I’ve spent over 30 years arguing about ideas.  During those decades, I’ve learned a lot.  I’ve changed my mind.  I’ve changed minds. Normally, however, arguing about ideas is fruitless.  Tempers fray.  Discussion goes in circles.  Each and every mental corruption that Philip Tetlock has explored rears itself ugly epistemic head.  You even lose friends. When a conversation goes off the rails, I’m sorely tempted to bluntly assess the other party’s deep intellectual flaws.  (As I repeatedly told my mom when I was a teenager, “When will you get it through your thick skull that…”)  You don’t have to master Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People to predict the results.  The other party typically has the temerity to bluntly assess my deep intellectual flaws, which in turn sparks an even more unpleasant, fruitless, and potentially friendship-ending exchange. The wise approach to fruitless argument, rather, is to politely disengage.  Yet how can you do this without counter-productively moving the conversation from bad to worse? The classic move is to make “one last point,” then terminate the conversation.  Again, you don’t have to master Carnegie to predict the results.  The other side rushes to get in their “one last point” and the cycle of suffering resumes. A better approach is to meekly announce, “I can’t think of anything else productive to say.”  Alas, this is still red meat in the eyes of many disputants.  “Aha, so you can’t even answer my brilliant arguments.  Typical!” The best ejector button I’ve discovered so far is a single word: “Impasse.”  You can stretch it out to, “I fear we’ve reached an impasse,” but even that provides a hand-hold for the other party to say, “Oh, we’ve reached an impasse, eh?  Speak for yourself.”  When you say, “Impasse” and stop talking, the conversation swiftly ends.  The other side won’t like it, but at this point you should meet further taunts with a silent shrug.  While this might spawn a grudge, it’s less likely to do so than further wasted words. Admittedly, if your real goal is to manipulate the other party into purging you, your best bet is probably Agree and Amplify.  But if that’s your goal, you have no need of my help. (0 COMMENTS)

I was very pleased to see Thomas Firey’s thoughtful series on the classical liberal currents in what was, arguably, the greatest television comedy ever, M*A*S*H.  The two original stars of the show were Alan Alda and the late Wayne Rogers.  What is lesser known of the latter, Wayne attended many Liberty Fund conferences between 2003 And 2015.  I had the privilege of knowing him for a number of years during his long and productive relationship with Liberty Fund. By CBS Television – Public Domain   Wayne first became acquainted with Liberty Fund through a personal relationship with a member of the Liberty Fund Board of Directors. Wayne began to attend our events, and he grew to love Liberty Fund.  I still vividly remember watching Wayne on his Fox Business show “Cashing In” wearing a Liberty Fund tie early on Saturday mornings.  I first met Wayne at a conference in 2006 on biology and the origins of virtue (directed by a long time friend of EconLib, the ever humble Mike Munger).  Wayne and I hit it off immediately and over the years I had the opportunity to work with him twice as he directed Liberty Fund conferences.   Wayne’s involvement was not simply because of his fame as a celebrity.  He was a graduate of Princeton and was sharp as a whip.  Sure he could tell stories about his days on M*A*S*H or hanging out with Cher, but he was a voracious reader, and a tenacious advocate for positions he believed him.  Woe be the person who disagreed with him on Glass-Stegall.  Anyone who thought he was just some Hollywood figure quickly learned that Wayne was an intellectual of the first order who was prepared to push you if you couldn’t defend your position or the text didn’t support your views.   For a while, people used to joke that Wayne Rogers must have financially regretted leaving the cast of M*A*S*H after just two seasons because of a contract dispute.  But trust me, Wayne got the last laugh.  At the root of his departure was what he described as his attraction to puzzles, most of them involving how to make money in a wide range of businesses and endeavors.  As I recall, the first deal that Wayne told me he was involved with was river barges, and because Wayne could tell a story, he made a business story about river barges seem like a pirate’s adventure along the Mississippi.   He went onto to be involved in a multitude of other businesses including wine making, banks, investments for some of his acting friends, such as Peter Falk, and perhaps most famously he was co-owner of a little bridal shop in New York called Kleinfeld. You may have heard of it because Wayne produced one of the most popular reality shows ever based at the shop called “Say Yes to the Dress” as just one of the many businesses he was involved with. In short, Wayne did just fine.   I’ll always remember Wayne for his energy and drive, his generosity with this time, the passion with which he lived his life, and his firm and unyielding commitment to the principles of liberty.  He loved playing what he called his “one string banjo” – his tendency to emphasize a point again and again until he convinced you of his position.  He was one of a kind, and as part of a one of a kind show, Wayne fit right in at the 4077th.  And he would have loved Tom’s discussion of the show’s classical liberal themes. (0 COMMENTS)

Author and economist Steven Levitt is the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago and host of the podcast “People I (Mostly) Admire.” He is best known as the co-author, with Stephen Dubner, of Freakonomics. The book, published in 2005, became a phenomenon, selling more than 5 million copies […] The post Steven Levitt on Freakonomics and the State of Economics appeared first on Econlib.

