At the time this article was written, the website c19iver​mectin​.com listed 73 clinical trials of ivermectin and COVID-19, involving 56,774 patients, as having been conducted. Thirty‐​one of the studies (6,828 patients) were randomized, controlled trials. Fifty‐​two were peer‐​reviewed (18,768 patients). A few of the studies have been challenged and even retracted for shoddy work (perhaps putting it kindly), but most have not; we will look more carefully at these studies below. Still, the aggregate results are noteworthy. The treatment group had 59% lower mortality than the placebo or standard therapy control group (examined in 34 studies involving 44,061 patients), 48% lower use of mechanical ventilation (12 studies; 2,316 patients), 57% fewer intensive‐​care‐​unit admissions (seven studies; 21,857 patients), 45% fewer hospitalizations (19 studies; 11,190 patients), 71% fewer cases (13 studies; 11,523 subjects), 52% faster recovery (23 studies; 3,664 patients), and 57% improved viral clearance (22 studies; 2,614 patients). The FDA has approved many drugs based on less clinical research. When one of us (Hooper) worked at Merck three decades ago, the ACE inhibitor Vasotec (enalapril), one of the company’s biggest drugs, was tested in 2,987 patients before receiving FDA approval. The statin drug Mevacor (lovastatin), another of Merck’s big drugs at the time, was tested in 6,582 patients. Back then, that was considered to be a massive trial. This is from Charles L. Hooper and David R. Henderson, “Ivermectin and Statistical Significance,” Regulation, Spring 2022.   On Scott Alexander Last November, Scott Alexander, a psychiatrist and author of the science‐​heavy blog Astral Codex Ten (and, before that, Slate Star Codex), authored an extensive literature review of 11 ivermectin–COVID studies that he deemed to be of high quality. He tentatively concluded that, when ivermectin is given early in an infection, the studies indicate the drug reduces mortality by 40 percent, which is just barely statistically significant (significance: p = 0.04). Yet, he refrains from endorsing the use of the drug. Why? To explain why, he presents a hypothesis and a prejudice (more on the prejudice below). The hypothesis is what we noted earlier: ivermectin’s benefit may come indirectly by ridding the body of parasites. The relationship isn’t direct. It has to do with corticosteroids, which are a common treatment for COVID. When patients don’t have parasites, giving them corticosteroids generally helps. But when patients do have parasites, giving the corticosteroids can cause a medical condition called hyperinfection syndrome. Hence, by removing the Strongyloides stercoralis worm infections, ivermectin may prevent potential problems with corticosteroid therapy, leading to the conclusion that ivermectin helps with COVID. However, when the larger pool of studies is examined, they show a benefit to ivermectin of 72% in areas of low parasitic prevalence, while in areas with high prevalence the benefit is 55%. This is the exact opposite of what Alexander conjectured. Further, there is some evidence that the difference in the two areas can be partly explained by considering treatment delays — it’s better to give ivermectin early in the infection — and dosage size. In the geographic areas where the drug did better, it tended to be given earlier and at higher doses.   On Statistical Significance Consider one COVID patient outcome: the need for invasive ventilation. In a randomized, double‐​blind, placebo‐​controlled clinical trial by Ranjini Ravikirti et al., of 55 patients in the ivermectin arm, only one patient needed invasive ventilation while five in the placebo group of 57 did. In other words, it appears that ivermectin reduced the need for ventilators by 80%. Yet, the study’s authors concluded, “This study did not find any benefit with the use of ivermectin in … the use of invasive ventilation in mild and moderate COVID-19.” But one can reasonably conclude that the authors did find a benefit. A close look at their data shows 91.2% confidence that there was a difference. Because the authors used the 95% threshold, they stated that they had found no benefit. Similarly, an observational controlled trial of 288 patients found that treatment with ivermectin allowed twice as many patients to improve and get off mechanical ventilators (36.1% vs 15.4%). But authors Juliana Cepelowicz Rajter et al. report no benefit to ivermectin because they were “only” 93% confident of the difference.   Scott Alexander Succumbs to Social Desirability Bias He [Scott Alexander] further acknowledges that “if you say anything in favor of ivermectin, you will be cast out of civilization and thrown into the circle of social hell reserved for Klan members and 1/6 insurrectionists.” Not wanting to be relegated to this group of undesirables, he withholds his recommendation of ivermectin. In short, the scientific evidence led him to a tentative conclusion that he does not want to embrace because of social desirability bias. What happened to “follow the science?” Read the whole thing. (0 COMMENTS)

