I am an economist and I regard that paper as rather weak evidence for the case that regulations reduce growth, for the same reason alluded to in the post: all the variation is over time in a single country.
From what I can tell, the paper was published because their time series analysis is integrated with a macroeconomic model such that they can parse out a relationship with total factor productivity, and because their results are in line with other papers that don’t rely solely on time series analysis. As always, one should draw inferences on the basis of the literature as a whole and update only weakly on individual papers. If the cited papers are using cross-country analysis this is better than time series analysis but has its own issues, and it makes some sense to see what happens if you try a pure time series approach, which the authors of this paper did. Ultimately it’s difficult for us to know much about a causal effect of total regulation because it is composed of many heterogeneous regulations and jurisdictions are large and few enough that we can’t really apply the sort of quasi-experimental methods that are the standard for estimating causal relationships.
The bull case for deregulation comes from looking at all the individual cases where overregulation is deeply harmful (housing, project permitting, drug development, nuclear, occupational licensing, etc.) and becoming redpilled to the apparent tendency of progressives and the federal bureaucracy to impose grievous costs for scant gains (though obviously some regulations are necessary). But it’s not enough to make some regulation that under ideal conditions results in some good thing and then pat yourself on the back for a job well done, there are usually assumptions that don’t hold, unmeasured costs, and unintended consequences.
A technical point: it’s not really accurate to say regression analyses are regarded as good evidence. It heavily depends on why and how you conduct the analysis.
It’s like saying “using microscopes is considered good evidence.” Well… sometimes?? Depends what you’re looking at and what you’re concluding based on that. If you’re trying to find the weight of an elephant, using a microscope is the wrong tool. Regression analyses can also be the wrong tool in many circumstances.
I might even go as far as saying regressions alone are NOT good evidence of causation. You need a design that allows for causal inference, like a natural experiment, DiD, RDD, IV, etc. Maybe sometimes if it’s a relatively simple thing you’re studying and you can make a good case that you’ve controlled for all the confounding variables, you could say a regression alone is good evidence? But the effect of all regulation on all productivity is definitely not that
It does seem clear to me that Zimmerman was lying about a few things. In his version of events, he is much farther down the neighborhood block than he could possibly physically be. I also can't really condemn any of Martin's actions: if a strange guy is hassling me with a gun, then, yes, I probably want to get that gun away from them.
Regarding Rittenhouse, I just want to point out that after the first guy, everyone who tried to stop him was also in the right. If I witness a teenager shooting people with a rifle at a protest, I am going to try to stop that person from shooting other people with any means I can.
I notice in both situations that could have been avoided if random men had simply chose to not playact their vigilante fantasies. A good reminder for people like me.
Why couldn't he possibly be far down the neighborhood?
On the ground savagely beating Zimmerman was obviously not justified, and it seems like he didn't see the gun until shortly before the shooting.
The other guys could have been justified with Rittenhouse also being justified. If I mistakenly believe you committed a crime and attack you, you can still kill me in legitimate self-defense. Additionally, it wasn't reasonable to chase him while he was running away.
Specifically, in Zimmerman's story that he gave to police, he said after making the first phone call to police, he headed immediately back to his vehicle before Martin "emerged from the shadows" and began beating him, with Zimmerman falling to the ground at the first punch. But if this were the case, then Martin's body should have been found at the T intersection at the north of the neighborhood. Instead, it was found 50 feet away from the T intersection, closer to where Martin's residence is and further away from Zimmerman's truck. 50 feet is not a lot, of course, but it makes no physical sense why Martin's body would be there if Zimmerman had been downed by the first punch, as he claimed.
At least a few regulations are good for example regulations about food expiry dates, and ingredient list is important.
Rather than just Huemer, Caplan, and David Friedman, I recommend checking out what major economics professors are saying and believe. By major, I mean economists who are researchers and regularly publish papers in respected journals. For example see this poll on gold standard (that libertarian capitalists really like) which has the votes of top economists on gold standard- https://www.kentclarkcenter.org/surveys/gold-standard/
Literally all of them are against gold standard.
I want you to consider the economic consensus and then think about how much in the minority David Friedman and Bryan Caplan are. Then I want you to consider how neither Caplan nor Friedman are close to shifting the economic consensus towards libertarian capitalism.
Most economists are social liberals/social democrats. See some of the policies that Daron Acemoglu supports and see the policies that Caplan and Friedman support - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daron_Acemoglu
David Friedman doesn't support carbon tax. Most economists support it.
David Friedman is an anarcho capitalist, but overwhelming majority of economists are not.
David Friedman doesn't support any kind of Government welfare or welfare state, but majority of economists support some form of government welfare.
