Last week, April Glaser, a journalist at NBC News, contacted me for a story on the unionization effort at Amazon in Bessemer, Alabama. She wrote: Is this bad for business or workers? Is it good? Would be great to get your perspective, especially considering President Biden’s pro-union comments made Sunday. I emailed her back the following response: Dear Ms. Glaser, Thanks for your note. I would prefer to answer questions by email. And we can go back and forth with follow-up. That way, there’s less chance of being misinterpreted. So here are my answers to your first questions. Unions per se are not bad or good. Unfortunately, unions under the laws of the United States tend to have bad effects. I watched President Biden’s 2-minute speech. I noted that he said that the choice to join a union is up to the workers. True, but here’s the problem. Once a majority votes for the union, the union represents all the workers, even those who didn’t want to be represented. So although President Biden makes it sound as if this is a free choice, the free choice is only on the first vote. Once the vote is taken, if the majority wants the union, everyone is forced to be represented and often everyone, even those who don’t join, is forced to pay union dues. Moreover, while our political system is imperfect, to put it mildly, we get to vote every 4 years on who the President will be. But once the workers vote to join the union, the union is there forever unless the workers choose to get a decertification vote going. If would be as if people who wanted President Biden to be president would have to get enough signatures to have a decertification election to remove President Trump. Absent that election, in this analogy, Trump would be president forever. One of the major effects of unions is to ossify the work structure in a plant or business, making it hard for the management to move workers around between various tasks. Unions also tend to compress pay scales so that the relatively less productive will gain somewhat and the most productive will lose. Overall, unions tend to raise the compensation package (wages plus benefits) per worker. That sounds good, but we’ve got to remember the law of demand. When wages rise, employers let attrition reduce the number of people employed and so while it’s good on average for those who keep their jobs, it reduces opportunities for those who would otherwise get jobs. Please reply if you want to follow up. Best, David R. Henderson Research Fellow Hoover Institution This isn’t my ideal strategy. I like socializing with reporters but I didn’t know who she was and I didn’t know whether she would get the nuances or report them. So maybe it was my ideal strategy. Ms. Glaser didn’t reply but within minutes wrote a piece quoting me. Here’s the piece. Here’s what she wrote in reference to my point: Not all academics agree that the union will be good for the Amazon workers in Bessemer. David Henderson, a fellow at the conservative think tank the Hoover Institution, says that while unions do tend to lead to a rise in wages for workers, it could amount to fewer jobs in the long run. “When wages rise, employers let attrition reduce the number of people employed and so while it’s good on average for those who keep their jobs, it reduces opportunities for those who would otherwise get jobs,” Henderson said. For more on unions, see Morgan O. Reynolds, “Labor Unions,” in David R. Henderson, ed., The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. (0 COMMENTS)

As far as I can tell, there are three aspects of cancel culture of concern to the old left: 1.  They recall when cancel culture was used against the left. 2. They worry that it diverts attention from achieving socialist aims, and indeed makes it more difficult to do so. 3. They believe the younger generation is too soft. The first point is obvious. Free speech has traditionally been a liberal idea. Those of my generation will recall the Berkeley free speech movement, and those a bit older will recall the Joe McCarthy era. The second point is less obvious. Here’s Freddie deBoer expressing frustration with defenders of cancel culture: [C]anceling is so powerless that Bacharach feels no compulsion to discuss it in terms of power. He literally does not discuss the efficacy of canceling. I scrolled down past the bottom thinking I had missed something. He is interested in undermining canceling’s critics, but he spends no time considering the actual material value of the tactic. I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: canceling is a political tactic that is most often defended with reference to its powerlessness, and this is bizarre. Bacharach defines the negative consequences of canceling as “getting nitpicked by an editor, yelled at on social media, or losing an occasional opportunity to rile up an auditorium.” Jacob: if that’s the extent of canceling’s power, why are you bothering to defend it in one of the biggest magazines in the country? “I’m defending this method to hurt political enemies by pointing out that it doesn’t actually hurt” is not compelling. On the contrary, it demonstrates just how unhealthy and bizarre our political culture has become. . . . There is indeed a conversation to be had about canceling on the individual level and whether people deserve basic fairness when accused, what kind of fairness if so, and debates to be had about who deserved it and who didn’t. But those have nothing at all to do with politics. Politics is about power. Cancel mobs don’t have it, and they never will. You wanted reparations; you got Dr. Seuss. Maybe time to take a hard look at why. Many people who are on the right on economic issues (including me) are frustrated that corporations have enthusiastically embraced cancel culture.  