We’re bringing back price theory with our series on Price Theory problems with Professor Bryan Cutsinger. You can view the previous problem and Cutsinger’s solution here and here. Share your proposed solutions in the Comments. Professor Cutsinger will be present in the comments for the next couple of weeks, and we’ll post his proposed solution shortly thereafter. May the graphs be ever in your favor, and long live price theory!   Question: Uber offers a membership option that entitles members to a percentage reduction in the price of Uber rides. Evaluate the following two statements: 1- Suppose an Uber customer is indifferent between becoming an Uber member or paying the standard Uber ride price. This customer will never spend less, and, in general, will spend more on Uber rides if the customer becomes a member. (Assume that Uber rides are a homogenous good.) 2- Introducing the membership option can never reduce the number of Uber rides this customer takes. (0 COMMENTS)

  California faces a firestorm, not just on fires, but also on energy. The state government continues to push households to electrify while, at the same time, electricity prices skyrocket. The dual impact of increasing dependence on electricity and a 35 to 45% boost in electric bills since 2020 is particularly hard on poor families. Already squeezed, Californians now pay the highest gasoline prices in the country, ranging from 30 to 50% above the national average. Inflicting more pain at the pump is California’s Air Resources Board (CARB). While they may be well-intentioned, the Board’s Low-Carbon Fuel Standards (LCFS) disproportionately hurt poor households because these households spend over 11% of their income (not including some government benefits) on gasoline. CARB’s stated mission is “to promote…public health…through [the] effective reduction of air pollutants…recognizing and considering effects on the economy.” (italics added) As “the lead agency for climate change programs” it’s also responsible for the State’s goal to achieve carbon neutrality by 2045. To achieve these goals the Board wants to speed up the shift to electric vehicles. CARB claims that its restrictive fuel standards will lead to a 90% reduction in carbon intensity of transportation fuels by 2045. It expects these efforts to eliminate over 500 million metric tons of CO2 emissions. That sounds impressive—until you look at data from China. The projected cumulative California emission reductions over this 20-year period amount to only two weeks (less than 5%) of China’s annual emissions. Sadly, California fires in 2020 wiped out all progress on carbon dioxide reduction over the previous 17 years. The current fires will likely wipe out a substantial amount of progress since 2020. This is from David R. Henderson and Francois Melese, “California’s New Fuel Standards Hurt the Poor, with Little Environment Benefit,” Independent Institute, February 12, 2025. (First published in California Globe, February 11, 2025.) Read the whole thing, which is not long. (0 COMMENTS)

In my last post, I described what R. R. Reno believes motivated the banishing of the strong gods, as well as the ideas that made that process happen. In this post, I’ll be reviewing what he sees as the consequences. One of the strong gods to be banished was the idea that communities are a sacred thing, and that individuals have obligations to uphold the well-being of their community and that the community has some claim to the loyalty of an individual living within in. This was acutely criticized by Karl Popper: We are tempted to imagine our collective life as in some sense sacred, giving the community a rightful claim upon our loyalty. Popper regards this as “magical” thinking, a form of “anti-humanitarian propaganda.” Strong notions of truth – not just moral truths, but even factual truths – are also strong gods. Turning to a weaker god of diminished, personal, or provisional “truth” prevents the kind of certitude that breeds fanaticism and motivates atrocities. Strong truths, the kind that are accepted as sacred and are considered unacceptable to question, “command our loyalty rather than being open to critical questioning and empirical falsification.” Because of this, the idea of strong truths needed to be rejected. This rejection of strong truths is more subtle than simply embracing blanket skepticism, even regarding issues of morality. Reno writes: Our moment is not one of thoroughgoing relativism or strict renunciation of moral principles. Instead, it encourages ways of thinking and social norms that are less burdened with pressing truths, giving us more elbow room to formulate our own bespoke views of the meaning of life while draining the demanding passions out of public affairs…It makes us less likely to rally around collective loyalties that fuel an aggressive politics prone to conflict and conducive to oppressive measures. Strong respect for inherited traditions, too, is a strong god in need of banishing: The “never-again” imperative imposes an overriding and unending duty to banish the traditionalists, who are loyal to the strong gods that are thought