Lockdown one of Canada's greatest policy failures, suggests economist

Economist: Lockdowns ‘Greatest Peacetime Policy Failure’ in Canada’s History | Foundation for Economic Education - Jon Miltimore: 

April 26, 2021 - "Canadian economist Douglas Ward Allen, the Burnaby Mountain Professor of Economics at Simon Fraser University, suggests the ineffectiveness of lockdowns may stem primarily from voluntary changes in behavior.

"'Lockdown jurisdictions were not able to prevent noncompliance, and non-lockdown jurisdictions benefited from voluntary changes in behavior that mimicked lockdowns,' writes Allen. 'The limited effectiveness of lockdowns explains why, after one year, the unconditional cumulative deaths per million, and the pattern of daily deaths per million, is not negatively correlated with the stringency of lockdown across countries.'

"Allen’s thesis would help explain the abundance of data that show lockdowns and other restrictions have been, at best, largely ineffective at reducing the spread of COVID-19. His study does not stop there, however.

"While much of Allen’s paper analyzes the literature to show that studies over-estimated the benefits of COVID-19 lockdowns, he also considers the cost of the lockdowns. In order to do this, he relies on the estimate from George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan regarding the quality of life lost due to lockdowns.

"Caplan frames this problem by asking, 'Suppose you could either live a year of life in the COVID era, or X months under normal conditions. What’s the value of X?' Caplan argues 10 months seems like a conservative estimate. Another way to think of this is that people would be willing to sacrifice 2 months of life to avoid a year of lockdowns. This estimate seems reasonable, due to the violence, job loss, business failure, and substance dependencies fostered by lockdowns. If a year of lockdowns means losing an equivalent of 2 months of life per person, multiplying that 2 months over the entire population of Canada (37.7 million people) gives a cost of 6.3 million years of life lost.

"If COVID-19 lockdowns made the death rate 10 percent lower, that would be equivalent to 22,333 years of life saved. Compared to the loss of 6.3 million years, this trade-off hardly seems worth it. Even if the frightening projections of the Imperial College of London had turned out to be correct — and Allen painstakingly shows they were not — the number of years saved from lockdowns would be 1,735,580, which is still significantly below the 6.3 million years of life lost.

"As more countries and states open and do not suffer the consequences lockdown proponents predicted, the empirical data will become increasingly difficult to ignore — especially as the adverse effects of lockdowns become more clear. For example, FEE’s Brad Polumbo recently reported on new CDC data that show 87,000 people died from drug overdoses from October 2019 to September 2020, a 30 percent increase from the same period the preceding year.... As more data are made available giving a complete picture of the effects of lockdowns, a long-established truth about tradeoffs observed by Nobel Prize-winning economist Ronald Coase is becoming apparent.

It would clearly be desirable if the only actions performed were those in which what was gained was worth more than what was lost,” wrote Coase. “But in choosing between social arrangements within the context of which individual decisions are made, we have to bear in mind that a change in the existing system which will lead to an improvement in some decisions may well lead to a worsening of others.

"To be sure, Allen’s research will not be the final word on lockdowns. But if his data are correct it will be difficult to disagree with his verdict on how history will judge government lockdowns. '[It] is possible that lockdowns will go down as one of the greatest peacetime policy failures in Canada’s history,' he writes."

Read more: https://fee.org/articles/economist-lockdowns-greatest-peacetime-policy-failure-in-canada-s-history/

Read study here: http://www.sfu.ca/~allen/LockdownReport.pdf

Ayn Rand's literary roots

Ayn Rand, the Russian-American Victor Hugo - Econlib - Bryan Caplan:

February 3, 2005 - "Ayn Rand’s novels blend two distinct genres. She fits squarely into the tradition of the Russian philosophical novelists like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. But she is also a plot-rich Romantic in the tradition of Victor Hugo. Some standard features of the Russian approach:

1. Characters embody philosophical positions.
2. The plot explores the implications of these philosophies on the characters’ lives.
3. The conclusion of the novel vindicates the current philosophical position of the author....

"In The Brothers Karamazov, for instance, Ivan embodies idealistic atheism, Alyosha earnest Orthodox Christianity, Dmitri unreflective pragmatism, and Smerdyakov nihilism. The murder of the sons’ father tests their convictions. And (spoiler!) the revelation that Smerdyakov is the murderer ultimately discredits not only his nihilism, but Ivan’s idealistic atheism, for the latter paves the way for the former.

