Russell Roberts's Blog, page 281

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 105 of the original 1951 University of Chicago Press edition of Michael Polanyi’s The Logic of Liberty:

Marxism offered them also a future, bearing unbounded promise to humanity. It predicted that historic necessity would destroy an antiquated form of society and replace it by a new one, in which the existing miseries and injustices would be eliminated. Though this prospect was put forward as a purely scientific observation, it endowed those who accepted it with a feeling of overwhelming moral superiority. They acquired a sense of righteousness, which in a paradoxical manner was fiercely intensified by the mechanical framework in which it was set.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is an insightful question from an e-mail sent to me yesterday by Rusty Jones; I share the question here with his kind permission:

If Joe Biden says there is no evidence that high corporate taxes cause companies to leave the US why does Janet Yellen push for a global minimum corporate tax to remove the incentive for companies to leave?

The Age Profile of Covid’s Victims Is Indeed Relevant

(Don Boudreaux)

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In my latest column for AIER I argue that it is bad public policy to ignore the fact that Covid disproportionately kills the elderly. A slice:

Importantly, to share this assessment is not to believe that some lives are more sacred and deserving of respect than other lives. It’s simply to recognize that all lives are finite, and that the older is someone, the closer is he or she to death. Therefore, in our world of scarce resources – in our world in which achieving more X means having less Z – it makes no sense for government to allocate whatever resources are legitimately at its disposal in ignorance of this widely shared recognition of life’s finiteness, and of the assessment of the meaning of this finiteness. (Note that this fact does not imply that government should coercively transfer resources from the old to the young simply because the young have more life remaining than do the old. In a liberal, free society, arbitrary government reallocation of privately owned resources is presumed to be illegitimate regardless of the owners’ age, health, sex, political affiliation, or whatever.)

Partly because I have little confidence that the state will act wisely and prudently, in my ideal world the state would play almost no role even in managing deadly pandemics. But the world is far from my ideal. The state is big, powerful, intrusive, and will without doubt play a role in managing pandemics. Given this given, libertarians such as myself are left to comment on options that, for us, are at best second-best. And so my plea is for the state to recognize the steep age-gradient of Covid’s victims and make policy accordingly.

Were the state to heed this plea, the result of course would be policies that differ from current policies which largely ignore Covid’s steep age gradient. In some ways, this difference in policies would be more favorable to the elderly. They would, for example, have priority over younger people for any vaccines the distribution of which is managed by government. But the biggest difference in policies is that they would be much less draconian, and they would reflect the Great Barrington Declaration’s advice to practice Focused Protection.

It is, I believe, deeply misguided to insist that the principle of government even-handedness requires that government ignore the age profile of a disease’s victims. It is misguided to demand – either on grounds of equity or by noting, correctly, that all lives are sacred – that the policy response to a disease that overwhelmingly kills old people must be just as vigorous and intense as would be the policy response to a disease that kills indiscriminately, or that kills overwhelmingly the young.

Such an indiscriminate policy response might be appropriate for a society that has escaped the bonds of scarcity or in which people can live forever. However, such an indiscriminate policy response to a highly discriminatory disease is utterly inappropriate for our society which remains firmly in the grip of both scarcity and mortality.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Matt Ridley, writing in the Spectator, warns that Britain is in danger today of repeating the costly mistakes that it committed in the immediate aftermath of WWII. A slice:

We are doing the same again now, as one of the most socially restricted major countries in Europe but the one with the lowest death rate. We risk allowing officials to cling on to their beloved levers of control too long, and to squander the advantage won by our vaccine taskforce. If a new variant of the virus threatens a third wave, permanent lockdown is very unlikely to stop it anyway. And if the new variant is vaccine-resistant, then vaccine passports will be useless.

When things are controlled by bureaucrats, it takes a real effort of imagination to envisage them not being so. We assume that in the absence of direction, chaos must ensue, forgetting the lessons of economics. ‘How does Paris get fed?’ asked Frédéric Bastiat in 1845, and answered: not through the efforts of brilliant and omniscient food commissioners — that way lies inevitable disaster — but through a market that blindly matches demand with supply and thereby summons up the collective genius of millions of ordinary people.

