The fragility of herd immunity
Trouble in the Madrid region is brewing again, even though earlier seroprevalance had clocked in at about 20 percent:
Good for New York of course, here is a thread discussing the comparison, to me the conclusions seem premature. The important point in any case is that Covid-protected time periods need not last forever, and you can end up in multiple rounds of “let it rip.” As far as I know, this is the first established case of a major “second wave” in a previously hard-hit area.
The good news is that Madrid cases seem to have peaked, and furthermore the death rate is much lower the second time around, the latter being one good reason for postponing cases into later time periods rather than taking them all up front.
Note also that England has had months of open pubs, and a very quiet situation, but now cases there are doubling every six to seven days (FT). Don’t switch back to talk of deaths! The “simple” theory of herd immunity is surprised to see that new trend in cases. What I call semi-herd immunity suggests a high degree of protection for the current configuration of social relations, after some point. As those social relations change, some of that temporary herd immunity dissolves, as new infecting connections are being created and new superspreaders arise and do their thing. But that takes a while, possibly months.
The herd immunity theorists downplay the possible temporariness of the equilibrium they pinpoint. They instead prefer to focus on the (correct) point that most of the mainstream approaches did not forecast the collapse in deaths and hospitalizations found in England, Sweden, New York, and now parts of the American South. In reality, you need to put both sides of the picture together, and grasp both the insights and limitations of the herd immunity theorists.
So herd immunity does seem to be fragile, and if other developments (treatment, antivirals, steroids, masks and thus lower dosage) lower death rates, bravo, but case behavior still moves against the simple herd immunity theory, at least in Madrid. How fragile we still do not know, and I readily grant and indeed would emphasize that Madrid is the only major counterexample to date. Appreciate the limits of knowledge!
If you listen to Ivor Cummins, a darling of the herd immunity theorists, he doesn’t seem to grasp these problems of possible temporariness (he loves to switch to talk of deaths at just the wrong time), but rather treats herd immunity as “it’s over,” with a few vague qualifiers tossed in at the very end. We will see.
Markets in everything
Swedish label Kön has produced a range of gender-neutral underwear to demonstrate that products “don’t have to be categorised” as just for men or women.
The underwear is made from plant-based textiles and comes in recycled paper packaging.
Wanting to create an inclusive brand suitable for everyone, Bill Heinonen founded Kön – a fashion company offering unisex underwear in a bid to give consumers the ability to “define some products themselves”…
Kön – pronounced “shaun” – takes its name from a Swedish word that stands for both gender and sex.
“I don’t want everything to be gender-neutral,” Heinonen explained, “but I think it’s important to give consumers that ability to define some products themselves.”
“Everything doesn’t have to be categorised as ‘men or women’ – a sweater can be just a sweater, a shower gel can be just a shower gel, and so on.”
Here is the full story, via a loyal MR reader. The photos are safe enough for work, though they are of…gender-neutral underwear.
Friday assorted links
1. Why the U.S. employment to population ratio has declined.
2. People are grinding their teeth more (NYT).
3. It seems Marshall Islands is doing an all-digital currency with a Friedmanite growth rule. With Patri Friedman on an advisory board.
4. Top fifteen dishes of Odisha.
5. And Kyle Lowry. A mini-essay on cognition, recommended for those who care.
6. Thick clouds of mosquitoes are killing livestock after the hurricane.
Declining Business Dynamism…The Role of the Burden of Knowledge
There is a new and important and I believe largely true paper from Thomas Astebro, Serguey Braguinsky, and Yuheng Ding:
We document that since 1997, the rate of startup formation has precipitously declined for firms operated by U.S. PhD recipients in science and engineering. These are supposedly the source of some of our best new technological and business opportunities. We link this to an increasing burden of knowledge by documenting a long-term earnings decline by founders, especially less experienced founders, greater work complexity in R&D, and more administrative work. The results suggest that established firms are better positioned to cope with the increasing burden of knowledge, in particular through the design of knowledge hierarchies, explaining why new firm entry has declined for high-tech, high-opportunity startups.
Here is the link.
How to Gain Super Powers!
