Russell Roberts's Blog, page 54

I Say Again: Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s an e-mail to a new and very aggressive correspondent.

Mr. B__:

You say that I “practice amateur economics.” My alleged offense is my offering as evidence against the notion that American labor markets are seriously infected with monopsony power Walmart’s recent decision to raise its wages closer to the wages paid by its rivals. “Monopsony power,” you insist, “is present when a firm faces an upward sloping labor supply curve. Just because Walmart starts paying workers more does not mean it faces a horizontal supply of labor.” You conclude that “Walmart’s move is completely consistent with the reality that too many corporations in the US wield monopsony power.”

I disagree.

I’m quite familiar, of course, with the textbook geometric analyses of labor markets, including with definition of monopsony power as consisting in an employer confronting an upward-sloping supply curve of labor. But as helpful as that textbook analysis might be for certain purposes, it’s not reality. It’s a diagram. And it’s a diagram that seems to possess unusual power to mesmerize many who encounter it to commit the fallacy of misplaced concreteness – that is, to mistake the analytical concept for the full reality that it’s meant to illuminate a part of.

Two real-world phenomena in particular are routinely overlooked by those persons who, entranced by the textbook definition, label real-world labor markets as ‘monopsonistic.’ The first of these phenomena is the fact that workers are paid not only wages but also fringe benefits and other attractive job amenities. The second is that competition necessarily occurs through time; it’s not and cannot be instantaneous.

Real-world competition for workers can’t possibly be fully described by the static two-dimensional graphs found in textbooks. And so when in the real world we nevertheless witness America’s largest private employer, Walmart, bringing its wages closer into line with those paid by its rivals by hiking by 17 percent the hourly wages for its new workers – workers who are low-skilled – we are indeed justified in taking this fact as strong evidence against the claim that American labor markets are infected with monopsony power.

From the tone of your e-mail, however, I suspect that you’ll not believe me. So I urge you to do what I urge every other person to do who insists that America’s labor markets are chockablock with monopsony power: Put your money where your mouth is. Start a business. If in fact monopsony power is rampant, you’ll be able to hire workers on the cheap. You’ll make a mint as you help to dissolve the monopsony power that you so detest. Indeed, your starting your own business and employing underpaid workers will do far more to help workers than your writing academic papers, op-eds, and pointed tweets.

But if you refuse to put your money where your mouth is, the only plausible explanation will be either that you don’t really believe that monopsony power is rampant or that you’ve not adequately thought through the implications of your assertions. Either way, unless and until you’re willing to back with your own efforts and money your assertion of the prevalence of monopsonized labor markets, you’ve no business demanding that government put other people’s effort and money where your mouth is.

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

Antitrust Confusion

(Don Boudreaux)

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Yesterday I participated in the Mercatus Center’s 2nd annual Antitrust Forum. After welcoming remarks by my Mercatus Center colleague Alden Abbott, a few words from me in defense of the consumer-welfare standard, and introductions by GMU Law’s James Cooper, George Washington University law professor Bill Kovacic (pictured here) delivered an excellent opening address.

Following Bill’s address, we heard from the American Antitrust Institute’s Diana Moss, who argued for more active antitrust enforcement. Alas, her arguments were unpersuasive – and one argument especially so.

Among Ms. Moss’s arguments is a call for more stringent challenges to vertical mergers. (Vertical mergers are mergers of firms or operations that have with each other a supplier-buyer relationship, as when Ikea a few years ago bought forests in Romania and the Baltics.) Ms. Moss’s line of reasoning is this: (1) Defenders of vertical mergers claim that these mergers create efficiencies. (2) This claim is sometimes, and perhaps often, false. (3) As notable example of this claim being false is the failed merger of AT&T with Time-Warner. As Ms. Moss emphasized, less than four years after this merger it was effectively undone. (4) Vigorous antitrust policing against vertical mergers therefore is needed to protect the economy against inefficient vertical mergers.

There are many weak arguments for active antitrust enforcement, but few are as weak as this one. First, no one has stronger incentives than do the owners and managers of firms to detect and achieve possible improvements in operating efficiencies – and to avoid inefficiencies. Antitrust bureaucrats have neither strong incentives on this front nor sufficient experience in each of the many industries that they would police if Ms. Moss’s proposal became reality.

