Russell Roberts's Blog, page 225
October 5, 2021
Some Covid Links
The Great Barrington Declaration (GBD), authored by Sunetra Gupta, University of Oxford, Martin Kulldorff, Harvard University, and Prof. Jay Bhattacharya, Stanford Medical School, is marking its one-year anniversary this week.
The Declaration is built around the concept of focused protection – using resources to protect people in the society most at-risk from COVID while avoiding the large-scale social and economic consequences of “one-size-fits-all” lockdowns.
J.D. Tuccille argues persuasively that “Vaccine hesitancy can, in part, be laid at the feet of experts who betrayed the public’s trust.” Another slice:
To large numbers of Americans, it’s obvious that many of the people issuing public health dictates base their proclamations not on science but on their personal biases. Those seeking actual medical guidance, or who entertain different values, might feel perfectly justified in ignoring public health officials who reveal themselves as just another class of activists.
“COVID-19 Cases, Hospitalizations, and Deaths Fell Significantly in September.”
Anthony Fauci’s verbal emissions are a dangerous virus. When will a vaccine protect us from this scourge? See Jay Bhattacharya on Twitter:
In Tony Fauci’s zero-COVID fantasy land, it is always winter but never Christmas.
Is long Covid being overblown? A slice:
But could such a broad array of symptoms indicate instead that many youngsters are showing signs not of long Covid, but of psychological distress?
Dr Michael Absoud, a reader in the Department of Women & Children’s Health at King’s College London, says that a “most striking” finding from the CLoCk study is that children who had contracted Covid had the same levels of fatigue scores as children who had tested negative for the virus.
As well as fatigue, both groups of children shared another thing in common, high levels of emotional symptoms, with 40 per cent saying they felt worried, sad or unhappy, regardless of whether they had been infected or not.
Here’s yet another disheartening report from dystopian Australia. A slice:
Much like George Orwell’s Big Brother, Chairman Dan [Andrews] also uses fear and intimidation to enforce compliance. The virus is described as a deadly beast, any criticism is condemned as selfish and dangerous and Victorians are forced to live under a constant state of emergency where freedom no longer exists.
Neighbours, families and friends are pressured to dob one another in for any offence, no matter how trivial, police have to power to invade your home and much like communist-dominated Hong Kong riot police fire rubber bullets and use truncheons and tear gas against protestors.
Ramesh Thakur continues to protest against the terrible tyranny that now reigns in Australia. A slice:
The weekend papers included what looks like a ‘sponsored content’ special report on vaccination rollout. The lead article was by Lt.-Gen. John Frewen, coordinator general of Operation Covid Shield. I have the highest respect for the military profession but I am troubled by the increasing militarisation of Australian public life, including successive former generals as Governor-General. Judging by Frewen’s article, the military academies may be mistakenly prescribing Orwell’s 1984 as a training manual. In order to regain our freedoms – to eat out, go to a hairdresser, see a family member (this is his order of listing them) – so we can return to pre-Covid normal, Frewen instructs us, with no hint of irony and self-awareness, we must all get jabbed. Other articles in the special report foreshadow multiples apps to show our immunisation status to different governments and airlines as part of the new ‘ask, tell and fly’ Covid normal that violates all pre-Covid strictures against accessing private medical history. Professor Margie Danchin speaks in cliched generalities that for kids, ‘we think that the benefits of vaccination outweigh the small risks’. She quantifies the risk of myocarditis and pericarditis in 12-24-year-old boys as 30-70 per million but not the mortality risk from Covid. A Stanford University team calculated the mortality rates by age groups in a WHO-peer reviewed study published in July that gave an estimate of 27-140 deaths per million for 0-29 year olds. In the US a major study last month found that ‘teenage boys are six times more likely to suffer from heart problems from the vaccine than be hospitalised from Covid-19’.
Responding to this New York Times report on New Zealand’s abandonment of its deranged pursuit of “zero Covid,” Phil Magness writes on Facebook:
We are about to see first hand that when the ZeroCovid fanatics touted Australia and New Zealand as “success stories” in taming the virus, what they really meant to say was China – and China-style lockdown totalitarianism.
