Russell Roberts's Blog, page 142
May 13, 2022
Some Covid Links
Juliette Sellgren talks with Jay Bhattacharya.
The New York Post‘s Editorial Board is rightly critical of an unmasked Patti LuPone’s tirade sparked by someone not wearing a mask to Lupone’s liking. (DBx: You might say that LuPone displayed the arrogance and hypocrisy of, let’s see, an Eva Peron.)
Douglas Murray wonders “why can’t these loathsome elites just give up the masked charade.” A slice:
On a visit to DC this week I discovered something everybody might know. Which is that dwellers in the swamp still wear masks. Unlike most New Yorkers, the DC crowd still like to cover their faces as they walk down the streets. If you get into a lift unmasked they still glare at you like New Yorkers did a couple of years ago.
It’s a reminder that different parts of the country are throwing off the COVID restrictions at different speeds. Just like nations. Even now there are places like New Zealand that are still reacting to COVID as though it was the bubonic plague. In fact I would guess that in decades to come those of us who once went there will tell our grandchildren about that majestic country. Immortalized in the “Lord of the Rings,” we will explain how it then cut itself off from the rest of the world in the 2020s. Who will believe our stories of that far-off land?
As a New Yorker it is easy to sometimes feel smug about our city getting going again. But while much of life has returned to normal, plenty of it still has not.
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Just this week a columnist at the New York Times actually wrote a lament for masks. Pamela Paul seems to think that we enjoyed mask-wearing and that children in New York liked being hidden behind these pointless face-coverings. It is a look that people are “sorry to see go” she claimed. Apparently, during the era of masks “we got to more creatively choose the face we presented to the outside world, without piercing a nose.” But the main point Paul tried to make was that masks were a useful political signifier. As though we needed more of these in our country.
Masks have certainly remained a signifier. Outside of a tiny number of people who believe they need them for a medical reason, they are a signifier of the people who want to get on with their lives versus those who do not. Who doesn’t? Well, the highly risk averse, obviously. But also those, like [Patti] LuPone, who want an excuse to feel better than other people. People who enjoy hectoring other people and want a virtuous excuse for doing so. I always thought LuPone was a natural on Broadway. But if she thinks she’s so above her New York audiences that she can scream abuse at them then perhaps she should move on down to the Swamp. They would love her. And she might even like them in turn.
While many experts believe there could be a seasonal wave, the figure of 100 million infections is pure speculation. And considering that infections have increased substantially the past several weeks with only a minimal increase in hospitalization and without any uptick in deaths, there is no basis for believing that a fall/winter wave of infections will necessarily lead to a significant increase in severe COVID illness.
Justin Hart identifies the true source of recent supply-chain web obstructions.
Writing in the Spectator, Matthew Parris digs into data on Britain’s covid deaths. A slice:
What for me stands out is not the pecking order, but two quite different observations. Firstly, it is difficult to spot any obvious correlation between the pandemic–suppressing measures taken by different members of the WHO, and the outcomes in terms of excess mortality. This suggests we should be more tentative about what works, and probably have much still to learn about how such viruses spread. Mask-wearing was far less common in Sweden than in Britain, yet we had twice as many excess deaths, though most Swedes live in urban environments, like us. There’s a strong case for serious and exhaustive study of the role of masks involving human challenge trials, about which (to my bafflement) there seems to be some kind of academic horror.
I lost confidence in health advice from official persons and organisations when more than a year ago it was established that surface contact (touching things) is not a significant source of Covid-19 viral spread. This, I repeat, has now been known for a long time. But official advice on handwashing has not been corrected, there remain (at some economic and environmental cost) signs and hand-gel dispensers everywhere, wipes are still being distributed and cleaners are still prancing around dabbing at bannisters and hand-holds. Why should I believe a government scientific establishment on anything else, if the official advice on this has not changed?
Here, though, is the thing that should not have shocked me (because the figures were broadly known) but did (because I did not know them). Some 109 excess deaths per 100,000 in Britain may be twice Sweden’s rate – but it’s still tiny! That’s about one person in a thousand. I had not properly understood how light the casualties have been in the developed world. And though it’s sad when anyone dies at any age, the average Covid-related casualty in Britain has been in the last ten years of his or her expected life, so viewed in terms of years lost the damage is far less severe than that inflicted by epidemics that target the young as well as old.
