I missed this when it first came out: We think that the debate regarding extreme social distancing has a clear verdict — it is imperative that we should engage in this social distancing (shelter in place for all but essential workers) at least for the foreseeable short-term, but for reasons that both sides have missed. Our […]
The House yesterday approved the Payroll Protection Program and Health Care Enhancement Act. The PPP part of the law quite literally just increases the amount of money allocated to the program. That’s it. The law does almost nothing to fix the serious defects of the program in the original CARES act. This is remarkable because […]
Matt Yglesias has a good piece up explaining why “opening” the economy now won’t save the economy. The reason is that people will continue to avoid contact with others until the epidemic is brought under control. Simply allowing restaurants, theaters, and workplaces to open will not change this basic fact. Indeed, airlines are still open […]
A bit of a post-mortem on my last post. Andrew Gelman discusses the Santa Clara county study here. He focuses on sample imbalances, selection bias, and especially the way the authors deal with the specificity of the test. See his post for the gory details, but he is quite critical of the study, to the […]
I want to think about how two pieces of news should change my thinking about COVID-19. (Warning: I have no expertise in medicine or public health, and you have no reason to take my thoughts seriously – but you knew that already.) A new serological study in Santa Clara county (discussed by Kevin Drum here) […]
Jason Brennan has a new post up doubling down on his earlier criticism of epidemiologists and government policy in response to the COVID crisis. I responded to his earlier blog posts here. I am still not convinced, but there are useful lessons to be learned from going through his argument. Brennan continues to claim that […]
What lessons should we draw about the role of government from the COVID-19 epidemic? I want to address this question in a few posts. I’m going to start by examining a blog post by the libertarian philosopher Jason Brennan. Brennan makes the following claims: Many medical journals published misleading papers based on bad statistical analysis […]
Senator Patty Murray has released a Democratic proposal to increase our capacity to test for the coronavirus. The report quite rightly emphasizes that expanded testing is critical for containing the epidemic and re-opening the economy. It criticizes the Trump administration for it’s failure to recognize the need for extensive testing: Democrats demand a clear, detailed […]
Thinking about the coronavirus is bleak, so let’s do some political philosophy to cheer ourselves up. Libertarian philosopher Jason Brennan has a new post up claiming that our obligations to help strangers are much weaker than we might think they are, and may not exist at all, because most people are “morally very bad”. Brennan […]
Michael Grunwald argues in Politico that House Democrats have a lot of bargaining power in negotiations over the next coronavirus relief bill, but that they are not aggressively using their leverage. He suggests that Democrats are holding back because they are worried about being labeled obstructionist and getting blamed if legislation does not pass. I […]