It's a lot less reasonable to legally require someone to be a member of government for a multi-year term than it is to require them to sit a jury, so presumably you would let people opt out. Keep drawing from the lottery, and hopefully within only a single-digit number of tries you'll get someone who is in a position that taking it is reasonable. Particularly if you set the salary as generous by current national standards.
This does inject a little more of the "you don't want to be ruled by anyone who wants to rule you" issue, but considerably less than a democratic system that requires that someone basically devote their life to achieving high office.
Honestly it sorta blows my mind how well juries do given they’re as close to a random sample of the population you can stitch together. Really renews my faith in society.
They'll still do a better job than the professional sociopaths we have now. Just removing the selection for dark triad traits from our political class would be an amazing feat.
The "Napoleon of Notting Hill" theory of government 😀
"We are, in a sense, the purest democracy. We have become a despotism. Have you not noticed how continually in history democracy becomes despotism? People call it the decay of democracy. It is simply its fulfilment. Why take the trouble to number and register and enfranchise all the innumerable John Robinsons, when you can take one John Robinson with the same intellect or lack of intellect as all the rest, and have done with it? The old idealistic republicans used to found democracy on the idea that all men were equally intelligent. Believe me, the sane and enduring democracy is founded on the fact that all men are equally idiotic. Why should we not choose out of them one as much as another. All that we want for Government is a man not criminal and insane, who can rapidly look over some petitions and sign some proclamations. To think what time was wasted in arguing about the House of Lords, Tories saying it ought to be preserved because it was clever, and Radicals saying it ought to be destroyed because it was stupid, and all the time no one saw that it was right because it was stupid, because that chance mob of ordinary men thrown there by accident of blood, were a great democratic protest against the Lower House, against the eternal insolence of the aristocracy of talents. We have established now in England, the thing towards which all systems have dimly groped, the dull popular despotism without illusions. We want one man at the head of our State, not because he is brilliant or virtuous, but because he is one man and not a chattering crowd. To avoid the possible chance of hereditary diseases or such things, we have abandoned hereditary monarchy. The King of England is chosen like a juryman upon an official rotation list. Beyond that the whole system is quietly despotic, and we have not found it raise a murmur."
"Do you really mean," asked the President, incredulously, "that you choose any ordinary man that comes to hand and make him despot — that you trust to the chance of some alphabetical list...."
"And why not?" cried Barker. "Did not half the historical nations trust to the chance of the eldest sons of eldest sons, and did not half of them get on tolerably well? To have a perfect system is impossible; to have a system is indispensable. All hereditary monarchies were a matter of luck: so are alphabetical monarchies. Can you find a deep philosophical meaning in the difference between the Stuarts and the Hanoverians? Believe me, I will undertake to find a deep philosophical meaning in the contrast between the dark tragedy of the A's, and the solid success of the B's."
"And you risk it?" asked the other. "Though the man may be a tyrant or a cynic or a criminal."
"We risk it," answered Barker, with a perfect placidity. "Suppose he is a tyrant — he is still a check on a hundred tyrants. Suppose he is a cynic, it is to his interest to govern well. Suppose he is a criminal — by removing poverty and substituting power, we put a check on his criminality. In short, by substituting despotism we have put a total check on one criminal and a partial check on all the rest."
"Suppose he is a criminal — by removing poverty and substituting power, we put a check on his criminality."
This seems pretty obviously false. Many criminals commit crimes for reasons other than poverty. Making sure they are not poor and giving them power won't reduce their criminality.
The article makes it clear that they are proposing using privateers if a war between the US and China breaks out, not before. If we are at war with China then Chinese trade becomes out business.
It's the ravings of a retired Marine colonel who probably wants to go earn some prize money because he grew up reading too much Horatio Hornblower. He doesn't speak for anyone else, because Proceedings doesn't work that way.
I moved to the United States at 15, exactly half a lifetime ago. I remember watching GSN and the History Channel almost daily with my brother. In France, at the time, most households only had 5, or at most 6 TV channels, and there simply wasn't enough airwave space for niche shows like Ancient Aliens or Hitler this-and-that; documentaries were dour (to children), but probably trustworthy.
We eventually adjusted to these new, ahem, TV standards of evidence. But for a few long, awkward weeks, we would excitedly bring up the bible code, or some random Hitler-flavored crackpot theory, entirely convinced by the on-air experts. I still remember thinking the bible code stuff in particular was very compelling; why, after all, would a documentary lie about something like that?
Anyhow, I think I'd tried to repress those memories, and your comment vividly brought them back with a shudder
Could someone please explain what the mechanism is that big index funds use to get pharmaceutical companies (or other companies, for that matter) to do what they want?
Do they threaten to change the index-status of the company? Threaten to use the votes their stocks give them to fire the CEO? Either of those seem very much against the whole point of index funds--is it just that this is a clear emergency that justifies the exception? Or do Blackrock, Vanguard, etc, have some way of pressuring pharmaceutical companies that I don't know of?
there is no issue with index funds making choices on how to vote their shares. In the past they have been passive but there is no reason they shouldn't be trying to improve the governance of their holdings (although there are reasons that they shouldn't be trying to force collusion).
Well, there is one pretty good reason, which is that you need to pay somebody to figure out how to improve governance of holdings, which means the fees on the index fund goes up. Perhaps this is just an exception because of how obviously beneficial it would be to have a vaccine.
So IS this how we think index funds influence these companies?
Big stock owners have sway. They're not going to vote all their shares all the time, but if BlackRock's CEO gets a bee in his bonnet, it doesn't even cost BlackRock anything extra to have the CEO (who's already on the payroll) make a few calls, or to have an intern go vote 397 million shares at the Pfizer AGM. And for the same reason, he has a pretty good chance of winning a proxy fight.
It’s very cordial and informal. Management will take calls from their biggest shareholders. The relationship is probably a lot more interpersonal than what you might be imagining. All the major stakeholders have very tightly aligned interests (most of the time etc etc).
The dismantling the octopus chapter of Radical markets gets into it. The short version is that Hedge funds and mutual funds have significant voting shares, and are a coherent block, while the rest of the investors aren't. This means that when the simply pick up the phone and call the Board CEO etc, they listen. I'm dismayed that Scott is implying that *destroying competitive markets through pseudo monopoly power* is a good thing.
Some chaps have a chat. The real money doesn't need mechanisms, it has trust relationships. The CEO of a fund has a chat with his chum, the CEO of a pharma giant. Lunch is arranged.
Then the pharma CEO has a chat with his head of operations and his marketing guy.
All very informal. You don't take minutes at lunch. No paper trails, just old friends catching up.
I did a college research paper on the changes in hurricanes over time with global warming. What I found was that the data sets are really bad. They're mostly based on tidal gauge measures of storm surges, but tidal gauges malfunction in massive waves.
The paper Scott linked is based on satellite imagery, which seems like it should be better, but I wonder how they backtested their "Dvorak" technique to estimate storm intensity from satellite imagery. If they had to test it on the old data sets (i.e. the tidal gauges), I'd worry about the reliability of the Dvorak technique as well.
Worth noting as well that NOAA has been adjusting the data from previous pre-satellite era hurricane seasons, often by as much as 20%; the adjustments might be entirely called for, but if so that indicates that the historical data being adjusted can't be trusted to within 20%, making long-term calibration of historical data to satellite data even more difficult. 8% per decade is a very small signal to try to extract from this noise.
If each individual data point may be shifted by ~20% (in either direction) then mean’s will still fairly easily extract trends. All that changes is the specifics of a given year, not the trend.
Because it reduces the absolute amount of misinformation released into the world. Also, commenters are fallible and are gonna miss stuff, and aren't really in a position to suggest structural changes to, say, the layout or argumentation of a piece. Any of these reasons ought to be adequate to hire an editor.
On the other hand, perhaps some of the charm of the blog is that it is "off the cuff." I think that should really be balanced against the fact that, as a subscriber, a lot of people are paying frankly ridiculous sums of money for it.
": Seen here: how has the wealth of different generations changed over time? Note that this is not tracking specific individuals, who continue to mostly gain wealth as they get older - it’s tracking how much money an (eg) 25 year old would have made in 1990 vs. 2015:"
I'm pretty surprised at how poorly middle-aged people are doing. You can definitely see a big drop in the 45-64 range from the 2008 recession, which makes sense to me (I would expect that to be age range that had the highest fraction of their wealth in housing), but I would expect some recovery. It also looks like the divergence of 65+ vs everyone younger started around 2004-2007, so I still find myself confused.
"32: Also from the Slime Mold Time Mold blog: a critique of the research on hypobaric hypoxia causing weight loss. I’d previously cited the research favorably in my post on why obesity negatively correlates with altitude; the SMTM authors have a different theory where it has to do with how many pollutants are in your water (the lower you are, the more runoff has made it into your water supply)."
By complete coincidence, I was looking at my comment (https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/12/11/open-thread-64-5/#comment-443619) following up on that post, and a respondent stated this exact hypothesis. (I'm still a bit skeptical, because for most of the country, the amount of water upstream of you has little to do with your elevation--think about all the people who live along the lower Mississippi, but are at nearly the same elevation as their slightly northerly neighbors, and also for the reasons I pointed out at the time, particularly the extreme selection effect of altitudes above 5,000 feet).
I'm looking at the map of obesity rates (figure 2), and I think upon looking more carefully, there's quite a lot that is still unusual. Most notably, I would expect a line of decreasing obesity running roughly North/South through Abilene, Dallas, Oklahoma City, Wichita, Lincoln, and Bismarck. The elevation increases pretty sharply, from about 500 feet to 4-5,000 feet above sea level (comparable to the higher Appalachian peaks) in 100-200 miles. Instead, it looks like the obesity is constant until you get to the CO and NM state lines, well after the elevation has been gained.
I will say that the array of evidence summarized in sections 1 and 2 seems to be among the most maddeningly bizarre of any scientific question I have ever heard of.
I suppose I do have a question: how are wild animals affected, but not people living separately from the rest of society? Shouldn't the !Kung and other tribes be consuming the same air and water as those wild animals, and in some cases eating those wild animals?
And a second question: how tightly controlled are the diet and exercise experiments? Some of them last for a year or longer; presumably the participants aren't living in a lab the whole time (and if they are, could that moderate the effects of the treatment?). Do these studies rely on people following the diet/exercise plan of their own volition, and take self-reports of whether they did or not literally?
A follow-up question: What is the mechanism by which environmental contamination affects obesity? As far as I can tell, you mention 2 candidates. One is leptin, which Scott wrote about in his own review of Guyenet's book. But the mechanism by which leptin affects weight seems to be through... how much you eat, which you already established doesn't matter. That's certainly the case with the leptin-deficient children. Is it not the case for common leptin resistance? Does leptin also coincidentally control some other function, like how much you fidget? (I use that as an example because Scott's old post mentioned it, but in retrospect, fidgeting is exercise, which you also established doesn't matter. I suppose in some sense I'm confused as the basic accounting of calories, if both diet and exercise are completely irrelevant).
The other mechanism I saw mentioned is the gut microbiome. That's currently too much of a black box to me for me to be able to comment, but it does seem like it renders some of the evidence from above (the rat-leptin experiments as well as the the fact that psychiatric medication causes weight gain) seemingly irrelevant.
"Also from a public health perspective, mechanism isn't that important. We didn't need to understand the mechanism of how smoking caused cancer to figure out that it did."
There's a very clear signal that smoking causes lung cancer.
I gather there isn't nearly as a clear a signal about what in modern life causes obesity.
Is fidgeting actually a plausible mechanism for how fat people are? It seems to me that it would burn very little energy compared to even light exercise, and the added number of hours doesn't seem like enough.
Maybe it's harder to eat more than you want if you're fidgety, though you can still jiggle your feet while you're eating.
Is there a dose effect? Men (at least) are notable for putting on weight after about age 30 or 35. Does this correlate with a decline in fidgeting?
I don't know. I only thought of it because Scott's post from a few years ago mentioned it. I thought he cited a study claiming it could burn hundreds of calories per day, which sounds impressive to me but apparently doesn't mean anything.
Local police departments in brazil go on strike all the time (I remember 3 different ones while I was in school in Salvador in the early aughts) and no big terrible things happen.
That was my immediate thought. In a county with a murder rate of 30 per 100,000 I'd hate to see what even worse terrible things looked like. Not a useful comparison.
I would expect that going on strike all the time would be *less* bad than going on strike exactly once ever, at least in terms of the immediate impact of a single strike.
If you strike often, then society has to find ways to cope during those periods, and criminals have many different strikes to take advantage of, letting them spread out their efforts. With only one strike, no other systems are in place to cope, and criminals are looking at a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Here's a question in light of your final [and potentially most stupendous!!] item, namely the one about the possibility of mRNA vaccines for malaria. [Footnote 1 reprints the link at bottom of this comment should you not want to scroll back up.]
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My Question: I note a veritable cottage industry among certain economists (e.g., most blog-famous --- especially around these here parts --- would be Alex Tabarrok, see footnoted link #2) to produce estimates implying that even stupendous additional monies on COVID-19 vaccine manufacture and distribution pass all reasonable cost-benefit analyses.
