Solve for the Fairfax County third dose equilibrium
I am genuinely unsure how this one is going to play out:
There is no proof of medical condition required to receive a third dose of vaccine at one of the Fairfax County Health Department vaccination sites, and individuals will not be asked to provide medical documentation.
Then there is this insanity, for people who in expected value terms need it most:
There is not enough information to recommend an additional vaccine dose for people who have received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Studies are currently underway to evaluate the protection provided by the Johnson & Johnson vaccine to people with weakened immune systems. Recommendations for these people will be coming in the near future. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does not recommend that people with a compromised immune system who have received a dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine start a new vaccination series with Pfizer or Moderna.
But I guess we’ll be telling them something different a few weeks from now! Or maybe not. Here is the cited press release.
Tuesday assorted links
1. New job offering in science and technology policy.
2. Hobgoblin. And five to ten thousand Americans still in Afghanistan.
3. Why is it so hard to be rational? (New Yorker) — and here is part of my cameo: “Cowen suggested that to understand reality you must not just read about it but see it firsthand; he has grounded his priors in visits to about a hundred countries, once getting caught in a shoot-out between a Brazilian drug gang and the police.”
4. Monte dei Paschi di Siena, possibly the world’s oldest bank, may be on the way out, as it recently failed a stress test (NYT).
5. Chinese government acquires stake in TikTok, and board seat. Corrected link here.
6. A claim that the frozen animal carcasses may have mattered after all.
Felines as labor market outlier?
When given the choice between a free meal and performing a task for a meal, cats would prefer the meal that doesn’t require much effort. While that might not come as a surprise to some cat lovers, it does to cat behaviorists. Most animals prefer to work for their food — a behavior called contrafreeloading.
A new study from researchers at the University of California, Davis, School of Veterinary Medicine showed most domestic cats choose not to contrafreeload. The study found that cats would rather eat from a tray of easily available food rather than work out a simple puzzle to get their food.
“There is an entire body of research that shows that most species including birds, rodents, wolves, primates — even giraffes — prefer to work for their food,” said lead author Mikel Delgado, a cat behaviorist and research affiliate at UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine. “What’s surprising is out of all these species cats seem to be the only ones that showed no strong tendency to contrafreeload.”
Here is the link, via E Durbrow. Having grown up with multiple cats, I can attest that part of the results should come as no surprise. But why do other animals prefer to work for their food?
Afghanistan thoughts
From my Bloomberg column, here is only one part of the argument, at the close:
The hawks I know, especially those with a politically conservative bent, typically will admit or perhaps even emphasize that the American electorate lacks the stomach for long-term interventions. But rather than consider the practical implications of such an admission, they too quickly flip into moralizing. We hear that the American citizenry is not sufficiently committed, or perhaps that non-conservative politicians are morally bankrupt, or that the Biden administration has made a huge mistake. But those moral claims, even if correct, are a distraction from the main lesson at hand. If your own country is not morally strong enough to see through your preferred hawkish policies, maybe those policies aren’t going to prove sustainable, and thus they need to be scaled back.
I still largely agree with most of the hawk worldview: America can be a great force for good in the world, the notion of evil in global affairs as very real, America’s main rivals on the global stage are up to no good, and there is an immense amount of naivete and wishful thinking in most of those who do not consider themselves hawks. What I do not see is a very convincing recipe for hawk policy success over time.
That all said, I still think the Biden withdrawal from Afghanistan was a policy mistake. The U.S. has allowed a very certain evil to rule about 38 million people, without constraint, and has damaged America’s credibility.
And:
This debate involves a host of untenable views. One camp condemns America’s Afghan interventions but offers few constructive alternatives. Another affiliates with hawkish values, but cannot enforce America’s will. Yet another recognizes the fragility of the current situation, but does not wish to turn over the keys to evil right now and hopes to straggle toward a different set of alternatives.
Very reluctantly, I’ve signed up for the last option.
I don’t by the way agree with Alex’s claim that we got nothing from our involvement in Afghanistan. We used it to bring down the Soviet empire, at a high benefit to cost ratio, noting that we have subsequently not handled the fallout very well.
