Category: Uncategorized
Tuesday assorted links
1. Short video feature on Curative, Inc., an earlier Emergent Ventures winner.
4. Andrew Potter, a former newspaper editor, on why people hate the media.
5. Henry Farrell on the evolution of libertarianism. And the pandemic, government, and libertarianism. By Brink Lindsey.
Why Are the Police in Charge of Road Safety?
It’s an unacknowledged peculiarity that police are in charge of road safety. Why should the arm of the state that investigates murder, rape and robbery also give out traffic tickets? Traffic stops are the most common reason for contact with the police. I (allegedly) rolled through a stop sign in the neighborhood and was stopped. It was uncomfortable–hands on the wheel, don’t make any sudden moves, be polite etc. and I am a white guy. Traffic stops can be much more uncomfortable for minorities, which makes the police uncomfortable. Many of the police homicides, such as the killing of Philando Castile happened at ordinary traffic stops. But why do we need armed men (mostly) to issue a traffic citation?
Don’t use a hammer if you don’t need to pound a nail. Road safety does not require a hammer. The responsibility for handing out speeding tickets and citations should be handled by a unarmed agency. Put the safety patrol in bright yellow cars and have them carry a bit of extra gasoline and jumper cables to help stranded motorists as part of their job–make road safety nice. Highways England hires traffic officers for some of these tasks (although they are not yet authorized to issue speeding tickets).
Similarly, the police have no expertise in dealing with the mentally ill or with the homeless–jobs like that should be farmed out to other agencies. Notice that we have lots of other safety issues that are not handled by the police. Restaurant inspectors, for example, do over a million restaurant inspectors annually but they don’t investigate murder or drug charges and they are not armed. Perhaps not coincidentally, restaurant inspectors are not often accused of inspector brutality, “Your honor, I swear I thought he was reaching for a knife….”.
Another advantage of turning over road safety to an unarmed, non-police unit would be to help restore the fourth amendment which has been destroyed by the jurisprudence of traffic stops.
As we move to self-driving vehicles it will become obvious that road safety does not belong with the police (eventually it will be more like air traffic control). We can get a jump start on that trend by more carefully delineating which police duties require the threat of imminent violence and which do not.
Defunding the police, whatever that means, is a political non-starter. But we can unbundle the police.
What I’ve been watching
Graduation, a Romanian movie and perhaps the most notable film about corruption I have seen, ever. From the director of Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days, also known as “the Romanian abortion movie.” Both strongly recommended.
Moana. I had to stop watching this one. I am not amongst those who regard Disney as a tool of Satan, but the transparent emotional manipulations are so strong in each and every scene that they distracted me from the ongoing technical marvels. It just wasn’t worth it, and I couldn’t bring myself to care.
Malcolm X, directed by Spike Lee. I thought this was a grave disappointment, noisy and cluttered rather than insightful, and grossly overrated. To put my evaluation in context, I consider The Autobiography of Malcolm X to be one of the greatest American books of all time.
Bullitt, with Steve MacQueen, San Francisco crime drama circa 1968, interesting throughout. Drama from start to finish, nothing hurried, wonderful soundtrack, always feels remarkably cinematic and reflects so many of the movie-making virtues of that era. No one seems that surprised when a guy ends up on a plane with a gun, by the way.
Dust in the Wind, directed by Taiwanese marvel Hou Hsiao-Hsien. One of his least scrutable movies, nonetheless memorable, and yes they are boyfriend and girlfriend. Do keep track of which passages are said in which languages, and what is the vision of both Taiwan’s past and future. Most of you won’t like this one, but nonetheless a landmark in Asian cinema.
Ozu, The End of Summer. Could this be the most underrated movie of classic Japanese cinema? It is hard for me to say more without bumping into spoilers, my only complaint is that the soundtrack is garish and unsuitable.
Monday assorted links
1. The role of pollen: weird but interesting.
2. How has the coronavirus affected the reign of Xi?
3. “Advisors do not always want advisees to fully adopt their advice.”
4. “Recency negativity: Newer food crops are evaluated less favorably.“
5. A new study of which non-pharmaceutical interventions are most effective, argues that open schools can be a significant transmission mechanism.
6. Is large household size a critical problem?
7. Map of international travel restrictions related to Covid-19.
13.3% unemployment rate
That one surprised me, as indeed it did most other economists. What should I learn from this episode? After all, labor market adjustment was relatively slow coming out of the 2008 crisis.
My tentative hypothesis is that “matching” is more important than I had thought (and I already thought it was quite important, relative to other macro commentators). One feature of the current layoffs and rehirings is that the ties between workers and firms apparently were not so severed in the first place. For most sectors (cruise ships aside, etc.), no “rematches” were required, and so rehirings were accomplished very quickly. As demand (partially) returned, employers wanted at least some of the old workers back, and workers wanted their old employers back, and then it happened. “Figuring out where I belong” did not slow down the process very much.
