Liberty

Skills and creativity

Jacques Delacroix Liberty , ,

Below is an excerpt from my book I Used to Be French: an Immature Autobiography. You can buy it on amazon here.

My mother was pretty much a part-time monster but she had big talents and one immense virtue.

She had been trained as a seamstress in a good technical high-school. Sometimes, when my father was working at night, she would hustle the five children through a hasty dinner of coffee with milk, bread, butter, jam and cheese and then, send everybody to his or her room. (She had to do that behind my father’s back because he belonged to the old French school that believes that if you don’t get two five-course, balanced meals a day, you will sicken in a short time.) She would lock herself in the dining room with fabric, her sewing machine, and her big scissors. By morning café au lait time, she would have a new outfit of extreme chic with appropriate gloves and detachable collars. Once, she produced in two nights matching tweed overcoats and golf pants for the three boys. Even little boys could see that the outfits were exquisitely elegant though the pants felt scratchy. No matter, we had to wear them to church and for a part of Sunday afternoon.

As long as she had defenseless offspring at home, my mother never saw a children’s costume event she did not like. She would enter as many of her children as would submit. The last time it happened to me, I was eleven and tall for my age. She dressed me up as a Roman legionnaire, with a cardboard armor ingenuously painted with stove silver coating. It almost killed me, not the armor, the embarrassment. I never wore a costume again until I was twenty-five though I must admit I have retained a certain flair. At least, I was never one of those social cowards who go to a Halloween party in jeans and keep a cowboy hat in their car just in case everyone else is costumed. (You know who you are, spineless scum!)

I was aware early that my mother used her talent to gain face and to pull rank on almost all other neighborhood women. Nevertheless, watching her cut and sew through the glass door exposed me early to the concept of creativity in general, and of visual creativity, in particular. I also picked up the broad notion that creativity not served by solid skills is meaningless. In my fifties, I began to paint, without hesitation although I am quite critical, because I had retained from observing her two forceful ideas: Skills will reveal talent, if any; with practice, skills can only improve.

My mother’s living example of inventiveness was at the antipodes of the narrow, sober petty-bourgeois values my whole environment projected. It belied what she was trying to teach her children every day. She contradicted with her hands what she  preached with her mouth.

A beautiful bit of small world mojo

Rick Weber Liberty , ,

The first time I went to Boston was to look for an apartment. On my last day I was hanging around Downtown crossing. Gmail confirms it was June 12th, 2010. I was having a polish sausage, and this guy approached me. I don’t remember what we talked about, but we chatted for a few minutes. Good town. That sort of thing is exactly what I’d expect in SLO (Central Coast California) or Santa Cruz… but this was in a place with a skyline! Anyways, he wasn’t in a cult and I didn’t get robbed.

Flash forward to some time that fall. I was in Inman Square and saw a chair left on the curb for anyone who needed a chair. I needed a chair. I lived in Union Square, but that was just the next neighborhood north (if I lived on Prospect Hill, there’s no way that chair would have made it, but I might have realized that before picking it up). So I pick up this chair and walk. Google Maps puts my route at 0.5 miles. I got a couple blocks short of that before I crap out. Fortunately I’ve got a place to sit down. So I’m sitting in an easy chair on the sidewalk, hauling it forward a few yards, and plopping down again.

Across the street, someone’s trying to get my attention. He comes over, and he’s the guy I’d randomly met months earlier. He lives across the street from me! And he helps me carry home my chair. We have a beer and chat.

Flash forward to Thanksgiving of that fall. I’m hanging out by myself. This is my first Thanksgiving alone. Neighbor guy knocks on my door and invites me over. Inside are a bunch of his musician friends, and this fantastic music is coming from one of the bedrooms. An impromptu jam session is playing the sort of dusty sounding blues I’m enamored with at the time. After they finish I mention that it sounds like this African blues guitarist, Ali Farka Toure. It turns out I pronounced his name right, because I’m immediately informed that his son was playing guitar just now!

