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More on Nancy MacLeans Egregious Scholarship

Posted: 28 Jun 2022 08:00 AM PDT
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(Don Boudreaux)




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My latest AIER column is the second of a two-part series looking back five
years to the publication of historian Nancy MacLeans scandalously
reality-challenged book purporting to show that the late Nobel-laureate
economist James Buchanan was a oligarch-loving racist. (As Ive often said
since June 2017, one of the few relevant facts that MacLean gets right
about Buchanan is the spelling of his name. She does seem to be a good
speller. Not much in her book beyond that is correct.)

Heres a slice from my latest column:

Finally, I share here my letter, of August 1, 2017, to MacLean – a letter
to which I received no reply:
Prof. Nancy MacLean

Department of History

Duke University

Durham, NC
Prof. MacLean:
On page 151 of your book Democracy in Chains you write that my late Nobel
laureate colleague James Buchanan (in his 1975 book, The Limits of Liberty)
“was outlining a world in which the chronic domination of the wealthiest
and most powerful over all others appeared the ultimate desideratum, a
state of affairs to be enabled by his understanding of the ideal
constitution.” Yet you supply no quotation from Buchanan’s book to support
this harsh accusation.
So I challenge you to find in any of Buchanan’s writings a single passage
that you are willing to offer to the public as evidence that Buchanan had
as an ultimate desideratum a political system in which “the wealthiest and
most powerful” exercise “chronic domination … over all others.” If you find
such a passage I will post it on my blog and offer to you a public apology
for having accused you, on my blog, of falsely portraying Buchanan on this
score.
Note that I am not asking for evidence that Buchanan proposed policies that
you believe will lead to the domination of the many by the wealthy few.
Buchanan certainly did endorse much greater freedom than you would accord
to individuals to interact as they choose in markets. But being a scholar,
you surely understand that even if you are correct that Buchanan was wrong
not to predict that the free markets and limits on government that he
endorsed would lead to the domination of the many by the wealthy few, his
different assessment of the likely consequences of free markets and limited
government does not establish the accuracy of what you accuse him of –
namely, desiring the domination of the many by the wealthy few.
If you fail to offer to me (or to post in some other public venue) – by,
say, the end of September 2017 – evidence from Buchanan’s own writings that
his goal was the domination of the many by the wealthy few, I will
interpret this failure as proof that you in fact have no such evidence. And
the conclusion that I, and others, will reasonably draw is that you simply
fabricated this offensive charge.
Sincerely,

Donald J. Boudreaux

A full list of the many posts that I’ve written at Café Hayek in response
to MacLean’s shoddy ‘scholarship’ is available here. ‘Scholarship’ is here
in scare-quotes because, as I note in this post from November 4, 2017,
“Nancy MacLean is to scholarship what Cap’n Crunch is to nutrition” –
children swallow it eagerly, while sensible adults never touch the stuff.

..

I fear that I am, with the above comparison, unfair to Capn Crunch.




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Some Links

Posted: 28 Jun 2022 03:48 AM PDT
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(Don Boudreaux)




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Art Carden and Phil Magness summarize their new paper that eviscerates the
attempt by Sandy Darity, Mbalou Camara, and Nancy MacLean to portray the
late W.H. Hutt as a white supremacist. Heres their conclusion:

Elsewhere, we show that their charges of “white supremacy” against Hutt
arise from plain misconstructions and misrepresentations of Hutt’s own
words. In one telling passage, they write that Hutt blamed Africa’s
“natural handicaps” on alleged “genetic” characteristics of black Africans.
He did nothing of the kind. The “handicaps” in the passage they misquote
refer to geography, the tropical disease environment of the continent
before the advent of modern medicine, and political institutions – not
genes. Elsewhere in documents MacLean and her co-authors cite (but
evidently did not read with any care), Hutt explicitly states that he does
not believe in race-based hereditary theories.

In our paper, we go on. And on. And on, for about four dozen pages with a
long bibliography. With William Darity and M’Balou Camara, Nancy MacLean
claims to have “set the record straight” with “irrefutable” evidence that
Hutt was a white supremacist. They have in fact set nothing straight, and
their argument, far from being “irrefutable,” wrecks itself upon the rocks
of at least one major citation error, selective use of documents, and
willful misreadings of Hutt’s words devoid of their original context.

Michael Strain again exposes as fallacious the incessantly asserted claim
that middle- and working-class Americans have stagnated economically since
the 1970s.

My GMU Econ colleague Bryan Caplan traces out the connection between
residential-land-use regulation and fertility.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Corey DeAngelis applauds Arizona for
significantly expanding school choice. A slice:

The state’s efforts come after what many have called the year of school
choice. After months of power-hungry teachers’ unions fighting for school
closings and political indoctrination in the classroom in 2021, 18 states
chose to enact or expand programs to fund students instead of systems.
Arizona just one-upped all of them.

Most of the nation’s existing school-choice initiatives are limited to
certain students based on eligibility categories such as income or special
needs. Arizona’s expanded program eliminates such distinctions by allowing
all families to take most of the state portion of their children’s
taxpayer-funded education dollars to the providers of their choosing. The
funding—about $7,000 a student—will follow the child to an “education
savings account” directed by his parents or guardians. The funds may be
spent on any approved education expenditures, such as private-school
tuition and fees, tutoring, instructional materials and curriculum.

Jacob Sullum reports on a newly issued, unanimous, and welcome U.S. Supreme
Court ruling: SCOTUS Rules That Doctors Who Write Prescriptions in Good
Faith Cant Be Convicted of Drug Trafficking.

Prompted by what he believes is Noah Smiths mistaken evaluation of Milton
Friedman, Arnold Kling offers his own understanding of Friedmans
macroeconomic legacy. A slice:

Milton Friedman’s project was to undermine the theories that supported
policy discretion. He had several objections.

