I genuinely appreciate people who look past the headlines and partisan squabbles to consider the implications of events. Consider this on the “lab leak” hypothesis for the origin of SARS-CoV-2 by Ian Birrell at UnHerd:

But what would it mean if the lab leak hypotheses proved correct? The result would be uncomfortable not just for the Chinese Communist Party, which would be guilty of overseeing arguably the biggest cover-up in history of an event that caused economic chaos, millions of deaths and misery around the world. It would shake science to its foundations for carrying out risky research despite clear warnings of the dangers, and then collaborating in an epic whitewash. And it would challenge a media that meekly accepted the establishment view rather than doing its job of asking difficult questions — a failure even more serious than the Iraq War intelligence debacle. Indeed, much of science and the media already look sadly tainted by their failures on this front, regardless of the outcome.

We still have no hard proof how this wretched pandemic emerged in that central Chinese city. We do know, however, that determined efforts in both China and the wider world to prove that Covid-19 had a natural zoonotic origin have failed so far to find an intermediate host animal that might have turned a bat virus into such a lethal, well-adapted pathogen for human beings, despite testing 80,000 samples. We know that Chinese officials were guilty of an initial cover-up that inflamed the impact of the disease with devastating global consequences, and that Beijing promoted false theories, smeared critics and expelled foreign reporters. We also know that the World Health Organisation’s collusion with the Communist regime has undermined its credibility.

Read the whole thing. I think that this assessment is about right:

No doubt there would be sanctions, sabre-rattling, some talk of consumer boycotts and loud demands for reparations — before the arguments drag on fruitlessly for many years. “China will do whatever it can to deny it,” said Lianchao Han, a leading dissident and former Chinese government official. “Xi will mobilise his massive propaganda machine to fabricate stories and facts to shake off his responsibility and liabilities. We already passed the point to depose him for mishandling the pandemic if it’s proved to a lab leak.”

But that just characterizes the repercussions for Xi. There would also be repercussions for China, science, and the media.

I’m still waiting for the inevitable civil law suits.

Read this post at Digg by Adwait Patil. The post is largely a repetition of 15 tweets by the CEO of Redfin, the online real estate site (annual revenue ˜$1 billion). I’ll just quote one of them (not retweet):

11 of 15: This migration to lower-cost areas may lead to lower workforce participation. For many families @Redfin has relocated, the money saved on housing costs lets one parent stop working. A wave of Redfin customers are retiring early.

It’s interesting. To whatever degree his observations are correct they comprise more evidence that the new normal will be quite different from the old one. Who works, where, how, and why are all changing.

Update

I can’t resist—here’s another one:

14 of 15: it’s not just income that’s k-shaped, but mobility. 90% of people earning $100,000+ per year expect to be able to work virtually, compared to 10% of those earning $40,000 or less per year. The folks who need low-cost housing the most have the least flexibility to move.

Kvetching about “equity” is not going to solve that problem. State and local governments are doing almost the opposite of what they need to be doing while the federal government is helping them to it. That will aggravate their problems rather than solving them.

I agree with the underlying sympathies behind Amanda Cage, Maureen Conway, Jeannine Laprad, and Sarah Miller’s post at The Hill:

The reality is that about half of America’s working population earns less than a living wage. It is past time to update federal policy and support all of our workforce in a way that matches its skills, talents and contributions to America’s success.

In the rebuilding year ahead, Americans need and deserve better jobs. Expanding the number of good jobs, and improving the quality of existing ones, must be an essential goal of the Biden administration.

Too little attention has been paid to the deteriorating wages and working conditions that have eroded economic stability and opportunity for a growing number of Americans. Some view low-wage jobs as an important entry point into the labor market, and one that enables hard-working people to advance quickly.

The research is clear. The size of the low-wage workforce and limited mobility in the labor market means that relatively few people are upwardly mobile.

While there is no single, comprehensive definition of a “good” job, the National Fund for Workforce Solutions, the Aspen Institute, Gallup, the Urban Institute, and others have defined job quality not just based on pay and benefits, but also on working conditions, workplace culture, job design, supportive work environments, skill development and career advancement.

Improving job quality requires employers, social sector leaders, worker organizations and many others to step up to the plate.

I think they’re missing something. The number of jobs and the pay offered for those jobs are dictated by supply and demand. Laws, regulations, and agitation function more by limiting the number of jobs that pay low wages, don’t carry benefits, and require working in poor conditions than they do by fostering the creation of good jobs.

I agree that we aren’t producing good jobs to the degree that we should but I think that has several major reasons:

• Too slack a labor market
• Replacement of good jobs with bad jobs due to the slack labor market
• Globalization
• Excessive financialization of the economy
• Inadequate capital investment
• Increasingly high requirements to get a good job
• Deadweight loss of government regulation

not necessarily in that order. Unless those are addressed nothing the authors are proposing will do much to change the status quo.

