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Interesting New Paper On How The Fed Produces Disinflation
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Solved Policy Problems Are Solved
We almost titled this “Don’t take the Good Lord’s children for wild ducks,” except nobody would have gotten the reference to the great midcentury French screenwriter and director Michel Audiard. An American phrase carrying the same meaning would be “Don’t ____ on my leg and tell me it’s raining.”
It’s Friday in the middle of August, and your correspondent is still recovering from surgery, so he will allow himself to write a little bit of a rant here, instead of what he hopes is measured and sober policy analysis.
You see, our job is to get up every morning and read the output of the majority of DC think tanks on the center and on the right-of-center. Believe it or not, we usually find it enjoyable.
But sometimes…
RAND is one of the most storied and important think tanks in history. They are largely responsible for developing the theory of “mutually assured destruction” during the Cold War. Next time someone asks you what think tanks do and whether they have impact, how about preventing World War III? Is that enough impact?
Anyhow, we usually find RAND’s valuable and most importantly highly rigorous. It often investigates topics that don’t get enough attention and that do require serious analysis, like veterans’ health.
But sometimes–and this is not an attack on RAND specifically, it’s just the nature of the business–sometimes you find a piece of work that is just completely useless.
RAND undertook a survey in Los Angeles and New York City to find that anti-Asian hate incidents are still important in those cities, which is important information on a lamentable phenomenon.
The paper’s 9 authors (!!!) have recommendations on how to fix it. These recommendations include “Strengthen services to meet the needs of members of two Asian American subgroups who might need more-tailored outreach and support” and “Leverage close family ties and use diverse linguistic and cultural social media platforms to enhance outreach and information dissemination about anti-hate resources” and “Empower first-generation community influencers to enhance outreach.”
Some policy problems are solved.
Some policy problems are extremely complex and contentious. But some policy problems are solved. We have done the theoretical work, and then we have applied it enough times in enough contexts with the same results that every reasonable person has to conclude that there is a known and understood solution to the problem.
The correct recommendation in the face of anti-Asian hate incidents is to arrest people who commit anti-Asian hate crimes and then lock them up for a very long time.
There is, in fact, no need to “strengthen services”, or to “leverage”, and there is certainly no need to “empower” “influencers”.
Yes, it’s a problem if recent Asian-American immigrants with poor English find it difficult to report hate crimes. However, there is a simple solution: ensure that they don’t have to report hate crimes due to hate crimes no longer occurring due to criminals and would-be criminals having been either arrested and locked up or deterred from committing crimes due to other criminals having been arrested and locked up.
It really is that simple. The way to “enhance support for Asian American communities facing hate crime” (the title of the paper) is to arrest the people committing hate crimes and keep them locked up for a very long time.
That’s it. It’s really that simple. Some policy problems are solved. And we wish serious think tanks did not muddy the waters.
Policy News
#FamilyPolicy – JD Vance has put family policy back on the agenda, and so we recommend this excellent essay by Patrick T. Brown on how Republicans should move forward on childcare reform.
#FamilyPolicy – Speaking of, given that family policy is back in the news, Brad Wilcox is right to point out that, according his studies, mothers’ lives are “happier, less lonely, and more meaningful” than those of women without children.
#K12 – One of the most interesting reform movements on education is so-called ESAs, Education Savings Accounts–the next step beyond school vouchers. Arizona is a state that went forward with ESAs. According to the Goldwater Institute, the budget impact has been very positive.
#Pharma #Patents – We very much enjoyed this overview of the economics of the pharmaceutical sector by R Street’s Wayne Brough, ending with an argument on how patents can slow innovation.
#Antitrust – Rep. Matt Gaetz and Sen. Mike Lee wrote a letter to Google on Wednesday, stating that they plan to hold the big tech behemoth accountable should it try to avoid a court-ordered remedy to address its monopolistic status. More.
#Infrastructure – It’s often assumed that if you want high speed train, you need the government to direct the process. But Florida shows it can be done through the private sector. Very interesting case study from City Journal.
#IndustrialPolicy – You may have seen a story in the Financial Times about how IRA/CHIPS Act projects have been delayed. Opponents of industrial policy tweeted it with much hurrah. If you didn’t pay close attention, you may not have noticed that, actually, most of those delays, for very large and complex facilities, seem pretty short and inconsequential.
#Reg – “Agencies issued 64 final regulations last week, after 57 the previous week. That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every two hours and 38 minutes.” Ryan Young at CEI takes us through some of the more absurd ones.
#TheScience – Science, which is supposed to be a renowned science journal, has just published an article full of far-left gibberish calling for “dismantling capitalism” and claiming that intellectual property is “colonialism” among other nonsense. This is not serious, and this entire sector is taxpayer-funded, to it’s a policy problem. More at Evolution News.
#PriceControls – California’s minimum wage for fast-food workers went up to $20 per hour in April and now—no surprise—thousands of those workers have lost their jobs. Whodathunkit. More from Cato.
#PublicArt – It was President Trump who made public art into a salient issue of public debate, with his executive order on classical architecture of public buildings, and rightly so. A nation honors itself through its public art, and we have had a lot of disastrous public art over the years. Which is why it was heartening to hear from Gerald P. Boersma at First Things that the new World War I memorial is a “masterpiece.“
Friday Essays
If you care about world religions–and you should–then you should read First Things’s symposium on the future of the Catholic Church.
Medical/pop-science substacker Scott Alexander is always worth reading, and now he asks: why does Ozempic seem to cure all diseases?
Kudos to The European Conservative for interviewing Renaud Camus, the celebrated French writer and much-maligned author of The Great Replacement.
At the New York Times, David Brooks writes an essay-length appreciation of the great, the irreplaceable, Tom Wolfe, whose “classics turned sociology into art”.
Don’t miss the cover story in the September/October issue of The American Conservative, by Jude Russo, on the dying American maritime industry.
Law & Liberty has been holding a symposium on the issue of nullification. Expect more of this kind of talk if the Federal government keeps drifting left.
Have you read the acclaimed Chinese SF book The Three-Body Problem, now adapted into an okay-ish Netflix show? In any case, the somewhat heterodox liberal writer Yascha Mounk has some common sense for us: stop telling aliens we’re here.
At Church Life Journal, Thomas Hibbs fills us in on John Henry Newman’s vision of Catholic education.
Chart of the Day
There will soon be more obese children globally than malnourished ones.
Meme of the Day
