What makes some groups thrive while others crash and burn? According to organizational-behavior scholar Colin Fisher, the real villains are rarely individuals, but dysfunctional teams and organizations. Listen as he and EconTalk’s Russ Roberts discuss the reasons for the free-rider problem and the importance of meaningful, well-defined tasks to incentivize synergy. They speak about why […] The post How Teams Succeed (with Colin Fisher) appeared first on Econlib.

Based on the discussion over numerous posts in this series (beginning here) unpacking the arguments of Musa al-Gharbi’s We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, one might assume that al-Gharbi is hostile to woke ideas or woke values. But that would be a mistake, and would show that one has failed to closely pay attention to his arguments. The title of the book itself should make this clear. The argument is that symbolic capitalists have failed to be woke, not that wokeness as such is a failed idea. As I mentioned in my initial post in this series, the book is a criticism of woke activism written by someone who is himself sympathetic to woke ideas. His criticism is that the activists have failed to live up to the ideas—their behavior contradicts what wokeness would actually imply. As such, the strongest critique of woke activists is the actual content of woke ideas: Ideas associated with wokeness can similarly provide us with tools for challenging the order that has been established in its name. In many respects, that is precisely the project of this book. Throughout the book, al-Gharbi finds that what woke progressives espouse and what they do are wildly out of sync with each other: Over the course of this text, we have seen that the attitudes and dispositions associated with “wokeness” are primarily embraced by symbolic capitalists. Wokeness does not seem to be associated with egalitarian behaviors in any meaningful sense. Instead, “social justice” discourse seems to be mobilized by contemporary elites to help legitimize and obscure inequalities, to signal and reinforce their elite status, or to tear down rivals – often at the expense of those who are genuinely vulnerable, marginalized, and disadvantaged in society. But this, by itself, does not undermine the ideas the woke espouse. For example, no libertarian would seriously think that the arguments libertarians make against rent control legislation (both economic and moral) are undercut by the fact that Robert Nozick once invoked rent control legislation to try to prevent his landlord from increasing his rent. Was this hypocritical of Nozick? Certainly. Does it constitute evidence that arguments against rent control are therefore invalid? Of course not. This, too, is the case with woke ideas, as al-Gharbi points out: What, then, should we make of the ideologies and modes of analysis associated with wokeness? Can they be useful guides for understanding and discussing the social world? Or are they fundamentally dangerous, misleading, or irredeemably corrupted? Is the main issue that symbolic capitalists tend to leverage social justice discourse in unfortunate ways? Or is it that symbolic capitalists have been led astray by wokeness into pursuing social justice in a counterproductive manner? Put simply, is the problem wokeness or are we, ourselves, the problem? Just as physicists (so far) lack a theory of everything, social scientists, too lack a theory of everything. As al-Gharbi points out, “any theoretical approach that elucidates some important aspect of society will generally obscure other phenomena. It will handle some things well and explain other things poorly.” This is just as true with woke ideas. As an example, al-Gharbi describes the so-called “discursive turn” in social research. This idea emphasizes that how terms are defined is not something that emerges in a purely neutral way from the ether. How things are defined can strongly stack the deck in favor of or against certain ideas or groups—and this makes the definition of terms a significant power struggle. Overall, al-Gharbi notes, “This is a genuine contribution to understanding the world.” However, even though the idea is legitimate, the woke extend the theory well beyond its usefulness: That said, today many symbolic capitalists seem to attribute too much power to symbols, rhetoric, and representation. Many assert, in the absence of robust empirical evidence, that small slights can cause enormous (often underspecified) harm. Under the auspices of preventing these harms, they argue it is legitimate, even necessary, to aggressively police other people’s words, tone, body language, and so forth. As we have seen, people from nontraditional and underrepresented backgrounds are among the most likely to find themselves silenced and sanctioned in these campaigns, both because they are less likely to possess the cultural capital to say the “correct” things in the “correct” ways at the “correct” time and because their deviance is perceived as especially threatening (insofar as this heterodoxy undermines claims made by dominant elites ostensibly on behalf of historically marginalized and disadvantaged groups). This overextension also leads the woke to put an undue emphasis on “symbolic gestures towards antiracism, feminism, and so forth,” despite the fact that these efforts “change virtually nothing about the allocation of wealth or power in society.” Overall, the focus on language, while legitimate in the proper context, has been stretched to the point where it becomes useless or even actively counterproductive: Campaigns to sterilize language, for instance, will never lift anyone out of poverty. Referring to homeless people as “unsheltered individuals,” or prisoners as “justice-involved persons,” or poor people as “individuals of limited means,” and so on are discursive maneuvers that often obscure the brutal realities that others must confront in their day-to-day lives… More broadly, gentrifying the discourse about the “wretched of the earth” doesn’t make their problems go away. If anything, it renders elites more complacent when we talk about the plight of “those people.” On this the empirical research is quite clear: euphemisms render people more comfortable with immoral behaviors and unjust states of affairs. This is one of the main reasons we rely on euphemisms at all. Another idea associated with the woke is that of “intersectionality,” an idea that al-Gharbi says is “both important and fairly uncontroversial: there are emergent effects, interaction effects, that are greater than, or different from, the effects of two phenomena studied independently.” However, as al-Gharbi has stressed throughout his book, the way this idea is invoked by the woke tends to be unrelated to, or even the opposite of, what the scholarship they cite actually says. For example, al-Gharbi describes how the woke cite the idea of intersectionality to “simply tally up their different forms of perceived intersectional disadvantages as though they can simply be stacked on top of one another (e.g., ‘As a Latinx, bisexual, neurodivergent woman my perspective is more valid, and my needs more important than yours — a white, cisgender, gay neurotypical man.’)” This is exactly the sort of thing that the actual scholarship of intersectionalism says we can’t validly do. For example, someone might naively say “Given that in America, with respect to income, whites do better than Blacks, and natives do better than immigrants, native whites must do better than immigrant Blacks.” But intersectional theory tells us that this would be a fallacious inference—and that’s to the credit of intersectionality, because the conclusion is also factually false. Immigrant Blacks actually tend to have somewhat higher incomes than native-born whites. So, al-Gharbi says, intersectionality is an important insight despite how it is misrepresented by the woke: However, the fact that many engage in these kinds of self-serving and facile analyses does not mean intersectionality itself is wrong or should be discarded. The essential elements of the concept seem straightforwardly true and useful for social analysis. Another useful and true idea associated with the woke is about how the impacts of past racial discrimination can continue even in the absence of current racial discrimination, as a result of how past effects can be perpetuated in current institutions: In this same period, following the civil rights movement, prejudice-based discrimination