In a word, no. Even at the very beginning of the pandemic, the CDC said only that schools might want to close depending on local transmission rates and known outbreaks—but even then said there was little evidence it helped more generally. After that they became positively evangelistic in their recommendations for schools to stay open (but to do it safely).
Here are excerpts from four CDC documents published during the first year of COVID. Not media or talking head perspectives. These are the CDC's actual words.
March 12, 2020: "There is a role for school closure" in response to outbreaks of COVID. However:
Short to medium closures do not impact the epi curve of COVID-19 or available health care measures (e.g., hospitalizations).... Other mitigation efforts (e.g., handwashing, home isolation) have more impact on both spread of disease and health care measures. In other countries, those places who closed school (e.g., Hong Kong) have not had more success in reducing spread than those that did not (e.g., Singapore).
July 23, 2020:“It is critically important for our public health to open schools this fall,” said CDC Director Dr. Robert R. Redfield. “The CDC resources released today will help parents, teachers and administrators make practical, safety-focused decisions as this school year begins.”... The resources and tools made available today support how to open schools safely by promoting behaviors that prevent spread, [etc.].
August 1, 2020: While opening schools—like opening any building or facility—does pose a risk for the spread of COVID-19, there are many reasons why opening schools in the fall of 2020 for in-person instruction is important.
Schools play a critical role in the wellbeing of communities
Schools provide critical instruction and academic support
Social and emotional health of students can be enhanced
through schools
Mental health of students can be fostered through school
supports and services
Continuity of other special services is important for student
success
February 12, 2021:K–12 schools should be the last settings to close after all other mitigation measures in the community have been employed, and the first to reopen when they can do so safely. Schools should be prioritized for reopening and remaining open for in-person instruction over nonessential businesses and activities.
The top chart shows total public K-12 spending as a percent of GDP. The bottom chart is the same for per-pupil spending. For this one I used the share per billion dollars of GDP to avoid a big mess of decimal places.
Here's an interesting thing. It starts with a typical outraged Twitter post:
Now suck in your gut and read this very long—but fascinating!—reply from Greg Koenig about why bolts like this cost so much and are worth every penny:
Fun fact.
In the outskirts of Portland is a nice little shop in an anonymous industrial park. You walk in to a little foyer with a folding card table and 9 thick, vacuum sealed Mylar bags, each about 1' long and 4" in diameter. They are sitting on top of about 70 pages of paperwork. This is the entirely daily production of this facility.
Inside are a bunch of old Mori Seiki NLX lathes — the old ones, before Mitsui bank let Dr. Mori train wreck the company with the DMG merger. Aside from a little wear on the interior paint, the 7 lathes look like they just came out of the showroom. In fact, the whole place looks like a machine tool showroom — spotlessly clean, with a thick, perfectly level urethane floor that a product photographer could use as a mirror white background plane in an Apple ad.
There are a few big things in our lives that are literally held together with a couple of fasteners. One example; every Boeing and Airbus engine is held onto the wing by only 2 bolts, and this is the shop that makes them. Boeing and Airbus both require multiple suppliers for critical components, so this is not the only shop that makes these bolts, but the nearest competitor is in Seattle (close to Boeing, but far enough away that the Cascadia Subduction Zone quake won't take both out).
The shop bay next door is equally clean, but contains a vacuum furnace and the most through inspection lab I've ever seen. X-ray and magnetic particle inspection, CMM, optical comparators. In the corner is a cherry red custom painted Lista cabinet where raw blanks are stored. An identical Lista cabinet in Green is at the opposite side of the shop. Raw material comes in, gets inspected, heat treated, inspected again, and moves from the Red to Green cabinet, collecting about half the paperwork along the way.
The blanks take about 3 days to go from a cylinder of Sandvik or Thyssen-Krupp steel into a bolt. One machine, the oldest, is used to rough the blank into a pair of concentric cylinders, the second oldest machine roughs the hex head, before the bolt is stress relieved and allowed to rest for 36 hours. Another machine finishes the hex and applies chamfers, these are final surfaces.
