Russell Roberts's Blog, page 123

And Student-Loan Forgiveness Didn’t Help

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to the New York Times:

Editor:

On your webpage this afternoon readers are told that “A pervasive sense of pessimism across the U.S. has driven Mr. Biden’s support lower. His job approval rating is 33 percent.”

Pervasive pessimism isn’t like earthquakes or solar flares which happen independently of human actions. This pessimism has a human cause. And here that cause is Mr. Biden himself. He doesn’t govern as the moderate that voters expected him to be. Further, the Progressive economic policies condoned or pushed by his administration fuel inflation and rising real energy costs, while Progressive threats to pack the Supreme Court and end the Senate filibuster – which Mr. Biden does too little to discourage – stir in many Americans a sense that an assault is underway against the rule of law and institutions that temper political passions.

Finally, preposterous policies by many state and local Progressives – well-publicized moves from those of D.A.s in San Francisco and New York City to those of teachers’ unions and woke college administrators – understandably intensify Americans’ leeriness of the ideology to which Mr. Biden has hitched his presidency.

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

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from Thomas Sowell’s October 6th, 1963, letter to a Mrs. Mann, as this letter appears on pages 37-38 of Sowell’s 2007 collection, A Man of Letters:

Let us face it – most people are pretty damned satisfied with themselves the way they are, though they would like to see lots of improvements in the world around them. There is probably no more thankless task than trying to get people to shed their illusions and realize that there are certain objective standards which they simply must meet, that they cannot go on whining their way through the world looking for favors (and reacting like wounded animals when they do not get them).

Desperate to Keep Humanity Alarmed

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to the Washington Post: (For excellent feedback on an earlier version of this letter I thank Matt Ridley)

Editor:

Joel Achenbach’s report on the BA.5 variant of omicron misses an important reality (“As the BA.5 variant spreads, the risk of coronavirus reinfection grows,” July 10). Yes, this variant might well be more transmissible than were its predecessors. But this evolution is no cause for alarm: it occurred because respiratory viruses achieve greater transmissibility by becoming less dangerous. As the acclaimed science writer Matt Ridley explained, “[t]he fiercest enemy of a virus is another virus. Omicron ousted delta at least partly because people with mild symptoms were more likely to go to work or parties (or not notice they were ill) than people with severe ones.”*

And so it is with the BA.5 variant. As Mr. Achenbach admits, despite its impressive transmissibility, BA.5 is a piker compared to earlier variants at putting people into their graves or even into hospitals.

You and other major news organizations must quit obsessively focusing on covid. Because it is, or will soon be, endemic, cases of this virus should no longer be reported as headline news.

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

* Matt Ridley, “Breathe easy: how respiratory viruses evolve to become milder,” The Spectator, February 25, 2022.

Some Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Alexander Riley interviews Glenn Loury.

Larry Reed reminds us of the true greatness of Jesse Owens.

David Hart – now again living in his native Australia – reflects on voting in a country the government of which makes voting mandatory but also punishes non-voting with only a small fine. A slice:

I think it is as important to take into account those who did not vote for a candidate or party as those who did. Not voting at all or not voting “properly” (i.e. in the state approved manner) is also an expression of a political viewpoint which needs to be taken into account when trying to understand voter attitudes. I call this the “negative vote” as opposed to the “positive vote” which most journalists and academics consider when analyzing the results of an election. And the combined vote of the DNV (did not vote) and the “informal” vote (I) might be termed the “negative candidate” who stands for a “negative political party”. This “negative political party” did quite well in the last election, coming 3rd behind the two major parties and ahead of the Greens in the House of Representatives with a combined vote of 2,554,391 or 14.84%; and in the Senate similarly, also placing 3rd behind the two major parties and ahead of the Greens with a combined vote of 2,172,775 (12.62%). By my reckoning this makes the “negative political party” a potentially powerful force in Australian politics.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, David Rivkin and Mark Wendell DeLaquil join in the applause for the ruling in West Virginia v. EPA. A slice:

Chevron also dramatically weakened the judiciary’s ability to check agencies’ regulatory overreach. Before 1984, the judiciary took a “hard look” approach in assessing the legality of federal regulations. Chevron was more of a rubber stamp. Judges blessed specific regulations and countenanced agency actions that Congress had never authorized. It made a mockery of Chief Justice John Marshall’s declaration in Marbury v. Madison (1803): “It is emphatically the duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is.”

