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My Conversation with Zeynep Tufekci
Here is the audio and transcript. Here is part of the summary:
Zeynep joined Tyler to discuss problems with the media and the scientific establishment, what made the lab-leak hypothesis unacceptable to talk about, how her background in sociology was key to getting so many things right about the pandemic, the pitfalls of academic contrarianism, what Max Weber understood about public health crises, the underrated aspects of Kemel Mustapha’s regime, how Game of Thrones interested her as a sociologist (until the final season), what Americans get wrong about Turkey, why internet-fueled movements like the Gezi protests fizzle out, whether Islamic fundamentalism is on the rise in Turkey, how she’d try to persuade a COVID-19 vaccine skeptic, whether public health authorities should ever lie for the greater good, why she thinks America is actually less racist than Europe, how her background as a programmer affects her work as a sociologist, the subject of her next book, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Max Weber — overrated or underrated as a sociologist?
TUFEKCI: Underrated.
COWEN: Why?
TUFEKCI: Part of the reason he’s underrated is because he writes in that very hard-to-read early 19th-century writing, but if you read Max Weber, 90 percent of what you want to understand about the current public health crisis is there in his sociology. Not just him, but sociology organizations and how that works. He’s good at that. I would say underrated, partly because it’s very hard to read. It’s like Shakespeare. You need the modern English version, conceptually, for more people to read it.
I would say almost all of sociology is underrated in how dramatically useful it is. Just ask me any time. Early on, I knew we were going to have a pandemic, completely based on sociology of the moment in early January, before I knew anything about the virus because they weren’t telling us, but you could just use sociological concepts to put things together. Max Weber is great at most of them and underrated.
COWEN: Kemal Mustafa — overrated or underrated?
TUFEKCI: Underrated.
COWEN: Why?
TUFEKCI: Why? My grandmother — she was 12 or 13 when she was in the Mediterranean region — Central Asia, but Mediterranean region, very close to the Mediterranean. She was born the year the Turkish Republic had been founded, 1923, and she was 13 or so. She was just about to be married off, but the republic was a little over a decade — same age as her. They created a national exam to pick talented girls like her. The ones that won the exam got taken to Istanbul to this elite, one of the very few boarding high schools for girls.
The underrated part isn’t just that such a mechanism existed. The underrated part is that the country changed so much in 13 years that her teacher was able to prevail upon the family to let her go. To have a 13-year-old be sent off to Istanbul, completely opposite side of the country, to a boarding school for education — that kind of flourishing of liberation.
I’m not going to deny it was an authoritarian period, and minorities, like Kurds, during that period were brutally suppressed. I can’t make it sound like there was nothing else going on, but in terms of creating a republic out of the ashes of a crumbling empire — I think it’s one of the very striking stories of national transformation, globally, within one generation, so underrated.
There are numerous interesting segments, on varied topics, to be found throughout the dialog.
Wednesday assorted links
1. The cotton tote crisis (NYT).
2. Autistics are less subject to sunk cost fallacy.
3. A growing heap of evidence that natural infection is more protective (not recommending it, to be clear!).
4. David Trotter on Elizabeth Bowen.
5. “Tetlock and the Taliban,” on the nature of expertise, excellent Richard Hanania piece.
6. The new NIMBY: Judge freezes Berkeley’s enrollment growth until further study is done.
7. Nirvana is being sued by that baby in the pool. (OH: “So the baby chasing a dollar was literal!”)
8. Delta (the airline!) will charge unvaccinated employees higher premia.
Is the scolding equilibrium shifting, and if so why?
As the pandemic evolves, so is the tendency of people to take moral positions they would not normally endorse. Most notably, many left-wing commentators are becoming moral scolds, stressing ideals of individual responsibility.
Consider these words:
“So it’s time to stop being diffident and call out destructive behavior for what it is. Doing so may make some people feel that they’re being looked down on. But you know what? Your feelings don’t give you the right to ruin other people’s lives.”
If I had read that paragraph two years ago, I might have thought it was a conservative columnist lamenting inner-city crime, or perhaps complaining about the behavior of homeless people in San Francisco. But no: It is Paul Krugman discussing those who will not get vaccinated or wear masks. He calls it “the rage of the responsible,” and it is emblematic of a broader set of current left-wing attitudes, most of all toward the red state responses to the pandemic.
