Russell Roberts's Blog, page 187
January 15, 2022
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 319 of Deirdre N. McCloskey’s insight-filled 1994 collection, Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics:
Notice the pattern that the critics are falling into; it is a modern trope, apparent from the philosophy seminar to The Times, fiercely demanding Truth with a big T the better to assault someone else’s truth with a small t, making the ideal the enemy of the good. To repeat, no one from Plato down to the present has been able to say how we mortals would know an ideal, big-T Truth when we saw it.
[image error]
[image error]
[image error]
January 14, 2022
In Praise of Jurisdictional Competition
Here’s a letter to an unhappy reader of the Wall Street Journal:
Mr. K__:
You’re “disappointed with” my “ridiculous letter” in today’s Wall Street Journal – your reason being that my letter allegedly reveals that I am “uninterested in the public good.”
Specifically, you accuse me of failing to see that people who migrate from states with draconian Covid restrictions to states with lighter restrictions “selfishly seek license to live like they wish and avoid helping pay the cost of fighting Covid…. Instead of being all in this together these selfish people are only looking out for themselves.”
With respect, you’re mistaken. If Smith is prompted by California’s harsh Covid regime to migrate to Florida, he personally experiences in Florida, in addition to the benefits of more freedom, the costs of whatever might be the greater risks of exposure to Covid. Furthermore, by moving, he unjustly imposes costs neither on Californians nor on Floridians.
That his moving out of California imposes no unjust costs on Californians is obvious. That his moving to Florida imposes no unjust costs on Floridians is inferred from two facts: First, Floridians who are uneasy with their state’s light-touch Covid policy are themselves free to move to more-restrictive states such as California; second, an especially large number of Floridians presumably agree that the costs of draconian Covid measures are greater than any likely benefits. These Floridians want the more active – the ‘normal’ – commercial and social engagements that are denied to denizens of more-restrictive states.
Because there are worthy goals in life other than ever-greater avoidance of Covid – and because there’s no objective, single answer to the question ‘Are the benefits of some quantum of Covid avoidance greater or less than the costs of such avoidance?’ – when different jurisdictions experiment with different degrees of restrictions, individuals with different preferences are better able to sort themselves into jurisdictions that more closely match their preferences. The sorting and the results aren’t perfect, but they’re far better than what would arise under a regime that’s nationally imposed, single-sized, and nearly impossible to escape.
If nothing else – and this point is really what my letter is about – people’s ability to migrate across state lines supplies important information to government officials about the relative popularity of their policies, as well as puts at least some constraints on these officials’ power to abuse the masses.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
[T]he lockdown was killing people by interfering with important medical care, destroying families, and sacrificing children.
DBx: Yes.
Atlas goes on, in the same paragraph, to put much of the blame for this calamity on “the fear-addicted media and power-hungry lockdown advocates.”
Some Non-Covid Links
Arnold Kling wisely reviews Jonathan Rauch’s new book, The Constitution of Knowledge. A slice:
If Rauch has a blind spot, it is that he overlooks the deterioration that has taken place within twentieth-century institutions. He is unable or unwilling to recognize institutional decay.
As one trivial example, Rauch quotes Lisa Page in one place and Peter Strzok elsewhere to buttress minor points. Rauch refers to each only as “a former FBI agent.” In fact, they were infamously lovers who boasted to one another in text messages about their intentions to bring down the Trump Presidency. When this was revealed, their superiors felt it necessary to take punitive action. Rauch mentions none of this, not even in a footnote. For me, this is equivalent to quoting Michael Milken on financial institutions without mentioning that he served time in prison for securities and tax violations.. As a professional journalist, if you view the accusations against Page and Strzok (or Milken) as overblown, then you owe it to the reader to say so, rather than going on as if their records were unblemished.
A more significant example is when Rauch writes:
Many people, to be sure, will pay a premium for reality-based content (aka “news”). As I drafted this chapter, the New York Times announced that its subscription base had topped 5 million. (p. 156)
That is a very cheerful interpretation of the rise in NYT subscriptions in the Trump era. A quite different interpretation comes from Andrey Mir in Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers. Mir sees the NYT not as beating the social media disinformation warriors, but joining them. In Mir’s view, opposition to Mr. Trump became a business model, gathering in subscribers who donated to the cause. Along the way, the NYT discarded the values of truth and journalistic integrity.
Similarly, Rauch is unwilling to address the decay in academia. The culture of excellence has been undermined in many ways. Mediocrity has become endemic at all levels.
Students gain admission by manipulating the process. With grade inflation and a generally forgiving environment, many graduate having undertaken little effort and accomplished minimal learning. But many others do not graduate at all, with only a debt burden to show for their excursion into higher education.