West Virginia limits Chevron by fleshing out the “major questions doctrine,” a longstanding judicial presumption that when an administrative agency asserts authority over questions of great economic and political significance, it may act only if Congress has clearly authorized it to do so. Or, as the Constitution puts it: “All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States.

David Trabert’s letter in the Wall Street Journal is spot on:

Jeff Yass is spot on: It’s time to stop writing blank checks for failing public-school systems (“Money for Children, Not Schools,” op-ed, June 23). States with robust money-follow-the-child programs, such as Florida and Arizona, register achievement gains far exceeding the national average. Florida’s low-income fourth-graders went from 12% proficient in reading in 1998 to a nation-leading 28% proficient in 2019. That 133% improvement is more than double the national average, while here in Kansas proficiency declined.

Toni Jennings, a retired teacher and former lieutenant governor of Florida, says, “The more competition we had in education, the better off we became. So, I for one believe that competition is good. But you will hear those who say, ‘Oh no, you’re making the public schools compete with others.’ Well, those children are going to have to go out and compete with others in the workaday world.”

The 2021 ACT results show that 31% of white students are college-ready in English, reading, math and science, while only 14% of Hispanic students and 6% of black students met that standard. Achievement gaps are getting worse, and at least here in Kansas, school districts ignore state laws directing them to identify and address barriers to improvement in each school.

The public-school system needs a healthy dose of choice, transparency and accountability to give students a fighting chance to succeed in life.

Dave Trabert
CEO, Kansas Policy Institute
Overland Park, Kan.

Writing in Reason, David French warns of book bans in government-school libraries. A slice:

A third line of thinking takes a pox-on-both-your-houses approach. Don’t choose between public school parents and public school educators. Blow up the system. Pass backpack funding. Expand school choice. That way, parents win and teachers win. Parents can find the school that meets their standards of excellence and/or teaches their values. Educators can build institutions centered around their expertise. Families will then choose from a menu, and that menu will cover almost every educational meal.

I’m drawn to the third way. School choice de-escalates curricular culture battles and enhances the autonomy and responsibility of every individual in the system. Both parents and teachers have the ability to vote with their feet, to seek schools and jobs that match their philosophy and priorities. Moreover, it builds a sense of constructive cultural purpose. An explosion of school choice could revitalize the lost art of institution-building and community formation.

Pierre Lemieux blogs on “government externalities and the Friedman criterion.”

Why, who’d a-thunk it?! Businesses do not have to be commanded by the state to attempt to increase the security and reliability of their sources of supply!

The straw man stubbornly continues to stomp through China.

A New York State Supreme Court judge reins in the ability of the New York State Health Department to issue, in the name of protecting public health, isolation and quarantine procedures. (DBx: Note that because in New York the Supreme Court of that state is, in fact, a trial court and not an appellate court, this ruling could be reversed by a higher-level New York court.)

TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid) (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 44 of Thomas Sowell’s excellent 1993 collection, Is Reality Optional?:

Prices force us into trade-offs, which is one of many reasons why the marketplace operates so much more efficiently than political allocation according to “need,” “entitlement,” “priorities” or other such rigid notions.

DBx: Yep.

I would, however, amend Sowell’s wording slightly. We’re not forced into trade-offs by prices; we’re forced into trade-offs by scarcity. Scarcity makes trade-offs inescapable. Rather, market prices (1) make trade-offs visible, revealing as clearly as possible each option’s cost, and no less importantly (2) put the consequences of choices as fully as possible on the individuals responsible for choosing just how to make each particular trade-off.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 32 of Joseph Epstein’s 1999 book, Narcissus Leaves the Pool:

The cultivated person is good at the art of extrapolation: at imagining the unknown on the evidence of the known. He has a strong historical sense, so that he tends to be less impressed by the crisis of the week that agitates the news media, which they in turn use to agitate the rest of us. From his historical sense, he knows that this caravan has passed before, and that another, not very different one will pass through next week and another the week after that.

Some Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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George Will decries the digital-age stupidification of millennials.

Here’s part two of George Leef’s review of Deirdre McCloskey’s and Art Carden’s Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich. A slice:

Another currently popular explanation for the wealth of some nations (especially the United States) is that it was due to slavery. Among “progressives” in recent years, it has become fashionable to maintain that slavery was the cause of society’s wealth, and since the unfairness of slavery still has lingering effects, government reparation programs must be undertaken. The problem is that enslaving others is no way to earn great profits, much less catalyze economic growth. “Slavery,” the authors write, “is a common if horrible human institution. If slavery led to Great Enrichment, it would have happened in the slave societies of Greece or Rome.”

