Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Books

Reviews
"Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America" by Alison J. Clarke
A smart, fun history considers the influence of those indispensable containers on the culture of the nation.
By Jonathan Groner
[11/10/99]

Does beauty really equal truth?
Philosopher Elaine Scarry defends beauty from p.c. critics and wins over one cynical writer.
By David Bowman
[11/09/99]

The Writer's Life
A titan of American letters reflects on his timeless art and the sacrifices it exacts.
By David Rakoff
[11/09/99]

Dear Mr. Blue
Murder, she wrote
The victim in my wife's latest mystery looks suspiciously like me -- a middle-aged man who left his wife for a younger woman.
By Garrison Keillor
[11/09/99]

Reviews
"Stephen Spender: A Life in Modernism" by David Leeming
A biography of the celebrity-loving man of letters -- friend of Auden and Isherwood, surrogate son of Eliot and Woolf -- whose social calendar was one of his finest works.
By Jaime Manrique
[11/09/99]

Complete archives for Books

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

It means different things to different people. I suspect that at least half the people at the Hoover Institution were on the left -- liberals and in some case radicals -- in their early 20s. I include myself. One reason is that you simply want to save people who haven't received cosmic justice. You would like to see that rectified. And it's only with the passage of years that many people finally understand that life doesn't work that way. But there are other people, I think, who get a personal sense of worth and sometimes superiority from their liberal vision of the world. And they're not going to give that vision up easily.

So you were a lefty once.

Through the decade of my 20s, I was a Marxist.

What made you turn around?

What began to change my mind was working in the summer of 1960 as an intern in the federal government, studying minimum-wage laws in Puerto Rico. It was painfully clear that as they pushed up minimum wage levels, which they did at that time industry by industry, the employment levels were falling. I was studying the sugar industry. There were two explanations of what was happening. One was the conventional economic explanation: that as you pushed up the minimum-wage level, you were pricing people out of their jobs. The other one was that there were a series of hurricanes that had come through Puerto Rico, destroying sugar cane in the field, and therefore employment was lower. The unions preferred that explanation, and some of the liberals did, too.

Did you discover something that surprised you?

I spent the summer trying to figure out how to tell empirically which explanation was true. And one day I figured it out. I came to the office and announced that what we needed was data on the amount of sugar cane standing in the field before the hurricane moved through. I expected to be congratulated. And I saw these looks of shock on people's faces. As if, "This idiot has stumbled on something that's going to blow the whole game!" To me the question was: Is this law making poor people better off or worse off?

That was the not the question the labor department was looking at. About one-third of their budget at that time came from administering the wages and hours laws. They may have chosen to believe that the law was benign, but they certainly weren't going to engage in any scrutiny of the law.

What that said to me was that the incentives of government agencies are different than what the laws they were set up to administer were intended to accomplish. That may not sound very original in the James Buchanan era, when we know about "Public Choice" theory. But it was a revelation for me. You start thinking in those terms, and you no longer ask, what is the goal of that law, and do I agree with that goal? You start to ask instead: What are the incentives, what are the consequences of those incentives, and do I agree with those?

I notice that in New York liberal circles, people generally prefer arguing over ideals to discussing what might work.

Being on the side of the angels. Being for affordable housing, for instance. But I don't know of anybody who wants housing to be unaffordable. Liberals tend to describe what they want in terms of goals rather than processes, and not to be overly concerned with the observable consequences. The observable consequences in New York are just scary.

You aren't a fan of rent control?

No, I'm not. A figure I ran across recently that struck me as illustrating the moral bankruptcy of rent control is this: The number of boarded-up housing units in New York City is four times the number of homeless people on the streets. To think of that! On winter nights there are people sleeping on the cold pavement and dying of exposure, when there are these buildings that are boarded up as a consequence of economic protectionism.

I know you're usually referred to as a conservative. Do you think of yourself that way?

I don't. Because if by "conservative" you mean trying to preserve something from the past, I have no particular reason to do that. Right now, the public schools as they exist I would not want to conserve. There are other things I would want to conserve. But conserving something just because it's there has no appeal for me.

What would your preferred label be?

I prefer not to have labels, but I suspect that "libertarian" would suit me better than many others, although I disagree with the libertarian movement on a number of things -- military preparedness, for instance.

Is being a black libertarian tough? What are the assumptions people most often make about you?

Being a liberal or a conservative or a Marxist has never made that much difference in my life. I've never been someone who was courting popularity. I was a Marxist during the height of the McCarthy era.

You do have a knack.

[Laughs.] I missed the trend.

What's it like for you on the right? I certainly have met racist Republicans. I ask this question for the Salon readership, many of whom are probably convinced that the Republican party is made up entirely of racists.

That's not true, of course. It's amazing, for example, how many people on the right have for years been up in Harlem spending their money and their time trying to help the kids, including one whose name would be very familiar to you. But he hasn't chosen to say it publicly, so I won't either.

What are the biggest mistakes liberals make when they think about problems that afflict the black community?

One of their mistakes is to confuse moral issues with causal issues. People often attribute things to the legacy of slavery, for instance. But many of the things that are attributed to the legacy of slavery really were not as bad a hundred years ago as they are today. In the book I mention marriage rates and rates of labor-force participation. Another example is from Washington, D.C. A hundred years ago, there were only four academic high schools in Washington, D.C., three white and one black. There were some standardized tests administered, and the black high school came in ahead of two of the three white high schools. Now, it was certainly true, at that time and for a long time after, that Washington was a racially segregated and racially discriminatory town. But those clearly weren't the only controlling factors. I happen to have followed that particular school on into the 20th century. From the late '30s into the mid-'50s, the student body of that school ranked at or above the national average on IQ tests.

Next page | Let's pay all the education professors to retire