In his most recent New York Times column David Brooks puts out as good a definition of American exceptionalism as any:

In an important 2001 paper, the economists Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser and Bruce Sacerdote detailed exactly how distinct America’s system has always been.

In 1870, they wrote, government in America spent only 0.3 percent of gross domestic product on social benefit programs while France spent 1.1 percent. By 1998, America’s spending on such welfare-state programs as poverty relief and benefits for retirement, disability, unemployment, health care and family care had risen to 11 percent of G.D.P., but France’s had risen to 21.6 percent. Several European countries were typically spending twice as much as America to help the old, the young, the sick and the disadvantaged. Today, America spends 19 percent of G.D.P. on social benefits while France is at 31 percent.

Why have we adopted such a distinct system? Well, we’re a country that came into being through a revolution against centralized power. We have a high suspicion of the state. We’re also an immigrant nation. We put enormous faith in the gospel that hard work leads to success. This has led to an ethos that invests lots of money in future growth and less in a safety net for those who fall behind.

Finally, we’re a diverse country. People support social spending for the poor when they see the poor as members of their racial or ethnic group. People are less likely to support social spending when they see the poor as predominantly members of some other group.

to which I would add that government in the United States is not merely trusted less than that of other countries; it is less worthy of trust. If you’re looking for evidence that’s the case just consider how many elected officials become wealthy in elected office, far wealthier than can be explained by their official salaries.

He then expresses his doubts about current trends:

Ten years ago, I would have been aghast at this leftward shift. But like everybody else, I’ve seen inequality widen, the social fabric decay, the racial wealth gap increase. Americans are rightly convinced that the country is broken and fear it is in decline. Like a lot of people, I’ve moved left on what I think of the role of government and income redistribution issues. We surely need to invest a lot more in infrastructure and children.

But I worry about this new economic philosophy that asserts you can have everything you want without trade-offs. This week I was reading a smart blog post from a progressive economist and I came across phrases that startled me: “Public debt doesn’t matter” and “Work incentives don’t matter.” Really? Have the laws of gravity been suspended, too?

These are not disconnected. For reasons I don’t quite understand progressives tend not to believe that there is such a thing as “human nature” or, at least, they believe that human nature is completely malleable. Furthermore, also incredible to me, they tend not to believe that people follow incentives. If you reject the possibility that history is any guide, you are ipso facto rejecting the lessons of history.

In my view the adverse developments to which he points are a consequence of factors that include the following:

• Financialization of the economy and its handmaiden
• Monetization of the debt
• Deindustrialization, i.e. Loss of productive capacity
• Mercantilism on the part of countries with which we compete
• Passing laws but not enforcing them
• The strategy of improving the lot of the poor by paying people to provide services for them
• Too many poor immigrants too fast

Contrary to what you might conclude from that last bullet item, I am not anti-immigrant. I just think that the U. S. is an outlier and should remain so but at 15% being immigrants, mostly from Mexico and Central America, we presently have an immigrant population that is more than we can assimilate. We’re changing: we’re becoming more like Guatemala.

Which of these factors does the Republican leadership want to change? None. Which of these factor does the Democratic leadership want to change? None.

That’s why that rather than “investing a lot more in infrastructure and children” we will inevitably end up paying a lot more to construction companies and teachers without improving our infrastructure or educational outcomes. It’s also why what will be billed as “ending the carnage” will do practically nothing to reduce gun homicides but will mostly result in more unenforced laws being broken.

I’m pretty much in agreement with Eric Boehm’s take at Reason.com on the rush to abolish the filibuster:

The idea that the filibuster is a holdover from the Jim Crow era—an idea that is suddenly popping up all over left-wing politics and media—stems from the fact that filibusters were relatively rare until the past few decades. “It was used rarely and almost always for the purpose of blocking civil-rights bills,” explains New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait. “The filibuster exception to the general practice of majority rule was a product of an implicit understanding that the white North would grant the white South a veto on matters of white supremacy.”

There is no question that the filibuster has been wielded for racist purposes. Sen. Strom Thurmond (D–S.C.) spoke on the Senate floor for more than 24 hours—still the longest filibuster on record—in a failed attempt to block a final vote on the Civil Rights Act of 1957, for example. The bill passed anyway.

