Results for “assorted links” 6337 found
The Intellectual Roots of YIMBYism
At the Democratic National Convention former President Obama came out strongly in favor of housing deregulation saying “we need to build more homes and clear away some of the outdated laws and regulations that make it harder to build homes”. Robert Kwasny asks on X, “What are the intellectual roots of present-day YIMBYism?”
Looking at MR I think the first truly YIMBY post was a 2005 guest post by Tim Harford, Red tape and housing prices, pointing to a Slate article by Steven Landsburg. Here’s Landsburg:
Instead of the traditional formula “housing price equals land price + construction costs + reasonable profit,” we seem to be seeing something more like “housing price equals land price + constructions costs + reasonable profit + mystery component.” And, most interestingly, the mystery component varies a lot from city to city.
Even in cities like San Francisco, where there’s little room to build and land is consequently dear (on the order of $85,000 per quarter acre, compared with $2,200 for Dallas), you can’t use land prices to explain away housing prices. The mystery component in San Francisco housing—that is, the amount left over when you subtract land prices and construction costs from house prices—is the highest in the country.
Edward Glaeser of Harvard and Joe Gyourko of the University of Pennsylvania have computed these mystery components for about two dozen American cities. They speculate that the mystery component is essentially a “zoning tax.” That is, zoning and other restrictions put a brake on competitive forces and keep housing prices up. (Read one of their papers here.)
Zoning’s Steep Price, the Glaeser and Gyourko paper is actually from 2002 (a popular version of their NBER piece presented that same year at the NYFed) so you can see back in the old days it took years for ideas to circulate even among the bloggers! Nevertheless, 22 years from NBER paper to Presidential campaign is a great accomplishment. I see Glaeser and Gyourko as the YIMBY fountainhead. All hail Glaeser and Gyourko!
MR continued to promote housing deregulation on and off for years but I think it picked up around 2017 which is when the first YIMBY reference I can find on MR appeared in an assorted link. Here’s Tyler in 2017 pointing to a job market paper on how regulation increases housing prices and here is me in early 2018 on Why Housing in California is Unaffordable. The increase in research on this topic gave us something to talk about which is an interesting model of how ideas are transmitted.
Kwasny also wonders why Democrats seem to have picked up YIMBY more than Republicans, especially given that deregulation, anti-zoning, pro-growth, pro-developers would seem more compatible with Republican rhetoric and political support. Indeed, Zoning’s Steep Price was published in Cato’s Regulation and the assorted link which introduced YIMBY to MR was to an article blaming YIMBY on libertarians, Peter Theil and tech bros! (Congratulations Jeremy Stoppelman for an extremely effective EA donation!)
While it might have started out as being coded libertarian, Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias are to be credited with pushing YIMBY and housing growth among Democratic elites. (Jon Favreau, an Obama speech writer, says Obama sounds like Ezra Klein!) But it’s not too late for Republicans to come home. Can’t we all agree on building more? Read Bryan Caplan in the NYTimes and buy his book!
Addendum: Tyler traces the intellectual roots of YIMBY back much further to Nicolas Barbon’s An Apology for the Builder which is also recommended by Marc Andreessen. For Britain, Sam Bowman points Mark Pennington’s excellent 2002 monograph Liberating the Land: The Case for Private Land-Use Planning (pdf).
MR and Guinea (Conakry), a short history (from my email)
I will not double indent:
“Dear Tyler,
I am a great fan. I am currently focused on Guinea (Conakry) and wondered what you might have posted about the country over the years. My search for “Guinea” in Marginal Revolution results in 50 posts:
- In 13 of them you are referring to “guinea pigs”.
- In 9 of them you are referring to “Papua New Guinea”.
- In 9 you refer to “Equatorial Guinea”.
- In 5 of there is no explicit mention of Guinea (I assume the reference to Guinea can be found if one follows the links?)
- In 4 you refer to “Guinea Bissau”.
- In 4 you refer to “Guinea”, the country of that name with capital in Conakry
- In 3 the reference is to the broader region (Gulf of Guinea, etc).
- One reference to the island of “New Guinea”.
- One reference to the “guinea worm”.
- One reference to “guineas” as in the coins.
Of the references to the country of Guinea, one refers to Bembeya Jazz (good one!), another to press coverage from that country on the DSK affair in 2011, one mentions Guinea as one of the countries of origin for Africans in Guangzhou, and a final one appropriately mentions it on the topic of “Wikipedia knowledge deserts”.
