Russell Roberts's Blog, page 137

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Thorsteinn Siglaugsson reports on the updated version of Jonas Herby’s, Lars Jonung’s and Steve Hanke’s John Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics paper on lockdowns. A slice:

Appendix II is a particularly interesting read. Some readers may recall the media storm against this paper, driven by some self-proclaimed fact-checkers. The appendix not only debunks all the “fact-checkers” claims but the authors also demonstrate how they were based not on any understanding of the paper (in fact it looks as if the “fact-checkers” mostly never even read it), but rather on superficial and to a large extent irrelevant “criticisms”, repeated blindly by one “fact-checker” and one media outlet after another.

Ananish Chaudhuri, writing in the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, reviews Paul Frijters’s, Gigi Foster’s and Michael Baker’s The Great Covid Panic. (HT Jeffrey Tucker) A slice:

Supporters of lockdowns typically argue that lockdowns saved lives and in the absence of the same there would be more lives lost. Unfortunately, this argument fails to hold water Bjørnskov (2021). has shown this to be incorrect for 24 European countries during the first half of 2020. There is controversy regarding true Covid death counts since in many cases deaths were counted as Covid deaths even if Covid was not the primary cause of death. (Boyle, 2021) To avoid this, Bjørnskov (2021) looks at all-cause mortality since if lockdowns indeed resulted in lives being saved then countries with more stringent lockdowns should report fewer total deaths than those with weaker or no lockdowns. In Fig. 1 , I reproduce the results from this study. It is clear that countries with more stringent lockdowns reported more total deaths.

And no, countries that implemented early lockdowns did not fare any better. It did not help them avoid further and stringent lockdowns down the road. Can reverse causality be an issue? Could it be the case that countries that experienced more cases and deaths ended up with more stringent lockdowns rather than lockdowns causing more deaths? One way to address this question is to exploit the Sebhatu et al. (2020) finding regarding the large amount of mimicry among countries in implementing lockdowns. This allows Bjørnskov (2021) to use the stringency index of other countries as an instrument. It turns out that mortality in these countries is strongly correlated with the stringency index of its neighbors implying that reverse causality is not a factor.

A key chapter in the book is Chapter 5: The Tragedy where the authors provide an accounting of the collateral damages caused by lockdowns ranging from the economic fall-out to the social and ethical consequences. This chapter should make most readers both sad and angry.

“Covid lockdowns caused 3,000 extra diabetes deaths in England due to lack of vital checks and tests, NHS report finds.”

Rod Liddle regrets supporting lockdowns in Britain. A slice:

It is difficult to credit the sheer surreal nature of that first lockdown — which, nonetheless, I rather enjoyed. In theory, we were allowed out shopping once every two weeks, and could take a constitutional once a day for one hour, provided we didn’t sit on a bench or talk to anyone else. I had reckoned it all to be a little Ballardian — not least in the stockpiling of lavatory paper and spaghetti. And yet, shockingly, it wasn’t Ballardian, because there was no real breakdown in society: we all did as we were told in an extraordinarily compliant manner. Meanwhile, somewhere in government, they were getting pissed at a party and vomiting, and two civil servants or wonks were trying to kick each other’s heads in.

I had been entirely in support of that first lockdown, in every measure of its severity, craven before the little Hitlers who sprang up to lecture you about keeping a safe distance outside the supermarket, masked-up and with chapped hands from the constant washing, and with the perpetual acrid, alcoholic reek of hand sanitiser in my nostrils. OK, I began having grave doubts later that summer, with the bizarre non-sequiturs about where we were allowed to go and what we were allowed to do — drinks down the pub, fine; visit your dying grandmother, banned etc. But for three months at least, I was a happy, supine, strangely unquestioning camper. My wife remarked to me, in March 2020: “It’s all shite, all of it. None of it will make a difference. It’s about control. And it will go on for ages.” Nonsense, my dear — it will all be over by September, and this is simply a case of ensuring the frailest of us survive, I assured her.

What a terrible thing it is to have to admit, in a national newspaper, that one’s wife was absolutely right, on all counts, and that I was wrong. The government was right too. The ministers, including the prime minister, and the civil servants took not the slightest notice of their own advice. They partied like it was 2019. They were happy to pass on the fatuous injunctions from Sage to the plebs and to ensure that transgressors were fined or shamed or both — but they knew it was all bollocks. Their actions prove this beyond all reasonable doubt.

el gato malo reports evidence, from a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine, that “natural immunity outperforms vaccinated AND vaccinated and recovered.”

Jay Bhattacharya tweets:

The zeitgeist is shifting rapidly beyond the capacity of public health to induce fear. Next will come the widespread public realization that much of our covid policy response was useless in stopping covid & caused substantial harm.

