WHAT I’M EMAILING MY OLD HOME TOWN ON “DE-FUNDING” POLICE (ends the way everything I write ends :-])
(subject) Up the down police presence
New York cutting its police budget (90% personnel costs) by 1/6 harkens me to the 70s when a no longer bridgeable budget gap forced laying off 1/3 of officers.
To bolster police presence on the street back then, anti-crime units were ordered to patrol in uniform. Our local guys patrolled in the same unmarked cars, but sitting low, hoping their uniforms wouldn’t show. Today, the City wants to disband these units all together. One of the theories behind these units is that 10% of the cops make 90% of the felony arrests – so it’s best to have the “super cops” work together, Startsky and Hutch style.
My small contribution to the lawlessness of the late 70s – I was a Bronx car service and gypsy cab driver by then – was to treat steady red lights like blinking red: stop, look both ways for a police car and go. It got to be a disease. I guessed at the time that assignments used up most of the patrol cars, leaving few for patrolling.
Along came the 00s – police rolls and crime had gone up and down to normal levels respectively — crime by some measures down 3X since 70s. And along came a mayor who thought it a good time to multiply police street stops 7X. 7 X 3 = 21 X as many stops per reported crime – mostly all dumped on minorities. Residents of once crime ridden neighborhoods could stop looking over their shoulders for bad guys and start looking over their other shoulders for cops. (Same mayor chipped in a billion dollars-plus on superfluous courthouses in the Bronx and Brooklyn.)
Today, reducing cops to reduce cop abuse strikes me a little bit like cutting back on doctors to reduce malpractice. Problem: the more you cut down on cops, the more that criminals up abuse. Follow up problem: it’s hard to make police behave in war zones — so, you cut down on cops; criminals commit more crimes; and cops come on worse again.
The only way to make minority – and everyone else’s — lives safe from cops and anybody else – is to get everyone on the same economic level. That’s just human nature. Here’s the one — and only way — to get there from here:
Scientists warn of potential wave of COVID-linked brain damage
Scientists warned on Wednesday of a potential wave of coronavirus-related brain damage as new evidence suggested COVID-19 can lead to severe neurological complications, including inflammation, psychosis and delirium.
A study * by researchers at University College London (UCL) described 43 cases of patients with COVID-19 who suffered either temporary brain dysfunction, strokes, nerve damage or other serious brain effects.
The research adds to recent studies which also found the disease can damage the brain.
“Whether we will see an epidemic on a large scale of brain damage linked to the pandemic – perhaps similar to the encephalitis lethargica outbreak in the 1920s and 1930s after the 1918 influenza pandemic – remains to be seen,” said Michael Zandi, from UCL’s Institute of Neurology, who co-led the study.
COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, is largely a respiratory illness that affects the lungs, but neuroscientists and specialist brain doctors say emerging evidence of its impact on the brain is concerning.
“My worry is that we have millions of people with COVID-19 now. And if in a year’s time we have 10 million recovered people, and those people have cognitive deficits… then that’s going to affect their ability to work and their ability to go about activities of daily living,” Adrian Owen, a neuroscientist at Western University in Canada, told Reuters in an interview.
In the UCL study, published in the journal Brain, nine patients who had brain inflammation were diagnosed with a rare condition called acute disseminated encephalomyelitis (ADEM) which is more usually seen in children and can be triggered by viral infections.
The team said it would normally see about one adult patient with ADEM per month at their specialist London clinic, but this had risen to at least one a week during the study period, something they described as “a concerning increase”.
“Given that the disease has only been around for a matter of months, we might not yet know what long-term damage COVID-19 can cause,” said Ross Paterson, who co-led the study. “Doctors need to be aware of possible neurological effects, as early diagnosis can improve patient outcomes.”
Owen said the emerging evidence underlined the need for large, detailed studies and global data collection to assess how common such neurological and psychiatric complications were.
Research shows isolation of asymptomatic cases key to reduce COVID-19
“Silent” infections refer to people who either are in the presymptomatic stage or have asymptomatic infections.
WASHINGTON — A new modeling analysis of COVID-19 transmission data attributed to “silent” infections has suggests that even isolation of all symptomatic individuals may be insufficient to suppress outbreaks.
According to the study, * published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday, at least one-third of asymptomatic cases would need to be detected and isolated in order to reduce the attack rate below one percent.
“Silent” infections refer to people who either are in the presymptomatic stage or have asymptomatic infections.
In the absence of population-wide restrictions, isolation of infected individuals is key to curtailing transmission. However, the effectiveness of symptom-based isolation in preventing a resurgence depends on the extent of presymptomatic and asymptomatic transmission, said the study.
Researchers from Canada and the United States evaluated the contribution of presymptomatic and asymptomatic transmission based on recent individual-level data regarding infectiousness prior to symptom onset and the asymptomatic proportion among all infections.
They found that the majority of incidences may be attributable to silent transmission from a combination of the presymptomatic stage and asymptomatic infections.
“Consequently, even if all symptomatic cases are isolated, a vast outbreak may nonetheless unfold,” said the study.
The results indicate that symptom-based isolation must be supplemented by rapid contact tracing and testing that identifies asymptomatic and presymptomatic cases, in order to safely lift current restrictions and minimize the risk of resurgence, according to the study.
One Million Tests a Day: How Beijing stemmed new COVID-19 outbreak
By Hu Yiwei and Gu Yingjie
Beijing, the Chinese capital, saw no new COVID-19 cases on Tuesday for the first time since a cluster of infections erupted in early June.
A 52-year-old man surnamed Tang in Beijing’s Xicheng District was found to have contracted COVID-19 on June 11, ending 56 case-free days. The infection was traced back to the city’s largest wholesale produce market, Xinfadi.
Two days after the first case was confirmed, Beijing launched citywide nucleic acid tests for COVID-19 on all people who had close contact with Xinfadi market since May 30.
As of Monday, at the daily coronavirus press conference, Pang Xinghuo, deputy director of the Beijing Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said the capital had conducted coronavirus nucleic acid testing on over 11 million people.
According to Zhang Qiang, deputy head of Beijing’s special COVID-19 task force at a press conference on June 28, Beijing can now test up to 1.08 million people a day for COVID-19.
Quick and extensive testing has played a key role in containing the coronavirus’s spread, Pang said.
