Month: February 2021

A few days ago Morning Consult released a poll showing that 18% of American adults believed in QAnon's conspiracy theories. Shazam! That might be down a bit from previous polls, but 18% is still a lot. It's one out of six Americans.

Except that if you read closely, that was 18% "among all adults who had heard of the group." It turns out that two-thirds of adults have never even heard of QAnon, which means Morning Consult's chart should have looked approximately like this:
When people read about this stuff, the chart is all that a lot of them are going to see. They won't read the accompanying text at all, let alone read it carefully. They'll just take a quick glance and come away thinking that Americans are nuts.

But a proper chart shows that only 6% of adults think QAnon is even "somewhat" accurate. And only 2% think it's very accurate. That's really not much. I imagine that 6% of American adults are unsure if we really landed on the moon. And you could get 2% of Americans to believe that the country is run by a secret cabal from Botswana.

Bottom line: We are not QAnon Nation. In fact, QAnon barely has a foothold in the American psyche at all.

Yesterday brought some routine news about California's bullet train: it would cost more and be finished later than expected. Yawn. Today, however, brings some genuinely entertaining news: our train to nowhere will also be running on a single track. This seems like a problem since trains need to go in both directions, but the train executives say there's nothing to worry about:

The agency said the Central Valley cutback would not have an operational impact in early train service, because not many trains would be running and they could move off the single track at stations to allow approaching trains to pass.

So not only will this train go from nowhere to nowhere, but it will be distinctly non-bullety because it has to pull off the track regularly. I swear, this is becoming something like an Abbot and Costello routine. It's getting to be literally insane that anyone continues to vote to fund this white elephant.

This is a mystery bird at the San Diego Zoo. I followed it around and took some pictures, but I never IDed it off one of the signs. Perhaps someone in comments can help us?

UPDATE: It's a Tambourine Dove. Thanks, Steve!

The insanity continues:

Twitter Inc.’s  finance chief said the social-media company has thought about how it might pay employees or vendors using the popular cryptocurrency bitcoin....“We’ve done a lot of the upfront thinking to consider how we might pay employees should they ask to be paid in bitcoin, how we might pay a vendor if they ask to be [paid] in bitcoin and whether we need to have bitcoin on our balance sheet should that happen,” Mr. Segal said.

This is nuts. What if an employee asks to be paid in pork belly futures? What if a vendor wants to be paid in gold nuggets?

The answer, of course, is that Twitter should give them dollars, which they are then free to convert into pork bellies or Krugerrands at their leisure. Ditto for bitcoin, except for the fact that bitcoin is totally awesome so CFOs like to mention it on TV in hopes that some of its awesomeness will rub off on them. Or maybe just to keep their boss the bitcoin fan happy. Or something.

Over at Vox, Sean Illing interviews Lawrence Wright, author of a long and detailed piece in the New Yorker about our response to the coronavirus pandemic. Wright says we did a terrible job and points in particular to three big mistakes. Here they are:

1. The CDC fails to get cooperation from the Chinese, thus delaying our knowledge that the virus could be transmitted asymptomatically.
2. CDC bungles the testing.
3. CDC spends a couple of months telling people not to wear masks.

The first of these is basically the fault of China. The other two are the fault of the CDC. None of them are the fault of Donald Trump.

Now, Trump clearly deserves a share of blame on the mask debacle, since he failed to support mask wearing after the CDC finally came around. In fact, it's worse than that. He didn't just fail to do anything, he actively turned masks into a stupid partisan issue:

You can look at the various states and how they reacted to the virus and how the outcomes were different. And you can compare similar states; Kentucky and Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi, Vermont and South Dakota. In many respects, these were similar states with similar demographics. In one case, the governor imposes strict lockdowns, mask wearing, and so on. In another case, the tap is open. One public health official said, “If the country had behaved like the state of Vermont, we would have 200,000 fewer deaths.” Well, that’s almost half of what we’re talking about. More responsible leadership could have made an immense difference in the suffering and the death that America has endured.

