I was talking to someone on the phone a few days ago and we got into a side discussion about masks. I told her that I hate wearing them. It was hard to tell her attitude. Then she told me that she had recently taken her 3-year-old grandson into a fast food restaurant in another state. When they got to the door, her grandson realized that he didn’t have his mask and he panicked. She reassured him that he could borrow one of hers. Then she told me that basically as long as he can remember, he’s had to wear a mask when going out. She said that he basically regards it as part of his wardrobe. That’s scary and tragic. How long will it take him to recover? And what has he missed in the meantime? (0 COMMENTS)

The Wall Street Journal reveals that the small risk of Covid-19 vaccines has translated into serious health consequences in 11 cases in 100,000 thousand vaccine doses. To give an idea of this order of magnitude, it is more than twice the homicide rate in America. Some people have died from the vaccine in the United States. In the U.S. and elsewhere, governments are preparing to pay statutory “compensation” to the victims or their survivors. (Jenny Strasburg, “Covid-19 Vaccines Were Deadly in Rare Cases. Governments Are Now Weighing Compensation,” Wall Street Journal, February 19, 2022.) Aren’t these costs low compared to the benefits of vaccination, as some cost-benefit analysis would arguably have shown (had governments done any such analysis)? By raising this question, one puts one finger on the basic problem of cost-benefit analysis is that it aims at calculating the benefits to some individuals compared with the costs to other individuals. The intellectual exercise would be innocuous, except for the false impression of making an accurate calculation, if the purpose were to inform each individual of his own risk. But even then, isn’t this what each individual does before making a decision: he weighs his own expected (ex ante) costs and benefits. It is argued that government economists can better calculate these future costs and benefits, but this is forgetting that they are largely subjective, dependent on individual circumstances, and unknowable by any external observer (see James Buchanan, Cost and Choice [1969] [Liberty Fund, 1998]). Cost-benefit calculations, then, can only be useful if the government intends to force the estimated lower costs on some individuals in order to confer some estimated higher benefits to other individuals. These ideas are not easy to grasp. (It took me several decades to realize their import.) They undermine a structural pillar of what has been the reigning political culture of the past century and a half—that the role of government is to help some individuals by imposing costs on others. An alternative approach in economic theory is not to “impose” anything except according to a rule that each and every individual would consent to. This was the approach of James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock in their seminal 1962 book, The Calculus of Consent; my anniversary review for Econlib tries to give an idea of the intellectual force of this argument. (Note that this approach does not necessarily justify a minimal state.) Perhaps I can illustrate the problem with own intuitive calculations regarding the Covid-19 vaccine. Given my preferences, my circumstances, and my probabilistic guesstimates, I determined that the benefit of a the vaccine was higher than its cost—for me. I also hypothesized that the principle of portfolio diversification must be a constant of the universe (like, say, π) and decided to mix a Pfizer booster, which I could choose at Walmart, with a previous two-dose Moderna, the only choice I had at the time under the government allocation system. I don’t pretend I can decide for any other adult, but I can certainly, and did, make similar recommendations to my friends and loved ones. The quote marks I put around “compensation” at the beginning of my post may now be easier to understand. A compensation must be accepted in a voluntary trade or transaction (even if ex ante and in a probabilistic context), or it is not a full compensation. The problem of weighing the benefits of some against the costs to others is related to attempts at comparing and adding up preferences across individuals. The opinion of the economic analyst or of the committee of bureaucrats writing the cost-benefit analysis is of no more scientific value than that of any Blue, Red, or Brown politician down the aisle. Consider the following illustrative question: Would the loss of one dollar by every American adult represent a higher or lower cost than the $250 million transferred to a single one chosen at random among them? And can the answer justify forcing the 250 million individuals pay $1 each in a government lottery ticket? It is true that in most Western countries, there was no legal obligation, sanctioned by legal punishments, to be vaccinated against Covid-19. The coercion, though, was more subtle and worked through several prohibitions and daily hurdles for unvaccinated individuals. We are quite far from benevolent advice or motherly nudging from disinterested politicians and wise bureaucrats; but that’s how Leviathan works. (0 COMMENTS)

