employer will offer, say $12 an hour to lure the worker away from his current job. And then another employer will compete by offering $13 an hour. Competition among employers, not government wage-setting, is what protects workers from exploitation. We all understand that fact when we see discussions on ESPN about why one football player makes $20 million a year and another makes “only” $10 million a year. Everyone recognizes the twin facts of player productivity and competition among NFL teams. The same principles, but with much lower wages, apply to competition among employers for relatively low-skilled employees. Also, see how I discuss the last 28 years of literature on the minimum wage. And finally: The University of Chicago’s Booth School has an Initiative on Global Markets (IGM) that occasionally surveys US economists on policy issues. Possibly because of the surveyors’ understanding that the $15 minimum wage would hurt some states more than others, the IGM recently made the following statement and asked forty-three economists to agree or disagree: “A federal minimum wage of $15 per hour would lower employment for low-wage workers in many states.” Unfortunately, the question did not specify what is meant by “many.” Is it ten, twenty, thirty? Some economists surveyed pointed out that ambiguity. That ambiguity could explain why a number of the economists answered that they were uncertain. But of those who agreed or disagreed, nineteen agreed that it would cause job loss in many states and only six disagreed. One economist who disagreed, Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago, gave as his explanation this sentence: “The literature suggests minimal effects on employment.” No, it doesn’t. As noted earlier, the federal government has never tried to raise the minimum wage by such a large amount and so there is no scholarly literature on such an increase. Would Thaler say that if putting a cat in the oven at a temperature of 72.5 degrees Fahrenheit doesn’t hurt the cat, then putting a cat in the oven at 150 degrees wouldn’t hurt the cat either? Read the whole thing. (0 COMMENTS)

As I mentioned in a recent post, Monterey County, where I live, is behind almost every other part of the country in achieving vaccinations. Enter CVS. Last Friday, my wife, Rena, got on a user-friendly CVS site to see where she could get vaccinated. She was still working with it when I left for work. I have a 10-minute commute. A minute after I arrived at work, she called and told me that she had an appointment for the following Monday, Feb. 15, in Capitola, about 45 minutes north of us. She told me how to get on and find an appointment. I got on the site and it seemed that everything had been taken. I called her and told her that. Rena said, “You always give up too early. Let me try it. How far are you willing to drive?” “Quite far,” I said. I was picturing driving 2 or 3 hours to Modesto or Fresno. Ten minutes later she called back and had an appointment for me on the next day, Saturday, Feb. 13, in Santa Clara, a 75-minute drive each way. I drove up there the next day. I called a friend on the way, a fellow Canadian who had come with me to UCLA in 1972, and told him that I hadn’t been that excited since getting my green card. A couple of hours later, I got the Moderna shot. Thank you, CVS. I like you so much more than the Monterey County government. (0 COMMENTS)

This Matt Yglesias tweet criticizes a recent Bloomberg article by Noah Smith: Yglesias is referring to an important 1998 paper by Paul Krugman, where he argued that when in a liquidity trap a central bank should promise to be irresponsible, that is, commit to higher than normal inflation after the economy has recovered and interest rates have risen above zero. Like J.M. Keynes, Krugman is very good at expressing unconventional ideas in an evocative fashion, but it’s also important to understand exactly what he is saying.  My reading of the paper is that Krugman is not suggesting that central banks promise to be irresponsible, rather that they promise to be “irresponsible”.  The scare quotes indicate that Krugman actually views his policy recommendation as responsible, but recognizes that a period of above normal “catch-up” inflation might be viewed as irresponsible by conservative central bankers, and even the broader public. For example, suppose a central bank had a 2% inflation target, but was in the midst of a 5-year period of zero inflation.  Assume that because interest rates are zero the central bank is currently unable to stimulate the economy.  In that case, the central bank might want to promise a 5-year period of 4% inflation after exiting the liquidity trap.  If credible (an important consideration) this promise would raise inflation expectations and reduce real interest rates.   (If I’m wrong and it raised nominal interest rates, then it would allow the central bank to stimulate the economy using conventional policy tools.) The policy may look irresponsible during the subsequent period of 4% inflation, as the economy will have already recovered from the recession.  But this inflation overshoot is helpful because it creates more bullish expectation during the preceding recession, spurring a more rapid recovery. One can make a pretty good argument that the Fed’s recent adoption of “average inflation targeting” is at least partly motivated by Krugman’s paper, and subsequent research by scholars such as Michael Woodford, Gauti Eggertsson and Ben Bernanke.  The Fed is committing to having inflation average 2% over the long term (say the entire 2020s) even though it is currently running at below 2%.  That means they are committing to an “irresponsible” above 2% inflation rate in the latter 2020s.  But that’s the responsible thing to do! So who’s right, Yglesias or Smith?  Each side of the debate has a valid point.  For instance, here’s Smith: Seeing these developments, economists like Summers and Blanchard might worry that a policy regime change is about to follow — or that the public will believe that one has happened, which would amount to much the same thing. So they might be trying to set themselves up as a counterweight to those who dismiss the importance of deficits, in order to reassure the public that once the Covid-19 crisis ends, leaders will go back to worrying about fiscal prudence. But given their lack of roles within the Biden administration, economists like Summers and Blanchard might not be the best-positioned to do this. Instead, this is probably a job for the Fed. The central bank should make it clear that if deficit spending leads to substantial inflation — say, over 6% — it will raise interest rates to fight it, even if that means hurting the economy. I would go even further.  The Fed should set rates at the level necessary to hit their target.  Full stop.  If it’s a 2% AIT over the 2020s, then interest rates should be set at a level that produces 2% inflation over the 2020s, on average.  Yes, they have a dual mandate that includes employment, but that’s why they’d be better off targeting NGDP growth.  Unfortunately, they have not taken my advice, and have committed to an average inflation rate of 2%.  So the Fed should what’s necessary to achieve their target, otherwise their promises will not be credible in the future. In Yglesias’s defense, at the moment it seems like the public is expecting inflation to average a bit less than 2%.  Here’s David Beckworth and Ramesh Ponnuru: So inflation hawks have highlighted the difference in yields between Treasury bonds that are adjusted for inflation and those that are not. That difference has been rising in a way that seems to imply that the market is forecasting inflation a little above 2 percent. But the Treasury ties its inflation-adjusted bonds to a different measure, the Consumer Price Index, and it typically runs higher than Personal Consumption Expenditure inflation. More important, the Fed’s own purchases of these bonds has made the market for them more liquid, thus decreasing their yield. Take account of such factors, and the forecast for the average inflation rate over the next five years is under 1.5 percent, well below the Fed’s target for action. For all of the recent alarms sounded about inflation, expectations are below where they were before the pandemic started. . . . But catch-up growth in the dollar size of the economy would almost certainly entail going through a period of inflation above 2 percent. The key questions are whether the Fed will seek such growth, or at least tolerate the inflation that comes with it, and whether markets will have confidence that it will. The financial markets continue to fear that the Fed will be a bit too “responsible”. To summarize, Smith is right that the Fed needs to be responsible in the sense of being willing to raise rates if necessary to prevent the sort of high rates of inflation that we saw in the 1970s.  And Yglesias is right that the Fed needs to be “irresponsible” in the sense of allowing a bit above target inflation in the future to offset the below target inflation that we are currently experiencing. Don’t let terms like “irresponsible” do your thinking for you.  Work out exactly what central bankers need to do to hit their target, and judge them on that basis. PS.  This post is written from a Keynesian perspective.  I’m somewhat more optimistic than most Keynesians about the ability of central banks to do monetary stimulus at the zero bound.  But I do accept the view that an effective monetary stimulus should lead to expectations of at least some catch-up inflation.  The disagreement relates to how aggressively the Fed should be willing to take concrete steps such as large asset purchases while at the zero bound.  I say, “Whatever it takes”. (0 COMMENTS)

