Russell Roberts's Blog, page 254

Some Non-Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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GMU Law professor Joshua Wright is right, in this letter to the Wall Street Journal, about the FTC:

It’s a touch ominous when a bureaucrat begins her tenure by sending bipartisan procedural safeguards to the paper shredder. Federal Trade Commission Chairman Lina Khan wasted no time making confetti of the guardrails at the FTC, including the Obama administration policy statement placing minimal limits on how the agency could use its theretofore undefined power to police “unfair methods of competition.” Shredding the statement clears the way for Ms. Khan’s attempt to remake antitrust law in her image (“Lina Khan’s Power Grab at the FTC,” Review & Outlook, July 6). With the announcement of a global gag order on FTC staff, Ms. Khan has made it clear the FTC will now speak with one voice—hers.

All that has been overshadowed by an executive order aimed at competition and loaded with goodies, good intentions, new regulatory regimes and a blissful ignorance of unintended consequences (“Joe Biden, 20th Century Trustbuster,” Review & Outlook, July 10). Some of its pronouncements, like occupational-licensing reform, are to the good. But the FTC’s competition authority is about to become a free-for-all for the Biden administration to reshape the economy. One wonders how the Republicans going along with all this to “get Big Tech” are feeling right now; I’m guessing “played.” If not, they’ll catch up soon enough.

Imagining the FTC as Icarus flying without the constraints of history, economics or law is a fun thought experiment, but we’ve been here before. Ms. Khan’s initial steps are indicative of a regulatory overreach that will end with the FTC’s wings melting in the courts. This path does not lead to incremental, much less radical, change. I predict early headlines that appease a rabid base, frustration for FTC staff and a new, volatile partisanship at the agency, but actual results that leave unsatisfied the progressives aching for radical change.

Mark Jamison is correct: “Joe Biden sets regulation and antitrust back 100 years.” A slice:

As I have explained, more merger controls would result in fewer startups and less innovation, as acquisition by an established firm is sometimes a startup’s goal. Absent such acquisitions, numerous important products might never have existed. For example, Earle Dickson created Band-Aid for his wife’s use. Business development wasn’t his strong suit, so he gave the invention to his employer, Johnson & Johnson, who gave him a promotion and turned the product into a household name. In the tech space, products such as Microsoft’s Disc Operating System, Microsoft Word, Apple’s mouse, and Facebook’s Instagram all originated elsewhere and became business successes via companies with the necessary acumen.

Eric Boehm explains why “the trade embargo allows Cuba’s regime to blame the U.S. for communism’s failings.” A slice:

Despite being in place since 1962, the trade embargo has plainly failed to accomplish its primary goal of toppling Cuba’s regime. If anything, the policy has likely bolstered the regime by allowing the communist government to blame the U.S. for its own economic problems, as Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel did on Sunday. The trade embargo has contributed to the Cuban government’s impoverishing of millions of Cubans while limiting Americans’ economic freedom, too. That it remains in place nearly three decades after the fall of the Soviet Union shows that America’s foreign policy towards Cuba has failed to learn the primary lesson of the end of the Cold War: Economic freedom is the best weapon to aim at communism.

Richard Vedder identifies the real problem with critical race theory. A slice:

CRT banishes any classroom mention, let alone thoughtful discussion, of the full range of ideas about race currently articulated across the political spectrum. (The same thing is true in corporate America and at universities, where employees know better than to openly object to CRT’s rigid dogmas.) The CRT-approved story, in a nutshell, is that white racism is pervasive and accounts for all racial deficits and disparities. What is not being taught—what students are not exposed to, and not even allowed to hear—is the contrary position that persistent racial inequalities are oftentimes rooted in cultural differences and behavioral tendencies that are not all traceable to slavery or Jim Crow, and cannot all be solved by purging the vague category of “structural racism.”

Also writing on critical race theory is Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley; he correctly calls CRT “a hustle.” Here’s his conclusion:

And while Mr. Kendi is using trendier language—“antiracism,” “implicit bias,” etc.—critical race theory amounts to little more than a fancy argument for affirmative action, and always has. The theory comes out of the legal academy, and early proponents argued that race, ethnicity and gender should be used as academic credentials in hiring and promoting professors. It’s less a serious academic discipline than a hustle. It posits that racial inequality today is the sole fault of whites and the sole responsibility of whites to solve—through racial preferences for blacks. It’s employed by elites primarily for the benefit of elites, though in the name of helping the underprivileged. Ultimately, it’s about blaming your problems on other people—based on their race—which might be the last thing we should be teaching our children.

I’m honored to have been a recent guest on Marc Victor’s podcast, “The Live and Let Live Moment.”

Joakim Book is always worth reading.

Juliette Sellgren talks about campaign finance with the Cato Institute’s Trevor Burrus.

