webodec3ARCHIVEPreview
Open in TheBrain

cowen, tyler

---

ntbcw brain taylor cohen

THIEL SECRET CONF W/ RYAN STOWERS

NAVARRO FAN

LIBTARD KOCHADEMIA

SEE ROB BRADLEY

INST FOR PROGRESS EMERGENT VENTURES

// prageru vids

---

GIL BK

PRAXIS dryden BROWN COWAN EMERG V; sri

pronomos cap pt; altman, sbf, a16 winkel lonsdale, coinbase

GIL BK

// GAZA

MARK LUTTER GMU VENEZ EMERG V

...

-=-=

-=-=

:{The Economist described Navarro as having "oddball views".[212] :{The George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen has described Navarro as "one of the most versatile and productive American economists of the last few decades"}:, but Cowen noted that he disagreed with his views on trade, which he claimed to go "against a strong professional consensus."

---

WIRED

The economist Tyler Cowen, by contrast, was initially denied a VIP “C” rating after the group’s AI tool described him as “widely recognized within his field” but not a leader of “an organization that is a household name to the average person.

---

---

AI Overview

Tyler Cowen, Joe Lonsdale, and Stand Together are prominent figures and organizations driving the "Abundance Agenda", a cross-ideological movement focused on solving modern challenges—like sluggish economic growth, housing shortages, and over-regulation—by actively increasing the supply of innovation, technology, and foundational infrastructure. [1, 2, 3, 4]

The core connection between these thinkers, the foundation, and the abundance movement centers on the following key areas:

  1. Joe Lonsdale and Regulatory Reform

Joe Lonsdale and his network are actively pushing to dismantle bureaucratic barriers that slow down technological progress. Through the Abundance Institute and Stand Together Trust, Lonsdale helped raise funds to embed teams of "elite AI-native engineers" directly into federal agencies like the FDA. The goal is to slash review times for life-saving drugs and bring American regulatory speeds in line with international competitors. [1, 2, 3, 4]

  1. Tyler Cowen and Productivity

Economist Tyler Cowen popularized the concept of the "Great Stagnation", arguing that America went through a decades-long slowdown in technological progress. To combat this, he has been a major proponent of the "abundance agenda," championing robust economic growth, techno-optimism, and the swift integration of Artificial Intelligence to boost human productivity and cure long-term societal complacency. [1,2, 3, 4, 5]

  1. The Stand Together Network

The philanthropic network Stand Together (founded by Charles Koch) provides strategic support and capital to organizations that bypass partisan stalemates to focus on practical, supply-side solutions. By partnering with thinkers like Cowen and entrepreneurs like Lonsdale, Stand Together advocates for dismantling self-imposed scarcity to foster abundance in energy, housing, healthcare, and technology. [1, 2, 4, 5]

---

[### America Needs More Techno-Optimism, with Marc ...

YouTube · a16z

23.5K+ views · 2 years ago](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rr3ErEa0kKA)

31:04

In this fireside chat, a16z Cofounder and General Partner Marc Andreessen sits down with economist, podcaster, and polymath Tyler Cowen to ...

Missing: STAND ‎TOGETHER ‎ABUNDANCE

[### The tech right and the MAGA right

Marginal REVOLUTION

https://marginalrevolution.com › 2025/06 › the-tech-rig...](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/06/the-tech-right-and-the-maga-right.html)

Jun 20, 2025 — The tech right and the MAGA right. by Tyler Cowen June 20, 2025 at 12:30 am in. Current Affairs · Political Science.Read more

[### The rise of the abundance faction

Niskanen Center

https://www.niskanencenter.org › the-rise-of-the-abund...](https://www.niskanencenter.org/the-rise-of-the-abundance-faction/)

Jun 4, 2024 — By working within a party, the new supply-siders can boost their cause — and pull us away from left-right polarization.Read more

Missing: LONSDALE ‎| Show results with: LONSDALE

[### American Optimist: Joe Lonsdale

Joe Lonsdale: American Optimist

https://www.americanoptimist.com](https://www.americanoptimist.com/)

When we work together toward an optimistic vision of the future, anything is possible. ... Tyler Cowen is a professor, best-selling author, blogger, podcaster, ...Read more

---

AI, Employment, and Education (with Tyler Cowen)

Mar 30 2026

Tyler Cowen is bullish on the integration of AI into higher education. He's also not worried about its effects on the future workplace. Listen as Cowen speaks with EconTalk's Russ Roberts about the reasons for his optimism, and argues that college classes should devote significant time to learning how to use AI. They discuss the future of writing (and thinking) in an academic context, and Cowen's solution to dealing with worries about cheating. Cowen also shares how he personally has adapted to AI, and whether he thinks there's value to a college education designed not to ensure mastery of a subject, but instead to help students become the kind of people they want to be.

This episode also discusses the listeners' survey votes for their Top 10 EconTalk podcast episodes for 2025.

---

sidekick

Alex Tabarrok is Bartley J. Madden Chair in Economics at the Mercatus Center and a professor of economics at George Mason University. Along with Tyler Cowen, he is the co-author of the popular economics blog Marginal Revolution and co-founder of Marginal Revolution University. He is the author of numerous academic papers in the fields of law and economics, criminology, regulatory policy, voting theory and other areas in political economy. He is co-author with Tyler of Modern Principles of Economics, a widely used introductory textbook. He gave a TED talk in 2009. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and many other publications.

---

Think Tank Watch: Billionaires Play Big Role in Funding of New Think Tank Institute for Progress (IFP)

Friday, January 21, 2022

Billionaires Play Big Role in Funding of New Think Tank Institute for Progress (IFP)

Get ready to learn another think think tank acronym: IFP. It stands for Institute for Progress, a new Washington, DC-based think tank that has been launched by Caleb Watney and Alec Stapp.

Its mission is to "accelerate scientific, technological, and industrial progress while safeguarding humanity's future." The founders say they will spend most of their initial attention on three key areas: 1) Metascience, 2) Immigration, and 3) Biosecurity.

Mr. Watney, the Co-CEO, was the director for innovation policy at the think tank Progressive Policy Institute (PPI). Before that, he worked as a technology policy fellow at the R Street Institute and as a graduate research fellow at the Mercatus Center.

Mr. Stapp, the other Co-CEO, was the director of technology policy at PPI, a research fellow at the International Center for Law and Economics, a technology policy fellow at the Niskanen Center, and a graduate research fellow at the Mercatus Center.

Scholars at the think tank include senior biosecurity fellow Nikki Teran, who previously worked with the Committee on International Security and Arms Control at the National Academy of Science, the Council on Strategic Risks, and the Open Philanthropy Project. Another scholar is senior immigration fellow Jeremy Neufeld, who previously worked at the Niskanen Center.

There are currently three external board members: Tamara Winter, who formerly worked at the Charter Cities Institute and the Mercacuts Center; Dan Correa, a former Obama Administration official who was CEO of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) and worked at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute as well as the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF); and Zachary Graves, a visiting fellow at George Mason University's Antonin Scalia Law School who formerly worked at the Cato Institute and R Street Institute.

IFP, whose new website can be found here, only accepts funding from individuals and foundations. It is currently funded with the support of Open Philanthropy, Emergent Ventures, Patrick Collison, John Collison, and Sam Bankman-Fried.

Facebook co-founder Dustin Muskowitz and wife Cari Tuna are the main funders of Open Philanthropy, an entity which supports numerous think tanks. George Mason University's Mercatus Center houses Emergent Ventures, a fellowship and grant program which was launched with a $1 million grant from the Thiel Foundation. That foundation was created and funded by billionaire Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and early investor in Facebook.

Patrick Collison and his brother John Collison are Irish billionaires who co-founded online payment processor Stripe. Sam Bankman-Fried, another billionaire, is the founder and CEO of FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange.

The IFP founders note that Tyler Cowen, head of the Mercatus Center, played a big role in their thinking.

IFP joins a crowded field of policy shops in Washington, which has more than 400 think tanks large and small.

---

nyt? heADLINE LTCM IN MONEY FOR NOTH 2013

---

[### Tyler Cowen (Economics) - Templeton Ideas Podcast

Apple Podcasts

https://podcasts.apple.com › podcast › tyler-cowen-eco...](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tyler-cowen-economics/id1676100611?i=1000649195554)

Mar 14, 2024 — Tyler Cowen is a professor of economics at George Mason University and serves as the director of the Mercatus Center.

---

GGL 6 26

Artificial Intelligence

Cowen frequently discusses how AI will reorder global economies, schools, and spirituality. 1]

For tips on how Cowen views the future of education and why he is bullish on AI mentoring, check out his thoughts shared via the University of Austin:

2m

[Tyler Cowen Is Bullish on AI Education — Here's Why

University of Austin (UATX)

YouTube · Jan 22, 2026](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSx9kcFr7XA&t=42)

Projects and Writings

Cowen hosts the popular interview podcast Conversations with Tyler, where he probes leading thinkers across a wide variety of topics ranging from AI and economics to Indian classical music and food. Along with Alex Tabarrok, he co-created Marginal Revolution University, an online platform designed to make economics education free and accessible. 1, 2,3, 4]

Environmental and Urban Ties

---

GGL AI Overview

+5

Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University, wrote a widely read critique of the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD), an anti-lockdown petition co-authored by Stanford's Jay Bhattacharya. [1, 2, 3, 4]

Their disagreements highlight distinct philosophies on pandemic management: [1, 2]

You can explore Cowen's breakdown of the declaration on Econlib, or hear Bhattacharya discuss his own pandemic views in detail on Econtalk.

---

NOV 11 2020

George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen is attacking the Great Barrington Declaration again today on Marginal Revolution. He writes:

If you are still pondering the Great Barrington Declaration and related matters, let us try a simple empirical test about predictions.

He then links to an article quoting incorrect predictions made by Sunetra Gupta, a professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford University, who was one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration. The predictions were made back in May, a fact that Tyler notes in passing but seems to miss the significance of. The Declaration was signed on October 4th. The incorrectness of the May predictions was already obvious by October, and there is no reason to believe that those particular predictions played any role in the signing of the declaration or the policy advice it offers. Yet Tyler declares “Come on people, you were wrong,” as if this somehow discredits the advice given in the Great Barrington Declaration.

Does Tyler believe that anyone making incorrect predictions last spring lacks credibility to give advice today? Would he apply that standard to all the lockdown advocates that used the sensational overestimated death tolls of the Imperial College London model to justify their favored policies?

There is one person who, unfortunately, was clearly wrong more recently. In his October 15th Bloomberg column attacking the Great Barrington Declaration Tyler wrote,

Whatever you think of the stricter policies of last spring, they are now behind us, and the emphasis on ‘lockdowns’ is not helpful.

He later continued, “the critics who emphasize lockdowns are setting up a straw man.”

