Bari Weiss talks with an interventionist; Ed West explains lockdown blowback; Freddie deBoer and Scott Alexander on the Null Hypothesis; Tyler Cowen and Scott Sumner vs. Bryan Caplan
I think its a lot more likely that the polling on pandemic measures was simply bad in the following ways:
1) Who answers the polls.
2) How the question is phrased.
3) What information the person answering the poll is trying to convey to the pollster (this is not necessarily the same as what they are literally saying).
4) How such answers correspond to revealed preferences.
Simply put, the people conducting the polls wanted and expected a certain kind of answer and then uncritically accepted it. I suspect the polling has been bad for most of the pandemic but especially in the post-vaccine era.
That bad polling data was probably the driver behind the second wave of pandemic theatre during the Delta and Omicron waves. Biden correctly tried to declare victory after vaccines and even shocked people by trying to get rid of masks and crafting a very simple pro-vaccine policy (get the vaccine, take off your mask). Then when Delta came he and others saw a bunch of polls that said abandoning that for shrill COVID hawking would be politically popular, and instead it backfired spectacularly because the polling was bad for the above reasons.
This isn't limited to COVID. Pollsters have been getting worse and worse at basically everything for many years now. Either because they are less competent or because they more and more feel pressured to get the "right" poll results. The inaccurate skew is almost always for the left/PC position. One reason the Democratic Party has swerved progressive is that a misplaced confidence in polling has led them to believe this progressive swing is more popular than it actually is.
Re: "Tyler is accusing Bryan Caplan of using too much economics and not enough sociology. Robin Hanson sides with Caplan." [Robin writes: "I think Bryan sees himself correctly has not having much useful advice to offer on how to change cultures."]
But economics does have useful advice on how to change cultures: "Incentives matter" & "Free to choose". Examples:
a) A key finding in 'law & economics': Swift and certain punishment deters wrongdoing. (Severity of punishment matters much less, if punishment is swift and certain.)
b) Always treat persons as individuals.
c) Discourage excuse-making.
d) Practice tough love when necessary.
Collective boot-strapping is crucial in one dimension: Every authority figure (teachers, employers, parents, coaches, cops, etc) should be mindful of 'station and duty' in culture.
PS: Props to Arnold Kling, who has been ahead of "The Science" on inflation. Bryan Caplan's blogpost essentially echoes some points from Arnold's early blogposts on inflation.
I'm convinced Cowen is being Straussian and doesn't really mean it. Let me explain.
A classic Straussian signal is a jarringly uncharacteristic drop in rigor, such that any careful reader familiar with the author comes across some error sticking out like a sore thumb and suddenly perks up and reacts, "Huh? Wait, what? What a silly thing to say, surely he's smarter and knows better than to ... ohhh ... I see." A signal must be plausibly deniable, but not *too* subtle.
I think he is helping out his friends via publicity with a bit of "praising with faint damning" marketing.
And he usually does this in a way that preserves relations with influential progressives and keeps him off the high-value-target list, for example, by saying something kind of strategically imprecise but which resembles the expression of sympathy for and alignment with one of their mantras or tenets.
You can handwave anything with 'culture', and everybody knows it. "Making it harder for people to make no-brainer decisions" is conspicuously counter to the common sense expression of the causal relation, that is, "making it easier for people to make the opposite, bad decisions," which may be 'important' but is not quite as 'deep' a question after all. "Men worth marrying" begs exactly this question.
He lobs these softballs at Caplan and Hanson who then reliably hit them out of the park.
I don't think they are 'in' on it, but I suspect they suspect what's really going on, and are playing along. Not just that, but one doesn't have to pass the Ideological Turing Test with a perfect score for these guys to predict with very high accuracy exactly how they are going to respond to Cowen's points. I did this for Hanson and he said exactly what I guessed he would say. This is nothing to brag about precisely because Cowen makes those points in such a way that the responses from the mainstream econ perspective that Caplan and Hanson would articulate are so typical and obvious that they don't require any special genius or creativity.
