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Those of you who receive an email from Cafe Hayek with the most recent posts (or who use a feed reader) have asked for a way to tell who is doing the writing. For some reason, the email version doesn't make the distinction. I'm trying to fix that so please bear with us if your email looks a little funky until we figure it out.

OK, that isn't quite the right pronoun in the phrase "I'm trying to fix..." It's at least a "we" and really a "she."

Many thanks to Lauren Landsburg who appears to have solved the problem.

For Our Friends in Brazil and Portugal

Here's a website, in Portuguese, devoted to free markets and liberalism.  (Thanks to Cato Institute intern Gabriel Araujo.)

Typepad and the "remember personal info" when commenting

We've all been frustrated at times by the weird problem of having checked "Remember Personal Info" on the comment form and finding that when we go to comment again, it's all blank. So you dutifully fill out the form again and dutifully check the box hoping that next time Typepad will indeed remember you, but annoyingly, nothing happens the next time.

It turns out that all you have to do is check the "Remember Personal Info" BEFORE you start filling  in the info the second (and third and fourth and so on) time. As soon as you check the box, Typepad fills it all in. At least that's what happens to me on Firefox with a Mac. This order of events does seem to violate one's expectations but at least it works once you've figured it out.

Good luck, good commenting, and let's keep the civility high. Fewer gotchas and more exploration and education.

"It's Getting Better All the Time"

If the New York Times and other major, elite news outlets are to be believed, the only real question today is whether ordinary people will meet their end by being roasted or flooded to death by man-made global warming or by being crushed -- as they crawl in search of crumbs of toxic food not grown locally -- beneath the diamond-studded heels of boots worn by the richest one-percent of the population.

Patrons of the Cafe know that Russ and I are generally skeptical of most of the fear-mongering about the state of humanity.  Admittedly, we are both deeply influenced by the late Julian Simon, who is, in my opinion, the most underrated economist ever to live.

So I'm delighted to learn that Manoj Padki has started the wonderful new blog "It's Getting Better All the Time" (whose title comes from this book written by Julian Simon and his student Stephen Moore).  In this blog, Manoj will report and document many of the countless ways that humans are progressing.  I will visit Manoj's blog at least once each day.

The Essence of a Masonomist

Arnold Kling very eloquently explains the uniqueness of economics as taught and researched at George Mason University.  Here's an excerpt:

At MIT and other bastions of mainstream economics, most economists are to the left of center but to the right of the academic community as a whole. These economists are known for saying, in effect, "Markets fail. Use government."

Masonomics says, "Markets fail. Use markets."

Somewhere along the way, mainstream economics became hung up on the concept of a perfect market and an optimal allocation of resources. The conditions necessary for a perfect market are absurdly demanding. Everything in the economy must be transparent. Managers must have perfect information about worker productivity and consumers must have perfect information about product quality. There can be nothing that gives an advantage to a firm with a large market share. There cannot be any benefits or costs of any market activity that spill over beyond that market.

The argument between Chicago and MIT seems to be over whether perfect markets are a "good approximation" or a "bad approximation" to reality. Masonomics goes along with the MIT view that perfect markets are a bad approximation to reality. But we do not look to government as a "solution" to imperfect markets.

Masonomics sees market failure as a motivation for entrepreneurship. As an example of market failure, let us use a classic case described by a Nobel Laureate, which is that the seller of a used car knows more about the condition of the car than the buyer. Masonomics predicts that entrepreneurs will try to address this problem. In fact, there are a number of entrepreneurial solutions. Buyers can obtain vehicle history reports. Sellers can offer warranties. Firms such as Carmax undertake professional inspections and stake their reputation on the quality of the cars that they sell.

Masonomics worries much more about government failure than market failure. Governments do not face competitive pressure. They are immune from the "creative destruction" of entrepreneurial innovation. In the market, ineffective firms go out of business. In government, ineffective programs develop powerful constituent groups with a stake in their perpetuation.

I'm proud to be a Masonomist.

A part of the mafia

We're part of the mafia but it's the good kind. (HT: The Big Picture)

Defending Free Speech and Free Trade

Cato Institute scholars have very recently published important op-eds in Washington's daily newspapers.  The first appeared in yesterday's edition of the Washington Post; it is by Raja Kamal and Cato's Tom Palmer.  They defend the right to free speech in Egypt -- where it is, sadly, now under severe attack.  Kamal and Palmer open their op-ed with this sad fact:

A former college student, Abdelkareem Nabil Soliman, is sitting in an Egyptian prison, awaiting sentencing tomorrow. His alleged "crime": expressing his opinions on a blog. His mistake: having the courage to do so under his own name.

