Russell Roberts's Blog, page 165

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Wall Street Journal columnist James Freeman decries the Covidocracy’s cruelty to children. Two slices:

If the Covid era doesn’t make one suspicious of government, it’s hard to imagine what would. Two years after state and local officials—egged on by federal disease doctors—started inflicting massive burdens on U.S. children, reports of the ineffectiveness of mandated public health measures and their destructive side effects continue to roll in.

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A visitor from another planet would likely be shocked to learn that the press made a hero out of a government doctor who warned against reopening society after the spring shutdowns of 2020 even while admitting he had not even studied the impact of school closures on children. But that’s the story of Dr. Anthony Fauci and his legion of media admirers.

Just as hard to believe in March 2022 is that a few mandate bitter-enders like New York City Mayor Eric Adams are still mandating masks for daycare and preschool kids under the age of 5.

Will the less-than-useless pandemic measures imposed in 2020 never end?

el gato malo is correct to observe that “zero carbon and zero covid are the same grift.”

Also from el gato malo is this exposure of a pro-lockdown Covidian now attempting to rewrite her history.

Jeffrey Tucker is correct that we should never forget about the wanton destruction and authoritarian excesses done over the past two years in the name of protecting people from exposure to one particular pathogen.

Who’d a-thunk it? The pursuit of zero-covid in Hong Kong and New Zealand failed. (HT Phil Magness)

TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.)

Here’s some good news is Britain.

“We Learned Our Lesson Last Year: Do Not Close Schools” – this is the headline of a December 20th, 2021, New York Times op-ed by Joseph Allen. (HT Jay Bhattacharya) A slice:

The argument for keeping schools open rests on two constants ever since the Covid pandemic began: The risk of severe outcomes to kids from coronavirus infection is low, and the risks to kids from being out of school are high.

On risks from Covid: The weekly hospitalization rate for school-age children is approximately 1 in 100,000. This has stayed remarkably consistent throughout the pandemic — through the origin strain, the more transmissible Alpha and last winter’s surge and, yes, even through the summer Delta surge in the South and the fall Delta surge in the North.

As the American Academy of Pediatrics stated in a report released this month, “The available data indicate that Covid-19-associated hospitalization and death is uncommon in children.” There is also promising news regarding long Covid and children: A large meta-analysis published last month shows that kids who tested positive for the coronavirus have rates of persistent symptoms that are similar to those who tested negative, and when there were differences, they were small.

The early evidence from outside the United States suggests that kids will remain low risk during the Omicron surge as well.

Wesley J. Smith talks about Covid and Covid policy with Jay Bhattacharya.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 77 of my late, great colleague Walter Williams’s 2015 book, American Contempt for Liberty, which is a collection of many of Walter’s columns and essays; this quotation specifically is from Walter’s October 6th, 2010, syndicated column, “Politicians Exploit Economic Ignorance“:

It’s not rocket science to conclude that whatever lowers the cost of capital formation, such as lowering the cost of investing in earthmovers, enables contractors to purchase more of them. Workers will have more capital to work with and as a result enjoy higher wages. Policies that raise the cost of capital formation such as capital gains taxes, low depreciation allowances and corporate taxes, thereby reduce capital formation, and serve neither the interests of workers, investors nor consumers. It does serve the interests of politicians who get more resources to be able to buy votes.

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Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 71 of Israel Kirzner’s excellent March 2000 Freeman essay titled “The Irresistible Force of Market Competition,” as this essay is reprinted in Competition, Economic Planning, and the Knowledge Problem (Peter J. Boettke and Frédéric Sautet, eds., 2018), which is a volume in The Collected Works of Israel M. Kirzner (original emphasis):

What is needed to stimulate that all-powerful entrepreneurial-competitive process upon which the free market depends is nothing more than freedom of entry to anyone with an idea of how to profit by serving consumers more faithfully than they are being currently served. It is important to remember that no claim is made that freedom of entry entails that competitors refrain from attempts to monopolize markets. They may attempt to do so; and certainly their efforts may possibly place the consumer in a worse position (than he might be under a system reflecting perfect knowledge). The Austrian claim is that since no such perfect knowledge can exist, we must rely on the competitive-entrepreneurial process to reveal how the consumer may be better served. To obstruct this process in the name of competition (!) is to undermine the only way through which the tendency toward social efficiency is possible. By obstructing or preventing entrepreneurial steps taken that do not fit the “perfectly competitive” model of universal utter powerlessness [of firms to alter price or product quality] – even if such obstruction or prevention stems from the best of intentions on behalf of consumers – government is necessarily tending, to a greater or lesser extent, to paralyze what is truly the competitive process.

