… is from page 77 of the May 9th, 2020, draft of the important forthcoming monograph from Deirdre McCloskey and Alberto Mingardi, The Illiberal and Anti-Entrepreneurial State of Mariana Mazzucato:
Harmful bigness in the private economy does not survive without the protection of the State.
DBx: Yep.
The rhetorical trap of critical theory is that it has coopted the cause of inclusion and forced liberals onto the defensive. But liberals have nothing to be defensive about. What’s so encouraging about this book is that it has confidence in its own arguments, and is as dedicated to actual social justice, achieved through liberal means, as it is scornful of the postmodern ideologues who have coopted and corrupted otherwise noble causes.
This is very good news—even better to see it as the Number 1 Amazon best-seller in philosophy long before its publication date later in August. The intellectual fight back against wokeness has now begun in earnest. Let’s do this.
George Will reminds us that the New Deal was really a rather poor deal. A slice:
Historical data seems powerless to dent progressive nostalgia for the New Deal’s fictitious triumph of economic revival through job creation. And, now, this nostalgia has seeped into climate policy: Democrats advocate a Green New Deal, invoking the now-talismanic phrase first publicly spoken by Roosevelt 88 years ago when accepting his party’s presidential nomination.
Since 2017, however, most congressional Republicans have indulged an even older nostalgia. Channeling the ghost of President William McKinley, they have acquiesced in the current president’s protectionism. This policy of government picking economic winners and losers does not just pose a danger of becoming crony capitalism, it always and everywhere is crony capitalism.
Also debunking myths about the New Deal is GMU Econ alum Dan Mitchell.
My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy makes the case against taxing wealth.
Pierre Lemieux applauds H.L. Mencken for making an accurate prediction.
… is from page 21 of Kristian Niemietz’s 2019 book, Socialism: The Failed Idea That Never Dies:
Over the past hundred years, there have been more than two dozen attempts to build a socialist society. It has been tried in the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Albania, Poland, Vietnam, Bulgaria, Romania, Czechoslovakia, North Korea, Hungary, China, East Germany, Cuba, Tanzania, Benin, Laos, Algeria, South Yemen, Somalia, the Congo, Ethiopia, Cambodia, Mozambique, Angola, Nicaragua and Venezuela, among other countries. All of these attempts have ended in varying degrees of failure. How can an idea which has failed so many times, in so many different variants and so many radically different settings, still be so popular?
DBx: How indeed?
Niemietz directly takes on, and thoroughly debunks, the popular retort that none of these schemes was truly socialist. As he points out for most cases, when each scheme was launched western intellectuals embraced it as – and referred to it as – socialist. These intellectuals assured the world that this and that glorious attempt to improve the economy by giving to the state enormous powers to allocate resources would prove the superiority of socialism over decrepit, failing, irredeemable capitalism. It is only after each such scheme not only failed to deliver its promised material bounty, but also showed itself beyond any doubt to be tyrannical, that intellectuals denied that it was ever “true” socialism.
But let us, for the moment, pretend that intellectuals are correct in their assertion that none of these attempts to implement socialism actually followed a recipe that, in the end, is discovered to have been that for “true” socialism. The case for socialism remains demolished: Any system that is so difficult to implement despite all the trying is not a feasible system for real-world human beings. And because these many failed attempts to implement “true” socialism not only do not increase prosperity, but also generate grotesque poverty mixed with state brutality, socialism is far too dangerous a scheme to be tried. If socialism works only when implemented just so and with no imperfections – if slight deviations from perfect implementation result not in slight deviations from perfect prosperity and equality but, instead, in the actual horrors that the world has witnessed – socialism is not for this world.
Here’s a letter to a Café Hayek reader:
Mr. Rose:
Thanks for sending along Eric Levitz’s recent New York essay “‘Working Class’ Conservatism Doesn’t Work Without Unions.” I must report that I share none of your enchantment with it. An author who describes the Trump administration’s economic policies as “fanatically libertarian” clearly is uninformed – either about the policies or about libertarianism (or both).
But we can chalk up one libertarian-ish move (though surely not motive) to the administration – a move that Levitz, however, misunderstands. Specifically, he complains that “the administration has even opposed environmental regulations that enjoy industry support.” Levitz is obviously unaware of an important reality – namely, environmental regulations are notorious for artificially enhancing the very phenomenon that Levitz fears: the economic power of politically influential corporations.
