Russell Roberts's Blog, page 322
January 26, 2021
Some Links
And here’s Nick Gillespie’s recent conversation with Ajit Pai.
Pierre Lemieux draws economic lessons from Bernie Sanders’s mittens.
Richard Ebeling recalls Lithuanians’ 1991 fight for freedom.
Matthew Lau identifies a virus far more dangerous than SARS-Cov-2. Here’s his opening paragraph:
One of the most alarming things about the pandemic is how sheepish almost all of us have been in surrendering our freedoms to government. The initial lockdowns last spring were met with little protest. Even today, nearly a year later, after the benefits of lockdowns have proven questionable and the costs exorbitant, even in jurisdictions where the terms of the lockdowns are arbitrary and senseless, and despite the fact that many prohibited activities can be done responsibly with minimal public health risk, there is not much pushback against governments’ widespread restrictions of economic and civil freedoms. (If “arbitrary and senseless” seems too strong, just how should we characterize Ontario’s policy that small retailers are not allowed to sell “non-essential” goods in-store but crowded big box stores can?)
Sebastian Rushworth has some interesting data on SARS-CoV-2 antibodies. (HT Michael McAuley) A slice:
At the end of the second week of January, 10, 323 people had died of/with covid in Sweden. In fact, the real number is probably much lower. A recent study carried out here in Stockholm found that only 17% of those who supposedly died of covid in care homes actually had covid as the primary cause of death.
The #ZeroCovid crowd is the anti-vaxx movement of the lockdown debate. They’re advocating a position with no basis in scientific reality, but also one that would cause severe and deadly harms if our government pursued it in earnest.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 197 of Steven Pinker’s wonderful 2018 book, Enlightenment Now:
The most damaging effect of terrorism is countries’ overreaction to it….
DBx: Indeed so.
And this same truth holds, yet with a thousand times more force, for Covid-19.
January 25, 2021
The Great Thomas Sowell
This just-released documentary of the life and legacy of the great Thomas Sowell – done by the Wall Street Journal‘s Jason Riley with the assistance of Bob Chitester’s Free To Choose Network – is simply spectacular. Watch it. Then watch it again. It’s that good.
The Utter Insanity of Covid-19 “Policy”
Tory MP Desmond Swayne – just after Christmas – channeled his righteous anger properly against the reckless and unfathomably destructive mad ‘scientist’ Neil Ferguson, the arrogant tyrant Boris Johnson, and other imposers, advocates, and tolerators of what David Hart calls “hygiene socialism.”
Covid-19 in Historical Perspective: A Speculation
In this recent essay, John Tamny writes:
That so many dying with the virus are old and in nursing homes speaks to endless “success at every level.” It used to be in the 19th and early 20th century that those born had as good of a chance of dying as living, after which those who survived infancy realistically had no chance of expiring in nursing homes. For one, they didn’t exist. For two, pneumonia, tuberculosis and other near-certain killers got to Americans long before they could ever be committed to assisted living.
John hints at an important point that deserves to be made even more explicit – namely, Covid-19’s death rate might overstate Covid-19’s danger when reckoned historically.
Suppose that a virus nearly identical to Sars-CoV-2 had emerged on multiple – say, ten – different occasions between 1750 and 1900. Further suppose that the data that we have about the deaths caused by these earlier viruses are just as reliable as are the data that we have about deaths caused by Covid-19, but that we have no further reliable information about the nature of those earlier pathogens. Other than knowing that they were viruses, we cannot today tell that they were nearly identical to Sars-CoV-2.
What would these data show when compared to our current experience with Covid-19?
Answer: Compared to these earlier viruses, Sars-CoV-2 would appear from the data to be unusually lethal. The spike in deaths-per-million caused by Covid-19 would be higher than were the spikes caused by the earlier viruses. “See!” scold those who continue to warn us of Covid-19’s unusual lethality, “Sars-CoV-2, although not in the league of the 1918 virus, is nevertheless an unusually lethal monster.”
But such a claim would be overblown, and perhaps downright wrong.
In the past, the portion of the population who survived into very old age – or who survived serious illnesses – was smaller than it is today. Therefore, virus-ancestors of Sars-Cov-2 would have killed smaller fractions of earlier populations. And so those earlier outbreaks of viruses would appear, when compared to Sars-CoV-2, to be much less deadly – which is to say that Sars-CoV-2, when compared with these earlier outbreaks of viruses, would appear to be much more deadly.
