Tag: Tyler Cowen

Contra Caplan on COVID Consequentialist Calculations

Bryan Caplan writes this week about life years lost due to COVID and in particular what he sees as an overreaction to the pandemic:

Well, we’ve now endured 8 months of COVID life.  If that’s worth only 5/6ths as much as normal time, the average American has now lost 4/3rds of a month.  Multiplying that by the total American population of 330M, the total loss comes to about 37 million years of life.  That’s about 15 times the reported estimate of the direct cost of COVID.

Tyler Cowen has an important critique. Given very low government restrictions in the U.S. South, Sweden, and Brazil, we can see that even as a baseline, lots of anti-pandemic actions are actually taken by citizens voluntarily rather than by force of the state. If true, then there is little we can do to mitigate these costs even if Caplan is correct. And moreover, if we could change people’s behavior to pretend that everything was normal, then why wouldn’t we also change people’s behavior to perfectly isolate when necessary and wipe out the pandemic within a couple weeks?

Cowen argues that the best way to improve the situation if private citizens’ actions are in fact greatly damaging is to push for a vaccine as fast as possible. Robin Hanson has objections here, but putting all that aside, I wanted to look at Bryan Caplan’s numbers.

If Caplan is correct, I should change my behavior; I’ve been avoiding movie theaters and indoor restaurants and perhaps I shouldn’t. Caplan suggests 37 million QALYs lost due to “COVID” time being worse than normal time. However, this is based on a Twitter poll and Caplan points out that when asked personally about how to compared “COVID” time to normal time, his median follower says it’s almost even. But let’s take the 37 million figure at face value because it’s really the best we’ve got.

Caplan points out that what we are not comparing the 37 million QALYs to the total loss in QALYs we’ve had with COVID in this timeline, but rather a counterfactual one where we didn’t overreact.

You have to ask yourself: If normal life had continued unabated since March, how many additional life-years would have been lost?  I can believe that the number would have been double what we observed, even though no country on Earth has done so poorly.  With effort, I can imagine that the number would have been triple what we observed.  There’s a tiny chance it could have been five times worse.  But fifteen times?  No way.

Actually, it’s pretty easy to imagine! Every country on Earth has had a strong reaction to COVID and that’s why it’s hard to imagine a doubling or tripling of QALYs. If people simply went about their business, or very nearly so, then there really is little to stop COVID from spreading exponentially. In all likelihood, we would have seen overwhelmed hospitals. Instead of the per infection death rate being 0.55%, it seems quite plausible to me it could be up around 1%, especially given we were worse at treating the disease towards the beginning of the pandemic.

Moreover, if lots of people got this disease, they’d have to deal with the aftereffects which can be remarkably unpleasant. Certainly there’s a guaranteed loss of quality of life for half a month to a month as you battle the virus. Many people then have extended loss of taste and smell, extended fatigue, difficulty breathing, and perhaps even cognitive effects.

If we taken Caplan’s citation that people who die from COVID on average lose 10 QALYs (I would guess higher if more people got it, but we’ll go with this number) and say people who survive COVID on average lose half a QALY from lingering issues, the formula for this calculation of QALY loss is:

[Total QALYs lost] = [US population] * [% who get COVID] * ([% who die] * [10 QALYs] + [% who don't die] * [.5 QALYs])

If we say two thirds of the country gets COVID under a “no change in behavior” scenario (again, this seems very conservative, I would think it’d be higher) and 1% of infected die, we get:

[Total QALYs lost] = 330,000,000 * .67 * (.01 * [10 QALYs] + .99 * [.5 QALYs])
[Total QALYs lost] = 2,211,000 * [10 QALYs] + 218,889,000 * [.5 QALYs]
[Total QALYs lost] = 147,262,500

Notably, this is much higher than 37 million. Interestingly, the vast majority of the cost actually comes from the people who get the disease and survive. Perhaps I was too pessimistic on how difficult their lives are, after all, we are still uncertain. Let’s change it to a quarter of a QALY lost. Some people might have trouble breathing for years, but most people won’t, so perhaps this is a better estimate. 

[Total QALYs lost] = 330,000,000 * .67 * (.01 * [10 QALYs] + .99 * [.25 QALYs])
[Total QALYs lost] = 2,211,000 * [10 QALYs] + 218,889,000 * [.25 QALYs]
[Total QALYs lost] = 76,832,250

Again, bigger than 37 million. And it’s not close. In fact, even if you say it’s only one month QALY lost when contracting COVID (which seems way too low to me considering that’s pretty much the baseline of getting and recovering from the disease) that still gets you over 40 million QALYs in our model. Add back in that the two thirds assumption is definitely an underestimate, that 10 years of QALY loss per death might also be an underestimate, and 37 million is again completely unattainable.

