The City of Chicago has renamed Douglas Park on the West side, named for 19th century Illinois politician Stephen Douglas, to Douglass Park for Frederick Douglass and his wife. ABC 7 Chicago reports:

CHICAGO — A sprawling park on Chicago’s West Side will now bear the name of 19th century abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Anna Murray-Douglass and not that of a former Illinois senator and slaveowner.

Chicago Park District commissioners voted Wednesday to officially rename the 173-acre park created in 1869 and named for Stephen Douglas after years of efforts by a group of high school students. The teenagers had gone as far as to paint an extra S” on signs in the park that carried its original name, Douglas Park.”

Stephen Douglas lost the presidential election to Abraham Lincoln in 1860 and died a year later.

Students at Village Leadership Academy began pushing for the name change in 2016. Their original choice was to honor Rekia Boyd, who was shot and killed near the park in 2012 by an off-duty police officer who was later acquitted of involuntary manslaughter. Their choice was rejected by officials for lacking historical significance. The students settled on Frederick Douglass and his wife, who helped him escape slavery.

Presently, Douglas is remembered (if he is remembered at all) for debating Abraham Lincoln in 1858 during their campaign for U. S. senator. Republican Lincoln won the popular vote but was not appointed to the Senate by the Illinois legislature, dominated by Democrats. I presume that the many ironies of this renaming are lost on most of its advocates.

There are any number of reasons to not want to name a park for Stephen Douglas. That his wife’s family owned slaves is, perhaps, one of the weakest. A main topic of the debates was slavery and in essence Douglas defended it. He was the author and principle sponsor of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854.

I support the renaming but it did remind me of one of the corollaries to Parkinson’s Third Law: you can identify the start of decline in any institution by its building a grand new headquarters. Getting results may or may not be a sign of increasing strength.

In an op-ed at the Washington Post pollster David Hill explains why telephone opinion polling has reached the end of its usefulness:

When I first undertook telephone polling in the early 1980s, I could start with a cluster of five demographically similar voters — say, Republican moms in their 40s in a Midwestern suburb — and expect to complete at least one interview from that group of five. I’d build a sample of 500 different clusters of five voters per cluster, or 2,500 voters total. From that number, I could be reasonably assured that 500 people would talk to us. The 500 clusters were designed to represent a diverse cross-section of the electorate.

As the years drifted by, it took more and more voters per cluster for us to get a single voter to agree to an interview. Between 1984 and 1989, when caller ID was rolled out, more voters began to ignore our calls. The advent of answering machines and then voicemail further reduced responses. Voters screen their calls more aggressively, so cooperation with pollsters has steadily declined year-by-year. Whereas once I could extract one complete interview from five voters, it can now take calls to as many as 100 voters to complete a single interview, even more in some segments of the electorate.

And here’s the killer detail: That single cooperative soul who speaks with an interviewer cannot possibly hold the same opinions as the 99 other voters who refused.

In short, we no longer have truly random samples that support claims that poll results accurately represent opinions of the electorate.

Instead, we have samples of “the willing,” what researchers call a “convenience sample” of those consenting to give us their time and opinions. Despite knowledge of this, pollsters (including myself) have glossed over this reality by dressing up our results with claims of polls having a “margin of error” of three or four percentage points when we knew, or should have known, that the error factor is incalculable given the non-random sample. Most pollsters turned to weighting results to “fix” variations in cooperation, but this can inadvertently amplify sampling errors due to noncooperation.

That strikes me as about right. Combine answering machines, caller ID, cellphones, and just plain distrust of political polling and telephone polling is pretty much a thing of the past as much as rotary phones are.

That doesn’t mean that people will stop trying to figure out how people are planning to vote or that data analysis is going to go away. Far from it. I think that the incentives are sufficiently high that both will continue. I just think that it will take different people with different skills and the identification of better proxy measures to do the job.

But if telephone polling isn’t dead, it’s certainly pining for the fjords.

In his New York Times column this morning Paul Krugman predicts a “Biden boom”:

But my sense is that many analysts have overlearned the lessons from the 2008 financial crisis, which was indeed followed by years of depressed employment, defying the predictions of economists who expected the kind of “V-shaped” recovery the economy experienced after earlier deep slumps. For what it’s worth, I was among those who dissented back then, arguing that this was a different kind of recession, and that recovery would take a long time.

