Christopher Condon: Biden Is Rebranding Reagan’s Supply-Side Economics to Save His Agenda

Supply-Side Liberalism is in the news. (It is sometimes called Supply-Side Progressivism these days, but personally, think of “Liberal” as a much more positive word than “Progressive.”) Christopher Condon interviewed me as well as many other economists for his piece “Biden is Rebranding Reagan’s Supply-Side Economics to Save His Agenda.”

Here are the bits most directly related to Christopher’s interview of me (bullets added to separate quoted passages):

  • A host of economists, such as Eli Dourado at Utah State University, have been promoting what they call “progressive supply-side economics.” Miles Kimball at the University of Colorado at Boulder has been writing a blog since 2012 titled Confessions of a Supply-Side Liberal.

  • At its heart, supply-side economics is about tax policy. Because people seek to avoid them, taxes cause distortions in behavior that can hurt the economy. For example, if your next hour of work will be taxed at 80% instead of 20%, you’re less likely to keep working. Applied more broadly, anything the government provides by means of taxation will involve a trade-off that reduces total output by hindering the supply of capital or labor to productive economic pursuits. How large a trade-off, and whether it’s worth it, have long been matters of intense debate.

    Under Reagan, an exaggerated interpretation emerged … [See my inaugural post “What is a Supply-Side Liberal?”]

  • Hubbard, now a professor at Columbia’s business school, calls foul on how the Biden administration is pursuing that last goal through subsidies, like ones for child care, that aren’t tied to work requirements. “Doing it when work is not present doesn’t strike me as supply-side at all. That’s purely social welfare,” he says. “You may or may not think those are a good idea—democracy will decide that—but calling them modern supply-side economics is just disingenuous.”

    That’s splitting hairs to liberal supply-siders like Kimball, but he has his own quibbles. [I think what I said was that tending young children should count as work, even if they are one’s own children! It certainly isn’t an easy task. I just saw strong correlations from “Fragile Families” data in a seminar last Friday by Rebecca Lessem that, if interpreted causally (a big if), say that kids’ later outcomes are better if the focal parent isn’t working when they are young.]

  • If the Biden administration were really serious, [Kimball] says, it would address a couple other obvious supply-side targets. The first, government regulation, isn’t an easy topic for a Democratic White House, but it’s a big reason public infrastructure is far more expensive in the U.S. than in most other developed economies. Then there’s immigration, another political hot potato. “Of course, immigration should be part of this,” says Kimball, who advocates revamping policies to allow more skilled foreign-born workers into the country. “I’m surprised they’ve almost totally given up on that politically.”

What Christopher didn’t include in his piece was my insistence that state and local policy also needs a supply-side transformation. On that, see for example, my posts “Why Housing is So Expensive,” “Janet Adamy and Paul Overberg on Immobility in America,” “Magic Ingredient 1: More K-12 School”—and looking forward a bit more to the future, and “Michael Ostrovsky and Michael Schwarz: Self-Driving Cars, Tolls, and Carpooling are Much More Powerful as a Combination than Separately.” Also, I mentioned that higher education is messed up and needs a transformation; see “How to Foster Transformative Innovation in Higher Education.”

Overcoming Emotional Miscommunication

It is very easy to misread what a spouse or significant other is saying. The older I get, the more insightful I think the song above is. Here is the the refrain:

She said "I'm mad"
He heard "I'm leaving"
She said "I need your attention"
He heard "I want you to crawl"
She said "I'm sad"
He heard "It's all your fault"
There is no translation
Emotions don't fit into words
There's so much between what she
And what he heard

Let me write from the perspective of someone who often misunderstands their partner in such a way.

Sometimes, what is going on is this: you don’t want to face a medium-sized unpleasant truth about yourself, so you pretend your partner is saying something much worse, which allows you to be indignant that you would be accused of something so obviously not true. The downside: in addition to keeping you from letting in the genuine feedback, part of you might really get snookered by this pretense and feel awful at what you are supposedly being accused of.

Other times, your partner genuinely has difficulty articulating what bothers them accurately. For example, they may use totalizing words such as “always” or “never.” Unfortunately, it is always necessary to translate from any infelicity in how your partner says things. You can ask them to say things in a way that is more accurate, but most people don’t manage to change such things very fast. So you might need to be patient.

The World Isn't Fair. Any Fairness You Stumble Across Is There Because Someone Put It There.

