Christian Edward Kimball on Edward Lawrence Kimball

Thanks to Ralph Johnson for permission to use this picture here, which Ralph took in honor of Edward Lawrence Kimball. Picture copyright Ralph Johnson

Thanks to Ralph Johnson for permission to use this picture here, which Ralph took in honor of Edward Lawrence Kimball. Picture copyright Ralph Johnson

Below is my brother, Chris’s tribute to my Dad, who died November 21. (My own tribute to my Dad appeared two weeks ago. Chris has appeared several times before on this blog: 1,2,3.) Here are Chris’s words:

My son Chase says:

My grandfather Ed Kimball was my soft spoken hero. He was the man I want to be, in virtually every way: a dedicated teacher; a thoughtful disciple; a loyal son, father, and husband; a clear writer and honest historian. I love him, and I know he loves me.

The list of Dad’s attributes is long: kind, smart, dedicated, thoughtful, honest, funny, considerate. I would like to illustrate a few, including some for which stories tell and single words fail.  

A. Dad saw three-dimensional people. He did it in writing history and biography. He did it in serving on the parole board. He did it in serving as a bishop. He did it in parenting seven quite different children. He did not categorize or label people. He saw individuals and dealt with us as individuals.  

B. Behind the Clark Kentish mild-mannered demeanor, Dad thoughtfully and knowingly challenged the status quo. He did it by asking good questions. I have called him “subversive” in the kindest most affirming sense. He would have rejected the label but smiled with recognition. Dad was not didactic. He seldom preached or argued. Dad was subversive in the sense that Socratic dialogue is subversive of things as they are. He was subversive in the sense that good history is sometimes subversive of revealed religion. Dad took pleasure in asking good questions.

C. Dad would volunteer to act as scribe or secretary for faculty meetings. He explained to me that nobody wanted the job and it was a way to serve, and allowed him be more of a quiet listener than active participant. He was a modest, self-effacing man, always serving others. But the next sentence is important. He went on to say that when anyone wants to know what was discussed and decided, the minutes tell the story. By delivering the minutes in his voice, he had the last word.

D. When I was 14, Dad and I went to the Boundary Waters in northern Minnesota for a 50-mile canoe trip. We paddled across lakes, then portaged the canoe and our packs from one lake to the next. Dad was commanding in the canoe but struggled to carry a small pack over the portages. I carried a pack on my back, a second in front, and the canoe on my shoulders. With powerful arms and shoulders, but something like 1-½ legs, Dad did the almost impossible feat of paddling and walking 50 miles. That’s big. Dad took his son on a once-in-a-lifetime trip. That’s really big. But the most important part of the story is that Dad humbled himself to make the trip even knowing that his 14 year old son would have to carry the load.

No son should see his father that way. It ruins the hero myth. But every son should carry his father, at least once in his life.

E. In the context of a discussion about the nature of God and how we think about the God-Man relationship, I mentioned to my Jewish philosophy professor that one of my models was my father in that I knew about him that he loved me, without reserve, without regard to what I did or did not do. It was absolute bedrock certainty. The professor suggested that was valuable knowledge–unusual and to be treasured.

If I had one wish it would be that my children and grandchildren would enjoy that absolute assurance, that I love you, as my father loved me, as our Father and Mother love us.

F. Dad is rightly lauded for the two biographies of Spencer W. Kimball. The first one in particular (written with his nephew Andrew) broke the pattern of hagiography that characterized stories of Mormon leaders. The usual narrative is that he was a truth teller, essentially unable to do otherwise than tell it ‘warts and all.’ That is correct. But the deeper story is that he knew what he was doing–consciously, intentionally, using all the advantages at his disposal. He told me once that he felt a filial duty to write about his father, but he also recognized an opportunity to make a difference in the world of Mormon history and biography. He had unparalleled access to the life of a living Mormon Prophet. He was confident that he could persuade his father to give permission. And he knew that it would work out to everyone’s benefit because his father was a genuinely good man–not perfect, but good.

Dad would not say it about himself, but would have warmed to my saying it of him, as he did of his father: Edward Kimball, my father, was a good man.

