Russell Roberts's Blog, page 270
May 30, 2021
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is a repeat from more than seven years ago, but its relevance to the events of today is too high for me not to share it again; specifically, it’s from page 61 of the magnificent first volume (“Rules and Order,” 1973) of Hayek’s Law, Legislation, and Liberty:
The preservation of a free system is so difficult because it requires a constant rejection of measures which appear to be required to secure particular results, on no stronger grounds than that they conflict with a general rule, and frequently without our knowing what will be the costs of not observing the rule in the particular instance. A successful defence of freedom must therefore be dogmatic and make no concessions to expediency, even where it is not possible to show that, beside the known beneficial effects, some particular harmful result would also follow from its infringement. Freedom will prevail only if it is accepted as a general principle whose application to particular instances requires no justification.
Some Non-Covid Links
The school principal, who is fluent in the flowery, obfuscating argot resorted to when recommending racial spoils systems, says TJ “is a rich tapestry of heritages” but does not “reflect” the county’s “racial composition.” As the district judge said in allowing the parents’ suit against the county to proceed, “You can say all sorts of beautiful things while you’re doing others.” Many have noted that the use, by TJ and others, of “holistic” metrics to limit Asian American admissions and fine-tune a school’s “culture” resembles the use of geographic preferences and “character” considerations employed by Ivy League universities to restrict Jews, before being recycled to restrict Asian Americans.
It’s simply infuriating to read of such wanton abuses of power.
Steve Davies has written an important new paper titled “Grounds for Debate.”
David Henderson wisely worries about some likely ill consequences of a universal basic income.
Ethan Yang celebrates the country of Taiwan.
Here’s Chris Edwards on Biden’s proposed “budget.”
Here’s Simon Lester on country-of-origin labelling.
Alejo José G. Sison and Dulce M. Redín have written a new paper titled “Francisco de Vitoria on the Right to Free Trade and Justice.” (HT Walter Grinder). Here’s the abstract:
In 1538–39 Francisco de Vitoria delivered two relections: de indis and De iure belli. This article distills from these writings the topic of free trade as a “human right” in accordance with ius gentium or the “law of peoples.” The right to free trade is rooted in a more fundamental right to communication and association. The rights to travel, to dwell, and to migrate precede the right to trade, which is also closely connected to the rights to preach, to protect converts, and to constitute Christian princes. This has significant repercussions on the field of business ethics: the right to free trade is ultimately founded directly on natural law and indirectly on divine law; trade is not independent of ethics; and trade is presented as an opportunity to develop the virtues of justice and friendship, among other repercussions. Vitoria is portrayed as a defender of private initiative and free markets.
Ian Rowe and Nique Fajors talk with Jason Riley about the legacy of Thomas Sowell.
Tim Worstall writes about the long thread of lessening labor. Here’s his conclusion:
We all have more leisure now than our forebears did. We have more time to do as we wish and fewer needs that force us to do as we must. But this wonderful outcome of human progress is obscured by the fact that, in large part, it is the household labor that has been automated away. Sure, the Roomba might not be a great leap forward, but it is just the latest iteration of a process that began a thousand years ago. And there is no sign of it ending.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 14 of the first volume (“Rules and Order,” 1973) of F.A. Hayek’s brilliant trilogy, Law, Legislation, and Liberty:
In civilized society it is indeed not so much the greater knowledge that the individual can acquire, as the greater benefit he receives from the knowledge possessed by others, which is the cause of his ability to pursue an infinitely wider range of ends than merely the satisfaction of his most pressing physical needs. Indeed, a ‘civilized’ individual may be very ignorant, more ignorant than many a savage, and yet greatly benefit from the civilization in which he lives.
DBx: Who can seriously doubt either the truth or the significance of this insight?
Think of any five-minute slice of your life today: you munching on breakfast; you showering; you putting in your contact lenses; you driving to the gym; you using your smartphone to chat with your mother or with your child or with your business associate; you reading this blog post; you having a hard roof above your head and with your feet and furniture resting firmly on hard floors. You having indoor plumbing and artificial lighting. It’s impossible to comprehend all the uncountable different bits of knowledge that were put to use, almost all by strangers, to make each of these experiences possible for you.
