One source of public misunderstanding could be that doctors are often unaware of the extensive research concluding that vaping, while not risk-free, is substantially less risky than smoking (such that were all smokers to switch to vaping, tens of thousands–if not millions–of premature deaths could be averted). While reports by the National Academy of Sciences and Public Health UK (among others) have concluded that vaping exposes users to significantly lower contaminant levels and is likely to be substantially less harmful than smoking, one recent study found that 60 percent of doctors believe all forms of tobacco are equally harmful.
While some medical professionals are simply unaware of what can be said about the relative risks of smoking versus vaping, others seem intent on spreading disinformation. For instance, here's a TikTok by a cardiovascular surgeon claiming that vaping "is significantly worse than cigarette smoking." This is an outrageous and unfounded claim. Worse, insofar as this message is internalized by current smokers, it could discourage them from switching to less harmful sources of nicotine.
[Note: Even if this claim is based upon experience with EVALI victims, suggesting that EVALI is a consequence of vaping generally, when EVALI has been linked to black-market THC vaping fluids containing vitamin E acetate, is still quite irresponsible. There is no documented case of EVALI that has been linked to conventional vaping products.]
It is one thing to discourage vaping, as it is not risk-free (and there is limited evidence about its long term effects). It is quite another to suggest that vaping is equal or worse than smoking. The latter is misinformation–and the sort of misinformation that could cost lives.
The post When Doctors Are the Source of Public Health Misinformation appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Nobody likes paying fees. A fee, however, is a transparent way to reflect the price of something. And in a market economy, prices convey vital information that consumers and producers use to make good decisions. A rise in the price of apples tells producers that consumers want more apples. This prompts more apple production (and eventually, lower prices). And so when political interference keeps prices from fluctuating freely, the result is inefficiency and waste.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), calling the prices of bank overdraft protection "junk fees," now proposes to interfere with these prices.
We've been down this road before. Last year, the CFPB proposed capping credit card late fees at $8 as part of President Joe Biden's populist appeal to consumers who dislike this cost, which is obviously everyone. The problem, as I and many others explained at the time, is that late fees encourage timely payment, and their practical elimination leaves lenders unable to offset the risk of working with people who have lower credit.
The result will be fewer lines of credit available to those who need credit the most. But that's a difficult outcome for most to see compared to the tangible benefit of lowering fees. Even consumers denied credit won't know what or who to blame, so it's no surprise that CFPB is expected to finalize the late fee rule any day now.
The next CFPB price control scheme would cap overdraft fees at levels as low as $3 per overdraft transaction. Commenting on this rule, Biden sounded perfectly populist: "For too long, some banks have charged exorbitant overdraft fees—sometimes $30 or more—that often hit the most vulnerable Americans the hardest, all while banks pad their bottom lines." He added, "Banks call it a service—I call it exploitation."
I get it. I remember the annoyance I felt when I was charged such fees. However, I reminded myself that it was the price to pay for not having one of my checks bounce or a debit card payment declined. It's fair to wonder whether most of the people proposing these rules have ever had a checking account balance low enough to need the overdraft cushion.
In fact, overdraft protection is an optional, opt-in service that allows consumers to spend money they don't have at the bank's expense. Purchases are approved that would otherwise be declined for lack of funds. For low-income consumers, this service is sometimes vital. And indeed, consumers report by wide margins that they are glad it exists even though it naturally comes at a cost.
Thankfully for all of us, CFPB bureaucrats agree that banks should charge a fee. Unfortunately, they think they know best what these fees should be. They think they know the exact costs of honoring charges for customers with negative balances better than the banks do. And remember, because banking is competitive, any bank that charges excessive overdraft fees will lose customers to banks that don't. That $30 fee per overdraft transaction is the price that emerged among the competitive forces that keep prices lower than they could be.
Because of bureaucratic interference, many who see overdraft protection as preferable to other short-term credit options, such as payday lending or high credit card balances, will have fewer choices as some banks decide that the service isn't worth offering at the price deemed appropriate by government officials.
Banks might go even further. Given the slim profit margins they earn on small bank accounts, it's possible that the loss of overdraft protection revenue results in some simply abandoning the very customers—the least well off—whom interventionists claim to be protecting.
This frequent political problem—failing to consider how policy interventions alter incentives in ways that produce bad outcomes—extends well beyond the realm of finance. The United States education system, for instance, is collapsing in part because school boards across the country have decided that graduation rates were the most important metric to track success and are now frequently used to determine funding. So school administrators responded by boosting graduation rates in the simplest and most obvious manner: by making it all but impossible for students to fail. Students, in turn, have largely stopped trying. Graduation rates are up, but learning is down.
Politicians and bureaucrats appear not to be learning much, either. When planners make ham-fisted attempts to alter complex systems or intervene in markets, results rarely match their expectations.
COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM.
The post Bureaucrats Are Moving To Cap Bank Overdraft Fees, Which Will Hurt the People It's Meant To Help appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Sen. John Kennedy (R–La.) is upset because Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) wants to limit federal flood insurance.
But Paul is right. In my new video, Paul says, "[It] shouldn't be for rich people."
That should be obvious. Actually, federal flood insurance shouldn't be for anyone. Government has no business offering it. That's a job for the insurance business.
Of course, when actual insurance businesses, with their own money on the line, checked out what some people wanted them to insure, they said, "Heck no! If you build in a dangerous place, risk your own money!"
Politically connected homeowners who own property on the edges of rivers and oceans didn't like that. They whined to congressmen, crying, "We can't get insurance! Do something!"
Craven politicians obliged. Bureaucrats at the Federal Emergency Management Agency even claim they have to issue government insurance because, "There weren't many affordable options for private flood insurance, especially for people living in high-risk places."
But that's the point! A valuable function of private insurance is to warn people away from high-risk places.
But instead of heeding that warning, politicians said, "Don't worry. Since private companies won't insure you, we will."
Of course, the politicians claimed they'd price the insurance properly so they wouldn't lose taxpayer money.
"We must [do] everything we can to protect taxpayer dollars." said then-Sen. Wayne Allard (R-Colo.).
But Paul points out, "Like most things in government, they continue to lose money."
So far, the government lost $36 billion of your money.
Yet they still insure people who can't get private insurance.
Kennedy thinks that's fine. "The first role of government is to protect people and property," he shouts from the Senate floor. "I thought this is what libertarians believe."
No, Senator, we believe government should protect our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and then leave us mostly alone.
By insuring risky property, Paul points out, "You're actually doing the opposite of what you would think government would want to do; you're promoting bad behavior."
Exactly.
Years ago, federal flood insurance encouraged my bad behavior.
I wanted to build a house on a beach. When I asked my father to help with the mortgage, he said, "No! Are you crazy? It's on the edge of an ocean!"
Dad was right. It was a dumb place to build. But I built anyway, because federal flood insurance, idiotically, guaranteed that I wouldn't lose money.
I enjoyed my house for ten years, but then, as predicted, it washed away.
It was an upsetting loss, but thanks to Uncle Sam, I didn't lose a penny.
I'm grateful. But it's wrong that you were forced to pay for my beach house.
Paul is right to say that people with second homes "should not get insurance through the government."
Actually, no one should get flood insurance through the government, but Paul fears that his irresponsible colleagues won't approve killing the handout altogether. Instead, he just proposes limiting the handout to primary residences.
It would be a start.
But even this slight reform is too much for Kennedy, who says, "If you earn enough to buy a second home, we shouldn't discourage that."
No, we shouldn't.
But we shouldn't subsidize it with taxpayer money!
Doesn't he get the difference?
Federal flood insurance is like buying drunk drivers new cars.
Adding to the idiocy, there is no limit on how many times the government will give away your money.
"One home in Virginia," says Paul, "they've rebuilt the house 41 times!"
I took your money once. I apologize for taking it, but when my government offers me a handout, I feel stupid not taking it.
Let's get rid of federal flood insurance and all subsidies that encourage people to do foolish things.
COPYRIGHT 2024 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.
The post The Feds Shouldn't Subsidize Fancy, Risky Beach Houses appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Some policy experts who, over the last few decades, saw little need for serious fiscal austerity because the government could borrow at low interest rates are now changing their tune. Their argument is that with rates now rising and the government's interest payments set to become extremely expensive, it's time to adjust. While I suppose that's progress, they fail to see that the past calls for austerity were attempts to avoid precisely what's happening today.
Indeed, the need for fiscal responsibility was never based on an inability to afford extra debt back then. It was because the moment was destined to arrive when adjustments became necessary, and rising indebtedness ensured that these changes would become more painful.
Let me explain. Consider two well-respected economists and former high-ranking government officials, Lawrence Summers and Jason Furman, who previously suggested that in the aftermath of the Great Recession, concerns expressed by "deficit fundamentalists" (like me) were excessive, and that some of the efforts we championed to reduce the debt were unnecessary.
Despite the growing national debt, interest rates remained historically low, meaning the cost of servicing it was not particularly burdensome. This, they argued, made calls to control the debt out of touch. Better yet, those low rates were said to present an opportunity to "invest" in productive projects like infrastructure and education. This spending, in turn, would fuel productivity and raise economic growth, helping offset the future cost of the debt.
Now, unlike some who subscribe to similar ideas, Summers and Furman aren't extremists. They acknowledged that debt cannot accumulate indefinitely. But they mocked calls for austerity measures back in the 2010s as premature, while encouraging government investments paid for with debt accumulation.
Undoubtedly, interest rates were low. As Summers and Furman highlighted in a 2019 paper, "in 2000, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) forecast that by 2010, the U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio would be six percent. The same ten-year forecast in 2018 put the figure for 2028 at 105 percent. Real interest rates on ten-year government bonds, meanwhile, fell from 4.3 percent in 2000 to an average of 0.8 percent last year."
This thinking has problems. First, it assumes government officials have the right incentives and knowledge—in addition to a comparative advantage over the profit-driven private sector—to "invest" productively. Not all government spending qualifies as productive investment, especially when most comes in the form of transferring wealth from one group to another and the rest is driven largely by interest group politics rather than by sound cost benefit analysis.
Second, 10-year projections are really unreliable. Later, in 2008, CBO projected that in 2018, public debt would be 22.6 percent of GDP. It turned out to be 78 percent. Then, in 2018, CBO projected that in 2028, debt would be 96 percent of GDP. It's now projected to be 108 percent. Meanwhile, CBO projections for interest rates since the Great Recession have been higher than what they wound up being. Starting last year, that flipped, and actual rates are much higher than the projection. That gap between projected rates and actual rates is likely to continue. It could expand.
Overestimating interest rates means the federal government pays less than projected. Yay. An underestimation, however, means higher interest payments, more borrowing, and more debt than expected. Add to this misfortune an underestimation of debt levels and you quickly see a lot of red ink.
That's why betting on low interest rates to argue that we should not worry about a growing debt burden is risky. Interest rates are influenced by a variety of factors and can rise fast. In fact, back in 2021, many continued to wrongfully argue that rates would not go up. Is it crazy, then, to believe we would be in a better position to face the rate hikes today if the government had better controlled its debt over the last 10 or 20 years?
Finally, anyone looking at CBO budget forecasts could always see that the disconnect between government spending and revenue was growing. Even assuming no significant rises in interest rates, as well as no emergencies requiring more borrowing and no new congressional or presidential spending programs—all things that have come to pass—official debt projections never looked good. Why add more debt to that?
In the end, the risks associated with high levels of debt were never about what we could afford while rates were low. It was always about understanding that when change inevitably comes, we can better address the challenge if we are not in over our heads.
COPYRIGHT 2023 CREATORS.COM.
The post Spending Recklessly in Good Times Is a Recipe for Disaster in Bad Times appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>America needs more housing. Pressure for reform is only growing as available homes get less and less affordable. Unfortunately, rather than addressing the root cause of high housing prices—an epidemic of local overregulation that prevents enough homes from being built—some legislators continue to flirt with social experiments that can harm both landlords and renters.
For example, some states and localities have implemented well-meaning "fair chance" laws banning criminal history on background checks for prospective tenants. Progressive Reps. Ayanna Pressley (D–Mass.) and Rashida Tlaib (D–Mich.) recently introduced the idea as federal legislation. In a statement, Pressley said, "It's time we remove the systemic obstacles that have exacerbated the prison-to-homelessness pipeline."
We do indeed have an overcriminalization and overincarceration problem in this country, so on its face, this seems like a good idea. According to the Department of Justice, more than 650,0000 ex-offenders are released from prison every year, not counting the nearly 6.9 million people on probation, on parole, or still in jail or prison at any one time. Far too many face undeserved challenges when trying to re-acclimate into society and not reoffend.
That's partly because relatively few landlords want to rent to people with criminal records. Landlords minimize the risk of delinquent or destructive tenants by selecting the best applicants on a given margin. From this perspective, avoiding people with criminal records seems like an easy choice, even though it means some potentially great tenants are rejected. The best reforms would correct the real problems of overcriminalization and overincarceration. That's politically difficult and may take a long time. Equally important would be removing all artificial barriers to building more homes.
An abundance of homes, especially rental properties, would reduce prices and encourage landlords to compete along different margins, including accepting the previously incarcerated. More housing supply would also make it easier for ex-cons with stable jobs to buy homes at much lower prices and be free from landlords altogether.
On the other hand, top-down reforms like the one proposed by Pressley and Tlaib would shift more of the risk of housing ex-cons onto landlords. The result is both unjust and counterproductive.
Remember the Obama-era initiative to "ban the box"? Reformers sought to boost the job prospects of persons with criminal records by prohibiting employers from asking about applicants' criminal histories. It was another well-meaning idea, but one that overlooked unintended consequences. Preventing employers from discriminating based on criminal history didn't remove the desire of some employers to avoid hiring criminals; it just forced them to use poor information. More employers began discriminating against black and Hispanic applicants. Evidence suggests a similar outcome if criminal background checks of tenants are restricted. A study published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis found that when the use of background checks and other information was restricted in that city, racial discrimination in housing increased relative to nearby St. Paul, where no such restrictions were in place.
It's not that individuals with past convictions never see their applications accepted. It's that banning landlords from acquiring background information that they find useful won't suddenly change their thought processes about what makes for desirable tenants. These landlords will find other, noisier information to use in its place—information that may unfortunately sometimes draw from racial stereotypes.
Oh, and because noisier information means more mistakes, it will also further reduce the housing supply by discouraging people from becoming landlords.
Nevertheless, the effort is gaining steam. The Federal Trade Commission and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau recently sought public comment on the use of criminal and eviction records in screening clients. Although they have proposed no specific action, it's easy to guess which direction the Biden administration is leaning.
Increased racial discrimination is not the only possible unintended consequence. As one comment from the public observed, "Rental housing providers are in the business of housing and not the eviction business." Eviction is a last resort, but making it harder for landlords to match with the right tenant is likely to mean more of it.
There are many different types of landlords, and they should be able to judge for themselves what information is necessary to operate at their desired risk tolerances. Efficiency keeps customer costs down, and it's a rare market where efficiency improves with less information.
The formerly incarcerated certainly do need more access to housing. But the best available means is simply to increase the supply of housing while reducing the number of people imprisoned for minor offenses.
COPYRIGHT 2023 CREATORS.COM.
The post Banning Criminal Background Checks Will Lead To More Housing Discrimination, Not Less appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The search continues for exploration company OceanGate's Titan submarine and its five crewmembers, who went missing Sunday afternoon during a dive down to the Titanic wreckage in the North Atlantic.
Back on land, the commentariat is taking no shortage of joy in their misfortune, pointing to a long list of statements from OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush (who is on the Titan craft) about prioritizing innovation over the safety concerns expressed by former employees and other marine industry professionals.
Here's a reason I'm a pro-mockery of the OceanGate fiasco: that whole "regulations stifle innovation" thing that crops up in their PR to present the whole "untested and unlicensed" thing as a feature rather than a bug: people who want us eating heavy metals for breakfast say that
— Alexandra Erin | alexandraerin@peoplemaking.games (@AlexandraErin) June 21, 2023
The mockery about Titan's comeuppance is, for the moment, premature given that rescue operations are still underway. It's a little tasteless given that even risk-tolerant libertarian businessmen and their paying customers are still in fact human beings. And he's right that regulation stifles innovation.
But tweets like the one above also miss Rush's acknowledgment that his company was taking a risk. His argument was not that by taking the risk, everything would work out fine. It was that the risk he wouldn't make it back to land was worth it if it meant he got to see the wreckage of the Titanic up close.
Some people may not find that tradeoff personally compelling. But it's not that different from the goals that animated a long line of astronauts, test pilots, explorers, and more who all took insane risks (and often died) just to be the first person to do something or see something.
By modern standards, Ferdinand Magellan took an incredibly foolhardy risk to try and sail around the globe in a leaky carrack. And it didn't pay off! He was killed during his voyage. Robert Falcon Scott was taking large unnecessary risks by trying to be the first person to reach the South Pole. He made it there (albeit in second place) but froze to death on his way back to civilization.
There's no pressing societal need served by someone planting a flag at the bottom of the world or being the first to circle the globe. These men still felt it was worth the risk and history generally seems to agree with them. Even people who don't personally have the risk tolerance of a 16th-century explorer can still admire the drive and the effort.
To be sure, there's nothing admirable about imposing massive risks on uninformed or unsuspecting parties. The OceanGate crew seems likely to have been well aware of the Titan vessel's safety risks, as was the general public—the company itself discussed them at length on its website.
Past passengers had to sign consent forms describing the vessel as "experimental" and uncertified, and that could potentially lead to their deaths. If the same is true of this most recent Titan mission, the people traveling with Rush knew they were taking major risks as well.
People who do take massive risks shouldn't expect a massively publicly funded effort to bail them out of trouble. At a press conference today, a Coast Guard spokesperson said that a four-nation mission of air, surface, and subsurface vessels had yet to locate Titan.
If the assumption at OceanGate was that they could take a chance on their experimental vessel because the Coast Guard (and taxpayers) would always be there to save them, then the company was inappropriately trying to socialize their losses.
It shows that they too might have lost some of the golden age explorers' tolerance for risk. Magellan didn't have a Coast Guard to count on when he set off on his journey.
One could make the case that the U.S. Coast Guard, Canadian military, and British and French rescue personnel should leave it to the private sector to find and rescue Titan. They got themselves into this situation, and they should get themselves out of it.
OceanGate legal and operational advisor David Concannon complained in a NewsNation interview (and again in a follow-up Facebook post) that the government was slow to approve the deployment of private submersibles needed to reach and rescue Titan.
Somebody simply has to write the ultimate catch-all essay on disruptive, libertarian, private-sector-touting entrepreneurs simply begging and demanding for state intervention at the end of their journeys. (This is the Titan sub company's adviser.) pic.twitter.com/dsB9YLln8w
— Eve Fairbanks (@evefairbanks) June 21, 2023
That dumb billionaire oceangate submarine guy flaunted doing things in international waters where he'd be free of pesky regulation.
