I agree that marijuana should no longer be on the list of banned substances for athletes. It's a tragedy that Sha’Carri Richardson will not be allowed to compete in the 100 meter dash at the Tokyo Olympic Games.
However, it's worth understanding a bit of the context surrounding her suspension:
The maximum allowed level of THC in the bloodstream is 150 nanograms per milliliter. This is very high.¹ For all practical purposes, it means that anti-doping authorities have already declared that they don't care if you smoke a joint or three during your free time.
All top athletes are well aware of the drug rules. The substance testing regime is incredibly intrusive, which makes it a constant presence in the life of every athlete competing at the international level.
Richardson tested above the allowed level. There was really nothing that anti-doping officials could do at that point. They had to suspend her.
American authorities did everything they could to help Richardson, reducing her suspension to a single month, the minimum allowed.
As I often think in cases like this, Richardson was ill-served by her friends, who should have been helping her avoid marijuana as a way of coping with the loss of her biological mother. Instead, my guess is they were egging her on.
This whole thing is still a tragedy, and there's a growing consensus that anti-doping rules should be used solely to root out performance enhancing drugs. Government pressure has driven the inclusion of many recreational drugs as well, but those days may finally be coming to an end. Good riddance.
UPDATE: Based on feedback I've gotten, I've toned down the original text. I thought that Richardson's THC level indicated a substantial use of marijuana, but that's not necessarily the case. She clearly tested above the allowed level, which is pretty generous, but she wasn't necessarily bingeing or anything like that.
¹For comparison, in states that allow marijuana use the most common level used to indicate impaired driving is 5 nanograms.
On Thursday I posted a series of charts that all documented a similar theme: Since roughly the year 2000, according to survey data, Democrats have moved significantly to the left on most hot button social issues while Republicans have moved only slightly right.
This wasn't meant to be a rigorous scholarly analysis. And you can argue about margins of error, question wording, choice of topics, and so forth. Still, the gaps are too big and the trend too consistent to ignore the obvious conclusion that over the past two decades Democrats have moved left far more than Republicans have moved right:
I've made this point many times before, and I want to make it again more loudly and more plainly today. It is not conservatives who have turned American politics into a culture war battle. It is liberals. And this shouldn't come as a surprise: Almost by definition, liberals are the ones pushing for change while conservatives are merely responding to whatever liberals do. More specifically, progressives have been bragging publicly about pushing the Democratic Party leftward since at least 2004—and they've succeeded.
Now, I'm personally happy about most of this. But that doesn't blind me to the fact that "personally happy" means nothing in politics. What matters is what the median voter feels, and Democrats have been moving further and further away from the median voter for years:
I've added a scale of 0-10 to these charts to make them easier to interpret. As you can see, in 1994 the average Democrat was at 5 and the average Republican was at 6. In 2004, that had changed slightly: the average Democrat was at 4 and the average Republican was just under 5. In other words, both parties had gotten a little bit more liberal.
But by 2017 that had changed completely. The average Democrat was at 2 while the average Republican was at 6.5. In other words, between 1994 and 2017, Democrats had gotten three points more liberal while Republicans had gotten about half a point more conservative.
That takes us up to 2017, by which time Democrats were quite obviously farther from the median voter than they had been in 1994 or 2004. And it showed: Our election victory in 2020 was razor thin even though (a) the economy sucked, (b) we were in the middle of a pandemic, (c) voters had had four years to see just what Donald Trump was really like, and (d) our candidate was bland, amiable, white, male Joe Biden. This should scare the hell out of liberals.
At the subgroup level, Democrats gained somewhere between half a percent to one percent among non-college whites and roughly 7 percent among white college graduates (which is kind of crazy). Our support among African Americans declined by something like one to 2 percent. And then Hispanic support dropped by 8 to 9 percent....One implication of these shifts is that education polarization went up and racial polarization went down.
....What happened in 2020 is that nonwhite conservatives voted for Republicans at higher rates; they started voting more like white conservatives....Clinton voters with conservative views on crime, policing, and public safety were far more likely to switch to Trump than voters with less conservative views on those issues. And having conservative views on those issues was more predictive of switching from Clinton to Trump than having conservative views on any other issue-set was.
....This lines up pretty well with trends we saw during the campaign. In the summer, following the emergence of “defund the police” as a nationally salient issue, support for Biden among Hispanic voters declined. So I think you can tell this microstory: We raised the salience of an ideologically charged issue that millions of nonwhite voters disagreed with us on. And then, as a result, these conservative Hispanic voters who’d been voting for us despite their ideological inclinations started voting more like conservative whites.
....Over the last four years, white liberals have become a larger and larger share of the Democratic Party....And since white voters are sorting on ideology more than nonwhite voters, we’ve ended up in a situation where white liberals are more left wing than Black and Hispanic Democrats on pretty much every issue: taxes, health care, policing, and even on racial issues or various measures of “racial resentment.” So as white liberals increasingly define the party’s image and messaging, that’s going to turn off nonwhite conservative Democrats and push them against us.
