Book Review: Thomas Hager – Ten Drugs: How Plants, Powders, and Pills Have Shaped the History of Medicine

Posted on January 1, 2021 | Comments Off on Book Review: Thomas Hager – Ten Drugs: How Plants, Powders, and Pills Have Shaped the History of Medicine

Thomas Hager – Ten Drugs: How Plants, Powders, and Pills Have Shaped the History of Medicine (New York: Abrams Press, 2019)

Hager writes as a storyteller, rather than as a chemist. This makes a daunting subject much easier to approach. It also makes clear the significant progress medicine has made over the last several centuries. Though Hager argues that drug companies have already picked most of the low-hanging fruit, the next few decades will still see significant advances.

As he points out early on, he tells the stories of ten-ish drugs, not precisely ten. Each chapter is more about a group of drugs. The first chapter is about opiates and pain relievers, a category that likely includes more than ten notable drugs by itself. The good these drugs have done for surgical patients, women giving birth, and chronic pain patients is coupled with the problems of addiction and the inability of policymakers to deal with the problem with anything other than prohibition and restrictions. These policies, create more problems than they solve, which politicians are naturally proposing to address with more of the same.

Hager also tells the stories of antibiotics, which balance life-saving power versus rapid bacterial evolution; vaccines and inoculations, which have dealt with anti-vaxxer nonsense from the beginning of their thousand-year history; and other fascinating stories of progress and reaction, and innovation and suppression. The final category, of gene-based medicine, is flashing enormous potential right now, much of which is still unrealized. People with cancer, organ damage, birth defects, and genetic diseases such as sickle-cell anemia are all potential beneficiaries. However, they are threatened by a significant anti-science movement from both the right and the left.

This book came out in 2019, right before the COVID-19 pandemic. If Hager writes an afterword or an updated edition on the 2020 pandemic, it would be fascinating to see his thoughts on how the speed of invention has sped up over time.

For comparison, smallpox first appeared in third century, B.C. Egypt. It took more than a thousand years for the first inoculations to be invented in 9th century, A.D. China. It then took another 900 years or so for people like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to popularize the practice in the 1700s, and then another 200 years to eradicate the disease entirely. In modern times, HIV/AIDS took decades, rather than centuries, to move from a death sentence to a chronic, usually manageable condition. Time will tell if COVID-19 is ever eradicated. But its timeline took a little more than a year from the disease’s first appearance to its vaccine being taken by millions. This is a big deal. For all the pain 2020 has brought, this record speed should be a strong source of optimism for dealing with the next pandemic—and for further progress with existing diseases.

Hager does a good job of staying neutral in his stories, though on several occasions he shows the intellectual’s common distaste for the idea that someone, somewhere, might be making a profit by helping people. Fortunately, he doesn’t go much into public policy in this book. He would likely have little to add that would help patients, speed innovation, or reduce costs—all of which profits incentivize.

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Posted in Books, History, Innovation, Science

Book Review: Ian S. Port – The Birth of Loud: Leo Fender, Les Paul, and the Guitar-Pioneering Rivalry That Shaped Rock ‘n’ Roll

Posted on December 31, 2020 | Comments Off on Book Review: Ian S. Port – The Birth of Loud: Leo Fender, Les Paul, and the Guitar-Pioneering Rivalry That Shaped Rock ‘n’ Roll

Ian S. Port – The Birth of Loud: Leo Fender, Les Paul, and the Guitar-Pioneering Rivalry That Shaped Rock ‘n’ Roll (New York: Scribner, 2019)

A dual biography of Leo Fender and Les Paul, as well as a history of the instruments that bear their names. Fender, whose full name was Clarence Leonidas Fender, got his start in radio repair. He founded his own company in 1946 and began building his own PA systems and amplifiers for local musicians. By the 1950s, he was building the first mass-produced electric guitars. He was heavily influenced by his love of Hawaiian music, an dsome of Fender’s first electric instruments were Hawaiian-style lap steel guitars with pickups that wrapped around the strings in a circle. Today’s guitar pickups are typically flat slabs underneath the string. Fender’s customers were mainly working musicians who need instruments that were loud, reliable, and easy to repair.

Before Fender, most electric guitars were hollowbodies. They were built similarly to traditional acoustic guitars, but with pickups. Fender’s solidbody designs were almost impossible to destroy. They are also easy to mass produce, since they are essentiallu flat planks of wood carved into a standardized Telecaster or Stratocaster shape. The necks were a bolt-on design, which meant they were interchangeable and easy to replace if they broke—or if the player preferred the feel of a neck from one instrument, but preferred the body of another.

