Kevin Drum

I keep seeing stuff along these lines:

I have to say that my most frustrated and confused friends are the ones who "followed the science" and are now trying to figure out why the science has changed so drastically in the last 2 months

— PoliMath (@politicalmath) May 14, 2021

Am I crazy or is everyone else crazy? Nothing significant has changed about "the science" in the past two months—although we do have more data about how well the COVID vaccines work against all the variants floating around out there. (Pretty well, it seems.) Nobody has said otherwise.

What's changed is the circumstances. No one ever suggested that we'd wear masks forever, which means there was always going to be a day when the CDC would announce that it was OK for vaccinated folks to stop wearing them. That day would come when (a) the case count was dropping, (b) the vaccination rate had gotten sufficiently high, (c) real-world experience with the vaccines was convincingly positive, and (d) other indicators suggested that it was safe to drop the mask recommendation.

This is something of a judgment call, and there's nothing special about the day before or the day after. Nothing "suddenly" changed. Is this really so hard to understand?

Back in the day, this lamp sported an incandescent bulb that provided some lovely warmth for a snoozing cat. We replaced it long ago with an LED bulb, but Hilbert still loves it. Apparently the Pavlovian association of light with warmth continues even years after it's been broken.

This is apparently the latest progressive answer to every perceived problem with social welfare spending. It is usually proposed with such a palpable sense of self-evident truth that you'd think no one had ever thought of it before.

Just for the record, then: It's been thought of before. Many times. And we already do it with refundable tax credits like the EITC, the CTC, and the ACTC, which collectively amount to $100 billion per year. This makes "just give people money" the second biggest social welfare program in the nation after Medicaid.

Should we just cash out everything else and be done with it? Many conservatives think this is a great idea. And maybe it is. But think hard before you decide to agree with a movement that pretty plainly does not have the best interests of poor people at heart.

NOTE: I've been in a bad mood all week, which probably accounts for the tetchiness of some of my posts. Just being transparent here...

Whenever some kind of disaster hits, there is always somebody who has been warning about it for years. This is because there is always somebody warning about everything. If a giant fireball from space destroyed St. Louis, it would turn out that someone had been warning for years that Midwest cities were vulnerable to mysterious fireballs from space. And reporters would eat it up.

I'm starting to see the same thing with pandemic reporting, and I'd urge everyone to take it with a grain of salt. We're all suckers for stories about heroic but downtrodden scientists who fought the establishment and finally won, but those are easy to write with the benefit of hindsight. Just by chance, someone was bound to be more right and someone else was bound to be more wrong. The question, as always, is whether either side had good reason for its beliefs and whether either has a track record of always being right (or wrong). The problem is that this is usually much more complicated and doesn't always make for a blockbuster story.

With the exception of Michael Lewis, this is not aimed at anyone in particular. Just be careful about this stuff. There are exceptions, but "visionary hero vs. hidebound establishment" happens less often than you might think. That's why the real cases are so famous, after all.

Before Thursday, my Twitter feed was full of people complaining that the CDC was being too conservative about masks and its advice was too complicated. Today, my timeline is full of people complaining that the CDC has moved too fast and is providing advice that doesn't allow any exceptions.

Moral of the story: Everybody hates the CDC. If you were the public face of a pandemic, they'd probably hate you, too.

FRIDAY UPDATE: Oh ffs.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through May 13. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Here's a mystery:

The UK and the United States are both doing well in the vaccination race. Europe started out slow but is beginning to catch up. Countries in Asia are . . .

Nowhere. The four I've highlighted are all rich countries, so it's not a matter of money. All of them currently have very low infection rates, but surely that doesn't make them think they're invulnerable? What's going on here?

This is the Queen Mary, docked at Long Beach harbor. The stacks have a wavering look to them, as if I shot this from a mile away with a 2000mm lens, but that's just an artifact of shooting through the front windshield of my car. For some reason, even though the street was empty, I was apparently too lazy to open the door and shoot the picture normally.

The news is covered with such a remarkable array of nonsense that I can't really find anything to write about. The war in Israel is a tragedy, but it will end the way their wars always end. Donald Trump still lost the 2020 election. The insurrection at the Capitol on 1/6 is still an insurrection. National economic indicators are slightly off for a tiny time period, and they're still meaningless for anyone not desperately trying to make a partisan point. The Colonial pipeline has been restored, and in a week or two no one will remember it. The CDC has finally said that vaccinated people can stop wearing masks in most places.

Anyway, I was roaming around looking for something off the beaten path, when I remembered this:

"Coincident Economic Activity" is an index of economic health for each state. It's composed of four difference measures, and I don't suppose it's especially any better than other indexes that do the same thing. However, it has the benefit of being a longtime series from the Philadelphia Fed, which means it has no ax to grind.

In this case, it shows how well states have recovered from the Great Recession and then how well they've recovered from the pandemic. Among the six large states on the chart, California did the best at recovering from the recession, while Georgia has done the best at recovering from the pandemic (in the sense of getting back to its pre-pandemic level). Overall, California and Florida showed the best performance both before and after the pandemic.

There's no special point to make here. It's just something to take your mind off the news for a few seconds.

UPDATE: I got curious about which states had shown the biggest drops in economic activity after the pandemic hit. Here's the data for all 50 states:

Arkansas dropped only 3.4%, while West Virginia was down 46%. This is a pretty astonishing range of results and I'm not sure what explains it. Here's a chart that shows how well each state has recovered from the pandemic (that is, their current level compared to January 2020):

Utah comes in the best, while West Virginia still has a long way to go.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through May 12. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.