Russell Roberts's Blog, page 152
April 12, 2022
New York Daily News: “How immigrant labor helps us all”
This post is an entry in my on-going effort to archive at Cafe Hayek all of my opinion pieces. The one archived here appeared in the June 20th, 2012, edition of the New York Daily News. You can read this piece in full beneath the fold.
Some Covid Links
[NOTE: Because Covid hysteria seems to be cooling significantly in many places (if not, sadly, in China), I’ll no longer offer “Some Covid Links” daily. I’ll offer these links only occasionally, fervently hoping that the collective madness of the past 25 months is finally far enough behind us that it won’t return – at least not until the next more-dangerous-than-average pathogen emerges, as one will do, and is portrayed by the media and politicians as a Satanic threat, as it will be.]
We were right and Anthony Fauci was wrong. The person I never expected to hear say this, however, was Anthony Fauci.
Fauci finally admitted to the nation this weekend what has been obvious to everyone, except the most hysteria-prone slice of the population, since last summer: that the pandemic is now endemic. That means it’s here to stay, no matter what we do, so let’s learn to live with it. There is no point to the insane restrictions people insist on like latter-day Puritans denouncing each other for failing to carry out the prescribed rites to ward off the Devil.
“This is not going to be eradicated, and it’s not going to be eliminated,” Fauci said on ABC’s “This Week.” “And what’s going to happen is that we’re going to see that each individual is going to have to make their calculation of the amount of risk that they want to take.”
Great! But what has changed? This is exactly the message Fauci needed to deliver to the people . . . approximately a year ago.
…..
“The emergency phase of the disease is over,” Stanford professor and health economist Jay Bhattacharya said last summer. “Now, we need to work very hard to undo the sense of emergency . . . panicking over case numbers is a recipe for continuing unwarranted panic,” because the vaccines provide superb protection against death or hospitalization.
Yet as recently as November, Fauci said, preposterously, that he was going to put off calling the virus endemic until we got the thing cornered: “We want control and I think the confusion is at what level of control are you going to accept it in its endemicity.”
Huh? Asserting “control” has nothing to do with “accepting its endemicity.” When you do the latter, you’re acknowledging the former isn’t possible. COVID is not subtle: ever since we learned in the middle of last year that even vaccinated people can catch it and spread it, it has been flashing a message as unmissable as the American Eagle signage in Times Square: “You can’t control me, bro. I’m coming for everybody. Get vaccinated and you’ll live.”
You may have missed it, but Fauci said something even stupider than “We gotta control this thing before we admit it’s endemic” in the November interview: that we shouldn’t get too excited about the distinction between such COVID outcomes as “getting killed” and “missing a day of work.”
Why did he say something so absurd? Because he’s Larry Lockdown and loves to create confusion and panic.
This brutality has unsurprisingly reached its zenith (or nadir, if you prefer) in China, a nation of 1.4 billion governed by a despotic regime that has gone all in on Zero-Covid. The outbreak of Covid in Shanghai after years of restrictions proves the futility of the objective. The CCP’s response to the proof of the futility shows its insanity.
In response to the outbreak, the regime has locked down a city of over 26 million people. And this ain’t your Aussie or Kiwi or American or Brit or Continental lockdown, boys and girls: this is a hardcore lockdown. Mandatory daily testing, with those testing positive sent right to hospital, symptomatic or not–despite the fact that this has overwhelmed the medical system and is depriving truly sick people of vital care. Children separated from parents. People locked in their abodes, often without adequate food. Pets slain.
It is draconian–and dystopian.
The other prominent example is “Net Zero” carbon emissions. This has become the idol which all the right thinking bow down before, especially in the West. Governments, financial institutions, and other businesses (especially in the energy industry) are judged based on a single criteria: do their actions contribute to achieving “net zero” emissions of greenhouse gases? And woe to those who do not pass this judgment.
In Shanghai, 25 million people remain locked down as 26,087 new COVID cases were reported on Sunday.
