Converging narratives on Covid-19

Much more on this soon, but I wanted to point out another of those weird narrative convergences between the mainstream press and conservative media. In this case both are heavily pushing the idea that most people's concerns about the pandemic are overblown and irrational.

Here are two of many examples.

Cass R. Sunstein writing for Bloomberg

At this stage, no one can specify the magnitude of the threat from the coronavirus. But one thing is clear: A lot of people are more scared than they have any reason to be. They have an exaggerated sense of their own personal risk.
...

Turn to the coronavirus in this light. The situation is very fluid, but as of now, most people in North America and Europe do not need to worry much about the risk of contracting the disease. That’s true even for people who are traveling to nations such as Italy that have seen outbreaks of the disease.

Max Fisher writing for the New York Times (see also here):

 For most people, the disease is probably not particularly deadly; health officials tend to put it somewhere within range of an unusually severe seasonal flu. Even in a global pandemic, it’s expected to kill fewer people than the flu virus. Data so far suggests that if you catch the coronavirus, you may be likelier to have no symptoms at all than to require hospitalization.

And from the right (in more dramatic fashion).

Reviewing the coronavirus supplemental appropriation and preparing to go vote. pic.twitter.com/wjJ4YY4VZz

— Rep. Matt Gaetz (@RepMattGaetz) March 4, 2020

(Worth noting that there are a lot of seniors in Gaetz's district.)

The reasons for the convergence vary based on side. The mainstream press loves to think of itself as the voice of reason which may be part of the reason it's so fond of the irrationality-of-the-common-man narrative. Fox et al. are trying to hold to administration line and avoid spooking the economy and the electorate.

It's worth noting that the narrative I've been from researchers is a bit more concerned.

Snazzier than my sketches :) https://t.co/VrBQV0OExs

— Jeremy WASH YOUR DAMN HANDS Konyndyk (@JeremyKonyndyk) March 9, 2020

When language loses meaning: NYT has a rare bad moment

This is Joseph.

This tweet is just stunning:

I mean really, this "double dipping" language is quoted out of an actual NYT article. No, it really wasn't the Onion by mistake.

This is so silly. There is no such thing as "double dipping" -- if the players are eligible for Social Security Disability then it is because they have a separate insurance program and one that is hard to get on. This reduces costs for the most vulnerable players who are also the ones who got injured in the process of a dangerous occupation. Now I know there are probably bigger social injustices but what stops the NYT from framing this differently?

Given the brutal nature of the sport, hundreds of former players apply for disability benefits every year. Currently, some inactive players collect up to $135,000 year, or $11,250 a month, in disability benefits. If they also receive, say, $2,000 a month from Social Security, they collect $13,250 a month in disability payments. The N.F.L. wants to end that “double dipping” and reduce the players’ N.F.L. benefits by offsetting the amount they receive from Social Security.

Why not just say that owners want to reduce payments to disabled former employees to redeploy that revenue elsewhere?

Is that hard?

Barry Ritholtz on the Jack Welch legacy

In addition to luck, Welch built his success on two pillars:

1. Breaking the social contract that had long held between corporations and workers.

2. Cheating his ass off.

From the Big Picture:

I have long stated that Jack Welch was one of the luckier, more wildly over-compensated CEOs around. He became CEO of General Electric in 1981, just before an 18 year bull market in big cap stocks began. he left in 2001, just as the market implosion was getting rolling.

GE’s revenues grew 385% under his watch, but the company’s market cap grew 4000%. How did that happen? GE increased earnings over the years, and with stunning regularity, managed a quarterly profit beat.

Indeed, it was too regular: After the 2000 crash, we learned of earnings manipulation and accounting shenanigans. The criticism was GE Capital acted as an opaque leveraged hedge fund that always be counted on to help GE beat by a penny. (GE eventually had to settle accounting fraud charges with the SEC).

So if anyone knows a thing or two about cooking the books, its GE’s Jack Welch. Want even more proof? Have a look at this chart of Welch’s earnings versus his successor, Jeff Immelt:

This would probably be due a repost on its own, but the passing of Jack Welch is a good excuse

Sunday, November 4, 2012

Strauss and the war on data

The most important aspect of Randianism as currently practiced is the lies its adherents tell themselves. "When you're successful, it's because other people are inferior to you." "When you fail, it's because inferior people persecute you (call it going Roark)." "One of these days you're going to run away and everyone who's been mean to you will be sorry."

The most important aspect of Straussianism as currently practiced is the lies its adherents tell others. Having started from the assumption that traditional democracy can't work because most people aren't smart enough to handle the role of voter, the Straussians conclude that superior minds must, for the good of society, lie to and manipulate the masses.

