What’s the big deal about masks?  In exchange for slight inconvenience and discomfort, we save lives.  Basic human selfishness explains why many would fail to comply.  Anti-authoritarian scruples might lead some to oppose government mask mandates.  But how could anyone sincerely disagree with the principle that wearing masks is a good thing? The obvious place to start is: Almost no one thought that wearing masks was a good thing before Covid-19.  Yet contagious respiratory diseases that kill have been around longer than humans.  So if the “In exchange for slight inconvenience and discomfort, we save lives,” argument were airtight, we should have been wearing masks all along – and should plan on doing so forever.  Which seems crazy. You could reply, “That’s a straw man.  The real argument is that masks pass a cost-benefit test.”  If so, that leaves anti-maskers with two obvious margins to think about. 1. The degree of effectiveness.  The most popular version of this objection is that masks don’t save lives.  But once you start doing cost-benefit analysis, it is sufficient to claim that masks don’t save enough lives.  The evidence from Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) is surprisingly supportive of this position.  (And if you deem the RCTs subpar, please join me in calling for large-scale Voluntary Human Experimentation to settle the question once and for all).  Ultimately, however, I still suspect that masks reduce contagion by 10-15%. 2. The degree of inconvenience and discomfort. Many people plainly don’t much mind wearing a mask.  But despite Social Desirability Bias against convenience and comfort, plenty of others plainly do mind.  Since we’re doing cost-benefit analysis, the key question is: How bad is mask-wearing for the average person? Nothing good googled, so I ran this Twitter poll. Holding duration equal, wearing a face mask is X times as uncomfortable as wearing a seat belt. X is… — Bryan Caplan (@bryan_caplan) February 5, 2021 Millions of people bet their lives every day to avoid the discomfort of wearing a seatbelt, yet the median respondent considers masks far more uncomfortable.  Furthermore, note the long right tail of people who find masks massively worse than seatbelts. The upshot is that we are not talking about saving hundreds of thousands of lives per year by making the average person 1% worse off.  We are talking about saving tens of thousands of lives per year by making a quarter of the population miserable.   On reflection, however, this simple analysis overlooks a major factor.  A veritable elephant in the room.  Namely: 3. The degree of dehumanization. Personally, I only find masks marginally uncomfortable.  But I hate wearing them, and I dislike being around people who wear them.  Why?  Because a big part of being human is showing other people our faces – and seeing their faces in return.  Smiling at a stranger.  Seeing your child laugh.  Pretending to be angry.  Seeing another person’s puzzlement.  Masks take most of those experiences away.  At the same time, they moderately reduce audibility.  Which further dehumanizes us.  How many times during Covid have you struggled to understand another person?  To be heard?  Indeed, how many times have you simply abandoned a conversation because of masks?  I say the dehumanization is at least five times as bad as the mere discomfort.  And if you reply, “Want to see other people’s faces and hear other people’s voices?  Just Zoom!,”  I will shake my head in sorrow that you’re dehumanized enough to say such a thing. Am I just being a big baby about this?  I think not.  Suppose humanity could eliminate all disease by wearing bags over our heads forever.  Would you be willing to go through life not seeing the faces of your children?  Would you want your child to go through life not seeing the faces of their friends?  Well, during Covid we’ve moved at least 25% in that dystopian direction.  The word “hellscape” is not out of place.  I’ve never been a fan of the veiling of women, but I had to live through Covid to realize how horribly dehumanizing the custom really is.   What if the choice was between masks and a 50% annual chance of death?  The reasonable reaction would probably be, “Fine, we’ll be severely dehumanized, but we’ll survive.  Just like war.  I guess I’ll take it until a better deal comes along.”  When the choice is between masks and a 0.5% annual death of death, however, the reasonable reaction is rather, “I’ll take my chances and live like a human being.”  Indeed, once you’re old enough, even a 50% annual chance of death starts to look like a good deal.  My considered judgment: If another Covid strikes when I’m 80, I do not want my grandchildren to wear masks around me.  I want to enjoy their laughter while I still can. P.S. I’m curious to see if social media’s “independent fact checkers” flag any of this.  I suppose they might point to this study showing that masks don’t dehumanize, but if you read the piece you’ll see that it deliberately ignores everything I’m talking about. (1 COMMENTS)

