As promised, this is the full op/ed that Ryan Sullivan and I had published in the print edition of the Wall Street Journal on October 21. Because today (Saturday) is my 70th birthday, I will not be working. So I might not reply to comments until Sunday or Monday. End the School Shutdown In-person classes turn out not to cause spikes in cases or fatality. But keeping kids home has a high cost. By David R. Henderson and Ryan Sullivan Tens of millions of students started the school year completely online, including those in 13 of the 15 largest school districts in the U.S. The primary reason is concern over safety for students and staff. But recent data are shifting the discussion on school safety and infection rates of Covid-19. They argue strongly for opening K-12 schools. Previous evidence has suggested that schools are not superspreaders. That research came from other countries (whose rates and environments are different) or very specific cases in America, such as YMCA summer camps. While this suggested little impact on infection rates from opening the schools, it was possible that the unique environment of U.S. public schools would cause different outcomes. But they’re about the same. A group of researchers, spearheaded by Brown University Professor Emily Oster, have created and made available the most comprehensive databaseon schools and Covid case rates for students and staff since the pandemic started. Her data—covering almost 200,000 kids across 47 states from the last two weeks of September—showed a Covid-19 case rate of 0.13% among students and 0.24% among staff. That’s a shockingly and wonderfully low number. By comparison, the current overall U.S. case rate is 2.6%, an order of magnitude higher. Other research has shown that hospitalization and fatality rates for school-age children are also extremely low. People 19 and younger account for only 1.2% of Covid-19 hospitalizations in the U.S. during the peak of the pandemic. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that of all Covid-19 deaths up to Oct. 10, only 74 were of children under age 15. During the 2019-20 flu season, the CDC estimates, 434 children under 18 died of the flu. Yet we don’t shut down schools over the flu. What about teachers? We still don’t have hard information on the fatality rates for American teachers, but the new data have shown that Covid-19 case rates are low for staff working in the schools. That said, opening schools in other countries has had little impact on the fatality rates of teachers. Sweden never shut its schools, and teachers there have had the same fatality rate during this pandemic as IT technicians, who can often work from home. The cost of reopening the schools, measured in additional cases, hospitalizations, and fatalities, is low. And there are weighty costs of not opening. A report from McKinsey & Co. found that disrupting in-person classes through January 2021 would result in the loss of $61,000 to $82,000 in lifetime earnings for the average K-12 student in the U.S. Another study led by Georgetown University’s George Psacharopoulos found that shutting down all American schools for only four months would result in $2.5 trillion in lost future wages. One reason economists care about lost earnings is that they increase the risk of death. Lower incomes mean people aren’t able to buy safer cars and afford healthier foods, which inevitably leads to shorter lifespans. Even if the reports overstate the financial losses dramatically, these are large losses and will surely lead to tragic health outcomes in the future. Moreover, mental-health surveys indicate that keeping young children isolated from each other for months has devastating psychological consequences. Economists have specific methods to evaluate the trade-offs between lives and economic activity in a cost-benefit framework. The standard methodology is to place a value on the number of lives saved. A reasonable number is $4.5 million per life. This number is based on how much people need to be paid in the labor market to risk death and so is a good approximation of the monetary value of American lives lost during Covid. They then compare that value with lost gross domestic product. How many lives would need to be saved to justify even only a future $1 trillion loss in GDP? Standard economic logic suggests the number would have to be around 222,000. Given the low Covid-19 case and death rates among minors and teachers, the actual number of lives saved by maintaining the school shutdown is almost certainly an order of magnitude lower. Moreover, keeping schools closed has an immediate impact on working-class families. As one study from the University of Chicago details, roughly 50 million Americans are dealing with child-care issues now, and the lack of in-person schooling exacerbates that. The problem is most critical for single-parent, low-income and minority households. The school shutdown also increases inequality between the sexes as women drop out of the workforce at shocking levels. In September there were 865,000 fewer women over 19 in the labor force than in August. By contrast, only 216,000 men over 19 left the workforce over that same period. Much of that, probably most, is due to the lack of in-person schooling. Even for parents who stay in the workforce, not holding school causes many to shift work priorities or decrease total hours worked, as a