In a previous post, I mentioned Paul Ormerod’s argument that governments have relied too heavily on epidemiologists, and not enough on economists, when crafting their responses to COVID-19. (For example, they’ve consistently failed to subject their own policies to rigorous cost-benefit analysis.)
However, survey evidence indicates that many economists were just as strongly pro-lockdown as the doctors, epidemiologists and public health scientists who’ve been advising governments.
In April of 2020, members of the ‘IGM economic experts panel’ (a sample of 44 academic economists based in the U.S.) were asked whether a “comprehensive policy response will involve tolerating a very large contraction in economic activity until the spread of infections has dropped significantly”. Of those who answered, zero per cent disagreed.
In addition, zero per cent of the panel disagreed that “abandoning severe lockdowns at a time when the likelihood of a resurgence in infections remains high will lead to greater total economic damage than sustaining the lockdowns to eliminate the resurgence risk”.
In a survey of 47 Australian economists from May of 2020, only 19% disagreed that “the benefits to Australian society of maintaining social distancing measures sufficient to keep R less than 1 for COVID-19 are likely to exceed the costs”.
Why did so many economists back the lockdowns? Mikko Packalen and Jay Bhattacharya (of Great Barrington Declaration fame) seek to answer this question in a recent essay for Collateral Global.
They begin by taking the economics profession to task for its unqualified support of lockdowns. Of course, some economists did question the lockdowns, but the authors’ sense is that most did not. At the very least, few chose to air their reservations publicly.
Packalen and Bhattacharya are particularly exercised, they tell us, that so few economists raised the alarm about the costs of lockdown. After all, economists are meant to recognise that there’s ‘no such thing as a free lunch’.
As to why so few economists spoke out, the authors suggest a number of reasons. First, economists have a reputation for being somewhat miserly, and they were concerned about playing to type. This made them reluctant, during the early months of the pandemic, to raise the small matter of how much this was all going to cost.
Second, economists – like almost all professionals – are members of the ‘laptop class’ (i.e., people who sit around on their laptops all day). Lockdown didn’t affect their lives nearly as much as it affected those of small business owners, or workers who couldn’t access a furlough scheme.
Third, as economics has become more technical and more specialised, it has acquired a distinctly technocratic streak. Despite the subject’s roots in liberal political economy, the authors note, “there is now a widespread belief that almost any societal problem has a technocratic, top-down solution”.
Fourth, academic economics has formed a rather cosy relationship with big business, particularly the investment banks of Wall Street and the giant tech firms of Silicon Valley. It’s less surprising, therefore, that “the dismal science has had very little to say about how lockdowns have favoured big business”.
Packalen and Bhattacharya’s essay contains many other interesting observations, and is worth reading in full.
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Why Did So Few Economists Speak Out Against Lockdown?
Why do so few speak up against ANYTHING? For exactly the same reason as so few spoke up against Stalin during the 1930s and 1940s.
If you want to keep your ‘friends’, your job, or your life, it was inadvisable to point out obvious failings in central policy. We used to think that this was just a feature of ‘communist’ life.
It now turns out that it’s a fundamental feature of human societies. and that we are going through such a phase of intolerance right now. At the moment you are only going to lose your friends, your job and probably your family and house if you speak up against ANY Politburo statement. But history tells us that life is not far away…
“it’s a fundamental feature of human societies. and that we are going through such a phase of intolerance right now…”
E X A C T L Y
Was reading in the herald about NSW opening up public swimming pools and the locals kicking up about them letting ‘unvaccinated’ in.
For many years I had been mentioning my belief that the Nazi regime was NOT a peculiarly evil time run by a particularly evil set of people – but in fact it could have happened in any country, including the UK. It was just the way humans react when panicked, then brought to follow a strong leader who will deliver them from danger.
The German ‘Nudge Unit’ was very effective for its time, but we now have much more sophisticated techniques.
However, no one would ever listen to me…
Yes, they were the end result of the ideas taught in Germany.
Yes – by the likes of Ernst Haekel and Friedrich Nietsche
Indeed, the interesting part is how some are more susceptible than others. Its not down to education from what I’ve seen.
Fear of standing out as an individual.