But why shouldn’t they?  Cancel culture is a distraction for the left.  It has almost no impact on profits, whereas socialism would have a big impact.  Actual socialists like deBoer understand this, and not surprisingly are frustrated. There’s also a reverse class warfare aspect to cancel culture.  In a Bari Weiss piece discussing the woke transformation of elite private schools, she mentions how woke culture is a tool for cool rich kids to bully less sophisticated kids: Woe betide the working-class kid who arrives in college and uses Latino instead of “Latinx,” or who stumbles conjugating verbs because a classmate prefers to use the pronouns they/them. Fluency in woke is an effective class marker and key for these princelings to retain status in university and beyond. The parents know this, and so woke is now the lingua franca of the nation’s best prep schools. As one mother in Los Angeles puts it: “This is what all the colleges are doing, so we have to do it. The thinking is: if Harvard does it, it must be good.” I cannot prove that old leftists believe the younger generation is too soft, but reading between the lines I suspect this is the case.  In my view, modern cancel culture excesses often rely on a misapplication of utilitarian theory. Older cancel cultures focused on “dangerous” ideas, such as atheism or communism.  As the modern world has shifted in a more utilitarian direction, there is less interest in burning people at the stake for being atheists.  Instead, the focus has shifted from dangerous speech to “offensive speech”. Utilitarians worry that if we allow lots of offensive speech, it will reduce the utility of victimized groups.  While this claim seems plausible at first glance, I believe it’s too simple. Let me use an analogy from camping.  If you are used to a soft life, then camping can initially feel rather unpleasant.  A stick might scratch your arm while you are walking through the woods.  After a few days you get toughened up, and slight injuries that used to bother you in the city are hardly even noticeable. Before you jump all over this analogy, let me make two points.  First, one can also get serious injuries in the wild, such as a broken leg.  Indeed some campers die while out hiking.  I do realize that members of marginalized groups can be severely harmed by certain types of speech.  Second, just because being scratched by a branch tends to toughen one up, there’s no point in doing so intentionally.  Life will already throw plenty of discomfort your way, no need to go looking for it. So the cancel culture is not completely wrong; there really are some types of behavior that deserve to be cancelled.  Rather the actual problem is that cancel culture advocates often overlook the fact that vigorous debate makes people tougher, and that if you try to protect people from ever being offended, they’ll become softer and then will end up being offended by things that a person in a previous generation would have simply brushed off.  Cancel culture advocates believe they are reducing the aggregate discomfort suffered by marginalized groups, and yet we may be approaching the point where the movement becomes counterproductive, at least the margin.  And that can be true even if most recent cultural changes discouraging hate speech have been a net gain to society. I don’t doubt that behavior toward marginalized groups is better today than a few decades ago, but I feel we reached a sort of hedonic treadmill, where increasing wokeness reduces offensive speech at roughly the same rate that it reduces our psychological defenses against insult.  We are like a camper being too careful when walking through the woods.  For instance, does anyone seriously believe that constantly changing terms (say cripple to handicapped to disabled) affects the psychology of the disabled person who hears those terms?  Does a heavy person called obese in 2021 feel less bad than one called fat in 1971?  In the 1970s, we learned that inflation only fools workers in the short run.  The continual invention of euphemisms is sort of the verbal inflation of politeness.  It is equivalent to manipulating the Phillips Curve, and is about as likely to be effective.  In contrast, “fat-shaming” is always bad, whether you use the term ‘fat’ or the term ‘obese’. The old left grew up in a different era and hence probably see the younger generation as being too soft—just as my parents’ generation felt that us boomers were too soft.  But they also worry that cancel culture will push blue-collar whites, as well as many Asians and Hispanics, into the Republican Party.  