Everyone understands what your GPA this semester means

Rick Weber Comments, Current Events , , , , ,

In my industry there’s been a ton of discussion about how to handle grading for this spring semester. Campuses shifted to online instruction mid-semester. Students are losing jobs, struggling with home responsibilities, and otherwise being utterly thrown into the deep end of an unfair situation.

Here’s the thing: we all get it. C+ this semester will be a mighty impressive accomplishment for a lot of students this year. Nobody looking at and subjectively interpreting a transcript will fail to appreciate that. If I’m looking at your transcript, I’m going to look at your GPA for before this and heavily discount this semester’s GPA if it’s anything different than it was in the fall.

For some students, this pandemic will be a minor hiccup, or even a chance to rise to the occasion and excel. Good for them. For other students, it will be such a significant disruption that they won’t be able to learn the material they’re ostensibly in school for. And if they can’t pass the class, that sucks. Pandemics suck, and their impact on people’s educational progress is part of that suckiness.

We absolutely should look for ways to reduce the impact on those students. We need to grant exceptions for things like scholarships requiring certain timelines and GPAs (like my favorite NY state program). But life happens, and a if grades are worth having at all (which we should debate), then we shouldn’t abandon them now. We should just abandon the stakes we’ve attached to them.

Damned Models and Cutting off the Chinese

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Economics , , , , , , ,

I have a good eye for what ought to be there but isn’t. Don’t congratulate me; it’s a natural talent. I am retired so, I usually spend hours listening to the radio, reading newspapers and, watching television and, (Oops) on the internet. Nowadays, I do more of the same.

Today’s lecture is going to be a little longer than usual, on the one hand. On the other hand, there will not be a test. Bear with me; it’s going to be worth it (if I say so myself).

The first thing that’s missing from the endless and frankly a little sickening commentary on the C-virus epidemic is a good explanation of what’s a “model.” I mean the kind of models that are being blamed a little bit everywhere and especially in the conservative media for seemingly wildly inflated predictions (of infections, of deaths, of anything connected to this illness). Just from listening to talk radio, I think that some, or many, believe that with “computer models,” computers actually do the thinking instead of people. It’s not so.

The second thing missing is a clear description of the downside of national economic self-sufficency that appears so tempting now that we are extra-sensitive to both the comparative incompetence of our China-based suppliers, and to the possible ill-will of the Chinese Communist authorities.

First, first: a model is logically pretty much the same thing as we do when we say, ” On the one hand, on the other hand.” That’s as in, “One the on hand, If have saved $20, I will buy a nice cake; on the other hand, if I manage to save $200, I will look for a good used bike.”

The problems are: 1 that we have only so many hands; if we had one hundred each, and remembered each, we could produce mental models that cover more possibilities; 2 that we are not agile at combining possibilities, like this: “If the third hand and the fortieth hand are combined with the fifty-first then, this will happen.”

Models – designed by humans working slowly – can be entered into computers with many values and many combinations of values to tell us what would (WOULD) happen if… That’s all, folks.

Don’t blame the models, don’t blame those who build the models, in this capacity, rather, blame those who don’t do the needful to explain to decision-makers what actual models do and don’t do. (It’s true that they are often the same as those who actually construct the models but in a different role.)

Also, blame American universities and colleges that should have been in the business of teaching this stuff to all students since the late sixties and that have only done it for a tiny elite minority. A big missed opportunity. Even high school students could learn, I believe.

Second undiscussed issue. Under normal circumstances, self-sufficiency has a certain intuitive appeal: Let’s not count on others because they might fail, or fail us and, at any rate, distance makes the best linkages vulnerable. Now that we worry about running out of essential medical supplies made in China, now that we fear a shortage of the raw materials that go into our medical drugs, our intuition seems broadly vindicated. It did not help that a highly placed Chinese Communist official actually threatened the US aloud, about a month ago, with withholding medications. (I am guessing he is not going to have a happy retirement.)

Much about our intuition is correct, of course. As I never tire of stating (wittily, if you ask me), we should not count on steel deliveries from China to build the naval ships we would use in a war with China. The steel deliveries might be too late.

