Month: September 2021
Authoritarian Australia
Australia is now one of the most authoritarian states in the world. Conor Friedersdorf writes:
Australia is undoubtedly a democracy, with multiple political parties, regular elections, and the peaceful transfer of power. But if a country indefinitely forbids its own citizens from leaving its borders, strands tens of thousands of its citizens abroad, puts strict rules on intrastate travel, prohibits citizens from leaving home without an excuse from an official government list, mandates masks even when people are outdoors and socially distanced, deploys the military to enforce those rules, bans protest, and arrests and fines dissenters, is that country still a liberal democracy?
As I noted earlier, Australia is in clear contravention of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, Article 13 of which states:
- Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.
- Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.
Friedersdorf continues:
To give Australia’s approach its due, temporary restrictions on liberty were far more defensible early in the pandemic…Had it behaved rationally and adequately valued liberty, a rich nation like Australia would have spent lavishly—before knowing which vaccines would turn out to be most effective—to secure an adequate supply of many options for its people. It could afford to eat the cost of any extra doses and donate them to poorer countries. Australia then could have marshaled its military and civil society to vaccinate the nation as quickly as possible, lifted restrictions more fully than Europe and the United States did, and argued that the combination of fewer deaths and the more rapid return to normalcy made their approach a net win.
Instead, Australia invested inadequately in vaccines and, once it acquired doses, was too slow to get them into arms. “Of the 16 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine that have been released to the government by manufacturer CSL, only about 8 million have gone into the arms of Australians,” The Age reported on August 21, citing concern about blood clots and a widespread preference for the Pfizer vaccine.
…Because of its geography, Australia is a neighbor and an observer of authoritarian countries as varied as China and Singapore. But its own fate, too, may turn on whether its people crave the feeling of safety and security that orders from the top confer, or whether they want to be free.
Australians largely support the restrictions but to me that makes them all the more disturbing.
Temporary restrictions on liberty can be justified in an emergency if the restrictions produce something else of great value but respecting the great value of liberty and individual rights means doing everything in one’s power to limit the scope of and lift such restrictions as quickly and completely as possible.
China campaign of the day
The Chinese government has ordered a boycott of “sissy pants” celebrities as it escalates a fight against what it sees as a cultural import that threatens China’s national strength.
In a directive issued on Thursday, China’s TV watchdog said entertainment programs should firmly reject the “deformed aesthetics” of niangpao, a derogatory term that refers to effeminate men.
The order came as Beijing tightens control over the country’s entertainment industry, taking aim at an explosion of TV and streaming shows that hold increasing sway over pop culture and the youth.
Young, delicate-looking men who display gentle personalities and act in boys’ love dramas have amassed large fan bases mostly comprising women. Many of them, like Xiao Zhan and Wang Yibo, are China’s top-earning celebrities.
They came in sharp contrast with the older generation of male stars, who were expected to sing revolutionary songs and play intrepid, aggressive soldiers defending the country from foreign enemies.
But the more gender-neutral aesthetics have come under criticism from conservative voices in society. Some officials and parents fear the less macho men on TV would cause young men to lose their masculinity and therefore threaten the country’s development.
Here is the full story, and I thank B. for the pointer. As I said yesterday, I do get the point but such campaigns are not for me…
Ezra Klein making the case for Gavin Newsom
“If Gavin were recalled, that’d be disastrous for housing policy in this state,” Brian Hanlon, the president of California YIMBY, a pro-housing group, told me. “The Legislature, I believe, could override Larry Elder’s vetoes on key bills. But all of these hard-fought housing bills that we are not passing with a supermajority cannot survive an Elder veto. All that would die.”
“I also think that if the recall succeeds, in part due to housing, the overall situation in Sacramento would just be chaotic,” Hanlon added later. “It’ll be a lost year as Democrats and the Legislature work to retake the governor’s office in 2022.”
Metcalf, the former head of the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development, has moved from dismayed to impressed by Newsom’s record on housing. “We’re beginning to see Newsom find the levers to pull,” he said. “We’re seeing him figure out how to get the Legislature to do what he wants. We’re just getting there with Newsom, which would make it very painful to lose him now.”
There is much more at the NYT link.
My dialogue with Lipton Matthews
I appeared on his podcast, and we discussed trust, Jamaica and Trinidad, what you can learn from visiting funerals for five years, what I want for my non-funeral and why, social media and outreach, neurodiversity and autism, the importance of Kant and Hegel, and more.
