On Being Brought Up by Libertarian Economists

The central fact about child rearing by my parents was the equal intellectual status of everyone in the family. My sister and I did not get a vote on the family budget; we were not the ones who had earned the money. But in any disagreement the question was always who had good arguments, not who was older. Many years later I heard an elderly man of whom I had a generally favorable opinion tell a child who had disagreed with him not to contradict his elders. I was shocked — the statement struck me as heresy, very nearly obscenity. If your elders are wrong, you have as much cause to contradict them as they would to contradict you if you were wrong.  I thought the older man was correct on the disagreement, but that is a reason to present evidence or argument, not to assert superior status.

A friend at college told me that someone she knew had met me and my father skiing in Colorado, probably when I was about thirteen. By his account we spent all our time arguing and I won half the arguments. The first half is reasonably accurate but I don’t think my win ratio was actually that high.

My wife likes to quote the advice “never go to bed with an argument unsettled” as evidence that people confuse “argument” with “quarrel.” I had not been quarreling with my father, I had been engaged in an intellectual exchange with him, part of my education — and his.

Many years later I came across a book by Paul Krugman, Peddling Prosperity, that started as a defense of left wing economists against right wing economists, morphed into a defense of economists, left and right, against politicians, left and right, misusing their ideas.  In it he said something to the effect that my father was a very good debater but sometimes cut corners, chose his arguments on the basis of what conclusion he wanted not what was true. I wrote a letter to Krugman to tell him that, speaking as the world’s leading expert on arguing with Milton Friedman, it wasn’t true.

Consequences

I tell that story not as evidence that Krugman was wrong — I have offered an assertion, not evidence — but as an example of the effect on me of the approach to child rearing I have described.  Krugman was a prominent economist. I did not know him personally, had no reason to think he knew anything about me, but he had written something I had reason to believe was false, so I told him so. One of the benefits of email nowadays is that it makes it easier to do that sort of thing, argue with strangers, than it was then.

My high school driver’s ed textbook asserted that a head on collision between two cars each going 50 miles an hour had the same effect on each as running into a brick wall at 100 miles an hour. I constructed a simple proof that it could not be true, offered it to the teacher. He responded that he didn’t know but it was what the textbook said; we agreed to take the question to the physics teacher. He insisted that the textbook was right, had no interest in either responding to my proof or offering arguments for his position. I still regret that I did not happen to encounter him after getting my PhD in physics to tell him that by his criterion, educational status not arguments, he was now wrong.

Many years later the head of the Population Council, wanting to see how someone from the pro-market side of the political spectrum would deal with the issue of population growth, asked me to write a piece on it. Everyone at the time knew that population growth was a bad thing, probably a very bad thing, and most with opinions on the subject knew that one reason poor countries were poor was that they were overpopulated, would get still poorer if their populations continued to grow.

I tried to estimate the externalities, positive and negative, associated with population growth, ways in which a family having one more child would make other people better or worse off. The most obvious candidate, less land and other resources per capita if the number of people increased, was not an externality, at least in a market economy; a child is not born with a deed to a per capita share of the world’s resources clutched in his fist. If he wants land he or his parents will have to buy it, which does not make the rest of the world worse off. I tried to estimate the size of the externalities and concluded that I could not do so accurately enough to sign the sum, to tell whether the net effect was positive or negative.¹ As a check on my skepticism of the orthodoxy, I calculated the population density for all of the world’s countries, area divided by population. The five most densely populated were two rich European countries and three poor countries, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, that were rapidly becoming rich. India and China, which people imagined as examples of the problem, had large populations but also large areas so were not densely populated.

As some evidence in favor of that approach to orthodoxy, over the next fifty years the population of poor countries continued to grow and they got richer and less hungry, the opposite of the orthodox prediction. When climate change replaced population growth as the looming catastrophe that all of the authorities insisted something should be done about, I took the same approach to that issue and reached the same conclusion.²

We spent our summers at a house in New Hampshire; my job was mowing the lawn every week or two, and there was a lot of lawn. At some point, probably in my early teens, I started feeling resentful about having to mow it. After thinking about it for a while I concluded that the situation was indeed unfair; I was getting off very lightly considering how much time my mother spent maintaining the household and my father working to support us.  I concluded that my feelings were due to adolescence not unfair treatment and warned my father of my unjustified feelings in case any of them showed up in my interactions with him.

