1. How Portland is using the worst legislation in history to loot.
So Oregon’s largest district has hatched a plan to have its employees work four days a week for the remainder of this school year, and it is banking on its unionized employees agreeing to the deal. Employees would lose 20% of their pay from the district but would have that more than backfilled by receiving 20% of the weekly state unemployment benefit to which they are entitled under the state Work Share program plus the full $600 weekly federal match.
Pointer from David Henderson. Note that some private sector firms, such as Shake Shack, chose to refrain from looting. But our public servants have no such qualms.
2. Boris Johnson addressing the British people (video, pointer from John Alcorn). Lots of power rhetoric. To my ear, he doesn’t trust the people to make good decisions. He only trusts them to sacrifice and obey rules.
3. You can look up the track record of models, for U.S. states and other countries. Pointer from JA.
it is important to observe that the 73% value is the prevalence of care homes with outbreaks and not the incidence. This means homes should expect to suffer multiple importations over time. These outbreaks will accumulate cases so the final attack rate within a home may be large due to a mix of explosive outbreaks and repeated importation.
Pointer from JA. The article is about the UK. I give them credit for at least focusing on the topic of nursing homes (care homes in Brit-speak). I believe that there are now thousands of research papers on the virus, but my guess is that about 10 or fewer of them focus on nursing homes, which is where such a large share of the deaths and large outbreaks have taken place.
5. Chris Pope discusses nursing homes in the U.S.
With schools closed, many long-term-care workers have children to look after and would earn more under the CARES Act by staying home than by going to work, where they may risk getting infected and infecting family members. As a result, many nursing homes are currently staffed at less than 50 percent—putting further strain on those workers who remain and causing safety standards to slip even further.
6. Bryan Caplan on the case for paid human experimentation. That would be voluntary. What we have instead is involuntary human experimentation, using lockdown protocols. And the results of these experiments is never clear.
once the lockdowns come to an end people will be able to return to work – not necessarily to their old jobs and not necessarily in the sectors they used to work in, but the reason they haven’t been working is not that their reservation wage were higher than their productivity so there is little reason why we shouldn’t see the share of temporarily unemployed come down very fast in the coming few months.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen, who writes “Not my view, but happy to pass along.” As I see it, Christensen is applying conventional macro theory. Aggregate demand is not really damaged, because permanent income is not down. It is a short-term aggregate supply shock, and soon all will be well. I think of it in PSST terms, and once patterns of trade have been disrupted it takes a long time to discover new patterns. I hope he is right and I am wrong.
Borderline blow-out numbers today in terms of deaths, new cases, and tests performed. There will be the usual catch up on Tuesday in terms of deaths, but all of the numbers are heading in the right direction. Not just in the US but globally. Deaths by date of death look strikingly the same in NYC, UK, and Sweden, down to very similar peaks on about April 7-8.
Looks increasingly likely that the stock market sussed out a major inflection point in late March in terms of slowing case growth and correctly anticipated that states would be opening up in a matter of weeks rather than months. Recall that around the time that stocks bottomed, Imperial College was estimating 18 months of lockdown.
I think numbers won’t go to zero and may even perk up due to increased movement, that easing up on lockdowns will probably be a one-way deal. Once they are eased, we won’t be going back. If things do take a turn for the worse, we’ll go to universal masking and “test and trace” and just deal with the consequences. “Test and trace” in scare quotes because it’ll be more health theater than actually useful, but we can point to the high number of tests performed per day to at least say that the situation is under control.
+1
#6 it’s about frigging time. Finally a libertarian economist with the cojones to provide a path forward (vs. the silliness of Alex and Megan).
applying conventional macro theory
—-
N, the number of agents will adjust at warp speed. This allows them to treat the world as infinitely divisible and use simple Newton grammar. This is essentially what Lucas wanted included, adjustments for congestion.
Turns out we have a simple rule to make the Lucas requirement stick, we do not like being third in line for a very good reasons, if we suffer the fate too often we move to another location. Look around in your day to days, everywhere, and you will notice, we get very antsy when third in line.
With respect to #7, i think a reasonable person’s reservation wage for jobs involving customer service may well have gone up (because virus), which implies that some people will not return to customer service jobs for the foreseeable future*.
*If you foresee a vaccine soon, your foresight is either better or worse than mine.
