Russell Roberts's Blog, page 327
January 16, 2021
Let’s Not Join the Mob
Here’s a letter to an e-mail correspondent:
Mr. R___:
You accuse me of being “late to the game” when I oppose the application of First Amendment prohibitions to tech firms that deny platforms to certain people. Your case rests on the fact that “for decades government has overridden private business decisions by denying them the right to discriminate along lines of race, etc.”
You’re correct that such anti-discrimination legislation violates the principle that I wish to uphold – namely, private persons’ freedom to act ought not be constrained by the same rules that properly constrain government officials. But I don’t see how having taken a few steps toward the politicization of society renders additional such steps advisable or even acceptable. Surely, as long as there are different degrees of politicization – as there are – those of us who fear politicization of society are not bound to accept ever-more such politicization simply because some amount of it already exists.
And by no means should those of us who fear politicization of society be led by our anger at that politicization to call for more of it. It boggles my mind that many conservatives today, understandably upset that tech companies are behaving so politically, believe that an appropriate response is to politicize these companies further and more formally. Grave danger lurks in abandoning our principles.
Although perhaps prosaic at this point, I remind you of the famous scene in Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Season in which English Chancellor Thomas More refuses his son-in-law William Roper’s plea to act outside of existing law to arbitrarily arrest Richard Rich, who they suspect will turn traitorous:
“ROPER: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
“MORE: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
“ROPER: Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!
“MORE: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down (and you’re just the man to do it!), do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?
“Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!”
Let those of us who understand the importance of the rule of law not join the mob who don’t.
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
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 109 of UCLA economists Armen Alchian’s and William 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:
The first question really should be, “Why so much attention to price adjustments?” A major reason is that price adjustments make the aggregate quantity demanded of a good equal the aggregate available supply. Unhappily, our tastes, preferences, or total worths don’t change to make us desire to have only as much of a good as our income allows. Prices change so as to reconcile personal conflicts for available goods, they direct production from the less-highly to the more-highly demanded goods, and they affect your earnings and the kind of work you will be doing.
DBx: Huge amounts of mischief are caused by the widespread failure to understand the source and role of prices expressed in money and determined on markets. There is no single volume that teaches price theory as well as does Alchian’s and Allen’s legendary text.
Bill Allen (pictured above) died yesterday, a few months shy of his 97th birthday. He will be missed.
January 15, 2021
William R. Allen (1924-2021)
Among the ten greatest books ever written in economics is University Economics. First published in 1972, this textbook that is co-authored by Armen A. Alchian and William R. Allen is a marvel. If you read it and grasp even no more than one-third of its lessons you will gain keener insights into economic forces at work than are had by some Nobel laureates in economics. If you grasp most of the lessons of this book, you will possess economic insight that is rivaled by very few people indeed.
Alchian (1914-1913) died almost eight years ago. I learned just this evening, from Jerry Jordan, that Bill Allen (1924-2021) – Alchian’s co-author and long-time colleague at UCLA Econ – died today. Prof. Allen would have turned 97 in April. So sad.
Regular readers of Café Hayek know that I often quoted from Bill Allen’s “midnight economist” transcripts. Being a great economics educator, Allen for many years did short radio broadcasts as “The Midnight Economist.” One can learn enormous amounts of economics simply by reading these transcripts.
I never met Bill Allen face-to-face, but I’m honored that he initiated e-mail communications with me several years ago. We kept this communication up until not long ago. Prof. Allen appreciated the fact that I often quoted him at this blog. I was – and continue to be – amazed that an economist of his stature was thoughtful enough to extend his thanks to me. Café Hayek – and I – got from him far more than he can possibly have gotten from Café Hayek or from me.
In 2018, under the expert guidance and editorship of UCLA Econ alum Jerry Jordan, University Economics was revised and released by Liberty Fund as Universal Economics. The Foreword, appropriately, was written by Bill Allen.
Buy this book. Read it. Read it twice. Study it carefully. Learn the economic way of thinking. By doing so you will fit yourself with mental lenses that will reveal to you aspects of economic reality that would otherwise remain hidden, and that are unseen by the vast majority of your fellow human beings. And please remember Bill Allen – and Armen Alchian – as you celebrate the possession of your new, powerful vision!
The Reason of Rules
Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal:
Editor:
Kimberly Strassel might be right in predicting that actions by tech firms to silence Donald Trump and other conservative voices will give rise to successful efforts to treat tech firms as arms of government – and, hence, subject, as is government, to the First Amendment (“Big Business’s Sharp Left Turn,” Jan. 15). But Reaganite conservatives and classical liberals should fervently hope that she’s proven wrong.
A core characteristic of conservatism of the sort that has long been espoused in your pages, as well as of classical liberalism, is respect for rules. Rule-following, by its nature, requires toleration of occasional unfavorable situations in exchange for the best possible outcomes over the long-run. And among the most important rules in a free society is respecting the distinction between private actors and government actors in order to guard against excessive politicization of society.