Second, we live, inescapably, in an uncertain world. This uncertainty is only intensified at the industry level when the economy is truly competitive, for truly competitive economies are innovative and dynamic. Of course there will be mistakes. There’s no avoiding them. Identifying privately arranged mergers that prove after-the-fact to be mistaken is evidence only of inescapable economic uncertainty. Ms. Moss noted that she doesn’t oppose all vertical mergers; she opposes only those vertical mergers that will not generate the promised efficiencies. Yet she – rather amazingly, in my view – offered not a word to explain why she obviously believes that antitrust bureaucrats and courts are in a position to better predict the future than are firm owners and managers.

Third, Ms. Moss – also surprisingly – did not, as I recall, offer any evidence against the widely shared view that vertical mergers do nothing to increase genuine monopoly power. In other words, her argument against vertical mergers contained no substantive demonstration or evidence that vertical mergers often lead to monopolization of markets – that is, to industry structures and practices that harm consumers. And so even if vertical mergers never generate efficiencies, there is no good argument to use antitrust to police such mergers.

Fourth and most obviously, as soon as the AT&T – Time-Warner merger proved to be inefficient, the parties themselves undid it. This merger was undone by competitive market forces and not by antitrust!

The AT&T – Time-Warner merger is evidence as solid as evidence gets against the proposition that antitrust is needed to police against vertical mergers. The fact that Ms. Moss confidently presented this merger as an excellent case-study in favor of active antitrust policing against vertical mergers testifies to the deep confusion in which so many antitrust proponents find themselves.

…..

A final note: If, contrary to fact, the logic of Ms. Moss’s argument for antitrust oversight of vertical mergers were sound, then she should also support antitrust oversight of vertical spin-offs. After all, it’s possible that a firm that chooses to sell its division X that supplies inputs to its division Y will later discover that that decision to sell division X was a mistake. Yet I doubt that Ms. Moss would wish to subject to antitrust oversight firms decisions to make such sales – that is, to reduce the extent of their ‘vertical’ operations.

In the end, antitrust is what it has always been and what it cannot avoid being for as long as it exists – namely, industrial policy masquerading as pro-competition policy.

Some Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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David Simon criticizes Tucker Carlson’s Paul Ehrlich-like fear of a growing human population. Two slices:

[Paul] Ehrlich, who is back in the news with a recent appearance on “60 Minutes” and the subsequent publication of his autobiography, has lived long enough to see his doomsday predictions repeatedly proven wrong.

In 1990, he famously lost his bet with the late economist Julian Simon regarding Ehrlich’s related claim that population growth would lead to shortages of natural resources and resulting higher prices for them.

Yet more dramatically, as the world’s population has grown from 3.7 billion in 1970 to 8 billion today, the only mass starvation has been in draconian socialist economies like North Korea and mid-1980s Ethiopia. The University of Oxford’s Our World in Data reports that worldwide famine deaths sharply fell from an annual average of over 16.6 million in the 1960s to 255,000 since 2010.

The vast reduction in famine deaths, Our World in Data also shows, does not mean more are living in misery. From 1970 through 2015, extreme poverty around the world deeply declined from almost 48 percent to less than 10 percent.

…..

[Tucker] Carlson also argued that “Mass population growth makes life worse for pretty much everybody… There are never enough resources to go around.” The facts establish that the opposite is true. A new book by Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley, “Superabundance,” extends and expands on the work of Julian Simon and shows that as population has grown, resources have become vastly more abundant and less expensive, particularly when based on the number of hours of work required to earn enough to purchase them.

Rather than being anchored to facts, Carlson’s population growth views are part of his dark side that opposes freedom and prosperity. His population growth views are related to his restrictionist, zero-sum game claims about how immigration impacts jobs and wages that similarly cannot be squared with decades of directly contrary economic data. The same is true of his strident opposition to Walmart and apparent support for industrial policy. And nothing positive can be said about his admission that he wants Russia to win its murderous war against Ukraine.

