pandemic

A guide to surviving the apocalypse

pnrj current events, ethics, futurism , , , , , , , , , ,

Aug 21 JDN 2459820

Some have characterized the COVID pandemic as an apocalypse, though it clearly isn’t. But a real apocalypse is certainly possible, and its low probability is offset by its extreme importance. The destruction of human civilization would be quite literally the worst thing that ever happened, and if it led to outright human extinction or civilization was never rebuilt, it could prevent a future that would have trillions if not quadrillions of happy, prosperous people.

So let’s talk about things people like you and me could do to survive such a catastrophe, and hopefully work to rebuild civilization. I’ll try to inject a somewhat light-hearted tone into this otherwise extraordinarily dark topic; we’ll see how well it works. What specifically we would want—or be able—to do will depend on the specific scenario that causes the apocalypse, so I’ll address those specifics shortly. But first, let’s talk about general stuff that should be useful in most, if not all, apocalypse scenarios.

It turns out that these general pieces of advice are also pretty good advice for much smaller-scale disasters such as fires, tornados, or earthquakes—all of which are far more likely to occur. Your top priority is to provide for the following basic needs:

1. Water: You will need water to drink. You should have some kind of stockpile of clean water; bottled water is fine but overpriced, and you’d do just as well to bottle tap water (as long as you do it before the crisis occurs and the water system goes down). Better still would be to have water filtration and purification equipment so that you can simply gather whatever water is available and make it drinkable.

2. Food: You will need nutritious, non-perishable food. Canned vegetables and beans are ideal, but you can also get a lot of benefit from dry staples such as crackers. Processed foods and candy are not as nutritious, but they do tend to keep well, so they can do in a pinch. Avoid anything that spoils quickly or requires sophisticated cooking. In the event of a disaster, you will be able to make fire and possibly run a microwave on a solar panel or portable generator—but you can’t rely on the electrical or gas mains to stay operational, and even boiling will require precious water.

3. Shelter: Depending on the disaster, your home may or may not remain standing—and even if it is standing, it may not be fit for habitation. Consider backup options for shelter: Do you have a basement? Do you own any tents? Do you know people you could move in with, if their homes survive and yours doesn’t?

4. Defense: It actually makes sense to own a gun or two in the event of a crisis. (In general it’s actually a big risk, though, so keep that in mind: the person your gun is most likely to kill is you.) Just don’t go overboard and do what we all did in Oregon Trail, stocking plenty of bullets but not enough canned food. Ammo will be hard to replace, though; your best option may actually be a gauss rifle (yes, those are real, and yes, I want one), because all they need for ammo is ferromagnetic metal of the appropriate shape and size. Then, all you need is a solar panel to charge its battery and some machine tools to convert scrap metal into ammo.

5. Community: Humans are highly social creatures, and we survive much better in groups. Get to know your neighbors. Stay in touch with friends and family. Not only will this improve your life in general, it will also give you people to reach out to if you need help during the crisis and the government is indisposed (or toppled). Having a portable radio that runs on batteries, solar power, or hand-crank operation will also be highly valuable for staying in touch with people during a crisis. (Likewise flashlights!)

Now, on to the specific scenarios. I will consider the following potential causes of apocalypse: Alien Invasion, Artificial Intelligence Uprising, Climate Disaster, Conventional War, Gamma-Ray Burst, Meteor Impact, Plague, Nuclear War, and last (and, honestly, least), Zombies.

I will rate each apocalypse by its risk level, based on its probability of occurring within the next 100 years (roughly the time I think it will take us to meaningfully colonize space and thereby change the game):

Very High: 1% or more

High: 0.1% – 1%

Moderate: 0.01% – 0.1%

Low: 0.001% – 0.01%

Very Low: 0.0001% – 0.001%

Tiny: 0.00001% – 0.0001%

Miniscule: 0.00001% or less

I will also rate your relative safety in different possible locations you might find yourself during the crisis:

Very Safe: You will probably survive.

Safe: You will likely survive if you are careful.

Dicey: You may survive, you may not. Hard to say.

Dangerous: You will likely die unless you are very careful.

Very Dangerous: You will probably die.

Hopeless: You will definitely die.

I’ll rate the following locations for each, with some explanation: City, Suburb, Rural Area, Military Base, Underground Bunker, Ship at Sea. Certain patterns will emerge—but some results may surprise you. This may tell you where to go to have the best chance of survival in the event of a disaster (though I admit bunkers are often in short supply).

All right, here goes!

Alien Invasion

Risk: Low

There are probably sapient aliens somewhere in this vast universe, maybe even some with advanced technology. But they are very unlikely to be willing to expend the enormous resources to travel across the stars just to conquer us. Then again, hey, it could happen; maybe they’re imperialists, or they have watched our TV commercials and heard the siren song of oregano.

City: Dangerous

Population centers are likely to be primary targets for their invasion. They probably won’t want to exterminate us outright (why would they?), but they may want to take control of our cities, and are likely to kill a lot of people when they do.

Suburb: Dicey

Outside the city centers will be a bit safer, but hardly truly safe.

Rural Area: Dicey

Where humans are spread out, we’ll present less of a target. Then again, if you own an oregano farm….

Military Base: Very Dangerous

You might think that having all those planes and guns around would help, but these will surely be prime targets in an invasion. Since the aliens are likely to be far more technologically advanced, it’s unlikely our military forces could put up much resistance. Our bases would likely be wiped out almost immediately.

Underground Bunker: Safe

This is a good place to be. Orbital and aerial weapons won’t be very effective against underground targets, and even ground troops would have trouble finding and attacking an isolated bunker. Since they probably won’t want to exterminate us, hiding in your bunker until they establish a New World Order could work out for you.

Ship at Sea: Dicey

As long as it’s a civilian vessel, you should be okay. A naval vessel is just as dangerous as a base, if not more so; they would likely strike our entire fleets from orbit almost instantly. But the aliens are unlikely to have much reason to bother attacking a cruise ship or a yacht. Then again, if they do, you’re toast.

Artificial Intelligence Uprising

Risk: Very High

While it sounds very sci-fi, this is one of the most probable apocalypse scenarios, and we should be working to defend against it. There are dozens of ways that artificial intelligence could get out of control and cause tremendous damage, particularly if the AI got control of combat drones or naval vessels. This could mean a superintelligent AI beyond human comprehension, but it need not; it could in fact be a very stupid AI that was programmed to make profits for Hasbro and decided that melting people into plastic was the best way to do that.

City: Very Dangerous

Cities don’t just have lots of people; they also have lots of machines. If the AI can hack our networks, they may be able to hack into not just phones and laptops, but even cars, homes, and power plants. Depending on the AI’s goals (which are very hard to predict), cities could become disaster zones almost immediately, as thousands of cars shut down and crash and all the power plants get set to overload.

Suburb: Dangerous

Definitely safer than the city, but still, you’ve got plenty of technology around you for the AI to exploit.

Rural Area: Dicey

The further you are from other people and their technology, the safer you’ll be. Having bad wifi out in the boonies may actually save your life. Then again, even tractors have software updates now….

Military Base: Very Dangerous

The military is extremely high-tech and all network-linked. Unless they can successfully secure their systems against the AI very well, very fast, suddenly all the guided missiles and combat drones and sentry guns will be deployed in service of the robot revolution.

Underground Bunker: Safe

As long as your bunker is off the grid, you should be okay. The robots won’t have any weapons we don’t already have, and bunkers are built because they protect pretty well against most weapons.

