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… is from page 9 of Jagdish Bhagwati’s 1989 lecture “Is Free Trade Passé After All?” as reprinted in Political Economy and International Economics, a 1991 collection, edited by Doug Irwin, of some of Bhagwati’s writings [footnote deleted; link added]:

Thus [Alfred] Marshall, after observing the American experience with protection which reinforced his skepticism of rational tariff intervention, felt that “in becoming intricate it (i.e., protection) became corrupt, and tended to corrupt general politics.”

DBx: It has become fashionable among certain protectionists to attempt to strengthen the weak intellectual credentials of protectionism by conscripting into protectionist ranks famous economists, including Alfred Marshall (1842-1924), pictured here. But these attempts reflect nothing more than a failure, by the protectionists, to read the works of their would-be conscripts carefully.

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Here’s a letter to the Nevada Globe.

Editor:

Spurred by the White House’s recent announcement about tariffs on steel, aluminum, and copper, you applaud Pres. Trump’s protectionism because allegedly it is “rebuilding American industry” and strengthening U.S. national security (“Trump Tightens Tariffs on Steel, Aluminum, and Copper as America First Manufacturing Push Accelerates,” June 2). I have some questions.

– Are you aware that in April 2025, the month Mr. Trump imposed his “Liberation Day” tariffs, U.S. industrial capacity was at an all-time high, being then 11% larger than when China joined the World Trade Organization and 64% larger than when NAFTA took effect?

– Because nearly all imported steel, aluminum, and copper are inputs used in American factories to produce outputs – including military materiel – how, exactly, does restricting these factories’ access to inputs help to ‘rebuild’ American industry?

– The U.S.’s largest foreign supplier of steel and of aluminum is Canada, and Canada is also the U.S.’s second-largest supplier, after Chile, of copper.* How does tariffing imports of these metals from one of our closest allies promote U.S. national security? And as high U.S. tariffs prompt Canada (and Chile, Mexico, and Brazil – other major, friendly suppliers of metals to the U.S.) to build buyer networks away from the U.S., won’t we Americans regret having alienated allies as well as obstructed our access to their metals?

Unlike Mr. Trump’s second term, when tariffs were raised almost immediately, in Mr. Trump’s first term there were no tariff increases, or even announcements of such, until late January 2018, just over a year after Mr. Trump was first sworn into office. Might the following facts prompt you to reassess your position? Industrial production during the first year of Mr. Trump’s second term rose by 1.4%, but during the first, no-tariff-hikes year of Mr. Trump’s first term, this production rose at nearly twice that rate, by 2.7%. Real private-sector nonresidential fixed investment rose, in the first, tariff-filled year of Trump 2.0 by 5.8%, after having risen in the first, no-tariff-hikes year of Trump 1.0 by 7.5%.

Other economic measures that performed better during the first year of Trump 1.0 than during the first year of Trump 2.0 include, but are not limited to, all three major U.S. stock indices, real per-capita GDP, real median household income, real hourly earnings of all private-sector employees, and – important chiefly because the administration puts huge stock in this measure – manufacturing employment.**

If you were to investigate the facts rather than swallow and regurgitate conventional wisdom, you’d be much less gullible than you are about the alleged ‘need’ for – and wonders worked by – Mr. Trump’s punitive and mad taxation of Americans’ purchases of imports.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

* According to Claude (whose answers here are consistent with what I’ve learned over the past few years).

** See my forthcoming column at AIER.

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Charley Hooper and David Henderson, writing in the Wall Street Journal, make a powerful case for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to leave considerations of medications’ efficacy to doctors and their patients. Two slices:

With distressing frequency, the Food and Drug Administration rejects safe drugs it says haven’t demonstrated enough efficacy. These pages documented the FDA’s recent rejection of Replimune’s melanoma drug RP1, a case in which the agency seemed confused about key facts and failed to apply good judgment.

Here’s a solution: Remove efficacy from the FDA’s approval process and focus on safety alone. That would improve doctors’ ability to match patients with the best drugs and help Americans live longer, healthier lives.

Medicine is a matchmaking exercise in which potentially beneficial drugs are tested patient by patient, using trial and error. Clinical trials, while useful, don’t tell us which patient will respond to which medication. Consider anticoagulants, which reduce blood clots. Some patients respond to Pradaxa but not Xarelto, and vice versa.

