Month: August 2021
Wednesday assorted links
1. The cotton tote crisis (NYT).
2. Autistics are less subject to sunk cost fallacy.
3. A growing heap of evidence that natural infection is more protective (not recommending it, to be clear!).
4. David Trotter on Elizabeth Bowen.
5. “Tetlock and the Taliban,” on the nature of expertise, excellent Richard Hanania piece.
6. The new NIMBY: Judge freezes Berkeley’s enrollment growth until further study is done.
7. Nirvana is being sued by that baby in the pool. (OH: “So the baby chasing a dollar was literal!”)
8. Delta (the airline!) will charge unvaccinated employees higher premia.
Why Doesn’t the United States Have Test Abundance?!
We have vaccine abundance in the United States but not test abundance. Germany has test abundance. Tests are easily available at the supermarket or the corner store and they are cheap, five tests for 3.75 euro or less than a dollar each. Billiger! In Great Britain you can get a 14 pack for free. The Canadians are also distributing packs of tests to small businesses for free to test their employees.
In the United States, the FDA has approved less than a handful of true at-home tests and, partially as a result, they are expensive at $10 to $20 per test, i.e. more than ten times as expensive as in Germany. Germany has approved over 50 of these tests including tests from American firms not approved in the United States. The rapid tests are excellent for identifying infectiousness and they are an important weapon, alongside vaccines, for controlling viral spread and making gatherings safe but you can’t expect people to use them more than a handful of times at $10 per use.
We ought to have testing abundance in the US and not lag behind Germany, the UK and Canada. As usual, I say if it’s good enough for the Germans it’s good enough for me.
Addendum: The excellent Michael Mina continues to bang the drum.
Is the scolding equilibrium shifting, and if so why?
As the pandemic evolves, so is the tendency of people to take moral positions they would not normally endorse. Most notably, many left-wing commentators are becoming moral scolds, stressing ideals of individual responsibility.
Consider these words:
“So it’s time to stop being diffident and call out destructive behavior for what it is. Doing so may make some people feel that they’re being looked down on. But you know what? Your feelings don’t give you the right to ruin other people’s lives.”
If I had read that paragraph two years ago, I might have thought it was a conservative columnist lamenting inner-city crime, or perhaps complaining about the behavior of homeless people in San Francisco. But no: It is Paul Krugman discussing those who will not get vaccinated or wear masks. He calls it “the rage of the responsible,” and it is emblematic of a broader set of current left-wing attitudes, most of all toward the red state responses to the pandemic.
To be clear, I agree with Krugman’s point, and I frequently express similar sentiments. All the same, I wonder about the rules here. When exactly are “the responsible” allowed to express their quiet rage, on which issues and on which terms?
The alternative to this rage is the language of victimhood. For example, many on the left tend to portray the homeless as hostages to circumstances largely beyond their control: the high cost of housing, unjust eviction policies, a tattered social welfare state, perhaps mental illness or drug addiction.
There is some truth in all those hypotheses. Still, when it comes to the homeless, am I also allowed to express the quiet rage of the responsible? Or is only the rhetoric of victimhood allowed?
There is no doubt that homeless people suffer very real injustices. But it could be argued that allowing oneself to become homeless is a greater abdication of responsibility than refusing to be vaccinated. It is also worse for your health and bad for the community, as anyone from San Francisco can tell you.
One rejoinder might be that a pandemic is different. Maybe so, but if this were the 1980s, during the peak of the HIV-AIDS epidemic, one could imagine a Moral Majority advocate expressing sentiments similar to Krugman’s about gay men who engage in unsafe sex. Today such a view would be considered uncouth, at least in the mainstream media, and that’s not only because there are now effective treatments against HIV-AIDS. This kind of scolding has mostly gone out of fashion, especially when the recipients have been victims of prior or current social discrimination.
Or consider the question of suicide. There was a time in America when it was common to view suicide as a violation of Christian doctrine. Now there is largely sympathy for those who have killed themselves. Is this change for the better? Maybe, but it’s not clear that this issue has been given serious evidence-based consideration. Scolding sometimes helps to limit the number of wrong deeds, and everyone does it to some degree, even when it is sometimes not appropriate.
Then there are alcohol and drug abuse, which have some features of epidemics in that they exhibit social contagion. Your drunkenness, for example, on average encourages some of your friends to experiment with the same. But scolding alcoholics also is out of fashion, even though the social costs of alcohol abuse are extremely high, especially when considered cumulatively. As a teetotaler, I sometimes express my own quiet rage of the responsible, and my reaction is mostly considered a strange curiosity.