There’s been a lot of push from both left and right for the US government to regulate “Big Tech.” On the right, for example, Betsy McCaughey, a former lieutenant governor of New York, proposes two remediesfor censorship by Big Tech. The first is “for Congress to regulate Big Tech like public utilities or common carriers, compelling them to serve all customers without viewpoint discrimination.” The second is for the Supreme Court to “limit Big Tech censorship.” On the left, Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) has a bill titled American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICO) to regulate large tech companies that she thinks suppress competition. And this is just a shallow dive into the regulatory waters. Both left and right have proposed other regulations of Big Tech. I’ve got another option: trust freedom to rein in Big Tech. Let other companies compete to provide services that some critics think Big Tech should provide. Will this sometimes happen slowly? Yes, although it will typically happen way more quickly than any government solution. The freedom solution, moreover, will avoid the unintended consequences that come about when government steps in to regulate. In this article, I’ll focus on the case against what McCaughey advocates. In a subsequent article, I’ll discuss the problems with the kinds of government interventions that Klobuchar and others advocate. These are the opening paragraphs of David R. Henderson, “Let Freedom Rein in Big Tech,” Defining Ideas, February 17, 2022. Another excerpt: In short, the objection to some of Big Tech’s behavior is sound. I don’t think of it as censorship because the term “censorship” has traditionally been used to refer to governments that threaten to use force to prevent people from expressing certain ideas. For example, the Federal Communications Commission, a US government agency, censors. YouTube, by contrast, does not use or threaten force. Instead, it disallows certain viewpoints from being expressed, even if the viewpoints are backed by evidence. That’s troubling and even disgusting, but it’s not censorship. Moreover, YouTube has the right to choose, and should have the right to choose, what content it carries. Another excerpt: Here’s another example of competition solving the problem of information suppression, this time by a major search engine. I had never considered using Microsoft’s Bing. Google has been my browser of choice for years. But recently I saw a talk on Zoom in which the speaker said he had been trying, using Google, to find a paper by a Chinese doctor that argued that the coronavirus resulted from a lab leak. He couldn’t find it using Google. He had heard of Bing. So he went to Bing and put in a few key words and, as he said, “Bing!” There it was. For an article I’m writing, I had been trying to find a quote from Washington state governor Jay Inslee in which he claimed seriously that he was the only person in Washington state who had the capability to save lives from COVID. Using key words, I had tried for almost an hour on Google to find the quote, but to no avail. So I went to Bing, entered a few key words, and then “Bing!” There it was. Read the whole thing. (0 COMMENTS)

Yesterday, a libertarian friend in Ottawa, Janet Bufton, posted an article on the truckers’ protest. It’s titled “Canada’s Freedom Convoy Is Undermining the Cause of Freedom.” She makes some of the points I made in my critique of the protestors closing down the Ambassador Bridge. But she goes into much more detail, probably because she lives in Ottawa, about some of the goings on. She has the advantage of local knowledge. Some of the goings on are not pretty. I recommend that you read her post. Here’s one excerpt: Meanwhile, truckers have taken to blaring their horns in shifts from early morning until late at night. They stopped for four days last week after a court injunction, only to resume again in defiance of the injunction. They’ve heckled pedestrians, harassed homeless shelters, encouraged supporters to overwhelm 911 lines, and closed downtown retail stores and restaurants. And, of course, there have been multiple border blockades, including one where some protesters were heavily armed. Janet argues that a group called Canada Unity planned the convoy even before PM Justin Trudeau imposed a vaccine mandate, which he had said in May 2021 he would never do (go to the 10:00 point in the video), on truckers. She seems to think that this makes the convoy suspect. That might be right. But there’s another way of thinking about it. Imagine truckers and others who really are genuine fans of freedom and are looking for a way to express it visibly. They hear about this convoy. They decide to participate. So their own sincerity is not at issue. A crucial question is “What percent of the protestors are genuine believers in freedom and what percent are people with a very different agenda?” Janet doesn’t address this. She ends by writing: Sticking up for the rights of protesters does not mean giving them a pass on their tactics or their delusions. The Freedom Convoy is actually hurting the cause of freedom. Valorizing it is a mistake. You should never give people a pass on their delusions. But you should give them a pass on their tactics if their tactics are peaceful. Much of what she described in her earlier paragraph I quoted may not be peaceful. Certainly, if they’re physically blocking people from going about their business, they’re not peaceful. That was my point in denouncing the protestors who closed the Ambassador Bridge. But I would bet that a lot of what the protestors are doing is peaceful. I would want more details and I think it’s important to judge people as individuals and not regard them as part of an amorphous group. I think that