The first global election?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is the closing bit:
What kind of bargain is it for the country for the U.S. election to be the object of such global interest? We Americans may be flattered by the attention, but it is not clear that it is such a good thing. For one thing, it gives foreigners a greater incentive to try to manipulate U.S. elections.
Another possible problem is that political coalitions will, over time, be defined globally rather than nationally and locally. Is your presidential candidate attracting support from the wrong factions in France, Germany or South Sudan? On one hand that could be useful information, but it could also prove misleading. Foreigners support U.S. presidential candidates for their own reasons, and it could be distorting to have so many outside parties involved. That’s what happened in the Brexit debates, in which a pro-Brexit position was (and remains) all too quickly identified with populism, anti-globalization and support for Trump. The Brexit debate might have been more sane if it had been more local.
What if, come the next U.S. presidential election, most of the social media debate is among non-Americans? What if much of the world ends up with a common, one-dimensional political spectrum, rather than each country having its own (mostly) independent politics? We may be about to find out.
I’ll say it again: American soft power is rising, not falling.
Tuesday assorted links
Where We Stand
There is good news and there is bad news.
Let’s start with the good news.The early results from the Pfizer vaccine are very good, 90% efficacy. That will probably fall a bit but it’s very good news not just for the Pfizer vaccine but for most of the vaccines in the pipeline which target the spike protein.
The Pfizer vaccine does require very cold storage which means it won’t work for large parts of the world. A distribution plan is in place for most of the United States and Pfizer already has 50 million doses, which can cover ~25 million people, in storage.
Many thousands of people are dying every week so Pfizer should apply for and the FDA should issue a EUA without further delay.
One issue is, given limited supply, how to distribute the vaccine. I have suggested we randomize distribution across hospitals, police and fire stations, and nursing homes (see also my piece in Bloomberg with Scott Kominers, The Case for a COVID Vaccine Lottery.) A vaccine lottery is fair, it will make distribution easier by limiting the number of vaccination locations and it will in essence create a very large clinical trial. With millions of participants we will be better able to make fine distinctions between the vaccine’s safety and efficacy in different populations and the results will come in quickly. Thus, if we randomize and collect data, limited capacity has a silver lining.
Second issue. Manufacturing capacity. Pfizer will have enough capacity to produce 1.3 billion doses in 2021 which sounds like a lot but it’s a two dose vaccine and there will be losses in distribution so maybe 500 million people vaccinated. We need to vaccinate billions.
The cost to the world economy of COVID is in the trillions so we want to vaccine a lot faster. Faster than private markets are willing to go. There are other vaccines in the pipeline but we still need to ramp up capacity. Increasing capacity is something that Michael Kremer, Susan Athey, myself and others at Accelerating Health Technologies have been working on since the beginning of the crisis. It’s not too late to do more.
Third issue is testing. Trump got it into his head that more tests means more cases when in fact a lot more tests means fewer cases. There is a Laffer curve for testing. Our failure to get ahead of the virus with tests has meant hundreds of thousands of excess deaths. We are still failing this test. Winter is coming. Infections and deaths are both rising.
Biden won’t be president until late January but there are things he can do now. In particular, Congress already allocated $25 billion to testing in April—that was far too little. We spent trillions on relief and comparatively little fighting the virus. But here is the real shocker, most of the $25 billion allocated in April hasn’t been spent. Let me say that again, most of the money allocated for testing in April has not been spent. Biden can signal today that that money and more will be spent. He can also signal, as in fact he has, that he wants rapid antigen tests approved.
Rapid antigen tests are cheap, paper strip tests that can check for infectiousness and are ideal to getting things like the schools running again.
Even if we start vaccinating this year, we won’t vaccinate a majority of the US population until well into 2021. That’s true but what’s underappreciated is that testing, masks, social distancing and vaccines are complementary. The more people are vaccinated, for example, the greater our testing capacity rises relative to the population at risk.
