I know, I should probably not waste everybody's time commenting on this nonsense, but the push on it has been masssive, with it seeming to influence a lot of people it should not, so I have decided some pushback is called for, even if those who should see it do not. I am partly triggered in this by getting defriended on Facebook yesterday by a generally intelligent libertarian academic economist I know who started massively linking to every crackpot pushing this nonsense, and when I pointed out some serious problems with all of it and declared the whole thing to be "insane," I was told that my "TDS was showing" and was defriended. As far as I am concerned, TDS is people who believe lunatic lies by Trump, showing as a result their own derangement.
As part of all this the Trump media push on this is massive. I am not sure it held for the whole Sundy-Saturday week, but reportedly for at least a substantial portion of last week Fox News was spending more time on this story than on the pandemic, no distraction with this, of course. And this was not as in there might be two sides to it, at least not on Hannity where I have kept an eye on it. He has been for quite some time pushing for investigations of how the Russia investigation started with a demand that people go to jail for it for a long time. So he has been all u-rah-rah to Trump coming on to Fox News on Thursday morning with his completely off the wall claim that "This is the greatest political scandal in US history," repeated several times, along with his demand that Senate committees drag lots of people in and that Obama, Biden (of course), Comey, and Brennan should all go to jail for 50 years, although he has not mentioned any actual crimes for which they should go to serve these long sentences that would effectively put them away for life. Both Sens. Grassley and Graham have jumped sort of to attention to promise hearings on all this, although the generally odious Graham did show some streak of sanity by saying he would not call Obama before his committee, perhaps aware that the guy is the most popular political figure in the country, warning "Be careful what you wish for," although I did not see him ruling out dragging Biden in.
So have there been any actual crimes in all this "Obamagate" as Trump has now repeatedly labeled it? Not much. Probably a majority of the talk in this past week and a half or so as this has ramped up has been about the unmasking of former General Michael Flynn. Hannity has all bu frothed at the mouth over the supposedly awful "unmaskers," who seem to be as bad as Islamic terrorists, if not Commies in the 1950s. Of course, unmasking is a completely trivial and ordinary thing that goes on all the time, with the rate of it higher under Trump than under Obama. Officials ask the NSA for the identity of an American identified in a phone call with some foreigner of interest. This does not mean their identities become public, which rarely happens. In 2017 there were over 8,000 such unmaskings, with the requests needing to be approved by NSA. In 2018 this hit an all time record of over 16,000, approximately one per half hour, with that number falling back to something over 10,000 in 2019.
Apparently between his appointment as incoming National Security Adviser and Trump's inauguration, about three dozen officials requested him to be unmasked, some of them on multiple occasions. Note that while they may have suspected it was him, they did not know this when they made these requests. While there has been a big focus on Flynn's Dec. 29 phone conversations (two of them) with former Russian Ambassador Kislyak, the majority of these unamsking requests, which were granted as legitmate, came in mid-Deecember due to other phone calls he was in on, the contents of which remain unpublicized to this point. The Dec. 29 ones, which were later leaked to the Washington Post that published about them on Jan. 12, were especially important in that they made it clear that Flynn had lied to incoming VP Pence about making promises to the Russians about weakening sanctions just imposed by Obama to punish them for their interference in the US election, which lie Pence had publicly pronounced. This would lead Trump to eventually fire Flynn, and it was this matter that Flynn lied to the FBI about on Jan. 24, although they did not coordinate with the DOJ when they spoke with him. I note that two days after the election when Obama met with Trump, he specifically advised him not to appoint Flynn to anything due to his screaming incompetence, with Obama having fired Flynn from being director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA, Pentagon junior cousin to the CIA). There is an old Cold War era Wsahington joke that goes: "The CIA director testifies before the Senate Intelligence Committee, 'The Russians are coming!" Then the DIA director testifies and says, 'The Russians are coming tomorrow!" and then the Air Force Intelligence director testifies that, 'The Russians arrived yesterday!''"
I find it a sign of Flynn's screaming incompetence that as a former DIA director he did not realize that when he started having phone conversations with the Russian ambassador and who knows who else we do not still know about that NSA would be listening so any lies he would tell later would be caught and that indeed he would get unmasked by a gazillion officials all over the security establishment. And he has now committed perjury by withdrawing his confession of lying to the FBI, with all this pile of Trump media people pressing for Judge Sullivan to drop his case now that AG Barr has requested it, since AG Barr is clearly such an honest and straightforward player himself, given how he blatantly lied about the Mueller Report when it came out.
So, roughly coinciding with Barr's move was that of Acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Grenell declassifying and bringing to the Dept of Justice, with Fox News filming his arrival there with a briefcase containg them the roughly three dozen names of people who dared to unmask Flynn. Barr promptly transmitted these names to various GOP senators, three of whom then made the list public so Hannity and others could staart denouncing these evil unmaskers, triggering them to start receiving death threat from lunatic Trump followers. I note that Grenell's sole experience in intelligence or foreign policy matters was his recent bout of serving as ambassador to Germany where that government requested he be removed, a request that was ignored by Trump. Shortly after he arrived in Berlin, Trump withdrew the US from the Iran nuclear JCPOA, and Grenell then issued a demand that no German businesses have any dealings with Iran, a demand that was ignored aside from the German government's demanding he be removed.
Ah ha! At least one possible crime has been identified! (This has been "the scandal in search of a crime")In Friday's WaPo, Trump fan Mark Thiessen (who I grant has on rare occasions criticized Trump mildly for this or that) published a column in which he declared "Flynn isn't the one who committed a crime" (yes, he did). According to Thiessen the crime is the leaking of the stories about Flynn's Dec. 29 phone calls to Kislyak, about which he lied to Pence and others in the incoming Trump admin, which led them to fire him. Thiessen proceeded to identify 8 out of this three dozen people who might have been the evil leaker (although he only listed 7 names), and thus possibly open to being prosecuted, if only DOJ can figure out which one it was. This was the set of people who supposedly not only reuested unmasking of Flynn from NSA, but were actually given his name (allthough apparently in some cases these requests were made by staffers in their offices without even the main person even knowing about it, this being so routine). Obama's name was not among the 7 Thiessen listed, but Biden's, Clapper's, and Somantha Powers's were.
Obviously there is attention being paid to Biden in this regard, and no doubt we shall hear a lot about this from the Trump media mob, with him possibly even being demanded to testify before one of the Senate committees. However, it is almost certainlhy not him or even one of his staffers. Why not? The one unmasking request that came out of his office did so on Jan. 12 (not mentioned by Thiessen but reported elsewhere in WaPo), the day the leaked story appeared in WaPo. So quite likely somebody in his office sent the request after seeing the story in the paper. Anyway, not the leaker.
Curiously another name is somebody I never heard of, one Stephanie L. O'Sullivan, identified by Thiessen as "a CIA official whose name is redacted." What? He does not explain where her name was redacted. If it was redacted in the report given by Grenell to Barr, how did it come to be unredacted and made public? This looks like illegal leaking of its own, of a still hired person in the CIA whose identity is supposed to be kept secret. But ah, obviously this shows how the evil Deep State was after Flynn and the whole Trump administration, blah blah blah. The hypocrisy of this particular piece of this just stinks to high heaven.
Anyway, I realize that this is pretty complicated. But that may be why I see a need to put it out there as there is no doubt the Trump people will be putting out distorted and wildly exaggerated versions of this big time. So, here it is, for any of you who have made it this far. And that is enough from me on this, at least for now. Stay well, one and all.
Addenda: In today's Washington Post, Ruth Marcus noted something I had forgotten: it was Michael Flynn who led the chants to "Lock her up!" at the 2016 GOP convention. Of course such a worthy cannot be locked up himself.
For the record, here are the 7 people listed by Thiessen in his column as being candiated leakers (or maybe somebody from one of their staffs, although he does not mention that possibility): former VP Joe Biden, former UN ambassador Samantha Power (Fox News commenters have made much of her, who supposedly made 7 unmasking requests, how dare her!), former DNI (not Acting) James R. Clapper, Jr. (why would somebody in his position have any authority to make such a request?), former Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, former White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, deputy nation intelligence director Michael Dempsey, ah, and the above-menioned Stephanie L. O'Sullivan, whose name was supposedly "redacted," but I missed that she also is a "former deputy national intelligence director."
Oh, and in Trump's diatribes on all this he has called this "the greatest political crime" as well as "scandal" in US history. Maybe a "political crime" is not quite the same thing as a "legal crime," although, wow, there is this case of leaking!
