Can Anyone Do Arithmetic?

My current minor irritation is Gavin Newsom, governor of California. He keeps saying things that imply that California needs to reduce its CO2 output in order to reduce global warming in order to prevent future forest fires.

I think it dubious that warming, about a degree C in the U.S. (I don't have figures for California) over the past century plus, has anything to do with the forest fires, but put that aside. Total global warming since it started c. 1913 has been about 1.4°C. The IPCC believes the rate has increased — suppose it is now three degrees a century. The population of California is about 1/200th of the world population, the GNP about 1/40th of the world GNP. I don't have data on CO2, so will guess it is 1/50th of world CO2 output. If California cuts that in half, it reduces world CO2 output by about 1%. Over a century, that might reduce warming by something like .03°c. All calculations are back of the envelope approximations and I know that not all functions in the world are linear, but that's enough to give us some idea of the scale of the effect.

Actually, I'm not so much irritated at Newsom — I expect politicians to be demagogues. I'm irritated at the rest of the world, all of the media and all of the people who take blatant nonsense seriously either because it is says what they want to hear or because they cannot be bothered to do arithmetic.

Trump is a demagogue too, but at least people call him on it.

Free Audiobooks. Sort of.

Audible.com makes available vouchers for free audiobooks as part of the promotion process. I have such vouchers for The Machinery of Freedom and Future Imperfect.  I will give them to anyone willing to listen to a book and agree that, if he likes it, he will put a favorable review up somewhere that others can see it — a blog, Facebook, Amazon, ...  . 

I have vouchers for both the UK and the US marketplace. If you are interested, give me  contact information either here, via my email, or via FB.

The Real Problem with Voting by Mail

There has been lots of talk on mail-in voting, with Trump complaining about the possibilities of fraud. The real risk, it seems to me, is not fraud but vote buying. Someone with experience in black markets could offer to buy ballots for ten or twenty dollars apiece, and there are probably places where a fair number of people would sell. 

It would also be possible, but I think more difficult, for someone in a position to pressure many other people, such as an employer, a landlord, perhaps a priest, to give him their ballots to fill out on their behalf or to have everyone fill them out together. That would be more risky, because any one person who complained to the authorities could get him in trouble.

Rothbard, Reagan, and Rand

I recently wrote a chapter on Murray Rothbard for a section on libertarianism in a book I am working on. My central argument was that, because he viewed political conflict as a war between good and evil rather than a conversation among people about their differing beliefs, he was more interested in whether an argument reached the correct conclusion than whether it was true: All is fair in love and war. My first example was an exchange we had during a talk he gave. I wrote that that survived only in my memory, then went on to give other examples from his published work. 

I was wrong. Yesterday I downloaded from the Mises Institute the complete files of the Libertarian Forum, a magazine that Rothbard edited, initially with Karl Hess, from 1969 to 1984. After reading the article I was looking for, one by Rothbard relevant to a different chapter, I did a search on my name and found, among other things, an article by Rothbard clearly written after our exchange. In it he made precisely the same (bad) argument he had made in the talk, added that I and several other people had objected to it, and gave his defense.

The article is  “Are We Being Beastly to the Gipper? Part I," Libertarian Forum XVI Number 1, February 1982. The relevant volume is webbed here. Rothbard's thesis in  it is that, far from cutting government expenditure, Reagan increased it. He wrote:

In fiscal 1980, the last full year of the Carter regime, he of Big Spending and modern liberalism, total federal government spending was $579 billion. Originally, the Reagan projection of his own spending in the first full year of his regime, fiscal 1982, was $695 billion - thus keeping federal spending below the magic $700 billion mark. This "massive" and "historic" spending cut, dear reader, amounted to a 10% annual increase over the budget in the last days of the Bad Old Carter regime.

The problem with this, as should be obvious to any economist, is that these are nominal, not real, figures. From 1980 to 1982, prices increased by about 21%, so the real change implied by those numbers, the change in the quantity of goods and services consumed by government, is not +20% but -1%.

Rothbard went on to point out that the estimate had later increased and was likely to increase even more by the time the year was over. Using the new, higher, estimate for 1982 expenditure, the increase in expenditure was larger than the increase in prices, so his basic conclusion was correct. His argument was not. By using nominal instead of real figures, he had made the increase appear much larger than it actually was.

