Results for “asteroid” 53 found
What Operation Warp Speed Did, Didn’t and Can’t Do
Operation Warp Speed was a tremendous success and one that I was pleased to support from the beginning. Many people, however, are concluding from the success of OWS that big Federal funding can solve many other problems at the same speed and scale and that is incorrect.
First, it’s important to understand that OWS did not create any scientific innovations or discoveries. The innovative mRNA vaccines are rightly lauded but all of the key scientific ideas behind mRNA as a delivery mechanism long predate Operation Warp Speed. The scientific advances were the result of many decades of work, some of it supported by university and government funding and also a significant fraction by large private investments in firms such as Moderna and BioNTech. It was BioNTech recall that hired Katalin Karikó (and many other mRNA researchers) when she couldn’t get university or government funding. Since OWS created no new scientific breakthroughs there isn’t much to learn from OWS about the efficacy of large scale programs for that purpose.
Second, it’s important to understand that we got lucky. OWS made smart bets and the portfolio paid off but it could have failed. Indeed, some OWS bets did fail including the Sanofi and Glaxo-Smith-Klein vaccine and the at-best modest success of Novavax. Many other vaccines which we didn’t invest in but could have invested in also failed. To be clear, my work with Kremer et al. showed that these bets and more were worth taking but one should not underestimate the probability of failure even when lots of money is spent.
So what did Operation Warp Speed do? There were four key parts to the plan 1) an advance market commitment to buy lots of doses of approved vaccines–this was important because in past pandemics vaccines had entered development and then the disease had disappeared leaving the firms holding the bag with little to show for their investment 2) the lifting of FDA regulations to allow for accelerated clinical trials, for example, phase 3 trials could start before phase 2 trials were fully complete 3) government investment in large clinical trials–clinical trials are the most expensive part of the development process and by funding the trials generously, the trials could be made large which meant that they could be quick 4) government investment in capacity, building factories not just for the vaccines but also for the needles, vials and so forth, even before any of the vaccines were approved–thus capacity was ready to go. All of these steps shaved months, even years, off the deployment timeline.
The key factor about each of these parts of the plan was that we were mostly dealing with known quantities that the government scaled. It’s known how to run clinical trials, it’s known how to produce vials and needles. The mRNA factories were more difficult but scaling problems are more easily solved with investment than are invention problems. It’s also known how to lift government regulations and speed the bureaucracy. That is, no one doubts that lifting regulations and speeding bureaucracy is within our production possibilities frontier.
It also cannot be underestimated that OWS funded people who were already extremely motivated. The Pfizer and Moderna staff put in near super-human effort–many of them felt this was the key moment of their life and they stepped up to their moment. OWS threw gasoline on fire–don’t expect the same in a more normal situation.
Another factor that people forget is that with vaccines we had a very unusual situation where the entire economy was dependent on a single sector–a macroeconomic O-ring. As a result, the social returns to producing vaccines were easily a hundred times (or more) greater than any potential vaccine profits. Thus, by accelerating vaccine production, OWS could generate tremendous returns. Most of the time, markets internalize externalities imperfectly but reasonably well which means that even if you accelerate something good the total returns aren’t so astronomical that you can’t overspend or spend poorly. Governments can spend too much as well as too little so most of the time you have to factor in the waste of overspending even when the spending is valuable–that problem didn’t really apply to OWS.
So summarizing what do we need for another OWS? 1) Known science–scaling not discovering, 2) Lifting of regulations 3) Big externalities, 4) Pre-existing motivation. Putting aside an Armageddon like scenario in which we have to stop an asteroid, one possibility is insulating the electrical grid to protect North America from a Carrington event, a geomagnetic storm caused by solar eruptions. (Here is a good Kurzgesagt video.) Does protecting the grid meet our conditions? 1) Protecting the electrical grid is a known problem whose solution does not require new science 2) protecting the grid requires lifting and harmonizing regulations as the grid is national/inter-national but the regulations are often local, 3) The social returns to power far exceed the revenues from power so there are big externalities. Indeed, companies could have protected the grid already (and have done so to some extent) but they are under-incentivized. (The grid is aging so insulating the gird could also have many side benefits.) 4) Pre-existing motivation. Not much. Can’t have everything.