A pre-Fender guitar’s glued-in neck was permanent. One stage mishap could mean the end of the instrument—and a hefty expense for a musician who might not be able to afford it. Fender’s guitars also had a thinner, brighter, treble-heavy sound that belied his Hawaiian influences. In this way, 1930s Hawaiian music had an underappreciated influence on everything from country music to Jimi Hendrix’s searing guitar solos.

Fender also created the first mass-produced electric bass, the Precision Bass. As with Teles and Strats, these were designed for gigging musicians. Electric basses are far, far smaller than a traditional stand-up bass. They were also far louder, which meant they could keep up with modern rock bands—especially when played through a Fender Bassman amp. They had frets, which inspired the “Precision” name. A few years later Fender introduced the Jazz Bass, which has a slightly offset body shape and a brighter, more articulate sound. The two designs remain the standard choices for genres ranging from Motown blues to metal.

While Fender’s company had a rough going in its early days, the success of the Telecaster, introduced in 1952, and the Stratocaster, introduced in 1954, and its basses, allowed Fender to sell his company to CBS in 1965 for $13 million, or about $100 million in today’s dollars.

CBS was a negligent owner and allowed the quality of Fender’s guitars to decline, to the point where the company was at risk of going by the 1980s. Once the company regained its independence, it upped its quality control and embraced overseas manufacturing, established a custom shop, and began a renaissance that continues to this day. Fender is now the largest instrument maker in the world, and is a studious caretaker for other famous guitar brands such as Jackson and Gretsch that had also fallen on hard times.

Les Paul, born in Waukesha, Wisconsin, was one of the first people to make a solidbody guitar. Though he was not the first, as he liked to claim. He built his famous “log” guitar similar to Fender’s. he was the tinkering type, and after moving to New York he convinced the Epiphone guitar to give him the run of their workshop after-hours. He gave his log guitar a more conventional appearance by attaching the sides of an Epiphone hollowbody guitar to the log’s center block. Today’s semi-hollowbody designs, such as Gretsches and the Gibson ES-335, use this center-block approach to reduce feedback and give a different tone.

By 1952, the Gibson guitar company saw Fender’s success, and approached Les Paul about being the endorsee for its first entry into the solidbody market. That guitar, the Gibson Les Paul, remains in production today and has been favored by guitarists such as Eric Clapton, Slash, and Carcass’ Bill Steer.

Les Paul was also one of the first people to use overdubs and multi-tracking, which are now staples of modern recording. When he and his then-wife Mary Ford were at the peak of their popularity, Paul’s production techniques made their sound instantly recognizable.

Paul and Fender knew each other, though their careers were centered on opposite coasts, with Fender in California and Paul usually in New York when he wasn’t on the road. They were usually on good terms, although Fender and Gibson remain the two largest competitors in the instrument business.

Port is a gifted storyteller. While he usually treats Fender and Paul separately, he deftly points out common themes in their careers and their instruments. It helps that both men were a bit quirky. Fender was a bit of the nutty professor type, happier in his shop than working on the business side of his business. Paul was not the best husband to Ford, and he didn’t handle his decline in popularity very well. In his later years he became a gregarious elder statesman, and his talent for spinning a yarn made him particularly endearing, even when he was clearly exaggerating. While musicians will obviously get the most out of this book, it also makes a good case study in invention. As with most other ideas, including calculus and the steam engine, the modern electric guitar had multiple near-simultaneous inventors. There was trial, plenty of error, and the whole process was messy and unplanned. As befits the rock music Fender and Paul helped to make possible—even though neither of them even liked it.

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Posted in Books, History, Innovation, Music, The Arts

Regulation in 2020: Some Quick Numbers

Posted on December 31, 2020 | Comments Off on Regulation in 2020: Some Quick Numbers

The 251st and final issue of the 2020 Federal Register was released this morning. Here are some of the initial findings:

