Month: May 2021

President Biden has decided to support the idea of suspending patent protections on COVID-19 vaccines, a move that's intended to make it easier for poor countries to legally manufacture vaccines for themselves. Hooray for Biden?

I'm not so sure. As near as I can tell, this is something of a meaningless gesture. Many of the patents involved in manufacturing the vaccines don't belong to Pfizer/Moderna/etc. in the first place. They're licensed from various other sources. Nor are patents really the biggest stumbling block for poor countries that want quicker access to vaccines. It's manufacturing know-how and shortage of raw materials. And anyway, these countries already have legal remedies available that allow them to force pharmaceutical companies to license generic versions of their drugs at low cost.

Beyond this, if the US really wants to make vaccines more available to poor countries, the solution is easy: spend lots of money. How much would it cost to purchase, say, 10 billion doses of vaccine? $50 billion? $100 billion? This is not a huge sum of money by American standards. And it would be even less if we split the cost with Europe. This is more or less the goal of Covax, the global initiative aimed at equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines, which has so far been a dismal failure.

At the risk of sounding a little too cynical, I think Biden's patent announcement represents something of a bad habit. He's done a lot of things to appease the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, but many of those things are more symbolic than real. Sometimes that's because they're unlikely to ever become law; sometimes it's because they simply don't have a big effect; and other times it's because he can give in at a pretty low cost.

Politically, this is a savvy strategy, and it often has no real downside. But this time it might. The real answer to global vaccine coverage is money, and lots of handwaving about patents does nothing but obscure that.

Here's a rare picture of the sun and the moon sharing space in a single image. But where was it taken? Steve is exempted from this contest.

ANSWER: The building is Millikan Library at Caltech. At least, it is for now. It will soon be renamed thanks to Millikan's support of eugenics back in the day. A few other buildings are also due to be renamed, including my old dorm, Ruddock House.

It is natural that Democrats trust the government more when a Democrat is president while Republicans trust government more when a Republican is president. However, a new study confirms something we've seen before: Republicans are far more partisan than Democrats. Here's the basic chart, helpfully colorized by me:

This partisan difference among Republicans became even larger starting in the Bush era:

This is yet another demonstration of the malignant effect of Fox News. Before 2000, Republicans were somewhat more partisan than Democrats in their trust of government. After 2000 they went absolutely bonkers. This is what Rupert Murdoch has done to us.

Here's a chart from the Kaiser Family Foundation showing the vaccine performance of each state. I've drawn the ovals to show roughly where each region is clustered:

The best performance has been in the Northeast, which has vaccinated about 65% of its population. The worst is in the South, which is in the 45-50% range. The West and the Midwest are somewhere in between.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through May 4. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

My lunch partner and I were discussing the general question of wokeness and "critical race theory" in schools today, and I promised to look into the whole thing a little more deeply than I have so far (which is roughly zero). I'm not sure I'll follow up on that promise, but when I got home I found that at least a few corners of the internet were frothing over an alleged attempt by the state of California to destroy math education. This turned out to be prompted by an article in Reason, written by Robby Soave, about California's latest draft framework for K-12 math.

The bill of particulars is basically that (1) the framework wants to eliminate advanced math courses, especially calculus, and (2) it spends lots of time on connecting math to social justice concepts like bias and racism.

Does it? You guys don't pay me enough to read the whole framework, but I did demonstrate my dedication to the cause by reading chapters 1 and 2. I will say up front that the framework is practically bursting with edu-jargon and references to allegedly scholarly papers. This is not my cup of tea, but I won't hold it against anyone. So what does the framework say?

First off, it does indeed spend a lot of time connecting math to social justice concepts, but it's worth noting that this is done in a fairly conventional way. Everyone has agreed for decades that math needs to be made "relevant" by posing problems connected to the real world, and the new framework carries on this tradition. The big difference is that some of their examples involve social justice issues. For example:

Ms. Ross selects three word problems to connect with the class’s current read-aloud of George, a novel by Alex Gino that shares the story of a 10-year-old transgender fourth grader and her struggles with acceptance among friends and family.

There are other examples like this, and they're mostly just updated versions of the story problems that we all dreaded back when we were in math classes. I don't see much harm here, though I suppose your mileage will vary.

Second, the framework takes on the issue of tracking, which has been the source of math pedagogy wars since before I was born. The new framework comes down firmly on the anti-tracking side up through middle school, based on the idea that recent neurological research shows that (a) anyone can learn math up to high levels,¹ and (b) advanced kids who take the standard Common Core classes do better than those who are tracked into honors classes:

The overall achievement of the students after the de-tracking significantly increased. The cohort of students who were in eighth-grade mathematics in 2015 were 15 months ahead of the previous cohort of students who were mainly in advanced classes (MAC & CAASPP 2015).

As for calculus, the authors are unhappy about a "rush to calculus" that's mostly motivated by an insane competition for entrance to elite universities and "does not lead to depth of understanding or appreciation of the content." However, they also explicitly say this:

All students can take Common Core-aligned mathematics 6, 7, and 8 in middle school and still take calculus, data science, statistics, or other high-level courses in high school.

These are not the words of people who hate high school calculus.

In the end, the framework is guilty of the following sins:

1. Offering examples that incorporate issues of racism, sexism, etc.
2. Urging teachers to develop lesson plans that take into account the needs of English language learners.
3. Insisting that tracking is bad in lower grades because it encourages teachers to give up on "slow" students—very often children of color—who could learn more if they were given the chance.
4. Promoting an approach that leads to deeper learning by rejecting the current approach of memorizing a laundry list of concepts that students can't connect to any real-world problems. (It's maybe worth noting that every math framework ever written promises this.)
5. Offering calculus for those who want it, but not encouraging it as much as we do now.
6. Using an ungodly mix of pedagogy jargon and social justice buzzwords.

