Public Choice Under Fire

The recent publication of Duke historian Nancy MacLean's book entitled "Democracy in Chains" has caused quite a stir among economists interested in public choice and political economy. Having read several positive and negative (links to the many positive and negative reviews and commentary can be found in the updates to this post) reviews and comments on the book, it's clear to me that MacLean's thesis is something like the following: James Buchanan (Nobel Laureate in economics, 1986) along with this colleagues developed a school of economic thought (public choice) with the express intention to undermine democratic institutions in the U.S. to benefit the wealth interests that funded them. Also, as a man from the south, Buchanan was motivated by racism and based his ideas on the thought of other racist scholars.

Aside from the accusations of racism, the substantive critique made clear in the title strikes me as odd. What does it mean to put democracy "in chains?" Does making clear, in a scientific way, the limits of collective decision making put democracy "in chains" or does it allow us to determine what set of underlying institutions provides for the best set of laws?

The normative aspects of public choice are, in my mind, about the latter. The descriptive analysis of the inefficiencies in our actions as politicians, bureaucrats, lobbyists, political interest groups, voters, etc. helps us understand the characteristics of institutions that might limit such inefficiencies. We have, for instance, minority protections in the constitution precisely because a democratic majority might harm them.

MacLean insistst, for example, that libertarians long ago opposed Brown v. Board of Education. In fact, the source she cites comes to precisely the opposite conclusion. Further, Brown is a good example of a minority protection that restricts the will of the majority. If it is "unchained" majority rule that MacLean praises, she should oppose the Brown decision because it explicitly ensured that a problematic majority-rule decision was corrected.

There are, it seems, many other problems with MacLean's book, but her insistence that public choice economics is a tool for the powerful is obviously off base.

Does Public Choice Describe Political Reality?

by Levi Russell

Ben Southwood, Head of Research at the Adam Smith Institute, recently wrote a piece for Jacobite Magazine in which he argues against the applicability of public choice theory to politics in Western democracies. Below I quote Southwood at length and explain in detail where I think his analysis goes wrong. The overarching theme is this: Southwood seems to think (erroneously) that public choice is about ill intent or corruption on the part of politcians. In fact, it is merely about the application of rational, individual choice frameworks of economics to the study of politics. Politicians may have the best of intentions, but the limitations of collective action and opportunities to maximize their own benefit (as we all try to do, even if that sometimes entails benefiting others we care about or with whose interests ours align) in the political sphere lead them to act in ways that are inconsistent with an idealized view of politics.

In his description of public choice, Southwood starts off well, but understates the predictive power of public choice theory.

Public choice is true on the margin—that is: people’s actions in politics and government tend to be affected by self-interest—but if you predicted what people did using only or mainly public choice you’d get it wrong nearly every time, at least in the modern West.

In fact, public choice theory can predict the actions taken by politicians, bureaucrats, and voters well, if not perfectly. Politicians may have altruistic motives, but they cannot effectuate their agendas without acting in ways described by public choice theory. Southwood's first example is voting:

Start with voting. Voting is an extremely widespread behavior in Western societies. A third or two fifths of adults will turn out even for the most trivial local elections. Eighty per cent might turn out for a major contest. But public choice cannot explain this.

Your vote has a tiny influence on the outcome of most elections. The chance of an individual voter deciding an American presidential election is about one in sixty million (ranging from one in ten million in some swing states to about one in a billion in Texas or California). If you only care about the election’s impact on your own personal prospects, then the election would need to be worth about a billion dollars to you personally. Elections often make trillions of dollars worth of difference overall, but rarely more than thousands or hundreds to individuals or their families.

This is a complete misunderstanding of public choice theory on voting. The cost-benefit analysis of voting for an individual is straightforward if we account for the social dimesion. People turn out to vote because they and their peer group believe it is part of their civic duty. The cost of voting is small relative to the benefit of signaling to one's peer group that we care about our civic duty. The fact that an individual vote is highly unlikely to affect an election simply doesn't matter.

Southwood goes on:

In public choice theory politicians stand for elected office not in order to enact a program, based on their views and convictions, but in order to maximize their personal power. To do so, they maximize votes at elections. This claim is also a familiar conventional wisdom to the point of cliche: politicians are unprincipled schemers who will do anything for votes.

There's a lot to unpack here. The first sentence gives the impression that politicians' desire to enact a program "based on their views and convictions" precludes their intent to maximize personal power. On the contrary, the former is dependent on the latter! Immediately after their elections, presidents and prime ministers are often said to have a "strong mandate" if they win more votes than expected. This "mandate" is said to give them political leverage to implement their agendas. All of this is orthogonal to their status as "unprincipled schemers who will do anything for votes." They may be unprincipled schemers, or they may be very well-meaning people. The fact is, if they want to implement the policies they think best, they have to work the system. The idea that politicians are evil might be a popular shorthand for public choice theory, but it doesn't represent the theory itself.

Southwood continues:

Public choice also predicts that officials are easily lobbied: they can be bought by rent-seeking special interests. But the literature is almost unequivocal: the source of campaign funds makes little difference to campaigns or policies. The fact that the decisions politicians make affect how trillions of dollars are spent, and yet firms spend figures in the low billions on elections caused a famous economics paper to ask “Why is there so little money in US politics“?

Again, Southwood starts off fine. Campaign donations, lobbying, and the revolving door more generally are all ways certain interest groups can influence politicians. The literature, specifically the paper he cites, does find that campaign donations only influence legislators' votes in some cases. However, this doesn't include lobbying and other rent seeking behavior. There is a revealed preference component here; even if interest groups are not "buying votes" with campaign funds or lobbying firm fees, they apparently see some value in spending several billion dollars per year (at the federal level) on it. We can't observe a counterfactual world in which there is no "money in politics," so it's difficult to know precisely how much impact campaign funds and lobbying have on legislator's behavior. Finally, there is a point to be made here about marginalism. It's true the US federal budget is in the trillions. However, the votes held in any single legislature will only affect this budget at the margins, not halving or doubling the budget year to year.

