Category: Philosophy

Should You Listen to Experts?

Gerd Gigerenzer was giving a seminar to 160 gynecologists with a decade or more of experience. He set out to prove that most doctors do not understand test results. He posed a question that is customary in medical studies, in probabilities:

The probability that a women has breast cancer is 1 percent.
If a women has breast cancer, the probability that she test positive is 90 percent.
If a women does not have breast cancer, the probability that she nevertheless test positive is 9 percent.
A women test positive. She wants to know whether that means that she has breast cancer for sure or what the chances are. What do you tell her?
A) 9 in 10
B) 8 in 10
C) 1 in 10
D) 1 in 100

The best answer is one out of ten. That is, out of test women who test positive in screening, one has cancer. The other nine women receive false alarms. Yet the 160 gynecologists’ answers, monitored by an interactive voting system offering the four choices above, were all over the map. The majority believed that the answer was 8 in 10. Only 21% correctly informed the patient.
If I break it down in simple terms:
1- Ten out of every 1,000 women are expected to have breast cancer.
2- Of these 10 women with breast cancer, 9 test positive.
3-Of the 990 without breast cancer, 89 nevertheless test positive.
4- This means 98 (89+9) are expected too test positive, of whom nine actually have cancer. This is close to one out of 10.
The sloppy thinking by the “experts” was on full display during the COVID-19 pandemic. The proper way to conduct testing was discussed here.

Academics are Lazy

Patrick Deneen, professor at the University of Notre Dame, has posted an article in which he states the following:

Indeed, as a school of thought, a pure form of philosophical libertarianism was not a significant presence in American history until its articulation as Social Darwinism in the early 20th century- including its attraction to eugenics- and did not appear as an economic school of thought until the mid-twentieth century under the influence of several foreign thinkers, F. A. Hayek and von Mises (and later, Ayn Rand).

I will put aside Ayn Rand because I have not read enough of her work.  Von Mises rejected Social Darwinism and eugenics. Here is Mises on the subject of Social Darwinism:

Since Darwin we have been inclined to regard the dependence of human life on natural environment as a struggle against antagon­istic forces. There was no objection to this as long as people did not transfer the figurative expression to a field where it was quite out of place and was bound to cause grave errors. When the formulas of Darwinism, which had sprung from ideas taken over by Biology from Social Science, reverted to Social Science, people forgot what the ideas had originally meant. Thus arose that monstrosity, sociological Darwinism, which, ending in a romantic glorification of war and murder, was peculiarly responsible for the overshadowing of liberal ideas and for creating the mental atmosphere which led to the World War and the social struggles of to-day. lt is well known that Darwin was under the influence of Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population. But Malthus was far from believing struggle to be a necessary social institution. Even Darwin, when he speaks of the struggle for existence, does not always mean the destructive combat of living creatures, the life or death struggle for feeding places and females. He often uses the expression figuratively to show the dependence of living beings on each other and on their surroundings. lt is a misunderstanding to take the phrase quite literally, for it is a metaphor. The confusion is worse confounded when people equate the struggle for existence with the war of exter­mination between human beings, and proceed to construct a social theory based on the necessity of struggle.

He devoted entire sections of some of his books to destroying this idea.
Here is Mises on eugenics:

It is vain for the champions of eugenics to protest that they did not mean what the Nazis executed. Eugenics aims at placing some men, backed by the police power, in complete control of human reproduction. It suggests that the methods applied to domestic animals be applied to men. This is precisely what the Nazis tried to do. The only objection which a consistent eugenist can raise is that his own plan differs from that of the Nazi scholars and that he wants to rear another type of men than the Nazis. As every supporter of economic planning aims at the execution of his own plan only, so every advocate of eugenic planning aims at the execution of his own plan and wants himself to act as the breeder of human stock.
The eugenists pretend that they want to eliminate criminal individuals. But the qualification of a man as a criminal depends upon the prevailing laws of the country and varies with the change in social and political ideologies. John Huss, Giordano Bruno and Galileo Galilei were criminals from the point of view of the laws which their judges applied. When Stalin robbed the Russian State Bank of several million rubles, he committed a crime. Today it is an offence in Russia to disagree with Stalin. In Nazi Germany sexual intercourse between “Aryans” and the members of an “inferior” race was a crime. Whom do the eugenists want to eliminate, Brutus or Caesar? Both violated the laws of their country. If eighteenth century eugenists had prevented alcohol addicts from generating children, their planning would have eliminated Beethoven.

