Friday, May 1, 2020

Transparency

This is Joseph

There is a good conversation about transparency going on right now. The gist of it is that the 2016 elections have created perverse incentives for being transparent. If you release information then the press hunts through it looking for a series of mini-scandals. If you release nothing then people quickly lose interest. This creates a serious incentive to minimize transparency.

When talking to people about this, it has been speculated that the 2016 election was rather unique. And so it was. But the pattern continues. It has been three and a half years since the 2016 election and the question of whether congress can see the president's taxes is still being litigated.  This includes attempts to source these records from third party sources, such as banks.

It would be less of an issue if people were not suddenly asking Joe Biden to make as many records available as possible. What I find perplexing here, is that people have lost perspective on the size of the offence (as well as their ability to blame their own conduct). The question of how separate business interests are from the presidency is a perfect area for transparency.

What we need is the press to stand above "false equivalency" and make lack of transparency carry a political price, via repetition of the issues and refusing to punish openness on the part of candidates.
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Weekend Morricone

I've been making extensive use of my local libraries' e-book collection. One recommendation is a collection from Dr. Seuss's stint as a political cartoonist for PM in the early forties. You've probably seen a few of these but it's worth going through the whole set for both the unmistakable art and cross-section of liberal but definitely not leftist views (the difference being very  sharp while the non-aggression pact was still in place).

Some of the recurring targets included isolationists, racial discrimination and especially Charles Lindbergh.














I have some writing to do over the weekend. Harlan Ellison used to listen to Ennio Morricone film scores while he worked, so I thought I'd give it a try. Morricone has over 500 IMDB credits (the latest in pre-production), so if I like the results I'm set for a while.







I hesitated for a moment on this one because it is, in retrospect, a really stupid film  that arguably manages to be less historically accurate than the TV show.


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Thursday, April 30, 2020

Lowering the line

This is Joseph

I want to follow up on Mark's post earlier today. I think that a major concern that we have all had for awhile was whether or not there would be forward planning in the epidemic. After all, early in the epidemic there were problems because pandemic response had been under-funded and epidemiologists were caught by surprise at how unprepared we are.

Now we are seeing the same lack of forward planning. There is a principle of marshalling resources, even when there are free markets, that is being ignored. Few countries are happy if they are far from being food sufficient (and, when they are, they have a lot of planning around this), In the same vein, the United States has an energy reserve to prevent oil disruption, despite oil being part of a free market.

Why is healthcare so different?

Clearly it makes no sense to be cutting capacity here. You want to develop a healthcare reserve to handle the risk of a covid-19 hospitalization surge, not shrink capacity so people later in the epidemic have even worse care. Like with food and energy, one presumes the only rational provider of this financing is the government.

Why is this a partisan issue? Starving and freezing are bad, so we have a reserve against a disruption, but dying of a virus isn't a bad thing?
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Did anyone see this one coming?

 When I said flattening the curve doesn't accomplish that much if you lower the line, I was wrong. It certainly does something.





 



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Wednesday, April 29, 2020

A GOP strategy that asks seniors to sacrifice themselves for the economy may, in electoral terms, have a subtle flaw

You know that horribly overused news genre of voters supporting positions that hurt their own interests? This isn't one of those stories.

Josh Kraushaar writing for the National Journal:
Going against the tide of public opinion carries serious political consequences. This column has pointed out the downward trajectory of Trump’s approval ratings as he struggles to demonstrate competence in this crisis while failing to offer clarity about the path forward. But he risks doing greater damage by going against the interests of his own voters.

For a preview on how things could get worse for the president, look at the evolving political views of seniors, one of Trump’s most supportive constituencies in the previous election. They are also the most concerned about the coronavirus, given they have a much greater risk of dying if they become infected.