David Friedman supports fully privatizing the healthcare, but majority of economists don't support full privatization.
Bryan Caplan and David Friedman support no government regulations anywhere in any market. Majority of economists don't support that.
The reason I stopped being a libertarian capitalist is because economic consensus is neither libertarian capitalist nor Austrian economics nor Marxist nor MMTer. The orthodox economics just is social liberal/social democratic.
There is no question which asks them about general support for all or many regulations in all sectors because probably that is too broad. But I also don't see experts going to the way of libertarian capitalists.
So, to me, regulations should be considered on case by case basis instead of a general basis.
Maybe certain sectors need more deregulation and some other sectors don't.
While this is partially right, there are public choice theoretical reasons to assume that regulations will be inefficient that don't apply to private markets nearly as strongly. For example, voters are more irrational than consumers and don't have the same good decision incentives (see Myth of the Rational Voter). Therefore, we should assume regulations to be bad for the economy as a Bayesian prior in a way that we shouldn't with the market. Doesn't mean you can't have outweighing evidence.
I assume that economists don't think like this, so they don't see it. Economists seem to have a biased idealistic view of government decision making in a way they don't have for consumers.
> Rather than just Huemer, Caplan, and David Friedman, I recommend checking out what major economics professors are saying and believe. By major, I mean economists who are researchers and regularly publish papers in respected journals. For example see this poll on gold standard (that libertarian capitalists really like) which has the votes of top economists on gold standard... Literally all of them are against gold standard.
It's not true that libertarian capitalists generally all support the gold standard.
Perhaps the most famous libertarian economist was Milton Friedman, and he didn't support the gold standard. Scott Sumner is another libertarian economist and he doesn't support the gold standard. I don't think even Friedrich Hayek supported the gold standard in his later years.
I am not confident, but I'd be willing to bet that neither Huemer, Caplan or David Friedman support the gold standard either. My guess is that they'd more-or-less say we should ultimately have competing monetary systems, in line with their anarcho-capitalist beliefs.
Yes, it would be nice if the regulation thing was examined more closely, like what regulations and what their function is. A low resolution calculation over all regulations doesn’t seem convincing.
improves my confidence because just see how many of those economists support regulations in environmental area.
I do think that there are some areas where probably significant, but not total, deregulation is urgently needed like for example, housing industry or construction industry. But it is not clear that all sectors of the market require significant deregulation to the same amount as housing industry.
For an overwhelming number of individual issues, the consensus among informed economists would be either deregulation or a drastic reduction in regulatory pressure. Think of zoning laws, rent control, drug research, workplace licensing, nuclear energy, cash transfers, education, etc. The best economically informed position is probably classical liberalism, primarily to account for instances of genuine market failure. The informed case for social liberalism stands for sacrificing economic efficiency in favor of a more just outcome or to correct some negative externality, not from economic literacy.
I'm a little skeptical of appealing to a consensus here. Elsewhere in academia, consensuses on politically pertinent topics often seem like they're politically motivated, and, while economists are both among the more rigorous and most conservative disciplines (I think I saw at some point it's a "mere" 5:1 democrats:republicans), there's still an enormous disparity. When liberal economists say liberal things, my default explanation is that it's because they're liberal, not because they're economists. Acemoglu, for example, recently praised an article that, among other things, called for regulators to penalize Musk worldwide when bad things were said on twitter.
I think the political opinions is sufficient to motivate reasoning to support one's desired views, which makes it not especially compelling to me that a majority of economists thinks x, y, or z: based merely on their politics they would do that, so the question is merely whether the evidence is so overwhelming and so widely recognized as to compel them to do the opposite.
My impression is that GMU etc. are not fringe in the same way or to the same extent that MMTers or Marxists are, even if they disagree with the mainstream consensus on some points. Being comparatively more concerned about public choice and how governmental policies will tend to exist in practice, for example, seems to be a plausible position in our current state of knowledge. This is not the case for the labor theory of value.
Do I agree with all the things you criticize? Certainly not—carbon taxes sound okay if done right, and I'm certainly not an anarcho-capitalist. Nor do I blindly trust Caplan, etc. But I do think that they should be taken as serious people, even if you reject their opinions in some regions.
This could be because GDP allows greater state capacity, and thus more regulations. In such a case, slashing regulations to boost GDP would be senseless!
Oh, I didn't get that's what you were saying. That's super implausible though--if we were as poor as Mexico (which we'd be if we had 1% lower GDP growth per year over the last century) then even if we were regulated, society would obviously suck!
Most economists support carbon tax. Any tax would reduce GDP per capital to some extent at least in the short term to (perhaps) medium term. It is true that GDP per capita and GDP are good and they correlate well with wellbeing. But it also matters how much redistribution is happening and what incentives do people who are in poverty have. For example, some government welfare can create poverty traps, so there should be research and experiments on different kinds of welfare programs.
