Back in February, I got the idea to create a COVID vaccination t-shirt (now on sale!).  Reflecting on my past experience, I figured it would be easy. Step 1: Run an illustration contest on Freelancer.com, something I’ve successfully done several times before. Step 2: Take the winning entries to Zazzle.com, design some shirts, and sell them using the same interface, another thing I’ve done several times before (albeit on a small scale).   My thinking: The whole process would be pretty fun, so I’d only need to sell a few dozen shirts to cover the cost of the contest and count the project a success.  I’m still optimistic, but the process has definitely been much more aggravating than expected.  A chronological list of snags: 1. One of my winning entrants warned me that the other two winners had copied their designs.  Unpleasant news. 2. When I followed up, one of the accused was able to produce clear documentation that she had purchased the rights to her design.  One problem solved. 3. The other accused contestant, however, seemed quite evasive about the situation.  Or perhaps it was a language problem?  I didn’t like the idea of paying for an unusable design, but I also felt bad about refusing to reward one of my winners.  After much prodding, he finally produced clear documentation that the images he incorporated into his design were in the public domain.  Another problem solved, but the conflict weighed on me. 4. I was planning on immediately announcing that the three shirts were available for sale, but I decided I ought to order test copies for myself first.  And figuring I was losing sales every day, I paid for rush delivery from Zazzle. 5. A couple days later, Zazzle sent me an email canceling the order.  Why?  They claimed that the sole fully original design violated copyright!  Hopefully I’ll work this out eventually, but apparently every drawing of a guy in a white suit at a disco infringes Saturday Night Fever.  Argh. 6. I could have challenged the ruling, but instead I looked around for an alternative vendor.  I figured they’d all be pretty similar, so I quickly settled on Printful. 7. Since I’d never done business with Printful, I had to place another test order. 8. After a couple days, Printful emailed with with a new problem: Printing a white semi-transparent design on a black sweatshirt yields an unwanted gray color.  So I went back and revised the order. 9. Soon afterwards, Zazzle let me know my cancelled order was in the mail, rush order surcharge included!  In the past, Zazzle cancelled all items in an order if it flagged any item for copyright problems.  Now, apparently, it sends everything that wasn’t cancelled.  Argh. 10. A week later, I checked on my Printful order, and discovered that I had somehow failed to click the final “OK” after revising the gray sweatshirt snafu, so my test order was still in limbo.  Sigh.  So I fixed it again, double stampies no erasies. 11. A few days later, I finally got my Printful order.  The products looked good.  I was ready to go.  But when I went to the website to offer the products for sale to customers, I discovered that Printful – unlike Zazzle – makes selling designs a pain in the neck.  To do business on Printful, I’d first have to sign up for a totally separate vendor website, and then merge the two accounts.  Argh. 12. After trying this for a half hour, I realized that I would be better off going back to Zazzle.  So I dumped Printful and created a new Zazzle store, #FearMeNot, minus the disapproved design.  Happily, the Zazzle interface seemed to work just as seamlessly as I remembered.  You can order “Fear me not! I got my COVID vaccine” shirts, sweatshirts, and hoodies now.  (Be sure to use the coupon code TUESDAYGIFTZ).   So at the end of this arduous and aggravating journey, I finally started selling my products to nudge the world to back to normalcy.  In a week or so, I’ll try to convince the Zazzle copyright people that my third design is legit.  (Even if Saturday Night Fever does have a copyright on all images of disco-dancers in white suits, my design should clearly be protected as parody).  Overall, I think this will be a positive experience for me.  The creative pleasure I’ve enjoyed plus the money I expect to make will probably exceed the subjective and financial cost of the dozen hassles I’ve already swallowed. Still, a few more hassles could easily change my mind.  And selling t-shirts on Zazzle is virtually the lowest-hassle business I can imagine running.  Which makes me picture the horrors of creating and managing an actual business. Indeed, I suspect that anyone who’s ever run an actual business has been rolling their eyes at my self-pity.  Twelve little snags?  Real entrepreneurs face more challenges every day.  Unlike me, they have to coordinate a long list of products, each with their own attendant baggage.  Unlike me, they have to manage a physical space.  Unlike me, they have to hire and direct employees.  And unlike me, they have to cope with a morass of government regulation.  I don’t care if actual businesspeople do roll their eyes at me; their can-do attitude in the face of endless obstacles still fills me with awe. Note further that in this very blog post I’ve already publicly complained more about my business woes than most businesspeople ever will.  