Is Cheney being patriotic? Notes on a defenestration

Read the post from October eighth first. The points weren't original then (they weren't even new to the blog), but they are as or more valid now and they are particularly relevant to today's news.

Is Cheney being patriotic? I don't know. Like her father, she has never put principle before party and it's not obvious she is doing so now. There is a good case to be made that the best option for the GOP is to make the painful break with Trump as soon as possible. As both a loyal and savvy Republican, this could be the most partisan move open to her.

Is Cheney being patriotic? I don't care. The country needs a good, sane conservative party. Instead we have one consisting almost entirely of members who base their positions on increasingly absurd delusions and of "sane vampires" who go along with the believers either out of fear or ambition. Even if Cheney only cares about the GOP, she is still acting in the best interests of the country. 

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2020

More on the great unwinding -- the post-Trump GOP is probably inevitable but still unimaginable

Just to reiterate a few points we've been hammering for a few years now.

1. Trump has become more and more toxic to a growing majority of the country. If things continue going the way they're headed, he will be the ultimate example of von Hoffman's rat on the kitchen floor for the Republican Party.

2. But unlike with Nixon,  the base is personally loyal to Trump, not to the GOP.

3. It is difficult to describe what we're seeing as anything other than a cult of personality, complete with the Soviet style propaganda images, the assumption of mental and physical perfection and the messianic overtones.

4. Even if the base were to continue to support the party, the Republicans absolutely must broaden its appeal. After 1988, they have won the popular vote for the presidency exactly once and that was the special case of a wartime reelection.

5. But the base will not tolerate disloyalty to either Trump or his message. Keeping them happy while broadening support is impossible, but the alternative is to find a way to go from a minority to a majority party while trying to make up for the loss of around half of your supporters. 

Are there scenarios where this does happen relatively quickly? Sure, but there are no obvious paths that don't require some deus ex machina plot twist. Which leads to the final and most important point.

6. With a handful of possible exceptions like the extraordinarily sharp Josh Marshall, observers are almost all underestimating the chances of profound and unexpected changes to the way American politics works. I'm not saying what's going to fall or which direction it will tip, but things are going to be different.

From Marshall

But don’t take your eyes off this broader calculus – one separate from Trump, his state of mind, one that is above all rational. Yes, everyone should give their 110%. Everybody get out to vote. The stakes for a second Trump term are too high to take anything for granted. But for those gaming out their own moves and post-January realities, Trump’s defeat is starting to look very likely. Under normal circumstances that would lead congressional Republicans to cut Trump loose and pitch their reelection as a check on the power of a Democratic President. That would be a great card to play for a number of endangered Republican Senators at the moment. But it’s all but impossible since loyalty to Trump is now the centerpiece of Republican identity. And any move away from him would trigger a fatal backlash.

I am so goddamn sick of hearing things we've done in the past described as undoable.

Endless articles come out with headlines like "herd immunity is out of reach" even though we have contained even more infectious diseases through vaccination.

From the CDC:

Data are for the U.S.

Morbidity

• Reported number of new measles (rubeola) cases: 375 (2018)
• Reported number of new mumps cases: 2,515 (2018)
• Reported number of new German measles (rubella) cases: 4 (2018)

Source: Health, United States, 2019, table 10 pdf icon[PDF – 9.8 MB]

Vaccination

• Percent of children vaccinated by age 24 months against measles, mumps, rubella: 90.8% (2015)
• Percent of adolescents aged 13-17 years vaccinated against measles, mumps, rubella (2 doses or more): 91.9% (2018)

Source:Health, United States, 2019, table 31 pdf icon[PDF-9.8 MB] and table 32 pdf icon[PDF – 9.8 MB]

From WHO:

An R0 of 2.5 – the absolute maximum the WHO considers likely – would give COVID-19 an infection rate on par with the influenza pandemic of 1918 (2 to 3), at the high end of estimates for the 2014 Ebola outbreak (1.5 to 2.5) and at the low end of estimates for SARS (2 to 5).

Several common infectious diseases have much higher R0s, including measles (12 to 18), rubella (6 to 7) and mumps (4 to 7). Lower R0s were calculated for two recent outbreaks that caused pandemic fears – H1N1 influenza in 2009 (1.46 to 1.48) and MERS (0.3 to 0.8).

