Russell Roberts's Blog, page 316

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Stanford University’s Jay Bhattacharya talks with Sharyl Attkisson, in this podcast, about the ineffectiveness of lockdowns at controlling the spread of SARS-CoV-2.

“Greens love lockdowns.” Ben Pile explains. A slice:

For Monbiot, the logic of lockdown was simple enough. ‘What we’ve discovered with the pandemic is that when people are called upon to act, they’ll take far more extreme action than environmentalists have ever called for’, he said. In Monbiot’s view, all that was required to elicit the obedience of the population was for the government to make it ‘abundantly clear that we have to do this for the good of all’. But this is not true.

If it were true, there would not have been the need to pass emergency legislation, to force businesses to close, and to abolish gatherings, including protests, all under threat of fines of up to £10,000. Which is far in excess of what most people could afford without serious consequences, including the loss of their home. Moreover, there are countless reports of local authorities and the police failing to understand the regulations they were enforcing and exceeding their authority. People have stayed at home because there was nowhere to go to, and nothing to do, and because they do not want to break the law, and because they have been terrified of the virus. A July survey of British people’s estimation of the deaths caused by Covid found that (excluding ‘don’t know’) they overestimated the number of fatalities by up to 10 times. A third overestimated by 10 to 100 times, and 15 per cent overestimated by over 100 times.

Keith Joyce wonders if many of his friends have been taken over by aliens. A slice:

I am starting to wonder if some similar Wyndham-style phenomenon has affected all but a very few of the population, disabling their critical faculties and making them unquestioningly, even gladly, receptive to every word issuing from ‘authority’. It is hard otherwise to explain how so many previously sensible people have believed the government propaganda and given it the status of holy writ.

Or maybe, at least in the U.K., the explanation is a bit more mundane: government in 2020 has gotten much more influence over the press.

There is much wisdom in this essay by Dan Hannan…

… but, as Phil Magness notes here, the Covid-hysteria-stirring scientists at Imperial College act in ways that seem almost intended to bring discredit to themselves:

Imperial College just put out an absolutely bonkers new model of how they think Covid will evolve in the UK over 2021.

It predicts an additional 130,000 deaths in the next year *with the vaccine,* which is 20K more than what they’ve experienced in the last year without a vaccine.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from pages 169-170 of Steven Pinker’s excellent 2018 volume, Enlightenment Now (footnote deleted):

During the high-crime decades, most experts counseled that nothing could be done about violent crime. It was woven into the fabric of a violent American society, they said, and could not be controlled without solving the root causes of racism, poverty, and inequality. This version of historical pessimism may be called root-causism: the pseudo-profound idea that every social ill is a symptom of some deep moral sickness and can never be mitigated by simplistic treatments which fail to cure the gangrene at the core. The problem with root-causism is not that real-world problems are simple but the opposite: they are more complex than a typical root-cause theory allows, especially when the theory is based on moralizing rather than data. So complex, in fact, that treating the symptoms may be the best way of dealing with the problem, because it does not require omniscience about the intricate tissue of actual causes.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 228 of the late Hans Rosling’s wonderful 2018 book, Factfulness:

But now that we have eliminated most immediate dangers and are left with more complex and often more abstract problems, the urgency instinct can also lead us astray when it comes to understanding the world around us. It makes us stressed, amplifies other instincts and makes them harder to control, blocks us from thinking analytically, tempts us to make up our minds too fast, and encourages us to take drastic actions that we haven’t thought through.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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James Bovard unmasks problems with the new mask mandate imposed on visitors to U.S. National Parks. A slice:

Captain Sara Newman, NPS director of Office of Public Health declared, “Getting outside and enjoying our public lands is essential to improving mental and physical health, but we all need to work together to recreate responsibly.” But the latest mask rule will empower legions of zealots to accost, harass, and possibly assault people for failing to obey the latest Pandemic Security Theater mandate.

Jonathan Sumption is understandably worried about the consequences of Covid Derangement Syndrome. Two slices:

Despite the optimism created by the vaccines, powerful voices are still exploiting public fears to keep us locked up for longer and impose distancing rules indefinitely in pursuit of the mirage of zero Covid.

There is concern that medical scientists are moving the goalposts, changing their objectives in a way that would keep us locked up for longer, perhaps indefinitely.

