Russell Roberts's Blog, page 279
May 4, 2021
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 119 of John Mueller’s brilliant 1999 book, Capitalism, Democracy, & Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery:
Much of the most widely accepted economic thinking of the time derived from the work of John Maynard Keynes, whose central theme, according to his biographer, was “the state is wise and the market is stupid.”
DBx: Those who nod in agreement with this Keynesian misperception foolishly pave the way for the stupid state to override the intelligence of competitive markets.
(The Keynes biographer to whom Mueller refers is Robert Skidelsky.)
May 3, 2021
Some Covid Links
At least some Canadians are protesting the Covidocracy.
David Flint rightly decries Australia’s “lockdown lunacy.” A slice:
There is an increasing suspicion that media briefings are being held to panic the population, with shock reports about a small number contracting the virus. While most are likely to recover, a draconian solution is then imposed on the population, even across the whole state.
What is obvious is that while the vulnerable should be protected, there never was any justification in seriously damaging those in a specific range of businesses and employments.
When the virus first struck in Australia the declared policy was to ‘flatten the curve’, that is to slow down its impact so that the hospitals could cope. That has never been changed. But the conclusion from the actions of too many politicians is their aim is to achieve an obvious impossibility: eradicating the virus without the population becoming immune.
Will Jones, I fear, is correct that “They’ll never dare tell us the lockdown narrative is a lie.” A slice:
What’s strange is that even in America where parts of their own country are living free and showing that the measures aren’t needed, state governments, with popular support and backed by federal agencies, just carry on with their restrictions, lifting them only very slowly and with no obvious commitment to bringing them finally to an end. It’s as though people don’t want to know. Too much has been invested in the lockdown narrative, it seems, for people to be able to cope psychologically with the trauma of facing the truth that it is fundamentally false. Too many reputations are at risk. Too many interests coincide.
Are we doomed to live forever in this Covid state of emergency? I confess it is hard to see what will prompt governments to bring it to an end, now that we live in permanent fear of the appearance of variants and believe we must continually top up the whole world’s antibodies through rolling annual programmes of vaccinations. One of the most depressing thoughts is I find it almost impossible to imagine Boris Johnson facing the camera and announcing: “My friends, our ordeal is over. The data is clear. The virus is now one among many hazards with which we daily must live. Vaccines are available to the vulnerable, as are effective treatments, and we will continually strive to find the safest ways to protect those at risk from this and other illnesses. It is time to resume our old lives. I declare the state of emergency to be over.”
Phil Magness compiles types of lockdown papers:
Quotation of the Day…
While other scholars ask what factors cause poverty, Sowell wants to know what circumstances lead to wealth creation. While others argue over how to explain different economic outcomes among different racial and ethnic groups, Sowell wonders why anyone should expect similar outcomes to begin with.
May 2, 2021
The Precautionary Principle Devours Itself
Here’s a letter to a first-time correspondent:
Mr. P___:
“[P]ut off by” my “tiresome critique of governmental struggles to protect us from a very dangerous disease,” you write that
in the face of great uncertainty decision makers don’t have the luxury of fastidiously weighing the full consequences of their acts. A novel danger calls for decisive action which may retrospectively be found to be excessive, but only hindsight is 20-20.
I agree that hindsight is more accurate than foresight. For at least two reasons I disagree that this fact justifies the draconian responses over the past 15 months to Covid-19.
First, because we learned early on that SARS-CoV-2 poses a disproportionately high risk to the elderly – and very little risk to the young – there’s no good reason why this relevant information was ignored. Yet even after hindsight had given government officials knowledge that is both solid and pertinent, they refused to act on it. Indeed, when in early October a major Declaration (the Great Barrington) was released recommending action based on what was by then well-established facts about Covid, it was dismissed overwhelmingly with derision.