Barkley Rosser
Sunday, May 17, 2020
Four Days On, Ten Days Off
A very interesting paper (not peer-reviewed) by a team of Israeli scholars proposes that a more manageable exit from pandemic lockdown might be achieved by implementing a scheme in which employees go in to work for four days and then return to isolation for ten days before repeating the cycle. A variation on the proposal would have two staggered relays of workers cycling through the 14 day routine.
The research has been popularized in a New York Times op-ed and a Fast Company feature, so I would bother to discuss it here in detail. Not being an epidemiologist, I can't vouch for the authors' assumptions about average infectiousness. Obviously, implementing such a scheme out of the blue would present formidable challenges even assuming competent political leadership.
The research has been popularized in a New York Times op-ed and a Fast Company feature, so I would bother to discuss it here in detail. Not being an epidemiologist, I can't vouch for the authors' assumptions about average infectiousness. Obviously, implementing such a scheme out of the blue would present formidable challenges even assuming competent political leadership.
Wednesday, May 13, 2020
Reopening Isn’t Reopening—It’s Cutting Off Unemployment
Donald Trump, cheering on his “warriors” who demand that states lift their lockdown and distancing orders (where they have them), would have you believe this is about bringing the economy back to life so ordinary people can get their jobs and normal lives back. Elitist liberals who work from home and have country estates to retreat to don’t care, but “real” people do.
The reality is different. The shuttering of stores, restaurants, hotels and workplaces didn’t begin with government orders and won’t end with them. If the rate of new infection and death is too high, a lot of people won’t go along. Not everyone, but enough to make a huge economic difference. Ask any small business owner what it would mean for demand to drop by 25-50%. Lifting government orders won’t magically restore the economic conditions of mid-winter.
So what’s it about? Even as it makes a big PR show of supporting state by state “liberation” in America, the Trump administration is advising state governments on how to remove workers from unemployment insurance once orders are lifted. Without government directives, employers can demand workers show up, and if they refuse they no longer qualify. And why might workers refuse? Perhaps because their workplaces are still unsafe and they have vulnerable family members they want to keep from getting infected? Not good enough—once the state has been “liberated”.
How should we respond to this travesty? First, of course, by telling the truth that an anti-worker, anti-human campaign is being conducted under the guise of defending workers. If the Democrats weren’t themselves such a tool of business interests we might hear that narrative from them, but the rest of us are free to speak out and should start doing it, loudly, wherever we can.
Second, one of the laws of the land is the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, which gives workers the right to refuse imminently hazardous work. This hasn’t been used very often, nor is there much case law around it, but the current pandemic is a good reason to pull it out of storage. If there are public interest law firms looking for something useful to do during distancing, they could advertise their willingness to defend workers who need to stay home until work is safe—while still getting their paycheck. If employers thought the choice was between public support for workers sitting out the pandemic or their support for them we might hear less about “liberation”.
The reality is different. The shuttering of stores, restaurants, hotels and workplaces didn’t begin with government orders and won’t end with them. If the rate of new infection and death is too high, a lot of people won’t go along. Not everyone, but enough to make a huge economic difference. Ask any small business owner what it would mean for demand to drop by 25-50%. Lifting government orders won’t magically restore the economic conditions of mid-winter.
So what’s it about? Even as it makes a big PR show of supporting state by state “liberation” in America, the Trump administration is advising state governments on how to remove workers from unemployment insurance once orders are lifted. Without government directives, employers can demand workers show up, and if they refuse they no longer qualify. And why might workers refuse? Perhaps because their workplaces are still unsafe and they have vulnerable family members they want to keep from getting infected? Not good enough—once the state has been “liberated”.
How should we respond to this travesty? First, of course, by telling the truth that an anti-worker, anti-human campaign is being conducted under the guise of defending workers. If the Democrats weren’t themselves such a tool of business interests we might hear that narrative from them, but the rest of us are free to speak out and should start doing it, loudly, wherever we can.
Second, one of the laws of the land is the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, which gives workers the right to refuse imminently hazardous work. This hasn’t been used very often, nor is there much case law around it, but the current pandemic is a good reason to pull it out of storage. If there are public interest law firms looking for something useful to do during distancing, they could advertise their willingness to defend workers who need to stay home until work is safe—while still getting their paycheck. If employers thought the choice was between public support for workers sitting out the pandemic or their support for them we might hear less about “liberation”.
How Likely Is A Second Wave Of SARS-CoV-2?
Dr. Anthony Fauci has testified before a Senate committee that he is worried that there may be a serious "Second Wave" oof the current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in the United States. The basis for this fear is the experience over a century ago with the Spanish flu, still deadlier than the current pandemic. It came in three full waves, and of those the second was easily substantially larger than the other two. The lag between the first and second was several months, and as of now no nation that has had its first wave essentially ger under control has not had it under control for as long as that gap. So we are not yet in a position to see if this pandemic can or will imitate that former pandcmic.
Nevertheless, there is some evidence about the possibility of more immediate, less dramatic, second waves in the form of the number of new cases in a nation rising noticeably after having had a major decline from an initial peak. We have now seen this in a number of nations, in a small number quite dramatically. What is the current situation regarding this?
On May 11, the site endcoronavirus.org showed graphically the time path of new cases per day for 99 nations. This group divides these nations into three groups: "Winning" (32 nations) that have basically gotten their numbers well down, with a few exceptions; "Nearly There" (31 nations) that exhibit a variety of patterns, although nearly all currently below their peak by some; and "Need to Take Action" (36 nations), most of which simply are steadily moving up, although a small group have flattened (includes Moldova, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Sweden, and UK) or are slightly declining from a peak (including Ecuador, Finland, and US).
Out of each of these groups there are minorities that have exhibited seeing a noticeable upturn in the number of cases after noticeably declining from a peak, with some of those only showing a modest upturn, but a smaller group showing a substantial such upturn of moving back up at least halfway towards the previous peak, with a very small number actually moving back up above the previous peak. I shall note these particular set, but note that out of the 99 total, 16 have shown such a noticeable secondary increase, and out of those 7 that have exhibited a large such increase, with two of those moving back up beyond the previous peak. Who are these?
From the first group of nations, the ones supposedly "Winning" there are five that have moved up, with two of those having done so substantially. Those moving back up by small amounts are Croatia, Lithuania, and Vietnam, while those moving up a lot, both of them on the order of halfway back to the previous peak are Jordan and Lebanon (I am not sure why these last two are in this first group).
From the second group there are 7 that have shown some second uptick, with 3 of those more substantially so. Those first 4 are Bosnia, Costa Rica, Niger, and North Macedonia, while the 3 that have moved back substantially are Burkina Faso and Kyrgyzstan, both moving up about halfway, and San Marino, the natoin with the highest per capita rate of cases of all nations and that saw a decline of nearly half that was then followed by an increase that went above the first peak but has since been declining again.
Out of the final group, "Need to Take Action," there are 4 that have seen an increase after a peak, with two of those showing substantial secondary upticks. The first 2 are Iran and Singapore while the latter 2 are Azerbaijan, now back up to about half its former peak, and Iraq, which has moved back up itss former peak again.
Aa a broader perspective on all this I close by noting that a substantial portion of the world's 10 most populous nations are not only in the final group that need to take action, which included the US that is mildy declinging, they are simply rising solidly with little sign of flattening, with this group including Bangladesh, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Russia. Clearly this pandemic has a serious way to go, even if we luck out and avoid any really enormous second waves on the scale of the Spanish flu's one, which we have not yet seen out of any nations so far.
PS: I note that Germany, Lebanon, Singapore, and South Korea have all reimposed some previously lifted lockdown rules, even though the secondary outbreaks in two of these do not even show up in this data set (Germany and South Korea).
Barkley Rosser
Nevertheless, there is some evidence about the possibility of more immediate, less dramatic, second waves in the form of the number of new cases in a nation rising noticeably after having had a major decline from an initial peak. We have now seen this in a number of nations, in a small number quite dramatically. What is the current situation regarding this?
On May 11, the site endcoronavirus.org showed graphically the time path of new cases per day for 99 nations. This group divides these nations into three groups: "Winning" (32 nations) that have basically gotten their numbers well down, with a few exceptions; "Nearly There" (31 nations) that exhibit a variety of patterns, although nearly all currently below their peak by some; and "Need to Take Action" (36 nations), most of which simply are steadily moving up, although a small group have flattened (includes Moldova, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Sweden, and UK) or are slightly declining from a peak (including Ecuador, Finland, and US).