And here’s the thing: The same logic that predicted sluggish recovery from the last big slump points to a much faster recovery this time around — again, once the pandemic is under control.

What held recovery back after 2008? Most obviously, the bursting of the housing bubble left households with high levels of debt and greatly weakened balance sheets that took years to recover.

This time, however, households entered the pandemic slump with much lower debt. Net worth took a brief hit but quickly recovered. And there’s probably a lot of pent-up demand: Americans who remained employed did a huge amount of saving in quarantine, accumulating a lot of liquid assets.

All of this suggests to me that spending will surge once the pandemic subsides and people feel safe to go out and about, just as spending surged in 1982 when the Federal Reserve slashed interest rates. And this in turn suggests that Joe Biden will eventually preside over a soaring, “morning in America”-type recovery.

The balance of the column is devoted to counting chickens in advance of their hatching.

I don’t know if Dr. Krugman is right or wrong. I sincerely hope he’s right. There are reasons to doubt. For example when you consider the U. S. population in age brackets rather than as a whole things look a bit different:

From MarketWatch:

Those who are 70 and older are in double the household debt collectively now than they were during the financial crisis in the late 2000s — $1.16 trillion in the second quarter, versus the $0.54 trillion 11 years ago.

My reading of that graph tells me that some age brackets (basically, the young and the old) are in greater debt than they were in 2007-2008. I once heard a description of life in the U. S. as “spend, spend, spend, spend, save, spend, die”. One of the big differences between now and then is educational debt. If that description is correct, then there may not be as much of a post-COVID spending surge as he expects. Also, I think that, even assuming safe, effective vaccines that begin mass distribution before the end of the year, it will take years before enough people have been inoculated to predict “morning in America”.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that the preliminary results of a manual recount of 5 million ballot in the Peach State is likely to leave Joe Biden the winner in the state:

A manual recount of 5 million ballots cast in Georgia showed Thursday that Joe Biden won the presidential election, validating initial results.

The recount found that Biden received 12,284 more votes than President Donald Trump.

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger plans to certify the election by Friday, a deadline set by state law to finalize results.

The hand recount, which also functioned as an audit of the election, mostly aligned with initial machine counts. It also uncovered almost 6,000 ballots in four counties that had been overlooked in the initial tally, resulting in Trump closing his deficit to Biden by 1,400 votes.

Both counts found the same outcome: Thousands more voters in Georgia chose Biden than Trump.

Barring something dramatic in Pennsylvania or Michigan, it’s over. Trump should concede and put us all out of our misery.

I stumbled across this on Quora so I thought I’d pass it along:

Two years ago I traveled with my girlfriend all over the USA. We started our journey in New York and arrived in Los Angeles by bus. Travelling by a bus allowed us to take a closer look at America. On the way we stopped in Indianapolis, Nashville, Dallas, Phoenix. USA turned out to be much bigger than we expected. There everything was big, overwhelming. In the stores there was a huge selection of goods, which have no equivalents in Europe. The USA was a strange experience for us because on the one hand we knew this country from the movies and that’s why we had more ideas about it than about some unknown country and at the same time this country was completely different than the image we had in our mind. In the province people are very open, very curious about the world and at the same time do not know the world. When we said that we live in France, we were asked strange questions such as whether there are cats in France….The USA is a country of extraordinary diversity of landscape, huge spaces, full of colors. I really admired the American province, small towns. The biggest disappointment was Los Angeles.There are a lot of people with guns in Texas. I’ve been thinking about why they go in public with these guns all this time….Do they feel safe because of this or are the streets in Texas so dangerous?

I first became aware of this decades ago when a Brit friend spoke blithely about driving from Atlanta to Chicago. Just because you can go by train or car from London to Bristol or Manchester in a couple of hours doesn’t mean the same is true of the U. S. Most visitors stay in the big cities which also gives them a distorted view of the U. S.

Heck, the problem extends to Americans as well. IMO people from the Northeast would do well to take a driving trip across the U. S. Stay off the interstates. It might give you a different view of the country.

