All posts by Lauren Hall

Professor and Chair, Department of Political Science, Rochester Institute of Technology
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Regressive Regulations and structural racism

The CDC released data last month showing how women fled NYC at the height of the pandemic to give birth, largely as a reaction to fear of overwhelmed hospitals as well as restrictive birthing policies.

What’s interesting about the data, from my perspective, is how clearly it demonstrates that it’s those with wealth who can avoid the limitations regulations create. New York State has regulated birth centers out of existence, largely through the burdensome and outdated Certificate of Need (CON) process, resulting in fewer options for precisely those people who can’t buy themselves out of these limitations.

Predictably, from the CDC data, white women were most likely to successfully escape the city. Black and Hispanic women were left behind, likely as a result of less flexible employment and fewer financial resources overall. Meanwhile, at the same time women downstate were desperate to find safe places to give birth during a pandemic, New York was prosecuting midwives who served an upstate maternity desert of low-income Mennonite women. The absurdity of the entire situation should be obvious, but in reality it demonstrates one of the primary ways in which regulations have regressive effects.

Certified professional midwives, licensed in 35 other states, are illegal in New York. As a group they tend to serve underserved communities, including low-income rural communities and communities of color. So when low-income New Yorkers looked around for out-of-hospital birthing options during a global pandemic it turns out they couldn’t find any, not because of a market failure, but because of simple and obvious government failure.

There’s a broader lesson here for classical liberals. Most people acknowledge that classical liberalism has a diversity problem, but it’s been hard to know what to do about it. I think one clear way libertarians and classical liberals can appeal more strongly to diverse populations, including women and people of color, is by emphasizing the way government regulations overwhelmingly harm the most vulnerable among us. While there’s been a lot of work done in this area in terms of criminal justice reform, the drug war, and immigration, women’s issues haven’t yet really gotten as much attention. And regulation in particular is still often discussed as an efficiency issue rather than a justice issue. Yet government-imposed barriers place real and disparate burdens on women and communities of color, creating serious impediments to accessing diverse providers on the one hand and wealth building among would-be entrepreneurs on the other.

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Libertarians Should Support a Politics of Place (and Vote Local)

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I’m reading Ezra Klein’s book Why We’re Polarized with my students this semester and while I disagree with some of his prescriptions, his diagnosis seems accurate and at least one prescription seems particularly powerful: the importance of building a politics of place.

Klein’s overall point, which I think is mostly right, is that our focus on national politics polarizes us in a way that is both actively harmful to American civic life but that also undermines the areas where our votes and our advocacy and our opinions have an actual chance of making a difference, namely the state and local level.

In general in American politics, there’s far too much emphasis on national politics and not nearly enough on state and local politics. The reality is that the vast majority of the really awful rights violations – at least those affecting American citizens – are done by the state and local governments. National politics tends to brutalize people overseas or those trying to enter our country, but it is state and local politicians that profit off the poor, brutalize the vulnerable, execute the innocent, and engage in a variety of corrupt and vicious practices that make us all worse off. (The Innocence Files on Netflix, produced in conjunction with the Innocence Project, is a good reminder of how brutally unjust state and local governance can be).

Klein’s argument is not new. It’s basically the same argument made by the Anti-Federalists against the Federalist support of strong national government, made by Hayek in his essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society”, and made by many other libertarians in their support for bottom-up economic policies, but I see it less explicitly when libertarians talk about politics. In fact, I’ve seen Facebook posts from a lot of well-known libertarian scholars this week poo-pooing voting in general. What all these posts focus on is the Biden-Trump binary, as though voting for president doesn’t also usually involve voting for lots of other people in lots of other elections that we might very well have an impact on at the same time.

It seems ironic that libertarians seem to have fallen for the same sort of nationalism that other people have. Possibly it’s a visibility issue. The federal government is huge, unwieldy, very expensive, and kills hundreds of thousands of people overseas, so it seems like a good enough target for small government ire. And of course federal elections are in fact pretty stupid. Your vote won’t really count in any meaningful mathematical way (though it may count in a symbolic way, which is often overlooked).

