At pickleball recently, I made the following point to a fellow player: every instance I can think of where a politician imposed or supported lockdowns yet violated the letter or spirit himself of herself is a Democrat. Art Carden talks about the hypocrites here. Notice the names: Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Washington mayor Muriel Bowser, Philadelphia mayor Jim Kenney, New York governor Andrew Cuomo, and California governor Gavin Newsom. All are Democrats. Art could have also mentioned Denver mayor Michael Hancock and U.S. Senator from California Dianne Feinstein. My pickleball friend had a comeback. She said, “That’s because it’s Democrats imposing the lockdowns. Republican governors aren’t.” I answered, “That’s not true. Charlie Baker of Massachusetts and Larry Hogan of Maryland have pretty extreme lockdowns and I haven’t heard or seen any evidence that they’ve been hypocritical.” I made this point to a fellow libertarian the other day, a man who is generally nuanced. He answered, “I have no desire to defend Republicans.” Neither do I. I do want, though, to note and report evidence. I think the hypocrisy about lockdowns is almost entirely one-sided: it’s Democrats. This doesn’t mean that Republicans can’t be, and aren’t, hypocritical.  Ted Cruz often talks about this father escaping from Cuba and there’s no doubt that he wants people to think it was good for his father to escape from Cuba. But Cruz has been horribly hypocritical recently in trying to prevent Chinese people from escaping from Hong Kong to come here. So the hypocrisy is on both sides. But on lockdowns, it’s not. (0 COMMENTS)

David Levey directed me to an excellent essay by Agnes Callard, which reviews several books that are critical of meritocracy. While I share many of her criticisms, I’m not persuaded by her recommendations: The question of who we praise and who we blame is not a scientific question, but an ethical one; there is no way to answer it except by deliberating seriously about the kind of society we want to live in. In that spirit, I want to propose a new candidate for what the “the compassionate, sympathetic, progressive position” should look like. First, we should incline toward crediting people for their achievements as being genuinely their own, the justly earned fruits of hard work and diligence, deserving of pride and a sense of accomplishment. Second, we should incline toward explaining away failures on the basis of genes, socioeconomic obstacles, bad luck, and so on—things beyond their control—in such a way to make clear that the attitude called for in response to failure is sympathy and readiness to assist. The successful should be proud of themselves, and when they see others fail, they should think: there but for the grace of God go I. I fully accept the philosophical position that we don’t get to choose which person we become.  Nonetheless, I wonder if she is too hasty in dismissing the value of “blame”. Most economic models have a certain degree of symmetry.  Thus while it’s not impossible that praise for good behavior makes sense and blame for bad behavior is unwise, a priori I find that claim to be rather unlikely—if only because in that world the withholding of praise becomes a sort of blame. As a utilitarian, I see two arguments for blaming people.  Blame can be justified when bad behavior causes external harm.  Thus you might yell at someone in a park who throws trash on the ground instead of putting it into a bin.  Fear of being blamed makes people behave better.  Second, people might not be fully mature, and thus might not understand that certain behavior is not in their long run interest.  This is especially true of children, which is why they get criticized more often than adults.  It’s “for their own good.”  This is what people mean by “tough love”. While adults are in many ways (not all) more mature than children, I’m not sure anyone ever fully grows up and becomes 100% mature.  Even adults often engage in behavior that we think of as child-like, such as shirking an unpleasant duty or eating a big sweet dessert when we are on a diet. Most counterproductive behavior, that is behavior that causes external harm or internal harm, is caused by a mixture of genes and environment.  This includes behavior that leads to poor outcomes in academics, health, wealth, interpersonal relations, and the violation of laws.  Genetics makes some people more predisposed to drop out of school, get diabetes, become poor, cheat on their wife, and rob banks.  But behavior is also affected by environment. The easiest way to see this distinction is to compare a problem cross sectionally and over time.  At a point in time, genetics largely determines who is obese and who is not.  And yet the rise in obesity in recent decades probably reflects a change in our environment.  Ditto for changes in the crime rate, the poverty rate, and other variables. So far I’ve been arguing that there is a case for engaging in both praise and blame.  