  • Federal agencies issued 3,353 final regulations in 2020. This is up from 2,964 regulations in 2019, or an 11 percent increase.
  • This was the second-highest total of Trump’s presidency, just behind 2018’s total of 3,368.
  • Since 1993, federal agencies have issued 111,065 final regulations.
  • Since 1975, federal agencies have issued 208,155 final regulations.
  • Although the Trump administration claims to have eliminated more than 600 regulations during 2020 as part of an effort to get rid of #NeverNeeded regulations harming the COVID-19 response, few of these went through the proper rulemaking process. This means they were not recorded in the Federal Register. My colleague Alex Reinauer tallied fewer than 60 rules properly removed as of October.
  • That said, removed rules still count as new rules in the Federal Register’s accounting rules. So this year’s rule and page counts capture a modest amount of deregulation, as well as new regulation.
  • Some of President Trump’s most significant increases in regulatory burdens will not show up in The Code of Federal Regulations or the Federal Register. These include its doubling of tariffs, its immigration restrictions, its threats to regulate political speech, and its antitrust investigations and lawsuits against tech companies, each of which could have billions of dollars of economic impact.
  • Compare this to the $100 million threshold for a regulation to count as “economically significant.”
  • While only five economically significant rules appeared in the 2020 Federal Register, the Trump administration is clearly imposing economically significant regulatory costs through other means.
  • 2020’s unadjusted page count is 87,351 pages. This number will later be adjusted to subtract skipped and blank pages—usually a little less than a thousand pages in recent years. This is the second-longest edition in the Federal Register’s 85-year history, and the largest ever from a Republican administration by a mile—literally.
  • The previous GOP record was 80,700 pages in 2008, George W. Bush’s final year in office. With standard paper size of 11.5 inches in height, President Trump’s final Federal Register is 1.2 miles longer than President Bush’s.
  • The 87,352-page Federal Register would stack more than 7 feet, 3 inches tall. This is two inches taller than NBA great Shaquille O’Neal.
  • Federal agencies issued 22,480 notices in 2020. These are often as innocuous as announcements of upcoming hearings or address changes. But agencies have also used notices to enact significant policy changes without putting them through the required notice-and-comment rulemaking process.
  • One of the Trump administration’s biggest positive regulatory contributions is an executive order directing agencies to be more transparent about their use of guidance documents and prevent their abuse. CEI’s Wayne Crews had spent years promoting this reform. As a result, most federal agencies issued rules in 2020 implementing new guidance document processes.

Wayne Crews and I will have more say about regulation in 2020 soon.

For more data, see Ten Thousand Commandments and follow @10KC and @RegoftheDay on Twitter. See also neverneeded.cei.org for reform ideas. My article on why 2020, though difficult, was not the worst year ever, is here.

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Posted in regulation

2020 Was Difficult. It Was Not the Worst Year Ever

Posted on December 30, 2020 | Comments Off on 2020 Was Difficult. It Was Not the Worst Year Ever

It’s been a hard year, and I am hardly alone in being glad it’s almost over. But was 2020 the worst year ever? Over at Inside Sources, I argue it was not.

COVID-19 is a novel disease. No human caught it before 2019. Scientists created effective vaccines in about a year. By comparison, smallpox has been around since at least Ancient Egypt in the third century B.C. The earliest evidence of inoculation dates to 10th century China. That’s more than a thousand years between smallpox’s first appearance and its first effective treatment—for a disease with a 30 percent fatality rate. But inoculation was rarely practiced until the 18th century, so it didn’t help very many people for its first 900 years or so.

When Abigail Adams had her children inoculated in 1776, it was still a scary, new technology for most people. It was an act of courage for her to set a positive example like that. And it took an additional two centuries for smallpox to be eradicated altogether, in 1977. Our generation’s COVID timetable is unimaginably better than with which our ancestors had to deal.

Read the whole thing here.

It is important for us to learn the right lessons from our COVID-19 experience. We need cultural and political institutions that are open and adaptable. These will make us more resilient against future crises, and make it easier to apply new things we learn as quickly as possible. CEI scholars spent the better part of 2020 compiling these sorts of ideas, which you can find at neverneeded.cei.org. Former CEI Julian Simon Award winner Johan Norberg offers further perspective in a recent piece in the UK’s Spectator.

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Posted in #NeverNeeded, Economics, History

Best Books of 2020: Joseph Henrich – The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2020)

Posted on December 29, 2020 | Comments Off on Best Books of 2020: Joseph Henrich – The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2020)

It’s early, but The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous by Joseph Henrich will likely be one of the new decade’s most influential books. Henrich complements work by Joshua Greene, Richard Wrangham, Jonathan Haidt, Steven Pinker, Michael Shermer, and others on the psychological underpinnings of modern liberalism—liberalism in the more-or-less original sense of the word.

Henrich’s book has two main arguments. One is historical: The Catholic church, completely unintentionally, set off a social chain reaction that created modernity. The second is psychological: People in modern societies are psychologically distinct than people in traditional kin-based societies.

He uses the acronym WEIRD for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic, to describe the unusual people in modern market-liberal societies. If you are reading this book review, then you are probably WEIRD, and so is nearly everyone you know. But we WEIRD people are the outliers in human history. Outside of Europe, East Asia, and North America, there are very few of us.

