The United Kingdom’s Queen Elizabeth has died. She will be succeeded by her eldest son, Charles. The people of Britain, many of them for the first time in their lives, will have the occasion to say “God save the King!” This despite the majority no longer believing in God.

I am not much of a monarchist. Indeed, that is true of quite a number of Britons these days (38% these days, more among the young).

Now the fate of the monarchy is in Charles’s hands. Will he reign under his own name or will he assume another as king? It has been over a century since the United Kingdom has had a king under other than his given name but more than 330 since it has had a king named Charles.

Will he be the last king of the United Kingdom?

And how do you know?

I read just about everything I come across about the war and I honestly have no idea. Everything from “Russia has already lost” to “Russia’s victory is inevitable”, “Ukraine has begun a counter-offensive” to “Ukraine’s counter-offensive has already been defeated”.

The volume of propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation is so great I honestly don’t know how anyone can be confident in the outcome.

There has been an interesting development in ongoing research on COVID-19. From a piece at SciTechDaily:

A scientific breakthrough against COVID-19 has been realized by Tel Aviv University. A team of scientists from the university has demonstrated that antibodies isolated from the immune system of recovered COVID-19 patients are effective in neutralizing all known strains of the virus. This includes the Delta and the Omicron variants. This discovery may eliminate the need for repeated booster vaccinations and strengthen the immune system of populations at risk, according to the researchers.

Dr. Natalia Freund and doctoral students Michael Mor and Ruofan Lee of the Department of Clinical Microbiology and Immunology at the Sackler Faculty of Medicine led the research. The study was conducted in collaboration with Dr. Ben Croker of the University of California San Diego (UCSD). Prof. Ye Xiang of Tsinghua University in Beijing as well as Prof. Meital Gal-Tanamy and Dr. Moshe Dessau of Bar-Ilan University also took part in the study. The study was published on August 5 in the Nature journal Communications Biology.

The current study is a continuation of a preliminary study that was conducted in October 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 crisis. At that time, Dr. Freund and her colleagues sequenced all the B immune system cells from the blood of people in Israel who had recovered from the original COVID strain. They isolated nine antibodies that the patients produced. The scientists have now found that some of these antibodies are exceptionally effective in neutralizing the new coronavirus variants, Delta and Omicron.

Dr. Freund: “In the previous study, we showed that the various antibodies that are formed in response to infection with the original virus are directed against different sites of the virus. The most effective antibodies were those that bound to the virus’s ‘spike’ protein, in the same place where the spike binds to the cellular receptor ACE2. Of course, we were not the only ones to isolate these antibodies, and the global health system made extensive use of them until the arrival of the different variants of the coronavirus, which in fact rendered most of those antibodies useless.

“In the current study, we proved that two other antibodies, TAU-1109 and TAU-2310, which bind the viral spike protein in a different area from the region where most of the antibodies were concentrated until now (and were, therefore, less effective in neutralizing the original strain) are actually very effective in neutralizing the Delta and Omicron variants. According to our findings, the effectiveness of the first antibody, TAU-1109, in neutralizing the Omicron strain is 92%, and in neutralizing the Delta strain, 90%. The second antibody, TAU-2310, neutralizes the Omicron variant with an efficacy of 84%, and the Delta variant with an efficacy of 97%.”

If this discovery can be capitalized on, it might increase the likelihood of actually stamping out COVID-19, the much-touted “herd resistance”. Present vaccines are clearly not effective enough and the need for repeated vaccinations reduces the likelihood of people actually seeking them.

Does anyone see more blood during the course of a professional career than embalmers? Embalmers or at least some of them are reporting they’re seeing some weird stuff in blood that they haven’t seen before: unusual clots. At Politifact Naseem Ferdowsi takes it seriously enough to debunk the claims that the clots have been caused by the COVID-19 vaccines:

Embalmers and funeral home workers say they are noticing an increase in unusual blood clots among the deceased. Some of them, without evidence, are attributing it to the COVID-19 vaccines.

