Month: November 2020
Paige Harden on Genetic Differences and the Left
Paige Harden, the left-leaning behavioral geneticist, brings the fire in comments on an AEON article about her work:
In this article, Erik Parens urges me and other scientists working in the field of social genomics to “curb [our] optimism” regarding how genetic discoveries could be used to advance progressive and egalitarian social goals. In my view, however, it is Parens and other critics of social genomics who need to curb their optimism, in two ways.
First, Parens is overly optimistic that social science can ever hope to be successful without genetics. In reality, social scientists have failed, time and time again, to produce interventions that bring about lasting improvements in people’s lives. There are many reasons for that failure. But one reason is that many scientists continue to engage in what the sociologist Jeremy Freese has called a “tacit collusion” to avoid reckoning, in their research designs and in their causal inferences, with the fact that people are genetically different from one another.
All interventions and policies are built on a model of how the world works: “If I change x, then y will happen.” A model of the world that pretends all people are genetically the same, or that the only thing people inherit from their parents is their environment, is a wrong model of how the world works. The more often our models of the world are wrong, the more often we will continue to fail in designing interventions and policies that do what they intend to do. The goal of integrating genetics into the social sciences is not to design boutique educational interventions tailored for children’s genotypes. It is to help rescue us from our current situation, where most educational interventions tested don’t work for anyone. This track record of failure plays directly into the hands of a right-wing that touts the ineffectiveness of intervention as evidence for its false narrative of genetic determinism.
Second, Parens and other critics are overly optimistic that their strategy of disapproval, discouragement, and disavowal of genetic research will be effective in neutralizing the pernicious ideologies of the far-right. What is the evidence that this strategy actually works? Herrnstein and Murray published “The Bell Curve” when I was 12 years old; Murray published “Human Diversity” when I was 37 years old; and in all that time, the predominant response from the political left has remained pretty much exactly the same – emphasize people’s genetic sameness, question the wisdom of doing genetic research at all, urge caution. Yet, the far-right is ascendant. In my view, the left’s response to genetic science simply preaches to its own choir. Meanwhile, this strategy of minimization allows right-wing ideologues to offer to “red-pill” people with the “forbidden knowledge” of genetic results.
What the left hasn’t done (yet) is formulate a messaging strategy that (a) reconciles the existence of human genetic differences with people’s moral and political commitments to human equality, and (b) is readily comprehensible outside the confines of the ivory tower. Reminding people that genes are a source of luck in their lives has the potential to be that message. Parens characterizes me as making a “generous hearted but large leap” to expect that portraying genes as luck will change people’s minds, but economic research suggests that reminding people of the role of luck in their lives does, in fact, make them more supportive of redistribution.
Overall, this article portrays me and others working in this space as “soft-pedaling” the dangers of social genomics being appropriated by the far right. But I am fully cognizant of the dangers. Parens is the one who is soft-pedaling. He is soft-pedaling the enormous damage done to progress in psychology, sociology, and other social sciences – fields that are tasked with improving people’s lives – by their refusal to engage with genetics. And, he is soft-pedaling the danger of simply continuing the left’s decades-old, easily-“red-pilled” rhetorical strategy at a time with right-wing ideologies are on the rise globally.
Toward a universal medical test?
UC San Francisco scientists have developed a single clinical laboratory test capable of zeroing in on the microbial miscreant afflicting a patient in as little as six hours – irrespective of what body fluid is sampled, the type or species of infectious agent, or whether physicians start out with any clue as to what the culprit may be.
The test will be a lifesaver, speeding appropriate drug treatment for the seriously ill, and should transform the way infectious diseases are diagnosed, said the authors of the study, published Nov. 9 in Nature Medicine.
The advance here is that we can detect any infection from any body fluid, without special handling or processing for each distinct body fluid,” said study corresponding author Charles Chiu, MD, PhD, a professor in the UCSF Department of Laboratory Medicine and director of the UCSF-Abbott Viral Diagnostics and Discovery Center.
