Russell Roberts's Blog, page 348

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Writing in the Wall Street Journal, playwright David Mamet decries the failure to hold government officials, and the “experts” who advise them, accountable for the massive destruction that they so frequently inflict on humanity – and that they today are inflicting on humanity by fueling Covid Derangement Syndrome and insisting on authoritarian restrictions. Here’s his conclusion:

The virus here is government—or at least the incompetents who advise our rulers and cannot admit the legitimacy of dissension. Absent intervention, this virus may eventually kill the host organism.

Also in the Wall Street Journal, that consistent voice of sanity amidst CDS-20, columnist Holman Jenkins, is properly critical both of government “leaders” and of the mainstream media who have recklessly fueled this derangement. Two slices:

A wit once said war is too important to be left to the generals. In a similar vein, the political consequences of Covid are so dramatic that even experts have been bewitched by the imperative to mythologize the pandemic. A disease that infects 10 million people and kills 2.5% will kill the same number as a disease that infects 100 million and kills 0.25%, but they need to be approached differently. The latter is what we’ve been facing. The former is the picture we have been consistently painting for the public with our obsession with “confirmed cases.”

….

We have a media that overwhelmingly sees its job as repeating things, rather than finding things out and understanding them. A free press has been less of an asset in dealing with Covid than it might have been.

Michael Heller rightly applauds resistance by the Hasidim to tyranny done in the name of containing Covid-19. A slice:

Indeed, the worst crimes of the 20th century were perpetrated by states in the name of “Science,” specifically “scientific” racism and eugenics. These crimes were committed in the U.S. and, even more horribly, in Europe. The views of today’s Hasidim toward government edicts guided by “Science” are strongly colored by the fact that millions of their ancestors were lawfully murdered in Europe by a government guided by that day’s “Science” of eugenics and racism.

It is no coincidence that today’s Hasidim will have none of it. Nor should they. Nor should we.

Here’s the full version of David Hart’s April 2020 deep reflections on the need for intellectual change if human liberty is to survive public derangements, such as today’s hysteria over Covid.

“The Strangely Unscientific Masking of America.”

The title of this recent lecture by David Henderson is “To Fear or Not to Fear: That is the Question.“

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 115 of Matt Ridley’s superb 2010 book, The Rational Optimist:

I repeat: firms are temporary aggregations of people to help them do their producing in such a way as to help others do their consuming.

DBx: Yes. The ultimate economic justification for any firm – as for any productive activity – is to produce outputs for consumption. If a firm is literally producing nothing, then any resources (including labor) used in it are being wasted unless the owners of all of those resources willingly, and personally, bear the costs of ‘using’ their resources in this idling manner.

The situation is not changed simply by arranging for the resources used in a firm to generate physical outputs. Unless those physical outputs satisfy some consumption desires, all such resource use is complete waste. If the resources in the firm ‘produced’ nothing but maggot-and-sawdust pies, this firm would be, economically, in the same category as is a firm that literally generates no physical output.

But producing outputs that do satisfy some consumption desires is not sufficient for the firm’s existence to be economically justified. In order for any firm to be economically justified, the amount of consumption desires that its outputs satisfy must be greater than the amount of consumer desires that the resources used in the firm would have satisfied were these resources used differently.

For example, coercively preventing LeBron James and other NBA employees from earning their livings by playing basketball would result in each of them holding other jobs and producing outputs with some value to consumers. Yet the total value of the consumption desires satisfied by these other uses would be less than is the total value of the consumption desires satisfied by these men playing basketball professionally. Whatever might be the particular species of coercion that prevents people from earning their livings by playing basketball professionally would cause resources to be wasted. Society would, as a result, be less wealthy.

The same conclusion holds if consumers’ desires to watch NBA games were to fall significantly but coercion is used to force consumers to continue to fork over to the NBA the same sums of money that they voluntarily paid to the NBA before their preferences changed. In this case, NBA employees would be no worse off as a result of the change in consumer preferences, but consumers would be worse off – and worse off by an amount greater than is the benefit that this coercion bestows on NBA employees. Proof of the truth of this latter conclusion is found in the fact that, in this example, consumers pay what they pay to the NBA only because they are coerced to do so. (The logic here is the very same that leads you to understand that if I steal your car, there is every reason to believe that you value the car more highly than I do, for otherwise I would have acquired the car from you through voluntary exchange.)