in most job markets declined. However, skill – and education – based discrimination increased dramatically, as did the returns on having the “correct” credentials and talents. Because education was (and continues to be) unevenly distributed across racial lines, the practical effects of these new “meritocratic” forms of reward and exclusion have been comparable to overt racial discrimination in many respects. Hence, racialized socioeconomic gaps persist, largely unchanged, even as overtly bigoted attitudes and behaviors have become far less common and increasingly taboo. A problem, however, is that much of the “skill – and education – based discrimination” paired with the heavy emphasis on credentials and certifications has itself been actively promoted and upheld by woke progressives. Thus, in practice, the ways the woke “appeal to ‘systems,’ ‘structures,’ and ‘institutions’ can serve as a means to mystify rather than illuminate social processes. These frameworks can be, and regularly are, deployed by elites in order to absolve them of responsibility for social problems and to legitimize their inaction to address those problems. They are evoked in hand-wavy ways to avoid getting into specifics (because the specifics are uncomfortable).” This mystifying (and unclarifying) way the woke invoke ideas like “systemic racism” is also reflected in how they invoke “historical injustices” or “history” to describe current outcomes: In a similar fashion, many contemporary symbolic capitalists evoke “history” as a chief cause of contemporary injustices. However, “history” doesn’t do anything. The tendency of many symbolic capitalists to analyze contemporary injustices in historical terms often obscures how and why certain elements of the past continue into the present. Discussing the persistence of race ideology, historian Barbara Fields explained, “Nothing handed down from the past could keep race alive if we did not constantly reinvent and re-ritualize it to fit our own terrain. If race lives on today, it can do so only because we continue to create and re-create it in our social life, continue to verify it, and thus continue to need a social vocabulary that will allow us to make sense, not of what our ancestors did then, but of what we ourselves choose to do now.” But, properly understood, the ideas are themselves sound and worth considering: In a similar vein, this chapter spent significant time exploring how appeals to “systemic” or “institutionalized” racism or sexism are often used to mystify social processes rather than illuminate them. However, the idea of systemic disadvantage seems straightforwardly correct: historical inequalities, paired with the ways systems and institutions are arranged in the present, can lead to situations where certain people face significant disadvantages while others are strongly advantaged. Another valuable idea associated with the woke is the idea of positionality—the idea that our social position and identity influence how we see and understand the world. This, too, is a valuable and useful idea, al-Gharbi says. But there’s a problem here, too: those who most commonly evoke positionality fail to apply the idea to themselves: Taking positionality seriously should lead folks to interrogate the extent to which their own ostensibly emancipatory politics (and especially the homogeneity of these convictions within a field) may undermine their ability to understand certain phenomena, lead them to ignore key perspectives and inconvenient facts in the pursuit of their preferred narratives and policies, and drive them to pursue courses of action that do not, in fact, empower or serve the people they are supposed to be empowering or serving, nor reflect others’ own values and perceived interests. Indeed, taking these ideas to their logical endpoint should lead more people aligned with the Left to question the extent to which their own “emancipatory politics” may, in fact, be a product of their own elite position, and may primarily serve elite ends rather than uplifting the genuinely marginalized and disadvantaged. Overall, a parallel might be made with confirmation bias and its use in public discourse. I have no formal numbers here, but my impression is that approximately every single time the idea of confirmation bias is invoked, it’s as an explanation for why those people are unable to see why my side is actually correct about whatever the issue of the moment is, and approximately zero point nothing percent of the time it’s used as an opportunity to explore why my views might be misinformed and what kind of important insights I might be overlooking. But this doesn’t invalidate the idea of confirmation bias itself! So, too, al-Gharbi says about the ideas associated with wokeness: The fact so many instead use these frameworks in nonreflexive ways—to reinforce their own sense of moral and intellectual superiority or confirm their prejudices about “those people” who do not profess, believe, or feel the “correct” things—neither entails nor implies that these modes of analysis cannot be put to more productive use. And that’s al-Gharbi’s overall message. His critique is not of wokeness per se, but of the behaviors of those who claim to be inspired by woke ideas. When he says “we have never been woke,” he doesn’t then go on to say “and a good thing too, because these ideas are all terrible!” Instead, he sees that as a problem that needs to be fixed, because behind it all, there are valuable ideas in wokeness that can make the world a better place – and the fact that progressives have never been woke in practice is a failure of progressives, and not of woke ideas. As he sums it up, To put it simply, the fact that symbolic capitalists have never been woke reveals a lot about us. It says much less, however, about the frameworks and ideas that we appropriate (and often deform) in our power struggles. This wraps up my summary of al-Gharbi’s book. In the next few posts, I’ll outline what I agree with from his book as well as what I’ve learned, what I disagree with or where I think he missed the mark, and then summarize my overall thoughts.   As an Amazon Associate, Econlib earns from qualifying purchases. (0 COMMENTS)

The title of this post is a nod to Timur Kuran’s book Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification. This book examines the disconnect between what people say they believe publicly and what they believe privately. As Kuran puts it, The preference that our individual ends up conveying to others is what I will call his public preference. It is distinct from his private preference, which is what he would express in the absence of social pressures. By definition, preference falsification is the selection of a public preference that differs from one’s private preference. This turns out to be an issue of some significance. Political scientists or policymakers may collect data on expressed public opinion to try to inform their own decisions, but expressed public opinion can be very different from the actual opinions of the members of the public. Something can hold broad support according to “public opinion,” yet actually be opposed by the vast majority of individual members of the public, when circumstances that create pressure for preference falsification are in place. When this happens, unpopular ideas and policies can be perpetuated by an illusory popular demand. Recently, researchers at Northwestern University tried to get a sense of how common this phenomenon is among college students. They conducted confidential interviews with 1,452 students at Northwestern and the University of Michigan. They found that preference falsification is shockingly common: We asked: Have you ever pretended to hold more progressive views than you truly endorse to succeed socially or academically? An astounding 88 percent said yes. They also touch on how many students engage in preference falsification on specific issues: Seventy-eight percent of students told us they self-censor on their beliefs surrounding gender identity; 72 percent on politics; 68 percent on family values. More than 80 percent said they had submitted classwork that misrepresented their views in order to align with professors… Perhaps most telling: 77 percent said they disagreed with the idea that gender identity should override biological sex in such domains as sports, healthcare, or public data — but would never voice that disagreement aloud. It’s easy to underestimate just how powerful a