Review of Classical Liberalism and the Industrial Working Class, by Alberto Alberto Mingardi.1 Thomas Hodgskin (12 December 1787-21 August 1869) was an English socialist writer on political economy, critic of capitalism, and defender of free trade and early trade unions. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the term socialist included any opponent of capitalism, at the time defined as a construed political system built on privileges for the owners of capital. Intellectual historian Alberto Mingardi’s new biography of Thomas Hodgskin, Classical Liberalism and the Industrial Working Class, takes a different view of the 19th-century journalist and commentator. Mingardi argues that when understood in the context of his era, Hodgskin’s views were close to what we would today call libertarianism. Mingardi concedes that Hodgskin’s sympathies lay with ordinary working people against the upper classes. The crucial issue therefore appears to be the legislative domination by those whom Hodgskin considers “idle,” not “productive,” classes as they live off private income. These privileged positions are a not natural consequence of the social division of labor; they are, in fact, parasitical to the division of labor. (39) But Mingardi tells us that this did not make Hodgskin an intellectual cousin of Karl Marx or Thomas Piketty. Instead, Hodgskin saw government interference, not capitalist exploitation, as the force standing between workers and their fair share of income. Mingardi suggests that Hodgskin came to his particular prejudices from his experience as a youth. Forced by his father to leave school and enlist in the navy at age twelve, his formative experience was aboard a ship, where the captain had absolute authority and corporal punishment was routine. When the Royal Navy needed extra manpower, particularly in times of war, it would send “press gangs” to capture sailors from private ships–or even ordinary men on shore– and force them to help sail the warships. This form of slavery is where the phrase “pressed into service” comes from. In 1813, now out of the Navy, Hodgskin wrote An Essay on Naval Discipline, expressing his opposition to absolute power and the use of force on board naval vessels. In 1815, he wrote a series of letters in a newspaper arguing against impressment. These helped launch him on a career in journalism. “Mingardi sees Adam Smith as the theorist who made the strongest impression on Hodgskin.” Hodgskin’s political economy was self-taught. Mingardi sees Adam Smith as the theorist who made the strongest impression on Hodgskin. Early in the 19th century in England, factories were a new phenomenon, spreading rapidly and frightening many observers. Critics saw factories as de-skilling workers. Hodgskin differed in that he saw machines as up-skilling workers and raising their standard of living. Today, mainstream economists would analyze the effect of machinery on labor by referring to a neoclassical production function, in which output depends on capital and labor. But this approach has its problems. For one thing, it treats labor as homogeneous, when in fact there are a variety of skills and occupations. For another thing, it treats innovation as either “embodied” in capital or else “neutral,” meaning that it just appears as a deus ex machina, raising output. The concept of “human capital” sits awkwardly on the side of the standard neoclassical model. Mingardi shows that Hodgskin anticipated the idea of human capital. In fact, Hodgskin’s analysis may have even been more sophisticated, in that he saw innovation as embodied in labor. Hodgskin also was keenly aware that the factory system created specialized labor, not simply undifferentiated rote work. Hodgskin was optimistic that workers’ skills and living standards were headed upward. He saw this improvement as the natural outcome of a market economy. If workers did not receive a fair share of prosperity, this was because government intervened on the part of the idle rich. Note that at the time that Hodgskin wrote, much of the power in Britain’s Parliament was concentrated in the hands of wealthy landowners. Hodgskin’s more nuanced characterization of labor led him to see population growth as promoting prosperity. Mingardi quotes Hodgskin, The chances of improvement… are great in proportion as the persons are multiplied whose attention is devoted to any particular subject… an increase in the number of persons produces the same effect as communication [on longer distance]; for the latter only operates by bringing members to think on the same subject… Almost all discoveries and improvements have been made in crowded cities and in densely peopled countries. (72)2 For more on these topics, see Thomas Hodgskin, Online Library of Liberty. See also Division of Labor, Part 3: The System of Exchange, by Michael Munger: Adam Smith Works, Aug. 21, 2019; and the EconTalk podcast episodes Michael Munger on the Division of Labor and Paul Romer on Growth. Mingardi notes that Hodgskin is suggesting that increasing the extent of the market through population growth has the same positive effects that Adam Smith saw arising from increasing the extent of the market through trade. I would add that the quoted passage seems to anticipate the growth theory that earned Paul Romer a Nobel Prize in 2018. Among those who