Russell Roberts's Blog, page 59

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 139 of the 1985 (3rd) edition of the late Ralph Raico’s translation of Ludwig von Mises’s great 1927 book, Liberalism:

Attempts to justify on economic grounds the policy of restricting immigration are therefore doomed from the outset. There cannot be the slightest doubt that immigration barriers diminish the productivity of human labor.

DBx: And, thus, because in a market economy every increase in the productivity of human labor creates more goods and services not only for each of the workers whose productivity rises but also for those persons with whom those workers trade, immigration restrictions diminish the economic welfare not only of would-be immigrants but, also, of all those persons with whom those would-be immigrants would have traded.

Some Links

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

Washington Post columnist Leana Wen is certainly not in the camp of those who wisely warned early on of the dangers of lockdowns and covid hysteria, but even she reports that counts of today’s covid deaths and hospitalizations are exaggerated, perhaps wildly so. Two slices:

Two infectious-disease experts I spoke with believe that the number of deaths attributed to covid is far greater than the actual number of people dying from covid. Robin Dretler, an attending physician at Emory Decatur Hospital and the former president of Georgia’s chapter of Infectious Diseases Society of America, estimates that at his hospital, 90 percent of patients diagnosed with covid are actually in the hospital for some other illness.

…..

Another infectious-disease physician, Shira Doron, has been researching how to more accurately attribute severe illness due to covid. After evaluating medical records of covid patients, she and her colleagues found that use of the steroid dexamethasone, a standard treatment for covid patients with low oxygen levels, was a good proxy measure for hospitalizations due to the coronavirus. If someone who tested positive didn’t receive dexamethasone during their inpatient stay, they were probably in the hospital for a different cause.

Doron’s work was instrumental to Massachusetts changing its hospitalization reporting a year ago to include both total hospitalizations with covid and those that received dexamethasone. In recent months, only about 30 percent of total hospitalizations with covid were primarily attributed to the virus.

This tracks with Doron’s experience at her hospital, Tufts Medical Center, where she also serves as hospital epidemiologist. Earlier in the pandemic, a large proportion of covid-positive hospitalizations were due to covid. But as more people developed some immunity through vaccination or infection, fewer patients were hospitalized because of it. During some days, she said, the proportion of those hospitalized because of covid were as low as 10 percent of the total number reported.

Leslie Bienen and Margery Smelkinson talk with UnHerd‘s Freddie Sayers about the “scientific case against facemasks.” Here’s a slice from the accompanying essay:

This winter season, the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and Atlantic, among other outlets, have all published articles on the same theme. According to their advice, we should re-don masks to prevent seasonal spread of influenza, RSV, Covid-19 and run-of-the-mill colds. This seems poised to become a yearly occurrence, as with the accompanying post-holiday mandates in some schools, colleges, and elsewhere that these articles actively encourage.

However, while these articles are full of quotations from health officials and disease experts, glaringly absent is high-quality data to support claims that masking reduces spread of circulating seasonal viruses.

The reason for this omission may be that, three years into the pandemic, there are no rigorous studies showing masks to be an effective method of viral infection control. In fact the highest-quality scientific studies, randomised controlled trials (RCTs), show the opposite: that masks make little to no difference in controlling spread of influenza, SARS-CoV-2, or RSV.

In May 2020, the CDC summarised data from 14 RCTs as failing to show a significant benefit of masks in reducing transmission of influenza. An analysisof nine trials conducted by Cochrane, an organisation that conducts large reviews of health-care interventions, reached similar conclusions in November 2020. Studies of masking to prevent common colds and RSV also had negative results.

Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson decries the fact that, in Britain, “up to 100 times more may have been spent on preventing each Covid death than on preventing each non-Covid death.” A slice:

Why were sums which the Government and its scientific advisers should have done as a matter of course never attempted? In an excellent recent column on the catastrophic legacy of lockdown, my colleague Fraser Nelson highlighted the dud Sage “scenarios” which prolonged restrictions into the spring of 2021 without any cost-benefit analysis. As he points out, the standard “way of judging public health questions is a ‘quality of life years lost’ study: factoring in age and health impacts of the problem and the solution”.

