Russell Roberts's Blog, page 45

An Open Letter to Michel Martin

(Don Boudreaux)

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Ms. Michel Martin
All Things Considered
National Public Radio

Ms. Martin:

I do wish that in your conversation with the Marxist historian Malcolm Harris you would have exercised at least a modicum of critical scrutiny (“Author Malcolm Harris’ version of Palo Alto: a microcosm of a capitalist system,” Feb. 19). Such scrutiny would have prompted you to challenge Harris’s ridiculous assertion that the capitalist “technologies and forces that we’ve invoked” since the end of the 19th century “have been incredibly destructive.”

Did Mr. Harris refer here to modern health care? Near-universal electrification? The dramatic improvements in the quality and spaciousness of housing? The spread of air conditioning and central heating? Access of the masses to radio, television, telephones, and now smartphones and the Internet? The enormous decline in the cost of food? The ever-increasing affordability of books and other sources of knowledge? The incalculable fall in the cost – measured in both money and, especially, time – of travel courtesy of automobiles and airplanes?

Of course not, for no sane person regards these outcomes of capitalism as “incredibly destructive.”

The lone destructive product that Harris identified as caused by capitalism are weapons of war. Forget that such weapons were produced also by communist regimes. Instead recognize that no Marxist-inspired government ever came close to producing the cornucopia of consumer goods and services that ordinary Americans today purchase regularly and eagerly – goods and services that raise life-expectancy, increase leisure, and free women from backbreaking housework.

To identify weapons of war as the signature achievement of capitalism is the equivalent of identifying lobotomies as the signature achievement of modern medicine.

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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My GMU Econ colleague Bryan Caplan never ceases to amaze me with his creative insights.

Does Joe Biden favor school choice?!?!?

What’s the greatest (genuine) anti-poverty ‘program’ in the U.S.?

Here’s David Henderson on Larry Summers on Marian Tupy’s and Gale Pooley’s super Superabundance.

GMU Econ alum Caleb Brown reprises a 2015 podcast with Cato’s Peter Van Doren on President Jimmy Carter.

My GMU Econ colleague Vincent Geloso, in a new paper written with Casey Pender, uncovers evidence that Canadians enjoyed no wartime prosperity – and that the Great Depression in Canada was not ‘cured’ by that country’s involvement in WWII. Here’s the abstract:

This paper provides a series of nominal non-war output for Canada during WWI and WWII and a novel estimated price deflator to account for wartime price controls. We argue that our nominal series, deflated by our price estimates, provides a superior indicator of welfare and general economic well-being during wartime than more traditional measures of real output. When looking at our series, we find that it is 11% lower than traditional measures in 1918 and closer to 30% lower in 1945. We also corroborate our finding with domestic private investment in Canada, which we show follows similar trends of decline during wartime relative to trend. We argue that this provides evidence against the idea of wartime prosperity and, more specifically, against the notion of WWII ending the Great Depression in Canada.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Meghan Cox Gurdon decries the “bowdlerizing of [Roald] Dahl.” A slice:

Ray Bradbury, a 20th-century writer who knew the value of sharp description, saw his anticensorship novel “Fahrenheit 451” stealth-edited to placate his feminist critics. He was enraged. “There is more than one way to burn a book,” he wrote, “and the world is full of people running about with lit matches.”

Also weighing in on the woke’s malignant effort to unDahl Roald Dahl is Reason‘s Robby Soave.

Richard Rahn warns of campus wokism. A slice:

What I never anticipated was that years later, an enforced ideology would become the norm on many college campuses in the United States. Professors and others who have never directly experienced socialism and communism are indoctrinating students with utopian fantasies about how everyone could be equal if only capitalism were abolished. The fact that communism has always failed is excused because those who tried to implement it made “mistakes that will be corrected next time.” Some advocates admit coercion will be necessary to force people to give up their hard-earned assets, and free expression will be curtailed to avoid allowing the people to be exposed to “impure racist and sexist thoughts.” All of this is justified for the “greater good.”

“Biden’s ‘Buy American’ promise is a lot more complicated and bureaucratic than it seems” – so reports Eric Boehm.

Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson feel vindicated by a recent meta-analysis published in the Lancet.

