Russell Roberts's Blog, page 218
October 25, 2021
The Abuse and Misuse of Science “Is Gross to Watch”
An economist friend, who teaches at a prominent U.S. university (not George Mason!), just sent to me the following e-mail in response to this earlier Cafe Hayek post in which I quote Thomas Sowell on the abuse of science. I share the e-mail with my friend’s kind permission, but my friend wishes to remain anonymous.
Regarding your quotation from Sowell on the use of “Science (TM)” by elites:
I’m becoming increasingly creeped out by the way the phrase “follow the science” is entering our common lexicon. At a minimum, the phrase betrays fundamental ignorance about how true science actually works. Science can’t lead anyone (it is far too haphazard and chaotic for that). Moreover, science is a process of discovering what is (the positive), and can never tell us what we ought to do (the normative). But if this sort of ignorance were all we had to worry about, I think the problem would be manageable. I’m worried that Science(TM) is becoming religious in nature. Human beings have an innate religious tendency. They long to worship something that can imbue themselves and their world with metaphysical meaning. As the West has moved away from the Judeo-Christian religious tradition, people are looking for substitutes to fill their religious instincts. John McWhorter has a new book out about how “Wokeism” is one such substitute. Others have pointed out that environmentalism often functions as another religious substitute. I think this cult-of-science is a third. (I’m a religious person myself, which I think makes it a bit easier for me to see the inherently religious nature of these phenomena.)
The cult wants to anoint scientists as 21st century scientist-priests who receive divine truth and convey it to the masses. To question the priests is to question the divine and thus out oneself as a heretic (i.e. a science-denier). I fear that precious few scientists will be able to resist the lure of celebrity and adulation that followers of the cult are offering them. They may not realize until it’s too late that it’s a devil’s bargain. In exchange for becoming the scientist-priests of the science-cult mob, these former scientists find that they are as much the captives of the mob as they are its leaders. True science is driven by evidence and almost always leads in surprising and unpredictable directions (because the universe is far more complicated than we can imagine). The cult-of-science is nothing more than scientism married to confirmation bias. Thus, the conclusions of the new scientist-priests are actually dictated to them by the mob. In return for status and celebrity (and even some money), the scientist-priests then furnish the mob with a sciency-sounding justification for their predetermined conclusions. Thus, “follow the science” really means to follow the crowd, with some science jargon judiciously applied, like lipstick to a pig. The whole thing is gross to watch.
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 257 of Thomas Sowell’s December 22nd, 2009, National Review essay titled “The ‘Science’ Mantra” as this essay is reprinted in Sowell’s 2010 collection, Dismantling America:
Among the intelligentsia, there have always been many who are ready to jump on virtually any bandwagon that will take them to the promised land, where the wise and noble few – like themselves – can take the rest of us poor dummies in hand and tell us how we had better change the way we live our lives.
DBx: Indeed so.
Modern science is indeed a remarkable and wonderful human achievement. Yet it loses all claim to objectivity and to the noble name “science” the moment any of its conclusions are regarded as incontestable justifications for using state power to engineer society. “Science” so used is a synonym for “god.” And the politicians, bureaucrats, and “experts” who today seek to rule according to such “science” differ in no intellectual or ethical way from the chieftains, monarchs, and apparatchiks in the past who coercively lorded over others in the name of fulfilling the will of god or of achieving what is ordained by “History.”
Some Non-Covid Links
Subsidies nearly always amount to confiscating money from the many in order to redistribute it to the few. Those who advocate funneling funds to local newspapers via tax breaks for publishers, advertisers, and subscribers are really saying that if people won’t support local journalism voluntarily, the government should make them do so involuntarily by manipulating the tax code. If you ask me, every family ought to subscribe to one or two newspapers and read them faithfully. Others might feel just as strongly about the importance of music lessons, sending kids to summer camp, filling a house with books, or mastering a foreign language. They’re all worthy activities. But that’s no justification for propping them up with tax breaks.