Unfortunately, Tyler, you were wrong. Lockdowns are being re-imposed across Europe, and we’re in increasing danger of seeing them re-imposed in parts of the United States. Ironically, if policy makers heed the advice in the Great Barrington Declaration, which Tyler disagrees with, then the lockdowns would be behind us. That’s something I’d like to see Tyler be right about.

Benjamin Powell

is a Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute and Director of the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University.

---

Tyler Cowen on the Great Barrington Declaration - Econlib

Tyler Cowen on the Great Barrington Declaration

74

David Henderson

The most recent EconTalk with Russ Roberts interviewing Tyler Cowen is quite good. They cover a lot of territory and Tyler has a lot of insights about culture, among other things. Tyler also, to his credit, even points out predictions and thoughts on which, he realizes in retrospect, he was wrong.

There’s one issue, though, an important one, on which Tyler still has trouble admitting he’s wrong: the Great Barrington Declaration.

Here’s an excerpt from the interview:

Russ Roberts: Should we have followed something akin to what the Great Barrington Declaration folks are suggesting: Extreme care with people over the age of 70 and 80 and letting other people mostly go about their business?

Tyler Cowen: That’s not my read of what the Great Barrington Declaration [GBD] actually called for.

Russ Roberts: That may not be fair to them. That’s my read. Yeah.

Tyler Cowen: A lot of the people connected with that institution [DRH note: by “that institution” Tyler means the American Institute for Economic Research] have made very dubious predictions and not backed down from them. They’ve told us that a lot of the cases are phony. It will all be over by–fill in the month. But, it’s typically some time that was a while ago. Very passive attitudes or even hostile attitudes toward vaccines. And, making lockdown the only issue.

I think when you look at the overall entire framing of Great Barrington, it’s been extremely harmful. It has led libertarian and conservative movements in the wrong direction.

The emphasis should have been, all along, deregulating the process of getting good vaccines out there quickly. And, if you look at what the Great Barrington people did on that it was remarkably little until very late in the process. And, you even have Jeffrey Tucker, well into fall, saying, ‘Vaccines, what vaccines? We need to let everyone get infected.’

Russ Roberts: I’m more interested–

Tyler Cowen: So, I’ve been very much opposed to their program as a whole. Though some parts of it, if you present in isolation, do in fact make good sense.

Russ Roberts: Yeah. I’m think of Jay Bhattacharya, who on this program I thought was quite sensible about the idea of locking down everyone seems remarkably inefficient and puts an enormous cost on people who are at relatively low risk.

Yeah, I have nothing to say about the more institutional implementation of that Declaration [GBD]. But, the original Declaration [GBD] and the epidemiologists and economists who were involved, the three people, made some sense to me. But, yeah, I’m not interested actually in those other side-agendas.

Tyler Cowen: It’s not independent from the other agendas. And they also systematically overestimate how many lockdowns are in operation.

So, past a certain point most parts of the United States, schools aside, have been mostly open. My state of Virginia, virtually all stores have been open for really a long time. One may or may not agree with that. But, there has not been a major lockdown for a long time in most of the Southeast, and indeed many other parts of the county.

Notice what happened. Russ tries as gently as he can to get Tyler to answer his question about the GBD. Russ summarizes the GBD in one sentence. And I think Russ does a great job of that. Tyler says that’s not his read of the GBD but doesn’t say how the GBD differs from what Russ has summarized.

Instead, Tyler engages in classic “guilt by association.” Tyler says, “A lot of people connected with that institution have made very dubious predictions.” But the issue Russ asked about was not “that institution” but the GBD. Then Tyler names someone: “And, you even have Jeffrey Tucker, well into fall, saying, ‘Vaccines, what vaccines? We need to let everyone get infected.'”

I don’t know if Jeff Tucker said exactly what Tyler said he said, but it doesn’t matter: Jeff Tucker is not one of the authors of the GBD. I had lunch with Jay Bhattacharya on Tuesday and asked him point blank: “Did Jeff Tucker write or edit any part of the GBD?” Jay’s answer: No.

This is not a small issue. Had we focused on protecting the vulnerable and n0t locking down the young and healthy and keeping children out of school, we would be in a lot better shape today, with fewer COVID deaths of the elderly and less destruction of the economy.

Here, by the way, is the Great Barrington Declaration. See if you think Russ did a good job of summarizing it.

---

Jay Bhattacharya at the NIH - Marginal REVOLUTION

by Tyler Cowen November 27, 2024

Trump has announced the appointment, so it is worth thinking through a few matters. While much of the chatter is about the Great Barrington Declaration, I would note that Bhattacharya has a history of focusing on the costs of obesity. So perhaps we can expect more research funding for better weight loss drugs, in addition to other relevant public health measures.

Bhattacharya also has researched the NIH itself (with Packalen), and here is one bit from that paper: “NIH’s propensity to fund projects that build on the most recent advances has declined over the last several decades. Thus, in this regard NIH funding has become more conservative despite initiatives to increase funding for innovative projects.”

I would expect it is a priority of his to switch more NIH funding into riskier bets, and that is all to the good. More broadly, his appointment can be seen as a slap in the face of the Fauci smug, satisfied, “do what I tell you” approach. That will delight many, myself included, but still the question remains of how to turn that into concrete advances in public health policy. Putting aside the possibility of another major pandemic coming around, that is not so easy to do.

My main worry is simply that NIH staff will not trust their new director. The problem is not so much GBD, which can be compartmentalized as a “political” stance, but rather the earlierclaims that many more people had Covid early than we had thought, and that expected fatalities were going to be quite low, with a maximum of 40,000. We all make mistakes, the question is how those mistakes get processed. If you interrogate Perplexity it will report “Bhattacharya has not publicly acknowledged or confessed to these mistakes in his early predictions.” You don’t have to agree with Perplexity (though contrary cites are welcome!), rather it suffices to say that reflects a common perception of the scientific community. He also seemed to be pushing those low fatality estimates for longer than might have been considered appropriate. And that is indeed a problem for his tenure at the NIH.

The danger is simply that NIH staff will double down on risk aversion, and they may not so readily support any attempt to make the grants themselves riskier, or rooted in the greater discretion of program directors, a’la DARPA and the like. They will fear that their director will not sufficiently follow the evidence, or admit when mistakes are being made and reverse course. Even if you fully agree with GBD and the like, I hope you are able to see this as a relevant problem. Every institutional revolution requires supportive troops on the inside, even if they are only a minority.

I very much hope this works out well, but in the meantime that is my reservation.

---

---

AI Overview GGL 6 26

Economist Tyler Cowen argues that the 1998 bailout of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) set a disastrous precedent. By rescuing the fund's creditors, the Federal Reserve created a widespread moral hazard, fostering the belief that governments would always bail out unsound financial institutions to protect the global credit system. [1, 2, 3]

Cowen expanded on this in his *New York Times* column, emphasizing the following points regarding the LTCM intervention: [1, 2]

For broader historical context on economic fluctuations and the eras surrounding financial crises like LTCM:

35s

[The Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen

clemsoncapitalism

YouTube · Sep 17, 2014](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIHGOo7OC8c)

4,943 views Sep 17, 2014 #PopeLecture #ClemsonInstitutefortheStudyofCapitalism #ClemsonUniversity

Pope Lecture Fall 2011 Dr. Tyler Cohen argues that our economy has enjoyed low‐hanging fruit since the seventeenth century: free land, immigrant labor, and powerful new technologies. But during the last forty years, the low‐hanging fruit started disappearing, and we started pretending it was still there. He reveals the underlying causes of our past prosperity and how we will generate it again. Dr. Cowen has a Ph.D in economics from Harvard University and is a professor of economics at George Mason University. (Sept. 8, 2011)#PopeLecture #ClemsonInstitutefortheStudyofCapitalism #ClemsonUniversity

If you want, I can:

---

NEW REP

The New Republic

Noam Scheiber

/

December 28, 2008

Is Long-term Capital To Blame For Today's Crisis?

Tyler Cowen has an interesting Times column arguing that the 1998 bailout of Long-Term Capital Management, the once high-flying hedge fund, is an important factor in the recent financial meltdown:

At the time, it may have seemed that regulators did the right thing. The bailout did not require upfront money from the government, and the world avoided an even bigger financial crisis. Today, however, that ad hoc intervention by the government no longer looks so wise. With the Long-Term Capital bailout as a precedent, creditors came to believe that their loans to unsound financial institutions would be made good by the Fed — as long as the collapse of those institutions would threaten the global credit system. Bolstered by this sense of security, bad loans mushroomed. ...

[I]t was important precisely because the fund was not a major firm. At the time of its near demise, it was not even a major money center bank, but a hedge fund with about 200 employees. Such funds hadn’t previously been brought under regulatory protection this way. After the episode, financial markets knew that even relatively obscure institutions — through government intervention — might be able to pay back bad loans.

The major creditors of the fund included Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers, all of which went on to lend and invest recklessly and, to one degree or another, pay the consequences. But 1998 should have been the time to send a credible warning that bad loans to overleveraged institutions would mean losses, and that neither the Fed nor the Treasury would make these losses good. ...

Fed inaction might have had graver economic consequences, especially if a [Warren] Buffett deal had fallen through. In that case, a rapid financial deleveraging would have followed, and the economy would have probably plunged into recession. That sounds bad, but it might have been better to have experienced a milder version of a downturn in 1998 than the more severe version of 10 years later.

It's an intriguing point with lots of analytic insight, but ultimately a little off the mark I think. Cowen's argument hinges on the idea of moral hazard: By bailing out LTCM, we set a precedent that investors (or at least creditors) don't have to suffer the consequences of their bad decisions. This made them even more reckless during the following decade, leading to an even bigger collapse when the music finally stopped.

But would not bailing out LTCM have really solved our moral hazard problem? Stick with the scenario Cowen lays out and ask yourself what's likely to happen when the financial authorities let a hedge fund collapse and it triggers a recession? My sense is that a huge political backlash ensues, and said financial authorities get scapegoated (even if they made the right call on the merits). Unfortunately, that also sets a precedent--this one for financial authorities--which is that, if you want to avoid being run out of town, you can never allow a financial institution to collapse on your watch.

This, in turn, creates an even bigger moral hazard problem than the one you were trying to avoid. Even with the way things unfolded for LTCM, no future creditor could be sure they'd be bailed out because the regulator was still free to make a case by case judgment, as Cowen points out. But if LTCM's collapse had triggered a recession, future creditors would be certain they'd get bailed out if their losses threatened the economy. No future regulator would want to deal with the kind of political blowback they'd be courting otherwise.

If you don't believe me, just fast forward to the present. As one shrewd money manager recently observed to me, the flack Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke took over the collapse of Lehman Brothers has basically ensured that no future Lehman Brothers will be allowed to collapse. Something tells me this person was not the only person on Wall Street to reach that conclusion.