But we need to keep our sights on two levels of government at the same time: the federal government’s bloat and mismanagement as well as state and local government’s immediate effects on people’s lives. And of course as many people have pointed out, your vote may in fact have an effect on a local election, while it’s very very very unlikely to have an effect on a national one, particularly with the electoral college in place.

State and local governments are precisely the best targets for libertarians for a lot of reasons. States decide who gets life in prison or the death penalty and local prosecutors decide whether to use coercive plea deals or hide exculpatory evidence and local police decide whether to police for safety or profit or whether to choke unarmed men to death. Not only that, but your state representatives also decide how democracy itself functions when they decide whether and how to gerrymander districts, whether third parties like the Libertarian Party get a chance at all with systems like ranked choice voting or whether, as in New York State, the governor simply wields election law as a way to punish third parties that criticize the job he’s doing.

If we took Hayek seriously we’d reject national politics as largely out of our control and instead embrace local and state politics. If we took Hayek seriously we’d vote more often in local elections, we’d use our Facebook platforms to encourage local voting on issues relating to criminal justice reform and other areas of serious injustice, and we’d run for local office more, advocate for local reforms more, and generally engage in much more local activism than I think we as libertarians generally do.

That’s a loss not only for the visibility of libertarian principles, but it also weakens our bench when it comes to actually getting libertarians into political office upstream (assuming that’s a worthwhile goal). But more than anything, the libertarian disdain for democracy (rightly criticized by people like Jacob Levy) knocks us out of the elections – whether as voters or candidates – where libertarian positions are the most needed and most likely to be heard. And that’s a loss for us all.

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Some more thoughts on education


Andrew Jason Cohen’s most recent post on education stimulated me to think a little bit more about some of the challenges associated with how we educate children.

We are a reluctant public-schooling family. Ideally we’d homeschool, but for a variety of complicated and personal reasons we are, for the moment at least, sending our two oldest children to school. This is despite significant misgivings about how traditional education in this country functions, including the concerns Andrew brought up in his post, namely a total disregard for the biological and developmental needs of children.

In addition to the reasons Andrew discussed in his post, there are a few other things that I think contribute to parental deference to educational authority in this arena. The most obvious is a lack of options. For many people, both parents need to work (or believe they do, which is perhaps the subject of another post) to keep the home fires burning, which makes homeschooling at least difficult and in some areas perhaps impossible. This is compounded by the expectation that has been created that schools provide a kind of “free” childcare (via taxation). Parents are then faced with the difficult decision to take a more active role in their child’s education while also paying taxes and presumably working fewer hours. This of course means that people who opt out of public schooling are often getting hit financially from both ends: fewer wage-earning hours while paying taxes for a service they are not using. This alone is a good reason to allow people to opt-out of coercive educational funding.

Second, the stakes of education now seem higher than ever, as the economy has become more competitive and parenting itself seems extremely high-stakes. In my own wealthy suburb, judging from parent demands at PTSA meetings and in local parenting groups, parents expect and want what actually constitutes terrible education: they want rigorous math and reading for elementary school students, which reduces recess and free play. They want competitive AP classes for every subject. They want less free play and more Zoom classes during a global pandemic. Many of the parents seem to care less about actual education itself (intellectual curiosity, exploration of the world) and more about a particular set of status markers (or means to achieve those status markers). In that sense education is very much bound up with bad parenting, but it is also bound up in our cultural expectations about what education is supposed to do. Is it supposed to develop creative, curious minds? Or is it supposed to provide a set of tangible status markers that assist students in achieving economic stability? In some areas of course it fails miserably at both of these things. But I think a lot of parents want the latter and are less concerned about the former, perhaps because they mistakenly see the two — intellectual curiosity and economic stability — as in conflict.

