Unmask the Vaccinated?
Ilya Somin points us to legal scholars Kevin Cope and Alexander Stremitzer who make the case that vaccine passports may be constitutional necessary:
Here’s why governments may be constitutionally required to provide a vaccine passport program for people under continuing restrictions. Under the U.S. Constitution, the government may not tread on fundamental rights unless the policy is “the least restrictive means” to achieve a “compelling” government interest. Even some rights considered nonfundamental may not be infringed without a rational or non-arbitrary reason. Before vaccines, blanket lockdowns, quarantines, and bans on things like travel, public gatherings, and church attendance were a necessary measure to slow the pandemic. The various legal challenges to these measures mostly failed—rightly, in our view. But now, a small but growing set of the population is fully vaccinated, with high efficacy for preventing transmission and success rates at preventing serious illness close to 99 percent or higher.
Facilitating mass immunity—and exempting the immunized from restrictions—is now both the least liberty-restrictive method for ending the pandemic through herd immunity and the most effective one. Imagine a fully vaccinated person whose livelihood is in jeopardy from ongoing travel or business restrictions. She might go to court and argue: “I present little or no danger to the public. So restricting my freedoms and preventing me from contributing to society and the economy isn’t rational, let alone the least restrictive means of protecting the public. Since you’re not lifting restrictions for everyone, the Constitution requires that I be exempt.”
This argument alone should be enough to justify mandating that passports be made available where COVID restrictions are still in place….
The NYTimes also notes that surveys suggest that the right to go maskless could increase vaccine take-up:
Enforcement is an issue but this might work well with universities and workplaces. See Ilya’s post for more.
Elon on SNL
He started by declaring that he speaks in a monotone and “has Asperger’s,” was funny and self-assured during the rest of the introduction, brought his mom on stage, and later played a variety of roles, including murderer, awkward guy at a party, a Mario character (Wario), and an Icelandic TV producer. He played a financial analyst repeatedly asked to explain “What is Dogecoin?” (Dogecoin was down significantly during the evening). The final skit was a gold-mining motif, something like “why are we panning for this gold when we can just invent our own currency?” Elon’s plan was to dig a tunnel to get at the bad guys. I enjoyed his line: “And I like self-driving horses, which are just…horses.”
He was funnier than any of the professional comedians.
Is there anything in American business history even vaguely comparable to this event?
From the comments, on restaurant labor and UI
Saturday assorted links
1. Furman and Powell on labor markets. And monopsony oops.
4. Jean Monnet, guerrilla bureaucrat.
6. “Last year, more anti-Asian hate crimes were reported to police in Vancouver, a city of 700,000 people, than in the top 10 most populous U.S. cities combined.” Note however that data standards may not be uniform! Still…
New results on Work from Home
Emphasis is added by TC:
Using personnel and analytics data from over 10,000 skilled professionals at a large Asian IT services company, we compare productivity before and during the work from home [WFH] period of the Covid-19 pandemic. Total hours worked increased by roughly 30%, including a rise of 18% in working after normal business hours. Average output did not significantly change. Therefore, productivity fell by about 20%. Time spent on coordination activities and meetings increased, but uninterrupted work hours shrank considerably. Employees also spent less time networking, and received less coaching and 1:1 meetings with supervisors. These findings suggest that communication and coordination costs increased substantially during WFH, and constituted an important source of the decline in productivity. Employees with children living at home increased hours worked more than those without children at home, and suffered a bigger decline in productivity than those without children.
That is from a new paper by Michael Gibbs, Friederike Mengel, and Christoph Siemroth.
*Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment*
That is the new and very interesting book by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein. Think of “noise” as the new major problem rather than bias. Here is one excerpt:
…we presented our findings to the senior managers of an asset management firm, prompting them to run their own exploratory noise audit. they asked forty-two experienced investors in the firm to estimate the fair value of a stock (the price at which investors would be indifferent to buying or selling). The investors based their analysis on a one-page description of the business; the data included ismplified profits and loss, balance sheet, and cash flow statements for the past three years and projections for the next two. median noise, measured in the same way as in the insurance company, was 41%. Such large differences among investors in the same firm, using the same valuation methods, cannot be good news.