That’s on the one hand. On the other hand, there is a downside to national self-sufficiency. It violates the general principle that specialization makes for efficiency. Just imagine that you had to grow all your own grain, harvest it, mill it, raise your own cattle, slaughter it, butcher it, skin it, preserve the meat, treat the skins (and cut and sew clothes out of them). You would do a bad job of some of these tasks, at least, possibly of all. You would have much less to consume than is true now. You would be poor.

And that’s the downside: National self sufficiency is a sure path to poverty. I am not speaking of small differences but of big ones. I remember clearly when the cheapest hammer at the hardware store cost $20, five years later, the cheapest hammer cost only $5. What happened in between was expanded imports from China. (Don’t even begin to talk about quality; the difference among the cheapest items of a kind is largely illusory anyway, or much exaggerated.) And if you think this is a special case, ask your self if the Canadians – who love bananas – should grow their own in the name of self-sufficiency.* (For an expanded view of international trade, see my series of articulated short essays beginning here: “Protectionism; Free Trade, Step-by-Step.”)

Here again, American colleges and universities deserve strong blame. First, many don’t even require a course in economics to graduate. One of the best undergraduates I have known personally, an honors students who is now very successful in her career, never heard a single lecture on anything pertaining to economics. Second, economics professors, by and large, do a piss-poor job of teaching international trade. Across 25 years of teaching in a business school, I have met a fair number of good MBA students who had taken three courses in international trade and still did not see the possible downside of self-sufficiency. So, this simple idea is not widespread among the educated populace. It’s not well anchored enough in the opinion media for many to push back intelligently against the wave of demands that the US minimize its dependency on what we obtain from abroad in general. (A national policy designed to induce American companies to source in Vietnam, for example, rather than in China is a different and defensible proposition.)

So, here you have it: Models are not to blame, confusion about them is; economic self-sufficiency is the road to poverty though it might be worth it. Knowing these two things does not prevent us from taking action collectively. It makes for more rational action in these irrational times.

* Those of you who received a decent education in economics might wonder here if I have just dealt improperly with the topic of Comparative Advantage. I haven’t, I have not even begun.

Nightcap

Brandon Christensen Links , , ,
  1. Life after the plague Helen Dale, Law & Liberty
  2. Believing in witches and demons Jan Machielsen, JHIblog
  3. What comes next? Dalibor Rohac, American Interest
  4. Modi’s ghastly Delhi dream Kapil Komireddi, Critic

Be Our Guest: “Rights and Government Confiscation During COVID-19”

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Philosophy , , ,

John A Lancaster has a new guest post up. Peep an excerpt of his definition of rights:

When extended into the realm of human contact, rights must be expressed through voluntary exchange. Any exchange that is not the product of consent necessarily entails an entity seizing use of facilities outside the entity’s personal vessel, which they have no right to do (theft).

Click here to read the thought-provoking rest. And don’t forget: if you’ve got something to say, and nowhere to say it, Be Our Guest!

Coddle the Old, Spoil Them; Everybody Else, Back to Work!

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Liberty , , , , ,

I am more worried by the day about the economic consequences of the current isolation policy intended to change the shape (not the numbers) of the corona-virus epidemic in America. This, in spite of the a large infusion of (national debt) money, that I would approve regretfully if it were my sole decision. (Note: I am not an economist but I have been reading the Wall Street Journal daily for thirty years. I am also a scholar of organizations including businesses.) What inspires most of my fear is that the issue of small-scale entrepreneurship is seldom discussed, as if it did not exist.

I believe that the larger businesses, those that survive the current crisis, may well come back with a roar (as the president seems to predict for the whole US economy.) The problem is that small businesses, restaurants, but also dry cleaning establishments, hair dressers, bookstores, and the like, have short financial lifelines. Many must be dying like flies, right now. It will be difficult or impossible for them to make a comeback once the health emergency is gone. Also we can’t count on fast replacement of those failed business by new entrepreneurs. The collection of small business that accrued over many years at a particular location is not going to be replaced in the course of a few months, I think. (Yes, I know something about this topic. Ask me.)

All the above, in spite of large infusion of my granddaughter’s money by the federal department. (She is 11.) And, repeating myself, I would do it too if it were my decision, but regretfully.

The ruinous strategy of idling much of the workforce could have been avoided and could still be modified quickly, it seems to me. The alternative solution would be to confine all the sick and most of the aged, and to keep children out of school (because they are veritable cesspools, as everyone knows).

