Insurance Rates Show LNG Shipment Is Safe

Claiming that LNG poses an unreasonable safety risk is wrong—nothing could be further from the truth

Letter to The WSJ.

"Regarding Mark A. Izeman’s Jan. 22 letter in support of blocking the proposed New Jersey liquefied natural gas (LNG) port: His argument falls flat in terms of the true risks of LNG. LNG in its liquid state is nontoxic, noncorrosive, nonflammable and isn’t explosive. His claim that LNG is “potentially explosive” is a stretch, at best. Only when the vapors of LNG are ignited in a closed space does it become flammable. Marine cargo insurance for LNG shipments are approximately 25% less than that of crude oil, due to the lower risk profile. Over the past 50 years, over 100,000 LNG shipments have been made globally, without any major safety incidents reported.

From an environmental standpoint, Mr. Izeman’s argument about the impact on water pollution simply doesn’t hold water (no pun intended). When LNG spills onto a land or water surface, it vaporizes, disperses and leaves no residue.

It’s no surprise that the Natural Resources Defense Council would be opposed to any form of fossil fuel, but claiming that LNG poses an unreasonable safety risk is wrong—nothing could be further from the truth.

Prof. Jon Sorensen (logistics)

Lone Star College

Houston"

How the Left Hijacked Civil Rights

For centuries black Americans debated how to overcome racism—but they always emphasized human agency and individual responsibility

By Robert L. Woodson Sr. and Joshua Mitchell. Excerpts:

"The history of black American responses to slavery and Jim Crow generally followed three paths. They were hotly debated, but all emphasized human agency, sought liberation, and rejected despair.

First, there were the recolonization or “back to Africa” movements championed by the likes of Marcus Garvey. These movements sought an exit from America.

Second, there were the insurrectionists of the 19th century, who believed that black Americans should engage in armed rebellion or vocal opposition so that they might find a home in this country. Here lie Nat Turner and, later, W.E.B. Du Bois. They wanted to have their resistant voice heard in America.

Third, there were accommodationist movements of the sort undertaken by Booker T. Washington, who thought that loyalty to America was the best cours

Exit, voice, loyalty—however different these strategies were, each supposed that human agency mattered, that oppression wasn’t destiny. That is why, even amid great struggle, black Americans responded by building their own institutions and businesses. Great universities, medical schools, hotels, restaurants, movie companies and even a flight school sprung up. All of this was self-financed—and made possible by two-parent families, churches and other cultural institutions that provided shelter against the outside storm of racism."

"For months, the radical left has been exploiting the country’s genuine concern for fairness to keep blacks in a constant state of agitation, anger and grievance, urging them toward behavior that lives down to the slanderous stereotypes of white supremacists. The leaders of these movements insist that every inequity suffered by blacks is caused by institutional and structural racism, that they have no power to liberate themselves, and that they will remain oppressed until white people change. Even to raise the issue of what role self-determination plays for blacks earns you the label of “racist.”"

"For every unarmed black American killed by the police, hundreds are killed in neighborhood homicides. 

Those who call for the defunding of police departments, such as leaders of the official Black Lives Matter organization, are silent about this inconvenient truth. They have a narrative and cannot let the facts get in the way. Their story is that the whole of American history is stained and the whole of America must be overthrown. When citizens declare that they support Black Lives Matter, do they share its opposition to the nuclear family, its objective of abolishing the police, and its view that the Christian cross is a symbol of white supremacy?"

"Bourgeois values drove blacks to build the powerful religious, fraternal, and other voluntary associations that helped them thrive in the worst days of Jim Crow"

"There would have been no civil-rights movement without this. But radical progressives now insist that such virtues are the legacy of white supremacy, colonialist values that reflect the continuing bondage of blacks to oppressive Western culture."

"The slave masters’ trick of old was to dissuade blacks from adopting bourgeois values precisely so they could be kept in servitude. Marriage was forbidden and families were split apart. Douglass observed that slaves were encouraged to indulge in drink and debauchery during the holidays so they would be “led to think that there was little to choose between liberty and slavery."

"leftist elites teach their own children the values of working and studying hard even as they encourage behavior among blacks that will make sure they remain uncompetitive but “authentic.”"

Bureaucracy Slowed Vaccine Rollout

See Covid-19 Vaccine Leaders Waited Months to Approve Distribution Plans: Holdup left states with little time to develop mass-vaccination plan; U.S. says it needed time for interagency clearance by Greg Betsy McKay, Rebecca Ballhaus and Stephanie Armour of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"Operation Warp Speed leaders waited more than two months to approve a plan to distribute and administer Covid-19 vaccines proposed by U.S. health officials, administration officials said, leaving states with little time to implement a mass-vaccination campaign amid a coronavirus surge.

State and local officials had been clamoring for months for help preparing for the largest vaccination program in U.S. history when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a playbook in September to guide them.

The CDC had wanted to start helping states plan in June how to get people vaccinated. But officials at Operation Warp Speed rebuffed the agency’s plan for distributing vaccines. They adopted a similar plan in August only after exploring other options—and then held the release of the CDC’s playbook for states for two weeks for additional clearance and to put it out with another document, the officials said.

Operation Warp Speed was supposed to be a high-water mark of the Trump administration’s coronavirus response, but it stumbled at the finish line because of problems in federal planning and foresight. Now, the public-private partnership is scrambling to speed up vaccinations, adjusting eligibility guidelines while states race to increase their abilities to administer doses on a large scale.

“They didn’t plan for the last inch of the last mile, the part that matters most—how you’re going to actually vaccinate that many people quickly,” said Dr. Bruce Gellin, a former Health and Human Services vaccine official and president of global immunization at the Sabin Vaccine Institute.

The federal government has distributed more than 30 million doses, about a third of which have been administered"

"In the midst of a pandemic surge in Massachusetts last month, UMass Memorial Health Care canceled an event to vaccinate health workers because it had no idea how many doses it would receive. A month later, the hospital system says it learns how many doses it will receive just one to two days before they arrive."

"On Dec. 31, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health advised hospitals to prepare to hold back half their allotted doses to ensure there was enough to give people their second doses. Six days later, state health officials told hospitals there was no need to do that. Two days after that, another email came from health officials, urging hospitals to be prepared to hold back doses."

"More recently, states have scrambled to change their guidelines for which Americans are eligible to receive vaccine doses and how hospitals should administer their doses, prompting mass confusion"

"federal leaders failed to issue clear guidance on how vaccines would be allocated and when they would arrive."

Is Biden's plan well targeted to reduce unemployment or help the needy?

See Biden’s Stimulus Is a Two-Pronged Attack on Income Inequality: The president-elect’s plan could rapidly cut unemployment—but at a hefty price by Greg Ip. Excerpts:

"parts of his plan—as outlined—aren’t well targeted either to reduce unemployment or help the needy. Boosting stimulus checks to $2,000 per adult from $600 will cost an estimated $464 billion. But 58% of the money will go to households earning more than $50,000, including some earning more than $200,000, according to the Tax Policy Center, a think tank. Most of these households aren’t holding back on spending because they have no cash, but because of Covid-19 restrictions. The $350 billion Mr. Biden proposes for state and local governments is much more than the revenue hit they have sustained."

Did the pandemic cause more crime in 2020 or was it a pull back in policing?

See Taking Stock of a Most Violent Year: Some blamed the mayhem on the pandemic, but persistent cop-bashing emboldened criminals by Heather Mac Donald. Excerpts:

"The local murder increases in 2020 were startling: 95% in Milwaukee, 78% in Louisville, Ky., 74% in Seattle, 72% in Minneapolis, 62% in New Orleans, and 58% in Atlanta, according to data compiled by crime analyst Jeff Asher. Dozens of children, overwhelmingly black, were killed in drive-by shootings. They were slain in their beds, living rooms and strollers. They were struck down at barbecues, in their yards, in malls, in their parents’ cars, and at birthday parties. Fifty-five children were killed in Chicago in 2020, 17 in St. Louis, and 11 in Philadelphia. In South Los Angeles alone, 40 children were shot, some non-lethally, through September.

