Russell Roberts's Blog, page 228
September 27, 2021
Some Covid Links
Public health has earned the distrust of minority communities by promoting ideas that have harmed minorities differentially like “essential/non-essential”, lockdown, zoom for public school kids, vax passports,… Experts who argued for these terrible ideas should be ashamed.
More from Jay Bhattacharya on Twitter:
It is irrational and cruel to permit the vaxxed to have liberty while forcing recovered COVID patients with better immunity — often poor, minority, and working-class “essentials” — to the shadows of society.
I say let everyone free.
So what Australia (and New Zealand) attempted was something every scientist has long known to be unworkable in modern times and highly threatening even if it were workable. To be sure, this idea of virus suppression (where does it go?) tempted policy makers the world over. Trump tried something similar in February and March of 2020, and only later came to see the errors of his ways. As bad as the US response has been, we’ve been mercifully spared the fanatical ideology of “zero Covid.”
Not so in Australia. They blocked outward and inward travel. They broadcast all kinds of messages about staying away from people. They closed businesses. Governments monitored social media for anyone straying too far from their assigned area. When they decided to lock down, they went all in. A nation that prided itself on its good government suddenly found itself managed like a vast prison colony.
By the summer of 2020, the country was cheering that they had somehow miraculously defeated the virus. Politicians claimed that Australia was the envy of the world. Their experts had shown the way! The US and the World Health Organization all said that Australia has done a great job. Fauci was full of praise.
That lasted for a few months. The data showing so few cases were helped by a low level of testing. It is actually impossible to know whether and to what extent Covid had been suppressed. Regardless, in the fall of 2020, positive tests began to rise. Then it came to the big cities of Melbourne and Sydney. The politicians took charge, and unleashed hell.
It’s been rolling lockdowns ever since. Protests were at first sporadic, and then more. The Prime Minister got involved and echoed the line of the local governors. The people who are protesting are being selfish, he said. The lockdowns will continue so long as the people are failing to comply, he said, echoing words of a prison guard.
UnHerd‘s Freddie Sayers talks with Bari Weiss, who is actually optimistic about the future. Here’s slice from Weiss’s remarks:
It’s become almost comical in how irrational it [the series of Covid restrictions] is. The idea that I need to wear a mask when I walk into a restaurant, wear a mask, as I sit down at my seat, I am told by the restaurant, that I should only remove it when I’m eating and drinking, but then I’m removing it and sitting in a packed restaurant and lots of other people eating and drinking… At some point down the line, I feel like we’ve lost sight of the science here, and it’s become a lot more about signalling what political tribe you’re a part of.
Sir John Key pleads with his fellow New Zealanders to get realistic about Covid. A slice:
Some people might like to continue the North Korean option. I am not one of them.
Public health experts and politicians have done a good job of making the public fearful, and therefore willing to accept multiple restrictions on their civil liberties, which are disproportionate to the risk of them contracting Covid.
Another problem with the hermit kingdom model is that you have to believe the Government can go on borrowing a billion dollars every week to disguise that we are no longer making our way in the world.
Alexis Keenan reports that “natural immunity emerges as potential legal challenge to federal COVID-19 vaccination mandates.” (HT Todd Zywicki)






Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 163 of F.A. Hayek’s great 1952 book The Counter-Revolution of Science, as this book appears as part of volume 13 (Studies on the Abuse & Decline of Reason, Bruce Caldwell, ed. [2010]) of the Collected Works of F.A. Hayek:
[T]he task of social organisation differs fundamentally from that of organising given material resources. The fact that no single mind can know more than a fraction of what is known to all individual minds sets limits to the extent to which conscious direction can improve upon the results of unconscious social processes. Man has not deliberately designed this process and has begun to understand it only long after it had grown up. But that something which not only does not rely on deliberate control for its working, but has not even been deliberately designed, should bring about desirable results, which we might not be able to bring about otherwise, is a conclusion the natural scientist seems to find difficult to accept.
DBx: Yes – and so for public-policy makers to “follow the science” requires that they follow also the best of the social sciences. And among the very best of the social sciences – namely, scholarship done in the tradition of Adam Smith, Frédéric Bastiat, F.A. Hayek, Ronald Coase, Armen Alchian, James Buchanan, and Harold Demsetz – is economics that shows that there is never for any social ‘problem’ an objective ‘solution’ of the sort that can be discovered or deduced in the same way that, say, astronomers determine when Haley’s Comet will next be visible with the naked eye from earth. It is a scientific fact that there are (as Thomas Sowell says) only trade-offs. This scientific reality, unfortunately, is usually ignored, or even denied, by those persons who bleat most loudly about the need for policy-makers to “follow the science.”






