Or, for that matter, Willie Nelson.
We shall return to this point.
The novel coronavirus, which causes the disease Covid-19, is shutting down the world’s economy. This would seem at first blush to be an overreaction. After all, relevant history — SARS, MERS, Zika, and so forth — tell us that the reaction of the media and others with a stake in, well, reaction, has been overwrought to the point of misleading or even counterproductive. In the fullness of time, if we are lucky, the same may reveal itself in the current case.
But that does not mean that the risk of Covid-19 is not different in important respects that carry the potential for enormous social change. We discussed some of the possibilities here.
We believe that the social and economic threat in the novel coronavirus is that it apparently has a long incubation period, and that carriers can transmit the virus before they are symptomatic. This fact, combined with delays in high volume testing in big countries like the United States, means that we actually do not know how many people there are who can transmit the disease, nor who they are. Quite honestly, any of us could be a carrier and in the moment feel just fine.
The problem, of course, is that Covid-19 is deadly, almost certainly several times more lethal on average than the seasonal flu. It does not kill consistently, though. Old folks, and especially those with some respiratory weakness or damage, are far more susceptible, with a 10-15% or greater mortality rate.
So, really, any of us could kill our grandmother without knowing we are doing it.
Living as we do in Austin, we are also worried about Willie Nelson, easily the most beloved living legend in town. Willie is in the backstretch of his 80s, and — rumor has it — has smoked a bit in his life. Covid-19 would be very bad news for Willie.
Nobody wants to kill their grandmother, or Willie Nelson, because they did not take every precaution.
The problem is that “every precaution” increasingly looks like it may involve shutting down the world’s economy. China did it, and now American businesses are doing the only rational thing from their perspective: Stopping all “non-essential” travel and in-person meetings, telling people to work at home, and so forth. Close to home, the massive SXSW conference is on the bubble, confronting a raft of corporate cancellations.
All of this may or may not be rational if the point is to stop the pandemic. Even the putative experts do not yet know enough to be confident that any particular measure – at least those among the policy options in a continental democratic republic riven with civic mistrust – will have a meaningful effect on the transmission of the disease.
So why are we, and the rest of the world, gripped by Covid-19 to a degree that we weren’t by SARS, MERS, Zika, or even Ebola? Why are we going to destroy trillions in economic value, throw people out of work, suspend schooling, give up the handshake, and reorder the supply chains of global industry?
Because we don’t want to kill our grandmother, or Willie Nelson.
As recently as last summer, 45% of Americans (according to one credible survey) “doubted” the safety of vaccines. This did not necessarily translate in to opposition to requirements for children to be vaccinated before going to school, for example, but it remains the case that most states have broad exemptions from mandatory vaccination.
The politics of this defy easy explanation. If the Great Karnak were asked to provide the question to the answer “California, New York, West Virginia, and Mississippi,” there is no chance he would have said “states with the fewest exemptions to mandatory vaccinations.”
Yesterday’s election results, coming as they did on the brink of the now virtually inevitable Covid-19 pandemic, offer early evidence that the tide may be turning. Last year, Maine’s legislature eliminated most exemptions from vaccination requirements by a one-vote margin, effectively turning it from dark blue to yellow on the map above. The anti-vaxxers being nothing if not committed tried to overturn the new strict law by referendum. They were destroyed.
Of course, it is impossible to know whether the anti-vaxxer referendum would have passed in the absence of the recent scare, but we strongly suspect that at least the margin of its defeat was so great because we have been reminded, rather harshly, of the social and economic consequences of unchecked infectious disease.
We are back, at least temporarily. Extraordinary times demand an extraordinary commitment from all of us, and this is mine.
Herewith, a few COVID-19 speculations.
It would be most helpful if you commented with reference to the numbered speculation. If I add speculations to this post, as the bourbon sinks in, I will insert them without renumbering.
Finally, it should be said, that no doubt others have thought of all of these before me. We stand on the shoulders of giants.
1. A large number of Americans, exceeding millions, will become infected.
2. The death rate in the United States will be substantially lower than in China, because we have much lower rates of respiratory illnesses and our medical intervention will, most of the time, be more aggressive.
3. Still, Americans value life and are afraid of dying, so social norms will change rapidly, and perhaps permanently, because of this event.