Patrick Deneen has not done his homework. He offers no evidence for his statements. He offers no direct quotes or citations for his statement. He is a wind bag. Parents spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to send their kids to Ivy League schools. Why?
Update
It appears someone has called him out on his eugenics statement and he has edited his article to drop the phrase. He still has Social Darwinism.

The Quantity Theory of Money and the Equation of Exchange

A more detailed critique of the so called velocity of money. Written by Kristoffer Mousten.

One of the first things that the student of economics is liable to be tortured with when he turns to monetary theory is the equation of exchange. Based on a mechanistic understanding of the quantity theory of money, the equation purports to show the relation between the supply of money and the prices of goods. It is one of the foundational fallacies of modern economics.
The quantity theory of money itself was a major landmark in the development of economic theory. It can be traced back to the Italian Bernardo Davanzati and the Pole Copernicus in the sixteenth century. But the quantity theory is better known from the classic elaborations by David Hume and David Ricardo. These theorists attempted to explain the relationship between prices and the quantity of money based on the laws of supply and demand. Their main conclusion—and the central truth established by the quantity theory—was that an increase in the quantity of money necessarily leads to an increase in prices. A corollary to this conclusion is that nothing is gained by increasing the quantity of money; any quantity is adequate to fulfill money’s social function.
Advances in monetary theory would have to look at how the supply and demand for money was determined, something that Mises investigated and discussed at length in his 1912 Theory of Money and Credit. Unfortunately, despite Mises’s pioneering work, a different and altogether inferior elaboration of monetary theory took hold and gained widespread popularity: a mechanistic version of the quantity theory of money summed up in the so-called equation of exchange.

Anatomy of the Equation of Exchange

The equation of exchange first achieved prominence with Irving Fisher’s 1911 book The Purchasing Power of Money, and latter-day monetarists spread its use far and wide. Milton Friedman, perhaps the best-known monetarist in the twentieth century, even had it printed on his license plates. There are different variants of the equation (M*V=P*T, M*V=P*Y, M*V=P*Q, to take the simplest), but none of them are substantially different from Fisher’s original formula: M*V=P*T. What are the components of this formula?
M signifies the quantity of money, or rather the average quantity in a given period.
V is the velocity of money and, as we shall see, is not a well-defined concept. Monetarists usually present it as money’s “turnover” or an indicator of how much “use” each monetary unit gets.
P is the level of prices, an average of all prices paid in a given period.
T is the sum of transactions over that same period.
This equation, it is claimed, shows the relation between the money side and the “real” side of the economy. Its proponents claim that the equation clearly shows the relation between the quantity of money and the price level: if we assume that V and T are constant, then an increase in M necessarily leads to an increase in P. Now we have clear proof of the quantity theory of money. Or do we?

A Critique of the Equation of Exchange

Both Mises and Rothbard penned devastating critiques of the equation of exchange and we will draw freely on their works in what follows. It is worth noting at the outset that the holistic approach underlying the monetarist theory is wholly inadmissible. As Mises said in The Theory of Money and Credit:

For a long time it was believed that the demand for money was a quantity determined by objective factors and independently of subjective considerations. It was thought that the demand for money in an economic community was determined, on the one hand by the total quantity of commodities that had to be paid for during a given period, and on the other hand by the velocity of circulation of the money….It is inadmissible to begin with the demand for money of the community. The individualistic economic community as such, which is the only sort of community in which there is a demand for money, is not an economic agent. It demands money only insofar as its individual members demand money. The demand for money of the economic community is nothing but the sum of the demands for money of the individual economic agents composing it. But for individual economic agents it is impossible to make use of the formula: total volume of transactions ÷ velocity of circulation. If we wish to arrive at a description of the demand for money of an individual we must start with the considerations that influence such an individual in receiving and paying out money.