Yes, yes, ‘one death is one death too many’ etc, and no, I didn’t know these victims personally and if I had I might feel differently. All true enough. But how I feel is not the point. We do need to be able to count. When we count dispassionately we see a pandemic that took relatively few people away. Looking at the past 30 years, the pandemic did cause a sharp year-on-year difference, but there have been others.
Yet in trying to slow its spread (we were honest about that limited ambition, unlike the Australians, New Zealanders, Chinese and South Koreans) we took a two-year wrecking ball to our economy and to the educational and job prospects, not to say the mental health, of millions of our young people.
Out of the Mouths of Baby-Formula Bandits
Washington University economist Ian Fillmore sent to me the following e-mail, which I share here in full with his kind permission:
Hi Don,
I’m not sure if the FDA spokesperson meant to be this honest in responding to the infant formula shortage:
“Our first and foremost priority is ensuring that any recalled product remains off the market and we are working with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and manufacturers to ensure that parents have access to alternative, safe infant formula,” the FDA said in a statement to Fox News Digital on Tuesday.
Rephrasing that only slightly, “While we are working to ensure parents have access to infant formula, our first and foremost priority is ensuring that any recalled product remains off the market.” Exactly. The FDA does not exist to get products on the market. It exists to keep products off the market. They have no idea how to get a product to market; that’s just not what they do.
Ian Fillmore
Some Non-Covid Links
Under this cartel of countries, with foreign governments committed to refusing to compete for capital by cutting tax rates, the incentives for U.S. companies to avoid high U.S. taxes are seriously reduced. So are the incentives for governments to keep their own tax systems modest.
Those changes run deep, almost fundamental to the way the federal government operates now. John Hart Ely noted in 1981, “By refusing to legislate our legislators are escaping the sort of accountability that is crucial to the intelligible functioning of a democratic republic.” The problem is now so acute, the atrophy of legislative muscle so dramatic, that major congressional votes on budgets, healthcare, environmental, social, and family policies take place with little debate or compromise throughout the body, more in the manner of a rugby scrum than a deliberative republican body. Policies in the form of “legislation” composed entirely by staffers, spanning hundreds and thousands of pages are announced by congressional leadership of the majority party and voted on within hours or days.
(DBx: It’s worth pondering the potential value of a constitutional provision insisting on “due process of legislation.” This provision would enable courts to strike from the books legislation the passage of which fails to meet minimum standards of due legislative process. And legislation that cannot possibly have been read – forget meaningfully debated – by the legislators who vote on it surely isn’t enacted with due legislative practice.)
Absurdly, provisions were added to the United States‐Mexico‐Canada Agreement (USMCA) to restrict imports of formula from Canada, supposedly because China was investing in a baby food plant in Ontario, and this new production might eventually enter the U.S. market (heaven forbid!). Thus, the provisions in the USMCA’s agriculture annex establish confusing and costly TRQs on Canadian exports of infant formula, and the United States imported no baby formula from Canada in 2021.
Making matters even worse, infant formula is subject to onerous U.S. regulatory (“non‐tariff”) barriers. For example, the FDA requires specific ingredients, labeling requirements, and mandates retailers wait at least 90 days before marketing a new infant formula. Therefore, if U.S. retailers wanted to source more formula from established trading partners like Mexico or Canada, the needs of parents cannot be quickly met because of these wait times. Businesses also have little incentive to go through the onerous regulatory process to sell to American retailers, given the aforementioned tariffs and the relatively short duration of the current crisis.
The Trump administration surprised everyone in 2018 by pushing an industrial policy to win the race to 5G. Advocates called the proposed national 5G wholesale network a disruptive reform that would spur progress by challenging existing mobile carriers. Writing in the New York Times that year, Kevin Werbach, a Clinton and Obama telecom adviser, welcomed the idea: “Forward-thinking Democrats and public interest advocates have been pushing it for decades.”