His response to my pointing that out was that the inflation was Reagan's fault, so it was appropriate to use it to make Reagan look bad. 

The expanded version in the article:

David Friedman, David Henderson, and other "libertarian" apologists for Reaganism have protested that such an attack is unfair since inflation can reduce the "real" level of government spending, as corrected for inflation. But while it is perfectly valid to correct yours and my incomes for inflation to see how well off we really are, it is impermissible to do this for the federal government, which, by its printing of counterfeit money, is itself responsible for the inflation. It is truly bizarre to try to excuse the growth of Reagan spending by pointing to inflation's reducing the "real" level of spending, for in that case, we should hope for an enormous amount of inflation and hail Reagan's spending "reductions" if such hyperinflation came about.  To take a deliberately extreme example to highlight the point: Suppose that the Reagan Administration suddenly doubled the money supply, thereby doubling or tripling the price level next year. Should we then hail Reagan for "cutting" "real" government spending by one-half or two-thirds?

Note the word "unfair" in the second line. The issue was not whether he was being fair to Reagan but whether he was being honest with his audience. Taking his argument seriously, if Reagan doubled the price level we should blame him for inflation, blame him for doubling government expenditure, and praise him for doubling the U.S. economy. I doubt that would have been his response.

Part of what struck me when I found the article was the implication of his publishing it. That implies either that he really believed his own argument, however implausible it seems to me, or that he believed his readers were sufficiently under his spell to accept his arguments, however bad, if given with sufficient confidence and passion.

 

Which brings me to Ayn Rand. Reading that article and others, I was struck by how similar Rothbard's approach was to Rand's. They disagreed on some issues, most notably anarchism and foreign policy. But they were both arrogantly certain of their positions, argued them with highly emotive language, believed that their natural rights position could be rigorously derived by reason along Aristotelian lines. Both saw political conflict as fundamentally good against evil. Both expected their followers to accept their current line without question.

 

Early on, Rothbard was an admirer or Rand, joining her circle and writing effusive praise of Atlas Shrugged. That did not last. He left her circle, ceased writing of her with admiration, eventually wrote a one-act play satirizing her and her circle.

There was not enough room for two captains in one boat.

 

So far as I know, nobody has yet written a book about Rand and Rothbard, their similarities, differences, and interactions. Someone should.

Wanted: Reviewers for the Audiobook of _Salamander_

The audiobook of Salamander, my second novel, should be out in a couple of weeks, and I am very happy with it — the narrator did a better job than I could have. Audible will give me vouchers to provide free copies to people willing to review the book, anyone interested who has a place to put a review where other people might see it. Let me know by email or comments here if you are interested.

I may be able to get similar vouchers for my other audiobooks — I didn't know about that option when they came out. If so, the same offer applies.

Here is the current, probably final, version of the cover by Anna Krupitsky, who has done covers for several of my other books.

A Very Long Shot

 At the 1975 Libertarian Party Convention in New York, I gave a talk on Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia. Nozick was in the audience, and we had an interesting exchange. Someone recently asked me if there was any record of the talk. I don't have any, and that was long before the time when everyone in the audience could be expected to have a video camera in his pocket, but it occurred to me that someone might have tape recorded the talk, perhaps the whole convention. If so, I would like to put a copy on my web page.

Does anyone know of such a recording and, if so, where it is?

A Little of my New Book

As I have mentioned here, I am working on converting fifteen years of blog posts into one or more books. I have now webbed one section, chapters dealing with libertarian philosophy and related issues, for comments.

My Talks this Weekend

There is a very large virtual event, How the Light Gets In, this weekend which I have agreed to participate in. The web site doesn't make it easy to figure out when a particular speaker is speaking on what, so I am posting a link to my itinerary here. The titles of my talks are their creation, not mine. All times are BST, and I have added the PST times. The first talk, not counting the pre-recorded one, starts at nine in the morning here.

I am also giving a talk as part of a different event on October 4th, and will post something about that later.

Products I Would Like to See: Category Peanut Butter

I am currently on a low glycemic index diet. 

