Dear University Presidents:
We all know that higher education falls far short of its promise. I’ve spent a large part of my twenty five years as a research professor documenting the shortcomings of our system. Perhaps you’re even familiar with my The Case Against Education (Princeton University Press, 2018). In recent years, however, we’ve begun failing our students in new and improved ways. In the past, we failed to transform our students into thoughtful and knowledgeable adults, but at least most of them had a great four-year party (or often a five- or six-year party). Now we’re making the college experience itself actively dehumanizing.
This is most obvious when we look at our forever war on Covid. Virtually every college in America has a vaccine mandate – a wise move, in my view. Yet instead of using these amazing vaccines to return to normalcy, virtually every college in America continues to aggressively “fight Covid.” Our policies would have been unthinkable two years ago: Indoor mask mandates. 50% seating in dining halls. Excluding guests from live performances. Social distancing. All combined with sporadic yet self-righteous enforcement.
These policies aren’t merely “inconvenient.” They are dehumanizing. Showing other people how we feel – and seeing how they feel in turn – is a basic part of being a human being. A basic part of making friends. A basic part of connecting with a community. True, most students in the Covid era continue to make friends – and even smile on occasion. As Jurassic Park teaches us, “Life finds a way.” But this is still a stunted and twisted way for young people to live.
Sometimes, sadly, dehumanization is the price we pay to survive. But this is not one of those times. Even pre-vaccine, universities absurdly overreacted to Covid. Now that virtually everyone on campus has the vaccine, the overreaction is absurdly absurd. A conservative estimate of Covid’s Infection Fatality Rate is .6%. For the college-age, divide that risk by 30. For the vaccinated, divide by 10 again. That means we’re talking 1-in-50,000, assuming a student even gets infected. And of course, vaccines also greatly reduce infection and hence contagion.
I beg you, don’t reply with the fashionable preamble, “Out of an abundance of caution…” Life is full of trade-offs. Americans’ annual risk of dying in a car accident is roughly 1-in-9000, yet I doubt you would ban students from driving. Similarly, please don’t start telling me about high-risk students and older members of our campus community. I am an “older member of our campus community,” and I know the risks. That’s why I got vaccinated as soon as possible. That’s enough to put my mind at ease; I face dozens of more serious risks every day. But if that’s not safe enough for me, then I, not an entire generation of students, should bear the burden of isolation.
You could insist that we have a fundamental difference of values. I’m a pluralist, while you put safety first. Actions, however, speak louder than words, and your actions clearly show that you do not “put safety first.” If you really put safety first, why not move all classes outside? Why have any social events at all? Indeed, if you really put safety first, why did you re-open campus in the first place? Despite your pious rhetoric, you don’t put safety first any more than I do.
Frankly, I’m not even sure that you care more than me about safety. Why would I doubt your stated priorities? Because both your Covid rules and your Covid enforcement are so arbitrary. You enforce your mask rules fanatically, often refusing lecturers the right to remove their masks so their audience can hear them. Yet you’ve long since abandoned any effort to enforce social distancing. If it weren’t for the ubiquitous propaganda, you’d think that social distancing policies were abolished a year ago. Similarly, you “fight Covid” by getting rid of self-service at buffets, ignoring all the extra crowding that ensues as a result. You deny parents the chance to see their own kids perform in concert, but don’t even ask students to avoid live music off-campus. Frankly, you seem far more concerned with “doing something” than actually making campus safe.
How much do all your efforts actually reduce the spread of Covid? Unless your campus is extremely isolated, it would be amazing if you were cutting transmission more than 10%. Which means you’re dramatically reducing students’ quality of life in order to reduce fatality risk if infected by 1-in-500,000.
We have a word for extreme fear of ultra-low risks. The word is “paranoia.” Paranoia is what you are teaching students. The good news is that, based on past educational experience, most students will eventually forget the lesson. Yet in the meanwhile, you are sickening many students with childish anxieties.
Nor is Covid the only issue where you are teaching paranoia. Many schools – and probably most of the top ones – now kick off the academic year with a long series of mandatory brainwashing sessions. You gather students together, then have your most fanatical employees preach against the evils of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and much more. As with Covid, you show near-zero interest in measuring (a) the on-campus prevalence of these ills, or (b) the effectiveness of your inhumane remedies. Instead, the brainwashing sessions just try to sow as much pessimism as possible.
