Russell Roberts's Blog, page 170
February 27, 2022
Some Non-Covid Links
Daniel Hannan writes wisely about Putin’s monstrous invasion of Ukraine. A slice:
The truth is that democracy is in retreat worldwide and, as it ebbs, it takes with it the neighbourliness among nations to which we have grown accustomed. Every league table – the Democracy Index, Freedom House, the Economist Intelligence Unit – tells the same story. After seven decades of steady advance, global democratisation stalled at some point between 2010 and 2015, and began to go into reverse. The strongmen in their sunglasses are not throwbacks, but grisly augurs of the future. As liberal democracy recedes, so does the peaceful international order on which it rested.
Billy Binion busts the myth that Putin is a defender of Christian values. A slice:
Conservative expressions of affection for Putin’s supposed moral clarity are perhaps louder than usual. That doesn’t mean they’re new. “While privacy and freedom of thought, religion and speech are cherished rights, to equate traditional marriage and same-sex marriage is to equate good with evil,” wrote former White House Communications Director Pat Buchanan in 2013, as he approvingly summarized Putin’s opposition to the latter. “No moral confusion here, this is moral clarity.”
But once again, Buchanan et. al need not align themselves with a murderous despot in order to take a principled stand for traditional marriage—particularly when considering that the Russian president’s positioning may be rooted more in strategy than in faith. “Putin is seeking to tighten his grip on Ukraine and Belarus, as well as expand Russian influence further into Eastern and Central Europe,” wrote Alexis Mrachek and Shane McCrum for the conservative Heritage Foundation in 2019. That feels a bit prophetic now: “He will undoubtedly continue to promote Orthodoxy in the process. This is simply an attempt to seduce former Soviet republics back under the sway of Russia.” The Soviet Union of Putin’s younger days was staunchly atheistic and used secularism as a tool to secure state worship. That ultimately failed. In some sense, Putin has subverted the approach to religion—leaning heavily on it as opposed to eschewing it—to arrive at the same end goal: state worship.
But Republicans should refuse to engage in the politics of personal destruction that Democrats routinely wage. Many Republicans may be frustrated that they don’t have more leverage, but elections have consequences. Mr. Biden won in 2020, and then President Trump’s claims of a stolen election in Georgia cost the GOP control of the Senate. Conservatives are paying the price again.
“Do Professors Make Good Administrators?” Ha!
George Leef reports on the increasing dysfunction of American law schools.
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
It made no sense to suddenly shut down the entire American economy, essentially lock everyone up, for a virus that was severely dangerous only to the elderly and others with significant underlying diseases….
The medical recommendations in the [Trump White House Covid ] Task Force meetings, run by the VP, focused only on stopping the virus and never once cautioned about the health impacts of closures and confinements.
Some Covid Links
The 925,000 signers of the Great Barrington Declaration understood epidemiology and public health better than America’s most famous lab scientist, Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Vinay Prasad insists that what must be restricted are the Covid restrictions. A slice:
Let’s reflect on this for a moment. NYC school district has been requiring children wear masks OUTSIDE all this time. Years after we knew the virus almost never spreads outside. During recess when kids play, forced to wear a mask while exerting themselves. Wow!
Whoever made the policy is an idiot. No way around it. They are not fit for policymaking. They abused the power of government to coerce children (at incredibly low risk of bad outcomes) to wear a mask in a setting where the virus simply does not spread. In other words, they participated in something done in the name of public health, which actually made human beings worse off. Worse, they used coercive force to do it.
Post-COVID we need to seriously talk about setting restrictions. But not on people. We need to place restrictions on public health and things done in the name of public health. We cannot allow individuals who are poor at weighing risk and benefit and uncertainty to coerce human beings, disproportionately the young and powerless (waiters/ servers) to participate in interventions that have no data supporting them, for years on end.
(DBx: I of course agree with what Prasad says above. I, however, disagree with his later-expressed proposal to put restrictions also on what private entities may prescribe or proscribe. It’s vital to remember that government cannot increase its ability to restrict what private parties may do unless its own powers become less restricted. Just yesterday, by the way, I went to get my haircut. Unlike my last visit to the privately owned and operated salon that cuts my hair, this time I was told that I must wear a mask. I politely declined and told the receptionist to contact me when the salon drops its mask requirement. I wish that this salon had no such requirement; this requirement makes my life less convenient. But I will defend vigorously the salon’s right to have in place this requirement.)