In other words, I don’t think the consequentialist calculation recommends going to movie theaters or indoor dining.

We’re All State Capacity Libertarians Now

Tyler Cowen kicked off this year with a heavily discussed blog post defining what he calls “State Capacity Libertarianism“.

I didn’t get it.

Cowen described a moderate libertarianism while adding the nebulous concept of “state capacity”, in particular noting that a capable or powerful state was different from a tyrannical state. I read the words, but I assumed he was describing a “left libertarianism“, where a typical position might be to push for the government to collect efficient taxes, and then distribute those to everyone via a basic income, and avoid otherwise messing in the economy. I’m open to engaging with something like that, but I didn’t grok how Cowen’s take was different or what this view offered.

And then there was the worst pandemic we’ve seen in the 21st century. Huge swaths of the American economy have been shut down, and this disease is still likely to kill the equivalent of an entire year’s worth of influenza fatalities in a single month. Pandemics are an obvious market failure scenario, with difficult to control externalities, and thus we have state institutions to deal with this and pick up the slack. They failed.

Policy Failures

I looked up my first tweet about COVID-19 (back then it was just novel coronavirus or nCoV). It was on January 30 in a reply to Robert Wiblin. My first standalone tweet was a few days later:

Now, I wasn’t warning people that this would be bad or telling people to start prepping. But it was certainly something occupying my mind, as I tweeted about it a dozen times in February. I did start mildly stockpiling food and household items starting in mid-February. Ultimately, I consider my actions to be a failure. I didn’t short the market (although I didn’t buy any index funds either), I didn’t warn enough of my close friends and family to start gathering supplies, and I didn’t advocate loudly for changes in government policy. I was partially concerned about looking alarmist, which in retrospect was a really silly thing to be concerned about.

Nonetheless, this blog is a hobby. I have a day job which isn’t concerned about government policy. My question is about the people whose day job is pandemic preparedness. If an anonymous blogger with a few hundred twitter followers can be concerned about a possible pandemic, then where were the people who are paid specifically to deal with this eventuality?

Why didn’t the CDC and FDA start a program to quickly approve new COVID testing in mid-February instead of mid-March? In an exponential growth situation, that is a long time. Why didn’t they start pushing hospitals to create new isolation wards in February? Why didn’t the CDC start putting together lists of events it strongly urged local governments to cancel when the first case appeared at local hospitals? Why did the NBA have to unilaterally suspend its season only after a player was diagnosed in March? Why was there confusion between who was in charge and what steps should be taken?

Beyond lack of distancing and lockdowns, there were several other failures. Firstly, the CDC created their own test which differed from previously used ones in the world. It was shipped to public labs around the country and…didn’t work. The FDA compounded the problem, disallowing any tests except the one the CDC had created. The University of Washington virology lab was able to create their own test and applied to the FDA for approval. The FDA said it couldn’t approve the test until the lab had demonstrated it wouldn’t return false positives for other dangerous coronaviruses. Perhaps this would be a good idea in more normal circumstances, but it was an asinine requirement if you were trying to head off a pandemic where every day saw exponential growth in a virus spreading across the country. The lab started using the test through a research loophole, but the story gets crazier:

Still, Greninger complied. He called the CDC to inquire about getting some genetic material from a sample of SARS. The CDC, Greninger says, politely turned him down: the genetic material of the extremely contagious and deadly SARS virus was highly restricted.

“That’s when I thought, ‘Huh, maybe the FDA and the CDC haven’t talked about this at all,’” […] “I realized, Oh, wow, this is going to take a while, it’s going to take several weeks.”

By this point, there were already over 50 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the United States and still, nobody but the CDC was permitted to conduct testing.

It was on February 28th, a full 8 days after the UW virology lab had applied for their test to the FDA, that the agency finally allowed other tests besides the CDC’s. Of course, most other labs hadn’t started making a test yet. What a disaster.

What’s interesting to me about the testing fiasco was its independence from President Trump. I think Trump is a bad leader, incompetent, unintelligent, a bad judge of character, and has terrible policies, but ultimately the point of a capable bureaucracy would be to have experts on hand with the proper plans in place to implement them regardless of political leaders. We shouldn’t have to recreate all the accumulated knowledge of the government every time there is a new president. Here, Congress had created agencies to oversee health and pandemic responses, the scenario arose…and then those agencies actively made things worse.