Nonetheless, I suspect our society engages in too much blaming.  For example, while I suspect that “fat shaming” would “work” in the limited sense of slightly reducing obesity, I also believe that it would do more harm than good.  Blame imposes psychic costs, which would likely outweigh the small reduction in obesity that would result from fat shaming.  For similar reasons, I don’t believe it is wise to criticize others for having “affairs”, unless we are personally affected. On the other hand, there are lots of cases where blame is appropriate.  Crime is the most obvious case, as we are all negatively affected when others engage in stealing and killing.  The trickiest case is behavior that reduces productivity in a welfare state.  You can argue that we should blame people for not studying, or being lazy, or abandoning their wife, or using illegal drugs that reduce their productivity.  It all comes down to the question of whether the direct psychic harm of blaming people for bad behavior is greater or less than the gain from improved behavior that would result as people try to avoid future criticism. Praise is sort of like eating a healthy food that also tastes great.  It has directly positive impact on utility, and an indirectly positive effect as well.  Blame is like a medication with nasty side effects.  The threshold for engaging in blame is much higher than praise.  If that’s what Callard is saying, then she’s right. To conclude, while I’m not persuaded by the specific argument made by Callard, I end up in roughly the same place—for utilitarian reasons.  Our society is probably a happier place if adults don’t frequently blame other people for not meeting their standards of self-control and hard work.  But some level of criticism may be appropriate, particular from those with close interpersonal relations, that is, those who might be especially negatively affected by someone’s behavior. (1 COMMENTS)

This winter, I’m a visiting scholar at the University of Texas.  Though Austin is gorgeous, visitors can’t help but notice vast homeless villages scattered throughout the city.  Local sources tell me that this is driven by Austin’s repeal of the ban on homeless camping.  One of the economists I’ve met here has written a Swiftian proposal for reforming Austin’s approach.  The author prefers to remain anonymous, but this is printed with his permission.  Engage your sense of satire, and enjoy! By using a signature sampling technique, the city of Austin kept the initiative to reinstate Austin’s camping ban off the November ballot.  As such, it is a good time to evaluate who exactly benefits and who pays the costs of the repeal of the camping ban.  The city would not have prevented the issue from being on the ballot if they were confident that the people of Austin would support continued homeless camping, so there seems to be some constituency for reimposing the ban, while the aggressive efforts by the city to promote homeless camping suggests the existence of a powerful constituency in favor of such camping. Fortunately, it is relatively easy to see who bears the costs and who reaps the benefits of the camping ban repeal.  Traveling around Austin, it is quite clear that much of the new camping takes place under highway overpasses and on highway right of ways.  This information is very valuable in understanding who benefits and who pays for the camping policy.  Highways are a classic “disamenity” in urban economics; people will pay to avoid living near highways due to increased noise, traffic, and pollution.  The equilibrium implication of this fact is that neighborhoods near highways tend to be poorer.  This situation is not necessarily something to be concerned about.  Any growing, dynamic economy will reward different skills differently, and the fact that those with fewer resources choose to save money on housing by living in less desirable neighborhoods is somewhat inevitable. This logic, however, does not justify policies that make such neighborhoods worse; at that point, the city government is changing the rules and in effect expropriating wealth, in the form of home values and unpriced amenities like safety, from lower income Austinites.  Where, then, is this transfer going?  One could argue that the benefits of the policy accrue toward the homeless themselves, but this conclusion is not clear.  While economists tend to view increasing the available choices to individuals as improving their welfare, there may be an exception for those caught in the depths of mental illness and substance abuse.  In any case, the idea that the homeless have sufficient political clout to enact such radical policies strains credulity. Thus, there must be another constituency that values homeless camping and has enough influence to get such policies passed.  Again, the recent history of the ballot initiative is informative.  The political, social, and academic elite of Austin is the primary relevant constituency for permitting homeless camping, and they receive the most unambiguous benefits of the policy through smug self-satisfaction while bearing none of the costs.  