Among faculty, new “disciplines” have emerged that lack standards for intellectual rigor. The intellectual weakness of these “___ studies” departments once was a source of embarrassment and insecurity for their faculty. Today, they are the tail that wags the academic dog. It is the traditional disciplines that now suffer embarrassment and insecurity, as they stand accused of having angered the Gods of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
Sad news: Terry Teachout has died. And see also here.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Crispin Sartwell advises skepticism of “experts.” A slice:
Consider a hypothetical person who was born in 1922 and has resolved for the past century to believe all and only what the experts said. On topics such as race and sex, economics and law, astronomy and physics, psychology and medicine, our centenarian would have beliefs now entirely incompatible with those he had at the beginning. If he were to reflect on these changing beliefs, he’d have to conclude that most of the things most of the experts in most areas had said for most of the past 100 years were false. He’d do well to assume that most of what they’re saying now is false as well.
Such a person couldn’t exist, because at every moment on almost every matter for the whole century, experts disagreed. Sheer deference would fetch you up in complete incoherence. And experts are people too. They’re muddling through like we are; they are confused too; they forget a key detail; they see what they expect or want to see.
And finally, I’d like to urge us all to show some pride. Nodding along isn’t enough. Not only can’t we off-load responsibility for our own beliefs, we shouldn’t try.
Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan assesses Biden’s recent speech in Georgia. A slice:
The speech itself was aggressive, intemperate, not only offensive but meant to offend. It seemed prepared by people who think there is only the Democratic Party in America, that’s it, everyone else is an outsider who can be disparaged. It was a mistake on so many levels. Presidents more than others in politics have to maintain an even strain, as astronauts used to say. If a president is rhetorically manipulative and divisive on a voting-rights bill it undercuts what he’s trying to establish the next day on Covid and the economy. The over-the-top language of the speech made him seem more emotional, less competent. The portentousness—“In our lives and . . . the life of our nation, there are moments so stark that they divide all that came before them from everything that followed. They stop time”—made him appear incapable of understanding how the majority of Americans understand our own nation’s history and the vast array of its challenges.
By the end he looked like a man operating apart from the American conversation, not at its center. This can be fatal to a presidency.
He was hardly done speaking when a new Quinnipiac poll showed the usual low Biden numbers, but, most pertinently, that 49% of respondents say he is doing more to divide the country, and only 42% see him as unifying it.
John Sibley Butler’s Liberty Matters essay on my late, great colleague Walter Williams is available by scrolling down here. A slice:
The greatest test of Walter Williams’s hypothesis about capitalism came in the dynamic of race and society. In Race and Economics: How much can be blamed on discrimination? The blended the history of Black entrepreneurship with the rewards of liberty and the importance of market economies. Like Booker T. Washington, Abraham Harris, and T.M. Pryor, he showed how an open capitalist society has always provided the best economic route for liberty for those who chose it. In the Chapter “Blacks Today and Yesterday,” he blended the success of history with the denial of that success today: “Black Americans, compared with any other racial group, have come the greatest distance, over some of the highest hurdles, in a shorter period of time. This unprecedented progress can be verified …if one were to total black earnings and consider black Americans a separate nation, he would find that, in 2008, they earned $726 billion.” To show how important liberty is in America, he juxtaposed his own experience in Up From The Projects: An Autobiography. Walter Williams showed how Blacks have made the best of things by using the free market and liberty at the worst of times. His experience took him through the military to becoming an economist who understood liberty.
Some, such as University of Massachusetts economics professor Isabella Weber, are now proposing government-mandated price controls.
As Robert Schuettinger and Eamonn Butler demonstrated in their 1979 book, Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls, price controls have been imposed throughout world history—and unfailingly fail. They’re such a bad idea that left-leaning economist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman called Weber’s argument “truly stupid” before apologizing for his rude tone.
But Krugman’s initial reaction was right. Rising prices are a symptom of an underlying problem—not the problem itself. Using the power of government to limit price increases will do as much long-term good as trying to stop global warming by preventing thermometers from registering higher readings.
It’s also important for policymakers to recognize that while the inflation rate is an aggregate measure, not all prices rise equally. Each individual price—for beef and poultry, gasoline, lumber and plywood, new cars and so forth—conveys information about the relative scarcity of specific goods or services. These price signals incentivize consumers to switch to relatively less scarce (and thus, less costly) goods, while incentivizing entrepreneurs and producers to find more efficient ways to produce sought-after goods or to find desirable alternatives. Price controls blunt such market adjustments, causing unnecessary shortages and surpluses and deterring innovation.
