This is an unusually weak Planet Money podcast.  About 15 minutes of an admittedly interesting tale of 4 Brazilian economists who concocted a seemingly crazy way to ease their countrymen into trusting their new currency after decades of government monetary mismanagement, the oral fine print admitted that oh, by the way, the economists also got the government to balance the budget, eliminating printing money to pay for everything, and peg the new currency to the dollar.

The tricky mechanism was interesting (basically creating a new unit of exchange which is defined as an every increasing number of the current currency units to get the population to start thinking in terms of the new unit of exchange, and then calling the new unit of exchange the new currency), and the lead up story about the horrors of living with hyper-inflation was quite compelling.  But no one could blame listeners for coming away with the impression that the cure for hyper-inflation is to induce a temporary mass illusion, rather than actually engaging in the hard work of sound fiscal and monetary policy.

Does it make sense to create a podcast discussing whether atheists must be liberals without even attempting to define “liberal” (and, by extension, “conservative”?)

To my mind, Chris Mooney is just too partisan to “c0-replace” D J Grothe as host of Point of Inquiry.  Mooney repeatedly asserts that “corporations are anti-science.”  A more tendentious claim can hardly be imagined.  All sorts of businesses use the results of scientific inquiry every day.  To describe them as “anti-science” is preposterous.

What Mooney observes is that different people will use whatever at least semi-plausible arguments available to influence the government (mainly) in all sorts of ways.  Many of these people will be speaking on behalf of businesses (and many will not), and many of these arguments will be scientifically dubious but politically influential.

This is the way politics works.  It is not some unique characteristic of  “corporations.”

In pondering “market fundamentalism,” David Sloan Wilson dedicates a post to defining a concept of fundamentalism which, I trust, will be soon wielded against free-market folks.

Wilson asks the reader to envision a 2×2 grid with “good for self” and “good for others” on the axes, leaving spaces four spaces:  good for self and good for others, good for self and bad for others, and so on, and speculates that

(using my) 2×2 table to code the way that words such as “market” and “regulation” are used by market fundamentalists (will almost assuredly lead to) the win-lose and lose-win boxes …largely unfilled

Even though it might, in some circumstances, lead to reasonable rules of thumb, from an evolutionary perspective, this is supposed to be bad.

…the most pressing problems of modern live require an accurate description of the real works so that the inevitable tradeoffs can be managed for the common good.  Fundamentalism interferes with this enterprise and needs to be recognized for what it is.

I wonder what Wilson would say if we replaced the words “market” and “regulation” with “free speech” and “censorship.”  Does “free speech fundamentalism” “interfere” with managing social tradeoffs?  The standard answer is not that all speech is beneficial, or, at least, harmless, but, rather, that we can’t trust the censors to do the job properly.  Where does that answer fit in the box?

Over at Free Exchange:

It does seem that the best hope for stability in the financial system, moving forward, is an attempt to supplement whatever reform passes by cultivating a culture of fierce, even oppositional, seriousness among financial sector regulators.

In that same sense that a head on collision results in a perfectly stable crash site.

The easiest, most likely, and probably only, way for oppositional financial sector regulators to create stability is by halting change.

It’s time for the commentators at Free Exchange to sit back and take a long, deep, breath.

Just as Lou Dobbs talks himself into believing that two people voluntarily trading with one another yields a net loss if they are both US citizens, various lefty types tie themselves into knots trying to convince themselves that destruction is good.

But, to be fair, we Bastiat fans tend to ignore what people are really referring to when talking about “helping the economy,” which is unemployment.  Economists rightly use wealth and GDP to measure the health of the economy.  The rest of the world uses unemployment.

Apparently David Sloan Wilson is one of a long series of non-economist academics who think they understand economics, but really don’t. The link is to the fifth of a series of posts contrasting evolutionary theory with a version of economic theory that few economists actually espouse.

…the metaphor of the invisible hand has represented the idea that unrestrained self-interest automatically enhances the common good, which is the foundation of laissez-faire economic philosophy.

No, not “unrestrained”. Most emphatically restrained, by respect for property rights (no theft) and the prohibition on fraud.

The invisible hand metaphor shows that, save for certain situations which economists have devoted extensive time and effort cataloging, respect for property rights and a prohibition on fraud is pretty much all that is needed.

An example will bring [the idea of group selection in the apparent face of individually costly behaviors] to life. When a honeybee colony runs low on honey, it behaves as if it is hungry, sending more workers to the fields to look for flowers. Yet, no individual bee is hungry. Instead, colony hunger is orchestrated by a social interaction between two work forces. When a foraging bee returns to the hive with her load of nectar, she waits until she can regurgitate it to another bee that will store it. The amount of time that she must wait provides an accurate index of the colony’s food supply. If not much food is coming in and most cells of the honeycomb are empty, then the storers are lined up at the hive entrance like taxicabs outside an airport and foragers can unload their nectar immediately. If lots of food is coming in and storers must search a long time to find an empty cell, then it is the returning foragers who must wait in line. Honeybees have been programmed by natural selection to follow a particular rule that causes foragers to remain foraging and to recruit more workers to forage whenever their waiting time is short. Brilliant!

Brilliant indeed! And remarkably similar to the invisible hand guiding entrepreneurs to the most needed tasks by restricting the supply of, say, restaurants, by requiring potential restauranteurs to pay for their inputs and earn profits by being able to sell meals for more than the cost of the inputs.

Wilson’s series touch on a bunch of interesting economic topics.  But his criticisms of the discipline of Economics sounds like an English professor commenting on nuclear physics.