The situation has grown increasingly dire: Two people who tried to leave their apartment to walk their dog were confronted by a COVID prevention worker who they ended up attacking. At least one man allegedly tried to get the cops to apprehend him so he could at least have food to eat. Meanwhile, people who end up in central quarantine—state-administered facilities where COVID-positive people are sometimes sent so others in their apartment buildings don’t get sick—complain about the fact that it’s so unhygienic, it may well be facilitating greater spread of the virus (or even reinfection). Shared rooms, no running water, broken toilets (or disgusting ones shared by hundreds of people), and people crammed into overflow beds in hospital hallways have grown to be expected by the city’s increasingly angry residents.
…..
This is all after reports emerged that parents were being separated from their COVID-positive children (a policy officials claim has been altered, with parents now allowed to apply to remain with their sick, minor children). Meanwhile, last week, a graphic video went viral on Chinese social media of a COVID prevention worker killing a family’s corgi dog in the streets.
Also decrying “the dystopian nightmare of ‘zero Covid'” is Brendan O’Neill. Three slices:
Shanghai’s lunatic lockdown shows just how dangerous Covid fanaticism can be.
…..
It was like a scene from a dystopian B-movie. Over a bleak, black city, in the dead of night, a drone emerged. From its speaker, it issued monotone instructions to the masses locked in their homes in the apartment blocks below. ‘Control the soul’s desire for freedom!’, the robotic voice said. ‘Do not open the window or sing!’, the joyless flying machine said. Then came the robot dogs. They staggered through deserted streets, barking diktats at residents cowering behind their curtains: ‘Wear a mask, wash your hands, check your temperature.’ No one dares ‘disobey the dog’s diktats’, according to one local newspaper.
Of course, this was no B-movie. This was not a cack-handed Hollywood attempt to do Orwell. No, it was real life, in a real city – Shanghai. Shanghai’s severe lockdown has shocked people across the world. Following a spike in Omicron infections, all 25 million of Shanghai’s residents were forced into house arrest. Forget an hour a day of outdoor exercise and the right to buy milk and bread at the local supermarket – the tiny liberties we comparatively lucky Brits enjoyed during that mad first lockdown we had in March 2020. No, in Shanghai people are not allowed to leave their homes at all. For anything. Not even food and water. Instead, essentials are being delivered to them by masked key workers, adding to the sense that this city has become the backdrop for an episode of The Walking Dead.
Every aspect of people’s lives is minutely governed. They are forbidden from walking out of their front doors. Streets and parks have become no-go zones. Covid testing is mandatory. Groups of people are frogmarched to testing sites to see if they’re infected. Woe betide those who are – they are not allowed to isolate in their own homes, but instead are packed off to vast quarantine centres that are reportedly overcrowded and under-resourced. Most controversially of all, the Shanghai authorities have taken to separating children who test positive from their parents. This caused a backlash, not surprisingly, so officialdom made a compromise: if parents also test positive, then they are permitted to join their kid in one of the heavily policed isolation centres. What compassion!
Every day has become a struggle for survival in locked-down Shanghai. Residents report getting up at the crack of dawn to find out which, if any, food-delivery app has a free slot that day. People are running out of basic foodstuffs. This was ‘the first time in my life that I have gone hungry’, said one social-media user. Some families have limited themselves to one meal a day. Predictably, public fury has exploded. This is why that drone warned people not to open their windows – because the locked-up, food-deprived folk of Shanghai have had the temerity to yell from their apartment windows, ‘We have no food to eat! We are starving to death!’.
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If we’re honest, we’ll admit that the chilling message issued by that drone in Shanghai – ‘Control the soul’s desire for freedom’ – was the unofficial slogan of our lockdowns, too. Sure, a nighttime drone didn’t bellow those words from the skies. Our politicians are not so crass that they would utter such a sentence at a Covid press conference. But, like those Chinese cities, we suspended almost everything – civil liberty, democracy, the right to protest, the right to associate, the right to go outside (except for one hour a day) – in the name of tackling Covid. Public life and private life were made subservient to the war on a virus. In the UK drones didn’t shout at us, but they did spy on dog-walkers in the Peak District. Cops threw people out of parks. A man was warned (wrongly) that he was forbidden from being in his own front garden. Let’s not get on our high horse over China’s crazy lockdowns – we did it, too.