No drug works for everyone. Only antibiotics, vaccines, insulin, anesthetics and direct-acting antivirals for hepatitis C come close. The top-selling drug in the world, Merck’s Keytruda, helps little more than a third of melanoma patients.

That’s where trial and error comes in—but only if the FDA approves the drug. If a new drug helps 10% of patients, that drops to zero if the FDA rejects it. If the FDA were to focus on safety, the question of efficacy would be left entirely to the medical community to answer.

Safety and efficacy are fundamentally different. Lack of safety kills. Lack of efficacy requires trying a different drug.

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Drug approvals became much slower and more expensive. Why? Roughly one-fourth of drug development costs are to demonstrate safety while three-quarters are for efficacy. The cost of the FDA’s efficacy requirement is tremendous, and the value is close to zero. If the FDA went back to its pre-1962 rules, Americans would live longer and healthier lives.

Alfredo Carrillo Obregon decries the Trump administration’s inexcusable efforts to obstruct the ability of Americans to be reimbursed for taxes that they were unlawfully compelled to pay.

Tosin Akintola reports on yet additional evidence that Trump’s tariffs punitive taxes on Americans’ purchases of imports are failing – and that Trump is looting taxpayers to mute the political consequences of this failure.

Bob Graboyes shows why “the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is dangerous for America and perhaps even more so for its Democratic fan base.”

Jason Riley, writing at City Journal, busts currently popular, sophomoric myths about America and slavery. Two slices:

Slavery was neither central to America’s founding nor the primary source of the country’s subsequent prosperity. Yet both ideas have gained currency in recent years, making it likely that the nation’s slaveholding past will figure prominently in commemorations of the 250th anniversary of American independence.

Scholarly studies offering a more accurate and balanced history of slavery in the United States are not impossible to find, but they are far outnumbered by ideologically driven treatments that downplay the institution’s ubiquity across the world and throughout history. Often the aim is less to illuminate a complex subject than to emphasize the sins of the West. As a result, what should be understood as a global evil is reduced to a single narrative: Europeans and their descendants enslaving Africans—in the Western Hemisphere generally, and in the southern United States especially. End of story.

The reality is that slavery has existed since time immemorial. It has taken many forms—field hand, domestic servant, soldier, artisan, concubine—and has been practiced on every continent. “There is no region on earth that has not at some time harbored the institution,” Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson writes in the preface to Slavery and Social Death, his landmark study. “Probably, there is no group of people whose ancestors were not at one time slaves or slaveholders.” Ancient Greece and Rome were slaveholding societies, as were medieval Europe, Africa, China, Southeast Asia, the Islamic kingdoms, the Caribbean islands, and pre-Columbian America.

Nor were the magnitude and savagery of slavery in the New World unprecedented, despite recent efforts to slant the historical narrative in that direction.

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The economist Deirdre McCloskey also challenged the authors’ claim that capitalism in the West is an outgrowth of slavery. Yes, raw cotton produced by slave labor was an important commodity in the South, but the “enrichment of the modern world did not depend on cotton textiles,” McCloskey wrote. “Cotton mills, true, were pioneers in some industrial techniques, techniques applied to wool and linen as well. And many other techniques, in iron making and engineering and mining and farming had nothing to do with cotton. Britain in 1790 and the U.S. in 1860 were not nation-sized cotton mills.” Plantation slavery “made a few Southerners rich; a few Northerners, too. But it was ingenuity and innovation that enriched Americans generally.” And, contra Marx, slave labor wasn’t essential to cotton production, noted McCloskey. “By 1870, freedmen and whites produced as much cotton as the South produced in the slave time of 1860.”

A review of the Baptist, Beckert, and Johnson books by two economic historians, Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode, took no issue with the authors’ broad claims about slavery’s legacy of social inequality and frayed race relations. “However, to agree that slavery was important and evil does not mean that it was economically essential for the Industrial Revolution, for American prosperity, or even to produce cotton in the United States.” They add that the three authors’ “new history of capitalism” makes “spectacular but unsupported claims, relies on faulty reasoning, and introduces many factual inaccuracies.”

Logan Tantibanchachai wisely refuses to swallow the tales told by Hasan Piker and his ilk.