Edward Lawrence Kimball, September 23, 1930–November 21, 2016

Edward Lawrence Kimball, September 23, 1930–November 21, 2016

India’s Assault on Cash

Link to Amy Kazmin’s article “India’s cash chaos sparks growing backlash” on ft.com (the Financial Times website)

Link to Wikipedia article “Indian 500 and 1000 rupee note demonetisation”

Link to Raymond Zhong’s Wall Street Journal article “India’s Money Launderers Soil Modi’s ‘Spring Cleaning’ of Cash”

India’s sudden declaration that its existing 500- and 1000-rupee notes were invalid and needed to be replaced by new notes, with severe restrictions on that conversion is so far afield from my proposals for taming paper currency that I have been slow to write about it. Nevertheless, there are some interesting lessons to be learned. In this post, I will assume you know the basics. For that, the Wikipedia article flagged above is actually much better than the news accounts. Here are some of the lessons to draw and theoretical insights sparked by thinking about this episode:

First, the details of any modification in paper currency policy matter a lot. Getting the details wrong can make a big mess. 

Second, central banks and governments do big unexpected things. With a bit of care, there is no reason they can’t do big things that are well-designed and have much smaller side-effects instead of big things that are badly designed and cause a great deal of trouble.

Third, a policy that doesn’t depend on surprising people is likely to be better implemented, since policies can be planned and executed better if the depth of secrecy required is less and therefore more people can be brought in on the planning.  

Fourth, keeping large cash hoards is inherently risky, since almost all of the reasons one might want to keep a large cash hoard are reasons the government is likely to frown upon. In practice, governments are unlikely to tolerate the equivalent of what in the US would be the trillions and trillions of dollars of hoarded cash needed to enforce a lower bound on interest rates. (See “How Negative Interest Rates Prevail in Market Equilibrium.”)

Fifth, reducing the expected rate of return on paper currency relative to the rate of return on bank money causes a flight away from paper currency, not a flight toward paper currency. People in India are not saying “If we can’t freely turn in paper currency without restrictions and without documentation at the bank, let’s just quit dealing with the banks and instead use the cash the government is trying to invalidate for transactions instead.”

Sixth, it is important to think through all of the ways that people might try to get around something. Approaches that leave no way around (such as a gradually changing effective exchange rate for paper currency that makes the return on paper currency equal to the return on safe, short-term electronic rates) have a real advantage. 

On the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

Link to James Freeman’s November 27, 2016 Wall Street Journal Article “Consumer Financial Protection Rewrite: The rogue bureau needs to be reined in if it can’t be killed.”

Election results have created great uncertainty about the future of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Having paid close attention to relevant articles, I can say that the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal has displayed a venomous hatred of the CFPB. Below, I will address some genuine constitutional questions about the CFPB, but the Wall Street Journal is wrong about the policy value and policy appropriateness of the CFPB’s actions. 

The Philosophical Basis for Consumer Financial Protection as Part of Limited Government

I can see three principles that can justify consumer financial protection beyond simple contract enforcement: 

Duping people is fraud even if they wouldn’t have been duped had they had infinite time and infinite intelligence. First let me argue that misleading people to their detriment by taking advantage of difficult-to-avoid finite cognition is a form of fraud. (See my post and paper “Cognitive Economics” on the argument that cognition is, in fact, finite and scarce.) Punishing fraud is viewed as a legitimate activity of limited government even in quite libertarian worldviews. For example, I recently read Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia. There, punishing fraud is viewed as something that careful vigilantes can legitimately do (see “Vigilantes in the State of Nature” on Robert Nozick’s views on vigilantes in general), and therefore something that the state can legitimately do. And I don’t think it is ultimately a winning argument to claim that something is not fraud because someone would have realized in advance all the flaws in the product that the seller knew if she or he had spent a wastefully large amount of time investigating something, or had had the acumen of Sherlock Holmes.

Facilitating gain for oneself and harm to others by taking advantage of preexisting confusion is predation of those who are especially vulnerable. A more difficult case than duping people by taking advantage of their finite intelligence and finite time is taking advantage of people who show up already confused. Here the issue is the mental competence of someone to make a particular decision. It is important that people have a decisive way to demonstrate their mental competence so that declaring someone confused doesn’t become a way to sneak in blanket paternalism. Fortunately, economic models identify in their common assumptions what knowledge is crucial for making key decisions. It should be possible to develop online tests of that knowledge that regular people can take (and have a good chance of passing if they are determined to pass) to demonstrate their competence to make complex financial decisions. 

