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The Big Fail

The Big Fail, Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean’s new book about the pandemic, is an angry book. Rightly so. It decries the way the bien pensant, the self-righteously conventional, were able to sideline, suppress and belittle other voices as unscientific, fraudulent purveyors of misinformation. The Big Fail gives the other voices their hearing— Martin Kulldorff, Sunetra Gupta, Jay Bhattacharya and Emily Oster are recast not as villains but as heroes; as is Ron DeSantis who is given credit for bucking the conventional during the pandemic (Nocera and McLean wonder what happened to the data-driven DeSantis, as do I.)

Amazingly, even as highly-qualified epidemiologists and economists were labelled “anti-science” for not following the party line, the biggest policy of them all, lockdowns, had little to no scientific backing:

…[lockdowns] became the default strategy for most of the rest of the world. Even though they had never been used before to fight a pandemic, even though their effectiveness had never been studied, and even though they were criticized as authoritarian overreach—despite all that, the entire world, with a few notable exceptions, was soon locking down its citizens with varying degrees of severity.

In the United States, lockdowns became equated with “following the science.” It was anything but. Yes, there were computer models suggesting lockdowns would be effective, but there were never any actual scientific studies supporting the strategy. It was a giant experiment, one that would bring devastating social and economic consequences.

The narrative lined up “scientific experts” against “deniers, fauxers, and herders” with the scientific experts united on the pro-lockdown side (the following has no indent but draws from an earlier post). But let’s consider. In Europe one country above all others followed the “ideal” of an expert-led pandemic response. A country where the public health authority was free from interference from politicians. A country where the public had tremendous trust in the state. A country where the public were committed to collective solidarity and public welfare. That country, of course, was Sweden. Yet in Sweden the highly regarded Public Health Agency, led by state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell, an expert in infectious diseases, opposed lockdowns, travel restrictions, and the general use of masks.

It’s important to understand that Tegnell wasn’t an outsider marching to his own drummer, anti-lockdown was probably the dominant expert opinion prior to COVID. In a 2006 review of pandemic policy, for example, four highly-regarded experts argued:

It is difficult to identify circumstances in the past half-century when large-scale quarantine has been effectively used in the control of any disease. The negative consequences of large-scale quarantine are so extreme (forced confinement of sick people with the well; complete restriction of movement of large populations; difficulty in getting critical supplies, medicines, and food to people inside the quarantine zone) that this mitigation measure should be eliminated from serious consideration.

Travel restrictions, such as closing airports and screening travelers at borders, have historically been ineffective.

….a policy calling for communitywide cancellation of public events seems inadvisable.

The authors included Thomas V. Inglesby, the Director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, one of the most highly respected centers for infectious diseases in the world, and D.A. Henderson, the legendary epidemiologist widely credited with eliminating smallpox from the planet.

Nocera and McLean also remind us of the insanity of the mask debate, especially in the later years of the pandemic.

But by the spring of 2022, the CDC had dropped its mask recommendations–except, incredibly, for children five and under, who again, were the least likely to be infected.

…Once again it was Brown University economist Emily Oster who pointed out how foolish this policy was…The headline was blunt: Masking Policy is Incredibly Irrational Right Now. In this article she noted that even as the CDC had dropped its indoor mask requirements for kids six and older, it continued to maintain the policy for younger children. “Some parents of young kids have been driven insane by this policy,” Oster wrote, “I sympathize–because the policy is completely insane…”

As usual, her critics jumped all over her. As usual, she was right.

Naturally, I don’t agree with everything in the Big Fail. Nocera and McLean, for example, are very negative on the role of private equity in hospitals and nursing homes. My view is that any theory of what is wrong with American health care is true because American health care is wrong in every possible way. Still, I don’t see private equity as a driving force. It’s easy to find examples where private equity owned nursing homes performed poorly but so did many other nursing homes. More systematic analyses find that PE owned nursing homes performed about the same, worse or better than other nursing homes. Personally, I’d bet on about the same overall. Covid in the Nursing Homes: The US Experience (open), my paper with Markus Bjoerkheim, shows that what mattered more than anything else was simply community spread (see also this paper for the ways in which I disagreed with the GBD approach). More generally, my paper with Robert Omberg, Is it possible to prepare for a pandemic? (open) finds that nations with universal health care, for example, didn’t have fewer excess deaths.