My former student Alex Nowrasteh explores the ability of the so-called “deep-roots hypothesis” to explain economic outcomes in the United States.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 375 of the 2016 second edition of Thomas Sowell’s Wealth, Poverty and Politics (original emphases):

By focusing on the rewards received for achievements, redistributionists ignore the benefits of those achievements for others , which is the very reason that those others – whether employees, patients, customers, or other recipients of the goods or services that people with these achievements produce – are willing to pay their own money to receive those benefits. As in many other contexts productivity vanishes into thin air by verbal sleight of hand, when discussing the “income distribution” that results from that productivity. It is as if all that matters is the income difference between A and B, ignoring the benefits of their respective achievements for C, D, E and many others. Ultimately, it is as if the internal distribution of the fruits of production is more important than the amount of production itself – on which the standard of living of the whole society depends.

Economists Should Recognize the Undesirability of Pursuing Corner Solutions

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to Max Roser, proprietor of Our World in Data; I thank Jay Bhattacharya for constructive feedback on an earlier version of this letter:

Mr. Roser:

I’ve long admired your website Our World In Data. It’s a remarkably rich mine of important information. Thank you for creating and maintaining that site.

But I write today in puzzlement. On your page “Daily new confirmed COVID-19 cases” there appears this statement: “Only if we end the pandemic everywhere can we end the pandemic anywhere. The entire world has the same goal: cases of COVID-19 need to go to zero.”

Cases of Covid-19 need to go to zero? Really?

Given that we humans have lived for millennia, and continue to live, with diseases caused by countless dangerous pathogens that have become endemic, what’s so special about Covid-19 that makes it one that we must literally eliminate? Even the bacteria responsible for the massively lethal 14th-century outbreak of the bubonic plague still exists and causes some infections.

Through deliberate efforts, humanity has so far succeeded in completely eradicating all of two contagious diseases – and one of these, rinderpest, affected only even-toed ungulates. The lone disease that we’ve completely eradicated that was of danger to humans is smallpox (the infection-fatality rate of which, by the way, was 30 percent – multiple times higher than any estimates of the IFR of SARS-CoV-2). Yet contrary to what your statement implies is impossible, smallpox was eliminated in many an ‘anywhere’ long before it had finally, by 1980, been eliminated everywhere. The United States, for example, was free of smallpox by 1952 despite this disease still breaking out for a few more decades in Africa.

Also unlike smallpox – the only reservoir of which was humans – SARS-CoV-2 has animal reservoirs, thus making complete eradication of this virus practically impossible.

Smallpox, in short, is a one-off case. Complete elimination of any disease typically makes no more sense than would, say, complete elimination of household hazards, of auto accidents, and of workplace mishaps. Any one of these outcomes is perhaps physically possible, but the cost of its achievement would be obscenely high. So too would be the cost of completely eliminating Covid-19.

You’re an economist. You understand that, at least after a certain point, the greater is the protection against some disease, the less valuable are additional amounts of such protection. And at some point, the benefits of additional protection become worth less than the costs of obtaining it. Further, you also know of, and applaud, the great benefits of economic growth – benefits that include improved health, and that would thus be jeopardized by pursuit of the wealth-destroying policy of zero Covid.

Even in the unlikely event that governments would pursue a zero-Covid policy without continuing their draconian restrictions on human freedom, what gives you the confidence that you obviously have to believe that the benefits of achieving this particular corner solution – that is, complete elimination of Covid-19 – would be worth the crushing costs of doing so?

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

P.S. The CDC several years ago discussed the economic considerations of disease eradication – considerations that render Covid an unfit candidate for eradication.

Economists Should Recognize the Undesirability of Pursuing “Corner Solutions”

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to Max Roser, proprietor of Our World in Data; I thank Jay Bhattacharya for constructive feedback on an earlier version of this letter:

Mr. Roser:

I’ve long admired your website Our World In Data. It’s a remarkably rich mine of important information. Thank you for creating and maintaining that site.

But I write today in puzzlement. On your page “Daily new confirmed COVID-19 cases” there appears this statement: “Only if we end the pandemic everywhere can we end the pandemic anywhere. The entire world has the same goal: cases of COVID-19 need to go to zero.”

Cases of Covid-19 need to go to zero? Really?

Given that we humans have lived for millennia, and continue to live, with diseases caused by countless dangerous pathogens that have become endemic, what’s so special about Covid-19 that makes it one that we must literally eliminate? Even the bacteria responsible for the massively lethal 14th-century outbreak of the bubonic plague still exists and causes some infections.

