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Why isn’t there more debate over the Biden economic plan?

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one bit:

My colleague Arnold Kling put it well: “With the reconciliation bill, there is no attempt to convince the public that it is desirable to enact an enormous child tax credit or to mandate ending use of fossil fuels in a decade. Instead, what we read is that if you’re on the blue team you want the number to be 3.5, but a few Democrats are holding out for something lower.”

The Democrats say they might be considering a carbon tax to fund their spending plans, and also to address climate change. You might have expected this news to be on the front page every day, and a dominant topic on Twitter and Substack. Isn’t the fate of the planet at stake, or perhaps an economic depression, depending on your point of view?

There was a lengthy and well-done article in the Washington Post on the political risks associated with this plan. It appeared on Page A21 of the paper edition.

And:

The contrast with earlier but still recent times is obvious. As recently as Barack Obama’s presidency, there was a vigorous policy debate on just about every proposal. A fiscal stimulus of $800 billion? That one was hashed out for months, with detailed takes on the multiplier, the liquidity trap and the marginal propensity to consume, coming from all points of view. Then there was Obamacare, which led to even more passionate and detailed debate over the course of years. Who didn’t have an opinion about the “Cadillac tax” or the proper size of the mandate penalty?

And why has this shift occurred?:

One possibility is that the substantive conversations are occurring on private channels, such as WhatsApp, or in person. This leaves the public sphere a relatively empty shell. Another possibility, more depressing yet, is that the main debate is now about political power and tactics, rather than policy per se. Squabbles over symbols are more common than disagreements over substance, and the influence of various interest groups matters more than the strength of any argument.

Another possibility I did not mention is that perhaps (since DT?) the news cycle has been shifting so rapidly that it no longer very easily sustains this older-fashioned style of ongoing debate?  What might some other reasons be?

Why the defenses of Australia do not persuade me

Alex laid out some complaints about Covid policy down under, I have been receiving emails and tweets arguing the following:

1. Australia is choosing a perfectly acceptable point on the liberty vs. safety frontier.

2. The Australian decision to do extreme lockdowns is democratic, and most Australians support it.

And sometimes I see a third point, which as far as I can tell is true:

3. Australia doesn’t have much in the way of ICU excess capacity, so a Covid surge would hit the country especially hard.

I think those responses, however, are missing the point of the critique.  I would stress that if Covid risk has you with your back against the wall and the government is forcing extremely restrictive measures on your citizenry, you should be implementing the following in an urgent manner:

a. Twice a week rapid antigen tests for everyone.  (Plenty of time to prep for this one.)

b. Much stronger incentives to vaccinate people more rapidly, including with the large stock (six million or so?) of AstraZeneca vaccines.  Demand side incentives, supply side incentives, whatever can be done.  Let’s throw the kitchen sink at this one.  But as it stands, I just don’t see the urgency.

c. Mobile monoclonal antibody units, as they are used in Florida (modest progress here).

d. Maybe other emergency measures too?  I’ve been hearing for decades that Australia has such a great health care system so surely they can make lots of progress on these and other fronts?

As far as I can tell from this great distance, Australia is doing none of these.  And, while there is some disquiet about lockdowns, few of its citizens are demanding that they do any of those positive measures.  Not many of its well-known politicians are proposing those ideas either.  (Please feel free to correct me if that is wrong!…but I just don’t see word of it on-line.)

If Australia implemented all of those policies, or even just one of them, they could attain a much better “liberty vs. lives” frontier, no matter where you think the government should end up on that frontier.  They could save lives, and enjoy more liberty.

And that is the great shame and indeed I would say crime.  There seems to be an incredible complacency that people in some parts of the country will put up with the current measures and not demand the government look for more practical measures to boost both liberty and security.

So when you write me and suggest “this is democratic and the people approve,” yes that is exactly the problem.

Gaming is coming to get us

That is the theme of my latest Bloomberg column, the first part concerns culture, but here is the section on government regulation:

The self-contained nature of games also means they will be breaking down government regulation. Plenty of trading already takes place in games — involving currencies, markets, prices and contracts. Game creators and players set and enforce the rules, and it is harder for government regulators to play a central role.

The lesson is clear: If you wish to create a new economic institution, put it inside a game. Or how about an app that gamifies share trading? Do you wish to experiment with a new kind of stock exchange or security outside the purview of traditional government regulation? Try the world of gaming, perhaps combined with crypto, and eventually your “game” just might influence events in the real world.