At every moment in history, all human groups and institutions have been messed up to some degree. One of the marvelous things about human beings is that, despite having no supernatural essence or powers, they have a moral compass within them that allows them to judge groups and institutions as deficient in justice.

There is a fork in the road when confronting injustice. One path is the path of anger. Occasionally this works: after seeing how deeply you feel about an unfairness, the perpetrator of that unfairness might back down and rethink. And sometimes it may be that an institution needs to be torn down because its injustice is great and irredeemable.

The path of anger is not one to be undertaken lightly. Many will react to your anger with anger of their own rather than with the reaction you want. And when you succeed at intimidation that leads to an immediate result you consider fairer, it can lead to long-term resentment that can cause trouble in the future.

The other path is the path of reconstruction and fixing. The path of reconstruction and fixing and works best when you emphasize justice for others as much as or more than justice for you. Often, only justice for others is at issue; you are called on to put in great effort to make it possible for an institution to deliver justice in a particular instance. In other cases, you are trying to improve rules, processes and execution to achieve more justice for everyone, including yourself.

The turn toward the path of reconstruction and fixing comes with saying “How can I make things better?” rather than focusing on “How could they do this?”

Justice is water in a glass that is both half-full and half-empty. The half-emptiness hits us like a brick. Seeing the half-fullness requires a shift in perspective toward gratitude that due to those who have gone before us, and those around us now, there is occasionally some justice in the world. When we feel gratitude for the portion of justice that is there, it provides inspiration for us to do our part to contribute to the justice in the world and improve things—without too quickly deciding to tear down the structures that may stand between us and a situation of even greater injustice.

Posts on Positive Mental Health and Maintaining One’s Moral Compass:

Michael Sandel on the Dignity of Work

Link to the Wikipedia article “Michael Sandel”

In his book The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good, Michael Sandel argues that redistribution that just hands people money isn’t enough; everyone needs to feel that they are contributing value to society. As a way to achieve this, he has some bad ideas. Two are to reduce immigration and to have less free trade. The trouble with these measures is that they hurt people in other countries who are worse off than the Americans they help. Similarly, increases in the minimum wage hurt people at the very bottom who now can’t find a job in order to help those who are one rung up on the economic ladder.

A much, much better idea is wage-matching for those near the bottom of the heap: taking whatever money a private employer is willing to pay and matching it with a corresponding amount of money from the government. I write about this in my post “Oren Cass on the Value of Work.” In one spot in The Tyranny of Merit, Michael Sandel speaks approvingly of wage subsidies, but it turns out he is mainly talking about trying to keep workers in jobs they already have. A robust wage-matching system would go far beyond that, helping create new jobs.

Philosophically, there are two justifications for a wage-matching system. The first is a principle that Michael Sandel emphasizes: it is valuable to the members of society to have a job because work gives people dignity and also helps them develop capabilities that make them better citizens when they aren’t at work. The second is that those at the bottom of the heap who get their wages matched are likely to provide many goods and services appropriate for the poor. (Those who provide high-end services probably already make a high enough wage they would not get wage-matching.) The poor don’t have enough purchasing power to fully represent the value of goods and services to them, so more work by people at the bottom of the heap making goods and services for them abundant is valuable.

Note that making a wage-matching system work smoothly requires cutting back on unnecessary occupational licensing and letting the minimum wage apply to the wage including government wage matching. The purpose of wage-matching is to make it easy for people at the bottom to find jobs as well as to give them a living wage after the wage-matching.

I would like to see arguments for a universal basic income routinely parried by arguments for a wage-matching system. A wage-matching system is better.

There is one place where those favoring a universal basic income and those favoring a wage-matching system ought to be able to agree. Being the parent of a young child is real work. Hence tax credits for young children can be seen as akin to a wage-matching system with the implicit private part of the wage being all the time and effort the parents were already willing to devote even when in poverty.

Don’t miss these other posts (some of them link-posts to outside pieces) on these alternative policies:

Suggestive Evidence that Vitamin D Supplements Lower Risk of Autoimmune Disease

Vitamins typically don’t do much for health unless you are deficient to begin with. But many Americans are deficient in Vitamin D, in part because of an error in setting the minimum daily requirements for Vitamin D. One of the consequences of Vitamin D deficiency seems to be autoimmune disease.