One effect of being brought up as I have described is to make you less willing to be persuaded by bad arguments, even when offered by high status people. Another is to make you more willing to be persuaded by good arguments, even ones nobody else is making.

The Second Generation

One of the things you learn in economics, and life, is the principle of revealed preference: Believe what people do, not what they say. The best evidence that I am giving a truthful account of my view of how I was brought up is how I brought up my children.

My first marriage broke up shortly after our son was born; he was brought up primarily by his mother and her second husband but, once he was old enough, spent summers with me and my second wife. I too am a libertarian economist and have tried to follow my parents’ example. On one occasion he expressed an opinion on something and one of us asked him what he based it on. He replied that it was just an opinion — why should he have to have a reason for it? One of us responded by asking why he would expect anyone else to be interested in his opinions if he had no reasons to hold them.

He responded that his other parents didn’t demand that he have reasons for his opinions. One of us, I think my wife, asked him whether, when his other parents made rules, they felt obligated to give reasons for them. He said they didn’t. Did we? Yes. She asked which he preferred, for neither parents nor children to be obliged to give reasons or for both to be. He decided that he preferred the second rule.

When the Covid pandemic started I was on a speaking trip in Europe. My younger son emailed me urging me to cut the trip short and come home to  isolate. My first reaction was to ignore that — I had been alive for more than seventy years and had seen no disease sufficiently dangerous to cancel talks for. My son pointed out that this time was different. His argument was right, mine was wrong; I cancelled, flew home and isolated until vaccines became available.

Sometimes the kids should win the argument.

Once, long after I became an adult with children of my own, my parents asked me if it would have been better for them to have brought me up in their parents’ religion: Judaism.³ I replied that I preferred having been brought up in what they believed in: 18^th century rationalism, the belief system of Adam Smith and David Hume.

An Economic Anecdote

We lived in Chicago, my mother’s parents in Portland, Oregon, so we visited them rarely. The trip by train took three days and two nights. Pullman berths were expensive; my parents planned to sleep in their seats but were willing to buy births for us.

My father offered me and my sister a choice. We could have berths or we could sit up and have the price of the berths added to our allowance. Both of us chose the money.

At first glance, the economic argument looks simple, a special case of the usual economic argument for freedom. As became clear when I had children of my own, it was not that simple; not all of the costs were on me and my sister. Small children who don’t get enough sleep become cranky. Cranky children are less pleasant for parents to deal with. There was an externality to our choice.

Making the choice ourselves and observing the consequences was useful education; educating us was a benefit to our parents. So perhaps there were two externalities, with opposite signs.

That brings me to another story about my older son. We had a friend in Boston who had a New Year’s party every year.⁴ It started when a friend of hers was killed driving home from a party on New Year’s and she decided to have a party nobody had to drive home from. Food, conversation, music, board games. People slept on couches, or crowded into spare beds, or on the floor; we were young. The next morning someone made breakfast and the party continued. Dinner was spaghetti and meat sauce by one of the regular attenders. The day after that we went home.

It was a very safe environment, a good place to let a child practice being a grownup. We told Patri that we were setting no rules — he was free to go to sleep when he wanted, get up when he wanted, spend his time entirely as he liked. On the third day he told us that he had made an interesting discovery; if he stayed up two nights running he got a headache.

He was about ten at the time. Most kids don’t discover that until they are in college. Reality is a good teacher.

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P.S. It occurs to me that at least one of my readers was also brought up by libertarian economists. If he happens to read this he is welcome to comment — the details of his family arrangements were rather different from ours.

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Yes indeed! It wasn't until I got to college that I met more than a couple of people for whom arguing was a mutual search for the truth rather than about status. (Commenter)

1. The article is “Laissez Faire in Population: The Least Bad Solution.”

2. My posts on climate. This one sketches the analysis.

3. Their parents were immigrants from eastern Europe.

4. “Places I Cannot Go,” a poem I once wrote, in part about that party.