Russell Roberts's Blog, page 102

Covid and Climate “Science”

(Don Boudreaux)

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My latest column for AIER was prompted by my reading of physicist Steven Koonin’s superb 2021 book, Unsetted? – a book detailing the reality that much of the science (and even more the media’s science “reporting”) used to drum up hysteria about the changing climate is incomplete or shoddy and sometimes even corrupt. And very little of this science can be truly said to be “settled.” There are ominous parallels between climate ‘science’ and covid ‘science.’ Two slices:

A public frightened into believing that some collective calamity is in the offing is a public more eager for, or at least more docile in the face of, authoritarian efforts marketed as necessary to prevent the calamity.

With the turn of almost every page of Unsettled? I was struck by the ominous parallels between the mainstream narrative on the climate and the mainstream narrative on COVID. Pointing out such parallels wasn’t at all Koonin’s purpose; in fact, I suspect that he himself took no notice of these parallels. And, of course, I’d earlier been alerted by other writers to these parallels. But the length and reality of these parallels weren’t driven home to me until I’d read Koonin’s tract.

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Science is an especially sweet and nutritious fruit of the Enlightenment. But an even sweeter and more nutritious fruit is the recognition that truth – including, but not limited to, scientific truth – is only reliably approached without ever being absolutely and forever secured, and approached only through open inquiry, discussion, debate, and tolerance for dissenting opinions and perspectives.

Too many elite intellectuals and public officials today – and, I fear, also too many ordinary men and women – have lost sight of the fact that science and reason are tools for improving our understanding and for supplying us with some information that’s useful for making the complicated and inescapably value-laden trade-offs that, in this vale, we must make. The belief that science is a source of complete and godlike knowledge is not merely mistaken, it’s a toxic fuel of authoritarianism when it’s combined with the false understanding of social problems as being a science project to be ‘solved’ by persons in power.

Some Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Charlotta Stern summarizes the history and current state of the Swedish labor market.

My GMU Econ colleague Bryan Caplan shares his favorite pages from Chapter One of his new book, Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation.

Jeff Jacoby’s assessment of Gorbachev is realistic. Here are his concluding paragraphs:

Fortunately for the former Soviet republics, Gorbachev’s tolerance for slaughter was low. He was too decent to successfully rule an evil empire. When he first rose to the highest position in the Kremlin in 1985, the longtime Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko vouched for his ruthlessness. “Comrades, this man has a nice smile,” Gromyko told the Politburo. “But he has teeth of iron.”

He didn’t live up to that billing. Maybe he wished he could be more brutal, but ultimately Gorbachev chose not to follow the path of unlimited bloodshed. As it became clear that the great Soviet revival he had hoped to engineer would come to naught, he did not resort to bullets to cling to power. “He will go down as a giant not because he succeeded but because he failed repeatedly,” wrote R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. in The American Spectator. “But in his repeated failures he made the world a better place.” There are worse ways to be remembered.

George Will looks back on elites and their role. A slice:

The mandarins who elicited the journalistic swoons that [David] Halberstam detested were not satanic. But they had, as Tenner says, “the disadvantage of unbroken success and cumulative advantage that so many experience”: “The confidence conferred by mandarin education can be seductive when not tempered by career reversals. Men and women sometimes fail because in eluding failure they come to ignore their own fallibility.”

Tenner cites Robert Hutchings — scholar, diplomat and former chairman of the National Intelligence Council — warning that academic careers can make people susceptible to self-deception “because they have been socialized in a world of theory in which their ideas have no consequences.” [Edward] Tenner says Americans today live in “Immoderation Nation, swinging between uncritical admiration and scorn” for elites. He hopes that “the mandarins of the future will include more people who, unlike the [McGeorge] Bundys of the world, have crashed once or twice on the fast track.”

Max Borders decries the mistaken and malignant impulse to blame capitalism. A slice:

The problem isn’t capitalism. The problem isn’t greed per se–or maybe it is. Too many people want to live at others’ expense or charge the national credit card, which – at 138 percent of GDP plus unfunded liabilities – is maxed out.

So when it comes to laying blame, we have to start getting more specific. Yes, there are bad individual actors, bad corporate actors, and bad government actors. But instead of blaming entrepreneurial capitalism, which is just a system for people sustainably to serve each other, it’s time to blame those who keep intervening to “save capitalism” or those who keep trying to save us from capitalism. And it’s time to blame those whose failures of imagination always end up in one of interventionism’s ideological ditches: regulation or redistribution.

