Russell Roberts's Blog, page 122

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 364 of the late, great Paul Heyne‘s insightful 1981 paper “Measures of Wealth and Assumptions of Right: An Inquiry” as it is reprinted in the 2008 collection of Heyne’s writings, “Are Economists Basically Immoral?” and Other Essays on Economics, Ethics, and Religion (Geoffrey Brennan and A.M.C. Waterman, eds.):

[I]n the political arena, the unanswered claim that a particular policy is unjust will almost always defeat a similarly unanswered argument that the alternative is inefficient.

DBx: For better or worse, Heyne’s observation is true, and likely always to be true. And so we economists had better improve our ability to reveal how many of the consequences of economic inefficiency are normatively relevant to the general public. Noting that this or that government intervention causes resources to be allocated less efficiently than otherwise is indeed uninteresting to the general public. But intensely interesting is noting that inefficiently allocated resources means slower wage growth for low-wage workers, less-effective health care for the middle class, and reduced ability to afford protection of the environment.

Also, pointing out, for example, that the aggregate dollar value of the gains seized by parties who benefit from protective tariffs are smaller than are the resulting aggregate dollar losses suffered by the general public has far less normative oomph than does pointing out that tariffs are a means by which the politically powerful coerce peaceful men and women into spending their own money in ways that these men and women would prefer not to spend their own money. When making the case against protectionism, it is no breach of the economist‘s professional duty for him or her to explain how economics casts much doubt on the widespread presumption that market exchange that occurs across political boundaries differs ethically from market exchange that occurs within political boundaries.

It is, in short, well within the professional role of the economist to describe protective tariffs as a weapon used by politically powerful producer groups to rob the general public. That this weapon isn‘t a gun, knife, or bludgeon – that this weapon isn‘t visible to the victims against whom it is used – that this weapon is more sophisticated than are the weapons commonly wielded by street thugs does not distinguish robbery by protectionism from robbery at literal gunpoint. Both are inefficient, it is true, as any competent economist can demonstrate. But both are also unjust – and also as any competent economist should be able and willing to demonstrate.

Some Links

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

Marty Makary and Tracy Beth Høeg report on the rejection by U.S. public-health agencies of science. Two slices:

The calls and text messages are relentless. On the other end are doctors and scientists at the top levels of the NIH, FDA and CDC. They are variously frustrated, exasperated and alarmed about the direction of the agencies to which they have devoted their careers.

“It’s like a horror movie I’m being forced to watch and I can’t close my eyes,” one senior FDA official lamented. “People are getting bad advice and we can’t say anything.”

That particular FDA doctor was referring to two recent developments inside the agency. First, how, with no solid clinical data, the agency authorized Covid vaccines for infants and toddlers, including those who already had Covid. And second, the fact that just months before, the FDA bypassed their external experts to authorize booster shots for young children.

That doctor is hardly alone.

At the NIH, doctors and scientists complain to us about low morale and lower staffing: The NIH’s Vaccine Research Center has had many of its senior scientists leave over the last year, including the director, deputy director and chief medical officer. “They have no leadership right now. Suddenly there’s an enormous number of jobs opening up at the highest level positions,” one NIH scientist told us. (The people who spoke to us would only agree to be quoted anonymously, citing fear of professional repercussions.)

The CDC has experienced a similar exodus. “There’s been a large amount of turnover. Morale is low,” one high level official at the CDC told us. “Things have become so political, so what are we there for?” Another CDC scientist told us: “I used to be proud to tell people I work at the CDC. Now I’m embarrassed.”

Why are they embarrassed? In short, bad science.

The longer answer: that the heads of their agencies are using weak or flawed data to make critically important public health decisions. That such decisions are being driven by what’s politically palatable to people in Washington or to the Biden administration. And that they have a myopic focus on one virus instead of overall health.

Nowhere has this problem been clearer—or the stakes higher—than on official public health policy regarding children and Covid.

…..

It is statistically impossible for everyone who works inside of our health agencies to have 100% agreement about such a new and knotty subject. The fact that there is no public dissent or debate can only be explained by the fact that they are—or at least feel that they are—being muzzled.