Are they stoic?  Do they realize that hardly anyone will sympathize with their plight?  Or are they just too busy making the trains run on time to stop and reflect?  All three answers make businesspeople look admirable indeed.  They don’t just make the world work.  They bear the suffering of the world in silence.  No wonder I love them! What motivates businesspeople?  While the full answer is complex, the basic answer is clear: Money.  People run businesses to get richer – and ideally, to get rich.  And whenever I get a small taste of the challenges businesspeople overcome, not to mention the disrespect they endure in our society, I have to say that businesspeople earn every penny.  As someone who definitely does not want your job, entrepreneurs of the world, I thank you. P.S. Put your customers at ease with a #FearMeNot shirt!     (0 COMMENTS)

On March 17, my favorite NBA player, Steph Curry shot a 3-pointer and then, as is his wont, backpedalled. The problem: he was backpedalling off the sideline instead of down the court and there was no barrier to stop him. In a normal game, there would have been some normal barrier to stop his going backward, whether the barrier be other chairs that players were sitting on or something else. But because of Covid cautions, there are large spaces between chairs and so as Steph went backward, he didn’t stop until his tail bone came in hard contact with some metal stairs. Go to this link and page down to the 38-second video if you want to see what happened. But be prepared to watch something painful. Why do I highlight this in an economics blog? Because it illustrates in microcosm the failure to make reasonable tradeoffs to deal with Covid-19. We know that Covid-19 is not particularly risky for young people and especially for young people without co-morbidities. NBA players are not a random sample; their physical fitness certainly puts them in the top 1 percent and maybe even in the top 0.1 percent of people their age, let alone of all ages. (And maybe in the top 0.01 percent.) The probability that Steph Curry would get badly sick from Covid, even if he didn’t get the shot, is really low. But the NBA did not make the tradeoffs the way I would have. I’m not challenging their right to do so: it’s their arena, pun not intended. I’m challenging the bad thinking behind their decision. We often hear from the behavioral economists like Richard Thaler and  behavioral legal scholars like Cass Sunstein about “availability bias.” The idea is that people pay attention to what’s most prominent, not to what’s most likely. Where oh where are Thaler and Sunstein? Shouldn’t this be their moment to shine by pointing out how absurd some of these policies are?   (0 COMMENTS)

The Economist has an article discussing the predictable failure of Berlin’s new rent control law: And indeed a recent study by the German Institute for Economic Research found that rents in the newly regulated market of flats built before 2014 have declined by 11% compared with the still-unregulated market for newer buildings. But the problem, entirely foreseeable and foreseen, is that the caps have made the city’s housing shortage much worse: the number of classified ads for rentals has fallen by more than half. Tenants, naturally enough, stick to their rent-capped apartments like glue. Landlords use flats for themselves, sell them or simply keep them empty in the hope that the court will nix the new regulation. Meanwhile, rents and sale prices in the still-unregulated part of the market, and in cities close to Berlin, such as Potsdam, have risen far faster than in other big German cities. In addition, rent control also discourages landlords from properly maintaining their buildings.  In the long run, the quality of rent-controlled buildings will tend to approximate their price.  And this can cause discord between tenants and landlords: The rent cap has managed to make Berlin’s housing shortage even worse—and poisoned relations between tenants and their landlords. Socialism is sometimes defined as statism plus egalitarianism.  But these are actually quite different policies, and in my view statism is far worse.  Regulations such as rent controls, minimum wage laws and immigration restrictions tend to pit one person against another, reducing cooperation and making society more cruel in the process.  Egalitarian policies such as progressive taxes can also have negative effects in areas such as work incentives, but they don’t tend to undermine civic virtue in quite as pronounced fashion as statist policies.  I’d rather live in a free market country with progressive taxes than a statist economy with flat taxes.   (0 COMMENTS)

Max Kenner, founder and executive director of the Bard Prison Initiative–which offers college degrees to prisoners–talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the program, which replicates the coursework of students at Bard College. The Bard Prison Initiative was profiled in a four-part PBS documentary, College Behind Bars. Kenner talks about the origins of the program, […] The post Max Kenner on Crime, Education, and the Bard Prison Initiative appeared first on Econlib.