to have caused so much suffering and death. As the students rioting in Paris in 1968 insisted, “It is forbidden to forbid.” Those who forbid must be censured and silenced – for the sake of an open society. In the modern mind, the goal is not the pursuit of unifying and binding truths, but the discovery of personal meaning. Binding truth is a strong god, and disagreement over such truths can drive division. Personal meaning is a weak god – it puts up no borders between what is or isn’t acceptable. But as a weak god, it also provides no real guidance on how to lead a meaningful life: Just what we were to grow toward remained vague, as it must when metaphysical questions are held at bay…Man is to progress toward “greater meaning,” self-actualization, and autonomy – “liberation enabling each of us to fulfill our capacity so as to be free to create within and around ourselves,” as Hillary Rodman declared to her fellow graduates of Wellesley College in 1969. Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory of moral development culminates in a post-conventional moral code that is at once deeply personal and universal. But precisely because it is post-conventional, one cannot teach young people the content of this code, the pinnacle of moral development – that would make it into a social convention. One can only urge young people in the direction of ever-greater “growth” and “development.” To tell people there is a specific goal they should be growing toward runs the risk of declaring some ways of living to be better or more desirable or more respectable than others – and this is an affront to the weak gods of openness and nonjudgmental acceptance. Reno sees great harm coming from this. In the end, humans beings simply are what we are. There aren’t many ways to live that lead us to thrive, but “the pathways of disenchantment are countless.” The strong gods of inherited cultural traditions helped to guide people through life in a time-tested way that leads to fulfillment and happiness – not perfectly so, but as well as can be expected in an imperfect human existence. Denying the value of this inheritance, declaring there are no truths that we can jointly hold to be self-evident and you must go off and discover meaning for yourself, leaves people adrift and listless about how to live: One conversation stands out. A younger friend, agonizing over the choices he faced in life, asked for advice. I told him I couldn’t help very much. For me, life has been like a train ride. The engine of strong cultural norms pulled me through life’s stages: college, job, marriage, children. In its time, the train will take me to retirement and, of course, death. He replied, “No, no—life’s not like that anymore. Now it’s a sailboat that you pilot first this way and then that in order to make your way to the destination of your own choosing.” It struck me as an exhausting way to live. More frustrating to Reno is the fact that the intellectual and cultural elites who advocate for the weak gods do not themselves live in the way they advocate: They may join in the chorus that condemns traditional norms as authoritarian, but they keep their marriages together, and their families look like traditional ones. In other words, they share the basic human desire to protect one’s children, to secure one’s patrimony, to sustain and transmit a living inheritance. They shelter themselves and those whom they love – a natural and healthy impulse. The problem is that what our most powerful and capable fellow citizens do in private is at odds with what they insist upon in public. But the rule of the weak gods has more implications than its impact on social life. It also has considerable political implications. We’ll look at what Reno has to say about that in the next post. (0 COMMENTS)

Those who read Tyler Cowen’s and Alex Tabarrok’s Marginal Revolution blog regularly, as I do, know that Tyler is a big fan of artificial intelligence (AI). Partly due to his posts and partly due to rave reviews by friends on Facebook, I’m realizing that I need to use it more. Having said that, I want to comment on a recent post by Tyler in which he linked to an analysis, done by OpenAI’s Deep Research tool, of the costs and benefits of USAID. Here’s what Tyler asked it to do: What are the best sources to read on US AID, and its costs and benefits? I want serious analyses, based on evidence, data, and possibly economic models. How does the program fare in cost-benefit terms? Please try to look past the rhetoric on both sides of the debate, pro and con, and arrive at an actual assessment of the agency in net cost-benefit terms. A five to ten page paper should be fine, with full citations, in any style. Notice that Tyler asked it to “look past the rhetoric.” Since rhetoric, as Deirdre McCloskey often reminds us, is the art of effective or persuasive speaking or writing, that is, the art of arguing,” it doesn’t make sense to ask AI to avoid rhetoric. To avoid rhetoric is to avoid making an argument. To assess costs and benefits is to argue. Maybe, though, Tyler expects that AI will have the same mistaken idea about what rhetoric