Sometimes you encounter a proposal that is so daft that you think to yourself, “The author can’t be serious!” In today’s column, I’d like to discuss an example of this sort that comes from one of the world’s most eminent moral philosophers, Martha C. Nussbaum. In her article, “A Peopled Wilderness,” appearing in the New York Review of Books, December 8, 2022, Nussbaum suggests that we need to think seriously about curbing predation in nature.

First, they came for the oil, now they’re coming for the cows.

Price inflation in the United States remains stubbornly high, with October’s print at 7.7 percent. The Fed’s preferred measure, so-called core inflation is only two-tenths of a percent below forty-year highs, at 6.3 percent. Yet, it was just last year that the Federal reserve and other “experts” were concerned that inflation wasn’t high enough.

It’s been said there’s no such thing as a controlled experiment in the social sciences, including economics. But we had something close to a laboratory experiment back in 1920–21 and 1930–31.

In each of these periods there was a depression. Unemployment was high—for a while—it briefly was higher in the 1920s than in the 1930s. Prices fell in both periods. 

Investors are on the edge of their seats for any sign that Fed central planners will someday “pivot” to cutting interest rates, instead of raising them. They forget that recessions and major stock bear markets have occurred after the Fed started cutting rates and the yield curve spread shifted from negative to positive.