The Re-Enlightenment of America and Its Universities

It has been almost a decade since Steven Pinker called for Enlightenment Now. Although many readers lauded his clarion call to return to logical empiricism, most of academia, including universities and research publishers, doubled down on postmodernism or its ugly spawn, meta-modernism and post-postmodernism. As a result, the quality of U.S. higher education, scientific research, and public discourse continued to spiral downward, pushed along by the Covid lockdowns, which were firmly rooted in postmodern worldviews that stress authority over scientific method. Only Re-Enlightenment can save higher education and with it Pinker’s optimistic view of human progress.

By Re-Enlightenment, I mean the revivification of the intellectual goals of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment that privileged empirical observation, logic, and reason above base authority, ancient custom, and rank superstition. That intellectual movement modernized the world, leading to the American Revolution and the sundry economic revolutions that released humanity from the population trap identified by Thomas Malthus and that helped billions of people to become better off materially than the wealthiest pre-Enlightenment monarchs just three centuries ago.

Will progress continue, though? Will the gains already made persist? History is literally littered with societies that experienced so-called Golden Ages only to devolve back towards what Adam Smith termed “barbarism.”

In the latter half of the twentieth century, many Western intellectual elites jettisoned the Enlightenment in the mistaken belief that its ideals had caused the horrors of the twentieth-century: the two world wars, the Great Depression, numerous genocides, and the ever present threat of nuclear holocaust, not to mention racism, sexism, and xenophobia. In the place of Enlightened ideals, those elites embraced postmodernism, a creed that denies the quest for objective truth and replaces it with nihilism, subjectivism, and a quest for governments powerful enough to dictate “truth” by fiat.

The irony is that authoritarian government, or in other words a dearth of Enlightenment in politics, diverted the productive forces unleashed by the Enlightenment in economics to violent, tribal ends. But instead of trying to tame the destructive forces of authoritarian government, the postmodernists blamed humanity’s woes on “capitalism” and Enlightenment, and undercut them at every turn in classrooms and legislatures while bestowing them with heinous sobriquets.

Where the postmodernists won early ascendancy, under labels like communism and national socialism, they ran headlong into the objective realities that they denied. Within a few years or decades they faltered and failed, often reappearing in the more gradualist varieties that gained a foothold in the “free” countries of the West, including the United States. There, they spread throughout government and academia supported by the largesse of rationally ignorant taxpayers and wealthy alumni with eyes swaddled by thick layers of nostalgia.

Reality, though, again reared its oft ugly head, revealing in 2020 Western institutions that the intellectual leaders of the Enlightenment would recognize as new forms of authority, custom, and superstition. The conflation of science and authority, the repression of legitimate business, and widespread censorship during the pandemic constituted the Enlightenment’s nadir, but also a springboard from which Re-enlightenment may gain ascendance. 

The same day that I began teaching U.S. History at the new University of Austin I began regularly to work out at the gym again, after having given up my lifelong routine during the pandemic. I did so because for the first time since March 2020, I again want to live long. The conversation that day in early January, which began before the appointed start time of 8:30 am, was deep, frank, and precisely the reason that I decided to join the academy 35 years ago.

The parallel institutions of higher education that have been springing up – some de novo like the University of Austin and Reliance College, others like mushrooms from the rotting corpses of dying incumbents – provide hope that America and the rest of the West will not further devolve into idiocracy, kakistocracy, or tribalism. I still fret, though, that their efforts will prove too little, too late unless they are accompanied by more widespread Re-Enlightenment across America’s intellectual landscape.

The Re-enlightenment can improve upon its predecessor by incorporating the best that its postmodern critics offered. The following sentiments encapsulate it:

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but Truth is not. Beauty therefore can be achieved for some, but humans can only strive towards Truth without ever fully attaining it. Intellectual humility therefore behooves everyone. No single mind, even that of the great leader or the mighty AI, can understand all. Collectively, however, through the free trade in ideas, human understanding can advance closer to Truth.

Anyone may claim whatever he or she likes, but no one else is bound to listen to, let alone heed, the message. Just because someone offers a good for trade does not mean anyone must take it up. The same holds for the trade in ideas.

Normative claims can be ignored on their normative basis alone. Positive claims can be ignored too, but at the listener’s peril. If a person shouts “fire!” in a crowded theater, for example, the listener can call the Thought Police but will be better off by critically assessing the veracity of the claim. Who is the speaker? Does the speaker have more information or better insight into the state of the theater than the listener does? If so, the listener should seek more information.

The listener can also independently assess the speaker’s credibility. If the speaker is carrying a large water hose and wearing a fire-retardant uniform, following directions will likely extend the listener’s existence. If the speaker is another theatergoer giving directions to a character to shoot his gun, ignoring “fire!” likely will extend the listener’s enjoyment of the film, play, musical, or other theatrical entertainment.

