Economics has a small stock of principles that a first-year student can recite and a Cabinet minister can forget within the hour. Incentives matter; Taxes change behaviour; Prices are signals. These are not obscure theorems. They are closer to proverbs, the kind of thing an intelligent teenager grasps within an afternoon. Yet politicians who could tell you the exact yield on a ten-year gilt will propose a policy that assumes people respond to subsidies but not to taxes, or that a price can be fixed by decree without anyone noticing. 

The puzzle is not that people are stupid. Despite obvious counter-examples, few politicians are. The puzzle is that intelligence and economic literacy are almost unrelated skills, and the political process actively selects against the second. 

Bastiat identified the mechanism of the seen and the unseen in 1850 and nobody has bettered it since. Every policy has a visible effect and a set of invisible ones. The visible effect is the ribbon-cutting: the new factory subsidized into existence, the rent capped at a friendly level, the tariff that saves a domestic industry. The invisible effects are the factory that was never built because the subsidy went elsewhere, the flats that were never converted because the return no longer justified the risk, the cheaper import that would have freed a household's income for something else.

Politicians are rewarded for the seen. Nobody holds a ceremony for the business that would have expanded had the tax not been raised. The unseen has no lobby, no press release, and no grateful constituent turning up at a surgery. A principle such as ‘all taxes change behaviour’is intellectually trivial and politically invisible, which is a bad combination if you want it acted upon.

There are concentrated benefits and diffuse costs, and the second reason follows from the first. A tariff on steel imports delivers a large, visible benefit to a small number of steel producers and a small, invisible cost to a very large number of consumers of steel products. The producers organize, lobby, and thank the minister. The consumers, each paying a few pounds more for a car or a washing machine, never notice the connection and would not bother to organize even if they did.

This is not a failure of intelligence. It is a rational response to a diffuse cost. Nobody studies the incidence of steel tariffs before buying a fridge. The politician, meanwhile, faces the steel producers at every election and the dispersed consumers never at all. The incentive to learn and apply the economics runs precisely backwards to the incentive to win.

A minimum wage is meant to help low-paid workers, so it is judged a success by the intention rather than the outcome. Rent controls are meant to help tenants, so their effect on the future supply of rented housing goes unexamined. This is moral reasoning masquerading as policy analysis; the goodness of the aim is allowed to stand in for evidence of the result. 

Economics has nothing to say about whether an aim is good. It has a great deal to say about whether the chosen means will achieve it, and the answer is frequently no, because the policy assumes landlords, employers, or consumers will absorb a cost without adjusting anything else about their behaviour. That assumption is where ‘incentives matter’ is quietly discarded. A rule that changes the price of an action changes the amount of that action. This holds whether the action is employing a teenager, letting a spare room, or importing steel, and it holds regardless of how virtuous the rule's authors believe themselves to be. 

Trade, in the popular imagination, is still a contest with a winner and a loser, an intuition inherited from a world of subsistence and conquest, where one man's gain genuinely was another's loss. We ask ‘Who gets the better of the deal?’ but the fact that both parties to a voluntary exchange can be better off, is not a difficult theorem. It is a counter-intuitive one, and counter-intuitive results do not survive contact with a five-second political soundbite. ‘British jobs for British workers’ fits on a placard. ‘Both countries specialize according to comparative advantage and both are wealthier as a result’ does not.

The same zero-sum reflex explains the persistent appeal of the wealth tax and the belief that a fixed pool of prosperity merely needs to be redistributed rather than to grow. Prices, profits, and wages are treated as arbitrary numbers to be argued over, rather than as signals co-ordinating millions of decisions nobody could plan centrally. A price is not merely a number on a till receipt. It carries information about scarcity that no committee possesses and no decree can improve upon, and price controls do not abolish scarcity, they merely hide it, usually behind a queue.

Every choice forecloses an alternative. A pound spent by government on one programme is a pound not spent on another, and not spent by the taxpayer on whatever they would have chosen. ‘The cost is worth it’ is not an answer until the alternative use has been named.

As Robert Heinlein and Milton Friedman told us, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.Resources are scarce, so every commitment of them is a commitment against something else. A promise that a policy is costless should be read as a promise that its cost has not yet been located.

Complex systems respond to intervention in ways the intervener did not plan for, because everyone affected by the rule has their own aims and will adjust their behaviour to it. The morphine of a well-meaning regulation is rarely felt where it was administered.

The first unit of anything, aid, regulation, taxation, tends to deliver more than the tenth. Policies calibrated on the first unit's success are regularly pushed well past the point of usefulness.Economists call this ‘diminishing returns,’ but politicians don’t call it anything at all.

Money already spent is irrelevant to a decision about what to do next, however painful that fact is to a minister who has staked reputation on a project. A tossed coin’s outcome does not bear upon the next throw.

