Figure 1 in the Wallace et al paper on excess deaths by party seems to actually demonstrate the opposite of their abstract – ie that vaccines don’t do much, if anything for mortality. Taken individually, there is essentially no improvement in excess deaths from the pre-vaccine wave to the post-vaccine wave for either party despite the fact that a majority of the most vulnerable got vaccinated, even among republicans. If vaccines truly worked to reduce death, we would see both parties’ mortality drop *significantly* given the large number of vaccinations administered, but with democrats perhaps dropping further. We don’t see that at all. In fact, if the timeline of the graph were unlabeled, no one could possibly fill in the date where vaccination began, which seems like it should be a prerequisite to claiming a breakpoint.
This seems like a case where they overthought the problem when the obvious conclusion wasn’t what they wanted.
Figure 3 also shows this. (I like Figure 3, by the way. Good figures show granular data if possible.) The distributions of excess death percentages look similar pre and post-vaccine, although there is a somewhat different pattern post-vaccine based on party affiliation. Counties with higher vaccine uptake tended to have lower excess mortality, but that was also true pre-vaccine!
Much was made about differences in vaccine hesitancy by party, but vaccine uptake also differed substantially by race (Asians higher, Blacks and Hispanics lower), though the gaps had narrowed by the end of 2021. If the Wallace et al interpretation is correct, I would expect to see similar patterns in excess mortality by race.
I see a paper that begins and ends with an unproven hypothesis. There might be a signal. Or it might be noise. The study has too much hand-waving to make any conclusions.
> it came to depend on a new mass elite of managers and professionals.
There's an assumption buriedi. The word "depend". The managerial elite is by it's nature a coordination network which gets to decide on the flow of resources in society.
So, to the extent that it has grown over the last century, is it really doing any work the world depends on , or is it simply doing self-justifying busywork?
Brink Lindsey mentions, but should emphasize, the role of status. The reality is:
1) status is zero-sum, the more you have, the less there is for others
2) economics is NOT zero-sum over time, all can have more, and capitalism has given more to the poor than any other system, ever.
As econ survival becomes more assured, econ AND non-econ status becomes a higher priority for folks. Among elites, there is a lot of virtue-signaling for status, as well as using cancel culture to reduce the status of non-tribal members, so as to have more status for the in-tribe. And money remains a highly objective portion of the total status evaluation of anybody.
The way to raise the status and self-respect of low IQ folk is to help them focus on their own personal virtues and work. Brink: "The rise out of poverty not only reduced physical suffering, it also swelled pride and self-respect." Doing work and getting paid allows folks to earn, in their own mind, self-respect.
In a prior post Brink explains The Permanent Problem (from Keynes)
>>"the economic problem is not — if we look into the future — the permanent problem of the human race.” If growth could just persist for another century, Keynes claimed, “for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem — how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.” <<
The need for self-respecting work for low IQ men is the biggest semi-econ / civilization problem now. (Low IQ women can, and do, become mothers - which is quite a job).
UBI will be a disaster for building self-respect for most low IQ men (90%?) - enough to eat on but always needing to mooch, unless they get a job. Which won't pay much more than free cash from Uncle Sugar.
For most low IQ folk, following the morals of a believed in religion gives more meaning to their lives than sex, drugs, video-games, and rock'n roll & hip hop.
But on any given night - partying gives more immediate pleasure.
Lindsey: How much of the speed of the shift away from "mass production/factory" work was encouraged by policy choices linking health insurance and retirement benefits to employment, structural deficits that drew in foreign savings and revalued the dollar, and trade agreement that focused more on getting foreigners to open their markets to US intellectual property than to US exports of goods?
The statement: "When the elite was tiny, those outside of it took comfort in their numbers; there was no shame in being an ordinary working stiff, and plenty of basis for pride." was also from a time when the elite managers were just technically educated people who understood the jobs the working stiff did. Our new elite of social scientists worrying about focusing on woke issues have no idea they actually depend for their parasitic survival on those working stiffs that keep things working. Our new elite doesn't even recognize when their beliefs are internally inconsistent or useless nonsense yet like any priesthood believe they are superior to the working stiff.
Regarding excess Republican deaths to Covid, it seems to me that this could easily be explained by the fact that Covid deaths are almost all old people and old people are predominantly Republicans. I have not looked at the paper to see if they addressed that.
They do some hand waving but you are right. They use aggregate data and generalizations of vaccine attitudes to make assumptions about population subgroups. My observation is older Republicans were just as likely as older Democrats to get the shots. Vaccine hesitancy was manifest in the below 60 population. A group at a much lower risk level.
