The coronavirus will create many natural experiments

There are many theories about society and human behavior that cannot be experimentally tested because of ethical reasons or impracticality. On occasion, there will occur conditions that allow for what are called natural experiments, where social conditions or governmental actions create situations that are suitable for large scale experimental studies that could not have been created by the researchers.

One such case I recall is where a state did not have the funds to expand Medicaid health insurance to everyone in the state who qualified so that they doled it out randomly. This enabled researchers later to study what benefits, if any, access to heath insurance provided, since they now had a large scale test group and a control group. I recall another study that looked into whether raising taxes encouraged people to move to a lower tax state, something rich people often threaten to do when their state is thinking of raising taxes. Researchers were able to study this when one state raised its taxes. They studied a large metropolitan area that was very close to that state’s boundary with a lower tax state to see if people moved a short distance to avoid paying the taxes.
[Read more…]

Fiasco!

We all need a good laugh from time to time especially during grim periods like this and I cannot recommend highly enough this hilarious episode from the radio show This American Life about fiascos, when things go so epically wrong that you have no choice but to laugh.

I have heard this episode twice and the first two parts especially, consisting of the prologue and Act I about an amateur stage production of Peter Pan, cracked me up each time.

Enjoy!

Verdi’s Aida (2018)

I watched this streaming by the New York Metropolitan Opera company two nights ago and found it to be excellent.

Set in ancient Egypt, the story begins with Aida, an Ethiopian who had been captured in an earlier war between her country and Egypt, who is now a slave in the service of Amneris, the daughter of the pharaoh. She keeps secret from everyone that she is really the daughter of the Ethiopian king Amonasro. She and an Egyptian soldier Radames fall in love but then he is appointed commander of the Egyptian forces to challenge the Ethiopian forces who have regrouped and are invading Egypt. Aida is torn between her love for Radames and her desire to have her own nation not be defeated in war.
[Read more…]

The role of YouTube in spreading coronavirus and other hoaxes

I received a text from a friend in Sri Lanka who forwarded a link to a YouTube video and asked for my ‘professional opinion’ on whether it was credible, even though I am not a professional when it comes to analyzing such things. Even without looking at it I suspected that it was not credible because like many people, my friend is pretty credulous about things that are passed around on Facebook, and other social media, and gets easily alarmed. His last query to me a year ago was about the miracle of fish falling from the sky which consisted of a doctored video that was obviously fake. (He is also very religious.)
[Read more…]

The “nobody could have predicted” excuse blows up

Just yesterday, I wrote that the Trump administration is using the “nobody knew” excuse to explain away their incompetence, claiming that nobody could have predicted the scale of the pandemic. That was false but today comes news that really undercuts it. Newly revealed memos from way back on January 29 and on February 23 reveal that people in the Trump administration were warned by chief economic advisor Larry Kudlow that the pandemic could have devastating consequences. This blows up the “nobody could have predicted” excuse of the Trump administration for their lack of prompt action.
[Read more…]

Why does this job still exist?

Stephanie Grisham has been replaced as White House press secretary by Kayleigh McEnany. You may not have heard of Grisham. That is because since the time she was appointed to that post in June of last year, she has not had a single press conference which, you know, used to be considered one of the main parts of that job. She apparently first learned of her ousting from the media.
[Read more…]

“It is better not to have the country run by sociopaths”

That is the lesson derived by Seth Meyers as he looks at the non-stop flow of nonsense and dangerous false information peddled by Trump and the people in his administration, including his odious son-in-law Jared Kushner. He points to the fact that Trump actually brags at his press conferences about how successfully Mike Pence, the vice-president and the head of the coronavirus task force, avoids answering questions posed to him by journalists.
[Read more…]

Challenging the pandemic skeptics

If you are a credentialed academic in any field at all, then if you espouse policies that are favored by the libertarian, free-market, right wing, you can be assured of a platform for your views in think tanks and the media, even if the subject you are pontificating on are not the ones in which you are credentialed.

Richard Epstein is a good example of that. He is a professor of law. In a recent interview, Isaac Chotiner of The New Yorker questioned him about some contrarian claims that he had made about the coronavirus epidemic. Epstein is one of those who believes that we are over-reacting to the pandemic and that the danger to the economy is greater than the danger to people and we should not be having these tough social distancing rule, views that the Trump administration is anxious to believe, and so his views have been influential and received considerable publicity.
[Read more…]

Coronavirus and ventilators

After self-isolating for seven days because he had the coronavirus, UK prime minister Boris Johnson has now been placed in an ICU of a London hospital, presumably because his symptoms have taken a turn for the worse. It is not clear if he has been placed on a ventilator. His spokespersons have been less than forthcoming about his condition in the past week, issuing upbeat statements when it now seems that he was not doing so well, and that has naturally made people suspect that things are worse than what they are being told.
[Read more…]