Month: February 2022

Ezra Klein wrote this weekend about a new study that tries to figure out why some countries did better with COVID-19 than others. Since COVID affects older people more severely than younger people, countries with older populations generally had more COVID deaths than younger countries. That was it. Nothing else had much predictive power.

But what about infection rates?

More unexpected was what the researchers found when they looked at the factors that predicted how many people got infected. Some of the obvious candidates — population density, G.D.P. per capita, and exposure to past coronaviruses — failed to predict much in the way of outcomes. But both trust in government and trust in fellow citizens proved potent.

....This yields the paper’s most striking finding: Moving every country up to the 75th percentile in trust in government — that’s where Denmark sits — would have prevented 13 percent of global infections. Moving every country to the 75th percentile of trust in their fellow citizens — roughly South Korea’s level — would have prevented 40 percent of global infections.

Here is distrust of government in the United States:

Running a simple regression shows that despite the ups and downs, distrust of government changed little between 1980 and 2000. But since 2000 it's soared.

Next up is something called affective polarization. Roughly speaking, this is how negatively you feel toward the opposite political party. Here are the results from a recent study:

The authors rammed a linear regression through the data (left chart), as they did for all the countries they studied, but even a brief eyeball examination suggests there's nothing linear about this (right chart). From 1980 through 2000 nothing much changed, but from 2000 through 2020 everybody went crazy. Dislike of the other party skyrocketed more than 50%.

In other words, starting around 2000 both distrust of government and our dislike of people in the other party shot up. And if anything explains our lousy response to COVID, even though we were rich and well prepared, that's it.

So what happened? I think you all know the answer, but here's one more chart presented in a slightly unusual way. It shows the average primetime audience for Fox News:

Obviously the trendline is flat from 1980-2000 since Fox News didn't even start broadcasting until 1996. But Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich and Matt Drudge had provided fertile ground for explosive growth. Nothing happened for the first few years as Fox struggled to get carried by cable outlets throughout the country, but starting in 2000, with carriage contracts in place, their viewership skyrocketed.

Correlation is not causation. The year 2000 featured the Florida election debacle and the beginning of the George W. Bush administration, while 2001 featured the start of the war on terror. But Florida faded in people's memories; George Bush practically disappeared in 2009; and the war on terror lost most of its momentum by the end of the aughts. And yet, both distrust of government and dislike of the opposite political party continued to grow.

Only Fox News stayed around this whole time, spewing its toxic blend of white fear, vilification of liberals, and scorn of government. None of those was new, but it was Fox News that weaponized them, packaging them with all the skills and glitz of modern marketing and promoting them relentlessly on ostensible TV news programs. It's been enormously successful, and probably would have been enough to turn conservatives into vaccine skeptics all by itself. But just in case it wasn't, Fox also spent much of 2021 airing an explicit vaccine skepticism to its primed and rabid viewers.

Why? Because it made a lot of money for Rupert Murdoch.

Here are the results of our weekend poll:

As you can see, my audience is full of farsighted individuals, not neo-Luddites who turn their eyes from the future. Hooray for us!

The CDC has a new study out that measures the efficacy of different kinds of masks. Here's the infographic:

Using our estimate that masks are equally effective at inward and outward protection, I converted this into one of the tables that I posted a couple of weeks ago:

This is very much in the same ballpark as the earlier estimates. The CDC is a little more bullish about surgical masks, and their estimate for N95 masks is somewhere between the previous estimates for fitted and unfitted masks.

In any case, everyone agrees on the basic hierarchy: N95 is best, surgical is next, and cloth is weakest. But all of them are better than nothing.

Amanda Marcotte wants liberals to stop being such downers:

Progressives in the past couple of years haven't been doing ourselves many favors. The dominant discourse is so often focused on suffering and surviving, without any talk about happiness and thriving as a counterbalance.

....The recent kerfuffle over Spotify is a good example....The action feels more about performing self-sacrifice, proving liberal bona fides by showing off the small indulgences you'll give up. That garners likes and retweets, but as political action, it's likely to backfire. It will be used as confirming evidence that liberals are fun-hating scolds — which makes it easier for Rogan and his allies to recruit more young people to the right.

I'm far from the only one who has noticed. On "Pod Save America" this week, host Jon Lovett complained about the "grim and joyless aspect" of progressive politics and warns "nobody wants to become part of a sour and sanctimonious movement." It's not a popular message, but it's uncomfortably true.