 

...

“Containment of COVID-19 is feasible and must remain the top priority for all countries.”

Virus Consulting

 A nice cartoon accompaniment to our recent thread (see here, here, and here)

From XKCD

When it comes to pandemic defeatism, even New York Times Music wants to get in on the act

Picking up from our previous post.

"Epidemiologists say" suggests a consensus, but they base this on quotes from one guy. pic.twitter.com/Z8sY0WLD31

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) May 6, 2021

quick aside. You are currently the subject of dozens of RCTs to determine, among other things, the impact of celebrity endorsements on your purchasing behavior. Take a guess what we found.

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) May 6, 2021

Obviously, stars getting shots will play a very small role in addressing vaccine hesitancy but it's low cost and pretty much all upside, and this is an all hands on deck moment.

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) May 6, 2021

Perspective

This is Joseph

Mark has been on a roll with his covid-19 posts of the last two days. One thing that I really want to reinforce is that we have been successful with previous infectious diseases and vaccination. Consider smallpox -- a disease that changed the destiny of nations. It was highly infectious, around for thousands of years, and even in societies that were experience it killed a third of adults. It was eradicated with a combination of vaccines and public health measures. 

It is impossible to overstate how bad smallpox was when released in a disease naïve population:

After first contacts with Europeans and Africans, some believe that the death of 90–95% of the native population of the New World was caused by Old World diseases. It is suspected that smallpox was the chief culprit and responsible for killing nearly all of the native inhabitants of the Americas.

Like even if this estimate is too high, the size of the death toll was a complete catastrophe for every population that first encountered it. Consider another random example:

In Japan, the epidemic of 735–737 is believed to have killed as much as one-third of the population

Smallpox outbreaks were huge sources of death and suffering, with high levels of suffering. A vaccination and test/trace campaign ended it as a major source of human mortality and morbidity to the point where it is considered eradicated. 

Smallpox is not a unique example. Measles has worse outcomes than covid-19 (one in four hospitalized!), at least in the aggregate and is highly contagious. In fact, both measles and smallpox seem to have a higher reproductive number (R0) than covid-19. This is a little tricky as R0 depends on conditions, and so there is not one single number nor do we really know precisely what the R0 of smallpox would be in modern living conditions. Same with polio, even more famously controlled with a mass vaccination campaign with a four order of magnitude reduction in number of cases. 

[Edit: Mark points out that smallpox is one of only two diseases eradicated. Polio and Measles are both still with us but very minor contributors to mortality at the population level. I am very much in favor of eradicating covid-19 -- and measles, and polio, and other dangerous viruses -- but there is a level of control that also mitigates a lot of the impact that can be achieved with vaccination and epidemiologic surveillance]

But it is clear that a vaccination campaign is likely to be highly successful. This vaccine science is so nondebatable that I can cite sources like wikipedia for just how effective these campaigns have been at improving public health. It is possible that a concerted campaign of public resistance could undermine the use of vaccines and reduce the benefits. But this is a choice. And it is quite clear that we have the technology to greatly mitigate and reduce the impact of covid-19 on everyday life. It isn't free, but the impacts of the pandemic on the economy are not negligible, either.

Now, it is possible that we might decide that this new social pattern is good for other diseases, like influenza. But, again, this would be a choice. But nobody worries about Polio, Smallpox, or Measles when going to a restaurant, a concert, or a haircut. With determination, there is no evidence that covid-19 cannot be added to this list with a vaccination and public health campaign. 

"Well, maybe one will come up"

For some reason over the past year and a half, this clip has come to mind frequently.

Perhaps cultivating learned helplessness is not the best strategy for fighting the pandemic

I'm pressed for time so I'm just going to crack open this topic. While right wing media is spreading anti-vax propaganda and engaging in various acts of journalistic sabotage, the mainstream press has been distorting coverage of the pandemic more subtly but perhaps doing just as much damage thanks to its greater reach and credibility. 

Whether it's overreporting a rare side effect or talking about a 92% return-for-second-shot rate as a crisis or failing to provide useful comparisons like measles for context or misrepresenting one side of the epidemiological debate as the consensus, outlets like the NYT have consistently framed positive news in a negative light and, more seriously, have shown a clear and dangerous bias against solutions. (I could write virtually the same post about climate change, but that's a topic for another day.)

