Russell Roberts's Blog, page 115

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from Wall Street Journal columnist Gerard Baker’s latest column, titled “‘Inflation Reduction Act’ Is an Insult to Used-Car Salesmen“:

If a bill that reduces the deficit by $300 billion over 10 years represents “inflation reduction,” what are we to make of a law Congress passed last year that increased the deficit by an estimated $1.7 trillion in less than two years?

If we are in the business of renaming legislative measures with a bill that is going to reduce inflation through deficit reduction, can we now all agree to call the American Rescue Plan of 2021—which added six times as much to the deficit in one-fifth of the time—the Inflation Acceleration Act?

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 75 of Paul Seabright’s superb 2004 book, The Company of Strangers:

It is usually a mistake to think that the risks that come from depending on exchange with others are greater than the risks that come from facing the environment alone. Most families even three hundred years ago were far more likely to die from the failure of their own crops or from disease than are their descendants today to die from all causes combined.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 203 of former Caltech physics professor and provost – and former Energy Department undersecretary during the Obama administration – Steven Koonin’s superb 2021 book, Unsettled? What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters:

Many an article that purports to be about how humans have broken the climate (or how we must reduce our emissions to “fix” it) is nevertheless filled with examples of climate trends that are not attributable to (or fixable by) humans.

Some Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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AIER’s Phil Magness and James Harrigan report on the University of North Carolina’s egregious settlement with the journalist (so called) Nikole Hannah-Jones. Here’s their conclusion:

And as galling as it is to see Nikole Hannah-Jones try to weasel her way into an unearned tenured professorship, there is one thing that is even more galling: She hasn’t published a single piece of journalism in the New York Times, her other full-time employer, in over two years. Maybe the Times is on to her. They claim to publish all the news that’s fit to print, after all.

If you were dictator, would you abdicate?

Stephen Miran, writing in the Wall Street Journal, explains that the Orwellian-named “Inflation Reduction Act” will emphatically not reduce inflation. Two slices:

There’s a net $300 billion in the bill dedicated to reducing the deficit through higher taxes. In normal times, when inflation runs around 2%, a tax increase of about 1.2% of gross domestic product would exert some downward pressure on inflation. But because the deficit reduction is concentrated at the end of a 10-year period, only about a tenth of this reduction, 0.12% of GDP, would materialize in the next year.

…..

The details of the bill are even worse. The deficit reduction comes not from spending cuts, which would reduce demand, but tax hikes, which reduce supply. The inflation hitting American families is a result of demand outstripping supply. The Inflation Reduction Act will place further constraints on supply through regulations and tax increases, as well as redirecting resources via hundreds of billions of dollars of special-interest subsidies aimed at Democrat constituencies. Roughly half of all new taxes would be paid by manufacturers, a disincentive for production. The bill would unleash an army of tax enforcers on small businesses, raising their costs and impeding their ability to respond to customers.

“Just How Clean and Green Is Your Electric Car?”

Samuel Gregg explains how “Thomas Aquinas desacralized the state.”

TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.)

Toby Young reports on the Sunday Times reporting on how lockdowns made the British sicker.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 277 of Joseph Epstein’s 1999 book, Narcissus Leaves the Pool:

I don’t share [Philip] Larkin’s contempt for children … reserving mine for people of adult age who prefer to carry themselves as children.

Some Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins asks why so many people pretend that green pork will stop climate change. His answer: “Because organized groups and politicians want the money, and the public wants to be a sucker.” Another slice:

Such packages are sold on the public’s faulty intuition that an erg of green energy consumed is an erg of fossil energy that stays in the ground. But it does not follow. The most widely celebrated paper in recent years on the economics of climate change concludes that green-energy subsidies mostly just increase total energy consumption rather than displace fossil fuels. The impact on CO2 and temperatures is “minuscule,” according to Princeton’s José Luis Cruz Álvarez and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg.

Arnold Kling calls on environmentalists to show their work. A slice:

To a first approximation, the best way to have a sustainable economy is to let the market work. In order to determine sustainability, markets perform a complex calculation problem. If a firm’s output sells for more than the cost of its inputs, then its production process is sustainable, and it remains in business. If it sells for less, it experiences losses, and it goes out of business. No public official has knowledge that can enable a regulator to outperform the price system.

David Henderson shares EconLog commenter Kevin Corcoran’s insightful thoughts about the full consequences of minimum-wage legislation.