Why yes! I don't necessarily agree with everything Amanda says after this, so please take up any issues you have directly with her. But her diagnosis is spot on.

Nor is it just the past two years, as she suggests. This has been going on for quite a while. Liberals are the party of:

• Don't watch the NFL. It's a racist concussion machine.
• Don't drive SUVs. They are destroying the planet.
• Nobody is "illegal." We should welcome hardworking folks from south of the border. Unless you're a racist, that is.
• Don't eat meat. It's all factory farmed and contributes to global warming.
• Suburbs are bad. We should fill them up with high rises.
• Watch your speech. You should talk the way young, college educated people do.
• The economy is terrible. Have you seen the latest news about what our heartless policies are doing to poor people?
• You aren't vaccinated? Obviously you're a selfish prick who doesn't care about your fellow human beings.
• The military? Why would anyone join the military?
• Everyone is racist. We should all gladly take diversity training courses to prove this to ourselves.
• Walmart is horrible. You shouldn't shop there because they're viciously anti-union.
• Amazon too.

I could go on, but you get the idea. Any of these things could be great if they were part of a passionate, upbeat crusade, but they aren't, really. They're mostly framed as scolding, and who the hell feels uplifted by a party of scolds?

I'm to the left of roughly 90% of all Americans, and even I get kind of tired of this stuff. There's just got to be a way for liberals to keep their principles but sell them more in an evangelistic tone and less in a hectoring one.

The Labor Force Participation Rate shows us the share of the population that works. The best measure is for ages 25-54, since that mostly eliminates the hassle of trying to adjust for people who are in school or retired. Here it is:

The trendline for men is drawn from 1960 through 2019 and then extended to the present. The trendline for women is drawn from 2000, when LFPR peaked, through 2019.

It's something of a mystery why these trends have gone steadily downward for 60 years (men) and 20 years (women), but they have. This is what the US labor market looks like. And right now, as you can see, the LFPR for both men and women is precisely on trend. There's no special reason to think it should increase.

It might, of course, though the usual way of bringing people off the sideline and into the workforce is higher pay, which we aren't seeing right now.

In other words, I continue to think that we're pretty close to full employment. The numbers might still go up by two or three million, which would be a small blip on the chart, or they might not. For all the complaining from employers about not being able to find workers, they can't be very serious about it since they aren't even willing to offer higher wages. That's the simplest way possible of getting more workers, after all.

Republicans are desperately trying to pretend that their censure of Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger was no how, no way, motivated by approval of violent insurrection on January 6. But they can "clarify" all they want. Here's the relevant clause of the censure resolution:

The New York Times reports that the language of the censure was "carefully negotiated in private among party members," and I have no reason to doubt that. So with all the time in the world and a gimlet eye on the wording, they decided to simply call the January 6 insurrection "legitimate political discourse," full stop—just like Donald Trump wanted them to.

Now they want to backpedal and claim that of course they were only talking about the peaceful folks who didn't break into the Capitol. It's just bullshit and no one should fall for it.

The seemingly endless hype of "artificial intelligence" has, naturally, produced plenty of obvious failures. I asked my car to call "Karen" the other day and instead it called "Mother Jones." Huh? Then I asked it to call "Home" and it asked if I wanted to call 611. This is typical performance.

On the other hand, the vast server farms of T-Mobile do a remarkably good job of transcribing messages left on my voice mail. It's so accurate it's hard to believe sometimes.

When you hear about this kind of stuff, what's your reaction?

• AI is just another overhyped scam. It's the dotcom boom of the '90s all over again.
• The AI snarkers are like the folks who mocked cars as toys in 1900. They were too blinkered to understand what would happen as the technology improved.

Which are you?

Guess what?

The unexpected triumph of António Costa’s Socialist party in Portugal’s elections this week continues a cautious comeback by Europe’s centre-left....All five Nordic countries are led by centre-left governments; Italy’s Democratic party is a member of its ruling coalition; Pedro Sánchez’s PSOE heads a progressive alliance in Spain; and a social democrat chancellor, Olaf Scholz, leads a three-party left-liberal coalition in Germany.

All of this, says the Guardian's Jon Henley, "is further good news for a movement that five years ago looked in terminal decline."

More broadly, terminal decline was what people thought about democracy itself after Trump and Brexit and Hungary got everyone in a tizzy.