Janet understates the good effect the protestors have had already. She does give them some credit, writing: Convoy supporters might be right that Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba dropped restrictions as a result of the protests. Likewise, the premier of Saskatchewan has suggested strongly he was responding to the protest. That’s nothing to sneeze at. Those provinces’ populations, added together, are 18% of Canada’s population. But I think she undercounts. Quebec’s government has not only dropped its plan to tax people who are unvaccinated, but also, on February 8, announced easing of Covid restrictions by mid-March. While Quebec premier Francois Legault claims he was not influenced by the protests, that’s hard to believe, given the direction he was going in–taxing the unvaccinated–just a month earlier. Quebec accounts for another 23% of Canada’s population. That’s 41% of Canada’s population living under provincial governments that arguably have been influenced by the protests. Not bad for a few weeks’ work. Janet writes further: But in other provinces across Canada, pandemic measures are being rolled back in line with long-standing plans. Ontario eased some of its provisions before the first trucks even hit the road. Moreover, the province’s announcement this week that it will end its vaccination passport requirements on March 1 is broadly in line with reopening plans set out last fall. Maybe. We’ve seen a lot of “long-standing plans.” How about “2 weeks to flatten the curve?” Or how about mask mandates lifted in Californian and then reimposed? I would want to see more evidence for her confident claim. And notice the timing of the Ontario government’s announcement that it will lift its vaccination passport requirements. Should we really conclude that the protests had no effect on this announcement? Note that Ontario has 38% of Canada’s population. So now we’re up to 79% of Canadians living in provinces that the protests arguably influenced to drop restrictions. I think some readers of Janet’s piece have been uncharitable, by suggesting that she is not against Trudeau’s taking on emergency powers. She doesn’t spend many words on it, but I think her statement “This is all terrifying” puts her squarely on the side of the people who oppose this totalitarian measure. Janet says one thing that I don’t quite understand. She writes: The cure would be to persuade the protesters to abandon the alternate reality they have created for themselves amid a hothouse media environment steeped in conspiracy theories. They need to return to a shared reality with their fellow Canadians. No polity can function without some such common ground and common understanding of basic facts. Unfortunately, this hasn’t proven an easy problem to solve anywhere. I’m not sure that a polity can’t function without “a common understanding of basic facts.” Most people don’t understand the basics of gains from exchange. Most people don’t understand that Jeff Bezos’s wealth comes about largely from helping others and that those others, in total, gain more than he does. And yet our polity functions reasonably well most of the time. I think it would be wonderful to have a shared reality based on understanding of basic facts. But I’ll settle for a government not imposing its understanding of reality, to the point of requiring vaccines and masks, on others. Janet is pessimistic. She writes: Some U.S. commentators believe that if Canada simply dismantled its mandates and restrictions, the protesters would melt away. The problem is with her term “the protesters.” Some would melt away; some wouldn’t. How about trying it and seeing? And even if some protestors remain, the feds would be dealing with a smaller problem.     (0 COMMENTS)

In a recent Bloomberg column, Tyler Cowen discusses Fischer Black’s view of monetary policy: Paul Krugman has argued that there was not high inflation after 2008 because the U.S. economy was in a liquidity trap. Black’s rejoinder to the Keynesians was a subtle one: We are always in a liquidity trap. Since banks can bid for reserves, and reserves can pass in and out of banks freely, the net value of additional bank reserves must be equal to other uses of the funds. The monetary expansion of the U.S. Federal Reserve, which operates through banks, is thus like swapping two nickels for a dime. Whether or not nominal interest rates are zero, after the swap banks can still move back to whichever portfolio they wished to hold. Thus any Fed actions will prove neutral if that is what the banks, and the economy as a whole, desire. Before responding, let me point out that Tyler is using the term “neutral” in an unconventional fashion.  In monetary economics, money neutrality generally refers to the case where exogenous changes in the money supply cause all nominal variables to move in proportion, leaving real variables unchanged.  Tyler is suggesting that Black believed that monetary policy didn’t even impact nominal variables such as inflation. To see the problem with this view, consider the case of an economy with a trillion dollars in base money, composed of $900 billion in cash held by the public and $100 billion in bank reserves.  Now assume that the Fed buys $100 billion of base money by selling $100 billion in bonds in the open market.  This open market sale immediately reduces the base to $900 billion, and reduces reserves from $100 billion to zero.  (In reality they’d do this slowly, to avoid disrupting the banking system, but I’m only interested in the long run effect.) Black is right that banks can rebuild their reserves.  