Cato Institute

This essay offers a framework for analyzing whether government may justifiably intervene to contain the spread of disease. Nonconsensual transmission of dangerous pathogens is an inherently violent act. This framework therefore justifies government public health activities for the same reasons and only to the same extent as other government activities. Government public health interventions are legitimate only to the extent they minimize the amount of violence in society. Violence-minimization is a more egalitarian and welfare-enhancing rule than, for example, a rule prescribing that government public health activities should minimize loss of life.

Central to modern arguments against free trade and globalization are claims that a now-decades-old surge in Chinese imports (the “China Shock”) was uniquely devastating and justifies new protectionism today. However, this popular narrative suffers from four fundamental errors. First, it ignores that the China Shock generated net economic benefits for the United States, and that its harms arose from workers’ inability to adjust to import competition, not the competition itself. Second, it erroneously contends that trade is uniquely costly when compared with other types of market-based disruption, such as automation. Third, it ignores the important economic gains that accompany this “creative destruction,” thanks in large part to individuals’ and companies’ adjustment thereto. And, finally, it overlooks the long list of government policies that thwart adjustment to disruption, whether due to trade or any other market phenomenon. Economic shocks can be painful for certain groups, but policy solutions lie not in stopping shocks from occurring but in reforming policies that prevent those affected from moving on with their lives.

Lower urinary tract dysfunction (LUTD) increases with aging. Ensuing symptoms including incontinence greatly impact quality of life, isolation, depression, and nursing home admission. The aging bladder is hypothesized to be central to this decline, however, it remains difficult to pinpoint a singular strong driver of aging‐related bladder dysfunction. Many molecular and cellular changes occur with aging, contributing to decreased resilience to internal and external stressors, affecting urinary control and exacerbating LUTD. In this study, we examined whether cellular senescence, a cell fate involved in the etiology of most aging diseases, contributes to LUTD. We found that umbrella cells (UCs), luminal barrier uroepithelial cells in the bladder, show senescence features over the mouse lifespan. These polyploid UCs exhibit high cyclin D1 staining, previously reported to mediate tetraploidy‐induced senescence in vitro. These senescent UCs were not eliminated by the senolytic combination of Dasatinib and Quercetin. We also tested the effect of a high‐fat diet (HFD) and senescent cell transplantation on bladder function and showed that both models induce cystometric changes similar to natural aging in mice, with no effect of senolytics on HFD‐induced changes. These findings illustrate the heterogeneity of cellular senescence in varied tissues, while also providing potential insights into the origin of urothelial cancer. We conclude that senescence of bladder uroepithelial cells plays a role in normal physiology, namely in their role as barrier cells, helping promote uroepithelial integrity and impermeability and maintaining the urine‐blood barrier.

An institutional cause of the rise of a national security state, one that often gets insufficient attention, is public opinion. It played an important role in supporting and inspiring—and even requiring at times—elements in the development of the extensive and excessive policing and surveillance measures that were designed to deal with Islamist terrorism within the United States after 9/11. Comparisons can be made with quests to chase other such “enemies within,” especially ones seen to be linked to foreign entities like domestic communists in the McCarthy era and witches in days past. Officials come to believe that they can defy such strong public sentiment only at their own peril while exacerbating such fears is congenial and goes unpunished. Thus, officials and elites are more nearly responding to public fear than creating it. A very few have been inclined to judge the fears to be exaggerated or the policies designed to deal with them misguided. But they have been able to do little, if anything, to reduce them—if people want to be afraid, nothing will stop them. Moreover, officials have been unwilling to take the political risks required—though they possibly exaggerate the extent of the risk. Public fears also led to support for the 9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but the fears seem more nearly to facilitate such foreign adventures than to cause them: Americans are not, in general, set on questing abroad for monsters to destroy. And even if fears about international terrorism decline, this does not mean that the national security state established to deal with the problem will also necessarily decline.

