Last December, Karyn Lewis and Megan Kuhfeld, two researchers at NWEA, a research organization, reported that student achievement at the start of the current school year was lower than for a typical year. There was a 3–7 percentage point decline in reading and a 9–11 percentage point decline in mathematics. That same month, education researchers Dan Goldhaber of the University of Washington, Thomas J. Kane of Harvard, and Andrew McEachin of NWEA plugged the Lewis/Kuhfeld data into a model to estimate how much those declines in learning would cause their lifetime income to decline. Their answer: $43,800. This number was broadly consistent with a separate study by McKinsey & Company that found an average lifetime earnings loss of between $49,000–$61,000 per student. Aggregated across all US K-12 students, these studies show more than $2 trillion in lost lifetime earnings for our youngest generation.

A recent report released by the World Bank paints a more dire picture. In that report, it estimates that the school closures could cause a loss of between 0.3 and 1.1 years of schooling, adjusted for quality. In its most pessimistic scenario, the World Bank estimates that worldwide cumulative losses could total between $16 and $20 trillion in present value terms.

A National Bureau of Economic Research study released in November 2021 analyzed recent test score data across 12 states in comparison to previous years and found passing rates declined by 14.2 percentage points on average in mathematics and 6.3 percentage points in English Language Arts. The authors found that much of the decline was due to the closing down of schools.

Historical evidence suggests that these learning losses are likely to be permanent. A 2019 article published in the Journal of Labor Economics analyzed the effect of teacher strikes in Argentina on students’ long-term outcomes in that country. The authors found that experiencing the average number of days of strikes during primary school reduced labor earnings of males and females by 3.2 percent and 1.9 percent, respectively.

In another study, researchers from the IZA Institute of Labor Economics analyzed long-term outcomes from one of the most extreme examples of learning disruptions – war. In that study, the authors compared Austrians and Germans who were 10 years old during World War II with their counterparts in neutral countries such as Switzerland and Sweden. The authors found that earning losses persisted into the 1980s. They estimated the earning losses to be about 0.8 percent of GDP.

Once these earning losses take hold, they lead to lower life expectancies. This connection was highlighted most prominently in a paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association that analyzed data on school shutdowns early in the pandemic. The authors found that missed instruction in the United States could be associated with an estimated 13.8 million years of life lost.

What makes these outcomes even more tragic is that they were experienced by children who, as was known early on, never had a significant risk of dying from COVID-19. As of the first week of March 2022, out of the nearly 950,000 Covid-19 deaths, only 865 were children under the age of 18. That amounts to about 433 children annually. This is comparable to a bad flu season in the US. For example, the CDC estimates that the actual number of flu deaths for children in the 2017-18 flu season was about 600.

Moreover, the school closings and lockdowns have led to a noticeable loss in children’s mental health. This was apparent early in the pandemic. In a CDC report released in November 2020, researchers reported that the proportion of mental health-related visits from April to October 2020 for children aged 5-11 and 12-17 years had increased by approximately 24 percent and 31 percent, respectively in comparison to 2019 data. In a follow-up CDC report, researchers found that emergency department visits due to suspected suicide attempts were 51 percent higher among girls aged 12-17 years during early 2021 in comparison to the same period in 2019; among boys aged 12-17 years, suspected suicide attempt emergency department visits increased 4 percent.

In 2021, FAIR Health released a report that analyzed data from over 32 billion private health care claim records tracking data from 2019 and 2020. Claims for intentional self-harm as a percentage of all medical claims in the 13-18 age group were 90.7 percent higher early in the pandemic in 2020 than in the same time period in 2019. Furthermore, the authors noted, claims for generalized anxiety disorder increased by 93.6 percent over that same time.

Not much can be done about this now, other than to end the remaining restrictions on children. But there is a lesson for future pandemics: follow the science. If the data say that young people are at very low risk, then treat them as if they are at very low risk. Maybe we’re all in this together, as the propaganda goes, but we are not equally in this together. Treating children the way government officials did was morally wrong.

David R. Henderson

Ryan Sullivan

This article is republished with permission from the American Institute for Economic Research.

The post The Kids Aren’t Alright appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

That’s a huge question. You can list every ingredient you want: the amazing characters, the charmed music, great story, beautiful animation, the right combination of drama plus bad guys plus humor. It’s impossible to identify a single element responsible for the greatness; somehow it all came together.

We all have a favorite thing about Frozen. For me it was the portrayal of bourgeois life in some uncertain Nordic country in some uncertain past, featuring normal merchants and regular people struggling to achieve peace and prosperity, plus the sad but ultimately triumphant story of estranged sisters who lived a once-lonely life in a castle but discovered together that love is a force that can heal the land. There was, of course, the epic emancipatory anthem of “Let It Go” complete with the magical construction of a glorious ice cathedral to individualism in the sky.

Unforgettable.

