If the question is “do governments or free markets allocate scarce resources more efficiently, in general” it’s hard to see why this is even a matter of doubt any more.
I remember reading an article a few weeks ago which stated that businesses were having trouble finding employees. The reason? Stimuli checks. Why go out and work when one can stay at home and receive the same or more money? Yet another example of government distortion in the economy.
A sad thing is how MSM peddles the narrative that the virus or the pandemic wrecked the economy. Hence, it's quite tough to explain to the average Joe that it was actually government reaction that wrecked the economy.
i liked the sand castle story. reminds me that fredric bastiat said French forts were a lesser way of stimulating the economy. heard of that from thomas woods. my life experience was in buying weapon systems for dod and my feel is multiplier from dod spending on weapons is about 0.5, and the weapons are largely sand castles as if the enemy would fight our way!
while bastiat's economic concern for french forts proved out in 1870, 1914 and 1940 as they were sand castles in use.
greenspan and the housing bubble, if ole alan had stopped the music a year early the bubble might not have hurt as badly. while krugman is so progressive as to forget mit taught him real math, and not parlor game math that got us in all this economic debt
treasury holdings are about $8trillion up from 4.2 trillion before the plague to gut the us economy was used to gut the us economy.
biden's recent 2 trillion whim is about 20% hard things and 80% degrade capitalism in the first world.
i do not do french but all i see from them is 'let the good times roll' and don't ask the price tag......
Just think about how hard it would be to plan a birthday party for somebody you don't know. What kind of cake do you get? How do you decorate? Where is it held? Who do you invite? What kind of music do you play? The party is almost certainly going to be a disappointment to the birthday boy or girl. Now repeat this exercise trying to get somebody the best healthcare. Impossible.
I do want to add, though, that the increase in UI for WA is almost certainly because people are waiting upwards of 3 months to even get into the system. The state has basically yanked down all the phone lines, and people have no choice but to sit and wait for the system to get to them. It's a travesty and it's been going on for over a year.
i ran that same correlation for US using the state restriction index and the 2020 variance from state all cause deaths vs 2017-19 baseline and got an r2 of 0.0126 which is nearly perfect non-correlation.
i've been running lockdown vs ACD globally for 15 months and have seen nothing resembling what you describe and reams of compelling evidence that contradicts it.
would need to see more info, i suspect you may have issue either with data or methodology.
the economist data and data handling are just awful. it's riddled with errors and bad assumption and benchmarking.
i would advise going right to source w/ CDC nchs or other national sources/aggregators.
this data has been vexingly difficult to work with and sanitize and a lot of third parties like the economist and especially for some reason the FT have been adding to the mess. (at the FT, it's clearly deliberate)
we're all here to help one another slog through it and check one another's results.
many others have certainly helped me sharpen my views and approach and to stop stepping on data-rakes.
the baseline cdc tools use to figure 'excess deaths' is lower in 2020 than in the previous several years, this as us boomers increase in quantity and being longer in the tooth........
I want to echo that. The Bad Cat was one of the best things about Twitter, which is mostly a sewer. Martin Kulldorff was another bright light in the toxic darkness there. I’m not sure what’s happened to him. Suspended or banned, I guess. Just think about the tragic, ridiculous irony of a highly respected Harvard Epidemiologist being suspended by the conformist and innumerate censors at Twitter for being “anti-science”, while these same censors leave Eric Ding, a nutritionist masquerading as an epidemiologist, to spread nonsense, pseudo-science and misinformation freely.
yes, he does seem to be playing a certain amount of "mop up" on analyses many had done a year ago. it's useful as there's more data now and it's good to see him getting on toward base facts.
but yes, i've not really seen him break a lot of ground. he seems very "overton window" based.
that said, it makes him a decent bellweather for how the tide of the debate is turning.
If the question is “do governments or free markets allocate scarce resources more efficiently, in general” it’s hard to see why this is even a matter of doubt any more.
Montaigne - Good to see you here. I miss your takedowns on twatter.
Thanks. I’m a fan of the Bad Cat. That’s why I comment here.
I remember reading an article a few weeks ago which stated that businesses were having trouble finding employees. The reason? Stimuli checks. Why go out and work when one can stay at home and receive the same or more money? Yet another example of government distortion in the economy.
A sad thing is how MSM peddles the narrative that the virus or the pandemic wrecked the economy. Hence, it's quite tough to explain to the average Joe that it was actually government reaction that wrecked the economy.
