I’m going to admit to being puzzled by this report in the Washington Post from Karla Adam and William Booth:

LONDON — This is a puzzler. Coronavirus cases are plummeting in Britain. They were supposed to soar. Scientists aren’t sure why they haven’t.

The daily number of new infections recorded in the country fell for seven days in a row before a slight uptick Wednesday, when the country reported 27,734 cases. That’s still almost half of where the caseload was a week ago.

The trajectory of the virus in Britain is something the world is watching closely and anxiously, as a test of how the delta variant behaves in a society with relatively high vaccination rates. And now people are asking if this could be the first real-world evidence that the pandemic in Britain is sputtering out — after three national lockdowns and almost 130,000 deaths.

Public health experts, alongside the government, predicted that cases would be rising in Britain at this point, perhaps even exponentially.

The highly contagious delta variant of the virus, first detected in India, accounts for almost all new cases here. On July 17, the number of new day cases reached 54,674, the highest since January.

Two days later, dubbed “Freedom Day” by the press, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government ended almost all government mandates in England for mask-wearing and social distancing. Pubs are serving pints at the rail and night clubs have reopened with maskless youths packed on the dance floors. Viral defense is now a “personal choice.”

And so some of the best infectious-disease modelers on the planet warned that 100,000 new cases a day this summer could be expected.

But the trend since then has been on a sharp decline.

The reason for my confusion is not just that Britain’s COVID-19 cases are “plummeting”. That’s good news and I hope it continues. Neither is it that the Brits declared “Freedom Day”.

My confusion is that the number of daily cases in the U. S., adjusted for population, is actually considerably lower than the UK’s. And yet here, rather than rejoicing, political leaders are warning us that things are getting worse. Which they are. They’re worse than the best it has been but that’s still considerably better than it was as recently as May 2021.

I wouldn’t proclaim “Freedom Day” or say we’re rounding a corner but I see little reason for doom and gloom, either. People are still getting sick but many fewer are dying; people should get vaccinated but many continue to be. Our health care system has not been brought to its knees.

This post is a reaction to this post by Cheryl Rofer to which she linked in the comments thread of this post by James Joyner. The particular passage to which I am reacting is this paragraph:

People who are not vaccinated will become sick and die. Those who recover will be immune to the disease. Either way, they will be removed from the susceptible pool. People are being vaccinated every day. They are removed from the susceptible pool after the appropriate number of shots and waiting period. The numbers of the susceptible decrease every day.

With all due respect I think that Cheryl is mistaken in almost every particular in that statement. The population is not divided into two groups (the vaccinated and the unvaccinated). There are many groups. We do not know whether those who do not elect to be vaccinated will become sick but we can be pretty confident that most who contract COVID-19 will not die because that has been the experience to date. We do not know whether some proportion of the population is simply not susceptible to the disease without either previous contracting of the disease or vaccination. We can be pretty confident, again based on present experience, that people who have been vaccinated can, in fact, contract the disease. At this time we cannot say with confidence whether vaccinated individuals who nonetheless contract COVID-19 are able to spread it to others. We are hopeful that they cannot but we do not actually know. We do not know whether those who have been fully vaccinated and nonetheless contract COVID-19 may die of the disease. We have fair confidence they will not but we do not actually know.

All of these reasons point to why my view differs dramatically from Cheryl’s. I don’t believe that the pandemic will ever be “over” in the sense that we will return to the status quo ante September 2019. The pandemic will technically be over but it will be endemic. “Zero COVID” is not an achievable goal. It probably was not an achievable goal as early as December 2019 and it may never be achievable. People will contract COVID-19, spread it to others, and some will die of it and all of those will be true regardless of how many people are vaccinated.

Just for the record I am fully vaccinated, I believe it is prudent to do so, and I wear a facemask when entering stores or other buildings in which I encounter the public. I do not see my self as either a “anti-vaxxer” or even as a pessimist. I think I am a realist and an empiricist.

The report on the situation in South Africa made by William Shoki in his op-ed in the New York Times paints a pretty discouraging picture of conditions there:

In fact, the events of the past weeks have demonstrated a bleak truth about the country. The deep rot of South Africa’s social and political order — rife with racial tension, communal mistrust, injustice and corruption — is now on full display. The rainbow nation, supposed beacon of reconciliation, is falling apart.

