Category: Current Affairs
“The Crypto Revolution Will Not be Public”
That is the title of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
In a remarkably honest yet radical speech last month about stablecoins, Fed Governor Randal Quarles argued that current payments systems already incorporate a great deal of information technology — and they are improving rapidly. The implication is that a central bank digital currency, or CBDC, is a solution in search of a problem.
Quarles also suggested that the Fed tolerate stablecoins, just as central banking has coexisted and indeed thrived with numerous other private-sector innovations. Stablecoins can serve as a private-sector experiment to see if individuals and institutions truly desire a radically different payments system, in this case based on crypto and blockchains. If they do, the system can evolve by having some but not all transactions shift toward stablecoin.
There need not be any “do or die” date of transition requiring a perfectly functioning CBDC. But insofar as those stablecoins can achieve the very simple methods of funds transfer outlined above, market participants will continue to use them more.
Quarles argued that with suitable but non-extraordinary regulation of stablecoin issuers, such a system could prove stable. He even seems to prefer the private-sector alternative: “It seems to me that there has been considerable private-sector innovation in the payments industry without a CBDC, and it is conceivable that a Fed CBDC, or even plans for one, might deter private-sector innovation by effectively ‘occupying the field.’”
In essence, Quarles is willing to tolerate a system in which privately issued dollar equivalents become a major means of consummating payments outside of the Fed’s traditional institutions. Presumably capital requirements would be used to ensure solvency.
For many onlookers, even hearing of innovation in finance raises worries about systemic risk. But perhaps the U.S. would do better by letting information technology advance than trying to shut it down. And if you are afraid of instability, are you really so keen to see foreign central bank digital currencies fill up this space?
If you are still skeptical, ask yourself two final questions. First, which has been more innovative on these issues: the private sector or the public sector? Second, how realistic are the prospects that Congress takes any effective action at all?
This is now a world in which radical monetary ideas are produced and consumed like potato chips. I say, pass the bag.
Recommended.
My Conversation with Alexander the Grate
Here is the audio and transcript, recorded outside in SW Washington, D.C. And no, that is not a typo, he does call himself “Alexander the Grate,” his real name shall remain a secret. Here is the event summary:
Alexander the Grate has spent 40 years — more than half of his life — living on the streets (and heating grates) of Washington, DC. He prefers the label NFA (No Fixed Address) rather than “homeless,” since in his view we’re all a little bit homeless: even millionaires are just one catastrophe away from losing their mansions. It’s a life that certainly comes with many challenges, but that hasn’t stopped him from enjoying the immense cultural riches of the capital: he and his friends have probably attended more lectures, foreign films, concerts, talks, and tours at local museums than many of its wealthiest denizens. The result is a perspective as unique as the city itself.
Alexander joined Tyler to discuss the little-recognized issue of “toilet insecurity,” how COVID-19 affected his lifestyle, the hierarchy of local shelters, the origins of the cootie game, the difference between being NFA in DC versus other cities, how networking helped him navigate life as a new NFA, how the Capitol Hill Freebie Finders Fellowship got started, why he loves school field trip season, his most memorable freebie food experience, the reason he isn’t enthusiastic about a Universal Basic Income, the economic sword of Damocles he sees hanging over America, how local development is changing DC, his design for a better community shelter, and more.
And:
COWEN: What’s the best food you end up with? Where is it from? What’s an A+ for a food day?
ALEXANDER THE GRATE: You want my classification system?
COWEN: Let’s hear it, absolutely. I’m a foodie, too.
ALEXANDER THE GRATE: Okay, you’re jumping around, too.
COWEN: Yes, this is the point of the podcast. This is the jump-around podcast.
ALEXANDER THE GRATE: Yeah, but let’s consummate one thought at a time. There’s some cool stuff here, fun stuff. Alright, that’s the beginning of the Bums Banquet. For those that are not fully acclimatized, we had a classification system. This is a class A. It hasn’t even been taken out of its wrapper. Class B, maybe there’s one bite — TYO, trim your own. We found some of it still in its wrapper. Double A would be from the hand of the person donating to us. Triple A would still be hot.
COWEN: What’s a D? C–?
ALEXANDER THE GRATE: Only the rats know that. A lot of forks here, but we’ll keep it to the general stuff first. Anyway, after hours, at the picnic tables of the [Library of Congress] Madison Building, that’s where this happened. Eight-foot diameter tables, so we could fit 10 people around there. That was a continuation of the Freebie Finders and the Bums Banquet and all that.
But one more thing about the lunches. We’re an overfed population — the affluent society. Are you really hungry three times a day? It’s a luxury to have that many. When people have to hesitate, “What am I going to eat now?” Truth to tell, I don’t really need it, but it’s become a tradition, a tradition of the affluent. We don’t need to eat as much as we do. It’s more habit than anything.
But the kids, the junior-high kids throwing their lunch away — they didn’t know that at the bottom of the bag, their mamma left a napkin with a stick figure on it, saying, “Hi, hope you’re having a good time in DC. Love, Mom.” Mother’s love comes along with a peanut butter sandwich. But under the napkin is up to $2 in change or bills for drink money, [laughs] so there’s cash left behind there, too.
Alright, let’s back up a few tangents here. Man, you have a lot of things out on the floor here.
COWEN: A lot of things going, balls being juggled.
And:
COWEN: Some economists I know have promoted the idea — it’s called universal basic income, and it’s something like every person would get $10,000, including NFAs. Is this a good idea?
