This state of affairs has persisted for months now, and administrators haven’t seemed to connect the dots. Students are living their off-campus lives largely unmasked, and they aren’t, for the most part, getting COVID. (To repeat: They’re vaccinated, and the vaccines work.) There’s nothing special about classrooms that makes them more susceptible to virus transmission than, say, restaurants or grocery stores. So having the same masking standards as restaurants or grocery stores should yield the same result: an extremely low risk of contracting a serious COVID case. If anything, unmasked classrooms should be much safer than unmasked restaurants or grocery stores, since everyone in classrooms is required to be vaccinated.
What we have here is the mind of the bureaucrat at work: Administrators want to believe that the stringent COVID policies they designed for their schools, rather than the arrival of effective vaccines, deserve credit for achieving the intended result. So the policies persist long past the point when they should have been eased.
As Matt Welch reports, Covid Derangement Syndrome still reigns at the CDC. A slice:
[CDC Director Rochelle] Walensky and the CDC have serially misrepresented the data on which they base their global outlier of a recommendation that kids aged 2 and older wear masks in indoor group settings. But what makes the director’s comments today particularly distressing for some parents is that it offers zero off ramp; no numerical set of targets to hit; not even a distant glimmer of light when it comes to the increasingly grim and questionably scientific practice of concealing children’s faces at a developmentally critical age.
“Please find a parameter to unmask children,” responded infectious disease specialist Monica Gandhi of UC San Francisco. Or as Johns Hopkins epidemiologist Jennifer Nuzzo wrote yesterday, “Masks in schools were meant to be a temporary measure. It is good policy and practice to establish off-ramps for interventions that aren’t meant to be permanent….We should be able to answer what conditions would enable an end.”
My 6-year-old, who has spent nearly one-quarter of her life wearing masks in group indoor settings, attends a school where all the adults are vaccinated, kids and adults alike get tested once a week, and (per state requirement, as directly influenced by the CDC) everyone over age 2 wears masks, even outdoors. We live in a moderately high vaccination zip code (68 percent of all residents with at least one shot, 64 percent fully vaxxed), in a city with a lower case rate than all but six states, whose positive rate among regularly tested, unvaccinated public school students since mid-September is a minuscule 0.23 percent. I would like to know what any of those numbers need to look like in order for my daughter to see her teachers’ mouths again.
“Pandemic Disagreements Fuel Exodus From Public Schools” – This happy news is reported by J.D. Tuccille.
On Tuesday, Professor Neil Ferguson, the Imperial College epidemiologist whose modelling was used as the basis for the UK’s lockdown policy, made an illuminating comment on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. “Nobody likes having their freedoms curtailed by measures but it’s prudent to be cautious, in everyday interactions certainly,” he told presenter Sarah Smith, “and wearing masks certainly helps that: it reminds people we’re not completely out of the woods yet.”
It was a startling admission, if we needed one, that masks are as much about psychology as they are about preventing infection. They act as a social cue, to use the language of behavioural scientists, nudging us into vigilance.
Speaking of Britain, “is the NHS at risk of being overwhelmed by Covid?” A slice:
Rather than being inundated, there are more empty beds in the NHS then there are patients with Covid. And even the latter figure contains patients who are in hospital for reasons other than Covid but either happen to have (or acquired) the virus. Back in January, one in three occupied NHS beds was taken up by a patient with Covid; now the figure is closer to one in twenty.
Thomas Harrington analyzes “the frightened class.”
Unlike those who bleat most loudly about “following the science,” Florida’s Surgeon General actually follows the science. (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
James Bovard explains why so-called “fair trade” is still a fraud. A slice:
When politicians call for fair trade with foreigners, they use a concept of fairness diametrically opposed to the word’s normal usage. In exchanges between individuals – in contract law – the test of fairness is the voluntary consent of each party to the bargain: “the free will which constitutes fair exchanges,” as Sen. John Taylor wrote in 1822. When politicians speak of unfair trade, they do not mean that buyers and sellers did not voluntarily agree, but that federal officials disapprove of bargains American citizens made. Fair trade means government intervention to direct, control, or restrict trade.
