Russell Roberts's Blog, page 80
November 7, 2022
Some Links
The point is that none of the Democrats’ objections are principled. They oppose Mr. Musk’s takeover for the simple reason that they want to silence conservative voices and contrarian views on subjects such as climate and Covid. Twitter’s deposed executives succeeded at this even as they failed to make money for investors.
Hillsdale College president Larry Arnn explains one reason for that college’s greatness. A slice:
A century after the college’s founding, the 1955 Hillsdale football team was invited to play at the Tangerine Bowl in Florida but instructed to leave all its black members at home. In keeping with its principles, the team declined to play.
In the 1970s, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare demanded Hillsdale College begin to count its students by race. It claimed the power to make this demand because some of the college’s students were using taxpayer-funded aid to pay for their education. After losing litigation that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, Hillsdale announced it would no longer accept government money.
Most Americans still agree with us on these points. When asked explicitly about taking race and ethnicity into account in hiring and promotion decisions, 74% of respondents are opposed. What Lincoln called the “better angels of our nature” still live.
Our policy of nondiscrimination has led to a student population comprising an array of socio-economic groups and cultural, racial and religious traditions. Currently, Hillsdale College has students enrolled from 49 states. In the past five years, the college has accepted students from 26 foreign countries, including Barbados, Brazil, Ghana, Guatemala, Kenya, Mongolia, Nepal, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Thailand and Vietnam. Not one of these young men and women was accepted on the grounds of race, heritage or background. They were invited to attend Hillsdale on the strength of their character, their intellect and, crucially, their intentions. Learning is hard work. It is done only by those who are determined to do it. Neither we nor anyone else is able to provide an education alone.
Nurse practitioners provide excellent primary-care services.
George Leef reviews Matthew Hennessey’s Visible Hand. A slice:
Hennessey knows that market opponents usually concentrate their fire on the price system, arguing that it is unfair to the poor, who struggle to pay for essentials. (See “Prices Are Hell,” p. 42.) It’s a fine sentiment to want to help the poor, he argues, but tampering with the price system is a bad way to do that. The result will be a misallocation of resources that won’t help the poor and will harm everyone else. Price controls (including so‐called anti‐gouging laws), rent controls, minimum wage laws, and other interference with the price system are detrimental, he shows. If the government, for example, tries to make medical care free, the result will be long waiting times and a decline in the quality of care—and even after that, people will still end up paying the monetary costs in higher taxes or some other way.
Gary Galles argues that Democrats fail the marshmallow test.
Here’s Aaron Kheriaty covid tyranny. A slice:
COVID-19 represents the first time in the history of pandemics that we confined healthy populations. While the ancients did not understand the mechanisms of infectious disease—they knew nothing of viruses and bacteria—they nevertheless figured out many ways to mitigate the spread of contagion during epidemics. These time-tested measures ranged from quarantining symptomatic patients to enlisting those with natural immunity, who had recovered from the illness, to care for the sick.
From the lepers in the Old Testament to the plague of Justinian in Ancient Rome to the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, lockdowns were never part of conventional public health measures. The concept of lockdowns arose in part from a public health apparatus that had become militarized over the previous two decades. We now routinely hear of “countermeasures,” but doctors and nurses never use that word, which is a term of spycraft and soldiering.
In 1968, while an estimated one to four million people died in the H3N2 influenza pandemic, businesses and schools stayed open and large events were never cancelled. Until 2020 we had not previously locked down entire populations, because that strategy does not work. In 2020 we had zero empirical evidence that lockdowns would save lives, only flawed mathematical models whose predications were not just slightly off, but wildly exaggerated by orders of magnitude.
When Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, leading the president’s coronavirus task force, decided in February 2020 that lockdowns were the way to go, the New York Times was tasked with explaining this approach to Americans. On February 27, the Times published a podcast in which science reporter Donald McNeil explained that civil rights had to be suspended if we were going to stop the spread of COVID. The following day, the Times published McNeil’s article, “To Take On the Coronavirus, Go Medieval on It.”
The piece did not give enough credit to Medieval society, which sometimes locked the gates of walled cities or closed borders during epidemics, but never ordered people to stay in their homes, never stopped people from plying their trade, and never isolated asymptomatic individuals from others in the community.
