Russell Roberts's Blog, page 227
September 29, 2021
Fighting Back Against Panic-Porn Reporting
I heard the report at the top of the 9:00am (EDT) hour this morning on DC’s WTOP Radio.
News Director, CBS Radio News
Sir or Madam:
You reported this morning that Montana hospitals are “overwhelmed” with Covid patients.
Having learned to be skeptical of reporting on Covid-19, I just visited the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’s Public Data Hub, at which can be found up-to-date information on the utilization rates both of hospitals’ inpatient beds and of hospitals’ ICU beds. There I find that, as of today and for Montana as a whole, 72.67 percent of inpatient beds in that state are occupied – meaning that more than a quarter of those beds are unoccupied. As for ICU beds throughout Montana, 76.92 of these are now occupied, leaving well over one-fifth unoccupied. There is here no evidence of hospitals being “overwhelmed.”
But Montana is big. Perhaps there’s overcrowding of hospitals in some locales. So using the same HHS data source, I looked at today’s (September 29th’s) inpatient and ICU-bed occupancy for each hospital in, and within 30 miles of, Montana’s ten largest cities (Billings, Missoula, Great Falls, Bozeman, Butte, Helena, Kalispell, Havre, Anaconda, and Miles City).
Even reading the data in a manner most favorable to your report finds, at most, scant evidence of hospitals in Montana being “overwhelmed.” No hospital reports having all of its beds – either regular inpatient beds or ICU beds – fully occupied. Further, only one hospital – Benefis in Great Falls – has more than 90 percent of its ICU beds currently occupied, while only two hospitals – Benefis, and Livingston Healthcare in Livingston – have more than 90 percent of their inpatient beds currently occupied.
Eighty percent of hospitals in, and within 30 miles of, Montana’s ten largest cities report having at least 20 percent of their inpatient beds unoccupied – indeed, three report having more than half of these beds unoccupied – while 56 percent of these hospitals with ICUs report that at least 20 percent of their ICU beds are now unoccupied.
Do you not suffer professional shame at your misleading, panic-porn reporting?
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
Some Non-Covid Links
For all the talk of getting people out of poverty, this policy will likely backfire. As shown by the work of Robert Doar, president of the American Enterprise Institute – and someone who, having run New York City’s welfare programs from 2007 to 2013, also happens to have a better understanding of this issue than most people who write about welfare – poverty isn’t just about money.
I’ve never seen Man on a Tightrope, but will watch it on the recommendation of David Henderson.
The Biden and House proposals would raise the statutory and effective tax rates to either the highest or nearly the highest in the OECD (see the table below). Both proposals increase the tax burden on domestic corporate investment, reduce the incentive to invest in the United States, and increase the incentive to shift profits and high-return assets into low-tax jurisdictions.
Mike Munger wisely warns against nutzenschmerz. A slice:
The mania for “justice” reached such extreme levels that on December 28, 2020 New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed an order imposing strict penalties—with fines up to $1 million per offense—for any injustice in the dispensation of vaccines. Since the criteria for “justice” were vague, and in fact contradictory, this meant that a large number of perfectly safe doses of the vaccine were intentionally thrown away in the first month, rather than give anyone an undeserved benefit. Cuomo, with the enthusiastic support of the legislature at the time, went so far as to threaten to revoke the medical license of any health care worker who gave a vaccine to anyone not in the priority list, even if the alternative was literally to throw the vaccine away because it spoiled quickly after being opened.
If the memo’s roadmap is followed, there isn’t much in the US economy that the FTC won’t oversee. Khan’s vision is for an agency that prescribes outcomes and processes for the economy. Her memo says the agency will deliver “a fair and thriving economy” for “consumers, workers, and honest businesses.” By this, she means the FTC will make businesses smaller and shape “the distribution of power and opportunities across our economy.”
The traditional American approach is being replaced with one uniformly more bureaucratic, eschewing courts and economic evidence in favor of political judgments. These changes—encouraged by both populists on the right and postmodernists on the left—will make American antitrust more European.
Here from Mark Perry are some revealing charts.
Sally Satel reminds us that authoritarianism is not a trait found exclusively on the political right. A slice:
An ambitious new study on the subject by the Emory University researcher Thomas H. Costello and five colleagues should settle the question. It proposes a rigorous new measure of antidemocratic attitudes on the left. And, by drawing on a survey of 7,258 adults, Costello’s team firmly establishes that such attitudes exist on both sides of the American electorate. (One co-author on the paper, I should note, was Costello’s adviser, the late Scott Lilienfeld—with whom I wrote a 2013 book and numerous articles.) Intriguingly, the researchers found some common traits between left-wing and right-wing authoritarians, including a “preference for social uniformity, prejudice towards different others, willingness to wield group authority to coerce behavior, cognitive rigidity, aggression and punitiveness towards perceived enemies, outsized concern for hierarchy, and moral absolutism.”
