Russell Roberts's Blog, page 293

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Professor of medical microbiology David Livermore puts SARS-CoV-2 into historical perspective as he warns against the continuing disproportionate reaction to today’s virus. Two slices:

First, the long-established 229E common-cold coronavirus mutates to escape immunity from prior infection, so it’s predictable that SARS-CoV2 will do the same. Already over 20,000 SARS-CoV2 variants are known to us. The E484K (glutamate to lysine) change of the Brazilian and South African types, which reduces antibody binding by reversing a charge, has occurred repeatedly, including in Bristol. Banning travel won’t prevent local evolution.

Second, the belief that variants will be squeezed out globally is delusional. Some are widespread in their countries of origin and many countries do very little sequencing. Some US states, less perturbed than Boris’s government, are rapidly opening as their populations are vaccinated. Even much of Europe is less restricted than the UK, and the Brazilian and South African variants account for around five per cent of cases in France.

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If we accept the limited victory offered by the vaccine, rather than holding out for an unattainable pipe-dream of Zero Covid, travel bans can be consigned to the scrapheap. And they should be, for they do great harm globally. Asides from separated ‘international’ families, the major losers from this are anyone unable to work via Zoom and without 80 per cent furlough pay. This group is as diverse as Caribbean hotel maids, Nepalese trek porters, Filipino cabin stewards, Thai bar hostesses, guides and souvenir vendors of every sort, along with swathes of bar and restaurant staff. Many families will be or have already been thrown into hardship by travel bans. Ruined safari lodges leave wildlife valuable only to poachers. Does all this harm count for nothing?

J.D. Tuccille warns that “after a year of lockdowns, travel restrictions, and surveillance justified on public health grounds, it’s likely that, rather than live up their liberating promise, health passports will become just another bureaucratic hurdle for people trying to go about their lives. For better or worse, though, the new credentials look destined to be part of the post-COVID-19 world.” And here’s his dismaying conclusion:

That’s the next concern. Having already expanded beyond air travel to encompass access to sports and concert arenas, it’s easy to see COVID-19 being only the first entry in credentials designed to be scalable. They can all be easily tweaked to record conformity with any imaginable public health requirement. Underground entrepreneurs certainly anticipate a large role for such documents—they’ve established a brisk business selling bogus vaccine certificates to buyers unable or unwilling to secure the real thing.

A year-plus into the COVID-19 pandemic, health passports are far too late to mitigate the damage done by lockdowns, surveillance, and travel restrictions. Even so, they’re almost guaranteed to be a part of the world to come.

David Henderson wonders where are all the behavioral economists and psychologists who, in normal times, never tire of warning people against being duped by the availability bias.

Here’s a new paper by John Ioannidis. And here are his conclusions:

All systematic evaluations of seroprevalence data converge that SARS‐CoV‐2 infection is widely spread globally. Acknowledging residual uncertainties, the available evidence suggests average global IFR of ~0.15% and ~1.5‐2.0 billion infections by February 2021 with substantial differences in IFR and in infection spread across continents, countries, and locations.

Robert Jackman understandably bemoans Covid-19 virtue signaling in television shows.

In this radio interview, Peter Hitchens decries the Covid-Derangement-Syndrome-driven servility of people to the state.

Will Jones weighs in against the notion that SARS-CoV-2 variants are a good reason to remain in a state of Covid Derangement Syndrome. A slice:

A Covid surge was, naturally, predicted by Government scientific advisers when schools went back on March 8. Has that happened? Not even a ripple. In fact, since mass testing in schools began in early March the positive rate has hit a floor of 0.4 per cent (presumably a lot to do with the false positive rate). Are any of these advisers embarrassed by their failed predictions that threatened the education of our children? If so, we’ve not heard.

Phil Magness asks this rhetorical question: “Guess which one of these 4 states the New York Times chose to feature in an article raising alarm bells about “rising cases.”

(Here’s the NYT ‘report’ to which Phil refers.)

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from pages 253-254 of Joseph Epstein’s June 2015 essay “The Conversationalist” as this essay is reprinted (and retitled as “Michael Oakeshott”) in the 2018 collection of some of Epstein’s essays titled The Ideal of Culture (brackets original to Epstein):

Oakeshott’s strong antipathy was for what he terms “rationalism” in politics. Rationalism is the reign of confident reason expended on a subject that cannot readily be reasoned upon. Politics, “always so deeply veined with both the traditional, the circumstantial and the transitory,” will not obey the kind of technical expertise under whose banner rationalism travels. For the rationalist, no problem evades solution, and perfection will arrive promptly when, one by one, all problems are solved.

“Political activity,” Oakeshott writes, “is recognized [by rationalist thinkers] as the imposition of a uniform condition of perfection upon human conduct.” His book On History (1983) concludes with a dazzling essay, “The Tower of Babel,” about the greatest utopian planning project of all time: that of erecting a building that would reach to heaven. The essay ends on a scrap of verse left by a poet of the day that reads:

Those who in fields Elysian would dwell Do but extend the boundaries of hell.

