AIER

If the “government” becomes the only source of truth, that source of truth is necessarily political. The oft-mentioned NHS — do they not have an incentive to lower health care expenditures? Would providing medical information to the public that prescribes a suggested course of action incentivize the course of action that is least expensive to the government but not necessarily the best treatment? Is there any potential for a conflict of interest there? Of course there is. If some condition is best treated with an expensive procedure, would the NHS be incentivized to recommend a cheaper, but less effective approach? Of course they would. The NHS routinely denies or delays life-changing surgeries over cost despite such denials not being in the best interests of the patient. (Try getting an NHS knee replacement.) There are treatments NHS won’t recommend because a person is too old. Not because they can’t handle the procedure but because the expense isn’t worth the amount of lifespan remaining in the patient.

Medical information provided by governments is often centered around what’s best for “populations” and not necessarily the individual. Covid is a prime example: masking kids was bad for the kids but allegedly “good” for the population. Damaging to the individual for the alleged benefit of the so-called greater good. Despite all the kid masking “science” turning out to be garbage. Covid vax for kids is another example: the government right now in the US promotes vaccinating…

> It makes zero sense to say that some set amount of money is worth objectively more or less ...

I think this is nonsense. We can't put a precise worth on it for different people, sure. But I think it's indisputable that there's a curve, we know it's rough shape, and that it's a reflection of marginal utility. The lack of labels or positions on the axes doesn't make that graph useless.

> The concept of marginal utility says nothing about the relative utility of the same amount of money to different people.

Sorry, but this is just completely wrong. Here's the most relevant paragraph from: https://commons.lib.niu.edu/bitstream/handle/10843/22650/12-2-373-Stein-pdfA.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

>The linchpin of The Uneasy Case is its rejection of the principle that income has diminishing marginal utility.' Diminishing marginal utility of income (DMUI) means that the greater a taxpayer's income, the less an additional dollar of income is worth to him. If DMUI holds, the government exacts a lesser sacrifice from a higher-income taxpayer, with each dollar taxed, than from a lower-income taxpayer. Moreover, any redistribution of income from a higher-income tax- payer to a lower-income taxpayer tends to increase aggregate welfare: The lower-income taxpayer derives greater utility from each dollar gained than 4 the higher-income taxpayer derives from each dollar surrendered.

Now, to be fair, there are arguments against the DMUI case for progressive taxation. For example, here's…

Thanks for the reply. You make an excellent point on the systems aspect of all this. And I personally agree things like poverty, fishery depletion, and so on are important issues to address. But, I am not sure Freeman Dyson intended to imply these are disconnected problems. With his broad-ranging mind, Freeman Dyson was definitely a systems thinker -- though with a bias to quantification. Assuming what you say is true, he might ask, to what degree are those problems made worse by CO2-driven climate change? 1%? 10%? 100%? 1000%?

Assuming that is a significant amount, we can choose to invest some resources to reduce emissions and/or we can choose to invest some resource to mitigate the consequences and/or we can choose to invest resources in some other way like space program, UBI, the arts, creating 1000s of free water-only-fasting and nutritional-reeducation health clinics like True North Healthcare to deal with the "diabesity" crisis overwhelming the USA and making things like respiratory viruses more deadly given comorbidities, to come up with safer plastics and safe ways to detox people of their current microplastics, and so on.

"Water-only Fasting" https://www.healthpromoting.com/water-only-fasting

"Woodstock Occurred in the Middle of a Pandemic" https://www.aier.org/article/woodstock-occurred-in-the-middle-of-a-pandemic/ "Lifespan in the US in those days was 70 whereas it is 78 today. Population was 200 million as compared with 328 million today. It was also a…

Regarding Truman:

In September 23, 1946, Robeson and a delegation representing the ACAL met with President Harry Truman to push for an anti-lynching agenda. Robeson demanded that Truman issue a public statement expressing his views on lynching and recommending a set of legislative and educational measures aimed at eradicating mob violence. Truman turned down these requests, claiming that timing and political circumstances made these measures difficult to implement at the moment. Robeson was disappointed by this and found it troubling that the US government was at the time willing to actively engage in the Nuremberg Trials while it turned its head from racial injustices at home.[5] Delegations also met with US Attorney General Tom Clark as well as the Democratic and Republican national committees. The delegation's program included the creation of a federal anti-lynching bill, arrest and punishment for all lynchers, and preventing Ku Klux Klan members from joining Congress.[6]

Many prominent intellectuals were members, including Albert Einstein.[7] Other notable supporters of the organization were Max Yergan, Joseph Curran, Canada Lee, Jack Kroll, Lena Horne, and Oscar Hammerstein II.[8] The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had been long concerned about socialist and communist movements for their instigation of social and labor unrest. Having noted communist support for African-American civil rights before World War II, the FBI characterized the "Crusade" as a…

Several co-related factors affecting this:

Worker productivity increases cannot be legislated. Such productivity increases can only come from workers improving their skills or technology that increases their productive output (as simple as an electric drill to as advanced as an exoskelleton with a HUD).
Minimum wage laws are effectively bans on low-productivity workers. By making labor artificially expensive through legislation, demand for it drops, total economic output decreases, production costs increase. There's no reason to believe that the home-production industry would be able to reduce costs / increase output with minimum wage increases; in fact that opposite is the case.

Legislation can only reduce the permitting costs of housing production IFF it becomes more permissive. In the regions of the US that I'm familiar with, all the areas that have high housing costs pass legislation that increases permitting costs or transactional costs to bring housing to market. This can only result in a price increase globally with some politically-connected group receiving a benefit.

Legislation and corporate-bank policies artificially increase the money supply to the greatest degree with housing loans. Typically these workers are not minimum wage and in addition to the above effects, the Cantillon effect gives an undue subsidy to these higher wage workers https://www.aier.org/article/sound-money-project/cantillon-effects-and-money-neutrality

Peter Boettke responds[0] by quoting Hayek’s Nobel banquet speech in which he warned about economists making pronouncements outside their respective areas of expertise

[Hayek’s worry about establishing the Prize in economics] is that the Nobel Prize confers on an individual an authority which in economics no man ought to possess.

This does not matter in the natural sciences. Here the influence exercised by an individual is chiefly an influence on his fellow experts; and they will soon cut him down to size if he exceeds his competence.

But the influence of the economist that mainly matters is an influence over laymen: politicians, journalists, civil servants and the public generally.

and pointing out the op-ed piece’s mistaken diagnosis.

The problem with narratives like Appelbaum’s isn’t that he is suspicious of the pretensions of economists, it is that he is blaming the wrong culprit for the mess we’re in. Here it is important that every one of these critics read Gregory Mankiw’s very important piece[1], published before the financial crisis, on the macroeconomist as scientists (read Chicago New Classical and Monetarists) and the macroeconomists as engineers (read MIT/Harvard Keynesian and New Keynesians).

[0]: https://www.aier.org/article/blame-economists

[1]: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.20.4.29