I will be covering this book more soon, you can pre-order it here. And here Tim Harford does FT lunch with Kahneman, self-recommending.
The excellent Tim Sackett on the labor shortage
I’m a daily reader of your stuff and I just love the sharing you do. Thank you! I’m a blogger and analyst in the HR and Talent Acquisition space and speak to CHROs and Org Executives every day and over the past 90 days or so there has been a giant disconnect between something I frequently see Economists saying in the media verse what is reality in the job market. I was hoping you guys could tackle this subject in a future post!
Specifically, around this idea that extended Unemployment Insurance and the extra federal government stimulus being given out to unemployed workers having only a “marginal” effect on the amount of available workers. A great example of this – https://www.wsj.com/articles/millions-are-unemployed-why-cant-companies-find-workers-11620302440
Economists claim that these policies have little impact to availability of workers, but CHROs at every size company, every industry, in all markets are begging for workers right now, and every one of them I speak to complain that they have workers telling them they won’t come back until they have to because they can make as much, or more, or even slightly less, but don’t have to work because of these additional benefits.
Why the giant disconnects between what Economists believe about UI verse what the reality is on the ground for organizations trying to hire? Also, I’ll give you UI/Stimulus isn’t the only factor driving difficult hiring. We have a ton of older workers leaving the workforce for retirement, which is giving us this step-up kind of hiring, where younger workers are skipping traditional entry level jobs and getting opportunities up the job food chain, we have GenZ who doesn’t want to work some dirty, crappy $12/hr job, so we see fewer GenZ in the labor force than previous generations at the same age, fear of Covid, etc. I still believe, especially in the $12-22/hr job market, UI plays a significant impact to worker availability currently.
File under #TheGreatForgetting. Noah fortunately remembers.
Friday assorted links
1. “Unlike some of these contests, the winner isn’t chosen at random. Instead, “your level of enthusiasm for watching home improvement shows will be a strong factor in the selection process,” according to the contest website.” Link here.
2. Inequality amongst children.
4. Which incentives for vaccines are most effective for which groups? (NYT)
5. Magnus Carlsen edition: That was then, and this is now (link fixed).
Four “dark horse” stories for 2021
From my Bloomberg column, here is one of them:
A possible Chinese move against Taiwan has received a lot of attention, but a Russian union with Belarus could be a greater danger. Belarus might even agree to such a proposition, so it would be hard for NATO or the U.S. to decry it as a coercive invasion. Yet such a Russian expansion could upend political stability in Europe.
If Russia and Belarus became a single political unit, there would be only a thin band of land, called the Suwalki Gap, connecting the Baltics to the rest of the European Union. Unfortunately, that same piece of territory would stand in the way of the new, larger Russia connecting with the now-cut off Russian region of Kaliningrad. Over the long term, could the Baltics maintain their independence? If not, the European Union would show it is entirely a toothless entity, unable to guarantee the sovereignty of its members.
Even if there were no formal political union between Russia and Belarus, the territorial continuity and integrity of the EU could soon be up for grabs. The EU has more at stake in an independent Belarus than it likes to admit.
You will find three more undervalued possible news stories at the link.
Does performance pay increase alcohol and drug use?
I would like to see this replicated, but the result is interesting nonetheless:
Using US panel data on young workers, we demonstrate that those who receive performance pay are more likely to consume alcohol and illicit drugs. Recognizing that this likely reflects worker sorting, we first control for risk, ability, and personality proxies. We further mitigate sorting concerns by introducing worker fixed effects, worker-employer match fixed effects, and worker-employer-occupation match fixed effects. Finally, we present fixed effect IV estimates. All of these estimates continue to indicate a greater likelihood of substance use when a worker receives performance pay. The results support conjectures that stress and effort increase with performance pay and that alcohol and drug use is a coping mechanism for workers.
By Benjamin Arta, Colin P. Green, and John S. Heywood, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Should the CIA be putting out “Woke” ads?
I am fine with the idea, for reasons I outlined in my latest Bloomberg column:
If you wanted to dilute wokeness, and limit its appeal to young radicals, what could be better than a CIA endorsement? I, for one, would like to make wokeness decidedly uncool — and if this video can recruit some new talent to the CIA at the same time, what’s not to like?