is that most of the public has. So maybe it’s not a problem. Although I think it is; see below. Here’s what I noticed. Deep Research’s answer is an argument. And not only an argument but also one that is somewhat one-sided. Here for instance is how it deals with the idea that there may be downsides to some of USAID’s subsidies and interventions: Democracy and Stability: The absence of USAID’s democracy programs is harder to game out, as changes in governance are path-dependent. In some cases, local forces for democracy might have prevailed even without external help (e.g. Eastern Europe’s desire to join the EU was a strong motivator). However, it is likely that progress would have been slower. Without technical support for elections and civil society, nascent democracies might have faltered or seen more contested processes. In places like Kenya in 2013, for instance, U.S. support to election commissions and peacebuilding helped avoid violence; without that, a repeat of the 2007 post-election violence could have occurred. On the other hand, one could argue that in certain countries, absence of U.S. political aid might have reduced suspicion of foreign influence and could have led to more organic change (a point critics raise, though evidence is scant either way). By and large, the counterfactual suggests that the world would not be more democratic had USAID never engaged – in fact, some gains in freedom and rights would likely be absent. Notice that it doesn’t discuss the idea that USAID might have been used to overthrow governments. I don’t know if it’s true that USAID money was used to help overthrow Bangladesh’s government. This piece in The Times of India says that it might be true. But notice that Deep Research doesn’t even raise the issue. Its dealing with other issues is similar. It takes a charge against USAID, vaguely suggests how it might be true, and then says that things are improving. Also, it literally doesn’t mention some of the misuses of the money that the DOGE people have highlighted. Maybe the direction to avoid rhetoric was taken as a direction to avoid mentioning criticisms for which the critics stated their case passionately. So maybe Tyler shouldn’t have asked it to avoid rhetoric. I’m not saying that the Deep Research approach is totally wrong. I’m simply pointing out the limits and expressing my skepticism. To his credit, Tyler’s mention of other sources means that he is not taking Deep Research as the last word on the subject either. (0 COMMENTS)

Among economists on the other side of the political spectrum, Jason Furman has always been one of my favorites. He has a new article in Foreign Affairs entitled The Post-Neoliberal Delusion, which evaluates the economic policies of the Biden administration. In a number of specific cases, he supports Biden administration policies.  But Furman also raises a number of concerns, including the following points: The new economic philosophy that dominated during the Biden years emphasized demand over supply. It considered concerns over budget constraints overstated and placed its faith in predistribution as a way to change the trajectory of the macroeconomy. It promised policies that could simultaneously transform industries, prioritize marginalized groups in procurement and hiring practices, and serve broad social goals. Ultimately, this post-neoliberal ideology and its adherents did not take tradeoffs seriously enough, laboring under an illusion that previous policymakers were too beholden to economic orthodoxy to make real progress for people. . . . New ideas about these old problems will never yield successful policies, however, if they dismiss budget constraints, cost-benefit analysis, and tradeoffs. It’s fine to question economic orthodoxy. But policymakers should never again ignore the basics in pursuit of fanciful heterodox solutions. Furman also has a very informative twitter thread that includes some graphs that were left out of the article.  This one caught my eye: There are two ways to convert nominal variables into real variables.  One approach is to deflate a nominal variable by an index measuring the overall cost of living, such as the CPI.  Another approach is to deflate nominal spending by changes in the price of the specific variable being considered.  Furman used the latter approach here, which seems appropriate in this case. How do I know that Furman didn’t deflate by the CPI?  Look at the divergence since 2020.  Nominal spending on highways is up roughly 50%, from about $100 billion to $150 billion.  Real spending is down about 10%, from $100 billion to $90 billion.  That roughly 60% divergence is far larger than the increase in the overall price level since 2020, which is closer to 20% or 25%. How can we explain this large divergence?  One possibility is that supply constraints make it difficult for the US to dramatically ramp up highway construction in a short period of time.  If the government then implements a rapid increase in nominal highway spending, the immediate impact is mostly higher construction cost inflation, not more highway output.  