The final step is the threads, where things get interesting. They are cut in 3 steps; roughed, semi-finished, and finished. The secret sauce here is that a new insert is always used as the semi-finisher, and the semi-finished state is very very carefully measured to compensate that exact insert. The final finishing pass is taken in one (surprisingly healthy) hit using the data from the semi-finishing pass to be on-dimension within about 2µm. The key insight they had is that you get a better surface finish off of a tool that has already taken a couple of cuts. The threads look like you wrapped a mirror around a spiral staircase; their process is so dialed-in that their work competes with thread-grinders for dimensional and surface quality. Even so, just before inspecting with old-school thread wires at the machine — the guy running the lathe spins it at about 500rpm and reaches in with a Bright Boy stick and touches them up, runs his fingers over them, and gives them the most important QC they'll receive. This guy has been on this machine for 15 years; nearly every aircraft passenger aircraft in the sky is held together by at least one bolt that has passed his touch inspection.
Of course, the engineers in Renton or Toulouse won't just accept that Mitch in Gresham touched this bolt so it is good... so whole reams of paperwork are geared by regularly calibrated Zeiss metrology gear that does a complete dimensional inspection, another magnetic particle inspection (3 in total), and an X-ray. Having said that, Mitch rejects more than Zeiss does (about 2-3%).
You want to pay more than $45 for each of these bolts.
Now, the particular bolts Koenig is describing actually cost $2,300: as he puts it, $100 for the bolt and $2,200 for the inspection paperwork. But the bolt in the picture is its little cousin. It doesn't hold engines onto wings, but it's an airplane bolt with similar quality requirements.
This is not the explanation for every high-priced milspec component. But you should know which is which before you shoot off your mouth.
I have a post all teed up about Why Kamala Lost, but I can't quite pull the trigger on publishing it. Here's why:
This is not the Democratic (popular vote) winning margin each year. It's the change from the previous election. For example, Joe Biden won by 4.5% in 2020 and Kamala Harris lost by 1.5% in 2024. That's a change of -6.0%.
The House vote barely changed at all in 2024. In 2022 Democrats lost by 2.7%. This year they lost by 3.0%.
These are just not world historical changes, especially in a weird election that featured a global mutiny against incumbents and a JV candidate hastily subbed in three months before Election Day.
In other words, there may not be an awful lot to explain. Maybe Democratic losses were just the result of a routine pendulum swing and the breast beating over causes is overwrought.
I do think there are some lessons for Democrats in this year's election, and I may yet write about them. But at this point I feel like every theory should be treated as highly provisional. Election results bounce around all the time, and this year's bounce wasn't wildly out of the ordinary. Maybe it really was just the price of eggs.
Ezra Klein has a long interview today about governance with Steve Teles and Jennifer Pahlka. The gist is that our government bureaucracies really are terrible and liberals are in denial about the need for massive reform. It left me with many thoughts because I think, overall, it hit the wrong targets.
It's hard to adopt just the right tone for this because, God knows, big bureaucracies have lots of problems and liberals aren't always willing to face up to them. I'm really not trying to be a big defender of the bureaucracy here. But maybe a little one? This turned out to be very long, so let's take it in small pieces.
KLEIN [on defending institutions]: The core conflict right now, the irresolvable one, the ones that two parties will not compromise on, is over institutions: Democrats staff and defend them. Republicans loathe and seek to raze them to the ground.
This is nothing new. Remember when William F. Buckley said he'd rather be governed by 2,000 random names from the Boston telephone book than the faculty of Harvard? That was 1963. As a possible explanation for the recent travails of the Democratic Party it really doesn't work.
PAHLKA [On the disconnect between policy and delivery]: Probably the biggest example of it would be the Biden administration’s insistence on the success of the big bills that were passed — the CHIPS Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, infrastructure, where they are incredible accomplishments legislatively. And if you look at it from that perspective, he is absolutely a hero. But if you look at from the perspective of people in states in the U.S. whose economies have been hollowed out: It took so long to get that money out the door.
This just isn't true. First, here's construction spending after the CHIPS Act:
That's fast! And despite lots of early warnings, new fabs have been opening on time and on budget. Second, here's estimated IRA spending on green energy projects:
This represents about two-thirds of the total authorized. It's going out the door and being used about as fast as you could hope for with such enormous sums.
Third, the infrastructure bill. The headline number is that it was a $1.2 trillion bill. But that's grossly misleading. It allocated only $550 billion in new funding, and as always, that's over a decade. It's really a $55 billion bill, and that money is being spent just fine.