Here is Lipton’s broader podcast series, many good guests. Here is Lipton on Twitter.
Thursday assorted links
1. John Tomasi to head Heterodox Academy.
2. Browser interview with Applied Divinity Studies.
3. Maxwell T. on start-up cities and the housing crisis. And here is the new Profectus Magazine more generally.
4. A vision of the future inspired by classical antiquity.
5. Florida now 19th for per capita vaccinations.
6. Stupid barter markets in everything how can this kind of stuff happen?
The Kids are Doing Alright
You may have seen the viral tweet suggesting that boomers own all the wealth and millennials are poor. It’s hard for me to get worked up. Talk about a problem that will solve itself!
The problem that the graph suggests, however, is not even correct. Why are we looking at generational wealth shares when we could be looking at the much more straightforward statistic, wealth per capita. Jeremy Horpedahl does just that:
Looking at the exact same data (from the Fed Distributional Financial Accounts) from a different perspective gives us a much different picture of recent history. In this version, Gen X is now richer (30% richer!) than Boomers were at the same age (late 40s). Millennials don’t yet have a year of overlap with Boomers, but they are tracking Gen X almost exactly. There is no reason they won’t continue to track Gen X, and therefore exceed Boomers as well when they are in their late 40s (which will happen in about 2037 for Millennials).
In other words, people in the current generation have as much or more wealth than people of previous generations did at the same age.
Read the whole thing if you want some additional astute points about student debt and politics but I call this one busted. The kids are doing alright.
A simple illustration of the benefits of feminization
Fox’s Tucker Carlson, the most important nationalist voice in America, seemed to sympathize with the gender politics of Taliban-supporting Afghans. “They don’t hate their own masculinity,” he said shortly after the fall of Kabul. “They don’t think it’s toxic. They like the patriarchy. Some of their women like it too. So now they’re getting it all back. So maybe it’s possible that we failed in Afghanistan because the entire neoliberal program is grotesque.” (By “neoliberalism” he seems to mean social liberalism, not austerity economics.)
From Michelle Goldberg (NYT), that in a nutshell is the case for the feminization of society, which I see as bringing strongly positive net benefits for both men and women, in most but by no means all cases.
Do note that if you ever see me describing this feminization in not entirely glowing terms, that is part of my desire to give you the entire unvarnished picture, as I would with most other topics. (The most common reading mistake you can make in these parts is to over-infer an entire mood affiliation from a single post.)
When it comes to feminization, I also think sometimes of my grade and junior high school gym teacher, Mr. O (I will omit his full name, but in fact we also called him “Mr. O”). He acted like a tough guy, but in fact was just a…grade school gym teacher. Nonetheless he acted as if he was auditioning for the role of Patton in a Hollywood movie.
He smoked his cigarillos (?) in that kind of plastic thing-y, like the Penguin did on the original Batman show.
If a smaller or less athletic kid took a tough spill, or was picked on by the others, he would say “Suck it up, kid!”, with little sympathy. (If you are wondering, the worst he ever said to me was “That was a stupid foul, kid,” in a fifth-grade basketball contest. So I didn’t bear a personal grudge against him.)
He seemed to love the game of Bombardment, as in fact I did too. (I still remember being one of the last two men standing, but losing to Jimmy Gravelis, who caught my too-weak toss.)
He was a Roman Catholic and a veteran of the Korean War. He seemed to stare too long at the boys entering and leaving the shower, after the exercise period of gym. But no one really questioned this.
Even as a kid, I thought he was a bit…sick and also over the top. In some ways though he was a good teacher and he definitely maintained discipline. Kids were afraid of him. And he toughened them up for the world to come.
Still, at the end of the day I am not wishing to return to the cultural ascent of Mr. O.
I would rather live in a more feminized world, even if I still miss Bombardment. But if you are not a fan of this new arrangement…hey, “Suck it up kid!”
Addendum: You might argue that I had the best of both worlds, namely to grow up in the “tougher” society, but live most of my life in the more feminized society — maybe so!
Toward a theory of Emergent Ventures
Tony Kulesa, a biomedical venture capitalist, has a very nice new piece up about how Emergent Ventures works. He overrates me in particular, but the overall account is quite accurate and insightful, and the piece is based on a considerable amount of detailed research. Here is one excerpt:
Tyler’s success at discovering and enabling the most talented people before anyone else notices them boils down to four components:
- Distribution: Tyler promotes the opportunity in such a way that the talent level of the application pool is extraordinarily high and the people who apply are uniquely earnest.