The pandemic is getting worse not better but we did flatten the curve, albeit imperfectly, and now if we can summon the will, we have the tools including rapid antigen tests, vaccines and monoclonal antibodies to really crush the virus.
What should I ask John O. Brennan?
The former head of the CIA, grew up in North Bergen, NJ, fluent in Arabic. I will be doing a Conversation with him. Here is his Wikipedia page. Here is his new book Undaunted: My Fight Against America’s Enemies at Home and Abroad.
So what should I ask him?
School choice in Los Angeles
By Christopher Campos and Caitlin Kearns have some very positive results on school vouchers:
This paper evaluates the Zones of Choice (ZOC) program in Los Angeles, a school choice initiative that created small high school markets in some neighborhoods but left traditional attendance zone boundaries in place throughout the rest of the district. We leverage the design of the program to study the impact of neighborhood school choice on student achievement, college enrollment, and other outcomes using a matched difference-in-differences de-sign. Our findings reveal that the ZOC program boosted test scores and college enrollment markedly, closing achievement and college enrollment gaps between ZOC neighborhoods and the rest of the district. These gains are explained by general improvements in school effectiveness rather than changes in student match quality, and school-specific gains are concentrated among the lowest-performing schools. We interpret these findings through the lens of a model of school demand in which schools exert costly effort to improve quality.The model allows us to measure the increase in competition facing each ZOC school based on household preferences and the spatial distribution of schools. We demonstrate that the effects of ZOC were larger for schools exposed to more competition, supporting the notion that competition is a key channel driving the impacts of ZOC. In addition, demand estimates suggest families place a larger weight on school quality compared to peer quality, providing schools the right competitive incentives. An analysis using randomized admission lotteries shows that the treatment effects of admission to preferred schools declined after the introduction of ZOC, a pattern that is explained by the relative improvements of less-preferred schools. Our findings demonstrate the potential for public school choice to improve student outcomes while also underscoring the importance of studying market-level impacts when evaluating school choice programs.
Here is a link to the paper, note that Christopher is on the job market this year from UC Berkeley.
Monday assorted links
1. A new argument against prison abolition (or is it new?). Or try this joyous hymn to Engels.
2. The evidence for the male breadwinner norm maybe isn’t that strong.
3. Magnus is now doing “ultrabullet.” Watch some here. That is fifteen seconds per game. No increment. The games are really quite remarkable to “watch.”
4. Alfred Russel Wallace, “How to Civilize Savages” (1865).
The very good vaccine news
Very good news from Pfizer on the vaccine front. And Zoom shares have been crashing. Disney is soaring. Book that wedding venue now!
Here is the woman who led the effort. And:
If you want to tell positive stories about immigration, look no further than the BioNTech vaccine: company co-founders Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci are both children of Turkish Gastarbeiter who came to Germany in the late 1960s.
This also means a lot of the other vaccine candidates are quite likely to work. Finally, please do note this:
In seriousness, the expected value of delaying getting sick just went way, way, way up.
Bravo to all those involved. And from one reader:
What do you think of proposing a new holiday to your readers?
Most of them are going to celebrate Christmas and Thanksgiving with their families during the peak of the pandemic, when immunity is available just around the corner. Perhaps “Vaccinalia” a two day celebration two weeks after your entire family is vaccinated, with presents AND turkey…
What I’ve been reading
1. Gregory M. Collins, Commerce and Manners in Edmund Burke’s Political Economy. Burke is underrated as an economist, and also more generally. This very thorough and thoughtful book goes a long way toward setting the record straight. In the meantime, it is not sufficiently well known just how much Keynes was influenced by Burke.
2. Terryl Givens, Mormonism: What Everyone Needs to Know. Perhaps if one needs to read this book, one is also under-qualified to comment on it. Still it seemed very good to me and providing one of the better introductions. I hadn’t know for instance that Abraham and even Adam to some extent were “in on” the covenant all along.
