Russell Roberts's Blog, page 291

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from pages vii-viii of Stephen Davies’s 2019 book, The Wealth Explosion: The Nature and Origins of Modernity:

Human beings today, in all parts of the world, live in a way that is truly unprecedented. In other words it is not a matter of there being more of what has been before or better or faster versions of things that were known to our forebears. Rather the experiences and reasonable expectations of anyone born in the last hundred years are so different from those of the vast majority in all previous epochs that we can say quite definitely that they are genuinely novel. There has been a fundamental change in the quality and nature of human life and experience.

Take Precaution Against Hypotheticals

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

For a full year now a courageous, clear, and deeply principled voice against Covid-19 lockdowns has been that of EconLog’s David Henderson. See, for example, here and here. And yesterday at EconLog (as I noted here), David rightly scolded me for carelessly giving a full three cheers (rather than a lower number) to Florida governor Ron DeSantis for resisting vaccine passports.

At David’s EconLog post yesterday, commenter Michael Sandifer put to David the following questions:

Is there any level of risk for which you’d have government mandate vaccination and providing paperwork thereof? If we had a pandemic killing 1/3 of people infected, for example, and it’s highly contagious?

These questions are perfectly understandable and fair. But encountering them brought to mind one of the most important lessons that I learned in law school – a lesson that I described in a reply to Mr. Sandifer, and that I share here (with very slight modification):

I remember well my very first day of law-school classes. It was late August of 1989. My great contracts professor, Bob Scott, announced that he doesn’t want to hear hypotheticals. Later that same day, my great torts professor, Saul Levmore, announced that he doesn’t want to hear hypotheticals. I heard the same prohibition on hypotheticals from some other professors during my entire three years in law school.

I recall being disappointed. “Hypotheticals are not only fun, they’re also useful,” I thought to myself. “Economists and, especially, philosophers use them all the time.” But I soon grasped the wisdom of avoiding hypotheticals in law school – which is this:

Law, especially in the Anglo-American tradition, grows out of lived experience. And lived experience is too often filled with too many surprises and complexities for hypotheticals to take adequate cognizance of.

Hypotheticals have their place, of course – and the questions posed here to David about a hypothetical situation are reasonable. But everyone should be aware of, and wary of, the unseen danger lurking within hypotheticals. Precisely because the ‘facts’ in hypotheticals are posited ex nihilo, these ‘facts’ are divorced from other facts that, in the real world, might be so relevant as to change the assessment of the real-world situation from the assessment of the hypothetical.

Another danger of hypotheticals springs from the human-imagination’s great fertility: hypotheticals are too easy to imagine. And once something is imagined, it’s too easy to lose track of just how likely is the hypothetical to come true in reality. Ability to imagine some possibility is not an ability to judge how plausible is that hypothetical; much less is it an ability to judge how probable it is.

By avoiding hypotheticals in legal instruction, good law professors keep their students’ focused on conflicts and situations that actually occurred, thus avoiding possible distortions in thinking that might well arise when students have their heads full of hypotheticals.

If people were more wary of hypotheticals, one great benefit would be far less infatuation with the so-called “precautionary principle” – a dangerous idea that is rooted in hypotheticals.

Homo Avoidcovidus

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal:

Editor:

Thanks to Dr. Nicole Saphier for explaining that Americans are so close to herd immunity against Covid-19 that the case for mask-wearing will soon disappear (“Dr. Fauci, Tear Off These Masks,” April 3). She correctly decries Anthony Fauci’s unjustifiably high benchmark for unmasking – an error that Fauci commits by inexcusably disregarding evidence that large numbers of Americans are already immune owing to prior infection.

Fauci, alas, isn’t alone in finding – or concocting – reasons to keep Americans hysterically fearful of Covid. After its chief, Rochelle Walensky, told Rachel Maddow on Monday that “Our data from the CDC today suggests that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick. And that it’s not just in the clinical trials, it’s also in real-world data,” the CDC later walked back, apparently on the absurd grounds that there isn’t 100 percent proof that vaccines protect 100 percent of vaccinated people 100 percent of the time.

Too many people today – especially in government and the media – are homo avoidcovidi. Each of these persons, like the infamous homo economicus of economics textbooks, blindly and without balance pursues one narrow goal to the exclusion of all others.

Yet homo avoidcovidus is even worse than homo economicus. While the latter pursues exclusively his own narrow material welfare, he at least recognizes that this goal is not achieved by maniacally doing only one specific thing, such as working as many hours as is physically possible to earn monetary income. Homo economicus values, and takes, leisure. In contrast, homo avoidcovidus does indeed maniacally do only one specific thing: reduce his risk of exposure to the coronavirus. For homo avoidcovidus, no cost is too high to pay for even the most minuscule reduction in the risk of contracting Covid.

