Russell Roberts's Blog, page 245
August 9, 2021
Some Classical Liberal Priors
In my latest column for AIER, I list 20 of my priors. A slice:
10. Official power over others – that is, the ability to initiate coercion without incurring the disapproval of society – is, for those who hold such power, intoxicating. Holding and exercising official power is less a “public service” and more a personal and almost vulgar thrill.
11. Those persons who will most eagerly and ably seek official power – those who will most successfully seek to be in positions to initiate coercion – will be those persons who have the fewest qualms about imposing their wills on others. That is, holders of official power will be disproportionately drawn from the ranks of predators and the officious.
12. Most of what is done by modern states is done through the initiation of coercion. This reality is no less true in stable democracies, such as the United States, than in authoritarian hellholes, such as Venezuela.
13. Modern society – including, of course, the economy – is inconceivably complex.
14. Social and economic complexity arises and grows only insofar as individuals are free to act peacefully as they choose – that is, are free to act peacefully without worrying that coercion will be initiated against them.
15. Initiating coercion with the intent to improve society or the economy will inevitably unleash consequences unintended by the initiators and unforeseen by those who encourage such use of coercion.
16. Unaware of unintended consequences, those who initiate coercion to improve society are too likely to make matters worse rather than better.
17. Self-interest, creativity, and competition within private-property-based markets are very robust. Opportunities to gain will eventually, although never instantaneously, be sought out and exploited. The economist’s short-hand way of expressing this prior is that twenty-dollar bills do not long remain laying on the sidewalk for the taking.
18. Individuals who stand to reap personal benefits by exploiting opportunities to gain are much more likely to seek out or to notice such opportunities – and to exploit these opportunities as effectively as possible – than are individuals who do not stand to reap personal benefits by doing so. One important implication is that whenever a politician, pundit, preacher, or professor insists that the state should initiate coercion to ‘solve’ some alleged ‘problem,’ that person is highly likely to be mistaken.
19. Each person is less willing to take some action the greater are the costs to that person of taking that action and the fewer are the benefits to that person of taking that action.
20. Other than breathable air and gravity, nothing in this world that is of use to humans is free. Getting more of one thing always requires getting less of some other thing or things.
Some Covid Links
Do masks reduce Covid transmission in children? Believe it or not, we could find only a single retrospective study on the question, and its results were inconclusive. Yet two weeks ago the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sternly decreed that 56 million U.S. children and adolescents, vaccinated or not, should cover their faces regardless of the prevalence of infection in their community. Authorities in many places took the cue to impose mandates in schools and elsewhere, on the theory that masks can’t do any harm.
That isn’t true. Some children are fine wearing a mask, but others struggle. Those who have myopia can have difficulty seeing because the mask fogs their glasses. (This has long been a problem for medical students in the operating room.) Masks can cause severe acne and other skin problems. The discomfort of a mask distracts some children from learning. By increasing airway resistance during exhalation, masks can lead to increased levels of carbon dioxide in the blood. And masks can be vectors for pathogens if they become moist or are used for too long.
Here’s Joel Zinberg on the CDC’s new mask ‘guidance.’ A slice:
These small and somewhat contradictory studies seem like a slim reed on which to base a nationwide change in policy. The CDC has not released any other data showing that breakthrough Delta infections present as high a transmission risk as infections of the unvaccinated. Despite the current Delta surge, vaccinated people likely pose a minimal risk to the uninfected.
The CDC acknowledges that even with Delta, only a small percentage of fully vaccinated people will be infected. For a vaccinated person to become infected, they have to encounter an infected person who is actively shedding the virus. A large percentage of the population is immune and unlikely to be infected or shedding; half the U.S. population is vaccinated, and at least another 20 percent to 25 percent more have natural immunity after recovering from Covid-19.
John Tierney talks with Brian Anderson about “the panic pandemic.”
