Russell Roberts's Blog, page 107
August 23, 2022
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 1 of the June 2022 typescript of Deirdre McCloskey’s paper, forthcoming in the Erasmus Journal, “Most Policy is Impossible”:
Yet most rights, except in a society of utter slaves in the silver mines of Laurion, are implemented by DIY, door locks, self-protection, shopping trips, family life, friendships, neighbors, mutual respect, blame, fictions, dreams, and a liberty of choice having little or nothing to do with state coercions by kings or parliaments. Wikipedia is a spontaneous order. The international order of nations evolves with no world state supervising. The German language evolves through the non-state action of adolescents, not through state-financed committees of professors. The stocking of US grocery stores evolves through the supplying and the demanding of 30, 000 or 40,000 new packaged consumer goods every year, under one percent of which become regular items. A society not entirely supervised by a tyrannical state or by brutal masters evolves largely by itself in art, science, sports, language, journalism, cuisine, hobbies, manners, child raising, conversation. There is no case that state coercions are any more foundational, and a good case that they are much less so, than ethics and convenience, what philosophers of language call ‘conversational implicatures’ and what the rest of us call common sense.
Some Links
The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal looks back on the reign of Fauci during the era of covid. Three slices:
He and a passel of public-health experts used their authority to lobby for broad economic lockdowns that we now know were far more destructive than they needed to be. He also lobbied for mask and vaccine mandates that were far less protective than his assertions to the public. Dr. Fauci’s influence was all the greater because he had an echo chamber in the press corps and among public elites who disdained and ostracized dissenters.
…..
Worse, Dr. Fauci smeared the few brave scientists who opposed blanket lockdowns and endorsed a strategy of “focused protection” on the elderly and those at high risk. This was the message of the Great Barrington Declaration authors, and emails later surfaced showing that Dr. Fauci worked with others in government to deride that alternative so it never got a truly fair public hearing.
…..
The costs of that mindset have been severe, and not merely economic. We know now that states that locked down fared no better, and sometimes worse, than those that didn’t. We also know that the vaccines, while invaluable against serious disease, don’t prevent the spread of Covid—even after multiple boosters. More honest candor would have been better for America’s trust in public-health authorities.
Also looking back on Fauci’s calamitous reign during covid is Michael Senger. A slice:
These lockdowns were unprecedented in the western world and weren’t part of any democratic country’s pandemic plan prior to Xi Jinping’s lockdown of Wuhan, China. However, they did cause Americans to believe the virus was hundreds of times deadlier than it really was. For this, Fauci became “America’s doctor.”
And here’s Reason‘s Robby Soave on Fauci. A slice:
No public official, not even President Joe Biden himself, personifies the U.S. government’s pandemic approach quite like Fauci, who quite deliberately positioned himself as the avatar of correct COVID-19 behavior. Fauci even said that critics who undermined him were attacking science itself.
These critics have grown more numerous over the course of the pandemic as Fauci’s miscalculations became more evident. He has confessed to telling nobles lies — to giving the public information he thought was wrong in order to serve some other goal. He downplayed the effectiveness of masks, purportedly out of concern that there wouldn’t be enough of them for hospitals. He also told the public that the herd immunity threshold was lower than his actual mental estimation; in the end, neither figure was accurate, since COVID-19 is able to evade both infection-acquired and immunity-acquired protection.
Fauci became a passionate advocate of mask-wearing, also pressing the public to engage in all kinds of social distancing measures. When criticized for supporting lockdowns, mask mandates, and other COVID-19 mitigation efforts, he has claimed that he only offered guidance, and did not personally authorize the relevant government orders. Many municipalities never felt like they had any choice to disregard missives from federal health officials; local authorities that did chart alternative courses were derided as science-deniers and practitioners of human sacrifice by Fauci sycophants in the media.
When I interviewed Fauci in July, he admitted to making just one mistake: He said that if he could repeat the COVID-19 pandemic, he would recommend lockdowns, mask mandates, and social distancing measures that were “much, much more stringent.” Some people might take note of the dwindling evidence that government mandates led to vastly preferable pandemic outcomes and wonder whether investing a massive bureaucracy with the power to bully millions of people into social isolation, unemployment, and juvenile delinquency was worth it; not Fauci, though. If he could do it all again, the bullying would only increase.
“Don’t tell me school choice is racist!” says Denisha Merriweather, founder of the new group Black Minds Matter. Choice opponents “are implying that parents, especially lower-income, Black parents, should stay trapped in public schools that have failed their children for decades,” she notes. “We need a new system . . . empowered by parents.”
School choice increases diversity, adds Liv Finne of the Washington Policy Center’s Center for Education. “Modern-day school vouchers lead to more ethnic and racial integration in the schools, not less.”