Imagine that you were offered the superpower of being immune to bullets. Bullets just bounce off you like Luke Cage. That’d be pretty cool, right? Even partial immunity to bullets would be a great superpower! I’d be willing to pay a lot for that superpower, even undertake say some mildly perilous journey. So I am puzzled that some people say they don’t want a COVID vaccine. What??? That’s like rejecting a super-power, the power of immunity! Indeed, COVID has killed far more people this year than bullets, so virus immunity is a much better superpower than bullet immunity. Sign me up!
Addendum: Perhaps you think that the superpower of bullet immunity is better than the super power of virus immunity because, like Luke Cage, you could use bullet immunity to save lives, thus becoming a super-hero. Guess what? Vaccination also gives you the power to save lives.
Arise Vaccination Man! Arise Vaccination Woman! Gain Super Powers! Be a Super Hero!
The Washington Consensus Works: Causal Effects of Reform, 1970-2015
Sustained economic reform significantly raises real GDP per capita over a 5- to 10-year horizon.
Despite the unpopularity of the Washington Consensus, its policies reliably raise average incomes.
Countries that had sustained reform were 16% richer 10 years later.
As for the method:
In this paper, we define generalized reform as a discrete, sustained jump in an index of economic freedom, whose components map well onto the points of the old consensus. We identify 49 cases of generalized reform in our dataset that spans 141 countries from 1970 to 2015. The average treatment effect associated with these reforms is positive, sizeable, and significant over 5- and 10- year windows. The result is robust to different thresholds for defining reform and different estimation methods.
There are dozens of books trying to tell you this is not true, but…it is true, at least as best we know.
That is all from the new paper by Kevin and Robin Grier, did you know by the way that I helped to fix them up, leading to their later marriage and also coauthorships?
On audiobooks
From my email, from Robert Kwasny:
I imagine you listen to audio books rarely but, still, I wonder if you have any new thoughts on this topic.
Few thoughts of my own:
1. Shakespeare audiobooks are excellent. Much better than watching blu-rays. Unlike on real stage, Prospero (voiced by Ian McKellan in one production) can actually whisper softly to Miranda without worrying about people in the back rows. Stage directions are already included in the dialogue.
2. Pop psychology and self-help are terrible. Once cannot easily skip or skim the boring parts.
3. History books written by academics (e.g. The Sleepwalkers) are tough unless one already knows the necessary context. Otherwise it’s easy to get lost in the thicket of background facts. That’s probably true for all dense books. For example, Piketty’s books are available on Audible but I didn’t even bother sampling them. It’s just a wrong format.
4. I’ve had great experience with books written by authors with journalistic experience. Robert Caro’s works are excellent in audio form. William Manchester’s Churchill biography is good as well. Lawrence of Arabia by Scott Anderson too. Good audiobooks can’t be just one fact after another, they need to tell a story.
5. If the book’s author does the narration it’s usually bad. Voice acting is hard.
Unfortunately I don’t know of any book created specifically for audio. Where are biographies of Bob Dylan with songs included? Or books on rhetoric with audio of great speeches included? Audiobooks (and ebooks for that matter) don’t seem to be a new medium, at least so far. 10 years ago I would have not predicted that.
I have no new thoughts on audiobooks! Though for my next book (which is co-authored), I was asked to read at least part of the AudioBook. I will thus develop additional thoughts over time.
Thursday assorted links
1. What do economists know about the Black Death?
2. Topol and Offit on vaccines. Excellent material, but it is striking how conservative Offit is when it comes to means of responsibly accelerating knowledge about vaccines. Not a peep about market incentives, for one thing. WWJBS?
3. More detail on the Taiwanese Covid response, especially from the tech side.
4. “…which includes work on the rhetorical strategies of far-right groups.”
5. Super recognisers, recommended.
6. Using AlphaZero (and Kramnik) to invent new forms of chess.
Evidence from 27 Thousand Economics Journal Articles on Africa
The first two decades of the 21st century have seen an increasing number of peer-reviewed journal articles on the 54 countries of Africa by both African and non-African economists. I document that the distribution of research across African countries is highly uneven: 45% of all economics journal articles and 65% of articles in the top five economics journals are about five countries accounting for just 16% of the continent’s population. I show that 91% of the variation in the number of articles across countries can be explained by a peacefulness index, the number of international tourist arrivals, having English as an official language, and population. The majority of research is context-specific, so the continued lack of research on many African countries means that the evidence base for local policy-makers is much smaller in these countries.
Here is the article by Obie Porteus, via David Evans.