By happy coincidence, I had an email on that very subject from a Natural Sciences contemporary at Cambridge. Alison wrote to say she was infuriated by

“the official failure to address whether the horrible impacts of the UK’s reaction to Covid had all been ‘worth it’?” By what British yardstick, she wondered, “can we judge the improved health outcomes delivered by this unimaginably vast expenditure?”

I reckon you could call it the Three Hundred and Seventy Billion Pound Question. (That’s the amount of money the Government is estimated to have blown on Covid, creating a debt it will take generations to pay back.)

….

Just think, a few of those billions thrown at Covid would have bought all the vital, state-of-the-art machines demanded by the Catch Up With Cancer campaign. Not to mention creating thousands more hospital beds and training doctors, nurses and midwives for a collapsing health service which endangers the British people. So, ladies and gentlemen, the Three Hundred and Seventy Billion Pound Question. Was it “worth it”? Is Alison’s maths correct? Could we ever justify lockdown again? Over to you.

Scott Atlas is now podcasting.

The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board remembers the historian Paul Johnson, who has died at the age of 94. A slice:

Though he was British, his writing often concerned the United States, which he called a “marvelous” country, as he told these pages in 2011; “a working multiracial democracy” and “the greatest of all human adventures.” That view is unfashionable now on the American left and even the so-called nationalist conservative right, most of whose denizens could benefit from reading Johnson’s “A History of the American People,” which invites readers in with this subversive opening note:

“I have not bowed to current academic nostrums about nomenclature or accepted the flyblown philacteries of Political Correctness. So I do not acknowledge the existence of hyphenated Americans, or Native Americans or any other qualified kind. They are all Americans to me: black, white, red, brown, yellow, thrown together by fate in that swirling maelstrom of history which has produced the most remarkable people the world has ever seen.”

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Eugene Scalia warns of “the FTC’s breathtaking power grab over noncompete agreements.” A slice:

The Federal Trade Commission’s ban on noncompete agreements may be the most audacious federal rule ever proposed. If finalized, it would outlaw terms in 30 million contracts and pre-empt laws in virtually every state. It would also, by the FTC’s own account, reduce capital investment, worker training and possibly job growth, while increasing the wage gap. The commission says the rule would deliver a meager 2.3% wage increase for hourly workers, versus a 9.4% increase for CEOs.

Robert Graboyes has some fun with ChatGPT.

George Will reports on the continuing infantilization of “education,” this time at a Virginia “school” (which is just a few miles from my home). Two slices:

TJHS [Thomas Jefferson High School] has long had a national reputation for excellence. Recently, however, it has earned an alarming reputation for extremism in pursuit of “equity,” understood as equality of outcomes among racial or ethnic groups. Fairfax’s progressive presumption is that disparities are the results of “systemic” or other unfairness.

TJHS and other Fairfax secondary schools recently chose not to disclose to students and their parents the fact that the students — at TJHS, 230 of them, mostly Asian Americans — had won National Merit Commendation awards. The National Merit Scholarship Corp.’s letter to TJHS said: “Please present the letters of commendation as soon as possible since it is the students’ only notification.” One parent says a TJHS administrator told her that announcing the commendations would hurt the feelings of students not commended. Many commendations were eventually announced too late to mention in college applications.

…..

The Fairfax school district paid $455,000 to a California consulting firm that says its aim is “equal outcomes for every student, without exception.” Tonight’s homework assignment, dear reader, is to write an essay explaining what that can possibly mean in practice, and to consider how Fairfax schools might apply it to, say, school track meets.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 81 of Will and Ariel Durant’s 1975 volume, The Age of Napoleon:

[P]ower dements even more than it corrupts, lowering the guard of foresight and raising the haste of  action.

