Even if they're not exactly right on everything (who is?) the Austrian economists and Mises Institute produce more content that's accessible to the general public than anyone else. I don't think it's even close. They do a tremendous job of trying to teach lay people economics and libertarian theory. Your story of back and forth correspondence with Block is great anecdotal evidence of this as well. If it weren't for them I wouldn't know half of what I do today about economics or libertarianism.
Their ardent defense of free markets that verges on dogmatism doesn't bother me either. I would take a million times more of it to balance out what people normally think and hear. I prefer your approach, to be sure, but I still find what they do incredibly valuable. To call him the biggest jackass is really myopic.
I was banned from commenting at Mises.org for being rude to a 9/11 truther, but it is true that they really were dedicated to making scholarly material freely & easily available. Now with libhub that has been applied to a lot more, but they should still get credit for when they were one of the few sources of economics articles for laymen without any academic affiliation.
"Error #1: Ignoring human irrationality. Throughout his book, Block consistently ignores the possibility that human beings systematically misunderstand their own interests."
People can "systematically misunderstand their own interests" and make all sorts of mistakes. But is this really "irrationality"? Using their reason, people attempt to act as they think is best at that moment in the perceived circumstances. That people are always rational in this sense, is why we should reason with them rather than dismiss or override their choices as being "irrational". https://jclester.substack.com/p/adversus-adversus-homo-economicus
I think this is pedantic and spurious. One can acknowledge that human beings make mistakes, even make mistakes in systematic and predictable ways (which they manifestly do), without necessarily endorsing all or any state paternalism.
Philosophical precision can sometimes look like pointless pedantry. The charge of being spurious is harder to make sense of. There are serious consequences with allowing allegations of “irrationality” to pass without scrutiny in scholarly contexts. The best book on the subject is Ray Scott Percival’s The Myth of the Closed Mind: Understanding Why and How People Are Rational.
Thanks for making this point. Claiming "human beings systematically misunderstand their own interests" leads to the question, "According to what experts, appointed by whom?" Every person has the right to decide how to weigh his own interests, even when everyone else would weigh differently.
It seems obviously true that people make all sorts of mistakes all the time, did they but know it. That is, they would themselves have chosen to have done things differently if only they were better informed. However, state paternalism not only flouts people’s liberty but does far more overall harm than good in addition.
> When someone asks, “Would you like to come to my party?,” you refuse with “Sorry, I can’t” even though that is almost never literally true.
This claim relies on a pretty tendentious definition of "literally true". It's quite common that "I can't go" is literally true for completely reasonable definitions of what's possible.
There's an episode of Scrubs in which the protagonist and his best friend are on call. They figure they won't be called in, attend a party, and have some drinks. The call comes, they show up at the hospital, and they get sent home as unfit to work.
Now clearly, they were able to attend the party. But if someone there had said to one of them "have a beer", and he'd responded "Sorry, I can't", who would have thought of that as a lie?
Your physical ability to move is not the only constraint on what you can do.
Can we simplify things a bit by admitting that we don't really care about many negative externalities? For instance, I'm personally not bothered by drug-abusing homeless campers, despite their prevalence where I live. I'm a big guy and somewhat combative. They leave me alone, and they make life more colorful and exciting. Are there negative externalities? Maybe, but none that bother me. The government response (being harrassed when taking a nap in one's car, for instance) does bother me, and I do not believe that cops make my life more colorful or exciting.
"To start, we must remind ourselves that the negative externalities of these disfavored activities are usually small or non-existent."
This strikes me as a debatable assertion depending on the topic at issue.
"The argument from arbitrariness is relevant as well. Alcoholism plausibly destroys more families than drug addiction."
We do regulate alcoholic consumption. How and when you can consume alcohol. How intoxicated you can be in different settings. DUIs involve heavy legal costs, even if you never got in an accident or if the particular route you were driving when pulled over was low risk.
We tax alcohol, sometimes quite heavily, and there are some people that think it should be taxed more. Even a place like Singapore, which is pretty into vice control, allows legal alcohol, but makes it very expensive.
