Monday 16 March, 2020

Posted on by

Quarantine reading

If (as seems possible) some of us are going to be confined to barracks for a substantial period, it would make sense to lay in a stock of useful reading material. There’s always the final volume of Hillary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy, of course. But for non-fiction addicts here’s a list of some books that, in one way or another, shed light on our current crisis. It’s worth remembering that (a) we’ve been here before, and (b) that pandemics hold up a mirror to human nature — and to society.

Albert Camus, The Plague
Published in 1947, this modern classic tells the story of a plague sweeping the French Algerian city of Oran. It asks a number of questions relating to the nature of destiny and the human condition. The characters in the book, ranging from doctors to holidaymakers to fugitives, all show the effects the plague has on a populace. Though set in the 1940s, the book is believed to be based on the cholera epidemic that killed a large percentage of Oran’s population in 1849 following French colonisation.

I was struck by a Guardian essay about the book by my Observer colleague, Ed Vulliamy, in 2015 during the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. “Most of us read The Plague as teenagers”, he wrote,

and we should all read it again. And again: for not only are all humankind’s responses to death represented in it, but now – with the advent of Ebola – the book works on the literal as well as metaphorical level.

Camus’s story is that of a group of men, defined by their gathering around and against the plague. In it we encounter the courage, fear and calculation that we read or hear in every story about West Africa’s efforts to curtail and confront Ebola; through its narrator, Dr Rieux, we can identify with the hundreds of Cuban doctors who went immediately to the plague’s Ground Zero, and those such as the Scottish nurse currently fighting for her life at the Royal Free Hospital in London.

Adam Kucharski, The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread and Why They Stop. Published earlier this year. The author is a mathematician who works at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine where he works on the mathematical analysis of infectious disease outbreaks. The book uncovers the underlying principles that drive contagion, from infectious diseases and online misinformation to gun violence and financial crises. It explains what makes things spread, why outbreaks look like they do, and how we can change what happens in future. It’s beautifully — and clearly — written (I’m reading it at the moment and can testify to that.) Funnily enough, I ordered it before COVID-19 hit the news, because I’m interested in the way that memes and conspiracy theories spread virally online. Serendipity rules OK.

Frank Snowden: Epidemics and Society: from the Black Death to the present, Yale, 2016. A real big-picture, long-view work of historical scholarship. examines the ways in which disease outbreaks have altered the societies through which they have spread — shaping politics, crushing revolutions, and entrenching racial and economic discrimination, affecting personal relationships, the work of artists and intellectuals, and the man-made and natural environments. Gigantic in scope, stretching across centuries and continents, Snowden’s account also seeks to explain the ways in which social structures have allowed diseases to flourish. “Epidemic diseases are not random events that afflict societies capriciously and without warning,” he writes. “On the contrary, every society produces its own specific vulnerabilities”. The New Yorker recently published an interview with Snowden which explores these questions. One passage in the conversation particularly stood out for me:

Epidemics are a category of disease that seem to hold up the mirror to human beings as to who we really are. That is to say, they obviously have everything to do with our relationship to our mortality, to death, to our lives. They also reflect our relationships with the environment—the built environment that we create and the natural environment that responds. They show the moral relationships that we have toward each other as people, and we’re seeing that today.

If you’re settling down for a long quarantine, this book will keep you absorbed for quite a while.

Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic, Souvenir Press, 2011. A masterpiece of investigative reporting. Shilts covered the AIDS epidemic from 1982 for The San Francisco Chronicle, the only US newspaper willing to give its full attention to the epidemic. He traced the roots of AIDS beginning in 1976 to two events and focussing on the mysterious illness of a Danish physician working in Africa. Before the virus even had a name, it had leapt across continents and destroyed communities, while the world stood idly by. It was, after all, a disease that affected ‘only’ gay men. There are lots of echoes of the Trump Administration in Stilts’s account. Like the present President, Ronald Reagan’s budget cuts affected the programs that needed funding for the necessary research. His Administration also dismissed scientists, thereby delaying the discovery of pharmacological defences. Remind you of anyone? Other culprits include: the businesses whose decisions to keep blood banks unaccountable and bathhouses liberated helped to spread the disease; mainstream media, for its reluctance to report AIDS; and the blasé attitudes of political officials, public health authorities, and community leaders. There are heroes in this story too, of course. But somehow it’s the villains we remember. Will it be any different this time?

Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year. Although a novel published in 1722, it’s really an early example of imaginative journalistic reportage. It’s an account of one man’s experiences of the year 1665, in which the bubonic plague struck the city of London. It’s presented as an eyewitness account of the events at the time, but Defoe was only five years old in 1665, and the book itself was published under the initials H. F. and is probably based on the journals of Defoe’s uncle, Henry Foe, who lived in London and survived the plague. It’s still a vivid read.

Dorothy Crawford, The Invisible Enemy: A Natural History of Viruses Published in 2000, this is an overview of the viruses that have wreaked havoc in the past. She looks at the havoc viruses have caused in the past, where they have come from, and the detective work involved in uncovering them. Finally, she considers whether a new virus could potentially wipe out the human race. It’s informative and readable. James Meek wrote an informative review of it for the London Review of Books in 2001.

Richard J. Evans, Death in Hamburg – Society and Politics in the Cholera Years 1830-1910 A terrific study by a formidable historian of the way Hamburg reacted when it was hit in 1892 by cholera.

Allan M. Brandt, No Magic Bullet – a social history of venereal disease in the United States since 1880 In a way, this book has echoes of the story told in Randy Shilts’s book on AIDS. Brandt demonstrates that Americans’ concerns about venereal disease have centered around a set of social and cultural values related to sexuality, gender, ethnicity, and class. At the heart of our efforts to combat these infections, he argues, has been the tendency to view venereal disease as both a punishment for sexual misconduct and an index of social decay. This tension between medical and moral approaches has significantly impeded efforts to develop “magic bullets”–drugs that would rid us of the disease–as well as effective policies for controlling the infections’ spread.

_____________________ 

Sunday 15 March 2020

Posted on by

Online memes are viruses too

This morning’s Observer column:

One of the things that makes this epidemic different from predecessors is the dominance of social media in today’s world. One of the most perceptive analyses of what’s going on has come from Kate Starbird of Washington State University, who’s a leading expert on “crisis informatics” – the study of how information flows in crisis situations, especially over social media. Crises always generate levels of high uncertainty, she argues, which in turn breeds anxiety. This leads people to seek ways of resolving uncertainty and reducing anxiety by seeking information about the threat. They’re doing what humans always do – trying to make sense of a confusing situation.

In the pre-internet era, information was curated by editorial gatekeepers and official government sources. But now anything goes, and sense-making involves trying to find out stuff on the internet, through search engines and social media. Some of the information gathered may be reliable, but a lot of it won’t be. There are bad actors manipulating those platforms for economic gain (need a few face-masks, guv?) or ideological purposes. People retweet links without having looked at the site. And even innocently conceived jokes (a photograph of empty shelves in a local supermarket, for example) can trigger panic-buying…

Read on

Profiting from the crisis

The other day, partly out of curiosity — having noticed that our local Aldi store had apparently been cleaned out of hand-sanitisers, I went on to Amazon.co.uk to see what was happening there. Lots of sanitizers on offer, though only a small percentage seemed to have the 60%+ alcohol content needed to see off the Coronavirus. So I chose one — priced at £6.99 (which seemed steep for a tiny bottle) but it advertised free delivery so I pushed it into the basket and continued. Turned out that the free delivery means delivery between March 30 and April 7. But if I wanted it sooner than that I could have it by paying for delivery. How much? £48. Having thus confirmed my low opinion of human nature, I deleted the item and logged off. (I have plenty of soap and have never hitherto used a hand-sanitiser.)

I guess this always happens when there’s a panic and people over-react. And of course there are smart people who know how to exploit that. The NYT has an interesting story today about two brothers who set about buying every hand-sanitizer and wipe they could find — in the process clearing the shelves of every story they visited on March 1 with the intention of selling them at a heavy markup on Amazon. Initially, it went swimmingly — until Amazon decided to take action against merchants the company judged to be engaged in price-gouging. Now, as the headline puts it over a photograph of one of the brothers in his lock-up garage, “He has 17,700 bottles of Hand Sanizer and Nowhere to Sell Them”.