I doubt that most of this matters much; preaching against “racism” at college is like preaching against “sin” at church. The people who need to hear the message are rarely in the audience. Nevertheless, there is one kind of brainwashing that probably does make a difference. For the worse.
I’m talking about your training in sexual harassment and sexual assault.
How can I say such a thing? Because most young adults are naturally shy around the opposite sex. Many if not most female students are so shy that they will never ask out a male student. Many if not most male students are so shy that they have to spend weeks or months “working up their courage” to propose a date. Social anxiety toward the opposite sex is a human universal, visible around the world and throughout history. And what does your training in sexual harassment and sexual assault do? Strive to maximize students’ anxiety. You try to convince female students that virtually any male is a plausible sexual predator. And along the way, you make male students wonder if any social interaction with their female peers will be labelled “harassment” or even “assault.”
None of this means that higher education should take sexual violence lightly. The wise path, however, is to define sexual violence narrowly – and punish it harshly. To treat it as an easily-identifiable aberration, a clear-cut crime, not something that an unbrainwashed person might do by accident.
Instead, you’ve taken the opposite path, of sowing paranoia. And, though your brainwashing is only one small part of a sad Zeitgeist, the patterns are what you’d expect: High gender segregation, loneliness, and lovelessness. Yes, extraverts land on their feet, but when I look at college campuses today, I feel sorry for the silent majority of shy kids. In the past, they only had to worry about being ignored and rejected. Now they have the added burden of paranoid fears of being victimized and demonized. And if you protest, “Such problems are unlikely,” you’re telling the wrong person. The people who need to hear that “Such problems are unlikely” are the students that you’re scaring to death.
Or better yet, stop trying to terrify them in the first place.
I realize, of course, that you didn’t reach the apex of the academic pyramid by defying the academic consensus. As a tenured professor, I have the luxury of speaking my mind, secure in the knowledge that I won’t lose my job. To become a university president, in contrast, you had to play ball, to compromise, to go along to get along.
Still, the key word here is “become.” Now that you are the university president, you are clothed in immense power. You have the power to return your campus to normalcy. You have the power to end mandatory brainwashing. You have the power to draw a bright line between criminal violence and normal human misunderstandings. Admittedly, your power is neither absolute nor permanent. You are more likely to keep your job if you go with the flow. But where is the honor or fun in that? Take a stand. Stick your neck out. And give your students a college experience they will remember with nostalgia, not disgust.
Sincerely,
Bryan Caplan
Department of Economics
George Mason University
READER COMMENTS
James Miller
Sep 29 2021 at 9:47am
Any clue that mask rules are not really about COVID protection is that ineffective cloth masks are allowed even though N95 masks are much better and are widely available and are fairly cheap.
Ben
Sep 29 2021 at 12:39pm
You left out the part about colleges actively supporting high risk activities e.g., football, gymnastics, cheerleading – each of which produces risks ranging from death or paralysis to strains and sprains which can reduce long term quality of life.
A relentleas focus on COVID excuses the need to focus on any and all other bad outcomes for people.
GDA
Sep 29 2021 at 12:59pm
Oops. Looks like my previous comment was accidentally deleted. Never mind, I posted it again.
Risk of a healthy young person dying of covid – estimated about 1 in 500,000.
There were 679 cases of COVID in 12-17 year olds during the first two weeks of school in Ontario. Only one wound up in hospital, and they were fully vaccinated.
We actually don’t know why the one ended up in hospital, but based on previous results, the C-19 diagnosis came after he went into hospital for other reasons.
At this point it’s an endemic virus, as the world (minus the USA) is acknowledging.
Are we going to start vaccine mandates for flu?
[Your comment was removed because it violates our civility policies. Please read our comment civility policies at
https://www.econlib.org/library/commentpolicy.html –Econlib Ed.]
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Sep 30 2021 at 10:30am
If flu were more deadly and vaccines more effective in preventing spread, it would probably a good idea.
Pat
Sep 29 2021 at 1:08pm
700,000 dead people in the U.S. before this time next week (officially, the number is certainly higher) and you’re still just not getting it.