The veracity of the most important positive claims, however, is not so easily ascertained. Some Enlightenment thinkers erred by being too optimistic about the ease of establishing Truth claims. Moreover, some policymakers incorrectly invoked the Enlightenment to support normative claims that bolstered their power, a propensity that constitutions based on Enlightenment thought did not sufficiently check. In reaction to the Enlightenment’s intellectual overreach and its usurpation by power seekers, the intellectual pendulum swung too far in the other direction, toward nihilism and Continental philosophies like postmodernism.

Higher education and freedom suffered as a consequence. Free speech devolves into vacuous concepts like “voice” when all claims carry equal weight, or solely the weight of the speaker’s perceived authority. Free enterprise likewise suffers when its defenders’ views can be outright censored, distorted through linguistic twists that conflate authority and liberty, or denigrated as “biased” even if based on empirical evidence and logic. 

To re-establish the intellectual milieu in which free speech and free enterprise can thrive, universities can again ground students in Analytic philosophy, reason, and logic, alloyed with applied history and tempered by post-modernist concerns over power relationships, particularly those of the state over individuals.

Consider, for example, classroom treatment of the following proposition: “The U.S. federal government should ban all firearms.”

Many universities today would laud students for making or virtue signaling support for such a claim. A few would chastise students for supporting it and might even try to ban such speech. A Re-enlightened University, by contrast, induces intellectual investigation by first asking what type of claim it is. It is normative, so listeners need not heed it. 

The proposition could be better understood, however, if reframed as a positive claim, like “If the U.S. federal government bans all firearms, the homicide rate will …” If the speaker ends the claim with “decline,” a certain set of universities will reinforce and another punish the speaker. If the speaker ends the claim with “increase,” the set of universities will reverse.

Note that if they do not insist upon restatement of the original normative claim in positive terms, some universities will laud students who believe that the U.S. government should ban firearms because the students believe doing so will increase the homicide rate. 

A Re-enlightened University, by contrast, asks the speaker to state the empirical grounds for his or her positive claim. That is where simplistic views of the world can be questioned (can’t people kill each other with weapons, like bombs and vehicles, other than firearms?) and rational tools like comparative analysis, logic, and statistical inference can be used to move toward a better understanding of the issue and perhaps even closer approximations of Truth. 

Re-enlightenment is not inherently imperialist, racist, sexist, or anything else anyone might think untoward because it is more intellectually humble than its predecessor. Contrast the views of, say, Friedrich Hayek with the Marquis de Condorcet. Re-enlightenment will also be even more skeptical of intrusive government policies than its predecessor. Contrast the skepticism of James C. Scott with, say, the optimism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. 

A Re-enlightened University does not exclude topics of discussion but simply accords postmodern approaches to policy questions their due weight. Not everything is knowable, or effable, but for those things that are, the methodologies of the Enlightenment, like randomized control trials and natural experiments, remain far superior to those of postmodernism. Re-enlightened universities allow postmodernists to speak, of course, but attend to them only insofar as they help students to progress toward greater understanding of the real world.

The Best Profs Teach and Research

 American higher education has wallowed in crisis for decades but outmoded thinking continues to stifle needed reforms. For example, David Randall, like many others in higher education, believes that professors must be either “researchers” (with a small course load) or “teachers” (with a large load). 

The best professors, however, perform both functions extremely well because teaching and research are complements, not substitutes. 

At first blush, the concept of opportunity costs, the fact that resources expended doing A cannot also be expended on B, would seem to support Randall’s “either, or” supposition. But professors at elite schools like the new University of Austin (UATX) do not do A or B, they do AB. In other words, research and teaching are not separate activities, they constitute components of the same mission, to “prepare thoughtful and ethical builders, leaders, and innovators through open inquiry and civil discourse.”

Such impactful missions cannot be achieved through the banking model of education, where a teacher disseminates accepted facts and assesses whether students have memorized them for some short period. They bear fruit by cultivating creative and independent thinkers, students who know the accepted facts but stand ready to adapt, critique, or even reject them.

At UATX, many professors assign students full books each quarter (10-week term) but use their expertise to go beyond the text in response to student reactions in the classroom. That expertise comes not from writing a dissertation on a narrow topic long ago but from maintaining an active research agenda. They do not publish for the sake of it, but rather so they can bring their students with them to the frontiers of knowledge.

When my students wanted to debate the relative merits of North’s and Grenvilles’ policies towards Britain’s mainland North American colonies, for example, I suggested that they should consider those policies in light of the Laffer Curve, i.e., the upside down U-curve tradeoff between tax rates and government revenue. The assigned reading did not address the concept, so the students had to think about what clues the text presented and then ask questions to fill in the gaps, questions that I could answer because of my previous research on the monetary causes of the Imperial Crisis.

