Russell Roberts's Blog, page 43

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(Don Boudreaux)

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George Leef adds his excellent thoughts to Phil Magness’s highly critical – yet appropriately so – review of the big myth peddled by ‘historian’ Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway. [DBx: I had dinner last evening with Russ Roberts. During the conversation he told me that he stopped reading the 500+ page book by Oreskes and Conway on page four. Despite Russ’s original intention of inviting Oreskes and Conway to be guests on his podcast, EconTalk, by page four Russ could tell that Oreskes and Conway are either so utterly uninformed or ideologically blinkered that “there was no way that a productive conversation could be had about that book.” Those of us who know Russ know that he is remarkably open-minded about views with which he disagrees – that he bends over backwards to interpret such views as generously as possible. Nevertheless, he was unable to do so in this case. This fact alone speaks volumes about the Oreskes-Conway volume.]

Frederick Hess explains that “‘true history’ frequently isn’t.” A slice:

Then there’s the New York Times’ celebrated, Pulitzer Prize-winning 1619 Project, which originally explained that its aim was to displace the “mythology” of 1776 “to reframe the country’s history” and posit the 1619 arrival of slave ships “as our true founding.” (Along with a slew of other stealth edits, this passage was quietly scrubbed from The New York Times‘ website in 2020.) The exercise was rife with inaccuracies, including the startling assertion that the American colonies revolted against Great Britain “in order to ensure slavery would continue” (rousing even the fustiest of scholars to collectively bark, “What?!”). As five eminent historians wrote to the Times, “If supportable, the allegation would be astounding—yet every statement offered by the project to validate it is false.” The project also attributed modern accounting practices to antebellum slavery—although such practices actually date back to Italian banking of the late Middle Ages. The whole thing was too much even for the World Socialist Web Site, which concluded that the exercise was “a politically motivated falsification of history.”

Terrence Keeley applauds Vanguard’s CEO Tim Buckley for resisting the prosperity-destroying fad of EGS investing. Two slices:

“Our research indicates that ESG investing does not have any advantage over broad-based investing,” Mr. Buckley said in a recent interview with the Financial Times. Matching word to deed, his comments came after he had withdrawn his firm from the $59 trillion Net Zero Asset Managers initiative, an organization that is part of the $150 trillion United Nations-affiliated Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero. Both alliances are committed to restricting their investments over time to companies that are compliant with the Paris Agreement’s objective of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Mr. Buckley claims the financial world, swept up in climate-change fervor, can’t make such commitments without reneging on its fiduciary duties.

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Mr. Buckley also knows that Vanguard can’t promise to be a fiduciary to its clients while also committing to align its assets with the 2050 net-zero target. Signatories to such initiatives effectively commit to reducing their volume of investments in companies not aligned to the Paris Agreement without ever knowing how much of the global economy will be compliant or investable. In other words, being a member of a net-zero alliance requires clairvoyance—something Mr. Buckley, in good conscience, can’t promise. If acts of war or nature force a sudden rethink of the priority given to carbon reduction over energy affordability and reliability, as they’ve done in the past year, the investment universe would no longer reflect how the real economy operates.

Jason Sorens decries the seemingly accelerating trend of governments treating adults like children. A slice:

New Zealand recently passed a law permanently prohibiting the sale of tobacco to anyone born on or after January 1, 2009. That’s right. If you’re unlucky enough to have been born on or after that date, it will forever be illegal for you to smoke a cigar on a celebratory occasion or to savor a pipe on a dewy summer evening.

The new law is part of a growing trend in the Western world toward treating adults like children. Even as governments experiment with lowering the voting age to 16, they are raising the age at which we may marry, work, have sex, own a gun, drink alcohol, and yes, smoke. The logic seems to be that young adults are rational enough to make decisions about everyone else’s lives but not their own.

Michael Shellenberger decries California’s pathologies. Two slices:

Now the state has become America’s shadow self. True, it is more prosperous than ever, surpassing Germany last year to become the world’s fourth-largest economy. But Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento, and smaller cities are today overrun by homeless encampments, which European researchers more accurately describe as “open drug scenes.” Crime has become so rampant that many have simply stopped reporting it, with nearly half of San Franciscans telling pollsters that they were a victim of theft in the last five years and a shocking one-quarter saying that they had been assaulted or threatened with assault.

