Notes

In one particularly eye-opening statistic, the share of adults who are unable to “use mathematical reasoning when reviewing and evaluating the validity of statements” has climbed to 25 per cent on average in high-income countries, and 35 per cent in the US.

***

Sir Keir Starmer is abolishing NHS England as Labour embarks on the biggest reorganization of the health service for more than a decade.
NHS England will now be brought back under the control of the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), and the two organizations will be merged over the next two years, leading to about 10,000 job cuts.

***

Poland will look at gaining access to nuclear weapons and also ensure that every man undergoes military training as part of an effort to build a 500,000-strong army to face off the threat from Russia, Prime Minister Donald Tusk told the parliament on Friday.

****

Notes (by others)

Every day, thousands of transactions take place in which Americans and Canadians consent to exchange currency for goods.

[Commerce] Secretary Howard Lutnick thinks there is someone they forgot to ask.

“We don’t want to buy 60 percent of our aluminum from Canada,” Lutnick explained during an interview with Fox News on Thursday. “We want to bring [aluminum production] to America.”

Lutnick’s phrasing there is pretty telling. There is no “royal we” n the marketplace—that Canadian aluminum is not being bought by the federal government, but by private American businesses, which are making deals with private companies on the other side of the border.

There is, indeed, no reason to think about those transactions in a nationalist way at all. The economy is not a World Cup match. When Canadian companies exchange their aluminum for American companies’ money, both sides win.

About 60 percent of the aluminum used by American companies to make all manner of products comes from Canada. That should be none of Lutnick’s business. --Boehm

***

A body of literature called the New History of Capitalism argues (incorrectly, I believe) that Western prosperity is built on legacies of exploitation like colonialism and slavery. Economists are very skeptical because the New Historians of Capitalism rest much of their case on fundamental misunderstandings of basic economic concepts like national income accounting. Economists have criticized some of the movement’s foundational texts in the blogosphere and scholarly journals.

There is a related body of work I’ve called the New Intellectual History of Capitalism, focusing on post World War II neoliberalism and the alleged conspiracy beginning with Mont Pelerin Society’s first meeting in April 1947. Examples of this genre include Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains, which stirred public choice circles in 2017 by attempting to link James M. Buchanan to Virginia segregationism in the 1950s and which Michael Munger called “speculative historical fiction.” Other contributions include work by Quinn Slobodian purporting to locate fascist sympathies in the judiciously selected and carefully minced words of Ludwig von Mises.--Carden

***

The principles of liberty provided a revolutionary cause but not a blueprint for designing a government that could preserve liberty. The institutions of governance evolved over time, sometimes through deliberate changes and sometimes as unintended consequences that those who advocated institutional changes did not foresee. Often, they were driven by the desires of citizens to have a louder voice in the operation of the government under which they lived. Thus began the transformation of American government from one based on the ideology of liberty to one based on the ideology of democracy.--Holcolmbe

***

The mismanagement of the pandemic hit us personally and exposed a massive, across-the-board institutional failure. It was the most tragic breakdown of leadership and ethics that free societies have seen in our lifetimes.

…..

Especially in the U.S.—where the Declaration of Independence proclaims that all men are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights”—it is stunning that liberty fell so quickly and thoroughly by government decree and with public assent.

Why did free people accept Draconian and illogical lockdowns? The answer reveals the reason for the silence on the pandemic. Censorship and propaganda are part of the explanation, tools of control that convinced the public of two lies—that there was a consensus of experts in favor of lockdowns, and that dissent from that false consensus was dangerous.

Yet that alone doesn’t explain today’s silence about that extraordinary collapse. It is also that so many smart and influential people were complicit. They bought into and even advocated irrational measures that defied data, biology and common sense. That acquiescence—frankly, cowardice—and the failure to grasp reality are inconvenient truths that, understandably, no one wants to revisit.--Atlas

***

As late as the 1980s it was widely believed that babies do not feel pain. You might think that this was an absurd thing to believe given that babies cry and exhibit all the features of pain and pain avoidance. Yet, for much of the 19th and 20th centuries, the straightforward sensory evidence was dismissed as “pre-scientific” by the medical and scientific establishment. Babies were thought to be lower-evolved beings whose brains were not yet developed enough to feel pain, at least not in the way that older children and adults feel pain. Crying and pain avoidance were dismissed as simply reflexive. Indeed, babies were thought to be more like animals than reasoning beings and Descartes had told us that an animal’s cries were of no more import than the grinding of gears in a mechanical automata. There was very little evidence for this theory beyond some gesturing’s towards myelin sheathing. But anyone who doubted the theory was told that there was “no evidence” that babies feel pain (the conflation of no evidence with evidence of no effect).

Most disturbingly, the theory that babies don’t feel pain wasn’t just an error of science or philosophy—it shaped medical practice. It was routine for babies undergoing medical procedures to be medically paralyzed but not anesthetized. In one now infamous 1985 case an open heart operation was performed on a baby without any anesthesia (n.b. the link is hard reading). Parents were shocked when they discovered that this was standard practice. Publicity from the case and a key review paper in 1987 led the American Academy of Pediatrics to declare it unethical to operate on newborns without anesthesia.--Tabarrok

***