ALEXANDER THE GRATE: Yes, Finland… Okay, save that for that because I’m going to ask you —
COWEN: You can ask me your question now, but also just indicate if you think that’s a good idea, bad idea, in between, and then you ask me yours.
ALEXANDER THE GRATE: Alright, I want to ask you — just the answer. National debt — this was before the multi-trillion-dollar relief bills had been signed into law by the president.
COWEN: Correct.
ALEXANDER THE GRATE: A progressive algorithm, no doubt, but I don’t know if they’ll factor in if it’s the five-year plan for the $5 trillion and they’ll add $1 trillion automatically to this amount. But it’s pushing $30 trillion, which is, what? You can scan this quick — $84,000 for every man, woman, and child in America.
COWEN: So you’re a fiscal conservative?
ALEXANDER THE GRATE: I’m just an observer at this point. The point is, I see this number, and I see a sword of Damocles hanging over the economic head of America. I know a lot of it’s built in, but theoretically, if all this came due catastrophically overnight, do we have a plan?
Recommended, you won’t find many podcast episodes like this one. It is noteworthy that Alexander has a better and bigger vocabulary than the median CWT guest. Also, this is one episode where listening and reading are especially different, due to the ambient sounds, Alexander’s comments on the passing trains, and so on — parts are Beckettesque!
Is Haiti Governable Right Now? (at all)
More generally, might there be some countries that simply are not viable nation-states any more, no matter what we do? That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
In other words, at the moment there doesn’t seem to be any way to govern Haiti. One problem is that foreign flows of money, whether from the drug trade or from Venezuelan foreign aid, have overwhelmed the domestic incentives to play by the rules. Haiti’s political institutions are mostly consumed by bribes and rents, with no stable center. The news, so to speak, is that such problems do not always have solutions. At all.
It is fine to suggest that Haiti invest in building up its political institutions — but those institutions have been unraveling for decades. I was a frequent visitor to the country in the 1990s, and although the poverty was severe, it was possible to travel with only a modest risk of encountering trouble. Government was largely ineffective, but it did exist.
These days the risk of kidnapping is so high that a visit is unthinkable.
And:
The buildup and rise of nation-states has become so ordinary that the opposite possibility is now neglected: their enduring collapse. It’s not history running in reverse. It’s that modernity has created new forces and incentives — drug money, kidnapping ransoms, payments from foreign powers, and so on — that can be stronger and more alluring than the usual reasons for supporting an internal national political order. If the rest of the world gets rich more quickly than you do, it might have the resources to effectively neutralize your incentives for peace and good government.
So where else might the political order soon unravel? In parts of Afghanistan, external forces (Pakistan, China, Russia, the U.S.) have so much at stake that the conditions there may never settle down. Other risks might be found in small, not yet fully orderly nations such as Guyana, Equatorial Guinea, and Eswatini (formerly Swaziland). El Salvador and Nicaragua seem to be consolidating their political orders, but at the cost of losing fair democratic political competition. The nation-state as we know it might not survive in every part of Nigeria, where the recent surge in kidnappings is striking.
In the Baltics and Taiwan, dangers from larger, aggressive neighbors lurk. In spite of generally good governance in these places, the pressures from outside powers might be too much to bear, reflecting broadly similar destabilizing mechanisms — namely, that the internal rewards for coordinating support for a status quo might not be high enough.
Recommended.
*The Art Newspaper*
One complaint I have about the current “Woke” debates is that they don’t consider how diverse the intellectual playing field is. You can learn a good deal from studying the interstices of dialogue that don’t fit into the common boxes of either pro-Woke or anti-Woke.
Along the way, I am happy to recommend The Art Newspaper (NB: non-subscribers can click through three articles a month) as an excellent periodical, both the paper and on-line editions. It is considered the “journal of record for the international art world.”
To put it bluntly, the art world is torn. In terms of demographics, the art world should lean fairly hard left, at least in the Anglo countries. It is highly educated, cosmopolitan, wealthy, and “aware” of the world. And many of the individuals operating in the art world do lean fairly strongly to the left. Yet the art world itself is based on principles fairly different from Woke and often directly opposed to Woke.
First and foremost, the art world is based on ownership of property. Most (by no means all) of those properties were created by dead white males, or perhaps by living white males.
Art markets typically are ruled by Power Laws and massive inequality, with most works going to zero value and a small percentage of the creators hitting it big. No one in those worlds really thinks that is going to change, or should change. Indeed, you earn status by showing how discriminating your eye is, which means by dumping on the works that aren’t going anywhere.
Textiles, which are arguably the “most female” genre in terms of their creators, are worth systematically much less in the marketplace. Sometimes people complain about this, but they are not willing to bid up the prices commensurately. (I am pleased to consider myself an exception in this regard — I see and indeed “exploit” massive aesthetic arbitrage opportunities here. The same is true for some kinds of pottery as well. Buying artworks from talented yet undervalued women creators is one of the best ways to be Woke.)
Art works do not come attached with triggers, and many of them reflect “the gaze” of dead white males, or they are soaked with violence, not usually along politically correct lines. Women (and men) are eroticized without apology. And they are eroticized because of the market. “Reactionary” religions are central to many genres.
The subscribers to The Art Newspaper often are art owners, art collectors, and institutional participants in the art world, such as curators and people who work at auction houses. They might fret over the theft of art works from poorer and typically non-white parts of the world, but actual full-scale restitution is not in fact their #1 programmatic goal. Surprise!
