Category: History

A Genius Award for Airborne Transmission

by  Alex Tabarrok in

One of the strangest aspects of the pandemic was the early insistence by the WHO and the CDC that COVID was not airborne. “FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne.” the WHO tweeted on March 28, 2020, accompanied by a large graphic (at right). Even at that time, there was plenty of evidence that COVID was airborne. So why was the WHO so insistent that it wasn’t?

Ironically, some of the resistance to airborne transmission can be traced back to a significant achievement in epidemiology. Namely, John Snow’s groundbreaking arguments that cholera was spread through water and food, not bad air (miasma). Snow’s theory took time to be accepted but when the story of germ theory’s eventual triumph came to be told, the bad air proponents were painted as outdated and ignorant. This sentiment was so pervasive among physicians and health officials that anyone suggesting airborne transmission of disease was vaguely suspect and tainted. Hence, the WHOs and CDCs readiness to label airborne transmission as dangerous, unscientific “misinformation” promulgated on social media (see the graphic). In reality, of course, the two theories were not at odds as one could easily accept that some germs were airborne. Indeed, there were experts in the physics of aerosols who said just that but these experts were siloed in departments of physics and engineering and not in medicine, epidemiology and public health. 

As a result of this siloing, we lost time and lives by telling people that they were fine if they kept to the 6ft “rule” and washed their hands, when what we should have been telling them was open the windows, clean the air with UVC, and get outside. Windows not windex.

Linsey Marr at Virginia Tech was one of the aerosol experts who took a prominent role in publicly opposing the WHO guidance and making the case for aerosol transmission (Jose-Luis Jimenez was another important example). Thus, it’s nice to see that Marr is among this year’s MacArthur “genius” award winners. A good interview with Marr is here.

It didn’t take a genius to understand airborne transmission but it took courage to put one’s reputation on the line and go against what seemed like the scientific consensus. Marr’s award is thus an award to a scientist for speaking publicly in a time of crisis. I hope it encourages others, both to speak up when necessary but also to listen.

Addendum: I didn’t take part in the aerosol debates but my wife, who has done research in aerosols and germs, told me early on that “of course COVID is airborne!” Wisely, I chose to take the word of my wife over that of the WHO and CDC.

That was then, this is now — Gaza edition

by  Tyler Cowen in

The [Assyrian] empire’s chief concern were the corridors and trade routes that ran through Gaza on the coast as well as Megiddo, which had been an important city in the Northern kingdom.  Scholars are divided on the issue of Assyria’s economic interest in the Southern Levant.  Some insist that the empire was eager to exploit the resources of the region and even encouraged its economic development.  Others argue that it was interested in little else than collecting tribute from its client states, and that it left most lands (especially those that did not serve a strategic purpose) to languish under the imperial “yoke” it imposed on them.

That is from the new and quite interesting Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and its Origins, by Jacob L. Wright.  From the jacket copy: “…the Bible began as a trailblazing blueprint for a new form of political community.”

*George Harrison: The Reluctant Beatle*

by  Tyler Cowen in

By Philip Norman, a wonderful book of course.  My “problem” (not with the book of course) is just how much John and Paul tower over the proceedings, from the very beginning.  Here is one excerpt:

He [Hanton, an early drummer for the Quarrymen, a Beatles precursor] felt excluded from the others’ practice sessions at the art college and resented Paul, who was more than competent on drums as well as guitar and piano, for continually finding fault with his performances.

And:

John’s leadership remained unchallenged, but Paul was ever his zealous adjutant; convinced that they could be spotted by some talent scout at any moment, he called for maximum effort, however late the hour or sparse the audience.  And Stu Sutcliffe’s bass playing, though now reasonably competent, was clearly never going to satisfy Paul.

Recommended, I will read every page.  You can order here, Norman’s other bios are great too.  And if you are wondering, a few of the most underrated George songs are the early instrumental “Cry for a Shadow,” “Don’t Bother Me,” and the much later “You.”

*The Women Who Made Modern Economics*

by  Tyler Cowen in

By Rachel Reeves.  Here is the U.S. Amazon listing, but even the Kindle version is not actually available.  Here is the UK Amazon listing.  Here is a Times of London review of the book: “They [the book’s subjects] range from Beatrice Webb, who, as a founder of the LSE, is a natural choice, to Rosa Luxemburg, the revolutionary Marxist, and Dambisa Moyo, the international aid theorist elevated to the Lords by Boris Johnson.”  Note that Reeves is also Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, and thus surely worthy of getting U.S. book distribution?