Here’s my GMU Econ colleague Bryan Caplan’s opening statement in his UATX debate on immigration with another GMU Econ colleague, Garett Jones.

David Bier is thankful that, as he puts it, “the Supreme Court is unlikely to scrap birthright citizenship, because that would open the door to mass ethnic cleansing.”

Wall Street Journal columnist Gerard Baker urges his fellow Americans to take pride in the U.S. – a country which, despite its many warts, is indeed one worth celebrating. Here’s his conclusion:

I can’t do much about this cold civil war. But as an immigrant, perhaps I’m better placed than others to make the case that America’s greatness far outweighs its faults. The U.S. economy remains the envy of the world; its capitalist system is pushing out the frontiers of technology in ways that will transform lives and enhance our already world-beating prosperity. It remains a beacon of opportunity for almost the entire world. Most remarkable isn’t that our liberal values are again under attack, but how long and how firmly they have endured. Americans embarked on a wild experiment to preserve and advance liberty 250 years ago. How many other countries’ institutions that were around in 1776 are recognizably the same today?

This isn’t a call to complacency: We are all familiar enough with the mistakes America has made and continues to make to know that supremacy isn’t guaranteed. But you would have to be incredibly ignorant to believe that the accumulated genius of America won’t survive a flawed president or three, or a bout of cultural self-loathing,

If none of this persuades you of the intrinsic greatness of this country, my fellow Americans, then at least use this historic moment to take a holiday from the bad stuff. If the British in the 1970s, a byword for national decline and institutional collapse, could find a way to celebrate what their country stood for, perhaps by focusing briefly on America’s virtues more than its vices, you’ll get a better appreciation for what it is.

Take pride in your country, America. Despite 250 years of trying, no one has been able to come up with a better one.

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… is from page 233 of the 2003 edition of Benjamin Constant’s brilliant 1815 work, Principles of Politics Applicable to All Government (Dennis O’Keefe, trans., Etienne Hoffman, ed.) [emphasis added]:

Is it an advantage, however, for a nation to set up manufactures on its own territory which, in order to furnish it with a certain money income and quantity of production, absorb more funds than the purchase of these products would have required? We can reply in the affirmative only in supposing that if these funds were not thus employed, they would not be employed at all. Now, this supposition is clearly absurd. If these funds were not employed in this way, they would be employed in some other way and more advantageously. This is to say that with a portion of these resources one would buy products which the whole lot of them is now used in producing, while the remainder would be redirected to some other branch of production which it would vitalize. Governments, in forcing their subjects to manufacture themselves things they would not voluntarily have manufactured, force them to employ their resources inefficiently. They diminish the output of their capital and their labor. They therefore diminish their wealth and thereby the national wealth.

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Ryan Owens decries “the new politics of resentment.” Two slices:

A new wave of class-baiters and grievance politicians have shown how deeply economic liberty is under attack in parts of America. We should be alarmed because economic liberty is not merely about economics; it is about human flourishing.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani recently filmed a “tax the rich” video outside the Manhattan residence of Ken Griffin, founder of Citadel. His message was clear — that wealth creators are villains. Griffin rightly called the stunt “creepy weird.” He could have added “dangerous” and “economically destructive.”

On the other side of the country, Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson mocked concerns that wealthy residents and businesses will flee Washington’s new “millionaire tax” and take their jobs with them, stating: “I think the claims that millionaires are going to leave our state are, like, super overblown. And if — the ones that leave, like, bye.”

These attitudes from leaders of some of the nation’s largest cities are not merely juvenile; they are immoral, self-defeating, and profoundly economically illiterate.

America rests on the idea that citizens are and ought to be free to rise through hard work and risk-taking. That’s what “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” is all about. If you’re confused as to why, go ask a former Soviet, Cuban, or Venezuelan.

Frederick Douglass understood all this. The former slave explained the liberation he felt when, at last, he earned wages for his work: “To understand the emotion which swelled my heart as I clasped this money, realizing that I had no master who could take it from me — that it was mine — that my hands were my own” affected him in ways few Americans today can comprehend.

Every dollar the government spends comes out of your pocket. Every “free” item provided by the state comes courtesy of a taxpayer who has a job and a family to support. When government treats private success as public property, it tears the fabric of liberty.