Here's the latest example which Josh Marshall (perhaps our most clear-eyed commentator) calls "needlessly alarmist." 

NEW: The herd immunity threshold for the coronavirus will stay out of reach, because widely circulating variants and persistent hesitancy about vaccines. The virus is here to stay, but vaccinating the most vulnerable may be enough to restore normalcy.https://t.co/q5QOa7IKp8

— Apoorva Mandavilli (@apoorva_nyc) May 3, 2021

Note the use of the word "will." There are no qualifiers here. This is our fate because vaccine hesitancy is an unalterable natural constant. Assuming we use  the standard of containment rather than eradication (which has almost never happened), this level of certainty is absurd.

Consider this story from All Things Considered with the better but still inaccurate title, "Health Experts Disagree On Whether 'Herd Immunity' Can Be Achieved." The segment is an interview with Dr. Ali Mokdad of the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation and there's not much evidence of disagreement. 

MOKDAD: Compared to other viruses, it's somewhere between 75 to 85%. We in the United States are not going to get to herd immunity before this winter simply because right now the vaccine is only authorized for adults, not for children...

CHANG: Right.

MOKDAD: ...Fifteen or younger. So you have about 25% of your population not eligible for the vaccine.

CHANG: OK. But down the road, what is your view? Is herd immunity within reach?

MOKDAD: Yes, definitely. Down the road, we can get to herd immunity if we have a vaccine that we can provide to two years or older and if Americans are willing - who are eligible to take the vaccine are willing to go ahead and get the vaccine.

CHANG: You're talking about vaccine hesitancy at the moment. How significant do you think vaccine hesitancy is as an obstacle to ultimately achieving herd immunity?

MOKDAD: It's the only obstacle that we have right now between us and herd immunity simply because we have many Americans who are not willing to take the vaccine. Otherwise, we have vaccines that are safe and effective, and they will provide herd immunity. And we know children are going to get the vaccine. Twelve to 15 is coming very soon and, after that, 6 to 11.

To summarize, Dr. Mokdad says herd immunity can definitely be achieved which directly contradicts the title. 

The mainstream press have badly screwed up all of the truly important stories of the past decade, climate change, the attack on democracy, Covid 19. Perhaps we need a higher standard than "better than Fox."

Josh and the toasty warm take

Following up on a comment by Andrew Gelman, I was going to open this post with a discussion of hot takes, but going through the Twitter feed around this topic, and I saw that lots of mainstream media and political thinkers had the same take, greatly reducing its hotness.

If you'll remember, this started with the following tweet from Josh Barro:

Environmentalism is supposed to be pain and sacrifice. Because Musk offers an environmental vision that is fun, futuristic and coded with all sorts of “bro” aspects, he is deeply suspicious and must be stopped.

— Josh Barro (@jbarro) April 25, 2021

Before we go on, I think it's useful to break down the implicit and explicit points Barro is making. Here's my attempt:

a. Musk is fighting climate change

b. But many environmentalists dislike him

c. Because they disapprove of his style and image

The first two points establish a mystery to be solved; the third offers an explanation. While Barro may have intended this conclusion to be provocative, he treats the premise as axiomatic, as do many others.

Well also he’s very rich, which a small but vocal group thinks is per se bad.

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) April 25, 2021

Exactly https://t.co/33kVqRwvlC

— Alec Stapp (@AlecStapp) April 25, 2021

I don't claim to speak for the left, but:
-union busting
-poor workplace conditions/safety
-SWATing whistleblowers
-repeated environmental violations (really)
-market manipulation
-unsafe automated driving development/deployment, even by the standards of an unregulated industry https://t.co/gavkrYrkKV

— E.W. Niedermeyer (@Tweetermeyer) May 1, 2021

And a whole damned essay by James Pethokoukis.

More deeply, Musk is offering an attractive techno-optimist vision of the future. It's one in stark contrast with that offered by anti-capitalists muttering about the need to abandon "fairy tales of eternal economic growth," as teen climate activist Greta Thunberg has put it. Unlike the dour, scarcity-driven philosophy of Thunbergism, Muskism posits that tech-powered capitalism can solve the problems it causes while creating a future of abundance where you can watch immersive video of SpaceX astronauts landing on Mars while traveling in your self-driving Tesla. As journalist Josh Barro neatly summed it up recently, "Environmentalism is supposed to be pain and sacrifice. Because Musk offers an environmental vision that is fun, futuristic and coded with all sorts of 'bro' aspects, he is deeply suspicious and must be stopped."

