Russell Roberts's Blog, page 325

Some Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Noah Carl finds that countries with higher elderly populations generally suffered more Covid-19 deaths than did countries with lower elderly populations. (HT Dan Klein) A slice:

While there is variation in COVID-19 death rate at all levels of the x-axis variable, it can be seen that no country with an elderly population of less than 10% has a high COVID-19 death rate.

University of Miami philosopher Richard Yetter Chappell writes insightfully about Americans’ response to Covid. (HT Mark LeBar) A slice:

This all seems to come down to a failure to even attempt a proper cost-benefit analysis. This failure also took other forms. One of the most striking involved the blind prioritization of physical health over social, economic, and mental welfare. One saw this in the commonly-voiced idea that it was somehow “indecent” to question whether lockdowns might do more harm than good all things considered, for example. (Not to mention the Covid “security theatre” of closing parks!) N.B. I’m not here claiming that lockdowns were all bad. I’m claiming that cost-benefit analysis was needed to answer the question, and it’s bad of people to deny this.

Here’s Barry Brownstein on a Soviet dissident explaining many Americans’ closed-minded commitment to the party line.

Hugh Willbourn decries the derangement over Covid. A slice:

Amid the current hysteria about mutant strains, quarantines and vaccines it is easy to forget that the entire reaction to Sars-CoV-2 is utterly disproportionate. The virus is just one of many threats to our health, and it is far from the most dangerous. The attempt to control it is doing far more damage than does the virus. The longer the lockdowns last, the more destructive and unjustifiable they are. One simple illustration can stand for thousands. The median length of stay in a care home is approximately 15 months (Forder and Fernandez 2011). Almost all residents end their stay by dying. By the end March 2021, lockdowns in the UK will have placed more than half of all care home residents in isolation for four fifths of their remaining time on earth. There is no guarantee they will be freed in April. If Whitty, Valance and Ferguson continue to have their way it is more than likely that all care home residents will be isolated until they pass away. Few families intended to imprison their parents until they die.

Luke Gittos defends Lord Sumption against the ignorance and hysteria of those suffering Covid Derangement Syndrome.

Eric Boehm reports that we Americans did not win the trade war that was ignited by Trump.

From Autumn 2019 is this splendid lament by John Tierney of the increasing intolerance and closed-mindedness – and, hence, illiberalness – of journalists (so-called).

George Leef is rightly disturbed by Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel’s hostility to meritocracy.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague isn’t impressed with President Biden’s proposed scheme for building a United States of Italia. A slice:

I also salute the administration’s desire to reopen the schools. But again, don’t buy into the idea that the main obstacle to opening them before was a lack of money in state budgets. The Cato Institute’s Chris Edwards told me that total state?local government tax revenues “fell just $22 billion from the first to the second quarter of 2020 and then bounced back strongly in the third quarter. Meanwhile, federal aid to state-local governments soared $194 billion in the second quarter as a result of federal relief bills.” Federal relief has more than refilled state and local coffers, so there is no need for $170 billion more in state education subsidies proposed by the Biden administration.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 10 of the late, great UCLA economists Armen A. Alchian’s and William R. Allen’s Universal Economics (2018; Jerry L. Jordan, ed.); this volume is an updated version of Alchian’s and Allen’s magnificent and pioneering earlier textbook, University Economics:

Economics really is easy – in a subtle sort of way. Rely on application of its analytic principles. Sometimes they supersede dictates of physics. The law of gravity says, “If you drop a $20 bill on the ground, it will stay there.” Economics says, “If you drop a $20 bill on the ground, it will quickly disappear.”

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 540 of the final (2016) volume – Bourgeois Equality – of Deirdre McCloskey’s soaring trilogy on the essence of bourgeois values, on their transmission, and on their essential role in modern life:

The trouble with a liberal society is that it has few defenses against the worst of left or right dogma, because its leading principle is pluralistic nondogmatism.

