Last month, one of my favorite Hoover colleagues, Harvard professor Paul E. Peterson, interviewed me about Charley Hooper’s and my Wall Street Journal article on the lockdown-induced losses to young people.
This is part of his Education Exchange series.
Here are the approximate times and topics:
1:20 to 9:00: The elderly.
9:10: Young people.
10:05: Young people and schools; Bryan Caplan’s research on signaling; WWII data.
14:50: FDA.
18:00: Asian flu.
20:30: CDC as a political animal.
22:20: Why Florida governor Ron DeSantis deserves at most 2 cheers.
24:00: My proposed $50 offer to potential vaccination recipients (which, admittedly, I have done nothing about in the intervening 2 weeks).
24:30: Why I don’t cheer Biden.
26:00: What to do next time.
By the way, at the end of the recording, I told his technician, who hadn’t heard the story, about how Paul, as a teenager in a Minnesota government school, got totally into history because a teacher used the whole class period to leave the classroom to smoke. Paul was impressed that I remembered that story. I tend to remember people’s stories about incidents that made a huge impact, especially a positive one, in their lives.
READER COMMENTS
John Alcorn
Jun 4 2021 at 9:06pm
This interview is a model of clear, engaging, well-focussed discussion. Prof. Peterson is a first-rate interviewer — quick and agile with apt follow-up questions and probes. Compliments to both of you!
David Henderson
Jun 5 2021 at 4:52pm
Thanks, John.
Jim Dunning
Jun 4 2021 at 10:26pm
A piece analyzing how and why mainstream media (and politicians) completely ignored that 80 percent of COVID-19 deaths were people well over age 65 would be welcome. All through the summer and fall of last year, a regular “meme” on the ABC Evening News was a huge wall behind host David Muir consisting of a montage of COVID victims.
There were 234 faces in the image. One hundred and eighty seven of them should have had gray hair. Nothing even close to that number is evident.
Yes, “If it bleeds, it leads” is a long-time mantra of the news industry and explains why Muir & Co. consistently highlighted heart-string tugging stories about orphaned toddlers and dead single moms over dying gray-hairs in nursing homes. Maybe this would be fine if clickbait marketing revenue was the only thing to worry about, but, as Bill Maher pointed out, “we don’t want politics mixed in with my medical decisions. And when all of our news sources for Covid information have an agenda to spin us, you wind up with a badly misinformed population” — and badly misguided policy.
This strategy of media cost lives.
David Henderson
Jun 5 2021 at 4:54pm
Interesting. Of course I missed it because I don’t watch the news. But my guess is that the damage ABC did with that image was in the billions of dollars.
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Jun 6 2021 at 3:16pm
Another example of the error of people getting news from an entertainment medium. The online versions of “liberal” MSM like NYT, WaPo, Guardian, had plenty on the age distribution of the disease and criticism of the different policies in protecting the most vulnerable in NY and FL, for example.
Monte
Jun 4 2021 at 11:20pm
My proposed $50 offer to potential vaccination recipients (which, admittedly, I have done nothing about in the intervening 2 weeks).
States are betting big on cash prizes and lotteries to incentivize vaccine hesitancy, but is this the most effective way to encourage participation? Wharton’s Iwan Barankay says no. He insists that “To raise vaccination rates, we have to engage with the socioeconomic barriers that people are facing.” (ie. low income, lack of transporation, chronic illness, etc.).
Perhaps cities across the U.S. should consider utilizing ice cream trucks to cruise through neighborhoods blaring something like “Hit Me with Your Best Shot” instead of “Turkey in the Straw” in order to proliferate vaccines and work towards herd immunity.
Monte Woods
Jun 5 2021 at 12:44am
Correction: …to assuage vaccine hesitancy. I hate autocorrect.
Gene
Jun 11 2021 at 4:14pm
Did I hear Peterson correctly when he said another pandemic is a certainty? I don’t accept that premise. Possible: yes. Guaranteed in the short term: no.
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