Hong Hate Horoscope: Week of May 31, 2021
Good journalism/Cool shit
Can Removing Highways Fix America’s Cities?
Love reading about urban planning and its successes.
In a wide-reaching infrastructure plan released at the end of March, President Biden proposed spending $20 billion to help reconnect neighborhoods divided by highways. Congressional Democrats have translated the proposal into legislation that would provide funding over the next five years. And the Department of Transportation opened up separate grants that could help some cities get started.
Of course, somehow the NIMBY people end up still featuring somehow:
At a community meeting in Marketview Heights in early May, the biggest question on people’s minds wasn’t whether the highway should come down, but what will replace it.
Miquel Powell, a local resident and business owner working on a prison re-entry program, worried that more large-scale apartments, like those built in the East End, would come to the neighborhood. “That would totally change the whole dynamic,” he said. Marketview Heights is mostly free-standing, single-family homes; some are subdivided and most are rented.
Nancy Maciuska, who is in her 60s, said she wants to see more family-centric development in the area if the highway is removed, and some parks to replace those torn down by the construction of the freeway. “So people can raise their families and enjoy Mother Nature,” she said.
It’s Rochester guys. [New York Times]
No, you probably won't need a COVID vaccine booster shot
As a non-expert, found this interesting and vaguely reassuring about the current state of the pandemic (and way less doom and gloom). [SF Chronicle]
I think this is a really great way of thinking about inflation (hardly a macro expert though):
But in fact there’s probably a much simpler reason. People didn’t like inflation because their wages weren’t able to keep up…
Remember the graph from above, where wages successfully stayed ahead of inflation in the 60s? In the 70s, that changed, big-time.
This resulted in a loss of real purchasing power for American workers — people actually got poorer.
Now, theoretically, workers in that environment could still bargain for higher wages to offset the rising prices. But…what if they actually couldn’t? There’s plenty of evidence that nominal wages are “sticky” in the downward direction — it’s hard for employers to actually cut pay. But what if there are also reasons why it’s hard for workers to get employers to raise pay at an unusually fast clip? Some economists have claimed that this kind of “upward nominal wage ridigity” is a real thing.
And if something constrains the growth of nominal wages, it means that inflation really can make people poorer. In fact, when he did a survey in the 1990s to find out why people dislike inflation, Robert Shiller found that this was exactly why they disliked it:
To summarize the main perceived costs of inflation briefly, the concerns people mention first regarding inflation are that it hurts their standard of living and a popular model they have that makes such an effect plausible apparently has some badly behaving or greedy people causing prices to increase, increases that are not met with wage increases. This might be called a bad-actor-sticky-wage model. That people think wages are sticky is particularly supported by the results for [several] questions[.]
And on debt and savings:
Just from looking at these graphs, it sure looks like nominal wages are sticky, meaning that inflation — if it happens for the wrong reasons — can reduce workers’ wages and real purchasing power.
But what about debt? Doesn’t unexpected inflation bail people out of debt? Well, only if their wages go up. Wages are the way normal people pay down debt; if wages are sticky, inflation doesn’t actually erode the value of their debts.
But it does erode the value of their savings. Suppose that on Monday you earn $100, you have $100 in savings and $200 in debt, and a sandwich costs $10. Then on Tuesday, thanks to sticky wages, you still earn $100 (and you still have $100 in savings and $200 in debt), but thanks to inflation, a sandwich now costs $20. Your savings, which could buy you 10 sandwiches before, can now only buy you 5 sandwiches! But your debt is still 2 times your income, just like before. In other words, thanks to sticky wages, inflation eroded your savings while leaving your debt the same.
In other words, people probably hate inflation because of upward nominal wage rigidity. That means economists should study upward nominal wage ridigity more. Why is it so hard for workers to negotiate cost-of-living raises? Why was this so hard even in the late 60s and 70s, when unions were much stronger than they are today? What is broken in our wage-setting process? [Noahpinion]
Health, politics, and academia
The Electric-Car Lesson That China Is Serving Up for America
I think this is really interesting, but I wish they’d talk more about nationwide infrastructure (i.e. gas tanks and fueling systems) rather than simply pumping money into manufacturing (something I find less interesting). The cars seem to be well on their way to being great; it’s a change in overall infrastructure of charging and fueling that’s the biggest hurdle. [The Atlantic]
Why Covax, the fund to vaccinate the world, is struggling
I don’t think this is really all that surprising—with limited supply, of course each country is going to want to vaccinate their own first. They present supply as the second challenge, but I think it’s really the biggest one.
The second huge challenge facing Covax is the simple fact that vaccines and the raw materials needed to make them are still in short supply.
