Russell Roberts's Blog, page 210
November 17, 2021
The Container
In this new video (of just under three minutes) Johan Norberg appropriately celebrates the container, container shipping, and Malcolm McLean – the visionary entrepreneur who so greatly benefitted humankind with this innovation.
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from pages 244-245 of Volume 2 (“The Law,” “The State,” and Other Political Writings, 2012) of Liberty Fund’s The Collected Works of Frédéric Bastiat, brilliantly edited by David Hart; specifically, it’s a passage from Bastiat’s January 1849 essay “Protectionism and Communism“ (“Protectionisme et communisme”):
It seems as though intervention by the state reconciles us with plunder by attributing responsibility for it to everyone, that is to say, to no one, with the result that people can enjoy the property of others with a perfectly clear conscience.
Some Non-Covid Links
It would appear that MacLean’s ideological disdain for school vouchers is so intense, so fervent, and so unwavering, that she’s willing to countenance a direct partnership with racial segregationists in the service of that cause.
And yet MacLean has the temerity to charge [Milton] Friedman, [James] Buchanan, and other voucher-supporting economists with “collusion with segregationists” that they never in fact pursued? Or to charge libertarians with an unwillingness “to reckon with their cause’s long history of working against civil rights reform”? As the example of the VEA and VCPS partnership with Battle’s segregationist anti-voucher campaign illustrates, MacLean’s history is not only exactly backwards; is personally guilty of the very same allegations she recklessly and baselessly throws at Friedman, Buchanan, and other supporters of the school voucher movement.
What does Adam Smith mean to Vernon Smith?
Doug Bandow is justly angry at the presumptuousness and officiousness of politicians. A slice:
Over the long term the news is grim. Debt-to-GDP will run about 106 percent in a decade, matching the record set after World War II. By mid-century that number could be over 200 percent. Even modest increases in interest rates would sharply drive up total federal payments. And if investors increasingly doubt Uncle Sam’s ability to carry such a debt burden, the possibility of a financial crisis will grow. The US already includes individual jurisdictions, such as Illinois, that look like Greece before its financial collapse. Imagine similar US government insolvency nationwide.
Jeff Jacoby is correct: The inflation hawks have indeed been right all along. A slice:
This is what happens when the government unleashes an avalanche of spending, flooding the economy with trillions of dollars it can’t afford, and insisting against all evidence that it won’t lead to inflation, or that the higher prices will only be temporary, or — as Biden claimed recently — that more government spending will somehow reduce inflation. Or even, as some in the media are now contending, that rising inflation is something to celebrate. There was a time when you had to tune in to a comedy show to hear something like that.
Nick Gillespie busts an environmentalist myth about Bitcoin.
California gets ever-more-crazy and hostile to commerce.
Mike Munger pleads: “Don’t blame the ‘greedy wealthy.’”
George Will applauds a victory in court against “institutional derangement.” A slice:
Universities, rather than forming sturdy students exercising freedom of speech, encourage student brittleness by providing freedom from unwelcome speech. Churches, having saved sufficient souls, turn to saving society with the sort of social policies approved of by the New York Times, which, having perfected journalism, decided to “reframe” the teaching of U.S. history. The Federal Trade Commission’s chair decrees a “holistic” approach to antitrust enforcement that licenses the FTC to correct economic practices that it thinks impede the proper “distribution of power and opportunity across our economy.” Because the White House evidently was just kidding in July when it said mandating vaccines is “not the role of the federal government,” the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, disregarding Supreme Court rulings about compulsory vaccinations lying within the states’ police powers, has ordered them.
George Leef brings no good news about higher “education.”
There is a larger argument to be had here: what is most pernicious about the incontinent Woke mentality is that it often robs the individual of moral agency. Your value as a person is not determined by your own acts or even your intentions but by your association with a race (or class) over which you have no control. That is what should be the subject of discussion at universities, rather than a narcissistic cult in which hurt feelings are the measure of everything.
What may remain significant about this incident in which a 21 year old said some idiotic things and then took them back, is what happened next. John Cleese announced that, as he too had been known to impersonate Hitler, he was now cancelling himself and withdrawing from a Cambridge Union debate. The author Louis de Bernieres followed suit.
