Russell Roberts's Blog, page 280
April 29, 2021
Some Non-Covid Links
George Will eloquently makes the case against the death penalty. Here’s his conclusion:
Capital punishment is ending because of a wholesome squeamishness that reflects (in Chief Justice Earl Warren’s words) society’s “evolving standards of decency.” And because attempts to make it neither cruel nor unusual have made its implementation increasingly capricious, and hence morally absurd.
While it may sound old-fashioned, I don’t believe that it’s the role of the government to tell fully consenting adults what they can and cannot do with their own bodies, even if their choice is something that most people disapprove of. And if you tell me that socialized medicine should give Uncle Sam the right to boss us around, I’ll tell you that two wrongs don’t make a right.
Eric Boehm reports on Joe Biden’s rampaging statism. Also here.
George Leef reports on higher-education’s rampaging inefficiencies. A slice:
Quite a lot of administrative cost is related to the penchant that many college leaders have for political activism. Among them are the costs incurred in promoting diversity and inclusion policies, sustainability initiatives, and legal expenses entailed by their zealous suppression of free speech and their various forms of virtue signaling. [Neetu] Arnold mentions the disastrous decision by Oberlin College officials to side with “woke” students in their determination to smear a local bakery as racist and there are many more instances where college officials have decided to spend money on lawyers just to pose as ideological white knights.
And writing about making housing more affordable is Ilya Somin.
Ben Zycher comments on the “National Climate Bank.”
Without the norm of a balanced budget, the political cost of government spending drops to zero. So we get more and more of it. That is why tax cuts do not lead to less government spending. In the absence of a balanced-budget norm, lower taxes make more spending seem all the better.
Some Covid Links
Here’s the opening of Daniel Halperin’s and Monica Gandhi’s new piece in the Wall Street Journal:
You don’t need to wear a mask outdoors.
That applies whether you’re vaccinated against Covid-19 or not, regardless of your age, and despite the other qualifications in the Centers for Disease Control’s latest guidance, released Tuesday.
Daniel Hannan continues to write wisely about the disproportionate overreaction to Covid-19. Two slices:
The trouble is that lifting restrictions is an altogether tougher proposition than not imposing them in the first place. People tend to anchor to the status quo. Governments are reluctant to relinquish the powers they assumed on a supposedly contingent basis. Just as with post-war rationing, bureaucrats fear chaos if controls are lifted, and struggle to understand the (admittedly counter-intuitive) notion of spontaneous order. Freedoms, as always, need to be prised from the cold grip of the administrative state.
…..
Supporters of the Swedish approach did not argue that it was exactly like Britain or, indeed, that it was doing everything perfectly. Their contention, rather, was that Sweden was the control in the global experiment. Back in March 2020, when the rest of the world locked down, closures were sold as the only way to halt exponential spread. Sweden disproved that contention as early as May 2020 when, without closing shops, schools or restaurants, it saw a decline in case numbers.
That should have been that. Plainly, a country could protect itself without a complete shutdown. Cases would peak with or without draconian measures. Indeed, Professor Simon Wood, a statistician at Edinburgh University, has shown that the rate of new infections had already started to decline before the imposition of each of the three British lockdowns.
That, though, is an unpopular message. It suggests that at least some of the suffering we have gone through over the past year – not just the economic losses, but everything from ruined education to poor mental health – could have been avoided. To repeat, the argument is not that lockdowns are wholly ineffective, but that their cost is disproportionate.
Why am I saying this now? Because it is sensible, immediately after an event, to write yourself a memo to which you can refer next time. There will be more pandemics – whether derived from the Coronavirus or from new sources. And, given the state of our media discourse, they will now be met by calls for new lockdowns. Yet gathering evidence suggests that our closures were wrongly targeted, excessively harsh and, above all, too long.
And those of you who are confident that the Covidocracy rules in a scientifically informed manner might wish to note this reality. And also this reality (on the disgraceful treatment of Martin Kulldorff.) Two slices from the latter:
The Centers for Disease Control pulled a world-renowned expert off a vaccine safety advisory committee after he publicly disagreed with the agency’s pause of the Johnson and Johnson COVID vaccine.
