Anonymous Libertarian

In keeping with the spirit of the times, I will share some of my thoughts on the coronavirus outbreak, and what kind of public policy response would enable us to prepare for such an outbreak while still being economically feasible. I've found much of the popular writing on what the right policies are for epidemic preparedness to be disappointing. It is often too vague (Bill Gates's article in the New England Journal of Medicine struck me as short on details, which is bizarre given his foundation's involvement in many specific responses to the ongoing epidemic). Sometimes it's shamelessly partisan. Sometimes it's implausible (e.g., demanding that society constantly have enough resources on hand to handle an epidemic at any moment). But I think the problem must be talked about in greater detail for viable policies to be conceived and implemented. In this post, I won't discuss such key elements of epidemic policy as how to enforce quarantines, travel restrictions...

This week, congress and the president clashed over the details of a coronavirus relief package (I believe a deal has now been reached). One source of the conflict was congressional Democrats' efforts to include a mandate that employers give paid leave to employees. The mandate, it is worth noting, would be permanent. I don't know whether the bill that stands to pass mandates paid sick leave for all employees; news sources are rather ambiguous at the moment, as the term "sick leave" is used to refer to the provision of paid sick leave to health care workers specifically, or to federal employees, or payment by the federal government to sick workers. Originally at least, though, there was a proposed provision to mandate private employers generally to provide paid sick leave. This, I argue, is a bad idea, particularly during an epidemic. The reasoning behind why this policy is specifically necessary or useful during an infectious disease epidemic is, as I understand it,...

I suspect a major reason why political discourse is the way it is has to do with how we perceive what it means to be – and how we explain being – wrong. I don’t merely mean in our ‘polarized times’  (the extent to which we are more polarized today than in earlier eras is a matter of dispute among political psychologists)  but rather the way people think about politics in general, and the way it seems they always have. There are a couple persistent and remarkable phenomena about politics that should make us a priori suspicious of how political beliefs are formed: 1) people tend to cluster into few (mostly, two) political ideologies with remarkably little intra-cluster heterogeneity; and 2) there is little transit between clusters. 1 is remarkable because what one believes about abortion should not really predict what one believes about gun control, capital gains taxes, foreign policy, or the macroeconomics of business cycles. And yet, one’s opinion on any one of these issues...

In honor of Pete Buttigieg's apparent victory in the Iowa Caucus (though I believe, in terms of delegates, Sanders tied him), I thought I'd write some thoughts on the concept of electability, though only partially my own. Greg Mankiw wrote a blog post months ago ( http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2019/04/bayes-likes-mayor-pete.html ) in which he argued, more or less, that Pete Buttigieg appeared to be the most electable Democratic candidate. Admittedly, he didn't use that word, but I think he implied this. Basically, Buttigied had the highest conditional probability of winning the general election given that he won the primary. Later, Andrew Gelman criticized the post in his blog, though mainly because he didn't think using betting odds as genuine, stable probabilities of winning an election was a good idea. But it was in the comments section that there was a discussion of what I think was a more interesting point: even if the betting odds are correct, they still are not ...

Recently Ed Dolan had a post on his blog on Medium arguing that small government was not in fact conducive to prosperity ( https://medium.com/@dolanecon/does-the-government-that-governs-least-really-govern-best-142106728cba ), as libertarians often argue. Specifically, he shows that the size of government is actually negatively correlated with measures of prosperity, freedom, and quality of government; on the other hand, quality of governance was positively associated with per capita GDP. I came across this post, I should note, when Tyler Cowen linked to it on his blog as evidence for “state capacity libertarianism.” But there’s a problem with Dolan’s analysis, or at least the interpretation he provides of it with respect to the role of government size in economic prosperity. It may seem pedantic to repeat the old canard that ‘correlation does not equal causation,’ but the problem is more than that: there is an equally plausible explanation for the correlation he observes in wh...