Under the Trump plan, a private company would build and operate the system on a franchise basis. The U.S. government would supply the radio spectrum and impose an “open access” mandate—the network would have to host a range of wireless competitors. That would supposedly spur investment and promote innovation.
The plan has yet to be implemented in the U.S., but a similar plan was adopted in Mexico to establish a 4G network in 2013—and it has been a failure.
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Meanwhile, 5G networks are spreading more rapidly in the U.S. than in any other nation, with 49% coverage in October 2021. (China was at 20% that month.) This rollout benefits from recent U.S. auctions for flexible-use spectrum rights, infusing networks with new capacity that lowers costs and spurs rivalry. Further liberalization should continue.
Regulators haven’t been able to divert frequencies to selected business models to increase competition. U.S. policy makers should avoid trying.
John Stossel explains that GMO’s are good for us.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 182 of my colleague Peter Boettke’s September 2013 speech given at a conference, in honor of James Buchanan, at George Mason University, “What Should Classical Liberal Political Economists Do?”, as this speech is reprinted in Pete’s 2021 book, The Struggle for a Better World:
In the starkest way possible, it is important to remember that while [Adam] Smith identified the human propensity to truck, barter and exchange, Hobbes and others had also identified the human propensity to rape, pillage and plunder unless constrained. Whether men are Smithian or Hobbesian in their behavioral propensities is a function of the rules of the game under which they operate. If the costs of raping, pillaging and plundering are less than the benefits, then the ‘society’ under examination will indeed resemble the Hobbesian jungle. If the costs of predation are raised, and the benefits of cooperation are greater, then Smithian wealth creation through realizing the mutual gains from trade will be the foundation of the social order.
DBx: Indisputably true.
Deirdre McCloskey would add – and, I’m sure, Pete would agree – that the “rules of the game” are heavily determined by the way we talk to and about each other, as well as the way we talk to and about others. The words we use very much affect the way we, and those with whom we communicate, think. And, of course, the way we think very much affects the way we act regarding both ourselves and toward others.
If the words we use to describe predatory activities are sweet and forgiving, or even approving, we and those with whom we communicate will too often mistake predation for production. If the words we use to describe productive activities are harsh and unforgiving, or even hostile, we and those with whom we communicate will too often mistake production for predation.
If we use words with negative connotations to describe positive-sum activities or outcomes, we and those with whom we communicate will grow hostile to activities or outcomes that we should celebrate and welcome. If we use words with positive connotations to describe negative-sum activities or outcomes, we and those with whom we communicate will greet with approval activities and outcomes that we should fear and reject.
May 12, 2022
Samuel Adams and the “1619 Project”
The thorough debunking of the New York Times’s fictional-masquerading-as-factual account of America’s founding, the “1619 Project,” began – and succeeded in the judgment of all persons capable of reasoning – long before my recent posts here on this ‘project.’ Nevertheless, my reporting my encounters with evidence contrary to this ‘project’ might be worth a few peppercorns.
On page 133 of David McCullough’s 2001 John Adams, readers learn that “[w]hen Samuel Adams and his wife were presented with a slave girl as a gift in 1765, they had immediately set her free.” (J.L. Bell reports that the historical record is unclear if the emancipation was, in fact, completed immediately. Bell further suggests that the girl, Surry, continued to live with the Adamses, but not as a slave. Bell seems to have no doubt that Sam Adams never acted as a slave ‘owner,’ and – beyond the formalities of paperwork and legal proceedings – quite correctly never believed himself to one.)
Although there’s some question of just when Sam Adams became committed to the cause of American independence, he obviously came to support this cause by early July 1776, as he signed the Declaration of Independence. The anti-slavery Sam Adams’s embrace of the cause of independence is, therefore, yet one more piece of evidence that’s terribly inconsistent with the assertion that the American Revolution was largely meant to protect in North America the institution of slavery.
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Later this afternoon I’m likely to enjoy a Samuel Adams lager!
Quotation of the Day…
… is from David Hart’s splendid 2019 translation – still only on-line, but forthcoming in print – of Frédéric Bastiat’s 1850 Economic Harmonies; specifically, it’s from Chapter X, titled “Competition” (original emphasis):
[I]t is not right to talk, as often happens, about the tyranny of capital, since even in the most extreme cases its presence can never be more damaging than its absence to the situation of the worker.