It is legitimate to protect time-slices of people from serious injury by other time-slices of people. In blogging through John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, I put forward the view that time-slices of individual’s can be viewed as relevant moral units, so that people can be legitimately protected from serious injury by their past selves: 

The analogy I made was to the rules we have for children. Because most parents care deeply about the welfare of their children, the state should ordinarily show great deference to decisions parents make that affect their own children. But occasionally, a parent demonstrates so little concern for her or his own child that the child must be protected from the parent. Similarly, most people care deeply about their future selves, so the state should ordinarily show great deference to decisions people make that affect their future selves. But occasionally, someone is willing to sell her or his future self down the river. The future self, which is not around to defend her or himself, has a right to get help in trying to deter such an injury.

Refuting Specific Allegations by Wall Street Journal Editorialist James Freeman

On November 27, 2016, James Freeman wrote this about the CFPB:

This lack of accountability has led to outrageous abuses, such as its attempts to regulate car dealers though Dodd-Frank expressly said that wasn’t a job for the bureau. Last year Rep. David Scott (D., Ga.) ripped the bureau’s “deceitful” attack on auto lenders for alleged racial bias based on “shamefully flawed” information. The bureau sued banks for discrimination after guessing the race of borrowers based on their last names and addresses. Internal documents reveal that the bureau gang knew their guesses were wildly inaccurate. So they discussed how to keep defendants they were smearing as racists from learning the truth.

Then there is its attack on payday lenders though government research showed borrowers want such services and suffer when they aren’t available. 

Racial discrimination by car dealers. As I understand it, the CFPB was put in an almost impossible spot by its originating legislation. (1) A legislative carve-out with no principled justification said it had no authority to prevent car dealers from duping people or taking advantage of their preexisting confusion, except that (2) the CFPB was supposed to investigate and work to prevent racial discrimination by car dealers. Finally, (3) the CFPB was prohibited from collecting information on the race of car buyers. What would you do if you had the job of investigating discrimination by car dealers without being able to ask about the race of car buyers is a very difficult task? You would have to use some kind of proxy for race. Using names and addresses could easily be close to the best you could do. (I have a hard time believing that the CFPB would only use last names, though. First names could be quite helpful in guessing race to provide evidence on racial discrimination.) I may be mistaken in my understanding, but if not, the fact that over quite a few editorials I have read in the Wall Street Journal on exactly this topic (of CFPB investigations of racial discrimination in car-buying), the Wall Street Journal never provided the background above is unconscionable. It make the editorials into hatchet jobs, not serious journalism. 

Payday lending. Many who do payday borrowing are not well-informed about the high frequency of people making their financial situation worse by payday-borrowing. This counts as a preexisting confusion that makes the borrower less than fully competent to undertake the contract. Sometimes payday-lenders have key contract provisions that make a lot of money for them to the detriment of the borrower that they try to get the borrower not to pay attention to. That counts as duping the borrower. And sometimes, a payday borrower is, in all knowledge, selling her or his future self out. In all of these three cases, the borrower might well express a desire for a payday loan. So the fact that people say they “want such services” is only the beginning of the argument. It functions only as a reminder of the gravity of making the decision to regulate the purchase of something.  

Indeed, if people are buying something without a gun to their heads, one already knows that they “want such services” in some sense. So there wouldn’t have been any discussion of regulation in the first place unless there was some reason to think regulation was appropriate even if, in some sense, people “want such services.” To put it even more bluntly, is even the most avid regulator ever even tempted to talk about regulating something that no one wants at all, so that even in the absence of regulation none is purchased? 

Constitutional Issues

Other than the possible issue of almost unfireable regional Fed Presidents who have not been confirmed by the Senate voting on monetary policy, the Fed has passed US constitutional muster. So it seems possible that the CFPB could be governed in a similar way without being unconstitutional. The court case against the CFPB in the article linked at the top suggests that if only the Chair of the Fed could vote, the Fed would be unconstitutional too. If that is, so, there could be more people appointed to govern the CFPB, just like the Fed. But in practice, the way the Fed is governed seems quite different in practice from the usual bipartisan board for government agencies. There is a real danger that with more governors the CFPB would become more like other agencies run by a “bipartisan” board rather than like the Fed. “Bipartisan boards” often seem in practice overly politicized, yet without real political accountability to the public because the party generating a result is obscured by the “bipartisan” nature of the boards. 