*Eighteen Days in October*

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the new and excellent book by Uri Kaufman, and the subtitle is The Yom Kippur War and How It Created the Modern Middle East.  Here is one excerpt:

The ordeal of the 314 Israelis who fell into captivity during the 1973 war — 248 in Egypt, 66 in Syria — did not end when they returned home.  All were sent to a facility — not to be treated for post-traumatic stress, which was then only thinly understood — but to find out what they had told their captors.  The facility was located in the Israeli town of Zichron Yakov; the men sent there nicknamed it “Stalag Zichron.”  It was a nice play on words because it literally translated to “Stalag Memory.”  Interrogators plumbed the depths of their memories, even giving some “truth serum,” ostensibly to treat shell shock.  In interviews of these soldiers years later, the word that comes up again and again is humiliation.  Elazar asked the men, “Why didn’t you do what Uri Ilan did?  What didn’t you commit suicide?”  On a radio program interviewing the survivors of Mezakh, former chief of staff Chaim Laskov said that “falling into captivity, surrendering, these are evasive things.  An order to surrender is illegal.  The only proper order is ‘every man for himself.'”

And this short bit:

It was Napoleon who famously prayed that if he had to face an enemy, please God let it be a coalition.

Recommended.

My excellent Conversation with Jacob Mikanowski

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is the episode summary:

Jacob Mikanowski is the author of one of Tyler’s favorite books this year called Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land. Tyler and Jacob sat down to discuss all things Eastern Europe, including the differences between Eastern and Western European humor, whether Poles are smiling more nowadays, why the best Polish folk art is from the south, the equilibrium for Kaliningrad and the Suwałki Gap, how Romania and Bulgaria will handle depopulation, whether Moldova has an independent future, the best city to party in, why there are so few Christian-Muslim issues in Albania, a nuanced take on Orbán and Hungarian politics, why food in Poland is so good now, why Stanisław Lem hasn’t gotten more attention in the West, how Eastern Europe has changed his view of humanity, his ideal two week itinerary in the region, what he’ll do next, and more.

Here is one excerpt:

COWEN: Why isn’t Stanisław Lem more popular in the West today as a writer?

MIKANOWSKI: That’s interesting. I grew up on Stanisław Lem like some people grow up on the Grimms’ Fairy Tales. My dad’s a computer scientist. His father set up one of Poland’s first computers. The world of Polish science and science fiction: he used to read the Tales of Pirx the Pilot and the Ijon Tichy stories — the robots, the short, fun ones — like they were fairy tales. I grew up with them.

I think — actually I have trouble going back to those. I’d go back to Solaris, and I think Solaris is a real masterpiece and I think it’s had lasting influence. But there’s something pessimistic about them. They don’t have that thing that Asimov does, or even Dune, of world-building and forecasting the human future far in advance. They are like Kafka in space, and that’s absurd situations, strange turns of events — I think a pretty pessimistic view of progress. Maybe that makes them hard to digest. Also a kind of odd sense of humor with the short stories. Almost a childlike sense of humor that maybe makes them hard to take.

I think there’s been a little bit of a Lem revival, though. I know technologists, some people like them; futurologists like him. I like him.

COWEN: Some of the cybernetics tales, they seem weirdly close to the current state of LLMs. And I think I’ve seen this mentioned once, but it’s not generally known: the idea that you use them to talk to, that they’re weird, they might be somewhat mystical, they serve as therapists or oracles — that’s very much in Lem, quite early.

MIKANOWSKI: I think people should go back to them. I think — I was just thinking of Solaris, which I always thought about as this story about contacting a truly alien alien. Now it’s like, well, this is a little bit of what we’re doing with virtual reality and AI. It’s like, what would happen if you could actually talk to your dreams, if you could revive people? You could have the mimicry of consciousness, the appearance of consciousness, without anything behind it — without a consciousness.

There’s something seductive about it, and there’s something monstrous about it. I think he was there way ahead of anyone else, and people should be going back to them. Maybe they will.

Of course we talk about the Suwalki Gap as well. And this: “Given all your study of Eastern Europe, what is it you feel you understand about the current war in Ukraine that maybe other well-informed people would not?”

Recommended, interesting throughout.  Again, here is Jacob’s new and excellent book Goodbye Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land.

*China’s World View: Demystifying China to Prevent Global Conflict*

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is a forthcoming book by David Daokiu Li.  Perhaps it is the very best book explaining “how China works today?”

