Russell Roberts's Blog, page 252
July 20, 2021
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 268 of F.A. Hayek’s March 9th, 1976, essay in the Daily Telegraph, “Adam Smith’s Message in Today’s Language,” as this essay is reprinted in Hayek’s 1978 collection, New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas:
The great achievement of his [Adam Smith’s] famous discussion about the division of labour was the recognition that men who were governed in their efforts, not by the known concrete needs and capacities of their intimate fellows, but by the abstract signals of the prices at which things were demanded and offered on the market, were thereby enabled to serve the enormous field of the ‘great society’ that ‘no human wisdom and knowledge could ever be sufficient’ to survey.
DBx: This Smithian insight is indeed profound. As such, it has vast implications – only one of which is that so-called “corporate social responsibility,” sincerely pursued, would make society poorer than it will be if corporate managers aim exclusively at maximizing shareholder value. (Note that the case for maximizing shareholder value implies that corporate managers serve as faithful agents for their principals – that is, shareholders.)
…..
The essay by Hayek in which the above quotation appears was published exactly, to the day, 200 years after the publication of Smith’s magnificent An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.
July 19, 2021
Beware of Any Government-Engineered “Easy Choice”
The most iconic line from The Godfather is, “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse.” Don Corleone wasn’t horsing around. The Hollywood producer to whom this ‘offer’ was made was threatened with terrible consequences if he refused to accept it. The Don’s ‘offer’ was not refused.
This famous line came to mind as I heard Washington Post columnist – and CNN regular – Dr. Leana Wen (she boasts an M.D.) insist that the government needs “to make vaccination the easy choice.” Such innocent words! Indeed, they sound downright sweet. Who doesn’t like ‘easy?’ But there’s nothing sweet or even innocent in Dr. Wen’s words. They signal authoritarianism.
By “make vaccination the easy choice” Wen means – as she admits – that “it needs to be hard for people to remain unvaccinated.” She wants government to subject unvaccinated individuals to invasions of their private affairs so restrictive and obstructive that these persons will soon conclude that the “easy choice” is to get vaccinated.
This logic, of course, is the same as that which motivates armed robbers. When told, as you stare down the barrel of a thief’s gun, “Your money or your life,” your choice at that moment is indeed easy. Yet for obvious reasons no one applauds armed robbers for making it easy for their victims to ‘choose’ to relinquish control over their property. No one reckons that, because these victims ‘choose’ to turn over their money under threats of coercion, that these victims are not wronged by the robbers. And no one concludes that, because armed robbers formally give their victims a ‘choice,’ these robbers thereby act reasonably and in good faith.
In a free society, if Ms. Jones wishes to persuade Mr. Smith to take some particular action, Ms. Jones must offer to improve Mr. Smith’s well-being without being able to reduce his well-being.
“If you give me $5.00, Mr. Smith, I’ll give you this hamburger” is a legitimate offer by Jones, for if Smith refuses the offer he is not made worse off than he was before Jones made the offer. In contrast, “If you give me $5.00, Mr. Smith, I’ll not kill you” is not a legitimate offer. The reason is that Ms. Jones promises, if Mr. Smith does not agree, to make him worse off than he was before encountering Jones.
Put differently, in a free society there is a powerful presumption against anyone using threats of coercion to change the baseline from which each individual bargains. Armed robbers coercively – and of course without any justification – change the baseline from which their victims are then compelled to ‘bargain.’ Before encountering the bandit, the right to your life was controlled by you. Control of your life was part of the baseline from which you bargain with others. But by the very act of threateningly pointing a gun at you, the armed robber unilaterally transfers control of your life from you to her; the armed robber unilaterally changes the baseline from which you are now obliged to bargain.
Some Covid Links
Given that an estimated 469,982 under 18s were infected with the virus up to February of 2021, the survival rate in this age-group (the inverse of the IFR) was 99.995%. What’s more, 99.2% of total deaths were caused by things other than COVID-19.
Smith and colleagues’ findings underline just how small a risk COVID-19 poses to young people, and hence – I would argue – why a focussed protection strategy was preferable to blanket lockdowns.