To date the regulators have tried to be strict. It is currently difficult to build fully realized new worlds without creating something that is legally defined as an unregistered security. Those regulations don’t receive a lot of attention from the mainstream media, but they are rapidly becoming some of the most significant and restrictive rules on the books.

At the same time, regulators are already falling behind. Just as gaming has outraced the world of culture, so will gaming outrace U.S. regulatory capabilities, for a variety of reasons: encryption, the use of cryptocurrency, the difficulties of policing virtual realities, varying rules in foreign jurisdictions and, not incidentally, a lack of expertise among U.S. regulators. (At least the Chinese government’s attempt to restrict youth gaming to three hours a week, while foolhardy, reflects a perceptive cultural conservatism.)

Both the culture-weakening and the regulation-weakening features of games follow from their one basic characteristic: They are self-contained worlds. Until now, human institutions and structures have depended on relatively open and overlapping networks of ideas. Gaming is carving up and privatizing those spaces. This shift is the big trend that hardly anyone — outside of gaming and crypto — is noticing.

If the much-heralded “metaverse” ever arrives, gaming will swallow many more institutions, or create countervailing versions of them. Whether or not you belong to the world of gaming, it is coming for your worlds. I hope you are ready.

And the piece has a good footnote on how gaming relates to postmodernism.

Authoritarian Australia

Australia is now one of the most authoritarian states in the world. Conor Friedersdorf writes:

Australia is undoubtedly a democracy, with multiple political parties, regular elections, and the peaceful transfer of power. But if a country indefinitely forbids its own citizens from leaving its borders, strands tens of thousands of its citizens abroad, puts strict rules on intrastate travel, prohibits citizens from leaving home without an excuse from an official government list, mandates masks even when people are outdoors and socially distanced, deploys the military to enforce those rules, bans protest, and arrests and fines dissenters, is that country still a liberal democracy?

As I noted earlier, Australia is in clear contravention of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, Article 13 of which states:

  1. Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.
  2. Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.

Friedersdorf continues:

To give Australia’s approach its due, temporary restrictions on liberty were far more defensible early in the pandemic…Had it behaved rationally and adequately valued liberty, a rich nation like Australia would have spent lavishly—before knowing which vaccines would turn out to be most effective—to secure an adequate supply of many options for its people. It could afford to eat the cost of any extra doses and donate them to poorer countries. Australia then could have marshaled its military and civil society to vaccinate the nation as quickly as possible, lifted restrictions more fully than Europe and the United States did, and argued that the combination of fewer deaths and the more rapid return to normalcy made their approach a net win.

Instead, Australia invested inadequately in vaccines and, once it acquired doses, was too slow to get them into arms. “Of the 16 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine that have been released to the government by manufacturer CSL, only about 8 million have gone into the arms of Australians,” The Age reported on August 21, citing concern about blood clots and a widespread preference for the Pfizer vaccine.

…Because of its geography, Australia is a neighbor and an observer of authoritarian countries as varied as China and Singapore. But its own fate, too, may turn on whether its people crave the feeling of safety and security that orders from the top confer, or whether they want to be free.

Australians largely support the restrictions but to me that makes them all the more disturbing.

Temporary restrictions on liberty can be justified in an emergency if the restrictions produce something else of great value but respecting the great value of liberty and individual rights means doing everything in one’s power to limit the scope of and lift such restrictions as quickly and completely as possible.

Saturday assorted links

1. Private insurers are now picking up less of the tab for Covid-related hospital stays.

2. Claims about vaccine efficacy, useful.  And further claims about boosters.  The correct final picture here still is not clear to me.

3. Dishonesty update.

4. Progress in the use of monoclonal antibodies.  Sadly: “For the administration, mum’s the word on monoclonal antibodies, rapid home tests, high quality masks . . . anything except vaccines,” Eric Topol, founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, said in an email. “Which is wrong, since we need every tool in the kit to effectively take on delta; we’re not doing that well at all.”

5. What academia used to be like.  Before the internet, that is.

6. Jerry Brito on the coming regulatory challenge for crypto.

How many children are killed by the schools anyway?

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:

Of course, with or without Covid, some number of children die at school. But it is surprisingly difficult to find out how many. In 2020, there were more than 50 million students in public elementary, middle or high schools, yet there is no systematic national database of student deaths at school. School shootings have claimed up to 75 deaths annually in recent years, and there are many other possible causes of death, such as traffic or sports accidents.

