Russell Roberts's Blog, page 283

“Get Out of My Pub!”

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s the video clip of the brave pub owner denying entry onto his property of a Covid tyrant. Three cheers for this pub owner!

“The Tyranny of Tiny Risks”

(Don Boudreaux)

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In response to my letter today to the Wall Street Journal, Washington University economist Ian Fillmore sent to me the following e-mail, which I share with his kind permission:

Hi Don,

Like you, I find the whole blood clot thing incredibly frustrating. But there is something comical about the sequence of events. For most of 2020 we fixated on the low probability risk of dying from Covid (very low if you are under 65 years old) to the exclusion of all other risks. No price was too high to pay to reduce the risk from Covid, regardless of how low that risk might be. Until, that is, in April of 2021 we discovered any even more remote risk to fixate on—blood clots associated with the J&J Covid vaccine. Suddenly, no price is too high to pay, including the cost of more Covid deaths, to reduce the risk of blood clots. You might call it the tail wagging the dog, but it’s really the flea on the tip of the tail causing the dog to jump like a kangaroo.

We probably need a good pithy phrase for this phenomenon. Something like “the tyranny of tiny risks.” Alas, I’m not so great at coining phrases.

Ian Fillmore

J&J Vaccine Derangement Syndrome?

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal:

Editor:

Government’s halting of J&J’s vaccine reflects a problem far deeper than the CDC’s and FDA’s seeking guidance from outside ‘experts’ (“Inoculating the Government,” April 21). This far-deeper problem is the obsessive focus on a single risk.

For the past 14 months the fixation was on Covid-19. Ignoring countless other risks – health and non-health – that confront humanity, we treated Covid as the only relevant risk. As such, no cost, no matter how massive, was thought too high to pay for any reduction in Covid risk, no matter how minuscule.

Many public-health officials now fixate on the tiny risk posed by J&J’s vaccine. Fixating on this risk in the same manner as they fixated on the Covid risk spawns this cruel and ironic result: To protect people from this vaccine risk, government officials now subject Americans to a higher risk of suffering from Covid.

Trade-offs are inescapable. We can wisely recognize that we confront multiple risks and, thus, refuse to sacrifice everything for reductions in any one risk. Or we can unwisely do what has become the deranged but common practice since early last year: focus on a single risk as if it’s the only one that we confront and, thus, sacrifice everything to reduce that one risk as close as possible to zero.

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

(Don Boudreaux)

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Richard Atkinson, M.D., writes this letter to the Wall Street Journal:

Your editorial “The J&J Covid Vaccine Pause” (April 14) doesn’t make the necessary inferences. Six people in 6.8 million vaccinated have had cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (CVST). The “natural” annual incidence of these brain blood clots ranges from two to 16 per million. Using these figures, we would expect between 13 and 109 clots annually in 6.8 million people. Since the vaccine has been available for around six weeks, however, we’d expect between two and 13 clots over this period. Thus, the rate of clots in the vaccinated is similar to the “natural” rate. A U.K. study also shows that a Covid patient’s risk of CVST is 100 times greater than normal and eight-to-10 times that of a vaccinated person. The CDC and FDA may be overreacting.

Jacob Sullum reports on the Covid-19 disaster in Texas that didn’t happen. Two slices:

In any event, COVID-19 surges are happening mainly in states with more legal restrictions than Florida or Texas is imposing. The Washington Post nevertheless says “experts…agree” that rising infection numbers are largely due to “a broad loosening of public health measures, such as mask mandates and limits on indoor dining”—a claim that is tenable only if you ignore all the countervailing examples.

States differ from each other in various ways that may affect the spread of COVID-19, of course, so you can learn only so much from comparisons like these. But several systematic studies have cast doubt on the effectiveness of broad legal restrictions.

…..

In a 2020 National Bureau of Economic Research paper, UCLA economist Andrew Atkeson and two other researchers looked at COVID-19 trends in 23 countries and 25 U.S. states that had seen more than 1,000 deaths from the disease by late July. After finding little evidence that variations in public policy explained the course of the epidemic in different places, they concluded that the role of legal restrictions “is likely overstated.”