Some Links

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

This letter-to-the-editor in the Wall Street Journal is spot-on:

Regarding “Notable & Quotable: Lockdown” (Jan. 7): David Wallace-Wells, writing in the New York Times, identifies nine pandemic narratives that are wrong, including that the U.S. ever had lockdowns at all. The frame of reference for Mr. Wallace-Wells isn’t the freedom that Americans enjoyed prepandemic, but the lockdowns imposed by other countries such as China. Yes, some U.S. states had shelter-in-place policies that disrupted lives, he grants, but that inconvenience was nothing compared with draconian lockdowns elsewhere.

In 2020, journalists at the New York Times and most other news organizations pounded home the narrative that the Trump administration’s incompetence and failure to order strict nationwide lockdowns and masking resulted in tens or hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths. Now that we are living with collateral damage even from what Mr. Wallace-Wells says were “remarkably light” lockdowns, journalists on the left are going with a narrative of “it could have been much worse” in a global context.

In a domestic context, however, it could have been much better, if only blue states had followed the lead of red states with the shortest and least disruptive lockdowns. Mistakes made by the rest of the world are interesting, but the land of the free and the home of the brave is, thank God, not yet merely a follower of the pack.

Pat Evans
Melbourne, Fla.

“White House extends COVID-19 public health emergency once again.” [DBx: What say those of you who discount the dangers of government using covid as an excuse to grab and keep even more unwarranted power? I believe that these authors, writing back in May 2020, had a valid point.]

Wall Street Journal columnist Allysia Finley writes insightfully about covid-vaccine hesitancy. Two slices:

But surveys show that most Americans, including those who didn’t get Covid shots, don’t distrust vaccines in general. Public views on Covid vaccines are more complicated because they are new and haven’t been thoroughly studied. The experts are responsible for vaccine skepticism because they aren’t honest about the potential risks.

…..

Scientists continue to study and make new discoveries about the virus; the same goes for vaccines. An article in the American Heart Association’s journal Circulation last week found a link between myocarditis in teens and higher circulating levels of vaccine spike proteins in the blood. The authors found no correlation with vaccine antibody or T-cell responses, suspected by many as the cause of myocarditis.

A Dec. 22 study in Science Immunology found that repeated mRNA vaccines increased production of a specific class of antibodies known as IgG4, which is associated with immune tolerance. That’s when the immune system continually encounters a foreign agent, learns it isn’t lethal, and stops targeting it. In the case of the vaccine spike protein, IgG4 could make people more susceptible to future Covid infection.

“Data Doesn’t Support New COVID-19 Booster Shots for Most, Says Vaccine Expert.” (HT Peter Minowitz)

GMU Econ alum Matt Kibbe tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

Donald Trump managed to embrace all the wrong policies during the pandemic. One of his major failings is his willingness to trust the people around him, even when they don’t deserve it.

Brendan O’Neill talks with Zoe Strimpel about “the dangerous rise of safetyism.”

Joel Zinberg warns of an obscure provision in the omnibus spending bill that could give the FDA power to ban off-label uses of approved therapies. A slice:

Secreted within the 2023 omnibus appropriations bill—4,155 pages, spending $1.7 trillion—is a 19-line section that could change the way medicine is practiced.

Physicians routinely prescribe drugs and employ medical devices that are approved and labeled by the Food and Drug Administration for a particular use. Yet sometimes physicians discern other beneficial uses for these technologies, which they prescribe for their patients without specific official sanction. The new legislation amends the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, or FDCA, to give the FDA the authority to ban some of these off-label uses of otherwise approved products. This unwarranted intrusion into the physician-patient relationship threatens to undermine medical innovation and patient care.

John Hagel remembers the late, great Walter Grinder.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Marian Tupy decries the obsequious attention given by the media to that peddler of “doom porn” Paul Ehrlich. A slice:

Paul Ehrlich’s memoir, “Life: A Journey through Science and Politics,” comes out next week. It probably won’t sell as many copies as “The Population Bomb” (1968). But neither will it flop—and it should. Mr. Ehrlich, 90, whom the media treat with an obsequious deference—see the recent cringe-worthy segment on CBS’s “60 Minutes”—will again profit from the capitalist consumption he’s spent his life decrying.