The great Bruce Yandle calls out Biden’s scapegoating on inflation. A slice:
Keynes carefully documented the relationship I just described: Governments print money, inflation surges, profits head skyward, and the world points a shaking finger at business leaders. Yes, Keynes used Biden’s favorite word, profiteering, but he went on to bemoan how the blame game caused the public to lose deserved respect for the many business leaders who make markets work for all participants.
Keynes described the besieged business leaders as “now to suffer sidelong glances, to feel himself suspected and attacked, the victim of unjust and injurious laws—to become, and know himself half-guilty, a profiteer.”
Mostly because of inflation.
Biden and his key economic advisors are certainly aware that inflation can be a cruel tax that erodes a weekly paycheck’s purchasing power just as surely as would higher taxes. The administration’s $3.5 trillion spending package is now being pushed partly using the argument that some key provisions will work to reduce lost purchasing power by offering more meaningful federal support for child care, health care, and improved public transportation.
But the administration should also be aware that calling for more spending to calm inflation is like pouring gasoline on an already smoldering fire. Pointing fingers at business leaders and calling them profiteers is music to some people’s ears, but it distracts us from the real source of the problem, and that’s too much printing-press money.
Some Covid Links
The government of New South Wales, Australia, is giving children isolated because of COVID-19 restrictions a small amount of relief. Children will be allowed to form “friend bubbles” with two other children. Those children will be allowed to visit each other in their homes. But only if they all live within 5 kilometers (3.1 miles) of each other, live in the same local government area, and all adults in their homes are vaccinated against COVID-19. Once inside a friend bubble, children won’t be allowed to switch to another.
And here’s further evidence of the reality of Covid tyranny in Australia.
All this suggests that the administration’s statutory reliance on workplace safety is pretextual. OSHA was established to ensure workplace safety, not to act as a “work around” for achieving other political or policy objectives. In Department of Commerce v. New York (2019), the Supreme Court struck down an otherwise defensible census regulation because the Trump administration’s grounds for instituting it were pretextual.
Fact: Someone sitting in a room filled with COVID-recovered people faces a lower COVID infection risk than someone sitting in a room of fully vaxxed people who have never had COVID.
Lesson: Get the vax esp. if vulnerable, but nix the irrational vaccine mandates & passports.
Harvard Business School just shuttered in-person classes due to an allegedly “distressing” surge in “cases” among its overwhelmingly vaccinated student population. Now all students must submit to “surveillance testing” three times a week. The cycle of elite stupidity continues.
TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.)
Thomas Fazi decries Covid tyranny in Italy. A slice:
How did Italy reach this point? Essentially, the Italian government adopted a textbook frog-in-boiling-water approach. The green pass was announced in mid-July, pretty much out of the blue, despite very few hospitalisations for Covid and a vaccination rate well above the European average. When they first came into force on August 6, they were initially limited to indoor restaurants, museums, cinemas and sports venues. Given that it was the middle of the holiday season, and that most restaurants in the summer offer outdoor seating (no green pass required), the impact of the measure was initially rather limited.
But that soon changed. On September 1, the green pass became mandatory also for medium and long-distance public transport, as well as for all school teachers, staff and university students. And just a week ago came the decision to extend it to all public and private-sector workers — a move that caught almost everyone by surprise.
As the rules became increasingly restrictive, opposition to the green pass started growing as well: thousands of people, who were largely vaccine-hesitant, started taking to the streets in several Italian cities. Some demonstrators even went so far as to compare themselves to holocaust victims by wearing Star of David badges, like those worn by Jews in Nazi-era Germany, bearing the words “not vaccinated”.
Such comparisons are ridiculous, but the source of the protesters’ discontent is not. Covid passports — especially when so sweeping in scope — raise serious ethical and political issues. With these changes, we are effectively stripping citizens who haven’t broken any law whatsoever (in Italy, like elsewhere, Covid vaccines are not mandatory) of their basic constitutional rights — the right to work, to study, to move freely. That should give anyone reason to pause and reflect.
Robert Taylor writes that Covid has made Britain “a nation of hysterics. It’s time to get a grip.” A slice:
But what’s happened to us these last 20 months? The pandemic has left us with a collective case of PTSD and an absurd, shared insistence that our lives are under constant mortal threat, leading to a knee-jerk dread that the world’s collapsing. It really isn’t. Or at least wouldn’t if we’d just calm down. It’s all rather un-British and troublesome. If we start running for the hills at something like this, how on earth would we respond to a real crisis?