It is not only left-wing thinkers who have ended up in strange ideological positions. Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, a conservative Republican and one of America’s leading right-wing politicians, has essentially expanded public health-care coverage in his state by setting up mobile units to administer monoclonal antibodies to Covid-19 sufferers. I’m all for that. At the same time, I notice he continues to oppose Medicaid expansion in Florida.
What explains the attitudinal shifts we are seeing? One possibility is that left-wing thinkers are getting more puritanical and are more comfortable in their new role as scolds, including with respect to sex and vaccination and mask-wearing. That would leave Trumpist Republicans as the defenders of medical choice and the sexual libertinism of the 1960s and 1970s.
Another possibility, not mutually exclusive, is that few of us are intellectually consistent, and so our scolding is increasingly shaped by affective political polarization. The left will scold the practices of Trump supporters, while the right will scold the woke, and views on any particular issue will be adjusted to fit into this broader pattern. If an issue is not very partisan, such as alcohol abuse or suicide, scolding simply will decline.
Here is an article on the movement to treat vaccinated patients first. Fine by me! But what exactly are the egalitarians supposed to say? Is meritocracy now allowed to rear its ugly head? Or do no other social outcomes have anything to do with your merit? Only this one? Really?
Tuesday assorted links
1. Jason Crawford’s Roots of Progress is now a non-profit organization.
2. Fresh Vitalik: “Ergo, we should take the efficiency benefits of market and auction-based pricing, and the egalitarian benefits of proof of personhood mechanics, and combine them together.”
3. “Tyra, who is 37 and originally from rural Idaho, is clear with any potential dates that making babies is just a business transaction for her—albeit an all-encompassing one.” Recommended. And: “When Reeder’s not pregnant, she drives heavy machinery for a private logging company. She uses the money from her baby-making side hustle to travel to places like South East Asia and Zanzibar, where she has also donated her leftover breast milk to an orphanage.”
4. Freddie on education spending, also recommended.
5. How Nike ads have evolved the ongoing feminization of American society. And yet another recommended, one of the best and most important essays of the year.
6. There is a “new” Vermeer, take a look.
More on Australia, from an MR reader
“A random observation, in four sentences:
- I continue to see huge numbers of Australians (e.g. politicians like Dan Andrews, the Victorian Premier, and also huge numbers of random people on my facebook) say “if we don’t continue to lockdown, the health system will be overwhelmed; we have no choice”.
- Most of the at-risk population in Australia has already been vaccinated with at least one dose, which reduces hospitalisation/mortality risk by something like 70% (or perhaps even better in practice; the SMH today reports 94 people in ICU, 83 unvaccinated, 11 have one dose, and ~50% of adults have 1 dose and obviously are very negatively selected on age)
- The US never saw widespread overwhelming of the hospital system (lots of media reports of “hospitals in X about to hit capacity”, but it to date has always been one of those “just wait two weeks” things)
- People in Australia widely believe the quality of the US hospital/healthcare system is substantially inferior to the single payer hospital/healthcare system in Australia
It would seem extremely difficult for these four things to mutually coexist.”
TC again: Here is a short video from Australia, how about some AstraZeneca and a bit of testing regime instead? GG is right that the video resembles a bad dystopian science fiction movie from past decades. You will note that some segments of the American intelligentsia are so invested in criticizing the U.S. “red state” approach, and so warm toward collectivist mandates, that they won’t raise a peep about what is going on here.
Thailand and The WHO on Fractional Dosing
Thailand will study fractional dosing:
Thailand is studying the possibility of injecting coronavirus vaccines under the skin to try to stretch its limited supply, a health official said on Thursday, as the country races to inoculate the public faster amid a worsening epidemic.
“Our previous experience shows that intradermal injections uses 25% of a muscular injection, but triggers the same level of immunity,” head of the medical science department, Supakit Sirilak told reporters.
I am also pleased that the WHO’s SAGE has issued an interim statement on fractional doses:
WHO, with support of the Strategic Advisory Group of Experts (SAGE) on Immunization and its COVID-19 Vaccines Working Group, is reviewing the role of fractionating doses as a dose-sparing strategy in light of global vaccine supply constraints. SAGE is continuously reviewing the literature and has reached out to vaccine manufacturers and the research community for available information.
….While SAGE acknowledges the potential public health benefits of dose-sparing strategies to increase vaccine supply and accelerate population-level vaccination coverage, and possibly also a reduction in reactogenicity, SAGE considers there is currently insufficient evidence to recommend the use of fractional doses. Any use of a fractional dose at this point in time constitutes an off-label use of the vaccine. SAGE encourages research in the area, with a particular emphasis on research into using fractionated doses as potential boosters and fractional doses in children and adolescents. Programmatic and operational considerations should be considered from the start.