A few of them such as Sam Bowman occasionally let that slip through, and then got really mad at anyone who pointed that out. But now that Australia and New Zealand have let their own totalitarian impulses lead for the last several months, all for naught at controlling covid, the number of remaining “success stories” is dwindling down to totalitarian states like China that also conveniently happen to manipulate their own health statistics.
Yesterday I noted that, 18 months after the start of the pandemic, a sizeable chunk of Americans stilldramatically overestimate the risks of COVID. In a recent poll, more than one third said the risk of being hospitalised if you’re not vaccinated is at least 50%.
Of course, you’d expect some people to get the answer wrong just because we’re dealing with a small quantity, and there’s always going to be some degree of overestimation. But many people were off by a factor more than 10. What accounts for this?
Interestingly, Democrat voters’ guesses were much higher than Republican voters’ – about twice as many Democrats said the risk of being hospitalised if you’re not vaccinated is at least 50%. This suggests a role for ideology.
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Democrat voters, who’ve spent the pandemic consuming media like MSNBC, CNN and NPR, will recall numerous incidents of pundits saying that COVID is extremely dangerous, and we have to do whatever we can to stop the spread.
They will also recall that they were locked down for months, that their kids’ schools were closed, and that they had to wear a mask whenever they went to the grocery store.
Putting all this information together, they will tend to assume that the risk of being hospitalised from COVID is extremely high. ‘Why else,’ they might ask, ‘would there have been so many restrictions?’
Note: Republicans also overestimated the risk of being hospitalised from COVID, albeit to a lesser extent than Democrats. This indicates that people’s skewed risk perceptions cannot be blamed solely on the content of left-wing media (or the policies implemented in ‘blue’ states).
The psychological quirk that may account for people’s skewed risk perceptions has a name in psychology: the availability heuristic. As Steven Pinker notes, “people estimate the probability of an event or the frequency of a kind of thing by the ease with which instances come to mind”.
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We can agree it’s bad if people underestimate the risks. But it’s also bad if they overestimate the risks. We want them to have the right risk perceptions. That way, they can make informed decisions.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 3 of Deirdre McCloskey’s excellent 1990 book, If You’re So Smart: The Narrative of Economic Expertise:
Economic snake oil sells, in other words, because the public wants it. The public wants it because of the fears that magicians and medicine men have always assuaged and because the public does not know the limits on economic storytelling. The economists, even many who do not look to a career in selling snake oil, are disabled by their training from knowing the limits. They do not know they are telling stories and therefore cannot distinguish good stories from bad.
DBx: All theories are stories. And good theories are stories that improve – stories the telling of which deepen or widen (or both) – the storyteller’s and his or her audiences’ understanding of reality.
October 4, 2021
Some Covid Links
if we had paid attention to history, we would have known that once a disease becomes newsworthy, science gets distorted by researchers, journalists, activists and politicians eager for attention and power—and determined to silence those who challenge their fear-mongering.
Here’s another slice from Tierney’s superb WSJ essay:
When AIDS spread among gay men and intravenous drug users four decades ago, it became conventional wisdom that the plague would soon devastate the rest of the American population. In 1987, Oprah Winfrey opened her show by announcing, “Research studies now project that 1 in 5—listen to me, hard to believe—1 in 5 heterosexuals could be dead of AIDS in the next three years.” The prediction was outlandishly wrong, but she wasn’t wrong in attributing the scare to scientists.
One early alarmist was Anthony Fauci, who made national news in 1983 with an editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association warning that AIDS could infect even children because of “the possibility that routine close contact, as within a family household, can spread the disease.” After criticism that he had inspired a wave of hysterical homophobia, Dr. Fauci (who in 1984 began his current job, as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases), promptly pivoted 180 degrees, declaring less than two months after his piece appeared that it was “absolutely preposterous” to suggest AIDS could be spread by normal social contact. But other supposed experts went on warning erroneously that AIDS could spread widely via toilet seats, mosquito bites and kissing.
