As a public health physician, working for a large organization with on the ground workers, I did a lot of pandemic response for two years. Your take on Covid is not off, and was something I was saying after a few weeks/months into the pandemic. Very early we needed to take significant action in the face of uncertainty, but we should have adapted much more quickly to information we had. I think a lot of public policies don't adequately take into account tail risks (like inflation after pandemic spending, it may not have been likely but it was extremely consequential and at least somewhat foreseeable). But this time we overreacted, and kept that up for a long time when we could and should have been more responsive to both information we had and the public response. No public health policy exists in a scientific vacuum, you always have to consider the context and costs.
To tell the truth, the dogma and what looked to be forced speech and intimidation and flat-out lying during the 2020 riots, was what caused me to rethink what kind of party the Democrats were beginning to build. I put entirely too much hope into Biden governing like a moderate. I blame all of 2020 on Democrats, even the Covid insanity. The reason for this is that even at the time, it seemed they were just having all sorts of panic attacks about Trump no matter what was happening. Very early on, it didn't feel like we were all trying to do the best we could. It felt like they were using the riots and Covid to cause chaos and fundraise. I remember questioning everything and being very confused because it seemed like we weren't talking about a health issue in good faith. The response was political. And, then Joe got elected and went all in on DEI and Transworld and division. I feel ripped off, like I was sold a bill of goods.
And the problem is that Trump didn't push back hard enough against covid closures and BLM riots, which were fully endorsed Democrat policies. Trump 2.0 will be better at pushing back, which is why he's leading in all the polls.
Well Trump went on TV spouting nonsense for an hour every day while everyone was suffering and desperate for reasonable leadership. I think the reactions to him were understandable. Would've been a lot better if he just didn't do the TV part.
I disagree the reactions were reasonable because they were driven by politics rather than truth and it was a health matter. However, I agree with the TV part. He shouldn't have done it. Many times, if he would just shut it and focus on policy, everyone would be better off. His mouth-running is a major issue.
I think if you had no idea what his political stance was and you were purely judging him by what he was saying you would think that he did not know anything about health matters.
I agree. I think tons of people, including journalists, assigned themselves experts on health. Some workers on social media who aren't qualified to remove a band-aid correctly muted highly qualified doctors and epidemiologists because they didn't go with the narrative, even though they've been proven right over and over again. No different than Biden standing up there telling the world the shots would stop the spreading, masks work, and there was nothing risky about the shots. It's all a matter of people staying in their lane.
"With the benefit of hindsight — and the fading memories of the peak death tolls — COVID-era restrictions are now viewed as having gone too far"
Or at least the benefit of insularity: the belief that science stops at the US border and no one overseas, for example Sweden, has anything of value to add. Sweden has significantly lower mortality than UK, France, Spain with no lockdowns or school closures. They followed their plans in place for handling pandemics.
That approach was advocated, and censored, in the Great Barrington Declaration started by epidemiologists at Harvard, Stanford and Oxford.
To highlight the point of insularity even more - New Zealand and Australia (and China!) had much more radical covid policies and this served them very well. Well, for the short term in China because they never had a good vaccine rollout.
Thousands of people are alive in New Zealand and Australia who would otherwise be dead if we'd reacted like Europe and North America. Our economies were not hurt more badly than those who were more relaxes (one might say negligent) in their response. You might complain that this comparison isn't fair, and New Zealand and Australia are islands. But other islands exist too - like Hawaii, Great Britain, and the island of Ireland. And those islands saw catastrophic death rates just like the rest of Europe and North America.
It also ignores things working against countries that did well. Consider the resources available to tackle the pandemic - per-capita GDP in the US for instance drastically outstrips that of New Zealand. They couldn't use any of those extra thousands of dollars per person to secure their land borders during the pandemic if they really wanted to?
When raising this I run into a lot of people saying "well the US couldn't have done this because states can't close borders, etc". This is not an excuse. The fact that the US has a low ability to restrict movement in the case of a severe pandemic is a political choice. Everything relating to the failure to respond properly to the pandemic was a political choice. Some choices were made before the pandemic and some during it, but pandemics are a known quantity. We're lucky covid wasn't as severe as the flu pandemic of 1918.
"Thousands of people are alive in New Zealand and Australia who would otherwise be dead if we'd reacted like Europe and North America"
You have no way of proving this rigorously because you can't test the alternative.
What you can do is compare actual results in Sweden with other countries and the Swedish policies show much better results than many countries that adopted harsh lockdown measures. That is sufficient to show that harsh lockdown measures were not necessary for handling COVID.
The other results that have been measured are: 1) loss of educational achievement 2) "excess mortality", which means deaths above what could be expected based on prior years. This accounts for people missing cancer screening and EKG tests (there is no such thing as a "routine cancer screening"; all are essential to catching a life-threatening disease at an early stage when it can be treated).
"That is sufficient to show that harsh lockdown measures were not necessary for handling COVID."
The word "necessary" is doing a lot of work there. Strictly, it's not "necessary" to do anything about pandemics at all - you can just let as many people die as you want. But consider Sweden, and whether they did all that was "necessary". Sweden had ~20 000 people die over the projected amount without covid. Yes, that looks extremely good compared to the US, because if they had a similar pandemic outcome to the US they would have had 40 000 people die. Saving the lives of 20 000 people is a great thing to do.
On the other hand, if Sweden had had a pandemic outcome like New Zealand's, they would have only had ~1000 deaths. If saving 20 000 out of 40 000 lives (using the US response as a baseline) is so commendable to the point where we say "Sweden did what was necessary", what would we call saving 39 000 out of 40 000 lives? Why do we not care about the extra 19 000 people that can be saved?
To return to the more commonly understood US case for clearer context, the US had 1 200 000 people die. If they responded as well as Sweden, they could get that down to 660 000 deaths. Sure, perhaps the US could have done that without lockdowns. That'd be a damn sight better than what actually happened, true.
But if they'd locked down the way New Zealand did, we would expect closer to 37 000 deaths. over 500 000 people's lives is an awful lot to dismiss out of hand on the grounds that "You have no way of proving this rigorously because you can't test the alternative."
Sweden was among the five best countries for excess deaths, among developed countries, although it did lag NZ. Obviously that's hardly the same as letting as many people die as you want.
Sweden’s performance is sufficiently good to show that different measures taken in other countries were not the only way to reduce excess deaths; in English we might say they weren't necessary.
The US has about 35,000 traffic deaths per year. They could easily be reduced to 0 by enacting a national 5mph speed limit but other tradeoffs intervene.
Of course tradeoffs exist. But would you care to point to some of the tradeoffs where New Zealand suffered unduly compared to Sweden or the US, where those tradeoffs might be worth the lives of 500 000 people in the US?
The US is not at issue, it's the Swedish response that I'm pointing out.
The NZ Public Health Response Act of 2020 allowed police to enter homes without a warrant to enforce health restrictions. That loss of personal liberties, enshrined since at least the English Civil Rights Act of 1689, is worth the tradeoffs to the Swedish model which was not 500K deaths.