The evidence is high-quality evidence from the large-scale vitamin D and omega-3 trial (VITAL):

VITAL is a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled research study of 25,871 men (age 50 and older) and women (age 55 and older) across the U.S., conducted to investigate whether taking daily dietary supplements of vitamin D3 (2000 IU) or omega-3 fatty acids (Omacor fish oil, 1 gram) could reduce the risk for developing cancer, heart disease, and stroke in people who do not have a prior history of these illnesses. Participants were randomized to receive either vitamin D with an omega-3 fatty acid supplement; vitamin D with a placebo; omega-3 fatty acid with a placebo; or placebo only. Prior to the launch of VITAL, investigators determined that they would also look at rates of AD among participants, as part of an ancillary study.

The probability the results could be due to chance can be calculated with these additional details:

Among patients who were randomized to receive vitamin D, 123 participants in the treatment group and 155 in the placebo group were diagnosed with confirmed AD (22 percent reduction).

That difference has close to a 5% probability of happening by chance (a p-value near 5%). And of course the chance that one of the set {cancer, heart disease, stroke, autoimmune disease) would show a different incidence this big is considerably higher (multiple hypothesis testing). So the evidence is only suggestive, but with something this serious, a good Bayesian should take the evidence seriously in the absence of other contrary evidence.

Don’t miss these related posts:

The Federalist Papers #48: Legislatures, Too, Can Become Tyrannical—James Madison

Link to the Wikipedia article “Oliver Cromwell.” Oliver Cromwell led the armies of the Parliament of England and later effectively became a dictator under the title “Lord Protector.”

Link to full text of The Federalist Papers #48

In the Federalist Papers #48, James Madison argues that there need to be checks and balances against legislatures as well as against executives. In English history, Oliver Cromwell provides a good example of a dictator created by the legislature (Parliament). For a US example, James Madison refers to a report of the Council of Censors in Pennsylvania, who reported both legislative encroachments on the constitutional powers of the executive and the judiciary and executive encroachments on the constitutional power of the legislature. He explains the frequency of executive encroachments on the constitution power of the legislature partly by the exigencies of the Revolutionary War, actions the executive knew the legislature would approve of (even though it hadn’t authorized those actions) and as a result of diffusion of responsibility:

THIRDLY, the executive department of Pennsylvania is distinguished from that of the other States by the number of members composing it. In this respect, it has as much affinity to a legislative assembly as to an executive council. And being at once exempt from the restraint of an individual responsibility for the acts of the body, and deriving confidence from mutual example and joint influence, unauthorized measures would, of course, be more freely hazarded, than where the executive department is administered by a single hand, or by a few hands.

For Virginia, James Madison refers to Thomas Jefferson’s “Notes on the State of Virginia,” using this quotation:

All the powers of government, legislative, executive, and judiciary, result to the legislative body. The concentrating these in the same hands, is precisely the definition of despotic government. It will be no alleviation, that these powers will be exercised by a plurality of hands, and not by a single one. One hundred and seventy-three despots would surely be as oppressive as one. Let those who doubt it, turn their eyes on the republic of Venice. As little will it avail us, that they are chosen by ourselves. An ELECTIVE DESPOTISM was not the government we fought for; but one which should not only be founded on free principles, but in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among several bodies of magistracy, as that no one could transcend their legal limits, without being effectually checked and restrained by the others.

James Madison seems to assume quite a bit of familiarity with these other documents by his readers.

The Federalist Papers #48 is not that impressive all by itself, but it provide an additional brick in the wall of argument for checks and balances.

Below is the full text of the Federalist Papers #48.

FEDERALIST NO. 48

These Departments Should Not Be So Far Separated as to Have No Constitutional Control Over Each Other

From the New York Packet
Friday, February 1, 1788.

Author: James Madison

To the People of the State of New York:

IT WAS shown in the last paper that the political apothegm there examined does not require that the legislative, executive, and judiciary departments should be wholly unconnected with each other. I shall undertake, in the next place, to show that unless these departments be so far connected and blended as to give to each a constitutional control over the others, the degree of separation which the maxim requires, as essential to a free government, can never in practice be duly maintained. It is agreed on all sides, that the powers properly belonging to one of the departments ought not to be directly and completely administered by either of the other departments. It is equally evident, that none of them ought to possess, directly or indirectly, an overruling influence over the others, in the administration of their respective powers. It will not be denied, that power is of an encroaching nature, and that it ought to be effectually restrained from passing the limits assigned to it.