The upshot, to me, is twofold: 1.) By the time a financial institution is so large/leveraged that its collapse would threaten the economy, it's almost certainly (but not definitely) going to be bailed out if starts to crater. This creates a moral hazard problem, but the alternative is worse in almost every respect. 2.) The trick is to prevent most institutions from becoming so large/leveraged that their collapse would threaten the economy, and to regulate the hell out of the rest.

Update: Matt Yglesias has some good thoughts about this, too.

--Noam Scheiber

---

https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/wannabe-aristocrats/

Yesterday, I left you thinking about centibillionaire Warren Buffett's contempt for democratic morality. The sixth-richest person in the world paid 0.10 percent in federal income taxes over the course of four years, according to an analysis by ProPublica. The nonprofit news group obtained 15 years' world of tax returns for thousands of the country's richest people, including the top 25, which includes the Sage of Omaha. He said it's OK for him to pay virtually nothing, because he's giving his fortune away.

That's contempt. In saying philanthropy is better than paying a fair share for a national government of, by and for the American people, Warren Buffett is saying, though of course without saying it out loud, that he's separate from and unequal to American citizenry—on account of normal people paying more than their fair share for a government serving him more than it does them. But there's another layer of contempt I want to draw your attention to today. That's the contempt for work.

The Republicans Party has for decades been successful at portraying the poor (read: nonwhite people) as those who do not work. Because they do not work, the poor look to the government for things they won't provide for themselves. Republican-controlled states still use work as a requisite for the accessing of relief. This requisite amounts to proving one is a worthy enough American citizen. If you can work, you can get help. If you don't work, you don't get help, because only worthy Americans are deserving of help. Anyone who is not worthy of citizenship is someone who is worthy of contempt.

The thing about being poor, however, is that it's work. Hard work. This is so plainly true, I'm not going to bother proving it. The poor are rarely idle, because to be idle is to flirt with death. (That's how close to the bone a chronically impoverished existence is.) Obviously, the poor do not earn incomes with the nonstop labor that comes with being poor, but let's not confuse earning an income with work. If we accept the Republican view that working is a requisite for being a worthy citizen, the poor are the worthiest of all. The poor are deserving of state relief by simple dint of being poor.

But we shouldn't accept the Republican view, because it does not apply equitably or universally. The very obscenely rich are exempted. Always. Yet they are idle. Yet they are unproductive. Yet they sure as hell take more than they give. As the ProPublica expose revealed, the income of the 25 wealthiest people is not derived from labor but from "the skyrocketing value of their assets, like stock and property." The Republicans Party idolizes them as models for us to emulate. Tyler Cowen said that taxing capital gains (the stuff making the very obscenely rich so very obscenely rich) would be un-American. He said that instead we "should prioritize" the "valorization of wealth."

No, the US should prioritize the valorization of work. (In this I mean any kind of work, whether it's compensated or not.) And taxing capital gains is totally American. To be clear, being wealthy isn't the problem. The problem is political. The very obscenely rich of the 21st century are the wannabe aristocrats that Americans feared in the early 19th century. As aristocracy threatened everyone's liberty back then, the wannabes threaten everyone's liberty now. But before we get to the point of using government policy to break their choke-hold, we must demonstrate a depth of contempt for the very obscenely rich that's at least as robust and enduring as their contempt for us.

Again, it's not because the very obscenely rich are so very obscenely rich.

Judith N. Shklar, author of American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion explained Andrew Jackson's view of an aristocracy as

...any group that by its use of its wealth "exercises more than its just proportion of influence in political affairs." It was not wealth as such that was reprehensibly aristocratic, but wealth either gained through governmental favor or used to buy political power and influence. All monopolists and holders of license and charters were aristocrats because they owed their wealth to government grant, and had not earned it by their own efforts. They enjoyed unearned advantages. [my italics]

The aristocrat is not only a political monopolist, he is a moral and cultural threat to the republic as well. The aristocrat is idle and shows contempt for work. The merely rich were unobjectionable, but the "idle rich" were intolerable. The great division among men in society was not between poor and rich, but between "do-somethings" and "do-nothings." Failure to work was not merely immoral in and of itself, it also expressed a social ideology, the contempt for labor. Jacksonian democrats were acutely aware of the traditions that treated work as defiling. That is why so many insisted that by "we the people, we mean emphatically the class which labors."

ProPublica revealed that the very obscenely rich are so very obscenely rich because most of their money is not taxed. It is not taxed because the government does not see "the skyrocketing value of their assets, like stock and property" as income. They use this wealth to maintain their advantages politically. In other words, they "owed their wealth to government grant, and had not earned it by their own efforts. They enjoyed unearned advantages." They should be, therefore, seen as "reprehensibly aristocratic."

The Jacksonian democrats did not view the poor the way I do. Even so, they are useful in that they give us a history and heritage to draw from. The Republicans and their ideological comrades (think libertarian economist Tyler Cowen) want us to believe that taxing the very obscenely rich is un-American. That's a lie. It's the most American thing of all. The point of using the government to break their power isn't about envy or revenge. It's about the duty of the government to protect the citizenry from tyranny.

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

---

---

blogger and economist tyler cowan runs mercatus: fail on medicare cost report

==

https://bluevirginia.us/2013/03/kochfunded-mercatus-center-embarrasses-gmu-yet-again-with-laughable-report-on-freedom

in  many ways, George Mason University (GMU) is a fine school, an institution of higher learning that Virginians should be proud of. But in at least one way, it is a cringe-inducing embarrassment. That, of course, is the tremendous amount of money from the Koch brothers that goes to fund climate science denialism, to rail against environmental regulation more broadly, at GMU’s far-right-wingnut Mercatus Center, described in The New Yorker as essentially a scam to “take corporate money and give it to a neutral-sounding think tank.” Mercatus is very useful to the Koch brothers, of course, because they can count on the corporate/clueless media to cite it as some sort of unbiased, neutral “think tank,” when in reality it is wildly biased, and certainly not a “think tank” the way most people would ever “think” of that concept.

Given all this, it’s not surprising that Koch-funded fellows at Mercatus have now produced a laughable, far-right-wingnut report that purports to measure “Freedom in the 50 States.” Of course, it does no such thing, unless by “freedom” you mean “freedom for corporations, polluters, and the super rich to completely run amok, while the state tells you what you can and can’t do with your body, who you can or can’t marry, whether or not you can organize with other workers to demand better pay and benefits, etc.”  In short, this report is a Koch-brothers-meet-John-Galt wet dream of what America should look like. And that, my friends, is not a pleasant thought, in any way, shape or form.

Let’s look at a few of the metrics they use. Most importantly is having a low “tax burden” (note the loaded words they use?) — that metric makes up 29% of the entire score in and of itself, and of course the lower the better, even if your state’s schools, roads, bridges, health care systems, etc. are falling apart. The super-rich Koch brothers certainly don’t care – let the little people suffer, they’re doing fine, bwahahahahaha!

The next highest weighting in this “study” (using the word as loosely as is humanly possible) goes to that pressing issue, one that I know all of us sit up nights worrying about, namely “Freedom from Tort Abuse.” What on earth is THAT, you ask? According to Mercatus, “This is what the US Chamber of Commerce calls a state’s ‘lawsuit climate.’ It captures risks and costs that businesses must pass on to consumers as higher prices.”Yep, the virulently anti-government, pro-corporate-welfare US Chamber of Commerce came up with with the metric that makes up another 12% of the Mercatus Center’s scoring. ‘Nuff said.

So, combine those two items – low taxes and “freedom from tort abuse” – and you’re up to over 40% of the score right there. Throw in a few more on the “libertarian” wish list – “gun control freedom” (6.6%), “health insurance freedom” (5.4%), tobacco and alcohol “freedom” (6.9% combined), “labor market freedom” (3.8%) – and you’ve got the bulk of it. Note, by the way, that “marriage freedom” is weighted at just 2.1%, lower than “alcohol freedom” (2.8%), “tobacco freedom” (4.1%), and many others.

So yes, the whole thing would be completely laughable if it weren’t so insidious. Alex Pareene of Salon skewers it here, noting that the Koch-funded Mercatus Institute’s “definition of ‘freedom’ largely adheres to the standard American libertarian conception of ‘liberty,’ which is to say it is oriented almost entirely around private property ownership and low taxation.” Thus, North Dakota comes out in the rankings as the most “free” state, even though it just “passed the most restrictive antiabortion laws in the country…[i]ncluding a law specifically aimed at shutting down the state’s lone abortion provider.” In other words, you’re free in North Dakota to have very low taxes and very low services, but if you’re a woman you are NOT free to make important medical decisions, with your doctor, about your body. Is this the combo “Atlas Shrugged”/“The Handmaid’s Tale” version of “freedom” or what?

By the way, just in case you’re at all interested, Virginia is considered by the Koch brothers, aka Mercatus, as “one of the freest states in the country, ranking eighth overall,” in part due to ” Virginia’s status as a right-to-work state.” Lovely, huh? Meanwhile, just to our north, our unfortunate brethren in Communist Maryland suffer at #44, despite the fact that you can marry who you want there, while Virginia enshrines discrimination into its state constitution. Got that? I’d also note that, as a general rule, the “blue” states – the ones that are huge net donors to the “red” states – are considered less “free,” while the “red” states – huge net recipients of federal largesse, with the lowest education and health rankings in the country – are considered the most “free.” To put it another way, if you were dreaming up a dystopian vision of America, and ranking the most dystopian states the highest and the least dystopian the lowest, you’d basically have…the Mercatus Center study. What an embarrassment.

==

==

180?!  3/20

https://boingboing.net/2020/01/27/galt-underwater.html

Leading libertarian intellectuals are now disavowing the label (Tyler Cowan says he's now a "State Capacity Libertarian") thanks to the total failure of libertarianism to cope with climate change.

John Quiggin (previously) explores how, at the start of the climate debate, libertarians advocated for "market based" solutions, like tradeable emissions credits, something dubbed "free-market environmentalism." The model had been used successfully to fight acid rain, and it was appealing to libertarians as it "would supply incentives to find the most cost-effective path toward reducing emissions."

Climate activists weren't fond of the idea, favoring instead a limit on pollution itself (this traces a similar arc to the debate on smoking, which started with "sin taxes" on tobacco but really only made progress when these were augmented with absolute prohibitions on smoking in most places and strict curbs on the sale and marketing of tobacco products).

But once emissions credits became a reality, libertarians almost unanimously rejected them, and switched from "free market environmentalism" to straight-up climate denial. As Quiggin says, the problem with tradeable emissions is that it rebuts the core tenet of libertarianism: John Locke's idea that property rights arise spontaneously from nature, rather than being created by governments hoping to achieve specific policy goals.

But more deeply, "Affluent white men who don’t like being told what to do are by far the most important constituency for libertarianism. Such men would consider it a dreadful imposition to have to pay, whether directly or indirectly, for the right to drive a car or use air conditioning."

