Briefly Noted: For 2021-07-02 Fr

Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember:

Jul 02, 2021

First:

Is there any reason not to take this as a reasonable, non-stupid, rational, calm take on the issue?

Lindsay Beyerstein: Covid: Why a Natural Origin Story Is More Likely: ‘It took 15 years to trace SARS definitively to bats. Eighty thousand samples sounds like a lot, but it’s nothing in a country like China, which boasts over 7,500 native species of vertebrates. Besides, many of the animals tested in the first wave were pigs, chickens, and cows…. It’s not as if bat coronavirus hunters are coming up empty. New SARS-like bat coronaviruses are being found all the time….
“Even if you’re doing the most sophisticated gain-of-function research you could possibly be doing, you have to start with a virus that’s at least close. We would estimate 99 percent, [or] even higher than that, 99.9,” Dr. Robert F. Garry…. There’s no way to use laboratory tricks to overcome this need for a close source virus. Even if researchers were to cut and paste different natural viruses together, each component virus would have to be in the 99 percent similarity range…. [If] the WIV… didn’t have wild viruses almost exactly like Covid–19, it couldn’t have engineered it, period. As far as anybody knows, the closest strain the WIV had is a bat virus called RaTG13 that’s 96 percent similar to Covid–19, but the gulf between 96 percent and >99 percent is vast. The two viruses probably shared a common ancestor between 25 and 65 years ago….
If RaTG13 were used as a backbone for Covid–19, Rasmussen told me, you’d expect to see big chunks of exact similarity with coherent chunks of new information added in…. Instead… Covid–19 differs from RaTG13 by over 1,000 point mutations spread through the virus like raisins in a pudding…. If the WIV had a secret strain (or strains) at least 99 percent similar to Covid–19, it got that raw material from the wild. That would mean there’s at least one wild virus that’s at least 99 percent similar to Covid–19 somewhere in nature, where humans had contact with it at least once…. Given that Covid (or its direct ancestor) must exist in nature, it’s more likely that it got out naturally (like SARS and MERS) than that it took an undetectable detour through a secure biolab.
If Covid–19 were bioengineered, that would mean the WIV lab found the now-untraceable Covid–19 precursor strain(s), and even though its main job is publishing about the cool viruses it finds, it never published it or talked about it, not even to the small army of American and international scientists it collaborates with. Then it embarked on a painstaking process of undetectably tweaking the Secret Ancestor into Covid–19, its manipulation succeeded, and then multiple layers of biosecurity failed, and Covid–19 escaped. It’s not impossible. But it involves a number of exceptions to rules—a number of carefully designed systems failing. Meanwhile, the natural origin theory just involves countless bat roosts with millions of bats doing what they do best: generating new viruses like the world’s most chaotic supercomputer…
LINK: <https://newrepublic.com/article/162689/bats-covid-19-lab-leak-theory>

Add to this the fact that most of those enthusiastically pushing the lab-leak theory have a track record of being bad actors…

One Video:

Hamilton Project: Policies to Protect Workers and Families: Rethinking Social Insurance: ’pening remarks from former U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Matthews Burwell, as well as Q&A with former Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors Jason Furman…. Brian Deese… and Robert Greenstein… <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Lg-7aSc_Do>

Share Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality

Very Briefly Noted:

Elizabeth Wayland Barber (1995): Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Women_s_Work_The_First_20_000_Years_Wome/UanOCQAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0>
Carl T. Bergstrom: ’In PNAS… we address the harm wrought by dramatically restructuring human communication of the span of a decade, with no aim other than selling ads… <https://twitter. com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1407098810942164993>
Financial Times-CBS IGM: US Macroeconomists Survey <https://www.igmchicago.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/RESULTS-2021-06-25-Survey-01.pdf>
Geoffrey Fowler: Google’s Search Results Have Gotten Worse: ‘Right under our noses, the Internet’s most-used website has been getting worse…. Versus 2000, Google searches for “T-shirts” in 2020 require scrolling six times as far down the page to find an unpaid result that links to another site… <https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/19/google-search-results-monopoly/>
Andy Haldane: Thirty Years of Hurt, Never Stopped Me Dreaming: ‘Price surges across a widening array of goods, services and asset markets… pockets of excess demand…. I… expect inflation to rise, significantly and persistently. There are already some signs of this risk being priced in financial markets… <https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/speech/2021/june/andy-haldane-speech-at-the-institute-for-government-on-the-changes-in-monetary-policy>
Wikipedia: Socialist Education Movement: ‘Also known as the Four Cleanups Movement…. The movement resulted in at least 77,560 deaths, with 5,327,350 people being persecuted…. The relationship between Mao Zedong and Liu Shaoqi, the 2nd President of China and Mao’s potential successor, deteriorated.Socialist Education Movement is regarded as the precursor of the Cultural Revolution, during which Liu was persecuted to death as a “traitor” and “capitalist roader”… <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Education_Movement>

Paragraphs:

Phil Libin: Lessons for CEOs: ‘Imagine a parallel universe where we never had to commute before, and I came in and said, “Listen up guys, I need you to waste two hours of your day sitting in traffic. No, you won’t get any work done, no, it won’t be time spent with your friends or family, and yes, it’s terrible for the environment, but two hours a day, you have to sit in traffic.” Essentially that’s what companies are asking employees to do by telling them to come back to the office. So rather than saying that we’re only doing this because we have to, think about the amazing new powers we have, and how much better our lives are if we embrace them…

LINK: <https://foundersfactory.com/news/lessons-for-ceos-from-phil-libin-evernote>

Paul Krugman: Zach Carter has a characteristically fascinating article on Milton Friedman and his fading legacy. Somehow I never appreciated how Friedman started from right-wing politics, and built a reputation as a technical economist to serve that cause. Carter talks about the declining influence of Friedman's economic doctrines, but maybe I can add a little, having done some of this myself and also having watched macro evolve over 40 years…

LINK: <https://nybooks.com/articles/2007/02/15/who-was-milton-friedman/>

Wikipedia: Xi Zhongxun: ‘After the Cultural Revolution ended, Xi was fully rehabilitated…. From 1978 to 1981, he held leadership roles in Guangdong Province…. Xi Zhongxun arranged for the creation of special economic zones in Guangdong Province including Shenzhen, pictured here, which has grown to become one of the largest cities in China…. In meetings in April 1979, he convinced Deng Xiaoping to permit Guangdong to make its own foreign trade policy decisions and to invite foreign investment to projects in experimental areas along the provincial border with Hong Kong and Macau and in Shantou, which has a large overseas diaspora…. Deng added, “The Central Government has no funds, but we can give you some favorable policies.”… In July 1979, the party center and State Council approved the creation of the first four special economic zones…

LINK: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi_Zhongxun#High_offices_in_Beijing,_purge>

Joseph B. Bak-Coleman & al.: Stewardship of Global Collective Behavior: ‘Information flows were initially shaped by natural selection yet are increasingly structured by emerging communication technologies. Our larger, more complex social networks now transfer high-fidelity information over vast distances at low cost. The digital age and the rise of social media have accelerated changes to our social systems, with poorly understood functional consequences. This gap in our knowledge represents a principal challenge to scientific progress, democracy, and actions to address global crises. We argue that the study of collective behavior must rise to a “crisis discipline” just as medicine, conservation, and climate science have, with a focus on providing actionable insight to policymakers and regulators for the stewardship of social systems…

LINK: <https://www.pnas.org/content/118/27/e2025764118>