After discriminating, therefore, in theory, the several classes of power, as they may in their nature be legislative, executive, or judiciary, the next and most difficult task is to provide some practical security for each, against the invasion of the others.

What this security ought to be, is the great problem to be solved. Will it be sufficient to mark, with precision, the boundaries of these departments, in the constitution of the government, and to trust to these parchment barriers against the encroaching spirit of power? This is the security which appears to have been principally relied on by the compilers of most of the American constitutions. But experience assures us, that the efficacy of the provision has been greatly overrated; and that some more adequate defense is indispensably necessary for the more feeble, against the more powerful, members of the government. The legislative department is everywhere extending the sphere of its activity, and drawing all power into its impetuous vortex. The founders of our republics have so much merit for the wisdom which they have displayed, that no task can be less pleasing than that of pointing out the errors into which they have fallen. A respect for truth, however, obliges us to remark, that they seem never for a moment to have turned their eyes from the danger to liberty from the overgrown and all-grasping prerogative of an hereditary magistrate, supported and fortified by an hereditary branch of the legislative authority. They seem never to have recollected the danger from legislative usurpations, which, by assembling all power in the same hands, must lead to the same tyranny as is threatened by executive usurpations. In a government where numerous and extensive prerogatives are placed in the hands of an hereditary monarch, the executive department is very justly regarded as the source of danger, and watched with all the jealousy which a zeal for liberty ought to inspire. In a democracy, where a multitude of people exercise in person the legislative functions, and are continually exposed, by their incapacity for regular deliberation and concerted measures, to the ambitious intrigues of their executive magistrates, tyranny may well be apprehended, on some favorable emergency, to start up in the same quarter. But in a representative republic, where the executive magistracy is carefully limited; both in the extent and the duration of its power; and where the legislative power is exercised by an assembly, which is inspired, by a supposed influence over the people, with an intrepid confidence in its own strength; which is sufficiently numerous to feel all the passions which actuate a multitude, yet not so numerous as to be incapable of pursuing the objects of its passions, by means which reason prescribes; it is against the enterprising ambition of this department that the people ought to indulge all their jealousy and exhaust all their precautions. The legislative department derives a superiority in our governments from other circumstances. Its constitutional powers being at once more extensive, and less susceptible of precise limits, it can, with the greater facility, mask, under complicated and indirect measures, the encroachments which it makes on the co-ordinate departments. It is not unfrequently a question of real nicety in legislative bodies, whether the operation of a particular measure will, or will not, extend beyond the legislative sphere. On the other side, the executive power being restrained within a narrower compass, and being more simple in its nature, and the judiciary being described by landmarks still less uncertain, projects of usurpation by either of these departments would immediately betray and defeat themselves. Nor is this all: as the legislative department alone has access to the pockets of the people, and has in some constitutions full discretion, and in all a prevailing influence, over the pecuniary rewards of those who fill the other departments, a dependence is thus created in the latter, which gives still greater facility to encroachments of the former. I have appealed to our own experience for the truth of what I advance on this subject. Were it necessary to verify this experience by particular proofs, they might be multiplied without end. I might find a witness in every citizen who has shared in, or been attentive to, the course of public administrations. I might collect vouchers in abundance from the records and archives of every State in the Union. But as a more concise, and at the same time equally satisfactory, evidence, I will refer to the example of two States, attested by two unexceptionable authorities. The first example is that of Virginia, a State which, as we have seen, has expressly declared in its constitution, that the three great departments ought not to be intermixed. The authority in support of it is Mr. Jefferson, who, besides his other advantages for remarking the operation of the government, was himself the chief magistrate of it. In order to convey fully the ideas with which his experience had impressed him on this subject, it will be necessary to quote a passage of some length from his very interesting "Notes on the State of Virginia," p. 195. "All the powers of government, legislative, executive, and judiciary, result to the legislative body. The concentrating these in the same hands, is precisely the definition of despotic government. It will be no alleviation, that these powers will be exercised by a plurality of hands, and not by a single one. One hundred and seventy-three despots would surely be as oppressive as one. Let those who doubt it, turn their eyes on the republic of Venice. As little will it avail us, that they are chosen by ourselves. An ELECTIVE DESPOTISM was not the government we fought for; but one which should not only be founded on free principles, but in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among several bodies of magistracy, as that no one could transcend their legal limits, without being effectually checked and restrained by the others.

