In his book We Have Never Been Woke, Musa al-Gharbi examines the worldview of symbolic capitalists in great detail. Much of what he describes looks very familiar to me (although the fact that I see the behavior al-Gharbi describes so regularly is itself something I consider as having very little weight as evidence — I’ll describe why in a different post). But there are some points in his analysis that didn’t quite fit, as far as I can tell. For example, consider how al-Gharbi described the rise of the symbolic capitalists, and the worldview they embraced as they took the reins of social power: Secularizing the social gospel movement, they promised to help America transcend its divides, redeem its soul, and experience unprecedented peace and prosperity by leveraging science and reason to maximize human flourishing in a way that laissez-faire capitalism never could. They promised a world where robber barons would be restrained by technocrats, where corruption, nepotism, exploitation, and unjust discrimination would be replaced by meritocracy and professionalization. The poor and the unfit would be cared for and gradually eliminated through a combination of aid, education programs, expanded rules and regulations (and intensified enforcement), and eugenics programs. Political partisanship, ethnic and religious conflict, and other forms of tribalistic struggles would be settled by objective and disinterested experts committed to the greater good. Class struggle would be eliminated, not because inequality was vanquished, but because people across the social strata would be made to see that the prosperity and economic dynamism unleashed by free markets could benefit everyone—so long as the wealthy and powerful could be persuaded to entrust a share of their wealth and authority to symbolic capitalists to manage the economy and society writ large. This, al-Gharbi tells us, has continued to be basically the framework and ideology supported by symbolic capitalists (minus the support for eugenics, which was thankfully repudiated). Overall, al-Gharbi tells us, symbolic capitalists want social welfare programs, redistribution, increased and more strongly enforced economic regulation in order to “maximize human flourishing in a way that laissez-faire capitalism never could,” technocratic control of economic outcomes, legally enforced restrictions and barriers to entry for a wide range of careers, and to “manage the economy and society writ large.” Yet later in his work, al-Gharbi also tells us that symbolic capitalists “skew culturally and symbolically to the left but favor free markets.” Not wanting to go too deeply down the rabbit hole of arguing by definition, but there seems to be a strong disconnect here — how can someone favor top-down technocratic control of the economy, but also favor free markets? Granted, in his last line of the description, al-Gharbi says symbolic capitalists argue the “prosperity and economic dynamism unleashed by free markets could benefit everyone—so long as the wealthy and powerful could be persuaded to entrust a share of their wealth and authority to symbolic capitalists to manage the economy and society writ large.” But to my eye, saying free markets will benefit everyone as long as technocrats control the economy writ large is tantamount to saying free markets will benefit everyone as long as we abandon free markets. I confess to being unable to provide a flawless, exclusively correct analytic definition of what “free market” means (see Matt Zwolinski on this point here), but I have a hard time squaring the circle of “favoring free markets” with favoring all the various forms of top-down, technocratic control of market activity symbolic capitalists advocate. I mentioned in my last post that I at least got an impression that al-Gharbi favors increasing the minimum wage, even though he surely doesn’t advocate this policy for the reasons initially intended by progressives. Part of that impression came from passages like this: [Symbolic capitalists] prescriptions for addressing unfortunate market externalities vary systemically from everyone else’s too. Highly educated Americans, for example, tend to prioritize redistributive policies to address inequalities (taxes and transfers) over predistributive approaches (e.g., high wages, robust benefits, and job protections that render reallocation less necessary.) To be clear, al-Gharbi isn’t explicitly saying he favors the “predistributive” approach, so I can only report my impression — I may very well be wrong. Still, I think this difference is somewhat overstated. In support of this claim, al-Gharbi cites the paper Compensate the Losers: Economic Policy and Partisan Realignment in the US. While there is a negative association between education and support for predistributive economic policies (defined as increased minimum wages, stronger unions, job programs, and economic protectionism), that trend has been weakening over time with regard to minimum wages and labor unions from the second “Awokening” forward.  By contrast, the negative association between education and support for protectionism has only gotten stronger over time, while the association between education and support for redistribution is very weak and not always positive. Figure A.1 (on page 58 of Compensate the Losers) shows the association for various redistributive measures, and the coefficients are all very close to zero — and in some cases, slightly negative. Even more noteworthy is what we see on Figure A.13 (page 70). In his book, al-Gharbi criticizes the symbolic capitalists support for policies like affirmative action, suggesting that this policy has been a tool of elites to secure their own advantage, while failing to benefit the genuinely disadvantaged: These beneficiaries also tend to be already affluent compared with most other Black Americans. These patterns are especially pronounced at elite schools (and by proxy, elite symbolic professional institutions). Critically, this “elite capture” is hardly unique to Black people. Across ethnicities, comparative studies in the United States and abroad have found that affirmative action programs tend to primarily benefit already financially well-off members of the target groups. But in Figure A.13, we see there is a strong negative association between support for affirmative action and years of education. The more highly educated someone is, the less likely they are to support affirmative action policies. This runs contrary to the usual association al-Gharbi makes of woke policies being disproportionately held by highly educated elites. It’s also not clear to me that highly educated Americans being more likely to oppose the minimum wage and more supportive of redistribution fits well with al-Gharbi’s general thesis. One of the causes of “Awokenings,” al-Gharbi says, is the desire of elites or elite-aspirants to secure their situation by embracing policies that shut out potential rivals. But an increase in minimum wages doesn’t seem like a good way for elites to shield themselves from competition the same way that, say, licensing, educational, and certification requirements would. As al-Gharbi says elsewhere, “The amount of money symbolic capitalists take home every year is higher than for virtually anyone else in society,” and even “symbolic capitalists on the low end of the spectrum still tend to earn about as much or more than they