You'll notice that that these examples include liberals, conservatives and centrists. This is one of the many cases where trying to approach this with an ideological filter not on fails to help, but actually obscures what's going on. The distinction we need to focus on isn't left vs. right but close vs. far.

I don't know of another case where the standard narrative and the story told by reporters on the front lines diverge this radically, and the gap has only grown larger. In one version Musk is a visionary and spectacularly gifted engineer who, though flawed, is motivated only out of a passion for saving the planet. He does amazing things. In the other, he is a con man and a bully who, when goes off script, inevitably reveals a weak grasp of science and technology. Outside of the ability to get money from investors and taxpayers, his accomplishments range from highly exaggerated to the frauulent.

While this view may not be universal among journalists covering the man, it is the consensus opinion. 

The explanations of Barro et al. are not all that reasonable, but they are probably as good as you can get when you start with the assumption that the standard narrative is right.

Sometimes it's useful to stop and think about what really fast progress looks like

That last post got me thinking. Over the past dozen or so years, autonomous vehicles have made impressive advances, but it's important to remember that many researchers had convinced most of the press that level 5 was just around the corner and that the progress we've seen, while substantial, has not been exceptionally fast by historical standards.

Here's a look at what happened in the first decade of powered flight. The pace of breakthroughs was stunning. Just as important, the adjustments people had to make in the way they viewed the world was tremendous. 

This was not an isolated case. From the same late 19th/early 20th century period, I could come up with a half dozen similar stories, with perhaps as many coming out of the postwar era. As cool and as significant as many of the developments of the 21st century, from a historical perspective we have a ways to go.

From late 1903:

According to the Smithsonian Institution and Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI), the Wrights made the first sustained, controlled, powered heavier-than-air manned flight at Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina, four miles (8 km) south of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina on 17 December 1903.

The first flight by Orville Wright, of 120 feet (37 m) in 12 seconds, was recorded in a famous photograph. In the fourth flight of the same day, Wilbur Wright flew 852 feet (260 m) in 59 seconds. The flights were witnessed by three coastal lifesaving crewmen, a local businessman, and a boy from the village, making these the first public flights and the first well-documented ones.

To 1913:

A good indication of the progress during the era is provide by the annual Gordon Bennett races. The first competition, held in 1909 during the Grande Semaine d'Aviation at Reims, was over a distance of 20 km (12  mi) and was won by Glenn Curtiss at a speed of 75.27 km/h (46.77 mph). By 1913, the last pre-war contest, the race was over a distance of 200 km (120 mi) and the winner's speed was 200.8 km/h (124.8 mph). At the end of 1909 the record for distance flown was 234.30 km (145.59 mi) and for altitude 453 m (1,486 ft): by the end of 1913 the record for distance was 1,021.19 km (634.54 mi) and the altitude record was 6,120 m (20,079 ft)

The fact that I could probably pass off a ten year old post on AVs as new suggests that the technology may not be advancing quite as fast as initially promised

In all seriousness, when you look back at periods of ubiquitous revolutionary advances (late 19th/early 20th centuries, the postwar era), you see not only the technology but the conversation around the technology rapidly evolving, changing radically from year to year. I'm not seeing a lot of rhetorical evolution at the moment, certainly not a decade's worth.

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 1, 2011

Tyler Cowen argues against more regulation with an example that calls for more regulation

Tyler Cowen has a piece in the New York Times on how regulation inhibits innovation in transportation using the example of driverless cars. I'm not sure he's made his general case (that's the subject for an upcoming post), but his specific case is particularly problematic.

In case you haven't been following this story, Google has been getting a lot of press for its experiments with self-driving cars, especially after statements like this from Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun:

"Think about the car as a medium of mass transit: So, what if our highway-train of the future meant you go on the highway, and there's a train of very close-driving cars with very low wind drag, fantastic capacity, is twice as efficient as possible as today, and so there is no congestion anymore?"