A friend of mine in Los Angeles recently took off 10 days to celebrate his birthday and drive up to northern California. To do so, he rented a car and paid just under $300, including tax, for those 10 days. He rented from Enterprise. It was a nice Toyota Camry too, as I noted when he stopped to visit me for coffee on the way up. While driving on a bad road in one of the national parks in northern California, he hit some solid underbrush and damaged a plastic panel of the car. I asked him what happened next. He called the rental car company and told them about it. The person who answered told him to take it to the nearest Firestone or Pep Boys. He found a Firestone nearby and took it in, where it was repaired quickly. “How much did you have to pay?,” I asked. “Nothing,” he answered. (0 COMMENTS)

That masked man struck even harder than I had thought. On yesterday’s post on income taxes in Illinois and other states, commenter Boris pointed out something I had missed. He stated what I had written about Illinois governor Pritzker’s proposal for the top marginal tax rate to be 7.99% and then added: It’s worse than that. It’s 7.99% on all your income if your income is over that line. So for a married couple, going from $999,999 to $1,000,001 (to be safe; not sure how exactly $1 million is treated) increases tax liability from $70,935 to $79,900. I still haven’t figured out who thought it was a good idea to have a discontinuity in the assessed tax like that and why everyone played along. This is so important that it deserves a post of its own. First, thanks to Boris. I checked his math and he’s right. I did add the pennies. So the 1,000,001th dollar that puts the married couple over the line causes the couple to pay $79,900.08 in income tax. That’s an increase of $8,965.08. So the marginal tax rate on that 1,000,001th dollar would be 896,508%. I’m guessing that in reality there are at least a couple of tax writers on the Democratic staff in Springfield, IL who would have seen this. What would have been interesting, though, and fortunately we won’t see it, would have been what they did when they discovered it. (0 COMMENTS)

On the first Friday of October I laid out the somewhat good news on employment and unemployment for September. This Friday (today), the news is fantastic! 1. The number of people employed increased by 2.243 million. A typical increase in normal times is between 0.2 and 0.3 million, so this is 7 to 10 times as large. 2. The employment to population ratio increased from 56.6 percent to 57.4 percent, a large increase. 3. The number of people unemployed fell from 12.580 million to 11.061 million, a drop of 1.519 million. 4. The unemployment rate fell from 7.9 percent to 6.9 percent. 5. The unemployment rate for people in every single category: black, white, men, women, teenagers, Asian, and Hispanic or Latino, fell. For many of those groups it fell by more than 1 percentage point. The above are all data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics household survey. The data from the establishment survey are also good, especially in the details. 1. Private employment rose by 906,000. 2. Leisure and hospitality, one of the sectors hardest hit by both the pandemic and the lockdowns, rose by 208,000. 3. Government employment fell by 268,000. (1 COMMENTS)

American voters (those who, in the electorate, actually vote) are split into two halves, each of which hates the other and wants to impose its preferences and values on others (assuming that each half is homogeneous). A Twitter follower of mine suggested that breaking up  the country into smaller pieces may be a solution. It would still not be possible to gerrymander the country into homogeneous parts except with a very large number of pieces. I replied (in not perfect English) with another solution: The other solution is to shrink the federal government to the point where it doesn’t matter much who is elected–except that voters keep the option of kicking out any elected ruler who turns [out] to be a liar and fraudster (or a dangerous ignorant). This is the (classical) liberal solution, which a three-century-old tradition has been after, from John Locke to Adam Smith, from David Hume to James Buchanan–not to forget Jean-Baptiste Say and many others. At the extreme margin of this tradition, we even find some anarchists–witness Anthony de Jasay’s “capitalist state” or Robert Nozick’s “minimal state.” In some sense, the liberal tradition would split America into 330,000,000 pieces each made of one free individual (including children, who are sovereign-to-be persons). Live and let live. A solution somewhere on this liberal continuum is not easy to reach, as the past three centuries demonstrate. But the alternative equilibrium, tyranny, is not exactly endearing. My Twitter correspondent seemed to agree. He finally tweeted: We learn to leave each other alone.”