“Following the science” became a mainstay mantra of the pandemic, frequently trotted-out to justify unpalatable policy decisions such as banning hugging or denying fathers the right to attend the birth of a child.
Yet as Britain’s epidemic begins to fade away, it is becoming increasingly clear that many influential scientists were ignored, ridiculed and shunned for expressing moderate views that the virus could be managed in a way which would cause far less collateral damage.
Instead, a narrow scientific “groupthink” emerged, which sought to cast those questioning draconian policies as unethical, immoral and fringe. That smokescreen is finally starting to dissipate.
Take scientists who supported the Great Barrington Declaration. They, not unreasonably, believed that it would be sensible to shield the most vulnerable while allowing those at very low risk to carry on their lives, thereby preventing cataclysmic damage to the economy, mental health and education.
Instead of the idea being sensibly debated, the signatories were pilloried and made to seem as if they were in the minority. A recent study by Stanford University revealed they weren’t; they just had fewer social media followers and so struggled in the face of more organised opposition.
The report neatly demonstrates the alarming reach and power of demographically unrepresentative forums like Twitter, which are easily hijacked by powerful lobbying groups.
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Much of the pro-lockdown narrative was controlled by a small group of scientists who effectively organised themselves into a political movement which sought to influence policy.
Independent Sage, a group of largely Left-wing academics which regularly called for tighter restrictions, was put together by The Citizens, a group founded by Carole Cadwalladr, a Guardian and Observer journalist and activist.
Many of the scientists on Independent Sage also signed the John Snow Memorandum, which branded the Great Barrington Experiment as unethical.
In his article in BMJ Open, Prof Ioannidis made the point: “Perusal of the Twitter content of John Snow Memorandum signatories and their op-eds suggests that some may have sadly contributed to Great Barrington Declaration vilification.”
Even moderate scientists who called for greater evidence on lockdowns, masks, and other restrictions, faced the full force of supporters of the highly-organised group.
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Large parts of the scientific community were completely ignored as a disproportionate amount of attention was given to virologists and epidemiologists.
One government minister said: “We have had to have the guts to say the data can be challenged sometimes, and say that’s good data but we have to make a political decision.
“In the pandemic we got a bit close to pretending there was no tension. Public health officials who have absolutely no remit to keep the economy vibrant, they only remit is to make sure there is no infection were calling for the whole thing to be shut down
“You can see there is a legitimate voice that says, hang on, we need to get the balance right. Shutting down the local economy and sticking everyone back in boxes is not going to be good for public health.”
…..
In the 1841 book, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds Charles Mackay, the Scottish journalist, observed: “Men go mad in herds and they only recover their senses slowly, one at a time.”
Prof [David] Livermore added: “I suspect that it’ll shortly be hard to find anyone who once was in favour of lockdowns.”
Telegraph columnist Juliet Samuel laments the lingering ghosts of lockdowns. Two slices:
They are everywhere: the ghosts of lockdowns past. Circles on the floor telling you to stand here and not there; lines outside the supermarket where we once had to queue; notices informing you that “face coverings are required by law”; and the latest, put up only a few weeks ago, helpfully announcing that “you can now isolate for five days instead of six”. And, as of this week, with all restrictions abolished in England, the little Covid cues to our behaviour dotted around the public sphere are fading away, like a child’s scribbles in chalk.
Before they disappear, it’s worth noting what these lines and stickers and notices overlaid upon one another say about the process of trying to manage a pandemic. They signal the ultimate futility of trying to control and measure human behaviour down to such pettifogging detail. The first lockdown was clear enough: “Stay at home.” There wasn’t much to interpret. But this dabble in China-style disease management didn’t last long. After that, everything grew murky.
The police couldn’t track down everyone and check what they were up to, after all. They couldn’t very well go around the streets with a measuring tape. Besides which, can anyone really tell us the impact of revising the two-metre rule down to one metre? Did the Test and Trace app save a single life? What proportion of people actually isolated when they flew home from their holidays? Did the bossy signs and one-way systems make any difference at all? Or did they quickly just become a piece of the scenery, like an ever-changing window display? Like a politician spending his political capital on gimmicks, they quickly lost their authority. Is this sign up to date, I wonder, seeing another one in the loos, or was that last week’s war with Oceania?