Yesterday, I listened to some financial analysts discuss Fed policy on NPR. One remarked that there wasn’t much the Fed could do to bring inflation down this year, and that policymakers hoped for improvement in 2023. I agree that Fed policy won’t have much impact on inflation this year. But that’s not because it cannot affect current inflation, rather because the Fed will likely choose not to do so. Thus far the Fed has not taken ANY significant steps to tighten monetary policy. They slightly raised their target interest rate, but with the equilibrium interest rate rising even faster, this effectively meant an easing of monetary policy. That’s why inflation expectations are rising, not falling.If the Fed actually were to adopt a tight monetary policy, inflation would fall almost immediately. The misconception about long and variable lags is due to two factors:1. The assumption that many prices are sticky.2. The assumption that the Fed cannot affect the relative price of commodities.The first assumption is true but misleading, while the second is false. When the Fed adopts a dramatic change in monetary policy, the relative price of commodities responds immediately, and so does the overall price level. While it’s true that flexible prices respond more quickly than sticky prices, the former are an important enough part of the CPI to have an immediate impact on inflation.When the Fed adopts a very tight monetary policy, as in late 1929, NGDP falls sharply. Both prices and output fall, with the fall in commodity prices being much more rapid than the fall in stickier goods prices. Thus the relative prices of commodities (which are unusually sensitive to the business cycle) tend to fall with tight money.  This means the Fed can affect relative prices in the short run (but not the long run.) In April 1933, the US adopted an extremely expansionary monetary policy that caused rapid growth in NGDP. Both prices and output immediately rose at a rapid pace. Again, commodity prices rose much faster than the prices of other goods.Today, a dramatic move toward tighter money would cause relative commodity prices to decline almost immediately. Headline inflation would fall substantially, even in 2022, although the decline in core inflation would be more gradual. [As an aside, actual inflation would fall faster than measured inflation, as there are problems with the way the Fed measures things like housing costs. But even measured inflation would decline.]The fact that inflation is not slowing right now is not an indication that the Fed’s tight money hasn’t yet begun to work; it’s a sign that the Fed has not yet adopted a tighter monetary policy. Let’s hope they do so in the near future.  I’d like to see them bring NGDP growth down to no higher than 4% in 2022. (0 COMMENTS)

Imagine that a new pandemic hits and, sadly, you test positive. Luckily, we’re better prepared this time and a widely used, safe, convenient pill priced at only $1 is available and can reduce your risk of death by 56%. Would you take it? Actually, such a drug was available during this pandemic. It has been on the market for decades. This is from Charles L. Hooper and David R. Henderson, “In Pandemics, Old Drugs May Save Us,” Goodman Institute, Brief Analysis No. 145, March 18, 2022. Another excerpt: While newer drugs are often better than older drugs, older drugs have something that newer drugs don’t: they are cheap and widely available today. When a pandemic starts, they are all we have. We estimate that using these drugs and vitamins could have saved hundreds of thousands of U.S. lives. Finally: Pandemics, by nature, move quickly. Drug and vaccine development, especially when highly regulated, are slow. The problem moves faster than the solution. however, there’s one good solution that’s hidden in plain sight: older drugs. The first place to look for useful therapies during a pandemic is older, generic drugs. These drugs offer Americans the prospect of reduced morbidity and mortality while simultaneously being very cheap. We just need the FDA to cease being a roadblock. What about the statistical significance argument, which has been used to discredit, in particular, ivermectin? We address that in a forthcoming article in Regulation. The table at the top is from our article. Read the whole thing.     (0 COMMENTS)

Our sister website, Law and Liberty, is hosting a forum discussion on industrial policy.  The discussion begins with a masterful piece by Acton Institute’s Sam Gregg. Gregg rejects the notion of “broad-based growth”, defined by the World Bank as economic growth which is “broad-based across sectors, and inclusive of the large part of the country’s labor force.” There are a number of excellent points Sam’s article (beginning with the first paragraph), but let me single out this passage: Sectoral economic change has characterized the history of America’s development since the 1790s. In 1800, the U.S. economy was dominated by agriculture and mineral production, with an estimated 85 percent of the workforce engaged in farming. On the eve of the Civil War, America had the world’s second-largest GDP and second-largest industrial base. In 1900, just under 40 percent of the total US population lived on farms, and 60 percent lived in non-metropolitan areas. By 2016, the respective figures were about 1 percent and 20 percent. Beginning in the late-1960s, the move from factories to service-provision started accelerating across the United States, as it did in all the world’s developed economies. In 2015, approximately 80 percent of the American workforce was located in the entire service sector. These transitions reflect what it means to live in an economy orientated towards the generation of growth. If an economy is to continue growing and competing with the rest of the world, then people and material resources must continuously shift to higher value-added sectors, and, within specific sectors, to the more efficient firms. That, however, doesn’t mean that entire economic sectors disappear or become less productive. While the percentage of Americans who work in agriculture today is far smaller than what it was 100 years ago, U.S. agricultural productivity has never been higher. Technological developments ranging from tractors in the early twentieth century to high-tech vertical farming in more recent years may have reduced agricultural employment as a percentage of America’s workforce, but they also have magnified agriculture’s output many times over. The same technological transformations have changed the profile of agricultural employment. Agronomists and agricultural scientists, for example, are more needed today than unskilled labor. A