study from the IZA Institute of Labor Economics showed. The losses from keeping children out of school are huge and the benefits are small. Let’s get kids back into the classroom—and on the playground. Mr. Henderson is a research fellow with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Mr. Sullivan is an associate professor of economics at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. Two notes: For Bryan Caplan-type reasons about the value of education, I persuaded my co-author to use an estimate of $1 trillion in human capital losses rather than the $2.5 trillion from the Georgetown study. Given the other psychological losses, though, I’m quite confident that $1 trillion is an underestimate. In my post on October 21, commenter Kevin Dick noted a stock-flow error in the last sentence of the third paragraph.   (0 COMMENTS)

Gordon Hanson directed me to a brilliant 1992 essay by Richard Rorty, which refutes the claim that postmodern philosophy is an inherently left wing concept.  Rorty describes “two cultural wars”—an important one between the left and the right, and an unimportant one within the left: The second cultural war is . . . between those who see modern liberal society as vitally flawed (the people handily lumped together as ‘postmodernists’) and typical left-wing Democrat professors like myself, people who see ours as a society in which technology and democratic institutions can, with luck, collaborate to increase equality and decrease suffering. This war is not very important. Despite the conservative columnists who pretend to view with alarm a vast conspiracy (encompassing both the postmodernists and the pragmatists) to politicize the humanities and corrupt the youth, this war is just a tiny little dispute within what Hunter calls the ‘progressivist’ ranks. People on the postmodernist side of this dispute tend to share Noam Chomsky’s view of the United States as run by a corrupt elite which aims at enriching itself by immiserating the Third World . From that perspective, our country is not so much in danger of slipping into fascism as it is a country which has always been quasi-fascist. These people typically think that nothing will change unless we get rid of ‘humanism’, ‘liberal individualism’, and ‘technologism’. People like me see nothing wrong with any of these -isms, nor with the political and moral heritage of the Enlightenment – with the least common denominator of Mill and Marx, Trotsky and Whitman, William James and Vaclav Havel. Typically, we Deweyans are sentimentally patriotic about America – willing to grant that it could slide into fascism at any time, but proud of its past and guardedly hopeful about its future. Most people on my side of this second, tiny, upmarket cultural war have, in the light of the history of nationalized enterprises and central planning in central and eastern Europe, given up on socialism. We are willing to grant that welfare state capitalism is the best we can hope for. Most of us who were brought up Trotskyite now feel forced to admit that Lenin and Trotsky did more harm than good, and that Kerensky has gotten a bum rap for the past 70 years. But we see ourselves as still faithful to everything that was good in the socialist movement. Those on the other side, however, still insist that nothing will change unless there is some sort of total revolution. . . . I am distrusted by both the ‘orthodox’ side in the important war and the ‘postmodern’ side in the unimportant one, because I think that the ‘postmoderns’ are philosophically right though politically silly, and that the ‘orthodox’ are philosophically wrong as well as politically dangerous. Unlike both the orthodox and the postmoderns, I do not think that you can tell much about the worth of a philosopher’s views on topics such as truth, objectivity and the possibility of a single vision by discovering his politics, or his irrelevance to politics. . . . Both the orthodox and the postmoderns still want a tight connection between people’s politics and their views on large theoretical (theological, metaphysical, epistemological, metaphilosophical) matters. Some postmodernists who initially took my enthusiasm for Derrida to mean that I must be on their political side decided, after discovering that my politics were pretty much those of Hubert Humphrey, that I must have sold out. The orthodox tend to think that people who, like the postmodernists and me, believe neither in God nor in some suitable substitute, should think that everything is permitted, that everybody can do what they like. So they tell us that we are either inconsistent or self-deceptive in putting forward our moral or political views. I take this near unanimity among my critics to show that most people – even a lot of purportedly liberated postmodernists – still hanker for something like what I wanted when I was 15: a way of holding reality and justice in a single vision. More specifically, they want to unite their sense of moral and political responsibility with a grasp of the ultimate determinants of our fate. They want to see love, power and justice as coming together deep down in the nature of things, or in the human soul, or in the structure of language, or somewhere. They want some sort of guarantee that their intellectual acuity, and those special ecstatic moments which that acuity sometimes affords, are of some relevance to their moral