Russell Roberts's Blog, page 62

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(Don Boudreaux)

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At his Facebook page, Phil Magness makes short work of dispensing with the strained assertion that W.H. Hutt’s opposition to apartheid wasn’t why, in 1955, South Africa’s apartheid government deprived Hutt of his travel visa.

GMU Econ alum Dominic Pino, writing at National Review, joins those who rightly condemn 60 Minutes for giving air time to the consistently and spectacularly wrong Paul Ehrlich. Two slices:

And as [Julian] Simon knew, the price mechanism has a way of encouraging efficiency. The solution to high prices is high prices: If a commodity becomes scarcer and is permitted to become more expensive, in accordance with the laws of supply and demand, the incentive increases to economize the use of that resource or find alternatives to it. That will, in turn, avert the looming disaster because new technologies that were not profitable before the price increase become profitable, which means people are likely to develop them and use them. Resource allocation is an economic problem, not a biological problem.

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There will always be a market for doomsayers. The existence of the 60 Minutes segment proves Simon right as well; he understood the incentives the media have to play up bad news and the limited bandwidth that good scholars have to refute it. But David Harsanyi was smart to ask, “Couldn’t 60 Minutes find a fresh-faced, yet-to-be-discredited neo-Malthusian to hyperventilate about the end of the world?”

It seems they could not. The other scientific “experts” CBS included in the segment were Ehrlich’s Stanford colleagues Tony Barnosky and Liz Hadly. Barnosky and Hadly are married. Hadly earned her bachelor’s degree in 1981, and Barnosky earned his in 1974, meaning they are both reaching retirement age or are beyond it already. Other statistics in the segment came from environmental activist groups, which have incentive to exaggerate the facts to justify their activism to donors.

A better framing of the 60 Minutes segment would have been: “Discredited 90-year-old Stanford biology professor and a couple in his department think we’re all going to die.” It might be slightly interesting as a story of how groupthink works in higher education. But it’s no cause for alarm. And if the best CBS could do to support Ehrlich’s scientific claims was to interview a gray-haired couple that Ehrlich knows, hard-core population-bombers will go extinct before all the fish do.

The Babylon Bee reports on 60 Minutes‘s recent interview of Thanos.

George Will explains how the U.S. Supreme Court “can protect charter schools from suffocating litigation.” Two slices:

If opponents of expanded school choices would devote to improving public education half the ingenuity they invest in impeding competition from alternatives to the status quo, there would be less demand for alternatives.

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Charters are so popular the public education establishment must attack them indirectly, by what [Judge J. Harvie] Wilkinson calls “the slow strangulation of litigation.” Unless the Supreme Court rescues charters from the “state actor” designation, today’s argument that sex differences in dress codes violate “equal protection” will morph into attacks on single-sex charters, and bathroom or sports policies based on biological sex. Discussions of religion will provoke First Amendment establishment clause challenges. Only the Supreme Court can protect charters from progressives who, ever eager to break all institutions to the saddle of government, pursue this aim while praising a predictable casualty of it, true diversity.

George Leef offers a key lesson in education policy.

James Bacchus rightly decries the Biden’s continuation of Trump’s international-trade lawlessness.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, NYU physicist Steven Koonin calms fears that climate change will drown New York City. A slice:

The Battery’s sea level also depends on local changes in the sea and the sinking of the land. Most important is the natural variability of winds, currents such as the Gulf Stream, salinity and temperatures of the North Atlantic, which cause variations in sea level along the entire U.S. Northeast coast. Because of these many variables, climate models can’t account for the ups and downs so evident in the graph.

Despite this, the recent NASA report echoes a February National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report predicting more than 1 foot of rise at the Battery by 2050. Such a rise during the coming 30 years would be more than double the rise over the past 30 years and more than triple the past century’s average. Even more remarkably, the NOAA report says this rise will happen regardless of future greenhouse-gas emissions. There is no way of knowing if this prediction is correct.

David Henderson finds Bryan Caplan’s classification of libertarian covid camps to be flawed.

