Russell Roberts's Blog, page 269

June 2, 2021

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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David Thunder writes that “governments need to stop playing God.” A slice:


But social life is not a luxury that we can just suspend for a higher cause — it is the way we meet our most basic physical, spiritual and emotional needs. People will do what it takes to meet these needs, no matter what public officials decree. People will keep needing to be cared for, fed, nurtured, consoled and attended to by other human beings – and people will not tolerate social isolation forever, no matter how many police you put on the streets.


It is reasonable to feel some fear in the face of a virus that poses an elevated risk of death to the elderly and those with underlying health conditions. But we also have much to fear from governments that believe a public-health crisis gives them the right to play God with our lives.


I’m very happy to have again joined Michael Schaus for a discussion of Covid-19 and the lockdowns.

Jacob Sullum sensibly wonders why the TSA continues to require that those of us who are fully vaccinated nevertheless wear masks while flying commercially. A slice:


The situation for air travelers is quite different. Under a rule that the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) recently extended through September 13, all passengers, regardless of whether they have been vaccinated, must wear face masks “at all times” in airports and on airplanes. Violators are subject to a $250 fine the first time around and a $1,500 fine for repeat offenses. As you might expect from the agency that gave us “security theater,” the face mask rule is a form of “hygiene theater,” gratuitously incommoding passengers to create the illusion of added safety.


While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) “recently announced that fully vaccinated travelers…can travel safely within the U.S.,” the TSA says, “the CDC guidelines still require individuals to wear a face mask, socially distance, and wash their hands or use hand sanitizer.” The TSA’s attempt to pass the buck is more than a little misleading.


The CDC’s latest guidelines actually say that fully vaccinated people “can resume activities without wearing a mask or staying 6 feet apart, except where required by federal, state, local, tribal, or territorial laws, rules, and regulations, including local business and workplace guidance.” So yes, as long as the TSA requires all airline passengers to wear masks, that edict qualifies as an exception to the general rule. But that hardly means the TSA’s requirement is based on scientific guidance from the CDC, as the TSA implies.


Here’s Matt Ridley on the Wuhan lab-leak theory.

David McGrogan offers an enriched theory for Covid Derangement Syndrome. A slice:


Why is it that people’s compassionate instincts have been so turbocharged during the pandemic? Why is it that we have come to care so much about the fact that people are dying of Covid, when we generally care so little about people dying of cancer, traffic accidents, or diabetes – or, for that matter, starvation and war in the developing world?


The pat answer is that it is because we have been subject to such a relentless stream of imagery and statistics about Covid, and that this has put the victims of the disease at the forefront of our minds in a way that simply is not the case for other causes of death and suffering in the world. This is undoubtedly so, but there is something else at work in this – something which, borrowing from Milan Kundera, I will describe as a form of kitsch.


A straw man in Australia appears determined to extend his stay – as this hideous gent has already done in Scotland.

SAGE ‘scientists’ are both victims of, and spreaders of, Covid Derangement Syndrome.

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

Texas update: Today (June 2nd) is the three-month anniversary of the lifting in that state of statewide Covid restrictions – a policy move that Biden at the time alleged to spring from “Neanderthal thinking.” Covid cases have since fallen steadily. As of yesterday, the seven-day average of Covid cases in Texas were only 13 percent of what it was on March 2nd (despite testing being up by 36 percent over the past two weeks; the seven-day average case count as of yesterday was only 47 percent of its level two weeks earlier).

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Published on June 02, 2021 04:04

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 210 of University of Notre Dame philosopher James Otteson’s superb 2021 book, Seven Deadly Economic Sins:

It is no more a failure of markets that resources are scarce than it is a failure of engineering that I cannot travel faster than the speed of light. Similarly, the fact that markets do not solve all problems is no more a problem with markets than the fact that modern medicine cannot cure all diseases is a problem with modern medicine.

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Published on June 02, 2021 01:45

June 1, 2021

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 143 of Thomas Sowell’s 1980 magnum economic opus, Knowledge and Decisions:

A government bureaucracy, which can dispense its goods or services below cost – including at zero price, in some cases – can always demonstrate a large “need” for its output, and therefore a “justification” for a large staff and budget.