Ilana Redstone exposes the fallacy of equal knowledge. Here’s her conclusion:
The upshot is missing information isn’t always what makes people disagree. When we pretend that it is, we make it even harder to communicate across our political and ideological differences.
Some Covid Links
The Supreme Court rebuked the Biden Administration’s vaccine mandates with one hand on Thursday but gave it a pass on the other. The split decision counts as a welcome setback for an overreaching administrative state, but not as welcome as it might have been.
In the more important decision, a 6-3 majority blocked the Occupational Health and Safety Administration’s sweeping mandate covering some 84 million employees of large employers. In an unsigned opinion, the Court said OSHA exceeded its statutory authority. And it has never adopted a “broad public health regulation of this kind—addressing a threat that is untethered, in any causal sense, from the workplace.”
…..
The disappointment was the Court’s 5-4 decision upholding the mandate on 10 million health-care workers. The Chief and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined the liberals in ruling that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services did have proper legislative authority.
CMS found broad latitude to regulate healthcare providers when “necessary in the interest of the health and safety of individuals who are furnished services.” But that judgment was taken to task in a sharp dissent by Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Gorsuch and Justices Samuel Alito and Amy Coney Barrett.
The government “fell back on a constellation of statutory provisions that each concern one of the 15 types of medical facilities that the rule covers,” Justice Thomas writes. “The majority, too, treats these scattered provisions as a singular (and unqualified) delegation to the Secretary to adopt health and safety regulations.”
We think the dissenters have the better reading of the healthcare law, but at least the CMS statute has some relation to the health regulation it imposed. Had the Court blessed OSHA’s mandate on private employers, the message to regulators would have been that they can do whatever they want as long as they call it an emergency.
Rather, the reason why the “indiscriminate” nature of the OSHA mandate dooms the mandate is that many of the workers covered don’t actually face a “grave danger,” as required by the ETS statute. This is especially true, given that they could easily mitigate any danger simply by getting vaccinated voluntarily (the government concedes that OSHA found a “grave danger” to exist only for unvaccinated workers).
In a concurring opinion joined by two other justices (Thomas and Alito), Justice Neil Gorsuch argues that the OSHA mandate also violates the nondelegation doctrine. I agree with much of his argument.
Also writing on yesterday’s ruling is Reason‘s Eric Boehm. A slice:
In the end, the five-month saga of Biden’s private-employer vaccine mandate highlighted just about all of the major problems with how the federal government operates these days. Here was a major policy change implemented not by the legitimate legislative authority (Congress) but by the executive branch, which increasingly sees its authority as covering anything that’s not been explicitly forbidden. Congress then stood by and waited for the Supreme Court to invalidate the order, effectively forcing nine legal scholars to do its job.
The outcome is the right one—Biden’s order [through OSHA] was a breathtaking overreach of federal power into the affairs of private individuals and businesses—but this is, to paraphrase Kavanaugh, not how the everyday exercise of government should work.
And about the Court upholding the vaccine mandate that applies to health-care workers at facilities that receive funds from Medicare or Medicaid, Jay Bhattacharya tweets:
The US Supreme Court just guaranteed staff shortages in American hospitals for the foreseeable future. The vax does not halt transmission, so no marginal benefit to patients regarding covid risk either.
Quebec is now home to a sad and scary, but not surprising, outcome in a world gone hysterical with excessive fear of – and failure to understand – Covid. (DBx: There will soon be several economists justifying Quebec’s tax on the unvaccinated as being nothing more than an innocent, textbook-legitimate “Pigouvian tax” – a measure simply meant by a science-guided and apolitical government to “internalize” an “externality.” We’ll encounter such naive prattle as ‘The government there is simply bringing the marginal private costs of individual decisions into line with the marginal social costs of those decisions!’ The ability of so-called “welfare economics” to be so easily co-opted to justify tyranny should warn all sensible economists of the inherent intellectual weaknesses of – and ethical dangers in – mainstream welfare economics.)
To paraphrase el gato malo, who’d a-thunk it?
Noah Carl nicely summarizes much of the past two years:
When it comes to the pandemic, do the people in charge know what they’re doing? Or are they kind of making stuff up as they go along? Much evidence points to the latter. Of course, politicians and other government figures aren’t exactly known for their unwavering humility. (Rarely does the man of high office admit, “We got that one wrong.”) But the pandemic seems to have turbocharged this obliviousness to error.
That leaves us with courts’ other rationale for dismissing the prior lawsuits: Universities don’t promise applicants in-person learning. That is simply absurd. Online programs are marketed as such and generally cost less. University promotional literature emphasizes the in-person experience. Most important, in-person learning comports with reasonable expectations formed through campus visits and past educational experiences. Would anyone believe a university fulfilled its obligations if it switched to online learning to save on building costs? Mounting evidence shows that online learning generally underperforms in-person instruction at all levels of education.