The bottom line is that vaccines worked and everything else was a sideshow. Had we approved the vaccines even 5 weeks earlier and delivered them to the nursing homes, we could have saved 14,000 lives and had we vaccinated nursing home residents just 10 weeks earlier, before the vaccine was approved, as Deborah Birx had proposed, we might have saved 40,000 lives. Nevertheless, Operation Warp Speed was the shining jewel of the pandemic. The lesson is that we should fund further vaccine R&D, create a library of prototype vaccines against potential pandemic threats, streamline our regulatory systems for rapid response, agree now on protocols for human challenge trials and keep warm rapid development systems so that we can produce vaccines not in 11 months but in 100 days.

The Big Fail does a great service in critiquing those who stifled debate and in demanding a full public accounting of what happened–an accounting that  has yet to take place.

Addendum 1: I have reviewed most of the big books on the pandemic including the National Covid Commission’s Lessons from the COVID WAR, Scott Gottlieb’s Uncontrolled Spread, Michael Lewis’s The Premonition, Andy Slavitt’s Preventable and Abutaleb and Paletta’s Nightmare Scenario.

Addendum 2: I also liked Nocera and McLean’s All the Devils are Here on the financial crisis. Sad to say that the titles could be swapped without loss of validity.

Bona Vacantia

Bona vacantia are unowned assets–primarily the assets of people who die without a will and without heirs. In Britain, as in the United States, unowned assets generally pass to the government but Britain is full of ancient and strange traditions and one of them is that the estates of people resident in the “ancient county palatine of Lancashire” who die without a will or heirs go to the Duchy of Lancaster.

The Duchy of Lancaster is “a portfolio of lands, properties, and assets held in trust for the sovereign.” The Duchy dates back to 1265 but in 1461 Edward IV made it a distinct and private inheritance of the reigning monarch. As such the reigning monarch is not allowed to sell the Duchy but is due any returns. To be clear, this is all different from the Crown Estate which are a bunch of land and property nominally owned by the monarch and dedicated to funding the monarchy but yet not owned by the monarch privately. Having fun yet?

Periodically someone discovers the duchies and kicks up a fuss and there is a debate about making the revenues public and giving the monarch a stipend instead. The latest fuss was kicked up by the Guardian with an article that describes the whole thing in accurate but lurid terms:

The king is profiting from the deaths of thousands of people in the north-west of England whose assets are secretly being used to upgrade a commercial property empire managed by his hereditary estate, the Guardian can reveal.

Great stuff! It could only have been improved by adding “the king and his son” are profiting from the deaths of thousands of people because there is another Duchy in Cornwall which is owned by the eldest son of the reigning monarch, in this case Prince William, where the same rules apply. Prince William also has the rights to all the royal fish caught off the shores of the Duchy—namely to whales, porpoises, and sturgeon (obviously).

Despite having once read a book on the subject, I am obviously not an expert in the intricacies of British inheritance law. Who is? But I found the back story very amusing.

My favorite non-classical music of the year 2023

I liked these best:

Lankum, False Lankum.  Claims to be Irish folk music, but has ambient textures and is designed to alienate its core audience.

Yaeji, With a Hammer.  A mix of English and Korean, house and hip hop.  She lives in Brooklyn.

Boygenius, The Rest.  Four songs, twelve minutes.

Christine and the Queens, Paranoia, Angels, True Love.  Three CDs, weird, still growing on me.  By some French person.

Paul Simon, Seven Psalms.  Now he is partly deaf, and he was already singing about dying.

Arooj Aftab, Vijay Iyer, and Shahzad Ismaily, Love in Exile.

Cecile McLorin Salvant, Mélusine.  Her track record (and consistency) at this point is simply staggering, and you can put her on a par with the very greatest of female jazz vocalists.

Irreversible Entanglements, Protect Your Light.  From a free jazz collective, still vital.

Your Mother Should Know: Brad Mehldau Plays the Beatles.

Ches Smith and We All Break, Path of Seven Colors.  From the year before, but I discovered it this year, a blend of Haitian vodou and jazz.

