Cats, charts, and politics
Apparently Johns Hopkins decided they had misreported the numbers for the past week or so. They've been updated, and the new numbers show a clear and ongoing decline in the COVID-19 death rate in the US.
Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through February 16. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.
Yesterday I came across an article about some group or another that was upset about the distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine. It felt like about the hundredth article I'd read along those lines, and I've finally had it.
Listen up. We were hit by a brand new virus that spread like wildfire throughout the world. Lots of people made lots of mistakes because this was a brand new disaster we were facing. Nevertheless, the actions we took have kept the US death toll down to 0.15% so far, an astonishingly low number. At the same time, pharmaceutical companies employed brand new technology to develop, test, and manufacture hundreds of millions of doses of vaccine within 11 months. Most likely, the entire country (or close enough) will be fully vaccinated within six months even though distribution of the vaccines is wildly complicated thanks to super low temperature storage requirements.
We are living through a damn miracle. But all I ever hear is endless bitching that boils down to whether someone will get a vaccination a week from now vs. four weeks from now. It's stupid not to focus solely on old people first. No, wait, what about essential workers? And what about Black people, who have the highest infection rate? Oh, so now we're going to get all woke about it? I've been trying to get my grandma vaccinated and it took forever! We should be giving people just one dose and not worrying about the second—and everyone at the FDA should be shot for not immediately agreeing about this. Did you know that bus drivers are especially vulnerable to the virus? They should be put at the top of the list. No, teachers should. No, single mothers should. No, poor countries should.
I know this is just human nature, and maybe it's pointless to fight it. But for God's sake, can we stop obsessing over every single thing we think has been unfair, or been done badly, or just gone wrong? Mistakes are part of human nature too. For my money, though, our response to the pandemic—even including all the blunders, all the backtracking, and all the Trump idiocy—has been nothing short of exceptional. If we had managed the Iraq War this well, Iraq would be a fabulous oasis of democracy and economic opportunity blooming in the desert.
UPDATE: I changed the headline from "spectacular" to "pretty good." I admit that "spectacular" was a wee bit too strong.
To add a little more detail, I'd stick to my guns on the vaccine side, which really has been pretty spectacular all the way around. It has suffered from only minor mistakes along the way, mostly of the kind that are inevitable in a big, complex project.
On the general subject of pandemic control, I continue to think we did better than most people think. However, there's no question that we made some serious errors that increased the death toll considerably.
I may write about this again. The reason is that part of my position here came after reading an article in which Lawrence Wright all but said that our pandemic response was the biggest FUBAR in the human history of FUBARs. But his evidence was so laughably weak that it prompted me to write this post.
Plus, of course, the hundredth article in which someone was griping about some group or another being unfairly treated by ignorant and blinkered distribution policies.
Guess what? I'm on vacation for a few days. I'm still online, and I'll post on topics of national importance when they pop up, but mostly I'll be driving around scenic places and taking photographs.
So where am I? This picture is the clue. The more precise your answer, the more genius points you'll rack up.
UPDATE: The mountains gave it away. I spent Monday driving up US 395 to photograph the Eastern Sierra, and stopped along the way at Manzanar, formerly home of a World War II internment camp for Japanese American citizens. It is now a national historic site.
I've said before that we will never make serious progress toward eliminating racism until Black students are educated on a par with white students. Half a century ago that would have been an uncontroversial statement, but after 50 years of trying and failing to close the Black-white education gap it's become tiresome to many people, little more than a cheap excuse for doing nothing. But tiresome or not, it's still a huge problem. Here's a chart that demonstrates the scope of what we're up against:
Black students who graduate from high school score about 30 points worse than white students on the NAEP reading test. Ditto for the math test. That's roughly three grade levels, which means that, on average, Black high school grads perform at about the same level as 9th grade white students. And this hasn't gotten any better over the past 30 years. In fact, it's gotten worse.
This is bad enough on its own. But it turns out that education is associated with a host of other problems. Not every problem, but a lot of them. Today I want to go through a few of them in an effort to persuade you to join the education cause. The evidence isn't perfect—in the real world it never is—but it's surprisingly consistent.