Recent journalistic investigations revealed that the family and friends of New York governor Andrew Cuomo benefited from nomenklatura privileges at the time when ordinary people had problems getting Covid-19 tests and timely results. These state-privileged people could be tested rapidly, often at home and many times if they wished. Their tests were often rushed to laboratories by state troopers and treated in priority. Liz Wolfe of Reason Magazine writes: There was limited testing if you thought you’d been exposed, and long wait times if you did manage to nab one of those precious few tests. But not if your last name starts with a C and ends with an uomo! … The Albany Times Union reported last night that Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo directed the state’s top health officials to prioritize COVID testing for “the governor’s relatives as well as influential people with ties to the administration.” This reminded me that, in late December, I reported on Cuomo’s intention to prosecute those who would give or sell Covid-19 vaccines to anybody outside the groups favored by the state and its priorities (“Free Enterprise: A Daring New Year Wish”). At that time, I asked the governor’s office, through its website, if he had himself received the vaccine. Two weeks later, having received no reply, I rapidly drafted a freedom-of-information request (called Freedom of Information Law or FOIL request in New York State) and emailed it to both the governor’s office and the New York State Department of Health. The two replies landed in my virtual mailbox a few days apart in January. The letter from the Executive Chamber of the State of New York said: This letter responds to your correspondence dated January 12, 2021, which pursuant to FOIL, requested: “the dates Governor Cuomo, members of his family, and immediate staff have received vaccines against Covid-19; and indicate in which group of priority recipients (according to the State of New York’s policies) they fall.” To the extent your request is reasonably described, these records are not maintained by the NYS Executive Chamber. Please be advised that even assuming such records were maintained by the Executive Chamber, they would be exempt pursuant to Public Officers Law § 87(2)(b) because, if disclosed, would “constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy. Additionally, pursuant to Public Officers Law § 87(2)(a), an agency may deny access to records or portions thereof that are “specifically exempted from disclosure by state or federal statute.” Accordingly, to the extent records may exist said records are exempt from production pursuant to Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, Public. Law 104-191 and New York State Public Health Law §18. The reply from the Department of Health was not very different: This letter responds to your Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request of January 12, 2021, in which you requested “the dates Governor Cuomo, members of his family, and immediate staff have received vaccines against Covid-19; and indicate in which group of priority recipients (according to the State of New York’s policies) they fall.” Please be advised, the records you are requesting, to the extent such records exist, contain protected health information (PHI) regarding the individuals referenced in your request. In accordance with New York State law and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) (Federal Law 45 C.F.R. §164.524), the Department requires a duly executed HIPAA authorization form in order to release PHI regarding any individual. We note your request was not accompanied by any HIPAA authorization forms. Accordingly, your request is denied pursuant to POL §87(2)(a) as “specifically exempted from disclosure by state or federal statute” in accordance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) (Federal Law 45 C.F.R. §164.524), and §87(2)(b), because disclosure “would constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.” We now know that the governor himself waited his turn and received the vaccine in mid-March with much public fanfare. The replies to my FOIL requests, however, show something interesting. One might have thought that privacy laws were meant to protect individuals against Leviathan’s lust for private information. But these laws seem to have been hijacked to protect the privacy of the rulers themselves. Perhaps actual governments don’t work as their ideal models? Is “highjack” exaggerated? Consider the following. If, as current legal doctrine claims, ordinary individuals have no expectation of privacy when they enter an air terminal or cross the U.S. border or relate to their loving governments in certain other ways, why would political rulers have an expectation of privacy while they serve the people and sacrifice themselves for the “public good”? (0 COMMENTS)