If universities choose to go online under present circumstances, they are likely in breach of contract. Some schools with similar residential and online degree programs steeply discount their online offerings. Basic contract-law principles would require universities to refund students for the difference between standard and online tuition.
University of Chicago history professor Rachel Fulton Brown pens a letter to that university’s president and provost. (HT Jay Bhattacharya) A slice:
Some things you could do IMMEDIATELY:
1. MAKE PUBLIC that you have granted exemptions to those of us who refused to consent to being part of a giant experiment which from the beginning has been compromised by politics and haste.
2. MAKE PUBLIC which of our faculty were courageous enough to sign the Great Barrington Declaration and stand for SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY over POLITICAL GRANDSTANDING.
3. MAKE PUBLIC that we have students intelligent enough to see through the gaslighting and fear to the real questions we should be asking about what it means to be a great school.
Phil Magness writes at Facebook:
Q. In a just world, should Anthony Fauci be criminally prosecuted?
A. Yes, on at least two counts: (1) lying under oath to Congress and (2) public corruption, including intentional actions to conceal evidence that he misappropriated public resources on gain-of-function research.
He should also be terminated from his job and have his medical license suspended, both effective immediately, for rampant professional misconduct in using his government office to target and smear other scientists who challenged or disagreed with his policy positions.
Matt Ridley talks with Julia Hartley-Brewer about the origins of SARS-CoV-2.
Ian Miller and Michael Betrus ask: “Is masking kids at school working?”
TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.)
Sadly the art of government is not about making the net-best decisions for society, but avoiding a narrow variety of politically explosive scenarios. The most fearsome among them is a winter meltdown in the NHS, keenly covered by the press. As another reader, Beech More, wryly noted on my column, the mainstream media has “hit the mother lode with Covid”.
Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson rightly decries the hypocrisy of the Covidocracy. A slice:
It’s not just the hypocrisy that enrages me. All the people who attended that party in the Downing Street garden knew full well that Covid wasn’t the plague – not even close. They had access to all the data. They weren’t scared to attend a boozy party because they seemingly thought it wasn’t a risk for them. (It wasn’t a risk for the majority of us, certainly not for students or children.) Yet did they withhold that knowledge from the public? They continued to ramp up the propaganda to spread fear so that people would blindly obey the rules which some of them were cheerfully breaking.
Who remembers the John Snow memo? (The “experts” response to the Great Barrington Declaration)
Doesn’t seem to have aged well. pic.twitter.com/c13fyRRnPd
— James Todaro, MD (@JamesTodaroMD) January 10, 2022
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 13 of Chandran Kukathas’s superb 2021 book, Immigration and Freedom (footnotes deleted):
Yet it was not until the rise of Napoleon that any ruler took the trouble to locate a country’s borders with precision; not until the First World War that serious efforts were made to control the movement of people between countries; and not until the 1960s that the most prosperous countries in the world thought it necessary to distinguish legal from illegal migration.
DBx: Note that nations, including the United States, existed – and were conscious of, and confident in, their existence – before the occurrence of any of what Chandran here describes.
January 13, 2022
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from Brendan O’Neill’s January 12th, 2022, Spiked essay, “After Covid“:
And what about the culture of freedom? Forget, for a moment, the way our legally guaranteed liberties were put on ice during this crisis. That was bad, no question. But a more injurious if sometimes intangible process was taking place alongside this temporary unwinding of our rights. The culture of freedom was undermined. The individual self-confidence and social trust that freedom depends upon, which freedom cannot exist without, was pummelled, day in, day out. We were educated to distrust others, to distrust ourselves. People are vectors of disease, the messaging went, not fellow citizens in the cause of the common good. Your friends, your neighbours, your colleagues, they will infect you. They’re bad for you, and you are bad for them. That was the propagandistic menace through which lockdown was maintained. Anyone who thinks that such weaponised distrust will not have consequences beyond the crisis itself is kidding themselves. You cannot sow suspicion, tear citizen from citizen and criminalise community life and then expect everything to be hunky-dory once you say: ‘Right, back to normal!’ The beast of fear is easy to unleash, but rather more difficult to heel.
Some Non-Covid Links
“The most dangerous pronoun discourse has nothing to do with gender identity. It’s the undefined ‘we’ in public policy debates that’s the problem.” These are the words of Richard Morrison, a research fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Morrison identified “the fallacy of we,” and I’m often guilty of committing it.
I frequently say things like, “If we increase spending on this or that, it will cause some economic distortions.” Who exactly is this “we”? Certainly not me or most of you. Politicians propose and vote for additional spending, and the president signs new spending bills into law.