What is being pursued in China is the mad and hopeless ideology of ‘Zero Covid’. The lunacy in Shanghai is ‘China’s latest attempt to achieve Covid Zero’, as the New York Post said. And we have our fair share of Zero Covidians over here: activist academics, ‘experts’, public-health fanatics and others who openly said society should be shut down until Covid had been eliminated. If they’d had their way, we would be like Shanghai now, putting on hold everything – from socialising to shopping, education to leisure – in pursuit of that most impossible of tasks: erasing Covid.
Indeed, some British experts praised China for its severe response to Covid. When it was revealed in late 2021 that the CCP had built a 5,000-room quarantine centre, UCL’s resident doom-monger, Professor Christina Pagel, congratulated China for ‘tak[ing] its Covid approach very seriously’. SAGE adviser Professor Susan Michie cooed in March 2020 that ‘China has a socialist, collective system… not an individualistic, consumer-oriented, profit-driven society badly damaged by 20 years of failed neoliberal economic policies’. Then there was Imperial’s infamous modeller, Neil Ferguson, who said he and his fellow lockdown promoters never imagined that they could ‘get away with’ the extraordinary measures being pursued in China at the start of the pandemic – but ‘then Italy did it, and we realised we could’. We realised we could get away with doing to the people of Britain what China had already done to its citizens – that’s what he meant.
Martin Kulldorff – a co-author of the great Great Barrington Declaration – reviews the ins and outs of Covid-vaccine safety. Here’s his conclusion:
Public health officials face a temptation to summarily dismiss anecdotal vaccine injury stories and people concerned about the publicly available VAERS reports, but in public health, we cannot do that. We must take people’s concerns seriously.
Whatever the truth is, we need to convincingly determine whether there is a problem or not and make that evidence public. Rather than the CDC and FDA feeding the public with inferior VAERS data that cannot answer the question, Americans deserve to be presented with solid evidence from the superior VSD and BEST systems.
But the policy of forced masking on airplanes actually runs counter to what many industry experts say is appropriate: The CEOs of several major airlines have testified before Congress that the air quality on planes is better than the air quality in the ICU. They think it would be extremely safe to let passengers make their own decisions about whether to wear a mask; it is not likely that COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths would surge as a result.
Unfortunately, the responsibility for making this determination does not rest with the individual traveler or even the individual airline: It largely rests with Walensky. This means that even though hospitalizations and deaths remain steady as cases rise,extreme risk-aversion will likely continue to be the law of the land.
For many families with young children, the practical implication is that they cannot travel by airplane at all, since it is difficult to force small kids to wear their masks for entire flights. Masks are not a cost-free intervention for parents in this circumstance, and whatever benefits the CDC thinks this policy yields must be weighed against the very real downsides.
[DBx: I wonder if Drs. Walensky and Jha, along with other Covidocrats, are aware that the science shows that travel by automobile is much riskier than is travel by commercial airlines. How many additional deaths and injuries are there now as a result of these mask mandates prompting some people who would otherwise fly instead to drive?]
Craig Eyermann reports on a Covid-derangement-sparked “biggest fraud in a generation.”
Roger Watson reviews Paul Fritjers’s, Gigi Foster’s, and Michael Baker’s The Great Covid Panic. A slice:
The essential thesis of the book is, regardless of the efficacy of pandemic management measures, that there was never an assessment of what the likely damage was going to be. The equation between benefit and damage was unbalanced; in fact, the damage side was left blank. As the heroic Lord Jonathan Sumption, former Supreme Court judge from the UK, repeatedly pointed out in the early days of the pandemic, it was immoral not to weigh the potential for harm when introducing severe measures to manage COVID-19. He was aghast at the restrictions to basic and assumed freedoms that the Common Law in the UK traditionally assured us and claimed there was a moral case for ignoring them.
“Pastor jailed for speaking to Canadian Freedom Convoy says he was kept in a cage, made to sleep on a concrete floor, deprived of his Bible and repeatedly strip-searched“. (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 131 of my colleague Peter Boettke’s 2019 talk “The Role of the Economist in a Free Society,” as this talk is printed in Pete’s 2021 collection, The Struggle for a Better World:
Economics in the hands of its masters is an expert critique of rule by expertise.
DBx: Absolutely correct.
Pictured above is economist Ken Elzinga teaching one of his principles of microeconomics courses at the University of Virginia. Ken is justly famous for being a singularly superb teacher of economics.
