Winston: Government anti-poverty programs succeed only at unnecessarily high costs
Dr. Cliff Winston · Ep 87: Dr. Cliff Winston — Deregulate Lawyers, Deregulate Airlines & Let Markets Correct Themselves · Joe Lonsdale · May 2, 2024 · at 8:26
Brookings Institution economist Dr. Cliff Winston and Joe Lonsdale discuss government failure versus market efficiency in the context of welfare programs.
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“Poverty has declined, and some of government policies have certainly contributed to that, but it's so expensive to do that, and oftentimes there's, you know, multiple policies, you know, to address poverty as opposed to something that's more streamlined, more focused, so on and so forth. And there's very little attention to minimizing costs”
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“I went through all the evidence that economists had accumulated. I said, you know, where, where have they done well? You know, monopolization cases, collusion cases, merger cases. Where is there anything strong that shows, yes, consumer welfare, Has improved. …”
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Winston: Economics focuses on market failures while ignoring government failures
“So the theoretical instincts is that were that the action is really in market failures and very little attention Was given the government failures. And so as things go on, people think, yeah, market failure is a problem. They never stepped back and said, well,…”
Winston: Retrospective assessments are not part of government policymaking agendas
“There's a sort of, you know, checklist of things that you want to go through, but obviously this is not what government does, because you can have failure along at any of these points, and more often than not, we just go ahead with things, and there's never be…”
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“Is we really don't even know systematically why government fails. Oh, we can speculate about many things, but trying to find some hard evidence is this is why government fails. We have a theory. We test it. It applies to many things. We don't have that.”