The Latest from Cafe Hayek

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 132 of Deirdre McCloskey’s excellent 1990 volume, If You’re So Smart: The Narrative of Economic Expertise:

[T]he model of the future is no substitute for the entrepreneur’s god-possessed hunch.

DBx: Wishing a very happy birthday to the great Professor McCloskey!

(Don Boudreaux)

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Sixty-one years ago today I was born at the old Hotel Dieu hospital in downtown New Orleans. I was the first of four children born to Carolyn and Buddy Boudreaux, who were at the time of my birth 20 and 23 years old, respectively. Virtually children, as it now appears to me.

My parents, although never materially wealthy by American standards, were – like so many unheralded men and women – damn good people who, as far as I recall, never once gave any sign of envying those with more material wealth.

I had the good fortune of knowing – and knowing them long enough to remember each of them well and with love – all four of my grandparents.

My mom, five months shy of her 70^th birthday, died in 2008; my father followed her one year later, six weeks shy of his 74^th.

This post, however, isn’t about my parents – who I wrote about here and here. Nor is this post about me. It’s about the years (so far) of my life.

Two days after I was born, a Texas Instruments engineer (Jack Kilby) invented the microchip. This invention – and an unlistably large number of other innovations since then – have improved the lives of ordinary people immeasurably.

How lucky I am!! How incredibly, stupendously lucky I am – at least not to have been born earlier or in any of many elsewheres. At the time of my birth, my oldest grandparent – my father’s father – was 58 years old. Living most of his life in New Orleans, Adrian Boudreaux, Sr., never set foot outside of the deep south. He barely went to school, although he did somehow learn to read.

None of my grandparents ever set foot outside of the continental United States.

Yet I have traveled, and continue to travel, widely. And –

– I have never known a world without air-conditioning in buildings (an especially happy reality, given that I spent the first 22 years of my life in or near New Orleans).

– I corrected my once pathetically poor vision with the modern miracle of soft contact lenses and, as of last year, had the even more astonishing miracle of artificial lenses replace my cataract-scarred natural lenses, thus now giving me 20/20 vision.

– All the marvelous electronics and appliances of my childhood would be regarded by my own 22-year-old son, Thomas, as primitive monstrosities – as indeed they are compared with the cornucopia of almost-miraculous devices that today are standard fare in most American households and in most American pockets and backpacks.

– Forty or so years ago, when I first started to read serious books, books were affordable, but expensive by today’s standards. I’ve lived to download books on to e-readers, to order hardcover and paperback books – new and used! – on this stupendous thing we call “the Internet,” and to have these books delivered to my doorstep, sometimes within 24 hours of my ordering them. (I remember back in the late 1970s ordering books by mail from the paper catalog of Laissez Faire Books in New York City. I was pleased to receive any of my orders as quickly as three weeks after placing them.)

– I haven’t paid a long-distance telephone charge in years. Who in 1958 – or, for that matter, in 1988 – would have guessed that domestic long-distance would one day not be a thing? Who back then could have imagined that a middle-class person standing in the sand of a Cape Cod beach can call, even “Facetime”!, another middle-class person standing in the sand of a southern California beach and talk for hours without paying a cent more than they would pay had the phone call or Facetime call never been placed.

– I learned to drive in 1973 in a 1969 Chevy pick-up truck that had no power steering, no power brakes, no air-conditioning, and for entertainment only an AM radio. This vehicle did have seat belts, but no shoulder belts, no airbags, and no collapsible steering column. It had manual crank windows and a standard transmission. I cannot recall when I last rode in an automobile so primitive, uncomfortable, dreary, and dangerous.

– In my life I’ve seen the proliferation of personal computing and of cellular telephony; I’ve seen dramatic decreases in the costs of food, clothing, and transportation. Foods that I’d never heard of when I was 21 are now standard fare in my diet. The quality of coffee today is far higher than it was even as recently as the mid-1980s, and the quality and varieties of beer even more so.

– Supermarkets were super (by the standards of the day) when I was born; since then they’ve become much superer.

– Music! Oh my. Among my first memories is of the Beatles first coming to America. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah! But to compare the sound quality and accessibility of music today to that of 1964 or even 1984 – or, hell, to that of 2004! – is almost comical. Listening to music today is so, so much easier and better.