Ship at Sea: Hopeless

You are surrounded by technology and you have nowhere to run. A military vessel is worse than a civilian ship, but either way, you’re pretty much doomed. The AI is going to take over the radio, the GPS system, maybe even the controls of the ship themselves. It could intentionally overload the engines, or drive you into rocks, or simply shut down everything and leave you to starve at sea. A sailing yacht with a hand-held compass and sextant should be relatively safe, if you manage to get your hands on one of those somehow.

Climate Disaster

Risk: Moderate

Let’s be clear here. Some kind of climate disaster is inevitable; indeed, it’s already in progress. But what I’m talking about is something really severe, something that puts all of human civilization in jeopardy. That, fortunately, is fairly unlikely—and even more so after the big bill that just passed!

City: Dicey

Buildings provide shelter from the elements, and cities will be the first places we defend. Dikes will be built around Manhattan like the ones around Amsterdam. You won’t need to worry about fires, snowstorms, or flooding very much. Still, a really severe crisis could cause all utility systems to break down, meaning you won’t have heating and cooling.

Suburb: Dicey

The suburbs will be about as safe as the cities, maybe a little worse because there isn’t as much shelter if you lose your home to a disaster event.

Rural Area: Dangerous

Remote areas are going to have it the worst. Especially if you’re near a coast that can flood or a forest that can burn, you’re exposed to the elements and there won’t be much infrastructure to protect you. Your best bet is to move in toward the city, where other people will try to help you against the coming storms.

Military Base: Very Safe

Military infrastructure will be prioritized in defense plans, and soldiers are already given lots of survival tools and training. If you can get yourself to a military base and they actually let you in, you really won’t have much to worry about.

Underground Bunker: Very Safe

Underground doesn’t have a lot of weather, it turns out. As long as your bunker is well sealed against flooding, earthquakes are really your only serious concern, and climate change isn’t going to affect those very much.

Ship at Sea: Safe

Increased frequency of hurricanes and other storms will make the sea more dangerous, but as long as you steer clear of storms as they come, you should be okay.

Conventional War

Risk: Moderate

Once again, I should clarify. Obviously there are going to be wars—there are wars going on this very minute. But a truly disastrous war, a World War 3 still fought with conventional weapons, is fairly unlikely. We can’t rule it out, but we don’t have to worry too much—or rather, it’s nukes we should worry about, as I’ll get to in a little bit. It’s unlikely that truly apocalyptic damage could be caused by conventional weapons alone.

City: Dicey

Cities will often be where battles are fought, as they are strategically important. Expect bombing raids and perhaps infantry or tank battalions. Still, it’s actually pretty feasible to survive in a city that is under attack by conventional weapons; while lots of people certainly die, in most wars, most people actually don’t.

Suburb: Safe

Suburbs rarely make interesting military targets, so you’ll mainly have to worry about troops passing through on their way to cities.

Rural Area: Safe

For similar reasons to the suburbs, you should be relatively safe out in the boonies. You may encounter some scattered skirmishes, but you’re unlikely to face sustained attack.

Military Base: Dicey

Whether military bases are safe really depends on whether your side is winning or not. If they are, then you’re probably okay; that’s where all the soldiers and military equipment are, there to defend you. If they aren’t, then you’re in trouble; military bases make nice, juicy targets for attack.

Ship at Sea: Safe

There’s a reason it is big news every time a civilian cruise liner gets sunk in a war (does the Lusitania ring a bell?); it really doesn’t happen that much. Transport ships are at risk of submarine raids, and of course naval vessels will face constant threats; but cruise liners aren’t strategically important, so military forces have very little reason to target them.

Gamma-Ray Burst

Risk: Tiny

While gamma-ray bursts certainly happen all the time, so far they have all been extremely remote from Earth. It is currently estimated that they only happen a few times in any given galaxy every few million years. And each one is concentrated in a narrow beam, so even when they happen they only affect a few nearby stars. This is very good news, because if it happened… well, that’s pretty much it. We’d be doomed.

If a gamma-ray burst happened within a few light-years of us, and happened to be pointed at us, it would scour the Earth, boil the water, burn the atmosphere. Our entire planet would become a dead, molten rock—if, that is, it wasn’t so close that it blew the planet up completely. And the same is going to be true of Mars, Mercury, and every other planet in our solar system.

Underground Bunker: Very Dangerous

Your one meager hope of survival would be to be in an underground bunker at the moment the burst hit. Since most bursts give very little warning, you are unlikely to achieve this unless you, like, live in a bunker—which sounds pretty terrible. Moreover, your bunker needs to be a 100% closed system, and deep underground; the surface will be molten and the air will be burned away. There’s honestly a pretty narrow band of the Earth’s crust that’s deep enough to protect you but not already hot enough to doom you.

Anywhere Else: Hopeless

If you aren’t deep underground at the moment the burst hits us, that’s it; you’re dead. If you are on the side of the Earth facing the burst, you will die mercifully quickly, burned to a crisp instantly. If you are not, your death will be a bit slower, as the raging firestorm that engulfs the Earth, boils the oceans, and burns away the atmosphere will take some time to hit you. But your demise is equally inevitable.

Well, that was cheery. Remember, it’s really unlikely to happen! Moving on!

Meteor Impact

Risk: Tiny

Yes, “it has happened before, and it will happen again; the only question is when.” However, meteors with sufficient size to cause a global catastrophe only seem to hit the Earth about once every couple hundred million years. Moreover, right now the first time in human history where we might actually have a serious chance of detecting and deflecting an oncoming meteor—so even if one were on the way, we’d still have some hope of saving ourselves.

Underground Bunker: Dangerous

A meteor impact would be a lot like a gamma-ray burst, only much less so. (Almost anything is “much less so” than a gamma-ray burst, with the lone exception of a supernova, which is always “much more so”.) It would still boil a lot of ocean and start a massive firestorm, but it wouldn’t boil all the ocean, and the firestorm wouldn’t burn away all the oxygen in the atmosphere. Underground is clearly the safest place to be, preferably on the other side of the planet from the impact.

Anywhere Else: Very Dangerous

If you are above ground, it wouldn’t otherwise matter too much where you are, at least not in any way that’s easy to predict. Further from the impact is obviously better than closer, but the impact could be almost anywhere. After the initial destruction there would be a prolonged impact winter, which could cause famines and wars. Rural areas might be a bit safer than cities, but then again if you are in a remote area, you are less likely to get help if you need it.

Plague

Risk: Low

Obviously, the probability of a pandemic is 100%. You best start believing in pandemics; we’re in one. But pandemics aren’t apocalyptic plagues. To really jeopardize human civilization, there would have to be a superbug that spreads and mutates rapidly, has a high fatality rate, and remains highly resistant to treatment and vaccination. Fortunately, there aren’t a lot of bacteria or viruses like that; the last one we had was the Black Death, and humanity made it through that one. In fact, there is good reason to believe that with modern medical technology, even a pathogen like the Black Death wouldn’t be nearly as bad this time around.

City: Dangerous

Assuming the pathogen spreads from human to human, concentrations of humans are going to be the most dangerous places to be. Staying indoors and following whatever lockdown/mask/safety protocols that authorities recommend will surely help you; but if the plague gets bad enough, infrastructure could start falling apart and even those things will stop working.