May 11, 2022
Some Covid Links
Large swathes of China have been under some form of lockdown in recent months. That includes Shanghai, a crucial commercial hub, which has yet to emerge from restrictions after a month. The government shows little sign of recalibrating even as other countries abandon lockdowns in favor of learning to live with the virus.
This self-inflicted disaster is a growing danger to the global economy. Any supply chain passing through China either has snapped already or is in danger of doing so. Beijing’s zero-Covid mistake is disrupting the supply of a wide range of goods for consumers elsewhere, and is prompting more companies to reconsider their China business.
The biggest risk, however, is to China’s own economy—and Beijing increasingly realizes it. The country is all but certain to miss the Party’s 5.5% economic-growth target for the year, and that already was a modest goal compared to years past. Surveys of business confidence and investment are dire and the property market continues to sink.
Covid was used as an excuse by Chinese authoritarians to kill dissent in Hong Kong.
Meanwhile, in Shanghai the straw man is tightening his suffocating grip. (HT Phil Magness) See also this report. And this one.
“China faces ‘complicated and grim’ future as zero-Covid hits economy.”
In 2006, Henderson and his colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh Center for Health Security, where Henderson also maintained an academic appointment, published a landmark paper (embedded below) with the anodyne title, “Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza,” in the journal Biosecurity and Terrorism: Biodefense Strategy, Practice, and Science.
This paper reviewed what was known about the effectiveness and practical feasibility of a range of actions that might be taken in attempts to lessen the number of cases and deaths resulting from a respiratory virus pandemic. This included a review of proposed biosecurity measures, later utilized for the first time during covid, such as “large scale or home quarantine of people believed to have been exposed, travel restrictions, prohibitions of social gatherings, school closures, maintaining personal distance, and the use of masks”.
Even assuming a case fatality rate (CFR) of 2.5%, roughly equal to the 1918 Spanish flu but far higher than the CFR for covid, Henderson and his colleagues nevertheless concluded that these mitigation measures would do far more harm than good.
They found the most helpful strategy would be isolating symptomatic individuals (but not those who had merely been exposed) at home or in the hospital, a strategy that had long been part of traditional public health. They also cautioned against reliance on computer modeling to predict the effects of novel interventions, warning that, “No model, no matter how accurate its epidemiologic assumptions, can illuminate or predict the secondary and tertiary effects of particular disease mitigation measures.” Furthermore, “If particular measures are applied for many weeks or months, the long-term or cumulative second- and third-order effects could be devastating socially and economically.”
Regarding forced quarantines of large populations, the authors noted, “There are no historical observations or scientific studies that support the confinement by quarantine of groups of possibly infected people,” and they concluded, “The negative consequences of large-scale quarantine are so extreme (forced confinement of sick people with the well; complete restriction of movement of large populations; difficulty in getting critical supplies, medicines, and food to people inside the quarantine zone) that this mitigation measure should be eliminated from serious consideration.”
Likewise, they found, “Travel restrictions, such as closing airports and screening travelers at borders, have historically been ineffective.” They argued that social distancing was also impractical and ineffective.
el gato malo shares an ugly reality of a mask maven.
TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.)
Noah Carl is not okay with the covid-inspired performance of Britain’s ‘leaders.’
Who can blame New Zealanders for wanting to escape Jacinda Ardern’s tyranny?
Team Sweden tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
March 2020: Sweden doesn’t close schools, kids and teachers are fine.
Aug 2020: Trump tweets “OPEN THE SCHOOLS!” so his opponents flight like hell to keep them closed. Many poor countries copy the US.
Result: catastrophic learning losses for over one billion poor kids.
Yet Further Evidence – From Another Legitimate Historian – Against the “1619 Project”
Historian Rick Atkinson’s superb 2019 The British Are Coming is the first volume of what I believe will be a trilogy on the American Revolution.
Atkinson of course writes about the proclamation issued in November 1775 by Virginia’s royal governor, Lord Dunmore – the proclamation freeing some slaves and today paraded by advocates of the New York Times’s “1619 Project” as a key piece of evidence that the American Revolution was waged chiefly to protect slavery.
