Russell Roberts's Blog, page 309

Explaining My Position on Covid-19 and the Restrictions

(Don Boudreaux)

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In my latest column for AIER I offer some of the reasons why I believe that the public’s fear of Covid-19 is far in excess of what the facts warrant. I explain also why I so adamantly oppose lockdowns, mask mandates, and other hygiene-socialism measures. And in the conclusion I offer what I believe is a sound justification for describing this public hysteria with the attention-grabbing term “Covid Derangement Syndrome.” A slice:

Covid-19 is disproportionately lethal to the very old and ill, and heavily so. In the United States as of February 17th, 2021, nearly a third (31.8%) of “All Deaths Involving Covid-19” – as defined and reported by the CDC – were of persons 85 years old and older. Nearly 60 percent (59.6%) of these deaths were of persons 75 years of age and older. More than 81 percent (81.3%) were of people 65 years of age and older. Despite media-trumpeted exceptions, serious suffering from Covid-19 is largely an experience for very old people.

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Although Covid-19 is indeed unusually dangerous to very old people, it’s still not close to being a death warrant. The infection fatality rate for 85-year-olds is estimated to be 15 percent; for 75-year-olds it’s estimated to be 4.6 percent. For 65-year-olds, Covid’s infection fatality rate is estimated to be 1.4 percent. For 55-year-olds it’s estimated to be 0.4 percent.

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Covid’s overall lethality compared to that of the seasonal flu is no more than10 times greater. (Some estimates have Covid’s lethality, compared to that of the flu, to be as low as 3.5 times greater.) Of course, because Covid’s lethality undeniably rises significantly with age, for the elderly Covid is far more than 10 times as deadly than is the flu, and for young people Covid is much less than ten times as deadly. (Keep in mind that the numbers in this and the previous two paragraphs come chiefly from before any vaccines were administered.)

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Since the Spring of 2020, hospitals in the U.S. have had a financial incentive to inflate their Covid numbers. As reported on April 24, 2020, by USA Today, “The coronavirus relief legislation created a 20% premium, or add-on, for COVID-19 Medicare patients.” Covid inflation occurred outside of the U.S. as well. In Toronto, for example, officials admit that they are inflating the Covid death count: Here’s Toronto Public Health: “Individuals who have died with COVID-19, but not as a result of COVID-19 are included in the case counts for COVID-19 deaths in Toronto.” (I encourage you to read the whole Twitter thread.)

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Lockdowns themselves have negative health consequences. How could they not, even if the only such effect arises because of people’s increased difficulty of visiting physicians for non-Covid-related illnesses and injuries? But there is evidence that negative health consequences of lockdowns extend beyond those that arise from delayed or foregone medical treatments.

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There is credible evidence that lockdowns do not significantly reduce people’s exposure to the coronavirus.

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Lockdowns have negative personal and social consequences. Avoiding contact with family and friends, even during holidays. Inability to fraternize at your favorite gym, coffee shop, bar, or restaurant. Restrictions on travel. Even if you believe that these costs are worth paying, you cannot deny that these costs are serious.

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Lockdowns have a severe negative impact on economic activity. How could they not, given that people are prevented from going to work and from engaging in much ordinary commercial activity? There’s debate about how much of the decline in economic activity is caused by voluntary action and how much is caused by the forcible lockdowns. Even in light of the likelihood that people’s fear of Covid is further stoked by the very fact that governments’ resort to the dramatic action of locking us down, evidence exists that a great deal of economic damage was caused by the lockdowns themselves.

Lord Protector Boris

(Don Boudreaux)

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Desmond Swayne compares the tyranny currently raging in Great Britain to the tyranny that raged in England under Oliver Cromwell.

Some Non-Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Arnold Kling takes on Oren Cass (who continues to deeply misunderstand the case for free markets). Here’s Arnold’s opening sentence:

In “When Market Economists Fail” (Fall 2020), Oren Cass sets up a strawman version of free-market economics, which he proceeds to burn up in a blaze of rhetoric.

Pierre Lemieux tries to demystify the mysterious shortage of microchips.

My colleague Bryan Caplan asks “What does the success sequence mean?”

Nobel-laureate economist James Heckman will discuss the role of families in human flourishing.

Who’d a-thunk it?!

Robby Soave reports on the ominous trend of government officials pressing private citizens to control the dissemination of information.

Scott Lincicome and Revana Sharfuddin ponder the demise of the department store. A slice:

As we’ve discussed here previously, other data on middle-class wages and incomes show that the primary cause of the “shrinking” middle class is Americans moving up, not down, the financial ladder. Thus, there’s little data to suggest that “the collapse of America’s middle class crushed department stores.” Instead, this is far more likely a simple case of – pandemic aside – increasingly wealthy Americans preferring the convenience and variety of e-commerce or the uniqueness of brick-and-mortar niche retail over the traditional department store model – a preference that anyone who’s recently wandered a cavernous department store looking for a shirt or toaster, only to find it’s out of stock, probably understands. (And don’t even get us started on the parking garages.)

