1) Sure looks like our measures against Covid have killed off the flu, thanks to flu’s notably lower R0:
Why is this happening? The push to get more people vaccinated against the flu this fall to avert the feared twindemic may have had some impact, but that doesn’t explain why flu incidence plummeted last spring. The obvious explanation is simply that the things that individuals and governments have been doing to slow the spread of Covid-19 have brought the spread of influenza, a respiratory disease that is transmitted in similar, if not identical fashion, to a screeching halt.
These measures have likely been more effective against influenza than against Covid because influenza is so much less contagious than Covid. A rough measure of contagiousness is the basic reproduction number — the number of people each person with the disease can be expected to infect if everyone behaves normally. For seasonal influenza it’s about 1.3, in flu pandemics it’s been higher than that but still below 2. For Covid-19 it’s probably somewhere between 2 and 4.
Mask-wearing, working from home, banning large gatherings and other social distancing measures — together with more people acquiring immunity by contracting Covid-19 — seem to have brought Covid’s effective reproduction number in the U.S. down to not much more than 1. (When last I checked the estimates on rt.live, Tennessee had the highest rate at 1.22 and Wyoming the lowest at 0.85.) By all appearances, that’s also pushed the effective reproduction number for the flu down well below 1.
One lesson from this is that the oft-heard lament that U.S. and many European countries have failed in battling the pandemic is wrong. Sure, a quick glance at East Asia makes clear that the West could have done much, much better. But given how successful we’ve been at halting the flu, it seems clear that we’ve also been successful at slowing down Covid. The resurgence of the disease this fall has been bad, but it could have been much, much worse.
Another lesson is that “non-pharmaceutical interventions,” the term of art for all the things we’ve been doing to slow Covid’s spread while waiting for vaccines, ought to be a bigger part of the toolkit for battling the flu. That’s not to say we should close all the borders and restaurants every winter, but lower-cost measures such as taking hand-washing seriously, wearing a mask when you don’t feel well, working from home if you’ve been exposed and keeping sick visitors and workers away from nursing homes could save thousands of lives every year. And if a new pandemic flu strain comes along that’s as deadly as, say, the 1918 variety (which was much deadlier than Covid-19, especially for young people), costlier interventions would almost certainly be worth the price.
2) Craig Stirling on the shocking fact that tax cuts for the rich don’t actually trickle down:
Tax cuts for rich people breed inequality without providing much of a boon to anyone else, according to a study of the advanced world that could add to the case for the wealthy to bear more of the cost of the coronavirus pandemic.
The paper, by David Hope of the London School of Economics and Julian Limberg of King’s College London, found that such measures over the last 50 years only really benefited the individuals who were directly affected, and did little to promote jobs or growth.
“Policy makers shouldn’t worry that raising taxes on the rich to fund the financial costs of the pandemic will harm their economies,” Hope said in an interview.
That will be comforting news to U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak, whose hopes of repairing the country’s virus-battered public finances may rest on his ability to increase taxes, possibly on capital gains — a levy that might disproportionately impact higher-earning individuals.
It would also suggest the economy could weather a one-off 5% tax on wealth suggested for Britain last week by the Wealth Tax Commission, which would affect about 8 million residents.
The authors applied an analysis amalgamating a range of levies on income, capital and assets in 18 OECD countries, including the U.S. and U.K., over the past half century.
Their findings published Wednesday counter arguments, often made in the U.S., that policies which appear to disproportionately aid richer individuals eventually feed through to the rest of the economy. The timespan of the paper ends in 2015, but Hope says such an analysis would also apply to President Donald Trump’s tax cut enacted in 2017.
3) I finally get HBO Max for my Roku, and, apparently, Wonder Woman to thank. Also, so much damn good content today, but, alas, for the simpler times of cable television and that was it:
To be fair, though, the issue of not having every streaming service on every device wasn’t a HBO-Max-and-Roku-specific problem. It’s more like one particular beachhead in the ongoing streaming wars. A couple years ago, the worry was that every media company would start its own streaming service and everyone would get nickel-and-dimed paying for monthly subscription fees. In the last 13 months, with the launch of Disney+, HBO Max, Apple TV+, and Peacock, that’s pretty much come to pass. But those launches were also accompanied by an ever growing prevalence of connected TVs and streaming devices, from Fire TV sticks to Chromecasts. Because each gadget and each platform has its own set of partners, it might not even be possible to have one single configuration that provides all the vitamins and minerals any one person needs to satisfy their media diet. (Peacock had similar issues with Amazon and Roku when it launched over the summer.) So we’re left improvising and compromising. Oh, and that doesn’t even factor in any one person’s gaming consoles of choice, which is a whole other nightmare.
