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Russell Roberts's Blog, page 244
August 12, 2021
Some Covid Links
Martin Kulldorff decries the shoddy ‘science’ behind some research on the effectiveness of masks.
Jeffrey Anderson takes a careful look at the evidence on the efficacy of masks. Two slices:
In truth, the CDC’s, U.K.’s, and WHO’s earlier guidance was much more consistent with the best medical research on masks’ effectiveness in preventing the spread of viruses. That research suggests that Americans’ many months of mask-wearing has likely provided little to no health benefit and might even have been counterproductive in preventing the spread of the novel coronavirus.
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Hiram Powers, the nineteenth-century neoclassical sculptor, keenly observed, “The eye is the window to the soul, the mouth the door. The intellect, the will, are seen in the eye; the emotions, sensibilities, and affections, in the mouth.” The best available scientific evidence suggests that the American people, credulously trusting their public-health officials, have been blocking the door to the soul without blocking the transmission of the novel coronavirus.
See also this other essay by Jeffrey Anderson on masks. A slice:
The day after the CDC endorsed nationwide mask-wearing, President Trump announced, “I won’t be doing it personally.” From that instant, the mask quickly became a symbol of civic virtue—a sort of Black Lives Matter flag that could be hung from one’s face. For many it conveyed a trio of virtues: I’m unselfish; I’m pro-science; I’m anti-Trump. What it also conveyed, incidentally, was rejection of longstanding Western norms, unhealthy risk-aversion, credulous willingness to embrace unsupported health claims, and a pallid view of human interaction.
Apparently, the federal agency charged with disseminating COVID-19 data and setting public health policy is taking its cues from a newspaper infographic. Oh my.
Using more accurate data, the delta variant proves more transmissible than O.G. COVID but less transmissible than the virus behind the chickenpox.
Jon Miltimore puts into perspective the danger that Covid-19 poses to children.
Joel Zinberg calls for individual choices rather than lockdowns. Two slices:
The influential Imperial College of London model was typical. In March 2020, it predicted exponential growth of Covid cases that would overwhelm ICU bed capacity by early April and cause 2.2 million U.S. deaths by July. The authors recommended prolonged lockdowns until vaccines became available.
The model grossly overpredicted deaths because of critical errors, including an unrealistically high infection-fatality rate. Most important, its predictions were based on the “unlikely” scenario that there would be no changes in individual behaviors. The model used a reproduction number, or Rt—the average number of secondary infections that each infected person produces in a susceptible population—that was too high and, contrary to standard epidemiological practice, did not vary over time. In fact, Rt declines as people voluntarily avoid contact with others and as the number of recovered people no longer susceptible to infection grows.
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Lockdowns are an indiscriminate tool that can undermine more effective, particularized, private responses. Government mandates affect everyone—from high-risk individuals who would have taken precautions anyway to low-risk individuals who might not need the same level of protection. Stay-at-home orders short-circuit the discovery and implementation of innovative measures to limit workplace transmission and force workers from safer employment settings into households, where Covid transmission rates are higher.
Some Non-Covid Links
George Will attempts to calm the hysteria over climate change. A slice:
A scandalous 2019 Foreign Affairs article by the director-general of the World Health Organization asserted: “Climate Change Is Already Killing Us.” Says [Steven] Koonin, “Astoundingly, the article conflates deaths due to ambient and household air pollution (which cause … about one-eighth of total deaths from all causes) with deaths due to human-induced climate change.” The WHO says indoor air pollution in poor countries, mostly the result of cooking with wood and animal and crop waste, is the world’s most serious environmental problem. This is, however, the result not of climate change but of poverty, which will become more intractable if climate-change policies make energy more expensive by making fossil fuels less accessible.
Physicist Steven Koonin, writing in the Wall Street Journal, rightly criticizes climate hysteria. A slice:
As is now customary, the report emphasizes climate change in recent decades but obscures, or fails to mention, historical precedents that weaken the case that humanity’s influence on the climate has been catastrophic. The Summary for Policy Makers section says the rate of global sea-level rise has been increasing over the past 50 years. It doesn’t mention that it was increasing almost as rapidly 90 years ago before decreasing strongly for 40 years.