Environmental regulations routinely raise the costs borne by politically potent producers by less than they raise the costs borne by their politically weaker rivals. Innocent-looking regulations thereby grant to some corporations market power denied to them by free markets.
A journalist who is unaware of this reality has not done his or her homework.
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
… is from page 589 of Will & Ariel Durant’s 1961 volume, The Age of Reason Begins:
Mechanical inventions multiplied as industry grew, for they were due less frequently to the researches of scientists than to the skill of artisans anxious to save time.
This report, written by Sonal Desai, on Americans’ enormous misconceptions about the risks posed by covid-19 is well worth a careful read. It’s not long. (I thank my colleague Dan Klein for alerting me to this report.)
Here are some highlights:
Six months into this pandemic, Americans still dramatically misunderstand the risk of dying from COVID-19:
- On average, Americans believe that people aged 55 and older account for just over half of total COVID-19 deaths; the actual figure is 92%.
- Americans believe that people aged 44 and younger account for about 30% of total deaths; the actual figure is 2.7%.
- Americans overestimate the risk of death from COVID-19 for people aged 24 and younger
by a factor of 50; and they think the risk for people aged 65 and older is half of what it actually is (40% vs 80%).
These results are nothing short of stunning. Mortality data have shown from the very beginning that the COVID-19 virus age-discriminates, with deaths overwhelmingly concentrated in people who are older and suffer comorbidities. This is perhaps the only uncontroversial piece of evidence we have about this virus. Nearly all US fatalities have been among people older than 55; and yet a large number of Americans are still convinced that the risk to those younger than 55 is almost the same as to those who are older.
…..
For the last six months, we have all read and talked about nothing but COVID-19; how can there be still such a widespread, fundamental misunderstanding of the basic facts? Our poll results identify two major culprits: the quality of information and the extreme politicization of the COVID-19 debate:
- People who get their information predominantly from social media have the most erroneous and distorted perception of risk.
- Those who identify as Democrats tend to mistakenly overstate the risk of death from COVID-19 for younger people much more than Republicans.
This, sadly, comes as no surprise. Fear and anger are the most reliable drivers of engagement; scary tales of young victims of the pandemic, intimating that we are all at risk of dying, quickly go viral; so do stories that blame everything on your political adversaries. Both social and traditional media have been churning out both types of narratives in order to generate more clicks and increase their audience.
The fact that the United States is in an election year has exacerbated the problem. Stories that emphasize the dangers of the pandemic to all age cohorts and tie the risk to the Administration’s handling of the crisis likely tend to resonate much more with Democrats than Republicans. This might be a contributing factor to why, in our survey results, Democrats tend to overestimate the risk of dying from COVID-19 for different age cohorts to a greater extent than Republicans do.
…..
This misinformation also causes another fundamental problem. The policy decision of what activities to keep shut and for how long is a very difficult and consequential one. It requires balancing two opposite effects of uncertain scale: on the one hand the benefits in terms of slowing COVID-19 contagion, on the other hand the harm to the economy and to people’s long-term health and livelihoods. This decision is strongly influenced by public perceptions of dangers, not only because politicians are sensitive to the public’s concerns but also because politicians are people too, subject to some of the same biases. Our poll results suggest fundamental misperceptions of the risk of death or serious adverse health consequences from COVID-19 could be distorting these decisions.
Nick Gillespie debunks the recent and inexcusably mistaken “highest single-day of COVID-19 deaths” report. Here’s Nick’s conclusion:
The COVID-19 story is a tough one, with new information emerging all the time. But the media, never infallible in the first place, seem increasingly prone to running stories that are not even internally consistent but instead are a hodgepodge of anxiety and apocalypticism. Under such circumstances, it’s more important than ever to develop razor-sharp media-literacy and bullshit-detection skills. Whether or not a coronavirus vaccine ever arrives, but can at least inoculate ourselves against the more obvious failures of the Fourth Estate.
Bruce Yandle writes that the U.S. economy isn’t improving fast enough.
Ben Zycher applauds the Trump administration’s reform of Obama’s misguided methane-emissions rule.
William McGurn praises the courageous Jimmy Lai. A slice:
Soon Jimmy will go to trial on charges from sedition to colluding with foreign powers. It’s utter rot, of course. If he finds himself facing prison, it is only because Communist China, for all its size and power, fears any Chinese who insists on speaking the truth.