GMU Econ alum Peter Jacobsen writes insightfully about so-called “renewable” and “non-renewable” resources. Here’s his conclusion:

So, if you have been feeling pessimistic, renew your hope! People’s capacity to think of innovative, creative solutions to problems is the well that never runs dry. Our world is more complex than being pigeonholed into working with only one of two categories of resources. So forget the broken renewable/non-renewable dichotomy. As Julian Simon pointed out, people are the Ultimate Resource, and all other resources are created from the same place: the human mind.

My former Mercatus Center colleague Adam Thierer’s letter in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal is excellent:

The only thing Europe exports now on the digital-technology front is regulation. That is why it is mind-boggling that William Barr (“Congress Must Halt Big Tech’s Power Grab,” op-ed, Jan. 23) joins President Biden (“Unite Against Big Tech Abuses,” op-ed, Jan. 12) in calling for America to lead from behind on technology policy, following in the footsteps of the European Union rather than further developing one of the largest sectors of our economy.

Neither mention the staggering costs of the EU’s big-government regulatory crusade against digital tech: Stagnant markets, limited innovation and a dearth of major players. Overregulation by EU bureaucrats led Europe’s best entrepreneurs and investors to flee to the U.S. or elsewhere in search of the freedom to innovate.

Yet Messrs. Barr and Biden would have us import the EU model to our shores and smother our best and brightest with similar red-tape burdens. This would be a stake through the heart of the “permissionless innovation” that made America’s info-tech economy a global powerhouse.

With China challenging America’s dominance in technology and AI, new mandates could compromise America’s lead. Shackling our tech sectors with regulatory chains will hobble our nation’s ability to meet global competition and undermine innovation and consumer choice domestically. Messrs. Barr and Biden’s call for bipartisan big government in tech markets must be rejected.

Adam Thierer
Senior Fellow, R Street Institute
Washington

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Bjorn Lomborg exposes how “‘fact checkers” spread climate-change misinformation. A slice:

Partisan “fact checks” are undermining open discourse about important issues, including climate change. Earlier this month I wrote an accurate post on Facebook about the growing polar-bear population. The post undercut alarmist climate narratives, so it was wrongly tagged as a falsehood.

Activists have used polar bears as an icon of climate apocalypse for decades, but the best data show that far from dying out, their numbers are growing. The official assessments from the leading scientists who study these animals—the Polar Bear Specialist Group within the International Union for Conservation of Nature—peg the global population today at 22,000 to 31,000. That’s higher than the 5,000 to 19,000 polar bears scientists estimated were around in the 1960s.

The main reason has nothing to do with climate. An international agreement enacted in 1976 limits polar-bear hunting, always the key threat to polar bears’ numbers. Polar bears survived through the last interglacial period, 130,000 to 115,000 years ago, when it was significantly warmer than it is now.

Arnold Kling offers sound, practical advice for anyone managing an organization.

The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California has temporarily enjoined enforcement of California’s new Orwellian statute designed to punish physicians for allegedly spreading covid misinformation and disinformation.

About this court ruling, Sarah Beth Burwick tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

It’s difficult to read this decision regarding California’s “covid misinformation” law without feeling deep disgust for the Democrat legislators who enacted this blatantly unconstitutional, anti-speech statute — and for the governor who signed it.

Writing in Time, epidemiologist David Halperin warns of sources of covid misinformation – including, of course, from that steady gusher of misinformation, Anthony Fauci. Two slices:

A month before his recent retirement, Dr. Anthony Fauci cautioned that the U.S. “certainly” remains in the midst of a COVID pandemic. Other experts repeatedly warn of impending “deadly” waves caused by the latest genetic variants, and recently President Biden once again extended the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency. Yet those dire warnings hinge largely on an assumption that some 400 people in the U.S. continue dying daily from the disease. There are important reasons to question this assertion, as Dr. Leana Wen explored in the Washington Post. And if therefore in fact we’re no longer in a public health emergency (which a renowned virologist in Germany concluded last month), then some growing calls for reinstating school mask mandates or other inappropriate restrictions should be dropped.