I participated in a Liberty Fund colloquium on Zoom Friday and Saturday on the topic “Slavery and the New History of Capitalism.” It went very well. One of the most interesting readings was by Charles Ball, an escaped slave. Ball’s book, published in 1837, was titled Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball. In it, he describes his experience as a young man who was moved from Maryland’s Eastern Shore in 1805 to the cotton fields in South Carolina. One of the big issues in Cornell University history professor Edward E. Baptist’s work is whether the quotas of Ball and others were continuously raised by a ratcheting up of torture. Baptist claims that it was and, to back his point, quotes from Ball’s autobiography, but the striking thing about the 4-page excerpt from Ball’s autobiography is that Baptist left out passages that showed that his (Baptist’s) claim was untrue. But I found something else striking: despite the fact that Ball was a slave, he took pride in his work. After detailing the fact that he picked “only” 38 pounds his first day on the job while two young men about his own age had picked 58 and 59 pounds, respectively, Ball writes: I hung down my head. and felt very much ashamed of myself when I found that my cotton was so far behind that of many, even of the women, who has heretofore regarded me as the strongest and most powerful men of the whole gang. He continues: I had exerted myself today, to the utmost of my power; and as the picking of cotton seemed so very simple a business, I felt apprehensive that I should never be able to improve myself, so far as to becoming even a second rate hand. In this posture of affairs, I looked forward to something still more painful than the loss of character which I must sustain, both with my fellows and my master; for I knew that the lash of the overseer would soon become familiar with my back, if I did not perform as much work as any of the other young men. He goes on to say that the overseer told him that he had good hands and would “make a good picker.” Sure enough, his productivity improved to 46 pounds the second day, and 52 pounds the third day. The next week he and the others were told that if they picked more than 50 pounds in a day, they would be paid a penny for every extra pound. Here’s what I found interesting: not the incremental incentives but my own reaction to Ball. One of the other participants said that Ball was kind of pathetic, like a child or a puppy dog, for feeling shame at not being productive enough the first day. I responded that I thought of the situation completely differently. I thought Ball was a man I would have liked. Here he was being enslaved but he didn’t let that take away his humanity. He still had pride in his work. Then I told the following true story. In 1968, when I was at the University of Winnipeg, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s buddy and Secretary of State (which isn’t like the position that has the same label in the United States) Gerard Pelletier had told a meeting of newspaper editors in Montreal that he was thinking of pushing for a draft in Canada. Canada has an even stronger tradition of a volunteer military than the United States has. I was 18 at the time and I wrote an angry letter to the Winnipeg Free Press, which was published in full. I read with astonishment the article in the Free Press, October 29, entitled Non-Military Draft Plan Under Study. The only objection to the idea made by State Secretary Gerard Pelletier was that it would be difficult to put into practice. Considerations of justice do not appear to have entered his mind. It is indicative of the temper of our times that when people propose government intervention, they do not say, “Is it right?” but only “Can we get away with it?” In the same article Mr. Pelletier is quoted as saying that the young would like to “play their part in creating a more just society.” I am one of those young people. Because I want a just society I am taking my stand. I refuse to be coerced into serving a year for the government. Government intervention has never led to a just society and never will. (November 9, 1968.) A week later I was thinking about the last part of my letter. I then realized who I was and said to myself, “You wouldn’t refuse. You would prefer compulsory work for the government to jail. You always make the best of a bad situation. You would probably resist for a few hours at most and then would try to figure out what you could learn from whatever job the Canadian government assigned you to during this period of short-term slavery.” That’s why Ball’s first paragraph quoted above resonated with me. He made the best of a bad situation and didn’t let the fact that he was a slave  take away his humanity or his pride in his work. This morning I woke up with a further thought. I remembered a 1957 movie titled Bridge on the River Kwai. SPOILERS AHEAD. Colonel Saito, the sadistic commandant of a Japanese POW camp in Burma, insists that the mainly British prisoners, including officers, build a bridge over the River Kwai. This, by the way, violated the Geneva Conventions. Work is not going well and there’s a lot of sabotage. But then Colonel Nicholson, played by Alec Guinness, takes over and persuades the men to take pride in their work and build a first-class bridge. When I watched the movie, I was torn between wanting