One of the symptoms of COVID-19 is the loss of the sense of smell. There appears to be some evidence that this symptom is genetic. From an article in medRxiv (preprint):

Loss of sense of smell is a characteristic symptom of infection with SARS-CoV-2. However, specific mechanisms linking infection with loss of smell are poorly understood. Using self-reported symptom data from the 23andMe COVID-19 study, we describe the demographic patterns associated with COVID-19 related anosmia, and find the symptom is more often reported in women and younger respondents, and less often by those of East Asian and African American ancestry compared to those of European ancestry. We ran a trans-ethnic genome-wide association study (GWAS) comparing loss of smell or taste (n=47,298) with no loss of smell or taste (n=22,543) among those with a positive SARS-CoV-2 test result. We identified an association (rs7688383) in the vicinity of the UGT2A1 and UGT2A2 genes (OR=1.115, p-value=4×10−15), which have been linked to olfactory function. These results may shed light on the biological mechanisms underlying COVID-19 related anosmia.

The variant occurs very slightly more frequently in those of European descent but the relation between the variant and anosomia in COVID-19 appears to be pretty constant.

James Freeman reports something interesting in his latest Wall Street Journal column:

What will it take to persuade potential workers to join the U.S. labor force? American small businesses have never had such a hard time trying to attract new employees. That’s according to the May employment survey from the National Federation of Independent Business, due out later today.

“Strong job growth eased in May as small businesses struggled to find workers to fill open positions,” reports NFIB Chief Economist William Dunkelberg. He notes that survey respondents with unfilled job openings “increased from 44 percent to 48 percent, seasonally adjusted. May is the fourth consecutive month setting a record high reading for unfilled job openings. May’s reading is 26 points higher than the 48-year historical average of 22 percent.” He adds that the labor shortage is particularly acute in industries like construction, where 66% of surveyed firms reported few or no qualified applicants, an increase of 6 percentage points from the April survey.

I want to point out three things:

1. A lot of the jobs on offer are probably lousy jobs as has been pointed out in numerous articles.
2. Increasing wages for these jobs is a textbook example of inflation.
3. Many of these small businesses are marginal operations which may not be able to increase prices without losing sales, can’t afford to lose sales, and can’t afford to operate on a lower margin.

The chickens of decades of bad fiscal, economic, immigration, and trade policy are coming home to roost.

I’m still trying to figure this one out. The editors of the Wall Street Journal observe:

President Biden wants to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on infrastructure, but there’s a contradiction at the heart of his ambition. His own White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council issued a report in May that blacklisted a litany of projects most Americans would think are classic public works.

The council is made up of three members of the Administration and 26 progressives from the academy or activists such as Susana Almanza of People Organized in Defense of Earth and Her Resources. That’s really the group’s name. In March Mr. Biden directed them to recommend federal investments in which 40% of overall benefits would flow to disadvantaged communities.

The report floats some ideas that pass progressive muster, such as renewable energy and worker training, public transportation and “green housing.” But the report also cites more than a dozen “types of projects that will not benefit” poor communities.

These include “highway expansions” and “road improvements or automobile infrastructure, other than electric vehicle charging stations.” The advisers don’t explain why fixing roads wouldn’t help low-income people, perhaps because they can’t. The poor are far more likely to buy used cars that run on gasoline rather than new, expensive EVs. They need the mobility to travel from their homes to where the jobs are, which often isn’t where mass transit goes.

Also on the naughty list are oil pipelines, electrical transmission lines, nuclear power plants, and improvements in power production efficiency. I’m hoping the editors are mistaken or at least President Biden ignores these advisors. An infrastructure spending bill is marginally defensible on the grounds that it’s investment. An infrastructure spending bill that doesn’t even remotely satisfy Lord Keynes’s requirements for fiscal stimulus that builds precious little infrastructure but includes lots and lots of just plain consumer spending can’t be defended on any grounds except political ones.

Contrariwise, I was a bit disappointed by Michael McFaul’s piece in the Washington Post on Joe Biden’s upcoming meeting with Russian President Putin. Here’s the meat of the piece:

The two leaders could launch strategic stability talks. Biden and Putin have rightly extended New START. But a subsequent arms-control treaty will be difficult to complete before New START expires five years from now, since nonstrategic nuclear weapons and new delivery vehicles must be part of a new deal. Negotiators need to start now.

Next, a series of consulate closures and diplomatic expulsions, as well as reduced hiring of Russian staffers at U.S. diplomatic missions, have brought public diplomacy and visa issuance to a near halt. Biden and Putin should reverse this trend. And that’s it — that’s the cooperative bilateral agenda. The remaining time in Geneva should focus on issues of disagreement, such as Putin’s persecution of opposition leaders, the detention of Americans, Belarus, Ukraine, cyberattacks, assassination attempts and microwave-radiation attacks.