Fair trade often consists of some politician or bureaucrat picking a number out of thin air and forcibly imposing it on foreign businesses and American consumers. Fair trade meant that Jamaica was allowed to sell the U.S. only 970 gallons of ice cream a year, that Mexico could sell Americans only 35,292 bras a year, and that Poland could ship us only 51,752 pounds of barbed wire. Fair trade meant permitting each American citizen to consume the equivalent of only one teaspoon of foreign ice cream per year, two foreign peanuts per year, and one pound of imported cheese per year.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Lawrence Krauss explains “how ‘diversity’ turned tyrannical.” Two slices:
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was supposed to host Thursday’s John Carlson Lecture on climate. MIT’s department of earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences canceled the event because the speaker turned out to have expressed a dissenting opinion—though not about climate science. University of Chicago geophysicist Dorian Abbot argued in a Newsweek piece that universities’ obsession with “diversity, equity and inclusion,” or DEI, “threatens to derail their primary mission: the production and dissemination of knowledge.” If MIT wanted to prove Mr. Abbot’s point, it could hardly have done better. (His lecture will be hosted instead by Princeton’s conservative redoubt, the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.)
…..
Critics have likened DEI statements to the loyalty oaths of the Red Scare. In 1950 the University of California fired 31 faculty members for refusing to sign a statement disavowing any party advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government. That violated their freedom of speech and conscience, but this is worse. Whereas a loyalty oath compels assent to authority, a DEI statement demands active ideological engagement. It’s less like the excesses of anticommunism than like communism itself.
Recognizing the threat of rising illiberalism, five alumni groups from Cornell University, Davidson College, Princeton University, the University of Virginia and Washington and Lee University just created the Alumni Free Speech Alliance to fight for open inquiry on campus. Also, as of now, 82 institutions or faculty bodies have adopted or endorsed the Chicago Statement or a substantially similar statement to show their commitment to free speech on campus. Also, Princeton university is stepping up to host a conference by the University of Chicago’s Dorian Abbot, whose lecture at MIT was canceled under pressure from activists who objected to his political views.
Nonetheless, many in the media push unrealistic projections of climate catastrophes, while ignoring adaptation. A new study documents how the biggest bias in studies on the rise of sea levels is their tendency to ignore human adaptation, exaggerating flood risks in 2100 by as much as 1,300 times. It is also evident in the breathless tone of most reporting: The Washington Post frets that sea level rise could “make 187 million people homeless,” CNN fears an “underwater future,” and USA Today agonizes over tens of trillions of dollars in projected annual flood damage. All three rely on studies that implausibly assume no society across the world will make any adaptation whatever for the rest of the century. This isn’t reporting but scaremongering.
GMU Econ grad student Dominic Pino, writing at National Review, defends “I, Pencil” against a recent, uninformed criticism that appeared in The American Conservative. Here’s Dominic’s conclusion:
Instead of suggesting constructive reforms to improve our global supply chains, [Declan] Leary advocates that we should “withdraw from dependence on the global system and reconnect ourselves to local, tangible, human networks of production and consumption.” He has in mind shopping at farmer’s markets and growing your own food. “We can reject the miracle, as fully as we’re able,” he writes.
“Reject the miracle” is not a conservative impulse. Libertarians are often derided as hyper-individualistic, and sometimes that criticism is fair. But who are the hyper-individualistic ones: the people who appreciate the complex interactions of humans all over the world that are necessary to make a pencil, or the people who think they are better off withdrawing from dependence on others, as fully as they’re able?
People who make “I, Pencil” into a religion are wrong to do so, but [Leonard] Read’s insight is fundamentally empirical, anti-individualistic, and pro-humanity. Lots of people all around the world had to do plenty of hard work to provide you with your pencil. That’s a cause for the fundamental conservative sentiment: gratitude.
Reason‘s Eric Boehm is always worth reading.
George Will rightly decries the abuse of language in public discourse. Here’s his conclusion:
In June, when Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra testified to a Senate committee about “birthing people,” a.k.a. mothers, he was already falling behind the swift evolution of progressive nomenclature. The Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine’s revised “lactation-related language” respects mothers by identifying them as “human milk-feeding individuals.”
Almost nothing infuriates people as much as inflation — government’s failure to preserve the currency as a store of value. Even more infuriating, however, is a pervasive sense of arrogance and disorder, which now includes public officials and others propounding aggressively, insultingly strange vocabularies. Next November, there might be a cymbal-crash response to all this.
… is from page 37 of the 2021 35th anniversary edition – being released today – of Steven Rhoads’s excellent 1985 book, The Economist’s View of the World: And the Quest for Well-Being:
We can know how high to set any one objective only if we know what we give up in progress toward other objectives.