Suburb: Safe

In a suburb, you are much more isolated from other people. You can stay in your home and be fairly safe from the plague, as long as you are careful.

Rural Area: Dangerous

The remoteness of a rural area means that you’d think you wouldn’t have to worry as much about human-to-human transmission. But as we’ve learned from COVID, rural areas are full of stubborn right-wing people who refuse to follow government safety protocols. There may not be many people around, but they probably will be taking stupid risks and spreading the disease all over the place. Moreover, if the disease can be carried by animals—as quite a few can—livestock will become an added danger.

Military Base: Safe

If there’s one place in the world where people follow government safety protocols, it’s a military base. Bases will have top-of-the-line equipment, skilled and disciplined personnel, and up-to-the-minute data on the spread of the pathogen.

Underground Bunker: Very Safe

The main thing you need to do is be away from other people for awhile, and a bunker is a great place to do that. As long as your bunker is well-stocked with food and water, you can ride out the plague and come back out once it dies down.

Ship at Sea: Dicey

This is an all-or-nothing proposition. If no one on the ship has the disease, you’re probably safe as long as you remain at sea, because very few pathogens can spread that far through the air. On the other hand, if someone on your ship does carry the disease, you’re basically doomed.

Nuclear War

Risk: Very High

Honestly, this is the one that terrifies me. I have no way of knowing that Vladmir Putin or Xi Jinping won’t wake up one morning any day now and give the order to launch a thousand nuclear missiles. (I honestly wasn’t even sure Trump wouldn’t, so it’s a damn good thing he’s out of office.) They have no reason to, but they’re psychopathic enough that I can’t be sure they won’t.

City: Dangerous

Obviously, most of those missiles are aimed at cities. And if you happen to be in the center of such a city, this is very bad for your health. However, nukes are not the automatic death machines that they are often portrayed to be; sure, right at the blast center you’re vaporized. But Hiroshima and Nagasaki both had lots of survivors, many of whom lived on for years or even decades afterward, even despite the radiation poisoning.

Suburb: Dangerous

Being away from a city center might provide some protection, but then again it might not; it really depends on how the nukes are targeted. It’s actually quite unlikely that Russia or China (or whoever) would deploy large megaton-yield missiles, as they are very expensive; so you could only have a few, making it easier to shoot them all down. The far more likely scenario is lots of kiloton-yield missiles, deployed in what is called a MIRV: multiple independent re-entry vehicle. One missile launches into space, then splits into many missiles, each of which can have a different target. It’s sort of like a cluster bomb, only the “little” clusters are each Hiroshima bombs. Those clusters might actually be spread over metropolitan areas relatively evenly, so being in a suburb might not save you. Or it might. Hard to say.

Rural Area: Dicey

If you are sufficiently remote from cities, the nukes probably won’t be aimed at you. And since most of the danger really happens right when the nuke hits, this is good news for you. You won’t have to worry about the blast or the radiation; your main concerns will be fallout and the resulting collapse of infrastructure. Nuclear winter could also be a risk, but recent studies suggest that’s relatively unlikely even in a full-scale nuclear exchange.

Military Base: Hopeless

The nukes are going to be targeted directly at military bases. Probably multiple nukes per base, in case some get shot down. Basically, if you are on a base at the time the missiles hit, you’re doomed. If you know the missiles are coming, your best bet would be to get as far from that base as you can, into as remote an area as you can. You’ll have a matter of minutes, so good luck.

Underground Bunker: Safe

There’s a reason we built a bunch of underground bunkers during the Cold War; they’re one of the few places you can go to really be safe from a nuclear attack. As long as your bunker is well-stocked and well-shielded, you can hide there and survive not only the initial attack, but the worst of the fallout as well.

Ship at Sea: Safe

Ships are small enough that they probably wouldn’t be targeted by nukes. Maybe if you’re on or near a major naval capital ship, like an aircraft carrier, you’d be in danger; someone might try to nuke that. (Even then, aircraft carriers are tough: Anything short of a direct hit might actually be survivable. In tests, carriers have remained afloat and largely functional even after a 100-kiloton nuclear bomb was detonated a mile away. They’re even radiation-shielded, because they have nuclear reactors.) But a civilian vessel or even a smaller naval vessel is unlikely to be targeted. Just stay miles away from any cities or any other ships, and you should be okay.

Zombies

Risk: Miniscule

Zombies per se—the literal undead—aren’t even real, so that’s just impossible. But something like zombies could maybe happen, in some very remote scenario in which some bizarre mutant strain of rabies or something spreads far and wide and causes people to go crazy and attack other people. Even then, if the infection is really only spread through bites, it’s not clear how it could ever reach a truly apocalyptic level; more likely, it would cause a lot of damage locally and then be rapidly contained, and we’d remember it like Pearl Harbor or 9/11: That terrible, terrible day when 5,000 people became zombies in Portland, and then they all died and it was over. An airborne or mosquito-borne virus would be much more dangerous, but then we’re really talking about a plague, not zombies. The ‘turns people into zombies’ part of the virus would be a lot less important than the ‘spreads through the air and kills you’ part.

Seriously, why is this such a common trope? Why do people think that this could cause an apocalypse?

City: Safe

Yes, safe, dammit. Once you have learned that zombies are on the loose, stay locked in your home, wearing heavy clothing (to block bites; a dog suit is ideal, but a leather jacket or puffy coat would do) with a shotgun (or a gauss rifle, see above) at the ready, and you’ll probably be fine. Yes, this is the area of highest risk, due to the concentration of people who could potentially be infected with the zombie virus. But unless you are stupid—which people in these movies always seem to be—you really aren’t in all that much danger. Zombies can at most be as fast and strong as humans (often, they seem to be less!), so all you need to do is shoot them before they can bite you. And unlike fake movie zombies, anything genuinely possible will go down from any mortal wound, not just a perfect headshot—I assure you, humans, however crazed by infection they might be, can’t run at you if their hearts (or their legs) are gone. It might take a bit more damage to drop them than an ordinary person, if they aren’t slowed down by pain; but it wouldn’t require perfect marksmanship or any kind of special weaponry. Buckshot to the chest will work just fine.

Suburb: Safe

Similar to the city, only more so, because people there are more isolated.

Rural Area: Very Safe

And rural areas are even more isolated still—plus you have more guns than people, so you’ll have more guns than zombies.

Military Base: Very Safe

Even more guns, plus military training and a chain of command! The zombies don’t stand a chance. A military base would be a great place to be, and indeed that’s where the containment would begin, as troops march from the bases to the cities to clear out the zombies. Shaun of the Dead (of all things!) actually got this right: One local area gets pretty bad, but then the Army comes in and takes all the zombies out.

Underground Bunker: Very Safe

A bunker remains safe in the event of zombies, just as it is in most other scenarios.

Ship at Sea: Very Safe

As long as the infection hasn’t spread to the ship you are currently on and the zombies can’t swim, you are at literally zero risk.

Welp, I have COVID.

pnrj current events, personal , , , ,

May 1 JDN 2459701

Tuesday night I had a fever. Wednesday morning, I tested positive.

Given how the pandemic has been going, I suppose it was more or less inevitable that this day would come. From almost the beginning, the refrain was “flatten the curve”, not “wait for a cure”. It was expected that almost all of us would get the virus eventually, and just a question of how long we could draw that out. In my case, apparently two years. For that whole time I had been scrupulous about precautions, but I did not sustain all of them all of the time, and indeed as Scotland loosened restrictions I think I became too complacent.