Cue violins.

Andrew Sullivan on the Plague

“Reality Arrives to the Trump Era”. Spot on, as usual.

Dressing for the age of Surveillance

“If the government were to demand pictures of citizens in a variety of poses, against different backdrops, indoors and outdoors, how many Americans would readily comply? But we are already building databases of ourselves, one selfie at a time. Online images of us, our children, and our friends, often helpfully labelled with first names, which we’ve posted to photo-sharing sites like Flickr, have ended up in data sets used to train face-recognition systems.”

Yeah, but if you’re an AI geek, you can make a T-shirt with a pattern that renders you invisible to facial-recognition systems. This from a fascinating New Yorker essay by John Seabrook.

The economic impact of the pandemic (and related thoughts)

Greg Mankiw is the Robert M. Beren Professor of Economics at Harvard. People keep ringing him up asking for his views on the impact of the virus. Here’s his blogged reply:

  • A recession is likely and perhaps optimal (not in the sense of desirable but in the sense of the best we can do under the circumstances).

  • Mitigating the health crisis is the first priority. Give Dr. Fauci anything he asks for.

  • Fiscal policymakers should focus not on aggregate demand but on social insurance. Financial planners tell people to have six months of living expenses in an emergency fund. Sadly, many people do not.

  • Considering the difficulty of identifying the truly needy and the problems inherent in trying to do so, sending every American a $1000 check asap would be a good start. A payroll tax cut makes little sense in this circumstance, because it does nothing for those who can’t work.

  • There are times to worry about the growing government debt. This is not one of them.

  • Externalities abound. Helping people over their current economic difficulties may keep more people at home, reducing the spread of the virus. In other words, there are efficiency as well as equity arguments for social insurance.

  • Monetary policy should focus on maintaining liquidity. The Fed’s role in setting interest rates is less important than its role as the lender of last resort. If the Fed thinks that its hands are excessively tied in this regard by Dodd-Frank rules, Congress should untie them quickly.

  • President Trump should shut-the-hell-up. He should defer to those who know what they are talking about. Sadly, this is unlikely to occur.

Ian Donald’s tweetstream about UK government policy on COVID-19

Wonderfully succinct and helpful. Link

Saturday 14 March, 2020

Posted on by

Quote of the Day

”Everything is relative; and only that is absolute”

  • Auguste Comte

The Trump presidency is over

Really? The pessimist in me (plus the ghost of HL Mencken sitting on my shoulder) says that nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. But maybe this time is different. At any rate, that’s what one Republican — Peter Wehner — says in a blast in The Atlantic. Here’s how it ends:

The coronavirus is quite likely to be the Trump presidency’s inflection point, when everything changed, when the bluster and ignorance and shallowness of America’s 45th president became undeniable, an empirical reality, as indisputable as the laws of science or a mathematical equation.

It has taken a good deal longer than it should have, but Americans have now seen the con man behind the curtain. The president, enraged for having been unmasked, will become more desperate, more embittered, more unhinged. He knows nothing will be the same. His administration may stagger on, but it will be only a hollow shell. The Trump presidency is over.

Here’s hoping.

The remarkable Dr Fauci

Jame Fallows has a fascinating piece about Dr Anthony Fauci, who has been head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, at the National Institutes of Health, since Ronald Reagan’s first term, in 1984. Although nothing in his look or bearing would suggest it, Fauci is older than either Bernie Sanders or Joe Biden. He recently turned 79. And what’s really interesting about him is that he has been the only official to contradict Trump in public and keep his job. (Remember Jim Mattis, for example?).

“There is no precedent”, writes Fallows,

from Mattis or anyone else, for what we have seen these past few weeks from Fauci at the podium. Is the coronavirus problem just going to go away (as Trump had claimed)? No, from Fauci. It is serious, and it is going to get worse. Is the testing system “perfect” (as Trump had claimed)? No, it is not working as it should. Is the U.S. once again the greatest of all nations in its response to the threat? No, it is behind in crucial aspects, and has much to learn from others.