It is an ancient, moral requirement of our profession to speak up when we believe questionable treatments are being proposed. It is also good for the public. Imagine, for example, a world in which those scientists who suggested that masking for children and school lockdowns were worse for public health were not smeared but instead debated?

The official public health response to Covid has undermined the public’s belief in public health itself. This is a terrible outcome with potentially disastrous consequences. For one thing, because of these sloppy and politicized policies, we run the risk of parents rejecting routine vaccines for their children—ones we know are safe, effective and life-saving.

The leaders of the CDC, the FDA and the NIH should welcome internal discussion—even dissension—based on the evidence. Silencing physicians is not “following the science.” Less absolutism and more humility by the men and women running our public health agencies would go a long way in rebuilding public trust.

Thorsteinn Siglaugsson decries the push to vaccinate children against covid. A slice:

According to a study recently published in the Paediatric Infectious Disease Journal, the risk of COVID-19 to children is truly minuscule. The study tracks the outcomes for Icelandic children with a positive COVID-19 test, covering all the children who tested positive during the study period. It concludes that out of the 1,749 children tracked, none had severe symptoms and no child needed hospitalisation. A fifth of the children showed no symptoms.

Here’s some good news out of France.

Here’s some bad news out of New Zealand.

Covidocratic tyranny intensifies in Hong Kong.

Phil Magness’s exposure of ‘historian’ – and 1619 Project contributor – Kevin Kruse’s plagiarism is getting more warranted attention.

Liz Wolfe reports on Elizabeth Warren’s latest authoritarian outburst.

Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger accurately describes Progressives’ irresponsibility:

Bowing to demands from the Sanders-Warren progressives, the administration put in motion a New-Deal-like spending plan that included four major new entitlement programs: federalized prekindergarten and child care, an expanded child tax credit, paid family and medical leave, and two free years of community college.

With the Senate divided 50-50, Democrats Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona resolutely opposed the legislation. Mr. Manchin warned his party repeatedly that the new spending would produce inflation and that expunging fossil fuels would be a mistake.

The whole of the Democratic Party, led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, chose to blow by all these red flags. Inflation is today 9.1%, not least because of the party consensus—actually a mania—to abolish fossil-fuel production.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Potter Stewart’s majority opinion in the 1972 case Lynch v. Household Finance Corp.:

Such difficulties indicate that the dichotomy between personal liberties and property rights is a false one. Property does not have rights. People have rights. The right to enjoy property without unlawful deprivation, no less than the right to speak or the right to travel, is, in truth, a “personal” right, whether the “property” in question be a welfare check, a home, or a savings account. In fact, a fundamental interdependence exists between the personal right to liberty and the personal right in property. Neither could have meaning without the other. That rights in property are basic civil rights has long been recognized.

Milton Friedman on Inflation

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

Although central banking has become more complex over the past 42 years – and although also, during this time, modes and mechanisms of payment have changed dramatically – much wisdom about inflation still resides in this clip from Milton Friedman’s 1980 PBS series, Free To Choose.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 79 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:

[A] host of vexing practical problems means that climate model results require at least a pinch, if not a pound, of salt.

DBx: I cannot recommend this book by Koonin highly enough.

Some Links

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

Ramesh Thakur details the reality that lockdowners very early on had ample reason to understand the dangers – indeed, the lunacy – of their favored draconian measures for ‘fighting’ covid. A slice:

A report in The Financial Times on April 26, 2020 referenced an internal British government estimate that ultimately, without mitigation, up to 150,000 people in the UK could die prematurely from other conditions because of the Covid-induced lockdown that put on hold huge numbers of screenings and operations. Professor Karol Sikora, a consultant oncologist with the NHS, estimated up to 50,000 more UK deaths from cancer with a six-month lockdown, owing to the pause in health screenings.

To add to the public policy insanity, the anti-scientific lockdowns barred people from some healthy lifestyle options like strolling and exercising in open air parks and beaches and instead cooped them up in high-risk environments like homes in high-density living complexes. The Guardian reported on May 9, 2020 that there had been 6,546 more non-Covid-19 deaths at homes across Britain compared with the seasonal five-year average.