Those of us who point to the staggering collateral cost of such policies are drowned out by outbursts of emotion and abuse from people who behave as if nothing matters except reducing the Covid death toll.

As a society, we have been urged to suppress the most basic instinct of the human spirit – our interaction with each other. In the process, we turned a public health crisis into something much worse: a public health crisis AND an economic, social and educational crisis.

Our economy is being laid waste, with small businesses snuffed out and job prospects destroyed for a generation of young people. Yet no society ever reduced deaths by making itself poorer.

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Panic is infectious. This is the root of most of our current problems. What’s more, as this was not in line with long-standing policy, there was no contingency planning or impact assessment. The Government had no idea of the economic, social or educational consequences, or its impact on mental health or diseases such as cancer.

Generally, it is a sound principle of government not to make drastic decisions without knowing where they might lead. But our Government crashed into the lockdown seemingly blind to everything but the headline Covid death toll.

The most serious consequence has been to make it impossible to concentrate containment measures on the old and clinically vulnerable.

Toby Young replies again to Christopher Snowdon.

Jeffrey Tucker decries the destruction of capital caused by lockdowns. A slice:

In the normal course of economic life, capital structures are constantly adapting to changed conditions. Changes in available technology, consumer demand, labor pools, and other conditions require entrepreneurs to stay constantly on the move. They need the freedom to act based on the expectation that their decisions matter within a market framework in which there is a test for success or failure. Without this ability, writes Ludwig Lachmann, “a civilized economy could not survive at all.”

When governments attack capital by making it less secure, denying its own volition over how it is deployed, or it comes to be depleted through some other shock like a natural disaster, capital cannot do the work of creating wealth. This is a major reason for poverty. Start a business, make some money, employ some people, and a powerful person or agency comes along and steals it all. People get demoralized and give up. Society can’t progress under such conditions. Take it far enough and people end up living hand to mouth.

Lockdowns seem focused on expenditures and consumption but fundamentally they attack capital. The restaurant, the theater, the stadium, the school, the means of transport, all are forced into idleness. They cannot return a profit to the owners. It’s a form of theft. All that you have done to save and work and invest is voided.

One of the best decisions that Karol and I ever made was not to send our son to so-called “schools” run by Fairfax County – “schools” that employ so-called “teachers.”

A German journalist describes the mainstream-media bubble. A slice:

Our newsroom also adopted all these counting methods with a sleepwalking naturalness. Everything that was communicated by the health authorities, the district administration and the regional government was adopted and reported without questioning and without doubt. Almost all critical distance disappeared, and the authorities became supposed allies in the fight against the virus.

I have to point out, however, that I have never been called or written to directly by politicians to influence me in any way. There were only the usual press releases from the ministries and offices, which are of course written from their point of view. Nor have I been pressured by superiors, at least not directly. The whole thing is far more subtle, as will be shown.

March was the start of the first restrictions: major events were banned and soon after the first lockdown was imposed. Almost all journalists of the “mainstream”, so the so-called “leading media”, including my editorial team, seemed to immediately develop an ‘inhibition to bite’ towards politicians and the authorities. Why this uncritical reluctance among journalists?

I can only explain it to myself that particularly the pictures from Bergamo and New York also put the experienced editors and reporters into an emotional state of shock, even if they might not admit it. But they, too, are only people who are afraid of illness and death, or who worry about elderly or sick relatives; this was repeatedly an issue in conversations with colleagues. They rallied around the government, the RKI (Robert-Koch-Institute; the German equivalent of the CDC; S.R.) and the health authorities, as if one really had to stick together now to combat this dire, external threat.

You couldn’t throw a club between the legs of those in charge, who were having a difficult time already, by fundamentally questioning their measures – that was how the attitude seemed to me.

In our conversations, too, it was said more and more frequently that “the government is really doing a good job”. Most were firmly convinced that the lockdown and the restrictions of our fundamental rights were necessary and certainly only temporary. I heard only a few skeptical voices.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 266 of Richard W. Duesenberg’s insightful 1962 article “Individualism and Corporations” (available without charge on-line here) as it appears in Liberty Fund’s 1981 single-volume collection of the New Individualist Review:

Acting as though the government were something other than collective coercion, politicians and public alike have ignored its invasion of our private lives as they have given it the power to clip the wings of some and to nourish the power grabs of others.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 6 of the original 1960 Harvard University Press edition of Frank Knight’s collection of lectures, delivered in 1958 at the University of Virginia, titled Intelligence and Democratic Action:

I recall a Republican campaign speech that exploited the hoary piece of nonsense that if Americans buy from foreigners, a foreign country gets the money and America the goods, but if they buy from Americans, America has the goods and the money both. Such reasoning raises the question whether there is any use in pointing out facts, whether one merely insults one’s own intelligence by casting pearls before, let us say, beings oblivious to their value.

