Month: August 2021

Saturday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Private insurers are now picking up less of the tab for Covid-related hospital stays.

2. Claims about vaccine efficacy, useful.  And further claims about boosters.  The correct final picture here still is not clear to me.

3. Dishonesty update.

4. Progress in the use of monoclonal antibodies.  Sadly: “For the administration, mum’s the word on monoclonal antibodies, rapid home tests, high quality masks . . . anything except vaccines,” Eric Topol, founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, said in an email. “Which is wrong, since we need every tool in the kit to effectively take on delta; we’re not doing that well at all.”

5. What academia used to be like.  Before the internet, that is.

6. Jerry Brito on the coming regulatory challenge for crypto.

The economics of Taliban finance

by  Tyler Cowen in

An example of Islamist governance can be found on the stretch of road from Kabul to the Mile 78 border crossing in south-west Farah province that borders Iran.

The road has more than 25 government checkpoints and a fee is charged at multiple points on the journey. By contrast, the Taliban who police the same road have far fewer checkpoints and give a receipt, so only a single payment is necessary.

Ibraheem Bahiss, an Afghanistan consultant at International Crisis Group, said the Taliban sought to portray themselves as better administrators. “Increasingly they began co-opting government infrastructure to offer [improved] service deliveries,” said Bahiss, explaining that the Taliban in some areas ensured that teachers and nurses showed up to work.

In recent years, the Taliban has widened its tax base from centuries-old taxes of oshr, a one-tenth tithe of harvest produce, and zakat, a religious tax of 2.5 per cent of disposable income for the poor, although collection is often lower.

In Nimroz province, levies on transit goods such as vehicles and cigarettes formed 80 per cent of Taliban revenues, ODI research concluded.

Illegal mining and taxes on imported fuel are further sources of funds. Taliban earnings on fuel imported from Iran were as high as $30m last year, according to the Alcis consultancy.

Here is the full FT story.  You will note that the “bandits” side of the Taliban are able to raise this revenue, in part, because Afghanistan suffers from the misfortune of being a landlocked country.  With sea routes as a possible alternatives to goods and services, such fiscal systems would be harder to pull off, for both the Taliban and the previous government, I might add.  Landlocked countries often have it tough.  (By the way, much of the rest of the article considers drugs as a revenue source.)

Covid markets in everything, certified air ambulance regulatory arbitrage edition

by  Tyler Cowen in

“We weren’t sure what was going to happen … if they were going to separate us or put us in a hospital,” said McElroy. “I didn’t know if I was going to need a respirator.”

None of that happened. Within 72 hours, the couple was on a Learjet back to Arizona.

Before they left, Underwood purchased memberships with Covac Global, a medical evacuation company launched by the crisis response firm HRI in the spring of 2020. It meant the couple didn’t pay a dime for their repatriation, said McElroy.

Commercial airlines and private jets can’t fly travelers with Covid-19 home, but certified air ambulances staffed with medical teams can.

While some companies evacuate travelers who require hospitalization, Covac Global retrieves travelers who test positive for Covid-19 and have one self-reported symptom. About 85% of evacuees are returned home, while the rest need hospital attention, said CEO Ross Thompson.

When CNBC first spoke with the company in March, it was performing about two to three medical evacuations every month. Now, that number has climbed to about 12 to 20.

Here is the full story, via Shaffin Shariff.

What is going on with productivity? (from my email)

by  Tyler Cowen in

Various web sources, but none of this seems controversial:

1. US GDP is now higher, in fact a fair bit higher, then when the pandemic began.

2. US labor force participation is about 1.5% lower than when the pandemic began.

Was there really slack to the tune of a few million people in Jan of 2020?

Has inflation really changed enough to make the GDP numbers misleading?

Has total factor productivity improved that much in that time, under those stresses?

Or is this all a sign that the structure of the economy is more stratified than we think – that there are millions of people in more-or-less filler jobs who can be cast out and the economy just keeps on running along?   Yes, there are all sorts of reports of labor shortages, and all manner of supply chain hiccups which seem to often be associated with off shoring, but general activity is still high.   (Or is it?  Are the numbers reporting “vapor GDP?” – or are the inflation adjustments really out of whack so real GDP is not what we think it is?)

That is all from Bryan Willman.

*Against White Feminism*

by  Tyler Cowen in

In Zero Dark Thirty (and the truish story behind it), American feminism — once a movement that existed in opposition to the state, as a critique of its institutions and mores — was recast as one that served the state’s interests through any means imaginable. This identification with state interests, and the idea of going out to conquer the world with the same mindset of subjugation and domination possessed by white men, seems to have become a warped feminist goal. Put another way, white women wanted parity with white men any at any cost, including by avidly taking on the domination of Black and Brown people.

That is from the new and noteworthy Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption, by Rafia Zakaria.  Or how about this:

Securo-feminism, thus, bound white American feminism to the neoimperial and neoliberal project of nation-building around the world — one that Harvard professor Niall Ferguson had articulated in his history of “Angloglobalization,” proposing that young Americans should be taught to go overseas and transform other nations in their own image much as Britain had done.  Caught in its fevers, American feminists did not question loudly enough the wisdom of exporting feminism through bombs and drones.