DBx: Yes.

In the market, entrepreneurs and firms profit only by discovering ways to deliver more satisfaction to consumers and successfully acting on these discoveries. Economic profit is never extracted; it’s always created by actually improving consumer welfare. Furthermore – and happily – the overwhelming bulk of the benefits of entrepreneurial success are eventually enjoyed by consumers; the entrepreneurs who create these benefits get only a tiny fraction of them.

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: “‘Help’ that hurts”

(Don Boudreaux)

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In my column for the March 28th, 2012, edition of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, I expressed some of my criticisms of the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009 (CARD). You can read my column in full beneath the fold.

(more…)

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Martin Kulldorff asks if children should be vaccinated against Covid. A slice:

When deciding whether to vaccinate a child, we must also consider known and potential adverse reactions. From the CDC’s Vaccine Safety Datalink we know that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines can cause myocarditis among adolescents and young adults. Current risk estimates are in the range of one myocarditis for every 3,000 or 8,000 vaccinated adolescents and young men. Women have lower risk. There may also be additional still unknown adverse reactions.

The Covid vaccine has been widely used for children without solid information about its efficacy on hospitalizations and deaths, and without the ability to conduct a proper benefit-risk evaluation.

Writing at National Review, Phil Klein urges that preschoolers be released from masks. A slice:

For all the headlines about New York City mayor Eric Adams removing the school mask mandate, reading the fine print reveals that preschoolers will be left out. This is an approach that has been consistent in many blue areas, where officials argue — contrary to new CDC guidance — that this age group must mask up because they are not yet eligible for vaccination.

The most puzzling aspect of insisting on masking toddlers and preschoolers is that this is the group least likely to benefit from masking and the one that has the most to lose.

Even those who believe that mask mandates work for the general population would be forced to acknowledge that toddlers are the least likely to be able to wear masks properly for eight hours a day. Also, according to CDC data, out of 914,259 Covid deaths in the U.S. for the entire pandemic, just 56 of them were in the two-to-four age group — or less than one-hundredth of 1 percent. And those numbers do not control for children who had other health issues and then happened to test positive once in the hospital.

Also protesting, in today’s Wall Street Journal, NYC’s irrational and cruel policy of masking preschoolers is Karol Markowicz. A slice:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is the only public health agency in the world to recommend masking toddlers in the first place. They are at almost no risk of serious illness from Covid, and not a single study has found that masks help stop viral spread in this age group.

How could they? I’ve seen children chew on masks and wipe their noses with them. My 6-year old once took off his mask to gulp some hot chocolate, then used it as a napkin to wipe his upper lip.

And masks probably do real harm to young children. When a politician removes his mask to address an audience, he is acknowledging that masking makes communication more difficult. Little kids are hard to understand even when you can see their faces.

These are the foundational years, when children learn so much by reading faces, watching mouths and mimicking sounds. We used to understand the importance of early childhood but, like so much else, we’ve discarded that knowledge to poorly combat the Covid-19 virus.

But what do I mean, “we”? Many of us wanted sanity for a long time. I left New York for Florida last year to find it. Children under 5 should never have been masked. To keep this up in March 2022 is doubling down on failure—and cruelty.

Yet another person disheartened by many New Yorkers’ irrationality regarding mask is Peter Pitts. A slice:

I live on the Upper West Side. I am a former Food and Drug Administration associate commissioner, run a not-for-profit public-health policy institute and am a visiting professor at the University of Paris Medical School. Despite my bona fides, I can’t get my neighbors or dog-park acquaintances to relax and unmask themselves.

Welcome to my world, where wearing a surgical mask has replaced wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt as a social-justice signal in post-pandemic America.

My ZIP code is deep blue. “Science is back!” we rejoiced when President Biden was elected. Alas, that doesn’t seem to be true when the science doesn’t match what many of my friends and neighbors want to believe.