Out of each of these groups there are minorities that have exhibited seeing a noticeable upturn in the number of cases after noticeably declining from a peak, with some of those only showing a modest upturn, but a smaller group showing a substantial such upturn of moving back up at least halfway towards the previous peak, with a very small number actually moving back up above the previous peak. I shall note these particular set, but note that out of the 99 total, 16 have shown such a noticeable secondary increase, and out of those 7 that have exhibited a large such increase, with two of those moving back up beyond the previous peak. Who are these?
From the first group of nations, the ones supposedly "Winning" there are five that have moved up, with two of those having done so substantially. Those moving back up by small amounts are Croatia, Lithuania, and Vietnam, while those moving up a lot, both of them on the order of halfway back to the previous peak are Jordan and Lebanon (I am not sure why these last two are in this first group).
From the second group there are 7 that have shown some second uptick, with 3 of those more substantially so. Those first 4 are Bosnia, Costa Rica, Niger, and North Macedonia, while the 3 that have moved back substantially are Burkina Faso and Kyrgyzstan, both moving up about halfway, and San Marino, the natoin with the highest per capita rate of cases of all nations and that saw a decline of nearly half that was then followed by an increase that went above the first peak but has since been declining again.
Out of the final group, "Need to Take Action," there are 4 that have seen an increase after a peak, with two of those showing substantial secondary upticks. The first 2 are Iran and Singapore while the latter 2 are Azerbaijan, now back up to about half its former peak, and Iraq, which has moved back up itss former peak again.
Aa a broader perspective on all this I close by noting that a substantial portion of the world's 10 most populous nations are not only in the final group that need to take action, which included the US that is mildy declinging, they are simply rising solidly with little sign of flattening, with this group including Bangladesh, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Russia. Clearly this pandemic has a serious way to go, even if we luck out and avoid any really enormous second waves on the scale of the Spanish flu's one, which we have not yet seen out of any nations so far.
PS: I note that Germany, Lebanon, Singapore, and South Korea have all reimposed some previously lifted lockdown rules, even though the secondary outbreaks in two of these do not even show up in this data set (Germany and South Korea).
Barkley Rosser
Monday, May 11, 2020
Saturday, May 9, 2020
The 75th Anniversary Of VE Day: Forgettable Or Boring?
My wife, Marina, as many of those reading this know, is from the Soviet Union, and takes extremely seriously the anniversary of the victory of the Soviet Union and its allies over Nazi Germany, which became official at 10:45 PM in Berlin on May 8, 1945, which was 12:15 May 9 Moscow time. So, while all of the rest of the world celebrates VE Day on May 8, now in Russia today is Victory Day, as it is called everywhere outside the US, although I just saw a clip from the day itself in London where Winston Churchill declared that what had happened was "Victory in Europe," although while UK did play a minor role in subsequent events in the Pacific, aside from the US for the rest of the allies VE Day was simply Victory Day in Europe.
So, yesterday in UK there was a flyover of planes in celebration of this anniversary, somehow according to the radio report I heard putting out red, white, and blue colors in the sky. Is this for the US helping out with D-Day? I do not know. The only other public demo on May 8 I am aware of was Donald Trump meeting with some WW II vets, all reportedly over 95 years in age, with neither him or any of them for the photo op wearing a face mask, despite the fact that the White House has suddenly become a new epicenter for the coronavirus.
The following nations have a public holiday for May 8 relatd to the victory of the Allies over the Axis powers in Europe: UK, France, French Guiana, French Polynesia, Martinique, Saint Martin, Guadeloupe, Gibralter, New Caledonia, Czech Republic, and Slovakia, which really boils down to three nations at the end of WW II, UK with some associates, France with a lot of associaates, and then the former Czechoslovakia, now slit into two. Nontrivially, Ukraine today has May 8 not a public holiday, but it is a Day of Peace and Reconciliaton, which is suupposed to be recognized.
In the US VE Day as it is still called since for us the war with Japan was more important then, and now that we got done with this distraction in Europe it was now time to get to real business to defeat Japan, well... So, VE Day is below Pearl Harbor Day, D-Day, and VJ Day (Aug, 15) in the general veiw of Americans. As it is, none of these are public holidays, but then, we only lost about a half million or so in the war, well underthe deaths in our Civil War, and also a number well under that who died in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, during the long siege it suffered thanks to Adolf Hitler.
More of the "nations" listed that have public holidays on May 8 are France-related. But unlike Britain with Churchill and all that, for France ultimatlely this holiday is not one they want to emphasize given their embarrassing history of having been defeated by Germany and then having the awful Vichy regime and all that, which they have still barely gotten over. Sure, Aug. 1944 de Gaulle pushed the Grmans out of Paris, with lots of support from US, UK, and Canada, so, well, not all that triumphant, and I checked: no big celebration there on May 8. For them the big one is the prvious war, WW I, which they unequivocally won, Battle of Verdun and all that. On Nov. 11, now Veterans Day in the US (well, sorry, the nearest Monday for commercial reasons), they have aserious military parade up the Champs Elysses with the French president utlimately bowing before the flame of the Unkown Soldier under the Arc de Triomphe. I have actually observed these events more than oncein the days when Jacques Chirac was the French president, and these French displays are apparently what has gotten our pathetic POTUS wanting same here.
Anyway, in the end, the French made no big deal about this day, and very few nations did as well, aside from the jet overfly in Britain, where rhey take it pretty seriously still. In the US Trump's embarrasssing meeting with some old vets from WW II barely made any news. The matter here at least is forgetable, and likewise in most of the world.
But there is one place where that is not true and has not been ever since 1945, the former Soviet Union, and its main successorussia, although as noted above for them Victory Day is today, while I am now writing, May 9. In the Soviet period the whole long week between the Workers Day, May Day, and Victory Day, May 9 was a total national holiday. But now May Day has been downgraded and the long holiday has been long gone in Russia. But in the recent years Victory Day, May 9, has been increasingly emphasized and celebratred. Especially since he annexed Crimea and thus brought down on Russia western sanctions, Putin has puffed up this celebration with massive military parades and presentations, with a side aspect of this a revival of Joseph Stalin, the victor in the end of that war.
So this year was supposed to be his utimate presentation. On April 22 there was supposed to be a referndum on a new Russian constittution that would allow Putin to run again in 2024 for two more 8 year terms. But, oh, a pandemic hit and the vote has been put off. Like his pal in Washington, Putin initally dismissed and ingnored the invading virus, although has since put in place a much more severe regime of lockown than anything going on anywhere in the US. But in the last fes days the infection rate has soared wildly out of control in Russia with daily figures of new infections exceeding 10,000 per day, one of the highest rates in the world.
Well, tsk tsk. So, Great Leader Putin had been planning and builuding up towards this grand event that was supposed to succeed his elevation to essentially lifetime leadership like his neighbor in China has, Xi Jinping. But, oooops! The humongous and super grand beyond anything ever seen before, even beyond the shows in Paris that set Trump drooling, was planned to happened today in Moscow on this, the 75th anniversary of their great victory over Hitlerian Germany. But no show.
And it was a great victory, maybe the greatest in all of world history. Nothing else remotely compares. At Yalta it is reported that a reason FDR and Churchill did not push back too hard against Stalin, aside from the hard fact that the Red Army was already sitting in much of Eastern Europe (and especially in Poland), they were aware that something like 26 million Soviet people had died as a result of Hitler's invasion of that nation, with their numbers of dead not even in the same order of magnitude. Many Americans ignorantly think that it was D-Day that did Hitler. No, it was Stalingrad, the bloodiest single battle in all of world history with over a million dead, followed by the battle of Kursk, by far the largest tank battle in history, after which it was all over, with D-Day basically a sideshow to make sure that 1814 would not be repeated, a time when Russian troops did get to Paris after Napoleon's failed invasion of Russia, which led to Russian soldiers demanding drinks, "bistro, bistro!" which French entreprneurs responded to, giving us the bistro.
So, with the possible aside from the flyover in the UK, most of the world outside of Russia has come to view VE Day as forgettable. The remaining vets are indeed over 95 and few in number, and the rest of us, especially in the US, have many other things on our minds. It is forgettable and has been forgotten.
