Arnold Kling ponders economists versus noneconomists. Two slices:
The line between economist and non-economist has nothing to do with possession of a Ph.D. People who have taken many economics courses but forgotten the key ideas are no better than non-economists. On the other hand, someone who absorbs the most important ideas from a freshman economics course can be an economic expert.
Probably the most essential idea is that the economy is impersonal. Economic outcomes are determined by general forces, like supply and demand, as opposed to the intentions—good or bad—of individuals.
Inflation does not rise because of a surge in greed. And it does not fall because greed recedes.
The grocery store owner does not control the price of eggs. That price is determined by supply and demand.
Corporate executives do not “move jobs overseas.” Economic activity shifts between domestic and foreign production because of complex, impersonal forces, one of which is capital movements.
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If you can appreciate the impersonal forces that affect international trade, you are an economic expert. Otherwise, if you fall back on “American executives who send jobs overseas,” then you are a dangerous demagogue. This is true even if—especially if—you are lauded in the press as a thought leader with new ideas.
Bjorn Lomborg writes that the U.N.’s “latest climate-change alarms are more about demagoguery than data.” Two slices:
The reason you’ve heard a lot about extreme heat deaths this summer has more to do with demagoguery than data. Alongside the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres’s “call to action” on the topic in late July, mandarins across U.N. organizations have issued warnings that are heavy on emotion and light on facts.
In early August, the World Health Organization trumpeted a disturbing figure: In Europe alone, more than 175,000 people die each year because of extreme heat. That was an about fourfold exaggeration. When called out, the organization quietly edited its online publication to remove the word “extreme” from the statement’s title, a concession that these deaths aren’t, as the WHO suggested, the result of a cataclysmic shift in temperatures.
Unfortunately, the media had already spread the WHO’s original, mistaken claim far and wide. Moreover, the edited version left out other important context: While seasonal rises in temperature that have been the norm for decades do kill people, it’s a far smaller toll than that taken by cold. In Europe, cold kills nearly four times as many people as heat—a danger that a warming climate helps ameliorate.
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Most important, even though the planet is warming, that groundbreaking 2024 study found that the global death rate from extreme heat has declined by more than 7% a decade over the past 30 years. When researchers adjusted for the increasingly older age distribution of the world population, they found that the global extreme heat death rate has declined by 13.9% every 10 years.
Falsely attributing heat deaths to global warming is likely to lead to more heat deaths. The recent decline in heat mortality is largely thanks to greater access to electricity and therefore to air conditioning. The best policy to avoid extreme heat deaths—or cold deaths for that matter—is to ensure that more people can afford technology to control the temperature in their homes. That necessitates economic growth and cheap, reliable energy.
Samuel Gregg looks back on “when Keynes killed laissez-faire.” A slice:
Driving Keynes’s determination to smash holes in market liberalism’s intellectual underpinnings was his desire to clear the way for extensive government economic interventions. Keynes was well aware that the wisdom of such interventions would be disputed on grounds of economic theory. His response was to marginalize the saliency of economic theory itself.
One consistency pervading Keynes’s thought from the 1920s onwards is his conviction that the facts and problems confronting us must drive action, with theory being subordinated to the demands of praxis. Keynes’s lecture does not hide his impatience with market-liberal economists and their perpetual concern for sound theory.
Stephanie Slade reports on the Heritage Foundation’s sad transformation into a MAGA mouthpiece. Two slices:
The last public address Tucker Carlson gave before Fox News ousted him in April 2023 was a keynote speech at a dinner celebrating Heritage’s 50th anniversary. Hailing Carlson as a hero, Kevin Roberts, the foundation’s president, noted afterward that “if things go south for you at Fox News, there’s always a job for you at Heritage.”
Carlson by that time had earned a reputation for dabbling in conspiracy theories, racially tinged and otherwise, and questioning the free markets that Heritage had long claimed to defend. His appearance at the gala, alongside other changes then afoot at the think tank, caused many observers to wonder what in the world had happened to the once-staid Heritage Foundation.
I spoke with multiple people formerly associated with Heritage, from research fellows to senior staff. They painted a picture of an organization that has, in the 14 years since launching its lobbying arm, Heritage Action for America, come to care less about getting conservative policies into law and more about getting friendly Republicans into power. During the Trump era, that has increasingly meant defending the 45th president and attacking his enemies, full stop, no matter what.
Standing by Trump after the events of January 6, 2021, was apparently a bridge too far for some Heritage insiders. Then-President Kay Coles James and then–Executive Vice President Kim Holmes announced their resignations in March of that year. Many more departures would follow—some voluntary, others less so.
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If it looks as if the contemporary Heritage Foundation has become primarily a vehicle for ensuring Trump’s will is realized, whatever that will might be at a given moment, Roberts doesn’t seem to disagree. In the same New York Times interview where he refused to say that Biden’s election was legitimate, he described Heritage’s role as “institutionalizing Trumpism.”
That switch from standing for a set of principles, regardless of who espouses them, to standing for a candidate, regardless of his principles, has put Heritage in bed with some unsavory characters, from Steve Bannon to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