Those new service sector jobs, coffin whisperer edition
Also known as markets in everything:
Bill Edgar has, in his own words, “no respect for the living”. Instead, his loyalty is to the newly departed clients who hire Mr Edgar — known as “the coffin confessor” — to carry out their wishes from beyond the grave.
Mr Edgar runs a business in which, for $10,000, he is engaged by people “knocking on death’s door” to go to their funerals or gravesides and reveal the secrets they want their loved ones to know.
“They’ve got to have a voice and I lend my voice for them,” Mr Edgar said.
Mr Edgar, a Gold Coast private investigator, said the idea for his graveside hustle came when he was working for a terminally ill man.
“We got on to the topic of dying and death and he said he’d like to do something,” Mr Edgar said.
“I said, ‘Well, I could always crash your funeral for you’,” and a few weeks later the man called and took Mr Edgar up on his offer and a business was born.
In almost two years he has “crashed” 22 funerals and graveside events, spilling the tightly-held secrets of his clients who pay a flat fee of $10,000 for his service.
And:
In the case of his very first client Mr Edgar said he was instructed to interrupt the man’s best friend when he was delivering the eulogy.
“I was to tell the best mate to sit down and shut up,” he said.
“I also had to ask three mourners to stand up and to please leave the service and if they didn’t I was to escort them out.
“My client didn’t want them at his funeral and, like he said, it is his funeral and he wants to leave how he wanted to leave, not on somebody else’s terms.”
Despite the confronting nature of his job, Mr Edgar said “once you get the crowd on your side, you’re pretty right” because mourners were keen to know what was left unsaid.
You might think “that’s it,” but no the article is interesting throughout. For the pointer I thank Daniel Dummer.
Wednesday assorted links
1. In honor of Assar Lindbeck.
2. The Biden health care plan.
3. How many votes get lost through the mail? (link now fixed)
4. Hummingbird torpor. Has implications for the parrot skit, they really are “pining for the fjords”!
5. Thread on estimating persistence. No one seems to be rebutting this critique with any effectiveness.
My Conversation with Matt Yglesias
Substantive, interesting, and fun throughout, here is the audio, video, and transcript. For more do buy Matt’s new book One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger. Here is the CWT summary:
They discussed why it’s easier to grow Tokyo than New York City, the governance issues of increasing urban populations, what Tyler got right about pro-immigration arguments, how to respond to declining fertility rates, why he’d be happy to see more people going to church (even though he’s not religious), why liberals and conservatives should take marriage incentive programs more seriously, what larger families would mean for feminism, why people should read Robert Nozick, whether the YIMBY movement will be weakened by COVID-19, how New York City will bounce back, why he’s long on Minneapolis, how to address constitutional ruptures, how to attract more competent people to state and local governments, what he’s learned growing up in a family full of economists, his mother’s wisdom about visual design and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Now, I think people, on average, should become more religious, in part because that would encourage fertility. Do you also think people should become more religious?
YGLESIAS: Yeah, if I could be full Straussian and kind of —
COWEN: You can be! It’s not a hypothetical.
YGLESIAS: [laughs] No. I don’t really know how to do it. If I put in my book that I think we should make people be more religious, I don’t know how I would do that.
COWEN: Not make them, but just root for it. Talk up religion.
YGLESIAS: Look, if you told me, for mysterious reasons, church attendance is going to start going back up again over the next 30, 40 years, I would consider that to be a very optimistic forecast for America. I think good secondary things would follow from that. I think community institutions are important, and in a practical sense, religious ones are what seems to really work for people.
When I hear people say, “Oh this new woke anti-racism on the left — that’s like a new religion.” I don’t know that that’s 100 percent accurate. I think there’s something to that, and there’s also ways in which it’s not true.
But if it was really literally true — this is a new religion where people are going to get together once a week, and they’re going to know each other, and they’re going to have a higher value system that motivates them, and they’re going to make connections — that would be really good. Bad things have happened by religious people or under religious causes, but generally speaking, it’s good when people go to church.
COWEN: If you’re rooting for a more religious America, does that mean, in a sense, you’re rooting for a more right-wing America? These are correlated, right? Causality may be tricky, but I suspect there is some.
YGLESIAS: I think probably we say that religiousness is almost constitutive of right-wingy-ness, at least in some definitions. Yeah, I think a more traditionalist America, in some ways, would be good.