Extreme weather events are invoked as proof of impending disaster. But the floods in Europe and China and record temperatures across regions of the U.S. are weather, not climate—singular events, not decadeslong trends. Both Europe and China have experienced equally devastating floods in past centuries, but these are forgotten or deliberately ignored. The drought and wildfires in the Western U.S. are part of a trend going back a few decades, but forest management and expanding human presence in the forests are perhaps more important than climate change in causing these events.
Also decrying climate hysteria is Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins. A slice:
Of interest to the nonfatuous was the track of real-world temperature changes. The IPCC estimates a rise of 1.1 degrees celsius in the past 150 years. This information, which it highlighted in bold print, led the IPCC in much finer print to lop 0.5 degree Celsius off its likely worst-case impact of a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
In other words, real-world warming, the IPCC finally acknowledges, has been less than that expected from its climate models.
And here’s Pierre Lemieux on climate hysteria.
Ron Bailey accurately describes Greenpeace as “evil.”
George Leef reports on Progressivism’s surge through American law schools. A slice:
At Columbia, president Lee Bollinger (a former law dean), said that introducing Critical Race Theory was “urgent and necessary.” And Professor Gillian Lester, referring to the Columbia Law faculty, stated, “Their scholarship, teaching and advocacy have illuminated the pervasive effects of structural racism in our society and the law.”
But is teaching CRT anything to brag about, in law school or any other educational institution? Many think not. For instance, professors Richard Vedder and Amy Wax, writing for Independent Institute, state, “the most pernicious aspect of CRT instruction is not its content, but the one-sided, dogmatic intolerance of any alternative points of view.”
Richard Ebeling writes clearly about the loss of clear thinking about liberty.
Americans should address the very real challenges posed by the PRC’s oppressive shift under Xi Jinping. But they should remain engaged with China and especially the Chinese people. Liberty is under siege but not forever lost.
“President Biden’s Electric Car Future Is Union Made” – so reports Bruce Yandle.
My colleague Larry White writes about the close of the gold window.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from pages 162-163 of the American jurist James Coolidge Carter’s profound yet unfortunately neglected (posthumous) 1907 book, Law: Its Origin, Growth and Function:
Justice is, therefore, not an absolute, but a relative virtue, finding its play in that field of our conduct which … relates to our dealings and intercourse with each other in society, and enforcing in that field the things necessary for the existence of society. This existence is assured when, and only when, each receives from all the treatment he may fairly expect. Then men love to live together; otherwise they fly apart as if charged with resinous electricity. Justice may therefore be defined to be the principle which dictates that conduct between man and man which may fairly be expected by both, and as none may fairly expect from another what is not in accordance with custom, justice consists in the compliance with custom in all matters of difference between men. It is the right arm of Peace and the antithesis of force.
August 11, 2021
Some More Covid Links
Dr. Martin Kulldorff talks about “vaccine Passports, the Delta Variant, and the COVID ‘Public Health Fiasco’.” (HT Betsy Albaugh)
“Speaking to Anderson Cooper on CNN Monday night, Andrew Sullivan said it was time to lift lockdown measures, encourage people to take vaccines, and stop letting federal and state governments continue to impose lockdown rules on Americans’ lives” – so reports the Daily Mail.
YouTube removes a video of Sen. Rand Paul.
Reason‘s Jacob Sullum reports on the failure of the Covid-deranged maskophiles to rationally evaluate reality. Here’s his conclusion:
The costs, meanwhile, are more substantial than mandate supporters typically acknowledge. The inconvenience and discomfort caused by mask requirements aggravate the unpleasantness of environments that were stressful, boring, and restrictive long before anyone had heard of COVID-19. Masks interfere with communication, learning, and social interaction. And they unfairly burden children with the responsibility of preventing infections that primarily threaten adults, who can better protect themselves by getting vaccinated. To justify those costs would require more evidence than mandate advocates have been able to muster.
TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.) (But because these people will suffer or die from something other than Covid-19, it’s okay.)
The straw man is again stomping through Hawaii. A slice:
Hawaii is bringing back a whole swath of pandemic restrictions on social gatherings and businesses in response to rising COVID-19 cases on the island.
On Tuesday, Hawaii Gov. David Ige, a Democrat, issued an executive order limiting indoor social gatherings to 10 people, and outdoor gatherings to 25 people. Restaurants, bars, and other “social establishments”—in addition to abiding by those gathering limits—must also require patrons to be seated and masked when not actively drinking or eating. Mingling between parties is expressly prohibited.
Phil Magness and Ethan Yang ask “Who fact-checks the fact checkers”? A slice:
Even more problematic was NewsGuard’s portrayal of the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD), signed at AIER in October 2020. [John] Gregory’s synopsis of the GBD contained numerous false and misleading claims that were brought to the attention of his company almost immediately after their publication.
Repeating a charge from another website, Gregory wrote that “none of the three [GBD authors] had published peer-reviewed research about the COVID-19 pandemic at the time they authored the declaration.” This claim is false. GBD co-author Jay Bhattacharya was part of a team of scientists from Stanford University that conducted one of the first wide-scale seroprevalence studies of Covid-19 at the outset of the pandemic. Their results appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association in May 2020. When contacted by AIER about this error in his article, Gregory conceded that the claim “will require a correction on our part,” though he appended it with a snide denigration of Bhattacharya for being “listed as the seventh author” on the study (Bhattacharya was in fact a principal co-author but was listed last, as per a convention with how some medical journal articles identify senior ranked investigators. Bhattacharya was also a primary media contact about his study’s findings at the time of its release).
NewsGuard’s depiction of the GBD contained other clear misrepresentations of its contents and positions. For example, Gregory wrote that the GBD “argued that restrictions meant to reduce the spread of the COVID-19 virus, such as face masks…should be eliminated for people considered to be at lower risk of severe illness and death from COVID-19.” The text of the GBD makes no mention of face mask policy though – only lockdowns and similar restrictions on schools and businesses. NewsGuard did not respond to multiple requests from AIER to correct this erroneous characterization.
Robert Freudenthal highlights three tragic assumptions behind the ‘strategy’ of lockdowns.
The CDC now admits that it did indeed over-count Covid cases in Florida.
Some Covid Links
The announcement elicited widespread praise from parents who oppose mask mandates and knee-jerk derision from Mr. DeSantis’s detractors nationwide. But the most interesting response came from some Covid-wary Florida parents who support mask requirements. They asked if they too could take advantage of the Hope Scholarships. The department said yes.
Thus, it is now possible for families on all sides of the mask wars to send their kids to a school with Covid policies that match their preferences. That’s a win-win.
Matt Welch wonders why Americans aren’t learning from the British experience with the Delta variant. A slice:
But what about the delta variant, which is far more transmissible, if otherwise roughly the same in effects on unvaccinated populations, including kids? “Our most significant post-Delta data comes from the UK,” Brown University economics professor and school-COVID data-collector Emily Oster wrote this week, “where the positive test rate for children up to age 11 was around 2% at the height of the Delta surge, when schools were open (largely without masks). This 2%, of course, reflects transmission from all sources—schools, but also households. Repeat: Household transmission is a much more common vector for children, meaning vaccinating people in the household is your most important prevention strategy.” (Emphasis Oster’s.)
It’s also worth noting that, unlike in the U.S., kids between the ages of 13 and 17 are still ineligible for COVID vaccines in the U.K.
