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Art Carden and Phil Magness summarize their new paper that eviscerates the attempt by Sandy Darity, M’balou Camara, and Nancy MacLean to portray the late W.H. Hutt as a white supremacist [2]. Here’s their conclusion:
Elsewhere, we show that their charges of “white supremacy” against Hutt arise from plain misconstructions and misrepresentations of Hutt’s own words. In one telling passage, they write that Hutt blamed Africa’s “natural handicaps” on alleged “genetic” characteristics of black Africans. He did nothing of the kind. The “handicaps” in the passage they misquote refer to geography, the tropical disease environment of the continent before the advent of modern medicine, and political institutions – not genes. Elsewhere in documents MacLean and her co-authors cite (but evidently did not read with any care), Hutt explicitly states that he does not believe in race-based hereditary theories.
In our paper, we go on. And on. And on, for about four dozen pages with a long bibliography. With William Darity and M’Balou Camara, Nancy MacLean claims to have “set the record straight” with “irrefutable” evidence that Hutt was a white supremacist. They have in fact set nothing straight, and their argument, far from being “irrefutable,” wrecks itself upon the rocks of at least one major citation error, selective use of documents, and willful misreadings of Hutt’s words devoid of their original context.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Corey DeAngelis applauds Arizona for significantly expanding school choice [5]. A slice:
The state’s efforts come after what many have called the year of school choice. After months of power-hungry teachers’ unions fighting for school closings and political indoctrination in the classroom in 2021, 18 states [6] chose to enact or expand programs to fund students instead of systems. Arizona just one-upped all of them.
Most of the nation’s existing school-choice initiatives are limited to certain students based on eligibility categories such as income or special needs. Arizona’s expanded program eliminates such distinctions by allowing all families to take most of the state portion of their children’s taxpayer-funded education dollars to the providers of their choosing. The funding—about $7,000 a student—will follow the child to an “education savings account” directed by his parents or guardians. The funds may be spent on any approved education expenditures, such as private-school tuition and fees, tutoring, instructional materials and curriculum.
Milton Friedman’s project was to undermine the theories that supported policy discretion. He had several objections.
First, regarding the idea of using temporary tax cuts to spur the economy, he proposed the Permanent Income Hypothesis. He never said that all consumers optimize their spending patterns using stochastic calculus—the Euler Equation was an element of the technically elegant but utterly stupid consensus that emerged in the decades after Friedman roiled the profession. It was part of Olivier Blanchard’s survey that infamously concluded that “the state of macroeconomics is good” .
Friedman merely claimed that the propensity to consume out of a temporary tax cut would be lower than the propensity to consume out of a permanent tax cut. If so, then temporary tax cuts might not be very stimulative when enacted. Instead, much of the tax cut would be saved, and it might be spent in later years, even after the economy had recovered. If you want evidence that Friedman was roughly correct, all you have to do is notice that economists believe that consumers have savings left over from the COVID relief checks, and that this is now fueling inflation. I cannot think of any economist who disagrees with the view that spending out of temporary tax cuts is likely to be less than spending out of permanent tax cuts.
Writing in Spiked, Matt Ridley makes the case that covid leaked from a lab [9].
Jay Bhattacharya tweets [10]:
Governments around the world should be issuing universal amnesty for covid era violations of nonsensical, tyrannical public health orders. Instead, gov’ts are prosecuting people in 2022 for the crime of sitting on an outdoor bench in April 2020.