That much seems safe to say in light of more recent experience in the United States.

Some good news reported by Scott Shackford: “Arizona Governor bans municipal ‘vaccination passport’ mandates.” A slice:

Arizona’s Republican Gov. Doug Ducey has ordered local governments to back off of any plans that would force citizens to carry around “vaccination passports,” instead leaving it to local businesses to determine their own best practices.

Vaccine passports would indeed be unchristian: they are, after all, inhuman and inhumane.

Writing from what she calls “kingdom of illogicality,” Allison Pearson wonders when the Britain’s lockdown inhumanity will end. Three slices:

Our Prime Minister, who used to have balls, has just cancelled his visit to India, a move he described as “sensible”. Well, that’s a novelty, common sense being in notably short supply among Boris’s Health Secretary and scientific advisers. Apparently, they see no contradiction in “trialling” bigger crowds at major sporting events while a vaccinated resident in a care home is forced into solitary confinement for 14 days if they dare to so much as leave the premises for a walk in the park with their vaccinated spouse.

It pains me to say it but, increasingly, I feel ashamed to have voted for a Government that has institutionalised such inhumanity and continues to disregard evidence that proves it’s unnecessary.

…..

Lockdown has crushed this nation’s spirit. We have all learnt to keep our heads down and meekly obey many nonsensical rules (or break them on the quiet). What a pleasure and a relief, then, to see Rod Humphris, the landlord of The Raven in Bath, yelling at Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer: “Get out of my pub!” A Labour voter, Humphris railed at the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition for his failure to provide any opposition to the draconian diminishment of British freedoms.

…..

This used to be a country of profound good sense. Many of us would quite like it back. The descent into lockdown lunacy continued apace yesterday with the news that the British Town Crier Championships is to be held in complete silence (written entries only).

And here’s an interview with the pub owner mentioned above, the man who understandably ejected from his premises a pro-lockdown politician. A slice:

All I did was offer him data and request the issues it raised get talked about – and that the whole thing gets seen in context. I’m not suggesting that there hasn’t been a pandemic. I’m not suggesting that Covid doesn’t exist, or that it’s not serious. It’s just that our reaction to Covid has been out of proportion.

Babylon Bee brilliance from one year ago.

Jonathon Riley rightly decries the scaremongering over Covid variants. A slice:

Forget about the Covid surge predicted by the Government’s scientific advisers when schools went back on March 8 which failed to materialise. The British variant that we’d been told by the Government was more deadly and more contagious than what had gone before failed to live up to its headlines. 

Nevertheless the myth of these deadly variants continues to be useful. On the back of them one government adviser after another predicted spikes from June through to August. British, Brazilian and South African variants have all been mooted. Ramping up the variant scare last week was Imperial College’s Professor Danny Altmann, who claimed that ‘we should be terribly concerned’ about the discovery of 77 cases of the Indian Covid variant in Britain. Covid variants, he asserts ‘are things that can most scupper our escape plan at the moment and give us a third wave. They are a worry.’ Given how wildly wrong Imperial College’s predictions have been so far it’s astonishing that the MSM gave this one any credence. This scaremongering however seems to suit the Government.

“[I]t is possible that lockdown will go down as one of the greatest peacetime policy failures in Canada’s history.” This line is from the abstract of Simon Fraser University economist Douglas Allen’s new paper titled “Covid Lockdown Cost/Benefits: A Critical Assessment of the Literature.” (HT Art Carden) Here’s the full abstract:

An examination of over 80 Covid-19 studies reveals that many relied on assumptions that were false, and which tended to over-estimate the benefits and under- estimate the costs of lockdown. As a result, most of the early cost/benefit studies arrived at conclusions that were refuted later by data, and which rendered their cost/benefit findings incorrect. Research done over the past six months has shown that lockdowns have had, at best, a marginal effect on the number of Covid-19 deaths. Generally speaking, the ineffectiveness of lockdown stems from voluntary changes in behavior. Lockdown jurisdictions were not able to prevent non-compliance, and non-lockdown jurisdictions benefited from voluntary changes in behavior that mimicked lockdowns. The limited effectiveness of lockdowns explains why, after one year, the unconditional cumulative deaths per million, and the pattern of daily deaths per million, is not negatively correlated with the stringency of lockdown across countries. Using a cost/benefit method proposed by Professor Bryan Caplan, and using two extreme assumptions of lockdown effectiveness, the cost/benefit ratio of lockdowns in Canada, in terms of life-years saved, is between 3.6–282. That is, it is possible that lockdown will go down as one of the greatest peacetime policy failures in Canada’s history.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 96 of University of Notre Dame philosopher James Otteson’s superb, hot-off-the-Cambridge-University-Press book, Seven Deadly Economic Sins (2021):

Because opportunity cost is “unseen,” however, meaning that forgone uses of our resources are not actually realized and hence must be imagined, it is easy to neglect or forget them. But opportunity cost cannot be evaded by being ignored, and it is no less real for being unseen.

Middle-Class Stagnation is a Myth

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a comment – that, alas, I discover that I’m unable to post – on a response by “Matthew A.” to Scott Winship’s devastating analysis of the latest from Oren Cass’s shop, American Compass:

Matthew A.:

I write in response to your comment on Scott Winship’s thorough exposé of the many flaws in American Compass’s latest portrayal of the American economy. I here focus on your assertion that official measures of inflation intentionally undercount the dollar’s devaluation.

While I’m the last person to doubt government-officials’ scurrility, I believe that the Boskin Commission finding remains valid – namely, that the Consumer Price Index overcounts (or, you might say, “inflates”) inflation.

But we needn’t quibble over this matter. When reckoning changes in living standards, a way to avoid the need to adjust for inflation is, first, to calculate the amount of time that an ordinary worker today must toil to purchase various goods and services, and then, second, to compare these findings to the amount of time that an ordinary worker in the past had to toil to purchase these same items. We can perform this comparison using only nominal wages and prices. If workers today must toil longer for most goods and services, living standards are lower than in the past; if not, not.

A quick Google search turned up this list of prices of 16 familiar grocery items along with their nominal prices for both 1990 and 2020. And FRED has, for each of these years, reliable records of the nominal hourly wages of private-sector production and nonsupervisory workers. And so we can then divide the nominal price, for example, of a pound of beef in 1990 ($2.81) by the nominal hourly wage in 1990 ($10.22) to determine how long an ordinary worker in 1990 had to toil to earn enough income to buy a pound of beef (16.5 minutes). After performing the same calculation for 2020, we can then see if a worker today has to work longer or less, compared to a worker in 1990, to earn the requisite purchasing power.

In the case of beef, priced at $4.35lb in 2020, an ordinary worker in 2020, earning $24.67 per hour, had to work only 10.6 minutes to earn enough income to buy a pound of beef. That’s 36 percent less time – or nearly six fewer minutes per hour – than he or she had to work to earn the same ‘beef’ purchasing power in 1990.

I performed this calculation for each of the 16 grocery items listed at the above-mentioned link. The amount of time that an ordinary worker today must work to earn income sufficient to purchase each and every one of these products is lower than it was in 1990.

Of course, the fact that ordinary workers today don’t have to work as long as did their counterparts of 30 year ago to buy these 16 grocery items itself doesn’t prove that middle-class Americans today aren’t worse off than they were decades ago. But it does counsel some skepticism of your assertion that, unlike in the past, to maintain a middle-class lifestyle today “most wives are forced to work.”

In the near future, The Age of Superabundance­ ­– a brilliant, data-drenched book by Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley – will be published. The authors document beyond any doubt that each hour of work on the job today by an ordinary American worker yields that worker far more purchasing power, across a wide range of goods and services, than was yielded just a few years ago. (Here’s an essay that gives you a flavor of the book. And you’ll find here my own, more-modest efforts that point to the same happy conclusion.)

The only reason women ‘must’ work today to maintain a household’s middle-class living standard is that what we regard today as a middle-class living standard is far more luxurious than it was in 1990, and made so by the voluntary participation today of more women in the labor force.