…..

Resentment politics and populism also make for bad economic policy.

People respond to incentives. When individuals are free to innovate and to keep a meaningful share of what they earn, prosperity grows. Individuals generally allocate resources more efficiently than centralized government planners. Families know their needs better than bureaucracies do.

Anyone who remains unconvinced that protectionism breeds cronyism should read this editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal. A slice:

President Trump is hammering away at “affordability” to help Republicans win an uphill battle to keep Congress in November. He can’t undo the damage his tariffs have done to household budgets to date, but he can keep things from getting worse.

One opportunity concerns “quartz surface products” used in some 36% of kitchen counter-tops in American homes last year. Quartz is also a popular choice for bathroom vanities, shower walls and backsplash. A handful of domestic quartz slab producers want to use Section 201 of the Trade Act of 1974 to hurt the competition: American quartz fabricators who use imported slab. If they prevail, expect costlier new homes and thousands of lost jobs in the U.S. quartz fabricating industry.

Mr. Trump can stop them, but he’ll have to disappoint the six companies that petitioned the International Trade Commission (ITC) under the banner of the Quartz Manufacturing Alliance of America. They’re led by Minnesota-based Cambria and CEO Marty Davis, a big Trump donor.

The ITC ruled 2-1 in April in favor of a “global safeguard” petition alleging that quartz imports are causing “substantial” harm to domestic producers. The lone Republican on the commission voted against the petition.

“Exxon says goodbye to New Jersey.” A slice:

Politicians like to blame companies for acting in their self-interest, but that’s the easy way out. If New Jersey and Delaware want to retain companies, let alone attract them, they need to take a hard look at what they’re doing to drive so many away.

The Wall Street Journal‘s Kimberley Strassel is right: “A federal registration fee [for automobiles] is one of the worst Republican ideas to come along in a while.” A slice:

Policywise, this idea is as short-sighted as they come. The GOP will bleat that its new Frankenstein targets only EV and hybrid owners. True, until it doesn’t. What Republicans build, Democrats will supersize. As Americans for Tax Reform’s Grover Norquist warned: “As soon as the Democrats get into power, they’ll say, ‘Oh my goodness, there’s the gas-car loophole. We must have the car tax on all cars.’ . . . It won’t take them two weeks to do it.”

And don’t think it will stop there, not after every local DMV has become a branch of the Internal Revenue Service. With that plumbing in place, Democrats can expand (or exempt) the “fee”—and plenty of new climate-related taxes—with infinite creativity. Greater and varying annual amounts for gas-guzzlers, luxury rides, vehicles that choke metro centers. Lower fees based on income, profession or government-favored safety features. Hedge-fund owner car tax: $2,000. Union teacher car tax: $11. What could possibly go wrong?

Politically, it’s even more foolish. Millions of Americans have bought electric and hybrid vehicles in recent years, and Congress paid them mass subsidies to do so. Republicans—who say they want to run on “affordability”—want to penalize these households with a brand new bill on Oct. 1. (Yes, these geniuses would impose this tax one month before the election.) Does the GOP fail to realize this pool contains any number of would-be (but won’t be) GOP voters?

Andrew Stuttaford reveals how China meets – “meets” – its green goals:

And thus the FT’s Edward White can only note that it “appears” that China [in its reports on carbon emissions] is now “excluding non-energy uses of fossil fuels. “

Convenient!

Ben Zycher continues to write wisely about energy. A slice:

There is a view, seemingly popular among many, that what is good for the oil industry must be bad for America—that is, the rest of us—and vice versa. That this is a view utterly childish should be obvious: What is good for America is good for America, and whether that condition is good for the oil industry is neither here nor there as a matter of general concern. But it is obvious as well that years of policies designed to substitute unconventional energy in place of fossil fuels have yielded a sharp increase in costs and a decline in political support for such policies. The reason too is obvious: A sharp increase in the cost of energy makes most people worse off. Baseless litigation against the fossil energy producers would have the same effect: It is an attack on national wealth and the well-being of ordinary people. It is a pure money grab.

My GMU Econ colleague Vincent Geloso explores the relationship between monetary policy and birth rates.