…..
So now we are left with the detritus of disproved theories and hypothesised behavioural cues. May it fade away fast and never come back. For those made most anxious by Covid, these signs are nothing but little reminders to be afraid and to seek out isolation. Whatever originally justified them, they can’t disappear soon enough.
Here’s the opening paragraph of Wall Street Journal columnist James Freeman’s latest:
The New York Times has its faults. But one can never accuse the newspaper’s editors of being insufficiently obsessed with Covid-19. “Another casualty of Russia’s invasion: Ukraine’s ability to contain the coronavirus,” reads a Times headline.
Sarah Beth Burwick tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
“Covid-minimizer” is another meaningless label people slap on you when they know they’re wrong. Demanding nuanced policies based on risk assessment informed by data, while balancing collateral harms ≠ minimizing.
The fear monger covid maximizers are who we need to worry about.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 424 of Robert Bork’s masterful 1978 book, The Antitrust Paradox:
[I]ntellectuals who speak to the subject regularly commit the logical fallacy of praising the antitrust laws as the economic counterpart of the First Amendment, designed to keep economic markets free even as the First Amendment keeps the market for speech and ideas free. The analogy, of course, reverses the true relationship of the two laws in a way compatible with intellectual class tastes. The First Amendment has become a severe limitation on the power of government to intervene in the competition of speech and ideas…. The antitrust laws, on the other hand, do not curb government; they are themselves governmental interventions in a marketplace, justified on the theory that competition is not to be trusted there, as it is to be trusted in the speech market. Thus, the First Amendment and the antitrust laws stand in philosophic opposition to one another.
DBx: This point is deep and important.
In liberal societies, all but today’s woke Progressives (and the snowflakes who increasingly populate college campuses), correctly understand that the best ‘cure’ for misinformation and misunderstanding is the better information and superior speech that emerge when speech is free. This understanding is not premised on any claim that freedom of speech will ensure instantaneous or ‘perfect’ responses to ‘bad’ speech. Instead, this understanding is premised on the realization that there is no better means of detecting and ‘curing’ misinformation and misunderstanding than freedom of speech. Put another way, the wisest support for freedom of speech is premised on the realization that government officials are neither sufficiently informed nor trustworthy to impose ‘truth,’ or even to use the coercive powers at their disposal to proscribe what people peacefully say regarding it.
It’s too bad that a similar liberal understanding isn’t more widespread and deep regarding non-coercive activity – industry and commerce – in the economy. The case against antitrust is not that markets are or will ever be perfect. Instead, the case against antitrust is that the most reliable means of detecting and curing market imperfections is the profit motive that incites entrepreneurs to discover and ‘correct’ market failures in ways that improve the performance of markets (meaning: improve markets’ service to consumers). Put another way, the wisest support for “freedom of markets” – and, thus, for abolishing antitrust – is premised on the realization that government officials are neither sufficiently informed nor trustworthy to impose ‘competitive outcomes,’ or even to use the coercive powers at their disposal to proscribe the peaceful ways with which businesses experiment to increase their market shares, to decrease their costs of operation, or both.
February 26, 2022
Some Non-Covid Links
George Will writes with his usual deep wisdom about the dangers of prosecuting “hate crimes.” A slice:
So, the government can conduct trials for the purpose of virtue signaling — to announce, however redundantly, that it condemns particular frames of mind. A bigot’s shabby mental furniture is, however, not a crime. Were it, what other mentalities might government decide to stigmatize by imposing special punishments? [Ahmaud] Arbery’s killers had expressed their racism in speech (texts, social media posts, remarks) that no jurisdiction can proscribe. But their federal punishment will be imposed precisely because their speech demonstrated their bigotry.
Proving the intent behind a criminal act is crucial. And no principle should prohibit ever making punishment proportional to the motive for a criminal act. However, deciding that an actor’s heinous behavior is made more heinous because they had a bad attitude is dangerous. It is one thing for the law to hold individuals responsible for controlling their minds, which presumably control their bodies. It is quite another thing for government to inventory an individual’s mind for the purpose of declaring how admirable the government’s mind is, and perhaps by doing so to improve the public’s mind.