It’s entirely plausible that a few hundred students die each year for reasons directly related to school attendance. If suicides induced by school bullying but occurring off campus are included, the number could be higher still. Some 4,400 young people in America commit suicide in a typical year, and surely many of those deaths are attributable, at least partially, to events at school.

Adding up all these admittedly indirect chains of causation, it’s possible that school attendance leads to at least 2,000 deaths every year in the U.S. And those have nothing to do with Covid.

Fortunately, it is not customary in normal times to debate whether it is worth opening schools knowing that it could result in the death of perhaps 2,000 students. The true toll of opening schools is unknown, much less debated, and if there is a discussion it is over school shootings, which ought to be preventable (or at least limited) by measures other than closing schools.

This “head in the sand” approach is highly imperfect. Still, it is preferable to panicking and closing the schools every year.

It is difficult to calculate how many children have died of Covid, but perhaps the best estimate comes from England, where it caused 25 deaths of people younger than 18 in the year ended in March. The final tally is certainly higher in the more populous U.S., but as of July seven states still were reporting zero Covid deaths among children. This recent estimate suggests 358 deaths, though it is based on only 43 states.

Yes, it is worth considering whether school reopenings will lead to unacceptably high levels of Covid in the non-school population. It is also worth pointing out that Covid is spreading very rapidly in states with low vaccination rates — without the schools playing a role. In any case, it does not justify focusing solely on the safety of children in discussions of school reopening.

Economists have long studied the tendency of people to assign more value to a “known life” than to a “statistical life.” When a baby is trapped down a well, for example, many millions of dollars will be spent trying to save her. Her photo will appear on the evening news and on social media. Yet when it comes to saving lives in the aggregate, such as by installing more and better smoke detectors, there is only modest interest.

Right now too many Americans are trapped: Because the pandemic has been so dramatic for so many, every life looks like a known life rather than a statistical life. We all need to start working our way back to a bit more emotional distance.

Recommended.

The median voter theorem is underrated

That is the theme of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:

More broadly, it is striking how many policies of the Biden administration reflect ideas or proposals from the Trump administration. Biden’s “Buy America” plan could be a Trump administration protectionist initiative. The Trump administration spent $2 trillion on coronavirus relief; the Biden administration proposed and spent $1.9 trillion. Trump wanted to pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan; Biden actually did. Biden has left many of Trump’s anti-China policies, such as the tariffs, in place. Biden also has continued rapid deportation programs for immigrants.

All of these policies are broadly aimed at the center. It is no accident that Biden, even though his “honeymoon” period is ending, has remained broadly popular in the polls.

There are still areas in which Republicans and Democrats differ greatly, of course. On Covid-19, they have divergent attitudes and safety practices. Still, the Biden administration has not seriously considered either a nationwide vaccination mandate or governmental vaccine passports, as neither would be especially popular with voters.

Then there are cultural issues, where the median voter theorem most definitely does not hold. What seems to have happened is that Americans have picked one area in which they can let off steam and express their mutual mistrust — and in turn that has allowed a kind of consensus to form around many actual government policies. Perhaps what the median voter theorem misses is that individuals have a deeply irrational side and need to treat some political debates more like a mixed martial arts competition than as a forum for getting things done.

The median voter theorem tends to be unpopular in an increasingly left-leaning academic environment. It has a decidedly anti-utopian quality, as it insists that policy is not going to deviate too far from the views of the ordinary American. It implies that many projects of left-wing progressives are pipe dreams, at least until major shifts in public opinion set in. It dismisses the common progressive attitude that current voters would welcome major left-wing reforms and are only waiting for a heroic politician to stare down the special interest groups that oppose them.

To be clear, there is no presumption that the median voter actually wants the right thing. As an economist, I am particularly frustrated by how frequently American voters fail to appreciate the benefits of international trade and migration, or how they tend to believe that government programs financed by borrowing represent a free lunch. They also put disproportionate weight on low gasoline prices, to cite yet another example from a long list of mistaken views.

Still, as a practical matter, the median voter probably represents a kind of protection against the worst excesses and arrogances of the human spirit. Failed politicians do tend to get voted out of office. Crazy views, regardless of how popular they may be, tend to get sanded down by the political process.

The upshot, for the U.S. at least, is that the reality of American life is very different from the one that pundits regularly describe.

True.

Why has the Indian diaspora been so successful?

Dwarkesh writes to me:

Why do you think the Indian diaspora has been so successful? Just selection of the best immigrants from a large pool of candidates or something else too?