force the fear of social ostracism can be. In his book The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, Jonathan Haidt describes an experience he had horseback riding: There was, however, one difficult moment. We were riding along a path to a steep hillside, two by two, and my horse was on the outside, walking about three feet from the edge. Then the path turned sharply to the left, and my horse was heading straight for the edge. I froze. I knew I had to steer left, but there was another horse to my left and I didn’t want to crash into it. I might have called out for help, or screamed “Look out!”; but some part of me preferred the risk of going over the edge to the certainty of looking stupid. So I just froze. Haidt was faced with a situation where, on the one hand, he faced the risk of almost certain death if he did nothing, and on the other hand, if he did something, people might laugh at him, and in a moment ruled by his deepest and most primal instincts, he decided the second of those two was the bigger concern. While this seems absurd in a detached perspective, it makes a certain degree of sense when examined in light of the world in which we live. We are social primates, and historically our survival has depended critically on getting along with our tribe and being held in good standing. For the vast majority of our time as a species, social exclusion was a death sentence — and we evolved powerful social instincts that make us fear rejection and exclusion. Even when a point of view is privately held by the majority of people, this fact can remain hidden if people even worry that expressing that view will lead to them being ostracized by the community. This is one reason why free speech is important as more than just a legal framework (though that is critical). In order to gain the benefits of free speech, open inquiry, and truth-seeking debate, the legal structures of free speech are a necessary but not sufficient condition. A culture of free speech, where it’s recognized that someone can be tragically wrong on issues of great importance while still being a good person (and that you might be such a person yourself!), and that mistaken views should be debated without shunning those who hold them, is also needed. In his book The Road to Serfdom, F. A. Hayek was clear about how disastrous he believed central economic planning would be. But he also made clear he believed the ideas he criticized were advocated by “authors whose sincerity and disinterestedness are above suspicion.” This isn’t to say that a culture of free speech is entirely without downside — but then again, nothing is. However, both a legal framework and a culture of free speech are the only tools that can enable a social order to break free from a socially damaging equilibrium brought on by preference falsification.   As an Amazon Associate, Econlib earns from qualifying purchases. (0 COMMENTS)

Cleveland-Cliffs Chief Executive Lourenco Goncalves’s invocation of “unfairly traded steel” shows, a contrario, many reasons why free trade is an essential feature of a free society. Mr. Goncalves said that adding tariffs on steel products to tariffs on primary (semi-finished) steel provides (“Trump Leans on National Security to Justify Next Wave of Tariffs,” Wall Street Journal, August 28, 2020) certainty that the American domestic market will not be undercut by unfairly traded steel embedded in derivative products. He means that tariffs on primary steel do not suffice because imported steel-containing goods would gain an advantage over their domestically manufactured equivalents. In passing, let’s note that in the roaring ’60s, it was popular among the ruling establishments of underdeveloped countries, supported by the Western intelligentsia, to impose large tariffs on foreign manufactured goods in order to help domestic manufacturing. Only when, a few decades later, it was realized that such an industrial policy was a fool’s errand, were the poor people of underdeveloped countries able to jump on the bandwagon of free trade and to escape dire poverty. A basic economic reason why “unfairly traded steel” or the underlying ideal of mercantilist and industrial policy is a fool’s errand is that it presupposes a central economic planner possessing what he does not and cannot possess, that is, the information of time, place, costs, and preferences that is carried by prices determined by supply and demand on free markets. Friedrich Hayek explained that in the 1930s and 1940s (see Hayek’s American Economic Review article “The Use of Knowledge in Society”). A central planner cannot even know many intricate effects of his resource-allocation decisions, especially in a complex economy. Thus, government intervention begets government intervention in the greatest political disorder. That the US government only realized after imposing steel tariffs that they should be imposed on steel products too provides a rather funny illustration. Another important lesson from protectionism—empirically confirmed a thousand times—is how rent-seeking special interests will try to exploit the general public, or part of it, each time the state offers them a means to do so. The requests for tariffs on steel-containing products are already flooding the government. A related reason why an expression like “fairly traded steel” has no meaning but exploitative (or illiterate if not, truth be told, clownish) comes from a reflection on the value judgements that necessarily underlie public policy. Rational public policy recommendations require a justification in moral and political philosophy. If fairness is not defined in terms of individual liberty—if what is fair is not simply what is free—it is probably a smokescreen to impose on others the pursuit of the speaker’s self-interest. “Fairly traded steel” is what Mr. Goncalves thinks is fair for the interests of Cleveland-Cliffs’s shareholders besides his own self-interest. It is rare that an individual considers fair something that harms his own interests, and unfair a government subsidy or protection for himself or his organization. “Free” is much easier to define than “fair.” Liberty does not require that the whole world be made “fair” by somebody’s standards. American steel companies have been protected off and on since the 19th century, and still think that fairness requires American consumers to be forced to pay more for steel products. How fair would it be that Americans be forced, in imitation of Chinese farmers in the heydays of Mao’s Great Leap Forward, to build little blast furnaces in their backyards? (See the featured image of this post.) What happens to the interests of industrial purchasers of steel, consumers of steel products, and consumers of the goods or services that would be produced if fewer resources (workers, engineers, managers, machines, buildings, electricity, land, etc.) were forcibly diverted to the production of steel? Three ways exist to reconcile or adjust the interests of individuals living in society: customs (the tribe), command (the coercive economic planner or dictator), or the market (free and voluntary cooperation). An interesting and easily accessible book on this is John Hicks, A Theory of Economic History (see also my review in Regulation). Both historical experience and economic theory teach that an efficient reconciliation of individual interests—“efficient” meaning that it maximizes the formal opportunities of all individuals—can be accomplished by free markets, but not by the diktats of the central planner and his court of lobbyists and sycophants. We are thus led to discover that “unfairly traded steel” could only make sense in a society where a dictatorial or collectivist political regime imposes on everybody some arbitrary conception of fairness. The alternative is reciprocal individual liberty, of which a manifestation is free trade, internal and external, between individuals or their private organizations. (James Buchanan’s little book Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative offers a reflection on reciprocity; I reviewed it in Regulation.) ****************************** Chairman Mao visits a homemade blast furnace, 1958 Credit: PC-195a-s-013 (chineseposters.net, Private collection) (0 COMMENTS)