Fluvoxamine update and new call for related proposals
In December 2020, we noticed a few findings — some of them from Fast Grants-funded scientists — that led us to be optimistic that fluvoxamine might be an effective Covid-19 treatment.
— Patrick Collison (@patrickc) August 16, 2021
Do read through the whole thread!
Monday assorted links
1. The roots of why people refuse to engage in win-win thinking.
2. Those new Mozambique service sector jobs: “This musician will sing about your enemies over WhatsApp.”
The FDA and CDC Standards on the J&J Vaccine and the Immunocompromised are Unintelligible
Last week the FDA authorized and the CDC now recommends a third mRNA booster for the immunocomprimised. The CDC says:
Who Needs an Additional COVID-19 Vaccine?
Currently, CDC is recommending that moderately to severely immunocompromised people receive an additional dose. This includes people who have:
- Been receiving active cancer treatment for tumors or cancers of the blood
- Received an organ transplant and are taking medicine to suppress the immune system
- Received a stem cell transplant within the last 2 years or are taking medicine to suppress the immune system
- Moderate or severe primary immunodeficiency (such as DiGeorge syndrome, Wiskott-Aldrich syndrome)
- Advanced or untreated HIV infection
- Active treatment with high-dose corticosteroids or other drugs that may suppress your immune response
That’s very reasonable but the headline is inaccurate because the CDC then goes on to say:
The FDA’s recent EUA amendment only applies to mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, as does CDC’s recommendation.
Emerging data have demonstrated that immunocompromised people who have low or no protection following two doses of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines may have an improved response after an additional dose of the same vaccine. There is not enough data at this time to determine whether immunocompromised people who received the Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen COVID-19 vaccine also have an improved antibody response following an additional dose of the same vaccine.
So if you got one dose of J&J and are immunocompromised then you can’t get a second dose. But if you got two doses of an mRNA (which is already more effective than one dose of J&J) and are immunocompromised then the CDC recommends a third dose. None of this makes any sense. The weasel words there ‘isn’t enough data to determine’ indicate a typical failure to think in Bayesian terms and use all the information available and a typical failure to think in terms of patient welfare and expected cost and benefits.
Notice also the illiberal default. Instead of saying ‘we don’t have data on the J&J vaccine and the immunocompromised so we are not at this time recommending or not recommending boosters but leaving this decision in the hands of patients and their physicians’ they say ‘we don’t have data and so we are forbidding patients and their physicians from making a decision using their own judgment.’
Hat tip: Pharmacist CB.
Why Didn’t the 2009 Recovery Act Improve the Nation’s Highways and Bridges?
Kevin Lewis has been on such a roll lately, I am pleased to bring you all more content that he has sent my way:
Although the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (the Recovery Act) provided nearly $28 billion to state governments for improving U.S. highways, the highway system saw no significant improvement. For example, relative to the years before the act, the number of structurally deficient or functionally obsolete bridges was nearly unchanged, the number of workers on highway and bridge construction did not significantly increase, and the annual value of construction put in place for public highways barely budged. The author shows that as states spent Recovery Act highway grants, many simultaneously slashed their own contributions to highway infrastructure, freeing up state dollars for other uses. Next, using a cross-sectional analysis of state highway spending, the author shows that a state’s receipt of Recovery Act highway dollars had no statistically significant causal impact on that state’s total highway spending. Thus, the amount of actual highway infrastructure investment following the act’s passage was likely very similar to that under a no-stimulus counterfactual.
The paper is by Bill Dupor, of the St. Louis Fed. Kevin is a shy, unassuming man, a family man at that, and still deeply underrated!
What I’ve been reading
1. M.J. Ryan and Nicholas Higham, The Anglo-Saxon World. I’ve been reading more books in this area, even though data limitations make it difficult to form an accurate picture of what was happening. Here is Wikipedia on King Alfred, plenty of facts, broader context often difficult to recreate. (What exactly would they have debated on Twitter, and why?) I would put this as one of the two or three best Anglo-Saxon books I have seen, and with excellent visuals and photos.
