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  • MIT Data Scientist: Lockdowns Not Correlated With Fewer Deaths (But Are Correlated With More Unemployment)

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    Dozens of studies show that lockdowns were an ineffective pandemic response. The list just got longer.

    In May, Youyang Gu, an MIT-trained engineer and data scientist, released data showing that government restrictions were not correlated with lower COVID mortality in America. Government restrictions were correlated with higher unemployment, however.

    “In the US, there is no correlation between Covid deaths & changes in unemployment rates. However, blue states are much more likely to have higher increases in unemployment,” wrote Gu, the creator of covid19-projections.com, a pandemic modeling site. “More restrictions in a state is NOT correlated with fewer COVID-19 deaths. However, more restrictions IS correlated with higher unemployment.”

    The COVID-19 pandemic is finally winding down and more and more people are beginning to acknowledge some hard truths about the failures of the collective response to the virus.

    George Orwell famously observed that during deceitful times telling the truth is a revolutionary act, so the fact that so many people are finally acknowledging hard truths appears to be a sign we are emerging from deceitful times.

    For some, such as Dr. Anthony Fauci, these truths are bitter medicine. As Hannah Cox recently observed, Fauci has been on the wrong side of numerous pandemic confrontations with Sen. Rand Paul—and has found himself on the losing end each time.

    Yet facts are stubborn things. And 14 months after the pandemic’s arrival, we have an abundance of data that shows stay-at-home orders backfired and lockdowns were terribly ineffective at slowing the spread of the virus.

    The harms of lockdowns, however, are undeniable: economic collapse, millions of jobs and businesses lost, rampant spending, surging debt and poverty, an explosion of drug overdoses, poor mental health, and a collapse of health screenings (including cancer) that will result in hundreds of thousands of excess deaths in the coming years—if not millions.

    It will not be easy to acknowledge this failure. As The New York Times noted in 2017, humans struggle mightily to admit we were wrong.

    “Mistakes can be hard to digest, so sometimes we double down rather than face them. Our confirmation bias kicks in, causing us to seek out evidence to prove what we already believe,” wrote Kristin Wong. “The car you cut off has a small dent in its bumper, which obviously means that it is the other driver’s fault.”

    There’s a name for this psychological phenomenon: cognitive dissonance.

    “Cognitive dissonance is what we feel when the self-concept — I’m smart, I’m kind, I’m convinced this belief is true — is threatened by evidence that we did something that wasn’t smart, that we did something that hurt another person, that the belief isn’t true,” Carol Tavris, a co-author of the book Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me), told the Times.

    Tavris added that cognitive dissonance poses a threat to our sense of self.

    “To reduce dissonance, we have to modify the self-concept or accept the evidence,” Tavris said. “Guess which route people prefer?”

    Coming to grips with the failure of lockdowns is important for several reasons.

    For starters, the pandemic of 2020 will not be the last pandemic Americans face. If we’re to avoid the painful experience in the future, we’ll need to better understand how the unorthodox pandemic response came about and determine which public health policies worked and which did not.

    But there’s an even larger lesson that can be learned. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, F.A. Hayek warned of the danger of mankind’s inability to recognize the limits of its knowledge and power.

    “There is danger in the exuberant feeling of ever growing power which the advance of the physical sciences has engendered and which tempts man to try, “dizzy with success”, to use a characteristic phrase of early communism, to subject not only our natural but also our human environment to the control of a human will,” Hayek said.

    Dizzy with success in this age of wonders, Hayek feared humans would be bewitched by their accomplishments and believe they could achieve anything if they could only control society—”a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals.”

    We witnessed firsthand in 2020 the fruit borne from this effort to control society to save it. There’s an important lesson in humility there, if humans are wise enough to see it.


    Jon Miltimore

    Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune.

    Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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  • Biden Says ‘Generous’ Unemployment Benefits Not Responsible for Biggest Jobs Report Miss in History. He’s Wrong

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    Following a dismal April jobs report, President Joe Biden took to the podium Monday to defend his administration’s economic policies.

    “There’s been a lot of discussion since Friday’s report that people are being paid to stay home rather than go to work,” Biden said. “We don’t see much evidence of that.”

    A US employment report released Friday showed the economy added just 266,000 jobs in April, down substantially from the 770,000 jobs added in March and about one quarter of what forecasters had predicted.

    “Economists were hoping for a figure roughly 1 million jobs larger,” Axios reported, “making this the biggest miss, relative to expectations, in the history of the payrolls report.”

    Bloomberg writer Mohamed A. El-Erian, an economic adviser at Allianz SE, said the report constituted “the biggest data miss on record.”

    The jobs miss comes two months after Biden signed into law a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package that included a six-month expansion of federal unemployment benefits, which pay unemployed workers an additional $300 per week on top of their state unemployment benefits.

    These increased benefits mean in many cases people make less money returning to work, which economists warned prior to passage of the legislation would create a disincentive for workers to return to the labor force.

    “Expanding unemployment benefits during a recession has a predictable result: slower employment recovery,” Texas Tech economist Alex Salter told FEE in February. “We should be helping people get back to work—not making it more financially attractive to stay home.”

    This is precisely what the Biden administration did, however. The results have been a weak economic recovery and a record labor shortage. For some, like Larry and Roxane Maggio, who ran a deli in New Jersey for a decade, the labor shortage has proven fatal to their business.

    “We just can’t find anyone to work,” the Maggios recently told The Philadelphia Inquirer, as they prepared their final catering orders at Ludovico’s.

    The Maggios’s experience is not unique. The weak jobs report, the New York Times notes, is an indication the labor shortage business owners have been describing is quite real.

    “These numbers are consistent with the story many business leaders are telling, of severe labor shortages — that demand has surged back but employers cannot find enough workers to fulfill it,” writes senior economics correspondent Neil Irwin.