Let us hope that what follows is an avalanche of such self-cancellations – not just at Cambridge – which would make a mockery of the whole enterprise. And perhaps that is the key to undoing this: ridicule. Maybe it is the secret that explains why British life is not torn asunder by culture wars in the way that the United States so often is.
The Unicorn of Predatory Pricing
A wonky letter to a correspondent:
Mr. O__:
Thanks for your e-mail.
You ask what I think of Christopher Leslie’s 2012 criticism of John McGee’s famous 1958 paper on predatory pricing. I read Leslie’s paper years ago but have little recollection of it, and unfortunately I don’t now have time to reread it carefully. For this I apologize.
But I’ve never regarded McGee’s arguments – as good as they are – against the notion of predatory pricing to be the most fundamental. The most foundational and effective arguments to expose predatory pricing as mythical are in Frank Easterbrook’s 1981 paper “Predatory Strategies and Counterstrategies.” Also important is Kenneth Elzinga’s and David Mills’s 1989 paper, “Testing for Predation: Is Recoupment Feasible?”
I add this: While there’s no doubting that every firm wishes to secure monopoly power, selling at prices below costs is a pathetically poor means of achieving this goal. Not only (as is widely recognized) does such a monopolizing ‘strategy’ result in losses for the predator that are larger than are the losses suffered by any of its rivals, nothing is easier for the predator’s rivals than simply to match that price cut. Matching a price cut can be expertly done by a kindergartner.
A competently run firm aiming to ruin its rivals would invest not in waging a price war but, instead, in improving its product or lowering its production costs (or both). Compared to the simple act of matching a price cut, matching a competitor’s improved product quality or enhanced efficiency in production is far more challenging. No aspiring monopolist with even a modicum of business acumen would waste its resources by pricing predatorily – which is why history offers no compelling evidence of successful monopolization achieved in the market through predatory pricing.
By the way, the fact that a decently trained undergraduate economics major can sketch a scenario in which predatory pricing might work as a means of monopolization is no more evidence of the reality of predatory pricing than is the fact that a competent artist can sketch a unicorn is evidence of the reality of unicorns.
More of my thoughts on predatory pricing are here.
Sincerely,
Don
Some Covid Links
Robby Soave details some of the incoherence of DC’s Covidocracy. A slice:
It would be hard to argue that the mask mandate was what kept delta deaths at bay, since all those masks failed to prevent cases from increasing. Widespread vaccination—which dramatically reduces severe disease and death—is the public health initiative that’s working well, not the mask mandate.
Yet [Mayor Muriel] Bowser’s administration leaned hard on mask mandates as a pandemic prevention tool, even prioritizing them over vaccination in some curious cases. When D.C. gyms petitioned the city government to allow them to require their customers to be vaccinated rather than masked, for example, city health officials said no.
Bowser’s decision to keep the mask mandate in place for schools is a perfect example of the government’s incoherent thinking about COVID-19 risks. While many school-aged children remain unvaccinated, they are at very low risk of a negative coronavirus health outcome—whether they are vaccinated or not. Elderly Americans who are vaccinated have much more to fear from COVID-19 than kids do, so it makes little sense to link the withdrawal of mask mandates to the degree of vaccination among the kinds of people who congregate in a given location.
It is long past time to accept that COVID-19 is endemic and that there will always be some level of risk associated with it. People can drastically reduce their risk by getting vaccinated, getting booster shots, or even practicing greater caution if they so choose.
The ping-pong ball has been drawn, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit is the winner. All of the various state, industry, and union challenges to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s Emergency Temporary Standard (ETS) mandating large employers to require vaccination or regular testing and masking of employees will be consolidated into a single proceeding in the Sixth Circuit.
Thomas Harrington writes wisely about Covid and the calamitous over-reaction to it. A slice:
That Covid exists and has contributed to the deaths of many people is a fact. But the notion that it constitutes an “unprecedented” threat that requires the destruction of basic rights that have been hard-won over the centuries is an ideological presumption, one, moreover, that has been heartily disproven in places like Sweden, Belarus and huge expanses of the so-called developing world.