Just now I was listening to Spotify, and a song reminds me of another song which led me to the song above from that album I’d bought when I lived in SLO and was trying to be worldly. Absolutely fantastic music, a mish-mash of cultural influences bouncing back and forth around the world, and I got to experience something of it first hand because of the grace and generosity of a fellow human.

But more than that, a mix of technology, globalization, and absolutely random chance created that beautiful memory and triggered it again just now. We live in a beautiful world.

On How Poor France Was in the 18th Century?

Vincent Geloso Liberty , , ,

I have recently completed a working paper which has now been submitted (thank you a great many scholars who provided comments notably Judy Stephenson and Mark Koyama). That paper basically went back modestly on one datapoint in the work of Robert Allen which was published in 2001 in Explorations in Economic History. 

Probably one of the greatest ten papers in the field of economic history for the last twenty-five years, Allen’s article has had a tremendous influence. It introduced a new method of comparing real wages at a time when very few goods were traded internationally and most prices were determined at the local level. In using what we now call “welfare ratios” (which are akin to poverty lines), Allen managed to compare many countries before the industrial revolution.

My entire research agenda has been to improve on this stupendous work and to increase the constellation of observations as part of an “uncoordinated” (many scholars are working on this separately) effort to map living standards prior to the mid 19th century. The main part of my agenda is to add Canada and devote more attention to the important issue of relative prices in comparing old world (high labor to land ratios) and new world (high land to labor ratios) economies. In the process of comparing parts of the world, I had to re-examine some data for some established countries. One of my reconsiderations was for Strasbourg in France where I found that Allen might have misclassified wages of skilled workers which included in-kind payments as unskilled workers receiving full compensation in money wages.

When I enacted corrections to the money wage rate, I found that the Alsace region where Strasbourg is located had living standards more or less in line with those observed in Paris (rather than living standards at less than half the level of Paris). If you’re interested, the note is available here.

Note: For those who are interested, I really recommend reading this short article in Cliometrica by Sharp and Weisdorf who also discuss comparisons between France and England (and how it may relate to topics like the French Revolution).

The Ottoman Empire and Libertarianism

Jacques Delacroix Liberty , , , , , ,

Every so often libertarians ask, in a speculative mode, whether the re-establishment of the Ottoman Empire would not be a formula for peace in the troubled Middle East. The question is interesting on several counts, one of which is that the regions affected by the Islamic State today, Arab and Kurdish alike, plus all of southern Iraq, plus Kuwait, plus Jordan and Palestine (including the current Israel), plus, more loosely, all of the Arabian Peninsula, were more or less under Ottoman/Turkish control until the end of World War One.

Libertarians allude to the “millet” system under which many different ethnic or national groups co-habitated peacefully for several centuries. Those are pretty much the same groups that have been eviscerating one another for several years and pretty much every time a strong and dictatorial leader does not clamp down on them. There is one large fault in this happy vision: the attempted genocide of the Armenians begun under full Ottoman power in 1895 and nearly completed as the empire was falling apart during World War One.

The millet system of governance should be of interest to libertarians who generally wish for less government, less expensive government, more responsive government and, especially, less intrusive government. Under the millet system, at least when it was fully functional, the Ottoman governor of say, the province of the empire that now encompasses Lebanon and Western Syria would summon yearly the Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church. He would address him as follows:

“Your Eminence is well I trust, and his family, and I hope that his sons are brave a wise. I am happy to hear that Almighty God has blessed Your Eminence with many grandchildren. And I am told your community is thriving. Now, based on the figures your office gave me and based on my own information, I think that the Greek Orthodox community must deliver to our master the Sultan, one hundred pounds of gold and three hundred fit young men of military age this year. Agreed? Thank you for your visit and may you and your community, Your Eminence, continue to prosper under the benign, enlightened and fair rule of our great sultan.”

Then, the governor would ask over the main Ayatollah of the Shiite Muslims and deliver himself of a similar oration. And so on.

But I must pause for a confession. The quote marks around the above monologue are metaphorical. I am not reproducing a real monologue. Something like the monologue above must have been delivered thousands of times but I must admit I was not present to hear any of them. (On the other hand, I spent time in Turkey on vacation ten years ago and I regularly drink coffee with Turks. And, I like Turks in general.)