But the filibuster is better understood as the product of the Senate’s arcane procedural rules. As such, it is not inherently racist (and, by extension, abolishing it won’t make the Senate as an institution anti-racist). If it was used by racists to advance racist goals, the racists are to blame. Presidents have used the annual State of the Union address to advance all manner of terrible policy, but we rightfully blame them (and the Congress that eventually votes to enact such policies) and not the speech itself.

The debate over the filibuster, like all of the tedious debates over procedural mechanisms in legislative chambers, is really about power. That power can manifest itself in the perpetuation of racist and discriminatory systems, of course, but not exclusively.

“Short-term, pragmatic considerations almost always shape contests over reform of Senate rules,” Sarah Binder, a historian and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration last year. She was referring to the history of the filibuster and its evolution over the decades, but the same lesson applies to what’s happening right now.

If the Democratic leadership were really impelled to “anti-racism”, there would be a lot more black representatives and senators in their caucus than there are now. Their present approach to redistricting has multiple objectives: creating “safe” Democratic districts, producing representatives who are more progressive than Democrats are in general but, most of all, protecting incumbents which necessarily means a lot of old, white senators and representatives. FDR’s coalition is no more, black voters are practically its last vestige, and they’re getting short shrift as usual.

All I can say about eliminating cloture rules is be careful of what you wish for. In the near term you may pass a lot of laws. If any of them produce unfortunate unforeseen consequences, Democrats will own them. Their complaints about those evil racist Republicans blocking the things that Americans need won’t have quite the resonance they used to.

I’m not sure I buy the argument that Alfredo Ortiz is making in his post at RealClearPolitics—that Joe Biden is the contemporary reincarnation of Jimmy Carter but he does cite some concerning indicators:

Last week, the Philadelphia Federal Reserve’s Manufacturing Prices Paid Index reached its highest level since March 1980, when Carter was in office. Numerous other indicators, including rising bond yields and elevated commodity prices, suggest high inflation is coming. The latest Empire State Manufacturing Survey shows input prices rising at the quickest pace in almost a decade.

Even liberal economists such as Larry Summers worry that the recent $1.9 trillion spending package, ostensibly for COVID-19 relief, may “set off inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation.” According to Patricia Mosser, a former Fed economist and now a Columbia University professor, “Uncertainty about medium-term inflation is very high right now.”

Under Carter, America suffered double-digit inflation, significantly hurting the middle class, savers, and creditors. Small business owners were forced to rapidly raise prices just to try to maintain their bottom lines, alienating customers and making budgeting a nightmare.

Since Biden was elected, average national gas prices have skyrocketed, increasing by about 40% to nearly $3 a gallon. Biden’s strong opposition to traditional energy, reflected by policies such as ending the Keystone XL pipeline, rejoining the Paris climate agreement, and banning drilling on public lands, has contributed to this pain at the pump.

There’s a pretty reliable inverse correlation between retail gas prices and U. S. economic growth. Nonetheless, I don’t think that Joe Biden is that much like Jimmy Carter. I tend to assess presidents based on foreign policy and my take on Carter was that he was trying to manage U. S. foreign policy on the basis of moral suasion alone which, unfortunately, is a doomed prospect in this fallen world. There are lots of other differences. Joe Biden is a lawyer; Jimmy Carter an engineer. Carter was a Washington outsider; Biden’s the consummate insider. Carter is an Annapolis grad and served in the Navy; Biden has no military experience. I see few indications that Biden’s foreign policy will be much like Carter’s. The opposite if anything.

I don’t believe that presidents have much to do with U. S. economic growth other than as cheer captains. For that you should look to the Congress which does, indeed, influence the U. S. economy.

I’ll give you the TL;DR version of Gregory Johnsen’s piece on Yemen at Brookings: Yemen is no more. He discusses a country in seven fragments but why not 17 or 70? Here’s his conclusion:

The nation-state system is the key building block of diplomacy, international relations, and national security. The United States, like most countries, is set up to deal with other nation-states. The military prefers to work “by, with, and through” local partners. But what happens when there is no partner on the other side, when the gulf between what Yemen’s internationally recognized government claims and what it actually controls becomes so great the fiction of a single state finally collapses?

