Russell Roberts's Blog, page 240

On Science, Scientism, and Classical Liberal Individualism

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s an e-mail to Russ Roberts:

Russ:

Immersing myself finally into listening to podcasts, including your EconTalk, is rewarding – unsurprisingly.

I just enjoyed your late 2017 discussion with James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose on their essay “A Manifesto Against the Enemies of Modernity.” The discussion is superb. Like you, I deeply agree with most of what Lindsay and Pluckrose say, and I share their fear that modernity is being battered with barbarisms from the left and the right.

But there are two points that must be made yet weren’t, although I suspect that had time allowed you’d have made each.

First, both Lindsay and Pluckrose mistake Hayek’s rejection of scientism for skepticism of expertise. Hayek wasn’t in the least skeptical of expertise or of science. Instead, Hayek argued that rote application to the social sciences of the methods appropriate to the natural sciences thwarts rather than furthers our quest for a better, scientific understanding of society. A true, scientific understanding of society informs us that anyone who claims to have expertise at engineering society in general, or the economy specifically, is in fact a quack. It was jarring to hear especially Pluckrose repeatedly complain that Hayek (and his followers) don’t sufficiently value expertise. What Hayek and his followers don’t value – what we positively reject – is the social engineer’s false expertise, “expertise” that, when imposed, actually prevents the exercise of genuine expertise by individuals on the ground.

Second, it was frustrating to hear these two intelligent scholars repeat the myth that classical-liberal individualism pays too little heed to human beings’ natural sociability.

No one is more a classical-liberal individualist than Adam Smith, and his first book is about how each of us is filled with moral sentiments – sentiments derived from our sociability and honed to further enhance that sociability. And as did Smith in his second book, we liberals have ever since emphasized that among the greatest virtues of the free market is that it, and it alone, weaves ever-larger numbers of strangers together into what Hayek called “the Great Society” – which is a peaceful and productive process of social cooperation in which each person is led to serve countless strangers and, in turn, be served by countless strangers.

I came away from the podcast convinced that if Lindsay and Pluckrose were to read, for example, Mises’s Liberalism, or the first two volumes of Hayek’s Law, Legislation, and Liberty, or Henry Hazlitt’s The Foundations of Morality, or Deirdre McCloskey’s Bourgeois trilogy, or your own The Invisible Heart and The Price of Everything – or even just watch your wonderful video “It’s a Wonderful Loaf” – they’d realize that individualism is not a philosophy that defends personal venality or denies human sociability but, rather, is a recognition that only by keeping the initiation of coercion within reasonable limits will individuals have the gumption, knowledge, and ability necessary to come together to form a vast system of social cooperation.

Don

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Those of you who doubt that Covidocratic tyranny is both real and hard should keep up with what’s going on in Australia, where the organizer of a protest against that country’s deranged lockdowns has been sentenced to a minimum of three months in prison.

This report, in the New York Times, from Australia by Damien Cave often reads as if it’s lifted from a dystopian novel.

At least some Australians are actively resisting the thugs who govern that once-free country. (DBx: Note that Victoria’s premier, Dan Andrews, declared that Friday’s 61 new cases [cases, not deaths] of Covid in that state – a state with a population of 6.7 million – portends “catastrophe.” On Friday, the seven-day average of new Covid-19 cases was a whopping 39. Sixty-one is 0.00091 percent of Victoria’s population; 39 is 0.00058 percent. [There’s been no Covid death in Victoria since October 27th, when two people died.] When government gets to define such a situation as a “catastrophe” in the making, and then to use this ‘evidence’ of a coming “catastrophe” as an excuse to unleash unprecedented restrictions on freedom, restrictions enforced with unprecedented powers, tyranny has truly arrived. Meanwhile in Sweden, the seven-day average of Covid deaths is now one.)

Here’s Douglas Murray on Australia’s, and New Zealand’s, Covidocratic tyranny. Two slices:

The premier of Victoria, Dan Andrews, attracted notice this week with one particular threat. During a furious telling-off of the Australian public, Andrews announced: “There will be no removal of masks to consume alcohol outdoors. You will no longer be able to remove your mask to drink a cocktail at a pop-up beer-garden on a footpath as part of a pub crawl.”