This created a steady-state in which the climate steadily worsened and libertarians steadily denied that their cities were underwater, on fire, or gripped by pandemics, repeating expensive talking points about solar cycles or crooked scientists who were hoping to dismantle capitalism (IOW: "Reality has a well-known leftist bias").

But Trump disrupted the steady state. When he took office, the libertarian frontrunners abandoned any pretense of commitment to anything except more power and money for people who were monied and powerful, leaving the few standards-bearers for the movement with no way forward. Even as the Cato Institute abandoned its climate denial stance, it still argued that the climate crisis couldn't be averted by state intervention, despite the fact that markets had totally failed to come to grips with it.

Quiggin reckons with the incoherence of markets-only thinking in his masterful 2019 book Economics in Two Lessons, which explores the power, limitations and dangers of using markets to solve our problems in a thoughtful and clear way.

Having abandoned intellectual credibility in the fight to stop climate action, libertarianism has no future as a movement. Trumpism will soon swallow up what’s left of its organizational structure. Individuals have a number of choices available, from Niskanen-style “liberaltarianism” to the fantasy of “going Galt.” But the libertarian moment is well and truly over.

Global warming is the ultimate refutation of Lockean propertarianism. No one can pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere while leaving “enough and as good” for everyone else. It has taken thirty years, but this undeniable fact has finally killed the propertarian movement in the United States.

Libertarians Can’t Save the Planet [John Quiggin/Jacobin]

CAP-AND-TRADE / CATO INSTITUTE / CLIMATE / CLIMATE CRISIS / DENIALISM VS NIHILISM / FREE MARKET ENVIRONMENTALISM / LIBERATARIANISM / PEAK INDIFFERENCE / REALITY HAS A WELL-KNOWN LEFTIST BIAS / STATE CAPACITY LIBERTARIANS

---

==

jacobin no lnx

The decline of libertarianism — also known as propertarianism — has inspired a lot of discussion in the past couple of years. The economist Tyler Cowen recently disavowed the label, affirming his commitment to a modified version of the philosophy that he calls “State Capacity Libertarianism.”

Cowen’s defection continues the exodus of intellectually serious figures from the libertarian milieu, most notably to the so-called liberaltarian Niskanen Center. Both Cowen and the Niskanen cohort have stressed the failure of mainstream libertarianism to formulate an honest response to the climate crisis.

Free-Market Environmentalism: Theory and Practice

When the issue of climate change first received serious attention in the 1990s, for a time it looked set to establish common ground between environmentalists and libertarians. There was much interest in the concept of “free-market environmentalism” or FME, drawing upon the work of British economist Ronald Coase, who had suggested that environmental problems could be resolved through the proper allocation of property rights. Terry Anderson of Montana State University exercised a strong influence in these debates.

FME’s key proposal for addressing climate change was the creation of tradable emissions permits, a model that had been successfully deployed in the case of sulfur dioxide emissions. According to this view, a market in permits would supply incentives to find the most cost-effective path toward reducing emissions, as long as there were appropriate limits on the volume of permits.

Most environmental activists greeted the idea of “rights to pollute” with suspicion: they argued for more direct controls, as part of a broader shift away from mass consumerism. But many were won over by the prospect of forming an effective coalition to press for decarbonization. By the time of the Kyoto conference in 1997, support for carbon prices as the most cost-effective long-term solution, to be implemented through internationally tradable permits, had become the dominant view. Twenty years later, this vision is finally being realized in the European Union, where high permit prices are driving coal-fired power out of existence.

Trading Places

But a funny thing happened on the way to Kyoto. Propertarians, who had often been keen on tradable permits as long as environmentalists opposed them, now rejected the idea with near unanimity, along with the rest of the political right. Since then, we have faced a paradoxical situation where they consider any kind of market-based solution to climate change unacceptable. Why did this happen?

The problem was to some extent philosophical. Propertarian thought relies heavily upon the Lockean fiction that property rights arise naturally, before the emergence of a state (defined broadly to include any kind of authority within a group, tribe, or nation). Obviously, no such rights could have existed when it came to the atmosphere, so emissions permits would have to be the creation of national governments working through global agreements. Admitting that states define and enforce property rights was too big a pill for many propertarians to swallow.

But the cultural barriers standing in the way of free-market environmentalism were even greater. Affluent white men who don’t like being told what to do are by far the most important constituency for libertarianism. Such men would consider it a dreadful imposition to have to pay, whether directly or indirectly, for the right to drive a car or use air conditioning. Environmentalists who insist that untrammeled individualism of all kinds has malign consequences lie at the opposite cultural pole.

However, this created a dilemma for propertarians. Having rejected both state- and market-led solutions to climate change, their only remaining option was to deny that the problem existed at all. This required tremendous intellectual dishonesty, supplied in large measure by hired guns who had won their spurs in earlier fights over passive smoking and the ozone layer. This didn’t trouble the libertarian ground troops, who clung tenaciously to their baseless self-image as the smartest guys in the room. Lacking any scientific, economic, or statistical knowledge to back up their opinions, they seized upon the innumerable talking points that the denial industry churned out.

All-In for Trump

Then Trump came along. He grasped — indeed, embodied — the reality that abstract notions of personal liberty were not what really appealed to the conservative base. Rather, it was the conviction that well-off white men should be free to think, speak, and act as they pleased, while the state clamps down on everyone else when they step out of line.

At the same time, two decades of climate change denialism fostered a nihilistic and crudely partisan attitude toward basic questions of truth or falsehood among conservatives. Trump substituted barefaced lies for the ponderous apologetics of the intellectual right, starting with the claim that his inauguration crowd was bigger than Obama’s.

After Trump’s election, the “libertarian moment” so widely touted just a few years ago gave way to a sudden collapse, with most of the movement’s intellectual leadership shifting in the opposite direction. Republican politicians seen as potential leaders of the future, such as Rand Paul and Mike Lee, went all-in for Trump, along with advocacy groups like FreedomWorks and the Club for Growth. The only exception was Michigan’s Justin Amash, who quit the Republican Party in 2019 and now faces almost certain defeat, sharing the fate of a handful of state-level Republicans who departed to join the Libertarian Party.

The remnants, clustered around the much-diminished Cato Institute, have no obvious way forward. The institute finally abandoned climate denialism last year, but it still has no answer for the climate crisis. The last remaining cheerleader for the “libertarian moment,” Nick Gillespie, offered a rather slippery response to Tyler Cowen’s criticism:

Whatever your beliefs and preferences might be on a given issue, the scale (and cost) of addressing, say, climate change is massive compared to delivering basic education, and with the latter at least, there’s no reason to believe that more state control or dollars will create positive outcomes.

On close inspection, Gillespie is just restating the standard libertarian view on education, while saying nothing at all about climate change, other than to acknowledge that it is a massive problem. He neither denies that “more state control or dollars” are needed, nor offers any alternative.

Having abandoned intellectual credibility in the fight to stop climate action, libertarianism has no future as a movement. Trumpism will soon swallow up what’s left of its organizational structure. Individuals have a number of choices available, from Niskanen-style “liberaltarianism” to the fantasy of “going Galt.” But the libertarian moment is well and truly over.

Global warming is the ultimate refutation of Lockean propertarianism. No one can pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere while leaving “enough and as good” for everyone else. It has taken thirty years, but this undeniable fact has finally killed the propertarian movement in the United States.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Quiggin, an Australian economist at the University of Queensland, blogs at Crooked Timber.

no lnx

==

==

TC is full of shit:

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/**2015/**06/what-matters-inequality-or-opportuniy/393272/

no lnx

Lately, one argument that’s been making the rounds is that people should worry less about inequality and more about opportunity. Arthur Brooks, head of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said, “I don’t care about income inequality per se; I care about opportunity inequality.” Senator and presidential candidate Marco Rubio believes that inequality is but a symptom of immobility and constrained opportunity. Tyler Cowen argued in the New York Times that what matters is not the fact that the top 1 percent is capturing a much larger share of total income growth than they used to, but that the poor are stuck in poverty.

These individuals have identified a worthy goal. Unequal access to opportunity offends deeply held American values, and poverty is not only a matter of near-term material deprivation—too often, it also robs low-income children of the chance to realize their intellectual and economic potential.

But it’s not possible to effectively address either poverty or inadequate opportunity if America hives off its opportunity concerns from the broader problem of inequality (nor, as Senator Rubio intimates, can America reduce inequality by focusing solely on increasing mobility). Boosting mobility will require reductions in wage, income, and wealth inequalities.

For many in the opportunity-not-inequality camp, the relationship between the two concepts is an inconvenient truth. Concerns about inequality smack of “class warfare,” of “going after” the top 1 percent and Wall Street.Cowen is revealing in this regard: “The inequality focus tends to draw us to redistribution, whereas a mobility focus is more conducive to ideas for wealth creation.”

Many politicians and analysts would rather not address the power imbalances that have channeled so much of our economic growth to the highest-income families. They are much more comfortable focusing on the benign-sounding theme of “wealth creation” or insisting that economic growth alone can improve mobility without any redistribution of resources or political power, as if “a rising tide can lift all boats” matters when a few people are in yachts and many are stuck in dinghies.

But a growing body of research shows strong links among inequality, poverty, and opportunity. For example, new research by Elise Gould of the Economic Policy Institute reveals that of the factors most commonly cited as driving poverty in America—education, family structure, race and more (see chart below)—the number-one factor by far is the growth in inequality, which added seven percentage points to the poverty rate since the late 1970s.

So why is that? How is it that inequality reduces mobility and deepens poverty?

* * *

The relationship between childhood family income and life outcomes is well-established. Socioeconomic status is unfortunately the strongest predictor of a child’s academic achievement, as decades of social science research have found. A child’s income rank—her family’s income relative to the household income of other families—makes a difference for that child’s future adult-income rank as well. Research by Raj Chetty of Harvard and his colleagues links every 10-percentile-point gain in childhood income rank with a 3.4-percentile-point gain in income rank as an adult. Since inequality by definition means that less income will reach poor and middle class Americans for any given rate of economic growth, these facts alone highlight inequality’s relevance to mobility discussions.

In addition, a large and growing body of evidence, recently reviewed by Katharine Bradbury and Robert Triest of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, directly connects inequality of outcomes to inequality of opportunity. As shown in the figure below, Bradbury and Triest find a significant, negative relationship between living in an area with greater income inequality and children’s expected upward mobility.

The Relationship Between Inequality and Mobility

[no grafs]

Commuting zones with greater inequality have reduced expected upward mobility for low-income children (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities)]

It’s critical to understand the fundamental difference between these findings and the Cowen, Rubio, et al. view that America can address poverty without addressing inequality. As just noted,rising inequality implies that the income and wealth generated by GDP and productivity growth increasingly flow to those at the very top of the scale. As a result, relatively fewer resources reach everyone else. One thus would expect to see low-income families less able (relative to the wealthy ones) to invest in children’s futures, more indebted if they tried to go to college, more likely to be stuck in neighborhoods that lack opportunity, and more likely to experience the stressors that do permanent damage to children’s later educational and earnings outcomes.

