Russell Roberts's Blog, page 299
March 17, 2021
Some Non-Covid Links
My Mercatus Center colleague Adam Thierer catalogs some skeptical takes on industrial policy.
James Pethokoukis celebrates economic growth.
I just discovered Larry Reed’s excellent remembrance of my late, great colleague Walter Williams. A slice:
Pursuing truth for its own sake and mustering the courage to speak it without equivocation should be the loftiest of objectives in any profession. They fit the life and career of Walter Williams perfectly. He was a man of solid conviction, of unmovable passions for what he knew to be right. And he was always that way, for as far back as I have memory of him. He was the very epitome of what it means to be steadfast.
Dan Griswold makes the case for liberalizing immigration.
GMU Econ alum Daniel Smith collects an economics lesson from trash collection.
Simon Lester defends the WTO’s Appellate Body from misconceptions.
Jacob Sullum is correct: Congress uses Covid-19 as an excuse for fiscal recklessness. A slice:
Congress allocated $350 billion to “coronavirus state and local relief funds” for governments that generally have emerged from the pandemic in much better financial condition than expected. California, for example, will benefit from this largesse even though it is running a surplus.
Another $86 billion will be used to bail out union-run pension funds that were already in dire straits before the pandemic. Obamacare for households earning as much as $350,000 annually will cost $34 billion.
Some Covid Links
Barry Brownstein writes with clear-eyed realism about the tyranny of vaccine passports.
Robby Soave reports on the deranged detachment from reality of the bureaucrats at the CDC. Here’s Robby’s wise conclusion:
The proper response is to ignore the CDC en masse. People who are vaccinated should feel free to resume normal activities, particularly if these activities only involve other people who are also protected from the worst effects of COVID-19—either because they are vaccinated, or because they are young. We don’t need to wait until the vaccine is available to kids—something that won’t happen until much later this year, or early next—to start letting them enjoy normal childhoods again.
You can find here, at the Wall Street Journal, justified praise of Florida governor Ron DeSantis. A slice:
Early on, Gov. DeSantis promised to protect Florida’s elderly. He didn’t stuff Covid patients back into nursing homes, like some other states, and instead set up special nursing centers for elderly Covid patients discharged from hospitals. Though dealt a terrible demographic hand, he governed judiciously and saved lives. Florida’s death rate among seniors is lower than California’s and New York’s.
Mr. DeSantis also saved livelihoods and quality of life. Florida reopened quickly and its unemployment rate is 4.8%, compared with 9% in California and 8.8% in New York. At the governor’s direction, every student in Florida has had access to in-person instruction since September, and places of worship have been open and offering solace to Floridians since May.
One year out, Florida is a Covid success story. You can blame Mr. DeSantis for that.
—Rachel Gambee, Dartmouth College, religion
The Neil Ferguson 2.2 million dead forecast for the US was a “worst case” or “do nothing” scenario, leading some to believe his model is vindicated since we locked down and ended up with fewer deaths. The problem with this claim is that Ferguson never published the alternative NPI mitigation scenario models for the US (he did publish them for the UK where they’ve all been surpassed, meaning he overestimated the effectiveness of those NPIs and lockdowns as a whole).
So what was Ferguson’s mitigation projection for the US? We won’t ever know unless his US model run shows up in a FOIA request somewhere (hint: Birx and Fauci’s email accounts). But he did make a public statement to the NYT on 3/20 of last year where he said the “best case” US outcome was 1.1 million dead – presumably with mitigation measures.
In either case, his US projections were wildly wrong, and remain indefensible.
And here’s a comment added to Phil’s post by Ash Navabi:
You are leaving out the most damning criticism of Ferguson’s model: he predicted that the bulk of the 2.2 million deaths (or 1.1 million as the best case) would have occurred by August 2020. This was certainly a factor in creating urgency among politicians. By early August, the reported death toll was about 150,000.
Here’s David Henderson on the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine.
Once zero-risk thinking becomes reflexive – and institutionalised in law – it leads you into a cul-de-sac of systemic self-harm.
Kit Knightly has more on the classification of Covid deaths. A slice:
Globally, with a few notable exceptions, a “covid death” is a death “from any cause” following a positive test.
And when they say “any cause”, they mean it. Up to, and including, shooting yourself in the head.
In one blackly hilarious case, a man “died of coronavirus” after being shot by the police, with his 7 gunshot wounds being listed as “complications”.
