Russell Roberts's Blog, page 222
October 14, 2021
Some Non-Covid Links
John O. McGinnis and Mike Rappaport celebrate Clarence Thomas. A slice:
In United States v. Lopez, Thomas wrote a concurrence that was the most interesting judicial explication of the Commerce Clause in more than half a century. He reconsidered the “substantial effects on interstate commerce” test because it was inconsistent with the original meaning of the Commerce Clause. First, Thomas showed that the modern test used a meaning of “commerce” that encompassed all economic activity, whereas the meaning of “commerce” at the time of the Framing was limited to trading and exchange, as distinct from other productive activities such as manufacturing and farming. Second, Thomas observed that permitting Congress to regulate all activities “affecting” interstate commerce deprives many of the other clauses in Article I, sec. 8 of independent force. Why give Congress particular authority to regulate bankruptcy, since insolvency self-evidently affects economic activity among the states?
No justice has ever announced his jurisprudential stance more quickly or forcefully than Justice Thomas.
As my intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy often does, Scott Winship rightly criticizes Democrats for using the pandemic as an excuse to institutionalize their long-term spending goals.
Maxwell Meyer tells the disturbing tale of the cancelling of Boston Pride.
The annual cost of the promises to which President Obama signed on under the Paris climate agreement would have hit roughly $50 billion in 2030, or about $140 per person. Many studies show Americans are willing to pay a couple of hundred dollars a year to remedy climate change, but this data is highly skewed by a small minority willing to spend thousands of dollars. A recent Washington Post survey found that a majority of Americans would vote against a $24 annual climate tax on their electricity bills. Even if they’d hand over $140, it’d buy them little. If Mr. Obama’s agreement were sustained through 2100, it would reduce global temperatures by a minuscule 0.06 degree Fahrenheit.
The great Bruce Yandle warns that inflation is here for the long-haul.
Some Covid Links
Noah Carl – quoting Russ Roberts – dissects a new report from Britain’s House of Commons on that country’s lockdowns. (HT Dan Klein) Two slices:
I would agree that the UK’s initial policy was “wrong”, but only in the sense that it did not put enough emphasis on focused protection. In the early weeks of the pandemic, we should have emphasised things like: expanding hospital capacity; securing PPE for frontline healthcare workers; separating COVID and non-COVID patients in hospital wards; implementing daily testing for care home staff; and helping elderly people in multi-generational homes to self-isolate.
Of course, when the report says, “It is now clear that this was the wrong policy”, they mean it was wrong in the sense that it was not lockdown. This claim is of course highly contested. The fact that the authors were nonetheless confident enough to write, “It is now clear” (rather than, say, “We believe”) simply shows that they didn’t speak to anyone with the opposite view. Note: I say “anyone” (rather than “any scientists”) quite deliberately. One of the biggest mistakes of the pandemic has been to assume that only scientists are qualified to speak about pandemic policy. As the economist Russ Roberts observes, “Knowing a lot about the human body does not make you an expert in risk analysis, tradeoffs, or unintended consequences.”
…..
The authors might reply that a large majority of British people supported the lockdowns, which is true. However, this is partly because their perceptions of the risks of COVID were so skewed. As David Spiegelhalter and George Davey Smith noted last year, “the notion that we are all seriously threatened by the disease” has led to “levels of personal fear being strikingly mismatched to objective risk of death”. (People overestimating the risks of COVID is much bigger problem than people assuming it’s “just the flu”.) And I would conjecture that part of the explanation lies in the government’s policies and messaging.
Commenting on the graph seen here, Jay Bhattacharya writes on Twitter:
There is a lot to learn from this graph, but most obviously, the COVID vax does not stop infection.
The vax provides a private benefit (protection vs. severe disease), but limited public benefit (protection vs. disease spread).
So what is the argument for mandates?
John Stossel writes that “we have vaccines. We don’t need pandemic restrictions.”
Pierre Lemieux understandably worries about the now-eager resort, by oh-so-many people on the political left and on the political right, to dirigiste tactics. (And Pierre is correct to criticize Texas governor Greg Abbott’s prohibition on private businesses mandating vaccines for their employees.)
Jamie Walden decries Covid hysteria’s corrosion of liberal values. Here’s his conclusion:
There does not seem to be anything authoritarian enough that the virus cannot excuse it. A door has been opened and we have walked into a place in which our health and well-being is worse, we are poorer, and we are less free, in exchange for dubious claims of safety. The more people who realise that the damage done by many of the interventions should be regarded as unpalatable and the benefits illusory, the more likely we are to salvage something from this crisis and do better for the vulnerable next time.