None of these is a dedicated post to the country, something each of the other Guineas does enjoy on Marginal Revolution. I wondered if you might consider redressing the balance?
If it helps, here I write for the Centre for African Studies at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University on how Asian demand, investment and policies is driving a mining boom in Guinea. Guinea is posed to be one of the top 2 growing economies in the world over the next five years on the back of the $20 billion Simandou iron ore mining project. You heard it here first!
Cordialement,
Bernabé Sánchez”
Response from Devin Pope, on religious attendance
All of this is from Devin Pope, in response to Lyman Stone (and myself). Here was my original post on the paper, concerning the degree of religious attendance. I won’t double indent, but here is Devin and Devin alone:
“I’m super grateful for Lyman’s willingness to engage with my recent research on measuring religious worship attendance using cellphone data. Lyman and I have been able to go back and forth a bit on Twitter/X, but I thought it might be useful to send a review of this to you Tyler.
For starters, I appreciate that Lyman and I agree on a lot of stuff about the paper. He has been very kind by sharing that he agrees that many parts of my paper are interesting and “very cool work”. Where we disagree is about whether the cellphone data can provide a useful estimate for population-wide estimates of worship attendance. Specifically, Lyman’s concerns are that due to people leaving their cellphones at home when they go to church and due to questionable cellphone coverage that might exist within church buildings, the results could be super biased. He sums up his critiques well with the following: “Exactly how big these effects are is anyone’s guess. But I really think you should consider just saying, `This isn’t a valid way of estimating aggregate religious behavior. But it’s a great way to look at some unique patterns of behavior among the religious!’ Don’t make a bold claim with a bunch of caveats, just make the claim you actually have really great data for!” This a very reasonable critique and I’m grateful for him making it.
My first response to Lyman’s concerns is: we agree! I try to be super careful in how the paper is written to discuss these exact concerns that Lyman raises. Even the last line of the abstract indicates, “While cellphone data has limitations, this paper provides a unique way of understanding worship attendance and its correlates.”
Here is where we differ though… To my knowledge, there have been just 2 approaches used to estimate the number of Americans who go to worship services weekly (say, 75% of the time): Surveys that ask people “do you go to religious services weekly?” and my paper using cell phone data. It is a very hard question to answer. Time-use surveys, counting cars in parking lots, and other methods don’t allow for estimating the number of people who are frequent religious attenders because of their repeated cross-sectional designs.
There are definitely limitations with the cellphone data (I’ve had about 100 people tell me that I’m not doing a good job tracking Orthodox Jews!). I know that these issues exist. But survey data has its own issues. Social desirability bias and other issues could lead to widely incorrect estimates of the number of people who frequently attend services (and surveys are going to have a hard time sampling Orthodox Jews too!). Given the difficulty of measuring some of these questions, I think that a new method – even with limitations – is useful.
At the end of the day, one has to think hard about the degree of bias of various methods and think about how much weight to put on each. The degree of bias is also where Lyman and I disagree. In my paper, I document that the cell phone data do not do a great job of predicting the number of people who go to NBA basketball games and the number of people who go to AMC theaters. I both undercount overall attendance and don’t predict differences across NBA stadiums well at all.
The reason why Lyman is able to complain about those results so vociferously is because I’m trying to be super honest and include those results in the paper! And I don’t try to hide them. On page 2 of the paper I note: “Not all data checks are perfect. For example, I undercount the number of people who go to an AMC theater or attend NBA basketball games and provide a discussion of these mispredictions.”
There are many other data checks that look really quite good. For example, here is a Table from the paper that compares cellphone visits as predicted by the cellphone data with actual visits using data from various companies:
The cellphone predictions in the above table tend to do a decent job predicting many population-wide estimates of attendance to a variety of locations. The one large miss is AMC theaters where we undercount attendance by 30%. Now about half of that undercount is because the data are missing a chunk of AMC theaters (this is not due to a cellphone pinging issue, but due to a data construction issue). But even if one were to make that correction, we undercount theater attendance by 15%.
Lyman argues that one should be especially worried about undercounting worship attendance due to people leaving their phones at home. I agree that this is a huge concern that is specific to religious worship and doesn’t apply in the same way for trips to Walmart. I run and report results from a Prolific Survey (N=5k) that finds that 87% of people who attend worship regularly indicate that they “always” or “almost always” take their phone to services with them. So definitely some people are leaving their phones at home, but this survey can help guide our thinking about how large that bias might be. Are Prolific participants representative of the US as a whole? Certainly not. There is additional bias that one should think about in that regard.
