Out of the 120 million people vaccinated in the U.S., roughly 6.9 million have received J&J’s vaccine, Fauci said, noting that there haven’t been any “red flag signals” from the Pfizer or Moderna Covid-19 vaccines that rely on MRNA technology in their shots. Out of the 6.9 million people who got the J&J jab, six developed blood clots, he said. “We are totally aware that this is a rare event. We want to get this worked out as quickly as we possibly can and that’s why you see the world pause, in other words, you want to hold off for a bit,” Fauci said. “We want to leave that up to the FDA and the CDC to investigate this carefully. I don’t think it was pulling the trigger too quickly.” This is from Berkeley Lovelace, Jr., “Dr. Anthony Fauci explains what the U.S. pause on J&J’s Covid vaccine means,” CNBC, April 13, 2021. I’ll give you the short answer for what it means: it means more people will die of COVID-19 unnecessarily. Life is about tradeoffs. The data suggest that if 1 million people get the J&J vaccine, one will get a blood clot and will not necessarily die. We have ways of dealing with blood clots. Dr. Fauci may be familiar with them, although I’m starting to wonder. So pause the vaccine for 1 million people and you might save a fraction of one life, which you could probably have saved with medications. But say the people going without the vaccine are even in the medium-risk group, where their probability of dying if they get Covid is about 1 in 1000. Let’s say that even 100,000 of them would have gotten Covid-19. Then this pause would kill 10 people. Pause the vaccine for 10 million people and the saved lives are probably between 1 and 2, whereas the lost lives are about 100. Is Fauci that ignorant? You might say that he’s a paternalist. But even parents typically want their kids to live, not die.   (0 COMMENTS)

If you’re like me, it seems surreal that we entered the pandemic over one year ago.  One year ago, we were scared and uncertain. Today, many of us are starting to re-emerge. What did we learn from this experience? Are there any silver linings? What of the vagary of predictions put forth early in the pandemic? How many have been accurate? In this episode, EconTalk host Russ Roberts welcomes back Tyler Cowen, and the two revisit the topic of the pandemic almost exactly one year since their first COVID conversation. The two assess their predictions and revisit their concerns from that earlier episode, with some surprising results. And now we want to hear what you think and what you’ve learned from your pandemic experience. Use the prompts below to answer in the comments, or start your own conversation offline. As always, thanks for listening; we love to hear from you.     1- Cowen says the most important lesson of last year: the “speed premium.” What does he mean by this? Where has the “speed premium” been more effective, and where less so?   2- Cowen spend a fair amount of time discussing the Great Barrington Declaration. What are the points on which they disagree, and why? To what extent do you agree with Cowen’s statement, “when you look at the overall entire framing of Great Barrington, it’s been extremely harmful. It has led libertarian and conservative movements in the wrong direction”? (P.S. You may wish to revisit this episode with one of the original signatories, Jay Bhattacharya.)   3- How does Cowen compare the fiscal responses of the Trump and Biden administrations? How would you answer Roberts’s question regarding the story Keynesians have to tell in retrospect? (Hint: consider what happened to aggregate demand during lockdown.)   4- What lessons can we learn about European political economy post-COVID? What does Cowen mean when he says the most dangerous thing about lockdowns is that they encourage radicalism? To what extent do you agree?   5- Roberts asks Cowen about the unseen costs of the pandemic. How does Cowen answer? What do you think are the greatest unseen costs? (0 COMMENTS)