One poll showed that 74% of African Americans and 71% of Latinos support school choice.
Choice opponents are mostly unions, establishment Democrats and frightened suburban Republicans.
Michael Strain examines the worrying decline in labor-force participation in the U.S.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 86 of Robert Higgs’s important June 2004 Journal of Economic History paper, “Wartime Socialization of Investment: A Reassessment of U.S. Capital Formation in the 1940s” as this paper appears as Chapter 4 of Robert Higgs’s excellent 2006 collection, Depression, War, and Cold War (reference deleted; link added):
When private entrepreneurs make investments, they hazard their own property or the property that others have entrusted to them. Therefore, they must appraise carefully the prospect that the capital goods they purchase will give rise to an income stream sufficient to justify the present expense, the risks of loss, and the delays they anticipate before they can appropriate future income. Ultimately, the success of any private investment turns on the ability to use capital goods in a way that, directly or indirectly, consumers validate by purchasing final goods in the market.
Government officials follow different stars in making their investment decisions: Politics, ideology, and even personal vanity (“empire building”) have a much greater chance of carrying the day. As W.H. Hutt observed, “officials not only cannot have the necessary detailed awareness which market signals provide; but most important, they cannot be caused to lose property through error nor be rewarded by the acquisition of property through success.” For the government, no consumer-determined bottom line spells the difference between success and failure, because the government has the power to extract taxes from citizens in order to finance the investments initially and to subsidize money-losing projects afterward, in defiance of consumer preferences.
DBx: An earlier version of this paper by Higgs is available free-of-charge on-line here.
August 22, 2022
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from this recent blog post by Arnold Kling:
We have a civil rights enforcement complex that has turned into a self-licking ice cream cone, making up reasons to perpetuate itself.
Getting the Quantity Theory of Money Straight
Here’s another letter to Binghamton University student “Karl Marx”:
Mr. “Marx”:
You reply to my e-mail of August 20th by asserting that “the data which plainly shows war time price controls prevented inflation overrides” what you call my “desperate attempt to salvage free market fundamentalism by making up reasons why the data is unreliable. The historical record shows Meg Jacobs and Isabella Weber are still correct that WWII price controls were a total success.”
Perhaps you didn’t notice that one of the links in my previous letter in which I noted that price controls reduce the quality of goods and services is to a piece by NPR – a media organization that is hardly guilty of running interference for “free-market fundamentalism.”
More to the point, data never speak for themselves. They must always be carefully interpreted in light of the theoretical propositions that they are used to test. The theoretical proposition at issue here says that increases in the money supply relative to the demand to hold money reduce money’s purchasing power. Without price controls in place, this reduced purchasing power is manifested overwhelmingly in the form of higher nominal prices. But when government prohibits nominal prices from rising, it is no surprise that officially recorded prices do not rise. The historical record nevertheless reveals the predicted fall in purchasing power. This fall in purchasing power is manifested – and is detected by competent economists and historians – as declines in the quality or quantities of what buyers get for any given sum of money. The theoretical proposition that Jacobs and Weber claim to be invalid is, in fact, found to be vindicated.
In summary: The fact that inflation-induced deteriorations of product quality when price controls are in place don’t show up in time-series data on nominal prices is irrelevant. The more general argument is that increases in the money supply reduce money’s purchasing power. If that which a given sum of money purchases today is worse or less than it was yesterday, then purchasing power has been reduced and, therefore, price controls cannot be said to have succeeded at protecting against the ravages of inflation.
I leave you with another observation, this one from 2012, offered by the great economic historian Robert Higgs:
Economists are trained in theory, statistics, modeling, and other skills. Historians are trained in the careful scrutiny and interpretation of historical sources. Neither economists nor historians, unfortunately, are trained to use common sense in their work. Postwar proponents of the reimposition of price controls have often pointed to the success of such controls during the war. Yet, despite thousands of employees and an army of volunteer monitors associated with the Office of Price Administration and despite the U.S. Attorney General’s prosecutory zeal in hauling alleged violators into court, the government’s price-control efforts during World War II failed to stem the tide of rising prices set in motion by the huge contemporary increases in the money stock.
Price controls, at most, only create a population of liars. True prices continue to do what the existing economic conditions cause them to do. No one can control the amount of precipitation by passing a law against reporting more than a stipulated amount of rain and snow.
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
Some Links
The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board rightly criticizes SEC Chairman Gary Gensler’s proposed obstructions on financial markets. Here’s Editorial Board’s conclusion:
U.S. markets have on all the evidence been working well despite sharp monetary policy changes. The real purpose here seems to be the one that’s animated Mr. Gensler’s SEC tenure thus far: bringing as much financial activity as possible under his agency’s scope.