These pathologies are just the most visible manifestations of a deeper rot. Less than half of California’s public school students are proficient in reading, and just one-third are proficient in math (with a stunning 9 percent of African-Americans and 12 percent of Latinos in L.A. public schools proficient in eighth-grade math). Education achievement declined precipitously in California in 2021, as the state kept children studying at home well after kids in other states had returned to the classroom. Californians pay the most income tax, gasoline tax, and sales tax in the United States, yet suffer from electricity blackouts and abysmal public services. Residential electricity prices grew three times faster in 2021 than they did in the rest of the United States. And the state government, dependent on income taxes, faces a projected $23 billion budget deficit that will only grow if the nation’s economy enters a recession. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given these trends, California’s population stopped expanding in 2014 and has slightly declined since, resulting in the loss of a congressional seat after the 2020 Census.

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Or consider environmental nonprofits. Groups like the Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, and Climate Works often dictate what infrastructure can get built and combine pro-scarcity environmentalism with woke identity politics. For half a century, these neo-Malthusians have blocked new housing, power plants, and water storage and desalination in the state.

Bryan Caplan shares Alex Epstein’s response to Tyler Cowen’s review of Epstein’s Fossil Future. Here’s the conclusion Bryan draws from Tyler C.’s and Alex E.’s exchange:

Furthermore, Alex actually concedes too much to Tyler, since Fossil Future powerfully argues that (a) it’s unclear that the environmental effects of fossil fuels are even gross negatives, and (b) there is overwhelming evidence that – thanks to climate mastery – the net environmental effects of fossil fuels are highly positive. So contra Tyler, there really is no need to water down the subtitle of the book.

Russ Roberts talks with Vinay Prasad about problems with pharmaceutical development in the U.S.

The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board reports on the growing “evidence that those who derided the possibility of a man-made Chinese origin [for covid] were wrong.” Two slices (link added):

The Journal scoop Sunday that the U.S. Department of Energy has concluded that the Covid-19 virus leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China, doesn’t mean the case is definitive. But it is more evidence that the media and public-health groupthink about Covid was mistaken and destructive.

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We have since learned that public-health officials wanted to hide that U.S. financial aid to the Wuhan lab may have contributed to the “gain-of-function” research that could have led to the leak. It is a disgraceful episode, like so much of the initial Covid dogma.

Given China’s coverup, we may never know for sure how the virus first struck humans. But Americans deserve to know the facts about the relationship of the U.S. National Institutes of Health to the Wuhan lab and to promoting gain-of-function research. The early deception also needs to be exposed.

Wall Street Journal columnist Allysia Finley writes about how “[t]he public-health clerisy rediscovers a principle of immunology it derided throughout the pandemic.” Two slices:

The Lancet medical journal this month published a review of 65 studies that concluded prior infection with Covid—i.e., natural immunity—is at least as protective as two doses of mRNA vaccines. The most surprising news was that the study made the mainstream press.

“Immunity acquired from a Covid infection is as protective as vaccination against severe illness and death, study finds,” NBC reported on Feb. 16. The study found that prior infection offered 78.6% protection against reinfection from the original Wuhan, Alpha or Delta variants at 40 weeks, which slipped to 36.1% against Omicron. Protection against severe illness remained around 90% across all variants after 40 weeks. These results exceed what other studies have found for two and even three mRNA doses.

This comes after nearly three years of public-health officials’ dismissing the same hypothesis. But now that experts at the University of Washington have confirmed it in a leading—and left-leaning—journal, it’s fit to print.

The Lancet study’s vindication of natural immunity fits a pandemic pattern: The public-health clerisy rejects an argument that ostensibly threatens its authority; eventually it’s forced to soften its position in the face of incontrovertible evidence; and yet not once does it acknowledge its opponents were right.

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Recall that the [great Great Barrington] declaration called for a new pandemic strategy with a focus on protecting the elderly and vulnerable while letting those at low risk for severe illness “live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection.” The aim was to minimize deaths and social harm until we reach herd immunity.

While the goal of herd immunity proved elusive as the virus mutated, the declaration’s central premise was correct: “As immunity builds in the population, the risk of infection to all—including the vulnerable—falls.” This is what has happened over the past three years. Vaccines helped mitigate severe illness while people developed stronger natural immunity.