Here’s a report from the Philippines of the Covidocracy’s cruelty toward children. (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
Writing at Spiked, Jennie Bristow calls for a restoration of normalcy for children.
Allison Pearson rightly criticizes the groupthink on Covid vaccination. A slice:
The ‘groupthink’ among ministers, scientific advisers and civil servants, heavily criticised in the report, is still far too much in evidence. Just look at the official response to the low uptake of vaccines among younger teenagers. Instead of conceding that the public may well have a point – a mere 11 per cent of 12 to 15-year-olds have taken up the offer of a Covid jab so far – Nadhim Zahawi, the Education Secretary, and Sajid Javid, the Health Secretary, yesterday wrote a joint letter to parents which has an unpleasant, even bullying, tone. Children, they warn, could “lose out on face-to-face learning” unless the vaccine take-up improves.
Why should that be? The virus is currently racing like a forest fire through secondary schools. Being vaccinated would not always prevent students being infected or stop them passing it on. With any luck, most kids will have had Covid before half-term and the rest by Christmas. That should give them excellent, long-lasting immunity, which some studies suggest is superior to any bestowed by a jab.
The scientist refutes both falsehoods and innuendo from the medical journal, saying he does so because the process of scientific advancement developed over many centuries of human experimentation cannot exist without open inquiry, disagreement, questioning, and debate. These have been so damaged by the political and social response to COVID, Kulldorff says, that it’s an open question whether the human advances these hard-won scientific practices lead to can continue.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 23 of the late historian Joyce Appleby’s (uneven) 2010 book, The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism:
Exploitation in not distinctively capitalist, but wealth generating is.
October 13, 2021
Protesting More Panic Porn
Here’s a letter to CBS Radio News:
Sir or Madam:
During today’s 7:00am EDT broadcast (heard on WTOP radio in Washington, DC), your anchor reported – in the now-ubiquitous ominous tone – that the number of children admitted, with Covid, to hospitals since the arrival of the Delta variant “has increased five-fold.” This figure, alas, was presented without context. So allow me to serve as your unpaid research intern by providing such context.
Hospital admissions of Americans with Covid ages 0-17 were indeed approximately five times higher in mid-September 2021 than in mid-July 2021. Sounds terrifying! But the terror fades when we discover that the absolute number of such hospital admissions went, during this two-month period, from just over 70 to just shy of 400.*
There are in America today 72.7 million persons ages 0-17. Thus, the percentage of such Americans who were admitted to hospitals at the peak of Delta-variant hospitalizations (mid-September 2021) – that is, as a result of the “five-fold increase” sparked by the Delta variant – is 0.00055.
Now let’s compare the number of American children admitted with Covid to hospitals in mid-September 2021 with the number of American children hospitalized for other causes. In 2012 – the latest year for which I can find good data – the number of American children (excluding newborns and pregnant girls) hospitalized for the top eight reasons was 1.4 million. On average, then, during any day in 2012, the number of children who were hospitalized for one or more of these eight reasons was approximately 3,836. Because there’s no reason to believe that 2012 was an unusual year, the upshot is that the percentage of American children daily admitted to hospitals at the peak of the five-fold increase sparked by the Delta variant is only about 10 percent of the number of children normally hospitalized in the U.S. during any typical day.
Therefore, the hyped ‘five-fold increase’ in children admitted to hospitals with Covid as a result of the Delta variant is a true statistic used by you to create a grotesquely false impression.
Are you not ashamed to peddle panic porn?
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
* In 2021 there are 72.7 million Americans ages 0-17. Data from the CDC show that in July 2021 approximately 0.1 of every 100,000 such Americans were admitted, with Covid, to hospitals. In mid-September 2021, approximately 0.5 of every 100,000 such Americans were admitted, with Covid, to hospitals. (Such hospital admissions have since fallen.) Hospital admissions of 0.1 of every 100,000 American children translates into hospital admissions of approximately 73 such Americans. Hospital admissions of 0.5 of every 100,000 American children translates into hospital admissions of approximately 364 such Americans.