In November 1984, President Reagan said it was “Morning in America”. Good times were back again and the unemployment rate had fallen to 7.2%. He won 49/50 states (including Massachusetts) on the back of a booming economy. Today, the unemployment rate is 6.9%. In the Great Recession, it took more than 4 years for unemployment to fall from a peak of 10% to 6.9%. This time it took 6 months (from over 14%). Lars Christensen might still be correct in his spring prediction that the unemployment rate would fall to 6% by November (these figures were for October.) At the time Lars made the prediction, most experts were highly skeptical. People will say, “It’s much worse than the unemployment figures show”. Yes, but it’s much worse precisely because it’s a supply shock, not a demand shock. Supply shocks are really weird.  And fiscal stimulus is not going to fix this problem (although it can provided needed relief to jobless workers.)  It’s won’t give a job to a parent staying home to take care of kids because schools are closed, and thus isn’t even counted as unemployed. (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 Part 3. Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here.   Though Hornberger’s book avoids judgment on war, both the film and TV series are unapologetically anti-war. The series regularly portrays war’s miseries, tugging at the heartstrings but not breaking them, respecting viewers instead of putting them off. The greatest horror of war, death, was central to one of the series’ first ratings successes, the episode “Sometimes You Hear the Bullet” (s. 1). Hawkeye is visited by childhood friend Tommy Gillis, who has volunteered for service in order to write a book on his experiences. Later in the episode, a wounded Gillis is brought to the 4077, where he dies on Hawkeye’s operating table. Afterward, a tearful Hawkeye is consoled by the unit’s bumbling but kind-hearted first commander, Lt. Col. Henry Blake (McLean Stevenson): HAWKEYE I’ve watched guys die almost every day. Why didn’t I ever cry for them? HENRY Because you’re a doctor. HAWKEYE What the hell does that mean? HENRY I don’t know. If I had the answer, I’d be at the Mayo Clinic. Does this place look like the Mayo Clinic? All I know is what they taught me at command school. There are certain rules about a war. And rule number one is: young men die. And rule number two is: doctors can’t change rule number one.   The series’ pivotal episode, “Abyssinia, Henry” (s. 3), concluded with news that Blake, on his way home after an honorable discharge, was killed when his plane was shot down over the Sea of Japan. The story shocked viewers, prompting an avalanche of angry letters to the network. But as show co-runner Gene Reynolds explained, “We didn’t want Henry Blake going back to Bloomington, IL and going back to the country club and the brown and white shoes, because a lot of guys didn’t get back to Bloomington.”   Death-centered episodes are among the series’ best. In “Old Soldiers” (s. 8), the 4077’s subsequent commander, the venerable Colonel Potter, reminisces tenderly about his now-deceased comrades from World War I. “Follies of the Living — Concerns of the Dead” (s. 10) depicts a deceased soldier’s soul lingering at the 4077, observing the big and small tribulations of the staff. In “Give and Take” (s. 11), an American G.I. and a North Korean soldier whom the G.I. wounded are both treated at the 4077 and become friendly, only for the North Korean to succumb to his wounds. “Who Knew?” (s. 11) shows Hawkeye, sobered by the tragic death of a unit nurse, finding the courage to express his love for his unit colleagues. And in “Death Takes a Holiday” (s. 9), Hawkeye, fellow surgeon B.J. Hunnicutt (Mike Farrell), and head nurse Margaret Houlihan (Loretta Swit) try to extend the life of a brain-dead soldier brought in on Christmas Day, hoping to not ruin future Christmases for his children. When the G.I. dies before the day is out, Margaret reflects: “Never fails to astonish me: you’re alive, you’re