McCloskey and Carden then take a scalpel to the academic literature that supports the idea that slavery was what made western nations rich, finding it riddled with errors, and conclude by observing that slavery was ended due to the efforts of people who had earned fortunes the liberal way — through commerce.

Marcus Witcher reviews Matthew Continetti’s The Right: The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism. A slice:

Other conservatives joined the denunciations. [George] Wallace’s conservative fans, National Review founding senior editor Frank Meyer wrote, need to recognize that “there are other dangers to conservatism and to the civilization conservatives are defending than the liberal Establishment, and that to fight liberalism without guarding against these dangers runs the risk of ending in a situation as bad as or worse as our present one.” In modern parlance: Don’t back a man like Wallace to own the libs.

Ultimately, movement conservatives did not embrace Wallace. Ronald Reagan refused to run on his ticket with him (the idea had been floated by some conservative activists), and Wallace ultimately gave way to another Southern Democrat, Jimmy Carter (who Wallace endorsed and campaigned for in both 1976 and 1980). But the fact that he made so many inroads is revealing.

Dave Seminara isn’t impressed with Gavin Newsom’s attacks on Ron DeSantis. A slice:

California was far from free for much of the pandemic. In April 2020, a paddleboarder was handcuffed and arrested for being out in the Pacific Ocean alone while beaches were closed. Newsom put harsh limitations on personal freedoms, imposing mask and vaccine mandates that resulted in many Californians losing their jobs. A paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, ranking states on a Covid Report Card, had Florida sixth-best in overall performance, while California finished at 47. (As Bloomberg recently noted, Florida’s age-adjusted Covid mortality rates are almost identical to California’s.)

DeSantis also fought to keep Florida schools open. According to Burbio’s K-12 school opening tracker, Florida’s percentage of in-person school days was third-highest among the states in the 2020–2021 academic year, while California’s was dead last. Virtual learning represented a massive infringement on both the freedom of parents and the academic development of children, but Newsom was too afraid of teachers’ unions to insist on in-person learning during the pandemic.

Nate Hochman criticizes “the catastrophe grift.”

David Kirkwood describes the computer code used by Neil Ferguson as “amateurish.”

Writing in Spiked, David Livermore says that “[t]he worst thing we could do right now is impose new restrictions.” A slice:

The answer to the first question lies in the delusion that took hold in 2020. Those in positions of power believed that they could halt a respiratory pandemic through societal interventions. This ran counter to previous experience and beliefs. Historical respiratory pandemics – including the ‘Russian Flu’ of 1889-94, the ‘Spanish Flu’ of 1918-19, and the flu outbreaks of 1957-58 and 1968-69 – were allowed to run their course. Pre-Covid planning by Public Health England (2011) and the World Health Organisation (2019) anticipated that, next time, we would need to be similarly stoical. They recommended that life should be allowed to continue as normally as possible, with minimal panic. Neither agency advocated lockdowns or travel bans, and both were sceptical about the efficacy of masks for the uninfected.

Yet, in March 2020, all this planning and experience were discarded. It was enough that China asserted that lockdowns worked and that Neil Ferguson, then an adviser to the UK government, calculated that non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) could reduce deaths from 500,000 to 20,000. Without NPIs, the government stated, the NHS would be overwhelmed.

And, so from March 2020 onwards, the government imposed a whole range of NPIs, from lockdowns and masks, to Test and Trace and fines for non-compliance. The expectation was that NPIs should cut transmission by reducing human contacts. And any failure to cut transmission should be interpreted as a failure of public compliance. Hence the authorities were empowered to enforce the rules, while critics of the government’s approach were publicly denigrated and demonised.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 53 of Deirdre McCloskey’s hot-off-the-press 2022 volume, Beyond Positivism, Behaviorism, and Neoinstitutionalism in Economics:

Stagnationism has been asserted by every second generation of economists, to be refuted in the economic history of the next.

DBx: Pictured here is John Maynard Keynes. Among JMK’s many errors was his belief – held, mind you, in the 1930s – that the modern capitalist economy had just about run out of new innovative ideas.

Risks Are Inescapable – The Only Question Is Whether to Assess Them Accurately or Inaccurately

(Don Boudreaux)

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In my latest column for AIER, I lament the frequent misinterpretation of mishaps as evidence that greater precautions against particular risks are thereby necessarily justified. A slice:

In our personal, daily lives we understand that accidents happen. No particular mishap or accident that you suffer is necessarily evidence that you’ve been doing things wrongly. Put differently, each adult understands – if only subconsciously – that every possible course of action carries some risk. Therefore, an actual manifestation of a course of action’s risk is not itself proof that the risk had been underestimated or that precautions against the risk were insufficient.

