Russell Roberts's Blog, page 238

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 59 of Richard Epstein’s brilliant 1995 book, Simple Rules for a Complex World:

The reason for the dominance of the autonomy principle is not any belief that people live in small social islands uninfluenced by and unconcerned with the interests and the behavior of others. It is that no other principle matches power with interests to the same degree.

DBx: Indeed. A legal regime that concentrates in me power over my person and possessions, and concentrates in you power over your person and possessions, much better ensures that everyone’s persons and possessions are used in socially beneficial ways than would a regime that concentrates in me power over your person and possessions and concentrates in you power over my person and possessions.

Infant-Industry Protection Infantalizes

(Don Boudreaux)

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Bryan Caplan has a superb post at EconLog on (some of) the problems with the so-called “infant-industry” argument for protectionism. Do read it all.

One of the arguments (indeed, the chief argument) offered by proponents of infant-industry protection is that government-supplied protection from foreign competition will intensify the incentives of the owners and managers of the protected firms to improve their efficiency – to improve the quality of their outputs and to achieve maximum possible efficiencies in production and distribution. As Bryan points out, this argument is very weak.

Here’s a slightly expanded version of a comment that I added to Bryan’s post:

Bryan,

As usual, great post.

Here’s a mental experiment that I share with students in my International Economic Policy course when we get to the topic of infant-industry protection:

Suppose that I, as teacher of the course, were to tell each of you students that on each exam and paper that you submit for the course, I’ll raise the grade you earn by one letter grade. So a student who earns a C+ on a mid-term exam will be recorded in my Excel spreadsheet as having earned on that exam a B+. A student who earned a B on a paper will be recorded in my spreadsheet as having earned on that paper an A.

I explain that my grading policy is meant to encourage each student to study harder and, thus, to better learn the material. My reasoning is that a student who senses that he or she, with ordinary studying, is destined only to earn, say, a C- will feel that it’s not worthwhile to study harder if the likely result will be only a C or a C+. The improved outcome isn’t worth the effort. But if by studying harder this student understands that the C+ he thereby earns will be raised by me to a B+, the result suddenly does seem worth the effort.

What could be simpler?!

Even my students understand that, were I really to make such a promise to artificially raise their grades, the result would be less studying rather than more – and, hence, less learning rather than more. Similarly, of course, were government to use tariffs or other protective measures to artificially increase demand for certain firms’ outputs, the result would be less effort to improve output quality and productivity – and, hence, less economic growth in the country.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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BOUTROS on Twitter:

I don’t know if it was deliberate, but Dr. [Martin] Kulldorff just goaded half of Twitter into basically admitting that the moralistic response to COVID (othering, blame, ostracizing) is equivalent to a thousand-and-one historic atrocities.

Glenn Greenwald decries “the bizarre refusal to apply cost-benefit analysis to COVID debates.” A slice:

This framework [of cost-benefit analysis], above all else, precludes an absolutist approach to rational policy-making. We never opt for a society-altering policy on the ground that “any lives saved make it imperative to embrace” precisely because such a primitive mindset ignores all the countervailing costs which this life-saving policy would generate (including, oftentimes, loss of life as well: banning planes, for instance, would save lives by preventing deaths from airplane crashes, but would also create its own new deaths by causing more people to drive cars).

While arguments are common about how this framework should be applied and which specific policies are ideal, the use of cost-benefit analysis as the primary formula we use is uncontroversial — at least it was until the COVID pandemic began. It is now extremely common in Western democracies for large factions of citizens to demand that any measures undertaken to prevent COVID deaths are vital, regardless of the costs imposed by those policies. Thus, this mentality insists, we must keep schools closed to avoid the contracting by children of COVID regardless of the horrific costs which eighteen months or two years of school closures impose on all children.

It is impossible to overstate the costs imposed on children of all ages from the sustained, enduring and severe disruptions to their lives justified in the name of COVID.

Matt Welch’s advice is wise: “Don’t Let the Media Scare You with COVID Numbers from L.A. Schools.” A slice:

One of the most irritating parts about being a parent of school-aged children during the past 18 months has been trying to hack through the journalistic hysteria enough to extract useful and contextual information about COVID, group settings, and kids.