You don't limit your highway speed to 5mph and I preserve some measures of individual liberty.
North America simply doesn't have the luxury of being a small island that can close its borders like new zealand, or being incredibly sparsely populated like australia.
Hawaii is a series of small islands. Why could their borders have not been closed?
And when people in cities of five million people in Australia were infected by covid, why did the covid virus care that those cities were adjacent to sparsely populated areas?
I'm not entirely sure how to answer this. North America is so much more integrated economically across states than Australia and so much more connected through infrastructure I really have no idea what it would take to close down every state's borders. Were talking tens of thousands of road blocks, tens of millions of people who work across state lines not being able to to get to work. NYC alone, millions of people commute from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut every day. The northeastern seaboard is one continuous city with 50 million people living in it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_megalopolis. The US alone has 335 million people living in it with so many different cultural expectations and norms, it's utterly different than NZ and AU. A more honest comparison would be to the EU, where we saw wide variance in COVID outcomes across countries the same way we did across states here.
There are so many landlocked states that depend on states with ports for their imported goods and to export their own goods. There are tens of thousands of migrants that cross the US/Mexico border every summer to harvest food on farms.
This just isn't a continent that has the benefit of being a couple of coastal cities that can stop interacting with one another. All of this integration is a major part of why the US is so wealthy. In Hawaii's case, the entire economy is based on tourism - even if they could close their borders, would they?
"North America is so much more integrated economically across states than Australia and so much more connected through infrastructure I really have no idea what it would take to close down every state's borders."
You don't close down every state's borders. You close the borders between areas where covid is under control and areas where it is not, or where it cannot be verified to be under control. When Auckland had a delta outbreak, New Zealand restricted travel between Auckland and the rest of the country, and Auckland had more severe internal restrictions. Same thing when the Northland region had covid less under control than other areas. The places we put up some of these boundaries weren't even pre-existing administrative boundaries in a lot of cases, and yet we managed.
Talking about how many million people you have doesn't really make that much difference. You have 15 or 80 times as many people to control, and 15 or 80 times as many people and resources to enforce that control.
"A more honest comparison would be to the EU, where we saw wide variance in COVID outcomes across countries the same way we did across states here."
But this comparison is of no interest because no part of the EU ever made a serious attempt at a zero-covid strategy. My point isn't to say "this country did badly and this country did well", but instead to say "what options were available"? If country X had done Y instead of Z, could things have been better? In service to that, we have a number of excellent case studies.
The US with its states is often talked about as having dozens of laboratories for studying effective policies. Why ignore evidence of an effective policy implemented in another country? Sure, there are differences. Some differences might make it harder to control pandemics. Some differences might make it *easier* - like, for example, the much higher per-capita GDP in the US compared to New Zealand. A lot more money available to effect the same outcome.
"There are so many landlocked states that depend on states with ports for their imported goods and to export their own goods."
New Zealand has the same processes in play. The cities don't grow their own food. Food was either shipped in from overseas or grown locally and transported across internal covid-boundaries. This is a logistical challenge, not an impossibility. This is also the entire reason for the distinction of "essential workers". Essential work continued at all times in New Zealand. We never stopped all economic activity.
"There are tens of thousands of migrants that cross the US/Mexico border every summer to harvest food on farms."
We also have huge numbers of migrants come in from various pacific islands to harvest the produce from orchards.
>In Hawaii's case, the entire economy is based on tourism - even if they could close their borders, would they?
Parts of New Zealand are as largely tourist-dependent as Hawaii is. They had the same restrictions as everyone else. People whose income was restricted due to pandemic rules were compensated. As to whether they *would* close their borders - this gets to the heart of the matter. There is no reason at all to think places other than China, Australia, and New Zealand couldn't have successfully implemented covid-zero policies to achieve better outcomes. What is clear, though, is that most placed never attempted to do this. It was always a political choice. People chose not to control the pandemic.
That's a good point--censorship always raises the question of what exactly is one trying to hide, and why? Then, calling it "misinformation" then implies that people are too stupid to know the difference, and just causes people to double down on their skepticism as to the reasons for the censorship.
Exactly: "misinformation" simply means "stuff I don't want anyone to hear about"
A recent example was John Kerry, our former climate czar, saying it was disinformation that cold weather hampered charging electric vehicles.
My tenuous memories of thermodynamics are that the free energy of a system increases when the temperature goes down and that chemical reactions, like charging a battery, are inhibited when free energy rises. But this is now misinformation.
However, we can, apparently, continue to use thermodynamics for cooking: mix the ingredients and raise the temperature, lowering the free energy, so the chemical reactions take place. Works better than mixing ingredients and putting them in the freezer.
I saw one of those "In This House We Believe" package-deal-believer signs, and "Science Is Real" is now "Climate Change Is Real". Not saying climate change isn't real, but apparently science isn't always "real" now. Especially now that we have a lot of science coming out that doesn't fit The Narrative.
Well said. Instead of 'Follow the Science' the new tag-line should be 'Follow the Narrative'. For the NYT their motto should be changed from "All the News That's Fit To Print" to "All the News That Fits the Narrative".
While I'm not a fan of the various conspiracy theorists, don't you think that the COVID overregulation significantly contributed to pulling the country apart? The "elites" decided what was best for us which then leads to people losing all faith in institutions. While the us vs them was always there, it exacerbated it. Even now, the public health and governmental officials have a very tough time simply saying they were wrong and apologizing. As you note - for the 1st few weeks, you can give them a pass. But, once you know you're wrong, you have a responsibility to acknowledge it. For all the talk of COVID misinformation, we could apply that same label to much of what came from our government and public health officials.
For shutting down schools for over a year (long after it was clear school children were not vulnerable to Covid) and so putting enormous burdens on parents and doing significant social and educational damage to school children--especially the most socially and academically vulnerable.
Can you please, please, please always limit comments to paying subscribers? Maybe you’re thinking that you need it open to build subscribers’ habit of commenting, but for me the result has been the opposite. I stopped looking at the comments at all as they were really not a constructive place. I only looked today because you clarified that the cesspool is the result of a policy choice, not reflective of your more engaged readership.
Today Slow Boring posted an article about what Yglesias has learned from his years at Substack. Check out the comments. They are gated and there was an outpouring of people praising the quality of his comment boards.
- That Trump really means “are you better off than you were five years ago” but can’t say that because it sounds stupid
- Is counting on everyone to just ignore 2020 as a weird anomaly
- Just wants people to compare how the Democrats/Biden have handled the post-acute-phase-of-Covid world to how a hypothetical Trump administration would have handled it
IMO there are some strengths to this approach, but it neglects that the Dobbs decision has in fact made many people feel worse off than they were even five years ago.
Agree. People judge this in a ridiculously literal way: “are you better off than at the end of 2020?” The real subtext is, “do you feel better about the 4 years under Biden than the 4 years under me?”