Reminder: the Cochrane review of the mask literature provides no support of masking to prevent influenza infection. Ask “experts” pushing community masking for the flu to show their work. Spit shined swiss cheese is not worth your time.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 32 of F.A. Hayek’s 1973 essay “Liberalism” as this essay appears as chapter one of 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):
But while for these reasons it seems almost certain that unlimited democracy will abandon liberal principles in favour of discriminatory measures benefiting the various groups supporting the majority, it is also doubtful whether in the long run democracy can preserve itself if it abandons liberal principles. If government assumes tasks which are too extensive and complex to be effectively guided by majority decisions, it seems inevitable that effective powers will devolve to a bureaucratic apparatus increasingly independent of democratic control. It is therefore not unlikely that the abandonment of liberalism by democracy will in the long run also lead to the disappearance of democracy. There can, in particular, be little doubt that the kind of directed economy towards which democracy seems to be tending requires for its effective conduct a government with authoritarian powers.
November 6, 2022
Certainty is Dangerous
My latest column for AIER was inspired by watching Ken Burns’s, Lynn Novick’s, and Sarah Botstein’s moving new documentary, The U.S. and the Holocaust. In this column I warn of sensations of certainty. A slice:
In addition to displaying the bigotry and brutality of the 1930s and 1940s, the Burns film displayed an additional trait that featured prominently in the people of those decades, namely ignorant certainty. Hitler, Himmler, and other Nazi monsters were, of course, certain that Germany’s problems were largely caused by Jews and would, thus, certainly be easily solved by eliminating Jews. There’s no doubt that ordinary Germans who were entranced by Hitler and his propaganda machine were equally certain of those same ludicrous propositions.
Many Americans, for much of Hitler’s reign, were certain that reports of Nazi atrocities were exaggerated and likely the result of scurrilous Jewish propaganda. These same Americans were largely also certain that admission into the U.S. of more Jews would harm Americans.
The certainty in the people revealed by the Burns film isn’t as attention-grabbing as is the physical and psychological cruelty. But this certainty is of a piece with this cruelty. Indeed, it’s arguable that this certainty was every bit as much to blame for the cruelty as was the bigotry. Doubts that the ‘other’ human beings whom you are instructed to demonize, imprison, torture, enslave, and murder are really your inferiors dampen your willingness act cruelly toward those ‘other’ human beings.
Our passions are inflamed by certainty and dampened by doubts. Only when we feel certain that members of that ‘other’ group are dangerous to us do we not hesitate to imprison or kill them. Only when we feel certain that imperiled ‘others’ are not deserving of our assistance do we, without qualms, withhold help. Feelings of certainty suppress sympathy or fellow-feeling for anyone or anything not fully on board with whatever tasks we are certain must be carried out.
Nazi certainty about the inferiority and dangerousness of Jews was, of course, not only utterly unfounded, but also especially deplorably placed. Fortunately, this particular species of racism has largely been eliminated. Yet other instances of destructive certainties still abound, and they threaten to unleash much damage if they become more widespread.
Some examples. People who are certain that global warming will soon destroy humanity unless we radically restructure our way of life by abandoning fossil fuels have no sympathy for anyone who disagrees, nor who merely points to downsides of restricting fossil-fuel use. Those who were certain that COVID was destined to kill tens of millions of people annually across the globe, until and unless governments instituted draconian lockdowns, had only contempt and scorn for those who questioned this claim or who pointed to the downsides of lockdowns. Those who are certain that today’s income inequality reflects nothing but the pure happy chance lucked into by, or the predations committed by, the rich have no patience for arguments about how the rich might have earned their wealth honestly, nor how confiscatory taxation might destroy our economy.
Those who are certain that Americans’ prosperity today is rooted in the chattel slavery of the past, and that a great majority of today’s non-Black Americans continue to be incurably if subconsciously racist, self-righteously close their ears to pleas for policies that are colorblind. The reason is that these people are certain that colorblind policies will only further cement in place the unjust privileges and wealth enjoyed by white Americans. And these people are further certain that those individuals who advocate colorblind policies are really cunning knaves who wish to use colorblind policies as a tool to keep people of color poor and oppressed.
Certainty shuts the case on whatever matters the certainty enfolds. Certainty closes off further thought, conversation, and debate. Certainty demands unquestioning loyalty and the enthusiastic performance of whatever actions are prescribed by those who are certain. Certainty tolerates no dissent.
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 188 of my emeritus colleague Richard Wagner’s insightful 2016 book, Politics as a Peculiar Business:
Perhaps the language of contemporary life has constructed a “we” out of nothing by expanding the sharply limited domain to which “we the people” originally pertained. After all, if someone kidnapped you and a friend, took you to some dark parking lot, and robbed and beat you, you would not later tell police investigators that “we went for a ride.” You and your friend would comprise a “we,” but the two of you plus the kidnapper most certainly would not. To use “we” properly requires consensus among those whom the “we” covers.