Why this mayhem? The St. Louis Post-Dispatch expresses the conventional wisdom: because of the “economic, civic and interpersonal stress” from the coronavirus pandemic. Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot blamed pandemic-related “frustration, anger . . . trauma and mental health challenges.” But crime fell during the first months of the pandemic shutdowns, both in the U.S. and globally. Only at the end of May did that trend reverse itself, and only in the U.S., thanks to a surge in drive-by shootings.

Eighteen people were murdered in Chicago on May 31—the city’s most violent day in six decades, according to University of Utah law professor Paul Cassell. Other American cities saw similar spikes in mayhem, all tied to the street violence unleashed by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25. The political and media response to Floyd’s death amplified the existing narrative that policing was lethally racist. The ensuing riots received little condemnation from Democratic leaders and a weak response from the criminal-justice system.

Cops now face a poisonous environment. Since the summer, they have been shot in the head, firebombed and assaulted with lethal projectiles. An officer providing first aid at a crime scene may be met with a hail of rocks and bottles. Resistance is now the norm. Officers believe they face a political and legal environment that is eager to sacrifice them in the name of racial justice."

 

"In Minneapolis, police stops fell more than 50% over the summer. The number of police-civilian contacts plummeted in Philadelphia, Oakland, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere. Across the country, specialized police units that got guns off the street were disbanded, since they were said to have a disparate impact on African-Americans. Police chiefs and prosecutors have refused to enforce low-level quality-of-life laws for the same reason.

The consequence: More gang members are carrying guns, since their chances of being stopped are slim. They are enthusiastically killing each other and innocent bystanders out of opportunism, not economic deprivation or existential angst."

"In 2020 the police killed 15 unarmed African-Americans and 21 unarmed whites, according to the Washington Post’s database of fatal police shootings. The Post defines “unarmed” to include suspects fleeing the cops in stolen cars who attempted further carjackings en route, who then appeared to threaten the pursuing officer with a gun, and who violently resisted arrest. Those 15 “unarmed” blacks will represent 0.17% of all black homicide deaths in 2020, assuming a black murder toll of about 8,600 victims in 2020, as seems probable."

State Lessons in Vaccine Rollouts

Federalism is again proving its value in getting shots in arms

WSJ editorial. Excerpts:

"The risk is that Team Biden tries to micromanage state administration of the vaccine, especially now that the media, Democrats and some public-health officials are blaming slow state rollouts on a “vacuum” of federal leadership. But vaccine administration was always intended to be state-led, and too many jurisdictions squandered the ample time they had for preparation.

This criticism is also wrong because the biggest state mistakes so far have been adhering too much to the federal government’s initial guidance to limit the first batches to health-care workers and long-term care residents, followed by front-line employees and those over age 75. States couldn’t find enough takers, and precious doses ended up in the trash.

The most successful state rollouts have departed from overly prescriptive federal rules. North Dakota stuck with the initial recommendations on health-care workers and nursing-care residents, but then threw open its program to anyone age 65 and up, as well as to adults with underlying health risks. South Dakota added law enforcement and corrections staff to its initial tiers, and then also moved quickly to inoculate 65-and-older adults and school workers. The states with the highest per capita vaccination rates are all rule-breakers—Alaska (12,885 per 100,000), West Virginia (11,321), and North Dakota (9,602) as of Jan. 23." 

"West Virginia opted out of a federal program that puts CVS and Walgreens in charge of vaccinating most nursing homes, an initiative that is moving at a turtle’s pace. The state used a network of 250 local pharmacies—most of which had existing relationships with patients, which sped up scheduling and paperwork. It also enlisted its National Guard to lead on logistics, with the Guard delivering vaccines to the state’s long-term care facilities and hosting vaccination clinics that are now becoming common elsewhere."

How Economics Lost Itself in Data

Today’s researchers have tossed out price theory and don’t realize they’ve been politically compromised

By Alexander William Salter. He is an associate professor of economics at Texas Tech University. Excerpt: 

"Data doesn’t interpret itself. Contrary to the rallying cry of this new breed of economists, we cannot “just let the data speak for itself.” What and how you measure rely on theoretical judgments about how markets work. The way you understand concepts like competition, barriers to entry, and market power can completely change how you interpret identical data. Is an industry with a small number of high-earning firms oligopolistic due to its concentration? Or is it competitive due to continued customer satisfaction? Price theory helps us make sense of these questions. Going to the data without a strong theoretical grounding is an invitation to confusion.

The heights of the economics profession are increasingly inhabited by people who disdain price theory. Reliance on the economic way of thinking in solving problems is viewed as obsolete and unscientific. The data jockeys think they’re cutting-edge, but they’re merely repeating old mistakes. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, economists of the German Historical and Old Institutionalist schools thought they could make do with history and statistics alone, unconstrained by theory. In the end, they got so bogged down in details that they came up with very little that lasted.

A common anti-price-theory trope is that its practitioners are political ideologues masquerading as scientists. The opposite is closer to the truth. Old-school economics recognized that trade-offs and constraints are everywhere. There are no free lunches. Armed with price theory, economists resisted the politically appealing but economically unsound proposals of both the right and left. Today’s economists, innocent of price theory, have no such armor.

The atheoretical approach of contemporary economists makes them particularly susceptible to the technocratic pretensions of the center-left. If, contrary to the claims of price theory, there are no enduring laws of economics, then there is no reason to stop the technocrats from tinkering. Many of these economists don’t realize they have been politically compromised. They see it as “just the facts, ma’am” pragmatism. In reality, it is ideology sneaking in through the back door.

As an example, consider the corporate tax cut debate of 2017. At issue was whether labor or capital would benefit from the cut. Price-theoretic economists such as Greg Mankiw, Casey Mulligan and Steve Landsburg predicted big benefits for workers. Empirical pragmatists such as Gabriel Zucman, Emmanuel Saez and Larry Summers thought this prediction was not only unscientific but borderline dishonest.

As it turns out, Team Price Theory was right: Workers saw large wage increases after the corporate tax cut. Because capital adjusts over time in response to tax hikes, labor is left bearing the brunt of the reduction in productivity. But the reverse is true, too: Cut taxes on capital, and labor will gain big. The long-run adjustability of capital is a classic price-theoretic result. Score one for the old school.

While the divergence between price theory and pragmatism is obvious in policy debates, policy isn’t the biggest issue here. What the government should or shouldn’t do is a value judgment. An economist could agree with Messrs. Mankiw, Mulligan and Landsburg about the growth effects of corporate tax cuts but oppose them on deficit grounds, for example. Nevertheless, that the supposedly ideological and unrigorous economists came out on top in this kerfuffle shows that by scientific standards—intelligibility and predictability—price theory still matters."

Nationalism, prejudice, and FDA regulation

By Scott Sumner.

"President Trump was a forceful advocate of nationalism. Many intellectuals (myself included) are strong opponents of nationalism. Indeed I view nationalism and communism as the two great evils of the 20th century. Thus it’s ironic to find many proponents of government regulation making essentially nationalistic arguments.

Alex Tabarrok recently pointed to the FDA’s scandalous refusal to allow the manufacture and sale of AstraZenaca vaccine in America:

By the way, the US failure to authorize the AstraZeneca vaccine in the midst of a pandemic when thousands are dying daily and a factory in Baltimore is warmed up and ready to run is a tragedy and dereliction of duty of epic proportions. The AZ vaccine should be given an EUA immediately and made available in pharmacies for anyone who wants it while continuing to prioritize Moderna and Pfizer for the elderly and essential workers.