Economists have developed a vast empirical literature on how cultural traits like generalized trust affect economic output. Much of this literature finds a positive causal relationship between measures of generalized trust, as gathered by international surveys, and economic output. However, the trust literature commits five deadly empirical and theoretical sins that undermine many of its findings. From the quality of the survey questions and responses to the paucity of theoretical models used to explain how trust affects economic outcomes to the radically different results from experimental evidence and others, the trust literature is riven with poor methods and bad data. Even so, applying common methods used in the trust literature to regional level analysis in the United States during the 1972–2018 period reveals no statistically significant correlation between economic output and trust. Given our lack of findings at the subnational level, we find further evidence to be skeptical of the trust literature.

In an otherwise amiable review of a book by Peter Boettke, McCloskey observes that the neo-institutionalism of North, Acemoglu, and Boettke is statist, top-down, centralizing, constructivist, and therefore inconsistent with Austrian liberalism. One source of the inconsistency and liberalism is a too-wide definition of “freedom.”

In theory, public school districts with more funding might be more likely to reopen in person if resources are a primary driver of their reopening decisions during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, it is also possible that these decisions are influenced by other factors including political partisanship, incentive structures, and special interests. Using data on over 12,000 school districts in the United States, we quantify the relationship between public school revenues and expenditures per student and their reopening decisions in Fall 2020. Across a range of statistical specifications, including comparisons of districts within the same county with one another, we find an economically and statistically significant positive association between remote instruction and revenue per student. Our models control for district-level demographic characteristics, together with county COVID-19 risk and partisanship variables. We also find that increases in the share of remote school districts in a state are associated with increases in the growth of counselors and social workers, relative to 2019, even after controlling for the overall employment decline in the state. Our results are consistent with models of rent seeking behavior by teachers unions with unintended consequences on children.

The purpose of this study was to develop and validate a population pharmacokinetic model for Z‐endoxifen in patients with advanced solid tumors and to identify clinical variables that influence pharmacokinetic parameters. Z‐endoxifen‐HCl was administered orally once a day on a 28‐day cycle (±3 days) over 11 dose levels ranging from 20 to 360 mg. A total of 1256 Z‐endoxifen plasma concentration samples from 80 patients were analyzed using nonlinear mixed‐effects modeling to develop a population pharmacokinetic model for Z‐endoxifen. A 2‐compartment model with oral depot and linear elimination adequately described the data. The estimated apparent total clearance, apparent central volume of distribution, and apparent peripheral volume of distribution were 4.89 L/h, 323 L, and 39.7 L, respectively, with weight‐effect exponents of 0.75, 1, and 1, respectively. This model was used to explore the effects of clinical and demographic variables on Z‐endoxifen pharmacokinetics. Weight, race on clearance, and aspartate aminotransferase on the absorption rate constant were identified as significant covariates in the final model. This novel population pharmacokinetic model provides insight regarding factors that may affect the pharmacokinetics of Z‐endoxifen and may assist in the design of future clinical trials.

In standard economic theory, government support of science is expected to confer external benefits and ‘crowd-in’ additional private sector research. However, higher rates of economic growth from this effect are not easily discerned from the long run data, and government and business financed R&D have moved in opposite directions (as a proportion of GDP) since the early 1960s in the US and elsewhere. This paper looks at potential sources of ‘crowding out’ as well as ‘crowding in,’ and compares standard analysis with a ‘contribution good’ model of science. Two different policy issues are identified – the assembly of ‘critical mass’ for the ‘kick starting’ of commercial science, and the expansion of commercial science beyond its ‘private equilibrium’. We analyse the allocation of scarce business as well as scientific skills between sectors. The model produces regions of both crowding in and out. The latter dominates for very high wages in the public sector as the government deprives the private sector of the means to exploit new knowledge.