Yes, there are plenty of Indians, and surely that matters, but I see several others factors at work:

1. The Indian diaspora itself is large, estimated at 18 million and the single largest diaspora in the world.

2. A significant portion of the better-educated Indians are hooked into English-language networks early on, including through the internet.  The value of this connection has been rising due to the rising value of the internet itself.  That is a big reason to be bullish on the Indian diaspora.

3. India has been growing rapidly enough so that people understand the nature and value of progress, yet the country remains poor enough that further progress seems urgent.

4. Many Indian parents seem intent on expecting a great deal from their children.  The value of this cannot be overemphasized.  This effect seems to be stronger in India than in say Indonesia.

5. There is especially positive selection for Indians coming to America.  You can’t just run across a border, instead many of the ways of getting here involve some specialization in education and also technical abilities.  Virtually all migrated in legal manners, and here is some interesting data on how the various cohorts of Indians arriving in America differed by wave.

6. More speculatively, I see a kind of conceptual emphasis and also a mental flexibility resulting from India’s past as a mixing ground for many cultures.  Perhaps some of this comes from the nature of Hinduism as well, even for non-Hindu Indians (just as American Jews are somewhat “Protestant”).  Indians who move into leadership roles in U.S. companies seem to do quite well making a very significant cultural leap.  I cannot think of any other emerging economy where the same is true to a comparable extent.  In any case, the intellectual capital embedded in Indian culture is immense.

7. Those Indians who leave seem to retain strong ties to the home country, which in turn helps others with their subsequent upward mobility, whether in India or abroad.  In contrast, Russians who leave Russia seem to cut their ties to a higher degree.

8. I feel one of the hypotheses should involve caste, but I don’t have a ready claim at hand.

Here is the take of Stephen Manallack.  Here is Times of India.  (And by the way, here is Shruti’s piece on India’s 1991 reforms, not irrelevant to the diaspora.)

What else?

“The Crypto Revolution Will Not be Public”

That is the title of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:

In a remarkably honest yet radical speech last month about stablecoins, Fed Governor Randal Quarles argued that current payments systems already incorporate a great deal of information technology — and they are improving rapidly. The implication is that a central bank digital currency, or CBDC, is a solution in search of a problem.

Quarles also suggested that the Fed tolerate stablecoins, just as central banking has coexisted and indeed thrived with numerous other private-sector innovations. Stablecoins can serve as a private-sector experiment to see if individuals and institutions truly desire a radically different payments system, in this case based on crypto and blockchains. If they do, the system can evolve by having some but not all transactions shift toward stablecoin.

There need not be any “do or die” date of transition requiring a perfectly functioning CBDC. But insofar as those stablecoins can achieve the very simple methods of funds transfer outlined above, market participants will continue to use them more.

Quarles argued that with suitable but non-extraordinary regulation of stablecoin issuers, such a system could prove stable. He even seems to prefer the private-sector alternative: “It seems to me that there has been considerable private-sector innovation in the payments industry without a CBDC, and it is conceivable that a Fed CBDC, or even plans for one, might deter private-sector innovation by effectively ‘occupying the field.’”

In essence, Quarles is willing to tolerate a system in which privately issued dollar equivalents become a major means of consummating payments outside of the Fed’s traditional institutions. Presumably capital requirements would be used to ensure solvency.

For many onlookers, even hearing of innovation in finance raises worries about systemic risk. But perhaps the U.S. would do better by letting information technology advance than trying to shut it down. And if you are afraid of instability, are you really so keen to see foreign central bank digital currencies fill up this space?

If you are still skeptical, ask yourself two final questions. First, which has been more innovative on these issues: the private sector or the public sector? Second, how realistic are the prospects that Congress takes any effective action at all?

This is now a world in which radical monetary ideas are produced and consumed like potato chips. I say, pass the bag.

Recommended.

Use Fractional Dosing to Speed Vaccination and Save Lives

I’ve been shouting about fractional dosing since January, most recently with my post A Half Dose of Moderna is More Effective Than a Full Dose of AstraZeneca and the associated paper with Michael Kremer and co-authors. Yesterday we saw some big movement. Writing in Nature Medicine, WHO epidemiologists Benjamin Cowling and Wey Wen Lim and evolutionary biologist Sarah Cobey title a correspondence:

Fractionation of COVID-19 vaccine doses could extend limited supplies and reduce mortality.

