Russell Roberts's Blog, page 223

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Gary Saul Morson warns of the dangers of the politicization of science. Two slices:

To doubt a scientist is not to doubt science. Quite the contrary, personal authority is precisely what science dispenses with, as much as possible. Dr. Fauci’s assertion of authority creates skepticism about all his assertions—legitimately, because the distinction between science and a particular scientist is essential. To be sure, nonscientists often have to trust scientists to inform them what the science has discovered. But that is all the more reason that scientists bear the responsibility of not letting political or other nonscientific criteria affect their explication.

…..

If scientists expect their statements to be trusted, they must themselves be trustworthy in making them. One had better be scrupulously honest before asking people to surrender their own judgment and simply believe what they are told. Scientists should be especially careful not to misrepresent political or policy judgments as being scientific. And they must protest vigorously and loudly when other influential people claim to speak in the name of science while misrepresenting it.

Dr. Fauci admitted that he first stated that masks were ineffective in part because there was a shortage of masks and he wanted to preserve them for medical workers, who needed them most. He doesn’t seem to have considered: Once he shades the truth for a reason of policy, why shouldn’t reasonable people assume his other statements are based on policy considerations rather than science?

Perhaps the clearest sign that a scientist, or anyone else, is misrepresenting science is a confusion of a science with political or social claims that it is thought to imply.

Joakim Book decries Covid security theater. A slice:

Ron DeSantis, the much-hated and much-admired governor of Florida recently said about mask mandates that “Politicians wanna force you to cover your face as a way for them to cover their own asses.” We overreacted, truly, and couldn’t walk it back until saved by a deus ex machina in the form of a medical intervention – and even then, the mask mandates got harsher, for pretty incomprehensible reasons. Whether the vaccines are as effective in every way as their proponents first hoped doesn’t really matter. They were a game-changer that gave politicians a way out, a way not to admit wrongdoing in the first half of the pandemic.

Our political leaders and their bureaucratic underlings made plenty of errors in the last year and more, rooted on by an ever-more authoritarian press and more intolerantly divided electorate. More so the decades before that, with terrible foreign policy decisions (Iraq, Afghanistan), domestic surveillance and inapt and invasive TSA searches, macroeconomic decisions (low interest rate policies, bailouts, invasive financial regulations), health care decisions (affordable care), and many more.

“Even If Requiring People Who Have Recovered From COVID-19 To Be Vaccinated Is Legal, That Doesn’t Mean It Makes Sense” – is the headline of Jacob Sullum’s latest essay.

AJ Kay reveals a real cost of masking. (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

Back to Fauci. This photo is taken from a Disney Channel special on Fauci. (HT Todd Zywicki) As Matt (Boarding Group C) says on Twitter about this photo …

I just finished the Fauci documentary on Disney+ so you don’t have to. Here is what was, for me, the defining image: Fauci at work in his home office, beneath a larger-than-lifesize oil painting portrait of himself.

Some Non-Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy, writing at EconLog, shares new evidence on the perverse incentives unleashed by expansion of the child tax credit. Here’s her conclusion:

The bottom line is that the cost of the child credit expansion isn’t the only or even the biggest concern we should have. Its impact on some people’s willingness to work, marry, and ultimately on intergenerational mobility and child poverty should be front and center of anyone’s concern with this program expansion.

George Will applauds Gordon Klein, the UCLA business-school lecturer who is standing up to the moronic, but dangerous, woke mob. A slice:

When UCLA warned the Anderson School against immediately punishing Klein, the school did so anyway. On June 3, the next day, it placed Klein on involuntary administrative leave, accusing him of violating unspecified provisions of the university’s Faculty Code of Conduct. Antonio Bernardo, dean of the Anderson School, took center stage to preen about his sensitivity. He epitomizes the invertebrate academic bureaucrats who, oozing wokeness from every pore, pander to mobs clamoring for the unethical and hoping for the illegal.