In the 26 days since the fresh outbreak began, Beijing has rolled out a massive testing campaign following China’s consistent rules in prevention and control – making sure all those in need have been tested, quarantined, hospitalized or treated.
At a late June press conference, Li Jinming, a researcher at the Clinical Research Center of the National Health Commission, said Beijing’s prompt decision to conduct wide scale testing, starting with staff at the wholesale market and citizens living in 11 communities around it, helped quickly identify infected patients and cut the transmission chain.
Beijing carried out the operation in four phases, weighing the urgency of testing by key groups, starting with workers at Xinfadi market.
Guo Yanhong, the inspector general of the Medical Administration Bureau at the National Health Commission (NHC), also stressed the necessity of expanding the scope of detection to people who work for, stay in or have visited hospitals to protect the most susceptible population.
To boost its testing capacity, Beijing has increased the number of approved centers by almost 90 percent since early June by authorizing more existing medical facilities to conduct tests, building new laboratories and arranging tests within communities with the assistance of hospitals and medical staff dispatched from other provinces.
Many testing centers also adopted a method of sample pooling for people with a lower risk of infection. It is done by either pooling samples collected from three to five people in one tube or taking the same volume from three to five samples and mixing them for testing.
According to the NHC, the first type, which doesn’t affect the sensitivity of the test, is used most frequently in Beijing.
Chinese mainland reports 7 new COVID-19 cases, no new deaths
The Chinese mainland on Tuesday recorded 7 new COVID-19 cases from overseas, but no new domestic cases or deaths.
The total number of confirmed cases on the Chinese mainland stands at 83,572, and the cumulative death toll at 4,634, with 117 asymptomatic patients under medical observation.
Supreme Court Lets Employers Opt Out of Birth Control Coverage
The justices upheld regulations from the Trump administration that allowed employers with religious objections to decline to provide contraception coverage.
By Adam Liptak
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld a Trump administration regulation that lets employers with religious or moral objections limit women’s access to birth control coverage under the Affordable Care Act.
As a consequence of the ruling, about 70,000 to 126,000 women could lose contraceptive coverage from their employers, according to government estimates.
The vote was 7 to 2, with Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor dissenting….
A problem that has evidently not been emphasized but that the spread of the coronavirus infections in the United States makes clear to me is that beyond our political leadership problems we have a seriously deficient healthcare system. I find the same for the British healthcare system.
July 8, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 3,115,354)
Deaths ( 134,143)
UK
Cases ( 286,979)
Deaths ( 44,517)
Notice the remarkable 15.5% deaths to cases ratio for the UK.
Who wants to bet that the NBA ditches their Orlando season? Regardless of the true health implications, I have to believe that players are hearing a bunch from activists that playing will be a win for DeSantis, and by extension, Trump. And it would be in reality I think. The most socially woke and politically liberal major professional sport getting back to work in Florida would be a real endorsement of the reopening. Silver and company have it easy compared with the NFL however. They can ditch the plan without much consideration of market reaction. Yes, it could be terrible for revenue for some franchises, but it would go down okay with most of the audience and probably most of the players, too. The NFL I think has a worse problem. They do not have anything like a socially woke fan base. There are no good reasons to think that their fears about the anthem protests of a couple of years ago should be any less this season. In fact, I would say that there is a greater chance that it would be more likely to curtail revenue generation this season and possibly do long-term damage. A major portion of the fan base sees the league aligning with forces that gladly insult George Washington and Fredrick Douglass – among others and are going to be a lot closer to actually ditching this sport this time around. I would not put it past the league to simply cancel the season or delay the start past election day.
Churches Were Eager to Reopen. Now They Are a Major Source of Coronavirus Cases.
The virus has infiltrated Sunday services, church meetings and youth camps. More than 650 cases have been linked to reopened religious facilities.
By Kate Conger, Jack Healy and Lucy Tompkins
Reason, Kevin Drum makes a very convincing mathematical case for that — over and over. I have my own theory for the big nationwide drop in crime (see below) — very esoteric — no way of knowing who’s “right”; likely both.
But the split economic levels in every case finds most of the crime in the lower economic regions — as always in any era.
My theory of juvenile delinquency is that boys who don’t think anyone cares about them — can happen simply from being out of control of loving relatives — don’t care about themselves and so cannot be deterred by any level of enforcement and punishment. I’m thinking of the kind of kid who is getting arrested every week literally for one stupid thing after another — not your supposed “super predator”; never met one or was ever aware of one in the real world.
I tie this out-of-their-own-control boys thing in with the spread of street gangs — to explain the steep drop in crime (one possible explanation anyway). I see the gangs as co-opting these out-of-their-own-control boys; giving them sub-minimum wage jobs (“Five-O!”), with the promise of future macho stuff (guns) — keeping the out-of-their-own-control from practicing their stupid purse snatching or climbing in your fire escape window for your costume jewelry.
Cure for the, what I call, “hysterically alienated” delinquents (based on only a few accidental examples): five or six weeks of intensive attention (at least an hour a day) during which the crime does not slow one iota; first couple of weeks you have to kiss the kid’s toe nails and tell him anything he wants to here or he’ll go running off (truly hysterical); thence comes the “invasion of the body snatchers”, a different person wakes up one day — weird.
Anyway, lead or no lead in the air we have the same proportional difference in crime between the well off and the worse off.
President Trump, flouting the advice of his own federal health experts, threatened to cut off aid to schools that refuse to fully reopen this fall.
Hours after President Trump assailed guidelines issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for reopening schools, Vice President Mike Pence, appearing with the White House coronavirus task force, announced the agency would issue new recommendations next week, saying they don’t want the guidance to be a reason why schools don’t open.
“Well, the president said today, we just don’t want the guidance to be too tough,” Mr. Pence said. “That’s the reason why next week, the C.D.C. is going to be issuing a new set of tools, five different documents that will be giving even more clarity on the guidance going forward.”