    Biden, however, is reluctant to admit that the dismal April jobs report stems from the government’s “generous unemployment benefits.”

    “Americans want to work,” Biden told reporters. “As my dad used to say, a job is about a lot more than a paycheck. It’s about your dignity.”

    Biden’s father was not wrong that employment is about much more than a paycheck. I’ve pointed this out myself.

    My first job, a groundskeeper on a golf course, paid me $5 an hour—which doesn’t sound like much. But the job offered me much more than compensation. It taught me how to get up really early and punch a time clock on time, and how to drive a stick-shift and operate light machinery. I received a crash course in landscaping, learned how to take orders, and execute directions. I even managed to improve my slice (just a little) while working there that summer.

    It was one of the most rewarding and important jobs of my life, but it would not have happened if someone had said I could make more money by not showing up at 5:30 a.m. each day and working under the hot sun for eight hours. It wasn’t that I was lazy. It’s just that you can’t expect people to go to work for less money than they’d be getting to stay at home. Incentives matter.

    Indeed one of the first lessons in economics is that if you tax something, you get less of it. If you subsidize something, you get more of it. This is why economists warn lawmakers must be especially careful about what types of behavior they subsidize.

    “You cannot subsidize irresponsibility and expect people to become more responsible,” the economist Thomas Sowell has observed.

    It’s not complicated stuff. This is why it was obvious to economists from Salter to Lawrence Summers, who served in the Clinton and Obama administrations, predicted that Biden’s juiced unemployment benefits would have negative consequences.

    They were right, and those consequences are becoming visible now.

    The best thing the Biden administration could do is call a special session and terminate the perverse incentives that are causing people to choose unemployment over work. This is unlikely to happen, however, because it violates the first rule in politics: never admit a mistake.

    Fortunately, thanks to federalism, some states are taking matters into their own hands. South Carolina, Arkansas, and Montana, recently fully opted out of the federal unemployment benefit program.

    “Continuing these programs until the planned expiration date of September 4, 2021, is not necessary and actually interferes with the ability of employers to fill over 40,000 job vacancies in Arkansas,” Gov. Asa Hutchinson wrote in a letter.

    Turning away federal money is not an easy thing to do, but it is the proper course.

    Joe Biden’s father was right. Work isn’t just about a paycheck; it offers dignity and more, which is precisely why we should reject policies that discourage it.


    Jon Miltimore

    Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune.

    Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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  • The Minimum Wage Makes Teens Unemployable, So Taxpayers Are Paying $5.5 Billion to Find Them Jobs

    Posted on by Azrael 1 Comment

    In February, the Obama administration proposed a “First Job” initiative. The main goal of the aptly titled initiative is to help unemployed young people obtain their first job by spending $5.5 billion on grants, training, and direct wages. Unfortunately – but unsurprisingly – the press release failed to acknowledge the most significant factor impeding employment in this age group: the minimum wage.

    Everyone knows that a first job is a vital step in a young person’s development. Research has shown that work experience at a young age teaches positive work habits, time management, perseverance, and improves self-confidence. Increases in teenage employment also reduce the rate of violent crime. Yet despite these well-known benefits, the US maintains a minimum wage policy that makes it very difficult for all but the most productive teenagers to find a job.

    When the minimum wage was discussed in the late 19th and early 20th century it was in the context of preventing the least skilled, most “undesirable” workers from finding a job, with the goal of eradicating the unemployable people. For the next 80-plus years it was common knowledge that a minimum wage would reduce employment among the least-skilled workers. The only debate was about whether such a reduction was desirable from society’s perspective, as many of the appalling eugenicists of the time contended.

    As late as 1987, the New York Times editorial staff recommended a minimum wage of $0 because of its negative effects on employment. The Times argued that the minimum wage was an ineffective anti-poverty tool whose employment costs outweighed any benefits from higher wages.

    Fast forward to the early 1990s, when an economic study purported to show that a slight increase in the minimum wage may not reduce employment after all. Despite the tenuous results of this study, it provided minimum wage supporters with the ammunition they needed to push for increases in the minimum wage at the federal, state, and local level without worrying about declines in employment. This misinformed thinking continues and is the basis for modern calls to raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 per hour or even $15 per hour, as some cities have already done.

    Meanwhile, the labour force participation rate for 16-19 year olds has fallen from over 50% in the early 1990s to 35% in January 2016. Some of this is due to more young people engaging in extra-curricular activities and attending college, but if those were the only causes then the Obama administration would have little reason to be concerned about teenage employment.

    Despite the decline of teenagers in the labour market and the numerous recent studies that show that the minimum wage has adverse effects on teenage employment, the minimum wage continues to be viewed by many as an effective anti-poverty tool with little to no adverse effects. It is this line of thinking that has encouraged the newest proposal calling for billions of taxpayer dollars to provide jobs; the labor market, not the government, is the problem and so the government should intervene.

    An all too common occurrence in US policy is that government intervention causes a problem that the government then tries to solve with more intervention, completely ignoring the possibility that the initial intervention was the source of the problem. In this case, price controls at the bottom of the labor-market ladder have prevented young people from getting on the first rung, so now the government wants to roll over a $5.5 billion dollar taxpayer-funded stool to give them a boost.

    Government programs rarely achieve their goal so there is good reason to be skeptical of this one, especially since it fails to address the root cause of the problem. A better, more effective solution for helping teenagers gain valuable job skills would be to set the minimum wage at the proper level of $0 and let the labour market work.

     

    Source: The Minimum Wage Makes Teens Unemployable, So Taxpayers Are Paying $5.5 Billion to Find Them Jobs | Foundation for Economic Education


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