Russell Roberts's Blog, page 315
February 10, 2021
Phil Magness on the Calamity of Covid Derangement Syndrome
Here’s a video of Phil Magness’s wonderful recent talk, at Hillsdale College, titled “The Failures of Pandemic Central Planning.”
Am I a Guinea Pig in an Evil Scientist’s Experiment?
For many months now I’ve felt as if I am a guinea pig in a scientific experiment. Some unseen scientist, likely evil, is studying what happens to human beings if a relatively small number of us experience reality in a completely different manner from how the majority of humanity experiences the same reality.
This unseen experimenter has put me into the smaller group. Other American guinea pigs include Betsy and Lyle Albaugh, Jim Bovard, Bryan Caplan, Veronique de Rugy, David Henderson, Dan Klein, Jeffrey Tucker, and Todd Zywicki. But we are tiny in number. Most of our fellow human beings perceive reality very differently from how we guinea pigs perceive it.
We guinea pigs look at the data on Covid and see a dangerous disease, but one whose dangers are reserved largely for the very old and the seriously ill. The danger of this disease to most of humanity is somewhat higher to a large number of people than are the dangers of flus and other illnesses that we routinely confront, but not much higher. We guinea pigs see in Covid no disease that differs categorically from other diseases; we guinea pigs see in Covid nothing remotely approaching an existential threat to humanity.
We guinea pigs are therefore dumbfounded by the mass hysteria over Covid. We simply cannot understand the level of other people’s anxieties and fears. To us, these anxieties and fears are utterly out of proportion, by many magnitudes, to the risk that we perceive is presented by the coronavirus pathogen.
Here’s an example. The economist Jason Briggeman shared on his Twitter account my recent acknowledgement that I, without a second thought, dine indoors at restaurants and remove my mask immediately upon being seated. Here’s the entirety of Dr. Briggeman’s initial tweet:
Good tip from Don Boudreaux today on how to cope with wholesale lockdowns of society: Dine indoors at restaurants without a second thought and remove your mask the moment you’re seated.
To Dr. Briggeman and his Twitter followers, it appears that my actions are so obviously outrageous that they are self-indicting. Simply describing my behavior is sufficient to prove my lunacy. (For the record, I wasn’t offering advice to anyone. I was reporting on my own actions.) Yet to me – not least because the restaurants in which I eat conduct their indoor-dining operations legally and allow the removal of masks when seated – nothing about my actions seems unusual or worthy of criticism. And so I am genuinely flabbergasted by the fact that my actions strike Dr. Briggeman as being speaking-for-themselves outrageous.
Note that one of Dr. Briggeman’s followers wonders if my essay, or my account in that essay, is “real.” Like, wow! Surely no actual human being today dines indoors at restaurants and then publicly admits to doing so!
I understand that many people have risk preferences that differ from mine. And I respect these different preferences. But what I do not begin to understand is why people such as Dr. Briggeman treat actions such as my own not as manifestations merely of different risk preferences but, rather, as actions that are so extremely dangerous and self-destructive that no rational person would dare even to think of performing them. Is my comfort at dining indoors at restaurants so unusual, so bizarre, so self-destructive that I deserve to be publicly scorned?
As I explained in the essay to which Dr. Briggeman takes exception, my reading of the data on Covid tells me that it is not much of a danger to me (which is why I treat Covid as being not much of a danger to me). My reading of the data tells me also that Covid is not remotely close to being the grave danger to the general population that most people believe it to be.
And, frankly, I find it impossible to understand why anyone who looks at the data on Covid fails to see that this disease is magnitudes less dangerous than it would have to be to justify the hysteria and the lockdowns.
Thus I worry that some unseen experimenter has injected me and a relatively few other guinea pigs with some hallucinogen that causes us to perceive reality as differing fundamentally from the perception that most other people have of reality.
Is the unseen experimenter testing to see if, as a result of this powerful hallucinogen, I and my fellow guinea pigs will go insane? I don’t know the unseen experimenter’s purpose, but if he, she, or it is real, I earnestly beg him, her, or it to please stop. Awaken us from this nightmare of a deranged world in which one purpose and one purpose only is treated as worthy – namely, avoiding Covid, just as would homo avoidcovidus!
