Month: June 2021

In case you think things are going badly here, spare a thought for the poor folks of Lebanon:¹

This represents a GDP loss of about 35%, far greater than the US suffered during the Great Depression. Inflation is running at about 100%, the banking system is in about the shape you'd expect, and unemployment is sky high.

This all comes from the World Bank, which refers to this as a deliberate depression because Lebanon's leaders are deliberately not doing anything about it:

In the Fall 2020 LEM, Lebanon’s economic crisis was termed The Deliberate Depression. For over a year, Lebanese authorities encountered an assailment of compounded crises—namely, the country’s largest peace-time economic and financial crisis, COVID-19 and the Port of Beirut explosion—with deliberately inadequate policy responses. The inadequacy is less due to knowledge gaps and quality advice and more the result of a combination of (i) a lack of political consensus over effective policy initiatives; and (ii) political consensus in defense of a bankrupt economic system, which benefited a few for so long.

In other words, no one can agree about what to do, and lots of powerful people want to do nothing because they benefit from the current corrupt system even during a depression.

And now for the clickbait. Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, the reigning experts on episodes of economic collapse, use a formula called CSI to calculate how severe a depression is. It's pretty simple: just take the percentage GDP decline from peak to trough and add it to the number of years it takes to get back to the previous peak. Under this accounting, for example, the CSI for the Great Depression in the United States was 38 (a 28 point decline + 10 years for GDP to recover.

The World Bank's forecast is that Lebanon will suffer a GDP decline of 35% and it will take 12 years to recover. This gives them a CSI of 47, which would be the second biggest CSI since World War II and the sixth worst ever.

But that's the "good" scenario. The bad scenario is a GDP decline of 38% and 19 years to recovery, which produces a CSI of 57. This would be the worst since World War II and the third worst ever.

There's no real point to make here. I just thought you might be interested. Just think: possibly the worst depression since World War II and Lebanon's leaders are twiddling their thumbs and figuring it's better than the alternative, which might end up affecting them. It sure makes our political gridlock look penny ante.

¹Don't assume these numbers are absolutely precise. The World Bank seems incapable of proofreading its own reports and press releases, so I had to decide which of its various figures to use.

A few days ago I intended to post some thoughts on the Naomi Osaka affair, but didn't get around to it. The next day I didn't get around to it either. Ditto for the day after that, and then I gave up.

But now another couple of days have passed and my Twitter feed has annoyed me into changing my mind. As you might expect, it's completely pro-Osaka and full of dripping contempt toward all the old men who run the French Open. So let's roll the tape:

1. Out of the blue, just a couple of days before the tournament began, Osaka announced that she would not be meeting with the press after her matches. This is a requirement for all players and always has been, since press coverage is one of the things that drives the millions of dollars top players get for competing.
2. Osaka released a statement saying that she was tired of reporters sowing "doubt" in her mind and she no longer wanted anyone doubting her. She tried to pass this off as a "mental health" issue, which it most certainly is not. She also failed to acknowledge that skipping press briefings gives her an advantage over fellow players who still had to do them.
3. Tennis officials tried repeatedly to contact her to discuss the issue. Osaka refused to take their calls.
4. Osaka then played (and won) her first round match and, as promised, declined to show up for her press briefing.

Given this set of facts at the time, what do you think tennis officials should have done?

1. Nothing, which would tacitly approve of what Osaka was doing.
2. Issue a milquetoast statement that they would try again to get Osaka to take their calls after the tournament.
3. Issue a statement fining Osaka for missing the press briefing and further warning her that if she keeps this up she risks being defaulted from the tournament.

Response #3 sure seems like the appropriate one to me. Even if you concede—and I do—that tennis officials made a mistake or two along the way, they pale in comparison to Osaka's. She's been a top pro for eight years, after all. She's well aware of all of this stuff and knows who to contact to hash it out.

In any case, after all this Osaka released another statement saying that she had suffered from "long bouts of depression" for the past three years and now planned to take some time off tennis. This is when everybody suddenly took Osaka's side, but of course tennis officials had known nothing about this since she had refused to talk to them. Once they did know about it, their response was every bit as empathetic and understanding as you'd expect it to be.

Aside from a couple of minor hiccups, I just don't see that the tennis authorities really did anything wrong. Osaka certainly did, and I seriously wonder about the quality of the advice she gets from her team. Was there really not a single person near her who could have cautioned her to take a different approach?

At this point, there's nothing anyone can do except wish Osaka the best and hope that she overcomes her depression. If that's really what's driving all this, it's a serious problem. But none of that means she was treated unfairly at any point in this process. She wasn't

Exciting news today on the coronavirus naming front! After months of deliberation following my clarion call to simplify things for us lay folks, we finally have new common names for the known COVID variants:

1. Alpha (UK, 9/20)
2. Beta (South Africa, 5/20)
3. Gamma (Brazil, 11/20)
4. Delta (India, 10/20)
5. Epsilon (California, 3/20)
6. Zeta (Brazil, 4/20)
7. Eta (Multiple countries, 10/20)
8. Theta (Philippines, 1/21)
9. Iota (New York, 11/20)
10. Kappa (India, 10/20)

The first four variants in bold are "variants of concern," those with high transmissibility and virulence compared to the original strain. The others are "variants of interest," worth keeping an eye on but not thought to be especially dangerous. There are, thankfully, currently no "variants of high consequence," a category that I assume needs no explanation.

So there you have it. There are still 14 letters remaining in the Greek alphabet, and when we use them all up we will keep going with a "similar series," according to the WHO. Please leave your suggestions in comments.

POSTSCRIPT: The technical names (B.1.1.7 etc.) are still around and will continue to be used in the scientific community.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through May 31. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.