Again, the millet system is a good historical example of extreme decentralization and of minimally intrusive government. It was also very inexpensive to administer. It had little permanent bureaucracy to speak of that could grow upon itself and reproduce itself endlessly thus forever shrinking the area of individual autonomy. At the same time as the comparable Hapsburg Empire was developing a large bureaucracy, at the time when territorially much smaller France was perfecting the art of centralized bureaucracy, at the time when the small Kingdom of Prussia was developing the very model of modern bureaucracy that was to become a model for the whole world, the millet system endured in the Ottoman Empire. In general, the Ottoman government was small and it seemed to be treading lightly on the land, you might say. It sounded a little like a sort of libertarian dream.

But, wait a minute, I need to complete significantly the imaginary monologue of the Ottoman governor above. On parting, the governor would have probably added: “Enjoy life and enrich yourselves. Everything will be fine unless I hear too much about you. If I do, bad things will happen to your community.” Or, he did not even need to utter the words. Everyone knew about the bad things that would happen if disorder arose. Some of these bad things were community leaders’ heads on a spike in village centers.

The Ottoman Empire that relied on the light, non-invasive, decentralized millet system was also famous for the fierceness of its repression. And this haven of diversity disintegrated swiftly throughout the 19th century with a speed that must give pause.

The unraveling of the Ottoman Empire began around 1805 when the large and important Egyptian subdivision gained all but nominal independence through an armed revolt and even waged successful war on the Empire. During the rest of the 19th century, the areas of the Empire now comprising Greece, Bulgaria and Romania decisively seceded. In the meantime, much of the rest of the officially defined Empire drifted away, such as Libya and Tunisia. Later, during World War One, the British (Lawrence) and the French did not have much trouble talking the remaining Arab areas of the empire into open rebellion. And yes, there was an attempted massive genocide of Armenians, in two phases. The first phase was under full Ottoman power in the 1890s; the second, much larger step occurred during the waning days of Ottoman rule starting in 1915.

Now, one can argue – and historians routinely do – that the spectacular disintegration of the Ottoman Empire was due to external pressures from the rising, fast industrializing European powers. Yet, the fact that national (ethnic) entities took up every opportunity to leave the Empire does not speak well of the effectiveness of Ottoman administration. The fact that they sometimes did it a a cost of great bloodshed, the Greeks in particular, does not strengthen the idea of contentment of the administered. The fact is that the subject people of the Ottoman Empire including the many governed through the millet system described above seem to have left as soon as the opportunity arose.

The disintegration of the Ottoman Empire poses a conceptual problem: Did it fall apart in spite of the admirable millet system of government or because of it? Was internal peace maintained in the Empire for a long time because of the virtues of the millet system or because of the ever-present threat of a large and fierce army facing a divided and unarmed populace?

Was the Ottoman Empire taken apart from within, and also from without, because the administrative principles behind the millet system impeded the supply of the means of self-preservation?

Beyond this lies an even graver question for anyone with libertarian aspirations: Do systems of administration that share the main features of the millet system, decentralization, low cost, and low-level invasiveness contain the seeds of their own destruction? Does administrative lightness actually nurture violent intervention from above and/or from outside?

I don’t know the answers to these serious questions. I think libertarians of all feathers don’t discuss these and related issues nearly enough. I suspect libertarian circles harbor their own form of political correctness that paralyzes such essential inquiries. I do what I can. I know it’s not much.

Free lunch: college edition

Rick Weber Economics, Liberty , , , , ,

Andrew Cuomo recently proposed making college free taxpayer funded for middle class New Yorkers. He argues that college is a “mandatory step if you really want to be a success.” For the sake of argument, let’s assume that he’s making adequate adjustments for vocational training.

As a SUNY employee, I’m not sure how to feel about this. On the one hand, it means an increased demand for my services. On the other hand, it means increased pressure to keep costs down, which could mean a fall in my future earnings potential. Increased admissions pressure means I might have easier to teach students, but also probably means less chances for the low-income students coming from the worst public schools.

