Tag Archive for: knowledge

CNN Medical Analyst Says Masking Stunted Her Toddler’s Language Development—and Taught Her an Important Lesson about Tradeoffs

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A year ago, Dr. Leana Wen was arguing unvaccinated people shouldn’t be allowed to leave their homes. But now she says she’s abandoned her “extremely cautious” Covid views.

During the 1960s, the phrase “the personal is political” became a rallying cry for second-wave feminists challenging the social framework that existed at the time.

There was an unhealthy collectivist undercurrent to this idea—“There are no personal solutions at this time,” wrote Women’s Liberation Movement member Carol Hanisch in an essay on the topic, “There is only collective action for a collective solution”—but the phrase also contains an element of truth.

Personal experience does play an undeniable role in how many humans perceive politics and social structures, which brings me to CNN medical analyst Dr. Leana Wen.

Throughout the pandemic, Wen was in what I’ll call the “pro-mandate” camp.

In March 2021, she excoriated governors who rescinded or failed to pass mask mandates in their states.

“We are not out of the woods. We haven’t reached the end of the pandemic,” Wen said in a pro-mask CNN piece. “It’s counterproductive and truly infuriating these governors are treating this as if the pandemic is over. It’s not true.”

Later that year, she went so far as to argue that unvaccinated people shouldn’t be allowed to leave their homes.

“We need to start looking at the choice to remain unvaccinated the same as we look at driving while intoxicated,” Wen told CNN’s Chris Cuomo. “You have the option to not get vaccinated if you want, but then you can’t go out in public.”

A year later, Wen’s views have changed. In a recent Washington Post article, she explained why she’ll no longer be masking her children and how she shifted away from “being extremely cautious” with Covid protocols.

“I accept the risk that my kids will probably contract covid-19 this school year, just as they could contract the flu, respiratory syncytial virus and other contagious diseases,” she writes. “As for most Americans, covid in our family will almost certainly be mild; and, like most Americans, we’ve made the decision that following precautions strict enough to prevent the highly contagious BA.5 will be very challenging.”

Wen’s observations are not wrong. The new variants are less deadly, and this is particularly true for children, which has always been the case.

A year ago, when Wen was still advocating strict mandates, we pointed out that the CDC’s own data showed small children were at far greater risk of dying from the flu, drowning, vehicle collisions, cancer, and other things than Covid.

This data, for whatever reason, apparently did little to persuade Wen in 2021, however. What does appear to have changed her mind is that her child appears to have suffered from the mandates.

“Masking has harmed our son’s language development,” she bluntly asserts in the article.

Throughout the pandemic, few policies have been debated with more fury than mask mandates. The vast majority of these debates focus on a single point: does masking prevent or even reduce Covid transmission? Some studies say yes, others cast doubt on their efficacy.

For many, however, the efficacy of masking became a sort of dogma that could not even be questioned. (If you doubt this, consider that until a few days ago one faced risk of suspension on YouTube for suggesting that masks don’t play a role in preventing Covid transmission.)

Far less discussion focused on the costs of forcing people to wear masks, and Wen now sees this as a mistake.

“There is a tradeoff,” Wen says.

Many, however, refused to acknowledge this and argued that masking is simply a moral imperative. I recently had a discussion at a family gathering with a person who supports mask mandates. He became indignant when my sister-in-law said she didn’t think it was right to force her children to wear masks at school all day long.

“It’s about protecting others,” he said. “It’s the smallest thing.”

The fact that he was not wearing a mask himself as he said this didn’t seem the least bit ironic to him, but it proved Wen’s point: there are tradeoffs. (If there was not, we’d wear them all the time.)

The idea of tradeoffs is perhaps the most basic principle in all of economics. It’s rooted in a simple idea: in order to have or do one thing, one must sacrifice having or doing something else. All things come with opportunity costs, big and small. (A minor tradeoff with masking is simply being able to breathe more freely.)

For most of the pandemic, many Americans and most public health officials refused to acknowledge the reality of tradeoffs. In 2021, The New York Times described a phenomenon known as “Covid Absolutism.” It consists of two primary factors: 1. Taking every conceivable step that could reduce the spread of Covid regardless of its actual effectiveness; 2. Downplaying or ignoring the unintended consequences and tradeoffs of these policies.