As early as 10th April 2020, Martin Kulldorff – co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration – published an article on LinkedIn titled ‘COVID-19 Counter Measures Should be Age Specific’.
A day in the life under the reign of Covid Derangement Syndrome.
David McGrogan writes insightfully. A slice:
The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic highlights the dangers in starkly luminous yellow paint. The piecemeal expansion of the State that we have seen take place over the last 150 years or so was often built, as we have seen, on conceiving of sections of the population – the poor, the old, children, minority groups, and so on – as vulnerable and in need of help. We are now seeing what happens when the State is able to conceive as vulnerable not just a section of the population, but its entirety. Suddenly, potentially nothing is outside of the purview of public power, because every single interpersonal human relationship relates to the overriding goal of ‘stopping the spread.’ The family, the church, the community group, the workplace, even the sexual act – the State has now seen fit to put itself between individuals wherever they are, in whatever context, even in their own homes.
Peter Earle decries some of the bitter fruits of lockdowns.
Covid Derangement Syndrome continues to serve as a welcome mat for the straw man in Australia.
Daniel Hannan laments the increased willingness among the Brits to accept authoritarian rule. A slice:
No, what changed, frankly, was the public mood. Ever since the first lockdown was imposed, this column has been mournfully predicting that we would see an upsurge in authoritarianism that went well beyond the response to the disease. And so it has come to pass. The sense of a collective threat has made us more tribal, readier to compel and submit and regulate and ban. We demand closed borders. We back ID cards – at least in the form of vaccination certificates. We want (or say we want) higher state spending.
Jonathan Sumption describes “Freedom Day” in Britain as “yet another false dawn.” A slice:
He [Boris Johnson] declared that the vaccine had transformed the situation. The reality is that we have more restrictions on our freedom now than we had a year ago before vaccines became available.
He pointed out that we must open up for the sake of the economy. Yet hundreds of thousands are being pushed into self-isolation every week by the pings of the Test and Trace app. The great majority of them will not test positive for Covid, let alone suffer serious symptoms. Yet numerous businesses are grinding to a halt.
He acknowledged that we must learn to live with Covid. Yet it seems that he is not prepared to live with the one feature of viruses that is all but universal, namely that they mutate.
At his Facebook page, Phil Magness uncovers more nonsense about so-called “long Covid”:
The Lancet-owned journal EClinicalMedicine just published this “study” purporting to document over 200 symptoms associated with so-called “Long Covid.”
Dig a little deeper and you’ll find that this is yet another self-administered survey study conducted by the Body Politic Support Group – the alternative “wellness collective” organization that’s run by a professional psychic healer out of Boston who claims she can detect medical ailments by speaking to your dead ancestors.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/ec...
Some Non-Covid Links
Arnold Kling is also correct, I believe, to argue that the ‘gradualist’ school of economic growth – those economic historians who deny the historical reality of an industrial revolution – are mistaken. (DBx: But this growth was sparked by more than trade and specialization according to comparative advantage. As important as these are, innovation unleashed by bourgeois virtues, dignity, and equality are key.)
Alex Nowrasteh and Ben Powell explain how mass immigration put the damper on the push for socialism in America. Here’s their conclusion:
All in all, immigration did more to slow the growth of government in the 19th and early 20th centuries and to frustrate the goals of left-wing reformers than it did to overturn the fundamental economic and political institutions of the American founding. With few exceptions, immigrants helped preserve, protect, defend, and expand American free markets.
“It’s About Time We Stopped ‘Trying Communism'” – so correctly argues Ethan Yang.
In theory, more money in the IRS budget means more agents to help taxpayers comply or to track down tax evasion. But it likely requires some serious tradeoffs with civil liberties.
How far would you be willing to go to crack down on Uber drivers, cleaning ladies, and individuals operating cash-based businesses—also known as small businesses? We’d better have an answer, because that’s the plan. And in light of the recent IRS data leak to ProPublica or the political harassment of conservative political groups in 2012, how much more power would you give the IRS to access people’s finances?
David Simon identifies six facts that climate-change warriors would prefer remain unknown.
Richard Phelps writes critically about the long-standing peer-review process for academic papers.
Eric Boehm writes about the so-called “carbon tariff.”