So if you read The Art Newspaper, you will step into an elite world quite unlike say the world of the American Ivies. The performative incentives here are entirely different.
In the 1990s, The Art Newspaper hardly ever ran articles with Woke themes. Today it does a lot, yet the actual content and analysis just isn’t that Woke. You can think of it as a respite from the Woke, though it will never criticize the Woke directly. It tries to incorporate Woke rhetoric into an essentially non-Woke and anti-Woke set of customs and incentives and property rights.
If you look at the top five “most read” articles from this last week in early July, you will find at #2:
“Why are the top jobs in Chinese museums going to white men?”
Maybe you’re getting scared now, but the funny thing is the article actually addresses and answers the question. Basically those are the individuals who have essential contacts in the outside art world and knowledge of how that world works. At the end of the piece the article does call for more Chinese leadership talent (as we all would agree), but along the way no one is brow-beaten and there is remarkably little moralizing. Keep in mind The Art Newspaper is being written exactly for these white men, or those who aspire to become them.
One lesson is that when no one is watching, and when actual property is at stake, the contemporary world is still remarkably sensible.
Just how politically correct do you think this article is?
“…new book on 18th-century French art reveals discrete gradations of erotic images.”
Here is the opening passage:
Most who take an interest in 18th-century French art will know of the Goncourt brothers’ description of “the meanderings, the undulations, the pliancies of a woman’s body” in relation to Watteau, or their ecstatic response to Fragonard’s La Chemise enlevée (around 1770) depicting “a woman… on whose mouth hovers a languid smile, [trying], somewhat faintly, to retain the nightgown that has already been ravished from her body…”
I am not sure Andrea Dworkin would approve. Still, the topic is sufficiently obscure that no one is going to get cancelled for “their ecstatic response to Fragonard.”
Every now and then, The Art Newspaper gets downright sad:
The auction house’s £17.2m [Old Masters] offering in London tonight was only 57% sold, overshadowed by the football match
Are they going to stop calling them “Old Masters”? I don’t think so, not even if the term “Master bedroom” goes away.
The most widely read article of the week was “Archaeologists find ruins of vast Medieval Nubian cathedral in Sudan.” Again, no need to get nervous. They used remote sensing techniques to find the ruins. Good article, good photo, homage to its aesthetic virtues, zero moralizing, zero politics. Not a peep about cultural appropriation or CRT.
Lots of articles cover tax law too! You could say they are a kind of supply-sider, albeit without the revenue maximization idea.
And the editor is a woman, Alison Cole. She even wrote a book Italian Renaissance Courts: Art, Pleasure and Power — do you think she can be totally against those things? 22 Amazon ratings, five star average.
If you love the arts, or simply would like to step into a different intellectual world, I am happy to (strongly) recommend The Art Newspaper. It is also full of practitioner-driven economic reasoning, and fairly objective looks at geopolitics, on top of keeping you current about art worlds. The non-Woke lives.
OK, so what about The Woke and Non-Woke in other areas? Classical music? Stand-up comedy anyone? What else?
U.S.A. fact of the day
One in four Americans aged 40 to 49 is a millionaire, if you include in their household net worth the net present value of their retirement benefits. https://t.co/olaaomzo7H pic.twitter.com/zs1E2LCiap
— Ryan C. Radia (@RyanRadia) July 9, 2021
Alternative Dosing
Alternative dosing is finally getting some attention. This story in Nature recounts some of the recent arguments and evidence:
Two jabs that each contained only one-quarter of the standard dose of the Moderna COVID vaccine gave rise to long-lasting protective antibodies and virus-fighting T cells, according to tests in nearly three dozen people1. The results hint at the possibility of administering fractional doses to stretch limited vaccine supplies and accelerate the global immunization effort.
Since 2016, such a dose-reduction strategy has successfully vaccinated millions of people in Africa and South America against yellow fever2. But no similar approach has been tried in response to COVID-19, despite vaccine shortages in much of the global south.
“There’s a huge status quo bias, and it’s killing people,” says Alex Tabarrok, an economist at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. “Had we done this starting in January, we could have vaccinated tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions more people.”
…Sarah Cobey, an infectious-disease researcher at the University of Chicago in Illinois and a co-author of a 5 July Nature Medicine commentary supporting dose ‘fractionation’, disagrees about the need for time-consuming data collection.
“We shouldn’t wait that long,” she says. “People are dying, and we have historical precedent for making very well-reasoned guesses that we think are going to save lives.”
…According to a modelling study published by Tabarrok and other economists, such an approach would reduce infections and COVID-linked deaths more than current policies.
Addendum: The reason for doing the modeling study is precisely to take into account variants like Delta. Our modeling suggests that even with efficacy significantly lower than that suggested by Figure 1 in our paper, alternative doses of more effective vaccines would still provide significant reductions in mortality, even when new variants dominate. The benefits derive from vaccinating more quickly.
The Biden Executive Order on promoting competition
Here is the text, I won’t attempt a summary but here are some running comments:
1. The beginning of the piece suggests that concentration is rising in the American economy. But this probably isn’t true. See also these comments by me.
2. Industry concentration has not driven wages down by “as much as 17%” — that’s a porky! OK, they say “advertised wages,” but come on…
3. I am happy to see the document take on occupational licensing.
4. Contra to the recommendation, we should not ban non-compete agreements outright. Many non-compete agreements are perfectly normal institutions designed to protect corporate assets against IP theft, client lists for instance. We should restrict non-compete agreements in some more sophisticated manner, still to be determined.