Exactly so. They write:

Dose-finding studies indicate that fractional doses of mRNA vaccines could still elicit a robust immune response to COVID-192,3. In a non-randomized open-label phase 1/2 trial of the BNT162b2 vaccine, doses as low as one third (10 μg) of the full dose produced antibody and cellular immune responses comparable to those achieved with the full dose of 30 μg (ref. 4). Specifically, the geometric mean titer of neutralizing antibodies 21 days after the second vaccine dose was 166 for the group that received 10 μg, almost the same as the geometric mean titer of 161 for the group that received 30 μg, and 63 days after the second dose, these titers were 181 and 133, respectively4. For the mRNA-1273 vaccine, a dose of 25 μg conferred geometric mean PRNT80 titers (the inverse of the concentration of serum needed to reduce the number of plaques by 80% in a plaque reduction neutralization test) of 340 at 14 days after the second dose, compared with a value of 654 for the group that received the standard dose of 100 μg (ref. 5). According to the model proposed by Khoury et al.6, if vaccine efficacy at the full dose is 95%, a reduction in dose that led to as much as a halving in the post-vaccination geometric mean titer could still be in the range of 85–90%. Although other components of the immune response may also contribute to efficacy, these dose-finding data are at least indicative of the potential for further exploration of fractionation as a dose-sparing strategy. Durability of responses after fractional doses should also be explored.

…Concerns about the evolution of vaccine resistance have been posited as a potential drawback of dose-sparing strategies. However, vaccines that provide protection against clinical disease seem to also reduce transmission, which indicates that expanding partial vaccination coverage could reduce the incidence of infection. As described in a recent paper, lower prevalence should slow, not accelerate, the emergence and spread of new SARS-CoV-2 variants8.

…In conclusion, fractionated doses could provide a feasible solution that extends limited supplies of vaccines against COVID-19, which is a major challenge for low- and middle-income countries.

Also a new paper in preprint just showed that 1/4 doses of Moderna create a substantial and lasting immune response on par with that from natural infection.

Here we examined vaccine-specific CD4+ T cell, CD8+ T cell, binding antibody, and neutralizing antibody responses to the 25 ug Moderna mRNA-1273 vaccine over 7 months post-immunization, including multiple age groups, with a particular interest in assessing whether pre-existing crossreactive T cell memory impacts vaccine-generated immunity. Low dose (25 ug) mRNA-1273 elicited durable Spike binding antibodies comparable to that of convalescent COVID-19 cases. Vaccine-generated Spike memory CD4+ T cells 6 months post-boost were comparable in quantity and quality to COVID-19 cases, including the presence of TFH cells and IFNg-expressing cells.

Finally, an article in Reuters notes that Moderna are preparing to launch a 50 ug dose regimen as a booster and for children. Thus, contrary to some critics of our paper, the technology is ready.

Frankly, governments are way behind on this–they should have been pushing the vaccine manufacturers and funding trials on alternative dosing since at least January. Indeed, imagine how many lives we might have saved had we listened to Operation Warp Speed advisor Moncef Slaoui who advocated for half doses in January. On a world scale, we could have vaccinated tens even hundreds of millions more people by now had we ramped up fractional dosing.

At this point, it’s my view that there is enough knowledge to justify rolling out alternative dosing in any hot spot or in any country worried about outbreaks. Roll it out in a randomized fashion (as Kominers and I discussed in the context of the US vaccination rollout) to study it in real time but start the roll out now. Lives can be saved if we speed up vaccination, especially of the best vaccines we have, the mRNAs. Moderna and Pfizer have together pledged to deliver (mostly Pfizer and mostly through the US) some 250m vaccine doses to COVAX in 2021 for delivery to less developed countries. If we go to half-doses that becomes 500m doses–a life saver. And recall these points made earlier:

Judging by neutralizing antibodies, a 50 ug dose of, for example, Moderna looks to be more effective than standard dosing of many other vaccines including AZ and J&J and much better than others such as Sinovac. Thus alternative dosing is a way to *increase* the quality of vaccine for many people.

A 50 ug dose vaccine available today is much higher quality than a 100 ug dose vaccine available one year from now.

If we have the will, we can increase vaccine supply very rapidly.

A Half Dose of Moderna is More Effective Than a Full Dose of AstraZeneca

Today we are releasing a new paper on dose-stretching, co-authored by Witold Wiecek, Amrita Ahuja, Michael Kremer, Alexandre Simoes Gomes, Christopher M. Snyder, Brandon Joel Tan and myself.

