My Weekly Reading for August 10, 2025

by Lenore Skenazy, Reason, August 9, 2025.

Excerpt:

During this visit, the social services worker acknowledged that our home was clean, that the children were happy, well-fed, polite, and well-spoken, but said the children had to be supervised 100 percent of the time when outdoors. When I asked what constitutes supervision, she said that I had to be visible to my neighbors when the kids were outside, regardless of whether or not I could see the children. I asked where that was found in the Virginia law. She replied that it isn’t in the Virginia law, but that Social Services has its own set of rules.

by Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal, August 8, 2025.

Excerpts:

Progressives and a growing faction of Republicans support cash handouts as an important answer to America’s social ills. So readers might want to know about a study published as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research that finds $1,000 monthly payments have few long-term benefits.

Researchers with the nonprofit OpenResearch and several universities ran a randomized controlled trial to test the impact of a cash transfer on lower-income, working-age Americans. One group received $1,000 every month for three years—$36,000 total—no strings attached. The other were paid $50 a month to participate as a control group.

And:

Recipients also worked less, equivalent to roughly eight fewer days in the previous year. Yet OpenResearch touts that “average household income was roughly $6,100 higher for recipients than control participants, including the transfer amount” and payments “increased agency to work fewer hours or reduce the number of jobs held.” In other words, the payments led people to work less.

DRH comment: 8 days a year is substantial. It’s about 3% of a 2000-hour work year. But it’s not as substantial as I would have expected.

by Dominic Pino, Civitas Institute, August 7, 2025.

Excerpts:

Phil Gramm and Donald Boudreaux have written a book called The Triumph of Economic Freedom in which they debunk seven economic myths that undergird much of American government policy today. The book is a valuable resource to anyone who needs a refresher on the defenses of free markets based on historical research. Both men are teachers at heart — Gramm taught economics before serving in Congress, and Boudreaux is a professor — and they communicate with clarity and precision.

The problem is that people believe that the New Deal ended the Great Depression, free markets caused the Great Recession, the Industrial Revolution led to increased poverty, and free trade hollowed out America. They really, sincerely, believe these things to be true. And that really does matter.

And:

Between 1980 and 2000, the share of the world’s population living in extreme poverty declined from 34 percent to 25 percent. The death rate from malnutritiondeclined by 43 percent. Rice yields increased by 41 percent, and wheat yields increased by 47 percent. Global average life expectancy increased by six years. And all of that happened while the world’s population increased from about 4.5 billion to over 6 billion.

DRH Note: Although I haven’t yet read their book, I suspect that they cover some of the same ground that I covered in this talk that I gave to students at Stanford University. BTW, I got Malthus a little wrong in my exposition I gave, as David Friedman pointed out to me. Although Malthus was dismal, he wasn’t that dismal. He thought people would adjust their behavior before they got to anything like mass starvation. Lauren F. Landsburg, in her biography of Malthus in David R. Henderson, ed., The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, notes in the first paragraph the correct understanding of Malthus’s claims.

by Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution, August 9, 2025.

Excerpt:

Suppose the U.S. can import Hyundai Sonatas from Korea and Toyota Camrys from Japan, and consumers view the two cars as perfect substitutes. We compare three scenarios:

A)Free tradeB)10% tariff on both countries (uniform tariff)C) 10% tariff on Korea only (selective tariff)

The surprising result: B can be better than C, even though C is, in one sense, closer to free trade (the “best” policy) than B as it tariffs fewer countries. To focus on the key points I will assume 50 car buyers and no change in the number of buyers when tariffs change (so I will ignore the standard deadweight loss from reduced quantities).

DRH note: Although Alex doesn’t mention it in the title, notice that a crucial assumption in his proof is that the tariffs are uniform across imports from both Korea and Japan.

Note: The featured image was generated by ChatGPT.