Jenin Younes tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

I continue to be stunned by the sheer number of educated people who think that government and private companies working together to censor people is fine. The government cannot censor people for expressing views it disfavors, that’s basic First Amendment law 1/

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It should be just as clear that government cannot encourage, pressure, or coerce a private company to accomplish what it can’t directly. For if government can use private companies to circumvent constitutional safeguards, there’s literally no point in having a constitution 2/2

Writing at UnHerd, Thomas Fazi and Toby Green decry both the western media’s hysteria over China’s abandonment of its deranged policy of zero covid, and western governments’ absurd restrictions on travelers from China. Four slices:

It’s pretty clear that China abandoned Zero Covid because it didn’t work, was causing huge socioeconomic and psychological harm, and threatened to undermine the political control of Xi Jinping. The writing was on the wall when footage emerged in August of shoppers in a Shanghai Ikea stampeding for the exit after authorities sought to seal off the store and send everyone in it to quarantine following the discovery of one shopper who had been exposed to an asymptomatic six-year-old child. Once mass protests began to spread in November, the decision was taken to move on before they became a threat to the regime.

To us, a number of conclusions can be drawn, which we discuss in The Covid Consensus. Clearly, lockdowns could only work in a very limited way, to reduce spread for a short period of time; they were therefore impractical for any length of time without causing enormous harm, which is why Zero Covid was impossible. Moreover, in spite of China’s severe attempts to prevent travel, the spread of a highly infectious respiratory virus cannot be shut down completely in the era of global supply chains, even with hermetically sealed borders, as proved to be the case in Australia and New Zealand.

Nevertheless, many seem to be trying to draw different and nonsensical lessons, showing that nothing has been learned from the past three years. Once again, the Western media is stoking unnecessary fears with panic-stricken reports of “China’s new Covid nightmare”. The rapid infection of potentially more than a billion Chinese people, we are told, is likely to result in countless deaths among the population, and spark the emergence of dangerous new variants that could lead to “a global catastrophe”, as millions of potentially disease-carrying citizens prepare to celebrate the reopening of the country’s borders by travelling to all corners of the world.

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One thing, however, is certain: in the coming weeks and months, a huge portion of the Chinese population is going to catch the virus. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), for example, estimates that around 1 million Chinese people are already getting infected every day. Some reports claim that 250 million people across the country have been infected just in December. How many deaths this leads to depends on a number of factors, including the ability of the Chinese authorities to put measures in place to protect those who are actually at risk of developing a serious illness from Covid-19, namely the elderly and those with serious medical conditions. The IHME expects close to 300,000 Covid deaths by April 2023 — roughly 100,000 deaths per month (3,000 per day).

These numbers may seem shocking, but they need to be contextualised. Assuming that a large percentage of the 1.4 billion-strong Chinese population eventually catches Covid, as seems likely, this would amount to a minuscule infection fatality rate (IFR) — less than 0.001%. Most of the deceased are also likely to be very elderly people who would have died within a short time — as was the case for the overwhelming majority of Covid-related deaths in Western countries. In fact, since more than 10 million people died in China in 2021 (the most recent year for which there are statistics), this figure — even if it continued at that rate throughout the year — would lead to around a 12% mortality increase, broadly in line with global averages elsewhere in 2020.

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More importantly, why would we want to do that? Data from last month suggests a majority of people in Western countries have had coronavirus infections, and that prior infection, even in the unvaccinated, offers strong protection against BA.5 Omicron hospitalisation. Moreover, the Omicron subvariant that has been spreading in China has been detectedin the US, Europe and rest of the world for many months, which means we also have good levels of natural immunity to that subvariant (as well as high vaccination rates, which were told were the golden bullet to end the pandemic). So, there’s no reason to fear coming into contact with a Chinese tourist any more than there is to come into contact with any other human being.