"If she had written only We the Living, Rand would probably now be hailed as one of the lesser 20th-century descendants of Dostoyevsky. Its characters embody idealistic Communism, cynical Communism, defiant individualism, and despairing individualism. But then she up and wrote The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged which are, by the standards of the Russian philosophical tradition, far better. The characters' philosophies are more interesting, the plot pits them against each other more effectively, and the concluding epiphanies are more compelling (especially in Atlas)....

"When you measure Rand’s against her Russian peer group, she is among the masters. But this understates her artistic achievement because she simultaneously works in another tradition: 19th-century Romanticism exemplified by Victor Hugo. Some standard features of the Romantic approach:

1. The characters are larger-than-life.
2. The plots are imaginative.
3. The plots are carefully crafted puzzles, unpredictable in advance, but cleanly logical in hindsight....

"I love Victor Hugo, and even if he’s not for you, it’s hard not to admire the craftsmanship. Dramatic situations and dramatic characters stitched seamlessly together – it’s not easy....

"When you put Ayn Rand beside Victor Hugo, however, the student is the master. Rand out-Hugos Hugo. For starters, her characters are more colorful.... The plot of Atlas Shrugged is likewise more imaginative than anything Hugo cooked up.... Her craftsmanship is better too. Hugo is full of improbable coincidences. Rand studiously avoids them....

"If you hate Rand’s style, I probably can’t talk you into enjoyment. But I suspect that the main reason many thinkers I respect don’t enjoy Rand’s fiction is that – even though they like one or both of the genres she exemplifies – they can’t bring themselves to judge her by the standards of those genres. If they did, the worst they could say about her would be 'Pretty damn good.'"

Read more: http://www.econlib.org/archives/2005/02/ayn_rand_the_ru.html
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Twisting libertarianism

Twisting Libertarianism | National Review Online: - Kevin D. Williamson:

Michael Lind either misunderstands it or is intellectually dishonest.

May 15, 2014 - "If you would like to see everything that is wrong, shallow, and dishonest about our contemporary political discourse in one neat package, read Michael Lind’s recent drive-by defamation of Bryan Caplan, 'Libertarians’ scary new star'....

"Mr. Lind’s piece contains no analysis.... [I]t is mostly a half-organized swarm of insults out of which emerges the occasional tendentious misstatement of Professor Caplan’s views and those of the libertarian thinkers with whom he is sometimes associated. Mr. Lind begins by bemoaning our alleged national descent into plutocracy and writes: 'Some on the libertarian right have responded to this research by welcoming our new plutocratic overlords. Among these is Bryan Caplan.'

"Professor Caplan, author of The Myth of the Rational Voter, is a trenchant critic of electoral decision-making. Voters, he argues, suffer from specific, predictable biases — anti-market bias, anti-foreign bias, make-work bias, and pessimistic bias — that cause them to hold, and act on, untrue beliefs about the way the world works.... He characterizes the typical American voter as a moderate national socialist who strongly supports state intervention in many areas, and remarks, 'Given public opinion, the policies of First World democracies are surprisingly libertarian.'

"There is a great deal of agreement among the poor, the middle class, and the rich on most political issues, but the rich are significantly more libertarian ... not only on economic issues but also on social issues. The poor are 'much more anti-gay,' Professor Caplan writes. 'They’re much less opposed to restricting free speech to fight terrorism.' On the relatively few issues on which there is strong disagreement between the poor and the rich, the preferences of the rich have tended to prevail, and that pleases Professor Caplan, because that means that more libertarian policies are put into place than public opinion would suggest. 'To avoid misinterpretation,' he writes, 'this does not mean that American democracy has a strong tendency to supply the policies that most materially benefit the rich. It doesn’t.'

"But there is no avoiding misinterpretation when the opposite side is committed to misinterpreting you. Professor Caplan celebrates the advance of gay rights, pushback against the surveillance state, and, regrettably ... abortion rights, among other items on the progressive social agenda. Mr. Lind sees only a champion of plutocracy — because that is all he is inclined to see."

Read more: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/378004/twisting-libertarianism-kevin-d-williamson
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