4) My favorite thing about Brian Beutler is how he relentlessly calls out the bad faith (read the thread).
5) Amazing and heartbreaking story of a Mexican woman single-handedly seeking justice against her daughter’s kidnappers and killers. I feel like the fact that we border a disastrously murderous, near failed state is something we should care about more. A lot more, for example, than the Middle East.
6) So, once Yglesias offered the educator rate for his substack, I ponied up and subscribed. And, so far, it’s totally worth it. Loved this piece, for example on Trump’s gains with Latino voters. Especially this portion on the misguidedness of identitarian politics:
There’s a kind of tedious debate that goes on endlessly in progressive circles between, on the one hand, those who urge us to “listen to Black women!” or otherwise defer to the lived experience of people in marginalized groups, and on the other, people like Matt Bruenig and Jonathan Chait who denounce what’s known academically as standpoint epistemology and what Bruenig has popularized among anti-woke leftists as identitarian deference. Here, the critics pound the table in favor of objective truth, while the proponents insist on the situated nature of knowledge.
I think a smarter critique and ultimately a better path forward comes from the Georgetown philosopher Olúfémi O. Táíwò who calls on us to pay more attention to who is actually being deferred to (emphasis added):
I think it’s less about the core ideas and more about the prevailing norms that convert them into practice. The call to “listen to the most affected” or “centre the most marginalized” is ubiquitous in many academic and activist circles. But it’s never sat well with me. In my experience, when people say they need to “listen to the most affected”, it isn’t because they intend to set up Skype calls to refugee camps or to collaborate with houseless people. Instead, it has more often meant handing conversational authority and attentional goods to those who most snugly fit into the social categories associated with these ills – regardless of what they actually do or do not know, or what they have or have not personally experienced. In the case of my conversation with Helen, my racial category tied me more “authentically” to an experience that neither of us had had. She was called to defer to me by the rules of the game as we understood it. Even where stakes are high – where potential researchers are discussing how to understand a social phenomenon, where activists are deciding what to target – these rules often prevail.
But the piece is more complicated than the simple observation that the members of marginalized groups that we are exhorted to listen to are often a relatively elite sub-set of the groups. You should really read the whole thing (it’s not long) but I’ll just excerpt one more paragraph that I think is relevant:
Deference epistemology marks itself as a solution to an epistemic and political problem. But not only does it fail to solve these problems, it adds new ones. One might think questions of justice ought to be primarily concerned with fixing disparities around health care, working conditions, and basic material and interpersonal security. Yet conversations about justice have come to be shaped by people who have ever more specific practical advice about fixing the distribution of attention and conversational power. Deference practices that serve attention-focused campaigns (e.g. we’ve read too many white men, let’s now read some people of colour) can fail on their own highly questionable terms: attention to spokespeople from marginalized groups could, for example, direct attention away from the need to change the social system that marginalizes them.
Political “work” is overwhelmingly done by college graduates, most of them younger than the median voter. That’s true on formal political campaigns, but also inside activist and policy organizations and the foundations that fund them. Nobody would be so foolhardy as to believe that listening to the young whiter staffers at a progressive nonprofit constitutes listening to white people in a sense that would help you appeal to the marginal white voter.
But a lot of progressive spaces have, as Táíwò suggests, adopted norms that essential do this with young, college-educated non-white staffers.
And this happens even though young, left-wing, college-educated Black, Latin, and Asian people are as aware as anyone else — if not much more so! — that their older, more working-class relatives do not, in fact, share the values and language of young activists or junior faculty. But not only do progressives fail to “center” the perspectives of working-class people of color, efforts to note their cross-pressured political views are often actively stigmatized.
So let’s be clear about this. You can see in Pew data that Black people are less likely than white ones to say that “homosexuality should be accepted by society.” And in the GSS they are more likely to say that it is “wrong for same-sex adults to have sexual relations.” This is not about blaming anybody for anything. But it is factually true that anti-LGBT views are more prevalent among African-Americans. And since anti-LGBT white people are very likely to just be Republicans, this is particularly true when you’re looking at the dynamics inside something like a Democratic Party primary. If you can’t acknowledge this as a factual matter, then you are going to struggle to do politics effectively and end up with the kind of trends Democrats saw in 2020.
At the end of the day, all the stuff progressives point to in order to paint Trump as racist is not wrong. And in electoral terms, that’s exactly the problem. It’s very easy to imagine taking the exact same policy views, pairing them with a less offensive person, and doing way better than Trump. To stop that from happening, Democrats need to pay closer attention to the actual views of the non-white population and not just “listen to” the idiosyncratic subset that does progressive politics professionally.