When I advocate allowing people to be free to take a non-FDA approved drug or vaccine, the response is generally an argument relying on some form of paternalism. People are too poorly informed to be allowed to make these choices. They should not be allowed to take the drugs unless experts have verified that the drugs are safe and effective.

But that’s obviously not their actual motive. Experts in the UK have looked at the AstraZenaca vaccine and found it to be safe and effective. And yet Americans are still not allowed to use the product. So if paternalism is not the actual motive, why do progressives insist that Americans must not be allowed to buy products not approved by the FDA?  What is the actual motive?

The answer is nationalism. The experts who studied the AstraZenaca vaccine were not American experts, they were British experts. Can this form of prejudice be justified on scientific grounds? Obviously not. There has been no double blind, controlled study of comparative expert skill at evaluating vaccines. We have no way of knowing whether the UK decision is wiser than the FDA decision. Instead, the legal prohibition is being done on nationalistic grounds. We are told to blindly accept the incompetence of British experts, without any proof.  (And even if you believed there was solid evidence that one country’s experts were better than another, it would not explain why each developed countries relies on their own experts.  They can’t all be best!)

These debates always end up being like a game of whack-a-mole. Shoot down one argument and regulation proponents will simply put forth another. Their minds are made up.  You say people shouldn’t be allowed to take a vaccine unless experts find it to be safe and effective? OK, the UK experts did just that. You say that only the opinion of US experts counts because our experts are clearly the best? Really, where is the scientific study that shows that our experts are the best? I thought you said we needed to “trust the scientists”?  Now you are saying we must trust the nationalists?  Was Trump right about nationalism?

My dream of a completely free market in drugs will likely never happen. But what’s wrong with the following three-part system of regulation as a compromise solution:

1. FDA approved drugs can be consumed by anyone in America.

2. Drugs approved by any of the top 20 advanced countries (but not the FDA) can be consumed by anyone willing to sign a consent form indicating that they understand the FDA has not approved this product. I’ll sign for AstraZeneca.  (The US government puts together a list of 20 reputable countries.)

3. Drugs approved by none of the top 20 developed economies will still be banned.

This is what regulation would look like if paternalism actually were the motivating factor. But it’s not.  It’s Trump-style nationalism that motivates progressives to insist that only FDA approved drugs can be sold in America. They may look down their noses at Trump, but they implicitly share his nationalism."

Sorry—organic farming is actually worse for climate change

The practice cuts greenhouse-gas emissions only if you ignore the inconvenient fact that it requires a lot more land.

By James Temple of the MIT Technology Review. 

"Organic practices can reduce climate pollution produced directly from farming – which would be fantastic if they didn’t also require more land to produce the same amount of food.

Clearing additional grasslands or forests to grow enough food to make up for that difference would release far more greenhouse gas than the practices initially reduce, a new study in Nature Communications finds.

Other recent research has also concluded that organic farming produces more climate pollution than conventional practices when the additional land required is taken into account. In the new paper, researchers at the UK’s Cranfield University took a broad look at the question by analyzing what would happen if all of England and Wales shifted entirely to these practices. 

The good news is it would cut the direct greenhouse-gas emissions from livestock by 5% and from growing crops by 20% per unit of production. The bad news: it would slash yields by around 40%, forcing hungry Britons to import more food from overseas. If half the land used to meet that spike in demand was converted from grasslands, which store carbon in plant tissues, roots, and soil, it would boost overall greenhouse-gas emissions by 21%.

Among other things, organic farming avoids the use of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and genetically modified organisms, all of which can boost the amount of crops produced per acre. Instead, organic farmers rely on things like animal manure and compost, and practices such as crop rotation, which involves growing different plants throughout the year to improve soil health. 

The study notes that these biological inputs produce fewer emissions than nitrogen-based synthetic fertilizers, notably including the highly potent greenhouse gas nitrous oxide. Separately, the use of manure and longer crop rotations can increase the amount of carbon stored in soil. 

The emissions impact of the meat, milk, and eggs produced from organically raised livestock is more complicated. On the one hand, emissions can increase because animals don’t plump up as fast without hormones, supplements, and conventional feed. That, for instance, grants cattle longer lives in which to belch out methane, another especially powerful greenhouse gas. On the other, allowing animals to spend more of their lives grazing on open grasslands may stimulate additional plant growth that captures more carbon dioxide, while cutting emissions associated with standard feeds.

But the bigger problem, for both crops and livestock, is that these practices end up requiring a lot more land to produce the same amount of food.

After all, the whole point of synthetic fertilizer is it boosts crop yields, by providing a “fixed” form of nitrogen that promotes plant growth. The legumes that organic farmers have to rotate in to help convert nitrogen into more reactive compounds in the soil end up cutting deeply into other food crops they could otherwise grow, the study notes.

Specifically, the switch to 100% organic practices would require 1.5 times more land to make up for the declines, which would add up to nearly five times more land overseas than England and Wales currently rely on for food. That difference is amplified by the fact that the UK’s agricultural system produces particularly high yields compared with other parts of the world.

The study found larger effects than some earlier papers. Notably, a 2012 meta-analysis in Nature determined that organic farming yields are between 5% and 34% lower than those from conventional agriculture, depending on the specific crops and practices. In addition, a 2017 Nature Communications study estimated that switching to organic farming would increase land use by only 16% to 33%.

By evaluating the entire farming system of England and Wales, the new study helps to address some of the criticisms of earlier organic emissions assessments, which were often limited to specific farms or crops, says Dan Blaustein-Rejto, associate director of food and agriculture at the Breakthrough Institute, a think tank that promotes technology solutions to environmental challenges.

“Looking at the farm scale doesn’t really tell you what a large-scale transition to organic would look like,” he says. “Only a study like this, that takes a system-wide perspective, really does.”

The world does need to find ways to cut the emissions and environmental pollution from synthetic fertilizers. But the trick is to clean up these practices in ways that don’t require converting more land to agriculture, or forcing large parts of the world to go hungry.

Among other paths, a number of researchers and startups are trying to develop novel agricultural inputs that could cut emissions without reducing yields, crops that take up more of the nitrogen in soil, and various meat and milk alternatives."

The FDA was disastrously slow in approving Covid tests and held them to a standard more appropriate to doctor’s offices than home testing

See The Invisible Graveyard is Invisible No More by Alex Tabarrok.

"We called it the invisible graveyard, the place they buried people killed by FDA delay. Back then only a few of us–mostly libertarians long practiced in seeing the invisible hand–could see the invisible graveyard. Normal people looked at us oddly and quickly ran away when we frantically pointed to the dead. “There! there! Can’t you see the bodies?” Now, however, the veil has been lifted and even normal people see.

Here is Ezra Klein writing in the NYTimes:

The problem here is the Food and Drug Administration. They have been disastrously slow in approving these tests and have held them to a standard more appropriate to doctor’s offices than home testing. “The F.D.A. needs to catch up to the science,” Mina said, frustration evident in his voice. “They are inadvertently killing people by not following the science.” On my podcast, I asked Vivek Murthy, President Biden’s nominee for surgeon general, whether the F.D.A. had been too cautious. “I do think we’ve been too conservative,” he told me. Murthy went on to argue that there’s a difference between the diagnostic testing doctors do and the surveillance testing the public could do and that the F.D.A. had failed to appreciate the difference. Speeding the F.D.A. on this issue will be an early, and crucial, test for the Biden administration. In this case, Democrats need to deregulate.

Even back in December when I was tweeting from the rooftops things like:

Your daily reminder that 14,696 people have died from COVID in the United States since Pfizer applied for an EUA from the FDA.

people argued that I was exaggerating the simple math of FDA delay. Today, however, the reality of deadly delay is almost conventional wisdom. Here’s Klein again:

The new strains spread quickly. The speed of our countermeasures will decide our fate. What feel like reasonable delays in our normal experience of time — a few weeks here for Congress to debate a bill, a few weeks there for the F.D.A. to hold meetings — could lead to the kind of explosive infections that overwhelm our hospitals and fill our morgues."