Everyone else would be invited to go back to work by agreement with his employer. Some financial dispositions should be offered at state’s expense to help parents who lose income because they must stay home to care for their children. Under such conditions, the economy would grow again and many irreplaceable small businesses would survive. Sweden is currently trying something like this policy. That country never ordered most people to stay home. I hope this experiment stays in the news. It may not because the liberal media are afraid of rational responses and of responses that don’t proceed from panic.

I only know two people who have consistently advocated for an American policy and a California policy of confining only the old and the sick. The two are myself and Jimmy Joe Lee, a singer composer musician from Boulder Creek, near Santa Cruz. Both of us are old dudes. We are both close to the center of virus’ target. I am 78 and Jimmy Joe may be even slightly older. (OK, let the whole truth come out: He is taller, straighter than I am and a much, much sharper dresser.) I am just pointing to the obvious: neither of us is speaking out of selfishness.

Now, let’s imagine the old are confined from, say, the age of 65, even 60. First, some of them wouldn’t even know anything has changed because they don’t go out much anyway. For the rest of us, all you would have to do is serve us promptly two hot meals a day. They would have to be of gourmet quality. That would be easy to achieve because so many expensive restaurants are idle and hurting. It would be a nice touch if the meals were brought and served by a youngish woman wearing a short skirt. We may not remember why we like it but we do. Yes, and speaking for myself and I am sure, for Jimmy Joe, don’t forget to send along each meal a couple of glasses of really, really good old wine. I assure you that however extravagant you went with that last component of our confinement regimen, it would be a lot cheaper than what you are currently doing. At least, promise to think about it.

Nightcap

Brandon Christensen Links , , ,
  1. When arguments fail (a response to libertarians) Irfan Khawaja, Policy of Truth
  2. State-sponsored empire building (philanthropy) Edward Carver, LARB
  3. How airpower reshaped the global diplomatic order Thomas Furse, Age of Revolutions
  4. The friendly Mr Wu Mara Hvistendahl, 1843

Nightcap

Brandon Christensen Links , , ,
  1. Colin Powell: subordinate or statesman? Elizabeth Spalding, Law & Liberty
  2. Another right abolished by the government’s COVID lockdown Ryan McMaken, Power & Market
  3. “All our efficiencies melted away in the face of a man-made depression.” Razib Khan, City Journal
  4. Bread Arrives Patrick Henry, Commonweal

Mass Hysteria and the Great Economy-Killing: Lessons from 1856 South Africa

Andrei Znamenski History , , , , ,

Xhosa 1

In 1856, a teenage Xhosa girl Nongqawuse (1841-1898) had a prophetic vision that spread like a fire among that nation that resided in South Africa. The prophecy came amid a lung virus infection that spread among some Xhosa stock; it was rumored that the sickness came from the imported European cattle.  In her vision, which the girl duly delivered to her people, two spirits of ancestors had visited her and ordered Xhosa people to destroy all their cattle, corn, tools and foods.  The spirits insisted that these had been all contaminated. In return, the ancestors would bring the dead back to life, drive away the hated British, and launch the paradise on the earth, which was to bring the limitless supply of food, stock, and household items.

The spirits also “ordered” people  not to do any work but to wait and see the fulfillment of the prophecy.  At first, some Xhosa skeptics laughed at this, but soon when her uncle, a powerful and charismatic witchdoctor Mhalakaza, vouched for her and validated the prophecy by his expert opinion, people took it seriously, especially after all powerful chiefs sided with the uncle.  In fact, by killing his own cattle, Mhalakaza set a personal example. The supreme chief Sarili added to this his own spin by insisting that, besides the cattle slaughter, all European clothing should be ditched because it was unclean.  He insisted that his people, indigenous in their “naked attire” and coated in red clay, were “clean” compared to the whites who wore clothes.   Moreover, the “doctor” set a deadline for the paradise to materialize. It was to happen at the end of 1856 on a day of a full moon.