Many critics of the 1619 Project have pointed out this stubborn fact about Dunmore’s Proclamation – a fact that all but fully discredits the 1619 Project’s use of this Proclamation: November 1775 is seven months after April 1775 (when the silversmith Paul Revere and the tanner William Dawes rode, and shots were fired at Lexington) and five months after the battle of Bunker Hill. Critics have also pointed out that, regardless of the timing of Dunmore’s Proclamation, its substance doesn’t do for the 1619 Project’s fallacious thesis what supporters of that Project wish it to do.
Here’s Atkinson (page 185; emphasis added):
On November 7, using his confiscated printing press, Dunmore declared martial law and issued a proclamation: “I do hereby further declare all indentured servants, Negroes, or others (appertaining to rebels) free, that are able and willing to bear arms, they joining His Majesty’s troops as soon as may be.” Liberation applied only to the able-bodied slaves of his foes. There would be no deliverance for his own fifty-seven slaves – abandoned in Williamsburg when he fled and for whom he would claim compensation from the government – nor would loyalists’ chattel be freed. The governor intended to crush a rebellion, not reconfigure the social order.
The rebellion came first; Dunmore’s Proclamation followed. And the former caused the latter, not – as 1619 Project proponents would have it – the reverse.
Some Non-Covid Links
Imagine an American household with a Japanese car in the garage, whisky from Scotland in the liquor cabinet, Costa Rican coffee in the pantry, wineglasses from Austria in the kitchen, a laptop from Taiwan on the desk, and a deck built from Canadian lumber in the backyard. The family in that house has a lifestyle that plainly relies on imports. Is that evidence that its fortunes are declining? Obviously not. Its ability to exchange dollars for such an array of products from around the world is an indication of its economic strength. That family may be running a trade “deficit” with the rest of the planet. So what? That means it is blessed with access to a variety of products it could never create for itself.
What is true for individual families is generally true as well for companies, industries, and countries. Economists explain that more imports — and a wider trade deficit — are not a drag on US growth but the opposite. According to Mark J. Perry of the American Enterprise Institute and the University of Michigan, more than half of all imports are raw materials, capital equipment, or intermediate components, which US manufacturers use to produce new domestic output while employing millions of Americans. No surprise, then, that increases in the US trade deficit have been broadly associated over the years with rising employment levels.
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Unlike a budget deficit, a trade “deficit” isn’t a debt we owe. It is an accounting entry that tells us how much more we were enriched by foreigners than they were by us. In March Americans received $352 billion in foreign-produced goods and services in exchange for just $242 billion in exported American products. The difference — $110 billion — will flow back to the United States as capital for investment.
From surging inflation to snarled supply chains, the US economy has some real problems. Happily, the trade deficit isn’t one of them. Imports are good. And more imports? They’re good too.
Mr. Biden again blamed inflation on the pandemic and Vladimir Putin, omitting that Democrats poured kerosene on the accelerating economic recovery last March with their $1.9 trillion spending bill. Inflation was already at 7.9% when Mr. Putin invaded Ukraine (see the nearby chart). At the same time, their policies are hampering the supply side of the economy in myriad and interconnecting ways.
Consider energy and food. The Administration’s war on oil and gas created enormous regulatory uncertainty that is stanching investment in new production despite high energy prices. Producers can’t find workers. Many left the industry when prices nose-dived early in the pandemic and are reluctant to return because Democrats have promised to put drillers out of business.
Then there’s the left’s blockade on pipelines, which is limiting natural gas production in the Northeast’s rich shale deposits. Progressives blame rising gas prices on natural gas exports, but the larger culprit is increasing demand in the U.S. Hefty subsidies for wind and solar forced coal and nuclear plants to close down, but renewable power needs to be backed up by more gas.
George Will reports on banana-republic-like criminal (in)justice in Texas. A slice:
[Erma] Wilson, represented by the Institute for Justice, hopes to penetrate the shield of immunity that protects prosecutors from paying financial damages when they violate defendants’ constitutional rights. Violations are frequent, nationwide; redress is rare.
