Cats, charts, and politics
Here is poor little Hopper in her cone, looking wistfully into the now-forbidden backyard. But there's good news: Her tail seems to be getting better, and tomorrow we have another trip to the vet to find out for sure. And who knows? Maybe things will be in such great shape that we can remove the cone. Thoughts and prayers, people.
During a pandemic, anyone who poses a risk of transmitting the disease is a serious danger to those around them. The usual answer to this is quarantine rules, which historically have been pretty blunt thanks to poor knowledge of how disease transmission works and the lack of any alternatives. But thanks to advances in medical science we're luckier today: in the case of COVID-19 you have a choice of quarantine or getting a quick, safe vaccination.
Importantly, the quarantine option is still available. This is historically the way governments have addressed infectious disease, and there's literally no one who thinks that governments don't have the power to enforce quarantines during an epidemic.
In other words, there's no mandate for anyone to get vaccinated or tested. But if you don't, you're a danger to those around you. What's more, you remain a part of the potential disease pool, which poses a risk of breeding deadlier varieties of COVID-19. For those reasons, the government is fully within its authority to insist that you remain in quarantine until the emergency has passed.
Got it?
According to National Review, President Biden's vaccine mandate is illegal, unconstitutional, morally wrong, and impractical:
Beyond the serious legal and process issues raised by using a rarely invoked OSHA emergency authority to deputize private businesses to prod 80 million Americans into getting vaccinated, there are serious practical questions. And one of the problems with bypassing the typical regulatory process is that those tasked with implementing these requirements will have no opportunity to weigh in on the potential complications.
Just to think of a few complications, under this order, businesses will now have to set up a system for monitoring who has been vaccinated and who has not. They will also have to facilitate weekly testing for those who choose not to be vaccinated, and keep track of the negative tests. Who pays for the tests? What happens in the time that workers are waiting test results? This remains unclear as of now.
Hmmm. This does not seem like much of an organizational hurdle to me. I think the business community will be able to handle this pretty easily.
In any case, I think a lot of people are misjudging the point of the mandate. After all, its biggest flaw has nothing to do with its legal or bureaucratic aspects. It's the fact that the federal government has no practical way of enforcing it.
But that's OK. What Biden is really doing is giving cover to businesses that wanted to do this anyway. Until now, these businesses risked looking partisan if they mandated vaccines, but now they can simply say that it's the law and they have no choice. It lets them off the hook for making the decision.
And what will companies do to employees who refuse to get vaccinated or tested? I assume every company will decide for itself, but again, I think it's beside the point. What's important is that there are lots of people who will do something merely because it's "officially required." We saw the same thing with the Obamacare mandate: the fine didn't really matter. The mere fact that insurance became legally required was enough to make most people comply, even if they grumbled about it. It may not seem like it sometimes, but Americans really are mostly pretty law-abiding folks.
So that's that. The mandate gives cover to businesses and a quasi-legal mandate to individuals. But what's most important is that the message it sends—we're finally serious about this—should be enough to get a lot more people vaccinated regardless of its eventual legal status.
The way things are shaping up, Joe Biden's new vaccine mandate will spark two responses:¹
The question is, which of these will prove to be a more powerful political force? I think Biden is assuming that the anti-vaxxers will never vote for Democrats anyway, so pissing them off costs him nothing. Conversely, he figures that the folks who are vaccinated are really, really tired of the anti-vaxx antics and ready to support a Democratic initiative to just lay down the law. On net, then, Democrats will win support by getting tough on vaccinations.
This will be especially true if Republicans go to the mats in their opposition to vaccinations. They want to be known as the anti-mandate party, but if the nutbag caucus wins the PR fight they're going to become the anti-vaccination party whether they like it or not.
¹Three if you count the always-popular "Whatever."
Well, this is going to be fun. President Biden has finally decided that enough's enough on the vaccine front, so he has instructed the Department of Labor to write a rule requiring all employees of large companies (over 100 employees) to be vaccinated. Also all federal employees. Oddly, though, he didn't take this opportunity to mandate vaccinations for air travel.
Anyway, it will take some time for OSHA to write up the new rule, and it will instantly go to court after it's issued. My tentative take is that . . . I'm not sure about the president's authority to do this. If it were a state government doing it, I don't think there would be any question. But can the federal government do it? At one time I would have been inclined to think that the Interstate Commerce clause provided sufficient authority, but obviously the current Supreme Court will be a hard sell on that. Beyond that you have the vague "promote the general welfare" argument, but that's hardly a slam dunk either.
In any case, only about 27% of the adult population has yet to be vaccinated, and I'd guess that close to half of these people work for small companies and won't be affected by the mandate. So even if Biden wins in court, I figure this will get us up to maybe 85% or so. Not bad, but still not enough.
Behold this chart showing the Labor Force Participation Rate over the past few decades:
The LFPR is exactly what it sounds like: it's the percentage of the adult population that's either employed or looking for employment. Let's take a look at men first.