That’s how loosely defined “covid death” has become, it is more or less meaningless.
(DBx: To be clear, I fully support vaccines. I believe that the fear that some people have of vaccines is as overblown and out-of-context as is the fear that many people have of SARS-CoV-2. But Knightly is correct to note that if the same appallingly loose criteria for classifying deaths as “Covid deaths” were applied to classifying deaths as “vaccine deaths,” the official vaccine death toll would be inaccurately much higher.)
New research from WHO and partners shows that the COVID-19 pandemic is severely affecting the quality of care given to small and sick newborns, resulting in unnecessary suffering and deaths.
A study published in the Lancet EclinicalMedicine highlights the critical importance of ensuring newborn babies have close contact with parents after birth, especially for those born too small (at low birthweight) or too soon (preterm). However, in many countries, if COVID-19 infections are confirmed or suspected, newborn babies are being routinely separated from their mothers, putting them at higher risk of death and lifelong health complications.
This is especially the case in the poorest countries where the greatest number of preterm births and infant deaths occur. According to the report, disruptions to kangaroo mother care – which involves close contact between a parent, usually a mother, and a newborn baby – will worsen these risks.
I don’t recognise acquaintances who approach me in the street. It seems strange and artificial to chat with someone masked, like a pantomime of normality. I can’t imagine what this must be like for deaf people who depend on reading lips – one minority we don’t talk about much these days.
As our toddlers were having haircuts, a mother to whom I was chatting confided to me that her son resembles her. ‘I don’t know what you look like,’ I told her, chilling that conversation, since I had clearly transgressed the tacit ‘act like it’s normal’ Covid rule.
No, dear friend, what I will mostly retain of the Covid period will not be gratitude that me and my family came out just fine.
I will remember the sudden intrusiveness of the State and the transformation of our society, the unquestioning obedience of the citizenry, the stifling conformity and the utter lack of solidarity as the professional classes holed themselves up and depended on working-class people to fetch them things.
I will remember the stupidity of masking small children and sending in nurses to collect their saliva at nursery and primary schools because everyone is toxic, even three-year-olds.
I will remember our callousness as we sacrificed young, hopeful people at the start of their lives, eager to make their way in the world; our cruelty to the elderly and fragile, to whom this whole circus is supposedly dedicated, whom we abandoned to die surrounded by extraterrestrials in hazmat suits.
I will remember how we isolated single people and deprived the healthy elderly of the comfort of winding down their hard-earned days in the (albeit toxic) company of their loved ones.
I will remember the ease with which we dismissed precious human interactions. We all depend on the touch of a hand, a friendly smile in the grocery store, a night spent dancing with friends in a sweaty club and the dawn subway ride home afterwards, happy and laughing. That’s how I met you, dear friend.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 291 of Liberty Fund’s 2011 Definitive Edition (Ronald Hamowy, ed.) of F.A. Hayek’s soaring 1960 book, The Constitution of Liberty:
The decisive factor which made the efforts of the [French] Revolution toward the enhancement of individual liberty so abortive was that it created the belief that, since at last all power had been placed in the hands of the people, all safeguards against the abuse of this power had become unnecessary.
March 16, 2021
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from pages 15-16 of Richard Epstein’s superb 1995 book, Simple Rules for a Complex World:
Even the failure and disintegration of socialism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union has not led to a clear response to the next question: if government ownership of the means of production is so bad, why is government regulation of the private means of production so good?
DBx: An excellent question.
Ownership, after all, is a bundle of decision-making rights over property along with claims on the value of the property. And so what matters is not who has formal title to these rights and claims but, rather, who actually possesses these rights and claims. Ideally, those with formal title to the rights and claims are the same people as those who possess the decision-making rights.
If decision-making rights over property are separated from the rights to claims on the value of the property, then irresponsible decision-makers are underfoot. Jones decides how the factory is used while Smith enjoys any resulting increase in the factory’s value and suffers any resulting decrease in the factory’s value. It’s difficult to believe that Jones will be a good – a responsible – decision-maker regarding the factory given that Jones does not experience a key response to his or her decisions.
Some Covid Links
Ed Stringham looks back on one year of lockdowns. A slice:
This is the new line of the lockdowners. They can’t cite broad-based evidence of any correlation much less causation between lockdowns and virus control. There simply isn’t any, and meanwhile AIER has assembled 31 serious papers showing no apparent connection between lockdowns and better disease outcomes.