Getting rid of a lot of taxes and a lot of regulations would certainly boost GDP growth and GDP per capita but the way libertarian capitalists deal with the costs of those negative externalities sometimes bothers me. I saw Bryan Caplan enthusiastically supporting a book that argues for even more fossil fuel burning in the current era. And that seemed like such an obvious blind spot.
Yes. But you should consider Human Development Index, GDP per capita, government spending, GDP growth, and the amount of inequality into consideration as all that will give you the full picture.
It annoys me when people talk about “regulation” as if it were a natural kind. Some regulations are obviously good. Some regulations are obviously counterproductive. The devil is in the details.
For example, NEPA and CEQA are both major hindrances to growth right now and desperately need to be reformed. But we don’t want to declare open season on the environment. What we need is a better, more thoughtful regulation in their place.
Right that's certainly true but if regulations as a whole are very bad then we should be more supportive of those with general anti-regulation dispositions
Being ‘anti-regulation’ is like being ‘anti-law.’ Some laws are very bad and some laws are very good and others are mild or neutral. That level of generality just isn’t informative.
I agree that it's not informative for evaluating any particular regulation. But it is informative in electing candidates, some of whom are more supportive of regulations than others.
This doesn't require it being a very informative category. Imagine there exists some category X that is very gerrymandered. Republicans tend to support X and Democrats tend to oppose X. Even if the category is gerrymandered, if a study finds that X is generally bad, this would give you some evidence that Dems are worse.
So the category ‘anti-regulation-or-anti-nuclear-war’ is a very good category, since many studies show that the absence of nuclear war is fantastic for economic and productivity growth and this category will inherit that goodness. And Dens are more likely to be in this category than Reps.
Nevertheless this is probably not a reason to be pro-dem.
It's a heuristic, obviously not true of every gerrymandered category. Would you really deny that if most regulations are bad and Democrats are pro regulation that gives us evidence that Democrats are bad?
Here’s a similar argument to the one tha Dawson and Seater paper made.
Imagine for a second that I think laws are really great - laws save lives! It’s good that we lock up murderers, right?
I want to prove this! But to prove it I need some way to measure how many laws we have. Hmmmm. How about I measure how many pages are in the United States Code? (The US code contains the vast majority of federal laws). Okay, let’s see if as the number of pages in the US Code goes up, the mortality rate goes down.
Well no, you say: there’s all sorts of confounding variables. Like, maybe the causal arrow can also point the other way: a healthier society is more complex and therefore needs more laws.
But, with regression analysis, you can control for stuff like this. So, I add a bunch of controls for advances in healthcare, increases in wealth, etc. and after doing that, I still find a negative correlation between the number of pages in the US Code and the mortality rate. So laws must save lives, right?
I hope you still wouldn’t be persuaded! This is just too big and complicated of a question to answer this way. We can’t possibly hope to control for all the confounding variables.
What’s more, it’s a bit silly to even wish that we could. There’s incredible diversity between laws. Clearly, lots of laws save lives, and lots of laws cost lives. Figuring out which is which (and by how much) is the meaningful work - not thinking broadly about the relationships between laws writ large and lives.
Replace pages in the US code with pages in the CFR, and replace mortality with GDP growth, and you get the Dawson and Seater paper. It’s statistically more sophisticated than my example, but its logic is pretty much the same.
I have looked at the USC - I happen to look at it every day given what I do
The USC is huge, obviously. Whether it’s too huge or not I think is a bit of a silly question. There’s good laws and bad laws - I’d like more good ones and less bad ones.
Where did you get more likely to be killed by lightning or alligators? 26 total alligator deaths since 1948. Lightning has averaged 27 per year last 18 years.
In regards to regulations: it is entirely plausible that there are regulations on the books which, if repealed, would lead to a 2% (absolute) increase in the economic growth rate. But this is also almost certainly not a rate which would remain constant in time. The fallacy here is assuming that a marginal affect would remain constant.
There currently exists low hanging economic-fruit that regulations are blocking. So initially, upon the repeal of these regulations, those fruit could be picked. The result would be increased growth. This would not mean that the growth rate would remain perpetually substantially perpetually higher.
As an example, suppose there were a hypothetical country which only had one regulation: do not drill for oil in region A. Also suppose that if drilling were allowed in that region then there would be an increase to the economy by as much as 2-4%. Assume there was enough oil in region A to be drilled for 5 years.
You could run a time series over a reasonably long period of time, like let's say 20 years, and it would remain true every year that "regulations are capping the growth rate by more than 2%." If you allowed drilling and got rid of all regulations; however, you wouldn't just forever get a +2% boost in economic growth. As stipulated, you could get at most a boost of between 2-4% over a period of 5 years. And this ignores any long term costs which are more difficult to measure.