Resources (including labor) that are kept in particular lines of production only because other people are coerced to help keep those resources in those lines of production are net drains on society. They are net drains on fellow human beings (usually fellow citizens, for fellow citizens are generally more easily coerced for such purposes than are foreigners). To the extent that resources (including labor) are kept in ‘productive’ activities that persist only because coercion is used to prevent consumers from spending less on the outputs of the ‘productive’ activities, these activities are not really productive; they are wasteful – which means, economically damaging. These activities might look productive, but they in fact are economically damaging because the coercion that supports them prevents the production of more highly valued outputs.

If the above sounds trivially true, rest assured that it indeed is. It’s not, as they say, rocket science. Yet the world overflows with people who fail to understand this point. You show me a protectionist or industrial-policy proponent who argues that his or her scheme will enrich the economy and I’ll show you someone who doesn’t understand the above-explained reality. I’ll show you someone so feeble of brain that he or she believes that the mere physical transformation of inputs into outputs, when done by resource owners who wish to perform those particular transformations, is sufficient for genuine production to take place. (Or, usually I’ll show you such an economically uninformed person: Some protectionists and industrial-policy advocates are venal apologists for rent-seeking producer interests who have no qualms about living predatorily on their fellow human beings.)

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Pictured above is the 1991 Economics Nobel laureate Ronald Coase (1910-2013), whose pioneering 1937 paper, “The Nature of the Firm,” remains to this day at the foundation of all worthwhile work in the economics subdiscipline called “industrial organization.”

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is the concluding sentence of Antony Davies’s and James Harrigan’s November 28th, 2020, essay, “Blinded by a Blizzard of Data“:

That the media has consistently reported on Covid without appropriate context suggests that historians will look back on 2020 less for its outbreak of Covid than for its outbreak of hysteria.

DBx: Yes. I am certain of it. As Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins said, 2020 is humanity’s “year of living derangedly.” And no institution has contributed more to this tragic derangement than has the media with their almost criminally reckless ‘reporting.’

Another Appalling ‘Report’ on Covid-19

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to USA Today:

Editor:

Shame on you for running Mark Johnson’s wholly misleading report titled “The young die as well from COVID-19, even as many engage in denial” (Nov. 28).

No one denies that Covid kills some young people, but in context this number is tiny. Johnson’s own reported number of Covid deaths in America of people younger than 40 – 3,571 – is a mere 1.5 percent of all Covid deaths in this country, a reality that Johnson scandalously leaves unmentioned. Instead of writing about percentages or proportions (words that never appear in his essay) – instead of informing readers that more than 40 percent of all Covid deaths in the U.S. are of residents of nursing homes – instead of alerting readers to the fact that 97 percent of Covid deaths are of people 45 and older – Johnson sensationalizes the number of under-40 Covid deaths by observing that it “has now surpassed the total death toll from the 9/11 terrorist attacks.”

To see the irrelevance of this comparison, consider another: the number of Americans younger than 18 who are killed annually by injuries is nearly three-and-a-half times higher than is the number of Americans younger than 40 who’ve died of Covid – and, hence, multiple times higher than the number of 9/11 deaths. 9/11’s death toll is no watershed figure beyond which higher death tolls from other causes necessarily justify unprecedented concern and reaction.

By giving the false impression that Covid poses a grave danger to children and young adults, you recklessly fuel hysteria, out of which only can come ill-conceived policy responses.

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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Ivor Cummins talks with James Linden about Covid-19 and the deranged response to it. (HT Dan Klein)

Dan Klein has a deep take on humanity’s response to Covid. A slice:

To ignore the ill consequences of frenzy and restrictions is to fall in line with the simplistic intentions heuristic. To do so is irresponsible. To be responsible, one must have regard for the total effect. Coase wrote: “[T]he total effect…in all spheres of life should be taken into account.” The consequences are social, psychological, moral, political, cultural, and spiritual.

Are you minding the ill consequences? Again, some are treated here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Arnold Kling is correct: governments’ response to Covid is to restrict supply and to subsidize demand. What could go wrong?