I don’t know when I last read a post I disagreed with as much as this one at Big Think by Joseph Schulman, John Schaefer, and Henry Miller. It opens with an untruth:

The U.S. West suffers from severe — and worsening — water shortages.

and it premised on a misconception:

America does not have a water supply problem; it has a water distribution problem.

My contrasting claims would be that the U. S. does not have a water supply problem; it has a population distribution problem and the U. S. West suffers from severe overpopulation problems. Just to provide one example, when the Spanish arrived in the area that was to become Los Angeles County the population consisted of a few thousand people. That’s what the land would support. Now it’s home to 10 million people—far more than the land can support. The ecological consequences of that overpopulation of a fragile ecology are vast.

The authors want to create an Interstate Water System analogous to the Interstate Highway System with the mission of creating pipelines to move water from where it is plentiful, e.g. the North and East to where it is scarce, i.e. the West, particularly the Southwest. I think the Interstate Highway System was a costly mistake, only justifiable for reasons of national defense. Its original empowering legislation was the Federal Aid Highways Act AKA the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act. It mandated that the interstates be designed in such a way that aircraft could land on them.

There is a little book I would recommend you read: Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner. It is a short history of hydrological policy in the American West. A notable quote: “water moves uphill to money”. The effect of the authors’ IWS would be to waste enormous amounts of money, benefiting the few, at the expense of the many. It would destroy the very reasons that the American West is attractive to people. Any empowering legislation for such a boondoggle should be called the California Housing Developers Subsidy Act.

I was amused by the editors of the Washington Post’s take on taxing Bob Dylan’s earnings from selling his catalogue:

BELATED HAPPY birthday to Bob Dylan! It’s hard to fathom that the skinny kid from Minnesota who revolutionized popular culture back in the 1960s became an 80-year-old man on Monday. In addition to longevity, Mr. Dylan has been blessed with a personal fortune measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars. It’s a reward that is both well earned, given his artistry, and ironic, given his beginnings as a penniless poet of social protest.

The unduly gentle taxation of some of Mr. Dylan’s winnings — and those of other wealthy veteran singer-songwriters — is no cause for celebration, however. In fact, it would make a pretty good subject for a present-day social-change anthem. Though not the most flagrant loophole in the tax code, it does epitomize a key issue: the gap between the top tax rate on long-term capital gains, 23.8 percent, and the top rate on “ordinary” — wage and salary — income, 37 percent. This differential treatment overwhelmingly benefits the rich, and the two biggest capital gains breaks alone cost the Treasury $211 billion in 2021, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT).

Here’s the story: In 2006, music industry lobbyists persuaded Congress to let artists pay the capital gains tax rate on earnings from selling the rights to collections of their musical compositions, instead of the ordinary income rate, as they had done previously. The latter made more sense: Writing songs is labor, not investing, but the lobbyists said change was needed to equalize artists’ tax rates and those of their record companies. In any case, the JCT considered the bill’s likely cost too small to estimate, and it passed.

I think their view is reasonable, mild even. Not only would I tax royalties at the same rate as any other income, I would limit the duration of copyrights to 15 years, non-renewable and non-transferable. IMO the status quo impedes innovation and does not satisfy the constitutional mandate.

An interesting snippet from James Freeman’s Wall Street Journal column:

Jim Tankersley reports in the Times that the paper has obtained Biden budget documents and that “the documents forecast that Mr. Biden and Congress will allow tax cuts for low- and middle-income Americans, signed into law by President Donald J. Trump in 2017, to expire as scheduled in 2025.”

I have a vague recollection of the last president to reneg on a taxes pledge. Whatever happened to him?

I would recommend that President Biden take his own pledge not to raise taxes on the poor or middle income people seriously and until that report that has been the case.

I have no problem with Donna Brazile’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal against anti-semitism. In fact I like it. Here’s a snippet:

The latest eruption of anti-Semitism has been sparked by fighting between Israel and Hamas, the terrorist group that controls the Gaza Strip. But the perpetrators of these vile anti-Semitic attacks, in the U.S. and elsewhere, use the actions of Israel as an excuse to mount assaults against Jews.

There is nothing anti-Semitic about policy disagreements with the government of Israel. Jews themselves, including Israelis, are sharply divided in their opinions of the government, just as Americans are sharply divided in our views of the U.S. government. But attacking people because they’re Jewish isn’t about a policy dispute—it is about simple hatred.

but I have a bone to pick with the editors. The slug of the piece:

Jew-hatred is wrong whether it comes from neo-Nazis or left-wing activists.

conveys a distorted view of the piece itself. Here’s the sole passage calling out “left-wing activists”:

Those on the left who profess to champion Palestinian rights are sorely misguided if they believe praising Adolf Hitler, beating up Jews in New York and elsewhere, and defacing synagogues in the U.S. and Europe with swastikas will aid Palestinians.

which is not representative of the piece itself.