The latest Morning Consult poll found that 65-and-older voters prioritized defeating the coronavirus over healing the economy by nearly a 6-to-1 ratio. And over the past month, they’ve become the group most disenchanted with Trump’s handling of the crisis. In mid-March, seniors were more supportive of Trump than any other age group (plus-19 net approval). Now, their net approval of the president has dropped 20 points and is lower than any age group outside of the youngest Americans.

Those findings were matched by a new NBC/WSJ poll, which tested the presidential matchup between Trump and Joe Biden. Among seniors 65 and older, Biden led Trump by 9 points, 52 to 43 percent. That’s a dramatic 16-point swing from Hillary Clinton’s showing in the 2016 election; she lost seniors by 7 points to Trump (52-45 percent).

Seniors are among the most engaged voters in the country (71 percent went to the polls in 2016), and were critical to Trump’s victory. They’ve remained supportive of him for much of his presidency. And they’re counting on the president to protect them at a particularly precarious moment. If Trump’s desire to quickly reopen the economy ends up backfiring, they’ll be the first to abandon him and deal his reelection prospects a crippling blow.

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Tuesday, April 28, 2020

The Onion hires Nostradamus and other Tuesday Tweets







Explaining Elon.


 

   




Meanwhile...






Does this mean he's started telling people to drink Mercury?




 

And, no. It's not your imagination. The New York Times used to be a better paper.




("Who funds the Federalist?")

  


As noted before, there may be a subtle flaw in the GOP pushing the seniors-are-expendable line.


 
From the "standards are for other people" file.








 


You're just lucky this wasn't a rererepost.


 




And finally a damn good quote from Fallows.

  
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Monday, April 27, 2020

Flattening the curve doesn't accomplish that much if you lower the line

In a lot of ways, social distancing is a delaying action, an attempt to buy time (more or less literally) so that we improve our treatments and ramp up our capacity. Instead we're gutting our health care system.


Sue Dremann writing for Palo Alto Weekly:

Employees of Stanford Health Care, including doctors, nurses and technicians who are caring for COVID-19 patients, will have their pay reduced by up to 20% starting Monday, April 27, for 10 weeks, according to a tip sheet the organization sent to workers on April 21.

The medical center briefly stated it was making the cuts due to the economic impacts of COVID-19 on the organization instead of laying off employees. The "temporary workforce adjustment" program was created as part of the hospital's "cost-saving measure and initiatives," hospital administrators stated. The pay reductions will apply to all employees at Stanford Hospital, Lucile Packard Children's Hospital Stanford and, in the East Bay, Stanford-ValleyCare. Asked if the cuts included to doctors' salaries, hospital spokeswoman Lisa Kim reiterated the cuts are "across the board." 


Paul O'Donnell and Kevin Krause writing for the Dallas News:

Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare is furloughing about 3,400 of its hospital workers nationally, citing lost revenue from elective surgeries being halted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Tenet, one of the nation’s largest investor-owned hospital operators, announced the actions in a letter to employees Wednesday. CEO Ronald Rittenmeyer described the furloughs as temporary and resulting from the virus’s “acute” impact on the company’s business.

“These are difficult but necessary decisions in navigating near-term uncertainty that will eventually come to an end,” he wrote in the letter. “We remain ready to resume vital elective care in our communities once government restrictions are lifted.”

The 12-week furloughs affect 3% of Tenet’s 113,000 employees. It follows an earlier furlough of 500 corporate employees, as well as reductions in surgical center staffing at facilities closed or operating on a limited basis. The company said pandemic-related staffing cutbacks now affect about 10% of its workforce.