2. John B. Thompson, Book Wars: The Digital Revolution. Thompson’s Merchants of Culture was surprisingly excellent, now the quality is no longer a surprise. This book covers the Kindle revolution (now dominated by romances), Google books, how electronic publishing rights evolved, crowdfunding books, the ascent of Amazon, and much more. In all or most of these areas he offers you more substance and more inside scoops than the other discussions you might have read, thus recommended.
3. Max Siollun, What Britain did to Nigeria: A Short History of Conquest and Rule. It is hard to find good books on Nigeria that are easy to follow and not just for specialists. This new one is maybe the best overall treatment I know? The British conquest of Nigeria took seventy-seven years to accomplish. Siollun also stresses the role of missionaries in bringing literacy to Nigeria, noting that what you might call Nigerian literacy skills, for instance in native scripts, were longstanding in many regions. Before the British arrived, the north of Nigeria was much more advanced economically than the south, though colonialism inverted this relationship. I found this sentence interesting: “Perhaps no question makes Nigerians disagree as much as why Britain created their country.”
4. Matthew Affron, et.al. Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925: How a Radical Idea Changed Modern Art. Clustered discoveries are one of the best areas to read about, whether they be scientific or artistic. There will be many overlapping treatments, biographies, and so on. And the people who write about these areas may do so with a certain amount of passion. The rise of abstract art early in the twentieth century is one of the most remarkable of such clusters, as in so many countries top-rate artists made major breakthroughs in similar directions. This book shows you how better than any other I know, with excellent color plates as well.
5. Trevor Rowley, The Normans: A History of Conquest. As I understand the author, he presents the Normans as an essential part of what fed into the creation of modern Europe, also serving to spread those practices and norms. I hadn’t known that Tocqueville was in part originally a Scandinavian name, deriving from “Toki’s ville,” the Scand name tacked onto the Norman suffix.
Sunday assorted links
1. A problem in Baumol’s cost-disease argument.
2. Further fluvoxamine coverage. With a dose of Canadian nationalism. And Andy Slavitt agrees with the Israelis.
3. The culture that is Tlaxcalan the Tlaxcalan view of the Conquest and Cortes.
4. Soros on Xi (WSJ).
5. Did you expect the Spanish Inquisition (to have long-run, persistent effects)?
Shame. Shame. Shame.
The Afghanistan war was an epic disaster. Nothing good came of it. The least we can do as we evacuate, however, is to help all the Afghanis who helped us and who are now under death threat from the Taliban. But our record on Afghan refugees is shameful. At right from Daniel Bier is a chart of Afghan refugees resettled in the United States–604 last year 494 this year (data here). There are more Afghan immigrants accepted under other programs (not just the refugee program) and we have made motions to accept more but it may now be too late.
Canada in contrast is accepting 20,000 refugees.
Canada plans to resettle more than 20,000 vulnerable Afghans including women leaders, human rights workers and reporters to protect them from Taliban reprisals, Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino said on Friday.
The effort is in addition to an earlier initiative to welcome thousands of Afghans who worked for the Canadian government, such as interpreters, embassy workers and their families, he told a news conference.
“As the Taliban continues to take over more of Afghanistan, many more Afghans’ lives are under increasing threat,” he said. He did not provide a timetable.
Defense Minister Harjit Sajjan said some Canadian special forces were in Afghanistan taking part in the relocation effort but gave no details.
“The challenges on the ground are quite immense,” he said.
Eating out for big occasions is correlated with a lower quality of food
This paper incorporates applied econometrics, causal machine learning and theories of reference-dependent preferences to test whether consuming in a restaurant on special occasions, such as one’s birthday, anniversary, commencement, etc., would increase people’s expectations and would make consumers rate their consumption experiences lower. Furthermore, our study is closely linked to the emerging literature of attribution bias in economics and psychology and provides a scenario where we can test two leading theories of attribution bias empirically. In our paper, we analyzed reviews from Yelp and combined the text analyses with regressions, matching techniques and causal machine learning. Through a series of models, we found evidence that consumers’ ratings for restaurants are lower when they went to the restaurants on special occasions. This result can be explained by one theory of attribution bias where people have higher expectations about restaurants on special occasions and then misattribute their disappointment to the quality of the restaurants. From the connection between our empirical analysis and theories of attribution bias, this paper provides another piece of evidence of how attribution bias influences people’s perceptions and behaviors.