As you say, people don’t penalize Trump for the black-swan pandemic happening. A better argument on the merits is, “even if you think the pre-pandemic Trump years were good, do you really want to bet on how he’ll handle the next crisis?” Unfortunately for Biden, who handled Covid recovery very well overall, people don’t associate him with the Covid recovery but do associate him with mishandling the Afghanistan withdrawal, the fiscal aftermath of Covid, and surging migrants at the border. I think perceptions of Covid, Afghanistan are unfair, but he hasn’t done himself any favors by appearing slow to fight inflation and completely ignoring the border until it was too late to matter.
This article feels pretty biased and one sides-y to me. Seems like a lot of the women quoted here are offended more because they don’t want trans women’s rights to be lumped in with the rights of biological women, not because they’re afraid of being assaulted by a trans woman in the bathroom. This is definitely a complicated issue, and I think you can have a good debate about things like, eg, trans women in professional sports, but this article only seems interested in pushing an agenda.
As a non-binary teacher, I’ve definitely become more and more scared over the past couple years. Seeing another teacher get fired in Florida just for using they/them pronouns scared me. I don’t care a ton about, eg, one jerk at work deciding to constantly misgender me, but there need to be some laws to protect us. I already feel like there are states I can’t move to because I wouldn’t be able to get a job, or wouldn’t be safe if I did get one.
Yes, they are definitely pushing an agenda, one I fully agree with. Women and girls (that is, human females) have the right to single-sex spaces (as do men, human males), full stop. And every mammal (humans are mammals) is either male or female. This is determined at conception and cannot be changed later by any means.
Personally, I just want my trans women friends to be able to feel safe and normal. I don’t know any cis women who feel threatened by the possibility of trans women in the bathroom, but almost all trans women I know feel at least a little scared of going into the men’s room. And I don’t blame them.
Like yes I agree there are two sexes biologically but I don’t think it matters much, except maybe in physical competitions like professional sports. In other settings gender matters more than what genitals you have.
When deciding if they're better off now than 4 years ago people look at just 3 things:
1. The price of food (relative to their income), which they pay for daily.
2. The price of gas (relative to their income), which they pay for weekly.
3. The price of housing (relative to their income), which they pay for monthly.
Those 3 things are CONSTANTLY in their faces.
For context my wife and I are both DINK professionals with a combined 90 years of work history, so we are fine, and OUR lifestyle is unaffected, although even WE are shocked at the increases in those 3 items.
So if you're like us, the answer to the question, "Are you better off now than 4 years ago" our answer is "No difference". HOWEVER, people like us are a small percentage of voters. If you're like most people the answer to that question is simply "NO".
I actually switched jobs twice during the “Great Resignation” and am making far more money than in 2020, even with inflation. But I recognize I’m in a fortunate minority. Also, it seems extremely unlikely I could repeat that trick in 2024 and in fact would be facing a substantial pay cut if I got laid off and had to find a new job now.
And, after traumatic events like Covid, society/culture doesn’t like to ruminate on it (unlike many comment sections which do). Most everything, from entertainment to socializing - run as fast as we can away from it. As if we want to forget it ever happened. (I was reminded of this recently after reading “The Women” Krstin Hannah’s book about Vietnam, when she says even the music changed - yes it did, from Rock n roll to disco!)
So Trumps campaign question triggers that desire to forget it ever happened.
Also, now that even MSM kind of admits Russiagate was a hoax and Hunter’s laptop is real, there’s a bit of “in retrospect” it wasn’t as bad as we thought going on?
I'm continually shocked that there's apparently no "relax after vax" contingent. Where are my "the math changed significantly after the vaccines came out" people at?
Honestly there were moments between 2020-22 where both sides of the political spectrum left me absolutely furious on COVID. Yep, sorry to “both sides” this one. Almost every economic problem since 2020 has been a direct consequence of lockdowns and the reactions. But with a few minimal, not economically disruptive precautions, hundreds of thousands of lives could have been saved. I was shocked someone famous didn’t try harder to speak for the sensible middle here, they would have had my full attention.
Generally I agree with Nate - and many other Americans - in that I think the COVID lockdowns were too long. But I'm curious about how much sentiment varies state-by-state, even between states with similar politics.
Anecdotally, I lived near Boston during the pandemic, but visited my partner in the Bay Area regularly. In Massachusetts, schools opened hybrid in September 2020, and resumed full time, in person classes between November and March (suburban districts most resumed in November or December, urban ones waited until February or March). A year after the pandemic, things felt normal again. People were going to concerts and eating at restaurants, everyone had returned to the office, people had stopped wearing masks all the time.
Visiting Berkeley, CA, was like going back several months in a time machine. Berkeley in May 2021 felt like Massachusetts in the winter of 2020. Almost every public place still required masks, and almost all restaurants were either still closed or only doing takeout. I'm not sure if the Berkeley schools were open at this point, but I know the San Francisco schools were still closed (they stayed completely remote until the end of May). In fact, public institutions in Berkeley (like the library) had shortened COVID hours and required everyone to wear masks until sometime in 2023 - yes, 2023.
There are things to criticize about MA's covid response. I wish urban schools had re-opened earlier in Massachusetts - those kids need in person learning the most, and the fact that the suburban schools opened months earlier widened existing inequalities. But, just as an ordinary person who spent time in both cities, the pandemic felt much longer in Berkeley than Boston.
Basically, my intuition is that pandemic politics are very local, and how you felt about the response probably varies a ton depending on where you live.
This is a fascinating question and a really thoughtful take (with a quite convincing anecdotal account of Mass. cf. California) - the idea that local policy is likely to be a major determinant of perceptions about COVID policy (i.e. reactions to state-by-state policy in the U.S. or (usually) national policy elsewhere). A rare case where actual local factors outweigh what people see on news coverage (by whatever means they pick it up)?
The funny thing is my MA friends were mostly complaining vociferously that it either didn’t open up fast enough (parents), or opened up way too fast (childless lefties).
In particular I remember a lot of rage that bars and restaurants opened up a couple months before day cares.
I think there was probably a significant amount of variations between industries/individual businesses because the state government mostly stayed out, besides encouraging schools to open faster. Day cares are mostly private and also probably a lot of them are owned by progressive people/cautious people, so I can definitely imagine them opening frustratingly slowly.
We were not going to concerts and having normal life in Boston during May 2021. Are you serious?
The next month we did have our major reopening, but in May 2021 the plan was to wait until August 18. I remember being excited to start going to outdoor beer gardens and getting that kind of social life back, but the status during May 2021 was that you had to order from a waiter while sitting at your own table. Indoor concerts didn't regularly return until mid Fall.
Fenway park during May 2021 had socially distanced seating of around 7,000.
I will give you that things majorly changed in the next few months, but it was still a long delay compared to most of the country, even if CA was worse.
I'm not trying to be too critical; I supported most restrictions for a while. It just seemed like they should have mostly stopped once the vaccine was available. Of course, given my age and health, I wasn't allowed to get the vaccine until May 2021, which was quite annoying.
