Russell Roberts's Blog, page 149
April 20, 2022
A World Without Petroleum
The economist in me insists that I point out that (1) petroleum has, for most uses, substitutes, but (2) in many of these cases the costs of the substitutes are much higher. (HT David Lips)
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 102 of Deirdre McCloskey’s 2021 book, Bettering Humanomics: A New, and Old, Approach to Economic Science:
[B]y far the best safety net is vigorous economic growth, which enriches laborers in a dignified way by much more than any coerced transfer or trade union can.
Robin Givhan Should Read Ronald Coase
Here’s a letter to the Washington Post:
Editor:
Robin Givhan too quickly describes airline passengers’ joyous reaction to the news of no longer having to wear masks as “childish and selfish” (“Whoops of selfish delight,” April 20).
Why is it childish to enjoy the liberty to assess and choose risks individually rather than be compelled to abide by one-size-fits-all diktats of politically motivated bureaucrats? Why is it selfish to celebrate the freedom to travel and interact with others normally, without breathing obstructed, eyeglasses befogged, voices muffled, and facial expressions shrouded?
It won’t do – as Givhan inevitably does – to insist that your mask-wearing is a benefit to fellow passengers. Contrary to popular belief, evidence of the effectiveness of masks at preventing covid’s spread is, at best, ambiguous. More significantly, since Monday’s ruling it appears that most passengers prefer to travel unmasked – which explains why major airlines, who have strong incentives to correctly gauge their customers’ preferences, immediately announced that they’d no longer require mask-wearing.
Because of natural immunity, vaccination, or simply not being elderly or severely ill, most people are now at very little risk of suffering from covid. It’s neither childish nor selfish for the majority of passengers to welcome the return to normality, while leaving to the relatively small number of people still at risk from covid – or whose fear of this disease remains irrationally intense – the individual responsibility for choosing whether or not to fly and, if so, whether or not to wear masks.
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…
… is from page 293 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 (original emphasis):
If we take the current definition of extreme poverty, which is living on or below $1.90 a day, then in 1990, there were 1.9 billion (or 36 percent of the global population) living in extreme poverty. In 2015, that number had fallen to 730 million (or 9.9 percent of the global population). That was the first time in recorded human history that less than 10 percent of the global population was living in extreme poverty.
DBx: This enrichment is the result of market-driven innovation and globalization.
How anyone can today insist that ‘capitalism doesn’t work’ is beyond me. What such people are really complaining about – although they don’t realize this fact – is that the world isn’t perfect (or that the world fails to conform to their individual fancies). Well, the world will never be perfect. There will always be problems that in principle can be solved. There will always be injustice and bad actors. No change in human institutions will rid society of these unfortunate realities. When assessing reality, mature people ask “As compared to what?” and choose as the comparison plausible alternatives. Immature people, when they bother to ask “As compared to what?”, choose as the comparison impossible ideals and then condemn reality for not being heaven.
April 19, 2022
Some Covid Links
The ruling comes when the mask mandate is a waning health necessity, if it ever was. The CDC recently extended it until May 3, and it is increasingly unpopular with passengers and airline executives as Covid-19 becomes endemic and less lethal. Rather than appeal the ruling and risk a broader defeat, the CDC would be wiser to drop it.
The Biden Administration should also hire more lawyers who understand that the courts are looking more closely at sweeping federal orders that lack clear statutory justification. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration lost its vaccine mandate case at the Supreme Court. President Biden may want to govern with a pen and a phone, a la Barack Obama, but he’ll suffer more legal defeats without a clear command from a law written by Congress.
(DBx: I fly on Thursday from DC to Detroit. I am incredibly thankful to Judge Mizelle for saving me from having to participate in health-scare theater. For the first time in over a year I’ll not feel compelled to drink or eat simply as a means for me to keep the mask off of my face.)
About the lifting of the mask mandate, Matt Yglesias wisely tweets: (HT el gato malo)
People can argue all day but the fact that every airline immediately went masks-optional the day of the ruling suggests that people with actual money on the line do not believe there is a large group of people with a significant preference for masked flying.