Fauci is saying all these things politely and respectfully. As an experienced Washington operator he knows that there is no reason to begin an answer with, “The president is wrong.” You just skip to the next sentence, “The reality is…” But his meaning—“the president is wrong”—is unmistakable.

Anthony Fauci has earned the presumption-of-credibility for his comments. Donald Trump has earned the presumption that he is lying or confused. A year ago that standoff—the realities, versus Trump-world obeisance—worked out against James Mattis. Will the balance of forces be different for Fauci? As of this writing, no one can know.

Fascinating: someone whom Trump can’t sack because he needs Fauci now more than Fauci needs him. And if he did sack him, imagine what would happen to the markets.

Friday 13 March, 2020

Posted on by

How to make the show go on

COVID-19 bans on theatres would represent an existential threat to some. It hasn’t happened in London — yet — but Broadway has been closed by the State Governor. So what should US theatres do? Live streaming, of course, says Terry Teachout, Drama Critic of the WSJ.

Starting with the Metropolitan Opera in 2006, a fast-growing number of performing-arts groups have been using digital technology to beam their shows into movie houses on both sides of the Atlantic, and many older performances can also be viewed online….

According to City A.M., a London-based financial and business newspaper, a dozen English theater troupes are hard at work on contingency plans to live-stream their shows should they be closed by the coronavirus.

Writing as someone who was planning to go to a major concert in London on March 17 — but now isn’t, on the grounds that the less I have to do with large gatherings the better for the time being — I wish this was already happening.

Making Mike Pence the Administration’s lead on COVID-19 is really putting the lunatic in charge of the asylum

Wonderful editorial by Holden Thorp, who is Editor-in-Chief of Science:

“Do me a favor, speed it up, speed it up.” This is what U.S. President Donald Trump told the National Association of Counties Legislative Conference, recounting what he said to pharmaceutical executives about the progress toward a vaccine for severe acute respiratory syndrome–coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus that causes coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Anthony Fauci, the long-time leader of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has been telling the president repeatedly that developing the vaccine will take at least a year and a half—the same message conveyed by pharmaceutical executives. Apparently, Trump thought that simply repeating his request would change the outcome.

China has rightfully taken criticism for squelching attempts by scientists to report information during the outbreak. Now, the United States government is doing similar things. Informing Fauci and other government scientists that they must clear all public comments with Vice President Mike Pence is unacceptable. This is not a time for someone who denies evolution, climate change, and the dangers of smoking to shape the public message. Thank goodness Fauci, Francis Collins [director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH)], and their colleagues across federal agencies are willing to soldier on and are gradually getting the message out. [Emphasis added]

It’s a terrific editorial, pointing out that “while we don’t expect politicians to know Maxwell’s equations for electromagnetism or the Diels-Alder chemical reaction” you can’t insult science when you don’t like it and then suddenly insist on something that science can’t give on demand. For the past 4 years, Trump’s budgets have made deep cuts to science, including cuts to funding for two institutions that are now critical to coping with the virus — the Center for Disease Control and Prevention and the NIH.

Now, says Thorp, the president suddenly needs science. Yet three years ago, he declared his skepticism of vaccines and tried to launch an antivaccine task force. And so now he suddenly loves vaccines. What Trump, with his invincible stupidity, always calls to mind is those saloon-bar morons one sometimes encounters who have opinions on everything while knowing nothing about anything. And who can contradict themselves in successive sentences.

Herd immunity sounds good but…

Suddenly (yesterday) the UK government started to talk about “herd immunity” in relation to COVID-19. What it basically means is that if lots of people get the virus and survive it (which is likely for the majority of cases), then we will be in a better state to deal with it in future because those people will have immunity to it. Sounds reassuring, doesn’t it?

Er, perhaps not. Say 60% of the population gets it. That’s 40m infectees. With a 1% mortality rate, that’s 400,000 deaths. So we have to hope that the mortality rate will be a lot less than 1%. No matter how you look at it, this is deadly serious. Herd immunity doesn’t come cheap.