Mr Andrews appears to believe that his job is to bully the electorate. Perhaps knowing that if Australians are willing to give up drinking outdoors then they will be willing to give up anything.

…..

The overreactions in both countries highlight the absolute absurdity of the zero-tolerance coronavirus approach. Either you prepare to live with minimal cases or you have to lock down a whole country when even one person gets the virus.

That latter approach will not just kill whole economies but kill everything else that is left of society too. No country can live like that. And if the island of New Zealand can’t rid itself of the virus entirely then most likely nobody can.

Phil Magness on Facebook:

Hypothesis: the majority of people currently taking offense at analogies between lockdowns and the Taliban (or North Korea or other similar authoritarian regimes) are doing so primarily because these comparisons hit a little too close to home for their own comfort.

Yes, the comparisons involve a degree of hyperbole and intentionally so. But there’s more than enough of an authoritarian flavor to lockdowns, to the ways they were enacted, and to the basic curtailment of freedom that they entail to place them in the same ballpark as the types of policies that we usually associate with third world dictatorships or communist regimes.

Of course we also know that most of the offense taken here is feigned precisely because the very same people who get outraged at these comparisons spent the last 1.5 years indulging in far more severe hyperbole by likening even modest expressions of skepticism about lockdowns and masks to eugenics, ethnic cleansing, racism, and attempted murder.

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

Jay Bhattacharya talks with Dan Rea about Covid, including about the great Great Barrington Declaration.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from pages 33-34 of volume III (“The Political Order of a Free People,” 1979) of F.A. Hayek’s Law, Legislation, and Liberty:

There is not first a society which then gives itself rules, but it is common rules which weld dispersed bands into a society.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Judging from media reports, Australia and New Zealand daily become more dystopian as their governments pursue the impossible goal of zero Covid. A slice:

New Zealand has extended its national Covid-19 lockdown as case numbers continued to rise and a Delta variant outbreak spread from Auckland to the capital Wellington.

The number of cases rose from 21 to 31 today, three days after the country – which has the second lowest vaccination rates in the developed world – had its first case in the community in six months.

Ardern, who is trying to sustain a ‘Zero Covid’ strategy through strict border controls and lockdowns, initially announced the national shutdown would last three days but on Friday had to succumb to the inevitable and extend it to at least a week.

Vast swathes of Australia are also under ‘Zero Covid’ lockdowns and residents of Sydney were told they will have to stay home until at least October under strict lockdown rules that will not be lifted until at least 70 per cent of the population are fully vaccinated.

Ramesh Thakur writes about Australia’s descent into tyranny. Two slices:

Instead, people must learn to live with the virus as an endemic disease that will keep circulating and mutating over time. But Australians find themselves mouse-trapped in an endless cycle of lockdowns by governments mesmerized by the idea of “zero COVID-19.”

Consequently Australia has morphed from being the envy of the world last year for its incredible pandemic management to international incredulity at the brutality of its authoritarian measures to “crush and kill the virus.”
…..

The authoritarian streak has seen various instances of what some people would call inhumane treatment. At a time of zero active cases in Canberra, a woman was denied permission to fly to Queensland to see her dying father. A mother from across the border in New South Wales lost her baby last year after being unable to get timely treatment in Brisbane because of the time it would have taken to fill out the paperwork to cross the state line and enter the hospital to receive emergency care.

A fully vaccinated Sydney grandmother was also recently denied a permit to go to Melbourne to help care for her grandchildren while her daughter battles advanced breast cancer. And in a country town in February, a pregnant woman posting on Facebook to support a peaceful protest against Victoria’s lockdown was handcuffed and arrested in her house in the early morning hours, still in her pajamas.

Abroad, thousands of Australians remain stranded and unable to come home because of government limits on daily arrivals. During the last wave in India, citizens attempting to return were threatened with hefty fines and imprisonment. Now the government has decreed that Australians who live overseas and come home for whatever reason, including emergencies, must apply for special exemption to fly out again. Try to make sense of that.

Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins continues to write wisely about Covid. A slice:

This chosen myopia about unseen spread has proved costly but in ways that hint at its political utility. In January 2020, we could tell ourselves Covid wasn’t here because we hadn’t detected any cases. Later, when the pandemic was in full swing, overplaying the death risk and underplaying natural immunity helped to rally support for lockdowns, masking and vaccine rollout compliance.

Still, why would scientists like Anthony Fauci and CDC leaders be satisfied with inadequate data? One reasonable presumption is that people don’t ask questions they don’t want the answers to. From the start, our public-health experts were realistic, not to say fatalistic, about the virus. The CDC on its webpage for months advised that every American should expect to be infected eventually. This advice disappeared only as political messaging became paramount. Accentuating how much viral spread remained unobserved and unmeasured apparently did not fit the agenda.

Also writing wisely – specifically about Covid vaccines and mandates – is Joel Zinberg. A slice:

The GMU policy [of mandatory vaccination] exemplifies the type of rigid, irrational rule-making that has characterized much of the pandemic response. If an individual can demonstrate immunity via circulating antibodies after a previous Covid infection, there is no compelling reason to require him to undergo an invasive vaccination.

The CDC acknowledges that reinfection of recovered Covid-19 patients is rare. Nevertheless, it still recommends that recovered patients be vaccinated. The agency cites two reasons: first, that experts don’t know how long natural immunity protection lasts; and second, that vaccination provides a strong boost to natural immunity. The first— uncertainty about the duration of protective natural immunity—is not, by itself, a convincing reason for vaccinating previously infected individuals. The second, while true, does not provide a rationale for a vaccine mandate.

“A morsel of freedom, then we’ll be drowned like rats“.

David Zweig looks carefully at the evidence on masking children. A slice:

While the protective value of a mask mandate for children in school seems, at best, uncertain, experts have concerns about the potential downsides of them in a learning environment.

“Mask-wearing among children is generally considered a low-risk mitigation strategy; however, the negatives are not zero, especially for young children,” said Lloyd Fisher, the president of the Massachusetts chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics. “It is important for children to see facial expressions of their peers and the adults around them in order to learn social cues and understand how to read emotions.” Some children with special needs, for example those with articulation delays, may be most affected, he suggested.

Here’s a report, in the Washington Examiner, on masking. I wonder if the final paragraph shared below, verbatim, contains a misspelling:

The number of children who died from COVID in 2020 was less than died from the flu,” said Bhattacharya. He also noted that masks can cause problems for children with learning and emotional development.

Bhattacharya and Neera Sood, a public policy professor at the University of California, Berkeley, recently laid out their case against masks in schools in the Orange County Register, writing that “the onus is on proponents to show that the benefits of masking kids outweigh the costs.”

But Dr. Danny Benjamin, a distinguished professor of pediatrics at Duke University, disagreed.

“Universal masking policy has clearly been shown to interrupt transmission in schools in eight different pee-reviewed publications,” Benjamin said.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 648 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):

It is easier to find people fit to govern themselves than people fit to govern others.

Proving Ian Fillmore Prescient

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal:

Editor:

Protesting Drs. Marty Makary’s and H. Cody Meissner’s case against the masking of children, Drs. Jonathan Popler, Satyanarayan Hegde, et al., fail to put the risk posed by Covid to children into perspective (Letters, August 21). The authors say – and we needn’t doubt – that masking “has been shown to reduce transmission [and that] the student population isn’t currently eligible for vaccination.”

But reduce transmission by how much and to what effect? This the authors do not say – a curious omission for authors who praise cost-benefit analysis. Nor do the authors say what obviously ought to be said: Covid poses virtually no health risk to children. Therefore, children’s ineligibility for vaccination against Covid is as irrelevant as is their ineligibility for treatment for Alzheimer’s.

Washington University economist Ian Fillmore recently expressed his worry that even the smallest potential benefit of masking, regardless of cost, will be regarded as sufficient to justify masking. Drs. Popler’s, Hegde’s, et al.’s, letter proves that Prof. Fillmore is right to worry about what he calls “the tyranny of tiny risks.”

