Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don't (2 page)

Crime is another subject where this book will draw some unconventional conclusions. Criminals have something in common with everyone else—they make decisions based on incentives. Analyzing these incentives gives us a good indication of what policies will work in fighting crime. This approach helps to explain one of the great riddles that bedevil criminologists—what caused the dramatic fall in crime rates in the 1990s? The answer lies in a mix of policies—the more frequent use of the death penalty, higher arrest rates, and the spread of concealed-carry laws. Perhaps more surprising are the policies that didn’t work—gun control bills and “broken windows” policing methods had negligible effects, while the adoption of certain kinds of affirmative action programs in police departments actually had a detrimental effect. What’s more, contrary to a well-publicized argument in
Freakonomics
, legalized abortion was not the single biggest factor in reducing crime in the 1990s. Instead, this book will demonstrate that by increasing the number of out-of-wedlock births, abortion significantly
increased
crime.

I have been amazed by the constant resistance in academia to the idea that free market policies make people wealthier. If we look at the incentives of academics, we find that there’s an understandable reason for their viewpoint: much of the funding for universities—even for private schools—comes from the government. Academics often find the amount of their funding directly tied to the size of government. If an academic—especially at a state university—were to advocate small-government policies such as tax cuts, he’d be read the riot act. Faculty and administrators feel directly threatened by such policies, fearing they will lead to reductions in other government programs, including funding of universities.

Toward the beginning of my academic career, when I was briefly affiliated with Montana State University in Bozeman, I saw firsthand the conflict of interest between academics’ private interests and the best public policy. My wife—also a new Ph.D. in economics—and I had managed to find jobs in the same place. Soon after we moved to Bozeman in May 1986, Constitutional Initiative 27, which would have abolished property taxes in Montana, was put on the ballot. The vote was set for November, but the measure immediately elicited all kinds of horror stories in the press claiming that, if approved, the initiative would virtually eliminate Montana’s state and local government. The state superintendent of public schools warned that it would force the closure of all the state’s elementary schools. The governor and other top state officials resorted to similar jeremiads, releasing reams of statistics and twisting the data to support totally false claims such as the contention that Montana already was the lowest taxed state in the nation. In light of the barrage of criticism, most people, including myself, assumed the initiative would go nowhere.

But the facts were quite different from the fantastic declarations of public officials. The elimination of the property tax in 1984 would have left state and local government treasuries with at least $2 billion to spend—23.7 percent of personal income in the state. Thirty-five
other states did quite well spending even less than that ratio. In fact, the state would have been left with even more money than that since income tax revenues would have risen when people and corporations lost their property tax deductions.

I could see that the statistics being bandied about in the press were misleading, but no one was challenging them. Initially, I decided to get involved only by writing an op-ed piece, which appeared on July 13, 1986, in the
Great Falls Tribune
and
The Montana Standard
(Butte). Until then, I hadn’t had any contact with the four sisters who were primarily responsible for putting the initiative on the ballot. But after one of them, Naomi Powell, contacted me, I agreed to get more involved.

I went to Helena to talk to Frank Adams, a former newspaperman who was writing the ballot statement for the initiative. Then I met with the four sisters and some of their supporters in the small western Montana town of Corvallis. I quickly realized part of the reason why the initiative was having so many problems: the press was relentlessly attacking the sisters as “John Birchers” and as members of other sinister groups. Reporters were also angered by the sisters’ inability to answer immediately some of their more complex economic questions—the sisters often had to delay their replies until they could do some more research.

Having retired with their husbands to the Bitterroot Valley, the sisters ranged in age from their late fifties to late sixties. Living on fixed incomes, they had felt the squeeze as the cost of living, especially their property taxes, had risen. The sisters were hardly wealthy—the furniture in Naomi’s well-kept house was old and worn, and the windows had cracks that were mended with tape. They had spent much of their life savings trying to get the initiative on the ballot, traveling around the state and bedding down in sleeping bags while collecting signatures. The initiative, while not perfect, was pretty good—the effort struck me as an example of everyday Americans identifying a problem and trying to solve it. Collecting 50,000 signatures was not a problem. Ensuring the initiative received a fair hearing, however, was another story.

In hindsight, it was really the unfairness of the campaign against the initiative that prompted me to get more deeply involved in the effort. The fact that Naomi had my op-ed piece taped to her refrigerator door and told me, with tears in her eyes, that she would read it whenever people attacked her group or when they ran into other difficulties, probably didn’t hurt either.

Initially, I agreed to handle “number-type questions” from the media. But I quickly found that all press inquiries were being routed in my direction, and that I had become the unofficial (and later official) spokesman for the initiative. I viewed my primary role as just getting the correct numbers out to the press, although I ended up talking to some legislators and other individuals about the benefits of lower taxes. By early August, I had become a regular on the state-wide Montana Television News Network.

Newspaper editorials began attacking my involvement as soon as my op-ed first appeared. By late August, I learned that the Commissioner of Political Practices had come close to filing felony charges against me for ostensibly violating a law forbidding state employees from engaging in political campaigns. I had no idea that such a law even existed, but fortunately for me, I wasn’t on a state salary at the time because I was scheduled to go on leave at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University the following academic year. Learning of this, the commissioner’s office dropped its investigation of me. Curiously, no one threatened to prosecute the host of state-salaried academics and other state employees who were energetically campaigning against the initiative.