Of course, we can’t allow President Trump off the hook. He decided to dismantle the NSC pandemic response team which Susan Rice had set up, combining it into a single directorate with arms control, weapons of mass destruction terrorism, and global health. The president is entitled to manage the National Security Council bureaucracy as he wants, as it’s part of the EOP. It was claimed that there was too much bloat leftover from Obama’s NSC, and so this should have streamlined communication, which may have sounded reasonable. Nonetheless, whatever changes Trump implemented were a colossal failure. Managing the CDC, FDA, FEMA, and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to coordinate in a pandemic is crucial, and it did not occur until weeks after it should have. We should ask if the NSC, which varies from president to president, should even have this coordination power or if Congress should implement a more permanent response hierarchy.

Moreover, the president himself downplayed concerns about the virus the entire month of February, and even promised that 15 cases would soon be down to “close to zero”. This is an idiotic statement but is not unexpected. Trump has long ignored expert advice, lied to the public, and spoken erratically about how his administration will execute at his direction. The difference is that while the first 3 years of his presidency had few crises that weren’t self created, a pandemic actually requires decision making and policy implementation. Trump claimed that he would surround himself with good managers, and yet his White House has been plagued with scandals, including one that resulted in his impeachment. Ultimately, Trump is responsible for the leaders of the agencies that failed so spectacularly to manage this crisis. When asked about the testing fiasco, Trump said “I don’t take responsibility at all”.

Finally, the Obama administration had even created a “pandemic playbook”, a 69 page document you can review at this link which details decision making rubrics, key agencies that need to be consulted, and which questions need to be asked. It’s apparently unclear if senior leaders at government agencies even knew the playbook existed.

“State Capacity”

The typical consequentialist libertarian critique runs something like “the government doing things is bad because the state has poor incentives”. However, with this pandemic, we have instances where the state did too much, like where the FDA got in the way of scaling life-saving testing, but also where the state did too little, like coordinating responses of expert state agencies, or providing guidelines to local governments. A consequentialist libertarian critique would have a hard time dealing with these two failure types, and as somewhat of a consequentialist libertarian, I didn’t understand Cowen’s “state capacity libertarianism” until I was faced with these current government failures.

In a pandemic, every individual and company wants to continue working and consuming as much as possible, but each action also endangers non-parties to the transaction (e.g. other grocery shoppers or attendees at a basketball game). Here was a role for government to play, and yet it completely failed in that role. While a more typical libertarianism might treat the state as a necessary evil from which helpful action is capricious and rare, state capacity libertarianism suggests there is an expected duty for the state to play where there are negative externalities like the spread of a pandemic. The government’s failure here should thus be taken more seriously under state capacity libertarianism.

This also opens up a discussion about “state management” that previously I have often avoided. For example, it’s quite onerous to file taxes in the United States. Some libertarians argue that this is actually a good thing, and in fact making these state interactions difficult helps to convey to citizens how useless the state is, and they will thus be supportive in making the state smaller. Other libertarians might argue that added difficulty in the form of coerced taxation is adding additional rights violations on top of an already immoral action. A state capacity libertarian approach wouldn’t have this confusion; in this view, taxes ought to be collected in the most economically efficient way possible (land value tax or Pigouvian externality taxes would be a good start), and that method should be carried out competently and easily by the state. The IRS would just calculate your Pigouvian externality tax and send you a bill without requiring each citizen to compile their own information, spend hundreds on tax advice and then be punished when the amount is incorrect.

Relatedly, the management ability of electoral candidates sometimes comes up, and I think I may have even argued in the past that if congress or the president are less capable, then they would pass fewer laws. If most laws are net negative, then perhaps this incompetence would be good. However, elected officials do not just pass laws, they impact how government services are carried out. When a high risk, externality-laden scenario arises, like a pandemic, the management aspect of governance rises in importance.

Many presidents, especially Trump, have campaigned on the idea that they are good managers. Until now, I mostly shrugged at these claims, since governing is most often about policy and posturing than actual management. Yet the rare scenarios where management is required have outsized impacts; having fire insurance doesn’t matter until you actually have a fire, but then it matters a great deal. If we are concerned about catastrophic risk, then government management is a vital skill to be evaluated. State capacity libertarianism strongly favors evaluating this skill.