Schools Must Resist Destructive Anti-racist Demands

Contrary to what activists seem to believe, campuses are not bastions of social injustice

By John McWhorter. Excerpts:

"At Princeton last summer, 350 faculty members signed an anti-racist manifesto that described the school as founded upon the pillars of its oppressive past, requiring an overhaul of faculty, curriculum, and admissions procedures to fumigate the campus of an all-permeating racism."

"At Bryn Mawr College, anti-racist activists accused of intimidating students and faculty not actively involved in the protest essentially shut down the school last semester. Here, the claim was that Bryn Mawr is infested with a climate of racism that threatens Black students’ survival, and the “strikers,” as they titled themselves, demanded additional funding for the Black student center, a halt to evidently systemic “violence” against disabled students, and payment (as well as grade forgiveness) for protesters’ anti-racist “work” during the “strike.” President Kim Cassidy gave the “strikers” leeway, allowing some professors to cancel their classes or reformulate them into tutorials on anti-racism. Cassidy apologized for characterizing the strikers and their actions in a negative light."

"Although racism surely exists at Princeton, as it does throughout American society, Princeton is not the utter sinkhole of bigotry and insensitivity that the letter implies. American universities have long been more committed to anti-racism than almost any other institutions. Princeton is where, for example, Woodrow Wilson’s name was recently removed from the name of the School of Public and International Affairs in acknowledgment of his implacably racist beliefs—albeit in response to student pressure."

"Figuring out where to draw the line is ever elusive, but one clarifying development in the Princeton case was, of all things, a threatened civil-rights investigation of the university. The United States Department of Education announced over the summer that, in light of the Princeton manifesto, it was looking into whether the university had been misrepresenting itself in reporting adherence to federal nondiscrimination law—i.e., whether it had gone afoul of legislation designed to protect students."

"A Princeton truly all about racism, bigotry, discrimination, obstacles, and inattendance to same—as the faculty letter richly implied and even stated—would be gracefully submissible to charges of civil-rights violation.

The only way to make sense of this contradiction is to allow that Princeton’s problems must be much subtler, and also have much less actual effect, than what civil-rights law is designed to address. And if the letter refers to matters so elusive and indirect, one must question the uncompromising, alarmist extremity of the letter.

This skepticism is equally applicable to the other manifestos. At Bryn Mawr, as at pretty much all small, elite liberal-arts colleges in the 21st century, “woke” ideals are deeply inculcated and largely unquestioned; one can assume that most 19-year-olds have heard of the term intersectionality; and racism is considered the quintessence of human evil. The protests there were motivated not by an on-campus event, but by the police killing of a Black man a half hour’s drive away in Philadelphia."

"The letter at Northwestern asks that the university recommit to the demands made by Black students who took over the bursar’s office in 1968, with the implication that these were all but ignored by a callously racist institution. They weren’t. The 1968 demands included a Black dormitory, a Black student center, an increase in financial aid for Black students, Black-studies courses, and a Black psychological counselor. Today, all of those things exist except the Black dormitory, including not just Black-studies courses, but a whole African American–studies department, created in 1972."

"The unforgivable but undeniable effects of long-term poor education in depressed neighborhoods makes it all but impossible for students to get by at selective universities. Systemic problems in elementary and secondary education are, again, beyond the scope of a university.

Not only are these manifestos’ depictions of the institutions overblown, but many of the demands in question would destroy the institutions themselves."

"At Bryn Mawr, where the administration essentially gave the “strikers” what they wanted, protests left students there bereft of genuine education for weeks in favor of simplistic agitprop hovering around the single topic of anti-racism. Some parents said they planned to withdraw their children from the school, and the optics of the strike, including especially the unpunished intimidation of students in disagreement (who may have constituted the majority of the student body), will likely reduce future applications. If Northwestern did commit the amount of money it would take to even make the appearance of attempting to uproot “racism” from Evanston, that would mean less funding for, as an example, counseling for Black students and the new Black student center currently under construction. And a Princeton supervised by a punitive Star Chamber of people appointed to smoke out “racism” would instantly become the least attractive of the Ivies to students, parents, and even faculty.'

"To give in to anti-intellectual, under-considered, disproportionate, or hostile demands is condescending to the signatories and the protesters. It implies that they can do no better, and that authorities must suspend their sense of logic, civility, and progress as some kind of penance for slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, and the deaths of people such as Floyd. That “penance” would hurt only the community in the end, through lower educational quality.

Thus the model must be classics professor Joshua Katz at Princeton, who last summer took issue with the Princeton letter in a Quillette article, pointing out that the demands would lead to “civil war on campus,” and calling out a Black student association that serially harassed several Black students who disagreed with its philosophy."

"The writers of manifestos might classify resistance as racist, denialist backlash. But the civil, firm dismissal of irrational demands is, rather, a kind of civic valor. School officials must attend to the fine line between enlightenment and cowardice—for the benefit of not only themselves, but the Black people they see themselves as protecting."

COVID-19 Cases and Transmission in 17 K–12 Schools — Wood County, Wisconsin, August 31–November 29, 2020

From the CDC.

"Summary

What is already known about this topic?

COVID-19 outbreaks related to kindergarten through grade 12 (K–12) classroom settings have been rarely reported; however, in-school transmission risk has not been well described.

What is added by this report?

Among 17 rural Wisconsin schools, reported student mask-wearing was high, and the COVID-19 incidence among students and staff members was lower than in the county overall (3,453 versus 5,466 per 100,000). Among 191 cases identified in students and staff members, only seven (3.7%) cases, all among students, were linked to in-school spread.

What are the implications for public health practice?

With masking requirements and student cohorting, transmission risk within schools appeared low, suggesting that schools might be able to safely open with appropriate mitigation efforts in place."

NY undercounted nursing home coronavirus deaths by as much as 50%, state AG says

Jame's report said that government guidance requiring the admission of COVID-19 patients into nursing homes may have put residents at increased risk of harm

By Vandana Rambaran of Fox News.

"New York Attorney General Letitia James said that the state Department of Health underreported COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes by as much as 50%, according to a report released Thursday. 

The report holds New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's feet to the fire for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic in the early months, after he directed nursing homes in the Empire State to accept patients who had or were suspected of having COVID-19. The decision created an onslaught of COVID-19 cases that infected thousands of elderly patients and resulted in hundreds of deaths among the state's most vulnerable population.

The state Department of Health reported that as of Jan. 27, there were 5,957 confirmed deaths due to the coronavirus in nursing homes and an additional 2,783 presumed deaths. In assisted care facilities, there were 160 deaths and 52 presumed deaths. 

Cuomo has defended the nursing home policy as in-line with guidance from the Trump administration at the time. The governor was silent Thursday following the new AG report and did not respond to Fox News' immediate request for comment. 

James' report said that government guidance requiring the admission of COVID-19 patients into nursing homes may have put residents at increased risk of harm in some facilities and may have obscured the data available to assess that risk.

The Office of the Attorney General (OAG) asked 62 nursing homes to provide data about deaths in their facilities. 

In one example, a facility reported five confirmed and six presumed COVID-19 deaths at the facility as of Aug. 3 to the Department of Health, yet reported to the OAG a total of 27 COVID-19 deaths at the facility and 13 hospital deaths — a discrepancy of 29 deaths.

The report, which revealed the findings of an investigation into allegations of patient neglect and other "concerning conduct" that jeopardized the health and safety of both patients and employees, said that some facilities failed to comply with health protocols to stop the spread of the virus. 

Nursing homes that had low U.S. Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) Staffing ratings were found to have higher COVID-19 fatality rates. 

In addition, lack of sufficient personal protective equipment (PPE) equipment for staff, as well as low availability of testing, could have also increased the patients' risk of contracting the virus, the report said. 