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

The Coming of “The Tyranny of Tiny Risks”?

(Don Boudreaux)

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Washington University economist Ian Fillmore sent to me the following e-mail, which I share here in full with his kind permission.

Hi Don,

Our youngest child, Jack, was born in early December of 2017. It was a particularly bad year for RSV. As you may know, RSV can be quite serious for newborn infants, but for older children and adults it usually feels like a cold. The reason is that RSV causes you to produce a lot of mucous, and a newborn’s airways are so small that they get clogged. Anyway, Jack came down with a serious case of RSV in January. We were pretty confident that our daughter brought it home from preschool. The rest of us recovered quickly, but Jack ended up in the PICU on a ventilator for a few weeks. The PICU was full of patients just like him–newborns with serious cases of RSV. They had to convert an additional floor into PICU beds to accommodate all the patients (sound familiar?). Thankfully, he recovered and is healthy now (he does wheeze a bit when he gets sick, so we keep an inhaler on hand).

Would masking and social distancing at our daughter’s preschool have prevented Jack’s infection and PICU visit? It’s certainly possible, even likely. And that’s exactly my worry. Based on the logic we’ve established with Covid, I don’t see how we ever stop with masks and social distancing. While there’s mixed evidence that these things actually slow the spread of Covid, the evidence looks pretty strong that they’re really effective at slowing the spread of influenza and RSV and the common cold.

When it comes to mask mandates, social distancing, or any other pandemic restriction, what is the limiting principle? Or, putting it differently, under what conditions can we get back to normal? Based on the public health logic currently in vogue, I fear that the answer is never and that we are entering a new regime–the tyranny of tiny risks.

As you have pointed out, the vaccines have turned Covid into a disease that is no more worrisome than influenza, and less worrisome for healthy, young people. Now influenza can be serious, which is why I get my flu shot each year. But we have been dealing with influenza-like risks forever. So, at this point, I think it is reasonable to take the same level of precautions around Covid that we take around influenza. Encourage everyone to wash their hands, and strongly encourage vulnerable people (ie the elderly and the obese) to get a vaccine. In my mind, the pandemic is already over in that, through the miracle of modern medicine, it has been transformed into a manageable endemic disease, much like the other endemic diseases we are already accustomed to. That may not be the outcome people were hoping for, but I think it’s the best we’re going to do.

Ian Fillmore

Satire … or Truth?

(Don Boudreaux)

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Some Non-Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy understands the dangerous logic of government hubris. A slice:

One needn’t be a foreign policy expert to recognize that something in Afghanistan went terribly wrong. While many will blame the Biden administration for a fiasco that will have horrifying humanitarian consequences for the Afghan people, the failure also belongs to those who made the decision to go and remain there for two decades. These American officials argued that a continuing U.S. military presence there was important for achieving several goals, like training the Afghan army to resist the Taliban. Yet, today, the almost-immediate collapse of the U.S.-backed Afghan government makes it clear that whatever our strategy was, it failed.

Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that those who believed in nation building in the first place will realize from this dreadful episode that it never works as well as planned, even though the tragic scenario now unfolding before our eyes isn’t the first U.S. government foreign policy disaster. And it won’t be the last. People never seem to learn. Making matters worse is the fact that this sad state of affairs isn’t limited to foreign policy. It exists everywhere and throughout all levels of federal, state and local government.

Pierre Lemieux points to clear evidence of a reality that typically remains shrouded by economic ignorance – namely, employers need employees no less than employees need employers.

If god were in charge of public policy we might be justified in authorizing this leader to have the state tackle problems such as climate change, the spread of infectious diseases, and Big Tech’s wokeness. But god’s not in charge; instead, policy is heavily affected by appallingly ignorant – and authoritarian – people such as Rashida Tlaib.

Anthony Gill uses economics to explain the Taliban’s rapid advances.

Executive power continues to be used unconstitutionally.

Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley is right: meritocracy is indeed worth defending. A slice:

Meritocracies weren’t designed to degrade and exclude. Rather, the goals were to replace a system based heavily on patronage and nepotism, to treat people as individuals rather than as members of groups, and to distribute opportunities according to ability and talent. “For millennia, most societies have been organized according to the very opposite principles to meritocracy,” Mr. [Adrian] Wooldridge writes. “People inherited their positions in fixed social orders. The world was ruled by royal dynasties. Plum jobs were bought and sold like furniture. Nepotism was a way of life. Upward mobility was discouraged and sometimes outlawed.”

David Henderson reports on a recent case of a common disease: the affliction that leads a person to believe that when a neighbor engages in self-destructive behavior the proper response is for that person also to engage in the same self-destructive behavior.

Scott Lincicome and Ilana Blumsack look at new data, released by the Congressional Budget Office, on incomes, taxes, and inequality.

Sam Staley reviews the film adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights. A slice:

Miranda’s movie is a full-throttle, layered, and vivid depiction of the struggles and tensions faced by recent immigrants and their first-generation American children. The neighborhood serves as both an emotional and economic safety net, a platform to launch aspirations, and a seductress to those unwilling to break through its own cultural barriers.

Entrepreneurship is also front and center within the story. Miranda has sculpted an unusually textured depiction of how a business creates economic and social value. More importantly, throughout the film, he shows how these small businesses provide opportunity, fulfillment, and identity to a generation struggling to make their own way in an unfamiliar culture.

Alan Reynolds writes informatively about the unfortunate events of August 1971.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Jimmy Alfonso Licon explores the “masks-are-only-a-minor-inconvenience” justification for mask mandates. Here’s his conclusion:

It is important to understand that the argument isn’t against mask wearing—I do not take a stand on that issue—but to critically examine the minor inconvenience argument for masking wearing. The point is that arguing something is a minor inconvenience doesn’t show that one cannot reasonably object to it. There are many things we could do that would be minor inconveniences and save lives taken individually; but if we did everything that would be a minor inconvenience, but saved some lives, we would live a morally overbearing existence.

Jacob Sullum rightly criticizes the absurd argument, peddled recently in the New York Times, that masking children actually improves their ability to learn. Here’s his conclusion:

[Judith] Danovitch’s comical insistence on seeing secondary, character-building benefits from the rigors of mask mandates reeks of desperation. She even argues that masks inhibit nail biting and nose picking. I am not making that up.

In the same spirit, one can think of other advantages. Masks make it easier to verify whether you have bad breath, for instance, and they conceal pimples on much of your face. They thereby alleviate major adolescent anxieties. And for rebellious teenagers, masks make it easier to discreetly chew gum or use smokeless tobacco.

I would say that Danovitch is trying to make a virtue of necessity, except that the necessity remains unproven, which is the heart of the bitter debate about mask mandates in K–12 schools. If you think universal masking in schools is the only way to avoid a large number of COVID-19 deaths that would otherwise occur, you will be inclined to support that policy. But if you doubt that’s true, based on pre-vaccination experience with COVID-19 outbreaks in schools and the weak evidence offered by mandate enthusiasts, the possibility that requiring masks might offer “distinctive opportunities for learning and growth” will not sway you.

Larry Sand writes informatively about masking schoolchildren. A slice:

Mask mania, notably in schools, has become an epidemic, and needs to be dealt with. Children certainly are not Covid “super-spreaders,” very rarely get the disease, and almost never die from it. In fact, a Johns Hopkins study released in June found that “100% of pediatric COVID-19 deaths were in children with a pre-existing condition.” So, assuming vaccines are effective, I can only surmise that forced masking of children is a way to protect unvaccinated adults, which is a form of child abuse. (Statistics do show an uptick in pediatric cases for the “Delta variant,” but it is spreading most rapidly in areas where greater numbers of adults are not vaccinated.)

Just for a little perspective on Covid’s danger to children – as of August 11th, just 121 5-14 year-olds have died from it, yet 250 in that age cohort have died from pneumonia. Additionally, in 2016 over 4,000 children and adolescents died in motor vehicle accidents.