Maybe it's a mere incidental benefit, but the effect is as if he is outsourcing the making of socially undesirable counterarguments to folks like Caplan and Hanson while simultaneously driving traffic to those counterarguments under the guise of disagreeing with them.
I've read Cowen's stuff in various outlets and of course across many books, not quite since the beginning of MR, but nearly as long, going back nearly two decades. And one sees the same thing over and over. Every time there is any kind of publicly available debate or conversation transcript between Cowen and one of those guys, it's the same thing: he says something kind of uncharacteristically easy to rebut or just tangential, like he's letting them win at chess, and then they use the opportunity to take the queen.
"They are starting to wonder if it wasn’t all some weird dream".
Hopefully they'll also start to wonder, why no one (with power) was willing/ able to get to court to challenge lockdowns' constitutionality, esp. after the first "crisis" period of 30-60 days.
How could it be, that governors have unilateral authority to lock down their states *indefinitely*, when (at least since the War Powers Act came to be), Presidents must get Congressional approval after 60 days?
Something that I don't really understand about the 'boost immigration by 3x' argument by Cowen, portrayed in the post as a moderate position between restriction, stasis, and Caplanism is that the full political and state costs associated with immigration are rarely directly addressed by advocates in the US context, whereas in the context of contemporary debates on the same topic in Europe, the issue is central. For example, the high state burden of some classes of immigrant to Sweden were central in the political flip-flop in that country. Cultural issues are also perhaps easier to raise in Europe, but not by much compared to many of the contemporary US taboos around the topic.
What Sweden cannot do meaningfully that the US does do in very significant amounts is to enact major foreign investment projects and to coerce foreign governments to do what we want. For example, it is probably easier to coerce Mexico to enact a US-friendly policy than it is to fight for a domestic policy in the US. Mexico is within the US free trade area. If the goal is to create "1 Billion Americans," or to otherwise truly "Make Average Over," it is probably less destabilizing to shift hundreds of millions more into a larger American free trade area than it is to give them all expensive citizenship. Unlike the EU, which tries to give political representation to member nations that don't deserve it and can't handle it, we don't have to make those mistakes.
If the US has the capacity, for example, to educate all of Guatemala and El Salvador to a reasonable industrial standard, we should be able to do it more cheaply in Spanish and in their home countries than we can do it here in the US. The economic arguments so often get conflated improperly with what are really bids for political power here in the US. If the goal is to integrate a billion people into a free trade area for economic reasons, we don't need political union for that, and we don't need immigration. It's very strange to see fields like International Relations (not to mention the business world, which is all about reaping bonuses from barrier-free international trade) obsess over free trade areas whereas so much of the US economics profession obsesses over domestic political and fiscal policies that they have no hope of ever enacting. This would be an extension of the 'Charter Cities' argument to 'Charter Nations,' and yes I am just suggesting that indirect colonialism is a significantly more workable policy than invite-the-world.
Brayan is right about shortages / prices. But he oversimplifies the economics, and avoids the complex issues of substitutes and near- substitutes, as well as production which is semi-inventory as it is stored at the factory, or in the distribution chain, before it arrives in a retail location available for being taken home.
Sumner seems to be only semi-disagreeing with Caplan by redefining AD as spending. The substitution of non-supply chain products seems one of the biggest effects not discussed.
New technology — the internet — was a necessary condition for extended lockdowns. I have in mind Zoom, Amazon, Netflix, mobile phones. Zoom enables elites and white-collar employees to work from home for extended periods, while ‘essential workers’ deliver goods to them. Netflix and mobile phones provide home entertainment and virtual social interaction.
Public-health authorities pivoted to dress up sectional interest of the Zoom class as the public good.
No internet (no Zoom, no Amazon, no Netflix, no mobile phones) = No lockdowns.
Thought experiment: Imagine a Covid-19 pandemic in, say, 1990. Would there have been lockdowns?
I'm not saying that the internet was a sufficient cause of broad support for lockdowns. Perhaps commenters will list additional factors that substantially increased the probability of broad support for lockdowns.