Some Covid Links
This piece by Simon Elmer is long, but it contains some excellent information. A slice:
As if this weren’t enough to increase the official tally of deaths attributed to COVID-19 far beyond the numbers of UK citizens that actually died of the disease, there’s the additional problem of the changes to how death certificates record the cause of death. On 20 April, the World Health Organisation (WHO) issued the ‘International guidelines for certification and classification (coding) of COVID-19 as cause of death’. These instructed medical practitioners that, if COVID-19 is the ‘suspected’ or ‘probable’ or ‘assumed’ cause of death, it must always be recorded, in Part 1 of the death certificate, as the ‘underlying cause’ of death. In contrast, co-morbidities such as cancer, heart disease, dementia, diabetes or chronic respiratory infections other than COVID-19 should only be recorded in Part 2 of the death certificate as a ‘contributing’ cause. To clear up any confusion this may cause to a doctor filling out the death certificate of an 80-year-old patient who has died of cancer and tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 post mortem, the WHO instructed medical professionals: ‘Always apply these instructions, whether they can be considered medically correct or not.’
(DBx: This last quoted line sounded inaccurate even to my cynical ears, so I checked it out. It’s accurate. This unbelievable demand from the WHO for inaccuracy is outrageous. [Elmer’s link above doesn’t work for me, so I found the April 20th, 2020, WHO document here and downloaded it.])
GMU Econ alum – and cancer survivor – Matt Kibbe writes wisely about our reaction to Covid. A slice:
The same unintended consequences are occurring among people afflicted with cardiovascular disease and cancer, respectively the number 1 and 2 global killers. When all of the “fear porn” articles about the pandemic finally stop driving clicks, we will wake up to the devasting number of unnecessary casualties caused by a lack of attention and treatment against diseases far more dangerous than COVID.
I’m not writing this to judge anyone with a lower tolerance for risk than mine. I’m simply trying to give you a different perspective, hoping you might understand my perspective. Time, for me, is too precious to put life—my journey—on hold. Each day wasted is one I will never get back.
Derek Thompson, of the Atlantic, decries “hygiene theater.” A slice:
But half a year later, Goldman looks oracular. Since last spring, the CDC has expanded its guidance to clarify that the coronavirus “spreads less commonly through contact with contaminated surfaces.” In the past month, the leading scientific journal Nature published both a long analysis and a sharp editorial reiterating Goldman’s thesis. “A year into the pandemic, the evidence is now clear,” the editorial begins. “Catching the virus from surfaces—although plausible—seems to be rare.”
Andrew Codevilla ponders dismounting the Covid tiger. A slice:
Throughout 2020, doctors and hospitals had been encouraged—if not pressured—to label as COVID any set of symptoms that looked remotely like it (explaining why cases of influenza almost disappeared from the United States last year). Now the WHO asked them to make sure that in order for a case to be labeled COVID, symptoms must also match positive results of the standard PCR test.
Simultaneously, the WHO strongly suggested that those who administer the PCR test reduce the number of cycles through which samples are processed. Through 2020, most jurisdictions in America had run samples through 40 cycles. Running that many cycles radically increases the chances of a positive result. This not only inflated the number of “cases,” but it also attributed hospitalizations to COVID-19 rather than to other causes. It led to patients being treated as if they had COVID rather than for what really ailed them, and attributing deaths to COVID that in fact were not.
The new guidance guarantees that, in the coming months, the number of “cases” will drop. The oligarchy will credit the reduction to its wise management. Loosening its grip gradually, it will claim benevolence and prudence. By thus dismounting the COVID tiger, it will try to validate the harm it did over the previous year.
Anyone dreaming of a return to the old normality can forget it. The disease marks a defining point in history, where lots of things which have been incubating for years finally fall into place and the world shifts decisively on its axis.
Even though not a particularly serious pandemic by some past standards (the plague, Spanish flu), there is an air of fin de siècle about Covid, a shifting of the tectonic plates that tells us that things are never going to be quite the same again. Perhaps the biggest of these changes, and for the more liberally minded among us one of the most worrying, is a much bigger and more intrusive role for the state.
This is often the result of a serious crisis; all of a sudden, the state finds that it is needed, that when all around is frightened chaos, it is the only game in town, and it demands something back in return.
Covid has allowed the Government massively to expand its reach and powers, nationalising great swathes of the economy and, through its social distancing restrictions, reaching deep into the way people live their lives.
Under the guise of the public health emergency, Covid has also – via test and trace and mass vaccination – sanctioned a great leap forward in the surveillance society.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 215 of Maxwell Stearns’s 2000 book, Constitutional Process: A Social Choice Analysis of Supreme Court Decision Making (footnote deleted):
In evaluating the merit of an economic model, it is misleading to use terms such as correct or incorrect. Economic models are neither true nor false. Instead, the value of a positive economic analysis depends upon the extent to which the model generates meaningful insights about enigmatic phenomena in the real world. Because economic models are intended to be manageable images of reality, a tension necessarily arises between a model’s descriptive accuracy and its manageability. Developing an economic model, therefore, differs from developing a theory in one of the natural, or “hard,” sciences. While even a single contrary datum can raise questions about the accuracy of a genuinely scientific theory, even the most robust economic models are unable to account for a considerable amount of data. As a result, locating one or more data unaccounted for in an economic model may be of no more value in refuting the model than observing that the model and reality are different.