This impulse melds with what C.S. Lewis called the remedial theory of punishment, whereby government detains offenders until they are cured, as determined by government’s “official straighteners.” Another totalitarian temptation.
Nick Gillespie explains why legislating against hate speech backfires.
Mr. Trudeau deserves the scorn he is now receiving—including from principled liberals who understand that invoking emergency powers to silence political enemies sets a terrible precedent. But in fairness, Mr. Trudeau isn’t solely responsible for the climate of hysteria that now suffuses Canadian progressive politics. His rise to power coincided with America’s Great Awokening, and neither Mr. Trudeau nor anyone around him could have predicted how radicalized the social-justice movement would become.
Canada had its own Great Awokening in 2017, a few months after that famous meeting between Mr. Trudeau and Mr. Trump. That year marked Canada’s 150th birthday. But instead of joining the national party, many indigenous leaders refused to help celebrate a country created at their ancestors’ expense. The ensuing culture-war eruption was volcanic, with Canadian media (especially the already-quite-woke Canadian Broadcasting Corp.) launching into maudlin spasms of national self-recrimination.
Mr. Trudeau, who had succeeded in politics by presenting himself as both a great patriot and an unimpeachable progressive, couldn’t have it both ways. When Canada’s defining national ideal had been resistance to American laissez-faire capitalism and bellicosity, Canadian patriotism and progressivism went hand in hand. But, suddenly, an alliance with progressive true believers required agreeing that Canada is a racist and genocidal hellhole.
When in 2019 Mr. Trudeau was revealed as a hypocrite who’d lectured the world on social justice while hiding evidence of his wearing blackface—he can’t remember how many times he painted himself when young to look like a black person—that only turbocharged his performative approach. The white son of privilege had even more to prove. When George Floyd was killed in 2020, Mr. Trudeau took a knee—though Minneapolis isn’t a Canadian city—making clear that he was beholden not only to the parochial rites of Canadian wokeism but also to the American variant.
Stephen Budiansky reviews Ananyo Bhattacharya’s new biography of the remarkable John von Neumann. A slice:
As striking as von Neumann’s scientific intellect were his bon vivant’s zest for life and acute perception of human nature. These are not qualities typically associated with genius, much less with a child prodigy, which von Neumann undeniably was. As a boy he taught himself calculus; fluently mastered English, French, Latin, and classical Greek; and memorized entire stretches of a 40-plus-volume history of the world, which he was able to recite verbatim decades later.
Many prodigies go off the rails, but von Neumann did not. He loved company, excelled at both making money and spending it—on tailored clothes, Cadillac convertibles, first-class travel—and was famous for the endless flow of powerful martinis at unbuttoned cocktail parties at his luxurious home in otherwise stuffy Princeton. He was a master of smoothing over professional or political frictions among colleagues with a well-timed diversion into Byzantine history or, more often, a dirty joke or limerick, of which he maintained an endless store alongside the mathematical visions that filled his mind.
He also had a deep grasp of political realities exceptional for a scientist, or for that matter anyone. Mr. Bhattacharya quotes a remarkable letter von Neumann wrote a Hungarian colleague in 1935 predicting that there would be a war in Europe within a decade, that America would come to Britain’s aid, and that the Jews would face a genocide like the Armenians suffered under the Ottomans.
At National Review, GMU Econ graduate student Dominic Pino celebrates Stephen Breyer’s admirable role in deregulating commercial airlines. Here’s Dominic’s conclusion:
He wrote a lot of words as a Supreme Court justice that will not be long remembered. But he deserves to be remembered for his greatest act of public service: helping to get the federal government out of the air-travel market.
James Bovard decries Progressives’ “love affair with Leviathan.” A slice:
The same pro-Leviathan bias has radiated in liberals’ [DBx: Prorgressives’] response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Government officials vastly overstated the mortality risk and then exploited Covid fears to inflict “previously unimaginable restrictions on individual liberty,” as Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito declared. Governors in state after state effectively placed hundreds of millions of citizens under house arrest — dictates that former Attorney General Bill Barr aptly compared to “the greatest intrusion on civil liberties” since the end of slavery. The New York Times set the tone for media coverage when it announced that the task for government was to “learn how to frighten [citizens] into acting for the common good.” Shutting down entire states was the equivalent of burning witches or sacrificing virgins to appease angry viral gods.