fancy themselves friends of the working class, Hodgskins’ opposition to government interference and support for free trade appear to go against the grain. Mingardi shows how such views can be reconciled. There are many people today, conservatives as well as progressives, who would do well to explore Hodgskin’s thinking as documented in Mingardi’s concise biography. Footnotes [1] Alberto Mingardi 2021, Classical Liberalism and the Industrial Working Class: The Economic Thought of Thomas Hodgskin. Routledge, 2020. [2] The passage is from Hodgskin 1827, Popular Political Economy: Four Lectures Delivered at the Mechanics’ Institution. *Arnold Kling has a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of several books, including Crisis of Abundance: Rethinking How We Pay for Health Care; Invisible Wealth: The Hidden Story of How Markets Work; Unchecked and Unbalanced: How the Discrepancy Between Knowledge and Power Caused the Financial Crisis and Threatens Democracy; and Specialization and Trade: A Re-introduction to Economics. He contributed to EconLog from January 2003 through August 2012. Read more of what Arnold Kling’s been reading. For more book reviews and articles by Arnold Kling, see the Archive. As an Amazon Associate, Econlib earns from qualifying purchases. (0 COMMENTS)

Author and economist Branko Milanovic of CUNY talks about the big questions in economics with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Milanovic argues that the Nobel Prize Committee is missing an opportunity to encourage more ambitious work by awarding the prize to economists tackling questions like the rise of China’s economy and other challenging but crucial areas […] The post Branko Milanovic on the Big Questions of Economics appeared first on Econlib.

Some acquaintances recently paddled surfboards and kayaks into the Pacific to disperse a relative’s ashes where he loved to surf. During the memorial service, one brother of the deceased expressed concern about the risk from sharks. The image of an aggressive shark in the deep ocean is graphic and terrifying, but the risk of mundane threats far outweighs the risk from shark attack. The dead man’s brother should worry much more about heart disease, which felled his brother, and devote his attention to lowering that and similar risks. There is only so much time and energy; each unit of energy spent on lowering the risk from sharks is one less unit that can be spent on hearts. What should we fear? What threats are most likely to kill us? Setting aside cataclysmic events such as nuclear wars and planet-altering meteorites, there are some risks that generate a lot of fear but few deaths, such as shark attacks, terrorism, and killings by police. On the other end of the spectrum are everyday risks that kill a large number, such as heart disease and cancer. In between are risks from motor vehicle collisions and the seasonal flu. And this year is a new risk: COVID-19. This is from David R. Henderson and Charles L. Hooper, “What Should We Fear Most and What Should We Do About It?, Regulation, Winter 2020-21. Another excerpt: Larger risks / The typical American faces much greater risk of death from comparatively mundane causes. Heart disease kills about 1 in 502 Americans each year, while cancer kills 1 in 542. The number of deaths from seasonal flu varies significantly from year to year, but it has averaged about 40,000 in the United States in recent years, which works out to 1 death in 8,125 Americans. The good news is that rate has fallen significantly over the decades; if the death rate from flu in the 1950s and 1960s were applied to today’s population, we would see over 160,000 deaths per year. If the death rates from these diseases seem high, it is because they are. Heart disease alone kills as many Americans each year as the combined U.S. combat casualties from all American wars. Read the whole thing and check out our table.   (1 COMMENTS)

Pope Francis is an amazingly productive author. On October 3 he released a new encyclical letter (All Brothers), now he published a new book, Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future. We learn from UCL that the Pope commends in the book Mariana Mazzucato’s work and that in the book: The Pope … states that Mazzucato’s The Value of Everything “provoked a lot of reflection” within him as the book issues a direct challenge to the wealth creators of our world, urging them to reprioritise ‘value’ over ‘price’. In other words, ‘taking’ wealth is not the same as ‘making’ wealth, and the world has lost sight of what value really means. That a Pope praises an economist is always a news item, though this is not a first. If I’m right, John Paul II mentioned in public several times his friend and advisor Michael Novak, who, though not an economist, provided him with help in crafting the encyclical letter Centesimus Annus. In that letter, however, the then-Pope did not quote economists, but reasoned on the compatibility between Catholic social thinking and the market economy. Francis, on the other hand, as in his last encyclical, prefers quoting himself and is quite parsimonious with references to the Catholic tradition, including the Scriptures. In a book that deals largely with Mazzucato, The Myth of the Entrepreneurial State, Deirdre McCloskey and I have a chapter in which we sort of anticipated