To me, the constitutional case should involve a close examination of how well bipartisan boards for government agencies actually function. And it should take into account the value of political accountability in that whatever Richard Cordray, current head of the CFPB does, is something that a Democratic president–Barack Obama–is to an important extent accountable for by virtue of appointing Richard Cordray. 

If there is a change to the CFPB’s governance in order to pass constitutional muster, I think it is better to make the head of the CFPB fireable by the President than to go to a bipartisan board or to put it under some other agency that has some other mission. Then the head or acting head of the CFPB still has some capacity for decisive action in an area that I believe still often needs decisive action and at least the measure of independence that comes from a president’s reluctance to have to go through an additional Senate confirmation process for a replacement.  

Update: An In-Depth Reaction from a Reader

Here’s another way to put your point about “infinite time and intelligence”: Pitting an ordinary consumer against a large financial firm that can hire the smartest graduates of Harvard or MIT to design their contracts and web interfaces, is like asking an ordinary tennis player to go up against Roger Federer (worse, actually, because unlike playing tennis, participating in financial transactions is unavoidable). Even if both consumer and firm have to abide by the same laws (“the rules of tennis are the same for Federer and his opponent”), it’s still not a fair contest.  Federer starts with enormous talent and then spends all of his time improving that skill (but, if he’s a bank, he can play a hundred million opponents at once). If there were an argument that enormous benefits accrued to society from having the financial firm (Federer) wipe the floor with the consumer, that would be one thing, but if it’s just a transfer from consumer to firm then it’s closer to theft than to commerce. There’s an interaction between this point and your second point about preexisting confusion. What the clever financial firm can do is to construct a “choice architecture” (otherwise known as a website) that deliberately leads people into making decisions that they don’t really need to make, but that are most likely to exploit areas of “preexisting confusion.” Or, even more perniciously, design their websites in ways that make it difficult for consumers to use tools that could help clear up their confusions or enlighten them about alternatives. In this last category, over the last year there has been a big push by many financial firms to make it hard or impossible for their clients to subscribe to services like Mint.com or Yodlee or Check.me; the banks say it is cybersecurity, but it’s very hard not to suspect that the real reason banks don’t want you to use Mint.com is because Mint.com sends you messages saying things like “hey, your bank just charged you a big fat fee that lots of other banks don’t charge.” In my view, this is one of the biggest consumer protection issues out there, but the press coverage of it has been mostly focused on terrifying people about “here’s another cyberthreat for you to worry about – your kindly bank is generously cutting you off from Mint.com so that the Russians won’t steal all your money.” The truth is that there are straightforward technological fixes to the security problems, but those fixes seem to have been deliberately blocked by specific firms who believe that it would hurt their bottom line to fix the security problems.
Finally, on the supposed constitutional issues. For the reasons you mention and others, making the CFPB head fireable by the President is better than a “bipartisan commission” in which the Democrats appoint commissioners from Goldman Sachs and Citibank while the Republicans appoint commissioners from Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs (see: Securities and Exchange Commission).  CFPB has been a pioneer in “evidence based” policymaking and in bringing rigorous analysis to its rulemaking and other processes. The really radical proposal would be to say that if there must be a commission, it should require a PhD in some relevant field and a record of relevant publications in academic journals, and a meaningful scholarly reputation.  Work on consumers’ cognitive processes relevant to financial decisions (e.g., risk aversion) has begun to be published not just in economics and finance journals but in Science and Nature, and the increasing availability of big data in consumer finance means it is increasingly possible to do pretty much unimpeachable empirical research. It’s hard to imagine the constitutional argument against requiring commissioners have relevant expertise.  And there are precedents in other branches of government: the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health and the US Geological Survey are not mostly led by former industry lobbyists or congressional staffers or big campaign contributors.  Certainly, the CFPB should not be dominated by commissioners whose prior careers were entirely in the financial industry, or in politics, which is what would likely happen if some of the “reform” proposals currently circulating were to be adopted.