Part I: The Household, The Family, and the State Carol Stack’s All Our Kin is a classic ethnography from the early 1970s. The context for the book was the Moynihan Report on the state of the Black family produced by the U.S. government in 1965. The report’s conclusion was that the Black family was dysfunctional and in disarray. Stack and others explored the validity of that conclusion and examined the question of whether the official data used in the report had missed aspects of the lived lives of Black families, particularly poor ones. Stack’s strategy adopted a radical approach: she engaged in participant-observer research by living in a poor, urban, Black community in the American Midwest, which she refers to as “The Flats.” She spent several years there, integrating herself into the community to the extent possible. This enabled her to see the workings of family structure from the inside in a way not possible when one looks only at the statistical data and similar forms of evidence. The conclusion of All Our Kin is that even though poor Black families were not functioning ideally, they were not nearly as dysfunctional as portrayed in the Moynihan Report. I first read All Our Kin in the context of teaching about the family. One of the key insights of the book is that we have to disentangle function and form when we analyze the family, as well as other social institutions. Too often we assume that only one kind of form can provide the function we expect from an institution. With the family, we tend to treat the two-parent nuclear family this way. But we also see this with various structures of property rights, as Elinor Ostrom’s work on community responses to commons problems has shown us. If we treat one particular form as a proxy for function, we can miss the creative ways in which humans develop other practices and norms that can perform the same function. Understanding how particular social structures attempt to solve specific problems will require the kind of up close work that Stack did in this book, and that Ostrom did in her research as well. If we base policy on the assumption that there’s only one set of social practices that can solve a particular problem, we are highly likely to overlook the invisible order-generating processes that both Stack and Ostrom observed. Even if these alternative institutions do not perform ideally, they may be the comparatively best option we have, or they may point us in a different direction in the search for changes in policy or other institutions that would improve outcomes. Stack’s book shows that family policy needs to take account of the actual bottom-up sources of social order, particularly in the context of families of color or immigrant families, where histories of poverty, current discrimination, and the legacy of slavery have produced a wider variety of functional family structures. Stack’s book is of interest to Econlib readers in particular for several reasons. (I have a more extensive treatment of Stack in my chapter “Reciprocity, Calculation, and Non-Market Exchange,” in  Commerce and Community: Ecologies of Social Cooperation, Robert F. Garnett Jr., Paul Lewis, and Lenore T. Ealy, eds., New York: Routledge, 2015.) The first reason is that it represents a challenge to the way governments collect data and use them to make policy. In that way, Stack’s book anticipates some of the themes in James Scott’s Seeing Like a State, written three decades later. The Moynihan report approached its subject matter with a framework that was based on a particular view of the family and that wanted to organize what it found in ways that were amenable to public policy, particularly the policies from the era of President Johnson’s Great Society programs. In choosing that approach, it could not see the way people “on the ground” actually organized their family life and how that structure enabled them to respond to poverty and discrimination in reasonably effective ways. All Our Kin is a great story about human adaptability and the importance of bottom-up social coordination, both of which are frequently overlooked by the state. The specific ways in which families in “The Flats” responded to poverty are also relevant to classical liberals. The Moynihan Report noted the frequency of fatherless families and portrayed them as evidence of the black family’s dysfunctionality. Many non-resident fathers did take on varying degrees of responsibility for their children, but this did not always, or even often, involve legal marriage. Unlike the standard model of the family held up as the ideal by the Moynihan Report, the families of “The Flats” (like other poor families, both historically and globally today) relied on persons outside the nuclear family and physical household to provide income and various forms of household production such as child care. For poor, Black families of this era, the “family” and the “household” were not coterminous in the way they tended to be for white observers. What observers term as “extended family” was crucial to