Month: November 2020
Why we should be optimistic about various vaccines
I’ve been a long-time reader of your blog, and I have enjoyed your analyses of how the pandemic could play out in the US.
I saw that you gave some space to Arnold Kling’s pessimistic take on the vaccines. I’m a volunteer in the J&J Phase 3 vaccine trial, and my experience of the trial design makes me more optimistic about the vaccines than even the headline numbers in the so-far announced trials would suggest. I think the trial set-ups particularly for J&J have some biases that would lead to understated effectiveness results:
First, these trials are effectively unblinded. The placebos are saline solution in J&J, AstraZeneca, Pfizer and Moderna. Per the Phase 2 results for J&J, >60% of participants had significant side effects, with flu-like symptoms the most common; I believe other vaccine trials had similarly intense side effects. When I got a shot, I was nearly bedridden for 24 hours; it felt as if I had the flu, and the effect was far more pronounced than for any other vaccine I’ve had. If I got the placebo, I need a psychotherapist. Though I plan to remain generally responsible and not take too many incremental risks, given I’m only mostly sure I got a vaccine that is still unproven, I’m sure my assumption that I’ve been vaccinated will influence my behavior, and the behavior of anyone else who has had significant side effects from their injection too.
Second, upcoming trials are likely going to suffer from a “too much COVID effect” on an absolute basis, and relative to prior trials in particular. J&J counts any infection more than 14 days after injection toward its efficacy calculation. If full immunity takes longer (and my understanding is that antibodies build after infections for 3+ weeks in many cases), then there will be people out there getting infected before the vaccine has taken full effect. That wasn’t particularly likely to happen in the summer when there were fewer cases overall. This is particularly going to affect 1-shot vaccines, as other trials have their effectiveness measured only after the second dose (but I could still imagine this dynamic having some impact, if full immunity builds gradually after the second dose).
Anyway, hope this is of some interest. I found it encouraging to conclude that study bias could understate, not overstate, the effectiveness of vaccines.
That is from my email, identity of the author is redacted.
Friday assorted links
1. The EU drug regulator also does not have its act together. The Japanese, with vaccines, are being more cautious yet.
2. DuPont and Biden (WSJ).
3. “Sweden has reported 397 Covid deaths in the past nine days, more than either Norway or Finland — each with about half the population — have announced during the entire pandemic. Such figures led the normally cautious and measured state broadcaster SVT to declare that Sweden’s strategy looked increasingly like “a failure”.” FT link. And: “Remarkably, there were fewer (2.6) deaths/100K per day from *all causes* in SD [South Dakota] in Nov 2019 than are dying each day now just from COVID.”
4. Ed Lazear obituary (NYT). It is sad how they had to add in a “he had some left-wing views too,” so the readers have the liberty to feel sad about him dying. I would call that an underperformance of an obituary.
5. Rolf. Which kinds of political views are correlated with which kinds of academic priorities?
6. “There may even be a phenomenon like Dunning-Kruger at work, where the most conventional-minded people are confident that they’re independent-minded, while the genuinely independent-minded worry they might not be independent-minded enough.” Paul Graham.
7. Stripe and carbon removal (Atlantic).
SCOTUS, houses of worship, and the pandemic
The Supreme Court has sided with religious institutions (NYT) against some of the pandemic restrictions of state and local governments:
The opinion said the state had treated secular businesses more favorably than houses of worship.
“The list of ‘essential’ businesses includes things such as acupuncture facilities, camp grounds, garages, as well as many whose services are not limited to those that can be regarded as essential, such as all plants manufacturing chemicals and microelectronics and all transportation facilities,” the opinion said.
Here is also WaPo coverage. And:
“We may not shelter in place when the Constitution is under attack,” Justice Gorsuch wrote. “Things never go well when we do.”
While I am not myself religious, I regard religious services as essential parts of our society and also in the longer run for our economy (birth rates, if nothing else). More generally, I am struck by how many intelligent people no longer seem to attach much weight to religious liberty, by no means starting with the various anti-Church moves during the Obama administration, but certainly emphasized there. (Even centrist Democrats are often clueless about the traumatic effects here, one of the biggest gaps in their understanding of American politics.) So I am happy to see push back in the opposite direction, siding with the rights of religious institutions. On top of all other considerations, those institutions are also (usually) bastions of non-Woke sentiments, which makes protecting them all the more important.