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Published on June 01, 2021 13:59

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Megan McArdle writes wisely about popular – and elite – attitudes toward science. Here’s her conclusion:

Yet I, for one, expected more out of lockdown and masking policies than we ultimately got, and I wonder how my analysis might have changed if I’d engaged more fully with skeptics. And as a matter of pure scientific analysis, screaming that anyone with a different opinion has joined a science-hating death cult seems to have been among social media’s most popular and least effective non-pharmaceutical interventions.

There’s little that can be done to fix any of that now, except for people who went overboard in dismissing the lab-leak theory to reconsider. And then ask if there are other policy areas where they confused scientists with “science,” value judgments with cold calculation, and a shaky elite consensus with hard scientific facts.

Sherelle Jacobs warns of the cult of scientific ‘consensus.‘ A slice:


Research on the psychological impact of lockdowns remains extraordinarily stunted, save a few tentative papers on the effect of lockdowns on mental health and face masks on child development. A new academic project on the effects of restrictions, Global Collateral, has struggled to make headway. Leading Harvard epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff was recently suspended from Twitter after questioning the consensus on face masks, and whether the vaccine is necessary for children and those with prior natural infection.


Worryingly, freedom of speech on such controversial issues seems to be a one-way street. Prof Kulldorff is censored on Twitter for his perspective, and yet no less contentious contrasting opinions are given a free run. Take, for example, Oxford’s Prof Julian Savulescu, who has published high-profile papers arguing that mandatory Covid-19 vaccinations could be justified (“If people can be sent to war against their will, in certain circumstances some levels of coercion are justified in the war on the virus”). Prof Savulescu should be free to make his case without fear of cancellation – but so should his intellectual opponents.


To ensure post-Covid economic recovery, Ed Glaeser calls on governments to free the entrepreneurs.

Covid Derangement Syndrome and its straw-man spawn continue to haunt Great Britain. They do.

Covid Derangement Syndrome and its straw-man spawn continue to haunt Australia. They do. (HT David Hart)

Tomorrow (June 2nd) will mark the three-month anniversary of the lifting of statewide Covid restrictions in Texas – a policy move that at the time was said by many, including the President of the United States, to be reckless. Since March 2nd, 2021, Covid cases in Texas have fallen rather steadily. As of yesterday (May 31st), the 7-day average of new Covid cases there was a mere 17 percent of what that average was on March 2nd.

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Published on June 01, 2021 03:07

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is paragraph 6 of Appendix 3 (“Some Farther Considerations with Regard to Justice“) of David Hume’s 1751, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals:

All the laws of nature, which regulate property, as well as all civil laws, are general, and regard alone some essential circumstances of the case, without taking into consideration the characters, situations, and connexions of the persons concerned, or any particular consequences which may result from the determination of these laws, in any particular case which offers. They deprive, without scruple, a beneficent man of all his possessions, if acquired by mistake, without a good title; in order to bestow them on a selfish miser, who has already heaped up immense stores of superfluous riches. Public utility requires that property should be regulated by general inflexible rules; and though such rules are adopted as best serve the same end of public utility, it is impossible for them to prevent all particular hardships, or make beneficial consequences result from every individual case. It is sufficient, if the whole plan or scheme be necessary to the support of civil society, and if the balance of good, in the main, do thereby preponderate much above that of evil. Even the general laws of the universe, though planned by infinite wisdom, cannot exclude all evil or inconvenience, in every particular operation.

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Published on June 01, 2021 01:45

May 31, 2021

Beware Such Moves

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to The Federalist:


Editor:


Tristan Justice applauds Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s “proactive approach” in signing legislation to override private companies’ business decisions (“DeSantis Goes On Offense With Big Tech Bill Amid Silicon Valley Malfeasance,” May 29). This applause is unwarranted.


Mr. DeSantis deserves much praise for refusing, unlike most governors, to fight Covid-19 by putting citizens of his state under lockdown. And Mr. DeSantis’s – and Mr. Justice’s – exasperation over Facebook’s and other tech-companies’ biased means of governing the content posted to their sites is understandable. I share it.


