Russell Roberts's Blog, page 141

Some Non-Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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David Boaz remembers the late George Smith.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Todd Henderson warns against government regulation of Google ads. (DBx: Although I agree with Todd’s opposition to attempts to regulate advertising on Google – and I agree with him also that the market for on-line advertising differs in important ways from markets for financial securities – I am much more opposed to financial-market regulation than Todd seems to be.)

Art Carden wonders which non-Nobel-laureate economists should have been awarded the Nobel Prize.

My GMU Econ colleague Bryan Caplan has no patience for vacuous nonsense.

Ryan Bourne and Brad Subramaniam are not impressed with Elizabeth Warren’s newly unveiled whackadoodle scheme to outlaw so-called “price gouging.”

“AMA Proudly Beats Back Competition.”

“Anti-Vaping Hysteria Is Deadly.”

Peter Coclanis exposes the flaws in Matthew Desmond’s contribution to the “1619 Project.” A slice:

Desmond’s melodramatic narrative, like that of the 1619 Project generally, is as tendentious as it is thinly sourced. Except for a one-off nod in the direction of the distinguished economic historian of slavery Stanley Engerman (2000, 480), virtually every authority invoked and assertion made in Desmond’s piece are associated with the New History of American Capitalism movement and its take on slavery and capitalism. Indeed, although the piece is not footnoted, most of it seems to have been drawn from a single text—Slavery’s Capitalism, edited by Beckert and Rockman (2016b)—supplemented by a sidewise glance at Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams (2013). To be sure, an author has the right to his or her own path, but in a publication intended for a broad, nonspecialist audience, doesn’t every author also have an obligation to point out that there are other paths and that the path depicted has its critics and detractors? If Desmond opted for complete transparency, he might even have pointed out that almost every serious economic historian of slavery has rejected the basic NHAC positions he lays out in his essay, in most instances to devastating effect.

Applauding Jeff Jacoby’s Busting of Trade-Deficit Myths

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter of mine that appears in today’s Boston Globe:

Editor:

Jeff Jacoby’s attempt to calm people’s fears of a U.S. trade deficit is informed and eloquent (“The trade deficit is up again. No worries.” May 11). Applause would come even from Adam Smith, who wrote that “[n]othing, however, can be more absurd than this whole doctrine of the balance of trade.”*

So true.

Unfortunately, it’s also true that nothing can be more serviceable for politicians itching to transform economic ignorance into votes than this whole doctrine of the balance of trade. Bellowing about “the trade deficit” is a sure-fire way to incite the economically uninformed to support protectionist restrictions that artificially enrich political powerful producers at the larger expense of the public. This cronyist transfer of wealth will end only when we eliminate a deficit that we should truly fear, namely, the deficit of economic understanding. Fortunately, Jacoby is on the job.

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

* Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), Book IV, chapter 3, paragraph 31.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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University of Auckland Professor of Experimental Economics, Ananish Chaudhuri, is interviewed about his new book, Nudged Into Lockdown? Behavioural economics, uncertainty and Covid-19. Two slices:

Behavioural economics explains the failure to incorporate human response factors into the epidemiological models on which the lockdowns were based. Humans tend to focus on losses that are immediately in front of them rather than those that are more diffuse and dispersed in the background, even when they are larger.

…..

It was easier to justify lockdowns based on “saving lives” when faced with statistically high but overstated death projections. It was said no cost was too much in doing this, though calculations on the costs of lives are common for purposes such as insurance or building roads.

Chaudhuri argues public opinion demands moderation when costs vastly outweigh benefits. The Government did not act moderately until Omicron was endemic in the community, finally forcing the vast bureaucracy of the MIQ system to be dismantled without any effect on the fatality rate or hospital overload.

Another contentious claim is that the lockdown proponents started from the viewpoint that people couldn’t be trusted and should be coerced en masse into quarantine or managed isolation under threat of punishment. The regulations prioritised some lives over others, while opponents were accused of being guilty of the same thing.

The plight of bankrupted family-owned businesses, farmers who couldn’t harvest their crops and migrant workers left in limbo were just some examples of human rights and freedoms being trashed.