Here’s GMU Econ alum Erik Matson on “Adam Smith and problems with the new paternalism.” Here’s Erik’s conclusion:

To speak of any kind of “paternalism” justly smacks of “parentalism,” of treating others like children, and that brings us to the third problem, the cultivation of self-command. Smith identifies the wide world of social experience as “the great school of self-command.” We learn through error, instances of self-disapproval, and social feedback. We learn to act like adults by being treated like adults, not children; we learn responsibility by having responsibility.

The point is not to say that we can do nothing to help individuals better themselves. It is to say that, at least from a Smithian perspective, we must carry on that conversation in terms other than those proposed by the new paternalists. We should talk in terms that recognise the problems that inhere in claims about regulating affairs that make people better off by their own standards.

Nearly every year after the announcement of the Nobel Prize in economics, David Henderson writes in the Wall Street Journal on the prize winner(s). A slice from this-year’s piece:

MIT’s Amy Finkelstein and other health economists used a natural experiment in Oregon to assess Medicaid’s effect on health. The state government had set up a lottery for people who wanted to get on Medicaid. The economists could be reasonably confident that those who won the lottery wouldn’t be much different from those who lost. So they followed a large number of each and found that getting on Medicaid “generated no statistically significant improvements in measured physical health outcomes in the first two years.”

Wall Street Journal columnist Mary Anastasia O’Grady explains – and applauds – the defection of half of Cuba’s under-23 national baseball team. A slice:

The ballplayers were part of what the regime called its “patriots” team because they were supposed to embody youthful zeal for the communist state. Instead, when they saw freedom, they bolted—though not all at once. First three went missing, and then another three. Later reports trickled in of one here and two there who failed to show up when expected.

The 12th, according to El Nuevo Herald, vanished while on a team shopping trip to Walmart. He could hardly have chosen a more poetic escape from a life sentence of deep privation, disappearing as he did in a big-box store that screams capitalism. Viva la libertad.

Art Carden explores what it means to be “an informed citizen.” A slice:

To the presumptuous statesman and lawgiver, I would add the presumptuous voter–and saying “voters have a duty to be informed so that they vote well” runs into a lot of complications when we consider just how much one might need to know to be “informed.” The epistemic bar for “voting well” is pretty high. While it’s easy to speak in terms of vague generalities like “Poverty is bad,” it seems rather heroic to think voters or the statesmen and lawgivers they elect are well-positioned to cast well-informed, epistemically-justified votes. The sheer complexity of it all suggests that it probably is OK to ignore politics; moreover, political passivity is at least not blameworthy and might even be praiseworthy.

Walter Olson reports on a happy legal development (from, of all places, the Ninth Circuit).

Mustafa Akyol explains why he, as a Muslim, champions liberty.

George Leef busts some myths about student debt. A slice:

But, before the onset of federal intervention to make college “accessible” to everyone, Americans were not undereducated. Much of their skill and knowledge, however, was acquired outside of classrooms—especially through on the job training and apprenticeships. People found ways to optimize their education and only a small percentage concluded that they needed a college degree.

But those who had college degrees were among the wealthiest in the country. Higher education had obviously worked for them, so why not make it available to all?

The reasoning is fallacious.  Just because X is beneficial for some people doesn’t necessarily mean that having X will be beneficial for everyone. If anyone questioned the logic of “college for everyone,” his objections did not deter the politicians from going full speed ahead.

Scott Lincicome draws a brief lesson from Germany on manufacturing, mercantilism, and economic resilience.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 261 of University of Notre Dame philosopher James Otteson’s excellent 2021 book, Seven Deadly Economic Sins:

To develop one’s judgment properly, one first needs the freedom to make decisions for oneself, because judgment, like other skills, must be practiced to develop. But one must also be held responsible for one’s decisions, because it is through feedback – negative or positive, as the case may be – that one learns to correct, hone, and develop one’s judgment.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Writing in the Wall Street Journal, historian Katrina Gulliver recounts her encounter, on a recent cruise in Europe, with utterly irrational Covid-19 restrictions – restrictions that prove that Covid Derangement Syndrome is real and ominous. Three slices:

If you think Covid restrictions are onerous, try going on a cruise, as I did recently. The Adriatic coastline was beautiful, and the staff was lovely, but the Covid rules were jarring. We all had to prove we were vaccinated to board. But the cruise line also required that we submit to a daily PCR test and temperature checks and even wear a tracking device—a small medallion on a necklace, tied in to the ship’s computer. Despite all this, we were told to wear masks in all the ship’s common areas, not only indoors but out and during walking tours ashore.
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In Malta, the law required cruise passengers—even those from Malta—to stay in a “bubble” and not mix with the locals. Our guides had been given strict instructions and even gave us stickers to wear—four different colors, so that if we were inspected we could say we were four groups of six instead of one group of 24. We were all on the same bus! From the guides’ anxiety, it was clear the government took the rules seriously and their jobs were on the line. For me it was both stupid and frustrating.
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Normally on a cruise ship, there would be a lot of socializing and meeting new people. Masking creates a greater barrier than I anticipated. Almost the only time I chatted with new people was in the pool, where we were unmasked.

The lesson that I draw from Wall Street Journal columnist Allysia Finley’s report on how politics interfered with the development of the anti-Covid pill molnupiravir is that government should play no role in medical R&D or approval. A slice:

Mr. [Rick] Bright’s allegation that Trump officials promoted molnupiravir because of ties to Mr. Painter wasn’t borne out. Yet he was hailed by Democrats. Sen. Elizabeth Warren tweeted in May 2020: “The Trump administration ignored warnings from Dr. Rick Bright, the country’s top vaccine scientist, and then fired him after he wouldn’t go along with the President’s reckless push of a miracle cure for COVID-19.” In November President-elect Biden appointed Mr. Bright to his Covid task force. In August the Biden administration settled his whistleblower complaint. According to his lawyer, the settlement covers back pay, temporary housing costs and compensation for distress “associated with the disparaging comments and threats” from Trump officials.

The officials who backed molnupiravir can now claim vindication, but it’s too late for the thousands of Americans who’ve died of Covid-19.

Reason‘s Eric Boehm reports on yet another way that government involvement in health care made the Covid situation worse than it would have been otherwise. A slice:

Unfortunately, CON [Certificate of Need] laws are on the books in more than 30 states. Though they differ somewhat from place to place, the outcomes are the same everywhere: higher prices, reduced supply of medical care, and regulatory barriers for anyone who wants to change that. In South Carolina, for example, the two researchers found that 25 percent of CON applications during a recent three-year period were denied or withdrawn after being submitted. Those applications represented more than $450 million of investment in the state that never occurred because regulators got in the way.

Noah Carl writes about new evidence that supports the policy recommendations offered in the Great Barrington Declaration.

Writing in Spiked, David McGrogan decries a reality that surely has not surprised Robert Higgs. A slice:

Our leaders have become all too accustomed to exercising power in this way since March 2020. Throughout much of the crisis, former health secretary Matt Hancock was able to make laws on the hoof. Perhaps most infamously, Hancock made it a criminal offence to ‘mingle’, via a set of regulations created and passed into law in just two days in September 2020.

Tom Chodor, writing at UnHerd, reports from deep inside dystopian Melbourne, Australia. Two slices:

There are [in Melbourne] the “stay at home orders” which mean that anyone not deemed an “authorised worker” must work from home. For approximately 65% of the workforce this has meant working longer hours as office life seeps into the home. Meanwhile, throughout most of the lockdown, schools have also been closed. The impact has been stark: children in Victoria are already falling behind their peers in the country.

But at least they can play outside again; the Government re-opened playgrounds following a three-week closure in August. For adults, however, there are only five reasons to leave home: shopping for essentials, authorised work, exercise, caregiving and medical appointments. Yet even these luxuries are restricted. For example, only one person from a household can go shopping, once a day. And unless you’re exercising, you must wear a mask outside, even though a number of health experts believe there is no medical basis for this.
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Things are not much better in the city’s economy. Melbourne’s famed vibrant 24-hour city life has been gutted, as workers stay at home and bars and restaurants are closed. The arts and entertainment sectors — an afterthought when it comes to government support — have also been crippled. To top it off, economists estimate that around $1 billion is lost from the economy for each week of lockdown, and one in three small businesses are seriously considering closing. While city life sprang back into life after last year’s lockdown was lifted, there are serious doubts if it can do so again.