Public choice is fundamentally not about corruption or other criminal behavior; it's simply economics applied to political problems. Oftentimes, it's about incentive and information problems specific to the political world that result from the constraints we face in human interaction. Regulation can indirectly benefit special interests incentivizing rent seeking behavior, some laws can give politicians the power to benefit themselves personally, and arbitrary enforcement can create confusion and uncertainty. Even popular and well-meaning politicians understand the poor incentives they sometimes face.

Boetkke on Buchanan

by Levi Russell

I've enjoyed reading every bit of George Mason University economist Peter Boettke's work that I've had the time to read in the past several years. His work is very interesting in part because he addresses issues most of us don't spend a lot of time on. In this post, I reproduce some of my favorite quotes from a recent speech Boettke gave. The speech focuses on Jim Buchanan's perspective on economics generally and political economy specifically. As usual, I suggest you read the whole speech, as it is very good and very short.

The problem as Buchanan sees it is that economics as a discipline has a public purpose, but modern economists have shirked on that purpose and yet are still being rewarded as if they were earnestly working to meet their educational obligation. As he put it:“I have often argued that there is only one ‘principle’ in economics that is worth stressing, and that the economist’s didactic function is one of conveying some understanding of this principle to the public at large. Apart from this principle, there would be no general basis for general public support for economics as a legitimate academic discipline, no place for ‘economics’ as an appropriate part of a ‘liberal’ educational curriculum. I refer, of course, to the principle of the spontaneous order of the market, which was the great intellectual discovery of the eighteenth century” (1977 [2000]: 96).

Prices serve this guiding role, profits lure them, losses discipline them, and all of that is made possible due to an institutional environment of property, contract and consent. These are the basic principles from which we work in economics. Important to note, economic analysis relies neither on any notion of hyper rational actors myopically concerned with maximizing monetary rewards, nor on postulating perfectly competitive markets. It relies simply on the notion that fallible yet capable human beings are striving to better their situation, and in so doing enter into exchange relations with others. Atomistic individualism and mechanistic notions of the market is, as Buchanan has stressed, nonsensical social science.

From a Buchanan perspective, basic economics can be conveyed in 8 points.
1.Economics is a "science" but not like the physical sciences. Economics is a "philosophical" science and the strictures against scientism offered by Frank Knight and F. A. Hayek should be heeded.
2. Economics is about choice and processes of adjustment, not states of rest.Equilibrium models are only useful when we recognize their limits.
3. Economics is about exchange, not about maximizing. Exchange activity and arbitrage should be the central focus of economic analysis.
4. Economics is about individual actors, not collective entities. Only individuals choose.
5. Economics is about a game played within rules.
6. Economics cannot be studied properly outside of politics. The choices among different rules of the game cannot be ignored.
7. The most important function of economics as a discipline is its didactic role in explaining the principle of spontaneous order.
8. Economic [sic] is elementary.

Review of Sunstein's Latest Book

by Levi Russell

I came across a review of Cass Sunstein's latest book The Ethics of Influence: Government in the Age of Behavioral Science by Michael D. Thomas in Public Choice. It's a great review that provides a succinct summary of each chapter. Since I'm often critical of Sunstein's "nudge" theory, I thought I'd share the last few paragraphs of the review. The review itself is, unfortunately, behind a paywall.

The Ethics of Influence appeals to the reader interested in the scope of government. It challenges Buchanan’s (2004) response to Warren Samuels about the “status of the status quo”. One could respond to Sunstein’s analysis by adding Buchanan’s observation that pure rent seeking results when the status quo is simply one among many possible outcomes. Another view would be that the status quo emerges tacitly over time. Here a defense of customary and common law could include writings by Hasnas (1995) on the emergence of law.

In dealing with Sunstein’s treatment of Hayek, it is important to respond not only to the explicit claims about how emergent law works, but also to his characterization of Mill’s harm principle. This is where public choice must defend the epistemic argument in Mill. The individual is not justified because he is a rational chooser, as Sunstein puts it. Instead, Mill says, “Men are not more zealous for truth than they often are for error…” (2009, p. 31). Multiple choosing groups do not preserve the truth, but the possibility for recovering lost truths. Readers might incorporate theories of discovery here, such as those developed by Kirzner (1985). Sunstein’s choice architects, on the other hand, form law through the inclusion of popular sentiment which reduces competing truth claims to one.

Since this book was published before the most recent presidential election, one wonders if such a view is weakened by the dramatic shift in popular sentiment and large changes in policy. Public choice concerns over who wields the power of this ever increasing authority gain additional profile from these recent events. The Ethics of Influence is a must read because it lays out many issues that are important for the next round of debates in public choice.

A Video Primer on Public Choice

by Levi Russell

The video below is a great introduction to Public Choice economics. It's about an hour long and is delivered by Ivan Pongracic, a professor at Hillsdale College who studied under Jim Buchanan.
Here are some of the topics covered:

The Public Interest View
Precursors to Public Choice
Voting and Group Rationality
Rent Seeking
Constitutional Political Economy

At certain points, Pongracic gets a bit too ideological for my taste, but the video is still good if you ignore those bits.

A Discussion of Cost-Benefit Analysis

by Levi Russell

One of my favorite economics blogs is Cafe Hayek. Don Boudreaux, professor of economics at George Mason University, does a great job of using the economic thought of Alchian, Buchanan, Coase, Demsetz, and others to criticize popular fallacies and the perspectives of other professional economists.

Recently Boudreaux posted a couple of discussions on cost-benefit analysis. Below I reproduce key segments of these posts.

Boudreaux is clearly a fan of cost-benefit analysis, but he has a unique take on precisely who is best positioned to conduct such an analysis:

In this light, the benefit of moving consistently in the libertarian direction is that, to the extent that this movement is successful, one result is that both the number and the reliability of cost-benefit analyses increases. In the absence of the FDA and its prohibitions, each individual – with or without the consultation of his or her physician (as he or she chooses) – would make a series of personal cost-benefit analysis, throughout time, regarding various medical options.