The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board decries the continuing use of covid as an excuse to expand government’s authority to spend taxpayer money. Two slices:

Why keep extending the emergency? One reason is that in March 2020 Congress barred states from kicking ineligible people off Medicaid rolls during the emergency in return for more federal funding. Medicaid enrollment has ballooned to 95 million—30% of Americans are now enrolled—from 71 million in December 2019. The emergency expands Medicaid in GOP states that opted out of the ObamaCare expansion. It is also a boon for insurers in states that pay per Medicaid participant. Hospitals and physician groups support extending the emergency because they worry that state Medicaid payments will decline if the federal fillip goes away.

…..

Yet if the White House believes Covid continues to be an emergency, why hasn’t the Food and Drug Administration authorized the Novavax vaccine? The World Health Organization green-lighted it in December. The FDA’s advisory board nearly unanimously endorsed the vaccine over a month ago, in part because its traditional technology might encourage vaccination among the hesitant.

Covid shouldn’t be an emergency only when it’s useful to expand the welfare state.

The headline of Matthew Lynn’s latest Telegraph column is “Jacinda Ardern is paying the price for her hermit zero-Covid economy.” (DBx: But this headline isn’t quite right; those who are paying the price of that insane policy are ordinary New Zealanders.) A slice:

She was determined to protect the country’s health. She locked the doors to keep the virus at bay. And, although it might be tough for a while, the country and its economy would emerge in far stronger shape than most of its rivals.

At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was widely praised for her rational, science-based approach to the virus. She was dealing with it far better than anyone else, we were told again and again – and it was a model to be emulated.

Now it turns out that the bill is falling due. New Zealand is crashing into a hard recession.

Business confidence is plummeting. House prices are in freefall. And the central bank is raising interest rates at a faster pace than any other in the developed world.

In reality – surprise, surprise – you can’t turn a country into a sealed-off hermit kingdom without doing long-term damage to its economy.

“China locks down another city after one Covid case detected.”

Arnold Kling ponders deceivers, enablers of deceivers, and skeptics of deceivers. Two slices:

The political ecosystem consists of Deceivers, Skeptics, and Enablers. Deceivers have a gift for gaining power over others. Think Clinton, Obama, or Trump. Think of the purveyors of the folk versions of critical theory. Skeptics are those who see through the Deceivers and who stick with classical liberal values. Think Thomas Sowell, Robin Hanson, or Bryan Caplan.

Enablers are those who help Deceivers gain power. Think of people of strong partisan faith. They think that the candidate they are voting for is not a Deceiver. They take the professed intentions of political activists at face value.

…..

The academy and the press used to be bastions of skepticism. Professors once defied the bully Joseph McCarthy. Now, left-wing McCarthyism rules the campus. The press used to question the official narrative coming from Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon. Today, those same newspapers denounce as “disinformation” anyone who dares to question the official narrative of Deceivers like Dr. Fauci.

When America was founded, the Constitution was the product of Skepticism. Government powers were limited. Power was divided. Most people could not vote. Even so, the President and the Senate were elected indirectly, not directly by the voters.

In the many decades since, the country has become more democratic. The final blows against Skepticism were the advent of mass media and selection of nominees by political primaries. We now have the same dynamic between Enablers and Deceivers that has given Latin American countries demagogic rulers like Juan Peron and Hugo Chavez.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Paul Atkins and Paul Ray explain that the Securities and Exchange Commission’s proposed climate-disclosure rule would be the exercise of unlawful administrative power. Here’s their conclusion:

West Virginia v. EPA leaves no doubt that agencies must have a clear statement from Congress allowing them new powers if they are to try to transform America’s economy and society. The SEC should acknowledge the writing on the wall and stand down from this rulemaking. At the very least, it should reopen the comment period for its disclosure requirement, which closed some days before the Supreme Court’s decision, to let the public weigh in on how this tremendously important decision affects its rulemaking.