Let’s imagine an alternative scenario in which lockdowns actually did work on one pathogen. Would they be worth it? Public health, as Martin Kulldorff continues to explain, must consider not just one ailment but the whole well-being of the community, not just in the short run but the long run. Even if Covid-19 was controlled via coercion, was it worth it to wreck so many businesses, force missed cancer screenings, keep kids out of school for a year, shatter so many communities that depend on houses of worship, lock people in their homes, and hobble the ability to travel?
These are egregious actions, and contrary to all the policy practices we associate with free societies that respect human rights. So in one sense, the argument about whether lockdowns “work” – they do not – is beside the point. For the sake of social and economic functioning as well as human rights, disease mitigation must not be managed by political actors but rather medical professions, as AIER has been saying for a full year.
Christine Padgham pushes back against the dangerous insanity of the quest for Zero Covid. A slice:
You have very likely been infected with Russian Flu, especially if it was indeed coronavirus OC43, which is still in circulation.
You probably caught this virus as a child and experienced very normal cold symptoms – your mummy and daddy would have wiped your snotty nose and sent you to school or took you to the playground with unsanitised hands. You would have sneezed on your playmates, coughed over your siblings, hugged your grandparents with your runny nose and sore throat, and yet probably still not made many or any of your beloveds around you ill. You might have passed on your Coronavirus to a couple of unfortunate friends or family members and they would have tutted and rolled their eyes and said something like: “I must have caught it from the baby”. What a nuisance! But no hand-wringing seemed necessary and no quarantine was required.
Do you remember when we used to live like that? Free to be ill. When personal minor malaise was not a matter of public concern or record.
We have lived this way in an environment of ‘Not-Zero Russian Flu’ for around the last 130 years. And have you ever wondered where Spanish Flu has gone? The answer is: nowhere. If we tested the population for Spanish Flu and Russian Flu, we might well find them.
TANSTAFPFC. Parvez Dara points our attention to yet another reason why There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection from Covid. Here’s his conclusion:
There will be a rash of deaths that could have been prevented in the recent past and more so in the coming future, from not-screening, not diagnosing and not being able to care for. We might all rue the day when the public health policy experts did not consider the ramifications of their singular tunnel-vision focus.
Jordan Schachtel presents some unsurprising data.
Will Jones laments the latest instance of misleading reporting on Covid-19.
Let’s end today’s links with a bit of optimism from Jeffrey Tucker.
Quotation of the Day…
The impulse to trust experts and to give them authority over us is a venerable one, perhaps indeed having evolutionary roots in our development as a small-group species whose survival in evolutionary times might well have depended on our willingness to submit to and follow a single leader…. A dispassionate look at the actual historical results of obedience to such all-too-human leaders, however, should temper our enthusiasm. History is replete with atrocities committed by people following such leaders….
March 15, 2021
Some Non-Covid Links
My colleague Dan Klein, writing at National Review, defends Adam Smith from the ignorant or lying woke mob. Here’s his conclusion:
The same is happening in the United States, of course. Leftists are making quick work of towering figures from our past. But for the sake of our culture and of ourselves, we shouldn’t let them lie about history.
George Will rightly cheers a college student who is resisting the tyranny of the woke monsters. A slice:
It is difficult nowadays to be on the cutting edge of academic absurdity, but Gwinnett [College]] got there two ways. First, it stipulated that the First Amendment covers only wee slivers of campus: “free speech expression areas” available only four hours Monday through Thursday, and two hours on Friday, and which individual speakers could reserve only once every 30 days. Then Gwinnett argued that Uzuegbunam’s discussion of gentle Jesus meek and mild was “contentious” language with “a tendency to incite hostility,” and hence constituted “fighting words” unprotected by the Constitution.
Thomas Chatterton Williams encounters (the work of) Thomas Sowell. Here’s his conclusion:
And that is the revelation in a nutshell: reading Thomas Sowell has this déja-vu quality. The most important realization you are left with is not that he possesses the final word on every subject but that he wields profound insight and reams of data and comparative research into many of the very debates that still consume us. As a conscientious liberal it leaves you with a nagging question: Why haven’t you or anyone you know ever so much as acknowledged the existence of his output? If we are lucky, this documentary and Riley’s biography will be part of the necessary and overdue work of rectifying the oversight. I suppose I owe my aunt an apology.