True, these total benefits are dwarfed by the costs to those living in lower income areas, but the relative political power of the two groups leads to the policy being enacted despite the costs outweighing the benefits.  The camping ban repeal is thus both inefficient and regressive; the overall benefits are small relative to the costs, and the benefits accrue to the wealthy while the costs are borne by the poor. What, then, to do about the inequities generated by the removal of the homeless camping ban?  The first thing to note is that appeals to local government are useless; it is exactly those running the local government, formally and informally, who benefited most from the camping policy change.  Thus, we must appeal to authorities above the local level.  Fortunately, the State of Texas has at its disposal multiple tools that can lead to a more equitable outcome and that, crucially, can make sure that those receiving benefits from the policy are the ones paying the costs.  We can even achieve this without appreciably changing the opportunities available for homeless camping. The state has significant authority, separate from local authorities, over both highway right-of-ways and the University of Texas campus.  The Governor should immediately instruct the Department of Public Safety to clear out all campsites from highway right-of-ways while at the same time prohibiting the University from enforcing any prohibitions on camping, loitering, or solicitation.  Transportation of persons and property from the right-of-ways to campus could be provided free of charge. This policy might lead to some disruptions on campus, but it would be no worse than the disruptions faced by lower income Austinites who find such camps popping up near their homes and places of work.  And, certainly, faculty at UT are at the pinnacle of the social elite in Austin and among the strongest supporters of the repeal of the ban.  They benefit the most, and they should pay the costs.  It would be admittedly jarring to see faculty harassed and threatened on their way to teach classes, but faculty themselves have enthusiastically supported policies that have imposed such harassment and threatening behavior on less privileged Austinites, as is well documented in the viral video circulating regarding the Windsor Park neighborhood.  Surely “marginalized” working class individuals who provide important services to our economy deserve to have at least the same level of safety and security as those who write about the tribulations of the marginalized classes from the comfort of their own offices. Perhaps one would counter this argument by pointing out that faculty tend to earn higher incomes and live in more expensive housing than the working class, thus paying more in taxes to the city and thus deserving greater protection.  But, this argument breaks down; the academic elite lives largely off of taxpayer money, either directly through state funding of the university or indirectly through the funding of general university operations through “overhead” charges against federal grants.  How much of this government funding eventually ends up getting passed on to the local government in the form of taxes should not really play a role in determining who deserves the most protection by the local government.  The logic might be different when comparing high income productive workers with low income productive workers, but when comparing low income productive workers to high income “workers” with heavily subsidized lifetime sinecures we can hardly conclude that higher incomes warrant greater public services. (1 COMMENTS)

What a marvelous spectacle we have enjoyed this week, as the first wave of Covid-19 vaccines began shipping from Pfizer’s facilities in Michigan. Watching the news with my pre-teen son, as those box trucks rolled away carrying such precious frozen cargo, he said, “Wow, I bet that truck driver feels pretty good about his job right now.”  I nodded and replied, “Well said, son. I think maybe this is something we can all feel good about.” Who can’t feel good about the mind-blowingly short duration it’s taken to develop a safe and effective vaccine? For the same reason, we should also be amazed at the complexity of its distribution. The Wall Street Journal captures the point.  The effort to vaccinate the nation relies on chemists, factory workers, truck drivers, pilots, data scientists, bureaucrats, pharmacists and health-care workers. It requires ultracold freezers, dry ice, needles, masks and swabs converging simultaneously at thousands of locations across the country. To work, every one of the many and complicated links of the chain has to hold.   The distribution has been widely described as the biggest mobilization since World War II. Bravo!, I say. We need some awe-inspiring words to befit this marvelous spectacle.  