Hong Hate Horoscope: Week of December 27, 2021
A final newsletter of the year! Hope that everyone is safe/enjoying the holidays and see you next year!
The Lead
I always love this column from Noah, because it provides some actual optimism going forward, which we really don’t see enough of. Lots of great stuff here.
Good journalism/Cool shit
Why Are We Still Isolating Vaccinated People for 10 Days?
Our policies continue to make no goddamn sense.
A lot of this is common knowledge by now among the experts who design our policies. And yet, American guidelines have not substantially shifted since two summers ago—when, in July of 2020, the CDC said most people should no longer be using tests to determine when to leave isolation. Instead, they could exit 10 days after the start of symptoms or the first positive test result, provided that they no longer felt sick. (People who are seriously ill or immunocompromised might shed the virus for much longer, though, and could require isolation of 20 days or more.) That change happened 17 months ago, at a time when vaccines weren’t authorized, tests were absurdly scarce or slow, and the best option was to estimate how long folks might shed, and tell them to hide away for about that length of time….
We haven’t yet found a middle ground between catastrophizing post-vaccination infections and trivializing them. “We have to make it clear to people that getting COVID unvaccinated is really bad,” Ashish Jha, the dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, told me. “But in a vaccinated population? We can think about it very, very differently.” Perhaps acknowledging how vaccines transform our experience of COVID, and using that info to guide decision making, is a first step toward carving out that in-between space. [The Atlantic]
Neolib shill time! I really liked this from Matt (ignore the clickbait headline):
But if you think about a more expansive version of progressive ambitions like the original $3.5 trillion proposal or Bernie Sanders’ $6 trillion one, then I think it starts to emerge. Progressives believe that Medicare beneficiaries are currently underinsured and should be receiving dental, hearing, and vision coverage so that they can consume more health care services. And of course, they also believe that non-recipients of Medicare are even more underinsured and should receive additional coverage of their own so that that can consume more health care services, too. They believe college is too expensive, and people should be consuming more higher education services. And they also want us to consume more preschool and child care services. Then there’s the home care idea for the elderly and disabled that we have too many people receiving care in institutionalized settings and more should be getting care at home in a more customer-friendly but less labor-efficient manner.
Well, for that to happen, you’d need a lot more people working in the health care and education sectors, and the question is … who?
And his solution:
But the other way to go is just to reflect that we should probably have more emphasis on finding ways to expand the labor supply. Creating easier paths for foreign-trained doctors, dentists, and nurses to move to the United States and start practicing makes it much easier to provide expanded health care services. Instead of putting tariffs on imported solar panels because we want clean energy to “create jobs,” we could just let foreign manufacturers make the solar panels so we can get more clean energy without a massive reallocation of labor. And instead of celebrating the job-creating virtues of infrastructure spending, we could look to make our infrastructure work more cost-effective by improving productivity.
At the end of the day, the labor is a cost, not a benefit. So if you can come up with more cost-effective ways to do things (what if we had robot nannies that would make it possible to run high-quality daycare centers with lower staffing levels?), that’s good. After all these years of job-creation this and job-creation that, it’s hard to get your mind around making policy in a world of labor scarcity. But it’s actually kind of nice and everything makes more sense once you have a mindset of trying to reduce costs. And there’s no time like the present to get started.
Also great.
You can see the problem. Science communicators are using the same term - “no evidence” - to mean:
This thing is super plausible, and honestly very likely true, but we haven’t checked yet, so we can’t be sure.
We have hard-and-fast evidence that this is false, stop repeating this easily debunked lie.
This is utterly corrosive to anybody trusting science journalism. Imagine you are John Q. Public. You read “no evidence of human-to-human transmission of coronavirus”, and then a month later it turns out such transmission is common. You read “no evidence linking COVID to indoor dining”, and a month later your governor has to shut down indoor dining because of all the COVID it causes. You read “no hard evidence new COVID strain is more transmissible”, and a month later everything is in panic mode because it was more transmissible after all. And then you read “no evidence that 45,000 people died of vaccine-related complications”. Doesn’t sound very reassuring, does it?
The COVID Externalities Have Changed
Very much sick of talking about this, but this is good (ty Emily Oster, although I’m not sure these are externalities as much as direct consequences).