The paper makes three big points. First, Khoury et al (2021) just published a paper in Nature which shows that “Neutralizing antibody levels are highly predictive of immune protection from symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection.” What that means is that there is a strong relationship between immunogenicity data that we can easily measure with a blood test and the efficacy rate that it takes hundreds of millions of dollars and many months of time to measure in a clinical trial. Thus, future vaccines may not have to go through lengthy clinical trials (which may even be made impossible as infections rates decline) but can instead rely on these correlates of immunity.

Here is where fractional dosing comes in. We supplement the key figure from Khoury et al.’s paper to show that fractional doses of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines have neutralizing antibody levels (as measured in the early phase I and phase II trials) that look to be on par with those of many approved vaccines. Indeed, a one-half or one-quarter dose of the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine is predicted to be more effective than the standard dose of some of the other vaccines like the AstraZeneca, J&J or Sinopharm vaccines, assuming the same relationship as in Khoury et al. holds. The point is not that these other vaccines aren’t good–they are great! The point is that by using fractional dosing we could rapidly and safely expand the number of effective doses of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines.

Second, we embed fractional doses and other policies such as first doses first in a SIER model and we show that even if efficacy rates for fractional doses are considerably lower, dose-stretching policies are still likely to reduce infections and deaths (assuming we can expand vaccinations fast enough to take advantage of the greater supply, which is well within the vaccination frontier). For example, a half-dose strategy reduces infections and deaths under a variety of different epidemic scenarios as long as the efficacy rate is 70% or greater.

Third, we show that under plausible scenarios it is better to start vaccination with a less efficacious vaccine than to wait for a more efficacious vaccine. Thus, Great Britain and Canada’s policies of starting First Doses first with the AstraZeneca vaccine and then moving to second doses, perhaps with the Moderna or Pfizer vaccines is a good strategy.

It is possible that new variants will reduce the efficacy rate of all vaccines indeed that is almost inevitable but that doesn’t mean that fractional dosing isn’t optimal nor that we shouldn’t adopt these policies now. What it means is that we should be testing and then adapting our strategy in light of new events like a battlefield commander. We might, for example, use fractional dosing in the young or for the second shot and reserve full doses for the elderly.

One more point worth mentioning. Dose stretching policies everywhere are especially beneficial for less-developed countries, many of which are at the back of the vaccine queue. If dose-stretching cuts the time to be vaccinated in half, for example, then that may mean cutting the time to be vaccinated from two months to one month in a developed country but cutting it from two years to one year in a country that is currently at the back of the queue.

Read the whole thing.

The Becker-Friedman center also has a video discussion featuring my co-authors, Nobel prize winner Michael Kremer and the very excellent Witold Wiecek.

How will crypto wealth transform philanthropy?

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:

If the price of Bitcoin were to reach $200,000, Coinbase Chief Executive Officer Brian Armstrong observed recently, half of the world’s billionaires would be crypto billionaires. Even at the lesser valuations that currently prevail, this crypto wealth has vast potential to reshape philanthropy. Expect a relative decline in the influence of longstanding nonprofit institutions — and more weird, stand-alone projects.

Bitcoin itself is a weird, stand-alone project. The true identity of its inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto, is still unknown, and the broader Bitcoin ecosystem is not owned or controlled by any company or institution. It has been self-sustaining since the beginning, and so it should hardly come as a surprise that Bitcoin billionaires take Bitcoin itself as a model for future institutions, including in philanthropy.

As philanthropists, Bitcoin and other crypto billionaires will likely look to support ideas that can launch in a dramatic way and quickly acquire escape velocity. They are unlikely to fund the ongoing labor costs of established cultural institutions.

Bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies seem designed to stand independent of any government or mainstream financial institution. That too suggests that the philanthropic emphasis of crypto wealth will be on non-establishment, non-governmental organizations.

And:

Venture capitalist Paul Graham has pointed out that wealth is earned much more quickly nowadays, and that is all the more true in crypto, which after all is only 12 years old. Unlike many of the wealthy people in law or investment banking, these are not people who had to spend their lives working their way up, finally achieving a top position in their 60s. They either are founders of rapidly growing and scaling companies, or they bought large sums of the right crypto assets early on, or both. Either way, their temperaments are geared to expect immediate action and rapid results.

Nonprofits will have to adjust accordingly, even though speed is not typically their comparative advantage. That in turn suggests that the organizational structures of many nonprofits will have to change fairly radically. Many of them were designed or have evolved to be good at continuity, like the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra, which after all is still playing Beethoven with violins and cellos.

There is much more at the link.

