Trade and kids

I’m at EconLog today, with a “hear, hear” to an observation made by Scott Sumner last week: The most important effects of tariffs don’t look like an immediate recession or inflation, but a reduction in long-term growth. I illustrate with some observations on Brexit.

This week, I also hosted The Curious Task Podcast. I interviewed Alan Elrod of the Pulaski Institution about how liberals should think about children.

Libertarians are famously terrible at thinking about children. Rothbard treated them (philosophically) almost like property. But liberals can do better. More urgently, liberals must recognize what illiberal thinking about children looks like, especially when it’s cloaked in pro-family rhetoric.

Other good stuff:

A recent episode of Reimagining Liberty with guest Alysia Ames discusses gender and the economy. She raises tough challenges for liberalism when it comes to kids and the family, covering some stuff that made me wish I had more time to chat with Alan. I’m still thinking about:

• What would it mean to assign societal/market value to the positive externalities of having children?

• Does the “traditional family” make fathers fungible by reducing them to earners? If so, how has this affected how “traditional family” advocates value fatherhood?

It took me over a month to watch it, but the newest Contrapoints on Conspiracy is very good. Break it into seven or eight “chapter” installments, and the length becomes less daunting. In a similar vein, I’m listening to (and enjoying) the audiobook of Ghosts of Iron Mountain by Phil Tinline.

Finally, I had reason to revisit Tom Palmer’s piece, Radical Illiberalism on the Right. It remains important, especially if we’re interested in getting to a world where it seems less important again.

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Featured photo by Nik on Unsplash