In 1981, Secretary of Health Education and Welfare Patricia Harris wrote in the Washington Post that libertarian economists Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell are “middle class” so they “don’t know what it is to be poor.”

In fact, Williams grew up in a single-parent household in a poor section of Philadelphia. He was raised by his mother, who was a high school dropout. The family spent time on welfare, and eventually moved into the Richard Allen public housing project. (Sowell, whose father died before he was born, was the son of a maid.)

Drafted into the peacetime Army, Williams eventually earned a PhD from UCLA in the late 1960s and quickly became a sought-after researcher and public intellectual. His best known book, 1982’s The State Against Blacks, argues that a major cause of black unemployment is government intervention in the labor market.

Williams’ contrarian views have had wide exposure through documentaries, public appearances, and for the past 30 years, a syndicated weekly column. Since 1992, Williams has also been a frequent guest host of Rush Limbaugh’s radio show. Now a professor emeritus at George Mason University, Williams has taught at Temple University, California State University-Los Angeles, and other universities. (Go here for his personal web page.)

His new book, Up from the Projects: An Autobiography, is a fascinating look at his childhood, his half-century-long marriage to his recently departed wife, his unusual career path, and the genesis of his views on race, economics, and politics.

(more…)

A study released Monday by economists from George Mason University, Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Virginia said that the Federal Communications Commission’s proposed telecommunications regulation known as net neutrality would limit further broadband investments and innovation and substantively curtail consumer welfare.

“While there is no evidence of systemic market failures that might be remedied or ameliorated by the proposed rules,” the study read, “there is substantial basis for believing that the proposed regulations would harm competition, slow innovation, and reduce consumer welfare.”

Specifically, the study maintains that many of those practices that would be banned by the new regulations generally benefit consumers and foster competition and that the FCC’s existing framework is sufficient for the Commission to adjudicate traffic disputes and the like.

“Regulation can improve economic welfare only in the face of market imperfections, such as market power, externalities, or information asymmetries,” the study read. “While the markets at issue in this proceeding are characterized by product differentiation, high fixed costs and other deviations from the textbook model of ‘perfect competition,’ the evidence provides no support for the existence of market failure sufficient to warrant ex ante regulation of the type proposed by the Commission.”

(more…)

In March 2010, Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University released a study about President Obama’s stimulus package.  It contained many informational gems:

• Public entities received 42 percent of awards under the stimulus package, but received over half of dollars awarded (meaning they got larger chunks of change than private contractors);
• Even according to the administration, $285,814.61 was spent to create each job under the stimulus;
• On average, Democratic districts received 1.53 times the amount of awards that Republicans were granted, with Democratic districts receiving 2.65 times the amount of stimulus dollars Republican districts received.  Democratic districts received 73 percent of the total stimulus funds awarded, and Republican districts received 27 percent of the total amount awarded.

De Rugy claimed that “a district’s representation by a Republican decreases the stimulus funds awarded to it by 41.7 percent.”  She also found that unemployment did not correlate with stimulus funds received.  In other words, much of the money under the stimulus was directed at Democratic districts for political reasons.

The mere suggestion that politics had anything to do with allocations under the stimulus got the journalistic left’s panties in a wad.  Some of the criticism of de Rugy’s study was worthwhile.  Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com pointed out that de Rugy had not taken into account the fact that cash was allocated largely to districts containing state capitols, since money allocated to states generally flows through state capitols (which are overwhelmingly represented by Democrats).  There is something to be said for this criticism, of course, which is why de Rugy proceeded to re-run the study taking into account the effect of allocations to state capitols – and found that the average Democratic district still gets 30 percent more cash than the average Republican district.

(more…)

Think big. Gigantic. This is the latest from Charles Shumer, the Democrat from New York:

When he found out that Adidas was planning to outsource manufacturing of NBA jerseys he “called on the league to terminate its contract with the German-based sportswear giant unless it halts plans to transfer production of game-day jerseys from an upstate New York facility to Thailand.”

Great idea! Let’s make sure that we force companies to produce stuff at the highest possible cost in the name of some lame “buy and make American” nonsensical theory. I am sure that forcing Adidas to give up on the possibility to reduce its production costs will do wonders for this economy.

Besides, as George Mason University’s Don Boudreaux noted in a still unpublished letter to the editor of the New York Daily News yesterday:

(more…)

The duplicity surrounding news coverage of bisphenol A, a common and long-used chemical component of plastic, is evidenced by the media’s penchant for lavish coverage of specious claims of danger and a paucity of interest in peer-reviewed research showing no harm from the chemical.  This double standard extends to taxpayer funding of BPA research and raises questions about the pending research.

A particularly curious tale begins with a September 21 letter to Margaret Hamburg, the new Food and Drug Administration Commissioner, and National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences Director Linda Birnbaum who, among others, was copied on the correspondence.  The letter was penned by Thomas Zoeller, a member of the 2007 Chapel Hill Consensus that advanced theories of danger associated with BPA, and 32 additional signatories.  The letter opens by stating that its signatories are “a group of independent (mostly university) researchers with extensive experience working with endocrine disrupting compounds and in particular bisphenol A (BPA)” but then gives a curious warning to Commissioner Hamburg regarding plans for $10 million in BPA studies by FDA.

“We find it troubling that the FDA is proposing to spend such a large amount of money on such a well-researched chemical,” the letter notes.  It goes on to claim that plans to further research BPA are “disturbing” and that “there is sufficient research and independent review available for the agency to make a decision as to whether, as the law dictates, there is ‘reasonable certainty’ that this chemical is ‘not harmful.’”

(more…)

It’s a chemical that has been used in everyday plastic products like eyeglasses, medical equipment, bottles, and food can linings for over fifty years.  But the compound Bisphenol A (BPA) has been the target of scare campaigns over the last few years.  On one hand critics contend that BPA at low doses can affect endocrine systems and reproduction, and cause birth or developmental effects, as well as cancer.  On the other hand, a search of the literature finds no single case of illness or death related to BPA.

Most recently, BPA came under attack November 2 when Consumers Union, the parent organization of the respected Consumer Reports, sent out a press release announcing the results of its lab tests that purportedly showed high levels of the suspect compound in 19 food products.  The authors of the Consumers Report article did not claim that they had found any harmful effects in anyone, just that BPA had been detected.

The Consumers Union press release inspired panic-inducing headlines.  ABC News, the Los Angeles Times, Fox News, and the New York Times dutifully announced the “results” with alarm.  In a separate commentary, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff compared the danger of BPA to those he has faced as a reporter of “threats from warlords, bandits and tarantulas.”

(more…)

We should be happy. The Bureau of Labor Statistics announced a 3.5 percent growth in this year 3rd quarter. Yet, most of us aren’t. At least I know I am not. Why? Because I have no faith in the numbers.

First, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) numbers include government spending. So, when the government pumps thousands of billions of dollars into the economy it will look as if GDP is growing.

What’s more, the way the GDP accounts for government spending is totally biased: It assumes that if the government is spending $200,000 on a contractor to repave a road in the middle of nowhere that it will create $200,000 of genuine economic value.  By contrast, GDP measures are tougher on private-sector spending. As my George Mason university colleague Garett Jones explained to me recently “So if Exxon Mobil pays an engineer $200,000 per year, that only shows up in GDP if the engineer finds an extra $200,000 of oil to sell, or builds a new machine that sells for $200,000, something like that.  So our GDP measures of “government spending” are awful–and when the government is in a race to spend money as quickly as possible, these measures are going to be even worse than usual.”

(more…)