Here are the age-stratified statistics of the Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) for the disease, recently compiled by John I. A. Ioannides, one of the most prestigious bio-statisticians in the world.
0-19: .0027% (or a survival rate of 99.9973%)
20-29 .014% (or a survival rate of 99,986%)
30-39 .031% (or a survival rate of 99,969%)
40-49 .082% (or a survival rate of 99,918%)
50-59 .27% (or a survival rate of 99.73%)
60-69 .59% (or a survival rate of 99.31%)
More than 70, between 2.4 and 5.5% (or a survival rate of 97.6 and 94.5% depending on residential situation).
Jon Miltimore reports that “swine flu was far more deadly to children than COVID-19.” A slice:
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio this week announced he is considering requiring children as young as five years old to demonstrate proof of vaccination to enter private establishments, such as restaurants and gymnasiums.
Though New York City only began making vaccinations available to children a week ago, the outgoing mayor said he’d like to have a plan in place for incoming mayor Eric Adams.
Adams, who recently announced he hopes to soon end mask requirements in schools, may have less enthusiasm for mandates than his predecessor. But New York is not the only city pushing for proof of vaccination for children.
Last week, San Francisco lawmakers announced their plan to extend vaccination passport requirements for children 5 to 11 years old, “the first major U.S. city to do so,” NBC News reports. The vaccine passports would apply to children seeking to attend private establishments such as restaurants, gyms, and sporting venues.
reached for comment, those capable of basic math had the following to say:
this is a completely fabricated number with no basis in science or epidemiology.it’s a 0.0000303 infection rate. 1 in 33,000. this means a city of a million would have 30 cases a day.this number is impossible to reach under current circumstances to a degree that makes it clear, obvious fraud.the US has never, not once been that low since this all began.
but this is inherently a function of one simple thing: testing.
we’re currently running a million tests a day in the US. expect a spike back to 1.5 million as the high season kicks off.
a 1% false/non-clinical positive rate would be 10k cases at a million test rate, 15k at 1.5mm.
no test has such a low false rate. at a million tests a day, even at zero covid, you could not hit this.
we DID hit a low of 12k cases back in july, but testing was, wait for it, only 500k then.
The straw man will again stomp through Germany.
Tom Penn decries medical apartheid. A slice:
Segregation on so-called medical grounds is finding ever firmer footing in Europe – no doubt spurred on by its increasingly successful introduction in Australia and New Zealand even in the face of huge, impassioned protests.
This is the hyper-normalisation of medical apartheid at work, and one day soon the witless masses who permit this process to erode unchallenged the moral bedrock of their societies, will wake up to find that it was they, not their governments, who were the engineers of an all-encompassing punitive style of governance whose dystopian interventions not even the quadruple-jabbed will ultimately be able to evade.
This Wall Street Journal headline – “Pfizer Submits Covid-19 Pill for FDA Authorization” – prompts me to wonder if news of these Covid treatments will dampen the mania for vaccine mandates. Alas, I predict not. Vaccination has become an indispensable sacrament for the fundamentalist sect, Covidopalian, to which so many human beings have converted since early 2020.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 531 of the 2011 revised and enlarged edition of Thomas Sowell’s 2009 book Intellectuals and Society (link added):
When government is spoken of explicitly by the intelligentsia, it is often depicted as if it is simply an expression of a Rousseauian “general will,” rather than a collection of politicians, bureaucrats and judges, responding to the incentives and constraints confronting politicians, bureaucrats and judges. That there should be a separate specialty as “public choice” economics, in which government officials’ actions are analyzed in terms of the incentives and constraints of their circumstances, is a sign of how atypical such an approach is among intellectuals.
November 16, 2021
Does the Risk of Hospital Overcrowding Justify Government-mandated Vaccination?
Here’s a letter to a sympathetic correspondent:
Mr. W__:
Thanks for your e-mail in response to this post. You’re correct that the best argument available to those who advocate government-mandated vaccination is the one based on the threat of hospital overcrowding. Jones’s failure to vaccinate, it is argued, makes him more likely to be hospitalized with Covid and, thus, makes care less available for people suffering from non-Covid illnesses and injuries.