4. Shaking hands at large gatherings — sales meetings, conventions, and the like — will go out of style. I imagine we will try lots of things, but I hope we settle on a more equal version of Japanese bowing. (It will be interesting to see whether any of our presidential candidates stop shaking hands to make the point.)
5. Workers who do not perform in-person functions (construction workers, massage therapists, real estate brokers, and so forth) will be encouraged to work remotely for a period. Many of them will find they like working at home, and in the end many employers will agree. This will rapidly accelerate the decentralization of work. If you own a huge office building, consider selling it.
6. If you build houses, shrink the closets — people won’t have to dress up for work as much — and build home offices.
7. While you’re at it, offer “prepper” options, like a generator and a cellar with two exits and a built-in gun safe. These will become much more popular in the next few years.
8. The Japanese have already sent their school children home for a month. This might turn out to be a reasonable thing for Americans to do, but it would be much harder for us. What happens to the kids who need school lunches? Who supervises the kids at home if the parent(s) [both] [all] have in-person job requirements? What happens to high school football practice in Texas? We may yet find out.
9. The world will move away from China as a sole source for anything. The beneficiaries will be countries that make it easy for foreign investment. Latin America ought to be the ideal beneficiary, except that (by and large) the countries of the region make things very difficult for foreign investment. The American heartland will be a long-term economic beneficiary to a degree that will surprise even Trump and his acolytes.
10. We will expose huge gaps in our own competencies, gaps that we have long been worried about, in our quiet moments, but are reluctant to admit to ourselves. For example, a big reason why Chinese companies make so many medicines on which we depend is that China produces a staggering number of students with chemistry degrees. If you need to hire 200 chemists in a hurry, China is the place to do it. That won’t change until Americans raise their children to study useful things again (#SUTA). This event may do it. I predict that the number of Americans studying biology and chemistry will increase significantly.
11. Nevertheless, there will be big opportunities in making basic stuff right here in the USA. “Made in America” will become a far more potent marketing device. If I were a young person who knew something about manufacturing — and there are such people — I would figure out what products are now *only* made in China and start making some of them here. There is a window opening.
12. The cost of basic consumer products will go up significantly as a result. While this will hurt the standard of living of the poor, the culture-shapers will be all for it. I, for one, will be shocked.
13. Businesses will learn new habits, including that they can get by with much less travel. Obviously, this will be very tough on airlines and lodging companies. Interestingly, reduced business travel (along with a lot more telecommuting) will result in a non-trivial reduction in incremental CO2. Further speculation: When a climate activist oversteps and suggests that this is a “silver lining,” he or she will be mocked as a “Thanos wannabe” on Twitter.
14. There is a non-zero chance that COVID-19 will be a blessing in disguise. We will in short order learn a great deal about how to respond to situations such as these, and changing social norms will be high on the list of important adaptations. If we learn these new habits and techniques now, instead of in a worse crisis that involves a much more lethal disease, we will save a lot of lives in the future.
15. If the first effective vaccine for COVID-19 in fact comes out of Israel, virtually all the people who believe in boycotting and divesting from Israel will take the vaccine anyway. None of them will change their minds.
16. Our response to COVID-19 may challenge contemporary American ideas about autonomy and liberty. We may need to reinstate old school quarantines and sanctions for people who break those quarantines. Somebody is going to sue after a public health official locks them up. I doubt very much that in the middle of a pandemic the federal courts are going to side against the public health authorities, especially given the long, albeit old, precedent. (I have long thought that the American individual rights era, which roughly coincided with the [temporary?] elimination of infectious disease as a leading cause of death, was in practice *enabled by* the control of infectious disease through sanitation, vaccines, and antibiotics. We shall soon see if I am right.)
17. Your Editor is a speaker (mentor) at the upcoming SXSW conference in Austin. We hope to see you there, but we will bow, rather than shake your hand.
What else?
We are not sure of the rules, but we do know that any blogger or other gum-flapper who does not make a list of annual “predictions” might as well hang it up and climb in to a bottle. Last year, under another nom de plume, we produced a list that was oh-so-very-wrong in the matter of presidential politics and the Rose Bowl, but did not lack for inspiration (our call on the Dow Jones Industrial Average was close enough for horseshoes and hand grenades, and we generally did a lot better than famous predictor Byron Wien).