Although the virus has become more transmissible, we’ve built up what experts call an “immunity wall” that prevents it from spreading like a wildfire through a dense, dry forest, as happened in China after Beijing lifted its zero-Covid policy.

Jane who votes tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

My sons college baseball team was ratted out for a kid running the bases during a HOMERUN and pulling down his mask to celebrate – they were threatened with disqualification by the @NCAA – the whole world went mad and punished the innocent

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 251 of Thomas Sowell’s 1999 book, Barbarians Inside the Gates:

I cannot understand people who say that minorities should be represented everywhere and yet are upset when there are blacks represented in the conservative movement.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page xix of the 2003 Third Edition of economic historian Eric Jones’s 1981 book, The European Miracle:

A concern with economic growth does not necessarily mean an indifference to questions of the distribution of income. (It may be fairer to see it as a matter of putting first things first.)

The Glories of Globalization

(Don Boudreaux)

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For the first time in my life I’m in Jerusalem. Walking earlier today through the Old City, I was indeed – as Russ Roberts assured me I would be – taken back a few millennia in time. But I was also struck by the ubiquity of commerce; everywhere merchants are hawking goods and services (the latter including the many people who approached me offering to serve as my guide). I suspect this propensity to truck, barter, and exchange was no less prevalent when the Romans, and then later the Ottomans, ruled here.

And I smiled especially at these two signs – each in Jerusalem’s Old City – of modern, glorious globalization. (This alum of Auburn wonders how one says “Roll Tide!” in Hebrew.)

More Than Any Other, This Understanding Is the Distinguishing Feature of True Liberalism

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal:

Editor:

Whatever are the neglected merits of Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech, Peggy Noonan errs in applauding Pres. Carter’s claim that Americans faced a choice between “fragmentation and self-interest” and “common purpose and the restoration of American values” (“Jimmy Carter’s ‘Malaise’ Speech Aged Well,” Feb. 24).

A core American value is the belief that society can be peaceful and prosperous without everyone pursuing a common purpose. This understanding is reflected in American federalism, which permits different states to implement different policies according to their citizens’ different preferences. More importantly, rejection of a common purpose is implied in the Declaration of Independence’s ringing affirmation that each of us has an unalienable right to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” To identify liberty as a keystone of a good society is to realize that self-interest isn’t fragmenting when people engage with each other voluntarily, as they do in free markets which incite each person to pursue his or her individual happiness by helping countless strangers to pursue theirs.

If the term “common purpose” has any concrete content, then such a purpose can be possessed and pursued only by collectivist societies. A free society has the opposite: individual liberty governed by the rule of law. Pres. Carter was wrong in 1979 – just as politicians, left and right, are wrong today – to insist, in effect, that Americans can succeed only by mimicking collectivists.

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

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(Don Boudreaux)

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Phil Magness reviews Naomi Oreskes’s and Erik Conway’s new dumpster-fire of intellectual confusion, economic ignorance, and historical inaccuracy. Three slices:

Almost everything in this genre follows the same formula. When the American electorate fails to embrace the political priorities of an Ivy League humanities department, these disheartened authors cast about for a blameworthy culprit. They settle on “market fundamentalism” or “neoliberalism.” The explanation then takes a paranoid turn, declaring the targeted theories a “manufactured myth” arising from the “inventions” of 20th century business interests, which allegedly hoodwinked voters into accepting the “magic” of the free market as a matter of received wisdom. Certain that they have found the source of their political obstacles, these historians then claim to uncover a “secret” history that has been hiding in plain sight. All eventually settle on a mundane conspiracy of business interests and libertarian economists, who allegedly derailed America from its progressive path by convincing people that markets work better than government at solving problems.

At some 550 pages, The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us To Loathe Government and Love the Free Market is among the most loquacious entrants into this crowded literature. Harvard University’s Naomi Oreskes and California Institute of Technology historian Erik Conway lay out their conspiracy theory with formulaic precision, but their book is atypical in one significant way. While most of the other works in the anti-neoliberalism genre manage at least to excavate some interesting archival findings about libertarian economists (before badly misinterpreting them), this book is remarkably light on original content.