Vigilantes in the State of Nature

Link to the website for the “Vigilante Rick Grimes Deluxe” action figure pictured above, which has the following passage: 

…. as he discovers that there is more than just the undead to worry about,Rick makes the ultimate choice to do whatever it takes to keep his family and friends alive in this less than moral post-apocalyptic world.

McFarlane Toys’ Rick Grimes Vigilante Edition deluxe figure depicts this transformation from a peace keeping deputy to judge, jury, and executioner. This blood splattered 10-inch figure features the exact likeness of the actor, taken from a full 3D scan of the actor himself, Andrew Lincoln.

Two Models of the State of Nature

One of the best ways to better understand Thomas Hobbes’s and John Locke’s notions of the “state of nature” is to watch “The Walking Dead.” Within a few episodes, the zombies become merely backdrop and detail, as the focus shifts to the struggle of human against human. But this is not an amoral struggle: Issues of right and wrong trouble occupy a big share of the screen time, both purely as moral questions and as key factors motivating loyalty in some cases and antipathy in others.   

Before the rise of the zombies in “The Walking Dead,” one of the most vivid pictures of the Hobbesian and Lockian state of nature is the picture most of us have in our minds of the American Wild West. In movies about the Wild West, and in the historical reality of the Wild West, people had a keen sense of right and wrong, often enforced by vigilantism, since formal law courts were often far away and slow to act. Compare that picture of the Wild West to section 7 of John Locke’s  2d Treatise on Government: “On Civil Government”:

And that all men may be restrained from invading others rights, and from doing hurt to one another, and the law of nature be observed, which willeth the peace and preservation of all mankind, the execution of the law of nature is, in that state, put into every man’s hands, whereby every one has a right to punish the transgressors of that law to such a degree, as may hinder its violation: for the law of nature would, as all other laws that concern men in this world, be in vain, if there were nobody that in the state of nature had a power to execute that law, and thereby preserve the innocent and restrain offenders. And if any one in the state of nature may punish another for any evil he has done, every one may do so: for in that state of perfect equality, where naturally there is no superiority or jurisdiction of one over another, what any may do in prosecution of that law, every one must needs have a right to do.

John Locke’s train of logic is:

  1.  There is right and wrong, even in the equivalent of the Wild West or in the Zombie Apocalypse, 
  2. Right and wrong must be somehow enforceable,
  3. In the equivalent of the Wild West or the Zombie Apocalypse, everyone starts out equal, so in principle, anyone could be justified in enforcing the rules of right and wrong. 

Right and wrong, according to John Locke, focuses on this principle:

[Each] may not, unless it be to do justice on an offender, take away, or impair the life, or what tends to the preservation of the life, the liberty, health, limb, or goods of another.

(See “The Religious Dimension of the Lockean Law of Nature.”) That is, Locke, focuses on the wrongness of directly killing, injuring and stealing.

Robert Nozick on Vigilantism

Inspired in important measure by John Locke, Robert Nozick discusses right and wrong in the state of nature, and what he considers the fundamentally identical issues of right and wrong in more organized states of society in Anarchy, State and Utopia. Robert Nozick views vigilantes “taking the law into their own hands” as fundamentally no different from the government “taking the law into its own hands.” The issues in both cases is whether enforcement decisions are taken in accordance with what is right and wrong, not who does that enforcement. Of course, certain ways of organizing things may be more conducive to enforcement decisions being taken in accordance with what is right and wrong, but it is the decisions themselves that must be right, regardless of who makes them. If an enforcement action is wrong, the fact that the government did it does not make it OK. If an enforcement action is right, the fact that a private individual did it does not make it morally wrong. 

Robert Nozick does recognize the right to insist that if one does not know whether someone is guilty or innocent, that person be judged by a procedure likely to be accurate. But an insistence that people not use a procedure that might or might not be accurate would require compensating those eager to impose such justice. Then Robert Nozick argues that because of the value to people of having some means of enforcing their rights, compensating someone for a prohibition against an inexpensive mode of imposing justice of somewhat questionable accuracy will typically involve providing to them another mode of imposing justice in a way that is affordable to them.  To Robert Nozick, this is the moral justification for a the minimal state, which enforces rights to life and limb and property for everyone. 

