I’m catching up on some of these as football season interferes with blogging (and everything else in my life).
I. From Richard Hanania regarding the model of progress “Outrunning Democracy”:
Many support democracy because it supposedly gives the people what they want. A better argument in favor of democracy is that it very often doesn’t. Take the issue of price controls, which have broad support across the political spectrum.
The public wants government to tell firms what to charge for products and services, but elites of both major parties almost never do this. Why? Well, politicians are much smarter than the public and listen to experts who tell them that if you implement price controls, you’ll get shortages. Leaders might care about the well-being of the country, or they might be completely self-interested and not want to deal with the backlash from people not being able to find the products that they’re used to buying. Either way, the result is you end up with policy outcomes that are superior to what you would get if politicians just did what the voters wanted.
. . .
So what we see is a recurring cycle.
1. Some new technology or business innovation takes off.
2. It fuels popular opposition because people hate novelty and don’t understand economics. It also catches the attention of activists who hate capitalism, and are always looking for its most potent symbol.
3. Market logic wins in the end, people get used to the new innovation, and activists move on to the next thing.
We can call this process “outrunning democracy.” Markets are patient, while public opinion is fickle and scatterbrained. Issues remain hot until people look for something new to be mad about, and since the public hates novelty, new innovations only need to get a foothold and stick around for a while until people get used to them and begin focusing on something else. Sometimes, as with nuclear power, the restrictions placed on a technology are at the federal level and comprehensive, and therefore effective and long-lasting, but those are unusual cases and the outrunning democracy model is the norm.
II. Caleb Petitt at Reason pointing out the contradictions and problems with prohibitions on kidney markets:
If you think it would be wrong to solve the waitlist problem by compensating kidney donors, you should also oppose our systems of allocating blood, collecting and allocating plasma, Phase I drug trials, life insurance, hazard pay, and workers' compensation. Or, better, you should come around to recognizing that bodily commodification can be good.
III. Bryan Caplan succinctly explaining why the “better ingredients, better X” mantra is economic nonsense for both pizza and immigration:
The extension to immigration is straightforward. Limiting yourself to the “best people” may sound good, but it’s economically illiterate nonsense. Sophistry on stilts. Speaking purely prudentially, you want everyone who is better than nothing. Mathematically: E(X)>0. As I wrote in my open letter to Elon Musk:
You could reply: “Fine, but only very high-skilled immigrants have E(X)>0.” But look at your own companies. You don’t just hire top engineers and programmers. You hire receptionists, assembly-line workers, janitors, gardeners, and construction workers. With good reason: Otherwise, your top engineers and programmers would have to waste their precious time answering Tesla’s phones, assembling its cars, cleaning its toilets, mowing its lawns, and pouring its concrete.
Moreover:
This isn’t just true on the job; it’s true inside the household. Your top engineers and programmers are only able to work 80-hour weeks because they can hire nannies and maids, ride in Ubers, and order food delivery. High-skill productivity depends on an abundance of complementary low-skill productivity.
And:
The vast majority of humans who are “hard-working, honest, and love America” are not top engineers and programmers - or even in the top half of GRE scores. Especially globally, these stars are vastly outnumbered by ordinary, humble people with E(X)>0. Your company needs them — and your country needs them.
Just as it is economically illiterate to insist that pizza parlors produce only top-notch pizzas, it is economically illiterate to insist that countries admit only top-notch immigrants. The path of wisdom, rather, is to make the humblest pizzas and admit the humblest immigrants, so long as they have positive net value. Even the dried-out airport pizzas. Even the illiterate Afghan goat-herders. Just because you don’t see their value doesn’t mean that they aren’t worthwhile to someone. A hungry traveler whose flight got cancelled wants that dried-out pizza. An Afghan restaurant wants that monolingual Dari-speaking dishwasher.
IV. Alex Nowrasteh on sympathetic differences among various victims:
Criminals and victims who are sympathetic or very unsympathetic are ripe for narrative bias. We can’t look away. But the stories throughout this substack and others don’t prove any statistical fact; you can’t compare anecdotes and reach an intelligent conclusion. They don’t help you understand the world because it’s a big and complicated place. You should use narratives to understand the big picture statistical facts – don’t memorize the numbers – but just know that legal and illegal immigrants have a lower crime rate than native-born Americans. That’s the fact that matters. The stories are the sugar that helps the statistical medicine go down. Taste the sugar, plug your nose, and swallow.
V. Randal O’Toole, The Antiplanner, on “Socialism at Its Finest: The U.S. Transit Industry”:
Socialized transit is a money pit that imposes heavy costs urban taxpayers while providing most of them with no benefits. To the extent that subsidies are needed at all, it makes more sense to give people who need them transportation vouchers that they can apply to the transportation of their choice. Until transit is recognized as a socialist failure, taxpayers will continue to spend more money on obsolete transportation that few people need or use.
There is more than a through line with all these than you may notice at first. And there are logical connections and thematic overlaps among several as well.