Keep in mind, however, that the decision to lock down a state isn't a federal one. It's inherently a state issue. And the idea that the entire country might have equaled the performance of its single best state is silly. Trump may have bollixed the mask issue and then spent months doing and saying stupid things, but California spent that entire time basically doing everything right and it didn't matter. We did well at first, but our death rate from the coronavirus is currently one of the highest in the nation.
So how many deaths is Donald Trump responsible for? It's certainly not 200,000. Even 100,000 is probably a huge overestimate. If I had to guess based on what Wright says, I'd say that (a) Trump acted like a buffoon the whole time, (b) he made things worse by spewing stupid theories constantly, (c) he failed to support mask wearing, and (d) in concrete terms, maybe this increased the death rate 5-10%.

Obviously this is speculative. No one can put a firm number to any of it. But for as much as Trump's public performance was insane, the evidence really doesn't suggest that it was responsible for a massive increase in the COVID-19 mortality rate. That blame mostly goes elsewhere.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through February 9. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Tyler Cowen points today to a new paper suggesting that attractiveness counts for a lot when it comes to being accepted into top economics programs. That got me curious, so I clicked the link. Here's the data:
As you can see, average folks have a noticeably higher chance of ending up at the worst economics programs, while attractive people have a higher chance of ending up at the very best. The authors say these effects are "not only statistically significant but are also substantial in magnitude."

I guess I have no reason to question that, but an eyeball look at the data doesn't really make it look like attractiveness has all that big an effect. Even at the extremes it doesn't look all that large, and in the middle the effect is reversed, with attractive people more likely to go to below-average programs while average people are more likely to go to above-average programs.

Plus I'm suspicious of the big drop in the middle. Why does everyone avoid programs in the #5 and #6 positions?

I dunno. None of the differences are bigger than 1.5 percentage points, and the average difference in each half of the distribution is tiny. This just doesn't strike me as an awfully big deal.

An Israeli company has produced the first 3-D printed ribeye steak, and the Washington Post thinks there's an audience for it:

A survey of more than 1,000 U.S. adults, conducted by MRS research company for agriculture company Proagrica, showed that 39 percent of American consumers have considered going vegetarian or vegan since the pandemic began. Health concerns, climate change and animal welfare are drivers.

Hmmm. A poll from Proagrica. Got anything better? Here is Plant Based News:

More than half (60 percent) of Americans have started eating a more plant-based diet since the COVID-19 pandemic began, according to a new poll. The survey, which polled 2,000 adults, was conducted by market research firm OnePoll and by Eat Just, Inc – a food tech company best known for its plant-based JUST Egg product made from mung beans – ahead of Better Breakfast Month (September).

This is from Eat Just Inc., which makes mung-bean egg products. And that's all I could find after an exhausting two minutes of googling.

I officially declare this a worthless factoid. About 6% of Americans are vegetarians, and I imagine that there's always some huge share of meat eaters who are considering switching. Just like there are tons of Americans who are considering losing weight, or looking for a new job, or finally getting their act together and fixing that squeaky doorknob. In other words, none to speak of.

I didn't expect anything new from the release of JOLTS data today, so I didn't bother to look at it until after lunch. Most of the readings were unexceptional, but there was one that showed a big drop:
Job openings didn't change much in December. Quits didn't change much. Layoffs didn't change much. But new hires dropped by 400,000. With the exception of the spikes during the first few months of the pandemic, this is the biggest drop in the past seven years. The declines were almost entirely due to big drops in the leisure, food services, and recreation industries.

I'm not sure what this means. Maybe nothing. But it seems a bit peculiar.

There are usually lots of different ways of looking at data. That's part of what makes it fun. In the US, for example, COVID-19 vaccinations peak on weekends for obvious reasons, which makes weekend vaccination rates a useful gauge of what our infrastructure is capable of. So here it is:

As you can see, our weekend vaccination peaks have been steadily rising by about 300,000 each week. In our most recent weekend we vaccinated more than 2 million people each day. If we keep it up—and vaccine supplies hold up—we could reach peak days of 4 million by the middle of March.

POSTSCRIPT: Interestingly, the peak vaccination day for the world as a whole is Wednesday. Does anyone have an explanation for this?