Pundits on all sides are engaging in flood-the-zone tactics that serve to confuse rather than enlighten. Here are three, brief examples that stand against that tide.
Don Boudreaux is up first with an answer to what is seemingly the folk wisdom these days regarding NAFTA. Specifically, that Americans are worse off since its passage. To this he gives a well-reasoned, firm “No!”
If you pay attention to pronouncements, discussions, and debates in the US over trade you’ll regularly encounter laments about America’s “chronic trade deficits” (implying that new economic troubles began as 1975 ended), complaints about the depredations visited on Americans by NAFTA (suggesting that Americans’ economic fortunes began to worsen as 1994 dawned), and, of course, dire warnings of the alleged economic dangers that we Americans encounter by trading with the Chinese (implying that America’s economic health only took another turn for the worse as 2001 was coming to a close).
Fortunately, a great deal of relatively straightforward economic data allows us to put these common claims to the test. As is true of any economic data — which, after all, are drawn from an incredibly complex, dynamic, and ever-changing real-world economy — the data that I present below are incapable of proving anything.
Counterfactuals can always be offered, and questions about classifications, excluded variables, missing data, measurement methods, and errors, are never off the table. Nevertheless, even imperfect data can be sufficiently accurate to be revealing. At any rate, when used honestly such data are often an important part — although never the exclusive part — of any sound analysis or argument about economic policy.
So here are six economic phenomena the trends in which are useful to consult to test the claims about trade described above:
workers’ real earnings
US industrial production
US industrial capacity
US capital stock
US manufacturing employment as a share of total employment
inflation-adjusted average household net worth
Each of these is examined and found clearly to have improved by stark magnitude. On the first trend, he writes,
Today, average inflation-adjusted total compensation (wages and fringe benefits) for workers in the nonfarm business sector is about 250 percent higher than it was in 1975, 100 percent higher than in the year NAFTA took effect (1994), and about 40 percent higher than when China joined the WTO (2001).
Steven Landsburg brings his typical clear thinking to the topic of the federal government's on-going intrusion into university policies. I share his ambivalence with whether or not the current situation is true progress.
Trump’s overall stance on academia is exactly the same as Obama’s and Biden’s — they all favor federal micromanagement. The small picture: Should transexual women play on women’s sports teams? Biden says yes; Trump says no. The big picture: Should the federal government be deciding this issue in the first place? They both say yes.
Trump, true to form, has overplayed his hand. If he had actually reversed policy and backed off the micromanagement, we’d have seen something really interesting: The administrators would have been forced to either defend their policies or back off them. We might have had exactly what the administrators have spent decades dodging: useful debate about things like hiring practices and curriculum development. Instead we have a battle over who should be making these decisions. It’s a battle we should have had long ago. Too bad Trump chose to be on the wrong side of it.
Peter opens with this overview of the point of education:
Probably the most basic question that a person could ask about education is, what is it that people need to know? What constitutes a good life? Of course, to some extent, we all have different views of that. My view of a good life might be a little different from your view of a good life or anybody else's view of a good life. To the degree that the purpose of education is to enable us to have a good life. Right off, that means some of us are going to want to learn different things from others of us, but there are some things that we should all learn for a good life.
And I think most people would agree on this. You know, we human beings are social creatures. We can't survive alone. We have to know how to get along with other people.
If you don't know how to get along with other people, if you don't know how to pay attention to the person that you're interacting with and know whether they're having a good time or not a good time, if you're not attuned to that, if you're not able to negotiate with people, if you're not able to interact with people in a way that your needs get met, but their needs also get met, you're not able to have a good marriage.
You're not able to have real friends. You're not able to have real work partners. You are going to have an unhappy life if you can't do those things. That is critical. That's more important than reading. It's more important than numbers. It's more important than almost anything that we can think of. So that's critical.
Another thing that's really, really important is that you have a sense that I can take care of myself. I am not a victim of the world out there. I can run my life. Now, sometimes the reality is sometimes we are victims of fate, of circumstances, and so on and so forth.
But we can't be inclined to give in to that. We need to know that ultimately we have to run our own life. We have to have the confidence that we can make reasonable decisions for ourselves, that we can solve problems as they arise, that we can fail and bounce back up, we're not going to be overcome by all of that. You know, this sort of sense of sense what psychologists call an inner locus of control, that I have an inner sense of I am in control of myself. I am not so much being controlled by the outside world, I'm in charge of myself.