Here is the full story, via David Lim.
That was then, this is now, wartime casualties edition
U.S. Civil War combat deaths per day: 449
World War II U.S. combat deaths per day: 297
Covid-19 U.S. deaths per day: > 1,000
And rising, 1500 per day seems baked in, 2000 per day might also be within reach. I just don’t get you people who say this isn’t a big deal.
By the way, deaths as a percentage of population isn’t the right metric here. Losing 320,000 lives (including excess deaths) has about the same moral import, whether or not there are a billion Morlocks living under the earth’s surface, though that fact would change the loss greatly as measured in percentage terms and of course make it look much smaller.
If one thousand lives (and more) per day is not a big deal, then what is? The global toll is much larger of course, and most of the gdp contraction has come from fear rather than lockdowns per se — see for instance Sweden.
And as Scott Gottlieb tweeted:
This is not a question of lockdowns vs no lockdowns. The question is how do we take targeted measures, get broader compliance to prudent steps like masks, distancing, avoiding large gatherings; to reduce, slow spread so that the healthcare system doesn’t risk getting overwhelmed.
You won’t do a bit of restraint to stem these losses, and shift infections into the future, while a good vaccine is coming not to mention other therapeutics? Or try this simple question: If you are a limited government libertarian, then when would you deploy government action if not now?
Speaking of “that was then, this is now,” here is Jeffrey Tucker of AIER (of GBD fame) predicting, circa October 14, that there will never be a vaccine.
A love letter to law and economics education
“Quantifying Economic Reasoning in Court: Judge Economic Sophistication and Pro-business Orientation” (draft coming soon)
Abstract: By applying computational linguistics tools to the analysis of US federal district courts’ decisions from 1932 to 2016, this paper quantifies the rise of economic reasoning in court cases, ranging from securities regulation to antitrust law. I then relate judges’ level of economic reasoning to their training. I find that the significant judge heterogeneity in economic sophistication can be explained by attendance at law schools with a large presence of the law and economics faculty. Finally, for all regulatory cases from 1970 to 2016 I hand code whether the judge ruled in favor of the business or the government. I find that judge economic sophistication is positively correlated with a higher frequency of pro-business decisions even after controlling for political ideology and a rich set of other judge covariates.
That is the job market paper of Siying Cao, who is on the job market from the University of Chicago. Here is her home page.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Lewis Jackson on money in politics.
2. Cowen’s Second Law: “Criminal cannibalism: An examination of patterns and styles.”
3. “Black Churches still comprise the majority of the church chapter 11 filings.”
4. Laura Deming mental models for science and other things. And short history of the mRNA vaccine. And maybe the vaccine is 97% effective. And caveat lector out the wazoo, but here is a new report on the Sputnik vaccine. You will note the Russians are in any case having big problems scaling production.
5. Data on diversity and hiring practices in Silicon Valley.
Right-thinking Henry Olsen on Trump voter fraud
None of these early warning signs of fraud appear in the results.
There is much more detail and argument at the link. Via Ross Douthat.
*Religion and the Rise of Capitalism*
That is the new, forthcoming book by Benjamin M. Friedman, due out in January, you can pre-order here. I will be inviting him to do a CWT, he was also an excellent macro professor way back when.
Via Henry C. Clark.
Predictions of the herd immunity theorists
If you are still pondering the Great Barrington Declaration and related matters, let us try a simple empirical test about predictions. Start with this from one of the authors of the Declaration:
…the professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford University, Sunetra Gupta. In May she declared: “I think that the epidemic has largely come and is on the way out in this country.”
Link here. The UK just hit 500 deaths a day, highest since May and about 2x the current U.S. rate.
She also said:
“So I think the [infection fatality rate, or IFR] would be definitely less than one in 1,000 and probably closer to 1 in 10,000. That would be somewhere between 0.1% and 0.01%.”
Dominic Lawson continues:
As Sam Bowman, of the free-market Adam Smith Institute — and therefore far from an illiberal interventionist — observed: “By this point, 36,000 had died of Covid in the UK. If 100% of the UK’s population had had Covid by then, the UK would have had to have a population of 360 million people for her low-end IFR to be right.”