Pre-k (especially Headstart) is now a jobs program, possibly even a job training program. Why would you expect any other results? The early studies had well trained employees and even PhD students, now you have high schools drops and GEDs.
People who were skeptical of initial anti-spread measures did not frame it properly as opposition to sub-optimal policies to deal with the externalities of infection. Too much was just denunciation of obvious excesses without providing better alternatives and came across as if the best thing to do was nothing.
"in the current environment, prices low enough to create shortages are many times more common than prices high enough to create surpluses." This was certainly true in the early months of the pandemic. Instead we saw a fall in prices, clearly an indication that the Fed was not doing enough to keep inflation on target. (But also firms' pricing procedures were sorely tried. Grocery stores are not equipped to dynamically adjust the price of TP so that there is never a shortage.)
But today? I think there is enough room in current inflation rates for relative prices to move as much as they need to. The Fed is right to start tightening a bit to get inflation expectations back down to target. It probably should have started a back in September.
I had a really hard time thinking that Sumner is not deliberately misleading Caplan. He says Caplan:
"does not want to raise aggregate demand."
but what Caplan actually says is:
"I’m not saying that we need more monetary or fiscal stimulus. Quite the opposite. Aggregate Demand policy has been absurdly expansionary for over a year."
Saying you don't want more stimulus is obviously not the same as saying "there must be no change in aggregate demand".
I read those posts over a couple times and am still trying to figure out why Sumner is disagreeing. It seems to me that even within the AS/AD framework, what Caplan is saying is perfectly valid. There's plenty of "potential" demand. Supply is weak, and the main lever to increase supply is for suppliers to raise wages and induce those folks who don't want to work at current wages to become employed.
I did not understand the critique of the macro vs. micro argument re: inflation. Aren't both statements true? Rising prices for some goods/services will relieve shortages, but could reduce overall spending. In the aggregate, however, people may be better off as they are getting more aggregate utility from what they want to consume.
I think its a lot more likely that the polling on pandemic measures was simply bad in the following ways:
1) Who answers the polls.
2) How the question is phrased.
3) What information the person answering the poll is trying to convey to the pollster (this is not necessarily the same as what they are literally saying).
4) How such answers correspond to revealed preferences.
Simply put, the people conducting the polls wanted and expected a certain kind of answer and then uncritically accepted it. I suspect the polling has been bad for most of the pandemic but especially in the post-vaccine era.
That bad polling data was probably the driver behind the second wave of pandemic theatre during the Delta and Omicron waves. Biden correctly tried to declare victory after vaccines and even shocked people by trying to get rid of masks and crafting a very simple pro-vaccine policy (get the vaccine, take off your mask). Then when Delta came he and others saw a bunch of polls that said abandoning that for shrill COVID hawking would be politically popular, and instead it backfired spectacularly because the polling was bad for the above reasons.
This isn't limited to COVID. Pollsters have been getting worse and worse at basically everything for many years now. Either because they are less competent or because they more and more feel pressured to get the "right" poll results. The inaccurate skew is almost always for the left/PC position. One reason the Democratic Party has swerved progressive is that a misplaced confidence in polling has led them to believe this progressive swing is more popular than it actually is.
Re: "Tyler is accusing Bryan Caplan of using too much economics and not enough sociology. Robin Hanson sides with Caplan." [Robin writes: "I think Bryan sees himself correctly has not having much useful advice to offer on how to change cultures."]
But economics does have useful advice on how to change cultures: "Incentives matter" & "Free to choose". Examples:
a) A key finding in 'law & economics': Swift and certain punishment deters wrongdoing. (Severity of punishment matters much less, if punishment is swift and certain.)
b) Always treat persons as individuals.
c) Discourage excuse-making.
d) Practice tough love when necessary.
Collective boot-strapping is crucial in one dimension: Every authority figure (teachers, employers, parents, coaches, cops, etc) should be mindful of 'station and duty' in culture.