At best, we’re looking at a middle-class to middle-class transfer that will trade off the benefits of market pressure against the benefits (to families paying for school) of not having to think too hard about how to manage a large expense.

I won’t go into the issue of signaling (see Bryan Caplan), or the sheer wastefulness of having people get bachelor’s degrees for jobs that don’t need them (see Dick Vedder… esp. table 1). These are important points, because they get at the root problem Cuomo is misdiagnosing. College is mandatory because of subsidies and subsidies will only make it worse. But we don’t even need to be that sophisticated to understand why this plan is a problem.

Here’s my basic problem with “free” college tuition: it’s too good to be true. I get the desire to help out poor people, but the average household in NY makes just under $60K/year and this plan is for all households making less than $125K. That’s “free” tuition to a lot of households that would be sending their kids to school anyways. That money has to come from somewhere. The people paying for this program will largely overlap with the people benefiting from it.

If everyone thinks their kids should go to school, then what’s the point in taking away their money to send their kids to school?! We all like burritos, so give me your money and I’ll buy us all the burritos we want. Doesn’t make sense! Giving up control of your spending can only make you worse off, so this will ultimately be a bad thing for the middle class. And that lack of control from middle class helicopter parents will likely be a bad thing for the working poor people who could have been net beneficiaries (hopefully… I’m not certain this won’t back fire on net). Even if subsidizing higher-ed were a good idea, this is almost certainly a terrible way to go about it.

Libertarians on Climate Change

Michelangelo Landgrave Liberty , , , ,

This post is part of the preliminary results of the NoL Foreign Policy Survey 2017 Pilot. I will be posting results throughout the week as I play around with the data. As always, I strongly emphasize that this is a pilot survey and these are just preliminary results. 

Are libertarians climate change deniers? No. The majority agree that it is occurring, caused by human activity, and that it is harmful. They do not however support unilateral action by the United States government. At least not the average libertarian respondent.

climatechange

Note that the last question, asking about supporting unilateral action, is on a different scale from the other three.

 

When you drill down by type of libertarian though you start to see stark differences. Left-libertarians agree much more strongly that climate change is occurring, caused by human activity, and harmful. They are also much more in support of unilateral action to prevent climate change.

climatechangell

 

What is driving the differences between type of libertarian? Part of the story seems to be that those who think climate change is harmful are more willing to act to address it, but I suspect a large part of the story is also that some libertarians, particularly market anarchists, simply do not trust the government. Market anarchists are less likely to believe climate change is harmful or caused by humans compared to libertarians at large, but the big difference in opinion is whether the government should act on it.

Thoughts? Tomorrow I will be posting the demographics of those who took the survey.

climatechangema

Update: Updated graphs; minor coding error.

NoL Foreign Policy Results: Preliminary

Michelangelo Landgrave Liberty, Politics , ,

tldr version; Libertarians are not isolationists in their foreign policy. Left-libertarians in particular are more supportive of things like NATO. Left-libertarians are also more supportive of acting on migration and climate change issues.

These are the preliminary results of the NoL Foreign Policy Survey 2017 Pilot. I will release the raw data and more results in the coming days. I am still in the process of cleaning things up.

The survey targeted self-identified libertarians through online libertarians communities (e.g. the Ron Paul Forums, reddit subreddits, facebook groups, etc.). The survey aimed to better understand the foreign policy views of self-identified libertarians based in the United States. The survey was conducted between December 23rd 2016 and January 1st 2017 and received over 600 replies.

Warning: This survey was a pilot and I discourage trying to generalize its results to the wider libertarian movement with any high degree of certainty.