James Allan writes forcefully against the dystopian, Covidocratic tyranny now on the loose in Australia. Two slices:
That brings me to all the condemnation of the anti-lockdown protesters by our political class and by many of their lockdown-supporters in the media. It has been near to hysterical. Just last week New South Wales disgracefully announced it is in future calling in the army, for heaven’s sake, something I have not seen in the Anglosphere since then Canadian PM Pierre Trudeau did it to deal with the murdering terrorists in the Front de libération du Québec. For what is NSW doing this? To deal with unarmed people who have had their jobs taken away from them by politicians and bureaucrats who haven’t even had the decency to take a small pay cut? And who play God by deciding whose livelihood is ‘essential’ and whose is not? Now readers will know that from the start of this pandemic, in these pages well over a year ago, I have consistently been a strong opponent of these lockdowns. Every bit of the ‘science’ based on a century of data and fully endorsed by the World Health Organisation was unequivocally against lockdowns right up until December of 2019. Obsession with Covid as the only matrix that matters has seen (and will continue to see) Australia’s excess deaths go up noticeably – and these extra deaths can’t be from our very few Covid deaths but most plausibly have been caused by the lockdowns themselves. Our political class has bungled its response to this hugely. They are spending tens of millions of dollars a month on advertising about it, propagating with your and my money only their ‘accepted view’. They don’t tell you more doctors have signed the Great Barrington Declaration against lockdowns than have signed its rival for them. My Speccie colleague James Macpherson beautifully set out on 26 July on Flat White all the reasons one might want to protest against the last 15 months of despotic government in Australia, and despotic it has been.
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All this hypocrisy, the stinking hypocrisy that now affects nearly all of the decision-makers in this country, is what is ruining respect for government and for the political class. It is police pushing around a pregnant woman for next to nothing. The fact your fellow Australians wish peacefully to protest is what makes – sorry, made – this country great. It is not made great by heavy-handed lockdownistas whose grasp of the current data (not modelling, data) on the pros and cons of lockdowns seems feeble to me and whose first instinct is to reach for the heavy-handed, despotic stick. This is not the Australia I came to in 2005. And these changes are being overseen by a supposedly Liberal government. It’s enough to make a grown man weep.
A tweet from Martin Kulldorff:
Mary McGreechin decries the incivility and quotidian evil unleashed by Covid Derangement Syndrome.
What began as an effort to “flatten the curve” has swelled the curve.
Gavin Mortimer reports from France that Emmanuel Macron’s Covid-passport scheme is fueling intergenerational warfare. Here’s Mortimer’s conclusion:
The Covid passport has been a success in that it has achieved Macron’s objective of boosting vaccine uptake among the most reluctant. But at what cost to society? The young will not forget the way they have been bullied and threatened by their president, and nor are they likely to forget the selfishness of the 68ers [French baby-boomers] who are as spoiled now as they were half a century ago.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 127 of Frank Easterbrook’s superb 1989 paper “Ignorance and Antitrust,” which first appeared in published form in Thomas M. Jorde and David J. Teece, eds., Antitrust, Innovation, and Competitiveness (1992) (footnote deleted):
Ignorance and uncertain inference are the norm in antitrust. They are doomed to remain so….
August 8, 2021
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 449 of Art Carden’s and Deirdre McCloskey’s 2018 paper “The Bourgeois Deal: Leave Me Alone, and I’ll Make You Rich” (which is Chapter 10 of this excellent 2018 book edited by Steven Globerman and Jason Clemens):
Allowing people to venture forth and to reap the rewards of doing so is important, not just because it brings us ever-wider varieties of goods and services at ever-lower costs. It does a few other things as well. First, it recognizes our ability and our right to self-author however we choose, without having to ask permission from elites. Second, it extends an implicit and society-wide acknowledgement of liberty and dignity for everyone irrespective of bloodline or skin color. The last vestiges of racial hierarchy hang on, and stubbornly. The solution, we think, is not a larger and more active state, but greater freedom for entrepreneurs.
Some Covid Links
Jay Bhattacharya talks about the Delta variant.
