Russell Roberts's Blog, page 282
April 23, 2021
Am I a Cold-hearted Utilitarian?
Here’s a letter to a long-time reader of Café Hayek:
B___:
You’re correct that I believe that a pathogen, such as SARS-CoV-2, that kills mostly old people poses a less-serious threat to humanity than does one that kills an equal number of young people, or one that kills an equal number of people indiscriminately. You’re correct also that I believe that a pathogen that kills mostly old people should be treated with less urgency than is appropriate for one equally lethal but that does not reserve the bulk of its ravages for the elderly. But you’re incorrect to infer from these beliefs of mine that I “do not regard all lives as equally sacred.” (Nor, by the way, do I believe that Covid-19 “should be ignored.” Never have I said such a thing.)
My argument rests on the indisputable fact that the older is a person, the closer is that person to his or her inescapable death. And so although each life is indeed, as you say, sacred – although the moral value and ethical status of a life don’t deteriorate with age or with health – the deaths of old people are simply not to be lamented with the same intensity as are the deaths of younger people. It follows that, in our world of scarce resources, if it’s worthwhile to spend $X amount of resources and effort to reduce (say) 25-year-olds’ risk of dying within the year by Y percent, it might not be worthwhile to spend $X amount of resources and effort to achieve this same level of risk reduction for people (say) 60 and older. (I write these words as a 62 year old.)
If you doubt me, ask yourself how you’d react upon learning of the unexpected death of a kindly neighbor at the age of 85. You’d be sad. Now ask yourself how you’d react upon learning of the unexpected death, not of that elderly neighbor, but instead of that neighbor’s 19-year-old grandchild. You would, of course, regard the latter death as being a much greater tragedy than the former. In fact, the word “tragedy” is, on almost all occasions, an exaggerated descriptor of the death of an elderly person, although not of a young person.
Indeed, if you were to react to each of these deaths in the same manner your moral sentiments would be defective. You’d be an abnormal person, and not in a good way. But being a normal person, you understand that the significance of one of these deaths differs from that of the other. Yet surely this understanding of yours doesn’t signify that you do not regard all lives as equally sacred. It doesn’t signify that you are, to use your description of me, “a narrow and cold hearted utilitarian.” It signifies that you’re a normal person. I believe that – at least in this way – I, too, am a normal person.
Sincerely,
Don
Some Non-Covid Links
el gato malo accurately pegs Marxism.
Daniel Kuehn: It’s unfair to say Keynes’s economic theories are tainted by eugenics, even though he wrote multiple essays and papers in which he explicitly placed eugenic considerations at the heart of his economic theories.
Also Daniel Kuehn: James M. Buchanan used the world “eugenic” once in the lit review section of an unpublished term paper from grad school when summarizing another guy’s article. Let me pull out my Magic MacLean Decoder Ring and explain to you how this makes him a secret eugenicist himself.
If we are to reject any cultural, scientific, or religious achievements that don’t originate with “our own” racial or ethnic traditions, why should any “white” person whose ancestors weren’t Greek study Plato? If we didn’t descend from Britons, shouldn’t we reject Newtonian physics? Why should a Jew like me have anything to do with the writings of Christian authors like Dostoyevsky?
For that matter, what business do Europeans and their North American descendants have using Arabic numerals, in view of the Arabs’ having conquered Spain and other parts of Europe a millennium ago? Or alternatively, isn’t such usage a form of illegitimate “cultural appropriation?”
Here’s my review of Craig Smith’s excellent 2020 book, Adam Smith.
Art Carden reviews Mario Rizzo’s and Glen Whitman’s Escaping Paternalism. A slice:
In Escaping Paternalism, Rizzo and Whitman bring together their responses to the new paternalist arguments. They offer readers a lot of reasons why the new paternalism is not all it claims to be. By the end of the book, it is hard not to conclude that new “libertarian” paternalism is just the old paternalist wolf in libertarian sheep’s clothing. Critics will say this is unfair, and I’ll admit that I would much rather have Cass Sunstein nudging me toward more fruits and vegetables with a bit of choice architecture instead of having Michael Bloomberg telling me I can’t buy a Big Gulp. As Rizzo and Whitman argue, even though we are promised Cass Sunstein helping us make better choices, we almost inevitably get Michael Bloomberg telling us what we can and cannot do. “Better than outright authoritarianism” is in any case hardly a ringing endorsement; it damns the new paternalism with faint praise.
