Richard J Grant

Published in The Tennessean , Sunday, August 28, 2011 by Richard J. Grant The pattern of migratory flows throughout history suggests that people move from situations that they perceive to be relatively unsatisfactory to destinations where the living conditions are expected to be better. In a big world there will always be someone traveling in the other direction, but the greater flows of people tend to be toward those areas perceived to be better-suited to their survival, prosperity, and sense of life. Border controls are in place to manage the flow of people in both directions. But some borders are particularly geared to controlling traffic in one direction rather than another. That is why Hong Kong had to devote more resources to controlling inward-migration from Canton than did the People's Republic of China have to devote to controlling traffic coming the other direction. China's concern was with losing people, especially the most talented or productive. The sa...

Published in The Tennessean , Sunday, August 21, 2011 by Richard J. Grant When I passed through Checkpoint Charlie for the first time, the Berlin Wall was already 19 years old and its final construction had just been completed. It was more than just a wall. Physically, the 12-foot-high concrete slabs that formed the Wall's face to the West were paralleled on the East side by smaller walls, fences, and buildings. In between was the 100-yard-wide “Death Strip,” with various obstacles and little cover for those daring enough to cross it without authorization. East German and Soviet troops patrolled the strip. Looking beyond the physical, West Berlin was like an island of freedom surrounded by a prison. The Wall was designed to keep East Germans inside East Germany. Before the barriers went up, millions of East Germans had “voted with their feet” and crossed to the West through Berlin. The contrast between East and West Berlin reminded one of the sudden change from black-a...

Published in The Tennessean , Sunday, August 14, 2011 by Richard J. Grant If you manufacture aluminum baseball bats, you probably noticed an unusual increase in orders this past week. Then you noticed the demand is coming from Britain, where one thinks first of cricket, not baseball. You might have wondered why, but were only too happy to increase production to meet this new demand. Markets work. We often hear about “market failure.” What’s that? Just imagine something that is not provided in the marketplace but you feel should be. You can call that “market failure,” if you wish. The classic example was lighthouses. Surely they couldn’t be profitable, right? This was taught to an entire generation before someone decided to check history and discovered that lighthouses were, indeed, provided by private companies long before governments stepped in. You don’t need to know what’s happening in Britain to be able to supply them with more bats. But it helps to know more abou...

Published in The Tennessean , Sunday, August 7, 2011 by Richard J. Grant Economists call it “rational ignorance.” We all do it; we economize on information. Not only that, we economize on knowledge and education. All these things cost us something and at some point we deem increasing them not to be worth the extra expenditure of time, effort, or money. Things that are important or interesting to us get more of our attention. If we have a goal, whether it's earning income or helping a friend, we have a strong incentive to learn what is needed to succeed. But if the decision is unlikely to have any effect on our income or on our friend's welfare, then we have little incentive to put more effort into learning about it or even taking any action. We are helped by anyone who can save us time and energy in learning what we need to know. Often we'll even pay these information-providers, just as we pay the producers of the technology that helps to deliver that information. In life w...