The New Bazaar

Jen Doleac is an economist and the director of the Criminal Justice program at Arnold Ventures. She joins Cardiff on the show to chat about her upcoming new book, “The Science of Second Chances: A Revolution in Criminal Justice”.

From the book jacket:

Freakonomics for criminal justice, The Science of Second Chances presents a groundbreaking approach to criminal justice reform, revealing how small-scale interventions can reduce people’s chances of reoffending and break the incarceration cycle…

Drawing on cutting-edge economic research and real-world experiments, the book presents a blueprint for reform that runs all the way through the system. Doleac shows how economists like herself approach big, complicated problems as if they were scientists in a lab, carefully testing different approaches and following the data to maximize impact. She explains how shifting the incentives people face can produce dramatic changes in the decisions they make, significantly reducing the number of people cycling through the prison system.

Jen and Cardiff discuss the unique approach and contributions of economists to understanding the criminal justice system, why erring towards leniency so often leads to less reoffending, and the surprising failures of ideas that seem sensible. Along the way they examine the evidence needed to answer questions like:

How long should prison sentences be?

How should probation be structured?

For people who do go to prison, what kinds of incentives should we give them for how they spend their time there, how they rehabilitate themselves?

How should we take into account variables like age or mental health?

And what happens when someone gets out of prison? What are the best policies to put them on the path to success?

Jen herself has spearheaded a lot of the research behind this evidence, and she also has detailed knowledge of the work done by other economists in the field. So she’s about as well positioned to evaluate it as anyone Cardiff knows.

And her work is about more than just using limited resources in the best possible way (although that’s great) and more than just making society better and safer (also great). It’s about finding ways to help individuals get their lives back on track, so that a mistake made early in life doesn’t end up defining everything that comes after.

Related links:

Science of Second Chances pre-order links
Jennifer Doleac’s page at Arnold Ventures

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Nearly 30 million workers, or roughly one in five workers throughout the country, are required to have a professional license before they can do their jobs.

That’s more than twice the number of workers who belong to unions. And it’s almost ten times the number who earn the minimum wage. But in comparison to those other economic arrangements, curiously little attention is given to the process that governs licensing, the perverse outcomes it so often leads to, and the vulnerable workers who are affected by it.

Cardiff’s guest on this episode is Vanderbilt law professor Rebecca Haw Allensworth, author of “The Licensing Racket: How we decide who is allowed to work, and Why it goes wrong.” Among Cardiff’s picks for the economics book of the year, it is the product of not just a scholarly understanding of the topic, but of years and years of painstaking reporting, interviewing hundreds of people, and unearthing a variety of frankly shocking anecdotes.

She and Cardiff discuss:

The legal and institutional design behind the boards that oversee licensing in each state
How the desire to protect the already licensed leads board to impose outrageous requirements for new licenses
The ludicrous rationalizations of so many licensing boards for erecting obstacles to new workers entering their professions
The shocking failure of licensing boards, especially within medicine, to actually fulfill the mission they are set up to pursue: protect public safety
How the ratcheting up of licensing requirements led to a standoff between nurses and doctors
How licensing hurts dynamism and entrepreneurship
The more substantive tradeoffs involved in licensing, including the pride and validation that existing practitioners feel in having a license
Which jobs shouldn’t require a license, and for those that do, a better way forward

All throughout, Rebecca shares with Cardiff the tales of the workers, board members, and the others she interviewed.

Related links:

The Licensing Racket, by Rebecca Haw Allensworth
Rebecca Haw Allensworth page at Vanderbilt Law School
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Mike Bird, the Wall Street editor of The Economist, joins Cardiff to discuss his new book, The Land Trap: A New History of the World’s Oldest Asset.

By one estimate, the value of land makes up roughly a third of all the wealth in the entire world. Add the houses and commercial buildings on top of the land and the total value is almost two-thirds.

And according to Mike, land “defies some of the usual laws of capitalism that apply to other goods and assets.” Its supply is fixed, it is immobile, and it neither decays nor depreciates.

These special qualities have given land its fascinating history. They’re also the reason that so many economies end up in what Mike refers to as the land trap.

Mike and Cardiff discuss:

The definition of a land trap
Why booming land values are a problem while they’re rising and not just because they often set the stage for a bust
How land affects older, established companies differently than newer, innovative businesses — and why that matters for the economy
The perverse incentives that rising land values can have on a nation’s economy
The land histories of America, China, Hong Kong, Japan, and Singapore
Land reform and the development of low-income countries
The lessons of Singapore

And more!

Related links:

The Land Trap, A New History of the World's Oldest Asset
Housing booms, reallocation and productivity, by Sebastian Doerr, BIS
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How can the United States make its economy more resilient not just to future economic shocks but the threat of such shocks from its geopolitical rivals?

Arnab Datta has spent years working on this very question. In the immediate aftermath of the recent rare earths showdown between America and China, Datta and his colleagues at the Institute for Progress and Employ America published a new analysis titled How to Implement an Operation Warp Speed for Rare Earths.

China’s global dominance in rare earths, acquired over decades, allows it to “gain leverage in trade negotiations, retaliate against American restrictions, degrade American and allied technological capabilities, and potentially even to entrench its dominance in downstream rare earth-dependent manufacturing supply chains,” write Datta, Saif Khan, Tim Hwang, and Tim Fist.

The scope of the report extends well beyond the specific threat of a shock to America’s supply of rare earths. It speaks to the very nature of the ongoing geopolitical dispute with China itself — and more broadly, to the question of how best to respond when a single country has taken steps for decades to distort the global market of a product that the entire world depends on.

Why did the United States fail to spot the emerging threat? How should it respond now — and in such a way that embraces core American economic values like competition and innovation?

Related links:

How to Implement an Operation Warp Speed for Rare Earths
Arnab’s work at Employ America
Arnab’s work at the Institute for Progress
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What accounts for the astonishing streak of YIMBY wins this year — and which concessions, if any, should they consider offering to the NIMBYs? Should the center-left Abundance faction be trying to persuade conservatives and not just progressives?

Do struggling places need more market-based solutions (high-skilled immigration, tax incentives for investing in low-income communities) or more straightforward redistribution and pubic investment (in infrastructure, job training, internet access)?

Are liberals ceding too much ground to anti-immigrant sentiment? And should the most famous museums in the world stop hoarding their artwork?

Live on stage at the Economic Innovation Group’s annual Power of Place Conference in Washington, DC, Cardiff spoke with Slow Boring author Matt Yglesias about these topics and more.

Matt also reflects on how things have changed since his two books, The Rent is Too Damn High and One Billion Americans, were released. They close with their respective picks for best movie of 2025 and the likely winner of the NBA Finals.

Related links:

Slow Boring
The Rent is Too Damn High
One Billion Americans
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