Morning Recommendations

Russ Roberts interviews Bryan Caplan on the case for open borders. The challenge with making that case is that anything other than xenophobia is counterintuitive.

Thorfinn suggests that if the U.S. overspends on health care, it also overspends on education.

America spends far more on education that would be "accounted for" by this simple regression model. Yet we don't see a great deal of worry on where this excess spending is coming from, or where all the waste is in College education.

Well, some people think there is waste in both places. And speaking of Robin Hanson, he writes,

I think a lot of today's political disputes come down to a conflict between farmer and forager ways, with forager ways slowly and steadily winning out since the industrial revolution. It seems we acted like farmers when farming required that, but when richer we feel we can afford to revert to more natural-feeling forager ways. The main exceptions, like school and workplace domination and ranking, are required to generate industry-level wealth. We live a farmer lifestyle when poor, but prefer to buy a forager lifestyle when rich.

I am not sure that I buy this as a political story. It seems to me that most of my friends on the left still live by bourgeois values.

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