You will note that the decision does not strike down all restrictions on church services, but rather rejects a particular set of restrictions, leaving many broader issues open (to varying degrees for the different justices, if I understand correctly).
You might think “this decision is killing people,” but I wonder if that is true on net. If you do believe various pandemic restrictions are the way forward at this point (only modestly in my view), you will want to restrict more than just churches. If religious people see that the rights of churches will be protected to some reasonable degree, they might be more willing to support other restrictions. So even if you are very pro-restriction, I hardly view this decision as an obvious consequentialist disaster. We are not banning Thanksgiving travel either, right?
And if we do not turn government and also federal funds and tax exemptions into a battering ram against religious autonomy, we will reap a lot of other practical, life and death benefits from that decision over time, including a healthier American discourse.
That all said, if I were running a church likely I would cancel all in-person services beyond very limited numbers.
Addendum: If in 2016 you vowed to “respect Trump voters,” supporting this decision would be one good place to start. It might do a good deal to limit polarization and improve the other decisions we make.
Bryan Caplan on the cost of Covid
Here is Bryan’s post, here is one bit:
Taking quality of life into account, how many life-years has the reaction to COVID destroyed?…
Upshot: The total cost of all COVID prevention has very likely exceeded the total benefit of all COVID prevention.
I don’t agree with Bryan’s numbers, but the more important point is one of logic. The higher the costs of reaction to Covid, the stronger the case for subsidizing vaccines, therapeutics, and other corrective measures. Would you accept this Bryan? You have numerous posts about risk overreaction, but not one (if I recall correctly) calling for such subsidies. Furthermore we just did some of those subsidies, through Operation Warp Speed, and they worked and they will fix the relevant incentives and lead to a resumption of normal life. So the “subsidies will prove counterproductive” argument doesn’t seem strong here. The subsidies are the (much) quicker path back to what you desire.
A second question is whether moral suasion — “don’t overreact to Covid!” — is likely to prove effective. As I’ve already linked to, risk explains mobility reductions far more than do lockdown policies. Or consider Sweden, which had a relatively non-panicky Covid messaging, no matter what you think of their substantive policies. Sweden didn’t do any better on the gdp front, and the country had pretty typical adverse mobility reactions. (NB: These are the data that you don’t see the “overreaction” critics engage with — at all. And there is more where this came from.)
How about Brazil? While they did some local lockdowns, they have a denialist president, a weak overall response, and a population used to a high degree of risk. The country still saw a gdp plunge and lots of collateral damage. You might ponder this graph, causality is tricky and the “at what margin” question is trickier yet, but it certainly does not support what Bryan is claiming about the relevant trade-offs.
I keep on hearing this point again and again, about overreaction. What kinds of reaction are you expecting or viewing as feasible and attainable? If overreacting is indeed a public bad, why think you can talk people down out of it? How much do you think you can talk them out of it? What if someone suggested that we try to talk people out of their irrational voting patterns, as analyzed by Bryan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter? How sanguine would he be about that enterprise? I believe he instead stressed changes in relative prices.
And this is the huge flaw behind so much of the discourse about the “costs of lockdowns” — they can cite the stupidity of closing the parks in March, yes, but they don’t and indeed can’t tell you how most of those costs were to be avoided, given how the public reacts to risk.
If we instead look to the relevant changes in relative prices, that means subsidies for vaccines and tests, most of all through advance market commitments, but not only. And a full-scale commitment to implementing testing and masks and therapeutics.
The more you push home points about overreaction, the more you ought to favor these subsidies. Libertarians out there, do you? This chicken has come home to roost, so please fess up and give the right answer here. Do you favor these subsidies, not just murmured into your closet at night but in plain black and white for the world to read? Moral suasion against risk overreaction is a red herring, fine enough for cutting back on one part of the problem by maybe a few percentage points, but serving mainly to distract from the very real economic questions at hand and the need to admit that one’s libertarian ideology doesn’t fit around this problem as nicely as one might wish.