I will be doing a separate post on classical music.  What do you all recommend in these categories?

Addendum: And, via Brett Reynolds, here is a Spotify playlist for those.

*Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics*

The author of this excellent book is Nancy Scheper-Hughes, and the subtitle is Mental Illness in Rural Ireland.  One of the most interesting themes of this book is how life in rural Ireland became so “de-eroticized,” to use her word.  Here is one bit:

Marriage in rural Ireland is, I suggest, inhibited by anomie, expressed in a lack of sexual vitality; familistic loyalties that exaggerate latent brother-sister incestuous inclinations; an emotional climate fearful of intimacy and mistrustful of love; and an excessive preoccupation with sexual purity and pollution, fostered by an ascetic Catholic tradition.  That these impediments to marriage and to an uninhibited expression of sexuality also contribute to the high rates of mental illness among middle-aged bachelor farmers is implicit in the following interpretations and verified in the life history materials and psychological tests of these men.

And:

In the preceding pages I have drawn a rather grim portrait of Irish country life, one that differs markedly from previous ethnographic studies.  Village social life and institutions are, I contend, in a state of disintegration, and villagers are suffering from anomie, of which the most visible sign is the spiraling schizophrenia.  Traditional culture has become unadaptive, and the newly emerging cultural forms as yet lack integration.  The sexes are locked into isolation and mutual hostility.  Deaths and emigrations surpass marriages and births.

Recommended.  This seminal book, republished and revised in 2001, but originally from the 1970s, would be much harder to write and publish today.

Best non-fiction books of 2023

In the order I read them, more or less, rather than in the order of preference.  And behind the link usually you will find my earlier review, or occasionally an Amazon link:

Erika Fatland, High: A Journey Across the Himalaya Through Pakistan, India, Bhutan, Nepal, and China.

Adam Kuper, The Museum of Other People: From Colonial Acquisitions to Cosmopolitan Exhibitions.

Paul Johnson, Follow the Money: How Much Does Britain Cost?

Murray Pittock, Scotland: A Global History.

Reviel Netz, A New History of Greek Mathematics.

Melissa S. Kearney, The Two-Parent Privilege.

David Edmonds, Derek Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality.

Peter Lee, Carey Goldberg, and Isaac Kohane, The AI Revolution in Medicine: GPT-4 and Beyond.

Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi, The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism.

Sebastian Edwards, The Chile Project: The Story of the Chicago Boys and the Downfall of Neoliberalism.

Martyn Rady, The Central Kingdoms: A New History of Central Europe.

Norman Lebrecht, Why Beethoven: A Phenomenon in One Hundred Pieces.

Ian Mortimer, Medieval Horizons: Why the Middle Ages Matter.

Jacob Mikanowski, Goodbye Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land.

Sophia Giovannitti, Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex.

Christopher Clark, Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848-1849.

Fearghal Cochrane, Belfast: The Story of a City and its People.

Jennifer Burns, Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative.

Mikhail Zygar, War and Punishment: Putin, Zelensky, and the Path to Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine.

Jeremy Jennings, Travels with Tocqueville: Beyond America.

Fuchsia Dunlop, Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food.

David Brooks, How to Know Others: The Art of Seeing Others and Being Deeply Seen.

Jonny Steinberg, Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage.

Richard Cockett, Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World.

Cat Bohannon, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution.

Larry Rohter, Into the Amazon: The Life of Cândido Rondon, Trailblazing Explorer, Scientist, Statesman, and Conservationist.

Frank Trentmann, Out of the Darkness: The Germans 1942-2022.

Tyler Cowen, GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time and Why Does it Matter?

It is hard to pick out 2 or 3 favorites this year, as they are all excellent.  I am partial to David Edmonds on Parfit, but a lot of you already know you should be reading that.  Perhaps my nudge is most valuable for Jonny Steinberg, Winny and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage?  So that is my pick for the year!

As usual, I will issue an addendum at the end of the year, because I will be reading a lot between now and then.  I haven’t even received my 1344-pp. Jonathan Israel biography of Spinoza yet.  Here is my earlier list on the year’s fiction.  And apologies for any of your books I have forgotten to list, there are always some such cases.