I think it’s also notable that big pandemics and solar storms seem to occur about once in every one hundred years–just often enough to be dangerous and yet not so often that we are well prepared.
Thus, while I think that enthusiasm for an “OWS for X” is overblown, there are cases–protecting the grid is only one possibility–where smart investments could pay big returns but they must be chosen carefully in light of all the required conditions for success.
The weirdness of government variation in Covid-19 responses
That is the new Substack post from Richard Hanania, here is one excerpt:
But imagine at the start of the pandemic, someone had said to you “Everyone will face the existence of the same disease, and have access to the exact same tools to fight it. But in some EU countries or US states, people won’t be allowed to leave their house and have to cover their faces in public. In other places, government will just leave people alone. Vast differences of this sort will exist across jurisdictions that are similar on objective metrics of how bad the pandemic is at any particular moment.”
I would’ve found this to be a very unlikely outcome! You could’ve convinced me EU states would do very little on COVID-19, or that they would do lockdowns everywhere. I would not have believed that you could have two neighboring countries that have similar numbers, but one of them forces everyone to stay home, while the other doesn’t. This is the kind of extreme variation in policy we don’t see in other areas.
It’s similar when you look at American jurisdictions.
And:
As the political reaction to COVID-19 has surprised me, I’m still trying to figure it out. But for now I can say it’s shifted my priors in a few ways.
- People are more conformist than I would have thought, being willing to put up with a lot more than I expected, at least in Europe and the blue parts of the US.
- Americans in Red States are more instinctively anti-elite than I would have thought and can be outliers on all kinds of policy issues relative to the rest of the developed world (I guess I knew that already).
- Partisanship is much stronger than I thought. When I saw polls on anti-vax sentiment early in the pandemic, I actually said it would disappear when people would have to make decisions about their own lives and everyone could see vaccines work. This largely didn’t happen. Liberals in Blue States masking their kids outdoors is the other side of this coin. Most “Red/Blue Team Go” behavior has little influence on people’s lives. For example, deciding to vote D or R, or watch MSNBC or Fox, really doesn’t matter for your personal well-being. Not getting vaccinated or never letting your children leave the house does, and I don’t recall many cases where partisanship has been such a strong predictor of behavior that has such radical effects on people’s lives.
- Government measures that once seemed extreme can become normalized very quickly.
- The kinds of issues that actually matter electorally are a lot more “sticky” than I would have expected. Issues like masks and lockdowns, though objectively much more important than the things people vote on, are not as politically salient as I would have thought. A mask mandate for children eight hours a day strikes me as a lot more important than inflation, but it seems not to be for electoral purposes. If an asteroid was about to destroy earth and Democrats and Republicans had different views on how to stop it, people would just unthinkingly believe whatever their own side told them and it would not change our politics at all.
- Democratically elected governments have a lot more freedom than I thought before, especially if elites claim that they are outsourcing decisions to “the science.” Moreover, “the science” doesn’t even have to be that convincing, and nobody will ask obvious questions like how “the science” can allow for radically different policy responses in neighboring jurisdictions without much of a difference in results. This appears true everywhere in the developed world but in Red State America, where people really hate experts, regardless of whether they’re right or wrong.
You should all be getting Richard’s Substack. Of all the “new thinkers” on the Right, he is the one who most combines extreme smarts and first-rate work ethic, with non-conformism thrown in to boot. Read him!
Sunday assorted links
1. Anecdotal: “But Herring’s refusal to give up his @Tennessee handle, federal prosecutors say, led to a night in which the shocking and confusing sight of police with their guns drawn outside his home caused the computer programmer to suffer a massive heart attack that killed him. His death in Bethpage, Tenn., was triggered by “swatting” — the illegal practice of calling in fake life-threatening emergencies to provoke a heavily-armed response from police.” Bizarre throughout.
