Some Republican leaders have, at last, started to blame Mr. Trump for burning the bridges behind him after being fired by the electorate or, perhaps more exactly (nothing is grandiose in that presidency), for breaking what he thinks are his toys after he felt scolded. (Will he also scratch graffiti on the oval office desk?) This is more or less what the Wall Street Journal, a newspaper that tried to like Trump, argues, although more prudently, in two pieces: “A Bogus Dispute Is Doing Real Damage,” November 19, by columnist Peggy Noonan; and Lindsay Wise, “Some Republicans Call for Trump to Back Up Claims of Fraud,” November 20, 2020. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported on weekend tweets of Mr. Trump attacking the Republicans who have asked him to stop trying to subvert the election results (Catherine Lucey and Ted Mann, “Trump Continues to Challenge Election Results as Legal Options Dwindle,” November 22). Against the (Republican) governor of Maryland Larry Hogan, who had said that “We’re beginning to look like we’re a banana republic,” Trump tweeted that “Hogan is just as bad as the flawed tests he paid big money for!” Interestingly, this jab refers to a story revealed last week by the Washington Post, one of the newspapers that Mr. Trump used to blame as “enemies of the people.” At the exact opposite of endangering American democracy to serve one’s political self-interest, lies the danger of sacralizing it. In the piece linked to above, journalist Lindsay Wise reports about Rep. Liz Cheney (R., Wyoming): Ms. Cheney, the top ranking Republican woman in the House, said that if Mr. Trump can’t stand up his fraud claims and show they would tip the election in his favor, he should “fulfill his oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States by respecting the sanctity of our electoral process.” In a classical-liberal perspective, nothing is sacred about ballots. They just need to be cast by eligible voters and be counted correctly. Perhaps this is what Rep. Cheney wanted to emphasize by speaking about the sanctity of the process. In the mind of populists (as I and other analysts define them), elections are supposed to reveal the “will of the people,” and they blame the electoral process if it doesn’t achieve that. In reality, the electoral process cannot reveal the will of the people, which is unknowable because it does not exist. It suffices for liberal democracy that the process deliver a good count of the votes cast by a majority or a plurality of the electorate. The populists have it exactly backward: they idolize democracy for what it cannot deliver and undermine its useful process. We can understand that moral rules develop to support voting because it is an institution that often fosters prosperity and offers some protection against tyranny. Contemporary economists who have formalized this theory of morals include Friedrich Hayek and, in game-theoretic terms, Robert Sugden. But this does not mean that democratic voting is a sacred panacea. (0 COMMENTS)

Modern Monetary Theory is a term that one encounters with increasing frequency. It is often applied to a specific policy, such as advocacy of expansionary fiscal policy. But that’s not a very useful definition. Lots of economists now advocate expansionary fiscal policy in the current environment of very low interest rates and high unemployment. MMT is more than fiscal stimulus; it is a model of the macroeconomy. In order to better understand the MMT model I’ve been reading “Macroeconomics”, an undergraduate textbook written by William Mitchell, Randall Wray and Martin Watts. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that it’s not my cup of tea. But I don’t want to be unfair in my appraisal, so I’ll discuss a point of confusion here (and another today over at MoneyIllusion), and try to elicit feedback from those better schooled in the model. Am I being unfair? If so, what’s the intuition that I’m missing? On page 85 they present a national income account equation (which is accurate), and then provide a peculiar interpretation: (6.4)  (GNP – C – T) – I   ≡  (G – T) + (X – M + FNI) The terms in Equation (6.4) are relatively easy to understand now.  The term (GNP – C – T) represents total income less the amount consumed by households less the amount paid by households to government in taxes net of transfers.  Thus it represents household saving. The left-hand side of Equation (6.4), (GNP – C – T) – I, thus is the overall net saving of the private domestic sector, which is distinct from total household saving (S) denoted by the term (GNP – C – T). Everything is correct until the final sentence.  It does not represent net saving. Once you subtract investment from household saving you end up with the sum of the government deficit (defined as a positive number) and the current account balance (the net inflow of foreign saving.)  That’s not net saving as conventionally defined, which is equal to net investment is a simple economy with no government or trade. Because this might be confusing to readers, let’s consider their model in a closed economy context, for instance, how would it apply to the global economy as a whole?  In that case, you could drop the current account balance (zero for the globe by definition) and you’d end up with: (GNP – C – T) – I   ≡  (G – T) The claim is that net saving equals the budget deficit in a closed economy.  Unless I’m missing something, that’s a really weird definition of net saving, completely unrelated to how mainstream economists (of all stripes) define saving. And it’s not just me; Robert Blumen reaches a similar conclusion: Modern monetary theory, which is now experiencing its fifteen minutes of fame, contains a number of strange and counterintuitive propositions.1 Proponents claim that these propositions are not an economic theory, only an accounting identity. One of these is that the private sector can save only if the government runs a deficit. Within the self-consistent, tail-chasing world of MMT, these statements are true by definition. However, when MMT aphorisms are interpreted using their normal meaning in the English language, their conclusions are not only false, but foolish. Now you might argue that it’s a free country and people are entitled to define terms in unconventional ways.  Nonetheless, I have two objections to the way they define net saving. 1. This is an introductory economics textbook.  Students that learn this definition of saving would be utterly confused by the way the term ‘saving’ is used in any other economics class, or in the broader society.  Thus by their definition, net saving would always be exactly zero in any closed economy with no government, or any closed economy where the budget was always balanced. And yet people would still be saving in that situation (in the conventional sense), as net saving would equal net investment.  To give you a sense of the magnitudes involved, suppose that the global budget deficit is 3% of global GDP and global net investment is 20% of global GDP.  Then net household saving would be 3% of GDP as defined by MMTers, and 23% of GDP as defined by other economists.  That’s a radically different definition. 2.  My bigger objection is that they seem to draw meaningful causal implications from this peculiar definition of saving.  This isn’t just a typo, one minor glitch in an otherwise straightforward textbook, this definition informs much of the subsequent analysis. Thus on page 96 we see the following: Since the accumulation of a stock of financial wealth results from a surplus, that is, from a flow of saving, we can also conclude that causation tends to run from deficit spending to saving. This is actually correct if you define “saving” according to the second equation above, but it’s an utterly meaningless statement.  After all, in a closed economy context, “net saving” is just another term for “budget deficit”.  In an open economy context, “net saving” is just another term for “budget deficit plus current account balance”.   In plain English, students are being informed that causation tends to run from deficit spending to deficit spending!  True, but utterly without significance. Identities like C+I+G = GDP or M*V = GDP can be useful if used correctly, as a foundation for a behavioral model that tries to compare a policy related term (M or G) with an interesting goal variable (GDP).  However both sides of the closed economy equation above are the budget deficit; there is no goal-related variable. Now it’s possible that I’m missing something very basic here.  But reread Robert Blumen’s appraisal; he’s saying the same thing. I’ll reserve final judgment until I hear back from MMT commenters; perhaps I’m misinterpreting the textbook.  My initial appraisal, however, is quite negative.  Over at TheMoneyIllusion I ask for help in understanding their view of open market operations. (0 COMMENTS)