Robert Redfield, an Army physician who would later direct the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the Covid pandemic, claimed in 1985 that his research on soldiers showed AIDS would soon spread as rapidly among heterosexuals as among homosexuals. He and other scientists became much-quoted authorities for the imminent “heterosexual breakout,” which was proclaimed on the covers of Life in 1985 (“Now No One Is Safe from AIDS”) and the Atlantic in 1987 (“Heterosexuals and AIDS: The Second Stage of the Epidemic”).
In reality, researchers discovered early on that transmission through vaginal intercourse was rare, and that those who claimed to have been infected that way were typically concealing intravenous drug use or homosexual activity. One major study estimated the risk of contracting AIDS during intercourse with someone outside the known risk groups was 1 in 5 million. But the CDC nonetheless started a publicity campaign warning that everyone was in danger. It mailed brochures to more than 100 million households and aired dozens of public-service announcements, like a television ad with a man proclaiming, “If I can get AIDS, anyone can.”
Writing at National Review, Dr. Joel Zinberg correctly points out that (as the headline to his piece describes the situation) “Journalists Face Disaster as COVID-19 Deaths Drop.” (HT Michael McAuley) Two slices:
The COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. is ebbing, but you would never know it from the headlines. Bad news, accurate or not, sells. And in the case of COVID-19, it also supports the journalists’ prejudices.
The seven-day moving average of new COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations peaked and started to decline in early September. Nationwide, COVID-19 hospitalization rates have decreased 17 percent over the past two weeks. Only 19 states had any increase, and many were small. The remaining 31 states and the District of Columbia saw hospitalization rates decline. But that hasn’t stopped journalists from publicizing localized exceptions to the good news.
A recent article, for example, starts with the statement, “Coronavirus patients are flooding and straining hospitals across the U.S.” and goes on to describe how some states are promulgating “crises standards of care” to guide health-care providers on how to allocate limited resources. The article cites as evidence high ICU utilization, ranging from 77 percent to 90 percent of capacity, in seven states: Alabama, Alaska, Georgia, Idaho, Kentucky, Montana, and Texas.
Yet the most recent government data shows other indicators of pandemic severity and health-care capacity look pretty good in those seven states. New COVID-19 hospital admissions per 100 beds were lower compared with the previous week in five of the states, with only small increases in Idaho and Montana. New COVID-19 cases per 100,000 population were lower in Georgia and Texas and essentially unchanged in Idaho. Test positivity rates (a rough indicator of how widespread disease is and how quickly it is spreading) were lower in all the states other than Montana. New COVID-19 deaths — a lagging indicator — were up in four states, down in another and unchanged in Georgia and Texas, which both showed declines in the three other indicators.
The ICU capacity figures cited in the article also lack context. What is the normal utilization level for the ICUs in those states? Most trauma-center and tertiary-care-center ICUs routinely functioned at 80–90 percent of capacity even before the pandemic. And ICU beds are not a static resource.
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Yet, while the unvaccinated may be foolish or misinformed, there is little evidence they have crowded out others. Some people delayed necessary care during the pandemic, but that was usually the result of fear, exacerbated by stay-at-home orders and other lockdown measures. Few if any people were unable to obtain emergency care if they sought it out.
Anyone who has worked in a hospital knows that ICU beds are a scarce resource and that ICU physicians often need to choose which sick patients get available beds and which do not. Perhaps the pandemic has made these choices more acute in limited locations for limited amounts of time. But triaging ICU patients is not a new phenomenon.
Distorting the news to censure the unvaccinated is unhelpful and unwarranted. The unvaccinated are primarily harming themselves. Unfortunately, many media outlets are misleading us all.
Northwestern University law professor John McGinnis critically analyzes recent eviction moratoria. Here’s his conclusion:
The prospect of future moratoriums makes investing in rental property less attractive and so there will be less demand for the property and consequently less housing will be built. Thus, while the eviction moratorium may help some people in the short term, it will hurt many in the same class in the long term and increase homelessness as well.
The larger lesson of eviction moratoriums is that the Constitution’s decisions to protect vested rights and property against democratic abrogation is morally and economically sound. The Constitution is designed in the words of Justice David Brewer to protect Peter Sober against Peter Drunk. In reviving the original meaning of the Contract Clause, the Court would create a steadier and more prosperous polity in the long run.