My favorite fiction books of 2023

These were my favorite fictional works from this year’s reading:

Mircea Cartarescu, Solenoid.  About communist Romania, long, profound, a major work of fiction which can justifiably enter the pantheon.

Tezer Özlü, Cold Nights of Childhood.  A Turkish novella, originally published in 1980, newly translated into English and the first English-language book by her.  Here is more on the author.  Only 76 pp., can be read in one bite.

Rebecca F. Kuang, Yellowface.

J.M. Coetzee, The Pole.

Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, new translation by Michael R. Katz.  I am on about p.200, so far my favorite of the major translations.

Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo, new translation.

Ovid, Metamorphosis, new translation by Stephanie McCarter.  I have only browsed this one, but expect it to be very good.

I will of course provide an update by the end of the year, if only because the new Ha Jin novel is coming soon.

What would you all recommend?

*Lineages of the Feminine*

That is the new book by Emmanuel Todd, subtitled An Outline of the History of Women and mostly on the feminization of society.  It does not cohere, and spends too much time wallowing in pseudo-anthropology, but it has a number of interesting bits.  Here is from the preface:

The feminist revolution is a great thing (I’m an ordinary Westerner on the point) but we are not yet able to see how much the emancipation of women has radically altered the whole of our social life.  Because we always see women as minors, as victims, we do not place them, for better or for worse (i.e., like men) at the centre of our history: they are the protagonists, for example, in the rejection of racism and homophobia, but they are also the unconscious protagonists of our neoliberalism, or deindustrialization and our inability to act collectively….we must accept that the inequalities between human beings in general, in the West, have increased at the same rate as the decrease in inequalities between men and women

The original pointer was from Arnold Kling’s review.

What is your favorite book that no one else you know likes?

I do mean no one.  You have to really like this book, have no other friends or colleagues who like it, and still think the book is very good, not just the product of your own contrarian snottiness.

I have my pick: Nancy Scheper Hughes’s 1992 study Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil.

Part of the GPT-4 summary runs as follows:

The central premise is the apparent paradox that mothers in this region seem to accept the death of their infants without the expected level of grief or weeping. Scheper-Hughes explores the sociocultural and economic factors that have led to a situation where such high infant mortality is normative and somewhat “accepted” as a part of life. This acceptance is a survival mechanism in a context where the death of children is so common due to factors such as malnutrition, dehydration, and lack of adequate healthcare.

It’s not that I know people who reject this book, rather I don’t currently know anyone who would read a 556-page work on medical anthropology/conflict studies in northern Brazil.

A long time ago, I would have nominated Rene Girard here, perhaps Theatre of Envy.  But he has since grown in popularity.

What are your picks, and why?

*Look Again*

The authors are Tali Sharot and Cass Sunstein, and the subtitle is The Power of Noticing What Was Always There.  Excerpt:

The day is known as Högertrafikomläggningen, which translates to “the right-hand traffic diversion,” or H-day for short.  It was the day Sweden changed from driving on the left side of the road to the right.  The move was initiated to align Sweden with the other Scandinavian countries.  The fear was that drivers would get confused, turning the wrong way or getting too close to other cars when attempting to overtake them.  That would seem to be a perfectly reasonable fear.  Surprisingly, however, the switch did not result in a rise in motor accidents,   On the contrary, the number of accidents and fatalities plunged!  The number of motor insurance claims went down by 40 percent.

A very interesting book, recommended, due out in February.

My Conversation with the excellent Jennifer Burns

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is the episode description:

Jennifer Burns is a professor history at Stanford who works at the intersection of intellectual, political, and cultural history. She’s written two biographies Tyler highly recommends: her 2009 book, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right and her latest, Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative, provides a nuanced look into the influential economist and public intellectual.

Tyler and Jennifer start by discussing how her new portrait of Friedman caused her to reassess him, his lasting impact in statistics, whether he was too dogmatic, his shift from academic to public intellectual, the problem with Two Lucky People, what Friedman’s courtship of Rose Friedman was like, how Milton’s family influenced him, why Friedman opposed Hayek’s courtesy appointment at the University of Chicago, Friedman’s attitudes toward friendship, his relationship to fiction and the arts, and the prospects for his intellectual legacy. Next, they discuss Jennifer’s previous work on Ayn Rand, including whether Rand was a good screenwriter, which is the best of her novels, what to make of the sex scenes in Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, how Rand and Mises got along, and why there’s so few successful businesswomen depicted in American fiction. They also delve into why fiction seems so much more important for the American left than it is for the right, what’s driving the decline of the American conservative intellectual condition, what she will do next, and more.