Here’s John Cochrane on the reaction to the death of Rush Limbaugh.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, John Greenwood and Steve Hanke worry that inflation is on the horizon. Here’s their conclusion:

So we already know that the money supply will likely increase by at least another $2.3 trillion over the current year. In other words, even without any new lending or further purchases of securities by banks, the M2 money supply will grow by nearly 12% this year. That’s twice as fast as its average growth rate from 2000-19. It’s a rate that spells trouble—inflation trouble.

Jay Nordlinger talks with Douglas Carswell, the former British MP who is now president of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Covid Derangement Syndrome cannot be spoofed, for it is an ongoing spoof – if a terribly sad and dangerous one – of itself. (HT Phil Magness) Meal-time wear:

Amelia Janaskie joins the ranks of those comparing lightly harassed Florida to tyrannized California.

GraceLife Church in Edmonton issued an eloquent statement about Covid-19 and lockdowns. (HT Michael McAuley)

Having engaged in an immense amount of research, interacting with both doctors and frontline healthcare workers, it is apparent that the negative effects of the government lockdown measures on society far surpass the effects of COVID-19. The science being used to justify lockdown measures is both suspect and selective. In fact, there is no empirical evidence that lockdowns are effective in mitigating the spread of the virus. We are gravely concerned that COVID-19 is being used to fundamentally alter society and strip us all of our civil liberties. By the time the so-called “pandemic” is over, if it is ever permitted to be over, Albertans will be utterly reliant on government, instead of free, prosperous, and independent.

As such, we believe love for our neighbor demands that we exercise our civil liberties. We do not see our actions as perpetuating the longevity of COVID-19 or any other virus that will inevitably come along. If anything, we see our actions as contributing to its end – the end of destructive lockdowns and the end of the attempt to institutionalize the debilitating fear of viral infections. Our local church is clear evidence that governmental lockdowns are unnecessary. In fact, it is also evidence of how harmful they are. Without going into detail, we recently lost the life of one of our precious congregants who was denied necessary health care due to government lockdown measures.

Britain is no longer a free country. It’s simply not.

Sonia Elijah hopes that her fellow Brits will come to their senses and protest the tyranny of lockdowns.

George Leef weighs in on the ZeroCovid cult.

A death caused by lockdown.

Three Canadian physicians discuss Covid and Covid restrictions.

Bill Gates has become a menace to humanity.

Here’s a letter sent by Philip Foster to the tyrannical U.K. Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Matt Hancock. A slice:

Remember your tame buffoons Ferguson et al telling us the (non-existent) ‘second wave’ would be far worse than the first? Yet again they could not have been more wrong. These people should not be allowed to remain in any kind of academic post. They are frauds and liars of the nastiest kind.

One day, when a sober analysis of the last year is done, there may be criminal prosecutions; not for going on holiday to Portugal, but for infringement of human rights, destroying your country’s economy and indeed for crimes against humanity (mass false imprisonment of the innocent). I hope you do not find yourself sharing a bucket with Mr Ferguson, who has been utterly wrong about every ‘epidemic’ in the last thirty years, including Covid, and has cost the taxpayer in excess of £300billion.

It is a crime to shout ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theatre for no reason. It is a far worse crime to scream ‘killer pandemic’ to a whole nation. You are complicit in this crime unless you return to the real world and bring sanity back.

Here’s a glimpse into the reality of government-schooling overlords. (HT my intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy)

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 318 of the “Random Thoughts” section of Thomas Sowell’s 2002 volume, Controversial Essays:

One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be and how dangerous it is to trust them.

DBx: Of course, not all would-be secular saviors are dishonorable; some are indeed motivated by good intentions. But what is true of all would-be secular saviors is that none of them has, or could possibly ever have, enough knowledge for their schemes to work as publicly advertised. All would-be saviors – whether dishonorable, honorable, or middlin’ – are arrogant; each is slathered in hubris.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 188 of Deirdre McCloskey’s and Alberto Mingardi’s excellent 2020 book, The Myth of the Entrepreneurial State (footnotes deleted):

Laissez faire was wise in another way, embodying the idea of a Hippocratic oath for social scientists and officials: First, do no harm. Yet, unlike the Hippocratic oath, it went out of fashion.

DBx: Indeed. And the absence of this prudential principle was especially regrettable over these past 12 months.