would if they pursued work outside the symbolic professions.” Minimum wages would be non-binding for symbolic capitalists — they would neither gain additional income nor risk being priced out of their jobs by the higher wages. Higher taxes and redistributive transfers, however, would seem to be against the self-interest of symbolic capitalists. Given that these are disproportionately high-income people, they would also be the ones who would have to foot the bill for redistribution, rather than benefitting from it. So the idea that symbolic capitalists support redistribution over predistribution as a means to protect their own status doesn’t strike me as compelling. There is one possible exception. There are situations where al-Gharbi describes some symbolic capitalists who work for very low or no wages, particularly when attempting to break into journalism, and that this arrangement can actually be beneficial for them in the long run: The people who occupy the really low-paid positions within the symbolic professions (working for free or nearly so) are often able to persist in these roles while living in expensive cities (rather than relocating to somewhere more affordable but less glamorous and doing something else with their lives) because they are supported in part or in full by families or partners who tend to be relatively affluent, or because they have a nest egg of their own. Symbolic capitalists generally try to “stick it out” in these positions not because they lack other options but rather because they view even the unglamorous and poorly compensated work they’re doing as more valuable or meaningful than pursuing other forms of employment that might pay more in the short to medium term—and because they view these contingent jobs as stepping stones to positions with especially high pay, benefits, and social prestige. In the meantime, the lack of compensation helps reduce the number of competitors for higher-pay, higher-status positions by weeding out most of those who are not from elite backgrounds early in the process (because most nonelites are unable to sustain themselves for long on little to no pay). Working in these relatively lowly positions also helps elite aspirants feel as though they have “earned” any eventual high-paying posts they might secure. As a consequence, if they are able to outlast the other competitors and successfully make the leap to the higher echelons, they demonstrate little sympathy or solidarity with those occupying the positions they used to hold. For symbolic capitalists in this specific situation, it would be in their interests to oppose minimum wages for freelance journalists, because this would remove a barrier that makes journalism inaccessible as a career to people who aren’t of similarly elite backgrounds. But this seems very much like an edge case, and not something that would motivate symbolic capitalists in general to be skeptical of wage mandates. An alternative explanation for why more highly educated people are skeptical of predistributive policies is that there are good reasons to believe such policies will backfire. Throughout his book, al-Gharbi frequently cites workers in the gig economy — Uber drivers, DoorDash delivery workers, etc. — as being emblematic of people who are exploited by symbolic capitalists. Do symbolic capitalists, for their own benefit, oppose predistributive policies mandating stronger wages for DoorDash drivers? It’s possible. Lacking mind-reading abilities, I can’t truly know someone else’s motives. But it’s also possible that skepticism of such policies is rooted in basic economics. For example, I once wrote about how Seattle (a place frequently referenced by al-Gharbi as a symbolic capitalist hub) did, in fact, push through a mandate requiring DoorDash drivers to be paid more. The result, I said, could have been easily predicted by anyone who absorbed the lessons of Econ 101: Food delivery became more expensive, leading to fewer people placing food orders, while the prospect of increased pay led more people to become DoorDash drivers, resulting in more drivers attempting to catch fewer orders. The end result was that effective wages for DoorDash drivers significantly declined. As the drivers themselves described it, “They’re not telling the whole story,” Shagen said. “Assuming that you are working constantly, then yes, you’re going to be making that much money. But that’s not what’s happening right now. Because people are not ordering as much anymore. The tips are going down because they think we’re making all this money.” One driver shared how much he made on this week last year: $931. But this week, he only made $464.81. Lardizabal said their “bread and butter” is often South Lake Union, near Amazon. But KING 5’s visit to the area Sunday resulted in several conversations with bored delivery workers who reiterated their wages have been slashed. This brings me to another point of contention I have with al-Gharbi’s ventures into economic issues. As mentioned, he’s highly critical of the situation faced by gig workers and frequently describes them as exploited by symbolic capitalists. The way he describes things can often seem bit over the top to me. For example, he says, What are Uber and Lyft drivers, for instance? They are chauffeurs for people who cannot deign to drive themselves around, take public transportation, or even exert the minimal effort of hailing a cab. And of food delivery services, he writes, However, for large and growing numbers of symbolic capitalists, it is not enough to simply have others prepare food for us—we often insist that meals are rapidly delivered to our homes as well (as it is apparently too much for us to pick up the food ourselves, let alone actually dining at the restaurants we order from). This seems like a bit much to me. Indeed, when al-Gharbi worries about symbolic capitalists (including himself) that “we’ve likewise grown increasingly out of touch with the values and perspectives of ordinary Americans”, these statements of his could easily serve as an example of that. As al-Gharbi says elsewhere, people “who are genuinely vulnerable, marginalized, disadvantaged, or impoverished don’t think or talk in these ways.” I mentioned in one of my initial posts that al-Gharbi analyzes social phenomenon using a lens he calls analytic egalitarianism – by which he means the “behaviors of white and racial and ethnicity minorities, men and women, and LGBTQ and ‘cishet’ (cisgender, heterosexual) Americans will be discussed in equivalent terms.” As an example, he goes on to say “For instance, when racial and ethnic minorities demonstrate a preference to hire, promote, mentor, and otherwise do business with coethnics, this is frequently analyzed in terms of in-group solidarity or building and leveraging social capital, and these behaviors are lauded. When whites engage in the exact same behaviors, they tend to be analyzed in a completely different way—almost exclusively through the lenses of racism and discrimination—and those who engage in such behaviors are pathologized and denounced.” Those who employ analytic egalitarianism would reject these double standards in evaluation. I would suggest that when it comes to matter of economic class, al-Gharbi’s analysis could also benefit from analytic egalitarianism. Imagine speaking this way about an ordinary working-class person who decided to order some delivery from the local