Pete Smoot
Sep 30 2021 at 7:20pm
Just shy of 3 million people die in the US every year. COVID is a serious issue but not uniquely dangerous. COVID deaths (which I expect are lower than the official numbers) rank around #3, behind cancer and heart disease, ahead of accidents and stroke. We get how serious it is.
But that’s not the point. The point is all the COVID restrictions on college campuses won’t change the numbers. College students are at very low risk, they’re exposed off-campus and on-campus in all sorts of ways, and the measures will reduce the on-campus exposure risk by a rounding error. We’re ruining lives for nothing. And that’s what I don’t thing you get: that doing something is not doing something useful or worthwhile.
GDA
Oct 3 2021 at 2:38am
In the UK, the powers-that-be announced that the IFR for C-19 was 0.096% back in July. It’s continuing to trend downwards.
Not sure on the UK flu IFR %, but in the US, the IFR for flu runs at around 0.1% (certainly in 2017/18 it did)
So they seem to be approaching parity.
But the flu is so much worse than the C-19, because is kills far more children and young adults.
Whereas C-19 takes almost exclusively the very old, the very sick and those with particular (now known) co-morbidities. No kids.
US News reported Sept 10 that the vaccinated have only a 1 in 13,000 chance of being hospitalized if they get a “breakthrough” case.
So, are we still pretending that mandates are all about protecting the vaccinated?
https://questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-questions/detail/2021-07-12/31381
Mark Z
Sep 29 2021 at 1:44pm
Note that Bryan here approved of colleges mandating vaccines, nor the federal government. There is no violation of human rights nor anything hateful about voluntary institutions requiring people who participate in them to get vaccinated.
I can’t tell what exactly you’re saying about Israel or the UK, but data from high vaccinate rate countries confirms that vaccines are probably >90% effective at preventing serious illness and the unvacccinated are at much much greater risk. Beware of Simpson’s paradox.
Mark Z
Sep 29 2021 at 1:45pm
*’nor’ is supposed to be ‘not.’
sean
Sep 29 2021 at 1:51pm
People have long-term contracts in these situations. If you have tenure at a school; something you spend 10 years earning; its not like you can just walk away from a new mandate without taking a severe loss to your life. And the vaccine mandate isn’t something you would have considered when you entered into the process of earning tenure. Almost everyone has something similar – like choosing to buy a house in a certain school district. Where prior commitments make it exhorbitantly expensive to not follow new mandates.
GDA
Sep 29 2021 at 1:49pm
According to a new Trafalgar Group poll, the vast, bipartisan majority of American voters (65%) oppose vaccine mandates for American workers.
Even with 18 months of non-stop propaganda. Imagine. They “get” it.
Wrong side of history Bryan – still time to look at the facts from the medical side at least.
From the human rights side………..less said the better.
Michael Hammock
Sep 29 2021 at 2:51pm
I’m not sure how much of this I agree with. For example, there are more costs from COVID infection worth worrying about than death, and Bryan doesn’t mention them.
I am sure I like the image from Paranoia XP Edition. Nice choice, Bryan.
robc
Sep 29 2021 at 3:32pm
There are more injuries from car accidents than just deaths too. But it is a useful shorthand in both cases.
steve
Sep 29 2021 at 4:20pm
I have asked and never had an economist answer so I guess I will keep trying. Why is is that when Covid is talked about only the risks and costs of dying are included? As far as I can tell this is unique for Covid. For example, one of my trainees helped do a double lung transplant on a Covid pt with post covid pulmonary fibrosis. The pt lived and didnt die so I guess we just dont count that one since he didnt die so it wasn’t a problem?
Also, I found this pretty disappointing. ” If you really put safety first, why not move all classes outside? Why have any social events at all? Indeed, if you really put safety first, why did you re-open campus in the first place?” I may not always agree with what you write but I enjoy your logic and seldom see such poor reasoning. You are creating a false dichotomy when I think if it was anything other than covid you would acknowledge that what we are dealing with is a continuum of responses. People who care about safety are probably going to advocate for something somewhere between living in a bubble and having covid parties, like we had the old measles parties.