Dylan Scott writing for Vox
  • The Cookeville Regional Medical Center in Tennessee will be furloughing 400 of its 2,400-person staff, and a few hundred others will see a cut in their hours, Fox 17 Nashville reports.
  • Boston Medical Center is furloughing 10 percent of its staff, about 700 people, according to the Boston Globe.
  • Trinity Health Mid-Atlantic, which runs five hospitals in the Philadelphia area and employs 125,000 people there, will furlough an unspecific percentage of its staff, per the Philadelphia Inquirer.
  • Mercy Health, the largest health system in Ohio, is temporarily laying off 700 workers.
  • Two hospital systems in West Virginia are furloughing upward of 1,000 employees combined, Metro News reports.
  • The largest hospital system in eastern Kentucky is laying off 500 workers, according to the Lexington Herald-Leader.
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Friday, April 24, 2020

Media and editorial judgement

This is Joseph

The New York Times has been accused lately of too much false equivalence. This deleted tweet is probably a high water mark:


The phrase "in the view of some experts" refers to injecting bleach into one's lungs as being actually dangerous. Yes, injecting bleach into lungs really was mused about. Yes, there is video. Who are these experts and can they go first?

The most amazing part was this:
“I was asking a question sarcastically to reporters like you just to see what would happen,” Trump said in the Oval Office, according to a pool report.
Neither explanation is good. On one hand, the president pondered the idea of people injecting lethal poison into their lungs. On the other hand, the president is so cynical about false equivalence that he set a trap to humiliate the media about their inability to apply editorial judgement. I don't think either explanation looks good.

Now, to be fair, the New York Times did eventually hear Donald Trump's explanation and update the story:


But surely better judgment can be used here? This isn't like hydroxychloroquine where there was actually some debate inside the biomedical community and an actual researcher, Didier Raoult, providing (weak) evidence. There was still some real risks with community use of hydroxychloroquine, but I can at least understand a political news correspondent not wanting to wade into a difficult debate.

But washing one's lungs with bleach? Here even the reporters covering it were asking a science advisor if it was really serious advice or not. This seems like a nitpick but surely this was one case where the NYT could have avoided this trap?


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Think of this as your weekend starter








I read quite a bit of mockery of Stephen Moore's Rosa Parks comment, but they left out the funniest part, where he delivered the comments from. (for more on Moore, click here)





Also impressed by the impressive work still being done by John Oliver.




Chipman has also been pumping out tons of thoughtful, literate video essays.




And a nice bit of accompaniment to your weekend by Thomas Newman.




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Thursday, April 23, 2020

At least, it's under $21 billion

 Another news story about our favorite real life Tony Stark.


 


Elon Musk has a real talent for selling himself as an exemplar of independence and champion of the public sector. Musk's promises of wondrous technology always come with amazingly low price tags. There's little if any reason to bother the taxpayer. All Elon asks is for the government to stay out of his way.

You may ask yourself why journalists would continue to fall for this. Perhaps it's because it appears to be a good career move.

Tuesday, May 31, 2016


At least it's under $5 billion...

As mentioned before, I'm working on a longer piece on the journalistic failure around the “proposal” for a supersonic passenger train called the Hyperloop (sorry about the scare quotes, but they really can't be avoided). It's a story of hype overwhelming the good work of some serious journalists.

The hype around the Hyperloop grows directly out of the carefully cultivated persona of Elon Musk. Here's a representative sample from the credulous Kevin Roose writing for New York Magazine:
For years, government has been a nuisance to Elon Musk. It's slowed him down. It's required him to spend his valuable time lobbying his Twitter followers for support in the New York legislature instead of building rockets. It's required him to explain his mind-bending technical innovations to grayhairs in Congress as if he were speaking to schoolchildren. Over and over, the public sector has convinced Musk that it is hopelessly lost when it comes to matters of innovation, and that anything truly revolutionary must spring from the ambitions of the private sector.

At the risk of a bit of Gawkeresque snark, Roose apparently has a rather unusually definition of “nuisance.”

Here is the far less credulous Jerry Hirsch writing for the Los Angeles Times:

Los Angeles entrepreneur Elon Musk has built a multibillion-dollar fortune running companies that make electric cars, sell solar panels and launch rockets into space.

And he's built those companies with the help of billions in government subsidies.