Yet this mature understanding of the inescapability of risk, and of the meaning of accidents and occasional misfortunes, seems lacking in the public sector. Very often, a newsworthy calamity is taken to be proof that precautions against such a calamity must be intensified.

Was there a recent mass shooting? We must therefore tighten restrictions on gun ownership!

Was Americans’ access to imported medical supplies obstructed? We must therefore rely less on foreign production of these supplies!

Was there a fatal accident on an amusement-park ride? We must therefore increase the safety of amusement-park rides!

Did insiders at a big corporation commit fraud? We must therefore strengthen government oversight and regulation of corporate-managers’ behavior!

Was someone caught getting through airport security with a gun? We must therefore increase the severity of security screenings at airports!

Did someone recently die of food poisoning from canned vegetables bought in a supermarket? We must therefore regulate the safety of foods more stringently!

Each of these events is unfortunate. But none of them, standing alone, implies that we “must therefore do something.” Short of completely prohibiting the activity in question, every degree of precaution regarding that activity leaves some chance that engaging in that activity will result in a mishap, perhaps even a catastrophe. For example, even the most stringent and strictly enforced regulation of food safety will not eliminate the chance of someone dying from food poisoning contracted from store-bought foods. It follows that if government responds to a new case of fatal food poisoning by intensifying its regulation of food safety, the result might be regulation that’s excessively restrictive.

Of course, if reducing the prospects of food poisoning were humanity’s only goal, then each and every increase in the stringency of food-safety regulation would be worthwhile. But because we humans have countless goals other than to avoid food poisoning, steps taken to avoid such poisoning are costly. With each such step that we take, we deny ourselves other valuable goods, services, and experiences. At some point, then, an extra dollop of – economists call it “a marginal increment of” – food safety is no longer worthwhile. The (very real) benefit we would get from the extra protection from food poisoning is less than the (very real) benefits from other goods, services, and experiences that we would have to sacrifice to obtain this extra dollop of protection from food poisoning.

Unfortunately, politicians are biased toward reacting to the latest headlines. Reacting in this manner is a cheap and flashy way of creating the appearance of being caring and responsive. And reporters and headline writers are biased toward blaring out, and even exaggerating, news of the latest unfortunate event. Too often, in response, governments spring into action to implement or to strengthen protections against whatever misfortune is blared in today’s headlines. The too-frequent result is excessive protection against particular risks.

While a series of particular misfortunes might accurately reveal the desirability of taking further precautions against those misfortunes, in almost all cases a single or infrequent misfortune – a misfortune that occurs only once or only relatively rarely – does not, standing alone, reveal that precautions should be intensified. Each of us in our private lives has strong incentives to make these assessments correctly, for if we don’t, we personally suffer. Politicians and bureaucrats, in contrast, not only do not personally suffer if they impose excessive precautions, they are often lauded for doing so – which is yet another good reason for reducing the role of government.

Defending My Drivel

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to a new correspondent:

Mr. P__:

Describing my latest essay for AIER as “pap to distract attention from the severe problems humanity is now confronted by,” you wonder why I “waste time writing such starry eyed drivel.”

My simple answer is that, while my prose might indeed be drivel, I don’t believe the substantive points in my essay are pap. It’s true that these points aren’t original to me; they’ve been known to competent economists for generations. But a great deal – I believe most – of the commentary that today is featured in major media outlets, on social media, in classrooms, and in political discussions reveals that very many people do not begin to appreciate just how utterly yet productively dependent each of us is on the knowledge and work effort of millions (and in some cases billions) of strangers from around the world. Today’s global economy works so smoothly, quietly, and effortlessly at productively coordinating the efforts of multitudes of strangers that we notice only the economy’s relatively few shortcomings and occasional hiccups. I believe that we should notice also, and celebrate, its countless silent successes – successes that occur literally every moment of every day and overwhelm, by orders of many magnitudes, its shortcomings and hiccups.

Contrary to your claim, I’ve never denied that the global economy has some real problems. But to have any hope of identifying actual, correctable problems – and of distinguishing real problems from the mere results of inescapable trade-offs – we must first appreciate just how remarkable is the daily coordination achieved by the global price system. The point of my essay is to instill such an appreciation.

You call this appreciation “starry eyed” because it reveals that the global market economy, by any reasonable standard, works remarkably – indeed, astonishingly – well. I call this appreciation realistic because, well, it is.

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