One of the claims comes from an article titled “Embalmers finding ‘strange clots’ in jabbed people” and published by NewsWars, a website run by Alex Jones that has a history of spreading fake news and conspiracy theories.

“I actually pulled this long, fibrous-looking clot out prior to embalming … . At the front end of it, it looks like a normal blood clot, but that white fibrous-looking stuff just isn’t normal,” Alabama embalmer Richard Hirschman was quoted in the article as saying. Hirschman added that “my gut is telling me” it’s caused by the vaccine.

Hirschman shared similar claims on the “Dr. Jane Ruby Show,” and with PolitiFact when we contacted him.

What struck me about the report was that it was so consistent with some of the reported effects of COVID-19. I won’t go so far as to dismiss the possibility of their being caused by the vaccine out of hand but IMO these clots are more likely to be the consequence of the virus than they are of the vaccine. We’ll need more than sporadic anecdotal evidence.

One thing that does concern me is that it has been my experience that being able to see something you’re not looking for is a gift.

The editors of the Washington Post seem convinced that the solution to our labor force issues is more immigration:

Two things are simultaneously true. First, the Biden administration has mishandled immigration messaging by telling migrants not to come even as it pressed for more humane — meaning relaxed — border policies. Second, without a more forward-looking immigration policy, one more closely aligned with labor-force demands in an economy starved for workers, the nation’s long-term economic growth prospects will be stunted.

I am not opposed to increased immigration if it means bringing in the workers we actually need but I think the editors are drawing the wrong conclusions from the data. Consider this graph:

I also went to the trouble of determining the wages of all classes of workers in constant dollars. Short version: wages of individuals with college degrees or better are keeping up with inflation; wages for all other workers are not.

Demand is not determined by “Want Ads” but by willingness to pay. I will purchase every $20 gold piece you care to sell for its face value—$20. That cannot be interpreted as high demand.

If there were a high demand for workers without college degrees, their wages would be rising in real terms. They aren’t. Furthermore, there is a roughly 35% premium paid to legal immigrants without college degrees or better, cf. here. Solving that by legalizing all workers rests on a dLAWassumption: that the five bucks per hour saved by hiring illegal immigrants doesn’t result in more of them being hired. I think it does. Also note the small increase in the slope of the wages for workers without college educations in 2019. You can’t make a trend from a single point but that at least provides some indication that limiting illegal immigration resulted in the wages of the workers with whom they were in competition to rise a little.

My conclusion is quite different from that of the editors. My proposal would be to grow less produce requiring hand labor, have fewer fast food restaurants that demand people working at minimum wage or less, do less construction that depends on workers earning minimum wage or less, let Americans mow their lawns, and so on.

Thinking otherwise is objectively wanting a national economy that depends on a continuing flow of new workers who don’t earn a living wage and orients itself around such an untenable situation.

I strongly suspect that just about everybody thinks that the U. S. could have handled the COVID-19 pandemic better. In his most recent Wall Street Journal column William Galston identifies two particular areas he cites as evidence of that, life expectancy:

A report recently released by the National Center for Health Statistics revealed that during the peak pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, life expectancy in the U.S.—the most basic measure of national well-being—declined by a stunning 2.7 years, from 78.8 to 76.1 years, the lowest level since 1996. Put simply, the pandemic erased the effects of a quarter-century of progress in medical innovation and healthier lifestyles.

These losses weren’t distributed evenly across the population. Life expectancy declined by 3.1 years for men but 2.3 years for women. Asian Americans showed the smallest loss (2.1 years), compared with whites (2.4), blacks (4.0), Hispanics (4.2), and Native Americans/Alaska Natives (6.6). For every group, the decline among men was substantially higher than that among women, and the overall difference between men and women widened from 4.8 years to just under 6 years, a gap last seen in the mid-1990s.