The answer isn’t clear, but increasingly in countries like Yemen, Syria, and maybe even Libya, it is a question the U.S. is going to have to solve.

That supports a point I made some time ago. Without harsh authoritarian dictatorships there’s a stretch of, essentially, ungoverned territory that stretches from the Hindu Kush and covers most of the Middle East and North Africa. Those are areas well-suited for terrorist bases. The Ottoman pacified that area for about a millennium and we’re still feeling the vacuum left by the collapse of the empire.

It takes a lot of throat-clearing for Richard Bernstein to get to the point in his analysis of the “China model” for economic development at RealClearPolitics but he does, eventually. Here’s the kernel of the piece:

“I basically don’t believe there is a China-centric model of growth,” Nicholas Lardy, a specialist on China at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C., said in a phone interview. In his most recent book, “The State Strikes Back,” Lardy challenges the narrative of Chinese efficiency, arguing its political system’s insistence on control has led it to invest in inefficient and often unprofitable state-owned enterprises, rather than in the private sector where most growth is generated.

“The ‘China model’ is one in which you have a very dynamic private sector with a very bad, resource-consuming state sector that doesn’t show much sign of improvement,” Lardy said. “So in that sense you could say that China does have a model, but it’s not one that many people would want to emulate.”

concluding:

The basic question, of course, has to do with a key element of the “China model,” the authoritarian control exercised by the CCP and the country’s constantly reiterated claim that this has always been indispensable to “the miracle of development never seen before in human history.”

There is no “control” in this experiment, no proof that had China become more democratic, its economic record might actually have been better. The experience of South Korea and Taiwan suggest that it may well might have been, and that an authoritarian political system wasn’t necessary.

It wasn’t necessary unless, of course, you were running it in which case it was vital.

For the last 30 years I’ve been warning that the risk China faces is that they’re following the same path the Soviets did. In the 1930s the Soviets achieved enormous economic growth by moving relatively unproductive labor resources from agriculture to manufacturing. China has done the same thing, becoming the low cost provider of labor with an effectively inexhaustible supply. That phase has ended—they still have an effectively inexhaustible supply of labor but they’re no longer the low cost provider and for the last decade of so they’ve been bolstering growth with enormous borrowing. How long that can continue is anybody’s guess. You also can’t remove labor resources from agriculture indefinitely and maintain the degree of food self-sufficiency the Chinese authorities have wanted.

In an article at Politico Zack Stanton interviews Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute. I agree with a lot of what Mr. Selee has to say, disagree with some but this passage particularly caught my attention:

For migration movements, reality trumps perception. Perception matters, but people don’t usually move 2,000 miles or spend $6,000—the only money they have, plus money that they borrowed from relatives or “financial institutions” like prestamistas, or “loan sharks”—people don’t do that, and they don’t take a dangerous journey unless they think they can get in. There was a perception that with Biden, the border would be more open. And then the reality was that some people actually did get in. The perception of the change, coupled with just enough reality of change, allowed the smugglers to sell this.

I mean, smugglers are smart and unscrupulous marketers. They can’t sell what doesn’t exist, but they can exaggerate what does. I lived in Tijuana for around six years, and I had neighbors who were smugglers. I worked with the Mexican YMCA back then. We had a home for migrant youth, and I was the one gringo there. A father would call us and say, “José is going to get picked up by a close friend of the family,” and these guys would show up — and it’d be the same “family friend” who picked up someone else last week. We got to know these guys. We’d hang out, have a cup of coffee. They are smart, smooth marketers. But as good as they are at selling their wares, they can’t sell what doesn’t exist. When there’s a real change on the ground, they’ll exaggerate that; they can exaggerate how easy it is to get in. But if nobody is getting in, they can’t completely make it up. The reality of change mattered as much as the perception of it.

which echoes things I’ve been saying here, as many of Mr. Selee’s remarks do.

There are a number of areas in which I part company with Mr. Selee, however, and many are related to path dependence. What happened in the past limits the choices we have now. In 1965 you could make a very good case that we could use a lot more immigrants. Wages were rising as was the marginal product of labor and those had been the case for a century. Income and wealth equality were reasonable. Healthcare and education were relatively inexpensive. About 4% of the population were immigrants.

