Hello! To kick things off today, I need to do some more follow up on “Elite colleges should fight for social justice by helping to educate poor kids.”
I cited data from Avery and Hoxby about the prevalence of high SAT/ACT scores among poor kids. They were making ecological inferences based on where people live. But last year, the Quarterly Journal of Economics published a paper by Raj Chetty, John Friedman, Emmanuel Saez, Nicholas Turner, and Danny Yagan that works with administrative data to get a much more precise estimate. They confirm the basic finding that “at any given level of SAT/ACT scores, children from higher-income families attend more selective colleges, suggesting that low- and middle-income students ‘undermatch’ to college.”
But they find that if you restrict yourself to the very most selective private institutions (what they call Ivy Plus), having totally income-neutral admissions would lead to a big increase in the share of middle-class kids, but only a modest increase in enrollment from the bottom 20% (from 3.8% to 4.4%). It basically turns out that a lot of Avery and Hoxby’s high-achievers are middle-class kids in poor neighborhoods rather than poor kids per se.
Thanks to those who brought the newer study to my attention. I think the broad point continues to hold — elite educational institutions control massive resources (including but not limited to money), and the primary means through which they could fight for social justice is not by fussing around with the curriculum but by deploying more of those resources to educate poor people.
On to the main event — when will things go back to normal?
Online is the new in-person
I’ve been dabbling on and off for weeks on Clubhouse, a newish app platform that seems to have succeeded in gaining publicity by attracting vaguely disapproving coverage in the New York Times. Mostly, I wasn’t really feeling it. But Friday night, I saw a room with Brian Hanlon and Louis Mirante of California YIMBY, Kim-Mai Cutler, and four members of the California State Legislature talking about housing reform.
The vast majority of the people on the planet would have found this lethally dull, but I was interested, especially in the California-centricity of it. California obviously looms large in housing policy debates, so I hear a lot about it and have met a lot of the main players. But I’m a national politics journalist, so my engagement is always with that lens. It was interesting to drop in on a panel that was really all about California.
And listening, I could feel the true disruptive power of Clubhouse in the genuine Clayton Christensen sense.
In other words, compared to the average panel discussion, the quality of the event was a bit low as they dealt with various forms of remote awkwardness. But it had a lot of advantages over a “superior” panel discussion. For starters, I could attend it from D.C.! I’d just never in a million years fly to California just to hear a good housing panel. But even better, I could listen to it while loading the dishwasher, taking out the trash, and handling a few other household tasks.
Will Oremus described Clubhouse as “What if SXSW, but an app?” I think that’s apt — an endless, 24/7 series of panels. I really enjoyed my two times going to SXSW on the company dime, but would not actually pay to do it myself. Clubhouse is way worse than SXSW. But it’s free! And you can multitask it like podcast listening. It’s hard for me to imagine this taking off absent the context of the pandemic, but I bet it will stick around now that it’s gained traction.
This brings me to my point — there’s been some debate and discussion lately about when things will go “back to normal,” but the reality is that there’s not going to be some “back to normal” bell. The pandemic’s salience in our lives will fade, but aspects of it will be with us forever.
The quest for absolution
Sunday on MSNBC, Dr. Anthony Fauci got asked when America will be back to normal, and he said “somewhere between the fall and the end of the year … as the president said, by the end of the year, by Christmas.” But then he hedged a little and said “maybe you’re going to still have to wear masks.”
To me, this all really hinges critically on what you mean by “normal.”
It seems to me that Fauci, in his capacity as a public health guy, is noting that between vaccine reluctance, the fact that we don’t have vaccines available for children, and variants possibly reducing vaccine efficacy, there will very possibly still be people getting sick with COVID-19 next winter.
I’m partial to this model from Youyang Gou, which shows infections still bopping along at a low level a year from now.
Given this situation, I would expect Fauci, in his capacity as Public Health Guy, to continue urging some degree of caution because lives really are at stake, and because the vaccines, as amazing as they are, are not 100% effective at preventing infection.
But as a public policy question, I just can’t believe there will be any serious legal restrictions on people’s activity once a vaccine is widely available for anyone who wants one. At that point, COVID-19 really is “just the flu” — in other words, a genuinely deadly disease that public health officials urge us to take more seriously, but that is not allowed to stand in the way of commerce or social life.
