I have three new updates. Each includes several links.
1. Keeping up the FITs, No. 11
[Emily Oster] says that she would vaccinate her own children.
I do not want them to get COVID. I am worried about their immune-compromised grandparent. I would like to avoid quarantine and keep them in school. I’m confident in the vaccines and the FDA process.
I would arrive at a different decision. The benefit seems small, almost negligible in the grand scheme of things. Although it is likely that the long-term risks of the vaccine are small, we do not know this. I say leave the kids alone.
2. And No. 12
I discount nearly all claims about aggregate productivity trends. You would not pay attention to “trends” in a poll for a political contest if the differences over time are smaller in magnitude than the margin of error. But economists commit that sin all the time with productivity data.
3. And No. 13.
Tyler Cowen looks at the coverage of President Biden’s economic proposals.
given all the stuff about Biden’s agenda on the internet, there has been remarkably little policy debate about it, and remarkably little attempt to persuade the American public that this spending is a good idea.
…My colleague Arnold Kling put it well: “With the reconciliation bill, there is no attempt to convince the public that it is desirable to enact an enormous child tax credit or to mandate ending use of fossil fuels in a decade. Instead, what we read is that if you’re on the blue team you want the number to be 3.5, but a few Democrats are holding out for something lower.”
Self-recommending, as Tyler would say.
–“I discount nearly all claims about aggregate productivity trends. You would not pay attention to “trends” in a poll for a political contest if the differences over time are smaller in magnitude than the margin of error. But economists commit that sin all the time with productivity data.”–
I’m not sure we can even say that we measure productivity accurately within a +/- 0.5% margin of error.
To take an extreme example, how do you measure productivity when it comes to smartphone production?
Let’s say that in 2007, 1 worker could produce 500 iPhones a year and in 2021 1 worker can produce 400 iPhone 13 Pros in a year. Is labor productivity down 20%, or is it up 300% because iPhone 13 Pros are (subjectively) 5x better than the original iPhone?
It seems that when we try to measure prices in real life, we give massive weight to technological improvements, but that can lead to misleading results. Seems like our current process for measuring productivity would conclude that productivity iPhone production is up 300%.
However, if you need to produce 2,000 phones in 2007 and 2,000 phones in 2021, the number of workers you need increases from 4 to 5, which seems to be a very jarring contrast with the 300% productivity number.
In reply to somebody named Justin in the Sep. 28 post “The era of unreal assets”, I suggested don’t compare prices from the beginning of a 10 year period to the end of that period. Likewise I wouldn’t compare 2007 prices to 2021 prices to measure inflation so I wouldn’t do that to measure productivity either. I also suggested don’t have a production category such as “iPhone” for long time span. I think 14 years is a long time span. I also asked if you have mean rent inflation data.
I don’t have a lot of data available, but suffice to say it is strange that private sector rent reports are talking about double digit rent increases whereas the Federal Government is showing sub 3% increases. One or the other is indicative of what most people are facing when it comes to the rent situation. And to me, it seems suspect that when the price of everything (especially housing) is soaring, making it difficult for families to buy homes, that there’s little upward pressure on rents whatsoever.
Out of curiosity, why wouldn’t you compare prices over a long stretch of time?
Isn’t the whole purpose of measuring inflation, from the perspective of the man on the street, is so that he knows how much his income needs to increase in order to maintain his lifestyle?
An inflation gauge should be able to give a good estimate of how the cost of living has changed for people in comparable situations a decade apart. In 2011, a family wanted a large reliable family sedan, so they bought a 2011 Honda Accord EX-L. One of the two parents bought the latest iPhone4S with the base storage. They just bought a 20 year old 2,400 sq foot home in a Missouri suburb. The eldest daughter is a first year student at a state university. They buy such and such groceries, and pay utilities. Each family member buys a few sets of clothes each year. Etc, etc.
With enough data, you should be able to tell how much additional income a family like theirs, but 10 years younger, would need to have the same spending patterns now. They buy a 2021 Honda Accord EX-L. One of the parents buys an iPhone13 with base storage. Eldest daughter is at a typical state school. Just purchased a 20 year old house with 2,400 square feet in the same suburb.
Obviously some categories can change, and some purchases will be replaced by others. The family in 2001 will only be buying a regular flip phone, but perhaps also an MP3 player or a Sony Discman. There was a 2001 Honda Accord EX-L, though, a 20 year old homes with comparable square footage. Generally speaking though, you can get a rough sense for how money much these very similar families would need in 2001, 2011 and 2021.
In any case, with our above example, it does no good to tell the family that, well, you can only buy a gently used Civic, because government statisticians think that’s as good as the new Accord of 2011, or that the ‘true’ price of an iPhone has fallen to $70 because phones are so much better, and look, the family can get a 5-year old used iPhone6S for $70 on eBay.
We live in the age of big data. We should be able to construct price indexes for different types of families living in different MSAs, with appropriate substitutions made when product lines change.
In like manner with prices, it seems suspect to say that a productivity measure doesn’t work over the long term. It suggests that we don’t really have an accurate measure of productivity if we can’t take the annual measures and make sense of the cumulative change over a decade. I think there’s also a question as to whether it truly counts as American productivity if China builds a product to $300 and some American company sells it here for $1,100.