But one of the key implications of freedom is that people may not be prohibited from using an alternative form of justice that is known to be at least as accurate as that use by the dominant form of justice in an area. In this view, a government only has legitimacy as the main form of justice that people choose to be protected by. It differs from other forms of justice only in (a) being the most popular choice and (b) by having the raw power to enforce its own view about what, in fact, are accurate modes of delivering justice. A government has no right to a monopoly of justice if someone comes into the market providing a close substitute of equal accuracy in dispensing justice that the government knows to be of equal accuracy to the government’s own procedures.  

Nozick often speaks of a minimalist government as “the dominant protective agency.” In addition to being a reminder that the government has no right to a monopoly of justice, that view also implies that the government has no absolute duty to protect the rights of someone who does not pay the government to protect herhis rights, except to the extent that government is preventing that person from using an alternative mode of justice. That is, if person A does person B wrong, then the government either needs to let person A hire someone else to punish B and get redress, or it needs to itself punish B and get redress for A.    

The limitations on the government’s duty to protect everyone’s rights when the government is viewed as simply the dominant protective agency opens up an interesting possibility for punishment in doubtful cases that was highly relevant to the Wild West. Suppose there is not enough evidence to punish someone directly for a crime that they in fact committed with some substantial probability. The government or dominant protective agency could deal with  this situation of some evidence but not enough for direct punishment by refusing to provide any more protective services to that person, except in specific cases where the government directly blocks that person from enforcing herhis own rights through some other agency or by self-help. These “outlaws” (not yet convicted, but deprived of the services of the dominant protection agency), would have to use methods of rights enforcement against other outlaws that could not take advantage of all the economies of scale the dominant protective agency has. In practice, they might also be subject to procedures that were not as accurate as those of the dominant protective agency–procedures the dominant protective agency could legitimately stop, but chooses not to. 

There is, of course, the potential problem of a dominant protective agency choosing to treat someone as an outlaw simply because poverty meant they couldn’t pay the fee; let me leave that discussion for another day. Here, I am talking about the dominant protective agency refusing to serve someone because of a strong and well-justified suspicion of wrongdoing, not sufficient to warrant direct punishment. This seems to me to be a phenomenon that was quite common in the Wild West. Most people in the Wild West did not get too upset if plausibly bad actors were killed by other plausibly bad actors. And according to Nozickian logic, maybe that fact wasn’t so terrible. 

What would be illegitimate are the many cases in the Wild West, when the government did not have enough evidence to punish person A directly, vigilante B attacked A without any more evidence, the government refused to deliver justice against vigilante B and prevented A from pursing herhis own vigilante justice against vigilante B. That just isn’t fair given the limited knowledge of A’s actual guilt or innocence. 

Spencer LeVan Kimball on Duty and Commitment

“Andrew bequeathed to my father, unaltered, that sense of commitment to unqualified performance of religious duty at any personal sacrifice. The sense of duty and commitment descended in part to my generation and even to my children’s generation, but as the generations changed, the sense of duty was often transformed in its nature and in its object.”
— Spencer LeVan Kimball (son of Spencer Woolley Kimball, oldest brother of Edward Lawrence Kimball and uncle of Miles Spencer Kimball) in his autobiography A Tale That is Told 

Harvard 35th Reunion Profile: Miles Kimball

Link to Wikipedia article “Miles Kimball”

It is hard to believe that this Spring it will be 35 years since I earned a Bachelor’s degree from Harvard. I did a profile for the 35th reunion report which you might find of some interest. (It had notes about my children Diana and Jordan at the top.) Here it is: 

My religious journey has been a big part of my life. In 2000, at the age of 40, I left Mormonism to become a Unitarian-Universalist. My Mormon background left me with a strong sense of mission, which has become a desire to make a difference in the world that is no longer connected to any belief in the supernatural.

In 2012, I began my blog “Confessions of a Supply-Side Liberal,” which has a personal dimension, in addition to talking about economics, politics and religion. I also began tweeting in earnest under my own name @mileskimball.

In 2016, after 29 years teaching at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, I moved to the University of Colorado Boulder as Eugene D. Eaton Jr. Professor of Economics. My wife Gail and I now live in Superior, Colorado, with stunning views of the Front Range.