No serious-minded person is surprised by this finding.
From an unsigned editorial in the Telegraph:
New figures from the Office for National Statistics confirm a trend that has alarmed clinicians in recent weeks. The number of excess deaths is far higher than would be expected at this time of the year and the coronavirus is not responsible.
More than 70,000 additional deaths above the five-year average have been recorded in private homes in England and Wales since the start of the pandemic in March last year. Of this number, just 8,423 – or 12 per cent – involved Covid-19. While some people continue to fixate on the rising number of daily Covid cases it is evident that another health crisis is unfolding connected to the lockdowns and the difficulties of accessing care.
(DBx: But remember, comrades: According to the gospel of anti-Covid, the chief purpose in life – a purpose that supersedes all – is avoidance of SARS-CoV-2. The fact that people are dying because of the lockdowns is of little relevance; the important reality is that these people did not die directly of Covid. For this happy outcome we owe perpetual thanks to the Great Covidocracy!)
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 240 of George Will’s 2021 volume, 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 Newsweek on September 12th, 2008):
The spontaneous emergence of social cooperation – the emergence of a system vastly more complex, responsive and efficient than any government could organize – is not universally acknowledged or appreciated. It discomforts a certain political sensibility, the one that exaggerates the importance of government and the competence of the political class.
September 28, 2021
Asking “Why Don’t You Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is?” Is a Test of Legitimacy
Here’s an e-mail to a Café Hayek reader:
Mr. B__t:
Thanks for your e-mail.
In response to my criticism of Prof. Eric Posner for not putting his money where his mouth is when he asserts the widespread existence of monopsony power in labor markets, you write:
I’ve always found this [response] to be underwhelming. Even if someone accepted the validity of the economic way of thinking, couldn’t someone say using that way of thinking “I agree with you that billions could be made if I invested in this area. However, I’m not interested in doing so and would rather continue in academic research because it makes me happy” or “I find it morally objectionable to invest funds in this particular area, so there is no benefit that can accrue to me by investing in this area” or “I find the benefits to continuing in academic research to be greater than investing in that area to make billions of dollars” or any other variation of these responses?
Of course someone such as Prof. Posner can legitimately wish to remain in academia rather than put his money and sweat on the line in business. I myself am a thoroughgoing academic, as excessively risk-averse as I am utterly unskilled in practical affairs, and as fond of issuing idle philosophical speculations as I am allergic to exposing my body and brain to the grind of commercial enterprise.
What Prof. Posner can not legitimately do, however, is to use his assertion about the alleged availability in the real world of yet-to-be-seized profit opportunities to justify government forcing other people to behave as if his assertion is true. If he’s unwilling – for whatever reason – to put his money where his mouth is, he has no business calling on government to put our money where his mouth is. And were government to intervene as Prof. Posner advises, it would indeed be putting our money where his mouth is.
But my reason for regularly asking persons such as Prof. Posner, and others who make similar assertions, to put their money where their mouths are is not really to persuade them to leave academia and start businesses. Their likelihood of failing in such endeavors is as high as my own – which is to say, nearly 100 percent. Instead, my reason is to reveal that persons such as Prof. Posner do not understand the full implications of their assertions.
If his assertion about monopsony power is correct, it implies that entrepreneurs who do have commercial skills, and who are willing to put these skills to profitable use, stand to profit handsomely by acting on this information about the market that Prof. Posner asserts to be accurate. Yet if no actual entrepreneurs seize the profit opportunities that persons such as Prof. Posner allege to be both real and widespread, only one of two conclusions is possible: Either every entrepreneur alive mysteriously refuses to credit the accurate, profit-laden information that Prof. Posner helpfully unveils to the public, or Prof. Posner’s information isn’t credible – at least not credible enough to serve as the basis for justifying government intervention.
Which of these two conclusions do you think is the more plausible?
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
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 342 of the 2016 second edition of Thomas Sowell’s excellent volume Wealth, Poverty and Politics (footnote deleted; link added):
To say that pay differences between people at the top and people at the bottom have increased over the years means something very different when these are differences between classes than when these are differences between people in different age brackets. When some people are in the bottom quintile for life and others are in the top quintile for life, that is a very different situation from one in which most people move from one quintile to another within a decade. Only 11 percent of Americans 25 years old have been in a household within the top 20 percent of household incomes. But 70 percent of Americans 60 years old have been in such a household at some point in their lives. Since every 60-year-old was once a 25-year-old, increased income differences between age brackets are hardly an injustice to Americans who live a normal life span.