The villainous thinkers for Oakeshott are those who claim to have all the answers.

DBx: Our world today seethes with such villainous thinkers. They swarm in from the Left and Right and even the center.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from Lord Acton’s 1864 review of Gustave de Molinari’s 1855 book, Course of Political Economy:

There is therefore no ground for the pretence that in order to maintain equilibrium between production and demand, we must employ the foresight of an army of administrators and surveyors, whose duty it should be to prescribe what every produce should provide, and consequently how much each consumer should enjoy. Inhabitants of our metropolis see every morning an ample but not excessive provision made for its 3,000,000 inhabitants, and this without any previous direction or settled plan; the utmost order and regularity result from the natural economic law of the supply and demand finding their equilibrium spontaneously; whereas we might look for a chaos tenfold more chaotic than that of Balaclava, if the problem were left to the arrangement of administrators or directors of social labour and consumption.

Some Non-Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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My colleague Bryan Caplan is multi-talented: He’s now got a clothing line.

On the horizon, Gerald Dwyer sees inflation. Here’s his conclusion:

The increases in money held by the public are a new experiment to test a widely verified proposition: substantial increases in the quantity of money held by the public are associated with substantial inflation. Inflation is quite likely to be higher in coming years than it has been in the recent past. Whether the increase is muted – an increase of one percentage point per year or so – or noticeably larger remains to be seen.

Here’s David Hart on the Great Books of Liberty.

Patrons of Arnold Kling’s excellent askblog picked their top 150 intellectuals. With the exception of a small number (Donald Trump?!), the list is quite good. (It would be even better if it included at least some of the following: David Boaz, Eric Boehm, Veronique de Rugy, David Friedman, Steven Landsburg, Scott Linicome, Phil Magness, Alex Nowrasteh, Virginia Postrel, George Selgin, and George Will.)

Speaking of my intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy, she continues to powerfully protest the U.S. government’s fiscal recklessness.

And speaking of Scott Linicome, he and Inu Manak report on “Protectionism or National Security? The Use and Abuse of Section 232.”

And speaking of Eric Boehm, he correctly explains that proposals to abolish the filibuster are about nothing more grand than raw power.

Also from Eric Boehm is this report on the appalling veto of a school-choice bill in Kentucky.

Let’s hope that Stephanie Slade is correct.

Manny Klausner shared with some of his friends this report of a recent instance of woke idiocy and intolerance.

David Henderson asks a germane question: “Whose body is it anyway?“

Markets Are Far More Subtle and Efficient Than Most Intellectuals Realize

(Don Boudreaux)

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In my most-recent column for AIER I explain that, contrary to the claims of Oren Cass and many other free-market skeptics, the competitive market process does not fail to take account of the value that workers attach to job stability. A slice:

The fact that nearly all workers today refuse to take pay cuts to retain their current jobs is a sign, not of market failure, but of the fact that workers generally believe that their other options are superior to working at lower pay in their current jobs. These other options include, of course, other jobs. But they also include retirement, living off of one’s family and friends, or living off of private charity or public assistance. The more attractive are these other options, the less attractive will workers find the option of keeping their current jobs at lower wages.

None of the above is to suggest that it’s not unpleasant to discover that fellow citizens have lowered the value that they attach to your current productive activities. Nor is it to suggest that adjusting to this discovery is easy. But it is to say that the market does indeed take account of the value to workers of their existing jobs. The very fact that most workers refuse to take pay cuts in order to keep their existing jobs reveals that these workers in fact do not value those jobs highly enough to keep them.

If government imposes tariffs to discourage Sarah and other consumers from buying imports, the result might be that textile workers in Dalton keep their jobs without having to take pay cuts. But notice the reason. The tariffs effectively compel Sarah and other consumers to subsidize jobs in Dalton textile mills. The textile workers themselves don’t value these jobs highly enough to keep them at their true market value, so protectionism is used to compel consumers to pay those workers to remain in jobs that those workers would otherwise quit.

Far from correcting a market failure, tariffs generate outcomes that mimic market failure. In this example, tariffs subsidize textile mill workers to remain in jobs not only that are not sufficiently productive to justify, but that the workers themselves would abandon if they had to bear the full cost of staying in those jobs.

Nothing is easier than for intellectuals to express displeasure with the observed manner in which individuals make trade-offs, and then to assert that this manner of making trade-offs implies a market failure. But assertions are not analyses. When analyzed carefully through the lens of economics, the need for producers to adjust to changes in consumer tastes and opportunities is seen to be, not evidence of markets failing, but of markets successfully taking into account as fully as possible the costs and benefits of alternative uses of scarce resources, including labor.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s Will Jones:

No surge as schools open in the UK, no surge as Texas throws off restrictions, free states like Florida and Georgia doing no worse than lockdown states – is anyone in Government watching the real world or are they too busy gawping at the curves of Neil Ferguson’s latest model?

Lucy Johnston documents the reality of the climate of fear that stymies scientific discussion and analyses of Covid-19.