The multilateral agenda is potentially broader. Working together with their international partners, Biden and Putin should commit to cooperating on stopping Iran’s nuclear weapons program, providing humanitarian assistance to Syrians, fulfilling the Minsk agreement on eastern Ukraine, and working together on covid-19 and climate change. Even in multilateral settings, however, the possibilities for cooperation are limited.

Once the Geneva summit is over, Biden and his team should not hope to forget about Russia. They cannot freeze U.S.-Russia relations in place to focus on the greater challenge of China. As Putin recently proved by amassing Russian soldiers on the Ukrainian border or unleashing more cyberattacks, he’s not going to allow that. Nor should Biden’s Russia policy become a derivative of his China policy. (For Biden to pursue his own version of the Nixon-goes-to-China strategy would be a huge mistake. It won’t work.)

No mention of the Arctic, Syria, or multi-domain operations which I would think to be an excellent talking point. I don’t believe that the Russian government is actually behind the recent spate of cyberterrorism but IMO it should be a major point of discussion. There’s little question the hacks are originating in Russia whether they’re state-sponsored or not and the Russian government should be willing to do something about them.

Seems to me like he’s setting the expectations pretty low.

And two leaders like Biden and Putin wouldn’t even agree to meet unless they expected something specific to emerge from the meeting. What will it be?

This article on the hunt for the origin of SARS-CoV-2 at Vanity Fair by Katherine Eban actually exceeded my expectations. Long as it is I think it’s worth reading. Depending on your preferences you may find the first few opening paragraphs tedious but bear with it—it’s owrth it. I’ll share a few snippets with you:

On February 19, 2020, The Lancet, among the most respected and influential medical journals in the world, published a statement that roundly rejected the lab-leak hypothesis, effectively casting it as a xenophobic cousin to climate change denialism and anti-vaxxism. Signed by 27 scientists, the statement expressed “solidarity with all scientists and health professionals in China” and asserted: “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”

The Lancet statement effectively ended the debate over COVID-19’s origins before it began. To Gilles Demaneuf, following along from the sidelines, it was as if it had been “nailed to the church doors,” establishing the natural origin theory as orthodoxy. “Everyone had to follow it. Everyone was intimidated. That set the tone.”

The statement struck Demaneuf as “totally nonscientific.” To him, it seemed to contain no evidence or information. And so he decided to begin his own inquiry in a “proper” way, with no idea of what he would find.

Demaneuf began searching for patterns in the available data, and it wasn’t long before he spotted one. China’s laboratories were said to be airtight, with safety practices equivalent to those in the U.S. and other developed countries. But Demaneuf soon discovered that there had been four incidents of SARS-related lab breaches since 2004, two occuring at a top laboratory in Beijing. Due to overcrowding there, a live SARS virus that had been improperly deactivated, had been moved to a refrigerator in a corridor. A graduate student then examined it in the electron microscope room and sparked an outbreak.

Demaneuf published his findings in a Medium post, titled “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: a review of SARS Lab Escapes.” By then, he had begun working with another armchair investigator, Rodolphe de Maistre. A laboratory project director based in Paris who had previously studied and worked in China, de Maistre was busy debunking the notion that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was a “laboratory” at all. In fact, the WIV housed numerous laboratories that worked on coronaviruses. Only one of them has the highest biosafety protocol: BSL-4, in which researchers must wear full-body pressurized suits with independent oxygen. Others are designated BSL-3 and even BSL-2, roughly as secure as an American dentist’s office.

and

There are reasons to doubt the lab-leak hypothesis. There is a long, well-documented history of natural spillovers leading to outbreaks, even when the initial and intermediate host animals have remained a mystery for months and years, and some expert virologists say the supposed oddities of the SARS-CoV-2 sequence have been found in nature.

But for most of the past year, the lab-leak scenario was treated not simply as unlikely or even inaccurate but as morally out-of-bounds. In late March, former Centers for Disease Control director Robert Redfield received death threats from fellow scientists after telling CNN that he believed COVID-19 had originated in a lab. “I was threatened and ostracized because I proposed another hypothesis,” Redfield told Vanity Fair. “I expected it from politicians. I didn’t expect it from science.”

and

The idea of a lab leak first came to NSC officials not from hawkish Trumpists but from Chinese social media users, who began sharing their suspicions as early as January 2020. Then, in February, a research paper coauthored by two Chinese scientists, based at separate Wuhan universities, appeared online as a preprint. It tackled a fundamental question: How did a novel bat coronavirus get to a major metropolis of 11 million people in central China, in the dead of winter when most bats were hibernating, and turn a market where bats weren’t sold into the epicenter of an outbreak?

