Russell Roberts's Blog, page 55

Konstantin Kisin on the Environment and ‘Woke’ Culture

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

This short Oxford Union speech by Konstantin Kisis is brilliant. (HT John Woody)

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 63 of Thomas Sowell’s 1999 collection Barbarians Inside the Gates:

When competition is working as a process, some competitors are almost certain to be hurt. Those for whom equality is not just an ideal but a dogma simply cannot accept this. Sinister theories are one result of their attempts to reconcile their dogma with a reality that repeatedly mocks it.

Some Links

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

The authors and supporters of the great Great Barrington Declaration warned that school closures and other lockdown measures would result in tragic trends such as the one documented in this Wall Street Journal report. (HT Todd Zywicki) A slice:

Police, prosecutors and community groups attribute much of the youth violence to broad disruptions that started with the pandemic and lockdowns. Schools shut down, depriving students of structure in daily life, as did services for troubled children. Increased stress compounded a swelling mental-health crisis. Social-media conflicts increasingly turned deadly.

My Mercatus Center colleague Kofi Ampaabeng writes sensibly about the damage caused by covid lockdowns. A slice:

This week The Economist published an article showing healthcare systems under stress around the world. The magazine argues that the source of the stress is pent-up demand from COVID lockdown policies and delayed medical care occasioned by COVID. Several papers have shown that delayed medical care could have far-reaching consequences. In the US alone, about 9.4 million cancer screenings were missed during the pandemic. There was a 90% drop in colonoscopies; 41% of patients with chronic conditions delayed care, and so on. Overall, about a third of Americans delayed medical care due to the pandemic. Early cancer detection has direct correlation with survival chances. The reason most healthcare systems are under stress is because of the backlog in medical care. These would eventually be cleared. However, for some diseases, the delay could prove consequential.

Take colorectal cancer, for example. According to one study, by 2044 mortality from the disease could be almost 10% higher than pre-pandemic trends. For all cancers, there would be almost 100 more deaths per 100,000. In addition to delayed diagnosis or delayed treatment of chronic conditions, there are significant effects of stringent lockdown policies on mental health, particularly of adults. In the UK, for example, there was a significant increase in depression, anxiety and alcohol use, among other afflictions. (Surprisingly, a number of studies show no increase in suicide rates.)

I have yet to find any studies that analyze the effects of delayed medical care in Sweden. However, we know that from other mortality analyses such as all-cause mortality, excess mortality, Sweden fared much better than countries with some of the most stringent restrictions. In a recent analysis from the UK’s Office of National Statistics, Sweden has one of the lowest excess mortality rates (almost indistinguishable from Norway and Iceland) for the period January 2020 to July 2022. Why is this still the case? This is not a rigorous study, which could rule out specious reasons. Yet, it’s somewhat surprising that over the past 12 months, Sweden has lower excess mortality than Denmark and Norway. Another puzzle is that excess mortality keeps rising even “after” the pandemic, and it is unclear when this rate would peak.

A headline from Great Britain: “Excess deaths highest since pandemic second wave – and less than 5 per cent are from Covid.”

Inspired by this spot-on short video by Matt Orfalea – which is less than five minutes long – Matt Taibbi rightly criticizes the media’s and politicians’ Orwellian scaremongering over the risk that covid posed to children.

Coronavirus Plushie tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

Dr. Scott Atlas: Lockdowns were a gross moral failure of public health leadership and an egregious abuse of public health. Families in lower socio-economic groups were destroyed by lockdowns, while the pro-lockdown affluent and ‘elite’, like Fauci & Birx, were spared their impact

Sean Thomas decries East Asians’ insistence on masking.

My GMU Econ colleague Vincent Geloso busts myths that fuel the efforts of many governments to prevent real estate in their countries from being purchased by Chinese nationals. A slice:

There are two strong reasons to resist these xenophobic – for there is no better term – policy proposals. The first is that the pressure on housing prices has little to do with rising demand; it has to do with inelastic supply. The cities where the backlash against foreign buyers of real estate is strongest are generally known for restrictive zoning policies, land-use regulations, construction regulations, and building codes that make it nearly impossible to add housing units. This makes the supply of housing highly inelastic.