convictions. They still think that virtue and knowledge are somehow linked – that being right about philosophical matters is important for right action. I think this is important only occasionally and incidentally. This is also my view; the postmoderns are philosophically right about truth and they are wrong about politics. When I discovered Rorty, I stopped wasting time looking for a grand unifying philosophical theory: This means that the fact that you have obligations to other people (not to bully them, to join them in overthrowing tyrants, to feed them when they are hungry) does not entail that what you share with other people is more important than anything else. What you share with them, when you are aware of such moral obligations, is not, I argued in Contingency, ‘rationality’ or ‘human nature’ or ‘the fatherhood of God’ or ‘a knowledge of the Moral Law’, or anything other than ability to sympathize with the pain of others. There is no particular reason to expect that your sensitivity to that pain, and your idiosyncratic loves, are going to fit within one big overall account of how everything hangs together. There is, in short, not much reason to hope for the sort of single vision that I went to college hoping to get. Rorty says that philosophers have interesting things to say, but: . . . we are not the people to come to if you want confirmation that the things you love with all your heart are central to the structure of the universe, or that your sense of moral responsibility is ‘rational and objective’ rather than ‘just’ a result of how you were brought up. There are still, as C. S. Peirce put it, ‘philosophical slop-shops on every corner’ which will provide such confirmation. But there is a price. To pay the price you have to turn your back on intellectual history and on what Milan Kundera calls ‘the fascinating imaginative realm where no one owns the truth and everyone has the right to be understood . . . the wisdom of the novel’. You risk losing the sense of finitude, and the tolerance, which result from realizing how very many synoptic visions there have been, and how little argument can do to help you choose among them. Despite my relatively early disillusionment with Platonism, I am very glad that I spent all those years reading philosophy books. For I learned something that still seems very important: to distrust the intellectual snobbery which originally led me to read them. If I had not read all those books, I might never have been able to stop looking for what Derrida calls ‘a full presence beyond the reach of play’, for a luminous, self-justifying, self-sufficient synoptic vision. The entire essay is a beautifully written defense of philosophical pragmatism. (0 COMMENTS)

And no, I won’t put it all in non-capitalized letters. Eliot could not have found a kinder, or more effective, way of putting me at ease. As we sat down, he said, “Tell me, as one editor to another, do you have much author trouble?” I could not help laughing, he laughed in return–he had a booming laugh–and that was the beginning of our friendship. His most memorable remark of the day occurred when I asked him if he agreed with the definition that most editors are failed writers, and he replied: “Perhaps, but so are most writers.” Timothy Taylor, quoting editor Robert Giroux, “Are Editors Just Failed Writers?” Conversable Economist, November 20, 2020. (0 COMMENTS)

This fall, LIFE magazine has published a special issue commemorating the 50th anniversary of the movie M*A*S*H. Despite the hook, the issue focuses on the ensuing TV series, which ran from 1972 to 1983. Though the show has often been characterized as being politically left-wing, it actually is heavily classically liberal, celebrating the individual, civil liberties, and the market, and harshly criticizing anti-individualism, government compulsion, and government decision-making. In a series of essays, I examine the classical liberalism of M*A*S*H. This is the 6th and final part. Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here. Part 3 is here. Part 4 is here. Part 5 is here.   M*A*S*H’s respect for civil liberties goes beyond people’s right to property and exchange. Freedom of speech and the press are lionized for protecting against government abuse (“For the Good of the Outfit,” “Are You Now, Margaret,” “Tell It to the Marines” [s. 9]); censorship is condemned and lampooned (“For the Good of the Outfit,” “The Moon Is Not Blue” [s. 11]); and religious freedom is revered (“Ping Pong” [s. 5], “A Holy Mess” [s. 10]). Throughout the show’s run, bigotry is condemned. Racism is ridiculed (“L.I.P.” [s. 2],” “The General Flipped at Dawn,” “Yessir, That’s Our Baby,” “Bottle Fatigue” [s. 8], “The Tooth Shall Set You Free” [ s. 10]) and immigration is championed (“L.I.P.,” “Tell It to the Marines”). In “Dear Dad … Three” (s. 2), a wounded white soldier, Sgt. Condon (Mills Watson), warns the doctors to make sure he gets the “right color” blood. Hawkeye and Trapper decide to teach him a lesson, sneaking into the recovery room at night to dab the sleeping soldier’s skin with tincture of iodine. Worried that his darkening complexion indicates he has indeed been given the wrong blood, Condon confronts the doctors: CONDON What are you guys tryin’ to do to me? Did you give me the wrong color blood? TRAPPER All blood is the same. HAWKEYE You ever hear of Dr. Charles Drew? CONDON Who’s that? HAWKEYE Dr. Drew invented the process of separating blood so it can be stored. TRAPPER Plasma. HAWKEYE He died last April in a car accident. TRAPPER He bled to death. The hospital wouldn’t let him in. HAWKEYE It was for whites only. TRAPPER See ya, fella.   