Yes, the American system of democratic self-government is strengthened by honest and diligent journalism. But government subsidies, almost by definition, are antithetical to the spirit of an independent press and the First Amendment. A newspaper that takes money from the government is apt to pull its punches when it covers that government — especially if it grows addicted to tax breaks that will have to be renewed every few years.
Kyle Smith shares some of the wit and wisdom of Thomas Sowell.
Glenn Reynolds reflects on the life and times of “the great dissenter,” Justice John Marshall Harlan.
As deputy Attorney General in the 1970s, Judge Silberman was asked by Congress to testify on the late FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s secret and confidential files and so was obliged to read them. In a 2005 op-ed in these pages, he called examining those files the “single worst experience of my long governmental service.” He vowed to take the secrets he read about politicians to his grave, and so they have never leaked to this day.
Samuel Abrams reports that “elite universities are the worst for free speech.” A slice:
New data from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), RealClearEducation, and research firm College Pulse provide empirical insight into this issue. The just-released survey captures the voices of over 37,000 students at 159 colleges, and finds free speech on campuses in a dire state, painting a picture of college life in which shouting down speakers, limiting others from hearing diverse viewpoints, and even the use of violence to prevent speech are viewed as acceptable by many students.
Eric Boehm identifies zoning as another culprit in worsening the supply-chain web crisis.
Scott Sumner reveals ugly truths about U.S. trade policy.
It isn’t just the money. Providing significant funding for new experimental ventures certainly is a challenge at a time when the country is already carrying a historic burden of debt. Using tax increases to provide that funding would only slow the economic recovery that would be needed to provide the investment which would in turn make the development of those ventures possible. That’s the short- and medium-term dilemma. The long-term, endemic obstacle is so entrenched in the British political culture as to be almost invisible – which, of course, makes it more difficult to confront.
Put simply, it is prejudice against precisely the things that this would-be miracle needs to encourage: idiosyncratic non-conformity, individual creativity, fledgling enterprises prepared to take great risks, counter-intuitive proposals which ignore the prevailing wisdom. All those proclivities – and the kind of people who are likely to embody them – are distasteful to the political establishment whose public school ethos favours like-minded, over-civilised team players.
Arnold Kling is pessimistic about American politics.
Some Covid Links
An Oregon high school ordered all 2,680 of its students to stay home for a week and a half in September—two days of complete shutdown, followed by a week of online classes. Oregon Public Broadcasting reports that the district sent a “flash alert message” to parents at Reynolds High at 5:35 a.m. informing them that their children wouldn’t be allowed in school that day.
It’s not hard to guess why. OPB reports that in the first two weeks of school “875 high school students and staff members … had to quarantine” before the shutdown. All that was in response to a mere four positive tests for Covid-19. Oregon is following the advice of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Despite the disease’s low risk to young people and the widespread vaccination of adults, the CDC continues to recommend seven- to 14-day quarantines for schoolchildren who are suspected of having been exposed to the virus.
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Even if quarantine policies were applied evenly, they would pose a heavier educational burden on low-income children, whose parents are less likely to have the resources to monitor their participation in remote learning or to hire tutors to make up for educational deficits.
Mary McGreechin decries the tyranny of the Covidocracy. Two slices:
No matter which euphemism governments employ for their permission slips, they are nothing less than slave passes. Coercive medical procedures to regain a scintilla of joy in your life is not freedom. Paternalistic privileges, granted temporarily in return for compliance, is not freedom. If you need the permission of powerful people to enter a cinema, pub or restaurant, you do not live in a free society. If a Health Secretary tells you that you must roll up your sleeve and get jabbed ‘to keep your freedoms’, you have none. If said Health Secretary holds your liberty like a pawn ticket, redeemable only by slavish obedience, your liberty is lost.