Methodology:

The survey uses a survey experiment where respondents were placed into one of four alternative scenarios. Each scenario received similar questions, but had slight wording differences in two questions:

(1) whether the respondent supported providing military aid to a US ally and
(2) whether the respondent supported allowing in refugees from that country

The four scenarios were:

(1) A US ally being attacked by a neighbor – the base scenario
(2) The Baltic republics being attacked by Russia
(3) Afghanistan being attacked by Russia
(4) Taiwan ROC being attacked by China PRC

The survey can divided roughly into four parts:

(1) Military policy
(2) Migration policy
(3) Climate change policy and
(4) Trade policy

Results:
supportmilitaryaidbyattackedcountry

In the base scenario libertarians we find that the majority of libertarians favor providing military aid to a generic US ally. However that support goes down substantially when details are provided. If Afghanistan, a non-NATO major ally, were attacked it would receive support from less than 10 percent of respondents.

supportrefugee

Likewise support for allowing refugees in from the attacked country is high in the base scenario, but drops for Afghanistan. Support for allowing refugees from Taiwan or the Baltic republics is not statistically different from the base scenario.

unilateral

In the above graphs we see respondents’ support for unilateral action in free trade (“remove all trade barriers”), open borders, and addressing climate change. Support for unilateral action is almost twice as high for free trade than either support for open borders or climate change.

unilateral2

When I dig further into type of libertarian we see that left-libertarians are more willing to act on open borders and climate change than their counterparts. Almost 100 percent of market anarchists are in favor of abolishing all trade barriers.

int

Respondents are split on support for international groups like NAFTA or NATO. If we look at sub-groups within the libertarian movement (i.e. libertarians, left-libertarians, and market anarchists) we see that left-libertarians are more supportive and market anarchists are less supportive of international action.

int2

The Asian Age

Edwin van de Haar Books, Current Events, Economics, Liberty , , , , , ,

I love Asia. Ever since my student days I have had a keen interest in South East Asia and China, with my course on the Politics of the Asia Pacific at the London School of Economics in the run up to the handover of Hong Kong as a high point. This was followed almost a decade later with four years of living in Manila, with time spend as a freelance journalist covering Philippine politics and society, as well as teaching for three years at the European Studies Program at the elitist Ateneo de Manila University. I also had the opportunity to travel to almost all countries in the region (with the notable exceptions of Laos, Taiwan and the Koreas, but one should keep something to be desired). I admire the resilience of the Asians, their humour, great work ethics, the beauty of their countries, and of course their sumptuous food.

As a classical liberal I always have a keen interest in the economic developments of the region, which to me serve as the prime evidence for the great and positive impacts freeing up economies have. The rise of Asia in essence is the empirical proof that classical liberal ideas work, that capitalism has the capacity to improve the life of millions of people, in a very short term. This despite the imperfect implementation of capitalism throughout the region, so there is much room for further improvement. In this light it is also interesting to see how long economic freedom and political lack of freedom can co-exist. Classical liberal ideas predict, most clearly expressed by Milton Friedman in Capitalism and Freedom, that one follows the other. Economic and political freedom cannot be separated forever (nor forever suppressed together, as the experiences in the former Soviet bloc continue to make clear, even despite Putin’s increasing autocratic rule).

For an international relations observer from Europe, the developments in the Asia Pacific are of particular interest, because the rise of Asia seems to go together with the fall of Europe as a geopolitical player. Or more precisely: the fall of the middle rank European powers, as the European Union itself is a significant player in trade politics only, the only field where it represents all member states and policy is determined at the European level, with a leading role for the European Commission.

The recent book Easternisation: War and Peace in the Asian Century, by Financial Times journalist Gideon Rachman, deals precisely with this issue.

blog-easternisation

It is a great book, bringing together Rachman’s extensive experience in the US, Asia, and Brussels. Often, books written by journalists lack sound analysis for the mid to long term, and historical perspective. While Easternisation is not an academic tome either, it does provide sufficient deep analysis, especially by tackling developments in all important countries which play a role in the process. It is not just another volume of simply USA or EU bashing, as we have seen before with the huge literature on the alleged Japanese take-over of the US economy.

Rachman’s main argument is that the influence of the West, Europe in particular, has crumbled. This may lead to a major conflict in the Asia Pacific, most notably between China and the US, which also endangers the global economic order. Yet many other conflicts are also building up, in a region which heavily invests in armaments. In short, in the 21st century, ‘rivalries between the nations in the Asia Pacific will shape global politics, just as the struggles between European nations shaped world affairs for over 500 years from 1500 onwards’. I think this is an important message, which should be taken seriously by everybody. Certainly by the Europeans, who are in danger of just inhabiting the world’s largest open air museum within a few decades.  One thing is certain: the Asians will not wait for them to come to terms with the current shift of power.