Amelia Janaskie and Ryan Yonk rightly lament the refusal these days to acknowledge the inescapability of trade-offs. Here’s their conclusion:
As Thomas Sowell famously wrote, “There are no solutions, only trade-offs,” and this scenario is not different. No policy is costless, and no policy is only to the upside. In every policy discussion including those around public health, understanding that trade-offs will occur is an important part of the policy process. When we refuse to engage with that reality, we will almost always pay far higher costs than are warranted.
GMU Law student Ethan Yang reports on GMU Law professor Todd Zywicki’s lawsuit against GMU officials for these officials’ refusal to exempt Zywicki, a Covid survivor, from the requirement of getting a Covid vaccine. (DBx: Like Todd, I’m also a GMU employee. Unlike Todd, I’ve had the full series of vaccinations. I wholly support Todd’s lawsuit.)
Cheering on – justifiably! – Florida governor Ron DeSantis.
Jon Sanders looks at masking from the perspective of the Tullock spike.
‘Staying home’ to “protect the NHS” might, perhaps, be said to have achieved its narrow purpose, but only at the expense of unnecessarily jeopardizing the health of millions of Brits whose health the NHS is allegedly meant to protect. (DBx: The lessons here are two. One is of the dangers of stirring up excessive fear of a communicable disease. A second is of the dangers of government-run health ‘systems.’)
It’s a mystery to me why Neil Ferguson isn’t universally regarded as a complete quack.
Stephen Armstrong laments the rise of “superforecasters.” Two slices:
Yet in battling Covid, he [Dominic Cummings] and we have faced endless wild forecasts that subsequently vanished, were rowed back upon or simply proved wrong. Neil Ferguson and Sir John Bell stand out from the pack here – Ferguson’s most recent speculative forecasting on Covid cases saw him shift from a mid-July prediction that the country would soon reach 100,000 daily Covid cases to a late-July prediction that as “infections in the community are plateauing, I’m positive that by late September-October time we will be looking back at most of the pandemic”.
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One of the chief rules of superforecasting is honesty, humility and transparency. “Notably, one of the characteristics that does not correlate with accuracy is extroversion,” explains Warren Hatch, CEO of the Good Judgement consultancy, set up by Tetlock to deliver superforecasting, um, forecasts. “All those loud talking heads – smart people with opinions – don’t have any inherent advantage when it comes to forecasting.”
Yet we live in a land where the loudest and gloomiest forecasters are king. Policy and business decisions hinge upon their every word.
Daniel Hannan continues to write with humanity, civility, and wisdom. A slice:
I hate the fact that face masks are becoming yet another front in our ghastly culture wars. And I hate, even more, the realisation that I am being dragged into combat. But I have little choice. The lifting of restrictions on 19 July was our one chance to return to normality. If we miss it, we won’t get another.
The arguments in favour of facemasks were always ambiguous. The WHO and SAGE began by telling us that they were at best pointless and at worst counter-productive. They changed their guidance, not in response to clear new evidence, but out of a sense that every little helped. Whether or not masks did any good, they couldn’t do much harm, and it was worth trying anything that might slow transmission.
I accepted that logic. Some hardline anti-lockdowners raged at me for getting a mask in the colours of the Garrick Club, a jeu d’esprit that they saw as glorifying servitude or something. But it seemed to me that, next to the real lockdown privations – closed shops, empty classrooms, separated families – masks were not worth quarrelling over.
Equally, though, there had to be a moment when we drew a line under the whole business. That moment came three weeks ago, when it became clear that the rise in infections was not translating into a significant rise in illness. The PM ignored the naysayers and opened up – and, on the figures we have seen since, he has been utterly vindicated.
Covidocratic tyranny in Australia grows more awful and Iron-Curtain-like, as this headline reveals: “Australian Army hits the streets to enforce the world’s strictest lockdown: Soldiers stop people from leaving their homes more than once in Sydney’s poor suburbs as part of losing pursuit of ‘Zero Covid’.” A slice:
It comes as Australia banned ex-pats who enter the country from leaving again in a bid to ease the pressure on quarantine hotels under strain from the delta variant.