To be clear, I agree with Krugman’s point, and I frequently express similar sentiments. All the same, I wonder about the rules here. When exactly are “the responsible” allowed to express their quiet rage, on which issues and on which terms?
The alternative to this rage is the language of victimhood. For example, many on the left tend to portray the homeless as hostages to circumstances largely beyond their control: the high cost of housing, unjust eviction policies, a tattered social welfare state, perhaps mental illness or drug addiction.
There is some truth in all those hypotheses. Still, when it comes to the homeless, am I also allowed to express the quiet rage of the responsible? Or is only the rhetoric of victimhood allowed?
There is no doubt that homeless people suffer very real injustices. But it could be argued that allowing oneself to become homeless is a greater abdication of responsibility than refusing to be vaccinated. It is also worse for your health and bad for the community, as anyone from San Francisco can tell you.
One rejoinder might be that a pandemic is different. Maybe so, but if this were the 1980s, during the peak of the HIV-AIDS epidemic, one could imagine a Moral Majority advocate expressing sentiments similar to Krugman’s about gay men who engage in unsafe sex. Today such a view would be considered uncouth, at least in the mainstream media, and that’s not only because there are now effective treatments against HIV-AIDS. This kind of scolding has mostly gone out of fashion, especially when the recipients have been victims of prior or current social discrimination.
Or consider the question of suicide. There was a time in America when it was common to view suicide as a violation of Christian doctrine. Now there is largely sympathy for those who have killed themselves. Is this change for the better? Maybe, but it’s not clear that this issue has been given serious evidence-based consideration. Scolding sometimes helps to limit the number of wrong deeds, and everyone does it to some degree, even when it is sometimes not appropriate.
Then there are alcohol and drug abuse, which have some features of epidemics in that they exhibit social contagion. Your drunkenness, for example, on average encourages some of your friends to experiment with the same. But scolding alcoholics also is out of fashion, even though the social costs of alcohol abuse are extremely high, especially when considered cumulatively. As a teetotaler, I sometimes express my own quiet rage of the responsible, and my reaction is mostly considered a strange curiosity.
It is not only left-wing thinkers who have ended up in strange ideological positions. Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, a conservative Republican and one of America’s leading right-wing politicians, has essentially expanded public health-care coverage in his state by setting up mobile units to administer monoclonal antibodies to Covid-19 sufferers. I’m all for that. At the same time, I notice he continues to oppose Medicaid expansion in Florida.
What explains the attitudinal shifts we are seeing? One possibility is that left-wing thinkers are getting more puritanical and are more comfortable in their new role as scolds, including with respect to sex and vaccination and mask-wearing. That would leave Trumpist Republicans as the defenders of medical choice and the sexual libertinism of the 1960s and 1970s.
Another possibility, not mutually exclusive, is that few of us are intellectually consistent, and so our scolding is increasingly shaped by affective political polarization. The left will scold the practices of Trump supporters, while the right will scold the woke, and views on any particular issue will be adjusted to fit into this broader pattern. If an issue is not very partisan, such as alcohol abuse or suicide, scolding simply will decline.
Here is an article on the movement to treat vaccinated patients first. Fine by me! But what exactly are the egalitarians supposed to say? Is meritocracy now allowed to rear its ugly head? Or do no other social outcomes have anything to do with your merit? Only this one? Really?
Tuesday assorted links
1. Jason Crawford’s Roots of Progress is now a non-profit organization.
2. Fresh Vitalik: “Ergo, we should take the efficiency benefits of market and auction-based pricing, and the egalitarian benefits of proof of personhood mechanics, and combine them together.”
3. “Tyra, who is 37 and originally from rural Idaho, is clear with any potential dates that making babies is just a business transaction for her—albeit an all-encompassing one.” Recommended. And: “When Reeder’s not pregnant, she drives heavy machinery for a private logging company. She uses the money from her baby-making side hustle to travel to places like South East Asia and Zanzibar, where she has also donated her leftover breast milk to an orphanage.”
4. Freddie on education spending, also recommended.
5. How Nike ads have evolved the ongoing feminization of American society. And yet another recommended, one of the best and most important essays of the year.
6. There is a “new” Vermeer, take a look.
Monday assorted links
1. “Increases in pain in recessions are borne predominantly by women.”