Basic economics, however, teaches us the folly of this thinking.

“There are no solutions, there are only trade-offs,” Thomas Sowell famously observed.

This was the economic lesson Wen learned during the pandemic. She didn’t learn it in a classroom or in a textbook. She learned it in her personal experience when her own child began to struggle with language development (not a minor tradeoff), just like countless other children.

Writing in The Atlantic, Stephanie Murray also wrote about the reality of tradeoffs, stating that many parents with youngsters who are struggling see the potential benefits of masking as a poor trade for what they lose developmentally.

“Children with speech or language disorders offer perhaps the clearest example of these murky trade-offs,” she writes.

This is precisely why decision-making must be left to individuals, not bureaucrats. Nobody is more capable of weighing the pros and cons of a trade or action better than the people who themselves stand to lose or benefit from that trade or action (or in this care, their parents).

Dr. Wen no doubt knows a great deal about public health, just like Anthony Fauci and Rochelle P. Walensky. But even Fauci and Walensky, I suspect, would concede that it’s Wen who knows what’s better for her child.

It must be stressed that it’s not just that Wen wants what’s best for her child. It’s that she actually knows what’s best for her child because she has infinitely more knowledge about her child than any distant bureaucrat or meddling politician could ever possess.

Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek detailed this “local knowledge” concept in his work exploring “the knowledge problem,” and he showed why central planners seeking to engineer society through force are capable of producing little beyond “planned chaos.” This is why it’s so important that freedom of decision-making is left to those who have the most local knowledge and can most accurately assess the risks and rewards of any given action.

The good news is that Wen, to her credit, appears to have learned something throughout the tragedy of the Covid pandemic, as have so many others.

The tragedy is that for so long she overlooked tradeoffs and used her platform to advocate coercive policies that deprived individuals of the ability to choose, a tragedy that is compounded by the fact that Wen now finds herself a target of cancellation for advocating a more sensible approach.

It’s an ironic twist considering that only a year ago Wen herself was a proponent of confining unvaccinated people to their homes, and not one we should celebrate.

But hopefully it can be a learning experience for Wen and others, who now recognize the danger in turning what should be individual decisions over to bureaucrats and political tribes.

AUTHOR

Jon Miltimore

Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune. Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times.

RELATED ARTICLE: The CDC is Broken and Apologies Can’t Fix It: “We’ve Made Some Mistakes, But NOW You Can Trust Us!”

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Why Do We Believe These Pathological Liars? by B.K. Marcus

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How do you feel when someone lies to you?

It probably depends on who is doing the lying. A stranger’s fabrications may not phase you, but dishonesty from a friend or lover can end the relationship. The more you feel the liar is supposed to be “on your side,” the more his or her deceptions feel like betrayal — unless, it turns out, the lies come from a politician you support.

When I shared a link on Facebook to Rick Shenkman’s article “Why Are Trump Voters Not Bothered by His Lies?” someone immediately replied by asking, “Why are Hillary voters not bothered by her lies?” Why, in other words, focus on only one mendacious candidate when lying to voters seems like a prerequisite for running for office?

Shenkman, who is the editor of HistoryNewsNetwork.org and the author ofPolitical Animals: How Our Stone-Age Brain Gets in the Way of Smart Politics, might respond with his claim that Trump “has told more lies than any other leading political figure probably ever has.” But his article is in fact about neither Trump’s astonishing number of fibs nor his supporters’ astonishing tolerance for them; it is about how widespread both such lying and such tolerance are across party lines and throughout the era of mass-media mass democracy.

Shenkman is writing for a left-leaning readership, thus his headline’s righteous indignation toward a right-wing candidate, but most of the examples he gives are of deliberately deceitful Democrats. He starts with candidate Kennedy’s campaign claim that the Soviets had more nuclear missiles than the United States:

He continued to insist that there was a missile gap to the Soviet’s advantage even after he was briefed by General Earl Wheeler that there wasn’t. After the election his secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, told the press on background that a study had found there was no missile gap, leading to blaring headlines the next morning.

JFK’s reaction? He ordered his press secretary, Pierre Salinger, to tell the media that there had been no study and that there was a gap. The truth was that JFK himself didn’t take his own rhetoric about the missile gap seriously. At cabinet meetings he cracked on numerous occasions, “Who ever believed in the missile gap” anyway?

