It’s become very fashionable in certain circles to prove your intellectual and critical thinking bona fides by changing your mind about ideas in the face of evidence or arguments to the contrary. In that spirit journalist David Leonhardt wrote this summer challenge in the New York Times, and I’m perfectly game. Now I just need some suggestions.
There are some obvious caveats. I’m not going to change my mind about whether women should have control over their reproductive choices because I’m not a lunatic (full disclosure: I also don’t think men should be forced by the state to undergo dangerous medical procedures). I’m not going to entertain the suggestion that #actually the GULAG was good.
Maybe restricting housing density in vibrant cities is good?
Personally, I love cities, and wish they’d get a lot denser so I, and others like me, could afford to live in more of them. But maybe I’m wrong! I recently heard Tyler Cowen make what seemed to me a very strange argument that the utter unaffordability of housing in Silicon Valley is a kind of subsidy for the very most creative and industrious people in society.
That seems nuts to me right now, but maybe I’m wrong, and housing density is actually bad in economically vibrant cities!
Maybe publicly-funded vouchers for private schools are good?
I went to a public elementary, middle, and high school. It was fine. We had some pretty bad teachers, but it seems to have worked out. That informs my view that public schools are fine and taking money away from them to pay tuition at private schools is a bad idea.
Further, it does not seem to me to be factually true that actual human beings at public schools are engaged in cutthroat competition with private schools. Instead, those people just run their schools and try to do the best job they can, like everybody else on Earth.
But maybe I’m wrong and #actually it would be good for public school teachers to be constantly worrying about losing their jobs if they can’t force their students to learn as much as the parochial school across town does.
Other ideas
I have a lot of strongly-held opinions! Maybe they’re wrong:
- maybe self-employment is #actually bad and more people should be employed in traditional full-time jobs by large firms;
- maybe unions are #actually bad and people are better off when they don’t have the ability to collectively bargain over wages and work conditions;
- maybe the complexity of the tax code is #actually good and the vast tax-preparation, tax-avoidance, and tax-evasion industries are a net positive for America or the world;
- maybe widespread police violence and violations of civil liberties are #actually the only thing standing between civilization and anarchy and we should stop struggling against it.
These are views that appear to me to be widely held by huge numbers of Americans. Maybe they’re right and I’m wrong!
So, what should I change my mind about?
Unions are a highly mixed bag, and in some fields and places they can be extremely anti-entepreneurial, anti-productivity, and pro-work-for-the big-company-forever. Not to mention the ‘blue wall’ put up by police unions that may well be the biggest impediment to badly needed reforms to address your last point, which you should definitely not change your mind about.
But, all I know is from the experience of working for non-union family-run construction/building companies with less than 30 employees where every employee could walk into the owner’s office any day they wanted, from owning a couple of very small businesses, and from conversations with small family businesses who face discrimination as well as the occasional threat of physical violence for going to work for themselves while not joining a union.
You are basing your elem, middle and high school knowledge on when you went to school? What was that 20+ yrs ago? You must not have kids – its a different world out there now
SumOfAll,
What is different about it? Poking around my high school’s website it doesn’t look any different than it did in 2003. I know that parents feel things are very different from when they were in high school. That’s a lifecycle effect. The question that’s interesting is whether students themselves experience public education differently today than they did 14 years ago when I was in high school and when everything was fine (we even somehow managed to survive 9/11, remember).
—Indy
Hey Ignorance is Bliss. I bet nothing has changed. Its all good cause you know, you looked at your high school website.
A suggestion:
Change your economic viewpoint from one rooted in traditional theoretical/Keynesian/zero-sum economics to that of the empirically-based, operationally realistic post-Keynesian school espoused by Wynne Godley, James Galbraith, Warren Mosler, Cullen Roche and others.
Most importantly, this will lead to a belief that the fiscal deficit is a tool with which to govern aggregate demand, not something which we should seek to arbitrarily balance over a full economic cycle. This is perhaps more relevant now than ever in a world with strong and persistent deflationary forces of technology, aging populations, decreased capital intensive investment, etc.
Erik,
Thanks for the suggestion! I’m somewhat familiar with Galbraith but would eagerly read more about his work. Do you have any suggestions for where to start?
I certainly believe right now that debt should be stable or falling as a share of GDP late in a recovery, but if I’m wrong about that then I’m more than open to being corrected!
—Indy
Indy,
Some free and fairly easy to digest sources:
Here is Cullen Roche’s site and link to a paper he wrote on the topic:
Pragcap.com
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1905625
Here is Warren Mosler’s site. I recommend starting with the “7 Deadly Innocent Frauds”
http://moslereconomics.com/mandatory-readings/
Plenty more out there if you are still interested later.
Without knowing all of your beliefs, it’s hard to know what to suggest but the things you listed track closely with my own thoughts, so here are a few topics that I’ve spent time exploring:
-whether fat content actually affects weight (ie common healthy diet beliefs)
– whether hybrid /electric vehicles have a net positive impact
-whether additional schooling is a good “investment” (financially or even just mentally)
– XYZ exercise or sport or hobby is dumb (for me, this has led to discovering a love for biking, kayaking, and rugby)
-small batch is “good” (vs large scale manufacturing)
– buying used is a smart bet overall