Max Borders pens an open letter to a young Marxist.
J.D. Tuccille argues for school choice.
“Price caps are a dumb idea” – so explains Warren Coats. A slice:
If prices are not allowed to ration supply among demanders such that everyone willing to pay $4.85 gets all they want, an alternative rationing mechanism must be imposed. Ration coupons might be issued randomly, or by lottery, or by the first letter of your last name, or to friends and relatives of the government civil servants handing out the ration coupons. Unlike any of these formulas, price rationing provides the available supply to those with the most pressing need for it. Less important trips will be canceled or postponed.
Steven Hayward is appalled by the goings-on today among many professional “historians.” (HT Phil Magness)
On Twitter, Jay Bhattacharya asks an important question:
Why are there people mad about fake reports of Florida banning books, but not mad about @Twitter and big tech banning dissident voices on covid? There is not one iota of moral difference between the two, but the former is a figment of imagination and the latter is real.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 319 of GMU Econ alum Benjamin Powell’s excellent 2005 paper “State Development Planning: Did it Create an East Asian Miracle?”
State development planning cannot promote real economic growth. Advocates of development planning fail to recognize that the same calculation problem that Mises and Hayek outlined in the socialist calculation debate also applies to more limited attempts at planning the market process. The knowledge necessary for solving the economic problem of how to satisfy the most urgently felt wants without leaving any more urgent want unsatisfied requires the price knowledge that the market generates. Any attempt to ‘guide’ the market operates without this knowledge.
DBx: I repeat: No proponent of industrial policy, to my knowledge, has even tried to give a serious answer to the question: How will government officials get the detailed, nuanced, and ever-changing knowledge that is necessary for them to possess if they are to improve overall economy welfare by overriding market-process-generated patterns of resource allocation with government-dictated uses of resources?
Vacuous answers to this question are abundant: ‘Government will invest in the industries of the future!’ ‘Industrial policy will ensure that critical industries aren’t destroyed by foreign competition or by the wiles of financiers!’ ‘With industrial policy we’ll invest more in Main St. and less in Wall St.!’ ‘With industrial policy we’ll ensure that we no longer depend on China for critical inputs!’
Oh so easy to say.
I’m quite sure that most proponents of industrial policy sincerely believe that such assertions of fine aspirations are sufficiently substantive to guide actual policy. But this sincere belief held by industrial-policy proponents only reveals their complete failure to understand the nature of the problem to which these proponents are confident they are offering a realistic ‘solution.’
Industrial-policy proponents continue to believe that they write and speak intelligently only because they refuse to come to grips with the reality of – that is, with the enormous complexity of – the modern economy and, hence, also with the indispensable role that is played in this economy by consumer sovereignty and the price system. This intellectual failure of industrial-policy proponents is as ludicrous as would be, say, the proposal of an astrophysicist wannabe who insists that, if only government would build a few asphalt roads from the earth to the moon, government can easily arrange for humans to bicycle to the lunar surface.
Or to use another analogy, to propose that government direction of resource allocation override resource allocation by market processes is to propose that the task of allocating resources be entrusted to a drunk – and lame – donkey.
August 21, 2022
Jay Bhattacharya and Scott Atlas
I’m delighted that TFAS – for whom I teach a course each Summer – recently hosted this event on Capitol Hill featuring Scott Atlas and Jay Bhattacharya.
Some Links
Phil Magness reports on “the suicide of the American Historical Association.” A slice:
Other activist historians such as the New School’s Claire Potter retorted that the 1619 Project was indeed scholarly history, insisting that “big chunks of it are written by professional, award-winning historians.” [James] Sweet was therefore in the wrong to call it journalism, or to question its scholarly accuracy. Potter’s claims are deeply misleading. Only two of the 1619 Project’s twelve feature essays were written by historians, and neither of them are specialists in the crucial period between 1776-1865, when slavery was at its peak. The controversial parts of the 1619 Project were all written by opinion journalists such as Hannah-Jones, or non-experts writing well outside of their own competencies such as Matthew Desmond.
The frenzy further exposed the very same problems in the profession that Sweet’s essay cautioned against. David Austin Walsh, a historian at the University of Virginia, took issue with historians offering any public criticism of the 1619 Project’s flaws – no matter their validity – because those criticisms are “going to be weaponized by the right.” In Walsh’s hyperpoliticized worldview, historical accuracy is wholly subordinate to the political objectives of the project. Sweet’s sin in telling the truth about the 1619 Project’s defects was being “willfully blind to the predictable political consequences of [his] public interventions.” Any argument that does not advance a narrow band of far-left political activism is not only unfit for sharing – it must be suppressed.