The problem also appears when I write things like “In 2021, we have increased the debt to $24 trillion.” Yet, neither the borrowing nor the spending was done by you and me. It was done by some politicians in Congress, aided by the president, and with the assistance of some bureaucrats at the Department of the Treasury.
Just pick up a newspaper or listen to politicians, or even to people like me, and you’ll soon realize that this “we” is everywhere: “We must protect our children by keeping the schools closed (or open)!”; “We need (or don’t need) a national industrial policy!”; “We must invest in infrastructure (or something else)!
This group is a phantom, easily invoked but sometimes impossible to identify. Is it individuals? Pundits? Experts? The federal government? All members of Congress, or just those in support? Does “we” include the president and his administration? How about the judiciary? Or do the leaders of a representative democracy get the honor of attributing their actions to every single one of us?
Then came the internet, and everything about the car-buying experience changed for the better. In a 2015 study, three Mercatus Center co-authors and I documented “How the Internet, the Sharing Economy, and Reputational Feedback Mechanisms Solve the ‘Lemons Problem’. ” We explained how information technologies and internet-enabled markets have made it safer and easier than ever to buy a used car. These technologies helped build greater trust between buyers and sellers, helping to finally reverse the lemons problem.
Jonah Goldberg writes insightfully about Biden’s recent speech in Georgia. A slice:
Consider voter ID laws, which are constantly cited as part of this racist, undemocratic tsunami. Tightening voter ID laws may or may not be a good idea. Personally, I think they’re fine in principle. But let’s concede that they’re bad. You know who else thinks they’re fine? A very large majority of Americans, including a majority of black Americans. A Monmouth poll this year found that 80 percent of Americans support voter ID requirements and only 18 percent oppose them. That’s not a new finding. In 2016, Gallup also found that 4 in 5 Americans support voter ID requirements, including 77 percent of nonwhite voters.
Again, are the majority of Americans siding with Jefferson Davis? Really?
And just to be clear, not all of the laws expanding the “right to vote” are good. Democrats have been pushing to make ballot harvesting (allowing individuals to collect ballots from others and drop them off at polling locations or early-voting drop boxes) easier. I think that’s wrong. If you disagree with me, that’s fine. But if you think that makes me a racist, my response is, “Go to Hell.”
Michael Shellenberger talks with Zach Weissmueller about how Progressives ruined American cities.
John Stossel says, don’t ban critical race theory; instead, legalize school choice.
For 40 years, the pain of inflation was only a fading nightmare. Then last year, piled on top of Donald Trump’s ill-advised postelection spending surge, the Biden administration, the Democratic majority in Congress, the Federal Reserve, and a chorus of intellectual supporters assured the nation that with accommodating monetary easing by the Fed, they could increase federal spending by 54% without causing inflation. When—shockingly—prices started to rise, those same voices harmonized in assuring the nation that any inflation would be minor and temporary. To this day, they blame the inflation on supply-chain problems and the usual suspects: big business, insufficient antitrust enforcement and greedy profiteers. They never blame government.
Here’s the Cato trade team’s 2022 policy wish list.
Jessica Melugin and Ryan Young speak in opposition to the FTC’s antitrust jihad against Facebook.
Some Covid Links
Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger reports that people no longer believe Fauci and other Covidocrats. (DBx: I hope that Mr. Henninger is correct, for this lack of credibility that he reports is as amply deserved as it was amply earned.) Two slices:
From Covid’s start in 2020, public and scientific authorities across the world said: “Trust us. We know what we are doing.” We now see that this unshakable, public-facing certitude was false.
Today, it’s fair to say that no one but the hopelessly credulous believe much of anything Mr. Biden, Jen Psaki, Anthony Fauci or Rochelle Walensky says about Covid and Omicron. The list of doubted authorities worldwide could extend to the horizon.
My purpose is not to discredit public authority or science. We need both. Public authorities in 2020 cleared the regulatory path for Operation Warp Speed, which let private-sector scientists develop protective vaccines. My intention is to re-establish a necessary virtue that looks altogether lost to public life and its scientific representatives: intellectual modesty.
…..
At the center of this collapse of public confidence sits science, which has a lot to answer for. The problem is not the process of scientific discovery as understood for centuries. The problem is “science,” a politicized totem now used routinely to silence legitimate challenge, for example regarding what happened in Wuhan.
Science triumphalism didn’t begin with the National Institutes of Health’s Anthony Fauci. Science as a political weapon originated with the battle over climate policy.