One long-term measure to address this problem is to eliminate Certificate of Need restrictions which artificially reduce hospital capacity. Also appropriate would be an easing of occupational-licensing restrictions on health-care providers.
But I concede that in the short-run existing hospital capacity must be taken as given. Yet surely to justify such an unprecedented policy of mandated vaccination of the general population more is needed than just vocalizing the possibility of hospital overcrowding, or even identifying some actual instances of such overcrowding. What are the facts? How frequent, long-lasting, and widespread are instances of overcrowding?
I regularly explore the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’s page featuring data on “Hospital Utilization.” There, data on hospital utilization can be gotten for each state and territory, and even for individual hospitals. My honest interpretation of these data tells me that hospital overcrowding during Covid is neither so frequent nor long-lasting – or geographically widespread – as to justify a policy as draconian as mandatory vaccination of the general public.
For example, the most recent data are from yesterday (November 15th). The state with the highest inpatient-bed-utilization rate is Rhode Island, with a rate of 88.7 percent. The state with the highest ICU-bed-utilization rate is New Mexico, with a rate of 93.6 percent.
As of yesterday, only 10 states had inpatient-bed-utilization rates of 80 percent or higher. Only 11 had ICU-bed-utilization rates of 80 percent or higher.
These data, of course, are silent on staffing. It’s possible that hospitals with lots of available beds nevertheless confront staffing shortages – shortages which, it’s relevant to note, are certainly worsened, and perhaps in many cases even caused, by government policies themselves, as well as by requirements that hospital staff be vaccinated.
Compelled vaccination of an entire population would be an unprecedented intrusion of government into individuals’ private affairs and a serious assault on their bodily integrity. Such a move would put government in America where it has never been, and thus would create a precedent for until-now unheard-of micromanagement of human affairs. Giving government officials the power to mandate general vaccination of the population is to invite tyranny. And to invite tyranny in order to temporarily reduce the risk of occasional and isolated hospital overcrowding would be, to put it mildly, frighteningly imprudent.
Sincerely,
Don
Thoughts on Democratic Choice
Yet there are at least two problems with leaping from the classical-liberal idea to the (very different) modern “liberal” idea. The first is that when an individual makes private choices, such as which flavor ice cream to eat or where to vacation, that individual doesn’t thereby impose those choices on other individuals. Jones can eat whatever flavor of ice cream he likes regardless of the flavor chosen by Smith.
The second problem with leaping from the classical-liberal idea to the modern “liberal” idea runs deeper. It begins with the fact that the choices that we make as individuals are always made in a dense, vast network of social and legal constraints. When you or I as individuals make choices for ourselves, we do so incrementally, seldom aiming to fundamentally alter our own lives, and much less to fundamentally alter society. And even on those rare occasions when you or I do make decisions that are life-altering – say, when we choose to have a child, or to move to a new city thousands of miles away – we do so constrained by countless social norms and legal rules. These norms and rules not only give us important knowledge about what to expect as a result of our choices, they also minimize the negative impact that our choices have on third parties.
I know, for example, that if I choose to have a child I must assume a vast array of parental responsibilities. I know also that I’m unable – without subjecting myself to harsh social and legal penalties – to unilaterally shove those responsibilities onto third parties.
The freedom of choice that classical-liberal institutions accords to individuals is not remotely unconstrained.
Yet when today’s electoral majority seeks to impose its will it seeks to do so largely without constraint. Not only does the majority today demand minority acquiescence even when its margin of victory is razor-thin, it is also constrained by far fewer of the social norms and legal rules that always constrain the choices of individuals. And just as no individual can be expected to choose wisely when he or she is unmoored from the obligation of heeding social norms and legal rules, a majority cannot be expected to choose wisely when so unmoored. (Indeed, the majority is likely to choose even more recklessly than an individual, if for no reason other than that, as my colleague Bryan Caplan explains, politics fuels irrationality in voters. But the topic of voter irrationality is for another time.)