For over a year, it has been apparent that many hospitalizations officially classified as being due to COVID-19 are instead of patients without COVID symptoms who are admitted for other reasons but also happen to test positive. Since nearly everyone is still routinely swabbed upon hospital admission (although the largest infection control organization has recommended against doing so), many patients with other conditions also receive a positive test result, especially during the ongoing Omicron surges—thereby overstating the number of hospitalizations tabulated as caused by COVID-19. UCLA researchers who examined Los Angeles County Public Hospital data discovered that over two-thirds of official COVID-19 hospitalizations since January 2022 were actually “with” rather than “for” the disease.

…..

Growing recognition of the overcounting of COVID-19 hospitalizations has caused some local authorities as well as the CDC to try to better estimate the actual levels. Misclassified hospitalizations obviously suggest there have also been miscategorized deaths, yet a parallel recognition that undoubtedly many official COVID-19 deaths are similarly due to persons dying with instead of from the coronavirus has only begun to emerge. CDC guidelines still stipulate that any death from (any) illness occurring within 30 days of a positive test result automatically be classified as due to COVID-19. Hence, if the current prevalence in the population is, say, 3% (towards the lower end of typical levels during major surges like the present one) then the background prevalence among persons admitted to hospitals for other reasons—and also among those who end up dying —would similarly be around 3%. Considering about 9,200 total deaths occur daily in the U.S., then in this hypothetical scenario some 275 deaths ascribed to COVID (or approximately two-thirds of the official daily count) would in fact have been due to other causes.

The former Milwaukee County chief medical examiner conducted a careful review of some 4,000 COVID-19 deaths reported during the pandemic there. His research revealed that nearly half had no link to COVID or in some cases only a “marginal” association, such as end stage cancer patients whose demise was possibly hastened by a few days or weeks, from catching the disease. An analysis of LA County and national data collected during the more recent waves of the highly contagious (but considerably less deadly) Omicron variants suggests that COVID-19 deaths are now likely being overcounted by at least fourfold. A newly published investigation from Denmark documented that, following the emergence of Omicron a year ago, an astonishing 65-75% of deaths officially attributed to COVID-19 have been merely incidental to the coronavirus, consistent with the above hypothetical exercise. Yet even if only half the currently reported deaths in the U.S. are not really caused by the virus, that would mean an actual daily COVID-19 toll of around 200, roughly the number dying during a bad flu season.

In addition to overcounted numbers of COVID hospitalizations and deaths, another reason for maintaining a public health emergency is the purportedly massive wave of ongoing long COVID. Yet almost all long COVID reports are based on tabulations of the number of persons who self-report lingering symptoms post-infection, rather than controlled studies that carefully compare the prevalence of persistent symptoms in persons who have been infected to those who have not. An announcement on San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit trains warns that any of a number of common maladies, including headaches, anxiety, diarrhea, muscle aches and trouble concentrating, may be caused by long COVID. But case control studies have so far found, at most, only modest differences in symptom prevalence comparing between persons previously infected or not (and new research suggests most symptoms dissipate within a year). While long COVID is undeniably a significant problem, as are those deaths still actually caused by the coronavirus, rigorous analysis is needed to more accurately estimate the prevalence.

Also documenting the incentives to exaggerate covid numbers are Leslie Bienen and Margery Smelkinson, here writing in the Wall Street Journal. Two slices:

Public-health experts are increasingly acknowledging what has long been obvious: America is overcounting hospitalizations and deaths from Covid-19. Hospital patients are routinely tested for Covid on admission, then counted as “Covid hospitalizations” even if they’re asymptomatic. When patients die, Leana Wen notes in a Washington Post column, Covid is often listed on their death certificates even if it played no part in killing them. Government programs create incentives to overestimate Covid’s toll, and poor data make it difficult to pinpoint who’s still at risk and how effective boosters are.

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Another incentive to overcount comes from the American Rescue Plan of 2021, which authorizes the Federal Emergency Management Agency to pay Covid-19 death benefits for funeral services, cremation, caskets, travel and a host of other expenses. The benefit is worth as much as $9,000 a person or $35,000 a family if multiple members die. By the end of 2022, FEMA had paid nearly $2.9 billion in Covid-19 death expenses.