Anyway, in no particular order:
1. The Iowa Hawkeyes will win the Outback Bowl tomorrow. Note that the shelf life of this prediction is about 24 hours.
2. Donald Trump’s earliest actions in office will relate closely to Barack Obama’s efforts to stymie him. This is a good summary of those efforts. Specifically, we predict that Trump will:
- Quickly take some step to reinforce the U.S. commitment to Israel, including at least one of (a) moving our embassy to Jerusalem, (b) visiting Israel personally, perhaps on his first official trip abroad, and (c) directing some form of overt military cooperation, such as an exercise, that will draw the ire of all the right people.
- Trump will issue an executive order reversing President Obama’s 11th hour designations under the Antiquities Act, triggering the first of what will be relentless litigation from environmental activists on a wide range of subjects (in general, we believe that environmental activists will be the biggest losers among the core Democratic constituencies under Trump).
- Similarly, Trump will move aggressively against the big raft of new regulations that the Obama administration has pushed through in the last year or so, with an emphasis on the new regulations from the EPA.
3. President Trump will indeed pursue a rapprochement with Russia, with two main objectives: (1) to increase Russian commitment to the fight against radical Islam so their guys die instead of our guys, and (2) to create a geopolitical counterweight against China. However, he will pursue this slowly, waiting a few months until the “election hacking” kerfuffle fades from public memory.
4. Mexico won’t pay for the “wall.”
5. The Democrats and the press will continue to make a big deal out of Trump’s various conflicts of interest, but this will not diminish his relatively low popularity, such as it is, unless something else entirely intervenes to hurt him with his base. Then the conflicts will suddenly get traction in the public’s mind. Democrats will develop a keen interest in having the FBI investigate the executive branch.
6. The first big domestic crisis of Donald Trump’s presidency will be catalyzed by a horrible urban crime or an ambiguous police shooting. Trump’s reaction in the moment will have a far greater effect on his popularity and credibility than any “scandal” likely to emerge, unless the organized left gets too excited and overreaches, in which case that will have the biggest effect on Trump’s popularity.
7. Trump will retract the Title IX “dear colleague” letter. University administrators will breath a sigh of relief, but not admit it in any circumstances that might involve a recording device. SJWs will go bananas, but nobody who has never heard the word “intersectionality” will actually care.
8. Black Lives Matter and allied groups will become much more active (see #6 above). Conversely, the word “alt-right” will all but disappear from the popular discourse by late spring.
9. In the spirit of striking “deals,” Trump will challenge the ideologues on both sides. Trump will act more like the “mayor” of America than its president, and at some point he will trade away some cherished position of the social conservatives — maybe a pro-business SCOTUS nominee who is a bit squishy on “life” — in return for Democratic Chuck Schumer’s support for corporate tax reform. Or something like that. Or, maybe, he will offer Democrats the huge infrastructure bill they have been clamoring for since, well, the end of the Johnson Administration, but only if they sign up for reforms in federal contracting, labor, and environmental rules that will allow that spending to be productive.
10. Trump will continue to call up CEOs and intimidate them in to high profile concessions. This will be very confusing for Democrats, who will not denounce the shakedowns per se — how could they after the Obama years? — but will try to deny that they do any good.
11. Income inequality in the United States will not increase, and may even narrow, during the Trump presidency (we will not see the data soon enough to know whether this will be true in 2017). The main reason will be because the stock market will do poorly compared to the Obama years, but the share of corporate expenses going to labor will also increase.
12. The Cubs will win the World Series for the second year in a row.
13. Other foreign leaders will follow Trump’s lead and will tweet with more, er, spontaneity than in the past. Twitter stock (NASDAQ: TWTR) will rally when investors figure out that it has become essential to populist democracy. For that obvious reason, Twitter will resist or ignore the many demands from the corporate media that it suspend @realDonaldTrump’s account. Because even Twitter isn’t that stupid.
14. The talk radio boobery — who spent the last eight years predicting financial and economic catastrophe — will now expect the economy and the stock market to go to the moon. Instead, the Dow Jones Industrial Average will crack 22,000 during the year, but close within 5% of 19,762, its close on Friday last.
15. Libertarians will worry that the trend toward legal weed will slow under Attorney General Sessions, but politics will prevail — too many states have moved too far, and it is far too popular. Especially with Trump’s base.