The good news is that I am young and reasonably healthy (migraines notwithstanding), and I had three doses of the Moderna vaccine. As a result my symptoms are relatively mild; I feel like I have a bad cold or perhaps a mild flu. Aside from the fever, which I’ve been able to keep down with NSAIDs, pretty much all my symptoms are in my sinuses. So far, I haven’t even lost my sense of taste.

It hasn’t even really interfered with my work, because my migraines were already doing a bang-up job of that. (My accent remains consistently “American broadcast standard”, but as you can see, I am gradually picking up some Britishisms, such as “bang-up job” and “sorted” with no “out”, as well as learning to put the “u” in “labour” and “behaviour”. I doubt I’ll ever start saying “aye” and “nae” though.) I am in fact even less productive than I was without COVID, but the marginal difference is relatively small. The main activity it has kept me from doing is moving and unpacking boxes (now that our shipment from California has finally arrived).

So, all things considered, if I was going to get infected with a pandemic and potentially life-threatening virus, it could have been a lot worse.

Unending nightmares

pnrj current events, ethics, market failure, politics, public policy , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sep 19 JDN 2459477

We are living in a time of unending nightmares.

As I write this, we have just passed the 20th anniversary of 9/11. Yet only in the past month were US troops finally withdrawn from Afghanistan—and that withdrawal was immediately followed by a total collapse of the Afghan government and a reinstatement of the Taliban. The United States had been at war for nearly 20 years, spending trillions of dollars and causing thousands of deaths—and seems to have accomplished precisely nothing.

Some left-wing circles have been saying that the Taliban offered surrender all the way back in 2001; this is not accurate. Alternet even refers to it as an “unconditional surrender” which is utter nonsense. No one in their right mind—not even the most die-hard imperialist—would ever refuse an unconditional surrender, and the US most certainly did nothing of the sort.)

The Taliban did offer a peace deal in 2001, which would have involved giving the US control of Kandahar and turning Osama bin Laden over to a neutral country (not to the US or any US ally). It would also have granted amnesty to a number of high-level Taliban leaders, which was a major sticking point for the US. In hindsight, should they have taken the deal? Obviously. But I don’t think that was nearly so clear at the time—nor would it have been particularly palatable to most of the American public to leave Osama bin Laden under house arrest in some neutral country (which they never specified by the way; somewhere without US extradition, presumably?) and grant amnesty to the top leaders of the Taliban.

Thus, even after the 20-year nightmare of the war that refused to end, we are still back to the nightmare we were in before—Afghanistan ruled by fanatics who will oppress millions.

Yet somehow this isn’t even the worst unending nightmare, for after a year and a half we are still in the throes of a global pandemic which has now caused over 4.6 million deaths. We are still wearing masks wherever we go—at least, those of us who are complying with the rules. We have gotten vaccinated already, but likely will need booster shots—at least, those of us who believe in vaccines.

The most disturbing part of it all is how many people still aren’t willing to follow the most basic demands of public health agencies.

In case you thought this was just an American phenomenon: Just a few days ago I looked out the window of my apartment to see a protest in front of the Scottish Parliament complaining about vaccine and mask mandates, with signs declaring it all a hoax. (Yes, my current temporary apartment overlooks the Scottish Parliament.)

Some of those signs displayed a perplexing innumeracy. One sign claimed that the vaccines must be stopped because they had killed 1,400 people in the UK. This is not actually true; while there have been 1,400 people in the UK who died after receiving a vaccine, 48 million people in the UK have gotten the vaccine, and many of them were old and/or sick, so, purely by statistics, we’d expect some of them to die shortly afterward. Less than 100 of these deaths are in any way attributable to the vaccine. But suppose for a moment that we took the figure at face value, and assumed, quite implausibly, that everyone who died shortly after getting the vaccine was in fact killed by the vaccine. This 1,400 figure needs to be compared against the 156,000 UK deaths attributable to COVID itself. Since 7 million people in the UK have tested positive for the virus, this is a fatality rate of over 2%. Even if we suppose that literally everyone in the UK who hasn’t been vaccinated in fact had the virus, that would still only be 20 million (the UK population of 68 million – the 48 million vaccinated) people, so the death rate for COVID itself would still be at least 0.8%—a staggeringly high fatality rate for a pandemic airborne virus. Meanwhile, even on this ridiculous overestimate of the deaths caused by the vaccine, the fatality rate for vaccination would be at most 0.003%. Thus, even by the anti-vaxers’ own claims, the vaccine is nearly 300 times safer than catching the virus. If we use the official estimates of a 1.9% COVID fatality rate and 100 deaths caused by the vaccines, the vaccines are in fact over 9000 times safer.

Yet it does seem to be worse in the United States, as while 22% of Americans described themselves as opposed to vaccination in general, only about 2% of Britons said the same.

But this did not translate to such a large difference in actual vaccination: While 70% of people in the UK have received the vaccine, 64% of people in the US have. Both of these figures are tantalizingly close to, yet clearly below, the at least 84% necessary to achieve herd immunity. (Actually some early estimates thought 60-70% might be enough—but epidemiologists no longer believe this, and some think that even 90% wouldn’t be enough.)

Indeed, the predominant tone I get from trying to keep up on the current news in epidemiology is fatalism: It’s too late, we’ve already failed to contain the virus, we won’t reach herd immunity, we won’t ever eradicate it. At this point they now all seem to think that COVID is going to become the new influenza, always with us, a major cause of death that somehow recedes into the background and seems normal to us—but COVID, unlike influenza, may stick around all year long. The one glimmer of hope is that influenza itself was severely hampered by the anti-pandemic procedures, and influenza cases and deaths are indeed down in both the US and UK (though not zero, nor as drastically reduced as many have reported).

The contrast between terrorism and pandemics is a sobering one, as pandemics kill far more people, yet somehow don’t provoke anywhere near as committed a response.

9/11 was a massive outlier in terrorism, at 3,000 deaths on a single day; otherwise the average annual death rate by terrorism is about 20,000 worldwide, mostly committed by Islamist groups. Yet the threat is not actually to Americans in particular; annual deaths due to terrorism in the US are less than 100—and most of these by right-wing domestic terrorists, not international Islamists.

Meanwhile, in an ordinary year, influenza would kill 50,000 Americans and somewhere between 300,000 and 700,000 people worldwide. COVID in the past year and a half has killed over 650,000 Americans and 4.6 million people worldwide—annualize that and it would be 400,000 per year in the US and 3 million per year worldwide.

Yet in response to terrorism we as a country were prepared to spend $2.3 trillion dollars, lose nearly 4,000 US and allied troops, and kill nearly 50,000 civilians—not even counting the over 60,000 enemy soldiers killed. It’s not even clear that this accomplished anything as far as reducing terrorism—by some estimates it actually made it worse.

Were we prepared to respond so aggressively to pandemics? Certainly not to influenza; we somehow treat all those deaths are normal or inevitable. In response to COVID we did spend a great deal of money, even more than the wars in fact—a total of nearly $6 trillion. This was a very pleasant surprise to me (it’s the first time in my lifetime I’ve witnessed a serious, not watered-down Keynesian fiscal stimulus in the United States). And we imposed lockdowns—but these were all-too quickly removed, despite the pleading of public health officials. It seems to be that our governments tried to impose an aggressive response, but then too many of the citizens pushed back against it, unwilling to give up their “freedom” (read: convenience) in the name of public safety.

