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My GMU Econ colleague Bryan Caplan never ceases to amaze me with his creative insights [2].
Does Joe Biden favor school choice?!?!? [3]
What’s the greatest (genuine) anti-poverty ‘program’ in the U.S.? [4]
Here’s David Henderson on Larry Summers on Marian Tupy’s and Gale Pooley’s super Superabundance [5].
This paper provides a series of nominal non-war output for Canada during WWI and WWII and a novel estimated price deflator to account for wartime price controls. We argue that our nominal series, deflated by our price estimates, provides a superior indicator of welfare and general economic well-being during wartime than more traditional measures of real output. When looking at our series, we find that it is 11% lower than traditional measures in 1918 and closer to 30% lower in 1945. We also corroborate our finding with domestic private investment in Canada, which we show follows similar trends of decline during wartime relative to trend. We argue that this provides evidence against the idea of wartime prosperity and, more specifically, against the notion of WWII ending the Great Depression in Canada.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Meghan Cox Gurdon decries the “bowdlerizing of [Roald] Dahl.” [8] A slice:
Ray Bradbury, a 20th-century writer who knew the value of sharp description, saw his anticensorship novel “Fahrenheit 451” stealth-edited to placate his feminist critics. He was enraged. “There is more than one way to burn a book,” he wrote, “and the world is full of people running about with lit matches.”
Also weighing in on the woke’s malignant effort to unDahl Roald Dahl is Reason‘s Robby Soave [9].
Richard Rahn warns of campus wokism [10]. A slice:
What I never anticipated was that years later, an enforced ideology would become the norm on many college campuses in the United States. Professors and others who have never directly experienced socialism and communism are indoctrinating students with utopian fantasies about how everyone could be equal if only capitalism were abolished. The fact that communism has always failed is excused because those who tried to implement it made “mistakes that will be corrected next time.” Some advocates admit coercion will be necessary to force people to give up their hard-earned assets, and free expression will be curtailed to avoid allowing the people to be exposed to “impure racist and sexist thoughts.” All of this is justified for the “greater good.”
Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson feel vindicated by a recent meta-analysis published in the Lancet [12].
But when it comes to the population-level benefits of masking, the verdict is in: Mask mandates were a bust. Those skeptics who were furiously mocked as cranks and occasionally censored as “misinformers” for opposing mandates were right. The mainstream experts and pundits who supported mandates were wrong. In a better world, it would behoove the latter group to acknowledge their error, along with its considerable physical [15], psychological [16], pedagogical [17] and political [18] costs.
David Zweig tweets about Bret Stephens’s NYT column [19]: (HT Jay Bhattacharya [20])
The remarkable thing here is that the only way the most prestigious data review on community masks – which found no clear evidence of benefit – made it into the paper of record was in an opinion piece
The NYT Science desk did not deem it newsworthy