But if you're coming from a liberal background and all it takes to convince you that regulation is bad is some magic econ modelling that comes up with "yup, it's 2%!", your belief must have been shaky in the first place :)
Most of these quantified conclusions are very much up for debate, and ultimately impossible to settle. They remain support posts for ideologies.
The typical story that economists tell you is that pollution is fertile ground for regulation, given that it's a classic externality. What we see for that poll is %82 support for regulation. What about rent control? https://joshgg.com/p/why-have-your-own-political-opinions
You get a similarly lopsided answer against it. These 2 examples are more than enough to disprove the myth that regulations are always good or even mostly good, as you would expect support for environmental regulation (which is extremely spotty among experts, take NEPA or nuclear regulation for example) as a type of conceptual ceiling for how much you should support regulation. What I'm basically saying is that for the most agreeable type of regulation you get around 80 percent expert support, but I'm sure if I drilled down and used negative types of regulation of the environment, I could probably poll economists and get it to around half.
So that's as good as regulations get; it's all downhill from there at least as far as expert consensus goes. Another important question is what percentage of regulations are environmental or otherwise deal with large, clear and present externalities? This almost surely kills the progressive myth.
Excited to read this. Is anyone aware of a book of similar quality that spears modern/online conservative sacred cows? I feel like to recommend this to my progressive friends, I have to (and should!) read and recommend both as a hedge.
> The most shocking claim I came across in Huemer’s book was the claim that regulation added to the U.S. since 1949 have reduced economic growth by about 2% per year. This is the claim of a 2013 study by Dawson and Seater, and Huemer says it’s in line with other estimates.
"We find that regulation added since 1949 has reduced the aggregate growth rate on average by about one percentage point over our sample period." ? It appears to be the conclusion that it's 1% per year, not 2% per year, and this doesn't appear to be a typo since you later say it would correspond to a 3x of GDP (which would be 2%, not 1%).
I'm also not sure about how much to give credence to the agreement with other studies. If you found regulation caused 10 pp decline in aggregate economic growth, you would not publish that because it's obviously stupid. If you found regulation caused a 10 pp increase in aggregate economic growth, you similarly wouldn't publish it for much the same reason. Regulation can only have a plausible effect somewhere in the 1-2 point range either way - even the 1pp number sounds insanely strong!
I'm not sure you can easily calculate how much gdp growth there would be if you only looked at the mean growth without analysing the distribution/other properties of the series. It could be that for all of the ~50 years there was a positive 2%-5% growth but if (depending on where) you have a -20 or -30% drawdown the avarage still would look good but you would get nowhere the final sum you estimate, due to the asymmetry of returns.
The reason I'm writing this is that deregulation can lead to runaway systematic risks that can blow up. So you are essentially trading (with deregulation) higher growth with the possibility of having major bad years vs smaller but more consistent, less risky growth (with regulation).
We should not automatically believe anyone's account of anything or accept their logic and that's the first thing I think when I hear "believe women " but given the numbers you refer to regarding sexual assault frequencies on campus I'm inclined to go Bayesian here and set my prior to higher than not, she's telling the truth.
I am an economist and I regard that paper as rather weak evidence for the case that regulations reduce growth, for the same reason alluded to in the post: all the variation is over time in a single country.
From what I can tell, the paper was published because their time series analysis is integrated with a macroeconomic model such that they can parse out a relationship with total factor productivity, and because their results are in line with other papers that don’t rely solely on time series analysis. As always, one should draw inferences on the basis of the literature as a whole and update only weakly on individual papers. If the cited papers are using cross-country analysis this is better than time series analysis but has its own issues, and it makes some sense to see what happens if you try a pure time series approach, which the authors of this paper did. Ultimately it’s difficult for us to know much about a causal effect of total regulation because it is composed of many heterogeneous regulations and jurisdictions are large and few enough that we can’t really apply the sort of quasi-experimental methods that are the standard for estimating causal relationships.
The bull case for deregulation comes from looking at all the individual cases where overregulation is deeply harmful (housing, project permitting, drug development, nuclear, occupational licensing, etc.) and becoming redpilled to the apparent tendency of progressives and the federal bureaucracy to impose grievous costs for scant gains (though obviously some regulations are necessary). But it’s not enough to make some regulation that under ideal conditions results in some good thing and then pat yourself on the back for a job well done, there are usually assumptions that don’t hold, unmeasured costs, and unintended consequences.