A Truly Terrible Analogy

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to Marketplace’s Nancy Marshall-Genzer:

Nancy Marshall-Genzer
Reporter, Marketplace

Nancy:

Reporting yesterday on plans for further stimulus spending financed with borrowed funds, you interviewed not a single economist who dissents from this fiscal incontinence. This omission is unfortunate.

Such a voice would have reminded listeners of traditional problems with borrowing funds for spending projects – such as that the mere act of spending money building infrastructure isn’t automatically an economy-strengthening “investment.” If the value of what would otherwise have been produced with the borrowed resources would have been greater than the value of the new infrastructure, the borrowing and spending harms rather than helps the economy. None of your interviewees seems aware of this (or of any other) potential problems with stimulus spending.

But today a dissenting voice would have also pointed out something unique to our time – namely, an economy locked down by edict and by physical fear isn’t akin to economies in the past mired in recessions because of deficient aggregate demand. People today are physically impeded – by lockdowns and by their fear of Covid-19 – from spending and working.

Rather than make sensible points, your interviewees instead ignored reality – including inaptly analogizing stimulus spending to repairing a roof today in order to prevent more costly damage to the house tomorrow. In fact, what’s going on today is more like vandals and termites wantonly laying waste to the house’s foundation and structure, with the owners hoping to keep their home in good repair by spending lots of money to mask the damage with shingles and paint.

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

(Don Boudreaux)

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Wall Street Journal columnist James Freeman is pessimistic about our prospects of being released from the tyranny of hygiene socialism. A slice:

Those of us who hoped that at some point a reasonable consideration of costs and benefits might somehow find its way into political deliberations on the virus have of course been disappointed.

For the most costly of the Covid rules, the search continues for a way to confirm the benefits. In a new study researchers at Stanford University review the recent history of lockdowns and the destructive societal side effects….

Looking across various countries, the Stanford team finds benefits from less-restrictive measures such as social distancing. But what about the most aggressive interventions that have wreaked such collateral damage over the past year? The researchers report, “we fail to find strong evidence supporting a role for more restrictive NPIs in the control of COVID in early 2020.”

Phil Magness reports that the case for mask mandates lacks scientific grounding.

Brendan O’Neill properly decries the intensifying demonization of lockdown opponents. A slice:

The demonisation of lockdown sceptics intensifies daily. They are branded ‘agents of disinformation’ (the Observer) who are ‘dangerous’ (the New Statesman). They are killing people, we are told. The reason Covid-19 is spreading again, and killing large numbers, is ‘because this metropolitan clique of elites put forth falsehoods and misinterpretations’, says one columnist (my italics).

This is, to be frank, unhinged. It is unreasonable in the extreme to blame the spread of Covid on sceptics who have very little influence in public discussion. Virtually the entire political establishment, the vast bulk of the media and every online ‘influencer’ favours lockdown. The message we receive constantly – on TV, online, in the press – is to stay home, be good, don’t kill people. It is a fantasy to believe that the voices of isolated and demonised sceptics are cutting through this conformist fog and inspiring people to recklessly spread the plague.

Also eloquently defending lockdown opponents is Freddie Sayers. A slice:

Many people might feel that we are in a wartime situation with this virus, and that something closer to martial law is therefore appropriate for this exceptional period. But as human rights lawyer Adam Wagner made clear in yesterday’s UnHerd interview, if history is any guide, emergency measures have a way of becoming permanent — most of the powers taken by the government during 9/11 are still there. We have now been governed in a “Napoleonic” style for almost a year, with new updates coming by ministerial decree on average every four and a half days and with very little oversight. Can anyone confidently say that none of that attitude will stick?

When it comes to the inevitable next virus or pathogen to be identified somewhere around the world, the playbook has surely now been written. As Wagner told me, “the danger is that if Covid never leaves us, or it mutates or a different virus arrives with a similar dynamic we’ll be in a semi-permanent state of “this is what we do” — when this happens, we have lockdowns, we have emergency laws, we take away parliamentary niceties like scrutiny, debates, votes, that sort of thing… And I think that is a danger that doesn’t come out of the fringes of the lockdown sceptic movement. That’s the real deal as a worry.