My buddy Andy Morriss draws lessons about law from four classic novels about the American west. A slice:
A common theme to all four novels is the need for creating order on the frontier. In each, the formal law and institutions of the state are distant and unavailable, although in Ox-Bow the sheriff is not that far away. In each story, the community provides its own law. In two cases, this ends badly. Ox-Bow closes with the narrator’s desire to leave the community in what the novel suggests is a likely fruitless effort to forget his role in hanging three innocent men; Warlock’s characters have all suffered considerable losses as a result of bringing Blaisedell to town and the town quickly fades away, leaving only the burnt out shell of its courthouse standing.
Private efforts at ordering communal life are more successful in Shane and The Searchers. In Shane it is the cattlemen, not the community, who first resorts to extra-legal violence, and Shane’s departure after his victory over the hired gunman and the rancher is his sacrifice for the community, a recognition that the violence he represents cannot stay in the civilization his efforts made possible. In The Searchers, Mart’s triumph over both the formal legal system’s indifference and Amos’ desire for revenge is a victory for love. Whatever the future holds for Mart and Debbie afterwards, the reader is given the sense that they will be alright.
This Institute for Justice video on school choice is worth watching.
John Stossel argues that climate-change activists should get real about nuclear power.
“Malign Psychological Changes”
In this seven-and-a-half-minute-long speech, Dan Hannan tells the House of Lords that fear of Covid-19 caused many people to resort to their “paleolithic heuristics,” and that “the world into which we emerge from lockdowns will be poorer, colder, more pinched, more authoritarian.” Indeed. Hannan’s warning of what David Hart calls “hygiene socialism” is underscored by the plastic enclosures in which he and each person in the room is seated.
Some Covid Links
As it turns out though, Ferguson and the Imperial College team were being less than truthful in their attempts to dissociate themselves from Sweden’s observed outcomes. In the weeks following the release of their well-known US and UK projections, Ferguson and his team did in fact produce a trimmed-down version of their own modeling exercise for the rest of the world, including Sweden. They did not widely publicize the country-level projections, but the full list may be found buried in a Microsoft Excel appendix file to Imperial College’s Report #12, released on March 26, 2020.
Imperial’s own projected results for Sweden are nearly identical to the Uppsala adaptation of their UK model. Ferguson’s team forecast up to 90,157 deaths under “unmitigated” spread (compared to Uppsala’s 96,000). Under the “population-level social distancing” scenario meant to approximate NPI mitigation measures such as lockdowns, the Imperial modelers predicted Sweden would incur up to 42,473 deaths (compared to 40,000 from the Uppsala adaptation).
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One year later we may now look back to see how Imperial College’s international projections performed, paying closer attention to the small number of countries that bucked his lockdown recommendations. The results are not pretty for Ferguson, and point to a clear pattern of modeling that systematically exaggerated the projected death tolls of Covid-19 in the absence of lockdowns and related NPIs.
After fully embracing the Covid policy panic for most of the last year, perhaps the governor was able to gain a new perspective as she quietly travelled out of state. Perhaps the trip’s disclosure will hasten the day when Ms. Whitmer will answer the question recently posed by Ingrid Jacques in the Detroit News: When is the governor going to ”set Michigan free”? Added Ms. Jacques:
At some point – and it should be soon – Whitmer will need to stop acting like the mother-in-chief, telling Michiganians where they can go and how many others can go with them and demanding they all wear masks.