A message to Trump from Jack Shafer

Lovely column from Jack. It begins:

As a self-designated, one-man task force assigned to smother the shifting coronavirus wildfire, allow me to direct my first edict to the president of the United States: Mr. Trump, please stop talking about the virus.

Don’t comment on the number of cases or deaths. Stop congratulating yourself about what a good job you’re doing, and never, ever again claim that you’ve got things “well under control.” Never again compare this virus with the flu. Never again promise that a vaccine is arriving “pretty soon“ or that the virus “will go away,” as you repeatedly have, or that “it’s going to disappear.” Don’t blame the Democrats or the Obama administration or the press for your bungling of the crisis. Don’t say “anybody that wants a test can get a test,” because it isn’t true.

Most everything you’ve said about the virus has been wrong, inflammatory and dangerous. You think you’re making things better, but your steady spew of misinformation is confusing people and making the situation worse. Much worse. In your Wednesday night national broadcast, you stirred irrational fears with your words and your heebie-jeebie speaking style. The markets heard you clearly, which is why they promptly went into the swirly on Thursday morning.

You’re so bad at conveying accurate virus information, you make the Fox News channel sound like the Scientific American…

You get the drift?

Thursday 12 March, 2020

Posted on by

Quote of the Day

“The cliche about Trump’s presidency is that it is malevolence tempered by incompetence. His haplessness would undermine his corruption and authoritarianism. But now, finally, the country faces a crisis in which Trump’s incompetence will not save us from him. His wholesale unfitness was on bright display from the Oval Office. It may be the most unsettling moment yet of this bleak era.”

Things companies might learn from this crisis

  1. They will need to figure out how to reconfigure their operations so more employees can work productively at a distance. In other words, how to rethink the office. It’s been a mystery to me for years why so many organisations use such primitive telephone-conferencing kit, for example. So it’s no wonder that shares in Zoom) went up 24% in the first day that the immensity of the crisis began to dawn on people.
  2. Surely the penny about the fragility of complex supply-chains will now drop. Surely?

(Thoughts stimulated by an excellent Economist piece).

So the ‘administrative state’ has its uses after all

One of the most pernicious delusions fostered by the rise of tech within a neoliberal mindset was its contempt for the state. This predated the rise of Silicon Valley, of course — remember Ronald Reagan’s tropes about how the state was always the problem, not the solution? But it really took off once the Web 2.0 boom started.

Well, one of the most interesting aspects of our current predicament is the discovery that we really need the state after all. It’s the only thing that stands between us and a biological Armageddon, it seems. Looks like the hapless citizens of the US are about to discover this, given that they have a president who has for three years been trying to dismantle the administrative state or sell it off to his cronies.

Actually, the state has been essential in lots of fairly-recent crises too. It was that self-same administrative state that provided the heroic first-responders in 9/11, for example; the same state that organised TARP and the recapitalisation of banks in 2008; and the state that is now busily trying to protect populations from the havoc that COVID-19 will wreak.

And of course, most of the fortunes made in Silicon Valley are built on the Internet — an infrastructure that was paid for by US taxpayers.

People have such short memories. Sigh.

No computer required

Spotted in the ‘i’ newspaper. Don’t you just love the “No computer required” advice. And the price — £199.

Wednesday 11 March, 2020

Posted on by

Wash your hands.

Rupert Beale, who works at the Francis Crick Institute, has a really good blog post about COVID-19 on the London Review of Books site. Towards the end, he reports a message he received from a colleague about the epidemic. It made three points.

  1. This is NOT business as usual. This will be different from what anyone living has ever experienced. The closest comparator is 1918 influenza.

  2. EARLY social distancing is the best weapon we have to combat Covid-19.

  3. Humanity will get through this fine, but be prepared for major changes in how we function and behave as a society until either we’re through the pandemic or we have mass immunisation available.

