Another Derek Lowe vaccine update
Here goes, and here is the close:
Dang, that’s a lot of vaccine candidates. And as you can see, it’s a long-tail distribution – there are some big ones that everyone knows about, but a lot of people are bringing a lot of technologies to bear on the problem. This makes me think that we’re going to have a multichapter story, in the end. There will be the first vaccines approved, then the second wave, then the improvements on those, until we have (with luck, hard work, skill, and lots of money) tossed this virus out of the human population and back to the bats, pangolins, or whoever had it in the first place.
An excellent side effect is that vaccine technology will never be the same after this – it’s going to be like aircraft design before and after World War II, and for many of the same reasons. This whole pandemic has been awful, in many different ways, but we’re going to come out of it stronger and more capable than when we went in.
Recommended.
My dialogue with Freddie Sayers of Unherd, on herd immunity and related matters
It is about fifteen minutes, and also I give you all a separate clip of me praising the new Matt Yglesias book (which was alas cut from the main edit, note there is a lag before the short clip pops up) and discussing “family capacity libertarianism.” Here is the main episode, with a few clips of text beneath the video itself:
https://unherd.com/thepost/tyler-cowen-on-herd-mentality-and-herd-immunity/
I was quite happy with how this interview turned out, and I feel a bit that I got to jab just about everybody, including the herd immunity theorists.
Brazil growing popularity of Bolsonaro fact of the day
As I have been saying, the median voter does not die of Covid-19, which means that many political responses will be highly imperfect. Here is one recent narrative:
Some 66 million people, 30% of the population, have been getting 600 reais ($110) a month, making it the most ambitious social program ever undertaken in Brazil, a shocking shift under President Jair Bolsonaro who railed against welfare, dismissed the virus — and now finds himself newly popular.
The government hasn’t published its own figures yet but data from the Getulio Vargas Foundation, one of Brazil’s top universities, show that those living on less than $1.9 a day fell to 3.3% in June from 8% last year, and those below the poverty line were at 21.7% compared with 25.6%. Both represent 16-year lows.
Here is is more from Lima, Rosati, and Iglesias at Bloomberg. By the way, Brazil’s primary deficit will be 11% this year.
Via Michael Pettengill.
Thursday assorted links
1. “Thailand’s King Maha Vajiralongkorn has reinstated Ms Sineenat Wongvajirapakdi to her post of royal noble consort, and returned her royal insignia and military ranks, the palace announced on the royal gazette on Aug 29.” Link here, short, and interesting throughout.
2. Straussian vaccine analysts: “And I don’t think people can use that information responsibly.”
3. “Staff at Hagerstown [Community College] must now go into their offices to work because they can’t access the VPNs.” No support for remote work there!
4. Morgan Kelly on understanding persistence. That is historical persistence, not the personal quality.
5. SPACs explainer, though it doesn’t convince me the implicit bid-ask spread/fees on securities offerings and deals will narrow so dramatically. Many of you are asking me about this, but it still feels poorly understood to me.
6. The Swiss canton of Zug will now accept taxes paid in either Bitcoin or Ether (Bloomberg). Limited to up to 100k, however, and maybe more of a marketing move than a real fiscal validation of crypto as money?
The new Elena Ferrante novel, up through p.138 (no spoilers)
Some surprises have come, and I am liking it more. Is it fair to judge it against the Neapolitan quadrology? This book has only one major character rather than two, so is it doomed to be only half as good? Can any current book manage to be half as good? Can we read this one fresh at all? (Is it better to view the Mona Lisa “fresh,” or not?) Should we be trying to discard prior expectations, or not be trying to discard expectations for a book such as this?
You’ll be getting another report soon, please note I am deliberately not reading the book too quickly. Here is my previous post on the book. I agree with the commentator who described the male characters as mostly flat.