Fortunately, peanuts are consistent with the diet and I like peanut butter. 

Unfortunately, the standard commercial versions of peanut butter have quite a lot of added sugar, which is not consistent with the diet. 

Fortunately, a number of firms make "old fashioned peanut butter," which contains only peanuts. 

Unfortunately, such peanut butter tends to separate, with the oil rising to the top. Stirring it is messy, especially when the jar is full, and one tends to end up with hard, dry peanut butter at the very bottom.

I think it unlikely that sugar keeps peanut butter from separating, although I could be wrong, and so conjecture that one of the other ingredients added to the standard brands is what does it. If so, it should be possible to make peanut butter that does not have sugar and does not separate. 

I want it.

What I want cannot be found, at least so far by me. I conjecture that part of the reason is information cost — the fact that the old fashioned peanut butter separates is an easy signal that it only has peanuts — and in part religion. The religion in question is the popular form of nature worship that equates "natural" to "good," and so rejects "chemicals" in food whether or not there is any reason to believe that they are bad for us.

Theory vs History

Yesterday, Mike Huemer and I had a debate with two anarcho-communists on the topic of left libertarianism vs right libertarianism. It can be viewed on YouTube.

One thing that struck me as interesting was a difference in how we supported our positions. While I made some factual points, my central argument was theoretical, based on the coordination problem. In order for each of us to achieve his objectives he requires the cooperation of thousands, probably millions, of others, as you can see by tracing the supply train for anything we use — what things went into making it, what went into making those things, and so forth — and considering the number of people involved at each stage. Property and trade provide a decentralized way of solving that problem.

My challenge to my opponents was to explain how, without property, they would solve that problem. They never made a serious effort to answer it. Instead, they offered what they claimed was historical evidence that it had been solved, most notably by the Catalonian anarchists during the Spanish Civil War, with a variety of other claimed factual examples.

The problem is that neither I nor they knew if any of that was true. In my experience, if you look carefully at any controversial bit of history, you can find convincing arguments for a range of very different interpretations. I have not tried the experiment, but my guess is that a sufficiently able holocaust denier could offer persuasive arguments that it would take at least an hour or two of research to debunk. I have encountered cases where a false claim, for instance that Hoover's response to the stock market crash was to cut government expenditure or that Adam Smith supported public schooling, is widely believed. Unless one happens to have already spent time and effort investigating a historical claim, there is no way to know if it is cardboard or gospel truth. Even if you have, there is probably no way, in a context like a debate, to prove its truth or falsity to your opponents and audience.

Theory, on the other hand, is something you can actually look at inside your own head, without worrying about biased or otherwise unreliable sources of factual information. My confidence that a minimum wage must always reduce employment opportunities for low skilled workers was answered not by Card and Kruger's very weak factual evidence but by their demonstration, using the conventional price theory I accept, that there was a conceivable situation in which it would have the opposite effect. I doubt that situation has much real world relevance in the U.S. at present, since it depends on the market for such labor being monopsonistic, but it might well be relevant in other environments. 

Similarly here. Persuading me that the coordination problem could be adequately solved without some equivalent of private property and trade on historical evidence would be difficult, since I would have to look at lot of historical claims, find people who disputed them, evaluate their arguments for myself. A clean theoretical argument, possibly inspired by looking at real world examples, could do it in twenty minutes. To the best of my knowledge and belief nobody has produced such an argument yet, which makes me suspect that it cannot be done.

None of that, of course, is an argument against doing empirical work — the real world sometimes has lessons to teach us that we were not clever enough to think of for ourselves. It is an argument against giving much weight to claims about such work that you have not yourself investigated with reasonable care or, short of that, seen confirmed by people who have investigated them and whose honesty and competence you have reason to trust.