Here is one excerpt:

COWEN: What’s the future of Milton Friedman, say, 30, 40 years from now? Where will the reputation be? University of Chicago is no longer Friedmanite, right? We know that. There are fewer outposts of Friedmanite-thinking than there had been. Will he be underrated or somehow reinvented or what?

BURNS: Let me look into my crystal ball. I don’t think the name will have faded. I think there are still names that people read. People still read Keynes and Mill and figures like that to see what did they say in their day that was so influential. I think that Friedman has got into the water and into the air a bit. I do some work on tracing out his influence.

Within economics, no one’s going to say, “Oh, I’m a Friedmanite,” or fewer people are, but this is someone whose major work was done half a century or more ago, so I don’t think that’s surprising. It would be surprising if economics had been at a standstill as Friedman still called the tune. When you think about the way we accord importance to the modern Federal Reserve, of course, there were things that happened in the world, but Friedman’s ideas did so much to shape that understanding.

He’s still in policymakers’ minds. He’s still in the monetary policy establishment’s minds, even if they’re not fully following him. I think we’re in the middle of a big reckoning now. You saw all the debate about M2 and the pandemic and monetary spending. I don’t know where it’s all going to settle out. It’s a more complicated world than the one that Friedman looked at. I tend to think he is an essential thinker, that the basics of what he talked about are going to be known 50 years from now, for sure.

COWEN: Did Milton Friedman have friends?

Definitely recommended, and Jennifer’s new book Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative is one of my favorite books of the year.  It will likely stand as the definitive biography of Friedman.

That was then, this is now

…the first German pogroms of the modern age, the so-called Hep-Hep riots, took place in 1819.  Jews were attacked on the streets and Jewish stores were ransacked.  It was a new and as yet unknown phenomenon in the German-speaking lands.  The riots were led by students, ostensibly the anti-absolutist and progressive force in German society.

That is from Shlomo Avineri’s Herzl’s Vision: Theodor Herzl and the Foundation of the Jewish State.  Here is a new bulletin from MIT.

My Conversation with the excellent Brian Koppelman

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is the episode summary:

Brian Koppelman is a writer, director, and producer known for his work on films like Rounders and Solitary Man, the hit TV show Billions, and his podcast The Moment, which explores pivotal moments in creative careers.

Tyler and Brian sat down to discuss why TV wasn’t good for so long, whether he wants viewers to binge his shows, how he’d redesign movie theaters, why some smart people appreciate film and others don’t, which Spielberg movie and Murakami book is under appreciated, a surprising fact about poker, whether Jalen Brunson is overrated or underrated, Manhattan food tips, who he’d want to go on a three-day retreat with, whether movies are too long, how happy people are in show business, his unmade dream projects, the next thing he’ll learn about, and more.

Excerpt:

COWEN: Thank you. I have some very simple questions for you about the history of television to start with. I grew up in the 1970s and I’ve long wondered, “Why was TV so bad for so long before the so-called Golden Age?” Maybe you could date that to the 90s or the noughties, but why weren’t shows in the 70s and 80s better than they were? Would you challenge that premise?

KOPPELMAN: Well, I also grew up in the ’70s. I was born in ’66. I’m not sure that the hypothesis that it was bad is correct. It certainly wasn’t, in general, as an art form, operating on the level that cinema was operating on or the level that music, in part, was operating on during that time.

But if we look at, say, children’s television, I could argue that Jim Henson and Sesame Street, for what it was and aimed at what it was aimed at, was as important as any television that’s on today. I would say that Jim Henson moved the art form forward. He figured out a use case for TV that hadn’t really been done before, and he created a way of thinking about the medium that was really different.

Then, look, Hill Street Blues shows up in the ’80s and, I think, figures out how to use certain techniques of theater and cinema and novels to tell these TV stories. Like any other business, when that started to connect, then people in the business started to become aware of what was possible.

