Month: May 2021

I've mentioned this before, but I remain puzzled by the repeated claim that India is facing an unprecedented surge of COVID-19 cases and deaths. Unless India is massively undercounting things, neither is true:

India's case load peaked at about the same level as Europe's recent peak, and well below the previous peaks of both Europe and the United States. The same is true for deaths, but even more dramatically. India is nowhere near the December peaks of either Europe or the United States.

India's problem is not that its surge of COVID-19 cases is exceptionally high or that its variant is exceptionally deadly. India's problem is that its health care system is nowhere near as good as that of the US or Europe. This is a tragedy in and of itself, but it's a different tragedy than the one that keeps getting reported.

Via Tyler Cowen, here's an interesting chart that suggests the amount of regulation in a state depends a lot on its population:

The authors use a metric for regulation that they say is more reliable than ones used in previous studies. They also say that they tried controlling for a whole bunch of different variables and none of them made much of a difference. Population is the only one that does. What's more they get similar results comparing Canadian provinces.

So why do bigger polities have more regulation? I can take a few guesses:

• A bigger population means more interest groups, thus more pressure to pass various regulations.
• A bigger population means more industry, which makes the cost of non-regulation more obvious.
• Likewise, a bigger population means bigger individual industries. It might not be worthwhile for Utah to have extensive regulations on oil drilling, but it definitely is worthwhile in Texas. It's worth noting that the three biggest outliers all have at least one gigantic industry (tech for California, energy for Texas, finance for New York).
• Bigger states are more impersonal. This is a little hard to quantify, but people in smaller states might feel like they "know" their state well and don't need lots of regulation to make people do the right thing.
• The cost-benefit of regulation might depend mostly on absolute numbers. That is, it's only worth regulating an industry if it employs more than, say, a thousand people. Obviously big states have a lot more industries that clear this barrier than small states.

Feel free to add your guesses in comments. I would be interested in a similar study applied to corporation size. Big corporations generally have more red tape in the way of getting things done compared to small corporations, right?

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through May 20. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Consider the map below:

Suppose you are the grand poobah of Democratic Party election strategy for the Senate. You are a sensible person, so you understand that nothing is going to change about Senate representation. Each state on this map gets two senators, and that's that.

Clearly, the gray and pink states are your main targets. Some of them (Colorado, Arizona) already have two Democratic senators while others are split (Wisconsin, Pennsylvania). Then there are the states controlled entirely by Republicans: Florida, North Carolina, Nebraska, Iowa, Kentucky, and Texas.

There are a few seats that can be picked up in the split states, and sometimes you can get lucky in red states, as Democrats did this year in Georgia. Then again, sometimes you'll get unlucky in blue states, so luck is hardly something to be relied on.

In the end, there's only one way to build any kind of long-term majority: you need to pick up seats in the states that are on the edge but have no Democratic senators: Florida, North Carolina, Nebraska, Iowa, Kentucky, and Texas. These states need to be persuaded to start electing Democrats.

So how do you do it?

I keep reading pieces claiming that the latest battle between Hamas and Israel is a watershed event. Nothing will ever be the same after this.

Huh? As near as I can tell, it was such a standard little war as to be almost boring. Hamas did what it always does, Israel did what it always does, and after a couple of weeks everyone pretends that their objectives have been met and agrees to a cease-fire. After that, things go back to exactly how they were before.

What am I missing here? When I say "the way things were before," what I mean is that (a) Israel controls everything utterly, and (b) every once in a while Hamas (or Hezbollah or some other Palestinian group) decides to lob a few thousand rockets in the general direction of Jerusalem in order to demonstrate that they still exist. The world condemns Israel for acting disproportionately, but Israel knows that no one is really serious about this and basically ignores it.

What exactly is different this time, aside from the fact that it happened over the past two weeks and we haven't forgotten about it yet?

Rep. Lauren Boebert went on TV—well, Real America's Voice, anyway—to claim that Texas hasn't had a single COVID-19 death since it lifted its mask mandate on March 2. Needless to say, it takes about 60 seconds to get the real data from the CDC:

Texas was heading steadily downward, but within 30 days of ending its mask mandate deaths from COVID-19 went back up. Total deaths since March 2 amount to a bit less than 4,000. And how is Texas doing now?

Texas is currently one of the worst states for COVID-19 mortality.

So why would Boebert say something so ridiculous? The best answer, I suppose, is that it's Lauren Boebert. What do you expect? But the other answer is that this is an example of Republicans literally being able to say anything. They know their audience will believe them, and they'll never be fact checked in any sense that will hurt them. So if you're going to make stuff up, why not go whole hog?

This is a common fiddleneck. I assume there must also be an uncommon fiddleneck, but for some reason I've never seen one.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through May 19. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Here's a chart showing the daily administration of COVID-19 vaccine in the US:

You can see the problem. I'm not saying that vaccinations will follow the straight trendline I've shown. I'm only saying that if they do, we'll end up with a total of about 320 million jabs by the end of June. That's 160 million people fully vaccinated, or a bit less than 60% of the eligible population. That's not enough.

This is why the downturn in vaccinations is so dangerous. We have time to turn it around with lotteries or donuts or bottles of beer or whatever, but turn it around we must. That line needs to flatten out.

I know you've all been waiting on the edges of your seats for the results of the poll I put up last night, so here it is:

You guys are pretty convinced that Zoom meetings, working from home, and telemedicine are here to stay. Conversely, you're pretty skeptical about distance learning, the permanent end of handshaking, and the end of trade shows. Everybody loves trade shows, after all.

I'm probably more skeptical than most of you. I figure that things like working from home and holding more Zoom meetings will get a bump, but nothing huge, and the others will mostly just fade away. We'll see.

NOTE: Just a reminder that participants could vote for as many items as they agreed about, which is why the percentages add up to far more than 100%.