The statement is reasonable but could have used some cost-benefit analysis. Given shortages, I’d push for a challenge trial or some field trials. I agree that if we are to have boosters and to vaccinate young children we should be looking very hard at fractional doses as they are likely to be sufficient for purpose and to preserve as much supply as possible for the rest of the world.
By the way, I think you can also see some status quo bias in the WHOs position on boosters: they are not (yet) enthusiastic about increasing supply with fractional doses but they are very negative about reducing supply with boosters. What a miracle that the status quo is just right!
In the context of ongoing global vaccine supply constraints, administration of booster doses will exacerbate inequities by driving up demand and consuming scarce supply while priority populations in some countries, or subnational settings, have not yet received a primary vaccination series.
The WHO also doesn’t note that if developed countries go for boosters then the case for fractional doses elsewhere to make use of the even more limited supply is likely even stronger.
Here’s my paper with co-authors on fractional doses.
Hat tip: Witold.
How to tell when you are reading a truly great history book
When it treatment of secondary topics is better than what you can find anywhere else. For instance I am reading Alexander Mikaberidze’s The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History. Just in the span of a few pages, his treatment of Dessalines and his plan to rule Haiti is excellent. Then his discussion of the French motivations for allowing the Louisiana Purchase is amazing. Yet a page later his take on the evolution of the Swiss confederation, while offered only in passing, is more instructive than I’ve found in books written solely on Switzerland.
This is in the very top tier of history books I ever have read. Highly recommended.
A temporary equilibrium only?
“The Tax Policy Center estimates that last year nearly 107 million households, or about 61 percent, owed no income tax or even received tax credits from the government,” Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, noted last week. “The spike is likely to be temporary, however. The share of non-payers will decline to about 102 million or 57 percent this year.”
n recent pre-pandemic years, the percentage of tax returns with no income tax liability has been closer to 44 percent in Tax Policy Center’s figures, though it has trended upward over time.
“The percentage of filers with no income liability has generally increased from where it was nearly 40 years ago,” the National Taxpayers Union Foundation reported in 2018. “This trend is indicative of a progressive income tax code under which higher-income earners pay a larger share of taxes while low-income earners are generally shielded from significant income tax liabilities.”
Here is more from Reason, via Ray Lopez. In so many other areas, the pandemic has accelerated trends that already were present…
Fortschritt
Germany has decided to stop using the coronavirus infection rate as its yardstick for deciding if restrictions should be in force to contain the spread of the virus, Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Monday.
The seven-day incidence rate was a key measure in determining whether restrictions could be imposed or lifted, with infection thresholds of 35, 50 and 100 per 100,000 people triggering the opening or closure of different parts of society.
But as the number of people who are fully vaccinated rises, calls have grown for the incidence rate to be dropped as a measure to determine whether lockdowns are necessary.
“We decided today that we no longer need comprehensive protective measures when the number of cases or incidence is 50, because a large proportion of the people are vaccinated,” Merkel said.
When will California do the same? Here is the full story.
Monday assorted links
1. “Increases in pain in recessions are borne predominantly by women.”
2. Covid earlier in the U.S. than had been thought. (Cowen’s 17th Law)
3. Josh Marshall on media bias and Afghanistan. And this one is brutal: “Out of a combined 14,000-plus minutes of the national evening news broadcast on CBS, ABC, and NBC last year, a grand total of five minutes were devoted to Afghanistan…”
4. Thread on the metaverse, and why securities regulation has suddenly become so onerous.
5. “…universalists have fewer friends, spend less time with them, and feel more lonely.”
Simple facts about Afghanistan
Trade will be a particular source of difficulty. The last IMF report on the country prior to the collapse of the government counted imports at about $7 billion annually, a huge fraction of Afghanistan’s $19 billion GDP. Imports exceeded exports by about a factor of five. While that high level of imports was sustainable under the unusual circumstances of the U.S. presence, it won’t be sustainable going forward.
So on top of its other problems, Afghanistan will need to balance its trade deficit, a deeply painful process that will, one way or another, reduce the number of imports available to Afghan civilians. Given that its currency reserves have been frozen to prevent the Taliban from accessing them, it will need to balance its trade deficit quickly, without any adjustment period.
Here is more, via Matt Yglesias (do subscribe!…and you can subscribe to the Afghanistan source here). Note that electricity and medical supplies are among the most important Afghani imports.
My Afghan hamburger recipe
It is simple, virtually foolproof, and relies on easy to store ingredients.
1. Cook up some Jasmine rice with lots of turmeric on top while the water is boiling. That will improve both the flavor and the visuals.
2. Cook some ground hamburger. Toss in a fair amount of cumin. For this recipe I find the ground, non-fresh version of cumin better, so its taste does not overwhelm the dish.