The most shocking findings of the report were the extent of the abuse of power that transpired under the guise of fighting Covid-19. In Western liberal democracies, the restrictions were quite severe with prohibitions on travel, discriminatory behavior, executive overreach, attacks against free expression, and a lack of time limits on emergency powers being common themes. However, what has transpired in more autocratic regimes under lockdowns would make even the most tyrannical American governors blush. Ultimately, the report concludes that liberal democracy during the lockdowns took a hit, but the damage can be minimized if restrictions are lifted and emergency powers are reformed. Lockdowns, as devastating as they were, are only one factor in the chronic decline of our liberal democratic system. However, such a decline opens the door to even worse possibilities.
The doubt/denial of immunity after prior COVID disease, and the resulting vaccine passports/mandates, is gravely damaging the confidence in both public health authorities and vaccines.
Jay Bhattacharya talks about vaccines.
Emilia Mituziene reports on Covidocratic tyranny in Lithuania.
TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.)
Jordan Davidson reports on the latest spasm of tyranny apologetics from the dangerous Dr. Fauci.
Steve Waterson harshly – yet appropriately – decries Australia’s Covid Deranged tyrants. (Also available here.) Three slices:
Many of us in the anti-lockdown corner are asked how many lives we would sacrifice to see the country open up again, our accusers triumphantly certain there is no decent answer because, as the NSW Premier told us in May, “no death is acceptable”.
She and her interstate counterparts would rather smash our lives and livelihoods in pursuit of their ridiculous, hubristic ambition.
If a foreign power were causing damage on this scale we would regard it as an act of war, when deaths in defence of the country would become acceptable again.
Perhaps we should bite the bullet and say 5000 predominantly old people taken prematurely is a sad but tolerable price to pay for the restoration of our freedoms and the repair of our society – as long as it’s not my precious grandparents. Oh wait, mine have already died of old age, like all my ancestors since humans first wandered out of the African Rift Valley. It happens a lot, I understand. And by the way, those 5000 projected deaths assume we could find no other way of protecting the vulnerable, which is hard to believe.
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The politicians look on, stern-faced and witless, bleating their platitudes about feeling our pain, and urging us to get vaccinated as the only way to escape the shackles on our lives, as though they had nothing to do with the sinister emergency powers they have granted themselves and aimed against us. “A surge in cases has closed restaurants”; “the latest outbreak means tradesmen can’t go to work”; “thanks to some selfish cab driver we must stay at home for the next month”.
No, ladies and gentlemen, the virus hasn’t done this to us; you have, cosy in your luxurious offices with your index-linked financial cushions, surrounded by sycophants and shoving people around like demented puppetmasters.
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What begins as absurdity soon turns dark. In NSW you must carry evidence of your address at all times when outside your home, and produce it to a police officer – “Papers please!” – on demand. You must carry a mask on your person, even to walk the dog around the block. Cold War Berlin-style police checkpoints have appeared on our streets to confirm cars are within 10km of their homes, and their occupants not intending to protest against their rulers. The army is on patrol in areas whose citizens are often refugees from regimes where camouflage battle-dress is rarely a welcome sight.
Do Western concepts of freedom no longer matter in Australia? Is it a trivial matter that we are commanded not to leave our homes? Does it seriously not bother anyone in office that we are being compared – accurately – to North Korea in our legislated refusal to allow our citizens to leave the country, or overseas Australians to return? This is very bad company we find ourselves in.
The politicians say they’re faced with tough decisions, but they’re not making decisions at all. They defend their abdication of responsibility by loftily declaring they are acting on the health advice they receive. They don’t evaluate that advice, mind, they simply follow it.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 66 of Nathan Jensen’s important, data-rich 2006 book, Nation-States and the Multinational Corporation:
No systematic evidence lends credence to the race to the bottom thesis. Simply no relationship exists between countries with low taxation and spending levels and higher FDI [foreign direct investment] inflows.
DBx: Regular readers of this blog will understand that I do not offer this quotation in support of higher taxation or of higher levels of government spending. Instead, I offer it in further support, against the assertions of many conservatives, of a policy of unilateral free trade. As Jensen convincingly shows, it’s simply not true that high levels of taxation or of government spending in a country are sufficient to put producers in that country at an ‘unfair’ disadvantage relative to producers in countries with lower levels of taxation or of government spending.