7) Also, learned a new term (new to me that is). Identitarian deference.
8) Zeynep’s got a substack now, too. All free, so far, at least. Good stuff on the case for prioritizing vaccinations almost exclusively by age:
But this simple fact is also true: the severity and death track one key variable more than anything else, and it’s age. The impact of age is not only huge, it’s exponential. As I wrote in my piece:
The risk profile of this disease is strikingly exponential: The risk of death for those ages 65 to 69 is a staggering two and a half times that of those just a decade younger. Those just a few years older, ages 75 to 79, face six times the risk of death compared with that same age group (ages 55 to 59). The steepness of this age curve really matters, because it means that protecting the most vulnerable groups with a highly efficacious vaccine will both quickly change our experience of the pandemic and relieve the strain on our hospitals.
It varies a little by country, but the numbers, everywhere, are staggering. In nearly all countries, almost all the deaths are from older people. In the United States, about 90% of the deaths are from people 55 and older. In Canada, it was about 95% of deaths from those above 65. In Italy, about 85 percent were 70 and older. And the gradations within those age groups are steep as well—hence the word, exponential. Unsurprisingly, severe disease and hospitalizations also track age.
When vaccinating under conditions of shortage, there are inescapable trade-offs. Obviously, vaccinating those most at risk is crucial. Transmission is always a consideration, so vaccinating people who either have a lot of contacts or have a lot of vulnerable contacts, is important. Often, as in this case, those groups do not overlap. There are also questions of equity: why should people who can work from home get the same priority as essential workers who have to work in person, and who take much higher risks? Shouldn’t those who have taken the most risk get priority?
In the end, though, we want to minimize human suffering and death. Overall, there seems to be a consensus that healthcare workers are going to be vaccinated first, along with long-term care residents, where a great majority of deaths have occurred. After that, the next question is whether to first vaccinate older people, starting with the oldest and working one’s way down the age range, or to start with essential workers, which are estimated around 80 million in this country.
It looks like the United States may first vaccinate essential workers—a category that will get defined somewhat subjectively, and according to the political power of these groups. A preliminary committee has already recommended vaccinating 80+ essential workers before vaccinating those 65 and older, and those with other conditions that put them at risk.The CDC will likely adopt this recommendation when they take up this issue on Sunday. After that, it will be up to each state to determine how they do this. Here’s what it may look like, with 85 million people being vaccinated ahead of those 65 and older.
But I’m already hearing that, for example, in Utah, a 30-year-old teacher may be vaccinated long before someone over 70 or even 80—even though the latter are at so much great risk if infected. In fact, it looks like teachers, police and food and agriculture workers will all precede adults over 65 and people with high-risk medical conditions.The predictable lobbying blitz has begun.
That is not what other countries rolling out the same vaccine are doing. For comparison, here’s the UK-wide vaccination prioritization, which sensibly ranks by risk, which corresponds to age.
9) Obviously William Barr is awful and odious. But it is honestly difficult to know what exactly to make of his last couple months and his resignation. David Rohde’s take is my favorite so far:
Former Justice Departments officials and legal experts were unequivocal in their assessment of Barr’s legacy. They credited him for breaking with Trump in the prelude to and aftermath of the election. But they predicted that he would go down in history as one of the country’s most destructive Attorneys General. “The few times Barr put the nation ahead of the President will not atone for the many times he chose the opposite. He leaves a wounded department,” Stephen Gillers, an expert in legal ethics at New York University School of Law, told me. “His tenure as Attorney General will be akin to the plague years at the Justice Department,” David Laufman, a former Justice Department official, said. “I think his tenure has been an indefensible and disgraceful betrayal of long-established norms,” Donald Ayer, a former Deputy Attorney General, noted. (The senior law-enforcement official was more magnanimous, calling Barr’s legacy a “mixed bag.”) A spokesperson for Barr did not respond to a request for comment…
Barr deserves credit for refusing to go along with Trump’s post-election de-facto coup attempt. But he also exacerbated the explosion of “alternative facts” in the Trump era. At a time when division and confusion regarding basic facts were already rampant among Americans, Barr used his position as a fact-finder to increase discord, not ease it. He decried the special-counsel probe and other investigations of Trump as politically motivated inquisitions. Whatever his intentions, his legacy will be that he then unleashed those same demons. Barr has extended the cycle of politically motivated investigations that increasingly plague American politics.
10) People getting rich (or in my case, a few extra dollars) with how dumb the Trump lovers are in the betting markets.