Mr. Trump openly rebuffed the C.D.C. on Twitter Wednesday morning, assailing current guidelines issued by the agency recommending a slew of preventive measures necessary to bring the nation’s children back to class. And he threatened to cut off federal aid to schools that refuse to fully reopen this fall. …
Mr. Trump’s threat comes as scientists grapple
with rising concerns about transmission of the virus in indoor spaces. Most public schools are poorly ventilated and don’t have the funding to update their filtration systems. Mounting evidence suggests that in crowded indoor settings, like schools, tiny droplets expelled when an infected person breathes, talks or sings can linger and infect others when inhaled. Children under 12 are thought to have only a low risk of getting sick themselves, but they may still spread the virus to other students, or to teachers and parents. …
NYT: “…May cut off funding if not open!” he wrote. …
But Mr. Trump’s funding threat carries real weight. When it passed its $2 trillion stimulus law, Congress gave enormous latitude to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to decide how to parcel out tens of millions of dollars in relief to school districts. Ms. DeVos said Tuesday that only 1 percent of the $13.5 billion in stimulus funding allocated to K-12 school districts had been claimed. And the Education Department doles out billions to states for a range of programs funded in the federal budget, including those that serve low-income and special education students.
Those districts are now desperate for funds as they try to find ways to open classrooms with far fewer students and staff in each, to maintain social distancing, to test students and staff for the virus, and to provide masks and other protective gear. Education groups have estimated that they need at least $200 billion in additional funding to reopen next school year.
How America Lost the War on Covid-19
It wasn’t because of our culture, it was because of our leadership.
By Paul Krugman
When did America start losing its war against the coronavirus? How did we find ourselves international pariahs, not even allowed to travel to Europe?
I’d suggest that the turning point was way back on April 17, the day that Donald Trump tweeted “LIBERATE MINNESOTA,” followed by “LIBERATE MICHIGAN” and “LIBERATE VIRGINIA.” In so doing, he effectively declared White House support for protesters demanding an end to the lockdowns governors had instituted to bring Covid-19 under control.
As it happens, the Democratic governors Trump was targeting in those tweets stood firm. But Republican governors in Arizona, Florida, Texas and elsewhere soon lifted stay-at-home orders and ended many restrictions on business operations. They also, following Trump’s lead, refused to require that people wear masks, and Texas and Arizona denied local governments the right to impose such requirements. They waved away warnings from health experts that premature and careless reopening could lead to a new wave of infections.
And the virus came.
The initial outbreak of Covid-19, centered on New York, should have taught us to be wary. Rising rates of infection can seem like a minor concern at first, especially if you don’t have adequate testing, until they explode with terrifying speed.
But neither Republican politicians nor the Trump administration was willing to heed that lesson. By the second week of June new Covid-19 cases were surging in Arizona and clearly on the rise in Texas. Yet the governors of both states dismissed calls for a pause in reopening, insisting that things were under control.
And on June 16, of course, The Wall Street Journal published an opinion article by Vice President Mike Pence declaring that there wasn’t and wouldn’t be a coronavirus second wave. Given the Trump administration’s track record, this virtually guaranteed that the wave was about to hit. And so it was.
Over the past three weeks things have quickly gotten very grim. Hospitals in Arizona and Texas are in crisis. And, yes, it was premature reopening that did it, both directly and by sending a signal to individuals that the risk was past.
But why did America bungle Covid-19 so badly?
There has been a fair bit of commentary to the effect that our failed pandemic response was deeply rooted in American culture. We are, the argument goes, too libertarian, too distrustful of government, too unwilling to accept even slight inconveniences to protect others.
And there’s surely something to this. I don’t think any other advanced country (but are we still an advanced country?) has a comparable number of people who respond with rage when asked to wear a mask in a supermarket. There definitely isn’t any other advanced country where demonstrators against public health measures would wave guns around and invade state capitols. And the Republican Party is more or less unique among major Western political parties in its hostility to science in general.
But what strikes me, when looking at America’s extraordinary pandemic failure, is how top-down it all was.
Those anti-lockdown demonstrations weren’t spontaneous, grass-roots affairs. Many were organized and coordinated by conservative political activists, some with close ties to the Trump campaign, and financed in part by right-wing billionaires.
And the rush to reopen in Sunbelt states was less a response to popular demand than a case of Republican governors following Trump’s lead.
The main driving force behind reopening, as far as I can tell, was the administration’s desire to have big job gains leading into November, so that it could do what it knew how to do — boast about economic success. Actually dealing with the pandemic just wasn’t Trump’s kind of thing.
In that case, however, why has Trump refused to wear a face mask or encourage others to do so? After all, wider use of masks would be one way to limit infections without shutting down the economy.
Well, Trump’s vanity — his belief that wearing a mask would make him look silly, or mess up his makeup, or something — has surely played a role. But it’s also true that masks remind people that we haven’t controlled the coronavirus — and Trump wants people to forget that awkward fact.
The irony is that Trump’s willingness to trade deaths for jobs and political gain has backfired.
Reopening did lead to large job increases in May and June, as around a third of the workers laid off as a result of the pandemic were rehired. But Trump’s job approval and electoral prospects just kept sliding.
And even in purely economic terms the rush to reopen is probably failing. The last official employment number was a snapshot from the second week of June; a variety of short-term indicators suggest that growth slowed or even went into reverse soon afterward, especially in states where Covid-19 cases are spiking.
In any case, the point is that America’s defeat at the hands of the coronavirus didn’t happen because victory was impossible. Nor was it because we as a nation were incapable of responding. No, we lost because Trump and those around him decided that it was in their political interests to let the virus run wild.
Defund the f**king CDC https://t.co/sipIzg8KoD If they are just going to write guidelines to please Donald Trump, let's save money and get rid of the middle man
You’re missing something huge. Working on a piece that hopefully will help and also inspire hope. Dug into some patriot act surplus funding that lead me in a weird direction recently that is interesting.
Just in case anybody does look here – my suggestion for the opening to a new blog (or even book) for when I’m retired. Any thoughts?;
INTRODUCTION
An alternative economics – Why it is needed
When I studies economics, I never really “got” it. Somehow, it didn’t gel with me intuitively, either in the institutional flavour , neo-keynesian or neo-classical flavour. There was something that didn’t quite add up.
As I have grown older, and moved from a professional to an amateur interest in economics, this feeling has got stronger not weaker, but the outlines of the reasons for this for have become clearer to me. It is not the details of the models that are the problem, it is the foundations.
