The Economic Thought of Dr. King

Just a few links to some old posts of mine:

- The Economics of Dr. King

- On property. This is the quote: "I am aware that there are many who wince at a distinction between property and persons--who hold both sacrosanct. My views are not so rigid. A life is sacred. Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect, it has no personal being. It is part of the earth man walks on; it is not man."

- Obama was right (and better at economics than a lot of my facebook friends at the time) on "you didn't build that", and King agreed with the sentiment.

I have several pages written from maybe six months back of a paper on Martin Luther King's economic thought. I should probably just get down to work and finish that this summer. Things are too busy now, though.

Six White Horses

It's his brother's song, but this is a nice version too

Who's got two thumbs and won the best oral presentation for social science at the 23rd Annual Robyn Rafferty Mathias Student Research Conference?

Cuz I talk pretty apparently

This is what I was saying about local prices and the minimum wage

How many minimum wage hours does it take to afford a two-bedroom apartment


Notice that the places with state minimum wages actually have the lowest real minimum wage. In a sense it's no wonder that you hear so many pleas for living wages and high minimum wages from these places and especially in certain localities: a dollar doesn't go as far there. In that sense we should probably be a little more circumspect before criticizing those super-high living wage campaigns. On the other hand, I think this shows that the federal minimum wage is perhaps too high and that maybe state variation is the way to go.

Some propositions on selection into homeschooling that are relevant to good empirical thinking about the impact of homeschooling

1. Families consider all educational alternatives and select the one with the highest value for their child

2. Better home life increases the quality of home schooling ("better" here and below could be, but does not have to be, a judgment on whether parents themselves are good people. I'd assume the most important elements of having a "better home life" have to do with available resources and the capacity to support and teach your kid, not variance in whether someone is a "good parent" or a "nice person").

3. Better communities increase the quality of public schooling

4. Quality of home life and quality of communities are highly correlated

5. There's an opportunity cost associated with home schooling (this is of course taken into account in #1)

It seems to me that these are all pretty defensible, and the conclusion I'm coming up with is that the people who will benefit from home schooling (and therefore select into it, according to #1) are those people who have a high, positive differential between the quality of their home life and the quality of their communities. The distribution of the impact of homeschooling over the underlying distribution of community quality therefore depends on the joint distribution of home life and community quality. Equalizing expenditures on public education across diverse communities should reduce the benefit of home schooling in previously low quality communities and increase the benefit in previously high quality communities.

It doesn't get at the impact, but an interesting first step in looking at this would be to look at whether policy changes around public school financing lead to this change in selection into home schooling.

Greenwald on Harris

This is actually an important and interesting conversation to have. Indeed, Greenwald almost exclusively deals in important and interesting conversations, and that's to his credit. But this article is basically a plea to readers "don't associate me at all with the dumb arguments of people on my side, but make sure you hold Sam Harris responsible for everything anyone I disagree with says".

I can see how Greenwald achieves such success as a columnist and as a lawyer. He argues his positions with great passion and conviction, and it does a great job papering over how flimsy they are in a lot of cases.

On the Harris thing: we've gone over these things enough on here to know that I disagree with him on the torture (although he's not an unqualified supporter) and on Iraq, but agree on the war on terror, etc. On the question of Islam (the subject of this article), I think it's entirely appropriate to say that modern Islam - not all of modern Islam, but considering all the elements and not just picking the "good" ones - is indeed uniquely threatening to liberal civilization and insofar as it imposes itself on innocent Muslims and non-Muslims, it needs to be met appropriately (which, under some circumstances, also means lethally). I am very much in favor of the distinction between "Muslims" and "Islamists" precisely because modern Islam is diverse and not uniformly problematic. But I don't think it's inappropriate at all to note that Islam's "Islamist" faction is more prominent and more dangerous than say Christianity's "Christianist" faction. Five hundred or a thousand years ago you could probably say the reverse. At that time liberal elements dissented (with mixed results), left Europe, or (eventually) reformed the problem. But today, it is the Islamist community within the wider population of Muslims that poses the real threat to liberal civilization. And you know what? You can say that without supporting U.S. policy (I support some parts, but not others)

I think this author means he "disposes with the highly restrictive assumptions" rather than "despises with the highly restrictive assumptions"

...although you never know. In this department we're assigned a heterodox article as often as we're assigned an empirical article :)

(it's a German author... I'm guessing something was just lost in translation)

What do we do with "crazy" equilibria?: Anarcho-capitalism

Context here.

I don't know what we're supposed to do with it, except Bryan's point not to discount the probability of something happening.

