Honor our veterans and don’t efface their experience with ideology: Freakonomics & the draft.

My understanding is that “Freakanomics” is the application of economic thinking that oversimplifies human behavior to the analysis of actions that economics typically doesn’t address. The thinking goes that if people are always left free to make choices for themselves about what to do for themselves, society as a whole will be best off.

When will this idiocy end? Isn’t there some recognition somewhere that individuals making decisions that are best for them might in the aggregate hurt everyone? And when is a person really free to make a decision one way or another about whether, say, he can go to law school or he should enlist in the armed forces?

It’s Veterans Day. It’s always been a special day in my family. My father was a soldier and POW in WWII. WWII was a difficult war with an outcome that was not certain until very near the end (and even then it took a new and horrific weapon to finally end it). The U.S. and the Soviet Union won it. My father didn’t get drafted, but he enlisted because he was about to be drafted. The U.S. military was a genuine citizen’s force. My father was changed forever by the experience — mostly for the better, but it was by no means an experience he wished me to undergo in the absence of a very good reason.

I cannot help but be humbled on Veterans Day.

But Steven Levitt is much too clever for all of that. He’d tell my dad that people like him who were forced into the military in WWII were the “wrong people”! Given Mr. Levitt’s brilliance, it’s a wonder we won WWII and haven’t won wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that we’ve now fought 2 and 4 years longer, respectively, than we fought WWII:

The idea that a draft presents a reasonable solution is completely backwards. First, it puts the “wrong” people in the military — people who are either uninterested in a military life, not well equipped for one, or who put a very high value on doing something else. From an economic perspective, those are all decent reasons for not wanting to be in the military. (I understand that there are other perspectives — for example, a sense of debt or duty to one’s country — but if a person feels that way, it will be factored into his or her interest in military life.)

One thing markets are good at is allocating people to tasks. They accomplish this through wages. As such, we should pay U.S. soldiers a fair wage to compensate them for the risks they take! A draft is essentially a large, very concentrated tax on those who are drafted. Economic theory tells us that is an extremely inefficient way to accomplish our goal.

When ideas replace the lessons of experience, we dishonor those who have undergone the experience.