The situation in Russia is more complicated, given the recent focus and buildup related to it by Putin. That the great celebration is not happening is clearly frustrating for Putin. But the word in various rceenteports has been that he is "bored," although I doubt that is really accurate. Anyway, just as he was about to imitate Xi and grab lifelong power, the nasty virus showed up, and while imitated Trump and other authoritarian idiots around the world in initally ignoring it, eventually it blew up in his face and now Russia is shut down, no vote for his supreme leadership, and no massive three quarters of a century celebration of Victory Day. Instead reportedly he has disappeared from public view, hiding in his dacha while nameless underlings deal with the pandemic. It is not his problem. By mnay reports he is "bored."
Barkley Rosser
So, yesterday in UK there was a flyover of planes in celebration of this anniversary, somehow according to the radio report I heard putting out red, white, and blue colors in the sky. Is this for the US helping out with D-Day? I do not know. The only other public demo on May 8 I am aware of was Donald Trump meeting with some WW II vets, all reportedly over 95 years in age, with neither him or any of them for the photo op wearing a face mask, despite the fact that the White House has suddenly become a new epicenter for the coronavirus.
The following nations have a public holiday for May 8 relatd to the victory of the Allies over the Axis powers in Europe: UK, France, French Guiana, French Polynesia, Martinique, Saint Martin, Guadeloupe, Gibralter, New Caledonia, Czech Republic, and Slovakia, which really boils down to three nations at the end of WW II, UK with some associates, France with a lot of associaates, and then the former Czechoslovakia, now slit into two. Nontrivially, Ukraine today has May 8 not a public holiday, but it is a Day of Peace and Reconciliaton, which is suupposed to be recognized.
In the US VE Day as it is still called since for us the war with Japan was more important then, and now that we got done with this distraction in Europe it was now time to get to real business to defeat Japan, well... So, VE Day is below Pearl Harbor Day, D-Day, and VJ Day (Aug, 15) in the general veiw of Americans. As it is, none of these are public holidays, but then, we only lost about a half million or so in the war, well underthe deaths in our Civil War, and also a number well under that who died in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, during the long siege it suffered thanks to Adolf Hitler.
More of the "nations" listed that have public holidays on May 8 are France-related. But unlike Britain with Churchill and all that, for France ultimatlely this holiday is not one they want to emphasize given their embarrassing history of having been defeated by Germany and then having the awful Vichy regime and all that, which they have still barely gotten over. Sure, Aug. 1944 de Gaulle pushed the Grmans out of Paris, with lots of support from US, UK, and Canada, so, well, not all that triumphant, and I checked: no big celebration there on May 8. For them the big one is the prvious war, WW I, which they unequivocally won, Battle of Verdun and all that. On Nov. 11, now Veterans Day in the US (well, sorry, the nearest Monday for commercial reasons), they have aserious military parade up the Champs Elysses with the French president utlimately bowing before the flame of the Unkown Soldier under the Arc de Triomphe. I have actually observed these events more than oncein the days when Jacques Chirac was the French president, and these French displays are apparently what has gotten our pathetic POTUS wanting same here.
Anyway, in the end, the French made no big deal about this day, and very few nations did as well, aside from the jet overfly in Britain, where rhey take it pretty seriously still. In the US Trump's embarrasssing meeting with some old vets from WW II barely made any news. The matter here at least is forgetable, and likewise in most of the world.
But there is one place where that is not true and has not been ever since 1945, the former Soviet Union, and its main successorussia, although as noted above for them Victory Day is today, while I am now writing, May 9. In the Soviet period the whole long week between the Workers Day, May Day, and Victory Day, May 9 was a total national holiday. But now May Day has been downgraded and the long holiday has been long gone in Russia. But in the recent years Victory Day, May 9, has been increasingly emphasized and celebratred. Especially since he annexed Crimea and thus brought down on Russia western sanctions, Putin has puffed up this celebration with massive military parades and presentations, with a side aspect of this a revival of Joseph Stalin, the victor in the end of that war.
So this year was supposed to be his utimate presentation. On April 22 there was supposed to be a referndum on a new Russian constittution that would allow Putin to run again in 2024 for two more 8 year terms. But, oh, a pandemic hit and the vote has been put off. Like his pal in Washington, Putin initally dismissed and ingnored the invading virus, although has since put in place a much more severe regime of lockown than anything going on anywhere in the US. But in the last fes days the infection rate has soared wildly out of control in Russia with daily figures of new infections exceeding 10,000 per day, one of the highest rates in the world.
Well, tsk tsk. So, Great Leader Putin had been planning and builuding up towards this grand event that was supposed to succeed his elevation to essentially lifetime leadership like his neighbor in China has, Xi Jinping. But, oooops! The humongous and super grand beyond anything ever seen before, even beyond the shows in Paris that set Trump drooling, was planned to happened today in Moscow on this, the 75th anniversary of their great victory over Hitlerian Germany. But no show.
And it was a great victory, maybe the greatest in all of world history. Nothing else remotely compares. At Yalta it is reported that a reason FDR and Churchill did not push back too hard against Stalin, aside from the hard fact that the Red Army was already sitting in much of Eastern Europe (and especially in Poland), they were aware that something like 26 million Soviet people had died as a result of Hitler's invasion of that nation, with their numbers of dead not even in the same order of magnitude. Many Americans ignorantly think that it was D-Day that did Hitler. No, it was Stalingrad, the bloodiest single battle in all of world history with over a million dead, followed by the battle of Kursk, by far the largest tank battle in history, after which it was all over, with D-Day basically a sideshow to make sure that 1814 would not be repeated, a time when Russian troops did get to Paris after Napoleon's failed invasion of Russia, which led to Russian soldiers demanding drinks, "bistro, bistro!" which French entreprneurs responded to, giving us the bistro.
So, with the possible aside from the flyover in the UK, most of the world outside of Russia has come to view VE Day as forgettable. The remaining vets are indeed over 95 and few in number, and the rest of us, especially in the US, have many other things on our minds. It is forgettable and has been forgotten.
The situation in Russia is more complicated, given the recent focus and buildup related to it by Putin. That the great celebration is not happening is clearly frustrating for Putin. But the word in various rceenteports has been that he is "bored," although I doubt that is really accurate. Anyway, just as he was about to imitate Xi and grab lifelong power, the nasty virus showed up, and while imitated Trump and other authoritarian idiots around the world in initally ignoring it, eventually it blew up in his face and now Russia is shut down, no vote for his supreme leadership, and no massive three quarters of a century celebration of Victory Day. Instead reportedly he has disappeared from public view, hiding in his dacha while nameless underlings deal with the pandemic. It is not his problem. By mnay reports he is "bored."
Barkley Rosser
Friday, May 8, 2020
What Is the Shape Of This Cyclel As A Letter: V, L, W, J, U, Or Maybe A Lazy J or Wiggly W?
For some time now it has become commonplace for people to describe business cycles by how they resemble one letter or another, although obviously this amounts to a lot of handwaving. But it does provide bright images. Thus Trump and crew seem to believe that the US will experience a V recovery, one that will boom up as rapidly as it fell down, so the sooner we can reopen America the sooner he can get that boomy uptrun to guarantee his reelection. Somehow he fails to understand that if he gets it going too soon, the uptrun is more likely to get sideswiped by a serious Second Wave of the coronvirus tht would turn the upturn back into a downturn, making it into a W, or if, as I suspect, given that the douwnturn we have just seen pushing the unemployment rate upo 10% in two months is truly unprecedented so that the upturn will not be all that fast, the outcome will not be a neat W, but a Wiggly W.
Use of letters is recent, but debates on the shapes of macro fluctuations is very old, dating back into the 19th century. Up until the 1930s, nearly all the discussion focused on "commercial crises" generating sharp downturns that then were asymmetrically followed by slower upturns. This was still the view in 1913 when Wesley Clair Mitchell of the NBER and Columbia published his Business Cycles, coining that term. I have been recently over on Econbrowser taken to describing such a pattern as a "Lazy J." Think of a J but then tilt it to the right so its upslope gets flatter until it is flatter than the downturn. I think this is what we are going to see now in the US, although it could turn into a Wiggly W.
In the 1930s, driven by Mitchell associated at the NBER, it became conmon to use sine curves to describe business cycles, so symmetric, and if one cuts one off at the inflection points going down and up, somethign that looks like a U. Over on Econbrowser, Jeffrey Frankel recently posed that the current situation might end up looking like a U, although I doubt it.
After WW II it looks like quite a few fluctuations actually had more rapid upswings than downturns, asymmetric but in the opposite direction of a Lazy J, more an alert proper J, with a rapid upturn. Over on Econbrowser David Papell posed something like this, although I really see no likelihood of a more rapid upturn to follow this massive downturn we have just seen. This just seems out of the question. My Lazy J looks more likely.