The Big Myth‘s argument most closely resembles that of Cornell University historian Lawrence Glickman’s 2019 book Free Enterprise: An American History, which advanced a nearly identical thesis wherein the concept of “free enterprise” allegedly arose as a myth in the service of anti–New Deal business interests. But The Big Myth also weaves in recent tracts by Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, Kim Phillips-Fein, Kevin Kruse, Quinn Slobodian, and Jane Mayer. Oreskes and Conway round out their spartan use of economic sources (their recounting of “market failure” theory makes heavier use of Pope Francis’ encyclicals than any actual economics texts) with a dash of Thomas Piketty’s dubious inequality empirics and a touch of Ha-Joon Chang’s attempts to resurrect trade protectionism.

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Such errors are frequently paired with another recurring theme: the authors’ fundamental inability to approach their opponents with anything remotely resembling intellectual charity. The book is filled with gratuitous swipes, many of them comically ahistorical.

This usually means either a false accusation of racism or a disparaging attack on a target’s qualifications. Mises receives both types of abuse. After dubbing him an “absolutist who sympathized with fascism,” Oreskes and Conway launch into an extended attack on the Austrian economist’s migration to the United States in 1940. In their telling, Mises was a relic of a bygone laissez faire ideology who struggled to find a respectable academic job until “dark money” funders created a succession of positions for him at New York University. It is doubtful they would pass similar judgment on the many academic refugees from Nazi Germany who hailed from the political left. Meanwhile, Mises’ academic work in the United States gained higher honors than either Oreskes or Conway has ever achieved. By the decade’s end, he had published three monographs with Yale University Press, including the decidedly anti-fascist book Omnipotent Government. Upon his retirement from teaching at age 88, Mises was named a distinguished fellow of the American Economic Association.

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The authors’ discussion of the latter subject, which closes the book, is unintentionally comedic. Oreskes and Conway use the pandemic to contrast U.S. “market failure” with the alleged success of “countries that mounted a strong, coordinated response,” China foremost among them. As their book went to press, China’s centralized “zero-COVID” regime was collapsing into the same unfettered disease spread that Oreskes and Conway ascribe to free markets. But readers should not expect any self-interrogation from this pair.

Also from Phil Magness, here on his Facebook page, is this bit of evidence that defenders of the 1619 Project are embarrassingly unfamiliar with the intellectually calamitous project that they contort themselves to defend.

David Henderson reports some good news on taxes. A slice:

But the tax situation at the state level is much more hopeful. Most states have some form of a balanced-budget requirement, and state governments can’t print money. State governments, therefore, must live within their means. You might think that would cause them not to cut tax rates. But many state politicians have learned that by cutting tax rates they don’t necessarily cut tax revenues because those lower tax rates attract people from high-tax states. That leads to more income being taxed, thus dampening the revenue-reducing effects of cuts in tax rates.

“Is there a market failure in child care?”

The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board explains just how huge are the stakes in the outcome of a case that will be heard on Tuesday by the U.S. Supreme Court. A slice:

The Supreme Court hears one of the most consequential separation-of-powers cases in American history on Tuesday when it considers President Biden’s unilateral student loan write-off. The question is nothing less than whether the President can steal Congress’s power of the purse and act like a King.

Mr. Biden’s claim of unilateral power to cancel $400 billion in debt is truly breathtaking, and he knew it. A month before taking office, Mr. Biden said it was “pretty questionable,” whether he had the power to cancel student debt. Then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi insisted in July 2021 that “it would take an act of Congress, not an executive order, to cancel student loan debt.” Now the Administration is arguing otherwise in court.

Lionel Shriver imagines what would be done by “sensitivity readers” to her 2003 novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin. A slice:

However, publishing poohbahs have pointed out that Roald Dahl’s characters are not allowed to have guns, even when they are toy guns. So for Kevin to have a toy gun wouldn’t be fair. Also, nothing can be ‘black’ anymore. The splats would have to be ‘dark’. (Nothing can be ‘white’ either, or ‘red’ or ‘brown’; as a pattern is developing, odds are ‘yellow’ is out, too, so the only primary colour available in our story is blue. How apt.) ‘India’ ink also made the narrative nabobs nervous that the author would uncontrollably mention Rudyard Kipling. Therefore, it has been agreed that this whole scene will go away. So far not much is happening in our book, which is very safe. Nothing happening means a bad thing can’t happen that would cause harm and pain.

Adam Summers decries the worldwide decline of freedom caused by covid hysteria.

