Category: Current Affairs
A variety of very recent electoral results
From Australia (WSJ):
…voters in Australia easily rejected a proposal to give indigenous people a special place in the country’s constitution. The vote was about 60% in opposition, and the referendum lost in all six states. It had to win in four of six to prevail.
The referendum was pitched as an attempt at “reconciliation” with Australia’s Aborigines and Torres Strait Islander people, who make up about 3.8% of the population. Labour Prime Minister Anthony Albanese campaigned on the idea in 2022 and urged a yes vote. Most conservative politicians opposed it.
Opponents said that adding the indigenous Voice to Parliament into the constitution was divisive and would create a special racial status in advising Parliament on indigenous matters that would complicate the job of the elected executive government. The proposal is part of the identity politics that has become a preoccupation of the global left.
I do think Australia should treat its indigenous groups better, but not through that mechanism, so I am happy. The results in New Zealand were positive too. Ecuador opted for the pro-business candidate rather than the pro-Venezuelan socialist. And most importantly, in Poland it is likely that the liberal, pro-EU forces are going to win. So good news all around, and all just in a few days time.
From the comments, what will happen in New Zealand edition?
Might a few Kiwi reforms resume or be restored?
New Zealand’s next prime minister will be Christopher Luxon, a former chief executive of Air New Zealand, whose center-right National Party will lead a coalition with Act, a smaller libertarian party.
Here is the full NYT story. Jacinda Ardern is revered in many circles, but note support for her Labour Party collapsed to 27 percent, in part due to their inability to solve cost of living issues. Via tekl.
What is an Emergency? The Case for Rapid Malaria Vaccination
Compare two otherwise similar towns. In Town A there have always been 1000 deaths every month from disease X. In contrast, Town B has been free of disease X for as long as anyone can remember until very recently when disease X suddenly started to kill 1000 people per month. A vaccine for disease X is developed. Which town should receive expedited vaccinations?
From a utilitarian perspective, both towns present equally compelling cases for immediate vaccination (1). Vaccination will avert 1,000 deaths per month in either location. The ethical imperative is thus to act swiftly in both instances. Lives are lives. However, given human psychology and societal norms, Town B is more likely to be perceived as facing an “emergency,” whereas Town A’s situation may be erroneously dismissed as less dire because deaths are the status quo.
A case in point. The WHO just approved a malaria vaccine for use in children, the R21/Matrix-M vaccine. Great! There are still some 247 million malaria cases globally every year causing 619,000 deaths including 476 thousand deaths of children under the age of 5. That’s not 1000 deaths a month but more than 1000 deaths of children every day. The WHO, however, is planning on rolling out the vaccine next year.
Adrian Hill, one of the key scientists behind the vaccine is dismayed by the lack of urgency:
“Why would you allow children to die instead of distributing the vaccine? There’s no sensible answer to that — of course you wouldn’t,” Hill told the Financial Times. The SII said it “already” had capacity to produce 100mn doses annually.
…“There’s plenty of vaccine, let’s get it out there this year. We’ve done our best to answer huge amounts of questions, none of which a mother with a child at risk of malaria would be interested in.”
Hill is correct: the case for urgency is strong. More than a thousand children are dying daily and the Serum Institute already has 20 million doses on ice and is capable of producing 100 million doses a year. Why not treat this as an emergency?! Implicitly, however, people think that the case for urgency in Africa is weak because “what will another few months matter?” The benefits of vaccination in Africa are treated as small because they are measured relative to the total deaths that have already occurred. In contrast, vaccination for say COVID in the developed world (Town B) ended the emergency and restored normality thus saving a large percent of the deaths that might have occurred. But the percentages are irrelevant. This is a base rate fallacy, albeit the opposite of the one usually considered. Lives are lives, irrespective of the historical context.
Hill, director of the university’s Jenner Institute, compared the timeframe with the swift rollout of the first Covid vaccines, which were distributed “within weeks” of approval.
“We’d like to see the same importance given to the malaria vaccine for children in Africa. We don’t want them sitting in a fridge in India,” he said. “We don’t think this would be fair to rural African countries if they were not provided with the same rapidity of review and supply.”
The term “emergency” inherently embodies the conundrum I highlight. Emergency is defined as an unexpected set of events or the resulting state that calls for immediate action. When formulating a response to an emergency, however, the focus should not be on whether the events were unexpected but on the resulting state. The resulting state is what is important. The resulting state is the end that legitimizes the means. The unexpected draws our attention–our emotional systems, like our visual systems, alert on change and movement–but what matters is not what draws our attention but the situational reality.
Lives are lives and we should act with all justifiable speed to save lives. The WHO should accelerate malaria vaccination for children in Africa.
(1) You might argue that in Town B the 1000 deaths are more unusual and thus more disruptive but you might also argue that Town A has undergone the deaths for so much longer that the case for speed as matter of justice is even greater. These are quibbles.
The “Deaths of Despair” narrative is somewhat wrong
Matt Yglesias does an excellent job laying out the case against the “deaths of despair” narrative and putting it bluntly.