Conservatives are understandably furious at tech-companies’ pandering to Progressive sensibilities. But conservatives’ own and best sensibilities should warn them against succumbing in anger to today’s urge to violate one of the most important rules of a free society.
Government may not silence speech and other expression that it dislikes. Private citizens, as long as they violate no property or contract rights, may. If this bright-line rule is breached by conservatives today, they will not close, but open far wider, the door to Progressives suppressing speech tomorrow.
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
Our diagnosis, not as medical experts but as students of leadership, is that many leaders stumbled in the fundamental step of determining the nature of the challenge they faced and identifying the different kinds of thinking that had to be brought to bear on it at different points.
In the early weeks of 2020, Covid-19 presented itself as a scientific problem, firmly in the epistemic realm. It immediately raised the kinds of questions to which absolute right answers can be found, given enough data and processing power: What kind of virus is it? Where did it come from? How does transmission of it happen? What are the characteristics of the worst-affected people? What therapies do most to help? And that immediate framing of the problem caused leaders — and the people they influence — to put enormous weight on the guidance of epistemic thinkers: namely, scientists. (If one phrase should go down in history as the mantra of 2020, it is “follow the science.”)
In the U.K., for example, this translated to making decisions based on a model produced by researchers at Imperial College. The model used data collected to date to predict how the virus would spread in weeks to come (quite inaccurately, unfortunately). At the frequent meetings of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies there was one government official in attendance, and early on, he tried to inject some practical and political considerations into the deliberations. He was promptly put in his place: He was only there to observe. Indeed, members expressed shock that someone from the world of hashing out policy would try to have influence on “what is supposed to be an impartial scientific process.”
But the reality was that, while scientific discovery was an absolutely necessary component of the response, it wasn’t sufficient, because what was happening at the same time was an escalation of the situation as a social crisis. Very quickly, needs arose for tough thinking about trade-offs — the kind of political deliberation that considers multiple dimensions and is informed by different perspectives (Aristotle’s phronetic thinking). Societies and organizations desperately needed reliable processes for arriving at acceptable balances between factors of human well-being too dissimilar to plug into neat equations. Pandemic response was not, as it turned out, a get-the-data-and-crunch-the-numbers challenge — but since it had been cast so firmly as that at the outset, it remained (and remains) centered in that realm. As a result, leaders were slow to begin addressing these societal challenges.
Jeffrey Tucker offers a pandemic reading list. A slice:
The History of Public Health, by Paul Rosen. This fascinating treatise was first published in 1958 and reissued in 1993 with new material. It is a wonderful introduction to the whole concept of public health and how it evolved through the centuries. A major theme of the book is how poor understanding of disease dominated public health from the ancient world through the 19th century. Ignorance and fear led to a run-from-the-miasma mentality. Once the science of cell biology improved, so too did public health.
The last bout of medieval-style brutality toward disease was in 1918, after which public health got very very serious and swore that nothing like that would happen again. The turning point occurred when it became clear that large-scale collective efforts to beat back and hide from pathogens were futile and tremendously harmful. Instead, disease is something to be managed by doctors and their patients. The job of public health became to focus on clean sanitation and water and otherwise give a message of calm, and clear recommendations to people in light of medical resources.
Outside of large factors, small things in our lives with be transformed. Masks will remain, workplaces will now opt for online work instead of the office space and governments will demand we be cautious at all times in regards to catching illnesses – even after COVID-19 is defeated. The police have been emboldened, and the public have shown that they will automatically consent to the stripping of liberties if they are told it is for the right reasons.
We have to ask ourselves what powers will be given back, and what precedent this sets for the state and the police in our everyday lives. It’s clear, from whatever angle you view it from, that the pandemic has changed everything and there will never be the ‘normal’ we once knew again.
Also from Eric Boehm: “Closing Bars and Restaurants Didn’t Stop People From Gathering”.
A headline from the Financial Times: “Covid infection shown to provide as much immunity as vaccines”. Here’s the report’s opening paragraph:
People who have already contracted coronavirus are as protected against reinfection as those who have received the best Covid-19 vaccines, according to a survey of 20,000 UK healthcare workers, the largest study in the world so far.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 82 of the brilliant yet largely forgotten 19th-century American lawyer and legal scholar James Coolidge Carter’s powerful 1884 monograph, The Proposed Codification of Our Common Law (original emphases):
[A] rule enunciated by a statute must be applied to all cases which fall within its scope, according to a fair interpretation of its language. Let it be supposed that language employed in it is used with the utmost accuracy, it is still impossible that its framers should intelligently provide for unforeseen cases. But the statutory provisions, by reason of their generality, must unavoidably embrace such cases, and the result necessarily is that such cases must be disposed by a statute framed without reference to them, and consequently such disposition is as likely to be wrong as right, depending as it does wholly upon chance.