3. R.F. Foster, On Seamus Heaney. A very good “short book essay” on one of my favorite poets. That is a UK link, here is what you get when you search U.S. Amazon. How can that be? These days you can search Amazon better using Google than using Amazon itself.
4. Charles Camic, Veblen: The Making of an Economist Who Unmade Economics. It makes sense that a biography of Veblen should be…somewhat verbose. Nonetheless this is a valuable contribution for anyone interested in the topic. To me the main question is why the libertarian right takes Veblen more seriously these days than does the Left, perhaps it is because they read Veblen and immediately think of Wokeism?
5. Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology. From the 1830s, this remains one of the great scientific classics. I had never known how well-reasoned or beautifully written it was, a big positive surprise for me. Not just a bunch of crusty old rocks, though it is also about…a bunch of crusty old rocks.
There is Judith Flanders, A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order.
John Fabian Witt, American Contagions: Epidemics and the Law from Smallpox to Covid-19 is a short but useful treatment of what its title promises. I had not known that both Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X were opposed to compulsory vaccination.
Should the young fear Covid more than the old?
Probably not quite, but I think people often get this calculation wrong. The chances for long-term damage seem to be as high for the young as for anyone (this is not certain, but these costs do not skew in the same way that chance of death does, and quite possibly they are distributed in accord with genetic mutations, not age).
If you are 70 years old, and incur long-term damage costs, that wrecks your life for only say ten or twelve years, on average. You will die or go senile anyway, and pretty soon.
If you are 30 and incur long-term damage costs, it could wreck your life for say fifty additional years, about five times more.
I am not sure how we should weight death costs vs. long-term damage costs, but in expected value terms it seems the latter are much worse for the relatively young, not for the old.
Not disappearing after November 3rd
Via Scott Gottlieb. And how about North Dakota? It is a low population state, but if all of the United States were putting in a comparable Covid performance we would be having about 12,500 Covid deaths a day. That is certainly not my prediction, but it is one way to think about what could happen from a very bad policy and social norms response. Is that the road we wish to be veering towards?
Sunday assorted links
1. They wouldn’t let Barbara Hannigan and Simon Rattle do this in the U.S. today (ten minute music video).
2. What the Chinese say. If you are really for diversity, why don’t we give that writer a NYT column? Why not a CCP columnist for every major outlet? Isn’t that the alternative perspective we should care about the most?
3. The public sector wrestling culture that is Uzbekistan.
Graduating in a Recession Can Be Rough
Graduating in a recession can be rough. Wages start lower and advance more slowly. It’s hard to get hired at a top firm which means it takes longer to get on a rapid ascent career path. As Till von Wachter notes in a review of the long-term consequences of initial labor market conditions, failure to takeoff leads to choices which often makes things worse.
…initial labor market conditions persistently increases excessive alcohol consumption (Maclean 2015) and leads to higher obesity and more smoking and drinking in middle age (Cutler, Huang, and Lleras-Muney 2015)…College graduates entering during the 1980s recession experience higher incidence of heart attacks in middle age (Maclean 2013). Following all labor market entrants from these cohorts, Schwandt and von Wachter (2020) find that starting in their late 30s, unlucky entrants begin experiencing a gap in mortality compared to luckier peers that keeps increasing in their 40s, driven by higher rates of heart disease, liver disease, lung cancer, and drug overdoses.
…Marital patterns of unlucky cohorts are affected from the time they enter the labor market up into middle age, when these cohorts have fewer children (Currie and Schwandt 2014), are more likely to have experienced a divorce, and are more likely to live on their own (Schwandt and von Wachter 2020). Initial labor market conditions also have been found to have effects on attitudes towards economic success and the role of the government (Giuliano and Spilimbergo 2014) and to lead to increasingly lowering individuals’ self esteem (Maclean and Hill 2015).