Compared with its peers, the U.S. fared poorly during the past two years. In 2020 the U.S. loss of life expectancy was more than three times the average of other advanced nations.

and education:

Public education presents a similar picture. The just-released report from the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed a historic drop in achievement among fourth-graders. Between 2020 and 2022, overall reading and math scores fell by 5 and 7 points, respectively, to lows not seen in decades. As with life expectancy, groups that lagged behind the national average tended to do the worst. In math achievement, for example, black students lost 13 points and Hispanic students 8 points, compared with 6 points for Asian students and 5 for white students. The differences were even more stark between high- and low-achieving individuals. At the top, NAEP scores in reading and math fell by an average of 2 to 3 points; at the bottom, by 10 to 12 points.

Differences in resources during periods of remote learning accompanied achievement gaps. Students in the top quarter of achievement reported much higher levels of access to computers, high-speed internet, quiet places to work and regular help from teachers than did students in the bottom quarter. Reinforcing these differences, 67% of high-achievers expressed confidence that they could tell when they weren’t understanding a lesson, compared with only 32% of low-achievers. It’s hard to ask for help if you don’t know when you need it.

Here, as with life expectancy, there is evidence emerging that we could have done better. Although overall student-achievement results for our European peers aren’t yet available, a recent academic paper studied Swedish primary school students and found no achievement losses during the pandemic.

Although I agree that we might have done better, I find each of those problematic in different ways and for many reasons. With respect to life expectancy, it was already declining in the U. S. before the pandemic. According to the CDC life expectancy in the U. S. peaked in 2014. I’m not sure how you’d go about disaggregating the declining life expectancy due to whatever led to the peak in 2014 from the declining life expectancy due to COVID-19 from the declining life expectancy due to the policy response to COVID-19.

The situation is slightly different with respect to education. I don’t think comparing the U. S. with Sweden is reasonable for any number of reasons. By comparison Sweden is tiny and highly socially cohesive but, more importantly, Sweden’s policy WRT COVID-19 was quite different from ours and just as importantly quite different from that of Finland, Norway, Denmark, or, for that matter, France.

Like most people I think there are quite a few things we should have done differently. For example, I think that President Trump should have shut down international air travel entering or leaving the United States for at least a couple of months starting in February. I think he should have limited traffic on the interstates early on as well. I think we should have emphasized preventing contagion to those most at risk and that closing schools to in person education was a mistake. Those are local issues not national ones. I also wish that COVID-19 and getting vaccinated against it had not been politicized as it was but I’m honestly not sure how that might have been accomplished.

At that point I’ll throw the matter open to the floor. What could we have done better in dealing with COVID-19?

If you’ve been thinking (as who of us hasn’t?) about what a nuclear detonation would do in your hometown, this post at BigThink explains how to figure it out in simple, graphical terms.

After tinkering with it a bit it was clear to me that nuclear weapons with a yield below 3 MT wouldn’t actually touch me where I’m sitting as I post this.

Of course nobody knows what the yields of the weapon in the present Russian arsenal are.

Have a nice day.

Do you recall that I mentioned “China permabears”, commentators who were reliably anti-Chinese? I singled Gordon Chang out by name. In a piece at 1945 after explaining China’s present economic situation, Mr. Chang provides his prediction for China’s near future:

Most analysts just assume growth will moderately decline in the years ahead. That assessment looks wrong, however. “We would not just be reverting to the sustainable growth rate, but we would also be reversing much of the previously recorded unsustainable growth,” Michael Pettis of Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management predicted in a September 3 tweet.

Pettis, also a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has politely suggested with his tweet that China’s economy will begin an extended period of contraction. Given the country’s massive debt overhang, a slowdown in reality means a crisis.

Last fall’s failure of Evergrande Group, which effectively triggered other defaults in the crucial property sector, is a warning of what will happen country-wide.

