Author: Kevin Drum

This is neither here nor there, just something that's been bugging me for a while. It's a timeline of vaccine development after the pandemic hit in 2020:

I've got no beef with Operation Warp Speed, which set up a pretty effective program to handle expedited development and manufacturing of COVID vaccines. That said, virtually everything of importance regarding vaccine development happened before Warp Speed was announced, and it was funded by grants from Congress, not Donald Trump. "Warp speed" was an effective marketing slogan, but beyond that it mostly just picked up a ball that was already in play.

I'm not quite sure what to make of this, but . . .

My M-protein number is continuing to drop. It's now at 0.21, quite a bit less than it was a couple of weeks ago.

Will it keep dropping? Was my response to the CAR-T better than I thought? Is it an unusual response that takes a long time to bottom out? Will it eventually hit zero?

My doctor doesn't know and neither do I. That said, lower is always better. At the very least, it suggests I'll have a longer period of low cancer load before I have to start up another round of chemotherapy. So it's good news.

This is a small pavilion in the Rose Garden on the grounds of the Huntington Library. The statuary inside is a classically draped woman with a winged cherub at her feet.

Business formation continues to grow like gangbusters:

New business applications are up 6% from last month and 15% from a year ago. I don't know what's going on with this, but it certainly suggests that the economy looks awfully good to a lot of people.

California's infamous CEQA—the California Environmental Quality Act—has been around for more than 50 years. It's a product of the late '60s, when environmental concerns over big corporate construction projects first emerged as a major issue and Californians decided they wanted to do something to rein them in.

Today it's much hated by housing advocates because it's routinely used to conduct scorched-earth resistance to practically any new housing development if even a few people oppose it. CEQA doesn't care about majorities, after all. It only takes one person with (a) money and (b) sufficient zealotry to go to court and grind things to a halt for years. Hell, even the judge hearing the case might think it's nuts, but it doesn't matter. Every single motion, deposition, and EIR has to be judged on its merits. This drives a lot of people crazy, including Gov. Gavin Newsom. Law professor Chris Elmendorf explains:

As Newsom noted, CEQA has been “weaponized” by “wealthy homeowners” (among others) to block housing — often in the urban and suburban areas where people have the least environmental impact.

And housing isn’t all that’s on the line. To meet the state’s greenhouse-gas emission targets — and secure its share of federal green-energy funding — California needs to quickly approve wind and solar energy projects, electricity transmission lines, car-charging networks and mass transit. To that end, in May, the governor unveiled an 11-bill infrastructure package to “assert a different paradigm.” No longer would we “screw it up” with “paralysis and process.” Going forward, the state would commit itself to “results.”

In the end, though, nothing much happened. Why, Elmendorf wonders, do we put up with this? CEQA's problems are so well known that surely the legislature is willing to reform it? Or perhaps the governor should be willing to issue new, looser regulatory guidelines? What's the holdup?

Hardly anyone likes to mention this for some reason, but it turns out the answer is simple: CEQA has two big fans. The first, obviously, is environmental groups who want to maintain the law's full authority in order to preserve wetlands, desert habitat, shorelines, old-growth forests, native chaparral, and so forth.

CEQA's second big fan is the social justice community. One of the original motivations for the law came from Black and Hispanic leaders who were sick of having every type of appalling blight imaginable—toxic dumps, rail yards, highways, landfills, refineries, smelters, chemical runoffs, and more—rammed into their neighborhoods because no one had the power to stop them. For them, CEQA has been a godsend, a law that finally provides them with the same power to halt development that rich people have always had.

And there you have your paradox. Is CEQA terrible because it allows rich homeowners to effectively ban local development? Yes indeed. Is CEQA a boon because it provides genuine protections against rapacious exploitation in poor communities of color? Yes indeed.

Finally, then: can you somehow have one without the other? Probably not. And so CEQA lives on. The plain fact is that for many people, the good outweighs the bad. Not everyone wants to get rid of it.

During the pandemic there was a lot of conversation about child care services and how badly they'd been affected. But the reality is a little different. Here is total revenue for the child care industry over the past decade:

Child care services briefly dropped by a third at the start of the pandemic, but had almost completely recovered within a year. Since then, child care revenue has been above its pre-pandemic level and only slightly below its trend level. This is not an industry that was ever in any special distress for more than a few months at most.