Through deliberate efforts, humanity has so far succeeded in completely eradicating all of two contagious diseases – and one of these, rinderpest, affected only even-toed ungulates. The lone disease that we’ve completely eradicated that was of danger to humans is smallpox (the infection-fatality rate of which, by the way, was 30 percent – multiple times higher than any estimates of the IFR of SARS-CoV-2). Yet contrary to what your statement implies is impossible, smallpox was eliminated in many an ‘anywhere’ long before it had finally, by 1980, been eliminated everywhere. The United States, for example, was free of smallpox by 1952 despite this disease still breaking out for a few more decades in Africa.

Also unlike smallpox – the only reservoir of which was humans – SARS-CoV-2 has animal reservoirs, thus making complete eradication of this virus practically impossible.

Smallpox, in short, is a one-off case. Complete elimination of any disease typically makes no more sense than would, say, complete elimination of household hazards, of auto accidents, and of workplace mishaps. Any one of these outcomes is perhaps physically possible, but the cost of its achievement would be obscenely high. So too would be the cost of completely eliminating Covid-19.

You’re an economist. You understand that, at least after a certain point, the greater is the protection against some disease, the less valuable are additional amounts of such protection. And at some point, the benefits of additional protection become worth less than the costs of obtaining it. Further, you also know of, and applaud, the great benefits of economic growth – benefits that include improved health, and that would thus be jeopardized by pursuit of the wealth-destroying policy of zero Covid.

Even in the unlikely event that governments would pursue a zero-Covid policy without continuing their draconian restrictions on human freedom, what gives you the confidence that you obviously have to believe that the benefits of achieving this particular corner solution – that is, complete elimination of Covid-19 – would be worth the crushing costs of doing so?

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

P.S. The CDC several years ago discussed the economic considerations of disease eradication – considerations that render Covid an unfit candidate for eradication.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 28 of Pierre Lemieux’s superb 2018 monograph, What’s Wrong With Protectionism?:

We must remember that the usual way of speaking about “countries” importing or exporting is merely a linguistic shortcut. Individuals and firms are the ones that import or export, not countries. Countries or societies are collections of individuals, not super-organisms. All benefits accrue to individuals and all costs are paid by individuals.

“Externality” Is Not “Open Sesame”

(Don Boudreaux)

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In my latest column for AIER I push back against the notion that the contagiousness and lethality of Covid-19 combine to create a sufficient condition justifying mandatory vaccination. A slice:

Second – and even apart from the first point – the fact that vaccinations are quite effective at protecting vaccinated persons from contracting and suffering from Covid should be sufficient to drive the final stake through the heart of the case for mandatory vaccination. Yet mandatory vaxxers have a retort. They believe that their case is made by establishing two facts. The first of these facts is that vaccination not only protects vaccinated individuals from Covid, it also reduces the prospect of vaccinated persons spreading Covid to others. The second fact is that not everyone is or can be vaccinated. These two facts are then cobbled into a springboard from which mandatory vaxxers leap to the conclusion that, therefore, the state should mandate vaccination of everyone who is medically able to be vaccinated.

But this leap is illogical, for it ignores several pertinent questions. And persons bearing the burden of proof are in no position to ignore pertinent questions.

Among the pertinent questions ignored – and, hence, not answered – are these:

1. By how much does being vaccinated reduce a person’s chance of transmitting the coronavirus? Is this reduction worth all the costs of mandating vaccination?

2. How many people have medical conditions that prevent them from being vaccinated against Covid? And what portion of these people are in groups whose members are at especially high risks of suffering from Covid?

3. What does having a medical condition that prevents someone from being vaccinated against Covid even mean? Does it mean that such persons, were they vaccinated, would incur a 100 percent chance of dying from the vaccination? Surely not. But if not, to what specific risk-levels would Covid vaccination subject such people? And are these risks high enough to be part of a credible case for mandatory vaccination?

4. What is the cost to the ‘unable-to-be-vaccinated’ group of otherwise protecting themselves from Covid compared to the cost of mandating that everyone else be vaccinated?

5. The very existence of a group of people for whom Covid vaccines are too risky to take implies that Covid vaccines are not risk-free for anyone. (Even apart from the inherent, if sufficiently small, ‘natural’ random risk posed by any medical treatment, each of us has some positive chance of unknowingly being afflicted with one or more of the conditions that are recognized as rendering Covid vaccination as too risky.) Why, then, should everyone – save individuals in the formally exempt group – be required to be vaccinated and, thus, be required to be subjected to some positive risk of being physically harmed by the vaccine?