Chris Freiman calls for an end to the war on drugs.

el gato malo ponders “Latinx.” A slice:

the deep and abiding hilarity of this is that this is not “diversity and inclusion.” it’s “alienating latinos and latinas to mollify becky from vassar” and make her feel like a champion of the downtrodden.

it would, of course, be news to most latins that they are downtrodden. when you don’t see yourself that way but instead as empowered people chasing the american dream, this sort of mascotism falls awfully flat.

and this is an idea around which these ersatz linguistic assassins simply cannot seem to wrap their little heads: nobody asked for your help or your patronage.

in an irony thick enough to stand a spoon in, this is what real “white privilege” looks like: rich, educated elites telling “minorities” what they must call themselves.

it’s assault, not alliance.

it’s outright subjugation “for your own good.”

Randy Holcombe reassesses the capture theory of regulation. A slice:

The ultimate result is that regulated firms are “captured” by legislators and regulators. In exchange for regulatory protections, those firms become dependent on continued regulation. They must continue to pay up—whether literally or figuratively—to maintain their regulatory protections.

Disney provides an example of what happens when firms do not support those with the power to continue their regulatory protections. In 1967, Florida’s state government essentially allowed the company to create its own government to run Walt Disney World. In 2022 the company opposed legislation supported by the Florida legislature and Governor DeSantis. In response, the legislature repealed their privilege to self-govern.

Firms that benefit from regulatory protections must continue to support the legislatures that can reverse those protections, or they will lose them. Stigler concluded that regulatory agencies are captured by the firms they regulate. Still, ultimately, it is the regulated firms that become captured by the legislators and regulators who have the power to terminate their regulatory protections.

Phil Magness, on his Facebook page, observes that…

It’s been over 2 years since Nikole Hannah-Jones published anything under her own name at the newspaper where she’s a full time reporter.

They are essentially paying her to tweet.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 110 of Scott Atlas’s important 2021 book, A Plague Upon Our House: My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop COVID From Destroying America:

Fear of the unknown was paralyzing America, and the media was inciting even more panic by sensationalizing any increases in cases or deaths as if those were always preventable or unexpected, or occurring uniquely in the US due to mismanagement.

More on BA.5 and Media Histrionics

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal:

Editor:

You title your report on the high transmissibility of covid’s BA.5 subvariant “Hopes of Covid-19 Reprieve Fade as BA.5 Subvariant Takes Over” (July 12). Yet three key facts noted within your report belie your headline’s pessimism. First, “[t]he seven-day moving average for confirmed Covid-19 patients in hospitals has topped 33,000, federal data show, up from a low near 10,000 in April but far below January’s record peak topping 150,000.” Second, even this relatively small increase in hospitalizations is less troubling than it initially appears because “[m]any of the hospitalizations are cases where patients test positive after being admitted for other reasons.” Third and most importantly, “[d]eaths are hovering around 300 to 350 a day… This is much closer to historic lows than highs.”

The new subvariant is obviously – as is to be expected from the evolution of a respiratory virus – less dangerous than were previous variants. And so the only data you offer to justify your report’s suggestion that we’ve not yet passed the need to mask and possibly even endure more lockdowns is the rise in cases.

Isn’t it time that you and other media outlets stop frightening the public by reporting on cases as if these are what they emphatically are not, namely, nearly synonymous with serious illnesses and deaths?

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

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

Wall Street Journal columnist Mary Anastasia O’Grady reports that Argentina is headed for another economic crackup. A slice:

But that won’t save Argentines from another round of hyperinflation driven by government “experts” who believe in modern monetary theory—which posits that printing money to pay bills doesn’t have to cause inflation if tax rates are high enough.

The public knows better. Since 2017 the peso has lost 87% of its official market-rate value, which is now roughly 130 to the dollar. In the black market the currency now trades at around 265 to the dollar.

Argentine economist Aldo Abram told me last week that “inflationary expectations are spiraling out of control” because “the central bank is robbing the public of its purchasing power.” As demand to hold pesos collapses, triple-digit inflation is becoming more likely, he said. Even with lots of flexibility and latitude from the IMF, it’s hard to see how this doesn’t end in tears.