Last August, that meant brushing past the “kids are not all right” headlines to get to underlying studies showing that no, minors are not carrying and transmitting the disease in numbers similar to adults, and that the policy response of preemptively closing most elementary schools was not consistent with the available research and contrary track records in summer camps and functioning schools around the world.

The result of those failures of both journalism and policy? “Devastating learning setbacks,” The New York Times editorialized this week. (Pssst: Y’all should tell that to the newsroom.)

This August, shamefully if not quite surprisingly, many American news outlets are exhibiting the same preference for acontextual, anecdotal sensationalism, as bedraggled parents muster themselves for a third consecutive school year marred by the coronavirus.

Charles Oliver reports yet another instance of petty Covid tyranny.

Some police officers in the once-free country of Australia are speaking out against the draconian Covid restrictions these officers are ordered to enforce.

Jeffrey Tucker laments the rise of “plexiglass nation.” A slice:

The normal things we expected before last year have just evaporated. There are strange and random shortages. A friend rolled up to a McDonald’s in Massachusetts and ordered a burger only to be told they are out of beef. Imagine that! Stores have empty shelves of products one would never expect to run out. Menu prices are soaring each time you go back to your favorite place – but these price increases are only transitory, don’t you know!

A strange cynicism pervades the whole country. We are settled into living less well, as if it is our plight and our fate about which we can do nothing. We know our leaders have lied to us. We cannot begin to count the ways. But no one in charge will actually admit it. They pretend to have the knowledge and be in control and we pretend as if they have credibility and deserve compliance, though we don’t believe and only perfunctorily comply.

South Dakota governor Kristi Noem is right to oppose government prohibitions on private entities requiring proof of vaccination.

TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.)

Glen Bishop wonders when Neil Ferguson will finally admit that he, Ferguson, was wrong. Here’s Bishop’s conclusion:

The [new Imperial College] paper continues to support lockdowns as if they were a laboratory experiment on rats with no damaging side effects or moral hazards involved. It remains completely blinkered to anything but an obsession with controlling one particular virus, with a reckless disregard for the wider societal consequences of the lockdown policies they advocate. In the ethics declaration on the paper, the Imperial team declare “no competing interests”, yet this is not the case. It is clearly in the interests of the Imperial team to denigrate Sweden’s policy as best they can. If their paper was to conclude anything else, they would have to admit that they have caused enormous damage to society and cost countless excess non-Covid deaths in the UK and around the world because of their advice. It is strongly in the interest of their careers, reputation and standing in society to spin Sweden as a failure in any way they can.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 279 of the 2016 second edition of Thomas Sowell’s excellent volume Wealth, Poverty and Politics (footnote deleted; link added):

Empirical evidence has likewise seldom been mentioned by those who make a common claim, advanced by [Nicholas] Kristof among many others, that “Slavery and post-slavery oppression left a legacy of broken families” among blacks. But the plain fact is that the proportion of black children living with only one parent was never as great during the first hundred years after slavery as it became in the first thirty-five years after the great expansion of the welfare state, beginning in the 1960s. Yet the “legacy of slavery” argument continues to be blithely repeated, and the legacy of the welfare state ignored.

Quiet this Panic

(Don Boudreaux)

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In response to this letter of mine that appears in today’s Wall Street Journal, Phil Siegel e-mailed to me the following note. (In his e-mail he included the name of the consulting firm, but I’ve removed it so that that firm isn’t held accountable for Mr. Siegel’s views as shared here. I share his e-mail with his kind permission.)

Agree entirely; I’ve worked on response to this disease with many governments at [a large consulting] firm and when we had unvaccinated older/vulnerable people the health measures were one thing to save lives. But now forcing our kids to do the same measures for a disease LESS pathogenic to them than the seasonal flu is outrageous. Either we’re overreacting now or we have been derelict for decades not protecting kids against the flu by making them always mask in schools.

Well of course it’s the first. We send them to sleepaway camp where Lyme Disease is a much worse threat to their well being as well. We accept risks and make choices in life but in this case our risk assessment isn’t just off it’s become irrational. If we don’t want them to spread Covid wait to open schools until community levels are low and then let them be. And give small vaccine doses to asthmatic, obese and diabetic kids at the choice of parents. There shouldn’t be any more measures than that. This panic, by not understanding the risk, is literally a mass hysteria.