And yet, the vaccine itself is a relatively simple compound. It consists of Pfizer’s modified mRNA plus seven inactive ingredients as common as table sugar. The mRNA itself stands as an unprecedented achievement. Yet the compound is ordinary, even elegantly so. And it will save millions. What beauty in the simple! For many, this facet of the story evokes the classic essay with the curious title, “I, Pencil: My Family Tree as Told to Leonard Reed”. Originally published in 1958, this essay skillfully describes the materials that comprise an ordinary pencil, and the far reaches of the world whence those materials source. It also artfully describes the innumerable people around the world whose daily work contributes crucially to putting ordinary items such as pencils on nearby stores’ shelves. That’s exactly how the WSJ describes the Pfizer mobilization. The vaccine must arrive at the right time in the right condition at thousands of locations around the country. And the efforts of myriad numbers of people from faraway places contribute to the mobilization. When you start to think about it, the amount of human coordination being achieved is astounding. It makes my son and me want to ask: Who designed such a marvelous plan? Who deserves credit for taking charge of this? The surprising answer that comes to us from the pencil is: no one! Leonard Reed’s ordinary little friend conveys the idea himself. I, Pencil, am a complex combination of miracles: a tree, zinc, copper, graphite, and so on. But to these miracles which manifest themselves in Nature an even more extraordinary miracle has been added: the configuration of creative human energies—millions of tiny know-hows configurating naturally and spontaneously in response to human necessity and desire and in the absence of any human master-minding!   And again, the WSJ informs us exactly how this applies to how this week’s vaccine mobilization. ‘Everything has to come together—the packaging, the dry ice, the vials, the material itself. It all has to come together to the same place and have enough of it and exactly the right people there ready to take it,’ said Yossi Sheffi, director of the MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics. ‘Right now, there’s no conductor to the symphony,’ just many parts that each need to work.   This reflects the time-tested idea in economics that great things for humanity can be the result of people self-organizing through markets because they’re free to do so. Reed is channeling economics Nobel Laureate F. A. Hayek, whose 1945 article, “The Use of Knowledge in Society” describes market prices as a mechanism of human coordination that deserves to be marveled at. I have deliberately used the word “marvel” to shock the reader out of the complacency with which we often take the working of this mechanism for granted. I am convinced that if it were the result of deliberate human design, and if the people guided by the price changes understood that their decisions have significance far beyond their immediate aim, this mechanism would have been acclaimed as one of the greatest triumphs of the human mind. Its misfortune is the double one that it is not the product of human design and that the people guided by it usually do not know why they are made to do what they do. But those who clamor for “conscious direction”—and who cannot believe that anything which has evolved without design (and even without our understanding it) should solve problems which we should not be able to solve consciously—should remember this: The problem is precisely how to extend the span of our utilization of resources beyond the span of the control of any one mind; and therefore, how to dispense with the need of conscious control, and how to provide inducements which will make the individuals do the desirable things without anyone having to tell them what to do. Hayek is in turn channeling Adam Smith who pioneered the idea that people’s liberty to specialize and trade explains much of the wealth of nations. When people are free to truck, barter, and exchange according to their own terms, markets tend to happen, and price coordination tends to follow. For Smith, an invisible hand channels individual self-interest toward these broader gains. Toward a better life.  This old idea is discussed in today’s economics textbooks with section headings like “comparative advantage” or “gains from trade,” and in some books as “price coordination”. Critics count the idea as dogma, but most economists take it as one of the cornerstones of our trade. This is why, for example, most economists oppose tariffs. If that doesn’t impress you, try this other facet. Consider that each recipient of the vaccine has effectively harnessed the myriad efforts of the scattered multitudes. Imagine it is your turn next. Now imagine for a moment what it would feel like to employ millions of workers around the globe and to funnel all their efforts directly toward you in the form of a single and concentrated dose of betterment to your own well-being. See, that didn’t hurt at all. Congratulations, you’ve just received your Covid-19 inoculation, thanks in part to the invisible hand.   