Approximately $50 billion is spent annually world-wide in the quest to deter or disrupt terrorist attacks to aviation, significant expenditures that have rarely been subject to systematic cost–benefit or risk analysis. This chapter applies that approach, assessing the risks, costs, and benefits of security measures designed to disrupt terrorist hijackings of airliners assuming terrorists arrive at the airport undeterred and undetected. Under those conditions, existing security measures reduce the risk of a terrorist success by over 88%. Another security measure could be added to the existing array: secondary flight deck barriers, lightweight devices that are easy to deploy and stow, installed between the passenger cabin and the cockpit door to block access to the flight deck whenever the cockpit door is opened in flight. These barriers are highly cost-effective and raise total risk reduction to over 96%. The benefit-to-cost ratio of the measure is high at 5.1, and it remains cost effective even if risk reduction is halved and costs are doubled. On the other hand the expensive Federal Air Marshal Service fails a cost–benefit analysis, whereas the Federal Flight Deck Officer program proves to be cost-effective.

Access to private schools and public charter schools might improve parent and student satisfaction through competitive pressures and improved matches between educators and students. Using ordered probit regression analysis and a nationally representative sample of 13,436 students in the United States in 2016, I compare satisfaction levels of parents and students by school sector. I find that public charter schools and private schools outperform traditional public schools on six measures of parent and student satisfaction. Respondents with children in private schools also tend to report higher levels of satisfaction than respondents with children in public charter schools. These results tend to support the theory that access to public charter and private schools could lead to higher levels of satisfaction for families and students. However, although several control variables are included in the analytic models, the results may still be affected by selection bias.

The US complaint about Chinese tariff-rate quotas (TRQs) on certain grain products helps illustrate several key issues in US–China trade relations and the effectiveness of WTO disputes. First, do international obligations based on transparency and fairness work in relation to an authoritarian country not known for the rule of law domestically? Second, can there be a disconnect between the legal aspects of a dispute and the underlying economic interests, with a DSB ruling sometimes not leading to improved trade flows? And third, given the bilateral trade war and ‘phase one’ trade deal between the United States and China, has the WTO been superseded in this trade relationship? This paper summarizes the facts and law of the China–TRQs dispute, and examines each of these questions in that context.

Objective The COVID‐19 pandemic led to widespread school closures affecting millions of K‐12 students in the United States in the spring of 2020. Groups representing teachers have pushed to reopen public schools virtually in the fall because of concerns about the health risks associated with reopening in person. In theory, stronger teachers’ unions may more successfully influence public school districts to reopen without in‐person instruction. Methods We examine the relationship between teachers’ union strength and the reopening decisions of 835 public school districts in the United States using regression analyses. Results We find that school districts in locations with stronger teachers’ unions are less likely to reopen in person even after we control semiparametrically for differences in local demographic characteristics. These results are robust to four measures of union strength, various potential confounding characteristics, a further disaggregation to the county level, and various analytic techniques and datasets. We do not find evidence that measures of COVID‐19 risk are correlated with school reopening decisions. Conclusion Our findings that school closures are uncorrelated with the actual incidence of the virus, but are rather strongly associated with unionization, implies that the decision to close schools has been a political—not scientific—decision.

Although some regard the New Deal of the 1930s as exemplifying an aggressive fiscal and monetary response to a severe economic crisis, the US fiscal and monetary policy responses to the COVID‐19 crisis have actually been far more substantial – and, so far, much more effective in reviving aggregate spending. Although many fear that these responses, and the large‐scale increase in bank reserves especially, must eventually cause unwanted inflation, the concurrent sharp decline in money's velocity has thus far more than offset any inflationary effects of money growth, while forward bond prices reflect a general belief that inflation will remain below 2 per cent for at least another decade. Notwithstanding the growth of the Fed's balance sheet, Fed authorities can always check inflation by sufficiently raising the interest return on bank reserves. Nonetheless, recent developments have heightened the risk of ‘fiscal dominance’ of monetary policy at some point in the future.