Furthermore, vaccine disapproval did not take off until summer 2021 when the Biden administration and "Blue States" made the Covid shots political, pushing mandates. In the first half of 2021 the first to get shots were the elderly and enthusiasm was non-partisan. And why wouldn't it be? The Covid shots were Trump's great accomplishment! Just ask him.
And to be pretty blunt about the demographic differences between the two parties, I can't think of any reason that poorer more rural counties in Ohio and Florida might have lower vaccination rates and higher COVID death rates than upscale suburban ones except the former vote for Republicans and the later vote for Democrats.
Bink Lindsey's essay does a good job describing the shift from high(er) status unionized factory work to low(er) status non-union service work but that doesn't necessarily translate into what I see as a similarly diminishing status for skilled tradesmen, even though their work hasn't changed much. As a counter example, a lot of people remark on the fact that newspaper reporting was for quite awhile a grubby working-class-adjacent occupation but it has become higher and higher in status over time as it progressed into 'journalism'.
Vaccine Politics: It would have helped if from day one FDA had explicitly and publicly focused on the value of speed in getting vaccines approved and less on safety (“but of course, they’ll be safe”) _I_ at least only heard about people not trusting a “Trump” vaccine in the context of Trump saying he wanted it approved by election day. And after approval much more of the messaging should have been on the benefits and less on the non-costs.
The shots transitioned from being an emergency patch to the pandemic to a mandatory treatment without any of the necessary clinical study to justify the mandate. This shortcut has and will destroy the trust and confidence in public health agencies. Bear in mind, the latest booster approvals were based on the study of 8 mice!
Let's try to separate the issue of mandates (which depend on onward transmission and the value to others) and vaccine recommendation (which depend more largely just on the value to the person vaccinated).
Ideally vaccine development would not have to be done on and "emergency" basis. Normal CDC procedures would have built in the time value of any new vaccine. Warp Speed should be normal speed for a new, rapidly spreading viral disease.
I don't know about the number of mice, but at this stage in the game one'd Bayesian prior would be that a new mRNA molecule is quit unlikely to cause any new heretofore observed harm. I think we should have had a Omicron optimized booster available a year ago.
Figure 1 in the Wallace et al paper on excess deaths by party seems to actually demonstrate the opposite of their abstract – ie that vaccines don’t do much, if anything for mortality. Taken individually, there is essentially no improvement in excess deaths from the pre-vaccine wave to the post-vaccine wave for either party despite the fact that a majority of the most vulnerable got vaccinated, even among republicans. If vaccines truly worked to reduce death, we would see both parties’ mortality drop *significantly* given the large number of vaccinations administered, but with democrats perhaps dropping further. We don’t see that at all. In fact, if the timeline of the graph were unlabeled, no one could possibly fill in the date where vaccination began, which seems like it should be a prerequisite to claiming a breakpoint.
This seems like a case where they overthought the problem when the obvious conclusion wasn’t what they wanted.
Figure 3 also shows this. (I like Figure 3, by the way. Good figures show granular data if possible.) The distributions of excess death percentages look similar pre and post-vaccine, although there is a somewhat different pattern post-vaccine based on party affiliation. Counties with higher vaccine uptake tended to have lower excess mortality, but that was also true pre-vaccine!
Much was made about differences in vaccine hesitancy by party, but vaccine uptake also differed substantially by race (Asians higher, Blacks and Hispanics lower), though the gaps had narrowed by the end of 2021. If the Wallace et al interpretation is correct, I would expect to see similar patterns in excess mortality by race.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7123a2.htm
I see a paper that begins and ends with an unproven hypothesis. There might be a signal. Or it might be noise. The study has too much hand-waving to make any conclusions.
CDC did/does a poor job of data collection and analysis.
> it came to depend on a new mass elite of managers and professionals.
There's an assumption buriedi. The word "depend". The managerial elite is by it's nature a coordination network which gets to decide on the flow of resources in society.
So, to the extent that it has grown over the last century, is it really doing any work the world depends on , or is it simply doing self-justifying busywork?
Brink Lindsey mentions, but should emphasize, the role of status. The reality is:
1) status is zero-sum, the more you have, the less there is for others
2) economics is NOT zero-sum over time, all can have more, and capitalism has given more to the poor than any other system, ever.
As econ survival becomes more assured, econ AND non-econ status becomes a higher priority for folks. Among elites, there is a lot of virtue-signaling for status, as well as using cancel culture to reduce the status of non-tribal members, so as to have more status for the in-tribe. And money remains a highly objective portion of the total status evaluation of anybody.