A network of “hundreds of thousands” of people, including analysts, are using satellite imagery and other tools to help Afghan interpreters who worked for U.S. forces to evade Taliban checkpoints in Kabul and bring them to the safety of the airport. The network’s efforts are necessary because the Biden administration is offering little assistance to the 20,000 interpreters and their families who are at great risk every second they remain in Afghanistan. This is from Rick Moran, “Digital Dunkirk: Veterans Network Helps Afghan Interpreters Get to Kabul Airport,” pjmedia, August 22, 2021. Fascinating throughout, but the quote above is the best part. Very Hayekian in spirit: Decentralized people using a combination of decentralized and centralized information. If you’re wondering what I mean, read Friedrich Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” American Economic Review, September 1945.   (0 COMMENTS)

Art Carden has a quick but dense reading list of five books you should read to prepare for the next pandemic. (Well, I hope this isn’t a more-than-one-in-a-generation challenge, but read them anyway). The list is interesting and focuses on the limits of expert knowledge, which seems to be Art’s main takeaway from this year and a half of Covid-19. I would add two other themes I consider worth of consideration, and thus exploring through books: 1) I think one thing which was often missed in the debate was the extent to which the pandemic is a _Darwinian_ event. Experts’ reasoning and models were often flawed, not only because experts were hubristic, but because they were deterministic. They reduced the pandemic situation to a certain number of parameters, some of them scrupulously monitored, and provided speculation based upon them. Certainly experts responded to incentives: for example, they were incentivized to produce very dramatic projections, as it is way better to be proven wrong on the date of the end of the world (the people will be relieved it didn’t happen and won’t mind) than to miss it. But I think an important takeaway is that lethality and the growth rate of the contagion can’t be taken as a given, as they depend on the environment it is taking place in and can adapt and adjust in different circumstances. 2) Another important takeaway was how ill equipped we are to deal with a situation of danger, like the pandemic was and is, properly considering all the options and in particular, our immense luck in living in a prosperous and scientifically advanced society. We were very eager to consider freedom as a part of a trade off with security: to be safer from contagion, we were relatively happy to do away with a bunch of personal freedoms. This has something to do with our ingrained instincts and our inability to fully cope with an extended order, or a free society, which is very counterintuitive to us at any time but perhaps even more so in a situation in which we perceive danger. And yet, what worked best in this year was one quintessential feature of a complex society based on free markets: the pharmaceutical industry, which quickly developed a wide array of vaccines. So perhaps I’d add to Art’s list Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species and F. A. Hayek’s The Fatal Conceit, where he addressed some of this problem with great clarity (0 COMMENTS)

Law professors Michael Heller and James Salzman talk about their book, Mine! with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Heller and Salzman argue that ownership is trickier and more complicated than it looks. While we tend to think of something as either mine or not mine, there’s often ambiguity and a continuum about who owns what. Salzman and Heller explore a wide and surprising range of property rights from everyday life. The conversation includes a discussion of the insights of Ronald Coase on the assignment of property rights when rights conflict. (0 COMMENTS)

Law professors Michael Heller and James Salzman talk about their book, Mine! with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Heller and Salzman argue that ownership is trickier and more complicated than it looks. While we tend to think of something as either mine or not mine, there’s often ambiguity and a continuum about who owns what. Salzman […] The post Michael Heller and James Salzman on Mine! appeared first on Econlib.