Second, like all precautionary-principle logic, your precautionary-principle logic devours itself. This ‘logic’ leads you to declare that the costs of draconian Covid restrictions be largely ignored in order that we be saved from the potentially gigantic costs of Covid. Yet I can use this same ‘logic’ to declare that the costs of Covid be largely ignored in order that we be saved from the potentially gigantic costs of lockdowns. A lockdown, after all, is a novel event that threatens to inflict unprecedented damage on humanity. Surely – the ‘logic’ goes – in the teeth of the sudden and unprecedented threat posed by lockdowns we should do all we can to protect humanity from this particular danger and not worry too terribly much about the consequent spread of the coronavirus.
In 2020 a severe novel coronavirus spawned a severe novel policy virus. The undoubted severity of the former does not justify ignoring the undoubted severity of the latter. But unfortunately, humanity not only focused almost exclusively on the danger of the former to the exclusion of the danger of the latter, we greatly exaggerated the danger of the former and greatly discounted the danger of the latter.
In summary, in early 2020 humanity was confronted with two novel dangers. I see no reason why we should excuse overreaction to one and underreaction to the other. (Indeed, lockdowns are arguably a greater novelty than is SARS-CoV-2, but that subject is for a different time.)
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
Some Covid Links
I don’t believe that the rulers have any intention of allowing their subjects to return to the status quo ante regardless of what happens to COVID-19, vaccines, or treatments. The events of the past year have been a godsend for them, and they will fight tooth and nail to resist surrendering the powers they have seized and exercised. Moreover, many members of the public will support their quest to retain these powers; the people have already demonstrated that their fears can be easily aroused and heightened, whereas their concerns about liberty, if they had any to begin with, will be cast aside in a panicked stampede to comply with the government’s fear-mongering orders.
Yes, some people will resist, but the foregoing is my best guess of how things will develop overall. People who cherish a free society will be screwed once again, thanks to the state’s power-seeking exploitation of the “emergency” rationale.
David Henderson, writing in Reason, draws important economic lessons from the responses to Covid-19. A slice:
By the end of the Cold War, most economists—even some socialists—were acknowledging that Mises and Hayek had won the debate: The Soviet planners had failed because they had embarked on a task that could not succeed.
But in the COVID-19 era, a lot of policy makers have let this lesson slip their minds. While few have advocated full-blown state socialism, many have forgotten the more general truth that officials don’t have enough information to make detailed plans about people’s lives.
Take Gavin Newsom, the first governor to impose a statewide lockdown. The California Democrat listed 16 infrastructure sectors deemed so essential that they would not have to lock down. Restaurants, hairdressers, gymnasiums, and schools, not being among them, were compelled to close. So were large swaths of the retail economy. But Newsom did not base these regulations on a sophisticated understanding of what is essential and what is not. He couldn’t. No one has that understanding, for the reasons Hayek laid out long ago. The list of essential industries came from an old script; it was not highly correlated with the relative value of various industries and was not closely based on risks of spread.
What was missing from the discussion is something known only in the minds of the humans involved: the value of what was lost. Measuring the loss of gross domestic product (GDP) doesn’t quite do it, because the private sector component of GDP is valued at market prices but the value consumers put on goods and services typically exceeds the sticker price. (Economists refer to the value minus the price as consumer surplus.) Gatherings of more than a few people at funerals, for example, were prohibited; many mourners surely valued the gathering they had to miss at more than the ceremony’s price.
Andrew Gelman asks if it’s “really true that the U.S. death rate in 2020 was the highest above normal since the early 1900s—even surpassing the calamity of the 1918 flu pandemic.” His answer: No. Here’s a telling graph from Gelman’s post (from which, do notice, that to find a time in American history when the annual death rate was last as high as it was in 2020 we must go waaaaay back in time – about 15 or so years!):
Peter Suderman reports on a tremendously costly consequence of the hysteria over Covid.
Several friends have assured me that life will indeed largely return to normal after we conquer Covid. I hope that they’re correct, but reports such as this one only further fuel my fear that this derangement will last a long, long time.