My GMU Econ colleague Bryan Caplan offers some guidelines for government. A slice:
4. Think before you preach. Ask yourself, “What reason do I have to believe that I know better than most people?” If you have no compelling answer, shut up and do nothing.
5. Count when you think. Don’t just say, “This rule makes people safer.” Ask, “How much safer? And at what cost?”
6. Measure what counts! Before you wage a war to save lives, measure both the lives you’ll save and the lives you’ll destroy. Before you require masks, measure the risk reduction.
7. Always consider the convenience of the ruled. Due to Social Desirability Bias, explicitly valuing convenience is awkward. Government should shield the public from this awkwardness by habitually asking, “Isn’t this too inconvenient?” on the public’s behalf.
8. Avoid hyperbole. “Two weeks to flatten the curve” was a strangely honest slogan. “Together we can defeat Covid-19” was not.
9. Don’t move the goalposts. If you ask for two weeks to flatten the curve, then in two weeks you should loudly announce, “Your two weeks are up. Time to go back to work.”
Vinay Prasad weighs the relative dangerousness of the extremes on Covid.
“William Forbes” reports on life (so called) in lockdown Shanghai. Two slices:
This time around, what is going on is just utterly unbelievable. Despite high vaccination rates and a weaker variant of the virus at large, the restrictions are way tougher this time.
I’ve been locked in my apartment with my wife and kid for more than a month, and I have had to take more than 20 COVID tests during this time. Government health workers appear in white suits every other day, and neighborhood wardens use megaphones to summon everyone outside to take their tests.
There’s more than 1,000 people living in my complex — and everyone complies. Chinese people in general are pretty obedient. Privately, many Chinese friends tell me they don’t like the procedure and lockdown but believe going along with it is the quickest way back to normality.
Almost all apartments in Shanghai are in gated compounds, so it’s pretty easy to keep people corralled as there are walls all around. I used to think this was a good thing in general as it was secure — until I saw the huge steel mesh wire fence being bolted into the ground in front of the entrance at the beginning of lockdown, physically sealing us in. Talk about a sense of foreboding. Now we can’t even get outside except for COVID tests or to pick up food deliveries, which are passed up over the fence. That’s if food arrives.
…..
There’s also fear this time around — not of the virus itself but of testing positive. If you do, you’ll be taken away to a makeshift “hospital” where the lights may be on 24/7 and there are no showers. You’ll be isolated from the outside world and not let out until you test negative four or five times.
Understandably, nobody wants to end up in one of these places, and there’s been more than a few viral videos passed around of people being dragged kicking and screaming from their apartments.
So while she’s promising no shutdowns, she hasn’t made any real commitment to that beyond the rhetorical.
Nor admitted that New York’s restrictionist responses to COVID wrought utter disaster, pushing us to lead the nation in out-migration.
They wrecked the state’s economy. We’re still massively lagging the rest of the nation in recovery, with a 4.9% unemployment rate vs. the national 3.6%. We’re still missing hundreds of thousands of pre-pandemic jobs.
They did deep, possibly irrecoverable damage to students in our public schools, causing absenteeism to skyrocket, college-enrollment rates to fall and inflicting learning loss across the board.
Worse still, they were also utterly pointless in public-health terms. The virus ripped through New York in 2020, killing tens of thousands — despite the fact that city and state were almost entirely shut down. Each subsequent surge has been less deadly, with Omicron the least deadly of all — despite the loosened rules around masking, commercial restrictions and vaccines.
Here’s excellent commentary from el gato malo. A slice:
“bUt iT wUZ a nOVeL PaTHogeN!” how could we know?
this is one of the stupident arguments of all. so, what, every time you see a new anything, you forget all priors from similar things? if you see a new kind of fish, do you assume it will be nothing like any other of the 200 fishes you’ve seen before and make up and entirely new set of expectations because some muppet in london has a bad exponential poisson model? or might a sane person presume that it’s probably a lot like other fish until there was some strong reason to believe otherwise?
Something to Cheer About!
Airline passengers understandably and justifiably cheered yesterday as word came that they were no longer compelled, as a condition of flying commercially, to participate in annoying and pointless health-scare theater.
Some Non-Covid Links
Whatever Musk’s agenda and Twitter’s past behavior, the risks associated with boards and billionaire shareholders controlling or curtailing political speech are a tiny fraction of the destructive potential of inviting the federal government into the “content moderation” equation.