For the wars, all most of us had to do was pay some taxes and sit back and watch; but for the pandemic we were actually expected to stay home, wear masks, and get shots? Forget it.

Politics was clearly a very big factor here: In the US, the COVID death rate map and the 2020 election map look almost equivalent: By and large, people who voted for Biden have been wearing masks and getting vaccinated, while people who voted for Trump have not.

But pandemic response is precisely the sort of thing you can’t do halfway. If one area is containing a virus and another isn’t, the virus will still remain uncontained. (As some have remarked, it’s rather like having a “peeing section” of a swimming pool. Much worse, actually, as urine contains relatively few bacteria—but not zero—and is quickly diluted by the huge quantities of water in a swimming pool.)

Indeed, that seems to be what has happened, and why we can’t seem to return to normal life despite months of isolation. Since enough people are refusing to make any effort to contain the virus, the virus remains uncontained, and the only way to protect ourselves from it is to continue keeping restrictions in place indefinitely.

Had we simply kept the original lockdowns in place awhile longer and then made sure everyone got the vaccine—preferably by paying them for doing it, rather than punishing them for not—we might have been able to actually contain the virus and then bring things back to normal.

But as it is, this is what I think is going to happen: At some point, we’re just going to give up. We’ll see that the virus isn’t getting any more contained than it ever was, and we’ll be so tired of living in isolation that we’ll finally just give up on doing it anymore and take our chances. Some of us will continue to get our annual vaccines, but some won’t. Some of us will continue to wear masks, but most won’t. The virus will become a part of our lives, just as influenza did, and we’ll convince ourselves that millions of deaths is no big deal.

And then the nightmare will truly never end.

An unusual recession, a rapid recovery

pnrj current events, macroeconomics, market failure, public policy , , , , , , , ,

Jul 11 JDN 2459407

It seems like an egregious understatement to say that the last couple of years have been unusual. The COVID-19 pandemic was historic, comparable in threat—though not in outcome—to the 1918 influenza pandemic.

At this point it looks like we may not be able to fully eradicate COVID. And there are still many places around the world where variants of the virus continue to spread. I personally am a bit worried about the recent surge in the UK; it might add some obstacles (as if I needed any more) to my move to Edinburgh. Yet even in hard-hit places like India and Brazil things are starting to get better. Overall, it seems like the worst is over.

This pandemic disrupted our society in so many ways, great and small, and we are still figuring out what the long-term consequences will be.

But as an economist, one of the things I found most unusual is that this recession fit Real Business Cycle theory.

Real Business Cycle theory (henceforth RBC) posits that recessions are caused by negative technology shocks which result in a sudden drop in labor supply, reducing employment and output. This is generally combined with sophisticated mathematical modeling (DSGE or GTFO), and it typically leads to the conclusion that the recession is optimal and we should do nothing to correct it (which was after all the original motivation of the entire theory—they didn’t like the interventionist policy conclusions of Keynesian models). Alternatively it could suggest that, if we can, we should try to intervene to produce a positive technology shock (but nobody’s really sure how to do that).

For a typical recession, this is utter nonsense. It is obvious to anyone who cares to look that major recessions like the Great Depression and the Great Recession were caused by a lack of labor demand, not supply. There is no apparent technology shock to cause either recession. Instead, they seem to be preciptiated by a financial crisis, which then causes a crisis of liquidity which leads to a downward spiral of layoffs reducing spending and causing more layoffs. Millions of people lose their jobs and become desperate to find new ones, with hundreds of people applying to each opening. RBC predicts a shortage of labor where there is instead a glut. RBC predicts that wages should go up in recessions—but they almost always go down.

But for the COVID-19 recession, RBC actually had some truth to it. We had something very much like a negative technology shock—namely the pandemic. COVID-19 greatly increased the cost of working and the cost of shopping. This led to a reduction in labor demand as usual, but also a reduction in labor supply for once. And while we did go through a phase in which hundreds of people applied to each new opening, we then followed it up with a labor shortage and rising wages. A fall in labor supply should create inflation, and we now have the highest inflation we’ve had in decades—but there’s good reason to think it’s just a transitory spike that will soon settle back to normal.

The recovery from this recession was also much more rapid: Once vaccines started rolling out, the economy began to recover almost immediately. We recovered most of the employment losses in just the first six months, and we’re on track to recover completely in half the time it took after the Great Recession.

This makes it the exception that proves the rule: Now that you’ve seen a recession that actually resembles RBC, you can see just how radically different it was from a typical recession.

Moreover, even in this weird recession the usual policy conclusions from RBC are off-base. It would have been disastrous to withhold the economic relief payments—which I’m happy to say even most Republicans realized. The one thing that RBC got right as far as policy is that a positive technology shock was our salvation—vaccines.

Indeed, while the cause of this recession was very strange and not what Keynesian models were designed to handle, our government largely followed Keynesian policy advice—and it worked. We ran massive government deficits—over $3 trillion in 2020—and the result was rapid recovery in consumer spending and then employment. I honestly wouldn’t have thought our government had the political will to run a deficit like that, even when the economic models told them they should; but I’m very glad to be wrong. We ran the huge deficit just as the models said we should—and it worked. I wonder how the 2010s might have gone differently had we done the same after 2008.

Perhaps we’ve learned from some of our mistakes.

What if everyone owned their own home?

pnrj current events, public policy , , , , , , , , ,

Mar 14 JDN 2459288

In last week’s post I suggested that if we are to use the term “gentrification”, it should specifically apply to the practice of buying homes for the purpose of renting them out.

But don’t people need to be able to rent homes? Surely we couldn’t have a system where everyone always owned their own home?

Or could we?

The usual argument for why renting is necessary is that people don’t want to commit to living in one spot for 15 or 30 years, the length of a mortgage. And this is quite reasonable; very few careers today offer the kind of stability that lets you commit in advance to 15 or more years of working in the same place. (Tenured professors are one of the few exceptions, and I dare say this has given academic economists some severe blind spots regarding the costs and risks involved in changing jobs.)

But how much does renting really help with this? One does not rent a home for a few days or even few weeks at a time. If you are staying somewhere for an interval that short, you generally room with a friend or pay for a hotel. (Or get an AirBNB, which is sort of intermediate between the two.)

One only rents housing for months at a time—in fact, most leases are 12-month leases. But since the average time to sell a house is 60-90 days, in what sense is renting actually less of a commitment than buying? It feels like less of a commitment to most people—but I’m not sure it really is less of a commitment.

There is a certainty that comes with renting—you know that once your lease is up you’re free to leave, whereas selling your house will on average take two or three months, but could very well be faster or slower than that.

Another potential advantage of renting is that you have a landlord who is responsible for maintaining the property. But this advantage is greatly overstated: First of all, if they don’t do it (and many surely don’t), you actually have very little recourse in practice. Moreover, if you own your own home, you don’t actually have to do all the work yourself; you could pay carpenters and plumbers and electricians to do it for you—which is all that most landlords were going to do anyway.

All of the “additional costs” of owning over renting such as maintenance and property taxes are going to be factored into your rent in the first place. This is a good argument for recognizing that a $1000 mortgage payment is not equivalent to a $1000 rent payment—the rent payment is all-inclusive in a way the mortgage is not. But it isn’t a good argument for renting over buying in general.