** My basic question is: Anyone have opinions whether similar cost-benefit analyses for throwing stupendous government monies and effort on potential mRNA vaccines against... well, EVERYTHING (ok, ok, starting with a few major tropical diseases and certain types of cancer) would be worthwhile? **
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My own opinion is: Ummm, maybe? Seriously, I would need to expend more effort on the nitty-gritty of estimating costs and benefits. To wit, it's my preliminary impression that in the case of these COVID-19 cost-benefit estimates that a large part of the estimated benefit comes NOT from reducing COVID-19 sufferers' disability-adjusted-life-years-lost by themselves (at least not in the mean of most people's projections for the COVID-19 incidience in 2021), BUT RATHER from:
-- returning the world economy more quickly to its pre-pandemic productivity path [hey, say that 5 times fast ;) ],
-- and (sometimes) the possibility of reducing the tail risks of more-infectious-but-still-vaccine-affected variants getting out of hand and forcing massive lockdowns again --- indeed, lockdowns perhaps even more massive and more strict than those of early 2020.
Not to argue that it's morally right, but I get the strong impression most mainstream cost-benefit estimators wouldn't see those benefits as applicable to the case of markedly reducing the mortality and morbidity from major tropical diseases and a couple major cancers. (Prof. Tabarrok, are you reading this? Did you already think of this question? If so, hi!)
One potentially big advantage with the new mRNA vaccines is that they are driving down the marginal cost of vaccine development and testing. If this continues as expected, the costs of custom vaccines to disease X will be within the budgets of small organizations- single philanthropists. This could substantially change the social factors and economics of disease treatment...
The CDC announced that Covid had lowered life expectancy by a year. What they actually meant, as best I can tell, was that if you assumed that the age specific mortality rates of 2020 continued for ever, life expectancy would be a year less. Of course, that requires another pandemic every year for ever. Actual covid deaths represent an average cost of about five days.
But it occurred to me that if the Malaria story pans out, the pandemic might end up raising life expectancy — not life expectancy calculated by assuming pandemic mortality rates forever but how long people actually end up living.
I think the "lowered life expectancy by a year" thing was on the assumption that everyone got it, and it was a reduction to the life expectancy of people alive today. I won't swear to that, but it's killed about 1/700 Americans so far, and only a minority of the country has been infected. It's going to have a pretty substantial impact on mortality for the year.
As best I can tell, what it was about was what life expectancy would be if we had the age specific mortality of 2020 every year thereafter. That requires not that everyone gets Covid but that we repeat the pandemic, or something equivalent, every year forever.
So far as lost life per capita so far, it works out to about five days.
Yes, if you add “for someone born in 2020”. Which is not as ridiculous as it sounds, if you use it for e.g. comparisons over time or between sub populations. Of course it has no predictive value and is not intended to (any mor than one would blindly rely on instantaneous speed to predict the ETA for a cross-city drive).
One of the value propositions for the mRNA vaccine technology is in fact "super-customized" vaccine development. They're leading candidates for cancer immunotherapies, which hope to take cancerous cells from a biopsy and generate an immune response against those cells.
We know that vaccines against respiratory viruses can work so it's reasonable to throw money at making mRNA vaccines against this particular respiratory virus. We don't know that it's possible to vaccinate against certain major tropical diseases or major cancers so it is a very, very different thing to consider throwing money at those efforts.
Good point, Polynices. Though on that note of vaccines against respiratory viruses, you might be interested to note that mRNA vaccine work on a "universal" influenza vaccine [1, 2] is at the same encouraging-but-hardly-definitive stage as this malaria work linked to by Scott [3]. Namely, mRNA universal flu vaccines are at the stage for which honesty demands an explicit #justsayinmice hashtag caveat [which I gather is sort of a virology Twitter in-joke, see footnote 4]. Sadly, honesty's demands for such an explicit caveat are so rarely met in mainstream news / popular science media.
I bring up work on universal influenza vaccines since a novel strain of pandemic influenza seems to me to have been by and far the pandemic scenario that the US government was most worried about until SARS-CoV-2 reminded them for at least the 3rd time in 20 years that "ya know, there's other novel zoonotic respiratory viruses... indeed, ones that even scared the s#!% out of major countries... just sayin' ".
Indeed, if my memory's not failing me, I'm pretty sure not only Dr. Anthony Fauci, but also numerous other regular participants and guests on This Week in Virology (TWiV) podcast [https://www.microbe.tv/] have opined to the effect "Gosh, if this COVID-19 pandemic doesn't get a fire under our proverbial butt to finally fully fund universal flu vaccines as long as it takes to succeed in making one, well... humanity's probably going to regret it majorly... and maybe in a decade or two rather than just by, say, 2100." [I'm too lazy to find links for that, unlike the other links that you see below... also, I'm not a virologist [5], but I think the TWiV podcast deserves all the praise and attention... well, relative attention in the world of academics podcasting... that it gets.]
[2] Not to insult anyone's intelligence on this learned blog, but the way flu vaccines are manufactured, they're specific to only 3 or 4 flu strains that have to be identified by public health "surveillance" experts making an educated guess about which strains are likely to be in wide circulation in the coming flu season. Commentors more virologically-informed than I are invited to enlighten me (and presumably other people) why the number of flu strains you can put in a vaccine tops out at effectively 4 with present day technology --- be that (1) the old-school flu vaccine technology of actually involves culturing lots of flu viruses in chicken egg media or certain mammalian cell cultures, isolating all that virus, and then "inactivating" or "attenuating" that virus so it'll just stimulate an immune response without giving you the flu or (2) the fancy-schmancier-new-since-early-2010s-but-alas-still-not-magic "recombinant" vaccine technology that takes the DNA coding for the hemagglutinin surface proteins of the flu strains you want to vaccinate and putting that into baculoviruses to inject (hemagglutinin types being the reason for the "H[digit]" part of the "H[digit]N[other digit]" naming scheme for flu viruses).
[3] The link Scott gave for the malaria mRNA-esque vaccine was really a news release for a patent application by the Yale / GlaxoSmithKline collaboration. The actual research (again #justsayinmice!) is in this preprint: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.14.430970v1.abstract
[5] I'm a theoretical physicist, not a virologist or any other sort of molecular biology person. Though I'm co-author on a paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.15776) which, umm... mentions how to speed up differential equation solving pertinent to epidemiology as well as "virality" on social networks, I swear I'm not the type of physicist lampooned here https://xkcd.com/793/ . Really, I'm not!
There might be some interesting math about the question of giving vaccines for influenzas which are further down on the list. I'm thinking that if the fifth and sixth most likely flus aren't that much less likely than number four or possibly numbers three and four, maybe the best bet is to randomly give a fairly high proportion of people vaccines against 1, 2, 4, and 5 or 1, 2, 4, and 6 so as to blunt the slightly less likely epidemics. I'm guessing, though.
I wouldn't move quite as fast against malaria or the like - covid is a fast-moving crisis, and speed really matters. Malaria is also very bad, and I don't want to waste too much time, but it's not an emergency in quite the same fashion.
I wouldn't throw every available dollar at vaccines against everything, but I'd certainly start up some research programs. I'm a layman, so I won't put hard numbers on this, but if a few billion got invested into this globally over the next year, I'd probably nod happily.
I don't disagree about speed, at all, but I would point out that the impact on lost years of life of a disease that kills large numbers of children is much larger than that of a disease that most kills much older people, relative to numbers of cases.
Personally, I'm mostly angry about years already lost for no good reason. In what year did humans first gain the ability, technologically, to design a vaccine to a novel virus in a matter of weeks to a few months, and complete clinical trials in a few months more? The idea of mRNA vaccines is over 30 years old (but wasn't feasible back then), and this review paper https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3597572/) seems to show multiple demonstrations pre-2012. Even if it only became *really* feasible, say, 5 years ago, how many people died that didn't need to, of all sorts of diseases, which could already have vaccines if we'd thrown a few hundred billion dollars at them? How much faster could we have gotten a covid vaccine developed and rolled out if there were already a dozen other mRNA vaccines on the market with scaled-up manufacturing we could have repurposed?
Technologically, fast trials have been a thing for as long as vaccines. The limitation there is regulatory, not technological.
I don't know when mRNA became viable as a vaccine tech, per se, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_vaccine#History has a run-down of various related milestones. 1989 was when they showed you could inject mRNA, 1994 was when they showed it could create an immune response, and it looks like 2005 was when they solved one of the major issues with using it in actual humans. But Moderna and BioNTech were both working on mRNA treatments pre-covid, and not having a ton of luck getting them in a workable, marketable state. Looks like the transition to vaccines was comparatively recent - here's an article from 2017, for example: https://www.statnews.com/2017/01/10/moderna-trouble-mrna/
If they were only just switching to a vaccine mindset in 2017, then I doubt anything could have cleared trials by now (absent Warp Speed), so we wouldn't have any mRNA vaccines yet under normal circumstances.
Any sold-out-on-wokeness hypothesis for why the Sanders campaign failed has to grapple with several issues:
- Why New Bernie did so much better in Nevada in 2020 (with a much more diverse base). The article claims that caucuses "place a premium on ground-level organizing, where Sanders excelled." But this is not a distinction since Nevada was also a caucus in 2016 and the failures in 2020 South Carolina are being alleged at that same level, not that Bernie ran bad television ads or failed to show up.
- Why Classic Bernie did almost as badly in South Carolina in 2016. He got 26% of the vote there in 2016 and 20% in 2020. This is not a very dramatic difference considering the first contest was one-on-one against Hillary and it can be parsimoniously explained by an "anti-Hillary but not especially leftist" cohort.
- The specifics of Sanders' supposed sellout. What issues, specifically, does Bernie stand accused of shifting on? As near as I can tell, the only one on offer is that Bernie seems to have agreed with most Democrats that there was some sort of corruption involving Trump and Russia. Setting aside for the moment the various mottes and baileys imposingly shadowed here, I simply do not see a case made that any significant mass of (Democratic primary) voters were specifically motivated by an *absence* of this. And while Bernie was not a contrarian on this issue, neither did he especially lean into it. You can point to statements he made while being interviewed on news shows, but certainly it came up much less in his stump speeches than class issues.
As someone who followed his primary campaigns closely in 2016 and 2020 and supported him in both, I can't buy into this thesis. My view is much simpler: Bernie never had a majority of the primary electorate. In 2016 his numbers were puffed up by non-ideological anti-Hillary votes and in 2020 Democratic candidates simply coordinated to stop Bernie in exactly the way Republican candidates failed to do with Trump. The article skewers a straw man by contrapositing its arguments from "if the Democratic party was so desperate to rally around Biden...." They were not, any more than Republicans were eager to rally around Ted Cruz! The difference is they sucked up and did it when the circumstances left it as the only option. This is not corruption, A endorsing B to put them over C is basic coalition politics as they have been practiced in every Presidential nominating process since the introduction of the party system.
And while I know people here are loath not to take others at their word, I would also like to suggest a distinction between class-first leftists and "class-first leftists." Class-first leftists spend most of their time talking about class, are usually found in obscure academic journals and activist groups, and often have wonkish opinions about monetary policy and the labor theory of value. "Class-first leftists" spend most of their time talking about identity politics, can be found on Twitter, Fox News, or erstwhile pro-Trump outfits like American Affairs, and have often have wonkish opinions about how Republicans are correct to say that idpol is bad and Russiagate is fake, prefaced with "as a class first leftist,"
"This is not corruption, A endorsing B to put them over C is basic coalition politics as they have been practiced in every Presidential nominating process since the introduction of the party system."
Completely agreed, but it's worth noting that *arguing over* whether this type of coalition politics constitutes corruption has also been practiced since at least 1824 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupt_bargain). I think the arguments boil down to, if you're part of the deal then it's not corrupt, and if you're on the other side then it is.
If we think politicians do actually care about their stated policy preferences then it's the rational option. Buttigieg, Harris, and Klobuchar were absolutely closer to Biden than to Sanders on policy, so when it looked like Sanders might win consolidating around one moderate-lane candidate was the rational choice. The GOP establishment messed up in 2016 — if they had been able to consolidate around one mainstream candidate, Trump wouldn't have been the nominee.
Of course, the fact that a lot of these turn into quid pro quos (see — VP! Cabinet positions!) does give it a whiff of corruption, but it's hard for me to imagine a world where politics didn't involve trades, negotiation, and deal-making. Being able to form a winning coalition is pretty much a politician's job.
One could imagine that giving way to another politician due to similar policy objectives could be a signal that those policy objectives are honestly held, and close to the then-recommended politician. If they win, and are then looking for people that are close to them on policy and have credibly signaled that they really care about said policies (plus being a "team player", as interpreted by those on the team), high level positions would seem a reasonably natural choice, without having to resort to it being a reward. Of course, then incentives for the ambitious would push them the same direction (which, so long as they push towards desired ends, still should mostly work out, I imagine).
The article is long but worth a read. They address a lot of your counterpoints.
On Nevada:
"Sanders’s only truly commanding victory of the entire cycle was in one of the few full-fledged caucus states that remained, Nevada. And this turned out to be completely illusory: caucus states place a premium on ground-level organizing, which is the area where the Sanders campaign obviously excelled: if there’s a need for left-wing activists to go agitate at complicated meetings (such as caucuses), that need was certainly able to be filled. In a cruel twist of fate, the Sanders representatives on the Unity Commission would’ve been better off lobbying for the retention of corrupt party-run caucuses, because these were evidently more favorable ground for Sanders than high-turnout primary elections—a paradox that directly countervails a central conceit of his campaign."
South Carolina is presented as emblematic, but hardly unique. They break down the numbers in many other states to show that Sanders' share of the vote, and in some cases raw vote count, went down despite higher overall turnout, including in rural and working class counties where he excelled in 2016.