Emma Woodhouse tweets this graph and commentary: (HT Martin Kulldorff)

Tragic increase in U.S. pediatric drug/alcohol-related deaths during the pandemic.

No reason to believe these numbers will return to 2019 level anytime soon.

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Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 22 of the late Gertrude Himmelfarb’s learned 1995 volume, The De-Moralization of Society:

If Victorians were concerned with the “small morals” of life – table manners, toilet habits, conventions of dress, appearance, conversation, greeting, and all the other “decencies” of behavior – it was because they saw them as the harbingers of morals writ large, the civilities of private life that were the corollaries of civilized social life.

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Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 198 of Arnold Kling’s excellent 2016 book, Specialization and Trade: A Re-introduction to Economics (footnote deleted):

It is always the case that government policymakers are going to lack importantinformation that can be discovered only by participants in the market. Just like a would-be socialist central planner, a regulator faces an insurmountable calculation problem.

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: “Just speculating”

(Don Boudreaux)

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In my column for the November 9th, 2012, edition of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review I reviewed some basic economics of speculation – speculation as done by every sensible human being who expects to be alive tomorrow. You can read my column in full beneath the fold.

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Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 82 of the original edition of Robert Higgs’s remarkable 1987 book, Crisis and Leviathan (footnote deleted; link added):

Though the post-Civil War era did not witness pure laissez-faire in the United States, it did see a limited government and an economy in which people had extensive freedom to enter into economic transactions of their own choosing on terms established by the transactors alone. As the legal historian Lawrence Friedman has expressed it, “Every new law on the statute books, if it dealt with the economy, was a cup of water withdrawn from the oceanic domain of the law of contract.”

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Some Non-Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Phil Magness tweets this following – and points out that such facts are nearly impossible to square with the cartoonish fallacies spread by the likes of Nancy MacLean about classical-liberal economists.

In 1958, the AEA [American Economic Association] was considering a future conference site in New Orleans. The hotel was still segregated. Milton Friedman proposed sending a message to the hotel: the conference would be conditional on ending discrimination before the proposed date.

Richard Ebeling looks back on the founding of the Mont Pelerin Society. A slice:

If one take Mises’s dictum seriously, it means that an individual may read, watch, consume, and act upon any desire he has or belief he holds, without molestation by either a fellow citizen or by the government, as long as his conduct is peaceful and honest. He may enter into any association and exchange, based upon mutually agreed-upon terms with any and all others, as long as they are not based on fraud or force. And he may keep all that he has peacefully and honestly earned and spend it any way he considers beneficial to himself, without being taxed or regulated to fund activities or redistributions to others for which he does not give his voluntary consent. It is the philosophy on the basis of which Leonard E. Read once entitled one of his books, Anything That’s Peaceful (1964).

Jason Hayes, writing in the Wall Street Journal, explains how ‘green-energy’ policies will make Michigan a darker, hotter place this summer. A slice:

Decades of mandates and subsidies mean Michigan has a quickly growing supply of solar panels and more than 1,500 wind turbines. Yet combined, they still can’t produce as much electricity as the Palisades plant alone. There is no economically viable path to ramp up wind or solar production to replace the lost power, much less meet the state’s rising energy demands.

For that matter, there’s no obvious recognition from the governor’s office that wind and solar are wholly dependent on the weather. They must have ample back-up from nuclear, coal and gas-fired plants for the significant amount of time on cloudy, windless days, when turbines and solar panels produce nothing. Yet it’s the reliable energy sources that are being targeted for closure today.

A different, more sane approach is needed, because rolling blackouts are looming.

GMU Econ alum Nathan Goodman, writing at EconLog, ponders the limits of Tiebout competition.

My GMU Econ colleague Bryan Caplan shares his observations about the ‘biography’ of the typical modern American economist. A slice:

Although I teach econ at heterodox George Mason University, I went to standard elite colleges: UC Berkeley for undergrad, Princeton for grad school. I talked to a lot of classmates at both schools, and have met many hundreds of other professional economists. I therefore confidently insist that the typical economist’s origin story actually goes like so:

You grow up in a well-off, center-left or left-wing home.As a teen-ager, you became a vocal left-wing intellectual, confident that your side has all the answers.Following the path of least resistance, you go to college. Despite left-wing misgivings, you take Econ 1 and discover some troubling downsides of standard left-wing policies. You hear about scarcity and opportunity costs. You learn about the equity-efficiency trade-off. You find out that incentives matter. You see why price controls lead to shortages and surpluses.While you absorb the reality of these downsides reluctantly, you eagerly embrace every textbook story about market failure. Monopoly, externalities, public goods, asymmetric information, behavioral econ: All “scientifically” confirm your left-wing priors. Still, the net effect of economics is to tone down your youthful leftist enthusiasm – to realize that “the world is more complex” than you thought. Left moves to center-left, center-left moves to moderate.Since you’re near the top of your classes and you fit in, you go to grad school to get a Ph.D. You toil with a pile of math and stats for most of the rest of your twenties.Voila, you become a professional economist – and start helping other youths of similar background to follow in your center-left “the world is more complex than I thought” footsteps.