“What should I read on China?  Which single book?” — those are two of the most common questions I receive.  There are plenty of perfectly fine history books, but I am never sure what I should recommend.  Now I have an answer to that question.  Here is one short excerpt from the text:

Many people in China are concerned with the side effects of the massive anticorruption campaign.  The first side effect is that government officials, especially those dealing with economic affairs, have now become inert.  The reason is that active officials almost surely create enemies or grumbling groups, such as through the demolition of an old building to make room for new investments.  These groups would bring their cases, and perhaps even historical cases, to the party discipline committee.  On their path to promotion and their current positions, most officials have either intentionally or unintentionally engaged in practices that are not in compliance with today’s tighter government rules.  In the Chinese reform process, laws and regulations are gradually implemented and then tightened.  The anticorruption campaign is using today’s tighter regulations to judge the past conduct of officials, which occurred when the rules were either looser or entirely unclear.  As a result, officials today are extremely hesitant to take any action that would make them stand out or draw extra attention, even if those actions are in the best interests of the locale or department they serve.

The author covers much more, including the importance of history, how the CCP works, local governments, SOEs, education, media and the internet, the environment, population, and much more.

There should be a book like this about every country.

I should note that the author lives in Beijing, so he soft pedals some of the more negative interpretations of the data, but ultimately I think this is much more fruitful than the books by journalist outsiders.  The analysis is here, and you can do the moralizing on your own, if that is how you want it.

Definitely recommended, a very real contribution.

The Calverts Cliff Decision

by  Alex Tabarrok in

By the early 1970s, Atomic Age dreams of ubiquitous nuclear power were evaporating as fast as those Space Age fantasies of humanity soon spreading out into the solar system. The data show a clear break in nuclear reactor construction in 1971 and 1972, which suggests the decline in reactor construction is likely attributable to a confluence of regulatory events, perhaps creating uncertainty about the future cost of safety regulations. Two of the most important events happened in 1971: the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Calvert Cliffs decision, in which the DC Circuit Court ordered federal regulators to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970, widely considered the “Magna Carta” of federal environmental laws. Basically, NEPA and related executive orders require federal agencies to investigate and assess the potential environmental costs, if any, of its projects and solicit public input. (At least twenty states and localities have their own such statutes, known as “little NEPAs.”) The following passage from the Calvert decision gives a good feel for the era’s Down Wing attitude: “These cases are only the beginning of what promises to become a flood of new litigation…seeking judicial assistance in protecting our natural environment. Several recently enacted statutes attest to the commitment of the Government to control, at long last, the destructive engine of material ‘progress.’”

Wow. They wanted to stop the the engine of material progress and they did. Right out of Atlas Shrugged.

This is from The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised, James Pethokoukis’s cheery introduction to ending the great stagnation. Pethokoukis ably covers all the big debates about the causes, consequences and solutions to the great stagnation and does so briskly, with optimism and covering culture as well as economics. Recommended as a one-stop shop for ending the great stagnation and as a pick-me-up.

Union Busted

by  Alex Tabarrok in

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.

My Conversation with Ada Palmer

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is the episode summary:

Ada Palmer is a Renaissance historian at the University of Chicago who studies radical free thought and censorship, composes music, consults on anime and manga, and is the author of the acclaimed Terra Ignota sci-fi series, among many other things.

Tyler sat down with Ada to discuss why living in the Renaissance was worse than living during the Middle Ages, how art protected Florence, why she’s reluctant to travel back in time, which method of doing history is currently the most underrated, whose biography she’ll write, how we know what old Norse music was like, why women scholars helped us understand Viking metaphysics, why Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist is an interesting work, what people misunderstand about the inquisition(s), why science fiction doesn’t have higher social and literary status, which hive she would belong to in Terra Ignota, what the new novel she’s writing is about, and more.

Here is one excerpt:

COWEN: De Sade — where does that come from? What are the influences on de Sade as a writer?

PALMER: Thomas Aquinas. No, lots and lots of things, but he’s very interested in the large philosophical milieu in the period. Remember that the 18th century is a moment when the clandestine bookshop is a major, major thing. And if anyone enjoys and is interested in the history of censorship and clandestine publishing, I can’t recommend enough the work of Robert Darnton, a brilliant, brilliant historian of clandestine literature.

But the same underground bookshops sell all underground materials, which means an underground bookshop sells pornography, and it also sells Voltaire and Rousseau, and it also sells diatribes criticizing the king, and it also sells radical Jansenist theological pamphlets about whether the Holy Spirit derives from the Father and Son equally or from the Father alone.