The Broken Window Fallacy is a nice adjunct to this line of thinking and helps highlight all of the hidden costs associated with any govt spending.
i liked the sand castle story. reminds me that fredric bastiat said French forts were a lesser way of stimulating the economy. heard of that from thomas woods. my life experience was in buying weapon systems for dod and my feel is multiplier from dod spending on weapons is about 0.5, and the weapons are largely sand castles as if the enemy would fight our way!
while bastiat's economic concern for french forts proved out in 1870, 1914 and 1940 as they were sand castles in use.
greenspan and the housing bubble, if ole alan had stopped the music a year early the bubble might not have hurt as badly. while krugman is so progressive as to forget mit taught him real math, and not parlor game math that got us in all this economic debt
treasury holdings are about $8trillion up from 4.2 trillion before the plague to gut the us economy was used to gut the us economy.
biden's recent 2 trillion whim is about 20% hard things and 80% degrade capitalism in the first world.
i do not do french but all i see from them is 'let the good times roll' and don't ask the price tag......
Great post, as always.
Just think about how hard it would be to plan a birthday party for somebody you don't know. What kind of cake do you get? How do you decorate? Where is it held? Who do you invite? What kind of music do you play? The party is almost certainly going to be a disappointment to the birthday boy or girl. Now repeat this exercise trying to get somebody the best healthcare. Impossible.
I do want to add, though, that the increase in UI for WA is almost certainly because people are waiting upwards of 3 months to even get into the system. The state has basically yanked down all the phone lines, and people have no choice but to sit and wait for the system to get to them. It's a travesty and it's been going on for over a year.
i ran that same correlation for US using the state restriction index and the 2020 variance from state all cause deaths vs 2017-19 baseline and got an r2 of 0.0126 which is nearly perfect non-correlation.
i've been running lockdown vs ACD globally for 15 months and have seen nothing resembling what you describe and reams of compelling evidence that contradicts it.
would need to see more info, i suspect you may have issue either with data or methodology.
the economist data and data handling are just awful. it's riddled with errors and bad assumption and benchmarking.
i would advise going right to source w/ CDC nchs or other national sources/aggregators.
I deleted my comment. That data did blow. Sorry about that.
absolutely nothing to be sorry for.
this data has been vexingly difficult to work with and sanitize and a lot of third parties like the economist and especially for some reason the FT have been adding to the mess. (at the FT, it's clearly deliberate)
we're all here to help one another slog through it and check one another's results.
many others have certainly helped me sharpen my views and approach and to stop stepping on data-rakes.
that's how science is supposed to work.
good point. I see the same with that dataset.
---
OLS Regression Results
=======================================================================================
Dep. Variable: y R-squared (uncentered): 0.000
Model: OLS Adj. R-squared (uncentered): -0.020
Method: Least Squares F-statistic: 0.005920
Date: Wed, 26 May 2021 Prob (F-statistic): 0.939
Time: 17:49:39 Log-Likelihood: -52.590
No. Observations: 50 AIC: 107.2
Df Residuals: 49 BIC: 109.1
Df Model: 1
Covariance Type: nonrobust
==============================================================================
coef std err t P>|t| [0.025 0.975]
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
StringencyIndex 0.0122 0.159 0.077 0.939 -0.307 0.332
==============================================================================
Omnibus: 2.076 Durbin-Watson: 1.624
Prob(Omnibus): 0.354 Jarque-Bera (JB): 1.484
Skew: -0.202 Prob(JB): 0.476
Kurtosis: 2.259 Cond. No. 1.00
==============================================================================
the baseline cdc tools use to figure 'excess deaths' is lower in 2020 than in the previous several years, this as us boomers increase in quantity and being longer in the tooth........
I don't really like their tools. I used the economists methods here:
https://github.com/TheEconomist/covid-19-excess-deaths-tracker
yes, i agree. there was no NPI that worked and you cannot learn "have more pre-existing immunity and less obesity" etc.
variance all seems exogenous to health policy beyond the obvious of "don't do anything wildly stupid like flood nursing homes with covid + patients"
Yes, the bar was literally "Don't kill your own people", but some "leaders" managed to wriggle underneath it all the same.
I want to echo that. The Bad Cat was one of the best things about Twitter, which is mostly a sewer. Martin Kulldorff was another bright light in the toxic darkness there. I’m not sure what’s happened to him. Suspended or banned, I guess. Just think about the tragic, ridiculous irony of a highly respected Harvard Epidemiologist being suspended by the conformist and innumerate censors at Twitter for being “anti-science”, while these same censors leave Eric Ding, a nutritionist masquerading as an epidemiologist, to spread nonsense, pseudo-science and misinformation freely.
We are living in the Theater of the Absurd.
YYG is good at confirming things “most of us knew already”.
yes, he does seem to be playing a certain amount of "mop up" on analyses many had done a year ago. it's useful as there's more data now and it's good to see him getting on toward base facts.
but yes, i've not really seen him break a lot of ground. he seems very "overton window" based.
that said, it makes him a decent bellweather for how the tide of the debate is turning.