Laura Perrins bemoans hygiene-socialists’ reckless sacrifice of innocent people, including children. A slice:

Those on the Right who have been supporting this policy, that has been imported from China of all places, should be ashamed of themselves. There is very little evidence that lockdowns work, and even if they did, they fail the test of proportionality.  

The lockdown also fails on moral and ethical grounds. It intentionally seeks to crush the individual rights of millions to save an institution, ‘the NHS.’

Just because you might like the NHS, and it might save other people’s lives, does not make it right. You cannot crush the rights of one individual in such a brutal and disproportionate way to save another – that is why, in a nutshell, we do not harvest the organs of one healthy person to save the lives of five people. It might be justified on utilitarian grounds, but it fails morally.

Even on utilitarian grounds, this lockdown fails: It will no doubt destroy more lives than it saves.

Sung to the tune of “Hotel California.”

Phil Magness defends the Great Barrington Declaration from, shall we say, sloppy interpretations.

Wow! Covid unleashed so much death in Sweden in 2020 that that country hasn’t experienced such a rash of fatalities since waaaay back in 2012.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 27 of Lionel Trilling’s Winter 1948 Kenyon Review essay titled “Manners, Morals, and the Novel“; I learned of this quotation – and of the essay in which it appears – from reading the late Gertrude Himmelfarb’s 1994 volume, On Looking Into the Abyss, where she herself uses this quotation on page x:

Some paradox of our natures leads us, when once we have made our fellowmen the objects of our enlightened interest to go on to make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion. It is to prevent this corruption, the most ironic and tragic that man knows, that we stand in need of the moral realism which is the product of the free play of the moral imagination.

“Stimulus” Ain’t Miracle Dust

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal:

Editor:

Incoming Treasury secretary Janet Yellen and other left-of-center economists reason that government should borrow and spend even more than the unfathomable sums that have been borrowed and spent in 2020 (“The Debt Question Facing Janet Yellen: How Much Is Too Much?” Jan. 19). Spending enormous amounts of borrowed funds is thought to be necessary to stimulate the economy out of its sluggishness.

Yet the only condition under which this reasoning even begins to make as much as a small sliver of sense is one in which sluggishness is the exclusive result of consumers and businesses expecting that the present sluggishness will continue indefinitely into the future. Such “stimulus” works by prodding consumers and businesses to act in accordance with the underlying reality of oceans of available idle resources that are able to be put to productive use if only their owners can be persuaded to put them to such uses.

But the above condition doesn’t apply today. Consumer spending and resources are not now idled simply by negative economic expectations. Instead, today’s idleness is caused by force and physical fear. Covid lockdowns force consumers to reduce spending. Also, these lockdowns force many workers to avoid work. Similarly, other consumers reduce spending, and other workers avoid work, because of their Covid fears.

Some spending and resources that are idled by physical fear might be enticed back into the economy by money-income gains sufficiently goosed-up by “stimulus.” Yet no amount of “stimulus” will inject into the economy any spending and resources that are idled by force – that is, idled by lockdowns.

If the new administration really wants to stimulate the economy, it should work to calm Americans’ hysterical fears of Covid and, even more importantly, to do whatever is in its power to end the unprecedented lockdowns.

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

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: “Above subsistence”

(Don Boudreaux)

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In my column for the April 6th, 2011, edition of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, I did my best to explain that, although material incentives matter more than most people realize, material incentives are not all that matter. You can read my column beneath the fold.

