The plague year is not over. It may be only half-over, depending on what Delta and subsequent variants do:
Bob Wachter: Covid (@UCSF) Chronicles, Day 453: ‘I know everybody’s sick of playing 3-dimensional Covid chess. Sorry, but the Delta variant forces us back to the chess board…. If you’re fully vaxxed, I wouldn’t be too worried, especially… in a highly vaxxed region…. If you’re not vaccinated: I’d be afraid. Maybe even very afraid…. Sadly, ~50% of the U.S. (>age 12) remains unvaccinated, and in certain states (mostly southern & right-leaning), it’s more like 2/3rds…. This is the most dangerous moment to be unvaccinated…. The virus… is better at infecting people…. 3 things… about variants… a) are they more infectious? b) are they more serious? (ie, are you likelier to get very sick) & c) are they vaccine (or prior Covid-based immunity) resistant?… For Delta, Pfizer dose 1 is only ~33% protective…. What to do? For a vaccinated person, watch the Delta %…. If you’re seeing more cases & more Delta, I’d restore some precautions… indoor mask wearing…. If you’re unvaxxed, get your shots!… If your strategy was “I’ll consider a shot if I see an uptick in cases,” that’s also a loser, since once a surge begins, you won’t be well protected against Delta for 4–6 weeks…. For unvaxxed, I wish you well but my sympathy is flagging. Your bad choice is looking worse…
Pat Gelsinger: 7 nm Execution: ‘Well, I’m happy to say it’s (Meteor Lake) taped in. We are on track. Not only is the process healthy, but we’re able to tape out a major compute component into it already… <https://twitter.com/aschilling/status/1404455779801894914>
David S. Mitchell: ‘The stable of all-star economists at UC Berkeley_ have a message for those overly concerned about inflation: Take a deep breath!… DeLong… Steinsson, Obstfeld, Nakamura, Gorodnichenko… <https://twitter. com/dsmitch28/status/1403369733429338115>
David Glasner: Ralph Hawtrey Wrote the Book that Arthur Burns Should Have Read—but Didn’t: ‘Here are the critical missteps of Burns’s unfortunate tenure…. Yielding to Nixon’s demands for an easing of monetary policy, Burns eased monetary policy sufficiently to allow a modest recovery to get under way in 1971. But the recovery was too tepid to suit Nixon. Fearing the inflationary implications of a further monetary loosening, Burns began publicly lobbying for the adoption of an incomes policy to limit the increase of wages set by collective bargaining between labor unions and major businesses…. On August 15, 1971 Nixon imposed a 90-day freeze on all wages and prices to be followed by comprehensive wage-and-price controls. With controls in place, Burns felt secure in accelerating the rate of monetary expansion, leaving it to those controlling wages and prices to keep inflation within acceptable bounds…. By Q4 1973, inflation rose to 7%, a rate only marginally affected by the Arab oil embargo on oil shipments to the United States and a general reduction in oil output, which led to a quadrupling of oil prices by early 1974. The sharp oil-price increase simultaneously caused inflation to rise sharply above the 7% rate it had reached at the end of 1973 even as it caused a deep downturn and recession in the first quarter of 1974…. These mistakes all stemmed from a failure by Burns to understand the rationale of an incomes policy. Burns was not alone in that failure, which was actually widespread at the time. But the rationale for such a policy and the key to its implementation had already been spelled out cogently by Ralph Hawtrey…. What Burns evidently didn’t understand, or chose to ignore, was that adopting an incomes policy to restrain wage increases did not allow the monetary authority to implement a monetary policy that would cause nominal GDP to rise at a rate faster than was consistent with full employment at the target rate of inflation…. What Burns might have learned from Hawtrey was that even if some form of control of wages was essential for maintaining full employment in an economic environment in which strong labor unions could bargain effectively with employers, that control over wages did not—and could not—free the central bank from its responsibility to control aggregate demand and the growth of total spending and income…
Lauren Bauer, Arindrajit Dube, Wendy Edelberg, & Aaron Sojourner: Examining the Uneven & Hard-to-Predict Labor Market Recovery: ‘Any effects of expanded unemployment insurance benefits on labor supply will dissipate quickly as the benefits expire nationally in early September and before then in an increasing number of states. Indeed, policymakers should be on high-alert for whether the expiration of those benefits results in extraordinary financial hardship for some workers unable to find jobs. There are many signs that the U.S. labor market is on the mend. For example, the average net increase in payroll employment from February to April was over 500,000. Initial unemployment insurance claims continue to decline. The number of unemployed people per job opening has fallen sharply. Teens are working in the labor market at higher rates than at any time in the past decade. Nonetheless, policymakers must be vigilant—continuing to increase easy access to vaccines and helping to make working safe and rewarding…
Anton Howes: Is Innovation in Human Nature?: ’The Industrial Revolution was caused by an acceleration of innovation. But how was that acceleration caused? Most theories of the acceleration’s causes assume that innovation is in human nature, that it has always been around…. I disagree. The more I study the lives of British innovators, the more convinced I am that innovation is not in human nature, but is instead received. People innovate because they are inspired to do so—it is an idea that is transmitted. And when people do not innovate, it is often simply because it never occurs to them to do so. Incentives matter too, of course. But a person needs to at least… an improving mentality… before they can choose to innovate, before they can even take the costs and benefits of innovation into account. An illustration: at a conference I was at last month the attendees wore lanyards with name tags, which listed their names on one side. Over the course of the conference the tags would inevitably flip over, hiding the names. People would, when introducing themselves, periodically check each other’s tags, flipping them the right way around. But only one person—one single person, of attendees in the hundreds, had the ingenuity to write their name on the other side. To my shame, it wasn’t me…
Diane Coyle: Why Is There No Government Chief Anthropologist?: ‘Having been on the economics reporting beat with Gillian Tett in the 1990s, she for the FT and me for The Independent. We were all very impressed by her PhD in anthropology, as fieldwork in Tajikistan seemed very exciting and adventurous. Gillian’s new book, Anthro Vision: How Anthropology Can Explain Business and Life, starts with that fieldwork, including the less thrilling part about being trapped in a hotel room as civial war raged outside. It’s a rattling good read… divided into what she describes as the core principles of anthropology: the need to make the strange familiar, to make the familiar strange and to listen to what is not said. These add up to an attempt to develop some objectivity about the group or society under investigation…. At the same time, the methods of enthropology, especially ethnography or participant observation bring the researcher close to the objects of study…
Peter Orszag: Why Yellen May Be Right Not to Fear Inflation: ‘The debate over whether prices will keep rising faster has overlooked a few important details…. Some prominent economists are concerned that the U.S. is entering an era of permanently higher inflation, but Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell believe the current spike will be temporary. So far, this debate has largely been missing three dimensions: what the best forecasters are saying, what’s happening in other countries, and steps that can be taken to attenuate problems in the supply chain…. Some inflation is to be expected as the economy re-opens…. A variety of supply-side chokeholds, from semiconductor-chip shortages to container-shipping delays, are also putting upward pressure on prices. The hard question is whether higher inflation, such as we saw in April, is a blip (as Janet Yellen suggests) or a harbinger of a longer-term problem (as economist Larry Summers contends). The best forecasters are definitively on Yellen’s side. And they include not only the people responsible for the leading macro-econometric models at the Federal Reserve, the Council of Economic Advisers and Wall Street banks. They also include “superforecasters” participating in the Good Judgment Project associated with Philip Tetlock…
Marcy Wheeler: The Hybrid Hatchet Conspiracy: A Premeditated Plan to Surround the Capitol on January 6: ‘ Contrary to what you might read on Twitter, I have not been predicting that Trump will be held accountable for January 6. Rather, I am observing–based on actual court filings and the evidence in them–that if he or his associates were to be held accountable, that would happen via conspiracy indictments, indictments that have already reached within two degrees of Trump’s closest associates. In a hearing yesterday, Christopher Wray answered one after another question about holding Trump accountable by talking about conspiracy indictments, so it seems he may agree with me…
Adam Tooze: Chartbook Newsletter #21: ‘Reading Grossman’s Stalingrad and Life and Fate…. Jameson puts it as follows: “as paradoxical as it may sound, what holds his novel together as a unified narrative is also what holds the Soviet Union together in this period, the unfreedom that allowed it, improbably, to defeat Hitler’s Wehrmacht and win World War II.” The only question is, why “improbably”? That casual suggestion of contingency is not innocent. It concedes far too much to Western condescension, to the British and American intelligence analysts who scoffed at Soviet production statistics, to the German generals who bemoaned the victories supposedly stolen from them by Hitler’s meddling. It mistakes the essential point. What Stalingrad demonstrated was precisely that the unfreedom of the Soviet Union, as terrible as it was, was different from that of Nazi Germany or for that matter of the West precisely because it was more historically generative, more potent. It wrought a material, social and cultural transformation on such a vast scale that it overturned the presumptions of historical normality. It shifted the balance of probabilities. It made it probable, not improbable, that the Soviet Union would win World War II. Certainly, that is the view of Grossman and his characters…
Dan Nexon: Against Great Power Competition: ‘Biden underscored his intention to “work with Beijing when it’s in America’s interests to do so,” but days later noted the likelihood of “extreme competition” with China…. [Moreover,] Republicans are certain to criticize the administration for being weak and ineffective in the face of international challenges…. This is unfortunate. For all the concept’s influence in recent years, great-power competition is not a coherent framework for U.S. foreign policy…. Rivalries between leading states exist in every international system…. With Washington’s unipolar status now on the wane, powers such as China and Russia find it easier than they once did to challenge U.S. leadership…. It is one thing, though, for Washington to observe increasing competition among great powers and adjust to a world in which it enjoys less influence than it once did. It is another entirely to elevate competition itself to the guiding paradigm of U.S. foreign policy—as the Trump administration proposed and Biden may wind up doing…. When adopted as a foundational paradigm of foreign relations, great-power competition relegates collaboration to an afterthought or, worse, dismisses it as naive…
Marcy Wheeler's piece is very readable and gives me a sense of optimism that the prosecutions of Jan. 6 insurrection conspirators will be effective, and I hope productive in going "up the food chain" to rein in at least a few of the upper conspiracy members.
Marcy Wheeler's piece is very readable and gives me a sense of optimism that the prosecutions of Jan. 6 insurrection conspirators will be effective, and I hope productive in going "up the food chain" to rein in at least a few of the upper conspiracy members.