Pope Francis was to fall in love with Mazzucato’s work. Here’s a dash of our argument: We disagree on the matter with the priest and with Zamagni and with Mazzucato and other good-hearted folk. We note that the independence of the individual in a liberal economy lets people exchange as they wish with free will—and it results in the great and good interdependence of modern life. Catholic social teaching of the sort Zamagni retails doesn’t get the point. One-to-one cooperation is splendid, and certainly subject to “intentionality.” You give virtuously to the worthy beggar, intentionally, consciously, in full knowledge of who is benefited. But one-to-many cooperation is by far more significant in life beyond the Desert Fathers in their hermitages. Your shoes, TVs, books, and whatever come of course from the voluntary paid work of thousands of people worldwide. They and you are cooperating every day, for producing a baguette out of self-interest and pride of craft. Interdependence gives everyone a mutually voluntary access to the talents and resources of everyone else. People do not know personally their benefactors, who grind the flour for their baguette or drive the truck to deliver it to the baker. As Hayek explained, in his somewhat Germanic English, “in an order taking advantage of the higher productivity of extensive division of labour, the individual can no longer know whose needs his efforts do or ought to serve, or what will be the effects of his actions on those unknown persons who do consume his products or products to which he has contributed.” Nonetheless the buyer receives the correct signal from its price, learning the cost to other people that is to be compared with the gain to the very buyer. Benefit minus cost is gain to the person and to society. It is, to use the business jargon, “value creating.” The economist’s word is simply “profit.” For the rest, read the book. If you like it and you’re Catholic, please consider buying an extra copy and sending it to Pope Francis in Vatican City. You know, the way of providence. (0 COMMENTS)

Regulators are supposed to protect us from making foolish decisions. When doing so, they often believe the public interest is served by promoting “white lies’, that is, false statements that are intended to be for our own good. If fact, the short run benefits of white lies are almost always outweighed by their much bigger long run costs. 1. Early in the pandemic, experts said there was no reason for a travel ban. Presumably they were trying to prevent panic, or xenophobia, or something. But in retrospect, an international travel ban would have been helpful if instituted back in January. Indeed travel bans largely explain why some countries have mostly avoided Covid-19, although in fairness other policies such as masks and test/trace/isolate also played a big role. 2. Early in the pandemic, experts suggested that masks don’t help average people. Even then they must have known that was wrong—why else would doctors wear masks? Their white lies seem to have been motivated by a feeling that masks might make people feel overly self confident (which might be true), as well as the fear that a mask shortage might deprive health care workers of masks.  Unfortunately, these “white lies” had extremely negative long run consequences. 3. More recently, Dr. Fauci suggested that it was important for the FDA to spend several weeks evaluating the Pfizer trial data before making a decision. According to experts cited by Tyler Cowen, that also seems to have been inaccurate. Alex Tabarrok suggests that the motivation seems to have been to make the public feel like the FDA was being careful: I am getting very angry at people like Anthony Fauci who say that FDA delay is necessary or useful to alleviate vaccine hesitancy. Fauci told Fox News that the FDA “really scrutinises the data very carefully to guarantee to the American public that this is a safe and efficacious vaccine. I think if we did any less, we would add to the already existing hesitancy on the part of many people because … they’re concerned that we went too quickly.” The WSJ says much the same thing just with a slightly different flavor: …this regulatory rigmarole is essentially a placebo to reassure the public it will be safe to get inoculated. The ‘we must delay to allay’ argument is deadly and wrong. Tabarrok points out that the effect could easily go in the opposite direction, making the public even more wary of vaccines, and Matt Yglesias is rightly skeptical of public health officials becoming amateur social psychologists: The internet is full of conspiracy theories about almost everything.  Most of the theories are unsubstantiated.  Unfortunately, if our experts believe that white lies are frequently in the public interest, this will gradually erode confidence in expert opinion, breeding even more conspiracy theories. As an analogy, deposit insurance is often useful in the midst of a financial crisis.  But in the long run, the existence of deposit insurance encourages banks to take excessive risks, and this makes financial crises more likely in the long run. Tabarrok and Yglesias are right that Dr. Fauci should not try to be an amateur psychologist.  And this is true for reasons even beyond those that they cite—the fact that he’s not very good at it.  Even if Fauci were an expert in knowing just how to manipulate public opinion at a point in time, the long run effect of his action would to reduce public trust in experts, with consequences much greater than any short run benefit. When it comes to regulators, there are no “white lies”.     (0 COMMENTS)

