Should Whole Foods Be Using Prison Labor?
I don’t definitively answer that question–I’m an economist after all. But I think you’ll have a better way of thinking about the issue after my latest FEE article. My favorite line: “In an ideal society, the term “prison labor” should not strike us as cruel and exploitative any more than the terms “office labor” or “factory labor.””
Potpourri
==> If you were bothered by my pontifications on the Ahmed clock case, don’t read Gene Callahan.
==> Richard Ebeling doesn’t view low interest rates as tonic for an ailing economy.
==> ZeroHedge on Mark Spitznagel–we ain’t seen nothin yet. (Sung to the tune of Sinatra’s, “The Worst Is Yet to Come.”)
==> Ben Powell (full disclosure: he’s head of the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech–where I now work–so you will see me treating him very gingerly no doubt) on Trump and immigration.
==> I translate Scott Sumner’s EconLog statement into a Sumnerian framework. Profundity declines.
More On Ahmed’s Clock
From a guy who actually knows about electronics (as opposed to 90% of the people commenting on this story–including me).
I don’t know what happened here. It’s entirely possible that he made the thing innocently enough, and then was coy about it once he realized the situation. I really doubt that he apologized profusely for scaring everybody and yet the cops still grilled him for hours. My guess is that by that point, he was being defiant, then the cops perceived a challenge to their authoritah and so became Tough Guys.
I don’t endorse the North or the South in the War Between the States (aka the Civil War). Likewise, I am allowed to say that both sides in this case were at fault.
But since you asked, here is why I was suspicious of this from the get-go:
==> The kid’s photo when he got arrested. When I was 14, if I were being walked out of school in handcuffs, I would be absolutely terrified. This not at all what my expression would have been:
==> Look at this thing. Of COURSE it looks like a bomb, and yes if you want to be more specific, it looks like a TV/movie bomb. That’s the point. If you wanted to alarm a bunch of people, you would bring in something that looked like what THEY would think a bomb looked like.
Last month, if you had asked 1000 Americans to draw a sketch of a clock, precisely 0 would look like the above. If instead you asked 1000 to draw a sketch of a homemade bomb, at least 100 would look something like that above.
Let me put it this way: If I owned a private airline in a Rothbardian world, and one of my passengers tried to take the above onto a plane, I would insist that it be checked, and I would tell the passenger that if he took it out in the airport so other people could see it, he could never fly my airline again (and I would share his identity with other owners so they could blackball him too). That would freak my customers out and ruin their experience.
OF COURSE you don’t take something like that into school. And after your engineering teacher tells you not to show it to anybody else, you unplug the thing so it doesn’t start beeping in English class.
==> I dunno, something just didn’t seem right to me when he was in front of a bunch of news cameras and said, “I wanted to show the teachers my talent.” Who talks like that besides Donald Trump? Is that how you would have talked in front of TV cameras at age 14? (This is where it’s relevant who his dad is. I’m not saying it was all a plan, and I didn’t know about his dad originally. I’m saying though that his demeanor seemed odd to me, for a nerdy kid who just wanted to be left alone and build his electronics.)
==> Last thing: In his press conference later, Ahmed said something like (not exact quote), “I wanted to impress my teacher, but she was afraid.” In that line, he’s referring to his English teacher. If I understand the chronology, that’s not really what happened. The thing started beeping in class, and the teacher told him to open it up so she could see what it was. If you just heard that part of his story, you would think the first teacher he showed was the one who ratted him out, and that’s not what happened. If he had unplugged the thing after his engineering teacher told him not to show anybody else, he would have been fine.
==> No I am NOT saying he should have been arrested. I don’t know what his intentions were. Kids do dumb things when they’re young. What I AM saying is that it was way too early for people to be accusing others of stupidity, racism, etc. in this situation when they didn’t know either.
Free Will vs. Determinism
A lot of people really don’t like the idea (which is certainly in Calvinism but is present in varying degrees in all forms of Christianity) that you have free will and yet God is in control (or “sovereign”). Another way of seeing the tension is that God knew whether you were going to be saved before you were born, right? (If He didn’t, He wouldn’t know everything.)
One way I’ve tried to handle that in the past is to liken God to a human author. For example, is Darth Vader evil? Yes. He killed innocent people, and he did it on purpose, knowing it was wrong. However, didn’t George Lucas really design the whole Star Wars universe, characters, and plot line? So there’s a sense in which Lucas “made” Vader turn evil. And yet, nobody thinks George Lucas is a murderer. In fact, a lot of people love him precisely because of the beautiful story of the fall and redemption of Anakin.
I hope you can see how the above is analogous to Christianity.
But now I’m saying something different. Back in the 1800s, the educated people believed that the physical universe was deterministic. So there was a sense in which your every bodily movement was already “set in stone” from before you were born (in their worldview). Yet they still had to live their lives, and act as if they had free will. They still held each other morally culpable for their actions. (Furthermore, it gets you nowhere to say, “It’s not his fault for robbing that bank! Look at the state of the protons in the universe at time T-2,” because we can say, “It’s not our fault for giving him the electric chair. We can’t help it.”)
So I think a Christian is in a similar situation. He knows that ultimately, even his bodily movements are carried along in an unstoppable current of God’s will, but yet he can’t help proceed as if he is making genuine moral choices.
Murphy’s New Book Choice
I’m doing an interview for Free Talk Live and realize that it’s not obvious how to find my new book. In the meantime while I set up a better landing page, here is the link to the synopsis at the Independent Institute.
And here’s the link to Amazon.
Scott Sumner, the Dr. Who of Economics Blogging
On EconLog he recently had a post entitled, “Recessions often begin before the thing that caused them occurs.”
Now that is a deliberately provocative title, but I understand what he means and in principle I could agree with him (though not in the particulars of his post).
However, today at his blog Scott writes: “I thought yesterday’s policy announcement would offer a nice natural experiment, but instead it served up perhaps the most muddled stock market response I’ve ever seen.”
Sounds fine at first, but think about what he’s saying. Do you see the problem with it? If not, try this.
Economists Are So Clever, They Can Make Good Climate News Bad
My latest at IER. My conclusion:
To repeat, these researchers at Harvard and other elite institutions are very smart, and they haven’t made a mathematical mistake in their models. But the public should pause and ask if these sophisticated maneuvers match the more populist rhetoric they’ve heard on the issue. When even good news—in the form of a lowered estimate on the likely range of human influence on the climate—is construed as cause for worry, don’t people start to get suspicious that this isn’t really a neutral scientific debate?
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