This decentralized process of cost-benefit analyses would be on-going. Every hour of every day, each of many individuals would be doing his or her own cost-benefit analysis. And because each of these cost-benefit analysts would, unlike those who conduct cost-benefit analysis on government programs, (1) have more of his or her own money on the line, and, more significantly, (2) have his or her own health at stake, the results of these countless cost-benefit analyses would be much more reliable than are the results of unavoidably only occasional and information-thin cost-benefit analyses conducted on the overall effects of FDA policies and other government actions.

So, yes, by all means let’s have more – and more trustworthy – cost-benefit analysis. One of best means of achieving this happy result in matters of Americans’ health care is to abolish the FDA. To support the retention of the FDA – to support the retention of this agency’s current ability to prevent Americans from using whichever medical products they individually choose – is to oppose maximum possible cost-benefit analyses.

He follows that post up with another example:

Let me put this last point somewhat differently: if the income gains, from a minimum wage, captured by some people are to be counted as ‘benefits’ to be weighed against the losses of other people – and if these gains can in principle be so high relative to the losses that the minimum wage passes a cost-benefit test that then is used to support the minimum wage – then there is flung open a Pandora’s box of utilitarian horrors.

For example, someone (call him CB) might propose that the state prohibit the employment of all blacks under the age of 20. CB would correctly point out that, while his policy would obviously have some losers, it would also produce winners – namely, the wages of non-black, mostly young workers will increase as a result. And he’d be correct. I can also imagine that, in reality, the measured increase in the aggregate pay of this policy’s winners would be larger than the measured decrease in the aggregate pay of its losers (especially if we confine “losers” only to the black teenagers who lose jobs). Yet who would counsel that we should, therefore, withhold judgment on CB’s proposed policy until a cost-benefit analysis is conducted? Who would think it to be “libertarian” or “one-sided” or “unscientific” to prejudge as unacceptable a policy of prohibiting the employment of blacks under the age of 20?

Here are a couple of related short posts:

This one, by Jon Murphy, one of Boudreaux's PhD students, tackles the issue of aggregation in cost-benefit analysis. Another by Roger Meiners at the Property and Environment Research Center examines the use of cost-benefit analysis by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Is Corruption an Issue in Antitrust?

by Levi Russell

Antitrust has been a big issue in agriculture recently. The Bayer-Monsanto merger, the dairy industry settlement last year, and a relatively new suit regarding chicken price fixing have been consistently making headlines. Here at FH, I've been critical of the standard perspective on market contestability (here and here) and the tension between economic regulation and antitrust policy. In this article on the Stigler Center's blog, William Shughart applies public choice theory to antitrust enforcement. His basic point is that antitrust enforcement is just as susceptible to capture as other forms of regulation. Below are some excerpts, but I definitely encourage you to read the whole piece. It's pretty short.

Standing on the shoulders of at least one giant, my former colleague and frequent co-author the late Robert Tollison, I laid out the special interest group basis of antitrust in Antitrust Policy and Interest-Group Politics (Quorum, 1990). That book documented the political pressures brought to bear on antitrust law enforcers, including those of congressional oversight committees and the competitors of antitrust defendants, that shape enforcement outcomes at every stage of the process. The rent-seeking and rent-defending efforts of the parties involved in both public and private antitrust lawsuits are consistent with Olson’s Logic. The antitrust authorities, no less than regulatory authorities, are vulnerable to capture by the collective interests of groups having the most salient stakes in antitrust law enforcement outcomes.

It is tempting to think that antitrust law enforcers—and the judges who rule on such matters—are immune from the self-interested motivations of ordinary mortals, that the parties involved look only to the “public’s interest” by protecting consumers from the depredations of profit-seeking business enterprises. A review of more than a century of the actual practices of applying the relevant laws points in the opposite direction.

Antitrust is economic regulation and, as such, is amenable to scholarly evaluations of it within the same analytical framework. If not, scholars will continue to bemoan antitrust’s failures rather than seeing them as the predicable outcomes of an understandable political process, helping to explain the secular rise and fall of activist intervention against mergers and the behaviors of so-called dominant firms both at home and abroad.3)

Antitrust bureaucrats, judges and the parties who can bring the laws to bear to their own benefit are rational actors, not Madison’s fictional angels able to shed their parochial interests in the courtroom. The evidence is clear. Chicago School scholars, if anyone, should take off their rose-colored glasses.

The Nirvana Fallacy in Healthcare Economics

by Levi Russell

RegBlog, a great source for regulatory info, published an opinion piece about three weeks ago by Allison Hoffman. a law professor, on the potential for an Obamacare rollback by Republicans. Reading the essay, I recognized several errors of economic logic that I thought I'd point out here. I'm not an expert in this field, but I'm a firm believer that the economic way of thinking properly applied can provide much-needed clarity. As with any other post on FH, I invite others to correct me on any of the following if I miss something important.

The first two-thirds of the post is essentially an exercise in Harold Demsetz's Nirvana Fallacy. Yes, of course people could have more accurate information about treatments and could do a better job choosing good doctors. Does that mean the government should step in? Of course people are generally healthier when they don't pay the marginal cost of care; the cost/benefit calculus is skewed by the fact that the cost is near zero. Of course diseases are caused, to some degree, by things outside of our control. Does that imply the government can control those things or can necessarily make better decisions than we can?