Libertarian Critiques Remain

Finally, we should quickly cover that a strong libertarian critique of government intervention into markets remains. Private property based markets with competition have much better incentives for rapid development and innovation. The FDA’s intervention to thwart testing probably killed thousands, especially compared to an alternate world where additional testing kits were explicitly allowed beginning in mid-February. Libertarians have been criticizing FDA policy on slow drug approval for decades though, and COVID patients will not be the FDA’s only victims this year.

And that’s not the only place where the state is dangerous: the War on Drugs, for example, has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands as prohibition empowers organized crime, makes drugs more dangerous, incarcerates people for non-violent crimes, creates more violent interactions between citizens and police forces, and on and on. U.S. government policy has also resulted in long-lasting deadly wars in the Middle East with little to no concrete benefits for the U.S. globally, and I’m sure your local libertarian could continue on with a very long list.

This pandemic places into stark realization that government both needs to get out of the way in some areas to save lives, and also competently carry out the tasks only it can do. A Cowenian marriage of state capacity and libertarianism is the way forward.

Podcast Recommendations October 2019

Last year I wrote up a post discussing my recommended podcasts, and I figured it was about time to update my list. Podcasts have grown significantly in the last 10 years to the point where I honestly haven’t listened to terrestrial radio stations for several years. Podcast distribution is decentralized, and the barrier to entry is low. We live in a world where if you have a niche interest, there’s going to be a podcast and several YouTube channels covering it.

But since podcast discussion is decentralized, my most common method of hearing about podcasts is through other people. In that light, I have created this list of recommendations. It is loosely grouped with podcasts I have listened to longer and/or enjoy more at the top, with more recent podcast discoveries or podcasts whose episodes I have found hit or miss towards the bottom.

I’d also like to take a second to recommend a method of podcast listening: have a low barrier to skipping an episode of a podcast that you otherwise enjoy. This was actually a recommendation by 80,0000 Hours podcast host Rob Wiblin. He encourages his listeners to skip podcast episodes if they find it uninteresting because he’d rather they continue to enjoy the pieces of content from the podcast that they do like, rather than feel like they have to slog through parts they don’t. Moreover, there is just so much good content out there, you should never waste your time with something you don’t find interesting. And now the (slightly sorted!) list:

Reason Podcast

First up, the Reason Podcast includes several different types of excellent content. My favorite is the Monday Editor’s Roundtable which usually includes Katherine Mangu-Ward, Matt Welch, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman. It’s well-edited, sharp, witty, and always tackles the latest news of the week from a libertarian perspective. In the last few years I often find myself wondering if the political world has lost its mind, and on Mondays I’m able to get the message that yes, everyone has gone crazy, but you’re still not alone, there are these four libertarian weirdos who are right there with you. Moreover, Nick and Matt’s obscure 70s and 80s pop cultural references and cynicism play well off of Katherine and Peter’s more techno-libertarian science fiction vibe.

However, that’s not the only content here! There are many interviews from presidential candidates to authors and professors. Audio from the monthly SoHo Forum debates are also posted, and I always listen to at least the opening statements (audience Q&As are less interesting to me). Overall, I almost never skip an episode of the podcast and they produce a ton of great content!

80,000 Hours

80,0000 Hours is an effective altruist organization researching how people can do the most good with their careers. The effective altruist movement does great work, and I think anyone seriously interested in making a difference in the world should be aware of it and the approach with which effective altruists analyze the world. But more than that, this podcast is just more awesome than other interview shows. Rob Wiblin, the host, is excellent at interviewing. He presses the guests on issues but is also willing to accepting strange concepts about the world and follow them to their interesting conclusions.

The interviews are also long, sometimes resulting in 3 hour episodes. This is on purpose, as they can cover in depth why people have the beliefs they do, and what specialized knowledge they have accumulated working in niche roles. Sample episodes include Vitalik Buterin (founder of Ethereum) on ways to revamp public goods, blockchains, and effective giving, Paul Christiano (AI alignment researcher at OpenAI) on messaging the future, increasing compute power and how CO2 interacts with the brain, and Philip Tetlock (author/inventor of Superforecasting) on why forecasting matters for everything.

This one is perhaps a bit more intense than some of the more chill “people hanging out” podcasts, but I listen to every episode.

EconTalk

EconTalk is centrally an economics podcast hosted by Russ Roberts. It’s funded by the Library of Economics and Liberty and Roberts leans libertarian, but he is a courteous and thoughtful interviewer. He knows his biases and acknowledges them during discussions. The podcast strays into many related fields, not just economics; Russ is interested in personal philosophy and introspection as well.