But the core reason for supporting Mr. DeSantis’s refusal to use lockdowns is a core reason to oppose his obstruction of the business decisions of private companies. That reason is the inestimable value of freedom from arbitrary dictates by the state. By supporting such regulation of business, Mr. DeSantis undermines his credibility as a champion of liberty.


Ironically, his practice of picking and choosing which liberties to defend and which to offend is every bit as biased and as unprincipled as is tech-companies’ practice of picking and choosing which kinds of expression to allow on, and which to remove from, their platforms. But because Mr. DeSantis, unlike any tech company, wields the power of government, his actions on this front are much less defensible.


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


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Published on May 31, 2021 11:18

Half-way There: Inspired by Julian Simon and Bryan Caplan

(Don Boudreaux)

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Exactly ten years ago today, the Wall Street Journal’s print edition ran my offer to “bet $10,000 that the average annual number of Americans killed by tornadoes, floods and hurricanes will fall over the next 20 years. Specifically, I’ll bet that the average annual number of Americans killed by these violent weather events from 2011 through 2030 will be lower than it was from 1991 through 2010.”

I received no serious offer to take my bet.

Although I’ve not checked the data for the first ten years (2011-2020) of this twenty-year period (2011-2030), I remain confident that, had someone taken me up on my offer to bet, I’d be in line to collect $10,000 in early 2031 when all the data are in.

Pasted below, for the first time in full here at Cafe Hayek, is that Wall Street Journal piece from May 31st, 2011.


More Weather Deaths? Wanna Bet?
Contrary to what many environmentalists would have us believe, Americans are increasingly less likely to be killed by severe weather.


By Donald J. Boudreaux


Writing recently in the Washington Post, environmental guru Bill McKibben asserted that the number and severity of recent weather events, such as the tornado in Joplin, Mo., are too great not to be the result of fossil-fuel induced climate change. He suggested that government’s failure to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases will result in more violent weather and weather-related deaths in the future.


And pointing to the tragedy in Joplin, Mr. McKibben summarily dismissed the idea that, if climate change really is occurring, human beings can successfully adapt to it.


There’s one problem with this global-warming chicken little-ism. It has little to do with reality. National Weather Service data on weather-related fatalities since 1940 show that the risks of Americans being killed by violent weather have fallen significantly over the past 70 years.


The annual number of deaths caused by tornadoes, floods and hurricanes, of course, varies. For example, the number of persons killed by these weather events in 1972 was 703 while the number killed in 1988 was 72. But amid this variance is a clear trend: The number of weather-related fatalities, especially since 1980, has dropped dramatically.


For the 30-year span of 1980-2009, the average annual number of Americans killed by tornadoes, floods and hurricanes was 194 — fully one-third fewer deaths each year than during the 1940-1979 period. The average annual number of deaths for the years 1980-2009 falls even further, to 160 from 194, if we exclude the deaths attributed to Hurricane Katrina, most of which were caused by a levee that breached on the day after the storm struck land.


This decline in the absolute number of deaths caused by tornadoes, floods and hurricanes is even more impressive considering that the population of the United States more than doubled over these years — to 308 million in 2010 from 132 million in 1940.


Contrary to what many environmentalists would have us believe, Americans are increasingly less likely to be killed by severe weather. Moreover, because of modern industrial and technological advances — radar, stronger yet lighter building materials, more reliable electronic warning devices, and longer-lasting packaged foods — we are better protected from nature’s fury today than at any other time in human history. We do adapt.


Of course, this happy trend might not continue. Maybe the allegedly devastating consequences of our “addiction” to fossil fuels, and the rapid economic growth these fuels make possible, will soon catch up with us. Maybe the future will be more deadly.


I reject this pessimism. I do so because economics and history teach that human beings in market economies have proven remarkably creative and resourceful in overcoming challenges. And there’s no reason to think that this creativity and resourcefulness will fail us in the face of climate change.


Since 1950 there have been 57 confirmed F5 tornadoes, with winds between 261–318 miles per hour, in the U.S. Of those, five struck in 1953; six in 1974. So far this year there have been four F5 tornadoes in the U.S., including the devastating storm that killed more than 130 people in Joplin on May 22. F5 tornadoes are massive, terrifying and deadly. But they generally touch down in unpopulated areas, thus going unnoticed. The tragedy of Joplin and other tornadoes this year is that they touched down in populated areas, causing great loss of life. Yet if these storms had struck even 20 years ago there would have been far more deaths.