With regards to how he "sold out", the overall thrust of the article is that the American electorate as a whole is "left" on economics and "right" on social issues, especially when social "right" on social issues means "not woke". They claim that, relatively speaking, Sanders put less emphasis on economic issues and more emphasis on culture war issues to appease a young, online, hyper-woke activist base, which led to less support among the typical Democratic primary voter.
They also make a pretty strong case that the party elite, while perhaps not stridently pro-Bernie, made a lot of concessions to his wing between 2016 and 2020, and that he wasted the large structural advantages that he held over the entire field.
They claim that, but I don't see much evidence for it. Obviously it's difficult to quantify something like "put less emphasis" but the least you could do is cite a bunch of examples and the only one on offer was "Sanders went along with Russia." If there were some deciding cohort of Democratic primary voters motivated by anti-anti-Russia skepticism they failed to show up in Tulsi Gabbard's vote totals (and the authors themselves point to her as an example of a candidate refusing while seemingly ignoring how it undermines their thesis; adding her vote to Sanders' gets you to the exact same place).
Other than that I can find no specific examples of this supposed shift to "culture war issues" by Bernie. I think there is some degree of distorted thinking on tap here, mainly in thinking Bernie Classic was "not woke" in some way because he took flak from Hillary on that subject. But this was Hillary's emphasis, not Bernie's, because she couldn't hope to flank him on economic policies. Bernie did not respond to this by running to the right. You can make a much, much, MUCH stronger case that Bernie shifted left between his time on the Congressional backbench and his 2016 campaign, since one of the few things Hillary could hit him on were past votes on immigration, gun control, and the like. But this would fail to make the case the authors want to make. The personnel shifts in South Carolina are also not terribly convincing. Nina Turner was a Bernie surrogate in 2016 too. Bernie's South Carolina polling was atrocious both before and after Kwadjo Campbell's ouster. There are simply no magic words to utter that will make cautious, religious black voters in the South embrace socialism. (Bernie's most prominent 2016 black surrogate, Symone Sanders, famously switched to Biden in 2020 and was fairly explicit about electability being the motivation.)
I agree with the structural portions of their thesis. Bernie was cheated in 2016 but he lost 2020 fair and square to the "Centrist Voltron" that left Twitter was roasting right up until it suddenly manifested. The difference between the 2016 and 2020 fields suffices to explain all of their observations about Bernie's vote totals; you simply cannot assume that everyone who voted for him in 2016 was committed to any particular policy at all, let alone specifically voting on anti-wokism, instead of being contingent anti-Hillary voters spoiled for choice in 2020. Who did those votes go to? Not to Tulsi or Yang, the only two candidates you can really make a case for being "less woke" than Bernie. Not out of the primaries entirely, turnout was way up from 2016. Mostly they went to Biden, who it must be said, was also not a paragon of wokeness compared to the field, and suffered not a whit for defending his old Senate busing votes.
The authors are correct that there is a certain fatigue among the electorate for meaningless culture war stunts. However this fatigue is just as much from the center as it is the far-left. The average American voter might be in the red quadrant, but if they are it's at like -1,1, and to those people, Biden is just fine. I do not like that this is the case, but facts don't care about my feelings.
I've never been a Sanders supporter (quite the opposite), so I never followed his campaign in detail. I'm also not plugged directly into the woke left. So I can't really comment on the degree to which he shifted in that direction -- I have a vague impression that he at least paid lip service to wokeness, but it's a second hand impression and may reflect the biases of my sources on this issue.
Having said that, I don't think the article was trying to make the case that Sanders became an ardent SJW or made identity politics the focus of his campaign. Only that in 2016 he at the very least seemed uninterested in it, and that in 2020 he at least seemed to appease it.
To my eye he did about the same amount of lip service in both campaigns. He himself is not "anti-woke," the class-first approach is a matter of emphasis. Where the authors go awry is in assuming voters cared about this lip service one way or the other. Bernie didn't lose ground from '16 because of some throwaway comment he made about "doing better" on sexism, or because they shitcanned some guy in South Carolina. He lost because he had no hope of uniting all of his former "not-Hillary" constituencies in her absence. Ironically, Nagle and Tracey are committing a similar error as their liberal counterparts, wishcasting their beefs with rose Twitter onto an electorate of Rust Belt boomers who were never really attached to Sanders in '16 beyond him not being Hillary. Joe was there if you weren't that woke. Pete was there if you wanted an outsider. Tulsi was there for the 1% who wanted vague anti-anti-Putin stuff.
I appreciate your perspective on this, and I can certainly see how the authors of that article might be wishcasting, as you put it. But there is one thing I'd like to explore a little more
'[Sanders] lost because he had no hope of uniting all of his former "not-Hillary" constituencies in her absence'
What if we apply that same reasoning to Trump? I think he benefited in a meaningful way from the "not-Hillary" vote in 2016, just as Sanders did (I've heard anecdotes about 2016 Sanders supporters whose second choice was Trump).
The answer might be, "Exactly! That's (one of the reasons) he lost in 2020!"
But as a counterpoint, consider that Trump increased his raw vote totals from 2016 to 2020 in *every single state*. The article claims (I haven't verified) that Sanders primary raw vote totals from 2016 to 2020 went down in several states and in several working-class counties. Voter turnout can't explain this alone because it was up in both the general election and primaries (at least the ones they cite).
Primary and general elections have different dynamics, obviously. Biden's raw vote totals were higher than Clinton's in *every single state*, too. If Sanders had been the Democratic nominee in 2020, the same trend may have held. Sanders went head to against Clinton in a year that was arguably a referendum on Clinton (or at least Clinton-sim). He didn't have the chance to go head to head against Trump in a year that was a referendum on Trump. Maybe that is all there is to it and I'm reading too much into it.
But the fact remains that after Hilary exited the scene, Trump maintained enthusiasm and even made inroads with new demographics. Sanders didn't (it seems). Why did Trump go up when Sanders went down? If 2016 anti-Clinton, anti-establishment Sanders-Trump voters switched to being Trump diehards in 2020, what did he do to make them so loyal?
I think it makes sense to talk about the "anti-Hillary" vote in three cohorts:
1. Sanders-Trump voters. These probably stayed loyal to Trump.
2. Sanders-nonvoters. These are represented by increased turnout in the general and I think there were more of them.
3. People who didn't vote at all in 2016. The article gestures at this by calling his first campaign "shoestring" but this is understating it. Bernie barely had *any* infrastructure spun up until about 1/3 of the way through the primary when people realized he could actually win this. If the campaign itself thought it was a doomed protest against a coronation, probably lots of voters did too. There's no way to guess how big THIS cohort is but since primary turnout was higher in 2020 this is probably a factor too.
Other than that, yes, parties tend to fall in line with their Presidents as elections become referendums on incumbency. Obama and Hillary fought to the bitter end in 2008, but while there were a few loud Hillary-or-bust PUMAs, most of the Democratic electorate fell in line and there was not a significant internal challenge to Obama in 2012. I think it's possible for Trump to have lost the upper Midwest due to a slice of "not-Hillary" voters that became "not-Trump" and restored just enough of the firewall even as turnout was juiced on all sides.
Sanders might have actually succeeded had he done two things:
1. Be more moderate (and not just on immigration issues; his economic platform was to the left of that of Corbyn's Labour)
2. Actually attack Biden
Democratic primaries, unlike Republican ones, tend to be massive hugfests. The only way for an unfavored candidate to win in such a system is to break out of that mold.
His Russia comments were not helpful to him because they were so easy to use against him, but they were only a symptom of Sanders's problem in the Democratic primary, not the actual problem itself.
Regarding the tricameral legislature proposal, I don't necessarily hate the concept, but one of the major arguments for it in that piece -- that the current political gridlock prevents laws from passing that have very wide support among the population -- is dubious. I don't know much about the other examples he cites, but the one about high support for background checks on firearms sales at gun shows is extremely misleading -- it's effectively a gun control talking point that gets passed around by their lobbyist organizations, but doesn't correspond to reality.
You can get large percentages of people to agree to "closing the gun show loophole" or "universal background checks" or similar, but when laws like these actually get brought up for consideration, even in proposal/referendum systems, the support is a much more partisan-typical 45-55%. This is because "universal background checks" is essentially a feel-good platitude, and the actual laws brought up to implement it are usually poison pills designed to attack gun owners. The usual form this takes is requiring full background checks on any transfer, and counting loans as transfers; thus, interactions that are completely normal among gun owners, like "let me use that rifle today while hunting so I can see how it feels", become felonies if not run through the proper federal bureaucracy. When concretized in this way, obviously support for the proposition drops.
In general, opinion polls like this are very weak sources of information, because even leaving aside lizardman effects, most public policy questions are sufficiently complex and subtle that your average person will require at least half an hour to understand what the question actually means. For people who aren't already policy junkies -- which is an excellent life choice that I endorse -- that means that a phone poll asking "do you approve or disapprove of $THING?" is basically only measuring whether the pollster phrases $THING in a way that sounds positive or negative. Thus a pollster can get whatever answer they want out of such polls, more or less; and any such poll that people are pushing is more likely propaganda than part of an effort to understand the world.
You could definitely write an implementation that isn't a poison pill, but no one really has a reason to do that.
For background, I'll go over the current background check regime. The phrase "gun show loophole" gets a lot of play, but the point of law involved has nothing to do with gun shows at all. Basically, if you sell guns for a living, you need to get a federal license (the FFL) and you need to run a background check on everyone you sell a gun to. If you don't sell guns for a living, on the other hand, you're allowed to sell your guns to other private citizens without needing to do a check, but if you know the person you're selling to is a prohibited person, then making the sale is a felony. The "gun show loophole" is the fact that private, person-to-person sales don't need a background check (and notionally a lot of these happen at gun shows). In practice, though, 99% of gun sales go through FFLs, including at gun shows; private sales are an edge case the same way garage sales are mostly an edge case compared to the overall retail market.
Thus, while you could design a system for universal background checks that wouldn't cause problems for non-criminals (say, by opening the background check system to ordinary citizens and letting it generate tokens that you can check through the system later), there's not much reason to think it would help with anything. 99% of existing legitimate sales go through FFLs and are checked already; criminal sales mostly happen in black-market contexts where no one involved cares what the law is. The marginal criminal who can get a gun via a private sale from a law-abiding private seller (who doesn't know the buyer is a criminal), but can't get one either by theft, via a straw purchase or on the black market, basically doesn't exist. (A "straw purchase" is when a legal buyer buys a gun at an FFL for the purpose of giving it to a prohibited person. This is, naturally, a felony, but it still happens a lot and is fundamentally hard to prevent.)
Gun owners and gun rights activists would not necessarily object to a non-poison-pill implementation of universal background checks, but they don't have any reason to proactively pursue it, because it wouldn't help any; and such people are also categorically extremely suspicious of any expansion of gun laws whatsoever. (This is basically for good reason, because probably the majority of new gun laws ever enacted are basically poison pills meant to hurt gun owners.) Meanwhile, gun control activists are mostly divided into people who don't know anything about the topic but support initiatives that sound nice, and people who do know about the topic and are actively trying to pass poison pills to hurt gun owners. None of these groups have any incentive to push for a reasonable universal background check system.
There was a proposal a while ago for a big gun control compromise, where gun control activists got a well-designed universal background check system in exchange for concealed carry license reciprocity and/or the removal of suppressors from the NFA. This got a fair amount of play and tentative approval among gun rights groups, but was never mentioned so far as I can tell among gun control groups; in any case, it never went anywhere.
#8: I had a parent on the wrong side of the ‘08 recession, they’re about mid 60s now, and that trend line down for 50-60 y/o nails it. There’s a large population of 60 y/o’s who will never retire because of ‘08 and ‘20, and I wonder what that future looks like for us. The money just isn’t there.
I’m thinking about another round of 401k liquidations and home equity prob occurring. Decades of saving get undone and age 40, really age 30 onward isn’t enough time to recuperate, using some rough excel math. That said - what did the 70 plus’ers do in ‘08 I wonder. Their numbers look fine, and right age in ‘08 to crack into their 401ks as well.
The 70+ people in '08 were probably old enough that most of them had little or nothing left on their mortgages and they had social security money to draw on, limiting the amount that they actually had to take out of the stock market (if any - by that age most financial advisors recommend things like bonds). And they're already unemployed, so it's not like they lost out on income. So while it wasn't great for them, they were pretty secure.
The people in their 50s however, would almost definitely still have a lot left on their mortgages, would not have social security as a stop-gap, would still have money in the stock market, and would still be relying on a job. So the unlucky ones would lose their job, then rely on savings and withdrawing from their diminished stocks, and then when the savings ran out, get foreclosed on. That of course also applied to people younger, but the younger people had more time before they expected to retire, so it didn't hurt their retirement chances in the same way, and younger people were more likely to be renting than owning, so they wouldn't be set back in the same way.
Please forgive me, I'm genuinely not that financially literate - 401k liquidation just means stocks went down a lot which hurt their retirement savings, right? Now that stocks have gone back up again, why is that still a problem?
The issue is when stocks go down and then you have to sell them near the bottom, for some nominally unrelated issue like losing your job or having large medical bills because you didn't have insurance. (You might ask how that works, since the funds are earmarked for retirement? The simple answer is that you can do it but you have to pay a penalty in taxes, although there are some ways to get around the penalty.)
The result of this is losing both the savings themselves and any chance of gaining them back. You have to start off from scratch and the nature of compound interest means that you've lost the years that would have been most important for your savings.
Old people are living on a retirement fund that includes mostly stocks, but need to pay their expenses in dollars. If stocks crash, as they did in '08, they need to sell more of the stocks to pay their constant dollar expenses. That means they've lost proportionately much more of their fund than they would have if stocks had remained high, and they don't get those assets back when the stock market rebounds.