Most people know that the pandemic was a black swan that isn’t going to repeat itself in the same form (yes there’ll be pandemics but not the same responses). His tweet means compare Trump to Biden; are you better off? Biden cares too little about inflation. He cares about sending money to other countries and forgiving student loans. That’s why he is going to lose in November. From, a democrat voter who voted for Biden in the primaries when most had written him off.
It's unfortunate that so few people are talking about how Biden is campaigning on continuing to reduce inflation, while Trump is campaigning on bringing it back! He wants across-the-board tariffs and cuts on immigration, which sounds like a recipe to bring inflation back.
I don’t think that’s a realistic ask when there are two candidates who have been president. Most people are going to vote on what they know rather than campaign gimmicks.
I agree that it’s unlikely that voters will think through the issues this way, but Trump’s tariff plan is likely to induce significant inflation. If the bet is on who will be better on inflation going forward, it’s going to be Trump.
Am I better off now rather than 4 years ago? Yes. Is the country? Yes.
Sustained job growth, inflation under control, Covid response of vaccine rollouts instead of bleach injections and anti parasitic medicine, infrastructure bills, semiconductor bills, allies working together to fight tyranny, green energy investment, zero impeachments, zero assaults on Congress.
What ever happened to the house’s impeachment investigation? Where did that go?
Exactly HOW does the house’s impeachment investigation affect your (or anyone else's) daily life? Wages MINUS inflation (aka 'net wages') is what the overwhelming majority of people use to determine whether they are I better off now rather than 4 years ago.
How has the investigation affected my life? It hasn’t. That is why it was a separate paragraph. It was just another example of how the gop isn’t interested in governing.
As for net wages, for most Americans their wage increases has outpaced inflation. So if that is how the “overwhelming majority of people” decide to vote, Biden should walk away with 65% of the vote in November.
While you are 'technically' correct, people don't vote on technicalities. To wit:
'Core Inflation' excludes Food and Energy which have FAR out paced wage gains and which are directly in people's faces constantly: Most people vote on what is in their faces.
Housing costs have also increased enormously, whether directly in the form of rent, or indirectly as those of us with mortgages have seen our property taxes go up with the rapid increase in the value of our houses.
Whether EITHER Party is 'interested in governing' plays a very small part in voter decisions (other than the politiclly active - which tend to get a disproportionate amount of the publicity). Who is President or which Party controls Congress has little direct effect on my daily life, which is why I tend to vote Third-Party (or not at all) in Federal Elections (I believe in a weak Federal Government so I want which ever major candidate that wins to have less of a 'mandate'). I never vote Third-Party in state and local elections because they DO affect my daily life.
I have no strong beliefs beyond The Second Law, Maxwell's Equations, and Wave-Particle-Duality.
For the most part if something doesn't directly affect my daily life I mind my own business. "I have no permanent Allies and I have no permanent Enemies: Only my Self-interest is Eternal". - Its what Economists call 'Rational Behavior".
I can only assume you are a white male since you are not worried about the federal government taking your rights and impacting you directly.
Also I am sorry that you live in a society with other people that are impacted by the government but you don’t care about anyone else, as long as you get yours.
"I can only assume you are a white male since you are not worried about the federal government taking your rights and impacting you directly"
Exactly, as long as the government doesn't pressure universities and businesses to hamper white males, for example by reducing their opportunities for admissions, job promotions, federal programs, there's no need for us white males to worry.
Perhaps the enlightened approach of the Nobel Prize committees for awarding the Physics, Chemistry and Medicine prizes should be the guide?
The vast majority of people spend 80% - 90% of their daily lives within a 16 mile radius of their homes, a rough estimate calculated as follows:
The average car is driven 12,000 miles/yr. Divide this by 365 and you get roughly 33 miles/day which is about a 16 mile radius.
In my case that would encompass about 400,000 people.
What happens within that Community of 400,000 directly impacts me, and what I do directly impacts it. That is my ’Sphere of Influence’ as we used to say in the Army. Therefore I actively participate in my community of roughly 400,000.
Now let's apply the 'Inverse Square Law’: Actions and events that impact my community of 400,000 or that my community or me can impact, decreases with distance from my home, which as I’ve noted above decreases with the inverse square of that distance.
At double the distance, which would be 32 miles from one's home, happenings and events have only 1/4 the effect. And at just 6 times the distance, 99 miles - roughly 2 hours by car - the impact would be 1/64 (about 1.5%) of the impact within the core 16 mile radius. And at that distance I’m not even at my state’s borders.
If you take a dispassionate analysis at what REALLY impacts people's lives and communities, the Inverse Square Law holds up very well in (almost) all cases.
I have no strong beliefs much beyond The Second Law, Maxwell’s Equations, and Wave-Particle-Duality.
When it comes to politics, I have no permanent Allies and no permanent enemies: Only my Self-Interest is Eternal. That’s what Economists would call ‘Rational Behavior’.
I’m sorry you have such a narrow view of your world. I have friends outside my driving bubble that I impact every day. They all have friends that worry they care about and care about them, so how I impact their lives impacts others.
There is also the idea of empathy for strangers, where I don’t need to know them personally to want them to be happy.
I know he doesn’t want to take any credit, but Operation Warp Speed was one of the great achievements of our government. Experts told Trump and his administration a vaccine could not be developed and deployed in less than 4 years. Instead of accepting their analysis, his team built on prior investments, bet on multiple options, and ended up with what still appear to be effective vaccines with limited side effects. Maybe we could have and should have loosened restrictions more quickly, but vaccine development and rollout is what accelerated recovery and the move to the new normal. If the election was held in April or May of 2021, does Biden win?
BLM turned out to be a huge financial scam, after burning down cities, costing billions in damages, and the murders of many people. All for Floyd who was convicted of eight crimes, spent four years in jail for aggravated robbery in a home invasion and pointed a gun at the belly of a pregnant woman.
The best campaign ad for the Republicans would be to simply post actuarial tables showing the life expectancy of an 82 year old, followed by a lingering picture of Kamala Harris.
As a public health physician, working for a large organization with on the ground workers, I did a lot of pandemic response for two years. Your take on Covid is not off, and was something I was saying after a few weeks/months into the pandemic. Very early we needed to take significant action in the face of uncertainty, but we should have adapted much more quickly to information we had. I think a lot of public policies don't adequately take into account tail risks (like inflation after pandemic spending, it may not have been likely but it was extremely consequential and at least somewhat foreseeable). But this time we overreacted, and kept that up for a long time when we could and should have been more responsive to both information we had and the public response. No public health policy exists in a scientific vacuum, you always have to consider the context and costs.
To tell the truth, the dogma and what looked to be forced speech and intimidation and flat-out lying during the 2020 riots, was what caused me to rethink what kind of party the Democrats were beginning to build. I put entirely too much hope into Biden governing like a moderate. I blame all of 2020 on Democrats, even the Covid insanity. The reason for this is that even at the time, it seemed they were just having all sorts of panic attacks about Trump no matter what was happening. Very early on, it didn't feel like we were all trying to do the best we could. It felt like they were using the riots and Covid to cause chaos and fundraise. I remember questioning everything and being very confused because it seemed like we weren't talking about a health issue in good faith. The response was political. And, then Joe got elected and went all in on DEI and Transworld and division. I feel ripped off, like I was sold a bill of goods.