Tesla Motors Inc., SolarCity Corp. and Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX, together have benefited from an estimated $4.9 billion in government support, according to data compiled by The Times. The figure underscores a common theme running through his emerging empire: a public-private financing model underpinning long-shot start-ups.

"He definitely goes where there is government money," said Dan Dolev, an analyst at Jefferies Equity Research. "That's a great strategy, but the government will cut you off one day."

The figure compiled by The Times comprises a variety of government incentives, including grants, tax breaks, factory construction, discounted loans and environmental credits that Tesla can sell. It also includes tax credits and rebates to buyers of solar panels and electric cars. [It does not, however, include the more than $5 billion in government contracts that keep SpaceX in business -- MP]

A looming question is whether the companies are moving toward self-sufficiency — as Dolev believes — and whether they can slash development costs before the public largesse ends.

Tesla and SolarCity continue to report net losses after a decade in business, but the stocks of both companies have soared on their potential; Musk's stake in the firms alone is worth about $10 billion. (SpaceX, a private company, does not publicly report financial performance.)

Musk and his companies' investors enjoy most of the financial upside of the government support, while taxpayers shoulder the cost.

The payoff for the public would come in the form of major pollution reductions, but only if solar panels and electric cars break through as viable mass-market products. For now, both remain niche products for mostly well-heeled customers.
...
Subsidies are handed out in all kinds of industries, with U.S. corporations collecting tens of billions of dollars each year, according to Good Jobs First, a nonprofit that tracks government subsidies. And the incentives for solar panels and electric cars are available to all companies that sell them.

Musk and his investors have also put large sums of private capital into the companies.

But public subsidies for Musk's companies stand out both for the amount, relative to the size of the companies, and for their dependence on them.

...

California legislators recently passed a law, which has not yet taken effect, calling for income limits on electric car buyers seeking the state's $2,500 subsidy. Tesla owners have an average household income of about $320,000, according to Strategic Visions, an auto industry research firm.

Competition could also eat into Tesla's public support. If major automakers build more zero-emission cars, they won't have to buy as many government-awarded environmental credits from Tesla.

In the big picture, the government supports electric cars and solar panels in the hope of promoting widespread adoption and, ultimately, slashing carbon emissions. In the early days at Tesla — when the company first produced an expensive electric sports car, which it no longer sells — Musk promised more rapid development of electric cars for the masses.

In a 2008 blog post, Musk laid out a plan: After the sports car, Tesla would produce a sedan costing "half the $89k price point of the Tesla Roadster and the third model will be even more affordable."

In fact, the second model now typically sells for $100,000, and the much-delayed third model, the Model X sport utility, is expected to sell for a similar price. Timing on a less expensive model — maybe $35,000 or $40,000, after subsidies — remains uncertain.


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Wednesday, April 22, 2020

The politics of covid-19 start to bite

This is Joseph

This viral facebook post is excellent:
It's about making sure people can't file unemployment. It isn't about saving lives, certainly. It's not about the peak of the curve. I think lots of people are going to ignore the governor and stay home regardless. This isn't a decision being driven by epidemiology. It's the rawest and most lethal of political decisions, and it will kill people.
Kemp is looking forward to the fiscal discussion in 2021 and 2022, when all of this really starts to hit. He got elected by out-yahooing the field. His base has been trained to view government spending as a crime, and he knows that he becomes politically vulnerable to an attack if he raises taxes. He is not capable of delivering a nuanced message around necessity, because his base doesn't know how to hear it.
and
Georgians did the Kansas thing a couple of years ago and instituted a hard constitutional limit on income taxes of 6 percent. It cannot go higher without amending the state constitution. What that means is that there's no easy mechanism for the state to accommodate an extraordinary expense, like this, without somehow telling Republican reactionaries that they must raise taxes. 
I really do look forward to the day that the right-wing has ideas other than "cut taxes" and "taxes bad". It is not that anybody likes taxes. I don't like many things that are necessary: queues, licenses, car service visits, etc . . . But there is a real lack of any idea of how to respond to an emergency; imagine a war today with the fear that raising taxes might be needed to win.