Indeed, it’s possible that humanity has encountered on many occasions viruses very similar to today’s ‘novel’ coronavirus but that people remained unaware that these viruses were among them. Such lack of awareness would have been the case if the elderly and seriously ill population was insufficiently large as to have the deaths caused by these viruses numerous enough to be noticeable.
I have no idea if my speculation here has actual historical merit. But, in a way, that’s rather the point. If in the past human beings were killed off in sufficient numbers by other illnesses and accidents so that there remained alive too few elderly and ill people whose deaths from earlier versions of Sars-CoV-2 were noticeable, the historical record would contain no mention of any such viruses. Such viruses might well have swarmed among the population with some regularity but left no mark in the historical record because their consequences went unnoticed by our ancestors.
In short, as John Tamny notes, the apparent unusual lethality of Sars-CoV-2 might owe more to modernity’s success at keeping enough ill and old people alive to be killed by Covid-19 in notable numbers as it does to anything especially rare or super-dangerous about Covid-19.
My speculation here is akin to the “dry tinder” hypothesis that helps explain why Sweden’s death rate in 2020 was as high as it was in comparison to many other countries: The 2018-2019 flu season in Sweden being unusually mild compared to many other countries, the number of Swedes in 2020 who were especially vulnerable to Sar-CoV-2 was unusually large compared to the number of vulnerable people in other countries. While the dry-tinder hypothesis helps explain cross-country differences in fatalities during the Covid-19 pandemic, my speculation – if it is correct – helps explain why Covid-19 fatalities are as high as they are.
Of course, even if my speculation is proven beyond any reasonable doubt to be correct, the proper inference is not that we should do nothing in response to Covid-19. We should not be indifferent to the deaths of old and ill people (a normative truth, by the way, that does not justify lockdowns). But knowledge of the correctness of my speculation would – again, were my speculation correct – help to tamp down the raging hysteria over Covid-19.
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I have no idea if what I call here “my speculation” is unique to me. In fact, I suspect that it’s not. The point is too obvious not to have been thought of earlier. But I’ve yet to encounter it – or, I don’t recall encountering it – and this blog belongs to me!
Irrelevant Comparisons
Another, more serious problem with comparing the number of Covid deaths to the likes of 9/11 fatalities or to jumbo-jet crashes is that Covid, unlike these other sources of death, kills selectively and more predictably. Covid reserves its dangers overwhelmingly for the very elderly. This truth is not diminished by being ignored or discounted by those who insist on dramatizing the threat of Covid.
Consider three different novel diseases – A, B, and C – each of which results in a total of 500,000 deaths chalked up to it. But – disease A kills only people ages 2 through 50; disease B indiscriminately kills people of all ages; and disease C kills only people ages 80 and older.
No reasonable person would be indifferent between these diseases. While each disease (obviously) is unfortunate, disease B is clearly worse than is disease C, and disease A is clearly worse than is disease B – making, of course, disease A worse than disease C. Yet each of these diseases will be said to kill 168 times the number of people killed by the 9/11 terrorists. Each of these diseases will be said to kill as many people who would die were 1,071 packed jumbo jets to fall from the sky.
Such comparisons mask important differences among these diseases. Although these diseases all kill the same number of people, they are not all equally dreadful.
One reason disease C is the least dreadful of the three is that it obliterates fewer life years than are obliterated by diseases A and B. Recent experience tells me that some people now deny the significance of this fact. But I deny that these deniers believe their denials.
If these denials were sincere, those who issue them would react with the same degree of extreme shock and sympathy upon learning of the death of an 84-year-old colleague as upon learning of the death of another colleague’s teenage child. Yet any person who so reacts would rightly be regarded, at best, as very strange and, more realistically, as emotionally defective. Mature human beings understand that death is inevitable. We understand also that every person’s chance of dying rises with age and that, even in our modern world, living into one’s 90s remains a relatively rare blessing.
There’s a second, related reason why disease C is less dreadful than are diseases A and B. Compared to those who are killed by disease A or B, those whose deaths are attributed to disease C are more likely to have had, or were more likely to contract in short order, other ailments that would have killed them if disease C hadn’t apparently done the job first. In other words, “being killed by disease C” has a meaning more ambiguous than “being killed by disease A.” Compared to the number of people whose deaths are attributed to disease C, many fewer persons killed by disease A were likely to soon be killed by some other cause – or to have death brought on by some other cause but mistakenly attributed to disease A.