Lawrence Krauss describes, accurately, the asylum of academia as being run by lunatics. (HT Roger Meiners) Two slices:
There are already a host of examples of such universities and institutions caving in to childish pressures exerted, not by students, but by young researchers caught up in this new era of victimhood and inferred oppression. Increasingly, various fields of science are being held hostage, infringing on research activities and terrorizing individuals.
David Sabatini, about whom I have previously written on this site. Sabatini had been terminated from his position at MIT after complaints lodged by a former colleague with whom he had had a relationship. No student of Sabatini ever complained about him. The NYU Medical School decided to hire him, and the Dean of the Medical School specifically stated that they had investigated his case and had determined he had been unfairly treated. No matter, shortly after the proposed announcement, junior researchers marched in the streets, again complaining that hiring Sabitini would somehow endanger the safety of young trainees, a claim made without any basis in fact. Nevertheless, not surprisingly, and fully aware of the impact on their own careers and the reputation of their school should they buck the mob, the medical school rescinded the offer.
…..
The magazine Scientific American, which used to be the most prestigious popular science magazine in print but has now become a vehicle for social justice activism, recently published an article entitled “Cultural Bias Distorts the Search for Alien Life”: “Decolonizing” the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) could boost its chances of success, says science historian Rebecca Charbonneau”
In the article this young historian, whose research work appeared last year in a special SETI-themed issue of the American Indian Culture and Research Journal, was extensively interviewed in order to make the argument that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence might be “undermined by biases they only dimly perceive—biases that could, for instance, be related to the misunderstanding and mistreatment of Indigenous peoples and other marginalized groups that occurred during the development of modern astronomy and many other scientific fields”.
It is natural to wonder how looking for patterns of radio or optical pulses, or searching for signs of technological civilization impacting on the atmospheres of distant planets could reflect racial biases. Charbonneau’s response, in the Scientific American article, is clear. Focusing on the technology at the very heart of a search is a mistake. Instead of listening for signs of alien intelligence, we should first be listening to indigenous people here on Earth, or as she puts it, to taking into account “marginalized and historically excluded perspectives”.
It is tempting to simply dismiss this confusing logic as just fodder for a now-woke magazine. Unfortunately, however, the rot goes much deeper.
Dr. Charbonneau sent out a photo advertising her appearance in a large SETI meeting recently in Pennsylvania in which she reiterated her claims that racism might basically underlay much of the current SETI mission. She was not alone. Another observer at the meeting reported that many of the “scientific talks” were about forbidding language of “colonization”, “indigenous”, non-binary sexuality, and transphobia.
Indeed, it is telling that Dr Charbonneau is a Jansky Fellow at the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory. These prestigious fellowships are meant to assist the most promising researchers in radio astronomy. But one of them has gone to a historian who has argued that focusing only on doing better science and improving detection technology is itself misplaced.
Steve Landsburg isn’t impressed with the intellectual integrity of politicians.
David Henderson reminds us that taxation is coercive.
Larry Reed sings the praises of the Marquis de Lafayette.
Tracy Hoeg tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
Today kids required to mask during basketball in LA Show me good evidence this will benefit them @MayorOfLA @LACityParks, you can’t
This is a picture from a society that prioritizes irrational non data-driven policies that ease adult fears over the well being & happiness of kids
Writing in the Telegraph, Jeremy Warner decries the enormous cost of the covid lockdowns in Britain. A slice:
But lockdown was also sold as just a temporary hiatus, a bit like an induced coma, with the economy returning to normal substantially undamaged by its sudden stop as soon as the public health emergency was over.
This has turned out to be very far from the case. The economic harm these policies have caused, never mind their wider impact on health, education and general well being, may even turn out to have been worse than the financial crisis, which presaged a decade long pause in living standards.
Last week we had the shocking news that health conditions left undiagnosed and untreated while the NHS concentrated on the pandemic, together no doubt with today’s virtual breakdown of ambulance services, are now killing more people per week than Covid did.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 105 of Deirdre McCloskey’s insightful 2022 volume, Beyond Positivism, Behaviorism, and Neoinstitutionalism in Economics:
It is not efficiency as economists think of it that is the best of the good news of the Great Enrichment, but utterly novel betterments causing the marginal product of the labor curve to zoom out, such as zippers, asphalt-paved roads, cheap screws and bolts, cardboard boxes, sewer traps in plumbing, screens on open windows, widespread secondary schools, computers and the internet – the sorts of betterments that can be adopted even by a terribly governed economy, such as Italy’s, with satisfactory results.
DBx: Yes.
Pictured above is reinforced concrete, yet another of the practically uncountable quotidian marvels, produced by the market apparently routinely, contributing to modernity’s astonishing prosperity.
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