With few exceptions, the tribe of academic scientists and hospital doctors which now controls our government has literally never heard such arguments. Their worldview is a top-down one: they assume things happen because somebody ordains that things happen. Spontaneous order is a foreign concept to them. This is surprising, given that it is the essence of evolution, but when it comes to society they are in thrall to intelligent-design theories. They are political creationists.

So of course the scientists will hesitate to recommend liberation. The politicians must bear this in mind.

My GMU Econ colleague Peter Leeson and GMU Econ PhD student Louis Rouanet, writing in the Southern Economic Journal, insightfully explore some of the economics of Covid-19. Here’s their paper’s abstract:

Negative infectious disease externalities are less prevalent in the absence of government intervention and less costly to society than is often supposed. That is so for three reasons. (1) Unlike externality‐creating behaviors in many classical externality contexts, such behaviors are often self‐limiting in the context of infectious disease. (2) In market economies, behaviors that may create infectious disease externalities typically occur at sites that are owned privately and visited voluntarily. Owners have powerful incentives to regulate such behaviors at their sites, and visitors face residual infection risk contractually. (3) The social cost of infectious disease externalities is limited by the cheapest method of avoiding externalized infection risk. That cost is modest compared to the one usually imagined: the value of life (or health) lost to the disease if government does not intervene. We elaborate these arguments in the context of the COVID‐19 pandemic.

(DBx: In the coming days I’ll link to some other of my colleagues’ academic papers on Covid.)

From one month ago: Dr. Adam Gaffney counsels cooler heads about so-called “Long Covid.” Two slices:

Such reports are concerning, but I also worry that the narrative about a new chronic disease caused by a mild infection with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, is getting ahead of the evidence.

Long Covid has no universal definition. It is instead often used as a catchall to describe individuals whose symptoms last more than a few weeks or months after the onset of Covid-19. That many individuals experience protracted symptoms after infection with SARS-CoV-2, however, should hardly be surprising. After all, critical illness of any cause can be devastating.

…..

Reporting on long Covid needs to be more cautious for several reasons.

First, consider that at least some people who identify themselves as having long Covid appear never to have been infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. In Yong’s influential article, he cites a survey of Covid long-haulers in which some two-thirds of them had negative coronavirus antibody tests — blood tests that reveal prior SARS-CoV-2 infection. Meanwhile, a survey organized by a group of self-identified long Covid patients that recruited participants from online support groups reported in late December 2020 that around two-thirds of those surveyed who had undergone blood testing reported negative results.

Taylor Dotson warns of the dangers of “fact-ist” politics. (HT my intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy) A slice:

By ducking at every turn behind “follow the science,” our leaders have reduced people to vectors for disease spread, data points to be controlled, while displaying an indifferent attitude toward their lived realities. That this style of leadership makes many people suspect is no surprise.

Even Scott Gottlieb is calling for an end to edicts to wear masks outdoors. Here’s his conclusion:

After a year of sacrifice, more than 140 million Americans have received at least one dose of a vaccine. They know their dangers are receding and want to return to normal. Public-health officials need to be willing to relax some restrictions and tolerate a low level of risk. Americans shouldn’t be afraid to go outside and enjoy the warm weather—no mask required.

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

Some avid lockdowners – unsurprisingly, actually – are literally communists.

Here’s a front-line report, by artist Antonia Rolls, from yesterday’s anti-lockdown protest in London. A slice:

“Hooray,” we all shouted, and those with horns blew them, those with drums banged them, some with saucepans and spoons bashed them and off we went like the jolly conspiracy theorists that we are. And actually, for conspiracy theorists, the people around me during the five hours of marching that I did, were very moderate. They just did not want to see their freedoms spirited away from them with weasel words by the Government. They did not trust all the figures, did not like children wearing masks (did not like anyone wearing masks). They were furious about the old people left to fade away and die in despair and loneliness, for their own good. They did not want to be forced to have vaccines and no one, absolutely no one wanted vaccine passports. “Wake up!” we all wanted to say, “much of this Government and media stuff is madness!”

Here’s a short video of some of the London protest scenes.