April 11, 2022
Some Non-Covid Links
GMU Econ alum Alexander William Salter likes Matthew Hennessey’s new book, The Visible Hand. A slice:
Chapter one dispels the fog of obscurantism that surrounds economics. Hennessey is surely correct that economists make economics too complicated. At its core, it’s all about tradeoffs. “You can’t have everything you want. That’s the heart of economics.” Understanding tradeoffs is crucial to appreciating Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” metaphor. Under capitalism, man’s struggle against scarcity results in a magnificent economic bounty: “The poorest American in 2022 is hundreds of times wealthier in real terms than the wealthiest Americans in 1776. He has greater access to essentials, like good food and quality housing, and enjoys a life expectancy that is essentially double what it was at the founding of the country.” Hennessey explains foundational economic concepts while opening readers’ minds to the Great Enrichment. Not bad for the opening chapter!
The second chapter is a crash course in trade theory. Exchange is central to economics, as Hennessey recognizes. “Voluntary and mutually beneficial exchange” is how markets “satisfy people’s needs and allocate resources fairly, efficiently, and without coercion.” Readers also learn about the universality of economizing behavior. Our decisions “are often motivated by economic concerns–not by money necessarily, but by an intuitive understanding that resources are scarce, trade-offs are necessary, and choices matter.” Just so.
Pierre Lemieux celebrates markets and market-set prices and wages.
James Pethokoukis applauds America’s venture-capital industry.
Phil Magness and Amelia Janaskie – writing at EJW – set the record straight about Ludwig von Mises and immigration. Here’s the abstract:
The purpose of peer review is to examine the integrity of research, verifying its quality and reliability. This article discusses a failure in basic peer-review mechanisms at the journal Contemporary European History (CEH). In early 2020, the first of the present authors discovered evidence of quotation editing and misrepresentation of original sources in an article about the economist Ludwig von Mises by historian Quinn Slobodian. After the editors of refused multiple attempts to seek corrections, it came to light that similar problems had been flagged during the referee process for Slobodian’s article. Like the correction request after publication, the referee report was ignored by the journal’s editors. This article chronicles the discovery of the misrepresentations, as well as unsuccessful attempts to obtain a correction to the edited quotations from and its publisher Cambridge University Press.
And here’s Bryan Caplan on Magness & Janaskie on Mises and immigration.
Grace Hall decries the virulent spread in medical schools of lethal-to-the-mind-and-soul wokism. (HT George Leef)
Katherine Mangu-Ward ponders cancellation of Putin and of Russians. A slice:
The World Taekwondo organization’s decision to withdraw the honorary 9th dan black belt it conferred on Putin in 2013, for instance, is extremely defensible, narrowly targeted, and frankly hilarious. Less clearly worth it is the accompanying edict not to “organise or recognise Taekwondo events in Russia and Belarus.”
On the other end of the spectrum are the clearly indefensible actions of the vandals who shattered windows and tore down a flag outside of Russia House, a restaurant across the street from Reason‘s D.C. office that isn’t even owned by Russians. But surely if the same restaurant declared all proceeds would be going to support the Russian war effort, it would be laudable for a hungry customer to walk 15 minutes to the Ukrainian-owned D Light Cafe instead?
In both of these examples, the stakes are relatively low, which makes the moral math easier. But in many other cases the stakes are very high indeed, even as the gray area is vast and murky.
The Wall Street Journal‘s Barton Swaim talks with, and writes about, playwright David Mamet. Three slices:
An informed observer of present-day America might reasonably conclude that our own decade—at least among the educated and advantaged classes—is far more imbued with the spirit of conformism than the ’50s were. Corporate managers and military leaders parrot nostrums about diversity, inclusion and sustainability that few of them believe. Museums and orchestras studiously avoid programming that might offend ideologues. Reporters and producers in the mainstream press seize on stories—or ignore them—solely because that’s what everybody else in the press is doing. Large majorities in wealthy cities dutifully comply with public-health restrictions they know to be largely ineffective, mainly because refusing to do so would invite the ire of friends and neighbors complying with those restrictions for the same reason.