Also from Tom Jefferson and Carl Heneghan is this chilling report on the New Zealand government’s dystopian proposal to stop the spread of covid “disinformation.”

Here’s the headline of the latest column by the New York Times‘s Bret Stephens: “The Mask Mandates Did Nothing. Will Any Lessons Be Learned?” A slice:

But when it comes to the population-level benefits of masking, the verdict is in: Mask mandates were a bust. Those skeptics who were furiously mocked as cranks and occasionally censored as “misinformers” for opposing mandates were right. The mainstream experts and pundits who supported mandates were wrong. In a better world, it would behoove the latter group to acknowledge their error, along with its considerable physical, psychological, pedagogical and political costs.

David Zweig tweets about Bret Stephens’s NYT column: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

The remarkable thing here is that the only way the most prestigious data review on community masks – which found no clear evidence of benefit – made it into the paper of record was in an opinion piece

The NYT Science desk did not deem it newsworthy

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 148 of Paul Seabright’s superb 2004 book, The Company of Strangers (link added):

However we feel about modern markets, it is important not to exaggerate the degree of spontaneity in the interactions of our ancestors. The anthropologist Marcel Mauss argued in his book The Gift that in what he called “archaic societies” gifts are “in theory voluntary, in reality given and returned obligatorily,” and that the gift exchange constitutes the major mechanism of circulation of goods in society…. The impression that prices have become more central to familiar relationships in the modern world might be due simply to our failure nowadays to be realistic about the nature of relationships in traditional societies.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 288 of 1992 Nobel-laureate Gary Becker’s and Guity Nashat Becker’s 1997 book, The Economics of Life:

Third World populations expanded rapidly because children and adults live much longer than they did even a few decades ago, not because families are having more babies. They are having fewer babies. How can one lament population growth due to dramatically fewer deaths from malnutrition and contagious diseases?

DBx: How indeed? Yet it is today de rigueur among progressives and environmentalists to decry population expansion. These intellectuals – widely believed, especially by themselves – to be unusually enlightened and humane, are often willing to countenance policies designed to forcibly suppress the flourishing of human life on earth.

Most progressives and environmentalists are not naturally evil, but they are very frequently led to embrace evil policies by their utter ignorance of history and of economics (and, in some cases, by a simple inability to think straight combined with an addiction to emoting).

Still Trying To Open John Tamny’s Eyes To the Harms Unleashed by Deficit Financing

(Don Boudreaux)

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John Tamny, RealClearMarkets

John:

Greetings from a member of a group of economists and pundits who, in your latest column, you call “sanctimonious,” “haughty,” and “eyes-periodically closed” – a group whose “self-regarding countenance obscures how little they understand markets.” We are a group, in short, who warn of the dangers of deficit financing of government spending and, thus, support annually balanced budgets.

I myself am of no consequence and likely guilty as you charge. But among the “deficit hawks” who you dismiss as deserving “bemusement, and perhaps scorn” are the majority of economists, including Adam Smith, who wrote prior to John Maynard Keynes. Post-Keynes, this group includes (to name only a few) Nobel-laureate economists James Buchanan and Vernon Smith, as well as the late William Niskanen and Buchanan’s brilliant student Richard Wagner.

Also in this group of individuals dismissed by you as economic ignoramuses is the Nobel laureate Gary Becker, who wrote in 2010 that “[t]he disturbingly large present and prospective fiscal deficits of the federal government receive much attention, and deservedly so.” One more member worth mentioning is Milton Friedman, who warned in 1981 that “[d]eficits are bad primarily because they foster excessive government spending – the chief culprit, in my opinion, in producing both inflation and slow economic growth.”

I continue to be mystified by your failure to understand that a sizeable portion of the excessive government spending that you rightly decry is fueled by the ability of today’s citizens-taxpayers to borrow money for today’s programs. Enabling today’s citizens-taxpayers to pass the bill for today’s programs onto future citizens-taxpayers, deficit financing allows people today to consume at the expense of people tomorrow, many of whom aren’t yet born.

You laugh at the claim that foisting debt on future generations is immoral. You do so by denying that anyone truly gains today from excessive government spending. You here, however, commit two errors. First, while such spending does indeed hurt the American people as a whole, it does indeed yield net benefits to the special interest groups on whom this spending is showered. It’s these groups specifically who are unleashed by deficit financing to free ride on future citizens-taxpayers.