Funeral homes, mortuaries and state health departments widely advertise this benefit on their websites, as does FEMA. By contrast, the agency barely advertises funeral assistance to hurricane victims. And while around 80% of requests for Covid death benefits had been approved as of Jan. 1, some 80% of applications following hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria in 2017 were denied. FEMA offers no death benefit for the flu, HIV or any other infectious disease.

Several physicians told us they are concerned that hospitals are being pressured by families to list Covid-19 on the death certificate. “Just try and leave Covid off the death certificate of a person who was asymptomatic positive and died in a car accident,” one infectious-disease doctor said. “Just try.” No one was willing to be quoted by name—unsurprisingly, since the implication is that their hospitals are falsifying death certificates.

These programs create a vicious circle. They establish incentives to overstate the danger of Covid. The overstatement provides a justification to continue the state of emergency, which keeps the perverse incentives going. With effective vaccines and treatments widely available, and an infection fatality rate on par with flu, it’s past time to recognize that Covid is no longer an emergency requiring special policies.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 73 of the 2021 updated version of Bjorn Lomborg’s 2020 book, False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet (original emphasis):

[D]eaths caused by climate-related disasters have declined precipitously over the past century. In the 1920s, these disasters killed almost half a million people each year, mostly in large floods and droughts in developing countries. Today the total number of climate-related deaths across the world has declined to fewer than twenty thousand each year. Over the past hundred years, the number of deaths from these climate-related catastrophes has plummeted by 96 percent. Remember that over the same time period, the global population has increased fourfold. So the average personal risk of dying in a climate-related disaster has declined by 99 percent.

DBx: The outcome of my bet with Roger Pielke, Jr., on this matter will be settled in just over eight years from not.

The Cost of Shipping Is Accounted for In the Retail Price

(Don Boudreaux)

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I do despair that so few people – including people allegedly trained in economics – understand even the first thing about the economic way of thinking.

Mr. S__:

After reading my recent celebration of the easy availability of fresh blueberries in mid-winter, you allege that I “just got half the story.” You accuse me of ignoring “the obscene cost of shipping blueberries over thousands of miles just so Americans may have a marginally better breakfast.”

With respect, I did not ignore that cost. I accounted for it when I mentioned the price that I paid at the supermarket for the blueberries ($6.49 for 18 ounces). Because at that price the supply in mid-winter of blueberries in Fairfax, Virginia, (where I live) is quite reliable, that price clearly covers not only the cost of growing, packaging, and displaying the blueberries, it covers also the cost of shipping them from a farm in Chile to a supermarket in Fairfax. If at that price the cost of shipping the blueberries were not fully covered, no Chilean-grown blueberries would be regularly sold in Fairfax at that price.

The fact that in mid-winter there is a steady supply in Fairfax of fresh blueberries from Chile implies that the cost of shipping blueberries from Chile to the northeastern United States is emphatically not obscene, for it’s a cost that ordinary American supermarket patrons easily and willingly cover.

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

What Accounts for All This Stuff?

(Don Boudreaux)

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In my latest column for AIER I marvel at capitalism’s seemingly easy ability to supply fresh blueberries and grapes to Americans living in the northeast in mid-winter. Two slices:

Take a look at the accompanying photo. In its center are fresh blueberries that I purchased in January 2023 at a supermarket in northern Virginia. “Meh,” you shrug. But not so fast. These delicious and nutritious little gems were grown in Chile, in an entirely different hemisphere from where they were purchased. If I had to rely on my fellow Virginians to supply me with blueberries in the dead of winter, I’d be out of either luck or a princely amount of money, for to grow blueberries in the mid-Atlantic winter would consume costly quantities of equipment and energy.

Fortunately, blueberries can be grown this time of year in the southern hemisphere at a cost that makes them affordable to middle-class Americans. So I spent a paltry $6.49 for these 18 ounces of yumminess. To earn enough income to buy these blueberries, a typical private-sector “production and nonsupervisory” American worker today, earning $28.07 per hour, toils for only about 14 minutes.

