Do economists have even more hubris than physicists?

It’s hard to believe, but it’s a valid question. Tyler Cowen demonstrates his arrogance by questioning the validity of epidemiology, and he asks a series of stupid questions that show how little thought he has put into the subject.

a. As a class of scientists, how much are epidemiologists paid? Is good or bad news better for their salaries?

You know, there’s this thing called “Google” which economists apparently haven’t heard about yet. If you look it up, it turns out that epidemiologists work in public health — which should already tell you they don’t get absurdly rich at this job — and they make on average about $69K per year. I would ask what the point of the question is. Does their salary say something about the accuracy of their conclusions? Because, near as I can tell, salaries under capitalism have nothing to do with intellectual rigor.

The employment of epidemiologists is not contingent on whether their results are good news or bad news, but on the quality and accuracy of their work. Why? Is it different for economists?

b. How smart are they? What are their average GRE scores?

Holy shit. Cowen reveals his own ignorant biases there.

Epidemiology requires solid skills in statistics and biology, neither of which are exactly easy-peasy topics. Their GRE scores were good enough to get them into demanding academic programs. There aren’t any shortcuts.

c. Are they hired into thick, liquid academic and institutional markets? And how meritocratic are those markets?

“Thick, liquid”? That sounds like economics jargon. I have no idea what he’s talking about, and I won’t pretend to know, unlike some.

I can say that academia is only loosely meritocratic. There are a lot of built-in cultural biases that mean we get some incompetent people, and some brilliant people get excluded. The question ought to be whether epidemiology is more or less meritocratic than economics. The evidence here says “more”.

d. What is their overall track record on predictions, whether before or during this crisis?

Crack an epidemiology textbook. There are a lot of variables and a lot of case studies. Unlike in economics, failed models tend to be rapidly discarded.

e. On average, what is the political orientation of epidemiologists? And compared to other academics? Which social welfare function do they use when they make non-trivial recommendations?

Fuck me. Like most educated academics, they probably skew liberal and Democratic. Their recommendations favor maximizing public health and minimizing death and illness. That’s their job. Economists seem to be much more twisted by flaky ideological concerns.

He has more questions, but I’ve had enough. What a chuzzlewit.

Vote for the lesser of two dotards

I agree with Rebecca. She’s voting for Biden because he’s somewhat better than Trump, but does not think that imposes an obligation on others to do likewise.

I’m making no predictions on the outcome of the November election. I know people are apathetic about voting at all, and are going to skip the election because they cannot bear to vote for a man who sexually assaults women, and that might depress Democratic turnout. On the other hand, Trump is such an egregious incompetent that maybe we could nominate an old stick and it would win. On the next hand over, on the basis of incompetence Trump should have been crushed in the last election; right now he’s busy fanning the flames of fear and xenophobia, and his party is engaging in widespread voter suppression, so maybe he’ll win. The president is not the product of a process that optimizes for the best person to do the job at all.

I don’t know what other people will do. My plan is to unenthusiastically vote for whoever runs against Trump, to hope they make a smart choice for the VP, and to hope Biden is at best a one-term president.

If you think David Frum will change people’s minds, think again

David Frum is a conservative Republican, a neo-conservative cheerleader who supported George W. Bush’s disastrous war in Iraq and the Israeli occupation of Palestine, who was an apologist for Sarah Palin, worked for Rudy Giulani’s short-lived presidential campaign, etc., etc., etc. He’s a deep Republican insider, although in recent years he has been rather unhappy with the radical turn towards idiocy that he’s observed in the party.

So maybe, you think, Republicans will pay attention to Frum’s agonizingly detailed chronicling of all of Trump’s failures? Maybe? Liberals have been saying the same sorts of things about Trump for years, and they’ve all failed to penetrate, so can we dare to dream that an arch-conservative pointing out the same issues might finally get through?

Nah, we still have meatheads like Joe Rogan favoring Trump. Fox News is still making excuses for him. Ron Paul thinks Fauci should be fired for disagreeing with Trump. Rush Limbaugh thinks the coronavirus pandemic is all hype.

Frum came up with the phrase “axis of evil” to label Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. Maybe he would have been better off using it on evangelicals, billionaires, war profiteers, the Tea Party, Fox News, Wall Street, and other enemies of the people right here at home. They’ve already got an ill-gotten conclusion about the right way to run the country, and they aren’t going to change it because of piddly little annoyances like the facts, or even tens of thousands of dead. The hundreds of thousands of dead in Iraq had no effect on Frum’s views, after all.