DBx: Reality is inconceivably more complex than is realized by those who would have government officials ‘plan’ and orchestrate our present conduct and craft our future.
January 14, 2021
Stories from the Bizarro World of Covid Hygiene Hysteria
True story.
This morning I arrived in the spacious lobby of the modern office building in Arlington, Virginia, in which the Mercatus Center and the Institute for Humane Studies have their main offices. I was there to meet a friend with whom I had some business to conduct on one of that building’s upper floors. Unlike me, my friend does not have a scanner card that would allow her to direct an elevator to the proper floor.
I arrived in the lobby about ten minutes early. The only other person in the lobby was a woman sitting behind the reception desk.
When I began to seat myself in a chair far from the reception desk but with a good view out of the window (the better to see when my friend was arriving), the woman sitting behind the reception desk informed me in no uncertain terms “Sir, you’re not allowed to sit down.”
Startled, I asked, “Can I stand?”
In a tone noticeably friendlier than she used to keep me from becoming comfortably seated, she answered “Of course!”
I said nothing in reply other than “Thanks.” I dislike confrontation. Plus, this receptionist was likely simply doing as the building management instructed her. But within my bowels I seethed at the situation’s stupidity.
I can stand in the lobby; apparently, doing so is sufficiently safe. But I cannot sit in the lobby; apparently, doing so will cause me to emit into the air lethal amounts of the coronavirus – or, at least, to emit more than I would emit were I seated.
My friend was about five minutes late. So I stood in the lobby for about 15 minutes. Intentionally, I stood – unmolested and unremarked upon – immediately beside the chair whose comforts I was not permitted to enjoy.
Do people standing emit fewer amounts of the coronavirus than do people sitting?
Someone should collect into a book accounts of such Covid insanity. This book, were it to become a reality, would be many volumes.
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 5 of Cass Sunstein’s superb 2005 book, Laws of Fear:
Human beings, cultures, nations often single out one or a few social risks as “salient,” and ignore the others.
DBx: Yes. What Sunstein here describes is called by behavioral economists the “availability heuristic.” It is defined by Wikipedia as “a mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to a given person’s mind when evaluating a specific topic, concept, method or decision.”
With the media, 24/7, bombarding people’s eyes and ears with reports of rising Covid-19 case counts and (“with-“)Covid fatality rates, and with photos of Covid patients in hospitals, it’s difficult for people to think of much else – including the unreported fatalities, health problems, and misery caused by the lockdowns.
Writing the above prompts me to wonder where are the behavioral economists these days. Surely there’s much to research, and much on which to opine, regarding the reporting on Covid and on the lockdowns, as well as on the public’s reactions to these events. I’d welcome some input here from behavioral economists. Surely there’s a plausible case to be made that the public’s reaction to Covid is excessive, and that this excess is driven by the same psychological quirks that behavioral economists are quick to point to when criticizing free markets.
Some Links
If Hawley, Rubio and Graham squint, they can see a silver lining on the dark cloud of Democratic control of the Senate: Majority Leader Schumer will soon give them an opportunity to vote for $2,000 disbursements. The national debt has increased almost 40 percent in the past four years. But when congressional Republicans rediscover (the rhetoric of) frugality, as surely they will at noon Jan. 20, Biden can cite Hawley’s assurance that there “obviously” is “plenty” of money.
For evidence, consider President George W. Bush’s presidency, when, for a time, Republicans controlled both the House and Senate. During that time, we saw the creation of a new department (Homeland Security) and of a new entitlement (Medicare Part D), and spending exploded. We didn’t see any restraint during the two years when Republicans were fully in control under Trump, either. Further data confirm that unified government does not keep government restrained, even if the controlling party is supposedly the enemy of big government.
George Selgin continues to write informatively about the New Deal.
David Beito looks at the scary history of trials for sedition.
John Stossel wisely recommends that “teachers'” unions be ignored and that schools be reopened.
I wish that Arnold Kling were in charge of content moderation at a major social-media company.
Cato Institute chairman Robert Levy reflects on President Trump’s behavior.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from pages 220-221 of my late Nobel-laureate James Buchanan’s “Morals, Politics, and Institutional Reform: Diagnosis and Prescription,” which is chapter 5.1 in James M. Buchanan and Richard A. Musgrave, Public Finance and Public Choice: Two Contrasting Visions of the State (1999):
This terrible century has done much more than bear witness to the tragic failures of collectivist control over personal lives. In the process of those failed experiments, valuable social capital was allowed to depreciate, capital that was represented in personal attitudes of independence, obeying laws, self-reliance, hard work, self-confidence, a sense of permanence, trust, mutual respect, and tolerance. This capital has been eroded only to be replaced by attitudes that embody irresponsibility, dependency, differential exploitation, opportunistic advantage seeking, short-run hedonism, legal trimming, litigation, mistrust, and intolerance, especially for the “politically incorrect.”
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