Here's an interesting little tidbit about religion in America. Devin Pope of the University of Chicago has been tracking church attendance using cell phone data that tells us whether you're really in church, and his results are remarkably consistent:

Week in and week out, there are roughly 25 million Americans at church each Sunday. Note that this is not the number who attend church every single week. It may be different people each week who make up the 25 million. So how does this compare to the number who say they attend church?

People lie a lot about church attendance! A quarter of Americans say they attend church weekly, but in reality fewer than 3% of them do. That's about 8 million regular weekly churchgoers.

That's . . . not very many. And not counting the Christmas & Easter crowd, only about 12% of Americans attend church at all. That's not very many either.

Vehicle miles traveled per adult peaked in 2004 and has fallen pretty steadily since then. By 2022 it had partly recovered from its pandemic dip but was still 10% below the 2004 peak.

Last year Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis decided he needed to revive the old State Guard under his personal command—in order, he said, "to respond to a projected active hurricane season." In particular:

In a natural disaster-prone state such as Florida with a potentially active hurricane season on the horizon, there is a clear and present need for a larger civilian emergency response force.

But times change, and so do ambitions:

Promoted by DeSantis as an “emergency focused, civilian defense force” when it was established in June 2022, the state guard has quickly morphed into something quite different....Volunteers have been trained for military combat, including the use of weapons; khaki polo shirts and pants were replaced by camouflage uniforms;

Additionally, DeSantis’s compliant, Republican-led state legislature has contributed to the change of direction, this year approving a massive expansion in the force’s funding, size and equipment. Its budget increased from $10m to $107.5m, and its maximum size more than tripled from 400 recruits to 1,500.

On the governor’s shopping list were helicopters, boats, police powers and reportedly even cellphone-hacking technology for a force outside of federal jurisdiction, and accountable directly to him.

....Maj Gen John D Haas, Florida’s adjutant general overseeing the state’s national guard...seemed to confirm the veterans’ assertion that the state guard’s brief had changed. It was a  “military organization”, he said, that will be used for “aiding law enforcement with riots and illegal immigration”.

Several veterans have recently quit the Guard over this change in direction and have gone public with their concerns. The response, generally speaking, has been to accuse them of being whiners who should pound sand. DeSantis has his personal little military force in hand, and he has no intention of letting go.

What really happened with Sweden and COVID-19? The story is a little more complicated than you usually hear, but you don't have to get too deep in the weeds to see that something interesting happened there.

Start off in 2020, when the pandemic begins and Sweden adopts the most hands-off policy of any peer nation. There are no lockdowns, no school closings, no restaurant closings, and no masking. Here's how they did:

Even in those early days, Sweden's death toll was fairly low, and it would have been even lower if not for their catastrophically bad handling of nursing homes. If they had even matched the performance of other countries in their protection of the elderly, their excess mortality rate would have been down around 5%.

Still, the pandemic continued to rage and Sweden's death rate was higher than other Scandinavian countries. So in late 2020 they cracked down a bit. Large groups were prohibited, schools were allowed to close if they wanted, and the government gave itself authority to shut down shops.

Importantly, though, these changes were modest and mostly voluntary. In practice, almost nothing changed. Restaurants, bars, shops and gyms all stayed open, and although schools were allowed to close, few did.

In one sense then, the "Swedish model" changed when the COVID death rate stubbornly stayed too high. But it was a very modest U-turn, and Sweden remained far more open than most other countries. Its model was basically intact, and it eventually produced this:

Over time, Sweden has had one of the best excess mortality rates among advanced countries despite having one of the worst vaccination rates:

One reason for Sweden's success is that although government recommendations were just those—recommendations—Swedes generally took them seriously:

In a survey by Sweden’s Public Health Agency from the spring of 2020, more than 80% of Swedes reported they had adjusted their behaviour, for example by practising social distancing, avoiding crowds and public transport, and working from home. Aggregated mobile data confirmed that Swedes reduced their travel and mobility during the pandemic.

Swedes were not forced to take action against the spread of the virus, but they did so anyway. This voluntary approach might not have worked everywhere, but Sweden has a history of high trust in authorities, and people tend to comply with public health recommendations.

Would this work elsewhere? One may doubt. But it worked in Sweden and the results were manifold. Restaurants stayed open and people continued to eat in them. Businesses mostly stayed open and people continued to work. Schools stayed open and kids continued to learn. All this happened with fairly minimal intrusion into people's lives and no panic or constantly shifting guidance. There's a lesson to be learned here.