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Why, then, are policymakers once again going down this route? Part of the explanation is that politicians, by peddling a pro-lockdown narrative for the past three years, have now created an artificial demand for restrictive measures among their fear-stricken constituents, some of whom are now even making the case for wearing masks forever or for the permanent institutionalisation of what Giorgio Agamben might call “bare life”. Even more worryingly, it appears to indicate that Western governments have little intention of giving up the powers they’ve claimed under the guise of “fighting the virus”. While these current travel restrictions won’t affect the daily lives of Western citizens, they nonetheless show how easily “lockdown laws”, many of which remain in place in the UK and other countries, can be reinstated. If restrictions can be arbitrarily brought back at any moment in the name of public health, what’s to stop governments from abusing these powers once again in the future? For instance, the British government’s “Living with Covid-19” guidance, published in February 2022, states that it “will retain contingency capabilities and will respond as necessary to further resurgences or worse variants of the virus”.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 42 of Morgan Reynolds’s May 1984 interview with W.H. Hutt, as this interview appears in W.H. Hutt: An Economist for the Long Run (Morgan O. Reynolds, ed., 1986); here Hutt answers a question that Reynolds put to him about his – Hutt’s – 1964 book, The Economics of the Colour Bar:

But I wanted to build from the bottom up. I wanted the poor people to come up, and to get opportunities. They should be refused no employment opportunities which were ever available to them, no matter what harm their accepting employment might cause for people better off than they are.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from pages 495-496 of the 11th (2006) edition of one of greatest economics textbooks of all time: Paul Heyne’s, Peter Boettke’s, and David Prychitko’s The Economic Way of Thinking:

[image error]Voluntary trade is mutually beneficial, regardless of whether it’s between Harry and Sam involving baseball cards back in the neighborhood, or between Joe and Mr. Smith at the grocery store, or between Mrs. Smith in Virginia who purchases furniture sold by Mr. Jones in North Carolina, or between Mr. Jones who purchases fine suits from producers in Italy and wine from producers in France. And what is true for baseball cards, furniture, suits, and wine, is also true for the purchase of labor services – be that on a factory floor in Latin America or from a radiologist in India.

Some Racist That Hutt!

(Don Boudreaux)

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The recent disgraceful effort to portray the late economist W.H. Hutt as a racist prompted me to scour through my library in search of a book that I recall buying years ago at a used-book store in Boston – specifically, the slim 1986 volume edited by economist Morgan Reynold titled W.H. Hutt: An Economist for the Long Run. I found it!

This volume’s insightful first chapter – titled “Razing Keynes: An Economist for the Long Run” – was written by my former GMU colleague Tom Hazlett. On page 15 of Tom’s chapter we read this about Hutt, who spent much of his adult life living in South Africa:

So doggedly annoying were his economic and classical liberal attacks on apartheid in scholarly forums and the popular press that the white supremacist government was at one point moved to deprive Mr. Hutt of his travel visa.

Apparently, Hutt was so clever at disguising his racism as anti-racist efforts that he managed to hide his racism even from the white-supremacist government of South Africa!

Some Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Writing at the Telegraph, Daniel Hannan warns that covidian-style illiberalism will continue to oppress humankind. Three slices:

The original justification for the restrictions had collapsed by April 2020. Sweden, which stuck to the plan that the UK had prepared in cooler-headed times, saw its cases peak and fall in line with everyone else’s, and now turns out to have had the lowest excess death rate of any OECD state.

But, by 2021, dirigisme had taken on a force of its own, and lockdowns were a policy in search of a rationale. “Flatten the curve” became “Protect the NHS”, then “Wait for the rollout”, then “Stop new variants”, then “Yeah, but Long Covid”.

The initial assumption that Britain would reopen once the vulnerable had been jabbed was dropped. For reasons that were never explained, young people had to be vaccinated. Yet the public kept cheering. Support for closing borders, shops, schools and pubs never dipped below two thirds. Oh, yes: 2020 won alright.

The following year did at least see an end to lockdowns. But, although we were no longer under house arrest, 2022 saw something which, in its way, was even worse. Covid illiberalism became permanent, despite the passing of the supposed danger. The furlough had taught us to look to government as a first resort. When prices rose, we demanded handouts. When the Ukraine war caused an energy crisis, we expected ministers to fix prices. We refused to come back to work, even when (as is the case for most civil servants) contracts obliged us to be in the office. It is not just that this was 2020 too – it is that there is no reason to expect future years to be different.