The paper offered an answer: “We screened the area around the seafood market and identified two laboratories conducting research on bat coronavirus.” The first was the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which sat just 280 meters from the Huanan market and had been known to collect hundreds of bat samples. The second, the researchers wrote, was the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The paper came to a staggeringly blunt conclusion about COVID-19: “the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan…. Regulations may be taken to relocate these laboratories far away from city center and other densely populated places.” Almost as soon as the paper appeared on the internet, it disappeared, but not before U.S. government officials took note.

and here

An intelligence analyst working with David Asher sifted through classified channels and turned up a report that outlined why the lab-leak hypothesis was plausible. It had been written in May by researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which performs national security research for the Department of Energy. But it appeared to have been buried within the classified collections system.

Now the officials were beginning to suspect that someone was actually hiding materials supportive of a lab-leak explanation. “Why did my contractor have to pore through documents?” DiNanno wondered. Their suspicion intensified when Department of Energy officials overseeing the Lawrence Livermore lab unsuccessfully tried to block the State Department investigators from talking to the report’s authors.

Their frustration crested in December, when they finally briefed Chris Ford, acting undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security. He seemed so hostile to their probe that they viewed him as a blinkered functionary bent on whitewashing China’s malfeasance. But Ford, who had years of experience in nuclear nonproliferation, had long been a China hawk. Ford told Vanity Fair that he saw his job as protecting the integrity of any inquiry into COVID-19’s origins that fell under his purview. Going with “stuff that makes us look like the crackpot brigade” would backfire, he believed.

There was another reason for his hostility. He’d already heard about the investigation from interagency colleagues, rather than from the team itself, and the secrecy left him with a “spidey sense” that the process was a form of “creepy freelancing.” He wondered: Had someone launched an unaccountable investigation with the goal of achieving a desired result?

Those snippets are just short excerpts from the first two-thirds of the piece. Here’s her peroration:

Will we ever know the truth? Dr. David Relman of Stanford University School of Medicine has been advocating for an investigation like the 9/11 Commission to examine COVID-19’s origins. But 9/11 took place in one day, he said, whereas “this has so many different manifestations, consequences, responses across nations. All of that makes it a hundred-dimensional problem.”

The bigger problem is that so much time has gone by. “With every passing day and week, the kinds of information that might prove helpful will have a tendency to dissipate and disappear,” he said. “The world ages and things get moved, and biological signals degrade.”

China obviously bears responsibility for stonewalling investigators. Whether it did so out of sheer authoritarian habit or because it had a lab leak to hide is, and may always be, unknown.

The United States deserves a healthy share of blame as well. Thanks to their unprecedented track record of mendacity and race-baiting, Trump and his allies had less than zero credibility. And the practice of funding risky research via cutouts like EcoHealth Alliance enmeshed leading virologists in conflicts of interest at the exact moment their expertise was most desperately needed.

Now, at least, there appears to be the prospect of a level inquiry—the kind Gilles Demaneuf and Jamie Metzl had wanted from the start. “We needed to create a space where all of the hypotheses could be considered,” Metzl said.

The account of the hunt is a mystery story worthy of Agatha Christie. All it’s missing is assembling all of the suspects in a posh living room and Hercule Poirot revealing who the culprit is.

I did want to add one small observation. The difference between the nearest relative of SARS-CoV-2 discovered in the wild is about 4%. That’s not particularly similar. It just means that they’re more similar than human beings are to cats and a bit less similar than humans are to chimps.

I don’t know where SARS-CoV-2 originated but I dearly wish I did. Indeed, I don’t know how sensible policies can be formulated in the absence of such confidence. I do think that the preponderance of the evidence as of this writing supports the lab-leak hypothesis.

When I was a kid, growing up in St. Louis in the pre-civil rights era, there was an annual event called the Veiled Prophet Parade and Ball. I believe it continues to this day. The proceedings of this event were all very hush-hush but it was generally believed that a clique of local business leaders elected one of their members as Veiled Prophet for that year and the selected individual’s daughter rode in the parade and presided over the ball as the Queen of Love and Beauty.

Even as a kid all those years ago the whole thing made me queasy for reasons that should be obvious if you look at the two pictures I’ve posted above. The main picture is a fairly recent photo of a Veiled Prophet. You can see “Veiled Prophet” on the poster behind him. The insert is a picture of someone wearing the regalia of a Grand Dragon of the Klu Klux Klan, an officer of the organization in control of a “domain”. No, they’re not identical but there is a strong resemblance. If you don’t hear a resonance between them, IMO you are tone deaf.