That is good news for the remainder of the recovery, provided the recovery happens soon, and it is at least one factor (not necessarily decisive, of course) militating in favor of a speedier reopening. “Reopen before the worker-employer ties are lost!”
It also implies that during regular, non-pandemic downturns a lot of the slowness of labor market recovery has to do with matching rather than demand per se, noting that the two interact. And that is a sign of a more general pessimism for the future, since demand problems are easier to fix through policy than matching problems are.
Another possible implication of the new numbers is that employers realized that “F*** it, I want to get back out there” is the prevalent consumer and also worker attitude, whereas Twitter-bound intellectuals were slower to see the same.
That was then, this is now, pandemic public protest edition
Greta Thunberg is calling on other young climate activists to avoid big protests and move their demonstrations online amid efforts to contain the novel coronavirus. Over the past year and a half, Thunberg has incited thousands of students across the globe to protest inaction on climate change. She’s inspired many to join massive demonstrations like those outside United Nations climate conferences in New York and Madrid last year. Now, she’s asking people to stay home…
Just as she does when it comes to climate change, Thunberg urged people to “unite behind experts and science” to address the current public health crisis posed by the novel coronavirus…
“We’ll have to find new ways to create public awareness & advocate for change that don’t involve too big crowds,” Thunberg tweeted. “Listen to local authorities.”
Here is the relevant article. I don’t recall anyone protesting her decision at the time, or arguing that the benefits of the climate change protests would outweigh their public health costs, or even attempting such a calculation.
I am inclined to conclude that some mix of two truths must hold, though I am not sure in what combination: 1) Many of you care less about climate change than you may think, compared to other issues, and/or 2) The lockdown has made us all somewhat batty.
I thank A. for the relevant pointer, noting that no one else seems to have considered this parallel, which is perhaps evidence for #2?
Revisiting Camden
Jim Epstein described the situation prior to rebuilding:
Camden’s old city-run police force abused its power and abrogated its duties. It took Camden cops one hour on average to respond to 911 calls, or more than six times the national average. They didn’t show up for work 30 percent of the time, and an inordinate number of Camden police were working desk jobs. A union contract required the city to entice officers with extra pay to get them to accept crime-fighting shifts outside regular business hours. Last year, the city paid $3.5 million in damages to 88 citizens who saw their convictions overturned because of planted evidence, fabricated reports, and other forms of police misconduct.
In 2012, the murder rate in Camden was about five times that of neighboring Philadelphia—and about 18 times the murder rate in New York City.
In May of 2013, however, the entire police department was disbanded nullifying the union contract and an entirely new county police department was put into place.
The old city-run force was rife with cops working desk jobs, which Cordero saw as a waste of money and manpower. He and Thomson hired civilians to replace them and put all uniformed officers on crime fighting duty. Boogaard says she didn’t see a single cop during the first year she lived in the city. “Now I see them all the time and they make friendly conversation.” Pastor Merrill says the old city-run force gave off a “disgruntled” air, and the morale of Metro police is noticeably better. “I want my police to be happy,” he says.
Note that the police were not “defunded.” In fact, Camden put more police on the street and as Daniel Bier noted crime fell and clearance rates increased.
Camden remains a high poverty, high crime place to live but the improvement shows the importance of some fairly simple attitudinal changes–“It’s more of a protect-and-serve approach to dealing with the residents, rather than kicking down doors and locking our way out of the problem,” –and reforms such as restraining the police unions, focusing on violent and property crimes and not using policing as a revenue source.
Sunday assorted links
1. Emily Owens survey on the economics of policing. Or try this link.
2. Europe’s reopenings have mostly gone OK.
3. Give masks to people held in custody.
4. New policing bill introduced (NYT, seems mostly good).
5. Is cell-mediated immunity relevant? Important if true, speculative, but to my amateur mind increasingly not crazy. It is lacking in sufficient direct support to say “I believe it,” and needs to be tested against concrete alternatives at more micro levels, and it has some uncomfortable “residual” properties (hi Bob!), but so far it is the only theory that fits the data and surely that is worth something.
Rescheduling for thee, but not for me
When Wisconsin Republicans refused to move their election day, Democrats, experts, and various media types decried the decision as immoral and dangerous during a pandemic. “Regularly scheduled, orderly elections with direct governmental consequences were either too dangerous, or insufficiently compelling,” Adam wrote in a late-night email. “Contrast that, of course, with Democrats’s evident belief that we absolutely must not delay these protests against police brutality. The protests—spontaneous not scheduled, disorderly not orderly, emotive not concretely consequential—simply had to go on.”
Protests and demonstrations are more important and indispensable than elections. The deliberate act of voting, essential to a democracy, can be put on a schedule delay but political catharsis must proceed on its own schedule. Mario Cuomo used to say that “We campaign in poetry but we govern in prose.” Now it’s poetry or nothing.