That said, it is a pity there isn't a union of states that could raise revenue, float debt, and step in to mitigate the financial crisis.
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Why low estimates matter

This is Joseph

People wonder why I am so concerned about the preprints that are suggesting much higher levels of infection (and thus lower fatality rates) than expected. Consider this example:

and
The low estimate of 500 was used to justify a policy response to the covid-19 epidemic. The current number as of April 20th is 45,013 reported US deaths.

But we need to be careful about predictions that can change. This study suggests a lower infection fatality rate then previous studies show:
We can use our prevalence estimates to approximate the infection fatality rate from COVID-19 in Santa Clara County. As of April 10, 2020, 50 people have died of COVID-19 in the County, with an average increase of 6% daily in the number of deaths. If our estimates of 48,000-81,000 infections represent the cumulative total on April 1, and we project deaths to April 22 (a 3 week lag from time of infection to death), we estimate about 100 deaths in the county. A hundred deaths out of 48,000-81,000 infections corresponds to an infection fatality rate of 0.12-0.2%. If antibodies take longer than 3 days to appear, if the average duration from case identification to death is less than 3 weeks, or if the epidemic wave has peaked and growth in deaths is less than 6% daily, then the infection fatality rate would be lower. These straightforward estimations of infection fatality rate fail to account for age structure and changing treatment approaches to COVID-19. Nevertheless, our prevalence estimates can be used to update existing fatality rates given the large upwards revision of under-ascertainment.
 Now, we all do "back of the envelope" calculations. This is me doing some. But we need to be careful. In a press release, the senior author pointed out that this calculation made the IFR of covid-19 about that of the flu. Like these are actual headlines. But this would be a massive issue, if true, as the decisions we are making depend on a higher IFR. But there are concerns with this research and there is a second study that appears to be only via press release.

Now, let me be clear, I would be deliriously happy if these studies were correct. I would feel much better about loosening the lock-down and "taking it on the chin", as Boris Johnson said. These super low rates of fatality would shift the conversation about the economy, as well as suggesting people will go back to movie theaters because we'll quickly all be immune.

But these numbers don't seem compatible with New York, Italy, Spain, or the careful studies in Iceland. Corrections to the Reason story note the NY problem. This doesn't mean we don't have a lot of asymptomatic infections, we do.

But it is important that we not base policy on numbers that can be rapidly revised and quite different when they are eventually put into the record. The reason I started with the article above is that it is easy to dismiss the epidemic. I would like there not to be one too! But if you are going to argue, either way, in an official capacity then there should be some serious accountability if the estimates are way off, in a way that a statistician helping might easily fix.

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Tuesday, April 21, 2020

Tuesday Tweets -- Dr. Elon will see you now

I have to admit it took me a while to realize to what degree Elon Musk learned his lines phonetically. In my defense, it was more difficult t tell at first. Musk would say lots of smart, technically savvy things then throw in something stupid, but lots of intelligent people have sudden dips when they wander out of their areas of expertise. It wasn't until Musk started routinely started going off script that it became clear he had no real understanding of anything scientific or technical. The illusion of comprehension was only maintained while he was repeating what the genuinely sharp engineers at SpaceX and Tesla had told him to say.

When he has to rely on Google, it doesn't work quite as well.

The latest example started when Musk, under fire for keeping his Tesla plant open during the pandemic, insisted he could make all the ventilators our ICUs need. Normally these promises are quickly forgotten but people kept bringing this one up, particularly when...
So the promise to build was quietly changed to a promise to provide.

And then the definition of "ventilator" was broadened.


  Musk responded with the full force of his expertise.