Domino’s while preparing to watch a weekend football game. Would we say to such a person, “I guess it’s just not enough for you to have someone else cook your meals for you — you can’t even deign to eat the food where it was made or even pick it up yourself, that’s just too much for you!” I can’t sign on to that – here, I am an analytic egalitarian. I don’t see any difference between Joe Sixpack ordering a pizza delivery on game day and Joseph Champagne ordering dinner from a Thai restaurant via UberEats. I would never speak so scornfully of the former — and for the same reasons, I see no reason to do so for the latter. Many of al-Gharbi’s criticisms of Uber (and similar app-based services) strike me as off the mark as well. (A good counterweight to the concerns he raises can be found in the work of Liya Palagashvili, a brilliant economist specializing in studying exactly these issues — see here for a general introduction to her work.) As part of his discussion of Uber, al-Gharbi makes what I think is another fundamental mistake when he says it is “the drivers from whom this wealth is derived.” It’s often easy for people to fall into thinking that the line-level workers are entirely or at least primarily responsible for creating the wealth of an industry. I’ve criticized this perspective here, but as it relates to Uber specifically, the flaw in this thinking was explained by this Uber driver far better than I could do myself. In my next post, I’ll offer my thoughts on al-Gharbi’s views of wokeness, both how it is defined and on his argument about whether we should be woke.   As an Amazon Associate, Econlib earns from qualifying purchases. (0 COMMENTS)

During the late 1990s a scientific paper investigating the link between the MMR vaccine and Autism was published in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet. Mayhem followed. Anti-vaccine attitudes increased, along with the presence of Measles. However, the paper’s finding were fabricated. Although the paper was later retracted by The Lancet, Pandora’s Box had been opened. America was infected with yet another wave of the anti-vaccine movement during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021, 1 in 12 Americans identified as an anti-vaxxer, and death from COVID-19 was 170 percent higher where vaccine hesitancy was more common. It has been over five years since the COVID-19 pandemic ravaged the United States, killing over 1.2 million people, and costing the American economy over $16 trillion. The pandemic revealed the weaknesses of public health institutions in communicating complex medical information while respecting individual freedom. Emily Oster, professor of Economics at Brown University, and New York Times bestselling author, argues during her sixth appearance on EconTalk that public health depends on delivering Americans the relevant information to make their own informed choices, not telling people what to do. Misinformation seems to have taken over the health world, while public health officials try to correct the record. Oster asserts that establishing the facts means that no information can be left out, including the potential side effects of treatments and limits to current scientific knowledge. Oster and Roberts acknowledge that there is a risk to telling the full story; some individuals may still avoid a potentially life-saving vaccine or perfectly safe medical treatment. But to Oster, nuanced information must be provided, because people have different preferences. Complete information combined with preferences creates room for individuals to make the right choices for them.  Oster also acknowledges that many people simply do not listen to public health officials, while citing the example of raw milk drinkers. Oster explains that the technological feat of pasteurization has saved millions of lives, as raw milk has regularly caused outbreaks of tuberculosis and food-borne diseases. Oster acknowledges that even though drinking raw milk is unsafe, some people will choose to do it regardless of what public health officials say. Failing to communicate with nuance removes the potential to reduce harm. Oster draws a comparison to her area of expertise, parenting- specifically, parents who co-sleep with their babies. Oster states that co-sleeping is incredibly dangerous, but even when people are presented with this information, many continue to do so. To Oster, navigating this issue requires acknowledging that people are not perfectly rational robots, and hence the pursuit of the next best outcome must be resorted to. Oster believes that communicating with parents how to more safely co-sleep with their babies, while  simultaneously acknowledging the risks, will lead to far safer outcomes as opposed to simply hoping parents will change their behavior. Roberts points out that these exact arguments show that public health officials should not be telling people what choices to make. Roberts and Oster agree that the decline in the trust of public health officials is due to a lack of transparency in acknowledging uncertainty alongside a failure to explain tradeoffs. For example, Oster finds that during the COVID pandemic, public health officials frequently changed their advice without explaining why, or were simply too cautious, such as within the rush to close schools. Oster herself came out against closing schools, believing in-person education to not pose a significant threat of spreading COVID. In retrospect, Oster finds that closing schools was an even bigger mistake than she thought at the time because of the profound negative effects on children’s educational and social development. Part of the reason I pushed this so hard in October of 2020 was it already seemed to me like this was really going to be very bad for kids and their learning. I think that’s proved to be right. I’ve continued a project in the wake of the pandemic about what’s happened to test scores, which especially in places that had closed schools–took an enormous hit during the pandemic. They’re crawling back, but we have not seen a recovery. And it’s now many school years from then. I think that there are cohorts of kids who are going to be affected forever. Roberts believes this issue to be a good example of how economists uniquely analyze issues through thinking about the opportunity costs of the various alternatives. Oster and Roberts do not refute the reality that fully opening schools during a pandemic would have had some inevitable cost of life to it but agree that the opportunity cost of a much higher level of social dysfunction was not the preferable alternative. Oster adds that activists who thought they were protecting the disadvantaged did not consider the fact that impoverished children are the most adversely affected by school closures, showing how digging deeper than the immediate costs and benefits can shift analysis towards developing comprehensive policy decisions. There is no consensus on the public health lessons from the pandemic. COVID remains a contentious issue with deep partisan divisions. Mistakes from public health officials and politicians, combined with failures from the American public in receiving medical information produced an institutional response where neither the best, nor the next best alternative was the outcome. Emily Oster makes the case that nuance is the lesson from the pandemic, it is the key to ensuring history does not repeat itself during future public health crises. Nuance allows public health officials to effectively combat misinformation while acknowledging the gaps in scientific knowledge. Neither was done during the pandemic, and it resulted in a loss of trust in public health institutions, and a consequent anti-vaccine wave that killed thousands of people. The path forward is to enable both those who are receptive and skeptical of information from public health authorities to make the decisions that are best for them.   