Weekend Update, April 17

Weekend Update, April 17

Driving to Baltimore this morning to get my second dose and be a full-fledged member of the Pfizer Pfam.

Build baby, build

New housing starts are on fire, and while the high cost of timber will likely slow that soon, it’s a reminder that there is strong demand for housing. Meanwhile, many big cities are facing anxiety about a possible structural decline in the demand for office space with attendant consequences for their tax base.

The solution? Rezone for more housing. Heck, the kinds of tall structures that market forces would support in cities like San Francisco, New York, D.C., Seattle, and Los Angeles don’t even rely on timber. And it’s not just zoning per se. If Buffalo can get results from reducing mandatory parking minimums, then so can your city. After all, it’s not like Buffalo is America’s greatest mass transit paradise or suffers from the most severe cases of land scarcity and high prices. Change the rules! Save yourselves! Build a better tomorrow!

Johnson & Johnson and the Experts

On Wednesday morning, the U.S. government announced a “pause” in the use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine based on six cases of serious blood clots detected out of seven million doses allocated. The math on that does not make sense on its face, and lots of people said so immediately, only to be shouted down by a new round of complaints about “amateur epidemiologists” and “men with charts.”

If you delve into it in a little more detail, the regulators are not making the crazy decision of banning a life-saving vaccine based on a one-in-a-million chance of developing a serious blood clot. Instead, the issue seems to be that the risks are more severe for younger women. Again, I don’t think it makes any sense to bar a 57-year-old man from taking an effective vaccine against a deadly illness on the grounds that it causes serious blood clots in younger women. But all day Wednesday we did the “experts vs. Nate Silver” discourse. Then on Thursday, the Dean of the Brown University School of Public Health says he agrees there’s no reason for a blanket ban.

I find it frustrating that this same dialogue goes round and round so often.

But my view is always that if you catch me going to war with trained scientists about the actual subject of their scientific expertise, then by all means give me hell. But the question of whether the “abundance of caution” framework makes sense is fundamentally not a scientific question at all.

A couple of months ago there was widespread concern in the public health community that the slightly lower efficacy rating of the J&J shot would lead to people deliberately trying to avoid it in favor of an mRNA shot. There was lots of propagandizing against vaccine shopping. Did we really need to leap all the way from “it is forbidden to express a preference for an mRNA shot” to “it is forbidden to take a J&J shot?” Does the CDC employ experts in the value of human freedom? The whole issue here is not medical science, but rather bioethicists having some peculiar ideas about when consent matters and how to do cost-benefit analysis.

A very different recovery

A blockbuster retail sales data release that came out on Thursday illustrates how much different the post-pandemic recovery is going to be than the slow recovery from the Great Recession. After the 2008 crash, retail sales rebounded but fell short of the pre-crash trend basically forever. This time around, retail and food services were back to the pre-pandemic trend as quickly as last July. Now thanks to the latest round of stimulus, they’re back on the trend that existed before the Great Recession.

Nothing is guaranteed, but I think the political world still hasn’t really caught up with how much more effective the policy response was this time around and with how good the economy will likely be six to 12 months from now.

Occupational sorting

Here’s a pet theory of one thing driving our society bananas — as we’ve become more prosperous over time, people’s career choices increasingly reflect ideas that are higher up on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

That’s good, as far as it goes. But the kinds of things that help people achieve self-actualization, unfortunately, have pretty strong correlations with partisan politics. So the overwhelming majority of people who sort into teaching are on the left — to the point where even tony prep schools are getting very left-wing. At the same time, the overwhelming majority of people who sort into law enforcement careers are on the right — even the people working as cops in big liberal cities.

Society as a whole would probably function much better if people were not sorted into occupational monoliths. But on an individual level, people are happier sorting themselves ever-more-aggressively.

Superficially, the analytic breakthrough the two political scientists make is to define “working class” as not just lacking a college degree, but rather people who lack a college degree and “who are in the bottom half of the household income distribution.”

Measured that way, they show no Trump working-class surge.

This got widely passed around in circles I follow, but it defies logic. We know upscale whites shifted away from the GOP in the Trump years. And we know Trump won in 2016. So someone must have shifted toward him. If you just look at the Electoral College map of 2012 versus the Electoral College map of 2016, it’s pretty clear that it must have been downscale whites in the Midwest.

So what’s wrong with the study the Post so excitedly wrote up? Well, it turned out that the ANES sample is way out of line with reality.

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