Weeks later, when studying the Tariff of Abominations through contemporary debates, students moved directly into a Laffer Curve analysis. The ensuing discussion helped with an article that I am coauthoring about that tariff. Clearly, teacher-researchers and great students can help each other to edge closer to Truth.

But what if you find yourself, as I did for 3 miserable semesters pulling a 4-4+ after the pandemic, in front of half-empty classrooms of students too distracted or tired from working or playing sports fulltime to complete the assigned readings? You still have an obligation to convey ideas as close to the bleeding edge of the research frontier in your field as you can. A so-called “master teacher” who helps students to understand outdated concepts has not really done them a service. Some claim to keep up in their fields of study solely by reading articles and books but that’s akin to a thoracic surgeon staying abreast only by watching YouTubes of other surgeons at work: helpful but not masterful.

Even the nation’s weakest education institutions matriculate some exceptional students whose brains brighten when challenged and even those beaten down by debt and work appreciate showing off what they can do when given a chance. I therefore edited a book, America’s Macroeconomy: A Quarter Millennial History, due out from Cambridge Scholars later this year. None of the contributors have a Master’s degree; many were high school students. It’s not the best book ever, but it makes a contribution and the authors reported learning much. 

To avoid the “Long Night” envisioned by Randall, higher education needs re-enlightenment, not several generations of professor-serfs lashed to an imagined teaching-only grindstone. As higher education shrinks, professors who cannot connect with students and publish well will become increasingly unnecessary.

To save a higher education worthy of the name, professors need to revivify the intellectual goals of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment that privileged empirical observation, logic, and reason above base authority, ancient custom, and rank superstition. Post-modernism’s moral and intellectual degeneracy bankrupts the nation’s universities and ultimately the nation itself by denigrating and then degrading rational thought. It, not teaching load, constitutes the biggest threat to Western Civilization.

Some of the Economic Origins of the American Identity Reconsidered

 This is the text of the prepared remarks I made at Villanova's Ryan Center symposia over the weekend. I said many other words, alas unrecorded, during the extensive round table and Q&As. 

Tax rebellion must loom large in any examination of the economic undergirding of the American identity. Without Shays, the U.S. Constitution and federal government would likely look very different. The two Pennsylvania tax rebellions of the 1790s, over whiskey and windows, helped to limit direct federal taxation in peacetime. Moreover, by encouraging federal government reliance on tariffs and discouraging the offsetting excise taxes promoted by Alexander Hamilton, those rebellions steered economic development towards manufacturing. The so-called Tariff of Abominations fomented the Nullification Crisis and tariffs constituted the second most important cause of the War Between the States, which is how many of us Texans refer to what you Yanks call the Civil War. Insert tongue into cheek.

Obviously, taxes have economic implications but they often code for ideological positions as well. Calls for lower taxes, for example, may stem from a desire to increase economic activity or they may be rooted in a desire for smaller government and its obverse, more freedom. Calls to replace tariffs or sales taxes with income taxes might be rooted in efficiency concerns but they can also indicate a desire to redistribute resources from rich to poor. 

Parsing economic from ideological motivation remains fraught, especially because scholars have become so siloed that few seem capable of addressing both sides of the issue and interdisciplinary partnerships face high barriers. As a History Ph.D. who has spent decades teaching undergraduate and MBA courses in economics, and who has spent as long trying to cultivate working relationships with both historians and economists, I am one of the few scholars who might be able to make a credible argument for the primacy of economic or ideological motivations in particular historical instances.

Today, I will argue that the real-world economic effects of Britain’s Imperial fiscal, monetary, and trade policies fomented the Stamp Act rebellion and eventually the American Revolution, but that ideology played the biggest part in the Nullification Crisis, the rebellion that wasn’t. That reverses the consensus, which has long held that the colonists were lightly taxed and hence rebelled over ideas rather than reality, and that the tariffs dug so deeply into Southern pockets that South Carolinians had to saber rattle to obtain relief.

To quickly recap both events, in March 1765 Parliament imposed on the colonists of mainland British North America a tax on the sale of newspapers, legal documents, and sundry then luxury items, including playing cards and dice. American colonists resisted by physically intimidating stamp distributors and boycotting British goods. A so-called Stamp Act Congress composed of representatives from nine colonies met and formally requested repeal. Parliament granted their request in March 1766 but also passed a Declaratory Act that asserted Parliament’s right to tax the colonists as it saw fit. This tax rebellion kicked off a decade of crises that culminated in a long war and a declaration of independence, the 250th anniversary of which we this year celebrate.