Steve
Christophe Biocca
Sep 29 2021 at 4:43pm
Deaths are well measured and easily compared across causes. It might be unreasonable if the proportion (DEATH/OTHER BAD STUFF) is substantially different between cause A and cause B.
The downside of trying to weigh non-fatalities is you quickly end up having to make complicated value judgments. How many “short of breath”s are equivalent to one “paralyzed from the waist down”? Car deaths also have a large ratio of injuries to deaths (94 injuries for every 6 fatalities in France, for example), so we can’t just add the non-fatal stuff to the COVID side of the comparison and ignore the other side.
You can try boiling everything down to QALYs, but that usually makes COVID fall way off in importance given its massively age-biased effects.
robc
Sep 29 2021 at 10:15pm
I answered your question 48 minutes before you asked it.
Christophe answered it better, however.
Jon Murphy
Sep 29 2021 at 10:48pm
On top of what Christophe and robc say, it’s also worth noting that deaths have been the metric for much of the pandemic by just about everyone. It’s really only been the past few months where non-death statistics have been discussed. So, what Bryan is doing is judging the arguments on the grounds the people making those arguments claim is the relevant metric.
steve
Sep 30 2021 at 10:14am
In patient death rates are running around 10%. That means 90% of those hospitalized live, after an average 5 day hospitalization. Most people, our clinical experience, need another 1-2 weeks at home before they are ready to go back to work. Those seem like pretty significant costs. This is something the medical world has talked about almost from he beginning. I still find it odd that he people you expect to care about costs, economists, just ignore this, even if it ids easier.
Steve
Jose Pablo
Sep 30 2021 at 11:47am
The “economic” problem of Covid19 is pretty complex, but, in any case, has nothing to do with the costs you mention.
To start with your figures are “age dependent” and so, when talking about campuses and 18-25 years old adults, figures for this age range should be used.
But, even more important, the most relevant information is not the absolute value of the Covid 19 related cost (whether deaths or any other) but the difference in those cost before and after the measure we are trying to evaluate.
The figures you mention are the costs incurred after throwing at Covid everything we had and them some: 60% of the population vaccinated, widespread mask mandates (historical and actual), business closures/reduction, … the question them is whether the “cost reduction” brought by these measures justifies the intervention.
As you can see, the “absolute value” of Covid related costs that you mention, plays no role in this discussion.
To say that “measure X” is justified because of the high cost of Covid19 without measure X is very poor reasoning. Which is relevant is the “difference” in Covid related costs before and after measure X (it works the same way with car accidents related deaths and injuries, by the way).
Washing your hands every 30 minutes would be an equally economically irrelevant measure even if Covid19 death rate were 20% instead of the 10% you mention.
Jon Murphy
Sep 30 2021 at 1:31pm
Again, no one is ignoring those costs. In fact, I’ve written two papers about it. One has been published and the other is under review. And many others have written as well.
Again, the point about deaths is the covid restrictions have been justified on the grounds that they prevent deaths. We are holding those folks’ feet to the flames.
steve
Sep 30 2021 at 3:10pm
“Again, the point about deaths is the covid restrictions have been justified on the grounds that they prevent deaths. ”
And again that goes to my point. If you are going to evaluate interventions you should look at all of the costs, not just deaths.
Steve
Joel Pollen
Sep 30 2021 at 12:38pm
Steve, you completely misunderstand Bryan’s point with your second paragraph. He’s actually making the same point you are. Of course there’s a continuum of responses. Bryan isn’t advocating either “do everything” or “do nothing.” He’s saying that we need to consider the costs of our interventions in terms of things other than health care dollars spent and number of deaths — like loneliness and dehumanization.
Specifically, his point is that it’s silly to say “we care about safety above all else” because when you do that you’re failing to acknowledge tradeoffs. He’s pointing out that they don’t really ignore tradeoffs — if they did, they wouldn’t have classes at all. But they talk as if they do because it sounds good and it’s a way to dismiss your opponents when they point out that your intervention doesn’t pass a cost-benefit test.