I remember reading Zen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and the author’s dealings with some musicians and artists whose way of looking at world was superficially slightly different. But as he dug into this he found that instead of this difference being a question of style, the more he analysed the more the difference seemed to a chasm. It affected everything. So it seems to me with economics. The differences aren’t superficial, they are very deep. I think we need to start again from first principles.
But classical or neoclassical some major features are apparent.
1. The centrality of the concept of “utility” (which is interpreted more as being satisfaction or pleasure rather than usefulness as the name suggests).
2. “Equilibrium” as a fundamental concept for analysis. Almost all results are derived from equilibrium positions, regardless of whether these equilibrium will actually be reached or whether they are in fact really equilibrium positions (i.e. points of stability).
3. The exogenous position of “money” in their models. Classical and Neoclassical economics is basically intermediated barter (explicitly in the Walrasian auctioneer). Interest rates (real) are determined by inter-temporal preferences, the productivity of capital and the supply of money.
4. Production as a mysterious and external process in their emphasis on demand and markets as the drivers of economics (Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations is an exception to this). The production process as such is not usually not considered in any detail.
Neoclassical economics also made a deliberate choice to ignore land concentrating instead exclusively on capital and labour as inputs to the production process perhaps for dubious reasons: https://evonomics.com/josh-ryan-collins-land-economic-theory/ .
I want to argue that ALL of these underlying concepts are dubious and/or inadequate and all need to be replaced completely. Continuing along the same path is not progress, when the path was wrong from the start. There is also (despite the fact the advice of economists is often ignored by politicians) the consequence that policy advice derived from these models is misleading and perhaps destructive. It also makes economics unnecessarily opaque. In particular economics suffers in comprehensibility because it uses ordinary words and gives them specialised meanings. This causes confusion not just to lay people, but to economists themselves.
I also want to argue that widespread use of comparative statics in economics (arguably introduced just as an tool for exposition) has caused economics to forget or underplay the importance of time. And this absence of time in economics is absolutely crucial. Things do not happen instantaneously in economies, not at all.
Thoughts? I got all kinds of those, but how about some memories? Any interest in memories?
I’m pretty sure my 1968-69 economics text book, by who else, spoke of utils as unit; from man’s earliest days, we have sought to unitize and quantify. I really liked economics in college, should have went on.
When I started business, 1972 for reference, it was a bit of surprise to learn that, in the real world, things didn’t really work according to Paul. In those days, want ads told you more about the state of the economy than any report.
High School:
If it’s early in the year, “Why take Economics?” Often, someone will respond, “I want to start a business.” I ask, “What’s needed to start a business?” After a while, we get around to the need for a market for your product.
Later in the year, it’s, “Where are you? What are you studying?” Followed with a bunch of questions meant to force them to apply what they’ve been studying. “Supply and demand,” they say. “So, Safeway just raised the price of grape juice from $3 to $5, what’s going on?” Whatever the market will bear beats supply and demand every time.
—Ken Melvin – with respect economics is not about an individual business, but about the network it sits in and the social purpose it serves.—
It’s the pond small business swims in. What I did was capital expenditure dependent which was dependent on the economy. In the early 70s, we had one recession, sometimes two, a year. Turns out, one could forecast the economy best by the want ads; such a good tool, too bad it’s no longer. “Twas also when I learned that they all read the same magazine/papers. The phone would stop ringing of a sudden and start again of a sudden. The ‘what the market will bear’ lesson was from the supplier’s price increases; there was also a lesson about inflation included. By the second half of the 70s, the canard about labor and inflation was beginning to implode.
WHAT I’M EMAILING MY OLD HOME TOWN ON “DE-FUNDING” POLICE (ends the way everything I write ends :-])
(subject) Up the down police presence
New York cutting its police budget (90% personnel costs) by 1/6 harkens me to the 70s when a no longer bridgeable budget gap forced laying off 1/3 of officers.
To bolster police presence on the street back then, anti-crime units were ordered to patrol in uniform. Our local guys patrolled in the same unmarked cars, but sitting low, hoping their uniforms wouldn’t show. Today, the City wants to disband these units all together. One of the theories behind these units is that 10% of the cops make 90% of the felony arrests – so it’s best to have the “super cops” work together, Startsky and Hutch style.
My small contribution to the lawlessness of the late 70s – I was a Bronx car service and gypsy cab driver by then – was to treat steady red lights like blinking red: stop, look both ways for a police car and go. It got to be a disease. I guessed at the time that assignments used up most of the patrol cars, leaving few for patrolling.
Along came the 00s – police rolls and crime had gone up and down to normal levels respectively — crime by some measures down 3X since 70s. And along came a mayor who thought it a good time to multiply police street stops 7X. 7 X 3 = 21 X as many stops per reported crime – mostly all dumped on minorities. Residents of once crime ridden neighborhoods could stop looking over their shoulders for bad guys and start looking over their other shoulders for cops. (Same mayor chipped in a billion dollars-plus on superfluous courthouses in the Bronx and Brooklyn.)
Today, reducing cops to reduce cop abuse strikes me a little bit like cutting back on doctors to reduce malpractice. Problem: the more you cut down on cops, the more that criminals up abuse. Follow up problem: it’s hard to make police behave in war zones — so, you cut down on cops; criminals commit more crimes; and cops come on worse again.
The only way to make minority – and everyone else’s — lives safe from cops and anybody else – is to get everyone on the same economic level. That’s just human nature. Here’s the one — and only way — to get there from here:
Had Obama “woke” to federally ordered cert/recert/decert votes in his time, Hillary would be running for re-election today.
in 2019 more prime age white youth were executed by the cops than blacks. Beyond even the racial % of the population.
Maybe the problem is they resist arrest and the cops are trained to shoot fleeing……………there it is.
Denis Drew, I guess you are just not into the lead/crime hypothesis.
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-07-08/Scientists-warn-of-potential-wave-of-COVID-linked-brain-damage-RXGs9FfEI0/index.html
July 8, 2020
Scientists warn of potential wave of COVID-linked brain damage
Scientists warned on Wednesday of a potential wave of coronavirus-related brain damage as new evidence suggested COVID-19 can lead to severe neurological complications, including inflammation, psychosis and delirium.
A study * by researchers at University College London (UCL) described 43 cases of patients with COVID-19 who suffered either temporary brain dysfunction, strokes, nerve damage or other serious brain effects.
The research adds to recent studies which also found the disease can damage the brain.