First, regarding the idea of using temporary tax cuts to spur the economy,
he proposed the Permanent Income Hypothesis. He never said that all
consumers optimize their spending patterns using stochastic calculus—the
Euler Equation was an element of the technically elegant but utterly stupid
consensus that emerged in the decades after Friedman roiled the profession.
It was part of Olivier Blanchard’s survey that infamously concluded that
“the state of macroeconomics is good” .

Friedman merely claimed that the propensity to consume out of a temporary
tax cut would be lower than the propensity to consume out of a permanent
tax cut. If so, then temporary tax cuts might not be very stimulative when
enacted. Instead, much of the tax cut would be saved, and it might be spent
in later years, even after the economy had recovered. If you want evidence
that Friedman was roughly correct, all you have to do is notice that
economists believe that consumers have savings left over from the COVID
relief checks, and that this is now fueling inflation. I cannot think of
any economist who disagrees with the view that spending out of temporary
tax cuts is likely to be less than spending out of permanent tax cuts.

Writing in Spiked, Matt Ridley makes the case that covid leaked from a lab.

Jay Bhattacharya tweets:

Governments around the world should be issuing universal amnesty for covid
era violations of nonsensical, tyrannical public health orders. Instead,
govts are prosecuting people in 2022 for the crime of sitting on an outdoor
bench in April 2020.




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Quotation of the Day

Posted: 28 Jun 2022 01:30 AM PDT
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(Don Boudreaux)




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is from page 82 of Matthew Hennessey’s excellent 2022 book, Visible Hand:

Everybody dreams of a free lunch. Everybody wants something for nothing.
Economists remind us that we’ll have to pay eventually because resources
are scarce and life is about trade-offs.




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More on the Standard of Living of Pets Under Capitalism

Posted: 27 Jun 2022 10:04 AM PDT
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(Don Boudreaux)




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Prompted by this post on how well household pets fare under capitalism and
how poorly theyd far under socialism Tim B. sent to me the following
e-mail, shared here with his kind permission:

I lived in Italy in the late 1980s and had an expatriate American friend
who was married to a German who worked for the WHO nutrition programs. The
first time they visited the U.S. together (his first time ever), she lost
him in a supermarket. When she finally found him he was in the pet food
section reading the labels on the pet food. He apparently commented that
pets in the U.S. eat more nutritious food than was natively available to
most of the populations he worked with.




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Some Links

Posted: 27 Jun 2022 06:12 AM PDT
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(Don Boudreaux)




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Wall Street Journal columnist Allysia Finley correctly notes that these
days its news when the CDC does something right. A slice:

Consider the CDC studies on school mask mandates, which have uniformly
claimed benefits. Two researchers at the University of Toronto and
University of California, Davis recently sought to replicate a CDC study
that found that pediatric Covid cases increased faster in U.S. counties
that didn’t have school mask mandates compared with those that did.

News media cited the CDC’s work as evidence that mask mandates in schools
could help reduce community spread of Covid. Journalists ridiculed
Republican governors who opposed mask mandates for ignoring this “science.”
But the CDC studies were deeply biased.

While the two academic researchers trying to duplicate the study employed
the same analytical methods as the CDC, they examined a larger sample of
districts over a longer period. They found no difference in Covid cases
between counties with and without mask mandates.

Michael Senger writes about the mainstream media slowly, and obviously
reluctantly, coming around to admit that much unnecessary net harm was
inflicted by governments on humanity as a result of lockdowns.

Noah Carl interviewed Matt Ridley.

Thorsteinn Siglaugsson busts one of the latest in a long line of
Twitter-spread covid myths.

Writing in todays Wall Street Journal, John Lott reports that more legal
guns reduced crime in Brazil. A slice:

Before Mr. [Jair] Bolsonaro, Brazilians had to pay $260 for a new gun
license and $25 every three years to renew it. This put legal gun ownership
out of reach of the poor. The initial license fee has fallen to around
$18.50, and licenses are good for 10 years.

Instead of surging, crime declined sharply in Brazil. In three years under
Mr. Bolsonaro, the homicide rate has fallen 34%, to 18.5 per 100,000.

(DBx: Note that my posting this favorable remark about Bolsonaro does not
imply that I generally support his policies. I do not. But this particular
policy of increasing poor Brazilians access to guns does seem to have
reduced Brazils murder rate for a perfectly understandable reason.)

J.D. Tuccille warns about an inescapable reality of efforts to prevent
abortions.

Barry Brownstein describes tribalisms big lie.

Rich Vedder decries instances of dystopian irrationality at Duke and
Princeton. (HT George Leef)




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Quotation of the Day

Posted: 27 Jun 2022 01:00 AM PDT
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(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
is from GMU Econ alum Steven Horwitz’s March 31st, 2011, Freeman essay,
Getting it Right or Knowing You Got it Wrong? The Austrian Edge (original
emphasis):

For Austrians, the fundamental issue is not whether markets get it right.
True, Austrians think markets are pretty good and governments quite bad in
that respect. And even though Austrians might explain things differently
from the mainstream, there are plenty of mainstream economists who would
agree with those general conclusions. Note, though, that the question here
is still about getting it right.

Where the Austrian view differs, I would argue, is in understanding that
markets are also really good at helping people to know when resources are
not optimally allocated and providing the signals and incentives needed to
correct the mistakes. Being adept at getting things right at a given point
is of course a good thing. But it is probably more valuable given that we
aren’t likely to get things perfectly right on a regular basis to be able
both to know when we are wrong and to have an incentive to do better.

DBx: Steve died, at far too young an age, one year ago today.




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