K. Lloyd Billingsley reports on conflicts of interest at the National Institutes of Health. A slice:

As [Adam] Andrzejewski explains, the NIH doles out $32 billion in grants to some 56,000 grantees, and over 11 years, approximately $350 million is “flowing back to NIH scientists and leadership.” With the NIH blocking requests for information, the payments are receiving no scrutiny, “on its face a conflict of interest.” Taxpayers and unwitting participants in medical trials might dial back to Dr. Fauci’s first “treatment” for AIDS.

auci promoted trials of AZT (azidothymidine), marketed as Zidovudine, a DNA chain terminator rejected for cancer treatment because of cytotoxicity, and lethality to cells. In 1987 the FDA approved AZT at lightning speed, which disturbed molecular biologist Dr. Harvey Bialy, who was the scientific editor of Biotechnology.

“I can’t see how this drug could be doing anything other than making people very sick,” said Dr. Bialy, but at the time, AZT was making some people very rich. After FDA approval, Burroughs Wellcome stock went through the roof. At $8,000 per year per patient, AZT was the most expensive drug ever marketed. As the BBC showed in “Guinea Pig Kids,” Fauci also conducted trials of AZT and other dangerous drugs on black and Hispanic foster children in New York City.

In her 1995 book, The Search for an AIDS Vaccine, Fauci’s wife Christine Grady said children and pregnant women were suitable subjects for drug trials and touted “the availability and effectiveness of AZT.” As the couple had to know, it was anything but.

el gato malo is correct:

if you learn one thing from the last two years, learn this:

the road to perdition is paved in apathy.

this was done to you, not for you.

and it will not change until we change.

In China, covid tyranny continues – as do protests against it.

Here’s Jay Bhattacharya, on Twitter, decrying the goings-on in today’s dystopian Shanghai:

Read this thread about one night in the Shanghai lockdown. The authorities killed pet cats and dogs of people who tested positive. Some owners released their pets into the city to save them. Now feral, they attack each other, howling in hunger every night.

“Covid lockdowns left toddlers unable to speak or play properly.”

Future generations will look back upon covid hysteria and shake their heads in a combination of amazement and despair at the realization that humans can be so very irrational and cruel. (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 228 of my colleague Peter Boettke’s 2017 paper “Rebuilding the Liberal Project,” as this paper appears in Pete’s 2021 book, The Struggle for a Better World (typo corrected):

Parochialism kills progress by forcing attention in-group, rather than allowing, let alone enabling, individuals in their quest to seek new ways to learn and benefit from others. Turning inward means turning away from pursuing productive specialisation and peaceful social cooperation in the global marketplace.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 285 of F.A. Hayek’s profound 1952 book The Counter-Revolution of Science, as this book appears as part of volume 13 (Studies on the Abuse & Decline of Reason, Bruce Caldwell, ed. [2010]) of the Collected Works of F.A. Hayek:

The discussions of every age are filled with the issues on which its leading schools of thought differ. But the general intellectual atmosphere of the time is always determined by the views on which the opposing schools agree. They become the unspoken pre-suppositions of all thought, and common and unquestioningly accepted foundations on which all discussion proceeds.

More on the Dangers of Price Controls

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to National Review’s The Corner:

Editor:

Andrew Stuttaford nicely reviews many of the reasons why the imposition of price controls would be “an act of remarkable economic destructiveness” (“Price Controls: An ‘Absurdity’ for the Generations,” May 14). There’s an additional reason worth noting; it’s one famously explained nearly 80 years ago by F.A. Hayek.

Market prices transmit information that’s indispensable if consumers and producers are to act in ways that are consistent with the realities of underlying market conditions. When, for example, the price of gasoline rises relative to those of other goods – when prices at the pump rise relative to the prices of goods from lubricants to lipstick, and from naphtha to nylon – producers are notified that more profits are to be earned by producing more gasoline, while consumers are notified that gasoline is now less abundant than it was earlier and, therefore, they should reduce their consumption of it.

Government-imposed price controls block the flow of this information – information that is always indispensable, but the need for which is especially acute when humanity is beset with calamities such as war, natural disasters, and pandemic-inspired lockdowns. As Mercatus Center Senior Fellow Rosolino Candela says,

Inhibiting the ability for consumers to communicate their demand to sellers through price controls is analogous to cutting a telephone cord in the middle of an emergency phone call.