You know virtually nothing about how to make any of these experiences a reality. And yet these experiences are not only a reality, their reality is so regular and reliable that you (as do we all) take them for granted. Each of us in modern society, every moment of every day, is served by the knowledge and efforts of billions of strangers.
Why are you not in awe of this amazingness? Why do you believe that the relatively few glitches, real or unreal, in the modern economy – “Damn, my Internet connection just went down!” or “Damn, Amazon’s delivery of my gourmet Keurig coffee pods is delayed by 24 hours!” or “Damn! Thomas Piketty has graphs that reveal that some people have lots more money in their financial portfolios than I have in mine!” – are the relevant facts to focus on rather than the sheer amazingness of modernity for ordinary people?
…..
I’ve often said that this book by Hayek – volume one of Law, Legislation, and Liberty – is the single most important book that I’ve ever read. I’m now re-reading it, cover to cover, for what is probably the fourth time since I first read it as a senior in college in 1979. My assessment of it stands. It’s not perfect, but it’s sublime. No book has had as big an impact on my worldview as has this one. Some works have come close: Leonard Read’s “I, Pencil”; Deirdre McCloskey’s Bourgeois Dignity; Frederic Bastiat’s Economic Sophisms; Richard Dawkins’s The Blind Watchmaker; Julian Simons’s The Ultimate Resource 2; Armen Alchian’s Economic Forces at Work; Adam Smith’s An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations; H.L. Mencken’s A Mencken Chrestomathy; James Buchanan’s and Richard Wagner’s Democracy in Deficit; Thomas Sowell’s Knowledge and Decisions; Geoffrey Brennan’s and Loren Lomasky’s Democracy and Decision; Robert Higgs’s Crisis and Leviathan; Richard Epstein’s Simple Rules for a Complex World; Don Lavoie’s National Economic Planning: What Is Left?; Paul Heyne’s textbook, The Economic Way of Thinking; Oliver Williamson’s The Economic Institutions of Capitalism; Etienne de la Boetie’s The Politics of Obedience – but none quite matches the first volume of Hayek’s Law, Legislation, and Liberty.
May 29, 2021
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 113 of Thomas Sowell’s superb 1984 book, Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?:
From an economic point of view, to say that any group is systematically underpaid or systematically denied as much credit as they deserve is the same as saying that an opportunity for unusually high profit exists for anyone who will hire them or lend to them.
DBx: This point, at once so obvious, is obviously overlooked in too many cases. How many are the professors, pundits, preachers, and politicians who insist that women as a group are underpaid? That blacks as a group are underpaid? That low-wage workers as a group are underpaid? That CEOs as a group are over-paid? That minorities as a group are denied adequate access to credit? Some of the people who so insist even claim to have empirical data to support their insistence. Yet almost none of these people act with their own resources on their words, despite in each case being able to personally profit from the alleged market imperfection.
Instead, people who assert that members of some group are systematically underpaid (or overpaid) issue their assertions as a means of prodding government to intervene by, say, imposing minimum-wage requirements (or caps on the incomes of employees who are allegedly overpaid). People who make such assertions, and who offer such policies, systematically fail to put their own money where their mouths are. This fact alone is sufficient to discredit the assertions issued by such people.
Some Covid Links
Laura Dodsworth, writing for Spiked, decries the manufactured hysterical fear of Covid-19. Three slices:
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
That is how the media approached Covid. Be afraid of everything, from ice cream to semen. Be afraid of being tall. Be afraid of being bald. Be afraid of going to the shops and accepting home deliveries. And if you’re a man, it’s not just semen you should worry about, but also your testicles, your erectile function and your fertility. Even your toes are in danger.
The fearmongering is relentless. Be afraid of your pets. Be afraid for your pets. Just be afraid.