Ian Vásquez reflects on “Chile and Latin America’s Disposable Constitutions.”

The straw man is currently wreaking havoc on the people of Chengdu.

Here’s the abstract of a new paper by Michaéla Schippers, John P. A. Ioannidis, and Ari Joffe: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

A series of aggressive restrictive measures were adopted around the world in 2020–2022 to attempt to prevent SARS-CoV-2 from spreading. However, it has become increasingly clear the most aggressive (lockdown) response strategies may involve negative side-effects such as a steep increase in poverty, hunger, and inequalities. Several economic, educational, and health repercussions have fallen disproportionately on children, students, young workers, and especially on groups with pre-existing inequalities such as low-income families, ethnic minorities, and women. This has led to a vicious cycle of rising inequalities and health issues. For example, educational and financial security decreased along with rising unemployment and loss of life purpose. Domestic violence surged due to dysfunctional families being forced to spend more time with each other. In the current narrative and scoping review, we describe macro-dynamics that are taking place because of aggressive public health policies and psychological tactics to influence public behavior, such as mass formation and crowd behavior. Coupled with the effect of inequalities, we describe how these factors can interact toward aggravating ripple effects. In light of evidence regarding the health, economic and social costs, that likely far outweigh potential benefits, the authors suggest that, first, where applicable, aggressive lockdown policies should be reversed and their re-adoption in the future should be avoided. If measures are needed, these should be non-disruptive. Second, it is important to assess dispassionately the damage done by aggressive measures and offer ways to alleviate the burden and long-term effects. Third, the structures in place that have led to counterproductive policies should be assessed and ways should be sought to optimize decision-making, such as counteracting groupthink and increasing the level of reflexivity. Finally, a package of scalable positive psychology interventions is suggested to counteract the damage done and improve humanity’s prospects.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 23 of Deirdre McCloskey’s excellent 2022 volume, Beyond Positivism, Behaviorism, and Neoinstitutionalism in Economics (footnote deleted):

The omnicompetence assumed in a policy science is regularly accompanied by a lack of ethical reflection. I ask, Where do you get off, Ms. Economist, in thinking that you are qualified in science or entitled in justice to “nudge” liberated adults?

An Open Letter to the Directors of the American Economic Association

(Don Boudreaux)

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Directors of the American Economic Association

AEA Directors:

In advance of the AEA’s annual convention next January in New Orleans, you inform all AEA members of the following:

All registrants will be required to be vaccinated against COVID-19 and to have received at least one booster. High-quality masks (i.e., KN-95 or better) will be required in all indoor conference spaces. These requirements are planned for the well-being of all participants. Participants are also encouraged to test for COVID-19 before traveling to the meeting.

Your announcement ensures that I will not attend the meetings under such absurd restrictions. Furthermore, it makes me weep for my profession, for it is strong evidence that today’s leaders of the world’s most prestigious organization of professional economists are unaware of basic facts about covid and, worse, ignorant of basic tenets of economics.

Start with this reality: While being vaccinated against covid might prevent serious illness in the vaccinated, it doesn’t prevent the virus’s spread. So there’s no negative externality that is avoided by requiring that all attendees be vaccinated and boosted. Each attendee can personally escape danger by being vaccinated without requiring that other attendees be vaccinated – or, indeed, that other attendees wear masks.

Even if you deny the reality that vaccination doesn’t prevent the spread of the virus, the effectiveness of the vaccine to substantially reduce the risk of serious suffering from covid should alone suffice to render pointless your draconian requirements. Or, at any rate, such is the conclusion that would be reached by any economist of competence.

Next let’s recognize the wisdom of cost-benefit calculations and the reality of the margin (remember those?!). Because (1) many AEA members are young and, thus, at very little natural risk from covid, and (2) by this point most members, regardless of age, likely have already had covid and, thus, (as even the CDC now admits) enjoy natural immunity, it’s reasonable for any member to conclude that, for him or her, the costs, although perhaps slight, of being vaccinated exceed the benefits.

Yet in issuing your draconian requirements you ignore three realities that we economists (should) teach our undergraduates: First, every benefit has a cost; second, at some point an additional increment of the benefit isn’t worth what that incremental benefit costs; and third, because each adult’s preferences – including that for risk – is subjective and differs from those of other adults, there is no objectively ‘best’ level of risk reduction that applies to any group of people each of whom is able to choose his or her preferred level of risk reduction.