Economic Nationalism Marches On
Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal:
Editor:
Commenting on the “Buy American” government procurement order to be signed by President Biden, an administration official boasts that “[w]e remain very committed to working with partners and allies to modernize international trade rules to make sure that we can use our taxpayer dollars to stir investments in our own countries and strengthen supply chains” (“Biden to Sign Buy American Order for Government Procurement, Jan. 25).”
Evincing ignorance of the economics of trade that’s downright Trumpian, the new administration seems unaware that “Buy American” orders might well – I believe likely will – reduce investment in America.
First, by preventing government from purchasing inputs at the lowest available prices, “Buy American” orders force taxpayers to pay more for government services. The practical result is a current increase in taxes or in government borrowing, either of which reduces the amount of money remaining in the private sector to be invested.
Second, by shielding favored American suppliers from foreign competition, “Buy American” orders dampen these suppliers’ incentives to innovate and remain cutting-edge. Even if these suppliers invest more to expand their production capacities, they will invest less to enhance their production efficiency and to fund R&D – consequences that will weaken, not strengthen, supply chains.
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
Some Covid Links
I also take issue with the substance of the position that Snowdon, Haimes and other so-called “lockdown centrists”, support: broadly, the current lockdown being maintained until enough people have been vaccinated, “in order to prevent tens of thousands of people dying this winter from [Covid-19]”. While I too went along with the first lockdown, in March last year, carried along by arguments about externalities and the harm principle, as well as general fear and uncertainty, I have since reconsidered my position. In moral terms, I struggle to conceptualise the harm principle as justifying the exercise of state power to confine healthy people in order to prevent a theoretical risk of harm to others. Even applying an economic cost/benefit analysis, if one includes all of the costs to individual welfare and utility, such as the loss of education (which will be most keenly felt by those least able to bear it) as well as GDP losses, it seems inconceivable to me that lockdowns will produce net benefits.
Also responding to Christopher Snowdon is Nigel Alphonso. Two slices (emphasis added):
To be fair to Snowdon, he does not deny or deprecate the extreme privations of lockdown and never has. Indeed, he has hitherto been one of the most articulate chroniclers of the lockdown devastation. But it illustrates a wider point that when the nanny state reached the apotheosis of its evolution and literally decided to lock us up not for anything we had done but for things that we might do (i.e., infect and potentially kill another person – infinitesimally small a risk as that is) the defenders of freedom went missing – instead focusing their considerable intellectual heft on attacking the unholy trinity of “false positives”, “casedemics” and Covid denialism.
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Unlike some of our adversaries, we on the anti-lockdown side (and I use that phrase deliberately rather than ‘lockdown sceptic’) must be ruthlessly honest about our intentions. We do not believe that an alternative strategy to lockdown would have cost more lives but intellectual and moral honesty should force us to admit that even if that sad eventuality transpired, it would have been preferable to the current malaise. As we survey a devastated economy, a dislocated society, an unfair allocation of cost to the most disadvantaged and economically fragile, the erosion of human rights and the brutal imposition of state controls with scant democratic accountability – we ask ourselves: “Is this what our country has become? Is this who we are?”
But potentially even more damaging for our long-term future are the lasting shifts in attitudes which the virus may leave behind.
These will be many and complex, but there are three which are particularly likely:
Permanently lowered public tolerance for life’s normal risks and challenges.Increased popular willingness to sacrifice freedoms in pursuit of safety.Greater tendency for authorities of all kinds to exploit the above.The first two of these malign legacies represent acceleration of existing trends, rather than completely new phenomena. But the third is undergoing more of a revolution.
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If you think measures like these are unthinkable in a Western democracy, then ask yourself whether you would have believed a year ago that we’d be willing to give up our right to leave our homes without a reasonable excuse to manage a disease that >99% of those it infects recover from.
Through GoFundMe, I will help support this heroic woman who is resisting the tyranny of lockdowns.
Here are some scenes, courtesy of the New York Times, of lockdown protests in the Netherlands.
John Cochrane riffs productively on Jacob Grier’s recent essay “Libertarians in a Pandemic.”
I’m honored that AIER has turned my recent essay, “On Living In Harmony With Nature,” into this ten-minute-long video narrated by Kate Wand:
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 51 of the 1997 Johns Hopkins University Press edition of H.L. Mencken’s brilliant 1956 collection, Minority Report:
In the field of practical morals popular judgments are often sounder than those of the self-appointed experts. These experts seldom show any talent for the art and mystery they undertake to profess; on the contrary, nine-tenths of them are obvious quacks. They are responsible for all the idiotic moral reforms and innovations that come and go, afflicting decent people.
January 24, 2021
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