Being foreclosed on a mortgage is a terrible experience—but surely no worse than being evicted from a rental. If anything, foreclosure is probably not as bad, because you can essentially only be foreclosed for nonpayment, since the bank only owns the loan; landlords can and do evict people for all sorts of reasons, because they own the home. In particular, you can’t be foreclosed for annoying your neighbors or damaging the property. If you own your home, you can cut a hole in a wall any time you like. (Not saying you should necessarily—just that you can, and nobody can take your home away for doing so.)

I think the primary reason that people rent instead of buying is the cost of a down payment. For some reason, we have decided as a society that you should be expected to pay 10%-20% of the cost of a home up front, or else you never deserve to earn any equity in your home whatsoever. This is one of many ways that being rich makes it easier to get richer—but it is probably the most important one holding back most of the middle class of the First World.

And make no mistake, that’s what this is: It’s a social norm. There is no deep economic reason why a down payment needs to be anything in particular—or even why down payments in general are necessary.

There is some evidence that higher down payments are associated with less risk of default, but it’s not as strong as many people seem to think. The big HUD study on the subject found that one percentage point of down payment reduces default risk by about as much as 5 points of credit rating: So you should prefer to offer a mortgage to someone with an 800 rating and no down payment than someone with a 650 rating and a 20% down payment.

Also, it’s not as if mortgage lenders are unprotected from default (unlike, say, credit card lenders). Above all, they can foreclose on the house. So why is it so important to reduce the risk of default in the first place? Why do you need extra collateral in the form of a down payment, when you’ve already got an entire house of collateral?

It may be that this is actually a good opportunity for financial innovation, a phrase that should in general strike terror in one’s heart. Most of the time “financial innovation” means “clever ways of disguising fraud”. Previous attempts at “innovating” mortgages have resulted in such monstrosities as “interest-only mortgages” (a literal oxymoron, since by definition a mortgage must have a termination date—a date at which the debt “dies”), “balloon payments”, and “adjustable rate mortgages”—all of which increase risk of default while as far as I can tell accomplishing absolutely nothing. “Subprime” lending created many excuses for irresponsible or outright predatory lending—and then, above all, securitization of mortgages allowed banks to offload the risk they had taken on to third parties who typically had no idea what they were getting.

Volcker was too generous when he said that the last great financial innovation was the ATM; no, that was an innovation in electronics (and we’ve had plenty of those). The last great financial innovation I can think of is the joint-stock corporation in the 1550s. But I think a new type of mortgage contract that minimizes default risk without requiring large up-front payments might actually qualify as a useful form of financial innovation.

It would also be useful to have mortgages that make it easier to move, perhaps by putting payments on hold while the home is up for sale. That way people wouldn’t have to make two mortgage payments at once as they move from one place to another, and the bank will see that money eventually—paid for by new buyer and their mortgage.

Indeed, ideally I’d like to eliminate foreclosure as well, so that no one has to be kicked out of their homes. How might we do that?

Well, as a pandemic response measure, we should have simply instituted a freeze on all evictions and foreclosures for the duration of the pandemic. Some states did, in fact—but many didn’t, and the federal moratoria on evictions were limited. This is the kind of emergency power that government should have, to protect people from a disaster. So far it appears that the number of evictions was effectively reduced from tens of millions to tens of thousands by these measures—but evicting anyone during a pandemic is a human rights violation.

But as a long-term policy, simply banning evictions wouldn’t work. No one would want to lend out mortgages, knowing that they had no recourse if the debtor stopped paying. Even buyers with good credit might get excluded from the market, since once they actually received the house they’d have very little incentive to actually make their payments on time.

But if there are no down payments and no foreclosures, that means mortgage lenders have no collateral. How are they supposed to avoid defaults?

One option would be wage garnishment. If you have the money and are simply refusing to pay it, the courts could simply require your employer to send the money directly to your creditors. If you have other assets, those could be garnished as well.

And what if you don’t have the money, perhaps because you’re unemployed? Well, then, this isn’t really a problem of incentives at all. It isn’t that you’re choosing not to pay, it’s that you can’t pay. Taking away such people’s homes would protect banks financially, but at a grave human cost.

One option would be to simply say that the banks should have to bear the risk: That’s part of what their huge profits are supposed to be compensating them for, the willingness to take on risks others won’t. The main downside here is the fact that it would probably make it more difficult to get a mortgage and raise the interest rates that you would need to pay once you do.

Another option would be some sort of government program to make up the difference, by offering grants or guaranteed loans to homeowners who can’t afford to pay their mortgages. Since most such instances are likely to be temporary, the government wouldn’t be on the hook forever—just long enough for people to get back on their feet. Here the downside would be the same as any government spending: higher taxes or larger budget deficits. But honestly it probably wouldn’t take all that much; while the total value of all mortgages is very large, only a small portion are in default at any give time. Typically only about 2-4% of all mortgages in the US are in default. Even 4% of the $10 trillion total value of all US mortgages is about $400 billion, which sounds like a lot—but the government wouldn’t owe that full amount, just whatever portion is actually late. I couldn’t easily find figures on that, but I’d be surprised if it’s more than 10% of the total value of these mortgages that would need to be paid by the government. $40 billion is about 1% of the annual federal budget.

Reforms to our healthcare system would also help tremendously, as medical expenses are a leading cause of foreclosure in the United States (and literally nowhere else—every other country with the medical technology to make medicine this expensive also has a healthcare system that shares the burden). Here there is virtually no downside: Our healthcare system is ludicrously expensive without producing outcomes any better than the much cheaper single-payer systems in Canada, the UK, and France.

All of this sounds difficult and complicated, I suppose. Some may think that it’s not worth it. But I believe that there is a very strong moral argument for universal homeownership and ending eviction: Your home is your own, and no one else’s. No one has a right to take your home away from you.

This is also fundamentally capitalist: It is the private ownership of capital by its users, the acquisition of wealth through ownership of assets. The system of landlords and renters honestly doesn’t seem so much capitalist as it does feudal: We even call them “lords”, for goodness’ sake!

As an added bonus, if everyone owned their own homes, then perhaps we wouldn’t have to worry about “gentrification”, since rising property values would always benefit residents.

Love in a time of quarantine

pnrj cognitive science, current events, personal , , , , ,

Feb 14JDN 2459260

This is our first Valentine’s Day of quarantine—and hopefully our last. With Biden now already taking action and the vaccine rollout proceeding more or less on schedule, there is good reason to think that this pandemic will be behind us by the end of this year.

Yet for now we remain isolated from one another, attempting to substitute superficial digital interactions for the authentic comforts of real face-to-face contact. And anyone who is single, or forced to live away from their loved ones, during quarantine is surely having an especially hard time right now.

I have been quite fortunate in this regard: My fiancé and I have lived together for several years, and during this long period of isolation we’ve at least had each other—if basically no one else.

But even I have felt a strong difference, considerably stronger than I expected it would be: Despite many of my interactions already being conducted via the Internet, needing to do so with all interactions feels deeply constraining. Nearly all of my work can be done remotely—but not quite all, and even what can be done remotely doesn’t always work as well remotely. I am moderately introverted, and I still feel substantially deprived; I can only imagine how awful it must be for the strongly extraverted.

As awkward as face-to-face interactions can be, and as much as I hate making phone calls, somehow Zoom video calls are even worse than either. Being unable to visit someone’s house for dinner and games, or go out to dinner and actually sit inside a restaurant, leaves a surprisingly large emotional void. Nothing in particular feels radically different, but the sum of so many small differences adds up to a rather large one. I think I felt it the most when we were forced to cancel our usual travel back to Michigan over the holiday season.