About 70 percent of the nearly 35,000 COVID deaths in New York were people aged 70 and older, according to state data as of Jan. 28.

Investigations into more than 20 nursing homes whose reported conduct during the first wave of the pandemic presented particular concern are still ongoing, James added.

"As the pandemic and our investigations continue, it is imperative that we understand why the residents of nursing homes in New York unnecessarily suffered at such an alarming rate," James said in a statement. "While we cannot bring back the individuals we lost to this crisis, this report seeks to offer transparency that the public deserves and to spur increased action to protect our most vulnerable residents.""

Special Report: How U.S. CDC missed chances to spot COVID's silent spread

By Ned Parker & Chad Terhune of Reuters.

"In early February, 57 people arrived at a Nebraska military base, among the first Americans evacuated from Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the new coronavirus outbreak. U.S. health officials knew very little then about the mysterious new virus, and the quarantined group offered an early opportunity to size up the threat.

The federal government sought help from a team at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, including Dr. James Lawler, an experienced infectious disease specialist. Lawler told Reuters he immediately asked the world-renowned U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for permission to test the quarantined group, deeming it crucial to know whether people without symptoms were infected and could spread the deadly pathogen.

Agency officials worried that detained people couldn’t give proper consent because they might feel coerced into testing. “CDC does not approve this study,” an official at the quarantine site wrote to Lawler in a Feb. 8 email obtained by Reuters. “Please discontinue all contact with the travelers for research purposes.”

More than two months passed before the CDC expanded its testing guidelines to include all asymptomatic people, saying soon afterward that this silent spread “may meaningfully contribute to the propagation of the COVID-19 pandemic.” By November, the agency estimated that more than half of cases were spread by people not currently experiencing symptoms.

Critics have widely asserted that the CDC fumbled key decisions during the coronavirus scourge because then-President Donald Trump and his administration meddled in the agency’s operations and muzzled internal experts. The matter is now the subject of a congressional inquiry. Yet Reuters has found new evidence that the CDC’s response to the pandemic also was marred by actions - or inaction - by the agency’s career scientists and frontline staff.

At a crucial moment in the pandemic when Americans were quarantined after possible exposure to the virus abroad, the agency declined or resisted potentially valuable opportunities to study whether the disease could be spread by those without symptoms, according to previously undisclosed internal emails, other documents and interviews with key players.

Soon after balking at testing the returnees from Wuhan, the agency delayed testing asymptomatic passengers among 318 evacuees from the Diamond Princess, a contaminated cruise ship in Japan. In addition, the agency failed at that time to make effective use of outside experts and appeared at times unprepared for the crisis on the ground, lacking adequate personal protective gear and ignoring established protocols, Reuters found.

“Yes, they were interfered with politically,” said Lawrence Gostin, director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University, referring to alleged meddling by the Trump administration. “But that’s not the only reason CDC didn’t perform optimally during COVID-19. There are a lot of things that went wrong.”

Four top public health experts or ethicists told Reuters that the question of whether to test or engage in research on detained people has always been a sensitive topic. But all said the CDC should have proceeded given the fast-moving public health emergency.

Moreover, the CDC finalized rules in 2017 providing that medical testing was expressly allowed in quarantine, as long as participants were given the opportunity to give “informed consent” or opt out. Informed consent means giving people adequate information to understand the risks and benefits of a test or procedure.

Gostin said the CDC’s argument against testing was “unreasonable” under the circumstances. “You are asking for consent and not imposing any harm,” he said. “There is a good reason to do it.”

It’s difficult to know whether more aggressive early testing among asymptomatic people would have significantly altered the trajectory of the pandemic in the United States, which has infected 24 million people and killed more than 400,000.

The CDC was not the only agency that struggled with this issue. Notably, an official with the World Health Organization called asymptomatic spread “very rare” in June, only to say a day later “we don’t actually have that answer yet.” In recent months, the WHO has said infected people without symptoms can be contagious, but “it is still not clear how frequently this occurs.”

Still, some countries such as South Korea and Singapore used widespread testing early on to identify infected people with or without symptoms and, unlike the United States, broadly required or distributed masks.

CDC scientists infamously botched the creation of a test for the coronavirus and took weeks trying to fix it, making widespread testing - well beyond those with symptoms - impossible during the pandemic’s first months.

In response to detailed inquiries from Reuters, a CDC spokesman said the agency declined to comment.

In the final weeks of the Trump administration, White House officials did not respond to requests for comment on reports of political interference.

The problems within the CDC, which has suffered from a decade of declining funding, point to the steep challenge faced by newly inaugurated President Joe Biden and his CDC director, Rochelle Walensky, to rehabilitate the agency in the eyes of scientists, other public health officials and the public.

Walensky “acknowledges that work has to be done to restore public confidence” in the CDC, according to a Biden spokesperson.

Dr. Sonja Rasmussen, who worked at the CDC for 20 years and at one point was responsible for pandemic influenza preparedness, said the agency’s staff are “among the most dedicated professionals in the world and they were doing the best they could under the toughest circumstances.”

“This has been an incredibly challenging pandemic and it would have been hard for anyone to guess what would have happened,” she said.

But she and other public health specialists also told Reuters that Americans deserve a thorough examination of the agency’s shortcomings in the crisis.

“We have to figure out what needs to be fixed before this happens again,” said Rasmussen, now a professor at the University of Florida.

REQUEST DENIED

On Feb. 7, a group of Americans arrived from Wuhan and the surrounding province at Camp Ashland, a National Guard base near Omaha and the University of Nebraska Medical Center, a major outpost in the nation’s defenses against bioterrorism and infectious diseases.

Infectious disease specialist Lawler, who worked in the George W. Bush and Obama administrations on pandemic response, suspected that some of the evacuees might be infected with the coronavirus and shedding it despite having no symptoms. His suspicions were based partly on scientific reports from Asia and Europe.

Starting on Feb. 8, Lawler pressed the CDC to greenlight voluntary and limited coronavirus testing among this group, according to emails obtained by Reuters through the Freedom of Information Act.

Lawler had already won support for such testing from the U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) officials in charge of the returnees at Ashland, the Nebraska health department and his university’s medical faculty, emails show. HHS oversees the CDC.

Later that Saturday, Eric Kasowski, the CDC’s representative at Camp Ashland, emailed Lawler to tell him that his request to test the 57 people in quarantine “was very quickly elevated to Dr. (Anne) Schuchat, Principal Deputy Director, CDC,” who had worked at the agency for 32 years.

Schuchat referred questions from Reuters to the CDC press office, which declined to comment.

The CDC’s answer to Lawler was no.

According to the Feb. 8 email: “It is CDC’s position that since the research is being proposed for a group of individuals who are detained under a federal quarantine order, the circumstances of voluntary participation would be extremely difficult to assure and therefore, CDC does not approve this study.”

Lawler said he kept pressing Kasowski. But Kasowski told Lawler the next morning that the testing proposal had been rejected again, this time by officials up to and including CDC director Robert Redfield.

“This is absurd,” Lawler recalled telling Kasowski.

Kasowski declined to comment, referring questions to the CDC.

Instead of having everyone tested during the two-week quarantine, only one returnee who became ill and was hospitalized got tested; the results were negative for coronavirus, Lawler said. The other 56 left quarantine without knowing whether they carried the virus, and Lawler said he knows of no CDC follow up with that group.

In a Feb. 10 email to Kasowski, Lawler warned that the federal government, by not testing symptomless individuals, “may be missing the submerged iceberg in the U.S.”

MAJOR PROBLEMS

Within days, Lawler got a new federal assignment: to help evacuate more than 300 Americans stranded on the Diamond Princess cruise ship docked in Yokohama, Japan.