Now our regulated tax dollars are being used to search for him and his gameboy controlled submarine.
They always come crying for a bailout.
— President Kamala's Hand (Again) (@myronjclifton) June 21, 2023
It's unclear exactly what approvals the company is waiting on, or how crucial those submersibles would be in the rescue mission.
Since taxpayers have already shelled out for massive publicly funded search and rescue operations, perhaps the most humane thing to do is deploy them trying to find the lost craft (and then send OceanGate a big bill for all their efforts).
User fees help private parties internalize the risks they take. Doing so would let people better price risky exploratory trips to the bottom of the ocean. But putting some value on that trip to the bottom of the ocean wasn't the sin it's being made out to be.
The post Don't Shame the OceanGate Crew for Taking Huge Risks appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Like a good neighbor, State Farm Insurance is warning Californians to stop living and building in high wildfire-risk zones. That is the upshot of a press release in which the insurer states that the company, as a "provider of homeowners insurance in California, will cease accepting new applications including all business and personal lines property and casualty insurance, effective May 27, 2023." State Farm is taking this step largely because the California Department of Insurance's system of price controls does not allow it and other insurance companies to charge premiums commensurate with the potential losses they face.
Consequently, State Farm is no longer willing to sell new homeowner insurance policies because the company calculates that it cannot cover potential losses in the face of increasing wildfire risks, fast-rising rebuilding costs, and steep increases in reinsurance rates. Higher rebuilding costs boost the values of the houses and businesses that companies currently insure.
Reinsurance is also a big factor in State Farm's decision. As part of its system of insurance price controls, the California Department of Insurance does not allow insurance companies to include reinsurance costs in their premiums. Reinsurance is basically "insurance of insurance companies" in which multiple insurance companies share risk by purchasing insurance policies from other insurers to limit their own total loss in case of disaster. And disaster did hit in the Golden State. The insurance companies paid out $13.2 billion and $11.4 billion respectively in 2017 and 2018 for fire damage claims resulting from those two catastrophic wildfire seasons. More recently, reinsurers have increased their rates to take into account large losses stemming from events like Hurricane Ian in Florida and Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
So, State Farm is declining to write new insurance policies in California "now to improve the company's financial strength."
One additional complication is that private insurance companies are forced to contribute to the state's backstop Fair Access to Insurance Requirements (FAIR) plan. The FAIR plan is basically a high-risk insurance pool that offers last-resort, bare-bones coverage, chiefly for fire losses, to property owners who cannot obtain a policy in the regular market. It was established in 1968, in the wake of urban riots and brush fires, when the California Legislature required insurance companies offering property policies in the state to create and contribute to the plan. It is not taxpayer-financed, and plan premiums are statutorily required to be actuarially sound.
As private insurers increasingly refuse to renew policies, more California homeowners are turning to FAIR plan policies. FAIR plan premiums have been too low to cover the losses its customers have incurred with the result that the plan is $332 million in debt. In other words, the plan is not actuarially sound. This means that the California Department of Insurance is likely to impose a special assessment on private insurers to make up for the FAIR plan's losses. Private insurers cannot pass along the costs of the assessment to their policyholders. As California's largest property insurer, State Farm would be on the hook for the largest share of any such special assessment. The way to lower or eliminate the amount that a private insurer could be assessed is to limit the number of policies it sells or simply leave the market altogether.
Insurance premiums, like all prices, are signals to consumers. In this case, higher premiums indicate the existence of increased risks. Because of the California Department of Insurance's price controls, homeowners have been deprived of market signals that could have steered them to building in less dangerous locales or encouraged them to build more fire-resistant homes. As California homeowners are about to find out, government-imposed market distortions cannot be maintained forever.
The post California Regulations Prevent Insurers From Accurately Pricing Wildfire Risk, so Now They're Fleeing the State appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Any parent will tell you that forcing children to eat their spinach is no way to win a household popularity contest. Children don't care about the long-term benefits of eating healthy food when the alternative is the short-term thrill of sugary treats. Much to their children's chagrin, parents impose rules, like limiting the quantity of treats and making their receipt contingent upon finishing a healthy meal. Good behavior must be encouraged with appropriate incentives.
Fortunately for parents, their authority does not derive from the consent of the governed. But imagine for a moment if it did. Children could appeal unpopular parental decisions to some higher authority that needs their strong support. Not only would it be hard to maintain the "no treats before dinner" rule, but there could also be a complete banishment of spinach—maybe even all veggies. Kids would cheer the results, but their future adult selves will come to regret it.
This is functionally what's happening at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The CFPB has proposed limiting banking and credit card late fees to $8 per overdraft as part of a larger effort to eliminate the misleadingly labeled "junk fees." In this case the "junk fee" is the $25 to $35 fee credit card issuers impose for overdue payments. Credit card companies collect an estimated $14 billion in late fees annually.
According to CFPB director Rohit Chopra, "junk fees make it harder for us to choose the best product or service because the true cost is hidden," hence the $8 cap, which consumers who have been hit with the fees will cheer. However, what people want and what is good for them is not necessarily the same.
Consumers like paying late fees even less than children like eating spinach. In a utopian world, no one would ever pay late fees. Everyone would only spend the money they have—no one would be late on their payments in the first place. In the real world, however, people often want, and sometimes need, to make purchases on credit. And unfortunately, those same people are sometimes late in making their minimum credit card payments. Ironically, the reason people can easily borrow money on credit cards and pay late is because of late fees. No less importantly, the reason why people try to be timely in repaying is also because of burdensome late fees.
The ability to levy appropriately stiff late fees is an important part of the overall consumer credit system. Placing arbitrary limits on such fees might prove popular with consumers today but will also leave these same consumers worse off tomorrow. Companies use heavy fees to discourage late payments. While the actual fee provides some amount of income, its chief function is to lower and offset the risks of lending. Companies would prefer that payments arrive on time rather than having to collect late fees.
Proper risk management doesn't just benefit financial institutions. Individuals considered risky are still able to access credit because of contractual terms like late fees. Lighten the fees and delayed payments will increase, making lending money riskier for institutions. When that happens, the only tools left to manage risk will be higher interest rates—which means higher costs even for responsible borrowers—or outright denials of low-income credit card applicants.
Rob Nichols, president of the American Bankers Association, similarly predicts that "credit card issuers will be forced to adjust to the new risks by reducing credit lines, tightening standards for new accounts and raising APRs for all consumers, including the millions who pay on time."
Late fees are already capped at a maximum $30 for a first late payment and $41 for any subsequent violations. Although the current rules impose what are essentially price controls, a large enough difference in degree becomes a difference in kind. The much stricter $8 cap can be expected to have much more pronounced negative consequences, especially for low-income consumers. Economic history is replete with examples of price controls leading to shortages. In this case, putting a ceiling on the price card issuers can charge for late payments will inflict most of its damage on low-income consumers who can least afford to lose credit.
The Biden administration, wanting a cheap political win, is counting on consumers being overjoyed with the sugary treat of lower late fees. But we see again that wanting something does not mean that it's good for you. Preventing or severely limiting the ability of financial institutions to assess appropriate late fees will hurt consumers who can least afford it.
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The post The Government Wants To Cap Credit Card Late Fees. It Will Hurt the Poor. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity," asserts an open letter signed by Twitter's Elon Musk, universal basic income advocate Andrew Yang, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, DeepMind researcher Victoria Krakovna, Machine Intelligence Research Institute co-founder Brian Atkins, and hundreds of other tech luminaries. The letter calls "on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4." If "all key actors" will not voluntarily go along with a "public and verifiable" pause, the letter's signatories argue that "governments should step in and institute a moratorium."
The signatories further demand that "powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable." This amounts to a requirement for nearly perfect foresight before allowing the development of artificial intelligence (A.I.) systems to go forward.
Human beings are really, really terrible at foresight—especially apocalyptic foresight. Hundreds of millions of people did not die from famine in the 1970s; 75 percent of all living animal species did not go extinct before the year 2000; and "war, starvation, economic recession, possibly even the extinction of homo sapiens" did not happen since global petroleum production failed to peak in 2006.
Nonapocalyptic technological predictions do not fare much better. Moon colonies were not established during the 1970s. Nuclear power, unfortunately, does not generate most of the world's electricity. The advent of microelectronics did not result in rising unemployment. Some 10 million driverless cars are not now on our roads. As OpenAI (the company that developed GPT-4) CEO Sam Altman argues, "The optimal decisions [about how to proceed] will depend on the path the technology takes, and like any new field, most expert predictions have been wrong so far."
Still, some of the signatories are serious people and the outputs of generative A.I. and large language models like ChatGPT and GPT-4 can be amazing—e.g., doing better on the bar exam than 90 percent of current human test takers. They can also be confounding.
Some segments of the transhumanist community have been greatly worried for a while about an artificial super-intelligence getting out of our control. However, as capable (and quirky) as it is, GPT-4 is not that. And yet, a team of researchers at Microsoft (which invested $10 billion in OpenAI) tested GPT-4 and in a pre-print reported, "The central claim of our work is that GPT-4 attains a form of general intelligence, indeed showing sparks of artificial general intelligence."
As it happens, OpenAI is also concerned about the dangers of A.I. development—however, the company wants to proceed cautiously rather than pause. "We want to successfully navigate massive risks. In confronting these risks, we acknowledge that what seems right in theory often plays out more strangely than expected in practice," wrote Altman in an OpenAI statement about planning for the advent of artificial general intelligence. "We believe we have to continuously learn and adapt by deploying less powerful versions of the technology in order to minimize 'one shot to get it right' scenarios."
In other words, OpenAI is properly pursuing the usual human path for gaining new knowledge and developing new technologies—that is, learning from trial and error, not "one shot to get it right" through the exercise of preternatural foresight. Altman is right when he points out that "democratized access will also lead to more and better research, decentralized power, more benefits, and a broader set of people contributing new ideas."
A moratorium imposed by U.S. and European governments, as called for in the open letter, would certainly delay access to the possibly quite substantial benefits of new A.I. systems while doubtfully increasing A.I. safety. In addition, it seems unlikely that the Chinese government and A.I. developers in that country would agree to the proposed moratorium anyway. Surely, the safe development of powerful A.I. systems is more likely to occur in American and European laboratories than those overseen by authoritarian regimes.
The post Elon Musk, Andrew Yang, and Steve Wozniak Propose an A.I. 'Pause.' It's a Bad Idea and Won't Work Anyway. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The way Washington's spending grows, in libertarian mythos, goes like this: Republicans want to spend money on X but not Y, and Democrats want to spend money on Y but not X, so they reach a grand, bipartisan compromise to spend money on both X and Y, in ascending quantities, forever. It's simplistic, as myths are wont to be, but it tells some truth.
Recently, I've been thinking about how divergent Americans' risk assessments appear to be—how we seem to have increasingly different ideas of what endangers us and our way of life—and that little spending parable keeps coming to mind. If we can't agree on what risks our government needs to address, if we operate from wildly varying ideas of reality and the dangers it contains, is this the sort of compromise we'll make, agreeing to over-regulate everything to address everyone's (often irrational) fears?
Gun violence is an obvious point of divergence right now. In recent weeks, especially after the horrific mass shooting in Illinois on the Fourth of July, a number of writers I follow have said they regularly fear becoming a victim of a mass shooter when they go to large, public events and expect to retain this sense of panic indefinitely. One spoke of experiencing a "background fear every time I'm out in any kind of crowd, also knowing it will probably never go away." Another, Joel Mathis, worried that these shootings will exacerbate our national epidemic of loneliness, "because the result of mass shootings is going to be that people (many of us, anyway) are going to do everything they can to reduce the chances of becoming a target."
I'd be pretty jumpy if I heard what sounded like gunfire at a concert. But this worry they share with—as Mathis noted—a full third of American adults has literally never crossed my mind. I know being shot in public is a possibility, I suppose, but so are all sorts of terrible and objectively uncommon things which don't influence my decisions day-to-day. I'm not even a gun enthusiast, but our risk assessments here are very far apart.
Or what about kidnapping? The desire to protect children—from being groomed, molested, abducted, and so on—is presently an animating force for much of the American right. An acquaintance recently told me her fear that her 12-year-old son, who "looks like a full-grown man," will be kidnapped by a stranger if she drops him off at the mall with friends. She spent her own adolescence safely wandering the mall, but she can't shake that worry, and 25 percent of Americans likewise report being "afraid" or "very afraid" of kidnapping.
Like mass shooting deaths, stranger abductions are awful—and extremely rare. They're the kind of edge cases which rightly provoke powerful emotions but also ill-considered legislative responses which can do more harm than good. And that's bad in its own right, stifling ordinary life to prevent something already very unlikely to occur. But it's even more difficult to live with if it's based on a risk assessment you don't share, and living in a society as historically wealthy and complex as ours creates endless possibilities for risk assessments to differ.
The pace of change in modern life brings new risks to consider, which is more difficult than simply inheriting familiar wisdom, and our fragmented media consumption means those decisions are informed by different—even competing—informational feeds. This is how we end up with large blocs of the public demanding government protection from something that other large blocs, frequently with the data to prove it, don't see as a significant threat at all.
Recent history suggests two models for having the state address such unshared fears. The COVID-19 pandemic instantly comes to mind. Yes, the past two-and-a-half years have seen many overreaches and hypocrisies, bad judgment calls and noble lies, and an abundance of bureaucratic foot-dragging. The transit mask mandates lasted beyond all reason. School policies in much of the country were a counterfactual debacle. There's much to critique. But as flawed as pandemic policies have been, they've generally—if often belatedly, and with plenty of regional variation—responded to changing conditions and new information. It's too soon to say with confidence, but for now, it looks like irrational risk assessments have not won the day to set the policy agenda in the long term.
Contrast that with how we've responded to the risk of terrorism. You can fly on a plane without a mask now, but you'll still have to take off your shoes, unpack your laptop, go through the body scanner, and maybe get groped by the TSA. A declassified report this spring revealed the CIA has for years been doing mass surveillance on Americans without warrants or oversight in the name of fighting terrorism. Just last year, the Supreme Court declined to consider a case that could have brought some transparency to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the government's secretive rubber stamp for spying requests. And we spent two decades on costly, counterproductive, and inhumane war and nation-building projects across the Middle East and North Africa and still maintain a significant anti-terror military presence in those regions.
Your risk of dying from terrorism in the U.S., by the way, is around 1 in 30 million each year, while risks of death from COVID differ widely but are certainly higher than 1 in 30 million. Policy will never neatly track with demonstrable risk, but are we doomed to live under the thumb of an ever-growing, excessively risk-averse state? Americans left and right are rational about some risks and irrational about others, and maybe the risk of broad and overcautious risk policies is one we should take more seriously.
The post The Left and Right Are Living in Different Realities appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"Time Is Running Out to Avert A Harrowing Future, Climate Panel Warns," ran the front page headline in The New York Times earlier this week. The Washington Post's front page similarly read, "Humanity has a 'brief and rapidly closing window' to avoid hotter, deadly future, U.N. climate report says." Both newspapers are citing claims and data from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) new report Climate Change 2022: Impact, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called the report an "atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership." He added, "Delay means death."
Is humanity's situation as dire as the headlines suggest?
"The cumulative scientific evidence is unequivocal: Climate change is a threat to human well-being and planetary health," urgently cautions the IPCC Adaptation report, which is nearly 3,700 pages long and is the second part of the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) on climate change and follows that agency's Physical Science Basis report issued last August. (The third part of the AR6 report on the mitigation of climate change will be issued in April.)
Let's be clear: man-made climate change is happening and humanity is already adapting to it and will continue to have to do so. Largely as the result of the rising atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels, global average temperature has increased by about 1.1°C (about 2°F) since the late 19th century. Consequently, heatwaves on land and in the oceans have become more intense and more common, downpours have become more frequent, and the rise in sea level is accelerating.
One not too startling finding of the report is that bad and worsening weather poses the biggest risks for poor people ruled over by corrupt kleptocratic elites. "Vulnerability is higher in locations with poverty, governance challenges and limited access to basic services and resources, violent conflict and high levels of climate-sensitive livelihoods (e.g., smallholder farmers, pastoralists, fishing communities)," notes the report's Summary for Policymakers.
As an example of the vulnerability, the Summary observes that between 2010 and 2020 that deaths from flooding, droughts, and storms were 15-times higher in poorer regions than they were in economically developed areas. To get that figure the report specifically compares weather mortality in Mozambique ($450 GDP per capita), Somalia ($310), Nigeria ($2,100), Afghanistan ($509), and Haiti ($1,177) versus the U.K. ($40,284), Australia ($51,812), Canada ($43,241), and Sweden ($51,925). When bad weather meets poverty, it kills people.
However, deep in its text the IPCC report gets around to citing the remarkable 2019 study in Global Environmental Change by two European researchers that found "a clear decreasing trend in both human and economic vulnerability, with global average mortality and economic loss rates that have dropped by 6.5 and nearly 5 times, respectively, from 1980–1989 to 2007–2016." Keep in mind that falling mortality and economic loss rates occurred as world population grew and people built lots more stuff.
The researchers additionally report that mortality and economic losses stemming from bad weather have declined faster in poor countries as they have grown richer. "This has led to a convergence in vulnerability between higher and lower income countries," they note. Despite the fast and steep decline, vulnerability to weather hazards remains higher in poorer regions.
In his 2020 article in Technological Forecasting & Social Change, Copenhagen Consensus Center founder Bjorn Lomborg noted that the "global death risk from extreme weather has declined 99% over 100 years and global costs have declined 26% over the last 28 years." Simply put: People around the world have already been rapidly and successfully adapting to changes in the weather.
Probably the most costly concern stemming from climate change is coastal inundation as sea level rises due to melting glaciers and thermal expansion. A 2018 study calculated that, if no efforts were made to adapt to rising seas, damages from coastal flooding would reach $14 trillion annually by 2100. Of course, people will not blithely let higher tides sweep over them and their property; they will adapt.
Estimates of how much it will cost to fend off rising seas vary considerably depending on projections of just how high the oceans will rise; how many people live near the coasts; and how much they build along the shorelines. A 2021 analysis in Climatic Change looking at best-case to worst-case temperature increases estimated that the total costs of building and maintaining seawalls, dikes, and other coastal protections ranged from 0.03 to 0.18 percent of global GDP. A 2019 World Bank analysis of best- and worst-case sea level increases calculated that the cumulative costs for coastal defense would range, in inflation-adjusted dollars between $2.9 and $18.2 trillion by 2100. Assuming a relatively modest 2 percent annual economic growth rate, annual global GDP will rise from $94 trillion now to $440 trillion by the end of this century which suggests that much richer and more technically adept generations will be able to adapt to rising seas.
"Climate change will increasingly put pressure on food production and access," according to the Adaptation report. In fact, the report asserts, "Human-induced warming has slowed growth of agricultural productivity over the past 50 years in mid- and low-latitudes." These claims rely chiefly on recent research that models what crop yields might have been absent climate change. In the meantime, global average cereal yields per hectare rose from 1,428 kilograms in 1961 to 4,070 kilograms in 2018, nearly a 300 percent increase. Global cereal production rose four-fold, from 744 million tons in 1961 to nearly 3 billion tons in 2018.