We have also seen some that do look like the V that the Trump gang hopes for. Probably the most obvious and impressive candidate would be the fluctuation that bottomed out in 1982 under Reagan with an unemployment rate ovet 10%, higher even than the peak in 2009 during the Great Recesson. After the deal was cut between Volcker and Baker for no more tax cuts in return Volcker would end his high interest rates after visiting and incoming Mexican Finance Minister Jesus da Silva threatened to default on Mexican debts to New York banks bearing those high interest rates, the evonomy zoomed back upwards through 1983, giving Reagan his "Morning in America" to run for reelection on, taking 49 states, certainly what is the hoping gleam in Trump's eye for now.
Then we have candidate L. Near as I can see the US has nver shown suvh a pattern, but recently John Cochrane was out there posing it as a possibility and claiming that was what we had during and aftwer the Great Recession. We certainly had the sharp decline upfront, but an L suggests that the economy then does not grow at all, simply lies flat. We may have seen such a pattern in Mexico after the 1982 debt crisis and maybe also in Japan in the 1990s after its debt crisis. But in the US we saw growth ranging from 1.5 to 3% annually following the turnaround, certainly not a flat line, although the "no growth" story fits ongstanding GOP propaganda repeated by Trump regarding the performance of the economy under Obama, even though the growth rates after he came in were not noticeably superior to those under Obama.
As it is, what happened then looks like a throwback to the 1800s, and maybe also the most likely scenario now if we avoid another near term downturn, an asymmetric pattern of a sharp downturn followed by a much slower upturn, in short the Lazy J.
Barkley Rosser
Use of letters is recent, but debates on the shapes of macro fluctuations is very old, dating back into the 19th century. Up until the 1930s, nearly all the discussion focused on "commercial crises" generating sharp downturns that then were asymmetrically followed by slower upturns. This was still the view in 1913 when Wesley Clair Mitchell of the NBER and Columbia published his Business Cycles, coining that term. I have been recently over on Econbrowser taken to describing such a pattern as a "Lazy J." Think of a J but then tilt it to the right so its upslope gets flatter until it is flatter than the downturn. I think this is what we are going to see now in the US, although it could turn into a Wiggly W.
In the 1930s, driven by Mitchell associated at the NBER, it became conmon to use sine curves to describe business cycles, so symmetric, and if one cuts one off at the inflection points going down and up, somethign that looks like a U. Over on Econbrowser, Jeffrey Frankel recently posed that the current situation might end up looking like a U, although I doubt it.
After WW II it looks like quite a few fluctuations actually had more rapid upswings than downturns, asymmetric but in the opposite direction of a Lazy J, more an alert proper J, with a rapid upturn. Over on Econbrowser David Papell posed something like this, although I really see no likelihood of a more rapid upturn to follow this massive downturn we have just seen. This just seems out of the question. My Lazy J looks more likely.
We have also seen some that do look like the V that the Trump gang hopes for. Probably the most obvious and impressive candidate would be the fluctuation that bottomed out in 1982 under Reagan with an unemployment rate ovet 10%, higher even than the peak in 2009 during the Great Recesson. After the deal was cut between Volcker and Baker for no more tax cuts in return Volcker would end his high interest rates after visiting and incoming Mexican Finance Minister Jesus da Silva threatened to default on Mexican debts to New York banks bearing those high interest rates, the evonomy zoomed back upwards through 1983, giving Reagan his "Morning in America" to run for reelection on, taking 49 states, certainly what is the hoping gleam in Trump's eye for now.
Then we have candidate L. Near as I can see the US has nver shown suvh a pattern, but recently John Cochrane was out there posing it as a possibility and claiming that was what we had during and aftwer the Great Recession. We certainly had the sharp decline upfront, but an L suggests that the economy then does not grow at all, simply lies flat. We may have seen such a pattern in Mexico after the 1982 debt crisis and maybe also in Japan in the 1990s after its debt crisis. But in the US we saw growth ranging from 1.5 to 3% annually following the turnaround, certainly not a flat line, although the "no growth" story fits ongstanding GOP propaganda repeated by Trump regarding the performance of the economy under Obama, even though the growth rates after he came in were not noticeably superior to those under Obama.
As it is, what happened then looks like a throwback to the 1800s, and maybe also the most likely scenario now if we avoid another near term downturn, an asymmetric pattern of a sharp downturn followed by a much slower upturn, in short the Lazy J.
Barkley Rosser
Thursday, May 7, 2020
RIP John Horton Conway
I am late to issue this RIP as John Horton Conway died on April 11, 2020, having been born in England, Dec. 26, 1937. He died of coovid-19. I was aware of his death when it happened, but have since become aware of things he did that I did not know about that have pushed me to post this.
Conway was one of the world's best known mathematicians, most famous for creating the Game of Life a half century ago in 1970, which was publicized by Martin Gardner in Scientific American. It is what I knew of him mostly about, as the canonical cellular automata model that generated simulation modesl capable of generating chaotic and unprredictable emergent outcomes within a Turing complete framework, the sort of thing that goofy complexity theorists like me salivate over. However, it inspired similar models that have been used in nearly every science, and I am quite sure that such models are being used in the current research push to find a vaccine for the disease that did Conway in. It was an enormous achievement and enormously useful. He deserves recognition for this alone.
I never met him or even saw him speak, but by all accounts he was highly extroverted and lively to the point of becoming at least for awhile "the rock star of mathematics." Not unrelated with that he invented an enormous array of games, none of which I have ever played, but apparently he would invent them on the spot as he interacted with people he met. Of course in some sense the Game of Life is a kind of game, and Conway himself on more than one occasion claimed that doing mathematics is fundamentally a game.
I had known that he did a lot of work in other areas of math, but had not really checked it out in details, but have recently become more aware of just how widely across math his work varied and how important and innovative so much of it was. I shall not list all these areas and theorems and discoveries as it is a long list that will probably be meaningless to most of you if it is just put out here, but anybody who wants to see a pretty complete version of it, well, his Wikipedia entry provides a pretty thorough one.
Anyway, I shall talk a bit more about a couple of the more out there high level stuff that relates to things that my father and I have long been interested in. My late father was a friend of the late Abraham Robinson and someone Robinson consulted with at length when he developed non-standard analysis, presented in a book of that title in 1966. Non-standard analysis allows for the existence of superreal numbers that have infinite values, real numbers larger than any finite real number. The reciprocals of these numbers are infinitesimals, numbers not equal to zero but smaller than any positive real number. These are ideas originated by Leibniz when he independently invented calculus, and allowed for viewing derivatives as ratios of such infinitesimals, an essentially more intuitive way of doiing calculus.
This extension of real numbers into transfinite and infinitesimal values led to further expansions of what might be numbers, with a further extension being hyperreal numbers that can be constructed out of the superreals.
Then in 1979 Conway would push this even further by conceptualizing surreal numbers, an even broader set that includes within it all of these sets, reals, superreals, and hyperreals. To give an idea of how one constructs these numbers one should think in terms of numbers represented by their decimal expansions, which are in effect sums of ever smaller numbers, although in the case of a whol number, the numbers added after the first one are all zero. In any case, for surreal numbers these numbers that get added in the equivalent of the infinite decimal expansion can include powers of infinite and infinitesimal numbers, which can lead to an incredibly array of pretty strange numbers, think something like "infinity plus one," hence deserving the name, surreal numbers.
Another concept he coined, and which reportedly occupied much of his attention in recent years, is that of the Monster group, a name Conway coined (it is also tied to monster moonshine, with the "moonshine" part reflecting how "crazy" all this is, according to Conway). I confess that this object, whose existence has been proven, is something I do not fully understand, although apparently really understanding it was what had Conway so occupied. It is really very complicated.
So, drawing on a lot of ideas in abstract algebra, thi object is a group constructed out of 26 classes of algebras, collections of ordering functions and numbers and relations, finite and infinite, that have important connections with each other and that somehow in total cover the complete group of these mathematical structures. Something Conway did in 1981 was to calculate the dimensionality of the space that this object exists in, which happens to be 196,884. Indeed.
OK, this sounds indeed like something verging on lunacy, if not outright total lunacy, monster moonshine indeed, something of no use whatsoever. However, it turns out that maybe this monster is not as totally useless as it might seem. In 2007, leading string theorist Edward Witten wrote a paper that suggests that in fact this Monster Group may actually be useful in understanding string theory. Sorry, I am not going to try to explain how this might be or is the case, but there it is: this incredibly complicated idea to the point of total mind-blowing may in fact have an application to understanding the deepest structures of the physical world, as string theory is the leading approach to Grand Unified Field Theory of the universe.
