Russell Roberts's Blog, page 248

Some Non-Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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George Will rightly decries the pursuit of ‘equity’ over equality. A slice:

Harlan’s Plessy dissent reflects modernity’s break with pre-modern politics. This break has had three components: Treating citizens as individuals rather than as members of collectivities (guilds, classes, etc.). Guaranteeing the equal rights of citizens in, and against, the state. And equal opportunity — all careers open to talents.

. A slice:

Over the last few weeks, my kids and I have been watching a series called Made in a Day on Disney+. It’s a “how-it’s-made” program that dives into how, for example, Jack Daniel’s makes whiskey and how McIlhenny makes Tabasco sauce. Programs like these illustrate how it’s not just “whiskey,” and it’s not just “hot sauce.” According to the program, Jack Daniel’s uses a mix of corn from Alabama, barley from Montana, rye from Canada, yeast from Tennessee, and water from a nearby limestone cave. They don’t use just any corn, either: they use #1-grade corn. McIlhenny contracts with farmers around the world to grow a specific kind of chile. They use vinegar from Alabama. They started using their distinctive bottles when the founder was able to obtain overproduced cologne bottles that would dispense the sauce a drop or two at a time. Both companies age their products for years before they are bottled and shipped, and they are scrupulous about quality control. If they weren’t, their fickle and ruthless customers would punish them by taking their business elsewhere.

Bryan Caplan is impressed with a new essay by Richard Hanania.

Phil Magness reviews Elizabeth Catte’s new book on eugenics.

Bruce Yandle sensibly asks: “Are Google, Facebook, and Amazon so good at what they do that we must get rid of them?” A slice:

If a firm offers goods and services that consumers voluntarily consider to be superior, as based on their patronage, and if in so doing they provide the same consumers with lower or no higher costs, and if that means that the former suppliers now shunned by consumers are struggling and therefore the count of competitors is falling, how can one argue that consumers are being harmed?

Liz Wolfe warns against cheering on Beijing’s crackdown on oppression of ‘Big Tech.’

Here’s how the Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal opens a recent editorial:

Americans may be richer than they think and less unequal than they’ve been led to believe. That’s the takeaway from a recent working paper by five economists from the University of Wisconsin and the Federal Reserve, which adds to standard wealth measures by including Social Security and pension guarantees.

Scott Lincicome reports that Biden rejects open trade at a factory that depends upon open trade. A slice:

As I explain in a new working paper on U.S. industrial policy (and as Cato scholars have explained for decades), “Buy American” rules are just another form of protectionism: they’ve been found, for example, to act as a barrier to entering the U.S. market and to raise domestic prices in the same way that a tariff does. Special provisions in the rules, moreover, make them a particularly‐​generous handout for the U.S. steel industry (to steel consumers’ clear detriment). The restrictions also encourage foreign retaliation against U.S. exporters, and, far from improving federal projects, routinely confound them (via higher prices, more paperwork, project delays, etc.). Indeed, according to one recent (and quite relevant for today’s purposes) study, “Buy American” restrictions tied to federal transportation subsidies raised the price of domestically‐​produced transit buses and discouraged the purchase of more efficient foreign‐​made buses, thus lowering the quality and use of public transit (frequency and coverage), increasing traffic congestion, and harming the environment.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Randy Holcombe writes that it’s time to end the Covid mandates. A slice:

The spike in new cases is among those who have chosen to remain vulnerable. Everyone should not face mandates because some have made these choices. Meanwhile, those who are vaccinated face a very small risk. It’s not zero risk, but in pre-COVID times, people interacted with others and risked getting the flu, the common cold, and other communicable diseases. COVID risks are analogous, for the vaccinated.

Recognizing the COVID will never completely disappear, and that those who want to can get vaccinated to protect themselves from it, it is time to set aside “temporary” emergency policies.

A year and a half of restrictions on individual liberty is too long, has given the government too much power, and has set a bad precedent that is likely to have negative effects on our liberties down the road. Florida is one state that has taken the path of freedom over mandates. That’s one reason I’m happy to be a Floridian.

J.D. Tuccille celebrates the maintenance of the ability for parents to keep their children out of government “schools” (so-called). A slice:

So, the Ninth Circuit decision reaffirms the freedom of private alternatives to public schools to offer options that might be at odds with the preferences of public officials—or with the policies of other private institutions. Private schools, microschools, learning pods, and homeschoolers retain their ability to cater to different styles, needs, risk-tolerances, and philosophies, as they should in a diverse and at least nominally free society that respects individual choice.

And here’s Ethan Yang on the same.