Anarcho-capitalism is a "crazy" idea (in the way that Bryan is using the term). Totalitarianism, state socialism, theocracy, and monarchy are also "crazy" ideas (not everywhere, but I assume we're talking in the U.S.). Indeed, Bryan even points out that some of these are today considered "crazy" where they wouldn't be a thousand years ago (when democracy would be considered "crazy").

This is why I am struggling to see how this helps the case for anarcho-capitalism. If the message is only "don't count it out", then OK - message received and I agree. I don't count out a state socialist or a totalitarian future either (hoping that's not our future - but I could see it in 3013).

I guess I just don't see what overcoming the plausibility hurdle really does for anarcho-capitalists. The real problem is the advisability hurdle, right?

That said, I don't think this clearly does away with the plausibility hurdle (although it helps). Anarcho-capitalism has a problem offering an explanation for one thing that totalitarianism or monarchy or feudalism/warlordism don't have a problem with: it seems like it should be a highly unstable equilibria. Totalitarianism, monarchy, feudalism, state socialism, etc. are "crazy" equilibria but at least they should be somewhat stable in the short-term (if not the long-term).

It's hard to conceive of what would make anarcho-capitalism a stable equilibrium even if it were a plausible equilibrium (which I agree it is) and even if it were an advisable equilibrium (which I don't think it is).

Some links, and one question

Links:

- David Henderson's review of Mulligan is out. I saw a piece of this earlier. What's nice about Henderson is he takes a lot of care in clearly expressing some honest pluses and minuses. I like that style. I've only done one book review so far (forthcoming), and when a referee got back to me with comments on it one thing he said was "I don't know if the author likes the book or not". I had to strategize how to respond to that, but I ultimately said something like "It's a great book - I note that in the introduction and have strengthened that language. But ultimately there are parts of it that are strong and parts that are weak and they ought to both be highlighted". No book gets published if it doesn't have good parts. By the same token, no author is perfect. So this is the sort of review we ought to expect, right? On Mulligan himself, you all know that I buy the labor-supply effects of welfare programs but that I think Mulligan does a much weaker job criticizing the AD explanation. I have two comments to this effect in the link to David's post above.

- Excellent article by Catherine Rampell on the economics of stay-at-home dads (HT - Kate). This is of personal interest to me because I will be a 75% stay-at-home dad in the fall, and of professional interest to me insofar as it deals with gender economics and labor supply.

- Brad DeLong agrees with me that the University of Rochester has a big problem named Steve Landsburg. I am very glad Brad pulled out the quote where Landsburg just couldn't fathom the difference between getting violently assaulted and getting hit by photons. Thinking back to it is making me sick again, so I'll stop - but not before reminding people about the excellent gender studies program at Rochester and the good gender economics work they've done there this year.

- Evan shares a good article with me on what I would just call the political economy of liberal education. He also highlights this comment which is a good takedown of the skills shortage argument.

- Maria Enchautegui, of the Urban Institute, has a paper out on high skill immigration programs and their impact on the composition of immigrant flows. My report on high skilled immigration will be released two weeks from today - more on that later.



Question:

I got in a discussion recently on the impact of homeschooling. It seems like the empirical research on the question is uniformly of very low quality. However, the people interested in this that I was talking to are highly partisan about it and bristle at the idea that the benefits might not far exceed the benefits of public school, or that some kids may not benefit from homeschooling. Some of them bristled at the very idea that I would suggest the existing studies weren't very good. This piques my interest. It's probably a highly variable impact depending on a kid's circumstances and alternatives. The selection bias associated with homeschooling has got to be huge (it's exactly the failure to account for selection bias that plagues existing studies). Does anyone know of a good empirical study on the effect of homeschooling? Or good data?

Attending on Friday: The Morality and Future of Capitalism

I am a little busy and will only make the first two sessions - it would have been nice of the organizers to accommodate my needs and put the three guys I want to see on the same panel, but so it goes:

“The Morality and Future of Capitalism”
Friday, April 5^th

10:00 -Noon: “Is Inequality Bad for America?”
Robert Lerman (American University & Urban Institute)
Loren Lomasky (Univerity of Virginia)
Jerry Muller (Catholic University).

1:00-2:45: “What Policymakers Should Know about Great Political Economists”
Richard Boyd (Georgetown) on Adam Smith
Bradley Bateman (Denison) on John Maynard Keynes
Peter Boettke (George Mason) on Friedrich Hayek



Robert Lerman, Brad Bateman, and Pete Boettke are of particular interest for me.