5. Lower prescription drug prices? Maybe. Do they estimate the elasticity of supply? No. Thus this discussion would fail my Econ 101 class. We do know, however, that prescription drugs are one of the very cheapest ways our health care system saves lives, so this is not obviously a good idea.
6. Right to repair laws? Again, maybe. But show me the trade-off and cite a cost-benefit analysis. If software gives more consumer surplus to consumers (again, a maybe), should we be wanting to tax it with contractual restrictions? Should we be wanting to tax Tesla right now?
7. Portability of bank account information is a good idea.
8. “Empower family farmers…” — do you even need to know what comes next? Aarghh!!!
9. The order “encourages” the DOJ and FTC to take various actions. I won’t blame Biden for this, but we’ve way overstepped what executive orders should be doing, some time ago. The net feeling the honest reader of this section receives is that our antitrust policies toward the large tech companies are not based in much of a notion of rule of law.
10. Should HHS “standardize plan options” in the NHIM to make price shopping easier? Makes me nervous — diverse market offerings can be good.
11. Lots of tired and not typically true claims and insinuations about concentration in airline markets; see my book Big Business or read Gary Leff. And shouldn’t airlines charge for bags? Maybe yes, maybe no, but prices per item are not in general a bad thing.
12. We are warned that farmers and ranchers take in an ever-smaller share of the food dollar spent — thank goodness! And there are a bunch of other selective, scattered observations about food prices (“corn seed prices have gone up as much as 30% annually…”), but nothing close to systematic or showing an actual market failure (corn prices by the way have been plummeting since 2012).
13. Broadband policy should indeed be improved, but this section reads as messy, should do more to emphasize the notion of competition and common carrier platforms, and how about a mention of StarLink?
14. There’s not really any point in marching through a discussion of the “Big Tech” section.
15. Is there a problem with bank concentration in this country? Not where I live. Maybe in some rural areas?
16. YIMBY > NIMBY would do more to limit market power than just about anything else, by the way.
17. Is there even a peep about this country’s biggest and worst-performing monopoly in K-12? Of course not. It is Amazon you have to worry about!
So overall this is not great economics. It is good to see the Biden administration pick up on a few pro-competition issues, but much of the document is not clearly pro-competition either. The reasoning and evidence are pretty much politicized from start to finish.
Tabarrok on RADVAC, the DIY Vaccine
The RadVac vaccine, as you may recall, is the open-source, do-it-yourself vaccine. Here’s Technology Review from one year ago (July of 2020):
Preston Estep was alone in a borrowed laboratory, somewhere in Boston. No big company, no board meetings, no billion-dollar payout from Operation Warp Speed, the US government’s covid-19 vaccine funding program. No animal data. No ethics approval.
What he did have: ingredients for a vaccine. And one willing volunteer.
Estep swirled together the mixture and spritzed it up his nose.
…Estep and at least 20 other researchers, technologists, or science enthusiasts, many connected to Harvard University and MIT, have volunteered as lab rats for a do-it-yourself inoculation against the coronavirus. They say it’s their only chance to become immune without waiting a year or more for a vaccine to be formally approved.
Among those who’ve taken the DIY vaccine is George Church, the celebrity geneticist at Harvard University, who took two doses a week apart earlier this month. The doses were dropped in his mailbox, and he mixed the ingredients himself.
Church say…he believes the vaccine designed by Estep, his former graduate student at Harvard and one of his protégés, is extremely safe. “I think we are at much bigger risk from covid considering how many ways you can get it, and how highly variable the consequences are,” he says.
I’m a big fan of the RadVac vaccine and was recently asked to give a talk about the vaccine and the pluses and minuses of the open source approach. In my talk I cover patents, when it was rational to take an unapproved vaccine, the FDA, paternal medicine versus the Consumer Reports model and more. I’m especially pleased with this talk.
Addendum: Great set of posts from johnswentworth from LessWrong on making the vaccine and then testing it.
Stripe Atlas update
Five years ago, Marginal Revolution covered a new project, Stripe Atlas, to help founders incorporate their start-ups and thus make them successful realities. There is a one-time fee of $500. Here are the results:
In 2016, we launched Stripe Atlas to help founders turn their ideas into startups, and in turn, collectively grow the GDP of the internet. Since then, over 20,000 businesses have started with Atlas and have generated over $3 billion in revenue. We surveyed over 1,000 Atlas founders to get a snapshot of this generation of entrepreneurs and their needs…
Ninety-one percent of Atlas founders are not in Silicon Valley. In fact, outside of the US, some of the places where we’re seeing the fastest growth are Nigeria (400% year-over-year), United Arab Emirates (165%), and India (66%). Twenty-eight percent of founders told us that they identify as minorities in their country, and 24% are immigrants. Just 12% of founders identified as female. (This is slightly better when compared to the portfolios of major startup accelerators or venture capital firms.) Over time we hope to help more female founders start and scale. Forty-three percent of Atlas founders are building businesses for the first time—nearly 10,000 of them started in just the past year (an indication of an upward trend in entrepreneurship after nearly three decades of decline).