DeservingPorcupine
Sep 29 2021 at 4:43pm
“Virtually every college in America has a vaccine mandate – a wise move, in my view”
Is even this obviously wise? I truly don’t know what the back of the envelope calculations looks like with the best parameter estimates available. I’m assuming you think it’s wise because a vaccinated person is much less likely to spread it to others, but if you take into account
The waning/less-than-expected VE against infection
The apparent superiority of natural immunity to infection
In concert with #1, the possibility that a vaccinated person might be more likely to socialize while infectious due to a mitigation of symptoms
how sure are we that, over a lifetime or at least a very long horizon, the probability that a vaccinated person will be a vector is much lower than the probability that an unvaccinated person will be a vector?
Seems like a guess with very, very wide error bars at the moment.
(I’m stressing again that I think it’s clear that getting vaccinated is good for person getting the vaccine in the vast majority of cases, but those benefits are internalized.)
Jose Pablo
Sep 29 2021 at 9:04pm
This is actually a very interesting point: since vaccinated persons are more likely to be asymptomatic and to not isolate themselves, lacking the “warning signal” those symptoms are, and so, they could spread the virus more.
On the other hand, they are less likely to get the virus in the first place and, probably, less likely to be contagious.
But we do have big question marks on all this.
Again, fairly sure that getting vaccinated make sense for yourself, not that sure about the “externalities” of the vaccines. And if there are no externalities, what’s the logical behind the mandates?
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Sep 30 2021 at 10:38am
If there are no externalities then there is no reason for a vaccine mandate. You are the first person I have heard explicitly suggest that there are no externalities. I have not heard vaccine mandates for COVID opposed on ground that the externalities are non-existent or minimal.
Jose Pablo
Sep 30 2021 at 8:35pm
I am very far from being the “first” suggesting this. Back in August, the CDC, after analyzing Covid19 transmissions in “multiple large public events in a Barnstable County, Massachusetts” concluded that:
74% of these cases were fully vaccinated individuals. The vaccination rate in the State were 69%. Granted that the relevant figure is the vaccination rate among people attending the events, but I very much doubt it was higher than 74%
This finding seems to suggest that vaccinated people are as likely to be infected as non-vaccinated people (at least in Massachusetts during the summer).
“(…) there was no significant difference between the Ct values of samples collected from breakthrough cases and the other cases. This might mean that the viral load of vaccinated and unvaccinated persons infected with SARS-CoV-2 is also similar”
So, the CDC (itself) is suggesting that viral loads are similar for vaccinated and non-vaccinated persons. They went on to recommend wearing masks even to vaccinated people (which would be totally unnecessary if they cannot transmit the virus, right?).
“On July 27, CDC released recommendations that all persons, including those who are fully vaccinated, should wear masks in indoor public settings in areas where COVID-19 transmission is high or substantial.”
The CDC clearly says that more analysis is needed. Which sounds very plausible. But these preliminary findings do not seem to point to “significant” externalities.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7031e2.htm?s_cid=mm7031e2_w
And I do believe that the main “externality” behind the mandates is the jeopardizing of the political careers of the politicians in charge, if they fail to contain the number of hospitalization and deaths.
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Sep 30 2021 at 10:51pm
Your argument is that vaccination does not absolutely prevent any transmission at all. But its an an odd model that suggests that a vaccine can drastically reduce severity w/o reducing transmission. I don’t think we know of another respirator disease that behaves that way. But conceptually I agree; the comparison is between the external effects of vaccination, the difference in transmission between transmission by the vaccinated and the non-vaccinated compared to the cost to the person of getting vaccinated.
Perhaps you have been paying closer attention to the debate, but in news reports of people being hesitant, I have not heard the argument made that there is a minimal externality. [They speak as if there is none, that only their own preferences should be taken into account, but that is not the same as considering the externality to dismiss it.]
Jose Pablo
Oct 1 2021 at 9:12am
Just for the sake of clarity, my argument is not that “vaccination does not absolutely prevent any transmission at all”, it is more that we have no idea on to what extend vaccination prevents transmission. And that mandates predate our scientific knowledge on this issue.
Although mandates could even make sense in this situation (by the infamous “abundance of caution”), I do believe government forcing people to do something requires I higher bar. And what worries me is that mandates have been justified, mainly, as a way of protecting yourself. “Fathering” people this way is against my idea of the government role in an open society.