this adaptability. Mothers relied on their relatives, especially other women, to provide both physical resources and time. In addition, if the father stepped up and took responsibility for his child, even outside of a legal marriage, his extended family was brought into the kin network of the mother and child and could be drawn upon for various kinds of resources. Of additional importance is that the biological mother need not be the de facto mother for purposes of identifying whose extended family will be drawn upon. Motherhood, as well as a variety of other familial relationships, were defined within the community through a long-standing system of evolved norms. Stack argues: “The system of rights and duties should not be confused with the official, written statutory law of the state,” and that these rights and duties are “enforced only by sanctions within the community” (1974, 46). The evolution of norms and the social coordination that results, though pressed upon these families by poverty, are very much a Hayekian spontaneous order process, and one that was hidden from the official view of the state.   Part II coming next week. *Steven Horwitz is the Distinguished Professor of Free Enterprise and Director of the Institute for the Study of Political Economy in the Department of Economics in the Miller College of Business at Ball State University in Muncie, IN. He is also an Affiliated Senior Scholar at the Mercatus Center in Arlington, VA, a Senior Fellow at the Fraser Institute of Canada, and the economics editor at the Cato Institute’s libertarianism.org. He is the author of four books, including most recently Austrian Economics: An Introduction. He is also the 2020 recipient of the Julian L. Simon Memorial Award from the Competitive Enterprise Institute. For more articles by Steven Horwitz, see the Archive. (0 COMMENTS)

AEI’s Nicholas Eberstadt and Evan Abramsky have eye-opening answers to a jarring question straight out of Richard Scarry: What do jobless men do all day?  Background: Thanks to the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we have detailed, self-reported information each year on how roughly 10,000 adult respondents spend their days—from the moment they wake until they sleep.1 These surveyed Americans include prime-age men who are not in labor force (or “NILF” to social scientists), ordinarily in their peak employment years, who are neither working nor looking for work. By examining the self-reported patterns of daily life of these grown men who do not have and are not seeking jobs, we may gain insights into the work-free existence that some UBI advocates hold to be a positive end in its own right. Immediate answers: NILF men report much less paid work than their peers—an average of just 12 minutes per day, nearly six hours a day less than employed men, and almost five hours a day less than employed women, but also close to an hour a day less than unemployed men. Perhaps more surprisingly, their time freed from work is not repurposed into helping out around the home, such as doing housework, cooking, and other tasks of home maintenance. In fact, they devote significantly less time to such home chores than unemployed men—less, too, than women with jobs. NILF men also spend much less time helping to care for other household members than working women—less time, as well, than unemployed men. Apart from work, by far the biggest difference between the daily schedules of NILF men and everyone else comes in what the ATUS calls “socializing, relaxing, and leisure,” a category that encompasses a range of activities, from listening to music to visiting a museum to attending a party. On average, prime-age NILF men spend almost seven and a half hours a day in such diversions—over four hours a day more than working women, nearly four hours a day more than working men, and over an hour more than jobless men looking for work. Furthermore: NILF turns out to be a catch-all category that merges two very different populations. One of them is adult students, out of the labor force for training to improve their job prospects upon return. The other is a group British parlance calls “NEET”—an acronym for “neither employed nor in education or training.” The NEETs are in effect complete labor force dropouts. And in contemporary America, the overwhelming majority of prime-age male NILFs are NEETs: in the years 2015-19, according to Census Bureau data, fewer than one in six NILFs was an adult student. In the lead-up to the COVID pandemic, this meant one in 10 prime-age men was neither working, nor looking for work, nor seeking the skills that might help them return to the workforce. If we disaggregate prime-age NILFs into NEETs and adult students, two strikingly different ways of life are revealed. Namely: On the one hand, adult students reportedly spend an average of nearly six hours a day on their education or training—and since those averages include weekends and