DBx: This point is subtle yet very important. A meaningful “we” – a “we” whose decisions and actions should be accorded the same generous presumptions that true liberals accord to the actions of peaceful individuals – is not simply any collection of individuals.
A great error of many conservatives and nearly all progressives today is their presumption that citizenship alone in a nation suffices to ensure that all such citizens together constitute a meaningful “we.” And if that nation has reasonably well-functioning democratic institutions, the outcomes of majority-rule elections there are treated as the rational, nearly sacred choices of this “we.” Hence, in such nations, any formal or informal limits on the collective’s (or its representatives’) range of options are regarded as an illegitimate assault on the presumed legitimate moral authority of the “we.”
The tyranny of monarchs was real. So, too, is the tyranny of dictators. But also so too is the tyranny of unrestrained majorities.
When true liberals – a group that includes Dick Wagner – embrace ethical individualism, this embrace (contrary to much ignorant commentary) isn’t of the notion that the individual is not, or should not be, a social creature. This embrace isn’t of the fiction of individual supermen and superwomen who are, or can be, complete masters each of his and her own fates. This embrace isn’t of the fallacy that the individual has, or ought to have, no legal or moral obligations to a larger group of people extending well beyond the family. This embrace isn’t of the straw man materialist consumer.
Instead, the embrace of liberal ethical individualism reflects the recognition that only individuals choose and experience sensations. Collectives do no such things. And so the measure of the goodness or badness of social institutions is found only in how well or poorly these institutions promote the well-being of individuals as judged by individuals. Merely lumping individuals together who happen to share a native language or who happen to be born or to live within certain political borders does not automatically create an ethically meaningful “we.” For such a creation, much more is needed. Identifying the details of the required “much more” is a (the?) great if devilishly difficult task of political philosophy.
Some Links
George Will draws some lessons from America’s 2022 political campaign. Two slices:
Twenty-six days before Election Day, the last preelection inflation numbers showed that government-made inflation, which the Biden administration 18 months ago called “transitory,” is like all “temporary” government programs: long-lived. By mid-year, a typical household was spending $460 a month more than 12 months earlier for the same set of purchases.
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Furthermore, because many Hispanics are upwardly mobile, they believe in upward American mobility, and hence are not attracted by the Biden administration’s enthusiasm for racial spoils systems, a.k.a., “equity.” These are, as Christopher DeMuth of the Hudson Institute correctly said at Hillsdale College recently, “programs favoring a long and elastic list of politically selected groups, including its catch-all category of those ‘adversely affected by inequality.’” Many Hispanics have experience of life under governments that pick winners and guarantee losers.
Jim Bovard isn’t impressed with Biden’s Union Station speech. A slice:
Biden endlessly castigates former President Donald Trump for the “Big Lie” that Trump won the 2020 election. But Biden’s “Big Lie” is that he is entitled to use federal power however he pleases because he was certified the winner of that election. But 81 million votes didn’t nullify the Bill of Rights.
Speaking on the edge of Capitol Hill, Biden portrayed himself as the savior of the republic. He declared, “Autocracy is the opposite of democracy. It means the rule of one, one person, one interest, one ideology, one party.”
Like Biden’s mandate for 80 million Americans to get COVID vaccines — a dictate the Supreme Court struck down as illegal? Like when Biden contorted federal law to cancel $500 billion in student loans to give Democratic candidates a boost in next week’s election? Like when Team Biden sends FBI agents to harass parents who complained at school-board meetings? Like the Biden administration’s proposal to cancel all federal school breakfast and lunch subsidies for any state that does not impose radical pro-transgender policies on every public school?
VERs arguably did accelerate investments by Japanese automakers in the United States in the mid 1980s, but crediting them with all such investment through 1991 is far-fetched. The VERs followed Volkswagen’s late-’70s investment in Pennsylvania and Honda’s in Ohio (announced in 1980), and about a dozen other automobile factories — Japanese, German, and Korean — have arrived since 1992. Moreover, the quotas likely weren’t binding in their final years (limiting their effect on investment), and U.S.-based factories would have made economic sense even without them. Foreign direct investment in motor-vehicle and equipment manufacturing grew faster after 1990 than before.
To the extent the quotas did encourage longer-term foreign investment, it went mainly to nonunion facilities in “right to work” states — hurting the UAW and the Rust Belt communities that the VERs were intended to help.
Combine these outcomes with stagnant productivity, continued long-term declines in Big Three market share, meager growth in exports, real automotive-output growth weaker than overall manufacturing growth, and a U.S. automotive-goods trade deficit that widened substantially (in real terms or as a share of GDP) in the 1980s, and one can call the VERs a “strategic trade policy” success only by defining the “strategy” decades after the fact.