Over the past few years, Anne Case and Angus Deaton have unleashed upon the world a powerful meme that seems to link together America’s troublingly bad life expectancy outcomes with a number of salient social and political trends like the unexpected rise of Donald Trump.
Their “deaths of despair” narrative linking declining life expectancy to populist-right politics and to profound social and economic decay has proven to be extremely powerful. But their analysis suffers from fundamental statistical flaws that critics have been pointing out for years and that Case and Deaton just keep blustering through as if the objections don’t matter. Beyond that, they are operating within the confines of a construct — “despair” — that has little evidentiary basis.
…Novosad, Rafkin, and Asher have provided a compelling analysis of a very concentrated problem of worsening health outcomes for the worst-off Americans. Case and Deaton, by contrast, have delivered a very misleading portrait of worsening health outcomes for the majority of Americans that (because they mistakenly think it’s a majority) they attribute to broad economic forces that exist internationally but which for some reason only cause “despair” in the United States.
…The point is that we face a set of discrete public health challenges that we need to think about both as policy matters and in terms of politics and public opinion. But there is no “despair” construct driving any of this, and the linkage to big picture political trends is simply that Republicans are more hostile to regulation. Case and Deaton, meanwhile, have sent us on the equivalent of a years-long wild goose chase away from well-known ideas like “smoking is unhealthy” or “it would be good to find a way to get fewer people to use heroin.”
I tend to agree with Matt but I would offer a few cautions. Case and Deaton have been too broad in identifying the at-risk population. Identifying more carefully the at-risk group(s) is important so that we can target different problems with different solutions. Indeed, part of what makes the very important opioid crisis so bedeviling is precisely that it is not limited to “despairing” populations but cuts across many groups.
I wouldn’t, however, throw out despair as an organizing principle. The evidence on “despair” goes beyond death to include a host of co-morbidities such as mental stress, marriage rates, labor force participation rates and other measures of well being. Regardless of the precise population to which these problems attach they are co-morbidities and I suspect not by accident. Education is a proxy for the underlying problem but likely not causal. Matt’s cheeky suggestion to promote ideas like “smoking is unhealthy” illustrates part of the issue. Education and information will not solve that problem. Smokers know that smoking is unhealthy but they do it anyway–perhaps because it’s one of the few easily available pleasures if you are unmarried, out of work and stressed.
Nevertheless, do read the whole thing.
Israel’s previous game-theoretic strategy?
Israel’s asymmetric response is supposed to serve a deterrent purpose, Byman told Vox, but the country has also, at least in the past, had a vested interest in keeping Hamas in power. According to a 2017 research brief by the RAND corporation, Israel has the military capability to wipe out Hamas, but doing so could perhaps be even riskier than not, given that an even more extreme organization could come into power — or that Israel could be put into the position of governing the territory itself. “As such, Israel’s grand strategy became ‘mowing the grass’ — accepting its inability to permanently solve the problem and instead repeatedly targeting leadership of Palestinian militant organizations to keep violence manageable.”
“We want to break their bones without putting them in the hospital,” one Israeli defense analyst told the research brief’s authors.
Here is more from Ellen Ioanes. Viewed through this lens, it is far from obvious what is the new equilibrium…? And here is some background context from the still-underrated Thomas Friedman.
Claudia Goldin Wins Nobel
Claudia Goldin wins the Nobel! Goldin is an economic historian, she was inspired to go into economics by Alfred Kahn (later the architect of airline deregulation) and became a student of Robert Fogel at the University of Chicago. Goldin pioneered the historical analysis of the labor market and gender. If you want to read a single Goldin piece then very fortuitously and appropriately her NBER paper called…Why Women Won just appeared as an NBER working paper! The Nobel Prize committee’s Scientific Background is a good summary of her work including her important work on education with Larry Katz.
Goldin is well known at MR which makes covering this year’s Nobel easy as I can point to our MRU videos on Goldin and her podcast with Conversations with Tyler.
First, an overview of Goldin and her work, especially interesting on her archival work. Goldin wasn’t just downloading datasets she discovered and developed them!
Next is my video on one of Goldin’s key papers (with Katz) about how the development of the pill vastly accelerated women entering the workforce especially in the professions (we also cover Goldin’s paper in Modern Principles.)
Women working: What’s the Pill Got To Do With It?
Then there is Tyler’s Conversations with Tyler podcast with Goldin. I am struck by how little Goldin is willing to speculate, pontificate or advocate in that conversation and instead sticks to the data.
Finally, here are many other MR posts on Goldin.
A few implications
I am not saying these are rational, or not, in any case they are predictions:
1. The momentum for gun control in the United States will weaken. There is a claim on Twitter that only two percent of Israeli households have guns at hand. May or may not be exactly true, but many people will become more attached to the idea of gun ownership as a means of defense.
2. We Americans will indeed build The Wall on our southern border.
3. The doctrine of deterrence has taken a beating. Few doubt that Israel can strike back at Gaza in a very powerful way, and yet that wasn’t enough to stop the attacks. I am still trying to digest this one.