Overall, my view is that estimating population-wide estimates for how many people attend religious services weekly is super hard and cellphone data has limitations. My view is that other methods (surveys) also have substantial limitations. I do not think the cellphone data limitations are as large as Lyman thinks they are and stand by the last line of the abstract that once again states, “While cellphone data has limitations, this paper provides a unique way of understanding worship attendance and its correlates.”
All of that was Devin Pope!
Claims about Iran (from the comments)
MR commentator “Sure” on YIMBY
People talk about YIMBY as though it will mean more high rise apartments. And maybe it would in New York or San Francisco, though I have my doubts.
But what people want from their housing is overwhelmingly a short commute and low density.
Currently, the neighborhoods that offer the best tradeoff for these are the priciest in most metropolitan areas. Georgetown, Arlington, Falls Church, Chevy Chase, Great Falls, McLean … all of them offer shorter commutes into DC (or other key job locations like the Pentagon).
And what have YIMBY’s won? Well in Arlington and Alexandria they can now build multifamily housing in places that were once reserved for SFH.
Suppose they do, who is going to move in? The guys who are buying in Chantilly because they want space? Or the guys crowded into a apartment building in NE DC who work in Foggy Bottom?
I submit it will be the latter.
End of the day, Americans want to live in the burbs and the country. If we liberalize zoning everywhere (i.e. the YIMBY dream) then we should expect a net movement from the areas where people say they don’t want to live to the areas where they say they want to live.
And on net that means out of the urban core and into something less dense. Most likely that means leaving the high rises and moving into low rises or multiplexes. End of the day, it will be moving from high density to lower density.
And this will create tensions between maintaining SFH in burbs as opposed to multiplexing them or building low rises.
I have no idea if the price will be the thing that gives – it may rise because the land has suddenly gotten more valuable for a teardown to low rise conversion. This would bring down “housing” prices, but quite possibly increase the cost of detached single family homes as the supply of that specific housing class diminishes. Possibly, the low rises will reduce demand for SFH more than teardowns and foregone SFH developments.
But if that does happen, it means that a lot of suburban areas are going to have a bunch of new residents and voters who are not keen to live the SFH lifestyle. And that is all but certainly going to mean disamenity for the SFH lifers. That may be new local politics, investment in public transportation at the expense of road maintenance, or declining school quality.
But end of the day, if YIMBYism allows people to live as they want because the market can better match demand, then the net flow has to be out of the oversubscribed cities. And the big reason people say they live urban when they would prefer otherwise is to be close to the jobs. This strongly suggests that YIMBY will end up resulting less in skyscrapering the cities and more in multiplexing the burbs.
Outside of a handful of cities with extremely harsh geographic constraints (e.g. NYC, SF), upzoning the burbs will likely eat into the city cores more than new folks will move to the city cores.
Of course there is always the immigration question. With enough immigration, even the cities will fill (i.e. both NYC and SF are already more than a third foreign born), but if we confine ourselves to current residents they want out and they want a short commute.
Here is the link, via Naveen K.
From the comments, space daddy edition
Benny Lava
2. Personal quibble but I hate the direct links to twitter because I can’t read the comments since I don’t have an account. Wish there was a better system to post threads from twitter.
By far the easiest way to handle this is to get an account with twitter.
Anonymous
If you want to use their service, you should probably get an account. They’re free.
Benny Lava
That is precisely the problem. I don’t want to use their service.
Anonymous
You seem to want to use their service. You want the information contained there, as per your 13:33:30 post.
Reason
He’s big sads that space daddy took away his Lefty playground.
Here is the link to the debate.
On the five-year breakeven rate (from the comments)
The market for TIPS isn’t deep enough for the market-implied breakeven rates to be a reliable signal. Making a sizable bet on future inflation rates requires leverage, and there aren’t exchange-traded TIPS futures to provide that leverage. Hedge funds that want to make this trade will instead enter an inflation swap contract with a bank. That activity only ends up being reflected in market-implied breakevens to the extent that the bank hedges by buying or selling TIPS in the swap market. This is atypical – the bank would hedge much if its exposure by entering offsetting swap contracts with other counterparties.
A real measurement of market expectations for inflation would need to include those swap transactions. The TIPS spot market is a biased and somewhat price-insensitive corner of the market, driven by buyers like target date funds that have a mandate to have an X% allocation to TIPS.
That is from an Alex in the comments.