At the very least it is an elitist institution and at worst racist or certainly evoking a deeply racist past. I think there are some traditions that really need to go and the VP is one of them.

Just when we think we’re out they pull us back in. Or at least they try. Lord, how they try. In a Washington Post op-ed Madiha Afzal does her best to persuade the Biden Administration that we’ve got to stay in Afghanistan:

Biden, as the Economist put it, seems to have “little time for a losing cause.” His decision also reflects his administration’s foreign policy for the American middle-class paradigm, which focuses on domestic considerations over international ones (and is this so different from Trump’s “America First”?). The irony, though, is that the American middle class largely doesn’t care about Afghanistan — their ambivalence gave way to support for this decision once it was announced, but it wouldn’t be hard to visualize the public approving of a scenario that kept a couple thousand troops there for a while longer.

What’s perhaps most disturbing is the narrative the president has presented along with the rationale for withdrawal: that we went to Afghanistan to defeat al-Qaeda after 9/11, that mission creep led us to stay on too long and, therefore, it is time to get out. This takes an incomplete view of U.S. agency in the war in Afghanistan. The narrative implies that the civil conflict in Afghanistan today did not originate with us — that this more than 40-year war began with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, preceded us and will follow our departure.

The fact of the matter is that, by beginning the campaign in Afghanistan in 2001 and overthrowing the Taliban, who were then engaged in their draconian rule, and installing a new government, we began a new phase of the Afghan conflict — one that pitted the Kabul government and the United States against the Taliban insurgency. The Afghan people did not have a say in the matter. That we are leaving Afghan women, children and youth better off in many ways after 20 years is due to us, and we should be proud of that. But that we are leaving them mired in a bloody conflict is also due to us, because we could not hold off the Taliban insurgency, and we must reckon publicly with that.

That is not a new argument. It has been phrased more succinctly as the “Pottery Barn argument”—you broke it, you bought it.

Since 2001 we have had three objectives in Afghanistan:

• Remove Al Qaeda and their hosts, the Taliban
• Leave Afghanistan
• Establish an Afghan government capable of defending itself against the Taliban and keeping Al Qaeda out

and since 2001 I have been arguing that accomplishing those in concert was impossible. In fact the only way to succeed there was for the president to announce to the American people that we planned to stay in Afghanistan forever. And it wouldn’t be under conditions like those in Germany or Japan. Our troops would be facing hostile attacks persistently forever. And we’d need to keep hauling supplies overland across Pakistan while paying off Pakistan’s government to let us do it. That would be far from a V-E Day success.

While I think that President Bush bears a lot of the responsibility for our persistent mess in Afghanistan none of his successors have done much to disabuse the American people of the true nature of the situation in Afghanistan. Did they figure that we couldn’t handle the truth or could they not handle the truth?

While I don’t agree with the entirety of this op-ed by Daniel Alpert in the New York Times I do have several points of agreement with it:

…many in Democratic policy and political circles have been queasy about addressing the connection between federally supplemented unemployment insurance benefits and the slowing pace of re-employment at this stage of the recovery from the pandemic. There is almost certainly a common sense connection: If you were a low-wage worker, why aggressively attempt to go back to work at a lousy, low-paying job, when you can make more money collecting unemployment benefits.

Still, Republican politicians are getting it wrong too. They are citing countless news reports that businesses are struggling to fill certain positions as both a reason to end federal unemployment benefits and as evidence that the extra benefits were too generous in the first place. They worry that the ability of some workers to stay on the sidelines of the labor market, unless employers offer wages that trump jobless benefits, could result in dangerous “wage inflation” — a potential increase in labor costs that, they believe, consumers will pay for in the form of higher priced goods and services.

That argument simply does not hold water either: Over the coming weeks and months as this aid for the jobless phases out, there will be a flood of anxious job seekers pouring into labor markets. Even if a significant share of workers are temporarily avoiding taking low-paying jobs while benefits remain generous, then there is no true “labor shortage,” as many economists and market commentators are calling it.

[…]

Now enhanced benefits are ending every day for the millions of Americans who have benefited from the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation, or PEUC, program, which extends unemployment insurance for 13 weeks to those who exhausted their conventional state and federal unemployment benefits. All extra federal supplements for the unemployed will end on Sept. 6, including the general $300 weekly benefit, as well as the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, or PUA, program, which provides aid to those who were self-employed. (Some states are in the process of cutting them early.)

