Category Archives: Libertarian Thought

Fear factor

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In an interview, Paul Romer says,

The key to solving the economic crisis is to reduce the fear that someone will get sick if they go to work or go shop. So it’s really about building confidence. The thing about testing is that it’s easy to explain and it doesn’t frighten people the way digital contact tracing does. It’s not subject to technological and social, political uncertainty the way digital contact tracing is. It doesn’t require the organizational capacity that doing human contact tracing does. It’s really just a very simple, easy-to-explain idea—that to control the pandemic, we need to get a reasonable majority of the people who are infectious into a quarantine, and then we’re good.

I agree with his first sentence. But is mass testing the solution for fear? Clearly, it would work for Paul, and for other people who are fond of abstract theory that has some math to it. But I don’t think my own fear would be any less if there were mass testing. And I can imagine that such a regime would actually stoke fear in a lot of people.

Some other thoughts:

1. Politicians and public officials try to convert fear into Fear Of Others’ Liberty. Their success at this is what expands government and reduces freedom.

2. We are now in a position where anything other than a lockdown causes fear. It takes someone with a lot of pro-Trump mood affiliation or a very disagreeable person like myself to not fear lifting restrictions.

3. Based on what I can infer from my reading, one should really fear being elderly and in a nursing home. One also should fear being elderly and having obesity, heart problems, or hypertension. You should have some fear of being in an enclosed area in which someone else is singing, talking loudly, coughing, or sneezing.

When I need to be in an indoor setting with people other than my wife, I have less fear if everyone, including me, is wearing a face covering. I would not fear being outdoors or touching surfaces touched by others.

But as you know, I wish that public health officials were doing more to verify what to fear and what not to fear, and stop giving us their Bubba Meises and their model forecasts as if they were Science.

A transit utopia?

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Kevin Fisher says to build a city from scratch in order to have an efficient road system for self-driving cars.

The grid would have no intersections because the east-west grid would pass under the north-south grid. When the cars switch directions they would use a ramp similar to a freeway. In fact the whole grid would work like a freeway with no stopping or stop lights. All the cars would travel the same rate of speed so merging would be effortless. You could go from point A to point B without ever stopping. Without the stop and go of normal travel the travel times would be greatly reduced. It combines the practical grid layout of city streets and the speed of freeways, giving you the best of both worlds. The amount of traffic allowed on the grid at any one time would be centrally controlled by computer. This would eliminate traffic jams and any slowing of travel times. The pricing to use the system would be dynamic, if you wanted to travel at a popular time you would pay more and you would pay less in times with less demand.

He suggests putting the grid underground. And it would be very expensive to do that under an existing city, so you have to build a new city.

I don’t think the “field of dreams” model works for creating a paradise of any sort, whether it pertains to transportation or for libertarian utopia.

Trouble on the right

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Andy Smarick writes,

We have unintentionally groomed a movement with too little grounding in conservative principles, too little ability to address contemporary challenges with intellectual verve, and too little understanding about how to actually govern. . .

And of course we were susceptible to Trump’s substitution of chutzpah and chauvinism for conservatism. And of course the vacuum caused by the dearth of effective, authentic conservative policies was filled by proposals that stretch the definition of “American conservatism” to its limits and sometimes beyond.

Smarick longs for conservative icons who are intellectually deep, adaptable to new conditions, and experienced in real-world governance. He may be persuasive, but that is a bit of a tall order.

General update, April 14

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1. Deirdre McCloskey writes,

Socialism should therefore be called “coercionism.”

. . .another good name for the system that the non-conservatives and the non-socialists among us favor would be “adultism.”

2. I am still cranky, for the same reasons as before. We still do not have results of random-sample testing to have an idea of how many people have the virus in various regions. We still do not know how viral load affects outcomes. We still do not know whether people get it from touching surfaces and then touching their faces, or whether they have to breathe near an infected person. We still are not conducting any scientific experiments. Instead, we are contemplating mass “experiments” with changing regimes for social distancing, arguing over putting at risk either more economic activity or more human lives. Worse yet, we really won’t learn anything from these “experiments.”

We still talk about political leaders “re-opening the economy,” as if the economy is theirs to re-open and individual choices will not be affected by the virus. People still expect that any and every household and business can be saved from the consequences of the virus, because government has the know-how and skill to undertake this. People still conceive of government as an infinite storehouse of riches that is disconnected from any need to obtain the wealth that it purports to distribute.