…..
The anxious, frightened climate this has helped to create has been suffocating. Death tolls were constantly brandished without the context of how many people die every day in the UK, and hospital admissions were reported while recoveries were not. As a result, Covid often appeared as a death sentence, an illness you did not recover from – even though it was known from the outset that Covid was a mild illness for the majority of people.
…..
Even though the vaccine rollout is proving a success, the media are still fearmongering about Covid. The language in headlines and articles continues to play up the risks and threats on the horizon. As Bloomberg had it recently, ‘We must start planning for a permanent pandemic – with coronavirus mutations pitted against vaccinations in a global arms race, we may never go back to normal’.
And those who do not conform to the safety-first orthodoxy continue to be demonised. It feels as if dangerous times are ahead.
Donald Siegel and Robert Sauer write insightfully about Covid Derangement Syndrome. A slice:
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, who is also a health economist and therefore familiar with the concept of trade-offs in decision-making (unlike infectious disease experts), notes that studies repeatedly show that children who wear masks completely undermine the very limited benefit masks provide by touching them and repeatedly taking them on and off. Moreover, there are serious repercussions to child social development when children are masked that go beyond “simple” physical irritation and difficulty breathing. Bhattacharya emphasizes that the development needs of young children require them to see other people’s faces. For example, learning to speak requires seeing a person’s lips move. Older children also need to see the face to learn body language and how to appropriately interact socially.
Glasgow continues, as Phil Magness would say, to get stomped on by a straw man.
Thank goodness his death wasn’t caused by Covid…
… and thank goodness, too, that these children in Colorado won’t die of Covid.
Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins writes about media bias and the origins of Covid-19. A slice:
In almost every profession—law, medicine, engineering, science, architecture—countering bias is central to the discipline. Yet notice that representatives of these professions, when talking to the press, often seem to adapt themselves to a media culture geared to the production of bias. Scientists who found their way into stories dismissing the lab leak theory were the ones most willing to model the media’s preferred standard: If Mr. Trump supports it, I’m against it.
Jonathan Sumption talks with Julia Hartley-Brewer about Covid Derangement Syndrome.
Some good news on the home front (but I am no victim of Stockholm Syndrome).
Phil Magness is justified in calling out, on Facebook, those who until recently denied this happy reality.
Here’s a video of a recent talk by Jay Bhattacharya:
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 4 of Reason magazine editor Katherine Mangu-Ward’s superb editorial in the July 2021 issue, “Don’t Try to Fix Big Tech With Politics” (no link to this piece by Katherine is yet available):
There is one clear monopoly in this ecosystem, however: the state. Any legislative or regulatory restriction on Big Tech will not be a triumph of the oppressed over the powerful. It will be yet another instance of the already powerful wielding the state’s machinery to compel private companies to do what they want, likely at the expense of their market competitors or political enemies. Such reforms are far more likely to be censorship than to reduce censorship, in the strictest sense.
May 28, 2021
A Refuge from Rampaging Presumptions
Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal:
Editor:
Like his biography, Maverick, of Thomas Sowell, Jason Riley’s essay on this great economist is splendid (“The Soul of Black Conservatism,” May 29).
It’s impossible, of course, for any one quotation to adequately capture the essence of the thought of someone who’s contributed so much knowledge and wisdom to humanity as has Mr. Sowell. But a quotation that comes close – one that I never tire of sharing – consists of the final two sentences of Mr. Sowell’s soaring 1980 book, Knowledge and Decisions:
Freedom is not simply the right of intellectuals to circulate their merchandise. It is, above all, the right of ordinary people to find elbow room for themselves and a refuge from the rampaging presumptions of their “betters.” *
No one in the past half-century has done more to help create for ordinary people such a refuge – and to encourage them to take it – than has Thomas Sowell.
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
* Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions (New York: Basic Books, 1980), page 383.