Take another glance at the photo. The blueberries are packaged in a transparent, light-weight, sturdy, and resealable carton made from petroleum. I know no workers on oil rigs or in refineries. Nor do I know anyone who works in a factory making plastic cartons. Fortunately for me, however, the many strangers who perform those jobs willingly shared with me one of the many fruits of their labors so that I can afford to purchase some fruits from Chile. Without modern packaging, those blueberries, were I to get any at all, would be less tasty and much more pricey.

Modern packaging is a stupendous fruit of the innovation and productive coordination achieved by capitalism. Yet we ignore packaging without giving it as much as a first (forget about a second) thought.

This reality should cause your jaw to drop. And your jaw should be made to drop even further by the fact that this reality is so quotidian to us Americans that it does not cause your jaw to drop at all.

I, the person who will eat these blueberries, know not a single Chilean farmer. Nor do I know any Chilean truck drivers. I’m also unacquainted with anyone who pilots cargo planes or locomotives. And despite my frequent visits to the supermarket at which I bought the berries, I couldn’t identify the manager of that store’s produce section. Yet these farmers, truck drivers, pilots, and supermarket employees all willingly worked to make these blueberries, which were until recently growing on land thousands of miles from where I live, available to me, a stranger, in January. And for a pittance!

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If you’re an American (or denizen of any other industrialized country), this photo is of what appears to be an unremarkable reality. It’s downright dull and seems to be information-poor. But upon reflection, this ‘ordinary’ photo testifies to the astounding daily achievements of the market order. From my ability even to take such a photograph (and at zero additional expense!) to the ready availability in the northeastern United States in mid-winter of fresh blueberries and grapes, this photo – seemingly ho-hum – is in fact a snapshot of capitalism’s marvels. This photo supplies proof as strong as economic proof gets that capitalism works.

Of course, even if, contrary to fact, all human beings agreed unanimously on what are perfect economic outcomes, capitalism does not and never will work perfectly. As a standard for assessing an economy’s performance, however, perfection is highly imperfect; indeed, it’s a standard so flawed as to be ridiculous. No human institution or pattern of activities will ever be perfect.

But if we take as the standard for economic performance improvements in the well-being of ordinary people, then capitalism’s performance is stupendous – stunning – spectacular – astonishing – amazing. The English language has no adjective sufficient to convey the marvelousness of capitalism’s routine performance.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 22 of Eamonn Butler’s 2022 book, An Introduction to Economic Inequality:

Meanwhile, life expectancy has risen markedly, and infant mortality is now a rarity. People work fewer hours and take longer holidays. This is not ‘stagnation’, but a marked improvement that benefits lower earners the most. It narrows the real differences in living standards, but the statistics fail to account for it.

Some Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Jay Bhattacharya, writing in the National Post, applauds the CDC’s eventual (if inexcusably delayed) embrace of essentially the same strategy that is recommended in the great Great Barrington Declaration. A slice:

For those who have followed dissident voices during the pandemic, the broad outlines of the CDC’s new strategy should have been familiar. On Aug. 11, [2022] the CDC eschewed COVID containment as a goal and replaced it with a plan of focused protection of vulnerable people. The CDC cited widespread immune protection provided by recovery from COVID infection and vaccination in the American population as the primary reason for the shift in strategy.

Though it did not explicitly say so, the CDC has embraced the core principles of the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) — a document I coauthored along with Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University and Sunetra Gupta of the University of Oxford in October 2020. The GBD called for focused protection of vulnerable people (e.g., the elderly) and lifting lockdown restrictions so that the less vulnerable could live more normal lives. The declaration provided numerous concrete suggestions about how to protect the vulnerable until widespread population immunity was achieved.

While commendable, the CDC’s shift in strategy came far too late in the pandemic. In response to the GBD, some in October 2020 argued that we should wait until a vaccine before lifting lockdown. Though the declaration noted that vaccines can “assist” in achieving this immunity, we maintained that keeping lockdown “measures in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed.”