As the result of greatly improved agricultural productivity, the share of the world's population suffering from undernourishment has fallen from about one-third in 1960 to around about 9 percent today. Clearly farmers around the world have, on average, been more than able to keep ahead of whatever deleterious effects that current climate change may have on their crops.
What about the future? Plant breeders are already developing crops that can withstand higher temperatures, drought, and can grow in salty soils. The application of modern biotechnology techniques such as genome editing will speed up the process of identifying and developing new crop varieties that can better cope with the vagaries of a changing climate. In addition, crop and livestock production is likely to be disrupted by novel food technologies such as alternative proteins, vat-grown meat, yeast-fermented milk, and vertical farming, which will have concomitant benefits of reducing the emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases.
The Adaptation report further warns, "Climate-sensitive food-borne, water-borne, and vector-borne disease risks are projected to increase under all levels of warming without additional adaptation." The report specifically cites the risk dengue fever spreading to billions more people by the end of the century.
First, of course, there will certainly be additional adaptation to disease risks. Since development of the germ theory of disease in the late 19th century, the chief "adaptations" to communicable diseases have been sanitation and vaccines. Even while implausibly spinning out scenarios of climate change-boosted epidemics, the report does acknowledge both sanitation and vaccines as "effective adaptation options." Just taking a short snapshot of trends, the number of people dying annually of food-borne and water-borne diarrheal diseases has been cut in half since 1990. In 1990, more than 34 percent of global deaths were the result of communicable diseases. By 2019 that had dropped to 18 percent. Access to clean water and sanitation strongly tracks per capita GDP.
With respect to vector-borne illnesses, the good news is that the number of annual deaths (mostly children) from mosquito-borne malaria has been trending down for the past 15 years or so. The really good news is that a vaccine against the parasite was approved for the first time last year and others are in the works. Hailed as a "game-changer," the new vaccine, in combination with other control measures, could reduce malaria deaths among children by 70 percent.
What about mosquito-borne dengue? Again, progress is being made toward developing a vaccine that significantly reduces the risks of hospitalization and death from contracting the virus. Research on developing even more effective dengue vaccines is ongoing. Another approach toward protecting people from vector-borne diseases would be to control the vectors. For example, mosquitoes could be genetically modified so that their populations crash or they themselves become immune to the disease organisms.
The Adaptation report offers a worst-case projection that high man-made temperature increase exceeding 5°C could result in the extinction nearly half of all land-dwelling species; in the best case where temperature is reined in at 1.5°C perhaps only 3 percent will die out.
Given the extremely poor record to mass extinction predictions, these projections should be taken with a grain of salt. Even if the extinction projections turn out to be ballpark correct, George Washington University biologist R. Alexander Pyron has argued that "both the planet and humanity can probably survive or even thrive in a world with fewer species." He added, "Developed human societies can exist and function in harmony with diverse natural communities, even if those communities are less diverse than they were before humanity."
On the other, happier, hand, the trends toward greater agricultural productivity, dematerialization, and urbanization suggests that humanity will be able to set aside increasing amounts of land and ocean for the natural world.
University of Colorado climate change policy researcher Roger Pielke Jr. points out that many of the headlined worst-case projections in the Adaptation report are based on highly implausible scenarios in which humanity would burn enough coal and oil to triple the amount of carbon dioxide currently in the atmosphere by the end of this century. In fact, Pielke and his colleagues argue that instead of heading toward a global average temperature of around 4°C by 2100, the world is on a more moderate track where temperatures would be around 2.2°C by 2100. Obviously, a lower temperature trajectory will make it easier for humanity to adapt to climate change.
Adaptation and the development of low-carbon energy generation technologies will both be required to address and mitigate the challenges of man-made climate change. And yes, the world is slated to get warmer, but humanity is not running out of time to avert a harrowing climate future.
Again, when bad weather meets poverty, people die. The recipe for successfully adapting to climate change is continued economic growth and technological progress.
The post When It Comes to Climate Change, Wealth Equals Adaptation appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Between December 7 and 13, Cornell University reported 903 COVID-19 cases, many of which were of the omicron variant, among students. CNN breathlessly reported the case count in a headline days later.
As of January 3, 97 percent of on-campus staff members are vaccinated. Undergraduate students are 99 percent vaccinated, while 100 percent of faculty are vaccinated. (The total on-campus percentage is brought down by the "other employees" category, which is 93 percent vaccinated.)
Despite the extraordinarily low risk of deaths and hospitalizations, the school still shut down its campus in mid-December, canceling all activities and sports while moving final exams online. The winter graduation ceremony was canceled; students were encouraged to switch to grab-and-go options in the dining hall; and ironically, given that it's increasingly permissible to point out that healthy weights are linked to better COVID-19 outcomes, all on-campus gyms were shuttered. The first two weeks of instruction for the spring semester have been moved to remote. Cornell did not respond to Reason's request for comment as to how many of these cases have resulted in severe illness, hospitalizations, or deaths.
It's a similar story at Yale University, which also did not respond to request for comment. There, 99.7 percent of undergraduate students are vaccinated (93.9 percent of staff are vaccinated, mirroring Cornell's data). Due to omicron, the start of the term has been pushed back to January 25, with in-person teaching finally beginning on February 7. Students must receive booster shots by January 18, adding to the existing vaccine mandate. Students must quarantine in their dorms following a COVID-19 test taken upon arrival, released only to grab food. They are barred from frequenting businesses in surrounding New Haven, even if eating outdoors—the only exception carved out is for curbside takeout.
Stanford University shifted classes to remote instruction for the first two weeks of the term, canceling all indoor in-person events until January 28. The University of Chicago has also made classes remote for the first two weeks of the semester. George Washington University will be virtual-only until January 18. Seven campuses within the University of California system have altered spring semester plans due to omicron, shifting to remote learning for the first few weeks. "The start of 2022 at the University of California feels like March 2020 deja vu for some students," writes the Los Angeles Times' Colleen Shalby.
But it shouldn't. In March 2020, we had a much harder time assessing the threat posed by COVID-19 to college kids. We didn't have widespread access to vaccines and, increasingly, antivirals. We didn't have good (pre-vaccination) data on severity for different age groups, understanding that the risk of death to people ages 50–64 is 25 times higher than for those ages 18–29; for those ages 65–74, 65 times higher; and for those ages 75–84, a staggering 150 times higher.
These advances, coupled with the fact that omicron results in less severe illness than prior variants, apparently have very little bearing on how university administrators are responding to this latest surge. Their decision to shut down campuses "reflects an outmoded level of caution," writes Emily Oster in The Atlantic, as well as "a failure of universities to protect their students' interests."
"Now that we have vaccines, campus restrictions have taken on an increasingly absurd character — ruining the college experience in a (failed) attempt to control a virus that poses minimal risk to students," writes Cornell student Matthew Samilow at National Review. "The claim that these restrictions work is designed to be unfalsifiable: If cases are low, the administration says it's because the restrictions are working; if cases are high, they say it's because students aren't following the restrictions enough. Either way, the question of whether the restrictions actually work is never answered."
Other students share Samilow's frustrations. Roy Matthews, who graduated from Maine's Bates College a few months ago, tells Reason, "I was so ready to leave," calling the required daily nasal-swab tests a "riveting good time." (If you missed three in a row, he says, you'd be swiftly kicked off campus.)
"It's turned into a complete clusterfuck…it's not the same school it was two years ago, or even three years ago. There's no plan to phase [COVID-19 restrictions] out or reduce the price tag because they're not having in-person classes," he says, noting that current students have had restrictions ratcheted up due to omicron's surge.
Travis Nix, a student at Georgetown Law who has had three out of four semesters so far conducted entirely online, says the school has failed to indicate when mask requirements will be removed. "We're having all these restrictions to give the appearance of safety…but there's very little safety risk with omicron when you have a student body that is 100 percent vaccinated essentially." Many schools, including each one mentioned in this piece, have vaccine mandates in place for students, with many of them adding booster requirements, and some forcing students to get tested on a regular basis.
Meanwhile, NBC News has invited experts on to talk about why would-be college applicants have, over the past year, "dropped [college] from their radar," with few considering that people's decision making may be affected by the terms of the deal changing. When all you get for your tuition is a glorified Khan Academy seminar paired with cyclical house arrest and intrusive testing regimes, why bother?
In perhaps the most tedious twist of all, pro-union organizers at Bates are alleging that anti-union elements have recently violated the school's COVID-19 protocol by bringing an outside consultant into school buildings, showing yet another example of pandemic concerns being wielded to get favorable political outcomes—a strategy perfected in big cities like Chicago and New York over the last two years by America's most illustrious teachers unions.
But it doesn't all have to be this way. In many places, it's not.
"Maybe the best feature of this year's edition is that I won't have to say too much about viruses, testing and tracing, quarantine space, or vaccination rates," wrote Purdue University President Mitch Daniels on January 5.
"With vaccination rates, achieved through personal choice rather than a 'mandate,' infections have been a fraction of last year's. Most important, we have seen virtually no severe cases, with almost none rising above Level 4 on the 6-level Severity Index we devised in 2020." Of the campus population, 88 percent have submitted proof of vaccination to the university, without a mandate compelling them to do so. The school's case severity levels "are based on several factors; primarily, what symptoms the patient is exhibiting (if any) and whether they have any comorbidities," notes Purdue's COVID-19 dashboard. Other schools (or news outlets like CNN) could choose to collect and publish similar data, to help students, parents, and staff discern whether cases are presenting in the real world as serious threats that warrant such restrictive measures, but few have made such data publicly available or provided it upon request.
Colleges clearly aren't bubbles, but parts of a larger ecosystem. Many people in favor of restrictive omicron-related policies have pointed to the fact that many faculty members are elderly and in need of heightened protection, or that the rate of spread on a college campus affects people who live in and service college towns—bar and restaurant workers, landlords, repairmen.
But college administrators at elite universities seem to be managing toward exceptions, not rules. They seem to be keeping liability and PR in mind, with little eye toward giving their paying customers the once-in-a-lifetime quality experience they advertised. On campuses where vast swaths of the total population are fully vaccinated and where omicron poses little risk of severe illness or death, hypercautious administrators are denying students the intellectual and social environment they came for, asking them to be compliant hermits once again in pursuit of a COVID Zero that may never come.
The post Colleges Use Omicron as Justification for Shutdowns and Surveillance appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The highly contagious omicron variant of the COVID-19 virus often does an end run around the immunological protections of vaccination or prior infection. But recent data from the U.K. and Canada indicate that these breakthrough omicron infections are much less dangerous than first-time infections in unvaccinated people.
Ontario public health authorities report that as of yesterday, 2,093 and 288 people are being treated for omicron variant infections in hospitals and intensive care units (ICUs), respectively. The hospitalization rate per million among unvaccinated people stands at 532.7; it's 105.9 for folks vaccinated with at least two doses. This means that the reduction of hospitalization risk for those inoculated with at least two doses is 80.1 percent.
The ICU occupancy rate per million is 135.6 for unvaccinated people and just 9.2 for those who have gotten two doses of COVID-19 vaccines. So vaccination reduces the ICU risk by 93.2 percent.
An analysis by the United Kingdom Health Security Agency (UKHSA) similarly found that "the risk of being admitted to hospital for Omicron cases was lower for those who had received 2 doses of a vaccine (65% lower) compared to those who had not received any vaccination." The risk "was lower still among those who had received 3 doses of vaccine (81% lower)."
The UKHSA report also parses the effectiveness of the vaccines against both the delta and omicron variants. Two vaccine doses essentially maintain their effectiveness against the delta variant over time, but protection against the omicron variant wanes fast. That said, a third shot significantly boosts the immune system's ability to fend off and reduce the severity of omicron infections for about 3 months. The good news is that the vaccines' protection against hospitalization is much greater than their protection against symptomatic disease. And with a booster dose, vaccine effectiveness against hospitalization is close to 90 percent.
These British and Canadian findings mirror those most recently reported by the New York State Health Department. It finds that the daily rate per 100,000 of COVID-19 hospitalizations stands at 4.56 for fully vaccinated people, compared to 58.27 for unvaccinated people. That means vaccinations are 92.3 percent effective at preventing hospitalization from COVID-19.
Other data from around the U.S. are in line with these findings. For example, in Greenville, North Carolina, The Daily Reflector reports that out of the 120 COVID-positive inpatients at Vidant Health hospitals, 101 had not been vaccinated; 30 out of the 34 COVID ICU patients were not vaccinated. Similarly, Block Club Chicago reports that 85 percent of people hospitalized for COVID in Illinois—and 90 percent admitted to ICUs—are unvaccinated. In Louisiana, the state health department says that 76 percent of the people hospitalized for COVID-19 infections were unvaccinated. In the Baystate Health system in Massachusetts, around 70 percent of COVID-19 patients are unvaccinated.
Some good news for both the vaccinated and the unvaccinated is that the omicron variant seems to cause less severe disease than earlier versions of COVID-19. Still, given the steep rise in the omicron wave, it would be wise for the medically eligible unvaccinated to now take responsibility to protect themselves, their families, their friends, and their fellow Americans by getting their shots.
The post Omicron vs. the Unvaccinated and the Vaccinated appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Currently, the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine produced by Pfizer/BionNTech is approved for people age 12 and older, whereas the Moderna vaccine is approved for those over age 18. If the current clinical trials in younger children prove successful, both vaccines will seek Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval for inoculating children between ages 5 and 11 years later this year.
As vaccines are further rolled out to younger cohorts, recent reports that in rare instances adolescents have experienced inflammation of their hearts (myocarditis) shortly after being inoculated with mRNA COVID-19 vaccines have understandably alarmed some parents. Although researchers are still trying to work out how the vaccines might cause this ailment, researchers have reported a correlation between vaccination and the onset of this side effect. The good news is that in the vast majority of cases the heart inflammation is safely resolved after a few days. So far, no one in the U.S. diagnosed with myocarditis after vaccination has died.
On balance, most research finds that the risks of this side effect in adolescents and young adults are outweighed by the risks from COVID-19 infection. For example, an August 25, 2021, New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) study by Israeli researchers used nationwide data from that country's largest health organization to compare the incidence of myocarditis among thousands of people inoculated with the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, unvaccinated people, and infected COVID-19 patients. The researchers report that, while still quite rare, vaccinated people experienced myocarditis at a rate just over three times higher than the unvaccinated. But more crucially, people infected with COVID-19 had 18 times higher risk than people who were not infected with COVID-19. In other words, the currently uninfected face the choice, with respect to heart inflammation, between the lower risks of vaccination versus the considerably higher risks of infection. More importantly, the health downsides of COVID-19 infections are not limited to just a higher risk of heart inflammation compared to those who are vaccinated.
As an accompanying NEJM editorial noted:
What is even more compelling about these data is the substantial protective effect of vaccines with respect to adverse events such as acute kidney injury, intracranial hemorrhage, and anemia, probably because infection was prevented. Furthermore, the persons with SARS-CoV-2 infection appeared to be at substantially higher risk for arrhythmia, myocardial infarction, deep-vein thrombosis, pulmonary embolism, pericarditis, intracerebral hemorrhage, and thrombocytopenia than those who received the BNT162b2 [Pfizer/BioNTech] vaccine.
A July 27, 2021, preprint analysis of the health records of 48 large U.S. healthcare organizations compared the heart inflammation risks of people under age 20 between those who had suffered a COVID-19 infection versus those who had been vaccinated. As with other studies, the researchers found that young males are, for unknown reasons, at greater risk of the malady than are young females. Overall, the researchers report that "young males infected with the virus are up 6 times more likely to develop myocarditis as those who have received the vaccine."
A September 3, 2021, article assessed the data for more than 36 million patients supplied by over 900 hospitals focusing on myocarditis and COVID-19 cases in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. The researchers stratified the data by age and sex. They note that myocarditis is rare with patients with and without COVID-19. The researchers report, "During March 2020–January 2021, patients with COVID-19 had nearly 16 times the risk for myocarditis compared with patients who did not have COVID-19, and risk varied by sex and age."
In contrast to these relatively reassuring data and analyses, another preprint article posted on September 8, 2021, seeks to parse adolescent heart inflammation data derived from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System(VAERS). Those researchers compare post-vaccination heart inflammation risks with the risks of being hospitalized with COVID-19 infections in the next 120 days. They report that that the rate of post-vaccination heart inflammation for boys ages 12-15 (males being more susceptible) without medical comorbidities is 3.7 to 6.1 times higher than their 120-day COVID-19 hospitalization risk as of August 21, 2021. For boys ages 16 to 17 without medical comorbidities, the risk is currently 2.1 to 3.5 times higher than their 120-day COVID-19 hospitalization risk.
However, the VAERS site warns users that because of significant reporting biases, inconsistent data quality and completeness, and the absence of an unvaccinated comparison group, its data cannot be used to calculate how often adverse events occur and cannot assess if a vaccine caused an adverse event.
Over at the Science-Based Medicine blog, Wayne State University oncologist David Gorski argues that the authors of this preprint have in any case misunderstood and badly mishandled the VAERS' self-reported data about COVID-19 vaccinations. Among other things, he points out that the researchers are not comparing apples to apples when they contrast vaccine-related cases of heart inflammation with COVID-19 hospitalizations instead of cases of vaccine-related inflammation with COVID-19 inflammation cases. In addition, he asks why the authors chose not to compare vaccine-related hospitalizations of children with COVID-related hospitalizations of children?
As it happens, a July 20, 2021 study in Circulation made just that comparison.
A slightly different comparison of the myocarditis risks for younger people versus the risks of remaining unvaccinated was put together for the August 30, 2021, meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices by National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases cardiologist Hannah Rosenblum.
After reviewing the evidence for vaccine-related myocarditis in young people, an August 27, 2021, editorial in the European Journal of Internal Medicine concluded:
At this point in time, very rare cases of myocarditis in younger adult men can occur following COVID-19 vaccination, but they are clinically mild and with benign evolution. To date, the benefit-risk assessment for COVID-19 vaccination shows a favourable balance in light of the potential of short- and long-term major cardiovascular and non-cardiovascular complications associated with this disease and the long life-expectancy of this population.
Therefore, COVID-19 vaccination is strongly recommended to prevent major complications and death.
Given current data and analyses, that seems about right.
The post Vaccine-Related Heart Inflammation Risks for Young People Much Lower Than COVID-19 Heart Inflammation Risks appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Hurricane Ida rapidly spun itself up to a Category 4 tropical cyclone—maximum sustained winds at 150 miles per hour—just before it made landfall on the coast of Louisiana on Sunday morning. Such rapid intensification is consistent with the effects of man-made climate change on hurricanes. The recently released Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change noted, "It is likely that the proportion of major (Category 3–5) tropical cyclones (TCs) and the frequency of rapid TC intensification events have increased over the past four decades."