Yes, it was a function of three channels, to answer your question. Yes, in the main, of course, TV was worse. No doubt about it, but there were high points. I think those high points pointed the way toward the high points that came later. For me, NYPD Blue is the network show that’s fully on the level of any of these shows that came after. David Milch cut his teeth on Hill Street Blues.

There’s a wonderful book by Brett Martin, called Difficult Men, that’s about showrunners. It starts, in a way, with Bochco and Milch in that time period. It’s a great look into how this idea of showrunners created modern television. HBO needing something, all these business reasons underneath it, but how people who came up through, originally, Hill Street were able to go on and start this revolution.

COWEN: In your view, how good, really, was I Love Lucy? Is it just a few memorable moments, like Vitameatavegamin? Or is it actually a show where it’d be good episode after good episode, like The Sopranos?

And from Brian:

I don’t know Wes Anderson. I don’t know him, but I met him once. I love his movies, and I love that his movies are 90 minutes. The one time I met him, we were screening a film. He invited some people who happened to be in town, who he knew were film people, so I got to watch a movie with him. Afterwards, we were just talking about movies, and I said, “These movies of yours — they are 90 minutes,” and he said, “Yes. I found that the concepts I’m interested in don’t really support a journey that lasts longer than that.” He’s an incredibly disciplined filmmaker. I was like, “That makes total sense.”

Recommended, interesting and entertaining throughout.

What I’ve been reading

1. Dan Sinykin, Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature.  An excellent history of U.S. trade publishing, and not the sort of anti-capitalist mentality snark you might be expecting from the title.  Recommended, for those who care.

2. Richard Cockett, Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World.  It’s not the same kind of deep explanation as Toulmin or Schorske, nonetheless an excellent survey and introduction to the miracles of Viennese science, philosophy, and culture, earlier in the 20th century.  I enjoyed this very much.

3. Peter Kemp, Retroland: A Reader’s Guide to the Dazzling Diversity of Modern Fiction.  Is this an actual book, or just some smart guy running off at the mouth and writing what he really thinks?  Would I prefer the former?  No!

4. Cat Bohannon, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution.  It is getting harder and harder to find good popular science books, due to exhaustion of the major topics, but this is one of them.  I kept on seeing reviews of this book, and not buying it due to fears of pandering.  But most of this book is genuinely illuminating and on a wide range of biological topics, most of all how the female body is different.  Ovaries, menopause, differences in brains — you’ll find it all here.  Furthermore, the book does not drown in political correctness.  Recommended.

5. Larry Rohter, Into the Amazon: The Life of Cândido Rondon, Trailblazing Explorer, Scientist, Statesman, and Conservationist.  I loved this book, in part because I like Brazil so much but not only.  Rondon, arguably the greatest tropical explorer of all time, played a central role in the development of northern Brazil.  He laid down a 1,200 mile telegraph line in the Amazon, at the time considered one of the world’s greatest achievements (radio telegraphy made this obsolete, however).  He was Teddie Roosevelt’s guide for two years, published over one hundred papers, and advocated rationalism, tolerance, and a Comtean version of progress.  Rondon’s indigenous background has made him a hero of another sort as well.  Recommended.

Note also that Ethan Mollick’s Co-Intelligence is coming out in April, likely to be very good.  I haven’t seen it yet.

What should I ask Fuchsia Dunlop?

Yes I will be doing a third (!) Conversation with her.  She has written some of the best books and cooked some of the best food.  Here is her Wikipedia page.  Here is her home page.

Here is her new book — self-recommending if anything was — Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food.

Here is my previous podcast with Fuchsia, and here is my first podcast with her.  This time around — what should I ask?

The Burial

I loved The Burial on Amazon Prime. Not because it’s a great movie but because it serves as a cinematic representation of my academic paper with Eric Helland, Race, Poverty, and American Tort Awards. Be warned—this isn’t a spoiler-free discussion, but the plot points are largely predictable.

The Burial is a legal drama based on real events starring Jamie Foxx as Willie Gary, a flashy personal injury lawyer who takes the case of Jeremiah O’Keefe, a staid funeral home operator played by Tommy Lee Jones. O’Keefe is suing a Canadian conglomerate over a contract dispute and he hires Gary because he’s suing in a majority black district where Gary has been extremely successful at bringing cases (always black clients against big corporations).