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 217 of Deirdre McCloskey’s and Alberto Mingardi’s superb 2020 book, The Myth of the Entrepreneurial State:
But the economy is not a car or boat: there is no helm, there is no wheel to steer it. Benevolent people at the “helm” are not enough to take a better direction, though bad or ignorant people messing with it can take it in a disastrous direction. The economy is more complex than anything a single set of benevolent human beings can steer, if we want to keep the economy rich and the society free. And non-benevolent people, of which sadly there is no shortage at any price, are very willing to use emergencies to seize riches and to crush liberty.
Some Non-Covid Links
We know what blanket infrastructure spending looks like. When the federal government is just throwing money at the states for projects they don’t really need, there’s not going to be any urgency to spend the money in a way that benefits taxpayers.
Juliette Sellgren talks with Reason‘s Nick Gillespie.
Phil Magness and Ethan Yang talk about Critical Race Theory in a free society.
Eric Boehm rightly decries Biden’s proposed “budget.”
Peter Robinson talks with Maverick author Jason Riley about the great Thomas Sowell.
Here’s James Pethokoukis (and Michael Strain) on wealth inequality.
It’s a pity what’s becoming of the economics profession. And see also here.
Merrill Matthews explains what Joe Biden could learn by reading “I, Pencil.”
Tim Worstall shares a secret recipe for civilization. A slice:
The U.S. healthcare spending has gone from 5 percent of GDP in 1960 to 18 percent today. But not, as [Mark] Bittman seems to think, because our food is making us sick – we live longer, healthier lives now. But because the reduction of our expenditure on food allows us to spend more on health care. Or, in another but equivalent formulation, we are richer, and therefore the portions of income we spend on different things have changed. We spend more on luxury goods and less on inferior goods. However tautologous that argument is, it is still true, and one of the proofs that we are richer is that spending patterns have changed.
Living standards are better today because we can get that worn-out hip replaced and treat the diseases that killed our forebears. It’s not just that technology has advanced so that we know how to do things; it’s that progress in reducing the cost of food relative to incomes has meant that we have the economic room to be able to do these other things.
Some Covid Links
After Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), was criticized for grossly exaggerating the risk of outdoor COVID-19 transmission, she said she was relying on a study published in “one of our top infectious disease journals.” But as I noted a couple of weeks ago, Walensky misrepresented that study, which was published by The Journal of Infectious Diseases in February, in several significant ways. Today New York Times columnist David Leonhardt, who first called attention to Walensky’s hyperbole, reports that a co-author of the study agrees the CDC director’s gloss was misleading.
TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection from Covid.)
According to Matt Ridley, “[t]he Covid lab leak theory is looking increasingly plausible.” A slice:
Even Dr Anthony Fauci, the US President’s chief medical advisor, now says he is ‘not convinced’ the virus emerged naturally. This month a letter in Science magazine from 18 senior virologists and other experts — including a close collaborator of the Wuhan lab at the centre of the debate, Ralph Baric — demanded that such a hypothesis be taken seriously. Suddenly, too, journalists have woken up and begun writing articles admitting they might have been hasty in dismissing a lab leak as a Trumpian conspiracy theory last year. CNN reported this week that the Biden administration shut down the State Department’s investigation into this.
The turning point, ironically, was the ‘press conference’ on 9 February in Wuhan where a team of western scientists representing the World Health Organisation sat meekly through a three-hour propaganda session at the end of a 12-day study tour. Strictly chaperoned throughout, the western scientists (approved by the Chinese government) had mainly listened to presentations by their Chinese colleagues during their visit and done no research themselves. Yet the result was presented to the world as if it was the WHO’s conclusion.
So it’s not quite as simple as a story of a deranged Prime Minister listening to fringe figures and rejecting sensible, balanced advice. He was rejecting an uncosted case for lockdown, based on claims that turned out to be wildly exaggerated. This infuriated Cummings, who now sees this as a “disastrous” decision that killed “tens of thousands”. It’s quite a claim. But one that’s pretty hard to back up.