The more inelastic the supply, the greater the price increase when demand shifts up. This means that the root cause of the rising rents and house prices is bad housing policy that restricts the supply side. The effect of some additional Chinese buyers is trivial in comparison to the noxious effects of these supply-restricting measures.

There is another reason, however, to resist this proposal. A far more important one, in moral terms. The ban makes it easier for the Chinese government to abuse its citizens.

Also expressing well-founded opposition to bans on land sales to foreigners is GMU Econ alum Benjamin Powell.

Billy Binion applauds Alliance Defending Freedom’s defense of Priscilla Villarreal.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, is rightly relentless in criticizing politicians’ fiscal incontinence. A slice:

I am sorry, but it is worth repeating that Republicans systematically fail to talk about fiscal responsibility when they are in the majority but suddenly remember that deficits matter when in the minority. As Chris Chocola, former head of the Club for Growth, once asked, “What good is a majority if you aren’t going to use it? What good is being part of a team, if the team is the problem?” Good question. Moreover, when Republicans stand up for fiscal responsibility, their efforts tend to fail because they are heavy on unrealistic promises (like balancing the budget in ten years without touching defense and entitlements) and gimmicks.

And now for the file titled “Yet Further Evidence of Monopsonized U.S. Labor Markets” is this report in the Wall Street Journal: “Walmart to Raise Starting Hourly Wages to $14 From $12: Country’s largest private employer seeks to close pay gap with rivals as workers remain scarce.” Oh, wait….

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 2 of Laura Huggins’s excellent 2013 book, Environmental Entrepreneurship: Markets Meet the Environment in Unexpected Places:

Despite the popular belief that market economies only generate consumerism and waste, in reality markets help create the capital that gives individuals the motivation and wherewithal to solve environmental problems.

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: “Coase’s valuable insights into market economies”

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

In my column for the September 9th, 2013, edition of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review I remembered the Nobel-laureate Ronald Coase, who died a week earlier. You can read my column in full beneath the fold.

(more…)

Some Links

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

My GMU Econ colleague Mark Koyama, writing at National Review, corrects Jacob Soll’s deeply mistaken interpretation of Adam Smith. Three slices:

Jacob Soll’s Free Market: The History of an Idea is a revisionist account of free-market thought from ancient Rome to the 21st century. It contains plenty of interesting historical material. The overall argument is an attempt to refocus our understanding of the market away from “free market economics” toward “a democratically oriented philosophy,” “one which accepts that the state is embedded in the market and vice versa.” At its core, this argument rests on profound mischaracterization of Adam Smith.

…..

In contrast to the mercantilists who sought to encourage industry, Soll claims, “Smith insisted that merchants and manufacturers were economically ‘sterile’: ‘The labor of artificers and manufacturers,’ he asserted, ‘never adds anything to the value of the whole annual amount of the rude produce of the land.’” Smith furthermore, we are told, was a supporter of empire and slavery and was not even a consistent critic of mercantilism. Rather, his vision “was Colbertist in that it sought protectionism and empire to aid internal development and to keep investment capital within the nation.”

Now it is true that many of the mercantilist writers were more insightful than they are given credit for and that the common claim that Smith was the founder of economics is an exaggeration. Different interpretations of Smith, moreover, should be welcomed. He was a complex and subtle thinker; he wrote in an age when esoteric writing was practiced; and serious scholars disagree about a range of issues, including the nature of his beliefs about religion. Soll’s account, however, isn’t within the range of scholarly opinions on Smith. Indeed, if the real Smith resembled the second-rate physiocrat Soll depicts, it would be a wonder if anyone bothered to read him today.

A small amount of digging establishes that Soll’s version of Smith is mistaken. Soll’s physiocratic Smith is drawn from book 4, chapter 11 of the Wealth of Nations. There Smith describes the physiocratic system and contrasts it to the mercantile system that he associates with Colbert. Smith is very clear, however, that he is summarizing the views of François Quesnay, a French physiocratic economist, not his own views. Indeed, Smith says (only a few paragraphs down from the lines that Soll quotes): “The capital error of this system, however, seems to lie in its representing the class of artificers, manufacturers, and merchants as altogether barren and unproductive. The following observations may serve to show the impropriety of this representation.”

