Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich. HOW THE BOURGEOIS DEAL ENRICHED THE WORLD
by DEIRDRE NANSEN MCCLOSKEY AND ART CARDEN
Bettering Humanomics. A New, and Old, Approach to Economic Science
The discoveries I have made by responding critically, yet as amiably as I could manage, are two:
1. There seems to be emerging a new and I think more serious and sensible way of doing economic science—quantitatively serious, philosophically serious, historically serious, and ethically serious, too, as I argue in this volume. The economist Bart Wilson and a few others nowadays call it the “humanomics,” as in the title here.4
2. But, I argue in the other volume, neoinstitutionalism, from Douglass North and Daron Acemoglu and many other economists and political scientists, is not the way forward. Scientifically speaking, its factual claims, like those of the other recent neobehaviorist fashions, such as neuroeconomics and behavioral finance and happiness studies, are dubious—or, at best, questionably founded and argued. The neoinstitutionalists, like the others, do not listen, really listen, to the evidence of humans, or to their friends’ scientific questions and objections. Substantively, they treat creative adults like a flock of little children, terrible twos, to whom we need not listen. We need, they say, merely to “observe their behavior,” omitting for some reason linguistic behavior. And then we record the behavior in questionable metrics. The children-citizens will be pushed around with “incentives,” beloved of Samuelsonian economists and econowannabes. From a great height of fatherly expertise in discerning and designing Max U institutions, the neoinstitutionalist looks down with contempt on the merely human actions and interactions of free adults.
A key book by controversial Deirdre McCloskey, this is the outline:
Part I. The Proposal
Chapter 1. Humanomics and Liberty Promise Better Economic Science
Chapter 2. Adam Smith Practiced Humanomics, and So Should We
Chapter 3. Economic History Illustrates the Problems with Nonhumanomics
Chapter 4. An Economic Science Needs the Humanities
Chapter 5. It’s Merely a Matter of Common Sense and Intellectual Free Trade
Chapter 6. After All, Sweet Talk Rules a Free Economy
Chapter 7. Therefore We Should Walk on Both Feet, Like Ludwig Lachmann
Chapter 8. That Is, Economics Needs Theories of Human Minds beyond Behaviorism
Part II. The Killer App
Chapter 9. The Killer App of Humanomics Is the Evidence That the Great Enrichment Came from Ethics and Rhetoric
Chapter 10. The Dignity of Liberalism Did It
Chapter 11. Ideas, Not Incentives, Underlie It
Chapter 12. Even as to Time and Location
Chapter 13. The Word’s the Thing
Part III. The Doubts
Chapter 14. Doubts by Analytic Philosophers about the Killer App Are Not Persuasive
Chapter 15. Nor by Sociologists or Political Philosophers
Chapter 16. Nor Even by Economic Historians
ECONOMICS IN ONE VIRUS. AN INTRODUCTION TO ECONOMIC REASONING THROUGH COVID-19
The outline of the book:
1. WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE ECONOMICALLY “WORSE OFF” DURING A PANDEMIC?
An introduction to economic welfare
2. SHOULD I BE FREE TO RISK INFECTING YOUR GRANDMA WITH A DEADLY VIRUS?
An introduction to externalities
3. DID WE CLOSE DOWN THE ECONOMY?
An introduction to public and private action
4. HOW MUCH WOULD YOU SPEND TO SAVE MY LIFE?
An introduction to the value of a statistical life
5. WHEN IS A LOCKDOWN CURE WORSE THAN THE DISEASE?
An introduction to cost-benefit analysis
6. WHY WAS I BANNED FROM GOING FISHING?
An introduction to thinking on the margin
7. WHAT GOOD IS A PANDEMIC PLAN WITH SO MANY UNKNOWNS?
An introduction to uncertainty and the knowledge problem
8. WHY DID PROTESTS AND MARCHES NOT LEAD TO OBVIOUS SPIKES IN COVID-19 CASES?
An introduction to endogeneity
9. WHY COULDN’T I GET A COVID-19 TEST BACK IN FEBRUARY AND MARCH 2020?
An introduction to regulatory tradeoffs
10. WHY WAS THERE NO HAND SANITIZER IN MY PHARMACY FOR MONTHS?
An introduction to the price mechanism
11. DOES THE PANDEMIC SHOW THAT WE NEED MORE U.S.-BASED MANUFACTURING?
An introduction to trade and specialization
12. WHY IS THAT GUY IN THE MASK GETTING SO CLOSE?
An introduction to moral hazard
13. WHY DID AIRLINES GET A SPECIAL BAILOUT BUT NOT MY INDUSTRY?
An introduction to public choice economics
14. WHY DIDN’T MY WORKERS WANT TO BE REHIRED?
An introduction to incentives
15. WHY WEREN’T WE WELL PREPARED FOR THE PANDEMIC?
An introduction to political incentives
16. CAN WE REALLY JUST TURN AN ECONOMY OFF AND BACK ON AGAIN?
An introduction to the nature of an economy
CONCLUSION: WHAT IS ECONOMICS GOOD FOR?