Mr. Ehrlich is a purveyor of “doom porn” at a time when the world has never been more prosperous. Developed countries are astonishingly rich, and even in developing nations the share of the population in absolute poverty has fallen to single digits. Mr. Ehrlich in 1968 predicted mass starvation; instead obesity is rising, even in Africa. So why don’t people ignore him? Ignorance is no excuse when we carry the entirety of human knowledge in our pockets.

The answer is that humans have evolved to prioritize bad news. “Organisms that treat threats as more urgent than opportunities,” wrote Nobel Prize-winning behavioral psychologist Daniel Kahneman, “have a better chance to survive and reproduce.”

As Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler explain in “Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think,” our brains have limited bandwidth and need to focus when a threat arises. Most information is first sifted through the amygdala, a part of the brain that is “responsible for primal emotions like rage, hate, and fear,” Messrs. Diamandis and Kotler write. “The amygdala is always looking for something to fear.”

That is a very powerful impulse that can deceive even the most dispassionate and rational observers.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 37 of Eamonn Butler’s 2021 book, An Introduction to Trade & Globalisation (reference deleted; link added):

As Richard Cobden realised, the non-material, non-economic benefits of trade are also profound. Regardless of their economic impact, the choice, innovation, and progress that are brought by trade improve our lives and the world we live in. Trade brings us better clothing, a better diet, better healthcare, better technology and much else.

Peace, which is not only valuable in its own right but also essential to economic life, is also promoted by trade, because trade demands that we deal with people from outside our own country and culture. To trade well with others, we must come to understand – and respect, or at least tolerate – their values. Such familiarity diminishes any hostility we may have towards them.

DBx: Yes.

Pictured here is Richard Cobden.

Jerry Z. Muller on Jacob Soll on Adam Smith

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

When my GMU Econ colleague, and accomplished Adam Smith scholar, Dan Klein shared with me this new essay by Jerry Z. Muller I anticipated sharing it soon in a “Some Links” post. But because the effort to mischaracterize Adam Smith is in full swing – and because the importance of getting Smith right is so great – Muller’s devastating exposé of historian Jacob Soll’s appalling interpretation of Smith warrants its own post. Do read Muller’s entire essay, but here are a few slices:

I must note that all historians make occasional mistakes. We make errors of transcription, cite quotations incorrectly, get page numbers wrong, etc., and the broader our inquiry, the more likely that such minor errors creep into our work. But the errors in Soll’s chapter on Adam Smith go beyond such peccadillos. They include some major mischaracterizations of Smith’s views, based upon a variety of errors, including, remarkably enough, the attribution to Smith of views Smith discusses at length only to refute. Not only that: the relationship of the pages cited in the footnotes to the claims in the text are often casual at best, and at times actually refute the statements they are meant to “prove.”

The first example in the chapter on Smith of a conflict between Soll’s claims and the sources he cites relates not to Smith himself, but to Friedrich Hayek. At the beginning of the chapter, Soll informs us that “In 1944… Friedrich August von Hayek painted Smith as a thinker opposed to all government intervention who focused on economic efficiency.” (196). The footnote refers us to two citations from Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. One of them is a direct and famous quotation from Smith’s Wealth of Nations (Road, p.100) about the folly of the statesman who presumes to direct private people as to how to employ their capital. The other citation is to page 88, where Hayek writes:

“To create conditions in which competition will be as effective as possible, to supplement it where it cannot be made effective, to provide services which, in the words of Adam Smith, ‘though they may be in the highest degree advantageous to a great society, are, however, of such a nature, that the profit could never repay the expense to any individual or small number of individuals’ – these tasks provide, indeed, a wide and unquestioned field for state activity. In no system that could be rationally defended would the state just do nothing. An effective competitive system needs an intelligently designed and continuously adjusted legal framework as much as any other. Even the most essential prerequisite of its proper functioning, the prevention of fraud and deception (including exploitation of ignorance), provides a great and by no means yet fully accomplished object of legislative activity.”