Suppose you could either save one 10-year-old, or X 80-year-olds.  What value of X is morally indifferent? That is, if you wanted to make the world as morally valuable as possible, when should you switch from saving one youth to X elders? I suspect that people’s modal answer will be 1.  Not the median, and certainly not the mean.  But probably the mode. Why would X=1 be such a popular answer?  Charitably, people set X=1 because they sincerely believe that all lives have equal value. In all honesty, though, I’ve yet to meet a person who merits this charity.  No one responds to the deaths of 10-year-olds and 80-year-olds with remotely equal concern.  Setting X=1 is one of the clearest-cut examples of Social Desirability Bias I’ve encountered.  The lives of the young are plainly much more valuable than the lives of the old, for three reasons. 1. When the young die, they lose far more years of life. 2. When the young die, they are far more likely to lose healthy years of life. 3. When the young die, the people who survive them miss them much more – and miss them for a much longer time.   All things considered, I’d say that a reasonable value of X is at least 100.  Probably more like 1,000. I suspect that many readers will strongly object to this, but on what basis? Point 1 is clearly a big deal.  A 10-year-old can be expected to live another 69 years, an 80-year-old just 9 more years. Point 2 is also clearly important.  Self-reported health dramatically declines with age.  And people clearly grade their health on an age-based curve.  An 80-year-olds’ version of “good health” is probably what an 18-year-old calls “poor health.” What about Point 3?  Despite angry denials, this disparity is enormous – just as Darwin would predict.  The loss of a child is devastating.  Many parents who lose a child never emotionally recover.  In contrast, most people get over the loss of an elderly parent in weeks – or days.  Indeed, to be brutally honest, a notable minority of people actually feel better when an elderly parent dies.  Never mind ungrateful children slobbering for their inheritances.  A model child can still be relieved by the death of a parent living in pain, no longer able to enjoy life.  Or a parent whose dementia has robbed them of their sense of self. Why are people so reluctant to admit these truisms?  In part, because they fear the bodyguards of Social Desirability Bias.  Once you admit the obvious fact that the lives of the elderly are worth much less than the lives of the young, they’ll absurdly claim you favor murdering the elderly.  Once you admit the obvious fact that people miss the elderly less than the young, they’ll absurdly claim that you don’t care if anyone over 50 drops dead.  Whatever.  A strict consequentialist will draw no fundamental distinction between killing and letting die.  The rest of us, however, know that it is wrong to murder the miserable – but praiseworthy to get the most bang for your buck when you’re selecting charities.  Or spending taxpayer money. Another reason people are so reluctant to admit that the lives of the young are worth far more than the lives of the old, though, is pride.  I just turned 50.  Does this mean my life is worth much less than it did when I was 20?  Hemming and hawing aside, the honest answer is yes.  I’ve burned up at least 75% of the value of my life already.  While I plan to savor my last 25%, do me a favor: If you ever have to choose between saving me and saving one of my children, save them. Indeed, if you ever have to choose between saving me for sure, and saving one of my children with 10% probability, save them.   (2 COMMENTS)

Back in the 1970s, the federal government began requiring environmental impact statements for certain types of projects. In retrospect, this was probably a mistake. The Tejon Ranch development provides a good example of what can go wrong. Here’s an article from 2008: “How heartening it is, the sound of environmentalists and developers harmoniously agreeing on new construction. That’s what first came to mind when the Tejon Ranch Co. and such environmental heavyweights as the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council jointly announced plans to both build on and preserve swaths of the 270,000-acre ranch that straddles Los Angeles and Kern counties. If all goes as intended, more than 200,000 acres would be preserved, with some as a state park and most under private conservancy.” Sounds great.  Developers and environmentalists agree on a massive new development that will provide much needed homes for California residents.  But it took another 10 years for the local government to actually approve the project. This is from 2018: The Los Angeles County Regional Planning Commission recommended approval of the proposed Centennial development, which would build 19,000 homes on Tejon Ranch at the northern edge of the county. “The Regional Planning Commission voted 4 to 1 to recommend that the county Board of Supervisors certify the project’s environmental impact report and approve associated land-use plans and permits, subject to some additional conditions,” reports Nina Agrawal. The project still has to go before the county Board of Supervisors for approval. You might think that all’s well that ends well.  Finally, we have agreement from developers, environmentalists and government officials.  Unfortunately, no project is safe from lawyers. This is from a few days ago: Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Mitchell Beckloff rejected the environmental impact report (EIR) for the massive Centennial project planned for northern Los Angeles County, one of the most controversial and closely watched master planning developments in Southern California in recent memory. Louis Sahagun reports on the latest twist in the long saga of the Centennial project, a proposal approved by the county of Los Angeles to allow Tejon Ranch Co. to build 19,300 homes on 6,700 acres on the border with Kern County to the north. Meanwhile, California has by far the nation’s largest homeless population, more than twice its share of the US population. In an ideal world, the government would repeal the laws that allow the courts to interfere in the construction of new developments. There’s a lot of recent talk about spending trillions of dollars on new “infrastructure”.  Much of this money is likely to be wasted, however, as regulatory hurdles make it almost impossible to build useful infrastructure in a cost effective manner.  If the Biden administration is serious about infrastructure, they will enact policy reforms to dramatically reduce the cost of building new projects.  Today, many infrastructure projects in America cost many times more than what they would cost in a truly deregulated environment.  One place to begin is by removing the need for environmental impact statements.   (0 COMMENTS)