3. When the hamburger is two or three minutes away from being done, toss in a whole bunch of raisins. The end of the cooking will soften and moisten them, but without pulverizing them. Make sure you are tossing the beef (and raisins) regularly at that point.
4. Put the finished beef on top of the yellow rice, and lather plain, whole fat yogurt on top. It will be better if you buy your yogurt from an Indian grocery.
5. And put it on a blue plate. Serve with mineral water.
Voila!
The cultural life extension query
You have the power to grant fifty more productive years to an artist of any discipline (writer, musician, painter, etc.) who died too young. Who do you pick?
My answer was Schubert, and here is why:
1. Schubert was just starting to peak, but we already have a significant amount of top-tier Mozart. And I take Mozart to be the number one contender for the designation. Schubert composed nine symphonies, and number seven still wasn’t that great. Some people think number eight was unfinished. Number nine is incredible. Furthermore, I believe the nature of his genius would have aged well with the man.
2. John Keats is a reasonable contender, but perhaps his extant peak output is sufficient to capture the nature of his genius?
3. After the 1982-1984 period, there was decline in the quality of Basquiat’s output. His was the genius of a young man, and drugs would have interfered with his further achievement in any case.
4. Buddy Holly had already peaked, and he didn’t quite have the skills or ambition to have morphed into something significantly more. No one from popular music in that time period did.
5. Frank Ramsey is a reasonable choice, but I am more excited about Schubert. We still would have ended up with the same neoclassical economics.
6. Perhaps Kurt Cobain’s genius was that of a young man as well? Nonetheless he is in my top ten, if only for curiosity reasons. Hank Williams and Hendrix are competitors too.
7. Carel Fabritius anyone?
Who else? Caravaggio? Egon Schiele? Eva Hesse? I feel they all have styles that would have aged well, unlike say with Jim Morrison. Seurat? Thomas Chatterton I can pass on, maybe Stephen Crane or Sylvia Plath from the side of the writers?
The problem with fitting third doses into a regulatory structure
That is a key theme of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
In the U.S., President Joe Biden’s administration is now pushing third booster shots for people who already have been vaccinated. That might be a good idea, but it too creates additional uncertainty for travel and migration — and for social interaction more broadly. If three doses are so important, should people be allowed to travel (or for that matter interact indoors) with only two doses? The bar is raised yet again.
Of course the issues do not end with the third dose. If the efficacy of the second dose declines significantly in less than a year, might the same happen with the third dose? How long before four doses are necessary, or maybe five? Or what if yet another significant Covid variant comes along, and only some people have a booster dose against that strain? What then counts as being “sufficiently vaccinated”?
Many Americans seem to be keen to get their third dose, but by the nature of counting that number is fewer than the number willing to get two doses. Furthermore, many people might just tire of the stress of dealing with an ongoing stream of obligatory booster shots and stop at one or two.
The sad reality is that the “two-dose standard” may not last very long, whether abroad or domestically (the same is true of the even weaker one-dose standard with Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca). Vaccine mandates will become harder to define and enforce, will be less transparent, and will probably be less popular.
If you tell people that three doses are needed for safety, but two doses are enough to get you into a concert or government building, how are they supposed to sort out the mixed messages? It is not obvious that enough people will get the third dose in a timely manner to make that a workable standard for vaccine passports.
Add to that the problems with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which originally the government urged people to get. Now those people are not being given comparable chances to obtain boosters — in fact, they are not yet being given specific guidance at all. Are they orphaned out of any new vaccine passport system, or will (supposedly dangerous?) exceptions be made for them? Or do they just have to start all over?
The big international winner from all this is likely to be Mexico, which has remained an open country and is not relying on vaccine passports. In general I do not admire Mexico’s lackadaisical Covid response, but the country may end up in a relatively favorable position, most of all when it comes to tourism and international business meetings.
As for the U.S. and Europe, the temptation to escalate required safety measures is understandable. But the previous vaccine standards were largely workable ones. If they are made tougher, they might break down altogether.
Recommended.
Sunday assorted links
1. “Why is violence so prevalent in kitchens, and how has it become a behavioral norm?”
3. I really don’t view MR or links as a chance to dunk on people, but this is so, so wrong, and so indicative of the problems with public health “experts.” More here. That is an example, and in my view an instructive one, but really not interested in making this about any particular person. It was in turn taught by someone else, and it is believed by many in the field. The actual reality is that even very poorly educated Americans, on the whole, hold more sensible views than that.
4. Michael Mina from November 2020. Not bad.
5. Dishonest dishonesty study study.
6. “They shoot dogs, don’t they?” Or try this short video. And the AstraZeneca stockpile continues to grow. Why are the defenders of civil liberties so quiet?
7. The difficulty in getting hospitals to post their prices (NYT).