Friday, July 13, 2007

Free Markets and Freedom

Very interesting interview with Dr. John Lott at FrontPageMag.com. The interview is somewhat of a promotional plug for his new book Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don’t, but even so, the interview has some very interesting points to ponder.  For example, the following question and answer regarding the effect women have had on the expansion of the state.

BC: You mention in your book that women’s suffrage led to a massive increase in the size of government, why is this the case?

Dr. John Lott: When I originally started working on this my wife begged me not to do the research.

Two reasons. I think that women are generally more risk averse then men are and they see government as one way of providing insurance against life’s vagaries. I also think that divorced women with kids particularly turn towards government for protection. Simply giving women the right to vote explained at least a third of the growth in government for about 45 years.

The effect on state governments was pretty dramatic, and I think that it not only explains a lot of the government’s growth in the US but also the rest of the world over the last century. When states gave women the right to vote, government spending and tax revenue, even after adjusting for inflation and population, went from not growing at all to more than doubling in ten years. As women gradually made up a greater and greater share of the electorate, the size of government kept on increasing. This continued for 45 years as a lot of older women who hadn’t been used to voting when suffrage first passed were gradually replaced by younger women.

After you get to the 1960s, the continued growth in government is driven by higher divorce rates. Divorce causes women with children to turn much more to government programs. Of course, changes in the divorce laws from “at fault” to “no fault” helped cause some of this change. As I discuss in the book, the liberalization of abortion also led to more single parent families.

That’ll put a bee in some women’s bonnets.

I’ll be voluntarily trading some of my dollars for Lott’s book.

Linked via Alan K. Henderson.

Posted by John Venlet on 07/13 at 12:56 PM
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