This is sort of the flip side of the worry within the GOP that Trumpism will push well-educated suburbanites over to the Democrats.  If both changes occur, then no single party has much of a constituency for socialism.  The old left probably senses that fact.  (BTW, the right has its own cancel culture.) My own views are hard to explain.  I don’t have any magic formula for determining exactly what should be cancelled and what should not.  But I do believe that a few sensible reforms would improve the situation.  Thus universities could have a board with 10 members, of which at least 3 were liberal and at least 3 were conservative.  Then, before sanctioning anyone for offensive speech, demand a vote of at least 9-1 in favor of sanctions.  That would insure that the speech really was offensive, and that the person wasn’t just being sanctioned for political reasons.  It’s an example of my preference for “rules utilitarianism.” PS.  If there are any universities that do not have at least three liberals and three conservatives, then cancel the entire university.  Shut it down. (0 COMMENTS)

On the website of the Center for Study of Partisanship and Ideology, a newly formed (2020) organization which I’ll make a point of following closely, there is a very good article by Philippe Lemoine (a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at Cornell University). Lemoine is making the case against lockdowns. I am biased in favor of such a position, so I may be easily persuaded, but I think Lemoine argues it very well, in a tone which is sensible and takes into account the- understandable- worries of pro-lockdown people, and so may persuade others who have a different view. His reasoning is nuanced; he points out that policy decisions aren’t the only thing that affect the way the pandemic is progressing. He tries to do something which should be obvious but has so far been unthinkable: discuss costs and benefits of different non-pharmaceutical measures, instead of interpreting measures as a proxy of a broader political worldview. There are many insights in this piece but let me just single out one: if you look at the data without preconceived notions instead of picking the examples that suit you and ignoring all the others, you will notice 3 things: • In places that locked down, incidence often began to fall before the lockdown was in place or immediately after, which given the reporting delay and the incubation period means that the lockdown can’t be responsible for the fall of incidence or at least that incidence would have fallen even in the absence of a lockdown. • Conversely, it’s often the case that it takes several days or even weeks after the start of a lockdown for incidence to start falling, which means that locking down was not sufficient to push R below 1 and that other factors had to do the job. • Finally, there are plenty of places that did not lockdown, but where the epidemic nevertheless receded long before the herd immunity threshold was reached even though incidence was increasing quasi-exponentially, meaning that even in the absence of a lockdown other factors can and often do cause incidence to fall long before saturation. Read the whole thing. HT Don Boudreaux and CafeHayek. (0 COMMENTS)

Here’s a guest post from the noble Rob Wiblin of 80,000 Hours.  Posted with Rob’s permission. I’ve periodically read commenters online say that with random unprecedented events (e.g. a total nuclear war) one can’t give meaningful Bayesian probabilities and therefore the probability of e.g. a nuclear war over the next 100 years is 50/50. Tabarrok got this from many people in response to his series of blog posts on the likelihood of nuclear war. It’s hard to believe these people are serious, but they are and insist on it even when pressed. I don’t know what university course melted their brain, but evidently one of them did! The fastest way to show this is wrong is to ask them three probability questions simultaneously: 1. What is the probability of a single total nuclear war over the next 100 years? 2. What is the probability of a single total nuclear war between between 2121 and 2221? 3. What is the probability of one or more total nuclear wars occurring over the next 200 years? Someone with this philosophy must respond 50/50 to all of them which leads to an internal contradiction. (0 COMMENTS)

British economist Charles A. E. Goodhart writes: Thus, people voting with their dollars are supposed to be rational and to reach an efficient outcome, but when they vote with their ballots, they may not achieve their own best interests. I have always found it difficult to perceive the logical basis for this dichotomy. This is from his “The Free Banking Challenge to Central Banks,” Critical Review, Summer 1994. The basis for the dichotomy is a difference in incentives. When people are spending their own money, their expenditures have a strong influence on what they get. If I decide to buy a Camry, for instance, I get a Camry. But when people vote, their vote is not determinative. To continue with the car case, if we were voting on whether Toyota Camrys or Honda Accords are provided, our individual vote has a tiny, tiny probability of influencing whether Camrys or Accords are provided. Therefore, we have little incentive to compare the two. Economists call this “rational ignorance” and it sometimes bleeds over into what co-blogger Bryan Caplan calls “rational irrationality.” By the way, this article is a reading for Jeff Hummel’s Masters course in Monetary Theory and Policy, a course offered by San Jose State University’s economics department. I’m watching it on Zoom, doing all the reading and homework, and learning a lot. (0 COMMENTS)