At the end of the episode, a wiser Condon thanks the surgeons “for giving me a lot to think about” and respectfully salutes nurse Ginger Bayliss (Odessa Cleveland), an African-American. Sexism and sexual harassment are likewise treated with derision (“What’s Up, Doc?” “Hot Lips Is Back in Town” [s. 7], “Nurse Doctor” [s. 8]). In “Inga” (s. 7), Hawkeye —a notorious womanizer in the series’ early seasons — is agog over a visiting woman surgeon (Mariette Hartley) — until she shows him up in the operating room. Later, Margaret takes him to task for having a limited view of women: MARGARET You think a woman is dead until she lives for you. Well, let me tell you something, Benjamin Franklin: We actually survive without you. We live, we breathe, we dream, we do our work, we earn our pay. Sometimes we even have our little failures, and then we pull ourselves together, all without benefit of your fabulous electric lips! And let me tell you something else, buster! I can walk into that kitchen any time I want and replace those fabulous lips of yours with a soggy piece of liver! M*A*S*H also respects the rights of homosexuals (“George,” s. 2) and the disabled (“Dear Uncle Abdul” [s. 8], “Run for the Money” [s. 11]). In “Morale Victory” (s. 8), Charles — a lover of chamber music — tries to help an injured soldier, David Sheridan (James Stephens), accept a permanent loss of dexterity in one hand even though Sheridan is a concert pianist. Charles introduces him to compositions written for one hand, explaining that the injury does not diminish who he is or his talent (and illustrates comparative advantage): CHARLES Your hand may be stilled, but your gift cannot be silenced if you refuse to let it be. SHERIDAN Gift? You keep talking about this damn gift. I had a gift, and I exchanged it for some mortar fragments, remember? CHARLES Wrong. Because the gift does not lie in your hands. I have hands, David. Hands that can make a scalpel sing. More than anything in my life, I wanted to play, but I do not have the gift. I can play the notes, but I cannot make the music. You’ve performed Liszt, Rachmaninoff, Chopin. Even if you never do so again, you’ve already known a joy that I will never know as long as I live. Because the true gift is in your head, and in your heart, and in your soul. Now, you can shut it off forever, or you can find new ways to share your gift with the world — through the baton, the classroom, the pen. As to these works, they’re for you, because you and the piano will always be as one.   Classical liberals respect civil liberties because they appreciate the value — and even marvel at the wonder — of the individual. (In contrast, the non–classical liberal Frank Burns believes that “individuality’s fine, as long as we all do it together” [“George”].) This wonder is expressed in “Hawkeye” (s. 4), in which Hawkeye suffers a concussion while away from the unit and seeks help from a Korean family. Despite the language barrier, he keeps talking to stay awake, often falling into philosophizing: HAWKEYE Don’t you sometimes wonder about babies? I mean, how do they know what to do in there? They start out looking like little hairless mice, and they wind up looking like us. How’s it all work? I’ve held a beating heart in my hand. I’ve poked into kidneys and crocheted them together again. I’ve pushed air into collapsed lungs like beat-up old pump organs. I’ve squeezed and probed and prodded my way through hundreds of miles of gut and goo, and I don’t know what makes us live. I mean, what keeps us in motion? What keeps the heart beating without anybody rewinding it? Why do the cells reproduce and re-re-reproduce with such gay abandon? Did you ever see Ann Corio or Margie Hart? Strippers. … I remember Polly O’Day. She worked with a parrot. He didn’t help her strip or anything; while she got undressed, he stood on the side and talked dirty. It was an exciting act. What a body. She was built great, too. But what I don’t understand is how she got that way, any more than how we did. Look at your hand. It’s one of the most incredible instruments in the universe. Of all the bones in the body, one fourth are in the hand. Forget the hand; look at your thumb, that wondrous mechanism that separates us from the other animals. The world-famous opposable thumb, that amazing device that has transported more students to college than the Boston Post Road. Ideal for sucking, especially as a baby. And lauded in song and story as the perfect instrument for pulling out a plum. Or, in the case of the Caesars, for holding it down for the gladiator to die, or holding it up, which means, “See you later at the orgy.” My friends, for getting up and down the pike, in your pie, in your eye, I give you the thumb. Have you any idea, Farmer Brown, of the incredible complexity of this piece of human apparatus? You have no idea of the balletic interplay of parts that make up the human thumb. The flexor ossis metacarpi pollicis flexes the metacarpal bone. That is, draws it inward over the palm, thus producing the movement of opposition — and the Boy Scout salute. Because of this magical engineering, we can do this. [Grasping a utensil.] And this. [Grasping a cup.] And this. [Making a fist.] But our greatest triumph comes not from flexing the metacarpal bone and making a fist, which always seems to be thirsting to be clenched. No, no, no, no, no. Our greatest moment is when we open our hand: cradling a glass of wine, cupping a loved one’s chin. And the best, the most expert of all, keeping all the objects of our life in the air at the same time. [Picking up three pieces of fruit.] My friends, for your amusement and bemusement, I give you the human person. [Begins juggling the fruit.] Thumb and fingers flexing madly, straining to keep aloft the leaden realities of life: ignorance, death, and madness. Thus, we create for ourselves the illusion that we have power, that we are in control, that we are loved.   