2. Covid earlier in the U.S. than had been thought. (Cowen’s 17th Law)
3. Josh Marshall on media bias and Afghanistan. And this one is brutal: “Out of a combined 14,000-plus minutes of the national evening news broadcast on CBS, ABC, and NBC last year, a grand total of five minutes were devoted to Afghanistan…”
4. Thread on the metaverse, and why securities regulation has suddenly become so onerous.
5. “…universalists have fewer friends, spend less time with them, and feel more lonely.”
The cultural life extension query
You have the power to grant fifty more productive years to an artist of any discipline (writer, musician, painter, etc.) who died too young. Who do you pick?
My answer was Schubert, and here is why:
1. Schubert was just starting to peak, but we already have a significant amount of top-tier Mozart. And I take Mozart to be the number one contender for the designation. Schubert composed nine symphonies, and number seven still wasn’t that great. Some people think number eight was unfinished. Number nine is incredible. Furthermore, I believe the nature of his genius would have aged well with the man.
2. John Keats is a reasonable contender, but perhaps his extant peak output is sufficient to capture the nature of his genius?
3. After the 1982-1984 period, there was decline in the quality of Basquiat’s output. His was the genius of a young man, and drugs would have interfered with his further achievement in any case.
4. Buddy Holly had already peaked, and he didn’t quite have the skills or ambition to have morphed into something significantly more. No one from popular music in that time period did.
5. Frank Ramsey is a reasonable choice, but I am more excited about Schubert. We still would have ended up with the same neoclassical economics.
6. Perhaps Kurt Cobain’s genius was that of a young man as well? Nonetheless he is in my top ten, if only for curiosity reasons. Hank Williams and Hendrix are competitors too.
7. Carel Fabritius anyone?
Who else? Caravaggio? Egon Schiele? Eva Hesse? I feel they all have styles that would have aged well, unlike say with Jim Morrison. Seurat? Thomas Chatterton I can pass on, maybe Stephen Crane or Sylvia Plath from the side of the writers?
Sunday assorted links
1. “Why is violence so prevalent in kitchens, and how has it become a behavioral norm?”
3. I really don’t view MR or links as a chance to dunk on people, but this is so, so wrong, and so indicative of the problems with public health “experts.” More here. That is an example, and in my view an instructive one, but really not interested in making this about any particular person. It was in turn taught by someone else, and it is believed by many in the field. The actual reality is that even very poorly educated Americans, on the whole, hold more sensible views than that.
4. Michael Mina from November 2020. Not bad.
5. Dishonest dishonesty study study.
6. “They shoot dogs, don’t they?” Or try this short video. And the AstraZeneca stockpile continues to grow. Why are the defenders of civil liberties so quiet?
7. The difficulty in getting hospitals to post their prices (NYT).
Saturday assorted links
1. Private insurers are now picking up less of the tab for Covid-related hospital stays.
2. Claims about vaccine efficacy, useful. And further claims about boosters. The correct final picture here still is not clear to me.
4. Progress in the use of monoclonal antibodies. Sadly: “For the administration, mum’s the word on monoclonal antibodies, rapid home tests, high quality masks . . . anything except vaccines,” Eric Topol, founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, said in an email. “Which is wrong, since we need every tool in the kit to effectively take on delta; we’re not doing that well at all.”
5. What academia used to be like. Before the internet, that is.
6. Jerry Brito on the coming regulatory challenge for crypto.
The economics of Taliban finance
An example of Islamist governance can be found on the stretch of road from Kabul to the Mile 78 border crossing in south-west Farah province that borders Iran.
The road has more than 25 government checkpoints and a fee is charged at multiple points on the journey. By contrast, the Taliban who police the same road have far fewer checkpoints and give a receipt, so only a single payment is necessary.
Ibraheem Bahiss, an Afghanistan consultant at International Crisis Group, said the Taliban sought to portray themselves as better administrators. “Increasingly they began co-opting government infrastructure to offer [improved] service deliveries,” said Bahiss, explaining that the Taliban in some areas ensured that teachers and nurses showed up to work.
In recent years, the Taliban has widened its tax base from centuries-old taxes of oshr, a one-tenth tithe of harvest produce, and zakat, a religious tax of 2.5 per cent of disposable income for the poor, although collection is often lower.
In Nimroz province, levies on transit goods such as vehicles and cigarettes formed 80 per cent of Taliban revenues, ODI research concluded.