JP Sears on AOC and Other Dishonest and Arrogant Politicians

(Don Boudreaux)

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Some Non-Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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J. Peder Zane profiles, in the Wall Street Journal, Duke professor John Staddon’s defense of the scientific method and his resistance to the idiocy and dangers of wokeness on campus. A slice:

Mr. Staddon has challenged the work of leading social scientists, including Duke sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, whose books include “Racism Without Racists: Colorblind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America.” “If colorblindness, the MLK ideal, is itself racist,” Mr. Staddon has written, “we are in an Alice-in-Wonderland world, and racial strife without end.”

Mr. Staddon is especially troubled by the concept of “implicit bias,” which holds that unconsciously held beliefs about social groups perpetuate racism, so that “basically, we are racist no matter what we do or even think.” He notes that the main mechanism for measuring it, the Implicit Association Test, “fails the most basic reliability and validity criteria. Yet it is still widely administered to hapless employees in numerous institutions across the country.”

John McWhorter writes about today’s neoracists. (HT Arnold Kling) A slice:

I suspect that deep down, most know that none of this catechism makes any sense. Less obvious is that it was not even composed with logic in mind. The self-contradiction of these tenets is crucial, in revealing that Third Wave Antiracism is not a philosophy but a religion.

The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board rightly warns us to be on guard against the arrogant social engineers being appointed by Biden. A slice:

Mr. Biden sent the nomination of Rohit Chopra, an Elizabeth Warren protégé and commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission, to the Senate last week. Senators who want to understand Mr. Chopra’s thinking about the role of regulators in American democracy might crack open a report he co-authored in 2018 for the Roosevelt Institute. It envisions an unaccountable Washington “corruption” czar writing rules, issuing fines and working his will over politicians, think tanks and nonprofits.

Art Carden explains that prices set on markets help us to bear one another’s burdens. A slice:

As a lot of people have pointed out, high prices for water, gas, and building supplies are like signal flares specifically saying “Send water, gas, and building supplies!” Importantly, a sudden high price for bottled water in New Braunfels raises the cost of selling bottled water in New Mexico, New York, or New South Wales: the relevant cost of selling bottled water in one of these places is the now-higher price people in New Braunfels are willing to pay. Even if it’s cost-prohibitive to remove water from shelves in New South Wales and ship it to New Braunfels, higher prices will tell merchants and customers in New South Wales to expect to pay more in the future and, therefore, to conserve what they have today.

The uncivilized banana-republic practice of civil asset forfeiture expands in Indiana.

Eric Boehm calls on Biden to remove Trump’s tariffs. A slice:

The tariffs on Chinese imports that came to define Trump’s trade agenda have been economically damaging, but Biden appears unwilling to discard them for fear of losing the domestic political benefits that come with standing up to China. The U.S.-E.U. front of Trump’s trade war, meanwhile, is economically nonsensical and politically pointless—it is causing unnecessary pain to American businesses and the economies of longtime allies without providing any apparent benefits (even vacuous, populist ones).

Peter Wallison warns against raising the minimum wage.

David Henderson carefully lays out the core economic case against minimum wages. A slice:

Among non-economists and politicians, the minimum wage is one of the most misunderstood issues in economic policy. President Biden and almost all Democrats and some Republicans in the US Congress advocate increasing the federal minimum wage from its current level of $7.25 an hour to $15 an hour over four years. They argue that many of the workers earning between $7.25 and $15 will get a raise in hourly wage. That’s true. But what they don’t tell you, and what many of them probably don’t know, is that many workers in that wage range will suffer a huge drop in wages—from whatever they’re earning down to zero. Other low-wage workers will stay employed but will work fewer hours a week. Many low-wage workers will find that their non-wage benefits will fall and that employers will work them harder. Why all those effects? Because an increase in the minimum wage doesn’t magically make workers more productive. A minimum wage of $15 an hour will exceed the productivity of many low-wage workers.

The reason some workers earn low wages is not that employers are greedy exploiters. If exploitation were enough to explain low wages, then why would employers ever pay anyone over $7.25 an hour? Wages are what they are because they reflect two things: (1) workers’ productivity and (2) competition among employers.

And don’t miss this new paper – discussed by David Henderson. It’s by David Neumark and Peter Shirley, and reviews minimum-wage research. Here’s the abstract:

The disagreement among studies of the employment effects of minimum wages in the United States is well known. What is less well known, and more puzzling, is the absence of agreement on what the research literature says – that is, how economists even summarize the body of evidence on the employment effects of minimum wages. Summaries range from “it is now well-established that higher minimum wages do not reduce employment,” to “the evidence is very mixed with effects centered on zero so there is no basis for a strong conclusion one way or the other,” to “most evidence points to adverse employment effects.” We explore the question of what conclusions can be drawn from the literature, focusing on the evidence using subnational minimum wage variation within the United States that has dominated the research landscape since the early 1990s. To accomplish this, we assembled the entire set of published studies in this literature and identified the core estimates that support the conclusions from each study, in most cases relying on responses from the researchers who wrote these papers. Our key conclusions are: (i) there is a clear preponderance of negative estimates in the literature; (ii) this evidence is stronger for teens and young adults as well as the less-educated; (iii) the evidence from studies of directly-affected workers points even more strongly to negative employment effects; and (iv) the evidence from studies of low-wage industries is less one-sided.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Per Bylund and Mark Packard, in a newly published academic paper in the Southern Economic Journal, offer an explanation for why so many governments clamped draconian lockdowns on their citizens while Sweden did not. (HT Dan Klein) A slice:

Worse, when political power coalesces around particular expertise, the concentration of specific knowledge in relatively small groups of experts causes de facto “epistemic monopolies” (Koppl, et al., 2012) – “this sort of dependency on expertise is intimately connected with the idea of monopoly” (Horwitz, 2012, p. 62). Although most social and scientific knowledge is heterogeneous, causally ambiguous, and thus widely disagreed or disputed, such disagreements are obscured by the fact that only a select few are the socially “recognized” or “appointed” experts and, thus, the only whose opinions are taken into account in policy decisions. Any heterogeneity among expert views, therefore, may be unrecognized by nonexperts.

Jenin Younes accurately describes the ZeroCovid movement as a cult dressed as science. A slice:

While marketing themselves as theoretically opposed to lockdowns, ZeroCovid adherents actually aspire to implement a totalitarian-style state, which we are supposed to believe will exist only temporarily. For example, Devi Sridhar, one of the movement’s most public faces in the United Kingdom, has claimed that the only way out of endless lockdown is a “crude, harsh, catastrophic lockdown” now, the first phase. Given that the third phase of Sridhar’s plan entails an “East Asian and Pacific model of elimination” that prohibits travel abroad, I can only imagine precisely what sort of totalitarian nightmare Sridhar envisions during phase one.

Robert Dingwall argues that the tyrannical Zero Covid movement must be resisted. Two slices:

We are rapidly approaching a crunch point for Britain. Do we treat the virus as an ordinary risk of life, much as we do with the other 30 respiratory viruses that have infected humans throughout history? This is the approach we have been promised since the beginning of the crisis.

Or do we try to eliminate the virus from the UK altogether – the so-called Zero Covid approach, a route I believe is now favoured by a worrying number of influential voices in science and in Government?

This is a political choice, not a scientific one – and I’m concerned at what I see. In my view, Zero Covid is authoritarian, involving a systematic denial of basic humanity. And it is probably impossible to achieve.

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The nearest working model of Zero Covid can be found in China, where the strategy from the outset was to have no infections at all. David Rennie, of The Economist, describes life in Beijing today: ‘Every time you step outside your door you have to use a smartphone to scan a QR code – every shop, every taxi, every bus, every metro station. You have no privacy at all – it’s all built around this electronic system of contact tracing…

‘We basically don’t have the virus here, but… it’s very hard to know where Covid containment starts and a Communist police state with an obsession with control kicks in.’

Derek Winton replies to Neil Ferguson’s response.

Sarah Williamson surveys the U.K.’s Covid-containment strategy. A slice:

In autumn of 2020 I lost my friend to a shocking heart attack at the age of 49. He spent 10 days in critical care with the amazing NHS staff doing everything in their power to save him against the odds. He tested negative upon arrival for COVID-19, but had he tested positive during his stay he would have been recorded as a COVID-19 death, despite dying from the injuries caused to his body and brain by the heart attack. The statistics vary but, nosocomial or hospital-acquired COVID-19 infections account for approximately 17-25% of hospital ‘admissions’ for Covid. The really important question here is should all these deaths and admissions be recorded as deaths attributed to COVID-19?

Mark Ellse writes that the case for lockdowns is built on intellectual dishonesty.

Ethan Yang shares insight from his mom. Two slices:

Knowing what people are capable of if given the tools to oppress one another, at this point I would say I am begging you as the reader to stand for freedom at a time when it is clearly under assault. When the government takes away liberty, it seldom gives it back and its abuse of power just keeps growing.

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Protecting free enterprise is just as essential to our liberty and prosperity as our civil rights. We can argue over how high taxes should be, the extent of environmental regulations, and so on but there should be a consensus that economic freedom is essential. The freedom to operate a business, to conduct commerce, and to be protected from the arbitrary will of central planners and their cronies. Nationalizing industry and imposing crushing restrictions on our ability to earn a living is a recipe for stagnation and decay. There is a powerful correlation between economic freedom and prosperity, and economists like Deirdre McCloskey assert that modern prosperity was made possible because of the acceptance of ideas regarding private enterprise. It allowed more and more people to contribute to society and checked the power of competitors who wished to keep everyone else down.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 94 of my late, great colleague Walter Williams’s 2010 autobiography, Up From the Projects:

I have always found a hiring on the basis of race, ethnicity, or sex demeaning and offensive.