As of late, Russ has particular concerns about the economics field and how free market policies fall short of what we might hope for. In particular, he has discussed themes of societal disillusionment and isolation that simple “material” concerns that dominate economic metrics cannot capture. I wouldn’t say I always agree with Russ and certainly not with all of his guests, but I can say I listen to almost every episode because there are so many good insights discussed.

The Fifth Column

I recently heard the term “Dive Podcast”. This is an excellent description of The Fifth Column, a talk show hosted by Kmele Foster, Matt Welch, Michael Moynihan, and Anthony Fisher. All lean various degrees and shades of libertarian, and discuss the news and/or critique the ever continuous stream of takes in print media, television, online, Twitter, etc while in various states of inebriation. This is much less of a cerebral lecture and more of a “rhetorical assault” as Kmele calls it.

I find the show incredibly entertaining, often informative, and very funny. I listen to all episodes as soon as they are posted.

Hello Internet

Hello Internet is another talk show, hosted by YouTubers CGP Grey and Brady Haran. It isn’t really related to any topics we cover here on the blog, but it is nonetheless entertaining and charming. Unlike The Fifth Column, there is no alcohol involved in the making of this podcast, but it does have an amusing self-grown culture and language.

For example, there is an official flag of the podcast after a referendum of users was held, but one of the losing flags is occasionally taken up by rebellious listeners. There are also unofficial official birds of Hello Internet (the Reunion Swamphen with limited edition t-shirts). Topics covered include YouTube, technology, but also the various interests of Brady and Grey, such as mountain climbing or Apple products. There’s no simple way to convey this podcast, but I do recommend it, and I do listen to every episode.

Rationally Speaking

Rationally Speaking is an interview show hosted by Julia Galef, founder of the Center for Applied Rationality and who I’ve heard described as one of the major pillars of the rationality community. Like Russ Roberts of EconTalk, Galef is an excellent, fair, and thoughtful interviewer. However, the subjects of these interviews are much broader than EconTalk’s admittedly broad discussion of economics. There is a general focus on the philosophy of why we believe what we believe. I do tend to skip more episodes of Rationally Speaking than I do of previously mentioned interview podcasts, but I estimate I still listen to 90% of all episodes, and I would absolutely recommend this very accessible podcast to everyone.

The Economist Editor’s Picks

This one is pretty straightforward. In a world where we tend to get news continuously from the internet or our smartphones, this podcast is a short, ~20 minute weekly selection of important topics from a global perspective that you might not know much about, and that may have gotten swept away in the torrent of your daily information deluge. The Economist is certainly opinionated, but I think does a good job of promoting moderate, liberal ideas that would improve the world. This podcast is an excellent way to expose yourself to some of those simple important concepts in a global context.

Anatomy of Next

From Founder’s Fund, this is a bit of an outlier podcast on here. It’s much more of a series of scripted journalistic pieces or lectures rather than recorded unscripted discussions between people. However, it is quite ambitious in its ideas. The latest season, entitled “New World” which finished up in early 2019, is about how to build a human civilization on Mars. Anatomy of Next explores everything, most of which does not exist yet, but perhaps could. There is terraforming, genetic engineering, sci-fi launch concepts, etc.

I wouldn’t say this podcast is for everyone, but if you feel like you are missing out on human optimism, where people talk about settling Mars with technology that doesn’t exist and yet remain incredibly compelling, this is a podcast you should definitely check out. Also, thanks to Nick Gillespie and Reason for interviewing Mike Solana and letting me know about this podcast in the first place!

Building Tomorrow

Building Tomorrow is a podcast about technology and innovation, and how that is leading to and interacting with individual liberty. It’s hosted at Libertarianism.org which is a project of the Cato Institute. I only recently discovered this podcast and thus it is lower down on my list only because I haven’t had a chance to listen to as many episodes as I would like. Nonetheless, every episode I have listened to is really great! Of course, this program is the perfect niche for me to enjoy, but I would definitely recommend it to anyone who enjoys this blog.

Conversations with Tyler

Tyler Cowen co-hosts one of the most popular econ blogs in the world, Marginal Revolution, and, of course, he is quite an accomplished economist and author. I have recently discovered his podcast, and it’s pretty wonderful. I admit, I don’t listen to every episode, as it turns out Cowen’s and my interests diverge somewhat, which is quite alright. On the episodes that I do find interesting, Cowen is an excellent, although unorthodox interviewer. I rarely go into an episode knowing much about the interviewee or even thinking that I’d really enjoy the topic, but I am always impressed.