Although this basic error should be more than enough to disqualify the equation, it is still both worthwhile and necessary to examine it in detail. Does it work on its own terms? Let us examine its components.
M, the quantity of money, is unproblematic. Exactly what kind of claims and money substitutes should be counted as part of the money supply in an economy is open to discussion, but the quantity of money is a clearly defined concept.
P and T are more suspect. What is the real meaning behind these terms? In reality, they are nothing but statistical abbreviations of all the trades in an economy in a given period. P is the average of prices paid and T is the number of transactions. However, this means that P*T is simply what sellers received in exchange for their goods and services—their aggregate revenues or money income, traditionally symbolized by Y.
This brings us to V. How exactly do we establish V? In sharp contradistinction to the other terms of the equation, there simply isn’t a way to independently arrive at or define a magnitude for V. It is simply the factor necessary to make the equation M = P*T true.
There are two ways to find V. One is to simply divide P*T by M. The other—and the one Fisher used—is to start with the sum of expenditures for a given period, E, and the quantity of money, M. Then we simply define V as the relationship between these two magnitudes: E/M=V. Unfortunately, this still does not solve the problem of V not being independently defined. It simply introduces another variable, E, into our equation.
More fundamentally, a little analysis shows that the equation is truly absurd if it is meant to say anything about the role of the quantity of money in an economy:
If V=E/M,
then M*V=M*E/M,
and then M*E/M=E.
And since we already know that P*T=Y, the equation M*V=P*T reduces to E=Y.
The ground-breaking insight of the monetarist equation of exchange is therefore that the sum of money expenditures in a given period has to equal the sum of money incomes for that same period. It is certainly true that in any transaction the buyer’s expenditure is necessarily equal to the seller’s income, but one wonders why this should be elevated to a cornerstone of monetary theory.
What about inflation? A defender of Fisher and his countless monetarist epigones might claim that at least the equation can be used to show the relation between the quantity of money and the level of prices. In Friedman’s famous dictum, it shows that “inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.” However, this says nothing more than what the primitive quantity theory had already established without the elaborate trappings of the equation of exchange. In fact, the equation depicts the relation between the quantity of money and inflation in an inferior and very misleading way, with changes in the price level simply being a function of changes in the quantity of money. And this is clearly erroneous.

The Alternative: Misesian Monetary Theory

Fundamentally, the equation of exchange rests on a misguided approach to economic theory. It simply postulates the existence of aggregate concepts such as velocity and the level of prices and that we can understand these without looking at what brings them about and what causes them to change. Any consideration of causality is sacrificed in favor of impressive formulae.
Mises and the other Austrians showed long ago how to think about monetary theory, based on the fundamental insights into the role of human action and subjective valuations in the economy. Rather than give a full description of Mises’s insights, let us here briefly illustrate how he conceives of an increase in the quantity of money and how it eventually affects prices.
At the outset, before the increase in the quantity of money, each individual has a certain cash holding determined by the marginal utility of money to him. Each person has a cash holding just large enough that the utility of the marginal monetary unit outweighs—is ranked higher on his value scale than—the utility he expects to gain from exchanging it for consumer or producer goods.
What happens when the quantity of money increases? This increase always means that some people gain more money than they had before. Let us assume that the close personal friends of J. Powell, money producer extraordinaire, Mr. Goldman and Mrs. Sachs suddenly find their cash holdings increased. Now their valuation of the marginal monetary unit has changed, as they have moved down their value scales, so to speak. The value of the marginal unit of money is now lower to Mrs. Sachs, and she will therefore use some of the new money on goods and services that are now ranked higher on her value scale.
In this way the new quantity of money moves through the economy: the first receivers, Mr. Goldman and Mrs. Sachs, spend the new money until their cash holdings again reflect their subjective valuation of the marginal unit. In the meantime, the added demand for goods and services leads to a rise in prices. The next receivers of the new money (those who supplied Mr. Goldman and Mrs. Sachs with goods and services) are now in the same situation as the first receivers. They too will spend their additional money, leading to increases in the prices of the goods they spend them on. And so the process continues, until the new money has been spread through the economy. Some prices rise while others remain the same. Some have gained from this process, namely, those who received the new money first, before prices had adjusted; others have lost, namely, those who only experienced an increase in their money incomes after the rise in prices, or who never saw any of the new money at all.