Most human societies are built on kin-based structures. This was true during our hunter-gatherer past, which was about 190,000 years of our 200,000-year history—95 percent of our species’ time on Earth. Societies remained kin-based through the agricultural revolution, and through the birth of cities about 6,000 years ago. And it is still true today in most countries. Despite occasional flowerings, there were no enduring WEIRD societies in human history until about two centuries ago. This is maybe one tenth of one percent of human existence, and even then, most societies remain kin-based. Again, it is WEIRD people who are unusual.

What is a kin-based society? In these, business partnerships, social networks, and marriages are confined to networks that rarely stray outside the extended family or clan. People tend to be wary of non-kin, and have a strong in-group-vs.-out-group worldview. People tend to look out for their clan’s collective interest over their individual interest. In kin-based societies, nepotism isn’t frowned upon; it’s the norm. WEIRD Americans today look askance when a president appoints inexperienced family members to be senior advisers. But in most other societies, this would have been acceptable, even normal behavior.

By contrast, WEIRD people are more individualistic and more trusting of outsiders. Kin-based families often arrange marriages for their children. WEIRD people usually marry for love. Kin-based people are expected to enter the family business. This is why so many of us have occupation-based surnames, such as Smith, Baker, or Fisher. WEIRD people usually prefer to choose their own line of work, which is one reason why today’s Smiths, Bakers, and Fishers rarely practice those occupations.

Kin-based people are reluctant to do business with strangers and foreigners. WEIRD people are more open to trade and more trusting of potential business partners they have never met. Nobody is purely meritocratic, but WEIRD people are closer to that ideal than most people.

So now that we know the difference between most people and WEIRD people, what is Henrich’s historical argument about the Catholic church accidentally making today’s WEIRD-ness possible?

The Catholic church blew up traditional kin networks through what Henrich calls its unofficial “Marriage and Family Program (MFP).” In short, the Church prohibited cousin marriages. The incest taboo is a human universal. But its boundaries vary from place to place. The church decided to push them progressively further out over a period of centuries. In many places, it eventually prohibited marriages closer than second and third cousins. In a few places it briefly went as far as eighth cousins.

This was a bigger deal than it sounds. Back in, say, the 12th century, people lived isolated lives. Few people lived in cities. Many people lived their entire lives within a 30-mile radius. They met few, if any, people outside of their extended families. And the wanderers they did meet were often beggars, vagrants, or outlaws. The Church’s MFP forced these isolated people to look outside their villages and kin groups for marriage partners. This forced openness, in the long run, ended up wiring people’s brains differently.

Young people are impressionable. When they are of marriageable age and are forced to meet and interact with strangers, and travel among them, traditional closed-kin psychological barriers gradually break down. They are gradually replaced with growing degrees of WEIRDness. It is a long, gradual process with many degrees. But over centuries, the effects add up.

None of the changes Henrich describes are genetic. None of them are racial, and none of them are peculiar to Europe. The conditions that make individuals WEIRD are cultural, intellectual, and psychological.

Using cousin marriage rates as a stand-in for how strong the Church’s Marriage and Family Program operated in different regions, along with historical records, Henrich finds that the MFP was the single biggest cause of everything from per capita GDP to interest rates to murder rates. Interestingly, regional cousin marriage rates closely track religious divisions and regional church influences. Henrich himself was skeptical about the MFP’s cultural influence, so he checked his results every way he could.

So, while openness is the real engine of WEIRDness, in Europe’s case, Church doctrine was what drove the process of opening up.

The differences between kin-based and WEIRD people show up in psychological tests. The Church’s MFP turns out to have changed people’s personalities and psychological profiles. In my recent review of Virgil Storr and Ginny Choi’s excellent Do Markets Corrupt Our Morals?, I noted their finding that people from market societies play decision-making games differently than do people in non-market societies. Henrich argues that this is because they are psychologically different.

From birth, WEIRD people from market societies have been more exposed to outsiders and more likely to trust them. No wonder they tend to play lab games that way. They tend to be more trusting of other players and more willing to use long-term strategies. People from kin-based societies are more likely to do the equivalent of a dine-and-dash from a restaurant. If the other player is not from their in-group, they feel fewer compunctions about cheating that other player.

Kin-based and WEIRD people even assign blame differently. Most WEIRD people see classroom teachers’ disciplinary tactic of punishing an entire class for one student’s offense to be morally wrong. Kin-based people see this as normal, and are fine with it. They think more in terms of collective responsibility than individual responsibility. In fact, criminal justice systems in many kin-based societies punish whole families for one member’s crime.

There is a reason for this. In most human societies, life was precarious. One bad harvest could mean starvation. Very strong conformity norms were a survival advantage. Collective punishment helps to reinforce conformity norms. Maybe someone does have a new idea for planting a crop differently. But if it fails, the stakes are life and death. It’s probably not worth it. Better to make sure that everyone sticks with what he or she knows works.