One of those boring yet fascinating innovation articles
Physicians who also have extensive training in scientific methods, often a Ph.D., are ideally suited to learn from the unusual clinical manifestations of Covid-19, such as strokes in young adults and autoimmune Kawasaki syndrome in children. Physician-scientists, however, are becoming extinct in the United States, comprising only about 1% of all physicians today, and with few young clinician researchers joining their ranks.
A solution to this crisis might be found in a quiet research program at the National Institutes of Health that flourished in the shadow of the Vietnam War. It may well have been the greatest medical research program in modern history. The two-year program, officially known as the NIH Associates Training Program, was started in 1953 as a way to bring newly minted physicians to the NIH campus in Bethesda, Md., so they could do research for two to three years under the guidance of senior NIH investigators…
Nine physicians who trained at the NIH during this period went on to win Nobel Prizes. From the class of 1968 alone, Robert Lefkowitz discovered a family of cellular receptors that one-third of all approved drugs target; Michael Brown and Joseph Goldstein discovered a cholesterol receptor that led to the development of cholesterol-lowering statin medications; and Harold Varmus discovered some of the fundamental mechanisms of cancer.
Here is the full StatNews article by Haider J. Warraich.
Show your work, people — advice on vaccines and approval timing
Every day I read maybe twenty or more tweets decrying Trump’s acceleration of the FDA vaccine approval process. And yet I do not see a single blog post with back of the envelope calculations. This is such an important decision, and it deserves better, just as we analyze the Fed’s monetary policy decisions in great detail. On those points, here is my latest Bloomberg column, excerpt:
One of your weaker arguments is that Trump’s push is disturbing because it is making the FDA “too political.” First, American responses to crises, such as Sept. 11 or the Great Recession, have always been political. Second, and more to the point, there is a strong case that the FDA should take politics into account more, not less.
The FDA has been too risk-averse in the very recent past, for instance in its reluctance to approve additional Covid-19 testing. Economists have generally concluded that the FDA is too risk-averse in the long term as well, considering all relevant trade-offs. What kind of fix might there be for those problems, if not a “political” one? Of course the initial risk-aversion was itself the result of a political calculation, namely the desire to avoid blame from the public and from Congress…
The American people will not buy the claim that the current [pre-Trump] FDA is above politics. Nor should they.
And:
As a public-health expert, you are also missing the broader context behind the current vaccine debate. In the early months of the pandemic, as late as April, it was common to hear that there might not be a vaccine for at least four years, and many were not sure if it would be possible at all. It is now likely (though not certain) that there will be a pretty good vaccine within a year.
That is a wonderful development, and it speaks well of your intelligence and hard work. Still, given that recent history, is it crazy for the American people to wonder if the process could be accelerated further? After all, the Chinese have a vaccine right now (albeit probably an inferior one), and they have been known to complete complicated infrastructure projects with a speed not previously thought possible.
And:
It’s not just about wanting to speed things up. One might argue that, due to the unprecedentedly high number of vaccines currently under consideration, the optimal threshold should be higher, not lower, for fear that the world will be left with a suboptimal choice.
Finally:
Too often I have seen one of you cite a single factor on one side of the approval equation, then invoke your authority or some previously existing institutional standard to suggest that this factor is decisive. In a Trumpian world, where credentials and authority no longer settle a debate — on public health or other matters — this kind of argument is not sufficient.
My plea is that such arguments and others be accompanied by concrete numbers, if only rough back-of-the-envelope estimates, and that all of the factors be considered together. Those numbers should incorporate the human, economic and public-health costs of allowing the current situation to continue for months. The result could be a useful public debate about the optimal speed of vaccine approval.
Yes, blah blah blah. But — public health experts — show your work.
The Solomonic solution?
Or should that be “Solve for the equilibrium”? How about “China Civil War of the Day”?:
The largest province in Solomon Islands has announced plans for an independence referendum as tensions with the country’s national government over China policy rise.