They can raise the interest rate they pay on bank deposits and thus induce cash holders to deposit their money into banks, where the cash is relabeled as “reserves”.  Indeed they could theoretically regain the entire $100 billion they had lost in the Fed’s open market sale.  But this is not what would happen.  Instead, banks would reclaim $90 billion in reserves, by attracting cash from the public. In the long run, this open market operation would cause all nominal aggregates to decline by 10%.  Once prices and NGDP fall by 10%, the public’s demand for cash falls from $900 billion to $810 billion, and the bank demand for reserves falls from $100 billion to $90 billion.  In this new equilibrium, nominal and real interest rates are unchanged, as is real money demand, velocity, the money multiplier, and all other real variables in the economy.  In that sense, money is neutral.  But it’s not neutral in the sense described by Tyler.  Money affects nominal variables such as inflation. Models that deny any impact from open market operations are implicitly assuming that the public is indifferent between holding cash and Treasury bonds (“nickels and dimes”).  But they are not indifferent.  Cash is a good way of hiding wealth and Treasury bonds pay interest.  Because they are very different assets, changing the quantity of cash (or more broadly base money) has the side effect of changing the value (purchasing power) of cash.  I.e. changing the price level. When interest rates are zero (or banks earn IOR), base money and bonds are somewhat more similar.  In that case, OMOs have a somewhat smaller impact.  But don’t forget that even when reserves earn interest, cash does not.   PS.  It’s been a long time since I’ve read Fischer Black.  So consider this post a response to Tyler’s Bloomberg column. PPS.  I have a new piece on constraining the role of the Fed over at Discourse. (0 COMMENTS)

To see nationalism and statism in action, look no further than the scandal of yesterday’s Olympics skating competition. Pushed in the Olympics and probably doped by her government’s agents, fifteen-year-old Kamila Valieva broke down, physically and psychologically, while failing to be the Russian flag carrier she was supposed to be (Sara Germano and Thomas Hale, “Olympics chief slams coach’s ‘chilling’ treatment of Russia’s Kamila Valieva,” Financial Times, February 18, 2022). National Olympic teams, typically financed by their national governments, do the later’s nationalist bidding by competing ruthlessly through nationalized athletes. Such competitions are of course, from the subjects’ or citizens’ viewpoints, much preferable to war and, for the national states, might be a substitute (abeit imperfect) for, rather than a complement to, armed conflict. So there are arguments for Olympic games. In this context, a few related hypotheses would be worth some public-choice investigations. One is that the most authoritarian states are, the worst child abusers. Since there is no place in the world where political power is strictly and effectively limited, child abuse by the state is a matter of degree. Another hypothesis is that child-abusing state rulers have political incentives to look like child protectors. Here is a tangential idea: raise the Olympic competing age to the age where the athletes are permitted to buy tobacco or vape pens. For nationalist and statist reasons (which are converging reasons), the state, in its most cartoonish versions (say, the Russian state), has no qualm about drugging children, provided it does it itself for reasons of international prestige and internal indoctrination. The most cartoonish versions of the state reveal phenomena that are milder and better hidden under other states. (0 COMMENTS)

Canada quickly turns totalitarian and at least Evan Solomon had the decency to challenge one of Canada’s leading totalitarians. Take a look at this interview of Canada’s Attorney General and Justice Minister David Lametti by a CTV reporter named Evan Solomon. Notice that he never answers the question that the CTV reporter, Evan, asked: What’s someone’s recourse if he thinks his bank account has been unfairly frozen? And for the really bone-chilling part, look at Lametti’s statement at about 3:40. The picture above is of David Lametti. (0 COMMENTS)

In a recent post, David Henderson contrasts the views of Neil Ferguson and Jay Bhattacharya: The first was Tyler’s praise early in the pandemic of “expert” modeler Neil Ferguson, and his related action, with his Emergent Ventures project, of sending a large check to Ferguson and Ferguson’s Imperial College team. If you check the link just above, you’ll see that Tyler thought, correctly, that Ferguson had a huge impact on the U.K. and U.S. governments’ responses to Covid. Because Tyler is so well respected, not just in the United States but also internationally, that large payment put the imprimatur on some very bad modeling. It was that modeling that led Boris Johnson and Donald Trump to recommend lockdowns, and Johnson and many U.S. governors to impose lockdowns. Would they have done that without Tyler’s support of Ferguson? Probably. But if Cowen had recognized how little we knew at first and taken more seriously the early seroprevalence studies, such as that done by Jay Bhattacharya, that showed that the infection fatality rate from Covid was a small fraction of the case fatality rate, and if Tyler had publicized that, there might have been more pushback early against the lockdowns. I have a different impression of the debate, one in which the pessimists were correct and the optimists were wildly off base.  