Regular readers here know that myself and my co-bloggers (both present and former) spend a lot of time talking about the problems of central planning.[1]  There are many, many problems with central planning: the Hayek-Lavoie knowledge problem, issues revealed by public choice analysis, and so on.  In this post, I want to highlight a big one: creativity. Human beings are insanely creative.  Seemingly unique in the world, we are abstract thinkers and often find ways around what appear at first to be insurmountable problems.  Every day, new inventions, innovations, music, and art come about to solve some problem and/or make our lives better.  When we want something, we can make it happen.  Indeed, Ball State University economics professor James McClure places that creativity as the core of economics: The economic problem of society is rapid adaptation, in the face of resource scarcity, to changes in the particular circumstances of time and place. This creativity is a problem for central planners.  Central planners tend to think of the economy not as a complex system of relationships among people, but as a system that’s more like water flowing through a pipe.  If you don’t like the course, simply pull some lever and change it.[2]  What central planners fail to appreciate is that the economy is not like water in a pipe, but rather the result of billions of people pursuing their goals, given their constraints and alternatives.  These goals are chosen by the people themselves.  And when barriers toward those goals are thrown up, say by some central planner who wants the people’s goals to be different, people find creative ways around those barriers.  Those creations may be illegal in nature (e.g., smuggling) or may become a whole new way of doing things. Of course, not all forms of creativity are equal.  People may get creative in gaming the system to get what they want out of it at the expense of others (e.g., rent-seeking). Regardless, creativity poses a problem for central planners when their plans do not come to fruition.  The central planner must then devote more resources to their plan to check these new behaviors not aligned with the plan.  And again, more resources are then consumed by people to be creative in getting around these new barriers.  Consequently, we have a sort of arms race.  More and more resources are spent, but there is no relative gain by either side.  Even assuming the central planner’s plans aren’t frustrated, the resource cost is significantly higher than expected.  Consequently, other plans by the planner are necessarily frustrated.  Even if the central planner didn’t suffer from the knowledge problem or face public choice constraints and had perfect information about outcomes that could be improved, this arms race tells us that it is quite unlikely that central planning can improve upon market outcomes. Long story short, central planning gets frustrated because people are people.   —— [1] Note: Historically, “central planning” has referred to total government control of the economy.  I am using the term more broadly to include all sorts of government interventions and schemes including (but not limited to): industrial planning, wartime planning, social-justice interventions like income inequality measures, “leveling the playing field,” and so on. [2] This metaphor is deliberate.  Economists borrow heavily from fluid dynamics. (0 COMMENTS)

Some 500 economists work for the Federal Reserve System. This is probably more than the entire dismal science faculty at all eight Ivy League Universities, perhaps with Chicago and Berkeley thrown in for good measure. If the Fed were disbanded, they would all have to seek other work, perhaps leading to prosperity. Under the present institutional arrangements, they undermine the economy. On the other hand, this is an empirical issue. Presumably, many of them would obtain faculty positions, on the basis of which they would be inculcating their charges with the same voodoo economics with which they ruin the economy. Why? How so? That is because one of their present roles is to determine, among other things, the interest rate. Thus, this job of theirs is “beneath contempt.” From whence did this phrase spring? It comes to us courtesy of an economist who has been accurately characterized as a “national treasure.” Here is the quote from Thomas Sowell (from Sowell’s textbook, Basic Economics) to which he refers: “Another reason for public support for protectionism is that many economists do not bother to answer either the special interests or those who oppose free trade for ideological reasons. The arguments of both have essentially been refuted centuries ago and are now regarded by the economics profession as beneath contempt.” Well, so it is for price controls, and, as interest rates are a price, just like that of imports, so too is controlling them via the Fed’s central planning “beneath contempt.” Moreover, if there is anything we have learned both from theory and practice, it is that price controls create economic disarray. Have we learned nothing from the almost perfectly controlled experiments of East and West Germany, North and South Korea, a true rarity not only in economics, but in all of social science? Presumably not, otherwise the Fed would never have lasted as long as it so far has. Central planning never works and never will work. Prices, market prices, free market prices, are the eyes and ears of the economy. Without them, we would not know whether it is economically better to use platinum or steel for railroad lines. The former can do a better job. But its market price is so high we may do no such thing, if we want to allocated resources productively. Its relatively high price indicated that this metal should be used for more important purposes elsewhere in the economy, and lower-priced steel for this use. Ditto for interest rate prices. Should we build a tunnel through the solid rock mountain, or a far longer road all around it? The former will cost far more right now and will take many years to come online, maybe decades. But it will save money for centuries, most likely in terms of reduced travel outlays. The circular road will cost less and will be available for motorists much sooner. It will last longer, and be in less need of repair, given that the danger of cave-ins will be comparatively minimal. If the interest rate is high, we will veer in the direction of the road. We will heavily discount the roundabout process of the tunnel. If low, the shortcut in terms of vehicle mileage will be more attractive. But this assumes a market rate of interest, not one concocted out of whole cloth by a bunch of central planners scattered all around the country, who pay no price, none at all, for being wrong. We have not yet said anything about the second job of the Fed: maintaining the value of the dollar. It has lost some 97% of its value from the time of its inception in 1913 to the present time. On that ground alone, it ought to be disbanded, forthwith, and salt sowed where it once stood.   Walter E. Block is Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar Endowed Chair and Professor of Economics at Loyola University New Orleans. (0 COMMENTS)

Occasionally, I use a grocery delivery service—not always, and not for every item. In a vacuum, one might think that having someone else take the time to gather grocery items for me and bring those items to my house seems clearly advantageous. So why don’t I always use this service? A few ideas from economics help explain why. For one, it’s not always the case that the time spent grocery shopping is purely a cost. While I know this isn’t true of everyone, I actually rather enjoy grocery shopping. Walking up and down the aisles of the store, chatting with my kids—that’s something I look forward to doing every weekend. Having all my groceries delivered would mean losing those outings, and I don’t particularly want that. Whether the time and effort of going out shopping is a cost or a benefit is subjective—it depends on the person doing it. Given my preferences, why do I ever use grocery delivery? Most of my grocery and general household supply shopping is done with a weekend Target run. However, there is a handful of grocery items I like that aren’t typically carried by Target but are usually available from Whole Foods. The nearest Whole Foods locations aren’t particularly convenient to where I live, and especially not relative to the Target where my weekly shopping runs occur. Tacking on an additional stop at Whole Foods (or finding some other time to insert a Whole Foods run) for a relatively small selection of items is too high a transaction cost in terms of time and effort. There is a delivery