You blame the party that didn’t control the Senate, Supreme Court or Presidency for “all of 2020”?
Who cares if Democrats were having panic attacks about Trump - he was the one in charge!
And the problem is that Trump didn't push back hard enough against covid closures and BLM riots, which were fully endorsed Democrat policies. Trump 2.0 will be better at pushing back, which is why he's leading in all the polls.
Well Trump went on TV spouting nonsense for an hour every day while everyone was suffering and desperate for reasonable leadership. I think the reactions to him were understandable. Would've been a lot better if he just didn't do the TV part.
I disagree the reactions were reasonable because they were driven by politics rather than truth and it was a health matter. However, I agree with the TV part. He shouldn't have done it. Many times, if he would just shut it and focus on policy, everyone would be better off. His mouth-running is a major issue.
I think if you had no idea what his political stance was and you were purely judging him by what he was saying you would think that he did not know anything about health matters.
I agree. I think tons of people, including journalists, assigned themselves experts on health. Some workers on social media who aren't qualified to remove a band-aid correctly muted highly qualified doctors and epidemiologists because they didn't go with the narrative, even though they've been proven right over and over again. No different than Biden standing up there telling the world the shots would stop the spreading, masks work, and there was nothing risky about the shots. It's all a matter of people staying in their lane.
"With the benefit of hindsight — and the fading memories of the peak death tolls — COVID-era restrictions are now viewed as having gone too far"
Or at least the benefit of insularity: the belief that science stops at the US border and no one overseas, for example Sweden, has anything of value to add. Sweden has significantly lower mortality than UK, France, Spain with no lockdowns or school closures. They followed their plans in place for handling pandemics.
That approach was advocated, and censored, in the Great Barrington Declaration started by epidemiologists at Harvard, Stanford and Oxford.
https://unherd.com/newsroom/anders-tegnell-sweden-won-the-argument-on-covid/
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/sweden-report-coronavirus-1.6364154
COVID was an opportunity for America's radicals to test their ability to suppress the population to North Korean levels. Forgive and forget?
To highlight the point of insularity even more - New Zealand and Australia (and China!) had much more radical covid policies and this served them very well. Well, for the short term in China because they never had a good vaccine rollout.
Thousands of people are alive in New Zealand and Australia who would otherwise be dead if we'd reacted like Europe and North America. Our economies were not hurt more badly than those who were more relaxes (one might say negligent) in their response. You might complain that this comparison isn't fair, and New Zealand and Australia are islands. But other islands exist too - like Hawaii, Great Britain, and the island of Ireland. And those islands saw catastrophic death rates just like the rest of Europe and North America.
It also ignores things working against countries that did well. Consider the resources available to tackle the pandemic - per-capita GDP in the US for instance drastically outstrips that of New Zealand. They couldn't use any of those extra thousands of dollars per person to secure their land borders during the pandemic if they really wanted to?
When raising this I run into a lot of people saying "well the US couldn't have done this because states can't close borders, etc". This is not an excuse. The fact that the US has a low ability to restrict movement in the case of a severe pandemic is a political choice. Everything relating to the failure to respond properly to the pandemic was a political choice. Some choices were made before the pandemic and some during it, but pandemics are a known quantity. We're lucky covid wasn't as severe as the flu pandemic of 1918.
"Thousands of people are alive in New Zealand and Australia who would otherwise be dead if we'd reacted like Europe and North America"
You have no way of proving this rigorously because you can't test the alternative.
What you can do is compare actual results in Sweden with other countries and the Swedish policies show much better results than many countries that adopted harsh lockdown measures. That is sufficient to show that harsh lockdown measures were not necessary for handling COVID.
The other results that have been measured are: 1) loss of educational achievement 2) "excess mortality", which means deaths above what could be expected based on prior years. This accounts for people missing cancer screening and EKG tests (there is no such thing as a "routine cancer screening"; all are essential to catching a life-threatening disease at an early stage when it can be treated).
"That is sufficient to show that harsh lockdown measures were not necessary for handling COVID."
The word "necessary" is doing a lot of work there. Strictly, it's not "necessary" to do anything about pandemics at all - you can just let as many people die as you want. But consider Sweden, and whether they did all that was "necessary". Sweden had ~20 000 people die over the projected amount without covid. Yes, that looks extremely good compared to the US, because if they had a similar pandemic outcome to the US they would have had 40 000 people die. Saving the lives of 20 000 people is a great thing to do.
On the other hand, if Sweden had had a pandemic outcome like New Zealand's, they would have only had ~1000 deaths. If saving 20 000 out of 40 000 lives (using the US response as a baseline) is so commendable to the point where we say "Sweden did what was necessary", what would we call saving 39 000 out of 40 000 lives? Why do we not care about the extra 19 000 people that can be saved?
To return to the more commonly understood US case for clearer context, the US had 1 200 000 people die. If they responded as well as Sweden, they could get that down to 660 000 deaths. Sure, perhaps the US could have done that without lockdowns. That'd be a damn sight better than what actually happened, true.
But if they'd locked down the way New Zealand did, we would expect closer to 37 000 deaths. over 500 000 people's lives is an awful lot to dismiss out of hand on the grounds that "You have no way of proving this rigorously because you can't test the alternative."
Sweden was among the five best countries for excess deaths, among developed countries, although it did lag NZ. Obviously that's hardly the same as letting as many people die as you want.
Sweden’s performance is sufficiently good to show that different measures taken in other countries were not the only way to reduce excess deaths; in English we might say they weren't necessary.
https://www.governing.com/now/the-tragedy-of-avoidable-covid-deaths
The US has about 35,000 traffic deaths per year. They could easily be reduced to 0 by enacting a national 5mph speed limit but other tradeoffs intervene.
Of course tradeoffs exist. But would you care to point to some of the tradeoffs where New Zealand suffered unduly compared to Sweden or the US, where those tradeoffs might be worth the lives of 500 000 people in the US?
The US is not at issue, it's the Swedish response that I'm pointing out.
The NZ Public Health Response Act of 2020 allowed police to enter homes without a warrant to enforce health restrictions. That loss of personal liberties, enshrined since at least the English Civil Rights Act of 1689, is worth the tradeoffs to the Swedish model which was not 500K deaths.
You don't limit your highway speed to 5mph and I preserve some measures of individual liberty.
North America simply doesn't have the luxury of being a small island that can close its borders like new zealand, or being incredibly sparsely populated like australia.
Hawaii is a series of small islands. Why could their borders have not been closed?
And when people in cities of five million people in Australia were infected by covid, why did the covid virus care that those cities were adjacent to sparsely populated areas?
I'm not entirely sure how to answer this. North America is so much more integrated economically across states than Australia and so much more connected through infrastructure I really have no idea what it would take to close down every state's borders. Were talking tens of thousands of road blocks, tens of millions of people who work across state lines not being able to to get to work. NYC alone, millions of people commute from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut every day. The northeastern seaboard is one continuous city with 50 million people living in it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_megalopolis. The US alone has 335 million people living in it with so many different cultural expectations and norms, it's utterly different than NZ and AU. A more honest comparison would be to the EU, where we saw wide variance in COVID outcomes across countries the same way we did across states here.
