Russell Roberts's Blog, page 241

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 412 of Amar Bhidé’s excellent 2008 book, The Venturesome Economy:

[I]ncreasing subsidies for scientific education and research will not serve up a free lunch. Constituencies that benefited from the Sputnik scare are happy to advertise what they achieved with the resources they secured, but a proper accounting must also include opportunity costs; in the view of some observers, these have exceeded the benefits.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 10 of the late Tom Bethell’s great 1998 book, The Noblest Triumph (footnote deleted; link added):

Property sets up fences, but it also surrounds us with mirrors, reflecting back upon us the consequences of our own behavior. Both the prudent and the profligate will tend to experience their deserts. Therefore, a society of private property goes some way toward institutionalizing justice. As Professor James Q. Wilson has said, property is a “powerful antidote to unfettered selfishness.”

On Corporate Social Responsibility

(Don Boudreaux)

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Trevor Burrus and Aaron Ross Powell did me the honor recently of having me as a guest on their podcast, Free Thoughts, to discuss corporate social responsibility (“CSR”).

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Robby Soave is on to the New York Times‘s pro-lockdown bias. A slice:

Note the agenda here: The “experts”—i.e., overly cautious epidemiologists picked by The New York Times to give weight to Team Blue’s quixotic COVID-19 mitigation preferences—think the focus on vaccines is damaging because it comes at the expense of a pro-lockdown, pro-masking, pro-social-distancing strategy. Vaccination, broadly speaking, lets most people live their lives like normal again; this is somehow viewed as a bad thing.

These policy preferences are completely contrary to the reality of the human social experience. The health benefit of a booster shot is not “obtained just as easily by wearing a mask or avoiding indoor dining or crowded bars,” because wearing masks and eschewing conversation with other people is much more taxing than getting a shot. Many normal people actually like talking to people in bars and seeing human faces, so forgoing this indefinitely is not a trivial matter. (Note that the Times recently ran an op-ed piece titled: “Actually, Wearing a Mask Can Help Your Children Learn.”)

If Trump deserves criticism for failing to urge his base to get their shots—and he does—then why should The New York Times get a pass for suggesting to its readers that regular masking is an effective substitute for booster shots?

John Stossel is correct: “YouTube has the right to shut down Rand Paul. That doesn’t mean it should.”

Here’s a new interview of Jay Bhattacharya.

I’m always honored to be a guest of Amy Jacobson and Dan Proft.

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

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

Gerry O’Driscoll writes about Covid and prevention measures with genuine scientific understanding. Here’s his conclusion:

As further research into the actual effects of the widespread, coercive policies implemented in the wake of the pandemic appears, one hopes there could be a dispassionate reassessment of the policies. There was widespread agreement that we had to give up freedoms to save our health. Together, the papers I’ve reviewed in two posts suggest that more freedom leads to better health.

In this insightful essay, the Brownstone Institute’s Jeffrey Tucker compares the hubris of nation building with the hubris of Covid restrictions. A slice:

The two weeks to flatten the curve have turned into 18 months of chaotic policy that have robbed Americans of all their traditional presumptions concerning their rights and liberties. We didn’t know it – or most did not – but government can shut our businesses, close our churches, empty out our schools, restrict our travel, separate us from loved ones, all in the name of crushing a virus.

We might as well replace crush the virus with drive the Taliban out of public life in Afghanistan. Some things government can do; others it cannot do. It is long past time to hear an American president recognize that. Now that recognition needs a domestic application as well.

Here’s a report (in the Wall Street Journal) of yet another of the multitude of manifestations of malicious Covid Derangement Syndrome.

Johan Hellström tweets from Sweden (HT Martin Kulldorff):

As of today the Swedish youth & children are back in school.
As last year we maintained in person & mark free education. I will follow and statically report on it’s overall public health effect. I was sending my two smiling boys this morning to their school and friends.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 620 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):

History is not a master but a teacher. It is full of evil. It is addressed to free men who choose among its examples. Like experimental science – in which many unsuccessful experiments prepare the way to discovery.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from pages 119-120 of Thomas Sowell’s monumental 1980 book, Knowledge and Decisions:

[image error][O]ne crucial difference between ballots and prices is that prices convey effective knowledge of inherent constraints, while ballots do not. If I desire a Rolls Royce and simultaneously a normal standard of living, the price tag on the automobile immediately informs, convinces, and virtually coerces me to the conclusion that these two things are inconsistent. But if I believe simultaneously in a large military arsenal, low taxes, a balanced budget, and massive social programs, there are no constraints on my voting that way.

