Gerrymandering

by David Friedman, “David Friedman’s Substack,” December 25, 2024.

Excerpts:

In 2024 Republicans won just under two-thirds of the vote in Tennessee. Yet they won eight of the state’s nine congressional districts. All else being equal, were Tennessee gerrymandered less severely, Republicans today would likely have a slim one-seat majority in the US House of Representatives rather than a five-seat advantage. (The Economist: At the state level, democracy in America is fracturing)

Two thirds of the voters getting eight congressional seats out of nine would be anomalous in a proportional representation system, but US congressional elections are first past the post. If the population of Tennessee were evenly distributed, with the same percentage of Republican and Democratic voters in each congressional district, the majority party would win all of them — even if the division of votes was 51/49. With a majority of almost two to one, the only way the Democrats get any seats is if their voters happen to be concentrated in one or a few districts.

And:

So far as the Economist article is concerned, its claim is supported by neither logic nor current law. No court has interpreted the Voters Rights Act to justify forced redistricting to make the number of congressional representatives of each party proportional to the number of votes cast for that party.

If one ever does, the Libertarian Party, with .42% of the vote in 2024, should sue for its two congressmen.

 

by Jeanna Smialek, New York Times, December 6, 2024. (HT to Tyler Cowen because I had missed this one at the time.)

Excerpts:

FRED — whose name stands for Federal Reserve Economic Data — was born in 1991. But he was a sparkle in the eye of the St. Louis Fed long before that.

And:

The story started in the 1960s, with an economist named Homer Jones (now sometimes referred to as the “grandfather of FRED”). Mr. Jones was the director of research at the Fed’s branch in St. Louis, and he wanted to make central bank decisions more data-based, so he started to mail typed data reports to Fed officials around the country.

DRH note: The story doesn’t mention it but Milton Friedman has credited his teacher Homer Jones with getting him interested in economics.

Grim Old Days: James Wynbrandt’s Excruciating History of Dentistry

by Chelsea Follett, Human Progress, December 24, 2024.

Excerpts:

The writer P. J. O’Rourke famously quipped, “When you think of the good old days, think one word: dentistry.” So let us take his advice. James Wynbrandt’s The Excruciating History of Dentistry: Toothsome Tales & Oral Oddities from Babylon to Braces provides plenty to chew on. As the New York Times Book Review put it, “Wynbrandt has clearly done his homework.”

Our ancestors’ teeth were in an appalling state. As Wynbrandt points out while quoting the Old Testament, calling a woman’s teeth white as sheep and noting that none were missing once counted as high praise worthy of a love poem. After all, healthy teeth were far rarer in the past than today. The first mass-produced bristle toothbrush did not appear until around 1780 in England during that country’s industrialization. Our preindustrial forebears had only a primitive understanding of what was causing their teeth to rot, fall out, and constantly ache.

And:

As noted, broken jaws were another exceedingly common outcome of tooth extraction. In 1530, the first printed book on dentistry, the German Zene Artzney, or “Medicines for the Teeth,” advised, “The sign by which you may judge whether the jaw be fractured or something of it broken off, is when the cavity wherefrom the tooth has been drawn bleeds more than usual, and the jaw swells so much that one cannot open the mouth, and the cavity festers and swells.” In the 17th century, as sugar became more widely available in Europe, tooth decay became an even more common ailment. The wealthy, who had the earliest and most abundant access to sugar, were the first and worst afflicted. By 1602, it was observed that Queen Elizabeth I “showeth some decay, which to conceal when she cometh in public she putteth many fine cloths into her mouth to bear out her cheeks. ”In other words, she was missing enough teeth to even affect the outward appearance of her face, with her skin sagging into the space where teeth would normally be.

DRH comment: In 2015, I disagreed strongly with Milton and Rose Friedman’s following statement in Free to Choose:

Industrial progress, mechanical improvement, all of the great wonders of the modern era have meant little to the wealthy. The rich in ancient Greece would have benefited hardly at all from modern plumbing–running servants replaced running water.

I don’t know about Milton and Rose, but I definitely count modern dentistry as one of the wonders of the modern era. The excerpted article above says why.

 

What ‘Trading Places’ Can Teach You about Racism (the Old and the New) 

by John Miltimore, The Daily Economy, December 25, 2024.

Randolph’s racism appears less severe than Mortimer’s. After all, denying a man a job because of his race and using a racial slur is much harsher than observing musical talent (real or perceived) in a group of people. But both are examples of racism; and the audience sees this clearly. Moreover, we later see that Randolph’s kinder, gentler racism is not far removed from Mortimer’s, since Randolph agrees with his brother following his racist outburst.

Not everyone might agree with this analysis, of course. Some may argue that Mortimer is more racist than Randolph. What’s important to understand is that the racism of the Duke brothers comes from the same place: they fail to see Billy Ray as an individual, even after testing his mettle.

And:

“[Racism] is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage — the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry,” Rand wrote in The Virtue of Selfishness. “Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.”

Rand, an individualist, called racism “the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism” — and she was right. Unfortunately, this primitive collectivism was institutionalized in America for much of the twentieth century through Jim Crow laws, which marginalized African Americans and enforced racial segregation and disenfranchisement in the South.

And:

“I don’t think white people worldwide have really reckoned with how much their own personal identity is shaped by constructions of whiteness,” Kendi said during a recent talk. “Whiteness prevents white people from connecting to humanity.”

One needn’t have a PhD to see that despite all of this fancy language, Kendi’s “antiracism” is deeply racist. Like Randolph and Mortimer, he doesn’t see people as individuals; he sees them in terms of their race (in this case “whiteness”).

 

What Today’s Economics Students Aren’t Learning About Economics

by Alexander William Salter, The James G. Martin Center for Economic Renewal, December 27, 2024.

Excerpt:

The economics major is in dire straits. Across the nation, econ curricula aren’t instilling an appreciation for, or even a familiarity with, the economic way of thinking. Theory classes limit the power of economic analysis by reducing markets to sterile exercises in “perfect competition,” or else subordinating social science to social control by obsessing over “market failures.” Empirical classes equip students with sophisticated statistical tools but at the cost of reducing applied economics to data-mongering.

The unfortunate result is that econ majors are almost always half-educated and quarter-lettered. They can memorize models and run regressions. They will confidently make pronouncements about the necessity of corrective taxes and regulations to promote economic efficiency. But they’re unable to explain why popcorn costs so much at the movies, how we knowhigh oil prices aren’t the result of price-gouging, or—most worrying of all– what makes some countries rich and others poor. The situation is grim.

Yet it’s not hopeless. All the materials that professors need to train economists well are already available. There are many ways to restructure curricula to produce competent economic reasoners. All of them require wide reading and deep thinking. Students whose attention spans run out at 280 characters have no place in an economics program.