From the comments, on Covid
We are just now evaluating vaccines based on the initial Omicron variant, which emerged seven months ago. They are only a moderate improvement on the status quo, in part because we have gone through several iterations of the variant since then. Because they are probably better but might not be that much better, Offit’s advice is even more delay while we study even more.
We have basically enshrined a process that guarantees vaccine development will be far behind the progress of the virus, the bad process itself being its own self fulfilling prophecy because the lag ensures the results will be worse.
The capability of mRNA vaccines to be quickly adapted to the disease is not being leveraged.
That is from Dan1111. And this is from Naveen K:
The Left in the last two weeks has said they’re for imposing mask mandates (coming soon in LA county) and Fauci restated his support for masks last week. All this while Biden WH saying Biden getting COVID isn’t a big deal.
On Nebraska (from the comments)
Seven-year Nebraskan here: Nebraksa is a well-governed semi-socialist polity effectively managed by competent antihero big businesses). This is all largely based out of business-Mecca Omaha. Business/govt relations are rather close. Governor Ricketts is brother to TDAmeritrade founder Joe Ricketts, Warren Buffet weighs in on the Omaha mayoral elections [1], real-estate taxes go to schools, [2] etc. There’s a tremendous amount of business/professional culture to match, and also a hometown/togetherness ensuring academia and healthcare are well-provisioned. CWT guest Ben Sasse best demonstrates these qualities. This comes at a cost of stopping taxation arbitrage -> eventual taxing of the burbs (Omaha annexing the wealthy Elkhorn suburb was the most notable political fight), the gradual Omaha-ization of Nebraska. Smaller counties struggle, and indeed some younger friends tell stories of their county struggling to keep the lights on when Bass Pro Shop dropped the store there. But one thing is certain – Omaha marches on.
Omaha has an effective moat (a business-only, low-arts town w/ awful weather) against a more radical political activist crowd that might ruin the flow of Omaha. Other companies are taking note – Google is building a new data center here, for instance.
This is all deliberate. Put yourself in enough fancy enough Nebraskan rooms and you will hear about how this is done – scholarships, targeting double-income-no-kids (DINKs) with things like dog parks, regular hosting of brief entertainment to draw crowds (CWS and Olympic trials) but not enough to draw the worst types of audience (drunk NFL fans). Omahans accordingly have an eagle eye for their city – ask them about Conagra’s HQ move and they will spend half an hour explaining to you how they were wronged.
Alas, the signs of Omaha experiencing larger business-town problems are sort-of on the way. For one thing, Omaha businesses were notably less woke when Trump was elected, and far more woke now, reflecting a greater influence of federal politics/topics, although it is hard to tell whether our businesses influence politics or our politicians influence our businesses. For another, the typical issues of more prominent cities are here – WestO, NorthO and SouthO are three different entirely towns divided by race/income pretty clearly. First National Bank of Omaha holds the original copy of the Louisiana Purchase, which ought to be visible to the public at a museum if you could ensure that BLM rioters wouldn’t destroy it. (Un)fortunately, the LP is hidden at the top of the building in a high-security office…
The real problem that Omaha faces is that while SF’s top guns are in their early thirties-fifties, Omaha’s leaders are in their early seventies to late nineties, and there is no guarantee that the next generation is up to the task. Culture changes when new people come in with new ideas, and there is no guarantee that Omaha’s next generation doesn’t ruin it for everyone.
I do find it odd, and perhaps a little too prescient, that some Omaha employers fitted their employees with emergency preparedness plans/WFH gear shortly before the pandemic, but this isn’t the point. The point is that Nebraska is an extremely intriguing place. The fact that there are only this many comments suggests MR audience does not take Nebraska seriously enough.
[1] https://jeanstothert.com/warren-buffett-endorses-mayor-stothert/
[2] https://omaha.com/news/state-and-regional/govt-and-politics/effort-to-revamp-nebraska-school-aid-ease-property-taxes-ends-for-now/article_98379cde-8b68-11ec-be12-affd05439f05.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elkhorn,_Omaha,_Nebraska
That is from Harvey Bungus.
From the comments, on Putin and Russia
I shall continue with my bad news from my Russian source. Apparently media in Russia are continuing to spout the brazen lie that US troops are in Ukraine (a few advisers are). I have also heard that apparently he is also ticked at Xi Jinping, apparently having not been met by any Chinese when he landed in Beijing, only the Russian ambassador. David Ignatius reports that Xi is “skeptical of Putin’s overbearing manner and disdain for rules” may be a two-way street.