In this way Jimmy might be thought of as Hong Kong’s Thomas More, the difference being that while King Henry VIII wanted More to speak up, Beijing wants Jimmy to shut up. In the more than two decades since Hong Kong was handed back to China, most Hong Kong elites have cut their consciences to accommodate their new overlords. Which leaves Jimmy Lai and his printing press as Hong Kong’s single most important counter to official propaganda.
Art Carden reviews Steve Horwitz’s Austrian Economics: An Introduction.
… is from page 107 of the late Hans Rosling’s 2018 book, Factfulness:
Yet here’s the paradox: the image of a dangerous world has never been broadcast more effectively than it is now, while the world has never been less violent and more safe.
Fears that once helped keep our ancestors alive, today help keep journalists employed. It isn’t the journalists’ fault and we shouldn’t expect them to change. It isn’t driven by “media logic” among the producers as much as by “attention logic” in the heads of consumers.
DBx: It is indeed a paradox, one with a significant impact. As the world becomes more and more safe, even small negative deviations from this trend become more and more unusual and, hence, noticeable and “newsworthy.” And these deviations – not understood in historical context – cause outsized anxiety and fear.
Ironically, this anxiety and fear can become self-fulfilling. Because, as Rosling notes, we human beings do not reason well regarding the long run when we are gripped by fear, fear leads us to make choices that in fact will make us worse off in the long run. Most obviously, fear leads us not only to tolerate the state grabbing more power over us, but even to demand that the state slap on us more binds and shackles. Yet bound and shackled, we cannot continue to innovate and create the prosperity that alone can truly reduce our exposure and susceptibility to the physical hazards that for so long mercilessly mowed down our ancestors.
… is from pages xi-xii of Kristian Niemietz’s superb 2019 book, Socialism: The Failed Idea That Never Dies:
Yet while socialists distance themselves from contemporary and historical examples of socialism, they usually struggle to explain what exactly they would do differently. Socialists tend to escape into abstraction, and talk of lofty aspirations rather than tangible institutional characteristics.
DBx: The same escape into abstraction and expressions of aspirations is performed also by all advocates of industrial policy.
Nothing is easier than to express lovely aspirations. Equally easy is simply to suppose that the state possesses the combination of god-like power and god-like goodness necessary to transform these aspirations into reality. Much, much more difficult is the task of describing the institutional details that flesh-and-blood human beings will confront and the actions these individuals will realistically take to acquire the knowledge necessary to achieve outcomes remotely close to the lovely aspirations.
Here’s a letter to a Café Hayek commenter:
Ms. Fernandes:
Regarding your comment on this blog-post of mine: You write as though covid kills all, or nearly everyone, who it infects. But it does not come remotely close to being so lethal.
I don’t deny that covid is unusually harmful. What I do deny is that the response of nearly every government worldwide has been proportional to the harm posed by covid. Governments’ responses have been, and continue to be, colossally excessive. Such excess is the result of panic all out of proportion to the underlying danger. To steal a point made yesterday by my colleague Bryan Caplan, if covid is ten times more dangerous than a ‘normal’ flu, then a response ten times stronger might be appropriate; what we’ve gotten instead is a response that is closer to 1,000 times stronger – one totally disconnected from reality.
And this response, I’m convinced, poses a far greater danger to humanity than does covid.
Orders for an indefinite suspension of economic activity are issued by government officials. Even in calm times, these officials routinely display obliviousness to economic realities. They treat material prosperity as if it grows automatically, with the only question being how it is distributed. They operate under the delusion that the economy will remain strong if government floods it with enough money, writes enough checks, and orders that prices not rise and that wages not fall. Most of these officials believe that they increase their fellow-citizens’ access to goods and services by using tariffs to decrease their fellow-citizens’ access to goods and services.
Politicians seem unaware of the unavoidable necessity of making economic trade-offs – and so they incessantly attempt the impossible task of avoidance. But politicians are keenly aware of the boosts to their power that occur whenever people are gripped by what the late Hans Rosling calls “the fear instinct.”
Reasonable people disagree over what is the optimal response to covid. But no reasonable person trusts that the same government officials who in calm times act in utter ignorance of economic reality are, in these panicked times, acting intelligently and prudently. And so every reasonable person stands on solid ground when condemning today’s draconian responses.
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
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