So, while the Game of Life probably has more practical uses and applications, and is certainly a whole lot more accessible and comprehensible, Conway also has been operating at some of the most esoteric and difficult limits of mathematics, with some of the most difficult of all to understand may well have practical applications as well.
So, RIP, John Horton Conway.
Barkley Rosser
Conway was one of the world's best known mathematicians, most famous for creating the Game of Life a half century ago in 1970, which was publicized by Martin Gardner in Scientific American. It is what I knew of him mostly about, as the canonical cellular automata model that generated simulation modesl capable of generating chaotic and unprredictable emergent outcomes within a Turing complete framework, the sort of thing that goofy complexity theorists like me salivate over. However, it inspired similar models that have been used in nearly every science, and I am quite sure that such models are being used in the current research push to find a vaccine for the disease that did Conway in. It was an enormous achievement and enormously useful. He deserves recognition for this alone.
I never met him or even saw him speak, but by all accounts he was highly extroverted and lively to the point of becoming at least for awhile "the rock star of mathematics." Not unrelated with that he invented an enormous array of games, none of which I have ever played, but apparently he would invent them on the spot as he interacted with people he met. Of course in some sense the Game of Life is a kind of game, and Conway himself on more than one occasion claimed that doing mathematics is fundamentally a game.
I had known that he did a lot of work in other areas of math, but had not really checked it out in details, but have recently become more aware of just how widely across math his work varied and how important and innovative so much of it was. I shall not list all these areas and theorems and discoveries as it is a long list that will probably be meaningless to most of you if it is just put out here, but anybody who wants to see a pretty complete version of it, well, his Wikipedia entry provides a pretty thorough one.
Anyway, I shall talk a bit more about a couple of the more out there high level stuff that relates to things that my father and I have long been interested in. My late father was a friend of the late Abraham Robinson and someone Robinson consulted with at length when he developed non-standard analysis, presented in a book of that title in 1966. Non-standard analysis allows for the existence of superreal numbers that have infinite values, real numbers larger than any finite real number. The reciprocals of these numbers are infinitesimals, numbers not equal to zero but smaller than any positive real number. These are ideas originated by Leibniz when he independently invented calculus, and allowed for viewing derivatives as ratios of such infinitesimals, an essentially more intuitive way of doiing calculus.
This extension of real numbers into transfinite and infinitesimal values led to further expansions of what might be numbers, with a further extension being hyperreal numbers that can be constructed out of the superreals.
Then in 1979 Conway would push this even further by conceptualizing surreal numbers, an even broader set that includes within it all of these sets, reals, superreals, and hyperreals. To give an idea of how one constructs these numbers one should think in terms of numbers represented by their decimal expansions, which are in effect sums of ever smaller numbers, although in the case of a whol number, the numbers added after the first one are all zero. In any case, for surreal numbers these numbers that get added in the equivalent of the infinite decimal expansion can include powers of infinite and infinitesimal numbers, which can lead to an incredibly array of pretty strange numbers, think something like "infinity plus one," hence deserving the name, surreal numbers.
Another concept he coined, and which reportedly occupied much of his attention in recent years, is that of the Monster group, a name Conway coined (it is also tied to monster moonshine, with the "moonshine" part reflecting how "crazy" all this is, according to Conway). I confess that this object, whose existence has been proven, is something I do not fully understand, although apparently really understanding it was what had Conway so occupied. It is really very complicated.
So, drawing on a lot of ideas in abstract algebra, thi object is a group constructed out of 26 classes of algebras, collections of ordering functions and numbers and relations, finite and infinite, that have important connections with each other and that somehow in total cover the complete group of these mathematical structures. Something Conway did in 1981 was to calculate the dimensionality of the space that this object exists in, which happens to be 196,884. Indeed.
OK, this sounds indeed like something verging on lunacy, if not outright total lunacy, monster moonshine indeed, something of no use whatsoever. However, it turns out that maybe this monster is not as totally useless as it might seem. In 2007, leading string theorist Edward Witten wrote a paper that suggests that in fact this Monster Group may actually be useful in understanding string theory. Sorry, I am not going to try to explain how this might be or is the case, but there it is: this incredibly complicated idea to the point of total mind-blowing may in fact have an application to understanding the deepest structures of the physical world, as string theory is the leading approach to Grand Unified Field Theory of the universe.
So, while the Game of Life probably has more practical uses and applications, and is certainly a whole lot more accessible and comprehensible, Conway also has been operating at some of the most esoteric and difficult limits of mathematics, with some of the most difficult of all to understand may well have practical applications as well.
So, RIP, John Horton Conway.
Barkley Rosser
Tuesday, May 5, 2020
A Very Grey Swan
Keynes and Knight famously simultaneously in 1921 identified the concept of fundamental uncerainty as a situation not understandable by using a probability distribution, an idea popularized by Nassim Taleb just as the 2008 crash happened as a "black swan." Taleb defined white swans as situations describably by Gaussian normal distributions. For situations not full uncertainty or white swans Taleb coined the idea of "grey swans," situations exhibiting "fat tails" and more generally lots of extreme outcomes, but yet possibly describable by probability distributions allowing more readily extreme outcomes.
I think this is what we are dealing with, although I claim no special expertise here. Indeed, for me the issue is whether or not this current pandemic actually a black swan of fundamental uncertainty rather than "just" a very grey swan. The reason it is the latter, despite the highly unusual outcomes on both health and economic outcomes, is that large numbers of experts have been warning for several years that we were facing with high probability a serious pandemic. The current administration has in fact been officially faced scenarios not all that different from what has happened. Among those is a largely ignored study in the president's own Economic Report for last year, where economists at the largely ignored CEA made such a study. But, heck, who in this administration reads the Economic Report of the President, hahhahah!?
So, beyond my wisecracks, a very hard fact is that we do not yet really understand the statistical dynamics of this particular virus. There is a lot more unexplained noise going on, which manifests itself at a superficial level in the wildly changing official projections of what is to come. To pick the greatest extremes, at one point our POTUS declared that while there were 15 cases in the US, this number would soon go to zero, but than not all that long later same individual at one point suggested, based on a model, that deaths in the US could be in the millions. But those numbers hae since been cut way back. But since then we have seen these forecasted numbers going all over the place.
In any case, I am struck by how much bizarre noise there is in all this. So to get personal where I live, Harrisonburg, VA is a hotspot: with a 50,000 population we have 485 cases and over 20 deaths. A city 25 miles to the southwest I once lived in and only slightly smaller, Staunton, has a whopping 14 cases and zero deaths so far. I can think of many similar cases. Why has Greece had very few cases while fellow Med nations Italy and Spain have been among the hardest hit on the planet?
I think it was Einstein who said that the more we know, the more we understand how little we know.
Barkley Rosser
I think this is what we are dealing with, although I claim no special expertise here. Indeed, for me the issue is whether or not this current pandemic actually a black swan of fundamental uncertainty rather than "just" a very grey swan. The reason it is the latter, despite the highly unusual outcomes on both health and economic outcomes, is that large numbers of experts have been warning for several years that we were facing with high probability a serious pandemic. The current administration has in fact been officially faced scenarios not all that different from what has happened. Among those is a largely ignored study in the president's own Economic Report for last year, where economists at the largely ignored CEA made such a study. But, heck, who in this administration reads the Economic Report of the President, hahhahah!?
So, beyond my wisecracks, a very hard fact is that we do not yet really understand the statistical dynamics of this particular virus. There is a lot more unexplained noise going on, which manifests itself at a superficial level in the wildly changing official projections of what is to come. To pick the greatest extremes, at one point our POTUS declared that while there were 15 cases in the US, this number would soon go to zero, but than not all that long later same individual at one point suggested, based on a model, that deaths in the US could be in the millions. But those numbers hae since been cut way back. But since then we have seen these forecasted numbers going all over the place.
In any case, I am struck by how much bizarre noise there is in all this. So to get personal where I live, Harrisonburg, VA is a hotspot: with a 50,000 population we have 485 cases and over 20 deaths. A city 25 miles to the southwest I once lived in and only slightly smaller, Staunton, has a whopping 14 cases and zero deaths so far. I can think of many similar cases. Why has Greece had very few cases while fellow Med nations Italy and Spain have been among the hardest hit on the planet?