When we wrote the GBD, lockdowns had already caused millions of school children to lose out on education, consigning them to poorer, shorter, and less healthy lives. Millions had already delayed necessary health care, including cancer screening, care for anxiety and depression, and even treatment for heart disease and diabetes. Many have paid the price by preventable death due to deadly but manageable chronic conditions. The economic harm from lockdown policies had already harmed the health and well-being of poor people worldwide in rich and poor countries, impoverishing tens of millions and pushing countless people to the brink of starvation. And these harms were and are unequally distributed, with the laptop class largely shielded.

Jonathan Sumption is correct: “Lockdown will ruin Britain’s health for many years to come.” Two slices:

A friend of mine suffered from cancer early in 2020. She was booked into a hospital for a course of treatment. The prognosis was uncertain, as it usually is, but reasonably good. Then came the pandemic and the lockdown. Her treatment was indefinitely postponed. By the time that the hospital was in a position to reinstate it, tests showed that it was too late. The cancer had developed beyond the point where the treatment had any prospect of success. She is now dead.

Her story is too familiar to be shocking. As government figures released this week show, excess deaths, by comparison with the pre-pandemic years, have reached extraordinary highs. Moreover, only a tiny proportion of all deaths are now due to Covid. The major contributors to death numbers have been cancer and ischaemic heart disease.

It is questionable whether lockdowns avoided any deaths from Covid. International comparisons suggest that, in the medium and long term, there is no significant correlation between the lockdowns and the Covid death toll. But the contribution of lockdowns to long-term excess deaths from other causes is becoming increasingly obvious.

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This is, above all, a failure of government. Governments across the world discarded previous plans that had been years in the making and allowed themselves to be panicked into a radical, ill-considered and ultimately unsuccessful experiment with human welfare. Covid was never going to be eliminated and people were infected in spite of lockdowns. In the process, there came a load of other problems that could have been avoided, all of them profoundly destructive and some of them mortal.

The moral is that politicians do not concentrate on the most serious problems but on the ones that they are most likely to be blamed for. Covid deaths were dramatic and newsworthy. Government messaging made them more so. The long-term outcome was subtler, less noticeable and ignored. It is coming back to hit us now.

Vinay Prasad accurately describes universities as “the one place on earth with the least common sense.”

Now who’d a-thunk it?: “For-Profit Nursing Homes Had Less Severe Lockdowns, Lower Fatality Rates During Pandemic.”

Caroline Breashears is no fan of hubris-slathered Davos Men & Women.

Art Carden says ‘Bring on the chain stores!’ Here’s his conclusion:

People enjoy quirky, unique, and local places. I know I do. They also enjoy reliable, consistent, and predictable places, . As chains expand to new areas, those areas start to look alike. But they’re more alike in their diverse options for reliable, consistent, and predictable cuisine, clothing, car care, and other goods and services. If Bonchon, In-N-Out Burger, and Tim Hortons make their way to my neighborhood, I don’t think I’ll shed any tears, but if I do, they’ll be tears of joy at my new opportunities to get food and coffee I previously wouldn’t have been able to get without getting on a plane.

My GMU Econ colleague Bryan Caplan explains why he should not be criticized for agreeing to have a friendly, public conversation with Tucker Carlson.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, wonders why Republicans rule out fiscally responsible reforms of Social Security and Medicare. Here’s her conclusion:

The GOP’s transformation into the party of big and fiscally reckless government is proceeding apace.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 15 of Michael Shellenberger’s excellent 2020 book, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All (footnote deleted):

When a hurricane hits Florida, it might kill no one, but when the same storm hits Haiti, thousands can die instantly through drowning and subsequently in disease epidemics like cholera. The difference is that Florida is in a wealthy nation with hardened buildings and roads, advanced weather forecasting, and emergency management. Haiti, by contrast, is poor nation that lacks modern infrastructure and systems.

DBx: If you consider yourself to be an environmentalist who is concerned about the condition of the environment because of its consequences for human beings, then you should be a vigorous supporter of economic growth. Prosperity both protects people from environmental harms and provides people with the interest and leisure to enjoy the natural environment. And because the best policies for promoting sustained economic growth are policies that keep markets free, open, and wide, you should champion free markets.

John Stossel on Paul Ehrlich and the Doomsters

(Don Boudreaux)

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Watch!