What worries me is his isolation and egomania. While Xi is rational, Ignatius reports that Putin seems to have some delusions. The worst apparently is the one W. Bush had about iraq before going in, that he will be welcomed as a liberator, at least by the native Russian-speaking minority. it is now pretty clear that even in relatively pro-Russia places like Kharkiv, they do not want him coming in at all. He also has gotten the idea that taking Ukraine is a “sacred” cause, ugh.
I had long been thinking he would not invade, partly following the views of my friends in Kyiv on this, where even now they are probably more complacent than many others. But this latest stuff from Putin has me more seriously worried. I think Xi has him so he will not go while the Winter Olympics are on, but around Feb. 20 looks like a dangerous moment, the end of those and also the supposed end of the war games in Belarus. Officially his troops there are supposed to go home. But they could easily decide to do otherwise about then.
It is a combination of his delusions, isolation, and clearly mounting egomania on the part of Putin that have me the most worried now, and I am.
That is from J. Barkley Rosser, who has longstanding connections with Russia and the USSR.
More energy shocks, and it was crazy to move away from nuclear power
The global energy crunch forced a German electricity producer to halt a power plant after it ran out of coal.
Steag GmbH closed its Bergkamen-A plant in the western part of the country this week due to shortages of hard coal, it said by email. The closure is the first sign that Europe may need to count on mild and windy weather to keep the lights on as the continent faces shortages of natural gas and coal is unlikely to come to rescue.
Energy prices are soaring from the U.S. to Europe and Asia as economies rebound from a pandemic-induced lull and people return to the office. The shortage is so acute that China ordered its state-owned companies to secure supplies at all costs and Europe is burning more of its already depleted stocks of the dirtiest of fossil fuel, a move that may complicate climate talks next month.
Here is much more from at Bloomberg. Coal is trading at record-high prices, but is this doing us or the environment much good? You need something to substitute into!
I would like to repeat my earlier question in earnest. Was anyone forecasting all these energy shortages even a month ago?
Via Anton Maier.
From the comments, on Covid and our response
It is simply not a tenable policy to oppose pandemic lockdowns on the premise that COVID-19 only negatively affects a certain portion of the population. First, the fact that COVID-19 disproportionately killed the elderly was not something that was readily apparent right out of the box, when the virus was spreading rapidly. Hindsight is 20-20. Second, focusing solely on mortality is short-sighted given that approximately one-third of all people who get over COVID-19 suffer “long haul” symptoms that persist for months and may even be permanent in some. We cannot simply claim that the non-elderly have no reason to fear COVID-19.
So far, COVID-19 has killed more Americans than we lost in World War II, and it took the war five years to do what the virus did in one year. Even though the majority of the deaths were 65+, these are staggering numbers. Losing well over 100,000 people under the age of 65 in one year alone is nothing to sneeze at, and that’s with lock-downs and other harsh measures being taken. A “let them live their lives” approach would doubtlessly have escalated those numbers greatly.
The best early policy for any pandemic is to ramp up rapid testing as fast as possible, and test people constantly. A widespread testing regime (like in South Korea) would allow uninfected people to live more or less normally, while stifling the spread of the virus by identifying infected people quickly so they can immediately quarantine and prevent further spread. [Alex’s] earlier post on Testing and the NFL is instructive on that point. Such a testing regime could have enabled us to avoid harsher measures later on. But, unfortunately, America was led at the time by a president who did not prioritize testing (and in fact discouraged it to hide the spread of the virus) and sought to pooh-pooh its danger, shrugging off even the slightest mitigation efforts, like masks. Even after he got it, and was hospitalized, almost put on a ventilator, he acted as though it was nothing. That leadership caused a dangerous cognitive dissonance in public perceptions of COVID-19 — a dissonance that is causing people to take unreasonable risks, refuse to get vaccinated, and otherwise take actions that will make it even harder for us to get out from under this pandemic.