Matthew Crawford reveals how “The pandemic has revealed a darkly authoritarian side to expertise.” (Arnold Kling, I think, will especially like this essay given its use of work by Martin Gurri.) Two slices:
The phrase “follow the science” has a false ring to it. That is because science doesn’t lead anywhere. It can illuminate various courses of action, by quantifying the risks and specifying the tradeoffs. But it can’t make the necessary choices for us. By pretending otherwise, decision-makers can avoid taking responsibility for the choices they make on our behalf.
Increasingly, science is pressed into duty as authority. It is invoked to legitimise the transfer of sovereignty from democratic to technocratic bodies, and as a device for insulating such moves from the realm of political contest.
Over the past year, a fearful public has acquiesced to an extraordinary extension of expert jurisdiction over every domain of life. A pattern of “government by emergency” has become prominent, in which resistance to such incursions are characterised as “anti-science”.
But the question of political legitimacy hanging over rule by experts is not likely to go away. If anything, it will be more fiercely fought in coming years as leaders of governing bodies invoke a climate emergency that is said to require a wholesale transformation of society. We need to know how we arrived here.
…..
Covid is indeed a very serious illness, with an infection fatality rate about ten times higher than that of the flu: roughly one percent of all those who are infected die. Also, however, unlike the flu this mortality rate is so skewed by age and other risk factors, varying by more than a thousand-fold from the very young to the very old, that the aggregate figure of one percent can be misleading. As of November 2020, the average age of those killed by Covid in Britain was 82.4 years old.
In July of 2020, 29 % of British citizens believed that “6-10 percent or higher” of the population had already been killed by Covid. About 50% of those polled had a more realistic estimate of 1%. The actual figure was about one tenth of one percent. So the public’s perception of the risk of dying of Covid was inflated by one to two orders of magnitude. This is highly significant.
Disasters don’t just happen, argues Ferguson in this superb, first-out-of-the-gate historical inquiry into the politics of pandemics: they are often caused, always experienced, so the way they play out tells us much about the human beings involved. Maybe the coronavirus was triggered by bats, but it was spread by us and bungled by us, and our attempts to interpret it expose our contemporary obsessions. The death toll of the past year has been pinned on populists such as Donald Trump or Boris Johnson; Ferguson, on the other hand, regards Trump’s poor leadership as symptomatic, not a catalyst. “What happened was in large measure a disastrous failure of the public health bureaucracy”, reflecting a long-term decline in the quality of American governance. Since the middle of the last century, the state has been trying to do more things, with less common sense.
As Phil Magness would say, a straw man is now stomping through Oregon. And this straw man is set yet again to stomp also through Perth, despite Australia having early on – so decisively and wisely, we are told – used harsh measures to rid itself of the Covid Monster.
A scene from a day in the life of the subjects of the inherently tyrannical Covidocracy.
Back to Bob Higgs: Those of you who are confident that Higgs’s ratchet effect will not play out as a result of the vast new and draconian powers exercised by the Covidocracy over the past 15 months might wish to read this piece by Dan Hannan about the once-free country of Britain. A slice:
It is true that shops and schools are at last open again. But universities are still not teaching face-to-face, offices remain empty and it is illegal to invite your friends to dinner. Frankly, at the rate we are going, I wonder how much impact the formal lifting of the remaining prohibitions will have. I have a nasty suspicion that, as when the first lockdown ended last July, many people will remain anxious, even mildly agoraphobic.
I hope to God that I’m wrong, but I can’t help noticing that many of my inoculated neighbours are being more cautious now than they were a year ago when they had had no vaccine.
Perhaps it is the unrelenting pessimism of the news cycle. We are constantly hearing about the tragedy in India, but when did you last see a report about, say, Florida, which lifted its restrictions last year and have suffered no ill effect? Or perhaps people have simply settled into new, timid routines. Few laws are as powerful as force of habit. If you spend 14 months telling people that it is dangerous to leave their homes, there is bound to be some lasting psychological effect.
The worst of it is that we seem to have accepted the reversal of the burden of proof. Our criminal justice system requires a high degree of evidence before incarceration. But we have switched things around so that we now demand proof before accepting normality. Our right to buy and sell, to congregate, to travel – these things are our birthright, not a set of privileges to be earned through good behaviour as though we were prisoners applying for parole. When did we stop caring?