And a message on cost-benefit:
Cost-benefit analysis is a useful economic technique for considering whether a project improves societal welfare and to compare the societal net benefits of different projects. To do cost-benefit analysis well, we must account for all the direct and indirect impacts of the proposed policy on societal welfare, account for externalities, and ensure that we compare like-with-like in both timeframe and measurement. When it comes to COVID-19, cost-benefit analysis can, in theory, be used to examine the efficacy of lockdowns. However, there are huge uncertainties that make it hard to weigh up the precise costs and benefits of those policies. Even if the societal benefits do appear to exceed the costs on reasonable assumptions, that doesn’t mean the exact contours of the lockdown are “optimal policy.” In an ideal world, we’d find the policy mix that minimizes the overall societal costs of the pandemic.
This ideal world doesn't exist.
That's all folks, and now you can ask why Catalonia is asking for independence and why our politicians are not answering the outcry for a better funding for health.
The COVID-19 Catastrophe. What’s Gone Wrong and How to Stop it Happening Again
From the final chapter, by Richard Horton, The Lancet editor:
COVID-19 is not an event. Instead, it has defined the beginning of a new epoch. It took a virus to connect us in life and in death. We understand now, I think, our extraordinary interdependence and unity as a species. Yet our world is organised and ordered by separation, by partition – countries and continents, languages and faiths, political systems and ideological allegiances.
We surely have to use this occasion to resist and to challenge the past mood for estrangement and prejudice. We have to use this time for solidarity, for mutual respect and mutual concern. My health depends on your health. Your health depends on my health. We cannot escape one another. The liberties that we prize so highly depend on the health of all of us. We cannot say that the politics and priorities of my country are of no concern to you. They are, and legitimately so. Just as the politics and priorities of your country are a legitimate interest of mine. Sovereignty is dead.
The post-COVID-19 age will usher in a new era of social and political relations, one in which our liberties will be achieved through new means of cooperation and communication. One can be proud of one’s national culture and identity. But COVID-19 also shows the importance we should attach to our global human identity. We are social beings. We are political beings. COVID-19 has taught us that we are mutual beings too.
NEW PANDEMICS, OLD POLITICS. Two Hundred Years of War on Disease and its Alternatives
Three selected paragraphs from the last chapter (the most interesting one):
Experts in infectious diseases had been worried about the radical uncertainties of a new pathogen. It turned out that the science had so improved in the years since SARS that the uncertainties were well within the scope of the anticipated. The radical uncertainty was in the politics – something that none of the experts had thought to anticipate. SARS-CoV-2 is a politically sophisticated pathogen, whose impact lies more in what it does to the body politic than what it does to the human body. The politics of response to Covid-19 was a disorienting combination. The political right invited popular debate on public health expertise, in pursuit of its new-found agenda of disrupting institutions. In the name of free-thinking, agitators veered into pseudo-science and conspiracy theories. Liberals and the left valorized scientists and rushed to embrace a standardized set of suppression measures. Lockdowns were over-engineered and had momentous social and economic consequences; some critics detected authoritarian longings.
Could Covid-19 become what Ulrich Beck called an ‘emancipatory catastrophe’?35 If so, what would be a new, emancipatory narrative for what we do about pandemic diseases, actual and threatened? I suggest that we begin with a return to a word introduced in chapter 1, and left waiting in the wings: ‘pandemy’. As our leading scientists insist, pandemic disease is too important to be left to the biomedical establishment. It’s a crisis in our way of life. In using the word ‘pandemy’, we can reclaim the concept of a holistic disruption, reaching backwards into the ecological, social, and health pathologies that have created virulent pathogens with pandemic potential, broadening to include other illnesses prevalent at the same time, and reaching forward into wider societal and political repercussions. In short, we can integrate the ‘One Health’ approach to where these diseases come from with the ‘people’s science’ practice of responding to them.
Emancipatory public health begins with a conversation on this whole-of-society, whole-planet, ‘One Health’, democratic, and participatory agenda. The starting point is not the content of the policies but the process for getting to them. Those who are most vulnerable and most excluded will have some of the most important things to say. This means dismantling the ‘war on disease’ mindset and its politics, assembled over the last two centuries. If we do this, Covid-19 may yet be the emancipatory catastrophe we need.
Sistema d'Informació sobre Drogodependències de Catalunya
You'll find these information in p.152 of the report:
In Catalonia, Fentanyl consumption has risen 24% in 5 years, in daily dose per inhabitant, while Tapentadol has jumped 300%!!!
Somebody should understand why it is this so and take some action.
Artificial intelligence, bias, and patients’ perspectives
By Topol et al. in Lancet
By training algorithms to predict labels related to clinical outcomes, rather than doctors’ judgments, we can start to push forward a new kind of clinical science. For example, by grounding patient reports of pain in objective radiographic features, we might develop a more comprehensive understanding of what causes pain. By not being doctor-centric and incorporating the patient’s perspective, machine learning has added potential for unravelling important mysteries of medicine.