Related EconTalk Episodes: Brian Deer on Autism, Vaccination, and Scientific Fraud Emily Oster on the Pandemic Ed Yong on Science, Replication, and Journalism Emily Oster on Cribsheet Vinny Prasad on the Pandemic   Related Liberty Fund Network Content: Economic Lessons from COVID-19, by David Henderson, at EconLog The Public Health Leviathan, by G. Patrick Lynch, at Law and Liberty The Bias in Health Science, by Richard Gunderman, at Law and Liberty The Economic Approach to Public Health, by Pierre Lemieux, at EconLog Lauren Hall on the Medicalization of Birth and Death, The Great Antidote Podcast, at Adam Smith Works   Kevin Lavery is a graduate student in the M.S. in Economics program at Georgetown University. He holds dual Bachelor of Science degrees in Economic Analysis and Political Science from Western Carolina University, where he graduated in Spring 2025. (0 COMMENTS)

A new paper by Elliot Ash (ETH Zurich), Daniel L Chen (Toulouse School of Economics), and Suresh Naidu (Columbia University) in the Quarterly Journal of Economics discusses the impact of the Manne Economics Institute for Federal Judges on judicial rulings (“Ideas Have Consequences: The Impact of Law and Economics on American Justice“).  From their abstract: We find that after attending economics training, participating judges use more economics language in their opinions, rule against regulatory agencies more often, and impose more severe criminal sentences.  We argue that economics, as a rigorous social science, was especially effective in persuading judges. The Manne Economics Institute for Federal Judges is a long-running program started by Henry Manne in 1976 to introduce judges to economic reasoning.  It continues to this day, the modern incarnation run by the Law & Economics Center at the Antonin Scalia Law School.[1]  An important thing to note is that the lectures given and the participants selection were non-partisan.  Both Republican- and Democratic-nominated judges participated, being chosen on a first-come, first-served basis.  Further, lectures were given by prominent economists like Milton Freidman, Paul Samuelson, Armen Alchian, Harold Demsetz, Orley Ashenfelter, and Martin Feldstein.  Imagine learning economics from that line-up!  Two Nobel Prize winners (Samuelson, Freidman), two who should have won Nobel Prizes (Alchian, Demsetz), and two who could still win Nobel Prizes (Ashenfelter, Feldstein). Manne’s efforts to break down the silos between disciplines stands as a testament to the importance of disciplinary engagement.  The judges used their new insights in their rulings, which in turn have continued to influence modern opinions.  Further, the classes helped make economic arguments more intelligible to the judges. As the late, great Ruth Bader Ginsburg said, the classes “lift[ed] the veil on such mysteries as regression analyses” (see page 7 of the linked paper).  When expert testimony is obscure and technical, it has little influence on judges.  Rather, the de-siloing turned such wizardly experts into teachers for the judges[2], allowing them to improve the quality of their rulings and make them less reliant on non-judicial factors. The specialization of knowledge (a natural consequence of the division of labor) is a great thing.  Just like the division of labor, the specialization of knowledge deepens our knowledge base, leading to more and more gains.  But one must be aware of the interconnectedness of knowledge.  Insights can be gained from all sorts of disciplines, even those seemingly unrelated.  This empirical test of the Manne program supports the need for breaking down silos and rejecting the “just stay in your lane!” mindset.   —— [1] Full disclosure: the LEC also runs a parallel program called The Law Institute for Economics Professors.  I was a participant in that program this past June. [2] This metaphor comes from Roger Koppl and E. James Cowan’s 2010 paper “A Battle of Forensic Experts is not a Race to the Bottom.” (Review of Political Economy 22(2): 235-262 (0 COMMENTS)

We’re bringing back price theory with our series on Price Theory problems with Professor Bryan Cutsinger. You can see all of Cutsinger’s problems and solutions by subscribing to his EconLog RSS feed. 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: Russ buys 5 sirloins per week. True or false: If the price of sirloin rises by $5 dollars apiece, and if Russ’ preferences and income remain constant, he will have $25 a year less to spend on other things. (0 COMMENTS)

A revolt is building across the United States against property taxes. From Florida to North Dakota, states have attempted or are attempting to abolish them. The anger driving this movement comes from two sources. One is the belief that you are being taxed for living in your house. “Is the property yours or are you just renting from the government?” Florida governor Ron DeSantis asked. “Boiled down to its very essence, fulfilling the promise of personal liberty is impossible if you can’t actually own a piece of real property,” Pennsylvania state Rep. Russ Diamond argues. The second driving force is that property tax burdens are often tied to the notional market value of an asset—your house—rather than to the owner’s ability to pay or the cost of providing the services the tax finances. They function like a wealth tax, which isn’t good. “Seniors on Social Security in 2025 received a 2.5% cost of living adjustment,” a Minnesota resident notes, “yet my city property tax increased by 10% and 48% over the past five years.” The first of these points is based on a misapprehension (albeit an understandable one, given the second point). Property taxes are payments for locally provided and consumed goods and services. Property taxes are not a fee for living in your house, but a payment for locally provided and consumed goods and services, like schools, police, parks, the fire department, etc. If advocates of property tax abolition are willing to forego these goods and services, then there is no problem. But few of them are. The question then becomes: how will these goods and services be paid for? The ideal is to charge for a local park the same way we would a water park, or the fire department, the same way we would pest control. But “public goods” – though less ubiquitous than often claimed – do exist, so simply paying for services isn’t always possible. A squad car cruising the street deters criminals from burgling number 48 and number 50 (it is “nonrivalrous,” in the jargon), whether number 48 pays for it or not (it is “nonexcludable”)—and whether they are still paying their mortgage or not. In these cases, if you want the locally provided and consumed service, you must pay for it somehow. Local service fee burdens should be based on the cost of their provision The payment method commonly used for locally provided and consumed goods and services is commonly called “property taxes,”  and they are frequently driven by the value of your house. So the above misconceptions about property taxes are understandable.  