Here is more by Jonah Goldberg. I am not looking to attack or make trouble for any individual person here, so no link or name, but this is from a leading figure in biology and also a regular commenter on epidemiology:
“As a citizen, I wholeheartedly support the protests nonetheless.”
My worries run deep. Should the original lockdown recommendations have been asterisked with a “this is my lesser, non-citizen self speaking” disclaimer? Should those who broke the earlier lockdowns, to save their jobs or visit their relatives, or go to their churches, or they wanted to see their dying grandma but couldn’t…have been able to cite their role as “citizens” as good reason for opposing the recommendations of the “scientists”? Does the author have much scientific expertise in how likely these protests are to prove successful? Does typing the word “c-i-t-i-z-e-n” relieve one of the burden of estimating how much public health credibility will be lost if/when we are told that another lockdown is needed to forestall a really quite possible second wave? Does the author have a deep understanding of the actual literature on the “science/citizen” distinction, value freedom in science, the normative role of the advisor, and so on? Does the implicit portrait painted by that tweet imply a radically desiccated, and indeed segregated role of the notions of “scientist” and “citizen”? Would you trust a scientist like that for advice? Should you? And shouldn’t he endorse the protests “2/3 heartedly” or so, rather than “wholeheartedly”? Isn’t that the mood affiliation talking?
On May 20th, the same source called a Trump plan for rapid reopening (churches too, and much more) “extraordinarily dangerous” — was that the scientist or the citizen talking? And were we told which at the time? Andreas’s comments at that above link are exactly on the mark, especially the point that the fragile consensus for the acceptability of lockdown will be difficult to recreate ever again.
If you would like a different perspective, bravo to Dan Diamond. Here is his article. And here are some better options for public health experts. Here is a useful (very rough) estimate of expected fatalities from the protests, though it does not take all-important demonstration effects into account. I can say I give credit to the initial source (the one I am criticizing) for passing that tweet storm along.
We really very drastically need to raise the quality and credibility of the advice given here.
Have we already defunded the police?
Here is more complete data on police expenditures, interesting throughout, via Charles Fain Lehman. The sociology of this issue I find fascinating. Usually in Progressive lore, if you defund an agency, you lower its quality and make it all the more dysfunctional. But in this case, defunding the bureaucracy, namely the police, is supposed to solve the problem. Is there anywhere a well-worked out model of why this particular bureaucracy might be different from the others? (Maybe it is, I would gladly link to such an argument!) Or, dare I say it, is this just mood affiliation and once again…politics isn’t about policy. I’ll give 4-1 odds on the latter.
Saturday assorted links
1. Which variables are most correlated with income? (Does not entirely make sense, but has some significant points and correlations of note).
3. Why won’t they let Andrew Sullivan write his column?
4. Rodney Brooks on peer review.
5. Do freelancers send negative commitment signals?
6. John Cochrane on Magical Monetary Theory.
8. What to do — and safely — rather than protest (my Bloomberg column).
Toward a model of the New York City police
Bill de Blasio has excused police officers who swing batons at unarmed protesters and ram their vehicles into crowds. He has repeatedly stuck by his commissioner, Dermot Shea, and maintained the police have acted with the utmost discretion, though eyewitness testimony and videos suggest otherwise. Former aides who worked to elect a mayor on a platform of police reform are aghast. What went wrong, exactly?
Why does the Mayor of New York City defer so egregiously to his police department? Why does this keep happening?
Mass protests aren’t new to New York City. Neither is police violence. The police department in New York is a paramilitary that operates with little accountability, relative to other city agencies. A police commissioner in New York can be thought of as an appointed mayor of a quasi-independent fiefdom. The police commissioner, ultimately, must answer to the mayor and City Council—mayors can fire commissioners at any time—but the police can cow those who oppose them politically. As recently as 2015, one year after Eric Garner died in police custody, the otherwise progressive City Council led a multi-year campaign to hire 1,000 new police officers. This year, in their latest stimulus bill, House Democrats included $300 million for a nationwide police expansion. Politicians of both political parties have supported bolstering police power for decades.
That is from Ross Barkan, here is more:
Police, in this calculus, safeguard property value. If police don’t do their jobs, a mainstream Democratic politician would tell you, the city could spiral into chaos. Crime would skyrocket. Property value would decline. The real estate and investor class would lose confidence in New York and stop investing their capital. Any pivot toward a model of social democratic urban planning—or even, at the minimum, a reduction in the NYPD’s near $6 billion budget—would trigger this unraveling. De Blasio’s appointment of Bratton, the Giuliani-era police commissioner, can be understood in this context. Bratton was a liberal mayor’s concession to a business and real estate establishment he believed needed to be placated. It was a signal that his administration, no matter its reputation, would never veer too far left. De Blasio is of the belief that any progressive reform can’t happen without police to maintain New York’s low crime rate. Any spike will sap political capital for his projects.