For this reason, that convention which passed the ordinance of government, laid its foundation on this basis, that the legislative, executive, and judiciary departments should be separate and distinct, so that no person should exercise the powers of more than one of them at the same time. BUT NO BARRIER WAS PROVIDED BETWEEN THESE SEVERAL POWERS. The judiciary and the executive members were left dependent on the legislative for their subsistence in office, and some of them for their continuance in it. If, therefore, the legislature assumes executive and judiciary powers, no opposition is likely to be made; nor, if made, can be effectual; because in that case they may put their proceedings into the form of acts of Assembly, which will render them obligatory on the other branches. They have accordingly, IN MANY instances, DECIDED RIGHTS which should have been left to JUDICIARY CONTROVERSY, and THE DIRECTION OF THE EXECUTIVE, DURING THE WHOLE TIME OF THEIR SESSION, IS BECOMING HABITUAL AND FAMILIAR. "The other State which I shall take for an example is Pennsylvania; and the other authority, the Council of Censors, which assembled in the years 1783 and 1784. A part of the duty of this body, as marked out by the constitution, was "to inquire whether the constitution had been preserved inviolate in every part; and whether the legislative and executive branches of government had performed their duty as guardians of the people, or assumed to themselves, or exercised, other or greater powers than they are entitled to by the constitution. " In the execution of this trust, the council were necessarily led to a comparison of both the legislative and executive proceedings, with the constitutional powers of these departments; and from the facts enumerated, and to the truth of most of which both sides in the council subscribed, it appears that the constitution had been flagrantly violated by the legislature in a variety of important instances. A great number of laws had been passed, violating, without any apparent necessity, the rule requiring that all bills of a public nature shall be previously printed for the consideration of the people; although this is one of the precautions chiefly relied on by the constitution against improper acts of legislature. The constitutional trial by jury had been violated, and powers assumed which had not been delegated by the constitution.

Executive powers had been usurped. The salaries of the judges, which the constitution expressly requires to be fixed, had been occasionally varied; and cases belonging to the judiciary department frequently drawn within legislative cognizance and determination. Those who wish to see the several particulars falling under each of these heads, may consult the journals of the council, which are in print. Some of them, it will be found, may be imputable to peculiar circumstances connected with the war; but the greater part of them may be considered as the spontaneous shoots of an ill-constituted government. It appears, also, that the executive department had not been innocent of frequent breaches of the constitution. There are three observations, however, which ought to be made on this head: FIRST, a great proportion of the instances were either immediately produced by the necessities of the war, or recommended by Congress or the commander-in-chief; SECONDLY, in most of the other instances, they conformed either to the declared or the known sentiments of the legislative department; THIRDLY, the executive department of Pennsylvania is distinguished from that of the other States by the number of members composing it. In this respect, it has as much affinity to a legislative assembly as to an executive council. And being at once exempt from the restraint of an individual responsibility for the acts of the body, and deriving confidence from mutual example and joint influence, unauthorized measures would, of course, be more freely hazarded, than where the executive department is administered by a single hand, or by a few hands.

The conclusion which I am warranted in drawing from these observations is, that a mere demarcation on parchment of the constitutional limits of the several departments, is not a sufficient guard against those encroachments which lead to a tyrannical concentration of all the powers of government in the same hands.

PUBLIUS.

Links to my other posts on The Federalist Papers so far:

Quicksand →

The reality of quicksand is very different that in the movies. In particular, the Wikipedia article linked above says:

It is impossible for a human to sink entirely into quicksand, due to the higher density of the fluid. Quicksand has a density of about 2 grams per cubic centimeter, whereas the density of the human body is only about 1 gram per cubic centimeter. …

…

Quicksand may be escaped by slow movement of the legs in order to increase viscosity of the fluid, and rotation of the body so as to float in the supine position (lying horizontally with the face and torso facing up).

Technically, quicksand is a “shear thinning non-Newtonian fluid.”

How to Foster Transformative Innovation in Higher Education

In his book The Tyranny of Merit, Harvard Professor Michael Sandel propose that prestigious universities have an explicit admissions lottery among the many qualified applicants as a way to combat the meritocratic treadmill and the meritocratic hubris to which their students are subject. He misses a more direct and more productive way of toning down the size of the prize that admission to the top schools now represents: pushing these top schools to increase the size of their undergraduate classes. (See “The Extensive Margin: How to Simultaneously Raise Quality and Lower Tuition at Elite Public Universities” and “Noah Smith: If Elite Schools Care About What They Claim To, and Believe in the Value of What They Do, They Should Take On More Students.”)