Here is the full paper by Ying-Kai Huang, via the excellent Kevin Lewis. I don’t think it is just about the expectations. If you go out for a special occasion, you have to bring grandma and Uncle Joe share a bunch of bland dishes with them. You are not choosing the crowd, and in any case the least common denominator effect kicks in (imagine instead choosing a dinner guest who knows all the best food at the place!). Plus everyone is bickering. You are also less likely to be eating at 5:00 p.m. when the food is best, and more likely to be eating at 8 p.m. when the food is at its worst, again a kind of least common denominator effect.
Don’t go out for special occasions is one obvious lesson here. Really. And choose your dining companions optimally.
*Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism*
That is the new Richard Rorty book, released ten years after his death. Parts feel unfinished or underdeveloped, but mostly it is splendid. Imagine Rorty defending the Enlightenment (but not the Enlightenment epistemology of representation), and then tracing how that might lead to a defense of democracy and liberalism. Some of the themes overlap with my own Stubborn Attachments, and here is one short excerpt:
Plato’s mistake, on Dewey’s view, was having identified the ultimate object of eros with something unique, atemporal, and non-human rather than with an indefinitely expansible pantheon of transitory temporal accomplishments, both natural and cultural.
Rorty makes a much better case for Dewey being an important philosopher of liberalism than I have seen anywhere else. Imperfect as a work, but to my eye this is by far Rorty’s best stab at political philosophy.
You can buy the book here.
Saturday assorted links
2. New IMF working paper “Mask Mandates Save Lives,” note pre-Delta.
3. People who have been working two jobs from home (WSJ): “The money is incredible, the 29-year-old software engineer says. So is the stress: “I’ll wake up in the morning and I’m like, ‘Oh, this is the day I’m gonna get found out.’ ”
4. Those new (and temporary) service sector jobs. And circa 2020, NYT publishes Op-Ed from the Taliban, outlining what they in fact want.
Is Africa losing its growth window?
The macro side of the story here is underreported, alas:
One of the saddest stories of the year has gone largely unreported: the slowdown of political and economic progress in sub-Saharan Africa. There is no longer a clear path to be seen, or a simple story to be told, about how the world’s poorest continent might claw its way up to middle-income status. Africa has amazing human talent and brilliant cultural heritages, but its major political centers are, to put it bluntly, falling apart.
Three countries are more geopolitically central than the others. Ethiopia, with a population of 118 million, is sub-Saharan Africa’s second-most populous nation and the most significant node in East Africa. Nigeria has the most people (212 million) and the largest GDP on the continent. South Africa, population 60 million, is the region’s wealthiest nation, and it is the central economic and political presence in the southern part of the continent.
Within the last two years, all three of these nations have fallen into very serious trouble.
And:
Based on size and historical and cultural import, Democratic Republic of the Congo ought to be another contender as an influential African nation. But the country has been wracked by conflict for decades. It is not in a position to fill the void created by the failings of Ethiopia, Nigeria and South Africa.
The last few decades have been a relatively propitious time for Africa. There have been a minimum of major wars in the world, and a dearth of major new pandemics (until recently). China was interested in building up African infrastructure, and across the continent countries made great advances in public health.
Could it be that this window has shut, and the time for major gains has passed? And that is not even reckoning with the likelihood of additional damage from Covid on a continent with a very low level of vaccination.
These sub-Saharan political regressions might just be a coincidence in their timing. But another disturbing possibility is that the technologies and ideologies of our time are not favorable for underdeveloped nation-states with weak governments and many inharmonious ethnic groups. In that case, all this bad luck could be a precursor of even worse times ahead.