… is from page 175 of William Easterly’s brilliant 2001 book, The Elusive Quest for Growth:

Technology is a wonderful thing, but let’s not anoint it as yet another elixir for growth.  Technology responds to incentives, just like everything else.  When technology exists but the incentives for using it are missing, not much will happen.  The Romans had the steam engine, but used it only for opening and closing the doors of a temple.

Here’s a letter to one of my very best recent GMU undergrad students:

Mr. Ben H______:

Dear Ben:

I’m glad that you’d support open immigration in the absence of a welfare state.  I challenge, though, your reason for rejecting my second-best proposal to open up immigration to foreigners who would agree, as a condition of immigrating to America, to take no cash handouts from federal, state, and local governments and to bind their children to the same restrictions.

You allege that it would be “immoral” to have policies that treat some people (native-born Americans eligible for government handouts) differently than other people (immigrants who are ineligible for such handouts), and you worry that such immigrants would be regarded to their detriment as “inferior second caste citizens.”

First, it’s not clear that, in this still-bourgeois society of ours, people who pull their own weight and never get government welfare will be regarded as “inferior” to welfare recipients.  I can imagine the opposite impression taking hold.

Second, I put to you the question that the economist Lant Pritchett puts to those who share your concern about government-welfare restrictions for immigrants.  Here’s Pritchett writing in 2006:

“A common response to the idea that not all people allowed to enter a country to work would necessarily be entitled to all privileges of citizens is: ‘Who wants to live in the kind of country where people are not treated equally?’…  The rejoinder to the ‘kind of country’ objection is: ‘Who wants to live in the kind of country that uses coercion to perpetuate global inequality?’”*

Moral considerations, by their nature, do not stop at political borders.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA  22030

* Lant Pritchett, Let Their People Come (Washington, DC: Center for Global Development, 2006), pp. 84-85.

… is from page 17 of the manuscript of Deirdre McCloskey‘s forthcoming volume, The Treasured Bourgeoisie; quoted with Deirdre’s kind permission:

The [political] right and left unhappiness [with the modern bourgeois economy] can be understood sympathetically as a present-mindedness.  It is like standing too close to a pointillist painting, such as Georges Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” in its room in the Art Institute of Chicago.  At close range one sees the dots as dots only, and laments the disorder.  If one stands back, however, the disorder resolves into a satisfying scene.  Likewise, the history seen in longer perspective shows how very much better off people are now than two centuries ago.

Perspective.  It’s among the treasures of insights that wise people bring to their analyses and to our discussions.  McCloskey brings it here, in the manuscript from which this quotation is drawn.  Tyler Cowen brings it here.  Johan Norberg brings it here.  Matt Ridley brings it here.  Adam Smith brought it here (in particular, at the end of paragraph 32).  Julian Simon brought it here.  Perspective is evidence of maturity, of sound and sober judgment, and of a disposition to avoid indulging in the often emotionally satisfying weakness of hysteria.

…

Deirdre will discuss her forthcoming book at this Cato Institute event on June 20th.

Oh, and here’s a recent interview of Deirdre.

… is from page 116 of Thomas Cahill’s splendid 1998 volume, The Gifts of the Jews; Cahill here is discussing the lessons of the Egyptian Pharaoh’s hubris as portrayed in the book of Exodus:

The comedy of the narrative lies in ironic juxtaposition: Pharaoh, supposedly all-powerful, understands nothing.  It would not be too much to say that this narrative asserts that power (because it is a feckless attempt to usurp God’s dominion) makes you stupid, blinding you to your true situation – and absolute power makes you absolutely stupid.

Cahill’s (or Exodus’s author’s) point is quite Hayekian: centralization of power and decision-making authority causes the countless bits of local knowledge and information about important details – details necessary for peaceful, successful, and productive social arrangements and interactions – to be overlooked; ignored.  It cause knowledge and information about those details to be wasted or, worse, often never discovered by anyone in the first place.  The consequence of this reliance (whether this reliance be forced on, or is demanded by, the general population) is stupid public policies.  And this stupidity is utterly unavoidable as long as the centralization of decision-making authority continues.  This stupidity can be avoided neither by the good intentions of the power-holders nor by changing the process by which those holders of centralized power are chosen.

The spark for the idea of the new series here at the Cafe – “Mid-Twentieth-Century America” – was a recent conversation over coffee with my former student Laura Sacher, a mother of four young children.  We were discussing dental care for kids, and I mentioned my recollections from 1960s-era t.v. commercials of child actors shown bragging, after visits to the dentist, of having only one or no cavities.  It was normal, apparently back then, to have the dentist discover several cavities in each patient on each visit.

Here’s a commercial, for Crest toothpaste, from the 1950s.  Note the assumption that tooth decay is a rather typical scourge.