February 9, 2021
Some Covid Links
This essay makes me miss South Carolina.
The subject of lockdowns was on the agenda of my most-recent chat with Dan Proft.
Libby Emmons decries Fauci’s flip-flopping.
Edward Cranswick writes from the increasingly totalitarian state of Victoria, Australia. A slice:
Following this disastrous episode, Premier [Daniel] Andrews’ seized the opportunity to implement the most extreme emergency measures modern Australia has seen. Victorians were only allowed out for one hour of exercise per day and one shopping trip per household per day. They couldn’t transgress a 5km radius from their home. Evening curfews were imposed without any evident public health justification, and heavy fines awaited anyone caught breaking any of these or myriad other rules.
Oliver Hartwich pulls back the curtain on New Zealand dictator Jacida Ardern.
“Wreckage upon wreckage, lie upon lie” (although I do not believe that Bill Gates, for all of his destructiveness as a philanthropist, was ever a monopolist as a businessman).
George Cooper is unimpressed with the SAGEs.
A reminder: At 7:00pm EST Phil Magness will debate Jeremy Horpedahl on “Lockdowns and Liberty.”
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 81 of George Will’s superb 2019 book, The Conservative Sensibility (original emphases):
Today, wise people, remembering a European nation galvanized by the slogan “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer” flinch from [Woodrow] Wilson’s trope about “the heart-blood of one people.” It is one thing to postulate that history will produce ever increasing social harmony; it is another and ominous thing to speak of society as “one people” in an organic sense. If society is supposed to be an organic unity because the laws of history’s unfolding say so, and if society is, as a matter of morality, supposed to be as united as the human body, then behold: Disagreements and factionalism become symptoms of bodily diseases. Such language greases society’s skid toward virulent intolerance of dissent, the sort of intolerance that gripped America during World War I and tarnished Wilson’s second presidential term. Wilson was, however, so thoroughly wedded to the conception of society as a single organism, his thinking could not accommodate even a flicker of the Founders’ anxieties about government being inherently dangerous, especially governments wielded by majorities. Such anxieties, which were present at the creation of classical liberalism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, seemed to Wilson not merely misplaced but illogical.
DBx: Indeed.
What is truly illogical, of course, is the notion that the people of a nation really are either a single sentient creature, such as a human body, or an extended family. As George Will suggests, this false belief creates hostility toward individuals whose peaceful, voluntary activities are regarded as being at odds with “society’s goals.”
February 8, 2021
Standing By My AIER Essay (and Thankful to Bryan Caplan for Sharing It)
There’s a reason why I never had a Twitter account:
Mr. D___:
Although I’m not on Twitter, I was able to read the Twitter thread on Bryan Caplan’s favorable tweet of my most-recent AIER column. Thanks – I think! – for sending it to me. While many of the criticisms of my position are very harsh, none is very strong. Indeed, many of the critics seem not to have read my column at all.
At least when I last looked (about fifteen minutes ago), no critic takes seriously the possibility of better containing Covid by focusing prevention (as recommended by the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration) on the vulnerable rather than by wholesale lockdowns of society. No critic considers the strong evidence that lockdowns are not very effective at controlling Covid. No critic deals with Bryan’s argument that our response to Covid is vastly out of proportion to the greater danger that Covid poses to us than is posed by the flu.
I could list other of the critics’ relevant omissions. But I want here to mention one critical commission: the point about alleged hospital overcrowding. Even if, contrary to much evidence, lockdowns significantly reduce Covid’s transmission, and even if there were a case to be made in the past that lockdowns were necessary to prevent hospital overcrowding, the data now show that this issue is no longer live.
At you’ll find hospital-occupancy data, as of February 1st, 2021, for each U.S. state and territory. Specifically, you’ll find state- and territory-level data on “% Inpatient Beds Used (Estimate)” and “% ICU Bed Utilization (Estimate).” Only one state or territory – Rhode Island – had inpatient-bed occupancy of more than 81 percent. That state’s rate was 91%. Of all 59 states and territories, 53 had inpatient-bed occupancy rates of less than 80 percent.
A similar pattern holds for ICU bed utilization. In only two states or territories was this rate in the 90s (Rhode Island at 91 and Delaware at 90). Of all 59 states and territories, 46 had ICU bed-utilization rates lower than 80 percent.