A homo economicus holding public office is an unpleasant fool; a homo avoidcovidus holding public office is a deranged tyrant.

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)

Tweet

Writing at AIER, Phil Magness reveals pro-lockdowners’ wacky conspiracy theories.

Noah Carl makes the case that the “Focused Protection” strategy advocated by the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration would have resulted in fewer deaths than did lockdowns. A slice:

The most emphatic endorsement of focused protection as a strategy for dealing with COVID-19 is the Great Barrington Declaration, a public statement co-authored by Sunetra Gupta, Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff. As an explainer on the website notes, the Declaration’s strategy is based on two key observations. First, the group of people to whom COVID-19 poses a serious risk is small and relatively well-defined: the elderly and those with certain pre-existing health conditions. (There is more than a thousandfold difference in mortality between the oldest and the youngest.) Second, lockdowns come with enormous costs – not only to the economy, but also to health, education and civil liberties. (And these are not spread evenly across occupation and income groups.) It follows, the authors argue, that we should focus our protective efforts on high-risk groups.

All the measures the authors have proposed strike me as sensible – and they would have been far less costly than the blanket lockdowns we ended up with. For elderly people living at home, they suggest offering home delivery of groceries and other essentials, as well as free N95 masks; and making tests available for friends and family who want to visit. For elderly people living in care homes, they suggest frequent testing of staff, as well as testing of all new residents. (Staff at one care home on the Isle of Wight even lived on site for several weeks to avoid catching COVID-19 – something the Government could have supported on a larger scale via financial incentives.) For elderly people still in the workforce, they suggest working from home where possible, or taking paid sabbaticals. And for elderly people living in multi-generational households, they suggest asking such people to live with an older friend or sibling, or providing them with free hotel rooms.

Assuming that lockdowns would protect care home residents may have been one of the biggest mistakes of the pandemic. According to data from the ONS, nearly half of those who died during the first wave in England and Wales were care home residents. While some have argued the only way to prevent COVID-19 getting into care homes is by suppressing community transmission, there is evidence that a degree of focused protection can be achieved. The Isle of Wight care home that I mentioned above had zero positive cases during the first wave. And it is far from the only one with this record.

But these people will die prematurely from something other than Covid-19, so it’s okay. A slice:

The widespread suspension of normal NHS diagnostic tests and surgery during the pandemic as hospitals prioritised Covid care has left the service in England with a record 4.59 million people waiting for hospital treatment.

Yet another dire prediction from the genius and supposedly oh-so-scientific Covid modelers fails to pan out.

Here’s Dan Wootten on Boris Johnson. A slice:

But what cannot be forgotten or erased is Boris’ Damascene conversion from a self-declared libertarian leader to the biggest proponent of the nanny state in a generation.

His inability to shake off doomsday scientific advisers, who would have us all caged till the end of the time to keep us from catching a cold, and realise we are at the end of this pandemic is now an egregious act of self-harm.

Tom Moran writes that “Vaccine passports would undermine one of the most fundamental rights in a civilised society: autonomy over one’s own body.” Here’s his conclusion:

In the past 12 months, dramatic shifts in mainstream attitudes to public health have moved us closer to this reality. The rights of the individual to assess risk and prioritise the quality of their own life has not only been forgotten — it has been scoffed at and derided, as though it never existed in the first place. The precedent set by the smallest step towards this broken philosophy is incredibly dangerous. Over the next few weeks, we must all ask ourselves what kind of world we want our children to grow up in. Do we grant them ownership of their bodies — indeed, their self, their soul, their identities? Or do we bequeath that ownership to the state? Some may argue that vaccine passports are the first step towards eradicating a disease. Rather, they are the first step towards the eradication of basic human rights.

(DBx: I’ve one quibble with the above: Vaccine passports aren’t the first step towards the eradication of basic human rights. Many such steps were taken long before 2020 dawned. But such passports are indeed the latest, and an especially egregious, step towards the further eradication of basic human rights.)

Here are 73 members of Parliament who have earned real applause.

Also protesting vaccine passports is Sean Welch. A slice:

These “vaccine passports” make no sense except as mechanisms of domestic control. This is an observation which floats free of any question about the efficacy of the vaccines themselves. It is not anti-vaxxer, to be sceptical about any specific vaccine. This is not a point that should require clarification, but in the mixed-up, muddled-up, world of Covid, apparently it does.

Anybody who wishes to take a vaccine should be free to do so. Anyone who refuses, similarly, should be free to do so. But any question of “choice” has, “Trolley Problem” style, been drained from the situation. This Government has introduced mechanisms of coercion which make the claim that anyone is “free” to make a choice about this issue laughable. That coercion sometimes presents as obstacles of a practical sort; but also, as forms of linguistic chicanery, such that Mr Gove is able with straight face to refer to “freedom passes”.