11) Interesting case here “”A Black Student’s Mother Complained About ‘Fences.’ He Was Expelled. A dispute about the reading of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play in an English class escalated at the mostly white Providence Day School in Charlotte, N.C.” I recently saw Fences for the first time last year. It was really good. I appreciate the mother’s particular concerns, but, ummm, play about a Black family by a Black playwright was added to the curriculum for very good reasons.
12) If you can all avoid it and you want the restaurant you are ordering from to thrive, you should avoid the third-party apps:
Under pressure to pay rent and retain workers, some restaurants turned more of their attention to delivery, particularly from app-based companies like DoorDash, UberEats and Grubhub. Few restaurants that hadn’t done delivery in the past had the time or money to create their own delivery service, which typically brings in less money than dining rooms, where customers are more apt to order more profitable items like appetizers, desserts or a second round of drinks.
These restaurants have quickly found that the apps, with their high fees and strong-arm tactics, may be a temporary lifeline, but not a savior. Fees of 30 percent or higher per order cut eateries’ razor-thin margins to the bone. And a stimulus package that would bolster the industry has stalled in Congress, even as states and municipalities enact new limits on both indoor and outdoor dining.
Restaurants are entering a critical stage as a new coronavirus surge takes hold and outdoor dining becomes less appealing during the colder months. Lawmakers can help by extending federal grants to independent restaurants that will help them close the gap in lost sales and cover payroll and other expenses. But legislators also should consider caps on the fees the apps can charge, particularly amid the pandemic, as places like New York City, San Francisco, New Jersey and Washington State have done, or risk seeing additional restaurant casualties. Officials in Colorado and Santa Clara County in California are considering similar fee limits, though app firms are pushing back by imposing $1.50 to $2 per-order charges on customers in some cities.
13) Jesse Wegman on majority rule:
First, and most fundamental: Majority rule is the only rule that treats all people as political equals. “That’s actually enormously important,” said Richard Primus, a professor at the University of Michigan law school. Any other rule inevitably treats certain votes as worth more than others. Sometimes that’s what we want, as when we require criminal juries to be unanimous in voting to convict. In that case, “there is one error that we prefer to the other error,” Mr. Primus said. “We want to make false convictions very difficult, much more rare than false acquittals.”
But in an election for the president, he said, there is no “morally relevant criterion” for departing from majority rule. Voters in one part of the country are no wiser or more worthy than voters in another. And yet the votes of those in certain states always matter more. “What could possibly justify that?” Mr. Primus asked.
This is not just an abstract numerical concern. When people’s votes are treated as unequal, it’s a short jump to treating people as unequal. Put another way, it’s not enough to say that we’re all equal before the law; we also must be able to have an equal say in the choice of the representatives who make and enforce the laws.
There is a second reason majority rule is critical: It bestows legitimacy on the system. A representative government only works when its citizens see the electoral process as fair. When that legitimacy is absent, when people perceive — often accurately — that their vote doesn’t matter, they will eventually reject the system.
“If we’re going to rule ourselves, we’re going to be ruled by majorities,” said Astra Taylor, an author and democracy activist. “There’s a stability in that idea. There’s a sense of the people deciding for themselves and buying in. That stability is incredibly valuable. The alternative is one in which we’re being ruled by something which is outside of us, whether a dictator or a technocracy or an algorithm.”
Finally,majority rule ensures electoral accountability. As the economist Amartya Sen put it, democracies don’t have famines. A government that doesn’t have to earn the support of a majority of its citizens, or at least a plurality, is not truly accountable to them, and has no incentive to represent their interests or provide for their needs. This opens the door to neglect, corruption and abuse of power. (Talk to the millions of Californians ignored by President Trump during wildfire season.) “If someone has to run for re-election, they have to put attention into running things well,” Mr. Amar said. “If they don’t, they will lose elections.”
14) Beethoven was born 250 years ago. Talk about standing the test of time. For my money, his symphonies are the single greatest musical accomplishment. And here’s, “5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Beethoven“
15) Always read Eric Foner, “We Are Not Done With Abolition: The framers of the 13th Amendment did not intend to establish an empire of prison labor.”
16) Also, seriously, people are always giving the NYT such a hard time, but deeply-reported essays like this on two teenagers of very different social classes dealing with the poisonous air are just amazing. If you only read a few NYT stories a month, make this one of them.
17) And if you want to learn more about air pollution (you should), this is a great article on PM 2.5, the key particulate matter we worry about for human health. I had never heard of Undark before (why not?), but seems like great science journalism.