Indeed, subsequent decades saw a truly resurgent American auto industry. The VER tale oddly omits this chapter, perhaps because of the centrality of trade liberalization to the plot. In particular, the relatively seamless trade and investment facilitated by NAFTA created a globally competitive North American supply chain, with the United States as the “dominant link.” Without NAFTA, the Center for Automotive Research noted in 2017, “large segments of the U.S. automotive industry would have moved to other low-wage countries in Asia, Eastern Europe, or South America.”
Boy, it sounds like there’s a ton of chatter in Washington about cutting entitlements. And it’s about time we embraced reform. So, which brave “key Republicans” are “openly talking” and “openly broaching” the idea of reforming Social Security and Medicare? We don’t know, because the author, Jim Tankersley, doesn’t offer a single quote from anyone in the GOP making that argument — not an elected official, not a candidate, not even some fringe backbencher spouting off.
How can one of the most prestigious newspapers in the country run a 1,500-word piece asserting that a major political party has been “talking” about a highly controversial policy position and not substantiate the claim with a single quote? That would be the first question of any competent editor.
Of course, as much as I wish it existed, there is no plan or campaign or reform effort aimed at slashing or weaning us off entitlements. The entire ginned-up issue basically relies on a single line from Rick Scott’s “Save America” agenda, which Mitch McConnell rejected as soon as it appeared.
(DBx: Like Harsanyi, I wish that Republicans were seriously talking about seriously reducing the size and scope of Social Security and Medicare. Alas, being politicians, they care above all for power, and power is not won in this land of liberty by proposing to diminish voter A’s ability to live at the expense of voter B, and voter B’s ability to live at the expense of voter A – and both voter A’s and B’s ability to live at the expense of yet-to-be-born voter C.)
Jamie Whyte sensibly asks: “Why should government spend tax money on private goods?”
Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson writes about the woke-resisting Cambridge philosopher Arif Ahmed. Two slices:
“It’s hard to convey the reality and the extent of this fear which stalks the halls of academia,” Arif Ahmed told me when I interviewed him for this week’s Planet Normal podcast. Increasingly, he says, universities see themselves as “social justice factories, rather than seats of learning”. He doesn’t blame the majority of students or the academics, who voted in large numbers against a sly move by the university in 2020 to compel them to “respect” all views and identities (Ahmed campaigned and got the word changed to “tolerate”). When the ballot was secret, they showed what they really thought.
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Ahmed is wise to their game. Drily he notes that they always say: “We believe in free speech, but…” (But only the speech we find appropriate, obviously.) On Tuesday, the professor ran the pilot of a class on free speech where undergraduates will learn to hear the other side of an argument and prepare to be offended. It’s extraordinary and sad that such a course should be necessary at one of the world’s great universities, but it is.
In times of universal deceit, speaking the truth is a revolutionary act. One day, students will not hide in the shadows to listen to a speaker the totalitarians and the intellectual cowards would like to ban. And freedom will return.
Should universities around the world use English?
TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.)
Jessica Hockett continues examine the data on Spring 2020 New York City hospitalizations.
Art Carden reviews Paul Frijters’s, Gigi Foster’s, and Michael Baker’s The Great Covid Panic. Three slices:
People advocating lockdowns, mask mandates, and other interventions might protest that they are just following the science, and they might be incredulous at the very idea that we should question what experts say. One of the problems with exalted expertise, however, is that it ignores a lot of important tradeoffs. Frijters, Foster, and Baker explore this throughout the book but especially in chapter 5, “The Tragedy.” In the name of a single and exclusive goal—limiting transmission—policymakers unleashed many unintended consequences. These range from relatively minor inconveniences like having one more thing to worry about (asking “Do I have a mask?” every time I leave the house), to the dystopian (not knowing what any of my students look like from the bridge of their nose down), to the devastating (enormous numbers of people pushed into poverty by COVID policy‐related economic disruptions).
The book’s most interesting chapter is chapter 6, “Science During the Great Panic: Finest Hour or Worst Cock‐Up?” It’s an interesting study in how initial conditions matter in scientific discussions. A lot of the early analyses started with suspect numbers and assumptions, but they were sanctioned by early peer review and not questioned as rigorously as they should have been. Scientists weren’t skeptical enough, they argue, of initial estimates of Infection Mortality Rates and Case Mortality Rates.
Lockdowns, mandates, and other expert‐directed central plans are suspect because they ignore what Hayek called “the particular circumstances of time and place.” Armed with this knowledge, we can take expert estimates of different probabilities and make what is, in our considered judgment, the best decisions for our families. A central planner or modeler cannot have this local knowledge; it is decentralized and often tacit, and it cannot confront the planner or modeler as data.