If we deal with these misconceptions and genuine problems with property taxes, we can construct something fairer that might garner more support, or at least tolerance. As a first step towards reforming the system of paying for locally provided and consumed goods and services, they ought to be renamed. When Margaret Thatcher abolished the “rates” system – which was essentially a property tax – she called its replacement the Community Charge. While this was hugely controversial in its application, it was an accurate reflection of what the payment actually was. A second step would be to break the link between changes in the burden of these payments and changes in the notional value of the payer’s property. The burden should change as the cost of providing the goods and services changes. A local Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR), which limits the growth of government spending to something like the growth rate of inflation plus population, for example, would help contain Community Charge burdens by containing local government spending. Finally, once the cost of these locally provided and consumed goods and services has been determined, there are a number of ways to apportion it between taxable units. One, closest to the current system, would be to allocate it according to each unit’s share of the total property value in the locality. Another, Thatcher’s idea, sought to approximate a private sector fee as closely as possible by apportioning the cost by the number of people in each unit. Some taxes are better than others Most people who want to abolish the property tax want to keep the locally provided and consumed goods and services that these taxes finance. There are several proposals for how to finance them, ranging from handouts from state governments to levies on migrants’ wires to foreign countries. While those pushing these schemes often present as “conservative” because they are pushing to abolish a tax, unless they are also pushing to abolish the spending, they are, in reality, merely seeking that free lunch which a wise man told us does not exist. There are notably few takers among the abolitionist ranks for the hefty sales tax hikes that could fill the gap. Those who consume goods and services, as far as possible, ought to be those who pay for them. (0 COMMENTS)

Many libertarians and classical liberals consider the 19th century in the West as the most liberal epoch in history. We can certainly see stains, notably slavery and later Jim Crow, as well as colonialism (think about the control of trade from the colonies, which Adam Smith criticized in his 1776 Wealth of Nations). In many countries, moreover, the liberal century started late (in France, for example) or ended early (in Germany). Even in the UK, the Corn Laws were only abolished in the middle of the century, and British libertarians were pessimistic as the end of the century approached (see Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi’s The Individualists, which I reviewed in Regulation). Yet, for Anthony de Jasay, whose thought is strongly anchored in the “private forteresses” of private property, the 19th century was clearly the era of liberalism, even if fleeting. In his book Against Politics (see my Econlib review), he wrote: It is to history taking its time that we owe thanks for the brilliant but passing nineteenth-century interlude in Western Civilization, with limited government and assured-looking private sovereignty of everybody’s own decisions over crucial domains of economic and social life. The UK was among the countries where the advance of liberalism was most promising. In his English History 1914–1945 (Oxford University Press, 1965), historian, journalist and broadcaster A.J.P. Taylor described his country on the onset of World War I. Was he influenced by similar observations in John Maynard Keynes’s 1919 book The Economic Consequences of the Peace? In any event, the opening paragraph of Taylor’s book is memorable and worth quoting nearly in extenso; it suggests that the promises of liberalism have been seriously betrayed: Until August 1914, a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police. Unlike the countries of the European continent, the state did not require its citizens to perform military service. … Only those helped the state who wished to do so. The Englishman paid taxes on a modest scale … rather less than 8 per cent. of national income. The rest of the paragraph shows both the emergence of an interventionist trend and that the British were still generally freer than nearly everybody in the West—and even than everybody now. The interventionist trend was not so much apparent in elementary public education and in last-resort social assistance as in the fact that some adults (mainly women) were deemed incapable of liberty in certain areas of life: The state intervened to prevent the citizen from eating adulterated food or contracting certain infectious diseases. It imposed safety rules in factories, and prevented women, and adult males in some industries, from working excessive hours. The state saw to it that children received education up to the age of 13. Since 1 January 1909, it provided a meagre pension for the needy over the age of 70. Since 1911, it helped to ensure certain classes of workers against sickness and unemployment. This tendency towards more state action was increasing. Expenditure on social services had roughly doubled since the Liberals took office in 1905. Still, broadly speaking, the state acted only to help those who could not help themselves. It left the adult citizen alone. Taylor is a controversial figure. He had shortly been a member of the British Communist Party in his youth and remained a lifelong socialist. But is it possible that the quote above mainly reflects something that we still observe? I mean that socialists don’t understand that individual liberty is impossible without economic freedom, just as conservatives have problems understanding that economic freedom is inseparable from individual liberty. According to David Pryce-Jones writing in The New Criterion, though, it’s worse than that: Taylor was also a fellow-traveler of the Soviet regime and a Nazi sympathizer—anything but the opposite of individual sovereignty! He seems to have gone through a whole palette of collectivist ideologies. So, his description of English liberty before WWI was probably an incrimination. At any rate, we can read his description as close to what individual liberty should be against all forms of authoritarianism on the right or on the left. ****************************** A London Underground station in the late 19th century, as viewed by ChatGPT (0 COMMENTS)