It’s like 100 people trying to squeeze through a narrow door at the same time.  Note than this is not just a question of how much highway a construction firm can produce; constraints might also involve getting environmental clearances for new projects, meeting mandates to use union labor, achieving various “diversity” benchmarks, and/or other types of regulations. In my view, the most effective way to get more infrastructure is not to spend vast funds on new federal programs.  Money is spent most efficiently when it is raised at the local level.  Instead, the best way to promote more spending on infrastructure is to reduce regulatory barriers such as environmental impact statements, “Buy America” policies, union mandates, and other impediments to cost efficiency.  If we were to dramatically reduce the cost of building infrastructure, local governments would have an incentive build more, even without federal help.   New York City is many times richer than Chengdu, China.  Yet Chengdu built the world’s third longest subway system over the past 15 years, a time during which which New York spent lots of money on a new subway line and achieved almost nothing.  New York might wish to bring Chengdu construction firms and workers over here to replace their substandard subway system with the sort of modern, clean and efficient system that they have in Chengdu.  This need not involve “immigration”–they could used Singapore-style temporary workers. PS.  I don’t know how much the Chengdu system cost to build, but AI overview suggests that subway construction in China costs roughly $140 million per kilometer.  In that case, Chengdu’s 634km system may have cost roughly $90 billion.  In NYC, subway expansion costs nearly $1.5 billion per kilometer. (0 COMMENTS)

The historic—and horrific—fires that have decimated Los Angeles-area neighborhoods have been attributed to obvious causes, not the least of which include the two recent “wet years” that increased vegetation growth on hillsides and in backyards, followed by the last twelve months of drought that turned the added foliage into highly combustible fire fuel. Many experts have pointed to climate change as the reason behind the rainfall variation and weather extremes, such as the hurricane-force Santa Ana winds that rapidly spread the fires.  Fire abatement readiness has also come under attack, with cuts in fire department budgets contributing to fire hydrants losing water pressure and running dry as firefighters fought desperately to save homes and lives. Consider another unheralded but aggravating cause of the fire damage, the area’s low water rates. In a 2022 study, John McKenzie (at the time with a major water-pipe manufacturer) and I reported that LA-area residents, who live in a near-desert climate, pay lower water rates than people in states with four or more times SoCal’s annual rainfall. At the time, in Irvine, I paid less for a hundred cubic feet of water than the price of a large Snickers bar, which is one reason I and many Irvine residents maintain overgrown backyard plantings. Of course, low water rates have had several effects, including increasing the recent fire damage. The lower rates have induced people to use more water in a variety of ways, which has been a factor in draining the area’s reservoirs and making aerial water drops more difficult. They have encouraged individual homeowners to develop tropical backyards. In doing so, they will be imposing greater fire risks (or costs) because this added foliage eases the spread of flames across neighborhoods (an outcome that has all the markings of a tragedy of the commons, similar to pollution, or an outcome few could have wanted). Those added fire risks can become real costs with the recent confluence of months of drought and the advent of fierce Santa Ana winds. This means that the conflagrations in Pacific Palisades, Altadena, and Malibu can be partially attributed to politically set low water rates, not just to “acts of God” and governmental incompetence, as critics have emphasized.  But there is more: The city of LA loses more than a billion gallons of water annually from known water pipe leaks. Of course, it doesn’t know how many more billions of gallons are lost to unknown pipe leaks. Water authorities sometimes delay repairs until the pipes erupt into thirty-foot geysers, imposing serious property damage and injuries.  Why aren’t leaking pipes repaired when discovered? The economic answer is well worn: Costs exceed benefits, which in LA’s case means that the cost of repairing pipes is greater than the saleable value of the recovered water—at low water rates! Unknown leaks could be detected with available surface detection technology but SoCal cities, not just LA, sometimes avoid searching for repairable leaks for economic reasons. First, detecting leaks can cost hundreds of dollars per mile. Second, if more leaks were detected, water authorities would be pressed to cover the costs, which, because of low rates, can’t be recovered. The additional repair costs can force curbs in other water-infrastructure projects needed. Higher water rates can be “rainmakers,” of a sort. Higher water rates can cause water conservation through less water “waste” and replacement of tropical foliage with more drought-tolerant landscaping. The greater water revenues can governments with the means to repair out-of-commission fire trucks. Homeowners will also have an added incentive to find and repair leaks. The resulting higher water levels in reservoirs can make aerial firefighting more effective.  