Unfortunately, we have technologically advanced massively in the last 200 years and evolutionary wise advanced zero. So, we are lumbered with emotions and instincts that were a survival aid a few thousand years ago. Most people cannot override their emotions and think under pressure of either fear or being ostracised. With COVID there is both of those.
i.e. we are human,
No such thing as sub-humans and superhumans. One human race.
No, it’s not education as a rule. It’s more to do with personality types. In a nutshell, I’d guess circa 80% of people being followers by nature are made up of ‘average’ types, ‘reserved’ types, or ‘self-centered’ types. and the rest are made up of independent thinkers, and leaders, many typically with a smidgen of irreverence, natural cynicism, critical self-sufficiency, and freedom of spirit. The type willing to take informed punts and calculated risks. The type that tends to end up working for themselves because they lack trust in the ability of others to do the job as well as they could themselves.
This ‘entrepreneurial role model type’ is very much in the minority. If they weren’t, everyone would be running their own businesses, there would be no one left to employ and we wouldn’t have the problem caused by the followers (sometimes referred to as sheeple) following the BAD role model types. Megalomaniacs who tend to gravitate towards leadership in Politics and Uber Corporations, Social Media, etc.
I have always believed this. Got in many arguments with “it couldn’t happen here brigade”. Some people are, in reality, as opposed to woke-ality, racist. They think we are different to other humans.
And when people start believing that “it can’t happen here” the chances that it will goes up exponentially.
This is worth adding to my placard. Or putting on a T-shirt.
This is why freedom of speech should be a basic human right, and it is why hate speech laws were introduced throughout Europe. I wonder how many of the people on this site and elsewhere on the internet who are decrying the censorship we are faced with today, have cheered on and applauded hate speech laws when they were being introduced?
Not me, for one.
Not me I assure you.
Yes, but I don’t hate anyone, I just don’t believe that men are women or that marriage is same-sex.
I don’t want economists or epidemiologists or public health scientists or behavioural scientists or career politicians or technocrats or rogue AI running this world. Look at the catastrophic disaster they have caused. It is without precedent and it is evil.
It is time for natural humans, with a spiritual consciousness and an affinity with nature to be in charge. The good book says “the meek shall inherit the Earth”. I hope this will be the case.
It’s simple, how can anyone live your life better than you?
Whenever you look at the lives of people who do want to run your life for you, you’d NVER want to live like they do.
You mean like an overweight Boris Johnson telling everyone how to stay healthy?
or Birth Control
What do you mean?
Do keep up.
Or, you know, you could try and post a useful, constructive comment.
It’s a fair comment, given his climate change zeal.
Boris is a bit of a mess when it comes to hanging around and providing fatherly input.
Quite frankly, Johnson is a lying criminal, guilty of malfeasance, and who should be locked up, alongside his cronies.
And then hung by the neck until dead.
But of course, he doesn’t mean it.
The trouble is, too few people in politics who believe less is more. Give people information (pros and cons) by all means, but don’t try and run people’s lives for them or withhold information that gives them a genuine informed choice.
Oh, and an overweight BJ who didn’t once mention “orthomolecular” in his daily “Covid” briefings.
…you’d never want to live like they
dowant you to.Unfortunately, England is doing everything it can to remove people from nature. You are not allowed to go camping, you are not allowed to go into the woods and cut down a hazel branch and learn how to build something out of it, you are not allowed to make fire anywhere. And now the authorities are considering closing down several national parks because they’re tired of doing their job and they would much rather be paid to sit around doing nothing all day long.
It is of vital importance to the wellbeing of nature that people go out there and live in it. Wild camping should be something most people do at least once a year. We need to live in nature to appreciate nature and to want to protect it.
Oh like Sicily. I remember a story that Sicily has as many forest rangers as the whole of Canada.
One of the nature reserves here put hand sanitiser out and told you to use it before and after touching the gates. More chemical shit in the environment.
Yep. Virtue signalling.
The meek are being injected with poison and will inherit nothing.
The meek (of strong character and yet humble).
Meek: quiet, gentle, and easily imposed on; submissive
Crucially, people who do not pursue power.
Obedient – as opposed to anarchist.
lambs to the slaughter?
The meek accept lockdown, Bozo.
The good book says “the meek shall inherit the Earth”.
Man wrote that book. You might ponder why some of the statements were made. “Don’t worry little people, be obedient and suffer, you will be rewarded in heaven” How convenient to those seeking power.