16. I will weigh no more than 202 pounds (my current weight) on this date next year.
17. Uber and Lyft will resume passenger service in Austin.
18. Willie Nelson will be alive on New Year’s Day 2018.
19. As a defense mechanism, the attention span of the average citizen will continue to shrink.
There is much silliness abroad in the land, but little is as silly as the outrage on the left over the idea that the Trump family might actually profit in some way from the presidency. This, from the side that saw nothing inappropriate in the Clinton family’s sudden prosperity, from “dead broke” in 2000 to centimillionaires — one of only about 5000 families in the United States with that much wealth — a few short years later.
But never mind that moral cartwheel. The manufactured outrage over Ivanka’s bracelet is all you need to know about how the suddenly powerless chattering classes regard the Trump family. If you are late to the story, Ivanka’s jewelry company advertised the “bangle” that she wore on “60 Minutes” as the bangle that she wore on “60 Minutes.” Cue outrage. Repeat.
Please remind us why selling books and receiving royalties therefor — as Kennedys, Clintons, and Obamas, and many others before have done — is somehow less offensive than the daughter of the president-elect, who is a celebrity in her own right, continuing to promote her business after her father has won the White House? Because books are somehow less, er, deplorable than jewelry? Does not the precedent of Billy Beer amply cover the non-book situation? Jewelry is icky but books and beer aren’t? Some might even call that sexist, but who are we to know what is and is not an intersectionality foul?
The bracelet story had traction because the leftist opposition to Trump is trying to make the case that his presidency will be all about his own financial profit, as if there were anybody who voted for Trump who did not know he was a billionaire with sprawling business interests dependent on the glory, or gaudiness, of his name. The basic idea is that Trump will some how make a ton of money because of all the people willing to walk through the demonstrations surrounding his properties just to be seen spending money there. Or something like that. It is all very confusing, perhaps because most of the people who write such drivel haven’t the first clue how business owners and executives make decisions.
No matter. Our broader point is this: We should all hope that President Trump will try to increase the economic value of his business.
Yeah, we just wrote that.
Apart from the obvious point — that leveraged real estate assets are a lot more valuable in a vibrant economy than in a foundering one, and even lefties claim they want a vibrant economy — do the people who are denouncing Trump for this reason (as opposed to other reasons) really think that resorts and hotels and branded consumer goods thrive when half the country is in full-on boycott mode? Remember the liberal laughter back in September when stories emerged that Trump’s businesses were suffering because of the controversy over his campaign? See the comments at the end of this story if you missed that unifying moment.
Trump needs to put an end to the demonstrations and the boycotts before he has a chance of building value in his business. And there is only one way to do that: Tack hard to the center, actually govern as a moderate, and — this is the most important — act neutrally and even inclusively toward the groups who most resent the tone and rhetoric of his campaign. Will he do that? We have no idea, but if you believe that Trump will use the presidency to “profit” in his business, then you also have to believe he will at least try to stop offending and enraging his customers. And who other than an unreconstructed partisan wouldn’t be grateful for that?
We are not gun people in the Blueberry Town household, but neither are we fans of gun regulation that is not closely tailored to solving a specific problem at a reasonable burden, as most proposed gun control is not. And, no, being a lover of freedom your Editor does not believe if it saves one life is ever a reason to regulate anything, even if the object of the regulation is not a fundamental right enshrined in our Constitution. Freedom ain’t free, dude.
So if you believe that if it saves one life is all the reason we need to ban something, carry on. You are unlikely to give up your safety-first authoritarianism on account of this post.
Regardless, one of the reasons we end up with silly gun regulation is that the media is not, in the main, intellectually honest on the topic of “gun violence.” Urban liberals, in particular, have long been irritated that we devote massive national resources to combating terrorism but will not pass “common sense gun control.” This morning’s CNN feed brings us a typical story — American deaths in terrorism vs. gun violence in one graph!
The linked story is especially precious, insofar as CNN published it because “[President Obama] asked news organizations to tally the number of Americans killed through terrorist attacks in the last decade and compare it with the number of Americans who have died in gun violence.”
Seriously. That was the reason. President Obama asks, and CNN is right on it! This approach will pay huge dividends during the next Clinton administration, required kneepads notwithstanding.
