Should I trust the “Economist” on a likely neofascist turn in South Africa?; major U.S. COVID missteps; Ed Glaeser on cities; Kara Swisher & Scott Galloway on the partial eclipse of the office...
My trust in the Economist starts from a very low base, is then an increasing function of the subject’s distance from the City with some downward adjustment for US subjects where poorly repressed longing for the GW Bush administration is always a subtext
4. Yes as an opportunity cost for US soft power. If we had, would Russia have dared invade Ukraine or at least have found fewer friends after doing so. Could we have pried Netanyahu out of the Occupied Territories? It would not have meant much less illness in the US
Let me guess. Murray thinks it is false because 2 Black teenagers who created the trigometric proof would undermine his thesis that Caucasians have a higher IQ than Blacks when comparing the Gaussian distributions for the 2 populations? If so, that is pathetic.
" (3) the decision not t ramp up candidate vaccine production immediately upon vaccine design but rather to wait nine months for the Phase 3 trial process"
Not sure where that information is sourced from. I have a bit of familiarity with Pfizer's effort and they started preparing for full scale manufacturing as soon as the Phase 2 results were known. This required scaling up mRNA production to industrial levels which had never been done before and turned out not be to easy - in the end they cleared out an entire R&D building in St. Louis and installed 200 copies of the prototype system for making the RNA starting material - it took years to figure out how to make it in larger batches. And the equipment, precision materials, packaging, etc for that effort was in extremely short supply at that time and often failed inspection on receipt. Meanwhile, the global logistics industry had to figure out how to increase its capacity for shipping and delivering at -70 deg.C by a factor of at least 10,000, then manufacture the necessary packaging material and shipping equipment. Vaccine was being delivered in bulk to Israel by August and in national quantities to the UK by September; hard to see how it could have been done faster. The US FDA wanted more evidence before approving which they got, but the product was ready to go in the US within two weeks of final approval.
People without experience in the industry deeply underestimate the difficult of manufacturing and distributing sterile pharmaceuticals in bulk. There are still shortages of sterilizable stoppers for injection vials tracing back to the supply chain disruptions of 2020 and COVID vaccine production in 2021.
Now, what happened to the vaccine production capacity that the United States paid hundreds of millions of dollars to build, mothball, and maintain is another question, but since Trump had fired most of the USG's inspectors general by that point there was never any real investigation or AFAIK follow-up to the failure of that system to work when called upon. Fortunately whether by chance or knowledge the vaccines that were assigned to those plants for scale-up either failed trials or didn't work out in practice (J&J).
‘Keynesianism doesn’t abandon… Whiggish liberalism…. But it does deny that these verities translate into simple rules for action in the present…..
Actually "Spend in accordance with NPV>0" works all the time and "Keep deficits near zero in normal times (almost all the time, see below) with progressive, low dead-weight loss and Pigou taxes" is pretty simple.
In 2008 we did not so much need "crisis fighters" as a Fed that would have prevented the "crisis." No excuse for TIPS to fall much below target, much less negative.
Plagues & State Capacity: There were four major errors in the American governance response to COVID: (1) The CDC’s decision to start lying to people—to say that masks did not work rather than that we wanted to reserve high-quality masks for doctors and nurses at the point of the sphere—(2) Trump’s extraordinary incompetence along so many dimensions, (3) the decision not t ramp up candidate vaccine production immediately upon vaccine design but rather to wait nine months for the Phase 3 trial process, & (4) the decision not to have the U.S. pay to vaccinate the world as fast as possible. Pretty much everything else is underflow, or is downstream from those clusterfuck decisions. But MattY has very good points about how the current retrospective politics-of-blame is highly contingent on Donald Trump’s being an idiot compared to Scott Morrison:
Re: Plagues & State Capacity
I don't think your point 1 is true. The CDC said that the public did not need masks, not that they were ineffective. If they had, there would have been no point reserving them for H/C professionals.
Point 3 uses hindsight. Had the vaccine failed at Phase 3 trials, then the ramping up of production would have been wasted. As the RNA vaccine were very expensive and had to be kept very cold to prevent degradation, the high cost could have stymied different vaccine development. It turned out that the first synthesized vaccine wass extremely effective, far more so than the Russian and Chinese vaccines. Saying that the Trump adminsitration not ramping up production before tests demonstrated effectiveness is an unfair accusation to make.
AFAIK, no rich country distributed vaccines to poorer countries on a timely basis. It was primarily vaccinate ones own citizens first, then help with sending vaccines internationally.
IMO, the US response was poor mostly because of your point 2. The administration did the most stupid actions starting with muddled thinking about the disease, and ending with politicising distribution of vaccines, PPE, and ventilators. We would all be better off now had Trump taken his own advice when he contracted Covid to take Ivermectin and injected bleach.
AFAIK, only New Zealand had a very effective isolation.
While I am skeptical of the population mortality rates for some countries, it doesn't seem to indicate that lockdown policies helped that much.
Across the US I think the studies of comparable demographics showed that mask-wearing and vaccinations were the 2 most effective measures generally. I do know that where I live, the local hospital was using Medevac helicopters to send acute Covid patients to hospitals with the needed resources, like O2 and ventilators.
What should be of concern now is:
1. Governments have declared Covid-19 "over".
2. The CDC has lost some credibility due to politicization of response.
3. There is apparently little planningfor the next plague.
My trust in the Economist starts from a very low base, is then an increasing function of the subject’s distance from the City with some downward adjustment for US subjects where poorly repressed longing for the GW Bush administration is always a subtext
Plagues:
1. Yes
2. Except (encept!) for politicizing COVID response, Trump was irrelevant. CDC/FDA could have avoided a plethora of errors [https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/covid-policy-errors] even with Trump
3. Yes.
4. Yes as an opportunity cost for US soft power. If we had, would Russia have dared invade Ukraine or at least have found fewer friends after doing so. Could we have pried Netanyahu out of the Occupied Territories? It would not have meant much less illness in the US
Re: The Jackson-Johnson Proof
Let me guess. Murray thinks it is false because 2 Black teenagers who created the trigometric proof would undermine his thesis that Caucasians have a higher IQ than Blacks when comparing the Gaussian distributions for the 2 populations? If so, that is pathetic.
" (3) the decision not t ramp up candidate vaccine production immediately upon vaccine design but rather to wait nine months for the Phase 3 trial process"
Not sure where that information is sourced from. I have a bit of familiarity with Pfizer's effort and they started preparing for full scale manufacturing as soon as the Phase 2 results were known. This required scaling up mRNA production to industrial levels which had never been done before and turned out not be to easy - in the end they cleared out an entire R&D building in St. Louis and installed 200 copies of the prototype system for making the RNA starting material - it took years to figure out how to make it in larger batches. And the equipment, precision materials, packaging, etc for that effort was in extremely short supply at that time and often failed inspection on receipt. Meanwhile, the global logistics industry had to figure out how to increase its capacity for shipping and delivering at -70 deg.C by a factor of at least 10,000, then manufacture the necessary packaging material and shipping equipment. Vaccine was being delivered in bulk to Israel by August and in national quantities to the UK by September; hard to see how it could have been done faster. The US FDA wanted more evidence before approving which they got, but the product was ready to go in the US within two weeks of final approval.
People without experience in the industry deeply underestimate the difficult of manufacturing and distributing sterile pharmaceuticals in bulk. There are still shortages of sterilizable stoppers for injection vials tracing back to the supply chain disruptions of 2020 and COVID vaccine production in 2021.
Now, what happened to the vaccine production capacity that the United States paid hundreds of millions of dollars to build, mothball, and maintain is another question, but since Trump had fired most of the USG's inspectors general by that point there was never any real investigation or AFAIK follow-up to the failure of that system to work when called upon. Fortunately whether by chance or knowledge the vaccines that were assigned to those plants for scale-up either failed trials or didn't work out in practice (J&J).
‘Keynesianism doesn’t abandon… Whiggish liberalism…. But it does deny that these verities translate into simple rules for action in the present…..
Actually "Spend in accordance with NPV>0" works all the time and "Keep deficits near zero in normal times (almost all the time, see below) with progressive, low dead-weight loss and Pigou taxes" is pretty simple.
In 2008 we did not so much need "crisis fighters" as a Fed that would have prevented the "crisis." No excuse for TIPS to fall much below target, much less negative.
Plagues & State Capacity: There were four major errors in the American governance response to COVID: (1) The CDC’s decision to start lying to people—to say that masks did not work rather than that we wanted to reserve high-quality masks for doctors and nurses at the point of the sphere—(2) Trump’s extraordinary incompetence along so many dimensions, (3) the decision not t ramp up candidate vaccine production immediately upon vaccine design but rather to wait nine months for the Phase 3 trial process, & (4) the decision not to have the U.S. pay to vaccinate the world as fast as possible. Pretty much everything else is underflow, or is downstream from those clusterfuck decisions. But MattY has very good points about how the current retrospective politics-of-blame is highly contingent on Donald Trump’s being an idiot compared to Scott Morrison:
Re: Plagues & State Capacity
I don't think your point 1 is true. The CDC said that the public did not need masks, not that they were ineffective. If they had, there would have been no point reserving them for H/C professionals.
Point 3 uses hindsight. Had the vaccine failed at Phase 3 trials, then the ramping up of production would have been wasted. As the RNA vaccine were very expensive and had to be kept very cold to prevent degradation, the high cost could have stymied different vaccine development. It turned out that the first synthesized vaccine wass extremely effective, far more so than the Russian and Chinese vaccines. Saying that the Trump adminsitration not ramping up production before tests demonstrated effectiveness is an unfair accusation to make.
AFAIK, no rich country distributed vaccines to poorer countries on a timely basis. It was primarily vaccinate ones own citizens first, then help with sending vaccines internationally.
IMO, the US response was poor mostly because of your point 2. The administration did the most stupid actions starting with muddled thinking about the disease, and ending with politicising distribution of vaccines, PPE, and ventilators. We would all be better off now had Trump taken his own advice when he contracted Covid to take Ivermectin and injected bleach.
AFAIK, only New Zealand had a very effective isolation.
While I am skeptical of the population mortality rates for some countries, it doesn't seem to indicate that lockdown policies helped that much.
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality
Across the US I think the studies of comparable demographics showed that mask-wearing and vaccinations were the 2 most effective measures generally. I do know that where I live, the local hospital was using Medevac helicopters to send acute Covid patients to hospitals with the needed resources, like O2 and ventilators.
What should be of concern now is:
1. Governments have declared Covid-19 "over".
2. The CDC has lost some credibility due to politicization of response.
3. There is apparently little planningfor the next plague.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/25/us-government-pandemic-virus-vaccine
" A new Washington consensus is taking shape."
I hope it is not the one _I_ see:
Vain attempts to deal with climate change with third best subsidies,
Supply security as an excuse for protectionism,
Near zero concern for closing deficits
Manufacturing Trade;
If the US were a capital exporting country as we should be with our wealth, the US line on the graph would look different.
Swisher-Galloway: Partial or full WFH always made sense for may jobs (as does more telemedicine). Covid just jolted us into a better equilibrium.