Although I do think that people not getting the vaccine are making a mistake, they should have the right to make this mistake if it mostly affects themselves.
MikeP
Sep 30 2021 at 9:06pm
You are the first person I have heard explicitly suggest that there are no externalities.
Interesting. As I read whom you replied to and whom they replied to, they are explicitly suggesting that vaccines might produce negative externalities.
I’ll suggest it too. That’s three!
For the actually vulnerable, the benefits of the vaccine in preventing illness and death clearly overwhelm any positive or negative externality of their getting vaccinated. So no mandate is needed.
However, there may be several sources of negative externality if vaccines are promoted or mandated for the general population.
1. Vaccinated carriers may spread coronavirus without knowing they have it.
2. Because it is designed against particular variants, the vaccine may suppress one subset of variants that it would be better to see evolve and hence promote a subset that it is worse to see evolve.
3. Having mainly vaccinated people catching coronavirus may outright evolve a variant that is very harmful for other, actually vulnerable, vaccinated people.
I consider the harms from these low probability events. Nonetheless, I think the reaction of states and societies against coronavirus has been utterly insane. This is not the Spanish flu. We should never have prevented young and healthy people from going about their normal lives so that the variants that evolve are those that allow young and healthy people to go about their normal lives. Those variants are the least lethal variants.
This vaccine externality question is only a small part of the much bigger catastrophe of a response that could yield epic externalities. Never in the several-hundred-thousand-year history of humanity have we ever reacted to a respiratory virus like this. It is really stupid, uncontrolled, and utterly unscientific.
robc
Sep 29 2021 at 10:18pm
I have WAGged the breakeven at about age 40. Error bars plus/minus 10 or more.
I was 51 in the spring when I got mine. I was mostly indifferent.
My suggestion is if over 40 or overweight, get the vaccine.
GDA
Sep 29 2021 at 5:03pm
Am advised that a previous comment of mine (now deleted) violated civility policy. Let me try once again, by restructuring my comment.
—————————
Vaccine mandates are a “wise move”?
Lots of good information here, but pushing mandates ruins it all.
Quite apart from the human rights aspect, if you’ve followed developments in Israel, the UK and other early fully vacced countries, you’ll realize that it’s the vacced who are now the “typhoid Mary’s”, not the unvacced. In increasing numbers, now in numbers far exceeding the unvacced,, they are catching and spreading C-19 variants, and unfortunately, the vaccine is not at all efficacious at protecting against the new “variants”.
Since the original virus is now gone, and the vaccines are not effective against the new variants, how on earth can we demonize the unvacced, especially since many have 27 times the resistance (Israeli study) from natural immunity if recovered from C-19.
So, just like Joe Biden, you’re promulgating a separation between vacced and unvacced, which can only lead to bad results, namely demonization of the unvacced. Mandates are emphatically NOT a “wise move” when they are an anathema to both human rights and to the existing medical facts as they stand.
As for Mr. Miller advocating for N95 masks, I wonder if he realizes that you don’t just hand out N95 masks to young adults and expect that they will solve any problems whatsoever. They were designed to be worn in certain strictly controlled situations, of which a college campus is definitely not one. This is not a solution.
anonymous
Sep 30 2021 at 12:58pm
What you say is simply false. It is not even remotely true that “the vaccine is not at all efficacious at protecting against the new ‘variants’.” In fact I believe you know this is false and that everyone else knows it is false so it is weird that you would say it.
The reason the majority of those with COVID in Israel are vaccinated is that most people there are vaccinated. There are no “Typhoid Mary”s for COVID as far as we know, although some would like it to be true for some reason.
suddyan
Oct 1 2021 at 9:05am
[anonymous says: The reason the majority of those with COVID in Israel are vaccinated is that most people there are vaccinated.]
In other words, it is true that vaccinated people spread the virus and also become sick and die.
[anonymous says: There are no “Typhoid Mary”s for COVID as far as we know, although some would like it to be true for some reason.]
In the sense that the virus is being spread by vaccinated people, who are now the largest proportion in Israel, they are in effect “Typhoid Mary’s” as many of them belived that they were not capable of spreading it after being vaccinated.
[anonymous says: What you say is simply false.]
I suggest you add that falsehood of yours to your others.