similar story may be told about American manufacturing. Although the number of Americans employed in manufacturing has dropped since the 1970s, real manufacturing production grew by 180 percent between 1972 and 2007. By 2019, it had rebounded to pre-Great Recession levels. Today, America continues to rank high among the world’s manufacturing nations and is a major global locus for manufacturing investment. Thus, while American manufacturing constitutes a smaller slice of the U.S. economy than the services sector, it is more sophisticated and productive than it was 50 years ago. The oft-repeated mantra of economic nationalists that America is de-industrializing is simply false. The service sector may have grown faster and bigger, but that doesn’t imply that the manufacturing sector’s output has shrunk. It simply means that manufacturing’s overall share of the U.S. economy was many times bigger 50 years ago. The rejoinder to Gregg is by Patrick T. Brown, a fellow with the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Scott Sumner has some brilliant comments on this piece. I would like to add a couple of things. First, Brown’s article begins with a non sequitur: Gregg offers some worthwhile reminders about inescapable tradeoffs. But if industrial policy advocates sometimes fall victim to a misplaced nostalgia for backbreaking factory jobs, Gregg’s framework downplays the cost of doing nothing. Part of the point of a modern welfare state is precisely to provide a form of social insurance for those caught on the wrong side of economic trends. After all, not every working- or middle-class parent is an aspiring entrepreneur—many just want a steady paycheck and a sense of stability, and feel that an excessively laissez-faire approach to trade and economic growth has undermined their ability to achieve those goals. Brown’s first point is very sensible: not everybody is an aspiring entrepreneur and indeed the great majority of people aspire not to be one and are far more risk averse than entrepreneurs (of any kind) tend to be. This does not mean by definition that they will be “on the wrong side of economic trends”: you can be an employee in thriving business sectors. Indeed, “social insurance” provided by the welfare state should work (though it is not always particularly efficient) as a buffer for those who are left behind. But then if you have such social insurance, why do you want to have an industrial policy, too? Brown offers two arguments: The first, more in the tradition of a Pat Buchanan, is that a properly conservative approach to trade would be more incremental and more concerned with ramifications on community and family life. The second is that a government that turns a blind eye to the existence of positive externalities, or is indifferent to developing a comparative advantage, will find itself on the receiving end of economic trends, rather than driving them. I find the second particularly unpersuasive. Brown himself later trims it as something like “so far as you have government intervention, industrial policy may be better than other kinds of interventions” (“Accepting government interventions in the economy need not be all or nothing. But once we have accepted certain practices to support the economy, pursuing industrial policy, in a sense, becomes a question of which tax breaks or provisions would be most effective, rather than a question of principle“). I think that besides creating further room for crony capitalism, this argument tends to assume government can be on top of innovation, which I am rather skeptical about – for the very record of industrial policy Gregg mentions in his piece. But I’d like to note that it is an argument which is not concerned with those who are left behind by abrupt and disruptive innovation. The stress on “managing” trade not to allow a free market to reshuffle society’s values is a more dubious argument than most conservatives assume, as it is somehow predicated on economic forces shaping a society’s values (did not conservatives think the opposite?), but it also assumes that communities need to be preserved as safety nets that are more efficient than government welfare. But the idea that the government should pick winners has little to do with providing aid to those workers who become the losers of the competitive game: it has a lot to do with helping some businessmen to win the competitive game. On a more general note, I find the title “The perils of inaction” interesting. It beautifully summarizes the rhetoric of all kinds of interventionism, right and left. Inaction will be too expensive, so something should be done and possibly now. This even in context in which we have very limited information to make choices that are correct (for example in picking winners). I find more promising and consistent, if we care to, to deal with the crisis of communities and traditional social structures, or to unemployment in some particular area, as problems in themselves, to be tackled as such. That sounds more reasonable, and humble, than endorsing industrial policy, which is intrinsically alternative to (and not correcting of) a free market, as it changes it from a competition for consumers’ favor to a competition for bureaucrats’ favor. When it comes to the economic game, let’s give inaction a chance. (0 COMMENTS)