Professionally, I continue to pursue broad interests in macroeconomics, the economics of risk and cognitive economics, but my most important efforts are working toward restoring the power of monetary policy by working out the details for effective negative interest rate policy and designing well-being indices that can improve policy-making not only for national and regional governments but also for non-governmental organizations. My research has become a very social activity as I work with a large circle of coauthors and research assistants. Technology has made long-distance collaboration easier and easier.

My Dad

Edward Lawrence Kimball, September 23, 1930–November 21, 2016

Edward Lawrence Kimball, September 23, 1930–November 21, 2016

Link to Wikipedia article on “Edward L. Kimball”

Link to the Deseret News article on Edward Lawrence Kimball’s death (source of the photo above)

Other than the fictional Clark Kent, my Dad is the only person who has ever made me think spontaneously of the adjective “mild-mannered.” My Mother explained why my Dad took almost no part in disciplining his children, by saying he was too much of a marshmallow. But in intellectual matters, my Dad had a spine of steel. He was not willing to say anything he did not believe, and he was not willing to believe anything he did not think through.

My Dad had an unwavering belief in a universe that makes sense. He rejected the idea that the universe is dead set against us. And while he recognized that people sometimes do terrible things, he always started with the assumption that people would act reasonably if not needlessly antagonized.

My Dad was an example of putting loyalty to the truth first and foremost, without neglecting other loyalties. He could do both because he knew the limits of his own knowledge, and gave people the benefit of the doubt. And because of both that intellectual humility and his tendency to give people the benefit of the doubt, he didn’t turn away by even a hair’s breadth from his friends and relatives whose views differed from his.   

My Dad knew well the complexity of Mormon history, but he believed in Mormonism until his last breath. In his last four years, after my Mother died, I had many conversations with my Dad about religion. He was genuinely curious about my beliefs and had me read to him many of my religion posts and Unitarian-Universalist sermons. In our discussions he homed in on the common threads in my beliefs and his.  

My Dad, like my Mother, was ambitious for his children. But neither of my parents ever pushed me in a particular career direction. And at moments when I had some success, my Dad made a point of reminding me it was more important to be good than to be successful.  

When my Dad was 56 years old, and his Mother followed his Dad in death, he spoke of himself as an orphan. In that same sense, at the age of 56, I am now an orphan. And the world, too, has lost a man it could ill afford to lose. 

Update, December 3, 2022: It has been a little over four years since my Dad died. Googling him today, I saw Peggy Fletcher Stack’s excellent obituary for him. See the image below. Here is the link.

We Are Who We Are Because of Our Ancestors

“We are who we are in large measure because of our ancestors. In addition to shaping who we are within, by their collective strivings, they made the world a much better place than it otherwise would have been. May we do as well in improving the world for our descendants, and act in such a way that if they try to be like us, we would be proud.”
— Miles Spencer Kimball

John T. Harvey: Five Reasons You Should Blame The Economics Discipline For Today's Problems →

Like John Harvey, I do think that the economics profession bears an important part of the blame for the state the world is in. To a failure of most economists to recognize the fragility of the financial system, I would add slowness in developing monetary policy tools powerful enough to counteract the aggregate demand effects of any elevation of risk premia. Beyond that, what I would add to John Harvey’s discussion is: 

1. The word “model” itself has become a reflection of the problem. Logic and reasoning behind a given argument are partly dismissed by saying “You didn’t have a model.” This really means “You didn’t have a [very particular type of] model.” And the limitation to that very particular type of model is often exactly what is interfering with understanding of a problem.  

(In passing, let me say that I am not impressed with the realism of the models currently being used in polite circles with great frequency to model financial frictions.) 

2. John Harvey is too enamored of heterodox schools. By the nature of heterodoxy, many economists who “think outside of the box” will be sui generis, not belonging to any school at all. (If they are really good, they may eventually they gather disciples who then constitute a school. But they may not belong to any school when they first break out of the mold.)  

3. I see the blogosphere as a partial antidote to the dysfunctionality of the economics journals. If one includes the robust and wide-ranging discussion of the real world and real-world policy in the economic blogosphere, things look much better. From that angle, the dysfunction in economics overall can be reduced if more and more people take the blogosphere seriously.