That is from Edwin Wee. The core lesson, at the meta-level, is that business services for an internet age remain drastically underprovided. But on the bright side, entrepreneurs are starting to remedy this…
Book Review: Andy Slavitt’s Preventable
Like Michael Lewis’s The Premonition which I reviewed earlier, Andy Slavitt’s Preventable is a story of heroes, only all the heroes are named Andy Slavitt. It begins, as all such stories do, with an urgent call from the White House…the President needs you now! When not reminding us (e.g. xv, 14, 105, 112, 133, 242, 249) of how he did “nearly the impossible” and saved Obamacare he tells us how grateful other people were for his wise counsel, e.g. “Jared Kushner’s name again flashed on my phone. I picked up, and he was polite and appreciative of my past help.” (p.113), “John Doer was right to challenge me to make my concerns known publicly. Hundreds of thousands of people were following my tweets…” (p. 55)
Slavitt deserves praise for his work during the pandemic so I shouldn’t be so churlish but Preventable is shallow and politicized and it rubbed me the wrong way. Instead of an “inside account” we get little more than a day-by-day account familiar to anyone who lived through the last year and half. Slavitt rarely departs from the standard narrative.
Trump, of course, comes in for plenty of criticism for his mishandling of the crisis. Perhaps the most telling episode was when an infected Trump demanded a publicity jaunt in a hermetically sealed car with Secret Service personnel. Trump didn’t care enough to protect those who protected him. No surprise he didn’t protect us.
The standard narrative, however, leads Slavitt to make blanket assertions—the kind that everyone of a certain type knows to be true–but in fact are false. He writes, for example:
In comparison to most of these other countries, the American public was impatient, untrusting, and unaccustomed to sacrificing individual rights for the public good. (p. 65)
Data from the Oxford Coronavirus Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT) show that the US “sacrifice” as measured by the stringency of the COVID policy response–school closures; workplace closures; restrictions on public gatherings; restrictions on internal movements; mask requirements; testing requirements and so forth–was well within the European and Canadian average.
The pandemic and the lockdowns split Americans from their friends and families. Birthdays, anniversaries, even funerals were relegated to Zoom. Jobs and businesses were lost in the millions. Children couldn’t see their friends or even play in the park. Churches and bars were shuttered. Music was silenced. Americans sacrificed plenty.
Some of Slavitt’s assertions are absurd.
The U.S. response to the pandemic differed from the response in other parts of the world largely in the degree to which the government was reluctant to interfere with our system of laissez-faire capitalism…
Laissez-faire capitalism??! Political hyperbole paired with lazy writing. It would be laughable except for the fact that such hyperbole biases our thinking. If you read Slavitt uncritically you’d assume–as Slavitt does–that when the pandemic hit, US workers were cast aside to fend for themselves. In fact, the US fiscal response to the pandemic was among the largest and most generous in the world. An unemployed minimum wage worker in the United States, for example, was paid a much larger share of their income during the pandemic than a similar worker in Canada, France, or Germany (and no, that wasn’t because the US replacement rate was low to begin with.)
This is not to deny that low-wage workers bore a larger brunt of the pandemic than high-wage workers, many of whom could work from home. Slavitt implies, however, that this was a “room-service pandemic” in which the high-wage workers demanded a reopening of the economy at the expense of low-wage workers. As far as the data indicate, however, the big divisions of opinion were political and tribal not by income per se. The Washington Post, for example, concluded:
There was no significant difference in the percentage of people who said social distancing measures were worth the cost between those who’d seen no economic impact and those who said the impacts were a major problem for their households. Both groups broadly support the measures.
Perhaps because Slavitt believes his own hyperbole about a laissez-faire economy he can’t quite bring himself to say that Operation Warp Speed, a big government program of early investment to accelerate vaccines, was a tremendous success. Instead he winds up complaining that “even with $1 billion worth of funding for research and development, Moderna ended up selling its vaccine at about twice the cost of an influenza vaccine.” (p. 190). Can you believe it? A life-saving, economy-boosting, pandemic ending, incredibly-cheap vaccine, cost twice as much as the flu vaccine! The horror.
Slavitt’s narrative lines up “scientific experts” against “deniers, fauxers, and herders” with the scientific experts united on the pro-lockdown side. Let’s consider. In Europe one country above all others followed the Slavitt ideal of an expert-led pandemic response. A country where the public health authority was free from interference from politicians. A country where the public had tremendous trust in the state. A country where the public were committed to collective solidarity and the public welfare. That country, of course, was Sweden. Yet in Sweden the highly regarded Public Health Agency, led by state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell, an expert in infectious diseases who had directed Sweden’s response to the swine flu epidemic, opposed lockdowns, travel restrictions, and the general use of masks.
Moreover, the Public Health Agency of Sweden and Tegnell weren’t a bizarre anomaly, anti-lockdown was probably the dominant expert position prior to COVID. In a 2006 review of pandemic policy, for example, four highly-regarded experts argued:
It is difficult to identify circumstances in the past half-century when large-scale quarantine has been effectively used in the control of any disease. The negative consequences of large-scale quarantine are so extreme (forced confinement of sick people with the well; complete restriction of movement of large populations; difficulty in getting critical supplies, medicines, and food to people inside the quarantine zone) that this mitigation measure should be eliminated from serious consideration.
Travel restrictions, such as closing airports and screening travelers at borders, have historically been ineffective.
….a policy calling for communitywide cancellation of public events seems inadvisable.
The authors included Thomas V. Inglesby, the Director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, one of the most highly respected centers for infectious diseases in the world, and D.A. Henderson, the legendary epidemiologist widely credited with eliminating smallpox from the planet.