Police unions understand politicians. Pat Lynch has been leading the PBA since 1999. He has merely followed a playbook written by past union presidents, who literally staged riots and race-baiting, citywide referendums when mild reforms of the department were proposed. The threat police have dangled over mayors, left and right, is rather simple: you make us angry and we will unleash disorder.
There is more of interest at the link, and for the pointer I thank Jordan.
Friday assorted links
*The Address Book*
The author is Deirdre Mask and the subtitle is What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power. The opening bit would have fit under “New York City fact of the day”:
In some years, more than 40 percent of all local laws passed by the New York City Council have been street name changes.
I guess that is because garbage collection, education, and policing are running so smoothly. Does any other fact so well sum up the pathology of our time?
In Paris, only 2.6 percent of the street names commemorate women, and this is expected to be a “growth sector,” as they say. I liked this sentence:
Tantner is perhaps the world’s leading expert on house numbers.
House numbers were in fact one of the more important results of the 18th century Enlightenment. For all their benefits in enabling mail, or finding your way, there was a dark side because they also made it easier to tax or imprison you, sometimes a good thing but not always.
Number streets are an especially American phenomenon, and today “every American city with more than a half million people has numerical street names. Second Street is the most common street name in America…”
Recommended, you can order it here.
Operation Warp Speed Needs to Go to Warp 10
Operation Warp Speed is following the right plan by paying for vaccine capacity to be built even before clinical trials are completed. OWS, however, should be bigger and should have more diverse vaccine candidates. OWS has spent well under $5 billion. At current rates, the US economy is losing about $40 billion a week. Thus, if $20 billion could advance a vaccine by just one week that would be a good deal. As I said in the LA Times, “It might seem expensive to invest in capacity for a vaccine that is never approved, but it’s even more expensive to delay a vaccine that could end the pandemic.”
I am also concerned that OWS is narrowing down the list of candidates too early:
NYTimes: Moderna, Johnson & Johnson and the Oxford-AstraZeneca group have already received a total of $2.2 billion in federal funding to support their vaccine programs. Their selection as finalists, along with Merck and Pfizer, will give all five companies access to additional government money, help in running clinical trials and financial and logistical support for a manufacturing base that is being built even before it is clear which if any of the vaccines in development will work.
These are all good programs and one of them will probably be successful but we also want to support some long-shots because a small probability of a very big gain is still a big gain.
The five candidates also all use new technologies and are less diverse than I would prefer. There are a lot of different vaccine platforms, Live-Attenuated, Deactivated, Protein Subunit, Viral Vector, DNA and mRNA among others. The Accelerating Health Technologies team that I am a part of collected data on over 100 vaccine candidates and their characteristics. We then created a model to compute an optimal portfolio. We estimated that it’s necessary to have 15-20 candidates in the portfolio to get to a 80-90% chance of at least one success and that you want diverse candidates because the second candidate from the same platform probably fails if the first candidate from that platform fails. Moderna and Pfrizer are both mRNA vaccines–a platform that has never been used before–while AstraZeneca, Johnson and Johnson and Merck are using somewhat different viral vector platforms (Adenovirus for AstraZeneca and J & J and measles for Merck) which is also a relatively novel approach. I think it would be better if there were some tried and true platforms such as a Deactivated or Protein Subunit vaccine in the mix. As Larry Summers said, “if you will die of starvation if you don’t get a pizza in two hours, order 5 pizzas”. I would change that to order 10 pizzas and order from different companies!
One way to diversify the portfolio is to make deals with other countries to avoid the prisoner’s dilemma of vaccine portfolios. The prisoner’s dilemma is that each country has an incentive to invest in the vaccine most likely to succeed but if every country does this the world has put all its eggs in one basket. To avoid that, you need some global coordination. One country invests in Vaccine A, the other invests in Vaccine B and they agree to share capacity regardless of which vaccine works.
So my critique is that OWS is good policy but it would be even better if more vaccine candidates and more diverse vaccine candidates were part of the program. In contrast, the critiques being offered in Congress are ridiculous and dangerous.
Democrats in Congress are already seeking details about the contracts with the companies, many of which are still wrapped in secrecy. They are asking how much Americans will have to pay to be vaccinated and whether the firms, or American taxpayers, will retain the profits and intellectual property.
How much will Americans have to pay to be vaccinated??? A lot less than they are paying for not being vaccinated! The worry about profits is entirely backwards. The problem is that the profits of vaccine manufacturers are far too small to give them the correct social incentives not that the profits are too large. The stupidity of this is aggravating.
Skepticism about Trump administration policies is understandable but I am concerned that one of the best things the Trump administration is doing to combat the virus will be impeded and undermined by politics.