(Edited for paragraph spacing)
As Scott Alexander once said, "beware the man of one study" - https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/12/beware-the-man-of-one-study/
I only scanned the paper but sheesh - is their explanatory variable really number of pages in the CFR? Am I crazy or is that kinda silly…
A technical point: it’s not really accurate to say regression analyses are regarded as good evidence. It heavily depends on why and how you conduct the analysis.
It’s like saying “using microscopes is considered good evidence.” Well… sometimes?? Depends what you’re looking at and what you’re concluding based on that. If you’re trying to find the weight of an elephant, using a microscope is the wrong tool. Regression analyses can also be the wrong tool in many circumstances.
I might even go as far as saying regressions alone are NOT good evidence of causation. You need a design that allows for causal inference, like a natural experiment, DiD, RDD, IV, etc. Maybe sometimes if it’s a relatively simple thing you’re studying and you can make a good case that you’ve controlled for all the confounding variables, you could say a regression alone is good evidence? But the effect of all regulation on all productivity is definitely not that
It does seem clear to me that Zimmerman was lying about a few things. In his version of events, he is much farther down the neighborhood block than he could possibly physically be. I also can't really condemn any of Martin's actions: if a strange guy is hassling me with a gun, then, yes, I probably want to get that gun away from them.
Regarding Rittenhouse, I just want to point out that after the first guy, everyone who tried to stop him was also in the right. If I witness a teenager shooting people with a rifle at a protest, I am going to try to stop that person from shooting other people with any means I can.
I notice in both situations that could have been avoided if random men had simply chose to not playact their vigilante fantasies. A good reminder for people like me.
Why couldn't he possibly be far down the neighborhood?
On the ground savagely beating Zimmerman was obviously not justified, and it seems like he didn't see the gun until shortly before the shooting.
The other guys could have been justified with Rittenhouse also being justified. If I mistakenly believe you committed a crime and attack you, you can still kill me in legitimate self-defense. Additionally, it wasn't reasonable to chase him while he was running away.
Specifically, in Zimmerman's story that he gave to police, he said after making the first phone call to police, he headed immediately back to his vehicle before Martin "emerged from the shadows" and began beating him, with Zimmerman falling to the ground at the first punch. But if this were the case, then Martin's body should have been found at the T intersection at the north of the neighborhood. Instead, it was found 50 feet away from the T intersection, closer to where Martin's residence is and further away from Zimmerman's truck. 50 feet is not a lot, of course, but it makes no physical sense why Martin's body would be there if Zimmerman had been downed by the first punch, as he claimed.
Definitely could have gotten mixed up about minor details.
At least a few regulations are good for example regulations about food expiry dates, and ingredient list is important.
Rather than just Huemer, Caplan, and David Friedman, I recommend checking out what major economics professors are saying and believe. By major, I mean economists who are researchers and regularly publish papers in respected journals. For example see this poll on gold standard (that libertarian capitalists really like) which has the votes of top economists on gold standard- https://www.kentclarkcenter.org/surveys/gold-standard/
Literally all of them are against gold standard.
I want you to consider the economic consensus and then think about how much in the minority David Friedman and Bryan Caplan are. Then I want you to consider how neither Caplan nor Friedman are close to shifting the economic consensus towards libertarian capitalism.
Most economists are social liberals/social democrats. See some of the policies that Daron Acemoglu supports and see the policies that Caplan and Friedman support - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daron_Acemoglu
David Friedman doesn't support carbon tax. Most economists support it.
David Friedman is an anarcho capitalist, but overwhelming majority of economists are not.
David Friedman doesn't support any kind of Government welfare or welfare state, but majority of economists support some form of government welfare.
David Friedman supports fully privatizing the healthcare, but majority of economists don't support full privatization.
Bryan Caplan and David Friedman support no government regulations anywhere in any market. Majority of economists don't support that.
The reason I stopped being a libertarian capitalist is because economic consensus is neither libertarian capitalist nor Austrian economics nor Marxist nor MMTer. The orthodox economics just is social liberal/social democratic.
But whether regulations are good is not something people were polled on.
See this - https://www.kentclarkcenter.org/surveys/esg-shareholders-and-regulation/
Which question do you think tells us about general expert support for government regulation?
There is no question which asks them about general support for all or many regulations in all sectors because probably that is too broad. But I also don't see experts going to the way of libertarian capitalists.
So, to me, regulations should be considered on case by case basis instead of a general basis.
Maybe certain sectors need more deregulation and some other sectors don't.
While this is partially right, there are public choice theoretical reasons to assume that regulations will be inefficient that don't apply to private markets nearly as strongly. For example, voters are more irrational than consumers and don't have the same good decision incentives (see Myth of the Rational Voter). Therefore, we should assume regulations to be bad for the economy as a Bayesian prior in a way that we shouldn't with the market. Doesn't mean you can't have outweighing evidence.