Ross Clark is correct: “Vaccines were supposed to liberate us, not expand the surveillance state.” Two slices:

What on Earth is going on? We’re being treated like donkeys. The carrot of freedom is dangled in front of us, but it never gets closer. No matter how obediently we stay at home, nor how many of us turn out for our jabs (the vaccination rate [in the U.K.] is well over 90 percent in the age groups which have been offered it yet), there is always some pretext for keeping society closed down.

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Covid has destroyed the livelihoods of many people, and has created huge opportunities for others – vested interests who have every incentive to push for restrictions to be kept in place for the long term. Using technology to control the population has become big business, and Covid has presented it with a prime opportunity.

Omar S. Khan decries Covid fascism. Several slices:

And it is hard to take heart from anywhere. US States that have thrown off the yoke of COVID “autocracy” are flourishing comparatively. Infections (“positive tests”) in Texas post removal of their mask mandate roughly a fortnight back, have plunged by roughly 29%. But too much of the US is still in a fact-free delirium. The UK is a true basket case, and the slippery slope from proud liberalism to crotchety authoritarianism has been depressing, not to mention shocking. The fact that excess deaths are again below a 5-year average seems irrelevant, the depth of economic devastation is just ignored.

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And in New Zealand hospitals are close to collapse with overflow (COVID is not blamed, though much of it comes from issues of related access we are told), and their economy is looking forward to a double-dip recession. Being a poster child of draconian probity may need to come with various warning labels.

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In California, much of Britain, and other cuckoo land jurisdictions, fines are slapped on for being “out” in the “wrong” zip code, penalties are assessed for gathering in larger than prescribed numbers (ten or something “colossal” like that). In “open” schools students sometimes get one day to play outdoors overseen by “educational” storm troopers, meaning penal environments are more humane in terms of daily exercise and fresh air.

Again, let us recall, this is a viral strain that most people don’t even know they had and virtually everybody recovers from, and for which now, for better or worse, there are also vaccines!

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Neil Ferguson has never had an accurate pandemic prediction we know of and has no medical background to make any of his prognostications unduly authoritative, and he has been catastrophically wrong this time. But his “SAGE” (all the world’s a stage for silly data-free predictions), still holds the British government apparently spellbound.

And the fickle medical chameleon in the US, Fauci, who is a true contortionist, having held virtually every view (no masks/masks, no asymptomatic spread/asymptomatic spread, no lockdown/lockdown, and many other dizzying gyrations), joins his unsavory cohorts listed here, in being the recipient of massive funding, as long as those views continue to flatter the interests of big Pharma and big Tech. Dissenters, far more eminent researchers in the field are, as mentioned above, reputationally attacked, slandered, and undermined.

Charles Oliver reports another of the countless instances of the inhumanity uncorked by Covid Derangement Syndrome.

Phil Magness reports more evidence of the tyrannical mindset fueled by Covid Derangement Syndrome: Twitter is now removing posts from Harvard Medical School professor Martin Kulldorff – posts that challenge claims made by Anthony Fauci. Take a look:

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from pages 87-88 of University of Notre Dame philosopher James Otteson’s excellent and hot-off-the-Cambridge-University-Press book, Seven Deadly Economic Sins (2021):

An objective look at the limitation of our knowledge – how difficult is it to know whether we are making good decisions even in our own lives, let alone in those of anyone else? – reveals that in fact we are typically in no position to judge what is good for others. We do not possess the detailed, personal, contextualized, historical information that is required to know what constitute good choices for others….

DBx: Yes.

Are you listening Joe Biden? Do you hear and understand Nancy Pelosi? Can you grasp this foundational truth Marco Rubio and Chuck Schumer and E.J. Dionne and Oren Cass and Paul Krugman? Where is your humility in the face of the enormity of social and economic complexity? Why are you so confident in your proposed schemes for human betterment?

Ten Problems with Freedom

(Don Boudreaux)

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It’s getting more and more difficult for humorists such as JP Sears to spoof the woke political left – the woke political left being so naturally self-spoofing. But Sears here gives it a good go!

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 95 of the late Stanford University economic historian Nathan Rosenberg’s insightful 1992 paper “Economic Experiments,” as this paper is reprinted in Rosenberg’s 1994 book, Exploring the Black Box: Technology, Economics, and History:

There is an additional advantage to a system that encourages, or at least tolerates, multiple sources of decision-making. Not only do human agents differ considerably in their attitudes toward risk; they differ also in their skills, capabilities, and orientations, however those differences may have been acquired. This heterogeneity of the human input, insufficiently stressed in microeconomics, constitutes a valuable resource that is much more readily enlisted into the realm of potentially useful experimentation by and organizationally decentralized environment.

Covid Derangement Syndrome Is A Cancer On Liberal Civilization

(Don Boudreaux)

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While I could pick one or two nits with it, recent talk by Nick Hudson is powerful, informative, and well worth watching. Its length is just over 27 minutes.