These people [those who are hysterically pulling their hair out over a possible takeover of Twitter by Musk] are desperately scared by the mere possibility that a wealthy person with somewhat different politics—and a somewhat more favorable disposition to unfiltered speech—is going to tweak their favorite toy.
Lionel Shriver is not impressed with President Biden.
Here’s my GMU Econ colleague Dan Klein on C.S. Lewis on the way forward.
Why would lawmakers make it illegal for us to directly purchase electric vehicles, or any cars for that matter? Sadly, the answer comes down to pure power politics: Local car dealerships don’t want the competition, and they’ve convinced some state leaders to protect their businesses with the law.
Imagine if your local florist didn’t like competition from a grocery store and coaxed lawmakers to make it illegal for you shop for flowers anywhere else, forcing you to always buy from them. You’d likely be outraged. Yet that’s the sort of protectionism car dealerships enjoy.
Wall Street Journal columnist Andy Kessler understands the ugly reality of California strongman Gavin Newsom. Here’s Kessler’s conclusion:
Through all this, Mr. Newsom has projected a $45 billion budget surplus for 2022, but it might be closer to $70 billion—bull markets are lucrative. He gives some of the surplus back in dribs and drabs: gas cards, climate credits and programs that do little to solve real problems like homelessness or poverty or education or healthcare. Restrictions on water, you-get-a-card actions, and the newly proposed four-day workweek are only a masquerade to hide the government’s ineptitude.
George Will reflects on the upcoming run-off election in France. A slice:
A French word describes the French disease: dirigisme, the micromanaging state as source and director of society’s creativity, which for that reason is another scarcity. The self-fulfilling assumption is that the public is infantile. Another assumption is that the civil service is omnicompetent. A French thinker, Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850), warned against the cognitive dissonance inherent in paternalistic statism:
“The government should know everything and foresee everything in order to manage the lives of the people, and the people need only let themselves be taken care of. … Nothing is more senseless than to base so many expectations on the state … to assume the existence of collective wisdom and foresight after taking for granted the existence of individual imbecility and improvidence.”
Cato Commentary: “Milton Friedman: A Centennial Appreciation”
Originally written for the Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star, and later picked up by Newsday, here’s the version of my appreciation of Milton Friedman, written on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of his birth, that was published by the Cato Institute. You can read my appreciation in full beneath the fold.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 643 of Will Durant’s 1944 volume, Caesar and Christ; in this part of the book, Durant writes about Rome during the late 3rd and early 4th centuries C.E.:
The bureaucrats found their task too great for human integrity, their surveillance too sporadic for the evasive ingenuity of men. To support the bureaucracy, the court, the army, the building program, and the dole, taxation rose to unprecedented peaks of ubiquitous continuity. As the state had not yet discovered the plan of public borrowing to conceal its wastefulness and postpone its reckoning, the cost of each year’s operations had to be met from each year’s revenue.
DBx: The same economic laws that operated in ancient Rome operate in modern America, in modern Europe, in any time and place where there is human society. Humans today are no less venal in spirit and limited in intelligence than were humans when Rome was in its so-called glory and in its decline. Reality is no more optional for us than it was for ancient Romans.
And as would have been true had the ancient-Roman state “discovered the plan of public borrowing to conceal its wastefulness and postpone its reckoning,” so it is actually true today that public borrowing conceals the modern-state’s wastefulness – and, thus, encourages further such wastefulness – and postpones its reckoning as it worsens its consequences.
April 18, 2022
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review” “Success and society”
In my column for the July 24th, 2012, edition of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review I took on the zombie myth that asserts that, because an individual’s economic success in a modern market requires the cooperation of millions of strangers, the economically successful individual is not really responsible for his or her success. (The fact that in the opening sentence of this column I inadvertently misstated the meaning of Pres. Obama’s famous “You didn’t build that” remark doesn’t detract from the validity of the point that I make in the column. There are many people – for example, Thomas Piketty – who do believe that individuals’ economic successes in markets are overwhelmingly attributable to some larger – and, to me, utterly mysterious – collective forces.)
You can read my column beneath the fold.
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