Links to Consider, 12/12
The Antiplanner on crowding and fertility; me on The Blank Slate; Ben Thompson on the Internet environment; Howard Husock on marijuana regulation; Scott Alexander on "abolish the FDA"
South Korea’s high-rise housing and low birthrates are closely related. People don’t have children if they don’t have room for them.
…Admittedly, South Korea has one of the highest population densities in the world with 1,340 people per square mile. But the country could have housed most of its population in low-rise apartments and single-family homes and still left well over 80 percent of its land for farming and other rural purposes.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen
One of the quotes attributed to Yogi Berra is “Nobody goes there any more. It’s too crowded.” If the causality runs from overcrowded housing to difficulty raising children to low birth rates, then doesn’t it seem as though population decline will be self-correcting? Once population falls, overcrowding will ease, family-friendly housing will be more available, and people will start having more kids.
I am not making a prediction that people will start having more kids. I am questioning the simple model that attributes lower fertility to crowded housing.
For my latest book review, I return to an old favorite, Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate. I refer to Pinker’s evolutionary psychology as Old Spicism.
In the end, for all of Pinker’s attempts to use common sense, logic, and evidence to make the case for Old Spicism, and for all of his efforts to claim a progressive opinion regarding race and gender, his project apparently failed. In the academic community to which The Blank Slate was addressed, Blank Slatism is still much more widely held than Old Spicism.
I do strongly believe that an essential quality for success, both on the Internet and off, is to not take social media too seriously. Humans simply weren’t meant to get feedback from thousands or sometimes millions of anonymous strangers all at once; the most successful creators I know are the most wary of getting sucked in to the online maelstrom. One wonders — hopes — that we can someday reach a similar conclusion collectively, and start treating X in particular more like the comments section and less like an assignment editor.
In this the demise of the ad-supported Internet may be a blessing
Amen.
tobacco products do not suffer a black market which poses significant concerns related to public order, in part because of their ubiquitous availability.
A similar cannabis market is imaginable: Brand-name cannabis products, inspected and approved for purity and potency and relied upon by consumers. These would be sold, like cigarettes, from locked cabinets behind store counters and restricted to adult buyers, to the extent possible. Sales taxes, in contrast to those on tobacco, might be minimal, at least at first, in order to marginalize black-market sellers. Over time, however, taxes could be used as a deterrent to use, as they are for tobacco — since most Americans likely would prefer to purchase pot legally.
As with immigration, the legal process for selling marijuana is so onerous that there is much more activity in the illegal sector. Husock suggests easing up on the legal sector where, for example, residents use NIMBYism to undermine legalization by not allowing stores in their area.
I am frustrated that the marijuana legalizers do not seem to care about anything other than getting legalization on the books. They have not thought through what they want the legal regime to look like. Husock’s “make it as accessible as tobacco” is an attempt to think things through. But would it work?
The use of tobacco does not impair someone’s judgment or inhibitions. In the case of alcohol, we try to deal with impairment by regulating potency. Would marijuana users accept strict limits on potency?
On another libertarian idea, Scott Alexander writes,
Full abolition of the FDA would have domino effects on every other part of healthcare. You would have to reform the insurance system, the War on Drugs, the medical evidence system, the malpractice system, and the entire role of doctors. All of these other things are terrible and should probably be reformed anyway. But you’d have to do it all at the same time, and get it all exactly right.
Back to marijuana legalization. It seems to me that in legalizers’ eagerness to get something passed, they either did not anticipate domino effects, chose to ignore them, or chose flawed approaches for dealing with them.
substacks referenced above:
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The empirical evidence is that overcrowding per se does not lead to rock bottom TFRs. E.g. the classic description of poor immigrant New York City "How the other half lives" by Riis (1890) contains many fascinating passages like this one:
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The sanitary policeman whose beat this is will tell you that [this seven stories high building] contains thirty-six families, but the term has a widely different meaning here and on the avenues. In this house, where a case of small-pox was reported, there were fifty-eight babies and thirty-eight children that were over five years of age. In Essex street two small rooms in a six-story tenement were made to hold a "family" of father and mother, twelve children, and six boarders.
We don't actually do much restriction of potency on Alcohol - and in fact, many types of alcohol have *minimum* restrictions on potency, such as whisky, bourbon, etc - where the name requires a minimum potency, but quality versions are commonly found at significantly higher potency, while a potency of exactly the regulated minimum is usually associated with a cheaper, mass-market liquor. Some regions impose restrictions on upper potencies of beer and wine, but those are usually as much about shifting higher potency alcohols to higher tax categories, not about restricting their availability.
I understand why someone who doesn't approve of marijuana might be repulsed by the current state of the market, but "remember when otherwise innocent people could reliably be imprisoned for years because an officer claimed to have found a bag of dried leaves in their vehicle during a traffic stop" is not a particularly compelling vision of a better state either.
This feels much like the education apologists complaint to Bryan Caplan - "You keep saying you want to stop wasting all this money, but you haven't given us new educational interventions that work better" The burden, it seems to me, should have been on those who want to employ the full might of criminal sanctions to show that the harm that they propose to resolve through the war on drugs is a) sufficient to justify such a regime, and b) impossible to solve or mitigate sufficiently through less restrictive means. Such justifications have generally not been forthcoming, or at best have been underwhelming, so the obvious response is to just stop the criminalization and let the market work. Yes it will fail, yes there will be externalities, and in time problems may become acute enough to require a more consistent regulatory response, but what is wrong with "Markets fail, use markets" in this case?