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 399 of Will & Ariel Durant’s 1963 volume, The Age of Louis XIV:
In St. Petersburg, to encourage foreign trade, he [Peter the Great] allowed Calvinist, Lutheran, and Catholic churches to be built on the Nevski Prospekt, which came to be called “the Prospect of Tolerance.”
DBx: Trade promotes diversity, equity, and inclusion.
May 1, 2021
Some Covid Links
The precautionary principle may have emerged from within environmentalism, but it now pervades all areas of life. It encourages us to feel fearful and insecure before the future. And it has led to safetyism – that is, the establishment of safety as the foundational value of Anglo-American culture.
We can see the deleterious impact of safetyism and worst-case thinking in the sphere of childhood. Indeed, childhood has been increasingly organised around the anticipation of the worst possible outcome. Parents are now reluctant to let their children out of their sight. And children have come to view themselves as fragile and vulnerable. During the pandemic, this fearful view of childhood and children intensified. Children’s mental health was said to be at risk, and their physical development threatened. This worst-case approach actually incited children to feel hopeless about their future.
So, fear is socially dominant. But this is not fear as an emotion, which arises when we instinctively feel threatened. Rather, this is fear as a perspective, a cultural orientation towards the world. It provides the prism through which we interpret everyday experience. It feeds risk-aversion, a heightened sense of vulnerability, a preoccupation with safety, and a lack of confidence towards the future.
The prevalence of this fearful perspective is turning lockdown into something approaching a permanent state. Policymakers and commentators talk of ‘the new normal’ – a post-pandemic world in which freedoms and customs we once took for granted are no more. And public-health professionals frequently hint that social distancing between people will be in place for years to come.
The CDC paper argues that the mandates were a success. In particular, the paper claims that “the increasing trend in COVID-19 incidence reversed” in the Kansas counties with mask mandates.
We noticed, however, that this conclusion is incorrect. As our paper shows, the trend did not reverse in those counties. Moreover, the growth in reported case incidence (and mortality) was, overall, virtually indistinguishable in counties with and without mask mandates.
It turns out that the CDC paper made an incorrect assertion because the authors used data that was later updated. As statistical studies go, this sort of mistake is surely forgivable.
However, the CDC’s refusal to publicly acknowledge this incorrect assertion – we corresponded with the main author, as well as several editors and an associate director for policy at the CDC – is inexcusable. There simply is no room in legitimate scientific study for refusal to admit mistakes.
Our experience, sadly, is not unique. Even in those rare instances where government public health officials yield to scientific evidence and revise their recommendations, they seldom admit error.
Molly Kingsley argues that “Forcing children to wear masks in classrooms when no one has bothered to calculate the risk is unconscionable.” She’s correct. Here’s her conclusion:
However, as increasing numbers of published papers emerge it becomes clearer still that masks are anything but a de minimis intervention: they are nothing short of violence against children’s emotional, physical and educational health.
Exposing children to a risk of this nature – a risk no one has bothered to calculate – is unconscionable. Children must be able to take off the masks, immediately, and they must be able to do so without being accused of putting others at risk. It is children, not adults, who are in danger now.
TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.)
It is still a criminal offence in England to meet people from outside your household indoors, other than for specific permitted purpose, or to meet more than five others outdoors. We were pathetically grateful to be allowed to have a pint outside a pub in the sleet of early April, but also risked prosecution for sitting in a group of seven for a picnic on days when the sun shone. I have written elsewhere about how this arrangement is fatal to the rule of law and invites arbitrary policing and a managerial, Big Brother state.
….
But most of all it seems that the Government has forgotten that freedom is (or used to be) our default setting, and any restrictions need to be justified. Laws preventing freedom of association, freedom to carry on business or to enjoy family life, should have to be assessed and justified for every single day that they continue in force. Instead, the opposite seems to apply – the restrictions are to continue until ministers are satisfied that there is no risk (the official timetable remains contingent). Risk of what seems unclear; we’ve come a long way from flattening the curve and protecting the NHS from being overrun. Many libertarians and free market conservatives were willing to accept emergency laws during the pandemic on the basis of the harm principle and remediation of externalities. I now think that was wrong, but even if you accept that justification it is hard to argue it still applies.