KLEIN [on nothing ever getting done]: The first contract to build the New York subways was awarded in 1900. Four years later — four years — the first 28 stations opened.
Compare that to now. In 2009, Democrats passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, pumping billions into high-speed rail. Fifteen years later, you cannot board a high-speed train funded by that bill anywhere in the country.
So, yeah: I’m worried about our institutions. I’m angry at our institutions. I don’t want to defend them. I want them to work.
Well, yes, but I don't think this is due to dysfunctional liberal bureaucracies. It's due to a different liberal delusion: the unshakable belief that America desperately needs lots of high-speed rail. This has been going on for 60 years, not just 15, and we still have no high-speed rail.
The bureaucracy isn't at fault for this. It would happily dole out the money for HSR if it was truly a priority for anyone. But it's not. California is ground zero for HSR boondoggles, and only a part of that can be blamed on inefficient bureaucratic rules—though there are plenty of those. Mostly it can be blamed on voters and politicians who have succumbed to hazy liberal dreams of gleaming trains that have no basis in reality.
TELES [on why bureaucracies deteriorate]: Things go wrong. There’s a scandal. We add a new process, we add a new procedure — without really thinking about how it interacts with all the rest of it. And so we shouldn’t necessarily think that the problems that Jen is describing are a result of the fact that anybody designed this thing to operate this way. It’s really the result of just additional layers of accretion without corresponding layers of destruction.
This is true. When we set out to build things these days there are lots of hoops to jump through. The project has to be let out to competitive bidding. You have to write an environmental impact report. Maybe you have to ensure some of the work is done by small businesses. There are minority set asides. Buy American provisions. Zoning variances. Environmental justice requirements. Public comment periods for new rulemaking. Grievance procedures for anyone who's unhappy. Etc.
But with few exceptions these hurdles have nothing to do with the bureaucracy per se. They're put in place by legislators at all levels. Liberals want to ensure social fairness. Conservatives want to make sure liberal interest groups can't cheat. Local politicos want to retain power. And everyone wants to make sure nothing objectionable happens near their own house.
This is where the blame lies. Bureaucracies themselves are just the unlucky bastards who are forced to make it all work.
PAHLKA [on outside forces]: We’re skipping over a really important point here that Steve touched on when he mentioned scandal, which is the adversarial nature of all this.... Steve was referring to that earlier, sort of the ’60s and ’70s that’s still very much in our DNA as Democrats — that is to sue, sue, sue. Well, if we sue, sue, sue all the time for all sorts of reasons —
Suing government, here, you mean?
PAHLKA: Exactly. Suing the government. Then every time we sue, we make the government more risk averse. There’s a lot of adversarialism out there, and the natural result of that is going to be a system in which you defend your judgments by using no judgment.
No argument here. This is absolutely a problem—though it's pretty ecumenical these days. Block a rich person's view and they sue over some alleged deficiency in the EIR. Build something near a poor neighborhood and liberal interest groups will sue. Build near a residential area and owners will sue over increased traffic. Violate someone's notion of government overreach and conservative interest groups will sue. Award a contract and the losers will sue.
But—this is obviously a broad problem that bureaucracies themselves do nothing to cause. All they can do is react, and it's true that sometimes the reaction can be a sort of fetal crouch where dotting i's becomes far too important.
If you want to solve this, the answer lies mostly in legislation that rolls back protections a bit and provides safe harbors if the truly important rules are followed.
KLEIN [on the problems with big cities governed by Democrats]: I was looking at some election results. And it was weighting the shift in the vote by the density of the place. And what it shows is that in the most dense places, which is to say the big cities, the vote turned against Democrats the most... These are places where people were very exposed to blue state governance, exposed to the cost of living, exposed to housing crises, exposed to disorder on the streets, homeless encampments.
I doubt very much that this is responsible for a sudden shift over the past four years. More likely it's due to the fact that Kamala Harris didn't campaign in these places and lots of Democrats in deep blue cities stayed home because they knew their votes didn't matter. The obsessive coverage this year of the seven swing states as the only ones that mattered may have had something to do with it.
But I want to make a larger point. It's true that big cities have deteriorated over the decades, but it's a couple of big trends that are largely responsible for this. The first one is also the most obvious: Both the rich and the upper middle class have increasingly disengaged from cities, partly by moving to the suburbs and partly by segregating themselves into gated enclaves where they can shut out the problems of urban life. This has left central cities increasingly subject to the pathologies of the poor, the poorly educated, and the homeless.
