Sep 5, 2020 | Sci-Tech
Writing in the FInanical Post, James H. Stock on why Lockdowns are too blunt a weapon against Covid makes three key points:
1. “[E]conomic lockdowns are neither necessary nor sufficient to suppress Covid-19”
[E]conomic lockdowns are neither necessary nor sufficient to suppress Covid-19. But the concerted use of largely non-economic interventions can suppress the virus and set the stage for the recovery of demand and employment in restaurants, travel and other high-contact sectors. …economic lockdowns alone are a blunt, costly and only partially effective instrument of public health.
2. Less expensive measures though individually not effective, when combined together become highly effective
There are many less expensive measures that, when deployed together, can be highly effective. These include working from home and setting rules to make the workplace safe. Taking special steps to protect the elderly, reopening the lowest-contact economic sectors first, banning the highest-risk activities such as bars and large social gatherings, wearing masks, social distancing and enhanced testing, quarantine, and contact tracing are already familiar. If they are seriously adopted, together they can suppress the virus without resorting to a new round of economic lockdowns.
2. The most important measure is wide use of frequent, cheap, rapid screening tests
Most important, testing for the virus remains grossly inadequate….Rapid screening tests need to be widely available…My colleague Michael Mina argues persuasively that the government should fast-track approval and production of cheap paper-strip antigen tests that would alert the newly infected of the need to isolate.
Screening tests need not detect every infection. Mathematically, rapid testing and isolation acts like herd immunity: by reducing the chance that a susceptible individual comes into contact with an infected one it can drive the basic reproduction or “R” number below one. Even if a testing regime pulls only a fraction of the infected out of circulation, that — along with other measures such as widespread mask usage and targeted bans of potential superspreader events — can suppress the virus, bring down deaths to very low levels and set the stage for a strong recovery.
Aug 24, 2020 | Politics, Sci-Tech
The science “experts” tell us that those who break curfews, do not socially distance, and do not wear masks, are responsible for COVID-19 deaths, which is why the economy, churches, and schools should remain closed. (For a proper approach to handling pandemics click here.)
These same priests of “science” also tell us that if one carries BLM Inc. signs, harasses policeman, and blocks traffic, one is exempted.
Now in a similar vein, the political talking heads, continue that these same “protestors” are unable to vote in polling booths in person because of the dangers of COVID-19, and therefore an untested new system designed by the DNC of nationwide mail-in voting must be implemented at the last minute, that goes beyond the present system of absentee ballotting (where a potential voter is verified before they cast a mail-in ballot).
Is their concern really over COVID-19 or to enable election fraud on a nationwide scale?
As for the dangers of in-person voting Dr. Fauci sets the record straight:
The
Aug 24, 2020 | Culture, Politics, Sci-Tech
Professor Jason Hill, author of We Have Overcome, mostly channeling Ayn Rand, made this important statement:
“What we’re seeing in the educational system is systemic nihilism. So let us go back a step further. A couple weeks ago Rutgers University declared that grammar was racist. Now grammar is the science that deals with the proper method of oral and written communication. When you attack grammar you attack language, which is the method of cognition. You attack man’s mind, you attack his ability to reason. So you attack man’s mind, which means you leave us on the level of grunting farm animals, so you leave us incapacitated to reason, to think. And then you take away his history, you take away human history, our Constitutional rights, our Bill of Rights, our Second Amendment, our First Amendment, or time-worn principles that we use to defend our way of life. Our Judeo-Christianity. Your looking at sysemtic nihilism. You are looking at the Anti-Christ as far as I am concerned. You’re looking at a bunch of nihilists and anarchists that want to destroy the system and replace it with nothing – nothing at all. They want to destroy the good for the sake of it being the good. I have been warning about these post-modern nihilists that started back in the 1960s, when we had these fake disciplines attacking reason, valorizing feelings as the only criterion for adjudicating disputes – one’s feelings and one’s feeling of being offended as the only criteria for adjudicating disputes – and dispensing with reason, objective reality, and logic as the construct of imperialist, racist, white men. That’s what we’re seeing today, and so you dispense with history altogether.”
Aug 24, 2020 | Sci-Tech
Some thoughts on Matt Ridley’s take on individualism and the collective from his discussion with Adam Mossoff on his book How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom:
- Innovation as a collective process is not a knock against individualism as Ridley’s “lone-wolf” conception of individualism makes it. Ridley sees “individualism” as doing things entirely by oneself. I see “unrugged individualism” as a straw-man. Individualism means one takes an independent, first-hand attitude in one’s thinking and decision-making. It means not bowing down to others when one’s mind thinks otherwise, and willing to “stand-alone” when one’s mind determines this is the best course of action. In any group or collective under-taking, it is the “individualist” who is willing to buck the trend and think differently, which provides the intellectual “mutation” for the development of new ideas.
- To say there is a “collective brain” is not reality, but a metaphor, much like Adam Smith’s “invisible hand.” I think both conceptions, though poetic, can hide the operations of the market rather than explaining them. This is why methodological individualism, favored by Professors Mises and Hayek, the latter that Ridley so approvingly quotes is so important.
- A group, or collective (whether association, society, corporation, etc.) is not fundamental. A group is made of individuals. It is individuals that exist. A collection is a collection of something. The unit is the individual. The problem with political “collectivism” is that that it entirely forgets this.