He was joined there by Dr. Michael Callahan, a veteran infectious disease specialist from Massachusetts General Hospital, who had just been appointed a special advisor to HHS on COVID-19. Callahan, who says his two years of physician scientist training at the CDC in the mid-1990s inspired him to forgo academia for a field career battling disease outbreaks, had just treated coronavirus patients in China weeks earlier.

Major problems emerged soon after Lawler and Callahan arrived in Yokohama on Feb. 14.

The U.S. team, including HHS and other U.S. personnel, had to borrow walkie talkies from Japanese authorities because they didn’t have mobile phones that worked internationally, according to an “after-action” report submitted by Lawler and Callahan in March to HHS and obtained by Reuters.

Japan had to lend the U.S. team basic protective gear because the Americans’ supplies didn’t arrive in time, the report said. Some team members were not trained for handling a “highly contagious disease.”

According to Callahan, he had to turn back two CDC staffers seeking to board the Diamond Princess in Japan because they had no current experience in emergency medicine and infection control.

Callahan said the problem was not isolated to the CDC’s coronavirus response. In his regular interactions in the field with CDC staff in recent years, he said, he has seen “a progressive degradation of clinical expertise and incident management,” particularly during Ebola outbreaks in Africa.

The CDC needs “people that can actually do public health when bad stuff happens,” Callahan said.

NOT ENOUGH PROOF

On Feb. 17, Lawler flew with 151 cruise passengers to Lackland Air Force Base near San Antonio, Texas. An isolation bubble was created using a plastic curtain in the rear of the plane for five passengers who had tested positive for COVID-19 in Japan.

During the flight, Lawler moved two passengers who had become feverish to the isolation area, planning to take them to Nebraska Medical Center. But those precautions went awry when CDC personnel greeted the plane in Texas.

“The CDC officer in charge boarded the aircraft without consulting the flight crew regarding safety or contamination issues,” according to the after-action report.

The officer’s personal protective equipment “was grossly insufficient due to the high level of contamination that likely existed on the aircraft. This likely put CDC personnel and other responders on the ground at risk.”

What’s more, the CDC official moved the two people who had developed symptoms mid-flight back with the group of healthy passengers, and the CDC’s handling of the flight violated disaster medicine protocols, according to the report. The CDC official is not named in the report.

Similar problems occurred when Callahan arrived with another group of 167 Diamond Princess passengers at Travis Air Force Base in Northern California and a CDC officer boarded the plane, the report said.

Meantime, officials at Nebraska’s public health laboratory, who had been working with Lawler, asked the CDC for permission to test passengers from the Diamond Princess while they were under quarantine, even if they didn’t have symptoms, emails show.

A CDC influenza expert, Dr. Tim Uyeki, wrote back on Feb. 17 to the director of the Nebraska Public Health Laboratory that the agency only wanted to test symptomatic individuals and those who had previously tested positive in Japan, citing a lack of detail on the accuracy of the Japanese tests.

Uyeki declined to comment and referred questions to the CDC press office.

Lawler and Callahan said they flew in late February to CDC headquarters in Atlanta to meet with Redfield and other senior officials, to raise concerns about the flawed evacuation and potential for asymptomatic spread based on their observations from the Diamond Princess.

Lawler said CDC officials replied that there wasn’t enough proof yet that people without symptoms spread the disease.

Redfield did not return requests for comment.

Meanwhile, at both quarantine sites in Texas and California, CDC staff began to test some cruise passengers without symptoms who previously had tested positive in Japan, according to Dr. Bela Matyas, the local health officer in California’s Solano County, as well as emails between the Nebraska hospital personnel and the CDC.

The CDC officials had doubts about the accuracy of testing done by Japanese authorities, but the results confirmed that at least some of the passengers were indeed positive - 16 at the California base alone, Matyas said. Texas numbers were not available.

During the second week of quarantine in late February, the CDC and local health officials began offering tests to all of the cruise passengers. In California, where most sought testing, 10 more people were found to have COVID-19, Matyas said.

Despite this evidence of infections without symptoms, the CDC made no immediate changes in its public guidance on asymptomatic infection.

‘FAIRLY COMMON’

By March, signs of asymptomatic spread were mounting in the United States and abroad.

A tipping point for the CDC came when staffers were deployed to the outskirts of Seattle to handle an outbreak at the Issaquah Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, a relatively confined setting. King County and CDC officials tested 76 of the 82 residents, regardless of whether they exhibited symptoms, beginning on March 13, according to the CDC.

They found 23 infected, 13 asymptomatic at the time. Ten of those went on to develop symptoms.

“That was really ... our first hint that asymptomatic transmission was fairly common, especially in those settings,” said Dr. James Lewis, an official with the county health department’s COVID-19 response, in an interview.

Two weeks later, on March 27, the CDC published the case study as evidence of asymptomatic infection. That same week, for the first time, the agency recommended testing health workers and first responders, even without symptoms.

In a radio interview that aired on March 31, Redfield said, “We have learned that in fact” symptomless individuals “do contribute to transmission.”

Based on that evidence, the CDC recommended that even asymptomatic people wear cloth face coverings in public areas. Almost a month later, on April 27, the agency expanded its testing guidelines to include “persons without symptoms.”

That was 11 weeks after Lawler’s first request to test the Wuhan group in Nebraska."

Reply to “Credible Research Designs for Minimum Wage Studies”

By David Neumark & William Wascher.

"The authors make three points in this reply to the article by Allegretto, Dube, Reich, and Zipperer (ADRZ 2017). First, ADRZ shed no new light on the sensitivity of estimated minimum wage employment effects to the treatment of trends in state-level panel data, and they make some arguments in this context that are misleading or simply wrong. Second, the key issue ADRZ emphasize—using “close controls” to account for shocks that are correlated with minimum wage changes—does not generate large differences in findings, and ADRZ do not address evidence from Neumark, Salas, and Wascher (NSW 2014a) that questions the validity of the close controls used in Allegretto, Dube, and Reich’s (ADR 2011) and Dube, Lester, and Reich’s (DLR 2010) work. Third, ADRZ ignore or dismiss a growing number of studies that address in various ways the same issue of potential correlations between minimum wages and shocks to low-skill labor markets that ADRZ argue generate spurious evidence of disemployment effects, yet often find rather large negative effects of minimum wages on low-skilled employment."

More on recent evidence on the effects of minimum wages in the United States

By David Neumark, J. M. Ian Salas & William Wascher.

"A central issue in estimating the employment effects of minimum wages is the appropriate comparison group for states (or other regions) that adopt or increase the minimum wage. In recent research, Dube et al. (Rev Econ Stat 92:945-964, 2010) and Allegretto et al. (Ind Relat 50:205-240, 2011) argue that past U.S. research is flawed because it does not restrict comparison areas to those that are geographically proximate and fails to control for changes in low-skill labor markets that are correlated with minimum wage increases. They argue that using “local controls” establishes that higher minimum wages do not reduce employment of less-skilled workers. In Neumark et al. (Ind Labor Relat Rev 67:608-648, 2014), we present evidence that their methods fail to isolate more reliable identifying information and lead to incorrect conclusions. Moreover, for subsets of treatment groups where the identifying variation they use is supported by the data, the evidence is consistent with past findings of disemployment effects. Allegretto SA, Dube A, Reich M, Zipperer B (2013a) Credible research designs for minimum wage studies. IZA Discussion Paper No. 7638, Bonn, Germany have challenged our conclusions, continuing the debate regarding some key issues regarding choosing comparison groups for estimating minimum wage effects. We explain these issues and evaluate the evidence. In general, we find little basis for their analyses and conclusions and argue that the best evidence still points to job loss from minimum wages for very low-skilled workers – in particular, for teens."

Revisiting the Minimum Wage—Employment Debate: Throwing Out the Baby with the Bathwater?

By David Neumark, J. M. Ian Salas & William Wascher.