I understand that these data do not necessarily capture the situations of individual hospitals or of locales within each state and territory. Perhaps some individual hospitals are still pressed for capacity. But at least at the state level as of February 1st, there is little evidence of American hospitals being overcrowded. (By the way, the situation was not much different in December.)
And because daily reported Covid cases have been falling now for four weeks, the situation today, on Feb. 8th, is likely even better than it was on Feb. 1st.
I stand by what I wrote in my AIER essay and am thankful to Bryan Caplan for sharing it on Twitter.
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
Standing by My AIER Essay (and Thankful to Bryan Caplan for Sharing It)
There’s a reason why I never had a Twitter account:
Mr. D___:
Although I’m not on Twitter, I was able to read the Twitter thread on Bryan Caplan’s favorable tweet of my most-recent AIER column. Thanks – I think! – for sending it to me. While many of the criticisms of my position are very harsh, none is very strong. Indeed, many of the critics seem not to have read my column at all.
At least when I last looked (about fifteen minutes ago), no critic takes seriously the possibility of better containing Covid by focusing prevention (as recommended by the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration) on the vulnerable rather than by wholesale lockdowns of society. No critic considers the strong evidence that lockdowns are not very effective at controlling Covid. No critic deals with Bryan’s argument that our response to Covid is vastly out of proportion to the greater danger that Covid poses to us than is posed by the flu.
I could list other of the critics’ relevant omissions. But I want here to mention one critical commission: the point about alleged hospital overcrowding. Even if, contrary to much evidence, lockdowns significantly reduce Covid’s transmission, and even if there were a case to be made in the past that lockdowns were necessary to prevent hospital overcrowding, the data now show that this issue is no longer live.
At you’ll find hospital-occupancy data, as of February 1st, 2021, for each U.S. state and territory. Specifically, you’ll find state- and territory-level data on “% Inpatient Beds Used (Estimate)” and “% ICU Bed Utilization (Estimate).” Only one state or territory – Rhode Island – had inpatient-bed occupancy of more than 81 percent. That state’s rate was 91%. Of all 59 states and territories, 53 had inpatient-bed occupancy rates of less than 80 percent.
A similar pattern holds for ICU bed utilization. In only two states or territories was this rate in the 90s (Rhode Island at 91 and Delaware at 90). Of all 59 states and territories, 46 had ICU bed-utilization rates lower than 80 percent.
I understand that these data do not necessarily capture the situations of individual hospitals or of locales within each state and territory. Perhaps some individual hospitals are still pressed for capacity. But at least at the state level as of February 1st, there is little evidence of American hospitals being overcrowded. (By the way, the situation was not much different in December.)
And because daily reported Covid cases have been falling now for four weeks, the situation today, on Feb. 8th, is likely even better than it was on Feb. 1st.
I stand by what I wrote in my AIER essay and am thankful to Bryan Caplan for sharing it on Twitter.
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
Mystified by the Reaction to Covid-19
And so here’s a feature of Covid that I do incessantly wonder about: What’s so special about this communicable and dangerous disease that causes humanity to treat it as differing categorically from the countless other communicable and dangerous diseases that we regard with utter blasé-ness?
It won’t do to answer that Covid’s lethality is higher than normal. Such an answer, strictly speaking, implies that lockdowns, masks, “social distancing,” and all the other arbitrary exercises of massive government powers and antisocial behaviors that are justified as necessary to fight Covid-19 become appropriate the moment we encounter a disease that is even slightly more dangerous than ‘normal.’
How much higher than normal must rise the lethality of a communicable pathogen in order to justify the sort of wholesale rearrangement of human existence, and crushing of human freedom, that we’ve suffered over the past eleven months? Pro-lockdowners ignore this question. They simply assume that Covid’s dangers are so much higher than normal as to make Covid unquestionably a categorically different threat, one that justifies categorically different responses.
It would be nice to get some specifics. For example, how much more lethal than the flu must a contagious disease be in order to justify lockdowns? Five hundred percent? One hundred percent? Five percent? Exactly where does Covid sit on the spectrum of less-than-normal to more-than-normal lethality? And where on that spectrum does a disease’s danger transform it categorically from less-dangerous ones?
According to the OhioHealth blog, whose proprietors recently compared Covid-19 to the flu, Covid kills 1.6 percent of the people who contract it while the flu kills 0.1 percent of its carriers. This difference is significant. But does it put Covid into an altogether different category of diseases? Does it justify the hysteria of the past year and the resulting lockdowns?