September 26, 2021
Some Non-Covid Links
Joakim Book is always worth reading.
Also always worth reading is Eric Boehm.
And don’t miss this important piece by David Boaz. A slice:
Now, to be sure, it’s a problem for our political economy when people are completely unaware of what a marvel the market system is and how easily government intervention can reduce the abundance it produces. So it’s a good thing at least a few people study economics. And if you do want to know more about supply chains and why they seem to be faltering these days, you can read Ms. Mull at the Atlantic or Scott Lincicome on the Cato website.
Chris Edwards details ten reasons to oppose an increase in taxes on corporations.
Alberto Mingardi mourns the death of Angelo Codevilla.
Matt Ridley gets to the root of Britain’s latest energy crisis. A slice:
Then came the shale gas revolution, pioneered in Texas. A flash in the pan, I was told by energy experts in this country: and ‘could never happen here anyway’. So Britain – whose North Sea gas was running out – watched on in snobbish disdain as America shot back up to become the world’s largest gas producer, with their gas prices one-quarter of ours, resulting in a gold-rush of industry and collapsing emissions as a result of a vast, home-grown supply of reliable, low-carbon energy.
We, meanwhile, decided to kowtow to organisations like Friends of the Earth, which despite being told by the Advertising Standards Authority to withdraw misleading claims about the extraction of shale gas, embarked on a campaign of misinformation, demanding ever more regulatory hurdles from an all-too-willing civil service. Nobody was more delighted than Vladimir Putin, who poured scorn on shale gas in interviews, and poured money into western environmentalists’ campaigns against it. The secretary general of Nato confirmed that Russia ‘engaged actively with so-called non-governmental organisations – environmental organisations working against shale gas – to maintain Europe’s dependence on imported Russian gas’.
Janet Daley argues that “green warriors are on a mission to stamp out prosperity as we know it.” A slice:
This odd mix of childlike sentimentality and economic illiteracy makes no room for the obvious truth: that industrialisation and market economics transformed the nasty, brutal and short lives of most people into something that at least approached the comfort and security that were once the sole property of those who were the inheritors of privilege. This is the quite shamelessly blatant refrain of the most aggressive elements of the climate change lobby.
Pierre Lemieux finds wise instruction in the writings of philosopher Michael Huemer.
Last Thursday, Mr. Biden trundled out to give a speech for his mega-trillion Build Back Better plan. The press says the Biden plan is in trouble with moderate Democrats, which could make or break his presidency, with votes starting next week.
This spending plan may be the whole Biden presidency, but it’s bigger than that. His seemingly run-of-the-mill afternoon speech was a significant statement. It was a public repudiation by Mr. Biden of the U.S. economic system.
Partway through the speech, Mr. Biden felt obliged to assert: “I am a capitalist.” During the campaign he said: “I am not a socialist.” Both statements are false. Joe Biden is not a capitalist. He is a socialist. Democratic progressives don’t like the s-word, which is why they started calling themselves progressives. Bernie Sanders declared himself a socialist so long ago it’s too late to change. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez admits to being a democratic socialist. Fact-check scolds argue the s-word has no meaning in the American political context because no one is suggesting state control of the means of production. Be that as it may, listen to Mr. Biden talk about the system we do have.






Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 552 of the 1988 collection of Lord Acton’s writings (edited by the late J. Rufus Fears), Essays in Religion, Politics, and Morality; specifically, it’s a note drawn from Acton’s extensive papers at Cambridge University; (I can find no date for this passage):
The working class have much more to lose by an inquiry to capital than the capitalist. They are more interested in its security. Because what threatens the one with loss of luxury and superfluity, threatens the other with the loss of necessity.
DBx: This insight is deeply important, although it’s lost on so very many people, both left and right.
Indeed, the point is even stronger than Acton seems to have realized. Taxes leveled on ‘rich’ capitalists likely cause them to reduce their consumption of luxuries even less than such taxes cause these capitalists to reduce their investments. And when capitalists reduce their investments, the amount and quality of capital – tools – that workers work with falls, thus causing workers’ productivity to fall, thus causing workers’ wages to fall, thus causing workers’ standards of living to fall.