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No book is perfect, of course, and The Great Covid Panic is no exception. I’m skeptical of Frijters, Foster, and Baker’s inequality‐and‐plutocracy narrative, both in the United States (see Phillip Magness et al.‘s March 2022 Economic Journal article “How Pronounced Is the U‑Curve?”) and globally.
The penultimate chapter, “What’s Next—and What Have We Learned?” is a little disappointing. It’s largely speculative, which is fine; however, some of the speculations distract from the book’s overall message.
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Despite these criticisms, this is the kind of book that needed to be written, and there needs to be many others like it. Liberty and prosperity will return as the pandemic wanes; however, they will return in modified, less lustrous form, as Robert Higgs explained over 30 years ago in Crisis and Leviathan. The advocates of lockdowns and mandates are calling for “bold, persistent experimentation” just like Franklin D. Roosevelt did in his 1932 address at Oglethorpe University. I suspect that, just like the New Deal exacerbated the Great Depression, the COVID panic will end up being an example of a cure that is worse than the disease. Better to learn that now than never.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 43 of Julian Simon’s 1996 masterpiece, The Ultimate Resource 2 (original emphasis):
The common morally charged statement that the average American uses (say) ninety times as much X as does the average Asian or African (where X is some natural resource) can be seen as irrelevant in this light. The average American also creates a great deal more of “natural” resource X than does the average African or Asian – on average, by the same or greater proportion as the resource is used by Americans compared with Asians and Africans.
DBx: As Simon argues, resources – including those that we call “natural” and even “non-renewable” – are produced by human ingenuity and effort out of the various atomic and molecular arrangements that are the creations of nature. No atomic or molecular arrangement is automatically a resource. No such arrangement is deemed as, and ensured to be, a resource by nature. For that arrangement to become a resource humans must creatively figure out how to use it to satisfy human purposes, and how to do so in a way that’s worthwhile for humans. Therefore, contrary to our intuition and to common belief, we produce natural resources – and, yes, we produce even those ‘natural’ resources that are labeled “non-renewable” – in the very same way that we produce paper clips, living-room furniture, and bottles of wine.
November 5, 2022
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 121 of Joseph Epstein’s February 5th, 2019, National Review essay, “Political Correctness Knows No Statute of Limitations,” as this essay is reprinted (under the title “The Menace of Political Correctness”) in the 2020 collection, titled Gallimaufry, of some of Epstein’s essays and reviews.
Something not merely humorless but mentally dull there is about the mindset of political correctness. Subtlety under political correctness is out. So, too, complexity of character. To be politically correct one must also firmly believe that people do not change: If they were the least racist, sexist, homophobic forty years ago, they must still be so now. The mental map of the politically correct consists of a minuscule pale, with much of what is genuinely interesting or amusing in life beyond that pale. For the politically correct, what someone says, as distinguished from what he does, is crucial. This precludes of course the many men and women who have harsh, even objectionable opinions but lead generous, entirely honorable lives. H. L. Mencken was such a man. In many of his essays Mencken refered to African Americans as “blackamoors,” yet in his professional life he praised and promoted black writers whenever he came upon them. Much more common are people with perfect sets of opinions – race, check; the environment, check; LGBT, check; . . . – and whose actions are selfish, insensitive, even cruel.
DBx: To be clear, the ways that we talk – what Deirdre McCloskey calls our “habits of the lip” – do indeed matter. Greatly. But actions also matter. Also greatly.
Opponents of Globalization Continue to Offer Only Weak Arguments
Here’s a letter to the Atlantic:
Editor:
Sen. Chris Murphy’s (D-CT) case for an American industrial policy is riddled with factual errors and legerdemain (“The Wreckage of Neoliberalism,” October 25). An example of the former is his assertion that the jobs created in America over the past 30 years by globalization “offered lower pay, fewer benefits, and less opportunity for advancement.”
In reality, economist Michael Strain found that real hourly wages – excluding benefits – earned by production and nonsupervisory workers were 34 percent higher in 2019 than in 1990.* And according to the St. Louis Fed, which has data on fringe benefits going back only to 2001, the real value of fringe benefits paid by private employers to their workers is today 89 percent higher than it was in 2001.
An example of Sen. Murphy’s legerdemain is his assertion that “[t]he consumerism that was supposed to fill our lives with the material rewards necessary for happiness instead left many feeling empty as our cultures and identities got swallowed up by the shapeless, antiseptic, profit-obsessed international economy.”