Fast forward to today. Wages for the lowest earners have been flat for decades and, contrary to the claims of those who demand sharp increases in the minimum wage, the reason for it is rather obviously the slack labor market produced by mass immigration from Mexico and Central America. Our income and wealth inequality are now more like those of a Third World country than of a European or Anglosphere country. Costs of healthcare and education have been rising faster than the non-healthcare or education sectors and have been doing so for decades, so much so that both are increasingly unaffordable for ordinary people let alone for the working poor. The percentage of immigrants in the country is around 15%. The last time it was this high we slammed the door shut for nearly a half century.

If we’re going to be able to improve the circumstances of blacks and immigrants already here while preserving legal immigration and accepting legitimate asylum seekers (as opposed to economic migrants), we need to control illegal immigration and that becomes increasingly the case with each new illegal immigrant. The situation is different than it was two years ago or five years ago because the circumstances are different than they were two years or five years ago.

There is an urgent necessity for the Biden Administration to broadcast an unequivocal message: we will control our borders and we will enforce our laws. Can the administration retain the support of open borders advocates, have the humane policies that Candidate Biden advocated, while doing what’s necessitated by today’s conditions?

The editors of the Wall Street Journal are not favorably impressed by the U. S. House of Representatives’ election reform bill, H. R. 1. Their opposition is not based on partisan grounds:

Over the weekend, the Daily Beast posted an article by Jessica Huseman of Votebeat, a nonprofit news group covering electoral issues. She calls H.R.1’s tenets “laudable” but says the bill “was written with apparently no consultation with election administrators, and it shows.” An unnamed Democratic state-level official is quoted as saying that he’d follow the law: “But I can’t guarantee it’s not going to be a total clusterf— the first election.”

Ms. Huseman knocks H.R.1’s “alarmingly prescriptive solutions,” its “deeply unrealistic time frames,” and its added costs with “no assured long-term funding.” How’s this for reportorial color? “Election administrators used the F-word a lot during my chats with them,” she writes, “frustrated because they’ve eagerly sought federal funding and basic attention to their offices, only to be handed impossible goals.”

concluding:

Fifty states have their own voting laws, and it makes no sense to micromanage them all from Congress, down to the glue on the envelopes. Democrats have dumped H.R.1 on the public as a half-baked brainstorm because they’re in a rush to rig the rules to their advantage.

I don’t know what the House’s motivations are. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and suggest they’re trying to avoid a repetition of the 2020 presidential election in future elections. They won’t accomplish it this way. In all likelihood the Supreme Court will declare a law with the provisions of this bill an unconstitutional arrogation of state powers to the federal government; the most they can hope to accomplish by it is to regulate federal elections, complicating already complicated discrepancies between state and federal election law, cf. “provisional ballots”.

I will say that H. R. 1 demonstrates the good sense in the provision in Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” of 25 years ago: no unfunded mandates. If you want to reduce opposition to your mandates from the states, pay for them.

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Marty Makary says that federal public health officials are overestimating the time it will take for the U. S. to achieve “herd immunity”:

Anthony Fauci has been saying that the country needs to vaccinate 70% to 85% of the population to reach herd immunity from Covid-19. But he inexplicably ignores natural immunity. If you account for previous infections, herd immunity is likely close at hand.

Data from the California Department of Public Health, released earlier this month, show that while only 8.7% of the state’s population has ever tested positive for Covid-19, at least 38.5% of the population has antibodies against the novel coronavirus. Those numbers are from Jan. 30 to Feb. 20. Adjusting for cases between now and then, and accounting for the amount of time it takes for the body to make antibodies, we can estimate that as many as half of Californians have natural immunity today.

The same report found that 45% of people in Los Angeles had Covid-19 antibodies. Again, the number can only be higher today. Between “half and two-thirds of our population has antibodies in it now,” due to Covid exposure or vaccination, Mayor Eric Garcetti said Sunday on “Face the Nation.” That would explain why cases in Los Angeles are down 95% in the past 11 weeks and the positivity rate among those tested is now 1.7%.