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Likewise in the Antebellum South passes (also known as tickets or permits) allowed slaves to leave the plantation for a specific purpose and a designated timeframe, and had to be shown to any white person on demand.
It is highly unlikely that any slaves considered themselves to be free whilst in the possession of such a document. Indeed the pass was tangible proof of one’s bondage. If your freedom depends on the whims of another human being, you are not free. In the words of Benjamin Franklin, freedom ‘is not a gift bestowed upon us by other men, but a right that belongs to us by the laws of God and nature’. Yet today we are witnessing the mass acceptance of politicians’ right to bestow and remove freedoms at will. Indeed there is celebration at being granted a morsel of ‘freedom’ demonstrated by the viral video of a Sydney woman overcome with emotion at being allowed to enjoy a drink in a pub. Despite this joy, it is hardly freedom day in New South Wales when mandatory masking still remains in place, residents cannot leave the state, numbers remain capped for weddings and funerals and at neither type of event may food or drink be consumed whilst standing.
For those in the state of Victoria, who believed they were close to being free again, the odious Premier Dan Andrews has moved the goalposts once more. Boosters are now the only route to liberty. Andrews nonchalantly warned Victorians that he will be keeping reins on their freedom probably until well into 2022: ‘It won’t be your first and second dose, it will be, “have you had your third?”’ Still feel like celebrating that freedom your government has so generously granted?
Dr. Fiona Underhill, in Britain, has this letter in the Telegraph:
SIR – In my GP surgery I have dealt with barely any Covid cases in the past month but large numbers of patients, especially children and babies, with other respiratory infections, largely caused by low natural immunity due to prolonged lockdowns last winter. I have also been visited by suicidal and despairing teenagers who see no future, and patients whose conditions are deteriorating as they languish on interminable hospital waiting lists.
The Government was warned of all these issues months ago but seems to have done nothing to prepare the NHS to cope. Instead we have thousands fewer hospital beds than last year, and one of the lowest number of beds per 100,000 people in Europe.
More restrictions are not the answer. Nor is more money unless it goes on more beds and medical staff rather than overpaid managers.
Dr Fiona Underhill
Woodford Green, Essex
Despite his unfortunate favorable mention of the work of Naomi Klein, this essay by Jacob Fox is excellent. Two slices:
Many of us already see that the mainstream narrative about Covid-19 is flawed and implausible and that the threat it poses, while not insignificant, has been exaggerated. Despite this, our response to Covid-19 has been to fundamentally change our way of life in such a way that threatens our freedom, bodily autonomy, and dignity, by implementing radical measures that had been previously discouraged by the known science and which may very well cause much more harm than good.
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The global response to Covid-19 has been influenced by a kind of utopianism that was borne out of early Christian mythology and which has resurfaced over and over again throughout the history of the modern West. There are many avenues for detailed research and investigation into how this has played out specifically, but for now, we can at least say that the changes we have made in response to Covid-19 have normalised things that will enable better compliance with ongoing and future ‘utopian’ projects.
First, and most obviously, severe restrictions on space and movement have been normalised, and there’s already talk of using lockdowns for other purposes, such as to combat climate change. Second, we’ve seen a dramatic shift in our stance towards medical interventionism and bodily autonomy. While Covid-19 vaccines might be safe, the stance that many are increasingly taking towards those who don’t want one seems unreasonably hostile and forceful, given the short duration of their clinical trials and the open questions surrounding their safety and effectiveness. Gray tells us that “the theory that guides the construction of Utopia is taken to be infallible; any deviation from it is treated as error or treason”, and we’re now seeing that those who don’t want the Covid-19 vaccine are increasingly being treated as treasonous. And if the path to utopia is one of absolute good vs. evil, they might increasingly be treated as evil. Third, we’ve witnessed the normalisation of constant state surveillance, tracking, and identification, even for partaking in normal day-to-day activities. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we’ve seen a dramatic increase in society’s reverence of chosen experts and their scientific proclamations. The phrase ‘the science’ is now commonplace, despite the fact that science is not absolute and is debatable, contestable, and rarely ever settled, especially when it comes to what is new, like Covid-19 and our response to it.