Nicholson to fail and wanting him to succeed. But the point is that he and many of his men took pride in their work. And this was a more difficult dilemma than Charles Ball had. To the extent they succeeded in building the bridge, it would help the Japanese war effort. But to the extent Charles Ball succeeded, he would help buyers of cotton. By the way, I read a few years ago that some of the people who were actually prisoners in that prison camp were furious at the movie. They felt pride in sabotaging. Here’s Wikipedia: Ernest Gordon, a survivor of the railway construction and POW camps described in the novel/film, stated in a 1962 book, Through the Valley of the Kwai: “In Pierre Boulle’s book The Bridge over the River Kwai and the film which was based on it, the impression was given that British officers not only took part in building the bridge willingly, but finished in record time to demonstrate to the enemy their superior efficiency. This was an entertaining story. But I am writing a factual account, and in justice to these men—living and dead—who worked on that bridge, I must make it clear that we never did so willingly. We worked at bayonet point and under bamboo lash, taking any risk to sabotage the operation whenever the opportunity arose.”[26] I get that too. One could take pride in the work or take pride in the sabotage. (1 COMMENTS)

Not all innovation makes things better. I doubt that WWI would have been as bad if not for the invention of guns. If soldiers had still used swords in 1914, it seems unlikely that trench warfare would have dragged on for 4 years, with nearly 10 million deaths. At the same time, war has been around for thousands of years, and the percentage of humans dying in war seems to be trending downward over the very long run.  So technology is not the primary problem. This story on cancel culture in China made me wonder whether social media is sort of like guns, a dubious form of “innovation”: Censors have not only kept their grip on entertainers with rules. Lately, the very nature of the modern Chinese internet, a hyper-commercial place patrolled by thin-skinned bullies, is helping them succeed. This is a perilous time to be famous in China. In the first few weeks of 2021, fans, prominent bloggers and state media have united to rebuke so many celebrities that a recent item on Tencent News, an online platform, was headlined: “The era of stars saying sorry is upon us: whatever you did wrong, apologise.” Those who have said sorry this year include an actress accused of abandoning two infants born via surrogacy in America and a comedian who made a sexist advertisement for women’s underwear. Other apologies have come from a comic actress who posed in a cardigan over the caption “husband-snaring gear”, leading to charges of objectifying women; and from a 20-year-old Tibetan horseman caught smoking on camera. Months earlier his good looks and shy smile had shot him to fame and helped him into a job as a goodwill ambassador for his hometown. When market forces help the Communist Party to rule Chaguan spoke recently to entertainment-industry veterans. They described famous friends on medication for depression, and explained why. Once, stars were on show only when they made a new film. Now, fans want to scrutinise every detail of actors’ lives on social media, and expect perfection from their idols. Back in 1968, there were massive student protests in places as diverse as the US, China, Mexico, France and Czechoslovakia.  Within each country, people focused on the specific factors motivating domestic dissent, and thus missed the bigger picture of how modernization was reshaping society. Within the US, cancel culture is often seen in narrow parochial terms.  Woke people trying to impose their definition of anti-racism, or conservatives trying to cancel professional athletes for insufficient patriotism.  But I wonder if that misses the bigger picture. People have always wanted to physically harm other people, and guns provided a more effective way of doing so.  People have always wanted to verbally bully and shame other people, and social media gives them a more effective tool for doing so. It’s not surprising that the US and China have cancel cultures; what would be surprising is if there were a country that did not have cancel culture. PS.  Tyler Cowen links to a study suggesting that things are getting worse in America: The worsening physiological and mental health profiles among younger generations imply a challenging morbidity and mortality prospect for the United States, one that may be particularly inauspicious for Whites. I’m agnostic on the question of whether happiness in America is increasing, decreasing, or staying about the same. (0 COMMENTS)