Some Covid Links
The Wall Street Journal published comments from several college students who are frustrated with the irrationality of their universities’ Covid restrictions. Here’s one of the students:
Singing is a gift, but during the pandemic it became a privilege. I joined my school’s Women’s Chorale during the second semester of last year. On the first day of rehearsal, we measured 10-foot distances to mark spots where we would sing, with masks on, in the concert hall. We could sing for only an hour, and in the fall the chorale had to sing outside—still 10 feet apart, with masks on. By the end of the spring semester, that became six feet apart, and instead of a concert, we recorded our songs with a sound guy who said “OK” at the end, in place of applause.
Fast-forward to last Friday night, when I sang in my first concert in two years before a full audience. Granted, we wore masks, but we stood next to each other, and the applause and seeing friends in the audience were well worth it.
At the beginning of the school year, we were able to sing without masks. But then my school flip-flopped due to government restrictions. The back-and-forth due to the amount of Covid cases on campus is giving us whiplash. When we sing with masks on stage, we look indistinguishable and impassive. We shouldn’t lose sight of how strange it is that the government and the university can now mandate the manner in which we sing.
–Claire Feeney, Wheaton College (Illinois), international relations
The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board criticizes the vaccine mandate madness now afoot. Two slices:
President Biden’s excessive executive action mandating vaccines is causing an equally excessive reaction among some Republicans. See Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s order Monday banning vaccine mandates by private employers. This political vaccine jujitsu is causing real harm to Americans and U.S. social harmony.
…..
Yet even as the U.S. was turning the corner on Delta, President Biden issued his sweeping vaccine diktats, which he no doubt hoped would boost his flagging public support. Polls show that vaccine mandates are popular with most Americans. But Mr. Biden’s mandate has hardened political opposition to vaccines and turned them into another accelerant for polarization.
What was once the land of “keep calm and carry on” could now be the “most frightened nation in the world.” So says Laura Dodsworth, author of A State of Fear: How the UK Government Weaponised Fear During the Covid-19 Pandemic. Data seem to bear her impression out. According to an Ipsos MORI poll conducted in July, an impressive 27 percent of Britons want to impose a government-mandated nationwide curfew of 10 PM—not then in force—“until the pandemic was under control worldwide,” which might be years from now. A not-inconsiderable 19 percent would impose such a curfew “permanently, regardless of the risk from Covid-19.” Presumably, these are people who don’t get out much. While 64 percent want Britain’s mask mandate in shops and on public transport to remain a legal requirement for the duration of the global pandemic, an astounding 51 percent want to be masked by law, forever.
There’s more: some 35 percent want to confine any Briton who returns from a foreign country, vaccinated or not, to a ten-day home quarantine—permanently, Covid or no Covid. A full 46 percent would require a vaccine passport in order to travel abroad—permanently, Covid or no Covid. So young people today would still be flashing that QR code on whatever passes for smartphones in 2095, though they might have trouble displaying the device to a flight attendant while bracing on their walkers. Likewise, the 36 percent who want to be required to check in at pubs and restaurants with a National Health Service contact-tracing app forever. A goodly 34 percent want social distancing in “theatres, pubs and sports grounds,” regardless of any risk of Covid, forever. A truly astonishing 26 percent of Britons would summarily close all casinos and nightclubs forever.Are these just a bunch of fogies who don’t go clubbing anyway? No. In the 16-to-24 age bracket, the proportion of Brits who want to convert Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in London’s Soho into a community lending library, even after Covid is a distant memory, soars to a staggering 40 percent.
…..
In styling their propaganda, health authorities have relied on the sledgehammer subtlety of World War II posters. Indeed, political rhetoric has consistently portrayed the pandemic as a war, called upon Britons’ “Blitz spirit,” and anthropomorphized the virus into an enemy with devious intentions to evade the country’s defenses. The most heavy-handed of the government’s several advertising campaigns—which together have constituted the real “blitz”—was “Look them in the eyes . . . and tell them you’re doing all you can to stop the spread of Covid-19.” Posters showed rheumy patients staring into the camera looking soulfully woeful while muzzled by oxygen masks. These images alternated with exhausted nurses in full PPE regalia. (Their dark, resentful expressions could perhaps explain why, for over a year, so few Britons have sought even urgent non-Covid health care from a service they fund.)
…..