Chris Lingle warns against “scientific authoritarianism.” A slice:

However, fear ginned up during the recent pandemic based on pronouncements reflecting “expert” authority caused individuals to stop thinking of health as a personal issue and to embrace “public health.” The notion that “public health” reflects an objective reality must be challenged, especially since so much focus is on only one among many viruses and on only one disease among many ailments that afflict mankind. It is troubling that these political feats of legerdemain have induced many citizens to accept an artificial collective construct, with solidarity dominating individual autonomy and security elevated over human liberty.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is rightly angry at “an incompetent Government invoking bogus science.” A slice:

Yet nothing quite so illustrates the bureaucratic incoherence of Britain’s post-vaccination policy as this lunatic quarantine rule for travellers.

Jacob Sullum rightly criticizes CDC Director Rochelle Walensky both for her seeming inability to understand what is meant by the effectiveness of a vaccine and her definite inability to put risks into proper perspective. A slice:

In the United States, breakthrough infections still seem to be rare, notwithstanding the delta variant, as the CDC acknowledges. “The 125,682 ‘breakthrough’ cases in 38 states found by NBC News represent less than .08 percent of the 164.2 million-plus people who have been fully vaccinated since January, or about one in every 1,300,” CNBC reports. CNBC notes that “the total number of breakthrough cases is likely higher,” since “nine states, including Pennsylvania and Missouri, did not provide any information” and “vaccinated adults who have breakthrough cases but show no symptoms could be missing from the data altogether.” But even if the true number is two or three times as high, it would still not be remotely consistent with Walensky’s risk estimate.

Robert Wright rightly decries CNN and other media for over-hyping the dangers of Covid. A slice:

It is by now notorious that its [CNN’s] producers were caught on tape admitting that its infamous death ticker was a cynical ploy to boost ratings. Producer Charlies Chester told his fake Tinder date that “fear really drives numbers … which is why we constantly have the death toll on the side.”

(DBx: To vaccinate myself here from possible push-back: To decry the over-hyping of some danger is not to deny the danger.)

The dire predictions by many of the horrors that would emerge after Britain’s “Freedom Day” (of July 19th) continue not to pan out.

Camilla Tominey writes that “Lockdown fanatics have created a poisonous Covid culture war.” Here’s more:

He isn’t the only one to have fallen victim to the online mob of armchair experts who think they know better. Oxford professor Carl Heneghan has also been criticised, not only on social media but by fellow academics as well for questioning the restrictions, while Professor Sunetra Gupta, also from Oxford, says she faced an “astonishing backlash” for calling for a focused protection approach. Leading oncologist Professor Karol Sikora, who has pointed out the collateral harms of lockdowns, has also been singled out for abuse.

So much for science supposedly being advanced by open debate.

One article blamed the media for “pitting scientists against each other” but as Cambridge statistician Professor David Spiegelhalter was brave enough to point out: “Shouldn’t this be: ‘Scientists should rise above polarised policy debates’? Odd to just blame media.” Indeed.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 146 of Milton & Rose Friedman’s great 1980 book, Free To Choose:

Wherever the free market has been permitted to operate, wherever anything approaching equality of opportunity has existed, the ordinary man has been able to attain levels of living never dreamed of before. Nowhere is the gap between rich and poor wider, nowhere are the rich richer and the poor poorer, than in those societies that do not permit the free market to operate.

DBx: Milton Friedman was born on this date, July 31st, in 1912.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from pages 253 of University of Notre Dame philosopher James Otteson’s excellent 2021 book, Seven Deadly Economic Sins:

To take one’s proper place in the world as a moral agent, one must set boundaries around oneself through which no one may enter uninvited. That means that one must not only have the right way to say “no, thank you” but must regularly exercise that right.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Jacob Sullum reports that the evidence for the CDC’s new mask guidance is less than solid. A slice:

The CDC still describes breakthrough infections as “rare,” although it has stopped keeping track of cases with minimal or moderate symptoms, focusing instead on hospitalizations and deaths. As of July 19, it had counted 5,601 hospitalizations and 1,141 deaths involving vaccinated Americans. Those cases represent a tiny fraction of all COVID-19 hospital admissions and deaths: The U.S. at that point was seeing more than 3,500 hospitalizations per day and had recorded a total of more than 260,000 deaths since the beginning of this year. Vaccinated people, in other words, accounted for less than 0.5 percent of COVID-19 deaths during that period. Based on data from January through May 2021, the CDC found that less than 3 percent of hospitalizations involved patients who had been fully vaccinated.

Phillipe Lemoine does a deep dive into the consequences of lockdowns.

Data on Covid hospitalizations in Britain might have been inflated.