Under divine inspiration, as indicated by various signs (which continue to this day, see, for example, Smith Wigglesworth). That book told us to love our neighbour, one of the most important messages ever given to mankind (oops, there I go again with my “hate” speech), and moreover, gave the encouragement to make it a reality –
Fifth. Most Economists sign up to the magical BS thinking of modern monetary theory
Most economists do not.
Since you are wrong on that, what else in your statement are you wrong about?
In March 1981 364 economists, including many of the top academics of the time, wrote a letter to Margaret Thatcher telling her that there was no basis in economic theory for thinking that her policies could get inflation under control and that her approach would destroy the economy.
Perhaps the current lot learned their lesson from history and decided that they’d best keep quiet.
More likely, they haven’t a clue what they’re talking about. Their models are gross simplifications based on the past. They are brilliant at explaining what happened. But when unprecedented things take place at a massive scale, their ability to predict outcomes is exactly zero.
Coming from a mill/coal town in the north Maggie was my HERO.
She had a down to earth knowledge of how every day people lived.
Sadly missed.
This is an important point. Economics also goes through fashions, phases or cycles. Currently we are in a post Keynesian cycle where interventionism in the economy during recessions has morphed into money printing as policy. The current spell of delusion does believe in free lunches as long as governments have their own currencies and can issue their own debts at artificially low interest rates they are free to spend on whatever project they deem “worthy.” This is called MMT, or Modern Monetary Theory. There were similar irrational and hubristic notions of this before the inflationary spirals in Europe Pre WW2.
The naive economists that litter the pages of the FT and the younger faculty at Universities are really not that far from the Soviet style planners of the 1970s. They certainly are not afraid of the virtual takeover and destruction of all small a d medium sized private industries, the likely takeover of utilities and the snug relationships between government and the protected international industry giants and conglomerates that often meet in Davos and other internationalist forums.
The economists of the Davos crowd fully understand that this system is unsustainable and are quite happy to do what is necessary to prepare for the next complete rewiring of the global financial system, that will occur when the global debt bubble bursts. For these globalist technocrats, the solution is digital identities, universal global income and central bank digital currencies.
we ALREADY have the inflation, it’s in title, mainly in land title (collapsing home affordability average earnings/average house prices), but increasingly in patent title (collapsing share affordability P/E).
It’s just marketed as a good thing and rather amazingly this inversion of economic reality has succeeded
It all becomes clear when you realise that money is a dynamic quantity that expands and contracts as required by the activity in the economy. And that means that the natural rate of interest, at base, is zero.
We have never had artificially low interest rates. We have had artificially high ones, and assets prices that have been suppressed are returning to their market value.
You don’t get free money for holding government bonds. You have to invest in a business and generate wealth to get any money.
>the natural rate of interest, at base, is zero.
Money is merely an aid to temporal barter.
Debt is temporal money.
QE is temporal Debt.
Interest HAS to be above zero because the future is not certain.
“Money is merely an aid to temporal barter.”
Nope. People hold it for status and insurance purpose in its own right. And it is that which causes all the problems by generating “excess financial savings” that have to be accommodated to avoid unemployment.
“Interest HAS to be above zero because the future is not certain.”
Not at base it doesn’t because money has no supply constraints. Therefore there can be no charge for it since it is not scarce.
Interest only arises as a function of taking on risk, and that only happens when banks asses a loan request, discount collateral and provide liquidity against it.
All of this comes as a consequence of money being a unit of account, not a thing.
money is a TOKEN for the future use of peoples time…
It represents their time * their ability to fulfil a perceived shortage.
Fiat Money hasn’t any constraint, and neither do numbers but the things it works best when it stably represents it does.
Is MMT really that naïve? MMT advocates really do seem like the new useful idiots
There’s absolutely no contraction in sight, Money printing only works in one direction.
“The current spell of delusion does believe in free lunches as long as governments have their own currencies and can issue their own debts at artificially low interest rates they are free to spend on whatever project they deem “worthy.” This is called MMT, or Modern Monetary Theory. ”
That isn’t what MMT says at all. MMT says that if there is unemployment, then we are overtaxed for the size of government we have. From the horse’s mouth here: https://twitter.com/wbmosler/status/762031006861955074
Since you haven’t a clue what MMT actually says, why do you think you can comment on it?
