Links - Pithy Recent Quotables That Caught My Eye
Wisdom in small bites
Workaholics are addicted to the solace they find in extreme fatigue; it’s like the high that a marathon runner might get in her last mile. I can be utterly depleted yet energized by that depletion. There’s a masochistic pride to overworking.
That is from Weike Wang writing in The New Yorker. I completely relate to this assertion.
Programs that provide in-kind benefits create political constituencies who have an interest in making sure that you don’t evaluate whether they work. Farmers and others in the food industry don’t want you to know whether food stamps work. Home builders and others in the housing industry don’t want you to know whether housing subsidies work. Health care providers don’t want you to know whether subsidies for health care work. Teachers unions don’t want you to know whether education subsidies work. Non-profits that sponge off government programs to help the homeless don’t want you to know that those programs don’t work.
That is from Arnold Kling explaining the lack of support for cash transfers to the poor. He is pointing out the combination of a Bootleggers and Baptists story along with simple bad incentives. The conflict of interests is strong with those who feed at the public trough.
Next and related is Matt Zwolinski discussing How (Not) to Shrink the State.
Shrinking the state without a plan is just vandalism; doing it right is the harder, but ultimately much more important work.
Read on for his partial list of four problems one must confront to successfully shrink the government: The problems of expectations, distributional [effects], vacuum, and politics. At least a couple go back to the points Kling was raising above.
We end with an extended one from Bryan Caplan expounding upon those who would raise objections to policy changes that amount to “someone, somewhere, in some way might be harmed”. The solution is cost-benefit analysis which crushes even GDP analysis. [emphasis added below]
I have a standard reply to all such criticisms: Even if you’re totally right, even if the problem is ten times worse than you fear, we should still implement the trillion-dollar proposal under discussion. Why? Because when we’re evaluating policies, we should “put a price tag” on every problem — and the price tag on your problem is a rounding error.
Logically, I think that’s a totally satisfactory answer. But recently I realized that many non-economists misunderstand my point.
. . .
That’s why I ask critics to put a “price tag” on their complaints. How much would you actually pay to reduce the murder rate by 1%? To reduce the illiteracy rate by 3%? To preserve 1000 unobstructed views of the San Francisco Bay?
Since these are marginal changes in outcomes that are barely even perceptible to the vast majority of people, the summed value for everyone in society isn’t in the trillions of dollars or even hundreds of billions of dollars. Probably not even in the tens of billions. As a result, I can casually grant the criticism. I can casually multiply the value of the criticism by a factor of ten. And the cost-benefit case for my trillion-dollar ideas remains overwhelming.
. . .
In slogan form, as I’ve said before, my response to such critics is not “I don’t believe you” but “You don’t believe you.” While cost-benefit analysis lets anyone put dollar value on anything, observed behavior tells us far more about dollar value than mere words.
Sorry, not sorry for the extend quote, but there was much pithiness in that post. And the point is one that resonates passionately within me. To be truthfully frank, I hear objections from so many to so much of what I have studied thoroughly while they have only just discovered it, and I find typically their objections childishly dumb. This is not because I expect them to be an expert. It is because the objections they raise, even if true (as Caplan points out), are “rounding errors” at best, illogical at worst.
Worse yet, as a call back to the points Kling and Zwolinski raise, if your objections are simply your selfish-benefit bias, my disdain for your position is equaled only by my contempt for you as a bad actor.
Working to fight bad reasoning and bad motives leaves me exhausted and not in a good way.