Second, even if it were true that not a single person today benefits from deficit-financed spending, it remains immoral for us today to stick future generations with the bill for this foolish spending.

Many of your criticisms of excessive government spending and regulation are correct and insightful. But you unnecessarily diminish the impact to your larger, worthwhile efforts by your continued attacks on those knowledgeable economists and pundits who warn of the very real dangers lurking in deficit spending.

Sincerely,
Don

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(Don Boudreaux)

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Writing in the Wall Street Journal, David Henderson and Phil Magness identify several instances where Hulu’s series on the 1619 Project inadvertently makes the case for capitalism and against reparations. Two slices:

Hulu’s series “The 1619 Project” blames economic inequality between blacks and whites on “racial capitalism.” But almost every example presented is the result of government policies that, in purpose or effect, discriminated against African-Americans. “The 1619 Project” makes an unintentional case for capitalism.

The series gives many examples of government interventions that undercut free markets and property rights. Eminent domain, racial red lining of mortgages, and government support and enforcement of union monopolies figure prominently.

The final episode opens by telling how the federal government forcibly evicted black residents of Harris Neck, Ga., during World War II to build a military base. The Army gave residents three weeks to relocate before the bulldozers moved in, paying below-market rates through eminent domain. After the war, the government refused to let the former residents return. Violation of property rights is the opposite of capitalism.

The series also highlights the noxious role of the Federal Housing Administration in red lining. The FHA discriminated against minority neighborhoods by classifying them as too “hazardous” for lending. The writers could have strengthened their case by citing Richard Rothstein’s 2017 book, “The Color of Law.” Mr. Rothstein quotes the FHA’s statement in the 1930s that “no loans will be given to colored developments.” This policy lasted into the 1970s, leaving a legacy of economic segregation. Capitalism wasn’t the culprit; the government was.

…..

The answer to these problems isn’t to place the burden on the market through reparations. It’s to root out bad government policies that continue, sometimes unintentionally, the long legacy of state-sponsored racial discrimination. That would be a worthy 2023 project.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, continues to explain the detachment from reality of those who argue that industrial policy can successfully improve America’s economy. A slice:

Unfortunately, political reality means that politicians will unfailingly impose all sorts of requirements on those receiving the funds, tack on goals in addition to those of industrial policy, direct resources to cronies, and resist admitting failure whenever their plans prove futile. The sum of it all is highly counterproductive.

GMU Econ alum Dominic Pino (with help from Tim Carney) chimes in with support of Vero’s criticisms of industrial policy.

Ted Balaker interviews DEI dissident Karith Foster. (HT George Leef)

Barry Brownstein is correct: the line separating destructive tribalism from human flourishing is thin. A slice:

Walter Grinder, a grand champion of liberty, passed last December. While not well-published, Walter was a scholar of the literature of liberty and a leader at the Institute for Humane Studies. He was dedicated to removing barriers to human flourishing by imparting the ideals of liberty. John Hagel III, Walter’s long-time friend and collaborator, explained, “Walter was consumed by the desire to share his reading and thoughts with his network of libertarian associates and protégés in more personal ways, so that they could see more clearly how it connected with their specific work and interests.” Walter shared insights from his scholarship in the form of emails addressed to single individuals and blind copied to his network.

In one of his emails, sent towards the end of his life, Walter wrote he had been “binging” the work of the Turkish-British author Elif Shafak. Walter marveled at “how well she sees into the human condition.”

Walter understood insights into the human condition are crucial to understanding the mindsets that foster or hinder human flourishing. On his recommendation, I read Shafak’s well-researched novel of the Cyprus Civil War, The Island of the Missing Trees. Using the device of a Greek-Turkish couple split apart by the war, Shafak imparts poetic wisdom about the dangers of tribalism.

“Immigration and Trade Are Key to Thriving Economies” – so explains Vance Ginn.

Georgetown Law graduate William Spruance reports on the draconian covidian measures he encountered while enrolled. A slice:

In August 2021, Georgetown Law returned to in-person learning after 17 months of virtual learning. The school announced a series of new policies for the school year: there was a vaccine requirement (later to be supplemented with booster mandates), students were required to wear masks on campus, and drinking water was banned in the classroom.