Freedom of choice is wonderful, and democracy – properly understood and constrained – can be a blessing. But democracy becomes a heinous curse when its ethos is reduced to nothing more than the belief that the majority is free to choose whatever it fancies unconstrained by higher law, such as a constitution, and by social norms that protect the rights of all, both as individuals and as members of minority coalitions.
The World Is Not Right
Over the past six days I’ve taken four direct domestic flights on American Airlines. The first was last Wednesday, late morning, from Washington’s Reagan National Airport to Greenville-Spartanburg in South Carolina. Well, it was supposed to be a late-morning flight. The flight wound up being delayed by about two hours and ten minutes.
The first cause of the delay was a crew shortage. The plane was at the gate before I arrived there in plenty of time for the scheduled departure, but there was no crew.
When a crew finally arrived and we passengers were boarded, the pilot informed us that someone mistakenly put too much fuel into the plane. 50,000 pounds of fuel had to be removed. ‘But,’ added the pilot (and here I paraphrase, for I don’t recall his exact words), ‘the ground crew to do the de-fueling is busy. It’ll take some time to get to us.’
Eventually the fuel was removed and we took off for Greenville. This delay, alas, resulted in my arriving in Greenville during the height of rush hour. What would normally have been about a 45-minute drive to Clemson – where I was to speak the next day for Brad Thompson’s Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism – turned into a 90-minute drive because of traffic congestion on I-85 South. My long-anticipated dinner with Brad and Bruce Yandle was abbreviated.
Flying back to Washington on Friday morning brought another delay, about an hour. This delay (I think) was due to foul weather in DC.
On Saturday morning I flew without delay from Reagan-National to Hartford to speak that afternoon at a Brownstone Institute event (at which I had the great honor to meet, and be on a panel with, Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff).
Alas, my return flight on Sunday morning was delayed for about two hours leaving Hartford. The incoming flight was delayed. When it finally arrived, I overheard this walkie-talkie conversation between the gate agent and a member of the ground crew.
Gate agent: “Flight XYZ just landed and needs to be brought into gate 25. Can you get some people over here to do that?”
Ground crew: “Not now. We’re busy. There’s only four of us working today.”
The incoming plane was stranded short of the gate for about 15 or 20 minutes.
Much is wrong with today’s labor markets.
…..
Epilogue: Upon finally boarding the flight from Hartford to DC, a middle-aged couple directly across the aisle from me each had a bottle of hand sanitizer. Before sitting in their seats, they proceeded to vigorously wipe down everything near their seats with the sanitizer – the seat backs and cushions, the arm rests, the window, the panels above their heads, the seat backs facing them, and the tray tables. By the time they were done with this ridiculous ordeal, I was half-surprised that they failed to wipe down also the floor beneath their feet.
This world is not right.
UPDATE: I forgot earlier to recount the following occurrence at the cocktail hour before the Brownstone Institute dinner on Saturday evening. I went to the bar to refill my wine glass with a second pouring of chardonnay. The bartender pulled out another, clean glass. “That’s okay,” I said, “you can refill this glass that I’ve been using.”
“No sir,” she replied. “Covid restrictions require that we always use new glasses.”
I smiled and thanked her as I took the freshly poured wine – and then said softly to myself, as I walked away from the bar needing that second glass a bit more than I did just a moment earlier, “Good thing the Covidocracy is protecting me from catching Covid from me.”
Again, the world is not right.
Some Covid Links
John Tierney writes that “[a]gainst ethics and evidence, public officials push vaccine mandates for kids.” Three longer slices:
In a sane era, no ethics review board would allow doctors to bribe young children to undergo a treatment with unknown dangers and minuscule benefits. But medical ethics are just one more casualty of the Covid pandemic, as Bill de Blasio cheerfully demonstrated at a recent press conference. New York’s mayor announced that children aged five and older would get $100 for being vaccinated against Covid—and then he made a direct pitch to those too young to appreciate the size of the city’s bribe.
“It buys a whole lot of candy,” the mayor explained.
