David Henderson needs a reboot - Marginal REVOLUTION

David is repeatedly writing critiques of my writings on Covid-19. (Google to them if you wish, they are so off base and misrepresentative I don’t think they deserve a link, and furthermore I find it almost impossible to track down EconLog archives under their new system.) Virtually all of his points revolve around simple or it seems even willful misunderstandings. For instance, David wrote:

But he’s willing to sacrifice the well-being of 50 million school-age children. Remember his casual “It just doesn’t seem worth it” remark about allowing kids to go back to school. He handles the tradeoff by not mentioning it.

Here is what I wrote:

…the value of reopening schools. It is an inarguable point, and Sweden seems to have made it work. But schools cannot and should not be reopened unconditionally. Amid high levels of Covid-19, a successful reopening very often will require social distancing, masks and a good system for testing and tracing. It would be better to focus on what needs to be done to make school reopenings work. Reopened schools in Israel, for instance, seem to have contributed to a significant second wave of Covid-19.

And my remark about “It just doesn’t seem worth it”, cited by David as me dismissing school reopenings? Here is what I actually wrote:

Indoor restaurant dining and drinking, for example, is probably not a good idea in most parts of the U.S. right now.

Yes, many of the Covid cases spread by such activity would be among the lower-risk young, rather than the higher-risk elderly. Still, practically speaking, given America’s current response capabilities, those cases will further paralyze schools and workplaces and entertainment venues. It just doesn’t seem worth it.

I am worried about reopening indoor bars and restaurants because I want to keep schools (and other venues) open. At my own school, GMU, I very much argued for keeping it open, which indeed we have done with success but also with great effort. My whole point is one about trade-offs.

I’ve also linked regularly to evidence that school reopenings are often possible and desirable, but still there is a right and wrong way to do it and they are not in every case a good idea. It is not just up to the policy analyst, you also have to keep the teachers and various other parties on board, whether you like that reality or not.

One issue here is that likely more students would end up in functioning schools under a Tyler Cowen regime than under a David Henderson regime. David’s sum of recommendations would, in practice, if we were to trace through their full consequences, lead to more schools being shut and more teachers refusing to show up. And more deaths and panic and overflowing medical facilities. Now that’s a trade-off.

I could point to numerous misunderstandings in David’s recent posts, pretty much in every paragraph. (I also think he is quite wrong on substance, allying himself with a few eccentric thinkers that hardly anyone agrees with, and who have not acquitted themselves well in debate, or made good predictions as of late, but that is another matter for a different time. He should pay greater heed to say Scott Gottlieb, who knows what he is talking about.)

In the meantime, David is failing the ideological Turing test badly and repeatedly.

Addendum: David’s Russian vaccine post does not misunderstand me, but I don’t think it shows a very full grasp of the issue. I very much favor regulatory reciprocity for pharmaceuticals, vaccines, and more, but I strongly believe adding Russia to the reciprocal list would “poison the well” and doom the whole idea. In the meantime, they are not nearly as far along for a major vaccine rollout as they claim, so probably we are not missing out on very much, even if the quality were fine. The slightest problem with the vaccine would be blown out of proportion, most of all with DT as president and Russian conspiracy theories circulating. If your goal is to nudge and push the FDA to move more quickly across the board, starting them off with the approval of a Russian vaccine is bad tactics and is risking the entire apple cart. Maybe try for Mother England first? So I think David here is quite wrong, and applying market liberalization ideas in a knee-jerk rather than a sophisticated fashion. He called the post “Tyler Cowen’s shocking post on the Russian vaccine,” but I wonder who he thinks is really supposed to be shocked by that one. If you read David’s comment on his own post you will see he is genuinely unable to imagine that such an argument as I present above might exist.

New addendum: Note that one of the earlier comments was under the name of David Henderson but was not in fact by him, read here. And a response by the real DRH here.