At which point, Elon Musk abruptly left the conversation.
But the conversation did not leave him.
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Monday, April 20, 2020

More on CA infection rates

This is Joseph

A new study is out which also suggests that the infection rate is higher than expected:
Based on results of the first round of testing, the research team estimates that approximately 4.1% of the county's adult population has antibody to the virus. Adjusting this estimate for statistical margin of error implies about 2.8% to 5.6% of the county's adult population has antibody to the virus- which translates to approximately 221,000 to 442,000 adults in the county who have had the infection. That estimate is 28 to 55 times higher than the 7,994 confirmed cases of COVID-19 reported to the county by the time of the study in early April. The number of COVID-related deaths in the county has now surpassed 600.
Methods are not yet out, but there are several points of concern. One, such small percentages are vulnerable to a lot of errors in specificity (see Andrew Gelman and Thomas Lumley).  They don't say in the press release (I cannot even find the study yet) but another press release says:
In L.A. County, researchers on April 10-14 sampled the blood of a random population of 863 area residents at six testing sites.
So we are talking maybe 30 or positives.

Two, the New York numbers make no sense if these estimates are correct, unless the disease is either wildly misclassified (in NY or LA there must be important mis-attribution of case of death) or the infection rates in NY must be enormous. Here is Megan McArdle discussing it. 

The obvious way to solve this is to do a 1000 person sample in NYC. If it is even close to the huge infection rates needed for these numbers then it should be quickly obvious in any study of seroprevalence.

The final point, is if the IFR is massively higher in NYC that, alone, is worth studying. They have 9,101 confirmed deaths and 4,582 probable deaths as of April 20th. There are 8.3 million people in NYC. That suggests an IFR of 0.16% assuming a 100% infection rate. The Stanford study suggested an IFR of 0.12% to 0.2% based on their models.

Figuring this out is important and not helped by being led by press releases before full scientific evaluation.


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It’s not about the economy versus public health – – more on the framing of the COVID-19 debate

Lots of things are over before they start. John Houston argued that once you had the script and the cast, the movie was mostly finished before filming even began. Something similar happens with journalism. Once the decision has been made what to cover and how to frame it, you have largely decided the outcome of the debate.

The conservative movement was especially good at playing this part of the game. Think back at all of the discussions about the social safety net that were set up in terms of compassion versus fiscal responsibility. The approach was a profoundly dishonest but remarkably effective. For years, it allowed Randians like Paul Ryan to rebrand themselves as the reluctant grownups in the room.

We are seeing something similar but much more dangerous with the debate over the economic cost of social distancing. Establishment conservatives (those who acknowledge that the pandemic is real) are pushing hard to frame this as a choice between the toll the disease will take if allowed to go unchecked and the suffering that would company an economic collapse. It’s worth noting that this is not the way that most economists are likely to approach this question. There appears to be a consensus in both camps that the economic cost of inaction would probably be greater than that of reasonable containment steps. Furthermore, it's not clear how much power governments have to end social distancing.



James Pethokoukis writing for the National Interest.
The economic impact of the Swedish strategy is also unclear. The government certainly thinks it’s going to be pretty bad. According to the National Institute of Economic Research, an agency that reports to the Finance Ministry, its baseline scenario has Swedish real GDP growth declining by 3.4 percent this year, worse than its 2.9 percent forecast for the United States. It also sees a 6 percent contraction in the second quarter, comparable to the annualized US forecasts by Wall Street of a 25 percent to 30 percent contraction here from April through June. From the NIER: “Concern about infection and official advice on limiting social contact are putting a major damper on household demand, and delivery problems are disrupting production in parts of the business sector. … However, there is extreme uncertainty about future developments.” It doesn’t seem the light-touch approach provides immunity from severe economic hardship.

So where does the lives versus jobs framing come from? For a bit of political context, both Trump and the Republicans desperately need Q3 of this year to be as non-terrible as possible. 
Even a dead cat bounce, if the timing were lucky, could considerably improve the prospects of the GOP.

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