Importantly, the mask hawks never acknowledge the downside of forcing face coverings on children. A study published in June in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that the wearing of masks by children “leads to an increase in carbon dioxide levels in both inhaled and exhaled air while wearing a mask.” In addition, masks can become saturated with viruses and bacteria from diseases, such as tuberculosis, meningitis, pneumonia, etc.

And the possible side effects of masks are not just physical. Neeraj Sood, director of the COVID Initiative at USC, and Jay Bhattacharya, professor of medicine at Stanford, maintain that masking “is a psychological stressor for children and disrupts learning.” The doctors assert that covering the lower half of the face reduces the ability to communicate. In particular, children lose the experience of mimicking expressions, an essential tool of nonverbal communication. “Positive emotions such as laughing and smiling become less recognizable, and negative emotions get amplified. Bonding between teachers and students takes a hit. Overall, it is likely that masking exacerbates the chances that a child will experience anxiety and depression, which are already at pandemic levels themselves.”

Sadly, even some private schools succumb to Covidocratic state tyranny on the matter of masking children.

Maxwell Hampton brings relevant facts and better perspective to the debate over the response to the Delta variant. A slice:

Just like how a grocery store sells more candy during Halloween, a hospital supplies more medical care, along with the necessary supplies, such as ICU beds, when demand increases. As one can see in the graph, when experiencing or expecting a surge in occupied ICU beds, hospitals anticipated growing demand and increased the number of supplied ICU beds. Moreover, once demand for the beds subsided, the hospitals decreased the supply of ICU beds accordingly.

This raises questions about the reasoning and incentives behind the St. Louis Department of Public Health’s policy mandates and recommendations. If the hospitals already have ways to manage their supply of ICU beds to match the ever fluctuating demand, then why does a temporary increase in the supply of ICU beds warrant a non-market solution?

James Bolt decries New Zealand’s zero-Covid trap. A slice:

Widely vaccinated Britain recorded 26,852 new cases on Tuesday. For New Zealand to experience a similar infection rate, it would need to record around 1,900 cases per day. After 18 months of being told that a single case of Covid is an existential threat to New Zealand, will even a vaccinated public accept 1,900 cases per day without locking down? As evidence emerges that even fully vaccinated people can be infected with Covid and pass it on to others, it seems unlikely.

Here is the reality of Zero Covid laid bare. There is no escape. If eliminating Covid is the goal, there is no end to lockdowns, no end to restrictions and no end to the constant fear that, at any time, your freedoms will be taken away and your life will be put on hold. Your country can be largely free of the virus for six months, but when one person in a city you have never been to tests positive, lockdown returns. New Zealand will leave this lockdown, but the fear of the next one will remain until the government and the people shake themselves out of this Zero Covid fantasy.

Brits were told to look to Australia and New Zealand as the gold standard for dealing with Covid in 2020. In 2021, Australia and New Zealand are falling way behind. Britain has shown that even with over 26,000 cases in a single day, you can still live with the virus. Locked-down Aucklanders will be able to watch packed British football stadiums full of maskless fans on their TVs this weekend, while they are forbidden from visiting their neighbours. New Zealand is living in a Zero Covid fantasy land.

And now for a little levity about New Zealand.

“Nick Cater talks to Brendan O’Neill about the never-ending lockdown Down Under.”

Martin Kulldorff corrects one of the many misimpressions about the great Great Barrington Declaration (a document he wrote with Jay Bhattacharya and Sunetra Gupta):

It is the other way around. It is because we take Covid very seriously that the @gbdeclaration argued for focused protection of high-risk elderly instead of the ineffective general lockdowns.

Matt Welch understands the true motives of Covidocrats.

David Axe wisely calls for weighting the British government’s ’emergency’ Covid powers with lead and then tossing them into the Thames. Here’s his conclusion:

Freedom has been redefined as the temporary suspension of state interference. In Scotland, ministers are already talking about potentially making some of their emergency powers permanent, and the government in Westminster shows no sign of giving up its powers anytime soon. Across the UK, those who believe in freedom and democracy must challenge political leaders who have become accustomed to ruling by decree.