Despite very clear guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Gov. Hochul and Mayor Adams, many of my neighbors want to keep their masks on (which is certainly their privilege), but they don’t want me to take mine off either. And they’re aggressive about it. Withering stares and cutting comments. The lack of respect and embrace of — what else can I call it? — “fake news” is disheartening.

Heather Mac Donald, too, calls for New Yorkers to unmask. Two slices:

Just when you thought the abyss between red-state and blue-state sensibilities could not grow wider comes post-pandemic America to reveal further cleavage. Residents of my 34-story Manhattan apartment building are still wearing masks in the elevators, halls, and lobby, even though the building’s internally imposed mask mandate has been lifted. At least half of my neighbors in Yorkville wear masks outdoors, even though New York governor Kathy Hochul suspended the indoor mask mandate for New York City weeks ago. It has always been the case, no matter the rate of indoor transmission, that inhaling a large enough viral dose outdoors to become infected is almost impossible. One might have imagined that even progressives would be ready to say: “Enough of this! We’ll take our chances. Let’s get back to normal life!” But it turns out that many people have a seemingly inexhaustible appetite for fear and risk aversion, especially when linked to control.

Covid metrics are, from a blue-state perspective, depressingly low when even the New York Times has given up on frontpage crisis-mongering. For weeks, the Times has buried its Covid stories deep in the paper, if it prints them at all, because there is only good news to report. There are 25 people per day hospitalized with or from Covid in New York City, out of a pre-pandemic population of 8.5 million. That is essentially zero risk. Deaths with or from Covid are too negligible to mention.

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Healthy young Manhattanites are choosing fear over facts. A group of masked mothers and their masked children recently gathered on the steps of the city’s Department of Education to sing, to the tune of “Frère Jacques”: “Just because we’re tired doesn’t mean it’s over. Mandate masks, that’s our ask.” When will it be over? In blue-state enclaves, a significant constituency would say, “never.”

The wise, humane, and well-informed Joseph Ladapo argues against Covid vaccination for children; the professional political spinmeister Jen Psaki argues against Dr. Ladapo.

Reason’s Eric Boehm reports on the Washington State legislature’s shameful refusal to limit “Gov. Jay Inslee’s indefinite, dictatorial COVID emergency powers.” A slice:

As I wrote in the February issue of Reason, broad and ill-defined emergency powers laws exist in most states but until the COVID-19 pandemic, they were mostly used for acute emergencies like severe storms, earthquakes, bridge collapses, terrorist attacks, and the like. Those are emergencies in the true sense of the term: limited events for which it makes sense to short-circuit the usual governing process so an immediate response can be directed by the chief executive.

A two-year-long pandemic is not really an emergency, even if it remains a vitally important policy issue. This sort of open-ended crisis that leaves the legislature out of the equation breaks the feedback loop that representative democracy relies upon. It also ignores the role that individual decision-making plays in mitigating the effects of a deadly disease, presuming that people would be utterly helpless without the government to protect them. No matter what Inslee might think, he was not solely responsible for the outcome of the pandemic in his state—nor would he want to be held singularly responsible for the more than 12,000 COVID deaths that occurred there, I’m sure.

Guy de la Bédoyère reviews Mark Woolhouse’s new book, The Year the World Went Mad: A scientific Memoir. Three slices:

For those with a general and sober intelligence and experience, it was clear that indiscriminate lockdowns were likely to lead to devastating and long-lasting outcomes. Those needed to be considered before we threw ourselves off a cliff to avoid a car crashing into us. This brazenly obvious consideration was overlooked with reckless disregard by people who really ought to have known better.

What was so difficult to understand two years ago was why that seemed to escape certain scientists who were supposed to have the knowledge and expertise to understand this in far more sophisticated detail. It also escaped the politicians who blundered into this mess, aided and abetted by the most irresponsible and craven public service journalism in decades.

Professor Mark Woolhouse OBE, Professor of Infectious Epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh, has, according to his new book’s blurb “been heavily involved with the UK’s response to COVID-19”. His The Year The World Went Mad is an excoriating attack on how governments around the world fixated on lockdown as the only solution and spurned the idea of quarantining the sick and vulnerable in favour of locking everyone in their houses.