When non-resident citizens – Australians that live abroad – visit their country of origin, they will soon have to apply for an exception to leave again.
… and Australia’s dystopian authoritarianism doesn’t seem to achieve even its own narrow, stated goal. (HT Phil Magness)
Despite that country having almost no Covid cases, New Zealand’s emergency rooms are overrun. (But at least these people aren’t suffering from Covid – which we now know is all that matters in this life.) (HT Phil Magness)
Robert Wright rightly praises AIER.
John Tamny rightly decries the selfishness and narrow-mindedness of many pro-lockdowners.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from Thomas Sowell’s March 27th, 1984, letter to a Mr. Ford, as this letter appears on pages 204-206 of Sowell’s 2007 collection, A Man of Letters:
Most black youngsters do not have parents who can hire them in the family business or use influence to get them jobs in a friend’s business. Their only hope is to get a start somewhere out in the harsh competition of the marketplace – or the even harsher competition of crime. After they get some experience under their belts, they will be worth more than the minimum wage. But to prevent them from getting the experience in the first place, by insisting that they receive the minimum wage from day one, is a great disservice to them.
August 7, 2021
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 25 of the 2008 updated version of University of Arizona philosopher David Schmidtz’s excellent 1994 paper, “The Institution of Property“:
We should applaud institutions that encourage people to care for each other. But telling people they are required to tend someone else’s garden rather than their own does not encourage people to care for each other. It does the opposite. It encourages spite.
Some Covid Links
Todd Zywicki, my friend and GMU colleague over in the law school, explains in today’s Wall Street Journal why he’s suing GMU officials over their vaccine mandate. Here’s his conclusion:
If I were not already naturally immune to Covid, I would have long ago gotten vaccinated at the first opportunity. But for those of us who have acquired natural immunity, vaccination provides none of the benefits of vaccination with all of the costs.
George Mason University’s vision aspires to “bring new perspectives and solutions to the world’s most pressing problems.” By breaking from the herd and following the example of George Mason himself—who refused to sign the U.S. Constitution until it included a Bill of Rights—my university can live up to this promise and treat naturally acquired immunity as at least equivalent to vaccinated status.
Newsweek reports on Todd Zywicki’s courageous lawsuit. A slice:
While one plausible solution is for Zywicki to work and teach from home, Younes said Zywicki doesn’t see that as an acceptable long-term remedy.
“This is not a situation where he’s guessing he had COVID. He’s had many antibody tests—he’s had a number of them as recently as June, which showed very robust immunity levels,” [Jenin] Younes told Newsweek. “Where we’re talking about following the science there’s really no reason to treat him differently than other vaccinated colleagues.”
The 37-page letter sent by the Alliance to university leaders included a lengthy statement by Noorchashm and a joint statement from Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford and Dr. Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, both agreeing Zywicki should be exempt. The two cited several studies to that point.
“If you have COVID and recover, then you have natural immunity, that’s how the immune system works,” Kulldorff, who has studied vaccines for many years, told Newsweek.“The vaccine works in the same way because it makes your immune system work without having the disease so having had the disease provides at least as good or better immunity than you’d have from the vaccine.”
From a public health standpoint Kulldorff also noted that by forcing people who are already immune to take the vaccine could take the vaccine away from others who need it.
Reason‘s J.D. Tuccille wisely counsels us not to “surrender to the pandemic control freaks.” Two slices:
When, exactly, do we get to return to normal life? Is it when every single person is vaccinated? Is it when lockdowns finally demonstrate any effectiveness at fighting COVID-19? When we’ve driven all our kids nuts and small businesses bankrupt with restrictions? When disease is completely eradicated around the time the sun sputters out? Or will it be when the pajama class is finally bored with lording it over the rest of society and decides it’s time to come up for air? It’s a question requiring an answer as our lords and masters show every inclination to once again tighten the screws to address a never-ending public health emergency.