Fewer, though, will celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Nullification Crisis a few years hence. In November 1832, a convention of South Carolinians called for the nullification of federal tariffs effective 1 February 1833. They protested the so-called Tariff of Abominations passed in 1828 and its 1832 revision, which kept tariff rates at unprecedentedly high levels. President Andrew Jackson responded to nullification by saying that he would die in the last ditch before allowing a state to nullify a federal tariff, a credible threat to use military force given the source, known to Americans as Old Hickory and the Hero of New Orleans. Kentucky Senator Henry Clay soon brokered a compromise that slowly reduced federal tariffs to 20 percent over a decade. South Carolina backed off Nullification and Congress passed the Force Bill, which empowered Jackson to use the military to enforce the tariff if need be.

The two crises certainly share some key characteristics: both reacted to the taxes of a central authority and led to a special convention. Both times, the central authority reversed policys but reasserted its authority with additional legislation.

Their differences, though, are telling. Resistance to the Stamp taxes was widespread and entailed a degree of physical violence and threats of more by spontaneous rabble action. Resistance to federal tariffs was largely limited to South Carolina and entailed political posturing by polities rather than physical protestation by the populace.

The main reason for those differences, I’ll argue, is that, as abominable as it was, the tariff had little negative effect on the overall U.S. economy while the stamp tax posed an existential threat to colonial economies given the dire macroeconomic situation when imposed. 

I would not go so far, of course, as to deny that ideology played some role in the stamp tax rebellion or to argue that real economic factors played no role in the Nullification Crisis. I am simply saying that they were not central to what transpired.

This point is probably most easily understood by examining the economic effects of the tariffs of 1828 and 1832. Nullifiers correctly noted that by increasing the price of tariffed goods, tariffs helped domestic producers, mostly located in the North, while hurting consumers of tariffed goods throughout the country, especially in the South. 

The size of the effect, though, was quite small. Economist Sonali Garg and I have spent the last year looking for major economic effects of the Tariff of Abominations and its 1832 revision and we have found none. Real per capita output continued to climb over the 1828 to 1833 period, long-term interest rates were almost unchanged, and only Clay’s compromise tariff sent bank and insurance stock prices uniformly and strongly upward as the threat of armed insurrection dissipated.

Moreover, after spiking to almost 62 percent in 1830, the average effective tariff, which is to say total duties paid divided by the total value of imports, dropped below its 1827 level in 1831 and fell further to 43 percent in 1832, the year that South Carolinians threatened nullification. In other words, the economy quickly adapted to the Tariff of Abominations through some combination of the increased smuggling, substitution, or domestic production of tariffed goods. The worst was over before Nullification, which was more rooted in fears that a national government powerful enough to aid one section of the country at the expense of another might meddle with a particular peculiar institution.

Garg and I also calculated the Harberger triangles or deadweight losses produced by the tariff on pig iron. With the tariff at 62 and a half cents per 112 pounds, they were hardly the stuff of rebellion, even when considered along with the litany of other tariffed goods. Many planters in South Carolina faced economic hardships in the late 1820s and early 1830s, to be sure, but their challenges were more due to declining yields and lower world prices for cotton and rice than to tariffs. The largely localized economic pain helps to explain why South Carolina acted alone and why nullification advocates were quick to compromise rather than itching for a fight, as they would be in 1861 when they faced an existential threat.

The macroeconomic situation in 1765, by contrast, was starkly darker and much more widespread than the deadweight loss from high tariffs. Economist Ron Michener and I worked on the post French and Indian war macroeconomic mess, him pretty much full time and me on and off, for almost a quarter of a century. Our argument is not easily understood in a short compass and appeared to some as figments of our theoretical imagination until I stumbled upon a miscatalogued primary source that encapsulated the same argument that we had been making on the basis of hundreds of primary sources that each told only a small part of the overall story.

Although I discovered it in 2008, I published this overlooked overview source only recently, as an appendix to a chapter in an edited collection about the Bubble Act, so you have not likely seen it. I want to explain here what key excerpts mean for our interpretation of the Stamp Act rebellion. Interleaved with another source about the monetary situation in New Jersey in 1786, it was unsigned and undated but I was able to date it to 1768 based on the exchange rates it quoted. Other internal evidence reveals the author to be a resident of the middle colonies, most likely New Jersey, and that the document was intended as a private letter to an unnamed correspondent, likely in Britain, who hoped “to restore that happy flourishing and tranquil State the Colonies formerly enjoyed, so beneficial and glorious to G. Britain.”