We all know our brain has many components, and we might even think we know what they are and do… So why can’t we just convince our brains to do what’s good for us??? Luca Dellanna, author of The Control Heuristic, thinks the answers to all of these questions are in our heads, or rather in our basal ganglia. In this episode, EconTalk host Russ Roberts chats with Dellanna about his book, how our brains might best be thought of as corporations, and how to think about and change our impulsive behaviors. Dellanna contrasts what he calls our analytical brain with our emotional brain, and it’s the latter that serves as the “gatekeeper” for our decision-making processes. All those regions of the brain we’ve heard about do in fact communicate with each other, says Dellanna, but they also suffer a sort of knowledge problem in that none has the whole overview. According to Dellanna, the various regions see the output of other regions, but they know nothing about why they produce that output.   1- How do the functions of the analytical and emotional brain differ, according to Dellanna? How does the “confabulation” between the two help explain compulsive behavior?   2- What does Dellanna mean when he says, “We think we have a decision-making problem, but we have an action-taking problem.”  What are some of the techniques he suggest you can use to help deal with your brain’s emotional gatekeeper and secure better habits- the ones your analytical brain knows you want to adopt?   3- Why is this seemingly antagonistic brain system good for us, according to Dellanna? What does he mean when he says, “Our brain is not the best brain to survive in the modern world, but the ancient one?”   4- How do addictions produce stress? Roberts describes addiction as a “strange mix of autonomy and lack of autonomy.” What does this mean? How do the analytical brain and the emotional brain interact with regard to addiction, and how might this help explain why some people seem able to overcome their addiction more easily than others?   5- The conversation concludes with a brief discussion of heuristics. Dellanna notes the more distant or abstract they are, the more false and/or dangerous beliefs we can hold. Yet it still can be rational to imitate these rules, even in the absence of any understanding of them. How can this be??? What are some additional examples that might illustrate Dellanna’s point?   (0 COMMENTS)

Critics of the Biden administration’s Ukraine policies have pressed for major changes in the country’s energy policies to impair Russian aggression in Ukraine. Most notably, the critics seek a restart of the Keystone XL pipeline. To date, the Biden administration has been unwilling to do that. If President Biden wants to help Ukraine by inflicting economic damage on Russia over and above what can be achieved by current sanctions, he should take the critics’ advice, and the sooner the better.   The Administration’s Case for Not Reversing Its Keystone Policy When pressed by a reporter at a March 3, 2022 press conference, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki staked out the Biden administration’s reason for opposing a policy reversal on the pipeline: The Keystone pipeline has never been operational. It would take years for that to have any impact. I know a number of members of Congress have suggested that but that is a proposed solution that has no relationship or would have no impact on what the problem is we here all agree is an issue.[i] Ms. Psaki—and her boss—must have missed some key Econ 101 lessons. An announcement to restart the Keystone pipeline as soon as possible would put immediate downward pressure on current global oil and gasoline prices, which would reduce European countries’ dependence on Russian oil and increase their willingness to impose more damaging sanctions. Ms. Psaki has clearly failed to understand how current and future oil supplies are interconnected through anticipated future oil supplies, prices, and profits. She understands that pump prices in February were 50 percent higher than when President Biden took office, but she and the President confidently deny the gasoline price hike has anything to do with the administration’s restrictive energy policy. She is also dead wrong on the impact of a Keystone-restart announcement on today’s gasoline prices.   The Tie between Current and Future Gas Prices When the Biden administration took over on January 20, 2020, it immediately began a “war on fossil fuels” under its green agenda, heavily weighted toward substantially reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. One of President Biden’s first acts was to terminate by executive order construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. He wrote, “Leaving the Keystone XL pipeline permit in place would not be consistent with my administration’s economic and climate imperatives.”[ii] What Ms. Psaki and the President have overlooked is that termination of the pipeline construction reduced the anticipated domestic and global supply of oil in the future and, therefore, increased future oil prices above what they would have been (as economists Dwight Lee and David Henderson argued years ago[iii]). The hike in anticipated future prices likely caused producers in the United States and around the globe to hang on to their current oil reserves in anticipation of higher future profits. They can do this by reducing their current and future drilling, leaving their easily accessible known reserves in the ground, and holding on to a greater fraction of their stored output. The resulting domestic and global market outcome from the pipeline cancellation? Higher current gasoline prices than Americans (and everyone else) have faced since President Biden first occupied the Oval Office. If the Biden administration announced a restart of the Keystone pipeline, oil producers would reverse their thinking, because anticipated future oil prices would fall with the greater future supply at lower cost, which can be expected when the Keystone becomes operational. This means they could anticipate that they future profits would fall below levels previously anticipated. Producers could be expected to increase current market supply drawn from reserves, which would put immediate downward pressure on the current price of gasoline at the pump. To the extent that current and future oil prices fall (or rise by less than otherwise) from the administration’s reversal of its