Whether you should regulate, tax, ban, etc a substance depends on a lot of factors. How harmful and addictive is it? Does a large market for the product already exist or would you be suppressing it from forming in the first place? Etc.
"Not only are some addicts high-functioning; some plausibly function better with their drug of choice than without."
I have a very different view of "moderate" drug use. It seems to me that more often than not it does moderate damage.
You don't have to end up a street druggie for drugs to make your life worse. I've known potheads that simply have shitty lives that revolved around the drug, even if they can hold down a mediocre job. Sam Bankenfield probably wishes he wasn't microdosing when deciding how to run FTX.
I would take the parents approach. If you kid said they were thinking of developing a pot habit, would your first thought be "well that's nice son, it will probably bring you a lot of happiness."
"Infidelity with non-prostitutes plausibly destroys more families than infidelity with prostitutes. But the law and public opinion largely overlook the former and harshly punish the latter."
I don't know if people ignore the former. If you found out your friend or loved one was cheating on their spouse or helping someone cheat on their spouse I would hope you were against it. We just don't have adultery laws on the books.
Open and legal prostitution changes social dynamics in a way that having to go out and find someone to have an affair with does not. You can debate whether that's a big enough effect, but it certainly seems clear to me that they would sleep with prostitutes more if it were easier to do.
William Stuntz argued in "The Collapse of American Criminal Justice" that enforcement of drug laws is inexplicably intertwined with homicide. Quoting my own paraphrase: "he views the timing & demographics of drug enforcement as explainable only with reference to violent crimes. Homicides among whites in smaller towns & rural areas tend to be easy to prove (while drug deals are not) and less frequent, homicides among blacks in inner cities are difficult to prove given gang intimidation (and the hostility of many residents to police) and frequent, whereas it is easy to bring up arrest numbers via buy & busts at open-air drug markets or crack houses (which police hate than more discrete drug trafficking due to their connection with violent crime)."
Isn't it strange that Caplan, a Jew, promotes open borders everywhere....except in the jewish ethnostate of Israel? Unlimited Africans to Europe is fine, but a few million arabs in Israel is catastrophic?
Bit of a stretch, claiming that prostitutes break up marriages. People who use prostitutes may break up marriages. People who file for divorce, because they learn their spouses have visited prostitutes, may break up marriages. People whose marital behavior contributes to their spouses' desire to visit prostitutes may contribute to breaking up marriages. To blame the prostitute seems inappropriate, an attempt to blame someone who has low social capital instead of assigning responsibility where it belongs.
That said, prostitutes do present a different externality risk: disease.
I think Walter Block's work stands on its own, and needs no "help" from this author. I'm guessing that if Mr. Block were to respond to the author's points, he'd repeatedly say, "Obvious, and not inconsistent with anything I said."
This article is a great take on "Defending the Undefendable". I remember when I read it that it seemed unintuitive and sometimes profound and often 100% correct (e.g. when talking about slumlords and gypsy cab drivers), but many bits felt off, though I could not always articulate why.
One other possible error that I would say that Block's book misses is that it generally ignores the moral hazards associated with breaking the law (or else it blames the blame for such problems entirely on backs of the scapegoaters). Few people who intentionally break a law do so because they decide that that specific law is morally (or logically) wrong. Instead, people usually break a law for selfish short-sighted reasons and this often leads to them breaking other laws for similar reasons. An example would be a drug addict who steals in order to feed his habit. Note that this not an argument in favor of unjust laws, but against the idea that such law-breakers should be considered "heroes". I could maybe go so far as to say that laws should generally be enforced, even in cases where there is some concern that the law might not be 100% just (if I were convinced that a law is unjust, then I would not want it to be enforced, but on the margins I would err on the side of enforcing the law).
Interesting. I’d never heard of Block before, but I’ve always loved The Fable of the Bees. Was Mandeville the first to suggest the virtue of vice? Is there a history of the irrational side of economics? (Behavioral Economics?) Was Adam Smith arguing the opposite in Moral Sentiments?
Even if they're not exactly right on everything (who is?) the Austrian economists and Mises Institute produce more content that's accessible to the general public than anyone else. I don't think it's even close. They do a tremendous job of trying to teach lay people economics and libertarian theory. Your story of back and forth correspondence with Block is great anecdotal evidence of this as well. If it weren't for them I wouldn't know half of what I do today about economics or libertarianism.