This year, family or other gatherings have fewer possible negative externalities—because vaccines are broadly available. Let’s first assume a gathering composed exclusively of fully vaccinated people. Your risk of hospitalization is down a huge amount relative to last year. Your risk of contracting and passing along the coronavirus is down, too, though not as much, particularly because Omicron seems quite good at breaking through vaccine defenses against infection. In the event of a breakthrough, however, the chances are lower that the next person in the chain will end up with severe symptoms…
Ultimately, the externality argument leads to an option that many people resist. The action with the most significant negative externality is not really an action at all, but an inaction: the decision not to accept a free, highly effective vaccine. By extension, the policy that most directly speaks to this externality is a vaccine mandate for adults. [The Atlantic]
The Great Shoplifting Freak-Out
This was absolutely fantastic. Some choice quotes (how do I tag my mom?):
Whether any of these offenses—simple shoplifting, organized theft, or violent smash-and-grabs—are actually happening more frequently overall is, at best, ambiguous. If we look closely at crime statistics in San Francisco, which news stories paint as the epicenter of this crime wave and whose crime stats are often used to illustrate these stories, the idea doesn’t seem immediately ridiculous. Robberies, which is where smash-and-grabs generally fall, are slightly down citywide from 2020, according to the San Francisco Police Department, but larceny theft, which is where shoplifting would fall, is indeed up more than 19 percent. In the city’s central district, where expensive fashion boutiques and other kinds of retail outlets are clustered together, larceny theft was up 88 percent from 2020 as of early December, when CNN used the number to demonstrate the dire nature of San Francisco’s crime problem.
You’ve gotta admit, that’s a worrying number. Except, as you might remember, 2020 was kind of a weird year—people stayed home and many stores were closed for months at a time, which helped make the year’s crime statistics, to put it mildly, unique. In San Francisco, the murder rate was (and still is) up, but recorded larceny thefts were way, way down compared with 2019. Robberies were also down by almost a quarter. This year, the 88 percent increase in the central district’s larceny reports is still not enough to bring the area’s theft rate back up to pre-pandemic levels, which themselves had been dropping for decades.
And the real retail issue that we should be concerned with: violence and shootings (emphasis mine):
This year, when the NRF asked the retailers in its survey which problems had become more of a priority for them in the past five years, organized retail crime wasn’t the most popular answer. It was in-store violence, specifically shootings. Retail stores are the site of a tremendous amount of violence in American life, and have been for a long time. When I worked at Best Buy in the late 2000s, there was plenty of shoplifting, both recreational and professional, but the incidents I remember most vividly had nothing to do with theft. They involved people putting their hands on me or my co-workers, or, in one case, trying to run over one of us in the parking lot. The situation has deteriorated since then. At their most extreme, malls, grocery stores, and big-box stores have been the scene of scores of mass shootings in the past two decades, including atrocities such as the 2019 Walmart shooting in El Paso, Texas, that left 23 people dead…
If we’re concerned with the types of crime that destroy lives and businesses, endanger retail workers on the job, and discourage people from going out to enjoy themselves, then shoplifting is the wrong crime to focus on. The problem is violence, which frequently has nothing to do with shoplifting at all. But shoplifting is an easier conversation for the retail industry to have, and one that plenty of people—journalists included—are keen to get in on. It’s a thousand other zeitgeisty arguments in one: about the role of police and prison in society, about the efficacy of tough-on-crime politicians or “Defund the police” as a slogan, about how serious property crime is relative to other types of harm, about whether liberal local governments are actually inept, about why there’s so much open human misery on the streets of San Francisco. [The Atlantic]
Sports hot takes
The 10 Moments That Define Urban Meyer’s Disastrous Jaguars Tenure
The schadenfreude is so good here. Some choice quotes:
You know that expression about how if you keep running into assholes all day, you’re actually the asshole? The same principle applies here. If every team you play against in the NFL feels like Alabama, it doesn’t mean that there are 31 versions of Alabama. It means that Meyer was coaching the NFL equivalent of Vanderbilt. [The Ringer]
Health, politics, and academia
We’re Heading Toward a Very American Climate Tragedy
We now know that, last week, Manchin proposed a package of exactly that size that includes more than $500 billion in climate spending, according to The Washington Post. The White House was considering how to respond when, according to The Hill, a tiff broke out over whether Biden could put Manchin’s name in a press release, of all things. (I don’t get that part either.) But if, like me, you believe that Biden must pass climate policy during this particular moment in time—when we can detect climate change but still act on it before it becomes irreversible—then it’s almost self-evident that Democrats should have taken this deal, and should do their best to get it back on the table, if it’s not already. If you believe what Democrats say about climate change, then virtually any social policy, including the child tax credit, is worth sacrificing so that decarbonization can become law.
There is an instinct among some progressives that Biden should cut his losses here and jump to executive action. This is horrible advice. It might do something, but it would not be enough. Models from the Princeton ZERO Lab show that Biden’s goal of cutting U.S. carbon pollution in half by 2030 (compared with its all-time high) will be far easier if Congress passes climate legislation. [The Atlantic]
Joe Manchin's 'Scaled-Back' Framework May Be Better Than It Sounds
Please take this deal and try to get the Romney child credit bill. Side note: the linked Weissman piece is also very good. [Huff Post]
Hate reading
Dude really? Everything sucks, but you can’t just be this nihilist about it, why bother living? Actually, yeah, you are supposed to ignore a lot, because if you focus on the negatives, you’ll never want to do anything ever (some plz tell my mom this regarding local news). (h/t Stadler for da hate) [Vox}
Recipe of the Week
These shortbread cookies were easy, delicious, and also extremely pretty. Highly recommend.