At the heart of the discord is the ruling African National Congress. In the 27 years since it steered South Africa to democracy, it has carried the hopes of millions of South Africans. Drawing on its reputation as the party of liberation, it has strong support and remains electorally unassailable. But it has now become squarely a source of division. A devastating battle for its soul is underway, with the country as the battlefield.

The riots there last week have been the worst in decades, basically since the end of apartheid. He concludes:

An uneasy calm has settled. How long it lasts is anyone’s guess. Yet the past few weeks have conclusively dispelled many illusions about the country, none more so than the myth of South African exceptionalism — of a South Africa more peaceful than its African neighbors, more developed and with a future that bends inevitably toward good and triumph. The reality, as we await the next outbreak of violence, is much uglier.

A few observations. The seriousness of instability in South Africa can hardly be overstated. There aren’t a lot of functioning economies in sub-Saharan Africa. The closest things may be Mauritius (barely African), Equatorial Guinea (oil rich), Botswana, and South Africa. Civil disorder in South Africa could be very bloody and might devolve into race war.

A South Africa going the way of Zimbabwe would be good for no one other than the ruling elite which is largely what the present disorder is about.

The weak opposition parties tend to be market-friendly. No wonder Mr. Shoki, no supporter of a market economy, is discouraged.

Finally, I recognize that we’re not talking about Nigeria but South Africa. Somehow the title of this post fits.

I found this post by Haley Zermba at OilPrice.com satisfying in a perverse sort of way:

While you can cut down your carbon footprint by a massive margin by switching over to an EV, you just can’t get away from using finite resources completely. EV batteries contain a litany of expensive and finite rare earth metals and minerals, most notably cobalt and lithium, which cause tricky negotiations with global supply chains and which are not without their negative environmental externalities thanks to sometimes messy mining operations.

The energy revolution’s dependence on rare earth metals, which is only set to intensify, has inadvertently put a huge amount of control into the hands of China, which controls around 90% of the market for some of these resources, and has shown that it is not afraid to use that power to sway international politics and diplomacy. In fact, it has been posited that China’s dominance of these supply chains, and other countries’ reticence of that dominance, could potentially lead to a new clean energy resource war if world powers don’t tread lightly.

And now, according to a new Bank of America Global Research report, the global EV battery supply is in danger of running out completely as soon as 2025. “Our updated EV battery supply-demand model suggests the global EV battery supply will likely hit [a] ‘sold-out’ situation between 2025-26, with its global operating rates reaching above 85%,” the report reads ominously. The supply shortage will be largely a product of rapidly increasing demand in a market that is simply unprepared for the levels of EV adoption coming down the pike in the immediate term.

As world leaders feature incentives and imperatives for electric car adoption in their post-pandemic recovery policies and economic stimulus packages, and the private sector leans further into Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) investment principles, the transition away from gasoline and diesel combustion engines is expected to go into overdrive. “We forecast the global operating rates of EV battery will rise to about 121% by 2030, based on announced capacity so far, implying another round of substantial CapEx cycles will likely kick in the next 2-3 years,” the BoA report went on to say.

The world needs to ramp up its EV battery production, and it needs to do it essentially overnight.

since it’s something I’ve been pointing out for over a decade now. The reject rate for EV batteries is alarmingly high and scaling production up will like as not increase the reject rate.

After any organization reaches a certain size, it becomes a bureaucracy. That is true in representative democracies, authoritarian states, absolute monarchies, companies, churches, clubs, benevolent societies&mdaash;the lot. That “certain size” isn’t particularly big. That was true in Hammurabi’s time and it’s true today. The very small companies for which I’ve worked have not been bureaucracies but once a company reaches 50-100 employees it inevitably becomes a bureaucracy. Maybe there is some other way of organizing human enterprises but to the best of my knowledge it hasn’t been invented yet.