DBx: In normal times government officials are poor at recognizing and accounting for the opportunity costs of programs that are popular with the public or with powerful interests groups. But in times when the populace – justifiably or not – is terrified, dealing with the source of the terror becomes the singular goal; all other considerations are either completely ignored or are pushed much too far into the background.
Single-minded pursuit of one good – even when that good is unambiguously one that we’d all wish to have in superabundance were it costless – is deranged.
I’m going to contribute to the legal-defense fund of this British anti-lockdown protestor.
Covid hysteria further eats away cancerously at Britain’s democratic institutions and ethos.
Madeline Grant understandably worries that Brits will be frightened back into lockdown.
Who’d a-thunk it?! It appears that China’s draconian lockdowns did not defeat Covid-19 after all. (HT Phil Magness)
Dave Seminara writes from the Sunshine (and comparably Liberty) state. Two slices:
According to the New York Times Covid Tracker, Florida now has the second-lowest per capita Covid rate of any state: 12 per 100,000, behind only Hawaii, with nine per 100,000 as of October 18. Florida’s vaccination rate (59 percent fully vaccinated) is now above the national average (57 percent.) I live in Pinellas County (St. Petersburg), which currently has a per capita Covid infection rate that’s lower than every county in Delaware, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and other blue states.
As media elites waxed indignant over Florida’s alleged Covid sins this summer, many couldn’t hide their see-we-told-you-so delight when the Delta plague hit our shores. The Left eviscerated Governor Ron DeSantis for his opposition to mask and vaccine mandates. Joy Behar of ABC’s The View called him a “homicidal sociopath” and a “dangerous criminal.” Jennifer Rubin, the Washington Post’s “conservative” columnist, wrote that DeSantis’s conduct revealed a “breathtaking disdain for the well-being of his state.” Charles Blow of the New York Times wrote: “Yes, Florida, DeSantis is allowing you to choose death so that he can have a greater political life.” Writing for CNN, Columbia University economics professor Jeffrey Sachs declared that “Governors Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas have, through their policies, been effectively leading their citizens toward death.”
MSNBC host Joy Reid called DeSantis “Dr. Death” and “the grim reaper of the South,” who was “rolling out the red carpet for the virus,” and “rooting for the virus.” She asked one guest to explain what she characterized as DeSantis’s strategy of “killing children in (his) own state and letting children die of Covid.” MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski called Florida’s governor “the DeSantis variant” and proclaimed him the new leader of a cult. “Almost all of these hospitalizations (and) deaths (in Florida) would have, and could have, been avoided if misguided Americans had not followed the crazed teachings of a growing death cult,” she said.
…..
Meantime, the states whose Covid infection rates are now heading in the wrong direction are almost all in cooler-weather states run by Democrats, like Michigan, Minnesota, Colorado, Pennsylvania, and New Mexico. Don’t expect the media to highlight this or question if the leaders of those states made bad policy choices.
The truth always finds a way to slip out, though. Florida’s second-quarter tourism arrivals were up 223 percent year over year, and the number of domestic visitors was up 6 percent over the record figures posted in 2019. (International arrivals were down substantially due to travel restrictions.) I’ve had several visitors from cold-weather states like New York, New Jersey, and Illinois, who expected to be stepping over bodies in the streets in my hometown of St. Petersburg but were pleasantly surprised by how normal life is here. At a time when the Left is having an authoritarian moment—pushing vaccine and mask mandates, demanding crackdowns on conservative speech, intimidating parents who criticize school boards, and branding anyone who disagrees with them bigoted or worse—Florida feels like a bastion of liberty.
Like the local leaders in San Francisco, Baltimore officials blamed the retailers for leaving instead of the thieves for driving them away. But indulging criminal behavior in the name of “social justice” only helps criminals, who are not representative of all blacks. Public policies that give priority to the interests of lawbreakers only lead to more lawbreaking, and by extension to more economic inequality. Businesses have every incentive to flee these communities and the jobs follow them.
Tempting though it may be to blame the social dysfunction in poorer communities on heartless business owners or racists cops, the bigger blame surely lies with public policies that condone counterproductive behavior and make successful businesses much more difficult to operate.
Still, credit goes to Maynard for coming up with a thoroughly fitting message for the party in power, as they approach the midterms: Democrats in 2022: Try to Lower Your Expectations!
If Ms. Maynard means it’s “our turn” to accept less economic vitality because Americans made the decision to elect Mr. Biden and enough Democrats to make Mr. Sanders the Senate’s first socialist budget committee chairman, then perhaps she has a point.