If you are a passionate young person, deeply concerned with social justice, you will be looking for causes rejected by the Establishment and embraced by a cool, in-the-know vanguard. Think of Marlon Brando’s line in “The Wild One,” when he is asked what he is rebelling against: “Whadda you got?”
The CIA, which just recently rebranded itself, just went a long way toward making wokeness feel ordinary and anodyne. Wokeness isn’t going to disappear, so the sooner wokeness becomes like the Unitarian Church — broadly admired but commanding only a modicum of passion and commitment — the better.
For similar reasons, those skeptical of wokeness should not be overly worried about so many American businesses embracing the concept, at least rhetorically. Some left-wing radicals might even consider the notion of woke and inclusive CIA assassins to be sinister, just as they fear that international conglomerates will neuter wokeness by embracing it.
Have you ever been walking through a department store and heard the Muzak version of John Lennon’s “Imagine”? Do you know the line: “Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can”? Maybe hearing the accompanying melody, perhaps while browsing the men’s wear section, made you think that Karl Marx had taken over the world. Or maybe — if you’re like me — your reaction was that John Lennon had found his place in history, and that both capitalism and conservatism were more robust than he had imagined.
Recommended, there are some subtle points in the longer exposition.
Thursday assorted links
1. Robin Hanson reasons it out.
2. New estimate is 905,000 U.S. deaths from the pandemic so far, 6.9 million worldwide.
4. Derek Lowe on breaking vaccine patents.
5. “Three dollar store chains will make up almost half of all the new stores opening up in the United States this year…” Update: Ryan Decker says nope!
Patents are Not the Problem!
For the last year and a half I have been shouting from the rooftops, “invest in capacity, build more factories, shore up the supply lines, spend billions to save trillions.” Fortunately, some boffins in the Biden administration have found a better way, “the US supports the waiver of IP protections on COVID-19 vaccines to help end the pandemic.”
Waive IP protections. So simple. Why didn’t I think of that???
Patents are not the problem. All of the vaccine manufacturers are trying to increase supply as quickly as possible. Billions of doses are being produced–more than ever before in the history of the world. Licenses are widely available. AstraZeneca have licensed their vaccine for production with manufactures around the world, including in India, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, China and South Africa. J&J’s vaccine has been licensed for production by multiple firms in the United States as well as with firms in Spain, South Africa and France. Sputnik has been licensed for production by firms in India, China, South Korea, Brazil and pending EMA approval with firms in Germany and France. Sinopharm has been licensed in the UAE, Egypt and Bangladesh. Novavax has licensed its vaccine for production in South Korea, India, and Japan and it is desperate to find other licensees but technology transfer isn’t easy and there are limited supplies of raw materials:
Virtually overnight, [Novavax] set up a network of outside manufacturers more ambitious than one outside executive said he’s ever seen, but they struggled at times to transfer their technology there amid pandemic travel restrictions. They were kicked out of one factory by the same government that’s bankrolled their effort. Competing with larger competitors, they’ve found themselves short on raw materials as diverse as Chilean tree bark and bioreactor bags. They signed a deal with India’s Serum Institute to produce many of their COVAX doses but now face the realistic chance that even when Serum gets to full capacity — and they are behind — India’s government, dealing with the world’s worst active outbreak, won’t let the shots leave the country.
Plastic bags are a bigger bottleneck than patents. The US embargo on vaccine supplies to India was precisely that the Biden administration used the DPA to prioritize things like bioreactor bags and filters to US suppliers and that meant that India’s Serum Institute was having trouble getting its production lines ready for Novavax. CureVac, another potential mRNA vaccine, is also finding it difficult to find supplies due to US restrictions (which means supplies are short everywhere). As Derek Lowe said:
Abolishing patents will not provide more shaker bags or more Chilean tree bark, nor provide more of the key filtration materials needed for production. These processes have a lot of potential choke points and rate-limiting steps in them, and there is no wand that will wave that complexity away.
