This is the end of August for 2017, and I haven’t gotten to everything I was going to post this year, but it was far from nothing and there is always next year. Anyway, it’s time to leave you again with a useful eponymy that sums up the month we spent together in this context, and that is Stein’s law:
“If something can’t go on forever, it will stop.”
Herbert Stein is an economist (you may notice a pattern if you’ve been following the last week here), who received his Ph.D from the University of Chicago in 1958. Unlike some other illustrious personas featured in this series, Stein was in his forties when he received his doctorate. In the intervening years, and onward to his death in 1999, Stein was employed by the American Enterprise Institute, the Wall Street Journal, the Council of Economic Advisers, and various other agencies. Stein was a strong proponent of regulating the economy through government deficit spending, still a radical idea during his lifetime, and a skeptic of Reaganomics (the idea that cutting taxes on the wealthy will have a trickle-down effect on the working class). Herbert Stein is also the father of Ben Stein, also an economist and speechwriter but famous for Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Win Ben Stein’s Money, and the intelligent design creationism documentary Expelled.
Stein’s Law focuses mainly on trends, like growth in a particular industry, or deficits. The underlying idea is that it’s not necessary to regulate the end of certain trends, because their limited shelf life means that they will burn themselves out eventually. This does not mean that the best option is always to let things go until they find their natural end; if a trend is responsible for negative externalities, for example, it may be wisest to curtail the trend before it has the opportunity to inflict maximum damage.
I don’t mean this to imply that this series will stop now. I’m shelving it for another 11 months, but there are still notes that I have that aren’t written up yet, and there is no external entity forcing me to wrap it up yet. But consider that someday I will run out of material, or drive, or both, and then I’ll have to end the series. That’s just natural.