Hong Hate Horoscope: Week of May 3, 2021
The Lead
How the US won the economic recovery
Really liked this—admitting that contrary to the belief of many, the US were extraordinarily generous for unemployment and did a great job of supporting many workers. Of course some do fall through the gaps, but let’s talk about our successes too.
The result? The poverty rate in the US fell in early 2020. The government did so much to assist its citizens that many people were left financially better off than before the pandemic.
As an American who supports large government intervention to help those in need, I’m used to envying other nations’ governments. I envy European universal health care systems, France’s crèches for child care, and Finland’s success at reducing homelessness.
When my editors asked me to write a story for our Pandemic Playbook series on the country that I thought “got Covid-19 right” economically, I immediately looked abroad. I spent a few weeks researching and writing about Japan, which has kept unemployment low and spent big to fight the economic downturn.
But as I was working on my Japan article, the US adopted Biden’s American Rescue Plan, a $1.9 trillion behemoth of a bill. With that step coming after the two Trump relief bills, the US just about matched Japan’s spending to fight the downturn. And as I looked into the details, it became impossible to deny that the US spent the money better.
To be sure, it’s not as simple as that. Would I rather have been in Japan for the outbreak or in the US? In public health terms, the answer was obvious: Japan has kept the virus under control vastly better. But in economic terms, the answer was also obvious: The US was more generous.
The comparison seemed even more favorable as I looked to Europe, which botched the virus on a public health level in a manner similar to the US, and offered less extraordinary support to its citizens. Most European countries have stronger safety nets to start with, but they largely didn’t use the pandemic as an occasion to strengthen them. The US did.
And on the stimulus checks, that some thought weren’t generous enough (don’t believe the falsities about Europe being more generous):
The most distinctive, and easiest to compare, part of America’s response was the stimulus checks. The US government has by this point sent out three rounds of “economic impact payments,” or stimulus checks. The March/April 2020 round was $1,200 per adult and $500 per child dependent; the December 2020 round was $600 per adult or child dependent; the March 2021 round was $1,400 per adult and child, including adult dependents with disabilities and college students.
For a family of four like Jasmine Holloway’s, those checks added up to $10,700 over the course of a year — a life-changing sum of money…
More strikingly, the checks were a distinctive policy internationally. The US, South Korea, and Japan were the only large countries to send checks to the vast majority of their citizens; Hong Kong and Singapore did something similar, but peer nations like the UK, France, and Germany did not.
And the US sent much bigger checks than Japan or South Korea did. If Jasmine Holloway lived in Japan, her family would have received about $3,800, or about one-third of what she actually received in America; in South Korea, she would have received 1 million Korean won or $1,151, far less. Even if you adjust for the fact that South Korea and Japan are poorer on a per-capita basis than the US, they sent out less. [Vox]
Good journalism/Cool shit
How Pfizer Makes Its Covid-19 Vaccine
Really cool interactive about the process of making the vaccine and all that goes into it. (Side note: damn this is good publicity for Pfizer.) (h/t Pat) [New York Times]
More Americans Are Leaving Cities, But Don’t Call It an Urban Exodus
This is really cool data journalism.
A year into the Covid-19 pandemic, after much speculation about emptied downtowns and the prospect of remote work, the clearest picture yet is emerging about how people moved. There is no urban exodus; perhaps it’s more of an urban shuffle. Despite talk of mass moves to Florida and Texas, data shows most people who did move stayed close to where they came from—although Sun Belt regions that were popular even before the pandemic did see gains…
Those Americans who did move accelerated a trend that predates the pandemic: Dense core counties of major U.S. metro areas saw a net decrease in flow into the city, while other suburbs and some smaller cities saw net gains. In other words, people moved outward. Outward to the suburbs of their own core metro area, but also farther out, to satellite cities or even other major urban centers that might still give people proximity to their region. As CityLab contributor Richard Florida has noted, the pandemic compressed into a matter of months moves that might have happened in the next few years anyway…
“The phrase or the concept of urban exodus, that really only applies to New York and San Francisco,” said Stephan D. Whitaker, a policy economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland who’s been analyzing migration patterns during the pandemic.
The San Francisco Bay Area tells a more dramatic story. The regions around San Francisco and San Jose, two of the country’s most expensive housing markets, saw the rates of permanent moves increase the most, by more than 23% and 17% respectively, compared to 3% nationally. Moves that were considered temporary—changes of address for six months or less—more than doubled in the San Francisco region, compared to 17% nationally.
As in the rest of the U.S., most people moved within their own region. But compared to other metro areas, a far greater percentage of people left the Bay Area entirely. Many of them moved to other parts of California including Los Angeles, but also smaller and less expensive cities like Stockton and, in Goodman’s case, Sacramento. [Bloomberg]
It’s Not Vaccine Hesitancy. It’s COVID-19 Denialism.
Enjoyed this a lot, let’s call it as it is.