18) It’s long past time for the face masks we rely upon to have clear standards for filtration efficiency. Looks like it may finally be coming.
19) This is really interesting– all the news websites with more than 100,000 digital subscribers. I subscribe to 5 of the 24.
20) Great stuff on Raphael Warnock’s ads, dogs, and racial stereotypes from Michael Tesler:
These ads have been praised as cute, humorous and clever. And the two spots have gone viral, generating almost nine million views while Warnock’s dog–oriented tweets accumulated over half a million likes on Twitter in November. The campaign has even profited off the pooch by selling “Puppies for Warnock” merchandise.
But some close observers of race and politics have noted that there is much more here than just an adorable electoral campaign. These ads, they argue, are carefully crafted attempts to neutralize racial stereotypes that work against Warnock in his bid to become Georgia’s first African American senator.
Hakeem Jefferson, a Stanford professor and FiveThirtyEight contributor, tweeted, “This ad is doing a lot. It’s obv[iously] cute, but it is also meant to deracialize Warnock with this cute ‘white people friendly’ doggy.” Fordham University political scientist and MSNBC contributor Christina Greer similarly tweeted, “This ad will be taught in Race Politics classes for years to come…it is doing A LOT of silent heavy lifting.” And The New York Times’s Jamelle Bouie concurred, tweeting in response to Greer’s comments, “Yep. The setting, Warnock’s outfit, even the dog breed all are sending a specific message.”
But why is Warnock’s pet beagle viewed as a “white people doggy”? And could his choice of pet have an effect on his electoral strategy?
Well, for starters, there’s a large racial divide in dog ownership. A 2006 Pew Research poll found that 45 percent of white Americans owned a dog compared to only 20 percent of African Americans. And the way pet ownership is portrayed in popular culture further exacerbates that divide in the minds of the public. In their classic study of media and race in the 1990s, “Black Image in the White Mind,” Robert Entman and Andrew Rojecki found no prime-time commercials containing African American pet owners. “According to the world of TV advertising,” Entman and Rojecki surmised, “Whites are the ones who occupy the realm of ideal humanity, of human warmth and connection, as symbolized occasionally by their love for their pets.” That is one reason Warnock’s ads are so effective: They directly push back against this stereotype, showing an affectionate Black dog owner who explicitly says he loves puppies.
Yet, as the tweets above suggest, the breed of Warnock’s dog is also doing a lot of work to counteract negative racial stereotypes of dog ownership. Take what my University of California Irvine colleague Mary McThomas and I’ve found in our research on dog ownership: When we asked people which dog breeds they thought white and Black people were more likely to own, the majority guessed that Black people owned rottweilers and pit bulls while white people owned golden retrievers, collies, Labradors and Dalmatians.
21) Bill Gates loved David Epstein’s Range. So did I. You should read it.
22) In his occasional newsletter, Epstein relies on his brother’s experience to take a look at the joke that is so much forensic science. In this case, how the ways in which forensic science methods are validated are basically junk. And, of course, we lock people up with this all the time:
We want to highlight one final study that Dror and Scurich cite in their paper. This study included 2,178 comparisons in which shell cartridge casings were not produced by the firearm in question. Forensic experts accurately assessed 1,421 of those and made 22 false-positive identifications. The remaining 735 responses were “inconclusive.” How big a factor should those inconclusives be when we think about the results of this study? (And since the Range Report promotes opportunities to use simple calculation for B.S. detection, think about this one for a minute before reading on.)
Those inconclusives are a really big deal. In this case, the study counted “inconclusive” as a correct answer, and so reported a 1 percent error rate in identifying different-source cartridges. (That is, 22/2,178.) Had the study left the inconclusive responses out, the reported error rate wouldn’t be much different: 22/(2,178 – 735), or 1.5 percent. But let’s say instead that “inconclusive” was counted as an error. Then the calculation is (735 + 22)/2,178, or a 35 percent error rate. So how accurate were those experts in identifying non-matches? Their error rate was somewhere between 1 percent and 35 percent, depending on how you deal with inconclusives. How accurate would they have been if they hadn’t been allowed to choose inconclusive at all? We have no idea—and that’s a huge problem. Ultimately, these tests are constructed so that forensic examiners can choose the questions on which they will be scored. In this example, one in five examiners answered “inconclusive” for every single comparison, giving them perfect scores. Again, if only the tests you took in school had worked that way.
23) Apparently, just a few decades behind the science, the US Army has figured out that sufficient sleep is important for optimum human performance (which you’d think matters when you’re fighting a war).
24) What science can tell you about how to choose a gift.
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