holidays, these men are committing over 2,100 hours a year to their schooling. The converse of such motivation is an unusually low involvement in “socializing, relaxing, and leisure”—distinctly less than for working men, though not as little as for prime-age working women, a notoriously “leisure-poor” population. On the other hand, self-identified prime-age NEET men spend about seven and a half hours a day in “leisure activities.” That works out to about 2,700 hours a year—almost 1,600 hours a year more than working women, nearly 1,400 hours a year more than working men, and remarkably enough, over 450 hours a year more than unemployed men. The deeper patterns: The overwhelming majority of this “leisure” is screen time: television, internet, DVDs, and all the rest. NEET men reported an average of over five hours a day in front of screens—nearly 1,900 hours a year, almost equivalent to the time commitment of a full-time job. ATUS does not ask specifically about video games; if it did, even more NEET screen time commitment would almost certainly be recorded. To go by the time-use surveys, prime-age men without work who are not looking for jobs and not engaged in training spend almost three times as many hours in front of screens as working women and well over twice as many as working men. Strikingly, they also report over 300 hours more screen time per year than their unemployed counterparts—men likewise jobless but who want to get back to work. And the reality is even more disturbing than these time-use numbers can convey on their own. According to a 2017 study by Alan Krueger, almost half of NILF men reported taking some form of pain medication every day. The fraction for NEET men would likely be higher still. The rhythms of life for a great many of the prime-age men in America currently disengaged with the world of work is defined not simply by days and nights sitting in front of screens—but sitting in front of screens while numbed or stoned. I’ve long opposed the Universal Basic Income for a great many reasons.  First and foremost: Helping everyone regardless of need is an absurd way to allocate finite charitable resources.  Eberstadt and Abramsky add another potent objection to the list: the UBI encourages the recipients to fritter away their own lives. There would seem to be no shortage of anomie, alienation, or even despair in the daily lives of men entirely free from work in America today. Why, then, would we not expect a UBI—which would surely result in a detachment of more men from paid employment—to result in even more of the same? Paternalistic?  Indeed.  But as I’ve argued before, the very fact that an adult fails to support himself suggests that he is a poor judge of his own interests – and donors are right and prudent to impose conditions on their assistance.  I call this “Ward Paternalism”: Let’s call this “Ward Paternalism” – paternalism limited to people who are dependents of the government.  For example, rather than give welfare recipients cash to spend, a Ward Paternalist might give them food stamps instead.  Why?  To nudge them into buying groceries instead of alcohol. Key point: Under Ward Paternalism, anyone who doesn’t want to be nudged can simply decline to become dependent on the government.  You can spend your own money your own way, no questions asked.  If, however, you ask taxpayers for help, the help comes with strings attached to encourage you to get your life in order.  He who pays the piper, calls the tune – and why shouldn’t the tune be, “Get your life in order”? Or in slogan form: If an independent adult can fairly protest, “It’s my money and I’ll do what I want with it,” why can’t taxpayers just as fairly protest, “It’s our money and you’ll use it as we think best”? (2 COMMENTS)

What’s the best way to really learn about life in another community? Is it ever possible for industry to really connect with a community? In this episode, author Lamorna Ash describes her experiences in a Cornish fishing villages- and time spent working on a trawler- to EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Ash first visited a Cornish village to to learn how fishing impacted the community, but the village became much more to her, including as the subject of her book, Dark, Salt, Clear. We hope you’ll help us continue the conversation- here in the Comments, or perhaps on your own offline. Either way, we love to hear from you.     1- What surprised you most about Ash’s description of life and work on the trawler? Roberts notes the lack of automation. Why do you think there seem to have been relatively few technological advances in this industry?   