Professor Hoffman then takes on a few individual proposals. She acknowledges that health savings accounts (HSAs) benefit some people, but complains that they are only beneficial for those with "surplus income." Her lack of a concrete example exposes the flaw in her critique. Suppose you are faced with two options for employer-provided healthcare: (1) a traditional "insurance" plan with a premium of $500 monthly and copays for doctor visits or (2) a catastrophic plan with a premium of $200 and an HSA with a contribution match up to $3,000 per year. The HSA allows you to save money for later when your monthly expenditures are lower than what you save. Comparing the two, it's trivial to point out that if I choose (2) I have $300 in "surplus income" to put into the savings account (plus the match!). Certainly some people don't have employer-provided health insurance, but the ACA was quickly making such policies tremendously expensive.

Hoffman later discusses tax credits, tax deductions, and other premium support programs proposed by Republicans. She criticizes one plan that would give a $2,100 tax credit to anyone between the ages of 35 and 50 for medical costs. Her criticism is that this credit would not cover a Bronze ACA plan which costs $4,200 per year. Assuming her figures are correct, this criticism seems empty to me. The credit would probably work well for a lot of people (especially those with low incomes) in scenario 2 above. The fact that it doesn't work with a choice-limiting, 3rd party payer program like the ACA isn't necessarily proof that the tax credit is bad. Perhaps it means choice-limiting 3rd party payer programs are inefficient.

Finally, Professor Hoffman criticizes reform proposals on the basis that the vouchers, credits, or deductions will grow at a rate at or below inflation, which is below historic rates of growth of healthcare costs. Unlike many, many other goods and services (even those produced in "non-contestable" industries), those that are heavily subsidized by the government like education and healthcare increase in cost much more rapidly than inflation. It's possible that reducing the government's role in healthcare will make that industry operate more like other industries, thus lowering costs. I'm sure there are reasons to think otherwise, but federal and state governments have had a lot of control over healthcare markets for at least 7 decades. Perhaps we should try something different.

How Do We Fix Rent Seeking?

by Levi Russell

Over at the ProMarket blog, Asher Schechter summarizes some key arguments made at the recent ASSA meetings on rent seeking, antitrust enforcement, and inequality. The post is quite long (for a blog), so I'll just comment on some key paragraphs and leave the rest to the interested reader.

“In all areas of economics, the rules of the game are critical—that is emphasized by the fact that similar economics [sic] exhibit markedly different patterns of distribution, market income, and after tax and transfers income. This is especially so in an innovation economy, because innovation gives rise to rents—both from IPR and monopoly power. Who receives those rents is a matter of policy, and changes in the IPR [Intellectual Property Rights] regime have led to greater rents without having any effects on the pace of innovation,” said Stigltz.

 Stiglitz's complaint about rents from innovation is telling. As I've discussed previously here at FH, if we take a dynamic view of competition, the rents (i.e. profits in excess of all costs) from innovation are merely an inducement to continue innovating. The value of the innovations themselves are still determined by the consumer and the "monopolist" is still incentivized to create what the public wants.

So, taking his last claim at face value, what would explain increasing profits to innovators without concomitant increases in innovation? I don't buy the intellectual property argument. More likely, it's the seemingly unceasing increase in regulation in so many industries. It explains reductions in the pace of innovation because it restricts entrepreneurs from doing what they believe is best for customers. It explains increasing profits because it keeps out new entrants and potentially pushes out smaller competitors.

Both Stiglitz and Deaton agreed that tougher antitrust enforcement is “incredibly important” in reducing inequality (an argument that was explored at length in ProMarket as well), rejecting claims that diminishing the role of government and regulation is the key.

What to do about increasing concentration? Ramp up antitrust enforcement, of course! The problem here is that a move back to the old ways of measuring market power, namely concentration indices, don't accurately capture market power. The work of Israel Kirzner, Harold Demsetz, and William Baumol bear this out. Stiglitz and Deaton seem to want more (or at the very least, not less) regulation, and more antitrust enforcement. The problem is that regulation creates barriers to entry that enhance market power of incumbents!

Campaign finance reform, he said, “would reduce the current selection of Representatives and Senators who are beholden to deep pockets. It’s hard to be elected to Congress or to stay elected without support from well funded interest, and that’s as true in recent years for the Democrats as for Republicans. Congressmen and Congresswomen are the farm team for K-Street.”

Another phrase for "campaign finance reform" is "abridgement of the first amendment." If we're concerned about the power of K Street Lobbyists (and I think we should be), it seems reasonable to address them directly, rather than through potentially damaging the freedom of political speech. If you want to reduce K Street's influence, the most direct way to do so is to reduce the scale and scope of power of the administrative bureaucracy and the legislature.

I'd love to hear readers' thoughts on these selections or on any other topic discussed in the article linked above!

Entry Regulation - Public Interest or Public Choice?

by Levi Russell

Don Boudreaux at his Cafe Hayek Blog points to a great article which comprehensively measures the effects of entry regulation - regulations associated with starting a business - that I thought I'd share.

The article does a great job explaining the three primary theoretical reasons for regulation:

1) the public interest view, which states that regulation is used by governments to correct for the many, many market failures existing in private markets

2) the public choice view, which states that regulation primarily serves politically-well-connected interest groups and that the public at large is inept to curtail these favors because of poor incentives and information problems associated with political decision making

3) another public choice view, which states that regulation benefits politicians because politicians are able to extract payments from private interests in exchange for not passing or exempting said private interests from the regulation

So what do the authors of the paper find? Here's the abstract:

We present new data on the regulation of entry of start-up firms in 85 countries. The data cover the number of procedures, official time, and official cost that a start-up must bear before it can operate legally. The official costs of entry are extremely high in most countries. Countries with heavier regulation of entry have higher corruption and larger unofficial economies, but not better quality of public or private goods. Countries with more democratic and limited governments have lighter regulation of entry. The evidence is inconsistent with the public interest theories of regulation, but supports the public choice view that entry regulation benefits politicians and bureaucrats.

The first 5 pages of the article go into a bit more depth about the three theories listed above and specifically how their analysis leads to the conclusions they draw.