Sanjai Bhagat writes wisely about ESG investing.

GMU Econ alum Caleb Fuller is correct: Studying economics requires curiosity.

Billy Binion writes about the NYC’s merchant who is being charged with murder as a result of acting in self-defense.

Robert Corn-Revere warns of the authoritarianism of some pro-life groups.

Nate Silver tweets: (HT Tim Townsend)

One clear case of liberal media bias is the relative lack of focus on the constant screw-ups at the FDA and CDC. It’s a huge failure of government. But there’s reluctance to critique “the experts” and perhaps too much presumption of organizational competence.

Molly Kingsley and Liz Cole decry the fear with which children have been raised over these past two years. A slice:

Fuelled by that fear, we locked our young in their rooms for days on end, padlocked their playgrounds and stopped them from seeing their grandparents and friends. We tossed their education to one side, in the process degrading it to an extent which, without drastic remedial action, will not recover. Fuelled by fear, a woman in Texas locked her own child in the boot of her car to escape his infection; a university in Manchester barricaded its students into their halls of residence; and a mayor in New York gagged the city’s toddlers for months. Fuelled by fear we breached our species’ most basic social compact: to protect our young, abandoning at so many touch points our posts as guardians and often even pushing children into harm’s way – mentally and physically – to save ourselves.

Worst of all, drunk on our diet of fear, we taught children they were “vectors,” “silent spreaders,” “reservoirs of infection” – posing a danger to the adults around them. “You people are just vectors of disease to me, and I don’t want to be anywhere near you, so keep your **** distance,” yelled one university professor in Michigan in January 2022.

The government – wielding the weapon of fear- also terrified itself. Fear fueled a chain reaction of bad decision after bad decision – school closures, masking of children, aching to give them a medical intervention they did not need, suspending vital safeguarding protections, and allowing or actively encouraging demonisation, scapegoating and stigmatization to take hold of a previously cohesive society to an extent that should have been unthinkable.

These decisions leave a debilitating legacy.

Michael Curzon reports that the British government seriously considered forcibly removing covid-positive people from their homes and imprisoning them putting them into “isolation centres.”

Britain still is home to far too much covid hysteria.

Jay Bhattacharya tweets:

Some big accounts worry that Novak Djokovic’s stand against vax mandates causes vaccine hesitancy. But really the problem is the public health promotion of the irrational vax mandates. They transformed his private health decision into a bold civil rights stance.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 41 of Deirdre Nansen McCloskey’s hot-off-the-press 2022 volume, Beyond Positivism, Behaviorism, and Neoinstitutionalism in Economics:

What is bizarre about the history of [market-]imperfection finding – and, from the left, the proposed statist corrections – I have said, is that never does the economic thinker feel it necessary to offer evidence that this or that proposed intervention by the state will work as it is supposed to.

DBx: People unfamiliar with professional economic literature might suppose that McCloskey here exaggerates. But she doesn’t. For more than 100 years – and especially since the 1930s – it has been considered by most economists to be a perfectly acceptable scientific move to identify and describe on chalk boards possible ways that markets might fail to achieve perfection, then to label these failures as “market failures,” and finally to conclude that the state should be charged with the responsibility of ‘correcting’ these imperfections. As McCloskey suggests, it’s a wholly unscientific move to assume – simply to assume – that government officials have the motivation, information, and power of omnibenevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent gods.

McCloskey in addition – in the book quoted above, as well as in many other of her works – correctly notes that the economists who identify these theoretically possible “failures” and “market imperfections” almost never attempt to quantify their real-world significance. Were such measurements reasonably carried out, the results in all cases would almost surely be swamped – magnificently swamped – by the the size and significance of market successes.

One of my dearest friends, who I’ve known since I was in my early 20s, has had (and still has) a splendid life and career. Yet this friend is often disgruntled. “Friend!” I say to him, “Your glass is 98 percent full, and yet you obsess over the unfilled two percent. Stop!” I say the same to my fellow economists – and fellow human beings – who obsess over market failures and imperfections.