Finally, I think there’s something linking both of these things in that parents are generally very risk-averse these days and sending kids to a school with a vetted curriculum and trained teachers (even if the vetting and training are bad or even perverse) seems safer than homeschooling or screwing things up oneself. Steve Horwitz’s book Hayek’s Modern Family (also at Amazon-CE*) has a great discussion of what he terms “corner solution parenting”, which essentially describes the way this kind of parental risk-aversion leads to worse outcomes overall.

In general, I think there’s a demand problem, which is linked to a broader cultural deficit. Too few parents understand what children need to learn, too few feel capable of offering it (even though they probably are), and too many are scared to experiment with their children’s education in the high-stakes game modern parenting appears to be.

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Adele and the local nature of social norms

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The singer Adele stoked controversy this week by appearing in a Carnival outfit, complete with Bantu knots — a style traditionally worn by people of African descent — and a bikini top with the Jamaican flag. Predictably, the Twitter mobs jumped immediately, with many in the media calling the singer out for cultural appropriation and cultural insensitivity.

Interestingly, the response from people of African descent was not uniform. Patterns emerged in the identities of her critics and defenders, with criticisms overwhelmingly coming from black Americans, while black Britons defended her outfit as an appreciation of Jamaican culture as well as a way of celebrating her birth neighborhood of Tottenham, which is home to one of the largest diasporas of African-Caribbean people in the world.

While normally I would just ignore this kind of controversy or put it down to the idiocy of the cancel culture that both the left and right engage in, I’m working through Cristina Bichierri’s The Grammar of Society (CE*) this week with my undergrads and it struck me that something more interesting was going on than first appeared.

Classical liberals can sometimes (myself included) fall into the trap of emphasizing Hayekian local knowledge in terms of economic knowledge, such as scarcity on the ground or crop conditions. But as most of us also know, there are lots of other forms of local knowledge that matter a lot too, which is why I find Bichierri’s discussion helpful. Particularly relevant here is her argument that all norms are local in nature. People use norms as heuristics to help them navigate complex social situations with some predictability, relying on the expectations they have about what others around them are doing and adapting based on reciprocal expectations about what people are or should be doing. But these norms themselves require extremely local knowledge about what people in this particular situation or this particular context are doing or expect others to do.

What’s fascinating about the internet and the cancel culture it seems to engender is that at the same time it brings people together from all over the world, it decontextualizes those people, removing them from their local situations and all the relevant facts, norms, and guideposts they used in the moment to determine what to do. Given the nature of the Internet there’s almost no way to avoid this decontextualization, the loss of local knowledge and local norms. This decontextualization makes it very likely that we will make errors about why someone behaved in a particular way.

But decontextualization is dangerous for an even more foundational reason Bichierri discusses. It doesn’t just lead us to make factually incorrect judgments about what other people are doing. It also makes it more likely that we will make a fundamental attribution error when we judge other people. People are not only calling Adele out for something that appeared to be completely appropriate in the social context in which she lives (and in fact is a sign of solidarity with the people of color in her community), but they are also jumping to conclusions about her essential nature, with anonymous users in more than one location discussing her as a “typical white woman” as though wearing bikinis of the Jamaican flag is just what we expect white women to do. One black American journalist concluded on Twitter, “this marks all of the top white women in pop as problematic”, again signaling that Adele’s behavior was not in fact a nuanced reaction to local norms during a celebration of culture but in fact a function of her essence as a white woman. Bichierri’s discussion asks us to take more seriously the way in which decontextualizing people’s behavior makes us even more likely to make these kinds of fundamental attribution errors, leading to even greater levels of polarization and cultural anger.

None of this means celebrities don’t sometimes (perhaps often!) make very stupid decisions. It also doesn’t mean we can’t praise or blame people, which would seem to be an important function in a free society where we want to avoid state coercion as much as possible. But praise and blame are most likely to be accurate and most likely to be effective when we know the people involved, have existing relationships with them, and understand the norms and general context of the situation they are reacting to. Both Bichierri’s and Hayek’s emphasis on local knowledge ask us to use caution when engaging in shaming of those we do not know, whose motivations and goals remain opaque to us. It is in effect, a call for both humility and humanity, which we could all use more of these days.

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