So confident am I that the number of deaths from violent storms will continue to decline that I challenge Mr. McKibben — or Al Gore, Paul Krugman, or any other climate-change doomsayer — to put his wealth where his words are. I’ll bet $10,000 that the average annual number of Americans killed by tornadoes, floods and hurricanes will fall over the next 20 years. Specifically, I’ll bet that the average annual number of Americans killed by these violent weather events from 2011 through 2030 will be lower than it was from 1991 through 2010.


If environmentalists really are convinced that climate change inevitably makes life on Earth more lethal, this bet for them is a no-brainer. They can position themselves to earn a cool 10 grand while demonstrating to a still-skeptical American public the seriousness of their convictions.


But if no one accepts my bet, what would that fact say about how seriously Americans should treat climate-change doomsaying?


Do I have any takers?


Mr. Boudreaux is professor of economics at George Mason University and a senior fellow at the Mercatus Center.


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Published on May 31, 2021 08:17

Scarcity Is Not Prosperity

(Don Boudreaux)

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In my latest column for AIER I satirize the mistaken notion that scarcity is prosperity. A slice:


Why is my income so high? Answer: economic ignorance! Nearly every cent that I earn is generated by my satisfying other people’s demands for reduced economic ignorance. Sometimes, as in the case of (many of) the students who I teach at George Mason University, the demand for the economic enlightenment that I supply comes directly from those who pay for it. Other times, as when organizations such as the Fraser Institute and AIER pay me to lecture or to write, the demand comes, ultimately, from donors who hope that my speechifying and wordsmithing will fall in enlightening ways on minds still benighted by economic ignorance.


And so (horrors!) if most people already understood basic economic realities, I’d be unemployed. If most people already knew the truths that I teach – truths such as that protective tariffs create no new jobs on net while they reduce most people’s living standards, that minimum-wage legislation hurts many of the very workers it is meant to help, and that antitrust interventions stymie rather than stimulate economic competition – no one would pay me to do this job that I so enjoy doing.


And while my being unemployed and penniless would be tragic enough, this essay is not about me. In fact, join me in forgetting about me. Think instead of the countless people who benefit from the economic ignorance that other people pay me to dispel.


Think, for example, of wine retailers and vintners. I spend a significant portion of my income on wine. In a world without economic ignorance, no one would pay me to do what I do and, thus, I’d have no income to spend at my favorite wine shops. Wine sales would fall. Some sales clerks would lose their jobs, as would workers in vineyards. Likewise for workers in the food industry. I spend an even larger portion of my income at restaurants. In a world without economic ignorance, I’d earn no money to spend on dining out. Restaurants and their cooks and wait staff would suffer – as would, of course, all the workers whose efforts are required to supply restaurants with furniture, food, and drink.


I also spend a good deal of money on clothing. Unable to earn income in a world of full economic enlightenment, I of course would buy less clothing. Nordstrom and other clothing retailers would feel the pinch – as would their workers.


Obviously, what holds true for wine, restaurant meals, and clothing holds true also for everything else on which I spend my hard-earned income.


An econometrician could quantify the value to humanity of the economic ignorance that I annually work to reduce. This scholar could so quantify, with a precise dollar measurement, the value of this economic ignorance by tracking all of my spending, and then tracking the spending by others – by wine-store owners, by restaurant waiters, by clothing retailers, etc. – that my spending makes possible.


I myself haven’t done such a tracking of the long and economically stimulating effects of my spending. But I’m sure that it runs annually into the tens of millions of dollars. And I’m just one economist! Add the full value of the spending that my income makes possible to the value of the spending by thousands of my fellow economists, and it becomes undeniable that one crucial source of modern humanity’s prosperity is economic ignorance, for without this ignorance we economists would earn no incomes to spend.


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Published on May 31, 2021 06:26

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Janet Daley:

What must be clear to all the governing operations of the world is that putting populations into enforced forms of social isolation which are, in the literal sense of the word, inhuman, cannot be an acceptable response to these phenomena. Even as we are assessing the long term consequences in collateral damage to physical health and social wellbeing of this shocking policy, it is absolutely undeniable that a perpetual cycle of imprisonment followed by (always uncertain) respite is completely unacceptable. What has happened over this past year must never be repeated.