(more…)

Some Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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George Will recognizes that members of today’s “woke” crowd display many of the same characteristics that they criticize in Donald Trump. A slice:

Postmodernists say, with Nietzsche, that there are no facts, only interpretations — alternative “narratives” about reality. As Andrew Sullivan writes at Substack, to be “woke” is to be awake to this: All claims of disinterestedness, objectivity and universality are bogus. So, reasoning is specious, and attempts at persuasion are pointless. Hence, society is an arena of willfulness where all disagreements are power struggles among identity groups. The concept of the individual disappears as identity becomes fluid, deriving from group membership. Silence is violence; what is spoken is mandatory and must accord with the mentality of the listeners. Welcome to campus.

In a world thus understood, life is a comprehensively zero-sum struggle. Postmodernism rejects, as Adam Garfinkle writes, the Enlightenment belief in a positive-sum social order in which human beings, who are both competitive and cooperative creatures, can prosper without making others poorer. Hence, the Enlightenment belief in, and Trump’s disbelief in, free trade. Postmodernism is the ill-named revival of a premodern mentality: the social order as constant conflict, unleavened by trust and constrained only by the authoritarianism of the dominant group.

In a related manner, Richard Ebeling decries what he calls today’s “releasing of the collectivist demons.”

My GMU Econ colleague Bryan Caplan observes that, in politics, convenience is inconveniently ignored. A slice:

In politics, alas, words rule.  From the viewpoint of any individual voter, elections are surveys.  As a result, demagogues run the world.  They gain power by swearing fealty to lofty ideals, not weighing costs and benefits.  And when lofty ideals imply serious inconvenience – as they sadly do – the demagogues impose serious inconvenience.

Why doesn’t a rival politician gain power by promising to make convenience great again?  Because “convenience” sounds petty and ignoble.  People love convenience.  They happily sacrifice other values for convenience.  But they don’t want to acknowledge this fact – or affiliate with those who do.

Arnold Kling has a recommendation for how to depress yourself and then another for how to feel better.

If you want to re-depress yourself, read Christian Britschgi’s report on Biden’s ‘recovery plan.’

John Cochrane writes insightfully about vaccines. A slice:

Operation Warp Speed, in which the government paid to produce vaccines ahead of FDA approval, was the one huge success of government policy. But why was it needed? Investors seem to have billions of dollars to finance Elon Musk’s electric cars and rockets to Mars. Why would they not spend a few billions ramping up production on a risky but diversified portfolio of vaccines? Because they and the drug companies know that they will not be able to charge a market price when the vaccine is finalized. Inevitable price controls, facing a government monopoly buyer, means no money for risky production, and makes Warp Speed necessary.

People are complaining that the drug companies might make a few billion dollars. The pandemic is costing us trillions! The companies should be making billions more — and more still the sooner, faster, and better their vaccines go out.

And then, the catastrophic rollout. Senseless priority lists. Massive paperwork and restrictions on administering vaccines. Penalties for skipping the line so it’s better to throw out vaccines than use them.

In a free market, vaccines would be sold to the highest bidder. The government could buy too, but you wouldn’t be forbidden from buying them yourself, and companies and schools would not be forbidden from buying them for their employees. Businesses would likely pay top dollar to vaccinate crucial employees who are off the job due to the pandemic. And only businesses know just which employees are crucial to the economy, and which can wait.

Writing in the New York Sun, Stephen MacLean wonders if Boris Johnson’s residence at Number 10 will end soon if the U.K.’s tyrannical lockdowns don’t. A slice:

Before setting out to select a new leader, then, Tories who rally to the cry of “maximal freedom and minimal government” must first “re-convert” Conservative faithful to these principles. Otherwise, with the membership enthralled to statist measures, there will be little relief from the mismanagement of Mr. Johnson’s prime ministry.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from pages 98-99 of the late UCLA economist Jack Hirshleifer’s February 1966 paper “Disaster and Recovery: The Black Death in Western Europe,” as this paper is reprinted in Hirshleifer’s 1987 collection, Economic Behavior in Adversity:

Without necessarily dismissing all the early reports as fabulous, it is evident that there is a tendency for occasional chronicles to record, even if they do not exaggerate, the extreme and unusual as opposed to the typical.

DBx: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.