A moral inquiry

Jacques Delacroix Liberty , , ,

Below is an excerpt from my book I Used to Be French: an Immature Autobiography. You can buy it on amazon here.

Note: I was born and reared mostly in Paris but I spent most summers in Brittany. Brittany summers left a deeper mark in me than the Paris school year.

In the Breton architectural fashion, my grandmother’s granite house shared a wall with the houses of two neighbors. On one side was the good looking old guy and his too virtuous old wife. On the other side of my grandmother’s house was a family of fishermen: old Pop, old Mom, grown daughter and grown son. They all lived in a single room that served as kitchen, dining room and bedroom. The parents shared a carved oak armoire-bed, accessible by climbing on a trunk and equipped with a sliding door to provide privacy. The adult children each had their small iron bed, placed at opposite corners of the room, I am pleased to report. There was no bathroom, of course, only an outhouse in the backyard. It was never scooped, never moved. It was surrounded by the most beautifully, healthy cabbage I have ever seen. The fisherman’s children never married. Perhaps they were too afraid of their parents; or, they liked each other too much. (But this is only hearsay.)

At the end of the dirt road, fifty yards away, lived the town ditch-digger and his large brood. The ditch digger’s boys were always hungry. They stole eggs, from wild birds’nests and from hen houses alike. They also picked wheat and toasted it in the fields, which was tolerated. In September, ripe hazelnuts were available for the picking. I don’t know what they did after September and I will never know because my family never stayed beyond that month. But school was back in session then, and there, they got at least one square a day.

Sometimes, we would climb over the priest’s orchard wall to steal his excellent pears. This happened less often than one might think because it presented moral problems: Everyone knew that the priest would not beat you hard if he caught you so, it was kind of unsporting to pick on him. And there was the issue of having to tell him in confession that you had stolen his pears. We discussed whether one would go to Hell for abstaining from confessing that single particular sin. There was no theological consensus.

Foreign Policy Survey

Michelangelo Landgrave Liberty , , ,

A project I’ve been playing around with for a while has been better understanding the policy views of libertarians. In a few policy areas one should expect near-unanimous agreement on what constitutes the libertarian position. I would, for example, find it hard to believe someone was a libertarian if they supported minimum wage laws. In other areas though it isn’t clear what the libertarian position is.

Foreign policy is one such area. As has been discussed on NoL, it isn’t clear that a singular libertarian foreign policy can exist. Contemporary libertarianism is heavily tied to the US, which further complicates matters. A US based libertarian might oppose NATO on grounds that it over extends the power of the government. A libertarian based in Poland on the other hand might support NATO as a necessary countermeasure to the threat of attack from Russia.

To answer these questions I’m playing around with a pilot study.  The survey can be accessed here. It should take 10-15 minutes and I would appreciate if you could all take it. The survey is aimed for US libertarians, but feel free to take if you’re elsewhere.

Emphasis on the ‘pilot’. I am still playing around with wording and such. I am debating which demographic questions can be removed to reduce possibility of identification – I know many libertarians are skeptical about taking these surveys out of privacy concerns. If you have any comments/suggestions feel free to do so in the comments.

New Year Research Resolutions – or – What are you working on?

Michelangelo Landgrave Liberty

Hi everyone. I am your co-blogger. Seeing as the end of the year is approaching I thought it would be nice to know what everyone is working on research wise. So if you have the time post the three (or less) research projects you hope to finish in the upcoming year in the comments below and in a short sentence describe each one.

I’ll start off:

(1) Social Remittances:

I am exploring how social remittances, the transmission of political capital through emigrants, affected the 2000 Mexican elections by increasing demand for improved institutions. Based on an earlier NoL post here.

(2) Libertarian Public Opinion Project:

I’m working on this with Brandon; the plan is to field a survey of the libertarian movement to answer questions such as ‘Is there a uniform libertarian foreign policy?’. Reddit apparently has done a straw poll of market anarchists: 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013

(2) Rodney King Riots 25 Years Later:

Next year will be the 25th anniversary of the Rodney King Riots and I plan to combine new survey data with older regional surveys to see if race relations have improved in Los Angeles since then.