Weary Determination Sadly, M*A*S*H seems out of step with today’s politics. In the America of the 1970s and ’80s and on through the end of the century, both the Democratic and Republican parties were liberal in the classical sense, believing in the value of the individual, the importance of civil liberties, and the benefits of the market. The parties did differ — vigorously — on where to draw certain lines: how big should the welfare state be and what should be required of beneficiaries, how muscular should foreign policy be, what tax rates should be. But those differences fit within a classical liberal philosophy. It’s no wonder that M*A*S*H found plenty of fans on both sides of that era’s red–blue divide. Today, the show might not find a similar audience. Both ends of the American political spectrum have embraced illiberalism, demanding that speech and the press be constrained, denigrating religious differences, reanimating old bigotries, obstructing immigration, and clamping down on markets and private exchange. For classical liberals, today’s politics are disturbing and exhausting. We feel a bit like the members of the 4077, who were tired of war, troubled by the horrors they witnessed, and desired the peaceful lives they led before Korea. But they rallied when they needed to. When the choppers and ambulances arrived laden with casualties, the 4077 determinedly carried out their medical duties. And when morale sagged, they found ways to boost it, often with a gag at the expense of some hypocrite, fool, or sadist who sorely deserved it. And so, maybe classical liberals in the 21st century can rally in the face of today’s grim times — and at the expense of illiberals who deserve it. And, concerning this so-far-illiberal century, maybe we can be reassured by Colonel Potter’s words to an orphan boy in “Old Soldiers”: “You’re off to a kind of a rough start, but I bet you’ve got some glorious times ahead of you.” (0 COMMENTS)

There are various proposals for the federal government to deal with student debt. I’ve seen two main ones. The one I’ll deal with here is the proposal to bail out people who have student loans. I came across this post from Justin Wolfers, written in September 2011. I debated Justin about lockdowns in Apriland We differed on that, but I agree with his bottom line here. I’ll note his thoughts in highlight and then give my comments after each. He wrote that we should look at the issue “through five separate lenses.” Distribution: If we are going to give money away, why on earth would we give it to college grads? This is the one group who we know typically have high incomes, and who have enjoyed income growth over the past four decades.  The group who has been hurt over the past few decades is high school dropouts. I agree. I would tweak the language a little. “We’re” not giving it; the federal government would be the entity that gave it and it would take from us to do so. Macroeconomics: This is the worst macro policy I’ve ever heard of. If you want stimulus, you get more bang-for-your-buck if you give extra dollars to folks who are most likely to spend each dollar. Imagine what would happen if you forgave $50,000 in debt. How much of that would get spent in the next month or year? Probably just a couple of grand (if that). Much of it would go into the bank. But give $1,000 to each of 50 poor people, and nearly all of it will get spent, yielding a larger stimulus. Moreover, it’s not likely that college grads are the ones who are liquidity-constrained. Most of ‘em could spend more if they wanted to; after all, they are the folks who could get a credit card or a car loan fairly easily. It’s the hand-to-mouth consumers—those who can’t get easy access to credit—who are most likely to raise their spending if they get the extra dollars. This is Justin’s unreconstructed Keynesian perspective. His view is that one should stimulate the economy by having the government give money to people who will spend it. I think a better way, and a much cheaper way, is with monetary policy. But I agree with him that from either vantage point, this is not good macro policy. Education Policy: Perhaps folks think that forgiving educational loans will lead more people to get an education. No, it won’t. This is a proposal to forgive the debt of folks who already have an education. Want to increase access to education? Make loans more widely available, or subsidize those who are yet to choose whether to go to school. But this proposal is just a lump-sum transfer that won’t increase education attainment. So why transfer to these folks? I agree. But I also think it would be a bad idea to have any level of government further subsidize college students. That’s a subsidy from a broad cross section of people to people who will be relatively wealthy. It also distorts incentives. Let people go to college by comparing the costs and benefits, not by subsidizing the costs. Political Economy: This is a bunch of kids who don’t want to pay their loans back. And worse: Do this once, and what will happen in the next recession? More lobbying for free money, rather than doing something socially constructive.  