The straw man now harassing Perth is thinking of hanging around a bit longer.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 108 of University of Notre Dame philosopher James Otteson’s excellent and hot-off-the-Cambridge-University-Press book, Seven Deadly Economic Sins (2021):

There is, unfortunately, no Great Mind who can survey the totality of one’s life, who knows all the possible courses one’s life might take, who can anticipate all the surprises and accidents that emerge in one’s life, or who, therefore, can know what you should do. (Maybe God could do this, but He is unfortunately not running for office.)

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 13 of my colleague Dan Klein’s November 2020 working paper titled “Adam Smith and Propriety in Moral and Political Discourse” (original emphasis):

I am not one to say that ad hominem arguments play no role in navigating discourse. In a court case, motive and character do play a role. But that role is limited; it may give grounds for suspicion and further investigation. The real work is in arguing the evidence. In political discourse, the real work is in arguing for one’s position as compared to the other person’s position. In such argumentative engagement, it is irrelevant what a person’s motives, personal habits, associations, and income sources are. To harp on such ad hominem irrelevancies is to confess the weakness of one’s argument.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Matt Ridley explains that “We no longer need to fear Covid.” A slice:

Yet the Government’s caution remains popular. Why is this? Because of the pessimism of officialdom – it is a circular argument. People readily believe in hobgoblins, and they rightly took fright at this horrible virus last year, so when Professors Whitty and Vallance tell them it’s still scary out there without a mask on, of course they believe it and resent their neighbours who do not comply. Yet to take that one example, the evidence that mask wearing has contributed to the decline in the virus is surprisingly thin, and especially among children in school mask wearing has been a grisly price to pay. To say so is to risk a furious response because mask wearing is no longer so much about preventing infection as about signalling that you are being careful.

“Rock legend Sir Van Morrison has claimed that blind obedience to Covid-19 lockdowns is like a ‘cult’.”

Phil Magness talks with Matt Kibbe about Covid, lockdowns, and Anthony Fauci.

At least some Brits are protesting the Covidocracy. And here (although I disagree with a few points, most notably the demand that private businesses not be allowed to discriminate).

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

Malcolm Kendrick lays out and analyzes the pro-lockdown narrative. Three slices:

I believe that the images from China, with people apparently dropping dead in the streets, spooked almost everyone. Then, when Italy was first hit, there were the images of overwhelmed hospitals filling our television screens. At which point the glass was smashed and we hit the ‘we’re all going to die’ red button. Fear was unleashed.

It certainly all happened very suddenly. On March the 26th Anthony Fauci stated the following in the New England Journal of Medicine:

” If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.”

…..

However, the doomsters had already managed to grab the narrative, and all attempts at scientific discussion were blown away. Fauci rapidly and completely changed his mind. COVID19 was, in fact, absolutely deadly and we must do absolutely everything possible to control it. At which point no-one else dared say anything else. Within a week the UK began, what is now called, Lockdown. An enormous, world altering decision had been made.

…..

Yes, we have realpolitik in place. Maybe we should call it realscientik. Neil Ferguson, and his ilk, pressed the emergency red button. It is a button they have been itching to press for years, decades. It is the ‘Here is the infection that is going to kill us all’ button. That infection may turn up at some point. COVID19 isn’t it. The button should never have been pressed.

The truth about the actions taken, and the true effectiveness of lockdown, and the damage of lockdown. This will not emerge for many years. By which time, the likes of Boris and Angela and Emmanuel, and Scott and Jacinda will be long gone, and won’t care.

DBx: Now is as good a time as any to make explicit what should be – but what often today is not – understood by reasonable people: Just because I link to some article or video does not mean that I endorse everything said in that article or video. I link to items that I believe make useful contributions to the anti-Covid-hysteria case. In some of these items, I do indeed find nothing disagreeable. Yet in most, I could pick a nit or two and sometimes more. (For example, in the Kendrick piece linked immediately above, I disagree that companies such as Facebook should treat the U.S. president differently than it treats any other of its customers.) And so you can assume that any item to which I link is one whose thrust I endorse but not necessarily one whose every point I will defend.