dead. No drums. No flashing lights. No fanfare. You’re just dead.” And in “The Life You Save” (s. 9), a philosophical surgeon Charles Emerson Winchester III (David Ogden Stiers) compares his profession’s limited abilities to those of the 4077’s company mechanic, Sgt. Luther Rizzo (G.W. Bailey): Don’t you understand the power you have here? You can take a Jeep apart and reduce it to an inert pile of junk. And then, whenever you want to, at whim, you can fit it together again, and it will roar back to life. If only we could do that with human beings. They — they wouldn’t die. Also among the series’ best episodes are several portraying the war’s devastating effects on the Korean people, few of whom cared—or even knew—about the ideologies and geopolitics of the Cold War. In “In Love and War” (s. 6), Hawkeye falls for a cultured, upper-class Korean woman who sells her possessions and uses her wealth to care for villagers dislocated by the war. The relationship ends when the woman decides to take the people in her care further south, away from the war zone. In “B.J. Papa San” (s. 7), B.J. devotes himself to a Korean family impoverished by the war. Just as he is about to reunite them with a long-missing son, he discovers they have disappeared, also fleeing south. And in “The Interview” (s. 4), “Radar” O’Reilly (Gary Burghoff), Klinger’s predecessor as company clerk, is asked by war correspondent Clete Roberts about the plight of Korean peasants: ROBERTS Do you get to meet the South Koreans? Do you know them? RADAR Yeah, they’re nice people. I worry about ’em though. We got a girl here that was, you know, pregnant. She doesn’t have any money or anything. I don’t know how these kids live. I mean, some of ‘em don’t. That’s the God’s honest truth. Some of ‘em don’t even live over here. ROBERTS Do you help them? RADAR We do the best we can, but we haven’t got— I mean, we got just— Sometimes we got just enough for ourself. Penicillin and stuff like that. I mean, I really wish somebody would tell these people back home this. When you have to look these kids in the face, that’s where it’s really at. I mean, that’s what the ball game really is. Is looking these kids in the face here. Several episodes focus on war-orphaned children. In “The Kids” (s. 4) and “Old Soldiers,” orphans visit the 4077 for checkups, touching hearts and boosting morale. “Yessir, That’s Our Baby” (s. 8) has Hawkeye, B.J., and Charles finding an abandoned Amerasian baby and battling the xenophobia of Korean society and the nativism of America to secure the girl’s future. And in “Death Takes a Holiday,” an initially incensed Charles learns just how desperate the lives of the orphans are after he confronts orphanage master Choi Sung Ho (Keye Luke) for selling the gourmet chocolates that Winchester had left the children as a gift, in accordance with a Winchester family tradition: CHARLES Go on. Deny it. Deny it, if you can. You took the Christmas candy I gave you, and you sold it on the black market. Have you no shame? CHOI May I explain? CHARLES No! What you may do is retrieve that candy immediately and have it in the children’s stockings by morning. Otherwise, they’re gonna find you hanging by the chimney without care! CHOI Major, I cannot. The money is gone. CHARLES You parasite! CHOI Please. Your generous gift and insistence that it remain anonymous touched me deeply. The candy would’ve brought great joy to the children for a few moments. But on the black market, it was worth enough rice and cabbage to feed them for a month. CHARLES Rice and cabbage? CHOI I know. I have failed to carry out your family tradition, and I am very sorry. CHARLES On the contrary, it is I who should be sorry. It is sadly inappropriate to give dessert to a child who’s had no meal.   