To be fair, if someone is in retirement and still has a lot of money in stocks, they should also have a 2+ year safe fund in cash or bonds to draw on in downturns. But many don't. This was also a problem in 2008.
But straight forward in a way that can be replicated on a excel doc, using numbers which are close enough to the last time I did this such that I feel ok standing behind them:
- You need about $1mil saved to retire on a ~$50-70k/year equivalent lifestyle
(take $50k, grow it by 2-5% annually from now until you retire). $50k isn't nuts if you have your mortgage done, independent kids, no debts, etc. etc.
- In plain English, if you retire in the ~65-75 y/o range, w/ $1mil saved, you run out of money right around or after the time you die, factoring in like a 20 year retirement and no passive income aside from your $1mil and social security etc. This is factoring out home equity, which is also a big financial boost once you sell a paid off place. But the bulk of your financial safety in retirement is going to come from your IRA.
- That number is entirely achievable *if you have enough time to save*. That time to save is about 30-40 years with the bulk of that in 7% annual returns in the stock market, maxing out your Roth IRA at $500-$600/month. If you do this exactly from the 25 y/o to 30/35 /yo range, and you *never sell,* you'll very easily hit that $1mil. Locking up your retirement is pretty easy.
- If you do any of the following, you essentially won't have enough to retire if $50-70k/yr equiv lifestyle and up is your idea of retiring. Even if you're looking at $30-40k/yr equiv, still won't be able to retire:
---> sell at any point between starting to save and retiring. This is exacerbated the further into your retirement age you get (~40s/50s/60s). TLDR you need 40 years of 7%/yr average acting on that $550/mo in your 401k/IRA, a single slip up will undo it all.
---> don't invest in stocks for the bulk of those years.
At it's root, it's just some math using compound interest, but you can really go wild on the excel sheet wizadry to model this all in interesting ways. All retirement accounts follow the above rules (401ks, Roth/Traditional IRAs).
The huge issue is there's a massive incentive if things get bad enough financially to touch your 401k "just once." The problem is "touching it just this once" means breaking that single rule of don't sell, ever. A lot of folks don't realize they nuke their retirements, or very nearly nuke it, by very small sales. If it's a serious emergency like 12 months of no work in '20-'21 and '07-'09, those small sales tend to be big sales, and those users will never retire because of it.
So, you have a large set of 40-50's in '07-'09, and I bet in '20-'21, who touched their retirement accounts, and didn't realize they bought themselves another 20+ years of saving to catch up. It's ugly, there's a whole generation of folks who won't retire because of this.
There are caveats, major one being the 401k limit is like $20k vs. the IRA limit being $5-6k (grows a bit each year). If you have the finances to max out a 401k consistently, you don't necessarily nuke your retirement if you sell a bit (or at least idk the numbers there but I sense that you could recover). The folks that can put $20k into a 401k year after year, after recovering from a financial setback that made them sell, is probably a small group I think.
Sorry, still confused. How do you nuke your retirement with a "very small sale"?
Suppose you have 500K saved up at age 50, and you do a "small sale" of 50K to support yourself in a difficult time. You still have 450K, which seems like most of your money - any retirement plan that succeeds on 500K (compounded for another 15 years) should also succeed on 450K. What am I missing?
"Oh no, my monthly bills are coming due! Better just make one small sale of $10000 to make ends meet! I'll still have 490k left next month, it's fine."
Then rinse and repeat that for the next two years while you can't get a job, and you're left with half. Meanwhile, the stocks kept on crashing for those two years, so you're actually down to a third of the original, which was the same amount that you had 14 years prior. That's assuming that you were investing $6,000 per year, the max Roth IRA contribution, and you got 6% return rate, but in actuality the markets in the 2000s weren't that good and the peak in 2007 didn't even reach the previous peak in 2000, so really it's more like what you had 20 years prior.
Even if you then got a job, and start putting in $10,000 per year, and had better returns in the market (7% instead of 6%), you're up to $700,000 when you retire, which is a good deal short of your goal.
On the other hand, if you hadn't lost your job and didn't have to make withdrawals, your retirement accounts would have gone down some (maybe to $400,000), but then with that better job at the better market, you're up to $1,350,000 at the end, twice as much, and plenty to retire on.
However, that all ignores that you need to be relying on the stock market less as you age, to avoid it crashing right when you retire. The usual solution is bond funds, which is much safer but much worse returns, or a mixture of bonds and stocks which is a mixture of the two in terms of safety and returns. So really the person who had to withdraw is only back up to $500,000 while the person who didn't have to withdraw is up to $1,000,000.
Even very smart people make blunders in volatile times. For example, here's Bryan Caplan on what he did in 2020:
> Conditions in March were so bleak that I set aside both of these beliefs and moved from 100% stocks to 90% bonds. As a result of my excessive open-mindedness, my family has lost an enormous amount of money. The situation is so weird that I’m going to wait until January to return to my normal investment strategy. After that, I will never again deviate from buy-and-hold. Never!
The part you're missing is the overall drop in the stock market ahead of time. If you start with 500K, and the market drops 20% (500K x 0.8) now you have 400K. You pull out 50K leaving 350K. The market recovers (x1.2) and you have 420K. You've lost 80K after the market has recovered. Assuming $1000 a month contribution rate, you've lost 80 months. Much worse really if you aren't contributing during the time when stocks are cheap.
First, the chart tracks wealth which is not yearly earnings. Wealth tracks closely to asset prices especially later in life. So the trend lines post 2008 probably says more about asset allocations by generation than anything else.
Second, a crisis is as much a psychological burden as an objective financial strain. They might not feel they can retire because 1) they made some panic-y investment decisions during the early days 2) they lost their job and were planning on having that income. Getting a new job at >60 isn’t really a thing or 3) they’re a bit stretched with their financial obligations. These things are deeply personal and reflect preferences and dispositions.
> “The United States should issue letters of marque to fight Chinese aggression at sea.”
It's difficult to over-state how stupid this is.
- Piracy and state-sponsored privateering are unequivocally against international law -- law that the US is a signatory to. (See the 1958 High Seas Convention, among others.)
- The Chinese have the world's largest surface navy, and the world's largest submarine fleet -- and they are chomping at the bit for any excuse to flex their muscles in the South China Sea, around the Strait of Malacca, in the Korean Sea, and in the Pacific all the way to the coast of Chile. The balance of power is not equal; the Chinese Navy is very powerful indeed, and these "Privateers" are, more likely than not, going to end up in Davy Jones' locker.
- Chinese trade is oriented towards export: Chinese cargo vessels are typically loaded with goods for US and European customers. Hit a Chinese freight carrier, and you've probably harmed Amazon and WalMart more than you've harmed the Chinese -- if indeed you've harmed them at all.
The notion of privateers may work as Casus Belli. It fails on every other strategic and tactical level. For there's only one way it ends: With the US condemned, with dead privateers, and with a justifiably strengthened and extended Chinese naval presence in every body of water but the Atlantic.
To be fair, the article argued in favor of using privateers if war ever broke out with China, not before. And the argument was that the Chinese Navy is so powerful that the US Navy will have it's hands full countering it, and that every privateer harassing Chinese shipping is one less US Naval ship that has to be diverted to the task.
While I agree that the idea is stupid, even the author isn't proposing that the privateers go up against the Chinese navy. He's proposing they take over the commerce campaign. There are other ways to do it which don't involve reliance on international law which hasn't been invoked for 160 years, though.
Also, where does the 1958 Convention ban privateering?
I've been trying to find the text of the 1958 convention online, so far unsuccessfully. But various references specify that piracy is "for private ends," which suggested that a privateer might not qualify. After all, British naval vessels in the Napoleonic period got prize money for ships they captured, but that didn't make them pirates. So a privateer that is trying to make money but acting under the authority of a state for the state's ends might also not qualify.
So far in the thread nobody seems to actually have a cite to the convention banning privateers.
Privateering is generally considered to have been banned by the 1856 Declaration of Paris (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Declaration_Respecting_Maritime_Law), which has now been incorporated into customary international law (which is generally binding on everyone, even if they didn't sign, although this isn't absolute. International law is weird.)
In any case, China isn't as reliant upon imports as the US. Privateering, unless done on a tremendous (impracticable) scale, would hardly annoy them -- and, given that the scale of Chinese shipping tilts towards exports, it might be an own-goal that injures allies and neutral parties more than it injures the Chinese.
Strategically-valuable shipping is sure to be well-guarded in any case. As a rule, privateers don't hit hard targets.
So this fever-dream, however romantic, is tactically and strategically moronic, and its implementation would probably strengthen the Chinese and weaken the US.
I am less than certain that those actually ban privateering, but I also don't think that's necessary. The Paris Declaration is almost certainly customary international law at this point. My 1980s International Law for Seagoing Officers doesn't even mention the subject at all, which I presume is because it was seen as totally irrelevant.
I agree that it's a bad idea. I'm not defending it in any way, and would point out again that Proceedings is not peer-reviewed, and that this is far from the stupidest thing I've seen there. My thoughts on how to do this were definitely informed by Spanish-American war experience, including the very ships that article cites, although I do think he slightly misunderstands the Naval Militia, and generally isn't that familiar with US thinking in the runup to war. (If you're not aware, I'm a serious hobbyist naval historian.)
And China is very reliant on imports. It's just raw materials rather than finished products. No clue how that ends up in a war, particularly given that one of the biggest suppliers (Australia) is a US ally.
I can't say exactly what level of commerce warfare we're likely to see in a war with China. That depends heavily on the diplomacy surrounding the war, and what the US thinks it can get away with. But there's also the issue that we have the power to slap a blockade around China at source, in a way that wasn't possible up until the late 1800s.
Don't pay much attention to those naval strategist type guys. They just have to write something to justify the salaries they get at some think tank. Plus, they get a hit of status in their field: "Oh, that guy over there in the pink shirt is the letter of marque guy, the one talking to the invade Hong Kong with the US Marines guy." They write some pretty wacky stuff because they know nobody but 50 people will ever read it. You can read to your heart's content at https://www.hudson.org if you really want to go down the rabbit hole.
"law that the US is a signatory to. (See the 1958 High Seas Convention, among others.)"
Madeline Albright called, she's reminding you of American Exceptionalism. For the liberal international order to work, we must enforce the international rules on others while not being subject to them ourselves. Thus she views American interference in other countries as totally in their right due to their superiority over others, while inferiors of course have no right to do the same to America.
All we have to do to put a stop to Chinese commerce is close the Strait of Malacca. It's where all their oil transits through from the US filling station in the Middle East, and they have a mere two months of reserves. You know what sits right at the lynchpin of the Strait of Malacca? Singapore, a staunch US ally. Unlike other US allies (Europe, looking at you, you worthless freeloaders) Singapore has a small but capable military, well suited to its job. Cutting China off from its oil supply would be as easy as when FDR cut Japan off from its oil supply in August 1941.
In a neat interlude probably of nobody's interest, but we have the minutes of the meetings at which the Japanese made the decision to go to war. They knew it was dicey and everything would have to go right to pull it off.
It's a lot less reasonable to legally require someone to be a member of government for a multi-year term than it is to require them to sit a jury, so presumably you would let people opt out. Keep drawing from the lottery, and hopefully within only a single-digit number of tries you'll get someone who is in a position that taking it is reasonable. Particularly if you set the salary as generous by current national standards.
This does inject a little more of the "you don't want to be ruled by anyone who wants to rule you" issue, but considerably less than a democratic system that requires that someone basically devote their life to achieving high office.
I love jury duty, so this is incredibly good news for me.
Honestly it sorta blows my mind how well juries do given they’re as close to a random sample of the population you can stitch together. Really renews my faith in society.
They'll still do a better job than the professional sociopaths we have now. Just removing the selection for dark triad traits from our political class would be an amazing feat.
The "Napoleon of Notting Hill" theory of government 😀
"We are, in a sense, the purest democracy. We have become a despotism. Have you not noticed how continually in history democracy becomes despotism? People call it the decay of democracy. It is simply its fulfilment. Why take the trouble to number and register and enfranchise all the innumerable John Robinsons, when you can take one John Robinson with the same intellect or lack of intellect as all the rest, and have done with it? The old idealistic republicans used to found democracy on the idea that all men were equally intelligent. Believe me, the sane and enduring democracy is founded on the fact that all men are equally idiotic. Why should we not choose out of them one as much as another. All that we want for Government is a man not criminal and insane, who can rapidly look over some petitions and sign some proclamations. To think what time was wasted in arguing about the House of Lords, Tories saying it ought to be preserved because it was clever, and Radicals saying it ought to be destroyed because it was stupid, and all the time no one saw that it was right because it was stupid, because that chance mob of ordinary men thrown there by accident of blood, were a great democratic protest against the Lower House, against the eternal insolence of the aristocracy of talents. We have established now in England, the thing towards which all systems have dimly groped, the dull popular despotism without illusions. We want one man at the head of our State, not because he is brilliant or virtuous, but because he is one man and not a chattering crowd. To avoid the possible chance of hereditary diseases or such things, we have abandoned hereditary monarchy. The King of England is chosen like a juryman upon an official rotation list. Beyond that the whole system is quietly despotic, and we have not found it raise a murmur."
"Do you really mean," asked the President, incredulously, "that you choose any ordinary man that comes to hand and make him despot — that you trust to the chance of some alphabetical list...."