First, although Sen. Murphy uses the word “necessary,” the tone and message of his passage indicates that he really means “sufficient.” Yet just as no serious opponent of globalization denies that access to material rewards is necessary or human flourishing, no serious proponent of globalization – contrary to Sen. Murphy’s insinuation – claims that access to material rewards is sufficient for such flourishing.
Second, it’s brazen for an author to complain about obsession with profit in the same essay in which he complains about lack of wage growth. If economic gain is appropriate for workers, surely it’s appropriate also for workers’ employers. Only employers intent on earning profit remain employers, and only employers who successfully seek maximum possible profit are able to pay workers maximum possible wages.
Third, although the words “feeling empty as our cultures and identities got swallowed up by the shapeless, antiseptic, profit-obsessed international economy” seem to convey meaning, reflection reveals that this phase is meaningless word salad. What, exactly, is this “empty” feeling? Is it suffered by Americans who shop at Ikea, who buy automobiles from Japan, who work in U.S.-based factories of the Dutch company DSM, or who are employed by John Deere producing equipment for export? Would we feel less empty if the prices of the goods that we buy were higher and the wages that we earn were lower?
Do we Americans traveling abroad sense that our culture is being “swallowed” when, upon stepping out of our Hilton Hotel rooms after catching up on the news with CNN, we see on the streets of foreign cities Starbucks and McDonald’s restaurants? And is American culture so fragile that it is threatened by the likes of Volkswagen dealerships in our suburbs and “Made in Turkey” labels on our bed linens?
Finally, are Sen. Murphy and other Congressional spendthrifts so worried about the global economy being “shapeless” and “antiseptic” (whatever the heck these words even mean in this context) that they’ll stop borrowing money, much of which is loaned to the U.S. government by foreigners who acquire the dollars they lend by selling exports to Americans?
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
* Michael R. Strain, The American Dream Is Not Dead (But Populism Could Kill It) (West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Press, 2020). See especially pages 45-46.
Some Links
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Bjorn Lomborg exposes “the Lancet’s ‘heat death’ deception.” A slice:
Annual heat deaths have increased significantly among people 65 and older world-wide. The average deaths per year increased 68% from the early 2000s to the late 2010s. But that is almost entirely because there are so many more older people today than there were 20 years ago, in no small part thanks to medical innovations that keep us alive longer. Measured across the same time span the Lancet maps heat deaths, the number of people 65 and older has risen by 60%, or almost as much as heat deaths. When the increase in heat mortality is adjusted for this population growth, the actual rise that can be attributed to rising temperatures is only 5%.
It is hard not to see the Lancet study’s failure to adjust this figure as a deliberate act of deception. Any academic who works with statistics would know to adjust the deaths to account for population growth. I’ve actually raised this issue to the Lancet before. Last September the journal published a study with the same fallacious argument, and I sent the editor a detailed letter explaining the problem. The Lancet never corrected it and here it is, over a year later, committing the same error.
This year’s study also cherry-picks data by discussing only heat deaths. Around the world, far more people die each year from cold than heat. In the U.S. and Canada between 2000 and 2019, an average of 20,000 people died from heat annually and more than 170,000 from cold. This omission matters even more because cold deaths are decreasing with rising temperatures. Modeling from the Global Burden of Disease replicates the relatively small increase in heat deaths shown by the Lancet, but shows a much larger decline in cold deaths from rising temperatures. Based on today’s population size, the current temperatures cause about 17,000 more heat deaths in older people, but also result in more than half a million fewer cold deaths. Reporting one finding without the other is misleading about the true effect of climate change.
My GMU Econ colleague Bryan Caplan is rightly impressed with Alex Epstein’s work on energy, the environment, and climate hysteria. And Bryan’s admiration continues here. A slice from the second link:
Needless to say, I’m skipping over piles of details. Epstein however, does not. What makes his treatment of the details credible, though, is his Big Picture: Given all of the horrors of nature that humanity has already mastered, humanity can clearly master some more. Yes, we can imagine worst-case scenarios that overwhelm our abilities. Imagination, after all, is infinite. But that doesn’t show that such scenarios are likely enough to worry about.
As I’ve argued before, our default should that worst-case scenarios are highly unlikely. After all, humanity already got this far. If specialists with a long track record of hyperbole warn us of doom, we should ignore them. Unless, of course, specialists with a long track record of calm, measured thought chime in, “For once, the doomsayers are right.” Show me these specialists, and I’ll read them.
