Null Hypothesis.

AuthorCohen, Rachel
PositionTEN MILES SQUARE - Alex Tabarrok - Interview

A libertarian economist set out to prove that federal regulations are strangling the economy. That's not what he found.

Alex Tabarrok is no one's idea of a big-government liberal. A libertarian economist at George Mason University, he's best known for cofounding Marginal Revolution, one of the most popular economics blogs on the internet. A deep skeptic of government bureaucracies, he has written favorably of private prisons, private airports, and even private cities.

That's why a study he co-published earlier this year is so noteworthy. When Tabarrok and his former grad student Nathan Goldschlag set out to measure how federal regulations impact business growth, they were sure they'd find proof that regulations were dragging down the economy. But they didn't. No matter how they sliced the data, they could find no evidence that federal regulation was bad for business.

Economists--like politicians, arguing spouses, and, yes, journalists--tend to interpret evidence in a way that corroborates their existing worldview. And the dynamics of academia weigh against publishing findings that fail to support a researcher's original hypothesis. But Tabarrok published his study anyway. That makes him something of a rarity.

Tabarrok came by his libertarianism early. When he was growing up in Toronto, his family would debate political and ethical issues over dinner every night. One evening the Tabarroks were debating the moral value of rock and roll. "I said, 'Well, look at this band, Rush: they even quote this philosopher Ayn Rand in their songs,"' he recalled recently. "My mother said, 'Oh yeah, you'd probably like her,' and I felt embarrassed because I was using this in an argument and I actually hadn't read any Ayn Rand before." Tabarrok thinks his mother probably regrets her suggestion to this day.

Tabarrok made his way to the U.S. for graduate studies at George Mason, returning there as a professor in 2002. He now directs its Center for Study of Public Choice and is the economics chair at GMU's Mercatus Center, a research institute heavily funded by Charles Koch and cofounded by Richard Fink, a former Koch Industries executive. The center, which boasts ties to prominent rightwing groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council, funds research to promote free-market policy solutions and the rollback of regulations. (Mercatus is Latin for "market.") The Wall Street Journal has called Mercatus "the most important think tank you've never heard of."

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