In the broader community, too, the institutions that keep society together — the sports teams, community groups and voluntary organisations — are all closed. Mental health experts say people in Melbourne are now up to seven times more anxious, depressed and stressed than before the pandemic, and the number of people experiencing loneliness has increased by 54%. Compared to 2019, calls to mental health and suicide prevention lines in Australia have increased by 40%, with three of Lifeline’s busiest days in its 58-year history coming in August 2021, as lockdown returned to Victoria.

Liz Wolfe rightly insists that NYC strongman Bill De Blasio “shouldn’t treat the unvaccinated as second-class citizens.”

Steve Templeton writes wisely about science and its domain. (HT Jay Bhattacharya) A slice:

More importantly, this cognitive dichotomy applies to everyone, even scientists. That may be surprising to some (including some scientists, apparently), as the media and politicians have portrayed scientists (at least the ones they agree with) as imbued with a magical ability to discern and pronounce absolute truth.

This couldn’t be further from reality. I often tell people that the difference between a scientist and the average person is that a scientist is more aware of what he/she doesn’t know about their specific field, whereas the average person doesn’t know what they don’t know. In other words, everyone suffers from crushing ignorance, but scientists are (one hopes) usually more aware of the depth of theirs. They might occasionally have an idea about how to slightly increase a particular body of knowledge, and sometimes that idea might even prove successful. But for the most part they spend their time thinking about a deep chasm of knowledge specific to their field.

Scientists are often hindered by their own years of experience and the potentially misleading intuition that has developed as a result. In the book Virus Hunter, authors C.J. Peters and Mark Olshaker tell how a former CDC director remarked that “young, inexperienced EIS (Epidemic Intelligence Service) officers CDC customarily sent out to investigate mystery disease outbreaks and epidemics actually had some advantage over their more experienced and seasoned elders. While having first-rate training and the support of the entire CDC organization, they hadn’t seen enough to have preset opinions and might therefore have been more open to new possibilities and had the energy to pursue them.” Experts are also terrible at making predictions, and as explained by researcher and author Philip Tetlock in his book Expert Political Judgement, they are no more accurate at forecasting than the average person. The more recent failures of pandemic prediction models have only strengthened this conclusion.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 14 of the soon-to-be-published 2021 35th anniversary edition of Steven Rhoads’s excellent 1985 book, The Economist’s View of the World: And the Quest for Well-Being:

In any case, private boondoggles have one big advantage over public ones: they don’t force uninvolved taxpayers to pay for them.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 267 of Richard W. Duesenberg’s insightful 1962 article “Individualism and Corporations” (available without charge on-line here) as it appears in Liberty Fund’s 1981 single-volume collection of the New Individualist Review:

A society of men, free to choose individually, and therefore free to make as many successes or failures as there are choices freely made, is definitely greater than the controlled society, limited to the powers and finite qualities of its collective controlling mind.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Reading this report in the Wall Street Journal prompts me again to ask if the advocates of lockdown – including “teachers” unions – will ever apologize for the harm their policies have inflicted on children. A slice:

When the pandemic disrupted schools in spring 2020, educators predicted remote learning would set up many children for failure, especially students of color and those from poor families. Test scores from the first months of remote learning showed students falling months behind in reading and math. This fall, as many students returned to classrooms for the first time after 18 months of disruptions, some teachers have found the learning loss is worse than projected.

New York Times “reporter” Apoorva Mandavilli on Wednesday “reported” that in the U.S. “nearly 900,000 children have been hospitalized with COVID-19 since the pandemic began.” On Thursday the NYT issued a correction: The actual number is 63,000 – a mere 7 percent of the original reported number.