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 113 of the 1969 Revised Edition of Lon Fuller’s profoundly important 1964 book, The Morality of Law:
The source of this tension between theory and everyday wisdom lies, quite obviously, in a concentration by theory on formal structure to the neglect of the purposive activity this structure is assumed to organize.
DBx: Intellectuals – contrary to their arrogant suppositions to the contrary – have knowledge only of formal structures and of aggregate data. Except for the details that they know of their own individual circumstances, intellectuals know nothing – nothing – of the details of the circumstances of any of the millions of individual lives that they presume themselves fit to command.
And yet intellectuals continue haughtily to presume not merely that they are fit, but that they are anointed by history and sufficiently knowledgeable, to inflict on humanity their “rampaging presumptions.”
July 18, 2021
A Must-Read Piece by John Tierney on the “Panic Pandemic”
The great science writer John Tierney’s latest essay in City Journal, titled “The Panic Pandemic,” is one of the best pieces ever written on Covid-19 and the calamitous, dark-ages-like reaction it. If I were to excerpt every part of this essay that deserves highlighting, I’d simply post below the essay in its entirety. But Tierney’s essay isn’t gated, so you can read it, in full, for yourself. Please do so. And share it. Widely.
Here, though, are a few especially choice slices:
The United States suffered through two lethal waves of contagion in the past year and a half. The first was a viral pandemic that killed about one in 500 Americans—typically, a person over 75 suffering from other serious conditions. The second, and far more catastrophic, was a moral panic that swept the nation’s guiding institutions.
Instead of keeping calm and carrying on, the American elite flouted the norms of governance, journalism, academic freedom—and, worst of all, science. They misled the public about the origins of the virus and the true risk that it posed. Ignoring their own carefully prepared plans for a pandemic, they claimed unprecedented powers to impose untested strategies, with terrible collateral damage. As evidence of their mistakes mounted, they stifled debate by vilifying dissenters, censoring criticism, and suppressing scientific research.
…..
The panic was started, as usual, by journalists. As the virus spread early last year, they highlighted the most alarming statistics and the scariest images: the estimates of a fatality rate ten to 50 times higher than the flu, the chaotic scenes at hospitals in Italy and New York City, the predictions that national health-care systems were about to collapse. The full-scale panic was set off by the release in March 2020 of a computer model at the Imperial College in London, which projected that—unless drastic measures were taken—intensive-care units would have 30 Covid patients for every available bed and that America would see 2.2 million deaths by the end of the summer. The British researchers announced that the “only viable strategy” was to impose draconian restrictions on businesses, schools, and social gatherings until a vaccine arrived.
This extraordinary project was swiftly declared the “consensus” among public-health officials, politicians, journalists, and academics. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, endorsed it and became the unassailable authority for those purporting to “follow the science.” What had originally been a limited lockdown—“15 days to slow the spread”—became long-term policy across much of the United States and the world. A few scientists and public-health experts objected, noting that an extended lockdown was a novel strategy of unknown effectiveness that had been rejected in previous plans for a pandemic. It was a dangerous experiment being conducted without knowing the answer to the most basic question: Just how lethal is this virus?
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In a brief interlude of journalistic competence, two veteran science writers, Jeanne Lenzer and Shannon Brownlee, published an article in Scientific American decrying the politicization of Covid research. They defended the integrity and methodology of the Stanford researchers, noting that some subsequent studies had found similar rates of fatality among the infected. (In his latest review of the literature, Ioannidis now estimates that the average fatality rate in Europe and the Americas is 0.3 to 0.4 percent and about 0.2 percent among people not living in institutions.) Lenzer and Brownlee lamented that the unjust criticism and ad hominem vitriol had suppressed a legitimate debate by intimidating the scientific community. Their editors then proceeded to prove their point. Responding to more online fury, Scientific Americanrepented by publishing an editor’s note that essentially repudiated its own article. The editors printed BuzzFeed’s accusations as the final word on the matter, refusing to publish a rebuttal from the article’s authors or a supporting letter from Jeffrey Flier, former dean of Harvard Medical School. Scientific American, long the most venerable publication in its field, now bowed to the scientific authority of BuzzFeed.