fee, but that is well worth saving the time and effort of a secondary stop. I’ve found that most produce items from Whole Foods are better than they are from Target. Despite this, I usually get my produce from Target rather than including them in my Whole Foods delivery. If I’m going to place a Whole Foods order anyway, and if produce from Whole Foods is generally better in my estimation, why don’t I just get those items from the grocery delivery service? There are two reasons: information asymmetries, and a principal-agent problem. Information asymmetries prevent potential gains from trade from being made when both parties don’t have the same information. For example, when I buy bananas, I try to get a small bunch of bananas that are yellow (to be eaten over the next few days) and a small bunch that are green (which will be ready to eat by the time the first bunch is done). A store employee picking out items for me doesn’t have access to that information, so the bananas I’d get wouldn’t line up with what I actually want. The same is true for an item like avocados. Another example: when I’m in the store, I try to get a sense of how far away the avocados are from ripening before I buy them based on how firm they are. The window between an avocado that’s a bit too underripe and one that’s overripe to the point of being a disgusting mess is fairly narrow (by my estimate, the window for an avocado to be “just right” lasts approximately thirty-seven seconds). Someone at the store doesn’t know that I’m buying an avocado for a recipe I intend to try out on Thursday, so they don’t know which kind of avocado would be best for me to get. When the store shopper doesn’t know my preferences, I don’t get what I want for the price I pay, and potential economic value isn’t realized. The principal-agent problem occurs when I have someone ostensibly working on my behalf, but their incentives don’t align with what would best serve my interests. When I’m getting, say, raspberries from the store, I often take a bit of extra time to sort through the selection available. Often, there will be at least some cases of berries where the fruit inside has gotten squished, or some of the berries are already starting to look a bit wilted. For me, it’s worth it to take the extra time to sort through the available selection and find a batch that looks good. But someone packing groceries for a home delivery order has different incentives. Their goal is to pack up this order as quickly as possible and move on to the next one. They don’t have any particular incentive to stop and spend extra time sorting through the produce to find the best-looking available batch. None of what I’ve just described is especially cutting edge—but that’s part of the point. As I’ve argued before, many ideas in economics can be easily recognized in how we make choices in everyday life. Economics is rooted in human behavior. The lessons and ideas of economics are like the water in which fish swim—it surrounds us so thoroughly that it becomes almost invisible from its own ubiquity. (0 COMMENTS)

Why are some people cruel? Why are some governments cruel? Do cruel governments require cruel citizens? I take cruelty to refer to Merriam-Webster’s definition of cruel as “disposed to inflict pain or suffering: devoid of humane feeling.” An individual is cruel who has a taste for cruelty, i.e. cruelty is an argument of his utility function. He will satisfy this preference when he can do it at a price that he considers acceptable. This is the standard price theory model, which remains useful despite all its critiques: the individual maximizes his utility given his preferences and the constraints he faces. Why are some governments cruel, whether we are speaking of the Russian government intentionally attacking Ukrainian civilians and torturing prisoners of war, or the American government inflicting pain or distress on immigrants? (Of course, there is a difference in degree between these two cases of cruelty.) It is a matter of incentives: if those who disobey government decrees risk not only punishments but cruel punishments, disobedience is reduced. In short, governments use cruelty when it contributes to the realization of their policies, and no constitutional or other binding constraints exist. A government (or “the state”) is not a supernatural being or a biological organism, but an organization of individuals who determine policies or enforce them. Cruelty in public policy depends on the costs and benefits of the individual rulers, their agents, and their supporters (at least their important supporters). A cruel government is made of, or supported by, cruel individuals, but the process of public choice may increase the extent of cruelty. For one thing, the cruelty of a government will increase through selection. Individuals with a taste for cruelty will self-select for government roles: politicians, prosecutors, security personnel, torturers, etc. A government known for its cruelty will attract more cruel rulers and servants—which is related to Friedrich Hayek fear of the rule of the worst (see his 1944 book The Road to Selfdom; see also my review of this book). Cruelty will likely increase as political rulers discover that hatred can be used to further their ambitions. Scapegoats, preferably unarmed and defenseless, are useful for a politician to both explain away his failures and enflame his supporters. Propaganda can present hated or to-be-hated minorities as “the worst of the worst” or “animals.” The more the rule of law has been compromised (at the limit, up to the aphorism attributed to Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s secret police chief, “Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime”), the more we would expect cruelty to follow hatred. Economist Edward Glaezer modeled the supply of hatred by politicians and the demand for it by voters. In his model, the supply of hatred depends on the existence of minority groups or “out-groups” that can be turned into scapegoats (the Blacks not so long ago, the immigrants today) and thus help “entrepreneurs of hate” in political competition. Other things being equal (including the individuals’ taste for cruelty), the demand for hatred is favored by “citizens’ willingness to accept false hate-creating stories [as] determined by the costs and returns to acquiring information” (Edward L. Glaezer, “The Political Economy of Hatred,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 120, No. 1 [February 2005], pp. 45-86). Since the typical citizen’s probability of changing the result of an election is infinitesimally small and the cost of political information remains very high—despite or because of social media—the voter will remain rationally ignorant and tend to hate the people his political tribe hates. Constitutions, norms (morals), religion (or at least certain forms of religion), trade, and other soft habits of civilization (les mœurs douces) can act as constraints to cruelty. They decrease the demand for it or limit its supply. In his book The Problem of Political Authority (see my review), philosopher Michael Huemer observes that, over a certain period of time, mores have become softer, more respectful of individual dignity, and less cruel. Political authorities may have helped but, past a certain point, the constraints on them can collapse, perhaps suddenly like an avalanche. Totalitarian regimes illustrate this. The North Korean or Russian states are not less cruel than political authorities in the High Middle Ages. Past a certain point, the state may contribute not to civilizing mores but, on the contrary, to fueling cruelty. Cruel governments don’t require cruel people or at least not a majority of them, and perhaps only a small faction. Many factors explain that. First, a government can contribute to making its subjects cruel through political hatred, propaganda, and selection (pulling the cruel to the top), as suggested above. Second, it appears easy to be cruel only toward foreigners or domestic minorities whose support the government doesn’t need. Professor Rudolph Rummel of the University of Hawaii estimated that, during the 20th century, states killed millions, if not hundreds of millions, of their own citizens, excluding interstate wars. Third, let’s not forget the Condorcet paradox: in a democratic society, an electoral majority can very well “prefer” the rule of law to despotism, despotism to poverty, poverty to cruel government, but then cruel government to the rule of law—as revealed if and when the latter alternative is the one put to the vote. Finally, note that political cruelty is a boomerang. Nothing guarantees the demanders of cruelty that the cruel enforcers of their demand will always only target others. The brutes live among the people. The Roman legions are stationed in Rome. ****************************** The Roman legions in Rome, as viewed by ChatGPT (0 COMMENTS)