Because on these numbers Covid is 16 times more likely to kill its victims than is the flu, a tentative answer of ‘yes’ might be given. Yet it’s fair to wonder – as does Bryan Caplan – why the response to Covid isn’t more proportional to Covid’s dangers. While I know of no credible quantification of society’s defensive reaction to Covid compared to society’s defensive reaction to the flu, my sense is that the Covid lockdowns and other unprecedented measures undertaken in the name of prevention are magnitudes more than 16 times greater than are the measures that humanity regularly undertakes to avoid the flu.
If you doubt my sense, consider the measures taken to avoid the flu. At the collective level, almost no such measures are taken – this despite the flu’s contagiousness and lethality. CNN doesn’t offer daily counts of flu infections and deaths. Schools don’t close despite children being at greater risk from the flu than from Covid. And neither Neil Ferguson nor Anthony Fauci scare us with descriptions of worst-case scenarios of the flu’s spread.
What few measures are taken in response to the flu are taken voluntarily by individuals. People get flu shots and stay home when they’re ill. Some die, are grieved by their loved ones, and are buried without their funerals being filmed and shown sensationally on TV.
Some Non-Covid Links
John McWhorter writes wisely about the pretenses and dangers of the hyperwoke. (HT Arnold Kling) A slice:
Ibram Kendi is someone who, in the role of social scientist, proposes a “Department of Antiracism,” in neglect of a little something called the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. Kendi’s insight on education, untethered to any engagement with pedagogical or psychometric theory, is that we should evaluate students on the basis of their “desire to know” rather than anything they actually do. This is a person whose most ready counsel to the public about interracial adoption is that white adopters might still be racists even if they don’t think they are.
Kendi is a professor who, in the guise of being trained in intellectual inquiry, bristles at real questions. He dismisses them as either racism or as frustrated responses to envy, as if he bears not proposal but truth. His ideas are couched in simple oppositions mired somewhere between catechism and fable, of a sort alien to what intellectual engagement in the modern world consists of, utterly foreign to exchange among conference academics or even Zooming literati. And on that, let us remember that he is also someone who, into the twenty-first century, was walking around thinking of whites as “devils” à la Minister Farrakhan.
Here’s the rub: The people who sit drinking all of this in and calling it deep wouldn’t let it pass for a minute if he were white.
There is, in short, a degree of bigotry in how this man is received by people of power and influence.
Matt Welch reports on the latest eruption of self-destruction at the New York Times.
When developed countries support equality before the law and property rights in poor countries, the left labels them imperialists. But use U.S. taxpayers’ resources to promote the termination of unborn life in poor countries, and progressives call it “health” spending. A similar language game is played when international socialists organize political factions under the banner of “democracy” to consolidate power.
Abortion and democratic socialism are two causes the Biden administration plans to champion in the Northern Triangle of Central America—Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. Sovereignty, respect for local cultural norms, and the economic aspirations of millions of have-nots have never been high ideals in Washington. But now the condescending ideologues are resupplied. The problem is likely to get worse
My colleague Dan Klein writes on David Hume writing on the ancients.
Joakim Book writes insightfully about that hip word and concept “sustainability.” A slice:
Human beings are the organism that has been the most successful at removing nature’s obstacles from our path, and protecting ourselves from its damaging forces. Even though there are six billion more of us today than in 1900, fewer people die at the hand of nature’s powers. That’s us impacting the environment and it is cause for celebration. Impact away!
Scott Lincicome writes about anti-dumping, deindustrialization, and China. Here’s Scott’s opening paragraph:
Whether it’s due to the “China Shock” or “deindustrialization,” a common refrain from those seeking to support American manufacturers and workers via U.S. trade restrictions and subsidies is that these groups have been the helpless victims of “unfettered trade” and “free‐market fundamentalism.” As I’ve explained in a series of recent papers, however, this narrative ignores (among other things) the panoply of U.S. laws that already exist to boost the manufacturing sector — laws that, despite their frequent and continued use, just haven’t worked very well in terms of increasing U.S. manufacturing jobs (and, in fact, have likely harmed the U.S. economy, domestic manufacturers, and blue‐collar workers).
Q: How did you help build George Mason’s economics department into a hotbed of research from a libertarian perspective?
A: When James Buchanan won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1986, we had 26 faculty members. When I became department chairman [in 1995], we had 18. There was considerable hostility toward our department. I tried to work with the administration to rehire those people, and I had a lot of difficulty, so I just said, “Well, the only way I’m going to improve the department is try to privatize the department and go out and raise money to hire people and subsidize hiring people.” A lot of it was from the result of the generosity of supporters like the Lilly Endowment and the [John M.] Olin Foundation.
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