Joe Biden was elected president in part because liberals wanted a more forceful response to the pandemic. Last August, Biden decreed that any employee of a private company with more than 100 employees must be injected with a Covid vaccine. The response from liberals and Democrats was almost entirely supportive. The fact that Biden’s order had no basis in the Constitution or federal law was irrelevant: instead, all that mattered was that the president was coming to the rescue. Washington Post editorials praised the mandates for “working” because they resulted in many individuals submitting to getting vaccinated in order not to lose their jobs. Federal appeals court rulings striking down the mandates as illegal and unconstitutional were derided or ignored by Democrats.
Similarly, Democrats have been prone to confer sainthood on Covid Czar Anthony Fauci, regardless of his endless flip-flops and his false congressional testimony about federal funding of dangerous research at the Wuhan Lab in China. Early in the pandemic, Fauci became the incarnation of coercive good intentions. Liberals posted lawn signs proclaiming “I believe in science” — implying that anyone who did not venerate Fauci and cheer politicians’ Covid crackdowns was a hopeless Neanderthal. On November 28, Fauci announced on a Sunday talk show that Republican senators who criticized him were “really criticizing science because I represent science. That’s dangerous.” On the day after Fauci effectively proclaimed “L’Science, C’est Moi,” FDA’s former top vaccine experts warned in the Washington Post that “the push for boosters for all could actually prolong the pandemic.” But liberal supporters of Fauci and Biden ignored the split in scientific opinion on Covid policy. Instead, Fauci’s job title apparently was the highest scientific evidence imaginable.
My GMU Econ colleague Bryan Caplan writes insightfully about externalities.
Here’s David Boaz on the late P.J. O’Rourke on “safety Nazis.” A slice:
P. J. O’Rourke may not have coined the term “safety Nazi,” defined by the Urban Dictionary as “A person obsessed with safety and possessing a fascist belief that everyone who believes otherwise is irresponsible, reckless, and should be publicly chastised.” But he does seem to have mainstreamed it. Glenn Garvin writes in Politico that he saw O’Rourke use it in a magazine interview around 1980 and invited him to expand on the topic in an article for Inquiry, a magazine founded by the Cato Institute and edited for a time by Garvin. P.J. did so in a 1982 article, which has just been posted on the Cato site. It seems to have been his first real political article, after his days with the National Lampoon and Car & Driver.
In the article P.J. lambasted seatbelts, safety bumpers, vegetarian restaurants, and childproof aspirin bottles. “Allen Ginsberg said he saw the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness. I have seen the best minds of my generation destroy a half gross of Tylenol with a ball peen hammer.”
“The forces of safety,” he declared, “are afoot in the land. I, for one, believe it is a conspiracy–a conspiracy of Safety Nazis shouting Sieg Health! and seeking to trammel freedom, liberty, and large noisy parties.”
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from Robert Seber’s comment on a recent EconLog post by David Henderson:
Every time I hear a politician talk about the kitchen table I throw up all over my kitchen table.
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Lynne Kiesling on Deirdre McCloskey
As part of its Essential Scholars series, the Fraser Institute’s volume titled Essential Women of Liberty is forthcoming. Available here is Lynne Kiesling’s entry, for this forthcoming volume, on Deirdre McCloskey. A slice (links added):
McCloskey thus starts the trilogy with Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (2006), grounding the emergent processes of prosperity in a virtue-ethics framework. Scorn for both the bourgeoisie and markets has been commonplace in human history, and McCloskey argues that this misplaced scorn emerges from a failure to appreciate the extent to which markets and exchange have moral as well as material value. In Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World (2010), she investigates the many other causal factors that have been offered as explanations for the Great Enrichment—geography, institutions, capital, culture, foreign trade, colonialism, slavery—and argues that even in combination they are not sufficient to account for the 300-fold improvement in living standards that we have experienced. Again in this book McCloskey applies fundamental “compared to what?” economic logic, even while rejecting monocausal economic arguments. Invoking Adam Smith’s language, the wealth of nations increased due not (I would say not solely, but here she and I may have a gentle disagreement) to these economic factors, but due to ideas, rhetoric, and their evolving into a recognition of the inherent dignity of free enterprise. In the final volume, Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World (2016), she expands this argument and emphasizes the liberal egalitarian implications of the spread of bourgeois ideas. The belief spread that ordinary people have equal liberty and inherent dignity, and should be free to “have a go” and try out new ideas. This freedom to choose, to experiment, and to innovate is morally proper and, over time, materially fruitful for individuals and for the societies composed of them. Without an ethical framework that honours hard work and industrious creativity, the Great Enrichment could not have happened. These three volumes make for an entertaining and engaging read, and reflect a magisterial breadth and depth of scholarship. Recently, McCloskey and Art Carden collaborated on a one-volume distillation of the themes and arguments in the Bourgeois trilogy: Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich: How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World (2020).