“Whether we will see an epidemic on a large scale of brain damage linked to the pandemic – perhaps similar to the encephalitis lethargica outbreak in the 1920s and 1930s after the 1918 influenza pandemic – remains to be seen,” said Michael Zandi, from UCL’s Institute of Neurology, who co-led the study.
COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, is largely a respiratory illness that affects the lungs, but neuroscientists and specialist brain doctors say emerging evidence of its impact on the brain is concerning.
“My worry is that we have millions of people with COVID-19 now. And if in a year’s time we have 10 million recovered people, and those people have cognitive deficits… then that’s going to affect their ability to work and their ability to go about activities of daily living,” Adrian Owen, a neuroscientist at Western University in Canada, told Reuters in an interview.
In the UCL study, published in the journal Brain, nine patients who had brain inflammation were diagnosed with a rare condition called acute disseminated encephalomyelitis (ADEM) which is more usually seen in children and can be triggered by viral infections.
The team said it would normally see about one adult patient with ADEM per month at their specialist London clinic, but this had risen to at least one a week during the study period, something they described as “a concerning increase”.
“Given that the disease has only been around for a matter of months, we might not yet know what long-term damage COVID-19 can cause,” said Ross Paterson, who co-led the study. “Doctors need to be aware of possible neurological effects, as early diagnosis can improve patient outcomes.”
Owen said the emerging evidence underlined the need for large, detailed studies and global data collection to assess how common such neurological and psychiatric complications were.
* https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/doi/10.1093/brain/awaa240/5868408
http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-07/08/c_139195501.htm
July 8, 2020
Research shows isolation of asymptomatic cases key to reduce COVID-19
“Silent” infections refer to people who either are in the presymptomatic stage or have asymptomatic infections.
WASHINGTON — A new modeling analysis of COVID-19 transmission data attributed to “silent” infections has suggests that even isolation of all symptomatic individuals may be insufficient to suppress outbreaks.
According to the study, * published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday, at least one-third of asymptomatic cases would need to be detected and isolated in order to reduce the attack rate below one percent.
“Silent” infections refer to people who either are in the presymptomatic stage or have asymptomatic infections.
In the absence of population-wide restrictions, isolation of infected individuals is key to curtailing transmission. However, the effectiveness of symptom-based isolation in preventing a resurgence depends on the extent of presymptomatic and asymptomatic transmission, said the study.
Researchers from Canada and the United States evaluated the contribution of presymptomatic and asymptomatic transmission based on recent individual-level data regarding infectiousness prior to symptom onset and the asymptomatic proportion among all infections.
They found that the majority of incidences may be attributable to silent transmission from a combination of the presymptomatic stage and asymptomatic infections.
“Consequently, even if all symptomatic cases are isolated, a vast outbreak may nonetheless unfold,” said the study.
The results indicate that symptom-based isolation must be supplemented by rapid contact tracing and testing that identifies asymptomatic and presymptomatic cases, in order to safely lift current restrictions and minimize the risk of resurgence, according to the study.
* https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/07/02/2008373117
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
July 8, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 3,100,272)
Deaths ( 134,055)
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-07-08/One-Million-Tests-a-Day-How-Beijing-stemmed-new-COVID-19-outbreak-RXqRcu3r4k/index.html
July 8, 2020
One Million Tests a Day: How Beijing stemmed new COVID-19 outbreak
By Hu Yiwei and Gu Yingjie
Beijing, the Chinese capital, saw no new COVID-19 cases on Tuesday for the first time since a cluster of infections erupted in early June.
A 52-year-old man surnamed Tang in Beijing’s Xicheng District was found to have contracted COVID-19 on June 11, ending 56 case-free days. The infection was traced back to the city’s largest wholesale produce market, Xinfadi.
Two days after the first case was confirmed, Beijing launched citywide nucleic acid tests for COVID-19 on all people who had close contact with Xinfadi market since May 30.
As of Monday, at the daily coronavirus press conference, Pang Xinghuo, deputy director of the Beijing Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said the capital had conducted coronavirus nucleic acid testing on over 11 million people.
According to Zhang Qiang, deputy head of Beijing’s special COVID-19 task force at a press conference on June 28, Beijing can now test up to 1.08 million people a day for COVID-19.
Quick and extensive testing has played a key role in containing the coronavirus’s spread, Pang said.
In the 26 days since the fresh outbreak began, Beijing has rolled out a massive testing campaign following China’s consistent rules in prevention and control – making sure all those in need have been tested, quarantined, hospitalized or treated.
At a late June press conference, Li Jinming, a researcher at the Clinical Research Center of the National Health Commission, said Beijing’s prompt decision to conduct wide scale testing, starting with staff at the wholesale market and citizens living in 11 communities around it, helped quickly identify infected patients and cut the transmission chain.
Beijing carried out the operation in four phases, weighing the urgency of testing by key groups, starting with workers at Xinfadi market.
Guo Yanhong, the inspector general of the Medical Administration Bureau at the National Health Commission (NHC), also stressed the necessity of expanding the scope of detection to people who work for, stay in or have visited hospitals to protect the most susceptible population.
To boost its testing capacity, Beijing has increased the number of approved centers by almost 90 percent since early June by authorizing more existing medical facilities to conduct tests, building new laboratories and arranging tests within communities with the assistance of hospitals and medical staff dispatched from other provinces.
Many testing centers also adopted a method of sample pooling for people with a lower risk of infection. It is done by either pooling samples collected from three to five people in one tube or taking the same volume from three to five samples and mixing them for testing.
According to the NHC, the first type, which doesn’t affect the sensitivity of the test, is used most frequently in Beijing.
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-07-08/Chinese-mainland-reports-no-new-domestic-COVID-19-cases-RWZABwyHEk/index.html
July 8, 2020
Chinese mainland reports 7 new COVID-19 cases, no new deaths
The Chinese mainland on Tuesday recorded 7 new COVID-19 cases from overseas, but no new domestic cases or deaths.
The total number of confirmed cases on the Chinese mainland stands at 83,572, and the cumulative death toll at 4,634, with 117 asymptomatic patients under medical observation.