Who defines and enforces property rights? If you are the average person, an undergraduate student, or even a mainstream economics professor, that answer is easy: the government. Look it up! Municipal and county governments determine the deeds to your property and various usage rights including wetland setbacks and easements. State governments create regulations that affect residential and commercial property and how businesses may go about their business. And the federal government controls patent and copyright protections, sets environmental policies, and enacts many other rules determining how one can use real estate and intangible assets. Sometimes property rights are not well defined, particularly when some new “thing” arises from technological innovation. The explosion of the internet in the 1990s posed a challenge to the ownership of information. Artificial intelligence is doing something similar today. But even when such novel situations arise that require defining ownership and usage, we still reflexively defer to government as the primary (if not sole) source for defining property rights. But what if I told you that there was a bigger and more amorphous entity that determines who owns and how we use all the stuff and junk in our daily lives? And what if I called that entity “civil society,” the spontaneous order of social norms, values, conventions, and rituals that coordinate human interaction without centralized direction? Would you want to know how that works? If yes, allow me a rather trivial example to illustrate the importance that civil society plays in defining property rights. Who Can Take the Shampoo? “Everyone knows” that hotel guests are allowed to take home the small bottles of shampoo and conditioner provided for individual use, not to mention lotion and mouthwash at fancier resorts. Admittedly, I love collecting them and possess several bins of diminutive aromatic toiletries. But recently, major hotel chains have moved away from individualized-use shampoo, substituting large dispensers attached to shower walls. This is ostensibly to minimize the waste and environmental damage that single-use bottles cause. But here is a question that I posed to several very smart political economists at a recent workshop I attended at Wabash College: Is it permissible for hotel guests to take the large dispenser bottles of shampoo and conditioner home? The immediate answer was “no!” But I prodded them, “Why not?” The initial answer was that the bottles were attached to the wall. I quickly volunteered to teach them how to dismantle these wall mounts; it isn’t hard. (Don’t ask how I know this.) The next answer from a prominent scholar proves my point above about our reflexive deference to government. “It is against the law to do that,” he claimed. I challenged him to show me the exact code stating “thou shalt not take thine hotel’s large bottles of shampoo.” While there are indeed laws against theft, there are no laws that specifically refer to hotel shampoo. No hotel that I know of calls the police on customers for taking the small bottles, which are as much the hotel’s initial property as the large bottles. So why is it a matter of just size? Taking small toiletries is fine, but snatching larger ones is felonious? Who says?!? What is and is not theft (i.e., what are the property rights) is what is under contention here. I pushed the matter further by asking if it was acceptable for me to bring small empty bottles on business trips and fill them up with shampoo from the wall dispensers. Here, I would only be taking the amount of soap that I would have taken if the hotel still provided the six-ounce tubes. The reaction of the intellectuals gathered was one of… well… bemused horror? What kind of ne’er-do-well brings empty bottles to pilfer hotel shampoo?! (I invoked the Fifth Amendment.) It didn’t stop there. I asked if anybody took home the half-used roll of toilet paper (a valuable commodity back in the pandemic spring of 2020). How about the towels? “Wait, you can’t take the towels because those can be washed and reused!” Fair point, but can’t small bottles of shampoo be washed out and refilled? “Gill, you’re being ridiculous.” While my questions over breakfast may have seemed silly, it so happens that those same examples became the empirical fodder of discussion for one of the papers being presented at the workshop. The trivial nature of toiletries became the focus of a broader intellectual debate. (For those interested in great debate, I encourage you to toss these questions to your friends and family to see their reactions.) Political Economic Explanations of Property Rights All the questions regarding hotel amenities above are about property rights. As I have yet to fully define the term, property rights are the socially agreed-upon rules about who owns a particular asset and how that asset can be used. Sometimes social agreement comes via government decree. Having paid off my mortgage, I legally own the title to my house and acreage, although my county government has specified that I cannot construct any building within 500 feet of the stream near the back of the property. My rights are not absolute, and I must conform my behavior to a government regulation. That’s the easy political economy explanation—I own and can use what the government tells me I can. But what about those hotel shampoo bottles? The scholar who suggested that one cannot take large bottles of shampoo because it is the illegal also noted that we cannot take the hotel mattresses home. Good point; I had never thought about doing that because most mattresses are hard to fit into a suitcase. Moreover, mattresses are expensive and time consuming to replace; a hotel would likely track the guest down and either force them pay for the mattress or call the authorities to report a dastardly bedding theft. “A claim on the use of an asset is only as good as one’s ability to monitor and enforce any misuse of that thing.” Here we have an economic explanation for defining property rights that conforms to the thinking of eminent scholars such as Harold Demsetz or Armen Alchian. Property rights are defined by the costs and benefits of communicating, monitoring, and enforcing rules. A claim on the use of an asset is only as good as one’s ability to monitor and enforce any misuse of that thing. As such, it is not just a matter of creating a formal rule, but of communicating that rule to others and somehow ensuring everybody obeys. To that end, the costs of creation, communication, monitoring, and enforcement all affect the actual nature of a property right. No hotel manager will find it cost effective to track down someone taking six ounces of hair conditioner. However, they will go after you if you take the mattress or television as those assets are costly to replace. Understanding the costs and benefits of enforcement, we can see why the property rights over small bottles of shampoo shift de facto to the hotel guest. Likewise, there is a regulation in my state that homeowners cannot capture and store the rainwater falling on their land (as it seeps into a underground watershed considered to be communally owned and managed by the government). However, I know that bureaucrats will not be policing my small 10-gallon rain barrel used to store water for my plants in the summer (and they openly acknowledge that). It is not worth the cost of policing such de minimus transgression, thus I de facto own ten gallons of rainwater each year despite the official policy against it. But what about that murky middle ground befuddling my academic colleagues? Will a hotel chase after you if you take the large shampoo dispensers? Or pump the shampoo into a half dozen smaller bottles? Or grab a half-roll of toilet paper for home use? Probably not. Some fancy hotels provide fluffy robes for room use but place a notice that they are not to be removed (or that they can be purchased upon departure). As the asset in question becomes more expensive to replace, the benefits of policing also increase shifting