The difficulty is that we’re now in a place where a minority of the population has formed a social identity around their compliance with public health guidelines. The Covid Conscientious are going to go out and get vaccinated themselves. But they are also aware that the best reason to be Covid Conscientious has never just been personal risk — it’s about protecting your community. And the inconvenient truth is that even if you personally get vaccinated this spring, it would probably be a selfless act for you to continue masking-up and refusing to eat indoors indefinitely. But of course, nobody wants to do that. They want public health officials to give them absolution — to proclaim that we are now “back to normal.”
Public health officials want you to be healthy
But the thing about public health officials is that they are really into public health. The CDC once put out a bulletin urging sexually active women who aren’t on birth control to preemptively abstain from drinking alcohol lest they risk accidentally exposing a fetus to the demon rum.
I think that if you dig into the details of the literature on alcohol and pregnancy, it becomes clear that one reason the public health authorities are so extremely averse to telling women that a little booze is okay is that alcohol consumption, in general, is a huge public health problem. So given any opportunity to urge people to drink less, their inclination is going to be to take it.
In other words, if you’re looking for public health authorities to tell you it’s okay to start disregarding public health, you’re barking up the wrong tree. Politicians need to make a cost-benefit decision about the rules, and what we’ve seen throughout this pandemic is that all but a tiny number of elected officials lean, in practice, in the direction of fewer restrictions rather than more. The good news for the Covid Conscientious is that the New York Times’ morning newsletter has already ruled that not only is it okay to resume normal social activity once you’ve been vaccinated, but that it is good and virtuous to say this to others, because it will build enthusiasm for vaccination.
That seems correct to me, so I will tell you now — once my dad gets his second shot, he is going to come and visit my family here in D.C., and we’re going to hang out and act as if the vaccine is 100% effective. And when it becomes possible for me to get a vaccine, I, too, will just go do whatever. But normalcy is going to be unevenly distributed.
Underpromising is politically wise
Now if you think about this from Joe Biden’s perspective, I think there’s a big obvious problem.
You don't want to tell everyone "life will be back to normal over the summer," and then there's an outbreak around Thanksgiving after the weather turns cold and 20% of adults refused to get vaccinated and Republicans start complaining that Biden broke his promise to end the pandemic.
One of the most enduring reportorial biases is a love of dumb hypocrisy/contradiction stories, because journalists are trained that they should be tough but also that they should be objective. One of the best ways to be both tough and objective is to note a contradiction. Tim Russert, who was a master of this style of journalism, is wrongly regarded as one of the greats by most people who cover politics for the big papers and television networks.
Biden, who is not new to this, is playing the politics correctly by being maddeningly vague and just sticking to the promise that Christmas 2021 will be better than Christmas 2020. And he’s surely right about that — there will be both fewer legal restrictions in place and fewer people in the hospital, and that’s true even if you make reasonably pessimistic assumptions about variants, vaccine takeup, etc.
But I think some people have an implicit notion in the back of their heads that COVID-19 will just vanish at some point, which seems really unlikely. Herd immunity isn’t magic. Back in 2018, there were about 140,000 measles deaths, which was a huge reduction from the 2000 level. That was mostly in poor countries, but outbreaks pop up in anti-vax areas of the United States. In the military, where we have good statistics, it looks like about a third of troops are refusing COVID-19 vaccines. The Veterans’ Administration says it’s having trouble convincing retired veterans in rural areas to get vaccinated. It’s possible the Covid Conscientious will need to get booster shots in the future (perhaps optimized for new strains), and other people will allege this is just Big Pharma trying to milk us for cash, and we’ll even get to keep arguing.
But macroeconomic normalization will happen before herd immunity — I think much faster than the labor market realizes.
Economic back to normal starts now
Adam Ozimek, a smart labor market economist who’s also a bar/restaurant owner in Pennsylvania, has been saying for weeks now that it would be better to send $1,400 to people after the pandemic to jumpstart dining and tourism than to do it right now while the supply side of the economy is still constrained.
That makes sense to me. But it looks like Democrats are hoping to get legislation signed and checks out in mid-March. And I think that in the relevant economic sense, that is going to qualify as “after the pandemic.”