Tegnell argued that “if other countries were led by experts rather than politicians, more nations would have policies like Sweden’s” and he may have been right. In the United States, for example, the Great Barrington declaration, which argued for a Swedish style approach and which Slavitt denounces in lurid and slanderous terms, was written by three highly-qualified, expert epidemiologists; Martin Kulldorff from Harvard, Sunetra Gupta from Oxford and Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford. One would be hard-pressed to find a more expert group.
The point is not that we should have followed the Great Barrington experts (for what it is worth, I opposed the Great Barrington declaration). Ecclesiastes tells us:
… that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
In other words, the experts can be wrong. Indeed, the experts are often divided, so many of them must be wrong. The experts also often base their policy recommendations on factors beyond their expertise, including educational, class, and ideological biases, so the experts are to be trusted more on factual questions than on ethical answers. Nevertheless, the experts are more likely to be right than the non-experts. So how should one navigate these nuances in a democratic society? Slavitt doesn’t say.
Slavitt’s simple narrative–Trump bad, Biden good, Follow the Science, Be Kind–can’t help us as we try to improve future policy. Slavitt ignores most of the big questions. Why did the CDC fail in its primary mission? Indeed, why did the CDC often slow our response? Why did the NIH not quickly fund COVID research giving us better insight on the virus and its spread? Why were the states so moribund and listless? Why did the United States fail to adopt first doses first, even though that policy successfully saved lives by speeding up vaccinations in Great Britain and Canada?
To the extent that Slavitt does offer policy recommendations they aren’t about reforming the CDC, FDA or NIH. Instead he offers us a tired laundry list; a living wage, affordable housing, voting reform, lobbying reform, national broadband, and reduction of income inequality. Surprise! The pandemic justified everything you believed all along! But many countries with these reforms performed poorly during the pandemic and many without, such as authoritarian China, performed relatively well. All good things do not correlate.
Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic make it easy to blame him and call it a day. But the rot is deep. If we do not get to the core of our problems we will not be ready for the next emergency. If we are lucky, we might face the next emergency with better leadership but a great country does not rely on luck.
Use Fractional Dosing to Speed Vaccination and Save Lives
I’ve been shouting about fractional dosing since January, most recently with my post A Half Dose of Moderna is More Effective Than a Full Dose of AstraZeneca and the associated paper with Michael Kremer and co-authors. Yesterday we saw some big movement. Writing in Nature Medicine, WHO epidemiologists Benjamin Cowling and Wey Wen Lim and evolutionary biologist Sarah Cobey title a correspondence:
Fractionation of COVID-19 vaccine doses could extend limited supplies and reduce mortality.
Exactly so. They write:
Dose-finding studies indicate that fractional doses of mRNA vaccines could still elicit a robust immune response to COVID-192,3. In a non-randomized open-label phase 1/2 trial of the BNT162b2 vaccine, doses as low as one third (10 μg) of the full dose produced antibody and cellular immune responses comparable to those achieved with the full dose of 30 μg (ref. 4). Specifically, the geometric mean titer of neutralizing antibodies 21 days after the second vaccine dose was 166 for the group that received 10 μg, almost the same as the geometric mean titer of 161 for the group that received 30 μg, and 63 days after the second dose, these titers were 181 and 133, respectively4. For the mRNA-1273 vaccine, a dose of 25 μg conferred geometric mean PRNT80 titers (the inverse of the concentration of serum needed to reduce the number of plaques by 80% in a plaque reduction neutralization test) of 340 at 14 days after the second dose, compared with a value of 654 for the group that received the standard dose of 100 μg (ref. 5). According to the model proposed by Khoury et al.6, if vaccine efficacy at the full dose is 95%, a reduction in dose that led to as much as a halving in the post-vaccination geometric mean titer could still be in the range of 85–90%. Although other components of the immune response may also contribute to efficacy, these dose-finding data are at least indicative of the potential for further exploration of fractionation as a dose-sparing strategy. Durability of responses after fractional doses should also be explored.
…Concerns about the evolution of vaccine resistance have been posited as a potential drawback of dose-sparing strategies. However, vaccines that provide protection against clinical disease seem to also reduce transmission, which indicates that expanding partial vaccination coverage could reduce the incidence of infection. As described in a recent paper, lower prevalence should slow, not accelerate, the emergence and spread of new SARS-CoV-2 variants8.
…In conclusion, fractionated doses could provide a feasible solution that extends limited supplies of vaccines against COVID-19, which is a major challenge for low- and middle-income countries.
Also a new paper in preprint just showed that 1/4 doses of Moderna create a substantial and lasting immune response on par with that from natural infection.
Here we examined vaccine-specific CD4+ T cell, CD8+ T cell, binding antibody, and neutralizing antibody responses to the 25 ug Moderna mRNA-1273 vaccine over 7 months post-immunization, including multiple age groups, with a particular interest in assessing whether pre-existing crossreactive T cell memory impacts vaccine-generated immunity. Low dose (25 ug) mRNA-1273 elicited durable Spike binding antibodies comparable to that of convalescent COVID-19 cases. Vaccine-generated Spike memory CD4+ T cells 6 months post-boost were comparable in quantity and quality to COVID-19 cases, including the presence of TFH cells and IFNg-expressing cells.
Finally, an article in Reuters notes that Moderna are preparing to launch a 50 ug dose regimen as a booster and for children. Thus, contrary to some critics of our paper, the technology is ready.