David links to a post by Tyler Cowen, which itself links to this NYT story from March 16, 2020: Sweeping new federal recommendations announced on Monday for Americans to sharply limit their activities appeared to draw on a dire scientific report warning that, without action by the government and individuals to slow the spread of coronavirus and suppress new cases, 2.2 million people in the United States could die. . . . Dr. Birx’s description of the findings was consistent with those in the report, released on Monday by an epidemic modeling group at Imperial College London. The lead author of the study, Neil Ferguson, an epidemiology professor, said in an interview that his group had shared their projections with the White House task force about a week ago and that an early copy of the report was sent over the weekend. Two years later, it looks like Ferguson’s estimates were basically correct.  The official US Covid death toll is over 900,000 (although if unreported Covid deaths were included it would be well over a million dead.)  But that’s not what Ferguson was estimating.  Rather, his claim was that 2.2 million would die without precautions and without a vaccine.  That seems quite plausible.  No one died of Covid in the large retirement complex where my 95-year old mom lives in Arizona, whereas without social distancing and without a vaccine they would have experienced many Covid deaths as the virus quickly spread though our population.  Of course, that’s not to say all Covid avoidance strategies were wise; in my view many were unwise on a cost/benefit basis, and some were absurd.  But the pessimists were correct on the specific point that the death toll would be horrific if people didn’t try to avoid Covid until a vaccine came along.   Of course even the optimists favored protecting the very old, but how accurate were their estimates of the death rate for the rest of us?  Consider the views of Jay Bhattacharya, expressed in a Nov. 20, 2020 interview with Russ Roberts: First you find that there’s a very steep age gradient in the survival rate. People who are under 70–if now, there’s now there’s like 50-some of these studies–so you can criticize mine but now you got to go after 49 other people–if you’re under 70, the infection survival rate is something like 99.95%. 99.95%, for under 70. Bhattacharya had an extra 8 months to make a better estimate than Ferguson and instead made a ridiculous claim, unless I am misreading what he is saying.  He seems to be claiming that only 0.05% of people under 70 who get infected with Covid end up dying from the disease.  The actual figure is not known with precision. But given that roughly 0.10% of Americans under 70 (about 300,000) have already died of Covid, with thousands more dying every week, and given that this occurred despite widespread social distancing and despite widespread use of vaccines after 2020, I think we can assume that the actual infection fatality rate in an unvaccinated population would be at least 3 or 4 times higher than Bhattacharya suggested.  And again, he benefited from an extra 8 months of data beyond what Ferguson had to work with. PS.  If someone wants to say that Ferguson should have said, “without action by the government and/or individuals” instead of “without action by the government and individuals”, I would not disagree.  But again, David’s discussion is of infection fatality rates, and it seems Ferguson was pretty accurate on that point.  Bhattacharya was not. (0 COMMENTS)

The textbook notion of externalities is expansive.  Potentially totalitarian, in fact.  Suppose, for example, that you dislike seeing Bahais.  The very fact that you have these bigoted feelings instantly implies that Bahais “impose a negative externality” on you purely by appearing in your field of view. Indeed, an anti-Bahai zealot could dislike the very existence of Bahais.  If so, this implies that Bahais “impose a negative externality” merely by being in the world.  If you think this is an absurd overextension of the concept, the notion of “existence externalities” is already well-established in environmental econ.  If you despoil the natural beauty of Alaska with an oil pipeline, you don’t just impose negative externalities on those who see the pipeline.  You impose negative externalities on everyone who dislikes the idea of marring Alaska’s natural beauty. While the concept of externalities is potentially totalitarian, it need not be so in practice.  It all depends on how strongly human beings refuse to mind their own business.  Someone might say “I can’t stand Bahais,” yet be quite tolerant in practice.  Actions speak louder than words, as I keep insisting.  If a self-identified Bahai-hater willingly shops in a Bahai-owned store in order to save 2% on his grocery bill, we discover that his negative externality is actually minimal. In the past, I’ve invoked the “actions speak louder than words” maxim to dismiss a wide range of popular complaints.  If you really hated Los Angeles, you’d move to another city.  If you really hated the cultural effects of immigration, you’d move to a low-immigration area of the country.  Yes, a few people actually do move.  Perhaps the negative externalities they endure are as bad as they state.  Yet the rest of the complainers are clearly exaggerating. Suppose, however, that a person demonstrably pays a large premium to avoid Bahais.  