In a recent interview with Sky News, London resident Viral Bhundia described what it was like to watch his young son Jai struggle to speak.
“If he wanted something he would scream, and it was up to us to decode him and figure out what he wanted,” Bhundia said. “Does he want a cup? Does he want water?”
Jai’s struggle is not unique. They are part of a broader trend of children falling behind in basic language communication around the world.
The latest evidence comes from Speech and Language UK, which found that one in five children in the United Kingdom is behind in basic speech. According to Sky News, this is reportedly the “highest number of children with speech and language challenges ever recorded” in the UK.
It is not difficult to understand why so many children lack basic language skills. Around the world, governments responded to the COVID-19 pandemic with an arsenal of blunt tools – lockdowns, mandatory mask orders, endless social distancing and travel restrictions – that had a devastating impact on learning development. (Of these, masking in particular is seen by many as the primary cause of speech delay.)
The pandemic years were a challenge for everyone, but it was especially damaging for children, as abundant evidence shows. For example, in the United States, ACT scores fell to a 30-year low, while teenage girls reported record levels of sadness and suicidal tendencies, likely due to widespread social isolation.
It is important to understand that such social consequences are not primarily caused by the virus, but by the government answer To the virus.
Difference matters. In previous pandemics, government officials had considered similar “non-pharmaceutical interventions” (NPIs) but opted against them, believing they would do little good and cause serious economic and social harm. In 2020, government officials chose a different approach, adopting the idea that central planning could be used to implement policies designed to reduce the spread of the virus. Healthy people and sick people alike will be masked up and quarantined.
The decision was disastrous.
The lockdown has been described as the worst policy mistake in modern history. Meanwhile, Dr. Anthony Fauci was recently embarrassed on CNN when he was faced with damning evidence showing how ineffective masks and mask mandates were at stopping the spread of COVID-19.
The government response to COVID-19 was a complete failure and few of us saw it coming. In March 2020, I pointed out that governments have a long track record of responding to crises and making things much worse,
Basic economics helps explain why some of us predicted (correctly) that government responses would prove counterproductive.
First, anyone who has read Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek use of knowledge in society It understands that central planners lack the knowledge to plan economies effectively because they lack local knowledge.
Today it is almost heresy to suggest that scientific knowledge is not the sum of all knowledge. But a little reflection will show that there is no doubt a body of very important but unorganized knowledge which cannot possibly be called scientific in the sense of knowledge of general rules: knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place.
What is related to this is that practically every individual has some advantage over all others because he has unique information that can be used beneficially, but which can only be used when decisions are based on it. Be abandoned or done with their active cooperation.
Hayek understood that societies are incredibly complex – almost infinitely complex – something that many people do not understand, especially those who want to engineer society. This was always the fatal flaw of centrally planned societies, and there was no reason to believe that central planners would be any more effective at managing an invisible pathogen than planning an economy.
Second, any student of economics understands the reality of tradeoffs, which are broadly defined as “any situation where choosing one option means losing something else, usually giving up a gain or opportunity.” Once one understands the trade-off, it becomes clear that even if governments had the knowledge to reduce the spread of COVID – a dubious assumption – it would do little good. Cost,
Economist Antony Davis and political scientist James Harrigan said this when they exposed the “if it saves one life” mantra being used by politicians to justify lockdowns in 2020.
Five thousand Americans die each year from choking on solid food. We can save every one of their lives by making it mandatory to purify all food. Pureed food doesn’t taste delicious, but if it saves just one life, it will be worth it. The chance of dying while driving a car is almost twice as likely as that of dying while driving an SUV. We could save lives by making it mandatory that everyone drives a big car. SUVs are more expensive and worse for the environment, but if it saves just one life, it will be worth it.
If these policies seem absurd, there’s a reason: That’s what they were. Harrigan and Davis were talking about tradeoffs.
“The inconvenient truth is that no policy can save lives; It can only trade life,” he explained. “Good policies result in net positive trade.”
Sadly, tradeoffs weren’t even part of the conversation in 2020 and 2021. No government has bothered to do a cost-benefit analysis of its COVID policies. Indeed, the idea that government policies could actually cause harm was not seriously considered (and in some cases treated as “misinformation”).
Yet the compromise was clear. In some cases they were fatal, such as when children were denied heart surgery because of travel restrictions. In other cases, the tradeoffs were deemed “minor” – such as lost learning due to school closures or mask mandates. (One should ask Viral Bhundia whether he thinks Jai’s speech challenges are “minor”. I suspect his answer will be ‘no’.)
It’s a sad reality that many people had to learn about tradeoffs the hard way during the pandemic. CNN medical analyst Dr. Leana Wen was a vocal supporter of mask mandates, until she found out about it One of the policy tradeoffs,
“Wearing a mask has harmed our son’s language development,” Wayne said. “There is a compromise.”
Actually there is. And broader speech development issues are just one of countless unintended consequences of delegating individual decisions to government bureaucrats.
To their credit, workers at Bhundia’s nursery made it clear to Sky News that they believe government policies are to blame for Jai’s language struggle.
The government’s response is also telling the same.
A Department for Education spokesperson told the newspaper: “We are conscious of the impact of the pandemic on pupils’ education, which is why we have made almost £5 billion available for education reform.”
You read it right. Lawmakers are now spending billions of taxpayer money to fix the problems they created. A very official response indeed.
John 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.
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