Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember: First: Chris Hanes says that he started a stopwatch to see how long it would take Jeff Williamson to propose a new joint research project. It took 39 minutes before he proposed a joint cooperative effort to jumpstart more research in the economic history of the Philippines: Australian Economic History Review: Globalisation, Migration, Trade, & Growth: Honouring the Contribution of Jeff Williamson to Australian and Asia‐Pacific Economic History...
Re: Will the Infrastructure Bill Fail to Create Jobs Where We Most Need Them?
TL;DR Real men want to build stuff and not deal with the social issues hindering the economy.
This is a good argument for having a much more representative number of working women in positions of leadership and policymaking to counterbalance male-orientated thinking that has proven so poor over the last century.
The unfolding of the pandemic is looking more and more like Poe's "The Mask of the Red Death". It doesn't matter which approach you choose, all approaches analogous to building a safe castle eventually leak allowing Death to enter. The best you can hope for is to reduce infections and deaths as far as possible. That means building herd immunity with vaccinations and buying time with the standard public health measures used since time immemorial. It is the forces [of ignorance, and stupidity] that operate against both options that result in unnecessary culling of the population.
I am reminded of the brilliant "Yes, [Prime] Minister" episode where the minister for health was up against the minister lobbying for the tobacco companies. His argument for allowing smoking was that it brought in tax revenue and killed the smoker early, saving public pension costs, dashing the aim of the Health Minister to curb smoking. It seems to me that was basically the possible thought of the current UK PM (Covid just kills the 80-year-olds) and various US Republican governors - Better to keep the economy running, let Covid cull the elderly and vulnerable who are a cost to the state. That heartless approach may even be rational from a purely economic POV. Pity they used the exact opposite argument against the specious ACA "death panels". Funny how it is always these "faceless others" that have to die. A world where a Rawlsian lottery was in operation to allocate deaths might change a few minds. [Everyone gets a ticket where about 1% must die (as in the ST:TOS A Taste of Armageddon) and 5% get "long Covid"] I imagine this working by allocating vaccines and denial of health care by lottery only, with no way to game the system. [Rather like how the wealthy countries are treating the poorer ones at the moment...]
What is surprising (well perhaps not) is the State department's resistance to that approach. I can see that their arguments are that it is too complex, requires nuanced thinking, etc. etc., and therefore it should be left alone. However, there is certainly no harm in building machine systems that take in all the data and provide reasoning for any policy based on prior experience. The policymakers can use that as a tool to interrogate their preferred policies to determine if there is evidence that they would work or fail. This should at least help to overcome bias in decision-making.
However, there is a caveat, and that is that policy outcomes are reasonably deterministic and not stochastic. If outcomes have little connection to policy inputs, then models become useless, worse they become crutches to support the desired policy. Ideally, the model would suggest low probabilities of success or failure for a range of policies indicating that choosing any policy makes little difference. This might be what the State Department worries about, as it demotes their role from policy making to data input for others to make policy...
Re: Will the Infrastructure Bill Fail to Create Jobs Where We Most Need Them?
TL;DR Real men want to build stuff and not deal with the social issues hindering the economy.
This is a good argument for having a much more representative number of working women in positions of leadership and policymaking to counterbalance male-orientated thinking that has proven so poor over the last century.
Re: Delta Variant’s Spread in Nanjing Tests China’s Covid Containment Efforts
The unfolding of the pandemic is looking more and more like Poe's "The Mask of the Red Death". It doesn't matter which approach you choose, all approaches analogous to building a safe castle eventually leak allowing Death to enter. The best you can hope for is to reduce infections and deaths as far as possible. That means building herd immunity with vaccinations and buying time with the standard public health measures used since time immemorial. It is the forces [of ignorance, and stupidity] that operate against both options that result in unnecessary culling of the population.
I am reminded of the brilliant "Yes, [Prime] Minister" episode where the minister for health was up against the minister lobbying for the tobacco companies. His argument for allowing smoking was that it brought in tax revenue and killed the smoker early, saving public pension costs, dashing the aim of the Health Minister to curb smoking. It seems to me that was basically the possible thought of the current UK PM (Covid just kills the 80-year-olds) and various US Republican governors - Better to keep the economy running, let Covid cull the elderly and vulnerable who are a cost to the state. That heartless approach may even be rational from a purely economic POV. Pity they used the exact opposite argument against the specious ACA "death panels". Funny how it is always these "faceless others" that have to die. A world where a Rawlsian lottery was in operation to allocate deaths might change a few minds. [Everyone gets a ticket where about 1% must die (as in the ST:TOS A Taste of Armageddon) and 5% get "long Covid"] I imagine this working by allocating vaccines and denial of health care by lottery only, with no way to game the system. [Rather like how the wealthy countries are treating the poorer ones at the moment...]
Re: Foreign Policy Should Be Evidence-Based
What is surprising (well perhaps not) is the State department's resistance to that approach. I can see that their arguments are that it is too complex, requires nuanced thinking, etc. etc., and therefore it should be left alone. However, there is certainly no harm in building machine systems that take in all the data and provide reasoning for any policy based on prior experience. The policymakers can use that as a tool to interrogate their preferred policies to determine if there is evidence that they would work or fail. This should at least help to overcome bias in decision-making.
However, there is a caveat, and that is that policy outcomes are reasonably deterministic and not stochastic. If outcomes have little connection to policy inputs, then models become useless, worse they become crutches to support the desired policy. Ideally, the model would suggest low probabilities of success or failure for a range of policies indicating that choosing any policy makes little difference. This might be what the State Department worries about, as it demotes their role from policy making to data input for others to make policy...