Weekend Update, April 24

Weekend Update, April 24

By Matthew Yglesias. SlowBoring.com. 

I’m in vaccine limbo this week, no longer suffering the side effects but still trying to be a good citizen and not do anything different for seven more days until I cross the two-week threshold. But soon!

Require the vaccine

As vaccine demand comes to be a bigger problem than vaccine supply, I suspect measures like California public universities moving to make vaccination mandatory this fall are going to become more important.

For months and months, there were people desperate to get vaccinated who couldn’t get an appointment, and under those circumstances, I think making vaccines mandatory would have been pointless and counterproductive. But I’ve heard from people in the military that the non-mandatory nature of the vaccine — in contrast to flu shots, which active duty service members are routinely required to get — not only reduces uptake of the vaccine but also reduces confidence. Soldiers are used to being ordered to do things, and they’re accustomed to vaccine mandates. The reason it’s not mandatory in the military is the vaccines have Emergency Use Authorization from the FDA, not regular licensing. To lots of people, that says “they don’t really think this is safe — a safe vaccine would be mandatory.”

Given the apparent seasonality of the virus, I think we could see cases drop to nearly nothing this summer even with a large share of the population non-vaxxed, only to see it roar back in winter. To stop that, I think we need to buckle down on getting that full approval and then in the fall have it be mandatory for college students, military members, healthcare workers, whatever school-aged kids it’s approved for, etc.

Beyond the mechanical impact of the mandate on lifting numbers, I think that’s how you build confidence in the safety and efficacy of the vaccines — act like you’re confident, since you are.

Privatize the police?

This is old news from last summer, but I noticed this week that last July during defund-mania, the Atlantic ran a piece called “How I Became a Police Abolitionist” that has a correction at the bottom reading:

An earlier version of this article described the shooter as “a cop.” In fact, he was an armed, uniformed security guard working at the municipal recreation center, employed by a security company under contract with the city of St. Louis. In addition, the author was 13, not 12, at the time of the incident.

Honest mistakes happen all the time even in good journalism, but this is a case where the change makes a really big difference. I 100% understand that the people who identify as police abolitionists do not understand themselves to be arguing for a huge increase in the use of private armed security guards.

But in almost any other context, left-wing people would understand that there is an interplay between public and private services. When a city’s public schools are bad, middle-class families leave for the suburbs and rich families send their kids to private school. When I grew up in New York in the 1980s, crime was very high, but we lived in two different buildings that had doormen. Aside from the direct loss of life, this is one of my big concerns about the huge surge in murders that happened in 2020. It’s not just that the violence predominantly impacts poor urban neighborhoods, but the secondary consequence of that violence is the withdrawal of more affluent people to more defensible spaces — exclusionary suburbs, gated communities, malls patrolled by private guards. If you want shared public spaces (and you should), then you need to care about public safety that is provided by public safety officers — i.e., the police.

That doesn’t mean blind cheerleading for the status quo, but it does mean trying to improve police departments, not shrink them.

Derek Chauvin is guilty

It’s of course good that Derek Chauvin got a fair trial and that we didn’t just convict him based on viral video footage but I mean… did you see the video footage? He was clearly guilty.

One interesting thing about this is that if you go back to last spring, this was not a remotely controversial judgment. Mitch McConnell said the officers involved in George Floyd’s death “look pretty darn guilty,” and even the Fraternal Order of Police (!) put out a statement condemning the officers and saying “there is no doubt that this incident has diminished the trust and respect our communities have for the men and women of law enforcement. We will work hard to rebuild that trust and we will continue to protect our communities.”

That’s not to say there was no controversy. The initial official statement from the Minneapolis Police Department was wildly dishonest, and it’s only because the incident was captured on video that we know the truth. That’s why from the get-go there was debate about how reflective this crime was of general issues in policing and society.

Twitter avatar for @jaketapper

But what’s striking about some of the ways our society is flying apart is the extent to which months later, figures like Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson can’t just bring themselves to be happy that someone who has really seemed guilty all along was in fact held guilty. I don’t want to reach a blithe conclusion that “the system works,” but in this case, the system really did work. That’s good!

When in doubt, don’t do this

In my more charitable moments, I like to give to the GiveWell Maximum Impact Fund that sends money to things like deworming, malaria bed nights, and direct cash transfers to very poor people.

I don’t think those kinds of causes are the only things worth supporting philanthropically, and I am glad there are people who are involved with issue advocacy and activism. But one thing I really like about, say, deworming is that not only do smart people who’ve looked at it say that it’s highly cost-effective — I am also very sure that they are not accidentally infecting children with intestinal worms.

And then there’s this.

Twitter avatar for @janerecker

Climate change is important. But a large share of climate activism seems to me to take forms that are pretty obviously counterproductive. And that’s before you get to the forms of activism that may be subtly or unexpectedly counterproductive. And I don’t think it’s because everyone involved is stupid, exactly. It’s because the name of the game is you have to do something, and Biden’s plan obviously isn’t perfect (whose plan for anything has ever been perfect?), so it seems like unless you want to go out of business, you need to go protest Biden’s plan. But how does that help?