This last point is worth focusing on because our post-Covid view of science isn’t so different from the way that Comte and Saint-Simon said that things would be in a future technocratic and scientistic utopia. Our reverence for ideologically correct science – utopian science – is such that we now allow scientists of the WHO or experts of government-picked SAGE to structure our way of life. Our Pontiffs are the chosen scientists, our commandments are lockdowns, booster vaccines, and distancing, and our sacred garb is the mask, or, in some places and perhaps soon in more, the immunity passport. Anyone who disagrees with the commandments, takes off their garb, or challenges the Pontiffs – even if they’re qualified experts themselves – is treasonous and should be treated accordingly.
Here is MikeP’s insightful comment that appears on David Henderson’s recommendation, at EconLog, of the recent Uncommon Knowledge interview of Jay Bhattacharya:
I agree with the recommendation. I watched the video a couple days ago. It is an excellent one-hour summary of the path we have taken from the perspective of a doctor and economist.
It is astonishing where we are now. If you had presented the characteristics of disease from SARS-CoV-2 at the same conferences and conventions that put out 2019 pandemic response plans across the globe, there is no way they would have changed those plans to what we have experienced over the last 19 months. Public health authorities and governments first reacted out of fear of (a) another Spanish flu and (b) an overwhelmed health care system. But after the general populace ate the restrictions up, seemingly delighted by the excitement and shared struggle, it did not stop. The strategy shifted from the stated and intentional protection of the health care system while the virus runs through the healthy population to the outright eradication of the virus, which was obviously impossible by April 2020.
The best case is that we have sleepwalked into disaster. The worst case is that we have been led into disaster by interests that are taking advantage of a crisis to gain more control over society.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 581 of Richard Epstein’s magisterial 2014 study, The Classical Liberal Constitution (emphasis added):
It should be clear then that both the progressives and conservatives work on models that are too divorced from constitutional text, constitutional theory, and private law. The consequences of these repeated errors are not just judicial curiosities. These epic mistakes in constitutional and political judgment have long-term adverse effects on the power of a nation to regenerate and recreate itself. So long as conservative justices cloak themselves in the language of judicial restraint on structural and economic issues, they will not address the legislative and administrative excesses at both the federal and state levels. So long as progressives continue to embrace policies that first tolerate and then encourage the massive expansion of transfer payments off an ever-decreasing productive base, they will also reinforce the economic and political risks.
October 24, 2021
Some Covid Links
Barry Brownstein explains that unity is not obtained by coercion. A slice:
The vaccine mandate is causing shortages of health professionals. To cope, the governor of New York has ordered new graduates from medical and nursing schools be permitted to practice without the required post-graduate training, such as medical internships. Does [Dr. David] Galinsky wonder how unseasoned, inexperienced nurses will learn with fewer senior nurses to help guide them through the perils of those early years? Worse, in New York State, the idea of deploying the National Guard as healthcare providers was trotted out. Are citizens in New York State better served by doctors and nurses fired for their lack of unity around mandates?
You, like me, had probably never heard of Galinsky, but his mindset—that unity requires that all follow the same medical path—is shared by many.
After pointing out that pandemic restrictions are the worst assault on the poor and working class since segregation and the Vietnam War, I was never invited back on @democracynow
Bridget Phetasy’s anger is righteous (and right). (HT Martin Kulldorff) Here’s her conclusion:
The discourse in the media makes it sound like these criticisms are aimed at the right-wing anti-vaxxer population—and that might be true on a countrywide level—but the numbers tell the truest story about who will be most disproportionately affected by draconian mandates. In L.A. County, only 54% of the Black population and 62% of the “Latinx” population have received at least one dose of the vaccine. Despite all the resources the city ostensibly devotes to equity and inclusion, it’s clear that these minority populations will be most affected by the mandates. If Black lives matter to you so much, shouldn’t you care that Black people will be excluded from restaurants and movie theaters and nail salons?