Scratch the last sentence, I’ve rethought that an no longer have that concern.
In the Sep. 28 post “The era of unreal assets” the reply to you in the comment section offers a solution to the long time span measurement problem.
Re: FITS 13. Taibbi quotes Brookings that 36.8% Republicans don’t believe in asymptomatic spread, while only 22.5% of Democrats don’t, and patronizingly calls this “atrocious”.
Well, first of all, that’s not such a big partisan split – the smallest of the ones studied actually – and secondly, the atrociousness is that both groups (and elite public messaging) is likely wrong.
Respiratory viruses in general are indeed known to have orders of magnitude higher liklihood of transmission resulting from the ballistic sneezes and coughs associated with symptoms. Hence “cover your mouth when you X” and why masks are more likely to protect other people from a wearer than a wearer from virus-laden aerosol particles in the air.
There is some semantic confusion that probably leaks into the polls between ‘asymptomatics’ and *pre*-symptomatics. If the question is whether someone who isn’t currently reporting symptoms but infected with covid can transmit it, the answer seems to be yes, but that only raises the question of whether anyone reports or notices the mild symptoms and occassional sneeze or cough associated with rapidly increasing viral load at the beginning of the disease cycle. If the question is can someone who *never* has any symptoms spread the infection, the answer is most likely no, and so both Republicans and Democrats (and elite messaging) are way off.
This has also been studied in particular for CV19 in several corroborating ways. E.g., “Analysis of Asymptomatic and Presymptomatic Transmission, Germany 2020”. But there are also many other “close contact transmission” studies about outbreak – actually the lack thereof – of contexts in which asymptomatic individuals were surprised to learn they were positive, and then looking for the missing outbreaks – especially in schools for young people – which turn out mostly not to exist.
So, when a kid at a school without masks or social distancing turns out to test positive, they try to look back at all his close contacts one or two degrees removed, doing serological tests for whether any of those kids also had asymptomatic cases. And most of the time, none of them do, – and *not even the old teachers* catch it from those kids, which is the major empirical argument for returning school-contexts back to normal.
All of this just raises the same old question and social crisis of modern epistemology due to a shifting emphasis from “How do you know?” with “Who do you trust?” which, in turn, just means, “Who do you side with? Who is on your team, helping fight the fight against the other team.”
There is no evidence that masks protect anyone, all indications are that they don’t work.
No, it doesn’t *just* mean that.
It could be, that you have rather good *reason* to trust one side over the other, based on assessment of the two sides’ (recent) performances.
On vaccinating my kids: It occurs to me that I’m more scared of the consequences of the restrictions that would be placed on my kids if they tested positive, then on the effects of the virus on their health. I looked up the data, 5x more kids in my state died from car accidents in 2020 than from covid during the whole pandemic (20 vs 110). So my kids are 5-10x more likely to get killed in a car crash than from Covid. However, I am super worried about them missing school for 2 weeks, and me needing to take 2 weeks off work to take care of them.
I will get my kids vaccinated mostly because I want them to visit my father who is immune compromised, and I think there is almost no risk from the vaccines, so I want them to help the community by upping the level of antibodies present, especially in their school.
Quarantine procedures are the back door method of control through which public health officials force NPIs on schools.
“Do what we say and we will give you some leeway on quarantine, don’t and we will make it impossible for your to stay open.”
The CDC was worried that people using at-home tests would hide their results, but its the CDCs own quarantine restrictions that lead people to not want to share their results.
“So my kids are 5-10x more likely to get killed in a car crash than from Covid.”
The risk of a child’s is far less than that if healthy. As of a few months ago, only one person under 18 died from Covid in British Columbia, population 5 million. She was 4 years old and had been in a children’s hospital for several weeks where she unfortunately got Covid.
“I would like to avoid quarantine and keep them in school.”
Of course, there is nothing about vaccines that automatically ends quarantine policies. As anyone on a 100% vaccinated college campus or K-12 school can tell you.
If vaccination leads to and end of COVID restrictions, people should state the exact percentage and exactly what restrictions will end and never come back. But nobody does.
Instead, I think vaccine mandates are about purging non-conformists and the “unclean”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAbjoyCud4Y
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Anyone can remember from the campaign that Obama spent most of his life attending a radical black power church that spewed anti-white racism constantly. I don’t know what the surprise is here.
Anyway, Glenn wants a return to the centre-right tough talk of the Cosby era, but that era is dead. It always had a time limit.
In a press conference today Biden says we need 97-98% vaxxed to get back to normal.
Regarding Oster, I feel like I’ve entered a dream reality where everybody is innumerate. I’ve long known that most people are, but this pandemic has exposed how innumerate the so-called “elites” also are. There is no reason whatsoever to “vaccinate” children and most of the populace for Covid. The fact we are even discussing it just shows how stupid those in charge are, as are all the sheep following them.
My only solace is the massive lawsuits that are sure to come from all this: I see no way Cuomo and other govt officials don’t end up paupers and in jail after all this is done.