Nudging the Nudgers with Better Regulatory Policy

by Levi Russell

A recent law blog post by Brian Mannix (hat tip to David Henderson for the link) discusses the significance of the Congressional Review Act (CRA) during a presidential transition period. In a nutshell, the CRA allows congress to overturn a regulation written by an agency in the executive branch with a bare majority in each house until the 60th day after it is issued. Of course, like a bill, the president can veto, in which case congress must come up with a 2/3 majority to override the veto. Given that most presidents wouldn't want to stop their own branch of government from implementing regulations, the CRA doesn't often come into play. However, since Republicans control both houses and the incoming president is a Republican, there are some interesting things that could happen given the Republicans' ostensible preference for less regulation. Mannix has some interesting examples in his post so I suggest reading it.

What interested me was a specific line in the post:

Note that the CRA mechanism is distinct from the proposed REINS Act mechanism.  Under REINS, Congress would need to approve of major regulations before they become effective; under the CRA rules become effective if Congress refrains from disapproving.

This got me thinking about behavioral economics and the idea of "nudges." An example of a nudge is a change to the rules that makes the "best" option the default. Often nudges are suggested as part of government policy, but that's not always the case. An oft-repeated example is to make 401k enrollment with your employer the default option while still providing an "opt out" opportunity for those who don't want to contribute to a 401k.

Looking again at the last sentence in the quoted text above, the REINS Act strikes me as a great example of "nudging the nudgers." That is, imposing a rule on those in the executive branch who are in charge of making and enforcing rules based on legislation. Specifically, the REINS Act would make the default position "no new regulations" and only those that passed additional scrutiny by elected representatives would actually be issued. I argue that, at least potentially, the REINS Act would lead to better regulation for a couple of reasons:

1) There would be more oversight by elected representatives of the regulatory process than there is currently.

2) Massive regulations like those written based on Dodd-Frank or the Affordable Care Act would probably be issued more slowly since the regulations would have to be approved by Congress. This would give us a chance to see how the initial regulations actually play out rather than relying on speculative cost/benefit analysis (side note - most regulations aren't subjected to cost/benefit analysis anyway).

Additionally, the REINS Act could reduce the problem of passing on more authority to the executive branch than it was designed to have. This problem arises when Congress passes a very general bill (which is more likely to garner enough votes to pass than a very narrowly-written bill) empowering the executive branch's bureaucracy to write regulations that are less likely to be in line with the will of the people.

The REINS Act was passed in the House last year and is currently sitting in the Senate. It would be great to see more discussion of this bill, but perhaps I just missed it. I'd love to read your thoughts in the comments below!

Bonus: Here's a great article on "nudging the nudgers."

Note that the CRA mechanism is distinct from the proposed REINS Act mechanism.  Under REINS, Congress would need to approve of major regulations before they become effective; under the CRA rules become effective if Congress refrains from disapproving. - See more at: http://www.libertylawsite.org/2016/11/17/midnight-mulligan-the-congressional-review-act-rides-again/#sthash.dJwa6OFY.dpuf

Ignoring Positive Externalities

by Levi Russell

Recently ag economist Jayson Lusk visited UGA to speak on the future of food and the "food movement." One great point he made is that food is quite abundant now relative to any time in the past, and yet there is a very lucrative book and movie industry built around concerns with our food supply. Certainly our food system is far from perfect, but absolute poverty on a global scale has been curtailed dramatically.

A question from the audience particularly interested me: what about externalities related to our current food production methods such as pollution? Lusk's answer was very good. He acknowledged the existence of both negative and positive externalities in food production. He went on to state that both should be considered when designing policy. It certainly seems to me that a lot of attention is paid to the negative externalities associated with food production in the policy world and in the economics profession; relatively little attention is paid to measuring the positive externalities such as the fact that on average Americans spend only about 10% of their disposable income on food and are free to pursue all sorts of other interests.

This discussion reminded me of a paper I read awhile back. It's ungated, and I encourage you to read it if you're interested in this stuff. Here's the abstract:

This paper criticizes the treatment of externalities presented in modern undergraduate economic textbooks. Despite a tremendous scholarly push-back since 1920 to Pigou’s path-breaking writings, modern textbook authors fail to synthesize important critiques and extensions of externality theory and policy, especially those spawned by Coase. The typical textbook treatment: 1) makes no distinction between pecuniary and technological externalities; 2) is silent about the invisible hand’s unintended and emergent consequences as a positive externality; 3) overemphasizes negative externalities over positive ones; 4) ignores Coase’s critique of Pigouvian tax “solutions;” and 5) ignores the potential relevance of inframarginal external benefits in discussions of policy “solutions” to negative externalities. Aside from presentations of “The Coase Theorem” excerpted from only 4 pages of Coase’s voluminous writings, it is as though the typical textbook author slept through nearly a century of scholarly critique of Pigou.

Can Plows Create Mountain Ranges?

by Levi Russell

According to the EPA, the Clean Water Act does not require a permit for normal agricultural practices including the following:

Normal farming, silviculture, and ranching practices. Those activities include plowing, seeding, cultivating, minor drainage, and harvesting for production of food, fiber, and forest products.

Upland soil and water conservation practices.

Agricultural stormwater discharges.

Return flows from irrigated agriculture.

Construction and maintenance of farm or stock ponds or irrigation ditches on dry land.

Maintenance of drainage ditches.

Construction or maintenance of farm, forest, and temporary mining roads.

That sounds pretty comprehensive to me, but the EPA and US Army Corps of Engineers has apparently decided to circumvent their own rule. A report released by the Majority Staff of the Senate Committee on Environmental and Public Works claims that

Landowners will not be able to rely on current statutory exemptions or the new regulatory exemptions because the agencies have narrowed the exemptions in practice and simply regulate under another name.  For example, if activity takes place on land that is wet: 
- plowing to shallow depths is not exempt when the Corps calls the soil between furrows “mini mountain ranges,” “uplands,” and “dry land;”
- discing is regulated even though it is a type of plowing;
- changing from one agricultural commodity constitutes a new use that eliminates the exemption; and 
- puddles, tire ruts, sheet flow, and standing water all can be renamed “disturbed wetlands” and regulated. 

