An astronomical breakthrough, a moral quagmire, and the difficulty of economics

This is pretty astonishing, something that would have been essentially unimaginable not very many years ago:

New York Times:  “Black Hole Image Revealed for First Time Ever: Astronomers at last have captured a picture of the darkest entities in the cosmos.”

Nature:  “Black hole pictured for first time — in spectacular detail: The Event Horizon Telescope’s global network of radio dishes has produced the first direct image of a black hole and its event horizon.”

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But, with the help four articles from the 6 April 2019 issue of (appropriately enough!) The Economist, let’s turn from extragalactic astronomy to a more difficult science, economics.

The first article that I’ll mention is a fascinating one that goes some distance toward justifying my tongue-in-cheek suggestion, just above, that the task of economics is more difficult than that of astronomy, astrophysics, and cosmology.  It also bears out the contention of many free market or libertarian-leaning economists — e.g., Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, and Friedrich von Hayek (the first and third of whom I was privileged to meet and spend just a bit of time with) — that the complexity of the economy is so great that it is mere folly and delusion (among other things) to imagine that it can be competently “directed” by the managerial elite bureaucracy of an interventionist administrative state:

“Free exchange: Simple interactions can have unpredictable consequences: How researchers are grappling with the fundamental complexity of economics”

The complexity and unpredictability of economic phenomena might help to account for the stunning fact pointed out in this article, which should also be read for its first paragraph’s appalling description of the largely-forgotten racist horror visited upon the Greenwood neighborhood in Oklahoma back in 1921:

“Melanin and money: The black-white wealth gap is unchanged after half a century”

It seems that President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society hasn’t materialized, and that the much-touted War on Poverty has failed.  However, it should also in fairness be said, despite my comments above about “unpredictability” of economics, that many critics on the political right predicted the failure of the War on Poverty from its beginning.  We’re not surprised.  We never thought that government welfare would really work.

But what can be done?  It’s complicated.  And, although the idea of “reparations” has suddenly become fashionable among certain Democrats, I don’t believe for a moment that “reparations,” even if one were to overlook their deeply questionable morality (see below) and their political infeasibility, will fix the problem.

This article treats a related matter that may also have implications for the issue, both positive and negative:

“The sons of slaveholders quickly recovered their fathers’ wealth: A new paper quantifies how quickly Southern planter elites recovered from the civil war”

Also of some slight but slightly relevant interest:

“Not keeping up with the Joneses: Rising inequality could explain tepid support for redistribution: The lessons of a new paper about welfare in Victorian England”

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To illustrate just one aspect of the moral difficulty with reparations:

I have no slave-owning ancestors — not even any who ever lived in a slave state.

My paternal ancestors entered the United States from Scandinavia decades after the end of the American Civil War, and they settled in North Dakota, where there were (and are) very few blacks.  So their opportunities to meet black people, let alone to exploit them or to profit illegitimately from their contributions to the local farming economy, would have been at most negligible.

Some of my maternal ancestors came first to Massachusetts, where they never owned slaves.  Then they came to New York, converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and were driven with it to Ohio and Missouri and Illinois and, finally, to the Great Basin, settling in Utah — where there were (and are) very few blacks.  Others of my maternal ancestors came straight to Utah from England.  None of them owned slaves, and the slave contribution to the settlement and economic blossoming of Utah Territory prior to 1865, if there was any at all, has to be reckoned as virtually nonexistent.

But I’m white.  So do I owe reparations?  If so, that would seem to me morally problematic.

But also, if so, to whom do I owe reparations?  Potentially to the descendants of West Indians who were never American slaves?  But what about those of mixed descent, some of whose ancestors were slaves and some of whose ancestors weren’t?  (Perhaps they’re even partially descended from slaveholders!)  Either this would be done crudely and hamhandedly, which would be bad, or on the basis of a complex proportionate genealogical calculus that might be even worse.  Government involvement in adjudicating such matters — a kind of Perpetual Full Employment Act for Litigators — would bring us uncomfortably close, in my opinion, to the Ahnenpaß (“ancestor passport”) or the Ariernachweis (“Aryan certificate”) issued by the Reichsverband der Standesbeamten in Deutschland (“Reich Association of Marriage Registrars in Germany”) under the Nazis.