Their ardent defense of free markets that verges on dogmatism doesn't bother me either. I would take a million times more of it to balance out what people normally think and hear. I prefer your approach, to be sure, but I still find what they do incredibly valuable. To call him the biggest jackass is really myopic.
I was banned from commenting at Mises.org for being rude to a 9/11 truther, but it is true that they really were dedicated to making scholarly material freely & easily available. Now with libhub that has been applied to a lot more, but they should still get credit for when they were one of the few sources of economics articles for laymen without any academic affiliation.
"Error #1: Ignoring human irrationality. Throughout his book, Block consistently ignores the possibility that human beings systematically misunderstand their own interests."
People can "systematically misunderstand their own interests" and make all sorts of mistakes. But is this really "irrationality"? Using their reason, people attempt to act as they think is best at that moment in the perceived circumstances. That people are always rational in this sense, is why we should reason with them rather than dismiss or override their choices as being "irrational". https://jclester.substack.com/p/adversus-adversus-homo-economicus
I think this is pedantic and spurious. One can acknowledge that human beings make mistakes, even make mistakes in systematic and predictable ways (which they manifestly do), without necessarily endorsing all or any state paternalism.
Philosophical precision can sometimes look like pointless pedantry. The charge of being spurious is harder to make sense of. There are serious consequences with allowing allegations of “irrationality” to pass without scrutiny in scholarly contexts. The best book on the subject is Ray Scott Percival’s The Myth of the Closed Mind: Understanding Why and How People Are Rational.
Thanks for making this point. Claiming "human beings systematically misunderstand their own interests" leads to the question, "According to what experts, appointed by whom?" Every person has the right to decide how to weigh his own interests, even when everyone else would weigh differently.
It seems obviously true that people make all sorts of mistakes all the time, did they but know it. That is, they would themselves have chosen to have done things differently if only they were better informed. However, state paternalism not only flouts people’s liberty but does far more overall harm than good in addition.
> When someone asks, “Would you like to come to my party?,” you refuse with “Sorry, I can’t” even though that is almost never literally true.
This claim relies on a pretty tendentious definition of "literally true". It's quite common that "I can't go" is literally true for completely reasonable definitions of what's possible.
There's an episode of Scrubs in which the protagonist and his best friend are on call. They figure they won't be called in, attend a party, and have some drinks. The call comes, they show up at the hospital, and they get sent home as unfit to work.
Now clearly, they were able to attend the party. But if someone there had said to one of them "have a beer", and he'd responded "Sorry, I can't", who would have thought of that as a lie?
Your physical ability to move is not the only constraint on what you can do.
Can we simplify things a bit by admitting that we don't really care about many negative externalities? For instance, I'm personally not bothered by drug-abusing homeless campers, despite their prevalence where I live. I'm a big guy and somewhat combative. They leave me alone, and they make life more colorful and exciting. Are there negative externalities? Maybe, but none that bother me. The government response (being harrassed when taking a nap in one's car, for instance) does bother me, and I do not believe that cops make my life more colorful or exciting.
"To start, we must remind ourselves that the negative externalities of these disfavored activities are usually small or non-existent."
This strikes me as a debatable assertion depending on the topic at issue.
"The argument from arbitrariness is relevant as well. Alcoholism plausibly destroys more families than drug addiction."
We do regulate alcoholic consumption. How and when you can consume alcohol. How intoxicated you can be in different settings. DUIs involve heavy legal costs, even if you never got in an accident or if the particular route you were driving when pulled over was low risk.
We tax alcohol, sometimes quite heavily, and there are some people that think it should be taxed more. Even a place like Singapore, which is pretty into vice control, allows legal alcohol, but makes it very expensive.
Whether you should regulate, tax, ban, etc a substance depends on a lot of factors. How harmful and addictive is it? Does a large market for the product already exist or would you be suppressing it from forming in the first place? Etc.
"Not only are some addicts high-functioning; some plausibly function better with their drug of choice than without."