Why I am not entirely keen on the Great Barrington Declaration and AIER

More people are asking me about my attitudes toward Great Barrington and AIER, including David Henderson in this post (which also has a good transcript of my remarks to Russ Roberts).  Earlier I wrote a conceptual critique of the Great Barrington Declaration, but today I would like to make some more targeted remarks.  I didn’t do this when speaking to Russ because I feel they require direct quotation and documentation, which one cannot easily do in a podcast.  And in general I don’t like to write posts “attacking people” (way oversupplied on the internet), but in this case libertarian sympathies are so split that a kind of a wake-up call is needed.

Let me first say that if you are libertarian, and would like a libertarian response to the pandemic, and you find Alex and me not libertarian enough, read the Ryan Bourne book from the Cato Institute.  You may not agree with everything in there, but it has no “gross errors” and no “biomedical weirdness.”  And people, the Cato Institute really is libertarian.  They once hired David Henderson as chief economist.

As for the AIER, read this Jeremy Horpedahl thread and click through appropriately, here is the Sam Bowman-produced part of the thread.  Conspiracy theorist and shall we say “speculative thinker” Naomi Wolf is now a senior researcher at AIER, please do read her tweets.  5G conspiracy theories?  Vaccine nanoparticles that make you travel back in time?  “Not kidding” she wrote, and the general weirdness extends far beyond that, to some of her books as well.  Or try this “externality denialism” from just a few days ago: “Your vaccine status makes no difference to others.”  Her pinned tweet casts suspicion on Bill Gates, and refers to “global treason.”

I say it is a mistake to let such a group set the libertarian agenda or indeed any agenda, even if you favor very rapid reopenings and are very critical of lockdowns.  I implore you to think very seriously about what is going on here.

Going back to the GBD proper, which again is sponsored by AIER, here is co-author Sunetra Gupta:

“What we’ve seen is that in normal, healthy people, who are not elderly or frail or don’t have comorbidities, this virus is not something to worry about no more than how we worry about flu,”  professor Gupta told HT.

Nope, almost 600,000 U.S. deaths later.  Or how does this Gupta claim look?:

‘Why would you arrest transmission?’ she asks. ‘To wait for a vaccine? You cannot get rid of it.’

What would Benjamin Netanyahu say?  Or Gupta in May: “Covid-19 is on the way out.”

The best of them is probably Jay Bhattacharya, with whom I often agree, and who, as far as I can tell, has no track record of blatantly false predictions.  Yet even he cannot avoid a tinge of biomedical weirdness.

Why was Bhattacharya on the advisory board of the anti-vax group Panda?  I am reluctant to play the “guilt by association” game here, but I think there is a broader pattern of these writers simply being wrong about the science, and their associations reflecting that.

I agree with his WSJ critique (with Kulldorff) of vaccine passports.  Still, he comes up with some literally true but misleading sequences such as:

The idea that everybody needs to be vaccinated is as scientifically baseless as the idea that nobody does. Covid vaccines are essential for older, high-risk people and their caretakers and advisable for many others.

I wonder why cannot he bring himself to say that “the average social value of a 16-year-old getting vaccinated is strongly positive”?  (And we are running significant tests to lower the remaining uncertainty, and if it is merely adenovirus platforms you worry about well say that.)  Instead he has to walk around the issue and play down the value of near-universal Covid vaccination.  You might think that is all the fault of the editorial chopping board, but it seems to be a broader and more consistent pattern with this group.

Take Hulldorff’s now-famous tweetThose with prior natural infection do not need it [Covid vaccines]. Nor children.”  “Need?” — OK, I get it, demand curves slope down.  But again, his tweet is not nearly as good or as accurate a message as “the average social value of a 16-year-old getting vaccinated is strongly positive.”  There is good evidence that the vaccines provide better protection than does natural infection, especially against the Covid variants, and it is established that infected younger persons can carry Covid to the unvaccinated, of which there will always be quite a few, most of all globally.  Furthermore, non-vaccine methods of achieving herd immunity are looking worse, due to the spread of variants and areas such as Manaus, which seem to have high rates of reinfection.  And have I mentioned that hospitalization rates for the young are rising?  (We are not sure why.)

Is it so great that 38.9% of Marines are refusing to take the vaccine? (no).  Or have these writers looked into the huge success that is Gibraltar?

Why take this weird, hinky attitude toward the science for no good reason?  It’s as if — when it comes to vaccines — they deliberately talk in an Alice in Wonderland universe without self-awareness of that fact.