DBx: Indisputably true.

See also Geoffrey Brennan’s and Loren Lomasky’s pioneering 1993 volume, Democracy & Decision, and my GMU Econ colleague Bryan Caplan’s equally pioneering 2007 book, The Myth of the Rational Voter.

Some Non-Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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James Bovard celebrates Ambrose Bierce. A slice:

Bierce’s biggest contribution to starkly perceiving political reality was The Devil’s Dictionary, first published in 1911. Mencken said that book contained “some of the most devastating epigrams ever written.” Bierce offered plenty of piercing insights that can be profitably studied by today’s friends of freedom.

Bierce defined “politics” as “a strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.” His definition of “politician” was more scathing: “An eel in the fundamental mud upon which the superstructure of organized society is reared…. As compared with the statesman, he suffers the disadvantage of being alive.” He defined “sorcery” as “the ancient prototype and forerunner of political influence.” Similarly, he defined “degradation” as “one of the stages of moral and social progress from private station to political preferment.”

This September 2008 EconTalk podcast – which I just listened to and in which Russ talks with Joseph Ellis about America’s founding – is excellent.

Alberto Mingardi just watched the HBO miniseries Chernobyl and recommends it.

Walter Olson asks if voter-ID statutes matter much.

Nick Gillespie’s recent discussion with Roger Pielke Jr. about the climate is excellent.

David Boaz ponders the “Nixon shock” (of August 1971) and libertarianism.

George Will decries murderous autocrats. A slice:

Perhaps Vitaly Shishov, 26, decided during a morning run this month in Kyiv to hang himself in a park. Authorities, noting his battered face, are doubtful. Shishov was living in Ukrainian exile from Belarus, where he had organized protests against the increasingly repressive Alexander Lukashenko, now in his 27th year wielding illegitimate power. In May, a Belarusian fighter jet forced an airliner flying from Greece to Lithuania to land in Belarus so that a Belarusian dissident could be seized. At the Tokyo Olympics, a Belarusian sprinter narrowly escaped being forcibly flown home to an unpleasant fate after she criticized her coaches, for which Belarusian media branded her a traitor. Lukashenko’s son chairs Belarus’s Olympic Committee.

Matt Ridley writes with his usual insightfulness about an “animal-sentience bill” considered in Britain. A slice:

If you think that government committees are content to remain toothless, you have never studied that sentient creature, the bureaucrat. Its very raison d’etre, as a squirrel gathers nuts and builds a drey in which to rear its young, is to maximise its budget, expand its remit, creep its mission and rear more bureaucrats. C Northcote Parkinson laid it all out in the 1950s, with his famous article that pointed out how the number of admirals in the navy increased in inverse proportion to the number of ships. There is a whole economic theory on the topic of the tendencies of bureaucracies to pursue their own growth, called public choice theory.

John Cochrane busts the myth of “climate financial risk.” Here’s his conclusion:

Climate financial regulation is an answer in search of a question. The point is to impose a specific set of policies that cannot pass via regular democratic lawmaking or regular environmental rulemaking, which requires at least a pretense of cost-benefit analysis.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Happily, my George Mason University colleague Todd Zywicki – who, having had Covid-19, already enjoys protection against significant suffering from the disease – has been granted by GMU officials a waiver from the University’s vaccine mandate.

Brumby tweets…

Sweden’s 7-day average COVID deaths have been at ZERO for about a month now.

I feel like its only a matter of time before the very existence of a place called Sweden is scrubbed from the internet.

… and Martin Kulldorff follows up:

If the 2020 media coverage of Sweden is to be believed, the only logical explanation is that they are all dead by now, so nobody left to die.

This level of Covid hysteria by New Zealand’s government is inexcusable. A slice from Christian Britschgi’s report:

The New Zealand government is also asking residents to only make physical contact with the people they live with.

“If you want to talk to a friend, call or video chat with them. If you want to talk to a [neighbor], do it over the fence,” reads the government’s guidance on social interactions. Separated parents can still shuttle their children back and forth, provided the parents both live in the same city.