Editors of research journals fell into line, too. When Thomas Benfield, one of the researchers in Denmark conducting the first large randomized controlled trial of mask efficacy against Covid, was asked why they were taking so long to publish the much-anticipated findings, he promised them as “as soon as a journal is brave enough to accept the paper.” After being rejected by The Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine, and JAMA, the study finally appeared in the Annals of Internal Medicine, and the reason for the editors’ reluctance became clear: the study showed that a mask did not protect the wearer, which contradicted claims by the Centers for Disease Control and other health authorities.
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But if it was unethical to recommend “interventions that are not scientifically well grounded,” how could anyone condone the lockdowns? “It was utterly immoral to conduct this society-wide intervention without the evidence to justify it,” Bhattacharya says. “The immediate results have been disastrous, especially for the poor, and the long-term effect will be to fundamentally undermine trust in public health and science.” The traditional strategy for dealing with pandemics was to isolate the infected and protect the most vulnerable, just as Atlas and the Great Barrington scientists recommended. The CDC’s pre-pandemic planning scenarios didn’t recommend extended school closures or any shutdown of businesses even during a plague as deadly as the 1918 Spanish flu. Yet Fauci dismissed the focused-protection strategy as “total nonsense” to “anybody who has any experience in epidemiology and infectious diseases,” and his verdict became “the science” to leaders in America and elsewhere.
Fortunately, a few leaders followed the science in a different way. Instead of blindly trusting Fauci, they listened to his critics and adopted the focused-protection strategy—most notably, in Florida. Its governor, Ron DeSantis, began to doubt the public-health establishment early in the pandemic, when computer models projected that Covid patients would greatly outnumber hospital beds in many states. Governors in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Michigan were so alarmed and so determined to free up hospital beds that they directed nursing homes and other facilities to admit or readmit Covid patients—with deadly results.
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And then along came Covid—“God’s gift to the Left,” in Jane Fonda’s words. Exaggerating the danger and deflecting blame from China to Trump offered not only short-term political benefits, damaging his reelection prospects, but also an extraordinary opportunity to empower social engineers in Washington and state capitals. Early in the pandemic, Fauci expressed doubt that it was politically possible to lock down American cities, but he underestimated the effectiveness of the crisis industry’s scaremongering. Americans were so frightened that they surrendered their freedoms to work, study, worship, dine, play, socialize, or even leave their homes. Progressives celebrated this “paradigm shift,” calling it a “blueprint” for dealing with climate change.
This experience should be a lesson in what not to do, and whom not to trust. Do not assume that the media’s version of a crisis resembles reality. Do not count on mainstream journalists and their favorite doomsayers to put risks in perspective. Do not expect those who follow “the science” to know what they’re talking about. Science is a process of discovery and debate, not a faith to profess or a dogma to live by. It provides a description of the world, not a prescription for public policy, and specialists in one discipline do not have the knowledge or perspective to guide society. They’re biased by their own narrow focus and self-interest. Fauci and Deborah Birx, the physician who allied with him against Atlas on the White House task force, had to answer for the daily Covid death toll—that ever-present chyron at the bottom of the television screen—so they focused on one disease instead of the collateral damage of their panic-driven policies.
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Luminaries united on Zoom and YouTube to assure the public that “we’re all in this together.” But we weren’t. When the panic infected the nation’s elite—the modern gentry who profess such concern for the downtrodden—it turned out that they weren’t so different from aristocrats of the past. They were in it for themselves.
On Matters of Trade, His Name Should be Darkhizer
Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal:
Editor:
Former U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer’s letter in the July 19th edition of your paper is a good reminder of just how confused the Trump administration was about trade.
In his letter, Mr. Lighthizer complains about a provision in the USMCA that, he says, discourages investment in the U.S. while encouraging it abroad. Standing alone, protesting such a result is unobjectionable. But it doesn’t stand alone.
Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Lighthizer has a long record of worrying about U.S. trade deficits. (See, for example, Lighthizer’s Nov. 12, 2010, op-ed in the New York Times.) But to worry about the U.S. trade deficit is to worry about the fact that America continues to receive more investment from abroad than Americans send abroad. Therefore, if Mr. Lighthizer is correct that the USMCA’s Investor State Dispute Settlement provision shifts investment from the U.S. to foreign countries, that provision keeps the U.S. trade deficit lower than it would otherwise be – an outcome that Mr. Lighthizer, given his long record of calling for measures to reduce the U.S. trade deficit, should applaud rather than oppose.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
On Lockdowns
Here’s a letter to a listener of Russ Roberts’s wonderful podcast, EconTalk:
Mr. G___:
Thanks for your kind and constructive feedback on my EconTalk episode on Covid.
You ask for evidence on the ineffectiveness of lockdowns. In my talk, rather than saying that there’s little evidence that lockdowns reduce the spread of Covid, I should instead have said that there’s little evidence that lockdowns save lives – the latter, of course, being the more important outcome. And it is evidence on the latter that I ultimately had in mind.
This March 2021 essay by the great science writer John Tierney summarizes much of the research. According to him, while there’s no compelling evidence that lockdowns save lives, there’s strong evidence that lockdowns take lives. Here’s Tierney’s conclusion:
If a corporation behaved this way, continuing knowingly to sell an unproven drug or medical treatment with fatal side effects, its executives would be facing lawsuits, bankruptcy, and criminal charges. But the lockdown proponents are recklessly staying the course, still insisting that lockdowns work. The burden of proof rests with those imposing such a dangerous policy, and they haven’t met it. There’s still no proof that lockdowns save any lives -let alone enough to compensate for the lives they end.
And just last month there appeared this National Bureau of Economic Research working paper by Virat Agrawal, Jonathan Cantor, Neeraj Sood, and Christopher Whaley. Here’s the abstract:
As a way of slowing COVID-19 transmission, many countries and U.S. states implemented shelter-in-place (SIP) policies. However, the effects of SIP policies on public health are a priori ambiguous as they might have unintended adverse effects on health. The effect of SIP policies on COVID-19 transmission and physical mobility is mixed. To understand the net effects of SIP policies, we measure the change in excess deaths following the implementation of SIP policies in 43 countries and all U.S. states. We use an event study framework to quantify changes in the number of excess deaths after the implementation of a SIP policy. We find that following the implementation of SIP policies, excess mortality increases. The increase in excess mortality is statistically significant in the immediate weeks following SIP implementation for the international comparison only and occurs despite the fact that there was a decline in the number of excess deaths prior to the implementation of the policy. At the U.S. state-level, excess mortality increases in the immediate weeks following SIP introduction and then trends below zero following 20 weeks of SIP implementation. We failed to find that countries or U.S. states that implemented SIP policies earlier, and in which SIP policies had longer to operate, had lower excess deaths than countries/U.S. states that were slower to implement SIP policies. We also failed to observe differences in excess death trends before and after the implementation of SIP policies based on pre-SIP COVID-19 death rates.
Of course, as with all topics the least bit controversial, evidence can be found in support of whatever position one holds. Enough torturing of the data will indeed cause them to confess to whatever the torturer wishes. This reality, however, doesn’t mean that all empirical studies are equally (in)valid. Some are much better than others. Ultimately, the reader must use sound judgment to determine which studies to accept and which to reject.
A final point: Even if the best evidence shows that lockdowns save lives, the case for lockdowns isn’t made. Lockdowns have consequences other than in the health dimension. Not the least of these consequences are the open-ended risks that inhere in the expansion of arbitrary government power over the ordinary affairs of life. As my emeritus Nobel-laureate colleague Vernon Smith wrote three days ago on Facebook: “What I have learned in the past year is that the mandators like controls, to control, and to have a justification for it. And now there is a reluctance to give them up.”
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 562 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):
Socialism easily accepts despotism. It requires the strongest execution of power – power sufficient to interfere with property.
DBx: Those who clamor for socialism – whether full-on or lite – mistake what they call “concentrations of wealth” for concentrations of power. And to solve this imaginary problem, those who clamor for socialism are eager to create a concentration of power that is genuine and, hence, genuinely dangerous.
July 17, 2021
Neil Oliver On the Covidocracy’s Inhumanity
I thank my Mercatus Center colleague Jack Salmon for alerting me to this powerful video.
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