Oh I see we have a member of the mystical fantasist MMT brigade here. You really are deluded. MMT is exactly what I said it was. Let’s see how well it goes for you and your crew of deluded morons.
“MMT is exactly what I said it was.”
And yet you can’t explain how it is that by reference to published sources can you.
MMT shows the way to lower taxation. Do you like paying over the odds?
Unemployment comes from Taxation of work.
Do you think they hand out fines for speeding for no reason? So why do they fine you for being productive?
Unemployment does come from taxation of work. That’s the purpose of taxation – to make some people unemployed so the government can hire them for the public purpose they were elected to provide.
But it also comes from people saving money, because saving money acts like taxation and denies somebody else an income. Which means that if there is a lot of people saving, you don’t need to tax as much. And we can tell that is happening in aggregate by the length of the unemployment queue.
An MMT view leads to lower taxes for any particular size of government. So if you like a small government, then MMT says you can have that and that you don’t need to tax as much as you think you do to provide it.
Some on the left think it is free money that allows them to do whatever they want. It specifically isn’t. It also say very clearly that ‘taxing the rich’ won’t allow you to spend millions on the NHS or free baubles for the woke – because the rich don’t have a secret supply of doctors or baubles.
> need to tax as much.
CRUMBS its getting even more silly.
Interesting perspective. I have to confess I had, perhaps rather lazily, understood MMT to be along the lines described by AYM. An ‘Austrian’ approach to economics has been my preference, even if it is rather simplistically idealistic. And those influencers within the Austrian approach do insinuate that MMT is more or less Keynesian.
“And that means that the natural rate of interest, at base, is zero.”
Well, I too have been guilty of parroting the line of artificially low interest rates. And yet your point there makes absolute perfect sense. I cannot believe I have never actually considered that very basic and obvious point. Which of course means we have had artificially high rates, as you rightly point out.
I consider myself someone who is capable of critical thinking, and this very basic point I seem to have gone brain dead.
Thank you for the points you raised. I need to go off and evaluate my economic principles a bit and perhaps look at MMT a bit more closely.
“An ‘Austrian’ approach to economics has been my preference, even if it is rather simplistically idealistic.”
It is. MMT leads to lower taxation for any particular size of government you wish to have – because it correctly takes into account the effect of excess financial savings in its analysis.
Austrian economics overtaxes the economy and leave you with less money. If you like small government, then you end up with more money in your pocket and higher asset prices by adopting the MMT viewpoint.
For example the current proposed corporation tax rise and even the Health levy tax rise is unlikely to be required. They are badly targeted and won’t do what is required.
“I consider myself someone who is capable of critical thinking, and this very basic point I seem to have gone brain dead.”
The basic point mistake is usually seeing money as a thing, rather than a unit of account which is what it is. Once you analyse money in that way you find that a monetary economy like the one we have in the uk tends to generate excess financial savings, and those excess savings act like taxation on the system. So you no longer need to tax as much to balance the system, and if you do you end up with unnecessary unemployment.
If you want lower taxes, you should understand MMT. And you’ll then be able to knock over the clowns on the left that think it gives them free rein to spend money like water. It specifically doesn’t.
It’s what happens when you spend a century demonizing the free market, and the people start believing you.
“Second, economists – like almost all professionals”
Economists are professionals, only in the sense that astrologers and fortune tellers are professionals, ie they take money off the gullible.
If you believe economists have a clue about the future, then I have a bridge to sell you.
Yep – economists are almost as good at predicting the future as ‘climate scientists’!
Apparently quite a few new millionaires/billionaires have been created, could have something to do with that
The path taken of lockdowns and masking and compensating the unemployed meant that a lot of government money would be spent. The calm, minimalist option would have generated far less expenditure. Economists know which path is more likely to require their professional expertise.
State actors in suits. They shouldn’t be forgotten when drawing up Nuremberg 2.0
A more fundamental point although it is a good article is surely like a lot of people they were terrified of being wrong, and not deferring to the class of people who are supposed to know about such things: actually of course the class of people who did know were divided and a powerful clique were ruling the roost through the offices of government – specialisation in modern society too often disarms people. You ought to be able to look at Jonathan VanTam (Deputy Chief Medical Officer for Pandemic Preparedness and Emergency Planning !!!) and say I wouldn’t buy a used car from him.