But it turned out to be just the usual political rhythms. Sometimes liberals are up and sometimes they're down. Sometimes the populist right makes inroads, other times they get tossed out on their bums. In Britain, Boris Johnson is on the verge of self-destruction with an approval rating below 30% and a party that's suddenly nearly ten points behind Labor. In the United States, Trump failed reelection and the White House and both houses of Congress are now in Democratic hands.

None of this is cause for complacency. A big part of the reason that right-wing populism has faded is that the left fought back. If that hadn't happened, who knows where we'd be.

So we keep fighting. Forever. That's how politics works.

Denmark is very different from the United States. It's small; its vaccination rate against COVID-19 is over 80%; and its citizens generally trust the government. That said, I still found it interesting to read a Twitter thread from Michael Bang Petersen, a professor at the University of Aarhus who advises the Danish government on pandemic policy.

The question he addresses is why Denmark has recently removed all pandemic restrictions even though case rates are very high. Petersen notes that there are reasons to think things are better than they look, but beyond that he's forthright about taking public opinion into consideration:

Despite this, a clear majority of the public supports removing all restrictions (https://t.co/VwDC41OX7E). A minority (28 %) is concerned. (3/19) pic.twitter.com/dDOQYQqOkm

— Michael Bang Petersen (@M_B_Petersen) February 1, 2022

Also, in our @hopeproject_dk we have - every day - tracked feelings of societal threat (https://t.co/wztCRXyexF). They have been dropping sharply the last month and are at the lowest point we have measured. (4/19) pic.twitter.com/CE8IOmt1dj

— Michael Bang Petersen (@M_B_Petersen) February 1, 2022

Petersen then makes a fairly conventional argument about the costs and benefits of imposing restrictions:

Should Denmark wait until all concerns have been settled? Maybe. But waiting is not free. It has costs in terms of the economy, well-being and democratic rights. Balancing these is an explicit part of the Danish strategy....Our research shows that these costs generate pandemic fatigue, which fuels distrust.

Should your country also turn the responsibility to people themselves? It depends on the epidemic & public preferences. But this shows how trust & solidarity entails an acceptance of costs, allowing society to act in agreement. Both when closing down & when opening up.

In the US this would have to be done on a state-by-state basis, but otherwise our issues are similar. The difference is that in the US we decide on pandemic policy by yelling and screaming and taking sides in a vast tribal war. In Denmark they do it by polling the citizenry and asking health authorities to take that into account.

The funny thing is that I'll bet both methods come to similar conclusions. In places were people don't want strict COVID rules, they don't have them. In places where they do, they do. The big difference is that Danes prefer a calm, technocratic approach to getting there while we apparently think it's more fun to burst a few national blood vessels on our way to letting the people decide. I guess every country has to be true to its national character.

Over at the American Prospect, Alexander Sammon has a good piece about the problems at our ports. Long story short, we've known this was coming for a while:

In July 2015, the Federal Maritime Commission, a federal agency with little name recognition and even less influence, released a report sounding the alarm about the state of America’s ports. A congestion crisis had been building for years and was fast becoming untenable; even the country’s relatively tepid economic-growth rate was straining against decades of disinvestment at its most critical trading hubs. Chassis weren’t available, trucks couldn’t get in or out, and terminals stayed perpetually clogged.

....Almost five years passed before the coronavirus announced itself on American shores, and another year after that before the disease gave an already fissured supply chain the nudge it needed to fully rupture. And while the circumstances of a global pandemic, its shutdowns and labor shortages, seemed exceptional, it was something as routine as a double-digit import growth, feared specifically by the FMC since at least 2006, that sent shipping container volume skyrocketing and brought the system to a grinding halt. A prophecy that few heard and no one heeded had finally come true.

The entire piece is well worth a read, not least because it confirms something I keep trying to get across: we don't really have a supply chain crisis. Generally speaking, our supply chain is working fine, delivering goods to American shores by the gigaton. The problem is a simpler one: we haven't invested in the capacity to handle ever rising demand for the stuff that consumers want and can afford thanks to the decade-long economic expansion under Obama and Trump.

This is not a supply chain problem, no matter how much we might like to place the blame on others. It's a problem with corporate forecasting. It's a problem with monopoly control of various links in the US transportation network. It's a problem with weak investment in infrastructure.

So let's stop pretending that our problems are the result of "chaos" in our overseas supply chains. The real problem is much closer to home, and it's up to us to fix it.