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BASIC ECONOMICS Thomas Sowell

First of all, this is a book about economics. Second, it is eminently readable. These two phenomena rarely if ever coincide; truly it should be the only criteria to receive a Nobel in either Literature or Economics. Or both. The only other examples of readable economics books I can come up with offhand are Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson and Walter Block’s Defending the Undefendable. The cover of the latter has a blurb that reads “Something To Offend Everyone”. Good stuff.

There are two principles in this book that should be committed to memory by anyone with an interest in government, politics, economics, human nature, environmentalism, public interest activism or anything like that.

First is the definition of economics that is the foundation of Sowell’s work: “Economics is the study of the distribution of scare resources which have alternative uses“. Anyone who lives on a budget knows intuitively what this means. You have 20 bucks in your pocket, and you need both a tank of gas and a new shirt for your job interview tomorrow. Without the gas, you can’t make it to the interview; without the shirt, you have to interview wearing your faded and tattered “I’m With Stupid” sweatshirt. The process you go through in solving this dilemma is called Economics. The same definition applies across the board whenever we have to make tough decisions about what we want versus what we need versus what we have. We all just fail to apply the same reasoning to big-picture issues such as farm subsidies or minimum wage laws.

Second is the notion that Government can control the price of certain goods and services, but it can never control the cost. The costs will paid by someone, and normally that someone is person who least can afford it. This for example, is why cities that practice rent control invariably have two things: people living on the street, and boarded up buildings which are perfectly inhabitable.

Why? If landlords can’t raise rent, they can’t afford improvements, they can’t afford maintenance, they can’t afford to expand, they can’t afford to pay property taxes, and eventually, they can’t afford to keep on being landlords. Ignoring economic reality in favor of “compassionate”, politically expedient policy creates a disincentive. Less housing is available, even though the actual space for housing exists, or could easily be built, minus the government meddling.

Professor Sowell also tipped me off to a principle which should be obvious, but which has always been stuck in my subconscious, just below the level where it could be called knowledge. That is, that the time frame of economic changes in society is a long-term time frame, while the time frame of political changes is a brief one. In other words, a politician will make the decision which effects his chances in next year’s election, regardless of the consequences of that decision 5-10 years in the future. By that time, when all the damage he’s caused is fully developed, the politician will either be in a different, higher position of government, or enough time will have passed for him to blame the consequences of his policies on someone else. Most likely greedy-capitalist-pig-running-dog-businessmen who exploit the masses.

Not that businessmen are given a free ride in this book. Professor Sowell tells how he has had a standing offer in his Economics classes to give an “A” to any student who could find a good word about businessmen anywhere in the 900+ pages of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. He has never had to pay up. Businessmen are the first ones to run to the government to have their particular industry protected from market forces, and, ironically, the first ones to clamor for free market reforms when someone else’s industry receives similar protection. Even if we agree wholeheartedly that a businessman will rip you off in a heartbeat, it is only a question of which mechanism is a better monitor: the market or the state. The answer is not always the state, oddly enough.

Last but not least, one of the more important distinctions made in the book is the difference between the goals of economic/political decisions and the incentives created by them. People don’t make decisions based on the lofty goals of government action, they make decisions based on incentives and self-intererst. Minimum wage laws are a good example. If you set an arbitrary minimum wage by government fiat, rather than let the market decide, all you do is guarantee someone is either getting fired or never getting hired in the first place.

Why? Employers have scarce resources with which to pay workers, if these resources are confiscated by the government in the name of minimum wage increases, the employer can only respond by cutting costs elsewhere. Often it is by firing (or just not hiring) a segment of the work force. Which segment? The segment that needs work the most: young, unskilled (and often, minority) workers who need an entry-level job to get them rolling in life.

Oh, and what does “market” mean in this instance? An “invisible hand” that we must trust like the Greeks trusted Zeus? No, really, all it means in this case is individuals making decisions. Some of the individuals are offering work, some of them are seeking. These are the individuals who should decide what amount of wages are offered and accepted. Instead it is usually a slick-talking politician who sincerely opines about how he wants to help “the worker” that he’s about to put on the street.

Basic Economics is filled with fascinating historical examples of economic ignorance, which in themselves are worth the price of the book (if you’re a history buff). The main text isn’t footnoted, to make it easier for the causal, non-academic reader, but there are extensive notes in the back giving primary and secondary sources for all factual material.

I can’t recommend this book highly enough. It should be required reading for all college freshman.

Then again, that would only create a disincentive for college freshmen to read it. Thus the aggregate knowledge of economic principles would decrease rather than increase.

Huh. I learned something. Go figure.

That Thomas Sowell is a genius, I tell you.

That last hour of work on Friday is the longest hour of the week. I imagine similar feelings may occur to people who actually enjoy their jobs, but for those of us who’ve built up a raging antipathy to our place of employ, it really is a torturous 60 minutes.

Time takes on a thick, murky, molasses-like existence. Time actually becomes viscous. That last hour is like trying to walk on the bottom of a pool, slow and suffocating.

I’m trying to remember back to a job I didn’t hate.

I didn’t hate the Air Force. The work itself wasn’t all that interesting, except when we were doing battlefield contingency training, which was great. I learned how to change light bulbs while wearing full chemical gear. Can’t beat that. But really, the day to day stuff wasn’t unpleasant at all. There was camaraderie, decent pay (for a young single guy), and I never had to worry about deciding what to wear to work.