I won't pretend that I agree with all of this, but neither do I think it spells the end of decent math education here in the Golden State. The bottom line is that if you hate the idea of schools incorporating social justice into their classrooms then you'll hate it here too. If not, then you won't. But either way, I doubt that it will have much effect one way or the other on the ability of students to learn math.

¹Without diving too deeply into this, I'll note that this belief is driven in large part by mindset theory, which says that children learn better if they are taught to adopt a "growth mindset." A growth mindset is one in which children believe that abilities like intelligence can be improved over time. Conversely, a "fixed mindset" teaches that things like character, intelligence, and creative ability are largely static.

Unfortunately, mindset theory hasn't fared well in recent research that has attempted to replicate the original mindset studies. Frankly, all the social justice stuff bothers me less than the framework's unquestioning reliance on a theory that hasn't panned out in the decade since it was introduced. If this is typical of their approach, there's little chance that the new framework will be successful.

This is a row of aspen trees at Aspendell, about ten miles southwest of Bishop. It is four images stitched together in Photoshop.

Too dense for display at this size? Maybe. Perhaps three images would have been better:

Alternatively, maybe this is just flatly too dense and detailed for display at this size no matter how I crop it. I'm not sure, but there's no question that it lost too much resolution when I reduced it to 2000 pixels wide. It's just not sharp enough now.

So what happens when the pandemic is over? Do lots of us continue working from home? Or do the bosses want us back in the office? JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who has a quarter of a million people working for him, knows what he wants:

Coming out of the pandemic, Mr. Dimon is eager for other signs of normalcy. More JPMorgan employees will return to the office starting this month, though Mr. Dimon acknowledged they aren’t all happy about it. But the remote office, he said, doesn’t work for generating ideas, preserving corporate culture, competing for clients or “for those who want to hustle.”

“We want people back at work and my view is some time in September, October, it will look just like it did before,” Mr. Dimon said. “Yes, people don’t like commuting, but so what?”

To Mr. Dimon, commuting is better than the alternative. “I’m about to cancel all my Zoom meetings,” he added. “I’m done with it.”

Only time will tell, but I suspect there are more bosses like Dimon than we think. Dimon wants people back in the office by October, and in the year following that I'll bet that more and more bosses will come to agree with him.

Joe and Jill Biden visited Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter a few days ago, and yesterday a photo of the visit was released. It's been making the rounds of the internet every since.

The Bidens look like giants compared to the Carters! What's going on?

There's a lot of talk about flash shadows and wide-angle lenses and so forth, but I don't buy it. I don't think the lack of shadows makes much difference, and the lens has introduced only a small bit of distortion (take a look at the picture frame on the far left to see how little there is).

In fact, this is all pretty simple: The Bidens really are bigger than the Carters and Jimmy is slouching, which makes him look even smaller than normal. Here are the measurements:

The chairs look fairly normal, so I'm figuring them at 35" tall and then using that as a baseline to measure the Bidens. Joe clocks in at 51", which seems about right. I'm a couple of inches taller than him and I stand 53" or so when I'm kneeling.

Jill Biden is six inches shorter than Joe, and in the picture she measures seven inches shorter. That may be measuring error on my part, or maybe she's just not standing as fully rigid as Joe the politico.

The wide-angle lens does make the Bidens slightly wider than they should be, but only by a little. The main reason they look like offensive linemen is because the Carters are so thin.

So that's that. To the extent that there's an optical illusion here, it's mainly because Jill/Jimmy are a lot closer to the camera than Joe/Rosalynn. But overall, the difference in sizes is quite real.

Paul Krugman is annoyed with Mohamed El-Erian, who says that inflation is here to stay and we should start responding to it. It's not entirely clear why El-Erian thinks this, but I suspect that it's yet another example of the trauma suffered by people who lived through the '70s.

This is a syndrome similar to beliefs about rising medical costs. As it turns out, it's not true that medical costs have been skyrocketing forever. They've been relatively restrained for the past 60 years with the exception of a 15-year spike in the '80s and '90s. Likewise, inflation has been relatively restrained over the past 60 years with the exception of a 20-year spike from the mid-60s through the mid-80s:

Since that spike ended, inflation has been trending steadily down. High inflation is neither normal nor inevitable in postwar American history.

The next line of attack is usually to highlight some particular commodity that's displaying very high rates of price growth. Chlorine tablets, for example. Or softwood lumber. But by definition, there are always a few items that top the price list at any given time. That fact means less than nothing.

And then we turn to food, a staple of nightly news shows. For some reason, it's been a favorite of NBC News lately, and even my own wife has turned against me on this. "Prices are sure up at Gelson's," she told me yesterday, knowing that I couldn't argue because I never look at prices. But whatever anecdotal evidence you have, the numbers just don't back you up:

Food has followed a trend similar to overall inflation: It spiked from the mid-60s through the mid-80s, but has been in the range of 1-3% for the entire rest of the postwar period.

But wait! What about that little spike at the very end of the chart. Let's zoom in:

This is a monthly look rather than an annual look. As you can see, food prices have been extremely restrained for the past five years, spiking only in April 2020, just as the pandemic hit. Food prices almost immediately began to fall after that, and the most recent monthly reading shows food inflation at 3%.

I would not be surprised if we saw some short-term inflation as we emerge from the pandemic faster than suppliers thought we would and consumer demand outstrips supply. I also wouldn't be surprised if $6 trillion in federal spending generates some short-term inflation.

But are there reasons to think that either food inflation or overall inflation will suddenly defy history and spike upward for years at a time? I guess you never know. Go ahead and make your case. But it better be a good one.