September 25, 2021
The Enduring Relevance of Mises’s and Hayek’s Critique of Socialism
Prices arise whenever prospective buyers offer to purchase inputs (including labor services) from owners who have the right to accept or reject these offers. The resulting pattern of prices reveals the prevailing, relative scarcities of different inputs. If the amount of steel necessary to build 10,000 lawn-mower blades is priced at less than is the amount of aluminum necessary to build 10,000 blades of the same quality, the blade manufacturer is not only informed by prices that steel is in more abundant supply for his purposes, the lower price of steel incents him to act on this information. He uses steel rather than aluminum. As my colleagues Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok succinctly note in their textbook, Modern Principles of Economics, “A price is a signal wrapped up in an incentive.”
Importantly, applicability of the Mises-Hayek argument does not kick in only when the economy becomes fully socialized. While it’s true that the greater the extent of intervention the worse will be the resulting economic damage, the Mises-Hayek argument is the general one that all market prices are rich with information – information that is inaccessible without markets – and that whenever government acts to distort or hide this information the economy suffers.
Consider a government that intervenes only by imposing a protective tariff on steel. The resulting higher price of steel tells a lie to market participants; it tells them that steel is less abundant than it really is. If the tariff pushes the price of steel above that of aluminum, the blade manufacturer will produce the 10,000 blades using scarcer aluminum rather than more-abundant steel. Lawn-mower blades are thus produced using an input – aluminum – that ‘should’ be reserved to produce other outputs. These other outputs will either go unproduced or be produced in lower quality.
Yet in an economy as large as that of today’s global market, this lone inefficient use of resources will obviously not quake society’s foundations. Its impact won’t register on even the most sensitive economic Richter scale. Given the size and dynamism of the modern economy, detecting – not to mention measuring – the negative impact of this tariff on overall economic performance would be practically impossible.
While this lone intervention will not, unlike full-on socialism, cause economic collapse, its negative impact nevertheless is real. If the government adds to this protective tariff on steel a subsidy to aircraft manufacturers, the pattern of market prices is further distorted. More resources are used wastefully. More consumer goods and services that would have been produced go unproduced.






Some Covid Links
The latest guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends that schools require all students to wear masks, regardless of their age or vaccination status. But by and large, the studies that the CDC cited to support that recommendation did not even compare schools with mandates to schools without them, let alone “take into account all of these extraneous factors.” When it issued its latest guidance for schools, the CDC’s best attempt at a more rigorous analysis was a large study of Georgia schools published in May, which found no statistically significant evidence that requiring students to wear masks reduced infection rates, even before vaccines were widely available.
In a preprint study posted the same month, Brown University economist Emily Oster and four other researchers analyzed COVID-19 data from Florida, New York, and Massachusetts for the 2020–21 school year. “We do not find any correlations with mask mandates,” they reported. But they noted that “all rates [were] lower in the spring, after teacher vaccination [was] underway.”
David Henderson reports his encounter, on a recent flight, with an officious Covid hysteric.
Now, 18 months of delayed treatments may be starting to take their toll.
Dr Charlotte Summers, an intensive care consultant from Addenbrookes Hospital, Cambridge, told a Royal Society of Medicine (RSM) event this week that patients were arriving at A&E with serious conditions that had worsened during the pandemic.
“There is an increase in non-Covid emergencies that are arriving at the front doors of hospitals from all the delays the pandemic has created already. Things like people presenting later with tumours, and therefore having bowel perforations and aneurysms and lots of other things that were delayed,” she said.
(DBx: But according to the ethical standard that has taken hold since March 2020, these non-Covid deaths are much less worrisome than are Covid deaths. The reason, as we are all now supposed to understand, is that the absolutely worst fate that can befall a human being – a fate incomparably worse than any other – is coming into contact with SARS-CoV-2. Covid and Covid deaths, you see, differ categorically from all other of life’s risks.)
TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.)
Good news from Norway: That country is today ending (almost) all Covid restrictions. (HT Dan Klein)
Dan McLaughlin defends Florida governor Ron DeSantis on the question of quarantining school children. A slice:
He’s right. As he noted, like many of the precautions taken at the beginning of the pandemic, making kids stay home from school if they were merely exposed to someone else was a common-sense response to an unknown, fast-moving virus, but one that was not actually based on scientific study. That’s fine as an initial precautionary response, but it’s not April 2020 anymore, and it is high time we stopped pretending that it is. We have inflicted enough on a whole generation of children already. European schools have not taken precisely the same approach as Florida, but they, too, have long emphasized keeping as many healthy kids in school as possible, and have not had much in the way of outbreaks as a result.
Michael Brendan Dougherty is rightly critical of “the overexposed Anthony Fauci.” A slice:
The one criticism allowed to slip through is a reference to his initial flip-flop on masks. But, even more recently, Dr. Fauci seems to be slipping up more and more. A few weeks ago, he was asked to comment on the video footage of packed southern college football stadiums. “I don’t think it’s smart,” he said. And yet, despite the dawn of football season and the southern states being uninterested in reimposing mask mandates, the Delta wave is collapsing in them. Fauci can read a chart like anyone else and has surely figured out that non-pharmaceutical interventions such as mask mandates make no substantive difference in the seasonal and regional waves of COVID. Surely he’s also noticed that every time someone predicts imminent doom from an outdoor gathering — especially one as unappealing to progressives as the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally — nothing much happens. The expected revenge of cruel COVID on outdoor conservatives never comes. Then again, maybe this is just a case of knowing which battles to fight.
Lenore Skenazy reports that obesity among children has increased in the Covid era.
Lockdowners who pushed for censorship are akin to book burners.
And more from Jay Bhattacharya on Twitter:
Zero-COVID and lockdown are dangerous ideologies. Devout adherents have caused enormous harm.