2. What would actually happen if a major asteroid were headed toward earth?
3. RNA breakthrough to boost agricultural productivity?
4. Machtverfall — on Merkel’s final term. And here is Tony Barber in today’s FT: “Above all, the floods have exposed weaknesses in Germany’s disaster response systems and opened up a debate about the long years of under-investment in infrastructure under Merkel. They indicate that Germany’s much-admired federal model of government can fail the people if the politicians in charge are complacent or slow to act.” Yes people, I do know that Germany has better bread, streetcars, vacations, whatever. The point remains that German political norms are not working well any more. It is time to wake up to this fact.
5. Why is Japan vaccinating so badly?
6. Do data from books indicate we are becoming more depressed over time?
Sunday assorted links
2. Ross Douthat on why so many people believe in election conspiracy theories (NYT).
3. C4 rice is finally making progress. That could be a big deal.
4. Gene editing is showing progress against sickle cell anemia (WSJ). And more here. And gene editing for Mendelian disease.
5. Peter Thiel also seems to be saying that the Great Stagnation is over. And Japanese space probe lands with asteroid rocks in Australian outback.
6. NYT obituary for Walter Williams.
7. The guy who bought Green Mountain College in Vermont. And what he will do with it.
8. Sweden truly abandons its prior approach to the pandemic (WSJ). And seven-day moving average Covid deaths for America just passed their April peak (“where are the deaths?” I used to hear…or “you can always test more and find more cases…”)
9. They solved for the equilibrium: Virginia GOP picks convention over primary to nominate gubernatorial candidate. WWGJS?
10. Hoover is hiring junior fellows.
When there are many links, it is because a lot is happening!
From the comments, on alien visitation
…it looks like Avi Loeb (Harvard astronomer) is writing a book that will argue that we have been visited by aliens.
Harvard’s top astronomer lays out his controversial theory that our solar system was recently visited by advanced alien technology from a distant star.
In late 2017, scientists at a Hawaiian observatory glimpsed an object soaring through our inner solar system, moving so quickly that it could only have come from another star. Avi Loeb, Harvard’s top astronomer, showed it was not an asteroid; it was moving too fast along a strange orbit, and left no trail of gas or debris in its wake. There was only one conceivable explanation: the object was a piece of advanced technology created by a distant alien civilization.
https://www.hmhbooks.com/shop/books/Extraterrestrial/9780358278146
That is from Josh P. And here is the Amazon link.
How to think about uni-disciplinary advice
Let’s say its 1990, and you are proposing an ambitious privatization plan to an Eastern bloc county, and your plan assumes that the enacting government is able to stay on a non-corrupt path the entire time.
While your plan probably is better than communism, it probably is not a very good plan. A better plan would take sustainability and political realities into account, and indeed many societies did come up with better plans, for instance the Poland plan was better than the Russia plan.
It would not do to announce “I am just an economist, I do not do politics.” In fact that attitude is fine, but if you hold it you should not be presenting plans to the central government or discussing your plan on TV. There are plenty of other useful things for you to do. Or the uni-disciplinary approach still might be a useful academic contribution, but still displaced and to be kept away from the hands of decision-makers.
Nor would it do to claim “I am just an economist. The politicians have to figure the rest out.” They cannot figure the rest out in most cases. Either stand by your proposed plan or don’t do it. It is indeed a proposal of some sort, even if you package it with some phony distancing language.
Instead, you should try to blend together the needed disciplines as best you can, consulting others when necessary, an offer the best plan you can, namely the best plan all things considered.
That might fill you with horror, but please recall from Tetlock that usually the generalists are the best predictors.
Ignoring other disciplines may be fine when there is no interaction. When estimating the effects of monetary policy, you probably can do that without calculating how many people that year will die of air pollution. But you probably should not ignore the effects of a major trade war, a budgetary crisis (“but I do monetary policy, not fiscal policy!”), or an asteroid hurtling toward the earth.
If that is too hard, it is fine to announce your final opinion as agnostic (and explain how you got there). You will note that when it comes to blending economics and epidemiology, my most fundamental opinion is an agnostic one.
This is all well-known, and it has been largely accepted for some time now.
If a public health person presents what is “only an estimate of public health and public health alone” to policymakers, I view it as like the economist in 1990 who won’t consider politics. Someone else should have the job. Right now public health, politics, and economics all interact to a significant extent.