David Henderson favorably reviews Phil Gramm’s, Robert Ekelund’s, and John Early’s 2022 book, The Myth of American Economic Inequality. Two slices from David’s review:
The book’s three authors are former US senator and former economics professor Phil Gramm, Auburn University economics professor Robert Ekelund, and former assistant commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics John Early. The authors take a deep dive into the data and use largely government-generated data to make their case. They point out that in computing household incomes, the US Census, part of the Department of Commerce, systematically leaves out two-thirds of the transfer payments that federal, state, and local governments give to people. This dramatically understates income of people in the lowest-income two-fifths (which economists and statisticians call quintiles) because these two quintiles, and especially the lowest, receive a hugely disproportionate share of transfer payments. The Census also leaves out taxes paid to federal, state, and local governments. Because higher-income people pay most of the taxes, failure to subtract these taxes substantially overstates the income of higher-income people. Both factors cause the Census Bureau to systematically overstate income inequality. They also show that the government’s usual measure to adjust for inflation, the Consumer Price Index, systematically overstates inflation and, therefore, understates the growth of real wages and real household incomes. Adjusting the data for both transfer payments and the overstatement of inflation, the authors show that the percentage of US households in poverty, rather than being in the low teens, is actually only about 1.1 percent.
Along the way, the authors show that US income mobility is high: the vast majority of people, over their lifetimes, move from one quintile to another. They also dispel a number of myths about the rich, the top 1 percent, the top 0.1 percent, and the incredibly wealthy Forbes 400. As a disturbing bonus, they show that in recent years some federal government agencies have encouraged people to be more dependent on government welfare.
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The authors end with three suggested reforms, making a strong case for each: (1) having Congress require the federal government to report more-complete data, (2) legislating school choice, and (3) reforming occupational licensing to make it easier for workers to advance in the economy.
They end with an inspiring message: “Our goal must be an America where people can rise as high and go as far as the sweat of their brows will take them and know the triumph of that achievement, whether it be large or small, belongs uniquely to them and those who love them.” Amen.
My former Mercatus Center colleague Dan Griswold continues to write insightfully about trade. Three slices:
A recent posting at the American Compass describes a trade problem that is not really a problem and then prescribes three bold solutions that are not really solutions. If implemented, their proposals would in fact create real problems for an American economy struggling to tame inflation and dodge a recession.
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The U.S. trade deficit is not a problem to be solved, but a basic feature of a U.S. economy that excels at attracting foreign investment from around the world. That investment, which even American Compass folks occasionally celebrate, keeps domestic interest rates lower than they would be otherwise and fuels job creation, innovation, and the construction or modernization of plant and equipment at U.S. factories.
American Compass complains that years of trade deficits have only succeeded in piling up “more than $13 trillion of trade debt.” That figure is a misleading way of describing America’s “net international investment position”—the difference between the value of assets abroad owned by Americans and the value of U.S.-based assets owned by foreigners. At the end of 2020, the difference was indeed more than $13 trillion, with foreign‐owned assets in the United States totaling $46.7 trillion and U.S.-owned assets abroad $32.0 trillion. But that difference is not “debt” in any normal sense. Most of the assets that foreigners own in the United States are in the form of foreign direct investment (FDI) in U.S. companies and portfolio investment in equities. When people outside the United States invest $1 billion in Apple Inc. stock or an automobile factory in Tennessee, this is not debt our children need to repay, but an infusion of new capital into the American economy.
The critics push back that almost all inward FDI comes in the form of mergers and acquisitions rather than “greenfield” investment in new plants. But as my Cato colleague Scott Lincicome has argued, this misses the important fact that those mergers and acquisitions allow U.S. sellers to reinvest those funds in other enterprise, injecting additional capital into the U.S. economy. Those transactions also encourage further investment in domestic firms that may then draw foreign partners in the future. Foreign acquisitions also typically lead to improved production methods, better marketing and customer service, and greater investment in research and development. The net inflow of FDI enhances the productivity of the nearly 8million Americans who work for foreign‐owned affiliates in the United States, boosting their wages and benefits.
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A tax on inward capital flows is arguably the most serious of the three “solutions.” It at least has the virtue of aiming at the underlying cause of the trade deficit—the persistent net inflow of foreign capital to the United States. A bill has been introduced in the U.S. Senate that closely resembles the American Compass proposal. But like the two clubs aimed at imports, it’s hard to imagine how making U.S. assets less attractive to foreign investors will make Americans more wealthy and prosperous. Russia’s war in Ukraine has made its assets less attractive, downright toxic, to foreign investors. This may have even contributed to an “improvement” in Russia’s trade balance, but the flight of foreign capital has caused real damage to its domestic economy and living standards.