The incipit of an article by Danielle Pletka of the Competitive Enterprise Institute on the Afghan debacle (“Having Won, We Chose to Lose” (Wall Street Journal, August 21, 2021) reads: We Americans like to deceive ourselves. The meaning of this is obscure. Does it mean that we lie to ourselves and we believe it? But what would be the lesson? That we should not believe ourselves when we lie to ourselves? The article conclusion repeats: … once we won, we chose to lose. Many economists and political scientists must wonder who is that “we” (and what he or she eats in the winter). It is true that in a state built on a social contract à la James Buchanan, the government is both “us” and “non-us,” which can easily muddle the water. In a deep sense, the state is us only at an abstract “contractual stage,” where general (constitutional) rules are established; while the current government is non-us with hopefully 50%+1 of us. In a shallow sense, it is the opposite: the state is non-us as it enforces, even against temporary majorities, the general constitutional rules unanimously agreed to; while the current government is us because we elected it in the forms prescribed by the constitution. This tension, if not the contradiction, between us and non-us may be inherent in Buchanan’s contractarian view of the classical-liberal state. (In Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s totalitarian view of contractarianism, the state is always us when each of us ignores his own personal interest in favor of the “general will.”) Under a state à la David Hume, which is not conceived as the result of a unanimous social contract but instead as a product of history and conventions, neither the state nor the current government is conceived as us. They are always “they.” Going a bit farther than Hume, they are just another organization, sometimes useful, often dangerous. One might think that this approach is more conducive to controlling Leviathan through denying it collective legitimacy, but European history (and a fortiori non-European history) does not seem to concur: Leviathans have generally been worse in Europe than in America. In any event, it is methodologically and politically prudent, when speaking about the US government, to say “the U.S. government,” not “the US” or “we.” And in the case under discussion, here is a minimum conclusion: “we” did not wage and lose the war in Afghanistan because it is not clear who is we. (0 COMMENTS)

Ryan Avent recently made a very astute comment: In my new book (of which I just received a copy), I argue that when considering demand shocks to the economy we should think of causation in terms of policy counterfactuals.  Thus if the lowest cost way of preventing the Great Recession would have been to set monetary policy in a different (more expansionary) position, then it makes sense to argue that tight money caused the Great Recession.  As an analogy, if a bus driver could have avoided going off a cliff by setting the steering wheel at a different position, then it makes sense to argue that inept steering by the bus driver caused the accident (not a turn in the road). (0 COMMENTS)

I recently saw an ad on the internet that caught my eye.  The product was a sleep aid, described as a treatment for snoring that allows for a more restful sleep: This got my attention for several reasons.  First, the detailed description in the ad sounds almost identical to a product that I own.  It physically moves your lower jaw forward when you sleep, making it easier to breathe  However, my device is aimed at addressing sleep apnea, whereas this ad doesn’t even mention any benefit in reducing sleep apnea.  Second, my device costs thousands of dollars, whereas this item is priced at $65. [Disclaimer: I know nothing about the effectiveness of this device, and thus don’t take this post as a recommendation.] Here’s a question for people that know more about this than I do.  Is it possible that this company is not allowed to advertise the device as treatment for sleep apnea?  The first amendment guarantees freedom of speech, but for reasons that I’ve never understood the courts exempt commercial speech from that protection. (0 COMMENTS)

Surprisingly, yes, at least for this group of U Mass Amherst students. We find no discernible effect of studying economics (whatever the course content) on self-interest or beliefs about others’ self-interest. Results on policy preferences also point to little effect, except that economics may make students somewhat less opposed to highly restrictive immigration policies. This is from the abstract of Daniele Girard, Sai Madhurika Mamunuru, Simon D. Halliday, and Samuel Bowles, “Does economics make you selfish?” Notice that I’m not focusing on the authors’ main findings, which have to do with the students’ behavior in various economic games. Instead, I’m focusing on the effect of taking economics on students’ positions on economic policy. Here is the particular statement about immigration that students were asked to respond to: Immigrants from other countries should be prohibited except where it can be shown that they will contribute to the quality of life of the current resident population. I’m focusing this way for two reasons. First, I find the issue of the effect on students’ policy positions more interesting. And in this case, unfortunately, depressing. Second, some of the ways the authors test the effect of taking economics on students’ generosity are flawed in a way that Steven Landsburg has pointed out (and also here): you can’t measure people’s generosity by their willingness to give away other people’s money.   (0 COMMENTS)