I think it was Einstein who said that the more we know, the more we understand how little we know.
Barkley Rosser
Monday, May 4, 2020
Potential Pricing for Remdesivir
The FDA has approved Remdesivir for emergency use and Gilead Science will denote its current 1.5 million vials, which could potentially treat 300 thousand patients as it takes 5 to 10 treatments per patient. The WHO wants more Remdesivir:
The World Health Organization said Monday that it will speak with the U.S. government and Gilead Sciences on how antiviral drug remdesivir could be made more widely available to treat Covid-19 as data of its effectiveness emerges.At some point we will need to consider pricing. This report considers two approaches with the first being to price at the economic cost of production:
For remdesivir, we used evidence on the cost of producing the next course of therapy from an article by Hill et all in the Journal of Virus Eradication (2020). Their methods sought to determine the “minimum” costs of production by calculating the cost of active pharmaceutical ingredients, which is combined with costs of excipients, formulation, packaging and a small profit margin. Their analysis calculated a total cost of producing the “final finished product” of $9.32 US for a 10-day course of treatment. We rounded that amount up to $10 for a 10-day course. If a 5-day course of treatment becomes a recommended course of therapy, then the marginal cost would accordingly shrink to $5.In other words, $1 per vial. The report also estimates a value based price known as Cost-Effectiveness Analysis:
In this preliminary modeling exercise, remdesivir extends life and improves quality of life versus standard of care. In public health emergencies, cost-effectiveness analysis thresholds are often scaled downward, and we feel the pricing estimate related to the threshold of $50,000 per incremental qualityadjusted life year (and equal value of a life-year gained) is the most policy-relevant consideration. In the case of remdesivir, the initial ICER-COVID model suggests a price of approximately $4,500 per treatment course, whether that course is 10 or 5 daysIn other words each patient would generate $4500 for the course of the treatments. Even if we assume 10 vials per patient, that comes to a price equal to $450 per vial. Someone call Dean Baker as he might want to write another one of his classic condemnations of the patent system. While I agree with the WHO on their call for an all hands on deck on getting this treatment produced and given to the patients who would benefit the most of this treatment, the policy debate over pricing should begin immediately. Update: Gilead Sciences is serious about ramping up production:
Gilead is in discussions with some of the world’s leading chemical and pharmaceutical manufacturing companies about their ability, under voluntary licenses, to produce remdesivir for Europe, Asia and the developing world through at least 2022. The company is also negotiating long-term voluntary licenses with several generic drug makers in India and Pakistan to produce remdesivir for developing countries. Gilead will provide appropriate technology transfers to facilitate this production. Finally, the company is in active discussions with the Medicines Patent Pool, which Gilead has partnered with for many years, to license remdesivir for developing countries. To further facilitate access in developing countries during this acute health crisis, Gilead is in advanced discussions with UNICEF to utilize their extensive experience providing medicines to low- and middle-income countries during emergency and humanitarian crises to deliver remdesivir using its well-established distribution networks.
Saturday, May 2, 2020
Planet of the Humans: A De-Growth Manifesto
Planet of the Humans, directed by Jeff Gibbs but featuring Michael Moore as its “presenter”, has been viewed by almost five and a half million people since it popped up on YouTube last month. In case you haven’t heard, it’s quite a provocation, and the response from almost every quarter of the environmental movement has been outrage. It traffics in disinformation and scurrilous personal attacks, they say, and I can’t argue. Two big problems: it falsely claims that more carbon is emitted over the lifespan of a photovoltaic cell than by generating the same energy through fossil fuels, and it uses dishonest editing techniques to portray activist Bill McKibben as having sold out to billionaire ecological exploiters. You can read about the misrepresentations elsewhere; my point is that, whatever else it is, the film is a logically consistent statement of the de-growth position.
Alas, much of the “left” has concluded that the chief obstacle to meeting our climate and other environmental challenges is the “capitalist” faith in economic growth. Capitalism requires growth, they say, and growth is destroying the earth, therefore we must abolish capitalism and embrace de-growth. Anything less is a sellout.
This philosophy is central to Planet; twice (at least) Gibbs proclaims, “You can’t have endless growth on a finite planet.” He shows charts depicting human population and consumption growth that portray us as a metastasizing cancer. Early in the film, when he’s setting the tone for what’s to come, he asks, “Is it possible for machines made by industrial civilization to save us from industrial civilization?”
But movies are not just words; they make their arguments visually as well. Planet has horrific scenes of mining and logging, as well as speeded up, frenzied shots of manufacturing, warehousing and shipping. It ends with heartbreaking footage of doomed orangutans amid a wasteland of deforestation. The message is clear: human use of nature is a travesty, and any activity that imposes a cost on Mother Earth is immoral.
There are two fundamental problems with this worldview. The first is that it is based on the mistaken idea that all economic value derives from the despoliation of nature, the second that it can’t be implemented by a viable program. Let’s look at each.
While Gibbs is the director and narrator of the film, its guru is one Ozzie Zehner, not only interviewed on camera as an expert but also, remarkably, its producer as well. Zehner is the author of a book entitled Green Illusions, and he has drunk deeply from the de-growth Kool Aid. In an article he wrote a year after his book, he announces
Meanwhile, the attack on renewable energy, anti-factual as it is, is of a piece with this deep-seated hostility to “industrial civilization”. If economic production is the enemy, then how can green energy technologies, which embody this production in themselves and allow us to continue consuming energy-using products, be OK? There has to be something wrong with them, and mere evidence can’t be allowed to get in the way. Imagine trying to make a movie along the general lines of Planet without these attacks on wind and solar installations. Can’t be done.
The other problem is that, aside from economic catastrophes like the 2008 financial crisis and the current coronavirus shutdown, there isn’t a way to implement the de-growth “program”. And that’s what we see in the movie, too. At the end, as we stare at those soulful orangutans, we feel a load of guilt but no sense of what we can do about it. If the underlying problem is too many people, who among us should be chosen for extermination? Or if it’s too much consumption, who will be made to cut back and what will they have to give up? Or is there no program at all but just a mood, apologetic for who we are and how we live?
The worst thing that can happen to an irrational idea is for it to be taken seriously and followed to its conclusions. That’s the fate of de-growtherism and Planet of the Humans.
Alas, much of the “left” has concluded that the chief obstacle to meeting our climate and other environmental challenges is the “capitalist” faith in economic growth. Capitalism requires growth, they say, and growth is destroying the earth, therefore we must abolish capitalism and embrace de-growth. Anything less is a sellout.
This philosophy is central to Planet; twice (at least) Gibbs proclaims, “You can’t have endless growth on a finite planet.” He shows charts depicting human population and consumption growth that portray us as a metastasizing cancer. Early in the film, when he’s setting the tone for what’s to come, he asks, “Is it possible for machines made by industrial civilization to save us from industrial civilization?”
But movies are not just words; they make their arguments visually as well. Planet has horrific scenes of mining and logging, as well as speeded up, frenzied shots of manufacturing, warehousing and shipping. It ends with heartbreaking footage of doomed orangutans amid a wasteland of deforestation. The message is clear: human use of nature is a travesty, and any activity that imposes a cost on Mother Earth is immoral.
There are two fundamental problems with this worldview. The first is that it is based on the mistaken idea that all economic value derives from the despoliation of nature, the second that it can’t be implemented by a viable program. Let’s look at each.
While Gibbs is the director and narrator of the film, its guru is one Ozzie Zehner, not only interviewed on camera as an expert but also, remarkably, its producer as well. Zehner is the author of a book entitled Green Illusions, and he has drunk deeply from the de-growth Kool Aid. In an article he wrote a year after his book, he announces
The cost of manufactured goods ultimately boils down to two things: natural resource extraction, and profit. Extraction is largely based on fossil-fuel inputs. Profit, in this broad stroke, is essentially a promise to extract more in the future. Generally speaking, if a supposedly green machine costs more than its conventional rival, then more resources had to be claimed to make it possible.There it is, quite directly: economic value equals resource use. Truly, this can only be called an anti-labor theory of value. If I see two chairs in a store, one for $60 and the other for $600, the second has to consume about ten times the resources of the first—as if human skill, knowledge and care have nothing to do with it. Crazy, but that’s what you have to believe if you think that the only way to reduce our burden on nature is to de-grow consumption. (The alternative, of course, is to replace the degradation of the natural world by an expansion of the application of human skill, knowledge and care.)