In an email, the CDC’s Dr. Amanda Cohn said Dr. Martin Kulldorff of Harvard Medical School was being removed for communicating to the public his expert opinion, which differed from what the CDC was saying publicly at the time. Four days later, however, the CDC reinstated the use of the vaccine, effectively adopting Kulldorff’s recommendation after punishing him for publicly communicating it.
…..
“I’m really happy Martin has been willing to say what a lot of people are thinking. It’s not easy for an academic to do that, which is scary. It’s scary that academics feel like they can’t express an alternate view,” [Harvard medical-school professor Jeffrey] Brown said. “The fact that Martin and Bhattacharya, that people are criticizing them for pretty basic epidemiology and public health, is insane. It chills debate when perfectly reasonable opinions are shunned.”
The reckless modelers at Imperial College are yet again shown to be wildly mistaken. A slice:
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) published new data showing that almost seven in 10 adults now have antibodies against Covid, in a leap towards herd immunity
The sunny picture sharply contrasts with the modelling presented by the Government’s scientists less than a month ago, when Boris Johnson warned that normality was “still some way off”, and promised to stick to his roadmap “like glue”.
Papers released then by the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) said that a full release from restrictions in June could trigger a wave of Covid hospitalisations as bad as those in January.
But the slew of new data adds weight to claims that many of their central assumptions were far too negative, or based on extremely partial information.
TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.)
Paul Dolan rightly laments the unscientific groupthink regarding Covid science and policy. A slice:
Consider the case of the pandemic. The prevailing narrative, especially among academics like me, is that lockdowns are both required and effective. So, if I am not fervently supporting lockdowns, then I am assumed to be opposed to any form of restrictions. This has been the reaction from across the academy when I have variously suggested: that the stay at home messaging was so effective that it might have resulted in more life years being lost from missed cancer treatments; that middle-aged decision-makers might have been unduly influenced by their own fear of dying; that the life experiences of younger people have been seen as a luxury good whilst we focus on the life expectancies of older people; and that it unethical to scare people into believing that their own risks from the virus are higher than they really are.
Why are people who behave in this way, and who brag about doing so, not derided as nut-cases by those who are quick to dismiss as nutcases others who aren’t so keen on life under the Covidocracy? (DBx: I don’t deny that many nutty things have been said, and continue to be said, by some people who oppose lockdowns. It’s a big world, with absolutely large numbers of people taking each of the many positions that it’s possible to take on Covid. Nor do I believe that these anti-lockdown people should be immune to appropriate criticism. But this fact is striking: A disproportionately large number of ‘scientifically’-minded individuals who are quick to denounce nutty statements, foolish actions, and mistaken predictions by anti-lockdowners are silent about nutty statements, foolish actions, and mistaken predictions by pro-lockdowners. It’s as if expressions of hysteria about Covid are a vaccine against being the object of criticism.)
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 195 of Deirdre McCloskey’s and Alberto Mingardi’s superb 2020 book, The Myth of the Entrepreneurial State:
But leaping into the Supply Chain Fallacy, as [Mariana] Mazzucato does with both feet, makes it easy in modern circumstances of the massive State to conclude that the entrepreneurship of the State is necessary all over the place. One looks down the supply chain of any innovation for any instance of State action, then one assigns “cause” to the instance (without considering private substitutes as counterfactuals), and concludes triumphantly that the State rules. It’s like saying that, because the road outside Google’s office in Mountain View was built by the city, the city of Mountain View caused the search engine.
April 28, 2021
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is a passage from a January 13th, 1859, letter from Lord Acton to Richard Simpson; this passage appears on page 517 of the 1988 collection of Lord Acton’s writings (edited by the late J. Rufus Fears), Essays in Religion, Politics, and Morality:
Bureaucracy is undoubtedly the weapon and sign of a despotic government, inasmuch as it gives whatever government it serves, despotic power.
Some Non-Covid Links
And this points to the deeper problem: The Republican Party, at the very least, lacks a coherent sense of what economic policy and legislation should do and what it is for.
Because it has no theory, the Republican Party cannot offer much in the way of a critique of Democratic governance. It’s not as if there aren’t arguments to make: The recovery bill was larded with pre-existing Democratic spending priorities that had little to do with pandemic relief.