Make no mistake: Social interaction is not simply something humans enjoy, or are good at. Social interaction is a human need. We need social interaction in much the same way that we need food or sleep. The United Nations considers solitary confinement for more than two weeks to be torture. Long periods in solitary confinement are strongly correlated with suicide—so in that sense, isolation can kill you. Think about the incredibly poor quality of social interactions that goes on in most prisons: Endless conflict, abuse, racism, frequent violence—and then consider that the one thing that inmates find most frightening is to be deprived of that social contact. This is not unlike being fed nothing but stale bread and water, and then suddenly having even that taken away from you.

Even less extreme forms of social isolation—like most of us are feeling right now—have as detrimental an effect on health as smoking or alcoholism, and considerably worse than obesity. Long-term social isolation increases overall mortality risk by more than one-fourth. Robust social interaction is critical for long-term health, both physically and mentally.

This does not mean that the quarantines were a bad idea—on the contrary, we should have enforced them more aggressively, so as to contain the pandemic faster and ultimately need less time in quarantine. Timing is critical here: Successfully containing the pandemic early is much easier than trying to bring it back under control once it has already spread. When the pandemic began, lockdown might have been able to stop the spread. At this point, vaccines are really our only hope of containment.

But it does mean that if you feel terrible lately, there is a very good reason for this, and you are not alone. Due to forces much larger than any of us can control, forces that even the world’s most powerful governments are struggling to contain, you are currently being deprived of a basic human need.

And especially if you are on your own this Valentine’s Day, remember that there are people who love you, even if they can’t be there with you right now.

2020 is almost over

pnrj current events, development economics, macroeconomics, personal, politics , , , , , ,

Dec27 JDN 2459211

I don’t think there are many people who would say that 2020 was their favorite year. Even if everything else had gone right, the 1.7 million deaths from the COVID pandemic would already make this a very bad year.

As if that weren’t bad enough, shutdowns in response to the pandemic, resulting unemployment, and inadequate fiscal policy responses have in a single year thrown nearly 150 million people back into extreme poverty. Unemployment in the US this year spiked to nearly 15%, its highest level since World War 2. Things haven’t been this bad for the US economy since the Great Depression.

And this Christmas season certainly felt quite different, with most of us unable to safely travel and forced to interact with our families only via video calls. New Year’s this year won’t feel like a celebration of a successful year so much as relief that we finally made it through.

Many of us have lost loved ones. Fortunately none of my immediate friends and family have died of COVID, but I can now count half a dozen acquaintances, friends-of-friends or distant relatives who are no longer with us. And I’ve been relatively lucky overall; both I and my partner work in jobs that are easy to do remotely, so our lives haven’t had to change all that much.

Yet 2020 is nearly over, and already there are signs that things really will get better in 2021. There are many good reasons for hope.


Joe Biden won the election by a substantial margin in both the popular vote and the Electoral College.

There are now multiple vaccines for COVID that have been successfully fast-tracked, and they are proving to be remarkably effective. Current forecasts suggest that we’ll have most of the US population vaccinated by the end of next summer.

Maybe the success of this vaccine will finally convince some of the folks who have been doubting the safety and effectiveness of vaccines in general. (Or maybe not; it’s too soon to tell.)

Perhaps the greatest reason to be hopeful about the future is the fact that 2020 is a sharp deviation from the long-term trend toward a better world. That 150 million people thrown back into extreme poverty needs to be compared against the over 1 billion people who have been lifted out of extreme poverty in just the last 30 years.

Those 1.7 million deaths need to be compared against the fact that global life expectancy has increased from 45 to 73 since 1950. The world population is 7.8 billion people. The global death rate has fallen from over 20 deaths per 1000 people per year to only 7.6 deaths per 1000 people per year. Multiplied over 7.8 billion people, that’s nearly 100 million lives saved every single year by advances in medicine and overall economic development. Indeed, if we were to sustain our current death rate indefinitely, our life expectancy would rise to over 130. There are various reasons to think that probably won’t happen, mostly related to age demographics, but in fact there are medical breakthroughs we might make that would make it possible. Even according to current forecasts, world life expectancy is expected to exceed 80 years by the end of the 21st century.

There have also been some significant environmental milestones this year: Global carbon emissions fell an astonishing 7% in 2020, though much of that was from reduced economic activity in response to the pandemic. (If we could sustain that, we’d cut global emissions in half each decade!) But many other milestones were the product of hard work, not silver linings of a global disaster: Whales returned to the Hudson river, Sweden officially terminated their last coal power plant, and the Great Barrier Reef is showing signs of recovery.

Yes, it’s been a bad year for most of us—most of the world, in fact. But there are many reasons to think that next year will be much better.

This is not just about selfishness

pnrj current events, ethics, public policy , , , , , ,

Aug 2 JDN 2459064

The Millennial term is “Karen”: someone (paradigmatically a middle-aged White woman) who is so privileged, so self-centered, and has such an extreme sense of entitlement, that they are willing to make others suffer in order to avoid the slightest inconvenience.

I recently saw a tweet (which for some reason has been impossible to find; I think I must have misremembered its precise wording, because putting that in quotes in Google yields nothing) saying that Americans are not simply selfish, we are so selfish that we would gladly let others die to avoid mildly inconveniencing ourselves. Searching Twitter for “Americans are selfish” certainly yields plenty of results.

And it is tempting to agree with this, when it seems that re-opening the economy and so many people refusing to wear masks has given us far worse outcomes from COVID-19 than most other countries.

But this can’t be the whole story. Perhaps Americans are a bit more self-centered than other cultures, because of our history of libertarian individualism. But if we were truly so selfish we’d gladly let others die to avoid inconvenience, whence the fact that we donate more to charity than any other country in the world? I don’t simply mean total amount or per-capita dollars (though both of those are also true); I mean as a fraction of GDP Americans give more to charity than any other country, and by a wide margin.

How then do we explain that so many Americans are not wearing masks?

Well, first of all, most of us are wearing masks. The narrative about people not wearing masks has been exaggerated; the majority of Americans, including the majority of Republicans, agree that wearing masks is a matter of public health rather than personal choice. There are some people who refuse to wear masks, and each one adds a little bit more risk to us all; but it’s really not the case that Americans in general are refusing to wear masks.

But I think the most important failings here come from the top down. The Trump administration has handled the pandemic in an astonishingly poor way. First, they denied that it was even a serious problem. Then, they implemented only a half-hearted response. Then, they turned masks into a culture war. Then, they resisted the economic relief package and prevented it from being as large as it needed to me. At every step of the way, they have been at best utterly incompetent and at worst guilty of depraved indifference murder.

From denying it was a problem, to responding too slowly, to disparaging mask use, to pushing to re-open the economy too soon, at every step of the way our government has made things worse. Above all, a better economic relief package—like what most other First World countries have done—would have done a great deal to reduce the harm of lockdowns, and would have made re-opening the economy far less popular.

Republican-led states have followed the President’s lead, refusing to implement even basic common-sense protections. But even Democrat-led states have suffered greatly as well. New York and California have some of the most cases, though this is surely in part because they are huge states with highly urbanized populations that get a lot of visitors and trade from other places. The trajectory of infections looks worst in Lousiana and Missouri, surely among the most conservative of states; but it also looks quite bad in New Jersey and Hawaii, which are among the most liberal.