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Sep 29 2021 at 6:24pm
BK’s take on the silliness, possibly even the counter-productiveness of “sensitivity training” seem OK, but not his attitude toward masks. No they don’t do a lot of good, but no many people see then as being as costly “dehumanizing” as BK does. Until a few months ago masks were the only thing we could do (short of isolation) to reduce our chances of infecting another person with a disease that they in turn could pass on to a widening circle of harm. Now we have vaccines that reduce our chances of transmission and the severity of the consequences of onward transmission, so the cost benefit ration has definitely gone up, but is is greater than 1.O? And is it so terrible to incur a bit of cost to signal to others that we are concerned for their health, maybe even overly concerned?
But whatever it is it sure is not paranoia, not fear; it is, at least ostensibly, love.
anonymous
Sep 30 2021 at 1:00pm
I certainly don’t feel any love when I see people wearing masks outside. I feel under attack- clearly this person thinks I should be wearing a mask as well. Wearing the masks outside serves no conceivable purpose so it’s not very impressive as a token of love.
Ghatanathoah
Sep 30 2021 at 4:42pm
@anonymous
I am trying to understand the thought process that imagines that a person must be attacking you by going about their business outside wearing a mask. Not everything is about you. Assuming someone is doing something in order to criticize you seems profoundly narcissistic. It is probably the same mindset that creates nonsense like “microaggressions.”
If someone is wearing a mask outside they probably just forgot to take it off when they exited a doorway. Or maybe they heard about all the studies showing masks worked to reduce spread, but not the additional ones showing that the risk of spreading COVID outdoors is negligible. Either way, they’re doing it because they are being extra careful to observe the Non-Aggression Principle by not recklessly spreading disease. Maybe they’re overdoing it, but their motives are noble, even if their risk analysis skills leave something to be desired.
AMT
Sep 29 2021 at 7:42pm
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/long-covid-much-more-than-you-wanted
I would argue that for anyone who isn’t elderly, the risks besides death are FAR more important to consider. Yes, there’s almost no chance I’ll die, but there’s a significant chance I’ll have very serious long run side effects. I’m close to someone still has parosmia, with no signs of improvement whatsoever after almost a year. I think having most of the foods you used to enjoy suddenly and possibly permanently smelling like rotting garbage is a pretty important consideration. Therefore, any argument that ignores every negative factor except death is almost completely missing the point.
Joseph Zepeda
Sep 30 2021 at 6:26pm
But does that really change the argument much? The Covid restrictions colleges are imposing are at best marginally effective and often totally ineffective, and aren’t going to change the fact that this virus is going to be endemic. So the risk of experiencing long after-effects of Covid is not greatly reduced by ruining college kids’ lives. It’s just ruining college kids’ lives. (Not to mention that there are long-term risks of impairing people’s mental and emotional health for a few years.)
For those who decide to put a high value on avoiding Covid even after vaccination, it is quite possibly better if everyone else, who thinks differently, gets exposed more quickly. The population will have more effective immunity that way, and you’ll have to live like a recluse for a shorter amount of time. I mean, very possibly – nobody can predict those dynamics with any real confidence.
robc
Oct 1 2021 at 9:16am
Going to be endemic?
I think it was endemic about September 2020. Possibly earlier, but I am erring on the side of caution.
AMT
Oct 3 2021 at 7:40pm
Does not ignoring the FAR more important factors change the argument much? I gave evidence which shows why it obviously does. There are many different procedures that have been enacted, doubtless many of which are practically useless, along with some that are helpful. To assert these procedures are “ruining lives” is just stupid. “Yeah, I have to wear a mask indoors, just kill me now.” What a joke.
Jose Pablo
Sep 29 2021 at 8:43pm
That’s a great letter, Bryan. Don’t expect any answer.
pgbh
Sep 30 2021 at 12:37am
As usual, a rational comment on an important topic. Thanks, Bryan.
Richard G Johnston
Sep 30 2021 at 12:44pm
I paraphrase our country’s greatest scholar, Thomas Sowell, and use his insight when teaching the Principles of Economics course: “Safety, like everything else, is incrementally valuable.”
At some point, additional safety, education, and health care are not worth the costs.