Unity proves elusive, but Americans who cannot seem to agree on much else— from Trumpian and traditionalist conservatives on the right, to certain libertarians, to liberals and progressive social justice advocates— do seem to agree on at least one big policy thing: space does not matter much, and other things matter much more than space. Cue the familiar disagreements on what those “other things” are. But the first part undoubtedly stands. Broadly speaking, the principals guiding our politics today—and, it would seem, the median journalist and current events commentator on Twitter— could not care less about whether humans make progress in space, or whether we as a species ever develop the technologies required to allow human inhabitation of other planets and celestial bodies at scale. (Transitory enthusiasm for the recent Perseverance landing does not, to my mind, negate this judgement.) The voting masses, by and large, seem to share in their leaders’ lack of real and urgent concern in this regard. Other crises have consumed us, and space seems—as in fact it is—so remote from our cares. As a result, our discourse doesn’t much dwell on the desirability, not to mention the possible necessity, of advancing human space exploration capabilities. I view this as an unfortunate collective oversight. While the yields to space exploration and the development of spaceflight technology may appear minimal in the immediate future, shifting our perspective to the longer term renders the human situation vis a viz space exploration extremely clear: if humans want to survive in perpetuity, we need to establish ourselves on other planets in addition to Earth. It is as simple as that. And yet we are not doing all that much to make that happen. To be clear, I’m long on Earth, too, and hope that technological improvements will continue to allow our species to get “more from less” right here on the third rock from the sun, enabling us to keep occupying the planet that saw us evolve into consciousness. I like to imagine that the distant future on Earth has the potential to be an extremely pleasant one, as advances in our scientific understanding and bio-technical praxis should hopefully allow our descendants to clean up any of the remaining messes previous generations will have left behind (e.g., nuclear and industrial waste, high amounts of atmospheric carbon, other lingering nasties) and stable-state free societies will hopefully allow all persons (or very nearly all persons) to live free and meaningful lives in productive community and exchange with their fellows. As the previous qualification highlights, the trickiest problems here on Earth and extending to wherever humans end up in the spacefaring age will still be social and political, and their successful resolution will depend more on the future state of our governing arts than our hard sciences. But regarding the negative events that could very well happen to Earth I think we all need to be equally clear: life might not make it here. There is no guarantee that it will, and in the very long run, with the expansion and subsequent death of our sun, we know with near certainty that it will not. Consider just a few possible extinction-level events that could strike even earlier: large meteors, supervolcanic eruptions, drastic climactic disruption of the “Snowball Earth” variety. As SpaceX founder and Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently observed on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, “A species that does not become multiplanetary is simply waiting around until there is some extinction event, either self-inflicted or external.” This statement, applied to the human species, is obviously true on its face. As doomsday events go a giant asteroid might be more shocking, since we (people living today) have never experienced one before while concerned atomic scientists warn us about the nuclear bomb all the time, but the odds that we blow ourselves up are still there. Slim, but there. It’s more plausible that a severe nuclear war and the nuclear winter it would likely trigger would leave the human population greatly reduced as opposed to completely extinct, but then the question becomes: why is that a risk we would want to take? The bomb is here to stay for now, but there is no reason that 100% of known life in the universe needs to stay here on Earth to keep it company, waiting around for something even more destructive to show up. While we’re on that happy subject: Do you have any good intuitions about our collective chances against hostile, or simply arrogant or domineering, technologically-advanced extraterrestrial lifeforms, if