Anonymous Libertarian

This being an election year in the US, the ongoing pandemic is inevitably going to become a major political issue going forward, more retrospectively than prospectively. Prospectively - the US's response going forward from this fall onward, is - for better worse - largely on autopilot or out of the hands of the federal government (e.g., there is not a whole lot the president will be able to do to expedite the development of vaccines). It will be widely believed - indeed already is - that the president (and congress) and the general political characteristics of the US played a major role - either positive or negative - in how well the US responded to the crisis. I think this general belief is false. I was partly motivated to write this after reading a couple pieces in the Atlantic (which I usually have the good sense to avoid), one by Tim Yong expressing, among other things, the belief in the importance of national leadership in responding to the crisis and also at various points su...

The importance of expanding testing for COVID19 is not really disputed anywhere at the moment. However, testing is largely spoken of as an auxiliary feature of the public health response to the ongoing outbreak; as a tool that informs us where the virus is most prevalent, what measures are or aren't working, etc. Testing may, however, be the most useful public health response in its own right, and as testing rates increase, it may serve as a substitute for broad lockdown measures, rather than merely a complement, enabling us to halt the spread of the virus while throttling less and less of our economy. I thought it might be worth reflecting on just how much a test is actually worth in terms of the economic activity it salvages. First, how is testing a public health remedy in its own right? This requires a challengeable (but I think still plausible) assumption: that people are, by and large, sufficiently considerate that, when they test positive for the virus, they will voluntaril...

I decided to practice my webscraping skills by pulling COVID-19-related death data from the web archives for worldometer.info (mainly because it's an easy site to mine), collecting the number of recorded cases at time points going back two weeks. The plots I got surprisingly seemed a bit encouraging, though of course trying to infer trends from a few days worth of data points (the data is updated every few hours so there are actually a few points per day) is risky. In any case there is something of a clear trend. Let's look at total COVID-19 related deaths over over the last couple weeks (worldometer only has state-level data going back to March 18), or since the first recorded case, in the largest and most affected states: There seem to be decelerations in the curves starting about 2-3 days ago in most large states. The red lines, I should add, are logistic growth curves fitted to the data. The logistic curves fitted to the curren...

In keeping with the spirit of the times, I will share some of my thoughts on the coronavirus outbreak, and what kind of public policy response would enable us to prepare for such an outbreak while still being economically feasible. I've found much of the popular writing on what the right policies are for epidemic preparedness to be disappointing. It is often too vague (Bill Gates's article in the New England Journal of Medicine struck me as short on details, which is bizarre given his foundation's involvement in many specific responses to the ongoing epidemic). Sometimes it's shamelessly partisan. Sometimes it's implausible (e.g., demanding that society constantly have enough resources on hand to handle an epidemic at any moment). But I think the problem must be talked about in greater detail for viable policies to be conceived and implemented. In this post, I won't discuss such key elements of epidemic policy as how to enforce quarantines, travel restrictions...

This week, congress and the president clashed over the details of a coronavirus relief package (I believe a deal has now been reached). One source of the conflict was congressional Democrats' efforts to include a mandate that employers give paid leave to employees. The mandate, it is worth noting, would be permanent. I don't know whether the bill that stands to pass mandates paid sick leave for all employees; news sources are rather ambiguous at the moment, as the term "sick leave" is used to refer to the provision of paid sick leave to health care workers specifically, or to federal employees, or payment by the federal government to sick workers. Originally at least, though, there was a proposed provision to mandate private employers generally to provide paid sick leave. This, I argue, is a bad idea, particularly during an epidemic. The reasoning behind why this policy is specifically necessary or useful during an infectious disease epidemic is, as I understand it,...

I suspect a major reason why political discourse is the way it is has to do with how we perceive what it means to be – and how we explain being – wrong. I don’t merely mean in our ‘polarized times’  (the extent to which we are more polarized today than in earlier eras is a matter of dispute among political psychologists)  but rather the way people think about politics in general, and the way it seems they always have. There are a couple persistent and remarkable phenomena about politics that should make us a priori suspicious of how political beliefs are formed: 1) people tend to cluster into few (mostly, two) political ideologies with remarkably little intra-cluster heterogeneity; and 2) there is little transit between clusters. 1 is remarkable because what one believes about abortion should not really predict what one believes about gun control, capital gains taxes, foreign policy, or the macroeconomics of business cycles. And yet, one’s opinion on any one of these issues...