"And why not?" cried Barker. "Did not half the historical nations trust to the chance of the eldest sons of eldest sons, and did not half of them get on tolerably well? To have a perfect system is impossible; to have a system is indispensable. All hereditary monarchies were a matter of luck: so are alphabetical monarchies. Can you find a deep philosophical meaning in the difference between the Stuarts and the Hanoverians? Believe me, I will undertake to find a deep philosophical meaning in the contrast between the dark tragedy of the A's, and the solid success of the B's."
"And you risk it?" asked the other. "Though the man may be a tyrant or a cynic or a criminal."
"We risk it," answered Barker, with a perfect placidity. "Suppose he is a tyrant — he is still a check on a hundred tyrants. Suppose he is a cynic, it is to his interest to govern well. Suppose he is a criminal — by removing poverty and substituting power, we put a check on his criminality. In short, by substituting despotism we have put a total check on one criminal and a partial check on all the rest."
"Suppose he is a criminal — by removing poverty and substituting power, we put a check on his criminality."
This seems pretty obviously false. Many criminals commit crimes for reasons other than poverty. Making sure they are not poor and giving them power won't reduce their criminality.
Where has it been done in the real world? What are the results?
Somewhat similar : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_Convention_for_Climate
Of course then if the government just ignores these propositions...
The article makes it clear that they are proposing using privateers if a war between the US and China breaks out, not before. If we are at war with China then Chinese trade becomes out business.
If we're at war with China, this will be a very short war, and the last war that the human species takes part in.
It's the ravings of a retired Marine colonel who probably wants to go earn some prize money because he grew up reading too much Horatio Hornblower. He doesn't speak for anyone else, because Proceedings doesn't work that way.
I knew about line-item vetoes but not the single-digit and Vanna variants. What's next, the Bible Code Veto? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bible_code_example.svg
I moved to the United States at 15, exactly half a lifetime ago. I remember watching GSN and the History Channel almost daily with my brother. In France, at the time, most households only had 5, or at most 6 TV channels, and there simply wasn't enough airwave space for niche shows like Ancient Aliens or Hitler this-and-that; documentaries were dour (to children), but probably trustworthy.
We eventually adjusted to these new, ahem, TV standards of evidence. But for a few long, awkward weeks, we would excitedly bring up the bible code, or some random Hitler-flavored crackpot theory, entirely convinced by the on-air experts. I still remember thinking the bible code stuff in particular was very compelling; why, after all, would a documentary lie about something like that?
Anyhow, I think I'd tried to repress those memories, and your comment vividly brought them back with a shudder
Could someone please explain what the mechanism is that big index funds use to get pharmaceutical companies (or other companies, for that matter) to do what they want?
Do they threaten to change the index-status of the company? Threaten to use the votes their stocks give them to fire the CEO? Either of those seem very much against the whole point of index funds--is it just that this is a clear emergency that justifies the exception? Or do Blackrock, Vanguard, etc, have some way of pressuring pharmaceutical companies that I don't know of?
IIRC, Blackrock isn't an index fund company. Or at least, not entirely index funds.
there is no issue with index funds making choices on how to vote their shares. In the past they have been passive but there is no reason they shouldn't be trying to improve the governance of their holdings (although there are reasons that they shouldn't be trying to force collusion).
Well, there is one pretty good reason, which is that you need to pay somebody to figure out how to improve governance of holdings, which means the fees on the index fund goes up. Perhaps this is just an exception because of how obviously beneficial it would be to have a vaccine.
So IS this how we think index funds influence these companies?
Big stock owners have sway. They're not going to vote all their shares all the time, but if BlackRock's CEO gets a bee in his bonnet, it doesn't even cost BlackRock anything extra to have the CEO (who's already on the payroll) make a few calls, or to have an intern go vote 397 million shares at the Pfizer AGM. And for the same reason, he has a pretty good chance of winning a proxy fight.
They (at least Vanguard) lay out how they vote in excruciatingly boring detail https://about.vanguard.com/investment-stewardship/portfolio-company-resources/2020_proxy_voting_summary.pdf
It seems to be about influence, not hard power. They just talk to them and maybe the CEO listens a bit.
It’s very cordial and informal. Management will take calls from their biggest shareholders. The relationship is probably a lot more interpersonal than what you might be imagining. All the major stakeholders have very tightly aligned interests (most of the time etc etc).
The dismantling the octopus chapter of Radical markets gets into it. The short version is that Hedge funds and mutual funds have significant voting shares, and are a coherent block, while the rest of the investors aren't. This means that when the simply pick up the phone and call the Board CEO etc, they listen. I'm dismayed that Scott is implying that *destroying competitive markets through pseudo monopoly power* is a good thing.
Some chaps have a chat. The real money doesn't need mechanisms, it has trust relationships. The CEO of a fund has a chat with his chum, the CEO of a pharma giant. Lunch is arranged.
Then the pharma CEO has a chat with his head of operations and his marketing guy.
All very informal. You don't take minutes at lunch. No paper trails, just old friends catching up.
It's how the real money actually makes decisions.
YES!! Just the existance of this post makes me happy. Thanks Scott :D
I did a college research paper on the changes in hurricanes over time with global warming. What I found was that the data sets are really bad. They're mostly based on tidal gauge measures of storm surges, but tidal gauges malfunction in massive waves.
The paper Scott linked is based on satellite imagery, which seems like it should be better, but I wonder how they backtested their "Dvorak" technique to estimate storm intensity from satellite imagery. If they had to test it on the old data sets (i.e. the tidal gauges), I'd worry about the reliability of the Dvorak technique as well.
Worth noting as well that NOAA has been adjusting the data from previous pre-satellite era hurricane seasons, often by as much as 20%; the adjustments might be entirely called for, but if so that indicates that the historical data being adjusted can't be trusted to within 20%, making long-term calibration of historical data to satellite data even more difficult. 8% per decade is a very small signal to try to extract from this noise.
https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/hurdat/metadata_master.html
Depends on the details.
If each individual data point may be shifted by ~20% (in either direction) then mean’s will still fairly easily extract trends. All that changes is the specifics of a given year, not the trend.
>They're mostly based on tidal gauge measures of storm surges, but tidal gauges malfunction in massive waves.
That kind of has an "Abraham Wald showing survivorship bias via bullet holes in planes" vibe.
Have you considered hiring a fact checker/editor with some of your substack money?
Why bother, when experience shows we'll happily do it for free?
Because it reduces the absolute amount of misinformation released into the world. Also, commenters are fallible and are gonna miss stuff, and aren't really in a position to suggest structural changes to, say, the layout or argumentation of a piece. Any of these reasons ought to be adequate to hire an editor.
On the other hand, perhaps some of the charm of the blog is that it is "off the cuff." I think that should really be balanced against the fact that, as a subscriber, a lot of people are paying frankly ridiculous sums of money for it.
A large part of the value proposition - that people are paying ridiculous money for - is that this is not a business, and is not ran like one.
Kinda Zen if you think about it.
If the fact checkers also write about what they found out links with misinformation, it would probably be worth reading.
": Seen here: how has the wealth of different generations changed over time? Note that this is not tracking specific individuals, who continue to mostly gain wealth as they get older - it’s tracking how much money an (eg) 25 year old would have made in 1990 vs. 2015:"
I'm pretty surprised at how poorly middle-aged people are doing. You can definitely see a big drop in the 45-64 range from the 2008 recession, which makes sense to me (I would expect that to be age range that had the highest fraction of their wealth in housing), but I would expect some recovery. It also looks like the divergence of 65+ vs everyone younger started around 2004-2007, so I still find myself confused.
"32: Also from the Slime Mold Time Mold blog: a critique of the research on hypobaric hypoxia causing weight loss. I’d previously cited the research favorably in my post on why obesity negatively correlates with altitude; the SMTM authors have a different theory where it has to do with how many pollutants are in your water (the lower you are, the more runoff has made it into your water supply)."
By complete coincidence, I was looking at my comment (https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/12/11/open-thread-64-5/#comment-443619) following up on that post, and a respondent stated this exact hypothesis. (I'm still a bit skeptical, because for most of the country, the amount of water upstream of you has little to do with your elevation--think about all the people who live along the lower Mississippi, but are at nearly the same elevation as their slightly northerly neighbors, and also for the reasons I pointed out at the time, particularly the extreme selection effect of altitudes above 5,000 feet).
Thanks, I'm reading it now.
I'm looking at the map of obesity rates (figure 2), and I think upon looking more carefully, there's quite a lot that is still unusual. Most notably, I would expect a line of decreasing obesity running roughly North/South through Abilene, Dallas, Oklahoma City, Wichita, Lincoln, and Bismarck. The elevation increases pretty sharply, from about 500 feet to 4-5,000 feet above sea level (comparable to the higher Appalachian peaks) in 100-200 miles. Instead, it looks like the obesity is constant until you get to the CO and NM state lines, well after the elevation has been gained.
US elevation map: https://gisgeography.com/us-elevation-map/
I will say that the array of evidence summarized in sections 1 and 2 seems to be among the most maddeningly bizarre of any scientific question I have ever heard of.
I suppose I do have a question: how are wild animals affected, but not people living separately from the rest of society? Shouldn't the !Kung and other tribes be consuming the same air and water as those wild animals, and in some cases eating those wild animals?
And a second question: how tightly controlled are the diet and exercise experiments? Some of them last for a year or longer; presumably the participants aren't living in a lab the whole time (and if they are, could that moderate the effects of the treatment?). Do these studies rely on people following the diet/exercise plan of their own volition, and take self-reports of whether they did or not literally?
Thanks a bunch!
A follow-up question: What is the mechanism by which environmental contamination affects obesity? As far as I can tell, you mention 2 candidates. One is leptin, which Scott wrote about in his own review of Guyenet's book. But the mechanism by which leptin affects weight seems to be through... how much you eat, which you already established doesn't matter. That's certainly the case with the leptin-deficient children. Is it not the case for common leptin resistance? Does leptin also coincidentally control some other function, like how much you fidget? (I use that as an example because Scott's old post mentioned it, but in retrospect, fidgeting is exercise, which you also established doesn't matter. I suppose in some sense I'm confused as the basic accounting of calories, if both diet and exercise are completely irrelevant).
The other mechanism I saw mentioned is the gut microbiome. That's currently too much of a black box to me for me to be able to comment, but it does seem like it renders some of the evidence from above (the rat-leptin experiments as well as the the fact that psychiatric medication causes weight gain) seemingly irrelevant.
"Also from a public health perspective, mechanism isn't that important. We didn't need to understand the mechanism of how smoking caused cancer to figure out that it did."
There's a very clear signal that smoking causes lung cancer.
I gather there isn't nearly as a clear a signal about what in modern life causes obesity.
Is fidgeting actually a plausible mechanism for how fat people are? It seems to me that it would burn very little energy compared to even light exercise, and the added number of hours doesn't seem like enough.
Maybe it's harder to eat more than you want if you're fidgety, though you can still jiggle your feet while you're eating.
Is there a dose effect? Men (at least) are notable for putting on weight after about age 30 or 35. Does this correlate with a decline in fidgeting?
I don't know. I only thought of it because Scott's post from a few years ago mentioned it. I thought he cited a study claiming it could burn hundreds of calories per day, which sounds impressive to me but apparently doesn't mean anything.
The wealth drop for 60s makes sense if you look at two metrics I bet:
- IRA/401k liquidations during ‘08/‘20
- PNL of people with total company stock in their IRAs, ie the “all in on Enron” generation.
Both have very rough numbers and I think were widespread.
Local police departments in brazil go on strike all the time (I remember 3 different ones while I was in school in Salvador in the early aughts) and no big terrible things happen.
Or no big even-more-terrible-than-usual things happen?
That was my immediate thought. In a county with a murder rate of 30 per 100,000 I'd hate to see what even worse terrible things looked like. Not a useful comparison.
I would expect that going on strike all the time would be *less* bad than going on strike exactly once ever, at least in terms of the immediate impact of a single strike.
If you strike often, then society has to find ways to cope during those periods, and criminals have many different strikes to take advantage of, letting them spread out their efforts. With only one strike, no other systems are in place to cope, and criminals are looking at a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
WaPo claims that terrible things did happen:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/03/01/police-went-on-strike-in-a-brazilian-state-the-result-was-near-anarchy/
This was more recent and was higher profile, true. I wasn't around then though so can't tell whether there is exaggeration going on.
The BBC reports that a more recent one also resulted in far more crime:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-51623670
Wow, I am a new subscriber and just have to say, the amount of quality thinking-writing you produce on a weekly basis is astounding. Thanks for it.
Technically, we're all new subscribers :D
He doesn't actually write this fast. It's backlog after spending several months without a blog.
Oh, that would make more sense. Thanks!
However, the amount and quality of Scott's writing before the interruption was still remarkable.
Here's a question in light of your final [and potentially most stupendous!!] item, namely the one about the possibility of mRNA vaccines for malaria. [Footnote 1 reprints the link at bottom of this comment should you not want to scroll back up.]
\\\\\
My Question: I note a veritable cottage industry among certain economists (e.g., most blog-famous --- especially around these here parts --- would be Alex Tabarrok, see footnoted link #2) to produce estimates implying that even stupendous additional monies on COVID-19 vaccine manufacture and distribution pass all reasonable cost-benefit analyses.