Xhosa 2

Society became divided into “believers” and “non-believers” who were a minority.  The greater part of the Xhosa became agitated and followed the command of the superior forces by slaughtering over 400,000 cattle and destroying their food supplies along with other “contaminated” items.  They also decided to sow no crops for future.  When on the designated day of the full moon no miracle arrived, fearing for his life, Mhalakaza disappeared.  From his hideout he had a message sent to the people that the spirits were angry with the Xhosa who did not slaughter all their stock.  For this reason, the fine new cattle did not emerge from the ground and the dead did not resurrect.  Within twelve months, with about 100,000 people starving themselves to death, the Xhosa population dropped by 80%.  For more about the Xhosa stock “pandemic” craze, see Jeffrey Brian Peires, The Dead Will Arise: Nongqawuse and the Great Xhosa Cattle-Killing Movement of 1856-1857 (Johannesburg and Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).

Xhoas 3

The state as the illusionary Deus Ex Machina

Aris Trantidis Current Events, Liberty, Philosophy , , , , , ,

The 20th century was a century in which societies consolidated the belief that governments should provide certainty and protection from collective risks and developed the expectation that governments are well equipped to do so through large-scale interventions in the social environment.

The image of the state was transformed from that of an alien and often hostile apparatus in the service of the king and nobility to that of a collective organization entrusted with society’s safety and prosperity. This view grew stronger in the years of war-like economy and post-war reconstruction during the 21st century. Nationalism gave it the face of a father taking care of his extended family. Socialism gave it the image of a collective machine serving the interests of the working class. Democracy promised to tame its power, make it accountable to its subjects and harness it for the provision of public goods, whose definition was open to public deliberation.

The image of the state was also shaped by a growing belief in the use of science to give meaning to the ‘common good’ and offer prescriptions as to how a powerful central planner should work to achieve it. The state and science together provided a replacement for the loss of divinity. They offered a rationalization of power as enlightened parenthood. They created a secular Deus Ex Machina. Governments cultivated this paradigm as they were strengthening their role and clout over society through increasing levels of taxation, regulation and distribution, which in turn fostered public expectations for state effectiveness and political accountability. Recurrent failures led to policy re-adjustments some of which were historical political transitions. Yet all these transitions were responses that complied with this paradigm and sought to re-establish confidence in it.

Consider one of the most discussed economic and political transitions, the neoliberal turn. In light of recurrent economic crises, most prominently long-standing stagflation in the 1970s, neoliberalism best describes a re-adjustment of the role of government in the economy through privatizations, a drift away from Keynesianism to monetarism, and the re-regulation of economic structure. In the field of ideology, there was an effort to reshape public perceptions of what the state should not do with the promotion of economic freedom. Governments – most of them very reluctantly, such as both the Conservative and Labour governments in the late 1970s and the Ford and Carter administrations, while others very enthusiastically such as the Reagan and Thatcher governments – adopted versions of a ‘take some economic decisions back to you’ approach.

In the so-called neoliberal era, the state did not become less interventionist overall. Instead, governments redefined the nature of interventions in some areas to forms of surveillance of the responsibilities and individual risks that were given back to businesses and workers. Neoliberalism was a large-scale intervention in itself. It was an effort to revamp the economy and protect the capacity of states to extract resources from the market for political allocation. Governments preserved interventions that privileged the few and maintained those that continued to offer a safety net for the many (such as health insurance, progressive taxation and welfare state spending).

A remarkable juncture occurred when the 2009 crisis posed a systemic threat. Governments intervened to patch the financial system from a sequence of cascading events – partly the result of imbalances attributed to its own macroeconomic policies. The management of collective risk came center stage.

Terrorism is another case of the interventionist state. Spectacular terrorist attacks triggered a war-like response that combined the use of the criminal justice system with extra-judicial actions, including the mobilization of security and military forces and the introduction of new intrusive norms of intelligence collection and surveillance.

It is easy to discern that, over time, demand for drastic state action is more pronounced in the presence of dramatic single-source events or cascading events that are traceable as a single sequence. While millions are killed by car accidents and diseases, large-scale massacres such as the 9/11 or unravelling developments from the collapse of a major bank trigger a collective alarm. The public expects the state to intervene and give a heroic fight against the visible threat on behalf of society.

The most extreme version of the protective state is the current general lockdown. Not knowing any way out, governments can only deliver a form of collective protection that requires a general population quarantine. They offer society the kind of shield that a medieval wall and a locked gate offers in times of siege. Society both expects and accepts this.