I just got back from a month in the UK, working for the John Locke Institute‘s two summer schools.  The morning before I left, I delivered my talk on “The Economics of Antipathy and Stereotyping.” In the subsequent Q&A, one of the students asked (roughly), “But shouldn’t we try to rectify past injustices that caused present-day differences in worker productivity?”  Since I wasn’t satisfied with my answer at the time, here are the three key points I wish I’d made.  Hopefully my John Locke students can read this before the summer school ends tomorrow. 1. Against collective guilt.  Consider the following thought experiment.  Group B holds Group A in bondage for centuries.  Then Group B finally emancipates Group A.  Group A leaves the area, and a plague wipes out all of the members of Group B.  Eventually, Group A encounters a totally new people, Group C.  The members of Group A then say, “For centuries, the members of Group Non-A oppressed members of Group A.  As a result, members of Group Non-A have a moral obligation to rectify the past injustices that continue to impede our economic success.  You are therefore morally obliged to both (a) give us preferential treatment in the labor market to ensure equal outcomes, and (b) create social programs to help us until A’s attain equal outcomes without preferential treatment.” The obvious objection, of course, is that the injustices were committed by Group B, not Group C.  As a result, Group C has no moral obligation to rectify anything.  Indeed, Group A is unjust to lump them in with Group B. Extending the thought experiment, imagine that many members of Group B escape the plague, then integrate so thoroughly into Group C that there is no practical way to distinguish the B’s from C’s.  Would that change anything?  Not much.  The obvious objection then becomes, “Many members of Group C are entirely innocent, yet you are demanding ‘rectification’ from innocent and guilty alike.” What is the connection between these thought experiments and the student’s original question?  To take the most egregious case, American blacks were once enslaved.  Perhaps this explains much of their continuing performance gap.  Unfortunately, to rectify this past injustice, we have to punish all non-blacks.  None now alive ever owned slaves.  Many are not even descended from former slave owners.  Even if they were, simply being a child of a slave-owner is not an injustice”  So the demand for rectification is tantamount to Group A making demands on Group C for the injustices of Group B.  And once again, not only is Group C not morally obliged to comply; Group A is morally wrong to make such demands. 2. Against moral distraction.  Popular demands for the rectification of past injustices are a grave distraction in a world where extreme injustices are ongoing.  And as I told my students repeatedly, there is an ongoing extreme injustice in even the most morally self-satisfied countries: The denial of people’s right to live and work where they please on account of their nation of birth.  “Social justice” advocates who have time to worry about affirmative action in a world with draconian immigration restrictions really are straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel.  Just think how much freer immigration would be today if all the First World’s “anti-racist” and “anti-sexist” moral energy had been redirected towards the protection of every human’s right to live and work where he likes. 3. What about private organizations?  If I recall correctly, the student specifically asked about Harvard admissions.  My view: As a private organization, Harvard has the right to spend its own resources on behalf of mistaken moral theories.  Still, Harvard ought to (a) refrain from making false accusations of collective guilt, and (b) focus their resources on the most severe injustices, instead of the most fashionable.  Furthermore, it is reasonable to deny government subsidies to organizations like Harvard that habitually spend taxpayer money for unjust causes. Followup question: Is it really true that modern “anti-racists” and “anti-sexists” believe in collective guilt?  For the most part, yes.  At minimum, they’re engaged in a provocative equivocation, and hence have only themselves to blame if they’re misunderstood. (0 COMMENTS)