the de facto ownership clearly to the hotel. Clear communication about who owns what is important in this murky zone. (Note: There are websites informing travelers that they can take “complimentary” items provided in hotels, but they don’t define what “complimentary” is, which is a statement of a property right. It is best to ignore those pages and just refer to what you learn below.) A Civil Society Explanation While government regulation and the costs and benefits of enforcement over an asset help explain how property rights are inevitably defined, there is yet another explanation. And this gets to the issue of the toilet tissue. While I stumped my colleagues about whether it was acceptable to fill my own bottles with dispenser shampoo, there was a universal revulsion that anyone would think of taking the toilet paper home. They all thought I was weird for even suggesting it! And therein lies the other answer for who decides property rights—civil society. As it turns out, everybody (and nobody in particular) really decides how we allocate and use different pieces of property encountered in our daily lives. Despite our first reaction that governments define property rights, it would be impossible for any government to do so completely; there are just too many things used in so many different ways that formally codifying rules would be overwhelming. Moreover, how many officially promulgated by government property rules do you know? Not many, I’m guessing. Few people (including lawmakers) read the Federal Register where such rules are defined at the national level. States, counties, and municipalities have their own code books that are also duly ignored by the public. But without knowing the formal government-defined property rights, we all somehow manage to get by because we rely upon a set of social norms and conventions to guide our actions. Consider a city sidewalk. While technically “public property” owned by the government (or “the people”), citizens make private temporary claims on portions of the walkway all the time and in changing ways. When walking in large groups, we yield the right of way to anyone in a wheelchair who needs extra maneuvering space. Shopkeepers keep sidewalks clear to foster foot traffic and shoo away loiterers or buskers. Of course, there are formal regulations that may govern the use of sidewalks (e.g., laws against loitering or begging), but for the most part our use of this important asset is governed by common sense and an appeal to what is “normally” expected (emphasis on the “norm”). There are other examples I provide my students with. Choosing seats in a lecture hall on the first day of class is usually determined by the convention of first come, first served, the most common cultural rule for allocating open access (public) resources. Nonetheless, students will cede specific seats to left-handers or those with a disability needing a front row seat. These are the norms of civil society, and they define how important assets are used. Enter the Impartial Spectator The beauty about property rights being defined by civil society norms is how they are enforced. Sometimes, we resort to shaming individuals for violating common norms of property use. A side glance or a “tsk tsk” is sometimes all we need to get a group of people to walk single file in a crowded hallway or not take two chairs for themselves and their jacket in a crowded conference room. Continued violations may result in ostracism. Punishment isn’t necessarily pre-determined as in a formal legal code but is usually adjusted to meet the circumstances. Flexible justice prevails. But property rights are also self-enforced. As Adam Smith noted in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, humans want to be loved and be lovely; we want others to think well of us by conforming to reasonable social expectations. And when it becomes difficult to know who might own a particular piece of property or how it should be used, we often resort to what Smith calls the impartial spectator. Here, we look at the situation from the outside and ponder how other individuals would be perceived if they made various choices. Hopefully, after performing this assessment, an individual chooses the most socially-acceptable course of action, gaining the esteem of others. This works quite well. Knowing that my colleagues think it strange to take toilet paper from the hotel, I choose not to do so. Social norms dictate such action would bring disapproval upon myself. Notice how strongly this works. While it is unlikely that any colleague of mine would ever know that I put toilet paper in my suitcase, I nonetheless abstain from this action (de facto making the hotel the ultimate owner of the unused tissue, even though it is “complimentary”). If we perform a thorough accounting of our daily choices with respect to different things (i.e., property), it is astounding how much social norms, not formal law, guide our daily decisions. The other beautiful aspect of social norms is that we are all part of the process of contributing to and communicating those norms, as well as monitoring and enforcing them. It is anarchy in action;1 the good kind of anarchy and not the “burn down Portland” kind. The impartial spectator operates in this arena and sensitizes individuals to how their choices impact the broader society. To channel Ronald Coase, we voluntarily internalize our externalities by way of Adam Smith’s “man within the breast”2 and not via “the man of system.” For more on these topics, see “How Property Rights Solve Problems,” by David Henderson. Library of Economics and Liberty, April 2, 2012. “What Arnold Schwarzenegger Can Teach You About the Economics of Property Rights,” by Rosolino Candela. Library of Economics and Liberty, February 6, 2023. “Conscience and Moral Rules in Adam Smith,” by Edward J. Harpham. AdamSmithWorks, August 11, 2021. Anthony Gill’s EconTalk Archive. Norms do slowly change through an uncountable number of tiny negotiations (involving social approval and disapproval) of human action over time. (See Friedrich Hayek’s discussion of this in his epilogue to Law, Legislation, and Liberty.3) It is how we define and redefine “the common good,” even though all may not agree. But this is truly democratic (more so than voting) in that we all become involved in crafting, recrafting, promulgating, and enforcing the property rights that ensure free markets work and that society prospers. For those seeking to promote human flourishing, it is worthwhile to consider not only how to draft formal rules, but to think deeply about how our civic culture determines prosperity. That is something to think about next time you’re shampooing your hair at the Sheraton. Footnotes [1] Anarchy in action is the idea that a viable, stateless society is possible—not through impersonal markets or state enforcement—but through the cohesive, egalitarian bonds of small-scale community relations. This comes from Michael Taylor’s book, Community, Anarchy, and Liberty. (Cambridge University Press, 1982.) [2] Daniel B. Klein, Erik W. Matson, and Colin Doran, “The man within the breast, the supreme impartial spectator, and other impartial spectators in Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments.” History of European Ideas. Volume 44, 2018. [3] F.A. Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty. University of Chicago Press, 2024. *Anthony Gill is Professor of Political Science  at the University of Washington, as well as a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion. He is the author of Rendering unto Caesar: The Catholic Church and the State in Latin America and The Political Origins of Religious Liberty, the latter earning the American Sociological Association’s Distinguished Book Award. His research spans political economy, public choice, and the role of social norms. A recipient of UW’s Distinguished Teaching Award, Gill is also known for creating the Research on Religion podcast. (0 COMMENTS)