Mark Perry celebrates the 110th anniversary of the birth of Milton Friedman.

And here’s Bryan Caplan, writing ten years ago on the centennial of Friedman’s birth. A slice:

Many libertarians look down on Friedman for his moderation and statist compromises. I’m about as radical as libertarians come, but these critics have never impressed me. By any normal standard, Friedman was a very radical libertarian indeed. If you’re going to take points off for a few deviations, remember to give him extra credit for earnestly trying to convince people who didn’t already agree with him. His arguments for liberty weren’t just intellectually compelling; he made them with humor and common decency. Friedman was a paragon of libertarian friendliness – a model of the nobility we should all aspire to.

Tyler Cowen remembers Geoff Brennan. (DBx: Although I don’t understand what Tyler means in his final paragraph about “intact.”)

A headline from CBC News: “Long COVID may now be less common than previously thought”.

Epidemiologist John Ayers explains why San Diego’s mask mandate won’t slow the spread of covid-19.

Victoria Fox tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

I love the way Ferrer accuses those who oppose ongoing COVID measures of not caring or wanting to protect (vulnerable) people.

Because I kind of feel the same way about people who continue to push disruptive/harmful measures that didn’t stop everyone from catching COVID.🤷🏼‍♀️

This letter by Phyllis Anderson in the Wall Street Journal asks a germane question:

Regarding Peggy Noonan’s “The ‘Great Resignation’ Started Long Ago” (Declarations, July 23): I marvel that discussion of vaccine mandates is frequently omitted from articles on workforce participation. How many millions of Americans who valued their jobs but chose not to vaccinate subsequently retired, were fired or were forced to quit?

Phyllis Anderson

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from Milton Friedman’s February 1963 speech “Inflation: Causes and Consequences“:

Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.

DBx: Although this gem of an observation by Friedman is quite famous, I’ve never before featured it as a Quotation of the Day. Now seems an appropriate time to rectify that oversight.

Milton Friedman was born in Brooklyn on this date – July 31st – in 1912.

Geoff Brennan, R.I.P.

(Don Boudreaux)

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This morning brings sad news of the death of the Australian economist and political scientist Geoffrey Brennan. A frequent co-author with the late Nobel-laureate economist James Buchanan, Geoff’s contributions are enormous. For me, his 1993 book co-authored with Loren Lomasky, Democracy & Decision: The Pure Theory of Electoral Preference, is not only his best work, it’s also among the books that most influenced my way of thinking. (And I know that it prominently influenced also Bryan Caplan, who in 2007, with The Myth of the Rational Voter, brilliantly expanded on the theme.)

Geoff also did the great service of co-editing this 2008 collection of some of the papers and lectures of the late Paul Heyne, as well as the Collected Works of James M. Buchanan.

Price Ceilings Harm Those Persons Who Can Least Afford to Be Harmed

(Don Boudreaux)

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This short video on the folly of government-imposed price ceilings is excellent. (It’s based on a recent essay by David Henderson.)

Some Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley reviews three new books that challenge the mainstream, “Progressive” view of race. A slice:

In “The State of Black America,” a new collection of essays edited by William B. Allen, an emeritus professor of political philosophy at Michigan State University, Mr. Allen writes that it is not only wrong but counterproductive for the media to give the last word on social inequality to black elites who traffic in racial resentment and identity politics. “The civil rights movement may inadvertently have spawned the most serious obstacle to the progress of American blacks in our time,” he writes in his own essay. “Black leaders have turned to group identity rather than individual identity and American principles of assimilation. The result has been cultural stagnation for some black communities.”

Elsewhere in the volume, Brown University economics professor Glenn Loury challenges the left’s notion that racism mainly explains this cultural underdevelopment. “The ‘structural racism’ argument seldom goes into cause and effect,” he writes. “We are all just supposed to know that it’s the fault of something called ‘structural racism,’ abetted by an environment of ‘white supremacy’ that purportedly characterizes our society. Any racial disparity, then, can be totally explained by the imputation of ‘structural racism.’”