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Not that he expects anybody among our institutional leaders to admit they were wrong, on Covid or crime or anything else. He mentions Stacy Schiff’s “Witches,” a 2015 history of the Salem trials. “The delusion ran for about 18 months,” Mr. Mamet says, summarizing the book, “and after that, since they couldn’t explain it, they just forgot it. It never happened.” The phenomenon by which authorities and experts make a hash of things and then move on as if nothing happened is one attentive readers will recognize. Mr. Mamet offers some encouragement. “The thing about history,” he says, “is not that people change. People don’t change. But people die. So a new generation comes up and says, ‘Yeah, I get it, that’s stupid, I’m not gonna do that.’”
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Mr. Mamet announced a turn to the political right in a 2008 essay for the Village Voice, “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal,’” but he was a black sheep long before then. His 1992 play “Oleanna,” for instance, features a male academic whose life and career are ruined by a calculating female student’s spurious accusation of sexual harassment.
Was there a moment when he decided to break ranks altogether? “I met a guy at my synagogue here maybe 20 years ago,” he says. “He was talking about Milton Friedman and [Friedrich] Hayek and Thomas Sowell. It didn’t make any sense to me, but I was impressed by his attitude. He wasn’t strident or arrogant. It was that guy’s attitude that impressed me.”
The man lent Mr. Mamet some books by these authors. “I said to him, ‘Good, I’ll read them. But,’ I said, ‘when my friends come over, I’ll have to hide them.’ He said: ‘I don’t.’ And that changed my life. What was I saying? Did I really think I had to hide books from my friends? How sick was I? It was a Road to Damascus moment.”
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 9 of David Mamet’s hot-off-the-press 2022 book, Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch:
Jefferson said that given the choice of government without newspapers or newspapers without government, he would unhesitatingly choose the latter. Now we have newspapers insisting on the infallibility of the state and calling out dissent as heresy.
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: “Economics, money & wealth”
In my column for the June 13th, 2012, edition of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review I explained that good economists – contrary to popular misconception – do not obsess over monetary values. You can read my column in full beneath the fold.
Some Covid Links
Utah ranks first by a considerable margin over Nebraska and Vermont. The Beehive State scored well across all three categories: fourth on the economy, fifth in education (as measured by lost days in school), and eighth in Covid mortality adjusted for a state population’s age and the prevalence of obesity and diabetes (leading co-morbidities for Covid deaths). The authors used a regression analysis for the economy that adjusted for state industry composition.
The top 10 in the rankings are smaller states with the notable exception of Florida, which ranks sixth. Recall how the Sunshine State’s decision to open itself relatively soon after the first lockdowns was derided as cruel and destructive. Gov. Ron DeSantis was called “Governor DeathSentence.”
The study ranks Florida 28th in mortality, in the middle off the pack and about the same as California, which ranks 27th despite its far more stringent lockdowns and school closures. But Florida ranks third for the least education loss and 13th in economic performance. California ranks 47th overall because its shutdowns crushed the economy (40th) and in-person school (50th).
In other words, Florida did about average on mortality as other states, but it did far better in protecting its citizens from severe economic harm and its children from lost schooling. “The correlation between health and economy scores is essentially zero,” say the authors, “which suggests that states that withdrew the most from economic activity did not significantly improve health by doing so.”
The NBER working paper presents the data straight without policy conclusions, but here’s one of ours: The severe lockdown states suffered much more on overall social well-being in return for relatively little comparative benefit on health.
Here’s a link to the Kerpen, Moore, and Mulligan paper.
Vinay Prasad, warning against unsubstantiated claims about Covid consequences, hopes that we’ll soon reach “herd sanity.” Here’s his conclusion:
As zero Covid advocates recover from Covid, we may eventually reach herd sanity. That is when we stop treating mild covid infections like the boogeyman, and realize that living with others means that there are many infections we cannot avoid.
National Review‘s Jim Geraghty decries the catastrophe created by the Chinese government’s Covidocratic tyranny. Two slices:
I can remember when James Palmer, the deputy editor of Foreign Policy, jabbed at me for calling China’s official Covid-19 statistics “insanely implausible,” insisting, “China did, in fact, get the pandemic under control with draconian lockdowns. Pretending that didn’t happen just reinforces the belief of the Chinese public in Western bias and prevents them accepting *good* coverage. That you don’t like it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”
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And the richest city in China is facing overwhelming food supply problems and the risk of large-scale starvation. This is your country on autocracy, devastating self-deception, and obsessively stubborn Covid-19 policies.