The same kinds of people frequent these shops, and the same kinds of people buy things. So, think about how, when you go into a Barnes & Noble, the science fiction and fantasy section is one section, even though science fiction and fantasy are different things. But they have a lot of overlap, both in the overlap of readership and in overlap in books that have both science fiction and fantasy elements. It was perfectly natural, in the same way, for clandestine bookshops to generate these works that are pornography and radical philosophy at the same time. They’re printed by the same printers, sold to the same audiences, and circulate in the same places.

De Sade uses his extreme pornography to get at questions of morality, ethics, and artificiality. What are the ethics of hurting each other? Why do we feel that way about hurting each other? What are so-called natural impulses, as John Locke and Hobbes were very dominant at the time, or Descartes, who is differently dominant at the time in rivalry with them? They make claims about the natural human impulses or the natural character of a human being. What does extreme sexuality show us about how that character might be broader than it is?

I mean it when I say Thomas Aquinas, right? One of Thomas Aquinas’s traditional proofs of the existence of God is that everything he sees around him in nature — this also is one that Aristotle uses, but Aquinas articulates it in the most famous way for de Sade’s period — that when we look around us, it’s clear that everything is designed to work.

Interesting throughout.

*Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage*

by  Tyler Cowen in

Have you ever visited a bookshop and noticed that a cover caught your attention in just the right way?  But then you say “Nah, I don’t want to read a book right now on that topic.”  But then you crack open the book and read a short amount and the quality of the work catches your attention all the more?  And then you buy the book?

I thought Jonny Steinberg’s Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage was one of the very best books of the year, and most of all this is a book about South Africa.  Here is one excerpt:

The outstanding feature of boxing in mid-century black South Africa was its wholesome and egalitarian dignity.  Wholesome because it could be contrasted to the brash honor of a gangster, and the township gans of those times loomed large in people’s minds, their violence dominating the newspaper headlines every.  And egalitarian because the dignity it conferred was available to everyone.  Nelson understood this and he delighted in it.  “In the ring,” he remarked much later, “rank, age, colour and wealth are irrelevant.  When you are circling yoiur opponent, probing his strengths and weaknesses, you are not thinking about his colour or social status.”

I learned just how much it was the earlier white South African plan (highly unrealistic, of course) not to have blacks move into South African cities at all.

Here is a short bit about Nelson Mandela:

In prison, the present wasted away.  Only the past and the future remained, both largely foreign to him until now.  Once he found them, he worked on them ceaselessly, year upon year, threading who he had been to who he’d become once his endless confinement was over.

An excellent book on many levels, no you cannot judge a book by its cover but judging a book by its cover is underrated nonetheless.

Patents, Intellectual Property and the Rise of the Rent Seeking Society

by  Alex Tabarrok in

During the summer I had the opportunity to spend a week at a16z’s crypto lab in New York City where I gave a fun talk on intellectual property including patents and copyrights, the great stagnation, the diffusion of ideas, American economic dynamism and even some discussion of AI and copyright in the Q&A.  Check it out!

The Zero Sum Idea Trap

by  Alex Tabarrok in

In an excellent column, John Burn-Murdoch in the FT draws out some of the implications of zero-sum thinking,  based on the new NBER paper Zero-Sum Thinking and the Roots of U.S. Political Divides.

Among the most striking Harvard findings was the discovery that there is a strong relationship between the extent to which someone is a zero-sum thinker, and the economic environment they grow up in.

If someone’s formative years were spent against a backdrop of abundance, growth and upward mobility, they tend to have a more positive-sum mindset, believing it is possible to grow the pie rather than just redistribute portions of it. People who grew up in tougher economic conditions tend to be more zero-sum and sceptical of the idea that hard work brings success. These attitudes are perfectly rational.

…Every five to 10 years, the World Values Survey asks people in dozens of countries where they would place themselves on a scale from the zero-sum belief that “people can only get rich at the expense of others”, to the positive-sum view that “wealth can grow so there’s enough for everyone”.

The average response among those in high-income countries has become 20 per cent more zero-sum over the last century. Moreover, two distinct rises in the prevalence of zero-sum attitudes have coincided with two slowdowns in gross domestic product growth, one in the 1970s and another in the past two decades.

The same pattern holds within individual countries. Britons and Americans have become significantly more likely to believe that success is a matter of luck rather than effort precisely as income growth has slowed.

The problem, of course, is that zero-sum thinking can causally lead to lower growth because it leads to anti-growth policies such as tariffs, anti-immigration, NIMBY, low-trust, high taxes, redistribution, identity politics and so forth.

All of this is reminiscent of Bryan Caplan’s Idea trap model. See also my earlier posts on how distrust leads to more regulation, even when people distrust the government!

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