My only quibble with the op-ed is that it doesn’t really provide a realistic assessment of anti-semitism in the United States. According to the Anti-Defamation League anti-semitic views are held by a smaller proportion of people in North and South America (19%) than in Western Europe (22%), Eastern Europe (34%), Asia (22%), sub-Saharan Africa (24%), or the Middle East and North Africa (a whopping 74%) but even that is an inadequate picture. The reason it’s that low in the Americas is that only 10% of Americans and 8% of Canadians hold anti-semitic views. Everywhere else in the Americas, a higher percentage hold anti-semitic views. Among the countries from which we receive the most immigrants 1 of 4 Mexicans holds such views, 1 of 3 Guatemalans, and 1 of 5 Chinese or Indians hold them.

In other words if we want to preserve the highly tolerant society we already have, condemning the U. S. as intolerant while welcoming less tolerant people is not a success-oriented strategy.

Onwards to Fareed Zakaria’s critique of China’s new, more assertive style of diplomacy in the Washington Post. He thinks it’s working against China’s interests. After citing a number of recent examples he remarks:

China’s current foreign policy is far removed from its patient, long-term and moderate approach during the Deng Xiaoping era and after. Back then, the central objective was to ensure that the country’s meteoric economic rise did not trigger resentment and counterbalancing from other nations. President Hu Jintao’s adviser Zheng Bijian coined the term “peaceful rise” to describe China’s aspirations and strategy. Now Chinese diplomats embrace conflict and hurl insults in what is known as “wolf warrior” diplomacy.

What is striking about China’s strategy is that it has produced a series of “own goals” — leading countries to adopt the very policies Beijing has long tried to stop. There have also been serious consequences for its global image, greatly diminishing its soft power. Negative views toward China among Americans soared from 47 percent in 2017 to a staggering 73 percent in 2020. If you think that’s a U.S. phenomenon, here are the numbers for some other countries: 40 percent to 73 percent in Canada, 37 percent to 74 percent in the United Kingdom, 32 percent to 81 percent in Australia, 61 percent to 75 percent in South Korea and 49 percent to 85 percent in Sweden. If there is a single theme in international life these days, it is rising public hostility toward China.

President Xi Jinping has transformed China’s approach, domestically and abroad. He has consolidated power for the party and himself. He has reasserted party control over economic policy, in recent months putting curbs on the most innovative parts of the Chinese economy (the technology sector) while lavishing benefits on its most unproductive one (the old state-owned enterprises). And he has pursued a combative, unpredictable and often emotional foreign policy.

In doing all this, he is dismantling China’s hard-earned reputation as a smart, stable and productive player on the world stage. It all brings to mind another period of centralized politics and aggressive foreign policy — the Mao era. That did not end so well for China.

I think he’s got it almost completely backwards. They’re playing to the house. They don’t care about the European Union, Australia, or the United States. The care about how they’re perceived in China. When a Chinese diplomat shouts down American diplomats who’ve been droning on about human rights, carbon emissions, or whatever interests the present U. S. administration, it’s received well by the Chinese people. It is seen as strength and an appearance of strength can bolster actual strength.

I’m not actually afraid of China. I’m afraid of the United States, its incompetent political leadership, and its uneducated, timorous elite who are assiduously pursuing what they perceive as their own interests at the expense of those of the rest of us.

Most of the articles I read to today made me wonder about in what world the authors were living? Let’s start with this New York Times op-ed from former Israeli Prime Minister Tzvi Livni on the possibility of an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians:

The argument over historical narratives hasn’t changed. It won’t. Those on both sides that insist on forcing their narrative on the other side, or turning the conflict into a religious war, cannot make the compromises needed for peace. This is true also for those from the international community supporting one side and denying the rights of the other. This is destructive and only strengthens extremists.

Peace based on the vision of two states for two peoples gives an answer to the national aspirations of both the Jewish people and the Palestinians and requires compromises by both.

which is fair enough. But this is more aspirational than actual:

National conflicts cannot be resolved by wars and violence, but only by a political resolution, leadership and compromise. A religious conflict is not a conflict over rights, but a fight against the right of others to live by their faith. For religious ideologists, there is no compromise.

History is filled with counter-examples, a notable case being the saving of the remnants of European Jewry by wars and violence about 80 years ago. And I think his conclusion is a free flight of fancy:

An agreement will be possible when pragmatic leaders on both sides understand that the price of not having an agreement for their people is far higher than the price of compromise.

It is pragmatism not to mention survival instinct on the part of the political leadership both among Israelis and Palestinians that has driven those parties farther apart over the last 30 years. The most extreme elements in both societies have veto power over any agreement which shoves those agreements into insignificance. As long as that’s the case which is to say the foreseeable future, agreements are meaningless.