But there’s no reason voters should simply accept Washington failures without exercising their First Amendment right to peaceably assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievances. Voters are permitted to have regrets and to try to persuade politicians to avoid huge, obvious mistakes.
On the other hand, if voters really think it’s high time that Washington punished them for wanting plentiful goods and services, various online commenters have suggested a slogan for Democrats running in 2022:
Expect Less.
Peter Suderman calls out “Progressive” Democrats in Congress for their budgetary shenanigans.
J.D. Tuccille reports some good news.
Bryan Caplan writes about newly minted Nobelist David Card.
Additional puzzling evidence comes from data on productivity (how efficiently firms use inputs). Choi and Levchenko show that HCI Drive‐targeted firms experienced a large decrease in productivity, something other research, using the same data, has highlighted. The two pieces of evidence – the apparent HCI policy success in growing sales, and the simultaneous decrease in productivity –could indicate that South Korea’s HCI Drive was a success to the extent it circumvented previous foreign credit restrictions, leading to an increase in sales. But subsidies also led to excessive borrowing, bloated firms, and lower productivity. In this scenario, simply repealing the FCIA would have produced better results.
Veronique de Rugy and Jack Salmon at the Mercatus Center summarized 24 cross‐country studies that looked at government debt and growth, as summarized in the table below. Seventeen of the studies found a threshold above which rising debt is associated with reduced growth.
Government debt above 90 percent of GDP is correlated with slower economic growth, based on the average of 17 studies. That means America’s debt—at 141 percent and rising—is well into the debt damage zone and is likely undermining our prosperity already.
Salmon updated his debt and growth research in the Cato Journal. He found 36 studies that identified a statistically significant negative effect of government debt on growth.
First, any economic activity ostensibly spurred by a subsidy will be offset by reductions in government services, increased debt, or higher taxes that siphon resources from private enterprise. It’s like trying to fill a pool by dipping a bucket in one end and pouring it back in the other. Advocates claim to know which high-impact industries to subsidize, but even if this were true (their track record is poor), they usually fail to account for these tradeoffs.
Subsidies also breed inefficiency. If a local project wouldn’t be built without a subsidy, maybe your community isn’t well-suited for it. With enough money, Mississippi could create an ice fishing industry in artificially frozen lakes. But some things are better left to Minnesota.
The president’s plan would be the largest tax-and-spend increase—and disincentive to work—since the introduction of the income tax. It would tax those who produce and subsidize those who don’t. It would encourage dependency on government and punish self-sufficiency. Wealth taxes could exceed 70%, and marriage penalties on small-business owners could exceed $130,000. Families could be hard-pressed to keep farms and businesses after the original owner dies. And the real median household income would fall by $12,000. Meanwhile, lower-income households would see their generous government assistance decline rapidly in the event of even a modest increase in earned income.
Increasing the implicit tax on working has the same effect as a statutory tax increase on income, investment and wealth: decreased employment. With inflation-adjusted private investment having declined for the first two quarters of this year, the nation doesn’t need direct—or indirect—tax increases, especially on investment.
… is from page 150 of George Will’s 2021 book, American Happiness and Discontents: The Unruly Torrent, 2008-2020 – a collection of many of Will’s columns over these years; (the column from which the quotation below is drawn originally appeared in the Washington Post on April 22nd, 2018):
Many conservatives have embraced populism where it least belongs, in judicial reasoning. They have advocated broad judicial deference to decisions because they emanate from majoritarian institutions and processes. Progressives favor such deference because it liberates executive power from congressional direction or judicial supervision.
Here’s another letter to John Tamny on the ill-consequences of deficit financing:
John:
The fact that you’re so astute about so many issues only intensifies my mystification at your continuing blindness to the dangers that lurk in deficit financing of government expenditures.
In your latest essay you again accuse those of us who oppose deficit financing of “the folly of putting the false notion of a ‘balanced budget’ on a pedestal.” You add that “[i]t has nothing to do with limited government.”
On the contrary, advocacy of keeping annual government budgets balanced has nothing to do with fetishizing some accounting outcome; this advocacy has everything to do with keeping government limited.
Deficit financing allows today’s citizens-taxpayers to push the costs of today’s government activities onto future generations. Deficit financing thus enables today’s citizens-taxpayers to live at the expense of others. And people able to live at the expense of others will live excessively expensively. Access to deficit financing loosens the limits on government growth. Therefore, a balanced-budget requirement would indeed limit the growth of government.