Some Non-Covid Links
George Leef busts the myth of so-called “market fundamentalism.”
Between 1940 and 1960 the percentage of black families living in poverty declined by 40 points as blacks increased their years of education and migrated from poorer rural areas to more prosperous urban environs in the South and North. No welfare program has ever come close to replicating that rate of black advancement, which predates affirmative action programs that often receive credit for creating the black middle class. Moreover, what we experienced in the wake of the Great Society interventions was slower progress or outright retrogression. Black labor-force participation rates fell, black unemployment rates rose, and the black nuclear family disintegrated. In 1960 fewer than 25% of black children were being raised by a single mother; within four decades, it was more than half.
Also from Vero is this post at EconLog on paid leave. A slice:
Unfortunately, there are two crucial aspects to this issue which the WSJ doesn’t address. First, it doesn’t go to the root of the confusion by debunking the idea that there’s a “failure” in the labor market that is evidenced by the fact that when workers are asked if they would like to get paid leave benefits, without ever being told at what cost they would get it, most workers say they would love to. Yet not all workers receive paid leave. This reality is no more evidence of market failure than is pointing to poll that shows that most Americans would be happy to receive a Tesla for free if given to them and calling the reality that most of these Americans do not have a Tesla a market failure.
The market is a process of exchange through which order emerges, not a static snapshot or outcome of exchange. And so the market shouldn’t be judged by comparing the outcomes of exchange at a certain point in time to the outcomes desired by policy makers or pundits. The fact is in most cases, there is simply a gap between what people think the world should look like and what the world really looks like given the necessity of making tradeoffs.
Art Carden explains that interventions into the price system spread lies.
Alberto Mingardi reviews Chandran Kukathas’s new book, Immigration and Freedom. A slice:
His key argument is as simple as it is powerful: immigration control cannot possibly end at an airport’s security check. Controlling (“governing”) immigration means imposing restrictions upon natives too. They will be less “at ease” in their hiring people or buying things from strangers whose legal status they would not otherwise be interested in knowing. It also means a further increase in red tape and in requiring documents from people, exacerbating an unfortunate trend in contemporary nation states. Kukathas points to a simple and yet often forgotten fact: immigration control means controlling more those who are not immigrants. It means, for example, checking on factories to make sure every worker is documented; to make sure that families are not employing a maid who does not have a regular permit to stay in that country; et cetera.
Eric Boehm reports that “tariffs on Chinese imports have accomplished approximately nothing.”
George Will celebrates the shipping container. A slice:
Although teaching economics to [Bernie] Sanders is akin to tutoring a typhoon, [Gregg] Easterbrook notes that U.S. manufacturing employment, which peaked in 1979, had fallen by 5 million before Chinese imports became significant in 2001. And, “Research conducted by economists at Ball State University in Indiana and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology” shows this net impact of trade with China: “The United States lost about 1.5 million manufacturing jobs — hardly inconsequential, but well less than the minus 5 million manufacturing employment that happened entirely for American domestic reasons.” These reasons include technology-driven productivity improvements and the rise of the knowledge economy.






Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 270 of Michael Fairbanks’s 2000 essay “Changing the Mind of a Nation: Elements in a Process for Creating Prosperity,” which is chapter 20 in Culture Matters, Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington, eds. (2000):
Prosperity helps create space in people’s hearts and minds so that they may develop a healthy emotional and spiritual life, according to their preferences, unfettered by everyday concerns of the material goods they require to survive.
DBx: Indeed so.
People who disdain economists’ talk of allocating resources efficiently – that is, of not using resources wastefully – unknowingly disdain the creation of the very wealth that these people insist is necessary for the lives of the poor to be made better. People who decry the profit motive – that is, the motive that prompts individuals to seek out, discover, and take advantage of opportunities to use resources in ways that produce more wealth – unknowingly decry an indispensable motive for creating the very wealth that these people wish government to use to build infrastructure (and “infrastructure”) and to “redistribute.” People who hold in contempt bourgeois values – that is, those values upon which modern, prosperous civilization is grounded – unknowingly hold in contempt values that are essential to enable individuals to develop genuine and capacious fellow-feeling rather than be consumed only with scratching out an existence for themselves, others largely be damned.






September 24, 2021
Some Covid Links
What’s especially pertinent to this anecdote? New York City has no general indoor mask mandate currently in force. Nor does it require social distancing. All the above nonsense is voluntary — the great and the good going overboard to seem even greater and gooder. The Grand Neurosis that gripped the Big Apple in 2020 is showing the sharpness of its talons.
For at least in New York, hypochondriacal hysteria seems here to stay. Sure enough, even the co-op board of my parents’ apartment building, where family gathered before the service, has not got the metropolitan message about elective indoor masks. In order to traverse the 30ft from the front door to the lift you have to mask up, or suffer the doorman’s disgusted rebuke. Only two people are allowed in the lift at one time, although the city has also ditched capacity limits. Inside the lift, we were still provided a handy sanitiser station, as pretty much nobody has absorbed the quiet Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory that fomites are a Covid transmission vector in only about one in 10,000 cases. This building houses a large elderly cohort, and I can’t see their casting aside any of these superstitious rituals anytime soon — if ever.
…..
In both the US and the UK, loads of institutions, universities and employers have taken the public health crusade into their own hands, continuing to enforce strict, often scientifically senseless ‘Covid security’ regulations that the law does not require. I’ve a sick feeling this internalised psychosis makes both governments perfectly happy.
One shock of this whole Covid fiasco has been how readily authorities can summon a formerly alien, even repulsive set of cultural norms by instilling widespread fear. When sharing memories at my father’s memorial, I was disheartened to look out on dismally isolated clumps of mourners anonymised by facial swaddling. My father deserved better, and so did his friends and family. But there will be many more such oppressive convocations before any of these protocols are rescinded.
And will they ever be rescinded? It was astonishingly easy for officialdom to manifest a whole new rancid, anti-social ethos. It may prove far harder to make the Grand Neurosis go away.
For some, there’s little value in a vaccine against a disease they have already recovered from, even as new variants develop. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that by May, 120 million Americans of all ages (35% of the population) had already been infected with SARS-CoV-2. New data shows natural immunity is six to 13 times more protective against emerging variants than vaccines.
Friend: “Be safe”
Me: “Enjoy life”






Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 123 of Thomas Sowell’s superb 1984 book, Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?:
There was a time, back in the heady days of the civil rights movement, when people expected to “solve” the racial “problem” – almost as if life were an academic exercise, with answers in the back of the book. Twenty years and many disappointments later, the question is whether we can even discuss the subject rationally.
DBx: Now sixty years and many more disappointment later, the question Sowell poses here has been answered: Because of Woke irrationality, rational discussion of the question is impossible.






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