Ethan Yang talks with Dr. Patrick Phillips about the censorship of science in Canada.

Laura Dodsworth decries the smearing in Britain of anti-lockdown protests. A slice:


The management and communication during the epidemic has been plagued by misleading statistics, the cherry-picking of the worst data, alarmist language, horror-film-style advertising, one-sided media coverage and coercive language and tactics, all of which I wrote about in my new book, A State of Fear.


Bludgeoning people with ‘nudge’ (behavioural psychology), weaponising fear, and tightly controlling the narrative risk undermining the public’s trust in government, public-health messaging and the media. This is the third time I have reported on anti-lockdown protests for spiked, and the third time I have been slack-jawed by the lack of honesty in how the media misrepresents the scale and purpose of these protests. This mistrust can be read clearly in the placards.


Also from Laura Dodsworth is this summary of how the British government “used behavioural science to scare a nation into submission.” A slice:


Using fear is ethically dubious at best. If psychologists were provoking fear in a laboratory experiment they would need the consent of the people taking part. Yet we never signed consent forms, and this huge social experiment has not been through any ethics committee.


We didn’t notice, maybe we didn’t even care, when behavioural psychologists were ‘nudging’ us into paying taxes on time, or cutting down smoking, but their underhand tactics have certainly got our attention now. You could argue that frightening people to make them follow the rules during an emergency was in our best interests. But what about the opposing arguments that it affected our personalities, our mental health and our agency?


The insufficiently fearful were deliberately alarmed. Horror film styled advertising, laws to manage the minutiae of our daily lives, the most punitive fines since the Dark Ages, encouraging social conformity and the alarmist use of statistics were just some of the government’s tactics during the pandemic, signalling their lack of trust in the public’s ability to understand risk and behave sensibly.


Even children were not exempt from such blame. Indeed, they were explicitly targeted with messaging warning “Don’t kill granny.” This shocking slogan looks even more abhorrent given the allegations that the elderly were not tested before being transferred from hospital to care homes – who killed granny, exactly?


As Dr. John Lee observes, “There has been global virtue signalling. This pandemic is when science met politics and politics won.

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

Laurie Clarke asks: Who fact-checks social-media’s fact-checkers? Two slices:


The term “misinformation” could itself contribute to a flattening of the scientific debate. Martin Kulldorff, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, has been criticised for his views on lockdown, which tack closely to his native Sweden’s more relaxed strategy.


He says that scientists who voice unorthodox opinions during the pandemic are worried about facing “various forms of slander or censoring . . . they say certain things but not other things, because they feel that will be censored by Twitter or YouTube or Facebook.” This worry is compounded by the fear that it may affect grant funding and the ability to publish scientific papers, he tells The BMJ.


…..
This debate is playing out against a wider ideological struggle, where the ideal of “truth” is increasingly placed above “healthy debate.” Kulldorff says: “To remove things in general, I think is a bad idea. Because even if something is wrong, if you remove it there’s no opportunity to discuss it.” For instance, although he favours vaccination in general, people with fears or doubts about the vaccines used should not be silenced in online spaces, he says. “If we don’t have an open debate within science, then that will have enormous consequences for science and society.”


There are concerns that this approach could ultimately undermine trust in public health. In the US, says [Jevin] West, trust in the government and media is falling. He explains, “Science is still one of the more trusted institutions, but if you start tagging and shutting down conversation within science, to me that’s even worse than the actual posting of these individual articles.”


Sunetra Gupta defends herself from some claims issued by Dominic Cummings, and she challenges Neil Ferguson to a debate:

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Published on May 31, 2021 04:30

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 20 of Alec Cairncross’s March 1992 BNL Quarterly paper, “From Theory to Policy-Making: Economics as a Profession“:

When it comes to action, economic theory is only one input among many. It has to be combined with a grasp of political and administrative feasibility and above all has to take advantage of experience and observation, not rely wholly on logic. As has often been remarked, logic can be a way of going wrong with confidence.

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Published on May 31, 2021 01:30

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