Some of the care homes in the US are doing just fine. In California, about 2% of the nursing home (care home) population has died of corona, the California Veterans Admin care homes have only 2 deaths for 2,100 residents. (That’s 0.1%) Thanks to an informed and expeditious leader, an old military doc. Bravo, Dr. Imbasciani.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-05-10/coronavirus-california-veterans-safe-homes
Re Boris Johnson:
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/jun/09/boarding-schools-bad-leaders-politicians-bullies-bumblers
Re vaccines and medicines etc:
What the scientists and politicians need to do is to create some sort of “Manhattan Project” to develop some quicker and cheaper way of verifying new medicines and vaccines. The double blind trial is about 60 years old and science and technology has moved on since then.
This is unlikely to provide a complete answer, but it does give a pointer to the sort of thing
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24632790-700-correlation-or-causation-mathematics-can-finally-give-us-an-answer/
“Paid voluntary human experimentation is vital because there is a massive supply of people willing to risk their lives for large cash payments, but relatively few heroes willing to risk their lives for free.”
Actually, I think there are a lot of “heroes”. Data backs this up for COVID, lots of volunteers even without large cash payments. I watched a program the other day where volunteers had signed up for a clinical trial for free. They interviewed the woman. Yes, she knew an untested vaccine could cause her harm, but think of what it would mean for society. The language she used wasn’t “I’m glad to be getting rich off this” but “I’m happy for the good I’m doing even if its a risk.”
I have no ethical qualms in this case, but I suspect large cash payouts isn’t the answer. It could actually devalue the cause in the eyes of most. And this sort of scolding isn’t a good path to getting what you want.
What should happen is that people who volunteer should get:
1) Some reasonable but not ridiculous payout (I’m going to say $100,000, but insert your own number).
2) Paid nice vacation during quarantine period and guaranteed free best of medical care.
3) Free Long Term Disability insurance if getting sick causes disability (generous but not ridiculous terms of what is “disabled”).
4) Free Term Life for the next ten years of at least $1M.
This works a lot better. If they do get sick and cause themselves harm, they or their heirs get a large cash payout. If they don’t get sick or don’t get that sick, they get a modest cash payout. Definitely enough for their trouble but not a gratuitous windfall.
I would restrict volunteers to the relatively young and healthy, no dependents, and moderate income (enough for the money to matter but not so poor to be desperate). Good credit scores.
I think you would have more than enough volunteers for human challenge trials under this method without accusations of exploitation and with the people doing it feeling like heroes rather than mercenaries.
1), 2), 3), and 4) is a very large payout. When people talk about possible payments for organ donations, it’s usually much less than that.
#1 Doesn’t seem that large to me if you are purposely infecting someone with the virus. Best case the person has to suspend their life for a month and get really sick (assuming the vaccine being tested doesn’t work).
#2 Shouldn’t be that much for a month. I don’t think anyone would purposely get infected so they can stay in a hotel sick for a month.
#3 If you are only giving this to healthy young people, this shouldn’t happen that often. And nobody wants to become disabled.
#4 Ten year term life on a healthy young person is a couple of grand for the entire ten years.
Rather than focusing on large payouts to everyone involved, we should focus on large payouts to those actually harmed by the virus and reasonable payouts for time and trouble for the rest.
Bryan focuses on the opposite, and the purpose of his post isn’t to actually effectively advocate for human challenge trials but to “sperg out” on why bastards like him would run a more effective world since they are emotionless zombies.
Take a few of his questions.
1. What is the true Infection Fatality Rate (IFR)?
4. How does the IFR really vary by age, gender, and prior health status?
9. How much does viral load affect infection severity?
So a reasonable Human Challenge Trial would focus on young healthy people who are unlikely to die from the disease. I wouldn’t give it to old sick people and I wouldn’t infect them with a maximum viral load just to see what happens.
Brian says that people do dangerous things like coal mining, lumberjack, etc. But being a logger, the most dangerous major job we have, had a 0.13% mortality rate in a given year. So getting infected with the virus is actually more dangerous then that unless you are young and healthy.
If logging had the mortality rate of the old or sick with COVID, then it would be illegal in its current form.
The benefit should also match the risk. Vaccine testing can be accomplished on the healthy at little risk. And the yield for success is a cure. Clearly a net win. Figuring out the IFR on the old and sick would mean purposely killing a lot of people to simply refine an estimate we already have.
Bryan seems to think that it’s OK to let people engage in high mortality activity of dubious positive value so long as its “voluntary” and that anyone who doesn’t agree with him in a monster. This is very counter productive. Getting what we actually want (a vaccine quick via human challenge trials) can be done while keeping risk low and staying within reasonable ethical guidelines. His tasteless noise actually complicates the issue in the wrong direction.