Higher water rates can fire damage, deaths, and injuries—as well lowering coming fire insurance hikes (and maybe even the overall costs of living in paradise).   Richard McKenzie is an economics professor, emeritus, in the Merage School of Business at the University of California, Irvine and author, most recently of Reality Is Tricky: Contrarian Takes on Contested Economic Issues. He is co-authored with John McKenzie of “California Leaking: People, Pipes, and Prices.” (0 COMMENTS)

Once in a blue moon, President Donald Trump has a fleetingly good intuition or does something seemingly good (“good” from the point of view of preserving the hope of a free society). This is part of the problem. Consider the announced closing of the “Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights Office” in the Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA Begins to Put Environmental-Justice Workers On Leave,” Wall Street Journal, February 6, 2025). The very name of the bureau indicates that it should not exist. Let’s forget the mystery of the “external civil rights” (perhaps related to the future civil rights on Mars?) and focus on “environmental justice.” It degrades the central ideal of justice in law and political philosophy into a faddish political pursuit. But this does not justify fighting this unicorn or other woke ideas with similarly absurd or authoritarian approaches. Interestingly, since the electoral campaign of 2016, Mr. Trump has been undermining real justice, of which the rule of law is inseparable, whenever it appeared to conflict with his self-interest. Different clowneries do not make a better political philosophy than wokeness. As a sample, consider the threat of tariffs against Americans (a tariff is a tax on importers), which will also harm Canadian and Mexican producers; saving TikTok after trying to ban it in 2020, and even proposing to transform it into a state or mixed corporation (see my forthcoming “TikTok, Public Choice, and the Theater of the Absurd” in the Spring issue of Regulation); annexing Greenland by force if necessary or transforming Gaza in “the Riviera of the Middle East,” despite Mr. Trump’s promise to end “forever wars.” And counting. Trump does a few good things in bad ways and lots of bad things in between. If he has any (intuitive) ideology, it is the supremacy of collective choices, especially when he is the one to make them in his own personal interest. Federal government practice has tried to make wokeness compulsory. Now, Trump is trying to ban it, as if there were only two modes for any individual choice: compulsory or banned. (However, I have defended the case that sexual mutilation of children should be off-limits.) This approach leads to funny government rhetoric, such as his February 5 Executive Order “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports”: the Secretary of Education, it is said, shall promptly prioritize Title IX enforcement actions against educational institutions (including athletic associations composed of or governed by such institutions) that deny female students an equal opportunity to participate in sports and athletic events by requiring them, in the women’s category, to compete with or against or to appear unclothed before males. The United States is a large, diverse country. Suppose that somewhere a private college, which nobody is forced to attend, offers mixed athletic competition. Why would the federal Big Brother object? But if both A and non-A are true, nothing can be surprising. In the department of funny things, recall what Trump said before the 74th Session of the United Nations General Assembly on September 24, 2019: We stand in solidarity with LGBTQ people who live in countries that punish, jail, or execute individuals based upon sexual orientation. Of course, there is nothing funny in tyrants punishing unusual private sexual tastes. Such tastes should be neither forbidden nor encouraged. The danger is that bad or incoherent intuitions and their ultimate failure will lead both bad-faith individuals and well-meaning people to reject individual liberty because they have also been led to believe, incredibly, that this is what Trump and his sycophants defend. (See my New Year post “A Dangerous Pass in 2025 and Beyond.”) (0 COMMENTS)

Why do we buy stuff we don’t need? Maybe for the same reason that some people can’t stand stuff at all. Listen as author Michael Easter speaks with EconTalk’s Russ Roberts about how two seemingly opposed approaches to our possessions–minimalism and hoarding–may stem from the same impulse to cope with uncertainty. They also discuss the downsides of minimalism and how […] The post Minimalists and Hoarders (with Michael Easter) appeared first on Econlib.