The colonist responded at some length, beginning his analysis with the key observation that it was not “the Stamp Act or New Duty Act alone that had put the Colonies so much out of humour tho the principal Clamour has been on that Head but their distressed Situation had prepared them so generally to lay hold of these Occasions, and how they came to be so I must trace back to commencement of the late War. There was then little paper Money in the Colonies, but all Ranks lived frugally within what they got and there transactions and Dealings did not exceed the Currency among them, there Trade to England was small and they made Remittances by their West India Trade for the Country People in general were contented with their own Produce and Manufactures, the Price of Land was so low that they could soon pay for it out of what they raised.” 

Before the French and Indian War, in other words, the colonists used paper bills of credit to settle debts with each other and specie, full bodied gold or silver coins in other words, to settle debts with Great Britain. They exchanged their produce for the coins in the West Indies mostly, the author fails to mention, with French and Spanish counterparties. Sales to British planters in the West Indies were most often settled in bills of exchange, a type of international check, drawn on specie deposits in Britain. 

The author also notes that land prices were low, which means that interest rates were high. It was well understood, even then, that asset prices moved inversely to interest rates.

The French and Indian War, the author continued, brought a “great Change [in] a short Time.” The war necessitated equipping and paying many troops, which the colonial governments financed by issuing paper bills of credit akin to today’s Federal Reserve Notes because “to raise the Sum wanted within the year, or by Loan as in England, was equally impossible, but being secured by the Legislature to be sunk by future Taxes they never depreciated but,” through what economists call the liquidity effect, the new money decreased interest rates and thus raised the price of real estate. 

At the same time, privateering profits and wartime trade, much of it illicit, brought in large quantities of specie from the West Indies, which the colonists used to pay for British imports. “Thus not withstanding the vast Importation of British Manufactures,” the author explained, “our Trade supplied us with ample Remittances.” After 1760, however, “this advantageous Business received a violent check by a most injudicious and ill advised circular Letter to the Governours on the Continent, and by orders to the Kings Ships to seize all Vessels employed in” trading with the enemy. British naval ships “rigorously performed this Order, [while] carry[ing] on the Trade themselves. This was equally a Loss to G. Britain and her Colonies, reduced many Merchants to a low State and gave the first Cause of Discontent.”

The second cause of discontent arose from the fact that when the war, privateering, and trade were winding down, money remained “plenty, both in Specie and Bills of Credit.” As a result, the colonists “were not afraid of entering into deep Engagements equivalent to our Circulation.” In other words, colonists borrowed large sums at low interest rates to buy real estate in the hopes that its price would go higher still.

Due to unexpected changes in British policy, it was not to be. The supply of money shrank “being … called in by Taxes or remitted for Goods.” That “occasioned a sudden Stagnation,” a big jump in interest rates, and a big fall in real estate prices. Most land speculators had borrowed with the full principal due in a year or two, as was customary. Unable to sell due to the collapse in land prices, or to refinance due to the spike in interest rates, they defaulted. A rash of lawsuits, bankruptcies, and sheriff’s sales resulted. “By calling upon and suing one another brought many to ruin,” including incarceration in debtors’ prisons described by other contemporaries as “loathsome cages.”

The extent of the distress was no exaggeration. As with other parts of the letter, Michener and I had already found numerous corroborating sources including, in this instance, an index of sheriff sales that we created from notices in the Pennsylvania Gazette, which has been full-text searchable since the 1990s.

Britain, the author and many other sources indicate, then enacted several policies that prevented colonists from refreshing colonial money supplies. British naval ships “often cramp Trade by stoping and detaining Merchants ships and pressing their Men.” British customs officials became so strict that for a time they even stopped row boats crossing freshwater rivers, the traditional way of supplying Manhattan and Philadelphia with wood and victuals.

“Another capital Greivance and Inconvenience to these middle Colonies,” the author continued, “is being restrained from issuing Notes or Bills of Credit … to recount our Distress for want of this Medium were Endless or by what unaccountable Policy G. Britain acts in the Restriction.” He referred, of course, to the well-known 1764 Currency Act that effectively banned colonies from issuing new bills of credit or extending the time in circulation of existing ones. Too often pooh-poohed by scholars, the restriction stripped the ability of colonial legislatures to augment their colonial money supplies, all of which shrank dramatically.

The want of a final means to settle debts was so severe that epistolary squirrel scalp bounties circulated from hand-to-hand as money in Bucks County, north of Philadelphia, in 1765. At a pence apiece, however, there were not enough squirrels or shot to make up for the dearth of specie or bills of credit. The author claimed that as a result many colonists fearful of winding up in debtors’ prison retreated “to the Wilderness. They acquire Land but give up every other Convenience, contract savage and brutal Dispositions, are too far Distant to carry their Produce to market, in exchange for European manufactures.”