PS: Props to Arnold Kling, who has been ahead of "The Science" on inflation. Bryan Caplan's blogpost essentially echoes some points from Arnold's early blogposts on inflation.
"Robin Hanson sides with Caplan."
I'm convinced Cowen is being Straussian and doesn't really mean it. Let me explain.
A classic Straussian signal is a jarringly uncharacteristic drop in rigor, such that any careful reader familiar with the author comes across some error sticking out like a sore thumb and suddenly perks up and reacts, "Huh? Wait, what? What a silly thing to say, surely he's smarter and knows better than to ... ohhh ... I see." A signal must be plausibly deniable, but not *too* subtle.
I think he is helping out his friends via publicity with a bit of "praising with faint damning" marketing.
And he usually does this in a way that preserves relations with influential progressives and keeps him off the high-value-target list, for example, by saying something kind of strategically imprecise but which resembles the expression of sympathy for and alignment with one of their mantras or tenets.
You can handwave anything with 'culture', and everybody knows it. "Making it harder for people to make no-brainer decisions" is conspicuously counter to the common sense expression of the causal relation, that is, "making it easier for people to make the opposite, bad decisions," which may be 'important' but is not quite as 'deep' a question after all. "Men worth marrying" begs exactly this question.
He lobs these softballs at Caplan and Hanson who then reliably hit them out of the park.
I don't think they are 'in' on it, but I suspect they suspect what's really going on, and are playing along. Not just that, but one doesn't have to pass the Ideological Turing Test with a perfect score for these guys to predict with very high accuracy exactly how they are going to respond to Cowen's points. I did this for Hanson and he said exactly what I guessed he would say. This is nothing to brag about precisely because Cowen makes those points in such a way that the responses from the mainstream econ perspective that Caplan and Hanson would articulate are so typical and obvious that they don't require any special genius or creativity.
Maybe it's a mere incidental benefit, but the effect is as if he is outsourcing the making of socially undesirable counterarguments to folks like Caplan and Hanson while simultaneously driving traffic to those counterarguments under the guise of disagreeing with them.
I've read Cowen's stuff in various outlets and of course across many books, not quite since the beginning of MR, but nearly as long, going back nearly two decades. And one sees the same thing over and over. Every time there is any kind of publicly available debate or conversation transcript between Cowen and one of those guys, it's the same thing: he says something kind of uncharacteristically easy to rebut or just tangential, like he's letting them win at chess, and then they use the opportunity to take the queen.
"They are starting to wonder if it wasn’t all some weird dream".
Hopefully they'll also start to wonder, why no one (with power) was willing/ able to get to court to challenge lockdowns' constitutionality, esp. after the first "crisis" period of 30-60 days.
How could it be, that governors have unilateral authority to lock down their states *indefinitely*, when (at least since the War Powers Act came to be), Presidents must get Congressional approval after 60 days?
Something that I don't really understand about the 'boost immigration by 3x' argument by Cowen, portrayed in the post as a moderate position between restriction, stasis, and Caplanism is that the full political and state costs associated with immigration are rarely directly addressed by advocates in the US context, whereas in the context of contemporary debates on the same topic in Europe, the issue is central. For example, the high state burden of some classes of immigrant to Sweden were central in the political flip-flop in that country. Cultural issues are also perhaps easier to raise in Europe, but not by much compared to many of the contemporary US taboos around the topic.
What Sweden cannot do meaningfully that the US does do in very significant amounts is to enact major foreign investment projects and to coerce foreign governments to do what we want. For example, it is probably easier to coerce Mexico to enact a US-friendly policy than it is to fight for a domestic policy in the US. Mexico is within the US free trade area. If the goal is to create "1 Billion Americans," or to otherwise truly "Make Average Over," it is probably less destabilizing to shift hundreds of millions more into a larger American free trade area than it is to give them all expensive citizenship. Unlike the EU, which tries to give political representation to member nations that don't deserve it and can't handle it, we don't have to make those mistakes.