Smith was pointing out the flaws in both the mercantile system of Colbert and the agrarian-centered analysis of Quesnay, not endorsing their conclusions.

Then Soll neglects Smith’s actual views on economic development as laid out in the opening chapters of the Wealth of Nations. There Smith depicts specialization through the division of labor, not agriculture, as the driver of economic growth.

…..

Finally, Soll is unable to explain one of Smith’s central ideas: that of unplanned coordination. Smith famously used the term “invisible hand” only in a few places (and not always to mean the same thing). But he expressed again and again the idea that the adjustment of prices brings out economic coordination — the meeting of supply and demand — and it was this striking idea that was so stimulating for subsequent economists.

My GMU Econ colleague Bryan Caplan writes wisely about the mainstream media. A slice:

This is how I see mainstream media. The problem isn’t limited to race, gender, and sexual orientation, where Richard [Hanania] agrees that the media is crazy. The problem isn’t specific factual errors, either. The central problem is that the mainstream media’s standard operating standard is to use selective presentation to spread absurd views about practically everything that matters.

David Waugh warns of the combination on campus of wokeness and a demographic trend.

Daryl Morey reports on the rapid rise of woke-inspired self-censorship at M.I.T. Two slices:

If MIT faculty, who are at the cutting edge of science and technology, can’t count on their employer to defend open inquiry, it might prevent them from taking innovative risks. This, in turn, would stymie technological progress and the education of the next generation of innovators.

…..

I was a student at the MIT Sloan School of Management from 1998 to 2000. A culture of open inquiry existed during my time there. It helped me develop skills that have been critical to success in my career and life. Among other things, I learned to question long-held assumptions, to use data to address problems with novel solutions, and to speak the truth—even if it sometimes gives offense. Given the reported state of speech at MIT today, I question whether students are experiencing the discomfort and risk necessary to navigate the real world or developing the courage to speak their minds when it matters.

Brendan O’Neill accurately describes Davos Man. A slice:

[British Labour MP Keir] Starmer has unwittingly revealed what ‘Davos Man’ is all about: he’s about escaping the irritating plane of democratic decision-making in preference for the rarefied company of the 21st century’s self-styled philosopher-kings. He’s about liberating himself from the constraints of democratic politics – especially the constraint of being answerable to the masses – in favour of chumming about with the better-educated, better-dressed better people of the World Economic Forum. For Starmer to dismiss Westminster, the Mother of Parliaments, the one institution over which British citizens have some direct and meaningful control, as just a ‘tribal, shouting place’ is depressingly revealing. It reveals his contempt for parliamentary democracy, and it reveals Davos Man’s belief that politics is better done away from us pesky plebs.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, John Cogan identifies a root cause of the U.S. government’s fiscal incontinence. Two slices:

Jurisdiction for entitlement legislation is dispersed among more than a dozen committees in each congressional chamber. In the House, the Agriculture Committee has jurisdiction over farm-support payments and food stamps, the Education and Workforce Committee over student loans and grants, the Ways and Means Committee over Social Security, Medicare hospital insurance and welfare programs, the Energy and Commerce Committee over Medicaid (sharing responsibility for ObamaCare and Medicare Part B with Ways and Means).

In this system, no committee is accountable for total spending. Each committee has a reason to expand its programs and resist attempts to restrain them, but none have an incentive to keep overall spending down.

…..

Former Speaker Samuel Randall delivered a prophetic warning in 1885: “If you undertake to divide all these appropriations and have many committees where there ought to be but one, you will enter upon a path of extravagance that you cannot foresee the length of or the depth of, until we find the treasury of the country bankrupt.”

The House dismissed these warnings and dispersed appropriations jurisdiction to eight committees. The Senate later followed suit. The new incentives caused expenditures to grow rapidly. From the 1890s to World War I, budget deficits were more frequent and larger than ever before in U.S. peacetime history.

After World War I, Congress recognized the source of its budget problem and solved it. A House select committee, established to create a new process in which the president would submit his own comprehensive budget request to Congress, recommended that the chamber consolidate all appropriation authority into a single committee. The remarkable resolution stripped seven House committees of their spending authority. Citing past support from some of its most respected former members, including Appropriations Committee Chairman James Garfield (1871-75) and Speaker Joseph Cannon (1903-11), the select committee urged members to “submerge personal ambition for the public good.” The House did so and consolidated appropriations in 1920. Two years later, the Senate changed its rules to match.