The way to raise the status and self-respect of low IQ folk is to help them focus on their own personal virtues and work. Brink: "The rise out of poverty not only reduced physical suffering, it also swelled pride and self-respect." Doing work and getting paid allows folks to earn, in their own mind, self-respect.
In a prior post Brink explains The Permanent Problem (from Keynes)
https://brinklindsey.substack.com/p/what-is-the-permanent-problem
>>"the economic problem is not — if we look into the future — the permanent problem of the human race.” If growth could just persist for another century, Keynes claimed, “for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem — how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.” <<
The need for self-respecting work for low IQ men is the biggest semi-econ / civilization problem now. (Low IQ women can, and do, become mothers - which is quite a job).
UBI will be a disaster for building self-respect for most low IQ men (90%?) - enough to eat on but always needing to mooch, unless they get a job. Which won't pay much more than free cash from Uncle Sugar.
For most low IQ folk, following the morals of a believed in religion gives more meaning to their lives than sex, drugs, video-games, and rock'n roll & hip hop.
But on any given night - partying gives more immediate pleasure.
Lindsey: How much of the speed of the shift away from "mass production/factory" work was encouraged by policy choices linking health insurance and retirement benefits to employment, structural deficits that drew in foreign savings and revalued the dollar, and trade agreement that focused more on getting foreigners to open their markets to US intellectual property than to US exports of goods?
The statement: "When the elite was tiny, those outside of it took comfort in their numbers; there was no shame in being an ordinary working stiff, and plenty of basis for pride." was also from a time when the elite managers were just technically educated people who understood the jobs the working stiff did. Our new elite of social scientists worrying about focusing on woke issues have no idea they actually depend for their parasitic survival on those working stiffs that keep things working. Our new elite doesn't even recognize when their beliefs are internally inconsistent or useless nonsense yet like any priesthood believe they are superior to the working stiff.
Regarding excess Republican deaths to Covid, it seems to me that this could easily be explained by the fact that Covid deaths are almost all old people and old people are predominantly Republicans. I have not looked at the paper to see if they addressed that.
They do some hand waving but you are right. They use aggregate data and generalizations of vaccine attitudes to make assumptions about population subgroups. My observation is older Republicans were just as likely as older Democrats to get the shots. Vaccine hesitancy was manifest in the below 60 population. A group at a much lower risk level.
Furthermore, vaccine disapproval did not take off until summer 2021 when the Biden administration and "Blue States" made the Covid shots political, pushing mandates. In the first half of 2021 the first to get shots were the elderly and enthusiasm was non-partisan. And why wouldn't it be? The Covid shots were Trump's great accomplishment! Just ask him.
And to be pretty blunt about the demographic differences between the two parties, I can't think of any reason that poorer more rural counties in Ohio and Florida might have lower vaccination rates and higher COVID death rates than upscale suburban ones except the former vote for Republicans and the later vote for Democrats.
Bink Lindsey's essay does a good job describing the shift from high(er) status unionized factory work to low(er) status non-union service work but that doesn't necessarily translate into what I see as a similarly diminishing status for skilled tradesmen, even though their work hasn't changed much. As a counter example, a lot of people remark on the fact that newspaper reporting was for quite awhile a grubby working-class-adjacent occupation but it has become higher and higher in status over time as it progressed into 'journalism'.
Vaccine Politics: It would have helped if from day one FDA had explicitly and publicly focused on the value of speed in getting vaccines approved and less on safety (“but of course, they’ll be safe”) _I_ at least only heard about people not trusting a “Trump” vaccine in the context of Trump saying he wanted it approved by election day. And after approval much more of the messaging should have been on the benefits and less on the non-costs.
The shots transitioned from being an emergency patch to the pandemic to a mandatory treatment without any of the necessary clinical study to justify the mandate. This shortcut has and will destroy the trust and confidence in public health agencies. Bear in mind, the latest booster approvals were based on the study of 8 mice!
Let's try to separate the issue of mandates (which depend on onward transmission and the value to others) and vaccine recommendation (which depend more largely just on the value to the person vaccinated).
Ideally vaccine development would not have to be done on and "emergency" basis. Normal CDC procedures would have built in the time value of any new vaccine. Warp Speed should be normal speed for a new, rapidly spreading viral disease.
I don't know about the number of mice, but at this stage in the game one'd Bayesian prior would be that a new mRNA molecule is quit unlikely to cause any new heretofore observed harm. I think we should have had a Omicron optimized booster available a year ago.