Chinese mainland new locally transmitted cases
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-07-08/Chinese-mainland-reports-no-new-domestic-COVID-19-cases-RWZABwyHEk/img/5d3a8d45d736403c9c8cea50c25e25f3/5d3a8d45d736403c9c8cea50c25e25f3.jpeg
Chinese mainland new imported cases
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-07-08/Chinese-mainland-reports-no-new-domestic-COVID-19-cases-RWZABwyHEk/img/5c44b8ee253440df96be67bc4d82de70/5c44b8ee253440df96be67bc4d82de70.jpeg
Chinese mainland new asymptomatic cases
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-07-08/Chinese-mainland-reports-no-new-domestic-COVID-19-cases-RWZABwyHEk/img/eb47b5ff23e14cb1aa286ffdeb0c3446/eb47b5ff23e14cb1aa286ffdeb0c3446.jpeg
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/us/supreme-court-birth-control-obamacare.html
July 8, 2020
Supreme Court Lets Employers Opt Out of Birth Control Coverage
The justices upheld regulations from the Trump administration that allowed employers with religious objections to decline to provide contraception coverage.
By Adam Liptak
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld a Trump administration regulation that lets employers with religious or moral objections limit women’s access to birth control coverage under the Affordable Care Act.
As a consequence of the ruling, about 70,000 to 126,000 women could lose contraceptive coverage from their employers, according to government estimates.
The vote was 7 to 2, with Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor dissenting….
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2019/demo/p60-267.pdf
November, 2019
People Without Health Insurance Coverage, 2007-2018
(Thousands without insurance for entire year)
2007 ( 44,088)
2008 ( 44,780)
2009 ( 48,985) Obama
2010 ( 49,951) (Affordable Care Act)
2011 ( 48,613)
2012 ( 47,951)
2013 ( 41,795)
2014 ( 32,968)
2015 ( 28,966)
2016 ( 28,052)
2017 ( 25,600) Trump
2018 ( 27,462)
(Percent without insurance for entire year)
2007 ( 14.7)
2008 ( 14.9)
2009 ( 16.1) Obama
2010 ( 16.3) (Affordable Care Act)
2011 ( 15.7)
2012 ( 15.4)
2013 ( 13.3)
2014 ( 10.4)
2015 ( 9.1)
2016 ( 8.8)
2017 ( 7.9) Trump
2018 ( 8.5)
A problem that has evidently not been emphasized but that the spread of the coronavirus infections in the United States makes clear to me is that beyond our political leadership problems we have a seriously deficient healthcare system. I find the same for the British healthcare system.
July 8, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 3,115,354)
Deaths ( 134,143)
UK
Cases ( 286,979)
Deaths ( 44,517)
Notice the remarkable 15.5% deaths to cases ratio for the UK.
There are more people infected than that.
Who wants to bet that the NBA ditches their Orlando season? Regardless of the true health implications, I have to believe that players are hearing a bunch from activists that playing will be a win for DeSantis, and by extension, Trump. And it would be in reality I think. The most socially woke and politically liberal major professional sport getting back to work in Florida would be a real endorsement of the reopening. Silver and company have it easy compared with the NFL however. They can ditch the plan without much consideration of market reaction. Yes, it could be terrible for revenue for some franchises, but it would go down okay with most of the audience and probably most of the players, too. The NFL I think has a worse problem. They do not have anything like a socially woke fan base. There are no good reasons to think that their fears about the anthem protests of a couple of years ago should be any less this season. In fact, I would say that there is a greater chance that it would be more likely to curtail revenue generation this season and possibly do long-term damage. A major portion of the fan base sees the league aligning with forces that gladly insult George Washington and Fredrick Douglass – among others and are going to be a lot closer to actually ditching this sport this time around. I would not put it past the league to simply cancel the season or delay the start past election day.
Wall Street climbs
as hopes of economic revival overshadow jump in virus cases
Dow up 0.1%; NASDAQ up 1.0%
This can only mean…
Apple: +1.95%; Microsoft: +1.6%; Amazon: +1.8%
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/world/coronavirus-updates.html
July 8, 2020
The C.D.C. announces it will issue new guidelines for reopening schools, hours after Trump assailed its recommendations.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/world/coronavirus-updates.html
July 8, 2020
The C.D.C. announces it will issue new guidelines for reopening schools, hours after Trump assailed its recommendations.
[ A remarkably revealing commentary on the nature of American democracy. ]
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/us/coronavirus-churches-outbreaks.html
July 8, 2020
Churches Were Eager to Reopen. Now They Are a Major Source of Coronavirus Cases.
The virus has infiltrated Sunday services, church meetings and youth camps. More than 650 cases have been linked to reopened religious facilities.
By Kate Conger, Jack Healy and Lucy Tompkins
Reason, Kevin Drum makes a very convincing mathematical case for that — over and over. I have my own theory for the big nationwide drop in crime (see below) — very esoteric — no way of knowing who’s “right”; likely both.
But the split economic levels in every case finds most of the crime in the lower economic regions — as always in any era.
My theory of juvenile delinquency is that boys who don’t think anyone cares about them — can happen simply from being out of control of loving relatives — don’t care about themselves and so cannot be deterred by any level of enforcement and punishment. I’m thinking of the kind of kid who is getting arrested every week literally for one stupid thing after another — not your supposed “super predator”; never met one or was ever aware of one in the real world.
I tie this out-of-their-own-control boys thing in with the spread of street gangs — to explain the steep drop in crime (one possible explanation anyway). I see the gangs as co-opting these out-of-their-own-control boys; giving them sub-minimum wage jobs (“Five-O!”), with the promise of future macho stuff (guns) — keeping the out-of-their-own-control from practicing their stupid purse snatching or climbing in your fire escape window for your costume jewelry.
Cure for the, what I call, “hysterically alienated” delinquents (based on only a few accidental examples): five or six weeks of intensive attention (at least an hour a day) during which the crime does not slow one iota; first couple of weeks you have to kiss the kid’s toe nails and tell him anything he wants to here or he’ll go running off (truly hysterical); thence comes the “invasion of the body snatchers”, a different person wakes up one day — weird.
Anyway, lead or no lead in the air we have the same proportional difference in crime between the well off and the worse off.
CDC to Revise Guidelines on Schools After Trump’s Attacks
President Trump, flouting the advice of his own federal health experts, threatened to cut off aid to schools that refuse to fully reopen this fall.