This expansion of jurisdiction is apparently not what the EPA previously claimed it would be. If farmers are required to get permits to cultivate the soil, I'd bet on a couple of things:
1) the average farm size will grow dramatically as smaller farmers go out of business very quickly;
2) food prices will rise, or will fall more slowly than they otherwise would.

I doubt the average person looking at this situation would call those outcomes "good" but they're highly likely in my opinion. As Public Choice theory indicates, the EPA is not a residual claimant with regard to its policies, so its incentives are not as well-aligned as are the owner of the typical non-monopoly firm. Further, the EPA has plenty of incentive to increase the quantity of work for its employees and lawyers. This question remains: Will the farm lobby be able to keep their exemptions?

Farmers as Environmentalists

by Levi Russell

This morning in my daily ag reading I came across an article entitled "Greens Make Green." The author lays out the case for the farmer-as-environmentalist better than I've ever seen, so I thought I'd share it here. The underlying economic argument here is that there is great incentive compatibility between farmers (who are interested in long-term profits) and environmental sustainability. Do you find it compelling? Let me know in the comments.

In truth, farmers and environmentalists should be allies. The environmental and agricultural communities have more in common than conventional wisdom might suggest. Both desire to preserve our planet and its resources for future generations. I am not shy about saying farmers are the original environmentalists.

To a person, every farmer I have ever met is driven by an ethical obligation to protect the environment. They view themselves as stewards of the land. And for good reason: Nearly all want their children and grandchildren to carry on the tradition. Cousins Scott and Tom Deardorff II reflect the common theme of sustainability that connects the past to the present and future. Founded in 1937 by patriarch and great-grandfather W. H. Deardorff, Southern California-based Deardorff Family Farms has dedicated four generations to refining its environmental craft. For nearly eight decades, the Deardorff family has been driven by the relentless pursuit of improvement, pioneering many farming practices aimed at increasing productivity while reducing their reliance on natural resources.

Today, Scott and Tom have not only embraced but expanded the family legacy of stewardship. For example, they have invested heavily in the latest water-saving technologies, including drip irrigation and state-of-the-art weather stations and soil moisture monitors. The cousins have also curtailed the use of fertilizer and pesticides on their organic vegetable farms through innovative soil fertility programs and integrated pest management systems. And they recently completed construction on a cooling and packing facility that meets the highest green building standards in the country.

Multigenerational farms like theirs are the heart and soul of agriculture in the West and across the country. They are the very embodiment of sustainability. We should be so lucky as to entrust all our natural resources to the collective care of such thoughtful stewards.

If you can't bring yourself to buy the moral argument, at least consider renting the financial one. Farmers are business owners. They are motivated by sustainable profit. Their businesses are dependent on healthy soil and clean water, both of which lead to stronger yields and higher quality products. The math is quite simple: An environmentally healthy farm can deliver sustainable profits, while land that has been abused will one day cease to produce anything. Furthermore, inputs like fertilizer and pesticides are expensive; a business that doesn't minimize operating costs won't stay in business very long. Clean air, soil, and water are all outcomes supported by environmentalists. So why do so many continue to paint farmers as the enemy?

In his farewell address, President Eisenhower famously warned the nation against "unwarranted influence .  .  . by the military-industrial complex." Today we see the maturation of an environmental-industrial complex, defined by multimillion-dollar global enterprises closely integrated with academia and government regulators implementing environmental programs.

Like a storyline out of Mad Men, environmental activists have channeled their inner Don Drapers, fomenting fear of business and industry, and of human activity generally, in order to build a database of committed donors. It is an ingenious business model, used by corporate America since the early 1920s, when Gerard Lambert stigmatized halitosis to sell Listerine. Marketers have long understood that fear is a powerful motivating tool.

Every cause needs a bad guy, a threat that must be put down. For Listerine, it was bad breath. For too many environmental organizations, farmers—cast as the pillagers of Mother Earth—have served as compelling bogeymen (typically referred to as "corporate agriculture," "industrial agriculture," or the like) to alarm the 98 percent of Americans who aren't farmers.

We are all motivated to some degree by self-interest. Farmers are motivated by the love of farming and social good that comes from providing healthy food, and they are also motivated by the desire to succeed financially. Environmental activists working in big organizations aren't all that different. There is no doubt that most choose a career based on a commitment to environmental values and a desire to do good. And there is also no doubt that another motivation, and one that is entirely defensible, is the financial reward and career security that these organizations can provide.

Unfortunately, in the public debate, it is perfectly acceptable to point to farmers' financial motivations and equally unacceptable to acknowledge the financial motivations of environmental advocates. Those in private enterprise who are targeted by the policy and political initiatives of the environmental lobby ought to be more vocal about that.

If one can acknowledge the reality that the environmental lobby is motivated not only by the values of environmentalism, but also by the financial rewards of growing a motivated donor base, one might ask whether it would benefit these organizations to ever declare a problem solved. After all, while committed donors might feel good upon hearing such an announcement, they would also have one less reason to contribute.

Nowhere was this more in evidence than during the opposition waged against Senator Dianne Feinstein's compromise California drought legislation in 2014, which culminated in a joint-letter from multiple organizations slamming her bill.

Not one to seek the ire of environmentalists, the senator candidly responded—as quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle—that they "have never been helpful to me in producing good water policy." She went on to lament, "I have not had a single constructive view from environmentalists of how to provide water when there is no snowpack."

The practice of environmental protection and the business of environmentalism are two sides of a scale. Our nation's natural resources have benefited from much that has come from the former, but today the scale is weighted too much to the latter. It is the business side of environmentalism that produces the political targeting of agriculture.

It should stop. We share a common aim: to safeguard the planet for its people, animals, and plants. Imagine how much good could be accomplished if all farmers, regardless of size, whether conventional or organic, were accepted and embraced as partners for environmental protection. Now that is a narrative I know Don Draper could sell.