Jeffrey Tucker rightly decries the terrible damage to labor markets caused by Covid hysteria and lockdowns.

Tyler Cowen is rightly critical of what he calls “mask apartheid.” A slice:

I am increasingly disturbed by what I call “mask apartheid.” If you have attended a conference or public event recently, you may have noticed it: The wealthier attendees are not usually wearing masks, but the poorer servers and staff almost always are.

Even if the attendees are wearing masks at the beginning, the masks come off once they start wining and dining — and they usually don’t go back on. Isn’t this a sign that mask-wearing is no longer so essential? At the very least, it sends a mixed message: If you want to be comfortable eating and drinking with your peers, it’s OK to take off your mask — but it’s not OK if you want to be comfortable serving food, carrying heavy trays and describing the dessert menu.

But at least what will kill these people won’t be Covid-19!

Meghan Murphy makes a feminist case against vaccine mandates. Two slices:

Vaccination should therefore be an individual choice. In a democracy, as Steinem points out, people should have the right to make informed choices about their own bodies and health. But far too many feminists and progressives who loudly pronounce their pro-choice politics, vilifying anyone opposed as repressive, misogynist, and authoritarian, blindly support vaccine mandates and the censorship and punishment of anyone critical.

Famed feminist lawyer Gloria Allred recently debated Dave Rubin on the issue of vaccine mandates, arguing on one hand that it is one’s “right to choose” what one does with their body, but that in the case of the Covid vaccine, this doesn’t apply because choosing not to get vaccinated endangers others. Putting aside the fact Allred lacks a basic understanding of how this vaccine works, it is appalling to suggest, as she did, that individuals should lose rights, freedoms, and their employment should they decline the vaccine.

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Either we live in a free and humane society wherein people get to make choices about their own lives and health or we live in an authoritarian society where the government dictates what individuals do with their bodies.

Jan Jekielek interviews Jay Bhattacharya. (Jay is correct to observe that the overreaction to Covid-19 has put the liberal order on “life support.”)

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 215 of Orlando Patterson’s 2000 essay “Taking Culture Seriously: A Framework and an Afro-American Illustration,” which is chapter 15 in Culture Matters, Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington, eds. (2000) (footnotes deleted):

It may be true, as Katherine Newman recently observed, that men “who lack the wherewithal to be good fathers, often aren’t.” But the fact remains that in nearly all other ethnic groups in America, including Mexican Americans with higher levels of poverty than Afro-Americans, and in nearly all other known human societies, including India with its vast hordes of people in grinding urban poverty and unemployment, poverty does not lead to the large-scale paternal abandonment of children. In fact, the best available data show little correlation between job availability and the marriage rate.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Reason‘s Scott Shackford reports on the Los Angeles City Council’s unwarranted Covid tyranny.

Mikko Packalen, rebuking Justin Wolfers, tweets:

If you want to kickstart economic recovery:

1) Rebuke lockdowns, vaccine mandates
-> Important signal for businesses

2) Stop shaming, coercion
-> Trust in elites doesn’t recede further

3) Admit we have no technology to stop Covid spread
-> Strong incentive to get vaccinated

“When It Comes to the Delta Variant, the Kids Are All Right” – so report Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer. (HT Jay Bhattacharya) A slice:

Even older variants are not particularly dangerous for children. According to the CDC, of the 633,786 COVID-19 deaths since the pandemic began in February 2020, 470 were children under 18.

Any child’s death is tragic, but this number needs to be put into perspective. COVID-19 deaths among children last year are comparable to the number of children who die annually in automobile accidents (636 in 2018) and the estimated 480 deaths from flu among the same age group during the 2018–19 flu season. As Martin Kulldorff, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, put it, “We don’t shut down schools in flu season.”

We also don’t shut down schools or keep kids home for the respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, another virus that most kids have had by the age of two—and that kills anywhere from 100 to 500 children under the age of five every year.