AIER’s James Harrigan and David Waugh write about Fauci’s recent lying to U.S. Senators. A slice:
Dr. Anthony Fauci offered some unhinged testimony before the Senate yesterday, and while his calling Kansas Senator Roger Marshall a moron on a hot mic got most of the ink, his exchange with Senator Rand Paul was the real lowlight. There just seems to be something about the limelight that forces Fauci to take leave of his senses.
So what was it this time? Easy. It was when Rand Paul asked him if he thought it “appropriate to use your $420,000 salary to smear scientists who don’t agree with you?” Fauci predictably denied the charge, but just about anyone with an ounce of sense could likely guess he was lying. Alas, there is no need for guesswork. An American Institute for Economic Research Freedom of Information request makes it plain: Fauci absolutely used his government position to smear any number of people with whom he disagrees.
To be clear: We have the emails proving the charge he denied. But don’t take our word for it, you can read them yourself here.
Journalist Rebecca Bodenheimer is among those Progressive parents who, experiencing first-hand how the left’s Covid hysteria and closed-mindedness fueled unwarranted school closures, has had her confidence in Progressivism shaken. (HT my intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy) A slice:
I probably should have inferred that becoming a school-reopening advocate would not go over well in my progressive Oakland community, but I didn’t anticipate the social repercussions, or the political identity crisis it would trigger for me. My own experience, as a self-described progressive in ultra-lefty Oakland, is just one example of how people across the political spectrum have become frustrated with Democrats’ position on school reopenings.
Parents who advocated for school reopening were repeatedly demonized on social media as racist and mischaracterized as Trump supporters. Members of the parent group I helped lead were consistently attacked on Twitter and Facebook by two Oakland moms with ties to the teachers union. They labelled advocates’ calls for schools reopening “white supremacy” called us “Karens,” and even bizarrely claimed we had allied ourselves with Marjorie Taylor Greene’s transphobic agenda.
There was no recognition of the fact that we were advocating for our kids, who were floundering in remote learning, or that public schools across the country (in red states) opened in fall 2020 without major outbreaks, as did private schools just miles from our home. Only since last fall, when schools reopened successfully despite the more contagious Delta variant circulating, have Democratic pundits and leaders been talking about school closures as having caused far more harm than benefit.
Some progressive parents now admit they were too afraid of the blowback from their communities to speak up. And they were right to be wary. We paid a price.
…..
But I began to fear that even in-person school in fall 2021 was at risk because of the impossible demands of the teachers union (that schools remain fully remote until there were “near-zero” Covid cases in Oakland) and apathy of the school board and district; even after teachers were prioritized for vaccination, there was no urgency to get kids back to the classroom. My dad offered to help pay for private school, and we applied. In March we were notified that my son was admitted to a private dual-language immersion school, and that we had been granted a 75 percent scholarship. There was still no deal in place between Oakland’s school district and the union to return to in-person school. I had lost all faith in the decision-makers to do what was best for my kid. So I made the only logical decision.
…..
In the longer term, many of us believe the pandemic-related myopia will devastate public education by alienating parents.
The pandemic, and the school-reopening debate in particular, has thrown me into an ideological mid-life crisis, questioning all my prior political assumptions. I’m still attempting to hold onto the progressive label while calling out the policies I see as antithetical to it, but the longer fellow progressives support new school closures and other policies that restrict kids’ lives in order to allay the anxieties of adults, and have been shown to cause far more harm than benefit, the more alienated I feel.
A new study of COVID-19 patients in California reinforces the evidence that the omicron variant, while highly contagious, is much less likely to cause serious symptoms than prior iterations of the coronavirus. Compared to people infected by the delta variant, the researchers found, people infected with omicron were half as likely to be hospitalized, one-quarter as likely to require intensive care, and less than one-tenth as likely to die. When omicron patients were admitted to a hospital, their average stay was 70 percent shorter.
Berkeley epidemiologist Joseph Lewnard and his collaborators examined the records of nearly 70,000 Kaiser Permanente patients in Southern California who tested positive for COVID-19 from November 30 to January 1. During that period, omicron accounted for three-quarters of COVID-19 cases. While 11 of the delta patients received mechanical ventilation, none of the omicron patients did; just one omicron patient died, compared to 14 deaths in the delta group. “During a period with mixed Delta and Omicron variant circulation,” Lewnard and his co-authors report, “SARS-CoV-2 infections with presumed Omicron variant infection were associated with substantially reduced risk of severe clinical endpoints and shorter durations of hospital stay.”
This is not an argument about the benefits of vaccination for the individual— vaccines likely (and evidence shows they) still have great protection against severe disease; instead this is an argument about the effects of vaccination on symptomatic diseases, and (some good portion of) transmission.
Conclusion: you cannot contain the viral spread of omicron by boosting.