And that’s exactly what happens.

Research indicates at least three causal pathways via which inequality constrains opportunity for those at the lower end of the economic spectrum.

First, inequality is driving increasing residential segregation by income. The shares of families in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty and neighborhoods of concentrated wealth both more than doubled between 1970 and 2009, while the share of families in middle-income neighborhoods declined from 65 percent to 42 percent. Those high-poverty neighborhoods—where more and more families are living—create lasting disadvantages for many who grow up there: If a family with young children (less than age 13) relocates from a high- to a low-poverty neighborhood, the kids achieve better academic and economic outcomes later in life, as new work by Chetty et al. indicates.

Second, inequality leads to unequal access to quality educational experiences throughout a child’s lifetime. Over the period of growing inequality, these disparities have increased. In 1995, for example, families with education debt in the bottom half of the net worth distribution (a broader definition of income, including assets minus liabilities) had a mean debt-to-income ratio of around 0.26, meaning that for every dollar of their income, they owed 26 cents in college debt. For families in the top 5 percent, that ratio was eight cents on the dollar. But by 2013, the debt-to-income ratio had more than doubled to 0.58 for the bottom half (some of whom are poor but many of whom are middle class) while remaining unchanged for those at the top.

Third, and most importantly, inequality directly undermines equality of opportunity, likely through a variety of mechanisms.As the gap between the rich and poor widens, lower-income families have less ability relative to their rich counterparts to invest in enrichment goods for their children. Children from families with less income have relatively less extensive and privileged social networks and, compared to their rich peers, are more likely to experience the type of "toxic" stress that can hamper brain development and long term academic, health, and economic outcomes.

In short, inequality entrenches immobility not just by enabling increasingly unequal transfers of wealth from one generation to the next, but also through a number of more subtle pathways that affect opportunity on a daily basis. It may not yet be possible to explain all of these subtle pathways with great certainty, but the fact that “rich and poor children score very differently on school readiness tests before they enter kindergarten” should be viewed as an unsurprising consequence of the high levels of inequality American society currently tolerates.

Members of the “don’t-mess-with-the-rich-to-help-the-poor” crowd also ignore the political dimension of inequality. While Rubio, Paul Ryan, and others are professing their concern for the poor, they’re busy trying to repeal the estate tax (at a cost of $270 billion over 10 years) and writing budgets that gut the safety net. These policies restrict mobility at both the bottom and top by exacerbating the burdens of being poor, increasing the privilege of being born into riches, and eliminating revenue sources for investments that might begin to reverse the inequality of opportunity. Why do politicians pursue such policies? Because they are nudged along by the interests of wealthy donors. Inequality begets greater inequality.

In other words, disadvantages faced by children in low- and middle-income families and advantages held by their wealthy peers are two sides of the same coin. The lack of opportunity for those in poverty is not some separate problem from the unequal distribution of wealth and income across society.

* * *

Boosting mobility therefore requires directly addressing residential segregation, educational access, and other barriers described above. Here are some ideas that hold promise:

One conclusion that stems from the Chetty et al. findings regarding the benefits of moving from high- to low-poverty areas is to improve the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Housing Choice Vouchers (HCV) program. Housing analysts Barbara Sard and Doug Rice recently detailed a number of specific, straightforward changes that could eliminate barriers for voucher recipients to move into low-poverty areas, including tying voucher subsidies to rent in specific zip codes instead of entire metropolitan areas. Importantly, such a change could be implemented without significant funding or even congressional action, and HUD has just announced that it is considering doing so.

...

---

hmn

n o lnx

The surprising decline of innovation in the West: Entrepreneurship has actually been on a worryingly downward trend since the 1980s ?— here’s why

Photo by Mavo, Shutterstock

Written by Wim Naude, The Conversation October 8, 2019

27

The idea that we are living in an entrepreneurial age, experiencing rapid disruptive technological innovation on a scale amounting to a new “industrial revolution” is a pervasive modern myth. Scholars have written academic papers extolling the coming of the “entrepreneurial economy”. Policymakers and investors have pumped massive amounts of funding into start-up ecosystems and innovation. Business schools, universities and schools have moved entrepreneurship into their core curricula.

The only problem is that the West’s golden entrepreneurial and innovation age is behind it. Since the 1980s entrepreneurship, innovation and, more generally, business dynamics, have been steadily declining – particularly so in the US.As economist Tyler Cowen has found:

These days Americans are less likely to switch jobs, less likely to move around the country, and, on a given day, less likely to go outside the house at all […] the economy is more ossified, more controlled, and growing at lower rates.

The ossified economy

No matter what measure of entrepreneurship you use, the underlying trend is the same: downwards. For instance, measured as the ratio of new firms (those younger than one year) to total firms, then entrepreneurship in the US declined by around 50% between 1978 and 2011. In terms of the share of young firms (those younger than five years), entrepreneurship declined from 47% in the late 1980s to 39% in 2006. Meanwhile, people working for big firms (those employing more than 250 people) rose from 51% to 57% of the overall workforce and the average firm size increased from 20 to 24 people over the same period.

Job-to-job mobility, within job mobility and geographical mobility – all indirect measures of business entry and exit dynamics – have been declining. There is also evidence that after 2000, job creation in the US shifted from the creation of high-paying jobs to low-wage (low-skilled) ones. Similarly, the share of entrepreneurs with higher education in the US declined from 12.2% in 1985 to 5.3% in 2014. As economist Nicholas Kozeniauskas puts it, “the decline in entrepreneurship is concentrated among the smart”.

Several measures indicate that entrepreneurs are also less innovative. The ratio of patents to GDP in the US is declining and the cost of patenting is increasing. The age of inventors, when they registered their first patent, and the average size of research teams, are on the rise. Plus, as economist Nicholas Bloom and his co-authors have found, “research productivity for the aggregate US economy has declined by a factor of 41 since the 1930s, an average decrease of more than 5% per year”.

As well as being a problem in the US – the world’s largest and most complex economy – evidence also confirms that entrepreneurship and innovation are declining in Belgium, the UK, and Germany. And, as I found in a recent paper, ILO data shows a decline, from 8.2% in 1991 to 6.8% in 2018 in entrepreneurship in high-income economies.

Reasons for the decline

One reason for this decline is a fall in population growth and population aging. Europe’s fertility rate is 1.6 children per woman, which means that each generation will be 20% smaller than the previous one.

Another reason is growing market concentration. Incumbent firms have a growing amount of power that stops new ones from entering the market. Similarly, new competition is suppressed by the proliferation of so-called zombie firms. These are firms older than ten years that have low productivity levels and are often kept in business by subsidised finance. There may be more than 100,000 zombie firms in the UK alone.

These reasons are probably interlinked. Poor population growth means lower levels of demand, which encourages existing companies to profit as much as possible from their existing markets. This means they stifle the entry to new competitors and extract more profit by paying employees less. The increasing number of mergers and acquisitions, as well as decline in initial public offerings, with young companies preferring to be bought by large incumbents, reflects this too.

Based on the nature of the problem, the solutions to this entrepreneurial decline are straightforward: break up monopolies, improve competition, allow markets to work better, facilitate knowledge diffusion. Moreover, and vitally, it will require boosting overall demand. This means more investment by governments in public services and infrastructure, reducing high levels of inequality and improving the bargaining power of labour unions.

The case for these policies is overwhelming. But, unfortunately, it might not be as simple as this. In a recent paper, I argue that the fact that the decline in entrepreneurship is confined to wealthy and complex economies, suggest that this may be a price to pay for complexity.

As Geoffrey West has stressed, the same growth curve that characterises living organisms also applies to the growth of cities, economies and companies. After growing beyond a certain threshold, size and complexity stabilises and growth levels off. So it becomes more challenging to create and use new valuable knowledge once you reach a certain size. And, the more complex a production process is, the more that can go wrong.

But how concerned should we really be? Some scholars have questioned whether the decline in entrepreneurship is necessarily undesirable. They point out that the decline has been accompanied by more employment, more job stability and better job matching (where people find jobs that better fit their preferences and talents). It may also reflect that the most productive firms, which happen to be larger, are being allocated the most resources, which is good for the economy.

If indeed this is the case, then the downside may be that complex, ossified, modern economies will gradually become less flexible, less adaptable to external change – and hence more vulnerable. Survival will therefore involve finding ways to deal with systemic societal vulnerability.The Conversation

Wim Naudé, Professorial Fellow, Maastricht Economic and Social Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (UNU-MERIT), United Nations University.

This article is republished from The Conversation

==

https://www.c-span.org/video/?459892-1/big-business

sadly not an ranting loon

https://www.c-span.org/video/?459892-1/big-business

booktv 419

tyler Cowen, "Big Business"Tyler Cowen argued that large corporations play an important role in our…

---

https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/in-the-curse-of-bigness-author-tim-wu-makes-his-case-that-big-business-ushered-in-the-nazis/

salon no author name? alec stapp

Alec Stapp is a research fellow at the International Center for Law and Economics.@alecstapp

https://www.salon.com/2019/03/14/in-the-curse-of-bigness-tim-wu-makes-his-case-that-big-business-ushered-in-the-nazis/

ICLE

Alec Stapp, Author at International Center for Law & Economics

https://laweconcenter.org/author/alecstapp/

1.

Alec Stapp joined ICLE as a Research Fellow in March 2019. His research interests include technology policy, antitrust law, and data privacy & security. Alec's ...

==

dem in chains

[ch 11 Democracy defeats the doctrine --

GMU courted JB hard; when he came, big corp $ which boosts rank of school; Richie Fink macher; grads can't get teaching jobs, but lots of policy gigs [CTT? gov't?] 173

Kemp-Roth bill req tearing up social contract ; Stockman realize he could not win b/c of popularity of SS etc, by 82 knew r revo not possible; seen as turncoat, gop left fact-based universe 177by 1989 nat debt 53% of GNP ; libtard say RR did not fail so much a forfeit [rt turned on Ike for accept SS]; so indirect brabattack; step 1 make SS look less attractive; step 2 divide and conquer; progressive will fall for make rich pay more/means test, but will kill it . libtard kill soc sec 3x win 181

pvtize once fringe theory

stephen moore

Manne program dead? sdo hot on mkt, got GMU law school head; pro corp vs green and consumerism

oct 86 Nobel JB; also libtard helped by lost of trust in gov't LBJ VN, ategate

IHS works with fedsoc

ch 12  The kind of force that propelled Columbus --

contract w. Am bal budget. mostly by Dick Armey, who staffed from Cato; gop sweep house and senate; armey studies house rules to manipulate; 2 shutdowns on debt limits fail; BC triangulates, takes on gop stated goals but avoid extreme measures works; 193

libtard had to present their bills as opposite of what actually were; so reform will kill; manne retires; 2/5 of all fed judge summer inst; greens biggest threat to corps, "quest for control over industry" 195

gov't health and welfare rules hobble labor mkt; flat rate tax more fair to rich; feminism "heavily socialistic for no apparent reason" 196 socialism is gov't $ for anything other than mil or police.

national voter reg act 1993 motor voter "enfranchising the illiterate" 197 JB

GMU bd of vis Kristol etc etc fink , armey, feulner...