** My basic question is: Anyone have opinions whether similar cost-benefit analyses for throwing stupendous government monies and effort on potential mRNA vaccines against... well, EVERYTHING (ok, ok, starting with a few major tropical diseases and certain types of cancer) would be worthwhile? **
/////
My own opinion is: Ummm, maybe? Seriously, I would need to expend more effort on the nitty-gritty of estimating costs and benefits. To wit, it's my preliminary impression that in the case of these COVID-19 cost-benefit estimates that a large part of the estimated benefit comes NOT from reducing COVID-19 sufferers' disability-adjusted-life-years-lost by themselves (at least not in the mean of most people's projections for the COVID-19 incidience in 2021), BUT RATHER from:
-- returning the world economy more quickly to its pre-pandemic productivity path [hey, say that 5 times fast ;) ],
-- and (sometimes) the possibility of reducing the tail risks of more-infectious-but-still-vaccine-affected variants getting out of hand and forcing massive lockdowns again --- indeed, lockdowns perhaps even more massive and more strict than those of early 2020.
Not to argue that it's morally right, but I get the strong impression most mainstream cost-benefit estimators wouldn't see those benefits as applicable to the case of markedly reducing the mortality and morbidity from major tropical diseases and a couple major cancers. (Prof. Tabarrok, are you reading this? Did you already think of this question? If so, hi!)
Thoughts?
Link Footnotes:
[1] https://academictimes.com/first-vaccine-to-fully-immunize-against-malaria-builds-on-pandemic-driven-rna-tech/
[2] https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/02/market-design-to-accelerate-vaccine-supply.html
One potentially big advantage with the new mRNA vaccines is that they are driving down the marginal cost of vaccine development and testing. If this continues as expected, the costs of custom vaccines to disease X will be within the budgets of small organizations- single philanthropists. This could substantially change the social factors and economics of disease treatment...
The CDC announced that Covid had lowered life expectancy by a year. What they actually meant, as best I can tell, was that if you assumed that the age specific mortality rates of 2020 continued for ever, life expectancy would be a year less. Of course, that requires another pandemic every year for ever. Actual covid deaths represent an average cost of about five days.
But it occurred to me that if the Malaria story pans out, the pandemic might end up raising life expectancy — not life expectancy calculated by assuming pandemic mortality rates forever but how long people actually end up living.
I think the "lowered life expectancy by a year" thing was on the assumption that everyone got it, and it was a reduction to the life expectancy of people alive today. I won't swear to that, but it's killed about 1/700 Americans so far, and only a minority of the country has been infected. It's going to have a pretty substantial impact on mortality for the year.
As best I can tell, what it was about was what life expectancy would be if we had the age specific mortality of 2020 every year thereafter. That requires not that everyone gets Covid but that we repeat the pandemic, or something equivalent, every year forever.
So far as lost life per capita so far, it works out to about five days.
Yes, if you add “for someone born in 2020”. Which is not as ridiculous as it sounds, if you use it for e.g. comparisons over time or between sub populations. Of course it has no predictive value and is not intended to (any mor than one would blindly rely on instantaneous speed to predict the ETA for a cross-city drive).
One of the value propositions for the mRNA vaccine technology is in fact "super-customized" vaccine development. They're leading candidates for cancer immunotherapies, which hope to take cancerous cells from a biopsy and generate an immune response against those cells.
We know that vaccines against respiratory viruses can work so it's reasonable to throw money at making mRNA vaccines against this particular respiratory virus. We don't know that it's possible to vaccinate against certain major tropical diseases or major cancers so it is a very, very different thing to consider throwing money at those efforts.
Good point, Polynices. Though on that note of vaccines against respiratory viruses, you might be interested to note that mRNA vaccine work on a "universal" influenza vaccine [1, 2] is at the same encouraging-but-hardly-definitive stage as this malaria work linked to by Scott [3]. Namely, mRNA universal flu vaccines are at the stage for which honesty demands an explicit #justsayinmice hashtag caveat [which I gather is sort of a virology Twitter in-joke, see footnote 4]. Sadly, honesty's demands for such an explicit caveat are so rarely met in mainstream news / popular science media.
I bring up work on universal influenza vaccines since a novel strain of pandemic influenza seems to me to have been by and far the pandemic scenario that the US government was most worried about until SARS-CoV-2 reminded them for at least the 3rd time in 20 years that "ya know, there's other novel zoonotic respiratory viruses... indeed, ones that even scared the s#!% out of major countries... just sayin' ".
Indeed, if my memory's not failing me, I'm pretty sure not only Dr. Anthony Fauci, but also numerous other regular participants and guests on This Week in Virology (TWiV) podcast [https://www.microbe.tv/] have opined to the effect "Gosh, if this COVID-19 pandemic doesn't get a fire under our proverbial butt to finally fully fund universal flu vaccines as long as it takes to succeed in making one, well... humanity's probably going to regret it majorly... and maybe in a decade or two rather than just by, say, 2100." [I'm too lazy to find links for that, unlike the other links that you see below... also, I'm not a virologist [5], but I think the TWiV podcast deserves all the praise and attention... well, relative attention in the world of academics podcasting... that it gets.]
Footnotes:
[1] https://www.cell.com/molecular-therapy-family/molecular-therapy/fulltext/S1525-0016(20)30199-4 [from April 2020]
[2] Not to insult anyone's intelligence on this learned blog, but the way flu vaccines are manufactured, they're specific to only 3 or 4 flu strains that have to be identified by public health "surveillance" experts making an educated guess about which strains are likely to be in wide circulation in the coming flu season. Commentors more virologically-informed than I are invited to enlighten me (and presumably other people) why the number of flu strains you can put in a vaccine tops out at effectively 4 with present day technology --- be that (1) the old-school flu vaccine technology of actually involves culturing lots of flu viruses in chicken egg media or certain mammalian cell cultures, isolating all that virus, and then "inactivating" or "attenuating" that virus so it'll just stimulate an immune response without giving you the flu or (2) the fancy-schmancier-new-since-early-2010s-but-alas-still-not-magic "recombinant" vaccine technology that takes the DNA coding for the hemagglutinin surface proteins of the flu strains you want to vaccinate and putting that into baculoviruses to inject (hemagglutinin types being the reason for the "H[digit]" part of the "H[digit]N[other digit]" naming scheme for flu viruses).
[3] The link Scott gave for the malaria mRNA-esque vaccine was really a news release for a patent application by the Yale / GlaxoSmithKline collaboration. The actual research (again #justsayinmice!) is in this preprint: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.14.430970v1.abstract
[4] The origin of the #justsayinmice Twitter corrective to / in-joke bemoaning mainstream news and popular science media hyping preliminary results was described here https://www.statnews.com/2019/04/15/in-mice-twitter-account-hype-science-reporting/
[5] I'm a theoretical physicist, not a virologist or any other sort of molecular biology person. Though I'm co-author on a paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.15776) which, umm... mentions how to speed up differential equation solving pertinent to epidemiology as well as "virality" on social networks, I swear I'm not the type of physicist lampooned here https://xkcd.com/793/ . Really, I'm not!
There might be some interesting math about the question of giving vaccines for influenzas which are further down on the list. I'm thinking that if the fifth and sixth most likely flus aren't that much less likely than number four or possibly numbers three and four, maybe the best bet is to randomly give a fairly high proportion of people vaccines against 1, 2, 4, and 5 or 1, 2, 4, and 6 so as to blunt the slightly less likely epidemics. I'm guessing, though.
I wouldn't move quite as fast against malaria or the like - covid is a fast-moving crisis, and speed really matters. Malaria is also very bad, and I don't want to waste too much time, but it's not an emergency in quite the same fashion.
I wouldn't throw every available dollar at vaccines against everything, but I'd certainly start up some research programs. I'm a layman, so I won't put hard numbers on this, but if a few billion got invested into this globally over the next year, I'd probably nod happily.
I don't disagree about speed, at all, but I would point out that the impact on lost years of life of a disease that kills large numbers of children is much larger than that of a disease that most kills much older people, relative to numbers of cases.
Personally, I'm mostly angry about years already lost for no good reason. In what year did humans first gain the ability, technologically, to design a vaccine to a novel virus in a matter of weeks to a few months, and complete clinical trials in a few months more? The idea of mRNA vaccines is over 30 years old (but wasn't feasible back then), and this review paper https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3597572/) seems to show multiple demonstrations pre-2012. Even if it only became *really* feasible, say, 5 years ago, how many people died that didn't need to, of all sorts of diseases, which could already have vaccines if we'd thrown a few hundred billion dollars at them? How much faster could we have gotten a covid vaccine developed and rolled out if there were already a dozen other mRNA vaccines on the market with scaled-up manufacturing we could have repurposed?
Technologically, fast trials have been a thing for as long as vaccines. The limitation there is regulatory, not technological.
I don't know when mRNA became viable as a vaccine tech, per se, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_vaccine#History has a run-down of various related milestones. 1989 was when they showed you could inject mRNA, 1994 was when they showed it could create an immune response, and it looks like 2005 was when they solved one of the major issues with using it in actual humans. But Moderna and BioNTech were both working on mRNA treatments pre-covid, and not having a ton of luck getting them in a workable, marketable state. Looks like the transition to vaccines was comparatively recent - here's an article from 2017, for example: https://www.statnews.com/2017/01/10/moderna-trouble-mrna/
If they were only just switching to a vaccine mindset in 2017, then I doubt anything could have cleared trials by now (absent Warp Speed), so we wouldn't have any mRNA vaccines yet under normal circumstances.
Thanks!
Any sold-out-on-wokeness hypothesis for why the Sanders campaign failed has to grapple with several issues:
- Why New Bernie did so much better in Nevada in 2020 (with a much more diverse base). The article claims that caucuses "place a premium on ground-level organizing, where Sanders excelled." But this is not a distinction since Nevada was also a caucus in 2016 and the failures in 2020 South Carolina are being alleged at that same level, not that Bernie ran bad television ads or failed to show up.
- Why Classic Bernie did almost as badly in South Carolina in 2016. He got 26% of the vote there in 2016 and 20% in 2020. This is not a very dramatic difference considering the first contest was one-on-one against Hillary and it can be parsimoniously explained by an "anti-Hillary but not especially leftist" cohort.
- The specifics of Sanders' supposed sellout. What issues, specifically, does Bernie stand accused of shifting on? As near as I can tell, the only one on offer is that Bernie seems to have agreed with most Democrats that there was some sort of corruption involving Trump and Russia. Setting aside for the moment the various mottes and baileys imposingly shadowed here, I simply do not see a case made that any significant mass of (Democratic primary) voters were specifically motivated by an *absence* of this. And while Bernie was not a contrarian on this issue, neither did he especially lean into it. You can point to statements he made while being interviewed on news shows, but certainly it came up much less in his stump speeches than class issues.
As someone who followed his primary campaigns closely in 2016 and 2020 and supported him in both, I can't buy into this thesis. My view is much simpler: Bernie never had a majority of the primary electorate. In 2016 his numbers were puffed up by non-ideological anti-Hillary votes and in 2020 Democratic candidates simply coordinated to stop Bernie in exactly the way Republican candidates failed to do with Trump. The article skewers a straw man by contrapositing its arguments from "if the Democratic party was so desperate to rally around Biden...." They were not, any more than Republicans were eager to rally around Ted Cruz! The difference is they sucked up and did it when the circumstances left it as the only option. This is not corruption, A endorsing B to put them over C is basic coalition politics as they have been practiced in every Presidential nominating process since the introduction of the party system.
And while I know people here are loath not to take others at their word, I would also like to suggest a distinction between class-first leftists and "class-first leftists." Class-first leftists spend most of their time talking about class, are usually found in obscure academic journals and activist groups, and often have wonkish opinions about monetary policy and the labor theory of value. "Class-first leftists" spend most of their time talking about identity politics, can be found on Twitter, Fox News, or erstwhile pro-Trump outfits like American Affairs, and have often have wonkish opinions about how Republicans are correct to say that idpol is bad and Russiagate is fake, prefaced with "as a class first leftist,"
"This is not corruption, A endorsing B to put them over C is basic coalition politics as they have been practiced in every Presidential nominating process since the introduction of the party system."
Completely agreed, but it's worth noting that *arguing over* whether this type of coalition politics constitutes corruption has also been practiced since at least 1824 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupt_bargain). I think the arguments boil down to, if you're part of the deal then it's not corrupt, and if you're on the other side then it is.
If we think politicians do actually care about their stated policy preferences then it's the rational option. Buttigieg, Harris, and Klobuchar were absolutely closer to Biden than to Sanders on policy, so when it looked like Sanders might win consolidating around one moderate-lane candidate was the rational choice. The GOP establishment messed up in 2016 — if they had been able to consolidate around one mainstream candidate, Trump wouldn't have been the nominee.
Of course, the fact that a lot of these turn into quid pro quos (see — VP! Cabinet positions!) does give it a whiff of corruption, but it's hard for me to imagine a world where politics didn't involve trades, negotiation, and deal-making. Being able to form a winning coalition is pretty much a politician's job.
One could imagine that giving way to another politician due to similar policy objectives could be a signal that those policy objectives are honestly held, and close to the then-recommended politician. If they win, and are then looking for people that are close to them on policy and have credibly signaled that they really care about said policies (plus being a "team player", as interpreted by those on the team), high level positions would seem a reasonably natural choice, without having to resort to it being a reward. Of course, then incentives for the ambitious would push them the same direction (which, so long as they push towards desired ends, still should mostly work out, I imagine).
The article is long but worth a read. They address a lot of your counterpoints.
On Nevada:
"Sanders’s only truly commanding victory of the entire cycle was in one of the few full-fledged caucus states that remained, Nevada. And this turned out to be completely illusory: caucus states place a premium on ground-level organizing, which is the area where the Sanders campaign obviously excelled: if there’s a need for left-wing activists to go agitate at complicated meetings (such as caucuses), that need was certainly able to be filled. In a cruel twist of fate, the Sanders representatives on the Unity Commission would’ve been better off lobbying for the retention of corrupt party-run caucuses, because these were evidently more favorable ground for Sanders than high-turnout primary elections—a paradox that directly countervails a central conceit of his campaign."
