The interview went 28 minutes and is here.
I won’t do my usual time-stamping because I’m busy with other things.
What I will point out is that approximately the first half is on my Wall Street Journal article, co-authored with Jonathan Lipow, that analyzed the findings of the major cost/benefit analyses of lockdowns and other measures that were in response to the coronavirus. We get into an interesting discussion of the value of a statistical life. It also gave me a chance to use the main thing I took away from my debate with Justin Wolfers back in April: how the concept of least-cost avoider strengthens the case against lockdowns.
The second half is about my latest article for Hoover’s Defining Ideas, “Black Livelihoods Matter,” Defining Ideas, June 17. We get into the minimum wage, Senator John F. Kennedy’s racist case for increasing the minimum wage, occupational licensure, how restrictions on housing supply drive up housing prices in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City, and other cities, and charter schools. Early in the second half, I dealt briefly with the issue of white privilege.
Also, right at the end, I get in a major criticism of mega-murderers Chairman Mao and Joseph Stalin.
Oksana Boyko did her homework and so the result was an excellent conversation.
P.S. I wanted to do a screenshot at the 1:27 point that shows both Oksana, me, and my Rocky movie poster, but with my new MacBook Pro, I couldn’t figure out how.
READER COMMENTS
Alan Goldhammer
Jun 28 2020 at 3:31pm
I came across the following preprint while I was preparing my Newsletter this morning: “Cost Benefit Analysis of Limited Reopening Relative to a Herd Immunity Strategy or Shelter in Place for SARS-CoV-2 in the United States” The link is HERE for the abstract and there is link on the right for the full paper.
It covers issues you have written and spoken about.
mark
Jul 26 2020 at 2:59pm
With due respect – and though I am with you on most points – an interview with RussiaToday is not such an innocent matter. You were used to show indirectly that Russia not doing a lockdown was “so much wiser than silly US”. While actually Putin&Co a) just utterly failed in responding (one lock-down just led to vacation, partying, getting together more than before) and b) could not care less about the life of their “un-productive” pensioners (many Russian men die before 65 anyway*). Not as if they minded the others much, as long as Gazprom has enough workers. The FT assumes “Russia’s Covid death toll could be 70 per cent higher than official figure” – I say: it could be anything. Ignore any numbers now and hope for only mildly tampered statistics of all deaths in Russia in 2019/20/21. Whenever.
Besides that : You often mention the “higher amount of suicides” – we did not see those here in lock-downed Germany. You never mention the strong fall in cases/deaths of our old killer, the flu + other infectious diseases. (WSJ had a nice article/map this week https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-measures-have-all-but-wiped-out-the-flu-in-the-southern-hemisphere-11595440682
The biggest loss of life/quality-of-life imho will be due the loss of jobs in the developing world due to the lock-down of the the “first” world alone. Garment workers. Tourism. 100-400$ a month jobs vanished. Lifes with hopes and smartphones. Back to a-dollar-a-day and less – begging, subsistence soil-tilling, we-shall-never-want-to-know … . https://www.wsj.com/articles/pandemic-crushes-garment-industry-the-developing-worlds-path-out-of-poverty-11594472400
And – as Scott Sumner never tires to remind us – lots of that would have happened anyway, even without much state-imposed-lockdowns. Coz we, the normal people of the world, take a rather rational break from travelling, shopping, eating-out, spending-around.
Pandemics suck indeed. Like the plague. – Those silly state rules during it – as silly as many are, they seem to be just a minor inconvenience, really.
– Let RT quote you, if they must. Granting them an interview without critically assessing the Russian responses/ public health system – just makes one a tool.
*”As of 2013, the average life expectancy in Russia was 65.1 years for males and 76.5 years for females. The average Russian life expectancy of 71.6 years at birth is nearly 5 years shorter than the overall average figure for the European Union, or the United States.” wikipedia I lived there most of 1995-2008. It feels much worse than those “nearly 5 years shorter” may sound like!
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