Month: July 2021

The New York Times, echoing the views of most liberals, says the Supreme Court is dismantling democracy piece by piece:

The latest blow came Thursday, when all six conservative justices voted to uphold two Arizona voting laws despite lower federal courts finding clear evidence that the laws make voting harder for voters of color — whether Black, Latino or Native American. One law requires election officials to throw out ballots that were cast in the wrong precinct; the other bars most people and groups from collecting voters’ absentee ballots and dropping them off at polling places.

This is starting to piss me off. Maybe the Supreme Court is bound and determined to take apart our voting laws no matter what, but the truth is that yesterday's ruling can be laid directly at the feet of liberals. This was just a stupid case to bring. You can't make a serious argument that there's anything really wrong with either a ban on ballot harvesting or with requiring voters to cast ballots in the right precinct.

More generally, this kind of stuff, along with voter ID laws, is popular with the public, and this has nothing to do with the alleged existence of voter fraud. Even if there's no fraud, the average Joe and Jane think ID laws make sense and are untroubled by common sense rules like being required to vote in the right precinct. Liberals will get nowhere by going after this stuff.

What's more, none of it matters. The actual effect of these rules on Black and Hispanic voter turnout turns out to be minuscule. It is a waste of time—maybe worse than just a waste of time—to yell and scream about these kinds of laws.

What really is bad are provisions of these laws that allow Republican legislatures to replace election officials they deem insufficiently loyal to the Republican cause. If you talk to moderate voters, they'll be shocked if you tell them about this. They'll agree that these provisions are outrageous.

So why do we spend so much time protesting the stuff that doesn't matter (and is popular) and so little time protesting the stuff that does matter (and is unpopular)? It is a vast mystery. And like I said, it's really starting to piss me off. If democracy is truly at stake here, wouldn't it make sense to be at least a little smart about trying to save it?

The American economy gained 850,000 jobs last month. The unemployment rate increased slightly to 5.9 percent.

This is an odd report. The establishment data (i.e., reports from businesses) shows an increase of 850,000 jobs, which isn't too bad. However, the household data is miles away from this, showing that the number of employed people went down slightly in June and the labor participation rate remained steady. These two reports usually differ, so there's nothing strange about that, but they don't usually differ by quite so much. I'm not sure what's going on.

Hourly earnings were up a bit after adjusting for inflation, but weekly earnings were down considerably. Presumably this is because the average number of hours worked went down as more people got hired and there was less need for overtime.

I'm not sure what to make of all this. I think it falls into the category of "not too bad but the labor market isn't surging yet." We're still waiting for the big jobs breakout.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through July 1. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Here are six charts showing trends in public opinion among liberals and conservatives over the past 20 years or so. First up is immigration:

The Republican view of immigrants has bounced up and down a bit and is now up by maybe five points or so since 2000. The Democratic view has gone up by 35 percentage points.

(Note that by "up" I mean that the percentage share of partisans who hold the conventional partisan opinion has gone up. For Republicans, it means the share of Republicans who endorse the right-wing position has gone up. For Democrats it means the share of Democrats who endorse the left-wing position has gone up.)

Next is abortion:

Among Republicans, the most extreme view on abortion (always illegal) has gone up by about two points since 2000. Among Democrats, the most extreme view (always legal) has gone up by 20 points.

Same-sex marriage:

Democratic support for same sex marriage is up 50 points. Republican support is down 39 points (that is, they've moved 39 points away from the conservative position).

Next up is guns:

Among Republicans, the conservative point of view has gone up about 10 points. Among Democrats, the liberal point of view has increased by about 20 points.

Here are taxes:

The Republican view of taxes has gone down about ten points (probably due to the Bush tax cuts). The Democratic view of taxes has gone up by about 20 points.

And finally, religion:

Among Republicans, religiosity hasn't changed at all. Among Democrats, it's gone down by nearly 15 points.

Here's a summary:

Question for the hive mind: what conclusions can we draw from all of this?

Is this a crane flying across a bamboo marsh in China? Nope! It's a black-necked stilt flying across the San Joaquin marsh in Irvine. But very pretty either way.