You deny that deficit financing imposes costs on future generations. To reach this mistaken conclusion you’re misled by the correct fact that all resources used by government today, regardless of how government finances their acquisition, are indeed drawn away today from other possible current uses. But you wrongly believe that this reality means that we budget hawks are mistaken to point out that the costs of deficit-financed projects are paid, not by today’s citizens-taxpayers, but by tomorrow’s citizens-taxpayers.
To see your error, suppose that you borrow from a bank $30,000 today to buy a car. You therefore do not buy this car out of your current income or savings. The $30,000 comes from the bank. But clearly the party who pays for your car is not the bank; the party who pays for your car is the future you.
The same logic holds with government borrowing, but with one huge twist. Just as the bank does not pay for your car, government’s creditors today do not pay for the projects that their loans enable government to undertake. Those projects are paid for by whoever is responsible for repaying the loans – namely, citizens-taxpayers in the future. (I’m vain enough to brag that Randy Holcombe and I explain this reality with some clarity in chapter two of our new book.)
The huge twist is this: When you buy a car with borrowed funds, you – the same individual who borrows the funds – are the individual responsible for repaying them. So you borrow and spend prudently. But with deficit financing by government, the individuals who borrow the funds (that is, today’s citizens-taxpayers and their political representatives) are not the same individuals who are responsible for repaying them. That responsibility falls on other people; it falls on future citizens-taxpayers, many of whom aren’t yet born. Therefore, access to deficit financing gives today’s citizens-taxpayers (and their political representatives) freedom to spend more lavishly than they would were they required to pay for all government projects out of current taxes.
Access to deficit financing fuels government growth. You cannot oppose the growth of government and simultaneously insist that the means of financing government’s activities is inconsequential.
Sincerely,
Don
Recognizing the reality of immunity after COVID-recovery is a pro-vax position.
Acknowledging this fact builds credibility so people believe it when you correctly say the vax protects vs. severe disease.
Pushing cruel vax mandates, on the other hand, undermines that trust.
“Yale Epidemiology Prof: ‘Natural Immunity is Much Longer-Lasting Than Vaccinated Immunity’.”
David Henderson and Charley Hooper ably defend their July 28th, 2021, Wall Street Journal piece on ivermectin. Here’s their conclusion:
While we can all be happy that Merck has developed a new therapeutic that can keep us safe from the ravages of Covid-19, we should realize that the FDA’s rules give companies an incentive to focus on newer drugs while ignoring older ones. Ivermectin may or may not be a miracle drug for Covid-19. The FDA doesn’t want us to learn the truth.
The FDA spreads lies and alarms Americans while preventing drug companies from providing us with scientific explorations of existing, promising, generic drugs.
Robby Soave reports on yet another high-profile Covid hypocrite. Here’s his conclusion:
And that’s what should really irritate people about Biden failing to mask up while making a quick exit. He isn’t worried about his health during those few seconds; he probably knows that it’s pointless to require masking under some circumstances while groups of unmasked people are eating, drinking, and talking for hours. The government’s strict mask policies are so stupid that everyone who can get away with ignoring them already does so, yet they remain in place. Not for safety, or because of the science, but because our elected leaders can’t be bothered to tweak the rules.
Speaking of high-profile Covid hypocrites….
TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.)
Of course Fauci – who admits to lying to the pubic – would accuse his critics thusly.
Well, at least some sanity is returning in some quarters.
Dr Byram Bridle, associate professor of viral immunology at the University of Guelph in Canada pointed out the lunacy of the vaccine mandates that reign across most of the Western world. He is banned from his campus even though he can demonstrate with a pathology test that he has robust antibodies whereas others with no effective antibodies and a vaccine pass enter. He offered to set up an antibody test for the university which was ignored. Instead, he has been subjected to vicious workplace harassment.
Noah Carl investigates the origins of the ‘science’ of lockdowns. Two slices:
As many lockdown sceptics (including myself) have noted, lockdowns represent a radical departure from conventional forms of pandemic management. There is no evidence that, before 2020, they were considered an effective way to deal with influenza pandemics.
In a 2006 paper, four leading scientists (including Donald Henderson, who led the effort to eradicate smallpox) examined measures for controlling pandemic influenza. Regarding “large-scale quarantine”, they wrote, “The negative consequences… are so extreme” that this measure “should be eliminated from serious consideration”.
Likewise, a WHO report published mere months before the COVID-19 pandemic classified “quarantine of exposed individuals” as “not recommended under any circumstances”. The report noted that “there is no obvious rationale for this measure”.