Undercounting or removing the many Americans with natural immunity from any tally of herd immunity is a scientific error of omission. When people wonder why President Biden talks about limiting Fourth of July gatherings, it’s because his most prominent medical adviser has dismissed the contribution of natural immunity, artificially extending the timeline.

which in turn motivated the question that is the title of this post. The honest answer is neither we nor the federal public officials nor, as far as I know, anyone else actually knows. What we do know is that about 8% of the population has been confirmed as having had COVID-19. There are significantly higher estimates of how many people have contracted the disease, for example, this one at News-Medical:

World health experts have long suspected that the incidence of COVID-19 has been higher than reported. Now, a machine-learning algorithm developed at UT Southwestern estimates that the number of COVID-19 cases in the U.S. since the pandemic began is nearly three times that of confirmed cases.

The algorithm, described in a study published today in PLOS ONE, provides daily updated estimates of total infections to date as well as how many people are currently infected across the U.S. and in 50 countries hardest hit by the pandemic.

As of Feb. 4, according to the model’s calculations, more than 71 million people in the U.S. – 21.5 percent of Americans – had contracted COVID-19. That compares with the substantially smaller 26.7 million publicly reported number of confirmed cases, says Jungsik Noh, Ph.D., a UT Southwestern assistant professor in the Lyda Hill Department of Bioinformatics and first author of the study.

but, that, too is just a guesstimate. I might have more confidence if I saw the actual algorithm used to produce the results. The true number (which has changed since I started writing this post) could be higher than that, lower than that, or about right.

Arguendo, let’s assume that the true number is something between 8% and 21.5%. Picking a number at random, let’s say 15%. How many of the remaining pool of 85% of the population would need to be vaccinated before herd immunity is achieved? We don’t know the answer to that, either:

The percentage of people who need to be immune in order to achieve herd immunity varies with each disease. For example, herd immunity against measles requires about 95% of a population to be vaccinated. The remaining 5% will be protected by the fact that measles will not spread among those who are vaccinated. For polio, the threshold is about 80%. The proportion of the population that must be vaccinated against COVID-19 to begin inducing herd immunity is not known. This is an important area of research and will likely vary according to the community, the vaccine, the populations prioritized for vaccination, and other factors.

Taking the pessimistic estimate of 95%, that would suggest that as many as 80% of the population would need to be vaccinated. Taking the most optimistic possible view based on present knowledge it suggests that the number would be between 55% and 72%. Clearly, it makes a difference.

I think that Phil Gramm and John Early are guilty of finessing the actual issues in their op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on income inequality:

We have shown on these pages that Census Bureau income data fail to count two-thirds of all government transfer payments—including Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and some 100 other government transfer payments—as income to the recipients. Furthermore, census data fail to count taxes paid as income lost to the taxpayer. When official government data are used to correct these deficiencies—when income is defined the way people actually define it—“income inequality” is reduced dramatically.

We can now show that if you count all government transfers (minus administrative costs) as income to the recipient household, reduce household income by taxes paid, and correct for two major discontinuities in the time-series data on income inequality that were caused solely by changes in Census Bureau data-collection methods, the claim that income inequality is growing on a secular basis collapses. Not only is income inequality in America not growing, it is lower today than it was 50 years ago.

While the disparity in earned income has become more pronounced in the past 50 years, the actual inflation-adjusted income received by the bottom quintile, counting the value of all transfer payments received net of taxes paid, has risen by 300%. The top quintile has seen its after-tax income rise by only 213%. As government transfer payments to low-income households exploded, their labor-force participation collapsed and the percentage of income in the bottom quintile coming from government payments rose above 90%.

I would point out that the situation is quite different with respect to wealth inequality:

Fifty years ago half of the national wealth was in the hands of half of the people. Now half of the national wealth is in the hands of a tiny fraction of the people. I think that kind of disparity is corrosive to a society like ours.

It has a number of causes including far too many poor immigrants coming into the country, over-financialization of the economy, and perverse incentives. I recognize that we can’t completely level wealth or incomes in the society but the present trajectory is completely wrong. And, contrary to the preferred policies of the Congressional Democrats, it can’t be solved through taxation. It will require changes much more basic than that including in some areas they consider sacrosanct.