Kevin Drum

In the Financial Times this weekend, Janan Ganesh is music to my ears:

This is as good a time as any to make a non-exhaustive list of things that I read in 2020 [which supposedly] had little future. Nightlife. The handshake. Buildings tall enough to need lifts. Casual sex (ha ha). Pret A Manger. The rat race. Business-class seats. Airbnb. I recount none of this in order to embarrass.

....The point is to draw lessons from their wrongness. One is that journalism has taken a neurotic turn over the past decade or so. It is there in the enthusiasm with which social maladies are talked up (the “loneliness epidemic”). It is there in the interior focus of so much feature writing.

....If you write on the regular, you have to play up the significance of transient events. “This little episode won’t change much, read 1,000 words on it”, is not a bad pitch. But it has to be rationed. The rest of the time, all the drive in media is to attribute significance to the ephemeral. Between 1997 and 2003, every other week was “Tony Blair’s worst week”. In 2020 — more forgivably, no doubt — the same impulse led to some dire futurology.

I have two points to make about this. First: duh. It was astonishing to count up the number of essays by alleged adults who insisted that millennia of human nature would be wiped out by a year or two of mild pandemic. Was this due to sweeping historical myopia? Ignorance of the power of social habits in primates? Wishful thinking about things the authors hoped would change? I don't know, but a lot of people ought to be giving this some serious thought.

Second: Ganesh acknowledges that one long-lasting change is remote work. I don't disagree with him, but I do wish there were some decent empirical evidence on this score. But nobody seems to have tracked this rigorously before the pandemic, and even after the pandemic we only get stuff like this:

Remote work has gone down from 35% at the start of the pandemic to 7.7% today. But this solely counts people who are working remotely because of COVID. It doesn't include the effect of workplaces that have changed their remote work policies more generally, even if the original impetus was COVID. At least, that's how I interpret this.

The truth is that outside the highly educated bubbles of the New York Times, progressive Twitter, and Silicon Valley, there's a lot of evidence that remote work is steadily fading away. But there's no firm evidence. It's hard to believe that some kind of consistent, semi-valid time series isn't available that covers the past 20 years or so, but that sure seems to be the case.

Scary times in Dana Point this weekend. As her father looked on frozen in terror, a little girl on a bodyboard was scrutinized by a hideous alien monster looking for a snack. In this high-resolution photo, you can even see the toxic venom dripping from its dreadful maw.

You will not see this in the mainstream media, of course, since the Deep State covers up all evidence of extraterrestrial activity on Earth. However, you'll be relieved to know that everything ended up OK. Moments after this picture was taken, the monster was distracted by a fish and flew over to dive bomb it. I guess it decided the little girl was a little too big for lunch.

Over the weekend Vox published about the millionth article informing us that our response to monkeypox is a total clusterfuck and bears an uncanny resemblance to our infamous COVID-19 clusterfuck.

Sure. Maybe. Generally speaking, though, I sometimes wonder how fast these newly-minted critics think a country should be able to roll out a massive testing and vaccine program for a new disease. But they never say. Nor do they ever hint at any real expertise in ground-level epidemiology and the obstacles it presents. The answers are just a vague faster and we're the richest country in the world for god's sake.

So here's the Vox piece:

Accurate data is critical for public health, and the US doesn’t have it. The US declared monkeypox a public health emergency this month, but the decision may have come too late....Reliable demographic information is key to making the right choices for allocating limited tests and vaccines.

All of this feels like an uncanny echo of the early mishandling of Covid-19....Reporting lags on rising cases meant that lockdowns began too late to save tens of thousands of lives. Similarly, certain communities uniquely at risk, like Black and Hispanic people who lacked access to health care, were suffering higher rates of severe illness and death from Covid before policymakers had any way of knowing where to direct public health outreach.

....The delays and poor coordination between clinics and city health departments meant that contact tracing happened too late to contain the spread. If the spread had been caught earlier, patients would have been more likely to minimize their risk and seek out testing and treatment if they were exposed, and there would have been more advance warning on ordering a vaccine supply.

First off, here are the numbers:

You'll notice that there are two lines for the United States. The bottom one is just the normal raw data. The top one is lagged by two weeks to account for the fact that our first case showed up about two weeks after the first case in Europe. I am doing this out of a monumental abundance of fairness.

But even using the lagged figure, the US is roughly in the middle of the pack. If our response was terrible, then just about everyone's response was terrible.

So this is Point One: You have to compare the US to the real world, not to some idealized response in a white paper. All of the countries in this chart are advanced economies and we did about as well or better than most of them.