August 10, 2021
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from pages 5-6 of the 2008 updated version of University of Arizona philosopher David Schmidtz’s excellent 1994 paper, “The Institution of Property“ (footnote deleted):
Philosophers writing about original appropriation [as a means of establishing property rights in some resource] tend to speak as if people who arrive first are luckier than those who come later. The truth is, first appropriators begin the process of resource creation; latecomers get most of the benefits. Consider America’s first permanent English settlement, the Jamestown colony of 1607. (Or, if you prefer, imagine the lifestyles of people crossing the Bering Strait from Asia twelve thousand years ago.) Was their situation better than ours? How so? They were never caught in rush-hour traffic jams, of course. For that matter, they never worried about being overcharged for car repairs. They never awoke in the middle of the night to the sound of noisy refrigerators, leaky faucets, or even flushing toilets. They never wasted a minute at airports waiting for delayed flights. They never had to change a light bulb. They never agonized over the choice among cellular telephone companies. They never faced the prospect of a dentist’s drill; after their teeth fell out, in their thirties, they could subsist for a while on liquids. Life was simple ….
Original appropriation diminishes the stock of what can be originally appropriated, at least in the case of land, but that is not the same thing as diminishing the stock of what can be owned. On the contrary, in taking control of resources and thereby removing those particular resources from the stock of goods that can be acquired by original appropriation, people typically generate massive increases in the stock of goods that can be acquired by trade. The lesson is that appropriation typically is not a zero-sum but a positive-sum game. As Locke himself stressed, it creates the possibility of mutual benefit on a massive scale. It creates the possibility of society as a cooperative venture.
Some Covid Links
American capitalism supported decades of innovation that created conditions conducive to the rapid development of the Covid vaccines. About 70% of the returns to medical research and development across the world come from the U.S., where price controls are less prevalent than elsewhere and companies compete to bring new treatments and cures to market. Without the U.S. market, investors would have shied away from funding the cumulative advances that eventually led to successful Covid vaccines. In this sense, the U.S. market-based healthcare economy saved the world from Covid-19. None of it would have happened in a government-run health system.
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Markets may fail sometimes, but government policy fails much more frequently, and the world benefits from private efforts to mitigate the fallout from those failures. The almost universal view of economists that government policy serves to correct market failures is misguided.
Speaking of government failure, Eugene Volokh shares this e-mail, originally sent to a listserv, from LSU Law professor Ed Richards (emphasis added by Boudreaux):
This is a comment about Louisiana, although it applies in varying degrees to other states.
If you are a historian of hospitals in the US, or just an old health policy person, you know that post-WWII the federal government subsidized the construction of a lot of hospitals and created the expectation that every small town would have its own hospital. In the 1970s, health economists raised questions about the costs of running hospitals at 40-50% occupancy. This led to the passage of PL 93-641, the health planning act, and the Certificate of Need Program (CON). CON was intended to have community boards vet new hospital beds, etc., with an eye to reducing costs in the community by reducing excess capacity. CON was mostly a bust—everyone understood in theory why excess beds were a problem, but no one wanted to forgo a new facility in their community.
Market changes did what CON didn’t and over the next 30 years squeezed out excess beds so that hospitals could operate at 90% capacity and make a lot more money. It was recognized at the time at time this was also removing the excess capacity that was a buffer for when there was a bad flu season or other outbreak. After 9/11 and SARS1, there were plans to build emergency ICUs outside of hospitals during outbreaks, including tents in the parking lots, to make up for the loss of beds. These plans were based on the assumption that there would plenty of people who could be brought in to staff the beds—sort of misunderstanding the PAN in pandemic.