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

Scott Winship on the Latest from American Compass

(Don Boudreaux)

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Oren Cass’s organization, American Compass, continues to dispense economically uninformed analyses of the American economy, all in an effort to pave the way for Cass and other nationalist-conservatives to impose on the rest of us their vision of what outcomes the economy should achieve.

Scott Winship has done a deep dive into American Compass’s latest effort – this one on inequality – and he is not impressed with what he found. Scott’s analysis is devastating. A slice:

At a time when national conservatism seems obsessed with cultural grievance to the exclusion of economic and social policy, we should all root for more serious policy analysis on the center-right. But as with earlier projects, American Compass’s latest looks like it begins with a set of priors about political economy—center-left priors—and then figures out how to make its argument with whatever evidence can be marshaled. Their inequality work looks similarly aimed at advancing center-left views through flawed analysis, ostensibly to advance national “conservatism.”

A brief review of AC’s past projects lays out the pattern. There was the early claim that the century-long project of modern inflation measurement had overstated improvement in living standards. Echoing Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s similarly confused Two-Income Trap from 17 years earlier, Oren Cass claimed that our lousy economy and dumb policy had created a situation where families need two workers to afford the same lifestyle that a single breadwinner could provide in the past. As I showed at the time, that was all wrong. Cass had simply misunderstood and assumed away the very measurement and conceptual challenges that economists have become successively better at addressing over time—namely how to account for consumers’ ability to switch up the goods and services they buy as prices change and how to address the replacement of older, lower-quality products with newer better ones.

Not only did American Compass purport to be smarter than microeconomists measuring inflation, in its next big economics project, “Coin-Flip Capitalism,” it discovered that hedge funds, private equity, and venture capital investments are losing bets—a conclusion that up to then had evaded ultra-wealthy investors putting their own money on the line.

But the AC analyses neglected the stronger long-run performance of private equity and venture capital beyond the 10-year window AC examined. Ignored, too, were the other reasons beyond expected average returns that investors turn to hedge funds (to hedge!), private equity, and venture capital. But concern for rich investors wasn’t the point. As Doug McCullough of the Lone Star Policy Institute succinctly put it, “American Compass seeks a virtual seat at the deal table to ensure private business decisions align with their concept of the general welfare.”

Like progressive groups such as the Roosevelt Institute (circa 2015), American Compass thinks the financial sector adds little value to the economy or the lives of everyday people and is a sort of vampire industry sucking up young talent who could do some good “in the real economy.” These critics reject arguments that finance promotes growth and higher living standards for all.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Writing in the Wall Street Journal, UCLA medical-school professor Joseph Ladapo rightly laments the “epidemic of ‘Covid Mania’,” correctly noting that “[t]he problem isn’t only the overreaction to the virus but the diminution of every other problem.” Two other slices:

The novel coronavirus has caused suffering and heartbreak, particularly for older adults and their loved ones. But it also has a low mortality rate among most people and especially the young—estimated at 0.01% for people under 40—and therefore never posed a serious threat to social and economic institutions. Compassion and realism need not be enemies. But Covid mania crowded out reasoned and wise policy making.

Americans groaned when leaders first called for “two weeks to slow the spread” in March 2020. Months later, many of these same Americans hardly blinked when leaders declared that lockdowns should continue indefinitely. For months Covid had been elevated above all other problems in society. Over time new rules were written and new norms accepted.

Liberty has played a special role in U.S. history, fueling advances from independence to emancipation to the fight for equal rights for women and racial minorities. Unfortunately, Covid mania led many policy makers to treat liberty as a nuisance rather than a core American principle.

…..

Covid mania is also creating new conflicts over vaccine mandates. The same people who assured the public that a few weeks of lockdown would control the pandemic now argue that vaccinating children, for whom no vaccine has yet been approved, is essential to end the pandemic. Children account for less than 0.1% of Covid deaths in the U.S. Is enough known about vaccines to conclude that their benefits outweigh potential risks to children?