and/or when they decide to pay us a visit on our home turf? These scary situation sketches will suffice. At bottom, the core reason I am a believer in the need to make life—and not just human life—multiplanetary is the same basic reason I would never counsel a friend to keep all their money and valuables in one place: diversification is good. Wisdom and experience suggest we store precious resources in multiple safe(ish) places. Diversification limits our exposure to risk, and increases our resilience when bad things do happen. One reserve gets hit, two or three others survive, and you probably feel that the effort to spread things out was worth it. What I’m saying here has strong undercurrents of common sense, yet our approach to the human population itself—the universal store and font of “human capital”—does not currently prioritize diversification to the degree our technological capabilities would allow. The distribution of the human population, and of almost all human knowledge and works, is overwhelmingly local. (Let us set to one side the possibility that aliens somewhere maintain an archive of captured human information.) Establishing outposts at least as large as those we maintain in Antarctica on the Moon and Mars, or other more suitable sites, by the end of this century would be a great first step toward genuinely diversifying the physical locations of the most precious resources known to us: human consciousness and creativity, human love and human soul, the great works in which all these things are displayed. Add also to this list repositories of scientific knowledge and knowhow, seed reserves, and certain materials necessary to re-start the manufacturing of fundamental technologies. Spreading these goods to a few additional locations within the solar system would be a major species-and-civilization-level accomplishment that all living at the time could feel satisfied by, and even take some pride in. And this is something that we seem to be just on the cusp of being able to do, given our recent and rapid technological advances in rocketry, computers, and materials science and engineering, among other important fields for space exploration and settlement. Quickly the uniplanetary human situation is becoming, if it is not already, one of pure choice. Who, then, will take us beyond the “exclusively-Earth-based” stage of our civilization? Many will have a role to play, as space is not just for nerds. Humanists and economists (two audiences with whom this site is popular) should want humans to greatly improve their spaceflight and off-world-dwelling capabilities, too—not just technophiles and STEM types. There need not be a clash of visions between cyber-futurists who would bring self-sustaining cities to Mars and classicists who would rather see us die out on Earth than submit to a posthuman, dystopic future among the stars. Alignment of visions is key. Humanistic input early in the development of space settlement plans would allow for the design of better, more user-oriented (in the richest sense of the phrase) systems and processes for settling space colonies. The kind of space future humans have—and I am relatively confident we will have a robust one, someday—depends in part on the kinds of choices we make today about the plans for and structure of our involvements on other worlds. All sorts of experts, artists, and practitioners—from physicists to economists to poets—should have a say in these decisions. Certainly humanists and economists could exert a positive influence on our space future by leaning into, instead of opposing, human space exploration, and by taking a constructive-critical interest in the plans and ideas of those who are already making progress toward space exploration today. Rather than cede the field completely to those who will build the rockets and raise the off-world settlements, social science and humanities advocates should get invested in the various problems space exploration will pose and that their disciplinary perspectives can help resolve. For instance, one space challenge for humanists and economists to consider is what kind of cultural practices and social institutions will be necessary to enable small, fledgling space colonies to grow and to thrive with a minimum of conflict, all while poised precariously somewhere out there on the barren edge of a brutally indifferent cosmos. There are other questions as well: How well will markets function—and what kinds of markets will function—in remote areas among small groups of space settlers? Are there minimum population density requirements for an adequate off world division of labor, considering not just baseline productive necessities but also humankind’s need to consume and participate in leisure-based culture? As these complex, interdisciplinary queries suggest, successful space exploration and off-world settlement will entail much more than a string of engineering advances. Humanists, economists, historians, and indeed all students of human culture will continue to have their place in the economy of things, even when that economy is dispersed amongst the stars. Analogies to our space present spring to mind from other