current restrictive policy on oil, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war machine would be impaired as its oil revenues decline. This means President Biden’s Keystone-policy reversal will add to the expected economic damage from the growing count of sanctions imposed on Russia by nations that span the globe. A Keystone-restart announcement would also dampen the decline in Americans’ real incomes suffered during President Biden’s first year in office, at least partially attributable to the administration’s energy policies. Of course, the administration must include in its restart announcement guarantees that it will hold to its more lenient energy policies long enough for investors to recover their added current fossil-fuel investment in the Keystone pipeline and other drilling projects. This means that the Biden administration must be willing to postpone progress on its green goals, which it has been reluctant to do. If the administration doesn’t provide the needed guarantees for investors, it might as well not bother with a policy reversal and suffer the political consequences of what now appears to be an ever-rising pump price.   Conclusion Granted, the administration and its green allies are committed to reversing climate change, and a reversal on the administration’s pipeline policy will likely delay the achievement of their emissions goals. However, the administration is now facing both practical and moral dilemmas. The United States and the world are witnessing an enormous and growing humanitarian crisis from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that seems, at this writing (mid-March 2022), to be growing in its savagery. Moreover, the Biden administration must now cope with the unfathomable designs of a power-obsessed autocrat who, if successful in Ukraine, could be emboldened to seek annexation of other nations, especially if the United States and NATO continue to be unwilling to risk starting a wider war by pulverizing the Russian army’s conventional war machine. The administration must now include in its green-policy calculus the prospects of growing greenhouse-gas emissions from an expanded war with, perhaps, the advent of World War III with nuclear exchanges.   [i] Press Briefing by Press Secretary Jen Psaki, March 3rd, 2022, James S. Brady Press Briefing Room, The White House, Washington, D.C. [ii] As quoted by Rob Gillies, 2021. “Keystone XL Pipeline Halted As Biden Revokes Permit,” ABC News, January 20. [iii]See Dwight R. Lee, 1978. “Price Controls, Binding Constraints and Intertemporal Decision Making,” Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 86, No. 2 (April 1978), pp. 293-301; and David R. Henderson, 2018. “Why Bryan Caplan Won His Gasoline Bet,” EconLib, February 14. Richard McKenzie is an economics professor (emeritus) in the Merage Business School at the University of California, Irvine. His latest book is The Selfish Brain: A Layman’s Guide to a New Way of Economic Thinking (2021). (0 COMMENTS)

Over the years, I’ve had a number of conversations with commenters that take the following form:Me: The Fed screwed up by missing its target of X.Commenter: Yes, but they ended up doing Y, which is the target I prefer in any case. Is Y such a bad target?Me: No, Y is not such a bad target. But if the Fed has a target of X, then they need to hit X.Commenter: But what’s wrong with doing Y from now on?Me: Here’s the problem. If the announced target is X, and then they do Y, they’ll eventually try to push the economy back to X. Alternating between X and Y is worse than doing either policy consistently. Monetary policy instability creates business cycles.I would add that policy “X” (which in this case is a 2% FAIT policy) was only announced 19 months ago. To abandon the policy so soon would mean an extreme loss of credibility. Why would anyone believe the new policy? But these policy rules are only effective in stabilizing the economy if people do believe them.I am not arguing that all is lost. The inflation rate has averaged 2% since 1991. (OK, it’s actually 1.995% over the past 31 years, but that’s very close to 2%) That’s a pretty long time. So the Fed’s credibility has not gone to zero. But they have certainly lost some credibility in the past year with 12-month PCE inflation currently running at 5.8%, and expected to remain high. The Fed’s 2% FAIT is actually a very good policy.  As St Louis Fed president Jim Bullard once observed, it’s quite similar to NGDP level targeting.  It’s a pity the Fed abandoned the policy so hastily. PS. In case you are interested, the 20-year inflation rate is 2.04%, and the 10-year inflation rate is 1.86%. The real problem is that the inflation rate during the 2020s is likely to be higher than the Fed’s FAIT would require. PPS.  I just saw a new speech by Chair Powell: Some have argued that history stacks the odds against achieving a soft landing, and point to the 1994 episode as the only successful soft landing in the postwar period. I believe that the historical record provides some grounds for optimism: Soft, or at least soft-ish, landings have been relatively common in U.S. monetary history. In three episodes—in 1965, 1984, and 1994—the Fed raised the federal funds rate significantly in response to perceived overheating without precipitating a recession. It’s worth noting that 1965 represents a major Fed policy error, which led directly to the Great Inflation.  Policy actions in 1984 and 1994 were indeed successful, but in both cases the inflation rate the Fed was dealing with was significantly lower than inflation had been 5 years previously.  Today, inflation is far higher than five years previously, so the Fed’s job is now much more difficult.  They can still avoid a recession if they quickly bring NGDP down to 4% and keep it there, but that outcome will be much more difficult to achieve due to their abandonment of FAIT.