A year and a half into the pandemic, every American 12 and older who cares to be vaccinated against COVID-19 has had the opportunity to get a shot. That’s important, because all of the available vaccines are extremely effective at reducing the dangers of infection for their recipients.
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COVID-19 has been an unpleasant ordeal for the entire planet, but perhaps not so awful as the policies inflicted on us in the name of public health. It’s time to move beyond pandemic panic to rebuild our prosperity, raise our kids, and reclaim our freedom. If the control freaks don’t like that, well, they’re another affliction we can do without.
Phil Magness’s letter in the August 6th, 2021, edition of the Wall Street Journal is a gem:
In times of public-health emergency, the federal government takes on the role of a provider of information. Unfortunately, as “The CDC’s Delta Variant Panic” (Review & Outlook, July 31) illustrates, our government has fallen into a pattern of not only vacillating between contradictory positions, but also fanning the flames of Covid-19 misinformation.
This pattern extends to the earliest days of the pandemic. Far from providing leadership, agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and figures such as Anthony Fauci have a record of projecting their own unfounded speculation as authoritative scientific judgments on matters in which they lack clear evidence. Recall how the CDC spent spring 2020 attempting to dissuade the public from buying masks, how Dr. Fauci described the risk of Covid to the U.S. as “minuscule” in late February 2020, and how “two weeks to flatten the curve” morphed into two months, then a year.
More recent vacillation includes ever-changing advice on masks, a re-evaluation of the lab-leak theory, the confidence-undermining pause on the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, and now encouraging alarmism with misleading claims about the number of Delta variant breakthrough cases. Despite this stream of inconsistent messages, these public-health authorities are routinely invoked by journalists and social-media fact checkers as the standard against which “Covid misinformation” is to be judged.
A year and a half of placing political expediency over scientific accuracy has taken its toll on the public. By failing to acknowledge the limitations of their own knowledge and repeated errors of judgment, Dr. Fauci and the CDC have undermined the very trust they seek to command. If public trust in science declines as a result, these officials have only themselves to blame.
Phillip W. Magness
Great Barrington, Mass.
L.A. City Council President Nury Martinez and Councilman Mitch O’Farrell have introduced a motion instructing the city attorney to draft an ordinance requiring people in Los Angeles to provide proof of at least one vaccine dose in order to enter any indoor spaces “including but not limited to restaurants, bars, retail establishments, fitness centers, spas, and entertainment centers such as stadiums, concert venues, and movie theaters.”
There is no actual scientific or safety justification for such a demand. The motion itself notes that more than 70 percent of Los Angeles County residents over the age of 16 have gotten at least one vaccine dose. Hospitalizations and deaths in Los Angeles due to COVID-19 are indeed rising again, but they’re nowhere near where they were before vaccines became available. Hospitalizations won’t reach that spot again precisely because more than 70 percent of residents are at least partly vaccinated.
Brian Doherty calls on New Yorkers to resist Mayor de Blasio’s Covidocratic tyranny. A slice:
It has never been possible to run a risk-free human society, and our current political class’s attempts to pretend to do so (while failing) get darker and more insane by the week. Public policy has made flailing attempts to eradicate a virus in the past year. It cannot do so, and it definitely hurts to try.
The straw man again threatens to stomp through Britain.
Millions with life-threatening health conditions were put at risk in order to block this unstoppable virus.
A generation of young people were forced to put their lives on hold when the average age of Covid victims was 83, a year older than the median UK lifespan. And our economy was damaged, in some areas perhaps beyond repair.
We deserve an explanation and we should not have to wait years for the outcome of a public inquiry. An apology from some would be welcome. Let’s start with Imperial College’s Neil Ferguson, “Professor Lockdown” himself.
Here’s more from Phil Magness:
Modest Proposal: If you’ve taken your Covid cues at any point over the last 1.5 years from the psychic healer wellness blog’s “long covid” survey; from the Neil Ferguson model; from Fauci’s self-contradictory press conferences; from Rebekah Jones’s social media activism; or from Sam Bowman, you don’t get to complain about the other side promoting scientific misinformation.