Malaita, a province of 200,000 people in the country’s east, “will soon conduct a provincial-wide referendum on the topic of independence”, a statement from premier Daniel Suidani said on Tuesday.
In a phone interview with the Guardian, Suidani confirmed the plan, saying a vote would be held as soon as this month.
The referendum plan comes after a year of tensions between Suidani’s provincial government, which is supportive of Taiwan, and Solomon Islands’ national government which has adopted a pro-Beijing stance.
Here is the full story.
Wednesday assorted links
1. An actual willingness to pay study for in-person university attendance.
2. How big is the “dry tinder” effect for Sweden?
4. “Thus, in ecologically valid real-world samples, people who do good are also likely to look good.”
5. The state that is California: “”I miss when it was just a pandemic and depression,” my mom told me.”
Monkey Parenting Matters
In a new NBER paper, a group of economists, including James Heckman, have joined with researchers who study child development to analyze data from a multi-generational monkey raising experiment. It’s well known from the Harlow experiments of the 1950s that monkeys raised without their mothers don’t do so well. (It’s also from these experiments that the mantra of skin-to-skin mother-child contact comes from.) What’s distinctive in the new paper is that there are two generations of monkeys who are raised by their mothers or in nurseries and in each generation the treatment is randomly chosen. Indeed, I believe this new paper includes the children of monkeys discussed in this earlier paper which also included Heckman. The multi-generational experiment lets the researchers test whether disadvantage is transmitted down the generations and whether it can be alleviated.
The analysis indicates first that being raised by a mother results in better health and higher social status than being raised in a nursery (as measured by who wins disputes and ELO scores similar to those used in chess!). Second being raised by a mother who was raised by a mother is better than being raised by a mother who was raised in a nursery. The latter indicates that disadvantage transmits down the generations. Indeed, being raised by a mother who was raised in a nursery is just as bad as being raised in a nursery. In other words, it’s hard to ameliorate disadvantage in one generation.
The sample is small (about 100 monkeys in generation one and 60 in generation two) but because of random assignment still potentially useful.
The authors suggest that there are lessons for humans:
Our findings are in line with results from a social experiment on humans. Heckman and Karapakula (2019) document the intergenerational effects of the Perry Preschool Project,which was a randomized social experiment in the 1960s that provided high-quality preschool experiences to socially disadvantaged children. They find that the positive effects of the preschool program were transmitted into the next generation. The offspring of the treated participants were more likely to have better health, achieve higher education, and were more likely to be employed than the offspring of the non-treated participants. In the same way that early-life advantage via maternal presence for rhesus-monkeys led to improved health and higher social rank for their offspring, early-life advantage via high-quality preschool in humans led to better health and social outcomes for their children.
But note the subtle shift in “treatment” meaning. In the monkey experiment, mother-raised is better and it’s the nurseries which are bad but in the human experiment it’s the nurseries that are good. It’s hard enough to justify external validity across human experiments in different places or times doing so across species is an even more perilous leap.
*The Stakes: American at the Point of No Return*
That is the new book by Michael Anton, the famed then pseudonymous author of the “Flight 93 piece.”
I consider this to be the very best book for understanding where the current Intellectual Right “is at.” In that sense I recommend it highly. The opening chapter is a polemical fear that all of American will go the route of California, and then Anton keeps on digging further in on what has gone wrong.
To be clear, my vision is not the same as Michael’s. I would like to see more emphasis on economic growth, on individual liberty, to recognize the emancipatory strands within the Left, to move away from the current historical pessimism of the Right and of Anton in particular, to be more unabashedly cosmopolitan, think more about science, and to become more Bayesian. Nor do I agree that “…there’s little wrong with President Trump that more Trump couldn’t solve.”
Nonetheless this book serves a very valuable purpose and many of you should read it.
Tesla’s Gigafactory
Elon Musk has said that he thinks not of building cars but of building factories that make cars, the machine that makes the machine. You can see what he is on about in this new video of the first Gigafactory.
