Weekend Update, April 3

Weekend Update, April 3

Some Easter takes

Matthew Yglesias. SlowBoring.com. 

Apr 3 

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Quick takes for your weekend fun.

(Photo by: Citizen of the Planet/Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Productivity is good

Joe Biden likes electric cars, which the New York Times discusses thusly:

From a climate perspective, the plan makes sense. Fossil fuel emissions from vehicle tailpipes are the leading cause of planet-warming pollution in United States. Replacing gas-guzzlers on the road with electric vehicles could be one of the most effective ways to lower the nation’s emissions.

From a job-creation perspective, it’s more complicated. On the one hand, it takes about one-third fewer workers to build an electric car than a car with an internal combustion engine. On the other, the plan could make Detroit more competitive and increase its share of the global automobile market.

Mr. Biden’s proposed solution is to lure the electric-battery industry, and its supply chain, to the United States from China and elsewhere in Asia, with a mix of manufacturing tax credits and other incentives. If it works, the next two years would see new electric vehicle battery and assembly plants sprouting up across the country. If it fails, Mr. Biden could face harsh political repercussions.

As a pure interest group politics story, this is right — electric cars are probably bad for “job creation.” But it’s important as we get back to full employment to get back to an understanding that productivity is good. If you want to know whether transitioning to electric cars will be Good For The Economy, the fact that they require less labor to manufacture and maintain is good, not bad. The big problem is that right now, batteries are still very expensive. But if we can get battery manufacturing costs down, then we not only have cleaner air; we have a much more productive auto sector.

Electric cars don’t fix everything

Conversely, while electric cars are very good for the environment, I think it’s important to insist that they don’t automatically eliminate every environmental concern about a society with a very high level of vehicle miles traveled per person.

It’s true that if you stipulate that every passenger vehicle is replaced with an electric car, and then further stipulate that over 100% of current fossil fuel electricity is replaced with zero-carbon sources, then your problem is done. But that’s a big stipulation. Electrifying the entire home heating sector is going to be another huge source of increased demand for electricity. Meeting all that demand is going to be very challenging. And realistically, building all the solar panels and wind turbines and transmission lines it takes to do it has environmental costs of its own.

This is one reason why I think opposition to things like nuclear electricity, geothermal power, and carbon capture technology is misguided. The amount of electricity we are going to need is simply off the charts.

But it also means that the amount of driving that happens continues to be a relevant ecological indicator — it doesn’t make sense to just hand-wave at electric cars and learn to love massive subsidies for highway-building.

The stilted Covid debate

I liked Ezra Klein’s column on Alex Tabarrok and his ideas about the COVID-19 pandemic. Several ideas I picked up from Tabarrok have been Slow Boring columns (challenge trials, AstraZeneca), so I am also appreciative of his work.

But it’s also a good window into what I find so frustrating and scary about the politics of COVID-19, namely that essentially the entire debate in mainstream politics has happened on the axis of “should we be more or less restrictive about people’s social and commercial activities?” with almost no consideration of any other possible dimension of policy. To take COVID-19 “more seriously” means to want to ban indoor dining. To think the public health agencies have been making mistakes means to want to lift mask mandates. To the extent that we argue about anything else, the people most vocally opposed to what they call lockdowns are also often against the vaccines that will end the restrictions.

To me, it’s scary because I think this probably won’t be our last novel respiratory pandemic. And for all that we’ve seen of incredible advances in the basic science of vaccine development, we’re clearly not doing well enough at actually manufacturing and distributing doses quickly. That’s especially true when you consider that the United States is doing much better than most developed countries, and poor countries are doing much worse than rich ones. We need to take everyone’s performance up a notch or three before the next one hits, and that can’t just mean yelling at people about hand-washing.

Excessive ignorance

Here’s a headline in The New York Times: “Can Vaccinated People Spread the Virus? We Don’t Know, Scientists Say.”

This sort of thing has been driving me crazy all pandemic. Back months before Pfizer and Moderna submitted their paperwork to the FDA, I asked some virologists and public health people some general questions about vaccines and they were all very clear — clinical trials are designed to test specific endpoints but in general, vaccines that are effective at blocking the development of serious symptoms also provide some “sterilizing immunity” against asymptomatic transmission. That’s a general attribute of human immune systems and disease transmission.

What’s also true is that in general, this usually isn’t perfect, so it’s still generally pro-social for a vaccinated person to behave somewhat cautiously.

Then once the vaccines were in hand, this very clear message — we don’t know exactly how much sterilizing immunity these vaccines provide but it would be bizarre if there wasn’t a significant impact — collapsed into a mush of fake ignorance and “we don’t know.” But again, delve into the text of the article and it’s clear that they actually do know:

“If Dr. Walensky had said most vaccinated people do not carry virus, we would not be having this discussion,” said John Moore, a virologist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York.

“What we know is the vaccines are very substantially effective against infection — there’s more and more data on that — but nothing is 100 percent,” he added. “It is an important public health message that needs to be gotten right.”

But I mean of course being vaccinated is not a 100% absolutely positive guarantee that you can’t transmit the virus; we already know that from the fact that the vaccines don’t prevent the development of symptoms in all cases. The vaccines are really good. Even really good vaccines aren’t perfect. We know this. The actual issue here is not a disagreement about vaccine science but a disagreement about social psychology. One group of people seems to think it’s important to try to encourage pro-social caution by discussing the risks that still exist post-vaccination, while another group thinks it’s important to try to encourage the pro-social behavior of getting vaccinated by emphasizing the positive. This is an interesting dispute. But it’s not a dispute about immunology at all, and it requires some other kind of evidence and probably a completely different body of scholarship.

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