That’s partly because rich countries bought up a lot of the early vaccine supply, as noted above. But it’s also because the pandemic itself sometimes makes it hard to stick to a production schedule.
The main supplier to Covax is the Serum Institute of India, which produces the AstraZeneca vaccine. But with Covid-19 raging in India, the supply has been necessarily turned to domestic use. Export restrictions mean that Covax is receiving much less vaccine than expected and has had to delay its shipments to countries.
As Dodson said, “Supply is incredibly tight for Covax.”
It’s a good illustration of why we need a global plan to increase the scale and security of vaccine production…
That won’t be an easy operation to pull off, because it’s not just a matter of building more plants with more production capacity in more countries. It’ll require coordination on a number of underlying factors — transferring technological know-how and personnel to countries in need, sending raw materials to prevent manufacturing bottlenecks, and loosening intellectual property rights. (The Biden administration’s decision to support patent waivers for Covid-19 vaccines will hopefully help with the latter.)
Aylward emphasized that it’s not enough to just scale up production — a good part of that production needs to be earmarked for Covax. As companies learn how to optimize their capacity, he wants them to give Covax the right of first refusal on any vaccine they produce in excess of their original targets. [Vox]
Hate reading
Simone Biles should be praised, not punished for achieving a feat that was deemed impossible
This article made sense for a bit, then quickly went off the rails:
Per the New York Times, the Yurchenko double pike is "so perilous and challenging that no other woman has attempted it in competition, and it is unlikely that any woman in the world is even training to give it a try."
However, the undervaluation of Biles' performance by judges is bringing attention yet again to how the athlete has repeatedly been punished rather than rewarded for her greatness, and the double standards applied to reception to her performances. Specifically, Biles' execution of the Yurchenko double pike for her vault routine was given a provisional score of 6.6, similar to her scores for other vaults and without any additional points for or acknowledgement of the near-impossible difficulty of the move.
This has happened to Biles before in other routines through the years, as she executes moves that no other female gymnasts have attempted or completed.
Ok sure, seems fair! Seems like this move should’ve been scored higher in terms of difficulty (seems like based on a small amount of research, it should be closer to 7.0).
Gymnastics routines are judged and scored based on their execution and difficulty. But rather than recognize or reward Biles' exceedingly difficult routines and moves with the added points they deserve for their difficulty, judges have often undervalued her performances that include historic completion of new moves. The rationale for this scoring has often been that there are safety risks for other gymnasts who aren't able to complete the moves that Biles is, if her moves are rewarded with high scores and other gymnasts are then motivated to try them.
This is a bit more of a stretch. The rationale seems to be because they don’t want Biles to blow everyone away. Quote from Biles herself in the Times article:
“They’re both too low and they even know it,” Biles said of the rewards for her beam dismount and the double-pike vault. “But they don’t want the field to be too far apart. And that’s just something that’s on them. That’s not on me.
And here’s where it just goes weirdly off the rails:
In other words, on a technical and cultural level, Biles, a young Black woman, is being punished and subjected to undeniably racist and sexist double standards for her greatness. After all, we've seen some form of this before, for other Black women athletes — Caster Semenya, a South African two-time Olympic champion runner, was literally barred from competing in women's sports last year unless she agreed to take medication to lower her naturally higher levels of testosterone. When Black women athletes work hard and go above and beyond, they're treated with suspicion, as if they're somehow being dishonest, or as if their success is a detriment to others that should be punished, restricted and prevented rather than encouraged. From Semenya to Biles, they and other Black women athletes face the same, intertwined racism and misogyny.
Uh. I’m really not sure how you got race involved here without any really good evidence (Semenya is an intersex woman and honestly that issue is much more complex than this dumb newsletter is gonna get), you really cannot just slap accusations of racism and double standards without any freaking proof! The main issue is that she’s too good, not racism—the last person to face something like this in a judged sport? Shaun White in snowboarding, a man so white that it’s literally his last name.
We’ve got enough actual racist shit to complain about without making it up. You can definitely even say that Biles faces racism a la Serena Williams or Naomi Osaka. This ain’t it though. [Salon]
An Oakland lake became a symbol of Black resilience. Then the neighbors complained
C’mon man, not with this fucking title and narrative. Not to both sides this shit, but I think it’s awesome that people like to party and celebrate by the lake, but also I feel like it’s reasonable to get some restrictions to the traffic, noise, litter, and music (honestly some of those sound systems are insane). Painting this in such broad strokes as a racial narrative helps no one. [SF Chronicle]
Et cetera
All the Sad, Lonely Pandemic Puppies
Maybe it was good that I didn’t get a pandemic pup? [The Atlantic]