This was a thing, yes it was, that was then, this is now
Initially founded in 1962, the Anti-Digit Dialing League quickly became the premiere sensible dialing association organization in the United States of America. Nearly 60 years later, the problems this country’s phone network faces are direr than ever. While we continue to espouse the use of 2L+5N dialing over all-number calling whenever possible, our primary aim today is to publicly oppose the proliferation of 10-digit dialing, which is fast becoming a public nuisance and dialing nightmare for ordinary people everywhere in this country.
Circa 1962-64 (those were the days), here is the web site. Web site? Wait, it still is a thing!:
Although 771 is scheduled to be overlaid on D.C.’s 202 area code in 2021, forcing residents of our nation’s capitol to dial 10 digits forevermore, the A.D.D.L. objected to the use of an overlay as a matter of principle. According to NANPA, splits are unlawful when the majority of the area code is in the same rate center (as is D.C.) (see pg. 12 of Sept. 1 Community Hearing Transcript). That doesn’t mean overlays are inevitable in other areas, though. Overlays continue to remain a public nuisance, and although splits have not been commonplace since 2006, we will continue to urge the use of splits over overlays whenever possible, because splits better serve the public interest, a finding which is well supported by empirical data.
Don’t let them tell you money illusion is not a problem. Via Anecdotal.
Thanksgiving assorted links
1. Suppressing Covid by blocking membrane fusion (Fast Grants funded).
2. Early contagiousness mutation now established (NYT, also Fast Grants funded work).
Best movies and films of 2020
I categorize them on the basis of when I watch them, so there is always some slippage at the beginning and the end of the year, all the more for foreign films, which can come to the U.S. as much as a year or two later than their original release dates. Of course this year was very different and there was hardly anything wonderful from Hollywood. Here is the list, as usual in the order I saw them:
Monos, Spanish-language, Lord of the Flies-type elements.
The Guilty, Danish police story, mainly talk, limited settings, really good.
Just 6.5, Iranian war on drugs movie, brutal at times, culturally fascinating.
The Wedding Plan, a few years older, a Rama Burshtein movie, imagine an Israeli woman setting out to get married by a particular date no matter what.
Diana Kennedy: Nothing Fancy. I think you need to have a preexisting connection to Mexico and Mexican food to enjoy it. I do.
Graduation, 2016 Romanian movie about trying to cheat on your kid’s exam. Excellent.
An American Pickle, Straussian critique of the Woke.
Tenet, if only to see a blockbuster again.
Cuties, yes it was really good, even if sometimes uncomfortably exploitative in its treatment of the source material, namely dancing young teen girls.
My Octopus Teacher, god-awful sentimental and storified, but everyone loved it.
The Two Faces of a Bamileke Woman, set in Cameroon, about cross-cultural differences.
Chez Jolie Coiffure, set in a Brussels hair salon, women from Cameroon and DRC talk to each other, from the same director as Two Faces of a Bamileke Woman, they make a nice set piece and are both quite short.
The Wild Goose Lake, set in Wuhan, a kind of Chinese noir, you have to already like Chinese cinema for this one.
Talking About Trees, Sudanese movie about the reopening of cinema.
Lovers Rock, Small Axe, Jamaican emigres in 1980 London.
Usually I put this list out later in the year, but what is the point of waiting?
Can we have an Operation Warp Speed for green energy?
Probably not, as I argue in my Bloomberg column. One problem is that advance market commitments work best when the output is well-defined, more or less homogeneous, and to be distributed according to very clear principles (one shot in the arm for everybody!). You can’t quite hand out green batteries or small nuclear reactors on the same basis. There is a case for subsidizing those, but not necessarily through advance purchase methods. Here is another part of the column:
Operation Warp Speed was also made easier by the internalization of vaccine research within companies or alliances of companies. The pre-purchase agreement limits risk, and within that framework the companies face strong competitive incentives to create a successful product. In the meantime, the work is removed from the public eye and debate, and at the end there is a definitive yes or no decision from the FDA. It is hardly simple, but it could be a lot more complicated.
In contrast, building a new energy infrastructure requires the cooperation of many companies and institutions, including local governments and regulators. One company can’t simply do everything (recall that the attempts of Alphabet to redesign part of Toronto as a new tech-based city met with local resistance and were ultimately put aside). The greater the number of institutions involved, the slower things get. Note that most of those institutions will not be getting pre-purchase funds from the federal government and they will face their usual bureaucratic and obstructionist incentives. When it comes to green energy policy, there are still too many veto points.