Years ago, my father offered me some advice. (Many such instances, but I have a specific case in mind.) When in class, he told me, never be afraid to raise your hand and ask questions or seek clarification on some point you don’t understand. People are often reluctant to do this, he said, because they’re afraid of seeming like they’re slower than their classmates. When a teacher pauses and asks “Are there any questions?” and nobody else around you has any, it’s easy to feel like everyone else is up to speed and you’ll stick out as falling behind. But, if everyone else in class also feels that way, then there can both be lots of people with lots of questions, but nobody raising their hand. Plus, there was an extra benefit, he told me. He asked, “Have you ever been in class and been confused by something, but someone else asked about it and you were glad that they did?” The answer, of course, was yes. And that was an extra reason to ask questions. Doing so would give me the chance to be that guy — by asking a question, I might also be helping other people who needed clarification but were too nervous to ask get the help they needed too. On that last point, my dad was speaking like an economist, albeit without the jargon. In economic jargon, asking questions in had the chance to create positive externalities. I might gain additional understanding for myself, but other people could benefit in the same way. Because of this, individually people might undervalue asking questions, leading to too few questions in class being asked. Pointing this out was a way to try to encourage me to internalize the externality — to consider that if I’m feeling confused on some point, it’s likely that at least a few others are as well, and that should increase my willingness to ask questions. The other point ties back to my earlier posting on preference falsification. The hesitance to ask questions in a classroom setting for fear of seeming like you’re not keeping up with everyone is another case where people might falsify their preferences. Publicly, students will express that they are up to speed and need no additional information, while privately desiring extra clarification. If each individual thinks they are the only one who is feeling confused, and is worried about seeming foolish compared to everyone else, then we can end up in a scenario where everyone privately wants extra explanation but publicly expresses a desire to keep moving ahead. An iconoclast is someone who loudly and boldly takes stances far outside of conventional (expressed) public opinion. Iconoclasts can attract a lot of criticism. On the other hand, in situations where there is widespread preference falsification, the only way to break out of that is for at least some people to be willing to noticeably make their private beliefs publicly known. Each person who does so makes it just a little bit easier for the next person to do so as well. The first people to do so may face heavy criticism — even attempts at cancelation — but iconoclasts often revel in the controversy rather than being deterred by it. There are upsides and downsides to this. In the worst case, we have trolls — people who say outrageous things simply for the purpose of causing outrage, and who revel in doing so. On the other hand, in at least some cases, people who are genuinely iconoclastic can start the process that breaks the spell of preference falsification. I have no doubt that trolls outnumber iconoclasts. But despite this, the value of open and free expression is not diminished. Even though most new ideas are terrible, some will be real breakthroughs. We don’t have a way of identifying in advance which will be which — because doing so would require us to know in advance what future experience will show. As Yogi Berra once said, prediction is hard, especially about the future. A parallel can be made with the work done by venture capitalists. They know that most of the ventures they support will turn out to be flops and will fail — but just a few here and there will turn out to be giant successes. There’s no way to know in advance which will be which — if they knew that, then they’d only invest their money in those rare few and not bother with all the rest. But because they don’t — and can’t — know which is which, they invest very broadly to make sure those few good ideas can be found and brought out. The same is true in the marketplace of ideas. Of all the ideas put forth that are drastically outside the (apparent) social consensus, most will probably just be duds and the people who advocate them likely trolls who just want to get a rise out of people. But some few will be different — and have the potential to make a commonly held but commonly hidden belief more freely expressed. We don’t know which ideas will be which, and most will probably be the former, but there only way to find the latter is to let all ideas out into the open. (0 COMMENTS)

Why are Super Bowl ads so good for launching certain kinds of new products? Why do we all drive on the same side of the road? And why, despite laughing and crying together, do we often misread what others think? According to bestselling author and Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, it all comes down to common knowledge, or the phenomenon that happens when everyone knows that everyone else knows […] The post Steven Pinker on Common Knowledge appeared first on Econlib.

After spending ten posts (beginning here) outlining Musa al-Gharbi’s arguments in his book We Have Never Been Woke, it’s time to move on to my evaluation of those arguments. In my first post discussing this, I covered al-Gharbi’s claim that elite overproduction is an important cause of “Awokenings.” Today I want to explore how thinking about incentives and political coalitions might help us evaluate al-Gharbi’s explanations. Bootleggers and Baptists Another point in al-Gharbi’s argument is that, in the guise of social justice activism, woke activists promote policies that benefit themselves, but are harmful to the poor and vulnerable, as a means of protecting their own status. He shows that when many of the policies associated with progressivism (or wokeism) today were first introduced during the first Great Awokening. These included welfare and social aid programs, education requirements, increased and more rigorously enforced regulations, licensing and certification laws, zoning and development regulations, and technocratic economic management. As al-Gharbi notes, the early progressive movement originally pursued these policies as a means of ensuring high-status social positions would be kept out of reach of the “wrong” kind of people (women and racial and religious minorities in particular) and as a means of bringing about eugenicist goals. This creates an interesting situation. The goals and motivations of modern progressives are very different from the explicitly racist, classist, and eugenicist goals of the early 20th-century progressive movement. Yet in pursuit of outcomes that are the opposite of those intended by early progressives, modern progressives tend to advocate…basically the same set of policies. There are a few ways we might square this circle. The most uncharitable is to suggest that the goals of progressives never changed, and the movement is still intent on keeping the “deplorables” in their place. In other words, that modern progressives are deliberately dishonest about their goals. Another possible explanation is the bootleggers and Baptists approach: Some progressives are Baptists, and genuinely believe that, say, occupational licensing laws are beneficial on net and their absence would bring about all manner of terrible outcomes. Others, however, cynically use licensing laws to protect incumbents and shut people out of upward mobility, as in the case of Sandy Meadows, described here by George Will: Meadows was a Baton Rouge widow who had little education and no resources but was skillful at creating flower arrangements, which a