From my perspective, this is state-sanctioned discrimination, and the righteous moralizing from the pajama class is the highest form of limousine liberal hypocrisy. Aiming uncharitable and derisive rhetoric at the very people you have been screaming should have a seat at the table is a tone-deaf disgrace. It seems like in Los Angeles County, the signs calling essential workers heroes really mean “if you do what we say.”
Aaron Kheriaty explores the CDC’s reasons for ignoring natural immunity. A slice:
Public health officials worry that acknowledging natural immunity will amount to admitting the failure of their prior policies, which were implemented to slow or halt the spread of the virus. The two most basic numbers in immunology are incidence and prevalence: the former designates the rate of new cases over a given period of time, whereas the latter designates the rate of overall cases for a given period of time.
The last myth is that “going early and going hard” with restrictions is always better than waiting. Again, given what happened in July and September [in Britain] when a huge surge was predicted by many, that would have been the wrong advice. Cases actually fell significantly.
The University of Virginia’s Matthew Crawford decries “the new public health despotism.” Three slices:
After a year and a half of this, going along with it starts to become habitual. If you defy the mask order, and are challenged by somebody doing their job as instructed, chances are you’re going to back down and comply, which is worse than if you had complied to begin with. Even if you strongly suspect fear of the virus has been stoked out of proportion to serve bureaucratic and political interests, or as an artefact of the scaremongering business model of media, you may subtly adjust your view of the reality of Covid to bring it more into line with your actual behaviour. You can reduce the dissonance that way. The alternative is to be confronted every day with fresh examples of your own slavishness.
In the Hobbesian formula, the Leviathan relies upon fear to suppress pride. It is pride that makes men difficult to govern. It may be illuminating to view our Covid moment through this lens and consider how small moments of humiliation may be put in the service of a long-standing political project, or find their meaning and normative force in it.
Specifically, to play one’s part in Covid theatre, as in security theatre at the airport, is to suffer the unique humiliation of a rational being who submits to moments of social control that he knows to be founded upon untruths. That these are expressed in the language of science is especially grating.
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The Columbia law professor Philip Hamburger writes about the administrative state. It consists of a vast array of executive agencies that empower themselves to place people under binding obligations without recourse to legislation, sidestepping the Constitution’s separation of powers. In theory, only Congress can make laws. Its members are subject to the democratic process, so they must persuade their constituents, and one another. But as the administrative state has metastasised, supplanting the lawmaking power of the legislature, unelected bureaucrats increasingly set the contours of modern life with little accountability. They stake their legitimacy on claims of expertise rather than alignment with popular preferences. This trajectory began a century ago in the Progressive era, and took large strides forward during the New Deal and Great Society.
Hamburger puts this in historical context with other forms of unaccountable power, such as the notorious Star chamber of James I: “Ever tempted to exert more power with less effort, rulers are rarely content to govern merely through the law, and in their restless desire to escape its pathways, many of them try to work through other mechanisms.”
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The absurdities of COVID theatre could be taken as a tacit recognition of this state of affairs, much as security theater pointed to a new political accommodation after 9/11. In this accommodation, we have accepted the impossibility of grounding our practices in reality. We submit to ossified bureaucracies such as the TSA that have become self-protective interest groups. They can expand but never contract, and we must pretend reality is such as to justify their existence. Covid is likely to do for public health what 9/11 did for the security state. Going through an airport, we still take off our shoes – because twenty years ago, some clown tried to light his shoe on fire. We submit to being irradiated and groped, often as not. One tries to put out of mind facts such as this: in independent audits of airport security, about 80-90% of weapons pass through undetected. The microwave machine presents an imposing image of science that helps us bury such knowledge. We have a duty to carry out an ascetic introspection, searching out any remaining tendencies toward rational pride and regard for the truth, submitting them to analysis. Similarly, the irrationality of the Covid rules we comply with has perhaps become their main point. In complying, we enact the new terms of citizenship.