Conclusion

This brief critique of the equation of exchange and the contrast to Misesian monetary theory will hopefully have made it evident that the equation of exchange is an incoherent and mechanistic version of the quantity theory of money. Unfortunately, bad theories have a long life in the social sciences, and this has certainly been true of the equation of exchange. Still, if one wants to understand monetary phenomena, the starting point must be a complete rejection of the mechanistic quantity theory. Let it be thrown out into the outer darkness, where there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth!

Ignore The Velocity Of Money

The velocity of money is frequently cited to pooh-pooh those of us warning about price inflation. They post this chart from the Federal Reserve.

This goes back to Irving Fisher’s formula MV=PT, where M is representative of the amount of money, V is the velocity, P is price and T is transactions.
First off, the idea that money “circulates” is a misnomer. Money is exchanged. It changes ownership just like any other good or service.
Whenever you look at a statistic or a fact you must use logic. Facts are meaningless without logic or a philosophy to interpret what you are looking at. So we look to the Federal Reserve website to see the explanation for this number and what it means. This is how they actual calculate the number.

Calculated as the ratio of quarterly nominal GDP to the quarterly average of M2 money stock.

So they take GDP and divided it by the money supply. Both the GDP and the money supply are measured in dollars. Therefore what we get is a ratio, which has no units. They than give an explanation about what this ratio means, which directly contradicts how they calculate the published number.

The velocity of money is the frequency at which one unit of currency is used to purchase domestically- produced goods and services within a given time period. In other words, it is the number of times one dollar is spent to buy goods and services per unit of time. If the velocity of money is increasing, then more transactions are occurring between individuals in an economy. The frequency of currency exchange can be used to determine the velocity of a given component of the money supply, providing some insight into whether consumers and businesses are saving or spending their money.

So how they actually calculate the velocity of money is a ratio (GDP/Money Supply) with no units . The worded definition they give is “the number of times one dollar is spent to buy goods and service per unit time”. The worded definition they give is in no way related to how they calculate it. One is unit less and the other is dollar spent per unit time. When any analysis comments on the velocity of money they always speak of it as “the number of times one dollar is spent to buy goods and service per unit time”.
Taking the GDP and dividing it by the money stock is meaningless. It tells you absolutely nothing. When people talk about the velocity of money, I suspect what they really mean is the demand to hold cash balances. If a person knew his cash was going to depreciate very fast, he would not want to hold it in his checking account for very long for fear that tomorrow it could buy significantly less goods. We see this behavior in countries experiencing hyperinflation. On payday the person goes out and spends his money right away before it becomes worthless.

Burned After Watching

Tucker Carlson discussed the recent activity of YouTube pulling down a video. The video shows doctors criticizing the lock down policy. The doctors are asking sensible questions. YouTube executives do not like sensible questions. Take a look.