As a non-American, I hear confusing news on the status of the American right at the moment. In particular, I have problems understanding whether the influence of President Trump is over after the Capitol Hill revolt of early January. On the contrary, are Republicans unable to free themselves from his spell- perhaps, only at the very high price of giving birth to a third party? Perhaps it is too soon to say: after all, Trump left the Oval Office only four months ago. What is pretty clear is that the Biden administration has deployed bigger guns than perhaps people expected. It is, in a sense, quite surprising. From this side of the pond, the understanding of Biden was that he would have been a more cautious president than the American left dreamt of in economic matters, while moving more left on so-called “cultural battle”. We expected a “traditional” Democrat, perhaps with a Clintonite flavor, who would have talked a bit more like AOC. It seems things are going differently. In his latest Dispatch, Jonah Goldberg writes that “Biden has overshot LBJ’s legacy and gone straight for FDR instead”. Incidentally, that piece by Goldberg provides a splendid, succinct vision of what the New Deal really was: both a sophisticated philosophical enterprise and an adhocracy calling for “more money” no matter what. (aiming “to replace mere government by erecting a State. It was to supplant what Wilson decried as the “dumb clockworks” organization of government with a Darwinian vision of all parts of the body politic working together”) Writes Goldberg: Joe Biden’s trillion-here, trillion-there approach is as ad hoc as FDR’s in many ways. You look at some of the outlays in his proposals—a hundred billion for this, a hundred billion for that—and it becomes clear that the important thing is just to spend a hundred billion, or $2.4 trillion; what the money actually goes to is an afterthought. What matters here is the size. We know that the government grows in crises: not only in size but also in scope. The pandemic opened the door to an astonishing growth in government, sometimes with measures which were supposed to be temporary but, as many temporary measures of the past, may be here to stay. The idea that the pandemic “changed everything” is so commonly accepted within the chattering classes that the debate over the Biden stimulus has been amazingly small, given its size. Some economists were skeptical and critical (read David Henderson on the stimulus here , for example) but it seems to me that most commentators are missing the magnitude, and the consequences, of what is happening. In part, I suppose this is the result of “Trump fatigue”: for years anything coming out of the White House seemed “tremendous” and “great” and “terrific” and, in his opponents’ eyes, “out of control”. Hence Biden can benefit a great deal from being different from his more colorful predecessor, and perhaps get a pass on most things he does. In part, the whole political spectrum has shifted in a more interventionist direction. It is debatable if Republicans were really a beacon of small deficits and free trade before Trump, but at least they pretended to be and words matter a lot in politics. Can a different vision be articulated, in order to regain ground to small government conservatism? The best attempt I have read so far is this long op-ed by Robert Doar, the President of the American Enterprise Institute. Writes Doar: The early years of Trump’s term, when growth was solid and foreign enemies deterred, provided a rare window of opportunity to address America’s more complex and long-term problems. This opportunity was squandered. By failing to pursue overdue reforms to America’s entitlement programs, infrastructure, or immigration system, advocates of limited government missed their best chance to secure conservative-steered compromises that could withstand successive Democratic administrations. Instead, we are now experiencing a blitz of Keynesian remedies to problems that don’t require radical solutions. Before the pandemic struck, Americans’ wages were rising at the fastest pace in decades, especially for those toward the bottom of the income ladder. Now as the pandemic is set to recede, the strong economy of 2019 could roar back. But the excessive spending has raised the risk of a surge in inflation, a specter even the left-leaning economist Larry Summers has cautioned against. Rising inflation might end up being the least of our worries. The danger of big government is not bigness per se, but the further risks bigness entails, to both individual liberties and the economy more broadly. Doar’s piece is an example of thoughtful conservatism. Is there a market for that, in today’s politics? Anyway, read the whole thing. (0 COMMENTS)