Harry de Quetteville asks why so many people were, and remain, so bizarrely enchanted with forecasters such as the atrocious Neil Ferguson. A slice:

It’s all terribly confusing, this world in which experts are hauled onto the news to tell us what is going to happen only to contradict themselves a few days later. In this way Ferguson has become the contemporary equivalent of the economist John Maynard Keynes (who infamously predicted we’d be enjoying a 15-hour working week by now). In 1961, asked by US Congress to report on the “Impact of Automation on Employment”, Nobel-winning economist Paul Samuelson noted the difficulty of such predictions. “If Parliament asked six economists for an opinion on any subject they always got seven answers,” he noted. “Two from John Maynard Keynes.”

Holding multiple, apparently contradictory views, is no bar to greatness, such stories tell us. Which means that neither is being wrong. And Ferguson is no stranger to that, either.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 14 of Thomas Sowell’s superb 1981 volume, Ethnic America: A History:

Nothing has so vindicated the untapped potential of ordinary people as the American experience.

DBx: Pictured here is Madame C.J. Walker – born to parents who were enslaved, she became a successful entrepreneur who died a millionaire (back when a million dollars was genuinely substantial wealth!).

Covid Did NOT Reduce Life Expectancy by 1.5 Years – And the FDA Is No Friend in the Fight Against Covid

(Don Boudreaux)

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David Colander explains, in today’s Wall Street Journal, that the much-ballyhooed statistic released last week by the CDC – the one that claims to show that Covid-19 reduced life expectancy for American new-borns in 2020 by a whopping 1.5 years – is “fake news.” Here’s the key paragraph:

The figure the CDC reported last week is known as “period life expectancy.” It measures the average length of time a hypothetical American who, from birth to death, is exposed to the mortality rates observed in the current period. That means the 2020 statistic assumes that Covid will be killing people forever at the same rate as it did last year—an implausible scenario.

Also in today’s Wall Street Journal, David Henderson and Charley Hooper rightly criticize the FDA for denigrating Ivermectin. A slice:

Ivermectin fights 21 viruses, including SARS-CoV-2, the cause of Covid-19. A single dose reduced the viral load of SARS-CoV-2 in cells by 99.8% in 24 hours and 99.98% in 48 hours, according to a June 2020 study published in the journal Antiviral Research.

Some 70 clinical trials are evaluating the use of ivermectin for treating Covid-19. The statistically significant evidence suggests that it is safe and works for both treating and preventing the disease.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Martin Kulldorff reports that Covid-19 mortality today in the U.S. is just about where it was in March 2020, at the start of the pandemic – and, hence, much lower than it’s been for most of the time since.

More Covidocratic tyranny might well be on its way to the U.S. as CDC Director Rochelle Walensky says that vaccine passports “may very well be the path forward” – “forward,” that is, into what David Hart calls “hygiene socialism.”

Although he doesn’t mention the Great Barrington Declaration, Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins ends his latest column appropriately decrying the fact that we failed to follow its sensible advice:

It now leaves us in the dark at a crucial moment, with various TV epidemiologists making opposite guesses: Either there’s lots of unseen spread of Delta among the vaccinated or hardly any.

Suddenly this is an important question on our bumpy road to Covid becoming a low-risk, nuisance virus. And my only explanation for the media’s insistence on the “confirmed cases” misdirection is that it makes Covid seem both more deadly and more controllable than it is. It loads the dice for the wrong choice we’ve made over and over, as should be clear by 600,000 deaths almost entirely concentrated among the elderly, obese and sickly. We’ve spent too much effort trying to regulate everybody’s behavior as if this were the best way to protect those who most needed protecting.

Want an example? The U.S. might have saved itself trillions of dollars and perhaps 200,000 deaths if it just did what one Connecticut nursing home did, setting up temporary housing for its caregivers so they wouldn’t be carrying Covid to their clients.

Matt Welch is correct: “Because adults can’t evaluate risk, kids continue to suffer the most from COVID policy, despite suffering the least from COVID.” A slice:

The delta trendline among the vaccinated is getting worse, but the baseline from which it has ticked up is borderline miraculous. Let’s put the above odds in context. You have a one in 2,535 chance of choking to death on food. If you drive more than 1,000 miles a year, you have a one in 366 chance of getting into an automobile accident. The odds of you dying from a lightning strike are higher than the ratio of vaccinated people who have perished while infected with COVID.

Also writing on the CDC’s utterly unscientific new masking ‘guidance’ is Elizabeth Nolan Brown. A slice:

That’s where the CDC guidance truly fails.

“CDC messaging is astonishingly bad here,” suggests cardiologist and CNN medical analyst Jonathan Reiner. Instead of clearly articulating the problem which is 80 million adults have chosen not to get vaccinated and they are largely also unmasked, CDC suggests that the problem is rare transmission from vaxed to unvaxed people. This is so wrong.”