Matt Yglesias tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome)

I am completely against involving “planners” in any of this. All I think is that a landowner should be allowed to build whatever he thinks there is a market for on the land that he owns, subject to bona fide safety concerns.

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… is from page 234 of William Shughart’s paper, “Robert Tollison: Underappreciated Economist,” which is a chapter in the hot-off-the-press book Unsung Heroes of the Market: The 24 Underrated Economists You Need to Know – a volume edited by Robert Whaples, Christopher Coyne, Gregory Robson, and Diana Thomas:

Tollison saw few differences between antitrust law enforcement and the perhaps more familiar industry-specific regulation of prices and entry conditions (e.g., public utilities). Both are vulnerable to influence by well-organized, politically powerful special interests having stakes in policy processes and, in catering to such lobbying pressure, undermine rather than promote competition.

DBx: Pictured here is Bob Tollison (1942-2016). He was a senior colleague of mine at GMU Econ in the late 1980s.

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Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal.

Editor:

How can you be so foolish as to oppose tariffs on quartz surface products (“Tariffs That Are as Dumb as Rocks,” June 1)?

As for me, I thank the U.S. government for protecting us poor, hapless Americans from heedlessly purchasing, at low prices, imported quartz surface products and thereby harming our great country!

Who cannot see that such protectionism is essential for America to guard herself against the wiles of the Chinese? Who dares deny that quartz surface products are a critical good for which we must, by all means, avoid dependence on foreigners? Who will not acknowledge the obvious strategic importance – to both America’s economy and national defense – of the quartz-surface-products industry? Who is so myopic as to overlook all the spin-off technological benefits that we Americans will enjoy by producing our own quartz surface products?

And who is so cynical as to portray U.S quartz-surface-products producers’ quest for protection as self-interested rather than as patriotic?

I’ll tell you who! Globalist cosmopolitan elite heads-up-their-butts academic economic “experts,” that’s who! Only they are blind to the fact that an American economy that imports too much quartz surface product is an American economy in perilous decline. Let every American of common sense join me in expressing gratitude to our government for protecting this vital industry and putting America first!

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

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Here’s a letter to Project Syndicate.

Editor:

Glenn Hubbard rightly denounces Trump’s tariffs, but he weakens his case by conceding, to protectionists, points that shouldn’t be conceded (“The Policy Pivot Trump Needs,” May 26). Most importantly, it’s simply untrue that what Mr. Hubbard calls “distributional effects” – the demise of some industries and jobs and the rise of others – are uniquely caused, as many protectionists insist, by trade deficits.

Any and all economic changes – including improvements in labor-saving technology and changes in consumer tastes – affect some domestic industries, jobs, and regions negatively as they affect other domestic industries, jobs, and regions positively. Nothing in economics or ethics justifies singling out for special consideration the “distributional effects” caused by foreigners’ strong desire to use their dollars to invest in the U.S. rather than to buy U.S. exports. Such a concession inadvertently treats as factual two of protectionism’s most egregious fallacies, namely, that trade with foreigners differs categorically from trade with fellow citizens, and that countries that run trade deficits suffer greater economic disruption than do countries with ‘balanced’ trade.

Mr. Hubbard also mistakenly accepts as true the false belief that the dollar’s role as global reserve currency is a “detriment” to manufacturing employment. The steady decline in U.S. manufacturing employment, as a share of total nonfarm employment, began in 1954 (only to slow down a bit starting in 2010).* If this decline in manufacturing employment resulted from the dollar’s reserve-currency status pushing manufacturing out of the U.S., U.S. manufacturing output would also have fallen. But it hasn’t. Today, U.S. manufacturing output is 153 percent higher than it was in 1975 (the last year the U.S. ran an annual trade surplus) and 464 percent higher than it was in 1954.

Mr. Hubbard should continue to speak out against protectionism. But his welcome voice would be stronger if he were to stop treating as factual so many of protectionism’s fallacies.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

* See attached screenshot.

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UPDATE: At Facebook, David Henderson offered this fair comment on my letter:

I read his piece and while I largely agree with your criticism, I didn’t find the part where he says the problems are uniquely caused by trade deficits.

Indeed, Hubbard wrote, “Trump’s economic agenda recognizes the adverse effects of globalization and technological advances on certain parts of American society, in contrast to economists’ emphasis on averages and overall benefits.” So notice that he granted part of your point–that technological advances can hurt certain segments of society.

