Kevin Drum

David Wallace-Wells is at the helm of Ezra Klein's podcast today and talks about "pandemic revisionism" with Katelyn Jetelin. It took them quite a while to get around to the topic of what worked and what didn't—thank God for transcripts!—and when we finally got there we were still left with no answers:

We know vaccination saved more than 3 million people in the United States. That’s a pretty easy analysis....But beyond that, we still do not know what works best to slow the spread of Covid-19 in terms of non-pharmaceutical interventions. For example, test and trace, or isolation, or quarantine, or indoor mask mandates, or closing venues. And this is very surprising to me because that means we still can’t answer important questions like you’re asking, like, their effectiveness or even more importantly, the trade offs.

We can see in the scientific literature that prolonged shelter in places are linked to, for example, harmful alcohol use. But how does that compare to uncontrolled viral transmission? We don’t know.

....How much masks reduced transmission in a population is not an answer we have. There’s been very few studies that have looked at this. And among the few studies, there’s a huge range, around 9 to 45 percent reduction in transmission with community masking. And this range means that these studies were done in different settings and different cultures. So many unanswered questions remain.

My own best guess is that test-and-trace is effective, but only if it can be done well. In the US it can't be. Indoor masking is moderately effective but probably a nonstarter in the US thanks to the mask truthers. Social distancing is effective. School closures aren't effective because of the health tradeoffs to keeping kids at home. Cleaning surfaces is not effective. Shelter-in-place is questionable. Border restrictions are pointless between countries with similar levels of infection. Banning large gatherings—theaters, churches, sports events—probably works well to minimize superspreader events. Plexiglass shields are ineffective and possibly even counterproductive. Improved ventilation is effective, but it's not clear how effective it is.

This doesn't leave much: just social distancing, cutting back on large gatherings, and indoor masking in places where health officials won't be lynched for suggesting it. What's worse, this is only a guess about what worked with COVID-19. A future virus with different characteristics might respond entirely differently.

This leaves me with my single biggest question: How much risk should we take with vaccines? They are by far the most effective response, so what should we do if we get to the point of mass production of a future vaccine before testing is complete? Go ahead and administer it if early results look good? Or bite the bullet and wait?

I've showed you St. Michael's Abbey before, shortly after it opened in 2021. Here it is again in a different view, framed by cactus and oak trees and lit up by the late afternoon sun.

Franklin Foer has written a book about the first two years of the Biden administration. Part of the book is about Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan:

By the end of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, President Joe Biden was sure he made the right decision after watching the events unfold in the Situation Room.

“Biden didn’t have time to voraciously consume the news, but he was well aware of the coverage, and it infuriated him. It did little to change his mind, though,” Franklin Foer writes in his upcoming book, an excerpt of which was released Tuesday....“So much of the commentary felt overheated to him. He said to an aide: ‘Either the press is losing its mind, or I am,’” Foer writes.

Biden can sleep easy: it was indeed the press that had lost its mind. In fact, it was one of the most egregious examples of bandwagon journalism in recent memory, a farrago of frenzied reporting that insisted on pasting the word chaotic into every story regardless of whether there was any real chaos to report. But reporters on the ground never seemed to acknowledge the obvious: somehow, amidst all this "chaos," the State Department and the military managed to steadily evacuate 6,000 American citizens and more than 100,000 Afghans with minimal loss of life. Under the circumstances, it was about as courageous and well executed an airlift as anybody could have reasonably expected.

And good for Biden for never giving in to the sniping. He was right to pull out and he was right to stick to his guns.

The Inflation Reduction Act was mostly a climate bill, but it also included a few other things. One of them was a provision that allows Medicare to start negotiating the price of prescription drugs instead of just paying whatever vendors feel like charging. Negotiations between buyer and seller are a standard part of market economies, so this makes total sense.