2- Why does Ash suggest that seasickness might be more psychological than physical? What doe she mean when she says it depends on “the relationship to the world you left behind?” Can you think of a similar phenomenon from another line of work?   3-  What does Ash think is the most important thing she learned through this experience? What’s a similar experience you have had, and how did it change you?   4- Ash and Roberts talk a great deal about the trade-offs of economic growth, particularly in small towns such as the one in Ash’s book. Roberts says, “Creative destruction, technological change. All these things that lead to a higher standard of living, international trade, also affect your sense of self, your sense of place. It’s disruptive.” how do we know when enough is enough, or how can we help the retired fisherman working at Tesco from falling into despair?   5- How do fishing quotas help solve the tragedy of the commons? Given Ash’s description, how likely do you think it is that the younger generations of fishermen will focus more on sustainability than the old?   Fun Bonus Question: Ash tells the story of her trawler nickname, Raymundo. What would your nickname be, and why?) (0 COMMENTS)

I posted recently about the discussion between Phil Magness and Jeremy Horpedahl about mask mandates to deal with COVID-19. My sometimes co-author and former student Charley Hooper wrote the following on masks in a recent email. He’s given me permission to share it. The bottom line: the evidence in favor of masks, let alone mandates, just does not seem to be there. Here’s Charley: The only randomized controlled trials conducted to study the effects of wearing masks and washing hands show that those two preventative techniques don’t significantly reduce the spread of the influenza virus. In some studies they help a bit. In other studies, they hurt a bit. “Although mechanistic studies support the potential effect of hand hygiene or face masks, evidence from 14 randomized controlled trials of these measures did not support a substantial effect on transmission of laboratory-confirmed influenza.” [Source: https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/5/19-0994_article] Why did I mention influenza and not COVID? COVID-19 is supposed to be transmitted by the same mechanism as influenza and influenza has been around long enough to be better studied. The Xiao study referenced above contains this shocking admission: “It is essential to note that the mechanisms of person-to-person transmission in the community have not been fully determined. These uncertainties over basic transmission modes and mechanisms hinder the optimization of control measures.” Scientist don’t have a handle on how the flu transmits throughout the community. If you don’t know that basic fact, it’s pretty hard to effectively prevent the transmission of influenza! By extension, I think it’s safe to say that scientists don’t understand how the SARS-CoV-2 virus is transmitted. The influenza virus can last about five minutes on a human hand. (“Virus survived on hands for up to 5 min after transfer from the environmental surfaces.”) I suspect that the SARS-CoV-2 virus lasts about the same length of time on hands. [Source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6282993/] Therefore, if you don’t wash your hands but also don’t touch your eyes, nose, or mouth shortly after touching an infected surface. you should be fine. There was one randomized controlled trial of the use of face masks to prevent COVID-19. The study was conducted in Denmark in April and May 2020. The results were not statistically significant but showed that the mask group suffered a 1.8% infection rate while the control group suffered a 2.1% rate (95% confidence intervals = 46% reduction to 23% increase due to masks). In other words, masks helped but were not a panacea. [Source: https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/full/10.7326/M20-6817] Other studies show the benefits of wearing masks, but they are correlational, population-based studies that identify relationships but don’t necessarily prove cause and effect. I’m not saying that masks don’t work. I’m instead highlighting some of the scientific uncertainty around the use of masks. With this uncertainty, COVID absolutism is unjustified and harmful. The rule seems to be that the less people understand about something, the more adamant their beliefs. (1 COMMENTS)

We continue our discussion of Orwell’s “War Is Peace.” Abe: I don’t think that Orwell did believe the Soviet system could last for a long time. In fact, I’ve always suspected that the last third of 1984 was more tongue-in-cheek than people believe; Orwell was in fact poking fun at people in his time who believed that such a society could be perpetuate itself. My reason for believing this is this essay where he reviews James Burnham’s “The Managerial Revolution”: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/second-thoughts-on-james-burnham/ Here is a quote from that essay: “It is too early to say in just what way the Russian régime will destroy itself. If I had to make a prophecy, I should say that a continuation of the Russian policies of the last fifteen years – and internal and external policy, of course, are merely two facets of the same thing – can only lead to a war conducted with atomic bombs, which will make Hitler’s invasion look like a tea-party. But at any rate, the Russian régime will either democratize itself, or it will perish. The huge, invincible, everlasting slave empire of which Burnham appears to dream will not be established, or, if established, will not endure, because slavery is no longer a stable basis for human society.” A fascinating essay; I’d never read it until now.  