Cowen is clearly thinking along the same lines:

Furthermore, computer-driven cars could allow for tighter packing of vehicles on the road, which would speed traffic times and allow a given road or city to handle more cars. Trips to transport goods might dispense with drivers altogether, and rental cars could routinely pick up customers. And if you worry about the environmental consequences of packing our roads with cars, since we can’t do without them entirely, we still can make those we use as efficient — and as green — as possible.

Putting aside the question of the magnitude of these savings in time, road capacity and fuel effeiciency (which, given the level of technology we're talking about here, aren't that great), where exactly are these savings coming from?

Some can certainly be attributed to more optimal decision-making and near instantaneous reaction time, but that's not where the real pay-off is. To get the big savings, you need communication and cooperation. Your ideal driving strategy needs to take into account the destination, capabilities and strategies of all the vehicles around you. Every car on the road has got be talking with every other car on the road, all using the same language and rules of the road, to get anything near optimal results.

Throw just one vehicle that's not communicating (either because it has a human driver or because its communication system is down or is incompatible) into the mix and suddenly every other vehicle nearby will have to allow for unexpected acceleration and lane changes. Will driverless cars be able to deal with the challenge? Sure, but they will not be able to able to do it while achieving the results Thrun describes.

A large number of driverless cars might improve speed and congestion slightly, but getting to the packed, efficient roads that Cowen mentions would mean draconian regulations requiring highly specific attributes for all vehicles driving on a major freeway. The manufacture and modification of vehicles would have to be tightly controlled. Motorcycles would almost certainly have to be banned from major roads. Severe limits would have to be put on when a car or truck could be driven manually.

This would seem to be another case of a libertarian endorsing a technology with less than libertarian implications.

Bitcoin and cryptocurrency as modern gold

This is Joseph

There has been a lot of discussion about bitcoin as a currency. There is a general concern that the value can jump around. From Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times:

From Dec. 18, 2017, to Feb. 10, 2018, bitcoin’s value fell by 55%. This year alone there have been three downdrafts of 20% or more over the course of a week or two, and an additional fall of 16% over 12 days in March. (All metrics are from Coinbase.)

This is obviously fatal to the primary idea of bitcoin as currency. It also finishes bitcoin as being a useful basis for financial instruments. Imagine buying a house for 100 bitcoin and then having it have a value of 50 bitcoin (because the coins are now worth more). Bought for 20 bitcoins down, the value of the mortgage is now 80 bitcoins and the house is underwater. How do you make long term investments when you cannot stably value real or financial assets? Here, I am using fait as a proxy for the purchasing power of bitcoin. 

But if you wanted a medium of exchange that has all of the pros and cons of bitcoin, then gold is actually a pretty good choice. Hiltzik again:

The problem is that as bad as bitcoin is as an investment, it’s even worse as a currency. Blogger Kevin Drum lists five features that a currency should have: It should be hard to counterfeit, stable in value, easy to carry, widely accepted and 100% liquid. Bitcoin fails three of these tests — it’s not stable in value, widely accepted or 100% liquid.

Now you could imagine gold, minted as coins, being able to do everything that bitcoin could do (including recordless transactions) except we know that it can be both liquid and widely accepted. It can be a pain if it is not coined to assess the value, but the trading features of bitcoin are complicated as well. For example, it clearly has a limit on how frequently it can be traded that greatly limits the ability to be used as a routine payment method. Thomas Lumley looks at how low the actual rate of bitcoin transactions is compared to the number of direct electronic transactions in the New Zealand economy. The short answer is that, for just a small country, bitcoin is way below the scale needed to replace the current financial system. This is bitcoin for the world (about 300,000/day)  and just New Zealand for the electronic transfers (looks to be about 5.5 million/day), and Dr. Lumley is quite transparent that these are not directly comparable measures as the blockchain might be bundling several transactions. But bitcoin is closing on on 1% of the world's energy usage, and still seems awful low for the number of transactions for just New Zealand (small, if rich, country). 

Now gold can be stolen but you can create financial instruments out of it. Further, bitcoin is vulnerable to theft or loss of a password. Furthermore, it is just as vulnerable to government snooping and law enforcement, due to the long term nature of the blockchain record. 

My real question is "what problem does it solve"? Especially compared to alternatives like gold. And, to be clear, gold was uniformly worse than fiat currency as a basis for the economy. I just don't see what bitcoin will do incrementally on gold or how it solves any major currency problem.