Covid tyranny in Austria is akin to some horror scene in 1984.
David Long sees clearly Australia’s authoritarian Covidocracy. Two slices:
But who can forget the most annoying event of all; those endless, useless, self-preening individual press conferences of our beloved Prime Minister, the state premiers (read Andrews, Berijeklian, McGowan and Palaszczuk) with and without their chief medical officers, appearing daily on a television station near you, to tell us the good news (for them) — there were X new cases today so we shall continue to imprison you for your own good – and the bad news (for us) that there were X new cases today so there will be another lockdown with social distancing, mask-wearing and limits on numbers at your funeral, just you and the man who lights the fire.
Another annoying aspect of this pandemic, has been the servile reporters who, having done no research on the science of the virus or the defects in the same, were obliged to ask, when they asked anything, leading questions such as, “Do you think more people will die if they do not wear masks?” and, “What do you have to say to the idiots who won’t socially distance?”
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What we thought was an eighteen-month pandamic catastrophe was actually an eighteen-month pandamic publicity bonanza for the governments: free front-page headlines, free television advertising every day and night of the week and with no critical journalistic comment, no opposition, while protected from difficult questions by a scientific shield impervious to even superman’s vision.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from David Ames Wells’s “Free Trade,” an entry in the 1899 edition of John J. Lalor’s massive “Cyclopaedia of Political Science, Political Economy, and of the Political History of the United States“:
The highest right of property is the right to exchange it for other property. That this must be so will at once appear, if it is remembered that, if all exchange of property were forbidden, or by circumstances rendered impossible, each individual would be assimilated in condition to Robinson Crusoe on his uninhabited island; that is, he would be restricted to subsisting on what he individually produced or collected, be deprived of all benefits of co-operation with his fellow-men, and of all advantages of production derived from diversity of skill or diversity of natural circumstances. In the absence of all freedom of exchange between man and man, civilization would obviously be impossible; and it would also seem to stand to reason that to the degree in which we impede or obstruct the freedom of exchange, or, what is the same thing, commercial intercourse, to that same degree we oppose the development of civilization.
October 23, 2021
On Civilized Disagreement and Argument
Here’s a letter to a new and very hostile correspondent:
Mr. P__:
Thanks for your e-mail in response to my defense of Phil Magness.
You think it “more than fair” for Nancy MacLean “to conclude from [Milton] Friedman’s radical laissez faireism that he was an enemy of people of color and other poor and unprivileged people or at most apathetic regarding them.”
I couldn’t disagree more. Milton Friedman – like many other scholars, from Adam Smith in the 18th century through Thomas Sowell in the 20th and 21st – offered a coherent theory of why the masses, and especially the poorest amongst us, are better served by free markets than by government interventions. I believe that Friedman was correct, but I concede that it’s possible that he wasn’t. You and Prof. MacLean believe that he was incorrect. Such disagreement, in addition to being normal, is healthy.
What is unhealthy, however, is to conclude that someone who disagrees with your preferred means of helping the poor is someone who really doesn’t share the goal of helping the poor. Such reasoning prevents productive conversation and argument. People who reason in this way simply presume that their understanding of how the world works is correct. They thus fortify themselves against learning – and, not incidentally, also against teaching.
What’s left to do once Prof. MacLean’s manner of argument reigns? Answer: Nothing but to accuse those with whom we disagree of being evil. Intellectual discourse disappears, to be replaced by assertions of dogma. Let me ask: Do you think it would be “more than fair” of me – who truly believes that policies of the sort endorsed by Prof. MacLean actually benefit the powerful at the expense of the poor – to accuse Prof. MacLean of therefore being a pro-oligarchical racist and enemy of the masses? Were I to play by her rules of intellectual engagement, that’s what I’d do, and I’d be as justified in my accusing her of having evil motives as she is justified in leveling the same accusation against Jim Buchanan and Milton Friedman.