I still have trouble believing that any part of 1984 is “tongue-in-cheek,” but this is the strongest evidence I’ve seen in favor of this reading. David Henderson: Ever since the end of the nineteenth century, the problem of what to do with the surplus of consumption goods has been latent in industrial society. Your comment is excellent. I also wonder, though, whether he had the idea of satiation: once we have so many consumer goods, we won’t want more. Maybe, but I doubt it.  Orwell gets the idea that the common man aspires to the standard of living of the middle classes, who in turn aspire to the standard of living of the upper classes.  Both sets of aspiration leave ample room for expanding consumption.  Orwell’s in the older socialist tradition of thinking that capitalism creates artificial scarcity, not the later view that capitalism creates artificial wants. From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. You commented correctly that we need inequality in order to have incentives. But there’s more to say. We are getting rid of human drudgery in the first world. Jobs at pretty much every level are much easier now. That’s distinct from inequality. If I were young, I think I’d prefer physical labor on a team of friends to teleworking in isolation.  But point well-taken. Also, while you emphasize the role of incentives, it’s important to note that no one “decides” that there’s inequality. It’s the natural result of a market process in which people become various degrees of good at what they do. No one decided that Jeff Bezos should be the wealthiest man in the world. Instead, billions of voluntary transactions led to that result. Yes, but we can still talk about how much inequality the government decides to allow. KevinDC: Imagine if we could revive Orwell and bring him into modern times. Let him see how those officially classified as “poor” in America or Britain have blown far past the threshold he describes, and in fact possess luxuries far beyond anything the wealthiest people in his day had available to them. Show him how even the poorest Americans have supercomputers in their pockets that can instantly connect to a wealth of easily accessible and freely available information in platforms like Wikipedia and Khan Academy. And after he’s taken all that in, let him browse Twitter and and listen to talk radio and attend some political rallies, and ask him if he still thinks it’s material poverty that keeps people stupefied. Brilliant.  If only we could actually revive Orwell for this fine experiment!  My guess is that he would switch to blaming the media for stupefying people, though the role of prolefeed in Oceania makes that an awkward move. And at the same time the consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival. Orwell is right by highlighting that this doesn’t depend on actually being in a state of war. It only requires a “consciousness of being at war” –  you need only make people feel like the social issue de jour is akin to a state of war. Think of the War on Drugs, or the War on Poverty – the rhetoric of both was designed to try to create a “consciousness of being at war” as justification for the “handing-over of all power to a small caste.” And interestingly, Orwell held no illusions that the socialism he advocated wouldn’t entail the same thing. Again, an excellent point. Jason Ford: “But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction — indeed, in some sense was the destruction — of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction.” Perhaps Orwell was on to a grain of truth. One hundred years ago, a town might only have a few college graduates. If old novels are to be believed, their status conferred a certain amount of respect. Today, how much deference does the average skilled laborer have for someone with a college degree and no other significant achievements? In my observation, very little. I’d say that the average skilled laborer respects the material dominance of college graduates, but not their rhetorical dominance.  He wants his kids to go to college.  He wants them to marry other college grads.  He wants his grandkids to go to college.  But he doesn’t want to defer to the political and social opinions of college graduates. Was this greatly different in the past?  I really doubt it.  Perhaps the masses had more deference for religious elites in the 19th-century than they have for intellectual elites today.  