Hours after President Trump assailed guidelines issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for reopening schools, Vice President Mike Pence, appearing with the White House coronavirus task force, announced the agency would issue new recommendations next week, saying they don’t want the guidance to be a reason why schools don’t open.
“Well, the president said today, we just don’t want the guidance to be too tough,” Mr. Pence said. “That’s the reason why next week, the C.D.C. is going to be issuing a new set of tools, five different documents that will be giving even more clarity on the guidance going forward.”
Mr. Trump openly rebuffed the C.D.C. on Twitter Wednesday morning, assailing current guidelines issued by the agency recommending a slew of preventive measures necessary to bring the nation’s children back to class. And he threatened to cut off federal aid to schools that refuse to fully reopen this fall. …
Mr. Trump’s threat comes as scientists grapple
with rising concerns about transmission of the virus in indoor spaces. Most public schools are poorly ventilated and don’t have the funding to update their filtration systems. Mounting evidence suggests that in crowded indoor settings, like schools, tiny droplets expelled when an infected person breathes, talks or sings can linger and infect others when inhaled. Children under 12 are thought to have only a low risk of getting sick themselves, but they may still spread the virus to other students, or to teachers and parents. …
NYT: “…May cut off funding if not open!” he wrote. …
But Mr. Trump’s funding threat carries real weight. When it passed its $2 trillion stimulus law, Congress gave enormous latitude to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to decide how to parcel out tens of millions of dollars in relief to school districts. Ms. DeVos said Tuesday that only 1 percent of the $13.5 billion in stimulus funding allocated to K-12 school districts had been claimed. And the Education Department doles out billions to states for a range of programs funded in the federal budget, including those that serve low-income and special education students.
Those districts are now desperate for funds as they try to find ways to open classrooms with far fewer students and staff in each, to maintain social distancing, to test students and staff for the virus, and to provide masks and other protective gear. Education groups have estimated that they need at least $200 billion in additional funding to reopen next school year.
Where oh where is our Betsy
https://crooksandliars.com/2020/07/nea-prez-i-double-dog-dare-donald-trump
July 8, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 3,137,790)
Deaths ( 134,569)
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/06/opinion/covid-19-trump.html
July 6, 2020
How America Lost the War on Covid-19
It wasn’t because of our culture, it was because of our leadership.
By Paul Krugman
When did America start losing its war against the coronavirus? How did we find ourselves international pariahs, not even allowed to travel to Europe?
I’d suggest that the turning point was way back on April 17, the day that Donald Trump tweeted “LIBERATE MINNESOTA,” followed by “LIBERATE MICHIGAN” and “LIBERATE VIRGINIA.” In so doing, he effectively declared White House support for protesters demanding an end to the lockdowns governors had instituted to bring Covid-19 under control.
As it happens, the Democratic governors Trump was targeting in those tweets stood firm. But Republican governors in Arizona, Florida, Texas and elsewhere soon lifted stay-at-home orders and ended many restrictions on business operations. They also, following Trump’s lead, refused to require that people wear masks, and Texas and Arizona denied local governments the right to impose such requirements. They waved away warnings from health experts that premature and careless reopening could lead to a new wave of infections.
And the virus came.
The initial outbreak of Covid-19, centered on New York, should have taught us to be wary. Rising rates of infection can seem like a minor concern at first, especially if you don’t have adequate testing, until they explode with terrifying speed.
But neither Republican politicians nor the Trump administration was willing to heed that lesson. By the second week of June new Covid-19 cases were surging in Arizona and clearly on the rise in Texas. Yet the governors of both states dismissed calls for a pause in reopening, insisting that things were under control.
And on June 16, of course, The Wall Street Journal published an opinion article by Vice President Mike Pence declaring that there wasn’t and wouldn’t be a coronavirus second wave. Given the Trump administration’s track record, this virtually guaranteed that the wave was about to hit. And so it was.
Over the past three weeks things have quickly gotten very grim. Hospitals in Arizona and Texas are in crisis. And, yes, it was premature reopening that did it, both directly and by sending a signal to individuals that the risk was past.
But why did America bungle Covid-19 so badly?
There has been a fair bit of commentary to the effect that our failed pandemic response was deeply rooted in American culture. We are, the argument goes, too libertarian, too distrustful of government, too unwilling to accept even slight inconveniences to protect others.
And there’s surely something to this. I don’t think any other advanced country (but are we still an advanced country?) has a comparable number of people who respond with rage when asked to wear a mask in a supermarket. There definitely isn’t any other advanced country where demonstrators against public health measures would wave guns around and invade state capitols. And the Republican Party is more or less unique among major Western political parties in its hostility to science in general.
But what strikes me, when looking at America’s extraordinary pandemic failure, is how top-down it all was.
Those anti-lockdown demonstrations weren’t spontaneous, grass-roots affairs. Many were organized and coordinated by conservative political activists, some with close ties to the Trump campaign, and financed in part by right-wing billionaires.
And the rush to reopen in Sunbelt states was less a response to popular demand than a case of Republican governors following Trump’s lead.
The main driving force behind reopening, as far as I can tell, was the administration’s desire to have big job gains leading into November, so that it could do what it knew how to do — boast about economic success. Actually dealing with the pandemic just wasn’t Trump’s kind of thing.
In that case, however, why has Trump refused to wear a face mask or encourage others to do so? After all, wider use of masks would be one way to limit infections without shutting down the economy.
Well, Trump’s vanity — his belief that wearing a mask would make him look silly, or mess up his makeup, or something — has surely played a role. But it’s also true that masks remind people that we haven’t controlled the coronavirus — and Trump wants people to forget that awkward fact.
The irony is that Trump’s willingness to trade deaths for jobs and political gain has backfired.
Reopening did lead to large job increases in May and June, as around a third of the workers laid off as a result of the pandemic were rehired. But Trump’s job approval and electoral prospects just kept sliding.
And even in purely economic terms the rush to reopen is probably failing. The last official employment number was a snapshot from the second week of June; a variety of short-term indicators suggest that growth slowed or even went into reverse soon afterward, especially in states where Covid-19 cases are spiking.
In any case, the point is that America’s defeat at the hands of the coronavirus didn’t happen because victory was impossible. Nor was it because we as a nation were incapable of responding. No, we lost because Trump and those around him decided that it was in their political interests to let the virus run wild.