I assume that economists don't think like this, so they don't see it. Economists seem to have a biased idealistic view of government decision making in a way they don't have for consumers.
> Rather than just Huemer, Caplan, and David Friedman, I recommend checking out what major economics professors are saying and believe. By major, I mean economists who are researchers and regularly publish papers in respected journals. For example see this poll on gold standard (that libertarian capitalists really like) which has the votes of top economists on gold standard... Literally all of them are against gold standard.
It's not true that libertarian capitalists generally all support the gold standard.
Perhaps the most famous libertarian economist was Milton Friedman, and he didn't support the gold standard. Scott Sumner is another libertarian economist and he doesn't support the gold standard. I don't think even Friedrich Hayek supported the gold standard in his later years.
I am not confident, but I'd be willing to bet that neither Huemer, Caplan or David Friedman support the gold standard either. My guess is that they'd more-or-less say we should ultimately have competing monetary systems, in line with their anarcho-capitalist beliefs.
Yes, it would be nice if the regulation thing was examined more closely, like what regulations and what their function is. A low resolution calculation over all regulations doesn’t seem convincing.
I like to think about regulations on case by case basis and seeing this - https://www.kentclarkcenter.org/surveys/esg-shareholders-and-regulation/
improves my confidence because just see how many of those economists support regulations in environmental area.
I do think that there are some areas where probably significant, but not total, deregulation is urgently needed like for example, housing industry or construction industry. But it is not clear that all sectors of the market require significant deregulation to the same amount as housing industry.
For an overwhelming number of individual issues, the consensus among informed economists would be either deregulation or a drastic reduction in regulatory pressure. Think of zoning laws, rent control, drug research, workplace licensing, nuclear energy, cash transfers, education, etc. The best economically informed position is probably classical liberalism, primarily to account for instances of genuine market failure. The informed case for social liberalism stands for sacrificing economic efficiency in favor of a more just outcome or to correct some negative externality, not from economic literacy.
I'm a little skeptical of appealing to a consensus here. Elsewhere in academia, consensuses on politically pertinent topics often seem like they're politically motivated, and, while economists are both among the more rigorous and most conservative disciplines (I think I saw at some point it's a "mere" 5:1 democrats:republicans), there's still an enormous disparity. When liberal economists say liberal things, my default explanation is that it's because they're liberal, not because they're economists. Acemoglu, for example, recently praised an article that, among other things, called for regulators to penalize Musk worldwide when bad things were said on twitter.
I think the political opinions is sufficient to motivate reasoning to support one's desired views, which makes it not especially compelling to me that a majority of economists thinks x, y, or z: based merely on their politics they would do that, so the question is merely whether the evidence is so overwhelming and so widely recognized as to compel them to do the opposite.
My impression is that GMU etc. are not fringe in the same way or to the same extent that MMTers or Marxists are, even if they disagree with the mainstream consensus on some points. Being comparatively more concerned about public choice and how governmental policies will tend to exist in practice, for example, seems to be a plausible position in our current state of knowledge. This is not the case for the labor theory of value.
Do I agree with all the things you criticize? Certainly not—carbon taxes sound okay if done right, and I'm certainly not an anarcho-capitalist. Nor do I blindly trust Caplan, etc. But I do think that they should be taken as serious people, even if you reject their opinions in some regions.
+1 to what Rajat wrote. Also, GDP is such a narrow measure that it can’t tell us if such a world would be a good one to live in. Questions like:
- how evenly would the GDP increase be distributed?
- what negative externalities would exist in this deregulated world?
GDP generally correlates pretty well with how well a society is doing.
This could be because GDP allows greater state capacity, and thus more regulations. In such a case, slashing regulations to boost GDP would be senseless!
The study looked at whether after imposing a regulation GDP generally went up in the U.S..
Ok? Please re-read my comment and get back to me. I'm pointing out that the reason GDP is good may in fact be that it allows regulations.
Oh, I didn't get that's what you were saying. That's super implausible though--if we were as poor as Mexico (which we'd be if we had 1% lower GDP growth per year over the last century) then even if we were regulated, society would obviously suck!
Most economists support carbon tax. Any tax would reduce GDP per capital to some extent at least in the short term to (perhaps) medium term. It is true that GDP per capita and GDP are good and they correlate well with wellbeing. But it also matters how much redistribution is happening and what incentives do people who are in poverty have. For example, some government welfare can create poverty traps, so there should be research and experiments on different kinds of welfare programs.
Getting rid of a lot of taxes and a lot of regulations would certainly boost GDP growth and GDP per capita but the way libertarian capitalists deal with the costs of those negative externalities sometimes bothers me. I saw Bryan Caplan enthusiastically supporting a book that argues for even more fossil fuel burning in the current era. And that seemed like such an obvious blind spot.