The second op-ed, in today's edition of the Washington Times, is by Cato's Dan Ikenson who challenges the arguments and assumptions trotted out almost daily now by the current gaggle of mercantilists occupying offices on Capitol Hill.  Here's a selection from Ikenson's op-ed:

Too many in Congress view exports as good, imports as bad, and the trade account as the scoreboard. Because the United States has a large and growing trade deficit, they reckon we are losing at trade. The reason we are losing, the story goes, is because our trade partners are cheating, and the Bush administration has turned a blind eye. The Democrats therefore intend to reverse our eroding economic standing through greater enforcement of our trade agreements.

An honest discussion about trade would note that as imports and our trade deficit have increased over the past year, five years, 10 years and 25 years (take your pick), the economy has expanded, creating an average of 1.8 million net new jobs each year since 1981. There is very clearly no inverse relationship between the level of imports and U.S. job creation. And in the sectors that compete most directly with imports, productivity gains (not import competition)account for the preponderance of job attrition.

The Contrarian Vice

Tyler Cowen is one of the smartest, most able people I've ever known.  He's also among the wisest.  I mention his wisdom -- sincerely so -- because in his recent post at Marginal Revolution on The Libertarian Vice Tyler accurately describes himself as a contrarian.

Being contarian is admirable because it keeps the mind open and exploring; it's of a piece with one of the finest of all intellectual dispositions: skepticism.

But even a disposition as admirable as contrarianism has its downside -- what I might call "the contrarian vice."  The contrarian vice is to weigh cleverness too heavily against wisdom.

Not all contrarians commit the contrarian vice; Tyler doesn't.  But the contrarian vice is a hazard of being an accomplished contrarian.  Contrarians run great risks of rejecting some piece of wisdom simply because it is widely accepted -- and of confusing the possible for the plausible.

I very much like Dietrich Bonhoeffer's definition of widsom: "To recognize the significant in the factual is wisdom."  Not all facts are significant, and most facts come at us in a barrage, raw and unsifted.  Knowledge and smarts are important tools to use in organizing facts and in distinguishing the more-relevant and reliable ones from the less-relevant and unreliable ones.  But that elusive quality that we call wisdom is also key.  Because wisdom is not (in my opinion, anyway) highly correlated with cleverness -- unless, perhaps, negatively -- and because being contrarian is highly correlated with cleverness, I fear that too many contarians are content to bask in the brilliance of their cleverness even if this brilliance blinds them to wisdom.

But to be contrarian for a moment, I point out  that Abelard said that "The beginning of wisdom is found in doubting; by doubting we come to the question, and by seeking we may come upon the truth."

Renovating the Cafe

We have been renovating the Cafe lately. One change is the red box to the left that allows you to subscribe to Cafe Hayek. Signing up will generate a daily email first thing in the morning with all the posts from the previous day. If you want to comment on any of the posts, you can click on the titles within the email to take you directly to the site. Don and I hope you like the changes.

My Class Autobiography

Bryan Caplan encourages each of us to write our class autobiography.  Here’s mine.

For as far back as I can see, both sides of my family were (and remain) working class.  My paternal grandfather was the youngest of (I think) a dozen kids; he was born, in 1900, to a Cajun family in Louisiana’s swampy Cajun country.  He ran away from home at 15 to New Orleans, where he met and later married Teresa Flanagan.  Neither of these grandparents went to high school.  My grandfather drove a street-car, and later a bus, until he retired in 1965.

One of my fondest memories as a boy is of riding on “Pa’s” lap as he drove his bus down Elysian Fields Avenue in New Orleans, past the house where I first lived.  (I didn't learn until a few months ago that this house is in the lower Ninth Ward.)  I remember Pa's wrinkled hands on the almond-colored, gigantic steering wheel.  I was very proud of him.  He lived with us after my grandmother died in 1967 and until his death in 1975.  The only time I heard him speak his native language – French – was when he cussed.

My dad dropped out of school in sixth grade, but he later earned his GED. He served a short stint in the Air Force (happily, just after the Korean war ended).  He then drove a bus in New Orleans for a few years (which was his job when I was born in 1958), but he soon took a job as a pipefitter/welder/crane-operator at Avondale Shipyards, where he worked until he retired in January 2001.

My maternal grandparents each were from families that had been in New Orleans for a few generations. My maternal grandfather was full-bred German (and looked it); my maternal grandmother (like my paternal grandmother) was of Irish descent.  My educated guess is that the families of both of my grandmothers emigrated from Ireland to New Orleans in the 1850s.  Both of my maternal grandparents completed high school, but received no further formal education.  My mom’s dad worked all of his life at Avondale Shipyard, as a pipefitter and, later, as a foreman in the pipe department.

Neither of my grandmothers ever worked out of the home, as far as know.

My mom graduated from high school and, until 1973 when she took a job in the secretarial pool at Avondale Shipyards, kept house and raised me and my three siblings.  When the shipyard laid her off in 1989, she became a clerk in a hardware store, where she worked until 2001.