Or:

White feminists in the colonial era were all about spreading their civilized ways, but neo-colonial white feminists want to illustrate their courage and compassion — often while providing moral subsidy for cruelties inflicted in feminism’s name. Times may have changed, but the commitment of whiteness to extracting value wherever it can — and dominating the narrative to frame this extraction as benevolence — persists.

Recommended, sort of.  And here is the author with more detail on “Securo-feminism.”

Friday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Local news writers come to Facebook’s Bulletin.

2. Julia Galef interviews Raymond Niles and Amihai Glazer about price-gouging, with transcript too.

3. Stanislaw Lem centenary (NYT).

4. Chuck Close, RIP.

5. “The Quiet Rage of the Responsible” (Krugman, NYT).  It is remarkable when this sentiment is allowed, and when it is not.

6. Yet more Pacific to South American contact in early times.

U.S.A. fact of the day

by  Tyler Cowen in

According to one recent measure, ninety-three of the top one hundred American television programs watched live across a single year have been sports related.  More people watched the Super Bowl than the Oscars, Emmys, Grammys, Golden Globes, and Tonys combined.

It is for this reason that I find it puzzling when some people simply are not interested in sports at all.  I find the “sports are just stupid” attitude defensible (though it is not my view), but that would in turn seem to make sports all the more interesting.

That is from Jonah Lehrer’s Mystery: A Seduction, A Strategy, a Solution, just published by Simon and Schuster.

They had better hurry up and distribute those AstraZeneca doses

by  Tyler Cowen in

Movement data from last weekend show Melburnians engaging in what experts have called thousands of small transgressions with the potential to drive COVID-19 infections higher, as the effect of 200 days of lockdown takes an emotional toll.

Google mobility data compiled by The Age reveals that across the state last Friday and Saturday, people were moving more than at any time since mid-July last year when complacency prompted Premier Daniel Andrews to plunge the state into stage-four lockdown and mandatory mask-wearing.

Last weekend saw a spate of breaches including an organised takeaway pub crawl in Richmond and an engagement party in Caulfield North attended by 69 guests. The couple involved in the illegal party have received $5400 fines. Two of their parents were also fined and other guests are being interviewed.

Some metropolitan municipalities including Glen Eira and Bayside recorded their highest lockdown movement levels last week, ahead of a number of mystery cases appearing in St Kilda.

Professor Mike Toole from Melbourne’s Burnet Institute, who lives in a mobility hotspot in the inner south, said he was shocked to witness large groups of people gathering in parks at the weekend.

Here is the full article, via Rich Dewey.  And the Sydney lockdown is now extended until the end of September, with masks mandated for outside as well.  Elsewhere:

Walmart, Target and Lowe’s, by contrast, all lifted sales forecasts this week after beating expectations for the three months to the end of July. While demand for toilet paper and cleaning supplies has cooled after 2020s pantry hoarding, the appetite for other products was broad-based.  Party supplies, apparel and travel gear flew off Walmart’s shelves. At Home Depot, an early cache of Halloween decorations sold out almost immediately. Swimsuits and children’s clothing were similarly popular at Target and, in another sign of confidence, more customers returned to Walmart and Target store aisles after a year of browsing online.

Here is the associated FT article.  Which set of values do you prefer?  Which do most people prefer?

How sad that our regulatory state is still failing us

by  Tyler Cowen in

When Pfizer representatives met with senior U.S. government health officials on July 12, they laid out why they thought booster shots would soon be necessary in the United States. Data from Israel showed the vaccine’s effectiveness waned over time, especially in older and immunocompromised people.

But officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention disagreed, saying their own data showed something quite different, according to four people with direct knowledge of the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Other senior health officials in the meeting were stunned. Why hadn’t the CDC looped other government officials on the data? Could the agency share it — at least with the Food and Drug Administration, which was responsible for deciding whether booster shots were necessary? But CDC officials demurred, saying they planned to publish it soon.

That episode, say senior administration officials and outside experts, illustrates the growing frustration with the CDC’s slow and siloed approach to sharing data, which prevented officials across the government from getting real-time information about how the delta variant was bearing down on the United States and behaving with greater ferocity than earlier variants — an information gap they say stymied the response…

“It’s not acceptable how long it takes for this data to be made available,” said a senior CDC official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters. “It’s done in a very academic way. Cross every ‘t,’ and dot every ‘i,’ and unfortunately, we don’t have that luxury in a global pandemic. There’s going to be a need to have a significant cultural shift in the agency.”

Here is the full Washington Post story by Yasmeen Abutaleb and Lena H. Sun.

Thursday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. “If one wishes to stop the virus, only one goal matters: Getting the reproduction rate below one. e to the 3 t is not a lot less exponential growth than e to the 6 t.”  Is that nowadays a cancellable thought?

2. NPR covers Fast Grants.

3. New Danish data on vaccine effectiveness against delta.  And Bergstrom on Simpson’s paradox.  Based on UK data, Eric Topol has a contrasting view.

4. The economics of Mexican indigenous languages.

5. Austria and Croatia set “expiry dates” for vaccinated travelers — 270 days.

6. “The current landscape sees Economists lobbing impeccably crafted papers into any conceivable area of social science inquiry.”

7. Why no Lyme disease vaccine?  (New Yorker)

8. Data fabrication?

9. Thomas Quasthoff update.

10. Has eighty percent of South Africa already had Covid?  (Bloomberg)