Wendy Gramm may 98 blatant partisan fundraiser ltr v501c3 so prolly illegal; JB PO's, verges on fraud"

PO's at Koch takeover, fink at CSE shady , claiming orgs all allies no consent eg boy scouts 210

Tyler Cowen 202; buch ctr splits off, JB retreats to cabin?

COS weekend retreats, scalia keynote?  no academics left in pgm?

...

fink 3rd rate pol hack, aptly named (which part?] : Rowley

big lie: makers and takers; 47% at 50k$ per plate mtg

cowen: worthy indiv will climb out of poverty but some will fall by wayside; poor shd move to texas where it's cheaper, tho admits skimps on medicare and welfare;

head for rio style favelas, bad water but will provide cheap housing;

paul ryan sez school lunch bad b/c full belly "and an empty soul" 213.

gov't shd not do sanitation public health;

koch org sez no req for employee to wash hands as long as post sign not req by restaurant, so magic og mktplace will fix?!

amity slales (sp) sez gov't check lead level in blood b/c job security?! 214 gov't sci wil never find cure for cancer b/c put out of work 215 note 26 robt tollison & Econ of Smoking 1992

flint b/c of Mackinac ; we listen to it sez gov John Engler --> emerg mgr;  2009 1/2 black ppl in mich under EM. mac ctr made sure EM protected from lawsuits;

:{:{}:

](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:2lSmM_iRsE0J:https://laweconcenter.org/author/alecstapp/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)}:

===

justin fox time

mylittle foray into Austrian economics is now taking me down a rabbit hole that I really should climb out of (I’ve got work to do) but is just too fascinating to leave. Paleolibertarian, Rothbardian, Misesian Austrian economist Lew Rockwell responded to my post:

The author hilariously sees Austrian economics as divided into two parts: the nice one, entirely in the super-wealthy Koch Brothers ambit, and the mean one, in mine!

A little background: when I started the Mises Institute (an organization unmentioned by Time) 26 years ago, the head of the Koch family foundation angrily pledged to destroy me if I went ahead. “We have worked too hard to rid Austrian economics of Mises,” he said. Hayek, he claimed, was their man, though, of course, he was far better than that, and a good supporter of the Institute. But the real problem turned out to be Murray Rothbard. It was the greatest of the Misesians and the founder of modern libertarianism whom the Koch World Empire longed to smash, and still does. Murray, founder of Cato, was the one man in the ambit to say no when the Kochs decided to jettison Mises for reasons of DC preferment. Otherwise, they felt, it would be harder to curry favor with the Fed and the Republican party. Hayek’s views on central banking, gold, conservatism, and competitive currencies are no more DC-friendly than Mises’s and Rothbard’s, but they are ignored, and just his name invoked.

Over more than 40 years, I have had the honor to work with such giants of economics and liberty as Mises, Hazlitt, Hayek, and especially Rothbard. Indeed, Hazlitt told me that my “greatest achievement was to give Rothbard a platform,” and I think I have also helped support the Menger, Bohm-Bawerk, Mises, Hayek, Rothbard tradition, and some of the many important scholars working in it. That’s why such Koch mouthpieces as Reason will say anything on orders. The Kochs also oppose the great Austro-libertarian statesman, Ron Paul, for his refusal to endorse the Fed when he was head of one of their organizations. None of us, however, is backing down. Among young people, in fact, we’ve already won. Mises held that ideas can beat back the state. Ideas can also triumph over billions of oil dollars, and the establishment’s antique media.

I had no idea what he was talking about regarding the billionaire Koch brothers, but a little Googling soon taught me that such salonfähig libertarian establishments as the Cato Institute, Reason magazine, and the George Mason University economics department are all mere tentacles of the “Kochtopus.” And Tyler Cowen, who got me started on this whole adventure, is seen by some Austrian true believers of the Mises school as perhaps the Kochtopus’s most monstrous creation. To quote (extensively) from David Gordon’s history of the Kochtopus vs. Rothbard struggle on LewRockwell.com:

Walter Grinder, working from the Koch-dominated Institute for Humane Studies, promised a “Rothbardianism with manners.” In his view, Rothbard had been too acerbic; through a policy of suaviter in modo, Austrian views could better gain access to the mainstream. … Grinder and others in leadership posts at IHS concluded that they should concentrate on elite universities such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton in the United States, and Oxford and Cambridge in England. If students could be recruited from these universities or, if already sympathetic, admitted to their programs, success was at hand.

Grinder placed particular emphasis on Tyler Cowen, a brilliant student who had been interested in Austrian economics since his high school days. Cowen enrolled in an Austrian economics program at Rutgers, where he impressed both Joe Salerno and Richard Fink with his extraordinary erudition. When Fink moved to George Mason University, Cowen moved with him; and he completed his undergraduate degree there in 1983. Grinder considered him the next Hayek, the hope of Austrian economics.

In accord with the elite universities policy, Cowen went to Harvard for his graduate degree. There he came under the influence of Thomas Schelling and gave up his belief in Austrian economics.

After he finished his PhD in 1987, Cowen was for a time a professor at the University of California at Irvine, and he used to visit me sometimes in Los Angeles. I was impressed with his remarkable intelligence and enjoyed talking with him. But I remember how surprised I was one day when he told me that he did not regard Ludwig von Mises very highly. Here he fitted in all-too-well with another policy of Richard Fink and the Kochtopus leadership. They regarded Mises as a controversial figure: his “extremism” would interfere with the mission of arousing mainstream interest in the Austrian School. Accordingly, Hayek should be stressed and Mises downplayed. …

Cowen eventually returned to George Mason University as a Professor of Economics. He is said to be the dominant figure in the department. Because of his close friendship with Richard Fink, who left academic work to become a major executive with Koch Industries and the principal disburser of Koch Foundation funding, Cowen exerts a major influence on grants to his department.

Although he is largely favorable to the free market and believes that the Austrian school has contributed insights, Cowen remains a strong critic of Austrian and Rothbardian views. He has published a book that sharply attacks Austrian business cycle theory, Risk and Business Cycles: New and Old Austrian Perspectives(Routledge, 1997); and in an article written with Fink, “Inconsistent Equilibrium Constructs: The Evenly Rotating Economy of Mises and Rothbard” (American Economic Review, Volume 75, Number 4, September 1985), he argued that a key feature in the economic theory of Mises and Rothbard, the evenly rotating economy, is fundamentally flawed. It was ironic that the hope of Austrian economics, according to Grinder, and the prime ornament of his stress on elite universities, wrote an article for the most prestigious economic journal in the United States critical of the theory Grinder wished to propagate. Cowen has also criticized libertarian anarchism, another fundamental plank in Rothbard’s thought. He has defended government funding of the space program and limited government subsidies for the arts.

Now I get why citing Tyler Cowen on matters Austrian so raises the hackles of some Austrian true believers. He’s an apostate! Notice how Gordon makes no attempt to explain what’s wrong with Cowen’s critique of Misesian and Rothbardian ideas–it’s enough just to point out that he has strayed from orthodoxy. Theirs is the true path, and all others are in error. As William F. Buckley wrote in his somewhat nasty obituary of Rothbard:

In Murray’s case, much of what drove him was a contrarian spirit, the deranging scrupulosity that caused him to disdain such as Herbert Hoover, Ronald Reagan, Milton Friedman, and–yes–Newt Gingrich, while huffing and puffing in the little cloister whose walls he labored so strenuously to contract, leaving him, in the end, not as the father of a swelling movement that “rous[ed] the masses from their slumber,” as he once stated his ambition, but with about as many disciples as David Koresh had in his little redoubt in Waco.

That bit about the number of disciples is not as true now as it was in 1995, when Buckley wrote it. Thank (or blame) the Internet for that. I can attest from personal experience that a link from LewRockwell.com, while not nearly the traffic driver that a headline on the TIME.com or CNNMoney.com homepages can be, brings more readers than a link from, say, Andrew Sullivan. Still, just as the great Austro-libertarian statesman Ron Paul’s support in this year’s presidential campaign turned out to be a mile deep and just a few inches wide, faithful-to-the-Mises-line Austrian economics will almost surely remain a pursuit for a small if enthusiastic minority. Because that’s the way the small if enthusiastic minority seems to prefer it.

---

There was a brief symposium, here are the results:

Larry Summers

President Emeritus of Harvard University, Former Chief Economist of the World Bank

My sense is that cap and trade is not the route to the future. It did not make it politically in the US at a moment of great opportunity in 2009. And European carbon markets have been plagued by constant problems. And globally it’s even harder. My sense is that the right strategy has three major elements. First, as the G20 vowed in 2009, there needs to be aconcerted phase out of fossil fuel subsidies. This would help government budgets, drive increases in economic efficiency and substantially reduce global emissions. Second, there needs to be assurance of adequate funding for all areas of basic energy research. As a practical matter my guess is the world will produce non fossil fuel power in the next 25 years at today s fossil fuel prices or it will fail with respect to global climate change. Third, there is a strong case for concerted carbon taxes to further discourage greenhouse gas emissions. But this is a follow-on step for after the elimination of fossil fuel subsidies.

Bjorn Lomborg

Director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and adjunct professor at Copenhagen Business School

The only way to move towards a long-term reduction in emissions is if green energy becomes much cheaper. If it cost less than fossil fuels, everyone would switch, including the Chinese. This, of course, requires breakthroughs in green technologies and much more innovation.

At the Copenhagen Consensus on Climate (fixtheclimate.com), a panel of economists, including three Nobel laureates, found that the best long-term strategy to tackle global warming was to increase dramatically investment in green research and development. They suggested doing so 10-fold to $100bn a year globally. This would equal 0.2% of global GDP. Compare this to the EU’s climate policies, which cost $280 billion a year but reduce temperatures by a trivial 0.1 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century.

Alex Tabarrok

Bartley J. Madden Chair in Economics at the Mercatus Center, George Mason University

:{:{Neither the developed nor the developing world will accept large reductions in their standard of living. As a result, the only solution to global climate change is innovations in green technology. A carbon tax will induce innovation as people demand a way to avoid the tax. A carbon tax,however, will be more politically acceptable if technologies to avoid the tax are in existence before the tax is put into place. Prizes for green innovations can blaze a path down a road that must be traveled, making the trip easier. The L-prize su}:

have never come across a mind quite like Tyler Cowen’s. The George Mason University economist, and Marginal Revolution blogger, has an interesting opinion on, well, everything.