Nancy Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren, and all others who now clamor for price controls clamor, in effect, to suppress the information necessary for the global economy to relieve today’s intense consumer distress.

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

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from pages 24-25 of the 2006 Liberty Fund edition of Ludwig von Mises’s 1956 volume, The Anti-capitalistic Mentality (available free-of-charge on-line here):

Everybody is free to join the ranks of the three progressive classes of a capitalist society. These classes are not closed castes. Membership in them is not a privilege conferred on the individual by a higher authority or inherited from one’s ancestors. These classes are not clubs, and the ins have no power to keep out any newcomer. What is needed to become a capitalist, an entrepreneur or a deviser of new technological methods is brains and will power. The heir of a wealthy man enjoys a certain advantage as he starts under more favorable conditions than others. But his task in the rivalry of the market is not easier, but sometimes even more wearisome and less remunerative than that of a newcomer. He has to reorganize his inheritance in order to adjust it to the changes in market conditions. Thus, for instance, the problems that the heir of a railroad “empire” had to face were, in the last decades, certainly more knotty than those encountered by the man who started from scratch in trucking or in air transportation.

Seek little-t truth, but Reject those Who Peddle Capital-T Truth

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal:

Editor:

Barton Swaim eloquently exposes the dangers posed by intellectuals and government officials who, insisting that facts ‘speak for themselves,’ arrogantly assume that their own particular interpretations of the facts are correct beyond dispute (“How Disagreement Became ‘Disinformation,’” May 14). For any person infected by this conceit, it’s a short leap to the conclusion that the good of society requires the silencing of individuals who dare to disagree with his or her interpretation.

No clearer recent example of such pre-enlightenment dogmatism exists than Francis Collins conniving with Anthony Fauci to use their high government offices to discredit and drown out the voices of the scientists who wrote the Great Barrington Declaration. Ironically, like every such censorious effort, Collins’s and Fauci’s attempt to smear the Great Barrington Declaration loudly announces the censors’ own justified fear that their interpretation of ‘the data’ will be exposed in open debate as being flawed.

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

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from pages 368-369 of the late Wesleyan University economic historian Stanley Lebergott’s indispensable 1984 book, The Americans: An Economic Record (footnotes deleted):

Major changes escalated in the twentieth century. Rising workers’ incomes enabled families to buy appliances that cut the work day more substantially, and freed housewives to enter the labor force….

[F]ewer families took in boarders and lodgers. In 1900 one urban family out of four shared its home with a boarder or lodger; by 1930, only 11 percent did so, and by 1970, a mere 2 percent did.

Together, such factors reduced housewives’ meal preparation and cleaning time from 6 hours a day to 1 1/2. Time was thus freed for education, the pursuit of “culture,” leisure.

DBx: Don’t forget this splendid TED talk by the late Hans Rosling:

Who’s Really Gouging Consumers?

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s letter to the editor of The Hill:

Editor:

Nancy Pelosi complains about rising gasoline prices and, to solve the problem, calls on government to cap such price hikes (“Pelosi hammers gas companies for consumer ‘exploitation,’” May 12). Ms. Pelosi’s screeching is as preposterous as would be that of an obdurate alcoholic who complains about his hangover and, to solve the problem, calls for his bartender to pour him more stiff drinks.

Progressives incessantly threaten to tax and regulate carbon fuels into oblivion. These threats cannot but reduce investors’ willingness to fund each of the many steps – from exploration through refining to transporting gasoline to market – that are necessary to keep energy prices low. One reality reflected by today’s high prices at the pump is this hostility to carbon fuels generally and to petroleum especially. And gasoline price controls would only make matters worse by further reducing the attractiveness of investing in the petroleum industry: Why invest in bringing products to market if the prices at which you’re allowed to sell are dictated by grandstanding politicians?

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

…..

DBx: Well, if price controls do return, the teaching of principles of microeconomics will soon become easier, as today’s students would then come to have first-hand experience with fuel shortages of the sort that those of us who remember the 1970s remember so well but not-so-fondly.