You also ignore the margin with your mask mandate. Most attendees will fly to New Orleans in airplanes in which the majority of passengers will be unmasked (and many, by the way, also unvaccinated). All attendees will dine at restaurants most of the patrons of which will be unmasked (and many unvaccinated). Many attendees when not in session will drink at bars, shop in stores, visit museums, and ride in elevators elbow to elbow with unmasked (and unvaccinated) fellow dinners, shoppers, and tourists. The Hilton Riverside itself – the convention’s main hotel – has no vaccination or mask requirements! It’s therefore unrealistic to suppose that the marginal benefit of requiring the wearing of KN-95 masks while presenting – or listening to – the presentation of papers, or while interviewing for a job, exceeds the costs that come in the form of the discomfort of obstructed breathing and the difficulty of muffled communications.

I earnestly hope that you’ll drop these extreme requirements – requirements that are not merely pointless and in disregard of the ethical agency of individual AEA members, but also pose a risk to the physical health of some individuals and reduce the benefits of professional engagement to everyone.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 147 of former Caltech physics professor and provost – and former Energy Department undersecretary during the Obama administration – Steven Koonin’s excellent 2021 book, Unsettled? What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters:

Floods, droughts, and fires bring great tragedy and sorrow, and their consequences can be devastating. As the world gets more and more connected through communications, we become more and more aware of these events when they happen. But that does not make them “further proof” of climate change. In the end, the data tells us there’s not very much changing very quickly with precipitation, either globally or in the US.

DBx: Does the fact that in August 2022, for the first time since 1997, there were no Atlantic hurricanes or even tropical storms constitute “further proof” that the climate isn’t changing? Of course not, for weather isn’t climate. The fact that weather isn’t climate should be kept in mind when you next encounter, as you surely will, some pundit or politician proclaiming that this flood and that drought and those blizzards are “further proof” that the climate is changing in ways that portend calamity.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 83 of an advance copy of Samuel Gregg’s excellent and important forthcoming book, The Next American Economy: Nation, State, and Markets in an Uncertain World:

There is also something perverse about using the state to encourage people to produce goods and services that fewer and fewer people want or need, or to stay in jobs being rendered redundant by technology. It is the equivalent of a very wealthy person deciding to purchase secretly all the cars made by an American car manufacturer but insisting on anonymity because he doesn’t want the producer and his employees to know that no one wants or needs their cars anymore. Should they discover that their products and their jobs are effectively supported by charity, it’s reasonable to suppose that the satisfaction which they gained from producing unwanted and unneeded cars would be radically diminished.

DBx: Yes!

Bas van der Vossen and Jason Brennan, in 2018, made a complementary argument, which I highlighted here.

The fundamental point is that “to produce” means “to satisfy the most urgent consumption desires.” It’s a fundamental point that is missed by Oren Cass and some other advocates of industrial policy.

A Lesson from Today’s NASA

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal:

Editor:

Describing U.S. government efforts to return astronauts to the moon, Robert Poole reports that NASA’s Space Launch System “and its Orion capsule have been developed using old technology and NASA’s traditional cost-plus procurement process, in which contractors get reimbursed for design changes and cost overruns” (“The Last Gasp of 20th-Century NASA,” September 3). He further observes that the space-agency’s attempt to build “a new launch vehicle with obsolete technology is emblematic of NASA’s approach to this late, overbudget program.”

In this episode is a lesson that extends well beyond NASA and space travel. The fact that a government agency – especially one with NASA’s prominent profile – pursues its high-tech mission using technology that’s both excessively costly and obsolete is reason enough to reject industrial policy as a means of enhancing the efficiency of the entire American economy and ensuring that we’ll be leaders in ‘the industries of the future.’

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

Regulation: “Phone Bill Too High? Blame the FCC”

(Don Boudreaux)

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Continuing with my effort to archive at Cafe Hayek as many as possible of my writings, I paste below the fold the full text of my review, which appeared in the Winter 1997 issue of Regulation, of Paul MacAvoy’s 1996 book, The Failure of Antitrust and Regulation to Establish Competition in Long-Distance Telephone Services.

(more…)

Some Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Robert Poole explains that NASA “is stuck in the past.” Two slices:

SLS [NASA’s Space Launch System] and its Orion capsule have been developed using old technology and NASA’s traditional cost-plus procurement process, in which contractors get reimbursed for design changes and cost overruns. Former NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver writes in her new book, “Escaping Gravity,” that the agency is paying the manufacturing company Aerojet Rocketdyne $150 million apiece to refurbish the outdated RS-25 outdated engines—$600 million a flight. It is no wonder that taxpayers so far have put nearly $30 billion into the Artemis moon-launch program before its first launch: $12 billion for the first SLS, $14 billion for two Orion crew capsules and $3.6 billion for new SLS launch facilities at Cape Canaveral.