Moreover, if these guys succeed, others will try, too. And we’ll just get more spending in the least socially productive part of our economy—the lobbying industry. Yes. A bunch of kids and a bunch of non-kids. There are a lot of 30-somethings with substantial student loan debt. Politics: Notice the political rhetoric?  Give free money to us, rather than “corporations, millionaires and billionaires.”  Opportunity cost is one of the key principles of economics. And that principle says to compare your choice with the next best alternative.  Instead, they’re comparing it with the worst alternative.  So my question for the proponents: Why give money to college grads rather than the 15% of the population in poverty? Agreed. I don’t want the government to give it to people in poverty either, but that would be less bad. Conclusion: Worst. Idea. Ever. Well not literally and I’m sure Justin doesn’t mean it literally. But it is a really bad idea. And I bet that the proponents can’t find a single economist to support this idiotic idea. I hope he’s right. We’ll see. Next up: Ben Shapiro’s bad idea. (0 COMMENTS)

When I emailed the editors of the National Academy of Sciences report on The Economic and Fiscal Impact of Immigration about Jason Richwine’s criticism, they responded swiftly and scrupulously.  Series editor Francine Blau put me in touch with Gretchen Donehower, one of the authors of the section.  Donehower sent me the following response.  Reprinted with her kind permission. Hi Bryan, Thanks for reaching out. Richwine is correct in that piece that he writes, and we actually exchanged a bunch of emails to verify back in February of this year.  The $35k cell (upper left-hand corner of Table 8-12) is the net fiscal impact of someone who comes to the US aged 0-24 whose parents’ average education falls in the

One of the many fascinating observations in Charles Postel’s The Populist Vision (Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 164) is the sweet spot that American populists of the late 19th century generally had for emperor Napoléon Bonaparte, the French dictator at the beginning of the century: In the 1890s, a Napoleon revival spread in the United States, as many Americans hoped for a strong man to deliver the nation from its multiple ills. Reporting on the so-called “Napoleon craze,” Century magazine reported that “the interest in Napoleon has recently had a revival that is phenomenal in its extent and intensity.” Muckraking journalist Ida M. Tarbell and Princeton Professor William Milligan Sloane contributed serialized Napoleon biographies in the Century and McClure’s Magazine. Politicians preened themselves in Napoleon’s image. Harper’s Weekly reported that then Ohio governor William McKinley, known as “the Napoleon of Protection,” also “looks like Napoleon and knows it.” The fascination with the French emperor corresponded to a broad discontent with corrupt and impotent political institutions, as well as strong currents of militarism and nationalism in American public life. The Populists were not immune to these currents. Tom Watson [a politician and writer of the times] and the Populists, however, were drawn less to military valor and patriotic glory than to the example of Napoleon’s administrative systems and energized state power. … In Watson’s treatment, Napoleon towers as “the peerless developer, organizer, [and] administrator,” who had applied the science of government to build a centralized and rational system of law and education, the Bank of France, and a strong state. … The general, Watson noted, was a “master builder” with “modern tone.” Contrary to today’s populists in America and in other countries, the American populists of the late 19th century believed in science and experts as Enlightenment people did in the previous century. Yet, both kinds of populism–the old one and the new one–are similar in favoring state intervention. In the old American populism, authoritarian experts and science represented rationality, hence the reverence for Napoleon; today’s populists prefer authoritarian politicians and their intuitions. Library of Congress, http://loc.gov/pictures/resource/cph.3a14529/ In its military version, the American infatuation with Napoleon appears to go back at least to the Civil War as illustrated above by the picture of General George B. McClellan in a typical Napoleonic pose. The Library of Congress says that McClellan was popularly known as the “little Napoleon.” General Ulysses S. Grant stroke the same pose. Craig Walenta, a frequent commenter on this blog, brought these pictures and others to my attention. A Napoleonic infatuation is not surprising. Since the “will of the people” does not exist and is unknowable, populists have to find a dear leader to incarnate it. (See “What Is Populism? The People V. the People,” Econlog, September 11, 2020.)   PS: I owe the Postel book reference to Jeff Hummel who, besides being a scholarly economist, is a walking encyclopedia on American history. (0 COMMENTS)