Phil

Some Letters to the Editor

(Don Boudreaux)

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In my latest column for AIER I reprise some letters-to-the editor. Here’s the introduction:

For more than three decades I’ve written letters-to-the-editor on an almost daily basis. The number of such letters that I’ve written over this time is, I estimate, close to 9,000.

Writing such letters is an effective means of making important points sharply, and with a much higher prospect – compared to writing a full Op-ed – of being published in prominent venues such as the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and The Economist. Most of my letters identify flaws in economic reasoning or faulty understandings of the current state of the world or of history.

In 2012, thanks to the generosity of my friends Ed Barr and the late Bob Chitester – and with the amazing editorial assistance of Jim Tusty – the Free To Choose Network collected 111 of my letters into a book (the title of which I’ve come to regret for its unnecessary snark and inappropriate, if unintended, arrogance). I’m pleased that many people have since asked me when another collection of my letters will be published. As of now, no plans exist for a second collection. But I share below a tiny sample of some of my favorites of the letters that I’ve written since the book was published.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 43 of Thomas Sowell’s 2018 book Discrimination and Disparities:

As a personal note, the first time I encountered a white professor at a white  university with a black secretary, it was Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago in 1960 – four years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley decries the confusion and excessive risk aversion that mars school openings across America. Two slices:

The officials in charge of running the nation’s public schools had all summer—and $122 billion in Covid relief funds from Congress—to plan for the first day of school, so naturally chaos has ensued as students begin heading back to the classroom.

…..

The Rand Corp. has released the results of a nationwide parent survey on school hesitancy taken in July. Although Delta was already spreading by then, 89% of parents, including more than 80% of typically more hesitant black and Hispanic respondents, said they would opt for in-person learning for their children this year. Parents apparently understand the health risks, and they’re weighing them against the harm of another year of horribly substandard instruction via Zoom.

Bryan Caplan masterfully unmasks shoddy reasoning about masking. A slice:

Personally, I only find masks marginally uncomfortable. But I hate wearing them, and I dislike being around people who wear them. Why? Because a big part of being human is showing other people our faces – and seeing their faces in return. Smiling at a stranger. Seeing your child laugh. Pretending to be angry. Seeing another person’s puzzlement. Masks take most of those experiences away. At the same time, they moderately reduce audibility. Which further dehumanizes us. How many times during Covid have you struggled to understand another person? To be heard? Indeed, how many times have you simply abandoned a conversation because of masks? I say the dehumanization is at least five times as bad as the mere discomfort. And if you reply, “Want to see other people’s faces and hear other people’s voices? Just Zoom!,” I will shake my head in sorrow that you’re dehumanized enough to say such a thing.

Am I just being a big baby about this? I think not.  Suppose humanity could eliminate all disease by wearing bags over our heads forever. Would you be willing to go through life not seeing the faces of your children? Would you want your child to go through life not seeing the faces of their friends? Well, during Covid we’ve moved at least 25% in that dystopian direction. The word “hellscape” is not out of place. I’ve never been a fan of the veiling of women, but I had to live through Covid to realize how horribly dehumanizing the custom really is.

Jacob Sullum reports that “the evidence supporting mask mandates in schools is weaker than Biden pretends.” A slice:

Assuming that mask mandates in schools do make a difference, the benefits are likely to be small. Adults and older students can more effectively protect themselves by getting vaccinated, and life-threatening COVID-19 symptoms are extremely rare in children and teenagers: The CDC’s “current best estimate” of the infection fatality rate among people younger than 18 is 0.002 percent.

Max Borders’s criticism of the media is just. A slice:

Instead of digging for the facts, the media have become bullhorns for state actors and political proxies. Instead of ‘speaking truth to power,’ most now think their job is to serve power. Their favored experts, whose expertise is unassailable, are just agents masquerading as sources of truth. The very idea of science as an ongoing process has been corrupted. And the media now view their favorite politicians as would-be angels ready to bring about Heaven on Earth (well, if they didn’t have to contend with the opposition’s monsters.) As they see it, a journalist’s job is to propagate and amplify narratives that keep the public compliant and otherwise lost in a Hall of Mirrors. Let our vaunted leaders do their jobs, which is apparently to shore up architectures of behavioral control. Sometimes that means repeating talking points ad nauseum or telling noble lies.