....If Democrats elevate issues or theories that a large minority of nonwhite voters reject, it’s going to be hard to keep those margins....Black conservatives and Hispanic conservatives don’t actually buy into a lot of these intellectual theories of racism. They often have a very different conception of how to help the Black or Hispanic community than liberals do. And I don’t think we can buy our way out of this trade-off. Most voters are not liberals. If we polarize the electorate on ideology — or if nationally prominent Democrats raise the salience of issues that polarize the electorate on ideology — we’re going to lose a lot of votes.
Now: maybe you're personally delighted by the Democratic Party's leftward march and maybe you're not. It doesn't matter. Despite endless hopeful invocations of "but polls show that people like our positions," the truth is that the Democratic Party has been pulled far enough left that even lots of non-crazy people find us just plain scary—something that Fox News takes vigorous advantage of. From an electoral point of view, the story here is consistent: Democrats have stoked the culture wars by getting more extreme on social issues and Republicans have used this to successfully cleave away a segment of both the non-college white vote and, more recently, the non-college nonwhite vote.
So why is it conventional wisdom to point to conservatives as "culture war mongers"? As I've mentioned before, it's a straightforward consequence of behavioral economics. For most people, losing something is far more painful than the pleasure of gaining something of equivalent value. And since conservatives are "losing" the customs and hierarchies that they've long lived with, their reaction is far more intense than the liberal reaction toward winning the changes they desire. This produces more outrageous behavior from conservatives even though liberals are actually the ur-source of polarization.
Here's the nickel summary of all this:
Since 1994, Democrats have moved left far more than Republicans have moved right.
This has produced lots of safe states in liberal places like California and Massachusetts but has steadily pulled Democrats farther and farther away from median states like Iowa and Ohio.
Recently, white academic theories of racism—and probably the whole woke movement in general—have turned off many moderate Black and Hispanic voters.¹ Ditto for liberal dismissal of crime and safety issues. Hispanics in particular moved in Trump's direction despite—or maybe because of—his position on immigration and the wall.
Democrats will remain on an electoral knife edge forever unless they can pull themselves back toward the center.
This is obviously not a popular proposal among the white activist class. But a dispassionate look at voting patterns hardly allows any other conclusion. Moving to the left may help galvanize the progressive base—which is good!—but if it's not done with empathy and tact it risks outrunning the vast middle part of the country, which progressive activists seem completely uninterested in talking to.
It is well within our power to break our two-decade 50-50 deadlock and become routine winners in national politics. All it takes is a moderation of our positions from "pretty far left" to "pretty liberal." That's all. But who's got the courage to say so?
¹And for God's sake, please don't insult my intelligence by pretending that wokeness and cancel culture are all just figments of the conservative imagination. Sure, they overreact to this stuff, but it really exists, it really is a liberal invention, and it really does make even moderate conservatives feel like their entire lives are being held up to a spotlight and found wanting.
We ordered a new box for Hopper and it arrived yesterday. As usual, though, there was a bunch of stuff inside that we had to discard before Hopper could use it. I don't know why that keeps happening.
The latest blow came Thursday, when all six conservative justices voted to uphold two Arizona voting laws despite lower federal courts finding clear evidence that the laws make voting harder for voters of color — whether Black, Latino or Native American. One law requires election officials to throw out ballots that were cast in the wrong precinct; the other bars most people and groups from collecting voters’ absentee ballots and dropping them off at polling places.
This is starting to piss me off. Maybe the Supreme Court is bound and determined to take apart our voting laws no matter what, but the truth is that yesterday's ruling can be laid directly at the feet of liberals. This was just a stupid case to bring. You can't make a serious argument that there's anything really wrong with either a ban on ballot harvesting or with requiring voters to cast ballots in the right precinct.
More generally, this kind of stuff, along with voter ID laws, is popular with the public, and this has nothing to do with the alleged existence of voter fraud. Even if there's no fraud, the average Joe and Jane think ID laws make sense and are untroubled by common sense rules like being required to vote in the right precinct. Liberals will get nowhere by going after this stuff.
What's more, none of it matters. The actual effect of these rules on Black and Hispanic voter turnout turns out to be minuscule. It is a waste of time—maybe worse than just a waste of time—to yell and scream about these kinds of laws.
What really is bad are provisions of these laws that allow Republican legislatures to replace election officials they deem insufficiently loyal to the Republican cause. If you talk to moderate voters, they'll be shocked if you tell them about this. They'll agree that these provisions are outrageous.
So why do we spend so much time protesting the stuff that doesn't matter (and is popular) and so little time protesting the stuff that does matter (and is unpopular)? It is a vast mystery. And like I said, it's really starting to piss me off. If democracy is truly at stake here, wouldn't it make sense to be at least a little smart about trying to save it?
This is an odd report. The establishment data (i.e., reports from businesses) shows an increase of 850,000 jobs, which isn't too bad. However, the household data is miles away from this, showing that the number of employed people went down slightly in June and the labor participation rate remained steady. These two reports usually differ, so there's nothing strange about that, but they don't usually differ by quite so much. I'm not sure what's going on.