Contrarily, recent research does not yet detect a significant increase in the intensity or frequency of Atlantic hurricanes striking the United States. Some researchers suspect that particulate air pollution combined with natural variation suppressed hurricane activity in the North Atlantic during the mid-20th century. On the other hand, the AR6 projects that "the total global frequency of TC formation will decrease or remain unchanged with increasing global warming (medium confidence). Basically, as a result of man-made warming, hurricanes and cyclones are expected to become fewer but more intense.
As the world continues to warm, the AR6 forecasts that "the proportion of intense TCs, average peak TC wind speeds, and peak wind speeds of the most intense TCs will increase on the global scale with increasing global warming (high confidence)." In addition, tropical cyclones appear to be becoming wetter. "Available event attribution studies of observed strong TCs provide medium confidence for a human contribution to extreme TC rainfall," observes the AR6. Why? Because, among other things, near-surface atmospheric moisture content increases by about 7 percent for every 1 degree celsius increase in warming.
Hurricane Ida and its remnants have so far knocked out electricity to around 1 million homes and businesses and killed 6 people. In contrast to the Hurricane Katrina disaster (1,833 deaths) 16 years ago, New Orleans' massively upgraded levees held, so the Big Easy escaped inundation this time. The protection afforded by the improved levees is an example of how increasing wealth and technological prowess over the past couple of centuries is enabling more and more of humanity to survive natural disasters.
Even as the world population nearly quadrupled, the global natural disaster death rates have plummeted, according to Our World In Data.
In fact, the annual number of people dying as a result of natural disasters has fallen by about 90 percent over the past century:
Deaths from weather and climatological events like floods and droughts have especially steeply declined over the past century. As University of Colorado environmental studies professor Roger Pielke, Jr. tweeted:
We may not be any better at preventing extreme weather events, but we are much better at surviving them.
The post Hurricane Ida, Climate Change, and Falling Trends in Global Deaths From Natural Disasters appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been largely missing in action when it comes to effectively responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. The agency's chaotic responses during the Trump administration have now given way to absurdly cautious approaches under the Biden administration.
Case in point: On April 27, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky grudgingly acknowledged that fully vaccinated people could gather outdoors and conduct outdoor activities without wearing a mask. She cited increasing data that a person is much more likely to get infected with COVID-19 through close extended contacts indoors. Walensky added, "Less than 10 percent of documented transmission in many studies has occurred outdoors. We also know there's almost a 20-fold increased risk of transmission in the indoor setting rather than the outdoor setting."
As Walensky testified today before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, CDC officials based their highly cautious threshold estimate of an outdoor infection risk of 10 percent on a February meta-analysis in The Journal of Infectious Diseases.
As David Leonhardt over at The New York Times makes clear today, Walensky and her agency are wildly overstating the risks of getting infected outdoors. As he explains:
That [10 percent] benchmark "seems to be a huge exaggeration," as Dr. Muge Cevik, a virologist at the University of St. Andrews, said. In truth, the share of transmission that has occurred outdoors seems to be below 1 percent and may be below 0.1 percent, multiple epidemiologists told me. The rare outdoor transmission that has happened almost all seems to have involved crowded places or close conversation.
Saying that less than 10 percent of Covid transmission occurs outdoors is akin to saying that sharks attack fewer than 20,000 swimmers a year. (The actual worldwide number is around 150.) It's both true and deceiving.…
These recommendations would be more grounded in science if anywhere close to 10 percent of Covid transmission were occurring outdoors. But it is not. There is not a single documented Covid infection anywhere in the world from casual outdoor interactions, such as walking past someone on a street or eating at a nearby table.
Keep in mind that the data suggesting that the risk of acquiring COVID-19 through outdoor infection is around 0.1 percent (1 in 1,000) were gathered before vaccines became widely available.
So what do the data say about how protective the COVID-19 vaccines are, irrespective of indoor or outdoor exposures? Even the CDC reports that as of April 26, among the 95 million fully vaccinated Americans only 9,245 had experienced breakthrough COVID-19 infections. Therefore, the risk that a fully vaccinated person wandering about in the wild would be diagnosed with COVID-19 after vaccination is 0.001 percent (basically, 1 in 100,000). Admittedly, some of the reduced risk may stem from continued mask wearing on the part of fully vaccinated people, but even so, it is clear that vaccination confers a huge amount of protection against the virus.
As Leonhardt observes, "The scientific evidence points to a conclusion that is much simpler than the C.D.C.'s message: Masks make a huge difference indoors and rarely matter outdoors."
Over at Stat news, Leana Wen, a George Washington University health policy professor, declared, "If [the CDC's] advice is too disconnected from reality, and if they are too slow, then they make themselves irrelevant." That's entirely correct.
Now that COVID-19 vaccines are in surplus, there is no time like the present to protect yourself and your family against this scourge.
The post CDC Greatly Exaggerates Risk of Outdoor COVID-19 Transmission appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>California was besieged by wildfires all summer, torching more than 4 million acres of land, leaving thousands without homes and 31 dead.
While wildfires are a common occurrence in the Golden State, 2020 is wrapping up to be the harshest in modern history, a result of a mix of climate change, poor forest management, and citizens' insistence on moving into wooded areas prone to fires.
Unfortunately, California seems hellbent on prohibiting market solutions from fixing that third problem. The state's insurance commissioner has announced that the state is mandating that companies that provide fire insurance cannot drop coverage of properties within the areas affected by wildfires. This is the second year in a row he has done so.
This counterintuitive announcement by Commissioner Ricardo Lara is the result of a state law passed in 2018 that forbids insurance companies from canceling or refusing to renew policies of a residential property for a year after a declaration of emergency on the basis of the property being in an area in which a wildfire has occurred. Lara was actually the primary sponsor of the bill when he was a state senator, so while his hands are technically tied here, he's directly responsible for this legal state of affairs.
This is a terrible law and an unethical one at that. The marketplace has efficient tools for discouraging building homes in dangerous environments. When insurance companies refuse to insure people who live in places prone to fire, flooding, or other natural disasters, the market is sending consumers a very important message: "It's not safe to live here. If you make the decision to ignore this warning, we're not going to be fiscally responsible for your choices."
Lara's law subverts these market signals and turns insurance into, essentially, a form of state-enforced financial subsidy. The consequences for bad outcomes are both likely and well-known. Requiring insurance companies to continue covering these properties will encourage people to continue to live and build in places where it's dangerous. Again, 31 people died as a result of these fires, and Lara's primary interest is making sure that homeowners apparently don't learn anything.
Lara's press release trumpeting the moratorium is clear that the goal is to keep people living in these places, even if they're at risk from future wildfires. The announcement features quotes not from insurance companies, but from consumer advocates who don't think it's fair to lose their fire insurance coverage just because they're at increased risk of having their homes catch fire.
"This moratorium ensures that families whose homes survived the flames do not lose their homes because insurers refuse to continue their coverage. With insurance, we pay year after year even though we hope never to need it, and California law helps make it a fair deal by saying that insurers cannot suddenly drop us just because a fire got close," said Douglas Heller, of California's Consumer Federation of America, in Lara's press release.
A "fair deal" for whom, exactly? It's not a fair deal for the insurance companies, who are now essentially being forced to subsidize dangerous practices. But this is a consistent problem with the role insurance is supposed to play in the market (assessing risk and pricing protection and recovery assistance accordingly) and what consumers think the role of insurance is supposed to be (a piggy bank you pay into that will then cover all expenses in the event of disaster).
The Los Angeles Times notes that these demands from California are causing insurance providers to "spike premiums or flee the marketplace altogether." Reports from the state's Department of Insurance determined that there's been a tripling of the number of people complaining about getting dropped by their insurance companies in areas prone to wildfires and complaints about premiums increasing have jumped more than 200 percent between 2010 and 2016.
And yet, the paper notes, people continue to build homes in parts of the country that are prone to wildfires. A report from the National Academy of Sciences found a 41 percent growth in housing near areas of wildland growth across the United States from 1990 to 2010.
People who decide to move to or live in areas that are at risk of wildfire should be free to do so, but it's not the role of the government to shield them from an appropriate market assessment of the risks of doing so. California's actions are actually fostering dangerous housing choices—ones which may lead to more deaths down the line—by getting in the way of very important market signals.
The post Dozens Died in California Wildfires. Why Is the State Forcing Insurance Companies To Ignore Risks? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Chicago's bail reforms may not have had the rosy outcomes indicated by a top county judge's analysis, which independent researchers say is downplaying the new crimes that have resulted from allowing defendants to await trial outside of jail.
Those are the results of an analysis by a group of Chicago Tribune reporters in a new investigative piece as well as a just-published data analysis paper by University of Utah professors Paul Cassell and Richard Fowles.
In 2017, Cook County Chief Judge Timothy Evans implemented an order reforming how the Chicago area courts handled pretrial detention. The goal was to reduce the demands for cash bail, which tend to keep people trapped behind bars on the basis of poverty rather than risk. Cook County met its goal of detaining fewer defendants before their trials. The number of defendants who secured pretrial release between 2016 and 2018 jumped from 71.6 percent to 80.5 percent. When cash bail was ordered, the amount demanded was much lower than before. Cook County's jail population dropped from 7,443 to less than 6,000.
Last May, Evans released a report that showed releasing more defendants from jail did not put the community at greater risk of crime. A high proportion of defendants (83 percent) charged with felonies and released under the new system returned to court as ordered and did not commit new crimes while released. In all, Evans' report painted a positive picture that matched the narrative of those who support bail reform: That court systems in Cook County were accurately sorting defendants based on the risk they posed to public safety and their likelihood of showing up to trial, rather than simply leaving everyone in jail simply because they couldn't afford to pay what the courts ordered.
But further examination of Evans' data paints a less rosy picture. Last week, The Chicago Tribune reported that Evans' report left out hundreds of violent crime charges filed after the bail reforms were implemented. The reporters say he did this by including certain violent crimes (murder, attempted murder, non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated battery) and excluding incidents like domestic violence, assault with a deadly weapon, battery, reckless homicide, and others. If Evans' report had included all these other crimes, the Chicago Tribune calculates the number of violent crimes allegedly committed by released defendants would jump from 147 to 578. The largest chunk of these charges—231 of them—were for domestic battery.
Furthermore, Evans' report stated that only three defendants who had been released under the new pretrial system had subsequently been charged with homicide. But the Tribune identified 21 defendants accused of murder who had been released during the 15 months of bail reform the report reviewed. Their exclusion from Evans' report is supposedly a result of incomplete records and some odd reporting decisions like only counting the first new charge a defendant received after being released (two of the defendants were arrested for another charge, then released, and then allegedly killed people); or not counting them because their initial charges weren't felonies (five murder defendants had been bonded out on misdemeanor charges).
In a separate review, Cassell and Fowles reanalyzed Evans' data and found other problems.
For one thing, there's a significant flaw in how Evans measured new crime charges prior to his bail reforms and afterward. When calculating the crime rate, Evans' report evaluated the "before" defendants for an average of 243 days and the "after" defendants for an average of just 154 days. This is a significant methodological problem because reducing the time frame in the post-reform evaluation gives these defendants less time to commit new crimes. Cassell and Fowles argue that this difference of nearly 100 days may well mean that, in actuality, the post-reform crime rate among those released might be even higher. Cassell and Fowles' report observes, "the second group will, other things being equal, undoubtedly commit fewer additional crimes simply because they have had less time to commit such crimes."
The two attempt to estimate what the crime rate might actually be if the report monitored the post-change pool for the same time frame. It's a challenging calculation, they note, because they couldn't find any studies showing month-to-month re-arrest rates among those released pretrial. So they used some modifications in stats from the Bureau of Justice Statistics for recidivism rates among those who have been released from prison, combined with some pretrial recidivism rates from Cook County's data. They conclude that in all likelihood, Cook County's report undercounted new crimes committed by released defendants by about 1,200. When they correct for the time frame, Cassell and Fowles estimate that there was actually a 45 percent increase in the number of new crimes caused by defendants who had been released.
It's important to make it clear that this is a mathematical model, and Cassell and Fowles aren't specifically detailing a bunch of concrete new crimes that have been committed by these defendants. But part of the problem here is that the court has been reluctant to share the data Evans used with Chicago Tribune reporters, which required the newspaper to file a petition with the Illinois Supreme Court. Evans has since agreed to share his data with the newspaper.
Cassell and Fowles write that their goal is not to kill off bail reforms or scare courts away from implementing them. Rather, they are concerned about biases in self-analysis that "always lurks when an entity implementing reform later studies whether that reform is successful. In this case, it appears that many dangers stemming from the court's expansion of pretrial release were not carefully assessed by the court's own subsequent study."
These kinds of independent assessments are extremely valuable in part because these reforms are still relatively new and they make a number of people very, very nervous. Part of that fear results from deliberate scaremongering by those who have a financial or political stake in protecting a harsh status quo, like bail bond companies and jail officials.
But as the Cassell and Fowles report notes, poorly managed pretrial reforms can backfire and cause additional harms. If you agree, for example, with the argument for reform—that it's a violation of a person's rights to keep them locked up before they're convicted only because they cannot pay bail—you must also consider the risk they pose to the rights of other people if they are released before trial. In a city like Chicago, it is mostly poor people whose rights are violated by the bail requirement and mostly poor people whose rights are violated by the defendants who commit additional crimes before their trials.
If, on the other hand, you make a utilitarian argument that keeping people locked up because they're too poor to pay bail but aren't dangerous is much more expensive than letting them return home, Cassell and Fowles note that the cost-benefit analysis changes if the person commits new crimes before trial. While there are established financial harms to pretrial detention (lost jobs and housing) and established benefits to letting them out to continue to work and care for families, the economic impact of a homicide wipes out the financial benefits of letting more people out of jail.
At some point, the cost of new crimes committed by a percentage of defendants free before trial financially outweighs the savings of freeing people who aren't dangerous. Data-driven bail reform is supposed to prevent a few bad defendants from spoiling it for everyone, yet Cassell and Fowles argue that it does not appear to be working as intended in Chicago: "Given equal weight to the benefits the pool of such defendants receive when compared to the costs inflicted on victims seems dubious."
The report ends not trying to bash reforms but warning that court systems need to really explore the impact of pretrial release data and make sure they're not perpetuating new harms: "To be sure, such pretrial release reforms can have significant benefits. But only if both benefits and costs are accurately measured can a sound decision be made about which way the scales tip and whether the 'reform' was truly an improvement."
Cassell wrote about the report's release over at The Volokh Conspiracy, hosted here at Reason.
The post Chicago Judge Says His Bail Reforms Were a Success. But Independent Reviews Show Flaws and More Crimes. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"Insurers cherry-pick homes, leave flooded ones for the Feds," runs a very odd headline over at E&E News. The article goes on to explain, "Taxpayers could be forced to spend billions of dollars to bail out the federal government's flood program as private-sector insurers begin covering homes with little risk of flooding while clustering peril-prone properties in the indebted public program." Well, yes.
The E&E News article misses the exquisitely simple point made in this 2012 New York Times op-ed:
Homeowners and businesses should be responsible for purchasing their own flood insurance on the private market, if they can find it. If they can't, then the market is telling them that where they live is too dangerous [emphasis added]. If they choose to live in harm's way, they should bear the cost of that risk — not the taxpayers. Government's primary role is ensuring the safety of its citizens, so the government's subsidizing of risky behavior is completely backward.
E&E News notes that private insurers paid out only a small proportion of the flood claims made after recent major hurricanes in Florida and Texas. This suggests that the companies are good at assessing flood risks.
The E&E News article strangely claims that "an increased number of people with flood coverage could help reduce flood damage by making homeowners more aware of their risk." Of course that's right, but not being able to purchase any flood insurance at all would be a much more effective and compelling way to make homeowners aware of their risks.
Both the Trump administration and climate activists want flood insurance rates to reflect the actual risks faced by homeowners. That's exactly what private insurance can do best.
Instead of decrying private insurers for sensibly refusing to cover houses located in high-risk flood zones, the E&E News article should instead have been arguing for ending the government's National Flood Insurance Program altogether.
The post Private Flood Insurers Chastised for Not Insuring Houses Likely To Be Flooded appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Hey there, parents! Got a giggly little ghost or goblin heading out for Halloween? Not for long.
That's basically the bottom line when it comes to the advice parents get this time of year. Because Halloween combines the two things we fear most in America today—kids actually leaving the house, and food other than hummus and baby carrots being fed to them—it has become an orgy of safety warnings wrapped up in the kind of fake cheer that makes you want to reach for your scythe.
"Halloween is an amazing holiday, when kids get to indulge in make-believe play and of course tons of candy! Unfortunately, as fun as this spooky holiday can be, it is statistically one of the most dangerous nights of the year."
So begins a typical upbeat/doomsday blog post, this one by a pediatrician who divides her warnings into such chipper categories as "Candy Catastrophes" and "Burns, Bruises and Broken Bones."
Burns are bad. Putting lit candles into pumpkins does seem stupid in this post-Edison era. But the author suggests that you not only get your kid a costume that isn't flammable, you also "go over and practice the principle of stop-drop-roll with your child, just in case his or her clothes catch on fire."
Hey kids! Let's get ready for a fun night…and melted flesh! A tradition that is actually extremely benign—kids playing dress-up and visiting the neighbors—is seen through the lens of extreme risk aversion, with every aspect given the attention usually reserved for a plane crash post-mortem.
"The nature of the holiday alone can make it perilous, as children wear loose fitting costumes." That's the staid U.S. News & World Report, getting worked up about tripping. Tripping! Kids trip all the time, but come Halloween that fact is rewritten as a "peril" that parents must take serious steps to avoid. The mommy blog She Knows goes so far as to tell parents to case the route in advance to make sure there are no "sidewalks in disrepair."
I guess if there's a crack, everyone will just have to stay home and play video games instead.
"Masks can limit your kid's range of vision," warns another safety site—which then warns about the alternative to masks: "Make sure to test any face paint on a small patch of skin a few days before Halloween to make sure your kid doesn't have a bad reaction." Parents are being told to prepare for the holiday as if it's outpatient surgery.
And of course, this is the month brought to you by the word tampering. So every article on the holiday insists you inspect your kids' hauls before allowing them so much as a single Smartie. Never mind the fact that no child has ever been killed by a stranger's candy. Lately, the warnings have evolved beyond "don't eat a Nestlé Crunch if there's already a bite taken out" to "have a system in place for your kids to trade out their trick or treating loot for other non-candy goodies when they get home" (advice from Molly Dresner, author of The Speech Teacher's Handbook).
A system in place? Doesn't that sound just a tad obsessive?
It has become almost a competition to see who can come up with the most outlandish fear and demand the most outlandish precautions. So the parenting lifestyle blog Babble told folks that if their little witch demands nail polish for the night, this should be applied with the windows open or, even better, outside, so the kid doesn't inhale dangerous fumes. Last year I overheard an acquaintance's tween daughter telling her friends that she'd wanted to wear a fake leather jacket for Halloween but nixed it because it was made of plastic and this could give her cancer.