Martin Kulldorff corrects some errors committed by John Giesecke. A slice:
On March 16, 2020, Neil Ferguson and his colleagues at Imperial College predicted that around 500,000 in Great Britain would die from Covid-19 under a do nothing let-it-rip strategy. A significant factor in their model was their assumed overall infection fatality rate (IFR) of 0.9%. While that was one plausible estimate at the time, it would have been more scientifically appropriate to present multiple plausible values, as did the Oxford group led by Sunetra Gupta. More recent IFR estimates are about a third to half of the Imperial College model assumption. With these later numbers, the Imperial College model would instead have predicted somewhere between 165,000 and 250,000 deaths under a let-it-rip strategy.
While not part of their research report, in an email from Ferguson dated March 29, 2020, he reported on a scenario that his group ran using the Imperial College model for an “age-based cocooning” strategy, with focused protection of older high-risk people, as advocated by the Great Barrington Declaration. “Making realistic assumptions about effectiveness,” they predicted 50-60% fewer deaths relative to a let-it-rip strategy. Together with the lower IFR estimates, that would have meant somewhere between 70,000 and 125,000 total Covid-19 deaths. We can compare this to the actual April 19 cumulative UK death count of 127,524 from the implemented lockdown strategy.
Though I am sceptical of any predictive pandemic modelling, even under the questionable Imperial College models, lockdowns turned out to be a rather high price to pay for an outcome that was worse than what their unpublished models predicted for a focused protection strategy.
Some are warning that Britain’s Covidocracy is on the verge of becoming permanent.
A full year after the initial roll-out of the utterly horrifying and completely fictional photos of people dropping dead in the streets, the projected 3.4% death rate, and all the rest of the official propaganda, despite the absence of any actual scientific evidence of an apocalyptic plague (and the abundance of evidence to the contrary), millions of people continue to behave like members of an enormous death cult, walking around in public with medical-looking masks, robotically repeating vacuous platitudes, torturing children, the elderly, the disabled….
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Basically, society has been transformed into something resembling an infectious disease ward, or an enormous hospital from which there is no escape. You’ve seen the photos of the happy New Normals dining out at restaurants, relaxing at the beach, jogging, attending school, and so on, going about their “normal” lives with their medical-looking masks and prophylactic face shields.
What you’re looking at is the pathologization of society, the pathologization of everyday life, the physical (social) manifestation of a morbid obsession with disease and death.
What kind of person could feel more powerless than an obedient New Normal sitting at home, obsessively logging the “Covid death” count, sharing photos of his medical-looking mask and post-“vaccination” bandage on Facebook, as he waits for permission from the authorities to go outdoors, visit his family, kiss his lover, or shake hands with a colleague?
The fact that in the Covidian Cult the traditional charismatic cult leader has been replaced by a menagerie of medical experts and government officials does not change the utter dependency and abject powerlessness of its members, who have been reduced to a state approaching infancy. This abject powerlessness is not experienced as a negative; on the contrary, it is proudly celebrated.
Thus the mantra-like repetition of the “New Normal” platitude “Trust the Science!” by people who, if you try to show them the science, meltdown completely and start jabbering aggressive nonsense at you to shut you up.
Covidocratic tyranny expands in Israel.
“Covid-19 has accelerated the creation of a dangerous surveillance state.”
Charles Oliver presents another snapshot of Covidocratic tyranny.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 186 of 1992 Nobel-laureate Gary Becker’s November 1st, 1993, column titled “Memo To Clinton: Japan Inc. Didn’t Make Japan Strong,” as this column is reprinted in Gary and Guity Nashat Becker’s 1997 book, The Economics of Life:
The Western experience shows that government officials who spend taxpayers’ money tend to make worse investments than private investors who spend both their own money and funds raised from banks and stockholders.
April 22, 2021
“Take These Masks Off Of My Child!”
Hear this mother’s impassioned plea. Stop the cruel absurdity of masking children. Stop it. Stop it now!