My review for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

Bruno Gonçalves Rosi Culture, Liberty , , , ,

I just watched Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and I believe it is a very important movie to review if you are a lover of liberty in the classical liberal tradition. Before starting the review itself, I’d better say that I like the old Star Wars movies very much (episodes IV to VI), especially Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, but other than that, my knowledge of the Star Wars universe is very limited. With that said, please be kind with me hardcore fans, and, of course, spoilers ahead!!! Continue reading →

Canadian Megatrends: Top 1% income share and median age

Vincent Geloso Economics, Liberty , , , , ,

Statistics Canada just came up with a study on the top income share of the top 1% in Canada. As I have explained elsewhere, my view of inequality is that: a) it has increased; b) not as much as we think; c) a lot of the increase is from desirable factors (personal utility maximization differing from income maximization or international immigration) or neutral factors (demography, marriage); d) that the inequality that is worrisome stems either from birth or government manipulations of the market and; e) that those stemming from government manipulations, direct (like subsidizing firms) or indirect (like the war on drugs which means that a large number of individuals are jailed and then released with a “prison earnings penalty” which stymies their income levels and growth), are the easiest to fight.

The recent Statistics Canada study allows me to make my point again with regards to element C of my answer. As I looked at their series, all I could think was “median age”. A lot of the variations seem to be related to the median age of the population. I went back to the census data I had collected for my book and plotted it against the data. This is what it looks like.

medianage

Why would there be a relation? Well, each year you measure the income distribution, the demographic structure of that population changes. As it grows older, you have more people at the top of their earnings curve relative to those at the bottom. Not only that, but earnings curve seem elongated in recent times – we live longer and so some people work older as witnessed by increased labor force participation rates above a certain age closer to retirement. And the heights of the earnings curve are now higher than ever before while we also enter later into the labor market.

Now, I am not sure how much aging would “explain away” rising inequality in Canada, but there is no point denying that it does explain some of it away. But, I would not be surprised that a large part is explained away. Why am I saying that? Because of this paper on Norway’s age structure. 

In Norway, the median age in 1950 was much higher than it was in Canada back then and today, it is roughly the same as Canada (although Canada has had a steeper increase in inequality). And according to the paper on Norway, adjusting for composition bias in inequality measures caused by aging, eliminates entirely the upward trend in that country. In fact, it may even reverse the trend whereby inequality adjusted for age has actually declined over time. This is a powerful observation. Given that Canada has had a steeper increase in median age, this suggests that the increase in inequality might be simply the cause of a statistical artifice.

Summing up: the year of irrationality

Rick Weber Current Events, Economics, Liberty, Politics , , , , , ,

Brandon says I’ve got one last chance to write his favorite post of the year. But it’s the end of a long semester and I’m brain dead, so I’m just going to free ride on his idea: a year end review. If I were to sum up the theme of this year in a word, that word would be irrational.

After 21 months of god awful presidential campaigning, we were finally left with a classic Kodos vs Kang election. The Democrats were certain that they could put forward any turd sandwich and beat Trump, but they ultimately lost out to populist outrage. Similar themes played out with Brexit, but I don’t know enough to comment.

Irrationality explains the Democrats, the Republicans, and the country as a whole. The world is complex, but big decisions have been made by simple people.

We aren’t equipped to manage the world’s complexity.

We aren’t made to have direct access to The Truth; we’re built to survive, so we get a filtered version of the truth that has tended to keep our ancestors out of trouble long enough to get laid. In other words, what seems sensible to each of us, may or may not be the truth. What we see with our own eyes may not be worth believing. We need more than simple observation to actually ferret out The Truth.

Our imperfect perceptions build on imperfect reasoning faculties to make imperfect folk economics. But what sounds sensible often overlooks important moving parts.

