Joshua Macy's Library tagged economics →  View Popular

Getting people to highlight wild risks comes easy, which I think is part of his book’s appeal.  Legislators and personal-injury lawyers eagerly hype risks with negligible real impact, like secondhand smoke, or getting cancer from trace amounts of chemicals. Sometimes they create considerable public concern about risks that don't exist, like that of contracting anti-immune disease from breast implants, or cell phones causing cancer.  Newsrooms are full of English majors who acknowledge that they are not good at Math, but still rush to make confident pronouncements about global-warming or some other complicated process, all in hopes of getting viewers or readers activated. 

America says to foreign producers: We prefer not to pump our oil, so please pump more of yours, thereby lowering its value, for our benefit. Let it not be said that America has no energy policy.

Longer than it took a culture to unravel, I suspected. I tried to imagine the Indonesian workers who were now making their way to the sorts of factories that had once sat along the banks of the Calumet River, joining the ranks of wage labor to assemble the radios and sneakers that sold on Michigan Avenue. I imagined those same Indonesian workers ten, twenty years from now, when their factories would have closed down, a consequence of new technology or lower wages in some other part of the globe And then the bitter discovery that their markets have vanished; that they no longer remember how to weave their own baskets or carve their own furniture or grow their own food; that even if they remember such craft, the forests that gave them wood are now owned by timber interests, the baskets they once wove have been replaced by more durable plastics. The very existence of the factories, the timber interests, the plastic manufacturer, will have rendered their culture obsolete; the values of hard work and individual initiative turn out to have depended on a system of belief that's been scrambled by migration and urbanization and imported TV reruns. Some of them would prosper in this new order. Some would move to America. And others, the millions left behind in Djakarta, or Lagos, or the West Bank, they would settle into their own Altgeld Gardens, into deeper despair.

The alternative is to tax consumption. Mr. Wilcox thus believes (as do I and probably most economists) that a consumption tax is better than an income tax, at least in principle. But he withholds his full endorsement for a variety of spurious reasons, mostly born of his false assumption that any consumption tax must be levied at the point of sale. He worries, for example, that a consumption tax is necessarily nonprogressive. But you can easily implement a consumption tax with a Form 1040 that says: "How much did you earn this year? How much did you save? Now pay tax on the difference." And you can make that tax as progressive as you like.

People like me with graduate degrees have done great.  But the median compensation (that includes fringe benefits, by the way) of high school graduate men has declined by about 10 percent since 1980!  Mr. Kristol: that means that for a high-school graduate, the odds that his compensation would have fallen by more than 10% is 50-50.  Note that even college graduates have not seen any income gains since around 2000.