Elsewhere in The Road to Serfdom and at greater length in his Constitution of Liberty (1960), Hayek would devote himself to analyzing the proper role and the limits of the state in providing for social welfare. But even the quoted paragraph, to which Soll’s footnote calls our attention, is far from advocating opposition to all government intervention.

…..

Yet these discrepancies pale in comparison to the problem with Soll’s main contention, namely that Smith believed that land and agriculture were the only source of a nation’s wealth. This claim is not only central to his chapter devoted to Smith, but is adumbrated in earlier chapters (14, 29), and repeated in later ones (220, 238). That of course was the position of the Physiocrats, a sect of thinkers Smith had encountered during his visit in Paris, and whose work he continued to read thereafter. Soll writes that “Quesnay, du Pont de Nemours, and Mirabeau introduced Smith to their main argument: that land was the only source of a nation’s wealth. With the physiocrats, Smith felt he had found kindred intellectual spirits.” (205) The accompanying note refers to a secondary source: the 2010 biography of Smith by Nicholas Phillipson, an authority on the Scottish Enlightenment, which is to say, a reliable source. But when one actually turns to Phillipson’s account one finds a discussion of how much Smith disagreed with the Physiocrats’ analysis, despite his respect for their attempt to think systematically about the economy.

Soll, by contrast, takes Smith to have embraced the premises of Physiocratic doctrine.

…..

Among other dubious, unsupported and unsupportable assertions about Smith in Soll’s chapter is the following: “Because Smith believed in stages of societal progress and in the British agrarian Lockean compact society, he enthusiastically supported both colonial conquest and slavery.” (210) Smith did make use of a stage theory – of hunters and fishers, nomadic herdsmen, settled agriculture, and finally commercial society. But he used this as a kind of ideal type through which to explore the interrelationship between means of subsistence, structures of authority, law, and forms of property in various societies at various points in history. He did not treat them as necessary, successive stages of progress. Nor did Smith enthusiastically support slavery. On the contrary: in TMS, he described contemporary slave traders and slave owners as

“the refuse of the jails of Europe, … wretches who possess the virtues neither of the countries which they come from, nor of those which they go to, and whose levity, brutality, and baseness, so justly expose them to the contempt of the vanquished.” (TMS V.2.9, pp.206-07.)

In WN, Smith wrote of “the unfortunate law of slavery” (Vol. 2, bk IV, ch. viiib, para 54) which he nevertheless explored, with an eye to minimizing the harms of that practice. It is in that context that Smith came to discuss contemporary slavery. He argued that slaves are worse off when their masters also form the government (as in the American and Caribbean British colonies), since the masters have unlimited control of their slaves. He thought that paradoxically, where there was more “arbitrary government,” — that is greater control by an appointee of the crown — slaves may acquire a bit more protection. Here he cites historical precedents going back to ancient Rome, as well as the situation of contemporary French sugar colonies. Soll chastises him for underrating the brutality of these colonies. But Soll misses Smith’s point, which was not to offer a positive portrait of slavery in the French colonies, but to speculate about the circumstances under which slavery was likely to be more and less oppressive. Smith’s treatment of slavery was anything but an enthusiastic embrace.

DBx: Muller rightly treats Soll’s ‘interpretation’ of Adam Smith harshly.

Each Spring semester for the past decade or so I re-read, cover to cover, Smith’s Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. But even someone who’s read this magnificent work only once cannot help but be struck by Smith’s rejection of physiocracy and by his opposition to slavery. And on each of these topics there is nothing remotely ambiguous, tentative, or qualified about Smith’s position.