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There is far too much in the book for me to summarise conveniently here, so I will move on to his comments about Imperial College’s COVID-19 Response Team Report 9, published in March 2020. This was the notorious paper that predicted half a million deaths (among other outcomes) if we didn’t lockdown and the effects of interventions of different severity over two years. As Woolhouse says, “It was perfectly obvious that no-one could predict the course of this epidemic over such a long timescale, so what was the point in publishing these outputs?” It was a scenario that “wasn’t remotely realistic”.

The effect was to ignore other solutions and deem lockdown to be a necessity from the outset. All the caveats and assumptions in the Report were ignored, and the headline half a million deaths became the only focus, led of course heroically by the BBC in its mission to terrorise the public into gibbering wrecks. Woolhouse’s preference would have been for less severe measures to have been imposed far earlier and which could have been lifted much more quickly.

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Later on, Woolhouse tackles the way the government’s advisors knew that “the actual risk to more than half the population was extremely low” and therefore advised the deliberate ratcheting up of the perception of personal risk to improve the acceptance of lockdown. “The BBC News backed this misperception up by regularly reporting rare tragedies as if they were the norm.”

His next target is the “damaging and disruptive” closing of schools. The evidence showed that teachers, despite their supposed exposure to walking virus factories in the form of schoolchildren, were not at “elevated risk”. “None” of the concerns surrounding schools “were surrounded by the epidemiological data” for COVID-19, which was in direct contrast to that for flu where there is evidence that children infect others.

It’s at this point Woolhouse found himself up against people, including parents and teachers, who actively wanted to believe otherwise, even to the extent of sending off a fusillade of hate mail, insisting that he was misinterpreting the data or that it was wrong. This was one aspect of a wider phenomenon which bewilders Woolhouse because he came across it among scientist colleagues. My belief is that while we might live in what purports to be a more rational and scientific, evidence-based world, the ancient/medieval mindset is not only still alive and well but is also much closer to the instinctive nature of human beings.

Aaron Kheriaty tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

The covid narrative is falling apart not because of conspiracy theories or intractable and recalcitrant fringe elements who refuse to comply. It is falling apart because it is plainly false.

Dr. Andrius Kavaliunas tweets this graph: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 601 of the 5th edition (2015) of Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics:

Although Adam Smith is today often regarded as a “conservative” figure, he in fact attacked many of the dominant ideas and interests of his own times. Moreover, the idea of a spontaneously self-equilibrating system – the market economy – first developed by the Physiocrats and later made part of the tradition of classical economics by Adam Smith, represented a radically new departure, not only in analysis of social causation but also in seeing a reduced role for political, intellectual, or other elites as guides or controllers of the masses.

DBx: Adam Smith’s An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations was first published on this date in 1776. In the 246 years since, there has appeared no more eloquent and powerful case against the interference by pretentious elites into the affairs of ordinary people.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 2 of Christopher Snowdon’s excellent 2017 book, Killjoys: A Critique of Paternalism (original emphasis):

A demand for something to be done can morph into a demand for anything to be done. Faced with a series of supposed crises and epidemics – the binge-drinking crisis, the obesity epidemic, etc. – the government is told to take action at all costs. But taking action at all costs is a terrible way to make policy.

DBx: Of course. And never in my lifetime was the move of ‘taking action at all costs’ as insanely costly and poisonous to liberal civilization as it was in the insistence of so very many people that government focus single-mindedly and obsessively – in effect, blindly – on reducing the spread of one pathogen.

Essential Women of Liberty

(Don Boudreaux)

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Hot off the press is the Fraser Institute’s newest Essentials volume, Essential Women of Liberty, which is co-edited by Aeon Skoble and me. All materials are available, free of charge, on line. (A physical book will eventually be produced, but a paper shortage is delaying that production.) Enjoy and learn!

(As always, I thank Fraser’s marvelously talented team, especially Jason, Niels, Kristin, and Bryn.)

And here’s the accompanying video on Deirdre McCloskey.

More Proper Praise for Petroleum

(Don Boudreaux)

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This short video by Liberty Oil CEO Chris Wright is superb. (HT Henry Butler)

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Some Non-Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Mike Munger’s life was saved by the division of labor… as also was, not incidentally, the life of my son.

David Henderson criticizes Joel Kotkin’s criticism of libertarians.