Joseph and I have an ongoing argument about which school is worse, a question greatly complicated by the compatibility of the two systems and the overlap of believers and their tactics and objectives. Joseph generally argues that Rand is worse (without, of course, defending Strauss) while I generally take the opposite position.

This week brought news that I think bolsters my case (though I suspect Joseph could easily turn it around to support his): one of the logical consequences of assuming typical voters can't evaluate information on their own is that data sources that are recognized as reliable are a threat to society. They can't be spun and they encourage people to make their own decisions.

To coin a phrase, if the masses can't handle the truth and need instead to be fed a version crafted by the elite to keep the people happy and doing what's best for them, the public's access to accurate, objective information has to be tightly controlled. With that in mind, consider the following from Jared Bernstein:

[D]ue to pressure from Republicans, the Congressional Research Service is withdrawing a report that showed the lack of correlation between high end tax cuts and economic growth.

The study, by economist Tom Hungerford, is of high quality, and is one I’ve cited here at OTE. Its findings are fairly common in the economics literature and the concerns raised by that noted econometrician Mitch McConnell are trumped up and bogus. He and his colleagues don’t like the findings because they strike at the supply-side arguments that they hold so dear.

And with Sandy still on everyone's mind, here's something from Menzie Chinn:

NOAA's programs are in function 300, Natural Resources and Environment, along with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and a range of conservation and natural resources programs. In the near term, function 300 would be 14.6 percent lower in 2014 in the Ryan budget according to the Washington Post. It quotes David Kendall of The Third Way as warning about the potential impact on weather forecasting: "'Our weather forecasts would be only half as accurate for four to eight years until another polar satellite is launched,' estimates Kendall. 'For many people planning a weekend outdoors, they may have to wait until Thursday for a forecast as accurate as one they now get on Monday. … Perhaps most affected would be hurricane response. Governors and mayors would have to order evacuations for areas twice as large or wait twice as long for an accurate forecast.'"

There are also attempts from prominent conservatives to delegitimize objective data:

Apparently, Jack Welch, former chairman and CEO of General Electric, is accusing the Bureau of Labor Statistics of manipulating the jobs report to help President Obama. Others seem to be adding their voices to this slanderous lie. It is simply outrageous to make such a claim and echoes the worrying general distrust of facts that seems to have swept segments of our nation. The BLS employment report draws on two surveys, one (the establishment survey) of 141,000 businesses and government agencies and the other (the household survey) of 60,000 households. The household survey is done by the Census Bureau on behalf of BLS. It’s important to note that large single-month divergences between the employment numbers in these two surveys (like the divergence in September) are just not that rare. EPI’s Elise Gould has a great paper on the differences between these two surveys.

BLS is a highly professional agency with dozens of people involved in the tabulation and analysis of these data. The idea that the data are manipulated is just completely implausible. Moreover, the data trends reported are clearly in line with previous monthly reports and other economic indicators (such as GDP). The key result was the 114,000 increase in payroll employment from the establishment survey, which was right in line with what forecasters were expecting. This was a positive growth in jobs but roughly the amount to absorb a growing labor force and maintain a stable, not falling, unemployment rate. If someone wanted to help the president, they should have doubled the job growth the report showed. The household survey was much more positive, showing unemployment falling from 8.1 percent to 7.8 percent. These numbers are more volatile month to month and it wouldn’t be surprising to see unemployment rise a bit next month. Nevertheless, there’s nothing implausible about the reported data. The household survey has shown greater job growth in the recovery than the establishment survey throughout the recovery. The labor force participation rate (the share of adults who are working or unemployed) increased to 63.6 percent, which is an improvement from the prior month but still below the 63.7 percent reported for July. All in all, there was nothing particularly strange about this month’s jobs reports—and certainly nothing to spur accusations of outright fraud.

We can also put many of the attacks against Nate Silver in this category.

Going back a few months, we had this from Businessweek:

The House Committee on Appropriations recently proposed cutting the Census budget to $878 million, $10 million below its current budget and $91 million less than the bureau’s request for the next fiscal year. Included in the committee number is a $20 million cut in funding for this year’s Economic Census, considered the foundation of U.S. economic statistics.

And Bruce Bartlett had a whole set of examples involving Newt Gingrich:

On Nov. 21, Newt Gingrich, who is leading the race for the Republican presidential nomination in some polls, attacked the Congressional Budget Office. In a speech in New Hampshire, Mr. Gingrich said the C.B.O. "is a reactionary socialist institution which does not believe in economic growth, does not believe in innovation and does not believe in data that it has not internally generated."

