Tom Hundley had a long piece in the Chicago Tribune on Sunday describing the influence of the University of Chicago on Barack Obama.
The most interesting part comes near the end, where law professors Cass Sunstein and Richard Epstein spar over whether Obama really believes in free markets.
Sunstein says, “As Nixon went to China, Obama will go to deregulation.” Epstein says Obama “has never met a mandate that he would vote against.”
Epstein then goes on to describe his prediction for the Obama economics team:
Obama comes from the tradition that thinks you can get your way on social justice and economic issues without affecting productivity very much — and that’s simply living in a dream world. … [Obama and his economics team] are very smart, but the problem is these high-I.Q. guys always think they can square the circle; they always believe they can beat the system with a cleverer system, and they always fail.
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Our government has done a fine job of showing how you can spend $200 thousand to get someone a job that will pay them $40 thousand per year, which is more than their current $25 thousand per year job.
I love Justin Harpers comment. You know President Obama had the power to vote against Bush but never did just voted present.
For better of worse our world will one day change.
I wish I could remember where I found this. Perhaps it was on the Freakonomics Blog:
The law of unintended consequences is what happens when a simple system tries to regulate a complex system. The political system is simple, it operates with limited information (rational ignorance), short time horizons, low feedback, and poor and misaligned incentives. Society in contrast is a complex, evolving, high-feedback, incentive-driven system. When a simple system tries to regulate a complex system you often get unintended consequences.
More generally, when regulation pushes against incentives, incentives tend to push back creating unintended consequences. Not all regulation pushes against incentives, some regulations try to change incentives but incentives are complex and constraints change so even incentive-driven regulations can have unintended consequences.
Does the law of unintended consequences mean that the government should never try to regulate complex systems? No, of course not, but it does mean that regulators should be humble (no trying to remake man and society) and the hurdle for regulation should be high.
Willing to bet if President Obama were to input all the ideological data of his vision for America into the IBM supercomputer (Roadrunner, capable of processing more than 1 petaflops per second), he would still not accept the outcome that the end results just do not compute for a sustainable financial republic.
The _Chicago Tribune_ article repeats some negative claims by Naomi Klein about Milton Friedman. There is a rebuttal here, should anyone be interested:
http://www.reason.com/news/show/128903.html
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Dave S
Greg -
That also something you might have read in “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness” which was co-authored by Cass Sunstein (the same Sunstein referenced in the post) and Richard H. Thaler. I highly recommend that book, by the way, if you haven’t happened to have read it as yet.
Obama would be late to the vote.
@Colin (#7) – Yes, the poverty rate has “flatlined”. Too bad the government has held the formal line that defines “poverty” at the same spot for so long! The reality is, if you actually readjust the poverty line to account for inflation (particularly the cost of housing… thanks to the bubble, housing is even LESS affordable!), more people live in poverty now than before.
J.Ja