A Response, along with a Movie Recommendation

A couple readers emailed me about yesterday's post, asking me whether I want to enforce the law. The implicit suggestion is that President Trump's immigration policy is simply law enforcement.

Of course, I believe in law enforcement, but enforcement has to be proportionate. Double parking is illegal, but we don't execute people for double parking. We give them a ticket.

The Trump administration's response to illegal immigration is vastly disproportionate. He paints a picture of the nation being ruined by illegal immigration, but that is just not true. He is doing great harm to many people to solve a problem that is largely fictional.

I don't pretend to fully understand Mr Trump's goals and actions, but his supporters seem motivated by a combination of understandable economic and cultural anxiety, misdirected blame, and in some cases latent prejudice. Mr Trump seems to play to that combination for purposes of self-aggrandizement.

Yesterday, I saw the movie Burden, a story about a man raised within the KKK community and his personal struggle to escape from it. I highly recommend the film. Along with the book Hillbilly Elegy, it does a good job of explaining the culture and perspectives of less educated white Americans, who are Mr Trump's base.

Anti-liberal Trolls

David Brooks:

For centuries, conservatives have repeated a specific critique against state power. Statism, conservatives have argued, has a tendency to become brutalist and inhumane because a bureaucracy can’t see or account for the complexity of reality. It tries to impose uniform rules on the organic intricacy of human relationships. Statist social engineering projects cause horrific suffering because in the mind of statists, the abstract rule is more important than the human being in front of them. The person must be crushed for the sake of the abstraction. 

This is exactly what the Trump immigration policies are doing. Families are ripped apart and children are left weeping by the fences constructed by government officials blindly following a regulation. 

This illustrates something crucial about this administration. It is not populated by conservatives. It is populated by anti-liberal trolls. 

Why Aren’t More Men Working?

Click here to read my column in Sunday's New York Times.

What a Sensible President Sounds Like

On Tariffs, Blame Congress Too

The tariffs just imposed by President Trump are, of course, terrible policy. Mr. Trump deserves the first line of blame for making decisions that no sensible economist would advocate.

But let's not let Congress off the hook. Over many years, Congress has passed the laws that give the President a lot of discretion over international trade policy. The assumption is that the President could be counted on to act responsibly. That assumption has now been proven wrong. Congressional leaders should think hard, in a bipartisan way, about how to revoke, or at least severely limit, those discretionary powers.

Update: Several senators are proposing a bill to rein in the President's power.

Open Letters from Economists

Some sign a letter opposing tariffs. Others sign a letter supporting President Trump. You can guess which one I signed.

Digital Textbooks

This podcast (from last summer, but new to me) offers a good discussion of the benefits of digital textbooks.

A T-shirt for the Times

Perfect for wearing when you teach Chapter 9 of my favorite textbook. (Make sure to check out the image on the back.)

What I've Been Watching

The End of the F***ing World.  A compelling coming-of-age/crime/love story, like a merger of The Breakfast Club and Bonnie and Clyde. On Netflix in eight brief episodes. Most definitely binge-worthy.

President Trump unites the country

How often do Jeffrey Sachs and the Wall Street Journal editoral writers agree?

Summer Camp at Hoover

A weeklong program for undergrads.

The Case for Free Trade

Click here to read my column in Sunday's NY Times.

Still Number One

From The Harvard Crimson:

Economics 10B: “Principles of Economics” topped the charts in undergraduate enrollment for the fifth consecutive spring semester, boasting 585 students as of Monday morning, according to the Registrar’s office of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences....[It] enrolls 200 more students than the next most popular course on campus.

FYI, here are this semester's guest lecturers:

Wisdom about Bitcoin

Industrial Organization Summer Camp

Organized by my colleagues Eric Maskin and Ariel Pakes and aimed at graduate students, information here.

History of Econ Summer Camp

Click on graphic to enlarge. For more information, click here.

A Decline in Brand Value

The University of Chicago's Allan Sanderson alerts me to this story about the Chicago real estate market:

Condos in Trump International Hotel & Tower sold for an average of $747 a square foot in 2017....That's down almost 12 percent from 2016....In the same period, prices in the downtown condo market overall rose by 2.8 percent.

Robert Barro on the Tax Bill

My colleague Robert Barro is enthusiastic about the recently passed tax bill. You can read his analysis of it here. His bottom line:

I estimate that the total tax package will create extra GDP growth of 1.1% a year through 2019. The main effect (0.8%) comes from changing the individual tax code, with the remainder from the corporate reform. Over the following eight years, the projected growth rate rises by 0.2 to 0.3 percentage point a year because of the law’s expansionary effects on long-run capital and GDP per worker.

Measuring Bias, or Reflecting Reality?

The above graphic, from today's NY Times, is intended to show bias in economics textbooks. I am not so sure that is the right interpretation.

In the world, only 4 percent of CEOs (of Fortune 500 companies) are women, so does the figure of 6 percent shown above demonstrate underrepresentation of women in textbooks or an accurate reflection of reality? Similarly, policymakers mentioned in texts are most often Presidents or Fed chairs. Historically, only one woman has been a member of this group. Economists mentioned in texts are most often important historical figures (Smith, Ricardo, Keynes) or prominent modern economists, such as Nobel laureates. Once again, 8 percent is higher than for the population being sampled.

To be sure, the role of women in society is changing, and in some circles there is some bias. But measuring the amount of bias is hard. The graphic above is not a useful gauge.

Or maybe in my next edition, I should add a discussion of Paulina Volcker's disinflation.

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Update: Some twitter commentators seemed to misinterpret my cheeky last line. At the risk of being pedantic, let me explain: Textbooks reflect reality, which includes a history in which men played a larger role than women in some spheres of life. If a history professor were to write a text on the history of presidential politics, and you were to find that there were more mentions of men than women in the book, would that be evidence that the historian is biased? I don't think so. The writer has to reflect what occurred and is not free to change the gender of historical protagonists.

A Quick Quiz

According to the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation, before the recent change in the tax law, taxpayers earning more than $1 million a year were scheduled to pay 19.3 percent of all federal taxes in 2019. What impact does the new tax law have on this percentage?

(a) It falls to 17.8 percent.

(b) It falls to 18.7 percent.

(c) It stays the same.

(d) It rises to 19.8 percent.

Find the answer here. (First table, seventh column, penultimate row.)