About a decade ago Jay Zagorsky, then at Ohio State, wrote a paper comparing the incomes of various educational groups. He used the language of IQ because that was the data available to him, but don't let that throw you: An IQ of 85 is roughly equivalent to an 18-year-old performing like someone three grade levels lower. What Zagorsky found was simple: that person earned about 25% less than a person performing at age level. And according to recent census figures, the median income of Black workers is 21% lower than white workers.
Put these numbers together with the NAEP test results and they suggest that the average Black worker (a) performs at about the same level as a white worker with a 9th grade education, and (b) earns about as much as a white worker with a 9th grade education.
And of course there's a corollary: Education is also tightly bound up with Black wealth, both directly (higher income ---> higher wealth) and indirectly (higher income ---> higher death bequests and higher inheritances). There are other things that affect Black wealth too, but education is clearly one of the strongest.
As we all know, the unemployment rate of Black workers is substantially higher than it is for white workers:
On average over the past three decades, the Black unemployment rate is about five points higher than the white unemployment rate. But take a look at this:
When you compare the unemployment rate for Black workers to the unemployment rate of all high school dropouts, the difference almost disappears. Once again, the average Black worker is being treated like a white worker with roughly a 9th grade education.
Moving on from jobs-related research, here's a paper that looks at incarceration. The main result is shown in this pair of charts:
White people with a 9th grade education are incarcerated at the same rate as Black people who are just shy of a 12th grade education. These numbers plummet so steeply between 9th and 12th grade that they aren't very precise, but once again we find that the average Black person with a 12th grade education is treated very much like a white person with a 9th grade education.
This one is interesting. Here's a table from a study of life expectancy by educational level:
Back in 1990, the life expectancy of Black people with a high school diploma was almost identical to that of white people who had dropped out of high school. This is very much in keeping with our thesis.
Interestingly, things have changed since then. White women with no high school diploma have lost nearly three years of life expectancy while Black men with a high school diploma have added about four year of life expectancy. Put together, it means that Black people with a high school diploma are now doing a bit better than white people who dropped out.
This is evidence that things can change even without a change in educational differences. Education has a big impact, but it's not everything.
This one is a little tricky because, obviously, it can't be based on the child's education. However, it can be measured relative to parental education. Here's the chart:
The red dot on the gray line shows the health of Black children whose parents have a high school education. (Poor health is indicated by having "activity and school limitations.") It's equivalent to the health of a white child whose parents have about a 10th grade education.
Nobody claims that education is the sole determinant of Black well-being. Studies over the years have consistently found that even after you adjust for education there's still a significant residual effect due solely to being Black. Most often, the residual is the impact of straight-up bigotry, both personal and systemic.
What's more, the evidence I've presented here isn't 100% consistent. It never is in the real world. In most of the studies the effect of education has stayed constant over the years, while in the case of life expectancy Black men have made large improvements. Sometimes a Black person with a 12th grade education is equivalent to a white person with a 9th grade education, while in others it's closer to a 10th grade education.
And of course there's a famously circular argument to address: We know that poor education is one of the causes of poverty, but we also know that poverty (especially concentrated poverty) is one of the causes of poor education. Which is the chicken and which is the egg? I think the evidence is fairly clear that education is the primal cause here, but there are plausible arguments in the other direction.
Taken as a whole, the evidence is strong that Black people in the US who graduate from high school perform, on average, at about a 9th grade level and have outcomes that are similar to white people with a 9th grade education. What's more, this disparate performance starts long before high school. Some of it is visible by kindergarten or earlier, and the full effect is generally in place by the end of elementary school. To close the gap, we need to address it as early as pre-K and keep it up all the way through the end of high school.
Our inability to educate Black kids as well as we do white kids is one of our great national shames, and until we turn this around there's no chance of making substantial progress on the racial equality front. It's the frustrating but necessary minimum effort necessary for anyone who's serious about fighting racism.
Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through February 15. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.