Yet in the current pandemic governments still cannot deliver a cure. If a safe vaccine is not found, if the epidemic does not recede with growing immunity, if seasonal change doesn’t make any difference with contagion and if an effective anti-viral treatment is not found, governments will oversee their economies in rapid collapse and will soon have to make tough choices about how to turn the epidemic into a chronic manageable condition. For the time being, citizens remain disciplined in their lock-down and are the ones demanding strict measures. Governments know that, like in terrorism, citizens can be overwhelmed by fear as well as managed through fear.

In our efforts to understand what has happened and to make informed guesses about what could happen, metaphors can help or distort our perception. Societies have subscribed to an ideal image of political power that metaphorically resembles the biblical God: omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent. They call for a divine intervention, they express their dissatisfaction when they see no signs of it but they never question its raison d’ être. But there is an ontologically different metaphor. In Greek mythology gods are superhuman creatures struggling for domination and survival with their own moral regards, vices and ignorance as they mess around with the world of humans. They struggle to rule based more on terror than wisdom, imposing justice that serves their order. Humans have to worship them in order to appease them. I find this imagery closer to a realist depiction of government.

Religious speech gets shorted again

Ethan Blevins Law, Liberty , , ,

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court denied a petition asking whether a transit authority can reject a Christmas ad for display on its buses just because the ad is religious. This is an easy question, and it’s a shame the Court denied the petition. Justices Gorsuch and Thomas, though, did write a short consolation prize, saying what they would have said if they granted the case: namely, the government can’t discriminate against a religious viewpoint on a topic while allowing other non-religious viewpoints.

The sides of buses are a frequent and heated battleground for free speech. Transit authorities often draw revenue by selling blank space on their buses. In this case, Archdiocese of Washington v. Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, the Catholic Church tried to place a Christmas ad on D.C. buses with the silhouettes of a few shepherds and the phrase “Find the Perfect Gift.” The transit authority rejected the ad.

    The key fact here was that the transit authority allowed other ads about Christmas. All the parties, and the various courts, agreed that Christmas has a “secular” component and a “religious” component. Hence, Wal-Mart and Macy’s and every other retailer could slap their ads on buses across the metropolitan area clamoring about how to celebrate the holiday (by buying their stuff). But a religious advertiser could not express their views on how to celebrate the holiday in that same space, the only difference being the religious nature of the content.

    The Supreme Court has repeatedly stated in other settings that similar restrictions constitute viewpoint discrimination. If the government allows speech on a particular subject matter, it cannot then restrict speech on that topic simply because the viewpoint is religious. That’s true even if the proposed speech drips with religious sentiment–such sentiment deserves equal footing under the First Amendment.

    This isn’t to say that D.C. buses can now be overrun with religious zealotry. D.C. could lawfully limit advertisements to only commercial ads (they don’t). And of course they could always just forego the revenue and say no ads at all. But if the government opens up a space for expression, it must do so even-handedly.

    Nightcap

    Brandon Christensen Links , , ,
    1. Behind the Iron Curtain: Soviet space art (gallery) Kadish Morris, Guardian
    2. The year I left the Soviet Union Alex Halberstadt, New Yorker
    3. Free speech, libel, and privacy rights Mark Hemmingway, RealClearPolitics
    4. 8 out of 10 Texans already live in cities and metropolitan areas Steven Pedigo, Dallas Morning News

    Nightcap

    Brandon Christensen Links , , ,
    1. The making of an Oriental Yankee Ed Park, NYRB
    2. “Xi Jinping Thought on Diplomacy” Denny Roy, Diplomat
    3. Good piece on the coronavirus James Hamblin, Atlantic
    4. Did you kill anyone? Titus Techera, Law & Liberty

    Nightcap

    Brandon Christensen Links , , ,
    1. Coronavirus rattles US national security priesthood Nahal Toosi, Politico
    2. Has libertarianism dodged a bullet? Scott Sumner, EconLog
    3. States don’t really mind their citizens dying (provided they don’t all do it at once) Malcolm Bull, LRB
    4. Jerusalem, riots, and Israel (from the comments) Irfan Khawaja

    A Timely Agent Based Model

    Rick Weber Current Events, Economics , , , , ,

    I’m going to play economic imperialist and declare that epidemiology is partly within the domain of economics. I’m not sure how big the overlap is, but certainly there are economic questions that bear epidemiological type modeling. The movement of ideas is, in the long run, as important as the movement of a virus is in the short run. In any event, economists should be using this sort of methodology more often.