Who are those guys? In December 1972, I was in southern Ontario for Christmas after a fairly successful first quarter in the Ph.D. program at UCLA. I had Christmas with my friend and fellow Canadian UCLAer, Harry Watson, at his mom’s (“mum’s” to Canadians) place in Brantford. We knew that the 1972 American Economic Association meetings were being held in Toronto just after Christmas. (Economists of all ideological stripes seem to adhere to the stereotype that we’re cheap. Hotel prices are generally low between Christmas and the first few days of the new year.) So Harry and I went into Toronto to hang out, pay the student rate, and see what those meetings were like. We ran into Clay La Force, the chairman of UCLA’s econ department, in a hotel lobby and he invited us up to the UCLA suite. We took him up on it. We were sitting on a couch with our backs to the front door of the suite, talking to someone across a coffee table. I don’t remember who. After a few minutes we heard a conversation between two people who had entered. It was very animated. They were talking about various colleges having made a pitch to hire them. One college had made it clear that he and his colleagues didn’t like the views of one of the guys but they did like his skin color. The other told a similar story. Then the first one told another similar story about a different college. As it ramped up, the laughter among the two got louder and louder. Who are those guys, I wondered. So I turned slightly and as unobtrusively as I could to see who was talking and saw two tall handsome black guys. We knew the more handsome of the two although we hadn’t spoken to him during our first quarter at UCLA: Professor Thomas Sowell. We didn’t know the other one and asked someone, who told us it was a recent UCLA Ph.D. named Walter Williams. What I remember is their delight in telling the stories about racist white department chairs making clear that they wanted to hire on the basis of race, not ability. It was such a fun conversation to eavesdrop on. They were talking as if there was no one else around and I wanted to keep it that way–so did Harry–so we just sat there with our backs to them listening in. (0 COMMENTS)

Urgently needed drugs developed under Operation Warp Speed are at the mercy of officials working at “bureaucrat speed.” I rarely like the titles that editors choose for my op/eds and articles. But this title that my Hoover editor chose is way better than mine. Here are the first three paragraphs of “Vaccines’ Last Hurdle: Central Planners,” Defining Ideas, December 4, 2020: First, the good news. We now appear to have at least two viable vaccines with high efficacy in preventing the awful disease known as COVID-19. On November 9, Pfizer/BioNTech announced that the efficacy of its vaccine exceeds 90 percent. On November 16, Moderna announced that its vaccine’s efficacy exceeds 94.5 percent. Take that, Pfizer! Seriously, though, both announcements are great news. Let’s put those percentages in perspective. I get a flu vaccine every year without fail. Is that because the vaccine is 90 percent effective? No. At best, it’s 60 percent effective, and its effectiveness is often well below 50 percent. There’s even more good news. Even when the vaccines don’t prevent COVID-19, they make it substantially less severe. For example, in a study of thirty thousand volunteers for the Moderna test, of the eleven cases in people who got the vaccine, no case was severe, versus thirty severe cases for people who received the placebo. It’s risky to generalize from a sample size of thirty thousand, but still, the numbers are extremely encouraging. There’s also good news for us elderly. I was talking with a healthy seventy-seven-year-old woman at pickleball last week who was delighted that she, as an elderly person, would be one of the first to get it. I just turned seventy and my wife is seventy-one, and so presumably we will be on the priority list. But the bad news for people who live in California is that California’s state government will slow things down. This might happen in New York and in some other states also. Let’s start by focusing on California, the state I know best. California’s government will slow things down in two ways: one is intentional and the other is unintentional. Read the whole thing. (0 COMMENTS)