Tyler Cowen (!):

You will note that some segments of the American intelligentsia are so invested in criticizing the U.S. “red state” approach, and so warm toward collectivist mandates, that they won’t raise a peep about what is going on [in Australia].

. Two slices:

The madness toggles between sinister and comical. Especially hilarious are the comedy stylings of the bullying dolt who is turning Victoria into a post-apocalyptic wasteland: it’s acceptable to remove your useless mask to drink coffee on the street, he declares, but an offence to do so to drink alcohol. It must be excruciating for black-clad Melburnians, paralysed indecision warming their espresso martinis.

Victoria’s Health Minister, not to be outdone as a stand-up comedian, alerted citizens to a prostitute’s positive test. “If you have employed a sex worker in the St Kilda area,” he said on Wednesday, “you need to come forward and get tested.” Employed? What, to do some gardening? Imagine the negotiation: “I don’t mind mowing, but it’ll be an extra $50 if you want full weeding.”

…..

Instead, we’re punished as though we were still in the classroom (unlike our schoolchildren), all in detention because one of the naughty pupils broke the rules; or worse, thanked and praised for “doing the right thing”, as though these idiots are capable of determining the difference between right and wrong. Just because they or their intellectually challenged health bureaucrats say something’s true, or (even less credibly) morally correct, doesn’t make it so.

Where do these buffoons find the audacity to tell us they’re “angry”, “disgusted” or “disappointed” with the citizens of their state, or country? If you think, premiers, that it’s appropriate to address your paymasters with that kind of supercilious, patronising language you have a profoundly flawed understanding of your relationship to the electorate.

Matthew Lesh rightly criticizes the “zero Covid religion.” A slice:

The simple story about protecting people and saving lives is hard to dislodge, even if it is extremely damaging and no longer achievable. This results in politicians grasping, out of desperation, for ever-crazier, unscientific and authoritarian policies. It’s like a Chinese finger trap, the more you try to pull out to escape Covid, the more locked in and angrier you become.

TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.)

Jay Bhattacharya tells Freddie Sayers that he stands by the Great Barrington Declaration (which he wrote along with Sunetra Gupta and Martin Kulldorff).

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 127 of the 1972 second edition of Henry Hazlitt’s profound – yet regrettably overlooked – 1964 book, The Foundations of Morality (footnote omitted; link added; emphases original):

The ideal moral rules are those that are most conducive to social cooperation and therefore to the realization of the greatest possible number of interests for the greatest possible number of people. The very function of morality, as [Stephen] Toulmin has put it, is “to correlate our feelings and behavior in such as way as to make the fulfilment of everyone’s aims and desires as far as possible compatible.” But just as all interests, major and minor, long-term and short-term, cannot be realized all the time (partly because some are inherently unachievable and partly because some are incompatible with others) so not everybody’s interests can be realized all the time.

DBx: Yes.

Among the foundational rules of the market order is that the law of property generally protects owners’ ‘physical’ interests in their properties but not properties’ market valuations. You may not reduce the value of my house by physically damaging it or otherwise interfering with its physical integrity, but you may reduce the value of my house by building another house down the street from mine.

One economic consequences of this legal reality is what economists call “consumer sovereignty”: In our roles as consumers we do not, by purchasing goods and services from particular sellers, thereby legally oblige ourselves to continue to purchase goods and services from those same sellers. We all have the right to use our properties, including that which we have in our labor, in whatever peaceful and honest ways we can to earn incomes – implying that we all have a right to compete amongst each other for customers (including customers for our labor) – and we have a right to spend our incomes as we wish, including, of course, changing the ways in which we spend our incomes. In our roles as producers we must adjust our property uses to the pattern of consumer spending; in our roles as consumers, we are not obliged to adjust our property uses in ways meant to maintain the market valuations of anyone’s properties.

Among the most important discoveries of economics is that the above rule of property – again, what economists call “consumer sovereignty” – over time leads to much higher market valuations of properties generally than arises when government protects some owners from suffering market-driven declines in their properties’ market valuations.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 431 of Tom Palmer’s 1997 essay “The Literature of Liberty” as this essay is reprinted in Tom’s superb 2009 book, Realizing Freedom:

One way of understanding the history of modern civilization is as a constant struggle between liberty and power.

DBx: Pictured here is Lord Acton.