A striking feature of vaccine development is just how few social goals are involved. A vaccine should be safe, effective and easy to distribute. In broadly similar fashion, the highly successful Manhattan Project of the 1940s also had a small number of goals, namely a working and deliverable atomic bomb. When it comes to energy, there are already too many goals, and additional ones are often added: job creation, better design and community aesthetics, reductions in secondary pollution, regional economic benefits, and so on.
When I explain Fast Grants to people, and how it worked, it is always striking to me which part of the explanation they understand least. Everybody gets “we had a preexisting team in place, ready to handle accounting, recordkeeping, and payments.” Hardly anyone understands — really understands — “the program has two goals: supporting quality research projects that will feed into stopping Covid, and speed.” On one hand, it sounds self-evident to them, but on the other hand I don’t think they realize how much the intellectual infrastructure of the project really is defined by those goals and no others. Nothing about meeting payroll, or pursuing other meritorious social goals, or getting grant or donor renewal, or raising the stature of the program in the biomedical community, or…? What you choose not to pursue is one of the most radical steps you can take, and often it is so radical that other people don’t even grasp or notice it. They just don’t see you “not doing something.” That can be a good way to innovate!
Wednesday assorted links
1. Russian vaccine reports very good results. Maybe we shouldn’t believe this, but in expected value terms the Russian vaccine still is underrated.
2. Money made people happier but psychotherapy did not.
3. Carrying costs exceed liquidity premium: Lion cheaper than a pedigree kitten in Japan. The lion might cost less than $1000.
4. Arnold Kling isn’t sure how effective the new vaccines will be, more here. I am myself very optimistic, but happy to pass along other points of view.
How good has media coverage of Covid-19 been?
We analyze the tone of COVID-19 related English-language news articles written since January 1, 2020. Ninety one percent of stories by U.S. major media outlets are negative in tone versus fifty four percent for non-U.S. major sources and sixty five percent for scientific journals. The negativity of the U.S. major media is notable even in areas with positive scientific developments including school re-openings and vaccine trials. Media negativity is unresponsive to changing trends in new COVID-19 cases or the political leanings of the audience. U.S. major media readers strongly prefer negative stories about COVID-19, and negative stories in general. Stories of increasing COVID-19 cases outnumber stories of decreasing cases by a factor of 5.5 even during periods when new cases are declining. Among U.S. major media outlets, stories discussing President Donald Trump and hydroxychloroquine are more numerous than all stories combined that cover companies and individual researchers working on COVID-19 vaccines.
Emphasis added by me. That is the abstract of a new NBER working paper by Bruce Sacerdote, Ranjan Sehgal, and Molly Cook.
“Mirror, Mirror” (Star Trek classic, spoilers in this post)
I haven’t seen most Star Trek episodes since I was a young teen, so I tried rewatching this one, you know, with the alternate universe and the evil Spock. It was good!
I took away from it the main lesson that our moral behavior — or lack thereof — is one of the most contingent and fragile features of our universe. The possibly happy ending for the bad universe drives this point home, as does the opening speech from the indigenous folk (the Halkans) who won’t sell their dilithium crystals, reminding Kirk that the Federation too might turn bad. Add to that the utter implausibility of their “highly moral” behavior in the bad universe, as the absurdity and unlikelihood of their invited destruction reminds us that virtually everyone is pliable in response to strong enough incentives.
If you think through the plot, to the extent the “good” people are more powerful and effective than the “bad” people, that is because the “good” people are better at deceit. Though the good people can teach deceit to the bad people, as the good Kirk does at the end to the evil Spock, who perhaps will reform. Another embedded lesson is that both the “good” and the “bad” men will sexually harass (both the good and bad) women, with the major differences being those of style not substance. And the “good” men seem to prefer the “bad” women.
If the “bad” universe were safer, would the powerful people find it better or worse to live in? What if you had a Ring of Gyges to help you along?
Overall you can read the whole episode as “the spirits” (God?) sending a Shakespearean-like dream to Kirk, so that he can better understand the perspective of the Halkans, which otherwise he finds baffling. Might the Halkans have sent the dream themselves?
