That’s Jayne Mansfield, labelled during the 1950s “the cleavage queen” and “the poor man’s Monroe.” She died in 1967 in a truly horrible car accident that within three months prompted the Transportation Department to propose strength requirements for the underside guards that hang parallel to the ground on the backs of tractor-trailers (and which eventually came to be called “Mansfield bars”). A final regulation appeared … almost 30 years later.
The reason for the delay was a takeover of the federal government, starting during World War II and accelerating rapidly afterward, by economists. In the case of Mansfield bars, economists prevented the regulation from being finalized because it couldn’t pass a cost-benefit analysis that initially assigned zero value to human life, then assigned $200,000, and only much later (with an assist from Harvard’s Thomas Schelling) assigned $3 million, which finally did the trick. Today a human life is worth about $10 million. (Not that you asked.)
Here is how Herbert Stein, chairman of Richard Nixon’s Council of Economic Advisers, who first arrived in Washington during the New Deal, described opportunities for economists after World War II:
It was almost as if someone had suddenly decreed that the language of the government would be Latin. There would be a great demand for people who could speak Latin. So there was a great demand in Washington for people who could speak economics. There was also a large supply of them, who had come for the war and didn’t want to go home again.
Economists ended the Vietnam draft. Economists deregulated airlines, trains, and trucks. Economists ended virtually all antitrust enforcement. In the Trump White House, the economist Peter Navarro, having got sidelined on economic policy, got assigned to something more trivial: managing the deadly Covid epidemic. Here is how he justified the assignment: “In the face of mortal danger, it doesn’t matter one whit what your expertise is.” Navarro learned this from the Matt Damon movie, The Martian.
The Economicist (eh-co-nom-i-cist) takeover of the federal government, which began to fall into academic disrepute after the Great Recession of 2007-9, creating a fascinating literature, is the subject of my latest New Republic piece. I spent much of the past summer research and writing it, and it appears in the latest print edition. I hope you’ll read it here.