In my view, a truly high-quality undergraduate economics program would turn even a far-left freshman into an avid Friedmanite – and push everyone else to more extreme libertarian stances. Regardless of whether I’m right, however, nothing of the kind goes on in most actually-existing undergraduate economics programs.

The chief function of actually-existing undergraduate econ, rather, is taking know-it-all leftist teen-agers and showing them some trade-offs. Kind of like that scene with the eyedrops in A Clockwork Orange. This intellectual experience has near-zero influence on students’ core values, which remain conventionally left-wing. In their hearts, most professional economists continue to place equity over efficiency, distribution over production, and social cohesion over economic growth, just as they did in their teens. Still, economic education convinces them that (a) there is a trade-off, and (b) this trade-off is occasionally severe enough to justify deliberate sacrifices of equity, distribution, and social cohesion.

This might not seem like much, but in a world ruled by Social Desirability Bias, what’s amazing is not that most economists continue to affirm feel-good platitudes. What’s amazing is that most economists occasionally play the iconoclast.

(DBx: I’m an exception to this pattern. I grew up in a decidedly working-class household with no conscious political ideology save for a natural distrust and dislike of the labor unions that regularly tried – and just as regularly failed – to unionize the shipyard at which my father, grandfather, mother, and uncles worked. But my parents had an acute allergy – which they spread to each of their four children – to envy, to covetousness, to ingratitude, and to the making of excuses.)

Steven Greenhut is correct: There is no political solution to the baby-formula shortage.

My GMU Econ colleague Larry White asks: “Should the Fed Devalue Our Currency to Implement Negative Interest Rates?”

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 233 of Jerry Ellig’s and my former student Daniel Lin’s excellent 2001 paper, “A Taxonomy of Dynamic Competition Theories,” as this paper is reprinted in Jerry Ellig on Dynamic Competition and Rational Regulation (Susan E. Dudley & Patrick A. McLaughlin, eds., 2021) (footnote deleted):

The innovations that arise from entrepreneurial discovery need not be limited to technical improvements. They can also include improvements in management methods, corporate culture, arbitrage opportunities, and organizational learning. Entrepreneurs capitalize on both “high-tech” and “low-tech” knowledge, and so analysis focused solely on measurables like R&D will likely miss a great deal of entrepreneurial innovation.

Save Us From Such ‘Progress’

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal:

Editor:

Your prediction rings true that this summer many Americans will suffer blackouts caused by ‘green-energy’ policies (“America’s Summer of Rolling Blackouts,” May 28). Having read your prediction immediately after spending what seemed an eternity washing my hands under the miserable mist emitted by my new (government-mandated) low-flow bathroom faucet, I was struck by this realization: Progressivism, preternaturally itching to issue diktats, thrives on undoing the ease, convenience, and comfort brought to humanity by free markets.

My fear is that Progressives won’t be satisfied until we’ve been ‘progressed’ back to a literal dark age in which every detail of the lives of us serfs is overseen by our masters as we’re brainwashed into being grateful for the yokes around our necks, the muzzles on our mouths, and the crumbs that barely sustain us.

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

Oh My Gosh, Canada

(Don Boudreaux)

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Dave Rubin talks with Rav Arora and Viva Frei about the hypocritical, arrogant, and dangerous strongman now at the head of Canada’s national government, Justin Trudeau. (HT Dan Klein)

Some Non-Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Rachel Ferguson and Marcus Witcher explain that markets are a powerful disinfectant against racial discrimination. Two slices:

In Black Liberation Through the Marketplace: Hope, Heartbreak, and the Promise of America, we collect classical liberal insights on Black American history as well as recommendations to increase Black flourishing today. We felt deeply the misfortune that the political philosophy which has done the most to increase the material well-being of impoverished people across the globe is not associated in the minds of most Americans with liberation for marginalized groups. From William Lloyd Garrison and his band of free market abolitionists; to Frederick Douglass’s challenge that America “live up to the Constitution;” to Moorfield Storey and Oswald Garrison Villard helping to found the NAACP; to Rose Wilder Lane’s libertarian arguments for Black rights in the Pittsburgh Courier; to Zora Neale Hurston’s passionate individualism, there is a clear line of pro-Black classical liberal thinkers pointing to the unrealized promise of America’s excellent Founding ideals when it came to its Black population.