Nothin’ but bad news today

Bernie Sanders is dropping out of the race.

Meanwhile, Paul Broun is running for the senate.

This country is so fucked.

Republicans using death threats to disenfranchise Wisconsin

I’m so sorry, neighbors to the east, but despite sensible orders to avoid congregating in groups, and despite the rising death toll of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Wisconsin and US supreme courts have decided that today’s election will proceed, and that you’ll have to congregate and risk exposure to a potentially deadly illness if you want to (checks notes) vote in a democracy.

  • The Supreme Court voted 5-4 on Monday to reverse an order extending the absentee ballot deadline for voting in the Wisconsin elections scheduled for Tuesday, stepping into a back-and-forth between Democrats and Republicans in the state over when voting would take place.
  • Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, signed an executive order suspending in-person voting in the state earlier on Monday after trying and failing to convince the GOP-dominated state legislature to postpone elections until May. His order was blocked by the Wisconsin Supreme Court in the evening.

  • The top court, in an unsigned opinion from which the four liberal justices dissented, reasoned that extending the date by which voters could mail absentee ballots “fundamentally alters the nature of the election.”

Some voters had taken advantage of the absentee ballot extension to vote by mail; those ballots will be destroyed, which is a perfect metaphor for how Republicans want to hold elections in the future. In an ideal Republican world, you’d all get to vote, but the electronic voting machines will, ummm, ‘translate’ what you selected into a ‘better’ decision, and if you use paper ballots, as we do in Minnesota, you’ll feed your ballots into a paper shredder rather than a tabulating machine.

Make no mistake, either: all of these decisions were made by conservative wankadoodles in our supposedly impartial, non-partisan judiciary. These actions are clearly and unambiguously the result of Republican corruption of the system.

I do appreciate the irony of a court decision ruling that enabling and encouraging more voter participation “fundamentally alters the nature of the election.” That’s not the American way!

Further irony: The Wisconsin Supreme Court met virtually to make this decision, because it wasn’t safe for them to meet physically. But they decided you peons must meet at the polling place to vote.

Viral dumping ground

Once again, let me get this out of my system, a dump of recent reactions to coronavirus news. Then I can just set it aside and think about more cheerful things for the rest of my day.

  • I am not at all a fan of Max Boot, who I consider an unpleasant warmonger with blood on his hands, but at least he gets one thing right: Trump is the worst president ever.

    So I have written, as I did on March 12, that Trump is the worst president in modern times — not of all time. That left open the possibility that James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Franklin Pierce, Warren Harding or some other nonentity would be judged more harshly. But in the past month, we have seen enough to take away the qualifier “in modern times.” With his catastrophic mishandling of the coronavirus, Trump has established himself as the worst president in U.S. history.

    Then he catalogs Trump’s lethally disastrous policies and errors.

  • You want more reasons? Do you need them? Where have you been? Just watch this nauseating performance.

    I’ve seen this before: the guy who hasn’t done the readings or the homework, called on to explain something, who then tries to fake it with a lot of oozing faux-sincerity and praise for the importance of the question, but who can’t actually say one word of substance.

  • How badly has Donald Trump fucked us over?

    Beyond the suffering in store for thousands of victims and their families, the outcome has altered the international standing of the United States, damaging and diminishing its reputation as a global leader in times of extraordinary adversity.

    “This has been a real blow to the sense that America was competent,” said Gregory F. Treverton, a former chairman of the National Intelligence Council, the government’s senior-most provider of intelligence analysis. He stepped down from the NIC in January 2017 and now teaches at the University of Southern California. “That was part of our global role. Traditional friends and allies looked to us because they thought we could be competently called upon to work with them in a crisis. This has been the opposite of that.”

    This article, which retraces the failures over the first 70 days of the coronavirus crisis, is based on 47 interviews with administration officials, public health experts, intelligence officers and others involved in fighting the pandemic. Many spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information and decisions.

    You’ve got to read the whole long article to get a sense of how catastrophic this presidency has been.

  • Unfortunately, one of the major contributors to the ongoing clusterfuck is the pseudo-objective “he-said-she-said” style of journalism that has been perfected by the New York Times. Here’s a perfect example of a NYT headline.

    Look at that. The presidential authority figure says testing is fine, but everyone else is saying he’s wrong…so let’s lead with the ass-in-chief lying and make it a story about “he-said-they-all-said” and not offend any Republicans. Even when scientists chime in to point out that Trump is all wet, the reporters stick their nose in the air and ignore the facts.