The lockdowns rendered us both grumpy and dependent. Like stroppy teenagers, we rage at the government while expecting it to solve our problems. Cut my fuel bills – and deliver on net zero! Make housing affordable – and don’t build anywhere near me! Pay the public sector more – and bring inflation down! Cut waiting lists – and Hands Off Our NHS! Grow the economy – but don’t expect me back in the office!

If, for the better part of two years, you infantilise voters, using the full force of the law to micromanage their behaviour and paying them to do nothing, you destroy their independence and their readiness to link action and consequence. Everything becomes someone else’s problem.

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Well, not this year. I’m afraid the lockdowns – or, rather, the public support for the lockdowns – knocked it out of me. When, in January 2020, I heard that the Chinese authorities were closing and quarantining cities, I thanked my lucky stars that I lived in a nation where such things were unthinkable. The months that followed taught me some hard truths. It became clear that many of my countrymen couldn’t give two hoots about liberty, either in the abstract or in practice. A horrifying survey in July 2021 showed that, with or without a virus, 26 per cent of people wanted nightclubs closed, 35 per cent wanted travellers quarantined and 40 per cent wanted mandatory facemasks. Incredibly, 19 per cent wanted nightly curfews – to repeat, not in response to Covid, but as a general principle.

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All agree that the illiberalism began nearly a decade before the pandemic. The lockdown reinforced the trend, making it seem reasonable to ask the state’s permission before travelling or enjoying your property. Who, in this darkening age, can fail to be a rational pessimist?

Even now, lockdown nostalgics are falling greedily on the news from China, beginning their clamour for yet another round of restrictions. And they will surely do the same whenever there is a new disease – or, indeed, a “climate emergency”. Lockdowns are out there now; the needle will not return to where it was.

Jacob Sullum reports that, “under government pressure, Twitter suppressed truthful speech about COVID-19.” A slice:

Consider a March 15, 2021, tweet in which the epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff responded to the question of whether “younger age groups” or people who had already been infected by COVID-19 “need to be vaccinated.” Kulldorff’s response: “No. Thinking that everyone should be vaccinated is as scientifically flawed as thinking that nobody should. COVID vaccines are important for older high-risk people, and their care-takers. Those with prior natural infection do not need it. Nor children.”

[David] Zweig reports that “internal emails show an ‘intent to action’ by a Twitter moderator, saying Kulldorff’s tweet violated the company’s Covid-19 misinformation policy” and claiming “he shared ‘false information.'” But as Zweig notes, “Kulldorff’s statement was an expert’s opinion—one that happened to be in line with vaccine policies in numerous other countries.”

Kulldorff’s tweet nevertheless “was deemed ‘false information’ by Twitter moderators merely because it differed from CDC guidelines,” Zweig writes. “After Twitter took action, Kulldorff’s tweet was slapped with a ‘misleading’ label and all replies and likes were shut off, throttling the tweet’s ability to be seen and shared by others, a core function of the platform.”

Zweig says he found “numerous instances of tweets about vaccines and pandemic policies labeled as ‘misleading’ or taken down entirely, sometimes triggering account suspensions, simply because they veered from CDC guidance or differed from establishment views.” Those actions were consistent with the Biden administration’s understanding of “misinformation,” which it defines as speech that deviates from a government-endorsed “scientific consensus.”

Jay Bhattacharya tweets:

This @washingtonpost Nov. 25, 2022 story was more sensible: “A coronavirus outbreak on the verge of being China’s biggest of the pandemic has exposed a critical flaw in Beijing’s “zero covid” strategy: a vast population without natural immunity.”

Wall Street Journal columnist James Freeman is rightly ridicules 60 Minutes newsman – ‘newsman’ – Scott Pelley for giving airtime to the consistently wrong (but never in doubt) doomsayer Paul Ehrlich. A slice:

This week Mr. Pelley notes Mr. Ehrlich’s history of failed analysis, but doesn’t seem to understand that this should make people more skeptical of Mr. Ehrlich’s climate pronouncements, not less.