The only three possible explanations for Soll’s interpretation of Smith on these (and a few other) scores is that (1) Soll is illiterate; (2) Soll intentionally mischaracterized Smith’s views; or (3) despite a pose to the contrary, Soll didn’t actually read Adam Smith’s books in full or with even the minimum of attention required of someone who will write about Smith. Because both (2) and (3) imply a moral failing while (1) implies only an intellectual failing – and because, without evidence to the contrary, it’s always best to attribute error to a failure of the intellect rather than to unethical intent – I conclude that Soll really can’t read all that well.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 36 of Phil Magness’s excellent 2020 book, The 1619 Project: A Critique (footnote deleted):

Linking historical capitalism to slavery is more of a political exercise for the present day than a scholarly inquiry into the past, and in fact the most virulent defenders of slavery in the mid-19th century actually presented their cause as an expressly anti-capitalist venture.

DBx: Indeed. The notion that modern capitalism’s material abundance is rooted in slavery is even more whackadoodle than are most notions dreamed up by intellectuals – which is quite an achievement.

Some Links

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, James Doti reports that people do indeed vote with their feet for lower taxes. A slice:

Gov. Gavin Newsom went to Austin, Texas, last year to tout his own state, California. Speaking at the Texas Tribune Festival, he said that conservative governors are “doubling down on stupid, and we will not follow their path. We’re going in a completely different direction.” He’s right about the latter point. Recent Census data confirm that Californians are going in a different direction—they’re fleeing their state in droves.

California’s net domestic migration—the number of people moving into the state minus those moving out—has been negative every year since 2011. But net outflows over the past two years were larger than both California’s natural rate of population increase (births minus deaths) and international migration to the state combined. As a result, California’s population declined by 1.3%, from 39.5 million in July 2020 to 39.0 million in July 2021. From 2021 to 2022 alone, California lost 343,000 people to net domestic migration. Although many socioeconomic factors explain this population exodus, my research points to California’s high state and local taxes as the primary culprit.

The Tax Foundation’s 2021 State Business Tax Climate report ranks California’s state and local taxes as the second highest in the nation, just below New Jersey and above New York. People are fleeing these states. As a percentage of its population, California’s loss in net domestic migration was fifth highest in the country, at 879 per 100,000 people. New York’s net migration loss was the highest of any state, at 1,522 per 100,000.

George Will ponders the challenge of protecting people against defamation by the media without chilling legitimate journalism.

GMU Econ alum Raymond Niles explains what should not, but does (even to prominent New York Times columnists), need explaining: inflation is not reduced by wage and price controls. Two slices:

The other disturbing error of Mr. Krugman, and a common one made by economists,is what I call the “Philosopher-King Fallacy.” It is the failure to consider the political context in which economic policies are made. Mr. Krugman cites a single example where a small country (Israel) imposed weakly enforced, partial price controls in the mid-1980s. By citing the apparent success of this policy in reducing inflation (which also entailed significant pro-market reforms, not credited by Krugman, such as reduced subsidies and privatization of businesses), Krugman implies that we could surgically and precisely impose and remove price controls without harmful effect, achieving the hoped-for goal of slowing down or stalling inflation, without other unwanted deleterious consequences.

…..

If the US imposed economy-wide price controls, as Krugman proposes, it would not stop inflation, just as the Emperor Diocletian’s economy-wide controls did not stop Roman inflation and just as the 1970s economy-wide controls did not stop US inflation. But it would throw sand into the gears of the economy, destroying the coordinating effect of the Invisible Hand. It would reduce our standard of living and create new vested political constituencies for maintaining parts of it, even if one could precisely remove the “temporary” controls at just the right time, as hoped for by the Economic Philosopher-King.

The advantage of established, true economic theory is that we do not need to keep repeating the mistakes of the past. There are unsettled parts of economic theory, but the beneficial coordinating effect of free, market-determined prices is not one of them. It surprises and disappoints me that a prominent economic columnist at the self-described “newspaper of record,” the New York Times, would traffic in such absurdities.

David Henderson (with an assist from Peter Lewin) celebrates doux commerce.