Even there, however, the surviving evidence seems thin.  Prior to the rise of public opinion research, who really knows what the masses thought and felt? I doubt it would be possible to establish a hierarchy in America that those on the bottom rungs of the hierarchy would take very seriously. If the Constitutional Convention happened today, for example, would most people be inclined to support a document written by a small group of the most educated Americans? It seems very unlikely. In short, Orwell might have been on to something. There was great deference for elites for a few years after 9/11 – a classic “rally round the flag” effect.  The Constitutional Convention fits the same mold. Mark Z: One issue with Orwell’s take on war as a means of perpetually maintaining social cohesion is that people tend to get war fatigue after a while, and I think the example of the Iraq War is an example of this. The original enthusiasm had mostly dissipated after a few years and opposition was a big factor in the 2008 election. Both Russia and Germany faced increasing domestic dissidence as WW1 dragged on and this partly motivated their governments to seek peace. War seems an effective way to encourage social cohesion for a few years, but not indefinitely. I think eventually the war would become a domestic burden to the party rather than an asset. An excellent point, very consistent with the work of Scott Althaus.  On reflection, the power-maximizing strategy is probably to go through cycles of suspicion and hysteria: “You never know when the enemy will pounce” seasoned with an occasional “The enemy is pouncing!”  Classic Stalinism. BC: Except for the first few years after 9/11, I don’t think that one can make a very strong case that war, or even threats to “national security”, is used as an effective way to amass much power nowadays. Although we have deployed troops in the Middle East for 20 years, the War on Terror just doesn’t garner much mindshare anymore, and hasn’t for quite some time. I agree that the War on Terror no longer generates much social cohesion.  But during the 90s, military spending as a share of GDP did plummet (see graph below), and the War on Terror managed to reverse that trend for about a decade.  Now we’re still a little higher than 20 years ago, but imagine how low military spending would have been without 9/11.  So I’d still say that war remains helpful for amassing and retaining power. In 2020, the obvious pretense for “handing-over of all power to a small caste” is the War on Covid. Prior, and after, some desperately wanted, and will want, the War on Climate Change to fill that role, although thus far their efforts have been largely ineffective. Instead, the War on Systemic Racism and Sexism has been, and post-Covid is on track to continue to be, the all-consuming War that justifies everything… Agreed.  As KevinDC says above, our metaphorical wars often serve the same function as the literal wars of Oceania, though the intensity is plainly far less.   (0 COMMENTS)

I live in Monterey County, where the Monterey County Health Officer, Dr. Edward Moreno, has had a lot of control over our daily lives since last March. Many of us were hoping that at least he would do his job and get Monterey County its pro rata share of the Covid-19 vaccines allocated to California. No such luck. Here’s what a local weekly publication, the Carmel Pine Cone, reported in an email on February 13: On Thursday the Wall Street Journal, citing data from Feb. 9, reported that Alabama had the worst vaccination rate in the nation, with just 10,013 doses administered per 100,000 residents. But on the same date, Monterey County said only about 8,000 doses had been administered here per 100,000 county residents. Nationwide county-by-county vaccination data doesn’t seem to be publicly available, but if Monterey County is that far behind Alabama, the county’s vaccination rate has to be one of the worst in the country. Many of us suspect that Dr. Moreno has not been aggressive in pushing our county’s case and getting more vaccines. And in a front-page news story in the February 12 Pine Cone, we might have found out why. Here’s a paragraph from a story about the grilling that Monterey County supervisor Mary Adams got in a recent town hall: As for Moreno, who is often under fire for his poor communication skills, failure to crack down on the county’s hot spots and dysfunctional vaccine rollout, she [Supervisor Mary Adams] said, “I hear so many people say Dr. Moreno is not the greatest communicator. Dr. Moreno is the most shy person I have ever met, and this is agony for him to have to speak publicly. He also is very conscious of giving precise and correct answers.” The reporter, Mary Schley, adds: Unmentioned during the call was the fact that Moreno’s job description requires him to be able to “prepare clear and concise written and oral reports,” and “speak effectively before large groups.”     (0 COMMENTS)