    Ron Paul’s Revolution: A libertarian education

    Brandon Christensen Culture, Liberty , , , , ,

    The Mises Institute, lewrockwell.com, and FFF all had cool articles mixed in with some not so cool stuff, and I stuck with these sites for a while after opening the floodgates. The fact that these sites are more combative, more dogmatic than other libertarian organizations probably played a role in my reluctance to branch out too far into other spheres of influence. I was a product of the public school system and a relatively strict religious upbringing and, as a result, my mind was mush. The combativeness spoke to me. It seized me in its grasp and led me forcefully down a path I knew I needed to take. This personal intellectual journey was complemented by my foray into formal education. My professors, too, were combative but not in the same way as the paleo-libertarian websites I would frequent. They pushed me, hard. The cool thing about Cabrillo College was a combination of the weather, the girls (me and the Banana Slug broke up shortly after our arrival in Santa Cruz), the PhDs teaching there, and the fact that most of the classes shrunk in size to about 12 people (more or less) in a matter of weeks. I was getting a first-rate education from great teachers who happened to be married to the California Teachers’ Union. After one semester at Cabrillo College, I was reluctantly ushered into its fairly challenging Honors program, where a transfer to Cal or maybe even Stanford was all but guaranteed.

    My go-to websites began to change. The Independent Institute, where Anthony Gregory was officially employed, and Liberty, which published occasional essays by a French-American scholar who happened to live in Santa Cruz, became more influential. FEE’s smorgasbord of scholars overwhelmed me with libertarianism. Cato’s devout, firebrand non-interventionism emboldened my heart. EconLog and Cafe Hayek were too wishy-washy for me at the time. They had no oopmf. Reason was cool but it was too bubbly, too pop-culture for me. Tyler Cowen’s name began to pop up in places. I also came across Peter Boettke and Steve Horwitz via a brutal intralibertarian squabble at the Mises Institute’s website. These were scholars I earmarked as possible sources of knowledge, but their blogs were too informal for me. They reminded me of my college classes, and I already had enough of those on my plate as it was. I wanted – needed – my libertarianism to be sure of itself, formal, and able to reinforce my thoughts about the world at large. Just like Ron Paul.

    I decided to spend the summer of 2009 traveling not around Europe or Ghana, but around the United States in order to attend seminars that various libertarian foundations put on for undergraduate students.

    I attended four seminars that summer. The first one was up the road from Santa Cruz in Oakland at the Independent Institute. It was a strange way to be introduced into the world of formal libertarianism. First, they had no idea I was coming. I had signed up for the seminar, and I remember paying for it because I had found out that the Independent Institute offered seminars during the summer long after I had already bought my plane tickets for the other three, so I bummed the money from my dad in order to squeeze in a week at my favorite libertarian think tank. Mary and David Theroux were nonetheless ecstatic to have me there and offered to waive the fee. I politely declined their offer and paid up on the spot. (I was a libertarian now and not some freeloading socialist.) My situation was probably helped by the fact that there were only 4 or 5 other students attending the seminar, and most of them were high school students forced to attend for an assortment of reasons.

    I was especially excited about the lineup of scholars the institute had cobbled together. Robert Higgs could not be there (I would see him later, at different seminar), but Anthony Gregory and Fred Foldvary would both be there, as would three guys I had never heard of before: Brian Gothberg, James Ahiakpor, and José Maria J. Yulo.

    The two things that brought me into libertarianism was its non-interventionist foreign policy and its internationalist worldview. I have always been attracted to other ways of life, and Ron Paul’s 2008-2009 campaign perfectly encapsulated these two attractive -isms. That James Ahiakpor, an economist from Ghana, and José Maria J. Yulo, a philosopher from the Philippines, were to be teaching me about libertarianism, in person, was perfect. Ahiakpor lectured on Adam Smith, and Yulo on Plato, two dead white guys whose thoughts I had never been introduced to before (though I knew both of their names). Ahiakpor’s lectures were actually a bit of a dud. He was not able to fathom, or entertain, the notion of an economy without a central bank. He appealed to Adam Smith on the matter, and that was that. Dr Yulo’s lectures were quite different. They were rich and socratic. They were peppered with personal anecdotes, both funny and serious. They were conservative, too. Dr. Yulo’s lectures eviscerated my aversion to conservatism. He made conservatives human and worthy of my time and attention. Anthony was Anthony and Fred was Fred. The star of the seminar was undoubtedly Brian Gothberg.