If the US has the capacity, for example, to educate all of Guatemala and El Salvador to a reasonable industrial standard, we should be able to do it more cheaply in Spanish and in their home countries than we can do it here in the US. The economic arguments so often get conflated improperly with what are really bids for political power here in the US. If the goal is to integrate a billion people into a free trade area for economic reasons, we don't need political union for that, and we don't need immigration. It's very strange to see fields like International Relations (not to mention the business world, which is all about reaping bonuses from barrier-free international trade) obsess over free trade areas whereas so much of the US economics profession obsesses over domestic political and fiscal policies that they have no hope of ever enacting. This would be an extension of the 'Charter Cities' argument to 'Charter Nations,' and yes I am just suggesting that indirect colonialism is a significantly more workable policy than invite-the-world.
Brayan is right about shortages / prices. But he oversimplifies the economics, and avoids the complex issues of substitutes and near- substitutes, as well as production which is semi-inventory as it is stored at the factory, or in the distribution chain, before it arrives in a retail location available for being taken home.
Sumner seems to be only semi-disagreeing with Caplan by redefining AD as spending. The substitution of non-supply chain products seems one of the biggest effects not discussed.
Re: Broad support for lockdowns.
New technology — the internet — was a necessary condition for extended lockdowns. I have in mind Zoom, Amazon, Netflix, mobile phones. Zoom enables elites and white-collar employees to work from home for extended periods, while ‘essential workers’ deliver goods to them. Netflix and mobile phones provide home entertainment and virtual social interaction.
Public-health authorities pivoted to dress up sectional interest of the Zoom class as the public good.
No internet (no Zoom, no Amazon, no Netflix, no mobile phones) = No lockdowns.
Thought experiment: Imagine a Covid-19 pandemic in, say, 1990. Would there have been lockdowns?
I'm not saying that the internet was a sufficient cause of broad support for lockdowns. Perhaps commenters will list additional factors that substantially increased the probability of broad support for lockdowns.
Pre-k (especially Headstart) is now a jobs program, possibly even a job training program. Why would you expect any other results? The early studies had well trained employees and even PhD students, now you have high schools drops and GEDs.
"Lockdown had consistently strong support."
People who were skeptical of initial anti-spread measures did not frame it properly as opposition to sub-optimal policies to deal with the externalities of infection. Too much was just denunciation of obvious excesses without providing better alternatives and came across as if the best thing to do was nothing.
"the determinants of disparities in outcomes include factors that do not correspond to what I think of as racism."
Exactly. There is a difference between "racism" and "systemic racism."
"in the current environment, prices low enough to create shortages are many times more common than prices high enough to create surpluses." This was certainly true in the early months of the pandemic. Instead we saw a fall in prices, clearly an indication that the Fed was not doing enough to keep inflation on target. (But also firms' pricing procedures were sorely tried. Grocery stores are not equipped to dynamically adjust the price of TP so that there is never a shortage.)
But today? I think there is enough room in current inflation rates for relative prices to move as much as they need to. The Fed is right to start tightening a bit to get inflation expectations back down to target. It probably should have started a back in September.
I had a really hard time thinking that Sumner is not deliberately misleading Caplan. He says Caplan:
"does not want to raise aggregate demand."
but what Caplan actually says is:
"I’m not saying that we need more monetary or fiscal stimulus. Quite the opposite. Aggregate Demand policy has been absurdly expansionary for over a year."
Saying you don't want more stimulus is obviously not the same as saying "there must be no change in aggregate demand".
I read those posts over a couple times and am still trying to figure out why Sumner is disagreeing. It seems to me that even within the AS/AD framework, what Caplan is saying is perfectly valid. There's plenty of "potential" demand. Supply is weak, and the main lever to increase supply is for suppliers to raise wages and induce those folks who don't want to work at current wages to become employed.
I did not understand the critique of the macro vs. micro argument re: inflation. Aren't both statements true? Rising prices for some goods/services will relieve shortages, but could reduce overall spending. In the aggregate, however, people may be better off as they are getting more aggregate utility from what they want to consume.