Illegal mining and taxes on imported fuel are further sources of funds. Taliban earnings on fuel imported from Iran were as high as $30m last year, according to the Alcis consultancy.
Here is the full FT story. You will note that the “bandits” side of the Taliban are able to raise this revenue, in part, because Afghanistan suffers from the misfortune of being a landlocked country. With sea routes as a possible alternatives to goods and services, such fiscal systems would be harder to pull off, for both the Taliban and the previous government, I might add. Landlocked countries often have it tough. (By the way, much of the rest of the article considers drugs as a revenue source.)
Covid markets in everything, certified air ambulance regulatory arbitrage edition
“We weren’t sure what was going to happen … if they were going to separate us or put us in a hospital,” said McElroy. “I didn’t know if I was going to need a respirator.”
None of that happened. Within 72 hours, the couple was on a Learjet back to Arizona.
Before they left, Underwood purchased memberships with Covac Global, a medical evacuation company launched by the crisis response firm HRI in the spring of 2020. It meant the couple didn’t pay a dime for their repatriation, said McElroy.
Commercial airlines and private jets can’t fly travelers with Covid-19 home, but certified air ambulances staffed with medical teams can.
While some companies evacuate travelers who require hospitalization, Covac Global retrieves travelers who test positive for Covid-19 and have one self-reported symptom. About 85% of evacuees are returned home, while the rest need hospital attention, said CEO Ross Thompson.
When CNBC first spoke with the company in March, it was performing about two to three medical evacuations every month. Now, that number has climbed to about 12 to 20.
Here is the full story, via Shaffin Shariff.
What is going on with productivity? (from my email)
Various web sources, but none of this seems controversial:
1. US GDP is now higher, in fact a fair bit higher, then when the pandemic began.
2. US labor force participation is about 1.5% lower than when the pandemic began.
Was there really slack to the tune of a few million people in Jan of 2020?
Has inflation really changed enough to make the GDP numbers misleading?
Has total factor productivity improved that much in that time, under those stresses?
Or is this all a sign that the structure of the economy is more stratified than we think – that there are millions of people in more-or-less filler jobs who can be cast out and the economy just keeps on running along? Yes, there are all sorts of reports of labor shortages, and all manner of supply chain hiccups which seem to often be associated with off shoring, but general activity is still high. (Or is it? Are the numbers reporting “vapor GDP?” – or are the inflation adjustments really out of whack so real GDP is not what we think it is?)
That is all from Bryan Willman.
Friday assorted links
1. Local news writers come to Facebook’s Bulletin.
2. Julia Galef interviews Raymond Niles and Amihai Glazer about price-gouging, with transcript too.
3. Stanislaw Lem centenary (NYT).
4. Chuck Close, RIP.
5. “The Quiet Rage of the Responsible” (Krugman, NYT). It is remarkable when this sentiment is allowed, and when it is not.
6. Yet more Pacific to South American contact in early times.
U.S.A. fact of the day
According to one recent measure, ninety-three of the top one hundred American television programs watched live across a single year have been sports related. More people watched the Super Bowl than the Oscars, Emmys, Grammys, Golden Globes, and Tonys combined.
It is for this reason that I find it puzzling when some people simply are not interested in sports at all. I find the “sports are just stupid” attitude defensible (though it is not my view), but that would in turn seem to make sports all the more interesting.
That is from Jonah Lehrer’s Mystery: A Seduction, A Strategy, a Solution, just published by Simon and Schuster.
Thursday assorted links
1. “If one wishes to stop the virus, only one goal matters: Getting the reproduction rate below one. e to the 3 t is not a lot less exponential growth than e to the 6 t.” Is that nowadays a cancellable thought?
3. New Danish data on vaccine effectiveness against delta. And Bergstrom on Simpson’s paradox. Based on UK data, Eric Topol has a contrasting view.
4. The economics of Mexican indigenous languages.
5. Austria and Croatia set “expiry dates” for vaccinated travelers — 270 days.
7. Why no Lyme disease vaccine? (New Yorker)
10. Has eighty percent of South Africa already had Covid? (Bloomberg)
How to think about third doses
The immediate topic is how to interpret the Israeli data. Important, and mostly good news, relatively speaking that is. I am reluctant to excerpt for fear of misleading you, please do read through the complexity. Simpson’s paradox!