Or why not read that august institution The Otago Times?:
Sweden’s former top virus expert says lockdowns are just a way of delaying the inevitable and warns that New Zealand could face years of quarantining foreigners entering the country, even after wiping out Covid-19.
Johan Giesecke has defended his country’s coronavirus strategy, saying lockdowns do not prevent surges in cases or deaths, but merely delay them.
Giesecke believes it is “futile” to attempt to stop the spread and says most countries will end up in a similar position, regardless of their strategy, until treatment can be found.
He believes Denmark, Norway and Finland, which are in full lockdown, will end up with the same number of cases as Sweden, which isn’t, as soon as their restrictions ease.
He also says New Zealand will begin importing cases from overseas, after successfully suppressing the virus during lockdown.
To avoid that, quarantine measures will have to stay in place until a vaccine is developed – something he says could take a decade, or longer.
Come on people, you were wrong. By the way, “Covid-19 hospitalizations in the United States hit an all-time high of 61,964 on Tuesday,” and deaths running about 1,300 a day. Not a nothingburger. p.s. One in five survivors end up diagnosed with a mental illness.
Movie podcast with Abe (and Agnes) Callard
We discuss Iranian cinema, most of all Farhadi films, focusing on the two best, namely A Separation and About Elly. At the end I hit Abe with a dose of underrated vs. overrated, mostly movies again. The host is Russell Hogg. Here is Abe on Twitter, here is Abe doing short films. Abe is the son of Agnes.
The first global election?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is the closing bit:
What kind of bargain is it for the country for the U.S. election to be the object of such global interest? We Americans may be flattered by the attention, but it is not clear that it is such a good thing. For one thing, it gives foreigners a greater incentive to try to manipulate U.S. elections.
Another possible problem is that political coalitions will, over time, be defined globally rather than nationally and locally. Is your presidential candidate attracting support from the wrong factions in France, Germany or South Sudan? On one hand that could be useful information, but it could also prove misleading. Foreigners support U.S. presidential candidates for their own reasons, and it could be distorting to have so many outside parties involved. That’s what happened in the Brexit debates, in which a pro-Brexit position was (and remains) all too quickly identified with populism, anti-globalization and support for Trump. The Brexit debate might have been more sane if it had been more local.
What if, come the next U.S. presidential election, most of the social media debate is among non-Americans? What if much of the world ends up with a common, one-dimensional political spectrum, rather than each country having its own (mostly) independent politics? We may be about to find out.
I’ll say it again: American soft power is rising, not falling.
Tuesday assorted links
Where We Stand
There is good news and there is bad news.
Let’s start with the good news.The early results from the Pfizer vaccine are very good, 90% efficacy. That will probably fall a bit but it’s very good news not just for the Pfizer vaccine but for most of the vaccines in the pipeline which target the spike protein.
The Pfizer vaccine does require very cold storage which means it won’t work for large parts of the world. A distribution plan is in place for most of the United States and Pfizer already has 50 million doses, which can cover ~25 million people, in storage.
Many thousands of people are dying every week so Pfizer should apply for and the FDA should issue a EUA without further delay.
One issue is, given limited supply, how to distribute the vaccine. I have suggested we randomize distribution across hospitals, police and fire stations, and nursing homes (see also my piece in Bloomberg with Scott Kominers, The Case for a COVID Vaccine Lottery.) A vaccine lottery is fair, it will make distribution easier by limiting the number of vaccination locations and it will in essence create a very large clinical trial. With millions of participants we will be better able to make fine distinctions between the vaccine’s safety and efficacy in different populations and the results will come in quickly. Thus, if we randomize and collect data, limited capacity has a silver lining.
Second issue. Manufacturing capacity. Pfizer will have enough capacity to produce 1.3 billion doses in 2021 which sounds like a lot but it’s a two dose vaccine and there will be losses in distribution so maybe 500 million people vaccinated. We need to vaccinate billions.