So the substantive debates are conducted not between left and right but between the left and the center left — or perhaps the obstreperous left. It’s telling that some of the most stinging critiques of Mr. Biden’s macroeconomic policy have come from the likes of Larry Summers, an economist long associated with the Democratic Party.
Mark Jamison exposes the fallacies that infect Josh Hawley’s case for so-called “trust-busting.”
“Deadly ignorance runs afoot in the Biden administration” – so argues Richard Rahn. A slice:
As if they were trying to prove they are incompetent, the Biden administration has also just proposed a massive increase in the capital gains tax rate — to a federal maximum rate of 43 percent and, with state taxes, the rate will be over 58% in New York City and 57% in California. Over the last 70 years, the capital gains tax rate has been raised and lowered many times. By 1976, the maximum rate had reached 40%, which was then reduced to 28% in 1979, and then further reduced, then increased, and then reduced three more times, finally down to 15% by 2010. In 2013, it was raised and currently stands at 23.5%.
A capital gain occurs when an individual or company sells an asset for more than they paid for it. Since many of the sales are voluntary — individuals largely decide at their discretion when to sell a stock or bond, or parcel of land, etc. If the rate is considered “too high,” people will often postpone a sale and this is known as the lock-in effect.
The lock-in causes capital to be misallocated, thus reducing growth and job creation. When the rate was its highest (40%) before 1979, the maximum tax revenue received from the capital gains tax was only a little over %6.6 billion while in 2007, when the maximum rate was 16%, the Treasury collected a record $137.1 billion from the tax, in inflation-adjusted terms.
Also making an important point about capital-gains taxation – and inflation – is Arnold Kling.
Samuel Gregg writes wisely about China.
David Henderson makes the case against child allowances.
Scott Lincicome shines much-needed light on the Defense Production Act.
David Boaz is correct: Drug prohibition leads to unnecessary deaths.
Juliette Sellgren talks with Chris Edwards about infrastructure.
Peter Wallison explains that Critical Race Theory is an enemy of reason, evidence, and open debate. A slice:
It would not be surprising to find in this a link to Marxism, a belief system that does not depend on facts or evidence but asserts that capitalism is at the root of society’s evils, including racism. It’s likely that what we are seeing in the rise of critical race theory is a transmuted form of Marxism, characterized by the same rigidity of outlook but with an updated or modernized complaint about the society and social system it is attacking.
Some Covid Links
Sohrab Ahmari eloquently decries the Covid-derangement-induced destruction of New York City. A slice:
When I got home, I told my wife that I wished to launch a civil-disobedience movement against the lockdowns. She blessedly talked me down, and I slept off the strong drink and inspired resolution. Still, I’m angry, as an American and a New Yorker, and have been angry since this all began. I can’t avoid holding in contempt the virtue-signaling double-masking types on the Upper East Side (“I’m one of the good ones, Dr. Fauci!”); the moms at my son’s Catholic school who pull Junior away from touching a metal railing (“Watch out! The virus!”); the young professionals who seem to take a perverse pleasure in the possibility that we are unlikely to socialize in person ever again and must learn to love the Clubhouse voice app.
Ben Domenech talks with Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff.
Knut Wittkowski talks with Bretigne Shaffer about the ravages of lockdowns.
Lenore Skenazy writes rationally about the irrationality of Covid hysteria.
Kick this tyrant and hypocrite from office.
Karol Sikora calls for a return in Britain, not to any ‘new normal,’ but to the true normal. A slice:
Having concerns about the cost of lockdown does not make you a ‘Covid-denier’, I would never dream of labelling someone a ‘cancer-denier’. The personal attacks and vicious insults have been relentless, but it’s important to rise above it. I refuse to smear and deride anyone in the search for Twitter ‘likes’.
It’s a sad truth that the severe negative consequences of lockdown have been largely ignored, presumably for political reasons. In cancer alone, the damage has been significant. Diagnosis, treatment, research and more have suffered enormously. There are no daily updates or ministerial press conferences, but this is a major public health crisis which will take years to recover from.
Ethan Yang compares Covid to the Spanish 1918 flu. A slice:
Furthermore, the two diseases are vastly different in terms of who is vulnerable. Covid-19’s severe outcomes almost exclusively affect the elderly and the immunocompromised, particularly those over the age of 65, which is also approaching the life expectancy of a human. Furthermore 94 percent of Covid deaths occurred with preexisting conditions. It poses virtually no risk to children, minimal risk to young adults, and only seems to kill more than 1 percent of victims with those over the age of 65.