I want to make the radical claim that colleges and universities should, first and foremost, be in the business of educating students well. One implication of this radical claim is that colleges’ and universities’ performance should be measured by value added—by graduation rates and how much stronger graduating students are academically than they were at matriculation. By this standard, bringing in students who were impressive in high school raises the standards for what one should minimally expect a college’s or university’s students to look like at graduation, and colleges and universities become truly impressive if they help weak students become strong.

I doubt that higher education in the United States will reform itself without a push from the outside. We need more competition from new kinds of higher education. The key to allowing alternative forms of higher education to flourish is to replace the current emphasis on accreditation, which tends to lock in the status quo, and instead have the government or a foundation with an interest in higher education develop high-quality assessment tools for what skills a student has at graduation. Distinct skills should be separately certified. The biggest emphasis should be on skills directly valuable in the labor market: writing, reading carefully, coding, the lesser computer and math skills needed to be a whiz with a spreadsheet, etc. But students should be able to get certified in every key skill that a college or university purports to teach. (Where what should be taught is disputed, as in the Humanities, there should be alternative certification routes, such as a certification in the use of Postmodernism and a separate certification for knowledge of what was conceived as the traditional canon 75 years ago. The nature of the assessment in each can be controlled by professors who believe in that particular school of thought.)

Having an assessment that allows a student to document a skill allows for innovation in how to get to that level of skill. For example, certification of skills separately allows academic instruction to be unbundled into instruction in each of the specific skills a student decides to acquire. One place this has already happened is in coding. It is straightforward to get a certification in a particular programming language. Having a good assessment of what students know at the end of their instruction also allows new entrants to higher education to show they are doing a good job.

I think this is doable. There are enough students who come out of colleges and universities not being able to write well or read carefully that it should be helpful to students in getting a job to have a certification proving that they can. To the extent colleges and universities claim to be teaching higher-order thinking, an assessment tool to test higher-order thinking is needed. One might object that testing higher-order thinking would be expensive, but it takes an awful lot of money to amount to all that much compared to four or more years of college tuition. And colleges and universities should be ashamed if they think we should take them seriously were they to claim that what they taught was so ineffable that it would be impossible for a student to demonstrate they had that skill in a structured test situation. On this, see “False Advertising for College is Pretty Much the Norm.”

Everything I am writing here is very much in line with my Quartz column “The Coming Transformation of Education: Degrees Won’t Matter Anymore, Skills Will.” This transformation can be hastened if the government or some other large actor creates appropriate assessment tools.

On a modest initiative to better measure student learning in my Economics Department, see Measuring Learning Outcomes from Getting an Economics Degree

Don’t Worry about the Fasting Thirst Roller Coaster

Let me add to what I wrote in “Fasting Tips” a little insight into a minor side effect of fasting that could puzzle you if you don’t know about glycogen. Near the beginning of a several-day fast, there is a day or two when I am much less thirsty than usual; then after I go back to eating normally I there is a day or two when I am much thirstier than usual. What is going on is that glycogen, the body’s short-term sugar storage doubles as water storage as well. Evolutionarily, this seems like a good trick.

The body taps into these glycogen sugar + water stores at the beginning of a fast before dipping into the long-term storage of energy in body fat. After going back to eating normally, the body needs extra water along with carbs to reconstitute the glycogen sugar + water stores.

You probably have 6 cups to half a gallon of water bound up with your glycogen. The glycogen proper amounts to about half a kilogram. Quoting from the current version of the Wikipedia article “Glycogen”:

… the liver of an adult, weighing 1.5 kg, can store roughly 100–120 grams of glycogen.[4][6] In skeletal muscle, glycogen is found in a low concentration (1–2% of the muscle mass) and the skeletal muscle of an adult weighing 70 kg stores roughly 400 grams of glycogen.[4]

Then there is 3 to 4 times as much water bound up with the glycogen:

Glycogen in muscle, liver, and fat cells is stored in a hydrated form, composed of three or four parts of water per part of glycogen associated with 0.45 millimoles (18 mg) of potassium per gram of glycogen.[5]

3 times 500 grams is 6.34 cups of water. 4 times 500 grams is 8.45 cups of water. Your glycogen probably won’t go below 10% of its normal level, so to get available stored water these need to be multiplied by .9, which is 5.7 to 7.6 cups of water. That is a lot!

