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On being brought up by libertarian economists

The central fact about child rearing by my parents was the equal intellectual status of everyone in the family. My sister and I did not get a vote on the family budget; we were not the ones who had earned the money. But in any disagreement the question was always who had good arguments, not who was older. Many years later I heard an elderly man of whom I had a generally favorable opinion tell a child who had disagreed with him not to contradict his elders. I was shocked — the statement struck me as heresy, very nearly obscenity. If your elders are wrong, you have as much cause to contradict them as they would to contradict you if you were wrong. I thought the older man was correct on the disagreement, but that is a reason to present evidence or argument, not to assert superior status.

As some evidence in favor of that approach to orthodoxy, over the next fifty years the population of poor countries continued to grow and they got richer and less hungry, the opposite of the orthodox prediction. When climate change replaced population growth as the looming catastrophe that all of the authorities insisted something should be done about, I took the same approach to that issue and reached the same conclusion. After thinking about it for a while I concluded that the situation was indeed unfair; I was getting off very lightly considering how much time my mother spent maintaining the household and my father working to support us.

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