When I taught benefit‐​cost analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School, one of the first principles I explained was that, to do a good analysis, you need to consider the costs and benefits to the various people affected rather than taking as gospel the desires of policymakers. We studied both good and bad examples of benefit‐​cost analyses. In the bad ones, a common error was to leave out the gains to consumers when they consumed items that policymakers did not want them to. A typical case was alcoholic beverages; policymakers kept overlooking the enjoyment that consumers receive from a drink. In his book The Rediscovery of Tobacco: Smoking, Vaping, and the Creative Destruction of the Cigarette, independent journalist (and one‐​time Cato staffer) Jacob Grier avoids that error. Not only does he consider the costs of cigarettes and other forms of tobacco to their users and to nonsmokers, but he also considers the benefits to users. In doing so, he makes a case for people’s freedom to smoke or inhale what they want when it does not inflict harm on non‐​users. Along the way, he details how the antismoking movement has shown its disregard for the interests of smokers. He also shows that the damage from secondhand and “thirdhand” smoke is often overstated and that the harm from e‐​cigarettes is overstated and the benefits understated. Although I am a dyed‐​in‐​the‐​wool nonsmoker and non‐​vaper and Grier did not persuade me to try these substances (nor did he attempt to change readers’ minds), I learned a lot from this book. You could say that I “rediscovered tobacco.” This is from David R. Henderson, “Whose Body Is It Anyway?” Regulation, Spring 2021. Another highlight: Grier notes an interesting difference in research methodologies between studies of the health effects on smokers in the 1940s and 1950s and the later studies of researchers on secondhand smoke. The earlier researchers had noticed a huge increase in deaths from lung cancer in the first half of the 20th century and wanted to figure out why. They established a clear relationship between smoking cigarettes and lung cancer. But, notes Grier, research on secondhand smoke “reversed that approach.” He writes, “Scientists started out with a hypothesis — that secondhand smoke was causing lung cancer in nonsmokers — and took on the task of finding the bodies.” My one criticism: Antismoking activists, he notes, didn’t stop with secondhand smoke. They raised the ante by stirring up concern about “thirdhand smoke.” What’s that? Grier quotes a definition the New York Times posited in 2009: “the invisible yet toxic brew of gases and particles clinging to smokers’ hair and clothing, not to mention cushions and carpeting, that lingers long after secondhand smoke has cleared the room.” Grier comments that he does not know “if studies will ever successfully demonstrate that thirdhand smoke increases the risk of any particular disease, and, crucially neither do the researchers who have been promoting these fears to the public for more than a decade.” This is awkward wording. He seems to be saying that the researchers have no evidence, but I wish he had stated his point more clearly. Read the whole thing. To do so, you need to go to the link and then download the pdf.   (0 COMMENTS)

I have listened to pundits and medical experts on networks from PBS to DW speak at length on the failures of America to adequately deal with the pandemic in comparison with European countries. Most recently, one of these sources cited Americas high fatality numbers as compared to other western European countries and specifically criticized the American system of states and federalism as presenting an unworkable patchwork of policies. One cited the per capita death rate as the highest of all. In both cases the point is misleading. The direct nation to nation comparison of the US and specific European countries, without any differentiation as to their economic condition or level of population, is the most invidious of the two assertions. Setting aside concerns about how the counting is done, America, taken as one undifferentiated mass, does look worse in absolute numbers, but such one-to-one comparison commits the classic error of contrasting apples to oranges. To make a meaningful comparison, we need to construct a proper basis by looking at countries that are similar in terms of economic organization and development. Then we have to combine those into a unit of population similar to the US. When that is done the figures don’t look all that different. The US has a population at roughly 330 million people. Of the most advanced economies comparable in development, none of the western European countries separately comes anywhere close to that figure, but if we cobble together what could be called the big five, we can arrive at a unit that is acceptably close: Germany : 83 million UK: 68 million France: 65 million Italy: 60 million Spain: 47 million Total: 323 million Now let us look at each country’s separate COVID death numbers: US: 542,000   And each of the big five European countries: Germany: 75,000 UK: 126,000 France: 92,305 Spain: 72,900 Italy: 105,000 Total: 471,205   If one then runs the per capita number that gives results for the US at approximately .0016 and for the European big five, .0014, a difference of only .0002. And now consider that in the US, the rate is slowing as we approach herd immunity through natural exposure and vaccination. Europe is again on the increase and has significantly botched its vaccine delivery. This doesn’t speak particularly well for the central administration in Brussels. As for the per capita rate, the UK still has that record at, .0018 despite very severe lockdowns. New York has one of the highest rates in the US at .0025, and it was one of the sates with comparably severe lockdown policies. From the numbers, it is hard to be happy with any country’s performance, but they do not indicate a failure of federalism. As we approach the end of the pandemic, there will be plenty of data to run through, but I suspect the more centralized forms of command and control will leave a lot to be desired. I for one would not advise putting all our apples in one basket—nor our oranges for that matter!   (0 COMMENTS)