…..

But the end of Jim Crow only meant the invention of new ways to abrogate Black rights, and this time with the far bigger weapon of massive federal projects. Progressive social engineering reared its ugly head through the Federal Housing Administration’s red-lining policy, but graduated to the construction of the Federal Highway System, and so-called ‘urban renewal,’ Orwellian new-speak for eminent domain abuse, referred to popularly as ‘Negro removal.’

The addition of terrible economic policies and a welfare state arranged according to deeply perverse incentives added to the perfect storm of central planning disasters, grinding decades of astounding Black economic growth to a halt in the early 1970s. After the precipitous drop from 89 percent below the poverty rate in 1940 to 30 percent by 1970, we’ve eked out only another 10 percent drop in the last 50 years, leaving Black Americans at double the proportion in poverty when compared to the white population.

Classical liberals and libertarians have been especially sensitive to issues that disparately affect Black Americans, such as the drug war and the mass incarceration crisis. They’ve been correct, though, to argue for these as American crises, not simply Black ones. To bring down our incarceration numbers, prosecutors don’t need diversity training; they need accountability, non-perverse incentives, and far less arbitrary power.

Tarnell Brown reviews Rachel Ferguson’s and Marcus Witcher’s Black Liberation Through the Marketplace. A slice:

A vibrant marketplace requires that the minority rights be protected against majoritarian whims, and this guarantee is one of the most basic tenets of classical liberalism. Despite the guiding framework of the American Constitution, the history of the United States is replete with state failures to properly police the rights of subgroups within its purview. Ferguson and Witcher provide several examples of these tragic derelictions of duty, warning the reader that the recounting of these instances is graphic and disturbing. One such case, the Colfax Massacre of Easter Sunday, 1873, saw a disagreement over the results of the Louisiana gubernatorial race turn deadly, resulting in over 100 Black fatalities.

Glenn Loury is wise. A slice:

I take no pleasure in doing so but feel obliged to report this reality: equality of dignity, equality of standing, of honor, of security in one’s position within society, an equal ability to command the respect of others—such things cannot simply be handed over. Nor will they be the fruit of insurrection, violent uprising, or rebellion. Equality of this sort is something we must wrest with our bare hands from a cruel and indifferent world by means of our own effort, inspired by the example of our enslaved and newly freed ancestors. We must make ourselves equal. No one can do that for us. My fear is that, until we recognize and accept this unlovely but inexorable fact about the human condition—until we disdain the rhetoric and embrace the realities about race in our country—the disparities that have so troubled our politics and so threatened our domestic tranquility will continue to persist.

Here’s David Henderson on Paul Joskow on the late, great Harold Demsetz.

The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board warns of the rolling blackouts that – because of ‘green-energy’ initiatives – await millions of Americans this summer. A slice:

Summer is around the corner, and we suggest you prepare by buying an emergency generator, if you can find one in stock. Last week the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) warned that two-thirds of the U.S. could experience blackouts this summer. Welcome to the “green energy transition.”

We’ve been warning for years that climate policies would make the grid more vulnerable to vacillations in supply and demand. And here we are. Some of the mainstream press are belatedly catching on that blackouts are coming, but they still don’t grasp the real problem: The forced transition to green energy is distorting energy markets and destabilizing the grid.

…..

One problem is that subsidies enable wind and solar generators to turn a profit even when the supply of electricity exceeds demand. Coal and nuclear plants, on the other hand, can’t make money running only some of the time, so many have shut down. Natural-gas-fired plants can help pick up the slack, but there aren’t enough of them to back up all of the renewables coming onto the grid.

John Tierney writes wisely about school shootings. A slice:

There are legitimate issues to debate about criminal violence in America, which has indeed been increasing, but we’re not going to identify the causes or remedies by focusing on a few isolated crimes and traumatizing Americans in the process. Surveys show that half of Americans worry about being the victim of a mass shooting, and a third of them avoid going to certain places and events because of this fear. More than 60 percent of parents worry that their child will be killed in a mass shooting at school.

Children do need to be better protected from criminals, and there might be ways to make schools safer, but students don’t need the active-shooter drills now conducted in over 95 percent of the nation’s schools, and which are associated with higher levels of depression, stress and anxiety. Nor do children and parents need to hear the deceptive statistics promoted by the press and the White House’s fearmonger-in-chief.

Juliette Sellgren talks with Randy Simmons about public choice.

Nick Gillespie argues that Tucker Carlson’s “great replacement theory” is “spectacularly wrong.”