3. Ben Thompson writes,

what has been increasingly whitewashed in the story of California and Washington’s success in battling the coronavirus1 is the role tech companies played: the first work-from-home orders started around March 1st, and within a week nearly all tech companies had closed their doors; local governments followed another week later.

So, the approximate order of events was: private sector response, then local government response in the west, then response in the east and by the Federal government. But as Thompson points out, the east coast media have missed this aspect of the story.

4. Ali Hortaçsu, Jiarui Liu, and Timothy Schwieg attempt to do some epidemoiology.

we find that 4% to 14% of cases were reported across the U.S. up to March 16

The paper describes their methods. As of March 16, according to this site there were 4300 reported cases. But if the authors are correct, there were between 3000 and 100,000 actual cases.

I suspect that the ratio of unreported cases to reported cases has gone down since then, but I have no idea by how much. We now have almost 600K reported cases, and if we have between 6 and 25 times as many unreported cases, then that would mean between 3.6 million and 15 million people have had the virus.

Economists are probably building better models than epidemiologists. But random-sample testing would be much better.

Tyler Cowen at Princeton, annotated

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Tyler Cowen talks about medium and long-term consequences of the virus crisis. I give it an A+.

For a couple of days I worked on a post on the economic outlook, which I scheduled to go up tomorrow. I think you will see a lot of similarity in our views. We differ in terms of tone. Tyler sounds detached and fatalistic. I sound cranky. Below are some more detailed comments of mine, sometimes amplifying his remarks and sometimes disputing them. Continue reading →

The virus and political alignment

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Joseph C. Sternberg writes,

The oddity is that the left in most of the world has been so intensely critical of Sweden’s experiment. If this model works, it would hold out some hope that the coronavirus could be managed without putting millions of members of the left’s own blue-collar base out of work. Yet the prevailing attitude is less “let them try” and more “excommunicate the heretics.”

I prefer to use the three-axes model. For those of you new to this blog, the model says:

Conservatives like to frame issues in terms of civilization-barbarism, accusing their opponents of being on the side of barbarism.

Progressives like to frame issues in terms of oppressors-oppressed, accusing their opponents of being on the side of the oppressors.

Libertarians like to frame issues in terms of liberty-coercion, accusing their opponents of being on the side of (state) coercion.

For conservatives, the easiest way to frame this in civilization-barbarism terms is to cast China in the role of barbarians. President Trump has taken that approach.

Progressives instinctively reacted against this. Early in the crisis, the progressive framing, as articulated by WHO and some American progressives, was to charge that racism was behind the fears of the virus. They saw themselves as heroically fighting against anti-Chinese prejudice.

Since then, the progressive framing has become less clear to me. I have seen, but forgotten to bookmark, a few articles claiming that the virus crisis is harder on minorities because their death rates are higher and harder on women because they bear the burden of caring for children home from school. Those articles would represent oppressor-oppressed framing, but to be honest, I don’t see them as representative of what most progressives are saying at the moment.

For now, I see progressives as focused on claiming President Trump has badly mis-handled the crisis. It seems to me that they place a higher priority on that than on establishing an oppressor-oppressed narrative. Such a narrative may emerge later, perhaps in the report of the investigative commission that many progressives are calling for.

Libertarians are being driven bonkers. Myself included. I don’t have to repeat what I already have said. I see as villains all of those who seem to me to automatically praise activist government regardless of whether it helps while ignoring the possibility that the private sector can adapt effectively.

Of course, libertarians are backfooted by the undeniable fact that there are externalities here. If I behave recklessly, I can endanger others by infecting them or using scarce hospital resources.

Should it be legal to ride a motorcycle without a helmet or for a restaurant to have a smoking section? Many people would say “no.” Libertarians would be inclined to say “yes.” There is some of the same division over whether or not you should be allowed to eat in a restaurant these days. And libertarians are not winning the argument.

How we lose the culture war

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[Note: askblog had an existence prior to the virus crisis. I still schedule occasional posts like this one.]
Titus Techera writes,

Monopoly over the sources of shame makes our elites superior to the rest of us, and Caldwell analyzes it in terms of the courts, administrative agencies, and business. This monopoly is why they can do anything and get away with it. No one will ask the Clintons or anyone around them or like them about their relationship to Harvey Weinstein or Jeffrey Epstein; it’s perfectly okay—because they are elite liberals who demonstrate their virtue by regularly calling the rest of us racist. In doing so, they remind us that it’s their privilege to slap us, the necessary punishment for our lack of enlightenment.