Second, the poor communities themselves have deteriorated. In the past, the smartest and most capable of the poor stayed put their entire lives because no other options were open to them. They ended up as the natural leaders of these communities. But no longer. We've gotten too good and too aggressive at identifying these people and sending them to college—where they become part of the middle class and move away. As a result, central cities are left rudderless and even poorer.
These problems obviously have nothing to do with governance, either red or blue. It's just the way things are.
TELES [on the high cost of building stuff]: A piece by Leah Brooks and Zach Liscow...shows in exhaustive detail just how much the costs of building infrastructure in the U.S. have gone up, which Jen was talking about earlier. And they demonstrate that the explanation for that increase, which I think is behind a lot of Americans’ sense that nothing works, is citizen voice. That there’s so many opportunities for often quite minoritarian intervention in building things, that everything takes very long. It takes a lot more. And the other thing is government doesn’t get big wins that translate into trust and a willingness to invest it with new resources.
"Citizen voice." Not bureaucracy. Beyond that, though, I'm a big fan of this chart:
New York City has astronomical infrastructure costs. But more broadly, the US is fairly middling. There's a popular myth that America has fantastically higher building costs than other countries, but it's largely based on (a) New York City, which gets a ton of media coverage; (b) comparison of a few high-profile HSR projects; and (c) massive building throughout China, where the government doesn't have to care about public approval. Overall, though, it really is mostly a myth. There's probably a kernel of truth to it because America really is a litigious nation, but no more than that.
Here's a story: FEMA has long handed out money to disaster victims, but in the past they required people to spend it only on approved things. If you ran out and needed more you had to show receipts that demonstrated you had followed the rules.
Then they decided this was dumb and rescinded the rule. That's an example of a bureaucracy killing a regulation on its own. It can be done.
But it also opens up FEMA to blowback. Someday an activist group is going to collect evidence of fraud and hand it to a friendly politician, who is then going to demand hearings that generate blaring headlines about millions of wasted taxpayer dollars. You can practically see it in your mind's eye already.
And it's not as if the criticism will be wrong. You'd like to think that people could be relied on to use common sense, but they can't be and we all know it. It would be nice, for example, if all we had to tell restaurant managers was, For God's sake, just make sure the place is clean and the refrigerator works and employees wash their hands. But as we become richer we also become more risk averse. That means lots of detailed rules—the refrigerator must close automatically and contain separate areas for meat and vegetables and run at 34-36°F and shelving must be stainless steel. This is not the bureaucracy at work. This is the result of the public reading The Jungle and Silent Spring and Food Politics and demanding action. But that's not all. At the same time we also demand that cheating can't be allowed. And the environment be kept clean. And the workplace be safe. And residents have some say in what gets built next door. So we demand politicians pass some rules about this and naturally they do what they're told.
This doesn't always turn out the way we'd like. But it's not really the fault of the bureaucracy. For that, we just need to look in the mirror.
The New York Timesreports today that the CDC reports that drug overdose deaths have plummeted recently. Sure enough, they have:
The Times article provides a bevy of possible reasons for the decline, but I have my own theory. One of the most consistent findings of drug research is that drug use is faddish. In the last 50 years it's gone from heroin to cocaine to crack to marijuana to meth to fentanyl. Now fentanyl use is finally dropping off. It's never clear why a particular drug falls out of favor, but it probably has something to do with generational shifting: youngsters watch their elders dying in huge numbers and eventually turn to something else when they get old enough to use drugs themselves.
It probably also has something to do with the stark decline in all drug use among teens. If you don't pick up the habit in high school, it's less likely you'll pick it up later.
How do people feel financially? Do they feel worse than headline indicators like unemployment, inflation, and growth suggest they should?
This is all but impossible to answer. If you look at personal finance figures, you'll see that people are earning more than they used to and also spending more. But how do they feel after they've spent as much as they can afford? Mostly satisfied? Or do they feel like they had to make a bunch of tough choices and they're stressed about all the stuff they couldn't buy?
It could be the latter. One aspect of modern life that doesn't show up in economic indicators is how much new stuff there is now that people feel they really have to have. We've always needed food, clothing, cars, health care, housing, and other necessities. But today we also need cable TV subscriptions; multiple computers; internet access; cell phones; video games; daycare (because mom works); air conditioning (50 years ago only half of all homes had air conditioning); and so forth. Has this outstripped our higher incomes?
That's tough to answer because the cost of things like food and clothing have gone down. When you combine that with higher incomes, do people feel ahead or behind compared with how they felt 50 years ago?
I don't know. Nobody knows. But we can still get a sense of how financially stressed people are by simply asking them. And we do:
As you'd expect, the less money you make, the more likely you are to say you're dissatisfied with your finances. But has this changed for the worse over the past 50 years?
Not really. The middle class and above are less likely to dissatisfied. The working and lower classes are more dissatisfied, but only by about three percentage points over half a century. That's noise level.
If this is accurate, it means that, over the long term, people don't feel any more stressed about their finances than they ever have. And since the digital baubles of modern life haven't changed recently, headline economic indicators ought to be pretty reliable guides to financial stress in the short term
We'll never know absolutely for certain. But the evidence sure suggests that in both the short and long term, American voters aren't feeling any serious increase in financial angst.
POSTSCRIPT: Of course, one thing to keep in mind is that even a 3-point increase in dissatisfaction is still a lot of people—probably on the order of three million or so. If they're loudly unhappy, it could make a bigger difference in the national mood than the tiny percentages suggest.
This would be no big deal for a president who nominated other Black cabinet members too. But your only one? Once could be a coincidence. Twice, not so much. The question is what Trump's thinking is:
(a) Black men aren't qualified for anything but HUD.
(b) The U in HUD stands for Urban, so only a Black man will do.
(c) He doesn't even realize he's done this.
This is hardly Trump's biggest offense. But still.
The US general who was photographed as the last American soldier to leave Afghanistan is seeing a promotion blocked by a sole Republican senator, multiple outlets reported.
....The senator reportedly placing a “hold” on [Lt. Gen. Christopher] Donahue’s promotion, Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma, did not comment. Citing a Senate aide, Military.com said Donald Trump’s transition team requested the move.
....News of Mullin’s block on promotion for Lt Gen Donahue caused a stir in Washington, particularly given a recent NBC report which said Trump transition staff were making “very serious” moves towards “creating a commission to investigate” the withdrawal.
Such moves, NBC said, included “gathering information about who was directly involved in the decision-making for the military, how it was carried out and whether the military leaders could be eligible for charges as serious as treason”.
Trump made a bit of election hay out of the Afghanistan withdrawal—including some typical Trump blather about court martials for treason—but none of the people involved did anything to him. So why is he so hellbent on going after them? Everyone knows they did nothing wrong.
And what's the point of the court martial talk, anyway? As commander-in-chief I suppose Trump can order a court martial, but he can't dictate the result. And there's no panel of 3- and 4-star generals in the country who would ever vote to convict.¹ The whole thing is just the pipe dream of a halfwit.
It's been my assumption for a while that if Trump won he'd continue his stream-of-consciousness bluster as usual but wouldn't ever follow up on his most appalling suggestions. More oil drilling in Yosemite Valley? Sure. Deporting 20 million illegal immigrants? Nah. But maybe a million. Court martialing innocent generals? Sent down the memory hole forever on Election Day.
And it might still work out this way. But I have to admit he's getting scarier and less attached to reality every day. And Congress sure doesn't show any signs of doing anything aside from rolling over and begging for Trump to give them a belly rub.
¹Before you ask, the panel votes are secret so nobody has to worry about personal retribution for voting the wrong way.
President-elect Donald Trump plans to fire the entire team that worked with special counsel Jack Smith to pursue two federal prosecutions against the former president, including career attorneys typically protected from political retribution, according to two individuals close to Trump’s transition.
Trump is also planning to assemble investigative teams within the Justice Department to hunt for evidence in battleground states that fraud tainted the 2020 election, one of the people said.
Jack Smith himself has been as good as dead for a while. But does Trump really plan to (try to) fire his whole team, who are just prosecutors assigned to a job?
And he wants to keep looking for fraud in 2020? Jesus. The guy is completely obsessed. Even the MAGA sycophants he's surrounded himself with must know there's nothing to find. But I suppose Pam Bondi will put together a team and produce some kind of report. It will go onto the shelf next to her reports on the Biden Crime Family and How the FBI Mistreated Trump.