Some Non-Covid Links
Uber and other ride-sharing services save thousands of lives. Brad Polumbo reports. A slice:
A study by two economists at the University of California, Berkeley examined the impact that Uber, specifically, has had on alcohol-related traffic deaths and total traffic deaths in the US. They sought to investigate a simple question. By providing people with a safe, convenient, and relatively inexpensive alternative means of transportation, would Uber reduce drunk driving and traffic deaths?
According to their findings, the answer is a resounding yes.
Uber has reduced alcohol-related traffic fatalities by 6.1 percent, the study finds, which equates to roughly 214 lives in 2019. Similarly, Uber reduced overall traffic deaths by 4 percent, likely by reducing other forms of dangerous driving such as driving while very tired. This equates to 494 lives saved in 2019. (And that’s just Uber: To understand the full life-saving impact of ride-sharing technology, we would have to factor in competitors like Lyft, too).
Arnold Kling explains that if rental contracts are ethical, then eviction moratoria are not. A slice:
Suppose that we think that renters and mortgage borrowers are deserving of charity because of the pandemic. The government chose to approach this by breaking their contracts. In effect, government took resources from landlords and mortgage lenders in order to provide charity to renters and mortgage borrowers.
Unlike many other people, I find this approach for providing charity deeply offensive. If the government wants to raise the income tax and use that money to subsidize renters and mortgage borrowers, then that seems to me more ethical than to single out landlords and mortgage lenders to provide this charity.
Jack Elbaum corrects some misinformation and economic ignorance spread by Ro Khanna. A slice:
And income has actually risen even more than that due to non-wage compensation taking up a larger portion of total compensation over time. The New York Times reported that non-wage compensation accounted for 32 percent of total earnings in 2018, up from 27 percent in 2000. Non-wage compensation includes “bonuses, paid leave and company contributions to insurance and retirement plans.”
Richard Ebeling writes about the insufficiently remembered British economist Edwin Cannan. A slice:
What stands out in Edwin Cannan’s writings is a simplicity and clarity in explaining the “miracle” of the market in a world-encompassing division of labor that connects multitudes of people for mutual improvement and peaceful cultural gains. His style, therefore, makes his volume, Wealth, for instance, an entertaining pleasure to read as he takes the reader through the various facets of the working and elements of the market order. While he did not presume to assign to the state only a minimalist place in society, he emphasized the power and productivity of free and creative initiative and incentive that comes only when people have a wide latitude of economic liberty.
As explained by Eric Boehm, Congress is doubling-down on a costly failure.
Cato’s Chris Edwards summarizes the “infrastructure” bill.
George Will rightly decries the rejection of meritocracy. Two slices:
This cultural moment is defined by the peculiar idea that America has such a surplus of excellence, it can dispense with something that should be rejected as inequitable — rigorous competition to identify merit. Progressives are recoiling from the idea that propelled humanity’s ascent to modernity: the principle that people are individuals first and primarily, so individual rights should supplant rights attached to group membership.
Progressives’ unease with society measuring merit when allocating opportunity and rewards is discordant with the nation’s premises. And rejecting meritocracy at a time when China — the United States’ strongest geopolitical rival ever — is intensifying its embrace of it is “an act of civilisational suicide,” Adrian Wooldridge warns.
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Some progressives, who are more interested in minimizing inequality than maximizing opportunity, insist that not even industriousness makes an individual deserving because it is an inherited trait. However, less loopy progressives rightly warn that there can be inherited hierarchies in meritocratic societies. America does fall short of Thomas Jefferson’s hope for “culling” talent “from every condition of our people.” SAT prep classes are not models of social diversity; parents are conscientious (this is not a vice) about transmitting family advantages to their children.
The answer, however, is to improve the culling, not to jettison the aspiration on the ground that all metrics of merit must be unfair. A first step would be to rescue children from uneducated educators of the sort who natter about “racist” arithmetic and the “myth” that some students are more arithmetically gifted than others
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