Commenter Tom Davies pointed to a paper that in turn referred to a paper by Verity and others. Instead of looking at data for the number hospitalized relative to the number of tested cases, which is skewed by the fact that people without severe symptoms are less likely to be tested, this paper seems to assume that hospitalization rates are proportional to death rates. Accordingly, they estimate a much lower rate of hospitalization for those in the lower age brackets. 1.1% for age 20-29, 3.4% for 30-39, and 4.3% for 40-49.

I prefer their method to the one that seemed to show a 12 percent hospitalization rate for the 20-44 age group.

Popular discussion forums like Twitter and Medium are characterized by:

1. a shortage of reasoned argumentation
2. a surplus of vitriol
3. predominantly far-left participants

It would be nice to see a popular Internet discussion forum that breaks from that mold. In theory, Thinkspot might do that.

Jordan Peterson may not have the right skill set to direct Thinkspot, and he certainly has not had the bandwidth to devote to it. It probably has very little chance of succeeding. Maybe there is no centralized way of doing it at all–I still long for the heyday of the blogosphere. But I believe that it is worth a try.

the plight of Yuval Levin, and others. Continue reading →

I will leave a bundle of presents–essay backups–today. Continue reading →

A reader forwarded this story to me under the heading of TLP Watch.

“At some point, you have to address the underlying issues of racism and classism,” said Daryl Atkinson, a former staff attorney at the North Carolina Office of Indigent Defense Services and co-director of Forward Justice, a civil rights advocacy organization. “Otherwise we’re kind of putting a Band-Aid on cancer.”

Carroll, who has helped restructure public defense systems in 15 states, has heard reactions like Atkinson’s from many liberal reform advocates. But he says looking at the issue through the lens of big government overreach—or what he calls “the tyranny prism”—may provide results that the left ultimately cannot argue with, even though it means sacrificing a central tenet of their ideology.

The point of the story is that conservatives (actually, libertarians) have been more effective than progressives at promoting criminal justice reforms. Libertarians frame the issue using the liberty-coercion axis, while progressives frame it using the oppressor-oppressed axis.

Staying away from twitter, facebook, writing posts, and reading blogs.

1. I wrote off the Washington Nationals* in the bottom of the 7th inning of their first game. Down a run, they let the starting pitcher bat. That told me how little confidence they have in their bullpen. A very bad sign.

*not the team that I root for. I did grow up in the St. Louis area, where the fans understand and appreciate baseball.

2. How similar are the Nats to the 1965 Dodgers? Like those Dodgers, the Nationals appear to have three main starting pitchers and one top-flight reliever. Statistically, the Nationals have better hitters, but if they played in Dodger stadium (as well as the other parks that prevailed in 1965) with the pitcher’s mound at 1965 levels and the ball with 1965 aerodynamics, those differences might narrow considerably.

But the reason that the 1965 Dodgers won 97 games and went to the World Series (which they took in 7 games) is that they got most of their innings pitched from their four best pitchers. Apart from Koufax, Drysdale, Osteen, and Perranoski, the Dodgers needed other pitchers to account for only 442 of their 1476 total innings. That is 48 games’ worth.

If you assume the same number of total innings and that Scherzer, Strasburg, Corbin, and Doolittle each pitch the same number of innings as they did last year, the other pitchers on the Nats will have to account for 881 innings. That is 98 games’ worth. If you figure that your best pitchers give you a 2/3 chance of winning and the rest give you only a 1/3 chance, then the Nats will not even win 80 games. They would win 100 if their best pitchers could match the innings of the 1965 Dodgers.

I suspect that the Nationals’ problem is organizational. I don’t believe that the organization is very smart. Although Bryce Harper is hard to replace (his personality seems childish, but he is a darn good hitter), other organizations would have the depth of quality players to carry on.

3. If you want to speed up the game, bring back Bob Gibson. He would not let the catcher or the manager come to talk to him on the mound. If a batter took too much time getting ready, Gibson would hit him with a pitch. He got his business done. When Gibson was pitching, you could go to a game on a school night, and even if it took 45 minutes to get home afterward, you could be asleep by 11.

4. If you want to improve the game, I continue to say use a slightly larger baseball. This would have a higher drag coefficient, making it harder to hit out of the park. It would be harder for pitchers to grip, reducing the velocity of fastballs and the spin on breaking pitches.

Pitchers would find it harder to get strikeouts but easier to keep the ball in the park. They could throw more strikes to most hitters, knowing that it is harder to hit a home run. Pitch counts would come down, because the first hit-able pitch would be put in play more often. That might reduce the need to change pitchers so often.

Hitters would find it easier to make contact and harder to hit home runs. They could more easily hit to the opposite field, beating the shift.

I don’t know whether the net result would favor offense of defense (you can always tweak that by expanding or contracting the strike zone). It would definitely favor more balls in play. That would make the game at least seem to go much faster.

Readers,
I am working on the idea of a retrospective, a sort of “greatest hits” collection of my writings.

My current thought is to have a set of short pieces, about one to four pages each. Each essay would be built around one of my sayings, such as “information wants to be free, but people need to get paid” or “the null hypothesis” or “price discrimination explains everything.”

What I am asking from you is to remind me of sayings that you think are worth including, or favorite blog posts or essays of mine.

Leave your suggestions as comments.

Thanks for your help.

About the new Italian government leaders, Mingardi writes,

Salvini and Di Maio both champion a vulgar form of Keynesianism: a blind preference for government spending, regardless of the macroeconomic outlook.

This has dire consequences for the long-term health of the economy.

Italy’s cost of borrowing has roughly doubled since the government took power last spring. This is a serious matter in a country where the public debt is over €2.2 trillion or 132 percent of GDP. It also translates into a higher cost of credit for households and businesses.

In an email exchange with me, he writes,

perhaps for the first time in my life I see the danger coming from the right, not the left. Immigration (that is: an exaggerated perception of it and its negative externalities) is triggering parties that are making nationalism great again. Their narrative is centred around the need to restore national sovereignty: so that immigrants, but also products and foreign financiers, can be kept at a distance. They do defend the welfare state and define it, somehow, as a national welfare state: the nation is that unit (established upon an alleged common culture/language) in which you can redistribute money from Peter to Paul.

. . .At the end of the day, they are campaigning against the idea that politics is a limited activity: that it can offer just a certain amount of answers, and at a certain cost. They claim that once proper sovereignty will be restored there will be no limit to what government can achieve. In short, they are campaigning against budgetary constraints and those that they see as enforcers of such constraints: the EU, financial markets, et cetera.

He writes,

I am very much a blockchain skeptic. Basically, most of the benefits are illusory and the risks are considerable. It doesn’t replace the need for governance. It doesn’t decentralize nearly as much as it promises to. And, near as I can tell, none of its applications truly need its security properties.

This is a brief paragraph in the context of an Ask Me Anything. He promises a longer essay forthcoming.