Economics articles featuring analysis of the global censorship industrial complex, impacts on public health, free trade, liberty, and policy.
All Brownstone Institute economics articles are translated into multiple languages.
It’s time we stop congratulating ourselves for taking away respectable professional opportunities from kids. Their lives have been utterly wrecked during this pandemic response. A slight consolation would be to celebrate when the kids want to work, earning money, feeling valuable, and finding some meaning beyond mere compliance with schoolmasters and bureaucrats.
Their Schools Shut, So Why Not Let Teens Work? Read More »
There is much to dislike in Spiegelhalter and Masters’ book on the plague year, but considering the partisan and authoritarian nonsense, garbage advice, and terrible statistical blunders we’ve grown used to, the book comes across as fairly balanced. They have some clear blind spots (vaccines, effectiveness of lockdowns, Vitamin D) but there are much worse things to read than Covid by Numbers.
Blinded by a Blizzard of Numbers: A Review of Spiegelhalter and Masters Read More »
Whenever applied, the precautionary principle needs to be challenged and stand scrutiny, to help us make decisions when there is uncertainty, and the situation is in flux as is typical in a pandemic. These alternatives emphasize seeking new facts, being rigorously honest about the evidence, being open to being wrong, adjusting our actions as we come to understand more, and communicating with trust, not fear.
Straight Talk about the Precautionary Principle Read More »
It’s essential we debrief on the harm we caused – the epidemiological harm we simply displaced and converted to economic harm that, at the end of the chain, has caused equally real people to suffer and die at higher rates than they would’ve had we acted differently. It’s irresponsible and unscientific to suppress discussions on the inconvenient truth that our response to the pandemic likely indirectly killed people.
Why Were They So Obtuse about the Terrible Harms They Would Inflict? Read More »
But given the corruption in American politics, in its bureaucracy, and most importantly in its media and academic establishments, is it inconceivable to suggest that maybe Big Pharma wanted its share of the as-a-Service-revolution?
The Corruptions of Pharma as a Service Read More »
By using general lockdowns, and by treating everyone – including school children – as being equally at risk of suffering from Covid, governments caused resources, attention, and mitigation efforts to be spread too thinly. Far too many resources, attention, and mitigation efforts were spent where they had much smaller impact than they would have had were they instead focused on protecting the most vulnerable.
The Economics of Focused Protection Read More »
There’s a sinister, symptom of denying that the labor shortage and vaccine mandates are unrelated. It absolves political leaders of accountability. Given that unemployment is a major bipartisan issue, average citizens may oppose mandates if they thought they were contributing to driving people out of the workforce.
How Much Have Vaccine Mandates Contributed to the Great Resignation? Read More »
For all the talk of the power of Big Pharma, the Covid-19 vaccine that is currently becoming the standard throughout the Western world has a far more powerful state sponsor and the state sponsor is Germany. This raises particularly obvious and thorny issues for the European Union, where the vaccine contracts for all 27 member states were negotiated by a European Commission that is headed by former German Minister of Defense Ursula von der Leyen.
The Pfizer/BioNTech Vaccine Monopoly: The Backstory Read More »
From these results it seems that mass vaccination is some sort of get-out-of-jail card, as a way to get out of ruinously expensive lockdowns and allow some rebound in economic activity. Yet it was politicians and health bureaucrats who put us in jail in the first place. At any time they could undo what they imposed, with or without mass vaccination.
The Economic and Health Effects of Mass Covid-19 Vaccination Read More »
Elected officials and ordinary citizens alike in both countries have been puzzling over the strange fact that Canadians were legally permitted to fly into the US via commercial aircraft — after having gone to a crowded airport and inhaling whatever particles happened to be in circulation — but barred from driving over the border alone in their private cars.
Why Was the US-Canada Land Border Closed for So Long? Read More »
21 months. Citizens are desperately struggling to get out from under the yoke of this despotism, and using every opportunity available to do so. Politicians who back these policies are being swept out of office. And yet they carry on. It appears that the sadistic state is quickly becoming a masochistic one.
The Mandate on Business Intensifies the Crisis Read More »
Our systems are mired in good old-fashioned crony capitalism, fascism, corporatism, mercantilism, protectionism…. fancy words for when private companies work with governments to subvert the forces of competition. The suppression of research into off-patent drugs is a notable symptom of this problem.
Regulatory Capture in the Age of Covid Read More »