Steve Templeton writes that “Exaggerating COVID harms in children and their role in disease spread in order to promote vaccination is a harmful and losing strategy.” (HT Jay Bhattacharya). Two more slices:
Unfortunately, it isn’t just masks that have been irredeemably politicized during the pandemic. Public messaging about the susceptibility of children to severe disease and their role in transmission of SARS-CoV-2 were distorted for political purposes and financial gain from the beginning.
For me, this was completely unexpected. I had interactions with friends on social media early on, and I had thought that I could reassure them that evidence suggested their children would be OK. Not only did they not believe me, it seemed they didn’t want to believe me. They had been watching 24-hour cable news, reading The New York Times, and listening to NPR. What I was saying sounded absolutely nothing like what they were seeing, hearing, and reading. I had run into a wall of cognitive dissonance impossible to overcome.
This was incredibly frustrating, because early evidence did suggest that children were not susceptible to severe disease nor were they super-spreaders. The average age of COVID-19 mortality in the northern Italy outbreak was 81, and reports from China suggested children were much less likely to get severe disease. The fascinating DECODE study in Iceland used viral sequencing to determine SARS-CoV-2 transmission patterns, even within families. An investigator in the study said in an interview that “children under 10 are less likely to get infected than adults and if they get infected, they are less likely to get seriously ill. What is interesting is that even if children do get infected, they are less likely to transmit the disease to others than adults. We have not found a single instance of a child infecting parents.”
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When considering the global preponderance of evidence, it becomes difficult to imagine a positive effect from the reported zero to modest benefits of school masking and quarantining of close contacts on school transmission. The real benefits of these measures are unclear despite an onslaught of biased media coverage and politically-motivated messaging by government agencies. Yet the costs of disrupting education are clear. Education and child mental health are more important than a political victory lap for achieving high vaccination rates, especially a victory lap that’s based on exaggerated harms and only the appearance of safety.
“Why universities have disregarded the relevance of natural immunity remains something of a true medical mystery” – so writes Daniel Nuccio. (HT Martin Kulldorff) A slice:
A more plausible scenario is that many [universities and colleges] are shaping policy around the counsel of their lawyers, accountants, and PR departments. By embracing the edicts of unchecked executives, unelected public health officials, and a moral zeitgeist that can be summed up with the maxim “vaccinated good, unvaccinated bad,” they avoid an array of non-medical risks far more effectively than if they independently attempted to develop their own science-based policies.
Amanda Brumwell explains that “The harms of neglecting of non-COVID care will require an extraordinary effort to reverse.” Another slice:
The first among these failures is poor messaging that caused confusion and fear among the general public out of proportion to the relative risk in many groups, discouraging caregivers and guardians from seeking out routine care for fear of infection with SARS-CoV-2. By encouraging the general public to avoid seeking care in order to protect health system generally from theoretical collapse, most public health messaging discouraged actual necessary service utilization while oddly placing responsibility for safeguarding the wellbeing of the health system on the average citizen (Saxena, Skirrow, & Bedford, 2020). Under more common circumstances, it would be expected that the health system would conversely seek to safeguard the wellbeing of the average citizen, including the youngest of these, due for routine immunizations.
Here’s the abstract of Phil Magness’s latest paper, “The Failures of Pandemic Central Planning“:
This study examines the performance of disease modeling during the covid-19 pandemic, and its associated effects upon the public health measures adopted to mitigate its course. Specific attention is given to the failure of the Imperial College model, which severely overstated mortality in 189 out of 189 countries under both its “do nothing” and “mitigation” models, and 170 out of 189 countries under its extreme “suppression” model. The Covid-19 policy response is analyzed as a failure in central planning, with specific attention to the public health dimensions of the same. Public health is identified both historically and in the present day as being acutely susceptible to knowledge problems, which in turn foster the conditions for a public choice trap that causes proposed policy measures to become ineffectual or even counterproductive in disease mitigation.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from pages 42-43 of Thomas Sowell’s October 2001 column titled “Social Security ‘Trust Fund’,” as this column is reprinted (with slight modification, and under the title “Social Security vs. Privatization”) in Sowell’s 2002 collection, Controversial Essays:
When your Social Security taxes get to Washington, they are spent – right then and there. What preserves the illusion of a “trust fund” is that the Social Security system is given government bonds in exchange for the money that Congress takes and spends. But, no matter what kind of accounting sleight-of-hand you use, you cannot spend and save the same money.