Is support for free trade treasonous?

James Rogers warns against reading too much into West Virginia v. EPA.

Last March, Anne Fortier spoke with Matt Ridley.

Michael Strain applauds freedom of exchange.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, continues to remind us of the dangers of unrestrained government spending and debt accumulation. A slice:

Every dollar spent by government is a dollar’s worth of resources drained away from the private sector, from household consumption and from private businesses. When paid for with taxes, government spends with some semblance of responsibility because it’s not running up a credit card bill to be handed to future generations. But use of the debt credit card encourages spending that a responsible government would avoid. Far too many resources are sucked from the private sector into the public sector, reducing investment, innovation and growth. Some restrain on deficit financing is necessary.

Also from Vero is this criticism of Henry Miller’s recent sloppy attack on Jay Bhattacharya.

Jay Bhattacharya explains “how Stanford failed the academic freedom test.” Two slices:

On Oct. 4, 2020, along with two other eminent epidemiologists, Sunetra Gupta of the University of Oxford and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University, I wrote the GBD. The declaration is a one-page document that proposed a very different way to manage the COVID-19 pandemic than had been used up to that date. The lockdown-focused strategy that much of the world followed mimicked the approach that Chinese authorities adopted in January 2020. The extended lockdowns—by which I mean public policies designed to keep people physically separate from one another to avoid spreading the SARS-CoV-2 virus—were a sharp deviation from Western management of previous respiratory virus pandemics. The old pandemic plans prioritized minimizing disruption to normal social functioning, protecting vulnerable groups, and rapidly developing treatments and vaccines.

Even by October 2020, it was clear that the Chinese-inspired lockdowns had done tremendous harm to the physical and psychological well-being of vast populations, especially children, the poor, and the working class. Closed schools consigned a generation of children worldwide to live shorter, less healthy lives. In July 2020, the Centers for Disease Control released an estimate that 1 in 4 young adults in the United States had seriously considered suicide during the previous month. The U.N. estimated that an additional 130 million people would be thrown into dire food insecurity—starvation—by the economic dislocation caused by the lockdowns. The primary beneficiaries of the lockdown—if there were in fact any beneficiaries of these drastic anti-social measures—were among a narrow class of well-off people who could work from home via Zoom without risk of losing their jobs.

It was amply clear by October 2020 that the lockdown policy adopted by many Western governments, with the exception of a few holdouts like Sweden, had failed to stop the spread of COVID. It was in fact too late to adopt a policy goal of eradicating the virus. We did not have the technological means to achieve this goal, then or now. By the fall of 2020, it was abundantly clear that COVID-19 was here to stay and that many future waves would occur.

Governments had imposed lockdowns on the premise that there was nearly unanimous scientific consensus in support of them. Yet an extraordinary policy like a lockdown requires, or should require, an extraordinary scientific justification. Only near unanimity among scientists, backed by solid empirical data, suffices.

Like Gupta and Kulldorf, I knew that such unanimity did not exist. Many scientists worldwide had contacted us to tell us about their qualms with the lockdowns—their destructiveness and the poor evidence of their effectiveness. Many epidemiologists and health policy scholars favored an alternative approach, though many were scared to say so. It seemed clear to the three of us that as the next inevitable wave appeared, there was a risk that the lockdowns might return, and that scientific evidence against such steps would be ignored and smothered, at tremendous social cost.

We wrote the GBD to tell the public that there was no scientific unanimity about the lockdown. Instead, the GBD proposed a focused strategy to protect the elderly and other vulnerable populations. There is more than a thousandfold difference in mortality risk from COVID-19 infection between the old and the young, with healthy children at negligible risk of dying. The humane thing is to devote resources and ingenuity to protect the most vulnerable. The GBD and its accompanying FAQ provided many suggestions about how to do that and invited local public health communities, which know best the varied local living circumstances of the vulnerable, to devise local solutions. At the same time, the GBD advocated lifting lockdowns and opening schools to alleviate harms to children. We put the GBD on the internet, and invited other members of the public to sign it.