My pre-teen son has a long life ahead of him, I hope. How much better will it be than mine? If you ask our ordinary little friend the pencil, the recipe for human flourishing is pretty simple. Just add one part specialization according to comparative advantage, add a bit of faith in free people, and let the good stuff rise as people better themselves through price coordination. Economic freedom is amazingly complex, and so is the vaccine marvel.  Yet they both are beautifully simple, too. That’s something we can all feel good about. —   Don’t get me wrong. Central planning is a major player in the success story we’re watching unfold. Vaccines are classically known to have inefficiencies on both the production and consumption sides, and non-price rationing is determining their allocation. It’s not like Pfizer is harnessing price-induced information to decide where shipments go. But still, there is pretty intense competition among vaccine suppliers. And there is something we can all feel good about here. Maybe even marvel at here. And much of it owes itself to the social coordinating force of market prices and globalized trade.   Edward J. Lopez teaches economics at Western Carolina University, where he is also director of the Center for the Study of Free Enterprise. His research focuses on the dynamics of legal and political institutions. His recent publications include “Informal Norms Trump Formal Constraints: The Evolution of Fiscal Policy Institutions in the United States” (Journal of Institutional Economics, 2017, with Peter T. Calcagno), and Madmen, Intellectuals, and Academic Scribblers: The Economic Engine of Political Change (Stanford University Press, 2013, with Wayne A. Leighton). He is Executive Director and Past President (2012-2014) of the Public Choice Society. (0 COMMENTS)

I found so many things memorable in Casey B. Mulligan’s recent book,  You’re Hired: Untold Successes and Failures of a Populist President. I noted many of them in my Hoover article 2 months ago but didn’t have space for the following story. Here’s Casey: The conventional wisdom is that @realdonaldtrump is a window into the “presidential id.” In other words, the person and the Twitter persona are in essence the same. That’s a nice theory, but how well does it fit the evidence? Let’s compare personal interactions between two 2016 Presidential candidates and look at President Trump’s use of nicknames for his staff. Stanford’s Hoover Institution got involved with the 2016 Presidential campaign. The senior economists there invited me to join a small roundtable to discuss economic policy ideas with the leading candidate at the time. Eagerly introducing me, they asked that I tell the candidate a bit about my findings related to President Obama’s economic policies as reported in my 2012 and 2015 books. Explaining how the Obama Administration, with the intention of helping the poor and unemployed, had created and expanded more than a dozen programs that subsidized them, I said, “When you subsidize something, you get more of it.” The candidate had little to bring to the conversation, so he mocked me instead. Why would anyone write two books to say something so obvious? The candidate was wrong: the Obama Administration was full of smart people who had yet to realize these “obvious” points. More important, the candidate was bullying the youngest person in the room in front of more senior economists. (In my profession, gatherings like that have real money at stake because someday the senior economists would decide whether and how I could be affiliated with Hoover.) If all we had were representations of the candidates provided by the major news outlets, we would conclude that this arrogant and egotistical candidate was named Trump. Instead, the July 2015 Hoover roundtable was for John Ellis “Jeb” Bush. It was said by the New York Times, and Jeb Bush himself, that he was suffering a regrettable campaign handicap. In contrast to a purported[ly] mean-spirited Mr. Trump, Mr. Bush was brought up to be polite and kind. Why then was I slinking down in my chair, desperately wishing for the roundtable to end? I’ve actually read this passage a few times. Part of the reason is that I like to prepare myself if I’m in similar situations. The main reason to be a Monday morning quarterback is to prepare for next Sunday. I think I would have answered to Jeb’s face the way Casey answered in his book, something like the following: There are two main reasons to point out what you claim is obvious. First, it’s not obvious to a bunch of smart people in the Obama administration, in the media, and even in academic economics. Second, I was summarizing it for you. But I put empirical meat on the bones, showing, for example, that at least half, and probably more, of the drop in aggregate hours worked since 2007 would not have occurred, or at worst would have been short-lived, if the safety net had been constant. I’m guessing you didn’t know that, Governor. I adapted the second last sentence above from his 2012 book, The Redistribution Recession, which I reviewed here. I’m not sure if I really would have used the last sentence. It would have been awfully tempting though.   (0 COMMENTS)