ages of human adventure, exploration, and discovery. Certain critics of space exploration are wont to point out the rapacity that has often attended early human colonial efforts, like those of European powers in the “New World”-era Americas. I point out in reply, however, that such comparisons are hardly appropriate when discussing the settlement of barren planets wholly void of (sentient) life. At a minimum, concerns about the exploitation of other worlds would require there to be exploitable agents on those worlds in order to be justified. In reality, we have little reason to believe that there will be much to find on our first stops beyond Earth besides (potentially very valuable) minerals, rocks, dust, and ice. Discovering liquid water, or microscopic life, or even hints of extinct former life, would be like finding El Dorado. But unlike the conquistadores, we have good evidence-based reasons to believe in the existence of what we are looking for, and we can all but guarantee that no blood will be shed in the process of our looking for it. (I’d be more worried about the potential for competition among fellow human space settlers or prospectors to occasionally turn violent in the absence of a meaningful law enforcement presence somewhere on the space frontier, than the possibility that we might discover, and then tyrannically dominate, ET’s home planet. And in the latter case, we have no reason whatsoever to believe that we would automatically be the ones doing the dominating.) Space is vast, and the idea of humans exploring it is epic. But we will not realize that epic vision if the main legacy of those living today ends up being digital participation in dysfunctional politics, a declining emphasis on education, innovation, and productivity, and the willful sacrifice of culture to “culture wars.” Continuing down this path for decades would spell death to the optimistic interstellar imagination. If we choose to remain caught up with fighting amongst ourselves, we will just be “waiting around” in precisely the sense that Musk says, and we’ll be dumbing ourselves down as we do so. But if we choose instead—in budgetary and investment decisions and with our words and arguments about the relative importance of human space exploration in a world of scarce resources—to collaborate around a more hopeful, humane blueprint for the future continuity of our species, a much better world, a world of worlds, becomes possible for our descendants. In this world, the human future is significantly more secure than it is now, and the conditions for those who will inhabit it are far better. Isn’t this a world we would all prefer to be working toward?   Shanon FitzGerald is Assistant Websites Editor at Liberty Fund. He can be found on Twitter @shanonspeaks. (0 COMMENTS)

A true homeschooling conversation between me and my son, lightly edited.  He’s eleven and I’m teaching him algebra. Father: Sorry, you got another problem wrong.  Do you know why? Son: [aggravated silence] Father: Because you skipped steps! Son: [further silence] Father: Is it ever OK to skip steps? Son: No. Father: Wrong!  It is OK to skip steps… when you are a master. Son: And I’m not a master. Father: You are not yet a master.  Do you know how you become a master? Son: No. Father: By following the steps. Son: I follow the steps, until I don’t need to follow the steps anymore? Father: Exactly.  Now start over, and follow the steps. (0 COMMENTS)

Use it or Lose It As you probably know, Dr. Seuss Enterprises has quit publishing And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, Dr. Seuss’s first book for children, published in 1937, plus 5 other books. Dr. Seuss Enterprises owns the copyright and so the company has the right to decide whether to publish. Is that the end of the story? No, I don’t think so. The government grants copyright protection as a way of giving authors a monopoly in their written work. The argument is that that gives them an incentive to produce. It’s a good argument. Various economists have contended, with some justification, that copyrights and patents are illegitimate because they are a government-granted monopoly. Let’s say that you reject that argument. There’s still no ethical principle that says how long a copyright should be. The argument for copyrights and patents is a pragmatic argument about costs, benefits, and incentives, not an argument from principle. It’s hard to argue that present U.S. copyright is reasonable. The copyright law is complex, but here’s one way to see how extreme it is: to be considered in the public domain today, it must have been published before this date in 1926. That’s 95 years of protection. Moreover, since the argument for copyright and patent protection is an argument for encouraging creative output, it is perverse to give such protection to owners who refuse to produce the item protected by the grant of monopoly. One could argue that those who refuse to produce a protected item right now might be contending with an optimal timing problem. They might want to wait a few years before producing again. OK, so a solution would be to say to owners of copyrights or patents: If you don’t use it for 5 