Three points of note. The factory was up and running in 10 months. There are lots of robots, in a factory in China–that tells you a lot about Chinese wages and the productivity of robots today. Tesla is building Gigafactory Berlin and Gigafactory Texas next.
Why cancel culture will not take over everything
I was reading this blog post by Arnold Kling, and I thought I should put my own views into a Bloomberg column. Here is one bit:
So what to make of the apparent growing strength of cancel culture and affiliated movements? Here is the fundamental point: With the rise of social media and low-cost communications, virtually everything that can be said, will be said.
It might be said on Twitter rather than on the evening news, or on 4Chan rather than on Facebook. But the sentiments will be out there, and many of them will be disturbing. The world has arrived at a place where just about every politically incorrect statement — and a response to it, not to mention every politically correct statement and a response to that — is published or recorded somewhere.
So the policing of speech may be vastly more common than it was, say, 15 years ago. But the discourse itself is vastly greater in scope. Political correctness has in fact run amok, but so then has everything else.
As a general principle, people notice what disturbs them more than what doesn’t. Therefore opponents of political correctness — and I include myself in this group — have a never-ending supply of anecdotes to be concerned about. I am not suggesting that this cycle will end well, but it does put the matter in perspective.
The issue is how social norms will adjust to cope with a world where everything is being said all the time. That path will not be smooth — but anxiety about it is different from fear of political correctness simply swallowing up everything and canceling everybody.
I’m no optimist. In fact, I suspect it will be harder to rein in the chaos and bewilderment from the say-whatever-you-want culture — have you checked out the pandemic discourse lately? — than to curb the intemperance of the you-can’t-say-that culture.
Consider also the evolution of internet communication. For all of its diversity, there are significant trends toward centralization. The English language is more focal than before, national politics command more attention than local politics, and the U.S. itself has more soft power in some crucial directions, thanks to its central role in the internet’s intellectual infrastructure. It is striking, for example, how much the entire world responded to the Black Lives Matter movement.
That means Americans will be subject to more cancellations and to more political correctness than people in the rest of the world. For better or worse, Americans are the central nexus that so many others are talking about, not always favorably. To quote Joseph Heller: Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you — and Americans have good reason to be paranoid these days. If you published your politically incorrect column in your local Croatian newspaper, the rest of the internet just wouldn’t care all that much.
Yet note the underlying assumption here — namely, that American soft power is indeed growing. And if you are an American intellectual, your relative influence around the world is likely to be growing as well. With that greater influence comes greater scrutiny, and greater risk that you will be treated unfairly by the PC brigades. Is that really such a bad trade-off?
At first I was afraid that “all the wrong people” would like this piece, but so far so good.
The new Elena Ferrante novel, up through p.63 no spoilers
It is a thrill to be dragged into her Neapolitan world of class and romantic intrigue and family strife once again, and the book is clearly Ferrante from the get go. Yet I have some doubts. The plot seems more accessible and less complex, and with fewer layers to be unpeeled. It has not yet moved out of “father-daughter cliché land.” Every page is engrossing, but I am still looking for the surprise.
They have been so stingy with advance review copies that there are still no Amazon reviews.
Tuesday assorted links
2. More on the vaccines from Russia and China.
3. “We conclude by analyzing New York’s efforts to address out-of-network billing through binding arbitration between physicians and insurers over out-of-network payments. This intervention reduced out-of-network billing by 12.8 percentage points (88%).” JPE link here.
4. “As if 2020 couldn’t get any weirder, airline pilots landing at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) on Sunday, August 30th, reported seeing “a guy in a jetpack” flying about 300 yards off their wing while on final approach to the bustling airport. What makes the reports even stranger is that, like a scene out of The Rocketeer, the airliners were descending through 3,000 feet when jetpack guy showed up next to them.” Link here.
5. The public choice of NIMBY: “Historic district designation generates a 12-23% premium for house transactions in Denver.”