Then there's Point Two: In the entire Vox article, contact tracing is mentioned precisely once. But this is the whole ballgame. All that testing and all that data we collect is primarily to support a vigorous program of contact tracing, especially in a case like this where we already knew early on who the most vulnerable community was (men who have sex with men).

And that's where everything falls apart: despite the heroic efforts of a small group of people, we're terrible at contact tracing and all the data in the world won't change that. What we need is (a) great data collection, (b) a large group of extremely well-trained people, (c) lots of funding, and (d) a population willing to answer the phone and provide intimate data to a government bureaucrat calling about a disease.

We have none of that. A few other peer countries do better, but most of them don't really have it either. And in the US, we have another obstacle: even if we were great at A, B, and C, we are possibly the world's worst at D. Not only that, but thanks to the Fox News paranoia machine we're probably worse on this score than we were before the COVID pandemic. Our monkeypox case rate is currently rising faster than in most peer countries, and the reason is most likely our collective unwillingness to embrace contact tracing as a way of life during pandemics.

So, yes, we should collect better data. We should coordinate local, state, and federal officials more efficiently. We should get this kind of thing up and running faster. We should pour money into it.

But it will never make more than a small difference as long as Americans are widely suspicious of contact tracing. That's our big problem, not a lack of funding or commitment or basic epidemiological expertise. The fault, my friends, lies in ourselves, not the CDC.

POSTSCRIPT: Here's another chart showing cumulative deaths from monkeypox:

That would be zero for every country on the chart, including the US. Keep this in mind as you evaluate the priority given to monkeypox by the medical community. During the period shown in the chart, 70,000 people in these countries died from COVID-19.

China's housing bubble is catching up to them:

A raft of data released Monday showed economic activity slowed across the board in July, including factory output, investment, consumer spending, youth hiring and real estate, highlighting the breadth of the economic challenge facing policy makers in a politically sensitive year for leader Xi Jinping, who is expected to break with recent precedent and seek a third term in power this fall.

This is on top of a longer term slowdown in economic growth:

China has a very uncertain future. Their demographics are bad; their dependence on low-value manufacturing is bad; their obsession with Taiwan is bad; and Xi Jinping's brand of nationalistic autocracy is bad.

On the other hand, their educational system is good and their dedication to economic growth is good. Those might be enough to make up for everything else. Maybe.

On its first anniversary, Doyle McManus writes about our withdrawal from Afghanistan:

It was Biden’s worst foreign policy failure, and prompted warnings that more catastrophes would follow: not only the tragedy of Taliban rule over 38 million Afghans, but a resurgence of international terrorism and a collapse of U.S. influence around the world.

Ah yes, Joe Biden's infamous "chaotic" withdrawal. I think we can all agree that the Taliban continues to be the appalling and thuggish group it's always been, but there was never any real argument about that in the first place. But how about everything else?

Terrorism? Contrary to pessimists’ fears, the Afghan-based core of Al Qaeda hasn’t succeeded in rebuilding.

....As for broader damage to U.S. credibility, reports of our demise appear to have been exaggerated....To Biden’s credit, he followed through, building international coalitions to counter China’s growing power....He also worked to assure NATO allies that the withdrawal from Afghanistan, where more than 50 other countries also sent troops, would not weaken the U.S. commitment to Europe.

Those relationships were tested within months, when Russia’s Vladimir Putin threatened to invade Ukraine. Biden and his aides took a leading role in organizing an allied response, including warnings that Western countries would impose joint economic sanctions on Russia if Putin launched an invasion.

To Putin’s apparent surprise, the NATO allies were serious. Even more surprisingly, the outbreak of war in Eastern Europe prompted Sweden and Finland to abandon their long-held status as neutral countries and apply hurriedly for membership in the U.S.-led alliance.

As McManus concludes, the fall of Kabul had "surprisingly modest" repercussions beyond Afghanistan itself:

A year later, Biden’s decision to withdraw, however disastrous it appeared at the time, looks more defensible.

Quite so. I would certainly like to hear a few others acknowledge this.

I didn't know this, but apparently there's a huge divide in our nation over the question of whether to use a flat top sheet as part of our bedding:

Ariel Kaye, 38, the founder and CEO of Los Angeles company Parachute, had never slept with a top sheet....Because of her business, the top-sheet discourse follows Ms. Kaye everywhere, even when she’s not in the mood to argue. “When people find out that I’m the founder of Parachute they want to go head-to-head on this issue in all sorts of circumstances,” she said. “There are very passionate people on both sides of this debate.”