Here’s Annabel Fenwick Elliott on the Covid-hysteric Cummings:
Surely there has to be a more nefarious threat that isn’t being made public; a better reason for keeping families apart and an entire industry bent over a barrel. And yet, there almost certainly isn’t. Had there been, Dominic Cummings would have spilled the beans with great relish yesterday. Instead, while his seven-hour Boris-bashing bonanza made for scintillating viewing, the only ‘bombshells’ that surprised me were his own admissions.
I didn’t know Cummings was pro-dictatorships, for example, or that he wanted to copy China’s approach and close the borders all the way back in January 2020. I don’t find it shocking that the Prime Minister, ever the libertarian at heart, pushed back on that plan, nor that he uses blustering rhetoric while strategising, nor indeed, that working with him is like trying to steer an errant shopping trolley. It definitely doesn’t surprise me that from early on, Boris wanted to be like ‘the mayor in Jaws’ who kept the beaches open despite the presence of a great white shark.
Even in hindsight, the data proves he wasn’t wrong. By the time Covid-19 had become endemic, there was little point in sealing off borders – we know that because, as the refreshingly rational Lord Sumption pointed out yesterday, there is no correlation between lockdown policies and deaths. On the contrary, the likes of Sweden and Switzerland, which had the lightest restrictions in Europe, had far fewer excess mortalities per capita than Spain and Belgium, where lockdowns were extreme.
It would be one thing if this form of hygiene theater was limited to restaurants. But school districts across the country have forced children to try to learn while encased in plexiglass desk dividers—that is, if they’ve allowed kids to return to full-time in-person schooling at all.
Not only does this make it harder for children to connect with their friends and teachers, but forcing them to learn this way may lead them to speak up louder to be heard—an act that increases aerosol production and is more likely to spread COVID than speaking at a quieter volume. Given the incredibly low risk of death to children posed by COVID, and the mounting evidence that Plexiglass barriers do not make people safer, it’s past time to remove them; a kindergarten classroom shouldn’t be filled with thick, see-through partitions like a convenience store in a bad part of town.
Some might counter that if they make people feel safer, that ought to be reason enough to keep plexiglass barriers in place. But this is misguided. Hygiene theater gives people a false understanding of how this virus actually works and which preventative measures to take. Pervasive COVID anxiety should not be used to justify silly rituals, especially when there’s good evidence a ritual may hurt us in the end.
In October, a trio of elite academics from Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford universities unveiled The Great Barrington Declaration to promote an alternative pandemic strategy to the experimental lockdowns Fauci pushed ceaselessly. The document proposed a strategy of “focused protection,” or of lifting social restrictions on the general population while implementing targeted measures to protect the most vulnerable.
The three signers wrote they were compelled to propose the declaration after observing the severe consequences of lockdown measures. The lockdowns, they observed, presented costs that far outweighed the benefits, including lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings, and deteriorating mental health. The absence of kids in schools, they noted, was “a grave injustice,” yet endorsed by Fauci.
Within two days the document drew more than 3,500 signatures including an impressive array of scientists whose voices had been ignored or dismissed. By May 2021, the declaration featured signatures from more than 50,000 doctors, epidemiologists, and scientists, along with nearly 800,000 lay people.
Yet Fauci shot the Great Barrington Declaration down, running to the friendly press to dispel criticism of his pandemic prescriptions, any concession from which offered Fauci nothing to gain and everything to lose.
“Quite frankly, that is nonsense,” Fauci said of the document’s proposal, calling his peers in the scientific community stupid for their disagreement. “Anybody who knows anything about epidemiology will tell you that that is nonsense and very dangerous.”
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, an epidemiologist and infectious disease expert at Stanford, was one of the document’s principal authors Fauci declared ignorant.
“Fauci propagandized against a reasonable alternative strategy,” Bhattacharya told The Federalist, “which absolutely shocked me.”
Speaking over the phone, Bhattacharya explained that his former admiration for the now-80-year-old doctor, whose textbook on internal medicine even sits on Bhattacharya’s shelf, has deteriorated with abject politicization.
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