2020 has gone from being an all bad news year, to what I guess can be described as a good news/bad news kind of year.  The good news?  We have several very promising vaccines that should be available fairly soon – in fact in record time.  The bad news is that public distrust about the safety and efficacy of the vaccine is surprisingly widespread; and it’s particularly high among African-Americans, according to NPR.  Three former presidents- Clinton, Bush and Obama- have all volunteered to receive the vaccine live in order to reassure the public over its safety. Just last year before the pandemic hit there was a lot of discussion about the problems that have arisen as a result of the decisions by so-called “anti vaxxers-” those who refuse to take vaccines or have them administered to their children for either religious reasons or because they doubt the veracity of the science behind them.  I don’t need to make a lengthy case that such beliefs fly in the face of reality, so I won’t.  If you think vaccines cause autism you’re just dead wrong. And yet as Ron Bailey over at Reason has adroitly noted – vaccines don’t in and of themselves solve the problem unless the vaccinations are widespread enough to help achieve herd immunity.  Public officials have to convince the public that the vaccine is effective in helping to solve the pandemic and safe.  As I have noted elsewhere, at the moment public trust in our political leadership is not especially high, for good reasons. So what should a liberty-minded person think about the role that the state should play in getting the public as widely vaccinated as soon as possible?  Initially, one might believe that a libertarian would make this an individual decision – a person has the right to decide to do what she sees as best.  However, libertarians and liberty-minded individuals also very much believe in John Stuart Mill’s “harm principle”.  The harm principle states that the only reason to restrict the actions of individuals is to prevent harm to others.  By not getting vaccinated individuals make hitting the herd immunity threshold a longer and more difficult goal to achieve, putting others directly at risk.  So for those of us who defend the concept of liberty, vaccines seem to be an example where perhaps the state can and should use its coercive power to force citizens to be vaccinated, assuming the vaccine is deemed safe and effective.  While this runs contrary to the intuition one might expect, individuals who reject the vaccine are obviously violating the harm principle. Should those of us who defend liberty endorse the idea that the state should set up mandatory vaccination clinics and drag people out of their homes in the night to vaccinate them?  Obviously not.  But just as schools require children to be vaccinated before attending, it seems to me that requiring a COVID vaccine for certain activities is a way to “encourage” such behavior.  One might even use the rather unpopular word “nudge”.  Want a driver’s license?  Show me your COVID vaccination.  Care to enter a public building?  You need to document you’ve been vaccinated.  Private businesses should take the same steps.  I would much rather peacefully and comfortably comb the aisles of Walmart and Costco without a mask but with my vaccination certificate. Freedom and responsibility are tied at the hip, and we are at the point where we must individually agree to act swiftly and responsibly to help save lives – let’s get vaccinated as soon as possible and save the lives of others.  But let’s also accept that we must allow for the prospect that the state might have a role to play here.  If cigarettes are regulated because of the risk of secondhand smoke, encouraging COVID vaccination seems like a no-brainer. (0 COMMENTS)

Svetozar “Steve” Pejovich, one of the most dynamic and insightful theorists writing on property rights, reflects on his experience in economics. With characteristic sagacity and humor, he demonstrates the power that empirical cases can bring to bear on theoretical problems. Born in Belgrade, Pejovich is Professor Emeritus at Texas A&M University, where he taught for over twenty years, and the author of many influential articles and books including The Economics of Property Rights: Towards a Theory of Comparative Systems and Law, Informal Rules, and Economic Performance: The Case for Common Law. In the late 1970s, he was Professor and Chair of the Department of Economics at the University of Dallas, where he also served as President. In conversation with Bill Jersey, Pejovich speaks openly about his life, which began under the tyranny of the Nazis, came into maturity subject to the despotism of the Communists, and was eventually transformed by a move to the United States. Under a government based on ideas of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” he found a new home in Texas—an expansive land where his vision of economic freedom and cultural vitality was realized.   “Every time you think you know an answer to a problem, the time has come to be asked to be convinced once again.”   Below are some prompts for further conversation:   Early Life in the Soviet Union 1- How did ideology affect every aspect of life in the Soviet system? What most surprised you about Pejovich’s account of his personal experiences under communism? 2- How does self interest regulate the economy, according to Pejovich? 3- What does Pejovich mean when he says that every choice is a contract? How do such choices create an unpredictable and spontaneous order?   Changing the World 4- Pejovich insists that the only way you can serve society is to make money, and that how much you make is an index of how well you are serving society. To what extent do you agree with this assertion? Explain. 5- Should profit guide the “non-profit” sector as well? What might this look like in practice? (Think about Pejovich’s comments regarding the Peace Corps, which he says were it profitable, would not need to rely on taxpayer money.)   