Other colonists turned their attention to “Manufactories,” including farm families “what make sufficient for their own Families both of Woollen and Linnen many of them keep Looms in their Houses, and make two or three Hundred Yards of different Cloths a year. I am well acquainted with one Family who makes 500 Yards at least yearly, and I am told that two others exceed 1000, all in Jersey. They likewise make great Progress in the Iron Manufactory, and tho their Edge Tools come higher, they are far superior to those imported. We have plenty of Hides for Shoe Upper Leather and Saddler Leather … Shoemakers we have in plenty, as well as Saddlers and chaisemakers. Many other Articles are made among us, but why should this give any Jealousy to Britain. … For it must not be forgot that our Trade to the Spanish and French West Indies was laid under the severest Restrictions, and the Spanish Ships were even prevented laying out their Money in our Ports. O wise Grenville!”

“To this miserable and discontented Situation,” the author continued, “were we reduced about the year 1765 and in November the ever odious and memorable Stamp Act was to take Place, which we look’d upon as equally inexpedient and illegal and which never could have been carried into Execution” for want of the money to pay for the stamps, especially given the number of lawsuits then in progress. Only near the end of his missive does the author mention “the Arguments in the Farmers Letters, which we deduced from sound Whig Principles,” before railing against British customs officers again, especially the way that they “riot in Pomp amidst our Distress.”

“Tho we object to unconstitutional Taxes,” the author continued, “we have always willingly submitted to those levied by our own Assemblies and it is well known how cheerfully in fact we mortgaged both our real and personal Estates during the late War, and to this Day a heavy annual Tax continues on our Lands, live Stocks, personal Estates, Servants, Negroes, Batchelors & Mills, Forges &c. ~~ All these Taxes are raised, managed and applied at a most triffling Expence. how different is the practice in Britain?” In other words, the colonists rebelled not at the level of Stamp tax but at the inefficient mode employed. 

The author implies that all those difficulties – little money, low land prices, high interest rates, numerous sheriff sales, and little interest in trade but much in manufacturing or moving to the frontier -- remained at the time of writing, a fact that Michener and I can also document from numerous other primary sources. Conditions improved a little when southern Europe needed American grain but sank again due to improved harvests there and the 1773 credit crunch.

In short, the long-held belief that colonial resistance was more ideological than economic in nature must be reversed. The Stamp Act was the straw that broke the camel’s back, a bridge too far, a marginal shock that threatened the colonists’ existence.

            Many other formative events of American Identity beg for reconsideration given the findings of economic historians over the last few decades. A very promising avenue is to examine the geographical and socioeconomic dispersion of federal bondholders. I found in my 2008 book One Nation Under Debt that Hamilton’s claim that the national debt would cement the Union was quite credible for the 1790s but the role of federal bond ownership, or rather the lack thereof, in the Hartford Convention, the Nullification Crisis, and Civil War remain unexamined, though the requisite primary sources exist.

            I could go on, but am out of my allotted time. Thank you!

The Big, Bad Natural Catastrophe Wolf

The fable of the three little pigs and the big, bad wolf can serve as a metaphor to help us to understand how better to mitigate climate risks.

In most of its many iterations, each of three little pigs make themselves homes, one of straw, one of sticks, and one of bricks. The big, bad wolf huffs, puffs, and blows the first two down but he cannot destroy the third.

Most Americans today follow the example of the second pig, building their homes with 2 by 4 “sticks.” They ain’t cheap but prove no match for the big, bad national disaster wolf, who sometimes blows the houses down (derechos, hurricanes, tornadoes), sometimes burns them down (wildfires), sometimes floods them out (avalanches, floods, mudslides), and sometimes swallows them whole (earthquakes, sinkholes). 

Time was, many Americans who lived in areas frequented by natural disaster wolves followed the example of the first pig, living light and cheap in trailers or “shacks.” They often suffered complete losses but if the wolf didn’t kill them, they recovered because they hadn’t invested much.

The third pig seems like the smart one but not every little pig can afford to make its house impervious to the entire pack of natural disaster wolves. And if a wolf doesn’t appear, pig three looks foolish because it could have consumed more or invested in something else instead of those under used bricks.

In a perfect, fairytale world, the little pigs would be able to buy wolf insurance at a price representing the risk that a particular wolf would appear. They could still self-insure by building with straw or brick if they wanted, but they could also build with sticks and, most importantly, get price signals on what type of stick house to build.

If the flood wolf is the biggest threat, the insurance premium would be lowest for a stick house on stilts not too close to any body of water. If the fire wolf is likely to come around, the premium would be highest for a stick house built like a cub scout tinder bundle (as many in southern California are). In the territory of the huff and puff wolf, a house with a robust roof tied to structural footers would have a lower premium than a house with an asphalt shingle roof near the end of its service life.

To ensure that the little pigs paid sufficient attention to the state of their stick homes, insurance contracts in fairytale land would say they have to pay some of the costs of any damage the wolf might cause.