Snitching on your neighbors for violating lockdown measures has been actively encouraged. The majority of English police forces established online forms to report lockdown breaches. Only three days into the first lockdown, the Northamptonshire force alone had received “dozens and dozens” of public reports about, for instance, neighbors who had been out for a second run in one day (more “guidance,” not law). By early April 2020, a full 11 percent of Derbyshire’s 2,300 daily calls were to rat out lockdown flouters. Last autumn, Johnson encouraged local councils to hire citizen “Covid marshals” to bully and harass the noncompliant. (One of Google’s “related searches” when I input “reports on lockdown breaches U.K.” runs “do you get a reward for reporting Covid breaches.”) In a January 2021 YouGov poll, 91 percent of Britons claimed that they would keep following the rules, but 56 percent did not believe that other people would. Sanctimony plus faultfinding equals a formula for “curtain twitchers” on a scale that would make the Stasi proud.
…..
In the main, the only criticisms that brave broadcast journalists have ventured are that lockdowns have not been imposed early enough, long enough, or strenuously enough. “Experts” have been systematically cherrypicked to be as alarmist as possible. Cheerful statistics—hospital discharges of Covid patients exceeding admissions or all-cause death rates dipping below the five-year average for months on end in 2021—never seem to make the news. This spring, when health-care professionals finally received instructions to stop tallying as Covid fatalities patients who tested positive for the virus but really died of something else, media reports were small and quiet. No one asked why moribund cancer patients who simply happened to carry the virus when they died (and who had often been infected in a hospital) were ever counted as Covid fatalities to begin with. It’s perverse, but from the start it’s been hard to resist the impression that, once committed to the narrative of full-blown calamity, the media and the government have both wanted to make the death toll appear as high as possible.
Finally, Gorski and Yamey compare lockdown sceptics to ‘climate science deniers’, insofar as both groups “argue that evidence-based public health measures do not work”. They call for experts to push back against the Great Barrington Declaration by highlighting “scientific consensus”, citing the John Snow Memorandum.
Of course, the pro-lockdown John Snow Memorandum is just another public statement signed by scientists and health professionals. If it constitutes “scientific consensus”, then so does the Great Barrington Declaration. I’m only aware of one attempt to gauge overall expert opinion on focused protection: the survey by Daniele Fanelli.
He asked scientists who’d published at least one relevant paper, “In light of current evidence, to what extent do you support a ‘focused protection’ policy against COVID-19, like that proposed in the Great Barrington Declaration?” Of those who responded, more than 50% said “partially”, “mostly” or “fully”.
Regardless of the exact number of experts who support focussed protection, claiming there is a “scientific consensus” against it is simply false. Long before the Declaration itself was published, manyscientists had proposed some version of precision shielding. In fact, this was basically the UK’s plan until the middle of March, 2020.
On 5th March, Chris Whitty told the Health and Social Care Committee that we are “very keen” to “minimise economic and social disruption”, and mentioned that “one of the best things we can do” is “isolate older people from the virus”.
The GBD, which I wrote, together with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya at Stanford and Dr. Sunetra Gupta at Oxford, argues for focused protection. Rather than a blanket lockdown which inflicts so much harm on society, we wanted better protection of those most at risk – mindful that Covid poses only a mild risk to the young. For saying so, we are smeared as ‘the new merchants of doubt’ – as if scepticism and challenge is regarded by the BMJ as something to be condemned.
The error-strewn attacks in BMJ demonstrate what awaits academics who do challenge prevailing views.
The BMJ article is full of errors that ought to have never found their way into any publication. Here are some examples:
My colleagues and I are described as ‘critics of public health measures to curb Covid-19’. On the contrary, throughout the pandemic we have strongly advocated better public health measures to curb Covid-19 – specifically protection of high-risk older people, with many‘clearly defined’ proposals. The failure to implement such measures, in our view, has led to many unnecessary Covid deaths.
We are described as ‘proponents of herd immunity’ which is akin to accusing someone of being in favour of gravity. Both are scientifically established phenomena. Every Covid strategy leads to herd immunity. The key is to minimise morbidity and mortality. The language, here, is non-scientific: herd immunity is not a creed. It’s how pandemics end.
It says we have ‘expressed opposition to mass vaccination’. Dr. Gupta and I have spent decades on vaccine research and we are all strong advocates for Covid and other vaccines. They are among the greatest inventions in history. To falsely credit the anti-vaccine movement with support from professors at Harvard, Oxford and Stanford is damaging for vaccine confidence. This is unworthy of a medical journal.