I just got back from two weeks in the Yucatan.  Overall, a fantastic trip.  Though Tyler told me we were crazy to go to Mexico during COVID, I’m sticking to the life course I set last June.  And since almost all our activities were outdoors, we felt very safe.  After factoring in the lower quality of Mexican health statistics, I’m still a little more nervous here in Texas.  In any case, here are my thoughts on our Yucatanean odyssey. 1. We stayed in Cancun for five nights, then spent two nights in Chichen Itza, two nights in Mérida, and four nights in Playa del Carmen.  Partly due to COVID, we drove in Mexico for the first time. 2. I was expecting to witness dire COVID-related poverty, but Chichen Itza and Xcaret were hopping.  Throughout the peninsula, I witnessed ample desperate peddling, but less begging than you’d see in almost any American city.   Even the poorest areas between Cancun and Chichen Itza were coping tolerably. 3. Almost all of the major attractions were open.  General rule: The smaller the attraction, the greater the COVID theater.  There were no more than 25 tourists total at glorious and immense Uxmal, but park employees barked when we took off masks for a photo or strayed from their prescribed one-way path.   All the ruins on the Puuc Route were closed, even though they’d be lucky to get 25 tourists a day.  My Spanish-speaking sons tried to smooth-talk our way into Kabah for just five minutes, but all we could do was look over the gate. 4. When I toured the Caribbean, I could at least understand thinkers who attribute differences in development to the virtue of the inhabitants.  The islanders really did seem disorganized and fatalistic; the level of broad-daylight public drunkenness shocked me.  If I were an investor, I would worry about my ability to build a team of reliable workers in the Caribbean.  In the Yucatan, on the other hand, the idea that lack of a “Western work ethic” impedes development is preposterous.  The people were model workers.  Everywhere I looked, I saw Mexicans energetically and cheerfully doing hard jobs.  Almost everyone I dealt with seemed to take pride in his work.  I’m not just talking about resort workers; wherever I looked, the population was hard at work.  The Yucatan is a can-do land. 5. If you have any sympathy for the “agorist” ideal of universal self-employment, the Yucatan should change your mind.  As Bloom and van Reenen’s work on international management highlights, even model workers flounder without sagacious management.  Big business, especially international corporations, fuse their Mexican workforces into crackerjack teams.  Most self-employed Mexicans, in contrast, are floundering.  On every beach, I saw lone peddlers trying to sell hats to tourists, yet never saw a single hat sold.  While old-school Chicago economists might insist that this desperate business model was somehow “optimal” given their complex constraints, I seriously doubt it.  The problem is that high-quality business management is too scarce in Mexico to give every Mexican the opportunity for high-productivity formal employment. 6. We toured four major Mayan sites: Chichen Itza, Uxmal, Coba, and Tulum.  Each filled me with a sense of alien wonder, but the ubiquity of human sacrifice in Mayan religion weighed on me the whole time.  The mere fact that a major civilization embraced human sacrifice so thoroughly and durably makes me shake my head at not only religion but humanity itself. 7. Our Chichen Itza tour guide insisted that human sacrifice was “voluntary.”  He also embraced the view that the winners, not the losers, of the Mayan ball game were sacrificed.  At minimum, I’d say, “How could you possibly know that?”  The fact that official accounts claim that the victims saw death as an honor is hardly probative.  It’s scarcely better than saying that the Jonestown massacre was voluntary because Jim Jones said so.  Nor should we retreat to agnosticism.  Darwin alone should give us a mighty prior that human beings want to live and reproduce, not drown in a sacred cenote or have their living hearts ripped out. 8. Chichen Itza has the most ubiquitous desperate peddling of any tourist site I’ve ever seen.  When I grilled my tour guide about how these businesses work, he explained that every peddler has an informal property right to his location in the park.  The peddlers near the front almost certainly do the best, while those in the remote sections of the park eke out a bare existence.  According to my guide, peddlers can bequeath their spots, so the same vending table we see today was probably once run by the current vendor’s parents and grandparents. 9. Driving in Mexico was much better than I expected.  The roads are probably better than in the U.S., though the number of roads is far fewer, with almost no gas stations in remote regions.  