Tom Nassif is president and CEO of the Western Growers Association.

Political Economy of Crop Insurance

by Levi Russell

Last week my (co-authored) article on the political economy of crop insurance in the next farm bill (coauthored with Art Barnaby of Kansas State University) was published in Choices Magazine. I thought I'd reproduce the theme overview here and link to all 4 articles for those who are interested.

The Farm Bill, passed every four or five years, is a large piece of legislation which includes agricultural, food, conservation, and rural development programs. The most recent bill, passed in 2014, made significant cuts to commodity programs and increased budgeted spending on crop insurance. This change shifts the focus of farm risk management toward crop insurance, making it an even more important part of a producer’s toolkit. Looking ahead to the next farm bill in 2018/2019, this focus on crop insurance will likely continue.

The articles in this issue anticipate three discussions surrounding crop insurance’s role in the next farm bill: the political economy of crop insurance by Barnaby and Russell, economic evaluation of crop insurance’s role in the safety net by Zacharias and Paggi, and crop insurance’s role in specialty crop agriculture by Paggi.

Barnaby and Russell examine three crop insurance alternatives which are likely to be proposed in the debate over the next farm bill:

 1. Replacing crop insurance with a free, area-based disaster program,
 2. Making modifications to existing policy which would significantly reduce support to  farmers and jeopardize the private delivery system, and
 3. Complete elimination of the safety net.

The article summarizes the political factors and their interaction with the economic effects of these proposals.

Zacharias and Paggi identify the key considerations for improving crop insurance’s role in the farm safety net. Among these are regional and commodity-specific considerations, government budget constraints, and interactions between crop insurance and other titles in the farm bill. They emphasize the importance of developing appropriate metrics for evaluating the simultaneous performance of crop insurance and commodity programs and conclude with a research agenda for examining these issues.

Paggi discusses the broader role of crop insurance as a risk management tool for specialty crop producers. Specialty crops are of interest due to the increase in specialty crops’ share of the total crop insurance liability over the last 15 years. Paggi details the connection between crop insurance and specialty crops and provides a discussion of factors affecting the future of this connection.

Finally, Woodard addresses the elasticity of demand for crop insurance issues.  This key value will determine the maximum achievable size of any cuts in USDA’s share of the crop insurance premium and still maintain a politically acceptable level of farmer participation in crop insurance needed to prevent any future ad hoc disaster program.  It is critical for policy makers to understand the impact of elasticity of demand to prevent unintended consequences by making Federal budget cuts to crop insurance.  All budget cuts are not equal so how those cuts, if any, are made is extremely important.

Given the important role of crop insurance in the future of the farm safety net, political and economic factors affecting policy decisions are particularly of interest. This issue provides a first look at the conversations policy makers, industry representatives, and academic economists will have leading up to the next farm bill.

Anti-Trust vs Regulation: The Case of Baysanto

by Levi Russell

Bayer's impending purchase of Monsanto is all over the news lately. As is typical in these situations, the conversation centers around concerns of increasing market power and monopoly profits. Regular readers might expect me to focus on the notion that industry concentration doesn't necessarily imply welfare losses, but I'm not.

It seems to me that the relationship between anti-trust legislation and regulation is an under-discussed issue in these cases. Agribusiness firms are heavily regulated by three of the most powerful regulators in the US: the FDA, the USDA, and the EPA. Many regulations function as fixed costs, implying that there are economies of scale in regulatory compliance. Thus, the greater the regulatory burden placed on firms in an industry, the greater the inducement to merge.

These regulatory economies of scale militate directly against the goals of anti-trust policy. The latter, perhaps as an unintended consequence, gives us fewer and larger firms while the latter attempts to reign in these cost-saving mergers in the name of competition. If we're going to seriously discuss regulation and anti-trust, we need to be cognizant of the interplay between them.

Of course, there are plenty of problems with the regulatory revolving door and other public choice issues to deal with as well. On this front, it seems fairly obvious that the incentive to rent-seek is positively correlated with the prize being offered. Perhaps this is an argument for less power vested in the administrative state and more power returned to the courts.

Pigovian Prices

by Levi Russell

An interesting exchange occurred last month between two economists/bloggers. Stephen Gordon, an economics professor at Université Laval in Canada, wrote a column on the concept of a carbon tax price. In it, he argues:

As the Conservatives should really know by now, market-based approaches to reducing GHG emissions are more efficient than regulations. It’s better to let households and firms make their own priorities in response to price signals instead of having them imposed by the government. And the extra upside of market-based approaches like carbon taxes or cap-and-trade is that some of the costs of the policy are transformed into government revenues that can be used to compensate vulnerable groups or even to reduce other taxes.

So it seems that Professor Gordon equates a price with a tax. Hoover Institution economist David Henderson responded, taking Gordon to task for his apparent confusion of a price with a tax.

But carbon already has a price, or, more exactly, multiple prices. Natural gas has a price; oil has a price; coal has a price. And their prices are related to the valuable carbon component of those fuels because it’s carbon that makes those fuels valuable. Just as there’s no such thing as a free lunch, carbon is not free.

So why does Professor Gordon claim that taxing carbon means “putting a price on carbon?”

I can only speculate because I don’t know him, but here’s what I’m willing to bet dollars to doughnuts on: he calls a tax a price in order to lull the reader into thinking that it’s not a tax. Later in the piece he admits that it’s a tax but in his first mention, which sets the stage, he doesn’t.

Gordon later responded:

A market price is what a consumer has to pay in order to purchase a good or service. In contrast, a tax is, er, what a consumer has to pay in order to purchase a good or service.