"The authors revisit the long-running minimum wage–employment debate to assess new studies claiming that estimates produced by the panel data approach commonly used in recent minimum wage research are flawed by that approach's failure to account for spatial heterogeneity. The new studies use research designs intended to control for this heterogeneity and conclude that minimum wages in the United States have not reduced employment. The authors explore the ability of the new research designs to isolate reliable identifying information, and they test the designs' untested assumptions about the construction of better control groups. Their analysis reveals problems with the new research designs. Moreover, using methods that let the data identify the appropriate control groups, their results reaffirm the evidence of disemployment effects, with teen employment elasticities near −0.15. This evidence, they conclude, still shows that minimum wages pose a tradeoff of higher wages for some against job losses for others."

New Research Debunks Claim That a $15 Minimum Wage Would Not Reduce Employment

A new paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research finds a “clear preponderance” of evidence that minimum wage laws reduce employment

From Brad Polumbo of FEE.

"President Joe Biden is pushing a federal $15 minimum wage in his sweeping $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package, and the policy is only gaining steam in progressive circles. But newly released research undercuts the main argument progressive economists make in favor of minimum wage increases.

A new paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research surveys the body of economic research on minimum wage increases and rebuts the notion that empirical data show no impact of increases in minimum wage hikes. The authors find that of all the available research on the subject they reviewed, there is a “clear preponderance” of findings that show a job-killing impact. The documentation of job losses is even more pronounced for teenagers, young adults, and the less-educated.

“[The] body of evidence and its conclusions point strongly toward negative effects of minimum wages on employment of less-skilled workers, especially for the types of studies that would be expected to reveal these negative employment effects most clearly,” economists David Neumark and Peter Shirley write. 

This research is a direct rebuttal of one of the most popular pro-minimum-wage-hike arguments offered by progressive economists. They rarely engage directly with the ironclad theory of supply and demand in competitive labor markets that proves the minimum wage causes unemployment just like any other price floor creates surplus.1 

Many advocates simply pivot to empiricism and handwave about “the data” not showing any impact.

“There’s just no evidence that raising the minimum wage costs jobs, at least when the starting point is as low as it is in modern America,” economist turned left-wing New York Times  columnist Paul Krugman has argued. (Reversing his own former position). Similarly, economist and former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen recently reversed her prior position during a confirmation hearing for her political position as the Biden administration’s Treasury Secretary. Now, she argues that the research suggests a “very minimal” impact on employment from minimum wage increases. 

The same argument has pervaded through much of academia.

“The last decade has seen a wealth of rigorous academic research on the effect of minimum wage increases on employment, with the weight of evidence showing that previous, modest increases in the minimum wage had little or no negative effects on the employment of lowwage workers,” reads a letter signed by prominent pro-minimum-wage economists in 2019.

But this new research, after surveying the field of empirical evidence, finds that reaching these progressive economists' conclusions “requires discarding or ignoring most of the evidence.”

The Takeaway: There’s No Escaping the Trade-Offs of the Minimum Wage

When the government mandates a price for labor—aka a minimum wage—that exceeds the market rate, employers will inevitably purchase less labor. It’s just like consumers would purchase less soda if the government arbitrarily mandated higher prices for it than what it’s actually worth to people. In fact, that’s the exact point of  “soda taxes” passed in the name of public health; they reduce soda consumption. The same thing happens with labor.

The lucky workers who end up being able to keep their jobs may benefit from the artificially high wage, but many others will not find work at all. As far a federal $15 minimum wage is concerned, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that it would eliminate 1.3 to 3.7 million jobs altogether.

This was before the COVID-19 pandemic. Layoffs would likely be much worse now, with so many small businesses already on the brink of collapse amid lockdowns and a struggling economy. 

No amount of empirical squirming can eliminate the reality of trade-offs. Minimum wage proponents bury their heads in the sand in order to argue that you can simply pass a law to miraculously make everyone richer without any consequences. You can’t.

“There are no solutions, there are only trade-offs,” economist Thomas Sowell once observed, “and you try to get the best trade-off you can get, that's all you can hope for.” 

“Economics teaches you that making a choice means giving up something,” economist Russ Roberts has similarly explained. 

The job losses that come with minimum wage hikes are a fundamental economic reality. This latest research offers yet another reminder that, no matter how much wish-casting progressives engage in, there’s no escaping trade-offs in public policy.

^{1. Some progressive economists engage with supply and demand theory by arguing that if a business has a labor monopsony, aka they are the only employer for that type of labor, then minimum wage increases will not cause unemployment. But this makes little sense, as the types of employers who hire minimum wage workers, such as restaurants, retail stores,  fast food, coffee shops, and so on, have nearly innumerable competitors for other places that will hire workers at the minimum wage.)"}

The disparate impact of a national $15 minimum wage

By Paul H. Kupiec of AEI.

"Even if you believe Janet Yellen’s recent testimony that a $15 federal minimum wage would have a “very minimal” impact on overall employment, it is hard to imagine that raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 an hour would not significantly impact business costs and employment in at least some parts of the country. But which parts, and by how much? I use publically available data to provide a rough answer to this important question.

Under the Occupational Employment Statistics program, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) surveys employers to collect compensation data on roughly 800 specific job categories each year. My impact measure, described below in detail, uses data from the BLS state-level survey results.

Using BLS data, each state is assigned an impact score. The score indicates how a $15/hour minimum wage would affect state labor costs compared to the average labor cost impact nationally. States with index values greater than 1.0 can be expected to face labor cost adjustments that exceed the national average whereas states with index values less than 1.0 will face lower adjustment costs than the national average. The BLS survey only covers non-farm occupations, so in states where employment is heavily tilted toward agriculture, the impact score may be slightly less accurate.

Historical data does not definitively reveal how businesses will react to an increase in the minimum wage. Some studies find that an increase in minimum wage increases the hourly wage for those working, but it tends to cut the overall pay of covered workers through diminished hours and a reduction in employees. There is little doubt that raising the minimum wage increases the cost of labor and creates incentives to adopt technologies that replace human workers with machines or labor extracted from customers. An example of the latter is the proliferation of self-checkouts in high-cost labor markets.

State impact scores are reported in the accompanying national map, where states are color-coded to identify the political party that carried the state in the 2020 presidential election. The map shows that the majority of red states will experience an above-average impact from a $15/hour national minimum wage. Most blue states already have high labor costs, so the increase in the minimum wage increase will impact a much smaller share of workers. Regardless of the overall employment impact of a $15/hour national minimum wage, these impact scores suggest that such a large increase in the federal minimum wage will shift business formation, growth, and employment from red states to blue, as the higher minimum wage erodes red states’ labor cost advantage in many job categories.

Index construction: In each state, I add up the 2019 BLS survey estimates of employment in each specific job category to get a baseline total employment estimate. This state total employment estimate is slightly less than the true total, because the BLS does not separately report employment and compensation estimates for some job classes even though it collects the data and includes them in the BLS reported totals. However, this total employment estimate eliminates double counting and provides a consistent basis for calculating the share of workers impacted by the minimum wage.

To estimate the number of jobs impacted by a $15 national minimum wage, I identify specific job categories in a state where the median wage is less than $15/hour. Half of the workers in this job category earn a wage less than the median wage estimate, and half earn more, so I am identifying job categories where at least half of the workers in that state and job category would either receive a raise to $15 or more, or faced reduced hours and/or termination if the employer could not afford the additional labor cost.

I calculate the total number of employees in specific job categories with median wages less than $15/hour, and divide that by the total number employed in the state using the aforementioned estimate. I calculate this ratio for all 50 states, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. The average ratio across the 50 states and three territories is 32.9 percent. The index value for each state is the state’s ratio divided by the national average ratio. This index gives a rough indication of which states and territories business costs will be relatively more impacted than the average state by a $15 national minimum wage (index values >1.0) and which states will be less impacted (index values <1.0)."