But thoughtful and civilized people do not play by such infantile rules. I’m quite sure that Prof. MacLean genuinely wishes to promote the best interests of ordinary men and women, but I believe also that her preferred means of pursuing that goal is flawed. On this matter perhaps she’s correct and I’m incorrect. But her manner of arguing her case – namely, calling those with whom she disagrees names and accusing them of evil rather than of error – is constitutionally incapable of convincing anyone who doesn’t already share her understanding of reality.
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
Some Covid Links
Dear Editor,
In their essay “Covid-19 and the new merchants of doubt” (BMJ Opinion, 9/13/21, https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/09/13/covid-19-and-the-new-merchants-of-d…), Gavin Yamey and David Gorski present themselves as defenders of sound scientific principles in the face of “denialism” related to the Covid-19 pandemic. These authors specifically target the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD), and the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) as sources of what they imply is a misinformation campaign about the efficacy of Covid-19 public health measures. Unfortunately, it seems to us that Yamey and Gorski have misrepresented both the GBD and AIER.
We write to set the record straight.
In October 2020, AIER hosted a small academic conference on the costs and consequences of lockdowns with three highly qualified medical scientists, Martin Kulldorff, Sunetra Gupta, and Jay Bhattacharya. These scientists received no compensation for their participation, which came about due to a mutual recognition that the medical, social, and economic harms of lockdowns were being neglected as countries around the world pursued an aggressive lockdown strategy. At the time the evidence of the efficacy of lockdowns was being debated (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.22.20160341v3). This novel approach conflicted with existing public health recommendations for respiratory pandemics from as recently as 2019 (https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/pubs_archive/pubs-pdfs/…, https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/pubs_archive/pubs-pdfs/…, https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/329438/9789241516839-en…).
During the conference, journalists including science writer David Zweig, Forbes’ John Tamny, and Jeanne Lenzer, who reported it for The BMJ (https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m3908), conducted a wide-ranging question and answer session with the scientists, which AIER videotaped for release to the public (https://gbdeclaration.org/video/). At the conclusion of the conference, the scientists drafted the GBD as a general statement of public health principles, calling for an end to lockdowns and outlining an alternative strategy of “focused protection” for vulnerable communities (https://gbdeclaration.org/focused-protection/). While AIER is proud to have hosted the conference that produced this document, its text and principles originated entirely with the scientists – indeed, the idea for a general letter came about spontaneously on the afternoon of October 4 as the conference drew to a close.
Yamey and Gorski’s allegations of fossil fuel and tobacco company interests in AIER are unfounded. These stem from their misunderstanding of AIER’s financial assets as independently managed by our investment subsidiary, American Investment Services. As with any investment fund, these holdings inevitably include stocks from hundreds of companies, none of which have any bearing on our editorial positions. This would be akin to suggesting that Yamey’s own pro-lockdown position is tainted by Duke University’s multi-billion dollar foundation – built from the tobacco fortune of James Buchanan Duke – or that Gorski’s medical work is ethically compromised by the presence of fossil fuel stocks in Wayne State University’s $400 million endowment. To portray either as a source of financial influence appears to display a misunderstanding of the very nature of investments, which are a way of ensuring an institution’s long-term financial stability – not a payoff from the firms whose stocks are owned.
Are financial theories about AIER and the GBD really where these authors want to hang their hats? For the record, AIER publishes its own financial reports every year (https://www.aier.org/financials/). Anyone who wants to see where the money comes from, or where it goes can simply navigate to our website and do so. There are no tricks. There is no deception.