 

A Question on Libertarian History

I am working on another chapter of my current book, one that starts with the letter I wrote Edith Efron back in 1978, responding to an article of hers in Reason. Her article is webbed and I have now reread it, forty some years later. One thing that struck me again was this passage:

I suspect that a critical turning point in the evolution of this movement occurred when the proponents of a constitional republic, who by definition advocate a nation-state, agreed to suspend their endless quarrel with the anarchists, on the grounds that one should not split the forces of a small pro-liberty movement. After all, the argument went, one could wait a few hundred years to debate the issue of whether the government should be merely microscopic, or downright non-existent. All, presumably, could agree on the necessity to diminish its powers. It sounded like a plausible agreement. But it wasn't. For the constitutional republicans it was a very serious error. Already traumatized by the Objectivist debacle, which had severely undercut their self-confidence, they actually had agreed to abandon a series of important areas of political thought-above all they had abandoned the affirmative aspects of their position—the value of nation, the necessity of a national culture, the value of a government, the need to defend the country, and the need for a radical reformer to formulate a political position which integrates his proposals for change with his desires to preserve ... The constitutional republicans were struck dumb. They became paralyzed, mute, and stupid. The plain fact is that repression addles the brain.

...

By agreement with the anarchists, no examination of the affirmative aspects of the nation-state or of the unifying abstractions of the nation's pluralistic culture, was allowed. Over the years, in fact, the taboo became so intense, that ugly invective broke out whenever an individual presumed to explore these areas. The invective, of course, came from the anarchists, whose sole position on nation and state is negative—and who had lost nothing whatever by the agreement.

I was an active libertarian throughout the relevant period, and cannot remember what Efron describes ever happening. As a Harvard undergraduate I attended meetings of Radicals for Capitalism, the campus Objectivist group, argued with its members, and was eventually asked to stop coming because they did not like having to defend their views against my arguments. As a member of YAF and the token libertarian columnist on The New Guard I argued with everyone from traditionalists through fellow libertarians. When, at a libertarian event, I gave a critical talk on Anarchy, State and Utopia with Nozick in the audience, the interaction was friendly. The agreement as I understood it was that anarchists and minarchists were all libertarians and could work together, not that either side was forbidden to argue its position.

I am guessing that some of my readers were also part of the libertarian movement in the sixties and seventies, the period Efron is describing. My question for you is whether your memory supports her description of the history or mine. 

One possible mistake I made in the letter was to identify the anarchists Efron was attacking with Murray Rothbard. She mentions Rothbard early on in an anecdote about the failure of an early attempt of his to interact with people on the left but not thereafter, despite the fact that, throughout the period, he was the most prominent figure in the libertarian anarchist movement. That may be because, having initiated the attempt to ally with the left in 1965 he had abandoned it by 1970, eight years before Efron wrote her article. That makes her identification of "the anarchists" with the people she is criticizing a bit odd — presumably most of them were Rothbardians who had followed him into the left but not out of it.

When I have the whole chapter done I may put it up here for comments, but at the moment I am just curious as to the difference between her account and my memory.

One Advantage to High Infection Rates

The obvious disadvantage is the risk of overwhelming the hospitals, but it occurred to me that there may also be one advantage. 

The latest evidence suggests that immunity after infection probably lasts at least four months. We don't know how much longer it lasts. Suppose that over four months everyone who can get infected does. At that point everyone is immune, so the virus has nobody to infect and vanishes away.

That is an extreme case, but four months is also an estimate of the current lower bound for how long immunity lasts. More plausibly, assume that the infection rate is high enough to push the population to herd immunity before the immunity of a significant number of those infected first wears off. At that point the number of infections starts to go down, since each infected person passes the disease on to fewer than one other. If it goes down far enough before the number of no longer immune people gets high enough to push the population back below herd immunity, it may reach the point where further transmission can be controlled by test and trace.

Suppose, on the other hand, that we hold the initial infection rate low enough so we eventually that reach a point at which people are losing immunity as fast as people are getting it, while the number immune is still below the herd immunity level. In that case the disease goes on forever, or at least until a vaccine becomes available. 

Obviously the argument does not hold if a vaccine is going to show up shortly, which at this point seems likely. It also does not hold if immunity is permanent, as might be the case. But it does imply that under some circumstances a higher infection rate is better, in the long run, than a lower.

 

How to Keep Home Schooled Kids Out of College

The University of California is apparently moving to abandon the use of standardized tests in admissions. That means that they are eliminating the only way in which home schooled kids, lacking the usual high school grades and teacher recommendations, can demonstrate their academic qualifications to a university.