On the other hand the Spanish Flu was devastating to virtually all age groups and did not discriminate between the healthy and the unwell.
Reactions such as this one are why I call it “Covid Derangement Syndrome.”
Harry Dougherty puts Indian Covid into perspective. Two slices:
It’s wise to be sceptical when faced with emotive journalism that expects readers and viewers to take what they see at face value. Images from Italy last March of coffins piling up in churches and being transported by military vehicles through abandoned cities sent the world into hysterics. It looked like something out of the pandemic thriller Contagion, but the reality was a lot less scary, if more infuriating. The disturbing scenes were simply the result of the Italian government’s decision to ban funerals, but the facts were redundant at this stage.
The global alarm in spring 2020 was boosted when aerial footage of the Hart Island public graveyard in New York City was lapped up as a ‘mass grave’ by many major broadcasters in the UK and US. It remains true that the graveyard was much busier than normal, but the whole truth was less scary, if much sadder. The site had been used by the city since 1869 as a burial place for deceased individuals who were either unclaimed or whose families didn’t plan funerals for them, and the increase in bodies arriving at Hart Island was largely due to a change in New York’s storage policy, which shortened the maximum amount of time a medical examiner could keep a body in storage.
…..
If we are generous to the catastrophists and act as if India’s population hasn’t risen considerably in the last two years (which would make any death toll appear to claim a higher percentage of the population then it actually has, and might compensate for any Covid deaths that may not be accounted for), and even more generously assume that every one of these officially labelled Covid deaths was directly caused by Covid, not heart disease, old age, road collisions or gunshot wounds, then roughly 0.0002 per cent of India’s population was lost to Covid on Sunday. But Hungary’s 205 new Covid deaths account for 0.002 per cent of their population, meaning April 25 was proportionally a deadlier day for Hungary than it was for India.
The latest number from India is roughly the equivalent of 120 Covid deaths in a day in England and Wales, which would not be regarded as a particularly grim milestone even by the doom-mongers in Whitehall and Fleet Street.
Here’s a bit of good news out of Canada.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from pages 125-126 of University of Notre Dame philosopher James Otteson’s superb and hot-off-the-Cambridge-University-Press book, Seven Deadly Economic Sins (2021) (three links added; footnote deleted):
What has changed over humanity’s recent history is not biology, psychology, physiology, ecology, or geography. What has changed, instead, is their attitudes. As economic historian Deirdre McCloskey has demonstrated in her magisterial three-volume investigation under the general title The Bourgeois Era, the most salient factor distinguishing the post-1800 era from everything that went before is the attitudes people held toward others. Before that period, the standard background assumption people had was that some people are superior to others – more specifically, one’s own people are superior to those other people – and hence people believed they were under no obligation, moral or otherwise, to treat all human beings as their moral equals. What began as an inkling in the sixteenth century, gained some traction in the seventeenth century, and then began to spread in the eighteenth century, was the idea that cooperation was not only allowable, but morally appropriate; and not only with some people, but with ever more people. As that idea spread, more and more cooperative behavior was engaged in, leading to mutually beneficial exchanges and partnerships, which launched world prosperity on the precipitate upward slope we have seen since.
April 27, 2021
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 217 of Roger Koppl’s important – and today especially relevant – 2018 book, Expert Failure:
The liberal defense of free speech is not based on any claim that the market for ideas somehow eliminates errors or erases human folly. It is based on a comparative institutional analysis in which most state interventions make a bad situation worse.
DBx: Yes. This reality is either forgotten or mistakenly discounted by the many conservatives, and also by not a few libertarians, who now call for measures to deny private companies such as Facebook and Google the right to determine the content of what is and isn’t said on their properties.
I agree that Facebook, Google, Twitter, and many other private companies today behave abominably. But abominable behavior isn’t necessarily unlawful. A terrible can of worms – many of these slimy creatures, beware, Woke – will be opened by obstructing the contents decisions of these private companies.