J.D. Tuccille rightly decries the hypocrisy of the Covid clerisy. A slice:

That attitude is obvious in Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, whose wife and daughter visited properties in Florida and Wisconsin even as he ordered state residents to stay at home except for “essential” activities. “My official duties have nothing to do with my family,” Pritzker huffed when a reporter called him out about his family’s wanderings. “So I’m not going to answer that question. It’s inappropriate, and I find it reprehensible.”

Reprehensible might more accurately describe government officials who penalize the common folk for behavior in which they themselves indulge. The word also could be applied to officials and hangers-on who try to leverage their positions for special advantage.

Also rightly decrying the hypocrisy of the Covid clerisy is Douglas Murray. A slice:

Since being outed for his hypocrisy [CA governor Gavin] Newsom has made a public apology of the predictable kind. He seems to be hoping that people will forgive his actions because of a miscalculation by him about the precise size of the gathering. He claimed that when sitting down at the table he realised that “it was a little larger group than I had anticipated. And I made a bad mistake. Instead of sitting down I should have stood up”. He acknowledged that the “spirit” of what he was telling everyone else to do had been broken.

And he also acknowledged that what he was “preaching” all the time had been contradicted “because I need to preach as well as practise”. It is questionable whether a politician should be into any sort of “preaching” at all, let alone preaching an ideal they then self-confessedly cannot live up to. But more than any other Covid scandal so far, Newsom’s lobbyist supper is deeply telling about a divide which is emerging between rulers and ruled.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 253 of the late Hans Rosling’s splendid 2018 book, Factfulness:

Ultimately, it is not the journalist’s role, and it is not the goal of activists or politicians, to present the world as it really is. They will always have to compete to engage our attention with exciting stories and dramatic narratives. They will always focus on the unusual rather than the common, and on the new or temporary rather than slowly changing patterns.

I cannot see even the highest-quality news outlets conveying a neutral and nondramatic representative picture of the world, as statistics agencies do. It would be correct but just too boring. We should not expect the media to move very far in that direction. Instead it is up to  us as consumers to learn how to consume the news more factually, and to realize that the news is not very useful for understanding the world.

DBx: For evidence that we would be wise to heed Rosling’s warning, see this new paper by Bruce Sacerdote, Ranjan Sehgal, and Molly Cook. Americans who don’t question the headlines – who swallow whole the breathless reports of “surging Covid cases” as if these are reports of surging imminent deaths – who believe only the pronouncements of those “experts” who the media and most politicians declare to be the “experts” – have a fear of Covid and a trust in government officials that not only are excessive, but also are dangerous physically, economically, and politically.

A Powerful Video In Support of Anti-Lockdowners

(Don Boudreaux)

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My dear friend Lyle Albaugh shared with me and a few other friends this video, which is less than 11-minutes long. Save for a few microscopic nits that, if I were pedantic and overly picky, I could pick with the last 60 or so seconds, it is superb and powerful and important. Please do watch it.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from Scott Culver’s Patrick Henry-esque comment on this Cafe Hayek post:

As far as I’m concerned it would be better to die of Covid as a free man than to be forced to cower safely in tyranny.

The “New Economy” Enriches Us All

(Don Boudreaux)

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In this New Republic essay on the coalitions that make-up the Democratic Party, Christopher Caldwell writes the following (emphasis added):

Two titans of the finance world (Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer) sought to win the Democratic nomination by funding their own and various down-ballot candidacies. (Both would eventually back Biden.) There was also one impecunious primary candidate who had some original ideas about the tech world: Andrew Yang. The new economy provides wealth for so few people that it can never command the party’s rank and file. But it exercises a dizzying gravitational pull on its leaders.

I’m pretty sure that I know what Caldwell means – namely, that the number of Americans who earn personal fortunes by owning or working at “new economy” firms is very small relative to the total number of Americans who are Democrats. But on its face the italicized and bolded sentence is simply wrong. The new economy provides wealth – lots of it – for nearly every American, and also for countless non-Americans.

I read Caldwell’s essay on my Apple computer using Google’s browser, Chrome. In the  middle of reading the essay, I received an e-mail from my colleague Dan Klein, which I read on my Apple iPhone. An hour or so earlier, my intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy sent to me, by text, a link to a Twitter thread.