South Carolina is presented as emblematic, but hardly unique. They break down the numbers in many other states to show that Sanders' share of the vote, and in some cases raw vote count, went down despite higher overall turnout, including in rural and working class counties where he excelled in 2016.
With regards to how he "sold out", the overall thrust of the article is that the American electorate as a whole is "left" on economics and "right" on social issues, especially when social "right" on social issues means "not woke". They claim that, relatively speaking, Sanders put less emphasis on economic issues and more emphasis on culture war issues to appease a young, online, hyper-woke activist base, which led to less support among the typical Democratic primary voter.
They also make a pretty strong case that the party elite, while perhaps not stridently pro-Bernie, made a lot of concessions to his wing between 2016 and 2020, and that he wasted the large structural advantages that he held over the entire field.
They claim that, but I don't see much evidence for it. Obviously it's difficult to quantify something like "put less emphasis" but the least you could do is cite a bunch of examples and the only one on offer was "Sanders went along with Russia." If there were some deciding cohort of Democratic primary voters motivated by anti-anti-Russia skepticism they failed to show up in Tulsi Gabbard's vote totals (and the authors themselves point to her as an example of a candidate refusing while seemingly ignoring how it undermines their thesis; adding her vote to Sanders' gets you to the exact same place).
Other than that I can find no specific examples of this supposed shift to "culture war issues" by Bernie. I think there is some degree of distorted thinking on tap here, mainly in thinking Bernie Classic was "not woke" in some way because he took flak from Hillary on that subject. But this was Hillary's emphasis, not Bernie's, because she couldn't hope to flank him on economic policies. Bernie did not respond to this by running to the right. You can make a much, much, MUCH stronger case that Bernie shifted left between his time on the Congressional backbench and his 2016 campaign, since one of the few things Hillary could hit him on were past votes on immigration, gun control, and the like. But this would fail to make the case the authors want to make. The personnel shifts in South Carolina are also not terribly convincing. Nina Turner was a Bernie surrogate in 2016 too. Bernie's South Carolina polling was atrocious both before and after Kwadjo Campbell's ouster. There are simply no magic words to utter that will make cautious, religious black voters in the South embrace socialism. (Bernie's most prominent 2016 black surrogate, Symone Sanders, famously switched to Biden in 2020 and was fairly explicit about electability being the motivation.)
I agree with the structural portions of their thesis. Bernie was cheated in 2016 but he lost 2020 fair and square to the "Centrist Voltron" that left Twitter was roasting right up until it suddenly manifested. The difference between the 2016 and 2020 fields suffices to explain all of their observations about Bernie's vote totals; you simply cannot assume that everyone who voted for him in 2016 was committed to any particular policy at all, let alone specifically voting on anti-wokism, instead of being contingent anti-Hillary voters spoiled for choice in 2020. Who did those votes go to? Not to Tulsi or Yang, the only two candidates you can really make a case for being "less woke" than Bernie. Not out of the primaries entirely, turnout was way up from 2016. Mostly they went to Biden, who it must be said, was also not a paragon of wokeness compared to the field, and suffered not a whit for defending his old Senate busing votes.
The authors are correct that there is a certain fatigue among the electorate for meaningless culture war stunts. However this fatigue is just as much from the center as it is the far-left. The average American voter might be in the red quadrant, but if they are it's at like -1,1, and to those people, Biden is just fine. I do not like that this is the case, but facts don't care about my feelings.
I've never been a Sanders supporter (quite the opposite), so I never followed his campaign in detail. I'm also not plugged directly into the woke left. So I can't really comment on the degree to which he shifted in that direction -- I have a vague impression that he at least paid lip service to wokeness, but it's a second hand impression and may reflect the biases of my sources on this issue.
Having said that, I don't think the article was trying to make the case that Sanders became an ardent SJW or made identity politics the focus of his campaign. Only that in 2016 he at the very least seemed uninterested in it, and that in 2020 he at least seemed to appease it.
To my eye he did about the same amount of lip service in both campaigns. He himself is not "anti-woke," the class-first approach is a matter of emphasis. Where the authors go awry is in assuming voters cared about this lip service one way or the other. Bernie didn't lose ground from '16 because of some throwaway comment he made about "doing better" on sexism, or because they shitcanned some guy in South Carolina. He lost because he had no hope of uniting all of his former "not-Hillary" constituencies in her absence. Ironically, Nagle and Tracey are committing a similar error as their liberal counterparts, wishcasting their beefs with rose Twitter onto an electorate of Rust Belt boomers who were never really attached to Sanders in '16 beyond him not being Hillary. Joe was there if you weren't that woke. Pete was there if you wanted an outsider. Tulsi was there for the 1% who wanted vague anti-anti-Putin stuff.
I appreciate your perspective on this, and I can certainly see how the authors of that article might be wishcasting, as you put it. But there is one thing I'd like to explore a little more
'[Sanders] lost because he had no hope of uniting all of his former "not-Hillary" constituencies in her absence'
What if we apply that same reasoning to Trump? I think he benefited in a meaningful way from the "not-Hillary" vote in 2016, just as Sanders did (I've heard anecdotes about 2016 Sanders supporters whose second choice was Trump).
The answer might be, "Exactly! That's (one of the reasons) he lost in 2020!"
But as a counterpoint, consider that Trump increased his raw vote totals from 2016 to 2020 in *every single state*. The article claims (I haven't verified) that Sanders primary raw vote totals from 2016 to 2020 went down in several states and in several working-class counties. Voter turnout can't explain this alone because it was up in both the general election and primaries (at least the ones they cite).
Primary and general elections have different dynamics, obviously. Biden's raw vote totals were higher than Clinton's in *every single state*, too. If Sanders had been the Democratic nominee in 2020, the same trend may have held. Sanders went head to against Clinton in a year that was arguably a referendum on Clinton (or at least Clinton-sim). He didn't have the chance to go head to head against Trump in a year that was a referendum on Trump. Maybe that is all there is to it and I'm reading too much into it.
But the fact remains that after Hilary exited the scene, Trump maintained enthusiasm and even made inroads with new demographics. Sanders didn't (it seems). Why did Trump go up when Sanders went down? If 2016 anti-Clinton, anti-establishment Sanders-Trump voters switched to being Trump diehards in 2020, what did he do to make them so loyal?
"Why did Trump go up when Sanders went down?"
Biden ran to the right in the primary and to the left in the general.
I think it makes sense to talk about the "anti-Hillary" vote in three cohorts:
1. Sanders-Trump voters. These probably stayed loyal to Trump.
2. Sanders-nonvoters. These are represented by increased turnout in the general and I think there were more of them.
3. People who didn't vote at all in 2016. The article gestures at this by calling his first campaign "shoestring" but this is understating it. Bernie barely had *any* infrastructure spun up until about 1/3 of the way through the primary when people realized he could actually win this. If the campaign itself thought it was a doomed protest against a coronation, probably lots of voters did too. There's no way to guess how big THIS cohort is but since primary turnout was higher in 2020 this is probably a factor too.
Other than that, yes, parties tend to fall in line with their Presidents as elections become referendums on incumbency. Obama and Hillary fought to the bitter end in 2008, but while there were a few loud Hillary-or-bust PUMAs, most of the Democratic electorate fell in line and there was not a significant internal challenge to Obama in 2012. I think it's possible for Trump to have lost the upper Midwest due to a slice of "not-Hillary" voters that became "not-Trump" and restored just enough of the firewall even as turnout was juiced on all sides.
Sanders might have actually succeeded had he done two things:
1. Be more moderate (and not just on immigration issues; his economic platform was to the left of that of Corbyn's Labour)
2. Actually attack Biden
Democratic primaries, unlike Republican ones, tend to be massive hugfests. The only way for an unfavored candidate to win in such a system is to break out of that mold.
His Russia comments were not helpful to him because they were so easy to use against him, but they were only a symptom of Sanders's problem in the Democratic primary, not the actual problem itself.
Regarding the tricameral legislature proposal, I don't necessarily hate the concept, but one of the major arguments for it in that piece -- that the current political gridlock prevents laws from passing that have very wide support among the population -- is dubious. I don't know much about the other examples he cites, but the one about high support for background checks on firearms sales at gun shows is extremely misleading -- it's effectively a gun control talking point that gets passed around by their lobbyist organizations, but doesn't correspond to reality.
You can get large percentages of people to agree to "closing the gun show loophole" or "universal background checks" or similar, but when laws like these actually get brought up for consideration, even in proposal/referendum systems, the support is a much more partisan-typical 45-55%. This is because "universal background checks" is essentially a feel-good platitude, and the actual laws brought up to implement it are usually poison pills designed to attack gun owners. The usual form this takes is requiring full background checks on any transfer, and counting loans as transfers; thus, interactions that are completely normal among gun owners, like "let me use that rifle today while hunting so I can see how it feels", become felonies if not run through the proper federal bureaucracy. When concretized in this way, obviously support for the proposition drops.
In general, opinion polls like this are very weak sources of information, because even leaving aside lizardman effects, most public policy questions are sufficiently complex and subtle that your average person will require at least half an hour to understand what the question actually means. For people who aren't already policy junkies -- which is an excellent life choice that I endorse -- that means that a phone poll asking "do you approve or disapprove of $THING?" is basically only measuring whether the pollster phrases $THING in a way that sounds positive or negative. Thus a pollster can get whatever answer they want out of such polls, more or less; and any such poll that people are pushing is more likely propaganda than part of an effort to understand the world.
Do you think hypothetical implementations that aren't poison pills would have widespread support? If so, why isn't anyone doing that?
You could definitely write an implementation that isn't a poison pill, but no one really has a reason to do that.
For background, I'll go over the current background check regime. The phrase "gun show loophole" gets a lot of play, but the point of law involved has nothing to do with gun shows at all. Basically, if you sell guns for a living, you need to get a federal license (the FFL) and you need to run a background check on everyone you sell a gun to. If you don't sell guns for a living, on the other hand, you're allowed to sell your guns to other private citizens without needing to do a check, but if you know the person you're selling to is a prohibited person, then making the sale is a felony. The "gun show loophole" is the fact that private, person-to-person sales don't need a background check (and notionally a lot of these happen at gun shows). In practice, though, 99% of gun sales go through FFLs, including at gun shows; private sales are an edge case the same way garage sales are mostly an edge case compared to the overall retail market.
Thus, while you could design a system for universal background checks that wouldn't cause problems for non-criminals (say, by opening the background check system to ordinary citizens and letting it generate tokens that you can check through the system later), there's not much reason to think it would help with anything. 99% of existing legitimate sales go through FFLs and are checked already; criminal sales mostly happen in black-market contexts where no one involved cares what the law is. The marginal criminal who can get a gun via a private sale from a law-abiding private seller (who doesn't know the buyer is a criminal), but can't get one either by theft, via a straw purchase or on the black market, basically doesn't exist. (A "straw purchase" is when a legal buyer buys a gun at an FFL for the purpose of giving it to a prohibited person. This is, naturally, a felony, but it still happens a lot and is fundamentally hard to prevent.)
Gun owners and gun rights activists would not necessarily object to a non-poison-pill implementation of universal background checks, but they don't have any reason to proactively pursue it, because it wouldn't help any; and such people are also categorically extremely suspicious of any expansion of gun laws whatsoever. (This is basically for good reason, because probably the majority of new gun laws ever enacted are basically poison pills meant to hurt gun owners.) Meanwhile, gun control activists are mostly divided into people who don't know anything about the topic but support initiatives that sound nice, and people who do know about the topic and are actively trying to pass poison pills to hurt gun owners. None of these groups have any incentive to push for a reasonable universal background check system.
There was a proposal a while ago for a big gun control compromise, where gun control activists got a well-designed universal background check system in exchange for concealed carry license reciprocity and/or the removal of suppressors from the NFA. This got a fair amount of play and tentative approval among gun rights groups, but was never mentioned so far as I can tell among gun control groups; in any case, it never went anywhere.
Given your last paragraph, I cannot refrain from posting the Yes, Minister clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GSKwf4AIlI
#8: I had a parent on the wrong side of the ‘08 recession, they’re about mid 60s now, and that trend line down for 50-60 y/o nails it. There’s a large population of 60 y/o’s who will never retire because of ‘08 and ‘20, and I wonder what that future looks like for us. The money just isn’t there.
Why '20? I'd expect any dip in earnings potential to be temporary once the economy reopens, and the stock market has already bounced back. Is it debt?
I’m thinking about another round of 401k liquidations and home equity prob occurring. Decades of saving get undone and age 40, really age 30 onward isn’t enough time to recuperate, using some rough excel math. That said - what did the 70 plus’ers do in ‘08 I wonder. Their numbers look fine, and right age in ‘08 to crack into their 401ks as well.
The 70+ people in '08 were probably old enough that most of them had little or nothing left on their mortgages and they had social security money to draw on, limiting the amount that they actually had to take out of the stock market (if any - by that age most financial advisors recommend things like bonds). And they're already unemployed, so it's not like they lost out on income. So while it wasn't great for them, they were pretty secure.