No sequel could possibly live up to the first, of that we can be certain. This is why so many of us had a slight sense of dread about Frozen II. We want to know more about this wonderful land and these people but are the producers up to the task? Would the creators find the reasons for the mighty achievement of the first and then reproduce them with an extended storyline that does no injury to the original ethos?

Olaf’s Frozen Adventure from 2017 (it’s only 20 minutes long) provided a reason for hope: it was an absolutely delightful story that captured many elements of the original that I liked. Or would Frozen II miss the reasons for the creative success of the first and instead default to a formula that draws mainly on the capital built up from the first effort to push some manipulative agenda?

I’ve spoken to many people who left the theater very happy with the movie. That’s good. Some people are screaming with delight. I wish I had been among them. But apparently, I’m the outlier here. The movie drew in $100 million on its opening weekend and the fan reviews are solid.

True, the animation is beyond-belief beautiful. Just remarkable. The clothing was spectacular, a dress designer’s dream come true. The music falls far short of the first but maybe that too is to be expected. At least three songs in the film attempt to capture the magic of Let It Go, but none come close. Still, “Show Yourself” is a powerful song.

My issues are as follows. I saw very little of the themes in the first that thrilled me so much. Instead, about halfway through, I suddenly felt browbeat by a pushy political agenda involving some of the most annoying features of contemporary high-brow debate, involving identitarianism, social justice, colonialism, industrial exploitation, race and ethnicity, environmental destruction, climate change, and group-based guilt and contrition.

All this was poured into a confused plot involving dark secrets of the family history, including a strained attempt to reframe Elsa and Anna as the product of a mixed-race/ethnicity marriage, and therefore tasked with righting historical wrongs even at the risk of destroying the town they are sworn to protect.

You can render this how you want. Maybe it is about, as one Twitter account said, “In order for us to save something, we need to sacrifice something. That is what we should do in our life. In order to save ourselves, sometimes we need to sacrifice things that are destroying us, relationships, friendships, efforts, money and more.” Great: if this is the takeaway, I have the sense that the creators will have missed their mark.

Again, for all the viewers who can look past all of this and just enjoy the movie, that’s fabulous. Once I saw the underlying ideological agenda  – and fortunately, no younger viewer will see a bit of this in the film – I couldn’t unsee it.

I can’t shake the sense that the entire plot was crafted to address the original’s most fanatical critics on the left, who of course are not satisfied because they will never finally be satisfied. The New York Times even took after the sisters themselves: “the harmonious emotions and good intentions never fully atone for the conventionalism of the blond-on-blond character design, the tiny waists, pert breasts, jeweled eyes and pale plastic-y skin. Hearing women sing of freedom is irresistible, but Disney needs to take its old-fashioned ideal of female beauty and just, well, let it go.”

Catch the language of sin and atonement here? The critical theory that has dominated elite cultural criticism has become a faith so pervasive that it threatens to blot out the creative imagination that is essential to creative art. Everything, we are told, must conform to a political narrative to impose on the entire bourgeois order a deep sense of guilt for its very existence.

Even the Frozen franchise, one of the most successful in history, must be twisted to make this point or else face a brutal beating at the hands of the cultural elite. The writers and directors were very clearly kowtowing to this fear. Here is a paradigmatic case in which a political ideology gets in the way of producing art that speaks to the real complexities of the human experience and uplifts the spirit.

But here is what is interesting. I’m looking all over the Internet for people who saw what I saw. It’s there but you have to look for it. This lefty site celebrates the film:

[In Frozen II] climate justice moves from allegorical substrate to the centre of the story. Elsa is drawn Into the Unknown (the title of the soundtrack’s first single) by an ethereal voice that speaks for disordered nature…. Elsa’s icy powers may be able to stop elemental forest fire, but it is her determination to learn about and take responsibility for colonial climate crisis, in solidarity with an indigenous community, that we need as the forests of California, where the film was made, burn down.

To which I can only roll my eyes.

National Review too picked up on it:

Sometimes the Left’s enthusiasm for making amends for ancient iniquity looks like random punishment directed at innocent living people. Disney typically contents itself with selling a sort of mushy be-nice liberalism, but Frozen II may presage a turn to storylines that celebrate extremism. Are you ready for Woke Disney?

The great news is that, so far as I can tell, viewers aren’t very interested in the climate-crisis-post-colonial-critical-theory-identitarian elements of the story and prefer to think mainly about the cute fire gekko, Elsa’s taming of the water horse, and Anna’s awesome boots.

All to the good. May the public’s implacable superficiality save us from insufferable wokeness that threatens to ruin all the things we love.

Jeffrey A. Tucker

Jeffrey A. Tucker is Editorial Director for the American Institute for Economic Research. He is the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and eight books in 5 languages, most recently The Market Loves You. He is also the editor of The Best of Mises. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture. He is available for speaking and interviews via his email.  Tw | FB | LinkedIn

This article is republished with permission from the American Institute for Economic Research.

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