That restored budget accountability and eliminated the pre-existing system’s incentives for higher spending. From 1921 to 1930, when the Great Depression hit, federal spending was restrained and the annual budget was balanced.

Joe Lancaster explains a fact that shouldn’t, but what constantly does, need explaining: rising prices are not caused by greed.

Ramesh Thakur continues to write insightfully about the calamitous, hysterical overreaction to covid. A slice:

From the start there was little empirical data to support the efficacy of lockdowns. The virus was not unprecedented, but the draconian societal shutdowns, which overturned the existing scientific and policy consensus, were. Few would have believed a year earlier in March 2019 that Western democracies would so enthusiastically mimic China’s authoritarian behaviour and be cheered on by citizens for doing so.

Yet, European countries and US states with hard lockdowns fared no better than softer counterparts. After a year of this extreme experiment, data from around the world showed that the spread of the pandemic correlated more with geography, demography, and seasonality than lockdown stringency and sequencing. This Politico headline from 23 December 2020 would have been funny if it wasn’t tragic: “Locked-down California runs out of reasons for surprising surge.”

Take note of this Economist headline: “Excess deaths are soaring as health-care systems wobble.”

Jay Bhattacharya tweets:

How is it possible that the governor of NY still supports firing of unvaxxed nurses on the false premise that they are a danger to their patients? If there is someone who is a danger to patients, it’s a leader whose policies promote nursing shortages.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from the William F. Fleming translation of Voltaire’s (1764?) essay titled “Property“:

The spirit of property doubles a man’s strength.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 31 of Michael Shellenberger’s excellent 2020 book, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All:

But rainforests in the Amazon and elsewhere in the world can only be saved if the need for economic development is accepted, respected, and embraced. By opposing many forms of economic development in the Amazon, particularly the most productive forms, many environmental NGOs, European governments, and philanthropies have made the situation worse.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 23 of William J. Bernstein’s 2004 book, The Birth of Plenty: How the Prosperity of the Modern World Was Created (original emphasis):

[E]ven the most wildly optimistic estimates suggest no more than a doubling or tripling in global GDP between the year A.D. 1 and A.D. 1000, versus the eightfold increase in the 172 years following 1820. During the same 172-year period, per capita GDP in the U.K. grew tenfold; in the U.S., twentyfold.

Some Links

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

Although Arnold Kling dislikes the term “naive realism,” he believes the concept to be useful. A slice:

Naive realism on the part of public officials is a serious drawback. If the officials are sure that their views are correct, then they may undertake bold interventions without regard to the risks, unintended consequences, or coercion that is embedded in their policies.

[Jeffrey] Friedman points out that although I may acknowledge that I do not know how to solve a problem, my naive realism may take the form of being convinced that someone has a solution. This will bias me toward supporting interventionist public officials, creating a selection bias in favor of officials who themselves are guilty of naive realism.

Juliette Sellgren talks with my GMU Econ colleague Pete Boettke about the late Don Lavoie’s arguments against government planning of the economy.

Suzanne Clark explains the large stakes in the effort to prevent the FTC from banning noncompete agreements. A slice:

The proposed regulation to ban noncompetes takes this one step further. Rather than reviewing and judging the specific and individual conduct of companies under Section 5, the FTC has proposed simply to issue a nationwide ban of a type of employment contract that three unelected commissioners have decided they don’t like.

The minds of progressive activists must be running wild with ideas of what they could do if this approach is allowed to stand. Don’t like the pay gap between executives and nonexecutives? The FTC could simply declare it unfair and regulate it. Think that businesses above a certain size shouldn’t be allowed to get any bigger through mergers? The FTC could simply declare those businesses can’t make acquisitions.

Sound far-fetched? Like the banning of noncompetes, both of these policies have been put forward by Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

This fight is about much more than the fate of noncompete agreements. That’s why the Chamber of Commerce will fight in court to hold the FTC accountable to the rule of law.