This comment by Arthur Schopenhauer raises some interesting questions: If a person is stupid, we excuse him by saying that he cannot help it; but if we attempted to excuse in precisely the same way the person who is bad, we should be laughed at.  And yet the one quality, like the other, is inborn.   This proves that the will is the man proper, the intellect the mere tool. While one can question any of these three claims, there is a real issue here that cannot be easily dismissed.  Thus I do not think being bad is entirely inborn, but then neither is being stupid.  Academic education is possible, and moral education is also possible.  With some effort, we can get smarter and we can get better. I doubt that any modest difference in the extent to which stupidity and badness are inborn can fully explain society’s vastly different attitude toward these two traits. And Schopenhauer’s conclusion about “the will” being the man proper leads one to ask:  Why are people viewed this way? One possibility is that the harm from stupidity is usually internalized to a much greater extent than the harm from being bad.  We blame people for being bad because bad behavior has much greater external costs than stupid behavior.  A person can stupidly throw away a fortune at a casino with very little in the way of legal or moral sanction.  But if someone uses fraud to steal a fortune from another person, we call them evil and throw them in prison.  Stupid behavior causes harm, but much of the harm (not all) falls on the person that engages in the foolish actions.  If we consider both blame and prison to be forms of deterrence, then these sanctions are less necessary where a person is already being punished for their foolish behavior. Think about two societies.  One is a community of average American families in Ohio, and the other is a few hundred hunters and trappers who live alone and isolated from each other in Alaska. The community in Ohio might condemn drug use, fearing that it could cause people to become irresponsible, unable to support their families.  In the wilds of Alaska, it’s unlikely that “society” would much care if an isolated hunter was using drugs.  If it interfered with his ability to hunt and trap, he would pay the price without any government sanction. From this perspective, society’s system of morality, our code for choosing when to blame people and when not to blame people, might be viewed as a sort of tool, like a shovel or a scalpel.  Blame is a tool we use to discourage people from imposing external costs on society. If I’m right, then stupidity that does not involve external costs would only be condemned when we actually care about the person hurting themselves.  And I think this is mostly true.  I might yell at a neighbor’s kid for scratching my car, but I won’t yell at that kid for not studying harder at school.  The child’s parents love their child much more than I do, and might yell at them for not doing their homework, for being “stupid”.  (That’s not to say parents cannot also punish children for selfish reasons, but surely the world contains at least some “tough love”.) I am not saying that people consciously act as utilitarian moralizers, rather that we’ve evolved in such a way that we instinctively try to use our moral system in an effective way, a way that makes society work better.  We instinctively overestimate the difference between being stupid and being bad. I’m also not saying that our moral sanctions are always appropriate—that would be absurd.  It’s highly unlikely that the prohibition of alcohol was optimal during 1920-33, but not optimal in either 1910 or 1940.  More likely, we sometimes make mistakes when deciding whom to blame and what sanctions to apply. It’s also possible that our moral indignation is more convincing if we do not understand where it comes from and what’s its purpose is.  This sense of indignation is so innate that it might lead us to get angry at a zoo animal that kills a child that has wandered into its cage.  That anger won’t deter other zoo animals, but the basic instinct that makes us angry is appropriate in the vast majority of cases where children are intentionally harmed. Indeed there have been times when I’ve yelled at my computer. PS.  In politics, we are reassured if we find evidence that voters on the “other side” are merely being stupid, rather than malicious. (0 COMMENTS)