It takes Anne Lowrey quite a bit of verbiage to blame the complexity of dealing with federal or state agencies in her article at The Atlantic on racism but she gets there eventually. She calls the time, attention, and, frankly know-how that it takes to navigate bureaucies “the time tax”:

The time tax is also racist, a straightforward instantiation of bias against Black and Latino families. Racism was a primary reason that the United States did not create universal benefit systems, as many European countries did a century ago. Today, programs used disproportionately by Black Americans have more complicated enrollment criteria and more time-consuming application processes than programs used disproportionately by white Americans. An application for cash assistance might involve an in-person interview, a drug test, and ongoing compliance with a work mandate; one third of recipients are Black, and another third Hispanic. Setting up a 529 requires no application and has no annual litmus-testing; the program’s participants are overwhelmingly white. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 targeted “tests and devices,” such as a literacy tests, that discouraged voting among minority groups. Yet such “tests and devices” live on in the safety net.

In this way, the time tax undercuts public confidence in government, turning people away from civic life. People think that government cannot work, because government does not work. So what reasonable person would trust government to work? Uncle Sam “is making people’s lives difficult,” Jamila Michener, a professor of government at Cornell, told me.

I suspect that’s the very optimistic in its own way view of government held by many progressives. I wonder how they explain the complexities of such agencies in extremely homogeneous countries? Clearly, she has never been to a post office in Denmark.

Contrariwise I attribute “the time tax” to bureaucracies. The principles under which bureaucracies operate have been well-known for a century. They’re more like single-celled organisms than they are like either mustachio-twirling villains in Victorian melodramas or philosopher-kings. They only live to eat, reproduce, and keep on living. Their putative missions were largely forgotten long ago.

Don’t bother looking for the perfect, efficient benevolent government agency. They’re all the DMV.

Please don’t interpret my remarks as a condemnation of government. I believe that government is necessary. We need governments to secure personal rights, make markets possible, and to promote the common good. I just don’t expect much of it. I certainly don’t expect it to function flawlessly.

On December 17, 2010 a street vendor In Ben Arous, Tunisia set himself on fire in protest over the confiscation of his wares and harassment he was receiving from municipal officials. That set off a series of demonstrations all across the Arab world which culminated in increasing liberalization on the part of government across the Middle East and North Africa. This came to known as the “Arab Spring”. Is the Arab Spring now unravelling? That certainly seems to be the case.

In his Washington Post column Josh Rogin calls for the Biden Adminstration to take more decisive action “stop a coup” in Tunisia:

Events are unfolding rapidly in Tunis, where President Kais Saied has declared a state of emergency, dismissed the prime minister, frozen the parliament for 30 days and deployed the military to bar them from the building. Tunisian police stormed the headquarters of the news organization Al Jazeera. Protesters looted the offices of the moderate Islamist Ennahda party, which holds a plurality in the parliamentary assembly. Assembly speaker and Ennahda party head Rachid Ghannouchi led a sit-in outside the parliament building Monday, rejecting the president’s moves as unconstitutional and insisting the assembly was still in session.

“We call on President Saied to stop this attempted coup and ask all our friends inside and outside to support the people of Tunisia in resisting the forces of dictatorship and tyranny,” Ghannouchi told my Post colleagues.

The problem is that it’s not clear which side if either is actually more democratic. The Biden Administration has, prudently I think, demurred from taking sides, e.g. calling for him, speaking up for democratic principles in the abstract, etc.

That’s not enough for Mr. Rogin:

Without a robust U.S.-led diplomatic initiative, pro-democracy leaders in the region such as Ghannouchi will be left to fend for themselves, Graham said. That would send a clear signal to all other would-be coup plotters that they need not fear resistance or reprisal from Washington.

Several administration sources told me they were waiting to see how the very fluid situation plays out and hoping to work with Saied rather than alienate him. The Biden team seems to be following the playbook of the Obama administration, which preferred to deliver tough messages in private and believed that public threats were counterproductive. But that didn’t work in Egypt in 2013, when Abdel Fatah al-Sissi staged a military coup and the United States avoided action until it was too late.

The good news now is that it’s not too late in Tunisia. There is still time for the United States and other Western governments to convince Saied that pressing forward with an authoritarian power grab will not turn out well for him. The United States has significant leverage at its disposal — above all, economic aid, including a recently signed $500 million Millennium Challenge Corporation compact.