America never had a perfect fairytale insurance system, but it long had one where premiums pretty closely reflected risks, and insureds and insurers both suffered when the big, bad wolf came around. The availability of actuarially fair insurance explains why so many Americans built stick homes.

The problem is that America’s insurance system degraded into a nightmare for insurers and homeowners, especially those in low-risk areas. Due to regulations, premiums on houses in many risky areas are too low. Because regulated premiums often subsidize risk-taking, few build with straw or brick anymore. Worse, many build stick houses of the wrong type, in the wrong places, and do nothing to mitigate risks. They know that if the wolf does its worst, regulators will either force insurers to make them whole or public or private assistance will do so.

Meanwhile, the little pigs who built out of sticks correctly or who live where wolves seldom roam suffer. Their risks remain the same but their premiums increase faster than inflation, or their day-to-day claims face unexpected scrutiny, because their insurers have big bills due to California’s wildfires or Florida’s hurricanes.

Because of the problems in the insurance market, some Americans can no longer afford a mortgage and the mandatory insurance that goes along with it. Insurance costs are also reflected in rents so there can be no American Dream or affordable housing without property insurance reforms.

Beyond the Quotidian: The Real-World Impact of Economic Analysis

 Individuals or small teams can move markets or persuade policymakers with incisive economic analysis.

Economic analysis melds models, data, and experience to prognosticate broad market movements or to steer policy discussions. It is empirical but not exclusively quantitative, giving both numbers and words their due weight. It synthesizes large swathes of information while searching for big picture patterns that can help businesses, investors, or policymakers to foresee the next big crisis or innovation before it overwhelms positions outflanked by an inherently volatile world.

Economic analysis differs from financial price data dissemination and post-market narration, which date from the 16^th century. It offers less precise predictions than forecasting, which in modern form began in the 1920s, because it tries to capture sea changes, not middle run trends or short-term fluctuations. Its scope far exceeds that of securities or even industry analysis.

Warren Buffett and Alan Greenspan both exemplify the power of economic analysis. The former made billions for stockholders through extensive reading and contemplation rather than relying on technical signals or trading hunches. The latter’s understanding of macroeconomy conditions proved largely ineffable but almost infallible as he guided U.S. monetary policy for the almost two decades now called The Great Moderation.

This post surveys three older but no less important economic analyses, Economist editor Walter Bagehot’s (1826-1877) lender of last resort rule, Brian Anderson’s (1886-1949) case for free trade in the Chase Economic Bulletin at the apex of American protectionism, and Wilma Soss’s (1900-1986) empirically based campaign to put women on the board of directors of America’s largest corporations.

Bagehot (pronounced badge ut), longtime editor of The Economist, explicated the lender of last resort trigger rule employed by the Bank of England during the periodic financial crises that struck the City of London in the Victorian Age. Sometimes called Bagehot’s Dictum, the rule, laid bare by Bagehot in his 1873 book Lombard Street, stated that to stave off panic and contagion central banks should lend freely to all borrowers with sufficient collateral at a rate of interest high relative to pre-panic levels.

Implemented but left unarticulated by U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton (1757? - 1804) during financial panics in 1791 and 1792, Bagehot’s Rule ensured that solvent firms could borrow from the central bank when needed but had incentive to do so only when no private lender would provide better terms. The collateral requirements minimized moral hazard while also protecting the central bank from losses. In the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, central bankers, including the Fed’s Brian F. Madigan, pointed to the continued overall usefulness of Bagehot’s Rule when “interpreted in the context of the modern structure of financial markets and institutions.”

A Ph.D. economist, Anderson wrote economic analyses for the Chase Economic Bulletin for much of the 1920s and 1930s. One of his themes was that America thrived due to trade, not tariffs. Policymakers ignored his analysis until America’s high tariff regime exacerbated the Great Depression and helped foment the Second World War. As nineteenth century French political economist Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850) put it, “Barriers result in isolation; isolation gives rise to hatred; hatred, to war; war, to invasion.”

Especially relevant for policy discussions today, Anderson warned against what he termed “the balance of trade bogey.” Americans fetishized a “favorable balance of trade,” but “the fear” of imports, he explained, “is an idle one” because “Europe will not merely send us goods, but will also provide us with funds with which to pay for them.” “A rich capitalist country,” he concluded, “can afford to import more than it exports.”

Financial journalist and notorious corporate gadfly Soss used her weekly NBC radio show, Pocketbook News, to push for corporate governance reforms like cumulative voting and independent audits.

Importantly, Soss leveraged her empirical studies of widespread female stockownership to induce many major U.S. corporations in the 1950s, 60s and 70s to put qualified women, like Alice E. Crawford of the Corn Exchange Bank, on their boards. Women remain underrepresented in C-suites but, thanks in large part to Soss’s trenchant analysis and promotional efforts, female directors are no longer anomalies.   

