Naked Economics by Wheelan, Charles (spanish books to read .txt) 📕

points ahead of students given the worst quarter of teachers (controlling for the students’ initial level of achievement); and (2) certification doesn’t matter. The study “found no statistically significant achievement differences between students assigned to certified teachers and students assigned to uncertified teachers.” The authors of the study recommend that states eliminate entry barriers that keep talented people from becoming public schoolteachers.4 Most states are doing the opposite.

Mr. Stigler would have argued that all of this is easy to explain. Just think about how the process benefits teachers, not students. Making it harder to become a teacher reduces the supply of new entrants into the profession, which is a good thing for those who are already there. Any barrier to entry looks attractive from the inside.

I have a personal interest in all kinds of occupational licensure (cases in which states require that individuals become licensed before practicing certain professions). My doctoral dissertation set out to explain a seemingly anomalous pattern in Illinois: The state requires barbers and manicurists to be licensed, but not electricians. A shoddy electrical job could burn down an entire neighborhood; a bad manicure or haircut seems relatively more benign. Yet the barbers and manicurists are the ones regulated by the state. The short explanation for the pattern is two words: interest groups. The best predictor of whether or not a profession is licensed in Illinois is the size and budget of its professional association. (Every profession is small relative to the state’s total population, so all of these groups have the mohair advantage. The size and budget of the professional association reflects the extent to which members of the profession have organized to exploit it.) Remarkably, political organization is a better predictor of licensure than the danger members of the profession pose to the public (as measured by their liability premium). George Stigler was right: Groups seek to get themselves licensed.

Small, organized groups fly under the radar and prevail upon legislators to do things that do not necessarily make the rest of us better off. Economists, particularly those among the more free-market “Chicago school,” are sometimes perceived to be hostile toward government. It would be more accurate to describe them as skeptical. The broader the scope of government, the more room there is for special interests to carve out deals for themselves that have nothing to do with the legitimate functions of government described in Chapter 3.

Tyranny of the status quo. If small groups can get what they want out of the legislative process, they can also stop what they don’t want, or at least try. Joseph Schumpeter, who coined the term “creative destruction,” described capitalism as a process of incessantly destroying the old structure and creating a new one. That may be good for the world; it is bad for the firms and industries that make up the “old structure.” The individuals standing in capitalism’s path of progress—or destruction, from their standpoint—will use every tool they have to avoid it, including politics. And why shouldn’t they? The legislative process helps those who help themselves. Groups under siege from competition may seek trade protection, a government bailout, favorable tax considerations, limitations on a competing technology, or some other special treatment. With layoffs or bankruptcy looming, the plea to politicians for help can be quite compelling.

So what’s the problem? The problem is that we don’t get the benefits of the new economic structure if politicians decide to protect the old one. Roger Ferguson, Jr., former vice chairman of the board of governors of the Federal Reserve, explains, “Policymakers who fail to appreciate the relationship between the relentless churning of the competitive environment and wealth creation will end up focusing their efforts on methods and skills that are in decline. In so doing, they establish policies that are aimed at protecting weak, outdated technologies, and in the end, they slow the economy’s march forward.”5

Both politics and compassion suggest that we ought to offer a hand to those mowed over by competition. If some kind of wrenching change generates progress, then the pie must get bigger. And if the pie gets bigger, then at least some of it ought to be offered to the losers—be it in the form of transition aid, job retraining, or whatever else will help those who have been knocked over to get back on their feet. One of the features that made the North American Free Trade Agreement more palatable was a provision that offered compensation to workers whose job losses could be tied to expanded trade with Mexico. Similarly, many states are using money from the massive legal settlement with the tobacco industry to compensate tobacco farmers whose livelihoods are threatened by declining tobacco use.

There is a crucial distinction, however, between using the political process to build a safety net for those harmed by creative destruction and using the political process to stop that creative destruction in the first place. Think about the telegraph and the Pony Express. It would have been one thing to help displaced Pony Express workers by retraining them as telegraph operators; it would have been quite another to help them by banning the telegraph. Sometimes the political process does the equivalent of the latter for reasons related to the mohair problem. The economic benefits of competition are huge but spread over a large group; the costs tend to be smaller but highly concentrated. As a result, the beneficiaries of creative destruction hardly notice; the losers chain themselves to their congressman’s office door seeking protection, as any of us might if our livelihood or community were at risk.

Such is the case in the realm of international trade. Trade is good for consumers. We pay less for shoes, cars, electronics, food, and everything else that can be made better or more cheaply somewhere else in the world (or is made more cheaply in this country because of foreign competition). Our lives are made better in thousands of little ways that have a significant cumulative effect. Looking back on the Clinton