Gary Galles warns of government efforts to ‘protect’ citizens from misinformation. A slice:
Obama reminded me of New York Times writer Kevin Roose’s call last year to create a “reality czar”-led government task force to root out disinformation, despite a history of government and its acolytes disseminating misinformation, clear biases, and suppression of those with different views. If that job was in academia, it would no doubt be called the “George Orwell Chair,” adding “of truthiness” if Steven Colbert was one of the donors.
So who could be trusted as the reality czar? No one. That is why Democrats never suggested one when Trump was in office. In politics, truth is subservient to power. Further, any attempt to provably establish the truth when it is in doubt would be littered with obstacles and controversies, and often beyond possibility, but it would create a clear path to eviscerating Americans’ freedoms. So only a person indisputably committed to both truth and freedom could possibly be trusted to lead such an enterprise. Is there anyone who qualifies? That looks like a nearly empty set.
Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins describes today’s antitrust regime as a “machine running downhill toward decadence.” Another slice:
A distinctly new era of ridiculousness, though, may have been inaugurated with the Trump administration’s failed case to break up the merger of AT&T and Time Warner, a meritless lawsuit launched (and disposed of by the courts) for political reasons that only began with then-President Trump’s animus for CNN (a Time Warner cable channel).
Is Lina Khan, the Biden administration’s Federal Trade Commission chief, about to commit a similar folly over Microsoft’s videogame deal?
She owes her position to a graduate-school paper she wrote decrying Amazon as an antitrust threat; she was hired to fulfill a Biden woke talking point about Big Tech. But though the Activision deal qualifies as big and Microsoft qualifies as tech, a case would hardly fit the bill in any other way. In desperation, advocates of a lawsuit point to Microsoft’s incentive to make certain games exclusively for its own Xbox platform. But even so, Microsoft would have every incentive also to make games for rival platforms and the world’s six billion-plus smartphones. How is this even a fit concern for the coercive powers of the state?
Ms. Khan is perhaps supple enough of mind to be rethinking already her youthful priors as a result of the demand she’s feeling to bring an ill-advised lawsuit. Maybe she will become a libertarian (antitrust has that effect on people when seen up close).
Randy Holcombe has read carefully Justice Alito’s leaked draft opinion in Dobbs.
There are rare instances in one’s life where one can reflect back and say that they were in the presence of greatness and were aware of it. As I reflect back on my experience as a student of Professor Richard Wagner in his Ph.D. courses at George Mason University, this was certainly one of those rare instances for me. His ability to communicate simple yet profound points in economics (for example, “prices are a set of traffic signals, not a set of marching orders” or “the magic number in markets is 2, and the magic number in politics is 3”) is unmatched by any living economist from whom I have had the privilege of learning. Moreover, if I have learned anything from Professor Wagner, it is imperative to take our existing body of knowledge and be creative as a teacher to communicate such knowledge in new and effective ways.
James Patterson is rightly appalled by Adrian Vermeule’s “common good constitutionalism.”
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 290 of my colleague Peter Boettke’s 2021 paper “Liberalism, Socialism, and Our Future,” as this essay appears in Pete’s 2021 book, The Struggle for a Better World:
Immature modes of reasoning – for example, bad people do bad things; good people do good things – must be replaced by the more mature and disciplined reasoning of “invisible hand” explanations.
DBx: Indeed so. Unfortunately, much of today’s economic ‘reasoning’ is immature, and highly so. The quality and usefulness of an appalling amount of today’s economic ‘reasoning’ is the polar opposite of that which is found in the works of Adam Smith.
A notable fact is that intellectuals who are especially prone to practice such immature ‘reasoning’ are those intellectuals who call themselves “progressive.” They like this moniker, I suspect, because they mistake intentions for results. Because progressives’ calls for government intervention into the economy are motivated by their sincerely held good intentions – and because they are so arrogant as to commonly suppose that anyone who disagrees with their preferred means is someone who is ill-intentioned – progressives mistake what they wrongly believe to be their singularly excellent intentions as evidence that they are more ethically and intellectually advanced than are those of us who are so insufficiently enlightened that we oppose their preferred means.
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