And we all know what the U.K.’s own ‘Pandemic Preparedness Strategy’ said, namely: “It will not be possible to halt the spread of a new pandemic influenza virus, and it would be a waste of public health resources and capacity to attempt to do so.”
As an additional exercise, I searched the pandemic preparedness plans of all the English-speaking Western countries (U.K., Ireland, U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand) for mentions of ‘lockdown’, ‘lock-down’ ‘lock down’ or ‘curfew’.
Only ‘curfew’ was mentioned, and only once – in Ireland’s plan. The relevant sentence was: “Mandatory quarantine and curfews are not considered necessary.” None of the lockdown strings were mentioned in any of the countries’ plans.
…..
As to whether one should trust ‘The Science’ on lockdowns, a reasonable answer would be, ‘Do you mean the pre or the post-Covid science?’
Is the school choice movement historically tainted by racism? American Federation of Teachers boss Randi Weingarten described vouchers in 2017 as “slightly more polite cousins of segregation.” Historian Nancy MacLean recently depicted vouchers as a product of an unholy alliance between economist Milton Friedman and segregationists after Brown v. Board of Education.
According to this narrative, vouchers came out of the “Massive Resistance” program of Sen. Harry F. Byrd Sr., who sought to circumvent Brown by rerouting education funding to private schools in 1950s Virginia. Friedman, the story goes, opportunistically assisted the segregationists in creating a voucherlike tuition-grant system that allowed white parents to transfer children out of integrated schools and into private “segregation academies.”
These critics have their history backward. As early as 1955, economists such as Friedman began touting vouchers as a strategy to expedite integration. Virginia’s segregationist hard-liners recognized the likely outcomes and began attacking school choice as an existential threat to their white-supremacist order.
Finally, I don’t need to explain to readers of EconLog what’s wrong with the statement that “markets don’t know best.” While markets aren’t perfect, they are a far superior to central planning and bureaucratic interventions at gather and using relevant knowledge.
The bottom line is that while this candidate would certainly bring a different perspective to the position of Comptroller of the Currency, in part because of her background, her affinity for making statements praising the USSR and her economic ignorance are pretty worrisome.
Samuel Gregg describes “the distorted market for woke capitalism.” A slice:
Whenever I inform students of Smith and Friedman’s unflattering opinions of the business community, they are invariably shocked. But their eyes start opening when I point out that large established businesses don’t actually like competition, aren’t wildly excited about other people’s new ideas and products threatening “their” market share, and are quite happy to hop into bed with complaisant legislators to use state power to make life difficult for new and potential competitors. At this point, students begin realizing that to be pro-market is not the same as being pro-business. The two are at odds in some very important ways.
This is one way of understanding the phenomenon of “woke capitalism,” and it features in Vivek Ramaswamy’s Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam. For if there is anything that characterizes woke capitalism, it is the desire—like the mercantilists of old—to exclude (ironically, in the name of tolerance, diversity, equality, etc.) particular individuals and groups from “their” markets and corporate America in general. In the case of woke capitalists, the excluded is anyone who doesn’t embrace all the usual progressive orthodoxies or who won’t play the woke game to go along to get along.
Writing in the Washington Post, Robert Atkinson busts some economic myths. A slice:
Monopolies are jacking up prices!” Economists Jan De Loecker, Jan Eeckhout, and Gabriel Unger asserted in 2020 that the prices companies charged above their costs of production tripled between 1980 and 2016. Their analysis is regularly cited as evidence we have a monopoly problem. But it is just not true. If markups tripled, then why didn’t profits increase? And why did markups increase faster in smaller firms and in industries with lots of competition? The reality is that they mismeasured firms’ costs, ignoring growth in spending on marketing, software and R&D.
Demonstrably wrong though these myths may be, they have had a very real impact on policy: Birch’s job-creation myth led policymakers to favor less efficient small firms over more efficient larger ones, showering them with tax preferences and other benefits. Frey and Osborne’s job-destruction myth has led policymakers to entertain anti-growth schemes such as taxing automation equipment. Piketty and Saez’s inequality myth has led many policymakers to abandon their faith in growth in favor of only redistribution. And De Loecker, Eeckhout and Unger’s price-markup myth has fueled the “anti-monopoly” fire, which holds the potential to distort U.S. antitrust laws in ways that will damage growth and innovation.
Speaking of inflation, Arnold Kling partially yet ably defends Jason Furman’s now-infamous tweet.