When most people’s only experience with foreigners is with either castoffs or invading armies, they probably aren’t going to trust them. They’d probably return the favor when possible. Unlike trade, theft and war are zero-sum interactions. When these are someone’s sole experience with out-groups, they are less likely to trade with foreigners and realize the benefits of division of labor. Safer to do it all yourself.

Henrich has written a provocative book that builds on an already robust literature. Despite its deep historical and psychological content, The WEIRDest People in the World is also highly relevant to modern public policy. The regulations and legislation that groups like CEI deal with on a daily basis do not come from a vacuum. They come from longstanding political institutions. And these system-level institutions in turn come from culture. All three of those levels matter. A reformer who works on only one of them will fail. Henrich has come up with a plausible framework to explain how they interact over the long run, and how they can shift. Where people are relatively WEIRD, people will build relatively market-oriented political institutions—and eventually, policies. Where they are kin-based, they probably won’t.

Without the Church’s unofficial Marriage and Family Plan, European culture likely would have remained insular and kin-based. That tendency still exists, and is expressing itself in the European Union’s trending towards becoming a protectionist trading bloc. Reformers need to push back and remind people that WEIRD-style openness has massive benefits, especially for the poor.

What about the rest of the world? Fortunately, the Church’s MFP is not the one and only way for people to become psychologically WEIRD. Ideas can be imported and exported, same as goods and services. America was a relatively WEIRD society from the start, as was Australia. The Asian tigers such as Japan, Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong, saw the economic success of WEIRD countries, and followed their example. China is at a weird midway point psychologically, and its institutions are still extractive and kin-based by WEIRD standards. This may limit China’s future growth as a global power.

The point is that setting a good example can do a lot more good than people think. This puts today’s nationalists and economic protectionists in an awkward position. They are not the future. They are throwbacks to an impoverished, unhappy past.

The post-1800 Great Enrichment that billions of people are enjoying today has deep and distant causes operating at multiple levels. Henrich’s thesis of WEIRD psychology, cultural openness, and economic prosperity will have a major impact on future work in geopolitics, economic development, political polling, immigration, and free trade for a long time to come.

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Posted in Books, Economics, History, International, modernity, nationalism, Philosophy

This Week in Ridiculous Regulations

Posted on December 28, 2020 | Comments Off on This Week in Ridiculous Regulations

Last week’s drama over the combined COVID-19 spending bill and omnibus budget bill ran over into Christmas, spoiling a three-day work week in Washington. In happier news, the COVID-19 vaccine had already reached a million people by Christmas Eve. This is a major accomplishment, considering the disease has existed for barely a year. Regulatory agencies issued new regulations ranging from fighter jets to non-small businesses.

On to the data:

  • Last week, 53 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register in a three-day week, after 85 the previous week.
  • That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every three hours and 10 minutes.
  • Federal agencies have issued 3,295 final regulations in 2020. At that pace, there will be 3,348 new final regulations. Last year’s total was 2,964 regulations.
  • There were 26 proposed regulations in the Federal Register last week, for a total of 2,124 on the year. At that pace, there will be 2,158 new proposed regulations in 2020. Last year’s total was also 2,158 proposed regulations.
  • Last week, agencies published 361 notices, for a total of 22,094 in 2020. At that pace, there will be 22,452 new notices this year. Last year’s total was 21,804.
  • Last week, 1,326 new pages were added to the Federal Register in a three-day week, after 2,288 pages the previous week.
  • The 2020 Federal Register totals 84,198 pages. It is on pace for 85,562 pages. The 2019 total was 70,938 pages. The all-time record adjusted page count (which subtracts skips, jumps, and blank pages) is 96,994, set in 2016.
  • Rules are called “economically significant” if they have costs of $100 million or more in a given year. Five such rules have been published this year. Four such rules were published in 2019.
  • The running cost tally for 2020’s economically significant regulations ranges from net savings of between $2.04 billion and $5.69 billion. 2019’s total ranges from net savings of $350 million to $650 million, mostly from estimated savings on federal spending. The exact number depends on discount rates and other assumptions.
  • Agencies have published 78 final rules meeting the broader definition of “significant” so far this year. 2019’s total was 66 significant final rules.
  • So far in 2020, 657 new rules affect small businesses; 26 of them are classified as significant. 2019’s totals were 501 rules affecting small businesses, with 22 of them significant.

Highlights from last week’s new regulations:

For more data, see Ten Thousand Commandments and follow @10KC and @RegoftheDay on Twitter.