Those bonds in the Social Security “trust fund” represent no tangible assets – not houses, not factories, not cars, not trains. They are promises that can be kept only by taxing future taxpayers.
DBx: Indeed.
It’s astonishing how many seemingly intelligent people have been duped over the years into believing that Social Security’s so-called “trust fund” is something more than a mere gimmick meant to fool the public. And it’s at least equally astonishing that so many people continue to look to the perpetuator of this gimmick, the state, as a trustworthy source of protection from fraud, deceit, and financial improprieties.
October 3, 2021
Some Non-Covid Links
David Boaz writes wisely about Washington’s inexcusable fiscal recklessness. A slice:
Back in that summer of discontent I talked to a journalist who was very concerned about the “dysfunction” in Washington. So am I. But I told her then what’s still true today: that the real problem is not the dysfunctional processthat’s getting all the headlines, but the dysfunctional substance of governance. Congress and the president will work out the debt ceiling issue, probably just in the nick of time. The real dysfunction is a federal budget that doubled in 10 years, unprecedented deficits as far as the eye can see, and a national debt (more accurately, gross federal debt) yet again bursting through its statutory limit of $28.4 trillion and soaring past 120 percent of GDP, a level previously reached only during World War II.
We’ve become so used to these unfathomable levels of deficits and debt—and to the once‐rare concept of trillions of dollars—that we forget how new all this debt is. In 1981, after 190 years of federal spending, the national debt was “only” $1 trillion. Now, just 40 years later, it’s more than $28 trillion. Traditionally, the national debt as a percentage of GDP rose during major wars and the Great Depression. But there’s been no major war or depression in the past 40 years; we’ve just run up another $27 trillion more in spending than the country was willing to pay for. That’s why our debt as a percentage of GDP is now higher even than during World War II.
Joakim Book identifies a “fortune of the commons.”
Peter Earle does a deep dive into the global-economy’s supply-chain -web woes. A slice:
Additionally, broader labor shortages arising from the payment of Federal unemployment bonuses have been impacting every link in the international logistical chain. “Many companies,” Business Insider reported, “have fewer workers [now] than before the pandemic started but face significantly more work due to the boom in demand for goods.”
My Mercatus Center colleague Adam Thierer explores the revival of analog-era media.
Daniel Hannan correctly argues that “price controls always do the opposite of what they intend.” A slice:
Walter Williams, the great African-American economist who died last year, once said: “Most of the great problems we face are caused by politicians creating solutions to problems they created in the first place.” Sadly, his aphorism holds true across most ages and most nations.
For some reason, this argument is habitually dismissed as “dogmatic” or “ideological”. People who oppose price controls, rent controls and other forms of economic dirigisme are painted as doctrinaire Thatcherites, more interested in the sanctity of contract than in the welfare of the masses.
In fact, it is the other way around. Free-marketeers hold beliefs that seem counter-intuitive but that turn out to work in practice. Most people, coming new to the subject, assume that lower prices are a way to help the poor – or, at least, to ensure that resources are not monopolised by a few oligarchs. But the most cursory study of history shows that the opposite is true. Price-fixing causes shortages, making everyone worse off – though the rich are usually more able to find ways around the rules.
The story of capitalism is the story of the progressive enrichment of ordinary people through falling prices. Specialisation and competition mean that goods and services become cheaper, thus allowing people to live at a higher standard while working shorter hours. As the great economist Joseph Schumpeter observed in 1942, “the capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort.”
Some Covid Links
These eviction moratoriums were dropped into place with virtually no public discussion of the limits of bureaucratic power, the rights of private property holders, the unintended consequences, or any other ramifications of such moves. Governments simply asserted that they had these powers and then used them.