I’ve been very discouraged by the global rise in nationalism. But there is one glimmer of hope. Nationalism is often its own worst enemy.Consider the current situation in North America. President Trump clearly dislikes Canada’s Liberal party (especially Justin Trudeau), and would vastly prefer a Conservative government take power north of the border. But Trump has recently antagonized the Canadian public, mostly over border control issues that seem of minor importance. [You might think that Trump’s comments on Canada becoming the 51st state and the threat of 25% tariffs are no big deal, but recall this scene in Mad Men.] Right before Trump’s recent criticism of Canada, the Conservative party had more than a 20 point lead in the polls, a lead that was expanding over time.  Just a week later, much of that lead has vanished: [As in most normal countries, red refers to the left of center party.] A few caveats: There is still a great deal of time before the fall election, and I still expect the Conservatives to win. The Canadian Conservative leader is not an authoritarian nationalist. But the second point actually strengthens my argument.  The US as a whole and Trump in particular is now so unpopular in Canada that a more Trump-like Canadian politician would have suffered an even bigger drop in the polls.  The US national anthem is now being booed at sporting events in Canada.  Trump recently split with Britain’s nationalist right over Trump’s support for a politician considered too extreme even for the Reform Party leadership. If the US starts imposing tariffs on our trading partners, that might further reduce the popularity of Trump among the European right.  Given enough time, nationalism always breeds international conflict.  Let’s hope it remains economic conflict. PS.  Slightly off topic, in a recent post I suggested that bigotry was becoming more fashionable on the right, an unfortunate side effect of a very welcome pushback against woke cancel culture.  Do I have any recent evidence for that claim? When Marko Elez recently quit his DOGE job after he was shown as having been behind some offensive tweets, many people focused on the “racism” aspect.  I was much more interested in the fact that he thought his own views were now becoming “cool”: In his online comments under a pseudonym, Elez within the last year advocated for “eugenic immigration policy” and rolling back the Civil Rights Act, according to a Wall Street Journal report. “Normalize Indian hate,” one post said. “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” another said. “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity.” Elez is correct–racism is becoming cool, at least on twitter. Vice President Vance (who’s wife is of Indian descent) had this to say: I obviously disagree with some of Elez’s posts, but I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life. I actually agree with Vance that social media activity should not ruin an immature kid’s life.  I suppose where I disagree with Vance is that I sort of wonder whether it makes sense to put immature “kids” into important positions in the federal government.  Perhaps wait until they grow up? (0 COMMENTS)

  Macro myths by Scott Sumner, The Pursuit of Happiness, February 5, 2025. Excerpt: I recently spoke to some Bentley University students (via zoom) about my views on the Great Recession. In this post, I summarize the substance of my talk. Long-time readers will have seen these arguments, but this blog has attracted some new readers who have asked me to justify contrarian claims such as, ”Tight money caused the Great Recession.” Here (in bold print) are 18 common misconceptions about the Great Recession: DRH note: Like his long-time readers, I’ve seen Scott make these arguments. This is the first time I’ve seen them in one place. The New Consensus on the Minimum Wage by Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution, February 4, 2025. Excerpt: My take is that there is an evolving new consensus on the minimum wage. Namely, the effects of the minimum wage are heterogeneous and take place on more margins than employment. Read Jeffrey Clemens’s brilliant and accessible paper in the JEP for the theory. A good example of the heterogeneous impact is this new paper by Clemens, Gentry and Meer on how the minimum wage makes it more difficult for the disabled to get jobs: Alex quotes Clemens, Gentry, and Meer: We find that large minimum wage increases significantly reduce employment and labor force participation for individuals of all working ages with severe disabilities. DRH note: I’m glad to see that Clemens, Gentry, and Meer looked at the bad effects of the minimum wage on severely disabled people. From July 1986 to January 1987, I was the economics editor of National Review. My job, assigned to me by William F. Buckley, Jr., was to write two short unsigned pieces for every biweekly issue. They took all my pieces but one and rarely changed them. One of the two exceptions was my editorial on this issue: I expressed upset at the effect of the minimum wage on disabled people and gave an example from my hometown, Pacific Grove. The editor kept the piece but edited out the emotion: I still think that was a mistake.   Don’t Believe Him by Ezra Klein, New York Times, February 2, 2025. Excerpt: I had a conversation a couple [of] months ago with someone who knows how the federal government works about as well as anyone alive. I asked him what would worry him most if he saw Trump doing it. What he told me is that he would worry most if Trump went slowly. If he began his term by doing things that made him more popular and made his opposition weaker and more confused. If he tried to build strength for the midterms while slowly expanding his powers and chipping away at the deep state where it was weakest. But he didn’t. And so the opposition to Trump, which seemed so listless after the election, is beginning to rouse itself. There is a subreddit for federal employees where one of the top posts reads: “This non ‘buyout’ really seems to have backfired. I’ll be honest, before that email went out, I was looking for any way to get out of this fresh hell. But now I am fired up to make these goons as frustrated as possible.” As I write this, it’s been upvoted more than 39,000 times and civil servant after civil servant is echoing the initial sentiment. In Iowa this week, Democrats flipped a State Senate seat in a district that Trump won easily in 2024. The attempted spending freeze gave Democrats their voice back, as they zeroed in on the popular programs Trump had imperiled. Trump isn’t building support; he’s losing it. Trump isn’t fracturing his opposition; he’s uniting it. DRH comment: I’m not sure Klein is right, but it’s an interesting perspective. Time will tell.   