Medicare was allowed to choose ten drugs to start with, and today they announced what those would be:

This is like a greatest hits list of the pharmaceutical commercials on my TV. Altogether it adds up to $50 billion in Medicare spending, which means the federal government can save upwards of $10 billion if it's able to negotiate even a 20% reduction in price. The new prices will go into effect in 2026.

Multiple myeloma is in the news again:

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) announced Tuesday that he has a “very treatable” form of blood cancer and has begun treatment that will last the next several months.

“After a few days of not feeling like myself this past week, I had some blood work done,” Scalise said in a statement. “The results uncovered some irregularities and after undergoing additional tests, I was diagnosed with Multiple Myeloma, a very treatable blood cancer.”

Scalise is right: multiple myeloma is very treatable. I'm living proof of that, still going strong nine years after I was diagnosed. At the same time, Scalise should plan on skipping a few days of work later this year. MM is treatable, but the treatment can knock you on your ass.

July was not a good month for employment: Both job openings and hires dropped sharply yet again. Job openings were down 338,000 and hires were down 167,000:

In percentage terms, job openings were down 22% from a year ago and hires were down 9%. Hires are now below their mid-2018 level. Quits were also down, a continuing sign that workers are a little more worried about finding a new job if they leave their current one.

Earlier today, while I was browsing through the MINT8 retirement report, I noticed something I had missed on earlier reads: estimates of the number of workers with pensions.

As we all know, the era of the traditional "defined benefit" pension is pretty much over except for government workers. These are pensions that had a defined payout when you retired, and they've mostly been replaced by "defined contribution" plans like 401(k) accounts. The value of these plans depends on how your investments do, so the payout isn't guaranteed.

MINT8 has projections for pension plan participation, and this is what it looks like for the upper middle class:

As you can see, DB plans are down and projected to keep going down, while DC plans have gone up. However, between the two of them pension plan participation is extremely stable: 87% a few years ago and 85% half a century from now.

However, the news is not so rosy for the working class:

Among workers with modest incomes, DB plans are down but DC plans haven't made up for them. A few years ago 55% of these workers had pensions of some sort, while half a century from now that's projected to fall to 44%.

A couple of days ago I was thinking, as one does, about the equivalence of gravitational mass and inertial mass. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, all mass has two properties:

• It is attracted to other mass (gravity).
• It resists having its motion changed (inertia). This is true even out in the deepest expanses of empty space where it's free of both gravity and friction.
• Quite remarkably, these two properties are exactly equal.

This is why a 10-pound bowling ball and a five-ounce baseball fall at the same speed if you drop them from the leaning tower of Pisa. The bowling ball has 32x more mass, so gravity attracts it 32x more strongly. However, it also has 32x more inertia, so it resists gravity 32x more than the baseball. Result: both balls fall to the earth at the same speed.

But then I got to thinking more. The source of gravitational attraction is the curvature of spacetime. But what's the source of inertial resistance? I fiddled with that a bit, trying to either remember or figure out the answer. Some quantum mechanical property? Just an uninteresting alternate way of saying objects travel on geodesics? Something to do with conservation of momentum and therefore the translational symmetry of space? Finally I gave up and googled it. And the answer is: no one knows.

Isn't that something? Inertia is everywhere and it's a concept so simple everyone understands it. But where does it come from? The precise equivalence of gravitational and inertial mass is one of those well-known mysteries because it's part of the familiar story of Albert Einstein's derivation of General Relativity. It even has a name. Until today, however, I had never realized that the very existence of inertia remained a deep and unsolved mystery of physics.

Donald Trump looks to be a busy man next year:

Busy calendar (per @cnn): pic.twitter.com/sqhxijdP2S

— Paul Farhi (@farhip) August 28, 2023

This is an impressive graphic, and I don't blame CNN for running it. At the same time, complex federal trials never begin on time—and they're really not going to begin on time in these cases. Trump's lawyers are going to flood the courts with motions for this and that, and many of them will be granted. I'll be surprised if any of these trials begin before summer.

A lone rider makes her way up the escalator from the Madeleine metro station in Paris.