None of this is difficult. It is neglected because the political market rewards visible generosity over invisible efficiency, concentrated gratitude over diffuse silence, and good intentions over measured outcomes. A politician who internalized all of it fully would frequently find the economically good answer to be a political bad one. Rational ignorance, on this view, is not really ignorance. It is a sensible response to an incentive structure that punishes anyone who says the popular remedy will not work.

The economist's task, and it is a modest one, is not to make politicians cleverer. It is to keep restating the unseen until it becomes a little harder to ignore.

 Madsen Pirie

When, a couple of decades ago, Simon Rattle performed Arnold Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder in Berlin, he was asked how he could bring together Gurrelieder (whose performance demands a gigantic orchestra with an additional 400 chorus members) with Schoenberg’s well-known acerbic remark that in civilized Europe everything one needs to render the desired effect in a music performance is six, maximum seven players—we need orchestras only for the primitive Americans… Rattle provided a precise reply: Gurrelieder is simply a piece of chamber music that needs 600 players to be properly performed… I think this paradox renders perfectly the greatness of Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey.

My first reaction to Odyssey was a big surprise: after reading numerous reviews enthralled by gigantic spectacular scenes and the raw authenticity of fighting, the movie itself appeared to me almost the opposite of these descriptions—a rather modest, almost chamber drama which occasionally reminded me of B productions. We never see the beach in front of Troy with thousands of Greek soldiers and hundreds of boats in the water behind them; there is no mass battle with hundreds of soldiers fighting. The Greeks on the beach are mostly a small group of a couple dozen individuals lost in bad weather on the desolate beach sand. Troy itself is also not shown as a mega-city but more as a group of buildings with narrow, twisted streets between them. Plus, Nolan avoided directly showing excessive cruelty—just recall the passage of Odysseus’ ship between Scylla and Charybdis. Charybdis is not a gigantic whirlpool (easy to render with special effects) but a very modest circle of water posing no terrifying threat… These remarks are not meant as criticism: they point out what makes the film great.

Commentators noted long ago that, while the Iliad focuses on male exploits and struggles with women reduced to background tokens, the Odyssey also brings forward women’s inner lives. The Iliad begins with the rage of Achilles: he is furious because Agamemnon took the slave Briseis from him—however, Achilles is not hurt because of any emotional attachment to Briseis; what matters is simply that his pride was hurt. The Odyssey changes the perspective entirely, and Nolan takes an even more crucial and ingenious step further: the well-known beautiful stars who play women (Anne Hathaway, Charlize Theron…) are not made beautiful—the way they are shot, sometimes almost embarrassingly, displays their age fully. They are mostly desexualized (although Calypso kept Odysseus as her lover for years, there is no erotic tension in their relationship). This desexualization reaches its climax in the figure of Circe, superbly played by Samantha Morton. In the poem, Circe is a seductress: she turns men who reject her advances into pigs and keeps Odysseus as her lover for a year, while in the movie she is simply disgusted by male gluttony and turns them into pigs when they cannot stop eating. It is the highest male figure, Agamemnon, who is not really personalized: we mostly don’t see his face, which is hidden behind a gigantic helmet, and the same holds for the Trojan soldiers—they are anonymous and depersonalized, so that although the movie depicts Greek crimes and cheating, it does not do so by opposing them to more honest and sympathetic Trojans.

Nolan doesn’t just lament the decline of the heroic Bronze Age—he does so by exposing the dirty, ordinary reality of heroic acts ignored by poetic narratives. Exemplary here is the Trojan horse itself. (Since the starting point of Odyssey [the movie] is the Trojan horse, one cannot but notice the irony that the Trojan horse is not mentioned in the Iliad, the poem about the Trojan War, and is only briefly mentioned in the Odyssey; it is described in detail only in Virgil’s Aeneid, which recounts the fall of Troy.) Forget the hidden Greeks jumping out when the horse is pulled into Troy—Nolan shows, in disgusting, claustrophobic detail, the lives of these heroes as they waited for days inside the horse, pissing and shitting on each other, i.e., he “takes audiences inside the Trojan horse for an extended, gritty scene that lays out the cramped, horrifying conditions for those hiding inside, underscoring their maniacal, animalistic hunger to prevail in battle.”1 Is this procedure not, from today’s standpoint, almost a case of Brechtian Verfremdung (estrangement)?

Odysseus mentions in the movie that they are at the end of the Bronze Age—an absurd self-designation that exposes the falseness of his historical awareness: Odysseus, by definition, could not know about the Bronze Age as a historical epoch because he was still part of it; he had no awareness of what the new world his crimes would ground would become. What one might call the original sin takes place at the very beginning of the film: we see Sinon, a young Greek soldier, guarding the wooden Trojan horse, half-buried in the beach sand. He is there to tell the Trojans that the Greeks have departed and that the horse is a gift of reconciliation, which the Trojans are expected to drag into the city. But Odysseus did not tell Sinon that elite Greek soldiers were hidden inside the horse: Odysseus knew the Trojan patrol would kill Sinon, and he wanted the Trojans to believe the explanation Sinon gave them (that it was simply a ritualized gift marking the end of the war). Why? Because Odysseus (correctly, in all probability) presumed that if Sinon himself did not believe the lie about the horse, he would not be able to convince the Trojans of it… Dante was right to place Odysseus in the eighth circle of hell in his Inferno.