Frankly, governments are way behind on this–they should have been pushing the vaccine manufacturers and funding trials on alternative dosing since at least January. Indeed, imagine how many lives we might have saved had we listened to Operation Warp Speed advisor Moncef Slaoui who advocated for half doses in January. On a world scale, we could have vaccinated tens even hundreds of millions more people by now had we ramped up fractional dosing.
At this point, it’s my view that there is enough knowledge to justify rolling out alternative dosing in any hot spot or in any country worried about outbreaks. Roll it out in a randomized fashion (as Kominers and I discussed in the context of the US vaccination rollout) to study it in real time but start the roll out now. Lives can be saved if we speed up vaccination, especially of the best vaccines we have, the mRNAs. Moderna and Pfizer have together pledged to deliver (mostly Pfizer and mostly through the US) some 250m vaccine doses to COVAX in 2021 for delivery to less developed countries. If we go to half-doses that becomes 500m doses–a life saver. And recall these points made earlier:
Judging by neutralizing antibodies, a 50 ug dose of, for example, Moderna looks to be more effective than standard dosing of many other vaccines including AZ and J&J and much better than others such as Sinovac. Thus alternative dosing is a way to *increase* the quality of vaccine for many people.
A 50 ug dose vaccine available today is much higher quality than a 100 ug dose vaccine available one year from now.
If we have the will, we can increase vaccine supply very rapidly.
Let’s all have a revisionist Fourth of July
That is the theme of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
Revisionist history serves many useful purposes, and for the most part it should be encouraged — even though many particular revisionist claims turn out to be wrong. The natural human state of affairs is a kind of complacency and acceptance of the status quo. If historians sometimes write a bit too sharply or speculatively to capture the audience’s attention, it is a price worth paying. At any rate, the audience tends not to take them literally or to pay close attention to their more detailed claims.
And:
The problem is that the revisionism isn’t diverse enough. A few issues — most of all those raised by Critical Race Theory — get caught up in the culture wars and are debated above all others. I agree that we should devote more time and attention to America’s disgraceful history of slavery and race relations, and I have incorporated that into my own teaching.
Still, other matters are being neglected. The longer trajectory of U.S. foreign policy is hardly debated, or what that history should mean for current decisions. There is plenty of carping about “the deep state,” but actual history has fallen down a memory hole, including the history of U.S. intelligence agencies.
It gets worse yet. According to one recent survey, 63% of the American public is not aware that six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. Ten percent had not heard of the Holocaust at all. Or consider the treatment of Native Americans, which was terrible and produced few heroes. Yet American soul-searching on this history seems to be minimal.
America needs revisionism, more of it please, and on timely and controversial topics. But it also needs less politicized and more intellectually diverse interpretations of its history. On this Fourth of July, what America needs is not the promotion of some particular claim of historical hypocrisy, but the elevation of the historical itself.
Recommended, and have a happy Fourth!
Haiti fact of the day
Democratic governance is eroding in Haiti, but through an unusual mechanism — an ongoing diminution [The Economist] in the number of federally elected officials:
Today there are only 11 nationally-elected officials, including him [Jovenel Moïse].
A parliamentary election had been scheduled for October 2019, but it was never held. The current president refers to himself as “Après Dieu” [second only to God], and also “Banana Man,” as he is a former plantation manager. Solve for the equilibrium.
The Strange Death of Human Challenge Trials
A good post at the Effective Altruism Forum on all the stuff we could have done to stop the pandemic but didn’t:
Probably the biggest mistake was not intentionally infecting vaccinated volunteers. This could be done in 1 month, vs 6.5 months for the ecological trials that the entire world did out of misguided PR ethics. (2.5 is probably more realistic given signups, approvals, and big pharma’s slow data analysis and reporting. That’s still hundreds of thousands of lives.)
1DaySooner wrote a letter. The world’s foremost consequentialist signed. The world’s foremost deontologist signed. Two of the most prominent bioethicists in the world signed. 15 Nobelists signed. Dozens of philosophers who otherwise agree on extremely little signed. But they’re unethical.
Rarely do I so strongly feel the boot of others on my neck, and humanity’s neck.
The one distinctively courageous thing about the UK – the human challenge trials which got 40,000 volunteers – actually eventually started!.. In January 2021, with n=90.
I am extremely puzzled why China or one of the other ahem non-individualist governments didn’t do these.
Lots more at the link.
The Premonition
In The Premonition Michael Lewis brings his cast of heroes together like the assembling of the Avengers. In the role of Captain America is Charity Dean, the CA public health officer who is always under-estimated because she is slight and attractive, until she cracks open the ribcage of a cadaver that the men are afraid to touch. Then there is Carter Mecher, the redneck epidemiologist who has a gift for assembling numbers into coherent patterns. And Richard Hatchett the southern poet who finds himself at the head of The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness (CEPI), the world’s most important organization during the pandemic; and Joe DiRisi the brilliant, mad scientist picked by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative as the person most likely to cure disease…all of them. As you might expect from Michael Lewis, it’s all terribly well done, albeit formulaic and sometimes over-the-top, e.g.
Charity’s purpose was clear….she was put on earth to fight battles, and wars, against disease. To save lives and perhaps even an entire country. p. 200-201
But Lewis has a bigger problem than over-the-top writing.
The heroes were defeated. Lewis likes to tell stories of brilliant mavericks like Billy Beane and Michael Burry who go against the grain but eventually, against all odds, emerge victorious. But six hundred thousand people are dead in the United States and whatever victory we have won was ugly and slow. Indeed, Lewis assembles his mighty team but then The Premonition trails off as the team is defeated by bureaucracy, indecision, complacency and malaise before they even have a chance to enter the real battle against the virus. It’s telling that none of Lewis’s heroes are even mentioned in Andy Slavitt’s Preventable (about which I will say more in a future post).