Sebastian Rushworth concludes:

That being said, a 92% or 93% risk reduction is a huge reduction, not far off the difference in lung cancer rates seen between smokers and non-smokers, so even with unknown confounders pushing the results up or down, it is clear that prior infection provides a high degree of immunity.

Sanjeev Sabhlok examines lockdowns origins and harms. A slice:

Hysterical epidemiological modellers had predicted 100,000 covid deaths in Sweden by June 2020 if it didn’t lockdown. Thumbing its nose at them, Sweden ended the year with around 3,000 excess deaths (as per the analysis of Nobel prize winner Michael Levitt) – around 3-4 per cent beyond the normal. Moreover, the death rate in Sweden in 2020 was equal to the average death rate of the past 10 years. I am willing to wager that virtually no one in the world will be able to correctly identify the 2020 death rate of Sweden from previous years’ death rates if these data are presented with the years scrambled.

Phil Magness nails it on his Facebook page:

A recurring pattern of the covid narrative over the last several months:

1. Lockdown country imposes draconian shelter-in-place style lockdown restrictions.
2. Lockdown country claims victory over covid because of those restrictions, and declines to lift them at anything more than a snail’s pace.
3. Covid returns anyway, precipitating more lockdowns.
4. Lockdown country claims victory again.
5. Covid returns anyway, precipitating more lockdowns.
6. Lockdown supporters in the lockdown country then blame their plight on lack of lockdowns/a failed herd immunity strategy/the Great Barrington Declaration, none of which accurately describe anything remotely like what they did.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from pages xii-xiii of the 2002 Dover Publications edition of the 1896 English-language translation – The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind – of Gustave Le Bon’s 1895 La psychologie des foules:

History tells us, that from the moment when the moral forces on which a civilisation rested have lost their strength, its final dissolution is brought about by those unconscious and brutal crowds known, justifiably enough, as barbarians.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, writing in the Telegraph, argue that “Lockdown proponents can’t escape the blame for the biggest public health fiasco in history.” A slice:

A year ago, there was no evidence that lockdowns would protect older high-risk people from Covid-19. Now there is evidence. They did not.

With so many Covid-19 deaths, it is obvious that lockdown strategies failed to protect the old. Holding the naïve belief that shutting down society would protect everyone, governments and scientists rejected basic focused protection measures for the elderly. While anyone can get infected, there is more than a thousand-fold difference in the risk of death between the old and the young. The failure to exploit this fact about the virus led to the biggest public health fiasco in history.

Lockdowns have, nevertheless, generated enormous collateral damage across all ages. Depriving children of in-person teaching has hurt not only their education but also their physical and mental health. Other public health consequences include missed cancer screenings and treatments and worse cardiovascular disease outcomes. Much of this damage will unfold over time and is something we must live with – and die with – for many years to come.

The blame game for this fiasco is now in full swing. Some scientists, politicians, and journalists are complaining that people did not comply with the rules sufficiently. But blaming the public is disingenuous. Never in human history has the population sacrificed so much to comply with public health mandates.

Strangely, lockdown proponents are also trying to blame the scientists who opposed lockdown measures. Though she has repeatedly argued for better protection of the elderly, with specific suggestions that could have saved many lives, Oxford professor Sunetra Gupta, one of the world’s pre-eminent infectious disease epidemiologists, has been attacked with particular viciousness.

Wall Street Journal columnist Allysia Finley reminds us that, to the extent that the details of pandemic responses are imposed by governments – especially by governments run by megalomaniacs – pandemic policy will be driven far less by science and far more by politics (for the latter is, after all, what politicians specialize in). A slice:

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo turned out not to be the hero the media hailed early in the coronavirus pandemic. His administration’s March 2020 directive that nursing homes admit Covid patients likely cost hundreds if not thousands of lives. A year later, his policy of prioritizing vaccine distribution based on “social equity” and interest-group lobbying again proved dangerous for the oldest New Yorkers.

Vaccine supplies are now sufficient that every adult in every U.S. state is eligible to receive a shot, but three months ago officials had to ration them. “New York is mandating social equity and fair distribution,” Mr. Cuomo declared Jan. 11. At first, vaccination was limited to anyone over 65 and workers Mr. Cuomo deemed “essential,” including police, firefighters, bus drivers, grocery clerks and teachers. A large share of the supply was allocated for government unions and their members.