Both supply and demand problems plagued the economy last spring, but only the former persist. Last year’s Covid relief packages put plenty of money into consumers’ pockets. In fact, households are awash in cash. Private savings rates are about as high as ever. The problem isn’t a lack of purchasing power, but a supply-side bottleneck: Many business restrictions remain in force, and the labor force is limited by the pace of the vaccine rollout. To fix this, it is reasonable to dedicate federal resources to increase vaccine production and distribution. ARPA does a little of this, devoting $16 billion to vaccine distribution and another $50 billion to virus testing and contact tracing. But this is far from satisfactory, given its $1.9 trillion total.
Spending packages such as ARPA can’t fix supply-side problems. Since the economy no longer suffers a demand shortfall, the main effect of the law will be to redistribute resources from productive, market-driven activities to unproductive, politically driven ones.
David Henderson describes some economists’ tin ear regarding inflation.
Some Covid Links
“The crew at the Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine (CEBM) have done an analysis of excess mortality for 2020 across 32 countries to get a clearer picture of the impact of the pandemic and lockdowns. They used excess mortality instead of “Covid deaths”, they explain, to avoid problems with recording and classification of deaths and include any impact of anti-Covid measures. They used age-adjusted mortality to take into account differences in the average age of populations. They compared 2020’s figures to the average of the previous five years to give a percentage increase or excess during the pandemic year (they have made the tool they used to analyse the data publicly available).” – More here.
And here’s a screenshot of the data:
My favorite example occurred while cruising a freeway at 75 miles per hour. I noticed a blue Honda Accord in my rear-view mirror, driving erratically. The Accord narrowly missed cars as it cut in front of them, careened across two lanes of traffic, and blew past me at about 90 miles per hour. The driver cut in front of me, missing by just a few feet as it lurched back to its original lane and vanished into the other traffic. The reckless driver, alone in his car, was wearing a mask.
Absent government restrictions, we would surely observe coffee shops catering to all of these groups. Some would operate with fewer or even no extra safety procedures. They may not require masks at all, or they may operate at full capacity. Customers who take Covid-19 lightly would prefer this more relaxed atmosphere. If too few people are comfortable with this level of safety, then the shop would have to institute more stringent sanitization procedures, or else the lack of customers would force it out of business.
Sinéad Murphy decries the rises of the expertocracy. A slice:
Expertise in any domain is eventually purchased at a price. Though often seeded in genuine commitment to better understanding and practices, once past a certain threshold it becomes counterproductive. It loses sight of the bigger picture that lies beyond its field and excludes contingent factors that fall outside its frame.
But when expertise is plied in directly human domains – of care and education, for instance – the threshold beyond which it becomes counterproductive is very low and the price that is paid is very high. For, what makes us human is the bigger picture of our background and circumstances. What makes us human are the contingencies of our character and abilities.
Expertise, even when it is aimed at noble human causes like those of care and education, is an inherently impersonal enterprise. Though it may begin in human sympathy, its pursuit of finer and finer distinctions and of bigger and bigger efficiencies leads it to end in inhuman indifference.
Here’s Phil Magness on Fauci’s latest ejaculation of Covid ‘advice’: “He. Is. Making. It. Up. As. He. Goes.”
From the Cafe Hayek comments section:
Michael Wolf writes-
The biggest knock against those who denounce Sweden is that, according to them, Sweden should be nothing less than a disaster zone. The whole case for lockdowns – the honest one – isn’t that they marginally help. It’s that they’re worth the MASSIVE devastation and destruction because without them, there’d be bodies stacked in the streets. If Sweden isn’t by far the worst performing country on the planet – and it isn’t even close to the worst – then their whole case crumbles. They obfuscate this by myopically focusing solely on covid (and even there, their case isn’t very strong as Sweden is better than the UK and in line with EU averages). But looking at the big picture of mental health, medical procedures and screenings canceled, and all the rest – Sweden obviously shows that the lockdowns weren’t worth it.
Patrick O’Flynn argues that “Until lockdown is eased and basic liberties are restored, our society will be in peril.” Here are three more slices:
They certainly have their uses, but neither Chris Whitty nor Patrick Vallance – the [U.K.] Government’s head honchos for medical and scientific advice – is ever going to be an expert on the wider impacts of curtailing basic freedom.
Either could tell you all about the R value – the reproduction rate of Covid – but neither would have the first clue how to draw up an L value – L being an index for the damage associated with the loss of liberty.