There are some additional podcasts I listen to sporadically, but either don’t fit the context of this blog, or I haven’t listened to enough episodes to recommend them here. Nonetheless, it’s worth mentioning that I have listened to a handful of episodes from the Neoliberal Podcast, and I hypothesize that if I wrote this list again in 3 months, it would likely be here.

If you have any podcast recommendations, please tweet at me or leave a comment! I’m always interested in more podcasts.

Netflix, Entrepreneurship, and the Case for Economic Freedom

How would you go about convincing a free market skeptic of the benefits of economic freedom, as opposed to a tightly regulated or even a command economy? A common approach is to discuss productivity gains from free market systems, which reward higher efficiency production as consumers purchase the best and least expensive products. Competition between firms pushes companies to find efficiencies and new production methods.

One might also point out that it’s possible to divide the question of taxation and distribution from that of free market pricing and competition; in other words, if the market skeptic is concerned about the effects of a free market on the unskilled or the handicapped, it’s possible to have a robust safety net and tax system that is built on the most efficient taxes and welfare payments (land value tax, consumption tax, and direct cash grants).

However, today I want to focus on a more amorphous part of the free market, entrepreneurship. The Library of Economics and Liberty has an excellent encyclopedia style article on entrepreneurship written by Russel S. Sobel. He defines an entrepreneur as

…someone who organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a business or enterprise. An entrepreneur is an agent of change. Entrepreneurship is the process of discovering new ways of combining resources. When the market value generated by this new combination of resources is greater than the market value these resources can generate elsewhere individually or in some other combination, the entrepreneur makes a profit.

Sobel also discusses the approaches of economists Joseph Schumpeter and Israel Kirzner in describing entrepreneurs. Schumpeter is famous for his theory of “creative destruction”, where entrepreneurs are the primary agents of disruption, upending the status quo and altering the market, leaving competitors behind. Kirzner focuses on the aspects of discovery that entrepreneurs perform, as they seek new markets, new processes, and new business models.

We should note that entrepreneurs don’t assume all risks. If their projects fail and the business operates at a loss, they lose their investments. However, if worker jobs are lost not due to performance but poor management, workers might be laid off, which is a risk workers assume, not the entrepreneur. Nonetheless, entrepreneurs likely take on more cumulatively, risking their job and also capital investment. Entrepreneurs are usually thought of in terms of small business owners or startups, but I’d argue many of the roles of an entrepreneur can be undertaken by larger companies. Maybe a publicly traded company cannot, by definition, have an entrepreneur, but if there are still market discovery and disruption operations that the company undertakes due to the search for untapped profit, that’s good enough for our purposes today.

So far, we’ve discussed that entrepreneurs search for market opportunities, new ways of doing business, and undertake risks, but what does this have to do with economic freedom? The benefits of entrepreneurship can be difficult to notice. Sobel uses the examples of Bill Gates and Microsoft which at the very least took over virtually (ha!) the entire personal computer market, and I’d argue created a large new market that hadn’t existed before. However, we don’t know what tomorrow’s entrepreneurs will come up with, and that’s the most vital point. Someone has to envision the new product or service, develop it into something that can be sold, create an organization capable of producing it, and then execute on those plans before the market reacts. If it was well known what needed to be done, it wouldn’t be innovative, and it would already be happening. Entrepreneurs need the freedom to operate, to create new ventures, and to attempt new processes and approaches.

Contrasting with state-run economies or state-owned enterprises, the benefits entrepreneurs bring to a free market economy are pretty straightforward; government enterprises aren’t going to be as profit focused because they don’t reap the benefits of any increase in efficiency. Command economies or highly regulated industries may have price controls imposed on them, and so innovation does not occur because there is no opportunity to do so. Political incentives might also overrule efficiency improvements, and since the state has a hard time going bankrupt, poor rules can hamstring organizations for years. My local DMV still refuses to accept credit cards.

Other forms of economic freedom are more subtle; regulation is a broad form of curtailing economic behavior, although certainly not always for bad purposes. Nonetheless, many well intentioned rules reduce the benefits of innovation or were in fact written with the help of powerful actors looking to keep out competition. Licensing can be especially destructive to innovation; Uber controversially solved this by ignoring licensing laws in many cities until they were too popular to be outlawed (results pending). Taxi licensing had allowed the taxi industry to remain relatively complacent, with poor service, product quality, and ease of use. Uber saw an opportunity to exploit the market with new technology and transformed the industry.

Finally, it’s worth mentioning that a strong defense of property rights is vital for the entrepreneurial process to occur; people will not take risks on new ventures if their asset can be seized at will by the government, or if the currency that transactions are conducted in could lose it’s value overnight (looking at you cryptocurrencies).