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Some Covid Links
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are letting most Americans take their masks off for a little bit, as a treat.
On Friday, the public health agency released a new COVID Community Levels tool that measures the severity of the pandemic by COVID’s burden on the hospital system, rather than the number of cases. That change in measurement means the CDC is now classifying about 70 percent of counties in the country at low or medium threat of COVID. In those areas, the agency is no longer recommending people wear a mask indoors.
These new guidelines don’t change the requirements that people wear masks on well-ventilated airplanes or near-empty buses and subways. The agency is still also recommending that people, including school children in K-12 schools, wear masks indoors in the 30 percent of counties where the risk of COVID-19 is ranked as high.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which had been stubbornly refusing to revisit its nonsensical masking guidance long after most states had abandoned it, magically discovered new science just days before a desperate President Biden is set to give his State of the Union address.
Not only was this predictable, but it was predicted by me in this space a few weeks ago. While the CDC would no doubt argue that the situation is better now and so it supports more de-masking, NBC had previously reported that the White House was pressuring the CDC to offer new guidance ahead of the speech. With the crisis unfolding in Ukraine on top of Biden’s mounting political problems, he was desperate to be able to cling to something.
…..
Under the new guidance, the CDC is shifting to another arbitrary set of thresholds to determine whether a given county is low/medium/or high-risk; only now, more weight will be given to hospital capacity. The new system doesn’t make much sense either, because there is no strong evidence to support the idea that mandating masks in indoor settings would lower the number of people hospitalized with Covid.
So on the one hand, this is good news because it will tangibly allow masks to come off the faces of millions of children who live in areas that have been religiously following CDC guidance. But it also leaves the door open to a permanent masking regime, if we assume that there will be future surges of different variants of Covid.
The timing of the announcement should disabuse people of the notion that CDC decisions are driven by anything more than politics.
el gato malo explains that what changed isn’t the science, but the ‘political science.’ A slice:
it’s time [for the Covidians] to pretend that all the mitigations, impositions, and pseudoscience we pushed worked, claim victory, tell everyone we saved them, and move on.
they are already pushing the data off “cases” and onto “hospitalizations” and then changing they way they count hospitalization. they will alter the data and use it to claim that their rain dance brought the monsoon.
Hannah Cox argues that “[i]t’s long past time for Uber & Lyft to end their idiotic mask requirements.” (HT Manny Klausner) (DBx: I agree with Ms. Cox that these requirements are idiotic. Whenever I now use Uber or Lyft, I immediately tell my driver to feel free to remove his or her mask; I’ll not mind. I estimate that on about 65 percent of occasions they do so. And whenever they do so, I remove my mask. The maskless rides are always more pleasant than the masked ones.)
spiked: Did our [the British] government ever properly consider the harms of lockdown?
Woolhouse: Advisers like myself were told at the time that these things were being considered. But like you and like everyone else, I never saw the evidence. Over the past two years we’ve all seen incredibly detailed epidemiological data, public-health data, NHS data, epidemiological modelling of what might happen. But I’ve never seen anything like that for the economic harms, the educational harms, the knock-on harms to the health service, the mental-health harms. Where were all those projections? I never saw them as an individual or as a scientist or as a government adviser. And that seems to me to be quite extraordinary. It’s a routine procedure in government to do some kind of impact assessment of any kind of major measure you’re going to introduce, whatever it may be. And we didn’t do it for lockdown. So these harms went unquantified. And therefore, I fear, they went unconsidered as well.