…..

The most egregious violation of academic freedom was an implicit decision by the university to deplatform me. Though I have given dozens of talks in seminars at Stanford over the past decades, in December 2020, my department chair blocked an attempt to organize a seminar where I would publicly present the ideas of the GBD. Stanford’s former president, John Hennessey, tried to set up a discussion between me and others on COVID policy, but he was unable to, owing to the absence of support from the university.

I never received an invitation from the medical school to present a “Grand Rounds,” a high-profile presentation by a faculty member on a topic of importance to the entire medical school. Instead, Grand Rounds and other seminars and webinars at Stanford univocally promoted positions which it is now obvious were devastatingly wrong, but which no one on campus was allowed to debate or challenge. Around the world in 2020 and early 2021, the GBD was a central topic of discussion—but not officially at Stanford.

Cindy Yu reviews the timeline of Beijing being forced to abandon its tyrannical and futile pursuit of zero covid.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 119 of Thomas Sowell’s superb 1984 book, Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?:

The past may be many things, but it is clearly irrevocable. Its sins can no more be purged than its achievements can be expunged. Those who suffered in centuries past are as much beyond our help as those who sinned are beyond our retribution. To dress up present-day people in the costumes and labels of history and symbolically try to undo the past is to surpass Don Quixote and jeopardize reality in the name of visions.

Non-covid Excess Deaths

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

Writing in the print edition of tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal, Rob Arnott and Casey Mulligan summarize their findings that excess deaths from non-covid causes “totaled nearly 100,000 a year in 2020 and 2021.” Two slices:

Covid-19 is deadly, but so were the draconian steps taken to mitigate it. During the first two years of the pandemic, “excess deaths”—the death toll above the historical trend—markedly exceeded the number of deaths attributed to Covid. In a paper we just published in Inquiry, based on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, we found that “non-Covid excess deaths” totaled nearly 100,000 a year in 2020 and 2021.

Even these numbers likely overestimate deaths from Covid and underestimate those from other causes. Covid testing has become ubiquitous in hospitals, and the official count of “Covid deaths” includes people who tested positive but died of other causes. On the other side, some Covid deaths early in the pandemic weren’t diagnosed as such. We adjusted for the latter effect but not the former.

…..

Non-Covid excess deaths have shown no signs of diminishing, at least through mid-2022. We now have more overdose deaths each year than all military deaths of the last 60 years combined. Homicides, accidents and alcohol deaths are collectively running tens of thousands per year above pre-pandemic norms. Given the substantial weight gains that were common during the pandemic lockdowns, non-Covid natural deaths from heart disease and diabetes seem unlikely to recede soon.

DBx: These findings are important. They verify what those of us who spoke out since Spring 2020 against lockdowns and covid hysteria knew from the start – namely, that lockdowns and other pandemic restrictions were destined to combine with over-the-top covid fear-mongering (and the resulting hysteria) to cause an enormous number of people to die unnecessarily of non-covid causes. And here’s what we also knew: these non-covid excess deaths would not, unlike covid deaths, be suffered overwhelmingly by the very old. Lockdowns and covid hysteria kill far more indiscriminately than does covid.

In writing the previous paragraph I do not applaud myself and others who recognized the grave dangers of lockdowns and protested against that authoritarian policy. Understanding that lockdowns, and the hysteria that helped to fuel them, would have dire consequences required no special insight or unusual wisdom. It required merely cool, rational thought, and a realization that complex modern society cannot be turned off and on as can an electric light. Also helpful in understanding the actual consequences of lockdowns and covid hysteria was intelligent skepticism of opinion that too-quickly became cemented as The Science – ‘The Science’ that was so damn sure of itself that its champions insisted on silencing dissenting voices.

Covid lockdowns are destined to go down in history as one of the great crimes against humanity – this despite the fact that many of the victims of this crime were filled with such a fright that they accepted their bondage willingly.