Daniel Klein
Sep 30 2021 at 7:39pm
Tremendous, thank you Bryan!
Brian
Sep 30 2021 at 10:24pm
Bryan,
Unfortunately, your letter contains factual errors (not that the audience will care). You say “Virtually every college in America has a vaccine mandate” In fact, a large percentage, perhaps even a majority, do not have a mandate. In my own state of Pennsylvania, for example, I count about 40 colleges that have a mandate and 48 that do not. Your statement would be accurate if it were limited to top-50 research universities, perhaps, but it is not generally true.
You further say that “instead of using these amazing vaccines to return to normalcy.” Vaccines cannot return campuses to normalcy on their own because they are not effective enough against Delta to reach herd immunity. Vaccines are only about 65% effective against Delta, while herd immunity requires an effective immunity of 80% – 90%. This means that COVID-19 will continue to spread and grow through a naive, vaccinated population in the absence of other measures.
You say “You enforce your mask rules fanatically, often refusing lecturers the right to remove their masks so their audience can hear them. Yet you’ve long since abandoned any effort to enforce social distancing.” Well, you’re right that it’s silly for a speaker to wear a mask when they are far from the audience. But social distancing of the 6-feet variety never accomplished anything, so it’s better that it’s been abandoned.
You say “Unless your campus is extremely isolated, it would be amazing if you were cutting transmission more than 10%.” No, masks are much more effective than that. My campus has no vaccine mandate–only about 60% of the students are vaccinated–but we wear masks in “shared public indoor spaces.” In other words, the mask requirement is targeted to high-transmission situations. We also use quarantining for contact cases. We’ve had fewer than 10 cases since the semester began. And we’re located in a city. It’s doubtful we would have had only 11 cases in the absence of those measures.
I think you should try to be better informed if you want to lecture university presidents.
Student of Liberty
Oct 1 2021 at 7:52am
I am afraid the jury is still out on that one: https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/are-covid-vaccines-working-take-2
Scott Gibb
Oct 1 2021 at 8:42am
Thank you for writing this Bryan. I doubt it will change things much, but at least you’ve catalogued the problems. Of course the problem is far larger than just the university experience. Once students graduate they will likely live in a big city dominated by progressive ideas and thinkers. They will likely work for a corporation full of progressives politics. They won’t be able to speak out or disagree with their progressives co-workers or bosses. The better solution is to leave “the Church of England behind.” It probably can’t be reformed. Better to move to a new place and start over.
suddyan
Oct 1 2021 at 8:46am
[Virtually every college in America has a vaccine mandate – a wise move, in my view.]
Reading the above quote in Bryan Caplan’s letter is the most disappointing thing I have experienced this week.
The respect I used to have for Bryan Caplan has plummeted.
Todd Kreider
Oct 2 2021 at 11:29am
That may be in part because you view Caplan as a libertarian when he at usually writes like a conservative as with this open letter.
nobody.really
Oct 1 2021 at 11:32am
According to the American Council on Education’s report, “The American College President 2017,” college presidents served an average of 6.5 years in that position, compared to a 7-year average in 2011 and an 8.5-year average in 2006. Maybe that’s evidence of immense power; maybe not.
John P Palmer
Oct 3 2021 at 8:18am
Nearly all of the college and university presidents I’ve known have moved onward and upward to more prestigious presidencies. Once a person becomes prez one place, they still find it to their advantage to signal certain views as they move up the prestige ladder.
Monte
Oct 3 2021 at 5:39pm
I often find myself at odds with Prof. Caplan’s viewpoints, but not in this case. Campus Covid policy today is much less about student health and “the science” than it is about conformity. As Hayek observed, “The credit which the apparent conformity with recognized scientific standards can gain for seemingly simple but false theories may, as the present instance shows, have grave consequences.”
Prof. Caplan is to be commended.
JdL
Oct 29 2021 at 7:32am
“Virtually every college in America has a vaccine mandate – a wise move, in my view.”
Why? Have you not followed the news that vaccines don’t prevent infection or transmission of the virus? Or even that, by reducing symptoms, they may make it more likely that an infected person will go out and spread Covid?
I fail to see any rational reason for mandating vaccines to anyone, particularly college-age people who have a minuscule chance of dying from it.
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