"No, it won't," I butted in.
"I don't want to die young," the girl retorted.
You gotta feel bad for the kids being driven from house to house in their not-too-long, nontoxic costumes, only to be allowed one well-wrapped treat at the end of the evening. But I feel even worse for parents, who are told they're basically killing their kids if they aren't on guard every second against cars, cancer, creeps, candles, candy, and—mwahahahaha!—cracks in the sidewalk.
The post Halloween Is Supposed To Be (a Little) Scary appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Just when you might have thought that economics was played out as a way for us to understand the world, along comes Allison Schrager, a Ph.D. economist who writes for Quartz, teaches at New York University, and is the co-founder of LifeCycle Finance Partners, a risk-advisory firm.
She's the author of the provocative new book, An Economist Walks Into a Brothel: And Other Unexpected Places To Understand Risk. In the opening chapter, Schrager describes spending time at Nevada's famous Moonlite Bunny Ranch and learning how both sex workers and customers pay a premium to minimize and manage all sorts of risks involved in legal prostitution (the prostitutes don't have to worry about screening potential customers or being arrested, for instance, and the johns don't have to worry about being ripped off, blackmailed, or catching a disease). She hangs out with paparazzi who stalk celebrities for high-value candid photographs worth tens of thousands of dollars but more often end up with no pictures at all. She attends an annual conference where big-wave surfers share information and new ideas about minimizing potentially deadly risks inherent in their sport. Other chapters cover professional poker players, horse breeders, a major battle in the 1991 Iraq War, and more.
Schrager combines an economist's analytic framework with a journalist's eye for detail and narrative, resulting in a book that is both difficult to put down and helpful when it comes to managing the risks we face every day, from planning for retirement to switching jobs to thinking about romantic relationships. An Economist Walks Into a Brothel also carries with it an implicitly—and at times explicitly—libertarian message about intentionality and responsibility when it comes to living life to the fullest. Schrager notes that there's no way to fully eliminate risk in our lives but that by using tools provided by financial economics, we "can make better choices and reduce risk."
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]]>If you think that all economists spend most of their time sitting at a desk plotting supply and demand curves, you haven't met Allison Schrager, author of the new book An Economist Walks Into a Brothel.
As her title promises, she visited the Moonlite Bunny Ranch in Nevada to learn how sex workers and their clients manage the risks that come even with legal prostitution. A Ph.D. economist who writes for Quartz, Schrager traveled the country to see how people in high-risk, high-reward fields such as horse breeding, candid celebrity photography, professional poker, and big-wave surfing assess and manage risk. The result is a compelling blend of first-person reporting and high-level economic analysis that gives individuals a new way not to avoid risk, but to make more-informed choices.
"People should feel more comfortable taking risks," Schrager tells Nick Gillespie. "We don't really give people the tools to feel comfortable with risk taking, but you really do need to take risks to make your life move forward and any aspect of your life, [whether] it's a relationship or your job." Their aren't any guarantees in life, she explains, but there are definitely smarter and dumber ways to take risks.
Interview by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Alexis Garcia. Camera by Jim Epstein.
To listen to separate, longer podcast that Nick Gillespie recorded with Schrager, go here now.
Photo credits: s_bukley/Newscom, Blainey Woodham/ZUMA Press/Newscom, Scott Serio/Cal Sport Media/Newscom, Steve Marcus/REUTERS/Newscom, Erich Schlegel/ZUMA Press/Newscom, Richard Hallman/ZUMA Press/Newscom, Tony Heff/ZUMA Press/Newscom.
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The post An Economist Walks Into a Brothel: What Prostitutes and Big-Wave Surfers Can Teach Us About Risk appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The U.S. government spends over $100 billion a year fighting terrorism, a risk that kills about as many Americans as lightning strikes or accidents involving home appliances, notes the Dartmouth political scientist Jeffrey A. Friedman in a fascinating new study, "Priorities for Preventive Action: Explaining Americans' Divergent Reactions to 100 Public Risks."
Actually, he got that slightly wrong. In 2017, the government spent $175 billion on counterterrorism.
Like many other earnest media explainers, I have believed that many of my fellow Americans simply don't understand how minuscule the risk of dying in a terrorist attack is and that providing them with the relevant data would calm them down. Once voters understand how low the terrorism risk really is, I thought, surely they will want some of those social resources to go to addressing higher mortality risks, such as heart disease and traffic accidents. I was puzzled why this strategy has not worked. Friedman's research has gone a long way toward dispelling my puzzlement.
Friedman surveyed 3,000 Americans about how they perceive 100 life-threatening risks along nine dimensions:
He found that Americans actually have a pretty good idea about which risks cause more harm than others. But he also found that "Americans' risk priorities reflect value judgments, particularly regarding the extent to which some victims deserve more protection than others and the degree to which it is (in)appropriate for government to intervene in different areas of social life. These subjective beliefs shape the perceived benefits and costs of government spending in ways that go beyond objective metrics like lives saved or dollars spent."
For example, perceptions of agency shape citizens' willingness to tolerate public risk. He points out that "the mortality rate among motorcyclists is far larger than the probability that a randomly-chosen American will be killed by a terrorist. Yet motorcyclists knowingly accept risk, whereas terrorists' victims bear no responsibility for their deaths." The "unfairness" of terrorist attacks leads many Americans to judge that it is reasonable that government should prioritize counterterrorism over motorcycle safety, even with the knowledge that terrorism claims many fewer lives.
Consequently, in his survey of 100 risks, Americans assign addressing motorcycle accidents to 79th place as a priority, whereas terrorism is in third place. As it happens, 5,286 people died in motorcycle accidents in 2016, and 59 people died in terrorist attacks in the U.S. that year. (The latter figure includes the 49 people killed in the Pulse nightclub attack in Orlando, Florida.)
Friedman concludes that his "findings raise clear questions about how voters develop the subjective beliefs that appear to drive their policy preferences. What makes some people think that dying in a terrorist attack is more 'unfair' than dying from a preventable disease? What makes some people think that governments have more responsibility to avert potential future harm caused by climate change rather than funding proven methods for saving lives today? And how malleable are these judgments? The answers to these questions have major significance for debates like what it would take to convince the American public to accept lower defense expenditures, to ramp up efforts to combat global warming, or to pursue any other major recalibration in risk priorities."
Nevertheless, silly people like me remain deluded into thinking that there is such a thing as objective risk data that should be given substantial weight when choosing among public policy proposals. I hope still that my fellow citizens will recalibrate their views on whether it's wise to spend tens of billions of dollars on counterterrorism measures.
The post 'Fairness' Outweighs Objective Data When Americans Evaluate Risks appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A proposal to scale back federally operated screening at small airports has been abandoned. Security theater wins again.
CNN reported in August on a potential plan to eliminate security checkpoints operated by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) at 150 smaller airports in the United States. The proposal called for passengers from those small airports to go through security at larger airports for any connecting flights.
It wasn't a huge plan, affecting only 0.5 percent of domestic fliers. Yet, some had a massive freakout over the very idea that a small number of fliers might not be fondled by federal officials before boarding planes. They saw a security vulnerability, even though there are already several airports within the United States that have privately operated screening, not TSA screeners. Presumably, these other airports would implement some sort of screening of their own.
Alas, there will be no scaling back of the oppressive TSA apparatus: TSA Administrator David Pekoske told Congress Wednesday that his agency will not go forward with the plan. What's more, Pekoske told legislators the TSA needs to actually "Improve our security profile at smaller airports."
Disappointing, but hardly surprising. As I noted when this concept was leaked to CNN, the trend for airport security under President Donald Trump's administration has been more theater, not less. Even the now-scrapped plan was a neglible reform; it would not have saved money or spared travelers from overly intrusive security measures. It would simply have redirected the security spending–and TSA encounters for small airport fliers–to the larger airports.
We also shouldn't be surprised that the TSA wants to make security even more oppressive. We know now that the Department of Homeland Security is going completely overboard with tracking some domestic air travelers, sending air marshals to stalk Americans as they travel, even though there's no actual suspicion of wrong-doing, just previous overseas visits to certain countries. The security theater has gotten so absurd that even the air marshals themselves are complaining, wondering why they're being forced to play spy games tracking some social media manager of an arts-and-crafts company simply because she went to Turkey.
Despite the complaints from the air marshals and the fact that this program has found absolutely no evidence of criminal or terrorist threats, the TSA is insisting that it's going to continue. So we shouldn't really be shocked that the TSA would quickly abandon the idea that not every airport requires federal employees to grope out terrorists.
The post TSA To Continue Fondling Travelers at Small Airports appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is considering a proposal to eliminate its security checkpoints at small airports. You'd think from some of the responses that the agency is planning to hire Islamic State terrorists as screeners.
According to documents that TSA officials provided to CNN, the plan would eliminate the agency's screening services at 150 small airports across the United States. The people who fly through these airports would not necessarily be free from security-theater hassles. If they had connecting flights at a larger airport, they would have to go through that airport's TSA-operated security. The change would affect an estimated 10,000 passengers daily, 0.5 percent of fliers.
The goal would be to "save" $115 million a year and redirect the money to security at larger airports. The proposal doesn't really seem to be a money saver, and it's not clear if it's going to be much of a time saver for travelers. It's also not clear whether the TSA is treating the idea seriously. A TSA spokesperson told CNN the agency frequently analyzes the impact of potential adjustments like this.
Under the Trump administration, the security theater at airports has been ramped upward, not downward. The administration seems intent on keeping Americans fearful that terrorists are out to get us.
Major news organizations are happy to help. Apparently CNN and The Washington Post could only find folks who think the TSA proposal is a terrifyingly bad idea with no potential benefit. Mary Schiavo, a former Transportation Department inspector general, offered the Post this overheated take:
Schiavo said people would be afraid to fly if TSA ended screenings at their local airports.
"Not only will this destroy any reasonable security over American skies, it will destroy small towns and cities across the country because they will virtually have no air service," she said.
"You poor folks from, say, Toledo, Ohio, you only have three regional flights a day," Schiavo said. "We're not going to do any security for you. Would anyone fly from Toledo? Absolutely not. What does it do to Toledo, Ohio? Destroys it. You'll have no air service. No one's going to get on a plane without security. It's not only terrorists, it's nut cases."
Schiavo bizarrely assumes that if small airports have no TSA screeners they won't have any security, and people will be so terrified that the airports will have to shut down. Or maybe—stick with me here—maybe they'll hire their own security? That's a thing that happens. It was a thing that was happening prior to the September 11 attacks. While it's true airports were much more accessible back then, there were still security checkpoints. If there's a market for flights from these smaller airports, they will find a way to secure themselves without having to rely on the TSA.
In fact, several small (and not-so-small) airports have already replaced TSA staff with private screeners. They operate under the same security protocols as the TSA, so passengers might not even notice the difference. But such arrangements make it easier for airports to hold screeners accountable for their job performance, a welcome change in light of frequent complaints about the aggressive behavior and bad attitudes of some TSA employees.
Schiavo's poor grasp of risk and how market pressures can provide safety solutions is nothing new. In a 1997 review of her book Flying Blind, Flying Safe, Robert Poole, director of transportation policy at the Reason Foundation (which publishes this website), took her to task for a naïve belief in more and more safety regulations, no matter their cost or effectiveness.
The post Will TSA Eliminate Security Checkpoints at Small Airports? If Only. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"Area Man Will Be Lucky to Live Until Tomorrow" sounds like a headline in the satirical newspaper The Onion. But plenty of Area Men (and Area Women) could be forgiven for thinking just that. Americans often have a poor idea of the risks they face, and plenty of people seem to delight in keeping the public scared.
Earlier this month The New York Times published an opinion column on "The Formaldehyde in Your E-Cigs." It noted that "in public health circles, people now tend to call [electronic cigarettes] by what they do: deliver nicotine. … Thus, the term Electronic Nicotine Delivery Systems, ENDS for short, has come into vogue."
But the author, an assistant professor of public health at Harvard, confesses that "I have a problem with that name. Nicotine isn't the only thing e-cigs deliver; they also deliver formaldehyde, a carcinogen. It seems equally fair to call them Electronic Formaldehyde Delivery Systems."
This sounds bad. Awful, in fact. But while the piece notes that manufacturers are not intentionally putting formaldehyde in electronic cigarettes—the chemical forms as a process of heating the liquid in them—it never says just how much formaldehyde an e-cig delivers. The closest it comes is: "sometimes, a lot of it." But how much is a lot?
Well, one of the studies the column cites found that formaldehyde in 10-puff aerosols generated from newer e-cigarettes ranged from 8.2 micrograms to 40.4 micrograms. Another study found up to 626 micrograms of formaldehyde per cubic meter of e-cig vapor.
Fair enough. But formaldehyde is not exactly rare elsewhere. It shows up in significant amounts in vaccines: up to 100 micrograms in the DTaP (diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis) vaccine given to children, for example. The FDA says formaldehyde has "a long history of safe use" in vaccines, and that formaldehyde "is also produced naturally in the human body as a part of normal functions." (It also says the cancer risk is highest "when formaldehyde is inhaled." Then again, "highest" is not the same as "high.")
Formaldehyde shows up in foods as well. The American Council on Science and Health cites European research showing that apples contain as much as 6.8 milligrams per kilogram (one milligram equals 1,000 micrograms). Potatoes contain as much as 19.5 milligrams per kilogram. Should we then refer to vaccines and potatoes as "Formaldehyde Delivery Devices"?
Before conservative opponents of regulating e-cigarettes start feeling superior, though, they should ask their friends on the right why they made Kate Steinle into a household name. Steinle was killed in San Francisco by an illegal immigrant who had been deported several times, and she was turned into a martyr by opponents of sanctuary cities, of which San Francisco is one.
Thing is, cases such as Steinle's are exceedingly rare. In fact, undocumented immigrants commit crime less than half as often as native-born Americans—and the homicide conviction rate for undocumented immigrants is 25 percent below that of native-born Americans. The homicide rate for legal immigrants is 87 percent lower. This suggests that one way (albeit a flippant one) to reduce violent crime in America might be to deport two American citizens for every immigrant, legal or illegal, who enters the country.
Or take terrorism—reaction to which has given us the Patriot Act, Guantanamo, waterboarding, the TSA, police militarization, and domestic surveillance that makes Facebook's data harvesting look like the magic X-ray glasses they advertise in comic books.
Yet how big is the terrorist threat to the average American? Vanishingly small: For the four-decade period from 1975 through 2015, the odds of an American dying in a terrorist attack carried out by a foreigner on U.S. soil have been 1 in 3.6 million. If that foreign terrorist is a refugee, the odds drop to 1 in 3.64 billion. And if that foreign terrorist is an illegal immigrant, the odds fall to 1 in 10.9 billion.
By contrast, the odds of being killed by a wild animal are about 1 in 30,000. In 2014, terrorists killed 17 Americans in the U.S. That same year, lightning killed 25 U.S. residents, dogs killed 36, and animals other than dogs killed 83.
On Friday, thousands of people here in Richmond, Virginia, will march against school gun violence—a commendable cause to be sure. But how many of them realize schools have been getting more safe, rather than less? From 1995 to 2015, the percentage of students who report being victimized at school has fallen by two-thirds. School shootings take 10 lives a year, on average. Roughly 100 students die each year riding their bicycles to or from school. Fifty million students attend public school in the U.S.
That doesn't make the murder of innocent schoolchildren by crazed gunmen any less heinous or horrible. But it does suggest that—as in so many other cases—the level of risk and the level of fear have little to do with each other.
The post Relax—You'll Probably Survive Until Tomorrow appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>On Halloween the media scare people with stories about dangerous costumes and poison candy. Most of the stories are not even true.
Lots of things Americans are scared of pose little risk.
John Stossel goes to Times Square and asks people what scares them. Most answered with low-risk dangers, like sharks, spiders, horses, and plane crashes. Common among the answers was the fear of losing control.
Flying scares many people more than driving. That's because in cars we feel in control. But there are more than 90 deaths a day from car crashes. No one's died in an American commercial plane crash in years.
Stossel says it's not good to fear so much. Fear is a friend of big government. Politicians use our fear to say, "there ought to be a law!"
Yet life in America is safer than ever. Don't let the media, and politicians, wreck your Halloween!
The post Stossel: Fear vs. Risk appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>First, condolences to those who lost friends and family last night as a result of the terrorist bombing in Manchester, U.K. According to the latest reports, at least 22 people are dead and 59 were injured in attack. The brutal thugs who run ISIS are claiming credit for the murders.
The British government defines terrorism as "the use of violence for political ends," including "any use of violence for the purpose of putting the public, or any section of the public, in fear." While it's hard not to be fearful in the aftermath of an attack, especially in our era of wall-to-wall media coverage, knowing just how severe a threat terrorism poses to people's safety might help keep that fear at bay.
According to The Telegraph's comprehensive analysis, 90 people died in Britain between 2000 and 2015 as a result of terrorism. The Telegraph notes that more than 1,000 people were killed by terrorists in the U.K. during the prior 15-year period—basically a reduction of 90 percent. That decline can be attributed to the abatement of IRA terrorism after the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 and the inclusion of 271 deaths from the Libyan bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988.
Given that the U.K.'s population is 65 million, that means that the chance of being killed by a terrorist between 2000 and 2015 was less than 1 in 700,000. For perspective, in those same 15 years 42,000 Britons died in automobile accidents. Indeed, more Britons die annually from drowning in their bathtubs. Even if ISIS' current campaign marks a riskier period for Britain, it will have a long way to go before terror deaths exceed the rates experienced by the U.K. during the last 30 years of the 20th century.
Of course, most of us do not fear car crashes and bathtub drownings as such; they are everyday background risks that barely register in the media. The malevolent intentions that motivate murders, and especially those caused by terrorist bombings and vehicle rampages, heighten our sense of vulnerability even if a risk is objectively small.
But with risks this low, those of us who live in western democracies should continue to forthrightly live our lives as though terrorism doesn't exist. We ultimately vanquish terrorism when we refuse to be terrorized.
Again, condolences for the lost lives and best wishes for the speedy convalesence of those injured by the attack in Manchester.
Bonus link: "September 11: Remembering the Lives and Liberties Lost 15 Years Ago."
The post Don't Be Terrorized: U.K. Edition appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"It's gotten to a point where it's not even being reported. In many cases, the very, very dishonest press doesn't want to report it," asserted President Donald Trump a month ago. He was referring to a purported media reticence to report on terror attacks in Europe. "They have their reasons, and you understand that," he added. The implication, I think, is that the politically correct press is concealing terrorists' backgrounds.
To bolster the president's claims, the White House then released a list of 78 terror attacks from around the globe that Trump's minions think were underreported. All of the attackers on the list were Muslim—and all of the attacks had been reported by multiple news outlets.
Some researchers at Georgia State University have an alternate idea: Perhaps the media are overreporting some of the attacks. Political scientist Erin Kearns and her colleagues raise that possibility in a preliminary working paper called "Why Do Some Terrorist Attacks Receive More Media Attention Than Others?"