Lunch with Freeman Dyson

A New York Times piece by Siobhan Roberts to celebrate the late Freeman Dyson. It’s a lovely piece, which captures something of the man himself. For example:

Lunch with Dr. Dyson was never short of fascinating, fun or lengthy. He was a slow eater, and he did nearly all the talking. Listening, while trying to capture the last few peas of my salad, I’d realize that my lunch mate had made little progress with his meal; it was work, cutting and chewing the meat.

I’d try to fill airtime — and trigger his silent but shoulder-bobbing laugh — with trivial bits, like recounting a tale relayed by his son, George Dyson, an author and historian of technology, regarding an email the elder Dyson once received from a woman with a cleaning business. Subject line: “vacuum — unsatisfied.” Cindy had spent $500 on the DC14 model and had come to hate it with a passion, she explained in great detail. The suction on the rug was so strong that it threw “my shoulder out (NO LIE) having to push so hard.” She signed off, defeated: “I know that I will not hear from Dyson.”

Dr. Dyson, ever the reliable correspondent, hit Reply: “Thank you for the hate mail which I enjoy reading. I get quite a lot of it because my name is Dyson. But I am sorry to tell you that I am the wrong Dyson. My name is Freeman and not James. I suggest that you take the trouble to find James’s address and send the message to him. I wish you good luck and good health.”

Worth reading in full.

Paul Krugman on Thomas Piketty’s vast new book

Readable review of *Capital and Ideology — friendly by not uncritical. I’m an admirer of Piketty and got a lot from his earlier Capital in the 21st Century. But this 1000-page doorstop will have to stay on the nice-but-not-for-now list. So Krugman’s review is helpful.

Krugman starts by referring to that earlier tome. For the book-buying public, he observes, its big revelation was simply the fact of soaring inequality.

This perceived revelation made it a book that people who wanted to be well informed felt they had to have.

To have, but maybe not to read. Like Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time,” “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” seems to have been an “event” book that many buyers didn’t stick with; an analysis of Kindle highlights suggested that the typical reader got through only around 26 of its 700 pages. Still, Piketty was undaunted.

His new book, “Capital and Ideology,” weighs in at more than 1,000 pages. There is, of course, nothing necessarily wrong with writing a large book to propound important ideas: Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” was a pretty big book too (although only half as long as Piketty’s latest). The problem is that the length of “Capital and Ideology” seems, at least to me, to reflect in part a lack of focus.

To be fair, the book does advance at least the outline of a grand theory of inequality, which might be described as Marx on his head. In Marxian dogma, a society’s class structure is determined by underlying, impersonal forces, technology and the modes of production that technology dictates. Piketty, however, sees inequality as a social phenomenon, driven by human institutions. Institutional change, in turn, reflects the ideology that dominates society: “Inequality is neither economic nor technological; it is ideological and political.”

But where does ideology come from? At any given moment a society’s ideology may seem immutable, but Piketty argues that history is full of “ruptures” that create “switch points,” when the actions of a few people can cause a lasting change in a society’s trajectory.

Krugman admires Piketty’s intellectual ambitions in trying to tell such a vast story, but he also implies that sometimes Piketty’s reach exceeds his grasp. For example:

For me, at least, the vast amount of ground it covers raises a couple of awkward questions.

The first is whether Piketty is a reliable guide to such a large territory. His book combines history, sociology, political analysis and economic data for dozens of societies. Is he really enough of a polymath to pull that off?

I was struck, for example, by his extensive discussion of the evolution of slavery and serfdom, which made no mention of the classic work of Evsey Domar of M.I.T., who argued that the more or less simultaneous rise of serfdom in Russia and slavery in the New World were driven by the opening of new land, which made labor scarce and would have led to rising wages in the absence of coercion. This happens to be a topic about which I thought I knew something; how many other topics are missing crucial pieces of the literature?

The second question is whether the accumulation of cases actually strengthens Piketty’s core analysis. It wasn’t clear to me that it does. To be honest, at a certain point I felt a sense of dread each time another society entered the picture; the proliferation of stories began to seem like an endless series of digressions rather than the cumulative construction of an argument.