There are so many landlocked states that depend on states with ports for their imported goods and to export their own goods. There are tens of thousands of migrants that cross the US/Mexico border every summer to harvest food on farms.
This just isn't a continent that has the benefit of being a couple of coastal cities that can stop interacting with one another. All of this integration is a major part of why the US is so wealthy. In Hawaii's case, the entire economy is based on tourism - even if they could close their borders, would they?
"North America is so much more integrated economically across states than Australia and so much more connected through infrastructure I really have no idea what it would take to close down every state's borders."
You don't close down every state's borders. You close the borders between areas where covid is under control and areas where it is not, or where it cannot be verified to be under control. When Auckland had a delta outbreak, New Zealand restricted travel between Auckland and the rest of the country, and Auckland had more severe internal restrictions. Same thing when the Northland region had covid less under control than other areas. The places we put up some of these boundaries weren't even pre-existing administrative boundaries in a lot of cases, and yet we managed.
Talking about how many million people you have doesn't really make that much difference. You have 15 or 80 times as many people to control, and 15 or 80 times as many people and resources to enforce that control.
"A more honest comparison would be to the EU, where we saw wide variance in COVID outcomes across countries the same way we did across states here."
But this comparison is of no interest because no part of the EU ever made a serious attempt at a zero-covid strategy. My point isn't to say "this country did badly and this country did well", but instead to say "what options were available"? If country X had done Y instead of Z, could things have been better? In service to that, we have a number of excellent case studies.
The US with its states is often talked about as having dozens of laboratories for studying effective policies. Why ignore evidence of an effective policy implemented in another country? Sure, there are differences. Some differences might make it harder to control pandemics. Some differences might make it *easier* - like, for example, the much higher per-capita GDP in the US compared to New Zealand. A lot more money available to effect the same outcome.
"There are so many landlocked states that depend on states with ports for their imported goods and to export their own goods."
New Zealand has the same processes in play. The cities don't grow their own food. Food was either shipped in from overseas or grown locally and transported across internal covid-boundaries. This is a logistical challenge, not an impossibility. This is also the entire reason for the distinction of "essential workers". Essential work continued at all times in New Zealand. We never stopped all economic activity.
"There are tens of thousands of migrants that cross the US/Mexico border every summer to harvest food on farms."
We also have huge numbers of migrants come in from various pacific islands to harvest the produce from orchards.
>In Hawaii's case, the entire economy is based on tourism - even if they could close their borders, would they?
Parts of New Zealand are as largely tourist-dependent as Hawaii is. They had the same restrictions as everyone else. People whose income was restricted due to pandemic rules were compensated. As to whether they *would* close their borders - this gets to the heart of the matter. There is no reason at all to think places other than China, Australia, and New Zealand couldn't have successfully implemented covid-zero policies to achieve better outcomes. What is clear, though, is that most placed never attempted to do this. It was always a political choice. People chose not to control the pandemic.
That's a good point--censorship always raises the question of what exactly is one trying to hide, and why? Then, calling it "misinformation" then implies that people are too stupid to know the difference, and just causes people to double down on their skepticism as to the reasons for the censorship.
Exactly: "misinformation" simply means "stuff I don't want anyone to hear about"
A recent example was John Kerry, our former climate czar, saying it was disinformation that cold weather hampered charging electric vehicles.
My tenuous memories of thermodynamics are that the free energy of a system increases when the temperature goes down and that chemical reactions, like charging a battery, are inhibited when free energy rises. But this is now misinformation.
However, we can, apparently, continue to use thermodynamics for cooking: mix the ingredients and raise the temperature, lowering the free energy, so the chemical reactions take place. Works better than mixing ingredients and putting them in the freezer.
I saw one of those "In This House We Believe" package-deal-believer signs, and "Science Is Real" is now "Climate Change Is Real". Not saying climate change isn't real, but apparently science isn't always "real" now. Especially now that we have a lot of science coming out that doesn't fit The Narrative.
For example, from Judith Curry, former chair of Geoscience at Georgia Tech
https://judithcurry.com/about/
Well said. Instead of 'Follow the Science' the new tag-line should be 'Follow the Narrative'. For the NYT their motto should be changed from "All the News That's Fit To Print" to "All the News That Fits the Narrative".
"All The News That Fits, We Print"
I like your version better than mine. Good job!
Refreshing to see someone on this site besides me who understands The Second Law and the Gibbs Free Energy. Well said sir!
While I'm not a fan of the various conspiracy theorists, don't you think that the COVID overregulation significantly contributed to pulling the country apart? The "elites" decided what was best for us which then leads to people losing all faith in institutions. While the us vs them was always there, it exacerbated it. Even now, the public health and governmental officials have a very tough time simply saying they were wrong and apologizing. As you note - for the 1st few weeks, you can give them a pass. But, once you know you're wrong, you have a responsibility to acknowledge it. For all the talk of COVID misinformation, we could apply that same label to much of what came from our government and public health officials.
What exactly should they be apologizing for?
For shutting down schools for over a year (long after it was clear school children were not vulnerable to Covid) and so putting enormous burdens on parents and doing significant social and educational damage to school children--especially the most socially and academically vulnerable.
Can you please, please, please always limit comments to paying subscribers? Maybe you’re thinking that you need it open to build subscribers’ habit of commenting, but for me the result has been the opposite. I stopped looking at the comments at all as they were really not a constructive place. I only looked today because you clarified that the cesspool is the result of a policy choice, not reflective of your more engaged readership.
Today Slow Boring posted an article about what Yglesias has learned from his years at Substack. Check out the comments. They are gated and there was an outpouring of people praising the quality of his comment boards.
Comments being restricted to subscribers only has gotten me to pay for more than one substack.
I would say there is still more of a cesspool here even among the paying readership than at Yglesias' site. Kind of surprising TBH.
Shouldn’t it be “worse off” in the first sentence? Or “you are probably better off”?
Shoot, my bad. I think I have a mental block about double negatives. Thanks for catching and now fixed.
*Thanks for not missing and now fixed.
But otherwise fully agreed with the analysis 👍
Isn’t the simple answer here:
- That Trump really means “are you better off than you were five years ago” but can’t say that because it sounds stupid
- Is counting on everyone to just ignore 2020 as a weird anomaly
- Just wants people to compare how the Democrats/Biden have handled the post-acute-phase-of-Covid world to how a hypothetical Trump administration would have handled it
IMO there are some strengths to this approach, but it neglects that the Dobbs decision has in fact made many people feel worse off than they were even five years ago.
Agree. People judge this in a ridiculously literal way: “are you better off than at the end of 2020?” The real subtext is, “do you feel better about the 4 years under Biden than the 4 years under me?”