After the 1990 recession, the LFPR for men dropped by about 1.5 percentage points and then flattened out. After the 2000 recession, ditto. After the 2008 recession, the loss was about 4 percentage points. In other words, after every recession the LFPR ends up at a permanently lower level.
This has now happened often enough that we should expect something similar to happen this time around: the LFPR will end up dropping about one point or so and then flattening out at around 68%. This is only about 0.5 points above where we are right now, which equates to less than one million people.
Among women we see a similar thing, though it's smaller and didn't start until the 2000 recession. At a rough guess, we should expect the LFPR for women to end up about one point from where it is now, which equates to two million people.
Altogether, then, this makes it look like we'll add about 3 million workers before the LFPR flattens out again. Looking at the unemployment rate provides a similar number. This is a lot less than the 10 million people who are supposedly looking for jobs.
There are no sure things here, but numbers like these are why I continue to think there are fewer people looking for jobs than we think. I'd put it at 3-5 million, at which point the unemployment rate is 3-4% and the economy is operating at 100% of its potential:
Can we boost the LFPR? Yes indeed. We just have to pay people more to lure them into the job market. Can we raise potential GDP? Also yes, in theory, but that's a slower, more complicated process and no one is entirely sure if we can do it—or what risks it involves. It's currently a matter of some controversy.
I would love to be wrong about this, but I'm not sure I see any reason to think that the US economy is on track to suddenly explode above its potential. The fast and massive stimulus spending did its job, but its job was to speed up our recovery, not to raise the economy to a permanently higher level.¹ The good news is that it did this marvelously. The bad news is that having done it, there's not much more we can expect it to do.
¹Its other job, of course, was to help people who were hard hit by the recession. That's not germane to a macroeconomic discussion, but it's certainly why massive stimulus is worthwhile regardless of its broader effects.
This is a mystery flower, one of three that I've never been successful in identifying. Can anyone tell me what it is?
UPDATE: Apparently it's Starwort, an invasive weed native to Ireland.
Criminologist John Pfaff brings this chart to our attention today:
There are a couple of things to notice. First, people always think that crime is worse overall than it is in their own neighborhood. Second, in 2020 perceptions of local crime went down while perceptions of overall crime went up.
It's not hard to figure out what happened in 2020. Basically, perceptions of neighborhood crime—i.e., crime that people know about firsthand—didn't change much. But an endless Fox News focus on the crime associated with George Floyd protests convinced a lot of people that America's cities were aflame. It was never really true, but on TV it sure looked true.
This is all part of a continuing perception that you take your life in your hands if you visit an American city. I've gotten this reaction a surprising number of times from friends who are sort of startled if I tell them I'm going up to LA. "Isn't that dangerous?" And this is LA in the middle of the day. It's not special pleading to say that it's not even remotely dangerous. But a surprising number of people don't know this.
I blame TV in general, Fox News in particular, and long memories that go back to an era when big cities actually were dangerous in certain areas. Obviously you shouldn't be an idiot, and there are certainly sketchy places that anyone with sense would avoid at night. But downtown areas in general in the daytime? Mostly they're no more dangerous than your local shopping mall.
I wrote about a pet peeve yesterday, so why not tackle another one today? Here is Alexandra DeSanctis at National Review arguing that opposition to abortion isn't really based on religious beliefs:
One need not be religious to acknowledge biological reality: The unborn child is a distinct, living human being. Abortion therefore is an act of violence. It is a procedure that, when successful, kills that distinct, living human being. It should be obvious that attempting to restrict or abolish such a procedure does not require imposing God or religion on other citizens; it doesn’t even require belief in God.
This is so tiresome. For the past several decades the anti-abortion movement has been driven by the idea that "life begins at conception." That is, at the moment of conception the embryo becomes a human being who deserves the full protection of the law. But there's no special secular reason to choose conception as the dividing line. It could just as well be based on heartbeat or brain development or viability outside the womb or anything else. It's a gray area. The only reason to insist on conception is if you also believe this is the moment that the embryo acquires a soul from God.
But you hardly even need to bother with philosophical arguments, which will only lead you down a rabbit hole anyway. Just look at what real-life people actually think. According to a Pew survey, virtually everyone who opposes abortion believes strongly in God. And there's this:
Hardly any atheists believe abortion should be illegal. It's almost exclusively a belief held by religious folks, and the more religious they are the more they believe it. In real life, full-on opposition to abortion is very obviously a religious conviction.
DeSanctis is annoyed at people who think that striking down Roe v. Wade puts us on a path to theocracy. Fine. I understand. But at the same time, opposition to abortion from conception onward is very clearly a religious belief. Denying this leads conservative writers to tie themselves in knots, desperately trying to find secular arguments that just happen to produce exactly the conclusions that their particular religion teaches. You are treating your readers like idiots when you do this.
I am genuinely puzzled by this:
A third of the country thinks 9/11 changed America for the better? That seems crazy to me. Off the top of my head, 9/11 produced the following changes:
I suppose you might think that the general increase in security is a good thing because we were too complacent about terrorism before 9/11. But that's all I can come up with.
I feel like I must be missing something really obvious here. But what?