Hourly earnings were up a bit after adjusting for inflation, but weekly earnings were down considerably. Presumably this is because the average number of hours worked went down as more people got hired and there was less need for overtime.
I'm not sure what to make of all this. I think it falls into the category of "not too bad but the labor market isn't surging yet." We're still waiting for the big jobs breakout.
Here are six charts showing trends in public opinion among liberals and conservatives over the past 20 years or so. First up is immigration:
The Republican view of immigrants has bounced up and down a bit and is now up by maybe five points or so since 2000. The Democratic view has gone up by 35 percentage points.
(Note that by "up" I mean that the percentage share of partisans who hold the conventional partisan opinion has gone up. For Republicans, it means the share of Republicans who endorse the right-wing position has gone up. For Democrats it means the share of Democrats who endorse the left-wing position has gone up.)
Next is abortion:
Among Republicans, the most extreme view on abortion (always illegal) has gone up by about two points since 2000. Among Democrats, the most extreme view (always legal) has gone up by 20 points.
Same-sex marriage:
Democratic support for same sex marriage is up 50 points. Republican support is down 39 points (that is, they've moved 39 points away from the conservative position).
Next up is guns:
Among Republicans, the conservative point of view has gone up about 10 points. Among Democrats, the liberal point of view has increased by about 20 points.
Here are taxes:
The Republican view of taxes has gone down about ten points (probably due to the Bush tax cuts). The Democratic view of taxes has gone up by about 20 points.
And finally, religion:
Among Republicans, religiosity hasn't changed at all. Among Democrats, it's gone down by nearly 15 points.
Here's a summary:
Question for the hive mind: what conclusions can we draw from all of this?
Is this a crane flying across a bamboo marsh in China? Nope! It's a black-necked stilt flying across the San Joaquin marsh in Irvine. But very pretty either way.
Probably the biggest mistake was not intentionally infecting vaccinated volunteers. This could be done in 1 month, vs 6.5 months for the ecological trials that the entire world did out of misguided PR ethics. (2.5 is probably more realistic given signups, approvals, and big pharma’s slow data analysis and reporting. That’s still hundreds of thousands of lives.)
In a "challenge trial," you don't vaccinate 50,000 people and then wait six months to see how they did compared to a different 50,000 who got a placebo. Instead, you round up a thousand people, vaccinate them, and then a month later deliberately infect them all. This gives you a very fast read on whether the vaccine is any good.
So why not do it? The typical answer is that it's unethical even though everyone in the study is a volunteer, but the flip side of this is that if it speeds up vaccine development by, say, five months, it's going to save hundreds of thousands of lives. Is it still unethical even with that kind of benefit in the balance?
While you ponder the ethics of this, I'll offer up a different reason to be skeptical of challenge trials: I'm not so sure they would have speeded up anything. What matters, after all, is not producing enough vaccine doses for testing, but producing billions of vaccine doses for mass distribution. And that takes time.
How much time? It's surprisingly hard to get a good answer to that. But it's a long process. You have to engineer the flow manufacturing process. You have to source raw materials. You have to license all the tech transfers you'll need. You have to physically set up the manufacturing floor. You have to debug the manufacturing. And then, finally, you can start producing vaccines in volume.
Whoops! Don't forget about distribution! The Pfizer vaccine required storage at super-low temperatures, which in turn required the creation of a massive new distribution system. How long did that take? Months, at least.
In the case of COVID-19 vaccines, this whole process began—
Well, the truth is that I don't know when it began. It's some kind of state secret or something. Roughly, though, it seems like it began about as soon as it could have, and even so actual production didn't begin until September 2020, with significant volumes available perhaps as early as October or November.
In other words, an earlier FDA approval via challenge trials might have shaved a month or two off the schedule if they went well, but not much more than that.
But wait. That's still thousands of lives that could have been saved. True enough. And we can now go back and look at every single mistake that was made and start adding up the lives that were lost because we're all idiots. But like all of them, my basic comment is this: Is the middle of a massive pandemic really the right time to start dicking around with processes that we know work, in favor of experimenting with a whole bunch of new things that might make things better? You can decide for yourself what you believe, but I'm skeptical. When the entire planet is in a panic, I think there's good reason to believe that it's precisely the time to fall back on well-known processes and not let hysteria drag your attention away to all the bright new ideas featured on the New York Times op-ed page.
Obviously, your mileage may vary. I tend to be naturally cautious about this kind of stuff. But in the end, I suspect that although challenge trials are an interesting idea, they would have (a) made little difference in the end and (b) produced data that was hard to interpret since it's never been done before. The speeded up version of standard testing that we used instead was probably for the best.
And idiots though we may be, we ended up putting a 95% efficacy vaccine into mass production within 11 months of startup. If you think that's a disgrace, you might simply be overestimating what H. sapiens is capable of.
POSTSCRIPT: Despite all this, I still recommend reading the linked blog post about vaccine development. Partly this is because even if you disagree about this and that, it's still useful to read an after-action report and this is a decent one.
But the main reason is that there's an art to the internet rant, and this is a pretty good rant. Regardless of whether it's right or wrong, we should have more like this.