As you say, people don’t penalize Trump for the black-swan pandemic happening. A better argument on the merits is, “even if you think the pre-pandemic Trump years were good, do you really want to bet on how he’ll handle the next crisis?” Unfortunately for Biden, who handled Covid recovery very well overall, people don’t associate him with the Covid recovery but do associate him with mishandling the Afghanistan withdrawal, the fiscal aftermath of Covid, and surging migrants at the border. I think perceptions of Covid, Afghanistan are unfair, but he hasn’t done himself any favors by appearing slow to fight inflation and completely ignoring the border until it was too late to matter.
Add to that Biden's full-on assault on women's rights:
https://womensliberationfront.org/news/women-outraged-over-regulations-replacing-sex-with-gender-identity-in-federal-civil-rights-laws
This article feels pretty biased and one sides-y to me. Seems like a lot of the women quoted here are offended more because they don’t want trans women’s rights to be lumped in with the rights of biological women, not because they’re afraid of being assaulted by a trans woman in the bathroom. This is definitely a complicated issue, and I think you can have a good debate about things like, eg, trans women in professional sports, but this article only seems interested in pushing an agenda.
As a non-binary teacher, I’ve definitely become more and more scared over the past couple years. Seeing another teacher get fired in Florida just for using they/them pronouns scared me. I don’t care a ton about, eg, one jerk at work deciding to constantly misgender me, but there need to be some laws to protect us. I already feel like there are states I can’t move to because I wouldn’t be able to get a job, or wouldn’t be safe if I did get one.
Yes, they are definitely pushing an agenda, one I fully agree with. Women and girls (that is, human females) have the right to single-sex spaces (as do men, human males), full stop. And every mammal (humans are mammals) is either male or female. This is determined at conception and cannot be changed later by any means.
Personally, I just want my trans women friends to be able to feel safe and normal. I don’t know any cis women who feel threatened by the possibility of trans women in the bathroom, but almost all trans women I know feel at least a little scared of going into the men’s room. And I don’t blame them.
Like yes I agree there are two sexes biologically but I don’t think it matters much, except maybe in physical competitions like professional sports. In other settings gender matters more than what genitals you have.
" I don’t know any cis women who feel threatened by the possibility of trans women in the bathroom"
Then you must not know very many women. And many women have been silenced by threats if they complain about men in their single-sex spaces.
But they are fighting back, and will continue to fight.
https://womensliberationfront.org
https://womensdeclarationusa.com
https://www.iwf.org
I'll keep this simple:
When deciding if they're better off now than 4 years ago people look at just 3 things:
1. The price of food (relative to their income), which they pay for daily.
2. The price of gas (relative to their income), which they pay for weekly.
3. The price of housing (relative to their income), which they pay for monthly.
Those 3 things are CONSTANTLY in their faces.
For context my wife and I are both DINK professionals with a combined 90 years of work history, so we are fine, and OUR lifestyle is unaffected, although even WE are shocked at the increases in those 3 items.
So if you're like us, the answer to the question, "Are you better off now than 4 years ago" our answer is "No difference". HOWEVER, people like us are a small percentage of voters. If you're like most people the answer to that question is simply "NO".
I actually switched jobs twice during the “Great Resignation” and am making far more money than in 2020, even with inflation. But I recognize I’m in a fortunate minority. Also, it seems extremely unlikely I could repeat that trick in 2024 and in fact would be facing a substantial pay cut if I got laid off and had to find a new job now.
Good summary of the argument.
I agree.
And, after traumatic events like Covid, society/culture doesn’t like to ruminate on it (unlike many comment sections which do). Most everything, from entertainment to socializing - run as fast as we can away from it. As if we want to forget it ever happened. (I was reminded of this recently after reading “The Women” Krstin Hannah’s book about Vietnam, when she says even the music changed - yes it did, from Rock n roll to disco!)
So Trumps campaign question triggers that desire to forget it ever happened.
Also, now that even MSM kind of admits Russiagate was a hoax and Hunter’s laptop is real, there’s a bit of “in retrospect” it wasn’t as bad as we thought going on?
I'm continually shocked that there's apparently no "relax after vax" contingent. Where are my "the math changed significantly after the vaccines came out" people at?
They're the silent majority.
Honestly there were moments between 2020-22 where both sides of the political spectrum left me absolutely furious on COVID. Yep, sorry to “both sides” this one. Almost every economic problem since 2020 has been a direct consequence of lockdowns and the reactions. But with a few minimal, not economically disruptive precautions, hundreds of thousands of lives could have been saved. I was shocked someone famous didn’t try harder to speak for the sensible middle here, they would have had my full attention.
Generally I agree with Nate - and many other Americans - in that I think the COVID lockdowns were too long. But I'm curious about how much sentiment varies state-by-state, even between states with similar politics.
Anecdotally, I lived near Boston during the pandemic, but visited my partner in the Bay Area regularly. In Massachusetts, schools opened hybrid in September 2020, and resumed full time, in person classes between November and March (suburban districts most resumed in November or December, urban ones waited until February or March). A year after the pandemic, things felt normal again. People were going to concerts and eating at restaurants, everyone had returned to the office, people had stopped wearing masks all the time.
Visiting Berkeley, CA, was like going back several months in a time machine. Berkeley in May 2021 felt like Massachusetts in the winter of 2020. Almost every public place still required masks, and almost all restaurants were either still closed or only doing takeout. I'm not sure if the Berkeley schools were open at this point, but I know the San Francisco schools were still closed (they stayed completely remote until the end of May). In fact, public institutions in Berkeley (like the library) had shortened COVID hours and required everyone to wear masks until sometime in 2023 - yes, 2023.
There are things to criticize about MA's covid response. I wish urban schools had re-opened earlier in Massachusetts - those kids need in person learning the most, and the fact that the suburban schools opened months earlier widened existing inequalities. But, just as an ordinary person who spent time in both cities, the pandemic felt much longer in Berkeley than Boston.
Basically, my intuition is that pandemic politics are very local, and how you felt about the response probably varies a ton depending on where you live.
This is a fascinating question and a really thoughtful take (with a quite convincing anecdotal account of Mass. cf. California) - the idea that local policy is likely to be a major determinant of perceptions about COVID policy (i.e. reactions to state-by-state policy in the U.S. or (usually) national policy elsewhere). A rare case where actual local factors outweigh what people see on news coverage (by whatever means they pick it up)?
The funny thing is my MA friends were mostly complaining vociferously that it either didn’t open up fast enough (parents), or opened up way too fast (childless lefties).
In particular I remember a lot of rage that bars and restaurants opened up a couple months before day cares.
I think there was probably a significant amount of variations between industries/individual businesses because the state government mostly stayed out, besides encouraging schools to open faster. Day cares are mostly private and also probably a lot of them are owned by progressive people/cautious people, so I can definitely imagine them opening frustratingly slowly.
We were not going to concerts and having normal life in Boston during May 2021. Are you serious?
The next month we did have our major reopening, but in May 2021 the plan was to wait until August 18. I remember being excited to start going to outdoor beer gardens and getting that kind of social life back, but the status during May 2021 was that you had to order from a waiter while sitting at your own table. Indoor concerts didn't regularly return until mid Fall.