Dean Bill Treanor announced a new anonymous hotline called “Law Compliance” for community members to report dissidents who dared to quench their thirst or free their vaccinated nostrils.

Meanwhile, faculty members were exempt from the requirement, though the school never explained what factors caused their heightened powers of immunity.

Shortly thereafter, I received a notification from “Law Compliance” that I had been “identified as non-compliant” for “letting the mask fall beneath [my] nose.” I had a meeting with Dean of Students Mitch Bailin to discuss my insubordination, and I tried to voice my concerns about the irrationality of the school’s policies.

Anthony LaMesa tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

Because of fear-mongering, many Americans were terrified to set foot in a grocery store, let alone a doctor’s office or hospital. How many of these people died from heart attacks or strokes? From delayed cancer care?

Wall Street Journal columnist Allysia Finley decries the CDC’s deceptions about long covid. Three slices:

Many liberals [DBx: progressives] label themselves “pro-science” as if that’s a political position. Then again, so many putatively scientific studies seem intended to promote progressive policies rather than advance scientific knowledge. Such studies then get amplified by the media and self-appointed experts on social media.

Consider a recent study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that claims to find that nearly 36% of Covid cases among students, faculty and staff at George Washington University resulted in “long Covid.” The study suggests that young, healthy people face a high risk of chronic debilitating symptoms after infection despite being at low risk of getting severely ill with the virus.

The study also finds that the unvaccinated were at more than twice as high a risk of developing long Covid as those fully vaccinated who had gotten boosters. This sounds plausible. But drill down, and it becomes clear that the evidence is too thin to draw any conclusions.

Like many colleges, George Washington University held classes online during the first year of the pandemic even as some students returned to campus. Those on campus were required to undergo weekly Covid testing. During the 2021-22 school year, classrooms reopened but students were required to be vaccinated and later boosted.

…..

Long Covid in general isn’t well-defined, but the study defines it expansively to include problems common among college students—difficulty making decisions, fatigue, anxiety, sadness, trouble sleeping and the catch-all “other symptoms.” If a student reported at least one physical or psychological problem, he was classified as having long Covid.

Physical symptoms like shortness of breath and fatigue can follow non-Covid infections, including the flu. Some people who get sick with Covid later report brain fog, but mental-health problems are prevalent among young people.

…..

A November 2021 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that many people with persistent physical symptoms that are commonly ascribed to long Covid didn’t test positive for antibodies. A belief that one had Covid was more strongly associated with physical symptoms than a lab-confirmed infection.

One question that deserves investigation is how lockdowns and school shutdowns may have contributed to putative long-Covid symptoms. A JAMA study last September found that depression, anxiety, perceived stress, loneliness and worry about Covid were tied to a 1.3- to 1.5-fold increased risk of self-reported postviral symptoms as well as increased risk of daily life impairment.

It’s well documented that traumatic life events and psychological stress such as social isolation can cause dysfunction of the immune system and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, which regulates physiologic processes implicated in long Covid. Stress can also trigger the reactivation of Epstein-Barr virus, which has been found to occur in many long-Covid sufferers.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 266 of Thomas Sowell’s 1999 book, Barbarians Inside the Gates:

It is amazing how much time and ingenuity people will put into defending some idea that they never bothered to think through at the outset.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 72 of economists Phil Gramm’s, Robert Ekelund’s, and John Early’s important and data-rich 2022 book, The Myth of American Inequality: How Government Biases Policy Debate:

The growth in American productivity was sufficient to produce real hourly earnings for high school dropouts in 2017 that were higher than those earned by high school graduates with some college or technical training in 1967. High school graduates in 2017 had higher real hourly earnings than college graduates in 1967, and high school graduates with some college in 2017 earned about as much as people with advanced degrees earned in 1967.

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Rebecca Sugar decries modern “education’s” failure to educate as it intoxicates young people with the hubris to mistake their poorly educated selves as being fit to “change the world.” (HT George Leef) A slice:

I was speaking to a young woman the other day who told me she was a member of a citywide youth commission on “equity” and “solidarity.” When I asked her what that meant, she seemed startled. Some words are designed to be conversation stoppers. If someone is an “activist,” or fighting for “human rights” or “inclusion,” if she believes in “diversity” or wants to “change the world,” we are all supposed to understand the meaning and the mission.