It was so much fun we even ran over the allotted time, we had to discuss Gilbert Arenas too.
Failing the Challenge
CNN says “In one word, this is why there likely won’t be a vaccine available before Election Day: biology.” Wrong. The one word is complacency. What CNN refers to as biology is the time it takes to run clinical trials.
Here’s how the trials work: You take 30,000 people, give half of them a vaccine and half of them a placebo, which is a shot of saline that does nothing. Then those 30,000 people go about their lives, and you wait to see how many in each group become infected and sick with Covid-19, the “endpoint” in medical parlance.
That waiting takes time, especially since the coronavirus vaccines currently being studied in the US are two-dose vaccines with each dose several weeks apart.
But it gets worse because trial volunteers are not random:
“Who’s in the trials – the kind of people who tend to stay at home or the kind of people who attended the Sturgis rally?” said John Moore, an immunologist at Weill Cornell Medicine, referring to a motorcycle rally in South Dakota that led to at least dozens of cases of Covid-19.
Historical precedent, as well as the demographics of the participants in the current coronavirus vaccine trials, suggest more the stay-at-home type.
That does not bode well for bringing the trials to a speedy conclusion.
Typically, those who volunteer for clinical trials tend to be “White, college-educated women,” said Frenck, who has been the principal investigator on dozens of vaccine clinical trials, and has served on the Data and Safety Monitoring Board for many others.
All three of those factors are potentially bad news for the coronavirus clinical trials, because data indicates White college-educated women are at lower risk for being exposed to the novel coronavirus.
None of this, however, is actually about biology. It’s about complacency. We could have run human challenge trials and paid for diverse volunteers but we decided that was too risky or too new or too radical or too something and so thousands of people die every week as we wait.
Addendum: Previous posts on challenge trials.
Not how things work any more may the great Gerald Shur rest in peace
The recently deceased Gerald Shur set up and then ran the Witness Protection Program:
“No witnesses got protection without his personal attention,” Pete Earley, co-author with Mr. Shur of the book “WITSEC: Inside the Federal Witness Protection Program” (2002), wrote in a tribute to Mr. Shur.
“He wrote nearly all of the program’s rules, shaped it based on his own personal philosophical views, and guided it with an iron hand. He helped create false backgrounds, arranged secret weddings, oversaw funerals. He personally persuaded corporate executives to hire a mafia hit man as a delivery route driver, once arranged for the wife of a Los Angeles killer to have breast enlargement surgery to keep her husband happy, and got the government to pay for a penile implant for one mobster turned witness after he became depressed.
“In return,” Earley continued, “WITSEC witnesses helped topple the heads of every major crime family in every major city, helping send ten thousand criminals to prison because of their testimonies.”
Here is the WaPo obituary for Shur. What would a bureaucratically stifled Shur be doing today? Working in the private sector perhaps? Here is the NYT obituary as well.
*Where is my flying car?: A memoir of future past*, by J. Storrs Hall
Who is this guy? How come no one told me about this book until Adam Ozimek asked about it?
One of the main arguments of the book is that we could have had major technological advances in multiple areas if only we had put in another fifty years of hard work on them. Flying cars could have been a thing some time ago!
The author estimates that if quality nanotechnology were up and running, it would take only about a week to rebuild the entire United States. Just imagine how silly the current building permit system would seem then.
The anecdotes on the history of helicopters are interesting and obsessive in a good way.
One of the arguments is simply that we have not much succeeded in boosting our aggregate use of energy. Hall also argues we do not face sufficient challenges, in part because nuclear deterrence has worked so well.
An editor would not approve of the organization and rambling structure of this book, including the lengthy digressions on technologies of the author’s choice and fascination. It does not bother me.
Here is one short bit, not actually representative of the basic style, but I enjoyed it anyway:
If you are a technologist working on some new, clean, abundant form of energy, I wish you all the luck in the world. But you must not labor under the illusion that should you succeed, your efforts will be justly rewarded by the gratitude of the people you have lifted from poverty and enabled to have a bright and growing future. You will be attacked, your work will be lied about by activists, demonized by ignorant journalists, and strangled by regulation.
But only if it works.
You can buy it here, Kindle only for $3.14, note it is a full-length book with all the proper trappings. It’s one of the best and most interesting books on technology in some time, either ignore or enjoy the organizational infelicities, first published in 2018.