Mr. Gingrich's charge is complete nonsense. The former C.B.O. director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, now a Republican policy adviser, labeled the description "ludicrous." Most policy analysts from both sides of the aisle would say the C.B.O. is one of the very few analytical institutions left in government that one can trust implicitly.

It's precisely its deep reservoir of respect that makes Mr. Gingrich hate the C.B.O., because it has long stood in the way of allowing Republicans to make up numbers to justify whatever they feel like doing.

...

Mr. Gingrich has long had special ire for the C.B.O. because it has consistently thrown cold water on his pet health schemes, from which he enriched himself after being forced out as speaker of the House in 1998. In 2005, he wrote an op-ed article in The Washington Times berating the C.B.O., then under the direction of Mr. Holtz-Eakin, saying it had improperly scored some Gingrich-backed proposals. At a debate on Nov. 5, Mr. Gingrich said, "If you are serious about real health reform, you must abolish the Congressional Budget Office because it lies."
...                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

Because Mr. Gingrich does know more than most politicians, the main obstacles to his grandiose schemes have always been Congress's professional staff members, many among the leading authorities anywhere in their areas of expertise.                                                                                                                                                                                                

To remove this obstacle, Mr. Gingrich did everything in his power to dismantle Congressional institutions that employed people with the knowledge, training and experience to know a harebrained idea when they saw it. When he became speaker in 1995, Mr. Gingrich moved quickly to slash the budgets and staff of the House committees, which employed thousands of professionals with long and deep institutional memories.

Of course, when party control in Congress changes, many of those employed by the previous majority party expect to lose their jobs. But the Democratic committee staff members that Mr. Gingrich fired in 1995 weren't replaced by Republicans. In essence, the positions were simply abolished, permanently crippling the committee system and depriving members of Congress of competent and informed advice on issues that they are responsible for overseeing.

Mr. Gingrich sold his committee-neutering as a money-saving measure. How could Congress cut the budgets of federal agencies if it wasn't willing to cut its own budget, he asked. In the heady days of the first Republican House since 1954, Mr. Gingrich pretty much got whatever he asked for.

In addition to decimating committee budgets, he also abolished two really useful Congressional agencies, the Office of Technology Assessment and the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations. The former brought high-level scientific expertise to bear on legislative issues and the latter gave state and local governments an important voice in Congressional deliberations.

The amount of money involved was trivial even in terms of Congress's budget. Mr. Gingrich's real purpose was to centralize power in the speaker's office, which was staffed with young right-wing zealots who followed his orders without question. Lacking the staff resources to challenge Mr. Gingrich, the committees could offer no resistance and his agenda was simply rubber-stamped.

Unfortunately, Gingrichism lives on. Republican Congressional leaders continually criticize every Congressional agency that stands in their way. In addition to the C.B.O., one often hears attacks on the Congressional Research Service, the Joint Committee on Taxation and the Government Accountability Office.

Lately, the G.A.O. has been the prime target. Appropriators are cutting its budget by $42 million, forcing furloughs and cutbacks in investigations that identify billions of dollars in savings yearly. So misguided is this effort that Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma and one of the most conservative members of Congress, came to the agency's defense.

In a report issued by his office on Nov. 16, Senator Coburn pointed out that the G.A.O.'s budget has been cut by 13 percent in real terms since 1992 and its work force reduced by 40 percent -- more than 2,000 people. By contrast, Congress's budget has risen at twice the rate of inflation and nearly doubled to $2.3 billion from $1.2 billion over the last decade.

Mr. Coburn's report is replete with examples of budget savings recommended by G.A.O. He estimated that cutting its budget would add $3.3 billion a year to government waste, fraud, abuse and inefficiency that will go unidentified.

For good measure, Mr. Coburn included a chapter in his report on how Congressional committees have fallen down in their responsibility to exercise oversight. The number of hearings has fallen sharply in both the House and Senate. Since the beginning of the Gingrich era, they have fallen almost in half, with the biggest decline coming in the 104th Congress (1995-96), his first as speaker.

In short, Mr. Gingrich's unprovoked attack on the C.B.O. is part of a pattern. He disdains the expertise of anyone other than himself and is willing to undercut any institution that stands in his way. Unfortunately, we are still living with the consequences of his foolish actions as speaker.

We could really use the Office of Technology Assessment at a time when Congress desperately needs scientific expertise on a variety of issues in involving health, energy, climate change, homeland security and many others. And given the enormous stress suffered by state and local governments as they are forced by Washington to do more with less, an organization like the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations would be invaluable.