A mother in Georgia speaks out against mask mandates for young kids at school
pic.twitter.com/O5Eh2Ads4h
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) April 22, 2021
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 66 of Tom Palmer’s 2011 essay “Adam Smith and the Myth of Greed,” as this essay appears in the 2011 collection The Morality of Capitalism: What Your Professors Won’t Tell You (Tom G. Palmer, ed.):
A common mistake is to identify the purposes of people exclusively with their “self-interest,” which is then in turn confused with “selfishness.” The purposes of people in the market are indeed purposes of selves, but as selves with purposes we are also concerned about the interests and well-being of others – our family members, our friends, our neighbors, and even total strangers whom we will never meet. Indeed, markets help to condition people to consider the needs of others, including total strangers.
DBx: If you doubt the last statement, ask yourself how successful you think Amazon or Target or Apple or Toyota or McDonald’s or Netflix or Levi Strauss would be if their executives refused to consider the needs and desires of total strangers. And you would have a shallow understanding of human nature if you doubted that the habitual consideration of the needs and desires of strangers in these commercial circumstances does not encourage in those who are so habituated a greater regard for strangers generally.
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It’s worth noting carefully here the wording of one of Adam Smith’s most famous passages in An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”
Contrary to how this passage is often misquoted, Smith did not here prefix “interest” with “self.” While the great Scot would not have denied that part of the butcher’s, the brewer’s, and the baker’s interest is the material care and comfort of themselves and their immediate families, Smith understood that the typical person in commercial society has also as part of his interest concerns that extend beyond the narrow, material “self.”
On the Relevance of the Age Profile of Covid’s Fatalities
Here’s an e-mail that I sent to my colleague Bryan Caplan:
Bryan:
You’re correct that the steep age profile of Covid-19 fatalities matters greatly for assessing the reasonableness of policy responses to the disease. And I applaud your eloquence and care at explaining the problems with Jeremy Horpedahl’s and others’ resistance to what truly does seem to be an irresistible conclusion.
To avoid the many challenges with calculating the value of a statistical life, think of the matter in the following way: Suppose that a society, identical to ours, will – with 100 percent certainty – be stricken with one of three deadly pathogens. But this society can choose which of the three to suffer. Each pathogen will kill the same number of persons, with this number being significant, potentially as high as 0.15 percent of the society’s total population.
Pathogen A will kill only people 80 years old and older.
Pathogen B will kill only people 30 years old and younger.
Pathogen C will kill indiscriminately across all age groups.
The Fates give the society 24 hours to choose which of these three pathogens to endure. Perhaps it’s true that a surprisingly large number of very selfish and frightened people 80 and older will argue for pathogen B, while many other elderly people, being a bit less selfish, will argue for pathogen C.
But surely the great majority of citizens – including, I suspect, elderly citizens – would argue for pathogen A. And this stance is the one that’s ethically agreeable. To see why, suppose further that just before voting on the pathogen is conducted, each person is given a shot that, for a few minutes, puts that person behind a veil of age-ignorance, causing each person to temporarily lose all knowledge of whether he or she is old, young, or middle-aged. Surely the great bulk of these age-blind people would vote for pathogen A over pathogen B or C.
The age profile of Covid’s fatalities, of course, isn’t quite as stark as that of pathogen A. But it’s much closer to pathogen A than to pathogen B or C.
Because pathogens B and C would each be regarded as far more devastating, heartbreaking, and frightening than pathogen A, if society were nevertheless stricken with B or C rather than with A, society would reasonably expend more effort and resources protecting against the pathogen than it would spend protecting against pathogen A. This point I cannot prove, but it does seem to me to follow firmly from the ranking of the three pathogens.
But even if the amount of effort and resources spent combatting pathogen A would be as great as that spent combatting either of the other two pathogens, surely the pattern of this use of effort and resources would differ. Surely efforts would be made to focus protection on its victims (namely, people 8o and older). Surely younger people would not be treated as if they are as at much risk from the pathogen as are the elderly.