Fenway park during May 2021 had socially distanced seating of around 7,000.
I will give you that things majorly changed in the next few months, but it was still a long delay compared to most of the country, even if CA was worse.
I'm not trying to be too critical; I supported most restrictions for a while. It just seemed like they should have mostly stopped once the vaccine was available. Of course, given my age and health, I wasn't allowed to get the vaccine until May 2021, which was quite annoying.
Summer 2020 was definitely peak Mommy State.
Most people know that the pandemic was a black swan that isn’t going to repeat itself in the same form (yes there’ll be pandemics but not the same responses). His tweet means compare Trump to Biden; are you better off? Biden cares too little about inflation. He cares about sending money to other countries and forgiving student loans. That’s why he is going to lose in November. From, a democrat voter who voted for Biden in the primaries when most had written him off.
It's unfortunate that so few people are talking about how Biden is campaigning on continuing to reduce inflation, while Trump is campaigning on bringing it back! He wants across-the-board tariffs and cuts on immigration, which sounds like a recipe to bring inflation back.
I don’t think that’s a realistic ask when there are two candidates who have been president. Most people are going to vote on what they know rather than campaign gimmicks.
I agree that it’s unlikely that voters will think through the issues this way, but Trump’s tariff plan is likely to induce significant inflation. If the bet is on who will be better on inflation going forward, it’s going to be Trump.
"Trump’s tariff plan is likely to induce significant inflation"
And then there's the scientific approach pioneered by Galileo to test the theory by looking at the facts:
https://www.investopedia.com/us-inflation-rate-by-president-8546447
"Biden is campaigning on continuing to reduce inflation" with the ultimate goal to bring it below 2%, as it was during the Trump administration
https://www.investopedia.com/us-inflation-rate-by-president-8546447
Am I better off now rather than 4 years ago? Yes. Is the country? Yes.
Sustained job growth, inflation under control, Covid response of vaccine rollouts instead of bleach injections and anti parasitic medicine, infrastructure bills, semiconductor bills, allies working together to fight tyranny, green energy investment, zero impeachments, zero assaults on Congress.
What ever happened to the house’s impeachment investigation? Where did that go?
Exactly HOW does the house’s impeachment investigation affect your (or anyone else's) daily life? Wages MINUS inflation (aka 'net wages') is what the overwhelming majority of people use to determine whether they are I better off now rather than 4 years ago.
How has the investigation affected my life? It hasn’t. That is why it was a separate paragraph. It was just another example of how the gop isn’t interested in governing.
As for net wages, for most Americans their wage increases has outpaced inflation. So if that is how the “overwhelming majority of people” decide to vote, Biden should walk away with 65% of the vote in November.
While you are 'technically' correct, people don't vote on technicalities. To wit:
'Core Inflation' excludes Food and Energy which have FAR out paced wage gains and which are directly in people's faces constantly: Most people vote on what is in their faces.
Housing costs have also increased enormously, whether directly in the form of rent, or indirectly as those of us with mortgages have seen our property taxes go up with the rapid increase in the value of our houses.
Whether EITHER Party is 'interested in governing' plays a very small part in voter decisions (other than the politiclly active - which tend to get a disproportionate amount of the publicity). Who is President or which Party controls Congress has little direct effect on my daily life, which is why I tend to vote Third-Party (or not at all) in Federal Elections (I believe in a weak Federal Government so I want which ever major candidate that wins to have less of a 'mandate'). I never vote Third-Party in state and local elections because they DO affect my daily life.
I have no strong beliefs beyond The Second Law, Maxwell's Equations, and Wave-Particle-Duality.
For the most part if something doesn't directly affect my daily life I mind my own business. "I have no permanent Allies and I have no permanent Enemies: Only my Self-interest is Eternal". - Its what Economists call 'Rational Behavior".
I can only assume you are a white male since you are not worried about the federal government taking your rights and impacting you directly.
Also I am sorry that you live in a society with other people that are impacted by the government but you don’t care about anyone else, as long as you get yours.
"I can only assume you are a white male since you are not worried about the federal government taking your rights and impacting you directly"
Exactly, as long as the government doesn't pressure universities and businesses to hamper white males, for example by reducing their opportunities for admissions, job promotions, federal programs, there's no need for us white males to worry.
Perhaps the enlightened approach of the Nobel Prize committees for awarding the Physics, Chemistry and Medicine prizes should be the guide?
No person is an island. That said:
The vast majority of people spend 80% - 90% of their daily lives within a 16 mile radius of their homes, a rough estimate calculated as follows:
The average car is driven 12,000 miles/yr. Divide this by 365 and you get roughly 33 miles/day which is about a 16 mile radius.
In my case that would encompass about 400,000 people.
What happens within that Community of 400,000 directly impacts me, and what I do directly impacts it. That is my ’Sphere of Influence’ as we used to say in the Army. Therefore I actively participate in my community of roughly 400,000.
Now let's apply the 'Inverse Square Law’: Actions and events that impact my community of 400,000 or that my community or me can impact, decreases with distance from my home, which as I’ve noted above decreases with the inverse square of that distance.
At double the distance, which would be 32 miles from one's home, happenings and events have only 1/4 the effect. And at just 6 times the distance, 99 miles - roughly 2 hours by car - the impact would be 1/64 (about 1.5%) of the impact within the core 16 mile radius. And at that distance I’m not even at my state’s borders.
If you take a dispassionate analysis at what REALLY impacts people's lives and communities, the Inverse Square Law holds up very well in (almost) all cases.
I have no strong beliefs much beyond The Second Law, Maxwell’s Equations, and Wave-Particle-Duality.
When it comes to politics, I have no permanent Allies and no permanent enemies: Only my Self-Interest is Eternal. That’s what Economists would call ‘Rational Behavior’.
I’m sorry you have such a narrow view of your world. I have friends outside my driving bubble that I impact every day. They all have friends that worry they care about and care about them, so how I impact their lives impacts others.
There is also the idea of empathy for strangers, where I don’t need to know them personally to want them to be happy.
I also like gated comments.
I know he doesn’t want to take any credit, but Operation Warp Speed was one of the great achievements of our government. Experts told Trump and his administration a vaccine could not be developed and deployed in less than 4 years. Instead of accepting their analysis, his team built on prior investments, bet on multiple options, and ended up with what still appear to be effective vaccines with limited side effects. Maybe we could have and should have loosened restrictions more quickly, but vaccine development and rollout is what accelerated recovery and the move to the new normal. If the election was held in April or May of 2021, does Biden win?
BLM turned out to be a huge financial scam, after burning down cities, costing billions in damages, and the murders of many people. All for Floyd who was convicted of eight crimes, spent four years in jail for aggravated robbery in a home invasion and pointed a gun at the belly of a pregnant woman.
The best campaign ad for the Republicans would be to simply post actuarial tables showing the life expectancy of an 82 year old, followed by a lingering picture of Kamala Harris.