Carlson believes we are entering into a totalitarian tech dystopia. This is good rhetoric. It is also good for getting viewers. But it is far from reality.
First, imagine this event was happening 40 years ago. Would we have ever known about this video? Would we have ever gotten a chance to see it? No. The four oligarchs of the media would have shielded it from the public.
Second, I just went on YouTube and searched “Dr. Erickson full video”. The full video can still be found. Trolls keep uploading the video over and over again. It has been copied to millions of computers. People everywhere are posting it on their websites. See this link. What this tells me is that YouTube can not even stop the video from being uploaded on its own platform. This shows how powerless they are. There are to many videos being uploaded on YouTube. To many memes. To many tweets. To many Facebook post. To many links to other sites. No algorithm can stop this without destroying the platform. These platforms only can act after a video has gone viral. This is similar to closing the barn door after the horses are already out.
All of these platforms have opened up free postings to billions of people around the world. They can express their opinion for zero dollars. This has given a voice to brilliant people as well as kooks. They overwhelm political leftism. We are already seeing alternatives to these platforms that promote free thought. It is amazing to see how short sighted YouTube is. If they push to hard, they will destroy the company.
Political leftist are the heads of most of these companies. They do not like dissent. However, they are bringing about the greatest advancement in freedom the world has ever seen. There is almost a funny irony to all of this. They are bringing about a world that is undermining their ideology. The reality is this: I only heard about this video because it was banned. I took me a whole 20 seconds searching online to find the full video.  This is not totalitarianism. This is the exact opposite.

All for Nothing?

The New York Times is reporting:

The preliminary data suggests that many more New Yorkers may have been infected than was previously believed.
More than one in five people who were tested for virus antibodies in N.Y.C. had them.
More than 21 percent of around 1,300 people in New York City who were tested for coronavirus antibodies this week were found to have them, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said on Thursday.
The results were from a state program that tested 3,000 supermarket customers across New York State. Nearly 14 percent of the tests came back positive, Mr. Cuomo said.
It was unclear just how telling the preliminary data was, as Mr. Cuomo acknowledged. And the accuracy of the antibody testing available in the United States in general has been called into question.
Antibody tests are intended to signal whether a person may have built immunity to virus. They do not test for the virus itself.
But if the state’s numbers indicated the true incidence of the virus, they would mean that more than 1.7 million people in New York City, and more than 2.6 million people statewide, have already been infected.
That is far greater than the 250,000 confirmed cases of the virus itself that the state has recorded.
It would also mean that the fatality rate from the virus was relatively low, about 0.5 percent, Mr. Cuomo said.

In other words, it is just another flu season.
Via livescience:

These tests were conducted over a two-day period at grocery stores and other big box stores. “The sample was by definition people who were outside the home,” Cuomo said.

It appears someone has smartened up and they are conducting the test in a proper manner to get relevant data. All the other data that is being discussed by nearly every media talking head and government official should just be thrown in the garbage. You do not need a medical license to see this.

Unlicensed Haircuts Are Only the Beginning

By Paul Sherman via the Atlantic:

Fourteen years ago this July, I crowded into a gymnasium in Roanoke along with hundreds of other newly minted J.D.s, waiting to take the exam that would determine whether we would be allowed to practice law in the Commonwealth of Virginia. But in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, it looks certain that this year’s crop of law-school graduates will be skipping this rite of passage, at least temporarily.
Though the bar exam is traditionally administered in July, the National Conference of Bar Examiners has already scheduled alternative dates for the fall. Meanwhile, a growing number of state bars have declared that they will permit new grads to practice law under the supervision of a licensed attorney until the bar exam can be offered again. Other states are considering waiving the exam requirement entirely for people who complete a term of supervised practice.
All of which raises the question: Was the exam necessary in the first place? In an era of specialization, few lawyers will ever use more than a tiny fraction of the material covered on the bar exam. But, for state bar associations, the exams are a useful way to hold down the number of lawyers.
As the nation’s economy and health-care system struggle to adjust to the pandemic, more and more states are reexamining some of their oldest occupational and business regulations—rules that, although couched as protecting consumers, do far more to limit competition. And for those of us who have long questioned the supposed benefits of these policies, their erosion is welcome, even if the pandemic that caused it is not.
Right now, of course, much of the attention is correctly focused on barriers to work in the health-care industry. Yet here, where the state’s interest in promoting public health and safety is undoubtedly highest, we are seeing some of the most sweeping reforms in decades. While some states have ordered their occupational-licensing boards to speed up the licensure of new health-care practitioners, others—such as Indiana—are granting immediate licensing reciprocity to any practitioner licensed in any state. Even Florida, which has long jealously guarded its occupational-licensing regime to prevent semiretired snowbirds from poaching on the locals’ turf, has gotten in on the act, allowing out-of-state health-care providers to practice telemedicine in the state without a license.
Besides these major changes, states have also begun enacting more modest, but no less welcome, changes to regulations that needlessly stand between doctors and the patients who might benefit from their services. Illinois has waived licensure fees for retired medical practitioners who wish to resume practice. Oklahoma and Massachusetts have eliminated restrictions that required doctors to have a preexisting doctor-patient relationship before they could offer telemedicine services. And Florida—no doubt recognizing the stress we’re all under—has waived the requirement of a physical examination before a doctor may issue a certification for the medical use of marijuana.
But occupational licenses aren’t the only long-established health-care regulations being reconsidered. Also being reexamined are state certificate-of-need, or CON, laws. A product of 1970s-era economic regulation, CON laws require health-care providers to prove that new services are “needed” before they may purchase certain large equipment, open new or expanded facilities, or—as is crucial now—offer home health-care services. Often, these laws give an effective veto power to existing medical providers, allowing them to torpedo new competition for their own benefit.
Here again, the needs of our current situation seem to have exceeded the lobbying power of incumbent health-care providers. Governor Kay Ivey of Alabama has issued an emergency order lifting that state’s CON requirements, allowing health-care providers to add new beds and medical services without first convincing the state they are needed. California, Connecticut, Georgia, Indiana, Michigan, Nebraska, New York, North Carolina, and Virginia have similarly lifted all or part of their state’s CON requirements.
While these changes are all welcome, how they are enacted is as important as their substance. In times of panic, the natural tendency is for government power to expand, and some states have already enacted laws giving state governors near-dictatorial power to waive or suspend legal requirements. But history teaches all too well that such expansions of power are rarely reversed when the crisis that precipitated them abates. So although our current situation requires rapid action, it is both better and safer to make changes through ordinary legislative and rule-making processes.
States that do choose to reexamine occupational licensure won’t lack targets. In the 1950s, only one in 20 American workers needed a license from the government to work in their chosen occupation. Today that number is nearly one in four, and it’s growing. Laws that were once aimed solely at doctors and lawyers now encompass everyone including florists in Louisiana and casket sellers in Oklahoma and interior designers in Florida. As people in lockdown take clippers to their own shaggy hair, they are learning that cuts from unlicensed stylists are not a health hazard—even if the results underscore the wisdom of leaving the job to a market-tested professional.
The consequences of this proliferation are significant. Basic economics predicts that competition reduces prices for consumers, and occupational licensing works directly to stifle competition. The University of Minnesota economist Morris Kleiner, a leading researcher on occupational licensing, estimates that licensing costs consumers nearly $200 billion annually. This might be justifiable if licensing produced substantial improvements in quality, yet most research has failed to find a connection between licensure and service quality or safety. In one study, for example, Kleiner found that the differences in state dental regulations—for instance, whether it was easy or hard for out-of-state dentists to start practicing—had no effect on the dental health of incoming Air Force personnel.
Some of the most profound costs of occupational licensure are felt not by well-paid professionals like doctors and lawyers, but by low- and middle-income workers. When my firm, the Institute for Justice, examined state licensure for 102 low- and middle-income occupations, we found that becoming licensed required, on average, $267 in fees, passage of a state-administered exam, and a year of education or experience. But these requirements can vary wildly from state to state and occupation to occupation. And many occupations are licensed in only a handful of states, being freely practiced throughout the rest of the country with no apparent problems. As a result, workers who have practiced their trade for decades without a license may find themselves ineligible to work in another state where their services are needed.
In 2015, the Obama administration released a study on occupational licensure, concluding that states, when regulating professions through licensing laws, had often failed to consider the costs and benefits. But states no longer have the luxury of ignoring the costs of occupational licensure in health care. When this pandemic ends, states’ reexamination of barriers to work should not, nor should it be limited to a single industry. The licensing reforms being enacted now, though forced upon states by necessity, are not new ideas. They were good ideas before COVID-19, they are good ideas now, and they will be good ideas when this crisis passes.