The cost to the world economy of COVID is in the trillions so we want to vaccine a lot faster. Faster than private markets are willing to go. There are other vaccines in the pipeline but we still need to ramp up capacity. Increasing capacity is something that Michael Kremer, Susan Athey, myself and others at Accelerating Health Technologies have been working on since the beginning of the crisis. It’s not too late to do more.
Third issue is testing. Trump got it into his head that more tests means more cases when in fact a lot more tests means fewer cases. There is a Laffer curve for testing. Our failure to get ahead of the virus with tests has meant hundreds of thousands of excess deaths. We are still failing this test. Winter is coming. Infections and deaths are both rising.
Biden won’t be president until late January but there are things he can do now. In particular, Congress already allocated $25 billion to testing in April—that was far too little. We spent trillions on relief and comparatively little fighting the virus. But here is the real shocker, most of the $25 billion allocated in April hasn’t been spent. Let me say that again, most of the money allocated for testing in April has not been spent. Biden can signal today that that money and more will be spent. He can also signal, as in fact he has, that he wants rapid antigen tests approved.
Rapid antigen tests are cheap, paper strip tests that can check for infectiousness and are ideal to getting things like the schools running again.
Even if we start vaccinating this year, we won’t vaccinate a majority of the US population until well into 2021. That’s true but what’s underappreciated is that testing, masks, social distancing and vaccines are complementary. The more people are vaccinated, for example, the greater our testing capacity rises relative to the population at risk.
The pandemic is getting worse not better but we did flatten the curve, albeit imperfectly, and now if we can summon the will, we have the tools including rapid antigen tests, vaccines and monoclonal antibodies to really crush the virus.
What should I ask John O. Brennan?
The former head of the CIA, grew up in North Bergen, NJ, fluent in Arabic. I will be doing a Conversation with him. Here is his Wikipedia page. Here is his new book Undaunted: My Fight Against America’s Enemies at Home and Abroad.
So what should I ask him?
School choice in Los Angeles
By Christopher Campos and Caitlin Kearns have some very positive results on school vouchers:
This paper evaluates the Zones of Choice (ZOC) program in Los Angeles, a school choice initiative that created small high school markets in some neighborhoods but left traditional attendance zone boundaries in place throughout the rest of the district. We leverage the design of the program to study the impact of neighborhood school choice on student achievement, college enrollment, and other outcomes using a matched difference-in-differences de-sign. Our findings reveal that the ZOC program boosted test scores and college enrollment markedly, closing achievement and college enrollment gaps between ZOC neighborhoods and the rest of the district. These gains are explained by general improvements in school effectiveness rather than changes in student match quality, and school-specific gains are concentrated among the lowest-performing schools. We interpret these findings through the lens of a model of school demand in which schools exert costly effort to improve quality.The model allows us to measure the increase in competition facing each ZOC school based on household preferences and the spatial distribution of schools. We demonstrate that the effects of ZOC were larger for schools exposed to more competition, supporting the notion that competition is a key channel driving the impacts of ZOC. In addition, demand estimates suggest families place a larger weight on school quality compared to peer quality, providing schools the right competitive incentives. An analysis using randomized admission lotteries shows that the treatment effects of admission to preferred schools declined after the introduction of ZOC, a pattern that is explained by the relative improvements of less-preferred schools. Our findings demonstrate the potential for public school choice to improve student outcomes while also underscoring the importance of studying market-level impacts when evaluating school choice programs.
Here is a link to the paper, note that Christopher is on the job market this year from UC Berkeley.
Monday assorted links
1. A new argument against prison abolition (or is it new?). Or try this joyous hymn to Engels.
2. The evidence for the male breadwinner norm maybe isn’t that strong.
3. Magnus is now doing “ultrabullet.” Watch some here. That is fifteen seconds per game. No increment. The games are really quite remarkable to “watch.”
4. Alfred Russel Wallace, “How to Civilize Savages” (1865).