Focusing on the Great Barrington Declaration itself, the big problem with its approach is that it presumes that “herd immunity” will naturally occur with COVID-19 at some point. The evidence indicates, however, that natural infection does not lead to permanent immunity. The worse a person’s symptoms from COVID-19, the longer their immunity lasts, but that’s it. The only immunity that is possible now is through vaccination, and even that will require yearly updates as the virus mutates as it is already doing. Eventually we will have it under control. But the suggestion that people under 65 can just safely infect themselves into herd immunity is likely an impossibility, and certainly not a good enough foundation to rest any pandemic policy on. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00728-2
None of this is meant to minimize or challenge the obvious economic and mental health effects of certain pandemic policies. There are a great many costs being imposed by lock-downs and other policies. Businesses are failing and not coming back, jobs are being permanently lost, people are feeling isolated, on and on. All of that is tragic, and could have been largely avoided had we aggressively pursued testing (especially rapid-result testing) from the outset. When the next pandemic comes, I hope our descendants remember that lesson. Because once the pandemic started spreading because we didn’t get a testing regime in place, it was too late, and then the harsher policies became inevitable. The horse was out of the barn, and the game changed for good.
That is from James N. Markels, responding to Don Boudreaux in these comments.
Here is another way to put the broader argument, not my preferred first-order response, but I think significant nonetheless. Given the way government and public choice work, anything that kills over half a million Americans is going to be a big deal for policy, whether we like it or not (Don should be the first to recognize that government will restrict your liberties for far less than 500k deaths!). You want the best feasible version of a response, as there isn’t really a stable libertarian response pattern out there. Trying partial but non-sustainable libertarian approaches will in the end get you more and more statism as the virus keeps on defeating you, deaths rise, and calls for ever-greater state action increase. A lot of what libertarians don’t like about lockdowns in part stems from the “do nothing” response of the first two months of notice that we Americans had when Covid first appeared in China.
Yes it is all coordinated
Comments section reform is coming to MR. Yes, we will replace you. Soon (but not today). Habermasian freedom shall reign and the sun will shine ever so brightly!
Herd Immunity is Herd Immunity
Some assorted thoughts:
In the big picture, the efficacious of a vaccine doesn’t matter per se what matters is getting to herd immunity. If you have a less efficacious vaccine you need to vaccinate more people but herd immunity is herd immunity, i.e. vaccines mostly protect people not because they are efficacious but because we reach herd immunity. I’ve never had measles mostly because I have probably never been challenged with measles not because I have been challenged but due to a vaccine I fought it off. The AZ vaccine at 70% efficacious will work just fine. (One potential issue, as Josh Gans notes, we don’t yet have data on transmission reduction which could vary by vaccine.)
As I mentioned in The Vaccine Works Fast, the first shot of the Pfizer vaccine seems to work well enough so that one *might* consider delaying the second dose a few weeks to get the first dose out more widely. In fact, the accidental low-dose, standard-dose regime for the AZ vaccine had people getting the second dose 7 to 8 weeks after the first dose and that was the 90% efficacious regime. We don’t have full-information but the exact timing of the second-dose does not seem critical, although everyone should get a second dose.
A related point is that we could mix and match vaccines. The UK will run a trial on this question. Mix and matching has two potentially good properties. First, mix and matching could make the immune system response stronger than either vaccine alone because different vaccines stimulate the immune system in different ways. Second, it could help with distribution. It’s going to be easier to scale up the AZ vaccine than the mRNA vaccines, so if we can use both widely we can get more bang for our shot. (As Tyler has noted the British have really stepped up on rational trial design.)
The mRNA vaccines are getting the press but for the world as a whole the AZ, Chinese, Russian and similar more traditional vaccines are going to be the big players because facilities exist for scaling them up around the world.
Addendum: Countries in the world that now have a vaccine: the UK, Canada, Bahrain, China, Russia. One country without a vaccine: the United States. The US FDA advisory committee is meeting today. You can watch here.
From the comments, on HCTs
The box most bioethicists are in is so small their thinking can’t extend beyond a few target people. In this case, the control group in a vaccine trial.
The subjects could be paid for the risk, which is what we do for jobs all the time. Those risk/reward amounts for risky jobs are used to make estimates for the value of human life. Life insurance would allow high-risk people (us geezers) to join the trials.
Their box doesn’t even consider human challenge trials (HCT) that give you very rapid and accurate data on efficacy even with pay and insurance to cover the risk. The lives saved by a month faster approval is in the 10’s of thousands more than offsetting and risk to a few people. Tracking the first million doses for side effects would provide the side effect data that is usually within days of injection.
Outside their mental box, 1000 people per day are dying for each day they study the issue and delay a decision, but those lives are not included in their thinking and analysis.
That is from Dallas. I would stress there are higher costs yet from delay, noting the hundreds of millions of people in developing nations who are falling back into poverty while the pandemic continues to rage. Some of them are dying too.
I don’t myself have a good sense of those issues, but I thought this gjk comment was interesting enough to pass along.