I’m a middle-aged – some would say “old” – man, who is none too tech savvy compared to nearly everyone a decade or more younger than me. Yet my life is daily enriched by the so-called “new economy.” I’ve already mentioned my Apple computer (I use a MacBook Air) and my iPhone. I have no Twitter account, but I read Twitter regularly. I can’t count the number of times I’ve used Uber. I do most of my banking on-line, usually with my iPhone, but sometimes with my laptop. I use these devices also to make reservations at restaurants, reservations on airlines, and reservations at hotels.

Google combined with my electronic devices eases my research burdens, and brings to my fingertips, almost instantly, untold quantities of information that in the  past would either be inaccessible or require hours, days, or even weeks to gather.

I send and receive texts and e-mails throughout the day, and even occasionally use my phone as an actual phone. And when used as an actual phone, I no longer have to pay extra charges to talk with people who are more than a few miles away from me. This actual phone, by the way, lets me do video calls with people – a feature that I especially like for talking with my son, Thomas, who lives in New Hampshire. I get to hear and see my son.

With my phone I take pictures and videos, and send these instantly to whomever I choose.

Nearly all music that I now listen to is streamed through my phone, and often transmitted (mysteriously) through Bluetooth to my speakers.

I shop often on Amazon, as well as at other on-line retailers. I love YouTube. Within minutes of the end of an NFL game that interests me, I go to YouTube to watch the highlights in hi-def. And when my spirits need lifting, I often find, on YouTube, a video of the Beatles performing “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” “Please Please Me,” “All My Loving,” or some other of their early songs, for which I have an irrationally intense fondness.

Many times each day I use Facebook.

When driving, I often navigate using Google Maps. And I no longer read print-and-ink newspapers; I read all newspapers on-line. Increasingly, I am reading e-books (although I still much prefer – and will for the rest of my days – to hold in my hands an actual book with ink printed onto paper).

The last time I wrote on a typewriter was during Ronald Reagan’s first term in the White House. (I continued into Reagan’s second term to use a typewriter, occasionally, to type addresses on envelopes.)

And, of course, I now teach my classes over Blackboard (a kind of Zoom), and deliver invited lectures using Zoom. I even had a consultation with a physician over Zoom.

To say that the new economy provides wealth for only a few people is crazy-mistaken. Nearly every American on the eve of 2021 would feel horribly impoverished if he or she were suddenly without all of the new-economy advances of the past quarter-century.

…..

I thank Manny Klausner for bringing this Caldwell essay to my attention – an essay the main substance of which I do not here comment on.

An Apologetic Explanation (or, Perhaps, a Retraction)

(Don Boudreaux)

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I stand by all of the thrust, and many of the particular points, of my recent post “Tyranny Unmasked.” But I wish to explain – and to pull back from – some of the language I used in the penultimate paragraph. That paragraph reads:

But for the few of us who want to live free, civilized lives – lives unobstructed by the awful officiousness of the healthocrats – I think I can speak: Leave. Us. Alone. For heaven’s sake, leave us alone. Please. Mind your own business. Cower in fear and live, if you wish, in your antiseptic and lonely closets. You’ll perhaps arrange for your hearts to keep beating for an extra year or two, but the ‘lives’ that you’ll lead will be pathetic, imbecilic, and unworthy of anyone worthy of life.

This paragraph was written in the heat of anger at the Orwellian tyranny that is going on now in Maryland. But anger is no excuse for being unclear or for using language excessively incendiary.

When I wrote this paragraph I had in mind people with (what I regard to be, in light of the facts of Covid-19) an irrationally elevated fear of the disease, and who actively support government-imposed lockdowns and other restrictions on ordinary social and economic activities. I did not have in mind people who only estimate the risks of Covid to be greater than my own estimate of the risks. My target was people who, because of their fear, unthinkingly endorse the lockdowns and other restrictions.

Further, I regret using the words “pathetic,” “imbecilic,” and “unworthy” to describe even the typical person who is a member of my target group. Such language is over-the-top and unnecessary. For this language, I apologize.

But I do so very much wish that more people would understand that unleashing arbitrary government power to combat Covid is to unleash a danger that very well might, especially over the long run, prove to be more debilitating and lethal than Covid-19 itself. It distresses me that so very many people discount the dangers of what is now tolerated in the name of fighting a physical pathogen.