- Application: Emergent Ventures’ application is laser focused on the quality of the applicant’s ideas, and boils out the noise of credentials, references, and test scores.
- Selection: Tyler has relentlessly trained his taste for decades, the way a world class athlete trains for the olympics.
- Inspiration: Tyler personally encourages winners to be bolder, creating an ambition flywheel as they in turn inspire future applicants.
Self-recommended! The piece is interesting throughout, and has much social science in it.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Is America’s aerospace industry regenerating?
2. Sam Enright’s guide to recreational math videos on-line.
3. “A good start” — they should be working for us, not us for them. And yes I believe in following the science — the science of expected utility maximization. They are the ones who do not really believe in science, just their own status within their own branch of science.
4. What kind of Berkeley protest is this?
What I’ve been reading
1. Anne Serre, The Beginners. What is it like for a woman to go from loving one man to another? This newly translated French novel was fun enough, insightful enough, and direct and short enough for me to finish.
2. Lachlan Goudie, The Story of Scottish Art. Even if you don’t care about art, this is a wonderful way to learn the history of Scotland. My takeaway favorite painters were Allan Ramsey (friends with Smith and Hume), Henry Raeburn, David Wilkie, and John Duncan, more or less consistent with my earlier views but now they are better informed. A good book with a nice blue and yellow cover.
3. Frank Herbert, Dune. For me a reread, I loved it when I was twelve, but how does it stand up? I am struck by how excellent and pathbreaking the best chapters are, including the introductory chapter. The influence on Star Wars is obvious, as is the role of Islam in the story. It strikes me as remarkably cinematic, with the right kinds of transitions to boot — how was this never put successfully on the big screen? I am about two-thirds through it right now, and maybe it 2/3 holds up? But would you want all of the slow pacing of the detail removed?
Carole Hooven, T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us. Recommended.
Aubrey Clayton, Bernoulli’s Fallacy: Statistical Illogic and the Crisis of Modern Science. I found this most interesting as a history of probability theory, and with more coverage of Quetelet than one usually finds.
How is nursing evolving? (from my email)
From Andrew K. Stein, MR reader:
There’s a massive and massively underreported shift going on right now in hospital nurse staffing that is interesting from a health and labor economics POV.
In normal times, hospitals pride themselves on having little or no use of “agency” nurses — i.e., not relying on nursing staffing companies to fill their bedside nursing slots. But it seems now that most hospitals can’t escape using agency (e.g., travel nurses) for a large plurality of their nursing staff. (In my day job, I talk to hospital Chief Nursing Officers somewhat regularly.)
Agency nurses are very expensive (high wages + agency markup) and also rather disruptive — every new travel nurse needs to learn the local hospital care processes (e.g., IV dressing changes). What you’re paying for as a CNO is the convenience of an on-tap nursing workforce. Pre-COVID, you’d hear agency labor described as an addictive drug — once you get hooked, it’s hard to wean yourself off.
What’s happening in the labor market, I think, is that there are two paths for a bedside nurse in the COVID era — keep working for a hospital or go work for an agency. Agency pay has gotten ridiculously high, so more and more nurses are quitting the local hospital, signing on with the agency, and then going to work for any hospital that can pay the agency’s rates. In exchange for going wherever the highest bidder is, they get huge increases in their take-home pay. No shame in that.
The net effect, I suspect, is that the bargaining power of nursing labor is going way up, though with unequal gains; to benefit, you have to quit your hospital-employed job and be willing to go wherever the agency sends you.
And then your open slot gets backfilled by another agency nurse from somewhere else!
It’s a reinforcing cycle: As nursing shortages rise, nurses increasingly “work short” — i.e., caring for more patients per shift than is reasonable — or work more shifts per week than typical. That daily stress spurs many nurses to either leave the bedside for something more 9-to-5 (think outpatient clinics) or jump into travel nursing to at least get paid for the extra load everyone is being forced to bear right now.
Agencies and travel nurses win, hospitals and hospital-employed nurses lose.
You could also tell the story that the labor supply of nursing has historically already been constrained (though of course now more so), and that nurses have historically been underpaid from a supply-demand perspective, and that now it’s a more liquid market (with agencies acting as market makers), so the price for labor is rising.
I’d be interested if any MR readers have seen data on how big of an effect this is (e.g., hospitals’ average % of agency staff).
I suspect that high use of agency staffing is the new normal, at least until the nursing labor supply grows to meet it — emergency authorization of 100,000 work visas for immigrant nurses? — or we invent robot nurses.