That warning from a surveillance drone warning people to go back inside from their balconies– “control your soul’s desire for freedom” — makes a really succinct national motto.
Xi hopes to extend his tenure as supreme leader of the CCP at its 20th Party Congress later this year. His explicit backing for Zero Covid seems to be influenced by his interest in claiming victory over the virus to support his ambitions at home and his struggle with democratic critics abroad. Those who seek to share in his dictatorship will not venture to derail Zero Covid now. Nor will Xi tolerate any exposure of its flaws.
Marty Makary tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
New Finnish study found that school mask mandates did not impact transmission. Well-done analysis comparing schools that adopted mask mandates to those that didn’t: https://medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.04.04.22272833v1 Nice explanation of how masking toddlers today is not following the science. It’s anti.👇🏼👇🏼
TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.)
Julia du Fresne warns of the horrifying pretensions of the World Health Organization.
March 2020: I asked Stanford for a letter granting me permission to travel to and from my office despite shelter in place. I carried that letter every single day in my pocket for a year in case I was stopped and asked to show my papers. In the USA.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 305 of George Will’s 2021 book, American Happiness and Discontents: The Unruly Torrent, 2008-2020 – a collection of many of Will’s columns over these years; (the essay – now titled “Salutary Ludicrousness” – from which the quotation below is drawn originally appeared in the Washington Post on June 5th, 2014):
It is salutary that academia, with its adversarial stance toward limited government and cultural common sense, is making itself ludicrous. Academia is learning that its attempts to create victim-free campuses – by making everyone hypersensitive, even delusional, about victimizations – brings increasing supervision by the regulatory state that progressivism celebrates.
DBx: Indeed so.
One cannot insist that everything is political without inviting politics – meaning, in practice, politicians of all persuasions and parties – to interfere with everything. This reality is especially difficult to escape for those working for, or enrolled as students in, schools owned and operated by government. Nothing is more ludicrous than to insist, with one breath, on the marvels and indispensability of education paid for and supplied by the state – and that everything is political – and then with the next breath bemoan the intrusion into education of politics.
April 10, 2022
Some Non-Covid Links
Phil Magness corrects the record about AIER. A slice:
Last month this journal [the BMJ], which is published by the British Medical Association, published a deranged smear against AIER over our involvement in the conference that produced the Great Barrington Declaration. Authored by Professors Gavin Yamey and David Gorski, along with graduate student Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, the commentary asserts that “AIER is funded through an investment fund that itself owns shares in tobacco companies and many organizations that stood to lose enormous amounts of money if the United States were to have enacted further lockdowns in 2020.” “This represents a large intellectual and financial [Conflict of Interest] for the AIER,” the authors continue, implying that our principled stance against lockdowns was really just a greedy ploy to increase the bottom line of tobacco companies. Far from an aberration caused by lax editorial oversight, the BMJ has now repeatedly published attacks by this same trio of authors, or some combination thereof, as they advance similar allegations of financial conspiracy by AIER and the GBD.
On what basis, then, do Yamey et al stake their claim? It comes from an intentional misrepresentation of AIER’s finances. Our assets are invested and independently managed by our financial subsidiary. Some of those assets are invested in market-indexed mutual funds which, in turn, contain stocks in a diversified array of companies. Just like your company’s 401K or your Roth IRA, those assets include small percentages of stocks of large publicly traded firms like Chevron, Exxon-Mobil, and Philip Morris. And that, apparently, makes us “funded” by Big Oil and Big Tobacco in the eyes of the BMJ authors.
The claim that simple stock ownership through a mutual fund somehow places you on the payroll of Big Tobacco and Big Oil would be risible in any other circumstance.
Indeed, it is the BMJ’s own published policy to specifically exclude “mutual funds or other situations in which the person is not in a position to control investment decisions” from its financial conflict of interest reporting requirements in published scientific research. This exclusion stems from a longstanding convention in the scientific community. The fact that you have a standard retirement account is not disqualifying of your research, because these instruments are specifically designed to maintain diversified and independently managed investments. The National Institutes of Health and most other agencies involved in medical research have similar exemptions for mutual funds and related investment vehicles. Stated differently, a mutual fund is specifically designed to ensure the long-term stability and growth of the portfolio as a whole – not to induce and manipulate short-term gains for a couple of individual stocks among the hundreds of companies that it holds.