In terms of calories, there are about 4 calories per gram of glycogen, so if 450 grams are available to be run down, that is 1800 calories—a large share of the calories needed for a day. So you might not burn much fat with a fast of just one day if your body leans strongly toward running down the glycogen first. I talk about that in “Increasing Returns to Duration in Fasting.”

Despite knowing about glycogen, I have had many moments after I begin eating again after a several-day fast when I have been alarmed at how thirsty I am, until I remember what is going on. Then I am reassured.

Being less thirsty at the beginning of a fast hasn’t ever gotten me needlessly worried. Note that this is something you could use if you are ever in a situation in which you have food available but not much water. If you don’t eat the food, then you will get access to your body’s stored water and for a while are likely to suffer less from thirst.

Let me share one more bit of experience. I just came off of three weeks in which I did a modified fast very low on the insulin index as I describe in “Forget Calorie Counting; It's the Insulin Index, Stupid” for 4 days each week and then did an almost total fast for 3 days each week. It was only when I began eating additional things higher on the insulin index after the three weeks were over that I experienced the extra thirst. Thus, eating low enough on the insulin index seemed to also be lowcarb enough that my glycogen couldn’t reconstitute.

For annotated links to other posts on diet and health, see:

The Curse of Meritocratic Hubris

In his book The Tyranny of Merit, Michael Sandel documents in excruciating detail the rise of meritocracy as a cultural ideal and the concomitant vice of the educated and successful looking down on the uneducated. I am aghast at this bad behavior. It is incredibly destructive socially for anyone to look down on anyone else, let alone a large fraction of our society looking down on another large fraction.

To me, this suggests a serious failure of moral education in our society. Everyone should be brought up and taught to appreciate the virtue of appropriate personal humility and gratitude and appropriate respect for other human beings. Let me be specific about what I have in mind, limited as I am by the perspective offered by my own experience.

After 45 years, I still remember my Dad taking me aside after a high school awards ceremony in which I won a large number of awards to remind me that it is more important to be good than to be smart. In the Mormon Church I grew up in, there were regular sermons about how “No success can compensate for failure in the home” and about how riches and success could make people proud and thereby lead them to go off-track in their lives.

In my Economics PhD program, we read Frank Knight arguing that despite the virtues of the free market, it was not fair—sentiments later cited approvingly by Friedrich Hayek. To put my own gloss on the argument, first, there is a moral arbitrariness to the genetic lottery that assigns raw talent. Second, there is a moral arbitrariness to which raw talents are scarce or in high demand and which are abundant or in low demand at a given moment in history. Third, market imperfections and poor regulatory design can make prices diverge from social value. And fourth, internal conflicts can give high prices to things such as drugs, gambling and other addictive or quasi-addictive things that part of an individual dearly wants and part of the individual wants to abjure. The social value of these things depends on which parts of people’s divided selves we want to foster.

Here is what I think a good society would look like. Everyone considers themself “just folks” without putting themself above anyone else—except insofar as hierarchy is needed to accomplish a necessary task, and then with as little differentiation as can do the job. Incentives involving one person being richer than another are only used to raises Utilitarian social welfare. (Despite John Rawls’s critique of Utilitarianism, this is much closer in practice to John Rawls’s Difference Principle than many realize.) Freedom and being treated with dignity are themselves brought into the Utilitarian social welfare function as valued goods in themselves.

One thing that need not be there at all in a good society is any notion of what someone “deserves” beyond what everyone deserves as a human being. Reward and punishment, honor and blame are there in an instrumental role as incentives, but they are not seen as having any ultimate significance outside of their role as cogs in the design of a society that works well.

Our higher education system is dysfunctional in many ways. Prestigious colleges universities becoming more and more selective instead of expanding their number of students seems to be contributing to the rise of an ugly meritocratic hubris. Once a student has added to whatever advantages they had to start with a huge amount of effort in order to get into a selective college or university, the temptation of thinking they “deserve” their high station is strong. What would be a better attitude? “To one to whom much is given, much is expected.” Having a high station in society increases one’s responsibility to do good. It doesn’t justify lording it over or looking down on others.

Posts on Positive Mental Health and Maintaining One’s Moral Compass: