Worþy Reads: For 2021-06-25 Th
A preview of my weekly read-around for Equitable Growth.. .
Worthy Reads from Equitable Growth:
1) This is an excellent choice. This will be great fun. And we really do have a shot at changing the world, albeit in a small way:
Equitable Growth: Names Economist Michelle Holder as New CEO: ‘Holder will take the reins at 7-year-old nonprofit research and grantmaking organization dedicated to accelerating research on how economic inequality affects economic growth and stability…. Holder is an assistant professor of economics at John Jay College, City University of New York. Her research focuses on the Black community and women of color in the U.S. labor market. Holder will succeed former President and CEO and co-founder Heather Boushey, who currently serves as a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. “I am thrilled to join Equitable Growth as its new president and CEO,” Holder said. “As a labor economist focused on race, class, and gender, I know how critical Equitable Growth’s mission is, especially funding and examining research to show how economic inequality affects growth. Now more than ever, in this new governing moment, we have a chance to advance evidence-backed policies to promote equitable economic growth.”… Named one of 19 Black economists to watch by Fortune magazine in June 2020… Holder will officially start as president and CEO in September…
LINK: <https://equitablegrowth.org/press/equitable-growth-names-economist-michelle-holder-as-new-ceo/>
2) It is crucial now to start doing the work so that we are prepared to deal with the next economic downturn, when it comes:
Alix Gould-Werth: New Report Lays Out the Path Forward for Faltering U.S. Unemployment Insurance System: ‘The Unemployment Insurance program has been plagued by serious problems for decades. It is underfinanced, which leads to benefit amounts that are too low, benefit durations that are too short, and enrollment processes that are confusing and cumbersome. The eligibility criteria do not reflect the realities of today’s labor market…. States are now taking unprecedented action that further erodes the strength of the program. More than 25 governors have announced that they will prematurely cut off workers in their states from the federal pandemic unemployment programs that extended benefit length, increased its amount, and made it available to workers who are outside the scope of the traditional program-eligibility guidelines… resting on unproven claims that providing support to unemployed workers hurts labor market recovery…. Today’s report provides a roadmap to developing a nationally uniform UI program with benefit levels and durations that are responsive to economic conditions… to prevent policymakers from continuing to rely on Band-Aid programs in moments of economic crisis…. The new report also offers a path to ensuring that all members of the contemporary workforce who lose work through no fault of their own are eligible for benefits. And perhaps most exciting, it lays out a blueprint for fixing the financing problems…
3) A truly marvelous interview of Equitable Growth’s own Betsey Stevenson:
Ezra Klein : Interviews Betsey Stevenson: ’"We got three months left of these extra $300 payments. I don’t think anybody is sitting at home and thinking, aw, I just am going to live high on the hog on these unemployment insurance payments. I think they’re thinking, my job is miserable and I’m going to take this nice time for a break. And I’m going to look right now while I can for something better. And I guarantee you that we could get rid of all of unemployment insurance tomorrow, and we wouldn’t put 7.5 million people back to work overnight…. It might even be OK… appreciate the fact that people have had a really hard year. People who have white collar jobs with good incomes feel like they’ve had a hard year…. Well, if you’re barely putting food on the table, your job became enormously more miserable, and then you turn on the news and you see people yelling at you because you’re not getting back to work fast enough. That’s just a lack of appreciation of the humanity of lower wage workers… If UI is having an effect, it’s small…. Do we really need to deny benefits to millions of people because we’re worried about whether we might have had a few thousand more jobs?…
LINK: <https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/18/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-betsey-stevenson.html>
4) From 2017, but still the best panel I have participated in on globalization’s current vicissitudes:
Gillian Tett, Steven Ciobo, J. Bradford DeLong, John Hagel, Alejandro Ramirez Magaña, & Stephen Schwarzman (2017): Globalization in the Crosshairs: ‘In the 20 years leading up to the financial crisis, international trade grew at twice the rate of global output. Since then, trade has struggled to recover. Recent data is more worrying still, suggesting that trade’s share of global GDP is falling. With mainstream political support for multilateral trade deals diminishing and populist movements on the rise in the U.S. and Europe, it is time to examine the future of globalization. Panelists will consider the following questions: Has international trade—and globalization more broadly—entered a period of stagnation or even reversal? Once unleashed, can globalization ever reverse or are we just seeing a slowdown in a normal cycle? What are the implications for the global economy and the international economic order?…
LINK: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPDH_R2Chbk&list=PLwJK8JzK8C_fT1czQseSmwjIGWEeE7TgL>
Worthy Reads from Elsewhere:
1) What do we mean when we say that “the plague years will pack between one and two decades of digital transformation into a very short time”? We need to figure this out, because it is going to be very important not just for productivity but for distribution, as a substantial part of white-collar work undergoes a Christensenian disruption, and that ramifies:
Steven Sinofsky: Disruption at Work: It’s More than just WFH: ‘The structure and design of corporations are rooted in everything that happened after WWII from an influx of labor, growth in housing, rise of computing, and even the military…. The disruption that took place was “scale”—corporations brought capabilities to make and distribute things globally…. The first 25 years of internet…. Walmart took computers and software and turned the elaborate processes of selecting merchandise, distributing it, monitoring sales, and so on and automated it per store. Amazon built one giant store with everything…. That is what disruption looks like…. The pandemic pulled forward a decade or more of “digital transformation”… the equivalent of what WWII did to the corporation…. The question is not “work remotely”, but what is the very structure of getting things done? We can’t see it now…. It happens slowly at first, then very quickly. It seems impossible to imagine a different way to do things, then we’re doing things in a different way…
LINK: <https://a16z.com/2021/06/12/disruption-at-work-its-more-than-just-wfh/>
2) This strikes me as rather important. But do note that Biden has consistently portrayed his major initiatives as sensible and common sense. It is the Republicans who are pretending that they are radical-left initiatives, and making them of partisan salience. All Democrats can do is to beg McCarthy, McConnell, Murdoch, and the other grifters to limit their culture war grifting to unimportant symbolic issues, and let the business of government operate as the business of government should. But experience tells us that does not work. ObamaCare is RomneyCare, after all. But, yes, instead of making everything a culture-war battlefield, today not everything is a culture-war battlefield. Perhaps McCarthy and McConnell have told Murdoch and company to cool it on normal business? It is not clear to me what is going on:
Matthew Yglesias: The Rise & Importance of Secret Congress: ‘On highly salient issues… polarization is high and compromise is rare. Congress is prone to gridlock…. Members of the minority (rightly) think that any popular, well-known bill that passes on a bipartisan basis is going to help the standing of the president…. In an era where congressional voting is so highly correlated with presidential approval, and primary electorates say they’d rather have members that fight the other party than help their own state, it’s extremely risky for a member of Congress to let an opposite-party president be seen as successful…. But… no Republican congressman is going to be primaried for voting for the low-salience Endless Frontiers Act, because it doesn’t count as “giving Biden a win”…. The most important implication is that if you don’t have the votes to steamroll the opposition, avoid making your issue coded as highly partisan. Don’t frame your issue as a “win” for your party; talk about it as a common-sense reform…. The energy bill that passed late last year is a very significant injection of funding into zero-carbon energy research and deployment. But it wasn’t coded as a “climate bill,” and it’s certainly not the “Green New Deal”…
LINK: <https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-rise-and-importance-of-secret>
3) The step-away from high-tech industrial policy that happened in the late-1970s here in the United States is still something that is grossly understudied. How did America forget so much of its Hamiltonian history that the Democratic establishment’s position in 1984 could have been one of opposition to “industrial policy”—that we should let the market pick our leading sectors, because the market was really good at figuring out where major externality spillovers were and at directing resources toward them? That was, frankly, insane. Yet that was what I was taught. The underlying, rarely voiced argument was that America was so sclerotic and prone to rent-seeking that we did not dare even think about what Alexander Hamilton had thought about, because it would encourage the rent-seekers and give them another tool to use to justify their actions. But they did not need another one. They had plenty. And we needed faster economic growth:
Robert Farley: With Focus on China, US Senate Passes Major Industrial Policy Bill: ’If the bill ultimately passes both houses of Congress, it will represent a major shift in how the United States government manages its relations with the tech sector…. The bill is intended to foster the reinvigoration of the manufacturing side of the U.S. technology sector…. The Senate version faces criticism regarding the lack of significant oversight of the technology companies that will benefit from the bill. However, the extent of bipartisan support in the Senate suggests a big enough coalition to survive negotiations between the House and Senate versions…. Both Republican and Democrats displayed an allergy to industrial policy after the 1970s; that both now seem interested in government intervention is a huge change from the long-standing consensus…. Whether this amounts to a new “Cold War Consensus” is altogether uncertain, but the fact that concern over China can bridge one of the most poisonous political divides in U.S. history should probably cause some concern in Beijing…
LINK: <https://thediplomat.com/2021/06/with-focus-on-china-us-senate-passes-major-industrial-policy-bill/>
4) With very low interest rates, blue-sky projects will swing massively in value, and the economy will be rife with bubbles, and skilled, charismatic salesmen touting fantastical castles in the air can become very very rich indeed. But those low interest rates are a reflection of a perceived reality, and eliminating them produces mass unemployment. My view is what is needed is much stronger restrictions on leverage accompanied by even lower interest rates and higher trend inflation, but I seem to be in a small minority of economists here:
Tim O’Reilly: Two Economies. Two Sets of Rules: ‘Elon Musk isn’t superman. He does have supermoney. At one point early this year, Elon Musk briefly became the richest person in the world. After a 750% increase in Tesla’s stock market value added over $180 billion to his fortune, he briefly had a net worth of over $200 billion. It’s now back down to “only” $155 billion. Understanding how our economy produced a result like this—what is good about it and what is dangerous—is crucial to any effort to address the wild inequality that threatens to tear our society apart…
LINK: <https://www.oreilly.com/radar/why-elon-musk-is-so-rich/>
5) P-hacking is nearly everywhere in studies that report marginal significance levels above 0.001. There is a reason that CERN uses five-sigma: p = 0.0000001:
Julia Rohrer: The Uncanny Mountain: P-Values Between .01 & .10 Are Still a Problem: ‘Study 1: In line with our hypothesis, … p = .03. Study 2: As expected, … p = .02.Study 3: Replicating Study 2, … p = .06. Study 4: …qualified by the predicted interaction, … p = .01. Study 5: Again, … p = .01. Welcome to the uncanny[1] p-mountains, one of the most scenic accumulations of p-values between .01 and .10 in the world!… if We apply the conventional alpha-threshold, 5 p-values that pass are extremely unlikely if the null is true (.055 = .0000003125)…. The data are not compatible with the null hypothesis! However, here comes the bad news: They’re not compatible with the alternative hypothesis either…. [If you] achieve a statistical power of 80%… you have an 80% chance to get a p-value between 0 and .05. However, zooming in on the p-values between 0 and .05, it is actually three times more likely to get a p-value between 0 and .01 (about 60%) than to get a p-value between .01 and .05. The chances of running five “adequately” powered studies and always landing in that sweet .01 to .10 range are again rather small, or 0.2%. This should happen once in a blue moon, but probably not twice in one journal issue, and certainly not routinely across whole fields of research…
LINK: <http://www.the100.ci/2018/02/15/the-uncanny-mountain-p-values-between-01-and-10-are-still-a-problem/>
6) America as non-overlapping, disparate social communities that do not ever, really, get to know one another:
Noah Smith: Social Class in America: ‘And so we wander through our country as if in parallel realities. We walk through teeming, crowded cities where only a few other people really exist—the other residents of our tiny stratum. Our class equals are real to us, manifesting in living color—people we might laugh with, do deals with, make love with, confess our frustrations to. The members of adjacent classes are a bit less real—washed-out caricatures we deal with using simple heuristics. And the members of distant classes are mere shadows to us—moving objects to be avoided on the street, automated kiosks to service our economic needs, statistics in our daily news. The Walgreens cashier, the BART conductor—who could they ever be to you? And who could you ever be to them?…
LINK: <https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/social-class-in-america>
7) 80% of those over 18 in the United Kingdom have had at least one vaccine dose. 55% have had the full course for their vaccine. And yet delta variant cases in mid-June—6000 a day—were eight times what they had been in mid-May. Other virus cases? From 1000 a day in mid-May to 200 a day in mid-June. As anti-spreading measures ebb across the United States, maybe some non-vaccinated people in highly vaccinated areas will avoid catching the COVID-19 plague. But it is now looking as though the overwhelming proportion of the non-vaccinated will catch it this summer and fall: if R-nought for the original virus was 2.5, R-nought for the delta variant is 6. Delta is already the 1/3 of the U.S. cases—3000/day. And the U.S. is currently running at 300 deaths/day, which is 1.3% of cases diagnosed three weeks ago. With only 2/3 of U.S. adults vaccinated, that leaves up to a million more deaths coming. And that is if the virus off in India and elsewhere does not further explore its genetic space:
Gaetan Burgio: ‘To illustrate the issue that Sydney area is facing with delta variant #COVID19 outbreak, here is… how quickly this variant has spread in UK. It is very quick ! <https://t.co/Q3Lca2MELJ>…
LINK: <https://twitter.com/GaetanBurgio/status/1407649334913507333>
8) Out of my lane again, but I do think that this is important. SARS-COVID-19 is so virulent that the way to bet is that it entered Wuhan very close to where and when we first see it rapidly spreading.
There were 30 cases of COVID-19 reported before January 1, 2020; there were 1500 cases reported in Wuhan on January 20, 2021. The natural log of 15 is 7. If we were to assume the virus took its virulent form in one spreading case on December 20, then the first plague version had a doubling time of 4 days. If we were to assume the virus took its virulent form in one spreading case on December 20, then the first plague version had a doubling time of 8 days. Given that lab workers are in social contact with each other, the odds seem to me at least 9-to-1 that the plague would have ripped through the lab staff early if it had come from a lab leak. But what do we have? 3 serious flu-like cases from lab workers in November.
Thus if you had thought that there was a 50-50 chance it was a lab leak, the fact that it did not rip through lab staff in a very obvious and visible way in November and December, and thus come to our notice much earlier than it did, should drive your confidence that it was a lab leak down to 17%. If you had thought that there was a 90-10 chance it was a lab leak, then the absence of its ripping through lab staff in 2019 should drive your confidence that it was a lab leak down to 50%.
The way to bet is always that the virus came from the places were we saw it spreading rapidly. We did not see it spreading rapidly among people on the lab staff, or those in contact with them. We did see it spreading rapidly among people unlucky enough to come in contact with the guy who visited the seafood market. Only if you had been damned near certain that it was a lab leak should you think a lab leak is more likely than not:
Zeynep Tufekci: Where Did the Coronavirus Come From? What We Already Know Is Troubling: ‘The H1N1 influenza pandemic of 1977–78… killed an estimated 700,000 people… almost exclusively affected people in their mid–20s or younger… virtually identical to a strain that circulated in the 1950s. People born before that had immunity that protected them, and younger people didn’t. But how on earth had it remained so steady genetically, since viruses continually mutate? Scientists guessed that it had been frozen in a lab…. It was only in 2004 that a prominent virologist, Peter Palese, wrote that Chi-Ming Chu, a respected virologist and a former member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told him that “the introduction of this 1977 H1N1 virus” was indeed thought to be due to vaccine trials involving “the challenge of several thousand military recruits with live H1N1 virus.”… Science itself seemed to have caused a pandemic while trying to prepare for it. Now, for the second time in 50 years, there are questions about whether we are dealing with a pandemic caused by scientific research….
Troubling safety practices persisted…. Even if the coronavirus jumped from animal to human without the involvement of research activities, the groundwork for a potential disaster had been laid for years, and learning its lessons is essential to preventing others…. Nearly every SARS case since the original epidemic has been due to lab leaks—six incidents in three countries, including twice in a single month from a lab in Beijing. In one instance, the mother of a lab worker died. In 2007, foot-and-mouth disease, which can devastate livestock and caused a massive crisis in Britain in 2001, escaped from a drainage pipe leak at an English lab with the highest biosafety rating, BSL–4. Even the last known person who died of smallpox was someone infected because of a lab incident in Britain in 1978…. In… 2014, the C.D.C. contaminated a benign flu virus sample with deadly A(H5N1) but didn’t discover the danger until months later…. It [also] mistakenly sent improperly deactivated anthrax bacteria to labs, potentially exposing at least 62 C.D.C. employees who worked with the samples without protective gear….
Secrecy and the cover-ups have led to some frantic theories—for example, that the virus leaked from a bioweapons lab, which makes little sense, since, for one thing, bioweapons usually involve more lethal pathogens with a known cure or vaccine, to protect those who employ them…. Bernard Roizman, an emeritus virologist at the University of Chicago with four honorary professorships from Chinese universities, said he was leaning toward believing there was a lab accident. “I’m convinced that what happened is that the virus was brought to a lab, they started to work with it,” he said, “and some sloppy individual brought it out.” He added, “They can’t admit they did something so stupid.”…
It’s… plausible that an outbreak could have started someplace else and was detected in Wuhan simply because it was a big city. Testing blood banks from across China… would help, but… the Chinese government has not carried out such research—or allowed the sharing of the results if it has. With so much evidence withheld, it’s hard to say anything about Covid–19’s origins with certainty, and even a genuine investigation would face challenges. Some outbreaks have never been traced to their origin. But even if we are denied answers, we can still learn lessons….
A better path forward is one of true global cooperation based on mutual benefit and reciprocity. Despite the current dissembling, we should assume that the Chinese government also doesn’t want to go through this again—especially given that SARS, too, started there. This means putting the public interest before personal ambitions and acknowledging that despite the wonders of its power, biomedical research also holds dangers. To do this, government officials and scientists need to look at the big picture: Seek comity and truth instead of just avoiding embarrassment…
LINK: <https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/25/opinion/coronavirus-lab.html>
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It seems possible maybe even probable to me, that SARS-2 may have in patient zero, been less contagious than the one that spread in late December 2019. That would account for the reported early cases, which if real present difficulties. I've read the virus was already well adapted to humans. Perhaps the first crossover had a very modest R value close to one, and it simmered along until it hit upon a lucky mutation?
Re: source of Covid outbreak. I agree with your reasoning. The NYTimes article is just speculative BS. This doesn't mean it couldn't have been a lab leak, but the probability is low. China has been its own worst enemy here, by covering up its early actions, suppressing evidence and warnings early on, possibly influencing the WHO, and certainly restricting full access to records. As they say, the coverup is often worse than the crime.
But this all deflects from the current problem - getting the globe vaccinated to reduce the petri dish of variant production, overcoming vaccine resistance (even from Covidiot Texam H/C workers), and preventing the next surges. The UK is facing a new surge in its zeal to open up the economy. The US is following suit.
My fear is that these responses will play into the hands of those who say we should have kept the economy open and let a fraction of the population die off and to hell with overwhelmed hospitals and untreated patients who are left to die at home or in the streets. We were truly lucky to get extremely effective vaccines so quickly (they certainly surprised me by how quickly they arrived). Had mask-wearing been initiated universally in each country from the start, even without social distancing the mortality rate would likely have been lower. Add in quick vaccine development and we would have been a lot better off. What we need now is adequate stockpiles of basic equipment, masks, PPE for health workers and essential workers, and a protocol with enforcement to ensure best practices are used and enforced. Whether we do this properly or play the same game as gun control is a political toss-up.