“Do not congregate. Don’t talk to your neighbors. Please keep to your bubbles. We know from overseas cases of the Delta variant that it can be spread by people simply walking past one another,” said Adren at a press conference. “So, keep those movements outside to a bare minimum, wear a mask, and make sure you keep up that physical distance.”

New Zealand has pursued a policy of generally closed borders and snap lockdowns as a means of fighting COVID-19. That approach is credited with keeping the island nation’s number of cases and deaths exceptionally low. In a population of 5 million, there have been 3,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and only 26 confirmed deaths.

The consequence of this strategy is that New Zealand is periodically thrown into a sudden shutdown of all social life over a single case popping up. Auckland had to endure multiple lockdown episodes of this sort in February of this year, for instance.

“Some Ohio Judges Are Mandating Vaccinations as a Condition of Probation. That’s an Abuse of Power.” Yes it is.

“Recent lockdowns in Melbourne and Sydney have driven a surge in calls by distressed children to the Kids Helpline, taking demand to the highest level recorded in the pandemic.”

Freddie Sayers:

Meanwhile, Israel, one of the earliest countries to vaccinate almost all its citizens and therefore a useful sign of things to come, is experiencing a surge in infections. In May, the Israeli Ministry of Health estimated the efficacy of two vaccines against infection at 95 per cent; by July 5, that estimate had fallen to 64 per cent; and the most recent estimate puts it at 39 per cent. They’re now rolling out booster shots to try to shore up the crumbling wall of immunity against infection.

As usual, there’s a lag of a month or two before the full implications of such a fast-changing situation sink in, but let me try to put it simply. If you have had your two vaccines, it doesn’t mean you will not get Covid: there is no way to remove that possibility. Happily, if you do get it you are much, much less likely to get seriously ill or die, so it is absolutely worth getting vaccinated, as well as taking booster shots when they are offered. But the case rests on protecting yourself from ill health, rather than other people.

Allison Pearson asks why the British government is hellbent on pushing Covid-19 vaccinations on children. As she says, “Teenagers no more need protection against Covid than they need protection against dementia or heart disease or asteroids.” Another slice:

For my son and his friends, who are in their early 20s, the risk-benefit analysis looks very different. Unlike their grandparents, they don’t need to be protected against serious symptoms and hospitalisation. Unless they have underlying conditions, they are at almost zero risk of dying from Covid (most will experience a “mild illness”, as Professor Chris Whitty said at the start of the pandemic). As for children, researchers from University College London, and the universities of York, Bristol and Liverpool, estimated that 25 deaths in a population of some 12 million children in England gave an overall mortality rate of two per million children. To put that into context, Nasa says the odds of asteroid Bennu hitting the Earth are one in 1,750.

David Henderson is among those who are rightly appalled by NIH director Francis Collins’s “shocking innumeracy.” (DBx: Unlike David – who is kinder than I am – I’m unwilling to excuse Fox News’s Chris Wallace for not challenging Collins. Members of the press incessantly preen as the ‘fourth branch,’ helping – often, they boast, with ‘tough questions’ – to keep the three formal branches of government honest. Further, as EconLog commenter Daniel B points out, government officials such as Collins have perverse incentives to present distorted, out-of-context information. Wallace should have been aware of this reality. That Wallace wasn’t aware of this reality isn’t surprising; on this matter I agree with David. But I believe that Wallace nevertheless deserves criticism for this failure.)

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 178 of the American jurist James Coolidge Carter’s incredibly profound, yet unfortunately neglected, (posthumous) 1907 book, Law: Its Origin, Growth and Function:

Had they [ancient Roman legal theorists] studied the facts of consciousness, and learned that conduct was necessarily exhibited in the form of habit and custom, they would have seen that the origin of law rested in a self-governing principle of society; and if they had carefully scrutinised the methods of the judicial tribunals, they would have seen that it [sic] consisted in the study of conduct and its consequences with the view of determining what was in accordance with custom or fair expectation, and that such study was simply the exercise of our ordinary reasoning powers upon the subject of conduct; in this way they would have reached the enlightening conclusion that law was tantamount to custom.

DBx: Pictured here is a bust of Marcus Tullius Cicero.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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

The basic source of social order, however, is not a deliberate decision to adopt certain common rules, but the  existence among the people of certain opinions of what is right and wrong. What made the Great Society [that is, the extended classical-liberal, commerce-filled order] possible was not a deliberate imposition of rules of conduct, but the growth of such rules among men who had little idea of what would be the consequence of their general observance.