Just as moving are episodes in which members of the 4077 deal with their own terror in war. In “The Interview,” Hawkeye describes how sometimes, when he’s lying on his cot at night, he finds it shaking — not because of falling artillery, but because his heart is racing. “Heal Thyself” (s. 8) tells of visiting surgeon Steve Newsome (Edward Hermann) who had performed valiantly under fire on the Pusan Perimeter during the desperate early months of the war, succumbing to post-traumatic stress and fleeing the 4077’s operating room. In “Dreams” (s. 8), members of the principal cast suffer nightmares of how the war has changed their lives. The same device is used in “Hawk’s Nightmare” (s. 5): Hawkeye experiences sleepwalking and nightmares of childhood friends suffering horrific deaths. Exhausted and worried about his sanity, he turns to recurring character Sidney Freedman (Allan Arbus), a psychiatrist, for help: HAWKEYE I keep having these dreams about these kids I grew up with. And the dreams start out OK. The kids are fine. And then they end in disaster. SIDNEY Like those kids who roll past you on that bloody assembly line. You dream to escape, but the war invades your dream, and you wake up screaming. The dream is peaceful. Reality is the nightmare. HAWKEYE Am I crazy, Sidney? SIDNEY [Chuckling] No. A bit confused, a little fershimmeled is all. Actually, Hawkeye, you’re probably the sanest person I’ve ever known. The fact is, if you were crazy, you’d sleep like a baby. HAWKEYE So when do my nightmares end? SIDNEY When this big one ends, most of the others should go away. But there’s a lot of suffering going on here, Hawkeye, and you can’t avoid it. You can’t even dream it away. (0 COMMENTS)

Who is that masked man?   Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill. Illinois residents dodged a bullet on Tuesday when voters refused to change the Illinois constitution to allow state income tax rates to vary by income. Currently the constitution requires a flat income tax rate and the current rate is 4.95 percent. That means that if the government wants to raise income tax rates, it must do so for all income classes. That puts a brake on the legislature. About 55% of Illinois voters voted against the change. That’s a more overwhelming victory than it looks because the change required a 60% vote to pass (or a simple majority of all of those voting in the election.) Governor Pritzker’s (pictured above) and the Democratic legislature’s plan, had the measure passed, was to cut the rate very slightly (by at most 0.2 percentage points) for joint filers with income below $250,000 and single filers with income below $100,000 and to raise it for everyone with income higher than that. It would have reached a peak of 7.99% on income over $1,000,000 for joint filers and on income over $750,000 for single filers. That likely would have caused an even greater exodus of high-income people from Illinois than the current rate of exodus. Similar attempts to impose a graduated rate structure in Massachusetts have also failed. The flat income tax rate there is 5.0%. Once the flat tax barrier is breached, marginal tax rates at all real income levels tend to rise over time. I wouldn’t be surprised if a fair a number of voters in Illinois understood that. Interestingly, just in my adult lifetime a number of states have adopted an income tax and the rate started low but went high because it was not constrained by such a constitutional provision. New Jersey, for example, adopted an income tax in 1976, with two rates: 2.0% for income below $20,000 and 2.5% for income above $20,000. By 2018, the marginal tax rate on singles with income between $35,000 and $40,000 was 3.5% and on married couples filing joint with income $50,000 and $70,000 was 2.45%. $20,000 in 1976 dollars translated to $88,000 in 2018. So almost everyone was paying a higher rate in 2018 than in 1976. And the top two rates were 8.97% and 10.75%. Similarly, Connecticut adopted an income tax in 1991, with a flat tax rate of 4.5%. Now the lowest rate is 3% and applies only to income below $10,000 for single payers and below $20,000 for married payers filing jointly. Everyone else pays rates that are higher than the original $4.5%. The rates range from 5% to 6.99%.     (0 COMMENTS)