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SLS is Congress and NASA traditionalists’ last attempt to preserve the old ways. If SLS fails to meet its mission objectives on its first test flight, Congress shouldn’t continue pouring billions of taxpayer dollars into this 20th-century approach.

(DBx: Proponents of industrial policy should explain why, if politics so dramatically increases NASA’s costs and compels it to stick with old technologies, we Americans can nevertheless be assured that when politicians seize the authority to allocate multiple times more resources than are used by NASA, politics will improve the allocation of resources as it wisely leads us to embrace the ‘industries of the future.’ Why, it’s almost as if industrial-policy advocates believe in miracles.)

John Staddon applauds the American Economic Association for refusing to recognize as a legitimate niche of economic science so-called “stratification economics.” (Also applauding the AEA’s decision is George Leef.)

Allen Guelzo reviews David Hackett Fischer’s new book, African Founders, American Liberty. A slice:

But if there is any message in African Founders, it is that there is no one racial “center” to the American story, that the “contributions of black Americans” have been to a syncretism that celebrates liberty, and as part of a constantly shifting, constantly expanding chorus, not as an alternative solo voice. Fischer is frankly disturbed that “the tone of much American historical writing” has “turned deeply negative,” and abandoned the celebration of the “vibrant traditions of freedom and liberty and the rule of law” in favor of “strident demands for ‘political correctness’” and for historical narratives which are “deliberate falsehoods, actively concocted . . . in new forms of rhetoric and communication.” Fischer is staggered by the claim that the American Revolution was a defense of slavery. How can that be, when Britain’s German mercenaries noted that “you do not see a regiment” in the Continental Army “in which there is not a large number of blacks”? Africans did not contradict American ideas of freedom; they embraced them and enlarged them alongside other Americans “by linking those ideas to a larger spirit of equality and humanity.”

Fischer decries the notion that racism is systemic to America. “Ideologies of racism are errors of modernity,” not of the American Founding, and to condemn America as ineffably racist is not only “fundamentally false” but “misses the successful efforts of twelve generations of Americans” to eradicate it, and to miss their “positive achievements and its central dynamics.” But the objection will arise at once that Fischer is describing just one strain of racism, as though only the fully formed development of race in “modernity” counts as a definition, when there are cognate notions—tribalism, language, religion, nationalism, ethnicity—that have operated as lethal forerunners (and modern cognates) to race since classical times.

David Simon describes the Orwellian-named “Inflation Reduction Act” as “Old Time ‘Global Warming’ Religion.”

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy argues that the only real and substantive similarity that Biden’s student-loan ‘forgiveness’ shares with the Payroll Protection Program (PPP) is that “[t]hey are both terrible policies.”

David Henderson remembers the late economist Betsy Bailey.

Juliette Sellgren talks with Matt Mitchell about “the continuing punishment of criminal records.”

Nick Gillespie talks with Corey DeAngelis about a silver-lining around the covid-lockdown insanity: greater support for school choice.

Debbie Lerman explains what a pandemic cannot do. Two slices:

A pandemic cannot impose mandates or lockdowns.

A pandemic cannot block borders or force people to stop traveling.

A pandemic cannot shutter schools – overnight or otherwise.

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In case there’s any doubt that the effects of a pandemic are separate and distinct from society’s response to the pandemic, we can take a look at Sweden, where schools were never shut down, and where there was no learning loss (ref) and much less devastation to schoolchildren than in countries that closed schools (ref) during the Covid pandemic.

Martin Kulldorff tweets:

The pandemic exposed the true character of people. It has been both stunning and fascinating to watch.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from pages 51-52 of my late Nobel laureate colleague Jim Buchanan‘s important 1979 article “Politics Without Romance,” as this article is reprinted in volume 1 of The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan: The Logical Foundations of Constitutional Liberty:

But the 19th- and 20th-century fallacy in political thought was embodied in the presumption that electoral requirements were in themselves sufficient to hold government‘s Leviathan-like proclivities in check, the presumption that, so long as there were constitutional guarantees for free and periodic elections, the range and extent of governmental action would be controlled. Only in the middle of this century have we come to recognize that such electoral constraints do not keep governments with the implied “contract” through which they might have been established….