First they ask how many terror attacks have taken place between 2011 and 2015. (The 2016 data will become available later this summer.) The Global Terrorism Database at the University of Maryland, which catalogs information on over 150,000 incidents since 1970, defines terrorism as an "intentional act of violence or threat of violence by a non-state actor" that meets at least two of three criteria. First, that it be "aimed at attaining a political, economic, religious, or social goal." Second, that there is "evidence of an intention to coerce, intimidate, or convey some other message to a larger audience (or audiences) other than the immediate victims." And finally, that it be "outside the precepts of International Humanitarian Law."
The Georgia State researchers report that the database catalogs 110 terrorist attacks in the U.S. over the most recent five-year span period in the database. (Globally, there were more than 57,000 terrorist attacks during that period.) In some cases, the media tended to report several attacks perpetrated by the same people as a single combined story; following their lead, the researchers reduce the number to 89 attacks.
They then set out to answer four different questions: Would an attack receive more coverage if the perpetrators were Muslim, if they were arrested, if they aimed at government employees or facilities, or if it resulted in a high number of deaths?
From a series of searches at LexisNexis and CNN.com, Kearns and her colleagues gathered a dataset of 2,413 relevant news articles. If each attack had received equal media attention, they would have garnered an average of 27 news articles apiece. Interestingly, 24 of the attacks listed in the GTD did not receive any reports in the news sources they probed. For example, a cursory Nexis search failed to turn up any news stories about a 2011 arson attack on townhouses under construction in Grand Rapids, Michigan. An internet search by me did find several local news reports that cited a threatening letter warning residents to leave the neighborhood: "This attack was not isolated, nor will it be the last. We are not peaceful. We are not willing to negotiate." The GTD reports so far that no one has been apprehended for the attack.
For those five years, the researchers found, Muslims carried out only 11 out of the 89 attacks, yet those attacks received 44 percent of the media coverage. (Meanwhile, 18 attacks actually targeted Muslims in America. The Boston marathon bombing generated 474 news reports, amounting to 20 percent of the media terrorism coverage during the period analyzed. Overall, the authors report, "The average attack with a Muslim perpetrator is covered in 90.8 articles. Attacks with a Muslim, foreign-born perpetrator are covered in 192.8 articles on average. Compare this with other attacks, which received an average of 18.1 articles."
Some non-Muslims did get intense coverage. Wade Michael Page, who killed six people in an attack on a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, generated 92 articles, or 3.8 percent of the dataset. Dylann Roof's murder of nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, inspired 179 articles, or 7.4 percent. Robert Dear's slaying of three people at a Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs led to 204 articles, or 8.5 percent. Still, "Controlling for target type, fatalities, and being arrested, attacks by Muslim perpetrators received, on average, 449% more coverage than other attacks."
No doubt this greater media focus on Muslim perpetrators has badly skewed the public's—and Trump's—impressions about the sources of terrorist attacks in the U.S. On the other hand, the Georgia State researchers do not acknowledge an important difference between the purveyors of jihadist ideology and domestic racists like Page and Roof. ISIS and Al Qaeda are adroit publicists who have leveraged their relatively few attacks into successfully instilling a sense of terror into many Americans.
The Georgia State researchers conclude: "By covering terrorist attacks by Muslims dramatically more than other incidents, media frame this type of event as more prevalent. Based on these findings, it is no wonder that Americans are so fearful of radical Islamic terrorism. Reality shows, however, that these fears are misplaced."
Such fears are indeed misplaced. Your risk of being killed in a jihadist terror attack in the last 15 years amounted to roughly 1 in 2,640,000. Even if you stretch the period back to include 9/11, the risk would still just have been 1 in 110,000. Your lifetime risk of dying in a lightning strike is 1 in 161,000, and your chance of being killed in a motor vehicle crash is 1 in 114. Given that our government has already squandered more than $500 billion on homeland security, while encroaching on our liberties, it is vital that Americans keep the threat of terrorism in perspective. This new study is one small step in that direction.
The post Do Muslims Commit Most U.S. Terrorist Attacks? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"It's gotten to a point where it's not even being reported. In many cases, the very, very dishonest press doesn't want to report it," asserted President Donald Trump a month ago. He was referring to a purported media reticence to report on terror attacks in Europe. "They have their reasons, and you understand that," he added. The implication, I think, is that the politically correct press is concealing terrorists' backgrounds.
To bolster the president's claims, the White House then released a list of 78 terror attacks from around the globe that Trump's minions think were underreported. All of the attackers on the list were Muslim—and all of the attacks had been reported by multiple news outlets.
Some researchers at Georgia State University have an alternate idea: Perhaps the media are overreporting some of the attacks.
The post Are the 'Dishonest' Media Really Under-Reporting Terrorist Attacks? New at <em>Reason</em> appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A new article in Science is reporting that most cancers in people are the result random copying errors that occur when cells in the body divide. Applying some sophisticated mathematics to the question of how the mutations that lead to cancers are produced, Johns Hopkins University cancer researchers Cristian Tomasetti and Bert Vogelstein, sought to figure out what causes 32 different types of cancers. The press release accompanying the report notes that when the two researchers looked "across all 32 cancer types studied, the researchers estimate that 66 percent of cancer mutations result from copying errors, 29 percent can be attributed to lifestyle or environmental factors, and the remaining 5 percent are inherited."
Additionally, they calculated how big a role random errors played for various types of cancers. For example, when critical mutations in pancreatic cancers are added together, 77 percent of them are due to random DNA copying errors, 18 percent to environmental factors, such as smoking, and the remaining 5 percent to heredity. For prostate, brain or bone cancers, more than 95 percent of the mutations that lead to malignancy are due to random copying errors. However, environment does play a big role in lung cancer in which 65 percent of all the mutations are mostly due to smoking, and 35 percent are due to DNA copying errors. Inherited factors are not known to play a role in lung cancers.
The risk of cancer goes up with age. People over age 65 account for 60 percent of newly diagnosed malignancies and 70 percent of all cancer deaths. Why? Because their bodies have experienced many more cell divisions and thus have had greater chances for the sort of random genetic errors that lead to cancer to occur.
Given that Americans face a lifetime risk of around 40 percent of suffering from cancer, what can be done? The researchers note: "Early detection and intervention can prevent many cancer deaths. Detecting cancers earlier, while they are still curable, can save lives regardless of what caused the mutation. We believe that more research to find better ways to detect cancers earlier is urgently needed."
The post Biggest Cause of Cancer? Just Plain Old Bad Luck appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Out: No Child Left Behind.
In: No Child Left Alone. Ever!
Writing at Bloomberg View, former Reasoner Virginia Postrel tracks the sad shift from a world in which kids could be left to their own devices for larger and larger periods of time as they got older to a culture in which children need more oversight than convicted serial killers in a super-max prison. Snippets:
Only in the past decade or so has "no child left alone" become the social and legal norm in the U.S. A doctoral student in cognitive science at the University of California at Irvine, [Ashley] Thomas is the lead author of a recently published study designed to understand what's going on. After all, under most circumstances, the objective risk to children left by themselves is extremely low. The chances that a stranger will abduct and kill or not return a child—the great fear driving the new norm—is about 0.00007 percent or one in 1.4 million annually. It's much more dangerous to drive a child somewhere, or even to walk with one across a parking lot, than to leave a kid alone in a well-ventilated car.
Postrel writes up Thomas' study, which unearths a particularly awful reasoning process in what H.L. Mencken called the Great Boob Public:
"People don't only think that leaving children alone is dangerous and therefore immoral," the researchers write. "They also think it is immoral and therefore dangerous. That is, people overestimate the actual danger to children who are left alone by their parents, in order to better support or justify their moral condemnation of parents who do so."
The result is a feedback loop that increases the legal and social penalties for leaving kids alone and reinforces the belief that even the briefest parental absence amounts to child abuse. These beliefs don't just affect busybodies. They lead police, prosecutors, judges and jurors to overestimate risks.
The result of such attitudes? More and more government-gone-wild horror stories of the sort reported at Reason by Lenore Skenazy and others (Postrel links to the mistreatment of Julie Koehler that Skenazy wrote about here).
The "no child left alone" attitude, coming soon to a courtroom near you, is the obvious endpoint of what I talked about in Reason as "Child-Proofing the World" back in 1997.
Things sure are different nowadays with the kids, and in a most puzzling way. By most standards, the vast, overwhelming majority of American children are doing better than ever. With some notable, insistent, and tragic exceptions, indicators such as mortality and accident rates, life expectancy, and educational attainment all suggest that the kids are more than all right. In fact, they are flourishing, brimming over with the potential to live longer, to live better, and to be smarter than their parents (just as their parents outstripped their parents).
And yet, the national discourse on children–the way we talk about "the kids" and their future—describes a tableau of unremitting fear and trembling, a landscape marked by relentless risk and deprivation. Although apocalyptic rhetoric in general has diminished in recent years—overpopulation, nuclear war, global warming, and the like just don't pack the same wallop they did in years past—the air remains thick with stories of how children must be protected from a world that is conceived largely as a malevolent presence that seeks only to hurt them, a sort of Mad Max environment for the younger set.
While not exactly new, this trend has been intensifying over the past two decades or so, lurching from isolated scares about poisoned Halloween candy in the 1970s and child abduction in the 1980s to a generalized calculus that places perceived harm to children at the center of seemingly every discussion. The tendency is ubiquitous enough to be fair game for parody. On The Simpsons, for instance, one character routinely asks at any public gathering, "What about the children?"
In that nearly 20-year-old story, I pointed to parenting styles and social obsessions prevalent among baby boomers as informing the bizarre mismatch in kids' better-and-better situations and parents' greater-and-greater anxiety about the safety and well-being of their offspring. Read the whole thing for the detailed causes, though a short list includes a decrease in the number of children per family, an increase in the personal and social investment in children, a warped understanding both of how trauma affects kids and how widespread trauma really is, and a media-informed desire to give your kid an advantage in all sorts of activities.
Snowflakes aren't born, they're made. And now we have entered a phase where our overactive imaginations about threats to children have been institutionalized into really bad legal, educational, and social-work systems.
Bonus reading: No Child Left Alone is a new book about this very phenomenon. I'll be talking with the author, Abby W. Schachter, soon, so look for a Reason interview in the coming weeks. It's a book that's well worth reading.
The post Former Latch-Key Kids Who Are Now Parents, Unite! appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Zika virus infections caused by local mosquito bites has now spread to three Florida counties. So far there are only 43 cases. The disease could become much more widespread if the Sunshine State gets whacked by a tropical storm. The disease is chiefly transmitted via the Aedes aegypti mosquito, and as it happens there is a technology available that has been shown to reduce the populations of that vermin by more than 90 percent. You might think that folks menaced by Zika (or any other mosquito-borne disease) would embrace such a technology, but you would be wrong. Why?
Because the technology consists of male mosquitoes that are genetically modified to pass along a lethal gene to their progeny. Whisper the words "genetically modified" and some GMO-phobic folks flee into the night screaming something about protecting their precious bodily fluids—and so it has been in Key Haven, Florida.
Several years ago, the elected Mosquito Control Board of Key West invited Oxitec, the company that grows the Friendly Mosquitos, to release them in the Key Haven section of Key West to see if they would reduce the population of mosquitoes then-spreading dengue fever. Some GMO-phobic residents managed to delay the plan by entangling it FDA redtape. However, the FDA regulators earlier this month finally issued a safety finding of "no significant impact," essentially greenlighting the release.
Now Florida Keys GMO-phobes are demanding that they get to vote on whether or not they can force their neighbors to endure a higher risk of being infected with the Zika virus. Well, since it's all democratic and so forth that means that no one is forcing anyone to do anything, right? The New York Times quotes Key Haven resident and GMO-phobe Ms. Jitka Olsak: "We are not going to be laboratory mice. Nature takes care of its own things."
Yeah, just like it did malaria, yellow fever, polio, smallpox, guinea worm ….
The post Your Neighbors Get to Vote on How Much Zika Risk You Have to Take appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>When The New York Times last year in a front-page editorial called for a full ban and confiscation/buyback on what they claimed they could, somehow, easily define as "assault weapons," I explained that the problem they were trying to solve at enormous expense in both money and the civil unrest that would arise in America from the attempt to fully remove an almost universally peacefully used object from millions of Americans hands amounted to around 2 percent of U.S. homicides.
The entire category of "rifles," of which the ones people want to ban because of their appearance and/or similarity to "military" weapons are just a portion, were used in 248 homicides in 2014.
The Marginal Revolution blog yesterday provided some more interesting context of what that number means comparatively in terms of all the FBI's data on instruments of murder in 2014, with the sums added up conveniently.
It might also be interesting that the whole number of rifle homicides has plummeted by 32 percent from 2010 til 2014, rather than being a growing crisis.
At any rate, outweighing rifles as an entire category in terms of whole numbers of murders in which they were used in 2014 in America are: Knifes, at 1,567; Blunt objects such as clubs and hammers at 435; and what the FBI calls "Personal weapons" and then defines as "hands, fists, feet, etc." at 660.
Well, nobody needs hands.
Jacob Sullum summed up well that the "assault weapons" so vilified recently are not a uniquely destructive weapon in practice in America.
More Reason on "assault weapons."
UPDATE: Commenters seem to want to assume that the "type not stated" category might be outrageously more overweighted toward rifles than are the known categories, and then weighted toward that subcategory of rifles that frightened people call "assault rifles."
In the known homicide data, rifles account for about 1/22 of the number of homicides as do handguns. I assumed lacking other evidence that the ratios would likely be roughly equal, meaning we could likely assume around 89 might be added to the "rifles" count, again a far larger category than the scary ones people want to ban.
One would have to assume that for some reason the "type not stated" is in fact mysteriously weighted toward rifles, and among that category "assault weapons," at a level four times that in the listed categories to get rifles—again, a larger category—to equal hands and fists as a murder tool.
The post Yes, in America in 2014 Bare Hands And Feet Were More Often Fatal to Americans than "Assault Weapons" appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"Je suis en terrasse!" (I am on the terrace) was the defiant slogan on the banner displayed when the Bonne Bière cafe reopened after the attack on the restaurant during the coordinated terrorist spree in Paris last November. The brasserie was the site of the first shooting which killed five patrons and injured eight others. When I was in Paris a month after the attack I heard that defiant sentiment from many Parisians: They refused to be intimidated by terrorism and continued to drink their coffee, beer, and wine seated outside (under heat lamps) at the city's cafes, bistros, and brasseries.
I spent three weeks in the city. One covering the U.N. climate change conference and two as a tourist. In the wake of the attacks, there was heightened security at most public venues such as museums, opera houses, and major churches. I did pay my respects to those murdered by the terrorists by visiting the memorials left outside Bataclan concert hall where 89 people died. But for the most part, the rhythms of the city did not seem thrown off kilter to me.
Condolences to the people who have lost loved ones in this latest atrocity. However, the notion of a city lockdown in the face of such attacks should be abhorrent to those love liberty. Residents should be free to go about their lives taking what due care they feel they must and, of course, aid the police as they pursue any remaining perpetrators and accomplices. While the evil intentionality of terrorism undeniably makes it more frightening, its effects on the lives of citizens are actually no greater than those stemming from a mass casualty accident. So far, the risk of dying in a terrorist attack in Belgium is less than 1 in 360,000; the risk of dying in a road accident is 1 in 14,000.
Recent research shows that terrorism is a near total failure as a strategy for achieving the demands of those who resort to it. In fact, it backfires and "increases the odds that target countries will dig in their political heels, depriving the non-state challengers of their given preferences."
Unfortunately, while terrorism poses absolutely no existential threat to liberal democracies, it is all too often used as an excuse to strenghten the powers of the national security surveillance state. Our civil liberties are destroyed not by terrorists, but by our own politicians.
So instead of succumbing to fear, which provokes some idiots to call for closing our borders, let us join the Parisians and toast life and liberty on the terrace.
For more background see my article, "How Scared of Terrorism Should You Be?"
The post Brussels Terrorist Attack: Refuse to Be Afraid! appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>George Mason University researcher Y.Tony Yang and his colleagues have published a new study in the American Journal of Public Health that looks at the demographic characteristics of anti-vaxxers in California. Until recently, California offered a very liberal personal belief exemption (PBE) policy that allowed parents to refuse vaccinations for their kids. Yang and his team report that between 2007 and 2013 that the portion of students with PBEs doubled from 2007 to 2013, from 1.54 percent to 3.06 percent. Who was seeking the exemptions? They report:
Across all models, higher median household income and higher percentage of White race in the population, but not educational attainment, significantly predicted higher percentages of students with PBEs in 2013. Higher income, White population, and private school type significantly predicted greater increases in exemptions from 2007 to 2013, whereas higher educational attainment was associated with smaller increases. … Personal belief exemptions are more common in areas with a higher percentage of White race and higher income.
As ArsTechnica reported:
Over that time period, more than 17,000 children attending more than 6,000 schools in California had opted out of normal vaccination schedules.
In more than 25 percent of schools in the state, the kindergartener immunization rate for measles has fallen below the 92-to-94 percent threshold that is recommended for maintaining herd immunity. That means that a quarter of California schools may not have enough vaccinated children to keep from having an outbreak, possibly endangering kids who are too young or medically unable to get vaccinated.
With a clearer look at the demographics, the authors suggest that public health experts trying to reverse the trend may need to place more emphasis on dispelling a notion among privileged whites that protective parenting can replace immunization.
In early 2015, an outbreak of measles in California eventually infected 131 residents. Most were unvaccinated and one in five had to be hospitalized.
In June, Calfornia passed law limiting BPEs. It will go into effect on January 1.
A systematic review of studies published in the journal Pediatrics in 2014 found that the health benefits of vaccines far outweigh their minimal risks. So get your kids vaccinated already!
The post Rich, White and Stupidly Anti-Vaccine in California appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Last week, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman revealed that his office is investigating ExxonMobil to see if the oil giant has misled its investors with regard to the risks that climate regulation poses to its business. ExxonMobil is not alone in Schneiderman's climate crosshairs. Yesterday, the AG's office issued a press release touting the fact that the attorney general has extracted an agreement from the coal producer Peabody Energy to include a statement that recognizes that regulations aimed to protecting the climate might reduce its profitability.
Schneiderman evidently believes that investors are ignorant sheep that can be misled by wily corporate wolves. But is it really plausible that investors in fossil fuel producing companies could have somehow missed the clamor over the risks of future climate change that burning coal, oil and natural poses. The trend of Peabody's stock price suggests otherwise. It has dropped from over a $1,000 per share in 2011 to around $15 per share today.
Schneiderman's investigation found that the company had considered various regulatory scenarios that could substantially reduce demand for its coal and failed to put that information in its annual reports. However, beginning in 2011, the company has evidently stated in its annual reports:
Enactment of laws or passage of regulations regarding emissions from the combustion of coal by the U.S. or some of its states or by other countries, or other actions to limit such emissions, could result in electricity generators switching from coal to other fuel sources.