Clark Packard writes wisely about export controls. A slice:
Too often Washington has treated sanctions as costless to the United States, but that is clearly not always the case. Aside from prioritizing multilateral over unilateral controls, policymakers should consider some simple steps to ensure a proper calibration between national security and economic considerations. For example, a tighter definition of “national security” is needed. The Trump administration’s bogus invocation of national security to restrict imported steel and aluminum is a perfect example of disguised protectionism. Though semiconductors are clearly a component of a country’s national security given their importance to weapons systems, the government should still explain how the controlled products in question are undermining U.S. national security (within reason; obviously certain intelligence must remain classified).
Likewise, policymakers should ensure that export controls are not unduly burdensome over the long term. A simple sunset with judicial scrutiny would be appropriate for export controls, particularly for products in which the technology is rapidly evolving. A high‐end semiconductor needed for surveillance or a weapons system today may not be fit for that purpose tomorrow, yet such product could still be useful in commercial and civilian contexts. The government should be required to periodically show that the control is still necessary to protect national security or other vital U.S. interests. Finally, Commerce should be required to consult closely with affected businesses to determine if there are ways to mitigate potential national security risks without damaging commercial considerations.
Terence Corcoran, writing in Canada’s Financial Post, warns of Canada and other western governments increasingly warm embrace of statist interventions of the sort that are championed by Chairman Mao Xi. (HT Jonathan Fortier) A slice:
But here’s the intellectual flip and liberal backslide behind these major shifts in economic policymaking. To counter Russia and China, the supply-siders are essentially adopting the economic control model favoured by the very countries that are menacing world peace, trade and prosperity. In many ways, the Freeland Doctrine and the PPF document read like speeches of Chinese leader Xi Jinping and his legion of Communist flunkies.
Reacting to this New York Times report on “the pandemic generation” going off to college being unusually unprepared, Vinay Prasad tweets:
Important to remember that @DrJBhattacharya and @MartinKulldorff were opposed to the closures that resulted in this
I wish that Fauci and Collins had tried to engage with them rather than smear them as ‘fringe’ scientists
(DBx: Yes. See today’s “Quotation of the Day.”)
Muriel Blaive tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
Listening to the news on French public radio. An expert is explaining that yes, public health’s terribly suffered from the contradictions of the COVID response, but we “didn’t know”. Was so obvious. Some of us damn well knew, but we were censored, that’s why you “didn’t know” 😡
What did we know about covid in the early days?
Telegraph columnist Camilla Tominey isn’t forgiving of pro-lockdown fanatics. Two slices:
Being socialist headbangers, Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and her Welsh equivalent Mark Drakeford brought in new restrictions anyway, including cancelling Hogmanay and fining Welsh people who refused to work from home £60 – decisions that now look beyond absurd.
Yet it isn’t with the benefit of hindsight that we know many of the UK’s coronavirus measures were not only wholly unnecessary but also a worse cure than the disease; some of us had been saying that all along, only to be ridiculed and demonised for it.
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What we are talking about here is decision-making that destroyed lives. This is not the same as a lack of understanding about how Covid was spread. While we may have been, in certain periods, in the dark about variants, transmission and the efficacy of tests, anyone who truly had a balanced view of lockdown suspected that the economic, social, educational and indeed physiological aftershocks would prove more injurious for society in the long run.
Those self-righteous zealots who used “saving the NHS” as a taxpayer-funded shield for their own one-dimensional thinking need only look at ambulance response times and waiting lists to see the folly of their moral superiority.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 36 of F.A. Hayek’s 1973 essay “Liberalism” as this essay appears as chapter one of Essays on Liberalism and the Economy (2022), which is volume 18 (expertly edited by Paul Lewis), of The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek:
The central belief from which all liberal postulates may be said to spring is that more successful solutions of the problems of society are to be expected if we do not rely on the application of anyone’s given knowledge, but encourage the interpersonal process of the exchange of opinion from which better knowledge can be expected to emerge. It is the discussion and mutual criticism of men’s different opinions derived from different experiences which was assumed to facilitate the discovery of truth, or at least the best approximation to truth which can be achieved. Freedom for individual opinion was demanded precisely because every individual was regarded as fallible, and the discovery of the best knowledge was expected only from that contentious testing of all beliefs which free discussion secured. Or, to put it differently, it was not so much from the power of individual reason (which genuine liberals distrusted), as from the results of the interpersonal process of discussion and criticism, that a progressive advance towards truth was expected.
DBx: Indeed.
Note the irony that those persons who insist that today’s truth as spoken by science must not be contested are overwhelmingly persons who boast of themselves as being “progressive.” Yet this hostility to challenging ‘the’ science is a mortal enemy to the progress of science – and, hence, a mortal enemy to the progress of humanity itself.
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