Kevin Drum

Over at Vox, Sean Illing interviews Lawrence Wright, author of a long and detailed piece in the New Yorker about our response to the coronavirus pandemic. Wright says we did a terrible job and points in particular to three big mistakes. Here they are:

1. The CDC fails to get cooperation from the Chinese, thus delaying our knowledge that the virus could be transmitted asymptomatically.
2. CDC bungles the testing.
3. CDC spends a couple of months telling people not to wear masks.

The first of these is basically the fault of China. The other two are the fault of the CDC. None of them are the fault of Donald Trump.

Now, Trump clearly deserves a share of blame on the mask debacle, since he failed to support mask wearing after the CDC finally came around. In fact, it's worse than that. He didn't just fail to do anything, he actively turned masks into a stupid partisan issue:

You can look at the various states and how they reacted to the virus and how the outcomes were different. And you can compare similar states; Kentucky and Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi, Vermont and South Dakota. In many respects, these were similar states with similar demographics. In one case, the governor imposes strict lockdowns, mask wearing, and so on. In another case, the tap is open. One public health official said, “If the country had behaved like the state of Vermont, we would have 200,000 fewer deaths.” Well, that’s almost half of what we’re talking about. More responsible leadership could have made an immense difference in the suffering and the death that America has endured.

Keep in mind, however, that the decision to lock down a state isn't a federal one. It's inherently a state issue. And the idea that the entire country might have equaled the performance of its single best state is silly. Trump may have bollixed the mask issue and then spent months doing and saying stupid things, but California spent that entire time basically doing everything right and it didn't matter. We did well at first, but our death rate from the coronavirus is currently one of the highest in the nation.
So how many deaths is Donald Trump responsible for? It's certainly not 200,000. Even 100,000 is probably a huge overestimate. If I had to guess based on what Wright says, I'd say that (a) Trump acted like a buffoon the whole time, (b) he made things worse by spewing stupid theories constantly, (c) he failed to support mask wearing, and (d) in concrete terms, maybe this increased the death rate 5-10%.

Obviously this is speculative. No one can put a firm number to any of it. But for as much as Trump's public performance was insane, the evidence really doesn't suggest that it was responsible for a massive increase in the COVID-19 mortality rate. That blame mostly goes elsewhere.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through February 9. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Tyler Cowen points today to a new paper suggesting that attractiveness counts for a lot when it comes to being accepted into top economics programs. That got me curious, so I clicked the link. Here's the data:
As you can see, average folks have a noticeably higher chance of ending up at the worst economics programs, while attractive people have a higher chance of ending up at the very best. The authors say these effects are "not only statistically significant but are also substantial in magnitude."

I guess I have no reason to question that, but an eyeball look at the data doesn't really make it look like attractiveness has all that big an effect. Even at the extremes it doesn't look all that large, and in the middle the effect is reversed, with attractive people more likely to go to below-average programs while average people are more likely to go to above-average programs.

Plus I'm suspicious of the big drop in the middle. Why does everyone avoid programs in the #5 and #6 positions?

I dunno. None of the differences are bigger than 1.5 percentage points, and the average difference in each half of the distribution is tiny. This just doesn't strike me as an awfully big deal.

An Israeli company has produced the first 3-D printed ribeye steak, and the Washington Post thinks there's an audience for it:

A survey of more than 1,000 U.S. adults, conducted by MRS research company for agriculture company Proagrica, showed that 39 percent of American consumers have considered going vegetarian or vegan since the pandemic began. Health concerns, climate change and animal welfare are drivers.

Hmmm. A poll from Proagrica. Got anything better? Here is Plant Based News:

More than half (60 percent) of Americans have started eating a more plant-based diet since the COVID-19 pandemic began, according to a new poll. The survey, which polled 2,000 adults, was conducted by market research firm OnePoll and by Eat Just, Inc – a food tech company best known for its plant-based JUST Egg product made from mung beans – ahead of Better Breakfast Month (September).

This is from Eat Just Inc., which makes mung-bean egg products. And that's all I could find after an exhausting two minutes of googling.