The moment we see that, the policy conclusions start to fall into place.
Booster mandates make no sense for young people/ working people/ hospitals/ anywhere. Young people will only be, at best, slightly less likely to spread for a short period of time, but the epidemic waves will eventually over take them. Boosting should happen in populations where it further reduces severe disease and death— aka older & vulnerable people. Focus on that and let college kids off the hook.
Some argue there is still a justification to boost because you can help prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed. Sadly, that argument fails in several ways. First, you have no evidence boosting younger people will slow hospitalizations. A vaccinated younger person already has very low risk of being hospitalized. Boosting may not further lower what is already very low. We simply have no evidence. Event rates are sparse at those ages.
Second, this argument would mean the state could tell people what to eat and how much to exercise, and how much to drink. Food, drink and obesity are drivers of hospitalizations. Instead, we have not accepted these infringements in the past. The justification for vaccine mandates is that it helps curb population spread. The latest vaccine effectiveness figures show that effect is now nearly gone, and transient at best. Ergo, the mandates are unjustified.
Firing nurses and other health care workers for being non-compliant with mandates is now defeating. We are better off having them work. Time to bring them back.
Draconian avoidance of omicron is not tenable. Omicron or a future variant will eventually find us all. It may even be preferable to encounter omicron a few weeks or months after your last vaccine than a year or two later, as the infection may be milder. As I explain in a prior post, wearing an n95 makes no sense.
It is time to face reality.
In a Senate hearing, Rand Paul said plainly to Anthony Fauci what everyone knows and is the most easily documented fact in the US experience of the pandemic: “You are the one responsible, you are the architect — you are the lead architect for the response from the government.”
Fauci very quickly protested: “Senator, first of all, if you look at everything I said, you accuse me of, in a monolithic way, telling people what they need to do. Everything that I’ve said has been in support of the CDC guidelines.”
This is the model that will consume all public discussion of the pandemic response in the future: seeking but never finding anyone to bear responsibility. This is typical for episodes in history that are characterized by mass frenzy and distorted fanaticism. Once the mania is gone, it is hard to find anyone who is willing to accept responsibility for feeding it and acting upon it.
Like, cool, man! (HT Phil Magness)
Dr. Alan Mordue decries what’s become of public health over the past two years. A slice:
This standard definition was not adopted at the start of the pandemic. Because of this we don’t know how many real cases of COVID-19 we have had or have currently – the numbers recorded include real cases of people with relevant symptoms and a positive PCR test for viral RNA, but also include people with no symptoms of COVID-19 and only a positive PCR test. This has been further complicated by mass population testing in the community and hospitals of those without COVID-19 symptoms, the use of high cycle thresholds in the PCR test, and inevitably large numbers of false positive tests.
This inadequate and inaccurate case definition has also had knock-on effects [in Britain] on the count of COVID-19 hospital admissions each day and current hospital in-patients – with many patients recorded as COVID-19 admissions or in-patients but without COVID-19 disease. Mortality data has also been corrupted by the adoption of a definition of a COVID-19 death as someone who has died within 28 days of a positive PCR test. So someone admitted with severe trauma after a car accident or after a heart attack who tests PCR positive and dies within 28 days is recorded as a COVID-19 death. This definition not only inaccurately attributes a death to COVID-19 but also has corrupted the mortality record for accidents, coronary heart disease and other diseases.
All these issues result in uncertainty about the true impact of COVID-19 and all will exaggerate its apparent impact. Throughout the pandemic there has been further exaggeration as a result of modelling rather than principally relying on real world data (even if it is imperfect). Modellers have produced regular worst case scenarios, that rarely if ever have come to pass, and there has been insufficient scrutiny of the underlying assumptions built into their models. Worse still, the Chairman of the SAGE modelling group has recently admitted on Twitter that their scenarios are developed to support policy rather than the other way around – as Fraser Nelson put it, an example of policy-based evidence-making.
It is abundantly clear that this fundamental principle of Public Health has not been followed during the management of the pandemic.
…..
This COVID-19 pandemic has been handled in a totally different way to the usual way we manage infectious disease outbreaks and pandemics. All the fundamental Public Health principles considered above have been violated.
Why has this happened? At least some of the major U.K. (if not Scottish) PH ‘officials’ driving the pandemic response have some relevant PH Specialist training and there are PH Specialist voices on SAGE, the new U.K. Health Security Agency and PH Scotland. Perhaps they lost perspective in the face of a global pandemic or were not strong enough to change direction with a relentless and hostile media on their heels.