The magnitude of Covid lockdowns and other indiscriminate, often draconian policies strikes me as what people would be more likely to endorse if Covid were akin to pathogen B or C. Yet Covid is much closer to pathogen A. If the responses that we’ve endured over the past 14 months are acceptable in light of the very obvious and steep age profile of Covid’s victims, what, I ask, would acceptable responses look like if Covid were akin to pathogen B or C? It’s terrifying to contemplate.
Please keep up your great work.
Don
Some Covid Links
Here’s the text of Scott Atlas’s February 2021 speech at Hillsdale College. A slice:
I have been shocked at the unprecedented exertion of power by the government since last March—issuing unilateral decrees, ordering the closure of businesses, churches, and schools, restricting personal movement, mandating behavior, and suspending indefinitely basic freedoms. Second, I was and remain stunned—almost frightened—at the acquiescence of the American people to such destructive, arbitrary, and wholly unscientific rules, restrictions, and mandates.
John Tierney argues convincingly that “Adults have failed children in foisting unnecessary, harmful Covid-19 restrictions on them.” (HT Dan Klein) Another slice:
The rationale for forcing anyone to wear a mask is questionable, as my colleague Connor Harris has meticulously demonstrated. Wearing masks might provide some protection for some high-risk adults in crowded indoor settings, but the evidence is mixed, and masks can be not just uncomfortable but harmful. Some adults may judge the trade-offs worthwhile for themselves, but for children it’s all pain and no gain.
The mask mandates are especially cruel to young children. Adults are supposed to ease their fears, to reassure them that monsters aren’t hiding under the bed. Instead, we’re frightening them into believing they’re being stalked by invisible menaces lurking in the air. A year of mask-wearing will scar some of them psychologically—and maybe physically, too, according to a team of Italian professors of plastic surgery, who warn that the prolonged pressure from the elastic straps could leave young children with permanently protruding ears. By hiding teachers’ lips and muffling their speech, mask-wearing makes it harder for young children to develop linguistic skills and prevents children with hearing impairments from lip reading. Unable to rely on facial cues, teachers and students of all ages are more likely to misinterpret one other, a particularly acute problem for children on the autism spectrum. How are children supposed to develop social skills when they can’t see one another’s faces, sit together, or play together?
Researchers from the University of Witten/Herdecke in Germany have catalogued other problems. They established an online registry for parents to report on the side effects of mask-wearing. Among the nearly 18,000 parents who chose to respond (not a random sample, obviously), more than half reported that the masks were giving their children headaches and making it difficult for them to concentrate. More than one-third cited other side effects: increased reluctance to go to school, unhappiness, malaise, impaired learning, drowsiness, and fatigue. After considering those reports as well as testimony from other researchers, a court in Weimar, Germany, recently ruled in favor of a parent arguing that her children’s basic rights were being violated by the mandates for masks and social distancing at her children’s two schools. The court ordered the schools to end the mandates, declaring that they damaged the “mental, physical and spiritual well-being” of students while failing to offer “any discernible benefit for the children themselves or for third parties.”
Nic Elliott’s Pepsi Max tests positive for Covid-19!
Noah Carl reports on the frightening degree of public overestimation of the dangers of SARS-CoV-2. A slice:
Last year, Gallup ran a poll for Franklin Templeton in which they asked Americans what percentage of people who’ve been infected with COVID-19 need to be hospitalised. Less than 20% of respondents gave the correct answer of “1–5%”. And a staggering 35% said at least half of those infected need to be hospitalised. Interestingly, Democrats were much more likely than Republicans to overestimate the risk of hospitalisation….
Here’s Phil Magness on Taiwan:
To those saying “Nuh uh! Taiwan took 124 countermeasures to control covid!” in response to notice of its non-lockdown status, you should really look into what those countermeasures entail. They are not even remotely comparable to a stringent lockdown regime.
Instead, most of these measures are just routine hygiene advice and public information campaigns. Taiwan did close its borders down and did so very stringently, taking advantage of a unique geography…but that’s hardly an uncommon measure given that almost every country on earth used some sort of border closure.