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

Only a small minority of the population will ever have a strong grasp on any particularly complex thing. As surely as my mechanic will never become an expert in economics, I will never be able to do any real work on my car. The trouble arises when we expect me or my mechanic to try to run the country. The same logic applies to politicians, whose job (contrary to what your civics teacher thinks) is to get re-elected, not to be a master applied social scientist. (And as awful as democracy is, the alternative is just some other form of political competition… there is no philosopher king.)

But, of course, our imperfect perception and reasoning have gotten us this far. They’ve pulled us out of caves and onto the 100th floor of a skyscraper*. Because in many cases we get good enough feedback to learn a lot about how to accomplish things in our mysterious universe.

We’re limited in what we can do, but sometimes it’s worth trying something. The trouble is, I can do things that benefit me at your expense. And this is especially true in politics (also pollution–what they have in common is hot air!). But it’s not just the politicians who create externalities, it’s the electorate. The costs of my voting to outlaw gravity (the simplest way for me to lose a few pounds) are nil. But when too many of us share the same hare-brained idea, we can do some real harm. And many people share bad ideas that have real consequences.

Voting isn’t the only way to be politically engaged, and we face a similar problem in political discourse in general. A lot of Democrats are being sore losers about this election rather than learning and adapting. Trump promised he would have done the same had he lost. We’re basically doomed to have low-quality political discourse. It’s easy and feels (relatively) good to bemoan that the whole world is going to hell.

We’re facing rational irrationality. Everyone is simply counting on someone else to get their shit together, because each of us individually is more comfortable with our heads firmly up our asses.

It’s a classic tragedy of the commons and it should prompt us to find some way to minimize the harm of our lousy politics. We’ve been getting better at this over the centuries. Democracy means the levers of power can change hands peacefully. Liberalization has entailed extending civil and economic rights to a wider range of people. We need to continue in this vein. More freedom has allowed more peace and prosperity.

 

So what do we do? I’d argue that we should focus on general rules rather than trying to have flawed voters pick flawed politicians and hope for the best. I don’t mean “make all X following specifications a, b, and c.” I mean, if you’re mad, try and sue someone. We don’t need dense and exploitable regulations. We don’t need new commissions. We just need a way for people to deal with problems as they arise. Mind you, our court system (like the rest of our government) isn’t quite ready for a more sensible world. But we can’t be afraid to be a little Utopian when we’re planning for the long run. But let’s get back to my main point…

We live in an irrational world. And it makes sense that it’s that way; rationality is hard. We can see irrationality all around us, but we see it most where it’s cheapest: politics and Facebook. The trouble is, sometimes little harmless irrational acts add up to cause real harm. Let’s admit we’ve got a problem with irrationality in politics so we can get better.

*Although that’s only literally true in 17 cases.

2016: Year in Review

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Liberty , , ,

I hope you have all been enjoying the run-up to your holiday season. Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, Happy Kwanzaa, Happy Hanukkah, etc. to the whole world, from me.

NOL had another great year, and it wouldn’t have been so great without you. Some of the older Notewriters have parted ways or disappeared from the blogosphere, and some newer blood has stepped up to fill in the gaps, including Nick Cowen, Lode Cossaer, Mark Koyama, Vincent Geloso, Zak Woodman, Adrián Lucardi, and William Rein. Keep your eyes peeled to NOL in 2017, baby!

Below are some of the top posts of 2016. (I am only going by the numbers this ’round, but I’ll try to patch together some of my favorites next week.)

These posts summed up the most viewed posts of 2016, but as I mentioned above I am going to highlight my favorites of the year next week.

NOL has been around since 2012 and I’m starting to see a number of posts attain “classic” status, which simply means that they are popular year after year and thus have a bit of staying power. Barry’s post on Foucault’s political thought always brings in a bunch of traffic, as does my post on libertarian intelligence. Amit’s post about migration from Bangladesh has become a classic since only last year, as has Rick’s “Gun control: Centralized vs Dispersed.”

Thanks for another great year, dear readers, this place wouldn’t be around without you. So keep stopping by, keep those comments coming, keep arguing with us (and each other), and I hope you’ll stick around for another year in 2017.

Next week: My favorite posts at NOL for 2016!