“Yes” is the answer of a salesman, not a scientist. Mandating a vaccine for children without knowing whether the benefits outweigh the risks is unethical. People who insist we should press on anyway, because variants will prolong the pandemic, should be reminded that a large reservoir of unvaccinated people in the U.S.—and in the world—will always exist. We cannot outrun the variants.

My colleague Bryan Caplan defends his ageless hypothesis against pushback from Jeremy Horpedahl.

Robby Soave is rightly critical of many on the political left who are addicted to Covid-19 panic porn. A slice:

Well, nope: COVID-19 deaths and cases continue to fall in Texas, even without a mask mandate or capacity restrictions on businesses. The same is broadly true of Florida, which relaxed its restrictions all the way back in September and has managed to weather the pandemic more successfully than super locked down states like New York and California.

This is good news! It’s more evidence that warmer weather does make it harder to spread COVID-19—in large part because the heat and sunshine allow people to socialize outdoors, where there is a significantly lower risk of transmission. It also shows that the vaccines are working. Fully vaccinated people are essentially immune from serious disease or death, and according to the latest data, they are very unlikely to carry or transmit COVID-19 at all. The message to the unvaccinated should be: Go get vaccinated. The message to the vaccinated should be: Rejoice! You can go back to normal life.

But the frustrating truth of the matter is that Team Blue doesn’t want to hear this. Many people—predominantly liberals—who claim to Follow the Science and Trust the Experts no matter what are nevertheless captivated by pandemic panic porn. By asserting, for instance, that social distancing and masks should be mandatory even for the vaccinated, they bizarrely fixate on the minuscule risk of post-vaccination infection.

(DBx: No surprise here, alas. The reaction to Covid from the start has rested on a lamentable inability to put risks into context. This inability quickly led to the deranged supposition that no amount of risk of coming into contact with SARS-CoV-2 is tolerable – or, what is the same thing, that no cost is too high to pay for even the most minuscule reduction in the risk of coming into contact with SARS-CoV-2).

Sherelle Jacobs reports on the continuing grip of Covid Derangement Syndrome in Britain. A slice:

The variant risk, then, is no more immediately terrifying than our five-year NHS backlog or that cancer research now faces its biggest setback in generations. And yet the Government seems captivated by the horror of a mutant punishing us for a sinful orgy of summer freedom. This is only in part explained by its fear that, after delaying the first lockdown, they will be accused of failing to act again. It is, more disturbingly, testament to the psychological power of the precautionary principle. Policy makers have become bewitched by the potentially infinite damage from existential risks, however remote or manageable they are in practice.

Over 40 years, the precautionary principle has mestasised from a fringe worldview propagated by environmental lobbyists to a groupthink mantra incorporated into everything from the Maastricht treaty to pesticide control. Despite its unscientific principles, demanding a level of certainty about safety that can never be reached and replacing trial and error with the elimination of error by banning trial, a weird synergy with predictive modelling has lent it academic credibility. Its intrusive hyper-caution has an aesthetic appeal for big-state politicians.

Sarah Manavis also ponders the grip of Covid Derangement Syndrome.

How can anyone learn of Australia’s policy and not believe in the reality of Covid Derangement Syndrome? Here’s a slice from an essay by Annabel Fenwick Elliott, who may never again see her father:

It is quite possible that I will never see my father or siblings again. That’s the logic behind Australia’s ongoing Covid policy, the country in which they live. Even if both he, my brother, sister, and I, are all fully vaccinated. Even though we therefore pose close to a zero risk of spreading the virus.

“If the whole country were vaccinated, you couldn’t just open the borders,” said Australia’s health minister Greg Hunt last week, dashing any hope that international travel will recommence this year, as was previously indicated. “Australia is in no hurry to open those borders, I can assure you”, its prime minister Scott Morrison confirmed yesterday.

The Australian government has also backed away from its promise to have its entire population inoculated by October. Due to inevitable supply issues, it looks like this won’t happen until 2022. Even then, it won’t allow vaccinated foreigners to visit. Even its own citizens, some 40,000 of whom are still stranded abroad, even if they’ve had the jab too.

