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The Substack editor is having a weird glitch this morning! The "image not found" is the album cover for Depeche Mode, People Are People, so use your imagination :-).

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It's also super-glitchy and adding extra subscriber buttons, sorry about that ...

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Some economists disparage occupational licensure. Some disparage public education. Some disparage ignorance. But if these three things are substitutes, which policy identifies the optimal mix?

One economist argued that a system of widespread education is needed to help reduce the social instability generated by panics/mobs/zealotry--but also argued that putting teachers on the public payroll does not provide sufficient incentive to provide socially optimal education. Instead, this economist argued for government to promote --

"the study of science and philosophy, which the state might render almost universal among all people of middling or more than middling rank and fortune; not by giving salaries to teachers in order to make them negligent and idle, but by instituting some sort of probation, even in the higher and more difficult sciences, to be undergone by every person before he was permitted to exercise any liberal profession, or before he could be received as a candidate for any honourable office of trust or profit. If the state imposed upon this order of men the necessity of learning, it would have no occasion to give itself any trouble about providing them with proper teachers. They would soon find better teachers for themselves than any whom the state could provide for them. Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition…."

Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Chap. I, Pt. II, Art. III. (1776) (advocating professional licensure)

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