I really enjoyed newspaper work quite a bit, even if I only did it part time. I’ve actually done it twice, once in Greensboro, NC, and then again in Guthrie, OK. Writing, editing, layout and design. Great work. I’d go back to it if I could afford to.

For that matter, I enjoyed working in radio more than anything I’ve ever done. That job didn’t pay anything at all, and I’d still count it as my favorite job. I’d actually take pay cut to get a radio show where I could talk and interview and play records as the mood struck me. I think I could get an audience for that. I’m fairly articulate and interesting; I’m witty, and I’ve been told I have the perfect face for radio. That would have to count as a dream job.

I used to work for PeopleExpress Airlines. That was a great job. In case you don’t recall, PEX was the first of the Airline Deregulation Era discount carriers. Truly, that airline was the mold from which Southwest and the like were copied. We had an intelligent, competent and fun-loving crew, an interesting workplace (airports are fun), and we got discount airfare. Occasionally, I got to be the guy who would hold the orange wands and guide the 737’s in from the taxiway to the gate. That’s almost too much fun to accept a paycheck for.

But sadly, that’s about it. I’ve had, if memory serves, something like 20 jobs in my life. I’ve hated all but the four I just mentioned. Well, not exactly; I used to love the job I have now. It’s only really gone south for me in the last four years or so. Still, 5-out-of-20 isn’t a great ratio.

I wonder, does this speak more to the banality of most employment in general, or am I just a whiny malcontent? Probably, as in most things, a little bit of both. One one hand, most jobs in this world are only barely tolerable at best. One the other, I’ve been afflicted all my life with a mild case of Lazy Sluggard Syndrome.

Does anybody out there really love their job? I’d be interested to know what you do.

Pixies Wave of Mutilation: Best of Pixies

There was a time in the mid-80’s that I was pretty up-to-date on new music. I was at UNC-Greensboro, I had a couple of shifts a week on the campus radio station (WUAG: 10 million microwatts of power), and I was hip enough to know that INXS was not pronounced “inks”. But then I dropped out of school and joined the U.S. Air Force. Thinking I’d have a chance to see the world, I was promptly stationed in the middle of Oklahoma. Among the disadvantages of this assignment was that I spent the years 1987-1991 in a place utterly devoid of any cool radio stations whatsoever.

So I completely missed out on the whole Pixies phenomenon.

Over the years I’d hear the name Pixies mentioned, but since going on name alone, they sounded a bit like a fluffy, poppy, bubblegummy kind of band I’d normally hate, I was never led to seek them out. I hate to get all “can’tjudgeabookbyitscover-y” and all, but you really can’t judge a book by its cover or a band by its name. Not in this case anyway. I suppose if you ignored, say, the Starland Vocal Band on the basis of corny moniker, you’d be safe, but that’d be the exception rather than the rule.

So while I normally never miss a pop-culture happening of Pixies-like stature, here I must sadly admit that I missed the boat. Utterly. I never saw Close Encounters of the Third Kind, either. Or E.T. the Extraterrestrial, for that matter. So sue me.

All that to say this: when I downloaded the Wave of Mutilation: Best of Pixies from i-Tunes (quite the little bargain at 23 tracks for $9.99, I must say), I went into it tabula rasa, being perhaps the only 40-year-old man in the United States who’d never heard a Pixies tune.

First impressions:

• I’m really mad at my so-called “friends” for letting me get this far in life without hearing this band.
• Some of the songs are reminiscent of Violent Femmes.
• Frank Black has (or had) issues, and I mean real issues, with his sister(s). I hope he’s had time to get that all therapied out of his system.
• I don’t think I’ll be listening to anything else for the forseeable future, unless it’s the other, earlier, Pixies albums.

As is true with almost any band I’ve ever liked, I found the earlier music more compelling than the later stuff. There seems to be some Universal Constant that forces bands to become either slow, ponderous, or boring as they “mature” (sometimes all three, but enough about U2). This album being a chronologically organized retrospective, I’d say they broke up just in time. Right on the edge, they were.

The early tracks have that fast, minimalistic, exciting feel of a band that is having fun and not being over-produced by some “old pro” who wants to smooth them out. They are what they are, with no inhibition, no pretension, and none of that “hey we’re famous let’s take ourselves seriously as artists” nonsense that has killed more bands than heroin.

The non-harmonic harmonies of Frank Black (yeah, I know, he was called Black Francis back in the day) and Kim Deal are strangely pleasant. Neither is what you’d call Simon Cowell material, but I see that as a plus. I’ve always been drawn to raw passionate rock and roll singers who can’t really sing a lick (e.g., Gordon Gano, Jello Biafra, Johnny Rotten). Frank could be the poster boy for that type, and I really like it.

Joey Santiago’s guitar is a perfect fit to my tastes: sparse, fast, catchy. Not a hint of horrid heavy metal soloist, or AC/DC repetitiveness. Just good, snazzy, improvisational-sounding coolness. Kim Deal and Dave Lovering as a rhythm section actually add to, rather than merely appear on, each and every track. Kim Deal had a few minor hits later on with the Breeders, as you may know. I liked their song “Cannonball” a lot, but had no idea that there was a Breeders/Pixies connection. How did I miss that? It really seems I was destined to never hear them until now.

So, yeah, a dozen years after the fact, let me say what has already been said a gazillion times in print: Pixies rule. I find myself happy that it took me until 2005 to hear them. Honestly, the music scene here in the early 21st century is brutally dull. Come on, you know it’s true, it’s ok to admit it. But here I am, hearing “Vamos” for the first time. Pretty good timing, as it turns out.