Alex Tabarrok points me today to a longish post about how badly we managed the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, especially highlighting this:

Probably the biggest mistake was not intentionally infecting vaccinated volunteers. This could be done in 1 month, vs 6.5 months for the ecological trials that the entire world did out of misguided PR ethics. (2.5 is probably more realistic given signups, approvals, and big pharma’s slow data analysis and reporting. That’s still hundreds of thousands of lives.)

In a "challenge trial," you don't vaccinate 50,000 people and then wait six months to see how they did compared to a different 50,000 who got a placebo. Instead, you round up a thousand people, vaccinate them, and then a month later deliberately infect them all. This gives you a very fast read on whether the vaccine is any good.

So why not do it? The typical answer is that it's unethical even though everyone in the study is a volunteer, but the flip side of this is that if it speeds up vaccine development by, say, five months, it's going to save hundreds of thousands of lives. Is it still unethical even with that kind of benefit in the balance?

While you ponder the ethics of this, I'll offer up a different reason to be skeptical of challenge trials: I'm not so sure they would have speeded up anything. What matters, after all, is not producing enough vaccine doses for testing, but producing billions of vaccine doses for mass distribution. And that takes time.

How much time? It's surprisingly hard to get a good answer to that. But it's a long process. You have to engineer the flow manufacturing process. You have to source raw materials. You have to license all the tech transfers you'll need. You have to physically set up the manufacturing floor. You have to debug the manufacturing. And then, finally, you can start producing vaccines in volume.

Whoops! Don't forget about distribution! The Pfizer vaccine required storage at super-low temperatures, which in turn required the creation of a massive new distribution system. How long did that take? Months, at least.

In the case of COVID-19 vaccines, this whole process began—

Well, the truth is that I don't know when it began. It's some kind of state secret or something. Roughly, though, it seems like it began about as soon as it could have, and even so actual production didn't begin until September 2020, with significant volumes available perhaps as early as October or November.

In other words, an earlier FDA approval via challenge trials might have shaved a month or two off the schedule if they went well, but not much more than that.

But wait. That's still thousands of lives that could have been saved. True enough. And we can now go back and look at every single mistake that was made and start adding up the lives that were lost because we're all idiots. But like all of them, my basic comment is this: Is the middle of a massive pandemic really the right time to start dicking around with processes that we know work, in favor of experimenting with a whole bunch of new things that might make things better? You can decide for yourself what you believe, but I'm skeptical. When the entire planet is in a panic, I think there's good reason to believe that it's precisely the time to fall back on well-known processes and not let hysteria drag your attention away to all the bright new ideas featured on the New York Times op-ed page.

Obviously, your mileage may vary. I tend to be naturally cautious about this kind of stuff. But in the end, I suspect that although challenge trials are an interesting idea, they would have (a) made little difference in the end and (b) produced data that was hard to interpret since it's never been done before. The speeded up version of standard testing that we used instead was probably for the best.

And idiots though we may be, we ended up putting a 95% efficacy vaccine into mass production within 11 months of startup. If you think that's a disgrace, you might simply be overestimating what H. sapiens is capable of.

POSTSCRIPT: Despite all this, I still recommend reading the linked blog post about vaccine development. Partly this is because even if you disagree about this and that, it's still useful to read an after-action report and this is a decent one.

But the main reason is that there's an art to the internet rant, and this is a pretty good rant. Regardless of whether it's right or wrong, we should have more like this.

Atrios wonders how it is that Donald Rumsfeld managed to retain his social standing in view of . . . everything. Sadly, the answer is all too obvious. Remember this?

This would change over time as the war went badly, but in 2003 it was wildly popular among Republicans and enjoyed majority support even among Democrats. In all, 72% of the country was in favor of the war.

And there's this:

Fundamentally, both the Iraq War and the torture of prisoners was popular. Given that, it makes sense that Rumsfeld was popular too.

This has been our history lesson for the day.

The year 2021 is half over. It's kind of hard to believe.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through June 30. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.