Thing is, this is infinitely more ridiculous than banning all cars everywhere lest anyone die in a crash. It is drastically more insane than forbidding families from hugging come next flu season, even if they’ve all had the flu jab. It is further horrifying proof that democratic leaders are in no rush to release this North Korea-esque grip on their own people: No-one in. No-one out. No questions. Just obey.

Amidst all this bad news about Covid Derangement Syndrome, let’s hope that Jeffrey Tucker is correct that the lockdown paradigm is collapsing.

Phil Magness understandably wonders “how many people caught covid because Fauci disrupted the vaccine supply chain for over a week in order to put a warning sticker about an extremely rare complication on the J&J box…”

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 325 of Richard Epstein’s great 1995 book, Simple Rules for a Complex World:

No one can expect miracles from a system of limited government – but the smaller the size of the government and the more disinterested its administration of the laws, the more likely it is that diverse communities can thrive under its rule. Communitarian values, rightly understood, are best served by small governments, not large ones.

DBx: It’s worth pointing out that nor should anyone expect miracles from a system of unlimited, or “Progressive,” government. Yet the belief in such miracles is a staple among the crowd that is so oddly insistent on applauding itself as grounded in reality and attuned to “the science.”

“Progressives” are self-unaware in their belief in miracles.

Ad Hominem Is a Fallacy, Not an Argument

(Don Boudreaux)

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In my latest column for AIER, I argue against ad hominem argumentation. A slice:

An even weaker argument against the Great Barrington Declaration is the observation that some people associated with AIER say, write, or tweet some things that other people find to be beyond the pale.

I don’t wish here to assess, and much less to defend, everything ever said or written by everyone affiliated with AIER. Undoubtedly, were I to survey it all I’d find much with which I disagree. But the same is true for every organization under the moon and stars.

Of relevance here is the irrelevance to the merits of the Great Barrington Declaration of what AIER associates Mr. X and Ms. Y said or tweeted.

Had the Great Barrington Declaration been penned by individuals known chiefly for their membership in the Libertarian Party, by Fox News interns, or by Miss Grundy’s sixth graders as a class project, dismissing it merely by pointing to the identities and affiliations of its authors would be acceptable. But this Declaration is co-authored by world-renowned scientists, each of whom is expert in the public-health challenges presented by Covid-19. Furthermore, this Declaration has been endorsed by a large number of other credible scientists. Under these circumstances, ad hominem dismissals of the Declaration simply carry no credibility.

Substantively criticizing parts or the whole of the Great Barrington Declaration is legitimate. Indeed, such criticism is welcome; it’s part of the scientific process. But in far too many cases people dismiss the Declaration with nothing more than ad hominem assertions and attempts to establish guilt by association. The conclusion that I draw from these sorts of dismissals is that those who offer them actually have no substantive criticism of the Declaration. After all, because substantive criticisms would carry more weight even with Miss Grundy’s sixth graders, anyone with such criticisms to offer would present them front and center rather than resort to ad hominem argumentation.

The greatest compliment paid to the Great Barrington Declaration, therefore, is one wholly unintended: Many of its staunchest opponents offer against it nothing beyond ad hominemattacks and accusations of guilt by association. This Declaration must indeed be powerful!

…..

George Leef e-mailed to alert me to a potential confusion in my remarks above regarding members of the LP and sixth graders. I ought to have been more careful in my wording.

Ultimately, the only legitimate argument against any claim (or set of claims, such as the Great Barrington Declaration) is an argument that goes to the substance of the claim. No claim has its legitimacy established or debunked merely by pointing to the identity of those who put forth the claim. But the identity of those who put forth the claim is nevertheless an important source of information about whether or not it’s worthwhile to spend scarce time considering the claim.

A Declaration on how to deal with Covid-19 put forth by Miss Grundy’s sixth graders is so likely to be mistaken or vacuous as to justify a refusal to spend scarce time considering it and debunking it (if it is indeed mistaken or vacuous). But a Declaration written by eminent scholars such as Profs. Bhattacharya, Gupta, and Kulldorff cannot and ought not be dismissed so easily. Grappling with the substance of what they offer is necessary.