The moratoriums—like so many other extreme COVID-era measures that were supposed to be an emergency stopgap—soon became a seemingly permanent feature of public policy. In the initial months of the pandemic, 43 states adopted some form of eviction restriction, according to the Eviction Lab at Princeton University. By September 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), leaning on a novel, near-limitless interpretation of its own powers, put a national moratorium in place. States could still implement their own eviction bans, but only if they were stricter than what existed at the federal level.
Those who have had #COVID and do not want the vaccine are not anti-vaccine. They simply understand science and natural acquired immunity.
Here’s another report of the cruelty and suffering that inevitably spring from a single-minded focus on avoiding one particular risk. (HT Jay Bhattacharya) A slice:
It can not be easy to measure the impact of isolation, while we can not avoid data on COVID cases, rates of infection, and the models they breed. The isolation experienced by special-needs individuals, like that visited upon so many of society’s vulnerable through pandemic restrictions, receives little attention because those touched by it are unable to speak effectively for themselves. I can not imagine that the officials who made the decisions that closed special-needs programming thought carefully about how much damage their decisions would cause to individuals around the world. All I can hope is that one day, those responsible for decisions that have unleashed such isolation will take advantage of the solitude that life offers to reflect fully on what they have wrought.
Matthew Ratcliffe explains “how lockdowns eclipse the harms they cause.” Three slices:
What else could have been done? It was never a case of imposing “lockdowns” (a term I employ here to refer to combinations of (a) stay-at-home orders, (b) school- and university-closures, and (c) closure of non-essential shops and hospitality) or doing absolutely nothing. One alternative would have been to adopt a more discerning approach, focusing our efforts upon protecting and supporting vulnerable people (instead of, e.g., discharging thousands of untested hospital patients directly into care homes). But, regardless of what else we might have done, did the benefits of lockdowns at least outweigh the harms inflicted? Let us suppose for the sake of argument that lockdowns (or, at least, some of them) did succeed in significantly reducing the number of virus deaths. Before endorsing such measures, it remains important to consider the many harms they cause, including deaths due to a variety of other causes. However, the costs of lockdowns have received remarkably scant attention throughout the pandemic. Of course, there are regular snippets in the news, regarding one or another actual or potential harm associated with them, but these need to be scrutinized systematically and in detail—only then do we get to see the full picture.
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The task of evaluating lockdowns, of identifying and responding to matters of importance, posed a distinctive challenge. Lockdowns profoundly disrupted the very frameworks of values, commitments, concerns, projects, habits, expectations and relationships relative to which the significance of unfolding events is more usually grasped. Previously taken-for-granted political values concerning liberty and autonomy were turned on their heads overnight: citizens of democratic countries were punished for straying more than a few miles beyond their homes, forbidden from kicking balls in parks with their children, publicly shamed for taking walks in the countryside, arrested for going surfing at public beaches, and even had masks forced onto their faces by police officers. Established moral standards underwent a similar upheaval. Depriving people of the opportunity to be with loved ones during their final days and hours was now the right thing to do, even as thousands of care home residents and hospital patients died lonely, frightened and confused. Children were prohibited from seeing their friends, confined to their homes (which, for many of them, were small flats with no outdoor space), allowed out no more than once per day (for exercise, not play!), with significant risk of serious harm in the guise of mental health problems, neglect, abuse, impaired social and emotional development, and loss of educational opportunities. Women had to give birth without the support of partners, family members or friends, leaving many of them traumatised. The unthinkable became not only acceptable but obligatory. Then there were all of the usual routines, through which we encountered the little things that mattered to us during the course of our daily lives—the walk to the shop; morning coffee with a friend; the journey to work; regular visits to an elderly relative. On top of this, many of those projects that gave people’s lives short- or longer-term meaning and structure were lost, suspended, curtailed, or substantially altered—getting married; starting or developing a business; studying for a university degree and graduating; doing one’s A-levels; visiting relatives overseas; training to be a pilot; participating in community groups.