I’m the only of my siblings to attend college for more than a semester. That wasn’t my plan.  To please my mom, I decided to go to college for one year and chase women.  (Alas, my chases were futile -- until, that is, many years later in law school I chased and finally caught the love of my life.)  After this one, fun year of chasing women I planned to marry my high-school sweetheart and work full-time at Avondale Shipyards (where I’d worked in high school during the summers).  But I found economics during my second semester of college at Nicholls State University.  It blew me away!  Never before had I encountered anything intellectually stimulating – and supply-and-demand curves were (and remain) for me analytically sublime.  I believe that I took so eagerly to supply and demand because I grew up in the 1970s and saw all around me the consequences of price ceilings – which I didn’t understand until my first economics professor (Dr. Michelle Francois) explained the economics of price controls.

It didn’t take me long to long for a PhD in economics.

Growing up, my siblings and I were aware that we weren’t wealthy, but we thought of ourselves as middle-class.  Our home was comfortable (despite having only one bathroom!) and our family life (dare I say it?!) normal and loving.

As I look back on my childhood, I appreciate my parents’ values.  Never, not once, did I ever hear my parents complain of not being rich; never was there any expressed or felt despair about driving mostly used and often rather decrepit automobiles; never was there any hints that the economic deck is stacked against us.  Never did I suppose that I was cheated, robbed, or even unlucky.  I know that my parents, and each of my siblings, feels the same way.

My parents were, and remain, largely apolitical. I suspect that they vote mostly GOP because they really dislike the welfare state.  They don’t, however, share my deep hatred of centralized power.  My father worries about “too many immigrants” coming to America.  And my mom, although I’m pretty sure that she’d not endorse a government effort to correct the problem, believes that professional athletes are paid “way too much money.”

One final note: even though both of my parents are deeply religious Roman Catholics, and even though my mom reminds me a great deal of Edith Bunker, my parents have always had a libertarian streak, of which I’m sure they aren’t really aware.  I’ve often heard my mom say that “it’s silly to outlaw prostitution; it’s going to happen anyway; and no one’s really hurt by it.”  Ditto for most illegal drugs.  Even on abortion my mom’s views are surprisingly liberal.  (Don’t know about my dad, I just realized.)  My mom truly believes abortion to be highly immoral, but she does not think that government should prohibit it.

A few years ago I wrote this open letter of thanks to my parents.

Thanks to Overlawyered

I enjoyed guest-blogging this past week at Overlawyered.  Proprietor Walter Olson does hero's work with his intrepid documentation of the absurd lawsuits that often are used to harass innocent people.  By the way, I highly recommend -- in addition to his blog -- Walter's books; The Rule of Lawyers is especially powerful.

Market Correction

Andy Morriss -- Professor Law at Case Western Reserve University -- and I started a new blog entitled Market Correction.  Here's the link.

At this blog, Andy and I post the many letters-to-the-editor that we each write.  Between us, Andy and I write more than a dozen letters weekly to editors of newspapers and magazines, usually attempting to correct pieces of mistaken economic or legal analysis.

I hope you'll visit Market Correction from time to time -- but don't let it keep you from Cafe Hayek!

Blogjam

I participated in a blogjam over at Pajamas Media earlier today on the state of the economy and various policy issues.  It was a free-for-all with Andrew Roth, James Hamilton and Paul Hoffmeister moderated (kind of) by Larry Kudlow.  You can find it here. 

Capital Freedom

I am delighted and proud to announce that another George Mason University student is actively contributing to the blogsosphere.  Check out, enjoy, and learn from Capital Freedom, whose proprietor learned her economics at GMU!

Thomas Macaulay Boudreaux

It's not our practice to use the Cafe as a forum for discussing personal matters, but I break that rule this once -- on the pleading of my eight-year-old son, Thomas, who wants to be able to find his picture by searching Google Images.

The cute one is Thomas Boudreaux.  The eight-month-old puppy is Molly Thewheatenterrier.

Mencken on Economists

Of all Americans ever to put quill to parchment, or fingers to a keyboard, the one who surely possessed the greatest talent to blog is, alas, a man who likely never set his eyes on a computer: H.L. Mencken.
.....
Here's Mencken on the economics profession:

Its dismalness is largely a delusion, due to the fact that its chief ornaments, at least in our own day, are university professors. The professor must be an obscurantist or he is nothing; he has a special and unmatchable talent for dullness; his central aim is not to expose the truth clearly, but to exhibit his profundity, his esotericity -- in brief, to stagger sophomores and other professors.

Later in the same essay ("The Dismal Science") Mencken laments "the mental timorousness and conformity which go inevitably with school-teaching."

Allowing for Mencken's acceptable exercise of journalistic overstatement, his description, penned sometime in the 1920s and reprinted in his Prejudices: A Selection, rings true today.