“Anything is small if you divide it by GDP.”  I’ve been quoting this line for decades, usually to point out exceptions like the gains of deregulating immigration and housing.  But who, if anyone, actually said it?  I recently decided to email Theodore Keeler, the Berkeley economist who (I believe) first shared the aphorism with me. Hi Ted, I took IO with you about 30 years ago!  I hope all is well with you. Question: There’s a quote you told us that I’m having trouble placing.  If memory serves, you told us that after seeing Harberger’s low estimates of the deadweight loss of monopoly, Samuelson said something like, “Anything is small if you divide it by GNP.” Ring a bell? Thanks either way. Here’s Keeler’s initial response: Hi Bryan, It’s good to hear from you!  I certainly remember the quote, but getting the source is more difficult.  I’m going to describe my process of reading the quote in hopes that you could retrace the steps and find it. As I probe my memory, I believe I remember reading an interchange at a conference, maybe an AEA session, from long ago, maybe the late 50’s or early ’60’s.  It may be a collected volume other than a journal; I can’t remember that for sure.  It can’t be after 1967 or 1968 that I read it, because it was early on in my time in grad school at MIT.  I believe it was indeed a session about Harberger’s estimates of the welfare loss from monopoly (there’s a small chance the loss analysis was from a follower of Harberger, but I doubt it). I may have things mixed up here, but I believe another discussant was Dale Jorgenson, who was born in 1933, so he got his Ph. D. about 1959, and it seems unlikely to be before that.  Jorgenson had some technical objections to Harberger’s work that Samuelson thought to be naive.  He said something like “I’ll defend Harberger against Jorgenson’s quaint objections,” and I believe it was he who went on to note the quote above about GNP, and also to note that the rectangle of redistribution was much greater than the triangle of welfare loss, and might in itself be worth considering (but that’s a distinctly non-Chicago view of course, so not so much of interest to Harberger). I wish I could come up with a more definite citation, but maybe these fragments of recollection can help.  I’m doing well.  I’ve been retired for quite a few years, though I continued to do research for some years after I stopped teaching.  At age 76, I’m enjoying full retirement now. Again, it’s good to hear from you.  I hope my random recollections can help you, and wish you well in your research.  Please let me know if you have a follow-up question that I might possibly remember enough to answer. With best wishes, Ted Keeler He soon added: Hi Bryan, I looked a little more into this, and I may have more information that could be helpful.  Specifically, page 28 of the following NBER pdf: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w6852/w6852.pdf shows three references to the AER May issue that contain Harberger’s presentations and discussions of his model and results.  They are the May issues for 1954, 1959, and 1964; page numbers are shown in the reference.  I don’t believe the discussions were in 1954, so it’s probably the 1959 or 1964 issues that contain the discussion.  Back in those days, the published AEA sessions in the AER included comments by the discussants, so I think you might be able to find them there. I also believe that Samuelson, in his graduate theory lectures, mentioned a facetious “Harberger’s Law,” which states that if you divide anything by GNP, the fraction will be very small.  I couldn’t find “Harberger’s Law” by a superficial Google search, but it could be possible. Anyway, that’s what I can find.  It’s okay to quote me in your blog, but, if I were you, I might check the AEA sessions on the pages listed if it weren’t too difficult.  If you do quote me in your blog, please note that these are memories of mine from over 50 years ago, so I fear I can’t vouch for their veracity. With best wishes, Ted Keeler I followed up on Keeler’s remarks by googling “Harberger’s Law”  – and found a pile of McCloskey references to a slightly different point: Any economist of experience knows this. It’s enshrined in Chicago tradition as Harberger’s Law. If trade is 10 percent of national income and free trade improves the terms of trade 20 percent, then (multiplying a fraction by a fraction) the rigorously derived gain to national income is… 2 percent. That’s once-for-all, not cumulatively year-upon-year. And for now, that’s all I know.  If you’ve got any further insight, please share in the comments. (0 COMMENTS)

Psychologist Emiliana Simon-Thomas of the University of California, Berkeley talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the science of happiness–what research can teach us about happiness. The post Emiliana Simon-Thomas on Happiness appeared first on Econlib.

Psychologist Emiliana Simon-Thomas of the University of California, Berkeley talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the science of happiness–what research can teach us about happiness. The post Emiliana Simon-Thomas on Happiness appeared first on Econlib.

Psychologist Emiliana Simon-Thomas of the University of California, Berkeley talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the science of happiness–what research can teach us about happiness. The post Emiliana Simon-Thomas on Happiness appeared first on Econlib.

    Amazon warehouse workers in Alabama will not be forming a union. The vast majority of votes cast by Amazon’s workers in Bessemer, Ala., were against joining the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union in a stinging defeat of the union drive. The final tally showed 1,798 votes against unionizing and 738 votes in favor of the union. This is from a news story from National Public Radio. The piece, by Alina Selyukh, is “It’s a No: Amazon Warehouse Workers Vote Against Unionizing in Historic Election,” NPR, April 9, 2021. One nice thing about the  news story is how objective it was. She gave both the union’s side, Amazon’s side, and, to some extent, the side of workers who didn’t want a union. The lopsided vote, with 71% of those who voted saying no, suggests that they don’t see themselves gaining from having a union. Here’s a quote from an Amazon statement after the election: It’s easy to predict the union will say that Amazon won this election because we intimidated employees, but that’s not true. Our employees heard far more anti-Amazon messages from the union, policymakers, and media outlets than they heard from us. And Amazon didn’t win—our employees made the choice to vote against joining a union. Our employees are the heart and soul of Amazon, and we’ve always worked hard to listen to them, take their feedback, make continuous improvements, and invest heavily to offer great pay and benefits in a safe and inclusive workplace. We’re not perfect, but we’re proud of our team and what we offer, and will keep working to get better every day. Actually, Amazon did win, but so, probably, did the majority of the employees who voted no. Here’s an interesting nugget from Sebastian Herrera, “Amazon Workers in Alabama Vote Against Forming a Union,” Wall Street Journal, April 9, 2021: “A lot of us are in agreement that we don’t need anybody there to speak for us and take our money,” said Cori Jennings, 40 years old, who works there and voted against unionizing. Ms. Jennings, who talked to The Wall Street Journal before the results were final, said she and many of her colleagues were also eager for the national attention to fade: “We want our lives to go back to normal.” For more, see what I said about the issues in that election last month.   (1 COMMENTS)