Deirdre McCloskey reviews Bruce Caldwell’s and Hansjörg Klausinger’s Hayek: A Life. A slice:
The peculiarly American term for such a worldview is libertarianism. The usage delivers liberal over to the social democrats. Hayek and I disapprove. True liberalism adopts instead the strange and wonderful idea arising suddenly by happy accident in northwestern Europe during the 18th century that the ancient hierarchies of husband and master and king should not stand. Ordinary people were to be treated for the first time like adults. Such a liberalism could be called adultism.
Where does Marx’s oversize impact come from? Magness and Makovi (2022) in the The Journal of Political Economy offer a simple and straightforward answer: the Bolshevik Revolution. Their paper is essentially a quantitative affirmation of what many intellectual historians had noted throughout the 20th century. Marx had a real following among German socialists in the late 19th century, but he was catapulted to international fame in 1917.
George Will explains why politics today is so toxic. A slice:
The fundamental economic problem of attaining subsistence having been banished by plenty, many hyper-politicized Americans have filled the void in their lives with the grim fun of venting their animosities. This would not have surprised Peter De Vries, the wittiest American writer since Mark Twain: “Human nature is shabby stuff, as you may know from introspection.”
I write this with some degree of trepidation, in part because I still have my grandmother in my ear and in part because I am keenly aware of the harm in underestimating bias. But there is also a cost to overemphasizing its impact. A black kid who believes he will face daunting societal obstacles is likely to underinvest in trying to climb society’s rungs. Every black student in the country needs to know that his return on investment in education is, if anything, higher than for white students.
The solution is neither to stop fighting biased behavior nor to curb honest inquiry about race in America. We shouldn’t stop searching for and penalizing discriminatory employers, or trying to reduce racial differences in police brutality, or estimating whether the value of a home appraisal depends on the race of the homeowner, or reducing bias in bail decisions by using artificial intelligence. I could go on, like the conversations stuck to those slipcovers. The solution isn’t to look away from discrimination. It does exist. But we also can’t point at every gap in outcomes and instantly conclude it’s racism. Prejudice must be measured rigorously. Statistically. Disparity doesn’t necessarily imply racism. It may feel omnipresent, but it isn’t all-powerful. Skills matter most.
Even the New York Times has lately surmounted its psychological infirmities to noticerealities, with a long piece on a recent Sunday recognizing that the outlook is less dire than routinely claimed. One nit I might pick with the sociological realists concerns a carbon tax, which might yet appeal for fiscal reasons. But even here the wisdom of Mr. Ausubel can’t be discounted:
“The outcome of [a carbon tax]” he said in the same 2007 interview, “will likely bear little relation to what experts forecast. I will wager the main beneficiaries will be government administrators, lawyers, accountants, and financial intermediaries, not people bothered by weather and climate. Keeping energy cheap for end-users matters. For those adapting to climate change, cheap energy matters enormously. Cheap energy can translate into cheap water, for example, through pumping or desalination. Cheap energy also means people can range further in search of jobs and income.”
It also allows them air conditioning to cope with hotter days, one might add.
Bjorn Lomborg decries the hypocrisy on display at the recent U.N. Climate Summit.
My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy talks turkey about work.
Ordinary Chinese citizens are bravely protesting being continually terrorized by the straw man. Two slices:
Residents in Shanghai, China’s most populous city, gathered Saturday night and early Sunday, calling for the end of pandemic lockdowns and chanting “We want freedom” and “Unlock Xinjiang, unlock all of China,” according to witnesses at the event. In even more extraordinary scenes of public anger aimed at the government’s top leader, a group of protesters there chanted, “Xi Jinping, step down!” and “Communist Party, step down!”
…..
The immediate trigger for the demonstrations, which were also seen at universities in Beijing, Xi’an and Nanjing on Saturday, was a deadly fire in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, in China’s far northwest on Thursday. Ten people, including three children, died after emergency fire services could not get close enough to an apartment building engulfed in flames. Residents blamed lockdown-related measures for hampering rescue efforts.
Zac Bissonnette tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
The original sin of the western COVID response was thinking China is in any way a model of public health.
It is a single-party dictatorship with no respect for individual rights, and a controlled media that isn’t allowed to investigate the voluminous fake data the CCP puts out.
James Bovard is rightly critical of Fauci. A slice:
No American has been more revered by the media in the COVID era than Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser and the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Since early 2020, TV and print profiles have deluged Fauci with endless adulation, spurring the sale of Fauci votive candles, Fauci bobbleheads and #trustFauci Twitter hashtags. But Wednesday, Fauci’s mind vanished.
Or at least that’s what he claimed. A federal judge compelled Fauci to answer questions from lawyers suing to reveal the role of “dozens of federal officials across at least 11 federal agencies “ to suppress “disfavored speakers, viewpoints and content on social-media platforms.” That lawsuit is exposing how Biden’s war on disinformation is demolishing Americans’ freedom of speech.
Fauci was deposed on Wednesday by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry. Landry labeled Fauci the “man who single-handedly wrecked the US economy based upon ‘the science, follow the science.’” But “over the course of seven hours, we discovered that he can’t recall practically anything dealing with his COVID response,” Landry said.
So Fauci is “omniscient except during depositions”?
Missouri Attorney General Schmitt said the deposition revealed: “When Fauci speaks — social media censors.“ The lawsuit will continue to expose federal shenanigans with perhaps the biggest bombshells still to come.