Now I’d like to walk through an example of the benefits of entrepreneurship. Netflix was established in 1997 to take advantage of the brand new DVD format for movies. The DVD format was introduced on March 21, 1997, and Netflix was formed by August. That’s an impressively quick turn around. At the time, the most common ways to see entertainment at home was to watch TV shows as they aired, watch movies that had been cut up for TV with commercials when a cable station played them, rent movies from Blockbuster if they had it in stock, or buy the VHS tape of a film.

DVDs had a lot of benefits over VHS when they came out, such as skipping directly to certain scenes, no rewinding, and often better durability than VHS tapes. But Netflix saw that DVDs offered something else: no prior storage format was small enough to be cheaply mailed and large enough to hold an entire film.  They foresaw a new method of home rental, and indeed, once DVD players became cheaper in 2001, Netflix took off. They dominated the mail subscription movie rental space, essentially creating a market where none had existed. Unlike movie rental stores, Netflix had a larger catalog and no late fees. Blockbuster was probably in the best position to take advantage of the new DVD technology; they had a pre-existing distribution network for their stores, and they had a customer base interested in movies. Yet Blockbuster peaked in the mid-2000s and filed for bankruptcy in 2010, a victim of Netflix’ creative destruction.

It’s worth mentioning a couple things about Blockbuster. In 2004, they attempted a hostile takeover of competitor Hollywood Video. They abandoned the deal in 2005 citing the FTC would probably block it. Yet both companies were either gone or bankrupt by 2010! The myopia of seeing a merger of Blockbuster and Hollywood Video as threatening to consumers when both companies would be essentially gone in five years underscores the points made here about the value of innovation and entrepreneurship. The state couldn’t look ahead and see that the industry consolidation they were concerned about would have shorter lifespans than many currently airing TV shows. Blockbuster’s competitors were actually Netflix, Redbox, and streaming video–even YouTube, which was founded in 2005 as well. Blockbuster itself made poor management decisions, opting for short term profitability over long term investment for a new industry. They eventually did create an online DVD rental subscription business similar to Netflix, but it was so poorly run, it either lost money or was too expensive to attract customers.

Yet customers did not suffer from this poor management! The entrepreneurship of Netflix filled the void before it even appeared. Netflix leveraged its online presence to profile its users with data, creating personalized recommendations in the mid-2000s, years before Facebook even started running ads. Netflix also saw that the future was streaming video, and noting the success of YouTube, they began including a streaming service with their DVD subscription in 2007. At the time, virtually no one had the bandwidth to watch movies in high quality on their computers, and essentially no technology existed to stream it to TVs. Yet, by 2011, Ars Technica was reporting that Netflix was responsible for about 30% of all North America peak internet traffic.

Netflix had accumulated many streaming titles, but was aware that as the importance of streaming grew, many publishers would be unwilling to renew their contracts, or raise prices. They might even face new streaming competition from content owners (like Hulu).  Consequently, Netflix started to invest in original content in 2011, something essentially unheard of for rental/streaming company, by buying the rights to make House of Cards, a political drama, for $100 million. In 2013, it premiered and went on to obtain 5 Primetime Emmy nominations for Outstanding Drama Series from 2013-2017. Other shows, such as Orange is the New Black, the various MCU Defenders series, Bojack Horseman, and Narcos have all been fairly successful. By this year, Netflix’ original programming pieces are in the hundreds if we count all seasons, original films, documentaries, comedy specials, and more. The Economist reports that Netflix will make more TV content than any television network this year, and release 80 movies, more than any Hollywood studio. Warner Brothers, the largest studio, will release just 26, admittedly most with much larger budgets. The critique that Hollywood doesn’t have original ideas is only true if you forget that Netflix is the largest player in Hollywood.

The foresight here for Netflix to to see and invest in the benefits of DVDs in providing by-mail home entertainment, to see streaming as the next iteration of entertainment consumption, and to see that any streaming service will require original content, when none of those markets had yet existed, is the foundation of entrepreneurial benefits. The ability to see where the market will be and adapt your organization to meet those needs in pursuit of profit is the dynamism of the market economy. Other companies’ failures are immediate market feedback on their inability to adapt. It’s not to say that a free market automatically takes advantage of all opportunities that present themselves; sometimes technology has made a new concept viable but no one is able to take advantage of it for some time because of lack of creativity. I also don’t intend to state that large corporations love competition and innovation; on the contrary, they are often trying to remove any competition through any means necessary. Out-competing another company results in better products for consumers; constructing barriers to entry so that consumers don’t have a choice does not.