Mr. Chang has been predicting a catastrophic collapse for China for more than 20 years. This time he may be right.

I honestly don’t know what will happen. What I think should happen is that China should rely more on consumer spending and less on government spending. In particular it should abandon its insistence on food self-sufficiency.

It has been suggested that the reason China has not adopted that strategy is that it would cause the Chinese Communist Party to lose control over the country. I suspect that rather than becoming more like other economies, the Chinese authorities will increasingly centralize authority in Beijing, as Mr. Pettis suggested in a piece to which I linked last week.

Update

I think this post by Christopher Carothers at The National Interest is relevant, too:

Why has Xi led so many policies that directly harm China’s economy? Analysts have often portrayed Xi’s moves as misguided attempts to avoid larger economic ills. Xi’s crackdowns on the technology and real estate sectors aimed to prevent bubbles and rebalance the economy. Zero-Covid is an attempt to protect the country’s weak healthcare system from going overboard. New rules on the education and gaming industries are investments in the health of China’s future workers.

Yet these explanations miss the big picture. Economically costly policies have all served to enhance the regime’s political and ideological control, both over the economy and over society.

Crackdowns on tech giants are driven less by distaste for monopolies, as in the United States, and more by fears that these companies are “insufficiently committed to promoting the goal advanced by the Chinese Communist Party,” as Harvard researcher Josh Freedman found. Similarly, restrictions on real estate borrowing and cryptocurrencies reflect fears that private market forces are too powerful, and that the state is losing its leading role in the economy and its free hand to dictate policy.

Said another way, the objective is continued control of China by the CCP. Economic growth and prosperity are just means to that end.

I agree with the point that Katha Pollitt is making in her piece in The Nation. The Democratic Congressional leadership is too old:

Dianne Feinstein is 89. Steny Hoyer is 83, Nancy Pelosi and Pat Leahy are 82, and Bernie Sanders is 80. Ben Cardin is 78, Richard Blumenthal is 76, Jeanne Shaheen is 75, Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden are 73; Debbie Stabenow is 72 and Chuck Schumer is 71. And that’s just the Democrats. In total, 46 percent of Senate Democrats and 40 percent of Democrats in the House are 65 or over. (Republicans in Congress are also way up there, but that’s their problem.) Unlike Europe, where leadership is comparatively youthful, America is a gerontocracy: President Biden is 79, and the average age of current Congress members is the highest it’s been in 20 years. That’s not good!

I had to laugh at this:

Half the US population is under 40. With the best will in the world, someone born during the Truman administration can barely grasp what life is like for them.

How about someone born during Franklin Roosevelt’s third term, like Bernie Sanders or Ben Cardin? Or during his second term like Nancy Pelosi or Pat Leahy? Or during his first term, for goodness sake, like Dianne Feinstein?

To be sure there are problems with her analysis. 22% of the U. S. population is under 18 and ineligible to vote for that reason. If what she’s saying is true, is she advocating the elimination of the age requirement for voting or serving in the Congress or is she saying that representative democracy is inherently flawed?

However, she fails to connect the dots. Why is the Democratic leadership so old?

There are multiple reasons. One of them is that like all presidents, Barack Obama picked and chose the parts of the job he cared to do and one of the things he did not care to do was cultivate a new generation of Democratic politicians. Indeed, the 2002 midterms were a bloodbath for younger members of Congress from which the party has yet to recover.

A second reason is the seniority system in the Congress. There are big benefits to serving a long time.

A third reason is that, like many members of the Silent Generation, the Democratic leadership is very insecure. I’m not entirely sure what they’re insecure about. Loss of livelihood? Loss of power? That everything will collapse without them?

The average age of the members of Congress is a full ten years older than that of the members of the Bundestadt, the French Assembly, or British Parliament. There’s a lot less difference between the average ages of Germans, the French, or people in the U. K. and their elected representatives compared with the U. S. We should ask ourselves why.