The probabilistic forecasts debate -- That's nice fellows, but I'm kinda focused on that iceberg

Andrew has a good breakdown of the debate over probabilistic election forecasts if you're interested. Here's why I think you shouldn't be.

1. At this point, economists have so thoroughly screwed up the discussion of rationality that I now make a conscious effort to avoid the term “rational,” much as I try not to use “significance” except in the technical sense. Rational actor arguments routinely rely on simplifying assumptions that are never observed in real life and which exclude most of what we would think of logical thinking.

2. That said, any reasonable “rational choice” model has got to address the accuracy and completeness of the information available to the actors. For people who relied on 538, perceived and actual closeness matched up fairly well and it makes a fair amount of sense to talk about “rational” voting behavior. For people who relied on NYT’s Upshot and Slate’s real-time exit polls, not so much…

3. With this in mind, this whole debate over probabilistic forecasts strikes me as another one of those secondhand smoke on the Titanic questions that are eating away at our collective decision making ability. We have larger and more immediate concerns.

Even with good data and solid analysis, it seems obvious to me that the social good of horse race coverage is U-shaped. A reasonable amount provides useful information and helps voters converge on a generally satisfactory choice. Too much (either probabilistic or old school) overwhelms the process and creates a noisy feedback loop. Even if we were getting good information we’d still be on the wrong side of the U, and we aren’t getting good information.

4. It’s convenient to blame the voters for being “irrational” but given the crap they’ve been fed, it’s difficult to see how they can reasonably be expected to make intelligent decisions. We have supposedly serious organizations like the New York Times giving oxygen to joke candidates.

Billionaire vanity campaigns crowding out viable options. Millions of early votes wasted because someone thought it would be a good idea to have Super Tuesday three goddamn days after the first real primary of the election (no one takes NH seriously). And, of course, a level of noise that would strain even a well running system.

Some post-Saturday, pre-Tuesday thoughts

Back in September, my co-blogger and I were having a conversation about worst possible case scenarios for the Democrats. He suggested a third party candidate. I went with having the Democratic nominee collapse shortly before the election. I was thinking about Biden at the time, but having an even older candidate actually have a heart attack didn’t lessen these concerns. 

I’m not sure if any of the chattering class have seriously thought through the implications of the Democrat’s electability focus. In the general election, this is all to the good, but in the primary, it can create all sorts of problems as the selection process frequently degenerates into a pure Keynesian beauty contest which can drown out real content and produce alarming levels of feedback driven noise. This can delay convergence on the best choice, particularly if…

The people covering the primary are a bunch of noise chasing idiots.

The noise and feedback issues remind us that the decision to move up California’s primary was incredibly bad. The idea that California needed more influence was insane on its face. In general, we give too little time for the tough part of the process and lengthened the part that was too long already, pursuing the mythical swing voter.

We also need to stop wasting oxygen on joke campaigns. Any system where Steyer, Yang, and Williamson don't drop out long before Booker, Harris, and Castro  is broken .

"Just as hard as I could" -- Ben Cooper 1933-2020

Support Your Local Sheriff is the better movie -- less cartoonish and it holds together better -- but if you're looking for a complete dismantling of the Western hero, you'd be hard pressed to find a more thorough job than the follow-up, Support Your Local Gunfighter.






Though the comedy is much drier, Paddy Chayefsky's The Americanization of Emily (Garner's personal favorite) had a similar take on military honor, and produced one of the few really good anti-war films.

Repost: We'll be coming back to this.

One of the many discouraging things about the fight to address climate change and ocean acidification is that while the facts are overwhelmingly on the movement's side, it's narrative are increasingly handed over to people who traffic in questionable arguments and misinformation.

Tuesday, July 18, 2017

David Wallace-Wells, autism and bad science

David Wallace-Wells has been catching a lot of flack (most of it richly deserved) for his recent New York Magazine article on climate change. It is a hugely troubling sign when the very scientists you were claiming to represent push back against your article.

This controversy illustrates a larger problem with science reporting at the magazine. We already have a post in the queue discussing the neutral-to-credulous coverage of topics ranging from homeopathy to magic crystals to Gwyneth Paltrow's goop empire. The Wallace-Wells piece takes things to another level and goes in a very different but arguably worse direction. Rather than giving bad science a pass, he takes good science and presents it so ineptly has to do it a disservice.

I am not going to delve into that science myself. The topic has been well covered by numerous expert and knowledgeable writers [see here and here]. The best I could offer would be a recap. There are some journalistic points I may hit later and I do want to highlight a minor detail in the article that has slipped past most critics, but which is perfectly representative of the dangerous way Wallace-Wells combines sensationalism with a weak grasp of science.