These kinds of disputes are endless, and here's the part I don't get: Why do people love to argue over them? Why are we so addicted to arguing over everything instead of just accepting that different people have different tastes? I mean, listen to whatever kind of music you like. Why should I care? Drive whatever kind of car you like. Eat whatever food tastes good. Make your bed however you like. But why argue endlessly over it?

Very roughly, our knowledge of the search warrant debacle has proceeded like this:

FBI searches Mar-a-Lago and removes about a dozen boxes of documents.

Donald Trump immediately suggests the FBI planted evidence against him.

Republicans almost unanimously back Trump and accuse the FBI of a partisan fishing expedition.

Parts of the search warrant and the FBI property receipt are leaked, showing some of the boxes contained ultra-top-secret documents, including signals intelligence related to foreign leaders.

In fact, some of the documents contained "nuclear secrets."

Trump ridiculously claims that he had declassified everything in the boxes. This sets off another round of disingenuous Republican chin stroking that's mostly designed to distract the press.

It turns out that FBI counterintelligence had visited Mar-a-Lago in June and asked for the return of any classified documents.

Against the advice of his staff, Trump refused. His lawyers then signed an affidavit saying Trump no longer had possession of anything classified. This was obviously untrue.

Republicans begin arguing that these classified documents weren't really any big deal. Probably just keepsakes or some such. Not classified classified, you understand.

Also, they say the FBI hates Republicans and is now a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party. They've increasingly felt this way ever since James Comey refused to indict Hillary Clinton for her handling of official emails. Rants about “defunding the FBI” finally confirm the death of irony.

Trump starts issuing a barrage of statements. Lots of other presidents took classified documents when they left the White House. He had a standing order to declassify anything he took with him to the residence. Barack Obama took millions of pages of classified documents, including nuclear secrets (a statement that prompted the National Archives to issue a statement denying this).

Aides start leaking stories about the chaotic last days of the Trump administration. Apparently everyone knew Trump was taking stuff he shouldn't, but nobody had the guts to stop him.

That's where we are now. By tomorrow, who knows? That depends on what kind of leaks our press corps is able to squeeze out of their sources.

Friday was an unusually clear night, so I hauled out my camera for a couple of quick photos. This is one of the sharpest pictures of the moon I've ever gotten.

FYI, my track record over the past week is: overcast skies at night, except when the moon is up and shining so brightly that clear skies don't matter. If Galileo had faced conditions like this he never would have discovered anything with his crummy little telescope.

Enough of this. Just stop:

The bill’s success shows how the politics of climate change have shifted profoundly since scientists began warning about global warming

On Friday, a dozen years after a sprawling climate bill passed the House but failed to move ahead in the Senate, Democrats successfully muscled the United States’ most ambitious climate change proposal ever past Congress, sending it to President Biden for his signature.

The bill’s success shows how the politics of climate change have shifted profoundly since scientists began warning about how human-caused emissions would warm the planet.

I've read other pieces about how, for example, environmental groups kept pushing and pushing and pushing, and that's why the bill passed. Or about the brilliance of Chuck Schumer's leadership. Or AOC and the squad mesmerizing America into supporting it. But it's all malarkey, as our president might say.

Oh, there were political differences between the previous climate bill in 2010 and now. The 2022 bill had to be weaker. It got fewer votes in the Senate. Republicans were unanimously opposed to the 2022 bill instead of just 98% against it. And Democrats had to bribe the fossil fuel industry to keep its mouth shut. The entire political climate has gotten worse since 2010.

But these are all trifles. The 2022 climate bill passed for one reason: Joe Manchin decided he was in favor of it. That's it. That was the difference between success and failure.

Not hurricanes or droughts or wildfires or floods. Not the Arctic melting faster than we thought. Not environmental groups suddenly pulling their heads out of their asses. And certainly not public opinion:

So let's stop with the tik-toks and thumbsuckers. Nothing much has changed politically. Nothing has changed in public opinion. Facts on the ground have so far not made a dent. Environmental groups have not suddenly become brilliant marketers.

If Joe Manchin had decided he wanted to spend $400 billion on the child tax credit, that's what would have passed. Instead he decided to support climate change. If you really want to write the story of how the 2022 climate bill passed, you need to figure out why Manchin changed his mind over the past dozen years. That's it.

Here's the rental vacancy rate since 2005 for the ten largest metro areas in the country:

The average vacancy rate for the top 75 metro areas has declined from 10.1% after the end of the Great Recession to 7.1% just before the pandemic to 5.7% in 2022.