The Use of Statistics-CDC Version

Yahoo news is reporting the following:

Of the 215 women who delivered babies at New York-Presbyterian Allen Hospital and Columbia University Irving Medical Center in Upper Manhattan from March 22 through April 4, 214 were tested for the coronavirus that causes Covid-19. Thirty-three of them, or more than 15%, tested positive, even though only a few had symptoms. In Gangelt, a German town that makes a big deal out of Karneval (aka Mardi Gras) and had a major coronavirus outbreak after this February’s festivities, 500 residents were tested for evidence of either the virus or the antibodies that indicate one has recovered from it, and 15% of them tested positive as well.

This goes back to my original point- A large random sample of a given population, lets say in NYC, should be tested. This will tell us the prevalence of the virus among people without symptoms. If it showed a large percentage of people already have (or had) the virus, it would show that the virus is not cause for concern. This would dilute the fatality rate and show that a major portion of people who got the virus are not at risk of dying. But because of the way the test are being conducted, what we are going to see is as the number of test rise so will the number of cases.
From the CDC website:

In the beginning of March, as the number of test increased so did the number of cases. When people stop showing up to get tested, we will see the number of cases fall. This tells us absolutely nothing.
This fiasco has reveled at least two things.
1- Epidemiologist are not very bright. They do not know how to use statistics properly. They do not believe there is a trade off between health and commerce.
2- To rely on the federal or state government is foolish.

Social Capital CEO on the Bailouts

He makes good points but it is far more complex than this. Governments are preventing many companies from operating. Some of these companies are in trouble due to goverment actions. Putting aside that point, everything else is spot on.
Some of these companies were just mismanaged. Rather than save for a rainy day, management decided to use the cash in good times to buy back stocks. I have no problem with stock buybacks. I have a problem with the CEO of a company asking the feds to bail them out when they did not act prudently. We all have the responsibility to save money for unexpected events. If you do not have at least 3 months of reserves to cover all your bills you are doing something wrong. I would recommend 6 months. Airlines going bankrupt does not mean flights stop. The airplanes do not just disappear and melt away. Stockholders and bond holders take a hit. Management gets fired, as they should. The assets are sold off to more competent people-hopefully.
The host pulls out the ‘moral’ card. It is not moral to take money by force from one group of people and give it to Person A or Company A. If someone wants to voluntarily send a check to Boeing or a friend in need, I have no problem with that.

Using Statistics Without Logic

The first doctor makes the point on the proper testing that should be done to understand what is happening. At 4:50, he explains the proper way to get valid data.

No one conducting any type of scientific experiment would do it in the manner in which it is being done now.
The next video explains how we really do not know anything because of the way testing is being done.

Based on various reports, my sense is that if you are older and do not have good health, you should refrain from interacting with others.  To shut down the entire world economy when we do not really know is foolish.

The idea that there is no trade off between health and commerce is silly. Of course there is.  We make everyday decisions based on the trade off between price and safety. When you buy a car do you get every safety feature? When you buy a house do you have fire rated walls installed and bullet proof windows installed? Over 30,000 people die on highways each year. We could reduce this substantially by making the speed limit 10MPH. Are we evil for not advocating for a 10MPH limit? No. We take chances in life.