Other stuff in the hotter air is even scarier, with small increases in pollution capable of shortening life spans by ten years. The warmer the planet gets, the more ozone forms, and by mid-century, Americans will likely suffer a 70 percent increase in unhealthy ozone smog, the National Center for Atmospheric Research has projected. By 2090, as many as 2 billion people globally will be breathing air above the WHO “safe” level; one paper last month showed that, among other effects, a pregnant mother’s exposure to ozone raises the child’s risk of autism (as much as tenfold, combined with other environmental factors). Which does make you think again about the autism epidemic in West Hollywood.

No, David, no it doesn't.

I want to be painstakingly careful at this point. These are complex and extraordinarily important issues and it is essential that we do not lose sight of certain basic facts: by any reasonable standard, man-made climate change is one of the two or three most important issues facing our country; the effect of various pollutants on children's mental and physical development should be a major concern for all of us; high ozone levels are a really bad thing.

But the suggestion that ozone levels are causing an autism epidemic in West Hollywood is both dangerous and scientifically illiterate. You'll notice that I did not say that suggesting ozone levels cause autism is irresponsible. Though the study in question is outside of my field, the hypothesis seems reasonable and I do not see any red flags associated with the research. If Wallace-Wells had stopped before adding that last sentence, he would've been on solid ground, but he didn't.

Autism is frightening, mysterious, tragic. This has caused people, particularly parents facing one of the worst moments imaginable, to clean desperately to any explanation that might make sense of their situation. As a result, autism has become a focal point for bad science, culminating with the rise of the anti-vaccination movement. There is no field where groundless speculation and fear-mongering are less welcome.

So, if ozone and other pollutants may contribute to autism, what's so bad about the West Hollywood claim? For that, you need to do some rudimentary causal reasoning, starting with a quick look at ozone pollution in Southern California.

Here are some pertinent facts from a 2015 LA Times article:

EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy selected a limit of 70 parts per billion, which is more stringent than the 75 parts-per-billion standard adopted in 2008 but short of the 60-ppb endorsed by environmentalists and health advocacy groups including the American Lung Assn. The agency’s science advisors had recommended a limit lower than 70 -- and as low as 60.

...


About one-third of California residents live in communities with pollution that exceeds federal standards, according to estimates by the state Air Resources Board.


Air quality is worst in inland valleys, where pollution from vehicles and factories cook in sunlight to form ozone, which is blown and trapped against the mountains.


The South Coast air basin, which includes Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties, violated the current 75-ppb ozone standard on 92 days in 2014. The highest ozone levels in the nation are in San Bernardino County, which reported a 2012-2014 average of 102 parts per billion.

Now let's look at some ozone levels around the region. West Hollywood, it should be noted, is not great.

But just over the Hollywood Hills, the situation is even worse.

Go further inland to San Dimas and the level is even higher…

Higher still in Riverside ...

Though still far short of what we find in San Bernardino.

If you look at autism rates by school district and compare them to ozone levels, it is difficult to see much of a relationship. Does this mean that ozone does not contribute to autism? Absolutely not. What it shows is that, as with many developmental and learning disabilities, the wealthy are overdiagnosed while poor are underdiagnosed. It is no coincidence that a place like Santa Monica/Maibu (a notorious anti-vaxxer hotspot) has more than double the diagnosis rate of San Bernardino.

The there's this from the very LA Times article by Alan Zarembo that Wallace-Wells cites [emphasis added]:

 Irva Hertz-Picciotto, an epidemiologist at UC Davis, suspects that environmental triggers such as exposure to chemicals during pregnancy play a role. In a 2009 study, she started with a tantalizing lead — several autism clusters, mostly in Southern California, that her team had identified from disability and birth records.

But the hot spots could not be linked to chemical plants, waste dumps or any other obvious environmental hazards. Instead, the cases were concentrated in places where parents were highly educated and had easy access to treatment.

Peter Bearman, a sociologist at Columbia University, has demonstrated how such social forces are driving autism rates.

Analyzing state data, he identified a 386-square-mile area centered in West Hollywood that consistently produced three times as many autism cases as would be expected from birth rates.

Affluence helped set the area apart. But delving deeper, Bearman detected a more surprising pattern that existed across the state: Rich or poor, children living near somebody with autism were more likely to have the diagnosis themselves.
Living within 250 meters boosted the chances by 42%, compared to living between 500 and 1,000 meters away.

The reason, his analysis suggested, was simple: People talk.
They talk about how to recognize autism, which doctors to see, how to navigate the bureaucracies to secure services. They talk more if they live next door or visit the same parks, or if their children go to the same preschool.