In publishing the attacks on AIER’s finances by Yamey, Gorski, and Meyerowitz-Katz, The BMJ accordingly violated its own policy standards for financial conflict of interest reporting. When I contacted one of its editors, Adrian Aldcroft, to express concerns about this blatant disregard of scientific norms and publishing ethics in his journal, he responded dismissively. Disregarding his own journal’s policy, Aldcroft reiterated Yamey et al’s charge: “you do not deny that AIER is funded via an investment fund that holds shares in many corporations including tobacco companies.” When I pointed out that it was both absurd and patently offensive to accuse us of profiteering on behalf of tobacco companies over our criticism of the COVID-19 lockdowns, he answered that this was simply the “the opinion of the authors” even though the trio had explicitly characterized them in their published commentary as statements of fact.
National Review‘s – and GMU Econ alum – Dominic Pino likes Matthew Hennessey’s book The Visible Hand. Here’s Dominic’s conclusion:
And so, the invisible hand becomes visible in our daily lives. You can start at faith, or you can start at empiricism, but the key is letting each inform the other through curiosity and a sense of wonder. Hennessey models that well in Visible Hand, producing a rock-solid defense of free markets and free people.
Jon Sanders likes George Leef’s new novel, The Awakening of Jennifer Van Arsdale. A slice from Sanders:
One of the strengths of Leef’s book is understanding what motivates Jen. Like us, she navigates a forced binary world of viewing all political choices in Marvel comics terms. Every policy question about which people may reasonably differ, which involve trade-offs, is instead seen through an apocalyptic lens of Good vs. Evil, and the fate of the entire world hinges on the choice. With so much at stake, persuasion is abandoned, and victory “by any means necessary” becomes all that matters.
My late, great monetary theory and macroeconomics professor Leland Yeager very much admired the work of Clark Warburton. Jim Dorn – who was also among Leland’s students – writes here about Warburton.
Here’s David Henderson on Steven Rhoads on unemployed men.
Matt Ridley reports that Putin spent big to spread fake news about fracking.
Some Covid Links
Like China’s previous efforts to contain the highly infectious Omicron variant, this one too is doomed to fail, although not before extracting an enormous cost. The dimensions of human suffering comes through in some of the videos posted by the suffering residents.
Here’s another report on the calamitous chaos caused in Shanghai by the pursuit there of zero Covid. Two slices:
Public disorder broke out in Shanghai last night as the Chinese Communist regime’s draconian restrictions to eradicate coronavirus cases left residents running out of food – while cases continue to rise.
China’s largest city and financial centre has been under lockdown for 22 days, despite public health officials warnings that the Omicron Covid variant is so infectious that it cannot be wiped out by lockdowns.
Shanghai residents are only allowed to leave their homes once a day to collect food and infected Chinese children have been separated from their parents in a desperate attempt to stop the virus spreading.
…..
Shanghai has a population of 26million and has now spent more than three weeks in the toughest lockdown anywhere in the world since the start of the pandemic.
American lawyer Jared T. Nelson, who lives in the city, tweeted that only two people from each apartment building are allowed to leave every day to collect food parcels.
Volunteers must wear full protective white suits and have two hours to finish the job.
Mr Nelson said he has been told the conditions at so-called central quarantine centres, where infected patients are taken, are ‘awful’.
He wrote: ‘No showers, portable toilets only, no hot water, and of course no privacy’.
The compliance lawyer also said food deliveries are regularly cancelled as supplies diminish.
Some parts of the city are much better connected to food supplies than others, he said.
Mr Nelson added: ‘[My family] had three deliveries that were booked to deliver today: two group purchases of meat/seafood + one individual purchase of soap and shampoo. All three were cancelled.’
David Livermore decries the Covidian horror now unfolding in Shanghai.
alex g tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
In 2020 the entire public health establishment praised China’s “zero covid” strategy. Today 25 million people in Shanghai are confined to their homes. Families are going hungry and young children have been separated from their parents. Zero covid is a human rights disaster.
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