It seems to me that Tunisia is a priority (in decreasing order of importance) for

• the African Union
• the United Nations
• the United States

Honestly, it’s unclear to me that a more strenuous response on the part of the U. S. will have a lot of impact. This does present, however, a sort of no-win situation for the Biden Administration. If the Arab Spring unravels under President Biden’s watch, he’s sure to get blamed for it whether he could have stopped it or not.

In a piece in the Wall Street Journal Tevi Troy pens a tribute to Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. July 25 was the anniversary of the beginning of their partnership as well as its end:

The two were a study in contrasts. Martin was a singer, traditionally handsome, Italian, a classic straight man. Lewis was a rubber-faced, hyperkinetic Jewish comedian who seemed as if he couldn’t stand still for a moment. Their act played off these contrasts, with Martin trying to get through a song or a bit and Lewis constantly interrupting and exasperating him, doing a medley of voices, imitations and emotions while Martin tried to maintain his considerable cool. Lewis felt that their contrasts broadened their appeal. As Lewis put it, “Who were Dean’s fans? Men, women, the Italians. Who were Jerry’s fans? Women, Jews, kids. Who were Martin and Lewis’s fans? All of them.”

concluding:

But the presidential meetings and the subsequent successes wouldn’t have ever occurred without their legendary partnership. Lewis thought so, telling People magazine in 1995 that “I don’t think we would have ever been heard of without the other.” July 25 is both the anniversary of their partnership and its breakup—their last show was at the Copacabana in 1956. The team lasted only one decade, but what a decade it was.

I loved Martin & Lewis as a team; I didn’t have much use for either one of them independently. I found Dean’s acting gigs mostly lacklustre and Lewis’s too frenetic. There are exceptions. Dean Martin’s performance in Rio Bravo was good and I’m glad we have the document of Martin and Ricky Nelson singing a duet. A lot of people liked The Nutty Professor but I liked The Bellboy.

Since I agree with the headline assertion—we should address the “wealth gap” from the bottom up, I wish I agreed with the editors of the Washington Post’s strategy for accomplishing that. Their strategy includes feel-good measures like

• A $15,000 credit for first-time home buyers
• Replace IRAs and 401Ks with a 26% credit up to a certain limit
• Income-indexed educational loan repayment plans

I think they’re operating under false premises. I strongly suspect that even were all three of those to be implemented in ten years time income and wealth inequality would be worse than when they started. I would add that the editors should check their numbers; the premium to bachelors degrees ain’t what it used to be.

I’m tempted to actually show the math on this. We cannot admit the number of poor people, particularly poor people with limited English, that we have to the U. S. over the last 50 years and not expect income and wealth inequality to skyrocket. It’s a mathematical certainty. We can do one of the following:

• Limit immigration the way Canada, Australia, and New Zealand do
• Continue to admit large numbers of poor people and accept the consequent income and wealth inequality
• Continue to admit large numbers of poor people and continue to whinge about income and wealth inequality

I would prefer the first; I think we will do the last.

One of the things that is terribly discouraging about the state of discourse today is that, contrary to Pat Moynihan’s admonition, everybody has his or her own facts. In a post at Medium John Ellis lists four “illusions”:

1. Biden is not too old
2. Harris “has what it takes.”
3. Trump is done
4. Trump can’t win

I agree with him that the first two are illusions but I honestly have no idea about the second two. I have never seen Trump’s appeal and have no idea why he commands so much loyalty among so many Republicans. Maybe the Republicans around here aren’t representative. None of them like Trump, either. I think that all of the Republicans around here that I know voted for Biden.

It is mind-boggling that so many people are in what I can only characterize as clinical denial about the first “illusion”. It’s deemed “fake news”, presumably since the news outlets they use (the NYT, WaPo, CNN, etc.) go to such lengths to avoid the rather obvious truth. If it’s fake news it’s fake news that has been commented on by the BBC, France 24, Deutsche-Welle, and Corriere della Sera. I don’t think he’s in full-blown dementia but let’s face it: he’s too old to be president.