6. If, as the mandatory vaxxers imply, any action that poses a risk to the health of strangers is an action that government should treat as an “externality” and forcibly prevent, why should not government treat all expressions of arguments in support of mandatory vaccination as externalities to be forcibly forbidden? Because vaccination itself is not risk-free, forcing people to be vaccinated is to forcibly subject some people to a risk that they’d prefer to avoid. Further, publicly advocating for mandatory vaccination increases the risk that a policy of mandatory vaccination will be implemented – meaning that publicly advocating for mandatory vaccination (according to the logic of the mandatory vaxxers themselves) exposes innocent others to a risk that government is duty-bound to prevent.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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J.D. Tuccilli concludes that “freedom looks all-too insecure in the post-COVID-19 world.” (DBx: I wish that I could honestly say that I disagree with Mr. Tuccilli’s conclusion, but I cannot. I believe that he’s correct.)

Those of you who trust governments to act with some semblance of rationality and reasonableness during pandemics should check out this report from the once-free country of Australia. In that down-under penal colony of the covidocracy, government “leaders” apparently believe that cash handouts are an acceptable substitute for actual, real economic activity.

Haley Strack reveals the appalling hypocrisy and authoritarianism of Washington Post columnist, and CNN regular, Leana Wen.

Martin Kulldorff is heroic…. as is, too, Sunetra Gupta.

The straw man is not eager to leave Great Britain. And see this item from Sherelle Jacobs. Two slices:

Far from being fully liberated on “Freedom Day” next week, Britons will merely be out on parole.

In the end, it only took a week of rising cases and scientific outrage over the “dangerous” and “premature” lifting of restrictions for the Prime Minister to wobble. Days after senior ministers were unapologetically vowing to ditch their masks, Mr Johnson has clarified that citizens will still be “expected” to wear face coverings in crowded areas. With public transport and many shops likely to continue to consider masks mandatory, the state’s shift in position now seems purely theoretical – from legal enforcer to moral endorser of Covid rules. Nor is the Government encouraging a mass return to the office. Instead, we are told it should be “gradual”. There are plans, too, to encourage some form of immunity certification, even for entry to pubs and restaurants.

…..

The PM has also set the tone for a tightening of restrictions in winter, should the situation deteriorate. The easing of lockdown is no longer “irreversible”. As Covid reaches endemic equilibrium, hospitalisations could well rise to hundreds a week (as is often the case with seasonal influenza). Meanwhile, the waiting list for urgent non-Covid care could rocket to 13 million. In such a situation, the NHS would be stuck in a trap. Its doctors will clamour for lockdowns to keep Covid admissions down. But further stay-at-home orders would risk worsening the backlog, as even more non-Covid patients put off seeking urgent help.

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

Ramesh Thakur rightly decries governments’ infatuation with “glamorous models.” A slice:

As is by now well known but studiously ignored by our politicians and most media, Florida has been pretty much open since May 2020 and Texas since March this year. Neither has become the predicted death chamber that ‘public health experts’ warned. The return of normality also means that their citizens are once again rebuilding natural immunity against life’s regular infections compared to the steadily growing immunocompromised cohorts in the lockdown states. The Guardian reports that New Zealand is already paying the price of an ‘immunity debt’ with paediatric wards flooded by babies with a potentially deadly respiratory virus. This is the same argument as the dry tinder effect with bushfires. Because Covid lockdowns suppress the circulation of bacterial and viral infections, babies have failed to develop natural immunity to other viruses. As public health professor Michael Baker explains, ‘we’ve accumulated a whole lot of susceptible children that have missed out on exposure – so now they’re seeing it for the first time’.

Thus the cult of safetyism through lockdowns increases our exposure to future epidemics.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 63 of the immensely important 1976 Vol. II (“The Mirage of Social Justice”) of F.A. Hayek’s trilogy, Law, Legislation, and Liberty (footnote deleted):

It is a sign of the immaturity of our minds that we have not yet outgrown these primitive concepts and still demand from an impersonal process which brings about a greater satisfaction of human desires than any deliberate human organization could achieve, that it conform to the moral precepts men have evolved for the guidance of their individual actions.

DBx: Indeed so.

Modern society in general, and the economy in particular, is not consciously organized by anyone (thank goodness!). Therefore, its particular results in each and every circumstance are not appropriately judged as if these emanate from some conscious plan or design. It is among the gravest and most grotesque of mistakes – yet also among the most frequently made – to treat society as if it is either a conscious being or run according to a consciously devised plan.

Which Decisions “Affect Nobody But the Individuals Who Perform Them”?

(Don Boudreaux)

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The following wonky rumination is written largely as an exercise for me to sharpen and deepen my thoughts on a matter about which there is a great deal of confusion and sloppy thinking, even among professional economists. In the following (which is beneath the fold) I repeat some points that I’ve made elsewhere.

(more…)

EconTalking with Russ Roberts About the Pandemic

(Don Boudreaux)

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I’m always honored to be a guest of Russ on EconTalk. Here, he and I discuss Covid-19 and the public and political reaction to it. (See also here.)