My GMU Econ colleague Bryan Caplan writes insightfully about helping the poor. A slice:

Housing regulation is another fine example. When housing regulation was light, housing prices stayed close to the physical cost of production. The obvious benefit for the poor was that they didn’t have to spend a huge share of their budget on rent or mortgage payments. But there was also a less-obvious benefit: Poor families used to have a near-foolproof way to raise their standard of living – move to higher-wage parts of the country. Over the last fifty years, however, housing regulation has become very strict, especially in the country’s high-wage areas. As a result, average U.S. housing prices are now roughly double the physical cost of production.

To ask, “How can we help the poor get affordable housing?,” creates the impression that the rest of us are neglecting the poor. In other words, that we’re guilty of leaving desperate folks to fend for themselves in a hostile world. The reality, rather, is that our society artificially strangles the supply of a naturally abundant necessity. In the long-run, this hurts almost everyone – probably including most homeowners. But the poor clearly suffer extra because (a) they spend a higher share of their income on housing, and (b) are much more likely to rent.

My very first publication was co-authored with my great teacher Bill Field and it appeared in the August 1979 issue of Reason; it was an argument against conscription. Today at Reason Ira Stoll wisely argues against the use of conscription by Ukraine’s government.

Writing in the New York Times, Ilya Somin calls on Americans to welcome refugees from Ukraine… and from Russia. A slice:

o ease the suffering caused by Vladimir Putin’s invasion and strengthen our position against him, the United States should open its doors both to Ukrainian refugees fleeing the conflict and to Russians seeking to escape Mr. Putin’s tyranny.

There are several things we can do quickly: President Biden has taken a valuable first step by making Ukrainians in the United States eligible for temporary protected status, which will shield them from deportation and allow them to seek employment. But this measure applies only to those who arrived in the United States by March 1 and lasts only for 18 months (though that could be extended). He can also protect Ukrainian students in the United States by granting special student relief, which would make it easier for them to remain here. Further, he should grant parole status to newly arriving Ukrainian refugees, allowing them to remain in the United States.

Fiscal illusion is real – and dishonest. So explains Chris Edwards.

Glenn Reynolds reviews Benjamin Barton’s The Credentialed Court.

In a new paper, Kenneth Costello asks: What is the social responsibility of companies? Here’s the abstract:

The major message in this Essay is that market-driven corporate social responsibility, reflecting the preferences of consumers, employees and investors, is the preferred approach for achieving many of the goals in a CSR world. Non-market, namely, governmental or CEO induced approaches, contain serious problems that either (1) ironically, undermine the intended goals or (2) leave the job of addressing social problems in the hands of company management and their boards, who have dubious incentives and capability to execute this task efficiently and effectively. The public-policy question comes down to what institutional arrangement can best address various social problems. The scientific assessment of most economists, and what seems practical and sensical, is that governments should assume primary responsibility for dealing with social problems.

Writing at National Review, GMU Econ grad student Dominic Pino finds in the American heartland some bright supply-chain web bright spots. Here’s his conclusion:

Populists of all stripes who want to tell you that globalized trade is a cosmopolitan conspiracy against the middle of the country are peddling nonsense. Countless high-quality American jobs depend on globalization, and many of them are located in so-called flyover country. Those of us who live on the coasts would do well to remember the people in Memphis, Louisville, Columbus, New Orleans, and elsewhere who make it possible for Americans to buy and sell products across the globe.

Also writing at National Review, my intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy insists on using economic realities to assess defense spending.

Omar Al-Ubaydli wisely warns that “economic decoupling is a threat to world peace.” Here’s his conclusion:

Thankfully, neither side is looking to decouple from the other economically. However, many countries – including the US – are actively trying to decouple from China. If successful, this will make it easier for people in those countries to hate Chinese people and vice versa and make the cost of war considerably lower for all sides. We should not be surprised, therefore, if the result is war.

Humans are intrinsically nomadic, and so we are easily seduced by the idea of managing our conflicts with others by permanently cutting ties and wandering off to a different hunting ground. This general impulse doesn’t work at the international level because we live in the same small space. Economic relations help us override our intrinsic desire to butt heads, and the great powers must remember this when they seek the short-term catharsis offered by economic decoupling.