A central argument of this book is that episodes involving mass violence that contribute to an atmosphere of social unrest and political instability are likely to increase national elites’ willingness to invest in primary education in order to prevent future threats against the state… they lead elites to conclude that repression and redistributive concessions alone are insufficient to prevent social disorder. –Agustina S. Paglayan, Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education.1 (page 108) In her book Raised to Obey, Agustina S. Paglayan presents the thesis that governments introduced mass education not to empower their citizens, but to control them by indoctrinating them as children. She argues that this thesis is supported by evidence concerning the timing of when states introduced mass education, the arguments that persuaded governments to provide mass education, and the training and direction that governments provided to teachers. By the 1800s, ruling elites were finding that conventional tools of social control, such as a national church, were not sufficient to quiet their populations. Revolutionary fervor emerged as a threat. Rulers became attracted to the theory that primary education could be used to train subjects to obey. Mass education is a relatively recent phenomenon. Paglayan writes, While in the 1850s only one in ten children were enrolled in primary schools worldwide, by 1940 a majority of children had access to schooling, and today, almost all countries provide universal or near-universal primary education. (page 12) She argues that in Europe the spread of primary education preceded industrialization and democracy. The leader was Prussia, which established comprehensive education regulations in 1763… while still maintaining an absolutist regime and an agrarian economy. By around 1850, a majority of children in Europe were already enrolled in primary school. (page 13) In the world as a whole, she summarizes data from more than one hundred countries: … governments began to systematically monitor primary schools on average sixty-five years before democratization. (page 48) Mass education also was not closely tied to industrialization. England was an industrialization leader and education laggard, whereas Prussia was the opposite…. In the early 1850s, many decades after England had begun to industrialize, less than 9 percent of English children were enrolled in primary school. (page 62) The United States was not a leader in primary education, either (although when enrollment began to rise, it did so rapidly). Teacher training was done by so-called Normal Schools. The first one to be established in the United States was in 1839. By that date, “there were already 264 Normal Schools throughout Europe.” (page 59) “Influential philosophers, including Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, were confident that human behavior could be shaped by education.” Influential philosophers, including Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, were confident that human behavior could be shaped by education. Hobbes and Rousseau, in particular, emphasized the need to train children to be obedient. Hobbes argues that education is what makes man fit for society and what ensures social order…. The “instruction of the people in the essential rights of sovereignty” by the sovereign is therefore “not only his duty, but his benefit also,” because this education provides “security against the danger that may arrive to himself in his natural person from rebellion.” (page 95) She quotes Rousseau in his Discourse on Political Economy, writing that “there should be laws for childhood that teach obedience to others” and that, “Public education under rules prescribed by the government, and under magistrates prescribed by the sovereign is, then, one of the fundamental maxims of popular or legitimate government.” Rousseau’s work illustrates the different types of education that Enlightenment philosophers envisioned for elites versus the rest…. Emile, however, is not a book about mass schooling; it focuses on the upbringing of a rich man’s son by his private tutor. The pedagogy… differs from the idea he advances in other works that the state should educate all children for the sake of cultivating obedience. (page 99) The Prussian model for schooling, which was admired and adopted elsewhere, was explicitly authoritarian. One of its primary theoreticians was Johann Felbiger. A school manual for teachers written by Felbiger in 1768 instructs teachers that every student must memorize the following answers: Q: Who is subject to the power of the ruler? A: Everyone… Q: From whence comes the power held by the ruler? A: This power comes from God. Q: Whom does God ordain? A: Everyone who holds authority. Because all who exercise authority are ordained by God, subjects must be submissive, loyal, and obedient, even to a ruler not of our religion… Q: What does it mean to resist authority? A: To resist authority is to rebel against the divine order. (page 104) Also in Prussia, … the king himself expressed the concern that if peasants learned too much, they might reject their place in society and migrate to the cities in search of better opportunities. The solution, according to his policy advisers, was to establish separate mandatory curriculums for rural and urban schools so that what children learned in rural schools would prove worthless in getting a city job—an approach that was adopted by other countries. (page 197) Paglayan carefully reviews the historical development of state-run mass education. She claims that, … the main goal driving the creation of national primary education systems was to shape the moral character of the lower classes to eradicate their “barbaric,” “violent,” “anarchic” predisposition and thus prevent future episodes of mass violence. (page 123) Because rulers saw education as a critical tool for maintaining order, they took a strong interest in how schooling should be undertaken. To successfully expand primary education in accordance with the state’s goals, states also needed a large number of teachers who had both the willingness and ability to implement the state’s educational agenda—an “army of teachers.” What was to be done to ensure that teachers would be loyal agents of the state inside the classroom? Here, central governments became directly involved in training aspiring teachers through state-controlled institutions often called Normal Schools, a name that alluded to their goal of normalizing or standardizing every aspect of teaching. In addition, most national laws of the nineteenth century established teacher certification requirements, including the requirement for aspiring teachers to show proof of their moral uprightness. (page 184) For me, Paglayan’s thesis raises a number of questions. • Did the state-sponsored primary schools achieve their intended goal of indoctrinating the masses? • If so, did they achieve this goal too well? Does this explain the otherwise puzzling fact that by 1914 the masses were enthusiastic supporters and willing participants in the brutality of the First World War? • To what extent do ruling elites continue to control primary schools today? • To what ends do today’s elites try to shape schooling? • How significant is it that schools of education in America (the contemporary equivalent of Normal Schools) are far to the left? • Is state control of schooling still necessary to ensure social order? • What would society look like without heavy state involvement in primary schooling? For more on these topics, see “Is State Education Justified? An Appreciation of E. G. West’s Education and the State,” by Kevin Currie-Knight. Library of Economics and Liberty, April 6, 2020. Diane Ravitch on Education. EconTalk. “Educational Despotism,” by Richard Gunderman. AdamSmithWorks, September 1, 2021. Her thesis is that government’s interest in primary schooling was to indoctrinate children to obey. Other histories of schooling tend to tell a much more benign story. If Paglayan is correct, then libertarians ought to be even more inclined to make the case for separation of school and state. Footnotes [1] Agustina Paglayan, Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education. Princeton University Press, 2024. *Arnold Kling has a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of several books, including Crisis of Abundance: Rethinking How We Pay for Health Care; Invisible Wealth: The Hidden Story of How Markets Work; Unchecked and Unbalanced: How the Discrepancy Between Knowledge and Power Caused the Financial Crisis and Threatens Democracy; and Specialization and Trade: A Re-introduction to Economics. He contributed to EconLog from January 2003 through August 2012. Read more of what Arnold Kling’s been reading. For more book reviews and articles by Arnold Kling, see the Archive. As an Amazon Associate, Econlib earns from qualifying purchases. 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