DBx: How many Progressives who preen about their insistence on “following the science” also ignore, when they complain about income ‘inequality,’ this scientific fact? (Methinks many.)
Some Covid Links
Jimmy Licon talks with Jay Bhattacharya.
The terrible spectre of vaccine passports – ‘your papers please’ – haunts Britain.
Jordan Davidson decries the Covidocracy’s deranged and despotic reign on college campuses. A slice:
After purging their enrollment lists of students who refused to comply with the shot mandate, a multitude of universities that boast a 100 percent vaccination rate are still restricting students’ activities on and off campus. Using capacity limits, travel bans, masking requirements regardless of vaccination status, and bolded recommendations barring dining in restaurants and bars, universities such as Amherst College in Massachusetts are implementing their own version of lockdowns on students and staff in the name of curbing future COVID outbreaks.
Officials at Amherst College recently threatened students with “stricter rules” following an outbreak at the nearby University of Massachusetts. The university’s paper admitted that “those infected had experienced mild to moderate illness and were not hospitalized,” but that didn’t stop College Chief of Police John Carter from demanding that Amherst students avoid “significant noncompliance” with the university’s mask mandates and other COVID-19 policies.
Most of these restrictions are indefinite, and the threat of more rules and regulations always looms over students’ heads.
In March 2020 people talked about letting folks with natural immunity return to work, but since then we denied it exists. Truly don’t get it. Marty [Makary] is right
US pandemic strategy
2020: high mortality & collateral damage
2021: high mortality & collateral damage
Common denominator: Anthony Fauci
Peta Credlin decries the loss of freedom in Australia.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 4 of Michael Munger’s 2021 book, The Sharing Economy: Its Pitfalls and Promises (footnote deleted):
Economic revolutions do not care what we think of them. For people who believe they are the centre of the universe, or for technocrats who want to pull strings and push levers to ‘run things’, that can be very disquieting. But failing to understand that economies are organic complex systems can cause problems that make things much worse. These systems have internal dynamics that operate independently of the will of the state, or of any individual for that matter.
September 27, 2021
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 26 of the 2008 third edition of James W. Ely’s important book The Guardian of Every Other Right: A Constitutional History of Property Rights (footnote deleted):
Throughout the revolutionary era, Americans emphasized the centrality of the right to property in constitutional thought. “The right of property,” Arthur Lee of Virginia declared, “is the guardian of every other right, and to deprive the people of this, is in fact to deprive them of their liberty.” Hence, the protection of property ownership was an integral part of the American effort to fashion constitutional limits on governmental authority.
DBx: Pictured here is Arthur Lee of Virginia.
Assertions are Cheap
Here’s a letter to a new and very persistent correspondent:
Ms. S__:
You’re correct that I didn’t blog on Eric Posner’s recent New York Times op-ed on the alleged prevalence of monopsony power in U.S. labor markets. You’re incorrect to infer that I therefore “accept American workers are victims of employer monopsonists.”
First, the New York Times is a roaring Niagara of economic fallacies. It’s impossible for anyone – never mind someone of my modest abilities – to address more than a tiny puddle of these.
Second and more substantively, the assertion of widespread monopsony power fails the smell test.
To back his assertion, Prof. Posner refers to “academic research on labor markets” that allegedly shows that “millions of Americans are paid thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars less than they should be paid.” Well, I can point to academic research on labor markets that shows the opposite, namely, that growth in worker pay has kept pace with growth in worker productivity. (See, for example, here and here.) This finding is inconsistent with the prevalence of monopsony power.
But in practice very few public-policy debates are settled by dueling academic studies. The reason Prof. Posner’s assertion fails the smell test is that it implies that billions of dollars of profits are available in plain sight with no entrepreneurs alert enough to seize these profit opportunities.
Underpaid workers – that is, workers who are paid less than the amounts they contribute at the margin to their employers’ revenues – are akin to underpriced shares of stock. These undervaluations might exist for a short time, but very soon alert entrepreneurs or investors notice and seize them. Just as underpriced stocks are bought in a manner that bids their up their prices, so too are underpriced workers hired in a manner that bids up their pay.
If Prof. Posner, along with the academic researchers he cites in support of the claim of widespread monopsony power are correct, they should stop writing papers and op-eds about the problem and instead start their own companies – companies that will bid away these underpriced workers from their current employers and, in the process, raises workers’ wages. Because in this case there is no good reason why Prof. Posner should not put his own money and effort where his mouth is, the fact that he doesn’t do so tells me that he either does not really believe his assertion or, more likely, that he doesn’t understand just what it is that he’s asserting.
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 2203
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