    Let’s just move on to Yale epidemiologist/infectious disease researcher Gregg Gonsalves kicking the Times’s ass, which sorely offended one of the Times writers so!

    “Move along,” said the pompously wrong New York Times reporter to the infectious disease specialist from Yale.

    Newspapers have responsibilities to the truth. When the NYT ceases to respect that, it’s time to disrespect the NYT.

  • Guess who’s advising the administration on the pandemic? That quack, Dr Oz. Enough said.

  • You may have seen a map going around that plots the distance people travel in a day, showing that southern states in particular were particularly bad at limiting their isolation. There’s a reason for that, and it isn’t that Southerners are stupid.

    But there’s another reason that the red states are also “red states” when it comes to their travel distance. As former Obama White House official Christopher Hale points out, these maps correspond closely to areas that are “food deserts,” where the nearest grocery story requires making an extended trip. “Food deserts” is a term that is often applied to urban neighborhoods where good nutrition is outside of walking range, but these are counties where it takes an extended auto trip to find any kind of nutrition, even bad nutrition. Why? The simple answer is Walmart. These areas represent locations where big box retailers like Walmart have annihilated local grocers, and where the quest for an apple or a box of Pop-Tarts means crossing the county to a store that also sells tires, televisions, and potting soil.

    I’ve lived in one of these “deserts” where you can’t do anything without getting in a car and driving, only it wasn’t the south — it was in a Philadelphia suburb. We had the nice middle-class home in the development, surrounded by lots of other nice middle-class homes, and after we settled in, we realized that there’s absolutely nothing there but middle-class homes. You want groceries, or a movie theater, or a pharmacy, or even a nice walk in the park, you’ve gotta drive.

    This was a bit of a shock. I grew up in a small town where a kid could find everything he wanted in a short walk or a bicycle ride. We had just moved from Salt Lake City, and say what you want about Mormon Town, the city actually was extraordinarily livable and offered a variety of things in walking distance. These horrid suburbs…nope. Worst of everything. They’re designed around cars, and Walmart has taken advantage of that destructive car culture.

    Now I live in a small town again, and it is actually a pleasant environment. You need a car to get away from the town, but all your day-to-day needs are conveniently close. We don’t have a Walmart. I hope we never do.

  • Here’s Elon Musk a month ago.

    He got a lot of pushback on that, which crimped his ego, so he rushed to be the ever-helpful billionaire, you know, like the Elon Musk who threw together an impractical submarine to help rescue boys trapped in a flooding cave…that is, he made noise to make it sound like he was a good philanthropist. He promised to put his engineers to work making over a thousand ventilators that he would donate free to hospitals.

    Reality is less impressive. He instead bought a bunch of devices from another company, slapped a “Tesla” label on them, and handed them out…but they’re the wrong kind of ventilator. They’re not totally useless, but they’re also not an appropriate response to a need.

    The tweet features a photo of the “40 ventilators” Musk donated still in boxes labeled with ventilator company ResMed’s logo. Those 40 devices represent a portion of the more-than 1,000 Musk purchased from the San Diego-based ventilator maker.

    A closer look at the photo, however, reveals a device that is not the kind of ventilator hospitals are struggling to find. The American Association for Respiratory Care confirmed to FOX Business that the device is a “bi-level machine” traditionally used to help people with sleep apnea. In particular, the photo shows ResMed’s non-invasive, five-year-old S9 bi-level model.

    Is anyone surprised? This is another example of a billionaire posturing to get attention, but only delivering the goods that salve his ego, rather than what people actually need.

  • You probably don’t want to read this last link. A doctor describes the intubation procedure he has to routinely do to save lives.

    Usually, before this, patients would be on a vent for three to five days. Now we’re seeing 14 to 21. Most of these people have acute respiratory distress syndrome. There’s inflammation, scar tissue, and fluid building up in the lungs, so oxygen can’t diffuse easily. No matter how much oxygen you give them, it can’t get through. It’s never enough. Organs are very sensitive to low oxygen. First comes kidney failure, then liver failure, and then brain tissue becomes compromised. Immune systems stop working. There’s a look most people get, called mottling, where the skin turns red and patchy when you only have a few hours left. We have a few at that point. Some have been converted to “do not resuscitate.”

    I don’t want to get sick. I don’t want to get sick. I don’t want to get sick. I don’t want to get sick. I don’t want to get sick. I don’t want to get sick. I don’t want to get sick.