The first month, he shells out $200 on Bahai-avoidance.  Even so, it is premature to declare that he’ll pay $2400 to avoid Bahais for a full year.  Why?  Because of hedonic adaptation; or in laymen’s terms, because people get used to stuff.  In the real world, that which initially horrifies you tends to gradually loses its sting.  So even if seeing Bahais inflicts a $200 negative externality the first month, that could easily fall to $100 by the third month, $50 by the sixth month, and $5 by the twelfth month. Hedonic adaptation is especially likely if the negative externality is inert, and almost certain if the negative externality is unobserved.  If Bahais actually do something bad to you day after day, you might resent them day after day.  If, however, the Bahais are just doing their own thing, even an anti-Bahai bigot will struggle to maintain his ire as he walks past.  And if the anti-Bahai bigot doesn’t personally encounter any Bahais, maintaining his outrage at their very existence is nigh-impossible.   Out of sight, out of mind. Real-world example: When I was young, many people vocally expressed antipathy for gays.  In fact, people presumed that everyone who wasn’t gay would share their antipathy.  In this social environment, coming out of the closet created negative externalities.  As more and more people came out of the closet, however, the strength of the antipathy eroded.  People gradually got used to being around gays.  As a result, the negative externality gradually went away. Nowadays, I bet that even self-conscious homophobes feel less aversion to gays than the average person in 1982.  When you encounter gays all the time, you get accustomed to them – and the antipathy evaporates.  The last forty years effectively gave the country’s homophobes a heavy dose of exposure therapy.  As usual, the exposure therapy worked. Does this mean that we can ignore all negative externalities because we’ll “just get used to them”?  No, that’s too strong.  What it means is that before taking expensive (and intrusive!) efforts to mitigate externalities, we can and should ask, “Is this the kind of externality people will get used to if we do nothing?” (0 COMMENTS)

In an article titled “The expert bias toward Covid catastrophe has been exposed,” The Telegraph, February 15, 2022, economist Ryan Bourne of the Cato Institute writes, as the title suggests, about the many expert failures during the Covid pandemic. He has a very good quote from Tyler Cowen. Bourne writes: Specialist expert failure these past two years has been pervasive, whether in epidemiological modelling or macroeconomics. In fact, “the people who reasoned best across multiple domains, and made a lot of the right calls, were often generalists with significant experience talking to both political decision-makers and the educated general public,” says American public intellectual Tyler Cowen. Bourne is right about the huge failures in epidemiological modeling. One of the worst failures was Neil Ferguson’s Imperial College model, a model that Phil Magness has effectively critiqued elsewhere. I think Tyler’s right that some generalists have done better. But there’s something missing here in Bourne’s treatment. It leaves out two roles that Tyler Cowen played during the pandemic–roles that both seemed to indicate Tyler’s own reliance on narrow experts and his own unwillingness to reason across multiple domains. The first was Tyler’s praise early in the pandemic of “expert” modeler Neil Ferguson, and his related action, with his Emergent Ventures project, of sending a large check to Ferguson and Ferguson’s Imperial College team. If you check the link just above, you’ll see that Tyler thought, correctly, that Ferguson had a huge impact on the U.K. and U.S. governments’ responses to Covid. Because Tyler is so well respected, not just in the United States but also internationally, that large payment put the imprimatur on some very bad modeling. It was that modeling that led Boris Johnson and Donald Trump to recommend lockdowns, and Johnson and many U.S. governors to impose lockdowns. Would they have done that without Tyler’s support of Ferguson? Probably. But if Cowen had recognized how little we knew at first and taken more seriously the early seroprevalence studies, such as that done by Jay Bhattacharya, that showed that the infection fatality rate from Covid was a small fraction of the case fatality rate, and if Tyler had publicized that, there might have been more pushback early against the lockdowns. The second role was Tyler’s attack on the Great Barrington Declaration. The GBD was the ultimate in, if only tersely, “reasoning across multiple domains.” I criticized Tyler on his negative reaction to the GBD (here and here), In a later interview on EconTalk with Russ Roberts, he doubled down, arguing that it couldn’t be any good because it was done at the American Institute for Economic Research, at which place Jeffrey Tucker was an employee. Tyler’s crude guilt by association argument is not even an example of reasoning across one domain, namely that of logical reasoning. It’s true that Ryan did not say that Tyler did a good job. He left that issue unaddressed. But if he had wanted to give examples of people who, on the Covid issue, did work across multiple domains and recognized tradeoffs, four of the best candidates are economists Phil Magness and Don Boudreaux, and Doctors Jay Bhattacharya and Scott W. Atlas. (0 COMMENTS)