Whatever the reason, in my view what has happened amounts to a betrayal of the Specialty of Public Health and all the principles and values it used to stand for; and a betrayal of the Public’s Health, in other words the health of the population. The excess non-Covid deaths we have seen so far, I fear, is just the beginning. What mystifies me is why my former colleagues and the U.K. professional body charged with developing and maintaining standards in the PH Specialty, namely the Faculty of Public Health, have been so quiet thorough the whole of this pandemic.
Brendan O’Neill argues, realistically, that “[w]e won’t get normality back without a fight.” (HT Jay Bhattacharya) Two slices:
Reasoned voices seem to be to the fore now, while the shriller fearmongers of the cursed Covid era are on the backfoot. That might be one reason why their commentary is becoming ever-more frenzied – they sense that the clout and celebrity they enjoyed during the Covid terror is slowly slipping away. Leading alarmist Deepti Gurdasani is now accusing even the Guardian and the BBC, possibly the least lockdown-sceptical institutions in the land, of being sources of misinformation, all because they’re saying that maybe, just maybe, the worst is behind us. This is typical of Covid authoritarians – they don’t merely criticise those they disagree with; they accuse them of deliberately intending to deceive the populace, which, according to the dictionary, is one of the meanings of the word ‘misinformation’.
…..
And yet… Without wanting to make any further contribution to the gloom that continues to grip too many in the political and media sets, we need to get real about how difficult the journey back to normality is likely to be. It will be a rocky ride. Liberty, public trust, social solidarity and freedom of thought have been ravaged to such an extraordinary degree over the past two years that their restoration is not going to be a simple or easy task. The technical accomplishment of weakening Covid-19 and holding at bay its most pernicious impacts on human health is one thing (and a great thing). Repairing the political freedoms and social bonds that were so violently undercut by lockdown is another thing entirely. It is naive to think ‘normality’ will magically re-emerge, intact, in rude health, simply because we have scored a scientific victory over Covid’s fatality rate. No, if you want to live normally again, you’re going to have to fight for it.
Just as we must assess the damage Covid-19 did to human health, so we must examine the impact restrictions had on society and freedom. One of the worst decisions made by governments across Europe was to deploy the politics of fear to try to dragoon their citizens into abiding by Covid rules and regulations. As sociologist and SAGE adviser Robert Dingwall said back in May 2020, officialdom ‘effectively terrorised’ the public into believing Covid would kill them if they broke the rules. We created a ‘climate of fear’, he said. The consequence of terrorising the public, rather than galvanising us to pull together to combat the spread of Covid and assist the vulnerable, became clear very early on. Snitching abounded. Neighbours told on neighbours. Venturing outside came to be viewed as dangerous anti-social behaviour. Police forces went wild, clearing people out of parks for no good reason and even sending drones to spy on dog-walkers in scenic country spots.
Dr. Carl Heneghan explains why he opposed lockdowns.
Joanna Williams explains that “[w]e should be outraged by the rules, not the rule-breakers.” A slice:
But there’s something worse here than all the cowardice. And that’s all those who look at the latest Downing Street party saga and still maintain that the biggest problem we face is not the rules, but the rule-breakers. Astonishingly, many cling on to the view that Johnson’s biggest crime was attending a party, not forbidding the entire nation from doing the same. The Guardian complains that ‘Downing Street was treating the lockdown rules that Mr Johnson had set with contempt’. This is perfectly true. But the rules were worthy of contempt. The problem, as Tom Slater notes on spiked, is that both Johnson and the rules held people in contempt.
If the party is over for Boris and Carrie, then the game should also be up for the media lockdown lovers who never challenged the inhumane restrictions and only ever demanded the government go further in shutting down society. We need to do more than berate the prime minister for what has happened to British society over the past couple of years: we must hold the entire political and media class to account for their role in bringing about and maintaining lockdown, whether they attended rule-breaking parties or not.
Rakib Esham decries the vilification of the unvaccinated.
Ehud Qimron sends a powerful letter to the Israeli Ministry of Health.
FreshRN tweets: (HT Martin Kulldorff)
The only winners from the mass testing are the testing companies.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 314 of my favorite of all of Richard Epstein’s many excellent books, his 1995 volume, Simple Rules for a Complex World:
No one wishes to deny that parents are capable of miseducating their own children. But to the extent that all parents can control only the education of their own children, we can avoid the greatest peril of social life, the nondiversification of political risk, which occurs when any central agency is allowed and determined to set the agenda for the system as a whole.
DBx: Unquestionably true.
It’s regrettable that a calamity such as Covid-19 hysteria seems to have been required to reveal more fully the rot that is K-12 government schooling. I continue to hope that among the results of this hysteria is significant growth in school choice.
Russell Roberts's Blog
- Russell Roberts's profile
- 39 followers