The influence of neighbors alone accounts for 16% of the growth of autism cases in the state developmental system between 2000 and 2005, Bearman estimated.

In other words, autism is not contagious, but the diagnosis is.

Electability

This is Joseph

Ok, I am bracing for being taken down by Mark, but I wanted to comment on one of my current pet peeves.

There is a presidential primary going on right now. One of the big issues I keep hearing is whether a candidate is "electable". Now, historically speaking this might have been a valid concern. From Wikipedia:

The impetus for national adoption of the binding primary election was the chaotic 1968 Democratic National Convention. Vice President Hubert Humphrey secured the Presidential nomination despite not winning a single primary under his own name.

So in earlier eras it was a reasonable concern that the delegates at the convention might not be a representative sample of the voting population. Now primaries today are not necessarily representative of the electorate as a whole, but they are broadly based elections. It's pretty clear that anybody who wins a primary is "electable" in some important sense of the term.

Now, I think that this argument is a proxy for what people don't want to say out loud. All candidates who are able to win the primary do it from a combination of "crossover appeal" (get the other side to vote for you) and "enthusiasm" (get more of your base to run out and support you). In general, these things tend to be negatively correlated. Making your core supporters super-happy is often in conflict with reaching across the aisle.

In the small number of cases where this is not true, there doesn't tend to be much life in such a proposal. Both parties are united in not wanting to return big pieces of the country to Mexico, and you will note the absence of such proposals.

So I loathe the term "electable" in this context. Instead, I want the more precise discussion of the trade-off between exciting people and building bridges. Anybody who can survive the primary process looks like they are at least potentially "electable" to me. We'd probably all have had a clearer view in 2016 if we'd remembered that about Donald Trump.

Daycare and what does work pay for?

This is Joseph

So, I have a philosophical question. It is clear that work places benefit from having a robust set of benefits for workers, many of which make a lot more sense given as a employer benefit rather than as a part of cash compensation. In the United States, for example, the current regulatory system favors employer sponsored health care (although I hear they are in the process of revisiting this assumption).

Other benefits are a lot more standard. For example, heating and/or air conditioning makes a big difference in an office. Parking is another case where you could just give employees money but liquidity issues might make that inefficient (is there a private parking vendor near work that employees could rent spots from? Will land use allow this?).

An interesting case in this rubric is daycare. On site daycare would make at least as much of a positive difference for workers as on-site parking. Not everyone uses parking and not everyone uses daycare, either, but it would be a broadly useful benefit. It is also quite possible to offer paid daycare just like many universities offer paid parking.

My question is what is it that has kept daycare from being in the same category as parking for workplace infrastructure? Marissa Mayer was famous for thinking that raising a child as CEO wasn't as bad as people predicted, but she had a daycare in the office next door. Now, she paid for the expenses but the typical employee does not have the option to pay for a daycare in the same building, even if they want to.

Is there a reason that this relatively big boost in workforce benefit is so rarely fully staffed? Most daycares I am looking at, in multiple cities, have difficult wait lists and are hard to coordinate with work locations. Can't this be improved?

Still out sick

Here's some weekend Debussy until we resume regular programming.

Out Sick

Back soon. Enjoy the musical interlude in the meantime.

Didn't even get to Thiel's Cato Institute essay on women's suffrage

This 2014 piece by Mark Ames on the relationship between the Holocaust denial movement and the Koch Brothers should be read in its entirety, but I wanted to highlight this section.

The Reason issue discussed here was from 1976. The provocative, contrarian rhetorical approach is familiar to anyone who has been following Robin Hanson. It’s a process that pretends to be a free intellectual inquiry but which always ends up attacking a liberal position and pushing the Overton Window to the right.

Of course, Reason and Hanson have something else in common.

My dept just got $5M grant from Koch foundation. I'm pretty sure this won't influence what policies we recommend. https://t.co/zuO71GysTG

— Robin Hanson (@robinhanson) March 22, 2018

It’s easy to dismiss the more clownish examples, but in today’s journalistic ecosystem, no one from the right is more than one degree of separation from respectability in the mainstream media. Pretty much every major press outlet (the New York Times, NPR, CNN) welcomes Koch-subsidized academics and pundits. For the serious news consumer, they are unavoidable.

Obviously, there are smart people doing serious work at places like the Manhattan Institute or George Mason University, but while we shouldn’t reject their work out of hand, for the sake of the discourse, we need to find a way of reminding ourselves that their funding comes from an initiative that promotes Holocaust deniers, rape apologists and other extremists and propagandists when they serve the agenda, and that even the most independent researchers in that world know that reaching the wrong conclusions too often will cost them.