– Television and movies. Ha! If my son or any of his contemporaries suffered the curse of being cast back to more than just a few short years ago, they’d die of boredom, not having access to the approximately 76 trillion sources of entertainment and information that they today have – many free of charge – at their fingertips.

The bottom line is this: despite my life not being terribly out of the ordinary from that of most Americans in 2019, my life has been, and continues to be, among the finest that any human being has ever lived. I live – and because you’re reading this post, you too almost certainly live – a life bursting with fabulous riches and comforts, and nearly stripped of many of the dangers, fears, and sorrows that were common to almost all of our ancestors.

I hope that I live for at least another quarter century – and, because I live when and where I do, that hope will likely be realized. But even if I’m struck dead tonight, I will have nothing to complain about. Already I am fortunate beyond my ability to express.

Thank you, modernity. Thank you, market-tested innovation. Thank you, private property and the rule of law. You all, for 61 fabulous years, have blessed me beyond what would have been my, or anyone else’s, most far-fetched dreams of 61 years ago.

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 280 of Kristian Niemietz’s 2019 book, Socialism: The Failed Idea That Never Dies (original emphasis; reference deleted):

Before the advent of industrial capitalism, virtually the whole of the world’s population lived in abject poverty. Before the mid nineteenth century, it would not even have made sense to measure poverty, because such a measure would not have shown anything interesting. Its long-term average would have been close to 100 per cent, and it would only have shown random fluctuations, not a systematic trend over time. It is not a coincidence that poverty measurement started in Britain in the late nineteenth century. Britain had reached a stage of development at which poverty was no longer the norm and no longer static. Later, other countries went through the same process, when and to the extent that they embraced free markets.

DBx: Do not forget that the title of Adam Smith’s 1776 book is not An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Poverty of Nations; it’s An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. As I first heard it said by the late Peter Bauer, poverty has no causes; wealth has causes.

(Don Boudreaux)

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Order your copies now of Deirdre McCloskey’s Why Liberalism Works – it’ll be available next month. I’ve read it and it’s marvelous.

Shikha Dalmia is rightfully distressed – and mystified – that so many Democrats are as bad as, or even worse, than Trump on trade. A slice:

The Peterson Institute for International Economics has estimated that expansion of free trade has generated $2.1 trillion for America between 1950 and 2016. That works out on average to $18,000 in income for American households. These gains have gone disproportionately to working-class households that shop at Walmarts stacked with foreign goods. If an American hasn’t felt a bigger pinch from the soaring prices of indigenously generated health care, education, and other services, it is because of the plummeting price of foreign goods.

But last year, for the first time in a decade, the prices of furniture, clothes, and electronics stopped falling. And if Trump does not back off his trade war with China, only divine intervention would stop them from spiking.

John Tamny reveals who will be hit by those who target the rich with wealth taxes.

Mike Munger celebrates the joyful contrarianism of my late colleague Gordon Tullock.

Richard Rahn writes realistically about climate change.

Also writing realistically about climate change is David Simon.

Vincent Geloso brilliantly busts the myth that capitalism is an artificial imposition on human affairs.

My GMU Econ colleague Alex Tabarrok comments on Paul Krugman. A slice:

So I agree with Paul quite a bit, more than you might expect, but sometimes he just says things which are absolutely evil.

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s another letter to a Café Hayek reader:

Mr. Archer:

Thanks for your reply.

I’m sorry, but I still disagree. I see no realistic reason to believe that the best means of lessening the economic damage that we are suffering from taxes imposed yesterday is for us to suffer additional taxes today.

David Ricardo put the case well in 1817:

“Because the cost of production, and, therefore, the prices of various manufactured commodities, are raised to the consumer by one error in legislation, the country has been called upon, on the plea of justice, quietly to submit to fresh exactions. Because we all pay an additional price for our linen, muslin, and cottons, it is thought just that we should pay also an additional price for our corn. Because, in the general distribution of the labour of the world, we have prevented the greatest amount of productions from being obtained, by our portion of that labour, in manufactured commodities, we should further punish ourselves by diminishing the productive powers of the general labour in the supply of raw produce. It would be much wiser to acknowledge the errors which a mistaken policy has induced us to adopt, and immediately to commence a gradual recurrence to the sound principles of an universally free trade.”*

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

* David Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004 [1817]), pages 317-318.