RIght, it's not a perfect measure, but still a very good one.
Yes. But you should consider Human Development Index, GDP per capita, government spending, GDP growth, and the amount of inequality into consideration as all that will give you the full picture.
It annoys me when people talk about “regulation” as if it were a natural kind. Some regulations are obviously good. Some regulations are obviously counterproductive. The devil is in the details.
For example, NEPA and CEQA are both major hindrances to growth right now and desperately need to be reformed. But we don’t want to declare open season on the environment. What we need is a better, more thoughtful regulation in their place.
Right that's certainly true but if regulations as a whole are very bad then we should be more supportive of those with general anti-regulation dispositions
Being ‘anti-regulation’ is like being ‘anti-law.’ Some laws are very bad and some laws are very good and others are mild or neutral. That level of generality just isn’t informative.
I agree that it's not informative for evaluating any particular regulation. But it is informative in electing candidates, some of whom are more supportive of regulations than others.
This doesn't require it being a very informative category. Imagine there exists some category X that is very gerrymandered. Republicans tend to support X and Democrats tend to oppose X. Even if the category is gerrymandered, if a study finds that X is generally bad, this would give you some evidence that Dems are worse.
So the category ‘anti-regulation-or-anti-nuclear-war’ is a very good category, since many studies show that the absence of nuclear war is fantastic for economic and productivity growth and this category will inherit that goodness. And Dens are more likely to be in this category than Reps.
Nevertheless this is probably not a reason to be pro-dem.
It's a heuristic, obviously not true of every gerrymandered category. Would you really deny that if most regulations are bad and Democrats are pro regulation that gives us evidence that Democrats are bad?
Given what we can do with Boolean combinations, not even most gerrymandered categories
Here’s a similar argument to the one tha Dawson and Seater paper made.
Imagine for a second that I think laws are really great - laws save lives! It’s good that we lock up murderers, right?
I want to prove this! But to prove it I need some way to measure how many laws we have. Hmmmm. How about I measure how many pages are in the United States Code? (The US code contains the vast majority of federal laws). Okay, let’s see if as the number of pages in the US Code goes up, the mortality rate goes down.
Well no, you say: there’s all sorts of confounding variables. Like, maybe the causal arrow can also point the other way: a healthier society is more complex and therefore needs more laws.
But, with regression analysis, you can control for stuff like this. So, I add a bunch of controls for advances in healthcare, increases in wealth, etc. and after doing that, I still find a negative correlation between the number of pages in the US Code and the mortality rate. So laws must save lives, right?
I hope you still wouldn’t be persuaded! This is just too big and complicated of a question to answer this way. We can’t possibly hope to control for all the confounding variables.
What’s more, it’s a bit silly to even wish that we could. There’s incredible diversity between laws. Clearly, lots of laws save lives, and lots of laws cost lives. Figuring out which is which (and by how much) is the meaningful work - not thinking broadly about the relationships between laws writ large and lives.
Replace pages in the US code with pages in the CFR, and replace mortality with GDP growth, and you get the Dawson and Seater paper. It’s statistically more sophisticated than my example, but its logic is pretty much the same.
> How about I measure how many pages are in the United States Code?
You may want to actually look at the size of the code and the number of pages it contains.
Hint: it's ridiculous large, you're probably violating several right now and don't even know it.
Not sure what the implication of this is intended to be
If you actually look into the US code it becomes obvious that it's way too large.
Well, I'll let Elon himself tell a particularly ridiculous example:
https://x.com/SwipeWright/status/1847858204652327402
I have looked at the USC - I happen to look at it every day given what I do
The USC is huge, obviously. Whether it’s too huge or not I think is a bit of a silly question. There’s good laws and bad laws - I’d like more good ones and less bad ones.
Even reasonable sounding laws can become bad when there are too many of them and they get filtered through dozens of layers of bureaucracy.
Where did you get more likely to be killed by lightning or alligators? 26 total alligator deaths since 1948. Lightning has averaged 27 per year last 18 years.
Unusually high rate of spelling errors in this one
Oof--any that came to mind (I'm in the UK and it's harder to print stuff, so that's likely why).
I ran it through Chat GPT, but did not confirm that each of these was correct:
Heumer should be Huemer (first paragraph of section 1).
plateued should be plateaued (section 2).
strange should be strangle (section 2).
Martins’ attorney should be Martin's attorney (section 3.1).
Martins’ phone records should be Martin's phone records (section 3.1).
sound like his screaming should be sounded like his screaming (section 3.2).
goings on should be goings-on (section 3.2).