But we digress.
Never mind the free-floating factoid that deaths from “gun violence,” however counted (of which more below), overwhelm deaths from terrorism. One cannot leap from that fact to what we ought to do even if one promiscuously traffics in “is/ought” violations in one’s daily life. No doubt more Americans died of “gun violence” in 1941 than at Pearl Harbor on December 7, but that was not a good reason to confiscate civilian guns that year, either.
The smoking gun — if you will — in the story is CNN’s use of the “gun violence” metric promoted by anti-gun activists, of which Barack Obama is now the leading light. It is a grossly inflated number, because it includes suicides, which account for more than 60% of the total per CNN’s own data. Even those of you who deny Hume’s guillotine and believe that the fact that there is “gun violence” inexorably means that we ought to enact “common sense” gun control cannot possibly believe that we will meaningfully reduce suicides even on the small chance that gun control “worked” otherwise.
Wait. You do?
Then consider this: The suicide rate of the United States is 50th in the world, behind such gun-free socialist paradises as France, Finland, Belgium, and Japan, among others. Sure, outright confiscation of all guns in private hands might prevent a small number of American suicides, but the vast majority of that “gun violence” would pretty quickly convert to “rope violence,” “razor-blade violence,” “pill violence,” or “carbon monoxide violence.” Unless, of course, you believe Americans are more easily frustrated in their suicides than, er, the Belgians.
In other words, including suicides by gun with “gun violence” figures to “prove” that we need “common sense” gun control is the tell that you are reading the transmitted talking points of activists rather than journalism, even when the author doesn’t admit that is what she is doing.
The annual Austin City Limits Music Festival is one of our favorite weekends of the year, not because we are a music aficionado — we are not — but because we love roaming around Zilker Park drinking beer, eating food, and watching the people incidentally to listening to music that we might not hear otherwise. For those of you who missed it this year or have not done in the past, here are a few pictures of Austin this weekend.
Among the many grounds for worrying about our democracy, there is the fear that the social media channels through which most Americans under the age of old now get their news may not be, shall we say, as neutral as implied. If you were not under a rock this spring, for example, you recall the controversy that exploded around Facebook, when several former Facebook “news curators” told Gizmodo that they “routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers.” This shocked exactly nobody, but was a useful reminder that culturally powerful businesses punch above weight in our democracy.
For the conspiratorially minded, the under-reported news of the day may therefore be this list of “7 Executives Who Could End Up in Hillary Clinton’s Presidential Cabinet.” At the very top? Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg.
All very unfair of me, we’re sure. Why would the chief operating officer lean in on something as trivial as the management of the “news curators”?
If the Republicans retain control of the Senate, which is looking less and less likely, this should at least make for an amusing confirmation hearing.
Yesterday, the editors of the Washington Post gave away the game in the opening sentence of an unsigned editorial titled “A porous ethical wall between the Clinton Foundation and the State Department“:
IN ANOTHER election year with an opponent who is not so obviously unqualified, last week’s revelations about connections between Hillary Clinton’s State Department and the Clinton Foundation would have been bigger news.
Bold emphasis added, just to raise the odds you read that carefully.
Our question is the obvious one: Who, other than the editors of the major news organizations, is going to determine whether or not a story is “bigger news”? The editors of the WaPo are, effectively, confessing that they have decided not to make big news of this story because Hillary Clinton’s opponent is “so obviously unqualified.”
We are of course not surprised, and indeed all is proceeding as we have foreseen: Donald Trump is Hillary Clinton’s get-out-of-jail-free card. The national political establishment, whether the “editors” of the mainstream media or the formerly principled leaders of our law enforcement agencies, are pulling out the stops to stop Trump. For good reason, they will say to themselves in those quiet moments when they know they have compromised what they claim to be their most cherished beliefs. Or at least what remains of their professionalism.
We wonder, however, whether this will not backfire, insofar as it makes Donald Trump’s invidious claim that the election is “rigged” seem true. We are confident that many Americans know quite well that it is going on, and that this heavy-handed partiality will register, unconsciously if not explicitly, as another example of cultural and political elites stiffing the average Joe.
Donald Trump is beating himself soundly, and will not be the next president. That is no reason to give Hillary Clinton a free pass, or manufacture for her what will be an entirely unearned mandate to govern.