Economic analyses require information acquisition but also the ability to process data and news as rationally as possible given the natural constraints of the human brain. Many of the best models are mental, incapable of being explicitly shared because they form from embodied human capital, or what was once known as wisdom.

To gain an edge over competitors, economic analysts think opportunistically and flexibly, like a fox, hunter, or natural intelligence, not in well-worn rows, like a hedgehog, farmer, or artificial intelligence. Like Anderson, Bagehot, Buffett, Greenspan, and Soss, the best economic analysts read widely and critically, selecting readings based on their perspicacity rather than reputation or popularity. Then, they write.

There’s a Long, Unsuccessful History of Presidential Trade Power

 NB: This should have gone up a week ago. Each part has subsequently been scooped. But I think it still offers a unique perspective overall.

There’s a Long, Unsuccessful History of Presidential Trade Power

by Robert E. Wright

Trump isn’t the first president to test the limits of the post-war free trade consensus.

Presidents Nixon, Carter, Reagan, and others also fiddled with U.S. trade policy even though Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution clearly vests Congress, not the president, with the power to “regulate commerce with foreign nations” and to “lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises.”

We’re going to tell you when and why presidents received limited but unilateral authority to impose tariffs, quotas, and non-tariff barriers (NTBs) and show that their efforts have proven of limited duration and effect, at most slowing inevitable shifts in international commerce rooted in comparative advantage and relative factor prices, especially labor and other input costs.

In 1934, Congress temporarily delegated President Franklin Roosevelt limited authority to negotiate bilateral tariff reductions – which were sky high due to the Fordney-McCumber and Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1922 and 1930 -- in the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act (RTAA). From its passage until 1939, the RTAA led to trade agreements with 19 countries. Although World War II muted the effects of those agreements, the claim of some political scientists that presidents would prove more amenable to free trade than Congress seemed empirically vindicated.

It turns out, though, that presidents, like Congress, will respond to political pressures to try to save industries and jobs from international competition.

President Richard Nixon’s (R, 1969-1974) 1971 use of the Emergency Banking Act of 1933 to impose short-lived 10% tariffs as part of his New Economic Policy provides our first example of the limited and short-lived effects of presidential trade tinkering.

Fearful that his decision to end dollar convertibility -- the lynchpin of the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate regime -- to protect the government’s dwindling gold reserves amid a growing trade deficit would spur yet higher levels of unemployment and inflation, Nixon tried to bolster the falling dollar, discourage imports, and encourage exports and domestic production by imposing tariffs and implementing domestic rent, wage, and product price controls.

The Nixon Shock triggered shortages and, as the accompanying chart shows, did not reverse the long-term decline in the country’s trade balance, a largely meaningless national accounting construct in any event.

Legislators and other policymakers, though, remained confident that presidents would use their power to reduce trade barriers rather than increase them, except in times of crisis or war. The 1962 Trade Expansion Act, the Trade Act of 1974, and the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA, 91 Stat. 1625) resulted.

In 1977, President Jimmy Carter (D, 1977-81), pressured by labor unions, used the 1974 act to negotiate Orderly Marketing Arrangements designed to protect American shoe and color TV manufacturing jobs from lower wage east Asian competitors.

To cover himself politically with free traders, Carter labeled those de facto quotas “free but fair trade.” President Trump has used similar phrases. The measures failed to re-elect Carter or to protect those industries, domestic production in which has been nearly nil since the 1990s, from the long-term effects of foreign competition.

Due to a big drop in domestic steel production in 1977, Carter also imposed a reference price system or “trigger price mechanism” on Japanese steel producers, effectively putting a floor on the import price of many steel products from 1978 until 1982.

As the accompanying chart shows, U.S. raw steel production indeed rebounded under Carter’s order but never again reached its historical highs because American steel producers continued to face higher input costs than foreign competitors.

In his first term (2017-21), President Donald Trump (R) leveraged provisions of the 1962 and 1974 trade acts to impose tariffs on solar panels, washing machines, steel, and aluminum. Their prices increased but domestic production hardly soared. Steel production has been below its 2017 level since January 2022 and Nippon Steel just bought US Steel.

As the chart below shows, domestic aluminum production is also lower today than in 2017.

 

Trump’s tinkering may have slowed the decline of protected industries but it certainly did not transform the U.S. economy or overcome the logic of comparative advantage and mutually beneficial trade. Even his tariff on Chinese imports had less effect than reported as workarounds like the de minimis customs exception were exploited.

In his second term, therefore, Trump declared an emergency to invoke IEEPA, which grants considerably more policy power. Unless Congress intercedes, ongoing court battles will determine just how much trade power Trump and future presidents will possess.