This is the BlackBerry building in Irvine, more formally known as 400 Spectrum Center. Along with its twin it's the tallest building in Orange County, topping out at a breathtaking 323 feet. That's a full 12% of the height of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the world's tallest building!
It's also clad in some kind of special glass that makes it take on the color of its surroundings. It doesn't disappear or anything, but it often blends in surprisingly well. It's hard to get a good picture of it thanks to the tight surroundings, but a few days ago I had the rare pleasure of being a passenger while Marian drove and I got this shot out the window of her car while we were tooling home on the 405. It was a very hazy day, and while the building is obviously quite visible, you can see that it's also taken on some of the day's haziness.
I am confused. This is hardly a rare occurrence, so let me explain.
Thirty years ago we held a great debate about welfare, with Bill Clinton running on a platform of "ending welfare as we know it." In 1996 he did just that, eliminating the old AFDC program that handed out money without limit to parents with kids, regardless of whether or not they worked. It was replaced by TANF, which combined incentives to work with a time limit for receiving benefits.
Fast forward to 2021 and Mitt Romney has proposed consolidating several current federal benefits in favor of a single new one. TANF would go away entirely; the EITC would be reduced; and the childcare tax credit would be eliminated. In their place would be a simple monthly check sent to anyone with children. The checks amount to $350 per month for young children and $250 per month for kids over age 5.
This is a universal program, so it includes everyone—regardless of whether they have jobs. This means that if you're a single mother of two who doesn't work—the hated target of the 1996 welfare reform—you would receive about $7,200 per year with no strings attached. Adjusted for inflation, this is more than the average AFDC payment for a family of three in 1995.
And that's if you have two children. If you're one of the even more hated "welfare moms" with a brood of four kids, you'd receive upwards of $15,000 per year. There's no time limit on these payments and no incentives to get a job. In fact, by reducing the EITC and the childcare tax credit, Romney's plan reduces the incentive to find a job.
What am I missing here? Am I misinterpreting Romney's plan? Or has enough time gone by since 1995 that even Republicans are no longer upset at the idea of no-strings welfare payments with no time limits?
I would like to propose that we abandon several commonly-used political words. It's not because these words are beyond the pale; it's because they have lost all meaning in popular discourse. In non-scholarly settings, no one truly knows what they mean. Here are four examples:
Neoliberal. It doesn't help that there are two established versions of this word to begin with: the Washington Consensus version and the Charles Peters version. It hardly matters, though, since almost no one in popular conversation knows either one. Instead, it's become little more than a vague accusation made against liberals who have insufficiently leftist economic opinions.
Socialism. It's hard to think of any serious definition of socialism that doesn't include state ownership of major industries like banking, steelmaking, oil extraction, and so forth. It doesn't mean that the government merely gives money to people for things like housing and medical care. That's social democracy. Republicans have always papered over this distinction, trying to tar virtually every liberal program as socialist. More recently, though, even progressives seem confused about this point.
Fascist. Even among scholars there's disagreement about exactly what fascism is. Among everyone else, it seems to mean nothing more than some kind of meanspirited attitude trumpeted by a Republican politician. That's really not very helpful. Not every hardcore conservative represents the second coming of Mussolini.
Cancel culture. There are at least two different versions of this. The first is used by progressives against other progressives and is basically an offshoot of callout culture. The goal is to shame the victim into apologizing and changing his tune. The second version is used by progressives against conservatives and represents no kind of "culture" at all. It's merely routine political disagreement. Occasionally it goes farther than it should and becomes a rallying cry on Fox News. But it's only the first version—a purely internecine spat among progressives—that has any real meaning.
Last week I put up a chart showing weekend vaccination rates in the US. Here it is again for the weekend just ended:
This is the same chart as last time with the same trendline. All I've done is add seven more days of data.
As you can see, we have suddenly plateaued. There was no growth at all in the number of vaccinations given. Is this because it was a holiday weekend? Or because we've reached the limit of how many doses are available? Maybe next week will provide some answers.
Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through February 14. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.