- In any collective undertaking, different individuals perform different actions towards the achievement of a commonly agreed-upon goal. Each individual is making an individual contribution that advances and builds on the work of others – and more often than not some, individuals contribute more than others and some less.
- The “heroic” inventor does not exist in a vacuum, but one needs to be careful not to slip into the “You didn’t build that!” attitude popularized by political collectivists like President Obama. Innovators do rely on the efforts and knowledge of those before them (“stands on their shoulders.”) What makes them heroic is the results they do produce by their efforts, as individuals, which in turn contributes to the process. The success of a group undertaking is that such individuals are able to coordinate their individual efforts together toward a shared goal.
- Ridley states that knowledge is not stored in individual heads, but knowledge is stored between them. I think a more accurate formulation would be: knowledge is conceptualized and stored inside an individual’s head and is shared between them. (It can then be stored in that wonderful innovation: the book).
- This is not to disagree that knowledge is dispersed, but to point out that it is dispersed among the minds of various individuals, which is why free markets — where individuals are left free to disagree and act against the desires of others so long as they do not violate their rights through the initiation of force and fraud — are so important as a coordinating mechanism for knowledge. As philosopher Ayn Rand has observed a free-market is a corollary of a free-mind.
Anyways How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom is a must-read.
Aug 11, 2020 | Sci-Tech
Adam interviews Ridley on the role of innovation in a free economy, and the two end up having a fascinating discussion on the role of intellectual property and its relationship to innovation.
Ridley sees an overall negative correlation between innovation and intellectual property empirically today, and Adam an unequivocally positive one.
Ridley takes a utilitarian justification of patents (“made to be shared” to benefit society) and Adam takes a property rights justification (made to benefit the patent owner’s intellectual work).
Adam sees the creation of intellectual property rights, such as patents, as similar to the initial creation of physical property rights in land (such as via the Homestead Act), where those who develop the land, that was once in the commons, first get title to the land. Brilliant.
As to Ridley’s concerns over copyrights being the life of the author plus 50 (or 70) years, I think that it makes a lot of sense if you release a book later in your lifetime — say in your 70’s. You can sell the publishing rights to the book now, for the 50 plus years to someone else, who can pay you a lump sum for the expected future sales after your death, in the present. That would not be possible if copyrights ended with the death of the author. Whereas if copyright ends at your death you would not get much for your efforts for selling the rights to a book at 70. Or, imagine if copyrights ended at the author’s death and you were J.K Rowling who just released the final book in the fantastic Harry Potter series.
I’m still digesting Adam’s thoughts — which also gave Ridley some pause to mull over — which I will post on later.
The two end the conversation with:
“I’ve probably learned more from you than you have from me but it’s it’s always interesting to do that.” — Matt Ridley
“I learned a lot from your book and I really appreciated the the depth of research and effort that you put into it I really hope it has a wide readership.” — Adam Mossoff
It’s always heart-warming that two great minds who disagree, on what can be a cantankerous issue in other circles, can discuss issues in such a collegial manner.
Recommended Reading: “How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom” by Matt Ridley
Aug 10, 2020 | Sci-Tech
As some policymakers push to include “green energy” initiatives as a key feature of economic recovery, a new Manhattan Institute report by senior fellow Mark Mills offers a sobering reality check. Any large-scale shift to using so-called green energy technologies instead of oil and gas as primary energy sources would require an unprecedented increase in the mining of key minerals across the globe.
Building wind turbines, solar panels, and electric vehicle batteries is far more resource-intensive than building hydrocarbon-fueled machines. These green technologies require, on average, more than ten times the quantity of materials to deliver the same amount of energy. If widely implemented, this will require far more mining, mainly in foreign countries, often with questionable environmental and labor practices. And while essentially all hydrocarbons America uses are produced domestically, nearly all green energy materials and the components of green machines are produced overseas. An aggressive green-energy path will exacerbate foreign supply-chain vulnerabilities at a time when many policymakers are considering the benefits of reshoring supply chains.
Among the report’s key findings:
- A single electric car contains more cobalt than 1,000 smartphone batteries; the blades on a single wind turbine require more plastic than five million smartphones; and a solar array that could power one data center uses more glass than 50 million smartphones.
- A single electric car battery weighing 1,000 pounds requires extracting and processing some 500,000 pounds of materials to obtain the key “energy minerals.” Averaged over a battery’s life, each mile of driving an electric car “consumes” five pounds of earth. Using an internal combustion engine consumes about 0.2 pounds of liquids per mile.
- As recently as 1990, the U.S. was the world’s number-one producer of minerals. Today, it is in seventh place. even though the nation has vast mineral reserves worth trillions of dollars, America is now 100 percent dependent on imports for some 17 key minerals, and for another 29, over half of domestic needs are imported.
- Oil, natural gas, and coal are needed to produce the concrete, steel, plastics, and purified minerals used to build green machines. The energy equivalent of 100 barrels of oil is used in the processes to fabricate a single battery that can store the equivalent of one barrel of oil.
- By 2050, with current plans, the quantity of worn-out solar panels—much of it nonrecyclable—will constitute double the tonnage of all today’s global plastic waste, along with over 3 million tons per year of unrecyclable plastics from worn-out wind turbine blades. By 2030, more than 10 million tons per year of batteries will become garbage.
Click here to read the full report.
Source: Manhattan Institute