“Ultra-Vaccinated, Locked-Down New Zealand Sees Record Infection Rate.”
“Covid lockdowns weren’t needed, finds inquiry in the country that stayed open” (HT Jay Bhattacharya) A slice:
Recurring lockdowns imposed across Europe to curb Covid-19 were neither “necessary” nor “defensible”, Sweden’s official inquiry into its handling of the pandemic has concluded.
In its final report, the country’s Coronavirus Commission strongly supported Sweden’s pandemic strategy, concluding that the decision to rely primarily on “advice and recommendations which people were expected to follow voluntarily” had been “fundamentally correct”.
The decision not to impose mandatory restrictions meant that Swedes “retained more of their personal freedom than in many other countries,” the report concludes.
In addition, the commission writes that it is “not convinced that extended or recurring mandatory lockdowns, as introduced in other countries, are a necessary element in the response to a new, serious epidemic outbreak”.
Several countries which did impose lockdowns, it notes, had “significantly worse outcomes” than Sweden, while the restriction of individual freedom was “hardly defensible other than in the face of very extreme threats”.
They damaged confidence. They damaged speech. They damaged trust. They damaged science. They damaged development. They damaged youth. They damaged normalcy. They damaged learning. They damaged democracy. They damaged truth. Don’t let them damage children further via distraction!
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Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 44 of my late, great colleague Walter Williams’s superb 1982 book, The State Against Blacks:
Moral philosophers can get into unending debate over whether it is fair for some people to have to pay higher prices for what they buy than others and accept lower prices for what they sell (as in the case of labor services) than others do. But solid economic evidence shows that whatever the handicap, preventing people from lowering (raising) the price of what they sell (buy) tends to reinforce the handicap.
DBx: Indeed so.
If for whatever reason all employers believe Smith to be a less-desirable worker than is Jones, the government harms, rather than helps, Smith by refusing to allow him or her to work at a wage lower than is the wage paid to Jones. The government can no more help Smith with such a prohibition than it would help, say, the owner of a used car were the government to prohibit this owner from selling his or her vehicle at a price lower than the price paid for a new car.
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February 25, 2022
Beware of an Inefficiently Narrow Understanding of Efficiency
But I believe that the anonymous commenter is nevertheless on to something important – namely, there’s no reason why the concept of “efficiency” should refer only to how well existing resources and knowledge are used. The work of the late Julian Simon suggests a broader and more useful meaning of economic “efficiency.”
Simon taught that there are no “natural resources.” All of the things that we identify as “resources” were only made that way by the creative human mind. The viscous, noxious, and malodorous sludge that centuries ago polluted the streams of western Pennsylvania was a nuisance to the native Americans then living in that part of the world. But that sludge is now a resource only because creative human minds figured out how not only to transform petroleum into fuel, plastics, and other goods that satisfy human desires, but also how to perform this transformation in a manner that makes it worth doing.
A mainstream economist would not classify pre-Columbian native Americans’ failure to refine petroleum into fuel and other outputs as “inefficient.” And given these native Americans’ state of knowledge, that mainstream economist’s decision makes sense. But because the human mind is capable of innovation – because the human intellect is capable of creatively turning heretofore worthless (or even harmful) raw materials into valuable resources – the relative efficiency of an economic system ought to be judged not only by how well it enables and incites people to reallocate existing resources in ways that result in greater outputs, but also by how much it encourages people to create new resources.
My plea here is for economists to stop always taking as fixed both the existing state of technical know-how and the existing stock of resources. To recognize that human minds in free markets create resources – to recognize that human creativity transforms what would otherwise be worthless raw materials into economically useful and valuable resources – is to recognize that the existing stock of resources is not fixed. And so in an open market economy, the stock of resources will never be fixed. The size and contents of that stock will change over time and that change is appropriately reckoned to be a result of the economic system.
It follows that a failure of the economic system to effectuate some achievable amount of resource creation is an inefficiency on par with the failure of an economic system to use today’s existing stock of resources in ways that yield maximum output value (as judged by consumers).
It seems to me, therefore, that Noah Smith is wrong – even beyond the reasons mentioned by David Henderson – to assert that in advanced economies “there are relatively few efficiency gains to be had.” Or at least, the ghost of Julian Simon gives reason to question this claim by Smith.
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