Tweet Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal: Editor: Reporting on California’s recent hike in the minimum wage for workers at fast-food restaurants, you note that “a spokesman for the governor said fast-food companies can afford to give their workers a deserved bump in pay” (“California Fast-Food Chains Are Now Serving Sticker Shock,” April 27). Bad arguments for minimum wages abound, but this one is among the silliest. Elon Musk can “afford” to pay $100 million annually to his dog groomer, but this fact doesn’t mean that he’ll do so simply because the government declares that the minim ..read more

Tweet George Will understands why so very many institutions of so-called “higher learning” have become self-spoofing embarrassments. A slice: Given academia’s nearly monochrome culture, most universities have many infantile adults. These are faculty members who have glided from kindergarten through postdoctoral fellowships (these often support surplus PhDs, who are being manufactured faster than the academic job market can absorb them). To such professors, the 99.9 percent of the world adjacent to campuses is as foreign as Mongolia. Still, suppose you want to hire a recent college graduate f ..read more

Tweet … is from page 20 of the original edition of Walter Lippmann’s sometimes deeply flawed but profoundly insightful and important 1937 book, The Good Society: No government planned, no political authority directed, the material progress of the past four centuries, or the increasing humanity which has accompanied it. It was by a stupendous liberation of the minds and spirits and conduct of men that a world-wide exchange of goods and services and ideas was promoted, and it was in this invigorating and sustaining environment that petty principalities coalesced into great commonwealths. The ..read more

Tweet April 2024 – to be precise, April 13th, 2024 – marks the 20th anniversary of Cafe Hayek’s launch. Although Cafe Hayek has been exclusively my blog for several years now, it is not my brainchild. That distinction goes to Russ Roberts, who was then my colleague in Economics at George Mason University. Russ persuaded me to join him in blogging. We pondered names for the blog. “Cafe Hayek,” the name, is also Russ’s brainchild. When the blog was launched, I was aware that I didn’t really understand what ‘blogging’ meant or entailed. But I agreed to join Russ in this endeavor because I so ver ..read more

Tweet Claims about the “hollowing out” of American manufacturing are as common today as is sand on a beach. But as readers of this blog know, the data as conventionally gathered and reported contradict both the assertion that Americans “don’t make things anymore” and that America’s capacity to produce industrial outputs has been declining for decades. But are these data the results of manufacturing appropriately defined and of economic activities appropriately categorized? Such questions should be asked from time to time. What, exactly, is meant by a term such as “manufacturing”? According to ..read more

Tweet Ron Bailey warns that a Greenpeace initiative “will blind and kill children.” A slice: Greenpeace and other anti-biotech activist groups have logged a win in a crusade that could ultimately blind and kill thousands of children annually. How? By persuading the Court of Appeals of the Philippines to issue a scientifically ignorant and morally hideous decision to ban the planting of vitamin A–enriched golden rice. The objective result will be more children blinded and killed by vitamin A deficiency. David Henderson is no fan of minimum-wage diktats. A slice: Moreover, if monopsony does ..read more

Tweet … is from page 190 of Jeffrey Clemens’s insightful 2024 paper “Minimum Wage Hikes Bring Tradeoffs Beyond Pay and Jobs,” which is chapter 15 in The War on Prices: How Popular Misconceptions About Inflation, Prices, and Value Create Bad Policy (Ryan A. Bourne, ed., 2024) (footnote deleted; link added): Several recent studies have found evidence that minimum wage increases change hiring patterns, as higher-skilled workers tend to replace lower-skilled workers. A notable study in this vein involved an actual randomized experiment conducted on the Amazon Mechanical Turk marketplace (an onli ..read more

Tweet Here’s a letter to the Washington Post: Editor: Brian Deese apparently thinks that if a proposition is repeated often enough its truth is thereby established regardless of contradictory facts and logic (“China already manufactures too much. Now it wants to make more.” April 25). For example, Mr. Deese worries about the “hollowing out of our industrial base” – a worry that in recent years has been expressed bazillions of times, yet never with supporting evidence. So here’s a fact: America’s industrial capacity hit its all-time high in December 2016 and is today (March 2024) a mere 0.1 p ..read more

Tweet John Lott points out some problems with recent statistics on crime. A slice: Another reason crimes reported to the police are falling is that arrest rates are plummeting. If victims don’t believe criminals will be caught and punished, they won’t bother reporting them. According to the FBI, if you take the five years preceding Covid-19 (2015-19) and compare them with 2022, the percentage of violent crimes in all cities resulting in an arrest fell from 44% to 35%. Among cities with more than one million people (where violent crime disproportionately occurs), arrest rates over the same pe ..read more

Tweet … is from page 181 of the late Richard Timberlake’s 1998 paper “Gold Standard Policy and Limited Government,” which is chapter 5 of Money and the Nation State (Kevin Dowd & Richard H. Timberlake, Jr., eds., 1998): Commodity money evolved as naturally and as spontaneously as the wheel, the screw, the hydraulic press, the inclined plane, a national language, and common law. Its emergence was economic and natural, not political and contrived. The post Quotation of the Day… appeared first on Cafe Hayek ..read more