4. A certain kind of military-flavored AI accelerationism will win out. Given #3, it no longer suffices to think you can deter a drone attack from your enemies, even if your country is very powerful. Rather you need your own drones, and your intelligence, to forestall major casualties in the first place.
Japan fact of the day
Employee earnings have dropped 2% in real terms in the past year and by 8% in the past decade.
Union Busted
The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) just filed for bankruptcy because it lost a case with a port operator in Portland. The back story is amazing.
The ILWU is one of the most powerful unions in the United States. Since bloody riots in 1934 it has controlled all 29 seaports on the west coast of the United States, giving them monopoly power. The ILWU’s 22 thousand workers are known as the “lords of the dock” and they earn an average of just over $200,000 in salary and another $100,000 in benefits, a bit more than the typical CEO. Some ILWU foremen take home half a million a year.
The ILWU has a lock on dockworkers but there are other rival unions. In Portland, for example, there were two jobs for reefers–electrical workers who handle special refrigerated containers–that since 1974 had been held by members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. The ILWU, however, wanted control of these jobs and in 2012 one of the heavies of the union, Leal Sundet, threatened the manager of the port operator that if he didn’t help him to take these jobs from the Brotherhood and give them to the Longshoremen he would create havoc. When the port operator didn’t comply–it wasn’t clear even that they could comply as the jobs were not under the port operator’s control–the ILWU followed through on its threat. Repeated shutdowns, slowdowns and discovered “safety violations” disrupted port operations so badly that the entire port closed.
The port operator, however, took the ILWU to court, arguing that the labor actions were illegal. The jury agreed giving the port operator an award of $93.6 million for its losses, later reduced to $19 million. The Union doesn’t have the $19 million, hence the bankruptcy.
Thus, the union has been bankrupted, the port closed, hundreds of millions of dollars lost and shipments slowed all because of a dispute over 2 jobs.
In related news, the just approved ILWU contract raises wages for ILWU workers and ensures that there will be no serious automation of the ports for at least another six years, again putting the United States behind the rest of the world in efficient shipping and logistics.
I am reminded of the day Ronald Reagan fired the air traffic controllers for their illegal strike.
Twitter channel covering Israel events
I thank S. for the pointer. What are some other good sources?
*The Genius of Israel*
That is the new book by Dan Senor and Saul Singer. The authors argue that Israel has higher solidarity and also higher social capital than recent media reports might indicate. They are thus optimistic about the country, and the subtitle is The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Natoin in a Turbulent World.
I do not go to Israel enough to have a strong opinion on this, but their thesis is consistent with my casual observation, and also with my intuition about negative bias in media. The book comes out November 7.
That was then, this is now (median voter edition)
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said this week that the Biden administration planned to waive 26 environmental, public health and cultural preservation laws in order to fast-track constructing sections of the border wall in South Texas.
…The administration would use funds from a 2019 appropriation designated by Congress to construct the wall, which was spurred by a disaster declaration by the Trump administration…
“There is presently an acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers and roads in the vicinity of the border of the United States in order to prevent unlawful entries into the United States.”
Here is the full story, via Rich Dewey. And note that an actual jaguar is crossing the border.
The new warfare?
“Today, a column of tanks or a column of advancing troops can be discovered in three to five minutes and hit in another three minutes. The survivability on the move is no more than 10 minutes,” said Maj. Gen. Vadym Skibitsky, the deputy commander of Ukraine’s HUR military intelligence service. “Surprises have become very difficult to achieve.”
…And, in a potential conflict with a lesser power, America’s overall military edge may also not be as decisive as previously thought. “It’s a question of cost,” said Phillips O’Brien, a professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. “If you can destroy an expensive, heavy system for something that costs much much less, then actually the power differential between the two countries doesn’t matter as much.”
…Western military planners are taking notice. “We have a lot of lessons to learn. One is that quantity is a quality of its own,” said Maj. Gen. Christian Freuding, the head of Ukraine operations at the German Ministry of Defense. “You need numbers, you need force numbers. In the West we have reduced our military, we have reduced our stocks. But quantity matters, mass matters.”
When it comes to tanks, in particular, the lesson of the Ukrainian war is that tank-on-tank battles have become a rarity—which means that the relative sophistication of a tank is no longer as important. Fewer than 5% of tanks destroyed since the war began had been hit by other tanks, according to Ukrainian officials, with the rest succumbing to mines, artillery, antitank missiles and drones.
Edge to the defense? Here is more from the WSJ, interesting throughout. Via Matt Y.
They are solving for the equilibrium
Canada is pushing the United States and other major economies to follow through on pledges to phase out “inefficient” fossil fuel subsidies, which have soared despite the growing threat of climate change.
Such subsidies hit records last year, according to several watchdog groups, including one that estimated that major world economies — members of the G-20 cooperation forum — surpassed $1 trillion in subsidies for the first time in 2022. That’s a fourfold increase over subsidy levels in 2010, the year after G-20 nations agreed to phase out support for fossil fuels.
That is from Ben Smith. For the interested, here is some New Zealand election coverage.