Sincerely,
Phillip W. Magness
Senor Research Faculty & Interim Director of Research and Education
American Institute for Economic Research
James R. Harrigan
Senior Editor
American Institute for Economic Research
So, what is driving the chaos? Government, along with union chokeholds, environmental and labor mandates on truckers, mandates on supply chain workers across the board, crony trade restrictions, and excessive unemployment benefits, nationwide, but especially in California.
Remember, too, that this is all before Biden’s vaccine mandates kick in. California truckers, in particular, have been socked by the state’s notorious AB 5 law restricting gig workers and independent contractors, combined with truck emission mandates introduced just last year that can mean tens of thousands of dollars out of pocket.
Many truckers have already decamped to greener pastures in friendlier states. Finally, crony trade restrictions like the century-old Jones Act can actually make it cheaper to import from China than to ship goods domestically, knocking internal shipping as an option.
Jacob Sullum reviews Ryan Bourne’s Economics in One Virus.
“What Did Public Schools Do With COVID Relief Money? Whatever They Wanted.”
Covid Derangement Syndrome continues to batter schoolchildren in Britain. A slice:
Over one million children are facing increased restrictions as rising Covid cases mean some schools have closed early for half-term.
Councils across the country have reintroduced face masks, bubbles and staggered break times and stepped up self-isolation rules for youngsters.
Seventeen local authorities in England are now recommending more stringent rules, affecting 1,098,349 pupils at 3,250 schools, analysis by The Telegraph has found.
TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.)
Indiana University School of Medicine’s Steve Templeton decries the politicization of immunology. Here’s his conclusion:
Both immunity to vaccination and infection protect against severe disease, but the scope of immunity that develops after infection is broader, generally more durable, and more specific to lung reinfection. Stronger immunity derived from infection comes with increased risk of severe disease and a higher incidence of long-term effects, especially in older people and those with comorbidities.
Despite the obvious downsides, misinformation about the inferiority of “natural” immunity to vaccination persists, likely out of fear that data showing long-lasting protective immunity from infection will promote vaccine hesitancy. However, the pandemic will not end due to vaccination alone, but due to a combination of vaccine-acquired and infection-acquired immunity, despite the unwillingness of politicians, scientists, and public health officials to admit it.
Phil Magness Does History; Some “Historians” Do “History”
Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal:
Editor:
Daniel Kuehn (Letters, Oct. 22) misses the relevant background of Phil Magness’s defense of the school-choice movement (“School Choice’s Antiracist History,” Oct. 19). Among the supporters of school choice were two of history’s most prominent economists, James Buchanan and Milton Friedman. Nobel laureates both, each man was led by his research to warn of the dangers of government intrusion into individuals’ private affairs.
Since their deaths – Buchanan in 2013 and Friedman in 2006 – a thriving mini-industry has emerged to falsely portray these scholars as aiders and abettors of oppressive oligarchs and racist hordes. Among the most aggressive of those who misrepresent the words and deeds of Buchanan and Friedman is Duke University historian Nancy MacLean. After smearing Buchanan in her fallacy-filled and thoroughly debunked 2017 book, Democracy in Chains, she recently took to the pages of the Washington Post to do the same to Friedman, who she alleges “backed the White Southern cause” and “White freedom.”
Yet the closest MacLean comes to presenting evidence for this scurrilous charge is to quote a passage from Friedman’s 1962 book, Capitalism and Freedom, in which he concedes – as the principled libertarian that he was – that parents should be free to use school vouchers to send their children to segregated schools. She completely ignores the many passages in that same book in which Friedman explicitly denounced racism and segregation, and approvingly predicted that vouchers would result in less segregation. Friedman went so far there to say that, although he opposed forced integration, “[i]f one must choose between the evils of enforced segregation or enforced integration, I myself would find it impossible not to choose integration.”*
Mr. Magness deserves thanks for carefully working to rid the history of the school-choice movement of grotesque parodies and perversions of the sort peddled by Ms. MacLean.
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
* Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), page 117.
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