Also weighing in on the 60 Minutes interview with Paul Ehrlich is Reason‘s Ron Bailey. Two slices:

Stanford University biologist and perennially wrong doomster Paul Ehrlich appeared on CBS 60 Minutes on Sunday where he once again declared, “I and the vast majority of my colleagues think we’ve had it; that the next few decades will be the end of the kind of civilization we’re used to.”

Ehrlich made himself (in)famous when he in his 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb predicted that “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970’s the world will undergo famines-hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.” Instead of rising as Ehrlich predicted, the global crude death per 1,000 people has fallen from 12.5 in 1968 to 7 in 2019 before ticking up to 8 in the pandemic year of 2020.

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CBS and 60 Minutes should be ashamed of promoting Ehrlich’s oft-debunked nonsense.

Note: I have debunked Ehrlich’s bogus prophecies many, many, many, manytimes. For more background, see my books The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the 21st Century and Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know: And Many Others You Will Find Interesting, with my co-author Marian Tupy.

George Leef warns of what’s going on in higher education.

Bryan Caplan is unquestionably correct: Housing markets in America are calamitously over-regulated. [DBx: Although I’m delighted that Bryan and others emphasize the importance of deregulating the market for housing, I stick to my knitting of busting fallacies about trade and trade policy!]

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from pages 135-136 of the original, 1964 edition of W.H. Hutt’s The Economics of the Colour Bar:

It is difficult to imagine a better illustration than is provided by [apartheid] South Africa of the truth that the fight against colour injustice is actually against the consequences of planning on the collectivist model. Every repression of the Africans has, at the same time, been a repression of the free market. It is so-called ‘central planning’ which has caused African labour to become regarded as a mere source of useful, unskilled, muscular strength. And it is profit incentives which have tended powerfully to raise the material standards of Africans, to develop their latent powers, to raise their status and prestige in a multi-racial society, and ultimately to win for them equality of respect and consideration.

DBx: Being a staunch classical liberal, Hutt was an economist who strongly supported free markets. So one wonders how that small group of ‘scholars’ who are now working hard to besmirch Hutt’s name by accusing him of being a racist can read passages, such as the one above, and in good conscience maintain their insistence that Hutt was a racist.

Either they know that they are lying about Hutt, or they are incapable of comprehending Hutt’s own words. As I prefer to believe that a person’s failings are due to his or her intellectual shortcomings rather than to his or her ethical deficiencies, I suspect that those ‘scholars’ who insist that Hutt was a racist simply, if grotesquely, misunderstand what Hutt wrote.

These ‘scholars’ will attempt to defend their interpretation by pointing to the fact that Hutt supported some restrictions on the franchise. But this fact about Hutt does not support the conclusion that he was a racist.

First, many of Hutt’s arguments were presented in light of what was, when he wrote, politically feasible. One can dispute the accuracy of Hutt’s political judgments on this front (although I suspect that he was quite well-informed). But when a writer is assessing or offering practical suggestions for policy changes to be made in the near future, it is wholly unjustified to interpret concessions that that writer makes to political realities as evidence that that writer is sympathetic to all of the real-world sentiments that make those realities practically unchangeable over the short-run.

Second and more importantly, unlike progressives, classical liberals value democracy only insofar as it is a means of protecting individual freedom. Freedom to make offers to buy and sell on terms that the individual (rather than the collective) chooses – freedom to say ‘no’ or ‘yes’ to such offers as the individual thinks fit – freedom from what Thomas Sowell called “the rampaging presumptions” of arrogant busybodies – freedom to choose with whom one associates, employs, befriends, loves – freedom to express one’s thoughts – these freedoms are far more fundamental than is the freedom to cast ballots in political elections.

As in other contexts, it’s possible to disagree with classical-liberals’ attitude toward the right to vote. But it’s impossible to deny that this attitude toward the right to vote is held by most classical liberals. It is therefore scandalous to conclude that a classical liberal, such as Hutt, was a racist simply because in what he wrote he revealed that he did not hold the right to vote to be as important as do modern-day progressives.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 198 – the final page – of Thomas Sowell’s 2004 book, Affirmative Action Around the World: An Empirical Study:

Despite sweeping claims made for affirmative action programs, an examination of their actual consequences makes it hard to support those claims, or even to say that these programs have been beneficial on balance – unless one is prepared to say that any amount of social redress, however small, is worth any amount of costs and dangers, however large.