Recommended, it was better and more idea-rich than expected. I will try another episode soon.
My podcast with Darren Lipomi
He is a well-known chemist (and more) at UC San Diego. We started with classic Star Trek and then moved into textiles, chemistry, music vs. sound, nanobots against Covid, how to interview, traveling during a pandemic, art collecting and voodoo flags, the importance of materials science, and much more. Mostly he interviewed me, though it went a bit both ways.
Almost 100% fresh material and topics, and here is the Spotify link.
MIT graduate micro exam, 1961
From the archives of Irwin Collier (I won’t do any extra indentation):
Economics Candidates: Answer any FOUR questions (thirty minutes each).
S.I.M. Candidates: Answer any TWO questions (thirty minutes each).
- Within the framework of static, partial-equilibrium theory, indicate under what circumstances advertising will reduce product prices in the long run, (a) if the advertiser is a simple monopolist, (b) if the advertisers are members of a large, perfectly symmetrical, Chamberlinian group of suppliers of differentiated products (the number of firms being large enough to rule out oligopolistic relationships, and variable in accordance with a long-run-equilibrium condition of zero profit for all firms).
- How is a firm’s demand schedule for a particular factor of production derived (a) when that factor is the only variable one, and (b) when the quantities of all factors are variable? Show which of these demands is, if anything, the more elastic.
- The demands for two products are: q1 = q2 = 54 – p1 -p2. How would you characterize their relationship? If they are produced by separate sellers at constant average costs of c1 = 12 and c2 = 6, respectively, calculate each man’s equilibrium price, quantity, and profit under each of the following conditions:
- Each seller assumes that the other’s price is a constant;
- The second seller behaves that way and the first seller realizes that he does;
- Both sellers maximize their joint profit and share it equally.
- Two countries can produce food (F) and clothing (C) with labor (L) as the only factor of production. Country A has 20 billion units of L, each of which can produce either 5 units of F or 2 units of C. Country B has 10 billion units of L, each of which can produce either 8 units of F or 6 units of C. Everyone always spends half of his income on F and the other half on C. In a purely competitive equilibrium with balanced trade between the two countries (and no transportation costs), what is the effect on the quantities of F and C produced and consumed in each country? Could either country benefit by imposing a tariff on the imported good?
- What are the various reasons why a free-private-enterprise economy may fail to allocate its resources in an optimally efficient way? Explain.
- Discuss the roles of “real” and “monetary” elements in a satisfactory theory of interest. Is it logically possible to fashion an interest theory exclusively in terms of one or the other of those elements? Explain.
TC again: I don’t think current graduate students (outside of MIT and a few other places) would do very well on #1, nor do I think they would understand what is being asked on #6, much less have a good answer. On #5, I wonder how many would give a sufficiently analytical answer rather than just repeating a bunch of cliches from media and social media?
Edward Lazear has passed away
He was one of the true microeconomists, from Wikipedia:
Edward Paul Lazear…an American economist, the Morris Arnold and Nona Jean Cox Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the Davies Family Professor of Economics at Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Lazear served as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors from 2006 to 2009, replacing Ben Bernanke. As Chairman, he was the chief economic advisor to President George W. Bush holding a cabinet-level post as part of the White House team that led the response to the 2007-2008 financial crisis. Lazear has been called the founder of personnel economics a subfield of economics that applies economic models to the study of the management of human resources in the firm. His research advances new models of employee incentives, promotions, compensation and productivity in firms. He is also credited with developing a theory of entrepreneurship and leadership that emphasizes skill acquisition. In addition to personnel economics, Lazear is a labor economist known for his work on the educational production function, teaching to the test, and the importance of culture and language in explaining the rise of multiculturalism.
Tuesday assorted links
1. What Vietnam has been like. And the Katya Simon recommendations.
2. Leopold Aschenbrenner is now blogging.
3. Don Boudreaux on “Tyler vs. Tyler.” (Usually a rich topic, I might add.) In my view, the mobility data and cross-comparative data show that most of the real resource costs have come from fear and risk avoidance, not from lockdowns per se. See this work, or visit your local movie theatre.
4. All the good writing about Substack.
6. AI to sum up research papers in a sentence.
7. John Lott update.