Hooray for Elon Musk who, as reported by the Telegraph, “moves Tesla to Texas after ‘fascist’ California lockdown.” A slice:

The Tesla billionaire has been an outspoken critic of some of California’s coronavirus policies, at one stage calling them “fascist”, after they forced the car company to close its plant in Fremont due to lockdowns.

In May last year, Mr Musk sued state officials, claimed Tesla would move its headquarters and threatened to shut down manufacturing in California. Mr Musk moved his home to Texas last December.

Philip Cowley decries Hong Kong’s deranged pursuit of zero Covid. A slice:

She was trying to argue that however grim the quarantine rules might be, life once here is fine and dandy. This might strike you as a bit “apart from that Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?”, but you can at least see her point: if they allow normal life to continue, maybe it’s possible to justify very strict travel restrictions.

Yet life is clearly not normal in Hong Kong, even if we just confine ourselves to the restrictions brought about by Covid. Rather, [Hong Kong’s Secretary for Food and Health Prof. Sophia] Chan’s claim is one of the best examples of the ratchet effect in public policy I’ve seen for ages.

Let’s just take just the things that affect me on an almost daily basis. Mask wearing is compulsory in public, for everyone, even when outdoors. There are limits on group gatherings, with still no more than four people allowed to gather outdoors (although unlike in the UK, say, there has never been any limits on private gatherings). Table sittings in restaurants are also restricted, usually to four, although some places are allowed to go really wild up to six, depending on the extent of staff vaccinations. Tracking entry and exit via an app into any public building or restaurant is compulsory.

Most schools are still not back to full-day provision, even though pupils are now in their sixth term of disrupted schooling, and even when at school there are innumerable restrictions on what they can do. Meanwhile, at home, there is routine compulsory testing of areas or groups. These can involve locking down whole blocks with no warning — so-called “ambushes” — even with the possibility of breaking into your home if you don’t answer the door.

And hovering above it all is the ever-present threat of being carted off to a government quarantine centre. Should one of your close contacts tests positive, there’s none of the would-you-mind-awfully-staying-at-home-please attitude here. Instead, you get picked up, with almost no notice, and chucked in a room in a quarantine centre for up to three weeks, just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

A full year after we were assured that, in calling for an end to lockdowns, the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration were attacking a straw man, the straw man now haunts New Brunswick, Canada:

In response to a rapid rise of cases over the previous month in the Canadian province, the New Brunswick government declared that in certain health zones of the province — including two that are located along the border with Maine — people must limit their private contact to their own households for two weeks beginning Friday.

The report on the New Brunswick straw man continues:

The number of active cases in New Brunswick was 775 as of Wednesday, including 71 cases reported that day. After having some of the lowest case counts in North America, the province has seen a large increase in cases over the past month. The province also announced another death from the virus in the province on Wednesday, a person in their 90s, who died in the Moncton area.

“Hearing of another death in our province from this virus is heartbreaking, and my sympathies are extended to the family,” said Dr. Jennifer Russell, chief medical officer of health for New Brunswick. “The measures we have put in place are aimed at reducing the spread, and we need every person in New Brunswick to follow them to combat the virus. Please do your part, get vaccinated and follow the Public Health measures.”

DBx: Note that the population of New Brunswick is just shy of 800,000, while the total number of deaths in this Canadian province attributed to Covid-19 is 72 – 0.0093 percent of the New Brunswick population.

A sure symptom of Covid Derangement Syndrome is using the death from Covid of someone in his or her 90s as part of the justification for tyrannical restrictions on people’s ordinary affairs.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 11 of the soon-to-be-published 2021 35th anniversary edition of Steven Rhoads’s 1985 book, The Economist’s View of the World: And the Quest for Well-Being:

The opportunity cost to society of taking from expanding industries the scarce investment capital needed to modernize declining textile and apparel industries is likely to be so high that the use of antiquated machinery by declining firms is perfectly efficient. Declining industries are always a sorry sight. Individuals who have not studied economics tend to blame the plight of such industries on their antiquated equipment and on the shortsighted management responsible for it. Economists see the equipment as the effect rather than the cause of the industry’s decline.