“First, economists have a reputation for being somewhat miserly, and they were concerned about playing to type. This made them reluctant – during the early months of the pandemic – to raise the small matter of how much this was all going to cost.
Second, economists – like almost all professionals – are members of the ‘laptop class’ (i.e., people who sit around on their laptops all day). Lockdown didn’t affect their lives nearly as much as it affected those of small business owners, or workers who couldn’t access a furlough scheme.
Third, as economics has become more technical and more specialised, it has acquired a distinctly technocratic streak. Despite the subject’s roots in liberal political economy, the authors note, “there is now a widespread belief that almost any societal problem has a technocratic, top-down solution”.
Fourth, academic economics has formed a rather cosy relationship with big business, particularly the investment banks of Wall Street and the big tech firms of Silicon Valley. It’s less surprising, therefore, that “the dismal science has had very little to say about how lockdowns have favoured big business”.”
Pretty good list. I’d add that economists are no exception to the main lesson of the coronapanic: neither the holding of educational status awards, nor nominal intelligence, nor social or professional status, are any protection against being manipulated by fear propaganda, nor are they any aid to resisting the temptations of virtue signalling compliance and adherence to elite dogmas. Probably the contrary, in fact.
Almost certainly. After 15 years of schooling plus 3-6 years of further education that demands that you suppress your own interests and ideas and strive for artificial goals that have little intrinsic value, it’s very difficult to think for yourself. And those who do best (i.e. have been rewarded most by the system) are probably the most vulnerable to believing whatever comes from on high.
Also have the most to lose from being seen to be off the reservation.
Money making opportunity.
Most economics writers and academics have a soft spot for authoritarianism (it is efficient is the excuse), if you don’t share these view you don’t get the senior jobs. All the business ‘journalists’ seem to support jab passports and vaccine mandates for the sole reason they have no souls and only think in terms of money and power, this is why most see the tech / police surveillance state of Singapore as utopia. Economists are either constantly wrong because they don’t understand humanity / or deliberately wrong for insider trading purposes.
No doubt like many academics they will also have a soft spot for the eugenics movement a bit like the Labour party.
https://amp.theguardian.com/politics/from-the-archive-blog/2019/may/01/eugenics-founding-fathers-british-socialism-archive-1997?__twitter_impression=true&s=09
eugenics and marxist attitudes to the evolution of the economy have vast overlaps.
My degree is economics. My instant thoughts on lockdown was that it would be terrible and potentially disastrous from an economic point of view. I instantly realised that by reducing economic activity, people would die. It was all done without any semblance of cost benefit analysis.
As time went on it was obvious why the governments did not do cost benefit models, because by doing them honestly it would show what a farce lockdowns were. If they tried to fudge them, their assumptions would be ridiculed, so they just didnt do them.
Lockdowns kill people, they do not save lives.
As for why other economists didnt speak out. I guess some were in on the scam, most were stupid and not fit to call themselves economists. Others were scared and the rest were kept quiet one way or another, censorship is pretty much all pervasive these days.
Lockdowns kill people, they do not save lives.
That’s a very important point: Toll in human life vs pecuniary harm is a false dichotomy. The economy isn’t some abstract game people play halfway for fun/ boredeom and halfway to enrich themselves for no particular benefit, it’s people’s lives and the pecuniary harm is only harmful because it robs people of critical resources enabling them to live their lives instead of being fed & clothed by (miserly) state handouts while engaging in state-prescribed, useless rites (eg, clap for carers).
Lockdowns are fundamentally meant to harm people in ways lockdown advocates don’t care about in order to achieve something said advocates consider more important than lifes of mere (other) people. They’re literally an antihuman policy and were never meant to be something else.
Most things come down to the fact that if you are financially well off and have a nice house and can work at home, lockdowns don’t matter so much – most people don’t care about freedom and liberty and are completely dead spirituality. Same for all Professions.
If the people in the City of London didn’t support lockdowns and tyranny it would end in a day. The privately owned Central Banks create currency to lend to tyrannical regimes and we the tax slaves have to repay it with interest. The whole system is broken and often outright evil.