And if you present only one of those disciplines to a policymaker, you will likely confuse and mislead that policymaker, because he/she cannot do the required backward unthreading of the advice into its uni-dimensional component. You have simply served up a biased model, and rather than trying to identify and explain the bias you are simply saying “ask someone else about the bias.”
If an economist claims he is only doing macroeconomics, and not epidemiology (as Paul Krugman has said a few times on Twitter), that is flat out wrong. All current macro models have epidemiology embedded in them, if only because the size of the negative productivity and negative demand shock depends all too critically on the course of the disease.
It is fine to be agnostic, preferably with structure to the opinion. It is wrong to hide behind the arbitrary division of a discipline or a field.
We need the best estimates possible, and presented to policymakers as such, and embodying the best of synthetic human knowledge. Of course that is hard. That is why we need the very best people to do it.
Addendum: You might try to defend a uni-disciplinary approach by arguing a decision-maker will mainly be fed other, biased uni-disciplinary approaches, and you have to get your discipline into the mix to avoid obliteration of its viewpoint. But let’s be clear what is going on here: you are deliberately manipulating with a deliberately non-truthy approach (I intend those words as a description, not a condemnation). If that’s what it is, I wish to describe it that way! I’ll also note I’ve never done that deliberately myself, and that is along many years of advising at a variety of levels. I’d rather give the best truthful account as I see it.
Friday assorted links
1. Shoplifters’ forum with discussion topics, some involving the idea of arbitrage.
2. Unconventional strategies for practicing Spanish.
3. The culture that is Sweden? Cook criticized for making food that is too tasty.
4. The culture that is (near) Maldon, Essex.
5. My two most read Bloomberg columns were on UFOs and Boomers.
6. Redux of a 2008 post: “For the people caught up in these intellectual traps, it all boils down to which groups of whiners they find most objectionable.”
*The Case for Space*
The author is Robert Zubrin and the subtitle is How the Revolution in Spaceflight Opens Up a Future of Limitless Possibility. I found this book fun, ambitious, and informative, even if I was not entirely convinced. Zubrin thinks big and bold in an exciting way, here is one bit:
Exploring Mars requires no miraculous new technologies, no orbiting spaceports, and no gigantic interplanetary space cruisers. We can establish our first small outpost on Mars within a decade.
There is not much talk of the stress space (or for that matter life on Mars) might place on the human body. Zubrin talks of Mars tours of four or six years or more.
Yet my biggest difference with Zubrin is this: I think of space and planetary exploration as presenting many surprising and difficult problems, ones which cannot be foreseen and fixed in advance by stocking a spacecraft with “just the right materials.” There are many sentences like this:
Mobile microwave units will be used to extract water from Mars’s abundant permafrost, supporting such agriculture and making possible the manufacture of large amounts of brick and concrete…
But when the problem of missing parts arises, or perhaps missing links between systems, you can’t run to the local hardware store. Try this one too:
Extracting the He3 from the atmospheres of the giant planets will be difficult, but not impossible. What is required is a winged transatmospheric vehicle that can use a planet’s atmosphere for propellant, heating it in a nuclear reactor to produce thrust.
My other worry is that if we do not find it profitable to inhabit rural Nevada, Mars might stay empty as well. Zubrin does make a detailed economic case for the value of space, though to my eye much of it falls on satellites. Asteroids have valuable minerals, such as uranium, and that might spur mining operations, powered by nuclear fusion. But is that really the cheapest way to get more uranium, in any case I suspect its price and value would fall rapidly with quantity.
Zubrin puts forward the interesting hypothesis that life in space will encourage a great deal of political freedom:
Historically, the easiest people for a tyrant to oppress are nominally self-sufficient rural peasants, because none of them are individually essential…In a space colony, nearly everyone will be individually essential, and therefore powerful, and all will be capable of being dangerous to those in authority.
Hard to verify, but worth a ponder.
Under another scenario, arks full of large, smart salamanders, genetically programmed to build incubators by instinct, will settle the galaxy at “a speed exceeding 20 percent the speed of light.”
