In the context of a book review of Kevin Davies’ Editing Humanity, I write,
As I see it, the proper treatment of intellectual property should have three characteristics. First, it should encourage knowledge to be shared as soon as possible. Second, it should reward those who take risks and exert effort. Third, it should reward actual profitable uses of ideas, not just sketches of possibilities. These goals are in tension with one another.
I reviewed Kevin Vallier’s Trust in a Polarized Age.
Vallier is saying that we are constrained to living among people with divergent values, and in that setting the most feasible libertarian society is one which sometimes bends libertarian principles to the popular democratic will.
This struck me as an argument for what Tyler Cowen calls “state-capacity libertarianism.” In a pluralistic society, many people will have expectations for state interventions. It is better to have state intervention well-executed. Government failure will only lead people to cede more power to government in the hope of seeing improvement.
The question in assessing universal tax rebates is, what about the vast majority of families who are still working, and whose incomes have not declined or whose pension or Social Security benefits have not been affected by Covid-19? For this group, the pandemic has reduced the ability to spend more than the ability to earn.
In other words, we should not be applying conventional macroeconomics right now. Conventional macro sees as all working the same GDP factory, which is producing below capacity because of insufficient demand. Conventional macro says that it does not matter how the government directs spending, because any spending will inject more “aggregate demand.”
Even a conventional macroeconomist like Larry Summers is able to see that this model does not fit the current situation. I happen to think that conventional macroeconomics needs a much broader reassessment.
2. We continue to argue about asymptomatic spreading.
The secondary attack rate for symptomatic index cases was 18.0% (95% CI 14.2%-22.1%), and the rate of asymptomatic and presymptomatic index cases was 0.7% (95% CI 0%-4.9%), “although there were few studies in the latter group.” The asymptomatic/presymptomatic secondary attack rate is not statistically different from zero
Just run a test, for crying out loud.
3. Megan McArdle writes (WaPo),
Looking back over the past nine months, it’s as if the public health community deliberately decided to alienate large groups of Americans, usually in the name of saving someone else.
The World Health Organization told us travel bans don’t work, apparently because they harm tourist economies; then we were told masks don’t work, apparently because experts worried that hoarding them would leave health-care workers without personal protective equipment; the public health community fell suddenly silent about the dangers of large gatherings during the George Floyd protests; a presentation to a government advisory committee actually described thousands of potential additional deaths as “minimal” compared with pursuing racial and economic equity; Anthony S. Fauci admitted he’d been lowballing his estimates of the point at which we’ll reach herd immunity.
The Orwellian public health community notwithstanding, my nominee for villain of the crisis is the FDA, for two reasons.
First, the FDA placed a very high priority on accuracy in deciding whether to approve tests for the virus. For some purposes, such as estimating the prevalence of the virus, accuracy is a good thing. But for controlling the spread of the virus, an accurate test that takes a week to provide results is worthless. The FDA should have prioritized “faster and cheaper” over “reliable.”
Second, the FDA did not use human challenge trials (give one group the vaccine and one group the placebo, and then expose them to the virus). Instead it gave one group the vaccine and one group the placebo, and then waiting until enough people naturally were exposed to the virus to show efficacy. We could have been starting to take the vaccine in June, but instead we had to wait until now.
4. Mr. Biden got into the virus forecasting business a few days ago, saying that the U.S. will have 400,000 deaths by the time he is sworn in as President. According to this site, we had 329,000 as of December 29. To get to 400,000 by inauguration day, we would need to average about 3000 deaths per day. On a 7-day average basis, the highest that it has been is 2680 on December 22. It has been edging down over the past week. But if you are trying to forecast the closest round number, then 400,000 is right.
He rightly criticized the slow process of distributing the vaccine. If it were rationed by price rather than by government authorities, my guess is that there would not be such a large supply of vaccine sitting around waiting for someone to administer it.
5. Miles Kimball joins those of us criticizing peacetime bureaucrats.
Highly accurate tests whose results take many days to arrive are next to useless. But the US government was very slow to approve tests of lower accuracy that could have made a big difference because they gave results within minutes.
Pointer from Alex Tabarrok. He says that the problem is perfectionism. I think it’s blame-avoidance.
If you do something and harm results (e.g., somebody gets a wrong test result), then you can be blamed. If you do nothing (i.e., don’t allow fast but less-accurate tests), then the harm that results is God’s Will. It’s the trolley problem.
This covers high school, college, and graduate school. Continue reading
Merle Kling was a professor of political science at Washington University. Our personalities were such that our relationship was a bit more like professor-student than father-son. Continue reading
I review Alberto Mingardi’s Classical Liberalism and the Industrial Working Class, which looks at the thought of a nineteenth century reputed socialist.
Hodgskin saw government interference, not capitalist exploitation, as the force standing between workers and their fair share of income.
This essay ends with a call for courage. Ironically, it was scheduled to appear a few weeks ago on a different web site, when the editor informed me that a “higher-up” decided that they were afraid to run it. I then submitted it to the Law and Liberty Web site. To their credit, they accepted it.
1. Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest People in the World. Analysis of human culture that is broad, deep, and bold. In a functioning academic world, graduate students in many social science disciplines would be mining this book for dissertation topics. My review could not do it justice.
2. Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Cynical Theories. A must-read on the intellectual foundations of the Woke movement. My review suggests ways it might have been better executed.
3. Kevin Davies, Editing Humanity. Tells the stories of the scientists involved in the discovery and development of the gene editing technology known as CRISPR, two of whom were awarded a Nobel Prize in chemistry the week that the book came out. The book is history of science reported with maximum melodrama, which makes for an entertaining and informative read.
4. Robert P. Saldin and Steven M. Teles, Never Trump. A look at the way that conservative intellectuals agonized over Mr. Trump. My review shows where I agree with them and where I part company.
5. Peter Zeihan, Disunited Nations. Zeihan has strong opinions about the way that demographics and resources affect the way nations operate in the world. As my review says, I find his opinions very provocative, even though he does not subject them to rigorous testing the way Henrich does his ideas.
I review The WEIRDest People in the World, by Joseph Henrich.
The latest book by Joseph Henrich is the most ambitious analysis of social behavior that I have ever read. It attempts to cover essentially all human history and the entire spectrum of different societies, using the full range of disciplines of social science. To offer a review is difficult, and to attempt a summary is impossible.
I strongly recommend both the review and the book. The book made Tyler Cowen’s list of best non-fiction books of 2020.
Today social media has amped up the power of gossip. Crowds can now form opinions on more cases, and thus enforce more norms on more people. But this has also revived the ancient problem of gossip rushing to judgement.
Sounds familiar.
Robin proposes this:
I seriously propose that some respectable independent groups create non-government non-profit “Cancel Courts”. When a crowd starts to complain about a target, these courts can quickly announce some mix of a speedy investigation and trial on this complaint. They’d solicit evidence from both sides, study it, and then eventually announce their verdict.
I see this as a proposal for resolving issues of social media gossip using a prestige mechanism. But the people who are using this tool are doing so to make a dominance move. They see prestige as a tool of the white supremacist patriarchy.