…..
The cumulative harms caused to general morale, mental health, physical fitness, personal relationships, family networks, job prospects, business viability, essential trust in government as a benign force and many other things must all be tipping into their highest-ever categories.
Sadly, we are never going to hear a TV news bulletin leading as follows: “Ministers were under growing pressure to accelerate the journey out of lockdown after experts revealed that the L value is believed to have reached an all-time high, soaring to dangerous levels in many parts of the country.”
Instead, we must trust Boris Johnson and his ministers to be their own experts on an implicit L value and instinctively know how to weigh it against the epidemiological metrics and projections presented to them by Messrs Whitty and Vallance. Is this happening to a suitable extent? It doesn’t look like it to me.
Given that the Government’s “data, not dates” mantra has been exposed as a sham because better data continues to be trumped by earliest dates that are apparently set in stone, it is unsurprising that another anti-lockdown rebellion is brewing on the Tory benches.
…..
The sense that authority is being wielded fairly, which is so essential to civilised society, is dissipating rapidly.
Anthony Fauci has become a one-man plague of societal and governmental dysfunction.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 35 of Thomas Sowell’s 1979 Hillsdale College lecture, “Knowledge and Decisions,” as it appears in Champions of Freedom, Volume 7 (1980):
Decisions over the past half century or so have been gravitating away from those people who directly experience the consequences, and toward third parties who simply observe. That is, decisions are moving, for example, out of the market, where those who directly buy and sell something can decide whether they want it or they want it a certain way or a different way, into the hands of other people who simply look on. For example, automobiles are now made not simply the way customers want them and General Motors is willing to produce them. They also have to please Ralph Nader. I happen to have one of those bumpers that are now built to please Ralph Nader, and I can’t get a bicycle rack on it. I’m willing to pay to have the old bumper, General Motors is willing to produce it, but it would not make Ralph happy.
March 14, 2021
Defending Scott Atlas
Here’s a letter to a woman who scolds me whenever, at my blog, I cite Scott Atlas approvingly.
Ms. D___:
You’re the fourth person to send to me the FT’s ‘interview’ of Dr. Scott Atlas. I’m much less impressed with the ‘interview’ than you are. It’s more of a hit piece on Atlas than an objective report of his views on Covid-19 and lockdowns.
I have now neither the time nor patience to give the ‘interview’ the full evisceration that it deserves. So let’s look at one key point – namely, ‘reporter’ Kiran Stacey’s attempt to discredit Atlas for endorsing the Swedish government’s famously light reaction to Covid.
After documenting his grilling of Atlas on Sweden and getting answers that he didn’t like, Stacey wrote:
Would he at least say that Sweden largely followed his blueprint, and so its success or failure reflects on whether he is right? “I don’t know. I haven’t made an effort to look in detail at everything that Sweden did.”
I am surprised by Atlas’s lack of familiarity with the Swedish case, not least because it had been a cause célèbre among lockdown sceptics….
Given the earlier grilling – during which, by the way, Atlas revealed that he in fact suffers no “lack of familiarity with the Swedish case” – Atlas appears to me to have sensibly avoided falling into what might have been a trap set by Stacey. If Atlas had answered “yes” to Stacey’s question, he’d have put himself at risk of Stacey finding some difference between the details of Sweden’s actions and what Stacey calls Atlas’s “blueprint.” A reporter as obviously hostile to Atlas as is Stacey would likely have highlighted these differences, however minor, and then inflated these into a charge that Atlas is so unfamiliar with Sweden that all that the Doctor says on the matter should be ignored.
More importantly, on the substance of the Swedish case: The data support Atlas, not Stacey. As shown in Our World in Data, the pattern over time in daily Covid deaths per million in Sweden tracks quite closely the pattern of daily Covid deaths per million in the U.K., even though the U.K. has suffered far harsher lockdowns than has Sweden. Indeed – and despite Sweden having at the start of Covid an unusually large amount of “dry tinder” – the percentage of Swedes who’ve so far died of Covid (0.13) is lower than is the percentage of Brits (0.19) who’ve done the same.*
So, no, the FT’s ‘report’ on Dr. Atlas does nothing to diminish my respect for him. But it does diminish my respect for the FT.
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
* Calculated from data easily gotten by Googling the population of both Sweden and the U.K., as well as the number of Covid deaths to date in each of these countries.
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