Republican-controlled states, as well as some more politically mixed states, are doing this because they presume there is a macroeconomic upside to millions of workers returning to lower-income jobs. They shouldn’t be so sure.

[…]

The majority of the jobs that aren’t back to prepandemic work force levels are very low-income jobs; they are what the U.S. Private Sector Job Quality Index, which I cocreated, calls low-quality jobs. Through March of this year, most of the private sector jobs eliminated during the pandemic that haven’t been restored are production and “nonsupervisory” jobs that offered weekly pay averaging less than $750 prepandemic. There are more than 45 million low-paying jobs like these, constituting roughly 43 percent of all production and nonsupervisory jobs in the country. This is not about a mere, unfortunate corner of the jobs market.

Twenty-three million of these jobs paid under $500 per week prepandemic: That’s $26,000 per year. Not only are the wages low: Many of these jobs offer well below 30 hours of work per week.

[…]

The chronic problem we face as we put Covid-19 in the rearview mirror is that the U.S. economy before the pandemic was incredibly dependent on an abundance of low-wage, low-hours jobs. It was a combo that yielded low prices for comfortably middle-class and wealthier customers and low labor costs for bosses, but spectacularly low incomes for tens of millions of others.

[…]

Some progressives may take me to task for admitting that emergency unemployment benefits, which served many so well, are now keeping some people from returning to their lousy, pre-crisis work. But why, as a former Obama administration economist pointed out, fight common sense or parse the data for more complex explanations? Instead, why not absorb the lesson being taught?

It’s pretty simple and one that, normally, progressives fight to have heard: businesses are paying tens of millions of workers too little money relative to the cost of living in this country.

There are any number of comments I might make but let’s leave it at two. For decades we’ve been using reducing unemployment as a policy goal and we’ve also steadfastly refused to control the number of immigrants without skills that are worth paying enough to sustain a middle class lifestyle. The possibly unintended consequence of those two policies in combination has been to maximize the number of low-paying jobs. But we’re in competition with every developing country in the world in producing cheap consumer goods and in particular it puts us into competition with China. Not only is that a contest we can’t win it’s a contest we don’t want to win. So that encourages job creation in the services sector which has been especially hard-hit during the pandemic.

We really need to do several things:

• Tighten the labor market until the wages for the remaining jobs that don’t require high levels of skills are high enough to live on.
• Stop the overemphasis on getting college educations. Not only does that produce the skills mismatch so apparent today it results in thousands of people incurring debts they will struggle to pay off.
• Encourage businesses to invest in producing goods in the U. S. Increasing productivity requires business investment by definition.

or we could impose tariffs on imported goods until it had the same effect.

To convince businesses to invest in the U. S. it’s got to be worth their while and we’ll never achieve that by raising their taxes or with an unstable, unpredictable economic climate.

William Galston, a supporter of the Biden Administration, has an interesting observation in his Wall Street Journal column (free link):

During the next two years, Mr. Biden’s spending surge would help return the economy to full employment faster than staying at the status quo. This is a good thing. But between the beginning of fiscal 2024 and the end of fiscal 2031, the administration’s projections show GDP rising by $8.9 trillion, barely distinguishable from the $8.8 trillion in CBO’s baseline.

The bottom line: The economy will stay stuck at 2% growth, extending the period of slow growth that began early in the 21st century. Even during the first three years of the Trump administration, large spending increases and an enormous tax cut yielded growth averaging 2.5%, well below the 3.5% level of the 1990s.

Does this mean that government is powerless to influence economic growth? Not exactly. But it does require an understanding of why the growth rate has been so disappointing during the past two decades, particularly compared with the last half of the 20th century.

According to a recent CBO report, the principal driver of slow growth since 2008 has been a sharp slowdown in the growth of the labor supply. As baby boomers joined the workforce, the annual increase in labor supply averaged more than 2%, peaking at 2.5% between 1974 and 1981. As late as the 1990s, annual labor-force expansion averaged 1.2%. But as the population aged and baby boomers began to retire, annual increases fell to 0.5% between 2008 and 2020, a figure that the CBO expects to fall to 0.4% in 2021-25 and 0.3% in 2026-31.

Additionally, output per work, another key determinant not only of GDP growth but of rising incomes, is stalled. The reason for that is obvious: productivity is dependent on business investment. If businesses aren’t investing at sufficient levels to increase productivity, it won’t just increase on its own. Why aren’t businesses investing?

IMO the Biden Administration would prefer growth at 2% per annum that it can control and benefits the sectors it picks over 4% growth in sectors it hasn’t picked and wouldn’t prefer. I would add that I think that deadweight loss is preventing growth that would otherwise be taking place.