The follow-up question doesn’t often follow. I asked one. Predictably, this young woman stumbled.

She tried to work out her understanding of “solidarity” in real time, seemingly for the first time. Then, she wrongly defined equity as equality. She clearly hadn’t spent much time thinking about the principles around which her committee had organized itself. She hadn’t gotten past the buzzwords, and no one, it appeared, had ever asked her to.

Teenagers aren’t expected to engage big issues at impressive depth, and I don’t blame the 18-year-old I was speaking with for her dilettantish efforts to “make the world a better place.” After all, signing up for social action projects, however manufactured, is the path to social acceptability and, of course, college admissions. I blame the adults who run programs like these, and who encourage young people to take serious matters so unseriously.

Arnold Kling identifies what is indeed one of the distinctive – and perhaps the most distinctive – feature of the human species. A slice:

Our brains evolved to develop skills involved in collaboration. One skill is the use of language. Another skill is the ability to handle situations that social scientists call games involving the choice between cooperation and defection. This includes skills related to cheating and detection of cheating, and skills related to deception and discovery.

Peter Earle defends so-called “junk fees.”

“Deregulation Remains Our Best Hope to Combat Alzheimer’s Disease.”

The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board applauds David Malpass’s tenure as president of the World Bank. A slice:

Mr. Malpass was under particular pressure to turn the bank into another slush fund for financing green-energy boondoggles. Some in the media are crowing, without evidence, that he’s been pushed out after Al Gore and the media climate conformity caucus raked him for comments last year they misconstrued as climate “denialism.”

The critics prefer to ignore the evidence that developing countries have figured out that Western-imposed carbon policies will trap their people in poverty. The danger is that the global climate clique will take the opportunity of Mr. Malpass’s retirement to remake the bank in their image.

The World Bank’s leader historically is nominated by the U.S., and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is pointing to “expanding our capacity to combat climate change” as a crucial goal for the bank’s next president as “we are undertaking to evolve” the bank and the IMF.

Mr. Malpass was right to focus the bank on helping countries cope with the economic damage from Covid and the Ukraine war. He’ll remain a strong voice for keeping developing economies and the institutions purporting to help them on the road to prosperity. As for the bank, let’s hope it doesn’t become an engine forcing costly renewables on countries that desperately need cheaper, more reliable electricity to lift hundreds of millions out of poverty.

Anthony LaMesa tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

In Europe, Sweden’s education minister said she was right to keep schools open; Norway’s pandemic-era health minister suggested Sweden was correct; Liz Truss said closures were wrong; and Germany’s health minister said they were a mistake. How about here? Anyone besides DeSantis?

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 161 of the 2007 Liberty Fund edition (Bettina Bien Greaves, ed.) of Ludwig von Mises’s 1949 treatise, Human Action (original emphasis):

People cavil much about Ricardo’s law of association, better known under the name law of comparative cost. The reason is obvious. This law is an offense to all those eager to justify protection and national economic isolation from any point of view other than the selfish interests of some producers or the issues of war-preparedness.

DBx: Yes. The principle of comparative advantage (which is the ‘law’ to which Mises here refers) is indeed a mighty intellectual obstacle for all persons who assert that protectionism is a means of increasing the wealth of the people of a nation. That it isn’t perceived as such by these persons reflects only their failure to understand it and its consequences.

Anyone who asserts that the principle of comparative advantage doesn’t apply in the modern world, doesn’t apply when capital and labor are mobile across international borders, doesn’t apply when capital or labor or both are immobile within national borders, doesn’t apply when it’s possible for humans consciously to change the pattern of comparative advantage, doesn’t apply when trade is so-called “imbalanced,” doesn’t apply when foreign governments impose tariffs or dispense subsidies, doesn’t apply during recessions, doesn’t apply when the government doesn’t compensate trade’s so-called ‘losers,’ doesn’t apply here, doesn’t apply there, doesn’t apply blah, blah, blah is someone who simply doesn’t understand the principle of comparative advantage.