grocery store hired her to do. Then Louisiana’s Horticulture Commission pounced. It threatened to close the store as punishment for hiring an unlicensed flower arranger. Meadows failed to get a license, which required a written test and the making of four flower arrangements in four hours, arrangements judged by licensed florists functioning as gatekeepers to their own profession, restricting the entry of competitors. Meadows, denied reentry into the profession from which the government had expelled her, died in poverty, but Louisianans were protected by their government from the menace of unlicensed flower arrangers. But Musa al-Gharbi’s explanation is that the proverbial bootlegger and Baptist are one and the same. The woke want to be upwardly socially mobile and protect their status — their inner bootlegger. But they also want to bring about egalitarian goals — their inner Baptist. When there’s a conflict between their inner bootlegger and Baptist, the woke behave like bootleggers and speak like Baptists – and construct narratives to convince others, but mostly themselves, that their behavior is also Baptist in its motivation as well. I think there some truth to this analysis. But, how much of the variance does it explain? I’m still skeptical that it explains much about why modern progressives support the policies of they do. Consider one particular policy that was originally, and for a long time, advocated for specifically on the grounds that it would serve as a barrier to entry to keep “undesirables” such as racial minorities and women unemployed: the minimum wage. As Thomas Leonard documented in his book Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era, what many economists now cite as one of the most damaging results of the minimum wage – how it disproportionally drives the most vulnerable people out of work – was originally considered to be the minimum wage’s primary benefit by progressives. Progressives today continue to be particularly aggressive in their support for increasing the minimum wage – but it’s far from clear to me that their modern support for that policy is ultimately rooted in the initial justification. Though al-Gharbi isn’t quite explicit on this point, there are a handful of passages in the book that lead me to believe he’s in favor of increasing the minimum wage. Certainly, however, al-Gharbi does not desire to ensure the most vulnerable people be shut out of upward mobility. Supposing I’m right about al-Gharbi’s support for an increased minimum wage, it naturally raises the question – if al-Gharbi can support this particular policy today for reasons contrary to the initial gatekeeping purposes it was meant to serve, can’t the same be true today of progressive who favor, say, licensing, certification, and educational requirements? And even if I’m wrong about al-Gharbi’s support for minimum wage increases, surly it’s not hard to imagine why progressives today might support that policy even while opposing the goals for which it was originally instated. Indeed, I suspect the vast majority of progressive simply have no idea that displacing the poor and vulnerable was the original goal of so many of the policies they support. I can’t help but wonder if there is a potentially much simpler explanation underneath it. But first, a digression into a different Scott Alexander post. In the post I have in mind, Scott Alexander describes (without necessarily endorsing) “the theory that the fear of disease is the root of all conservativism.” This elaborate theory, he points out, actually has a lot of fancy research supporting it: There has been a lot of really good evolutionary psychology done on the extent to which pathogen stress influences political opinions. Some of this is done on the societal level, and finds that societies with higher germ loads are more authoritarian and conservative. This research can be followed arbitrarily far – like, isn’t it interesting that the most liberal societies in the world are the Scandinavian countries in the very far north where disease burden is low, and the most traditionalist-authoritarian ones usually in Africa or somewhere where disease burden is high? One even sees a similar effect within countries, with northern US states being very liberal and southern states being very conservative. Other studies have instead focused on differences between individuals within society – we know that religious conservatives are people with stronger disgust reactions and priming disgust reactions can increase self-reported conservative political beliefs – with most people agreeing disgust reactions are a measure of the “behavioral immune system” triggered by fear of germ contamination. He also proposes the idea of another “Grand Narrative” underlying conservative thinking on social policy: The Narrative is something like “We Americans are right-thinking folks with a perfectly nice culture. But there are also scary foreigners who hate our freedom and wish us ill. Unfortunately, there are also traitors in our ranks – in the form of the Blue Tribe – who in order to signal sophistication support foreigners over Americans and want to undermine our culture. They do this by supporting immigration, accusing anyone who is too pro-American and insufficiently pro-foreigner of “racism”, and demanding everyone conform to “multiculturalism” and “diversity”, as well as lionizing any group within America that tries to subvert the values of the dominant culture. Our goal is to minimize the subversive power of the Blue Tribe at home, then maintain isolation from foreigners abroad, enforced by a strong military if they refuse to stay isolated.” Both of these grand and complex theories Alexander was proposing were meant to explain a particular question – specifically, the difference between Republicans and Democrats on the issue of how to handle the possibility of an Ebola outbreak in 2014. At that time, the position among Republicans was that the disease should be contained through travel restrictions and strict quarantines of those who might have been potentially exposed. And the position among Democrats was that even suggesting the use of even very limited quarantines or lockdowns to contain the spread of disease was an unconscionable violation of civil liberties, was harmful to the poor and vulnerable, and was intrinsically racist. As Alexander put it, What’s more, everyone supporting the quarantine has been on the right, and everyone opposing on the left. Weird that so many people suddenly develop strong feelings about a complicated epidemiological issue, which can be exactly predicted by their feelings about everything else. What’s interesting is this was written in 2014, which, dear reader, means it was written about a half-decade BC (Before Covid). And when Covid came around, suddenly the partisan divide flipped, with Democrats being overwhelmingly likely to embrace even widespread lockdowns and quarantines, and Republicans taking the opposite view. (Libertarians, by contrast, were consistently on the “oppose quarantines” side for both occasions.) This is pretty difficult to square with either of Alexander’s Grand Theories. However, in the same post, he does suggest there might be a simpler explanation: Is it just random? A couple of Republicans were coincidentally the first people to support a quarantine, so other Republicans felt they had to stand by them, and then Democrats felt