The people in their 50s however, would almost definitely still have a lot left on their mortgages, would not have social security as a stop-gap, would still have money in the stock market, and would still be relying on a job. So the unlucky ones would lose their job, then rely on savings and withdrawing from their diminished stocks, and then when the savings ran out, get foreclosed on. That of course also applied to people younger, but the younger people had more time before they expected to retire, so it didn't hurt their retirement chances in the same way, and younger people were more likely to be renting than owning, so they wouldn't be set back in the same way.
compared to the younger cohorts, the older ines will also have a higher percentage of pensions
Please forgive me, I'm genuinely not that financially literate - 401k liquidation just means stocks went down a lot which hurt their retirement savings, right? Now that stocks have gone back up again, why is that still a problem?
The issue is when stocks go down and then you have to sell them near the bottom, for some nominally unrelated issue like losing your job or having large medical bills because you didn't have insurance. (You might ask how that works, since the funds are earmarked for retirement? The simple answer is that you can do it but you have to pay a penalty in taxes, although there are some ways to get around the penalty.)
The result of this is losing both the savings themselves and any chance of gaining them back. You have to start off from scratch and the nature of compound interest means that you've lost the years that would have been most important for your savings.
Old people are living on a retirement fund that includes mostly stocks, but need to pay their expenses in dollars. If stocks crash, as they did in '08, they need to sell more of the stocks to pay their constant dollar expenses. That means they've lost proportionately much more of their fund than they would have if stocks had remained high, and they don't get those assets back when the stock market rebounds.
To be fair, if someone is in retirement and still has a lot of money in stocks, they should also have a 2+ year safe fund in cash or bonds to draw on in downturns. But many don't. This was also a problem in 2008.
Other two comments list the gist of it too!
But straight forward in a way that can be replicated on a excel doc, using numbers which are close enough to the last time I did this such that I feel ok standing behind them:
- You need about $1mil saved to retire on a ~$50-70k/year equivalent lifestyle
(take $50k, grow it by 2-5% annually from now until you retire). $50k isn't nuts if you have your mortgage done, independent kids, no debts, etc. etc.
- In plain English, if you retire in the ~65-75 y/o range, w/ $1mil saved, you run out of money right around or after the time you die, factoring in like a 20 year retirement and no passive income aside from your $1mil and social security etc. This is factoring out home equity, which is also a big financial boost once you sell a paid off place. But the bulk of your financial safety in retirement is going to come from your IRA.
- That number is entirely achievable *if you have enough time to save*. That time to save is about 30-40 years with the bulk of that in 7% annual returns in the stock market, maxing out your Roth IRA at $500-$600/month. If you do this exactly from the 25 y/o to 30/35 /yo range, and you *never sell,* you'll very easily hit that $1mil. Locking up your retirement is pretty easy.
- If you do any of the following, you essentially won't have enough to retire if $50-70k/yr equiv lifestyle and up is your idea of retiring. Even if you're looking at $30-40k/yr equiv, still won't be able to retire:
---> sell at any point between starting to save and retiring. This is exacerbated the further into your retirement age you get (~40s/50s/60s). TLDR you need 40 years of 7%/yr average acting on that $550/mo in your 401k/IRA, a single slip up will undo it all.
---> don't invest in stocks for the bulk of those years.
At it's root, it's just some math using compound interest, but you can really go wild on the excel sheet wizadry to model this all in interesting ways. All retirement accounts follow the above rules (401ks, Roth/Traditional IRAs).
The huge issue is there's a massive incentive if things get bad enough financially to touch your 401k "just once." The problem is "touching it just this once" means breaking that single rule of don't sell, ever. A lot of folks don't realize they nuke their retirements, or very nearly nuke it, by very small sales. If it's a serious emergency like 12 months of no work in '20-'21 and '07-'09, those small sales tend to be big sales, and those users will never retire because of it.
So, you have a large set of 40-50's in '07-'09, and I bet in '20-'21, who touched their retirement accounts, and didn't realize they bought themselves another 20+ years of saving to catch up. It's ugly, there's a whole generation of folks who won't retire because of this.
There are caveats, major one being the 401k limit is like $20k vs. the IRA limit being $5-6k (grows a bit each year). If you have the finances to max out a 401k consistently, you don't necessarily nuke your retirement if you sell a bit (or at least idk the numbers there but I sense that you could recover). The folks that can put $20k into a 401k year after year, after recovering from a financial setback that made them sell, is probably a small group I think.
If you do this exactly from the 25 y/o to 30/35 /yo range* and continuing $500/mo until you retire, it's no issue to save that much (correction)
Sorry, still confused. How do you nuke your retirement with a "very small sale"?
Suppose you have 500K saved up at age 50, and you do a "small sale" of 50K to support yourself in a difficult time. You still have 450K, which seems like most of your money - any retirement plan that succeeds on 500K (compounded for another 15 years) should also succeed on 450K. What am I missing?
"Oh no, my monthly bills are coming due! Better just make one small sale of $10000 to make ends meet! I'll still have 490k left next month, it's fine."
Then rinse and repeat that for the next two years while you can't get a job, and you're left with half. Meanwhile, the stocks kept on crashing for those two years, so you're actually down to a third of the original, which was the same amount that you had 14 years prior. That's assuming that you were investing $6,000 per year, the max Roth IRA contribution, and you got 6% return rate, but in actuality the markets in the 2000s weren't that good and the peak in 2007 didn't even reach the previous peak in 2000, so really it's more like what you had 20 years prior.
Even if you then got a job, and start putting in $10,000 per year, and had better returns in the market (7% instead of 6%), you're up to $700,000 when you retire, which is a good deal short of your goal.
On the other hand, if you hadn't lost your job and didn't have to make withdrawals, your retirement accounts would have gone down some (maybe to $400,000), but then with that better job at the better market, you're up to $1,350,000 at the end, twice as much, and plenty to retire on.
However, that all ignores that you need to be relying on the stock market less as you age, to avoid it crashing right when you retire. The usual solution is bond funds, which is much safer but much worse returns, or a mixture of bonds and stocks which is a mixture of the two in terms of safety and returns. So really the person who had to withdraw is only back up to $500,000 while the person who didn't have to withdraw is up to $1,000,000.
(Calculations done using https://www.calculator.net/investment-calculator.html)
Even very smart people make blunders in volatile times. For example, here's Bryan Caplan on what he did in 2020:
> Conditions in March were so bleak that I set aside both of these beliefs and moved from 100% stocks to 90% bonds. As a result of my excessive open-mindedness, my family has lost an enormous amount of money. The situation is so weird that I’m going to wait until January to return to my normal investment strategy. After that, I will never again deviate from buy-and-hold. Never!
(https://www.econlib.org/what-im-doing/)
This was a *catastrophic* decision by someone who ought to have known better!
The part you're missing is the overall drop in the stock market ahead of time. If you start with 500K, and the market drops 20% (500K x 0.8) now you have 400K. You pull out 50K leaving 350K. The market recovers (x1.2) and you have 420K. You've lost 80K after the market has recovered. Assuming $1000 a month contribution rate, you've lost 80 months. Much worse really if you aren't contributing during the time when stocks are cheap.
I think people are conflating a number of things.
First, the chart tracks wealth which is not yearly earnings. Wealth tracks closely to asset prices especially later in life. So the trend lines post 2008 probably says more about asset allocations by generation than anything else.
Second, a crisis is as much a psychological burden as an objective financial strain. They might not feel they can retire because 1) they made some panic-y investment decisions during the early days 2) they lost their job and were planning on having that income. Getting a new job at >60 isn’t really a thing or 3) they’re a bit stretched with their financial obligations. These things are deeply personal and reflect preferences and dispositions.
> “The United States should issue letters of marque to fight Chinese aggression at sea.”
It's difficult to over-state how stupid this is.
- Piracy and state-sponsored privateering are unequivocally against international law -- law that the US is a signatory to. (See the 1958 High Seas Convention, among others.)
- The Chinese have the world's largest surface navy, and the world's largest submarine fleet -- and they are chomping at the bit for any excuse to flex their muscles in the South China Sea, around the Strait of Malacca, in the Korean Sea, and in the Pacific all the way to the coast of Chile. The balance of power is not equal; the Chinese Navy is very powerful indeed, and these "Privateers" are, more likely than not, going to end up in Davy Jones' locker.
- Chinese trade is oriented towards export: Chinese cargo vessels are typically loaded with goods for US and European customers. Hit a Chinese freight carrier, and you've probably harmed Amazon and WalMart more than you've harmed the Chinese -- if indeed you've harmed them at all.
The notion of privateers may work as Casus Belli. It fails on every other strategic and tactical level. For there's only one way it ends: With the US condemned, with dead privateers, and with a justifiably strengthened and extended Chinese naval presence in every body of water but the Atlantic.
To be fair, the article argued in favor of using privateers if war ever broke out with China, not before. And the argument was that the Chinese Navy is so powerful that the US Navy will have it's hands full countering it, and that every privateer harassing Chinese shipping is one less US Naval ship that has to be diverted to the task.
Then it's even more stupid. What "war with China" ?!? Have they forgotten that China has nukes ?!?
While I agree that the idea is stupid, even the author isn't proposing that the privateers go up against the Chinese navy. He's proposing they take over the commerce campaign. There are other ways to do it which don't involve reliance on international law which hasn't been invoked for 160 years, though.
Also, where does the 1958 Convention ban privateering?
Honest question: why is the idea stupid? I recognize that it most likely is stupid, but I don't know enough to say why.
Short version: probably illegal, definitely less effective than simply requisitioning the ships and people and having the Navy give them orders.
I've been trying to find the text of the 1958 convention online, so far unsuccessfully. But various references specify that piracy is "for private ends," which suggested that a privateer might not qualify. After all, British naval vessels in the Napoleonic period got prize money for ships they captured, but that didn't make them pirates. So a privateer that is trying to make money but acting under the authority of a state for the state's ends might also not qualify.
So far in the thread nobody seems to actually have a cite to the convention banning privateers.
The 1958 Convention is here:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Convention_on_the_High_Seas
Privateering is generally considered to have been banned by the 1856 Declaration of Paris (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Declaration_Respecting_Maritime_Law), which has now been incorporated into customary international law (which is generally binding on everyone, even if they didn't sign, although this isn't absolute. International law is weird.)
Relevant because the U.S. did not sign the 1856 Declaration.
De facto, in articles 17 and 22.
The history of US privateering is interesting, and further illustrates why this would be a very bad idea, to say nothing of grossly hypocritical.
https://www.ijnhonline.org/why-there-was-no-privateering-in-the-spanish-american-war/
In any case, China isn't as reliant upon imports as the US. Privateering, unless done on a tremendous (impracticable) scale, would hardly annoy them -- and, given that the scale of Chinese shipping tilts towards exports, it might be an own-goal that injures allies and neutral parties more than it injures the Chinese.
Strategically-valuable shipping is sure to be well-guarded in any case. As a rule, privateers don't hit hard targets.
So this fever-dream, however romantic, is tactically and strategically moronic, and its implementation would probably strengthen the Chinese and weaken the US.
I am less than certain that those actually ban privateering, but I also don't think that's necessary. The Paris Declaration is almost certainly customary international law at this point. My 1980s International Law for Seagoing Officers doesn't even mention the subject at all, which I presume is because it was seen as totally irrelevant.
I agree that it's a bad idea. I'm not defending it in any way, and would point out again that Proceedings is not peer-reviewed, and that this is far from the stupidest thing I've seen there. My thoughts on how to do this were definitely informed by Spanish-American war experience, including the very ships that article cites, although I do think he slightly misunderstands the Naval Militia, and generally isn't that familiar with US thinking in the runup to war. (If you're not aware, I'm a serious hobbyist naval historian.)
And China is very reliant on imports. It's just raw materials rather than finished products. No clue how that ends up in a war, particularly given that one of the biggest suppliers (Australia) is a US ally.
I can't say exactly what level of commerce warfare we're likely to see in a war with China. That depends heavily on the diplomacy surrounding the war, and what the US thinks it can get away with. But there's also the issue that we have the power to slap a blockade around China at source, in a way that wasn't possible up until the late 1800s.
"De facto, in articles 17 and 22. "
Can you quote the articles for the rest of us, or link to the convention?
...and it's "champing at the bit", despite what William Safire might say. My wife rides horses and insists on that! :)
I bet that your wife is a champ.
Don't pay much attention to those naval strategist type guys. They just have to write something to justify the salaries they get at some think tank. Plus, they get a hit of status in their field: "Oh, that guy over there in the pink shirt is the letter of marque guy, the one talking to the invade Hong Kong with the US Marines guy." They write some pretty wacky stuff because they know nobody but 50 people will ever read it. You can read to your heart's content at https://www.hudson.org if you really want to go down the rabbit hole.
"law that the US is a signatory to. (See the 1958 High Seas Convention, among others.)"
Madeline Albright called, she's reminding you of American Exceptionalism. For the liberal international order to work, we must enforce the international rules on others while not being subject to them ourselves. Thus she views American interference in other countries as totally in their right due to their superiority over others, while inferiors of course have no right to do the same to America.
All we have to do to put a stop to Chinese commerce is close the Strait of Malacca. It's where all their oil transits through from the US filling station in the Middle East, and they have a mere two months of reserves. You know what sits right at the lynchpin of the Strait of Malacca? Singapore, a staunch US ally. Unlike other US allies (Europe, looking at you, you worthless freeloaders) Singapore has a small but capable military, well suited to its job. Cutting China off from its oil supply would be as easy as when FDR cut Japan off from its oil supply in August 1941.
In a neat interlude probably of nobody's interest, but we have the minutes of the meetings at which the Japanese made the decision to go to war. They knew it was dicey and everything would have to go right to pull it off.