Getting better: How Louisiana is raising reading and math scores by Joanne Jacobs, Thinking and Linking, February 3, 2025. Excerpts: Louisiana, never known for education excellence was the big winner on the 2024 NAEP when it comes to progress in the last few years, writes Chad Aldeman. “It was the closest state to recovering from COVID-related declines in 8th grade reading and math, and it was the only state in which fourth-grade reading scores were higher in 2024 than in 2019.” And: The state will not waste time “chasing shiny things,” says Brumley. Teachers will not be asked to serve as social workers or nurses. “Smart, responsive school systems are thinking about ways to be more efficient and allow their teachers as much time on task as possible.” Some of the NAEP reporting assumes Louisiana’s success is all about teaching the phonics part of the “science of reading,” writes Natalie Wexler. There’s a lot more. The state has ensured that “educators understand the connection between reading and knowledge.” DRH comments: First, I love the phonics part. That’s how I learned to read, before I got to Grade One. (Thank goodness we didn’t have kindergarten in my small rural Manitoba town. That way I got one additional year of freedom.) Second, I’ve been impressed by Joanne Jacobs, and her focus, for a few decades. I first met her at a Hoover conference on education in the mid-1990s. Here’s her bio. When I met her, she was with the San Jose Mercury News.   Recommended Readings on Free Trade Versus Protectionism by Williamson M. Evers, January 24, 2025. Economists, going back to Adam Smith and David Ricardo, are virtually unanimous that free trade benefits consumers and the overall economy. But there exist special interests who would gain in the short run from protectionist barriers. And there is a large segment of the public that doesn’t understand the arguments for free trade. Not surprisingly, there are politicians who are all too willing to gain votes by catering to protectionist interests. People, farms, firms, and factories in America should be able to trade freely with people, farms, firms, and factories across international boundaries. You should, for example, be able to buy shoes made in Ethiopia. Economist William Niskanen stresses the moral case for free trade: Individuals have the right “to make consensual arrangements across national borders.” Without governmental interference, such voluntary interaction is harmonious and mutually beneficial. People don’t trade unless they believe they will be better off afterwards. Much international trade can be explained by comparative advantage. Economist Donald J. Boudreaux explains that “the chief nontrivial insight” found in the idea of comparative advantage is that an economic concern’s “technical ability to produce a product” is, by itself, “irrelevant” for resolving whether “that entity should produce that product itself” or “acquire that product by first producing something else and then trading that something else” for the desired product. DRH comment: As with everything Bill Evers does, this set of readings is extensive and impressive.   Trump’s Tariffs Require Customs Agents To Check All Mail from China by Jack Nicastro, Reason, February 6, 2025. Excerpts: President Donald Trump announced his promised tariffs on Saturday and paused those levied against Mexico and Canada on Monday for 30 days. In addition to threatening to impose double-digit duties on all products imported from Canada, Mexico, and China(whose tariffs took effect on Tuesday), each of the president’s executive orders eliminates duty-free exemptions for low-dollar-value imports, known as de minimis exemptions. Eliminating these exemptions would increase the price of goods from international bargain brands enjoyed by cash-strapped consumers. De minimis is Latin for “concerning trifles,” per Merriam-Webster. The aptly named exemption applies to shipments “imported by one person on one day having an aggregate fair retail value in the country of shipment of not more than $800,” according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). The Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports that the U.S. imported $54.5 billion worth of de minimis products in 2023, 34 percent ($18.4 billion) of which came from China. Chinese e-commerce firms Temu and Shein had grown to make up 17 percent of the entire American discount market by 2023, according to the CRS. These discount brands contract with Chinese firms to make and ship goods directly to consumers, avoiding expensive tariffs via de minimis, explains Bloomberg. This business model caters to lower-income Americans who are willing to wait weeks instead of days to save more of their hard-earned dollars. Eliminating the de minimis exemption means that the cheap consumer goods sold by these brands will be subjected to the additional 10 percent duty on Chinese products, some fraction of which will inevitably be passed on to American consumers. The rule announced by CBP to carry out Trump’s executive order imposing duties on China goes even further, requiring formal inspection for all mail shipments from China “without regard to their value.” Christine McDaniel, senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center, tells Reason that this will require CBP to subject roughly 917 million more parcels to formal entry, a process so complex that CBP recommends importers outsource it to third-party brokers (whose services cost around $100). McDaniel says processing so many more parcels “could be prohibitively costly in terms of resources for CBP.” The accompanying pic is of Joanne Jacobs. (0 COMMENTS)