There is a politics to all of this, a politics that's barely budged since the days of the American Liberty League: The goal is to discredit the New Deal and FDR, which can't be done effectively without discrediting FDR's most popular cause, the victory over fascist Germany and Japan. To far-right extraction industry billionaires like the Koch family, FDR and his New Deal politics were a kind of anti-business "holocaust," because the New Deal forced the long-dominant plutocrats to part with a portion of their wealth and political power. To the nation's Big Business oligarchs in the 1930s, FDR's New Deal reforms — breaking up the power of finance, trusts, and industrialists, while empowering labor unions —was a crime and a wound as raw in 1976 as it was in 1936.

For them, FDR was a tyrant and a criminal, an American Hitler, only no one else could see things their way, because the real Hitler was widely believed to be one of the worst figures in history. Therefore, libertarian "historical revisionism" had to convince these Americans that Hitler wasn't nearly as awful as they believed, which meant that the Holocaust couldn't have happened — if the goal was to discredit FDR and the New Deal.

North’s article appeals to another sensibility popular with libertarians (and the Boomer left): the cult of the anti-Establishment iconoclast, every self-absorbed middle-class Baby Boomer's fantasy. That cult of the iconoclast allows North to paint libertarianism's far-right "historical revisionism" as anti-Establishment Cool, more an expression of one's individuality than a political act. So if the boring, bad Establishment says Hitler was bad and World War II was good, then naturally the anti-Establishment maverick will question that. Gary North writes:

One topic—the ultimate litmus test of hardnosed World War II revisionism—has generally been skirted: Hitler. Was he a madman, diplomatically speaking? Was he exclusively responsible for the Second World War?”

Much of the Reason Holocaust denier propaganda is about promoting a new set of anti-authority voices to replace the Establishment’s. So Martin cites Holocaust deniers Paul Rassinier and Harry Elmer Barnes; and Gary North introduces Reason’s readers to Bay Area Holocaust denier David Hoggan, the “anonymous” author of the 1969 neo-Nazi book “The Myth of the Six Million”:

    “In American revisionist circles the most famous (or infamous) case has been that of David Hoggan, the Establishment’s number-one academic pariah of the revisionist camp...Hoggan’s thesis regarding the origins of the Second World War are straightforward, and completely unorthodox. The primary villain was not Hitler; it was Lord Halifax, the British Foreign Secretary.”


North is a clever huckster who’s studied his Baby Boomer audience, so he uses marketing words that he knows appeal to his target consumer: “unorthodox,” “Establishment’s number-one academic pariah,” and weirdest of all for a strict Old Testament theofascist like North, he even uses the then-popular hippie expression “far-out” (meaning “cool") to sell Holocaust denial:

    “Probably the most far-out materials on World War II revisionism have been the seemingly endless scholarly studies of the supposed execution of 6 million Jews by Hitler. The anonymous author [Hoggan] of ‘The Myth of the Six Million’ has presented a solid case against the Establishment’s favorite horror story—the supposed moral justification for our entry into the war.”

Tuesday Tweets

These next few tweets go to a longstanding problem with the New York Times and its place in the ecosystem. As many including Josh Marshall have observed, the NYT has a way of coming late to a story and downplaying the work that came before. Because of the paper's standing, from that point on, it's "as reported by the New York Times."

in case i wasn't clear: THIS VERY NYT STORY rips off a Vox story, which the Times merely alludes to airily in passing, a dozen or more paragraphs in, without saying THIS IS THE EXACT SAME STORY. O the irony. https://t.co/ZYGFvSiubC

— Marjorie Ingall (@MarjorieIngall) February 15, 2020

here's one of the more egregious examples I know of but there are tons.

Buzzfeed (Apr 7): https://t.co/R1wmd8YjWq
NYT (Apr 21) https://t.co/Itm31NcCsF

— James Palmer (@BeijingPalmer) February 15, 2020

My impression is that the conservative think tank world initially built up Hanson as a deep thinker assuming he'd be useful for moving the Overton Window, Unfortunately, Hanson has been too big of a attention junkie/clown to be effective.

I'm going to retweet this every time @NoahHaber starts on about economists being smarter than epidemiologists. https://t.co/JmnyXmpmKO

— George Savva (@georgemsavva) February 15, 2020

In 1632, Rasputin would have been considered mildly unlucky.

Life came with challenges back in 1632.
“Kil’d by several accidents” seems a tough way to buy it. https://t.co/T6z5rsLjQs

— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) February 15, 2020

I know I'm not supposed to call Robin Hanson creepy because that would be mean. How about this? Can I call this creepy?