The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board criticizes Congressional and administration progressives’ efforts to impose nationwide rent control. A slice:

Democrats also want the Federal Trade Commission to issue “new regulation defining excessive rent increases” as an unfair trade practice. This would be an enormous usurpation of power since the FTC can only regulate interstate commerce and activities that affect it. Most landlords aren’t engaged in interstate commerce, and housing is regulated by states and localities.

Democrats also want the White House to dictate local housing policy by conditioning Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) grants on localities “mitigating cost burden and adopting anti-rent gouging measures.” So if cities want federal funds to build more housing for their homeless, they’d have to cap rents.

If there’s any consensus in economics it’s that rent control achieves the opposite of its intended goal. It leads to housing shortages by discouraging new development and maintenance of existing properties. Rents rise faster in properties not subject to controls. Even 60% of California voters rejected a ballot measure in 2020 to expand rent control. We can hope the White House pushes back against this economic destruction, but the last two years aren’t cause for optimism.

Eric Boehm warns that “tariffs targeting carbon emissions would be a costly blow to free trade.” Two slices:

The Trump administration had to do the whole “national security” song and dance because it provided access to a convenient loophole to impose tariffs without the consent of Congress—thanks to Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which delegates presidential authority over tariffs for issues relating to national security.

At the time, some observers pointed out that Trump’s tactic of declaring economic issues to be national security issues vastly expanded the powers granted to the president under Section 232. Some even suggested that it opened the door for a future president to declare climate change a national security issue and assume massive new powers over trade.

Sure enough, that’s what it looks like the Biden administration is now set to do.

…..

Regardless of whether the tariffs are implemented for domestic political reasons or in pursuit of an amorphous plan to address climate change, the economic costs are indisputable. The Peterson Institute for International Economics, a trade-focused think tank, estimated that every job saved by Trump’s tariffs on steel cost consumers roughly $900,000 in higher costs created by the tariffs.

It’s fair to expect a similar result from any new tariffs aimed at cutting carbon emissions—because the laws of economics don’t care about the intentions of policy makers.

“Americans are the ones who are going to pay those taxes. If you’re a consumer or a business, you’re going to end up paying those costs—without any input from Congress,” says Bryan Riley, director of the Free Trade Initiative at the National Taxpayers Union, a free market think tank.

Former environmental-cult member Zion Lights writes that she “watched people brainwashed into pulling outrageous stunts in the name of ‘saving the planet.'”

Sally Satel recently hosted this panel on the perils of politicized science.

Speaking of politicized science, Wall Street Journal columnist Allysia Finley decries “the deceptive campaign for bivalent covid boosters.” Three slices:

You might have heard a radio advertisement warning that if you’ve had Covid, you could get it again and experience even worse symptoms. The message, sponsored by the Health and Human Services Department, claims that updated bivalent vaccines will improve your protection.

This is deceptive advertising. But the public-health establishment’s praise for the bivalent shots shouldn’t come as a surprise. Federal agencies took the unprecedented step of ordering vaccine makers to produce them and recommending them without data supporting their safety or efficacy.

…..

The vaccine makers designed their studies to get the results they wanted. Public-health authorities didn’t raise an eyebrow, but why would they? They have a vested interest in promoting the bivalents.

The Food and Drug Administration ordered the vaccine makers in June to update the boosters against BA.4 and BA.5 and rushed in late August to authorize the bivalents before clinical data were available. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended the bivalents for all adults without any evidence that they were effective or needed.

Vaccine makers could have performed small randomized trials last summer and early fall that tested the bivalents against the original boosters and a placebo group. Results could have been available by the end of September. But the public-health authorities didn’t want to wait—and now we know why.

The CDC published a study in November that estimated the bivalents were only 22% to 43% effective against infection during the BA.5 wave—their peak efficacy. As antibodies waned and new variants took over later in the fall, their protection against infection probably dropped to zero.

…..

Covid vaccines mitigated severe illness while most Americans gained immunity through natural infection, which substantially boosts protection. There’s a growing consensus that we need better vaccines and treatments to protect those still at risk. But we also need honest public-health leaders.

Ian Miller denounces the Biden administration’s attempt to restore the CDC’s power to impose mask mandates on domestic flights.