Four years later, President Johnson “told the American people that the North Vietnamese were guilty of making repeated unprovoked attacks on [US] naval vessels in the Tonkin Gulf.” As with Kennedy, we know that Johnson was being dishonest, not mistaken. “Hell,” LBJ told an aide, “those dumb stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish.”

Shenkman barely touches on Nixon’s perfidy in Watergate and never mentions Nixon aide John Ehrlichman’s 1994 interview, admitting that the war on drugs was not about crime or health but was rather a politically motivated attack on war protestors and American blacks. “Did we know we were lying about the drugs?” said the president’s former domestic affairs advisor. “Of course we did.”

And while he may have given Ms. Clinton a pass, Shenkman does mention the millions of supporters who refused to believe the allegations against her husband “until prosecutors revealed they possessed [Monica Lewinsky’s] infamous blue dress.”

No one should be shocked by the frequency of politicians’ duplicity, but it is frustrating when a candidate is caught in an undeniable falsehood and his or her supporters never waiver.  Our political culture expects politicians to perjure and prevaricate left and right, but that doesn’t make their deceptions defensible. So where is the outrage?

“Our brains are partisan,” Shenkman writes:

While we are quick to seize on the misstatements of other candidates, we give them a pass when it’s our own. When the social scientist Drew Westen put voters in an MRI machine he discovered that their brains quickly shut off the flow of information contrary to their beliefs about their favorite candidates. The neurons actively involved in the transmission of this information literally went inactive.

It’s not just the political candidates who are lying. So are the voters. “We lie,” Shenkman points out, “about our unwillingness to put up with lies.”

If politicians keep lying and voters keep shrugging it off, isn’t that an indictment of democracy? Aren’t voters supposed to act as a check on the people in power?

In theory, an election is supposed to be more than a popularity contest. Candidates are supposed to represent an approach to policy making, which is in turn supposed to reflect both facts and a theory of cause and effect. What we have instead is a formalized tribalism, us versus them, facts be damned.

Shenkman assures the reader that the liars don’t get away with it forever, but his evidence for that conclusion is questionable. Johnson and Nixon are remembered as liars by both Democrats and Republicans, but the reckoning for Gulf of Tonkin and Watergate are outliers in the steady stream of deception flowing out of DC and the state capitals. Meanwhile, Mssrs Kennedy and Clinton will be remembered more for deceiving their wives than the voters.

Westen’s research on cognitive dissonance and party politics is troubling, but well before there was any hard data on how voters process unwanted facts, the theory of rational ignorance told us why so many facts are so unwanted: to the individual voter, the cost of acquiring the relevant knowledge far outweighs the practical benefits of knowing the truth when casting a ballot.

In contrast, the benefits of supporting a candidate accrue, not from any actual effect on the electoral outcome, but largely from the signaling that it provides the voter: this is the sort of person I am, and these are the sorts of causes I support. Symbolic affiliation isn’t dependent on the truth of any particular facts, so why should we expect inconvenient falsehoods to change anyone’s political alignment?

As I wrote in “Too Dumb for Democracy?” (Freeman, spring 2015), “getting an issue like the minimum wage terribly wrong takes no work and has the immediate payoff of feeling like you’re on the side of the angels. It also solidifies your standing within your own ideological tribe. Bothering to understand supply and demand … offers no practical reward after you pull the lever in the election booth.”

The lies we care the least to uncover are precisely those for which the cost of caring outweighs the benefits of our vigilance. That describes almost anything we may ever be asked to vote on. But when knowing the truth directly matters to the decisions we make every day — the truth about our jobs, our homes, our families and loved ones — the relative benefits of knowing the truth are far greater, and we therefore penalize the liars in our lives. Cognitive dissonance may be a barrier to accepting hard truths, but even cognitive dissonance is price sensitive.

The more decisions we cede to the political process, the less we should expect anyone to protect our interests. Even we don’t bother to do it, because the rules of the game — majority rules — render our efforts ineffectual. Worse than that: we’re not even rewarded for knowing what policies really are or aren’t in our best interest.

The truth can win out, but it’s a lot less likely in an election.

B.K. MarcusB.K. Marcus

B.K. Marcus is editor of the Freeman.