I think that is really crucial. There's a lot of evidence that shows that people have this internal locus of control are less likely to fall apart psychologically as they go through life. They're less prone to depression, less prone to anxiety. they're more able to deal with the bumps in the road of life.
There's always, in everybody's life, there's ups and downs. And you have to be able to survive the downs. And that requires that you have this internal sense of control. Interesting to note that these are sort of two complementary, kind of in some sense contradictory aspects of the human being. We depend on other people.
We have to know how to interact with other people. And yet we also have to be individuals. We have to say, I'm not completely dependent on other people. I am in control of my life. So I think those are really, really important skills.
On how schools have become prisons, he says,
Just like the hunter-gatherer kids were playing at things important to their culture, many of the things we were playing at were playing at our culture. Over time, and historians have documented this, social scientists have documented it, it's hard to quantify it. But over time, beginning around 1960, as a culture, we've gradually taken this freedom away from children.
And I think there are a number of forces that have done that. One is the increased power of school, the increased weight of school. Every bureaucracy tends to grow. The schooling bureaucracy is no exception. They want to grow, they want to have more teachers, more business, and so the school year has grown, the amount of homework has grown, we've become obsessed with what's happened in school. We begin to think that the stuff kids learn in school is the most important stuff that they learn. We've come to believe that. There's a lot of reasons we've come to believe that.
Part of it is that schooling is very good at teaching you that you need schooling. And so with every generation, people are more inclined to think you need more schooling, that schooling is how children grow up, it's how they learn, that's part of it. But we've also become, we've come to believe, and there's a little bit of truth to it, that going to college is very, very important. And we've come to believe, and this I think is a false belief, in fact, there's good research showing it's a false belief, but most parents believe it, and this is part of a societal belief, that the more elite college you go to, the better your life is going to be. So over time, the goal of parenting, at least if you're in the middle class or the upper class, the goal of parenting is to get your kid into the best college.
I mean, people are talking about that while the baby's still in the womb. They're already saving money for college, right? The assumption is my kid is going to go to college and my assumption is my kid is going to go to some damn expensive college. and I'm going to have to pay for that, right?
So that was never the assumption in the past, you know, that was never, but that's now the assumption. And so people think, I got to get my kid into the best preschool, right? So we now have, instead of childcare, we have preschool. We have school even for tots, right? We call it school.
We've become obsessed with this idea of schooling. But this has been a gradual change. It's not a sudden change. If we suddenly went from the 1950s to what we have today, nobody would have accepted it. What? Only 15 minutes of recess? Are you crazy? People would rebel.
But because it's been a gradual change over time, it's been kind of from year to year, it's an imperceptible change. And so we don't notice that it's changed. So that's part of it, this increased obsession about school, about getting people, our kids into college, our belief that you have to follow a certain track to get them into college. And then the other thing that's happened And there's a set of factors that have led to this, but we have become increasingly afraid of allowing our kids outdoors unguarded by an adult. We've come to believe that it's dangerous out there, that our kids are going to be snatched away or molested or who knows what if we let them out without an adult supervising and directing them. So on the one hand, we've come to believe that children develop in this school-like way. And so we put kids into school-like activities even outside of school.
Instead of just go out to play, we put them into adult-directed sports or karate class or any of these kinds of things, which is kind of like an extension of school. It's not play. It's not self-directed. It's not how they learn how to solve their own problems. And accompanied with that, we're afraid to let them go out and play because we believe that they're in danger if they do.
So these two forces combined have really led to a situation where it's not an exaggeration to say that our children are more or less in prison. In school, they are in an institution where they're told exactly what they have to do, where the basic human rights are not permitted. where you have to follow certain rules very rigidly. This is not like a job. A lot of people say like, well, don't we all adults have jobs?
No adult would accept a job that is as rigidly controlled as school is. No adult would accept that. And then they go home, and it's sort of like home confinement. They're not kind of allowed outdoors unless there's some adult, could call them a guard, going out with them, right?
I mean, this sounds maybe extreme language, but think about it. This is what we have done to childhood. Well, no wonder that over the same years that we have increasingly taken children's freedom away from them, we have seen dramatic increases in depression and anxiety and even in suicide in school-age children. Dramatic increases. There's no comparison.
Based on standardized clinical questionnaires that have been given to normative groups of school-age children over the years, the rates of depression and anxiety are at least eight times what they were today in the 1950s. The rate of suicide among school-age children is at least six times what it was in the 1950s.