So for my podcast conversation with him — which you can listen to on iTunes, SoundCloud, or wherever you get your podcasts — I had a simple plan: ask Cowen for his thoughts on as many topics as possible. And I think it worked out pretty well. We discuss everything from New Jersey to high school sports to finding love to smoked trout to nootropics to Thomas Schelling to Ayn Rand to social media to speed reading strategies to happy relationships to Donald Trump to the disadvantages of growing up in Manhattan. And believe me when I say that is a small sampling of what we covered.

We also talk about Tyler’s new book, The Complacent Class, which argues, in true Cowenian fashion, that everything we think we know about the present is wrong, and that far from being an age of rapid change and constant risk, we have become a cautious, even stagnant, society.

At the end of our discussion, I did a lightning round with Cowen, where I asked him for his snap reactions on everything from a universal basic income to superhero films to geoengineering to a cashless society. A transcript of that section, edited for length and clarity, follows here. For the full conversation,

---

http://robertdfeinman.com/society/gmu.html

:{Koch and Libertarianism

How to "Buy" a University

George Mason University is the home base of both Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, both libertarian economists.}:

Alex Tabarrok got his Ph.D. in 1994 from GMU

Tyler Cowen got his B.S. in 1983 from GMU

George Mason is the recipient of some generous funding from the Charles G. KochFoundation.The three Koch foundations contributed $23,030,497 between 1985 and 2002 to the university, its foundation and its Institute for Human Studies. (Media Transparency)

From the GMU web site:

Through major gifts and commitments, the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation has significantly bolstered programs focused on market-based solutions to social and economic problems. Its support has provided the university with vital resources for fostering dialog and innovation among scholars, policy experts, and government leaders.

The Koch Foundation’s generosity includes assistance in the recruitment in 2001 of Vernon Smith and his team of six distinguished economics professors to Mason. Smith, now a Nobel laureate, is a leader in the growing field of experimental economics. At George Mason, undergraduate and graduate students across related disciplines evaluate the performance and function of real-world markets and institutions.

Through the Koch Foundation, George Mason University is helping to bridge academic learning and real world practice. [my emphasis]

Charles G. Koch gets a bio in Wikipedia. Here is an excerpt:

Koch is a libertarian and supports many free-market organizations such as the Cato Institute, which he founded together with Edward H. Crane and Murray Rothbard in 1977.

Koch also funds the highly selective Charles G. Koch Summer Fellow Program through the Institute for Humane Studies.

Brother David H. Koch ran for vice president for the Libertarian Party in 1980.

Koch Industries is the largest privately held company in the country. The Koch family is part of the 18 super wealthy families who have worked for the elimination of the state tax.

From the report (PDF) (http://www.citizen.org/documents/EstateTaxFinal.pdf) on this, each Koch brother is worth about $12 billion and stands to have to pay about $4.7 billion in estate taxes, if not repealed. Koch Industries has spent $3.7 million on estate tax lobbying since 1998.

The Koch family is also a principle contributor to the Citizens for a Sound Economy (now Freedom Works) which supports think-tanks like Cato and Heritage foundation.

Alex Tabarrok is the research director of the Independent Institute:

The John M. Olin Foundation gave in 1996 to The Independent Institute $40,000 for "The promotion of two books: The Diversity Myth, by David O. Sacks and Peter aThiel; and The Melting Pot, by Richard K. Vedder and Lowell E. Gallaway" and in 1998 another $25,000 for "The Institute's book program".

The David H. Koch Charitable Foundation gave in 1995 - 2001 in total $160,000 for "General Operating Support".

The Earhart Foundation gave in 1998 - 2001 in total $46,095 to support editor Dr. Robert Higgs.

The Castle Rock Foundation gave in 2002 for "General operating support" $25,000.

Other GMU faculty affiliated with the Institute:

James M. Buchanan- Nobel Laureate in Economic Science University Professor, Center for the Study of Public Choice, George Mason University

Vernon L. Smith - Nobel Laureate in Economic Science; Professor of Economics and Law, Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science, George Mason University

Gordon Tullock - University Professor of Law and Economics and Distinguished Research Fellow, George Mason University

Richard E. Wagner - Hobart R. Hobart Professor of Economics, George Mason University

Walter E. Williams - Distinguished Professor of Economics, George Mason University

Donald J. Boudreaux - Chairman and Professor, Department of Economics, George Mason University

Lloyd R. Cohen - Professor of Law, George Mason University

Tyler Cowen - Professor of Economics, George Mason University

Bruce H. Kobayashi - Professor of Law, George Mason University

William E. Kovacic - Professor of Law, George Mason University

Gordon Tullock - University Professor of Law and Economics and Distinguished Research Fellow, George Mason University

Richard E. Wagner - Hobart R. Hobart Professor of Economics, George Mason University

The Mercatus Center at GMU's executive board includes Charles Koch and Tyler Cowen.

Koch is also involved with the Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation.

A nice summary of the Koch family's activities can be found at this page from Media Transparency (http://www.mediatransparency.org/funderprofile.php?funderID=9)

C

harles Koch and LibertarianismHow to "Buy" a UniversityGeorge Mason University is the home base of both Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, both libertarian economists.

Alex Tabarrok got his Ph.D. in 1994 from GMU

Tyler Cowen got his B.S. in 1983 from GMU

George Mason is the recipient of some generous funding from the Charles G. KochFoundation.The three Koch foundations contributed $23,030,497 between 1985 and 2002 to the university, its foundation and its Institute for Human Studies. (Media Transparency)

From the GMU web site:

Through major gifts and commitments, the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation has significantly bolstered programs focused on market-based solutions to social and economic problems. Its support has provided the university with vital resources for fostering dialog and innovation among scholars, policy experts, and government leaders.

The Koch Foundation’s generosity includes assistance in the recruitment in 2001 of Vernon Smith and his team of six distinguished economics professors to Mason. Smith, now a Nobel laureate, is a leader in the growing field of experimental economics. At George Mason, undergraduate and graduate students across related disciplines evaluate the performance and function of real-world markets and institutions.

Through the Koch Foundation, George Mason University is helping to bridge academic learning and real world practice. [my emphasis]

Charles G. Koch gets a bio in Wikipedia. Here is an excerpt:

Koch is a libertarian and supports many free-market organizations such as the Cato Institute, which he founded together with Edward H. Crane and Murray Rothbard in 1977.

Koch also funds the highly selective Charles G. Koch Summer Fellow Program through the Institute for Humane Studies.

Brother David H. Koch ran for vice president for the Libertarian Party in 1980.

Koch Industries is the largest privately held company in the country. The Koch family is part of the 18 super wealthy families who have worked for the elimination of the state tax.

From the report (PDF) on this, each Koch brother is worth about $12 billion and stands to have to pay about $4.7 billion in estate taxes, if not repealed. Koch Industries has spent $3.7 million on estate tax lobbying since 1998.

The Koch family is also a principle contributor to the Citizens for a Sound Economy (now Freedom Works) which supports think-tanks like Cato and Heritage foundation.

Alex Tabarrok is the research director of the Independent Institute:

The John M. Olin Foundation gave in 1996 to The Independent Institute $40,000 for "The promotion of two books: The Diversity Myth, by David O. Sacks and Peter aThiel; and The Melting Pot, by Richard K. Vedder and Lowell E. Gallaway" and in 1998 another $25,000 for "The Institute's book program".

The David H. Koch Charitable Foundation gave in 1995 - 2001 in total $160,000 for "General Operating Support".

The Earhart Foundation gave in 1998 - 2001 in total $46,095 to support editor Dr. Robert Higgs.

The Castle Rock Foundation gave in 2002 for "General operating support" $25,000.

Other GMU faculty affiliated with the Institute:

James M. Buchanan- Nobel Laureate in Economic Science University Professor, Center for the Study of Public Choice, George Mason University

Vernon L. Smith - Nobel Laureate in Economic Science; Professor of Economics and Law, Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science, George Mason University

Gordon Tullock - University Professor of Law and Economics and Distinguished Research Fellow, George Mason University

Richard E. Wagner - Hobart R. Hobart Professor of Economics, George Mason University

Walter E. Williams - Distinguished Professor of Economics, George Mason University

Donald J. Boudreaux - Chairman and Professor, Department of Economics, George Mason University

Lloyd R. Cohen - Professor of Law, George Mason University

Tyler Cowen - Professor of Economics, George Mason University

Bruce H. Kobayashi - Professor of Law, George Mason University

William E. Kovacic - Professor of Law, George Mason University

Gordon Tullock - University Professor of Law and Economics and Distinguished Research Fellow, George Mason University

Richard E. Wagner - Hobart R. Hobart Professor of Economics, George Mason University

The Mercatus Center at GMU's executive board includes Charles Koch and Tyler Cowen.

Koch is also involved with the Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation.

A nice summary of the Koch family's activities can be found at this page from Media Transparency

*Moral: Follow the Money

Click here to see all my essays in context.

If you have any comments or for further discussions email me at robert.feinman@gmail.com

==

podcast?

---

http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/climate-denial-college-students-push-back-koch-attack-academic-freedom/}:

INTERACTIVE DATABASE: Koch Foundation Funding to Colleges and Universities

Key findings:

*Part 2 of blog series taken from our full report: Koch Pollution on Campus Academic Freedom Under Assault From Charles Koch’s $50 million Campaign to Infiltrate Higher Education

We Sold Our Souls for Koch Control

Covering a deal struck between Koch and Arizona State University, LA Times reporter Michael Hiltzik asked, “When universities sell their souls, why do they have to sell so cheaply?” Koch’s sudden invasion of higher education has been widely protested and continues to escalate.

Brooklyn City University of New York (CUNY) flat-out rejected Koch’s offer for a multi-million dollar grant this year, to the ire of a professor negotiating with the Koch foundation.

At Florida State University (FSU), students and professors have exposed Koch influence since 2011, protesting how Charles Koch’s staff hold undue control over professor hires. The conversation at FSU remains heated, with students declaring that FSU’s revised contract with Koch is no better than its old contract, still conceding informal hiring control and other functions to Koch.

As FSU searches for a new president, one nominee in particular has drawn criticism from students and faculty for his lack of academic background, connections to Koch-funded groups and politicians, and his role as a Florida Senator in passing new legislation exempting university donor communications from public record requests.

At Suffolk University, an alumna has petitioned the university to address concerns over Koch money on campus. Suffolk University’s administration has been under fire for continuing allow Koch to run political campaigns out of the Beacon Hill Institute (BHI) in Suffolk’s name, on Suffolk’s campus.