And I replied there:

Fair enough. But the thrust of the piece is that the “imbalances” are real, with troublesome downsides that should be addressed, although with policies other than tariffs.

One can write a piece about the proper role of government in protecting workers from the downsides of economic change. But Hubbard’s piece is about trade – specifically, about what he (unfortunately) grants to be trade “imbalances.” I wonder how many readers will encounter his mention of technological advances and think that Hubbard is offering counsel, not about how to respond to trade deficits, but about how to respond to economic change more generally. I doubt many (but perhaps I’m mistaken). I’ll grant that the policies that Hubbard proposes at the end do address the more general phenomenon of economic change (rather than only change caused by trade or trade deficits). But, again, the thrust of the piece is about U.S. trade deficits, with the suggestion – if not strictly the logical implication – that these deficits are a sufficiently distinct source of economic problems, one that warrants attention and policy responses.

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Eric Boehm calls on governments to “stop giving property tax breaks to senior citizens.” [DBx: Eric is right, and I say this as a senior citizen.] A slice:

The federal government’s massive wealth redistribution machine is showering older Americans with money seized from the paychecks of younger, generally poorer, working-age people. But when it comes time for senior citizens to help pay property taxes—which foot the bill for schools and other state and local government services in most parts of the country—politicians want to give the olds a free pass. How is that fair? Where’s the payroll tax break for Americans under 40?

Here’s wisdom from Arnold Kling:

With computer technology, those who can, create. Those who can’t, regulate. Europeans are the leading regulators of tech, and you can thank them for the pop-ups that you get asking you whether or not you accept cookies. To me, those epitomize the wasteful, ineffectual policies that the regulators come up with.

The left leans heavily on “we.” That is why I cringed when I read Zvi [Mowshowitz] saying “we can steer this technology.”

The left wants us to think that “we” are all in this together, opposing the “they” of corporate elites and plutocrats. But my thought is that there is a narrow “we” of political elites, and I have no desire to give them more power.

Bob Graboyes reimagines commercial aviation.

GMU Econ alum Daniel Smith recounts “the bitter lessons of sugar control in World War I.” Here’s his conclusion:

Markets are not problems to be solved by committees; they are discovery processes that coordinate millions of decisions without central direction. When governments try to override that process, even with the best of intentions and the full powers of wartime emergency, the result is not order but the very chaos they sought to prevent.

The Trump administration deserves applause for rolling back this Biden administration EPA regulation.

Scott Lincicome and Chad Smitson explain why so-called “pro-worker” policies fail. A slice:

[Niklas] Engbom’s May 2026 update looks at worker-level data across individuals from 15 OECD countries, confirming his earlier finding that life-cycle wage growth is steeper in more fluid markets, but also demonstrating two additional, and important, findings.

First, the benefits of a fluid labor market do not solely accrue to job-switchers—even individuals in “continuing employment spells” experience faster wage growth in more fluid labor markets. Engbom offers two explanations for this result: human capital accumulation and employer competition for workers. In particular, workers in less rigid labor markets will see more job opportunities and thus have a stronger incentive to invest in their skills and make themselves better candidates. Their improvements increase their productivity and output—and, subsequently, their wages—even if they never leave their current job. At the same time, the heightened labor market fluidity pushes firms to raise pay to retain their employees who face lower barriers to switching jobs.

Second, Engbom finds that labor market fluidity has important implications for early-career individuals. In a dynamic labor market, workers will not only choose to develop their skills in the chance of a better opportunity elsewhere, but also actively sort themselves into “high learning” positions that might further this opportunity. This increased sorting leads young professionals to experience higher early-career wage growth as they become more productive. Rigid labor markets, meanwhile, experience the opposite results.

George Will describes how drones are helping the Ukrainians resist Putin’s aggressions. Here’s his conclusion:

A former senior Russian government official, writing anonymously for the Economist, says the war Russia started has reached a situation known in chess as “zugzwang,” when every move worsens the position. By the end of this year, two current unknowns might be known: how Putin might lash out in response to the pain of Ukraine’s military revival. And how Trump might lash out in response to the painful (to him) fact that, refuting his clairvoyance, Ukraine holds good and improving cards.