Alex Rampell tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

A *math competition* scheduled today requires KN95s for all participants, at all times…except during lunch, where the virus obviously takes a break.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 263 of F.A. Hayek’s December 1961 speech in New York City titled “The Moral Element in Free Enterprise,” which appears as chapter twenty of Essays on Liberalism and the Economy (2022) – volume 18 (expertly edited by Paul Lewis) of The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek:

Economic activity provides the material means for all our ends. At the same time, most of our individual efforts are directed to providing means for the ends of others in order that they, in turn, may provide us with the means for our ends. It is only because we are free in the choice of our means that we are also free in the choice of our ends.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from pages 11-12 of Jason Brennan’s 2019 book, When All Else Fails: The Ethics of Resistance to State Injustice:

Government agents are due no greater moral deference when they act unjustly than private agents are due.

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(Don Boudreaux)

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Kevin Schmidt and Thomas Kimbrell – writing in the Wall Street Journal – explain that “covid exposed the damage done by certificate-of-need rules.” Two slices:

When Covid-19 exposed the country’s dangerous lack of hospital beds, lawmakers used the taxpayer credit card to try to spend their way out of the problem. But that isn’t all they did. Two dozen states also suspended certificate-of-need regulations, which artificially suppress hospital bed capacity. Now that the crisis is over, states should repeal these rules permanently.

Certificate-of-need regulations require hospitals and healthcare providers to obtain government approval before they can build new facilities, expand existing facilities or purchase certain types of equipment—even beds. It would be more accurate to call them “permission to care” regulations, as they arbitrarily prevent patients from accessing life-enhancing innovations.

North Carolina has some of the nation’s top medical schools and ample resources, but our research has found the state’s stringent certificate-of-need regulations prevented at least $1.5 billion in medical innovation from 2012 to 2022. North Carolina health systems and companies seeking to expand face an application process riddled with cronyism. People employed by or affiliated with existing healthcare providers and medical institutions make up 60% of the State Health Coordinating Council, which determines the state’s need for healthcare facilities and services. It would be like forcing 7-Eleven to get permission from Wawa and Circle K before being allowed to open a new store.

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The problems arising from permission-to-care schemes long predate the pandemic. A 2016 Mercatus study found that states with certificate-of-need regulations have fewer hospital beds and facilities per capita than states that have embraced the free market.

In 1974 Congress mandated that states pass certificate-of-need laws as a condition for receiving federal health dollars. Since that mandate was lifted in 1987, 12 states have completely repealed their laws. Those states are empowering those closest to the community to address local needs without interference from state regulators or politically connected competitors protecting regional monopolies. Other states have adopted piecemeal reforms to ease the burdens placed on those working to improve patient care. In 2021 North Carolina raised the capital minimums that trigger certificate-of-need review, allowing for smaller-scale expansion plans to move forward without regulatory approval.

Other states should follow suit. Underinvestment in the nation’s health infrastructure will remain a problem until lawmakers end government micromanagement of healthcare. Innovators and entrepreneurs must be free to serve patients in urgent need of affordable and accessible care.

Doug Bandow adds his clear voice to those – including that of my intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy – who refuse to indulge the fantasy that fiscal reality is optional.

Juliette Sellgren talks with Robert Tracinski “on left and right illiberalism.”

Emma Camp is understandably unimpressed with Ron DeSantis’s proposed means of promoting “viewpoint diversity.”

“More immigration leads to better nursing home care.”

Here are more of Alberto Mingardi’s valuable reflections on Bruno Leoni’s magnificent 1961 book, Freedom and the Law.

Martin Kulldorff and Jay Bhattacharya make the case for a covid truth commission. A slice:

Perhaps the most perplexing sin of the public-health establishment is that it abandoned an essential commitment to science. For instance, why did public-health authorities ignore clear scientific data that COVID infection-acquired immunity is stronger than vaccine-acquired immunity? Vaccine mandates forced many frontline workers — heroes who contracted COVID early in the pandemic while doing essential work — to choose between their careers and a vaccine that provides less protection than the natural immunity they already had. University presidents forced young male students, including those with excellent immunity from a prior COVID infection, to accept an elevated risk of myocarditis as the price of a college education.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 191 of Thomas Sowell’s superb 1993 collection, Is Reality Optional?:

Most sound bites aren’t very sound.