So what did the company agree to do? Among other things, the agreement reached with the NYAG states:
Enactment of laws or passabe of regulations regarding emissions from the combustion of coal by the U.S., some of its states or other countries, or other actions to limit such emissions, could result in electricity generators switching from coal to other fuel sources or coal-fueled power plant closures. … The potential financial impact on us of future laws, regulations or other policies will depend upon the degree to which any such laws or regulations force electricity generators to diminish their reliance on coal as a fuel sources. … From time to time, we attempt to analyze the potential impact of the Company of as-yet-unadopted, potential laws, regulations and policies. These analyses sometimes show that certain potential laws, regulations and policies, if implemented in the manner assumed by the analyses, could result in material adverse impacts on our operations, financial condition or cash flow, in view of the significant uncertainty surrounding each of these potential laws, regulations and policies. We do not believe that such analyses reasonably predict the quantitative impact of future laws, regulations or other policies may have on our results of operations, financial condition or cash flows. (emphasis added)
With regard to the agreement, Peabody Energy noted in its press release:
Peabody Energy (NYSE: BTU) announced today that it has reached a resolution with the New York Attorney General's (NYAG) office regarding the company's disclosures involving climate change. Following an extensive eight-year investigation initially discussed in the company's 2007 disclosures, Peabody has agreed to amend its disclosures. There is no other action associated with this settlement, no admission or denial of wrongdoing and no financial penalty. (emphasis added)
In the AG's the press release Schneiderman declares:
"As a publicly traded company whose core business generates massive amounts of carbon emissions, Peabody Energy has a responsibility to be honest with its investors and the public about the risks posed by climate change, now and in the future. I believe that full and fair disclosures by Peabody and other fossil fuel companies will lead investors to think long and hard about the damage these companies are doing to our planet."
Is Schneiderman's crusade to extract meaningless disclosures about future climate risks from fossil fuel companies really a good use of New York state taxpayer dollars?
Disclosure: I own 50 or 100 shares (I'm too lazy to check my statements) of ExxonMobil stock that I bought with my own money. The stock prices is down from $103 in 2014 to $83 yesterday.
The post Extracting Useless Symbolic Climate Confessions from Fossil Fuel Purveyors appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>As all the world knows, yesterday the International Agency for Cancer Research (IARC), a arm of the World Health Organization, has just declared that cured meats are definitely human carcinogens and that red meats are probably carcinogens. So should you swear off bacon, hot dogs, sausage and ham? Only if you are worried about raising your lifetime risk of getting colorectal cancer from 5 percent to 6 percent, explains an article at Wired.
As the article notes, the IARC found that eating cured meats raises your risk of getting colorectal cancer by 18 percent. Since the average lifetime risk of getting the illness is about 5 percent, frequently eating bacon and assorted other tasty cured meats boosts your lifetime risk to about 6 percent. For context, smoking tobacco increases your risk of getting lung cancer by 2,500 percent, yet cured meats and tobacco are now classified together by the IARC as Group 1 (highest risk) carcinogens. From Wired:
"If this is the level of risk you're running your life on, then you don't really have much to worry about," says Alfred Neugut, an oncologist and cancer epidemiologist at Columbia.
Good news. Colorectal cancer rates are falling in the U.S. Cancer Facts & Figures 2015 notes:
Incidence rates [for colorectal cancer] have been decreasing for most ofthe past two decades, which has been attributed to both changes in risk factors and the uptake of colorectal cancer screening among adults 50 years and older.
Whatever your dietary habits, it's a very good idea to submit to a colonoscopy from time to time.
If you are nevertheless concerned, the folks over at Vegan Central, otherwise known as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) called me to let me know that they are offering …
… a free vegan starter kit and a personal vegan mentor to anyone ready to ward off cancer as well as a slew of other health issues by going vegan. Our lives may just depend on choosing a veggie burger over a bratwurst, and PETA's seasoned vegan mentors are standing by to help with a wealth of information on healthy, easy-to-find meat-free meals to enjoy at home or out on the town.
I, for one, will not be taking PETA up on its offer.
The post Your Bacon Risk of Cancer, From <em>Wired</em> appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>As Americans prepare to celebrate Independence Day, officials in the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are warning us that there's a heightened threat of Islamist terrorist attacks. CNN is reporting that law enforcement officials believe that the Islamist threat is "the highest in years." CIA deputy director turned CBS security analyst Michael Morrell declared, "I wouldn't be surprised if we're sitting here a week from today talking about an attack over the weekend in the United States. That's how serious this is."
So just how "serious" is the risk? Well, the risks to American lives aren't very big. Things don't look good, though, for the constitutional freedoms we celebrate on the Fourth.
The current spate of terrorism warnings certainly sounds scary in light of the recent terror attacks in Kuwait, Tunisia, and France. Islamic radicals linked with ISIS and Al Qaeda no doubt hope to carry out or inspire attacks in the United States. I was as horrified any other American by the September 11, 2001, atrocities. But we all need to keep in mind that terror only works if you let it.
The plain fact is that terrorism does not remotely threaten the existence of the United States. Even more importantly, it does not materially threaten you or your family. According to the Global Terrorism Database at the University of Maryland, only 68 Americans have died in terror attacks since 9/11, and that includes the 13 who died in the Fort Hood rampage by military psychiatrist Nidal Malik Hasan.
That's an average of just under 5 people per year. An additional 260 Americans were injured, including 132 in the Boston Marathon bombing, yielding an average of about 19 people wounded annually. So since 2001, your annual chances of dying or being injured in a terrorist attack have been 1 in 62 million and 1 in 16 million, respectively. For some context, note that an average of 335 people drown in their bathtubs annually, a rate of just over 1 in 900,000. Americans are 69 times more likely to die taking a bath than from terrorism.
Of the years covered by the Global Terrorism Database, the one with the most terrorist incidents in the U.S. was 1970—which also happens to be the year the data start being collected. That year saw an astonishing 468 terrorist bombings, arsons, and shootings, which were mostly perpetrated by black nationalists, student radicals, and left-wing militants, with an occasional white extremist group thrown in. These attacks killed 30 people and injured 161 others. In contrast, there were 16 deaths and 6 injuries in the database for 2014. Of those, only two deaths appear to have resulted from attacks motivated by radical Islam. Lightning strikes killed 26 Americans last year, 10 more than died in terror attacks.
When it comes to attacks specifically occurring around the Fourth of July, since 2001 four have been perpetrated by Animal Liberation Front activists, two targeted abortion clinics in Florida, one was a knifing of a Hispanic man by white supremacists in California, and one other was an attempted arson of a mosque in Missouri. Fortunately, no one died in any of those incidents.
So why do 49 percent of Americans say in a recent Gallup Poll that they are very to somewhat worried that they or a family member will become a victim of terrorism?
One big reason is that our extensive and growing security bureaucracies and their enablers in Congress have an interest in promoting those fears. As John Mueller, a political scientist at the Ohio State University, explained back in 2007, there is "a terrorism industry—politicians, bureaucrats, journalists, and risk entrepreneurs who systematically exaggerate dangers and who often profit from their fear-mongering and alarmism." Ian Lustick, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, argues that when public fears have been aroused by a spectacular attack, the standard processes of political power-grabbing can fuel a self-reinforcing cycle in which the government "can never make enough progress toward 'protecting America' to reassure Americans against the fears it is helping to stoke." Or as journalist H.L. Mencken put it, "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins."
As a result of these processes, Americans have seen their rights and freedoms eroded in ways both big and small. We live now in a "your papers please" world where we all are subject to "random" searches in order to enter government buildings or take public transport. We have lost our Fourth Amendment rights to privacy. The national security surveillance state has metastasized.
What is to be done? When the next terrorist attack occurs, we must forcefully remind ourselves that the perpetrators are seeking to destroy our open society and free institutions. By overreacting to the minimal risks they pose, we have been doing the terrorists' work for them. So if there is an attack this holiday weekend, stay calm, carry on, and above all, defend the Constitution.
The post Don't Be Terrorized By Your Government This Fourth of July appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>That's the headline for my op-ed over at the New York Daily News today. My colleague J.D. Tuccille very kindly mentioned and linked to this op-ed in his insightful post, "Keep Vaccine Choice—Long as Families Pay Their Own Way." Below are some excerpts that lay out more of my argument:
Vaccination is arguably the greatest public health triumph of the past century.
The University of Pittsburgh's Project Tycho database quantifies the prevalence of infectious disease since 1888 in the United States. The data suggest that vaccinations since 1924 prevented more than 103 million cases of polio, measles, rubella, mumps, hepatitis A, diphtheria and pertussis.
Researchers estimate that vaccination saved between 3 million and 4 million lives.
Now this dazzling success over disease, disability and early death is in danger of being undermined. Bamboozled by misinformation spread by anti-vaccine hucksters, the number of parents who are refusing to get their kids immunized is growing. The predictable result is the resurgence of highly communicable diseases.
It is long past time to aggressively counteract this threat to public health — not by resorting to government mandates and political arguments, but more importantly, through a concerted campaign of person-to-person shaming and shunning.
In speaking to friends, co-workers and neighbors, we must upset the notion that choosing not to vaccinate your child is just a personal choice. I say this not as a progressive or a liberal but as a proud libertarian — a libertarian who understands that with freedom comes responsibility. …
So how to turn the tide? People who refuse to get themselves and their kids vaccinated should be treated as deadbeats by their neighbors. They should feel the consequences of their decision.
Day-care centers should make it a policy to refuse to accept unvaccinated children. Parents arranging play dates should make a point of asking if the other kids are fully up on their inoculations. If not, they should explain to the parents of the unvaccinated children that their kids will have to go play elsewhere.
When choosing a school, parents ought to make it clear to administrators that they expect them to make sure that other students are immunized. NYU legal scholar Richard Epstein makes the point that private schools regularly send unvaccinated kids home; all public schools should have the same policy.
If parent-to-parent engagement fails to turn the tide, government might step in. In the 1905 case of Jacobson vs. Massachusetts, the Supreme Court ruled that Cambridge, Mass., could fine Henning Jacobson $5 for refusing smallpox vaccination.
Perhaps such fines — say, $250 — could today be levied against parents who refuse to get their children vaccinated.
I would prefer to live in a world where rational people take careful account of the evidence and dispassionately weigh the risks and benefits of vaccination to themselves, their families, and their neighbors. I am confident that if we did live in such a paradise of reason nearly eveyone who medically could be vaccinated would be vaccinated. Instead we evidently live in a world where politicized science is used to signal to other members of your tribe that you are on their side. Sometimes I despair that it's confirmation bias all the way down.
The post Shame and Shun Anti-Vaccine Parents appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>It's been a bizarre year for airliine crashes. Malaysia Airlines 370 is still missing, presumably lost in the depths of the Indian Ocean, possibly due to a pilot going amok. It took four months to recover the wreckage of Malaysia Airlines 17 that was shot down by Ukrainian rebels backed by Russia. And now AirAsia QZ8501 is likely missing at the bottom of the Java Sea, possibly as a result of encountering an especially heavy storm.
Despite these horrific crashes, the Bureau of Aircraft Accidents Archives reports that globally there have been 111 crashes in 2014, the lowest number since 1927. On the other hand, there have been 1,326 deaths in airline crashes this year, up from 459 last year which was the safest year since the advent of jet travel. The worst year for air travel was 1972 when 3,346 people died in crashes.
When assessing the safety of air travel keep in mind that 1.24 million people die each year in road accidents.
The post 2014: Fewest Airline Crashes Since 1927 appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>There's nothing like the feeling of a motorcycle sliding out from beneath you on a busy thoroughfare to focus the mind beautifully on the value of life. As your ass bounces from the cushioned seat toward the hard tarmac with the screech of unseen cars slamming on their brakes to your rear, you have one glorious moment in which to ask yourself: "What the hell am I doing?"
You see, that's the precise question that flashed through my mind as my accelerating rear wheel spun helplessly on an oil slick and 400lbs of Japanese machinery cushioned its fall with 170lbs of J.D. Tuccille.
My left elbow slammed against the asphalt before I had time to consider the answer.
But to a large extent, it's the question itself that matters the most: "What the hell am I doing?" Sooner or later most of us ask that same question. We ask it when we're doing something foolish, or brave, or unfamiliar, and we especially ask it when the situation goes sour—when we find ourselves airborne in late-morning traffic. And if we don't ask it of ourselves, somebody else is sure to do us the favor: "What the hell are you doing?"
The question means that we're taking risks, trying something new, or just pushing the boundaries of our usual behavior. It means that we're living, not just existing; to pass through life without facing that question would imply a tightly constrained existence lacking risk and adventure.
Not every situation that provokes the question is to our credit, of course. Sometimes we've made a mistake, sometimes we've embarrassed ourselves, and sometimes we've made a complete balls-up of a situation and we find ourselves staring up from the ground into the face of an Emergency Medical Technician. And whether we decide that our latest venture was a moment of glory or shame, it's a sure bet that somebody else views our decision with disdain; we all have our own lives, and our own very different standards by which to judge them.
But it's important to remember that while everybody has the right to ask the question of himself and others, only the person on the spot, the person living that moment has the right to decide whether the answer is justifiable—so long as that person also bears the costs and consequences of the answer, that is. And that is what gives life so much of its value. We have the right to try, to risk dignity and even death as we take the basic fact of existence and mold it into a life worthy of the name through a personal choice of experiences, occupations, and adventures.
So when others try to answer the question for us, to prevent us from taking the risk because they don't approve, they don't just do us a disservice—they rob us of the freedom that gives life its value. Through laws and taxes and regulations they try to consign us to an existence instead of a life; and this is not because the decisions they would make for us are necessarily bad decisions, but because they are not our own.
Some people—not enough—do understand this. After the accident, when the EMTs had assured themselves that my limbs were all in place and that I remembered my name, one turned to me and said: "And now for the important question: How's the bike?" (Answer: Not so good.) As an EMT he had certainly seen his share of nasty motorcycle accidents—incidents that ended with consequences more serious than my broken arm. But he understood, or at least respected, my decision to ride and to take risks that others find unacceptable.
We have the right to demand that attitude of everybody: disagree with us, call us fools, live your own lives differently, but don't try to tell us what decisions we may make in the conduct of our lives. Because the value of life is determined not by the mere drawing of one breath after another, but by the freedom to make our own decisions; to mold our lives as best we can into a shape that pleases us, and to enjoy the benefits or suffer the consequences.
What the hell was I doing? I was living my life. Now hand me my helmet or get out of the way.
The post The Right To Take (Even Really Stupid) Risks appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>This column is part of a debate over the proper view of vaccination in a free society. It began with a column by Reason's science correspondent, Ron Bailey, that argued that "people who refuse vaccination are asserting that they have a right to 'swing' their microbes at other people." Dr. Jeffrey Singer responded, writing, "To live in a free society, one must be willing to tolerate people who make bad decisions and bad choices." Bailey now continues the conversation.
I would like to thank Dr. Singer for a thoughtful response to my article. Before we get into the arguments for taking responsibility for your own microbes, let's review where Dr. Singer and I agree. First, we agree that vaccines are a safe and effective way to prevent and protect against communicable diseases. We agree that arguments to the contrary—e.g., assertions that vaccines cause autism and that thimerosal preservative is dangerous—are largely pseudoscientific nonsense. We agree that people who are known to be at a heightened risk from vaccines, such as people with impaired immune systems, should surely not be vaccinated. Interestingly, it is precisely immune-impaired people who would most benefit from the positive externality of widespread vaccination of other people. More on that topic below.
And I certainly agree with Dr. Singer when he states, "To live in a free society, one must be willing to tolerate people who make bad decisions and bad choices, as long as they don't directly infringe on the rights of others." But that is precisely what is at issue.
As Dr. Singer properly observes, one of the cornerstones of libertarian philosophy is the non-aggression principle. There is no canonical version, but at its heart is the idea that people are not permitted to initiate force against others except to defend themselves. That perspective is pretty well summarized by an Oliver Wendell Holmes quote I cited in my original article: "The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins." Just as an individual is responsible for where his fist is located vis a vis another's face, so too is he responsible for his microbes with regard another's health.
Some people object that aggression can only occur when someone intends to hit someone else; microbes just happen. Well, in medieval times, when diseases were blamed on demons and miasmas, people could not be expected to be responsible for their microbes. In the post-Pasteur era, people no longer have the excuse of ignorance. Being intentionally unvaccinated against highly contagious diseases is, to carry Holmes' analogy a bit further, like walking down a street randomly swinging your fists without warning. You may not hit an innocent bystander, but you've substantially increased the chances that you will.
One might usefully analogize the risk of disease to a crapshoot. A person's chance of being infected is, as Dr. Singer acknowledges, a matter of luck. But is it really OK for the unvaccinated to load the dice to increase the odds against other people? If so, by how much?
This raises the issue of utilitarianism. Some commenters on my original article dismissed the case of a vaccinated medical technician being hospitalized for measles caught from an intentionally unvaccinated kid, arguing that the possibility was too minor to worry about. Similarly, another observed that only 18 infants died from whooping cough out millions of babies last year. Never mind in each outbreak of whooping cough, about half of infected infants end up hospitalized. What could be more utilitarian than making those sorts of calculations? Those harmed by the irresponsibility of the unvaccinated in those cases are not being accorded the inherent equal dignity and rights that libertarians believe every individual possesses. The autonomy of the unvaccinated somehow trumps the autonomy of those they put at risk.
As central to libertarian thinking as the non-aggression principle is, there are other tenets that also inform a well-considered libertarian philosophy. One such is the harm principle, as outlined by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty. Mill argued that "the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others." In his response, Dr. Singer limits the protection of others from infectious disease to those cases in which a known individual is currently spreading disease. In such a situation, Singer that a strong case can be made for legally detaining and isolating people in quarantine. I agree. But is the libertarian case for protecting people from the risk of infectious disease limited solely to quarantining those who are currently infected?
In his response, Dr. Singer uses the plot of the science-fiction movie, Minority Report, to compare the intentionally unvaccinated to those wrongfully convicted for crimes on the basis of allegedly infallible precognition. Dr. Singer is quite right when he states, "There is no way to determine with certainty that the [intentionally unvaccinated] person will ever be responsible for disease transmission." Since that is so, he suggests, people like me must be similarly endorsing a kind of "infallible precognition" with regard to which of the unvaccinated will cause disease in innocent bystanders. Not at all.
Dr. Singer correctly notes that vaccination fails to immunize some people; that some unvaccinated never come down with vaccine-preventable diseases; and that others are simply lucky enough never to be exposed. All true, but inapt. In Minority Report, the people convicted on the basis of precog "evidence" never knew or thought that they were a danger to others. No precognition is required to know that an individual's refusal to be vaccinated against highly contagious airborne illnesses puts others at risk of death, debilitation, hospitalization, and plain old misery.