If you are required to show a vaccine passport to attend a concert, perform in that concert, drink a pint, pull a pint, buy a pint of milk, book a cottage, then the sinister deep state mechanisms of coercion have been fully implemented and you really have no “choice”.

Those of you who doubt that Covid Derangement Syndrome is real and that it fuels tyranny might wish to look at this item from Canada.

AIER has produced a transcript of this recent interview of Prof. Sunetra Gupta.

Here’s a new interview with Scott Atlas.

Profs. Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff write about California’s calamitous response to Covid. (Note that the publication date listed for this essay – March 12th, 2021 – is obviously mistaken. It appears that this piece was published on April 2nd, 2021.) Two slices:

The Florida policy has drawn sharp criticism from Fauci, who said it “opened up too quickly” in July. However, the infection control results to date look remarkably similar to California’s, and in some ways better. Through March 28, 9.5 percent of Floridians have been identified as COVID cases. Once we account for the fact that Florida has one of the oldest populations in the country and California has one of the youngest, the death rates with COVID through March 28 are lower in Florida than in California. In fact, the COVID death rate for the under-65 population and the over-65 population are both lower in Florida than in California.

Some think of lockdowns as the only possible way to protect the population from exposure to COVID risk. In reality, the lockdowns in California and elsewhere have served to protect only a portion of the population—the rich.

…..

That California and Florida have had similar COVID outcomes despite disparate policies would matter less if the lockdowns were costless.  However, this is very far from the case. The harms of the lockdowns are manifold and devastating wherever they have been implemented, including plummeting childhood vaccination, worsened cardiovascular disease outcomes, less cancer screening early in the epidemic, and deteriorating mental health, to name a few. According to a CDC estimate, one in four young adults in the United States seriously considered suicide, as reported this past June. For children, the cessation of in-person schooling since spring 2020 has led to severe learning losses, with adverse consequences projected throughout affected students’ life spans.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from pages 95-96 of University of Notre Dame philosopher James Otteson’s superb and hot-off-the-Cambridge-University-Press book, Seven Deadly Economic Sins (2021):

The fact that a proposed course of action would lead to a good result is necessary but not by itself sufficient to justify doing it. We must show not only that the proposed course of action would lead to a good result but in addition that it would lead to a better result than the other available alternatives.

DBx: Much harm has been – and continues to be – inflicted on humanity by the failure to recognize this one simple truth.

The Real Villains

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

In response to many posts here at Cafe Hayek over the past several months about Covid-19 and the deranged over-reaction to this disease, frequent Cafe commenter Patrick Barron sent to me by e-mail the following pertinent observation. I share it here with Pat’s kind permission.

There is much criticism, most well deserved, of the medical community’s fear-mongering over Covid-19, the possibility of new strains, and the often-bizarre public health remedies many recommend. But the real villains are the politicians who listen to these fear-mongers and then act on their hysteria. Politicians get lots and lots of advice–some official, some solicited, and much unsolicited. How they act or do not act is up to them. We expect them to exercise wisdom. So few really do. This reveals more about the deficiencies of today’s political class than it does about the medical community, in my humble opinion. Unfortunately, politics has become a blood sport, attracting the worst megalomaniacs among us and repelling those who are wise, honest, and most of all humble. For this reason alone, we need to return to extremely limited government.

Warmest regards,
Pat Barron

Two Cheers (Not Three)

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

David Henderson is correct that I gave too many cheers – in this earlier post – to Florida governor Ron DeSantis. While I cheer loudly and unequivocally Gov. DeSantis’s rejection of government-mandated vaccine passports, I also believe that private companies should have the right to insist on whatever conditions they fancy for their patrons and workers.

A Truly Heroic Woman

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

Prof. Sunetra Gupta – a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration – has been one of the too-few sane voices over the past year. Here’s an interview, from a couple of weeks ago, of her.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

Here’s the opening paragraph of a new essay by David Stockman:

We will not mince words. America is indeed suffering from a dangerous plague—a plague of misanthropic fearmongering from the likes of Dr. Fauci, the Scarf Lady and the Biden’s new CDC director, among countless others of the self-designated Virus Patrol.

And here’s another slice:

You can’t make up this kind of calculated mendacity, including, presumably, the off-script scripted tears.

That’s especially because it’s now an established fact that upwards of 60-80% of these “new cases” are not medical cases at all: They are asymptomatic individuals who got swabbed and had their nasal secretions run to at 35-40+ CTs on the PCR test, which immense magnification systematically generates false positives based on harmless RNA fragments and dead viral debris.

Yet with only 15,000 to 20,000 actual infected cases per day at best, of which 95% will not result in serious illness, hospitalization or death, the head of the CDC is out yelling fire in the theater still another time….