I have a very different view of "moderate" drug use. It seems to me that more often than not it does moderate damage.
You don't have to end up a street druggie for drugs to make your life worse. I've known potheads that simply have shitty lives that revolved around the drug, even if they can hold down a mediocre job. Sam Bankenfield probably wishes he wasn't microdosing when deciding how to run FTX.
I would take the parents approach. If you kid said they were thinking of developing a pot habit, would your first thought be "well that's nice son, it will probably bring you a lot of happiness."
"Infidelity with non-prostitutes plausibly destroys more families than infidelity with prostitutes. But the law and public opinion largely overlook the former and harshly punish the latter."
I don't know if people ignore the former. If you found out your friend or loved one was cheating on their spouse or helping someone cheat on their spouse I would hope you were against it. We just don't have adultery laws on the books.
Open and legal prostitution changes social dynamics in a way that having to go out and find someone to have an affair with does not. You can debate whether that's a big enough effect, but it certainly seems clear to me that they would sleep with prostitutes more if it were easier to do.
"Open and legal prostitution changes social dynamics in a way that having to go out and find someone to have an affair with does not."
Sounds like status quo bias to me.
William Stuntz argued in "The Collapse of American Criminal Justice" that enforcement of drug laws is inexplicably intertwined with homicide. Quoting my own paraphrase: "he views the timing & demographics of drug enforcement as explainable only with reference to violent crimes. Homicides among whites in smaller towns & rural areas tend to be easy to prove (while drug deals are not) and less frequent, homicides among blacks in inner cities are difficult to prove given gang intimidation (and the hostility of many residents to police) and frequent, whereas it is easy to bring up arrest numbers via buy & busts at open-air drug markets or crack houses (which police hate than more discrete drug trafficking due to their connection with violent crime)."
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2018/06/23/the-collapse-of-american-criminal-justice/
Just bought it! Thanks for the article.
Block is a hero. My hero, and yours, too.
Isn't it strange that Caplan, a Jew, promotes open borders everywhere....except in the jewish ethnostate of Israel? Unlimited Africans to Europe is fine, but a few million arabs in Israel is catastrophic?
Bit of a stretch, claiming that prostitutes break up marriages. People who use prostitutes may break up marriages. People who file for divorce, because they learn their spouses have visited prostitutes, may break up marriages. People whose marital behavior contributes to their spouses' desire to visit prostitutes may contribute to breaking up marriages. To blame the prostitute seems inappropriate, an attempt to blame someone who has low social capital instead of assigning responsibility where it belongs.
That said, prostitutes do present a different externality risk: disease.
I think Walter Block's work stands on its own, and needs no "help" from this author. I'm guessing that if Mr. Block were to respond to the author's points, he'd repeatedly say, "Obvious, and not inconsistent with anything I said."
What do you call this treatment, Bryan? It's not steel manning. Alloy manning perhaps? :-)
This article is a great take on "Defending the Undefendable". I remember when I read it that it seemed unintuitive and sometimes profound and often 100% correct (e.g. when talking about slumlords and gypsy cab drivers), but many bits felt off, though I could not always articulate why.
One other possible error that I would say that Block's book misses is that it generally ignores the moral hazards associated with breaking the law (or else it blames the blame for such problems entirely on backs of the scapegoaters). Few people who intentionally break a law do so because they decide that that specific law is morally (or logically) wrong. Instead, people usually break a law for selfish short-sighted reasons and this often leads to them breaking other laws for similar reasons. An example would be a drug addict who steals in order to feed his habit. Note that this not an argument in favor of unjust laws, but against the idea that such law-breakers should be considered "heroes". I could maybe go so far as to say that laws should generally be enforced, even in cases where there is some concern that the law might not be 100% just (if I were convinced that a law is unjust, then I would not want it to be enforced, but on the margins I would err on the side of enforcing the law).
Interesting. I’d never heard of Block before, but I’ve always loved The Fable of the Bees. Was Mandeville the first to suggest the virtue of vice? Is there a history of the irrational side of economics? (Behavioral Economics?) Was Adam Smith arguing the opposite in Moral Sentiments?
Interesting