In other words, the pattern of resistance to the coronavirus vaccines looks less like COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and more like COVID-19 denialism. While a significant chunk of Americans profess to be uneasy about getting shots to prevent COVID-19, most come from the swath of the population that has tended to downplay the disease’s severity and to resist other measures to fight it, rather than the swaths that have resisted vaccines for other diseases.
I hope they all get it. [The Atlantic]
How Senegal stretched its health care system to stop Covid-19
My main takeaway is that our country is full of idiots and selfish assholes, especially in comparison to this.
The country relied on its experience battling other outbreaks, from the Ebola epidemic in 2014 to HIV/AIDS, to prepare and act early. Senegal depended on local leaders and health agents, all front-line workers, often with multiple job descriptions: communicators, contact tracers, caregivers. They tried, and sometimes struggled, to make the Covid-19 policies work in their communities. They handed out masks. They went on local radio to talk about the coronavirus. These tiny acts, replicated from neighborhood to neighborhood, helped persuade a public to comply with public health measures.
“When we talk to the population and tell [them] to face this Covid, it’s the community who can do it,” Abdoulaye Bousso, the director of Senegal’s Health Emergency Operation Center, who helped lead the country’s Covid-19 response, said. “It’s not the health system, it’s the community.”
Those interventions helped Senegal withstand a first wave, with fewer than 15,000 cases and just over 310 deaths by the end of September. By then, the country had relaxed many of its most stringent policies, a combination of its early success and a growing recognition that cost and sometimes fierce public backlash had started to make those measures unsustainable. [Vox]
Good work and data viz from 538 on the Republican advantages… well pretty much everywhere. [FiveThirtyEight]
Why politically guided science is bad
I really liked this. I haven’t read this paper yet and I’m sure there are fair criticisms (the methods could be off), but to just criticize the results (if valid), doesn’t seem fair. I’m no fan of mass incarceration, but there could certainly be positive externalities! Or as Noah quotes in a few tweets:
Sports hot takes
Really good on Neymar’s brilliance and how we often don’t see it (also, he plays in France so take this with a grain of salt). The real standout though? The Luis Muriel statistics are wild. [No Grass in the Clouds]
Health, politics, and academia
The Biden Plan for Free Community College Has a Big Challenge
Good primer on why making community college free is easy in practice, but the devil’s in the details (let’s not even talk about four year colleges). [New York Times]
Hate reading
The dark side of our age of fitness
The hell did I just read?
That we are, as the title of the historian Jürgen Martschukat’s new book suggests, living in “the Age of Fitness” is self-evident. Perhaps fitness’s modernness feels intuitive because it seems postmodern, distinctively late-capitalist and post-industrial.
lol
But the quite literal connections he draws between bodily discipline and one’s capacity to survive contemporary capitalism are convincing: “Concern for one’s body and its potential is, more than ever, regarded as an indication of our willingness to perform at work.” The penalisation and stigmatisation of fatness is the other face of our obsession with fitness: fear of the former and obsessive pursuit of the latter are “part of a single social formation, centred on the self-responsible, committed and productive individual”. Martschukat suggests fitness is not merely one of many epiphenomena of neoliberalism, but that “the fitness athlete is the ideal type of self-regulated motivation and thus of the neoliberal self”.
lmao
Martschukat regards the modern obsession with fitness – with improving, measuring, disciplining, slimming, hardening, elasticising, preserving the body – as related to the retreat of welfarism and the increased “flexibility” of the workforce. Sometimes he presses too hard on the connection –“lean people in lean companies, flexible bodies for a flexible capitalism” – but in general the thesis is completely plausible, and has the bonus of allowing people like me, eager to externalise the masochism and competitiveness implied by their exercise habits, to lay the blame at the door of a malign socio-political order.
no it is not plausible at all stop
someone fire this guy.
Cool, just continue to promote awful NIMBY behavior WaPo. Do better. [Washington Post]
Et cetera
If You Can Make New York Cheesecake in Japan, You Can Make It Anywhere
I love this story so much.
In Japan, cheesecake is like a soufflé, delicately flavored and served in small portions. That’s a no-no for Yokosuka restaurateurs who advertise the American version, which is heavy on the cream cheese.
Local officials provide certificates of endorsement to cafes and restaurants that serve approved cheesecake, with an emphasis on the richness of the filling. Annual follow-up checks are conducted to ensure standards haven’t slipped and cakes haven’t become lighter and easier to wolf down.
Inspectors bring along weighing scales and keep a log book of precise weights of cheesecake servings at each location.
When Shigeru Iida, owner of a restaurant and bar called Tsunami, decided to go for the designation, he and his wife Keiko first took a trip to San Diego. Mr. Iida knew the city from an earlier business importing surfboards.
Eating at places like Cheesecake Factory reminded him of the challenge. “It was so rich and thick. I thought it would be really difficult to re-create,” he said.
This man is a legend:
Mr. Hirano, the restaurateur who tweaked his recipe to add Japanese cream cheese, said it took weeks of trial and error. He ate his early attempts for breakfast, lunch and dinner, gaining 11 pounds along the way. [Wall Street Journal]