My experiences with unions have not been good. My father was a Shell Oil union member.  His union went on strike long ago when my mother was pregnant with my younger brother. After a few months on strike it was growing obvious (according to my father) that it would end soon in failure from the union perspective. The union bosses feared that my father and others would return to work before the union had formally given up. They came to our house and told my pregnant mother that it would be quite unhealthy for her if my father returned to work. While a student at the U of C Berkeley I had taken jobs for three summers with Shell Oil, one of the perks they give their workers’ children. Two summers were [spent] roustabouting in the oil fields of Kern County, California with regular Shell employees who never spoke of labor relations with the company. Instead they talked about their families and non-work activities.  The middle of the three summers with Shell, I was assigned to the supply yard behind Shell’s Kern County headquarters. I assisted the one employee there who loaded pipes and other oil field equipment onto trucks that then delivered the equipment to the fields I had worked in the summer before. Much of the time the two of us just hung out there waiting for the next truck, very unlike digging ditches to repair leaking pipes as I had done the previous summer in 112-degree summer heat. We drove around in the small portable crane used for loading the trucks. The entire time my “companion,” an avid union member, complained about how Shell Oil was exploiting us. After a few weeks I dreaded having to be around him. This is from Warren Coats, “Unions vs the Gig Economy,” Warren’s space, November 14, 2020. This was not like my own experience with union workers, all of whom I liked. Maybe it was because we got a bonus for every foot we drilled, which made us very productive. I’ve written about one very positive experience here. But Warren’s story is like many I’ve heard from people who worked in union jobs in the summer and then got out of them. The whole thing, which is not long, is worth reading. (0 COMMENTS)

Back in 1976, I drove from Wisconsin to the Canadian Rockies. In North Dakota I drove past endless miles of wheat farms, with some sunflower farms thrown in. The countryside looked much the same after crossing the border into Saskatchewan, Canada. But one thing changes dramatically at the border. Just south of the border the farmers tend to vote for right wing candidates that are strongly opposed to Obamacare. To the north, the farmers vote for candidates that support Medicare for all. A system that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would love. A person’s political views can never be understood in isolation, only in the context of the broader society in which they are embedded. Based on numerous comments that I’ve seen in the press, I don’t believe that either party understands the role of “identity” in politics. Republicans sometimes suggest that their party would have won states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan if not for the votes of cities with large black populations, such as Detroit, Philadelphia or Milwaukee. Democrats suggest that America will gradually become a country where a majority of the population is “people of color” and that this will help their party in the long run. Both are wrong. If having lots of black voters made a country more left wing, then you’d expect America to be more left wing than Canada, and you’d expect the Deep South to be the most left wing part of America. What both parties miss is that the existence of racial minorities changes the voting behavior of white voters. There’s very little evidence that a majority of the population will ever become non-white, because the category “white” is so fluid. Watching the NBA draft on Wednesday, I was struck by how many of the first round draft picks came from bi-racial families. Admittedly this is a skewed sample that is not representative of the broader population. But both Hispanics and Asians intermarry at a surprisingly high rate. My Asian wife gave birth to a daughter that our society views as white. Race won’t go away, but there is no realistic prospect of whites becoming a minority in the US in the foreseeable future. Reason magazine reports that one Washington school district has already declared that Asian-Americans are white: One school district in Washington state has evidently decided that Asians no longer qualify as persons of color. In their latest equity report, administrators at North Thurston Public Schools—which oversees some 16,000 students—lumped Asians in with whites and measured their academic achievements against “students of color,” a category that includes “Black, Latinx, Native American, Pacific Islander, and Multi-Racial Students” who have experienced “persistent opportunity gaps.” Expect much more of this in the future. Then there is the “Latino” population: Though not everyone in the Rio Grande Valley self-identifies as Tejano, the descriptor captures a distinct Latino community—culturally and politically—cultivated over centuries of both Mexican and Texan influences and geographic isolation. Nearly everyone speaks Spanish, but many regard themselves as red-blooded Americans above anything else. And exceedingly few identify as people of color. (Even while 94 percent of Zapata residents count their ethnicity as Hispanic/Latino on the census, 98 percent of the population marks their race as white.) Their Hispanicness is almost beside the point to their daily lives. It is foolish to use ethnic identity to predict the future course of politics. (0 COMMENTS)

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