As an added twist, it appears that the JAMA article where this stat comes from arrived at it by sequentially counting changes to the same policy on the timeline. So it isn’t even 124 separate measures as is often implied – it’s just the same measure being implemented and made more strict over time.
From the outset, his approach has been to take every Government policy and double it. If the Government locks us down, he says that they should have done it earlier. If the Government relaxes its grip, he says that it should have happened later. If the Government opens the schools, he wants them closed for longer. If there are sparks of our former liberal tradition left, he wants them extinguished.
The mark of true moral and political stature is a willingness to stand up for the public interest in the face of public fear and governmental folly. Why has Sir Keir failed to live up to his initial promise?
On Monday, he was put on the spot in Bath by Rod Humphris, the landlord of The Raven pub, who threw him off his premises. Mr Humphris’s business, like countless others, has been closed down by ministerial order for seven of the last 12 months. As one might imagine, he has not taken kindly to being treated like this.
Initially, Mr Humphris was manhandled into a corner of his own pub by security men. When he was eventually allowed to confront Sir Keir, he made two basic points, crudely and loudly but effectively. First, the lockdown was indiscriminate. Instead of protecting the old by sheltering them, the Government tried to do it by interfering with the right of the young and healthy to visit his pub and his own right to serve them. Secondly, the lockdowns have not worked, and have themselves caused thousands of deaths. Sir Keir, he concluded, had “failed to do his job and ask the right questions”.
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What is a totalitarian state? It is a state in which citizens have no autonomy because they are mere tools of government policy. Until last March, it was unthinkable to treat citizens like this at the discretion of ministers. No government statement, planning document or published scientific advice ever previously contemplated such a thing. Why not? Because it was thought to be morally repugnant as well as economically destructive. A Leader of the Opposition should be able to do more than mouth platitudes when someone points this out to him in the street.
Kathy Gyngell shares “[t]he damning verdict of Christian leaders on vaccine passports.” (DBx: I’m not Christian. But I am human. And these Christian leaders are defending humanity from a tool of tyrants. I applaud and support them and their heroic efforts.)
My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy decries today’s ridiculous hygiene theater. Two slices:
And now we have pandemic hygiene theater to give uninformed people a false sense of control and sustain their fear of the virus.
Think of the number of hours that schools, restaurants, and other businesses spend wiping down surfaces to prevent COVID-19 transmission even though we’ve known since last July that this wiping isn’t necessary. Yet Americans continue to spend untold hours and dollars wiping surfaces to provide the appearance of virus protection to their patrons.
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While some of these examples may seem silly, hygiene theater has huge costs and wastes precious resources. It also keeps Americans unjustifiably scared of the virus while promoting the delusion that with enough such measures, we can finally live in a world free of risks.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 14 of the late, great Julian Simon’s Introduction to his brilliant 1995 edited volume, The State of Humanity:
When considering the state of the environment, we should think first of the terrible pollutions that were banished in the past century or wo – the typhoid that polluted such rivers as the Hudson, smallpox that humanity has finally pursued to the ends of the earth and just about eradicated, the dysentery that distressed and killed people all over the world as it still does in India, the plagues and other epidemics that trouble us much less than in generations past, or not at all. Not only are we in the rich countries free of malaria (largely due to our intensive occupation of the land), but even the mosquitoes, that do no more harm than cause itches with their bites, are so absent from many urban areas that people no longer need screens for their home and can have garden parties at dusk. It is a mark of our extraordinary success that these are no longer even thought of as pollutions.
DBx: Yes. Capitalism cleanses our world, and lengthens and enriches our lives. Our environment truly is cleaned by capitalism.
Were we not made so rich by the market order, none of us would enjoy the leisure and luxury to worry about the environment in the manner in which so many people worry about it today.
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Do not think me inattentive to Simon’s mention of plagues and epidemics. These do indeed “trouble us much less than in generations past.” By far the greatest trouble from the Covid-19 pandemic comes not from the pathogen itself but, rather, from humanity’s deranged overreaction to the pathogen.
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