Don Peck had a good popular survey of these effects in The Atlantic in 2010 that remains vital:
Andrew Oswald, an economist at the University of Warwick, in the U.K., and a pioneer in the field of happiness studies, says no other circumstance produces a larger decline in mental health and well-being than being involuntarily out of work for six months or more. It is the worst thing that can happen, he says, equivalent to the death of a spouse, and “a kind of bereavement” in its own right. Only a small fraction of the decline can be tied directly to losing a paycheck, Oswald says; most of it appears to be the result of a tarnished identity and a loss of self-worth. Unemployment leaves psychological scars that remain even after work is found again, and, because the happiness of husbands and the happiness of wives are usually closely related, the misery spreads throughout the home.
Especially in middle-aged men, long accustomed to the routine of the office or factory, unemployment seems to produce a crippling disorientation. At a series of workshops for the unemployed that I attended around Philadelphia last fall, the participants were overwhelmingly male, and the men in particular described the erosion of their identities, the isolation of being jobless, and the indignities of downward mobility.
Of course, most people who graduate during a recession do just fine in the grand scheme of things.You could have graduated in Sierra Leone. But if you want to be on a rapid ascent career path remember that your first job is not your last job, look for opportunity, and be prepared to take a risk and switch jobs early. Stay off drugs and alcohol.
Secularization and the Tribulations of the American Working-Class
That is a work in progress by Brian Wheaton, job market candidate from Harvard University. Here is the abstract:
Over the past several decades, working-class America has been plagued by multiple adverse trends: a sharp increase in social isolation, an even sharper increase in single parenthood, a decline in male labor force participation rates, and a decline in generational economic mobility – amongst other things. Material economic factors have been unable to fully explain these phenomena, often yielding mixed results or – in some cases, such as that of single parenthood – lacking explanatory power altogether. I study the decline in religiosity and, using a shift-share instrument leveraging the fact that different religious denominations are declining at different rates, I find that religious decline has a strong adverse effect on the aforementioned variables. The effects are not weakened by including other potential explanatory factors (such as China trade shocks and variation in public assistance). I present evidence that, to the extent reverse causality exists, it creates bias in the opposite direction of my estimates. These findings are also robust to several alternative instruments, including the repeal of the state blue laws banning retail activity on Sundays and the Catholic church scandals of the 2000s. Two instruments – the blue laws and the state anti-evolution laws mandating teaching of creationism in school – allow me to ascertain whether the effect proceeds through religious attendance or beliefs. I find that, for most outcomes, the bulk of the effect is driven by religious attendance.
To be clear, that is not Brian’s job market paper, which covers “Laws, Beliefs, and Backlash.” Or you might wish to try these results on corporal punishment in schools (with Maria Petrova and Gautam Rao):
We find that the presence of corporal punishment in schools increases educational attainment, increases later-life social trust and trust in institutions, and leads to less authoritarian attitudes toward child-rearing, and greater tolerance of free speech. Additionally, exposure to corporal punishment in school decreases later-life crime. We find no effects on mental or physical health.
Here is his paper about flat tax reform in Eastern Europe:
Using static and dynamic difference-in-differences approaches, I find that the flat tax reforms increase annual GDP growth by 1.36 percentage points for a transitionary period of approximately one decade.
I praise the scholarship and courage of Brian N. Wheaton.
This election’s winners and losers
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, and no I do not mean the politicians. Here is one excerpt:
…the political-science hypothesis of “retrospective voting” took a whacking. Retrospective voting suggests that the electorate evaluates incumbents by recent economic performance and votes accordingly, regardless of whether the incumbents are actually at fault. Yet Trump presided over about 320,000 excess deaths related to Covid-19, as well as huge contractions in GDP and employment. Even if he loses, as now seems likely, those failures didn’t knock him out of the race. A lot of his supporters still seem to have felt he would cope better with matters moving forward.
And to close:
American democracy: Maybe this one is premature, but so far the U.S. has held a closely contested election under pandemic conditions. Turnout was much higher than usual, and so far there hasn’t been much election-related violence. Could it be that the system really works?
And when will the “money in politics” people admit they were wrong?
The poor people
They can put their poor little comments in this poor little thread right here…