And a third slice:

We undercover the real motivation behind this blithering crackpottery below, but for want of doubt consider this data. The age-adjusted deaths from all sources during the 2020 Year of Covid is now in, and the thin green bar on the far right margin speaks for itself.

The age-adjusted death rate in the US was only a tad above its recent level, and actually much lower than it was during the entirety of the 105 years between 1900 and 2005. Yet we are still being told about Impending Doom and Sleepy Joe is calling upon governors of some of the Red States who have finally come to their senses to reimpose the mandatory mask requirement.

And that’s the Spoiler Alert. This whole Covid enchilada has not been about public health all along.

It’s an excuse for increased social control and aggrandizement of the state that the political classes have opportunistically seized upon, and are now determined to perpetuate indefinitely with new variants, new pretexts and new assaults on constitutional liberty, fiscal sanity and free market prosperity.

Johns Hopkins School of Medicine professor Marty Makary, writing in the Wall Street Journal, reports on further reasons to distrust the judgment of Anthony Fauci. A slice:

But this week, in response to a new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study showing a first-dose efficacy of 80% at two to four weeks, Dr. Fauci said that it isn’t known whether the protection drops “off a cliff after two weeks or three weeks.” That doesn’t happen with other vaccines. Why dismiss data and real-world U.K. experience with an untested hypothesis?

Britain has fallen far from being a free and open society. I fear that we in the U.S. are not far behind on this road to the hell of what David Hart calls “hygiene socialism.” See also here.

If you’re not yet convinced that the darkness of hygiene socialism has now descended on Great Britain, read this job ad seeking a Goebbels-like propagandist. A slice (emphasis added):

This is an exciting role for an experienced communications professional and offers the opportunity to work at the heart of the Department of Health. The role is a senior leadership role within the NHS Communications team and may offer the first step in developing a possible future career in a senior communication role in the Civil Service.

You will primarily be responsible for delivering a communications strategy to support the expansion of asymptomatic testing, that normalises testing as part of everyday life.

Alistair Cavendish is correct: Covid-hysteria-induced hygiene socialism has turned every English person’s home from his or her castle into his or her prison. A slice:

What would Pitt the Elder think of lockdown? His specific point is that the King of England cannot enter your ruined tenement: an Englishman’s home is his castle. Any time the King of England shows up at your front door enquiring how many people are within and whether they are all social distancing, or wrapped in cling-film, or whatever the rule is this week, you are entitled to send him on his royal way with a figurative flea in his ear. Presumably, the Great Commoner would take a similarly dim view of a king who hovered outside your door salivating like a traffic warden, eager to impose a fine, or a king who made a practice of wandering round parks breaking up picnics, or beating up women on vigils. It is such mean-spirited actions that mark one out as lacking true patriotism and English sensibility.

One of the most acute commentators on what it means to be English was George Orwell, a man who was under no illusions about the depredations of Empire, having seen them at first hand, and considered them at length in essays and novels. For Orwell, one of the most striking qualities of “the English genius” is an emphasis on private life….

Sam Spiegelman argues convincingly that the framers of the U.S. Constitution would be appalled by the CDC’s attempt to impose a moratorium on evictions.

Jon Sanders recommends that Biden and other ‘leaders’ learn the lesson of King Canute.

TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid) – the Israeli segment.

University of Hull Nursing professor Roger Watson decries how Covid Derangement Syndrome cancerously eats away at tolerance, civility, and, indeed, our very humanity. A slice:

Closer to home, my anti-lockdown activities have caught the attention of the local press and the city council, as they were intended to do. The response? Not a single counter-fact, not one link to material with which I could engage and thereby come to see the error of my ways. Instead, on three occasions I have been ‘reported’ to my employers at a university and to my vice-chancellor on the basis that I am a health professional and should, therefore, support all the measures being taken to manage the pandemic. One complainant, who remained anonymous, used the expression ‘have a word’. I am incredibly grateful to my vice-chancellor, who seems to believe in free speech. But what have we become, nationally, when merely questioning the government line – demonstrably ineffective and damaging – earns you such treatment?

I am not alone, either in academia or in healthcare. There are the brave and much-derided souls from HART who published the recent Covid-19 response, and the original signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration. There are others brave enough to voice their fears, for example, in TCW, Lockdown Sceptics and spiked online. Others who write anonymously and many who write personally to people like me in support of our actions, do not want to be identified to their employer – usually the NHS – for fear of reprisals. Again I ask: What have we become? I can only conclude that, as I suggested recently, the British Bulldog has been tamed or replaced with a poodle.

Three cheers for Florida governor Ron DeSantis!

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 181 of Arthur M. Diamond, Jr.’s wonderful 2019 book, Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism (footnote deleted):

Happiness depends more on freedom and hope for the future than on current income.