July 8, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 3,158,733)
Deaths ( 134,853)
India
Cases ( 769,052)
Deaths ( 21,144)
UK
Cases ( 286,979)
Deaths ( 44,517)
Mexico
Cases ( 268,008)
Deaths ( 32,014)
Germany
Cases ( 198,765)
Deaths ( 9,115)
Canada
Cases ( 106,434)
Deaths ( 8,737)
Sweden
Cases ( 73,858)
Deaths ( 5,482)
China
Cases ( 83,572)
Deaths ( 4,634)
Dean Baker @DeanBaker13
Defund the f**king CDC. If they are just going to write guidelines to please Donald Trump, let’s save money and get rid of the middle man:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/world/coronavirus-updates.html#link-5d360a96
The C.D.C. announces it will issue new guidelines for reopening schools, hours after Trump assailed its recommendations.
2:12 PM · Jul 8, 2020
You’re missing something huge. Working on a piece that hopefully will help and also inspire hope. Dug into some patriot act surplus funding that lead me in a weird direction recently that is interesting.
When is the next open thread coming along? I want to post something long hoping to attract comments – but I suspect this is a dead thread.
I don’t know who Michael T Smith is – but that is cruel. Make and curious and then – nothing.
oops – Make us curious and then ….
Just in case anybody does look here – my suggestion for the opening to a new blog (or even book) for when I’m retired. Any thoughts?;
INTRODUCTION
An alternative economics – Why it is needed
When I studies economics, I never really “got” it. Somehow, it didn’t gel with me intuitively, either in the institutional flavour , neo-keynesian or neo-classical flavour. There was something that didn’t quite add up.
As I have grown older, and moved from a professional to an amateur interest in economics, this feeling has got stronger not weaker, but the outlines of the reasons for this for have become clearer to me. It is not the details of the models that are the problem, it is the foundations.
I remember reading Zen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and the author’s dealings with some musicians and artists whose way of looking at world was superficially slightly different. But as he dug into this he found that instead of this difference being a question of style, the more he analysed the more the difference seemed to a chasm. It affected everything. So it seems to me with economics. The differences aren’t superficial, they are very deep. I think we need to start again from first principles.
Economics is old. Classical economics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_economics supposedly started with Adam Smith in the 18th Century but was not really formalised until later in the early 19th Century (David Ricardo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ricardo was particular important ). Karl Marx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx can basically be said to be a variation on Classical economics with a different moral interpretation of the same model. Major change did not come until Alfred Marshall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Marshall (the marginal revolution) with the Neoclassical theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoclassical_economics in the middle of the 19th Century.
But classical or neoclassical some major features are apparent.
1. The centrality of the concept of “utility” (which is interpreted more as being satisfaction or pleasure rather than usefulness as the name suggests).
2. “Equilibrium” as a fundamental concept for analysis. Almost all results are derived from equilibrium positions, regardless of whether these equilibrium will actually be reached or whether they are in fact really equilibrium positions (i.e. points of stability).
3. The exogenous position of “money” in their models. Classical and Neoclassical economics is basically intermediated barter (explicitly in the Walrasian auctioneer). Interest rates (real) are determined by inter-temporal preferences, the productivity of capital and the supply of money.
4. Production as a mysterious and external process in their emphasis on demand and markets as the drivers of economics (Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations is an exception to this). The production process as such is not usually not considered in any detail.
Neoclassical economics also made a deliberate choice to ignore land concentrating instead exclusively on capital and labour as inputs to the production process perhaps for dubious reasons: https://evonomics.com/josh-ryan-collins-land-economic-theory/ .
I want to argue that ALL of these underlying concepts are dubious and/or inadequate and all need to be replaced completely. Continuing along the same path is not progress, when the path was wrong from the start. There is also (despite the fact the advice of economists is often ignored by politicians) the consequence that policy advice derived from these models is misleading and perhaps destructive. It also makes economics unnecessarily opaque. In particular economics suffers in comprehensibility because it uses ordinary words and gives them specialised meanings. This causes confusion not just to lay people, but to economists themselves.
I also want to argue that widespread use of comparative statics in economics (arguably introduced just as an tool for exposition) has caused economics to forget or underplay the importance of time. And this absence of time in economics is absolutely crucial. Things do not happen instantaneously in economies, not at all.
@Reason
Thoughts? I got all kinds of those, but how about some memories? Any interest in memories?
I’m pretty sure my 1968-69 economics text book, by who else, spoke of utils as unit; from man’s earliest days, we have sought to unitize and quantify. I really liked economics in college, should have went on.
When I started business, 1972 for reference, it was a bit of surprise to learn that, in the real world, things didn’t really work according to Paul. In those days, want ads told you more about the state of the economy than any report.
High School:
If it’s early in the year, “Why take Economics?” Often, someone will respond, “I want to start a business.” I ask, “What’s needed to start a business?” After a while, we get around to the need for a market for your product.
Later in the year, it’s, “Where are you? What are you studying?” Followed with a bunch of questions meant to force them to apply what they’ve been studying. “Supply and demand,” they say. “So, Safeway just raised the price of grape juice from $3 to $5, what’s going on?” Whatever the market will bear beats supply and demand every time.
Supply = Inventory
Demand = Customer Orders
That is the practical application. How much inventory do I need to meet customer demand
Ken Melvin – with respect economics is not about an individual business, but about the network it sits in and the social purpose it serves.
But I was a few years later than you (early 70s), but yeah I fell asleep with Samualson a lot.
Actually, …. it was 1958-59 and I was 16.
Ken:
You really are old . . . You have Dan and I beat.
reason 5:44 pm
—Ken Melvin – with respect economics is not about an individual business, but about the network it sits in and the social purpose it serves.—
It’s the pond small business swims in. What I did was capital expenditure dependent which was dependent on the economy. In the early 70s, we had one recession, sometimes two, a year. Turns out, one could forecast the economy best by the want ads; such a good tool, too bad it’s no longer. “Twas also when I learned that they all read the same magazine/papers. The phone would stop ringing of a sudden and start again of a sudden. The ‘what the market will bear’ lesson was from the supplier’s price increases; there was also a lesson about inflation included. By the second half of the 70s, the canard about labor and inflation was beginning to implode.