Adam Creighton reveals some of the derangement of “zero Covid.” A slice:

Covid-19 was never an existential threat. After 18 months about four million people have died from or with Covid – most of advanced age apart for some tragic exceptions – in a world with a rapidly growing population of almost eight billion people. Sixty million people die every year.

But we have behaved like it was, racking up trillions in extra debt and trashing norms of liberal democracy that might not quickly, if ever, return. The idea that Sydney would be locked down in September 2021 or that American pediatricians would insist anyone over two years old wear a mask outside, to anyone living in February last year would have seemed ridiculous. Yet both, seemingly, are true. On this trend, silencing different scientific opinions or mandating individual tracking devices, all in the name of “saving lives”, may no longer be considered far-fetched.

Nate Silver criticizes the ‘scientist’ Neil Ferguson for being “overconfident” in his predictions.

Here’s a spot-on letter in The Telegraph:

SIR – At the start of the pandemic, Professor Neil Ferguson and Sage predicted 500,000 deaths. They have recently predicted 100,000 new daily infections and that rate doubling every nine days. Why? Because their modelling says so. Whatever happened to scientific evidence?

From the start, professors Karol Sikora, Carl Heneghan and Sunetra Gupta have been beacons of common sense, but their advice has sadly been ignored in favour of Sage’s radical proposals, which have undermined the Government. Why do Boris Johnson and Sajid Javid, the Health Secretary, still give it credence?

Peter Yarnall
Milnrow, Lancashire

Kathy Gyngell interviews A State of Fear author Laura Dodsworth. A slice:

KG: There is no doubt as to your conclusion, that the Government’s exploitation of fear was not ethical – you interviewed people who were almost pathologically terrorised by it. What do you believe to have been the worst of the intended and unintended consequences of it at an individual and societal level?

LD: Some of the collateral damage is obvious. Being frightened is bad enough in itself, and there is evidence that fear and stress correlate with lowered physical health. If the behavioural scientists who weaponised these tactics had been operating in a lab they would have been constrained by ethical frameworks and would have needed our consent to participate. We have not signed consent forms.

The Babylon Bee reports on a dangerous new freedom variant!

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 179 of Maverick, Jason Riley’s excellent 2021 intellectual biography of the great Thomas Sowell:

Civil rights organizations wanted to raise money and stay relevant, and black politicians who ran as ethnic leaders wanted to win votes. Which  meant they had a vested interest in framing black problems primarily as civil rights problems even when the evidence pointed to other factors.

DBx: Sowell’s 1984 book, the cover of which is pictured here, is a must-read on this topic.

The Invisible Hand Relies Upon Visible Prices

(Don Boudreaux)

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In my latest column for AIER I celebrate the remarkable and indispensable – literally indispensable – role that visible prices play in enabling the successful operation of the invisible hand of the market. A slice:

Just as the market order is essential to our survival, prices expressed in money are essential to the market order. Prices are among the visible results of the invisible hand’s successful operation, as well as the single most important source of this success.

Each price objectively summarizes an inconceivably large number of details that must be taken account of if the economy is to perform even moderately well.

Consider the price of a loaf of a particular kind and brand of bread. This price reflects, in part, the willingness of legions of consumers to spend their incomes on that sort of bread, as opposed to other goods or services. It also reflects details of the weather and of different governments’ trade and regulatory policies, each of which is among the many factors that affect supplies of wheat. And the price of bread reflects also supplies of yeast, of ovens, of electricity, of bakery workers, of delivery vehicles, of diesel fuel, of packaging materials, and of insurance. In turn, supplies of each of these inputs to the baking and distribution of bread are affected by the demands for these inputs for use in producing and distributing muffins, pasta, popcorn, particle board, bus tires, and jumbo jets – in short, everything else.

The price at the supermarket of a loaf of bread, a straightforward $4.99, is the distillation of the economic results of the interaction of an unfathomably large number of details from around the globe about opportunities, trade-offs, and preferences. The invisible hand of the market causes these details to be visibly summarized not only in the price of bread, but in the prices of all other consumer goods and services, as well as in the prices of each of the inputs used in production. These market prices, each easily visible in terms of a single ‘objective’ measuring unit of value (for example, the U.S. dollar), gives consumers guidance on how to get the most out of their incomes. These market prices also give investors and entrepreneurs guidance on how to deploy scarce resources in ways that produce that particular mix of goods and services that will today be of greatest benefit for consumers.

That this guidance is imperfect according to a standard that would be set by a supernatural intelligence is undeniable. Yet equally undeniable is the fact that this guidance is far better than any that we humans could achieve without market prices.

The market’s invisible hand, in short, alone makes possible – yet equally depends upon – visible market prices.