Great lede and great story by @JamesVGrimaldi, Brody Mullins and @johndmckinnon https://t.co/kQzSQRcj5F pic.twitter.com/wnVl4XxS0Y

— Joe Palazzolo (@joe_palazzolo) February 13, 2020

Could Bernie's branding help him in the primaries but hurt him in the general?

Bernie Sanders Isn’t a Socialist https://t.co/VGxWuWGeAX

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) February 13, 2020

Worth a look.

"It works just like Google Trends, the popular tool that displays and compares terms that people are searching for with Google, except that MuckRack Trends looks only at news articles." https://t.co/8C60scF7CI Pretty useful for people in my business.

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) February 14, 2020

As we've been pointing out for the past decade, the black and white, us vs them worldview of the education reform movement left it vulnerable to corruption.

In a damning audit, Indiana calls on two virtual schools to repay $85 million in misspent state funds https://t.co/JgBYFdc29d

— Jersey Jazzman (@jerseyjazzman) February 13, 2020

NEW: Arizona charter school principal pleads guilty in $2.5 million enrollment scheme https://t.co/d2mW8Z3Zwz via @azcentral

— Craig Harris (@charrisazrep) February 14, 2020

'“We remain neutral on geopolitical disputes and make every effort to objectively display disputed areas,” Russell said in the statement. “In countries where we have local versions of Google Maps, we follow local legislation when displaying names and borders.”'

Google redraws the borders on maps depending on who’s looking https://t.co/siDhFbGuWh

— Paul Staniland (@pstanpolitics) February 14, 2020

My favorites are the pundits who go from one set of absolute certainties to another completely contradictory set without the slightest pause for doubt, humility or reflection.

Lots of potential explanations for it, but maybe worth noting: On twitter I see tons of political scientists (and others) confidently stating which dem candidates are more or less electable. In offline conversations, the political scientists I talk to are far more uncertain.

— Andrew Little (@anthlittle) February 13, 2020





I'm not saying I'd never use the phrase "surge to third place in New Hampshire" unironically, but I promise to feel bad about myself if I do. https://t.co/BTImXfNsxb

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) February 13, 2020

 

I think that captures it. And there's an impatience that they're fighting each other - even though that's what a primary is - because people want to move on to running against Trump.

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) February 11, 2020

  

High SF housing prices are forcing Silicon Valley workers to make slightly shorter commutes

Just to get the obvious out of the way, California needs to build more housing. Rents are too high and the situation with the homeless is becoming a genuine humanitarian crisis. Unfortunately, as with climate change, the very seriousness of the problem sometimes makes people reluctant to criticize bad arguments, lest they be accused of minimizing the issue (see the reaction to the collected works of David Wallace Wells). The result is some truly silly ideas have lodged themselves into the standard narrative.

Case in point.  [Emphasis added]

Welcome to life on Silicon Valley's new frontier. When tech companies first introduced private shuttles for their employees more than a decade ago, they served the affluent neighborhoods in San Francisco and the Peninsula. Now the buses reach as far as the almond orchards of Salida and the garlic fields of Gilroy.

…

"That just tells you the story of the Bay Area," said Russell Hancock, president and CEO of regional think tank Joint Venture Silicon Valley. "We're going to be in these farther-flung places, and that's our reality because we're not going to be able to create affordable housing."

...


A few miles into Alameda County, a fairgrounds parking lot has been transformed into a massive park-and-ride operation. A laundry list of tech companies — Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and others — send shuttles here or nearby train stations, according to a report prepared for the Alameda County Transportation Commission. Around 7 a.m., people in puffy jackets and backpacks jog to a silver bus with its destination displayed as Wolfe Road in Sunnyvale, where Apple has a large campus.

We need to talk about the word “farther” because in this context, it is more of a cultural than a physical concept. Go online and check out the distance and rush-hour driving times from Silicon Valley towns like Sunnyvale to either San Francisco or Gilroy and you’ll find that the differences aren’t great and that Gilroy is often closer.

A great deal of the discussion of Bay Area housing and infrastructure is based on the implicit assumption that Silicon Valley is next to San Francisco rather than 40 or so miles away. It’s not even the closest big city (San Jose is considerably larger).

Nonetheless, Bay Area residents still refer to it as “the City” and the other towns continue to have an inferiority complex that as an Angeleno I’ve always found a bit odd, as if it were 1900 and it was the only outpost of culture west of the Continental Divide.

Whatever its origins, the mystique of San Francisco has badly muddled people's thinking about the housing crisis, and this is a problem that requires clear thinking.