DBx: A bit earlier (page 5) in this lecture, Knight referred to belief in the merits of protectionism and inflation as “two perennial examples of stupidity in economic ideas and policy.”

South Bay United Pentecostal Church v. Newsom

(Don Boudreaux)

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Late last night (Feb. 5th) the U.S. Supreme Court, in South Bay United Pentecostal Church v. Newsom, enjoined some of California strongman Gavin Newsom’s restrictions on in-person religious services. As described by Josh Blackman:

Here is the bottom line: six Justices enjoined California’s complete prohibition on indoor worship in so-called Tier 1 zones. Beyond that, the conservatives splintered sharply.

Here’s the concluding paragraph of Justice Neil Gorsuch’s accompanying Statement (joined by Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, and apparently mostly agreeable also to Justice Amy Barrett):

No doubt, California will argue on remand, as it has before, that its prohibitions are merely temporary because vaccinations are underway. But the State’s “temporary” ban on indoor worship has been in place since August 2020, and applied routinely since March. California no longer asks its movie studios, malls, and manicurists to wait. And one could be forgiven for doubting its asserted timeline. Government actors have been moving the goalposts on pandemic-related sacrifices for months, adopting new benchmarks that always seem to put restoration of liberty just around the corner. As this crisis enters its second year— and hovers over a second Lent, a second Passover, and a second Ramadan—it is too late for the State to defend extreme measures with claims of temporary exigency, if it ever could. Drafting narrowly tailored regulations can be difficult. But if Hollywood may host a studio audience or film a singing competition while not a single soul may enter California’s churches, synagogues, and mosques, something has gone seriously awry.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Those of you who believe that lockdowns – and the attitude that calls for, or merely tolerates, them – will be confined to dealing with physical pathogens might wish to consult this new essay by Stephen L. Miller. A slice:

The possibility of climate lockdowns is already being floated by some of our greatest thinkers. They see a confluence of global crises as an opportunity. The perfect storm caused by COVID-19 and the resulting global economic meltdown offers a chance to take what they see as bold and dramatic action to save the planet. The Biden administration will certainly use the consequences of COVID to push through some green legislation, but just as before, it will not be enough in the eyes of progressives. There must always be more.

Mariana Mazzucato, an author and a professor in innovative economics at the University of London, raised the prospect of climate lockdowns in MarketWatch last September:

‘Under a “climate lockdown”, governments would limit private-vehicle use, ban consumption of red meat, and impose extreme energy-saving measures, while fossil-fuel companies would have to stop drilling. To avoid such a scenario, we must overhaul our economic structures and do capitalism differently.’

Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins continues to write sensibly about Covid-19. A slice:

Covid was out of the bag globally before Beijing even knew it existed. And U.S. testing could hardly have isolated early Covid sufferers when 59% of spreaders have no symptoms and most of the sick have symptoms indistinguishable from the colds and flus millions suffer every day.

The new coronavirus was an efficient spreader and was not going to be stopped, as much as politics resists the idea of realities that can’t be changed by politics.

Robby Soave rightly decries the refusal of many government officials to talk realistically about Covid-19.

Alexander McKibben is understandably appalled at some of the sources of inspiration for pro-lockdowners.

“THE Christian apologist C S Lewis’s 1945 novel,That Hideous Strength, would seem to have been more prophetic of the ‘health and safety’ regime now in charge of Britain than George Orwell’s 1949 dystopian novel, 1984, with its all-embracing totalitarian rule.” – so begins this short essay by Julian Mann.

Jeffrey Tucker writes again on the oxymoronic term “social distancing.”

Phil Magness at Facebook:

A few months back I criticized the tendency of social scientists who knew better to look the other way when the New York Times, Fauci, and top journals such as Nature and the Lancet violated basic rules of causal inference to claim that the simple eyeballing of trends off of a cherrypicked time series “proved” that lockdowns worked.