Meanwhile, the attack on renewable energy, anti-factual as it is, is of a piece with this deep-seated hostility to “industrial civilization”. If economic production is the enemy, then how can green energy technologies, which embody this production in themselves and allow us to continue consuming energy-using products, be OK? There has to be something wrong with them, and mere evidence can’t be allowed to get in the way. Imagine trying to make a movie along the general lines of Planet without these attacks on wind and solar installations. Can’t be done.
The other problem is that, aside from economic catastrophes like the 2008 financial crisis and the current coronavirus shutdown, there isn’t a way to implement the de-growth “program”. And that’s what we see in the movie, too. At the end, as we stare at those soulful orangutans, we feel a load of guilt but no sense of what we can do about it. If the underlying problem is too many people, who among us should be chosen for extermination? Or if it’s too much consumption, who will be made to cut back and what will they have to give up? Or is there no program at all but just a mood, apologetic for who we are and how we live?
The worst thing that can happen to an irrational idea is for it to be taken seriously and followed to its conclusions. That’s the fate of de-growtherism and Planet of the Humans.
Friday, May 1, 2020
Donald Trump Goes Absolutely Bonkers Over China
Yesterday President Trump erupted with a series of demands and threat against China, focusing on various claims about its role in the current pandemic. I have here noted some issues with China's conduct, but Trump makes it completely impossible that there will be any of the much-needed cooperation between the US and China to overcome this virus. He has gone absolutely bonkers.
He has now threatened to remove China's sovereign immunity so people can sue it, with a former lawyer of his organization, George Sorial now of Berman and Associates, cooking up a class action suit against China; a threat to stop paying interest on US bonds held by China, which he probably will not do because it occurs to him that this default on the US national debt might "damage the sacred standing of the dollar" duh; and finally to impose yet more tariffs on China, a threat that promptly sent the stock market plunging after several days of rising, although we know he really likes putting tariffs on China. Probably the first of these would be the least harmful and the most likely he will do, very noisy but not amounting to too muc in the end as China will just ignore it.
I note that in this press conference he claimed that he has seen intelligence showing a "high probability" that the virus came out of a Wuhan lab. So far no other sources have said that, although by all reports that possibility has not been ruled out. But by this almost certain lie Trump has almost certainly killed any remaining chance that China might cooperate with the US on really determining the ultimate origin of the virus, something that would be scientifically and medically useful. It may be that this origin will be discovered, but it will not be through such cooperation. It is completely reasonable that China will resist something they perceive as possibly leading to them being denounced and sued.
My own theory as to what triggered yesteeday's outburst is that he reportedly blew up at his campaign chied, Brad Parscal, onWedneday when Parscale reportedly showed him serious polls showing him losing to Biden in most of the swing states. He apparently was yelling and using the "f word." of course public polling has been showing this for a long time, but Trump has apparenly up until Wednesday simply ignored or written off such polls. In any case, this going after China big time and hard looks to me to be his response to these bad polls, a desperate attempt to regain an electoral edge by an aggressive foreign policy, one that is potentially very dangerous and damaging in this current situation, which apparently some of his economic advisers understand. But he is reportedly now leaning to his national security hardliners like SecState Mike Pompeo. This is not at all good news.
Barkley Rossr
PS: Happy May Day everybody!
He has now threatened to remove China's sovereign immunity so people can sue it, with a former lawyer of his organization, George Sorial now of Berman and Associates, cooking up a class action suit against China; a threat to stop paying interest on US bonds held by China, which he probably will not do because it occurs to him that this default on the US national debt might "damage the sacred standing of the dollar" duh; and finally to impose yet more tariffs on China, a threat that promptly sent the stock market plunging after several days of rising, although we know he really likes putting tariffs on China. Probably the first of these would be the least harmful and the most likely he will do, very noisy but not amounting to too muc in the end as China will just ignore it.
I note that in this press conference he claimed that he has seen intelligence showing a "high probability" that the virus came out of a Wuhan lab. So far no other sources have said that, although by all reports that possibility has not been ruled out. But by this almost certain lie Trump has almost certainly killed any remaining chance that China might cooperate with the US on really determining the ultimate origin of the virus, something that would be scientifically and medically useful. It may be that this origin will be discovered, but it will not be through such cooperation. It is completely reasonable that China will resist something they perceive as possibly leading to them being denounced and sued.
My own theory as to what triggered yesteeday's outburst is that he reportedly blew up at his campaign chied, Brad Parscal, onWedneday when Parscale reportedly showed him serious polls showing him losing to Biden in most of the swing states. He apparently was yelling and using the "f word." of course public polling has been showing this for a long time, but Trump has apparenly up until Wednesday simply ignored or written off such polls. In any case, this going after China big time and hard looks to me to be his response to these bad polls, a desperate attempt to regain an electoral edge by an aggressive foreign policy, one that is potentially very dangerous and damaging in this current situation, which apparently some of his economic advisers understand. But he is reportedly now leaning to his national security hardliners like SecState Mike Pompeo. This is not at all good news.
Barkley Rossr
PS: Happy May Day everybody!
RIP Robert May
Robert May died on April 28 at age 84 of unreported causes. He has been described as "the grandfather of chaos theory," which I think exaggerates, but he was the second person to adopt the term after James Yorke first applied to a porticular type of irregular nonlinear dynamics subject to the "butterfly effect" of sensitive dependence on initial conditions (butterfy effect having been coined by the late Edward Lorenz to climate modeld, a reason we cannot make weather forecasts beyond a week or so usually), well ahead of May's work. But May was one one of the most influential people working on chaos theory as well as many other important dynamical issues in a variety of disciplines, including ecology, medicine (he modeled pandemics), as well as economics and finance.
From Australia originally, he ended up in Britain where he served as Chief Science Adviser 1995-2000, which got him knighted in 1997, then made Baron of Oxford in 2000, and then an Order of Merit in 2001. He has been pretty much universally admired, and his work has long been influential on mine as well as on that of many others, even predating my interest in chaos theory when I read his work on dynamics in ecosystems, which has been highly influential and original.
Probably his most famous paper, in which he was the first to suggest that chaos theory might be applicable to economics, along with many other disciplines, was "Simple mathematical models with very complicated dynamics," Nature, 1976, 261, 471-477. May he rest in peace.
Barkley Rosser
From Australia originally, he ended up in Britain where he served as Chief Science Adviser 1995-2000, which got him knighted in 1997, then made Baron of Oxford in 2000, and then an Order of Merit in 2001. He has been pretty much universally admired, and his work has long been influential on mine as well as on that of many others, even predating my interest in chaos theory when I read his work on dynamics in ecosystems, which has been highly influential and original.
Probably his most famous paper, in which he was the first to suggest that chaos theory might be applicable to economics, along with many other disciplines, was "Simple mathematical models with very complicated dynamics," Nature, 1976, 261, 471-477. May he rest in peace.
Barkley Rosser
Wednesday, April 29, 2020
Which Nations Have Most Rapid Rate Of Increase In Deaths Per Million from SARS-Cov-2?
As of earlier tody, 4/29/20,. according to "Our World in Data" ourworldindata.org/coronavirus, there are currently nine nations that based on looking at the three-day rolling average, have rates of increase of more than 5 per million per day. They are in order with their rates:
Belgium 15.97
Ireland 10.73
UK 9.2
Spain 9.01
Sweden 8.38
Italy 7.82
France 7.32
USA 6.2
Netherlands 6.13.
For what it is worth, many of these are declining, although source only showed this over time for a sub-sample of these (not including Sweden, but including Canada, whose rate of increase is accelerating)..
Barkley Rosser
Belgium 15.97
Ireland 10.73
UK 9.2
Spain 9.01
Sweden 8.38
Italy 7.82
France 7.32
USA 6.2
Netherlands 6.13.
For what it is worth, many of these are declining, although source only showed this over time for a sub-sample of these (not including Sweden, but including Canada, whose rate of increase is accelerating)..
Barkley Rosser
Tuesday, April 28, 2020
An Update on Shadow Government
Not only is the current level of testing for the coronavirus insufficient, the tests themselves are flawed. Read this summary by infectious disease specialist Michael Osterholm and a coauthor for particulars. Their key policy conclusion is
A blue-ribbon panel of public health, laboratory and medical experts, ethicists, legal scholars and elected officials should be convened immediately to set out a road map with realistic goals for testing and contact-tracing.If we had a reliable government, it would get this done, but we don’t. Concretely, one of the main jobs of a shadow government organized by Democrats would be to assemble this group and give it a regular, high profile platform.
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