Hospitalizations are currently plummeting, which means that even though different jurisdictions are starting at different levels and will maintain different paces, every place in the country is going to be looking to reduce restrictions on activities starting right now.
New York increased indoor dining capacity last Friday. California is the only state that still has indoor dining bans in place, which I take as a mix of COVID-19 caution and a sense that the weather is good in California, but state officials are talking about opening things up this week.
Foodservice lost about six million jobs between February and April last year, but then regained a majority of the losses by October. The problem was that cold weather (which crippled outdoor dining for the cautious) plus constantly rising case lines (which brought new restrictions) then sent the numbers heading the other way.
That’s all changing. Starting right now, each week a larger share of the Covid Conscientious will be vaccinated than were the week before, a larger share of the non-vaccinated Conscientious will be able to enjoy outdoor meals in pleasant conditions, and the non-Conscientious will have fewer legal restrictions on their activities.
The Atlanta Fed does this thing called GDP Now, where they predict what the GDP report will say based on the economic data that’s already been released (consumer spending, etc.), and they’re predicting a great number for Q1.
Now, who really knows what the future will hold beyond that? If I really knew how to predict the economy, I’d go use that skill to get rich, not share it with you here on the internet. But at least epidemiologically, we basically have to be in a better position in Q2 and Q3 than we were in Q1.
So normalcy starts right away. But to the point I started with about Clubhouse, things in some sense are not going to go “back to normal” ever.
Nothing stays the same
My kid went back to in-person kindergarten a few weeks ago, which made my life feel a lot more normal. But then we had snow last week, and it seemed to me that the district was being kind of hair-triggery about declaring snow days. On the other hand, the snow days weren’t normal snow days — instead, they just went back to doing Zoom Kindergarten.
Starting next year, at least some school districts will surely adopt this as the new practice — snow day means remote learning rather than a day off, and that in turn potentially means becoming more liberal with declaring snow days in the first place.
Some college professors have come around to the idea that they actually prefer teaching on Zoom. Long before the pandemic, there was plenty of interest in exploring ideas related to digital learning and “flipped classrooms,” but people and institutions are conservative about these kinds of things. Now that it’s been widely tried, some changes will stick in at least a few places.
And the same is even more true in the office. I expect most people will be back to showing up in person most of the time pretty soon. But that doesn’t mean things will go back to the way they were. Companies that want to re-assert a culture of mandatory office attendance are going to have to specifically and affirmatively do that, and they will stand out as companies that assert a culture of mandatory office attendance. Some people will strongly prefer working for such companies, whereas others will strongly prefer hybrid, flexible, or all-remote teams. We’ve lost the default norm.
The extent to which Covid-related efforts crushed the flu during the winter of 2020-21 is also going to have lasting consequences. I heard a pediatrician say that in her opinion, schools should consider mandatory masking every winter thanks to its low cost and apparent potency against the flu. I doubt that will happen, but it honestly strikes me as a reasonable idea. We all remember how after SARS, it became common to see Asian travelers routinely wearing masks in airports, and I’d imagine we’ll see some stickiness of mask-wearing in situations where it seems prudent and reasonably convenient.
A changed world
Not to be melodramatic, but even though it’s a cliché to talk about how terrible this past year has been, I’m sometimes not sure the extent to which this has been a really terrible twelve-month run has sunk in.
The United States, thanks to strong fiscal capacity and a lot of stimulus, has mostly managed to get through a calamitous public health situation without really wrecking our economy. But back during the financial crisis and the Great Recession, a contrarian journalist could always tell people that in worldwide terms, a year like 2010 was actually the best yet on record. By contrast, 2020 saw an unprecedented surge in extreme poverty worldwide.
(World Bank)
It also seems like the optimistic (and in retrospect, naive) view that economic integration between the U.S. and China is an unalloyed good is now just totally dead.
As with remote work, this is more a case of the pandemic reinforcing a prior trend than starting one from scratch. But that’s the point — a huge, disruptive disease outbreak is a significant accelerant of various kinds of social, cultural, and economic change. We won’t repeat the experience of 2020 going forward — heck, even if a new respiratory pandemic arrives we won’t deal with it in the exact same way — but things aren’t going to go “back to normal,” they’re going to keep changing.
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