This Wednesday, March 23, I’ll be giving a speech at McDaniel College in Westminster, Maryland. Details below. Event: The Rembert Lecture in Enterprise Economics Title of Speech: The Wonder of Economic Growth Time: 4:00 p.m. on Wednesday Place: Decker Auditorium The Rembert Lecture is named after Donald Mosby Rembert, a 1961 graduate of McDaniel. I talked to him on the phone a few weeks ago and he sounds like a neat guy. I’m looking forward to meeting him. If you happen to attend, please come up afterward and say hi. Thanks to Dr. Julie Routzahn and Tracy Fleming for setting this up.   (0 COMMENTS)

Bertrand de Jouvenel’s book On Power was more a cri de coeur than a coherent theory of the state. It is however relevant to the current war waged by a Kremlin dictator against the residents of Ukraine. About modern wars waged by both unconstrained democratic states and unconstrained autocracies, Jouvenel wrote: We are ending where the savages began. We have found again the lost arts of starving non-combatants, burning hovels, and leading away the vanquished into slavery. Barbarian invasions would be superfluous: we are our own Huns. For those who read French, the 1945 original says: Nous finissons par où les sauvages commencent. Nous avons redécouvert l’art perdu d’affamer les non-combattants, de brûler les huttes et d’emmener les vaincus en esclavage. Qu’avons-nous besoin d’invasions barbares ? Nous sommes nos propres Huns. Isn’t this what is happening in Mariupol? I suppose that Jouvenel’s reference to the enslavement of the vanquished relates to the forced labor imposed to some foreigners and POWs by the German and Russian governments during WWI and WWII. “We” have not recently resorted to this, at least in the West, but we can see well enough by observing today’s Russian state how the technology of war (shelling, bombers, and missiles), the power of conscription, and the technology of taxation empower barbarians. (0 COMMENTS)

One of the awful ironies of the pandemic lockdowns is that the people least at risk from Covid were among those whom the lockdowns hurt the most. We refer, of course, to the restrictions placed on children. Parks, zoos, and swimming pools were shut down. Little League seasons were canceled. In many states schools went remote for over a year. The evidence shows that these disruptions have had a substantial impact on children’s learning, their expected lifetime incomes, their life expectancies, and their mental health. The kids are not alright. This is from Ryan Sullivan and David R. Henderson, “The Kids Aren’t Alright,” AIER, March 21, 2022. Another excerpt: Once these earning losses take hold, they lead to lower life expectancies. This connection was highlighted most prominently in a paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association that analyzed data on school shutdowns early in the pandemic. The authors found that missed instruction in the United States could be associated with an estimated 13.8 million years of life lost. What makes these outcomes even more tragic is that they were experienced by children who, as was known early on, never had a significant risk of dying from COVID-19. As of the first week of March 2022, out of the nearly 950,000 Covid-19 deaths, only 865 were children under the age of 18. That amounts to about 433 children annually. This is comparable to a bad flu season in the US. For example, the CDC estimates that the actual number of flu deaths for children in the 2017-18 flu season was about 600. Ryan is especially passionate about this. He lives in California and has 2 young children whose lives were incredible disrupted for 2 years. Read the whole thing.   (0 COMMENTS)