“Teachers Cannot Teach What They Do Not Know”

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teacher by bes studios

PHOTO BY BES PHOTOS.

How bad is teacher education today? Consider: all states require that teachers be college graduates, but prospective teachers are passing licensure exams with skills and knowledge ranging from the seventh- to tenth-grade levels. Perhaps this shouldn’t surprise us, as colleges of education draw from the bottom two-thirds of graduating classes (and for those planning to teach at the elementary levels, it’s the bottom one-third). Much time in such schools is wasted on fashionable, politically tendentious, but ineffective pedagogy. Think Bill Ayers and Paulo Freire, among the most frequently assigned authors in education courses. Think elementary-education professors specializing in such things as gender identity and post colonialism.

In her new book, An Empty Curriculum: The Need to Reform Teacher Licensing Regulations and Tests, Sandra Stotsky, professor emerita of education at the University of Arkansas, offers a tested model of teacher knowledge, explains why it’s not being used, and describes strategies for overcoming the education establishment’s resistance. Stotsky’s credentials for this task are impressive: in her role as senior associate commissioner at the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education from 1999 to 2003, she oversaw complete revisions of the state’s pre-K-12 standards as well as its teacher-licensure standards. Until these standards were replaced by the Common Core in 2010, Massachusetts ranked first among the states in educational achievement.

An entrenched education bureaucracy remains a formidable obstacle to meaningful educational reform, particularly in the area of standards. Many state education commissioners and staff “are influenced,” Stotsky says, “by the education schools they attended, teacher unions, school administrators’ needs, the interests of professional education organizations, and the pressure of political groups (especially think tanks, institutes, and policy-oriented organizations that claim expertise on educational matters).” Testing companies, educational entrepreneurs, diversity advocates, accreditation agencies, and political ideologues also have a vested interest in keeping standards low. Teacher-licensure tests, intended to protect children from incompetent teachers, set low passing requirements in order to protect teacher-preparation institutions, most of which, Stotsky points out, enjoy taxpayer funding.

Stotsky reminds readers how rigorous America’s education standards used to be. She cites a Michigan teacher-licensing exam in history from 1900, in which sample essay questions asked future grammar school teachers to, for example, “describe Ireland during the reign of Elizabeth” or “briefly state the result and effect of the Battle of Waterloo, naming the leading general.” States relaxed standards after a post-World War II teacher shortage, however, and relaxed them further after job options expanded for women, and further still after the court challenges of racial discrimination in the 1970s. Additionally, political correctness has corrupted subjects ranging from English and European languages to music and literature.

Stotsky calls on legislators and their constituents to revamp the system. To ensure teacher competency, she proposes raising college-admission standards and abolishing credits for undergraduate education coursework, replacing it with four years of academic coursework for core-subject teachers. Educationally high-achieving countries, such as Finland, South Korea, and Singapore, already take such measures. Extensive studies show that a teacher’s subject-matter knowledge is the best predictor of a student’s achievement, in line with the common-sense notion that “teachers cannot teach what they do not know,” as Stotsky puts it. Graduate-level coursework and professional-development courses should also be in the teacher’s subject areas: coursework for an M.S. or M.A. degree is far more intellectually demanding than for a M.Ed. degree. Stotsky also suggests requiring that directors, department heads, and curriculum specialists at the 5-12 grade level hold a master’s degree in their core subject and at least 18 credits of advanced graduate studies in one of the core academic subjects they supervise.

Such practical measures, however, aren’t in vogue. Much of the rhetoric surrounding the 2009 Race to the Top contest for federal stimulus funds focused on improving teacher quality, but the methods for measuring such quality can be dubious—including having students, beginning as early as kindergarten, evaluate their teachers. Georgia’s eight-year-olds assess teachers on such criteria as “my teacher cares about my learning” and “my teacher shows me how I can use what I learn at home and in the community.” The state then ties teacher bonuses to such ratings.

Stotsky’s compact and data-filled book should serve as a useful resource for pushing back against failed education policies and the bureaucrats who defend them.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the City Journal. The featured image is of a Norman Rockwell painting titled “Visit a Country School” dated 1946. Link to Sandra Stotsky’s primer for improving American educational standards: An Empty Curriculum: The Need to Reform Teacher Licensing Regulations and Tests.