Odysseus’ reflections that conclude the movie quite evidently point toward our contemporary predicament: just as Odysseus’ manipulations and lies announce the end of the Bronze Age heroic spirit of honor and the arrival of classical Greece, today the age of machines used by humanity to control nature and people is coming to an end. We are entering a new era characterized by two main features: the dominance of AI and the rise of “post-truth” culture. This is why, as in Odyssey, we hear all around us today the idea that we are approaching a civilizational erasure, and, as in Odyssey, we have no precise idea what will follow: a new, much higher civilization, or a new barbarism (or an unheard-of combination of both). One cannot but recall here Walter Benjamin’s famous aphorism: “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” Usually, ideology provides only the glorious beginning of a new civilization, ignoring the dark background—its founding barbarism. Nolan’s Odyssey does the opposite: it focuses on the founding crimes without any indication of the new civilization these crimes will ground.

I am tempted to read Odyssey the way Fredric Jameson proposed to read Antigone: for him, Antigone is not a play about the crisis of the Greek polis, about the disintegration of its organic unity, but, quite on the contrary, a play about the emergence of a state through the division between the private family sphere and the public sphere of the state—a state without this gap is not a state. So what if Odyssey is also not just the sad story of the disappearance of the Bronze Age heroic warriors and the rise of a new spirit of lying and cheating; it is at the same time the story of the rise of a new civilization (classical Greece), of the crime and cheating on which the model that grounded the entire Western tradition—its philosophy and art—was built. Odysseus’ nostalgia for the disappearing Bronze Age is thus false: once we are in the new order, there is no way back; every such attempt to restore old greatness ends up in new, brutal barbarism.

Here, even Adorno’s famous chapter on Odysseus in Dialectic of Enlightenment misses the point when it presents Odyssey as the ultimate allegory for Western civilization: Odysseus is a prototypical bourgeois subject who suppresses his own desires and exploits nature to survive. He cheats and lies to exert domination over others and nature, but the price he pays for his survival is that it becomes an end in itself, serving no higher spiritual purpose—what was supposed to be merely an instrument turns into its own end… I think Odysseus’ manipulations, his readiness to sacrifice individual lives to enable the survival of some larger whole, amount to more than just instrumental reason. It is a form of trickery that brings its own perverse satisfaction in the renunciations it imposes on others and on the hero himself.

At the movie’s end, Odysseus and Penelope install their son Telemachus as the new king and leave Ithaca for the West to meet all the soldiers for whose deaths Odysseus was responsible, and to make peace with them. My evil idea is that (in an added scene intersecting with the end credits) we see Odysseus and Penelope reaching America and contacting the natives, who promptly slaughter them because they quickly discern their destructiveness…

And, to conclude on a more hopeful note, perhaps it is a sign of persisting civilization that, despite a gigantic negative campaign, a difficult, dark movie like Odyssey is still a big success, beating stupid blockbusters like Moana and Minions & Monsters.

I oppose Trump's SAVE Act for reasons I have already elaborated upon. It is nevertheless interesting to see that even some of its supporters see its passage now as a disaster, as it is currently written.

At The Washington Examiner is an editorial supporting the legislation that points out that it is now too late to implement it in time for the midterms:

The legislation's timing provisions would make that task especially difficult. The act would take effect upon enactment rather than after a transition period. The Election Assistance Commission would have only 10 days to issue implementation guidance, and the legislation does not provide states with implementation funding. These administrative changes will take months to complete properly.

Election Day is Nov. 3, but the operational election calendar begins much earlier. Under federal law, states generally must transmit absentee ballots to military and overseas voters at least 45 days before a federal election. That deadline falls on Sept. 19.

Before then, officials must finalize ballot procedures, update databases, print instructions, test equipment, and train personnel. Early voting begins in some jurisdictions not long afterward. Registration activity is already underway, and voters are already relying on rules published by their states.

Changing those rules in August or September could create different requirements for people registering only weeks apart. It could also produce inconsistent implementation among states or even among counties within the same state, as officials interpret hurried federal guidance while defending their decisions in court. [bold added]

It is even more interesting that, surely knowing this, the President is pressuring the Senate to rush this bill through to passage.

Gosh, it's almost as if Trump wants to undermine confidence in the next election and so look justified in meddling with the results.

It's impractical! has never been a great way to fight against terrible policy, but when a policy is so bad that even some of its proponents say that, perhaps there is more reason to hope the bullet in the chamber misses.

-- CAV

Radical tenant activists want to take down landlords—including by breaking the law.