As a drama, I’d rate the film a B-. The major failing is the implausible friendship between the young, black, flamboyant Willie Gary and the older, white subdued Jeremiah O’Keefe. Frankly, the pair lack chemistry and the viewer is left puzzled about the foundation of their friendship. The standout performance belongs to Jurnee Smollett, who excels as the whip-smart opposing counsel.

What makes The Burial interesting, however, is that it tells two stories about Willie Gary and the lawsuits. The veneer is that Gary is a crusading lawyer who uncovers abuse to bring justice. Most reviews review the veneer. Hence we are told this is a David versus Goliath story, a Rousing True Story and a story about the “dogged pursuit of justice.” The veneer is there to appease the simple minded, an interpretation solidified by The Telegraph which writes, without hint of irony:

The audience at the showing was basically adult and they applauded at the end which you often see in children’s movies but rarely in adult films.

The real story is that Gary is a huckster who wins cases in poor, black districts using a combination of racial resentment and homespun black-church preaching to persuade juries to redistribute the wealth from out-of-state big corporations to local knuckleheads. I use the latter term without approbation. Indeed, Gary says as much in his opening trial where he persuades the jury to give his “drunk”, “tanked” “wasted”, “no-good”, “depressed,” “suicidal” client, $75 million dollars for being hit by a truck! Why award damages against the corporation? Because, “they got the bank.” (He adds that his client had a green light–this is obviously a lie. Use  your common sense.)

My paper with Helland, Race, Poverty, and American Tort Awards, finds that tort awards during this period were indeed much higher in counties with lots of poverty, especially black poverty. We find, for example, that the average tort award in a county with 0-5% poverty was $398 thousand but rose to a whopping $2.6 million in counties with poverty rates of 35% or greater! The Burial is very open about all of this. The movie goes out of its way to explain, for example, that 2/3rds of the population of Hinds county, the county in which the trial will take place, is black and that is why Willie Gary is hired.

The case on which the movie turns is as absurd as the opening teaser about the drunk, suicidal no-good who collects $75 million. Indeed, the two trials parallel one another. The funeral home conglomerate, the Loewen group, offered to buy three of O’Keefe’s funeral homes but after shaking on a deal they didn’t sign the contract. That’s it. That’s the dispute. The whole premise is bizarre as Loewen could have walked away at any time. Moreover, O’Keefe claims huge damages–$100 million!–when it’s obvious that O’Keefe’s entire failing business isn’t worth anywhere near as much. So why the large claim of damages? Have you not being paying attention? Because the Loewen group, “they got the bank.”

Furthermore, and in parallel with the earlier case, it’s O’Keefe who is the no-gooder. O’Keefe’s business is failing because he has taken money from burial insurance premiums–money that didn’t belong to him and that should have been invested conservatively to pay out awards–and lost it all in a high-risk venture run by a scam artist. Negligence at best and potential fraud at worst. Moreover, in a strange scene motivated by what actually happened, O’Keefe agrees to sell to Loewen only if he gets to keep a monopoly on the burial insurance market. Thus, it’s O’Keefe who is the one scheming to maintain high prices.

Indeed, the whole point of both of Gary’s cases is that he is such a great lawyer that he can win huge awards even for no-good clients. As if this wasn’t obvious enough, there is an extended discussion of Willie Gary’s hero….the great Johnnie Cochran, most famous for getting a murderer set free.

Loewen should have won the case easily on summary judgment but, of course, [spoiler alert!] the charismatic Gary wows the judge and the jury with entirely irrelevant tales of racial resentment and envy. The jury eats it up and reward O’Keefe with $100 million in compensatory damages and $400 million in punitive damages! The awards are entirely without reason or merit. The awards drive the noble Canadians of the Loewen group out of business.

The Burial is a courtroom drama surfaced with only the thinnest of veneers to let the credulous walk away feeling that justice was done. But for anyone with willing eyes, the interplay of racism, poverty, and resentment is truthfully presented and the resulting miscarriage of justice is plain to see. I enjoyed it. 

Addendum: My legal commentary pertains only to the case as presented in the movie although in that respect the movie hews reasonably close to the facts.