During August, I also began hearing complaints about my activities from the Montana State University administration. The chairman of my department repeatedly told me that the dean didn’t want me to continue publicly advocating the initiative. But I continued my work anyway, helping Frank Adams, who had also become an official spokesman for the initiative, send out a flurry of press releases. Before
I left for Hoover, I helped to convince several prominent Montana political figures to endorse the ballot measure.

I left Montana in late August, but I agreed to remain a spokesman for the initiative and to return to the state in September and October to participate in several televised debates. When I first came back on September 19, I found my colleagues in the Economics Department in a state of panic. Several faculty members hollered at me that I was destroying the department because the university was going to punish it for my involvement in the initiative. I learned from the department chairman that there really was some truth to this—the university president and other administrators were calling him and threatening to cut the department’s funding if it did not get me to “shut up.”

On September 22, the day of my first TV debate, I spent a few hours in the chairman’s office listening to him describe the threats that my actions were posing to the department. He told me that while my analysis of the effects of property taxes was economically sound, it was best not to say anything about such a sensitive topic. I reluctantly agreed to skip that night’s debate, for which a local businessman filled in for me. Ironically, his opponent was a political science professor from the University of Montana.

I returned to Hoover, but over the next few weeks I continued talking to the press about the real economic implications of cutting property taxes. I flew back to Montana on October 9 to participate in a debate that evening with some state senators. When I arrived in Bozeman the next morning, I found the department chairman in a state of near-apoplexy. He demanded to know if I had really stated during the debate that public school teachers were overpaid. When I told him that I had, he related how incredibly upset the dean was, and that he was unsure what the consequences would be. Given the pressure facing the department, I went back to Hoover and refrained from scheduling any additional appearances in Montana.

Constitutional Initiative 27, which would have abolished property taxes in Montana, was defeated on November 4, receiving 46 percent of the vote. However, we took some measure of consolation that a parallel measure designed to freeze property taxes, Initiative 105, passed by a comfortable margin.

Things didn’t quiet down for me after the campaign ended. In the department evaluations conducted at Bozeman at the beginning of 1987, I received the department’s lowest ranking in the category of “outreach,” which deals with communicating with the nonacademic community. On a zero to four scale, with zero being the lowest score, I got the department’s only zero. I’m typically not overly concerned with that ranking, since I usually concentrate more on my teaching, research, and publications. However, given that my high-profile activities in support of Initiative 27 had made me one of the best known economists in the state and, more importantly, my research had gotten some national attention, I was a little surprised. The ranking was obviously a form of punishment for my politically incorrect activities supporting the abolition of property taxes.

As a final bit of collective punishment, I was told that the method used to rank the department relative to other departments had been changed. The new method would likely end the department’s ranking as the best department in the School of Agriculture, an event that could result in a cut in department funds. The chairman told me that the dean would consider returning to the old method if department members—especially me—behaved themselves in the future. The administration was particularly concerned over reports that there would soon be another ballot initiative on property taxes. The chairman asked me to promise not to talk to the press anymore about the issue. I declined, arguing that if the press were to publish more misleading statistics and I were asked about them, I would feel obligated to set them straight.

Perhaps I had been naïve, but I was surprised by the vehemence with which people who receive their income from taxes fought to protect
that largesse. While administrators at Montana State University would constantly extol academic freedom, they would not let something that trivial prevent them from doing whatever they believed necessary to protect their jobs. The experience convinced me that there’s an inherent inconsistency between publicly provided education and academic freedom. Even when people do not try to silence dissent as overtly as my former colleagues did, the fact that professors and administrators receive their income from taxes cannot help but color their opinions on issues touching on the free market or the size of government.

Aside from concerns over their own salaries and jobs, there is another reason why so many academics are skeptical of the free market: too many of them spend their whole lives in academia. Many go straight from college to graduate school and then spend the rest of their lives teaching in the ivory towers, where their output is primarily evaluated by other academics. Academia is about the only profession that consumes its own output. It’s as if car companies limited their auto sales to employees of other car companies. This tendency keeps academics too concentrated on theory and not enough on real world practicalities. Think about it: academic research about how an industry operates is refereed by other academics. Neither the author nor the referees may have had any actual experience in the industry.

I have spent much of my own career in academia, but one of my most educational experiences was my service as the chief economist at the United States Sentencing Commission during 1988 and 1989. The Commission, which set the criminal penalties for individuals and firms who violated federal law, offered me an inside view into the criminal justice system. It gave me a better understanding of how prospective penalties affect criminal behavior. I began to see that debates among economists in academic journals could be quite removed from the real
world. Sometimes, neither the authors nor the referees nor the journal editors really understood the institutions they were discussing.
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Focusing so intensely on theory, economists too often take on the role of central planners. They identify the “right” prices that companies should charge and the “right” policies they should adopt without considering why market incentives haven’t encouraged firms to take these measures on their own. A greater problem, though, is that some economists try to pinpoint the subsidies or taxes that should be applied to goods to ensure that the “right” amounts are sold.

But as Milton Friedman noted, a tax that might work in theory is difficult to make succeed in practice. Friedman and his wife Rose observed: “Government is one means through which we can try to compensate for ‘market failure,’ try to use our resources more effectively to produce the amount of clean air, water, and land that we are willing to pay for. Unfortunately, the very factors that produce the market failure also make it difficult for government to achieve a satisfactory solution . . . .Attempts to use government to correct market failure have often simply substituted government failure for market failure.”
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