Dr. Singer notes that mothers who smoke and drink alcohol increase the risk of harms to their fetuses. Quite true, but those actions are freely chosen and they do not put other people, including other women's fetuses, at risk of disease. Exposure to rubella does. In fact, researchers have reported that 100 percent of children whose mothers were infected with rubella before 11 weeks of gestation and 35 percent infected before 14 weeks were born with severe birth defects. As late as 1965, more than 2,000 kids were born with defects resulting from rubella infections. Now that an effective vaccine against German measles is available, who is responsible for those illnesses and defects? Surely not the mothers or their fetuses.
Dr. Singer clearly accepts the epidemiological reality of the positive externality of herd immunity. With regard to free riding on positive externalities, he further argues, "So long as the person being free-ridden is getting a desired value for an acceptable price, and is not being harmed by the freeriding, it really shouldn't matter to that person." If those of us who are successfully vaccinated obtain the benefits we are seeking, why should it matter to us that some refuse those benefits?
Here's why. Herd immunity is a positive externality that the vaccinated confer upon those who are too young to be vaccinated, who experience immunization failure, or who are immunocompromised. Immunocompromised people include people who have organ transplants, people who take certain drugs to ameliorate autoimmune diseases, medically fragile children, the elderly with senescent immune systems, and those infected with HIV. In America today, it is estimated that about 10 million people are immunocompromised. It is likely that the people responsible for those too young to be vaccinated and those who are immunocompromised would choose to take advantage of the protection offered by vaccination if they could, but they can't.
On the other hand, the intentionally unvaccinated are the only group that deliberately free-rides on the positive externality of herd immunity that the rest of us confer on them. And in exchange for this benefit, the unvaccinated inflict the negative externality of being possible vectors of disease, threatening millions who must depend through no fault of their own upon herd immunity. Vaccines are like fences. Fences keep your neighbor's livestock out of your pastures and yours out of his. Similarly, vaccines keep your neighbor's microbes out of your body and yours out of his.
Dr. Singer also recognizes that free riding by the intentionally unvaccinated could get out of hand when he asks, "How many free riders should be allowed?" One useful way to think about this question is to consider the population thresholds at which herd immunity breaks down. For most of the highly contagious airborne diseases for which vaccines are available those thresholds hover around having about 90 percent of people living in a community be vaccinated. Unfortunately, due to anti-vaccination propaganda those thresholds have been breached in numerous communities across the country. Outbreaks have resulted.
Dr. Singer worries that medical authoritarians would bend the arguments for vaccination to justify intrusions on liberty in the name of public health. Sadly, he is quite right. Already, nanny-state busybodies have ginned up "epidemics" of obesity and high blood pressure. Unlike people afflicted with contagious diseases, a fat person or a consumer of excessive amounts of salt cannot give someone else excess pounds or a heart attack. The arguments for vaccination apply only to situations in which innocent bystanders are at risk of being harmed by contagious microbes. Sticking to that limiting principle would prevent a fall down a slippery slope toward public-health totalitarianism.
Now let me directly address the issue of coercion. Dr. Singer—and many other readers—have been somewhat misled by the subhead on my article, "A pragmatic argument for coercive vaccination." I did not see that subtitle until after the article was published. My original article was supposed to make a more modest argument that vaccine refusal puts others at risk and that people should be responsible for their own microbes. My intent was to leave open the question of how to hold the intentionally unvaccinated liable for the damage they cause others, hoping to provoke readers to think about the issue and debate it among themselves. I stand behind what I wrote, but the subtitle has evidently somewhat diverted that discussion.
Education and the incentives of the market have encouraged lots of Americans to get themselves and their children vaccinated. Surely those avenues of persuasion have not been exhausted and should be used more. Perhaps schools and daycare centers could attract clients by advertising that they protect their charges by refusing to admit unvaccinated students. Or social pressure might be exercised by parents who insist on assurances from other parents that their children are vaccinated before agreeing to playdates. But it would be naïve not to note that state requirements that public school children be vaccinated against many highly contagious diseases have more than merely nudged most parents into getting their children vaccinated.
In the case of vaccination, the non-aggression principle, the harm principle, and proper respect for the autonomy of others combine to point to the libertarian conclusion that the intentionally unvaccinated do not have a right to "swing" their microbes at other people.
The post Vaccines and the Responsibility To Not Put Others at Risk appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>This column is a rebuttal to an earlier column by Reason science correspondent Ron Bailey that argued that "people who refuse vaccination are asserting that they have a right to 'swing' their microbes at other people." That column excited significant reaction. Bailey will respond to Dr. Singer's piece, in turn.
In the 2002 sci-fi noir film Minority Report, PreCrime, a specialized police agency, apprehends people who are forecast to commit crimes. No trial is necessary because the not-yet-committed crime is considered a vision of the future and thus a matter of fact. The film's plot challenges viewers to consider the issue of free will vs. determinism, and consequently, the morality of punishing someone for a crime not yet committed. It serves as a useful metaphor for the argument against coercive vaccination.
Some argue that mandatory mass vaccination is an act of self-defense, and thus completely compatible with the principles underpinning a free society. Unless people are forcibly immunized, it's argued, they will endanger the life and health of innocent bystanders. But such a position requires infallible precognition.
Not everyone who is vaccinated against a microbe develops immunity to that microbe. Conversely, some unvaccinated people never become infected. Some people have inborn "natural" immunity against certain viruses and other microorganisms. (Central Africans born with sickle cell trait provide a classic example of such inborn immunity: their sickle-shaped red blood cells are inhospitable to the mosquito-borne parasite that causes malaria. But there are innumerable less obvious examples.) Finally, some people are just lucky and never get exposed to a contagious microbe.
Just like not every pregnant woman who drinks alcohol or smokes tobacco passes on a malady or disability to her newborn baby, not every pregnant woman infected with a virus or other microbe passes on the infection to her fetus—nor are all such babies born with birth defects.
A free society demands adherence to the "non-aggression principle." No person can initiate force against another, and can only use force in retaliation or in self-defense. Forcibly injecting substances—attenuated microbes or otherwise—into someone else's body can not be justified as an act of self-defense, because there is no way to determine with certainty that the person will ever be responsible for disease transmission.
Aside from the obviously pernicious societal precedent set by the initiation of force against those who have not yet committed an act of aggression, there are also practical issues to consider.
How would coercive vaccination be enforced? What degree of invasion of personal information and privacy would be needed in order to make sure that everyone is vaccinated? How much liberty and autonomy would members of society have to surrender in order to make a system of coercive vaccination work? And what kind of liberty-infringing precedents would be established by enacting a mandatory vaccination program?
Then there is the matter of "herd immunity."
The phenomenon of herd immunity allows many unvaccinated people to avoid disease because they free ride off the significant portion of the population that is immunized and doesn't, therefore, spread a given disease. Economists point out that free riding is an unavoidable fact of life: people free ride when they purchase a new, improved, and cheaper product that was "pre-tested" on more affluent people who wanted to be the first to own it; people free ride when they use word-of-mouth reviews to buy goods or services, or to see a film; those who choose not to carry concealed weapons free ride a degree of personal safety off the small percentage of the public that carries concealed weapons. So long as a person being free-ridden is getting a desired value for an acceptable price, and is not being harmed by the free riding, it really shouldn't matter to that person. Achieving a society without free riders is not only unnecessary, it is impossible.
So perhaps allowing a certain amount of free riders could mitigate the disruption to liberty caused by a mandatory vaccination program. But then, how many free riders should be allowed? And what criteria would be used to decide who gets to ride free?
As a medical doctor I am a strong advocate of vaccination against communicable and infectious diseases. I am irritated by the hysteria and pseudo-science behind much of the anti-vaccination literature and rhetoric. In my perfect world, everyone would agree with me and voluntarily get vaccinated against the gamut of nasty diseases for which we have vaccines. (In my perfect world, pregnant women wouldn't smoke tobacco or drink alcohol until after delivery.)
But free societies are sometimes messy. To live in a free society, one must be willing to tolerate people who make bad decisions and bad choices, as long as they don't directly infringe on the rights of others.
A strong argument can be made that it is self-defense to quarantine people who are infected with a disease-producing organism and are objectively threatening the contamination of others. But in such a case, the use of force against the disease carrier is based upon evidence that the carrier is contagious and may infect others.
Any mass immunization program that uses compulsion rather than persuasion will, on balance, do more harm to the well being of a free people than any good it was intended to convey.
The post Vaccination and Free Choice appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A significant proportion of Americans believe it is perfectly all right to put other people at risk of the costs and misery of preventable infectious diseases. These people are your friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens who refuse to have themselves or their children vaccinated against contagious diseases.
There would be no argument against allowing people to refuse vaccination if they and their families would suffer alone the consequences of their foolhardiness. It would be their right to forego misery-reducing and life-preserving treatments. But that is not the case in the real world.
The University of Pittsburgh's Project Tycho database, launched last week, quantifies the prevalence of infectious disease since 1888 in the United States. Drawing on Project Tycho data, a November 28 New England Journal of Medicine article concluded that vaccinations since 1924 until now prevented 103 million cases of polio, measles, rubella, mumps, hepatitis A, diphtheria, and pertussis. While the NEJM article did not calculate the number of deaths avoided as a result of vaccination, one of the study's authors estimates that number is between three and four million.
People who don't wish to take responsibility for their contagious microbes will often try to justify their position by noting the fact that the mortality rates of many infectious diseases had declined significantly before vaccines came along. And it is certainly true that a lot of that decline in infectious disease mortality occurred as a result of improved sanitation and water chlorination. A 2004 study by the Harvard University economist David Cutler and the National Bureau of Economic Research economist Grant Miller estimated that the provision of clean water "was responsible for nearly half of the total mortality reduction in major cities, three-quarters of the infant mortality reduction, and nearly two-thirds of the child mortality reduction." Improved nutrition also reduced mortality rates, enabling infants, children, and adults to fight off diseases that would have more likely killed their malnourished ancestors.
But vaccines have played a substantial role in reducing death rates too. An article in the Journal of the American Medical Association compared the annual average number of cases and resulting deaths of various diseases before the advent of vaccines to those occurring in 2006. Before an effective diphtheria vaccine was developed, for example, there were about 21,000 cases of the disease each year, 1,800 of them leading to death. No cases or deaths from the disease were recorded in 2006. Measles averaged 530,000 cases and 440 deaths per year before the vaccine. In 2006, there were 55 cases and no deaths. Whooping cough saw around 200,000 cases and 4,000 deaths annually. In 2006, there were nearly 16,000 cases and 27 deaths. Polio once averaged around 16,000 cases and 1,900 deaths. No cases were recorded in 2006. The number of Rubella cases dropped from 48,000 to 17, and the number of deaths dropped from 17 to zero.
With the latter disease, the more important measure is the number of babies, born to rubella-infected mothers, who suffered from disease-induced birth defects, such as deafness, cloudy corneas, damaged hearts, and stunted intellects. Some 2,160 infants were afflicted with congenital rubella syndrome as late as 1965. In 2006 it was one.
The risk that infectious diseases will kill innocent bystanders is not the only issue. Sheer misery counts too. The fevers, the sweats, the incessant coughs, the runny noses, the itchy rashes, and the lost days at work must be taken into account, too. And, of course, many people end up in the hospital as a result of infectious disease.
Before a chicken pox vaccine became available, upwards of four million kids got the disease every year, of which 11,000 were hospitalized and 105 died. In 2004, the estimated number cases had dropped to 600,000, resulting in 1,276 hospitalizations and 19 deaths. Before the measles vaccine was introduced in 1962, some 48,000 were hospitalized and 450 died of that infection each year. So far this year there have been 175 cases and three hospitalizations. A 1985 study by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention epidemiologist in the journal Pediatrics estimated that the first 20 years of measles vaccination in the U.S. had prevented 52 million cases, 5,200 deaths, and 17,400 cases of mental retardation.
In rich countries, few children die of rotavirus diarrheal disease, but it does kill some 500,000 kids living in poor countries annually. Prior to 2006, when vaccines against rotavirus became available, about one in five kids under the age of five in the United States annually came down with it, of which 57,000 were hospitalized. Subsequent to widespread vaccination, hospitalization rates have dropped by 90 percent. Interestingly, rotavirus hospitalizations among older children and young adults who are not immunized have also fallen by around 10,000 annually. Why? Because they are no longer are exposed to the disease in infants who would otherwise have infected them.
Vaccines do not produce immunity in some people, so a percentage of those who took the responsibility to be vaccinated remain vulnerable. This brings us to the important issue of herd immunity. Herd immunity works when most people are immunized against an illness, greatly reducing the chances that an infected person can pass his microbes along to other susceptible people, such as infants who cannot yet be vaccinated, immunocompromised individuals, or folks who have refused the protection of vaccination.
People who refuse vaccination for themselves and their children are free-riding off herd immunity. Anti-vaccination folks are taking advantage of the fact that most people around them have chosen the minimal risk of vaccination, thus acting as a firewall protecting them from disease. But if enough refuse, the firewall comes down and other people get hurt.
Oliver Wendell Holmes articulated a good libertarian principle when he said, "The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins." Holmes' observation is particularly salient in the case of whooping cough shots.
Infants cannot be vaccinated against whooping cough, so their protection against this dangerous disease depends upon the fact that most of the rest of us are immunized against it. Unfortunately, whooping cough incidence rates have been increasing along with the number of people refusing immunization for their kids. The annual number of pertussis cases fell to a low of 1,010 in 1976. Last year, the number of reported cases rose to 48,277, the highest number since 1955. Eighteen infants died of the disease in 2012, and half of the infants who got it were hospitalized.
In 2005, an intentionally unvaccinated 17-year-old girl brought measles back with her from a visit to Romania and ended up infecting 34 people. Most of them were also intentionally unvaccinated, but a medical technician who had been vaccinated caught the disease as well and was hospitalized. Despite the medical technician's bad luck, the good news is that the measles vaccine is thought to protect 99.8 percent of who get the shot. Similarly, in 2008 an intentionally unvaccinated seven-year-old boy sparked an outbreak of measles in San Diego. The boy, who caught the disease in Switzerland, ended up spreading his illness to 11 other children, all of whom were also unvaccinated, putting one infant in the hospital. Forty-eight other kids who were too young to be vaccinated were quarantined.
To borrow Holmes' metaphor, people who refuse vaccination are asserting that they have a right to "swing" their microbes at other people. There is no principled libertarian case for their free-riding refusal to take responsibility for their own microbes.
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]]>A significant proportion of Americans believe it is perfectly all right to put other people at risk of the costs and misery of preventable infectious diseases. These people are your friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens who refuse to have themselves or their children vaccinated against contagious diseases. Reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey explains why there is no principled libertarian case for vaccine refusal.
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]]>About 200 million people go to U.S. beaches each year. About 36 of those hundreds of millions are attacked by sharks. Most of them survive. In contrast, more than 30,000 of those millions of beach-goers are to be rescued from surfing accidents. And many of those humans each year die, or must be rescued, from drowning incidents in which no other creature is to blame.
I have no stats, alas, on how often shark attacks are "personal":
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]]>In its report, the ACMG panel recommended that laboratories performing clinical genome sequencing on both adults and children look at 57 specific genes for disease-causing mutations. These mutations are associated with 24 different disorders, chiefly related to cancer and heart disease risks. The laboratories, the panel continued, should report all their findings about those genes to patients and physicians so that they can take early action to prevent or reduce the chances of illness or early death. Do those recommendations violate the hallowed bioethical principle of patient autonomy?
Whole genome testing is becoming ever cheaper and more widespread, enabling testing clinics to detect not only mutations relevant to the specific illness being investigated but also genetic variants that may be associated with other disease risks. The ACMG likened the situation to the case of a competent doctor who, while investigating a patient's complaint about gastro-intestinal symptoms, also examines her cardiac and respiratory systems. For example, a physician using ultrasound to check a patient for gallstones might also discover an aortic aneurysm; the aneurysm is incidental to the gall bladder problem, but it is obviously relevant to the patient's future health. Surely most of us would agree that it would be wrong for the doctor not to tell her patient about the aneurysm.
Consider a physician who finds a number of polyps while performing a colonoscopy on a female patient. As part of her treatment plan, the physician orders a genetic test to look for possible gene variants associated with increased risk of colon and other cancers. (Labcorp, for example, offers a test that looks for particular mutations associated with higher colon cancer risk.) In this case, the patient's tissue is sent to a lab, such as Ambry Genetics or XomeDx, whose standard comprehensive genomic tests look not just for gene variants related to colon cancer but mutations in other genes that correlate with other risks as well. The results reveal that the patient, like Jolie, carries mutations in the BRCA gene that dramatically boost her lifetime risk of breast cancer. The patient has not consented to being checked for breast cancer risk. Should the lab report those findings to her physician, and should her physician tell her those results?
Three prominent bioethicists say they shouldn't. In a May 17 article for Science, Susan Wolf of the University of Minnesota, George Annas of Boston University, and Sherman Elias of Northwestern University wrote that patients "have a right to refuse testing and findings, even if potentially lifesaving. Just because many patients might want this information does not mean that it can or should be imposed on all." They dismiss the gallstone/aneurysm analogy, arguing that "patients would have no reason to expect a hunt for incidental findings in the 57 disparate genes on the ACMG list." They further point out that the ACMG list "includes genes whose analysis and reporting have long required patient consent."
The bioethicists additionally objected to giving parents incidental genomic test results obtained by testing their kids. Previous bioethical statements have called for limiting the genetic testing of children to those assays that provide information that is medically necessary for treatments during childhood, and so many bioethicists are opposed to testing kids for adult-onset risks. The idea is that when a child reaches adulthood she can decide then whether or not she would like to take such tests or know the results of earlier tests. Bioethicists also worry that knowing a kid's future genetic risks will adversely affect how parents rear the child.
The ACMG accepts that children in principle should not be tested for adult-onset genetic risks such as BRCA gene breast cancer mutations. The panel notes, however, that an incidental finding that a child carries a pathogenic mutation also suggests that there is a high probability that one parent does as well; reporting such an incidental finding could benefit the affected child by preventing a bad health outcome for her parent. In addition, in the absence of any known family history of risk, a child might benefit from being alerted to an incidental finding because, unaware of her risk, she might not otherwise get herself tested before the onset of the disease in her adulthood.
In my view, the bioethicists writing in Science are indulging in moral hyperventilation. Genomic testing companies like Ambry Genetics and XomeDx have indeed adopted the AMCG incidental findings recommendations, and they report the results to physicians and patients as a default. But they also offer test subjects and patients consent forms that allow them to opt out of learning about any incidental findings. In the real world, patients are not being forced to hear genetic information to which they have not consented. Their right to remain ignorant is being honored.
Will that practice stand? I predict that, as genomic testing becomes more precise and prognostic, failing to tell a patient about her genetic disease risks will be seen as being just as moral as neglecting to tell her about an aortic aneurysm discovered during an ultrasound examination for gallstones. Keeping people ignorant is rarely the right thing to do.
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