I officially declare this a worthless factoid. About 6% of Americans are vegetarians, and I imagine that there's always some huge share of meat eaters who are considering switching. Just like there are tons of Americans who are considering losing weight, or looking for a new job, or finally getting their act together and fixing that squeaky doorknob. In other words, none to speak of.

I didn't expect anything new from the release of JOLTS data today, so I didn't bother to look at it until after lunch. Most of the readings were unexceptional, but there was one that showed a big drop:
Job openings didn't change much in December. Quits didn't change much. Layoffs didn't change much. But new hires dropped by 400,000. With the exception of the spikes during the first few months of the pandemic, this is the biggest drop in the past seven years. The declines were almost entirely due to big drops in the leisure, food services, and recreation industries.

I'm not sure what this means. Maybe nothing. But it seems a bit peculiar.

There are usually lots of different ways of looking at data. That's part of what makes it fun. In the US, for example, COVID-19 vaccinations peak on weekends for obvious reasons, which makes weekend vaccination rates a useful gauge of what our infrastructure is capable of. So here it is:

As you can see, our weekend vaccination peaks have been steadily rising by about 300,000 each week. In our most recent weekend we vaccinated more than 2 million people each day. If we keep it up—and vaccine supplies hold up—we could reach peak days of 4 million by the middle of March.

POSTSCRIPT: Interestingly, the peak vaccination day for the world as a whole is Wednesday. Does anyone have an explanation for this?

I took this picture accidentally. I was stopped at a red light and snapped the shutter just to make sure my settings were all correct. I only knew what I had gotten when I got home and looked at it.

I'm not especially expert on the meaning of modern hand signals and tats. So what's going on here? Anything?

Rep. Jamie Raskin kicked off the Donald Trump impeachment trial by railing against the "January exception" implied by the Republican argument that Trump can't be tried after he's left office. As Raskin says, this would implicitly mean that presidents can do anything they want during their last month in office and face no risk of punishment.

Rep. Joe Neguse is now following up on this, arguing that a "January exception" would allow any official to resign in order to avoid facing impeachment.

I believe that "January exception" will be the Democratic meme for the day. It's a smart move. I don't know what kind of technical legal force it has, but it's definitely the argument most easily understood by ordinary people.

Longtime readers know that I'm dedicated to bringing you every negative news report on California's bullet train. This is fairly easy since every news report about the bullet train is negative. Here's the latest:

The California bullet train authority will seek a $4.1-billion appropriation to complete construction in the Central Valley, as costs and schedules continue to grow.

....The disclosures by the rail authority include an update on the cost of the Central Valley system. Newsom originally said the estimated cost would not exceed $20.4 billion and that it would be operating by 2028. The new cost includes an upper limit of $22.8 billion, a 10% increase, and an operational date of 2030, a two-year slip.

....The $4.1-billion appropriation would substantially deplete the bond fund. At the time it was approved, the full 500-mile bullet train system from Los Angeles to San Francisco was supposed to cost $33 billion and the bonds would cover a third of it.

The idea here is to use up all the bond money on the "starter" segment between Bakersfield and Merced, and then pretend that more money will be found for the final links to San Francisco and Los Angeles. This will never happen, which means that a decade from now California will have a bullet train that takes people from Bakersfield to Merced.

You may be wondering how many people want to take a train from Bakersfield (pop. 400,000) to Merced (pop. 100,000) by way of Fresno (pop. 500,000), shaving maybe an hour or so off the 2½-hour drive by car. The answer is not very many, and it's hardly worth the time to quantify this any further.

Remember how much we all mocked the "bridge to nowhere"? Hell, that was only $400 million and it never got built anyway. It's nothing compared to our $20-30 billion bullet train to nowhere.¹

¹I don't mean to imply that Bakersfield, Fresno, and Merced are "nowhere." But I guess that's what I'm doing. However, I say this in a spirit of cameraderie with my friends in the Central Valley, not as some snotty liberal elite who's lived his entire life in Southern California.

I see that Ezra Klein is reading my mind today:

Should We Dim the Sun? Will We Even Have a Choice?

That’s the central theme of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist Elizabeth Kolbert’s new book, “Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future.”...In my conversation with her on my podcast, “The Ezra Klein Show,” I wanted to focus on one [subject] that obsesses me: solar geoengineering. To even contemplate it feels like the height of hubris. Are we really going to dim the sun? And yet, any reasonable analysis of the mismatch between our glacial politics and our rapidly warming planet demands that we deny ourselves the luxury of only contemplating the solutions we would prefer.

Fifteen years ago my view on climate change was conventionally liberal: we needed bold policies to fight global warming. This included things like carbon taxes; federal initiatives to spur investment in solar and wind; regulations to reduce power consumption, and so forth. One of my earliest magazine pieces for Mother Jones represents this kind of thinking. You can read it here.

For fifteen years I waited for evidence that the world would make even the mildest efforts to enter this fight. But this is a global problem that demands a global response, and on that score we've gotten almost nothing. We all signed the Paris Accord, but compliance is voluntary and few countries have any real hope of meeting their goals. Extraction of fossil fuels continues apace in virtually every country where it's possible: Canada has oil sands, Norway has offshore oil, the United States has fracking, Germany has coal, China has coal, and even Britain, which gave up mining coal years ago, is now set to open a new coal mine. No matter how green a country claims to be, it will extract all the fossil fuels it can if it means generating a few more jobs or making a small dent in its balance of trade figures. In the meantime, carbon levels in the atmosphere continue to rise like a metronome:
A couple of years ago I finally gave up on this: It was obvious there was no hope for an adequate global response in anywhere close to the necessary time frame. I now believe that our only option is to invest massive amounts of money in technology solutions, hoping against hope that enough of them succeed to reverse warming before it destroys the planet. You can read all about that here.

But there's one more thing. Technological progress may be our best hope right now, but how likely is it to work? Since it requires no big personal sacrifice other than trainloads of cash—which can be put on national credit cards if push comes to shove—it could gain enough public support. And since it will produce technology that everyone can use, other countries might well pitch in. And finally, since it does nothing one way or the other about the Uighurs, even China might get on board. It has a legitimate chance.

By "legitimate," however, I mean that my personal guess is that it has maybe a 10% chance of panning out. If you're an optimist, you might give it 20%.

Which brings us to this: what do I predict will happen? The answer is that I think around 2040 or so we will collectively conclude that we're screwed. Global temps will already be 2ºC above the historical average and we'll be on an irreversible path to 3ºC. The future will look so horrific that we simply have no choices left. And so we will shoot gigatons of aerosols into the atmosphere. This will dim the sun's heat just enough to halt, and then reverse, global warming.

This is not the only possible form of geoengineering. There are lots of others, many of them fascinating and some of them far better, in theory, than aerosols. But all of them are pipe dreams right now, and even in the future will probably be prohibitively expensive and intrusive. Aerosols, by contrast, are surprisingly well understood and surprisingly cheap.

They're well understood partly because every few years a volcano dumps a huge load of ash and aerosols into the atmosphere, which has given us a chance to study their impact. And they're cheap because, well, because they are. Roughly speaking, all it takes is a fleet of about a hundred aircraft spraying loads of sulfate aerosols 24/7. The cost would be in the range of $5-10 billion a year, which is peanuts, and it would lower the temperature of the earth by about a twentieth of a degree per year. We would slowly get back to a manageable level, and then continue spraying to keep temps steady.

Do I think this is a good idea? Absolutely not. For one thing, it doesn't solve all the problems of climate change. Ocean acidification, for example. For another, different areas of the planet have different ideal temperatures. Who's going to decide what our global goal should be? And what's to stop any country from spraying its own aerosols if it thinks temperatures should be even lower?

So of course it's not a good idea. It's a terrible idea. But is it a worse idea than warming of 3ºC? Nope. And it's not even close.

The things we're doing now will probably have an impact by 2040. That's good, since the less spraying we have to do the better. But they most likely won't be anywhere close to what we need, and the pressure to adopt a cheap, fast, and decently understood second-best solution will eventually become irresistible. And so we'll spray.