Jeannee Manalo should be Jeanne Manalo (section 3.2).
Thanks!
In regards to regulations: it is entirely plausible that there are regulations on the books which, if repealed, would lead to a 2% (absolute) increase in the economic growth rate. But this is also almost certainly not a rate which would remain constant in time. The fallacy here is assuming that a marginal affect would remain constant.
There currently exists low hanging economic-fruit that regulations are blocking. So initially, upon the repeal of these regulations, those fruit could be picked. The result would be increased growth. This would not mean that the growth rate would remain perpetually substantially perpetually higher.
As an example, suppose there were a hypothetical country which only had one regulation: do not drill for oil in region A. Also suppose that if drilling were allowed in that region then there would be an increase to the economy by as much as 2-4%. Assume there was enough oil in region A to be drilled for 5 years.
You could run a time series over a reasonably long period of time, like let's say 20 years, and it would remain true every year that "regulations are capping the growth rate by more than 2%." If you allowed drilling and got rid of all regulations; however, you wouldn't just forever get a +2% boost in economic growth. As stipulated, you could get at most a boost of between 2-4% over a period of 5 years. And this ignores any long term costs which are more difficult to measure.
I am very much pro deregulation in general.
But if you're coming from a liberal background and all it takes to convince you that regulation is bad is some magic econ modelling that comes up with "yup, it's 2%!", your belief must have been shaky in the first place :)
Most of these quantified conclusions are very much up for debate, and ultimately impossible to settle. They remain support posts for ideologies.
I'll write more about it in my own review, but for regulations I don't think that paper is super convincing. I think an example of a more convincing argument is the poll link Rajat shared: https://www.kentclarkcenter.org/surveys/esg-shareholders-and-regulation/
The typical story that economists tell you is that pollution is fertile ground for regulation, given that it's a classic externality. What we see for that poll is %82 support for regulation. What about rent control? https://joshgg.com/p/why-have-your-own-political-opinions
You get a similarly lopsided answer against it. These 2 examples are more than enough to disprove the myth that regulations are always good or even mostly good, as you would expect support for environmental regulation (which is extremely spotty among experts, take NEPA or nuclear regulation for example) as a type of conceptual ceiling for how much you should support regulation. What I'm basically saying is that for the most agreeable type of regulation you get around 80 percent expert support, but I'm sure if I drilled down and used negative types of regulation of the environment, I could probably poll economists and get it to around half.
So that's as good as regulations get; it's all downhill from there at least as far as expert consensus goes. Another important question is what percentage of regulations are environmental or otherwise deal with large, clear and present externalities? This almost surely kills the progressive myth.
Excited to read this. Is anyone aware of a book of similar quality that spears modern/online conservative sacred cows? I feel like to recommend this to my progressive friends, I have to (and should!) read and recommend both as a hedge.
> The most shocking claim I came across in Huemer’s book was the claim that regulation added to the U.S. since 1949 have reduced economic growth by about 2% per year. This is the claim of a 2013 study by Dawson and Seater, and Huemer says it’s in line with other estimates.
"We find that regulation added since 1949 has reduced the aggregate growth rate on average by about one percentage point over our sample period." ? It appears to be the conclusion that it's 1% per year, not 2% per year, and this doesn't appear to be a typo since you later say it would correspond to a 3x of GDP (which would be 2%, not 1%).
I'm also not sure about how much to give credence to the agreement with other studies. If you found regulation caused 10 pp decline in aggregate economic growth, you would not publish that because it's obviously stupid. If you found regulation caused a 10 pp increase in aggregate economic growth, you similarly wouldn't publish it for much the same reason. Regulation can only have a plausible effect somewhere in the 1-2 point range either way - even the 1pp number sounds insanely strong!
I'm not sure you can easily calculate how much gdp growth there would be if you only looked at the mean growth without analysing the distribution/other properties of the series. It could be that for all of the ~50 years there was a positive 2%-5% growth but if (depending on where) you have a -20 or -30% drawdown the avarage still would look good but you would get nowhere the final sum you estimate, due to the asymmetry of returns.
The reason I'm writing this is that deregulation can lead to runaway systematic risks that can blow up. So you are essentially trading (with deregulation) higher growth with the possibility of having major bad years vs smaller but more consistent, less risky growth (with regulation).
Left out is that there are pics of the back of zimmerman’s bloodied head from the night of the shooting entirely consistent w his narrative
Same with the Ferguson Michael Brown shooting that birthed "hands up don't shoot."
We should not automatically believe anyone's account of anything or accept their logic and that's the first thing I think when I hear "believe women " but given the numbers you refer to regarding sexual assault frequencies on campus I'm inclined to go Bayesian here and set my prior to higher than not, she's telling the truth.