“In Appreciation: James M. Buchanan”
I just discovered that I’ve never shared here the full text of my January 10th, 2013, remembrance, in the Wall Street Journal, of my late Nobel-laureate colleague, Jim Buchanan. It’s pasted below.
In Appreciation: James M. BuchananThe Nobel-winning economist who understood how politics really works.James M. Buchanan, who died Wednesday at age 93, was one of history’s greatest economists. Though he won the Nobel Prize in 1986, Jim at heart was always a farm boy from Tennessee—an old-fashioned, hardworking American who disdained unearned privileges as well as deeply distrusting the promises of politicians and the passions of collectives.
The theme of his life’s work is best summarized in the title of his 1997 [sic; this is a typo; the year should be 1979] article “Politics Without Romance.” With longtime colleague Gordon Tullock, Jim launched a research program—public-choice economics—that challenged the widespread notion that politicians in democratic societies are more nobly motivated and trustworthy than are business people and other private-sector actors. In a wide river of books and papers, Jim warned against the foolishness of romanticizing government.
Jim regarded his work as simply extending and applying the insights of America’s founding generation, especially those of James Madison. Unlike too many pundits and professors over the past century—but like America’s founders—Jim understood that politicians’ lovely proclamations of their desires to improve society too often camouflage unlovely venal motives that prompt politicians to disregard the general welfare in order to transfer wealth and privilege to powerful interest groups.
Auto-company bailouts, Solyndra subsidies, farm programs, tariffs—the real and ugly reasons for these and many other government activities become clear after absorbing Jim Buchanan’s lessons.
His deep skepticism of government, combined with his expert understanding of free markets, led Jim to describe himself as a “classical liberal.” But it wasn’t always so. Like many of his generation, the young Jim Buchanan was a socialist. His socialism was cured, though, by his studies in economics at the University of Chicago. While there, Jim polished his keen instincts for detecting nonsense.
Jim’s nonsense-detection instincts are on full display in his 1958 book “Public Principles of Public Debt.” By the 1950s most economists were trumpeting the Keynesian myth that government debt is no burden on future taxpayers as long as it is held internally—that is, as long as “we owe it to ourselves.”
Wrong, said Jim. It is unfortunate that he is no longer here to speak out against the again-rampant Keynesians who advocate massive deficit financing. Misled by their own unjustified lumping together of taxpayers and domestic bondholders, Keynesians mistakenly conclude that government is exempt from the reality that counsels households and firms to follow prudent rules of finance. This Keynesian error is one that Jim never tired of challenging.
Not that Jim held much hope that his speaking out against unwise government policy would do much good. He sought to prevent harmful policies by tying politicians’ hands rather than by pleading with politicians to be more public-spirited. And to tie politicians’ hands Jim championed constitutional reform. He believed that only binding, enforceable constitutional rules can prevent Leviathan from eventually suffocating private markets and stamping out human freedom.
Ironically, the constitutional reform that Jim advocated practically requires the cooperation of the politicians whom he so distrusted. Yet it is a mark of greatness in Jim Buchanan that he held out hope, until his dying day, that clear-eyed scholarship would eventually persuade people of the dangers of unconstrained government and of the need to somehow rein it in.
Mr. Boudreaux is professor of economics at George Mason University and chair for the study of free market capitalism at the Mercatus Center.
Some Covid Links
Jay Bhattacharya is interviewed by Jimmy Licon. Two slices from Bhattacharya’s responses:
There are so many mistakes that public health officials and policy makers have made in dealing with the Covid pandemic. There are many candidates to choose among for the single worst — e.g., using deception and panic as deliberate tools in public health communication, moralizing and stigmatizing an infectious disease so that people feel ashamed to contract it, and the censoring and smearing scientists to silence dissent, and many others.
If I have to pick among the mistakes, though, I think the single biggest one is that public health officials ignored the fact that that there are many public health problems and priorities beyond Covid that are also matters of life and death. It was public health malpractice to put those priorities to one side for a year and counting to address a single problem — Covid risk. The collateral damage from this catastrophic decision on the health and well-being of the world population, especially the poor, will continue for years to come.