There are many interesting ancillary points, such as using the length of the growing season to estimate global warming, or how pp.284-285 offer an ambitious take on the spin-off benefits from the space program so far, or pp.294-295 on exactly why taking out an asteroid with bombs is so hard.
With plenty of caveats of course, but recommended, the author of this one is never coasting.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Shade.
2. Bryan Caplan reviews *Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero*.
3. Why did the great cathedrals take so long to build?
4. Ross Douthat on Trump’s Fed pick (NYT). Endorses the idea of Ramesh Ponnuru, Karl Smith, Scott Sumner or David Beckworth.
5. “Contrary to popular accounts, this study finds that cross-national diffusion [of Google searches] is surprisingly rare—and seldom U.S. led—but occurs through a multichannel network with many different centers.” And here is a picture.
Blockchains in Space!
As far as I can tell, this is Not From the Onion.
Blockchain venture production studio ConsenSys, Inc. has acquired the pioneering space company Planetary Resources, Inc. through an asset-purchase transaction. Planetary Resources’ President & CEO Chris Lewicki and General Counsel Brian Israel have joined ConsenSys in connection with the acquisition.
…Ethereum Co-founder and ConsenSys Founder Joe Lubin said, “I admire Planetary Resources for its world class talent, its record of innovation, and for inspiring people across our planet in support of its bold vision for the future. Bringing deep space capabilities into the ConsenSys ecosystem reflects our belief in the potential for Ethereum to help humanity craft new societal rule systems through automated trust and guaranteed execution. And it reflects our belief in democratizing and decentralizing space endeavors to unite our species and unlock untapped human potential. We look forward to sharing our plans and how to join us on this journey in the months ahead.”
As Eli Dourado quipped, cryptocurrency mining, asteroid mining, pretty much the same thing, right? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Oumuamua and the Fermi paradox
“Where are they?”, cried out Enrico Fermi in anguish. We have wondered ever since. In spite of some subsequent refinements, I still find the Fermi paradox a…paradox. Where are they?
Now, Oumuamua comes along…
The object’s trajectory is so strange and its speeds are so blistering that it probably did not originate from within our solar system. Its discoverers concluded that the object is a rare interstellar traveler from beyond our solar system, the first object of its kind observed by humans.
So what do the academics say?
“The possibility that this object is, in fact, an artificial object — that it is a spaceship, essentially — is a remote possibility,” Andrew Siemion, director of the Berkeley Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Research Center, told The Washington Post on Monday.
Given the Fermi paradox, shouldn’t we assume a fairly high probability this is in fact some form of alien contact or display? It’s like when you are expecting a package from UPS and then finally the doorbell rings…
So I’m excited, even though I don’t see much of a chance of a visit. p = 0.3? I need to crack open those old Arthur C. Clarke novels.
Saturday assorted links
The nudge that is toast
Or should it be the toast that is nudge?
The creators of a new gadget on Kickstarter called the Toasteroid want people to make the most of their morning toast time. Yes, toast is one of life’s simple pleasures, but it serves no functional purpose in our lives beyond satisfying hunger. We’re busy people; we have things to do, and we need to optimize our time. The Toasteroid lets users design images to go on their toast through a companion iOS / Android app. More crucially, they can program it to print the day’s weather or a reminder.
File under: There is no Great Stagnation, Markets in Everything, Who Needs SMS? Be a Good Host, Will it Cut Down on My Carbs?
For the pointer I thank the excellent Samir Varma.
Assorted Wednesday links
1. The economics of Hamilton (the show).
2. In my own way, I too feel as if I have attended the University of Northern New Jersey (NYT).
3. “Touching a Robot’s ‘Intimate Parts’ Makes People Uncomfortable.”
4. A criticism of economics which I mostly don’t agree with.
5. “If you were in the middle of an asteroid belt, you probably wouldn’t see any asteroids at all.” (NYT)
Wednesday assorted links
1. In memoriam: R. Morris Coats, a second wave public choice scholar in camouflage (RIP).
2. Claims about money and happiness.
3. What if you were First Lady of Peru all of a sudden? Would it be fun?
4. Asteroid impact mission? And more.
5. Why are women more likely to escape North Korea?
6. Google software beats the GO master in game one (NYT). Ungated here.