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Posted in regulation

Book Review: Walter Williams – Up from the Projects: An Autobiography

Posted on December 27, 2020 | Comments Off on Book Review: Walter Williams – Up from the Projects: An Autobiography

Walter Williams – Up from the Projects: An Autobiography (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2010)

Williams, in typically blunt fashion, said that his purpose in writing this short (160 pages) autobiography wasn’t self-aggrandizement. It was to make it harder for people to misquote him. It also gave him something to refer journalists to, rather than waste time answering the same old questions over and over. It pairs well with Suffer No Fools, a documentary on Williams’ life released around the same time.

I wrote about the arc of Williams’ life in my recent tribute to him. The short version is that he was born poor in Philadelphia. He was smart but not necessarily obedient, though he wasn’t afraid of working hard when he wanted to. He worked as a cab driver for a while, spent some time in California with his father, and spent two years in the army in the Jim Crow south. He caused enough good trouble to be shipped off to Korea, and then honorably discharged. Outside of the military, he was also arrested three times for causing good trouble, and was once the victim of a racially motivated police beating in Philadelphia while driving his cab.

Williams eventually discovered economics, and earned his Ph.D at UCLA when its department was ranked 12th in the country. One of his teachers was Armen Alchian, justly considered one of the world’s top price theorists. Williams eventually wound his way to George Mason University in 1980, where he would teach until the day he died.

Williams’ rare gift for clearly communicating economic ideas gave him national prominence, and helped give Mason’s fledgling economics department a national reputation. He wrote a long-running column, frequently appeared on radio and television, and, oddly, was a frequent fill-in host for Rush Limbaugh. Williams also continued to teach George Mason’s first-year Ph.D-level microeconomics course, which became a rite of passage for grad students.

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Posted in Books, Economics, Great Thinkers

Book Review: Eric Metaxas – Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

Posted on December 25, 2020 | Comments Off on Book Review: Eric Metaxas – Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

Eric Metaxas – Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy  (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2010)

Who was Dietrich Bonhoeffer? He was a German pastor who became a prominent resistor to Hitler’s Third Reich. He helped people to escape Germany, was part of a group that plotted to assassinate Hitler, and died in a concentration camp.

This book would have been about two thirds shorter if it had stuck to its subject. Instead, much of the book is theological discourse. A hero’s courageous life story was regularly interrupted with digressions on obscure theological interpretations and debates—including an out-of-nowhere rant about abortion during a chapter on Bonoeffer’s time in Tegel prison.

Even while listening to the Audible narration at 2.25x speed, there was a great deal of tedium, and not enough about the remarkable man whose name is in the book’s title. There are occasional flashes of (possibly unintentional?) humor, as in Hitler’s description as an “irascible vegetarian.” These moments are few, though.

Bonhoeffer was born in 1906 into a prosperous, intellectual household with several siblings, including a twin sister. His childhood was happy, his parents raised him right, and Bonhoeffer showed high character from the start. He also had enough musical talent to seriously consider becoming a professional musician.

He instead decided to become a pastor. He received his doctorate at age 21, and was ordained at 25. Though protestant, he was tolerant of other denominations, including Catholics, making friends and attending their services. Bonhoeffer’s ecumenicism made him stand out as a little bit of a liberal hippie type by the standards of the day, though a straight-laced one.

The young Bonhoeffer also had an adventurous spirit. He traveled to Rome and Spain, though he spent much of those trips attending church services and in theological study. He was also able to spend a great deal of time studying his favorite sculpture, Laocoön and His Sons, located in the Vatican.

While on a trip to America, Bonhoeffer took a 4,000-mile road trip from New York to Mexico. Bonhoeffer did not know how to drive, and failed a driving test right before the trip. He drove anyway, though with a friend, and essentially taught himself on America’s highways.

During this period he read Erich Maria Remarque’s anti-war novel All Quiet on the Western Front and saw its movie adaptation. To that point, it was the 20th century’s best-selling novel. Bonhoeffer lost an older brother during World War I, and Remarque’s frank depictions of things his older brother experienced, and the way he humanized the soldiers, helped to turn Bonhoeffer into a pacifist.

Bonhoeffer and his similarly liberal-minded family were disturbed by Hitler’s rise from well before he took power, but didn’t take him very seriously until it was too late. But the problems were far larger than one man.

A German Christian movement arose in Germany, embracing the trendy new nationalism and supporting Hitler. Bonhoeffer denounced the movement—which did not come naturally to the inclusive Bonhoeffer—and began to earn a higher profile, and the attention of the authorities. In a theological distinction that actually mattered, Bonhoeffer argued that Hitler was converting the German Christians, not the other way around.