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Human beings are not objects that can be stored away for a while, remaining unaltered until they are re-activated. Human life is a process of pursuing meaningful life possibilities, which fit together as parts of a larger, temporally organized pattern. Many of us experienced not just the suspension, but the irrevocable loss, of possibilities that were profoundly important to us. For some, this involved losing whole networks of goals and values that were central to the structures of their lives, to who they were and to who they aspired to be. There are certain possibilities that cannot be taken away from someone while leaving their identity intact. For instance, being a musician may be more than just something that a person does; it may be central to the kind of person they are and also to their sense of being a particular, distinctive person. As other survey respondents wrote: “terrible grief and mourning for my lost ‘life’”; “grief over the future life that is no longer likely to be available”; “I feel a great sense of loss over things which have given me pleasure and confirmed my sense of self throughout my life. They’re absent now and may not return soon, if at all (singing in choirs, performing, rehearsing)”. A full appreciation of the costs of lockdowns needs to somehow factor in and evaluate the cost of depriving people of their social identities in this manner, inhibiting their ability to be who they are and pursue possibilities central to their lives.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 101 of my late Nobel-laureate colleague James M. Buchanan’s 2005 book, Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative: The Normative Vision of Classical Liberalism:
Persons, whether they be scientists, moral philosophers or ordinary folk, can be roughly classified into two sets – those who are described as having a liberal predisposition and those who do not. And by a “liberal predisposition” I refer, specifically, to an attitude in which others are viewed as moral equals and thereby deserving of equal respect, consideration and, ultimately, equal treatment.
DBx: All ideologies other than that of (classical) liberalism have at their cores the notion that some individuals – either by birth, by battle, by anointment, or by appointment – are entitled to command other individuals. Of course, all adherents to these other ideologies have no doubt that such commands are necessary for the greater good. Only true liberals seriously question the necessity of such commands, and fear such commands even on those rare occasions when liberals concede that commands might be worthwhile.
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Jim Buchanan (1919-2013) was born, in Tennessee, on this date 102 years ago.
October 2, 2021
Some Non-Covid Links
. A slice:
China’s population has likely crested, and will begin falling. India will take over as the world’s most populous country. The PRC is at risk of growing old before it grows rich, with a fertility rate that barely budged after abandonment of the coercive “one child” policy. This system resulted in a rapidly aging population that has turned a worker surplus into a dearth, and leading to a socially destructive shortage of women. Beijing has found no solution to counteract decades of counterproductive social engineering.
China’s economy remains heavily politicized, with rising party interference in business decision-making, a disproportionate role for inefficient state enterprises, significant examples of bad debts being concentrated in state banks, overbuilt and overpriced real estate and stock markets, and a host of other institutional weaknesses. The Xi government’s determination to harness private economic gains for regime advantage threatens the country’s economic foundation.
Robert Anthony Peters bemoans the loss of freedom in Hong Kong.
From David Simon’s latest essay:
To fuel the faster economic growth needed to lift more out of poverty and increase prosperity, the number of employment-based immigrants admitted each year should be substantially increased (without diminishing the number of immigrants in other categories) to one million each year.
About vaping, the FDA – so reports Jacob Sullum – ignores important data.
Steven Greenhut decries Joe Biden’s criticism of tax havens.
Jim Dorn critically analyzes the case for using central banks as tools to ‘address’ climate change.
The DOJ lawsuit is likely to fail under the prevailing consumer benefit standard. But other businesses are now on notice that antitrust will be wielded as a regulatory weapon no matter the evidence.
J.D. Tuccille is correct: Universities today are boiling cauldrons of noxious intolerance. A slice:
“American faith, it turns out, is as fervent as ever; it’s just that what was once religiousbelief has now been channeled into political belief,” Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institution argued earlier this year in The Atlantic. “Political debates over what America is supposed to mean have taken on the character of theological disputations. This is what religion without religion looks like.”
But universities are supposed to be centers for exploring ideas and expanding knowledge, not for establishing the one, true faith. When their denizens become convinced they’ve found “the real moral truth,” as Brocic and Miles put it, that leaves little room for their original missions, or for dissenters.
“66% of students report some level of acceptance for speaker shout-downs (up 4 percentage points from FIRE’s 2020 report) and 23% consider it acceptable for people to use violence to stop certain speech (up 5 percentage points),” The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education reported last week of poll results from its 2021 College Free Speech rankings.