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(Don Boudreaux)

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John Cochrane riffs productively on Charles Calomiris’s review of Phil Gramm’s, Robert Ekelund’s, and John Early’s superb book, The Myth of American Inequality. A slice:

Why has work collapsed in the bottom decile? Here we might have a big debate. $11.76 per hour (2017) isn’t a lot. But the previous graphs certainly contain a suggestion worth pursuing: The effective marginal tax rate in the lowest three quintiles is effectively 100%. Earn a dollar, and lose a dollar of benefits. Why work?

Gramm Ekelund and Early are careful, and don’t make any causal assertions here. They don’t really even stress the fact popping from the table as much as I have. But the fact is a fact, a nearly 100% tax rate + an income effect isn’t a positive for labor supply, and the amount of work in lower quintiles has plummeted. This is a book about facing facts and this one is undeniable.

As Emma Camp reports for Reason, it’s a darn good thing that Americans’ freedom of speech is constitutionally protected.

GMU Econ alum Scott Drylie reveals the economic lesson in Dire Straits’s great 1985 hit song “Money for Nothing.” A slice:

The subjective theory of value opens our eyes to the adjectives all around us, offering a credible explanation for unequal outcomes. Because of consumer proclivities, it is an expert worker who tends to earn more than a careless one, an innovative entrepreneur more than a feckless one. Similarly, it is an established and beloved male actor who tends to earn more than an untested and unknown female actor. (Seasoned female stars do just fine, on the other hand.)

Arnold Kling argues that “the Fed’s main role is to help manage government debt.”

I’m unsure how to summarize this recent post by Bob Graboyes, save to say that it’s fun.

Here’s wisdom from Tim Worstall: “No one will ever have an unassailable lead in a specific piece of tech. Simply because the existence of it shows everyone else that it’s possible.”

Prompted by a recent paper in Nature, Wall Street Journal columnist Allysia Finley asks if vaccines are fueling new covid variants. Two slices:

Notably, workers who had received more doses were at higher risk of getting sick. Those who received three more doses were 3.4 times as likely to get infected as the unvaccinated, while those who received two were only 2.6 times as likely.

“This is not the only study to find a possible association with more prior vaccine doses and higher risk of COVID-19,” the authors noted. “We still have a lot to learn about protection from COVID-19 vaccination, and in addition to a vaccine’s effectiveness it is important to examine whether multiple vaccine doses given over time may not be having the beneficial effect that is generally assumed.”

Two years ago, vaccines were helpful in reducing severe illness, particularly among the elderly and those with health risks like diabetes and obesity. But experts refuse to concede that boosters have yielded diminishing benefits and may even have made individuals and the population as a whole more vulnerable to new variants like XBB.
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The Biden administration’s monomaniacal focus on vaccines over new treatments has left the highest-risk Americans more vulnerable to new variants. Why doesn’t that seem to worry the experts?

In response to a covid hysteric admitting (yesterday on Twitter) that she’s so fearful of covid that she’s not had her teeth cleaned by the dentist in three years, Laura Powell tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

Overstating the effectiveness of masks and the risks of Covid has harmed people’s health.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from George Leef’s December 31st, 2022, post at The Corner – a post titled “Is There Anything Today That Isn’t Racist?“:

In woke circles, it’s an easy path to fame: Just make some groundless assertions about the evils of a free society and you’ll be a star.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from pages 512-513 of F.A. Hayek’s June 13th, 1980, letter-to-the-editor of the Times, as this letter is reprinted in Essays on Liberalism and the Economy (2022), which is volume 18 (expertly edited by Paul Lewis), of The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek (footnote deleted; link added):

From the technical point of view there is no serious difficulty about stopping inflation. As the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Arthur Burns, has recently confirmed in a much noticed lecture, the monetary authority can always stop inflation “with little delay“. The difficulties are not economic but political and especially problems of government finance. Ending inflation demands that government is deprived of the recourse to the printing press for financing its expenditures. Government must balance its budget and I admit that it is not humanly possible to do so overnight.