Richard Yetter Chappell on Lessons from the Pandemic

From David Henderson.

"It’s generally recognized that our (American) response to the Covid-19 pandemic was disastrous. But I think far fewer appreciate the full scale of the disaster, or the most significant causal levers by which the worst effects could have been avoided. (Yes, Trump was bad.  But his public health disinformation and politicization of masking—while obviously bad—may prove relatively trivial compared to the mammoth failings of our public health institutions and medical establishment.) Much of the pandemic’s harm could have been mitigated had our institutions been properly guided by the most basic norms of cost-benefit analysis.

This is the opening paragraph of Richard Yetter Chappell, “Lessons from the Pandemic,” DailyNous, January 19, 2021.

The whole thing is excellent. Chappell is a philosopher but the piece reads like a well-written analysis by a policy economist.

Another excerpt:

In ordinary circumstances, the status quo is relatively safe and so untested medical innovations present asymmetric risks. That is, until they are proven safe and effective, it may be reasonable to assume that the potential risks of an untested product outweigh its potential benefits, and so block public access to such products until they pass stringent testing requirements. (There are arguments to be made that FDA regulations are excessively onerous even in ordinary circumstances, but I remain neutral on that question here. I take it that there is at least a reasonable case to be made in the FDA’s defense ordinarily. No such case for the FDA’s stringency seems possible in a pandemic.)

A pandemic reverses the asymmetry of risk. Now it is the status quo that is immensely dangerous, and a typical sort of medical intervention (an experimental drug or vaccine, say) is comparatively less so. The potential benefits of innovation likely outweigh the potential risks for many individuals, and vastly so on a societal scale, where the value of information is immense. So the FDA’s usual regulations should have been streamlined or suspended for potential pandemic solutions (in the same way that any ethics barriers beyond the minimum baseline of informed consent should have been suspended for pandemic research). This should be the first thing the government does in the face of a new pandemic. By blocking access to experimental vaccines at the start of the pandemic, the FDA should be regarded as causally responsible for every Covid death that is occurring now (and many that occurred previously).

This last sentence is almost correct and similar to what Charley Hooper and I argued last month in “The FDA’s Deadly Caution,” AIER, December 16, 2020. Surely there are some deaths that would be occurring now, even without FDA intervention, due to people not taking the vaccine or due to the vaccines’ not being 100% effective

Yet another excerpt:

Closely related to the above mistake is the implicit assumption that it’s somehow better to do (or allow) nothing than to do (or allow) something imperfect. Letting the perfect be the enemy of the good in a pandemic is disastrous. Blocking quick Covid tests for having lower accuracy than slow ones is an obvious example of this form of stupidity. Deciding in advance that a vaccine must prove at least 50% effective in trials to receive FDA approval is another. (Obviously a 40% effective vaccine would be better than nothing!  Fortunately it didn’t come to that in the end, but this policy introduced extra risk of disastrous outcomes for no gain whatsoever.)

Compare Dr. Ladapo’s argument in the WSJ that “Doctors should follow the evidence for promising therapies. Instead they demand certainty.” (Steve Kirsch expands on the complaint.) Again, this is a very basic form of irrationality that we’re seeing from the medical establishment.

Misguided perfectionism has also damaged the vaccine rollout due to prioritizing complex allocation schemes over ensuring that as many people are vaccinated as quickly as possible. (Some are letting doses spoil rather than “risk” vaccinating anyone “out of turn”!)

More examples are discussed here."

Biden’s Keystone Pipeline Kill

On his first day he insults Canada and ends thousands of jobs

WSJ editorial. 

"President Biden issued a blizzard of executive orders on his first day in office, including a diktat to revoke the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline. This is a slap at Canada, and it sends a message to investors that playing by U.S. rules provides no immunity from arbitrary political whim.

TC Energy (formerly TransCanada) has been stuck in the quicksand of American politics for more than a decade. A 2004 executive order requires the State Department to approve cross-border projects. In 2008 TC applied for a permit to transport up to 830,000 barrels of crude per day from the Alberta oil sands to U.S. refineries on the Gulf Coast. 

The Obama State Department found five separate times that the pipeline would have no material impact on greenhouse gas emissions since crude would still be extracted. Shipping bitumen by rail or tanker would result in 28% to 42% higher CO2 emissions and more leaks. No matter. President Obama in 2015 rejected the permit as an oblation to the Paris Climate accords.

President Trump gave the right of way, but legal challenges by anti-fossil fuel groups marooned the pipeline and ran out the clock on the Trump years. Now Mr. Biden is yanking Keystone’s permit and rejoining the Paris agreement. Neither action will matter to the climate.  

Since 2000 the U.S. has led the world in energy-related emissions reductions as natural gas from shale hydraulic fracturing has replaced coal in power production. China’s Paris commitment doesn’t require it to cut emissions for another decade. Russia’s are set to rise for years. Last November Russian oil giant Rosneft launched a massive exploration project in the Arctic. “Mineral resources will remain a competitive advantage of Russia’s economy, and will determine the place and role of the country in the world,” Russia’s strategic mineral plan says.

Killing Keystone won’t keep fossil fuels in the ground. It will merely strand billions of dollars in Canadian investment and kill thousands of U.S. jobs while enriching adversaries and alienating an ally. Alberta Premier Jason Kenney has promised to “use all legal avenues available” to protect its Keystone investment if Mr. Biden killed the pipeline.

TC can avail itself of Nafta’s investor-dispute settlement provision until June 2022, which would allow it to recoup its investment. The company also has a strong legal case that the U.S. Constitution gives Congress, not the President, power over foreign trade and that Mr. Biden’s reversal violates due process.

A source says TC and unions tried to persuade the Biden team by explaining Keystone’s benefits to progressives, including 10,000 American union construction jobs; steel pipe made in the U.S.;a $10 million Green Job Training Fund; $500 million for indigenous suppliers and jobs; and 100% renewable power to operate the pipeline.

No luck, and so TC announced layoffs on Wednesday. On day one Mr. Biden has already managed to kill high-paying, working-class jobs. Expect many more losses, since on Wednesday Mr. Biden also ordered executive agencies to review all Trump environmental policies, including auto and appliance emissions and land and species protections.

Mr. Biden is sending an early signal that the climate panic will trump nearly everything else in his Administration. The unstated but operative message from the Keystone kill is that he will use regulation and permitting to do the dirty work."

How Government Subsidized the Opioid Crisis

The share of opioid pills paid for by the government went from 17% to 60% through the initial phase of the epidemic, from 2001 to 2010, when prescriptions dominated misuse

Letter to the WSJ.

"There are many bad actors in the opioid crisis and the government is right to go after them. But your editorial “Scapegoating Walmart” (Dec. 30) is correct: Walmart’s pharmacies are not among them. Our government is scapegoating and suing the private sector, when the most important driver of the crisis was the federal government’s indiscriminate financing of the underlying opioid prescriptions. Government subsidies for pain management and other medical uses of opioids may be valuable, but people are dying from nonmedical uses that shouldn’t be publicly financed.

A 2019 report by the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers shows that the share of opioid pills paid for by the government went from 17% to 60% through the initial phase of the epidemic, from 2001 to 2010, when prescriptions dominated misuse, and didn’t stop there. Out-of-pocket prices for prescription opioids declined by 81% during this period. Without government subsidies, it would have cost between $26,000 and $53,000 a year to buy the pills to maintain an opioid addiction out-of-pocket.

The large prescription-based crisis would have been infeasible without government funding. Innovation into illegal opioids, which lowered the “price of a high” through fentanyl, was profitable only because of the large demand already generated by the prescription crisis. The government would make greater strides toward limiting the crisis by looking inward, not only outward, for its causes.

Prof. Tomas J. Philipson 

University of Chicago

Mr. Philipson was acting chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers (2019-2020)."