He also struggled with depression, starting around the mid-1930s. In 1939, before the war started in September, Bonhoeffer managed to escape Germany and return to America. But he was restless and unhappy, because he knew that he could help the resistance. So he ended up going back to Germany. He would not survive the war.

He joined the Abwehr, an underground resistance group that ultimately aimed to assassinate Hitler. They nearly succeeded several times, most famously in the failed Valkyrie plot. They also whisked away Jews and others to safety outside Germany, and tried to communicate clandestinely with Allied governments.

Bonhoeffer took seven trips over the Swiss border and back helping the Abwehr cause. He was imprisoned in 1943, just seven miles from his parents’ house. He also became engaged to an 18-year old, though he was 36 at this point. They wrote each other frequently, but saw each other in person a total of 17 times during his imprisonment. As the tide of the war turned against Germany, they both believed Bonhoeffer would spend a year in prison at most.

They were not far off. In February 1945, Bonhoeffer was transferred to the Buchenwald concentration camp, site of some of the Nazis’ worst medical experiment atrocities. He was hanged on April 9, 1945. Allied forces liberated the camp two days later. He was 39. Bonhoeffer’s Letters from Prison were published posthumously, and remain in print today.

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Posted in Books, History, International, Philosophy

Book Review: Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker – A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump’s Testing of America

Posted on December 25, 2020 | Comments Off on Book Review: Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker – A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump’s Testing of America

Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker – A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump’s Testing of America (New York: Penguin Press, 2020)

This book, by two Washington Post journalists, is a chronological, personality-based history of the first three years of Donald Trump’s presidency. By keeping a mostly straight tone, it has significant comedy value. It also has instructive value about the intersection of personality and party politics.

Historians will likely have a field day with the Trump presidency. Or at least they will when enough time has passed for partisan passions to cool. Until then, there will likely be more splenetic rants than useful analysis. Leonnig and Rucker do a better job than most about keeping their spleens in check, though they are not perfect about it.

The late Charles Krauthammer viewed the Trump administration as a stress test for America’s liberal institutions. He thought they would remain intact, and the country would learn a few lessons about executive power. So far, so good, though there has been some important damage in the areas of trade, immigration, and diplomacy. The Republican party is also in rough shape, and isn’t quite sure what to do with itself now that the personality by which it is defining itself is no longer in office.

The story of American political institutions, almost from the beginning, has been a slow growth in the executive branch’s political power relative to Congress. Each administration takes on a little bit of new power to fight a war, ward off an economic panic, deal with a disaster, or simply to accomplish a common policy goal. After two centuries of this slow accretion, the presidency has become far too powerful compared to the other two branches. This imbalance makes the country especially vulnerable when the president is corrupt, incompetent, illiberal, or all of the above.

Today, Trump’s fondness for executive power is currently combined with congressional Republicans that will not buck him, and a Democratic opposition that also likes a powerful executive branch, at least when they are in power. The combination is a potent stress test for the separation of powers and limited government.

Trump’s various capers are often humorous—many parts of this book are laugh-out-loud hilarious. Others are damaging, such as placing tariffs against allies such as Canada on national security grounds, or forced family separations at the southern border. In the long run, Trump’s de-glamourizing effect on the presidency may actually do some good. This, however, assumes that people learn their lesson about putting too much power in one office.

As Trump has proven, in America, anyone can become president. This can be dangerous, as he is also proving. While he will not be fatal to America’s liberal institutions, it is important that his precedents do not become prologue for future presidents’ power grabs. Part of that project is not taking him or the presidency too seriously. This book helps very much in that department, such as when it tells the story, with a straight face, of the time Trump told India’s Prime Minister, “it’s not like you have China on your border.”

On the other hand, there is next to no analysis of Trump’s major policy initiatives, from his signature trade and immigration policies to his regulatory policies, foreign policies, and other initiatives. Politics should be about policy. In practice, it is mostly about personality. In that sense, A Very Stable Genius is a very practical book, though one will have to go elsewhere for actual policy content.

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Posted in Books, Executive Power, Political Animals

Best Books of 2020: Virgil Henry Storr and Ginny Seung Choi – Do Markets Corrupt Our Morals? (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019)

Posted on December 24, 2020 | Comments Off on Best Books of 2020: Virgil Henry Storr and Ginny Seung Choi – Do Markets Corrupt Our Morals? (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019)

Most people see markets as dens of greed and moral corruption. In their new book, Do Markets Corrupt Our Morals?, Virgil Henry Storr and Ginny Seung Choi, of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, argue the opposite. In fact, they go one step further: Markets make people more moral. Make that two steps further: Because markets have moral benefits, restrictions on markets have moral costs. They back up their argument with a healthy mix of theory and evidence. Along the way, they make a case for rethinking how people approach markets. Their arguments, rather than traditional “markets are efficient” arguments, are the liberal movement’s best hope for the future.