    Gothberg’s passion for liberty oozed out into the makeshift classroom (this makeshift classroom was one of the many charms connected with attending the institute’s seminar). Gothberg had been a California liberal, a technocrat rather than a socialist like me, and his intellectual journey sounded, to me at the time, a lot like my own. He used basic economic reasoning to show how prices could help save the environment, and how the Robber Barons captured their rents. Most of all Gothberg used every opportunity he could to engage me personally. I am an introvert and I just showed up on the institute’s doorstep with apparently no heads up. Brian went out of his way to make me feel welcome, to help me voice my thoughts aloud, and to get to know me.

    I spent my nights in San Francisco that week, sleeping on my best friend’s couch. I brought him all of the books I would receive from the seminar. My friend and I marched together in San Francisco. He was attending San Francisco State at the time. We had heated but mostly civil discussions about liberty and American politics. He and I went to the same schools in the same town. We both had the same worldview of civics up until Ron Paul crashed the party. Looking back, those discussions represented the flowering of our intellectual capacity to think for ourselves. We were teasing out ideas and confronting stark intellectual challenges to our conceptions of the world. The books I gave him ended up in his garbage can. When I was again sleeping on his couch, in Austin, in 2016, he had voted for Gary Johnson. (During those hot summer nights in Austin, we both revealed what turned out to be a shared disgust in our fellow anti-war protestors. Those people were not marching in San Francisco to protest the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq; they were marching against the Republican Party and, by extension, democratic politics.)

    Next up were two of FEE’s venerated seminars, one in Midland, Michigan and the other in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York. The Midland seminar, located at Northwood University, was a breath of fresh air. The topic of the seminar was “History & Liberty,” and lecturers included Lawrence Reed, Robert Higgs, Brad Birzer, Burton Folsom Jr., and Stephen Davies. Unlike the seminar in Oakland, this one was well-organized and well-funded. I was put up in a dorm and all of my meals were comped. These were also well-attended seminars. I met people from all over the world, though Midwestern Americans formed a slight majority. My roommate was none other than Vincent Geloso, 2017’s hottest libertarian blogger. In 2009, though, Vincent was already something of a star. A Quebecer, Geloso spent his free time either trying to get into the pants of an outgoing Guatemalan student whose name escapes me or watching Star Trek reruns on his laptop. He organized a boycott of Robert Higgs’ remaining lectures for the week after Dr. Higgs haughtily suggested that World War II was not worth the effort. Vincent also praised Paul Krugman’s academic work while bemoaning his blog at the New York Times, something I was not yet accustomed to libertarians doing. At Mises and FFF (and at the lectures of these summer seminars), Krugman was nothing more than a punching bag, not somebody you could learn from.

    Burton Folsom made everybody laugh, and Larry Reed made everybody feel good. Stephen Davies lectured on Paraguay, and its lessons have stuck with me over the years, but Brad Birzer’s intelligence and loquaciousness impressed me the most. Brad Birzer loves history. There are two events I remember most clearly about that first FEE seminar in humid Midland, Michigan. First: I remember seeing Sheldon Richman at a table by himself eating breakfast and reading at the same time. The man lived and breathed liberty. I remember thinking to myself (I dared not interrupt his breakfast) that he was probably reading some obscure work of Böhm-Bawerk or something. Second, I was dropped off at the airport a full day before my flight was scheduled. I tried to find a field to sleep in, but was instead picked up on the side of some god forsaken road by an airport employee on her way home, and she let me meet her family, dine with them, and crash on her couch for the night.

    The Irvington-on-Hudson seminar was an introductory course on “Austrian economics.” I don’t remember much about the lectures. Lawrence Reed was there again. He told different stories than the ones he told in Midland, and they were equally good. Sheldon Richman lectured, too. An economist named Paul Cwik lectured. He was funny, but unremarkable. I don’t think I learned anything new at this seminar.