When seeking historical analogies for Covid-19, commentators have referred more often to the catastrophic 1918-19 “Spanish influenza” than to the flu pandemic of 1957-58. Yet the later episode deserves to be much better known, not just because the public health threat was a closer match to our own but because American society at the time was better prepared—culturally, institutionally and politically—to deal with it.
…..
The policy response of President Dwight Eisenhower could hardly have been more different from the response of 2020. Eisenhower did not declare a state of emergency. There were no state lockdowns and, despite the first wave of teenage illness, no school closures. Sick students simply stayed at home, as they usually did. Work continued more or less uninterrupted.
With workplaces open, the Eisenhower administration saw no need to borrow to the hilt to fund transfers and loans to citizens and businesses. The president asked Congress for a mere $2.5 million ($23 million in today’s inflation-adjusted terms) to provide additional support to the Public Health Service. There was a recession that year, but it had little if anything to do with the pandemic. The Congressional Budget Office has described the Asian flu as an event that “might not be distinguishable from the normal variation in economic activity.”
Brilliant humor from the Babylon Bee. (HT Ian Fillmore)
Quotation of the Day…
… is from pages 71-72 of University of Notre Dame philosopher James Otteson’s superb and hot-off-the-Cambridge University Press book, Seven Deadly Economic Sins (2021) (emphasis original):
[T]o know whether we are choosing well we need to account for what we are giving up. It is not enough to show that what we decide to do is a good thing or would lead to benefit. There are many things we might do that might be good, lead to benefit, or create value. What we need to know instead is whether what we are considering is not merely good but better than the other good things we would have to sacrifice to do it.
April 30, 2021
Some Covid Links
Four cheers for these parents in Vail, Arizona, who successfully revolted against Covid Derangement Syndrome! (HT Yevdokiya Zagumenova)
Allison Pearson calls for an end to masking, once and for all. A slice:
People will get back to normal at very different speeds. I get that. The outrageous campaign of terror to which the British people have been subjected (far worse than in any other country) will have long-term casualties. But we have to call time on the fear on June 21 because it really is the case that, with nearly all the vulnerable vaccinated, we have nothing to fear but fear itself.
I have worn a mask since July 24 2020, when they became mandatory in shops. I don’t believe that masks make much difference to the spread of Covid (except maybe in a crowded bus or train). I wore a mask because it made other people feel better. From June 21, I will stop wearing a mask for the same reason.
Jeffrey Tucker documents the happy swelling of the ranks of anti-lockdowners. (DBx: I do not, however, share his optimism that people will come to see that the calamity into which humanity marched since March 2020 was misguided. I fervently hope that Jeffrey is correct and that my pessimism will be resoundingly proven to be mistaken.)
TANSTAFPC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.)
Draw whatever conclusion(s) you think to be reasonable from this Facebook post by Phil Magness:
The New York Times has been a major source of promoting the woo-woo side of so-called Long Covid research, including running a feature profile on its alleged sufferers.
This one from January is built around a lady named Lauren Nichols. She is the same Lauren Nichols who I previously discovered is a self-described “psychic healer” who claims to talk to dead people, and purports to be a specialist in detecting “invisible illness.”
Tom Slater decries the censoriousness given much freer rein by Covid Derangement Syndrome.
Peter Franklin warns us to beware the post-Covid surveillance state.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 136 of Thomas Sowell’s 2009 volume, Intellectuals and Race:
A crucial fact about the theories and social visions of intellectuals is that the intelligentsia pay no price for being wrong.
DBx: Many congratulations to Prof. Sowell for being awarded the Manhattan Institute’s 2021 Hayek Book Prize for his 2020 volume Charter Schools and Their Enemies!
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