years, you lose it. That way, we retain the incentive that the monopoly gives to the creative producer while not creating the perverse effect that output is zero. Those who favor patents and copyrights might object that this is undue government intervention. But they have already accepted the idea that government intervention is legitimate in this area, and so there can’t be a principled argument that (1) government grants of patents and copyrights are legitimate but (2) tweaking the terms of patents and copyrights to avoid some of the downsides is illegitimate. HT2 Eric Garris for helpful discussion. Note: Both the first and second editions of The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics have entries on intellectual property. In the first edition, “Patents,” is written by me. In the second edition, the much-more-extensive “Intellectual Property” is by Stan Leibowitz. (0 COMMENTS)

The Self-Interest Voter Hypothesis, or SIVH, claims that individuals’ political views are closely based on their objective self-interest.  Despite its popularity, the evidence is strongly against it.  If the SIVH were true, for example, income would be an excellent predictor of party identification.  In reality, the correlation between the two is near-zero.  People don’t vote for the party that gives them a better balance sheet; they vote for the party that speaks to their ideals. Still, you may ask, what happens if the stakes are life and death?  The whole COVID debacle provides an elegant illustration.  If people’s views on COVID were largely based on objective self-interest, we would see the following patterns. 1. Support for strict COVID policies would be near-zero for the young, then rise very rapidly with age, because the risk of death roughly triples as your age rises by a decade.  The inconvenience of policy, in contrast, varies little by age. 2. People with underlying conditions would be vastly more supportive of strict policies, because risk is again sharply higher for such people.  Indeed, support by people with no such conditions would be very low, because such people make up less than 10% of the victims even though they are a majority of the population. 3. Males, blacks, and Hispanics would be modestly more supportive of strict COVID policies, because their risks are modestly higher. 4. Yes, you can tweak the SIVH so people care about the well-being of their families.  But again, this implies that people who happen to have many high-risk family members would be much more supportive of strict measures than loners. 5. Support Human Challenge Trials would be virtually unanimous.  Why?  Because human experimentation would dramatically improve the quality of prevention policy and speed the arrival of safe, effective vaccines.  No one would worry about the risk to the participants, except the participants themselves: “If you’re worried, don’t volunteer.  End of story.”   On reflection, support for these SIVH predictions is weak at best.  While demographic breakdowns of public opinion on COVID policy are strangely scarce, Democrats clearly favor stricter policies than Republicans.  But it is Republicans who receive markedly more support from the elderly.  Since COVID risk increases very rapidly with age, this is a shocking result.  Other demographic patterns are mixed: Males, blacks and Hispanics are all higher-risk, but males are more Republican while blacks and Hispanics are more Democratic.  It’s hard to tell if people with underlying conditions or high-risk relatives has any effect on desired COVID policies, but remember: If the SIVH were right, these effects would be too big to miss. Most strikingly, other than a few economists, statisticians, Effective Altruists, and other exemplars of numeracy, virtually no one supports Human Challenge Trials!  Why not?  Because almost everyone is morally horrified by the very idea.  Rationally speaking, the underlying moral principle is hard to fathom: Why shouldn’t you let a thousand heroes voluntarily take a minor risk to their own lives to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of strangers?  Is low-risk heroism somehow villainous?  But the public’s moral confusion is small comfort to the politician who goes against the public’s atavism. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I would much rather live in a world of rational, selfish voters.  Yes, such people can be callous.  They would be deaf to the grand arguments of The Problem of Political Authority.  Yet they would favor much better policies than the irrational, unselfish voters whose dominate actual polities.  Unselfishness may lead you to “Do your part.”  What good is “doing your part,” though, if you refuse to think straight about what to do? (0 COMMENTS)

Leon Kass, long-time teacher of classic works at the University of Chicago and now Dean of Faculty at Shalem College in Jerusalem, talks about human flourishing with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Drawing on an essay from his book, Leading a Worthy Life, Kass gives a broad overview of Aristotle’s ideas on how to live. This […] The post Leon Kass on Human Flourishing, Living Well, and Aristotle appeared first on Econlib.