Some Covid Links
Martin Kulldorff explains that hospitals should hire, not fire, unvaccinated nurses with natural immunity. Two slices:
We have lived with endemic coronaviruses for at least a hundred years, for which we have long-lasting natural immunity. As expected, we also have natural immunity after Covid-19 disease, as there have been exceedingly few reinfections with serious illness or death, despite a widely circulating virus.
For most viruses, natural immunity is better than vaccine-induced immunity, and that is also true for Covid. In the best study to date, the vaccinated were around 27 times more likely to have symptomatic disease than those with natural immunity, with an estimated range between 13 and 57. With no Covid deaths in either group, both natural and vaccine immunity protect well against death.
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By pushing vaccine mandates, White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci is questioning the existence of natural immunity after Covid disease. In doing so, he is following the lead of CDC director Rochelle Walensky, who questioned natural immunity in a 2020 Memorandum published by The Lancet. By instituting vaccine mandates, university hospitals are now also questioning the existence of natural immunity after Covid disease.
This is astonishing.
Alberto Mingardi reports on the Madrid government’s response to Covid-19.
Philip Pilkington documents some of the damage done to Britain’s economy by lockdowns. A slice:
Market economies tend to be pretty good at getting food on the supermarket shelves and fuel in petrol stations, if left to themselves. That last part is key: if left to themselves. Heavy-handed interference in market economies tends to produce the same pathologies we see in socialist economies, including shortages and inflation. That has been the unintended consequence of lockdown.
When they started last year, what was most striking to me — cursed as I am with an economist’s brain — was that there was no discussion of the collateral damage they would have on the economy, not just immediately but down the line. As the weeks rolled on and it became clear that the lockdown was no one-off intervention, I looked to my Left and to my Right, expecting a phalanx of economists to come out warning of the dangers to the economy. But the cavalry never arrived.
While most of the media has been dishonourably absent from the field during the COVID pandemic, there are signs that as the audience-lure of COVID-porn wanes they are starting to pick up the stories of lives and livelihoods destroyed by the lockdowns.
They won’t be able to resist the stories of battlers living in their cars, or camped-out in the countryside because they can no longer afford a solid roof over their heads having lost their jobs to the jab.
For the last few months, CHOP’s occupancy rate has been at record-high levels, mostly because of non-COVID-19 respiratory illnesses, and mental health crises. On several occasions, the hospital ran out of beds and had to put inpatients in rooms normally used for treatment or postoperative recovery.
The surge is clearly traceable to the pandemic. Children who were hunkered down in relatively aseptic conditions — away from school and friends, donning masks to go out in public — didn’t get seasonal sicknesses last year, but they also didn’t build immunity to those viruses. Now that kids have resumed more normal lives, hospitals across the country are seeing an unusually big, early surge of sickness, particularly respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).
“There’s this concept of an ‘immunity debt,’” Keren said. “Kids haven’t been exposed to these viruses for going on two years, so they are vulnerable. It makes it easier for the virus to spread quicker.”
As Margery Smelkinson says about this situation at CHOPs,
Myopic views and draconian restrictions did not come free. And yet, they persist.
Fascinating debate on masks on children. Pro-maskers @IrwinRedlenerMD, @PatriceHarrisMD and @rweingarten claim belief in science, but ignore scientific evidence, while anti-maskers @TracyBethHoeg and @DrJBhattacharya quote study after study.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 116 of Robert Higgs’s Summer 1998 Independent Review essay, “Official Economic Statistics: The Emperor’s Clothes Are Dirty,” as this superb essay is reprinted in the 2004 collection of some of Bob’s essays, Against Leviathan:
Is this “growing inequality” not a fact? Who really knows? But whether in some purely arithmetic sense it is or not, it would never have been made the basis for public policy proposals to “correct” the situation if statisticians had not constructed “the distribution of income” in the first place. It is hard to imagine another statistical artifact better calculated to feed the fires of envy and political rapacity. Such information is unnecessary for the conduct of a just government but well-nigh indispensable for the operation of a predatory one.
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