…The Republican Party is not without its victories—remember 2016, when the people gave them victory in all elections throughout the land? But Republicans almost never follow through by using their electoral victories to practice politics. They refuse to cripple the power of Progressives to ruin decent citizens’ private lives. Every year, conservatives become more scared about even voicing their opinions on college campuses or at work or on social media, living in fear of Progressives and ashamed of themselves for being so afraid—and you may imagine how they feel about the elites who don’t even seem to want to protect them. We will get Progressives to stop when more citizens act to stop them with support from their own institutions and their own elites. We will get citizens to act when we make them angry at the humiliations Progressives inflict on them, and we will generate that anger only if we force our own elites to act on our behalf

The essay reacts to Christopher Caldwell’s controversial new book, The Age of Entitlement.

FEE tests the three-axes model

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[Note: askblog had an existence prior to the virus crisis. I still schedule occasional posts like this one.]
The Foundation for Economic Education has published a report on its “youth education and audience research” project. Part of that project tested the three-axes model. FEE developed didactic stories, such as a city taking property from a small-business owner to give it to a hotel chain. They then tuned the narrative of the stories to either emphasize oppressor/oppressed, civilization/barbarism, or liberty/coercion. Tuning helped to increase engagement in the targeted audience.

The 3-Axes Model is a genuinely useful way to understand major differences in the way that Progressives, Conservatives, and Libertarians fundamentally understand and process the world. When presenting messaging to these groups, using the language and themes that each group prefers is a good way to present your message without activating their ideological defenses.

A general update

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I still want to participate in a movement to change the direction of the policy response to the virus crisis. The health policy leadership strikes me as inflexible and unscientific in its approach. And the macroeconomics profession is even worse. Our peacetime bureaucrats are losing the war on all fronts.

I decided after experimenting the other day that I don’t have a comparative advantage in audio-visual media. Others in the movement may prove better at that. I am thinking in terms of a different blog-like format, but more polished than this one. I do want to involve well-known thinkers I respect. I want to hear from the audience and involve them, not just talk (write) at them. Stay tuned.

Here are some comments on analysis that has recently come to my attention.

We are still nowhere on mass public face covering, but at least one country’s leader thinks it’s worth a try. And if it works there, maybe all the flak the idea gets from the health policy experts won’t stop us from trying it here.

Listening to Peter Attia and Michael Osterholm, it seems likely that our hospital system is going to run into shortages of many supplies, including medicines, masks, and chemicals necessary to carry out tests. Thanks to Tyler Cowen for the pointer.

Listening to Jay Bhattacharya and Peter Robinson, it sounds like Jay understands the principles of science. I wish somewhat like him had more power to oversee the allocation of resources for testing.

Robin Hanson found a serious error in every so-called model to predict spreading. That is, treating the spread rate, or R0, as if it were a single, physical parameter is misleading. In fact, we know that most people with the disease have R0’s well below 1, and a remarkably large fraction of cases are caused by a tiny number of super-spreaders. Robin shows that this makes it much harder to contain the virus. I trust his model more than the fancier ones out there.

I think this argues for a policy of limiting the number of people any one person can be in contact with per 10-day period. But “in contact with” may have to include doorknob effects. Of course, we still have not done the experiment to see how strong doorknob effects are.

William Galston is among at least a few people promoting the idea of a commission to investigate the government’s response to the virus crisis. I think that is a terrible idea. A commission is a symbolic gesture–an alternative to really cleaning house.

What I want to see instead is a really effective effort to lower the status of the public health experts and economic experts who created the response. Meanwhile, raise the status of outside thinkers who have been more insightful. The real commission will be what is embedded in the movement that I pray will form and in which I plan to participate.

After the 2008 financial crisis, the elites raised the status of Ben Bernanke and the Obama team without critically examining whether what they did was helpful or harmful. Not surprisingly the current Fed and the Trump economic team are pulling out the same playbook, expecting to reap the same glory.

But what have they accomplished? They have taken us much farther down the road to serfdom. We need to turn this vehicle around.