Yet somehow a widespread consensus appears to have emerged among the commentariat, reflected in today’s report from MPs, that an earlier lockdown would have saved lives. This appears to be based on nothing more than the thought that if we stopped the spread by locking down, then an earlier lockdown would have stopped spread sooner and so fewer people would have died. That is pretty obviously true, but it ignores the key point that SAGE made so early on: what happens when lockdown is relaxed? Unless you are prepared to keep people locked up forever, at some point they are going to mingle again and the virus will spread. Without including that post-lockdown period in your analysis you cannot say whether earlier lockdown would have saved any lives.
And even if an earlier lockdown would have saved some lives that alone would not be remotely enough to justify it. In 1996 the death rate in the UK was 11 per thousand people. In 2019 it was 9.4 per thousand. That difference in death rates is equivalent, for the UK’s current population, to about 100,000 deaths.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 140 – and is the closing paragraph – of Thomas Sowell’s superb 1984 book, Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?:
People do not change their vision of the world the way they change clothes or replace old light bulbs. But change they must if they mean to survive. No individual (or group) is going to capture all of reality in his vision. If the only reaction to other visions – or uncomfortable evidence – is blind mudslinging, then the limitations that are common to all human beings become, for them, ideological prisons.
October 12, 2021
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 393 of George Will’s 2021 book, American Happiness and Discontents: The Unruly Torrent, 2008-2020 – a collection of many of Will’s columns over these years; (the column from which the quotation below is drawn originally appeared in the Washington Post on July 11th, 2020):
Fascism was entertainment built around rallies – e.g., those at Nuremberg – where crowds were played as passive instruments. Success manipulating the masses fed fascist leaders’ disdain for the led.
DBx: Today, of course, rallies can be virtual, and crowds can assemble on-line.
John Stossel on Covid and the Covidocracy
Despite my appearance in it, this new video by John Stossel on Covid – and on tyranny unleashed in the name of suppressing Covid – is excellent.
The (Il)logic of Vaccine Mandates
I thank my friend Frayda Levy for alerting me to this funny – but also spot-on-accurate – video of JP Sears’s criticisms of vaccine mandates.
A Current Ill-Consequence of Deficit Financing
Suppose, for example, that a majority of today’s citizens-taxpayers in America conclude that it’s a good idea to nationalize the steel industry. Further suppose that a Supreme Court ruling prohibits government from simply seizing steel mills; the Court rules that if government wants to acquire steel mills it must pay market prices for these firms. Finally suppose that upon learning that the market price is $500 billion, Americans today are unwilling to have their taxes raised by this amount for this purpose. If deficit financing were unavailable, the steel industry would remain in private hands.
Deficit financing, however, is available. By borrowing the $500 billion to purchase steel firms, government enables that subset of Americans who support nationalization of the steel industry to achieve their policy goal without having to pay for it. The entire $500 billion will be repaid in the future by citizens-taxpayers not yet born.
But there is nevertheless a burden that emerges in the current period from this deficit-financed policy move – namely, the inefficiencies that immediately arise from the nationalization. The amount of resources consumed to produce each ton of steel rises inefficiently because government bureaucrats have fewer incentives than do private owners to ensure that mills operate efficiently. The costs of this excessive consumption of resources by government-owned steel mills ripple throughout the economy in the form of diminished outputs and higher prices of countless other goods and services.
In this example, nearly all Americans – and even some non-Americans – today suffer an immediate (and ongoing) burden as a consequence of this deficit-financed policy. Some Americans who are so ideologically enamored with the notion of industry nationalization might be content to bear this burden, while many other Americans might remain unaware that the higher prices they experience throughout the economy are a direct result of the nationalization. But the fact remains that, in this example, deficit financing imposes a real burden on the current generation despite the fact that full responsibility for repaying the loan falls only on future generations.
This example of a nationalized steel industry is, of course, hypothetical. But its lessons apply in the real world. For instance, to the extent that government subsidies of farmers and of aircraft producers are funded with borrowed money, similar burdens are created immediately: Resources are diverted from efficient to inefficient uses, causing even today’s citizens-taxpayers to suffer as a result of deficit-financed government programs.
Deficit financing – by enabling people today to free-ride on people tomorrow – allows government to expand its size and reach beyond that which would be obtained if government were required to fund all of its current expenses out of current revenues, with no opportunity for deficit financing. In short, deficit financing paves a path for the unwarranted and wasteful expansion of government activity. Only someone who is convinced that government will undertake only economically worthwhile projects regardless of the means of financing – or someone who doesn’t understand economics – can look favorably upon deficit financing by government.
Russell Roberts's Blog
- Russell Roberts's profile
- 39 followers