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There should be no doubt at this point in the epidemic that public health officials and epidemiologists do not have sufficient expertise to make the sorts of decisions and recommendations that they have made during the epidemic. It is clear, for instance, that many of them cannot perform the most elementary sorts of cost-benefit analyses that come naturally to economists and to many other people. With lockdowns, for instance, many public health officials (including especially Dr. Fauci) seem utterly blind to their costs.
The idea that counting the costs of the lockdowns is somehow immoral, which took hold in the early days of the epidemic, was itself immoral since so many of those costs involve the lives of the poor killed by the lockdowns themselves.
Angus Dalgleish rightly decries the Covidocracy and its “crazy Covid dogma.” A slice:
In truth, Government policy [in the U.K.] is now being driven by nothing more sophisticated than a deranged dogma.
It is dogma of the worst sort, for it is shaped by political cowardice and burnished by discredited scientific advisers who no longer seem capable of reviewing the evidence in front of them.
This deep dive by Manfred Horst into the facts about Covid, and about responses to Covid, is useful. Two slices:
It may well be that some people suffer from the disease caused by this particular virus for extended periods, or are left with specific sequelae (‘Long Covid’). However, late effects have been described for other respiratory viruses as well, the influenza viruses in particular. Furthermore, many a former Covid-19 patient who does not feel fully recovered or who falls victim to some other disease will now conceivably be tempted to blame this on the SARS-CoV-2 virus. It may also be possible that the mere knowledge of having had Covid-19 – or simply having tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 – can make some people feel unwell. Be that as it may, there is as yet no scientifically valid study which would demonstrate any specific long-term consequences of infection with this virus.
…..
Now, it is of course true that having reached a certain age, one has a remaining life expectancy which is higher than at birth: in Germany, for example, you may expect to live 16 more years at the age of 70, 9 more at 80, 4 more at 90, and 2 more at 100. Life insurance companies base their premiums on this kind of calculation. In a number of recently published academic articles, this remaining life expectancy of the living has simply been transferred to those who had died ‘of and with corona’, the resulting claim being that these people had lost around 12 years of their lives. In other words, they would have lived, on average, to well over 90 years if they had not been struck down by the virus. This claim is not really plausible in itself. Moreover, following this line of reasoning, we could just as well demonstrate that red socks (or whichever random variable you care to choose) were life-threatening, and demand that the government mobilise all possible means in order to prevent people from wearing them.
On the basis of their age distribution and their multimorbidity (the virtually universal presence of other serious diseases), we can assume that the cohort of people who died with a positive test for SARS-CoV-2 is part of the normal and inevitable mortality of the general population and cannot significantly alter the total amount of that mortality.
The fact that a certain excess mortality is now being reported for some – though not all – countries for the year 2020 deserves closer analysis; it cannot unquestioningly be attributed to the coronavirus. A comparison with the average of previous years may already be misleading in countries with an increasing population and/or progressive ageing, such as the USA, since such factors inevitably lead to a continuous rise in the number of deaths.
Are SARS-CoV-2 hospital patients getting younger?
Here’s the abstract of Casey Mulligan’s new paper on Covid-19 and mitigation efforts:
Were workers more likely to be infected by COVID-19 in their workplace, or outside it? While both economic models of the pandemic and public health policy recommendations often presume that the workplace is less safe, this paper seeks an answer both in micro data and economic theory. The available data from schools, hospitals, nursing homes, food processing plants, hair stylists, and airlines show employers adopting mitigation protocols in the spring of 2020. Coincident with the adoption, infection rates in workplaces typically dropped from well above household rates to well below. When this occurs, the sign of the disease externality from participating in large organizations changes from negative to positive, even while individuals continue to have an incentive to avoid large organizations due to the prevention costs they impose on members. Rational cooperative prevention sometimes results in infectious-disease patterns that are opposite of predictions from classical epidemiology.
The Editorial Board of the Washington Examiner counsels rationality and avoidance of Covid cultism. A slice:
It has been a long year since the pandemic began. If you’ve spent these months fretting over the coronavirus and suffering the negative externalities of government lockdowns, it’s time to sit back and enjoy the good news that is finally pouring in.
There is a light at the end of this tunnel, and you can begin to bask in it now, if only you are willing to listen to science and ignore the doomers, gloomers, and anti-vaccine activists in the Biden administration.
As Phil Magness would say, the straw man is now stomping through Turkey.
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