Because most of them are fake economists, trying to justify socialism.
Economics, the ‘dismal science’. Well not actually science at all, no economist tests their hypothesis.
Increasingly they are all computer modellers, actually computer model ‘drivers’, with increasingly little real knowledge of the underlying statistical techniques in the models.
Not a group of people you want running anything, in general, although there are some exceptions. The 5%/95% rule applies in terms of ability.
(1) Rhetorical question surely?
(2) Anti-lockdown was anyway yesterday’s (UK) battle
(3) ‘Vaccine’ coercion, injuries and deaths are more pressing concerns
(4) Apartheid must be opposed and stopped
Why have so many so called Human rights Lawyers shown zero interest in taking cases against Lockdowns, Vaccine discrimination, and human rights abuses under the Covid regime?
Is it because they really don’t believe in human rights for Uk citizens, and that they are really just lapdogs of the Government
‘Human rights’ are those given by the State. They are not inalienable natural rights which cannot be withdrawn by governments or human made laws.
So-called human rights lawyers are constrained by the judgements of courts on ‘public interest’ issues including the State’s views on public health requirements for the ‘common good’.
There will be no help from this quarter.
Hence, only Common Law and our Natural God-given rights can resolve this conundrum…
All those that wish to enslave us and dominate humanity and acquire all of the resources of Planet Earth must be tried under Common Law.
Tried by whom? If all the courts, judges and lawyers, are corrupt – what then?
Economists are cowards and lickspittles.
To get ahead in any academic discipline, you have to be a coward and a lickspittle,
“Why Did So Few Economists Speak Out?”Because as we have found out, >90% of the population are incapable of controlling irrational fear.
Is there ONE profession that actually opposed lockdowns? Is there one profession which is distinguished by the number of independent-thinking contrarians? I can’t think of one.
Economists were just like bureaucrats, scientists, journalists, all college faculty, etc. Sad commentary here.
Covid mass hysteria spared no sector of society. At the height of the 2020 mania, a survey by the Economic Society of Australia has found that three-quarters of Australia’s top economists support lockdown on a cost-benefit basis. Their reasoning amounted to no more than weary slogans about lockdown saving tens or hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths (the academic Infallibility of Modelling myth); One Big Lockdown will defeat Covid for good and avoid the yo-yo risk of even more economically damaging repeated lockdowns in response to subsequent waves (that one has stood the test of time, hasn’t it); a dose of short-term economic pain yields long-term health and economic gain (that’s working a treat, too).
All of it is panic-fuelled speculation by ‘elite’ economists. From the earliest days of the virus, and the associated hand-flapping and arm-waving of pro-lockdown ‘experts’, we have been greatly in need of some real experts – experts in scepticism.
Not just economists… but where are the human rights lawyers? And for that matter where are the doctors “doing no harm” when jabbing kids?
Is it being renamed as ‘Daily Speculation’? However, it’s evident that most economists are in the same club as the politcians. Most of them have lost the plot on this topic.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/proposal-for-mandatory-covid-certification-in-a-plan-b-scenario/proposal-for-mandatory-covid-certification-in-a-plan-b-scenario
Do Economists deal with notions of ethics or morals? I assumed the bean counters were entirely heartless as a matter of course…
A financial guy I follow has maintained since the beginning that the lock downs are a financial measure, to supress activity and prevent an increase in interest rates that would trigger massive losses. Also so they can rejig the system before it blows.
This is on the same track – http://thephilosophicalsalon.com/a-self-fulfilling-prophecy-systemic-collapse-and-pandemic-simulation/.
Saw an interview with a hedgie last night and he sheepishly admitted that covid was the best thing that could have happened.
Living in the Uk x 24 years. Why is no one speaking out today about food shortages on grocery shelves x one month and now petrol shortages. The government is doing literally NOTHING about it. One friend told me she was not about to blame the government for either. Really, who else should she blame. The public’s silence right now is deafening. We all know this isn’t about any shortages or Brexit. The UK gov’t, like most other gov’ts, most likely accepted a large handout from the powers that be and are just doing as they are told. Could it really be that simple? Sure looks like it.
A cynic might observe that they ARE doing something about it, that is to say, they’ve caused it via the media etc. It’s well known that many of us are gullible enough for them to get away with it.