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Month: December 2021

Published on 17 Comments on There are three big things we can do to slow down COVID-19

What countermeasures are effective against COVID? As best I can tell, there are three that are pretty unquestionable:

  • Vaccination
  • Indoor masking
  • Stopping superspreader events

Vaccination is obviously #1 by a large margin. Indoor masking has been shown to be moderately effective by several good studies. And superspreader events—typically large indoor gatherings—were a clear problem in the early days of the pandemic. At the time, there was no solution except to ban them, but today we can simply restrict them to attendees who are vaccinated.

I suppose I should add testing to this mix, since it seems highly likely to be useful even though I'm unaware of any rigorous research to back this up.

What else? I'm open to correction here, but this seems to be about it. Business lockdowns, school closures, travel restrictions, working from home, and all the other things we've done have little evidence to support them.

As COVID moves ever closer to its eventual endemic status, we need to decide just how to react to each new wave. At this point, I'd put our efforts into the three things listed above along with recommendations to get tested if you feel symptomatic. Aside from that, there's probably not a lot more to do in all but the most severe outbreaks.

Published on 20 Comments on Just how long is “transitory,” anyway?

I have finally figured something out. Paul Krugman posted a longish look at inflation yesterday in which he surveyed the evidence for the recent spike being either transitory or long-lasting. He is on Team Transitory, but admits that Team Persistent is looking good right now:

Even once the inflation numbers shot up, many economists — myself included — argued that the surge was likely to prove transitory. But at the very least it’s now clear that “transitory” inflation will last longer than most of us on that team expected....And credit where credit is due: So far, warnings about inflation have proved right, while Team Transitory’s predictions that inflation would quickly fade have been wrong.

And here is a chart showing the Consumer Price Index:

Apparently Team Transitory thought that the inflation spike would last only a few months, which is why they're starting to cave in to the inflation hawks. But that never occurred to me. I always assumed that "transitory" meant 9-12 months, which is why I continue to feel comfortable about inflation. I've been assuming all along that it would peak around the end of this year and then start declining around the end of the first quarter of 2022.

I didn't have any particular reason for thinking this, aside from the sheer size of the stimulus ($2.8 trillion, including the $900 billion passed in December of 2020). But it explains why I've been a little perplexed by the conversation around inflation. Krugman was thinking inflation should already have started to decline, so he's worried. I've been cheerfully thinking it wouldn't decline for another few months, so I'm still happy as a clam.

I don't know who's right, of course. But at least now I know where the disconnect is between me and the professional economists.

Published on 30 Comments on The Great Resignation . . . isn’t?

A few days ago the Washington Post ran a piece about the Great Resignation that focused on Hinesville, Georgia. It was based on extensive interviewing that tried to get to the bottom of how the GR was hurting Hinesville businesses and the community in general. However, it left me puzzled. Once you plow carefully through everything, it turns out there are basically three problems.

First off, Hinesville has seen a big increase in good-paying warehouse jobs, so people have been leaving crummy minimum wage jobs to go work in a warehouse. But this started at least five years ago and has been ongoing ever since. It has nothing to do with the pandemic.

Second, some people—it's unclear how many—have decided to leave the workforce and subsist on government benefits. However, as time goes by and savings dry up, more and more of them are returning to work. If my arithmetic is correct, practically all of them have returned by now:

As of October, the participation rate in Liberty County is the highest it's been in the past decade. There's hardly anyone staying home just to collect government bennies. (At least, no more than usual.)

Finally, there are supposedly a lot of people who quit working at restaurants during the pandemic and have never come back. But that's entirely contrary to this chart:

If this is accurate, employment in restaurants has been growing for years. It fell a small bit at the start of the pandemic, but then rebounded and has been growing at its usual rate ever since. There's no apparent lack of workers.

As best I can tell, the only actual problem in Hinesville is that "mom and pop" restaurants say they can't afford to raise wages the way national fast food franchises can. But this is never explained. If a local McDonald's can afford to raise its wages, why can't a local pizza joint? They both have similar cost structures and they're both competing for the same customers. And local franchises are on their own, just like the mom-and-pop places. It's not as if the national corporation bails them out if they're losing money.

I don't doubt that everyone quoted in the piece is talking honestly, but the only serious problem seems to be the fact that mom-and-pop shops feel that they can't raise wages enough to attract workers. But is this true? Or could they go ahead and do it because everyone else has to do it too? If everyone has to raise wages, after all, the competitive landscape doesn't change much.

Maybe there's something here I'm missing. But one thing is for sure: all the problems supposedly related to the Great Resignation just don't pan out. Whatever problems Hinesville is suffering, they have entirely different sources.

Published on 26 Comments on The United States is safer than it’s been in decades

I was doodling around with something this morning and happened to come across a report showing the violent crime rate in 2020. However, this one wasn't the FBI's usual report, it was the annual data from the National Crime Victimization Survey. Here it is:

The FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting shows a slight increase in the violent crime rate in 2020. The NCVS, by contrast, shows a huge decline. If the NCVS is right, violent crime in 2020 dropped to its lowest level ever.

The homicide rate is up in a lot of big cities, for reasons we don't yet understand, but the absolute number of homicides is low and most of us bear little risk of being murdered. In terms of general safety, the United States is now safer than it's been in decades.