Technology transfer has been difficult for AstraZeneca–which is one reason they have had production difficulties–and their vaccine uses relatively well understood technology. The mRNA technology is new and has never before been used to produce at scale. Pfizer and Moderna had to build factories and distribution systems from scratch. There are no mRNA factories idling on the sidelines. If there were, Moderna or Pfizer would be happy to license since they are producing in their own factories 24 hours a day, seven days a week (monopolies restrict supply, remember?). Why do you think China hasn’t yet produced an mRNA vaccine? Hint: it isn’t fear about violating IP. Moreover, even Moderna and Pfizer don’t yet fully understand their production technology, they are learning by doing every single day. Moderna has said that they won’t enforce their patents during the pandemic but no one has stepped up to produce because no one else can.
The US trade representative’s announcement is virtue signaling to the anti-market left and will do little to nothing to increase supply.
What can we do to increase supply? Sorry, there is no quick and cheap solution. We must spend. Trump’s Operation Warp Speed spent on the order of $15 billion. If we want more, we need to spend more and on similar scale. The Biden administration paid $269 million to Merck to retool its factories to make the J&J vaccine. That was a good start. We could also offer Pfizer and Moderna say $100 a dose to produce in excess of their current production and maybe with those resources there is more they could do. South Africa and India and every other country in the world should offer the same (India hasn’t even approved the Pfizer vaccine and they are complaining about IP!??) We should ease up on the DPA and invest more in the supply chain–let’s get CureVac and the Serum Institute what they need. We should work like hell to find a substitute for Chilean tree bark. See my piece in Science co-authored with Michael Kremer et. al. for more ideas. (Note also that these ideas are better at dealing with current supply constraints and they also increase the incentive to produce future vaccines, unlike shortsighted patent abrogation.)
Bottom line is that producing more takes real resources not waving magic patent wands.
You may have gathered that I am angry. I am indeed angry that the people in power think they can solve real problems on the cheap and at someone else’s expense. This is not serious. I am also angry that they are sending the wrong message about business, profits and capitalism. So let me end on positive note. Like the Apollo program and Dunkirk, the creation of the mRNA vaccines by Pfizer and Moderna should be lauded with Nobel prizes and major movies. Churchill called the rescue at Dunkirk a “miracle of deliverance,” well the miracle of Moderna will rescue many more. Not only was a vaccine designed in under a year, an entirely new production process was set up to produce billions of doses to rescue the world. The creation of the mRNA vaccines was a triumph of science, logistics, and management and it was done at a speed that I had thought possible only for past generations.
I am grateful that greatness is still within our civilization’s grasp.
Addendum: Lest I be accused of being reflexively pro-patent, do recall the Tabarrok curve.
The New Era of Unconditional Convergence
Here is a new paper by Dev Patel Justin Sandefur, and Arvind Subramanian:
The central fact that has motivated the empirics of economic growthnamely unconditional divergenceis no longer true and has not been so for decades. Across a range of data sources, poorer countries have in fact been catching up with richer ones, albeit slowly, since the mid-1990s. This new era of convergence does not stem primarily from growth moderation in the rich world but rather from accelerating growth in the developing world, which has simultaneously become remarkably less volatile and more persistent. Debates about a middle-income trap also appear anachronistic: middleincome countries have exhibited higher growth rates than all others since the mid-1980s.
Here is the entire paper. My general conclusion is that no particular model of convergence, or lack thereof, is correct, and it simply all depends on the historical period.
How to beat Paul Graham and put him in his place
Paul writes me:
I remember you wrote an article about the intersection of cryptocurrency and philanthropy, so if you haven’t heard about it yet you’d probably be interested in the new “Save Thousands of Lives” NFT being sold by a nonprofit we funded.
They run programs in India to teach new moms to take care of their babies at home. They’re amazingly effective (not surprising since they’re using the most powerful force in the world as leverage) and have the lowest cost per life saved of any nonprofit I know: $1235. And that is conservatively estimated; in reality it’s even lower.
You can read about it here: http://paulgraham.com/nft.html
I’d really appreciate it if you could help publicize this project. I bid the reserve price, but I really want to get into a bidding war with a cryptobillionaire, because the higher the price goes, the more lives get saved.
OK people, now you know how to beat Paul Graham…
And Slocum chimes in:
Here is the link to the comments.