No matter what your associations may or may not be, getting people vaccinated with quality vaccines is the #1 issue right now and it is the path back to liberty most likely to succeed and prove sustainable.  If you are not really enthusiastic about that, I think, frankly, that you are out to lunch.

In praise of Alex Tabarrok

Here’s a question I’ve been mulling in recent months: Is Alex Tabarrok right? Are people dying because our coronavirus response is far too conservative?

I don’t mean conservative in the politicized, left-right sense. Tabarrok, an economist at George Mason University and a blogger at Marginal Revolution, is a libertarian, and I am very much not. But over the past year, he has emerged as a relentless critic of America’s coronavirus response, in ways that left me feeling like a Burkean in our conversations.

He called for vastly more spending to build vaccine manufacturing capacity, for giving half-doses of Moderna’s vaccine and delaying second doses of Pfizer’s, for using the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, for the Food and Drug Administration to authorize rapid at-home tests, for accelerating research through human challenge trials. The through line of Tabarrok’s critique is that regulators and politicians have been too cautious, too reluctant to upend old institutions and protocols, so fearful of the consequences of change that they’ve permitted calamities through inaction.

Tabarrok hasn’t been alone. Combinations of these policies have been endorsed by epidemiologists, like Harvard’s Michael Mina and Brown’s Ashish Jha; by other economists, like Tabarrok’s colleague Tyler Cowen and the Nobel laureates Paul Romer and Michael Kremer; and by sociologists, like Zeynep Tufekci (who’s also a Times Opinion contributor). But Tabarrok is unusual in backing all of them, and doing so early and confrontationally. He’s become a thorn in the side of public health experts who defend the ways regulators are balancing risk. More than one groaned when I mentioned his name.

But as best as I can tell, Tabarrok has repeatedly been proved right, and ideas that sounded radical when he first argued for them command broader support now. What I’ve come to think of as the Tabarrok agenda has come closest to being adopted in Britain, which delayed second doses, approved the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine despite its data issues, is pushing at-home testing and permitted human challenge trials, in which volunteers are exposed to the coronavirus to speed the testing of treatments. And for now it’s working: Britain has vaccinated a larger percentage of its population than the rest of Europe and the United States have and is seeing lower daily case rates and deaths.

Here is more from Ezra Klein at the New York Times.

FDA Postpones Inspections Delaying New Drugs and Creating Shortages of Old Drugs

NYTimes: The Covid-19 pandemic has forced the Food and Drug Administration to postpone hundreds of drug company inspections, creating an enormous backlog that is delaying new drug approvals and leading the industry to warn of impending shortages of existing medicines.

…In an interview, F.D.A. officials said they sharply curtailed the inspections to protect their investigators, following guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which discouraged federal employees from travel during the pandemic.

But some people in both industry and public health communities say that federal drug inspections are essential, and that the agency should bypass travel restrictions by taking precautions, including wearing proper personal protective equipment.

…In interviews, F.D.A. officials denied that the dramatic drop in inspections has slowed drug approvals. But a number of drug companies, including Spectrum Pharmaceuticals, Biocon Biologics and Bristol Myers Squibb, has issued statements noting deferred F.D.A. action because of the agency’s inability to conduct inspections.

  • In October, Spectrum announced that the F.D.A. had deferred action on its application for Rolontis, a treatment for cancer patients who have a very low number of certain white blood cells, because it could not inspect the manufacturing plant the company uses in South Korea.

  • In late December, Biocon Biologics notified shareholders that the F.D.A. deferred action on its joint application with Mylan for a proposed biosimilar to Avastin, a cancer drug.

  • Bristol Myers Squibb announced in November that the F.D.A. would miss its November deadline for taking action on a lymphoma treatment, lisocabtagene maraleucel because it could not inspect a third-party Texas manufacturing plant. The agency eventually did complete its inspection and approved the drug last month.

Grocery store workers are working, meat packers are working, hell bars and restaurants are open in many parts of the country but FDA inspectors aren’t inspecting. It boggles the mind.

Let’s review. The FDA prevented private firms from offering SARS-Cov2 tests in the crucial early weeks of the pandemic, delayed the approval of vaccines, took weeks to arrange meetings to approve vaccines even as thousands died daily, failed to approve the AstraZeneca vaccine, failed to quickly approve rapid antigen tests, and failed to perform inspections necessary to keep pharmaceutical supply lines open.

I am a long-time critic of the FDA and frankly I am stunned at the devastation.