The Road to Capitalism is Bumpy 6- All communities- from neighborhoods to nations- have their “rules of the game.” When members of a given community disagree with the community’s rules, what two alternatives do they have? 7- Related, Pejovich argues that any time you change the rules, you’re going to change the game. What are the two levels of social activity in this analogy, and what questions do these suggest for economic analysis? 8- Capitalism is not an economic system, according to Pejovich? What, then, is it?   Law, Culture, and Economics 9- What is the proper function of law, according to Pejovich? How does he argue we are to bring about justice or fairness in society? 10- In what way(s) is law an evolutionary process? 11- How does Pejovich describe the effects of law and culture on the economy? What happens when there is a conflict between a nation’s rules and its customs?   The Laboratory of the American West 12- How does the example of the American West prove that you don’t need a state to decide claims and resolve disputes? What do you need? 13- How does cutting down a tree help the environment, according to Pejovich? How does thinking abour interest rates help answer this question? (Put another way, how should we determine the optimal time to cut down a tree?) 14- What does Pejovich mean when he says of wealth, “To think only of the monetary components is very primitive economics.” How does this square with his discussion of cutting down trees?   Hayek’s Road to Serfdom 15- How does Pejovich liken living under communism to being a domesticated animal? Why doesn’t Pejovich resent any of the limitations imposed on him by a capitalist ecoomy? 16- What does Pejovich mean when he says, “The government does not create wealth. It can only distribute wealth?” 17- When the conversation turns to the prospects for socialized medicine, Pejovich tells Jersey, “I cannot tell you if you are right or wrong; I can only tell you the consequences.” What are the consequences of such a propsal as Pejovich describes them? 18- What does Pejovish see as his obligation(s) as a teacher?   “If you never had the right to choose, you cannot even imagine what that means.”   Related References: Svetozar Pejovich, Economic Analysis of Institutions and Systems Svetozar Pejovich, Fundamentals of Economics: A Property Rights Approach Svetozar Pejovich, The Economics of Property Rights: Toward a Theory of Comparative Systems Svetozar Pejovich, Law, Informal Rules, and Economic Performance: The Case for Common Law Terry Anderson and P.J. Hill, The Not-So-Wild, Wild West: Property Rights on the Frontier F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom   Entries from the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics: Communism, Bryan Caplan Capitalism, Robert Hessen Socialism, Robert Heilbroner Property Rights, Armen Alchian Opportunity Cost, David Henderson Friedrich Hayek biography Economic Freedom, Robert Lawson   Other Econlib Resources: Profile in Liberty: Friedrich A. Hayek Bryan Caplan, The Idea Trap Richard McKenzie, How the Collapse of Communism Has Undermined Faith in American Capitalism   EconTalk Podcasts: Terry Anderson on the Environment and Property Rights Caplan on Hayek, Richter, and Socialism George Shultz on Economics, Human Rights, and the Fall of the Soviet Union       As an Amazon Associate, Econlib earns from qualifying purchases. (0 COMMENTS)

The COVID pandemic has disrupted our lives in innumerable ways. For those with children, the disruption to schooling is likely at the top of the list. In this episode, EconTalk host Russ Roberts welcomes back economist (and parenting guru!) Emily Oster to talk about the pandemic’s effects on schools. Oster and team have been tracking COVID cases and precautions in schools since early in the outbreak. The ultimate goal of this massive data collection exercise is both to track COVID cases in schools and learn how outbreaks or cases are affected by mitigation practices. We realize this is a fraught subject for many, and that our questions for further thought and conversation are likely to rouse some strong feelings. Our aim, as thoughtfully expressed by Russ, is NOT to further politicize the conversation, but to learn together. With that, we hope you’ll consider sharing your thoughts with us below.     1- What has Oster found thus far regarding the relationship between school and community spread? What does she think this means for decisions about whether to (re)open schools? To what extent do you agree?   2- Roberts and Oster both note that the situation differs between K12 schools and colleges. Why does it seem that colleges, but not K12 schools, are “superspreaders?”   3- Oster and Roberts spend a great deal of time discussing the trade-offs inherent in all COVID mitigation efforts. How would you suggest the socioeconomic and geographic inequities (with regard to schooling) should be addressed?   4- Roberts describes a recent visit to his dentist, and notes the feelings of other people who feel “obligated” to work in contact with others during the pandemic. To what extent  ought teachers be similarly obligated? Under what conditions? What does the pandemic response to schooling suggest about the way we value teachers and education?   5- What are the things Oster says she has learned from her COVID research? What does she mean by recommending a “scalpel” versus a “sledgehammer” approach to COVID? (0 COMMENTS)