    There was an Asian girl from Stanford, an economics major, who attended the seminar. She stood out because she was a she, she was Asian, and she attended an elite school. I remember her asking Sheldon Richman, after one of his forgettable lectures, a question about economics and him becoming flustered by the questions. The Asian girl actually put up her hands at one point and said “woah.” She backed away slowly and I never heard from her again. This seminar had less Midwestern Americans in it. There were more Europeans. I don’t remember who my roommate was at Irvington-on-Hudson but I do remember going to the city not once but twice. The first time I went with a Dane and a Swede, both of whom were business students. The Empire State Building blew them away. I went a second time to the city with two Italians, brothers Claudio and Adriano Gulisano. The brothers stayed out late and pretended to enjoy the nightlife. I could see in their eyes, though, that NY’s nightlife was a perfunctory for them; a duty to be performed as a European in the United States. The Brothers Gulisano were, and are, brooding individualists concerned only with the next move of their enemy (the state), and NY’s shallow nightlife rudely illuminated the chains of their social obligations.

    The highlight of the Austrian Economics seminar was not the old FEE building or New York, but Lode Cossaer, a Belgian libertarian whose passion for liberty was unlike anything I had ever seen before. He freely gave the Americans history lessons about their own country. He told the Eastern Europeans to beware of clever authoritarian traps nestled in their Hoppeanism. He explained to the Guatemalans why their university, Francisco Marroquin, was such an important institution for global liberty. Cossaer did all of these things with the worst haircut in the world, too. (He had one of those little boy bowlcuts that just makes you want to puke when you see a grown man sporting it.)

    The final seminar of that eventful summer brought me, full circle, back to northern California. The Institute for Humane Studies was an institute I hadn’t heard much about. There wasn’t a lot of writing on its website, but it was obviously libertarian and the seminar had some great topics (I think it was “liberty & economic development” or something along those lines). I had to write an essay and wait around to be rejected or accepted. The seminar was at Cal, a school I still didn’t think I could ever get in to. IHS set itself apart from FEE and the Independent Institute before the summer even started.

    The students were different, too. Elite research universities and expensive liberal arts colleges adorned most of the nametags. The majority of the students were from the eastern seaboard or the upper South. There were more Californians; two attended Cal, one attended UCSD (and whose boyfriend was from my hometown), and Rick Weber, my favorite economist-blogger. The lecturers had no public presence that I was aware of, except for one of them, who was officially was part of the Coordination Problem group blog but hardly ever wrote anything there. The IHS seminar had more of a university feel to it, overall, while the other three had more of a Fellowship of the Rings vibe to them. There were more leftists and fewer foreigners. My roommate was an older undergraduate who was attending Georgetown. He had just gotten out of the Navy. The lecturers included an anthropologist, two economists – one from France and one from the United States – and a philosopher.

    The economists were forgettable, except for the French one’s contempt for his home country, but the anthropologist and the philosopher were excellent. Susan Love Brown lectured on planned societies and their many failures, and Andrew I. Cohen actually brought leftists to tears with his rigorous logic. So defeated were these leftists that they had no recourse other than to do what their mommies and daddies had taught them to do: cry about it. This was a phenomenon that I had never witnessed before.

    The lecturers and the students would party together after dinner. At one point the organizers, the 24 year-olds responsible for overseeing the day-to-day affairs of the seminar, asked us as a group to be aware of the fact that a big-time donor would be at one of the lectures for half of the day. Many of the non-Californian students, as well as the lecturing American economist, ignored me once they learned that Cabrillo College was a community college rather than an obscure liberal arts college in the redwoods. Dr. Cohen reached out to me, as did Dr. Brown, but the overall atmosphere kept the vibe bittersweet. IHS at Cal was nothing like FEE or the Independent Institute in Oakland.

    Altogether, the IHS experience was more rewarding precisely because it was more alarming. Berkeley taught me that libertarian people as well as libertarian organizations are fallible, something that I think FEE and the Independent Institute tried to ignore or gloss over. There are careerists in the libertarian movement. There’s an entire cottage industry dedicated to professionalizing libertarian thought, strategy, and outreach. I tried to hitch a ride with one of the Cal students up to Sacramento, where I could take a bus to Placerville, but he didn’t have any room in his car. I took a train instead, from Berkeley to Sacramento, and a bus from Sacramento to Placerville. I spent the next two weeks on my mom’s couch, and then it was back to Santa Cruz for the fall.

    Next: from Santa Cruz to Los Angeles