Louisiana was a leader in the specialty hospital business, having neither an effective CON process or state regulatory system. The public argument for specialty hospitals is more expertise and lower costs because of efficiency. The real model was no emergency room, and thus no way for un- and under-insured people to get into the hospital. All of the financial benefits of being a hospital without any of the responsibilities. So we get women’s hospitals, orthopedic hospitals, etc., sucking the profitable work from community hospitals, without taking any of the burden of community care for the indigent. General hospitals are even allowed to close their ERs in Louisiana.
The hospitals in Louisiana which take indigent patients and patients though the ER—pretty much all COVID patients—are slammed. The specialty hospitals have lots of staff and lots of beds and don’t have much in the way of COVID patients, if there are any at all. They also do little to help the others. Thus Louisiana has a very small number of general beds that are available for COVID patients. It is a real crisis, but it is as much a crisis in health care resources as in COVID. While the Children’s hospitals do have ERs, there are not many of them in Louisiana and there are very few total ICU beds. As another list member observed, you can have all the pediatric ICU beds full and still only have a tiny number of kids who are very sick.
Patrick Barron’s letter, in the Wall Street Journal, on the eviction moratorium is spot-on:
In his book “Economics in One Lesson,” Henry Hazlitt states that we must look not only at what is seen but also at what is unseen. A corollary is to look not only at the short-term effect but also at the long-term effect. The unseen effect here is financial cost to landlords. The long-term effect is on the willingness of landlords to stay in the business and provide rental housing in the future. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
Patrick Barron
West Chester, Pa.
Robby Soave rightly bemoans the spread of yet more misinformation about Covid. A slice:
A viral Instagram post claimed that COVID-19 is 99 percent survivable for most age groups—the elderly being an important exception. The post cited projections from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), but was flagged as misinformation by the social media site and rated “false” by the Poynter Institute’s PolitiFact.
That’s a curious verdict, since the underlying claim is likely true. While estimates of COVID-19’s infection fatality rate (IFR) range from study to study, the expert consensus does indeed place the death rate at below 1 percent for most age groups.
Sunetra Gupta defends herself against unfair charges.
The next morning, Mayor Bill de Blasio injected himself into that private dialogue. Under his vaccine-passport mandate, we must immediately submit to the vaccination of our son and 15-year-old daughter, or they will be treated as second-class citizens in New York City. They will be prohibited from entering restaurants and movie theaters, attending most indoor events or, in de Blasio’s words, generally living “a good and full and healthy life.” (They may continue to live a good and full and healthy life across the county line in our suburban village, not to mention everywhere else in the U.S.)
Americans are significantly divided, along party lines, on the question of ‘vaccine passports.‘
Phil Magness offers with this picture a lesson on the danger of (mis)interpreting data points:
Adam Creighton rightly criticizes Bill Gates’s express admiration for Covidocratic tyranny.
I’m glad that a court ruled against Florida governor Ron DeSantis on this particular matter.
Jonathan Ellen decries the unrealistic expectations and disproportionate response to Covid. A slice:
The panic stems from a failure to ask basic questions. Are our leaders setting realistic policy goals? Have they put too much emphasis on eliminating Covid-19? Is there any historical precedent for the rapid completion of a vaccination campaign?
These days, Americans tend to demand that societal problems be 100 percent fixed as soon as they’re discovered. When they’re not, media outlets explode with dire warnings and moral outrage. Not surprisingly, politicians and policymakers respond to this panic, failing to maintain a realistic perspective on what’s possible and what’s not.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 63 of F.A. Hayek’s last book, his 1988 The Fatal Conceit (citations omitted):
The question then is how to secure the greatest possible freedom for all. This can be secured by uniformly restricting the freedom of all by abstract rules that preclude arbitrary or discriminatory coercion by or of other people, that prevent any from invading the free sphere of any other. In short, common concrete ends are replaced by common abstract rules.
August 9, 2021
Talking with Ethan Yang About Trade
Several day ago, Ethan Yang and I recorded this conversation about trade. It’s just longer than a half-hour. (Note that, because there was a great deal of noise occurring outside of my office, I recorded this lecture from the office of my intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy.)
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