Published on 71 Comments on Maybe 2021 marked the peak of conservative influence

Last night Dave Roberts asked if there was any good political news in 2021. I responded:

But this got me thinking about something else: Is 2021 the year that conservatives finally went too far?

Liberals have long griped about how the media treats obvious conservative lies. The list is endless: climate change, Benghazi, Hillary's emails, tax cuts paying for themselves, and on and on. But these are fairly ordinary partisan disputes, and for better or worse the press is unlikely to take sides. Politics is politics, after all, and political reporters have seen this kind of stuff on both sides for decades.

But then came 2021, and suddenly conservatives went beyond—way beyond—the bounds of normal partisan fights. There have been two in particular:

  1. The "Big Lie" that the 2020 election was stolen and Donald Trump should have rightfully won the presidency.
  2. The refusal of conservative leaders to be aggressively pro-vaccine.

Even for people jaded by decades of partisan cat fights, these were shocking. The Big Lie was not something that was even colorably debatable. It was just a lie. A big one. And it was adopted by practically everyone in the Republican Party, leading to the insurrection of January 6. To this day, Republicans insist the election was stolen even though everyone knows this is Goebbels-level fabrication.

The Republican attitude toward vaccination is, if anything, even more shocking. For one thing, it's barely even partisan since it doesn't really harm Democrats in any way. It's just flat-out pandering that has cost thousands of lives and will cost thousands more. There's literally no reason for it aside from either pique (Donald Trump); a desire to promote conspiracy theories because it's profitable (Tucker et al.); or craven capitulation to the mob (DeSantis and other GOP leaders).

I may be fooling myself, but I've noticed at least a small change in the media's treatment of Republicans this year. Even hardened veterans who pride themselves on being cynical toward all sides are stunned by what's happened. Lying for partisan advantage? Yawn. Everyone does it. But lying in service of destroying faith in democracy? Refusing to promote vaccines just to get a few cheers from the cheap seats? Those are whole different things.

So far, this hasn't produced a sea change in coverage of Republicans. But I think it's produced the start of something that might eventually become a sea change—especially if Democrats can lighten up and take advantage of it. We'll see.

Published on 13 Comments on Did healthcare spending increase 9.713 or 1.913 in 2020? Probably neither.

CMS has produced its estimate of healthcare spending in 2020:

As with so many aspects of American life, the COVID-19 pandemic had a dramatic impact on the nation’s health sector in 2020, driving a 9.7% growth in total national healthcare spending, bringing spending to $4.1 trillion.

....However, when spending for federal public health and other federal programs (which includes COVID-19 supplemental funding) is removed, NHE growth was only 1.9%, a slower rate of growth from the 4.3% increase in 2019, largely due to reduced use of medical care goods and services because of the pandemic.

Obviously the 9.7% figure is meaningless since it includes billions of dollars in one-time COVID expenditures. However, the 1.9% figure is probably also meaningless since lots of routine healthcare was put off due to COVID staffing issues.

In other words, 2020 is a black hole and always will be. That probably goes for 2021 too. We have a period of a year or two (or three) where we really have no idea how much normal healthcare spending has increased. This is a disaster for those of us who like to make political points based on these numbers, but I suppose we'll all survive.

Published on 39 Comments on Fed decides to take Larry Summers’s advice

Fed chair Jerome Powell said today that "the risk of higher inflation becoming entrenched has increased." As a result, Larry Summers is getting his wish:

Most central bank officials, in projections released Wednesday at the conclusion of their two-day meeting, penciled in at least three quarter-percentage-point rate increases next year. In September, around half of those officials thought rate increases wouldn’t be warranted until 2023.

....One immediate sign of officials’ increased urgency: They approved plans that will more quickly scale back their Covid-19 pandemic stimulus efforts, ending a program of asset purchases by March instead of June. That opens the door for them to start raising rates at their second scheduled meeting next year, in mid-March.

This little chart from the New York Times shows what each member of the FOMC board thinks about where interest rates should be by the end of next year:

Nearly everyone thinks we should end the year at least at 0.5% (i.e., two quarter-point increases) and a strong majority thinks we should end up at around 0.75% (three increases).

So there you have it. Inflation hawks are getting what they want, and this ought to open the door to passing the BBB bill. It was never inflationary to begin with, but a lot of people seemed to be afraid it was. Now maybe they'll be willing to listen to reason.

Published on 118 Comments on Among working-age adults, COVID has increased the crude death rate from 0.43118 to 0.47118

Here is Chris Hayes today on Twitter:

I tweeted back that the level of COVID deaths wasn't actually that high, and naturally I've been dragged all over Twitter as a result. Maybe I deserved it. But I still think there's something not quite right about this.

The CDC's preliminary mortality report for 2020 is here. When you separate out the numbers for working-age adults, here's what you get: COVID has increased the crude death rate from 0.43% of the population to 0.47%. If this happened in the absence of COVID it would barely even be noticeable.

As before, I want to emphasize that I'm not saying that the deaths of the elderly don't matter. Or that COVID-19 is no big deal. Or that long COVID isn't scary. Or that we couldn't have done better.

All I'm saying is that the lived experience of most people simply doesn't match the constant rhetoric of "staggeringly" high levels of death. Does this matter? I think it does, though I admit I'm not quite sure how. But it's something to think about if you're trying to figure out why so many people have come to accept the COVID death rate as normal and tolerable.