The biggest problem is the extreme inequality of vehicle quality.  Even on the highways, many of the cars are too frazzled to go 100 kph.  If you have a modern car, as I did, you have to either slow down to a crawl or continuously pass struggling vehicles, usually on the wrong side of the road.  Fortunately, Mexicans driving low-performance vehicles were extremely courteous.  While many American drivers speed up when you try to pass them, Mexicans drive half-way off the road to make passing easier. 10. While we’re on the subject of Mexican inequality, my experience convinces me that official statistics greatly understate it.  Wikipedia reports after-tax/after-transfer Gini coefficients of .38 for the U.S. and .48 for Mexico.  Looking at the Yucatan, though, I’d say about 10% of the people are living on under $2000/year and about 10% are living on over $50,000 a year.  About 70% of the people at fancy resorts were Mexicans.  I know that COVID distorts these numbers by scaring off foreign tourists and depressing prices, but still. 11. Growing up in Los Angeles, I was raised to be terrified of Mexico.  The implicit model was: The typical Mexican is extraordinarily prone to both property and violent crime.  In 1990, this was a severe exaggeration: Mexico’s murder rate was only 50% higher than America’s.  Now, however, the disparity is far greater: In 2017, Mexico’s murder rate was almost 400% higher.  How do I reconcile this with my direct observation of the hard-working, respectful, and frankly docile people of the Yucatan?  My best story so far: While the median Mexican is wonderful, high Mexican inequality extends to virtue as well.  Mexican crime gangs are like wolves among the sheep: A handful of villains terrorizing a vast, gentle population. 12. If true, this story sheds new light on the tragic history of violent revolution in Mexico – and presumably the culturally similar nations of Spanish America as well.  Socialist and nationalist revolutionaries are Latin America’s most successful criminal gangs, augmenting sheer brutality with fanatical ideology.  The average person in these countries, however, craves tranquility and opportunity.  Revolutionaries are a handful of wolves who make daily life hell, all the while vainly promising a heaven-on-earth that never comes.  Unlike ordinary criminal gangs, however, Latin America’s revolutionaries have global legions of defenders and apologists.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Some men just want to watch Mexico burn. 13. Best easy-to-overlook place in the Yucatan: Choco-Story across the street from Uxmal.  They call it a “museum” but it’s really a chocolate jungle park and a place of wonder.  Try one sip of their bitter authentic Mayan hot chocolate, then add sugar and spice to enjoy the best hot chocolate you’ve ever tasted.  Hand-feed the monkeys.  And if you go to Chichen Itza, stay at the Hacienda Chichen.  Our first night, we were the only customers in this wonderful resort, where the staff’s response to every request is “¡Claro!”  During non-COVID times, you can even walk straight to Chichen Itza.  Do yourself a favor and book today. (0 COMMENTS)

Michael Oakeshott died thirty years ago. The Michael Oakeshott Association, which is a network of scholars who share an interest in his thought, maintains an interesting website with plenty of information about him and new initiatives concerning his work. Searching “Oakeshott” on Amazon, it seems apparent that there has been considerable interest in Oakeshott since his passing. Alas, I tend to fear this interest was confined to a certain number of experts and was not properly acknowledged by the wider community of political philosophers and historians of ideas. One of the reasons may be that Oakeshott’s work is difficult to fit in with any particular tribe in the political arena. He calls himself a conservative but, for him, conservatism is a “disposition”, an inclination, and not a particular creed. In particular, he was interested in religion, but his conservatism was quite free of any “religious” entanglement. Oakeshott once remarked that “Not to detect a man’s style is to have missed three-quarters of the meaning of his actions and utterances”. Oakeshott’s style was quite peculiar: both in writing (his prose is terse and profound at once) and in life. He was a self-confident thinker who did not search for others’ approval. He had an impressive career but somehow outside the mainstream, was remembered by friends (like Ken Minogue) as a splendid friend who cared about friendship deeply, eschewed honors, and was happy to retire in Dorset and lead a county life. In a beautiful article on Oakeshott, Gertrude Himmelfarb commented that he was “the political philosopher who has so modest a view of the task of political philosophy, the intellectual who is so reluctant a producer of intellectual goods, the master who does so little to acquire or cultivate disciples” and then all of these features perfectly fit in his character. Oakeshott is not very popular among libertarians, either. Libertarians may be wary of him for a few, understandable reasons: he was a British idealist (that smells of Hegel!), he was a scholar of Hobbes, and he was not interested in economic matters at all. In a sense, he was not very interested in politics at all: as Ken Minogue remarked, Oakeshott wrote “Rationalism in Politics” reacting against the “rationalist” attitude prevalent in England in those years when the Attlee government was shaping the welfare and entrepreneurial state. (When conservatives came back to power, things did not change much). But that splendid essay is not a political polemic at all. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on Oakeshot, written by Terry Nardin, is a must read. Libertarians may enjoy this learned article by Gene Callahan, too. Reading Oakeshott is a peculiar experience in these days of intense political polarization. It reminds us that politics should not be a totalizing part of human life and cautions us about the dangers of considering political philosophy a blueprint for political action. It impresses upon us a sense of the limits of politics as such not so much because of the existence of “individual rights” that should be respected, but because when politics becomes ambitious it becomes dangerous and grotesque at once. (0 COMMENTS)

Economist and physician Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University talks about the pandemic with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Bhattacharya, along with Sunetra Gupta of the University of Oxford and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University, authored The Great Barrington Declaration, which advocates a very different approach to fighting the pandemic than current policy and practice. Bhattacharya and […] The post Jay Bhattacharya on the Pandemic appeared first on Econlib.

School choice allows families to choose schools that are more suited to their children. These choices may affect non-academic outcomes, including students’ mental health. We empirically examine the relationship between school choice and mental health using two methods. First, we use difference-in-differences to estimate the effects of state voucher and charter school laws on adolescent suicide rates. States adopting charter school laws witness declines in adolescent suicides, whereas private school voucher laws are generally not associated with statistically significant changes in suicides. Second, we use survey data to estimate the effects of private schooling on adult mental health. Controlling for a post-baseline measure of mental health and a variety of individual characteristics, the estimates suggest that private schooling reduces the likelihood that individuals report having mental health issues as adults. This is the abstract of Corey A. DeAngelis and Angela K. Dills, “The effects of school choice on mental health,” School Effectiveness and School Improvement, December 3, 2020. Here’s one of the key paragraphs: Across all specifications, the estimated effect of a charter school law is robust: States adopting charter schools witnessed declines in adolescent suicide rates. The estimated effect of a charter school law translates to about a 10% decrease in the suicide rate among 15- to 19-year-olds. Voucher programs, tax credit scholarships, and ESAs assist 468,199 students (EdChoice, 2019c); charter schools enrolled more than 6 times as many students, 2.9 million, in 2015 (National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, 2015). The larger number of students affected by charter schools suggests more potential for affecting children’s outcomes. Read the whole thing. (0 COMMENTS)

Possible 11th Pillar of Economic Wisdom: When you’re in a hole, stop digging. One of the most absurd things that have happened with the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine is that politicians have been trying to increase demand for a vaccine of which, not surprisingly at a zero price, there is a shortage. The rationale for putting Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, Mike Pence, and Karen Pence at the front of the line way ahead of almost all of the rest of us is that it will persuade people that it’s safe and those otherwise-hesitant people will be more willing to take it. They might be more willing to take it, but if that’s the rationale, the rationale makes zero sense in December. Tens of millions of us are ready to take it now. There’s no need to persuade people to take it when there isn’t enough in the short term to satisfy all willing takers. Hmmm. Do you think there might be another reason for Pelosi, McConnell, and Pence to take it now? Let’s scratch our heads really hard and we might come up with a reason. Here it is. They’re selfish people who are using their privileged position to get immunized. This is Newsom French Laundry all over again. This “patriotic” behavior on their part is the opposite of admirable. (0 COMMENTS)