they had to oppose it, and then that spread to wider and wider circles? And if by chance a Democrat had proposed quarantines before a Republican, the situation would have reversed itself? Could be. I think this is ultimately a much stronger explanation than the fancy theories. And to put a bit more flesh on this – while there was a lot of screaming and yelling among the Extremely Online Crowd during 2014, the whole episode was fairly short-lived and had little impact on most people’s lives. (I suspect many people reading this post today forgot that there was ever an Ebola controversy in 2014.) As a result, neither position really “took” as being the “official position” for either party. However, Covid had an overwhelming social impact and left nobody’s life untouched. As a result, when that event occurred, many issues that were never politically valanced before became durably coded as the “conservative” or “progressive” view. In the same way, it seems to me that a simpler explanation is that progressives initially recommended a variety of social and economic policies for particular reasons at the time. But over time, those policy positions themselves became durably coded as “progressive.” And, over decades, people who thought of themselves as progressive would simply adopt whatever policies were coded with the proper political valance. They weren’t progressive because they supported those policies – they supported those policies because they considered themselves to be progressive. As Arnold Kling would say, we choose what to believe based on who we believe. I think in most cases people support the policies that are coded as favorable to their political ideology, rather than supporting an ideology because they deeply understand the history and impact of various policies associated with that ideology, or even an understanding of how the policy would impact them personally. To be clear, this is not to say I think al-Gharbi’s explanation is completely wrong. But I think it does explain at least some of the variance, and it represents a genuine contribution to understanding how the world works. I’m just not sure I’m convinced that the desire to protect one’s social class is a dominating factor compared to a desire to defend policies favorably coded by one’s political ideology. In my next post, I’ll be examining on some of al-Gharbi’s commentary on economics, and economic policy.   As an Amazon Associate, Econlib earns from qualifying purchases. (1 COMMENTS)

It’s easy to doomscroll these days. AI, it appears, is coming for our jobs. Even occupations that were previously considered an easy path to a middle-class lifestyle, like lawyer and radiologist, may be subject to the AI chopping block. Yet these stories, despite their flashy headlines, are missing nuance. They examine the seen (and likely) consequences of the AI revolution, but are missing the unseen “what comes next” part of the story. Every historical episode of creative destruction involves both creativity and destruction. Yet current news stories are focusing only on the destruction.  We might not know how AI will revolutionize the American workforce, but past episodes of similar technological upheaval suggest that the future will be brighter than we can imagine.  Recent headlines are, indeed, scary. Consider the following:  May 12, 2025: “For Silicon Valley, AI isn’t just about replacing some jobs. It’s about replacing all of them” – The Guardian June 18, 2025: “AI Will Replace Amazon Jobs. CEO Andy Jassy Confirms Workers’ Worst Fears.” – Barrons July 3, 2025: “Ford’s CEO is the latest exec to warn that AI will wipe out half of white-collar jobs” – Business Insider  July 19, 2025: “AI will take your job in the next 18 months. Here’s your survival guide.” – Market Watch   These headlines aren’t from some alarmist blogger, sheltering in a tin-hat corner of the internet. These are from reputable news sources with large readerships. And they’re causing an artificial panic. Consider the Amazon headline. Amazon has been an industry leader in automation, yet employment at the company has continued to grow unabated. Currently, Amazon employs more than 1.5 million people. That’s up from 17,000 in 2007, and nearly double its 2019 employment figure. This employment growth has happened despite the fact that the company currently has more than a million robots in its workplaces. The jobs those robots have replaced are primarily those involving menial work or repetitive tasks, freeing up labor for more valuable pursuits. While CEO Andy Jassy recently announced that AI will likely lead to future job cuts at the company, similar claims were made in 2012 when Amazon acquired robotics company Kiva Systems. Employment grew unabated after this acquisition.  These headlines also sound suspiciously like those circulating during a previous public conversation in which technology threatened to take all the jobs away. In the mid-1990s, the internet began to move from the plaything of tech hobbyists to a central part of work and education. Jobs that had previously been done by human processors were increasingly outsourced to data processors.   In 1995, Jeremy Rifkin published his book The End of Work, which argued that the dawn of the information technology age would create a massive and structural decline in jobs. He suggested that as many as two-thirds of all existing jobs could eventually be eliminated by machines. Jobs in manufacturing, agriculture, and clerical work were particularly vulnerable to this type of technology-based outsourcing.  To be fair, machines did take over many of those jobs. But we didn’t have massive, enduring, structural unemployment as a result. Instead, new jobs emerged.  Because I’m writing a piece on how AI won’t replace all our jobs, I asked ChatGPT to help me figure out how to identify some jobs that didn’t exist in 1990 and now have a significant number of employees. It very helpfully pointed me to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics. Here are a handful of new job categories and their current employment figures from that database: Software and Web Developers, Programmers, and Testers: 2,154,370 employees Database and Network Administrators and Architects: 633,540 employees Computer and Information Analysts: 677,230 employees Indeed, the full set of “Computer and Mathematical Occupations” has exploded since internet adoption began accelerating in the late 1990s. The entire category of “Computer Occupations” currently has an employment figure of 4,786,660.  These broad categories include a range of fulfilling jobs and occupations, including app developer, social media manager, cloud architect, cybersecurity analyst, and influencer. In past eras, many of the individuals pursuing these opportunities would have been good candidates for once-stable jobs in law, accounting, or manufacturing.  In 1897, Mark Twain heard a rumor that he’d died. He sent a letter to the New York Journal to clear up the matter, stating that “the report of my death was an exaggeration.” Not only are the reports of AI’s employment “death toll” an exaggeration, but they’re missing information about the critical second act of the play. After the destruction comes the creativity, and the story of the internet can give us clues about the future of work in this technological episode as well.    As an Amazon Associate, Econlib earns from qualifying purchases. (0 COMMENTS)