This is one of those cases of a distinction without a difference. Unless you’re the sort of person who reads the fine print on the pumps at the gas station, you probably don’t know what the market price of gasoline is, and even if you do, you probably don’t care — at least as far as it affects how much gasoline you buy. What really matters is the total you have to pay. So when the focus is on how carbon taxes work to reduce greenhouse gas emissions — as mine was — then there’s not much point in using up column space to make the price-tax distinction. (Although if you want to play this game, think of a carbon tax as the price governments charge for degrading a communally owned resource.)

It's interesting to note here that neither Henderson nor Gordon are getting at the fundamental difference between prices and taxes. Prices, to one degree or another, transmit information about the relative scarcity of resources. If the price of a good rises, consumers of the good are incentivized to use it more frugally while producers are incentivized to produce more of it. It doesn't really matter whether the initial cause of the price rise was a reduction in supply or an increase in demand; what matters is the incentive the price change has on behavior.

One might be tempted to argue that a tax can be used to correct market prices when they don't reflect all relevant information. Indeed, this is the Pigovian paradigm that has existed in the profession for nearly 100 years. However, there have been significant challenges to this paradigm that are, in my mind, not fully appreciated. Though Henderson doesn't make this point in his final response to Gordon, I think it gets to the heart of the matter. Perhaps a tax on carbon is a sensible policy, but to simply assume that governments can get that price right ignores the reality that information and incentive problems present in markets are not absent from governments.

Remembering Ronald Coase

by Levi Russell

The third year anniversary of Ronald Coase's death was last Friday. My Facebook and Twitter were alive with remembrances of this great economist, so I thought I'd put a few articles/videos/podcasts related to Coase for FH readers.

Though Coase is most famous for his work on transaction costs, what I find most interesting about his is his unique approach to economics in general. In the opening of this video interview, Coase says "Economics has become a theory-driven subject and I believe the approach should be empirical. You study the system as it is, understand why it works the way it does, and consider what changes could be made and what effects they would have." Coase derisively referred to abstract theoretical economics as "blackboard economics." In reading his work, the reader gets the sense that Coase is looking at the behavior of real people and trying to determine the underlying causal mechanisms. This is what makes Coase a great economist.

Here's an article on Coase that gives his background and surveys his most popular work. Here's a video featuring lectures on Coase's contributions by other well-known economists.

The video I linked to above, as well as this blog post of mine featuring Deirdre McCloskey, corrects the record on "the Coase Theorem." Speaking of my blog posts, here's another one that provides a summary of one of Coase's lesser-known, but no less fantastic, papers.

Finally, this post of mine summarizes a point by Bryan Caplan that, given his stated perspective on economic theory, I think Coase would have appreciated. It's a simple empirical observation that fundamentally challenges typical applications of standard monopoly theory.

Rent-Seeking and Regulation are Inseparable

Over at Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok links to a piece by Tim Carney on a move by the Securities and Exchange Commission to continue requiring mutual fund companies to send mostly-worthless documents to their clients. I've reproduced the Marginal Revolution post below (Carney indented, Tabarrok in italics):

Five years ago, a new quirky-sounding consumer-rights group set up shop in a sleepy corner of Capitol Hill. “Consumers for Paper Options is a group of individuals and organizations who believe paper-based communications are critically important for millions of Americans,” the group explained in a press release, “especially those who are not yet part of the online community.”

This week, Consumers for Paper Options scored a big win, according to the Wall Street Journal. Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Mary Jo White has abandoned her plan to loosen rules about the need to mail paper documents to investors in mutual funds.

Mutual funds were lobbying for more freedom when it came to mailing prospectuses — those exhaustive, bulky, trash-can-bound explanations of the contents of your fund. In short, the funds wanted to be free to make electronic delivery the default, while allowing investors to insist on paper delivery. This is an obvious common-sense reform which would save whole forests of trees.

You won’t be surprised to lean that Consumers for Paper Options is funded by paper mills, timber firms and the Envelope Manufacturers Association.

What bothers me about these stories is not the rent-seeking–that is to be expected. What bothers me is that there is a law that prescribes how mutual funds must inform their customers. Why must every aspect of commercial life be governed by a gun? And this is where I expect pushback–the mutual funds will rip us off if we don’t have these laws, blah, blah, blah. Fine, believe that if you must, but then you have no cause to complain about rent seeking. You created the conditions for its existence.

The Academic Literature on State Tax Cuts

by Levi Russell

State fiscal policy continues to be a popular issue. Some are criticizing right-leaning state governments for lowering taxes with the intention of boosting growth. These commentators point out that growth in these states has not skyrocketed. Others are criticizing left-leaning states for funding issues with their public pensions and financial problems associated with Affordable Care Act co-ops. These other commentators point out that these financial issues are not easy to solve and that a more conservative spending approach is probably warranted.

So, being an economist, I thought I'd look at the academic literature on the effects of state-level taxation on economic growth. I pulled the 5 most recent articles I could find on the subject from Google Scholar and looked at the results. Of the 5 articles (of which one examined Canadian provinces) I read, 4 showed a negative effect of state taxation on growth. One showed no effect on own-state growth, and a positive effect from other states' tax increases. I may have missed some other important analysis on this subject, but it seems to me that we can (at least provisionally) conclude that 1) it's not likely that lower taxes are harming growth at the state level and that 2) it's probably a good idea to find ways to fix over-spending rather than increase taxes.

Here are the articles I read. If I missed an important, recent paper, please link to it in the comments below!

Another look at tax policy and state economic growth: The long-run and short-run of it, Economics Letters, 2015, Bebonchu Atems (one of my former graduate school colleagues)

The Determinants of U.S. State Economic Growth: A Less Extreme Bounds Analysis, Economic Inquiry, 2008, W. Robert Reed

The Impact of Tax Cuts on Economic Growth: Evidence from the Canadian Provinces, National Tax Journal, 2012, Ergete Ferede and Bev Dahlby

Redistribution at the State and Local Level: Consequences for Economic Growth, Public Finance Review, 2010, Howard Chernick

The Robust Relationship between Taxes and U.S. State Income Growth, National Tax Journal, 2008, W. Robert Reed