Piketty sees rising inequality as being at root a political phenomenon. The social-democratic framework that made Western societies relatively equal for a couple of generations after World War II, he argues, was dismantled, not out of necessity, but because of the rise of a “neo-proprietarian” ideology. But, asked Krugman,

why did policy take a hard-right turn? Piketty places much of the blame on center-left parties, which, as he notes, increasingly represent highly educated voters. These more and more elitist parties, he argues, lost interest in policies that helped the disadvantaged, and hence forfeited their support. And his clear implication is that social democracy can be revived by refocusing on populist economic policies, and winning back the working class.

And his summing up?

The bottom line: I really wanted to like “Capital and Ideology,” but have to acknowledge that it’s something of a letdown. There are interesting ideas and analyses scattered through the book, but they get lost in the sheer volume of dubiously related material. In the end, I’m not even sure what the book’s message is. That can’t be a good thing.

Phew! I don’t think I have to read it.

Why the US is screwed

Posted on by

A new Quinnipiac University poll released on Monday finds that Democrats and Republicans have polarized views on both the danger the coronavirus poses and how the Trump administration is handling the outbreak.

By the numbers: The poll finds that 43% of respondents overall approve of President Trump’s response to the coronavirus, while 49% disapprove.

That divide falls largely along party lines. 83% of Democrats disapprove of Trump’s response, while 87% of Republicans approve. 68% of Democrats said that they are “very or somewhat concerned” about the virus, compared to just 35% of Republicans.

How will these views change when people start to die in significant numbers from the virus? Will they change? The funny thing about viruses is that they don’t distinguish between political parties.

Quote of the Day

Posted on by

“Anything we say in advance of a pandemic happening is alarmist; anything we say afterwards is inadequate.”

  • US health secretary Michael Leavitt, speaking in 2006.

The fable of the prodigal TechBro

Posted on by

Maria Farrell (whom God Preserve) has written a fabulously sharp essay about the phenomenon of Founder’s Remorse — the way guys (and they’re always guys) who made a packet out of drinking the Zuckerberg/Tech Kool Aid eventually realised that what they were doing was not exactly good for humanity — and quit to spend more time with their money. Not content with stepping off the surveillance capitalism treadmill, however, they also want to be loved and admired for their signal moral and ethical courage. And swathes of the mainstream media are falling for these faux mea culpae. All of which is just a bit nauseating, especially to those activists and contrarians who have spent decades critiquing and challenging the tech giants.

Farrell’s essay is well worth reading in full, because that’s the only way of catching the Swiftian edge of her satirical disdain, but here’s a sample to whet your appetite:

The Prodigal Son is a New Testament parable about two sons. One stays home to work the farm. The other cashes in his inheritance and gambles it away. When the gambler comes home, his father slaughters the fattened calf to celebrate, leaving the virtuous, hard-working brother to complain that all these years he wasn’t even given a small goat to share with his friends. His father replies that the prodigal son ‘was dead, now he’s alive; lost, now he’s found’. Cue party streamers. It’s a touching story of redemption, with a massive payload of moral hazard. It’s about coming home, saying sorry, being joyfully forgiven and starting again. Most of us would love to star in it, but few of us will be given the chance.

The Prodigal Tech Bro is a similar story, about tech executives who experience a sort of religious awakening. They suddenly see their former employers as toxic, and reinvent themselves as experts on taming the tech giants. They were lost and are now found. They are warmly welcomed home to the center of our discourse with invitations to write opeds for major newspapers, for think tank funding, book deals and TED talks. These guys – and yes, they are all guys – are generally thoughtful and well-meaning, and I wish them well. But I question why they seize so much attention and are awarded scarce resources, and why they’re given not just a second chance, but also the mantle of moral and expert authority.

Great stuff.

COVID-19: the choice

Posted on by

Basically, governments have to choose between public health and the economy. This is, ultimately, the message of this Editorial in The Lancet:

So far, evidence suggests that the colossal public health efforts of the Chinese Government have saved thousands of lives. High-income countries, now facing their own outbreaks, must take reasoned risks and act more decisively. They must abandon their fears of the negative short-term public and economic consequences that may follow from restricting public freedoms as part of more assertive infection control measures.

Yep. And, above all, they must not copy the US