George Will is correct: “What is still referred to, reflexively and anachronistically, as higher education is supposedly run by and for persons who are products of, and devoted to, learning. Today, this supposition is false.” Another slice:

The Chronicle of Higher Education, the reading of which is in equal measures fascinating and depressing, recently published Joseph M. Keegin’s bracing essay “The Hysterical Style in the American Humanities: On the ideological posturing and moral nitpicking of the very online.” Keegin, a philosophy student at Tulane University, argues that, confronted with “the slow slide of academe into oblivion,” scholars — especially in humanities departments, which are losing undergraduates, prestige, jobs and funding — “desperately grasp for relevance.” They seek it by becoming “professors of ‘academic Twitter.’”

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal rightly worries that Xi and the other thugs who today rule China will increasingly play the nationalist card to divert attention from the economic destructiveness of their policies. A slice:

Slowing growth is global, but Mr. Xi has added Chinese characteristics. A chronic problem is his “dynamic zero-Covid” policy, which Beijing shows no signs of easing. This imposes sudden lockdowns and stringent testing requirements anywhere Covid-19 is detected. The lockdowns are a severe strain for ordinary Chinese, and a danger to global supply chains passing through China. Foreign companies are rethinking investments, while local firms suffer.

Ryan Bourne, Brad Subramaniam, and Rachel Chiu describe the FTC’s attempt to block Meta’s (Facebook’s) merger with Within Unlimited as “bizarre.” Here’s their conclusion:

Yet these are the blinkers at the agency right now. The new trustbusters in DC describe Meta as a “behemoth” and an “empire” that must be restrained. They are convinced that they were in error to green‐​light Facebook’s acquisitions of WhatsApp and Instagram, a hindsight bias that ignores the possibility that Facebook’s ownership helped improve those products, and which suggests entry barriers in the social media sector are relatively low anyway. The Meta‐​Within move looks like an overcorrection to try to block even small purchases that might aid Meta as a company. Yet banning these sorts of acquisitions not only deters integration in the burgeoning VR ecosystem that might benefit consumers, but risks reducing incentives for startups to produce innovative new products in future.

Reason‘s Robby Soave reports on the political bias of Facebook’s third-party “fact-checkers” (so called). Two slices:

Meta’s third-party fact-checkers have flagged as “false information” posts on Instagram and Facebook accusing the Biden administration of changing the definition of a recession in order to deny that the U.S. economy has entered one. This is yet another reminder that the project of purportedly independent fact-checking on social media is a highly partisan one, in which legitimately debatable opinions are passed off as objective truth.

…..

This is hardly the first time that the social media fact-checking industry has failed to add clarity to a contentious issue. Last year, PolitiFact rated as false the claim that COVID-19 is 99 percent survivable for most age groups.

“Experts say a person cannot determine their own chances at surviving COVID-19 by looking at national statistics, because the data doesn’t take into account the person’s own risks and COVID-19 deaths are believed to be undercounted,” wrote PolitiFact.

Regardless of what “experts say,” it is certainly the case that individual persons can estimate their likelihood of surviving COVD-19 based on national statistics. The disease’s age discrimination is extreme: The overwhelming majority of young, healthy people are not at significant risk, especially when compared with elderly Americans. This was a curious fact-check, and it was hardly the first.

Writing about the challenge of defining “recession” is my GMU Econ colleague Vincent Geloso.

Brian Riedl reports that “Congress this week offered a masterclass in the incoherence of government.”

Nick Gillespie talks with the great John Cleese.

Juliette Sellgren talks with GMU Econ alum Jon Murphy about the Jones Act and Adam Smith.

Barry Brownstein warns of the dangers of using state power to settle questions of science. A slice:

The claim that a state-proclaimed consensus settles science has resulted in many losing their jobs. In 2021, Dr. Aaron Kheriaty was fired from the University of California, Irvine. Kheriaty was a professor at their School of Medicine and director of their Medical Ethics Program. He was fired for being unvaccinated and for believing natural immunity was superior to the COVID vaccine.

Dr. Kheriaty delivered his testimony against the California bill that would ban the expression of opposing opinions: “Advances in science and medicine typically occur when doctors and scientists challenge conventional thinking or settled opinion. Fixating any current medical consensus as ‘unassailable’ by physicians will stifle medical and scientific progress.”

Kheriaty explained how repressing alternative views creates a false consensus driven by politics and crony interests. Government cures drive out real cures.

Sai Medi tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

🧵 (1/19) Long Covid & Post Viral Syndromes

Scov2 is not that unique in this regard.

Our cardinal sin is a massive sampling bias in which we hyper focus on Scov2 and ignore 1) other viruses 2) important context around long term complications of any general illness.