Although unlike Andrew Sullivan I will avoid wearing masks wherever I am allowed, as soon as I am allowed, and for as long as I am allowed, I find much insight in this essay of his. (HT Peter Minowitz) A slice:

I mention this because we are in a similar phase in which reasonable people are being irrationally demonized for going back to normal and going mask-free. It makes no sense, but the truth is we get attached to rituals of safety, even after they have become redundant. Look at airport TSA screening, twenty years after 9/11. We so identify with safety protocols that it can feel dangerous simply to follow reason when circumstances change. The fear of Covid somehow gets internalized and perpetuated, just as HIV was. Even today, for example, a diagnosis of HIV feels far more terrifying than, say, diabetes. But diabetes is much, much more problematic now than AIDS, over a lifetime. Covid now seems much scarier than the flu. But if you’ve been vaccinated, that’s exactly how we should think of it. Nasty, but not fatal. So live!

Just to be sure that you don’t miss how very deranged Covid hysteria can make some people, here again is the report on Keith Olbermann’s vile attack on Reason‘s Robby Soave.

Christian Britschgi reports on Caitlyn Jenner running for California governor as an anti-lockdowner. A slice:

Newsom’s surprise decision to lift his regional stay-at-home order—which required Californians to stay in their homes unless engaged in a few essential activities—in late January was largely attributed to the order’s unpopularity. Earlier this month, the governor said that pandemic restrictions on businesses would be lifted come June 15.

Covid hysteria sure has made Anthony Fauci popular (just as Anthony Fauci has made Covid hysteria popular). A slice:

With all of that time in front of a camera, it might make some wonder if the celebrity bureaucrat has time to actually follow the latest data and statistics on the pandemic. Given his routine blunders, his lack of transparency, and his advocacy for continued shutdowns (there are now over 50 published scientific studies that show lockdowns don’t work), it’s safe to say that the NIAID director is either ignorant and clueless and/or purposely advocating for measures that do not work to “stop the spread.”

Good news doesn’t control people, which is why Fauci has become exclusively known as the bearer of bad news. Good news is not particularly good for ratings, nor is it good for the prospects of another exclusive appearance with Brian Stelter or Chuck Todd. He prefers to keep viewers afraid, malleable, and on edge. In media hit after media hit, Fauci predictably reminds viewers that there is supposedly an active or imminent crisis in the works. Without a perpetual crisis to shine a light on, the cameras may turn in another direction. Fauci, a seasoned operative, wants the show to continue. When the virus wasn’t scary enough, surely, the “double mutant” virus would keep people compliant. When people started accommodating the COVID vaccine, Fauci pulled the rug out from under them and openly speculated about the possibility of “variants” avoiding the vaccine, thereby making you “vulnerable” once more.

Fauci is having the best year of his life. It has become clear that he desperately wants the show to continue, even if that means demanding that tens of millions of people suffer by conforming to his pseudoscience-based edicts. The TV doctor sure knows how to drive ratings, with the hopes that this is just Season One of his long running hit pandemic series.

As Phil Magness would say, Cypriots are about to be stomped on by a straw man. This same straw man is also again stomping through Perth, despite Australia having, allegedly, beaten away the Covid beast with its draconian restrictions.

Those of you who trust government officials to act reasonably in a crisis might want to check out this report in today’s Wall Street Journal, which is titled “Covid Unemployment Relief Makes Help Impossible to Find” and subtitled “Congress’s enhanced benefits make it more remunerative not to work. Employers are struggling.” A slice:

Some workers still fear they’ll contract Covid if they return to the workplace, and some parents are unable to take on full-time work because their children’s schools remain shut. But there’s another reason for the acute labor shortage: It pays to stay on the couch.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 5 of the original 1951 University of Chicago Press edition of Michael Polanyi’s The Logic of Liberty:

A generation grew up full of moral fire and yet despising reason and justice. Believing instead in what? – in the forces which were left for them to believe in – in Power, Economic Interest, Subconscious Desire…. Compassion was turned into merciless hatred and the desire for brotherhood into deadly class-war.