Norms of science and medicine have been flouted throughout the pandemic, but the campaign to vaccinate schoolchildren represents a new low. It’s being led by the Centers for Disease Control with the help of politicians, journalists, and Sesame Street’s Big Bird (who appeared in a CNN special proselytizing children).
…..
Based on seroprevalence surveys, it appears that close to half of American schoolchildren have already had Covid. (The estimate was about 40 percent as of June and has undoubtedly risen during the spread of the Delta variant.) Children who’ve already had measles or chickenpox aren’t required to be vaccinated against those diseases. Why should tens of millions of kids with natural immunity against Covid be pressured to get a vaccine with known side effects? Federal officials have offered various answers, none convincing. The CDC continues to insist that infection is not proved to confer strong immunity and even published a study purporting to show that vaccinations offer better immunity. But as Martin Kulldorff of Harvard Medical School showed, that study was badly flawed and is contradicted by more rigorous research demonstrating that natural immunity is much stronger and longer-lasting than vaccine immunity.
For children without immunity, a vaccine would lessen the risk of being hospitalized or dying—but that risk for most children is already tiny, particularly for younger kids. (So is the risk of severe “long Covid,” and it’s questionable that vaccination would offer additional protection.)
…..
The creepiest justification for vaccinating children is that it would “help schools safely return to in-person learning as well as extracurricular activities and sports,” in the CDC’s words. The United States has been singularly cruel to children throughout the pandemic, closing schools and masking students for extended periods despite extensive evidence that these measures were unnecessary and harmful. Sweden showed that keeping schools open throughout the pandemic—without masks, social distancing, smaller classes or strict quarantines—did little to endanger students, teachers, or the community. Other European countries have also kept schools open without forcing young students to wear masks. Today, with most American adults vaccinated, there’s less reason than ever to close schools. Yet instead of apologizing for their previous child abuse, officials are placating neurotic adults—and teachers’ unions—by threatening still more punishment unless students submit to vaccination.
The threat is a version of the mob’s old protection racket—Nice school you got here, be a shame if anything happened to it—but at least the mob’s extortionists didn’t target children. Mobsters were content with cash payoffs, which would be preferable to today’s demands for mass vaccination. The children would be better off if de Blasio and the other adult bullies settled for taking their candy money.
Restrictions of scientific free speech will inevitably lead to restriction of any speech deemed detrimental to freedom, as Murthy described it. David Rubin was banned from Twitter for a week in July for predicting that the Biden administration would impose a federal vaccine mandate. In September, Biden announced such a mandate and is now telling businesses to ignore the court-ordered pause to it. While Paul’s offending statement was a scientific one, Rubin’s was merely an opinion.
…..
In a melancholy essay, John Ioannidis discusses how the Mertonian norms have come under further attack by the ideologization of the scientific method during the Covid-19 pandemic. These attacks didn’t start with the virus. One has only to look at discussions of climate change and biological sex to realize that even before Covid, our ability to speak freely about science has been narrowed. Murthy, Biden, Walensky, and Fauci, and others following what Thomas Sowell calls the vision of the anointed understand that science remains the standard of truth; thus, if they control what science says, they can control what is considered true. To rehabilitate the scientific method—and with it, our own freedom of speech—we need to stop participating in their deceptions.
Reason‘s Christian Britschgi reports on the return of the straw man to Austria.
I fear that el gato malo is correct about the ease with which government funding corrupts science.
Lloyd Billingsley criticizes the hypocrisy of California’s Covidocrats. Here’s his conclusion:
On November 9, Gov. Newsom said he skipped the climate conference, to spend Halloween with his four children, who staged an “intervention” to keep daddy home. While Californians assess that belated claim, Newsom has already made one reality perfectly clear. When it comes to pandemic restrictions, there is one standard for the ruling class and another for ordinary working people.
TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.)
It is an evil, demagogic policy to deny the unvaccinated basic civil rights and render them into an underclass.
The vaccine does not stop disease transmission. Thus, the laptop class’s support for lockdown policies has nothing to do with the risk posed by unvaccinated.
Russell Roberts's Blog
- Russell Roberts's profile
- 39 followers