How dangerous are mountain lions? The data tell an interesting story. Since 1980, there have been only 13 attacks in all of California (where David and Charley live) and three people have died as a result. Compare this with attacks by dogs. Each year in California, about 100,000 dog attacks cause their victims to get medical attention. This means that California residents are approximately 180,000 times as likely to be seriously attacked by a dog as by a mountain lion. But to really compare dogs and mountain lions, we need to check our base, because there are a lot more dogs than mountain lions. With so many more dogs running around, a reasonable person would expect more dog attacks. With about 8 million dogs and 5,000 mountain lions in California, we see that there are approximately 1,500 dogs for each mountain lion. Once we check our base and correct for the numbers of dogs and mountain lions, we see that dogs are still more dangerous, and in fact, the risk of serious attack from an individual dog is about 120 times that of the risk from an individual mountain lion. Mountain lions present a daunting and ferocious image, but with so few attacks, they must have very little interest in attacking people. This quote is from David R. Henderson and Charles L. Hooper, Making Great Decisions in Business and Life, Chicago Park Press, 2006. The picture above is of me at the entrance to Stanford University yesterday. It reminded me of maps I saw of Germany divided into 4 zones after World War II. My friend and co-author Charley Hooper and I walked on the campus and notice a whole lot of 20-somethings walking around wearing masks even though they were typically walking alone and were not closer than 30 feet to anyone else. They seem to fear COVID-19 the way some people fear mountain lions. My guess is that it’s a mixture of their fear and the fear of the administrators of Stanford, who seem to have taken an extremely anti-intellectual approach to the issue. Either way, the risk to the young is extremely low. Here are data from the Centers for Disease Control as of November 12, 2020. They are for the number of deaths between February 1, 2020 and November 7, 2020. (The CDC notes that there is a lag because death counts are somewhat delayed.) The number of Americans of age 15 to 24 who have died of COVID-19 is 410. The number of Americans of age 15 to 24 who have died of all causes is 26,662. Watch out for dogs, not mountain lions. If you’re young, watch out for deaths from other causes, not COVID-19. Postscript: What brought us to Palo Alto is my 70th birthday, which I celebrate on Saturday. Because it’s impractical right now to do what Governor Newsom did but tells the rest of us not to do, I’m not having a 70th birthday party. Instead, I’m seeing individual friends for outdoor lunches and conversation. Charley, Jay Bhattacharya, and I had a wonderful almost 3-hour outdoor lunch and conversation. (2 COMMENTS)

Julius Probst directed me to a list of the share of whites that are college educated in various states. (See the list at the bottom of the post.) Note that the 10 states with the highest college share all voted for Joe Biden, as well as 8 of the next 10.  Only Texas and Utah were exceptions, at #12 and #19. At first glance the explanation seems obvious; white college grads voted strongly for Biden. I believe that’s only part of the explanation; they actually didn’t vote all that overwhelmingly for Biden. Rather, college grads also reshape the broader society in a way that is friendlier to the modern Democratic Party. When I was young, middle class people would mow their own lawns. As time went by, the “middle class” tended to segment into the upper middle class and the working class, with different lifestyles. Working class people still cut their grass, while upper middle class people frequently hire others to do so, often immigrants from Latin America. Perhaps white people who cut their own grass tend to vote for Donald Trump, while those that hire others vote for Biden, as do the people they hire. More broadly, in upper middle class areas there’s been an explosion in service industries, everything from pet grooming to nail salons to full service car washes. Many working class immigrant people migrate to affluent professional cites, where they provide services to upper middle class professionals. And while Hispanics shifted slightly toward Trump in the latest election, in absolute terms they still voted overwhelmingly for Biden. The symbiotic relationship between affluent professions and the immigrant communities that provide services to them creates a very different society from what you see in more “self-sufficient” working class states like Kentucky and Arkansas (the bottom two states on the list.) Indeed if you look at the bottom ten states, only one voted for Biden. And that one exception–Nevada– is itself very interesting. Biden won Nevada because of strong support among Hispanic voters. While Nevada does not have a big group of college educated whites, it does have a huge tourist industry, catering to affluent travelers. Thus it has lots of the same low-skilled service jobs that you see in places like California, and the immigrant population to match. This idea is familiar to those who have studied racial politics in America. States with large (but minority) black populations such as Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Georgia mostly voted for Trump. But that’s not because lots of blacks voted for Trump. Rather having a large black population reshapes society.  