After much prodding about this silence, the answer I received from several people entailed variations of the following: “I’m silent about the NYT et al because I can’t do anything when those institutions err on causal inference. I only choose to speak out when institutions that I know well and care about – namely those in the free-market space – make similar errors of causal inference.” This was in a reference to their own involvement in a series of pile-ons that followed from instances of causal-inference-by-eyeballing in tweets and similar informal commentary by free-market commentators, some of it even intended as a joke.

I bring this up because there’s something very interesting happening in the UK press over the last few weeks. A number of prominent writers who explicitly work the free-market space (including IEA, ASI, and free-market aligned journalism outlets) have come out strongly in favor of the UK’s lockdown 3.0, and to justify this stance they’ve taken to doing the old “lockdowns work because of my causal-inference-from-eyeballing-it-off-of-a-time-series” trick, typically noting that UK cases have fallen off during the current lockdown.

The response thus far from social scientists who previously claimed they would only be spurred into commentary when such mistakes were made by market-aligned institutions and writers that they care about?

Crickets.

Speaking of Facebook, its behavior is appalling. (HT Betsy Albaugh)

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from H.L. Mencken’s November 28, 1936, letter to Ezra Pound; this letter appears on pages 410-411 of Letters of H.L. Mencken (Guy J. Forgue, ed., 1961):

You made your great mistake when you abandoned the poetry business, and set up shop as a wizard in general practise. You wrote, in your day, some very good verse, and I had the pleasure, along with other literary buzzards, of calling attention to it at the time. But when you fell into the hands of those London logrollers, and began to wander through pink fogs with them, all your native common sense oozed out of you, and you set up a caterwauling for all sorts of brummagem Utopias, at first in the aesthetic region only but later in the regions of political and aesthetic baloney. Thus a competent poet was spoiled to make a tinhorn politician.

DBx: Persons who become famous for being extraordinarily talented at, or successful in, their respective crafts often come to suffer the delusion that they are called upon, and competent to, save humanity from grave threats. These threats are sometimes real; far more frequently they are imagined, or at least grossly overblown.

Yet what is never real is the competence of these delusional celebrities to recommend or to superintend the re-engineering of society. Such a task is impossible for any human or committee or congress to carry out successfully. And so success at performing some tiny task – for every truly successful and productive person achieves that success only by performing some tiny task – never qualifies someone to play god with society.

…..

I take this opportunity to publicly thank my friend Mike Stetson for giving to me, as a gift back in 2008, a copy of Mencken’s Letters. Thanks Mike! Thirteen years later I remain deeply touched by your thoughtfulness.

Economic Reality Isn’t Optional

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to a college student who writes to me regularly. He describes himself as a “kind critic” of mine.

Mr. L___:

Thanks for your e-mail in response to my criticism of the City of Long Beach’s decision to order certain supermarkets to give their workers a “Hero” pay raise of $4 per hour.

You ask if I “worry if some supermarkets close down in Long Beach because of the higher minimum wage that the government would react by passing a law outlawing supermarkets from closing down for that kind of reason.”

I’m sure that a City Council so arrogant and economically ignorant as to raise the minimum wage might be sufficiently arrogant and ignorant also to enact legislation of the sort that you describe. But even if, contrary to fact, such ‘anti-closing’ legislation would confront no legal barriers, ultimately it would achieve an outcome quite the opposite of its ostensible goal of helping low-skilled workers.

Legislation that makes it more difficult for firms to exit a market makes it less attractive for firms to enter that market in the first place. To see why, consider your own reasoning when choosing which job to accept after you graduate. Suppose that you’re offered jobs by two firms, with the jobs being similar to each other except for one consideration: Unlike the job offered by firm A, if you accept the job offered by firm B you’ll won’t be allowed to quit until you’re 65.

What are the chances that you’ll accept firm-B’s job offer? Zero. The same logic holds true for businesses.

A second consideration applies: legislation of the sort that you mention cannot keep a firm operating if economic conditions make that firm unprofitable. A firm whose revenues consistently fall short of its costs is a firm that cannot fully pay its suppliers, including its workers. And so those suppliers and workers will quit doing business with the firm. Economic forces will shut the firm down despite the legal prohibition of its closing.

Were Long Beach to enact the kind of legislation that you mention, it would soon find itself with no businesses – and, hence, no jobs – whatsoever.

Sincerely,
Don