George Mason Universitystudents have recently called upon their administration to make transparent their financial arrangements with Koch and other corporate interests (p. 12). GMU president ngel Cabrera put up a response that didn’t address transparency concerns outlined by a student group calling itself “Transparent GMU.” On a recent Reddit AMA with President Cabrera, students cited a Politico Magazine article that implicated GMU as a major part of Koch’s political apparatus and pushed for answers. President Cabrera agreed to meet with students, though there is no indication that has yet happened.

The United Negro College Fund has become central in the Koch university debate after UNCF took $25 million from Charles Koch. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) withdrew its partnership with UNCF after learning UNCF president Michael Lomax personally attended Koch’s political strategy & fundraising meeting in June, 2014. Michael Lomax mocked his critics at the Koch donor summit, according to audio leaked to the press.

Students, faculty, alumni and activists alike have also spoken out at Catholic University, George Washington University, and University of Arizona.

Climate Science Denial on Koch-Funded Campuses

Of primary concern to Greenpeace is evidence of professors in Koch-funded university departments denying the science of climate change. Some universities that are threatened to be staffed or controlled by known financiers of climate “skepticism” or play roles in Koch’s political campaigns against climate policies.

FSU – Climate Denial Econ 101

Professor James Gwartney at Florida State University co-authored a textbook called Economics: Private and Public Choice. This “widely used” textbook has been criticized for six years straight by Ph.D economist Yoram Bauman for misrepresenting the science of climate change – a field well outside of the authors’ credentialed experience. Since 2010, when Dr. Bauman began ranking economics textbooks that include climate change back, Gwartney et al. have not only ranked dead-last every time, but have made little progress in updating the inaccurate and false assertions made in their widely-used textbook.

Three authors of Economics: Private and Public Choice have overlapping connections to Koch-funded universities and political groups.

Ironically, the 2008 and 2013 contracts between Koch and FSU were signed by former president Eric Barron, a climate scientist who is now president of Penn State University, which has received $74,500 from Charles Koch since 2008.

Climate Disbelief Ground Zero – George Mason University Economics

Perhaps most prominently, George Mason University’s involvement in undermining environmental priorities is well-known, undermining other GMU divisions, like the respected Center for Climate Change Communication.

GMU Professor Walter Williams has publicly rejected the science of climate change. After employing some popular disproved remarks to encourage doubt over scientists’ findings, Williams stated in June, 2014, “Only idiocy would conclude that mankinds capacity to change the climate is more powerful than the forces of nature.” Williams is a Rush Limbaugh stand-in host and charter board member of Americans for Prosperity. Williams mentored longtime Koch political operative Nancy Pfotenhauer, herself a former Koch Industries lobbyist her served as AFP’s first president, who until recently served as treasurer on GMU’s Board of Visitors.

The Mercatus Center at GMU was founded by Charles Koch and its ongoing president Richard Fink. Fink established Mercatus from a predecessor organization at Rutgers University, and was followed by GMU economics professor Tyler Cowen. Mercatus has history of opposing attempts to control greenhouse gas emissions responsible for global warming, an inherent consequence of Koch Industries’ oil and gas business divisions. Mercatus has continued this work into 2014, opposing attempts by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to limit carbon pollution at coal plants.

The Institute for Humane Studies, also at GMU and chaired by Charles Koch, was called “a haven for climate change deniers,” by Mother Jones, recruiting students to work for Koch-funded organizations that have battled climate change policy, clean energy development incentives and laws & regulations in the crosshairs of Koch Industries.

Suffolk University – The Backbone of Attacks on Clean Energy & Climate Policy

The Beacon Hill Institute (BHI) at Suffolk University serves as a factory of economic policy studies for the Koch-funded State Policy Network. BHI’s research methodology (STAMP model) has been widely dismissed by economistsand journalists citing BHI’s liberal use of “mathematical adjustment.” BHI has published anti renewable energy studies in states across the country, a tactic to interfere with addressing climate change, not to mention competition with fossil fuel companies like Koch.

The Suffolk Journalconfirmed that over $750,000 in Koch donations have gone to BHI. The Journal interviewed BHI director David Tuerck, who admitted to Koch funding but denied any influence over research.

But shortly after, The Guardian published a grant proposal from BHI to undermine the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a cap-and-trade program practiced by 10 northeast states that the Koch brothers actively oppose. The grant proposal proved that the BHI study’s outcome preceded the research: “Success will take the form of media recognition, dissemination to stakeholders, and legislative activity that will pare back or repeal RGGI.” BHI’s grant request was sent to the Searle Freedom Trust, one of several corporate foundations that bundles grants in coordination with Koch.

In response, Suffolk denounced the actions of the Beacon Hill Institute, but has allowed BHI to use its campus office to continue attacks on state clean energy laws around the country and undermine the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.

A Pope of Climate Denial Looms – UNC Chapel Hill

University of North Carolina schools Chapel Hill and Greensboro are on the Charles Koch payroll, and receive money from one of Koch’s closest political allies, Art Pope. Pope, himself a major funder of groups that deny climate change,has leveraged his political groups, his personal donations and his former position as North Carolina’s budget director to bring the university system to its knees.

Pope was a charter director of Koch’s Americans for Prosperity, which runs a pledge to commit politicians against addressing global warming. Pope previously served on the board of AFP’s predecessor, Citizens for a Sound Economy, another group created by the Kochs. He attends Charles Koch’s regular donor summits and gives over $1 million to Koch’s political campaigns, as acknowledged by Charles Koch himself.

Groups founded by Art Pope, including the Civitas Institute and the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy (named after Pope’s father, a former UNC Chapel Hill trustee), have been critical of the UNC system, lining up behind Pope’s consistent pressure to weaken UNC’s budget. The president of the Pope Center for Higher Education, Jane Shaw, is married to Richard Stroup, the NC State professor who co-authored the economics textbook misrepresenting climate science (see above).

Freshly departed from his appointed position as NC Gov. Pat McCrory’s budget director, Art Pope is now rumored to be seeking presidency at the entire University of North Carolina system, composed of 17 schools.

Climate Denier Slips into University of Colorado, Boulder & Pepperdine University

In the spring of 2014, Steven F. Hayward taught “Free Market Environmentalism” at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Hayward has no credentials as a scientist nor economist, and has a long history of involvement anti-environmental campaigns for fossil fuel interests like Koch and ExxonMobil. “Free Market Environmentalism” is a concept promoted by the Koch-funded Property and Environment Research Center, of which Hayward is a board member.

Steven Hayward’s appointment as Boulder’s “Visiting Scholar in Conservative Thought” was controversial after he published offensive commentary on the LGBTQ community that was protested by students and faculty.

The University of Colorado Foundation, located in Boulder, has received $58,000 from Charles Koch since 2009. Now, Hayward is teaching at Pepperdine University in Malibou, CA, which has received $49,650 from Koch since 2009.

Steven F. Hayward has been one of the most outspoken deniers of climate change science for over a decade. He wears numerous hats among Koch-funded groups opposing environmental policies, and oversees tens of millions of dollars as a board member of organizations that coordinate funding with Koch foundations or launder Koch money to front groups.

Hayward controls tens of millions of dollars flowing to SPN & climate denier groups every year:

Hayward’s various positions before U-Colorado and Pepperdine:

Other financial ties back to Koch:

Steven Hayward and climate science denial:

Database of Koch Funding to Colleges & Universities:

big doc/graphic

---

Climate Denial College: Students Push Back on Koch Attack on ...

www.greenpeace.org › Home › Posts

2.

Sep 19, 2014 - Climate Disbelief Ground Zero – George Mason University Economics ... University, and was followed by GMU economics professor Tyler Cowen. ... work for Koch-funded organizations that have battled climate change policy, ...

George Mason University - RationalWiki

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/George_Mason_University

1.

Dec 27, 2016 - Most of its crank hires are employed in global warming denial, libertarian ... They're all part of the Mercatus Center, which is funded by Koch Industries. Persons ... Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, economists who run the Marginal Revolution blog. ... George Mason University's Endless Inquiry, Deep Climate ...

Historian alleges coordinated criticism of her latest book, which is ...

https://www.insidehighered.com/.../historian-alleges-coordinated-criticism-her-latest-b...

1.

Jul 12, 2017 - In fact, Cowen had written that while such a change could lead to good ... have done toclimate change scientists and others bearing inconvenient truth). ... at the Koch-affiliated Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason, and ..... that in the eyes of Charles Koch — and Tyler Cowen, I might add — he had ...

Mercatus Center | DeSmogBlog

https://www.desmogblog.com/mercatus-center

1.

“The evidence regarding global warming and human contribution to it is mixed, .... Tyler Cowen — Holbert L. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason .... “Mercatus Center: Koch Industries ClimateDenial Front Group,” Greenpeace USA.

Koch influence => climate change science denial (documented at ...

https://www.reddit.com/r/gmu/.../koch_influence_climate_change_science_denial/

1.

Climate Disbelief Ground Zero - George Mason University Economics. Perhaps ... at Rutgers University, and was followed by GMU economics professor Tyler Cowen. ..... Whats a good unbiased report presenting evidence on global warming.

'I don't like the idea of capitalism': Charles Koch, unfiltered - The ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/.../i-dont-like-the-idea-of-capitalism-charles-koch-unfil...

Aug 1, 2016 - Charles Koch during an interview with The Washington Post at the ..... And then I thinkTyler Cowen was one of his students, and Tyler is a pretty good example of that. ..... So,” he said, “I'll take a leave of absence from George Mason ..... reports on what Charles's position on climate changeactually is.

[PDF]How George Mason Became Koch's Academic Darling - Future U

https://futureu.education/.../How-George-Mason-Became-Kochs-Academic-Darling.p...

1.

May 13, 2016 - as consistently from the Koch largess as has George Mason. .... Tyler Cowen, general director of Mercatus, declined an interview request .... To Mr. Cabrera, Mr. Koch is no different than a passionate climate-change activist.

Mercatus Center - SourceWatch

www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Mercatus_Center

2.

Aug 3, 2017 - The Mercatus Center was founded and is funded by the Koch Family Foundations. .... Mercatus Center Called Out for Blocking Action on Climate Change ... Scholar and Provost and Dean at Washington College; Tyler Cowen, Holbert L. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University; Chairman and ...

Mercatus Center - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercatus_Center

2.

The Mercatus Center at George Mason University is an American non-profit free-market-oriented research, education, and outreach think tank directed by Tyler Cowen. ... After the Koch family gave more than $30 million to George Mason University, the Center moved there in .... "2014 Global Go To Think Tank Index Report".

Sen. Ben Sasse delivers enlightening conversation with Tyler Cowen ...

https://www2.gmu.edu/news/430516

1.

Jun 15, 2017 - U.S. Sen Ben Sasse sitting with Tyler Cowen at the Mercatus Center in Arlington ... Founders Hall Auditorium and an overflow room at George Mason University's ... On study abroad andglobal travel: “You need to see different forms of ... Global · Sustainability, Environment and Climate · Technology and ...

===