It makes the non-blacks behave differently, more likely to vote overwhelmingly for the candidate that blacks are not voting for. In contrast, whites in Vermont probably don’t think about the preferences of their tiny black population when casting their ballots. The states full of affluent whites and large immigrant populations are likely to be relatively open to immigration, trade, specialization, etc. They will also tend to be more urban.  This creates a dilemma for Democrats. How can they appeal to this group, and also to the factory workers to which Bernie Sanders was trying to appeal (albeit not necessarily successfully?) America is too complex a society for either political party to have a neat and tidy solution to coalition building in a two party structure. There will always be strange bedfellows. Furthermore, as society changes over time, the parties will evolve into new and different coalitions. For the moment, the Dems are the “college plus minorities” party. Who knows what they’ll be in 50 years? (0 COMMENTS)

In Open Borders, I heavily rely on the National Academy of Sciences report on The Economic and Fiscal Impact of Immigration to estimate the net fiscal effect of immigration.  Recently one of my graduate students pointed out this post by Jason Richwine criticizing my interpretation of the results. Among dropouts, immigrants in the 25-64 and 65+ age categories are clearly fiscal burdens, as they cost taxpayers $225,000 and $257,000, respectively. Caplan, however, is tantalized by the age 0-24 column, which shows positive $35,000. “Even young high school dropouts more than pull their weight,” he concludes. That conclusion is based on a misunderstanding of the table. Among immigrants in the age 25-64 and 65-plus columns, the education rows refer to the education of the immigrants themselves. However, in the age 0-24 column, education refers to the education of the immigrants’ parents. As p. 464 of the National Academies’ report explains, “If the immigrant arrives before age 25, we instead predict a future education level … based on parental education.” The reason the fiscal impact appears positive is that the model assumes that the children of high school dropouts will get more education than their parents did. In other words, most of Caplan’s “young high school dropouts” are not dropouts at all. Richwine concludes in a gentlemanly manner: This is an understandable mistake, as the National Academies authors should have been clearer that the age 0-24 column has a different interpretation than the other two age columns. Nevertheless, Caplan’s misinterpretation has led him far astray. Did I indeed misread the report?  Yes.  Volume editor Francine Blau connected me with Gretchen Donehower, one of the authors of the section, and she confirmed my mistake. Here’s the relevant NAS passage: Because an individual’s tax payments and benefit receipts differ so much by the individual’s educational attainment, to predict future flows for an immigrant one must first predict the educational level that individual and his descendants will attain. An immigrant who arrives after age 25 is likely to maintain the education level observed on arrival, so we assume no change in educational attainment after age 25. If the immigrant arrives before age 25, we instead predict a future education level by estimating regression functions that predict offspring education based on parental education. In hindsight, I was always a little puzzled by the NAS tables.  What does it mean, after all, to report the net fiscal impact of a 10-year-old college graduate?  I was also somewhat puzzled by how young immigrants could have such a favorable fiscal effect when taxpayers are immediately paying massive sums to educate so many of them.  But I deferred to the NAS numbers instead of double-checking the text.  I did read the whole chapter, but this qualification failed to register.  Mea culpa. In light of Richwine’s correction, here is my revised position on the NAS report. 1. Young immigrants (ages 0-24) whose parents are high school dropouts have a positive net fiscal effect. 2. But the dropout parents themselves generally have a negative effect, even if they arrive as young adults. 3. Even 25-year-old immigrant high school dropouts have a negative net fiscal effect (-$186,000), though 25-year-old immigrant high school graduates have a positive net fiscal effect (+$72,000).   I continue to stand by several closely related controversial claims, most notably: 1. Immigrants have a much more favorable fiscal effects than matching natives.  The table showing that 25-year-old immigrant dropouts have a net fiscal effect of -$186,000 also shows that 25-year-old native dropouts have a net fiscal effect of -$388,000! 2. If you consider this an inadequate basis for restricting the reproduction of natives, it is hard to see why it is an adequate basis for restricting the migration of foreigners.   Last point: If there is a second-edition of Open Borders, I’ll definitely fix the mistake and thank Richwine for pointing out my error. (0 COMMENTS)