Finally, given the benefits of entrepreneurship, we should note that it has been declining in the US. Why? It could be due to better economies of scale due to technology, it could be increased regulation has made it harder to form new businesses, it could be reduced labor force participation, or several other theories. Tyler Cowen has discussed this phenomenon in his 2017 book, The Complacent Class. He views it as a possible response to risk avoidance that accompanies increased wealth. Regardless, the questions of why entrepreneurship is declining, and what tradeoffs are involved in the level of dynamism of the economy are the important questions to ask. Dynamic markets are valuable tools to create ideas and innovation that cannot be predicted. Yet lack of clear future benefits should not be counted against the value of economic freedom.

 

Links 2016-12-2

Added the awesome Conor Friedersdorf and Megan McArdle to the Libertarian Web Directory.

First, all the Trump-related links:

I’ve been saying this for a while, but Robby Soave at Reason articulates why the left bears a lot of the blame for Trump due to their aggressive pushing of political correctness.

Slate Star Codex talks about similar problem on crying wolf about Trump.  Even mentioned in Episode 33 of The Fifth Column.

Tyler Cowen on why Trump’s plan to keep jobs in the US is pretty awful.

Nonetheless, also read why Bryan Caplan isn’t freaking out about Trump.

The Nerdwriter, on YouTube, makes the case that Trump is a magician, using the media to distract our attention from where it should be.  Maybe I should stop reading about him so much.

Now, other related political posts not explicitly about Trump:

Megan McArdle had a good piece talking about bridging the gap between the “right-wing media” and the regular “media”. If you want to bring conservatives back into the mainstream, you have to stop politicizing everything and only hiring left-leaning news reporters who only want to cover the local food movement and how evil Walmart is.

Related: Bryan Caplan discusses that if you just talk about how great cohesion is and despair at the political divisions we see, you’ll never get outgroups to come back in, because to them you sound like you’re telling them to conform. You have to actually unilaterally reach out to them and show them respect despite how much you dislike them.

Philosopher Nick Land argues that contrary to the notion that fascism as a societal system has been largely dead since WWII, in fact almost all political philosophies in the world today are largely rooted in fascism, including the major political philosophies of the United States, progressivism and conservatism.

What is the most prominent social science debate happening at Peking University today? The most prestigious university in the still-technically-communist-party-controlled China isn’t about Maoism vs Stalinism, it’s a planned economy vs markets.  

Scott Sumner has a hopeful take on fiscal policy and specifically reducing government budgets.

Here is a terrifying story about the unintended consequences of overcriminalization, and deference to state power. A woman with a previous arrest for prostitution, was picked up and charged with “loitering for the purposes of prostitution”. Loitering is not a criminal activity, but can be applied to anyone standing still. Loitering for the purpose of doing something else is quite speculative. Of course, prostitution itself is already a criminalization of a voluntary transaction, so now anyone who has been arrested for a voluntary interaction other people find distasteful cannot stand anywhere without being accused of a crime. In fact, if cops think women are dressed too lewdly, they can also be arrested for intent to prostitute themselves. Since this woman is relatively poor (thus the loitering for a ride outside of a trailer park), she’s forced to plead guilty to the charges and go to jail for 2 months.  

Related: Adam Ruins Everything this week is about how important prostitution was to settling the American west, and, interestingly, empowering women in that region of the country far before they had similar rights in the east.

Why build higher? This video takes a look at the history of skyscrapers, but also delves into important areas of urbanization and how humanity will live in the future. Cities are more and more important to human civilization, and improving urban areas to exploit efficiencies of concentrated living is one of the most important challenges we face.  

Crash Course has a 10 minute intro video for the philosophy of utilitarianism. Since that’s an important building block for many of the arguments on this blog, I would definitely recommend it.  

Finally, to wrap up the short videos category, Learn Liberty has a great 5 minute video on one of the most fundamental economic concepts: Opportunity Costs. Every choice we make has a hidden cost of what could have been done with those resources and time. Ignoring those opportunity costs can lead to paradoxical ideas like the Broken Window Fallacy.

For the best coverage of the death of the dictator Fidel Castro, this long piece at the Miami Herald is the most comprehensive take available.

Postlibertarian throwback: read about the politics of outrage back in 2014. Unfortunately we have…not fixed our focus on outrage yet. 2017 and the age of Trump isn’t looking so great either.

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