I think what this shows us is that America lacks coordination. Despite having United in our name and E pluribus unum as our motto (“In God We Trust” was a Cold War change to spite the Soviets), what we lack most of all is unity. Viruses do not respect borders or jurisdictions. More than perhaps any other issue aside from climate change, fighting a pandemic requires a unified, coordinated response—and that is precisely what we did not have.

In some ways the pluralism of the United States can be a great strength; but this year, it was very much a weakness. And as the many crises around us continue, I fear we grow only more divided.

We still don’t know the fatality rate of COVID-19

pnrj current events, public policy , , , , ,

May 10 JDN2458978

You’d think after being in this pandemic for several weeks we would now have a clear idea of the fatality rate of the virus. Unfortunately, this is not the case.

The problem is that what we can track really doesn’t tell us what we need to know.

What we can track is how many people have tested positive versus how many people have died. As of this writing, 247,000 people have died and 3,504,000 have tested positive. If this were the true fatality rate, it would be horrifying: A death rate of 7% is clearly in excess of even the 1918 influenza pandemic.

Fortunately, this is almost certainly an overestimate. But it’s actually possible for it to be an underestimate, and here’s why: A lot of those people who currently have the virus could still die.

We really shouldn’t be dividing (total deaths)/(total confirmed infections). We should be dividing (total deaths)/(total deaths + total recoveries). If people haven’t recovered yet, it’s too soon to say whether they will live.

On that basis, this begins to look more like an ancient plague: The number of recoveries is only about four times the number of deaths, which would be a staggering fatality rate of 20%.

But as I said, it’s far more likely that this is an overestimate, because we don’t actually know how many people have been infected. We only know how many people have been infected and gotten tested. A large proportion have never been tested; many of these were simply asymptomatic.
We know this because of the few cases we have of rigorous testing of a whole population, such as the passengers on this cruise liner bound for Antarctica. On that cruise liner, 6 were hospitalized, but 128 tested positive for the virus. This means that the number of asymptomatic infections was twenty times that of the number of symptomatic infections.

There have been several studies attempting to determine what proportion of infections are asymptomatic, because this knowledge is so vital. Unfortunately the results are wildly inconsistent. They seem to range from 5% asymptomatic and 95% symptomatic to 95% asymptomatic and 5% symptomatic. The figure I find most plausible is about 80%: This means that the number of asymptomatic infected is about four times that of the number of symptomatic infected.

This means that the true calculation we should be doing actually looks like this: (total deaths)/(total deaths + total recoveries + total asymptomatic).

The number of deaths seems to be about one fourth the number of recoveries. But when you add the fact that four times as many who get infected are asymptomatic, things don’t look quite so bad. This yields an overall fatality rate of about 4%. This is still very high, and absolutely comparable to the 1918 influenza pandemic.

But the truth is, we just don’t know. South Korea’s fatality rate was only 0.7%, which would be a really bad flu season but nothing catastrophic. (A typical flu has a fatality rate of about 0.1%.) On the (deaths)/(deaths + recoveries) basis, it looks almost as bad as the Black Death.

With so much uncertainty, there’s really only one option: Prepare for the worst-case scenario. Assume that the real death rate is massive, and implement lockdown measures until you can confirm that it isn’t.

Motivation under trauma

pnrj current events, ethics, personal, science and academia , , , , , , , , , ,

May 3 JDN 2458971

Whenever I ask someone how they are doing lately, I get the same answer: “Pretty good, under the circumstances.” There seems to be a general sense that—at least among the sort of people I interact with regularly—that our own lives are still proceeding more or less normally, as we watch in horror the crises surrounding us. Nothing in particular is going wrong for us specifically. Everything is fine, except for the things that are wrong for everyone everywhere.

One thing that seems to be particularly difficult for a lot of us is the sense that we suddenly have so much time on our hands, but can’t find the motivation to actually use this time productively. So many hours of our lives were wasted on commuting or going to meetings or attending various events we didn’t really care much about but didn’t want to feel like we had missed out on. But now that we have these hours back, we can’t find the strength to use them well.

This is because we are now, as an entire society, experiencing a form of trauma. One of the most common long-term effects of post-traumatic stress disorder is a loss of motivation. Faced with suffering we have no power to control, we are made helpless by this traumatic experience; and this makes us learn to feel helpless in other domains.

There is a classic experiment about learned helplessness; like many old classic experiments, its ethics are a bit questionable. Though unlike many such experiments (glares at Zimbardo), its experimental rigor was ironclad. Dogs were divided into three groups. Group 1 was just a control, where the dogs were tied up for a while and then let go. Dogs in groups 2 and 3 were placed into a crate with a floor that could shock them. Dogs in group 2 had a lever they could press to make the shocks stop. Dogs in group 3 did not. (They actually gave the group 2 dogs control over the group 3 dogs to make the shock times exactly equal; but the dogs had no way to know that, so as far as they knew the shocks ended at random.)

Later, dogs from both groups were put into another crate, where they no longer had a lever to press, but they could jump over a barrier to a different part of the crate where the shocks wouldn’t happen. The dogs from group 2, who had previously had some control over their own pain, were able to quickly learn to do this. The dogs from group 3, who had previously felt pain apparently at random, had a very hard time learning this, if they could ever learn it at all. They’d just lay there and suffer the shocks, unable to bring themselves to even try to leap the barrier.

The group 3 dogs just knew there was nothing they could do. During their previous experience of the trauma, all their actions were futile, and so in this new trauma they were certain that their actions would remain futile. When nothing you do matters, the only sensible thing to do is nothing; and so they did. They had learned to be helpless.

I think for me, chronic migraines were my first crate. For years of my life there was basically nothing I could do to prevent myself from getting migraines—honestly the thing that would have helped most would have been to stop getting up for high school that started at 7:40 AM every morning. Eventually I found a good neurologist and got various treatments, as well as learned about various triggers and found ways to avoid most of them. (Let me know if you ever figure out a way to avoid stress.) My migraines are now far less frequent than they were when I was a teenager, though they are still far more frequent than I would prefer.

Yet, I think I still have not fully unlearned the helplessness that migraines taught me. Every time I get another migraine despite all the medications I’ve taken and all the triggers I’ve religiously avoided, this suffering beyond my control acts as another reminder of the ultimate caprice of the universe. There are so many things in our lives that we cannot control that it can be easy to lose sight of what we can.

This pandemic is a trauma that the whole world is now going through. And perhaps that unity of experience will ultimately save us—it will make us see the world and each other a little differently than we did before.

There are a few things you can do to reduce your own risk of getting or spreading the COVID-19 infection, like washing your hands regularly, avoiding social contact, and wearing masks when you go outside. And of course you should do these things. But the truth really is that there is very little any one of us can do to stop this global pandemic. We can watch the numbers tick up almost in real-time—as of this writing, 1 million cases and over 50,000 deaths in the US, 3 million cases and over 200,000 deaths worldwide—but there is very little we can do to change those numbers.

Sometimes we really are helpless. The challenge we face is not to let this genuine helplessness bleed over and make us feel helpless about other aspects of our lives. We are currently sitting in a crate with no lever, where the shocks will begin and end beyond our control. But the day will come when we are delivered to a new crate, and given the chance to leap over a barrier; we must find the strength to take that leap.

For now, I think we can forgive ourselves for getting less done than we might have hoped. We’re still not really out of that first crate.