Inspired by Jim Dorn’s contribution to Cato’s “Defending Globalization” project, GMU Econ alum Dominic Pino explains that “central planning didn’t make China richer.” Here’s his conclusion:
If China wants to ignore that lesson and persist on its return to state-run economic planning, the U.S. shouldn’t get in the way. And hopefully someday the communist regime will fall, and Chinese people will be able to prosper as much as they could if only they lived under the rule of law with property rights and free markets.
China’s rise has a lot more to do with its abandonment of central planning decades ago than it does with today’s re‐embrace of protectionism, industrial policy, and Maoist socialism.
Also from GMU Econ alum Dominic Pino is this post on Nobel-laureate economist Claudia Goldin. A slice:
As Alex Tabarrok notes, Goldin studied under two of the top economists of the past few decades, Alfred Kahn (who probably did more to advance deregulation in the 1970s and 1980s than any other economist) and Robert Fogel (who won the Nobel Prize himself for economic history). Tabarrok’s post contains videos and links to other articles explaining her research, if you’re interested in learning more.
Goldin’s work on female labor-force participation finds that women left the labor force in the 1800s and then have returned since the 1960s. That’s contrary to the popular narrative that every woman stayed at home in the olden days and only recently have women worked for the first time.
“The economic literature on minimum wage increases has become murkier in recent years, but the overwhelming majority of economists agree that large minimum wage increases in excess of productivity gains means that employers will operate at a loss as far as the affected workers go,” wrote Michael D. Tanner, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute following the passage of the FAST act. “Given that the average profit margin in the fast food industry is just 6–9 percent, those costs are almost certain to be passed along in terms of higher prices or lost jobs.”
“Oh, SNAP”
Nick Gillespie talks with Alexandra Hudson about civility.
Juliana Geran Pilon calls out those who refuse to condemn unequivocally Hamas’s brutality. A slice:
Yet the most alarming consequence of this metastasized ideological cancer lies far beyond the Middle East: the warped narrative framing of the conflict has spread to the minds of America’s best and brightest. Even while the massacres were ongoing, more than 30 Harvard student organizations declared that Israel was “entirely responsible” for the violence occurring in its war against Gaza. A student group at Columbia University went further, celebrating Hamas’s “historic” massacre of Israeli civilians, calling it a long-overdue “counteroffensive” against Israel’s purported apartheid regime. This is no longer a mere matter of moral equivalence but proof that the West is at war with itself.