Storr and Choi describe their main thesis on p. 225:

But the evidence suggests that the consensus is wrong. Markets do not corrupt our morals. Not only are people wealthier, healthier, happier, and better connected in market societies, market activity makes us better people. Markets are spaces where we discover who is virtuous and can expect many of our vices to be revealed. Additionally, markets reward virtue and punish vice. As such, markets are moral training grounds.

In short: Less of Alfred Marshall’s supply and demand graphs, and more Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. Less Homo economicus, more Homo sapiens.

Their phrase “moral training grounds” is important. One of the most common mistakes in economics is the Nirvana fallacy. This says that because markets are not perfect, government can make things better. Storr and Choi know that perfection does not exist. Markets fail, but they also have a built-in improvement mechanism. Markets are an ongoing discovery process. People have to learn from experience what works and what doesn’t. They make mistakes, learn from them, and make changes. But because conditions are always changing, the adaptation process never ends.

People use markets to learn how to trust and to be trustworthy. This takes practice. It takes trial and error. The feedback people get from profit and loss help. So does learning what it takes to earn someone’s trust or their repeat business. Evidence from experimental economics shows that people who participate in markets learn these things more quickly than in other systems.

In one-shot games in lab experiments, people can cheat and get away with it, like doing a dine-and-dash at a restaurant in a town you’ll never visit again. Despite this, people in these studies who come from market-oriented societies cheat far less than one would expect from a traditional blackboard-economics model. They also cheat less than people from non-market societies who play the same games.  

Repeat-play games give the opportunity for cheaters to learn from their moral decision. Other players can punish cheaters in future rounds. They will often do so even when punishment also comes at a cost to the punishers. Upholding honesty is important enough that most people are willing to pay for it. In the long run, this reduces cheating. In fact, it happens almost automatically.

Without coaching, players often spontaneously settle on a tit-for-tat strategy. You start by assuming the other players are trustworthy, but if they cheat, return the favor. Depending on a game’s rules, this may mean punishing cheaters, or simply refusing to do business with them again. Regardless of whether the players come from countries with free markets or not, they tend to behave better in repeat-play games than in one-shot games. And again, players from market societies cheat less often than players from non-market societies.

Storr and Choi also take a tour of the different ways in which markets affect morals. The obvious one is that because people in market societies are richer, they can afford to be more moral. They can afford to give to charities. They can also afford a fuller life. Education, literature, the arts, and world travel all cost money. Dollars are nice, but they aren’t really wealth. Wealth is being able to treat others well, to have leisure to spend time with family, and to pursue friendships, hobbies, and to try new things. Market societies can afford far more of these life enrichments than non-market societies—and these experiences positively shape people’s characters.

Moreover, people in market societies have longer life expectancies, lower infant mortality, are more respectful of women’s rights, minority rights, and LGBT rights, are more religiously tolerant, go to war far less often, and have lower crime rates. All of these are moral outcomes. All of them are backed by abundant data. All of them are made possible by embracing markets. The moral conclusion is obvious.

Storr and Choi represent the future of the liberty movement. The Cold War is a generation in the past now. People still throw around the word “socialist,” but usually just to mean they don’t like something.

But markets are still very much under attack in the current political realignment. The in-groups and out-groups people are using are different now; capitalism-vs.-communism is out, and populist nationalism-vs.-liberal cosmopolitanism are in. Yet, most libertarians are still using the same materialist arguments.

Yes, markets are efficient and create more wealth than other systems. That’s important, but that also isn’t the main point. Markets have other positive effects that are ultimately more meaningful—and more persuasive in today’s society. Not only is Storr and Choi’s moral defense more versatile in today’s intellectual climate, it is more in tune with most people’s values. As CEI founder Fred Smith argues regarding values-based communication, it is important to speak to people in their language.

Most people don’t care about adding an extra decimal point to this quarter’s GDP growth, even though that is important in the long run. They do care about their kids growing up to be decent people. They don’t care that subsidies and taxes cause market distortions. They do care about having a well-rounded life.

Many market liberals only speak a niche language of efficiency. This is one reason why they remain a curiosity. Their disconnect is a major reason why so many people continue to oppose markets despite their moral benefits—hardly anyone makes the moral case.

Storr and Choi are not the only thinkers trying to correct this oversight. CEI Julian Simon Award winners Deirdre McCloskey, Johan Norberg, and Steve Horwitz are among them. But Storr and Choi just might be the ones to do it best. They deserve far more company.

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Posted in Argumentation, Books, Economics, Philosophy, The Market Process