To be fair, Lewis’s heroes are fascinating, brilliant people who did some good. As part of the Kremer team I interacted a bit with Richard Hatchett and CEPI. Hatchett headed CEPI and understood the danger of SARS-COV-II before anyone else and with Bill Gates’s support started funding vaccine production and shoring up supply lines before anyone else was off the starting line. CEPI was magnificent and their story has yet to be told in full measure. Had Lewis’s heroes been in charge I have no doubt that many lives could have been saved but, for the most part, the heroes were sidelined. Why and how that happened is the real question but Lewis’s story-telling skills aren’t the right skills to answer that question.
If there is one central villain in The Premonition, it’s the CDC. Lewis acknowledges that his perspective has changed. In The Fifth Risk, the system (the “deep state” used non-pejoratively if you will) is full of wisdom and power but it’s under threat from Trump. In The Premonition, Trump is an after-thought, at best a trigger or aggravating factor. Long before Trump or the pandemic:
Charity had washed her hands of the CDC. “I banned their officers from my investigations,” she said. The CDC did many things. It published learned papers on health crisis, after the fact. It managed, very carefully, public perception of itself. But when the shooting started, it leapt into the nearest hole, while others took fire. “In the end I was like ‘Fuck you’, said Charity. “I was mad they were such pansies. I was mad that the man behind the curtain ended up being so disappointing.” p. 42
As the pandemic starts the CDC fails repeatedly. At the beginning of the pandemic on January 29 the government had started to repatriate Americans from Wuhan bringing some of them to a National Guard base just outside of Omaha. But shockingly the CDC doesn’t test them for the virus.
Never mind that every single one of the fifty-seven Americans in quarantine wanted to be tested: the CDC forbade it. And [James] Lawler [US Naval Commander and national security coordinator on pandemic response] never understood the real reason for the CDC’s objections…Whatever the reasons, fifty-seven Americans spent fourteen days quarantined in Omaha, then left without having any idea of whether they’d been infected, or might still infect others. “There is no way that fifty-seven people from Wuhan were not shedding virus,” said Lawler. p. 176
Many of the people brought home from China are not even quarantined just told to self-quarantine:
…When local health officers…set out to find these possibly infected Americans, and make sure that they were following orders to quarantine, they discovered that the CDC officials who had met them upon arrival had not bothered to take down their home addresses.
…[Charity] posed a rude question to the senior CDC official moved on the call: How can you keep saying that Americans are at low risk from the virus if you aren’t even testing for the virus. She’d been answered with silence, and then the official move on to the next topic. [p.206-207, italics in original]
And all of this is before we get to the CDC’s famously botched test an error which was amplified by the FDA’s forbidding private labs and state governments to develop their own tests. Charity Dean wanted California to ignore the CDC and FDA and, “blow open testing and allow every microbiology lab to develop its own test.” But Dean is ignored and so by as late as February 19, “Zimbabwe could test but California could not because of the CDC. Zimbabwe!” p. 223. The failure of testing in the early weeks was the original sin of the crisis, the key failure that took a containment strategy ala South Korea and Taiwan off the table.
Lewis’s most sustained analysis comes in a few pages near the end of The Premonition where he argues that the CDC became politicized after it lost credibility due to the 1976 Swine Flu episode. In 1976 a novel influenza strain looked like it might be a repeat of 1918. Encouraged by CDC head David Sencer, President Ford launched a mass vaccination campaign that vaccinated 45 million people. The swine flu, however, petered out and the campaign was widely considered a “debacle” and a “fiasco” that illustrated the danger of ceding control to unelected experts instead of the democratic process. The CDC lost authority and under Reagan the director became a political appointee rather than a career civil servant. Thus, rather than being unprecedented, Trump’s politicization of the CDC had deep roots.
Today the 1976 vaccination campaign looks like a competent response to a real risk that failed to materialize, rather than a failure. So what lessons should we take from this? Lewis doesn’t say but my colleague Garett Jones argues for more independent agencies in his excellent book 10% Less Democracy. The problem with the CDC was that after 1976 it was too responsive to political pressures, i.e. too democratic. What are the alternatives?
The Federal Reserve is governed by a seven-member board each of whom is appointed to a single 14- year term, making it rare for a President to be able to appoint a majority of the board. Moreover, since members cannot be reappointed there is less incentive to curry political favor. The Chairperson is appointed by the President to a four-year term and must also be approved by the Senate. These checks and balances make the Federal Reserve a relatively independent agency with the power to reject democratic pressures for inflationary stimulus. Although independent central banks can be a thorn in the side of politicians who want their aid in juicing the economy as elections approach, the evidence is that independent central banks reduce inflation without reducing economic growth. A multi-member governing board with long and overlapping appointments could also make the CDC more independent from democratic politics which is what you want when a once in 100 year pandemic hits and the organization needs to make unpopular decisions before most people see the danger.
Lewis hasn’t lost his ability to write exhilarating prose about heroic oddballs. Page by page, The Premonition is a good read but the heroes in Lewis’s story were overshadowed by politics, bureaucracy and complacency–systems that Lewis’s doesn’t analyze or perhaps quite understand–and as a result, his hero-centric story ends up unsatisfying as story and unedifying as analysis.