A Danish study of the effects of wearing masks on contracting COVID-19, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine will probably have varying interpretations:

A total of 3030 participants were randomly assigned to the recommendation to wear masks, and 2994 were assigned to control; 4862 completed the study. Infection with SARS-CoV-2 occurred in 42 participants recommended masks (1.8%) and 53 control participants (2.1%). The between-group difference was −0.3 percentage point (95% CI, −1.2 to 0.4 percentage point; P = 0.38) (odds ratio, 0.82 [CI, 0.54 to 1.23]; P = 0.33). Multiple imputation accounting for loss to follow-up yielded similar results. Although the difference observed was not statistically significant, the 95% CIs are compatible with a 46% reduction to a 23% increase in infection.

depending on your political views. My interpretation is that although wearing masks is not useless its utility is quite limited and very possibly offset by changes in behavior on the part of people wearing masks. Or, as I have been contending for months, they’re being oversold.

I think that the present administration has been remiss in not showing a good example but rather pooh-poohing mask use but pleas for national mandates are misplaced as well. Possibly the greatest utility of masks is to convince people they’re doing something personally to contribute to the “war effort”. Combined with an organized public relations campaign, aimed less at shaming people than at encouraging them, more wearing of masks might help a little and, again combined with a public relations campaign, it isn’t particularly harmful.

To me the bottom line is that it is unlikely that the present resurgence in cases of COVID-19 can be attributed to insufficient mask-wearing or opening restaurants.

The editors of Bloomberg urge the Congress to pass a second COVID-19 relief bill:

The shape of such a deal isn’t hard to make out. Renewed unemployment assistance of an additional $400 a week (up to a cap on income) would disappoint Democrats holding out for another round of $600 supplements. Yet the households running out of savings would doubtless prefer $400 now rather than the vague possibility of more, depending on what happens, sometime next year. More help for financially stressed states and cities is the concession Democrats could ask in exchange, and that Republicans ought to accept. Again, this might fall short of what states and cities will eventually need. Again, right now, something is better than nothing.

The ball is in Nancy Pelosi’s court now. The House passed its initial version of a second relief bill while the Senate passed it. So far Speaker Pelosi has rejected any compromise with the Senate. Does President-Elect have any influence over her? I don’t honestly know.

There were many problems with the original COVID-19 bill, passed all those long months ago, among them that it actually paid some people more not to work than to work. Reducing the supplements is a crude way of accomplishing that. Administration of the plan was obviously flawed. Can that be remedied as well?

I’m not as convinced as the editors of the prudence of bailouts for state and local governments. If we’re truly all in this together, isn’t a little belt tightening by state and local governments in order? So far we’ve seen none of that here.

You might find this piece by Ben Burgis at Arc Digital enlightening or infuriating or both. While I complete agree with his conclusion, encapsulated in the piece’s subheading:

We should think of America’s divisions more in terms of class and ideology, and less in terms of race

the path by which he gets there is pretty remarkable.

Here’s as close as I can get to the meat of the piece:

There are a lot of obvious differences between socialist politics and the liberal vision of most MSNBC hosts. One of the less obvious ones has to do with how to conceive of racial justice and other struggles for equal treatment that have to do with identity — how people identify themselves and how others identify them (and might then treat them on the basis of that identity).

When thinking about these issues, it’s easy to treat “race,” “class,” and “gender” as basically similar conceptual categories. One way this assumption makes its way into our language is with the word “classism” — which suggests that class-based oppression is best understood as a form of prejudice.

Like many socialists, I think this picture is misleading for several reasons. But before getting to those reasons, it’s important to consider what this view gets right. It’s true that injustice takes a variety of forms, some of which are directly and obviously economic, and some of which have to do with identity.

I wanted to comment on a few things. First, if you find the views being articulated by “centrist liberals” infuriating, preferring those in Jacobin, you are so far outside the mainstream of American political thought that a little introspection might be in order.

In one of the first posts I ever wrote at The Glittering Eye I pointed out that people on the far right see people less to the right than they as leftists while people on the far left of the spectrum see ordinary liberals as radical rightwingers. Most people, regardless of political views, think of themselves as moderates. You occupy the center of your own particular universe. Only pragmatists and true moderates, neither of which are in good odor right now, can see both edges of the political spectrum.

The second thing if you’re shocked at the Democratic Party because you don’t see how an old-fashioned liberal (a dead or dying breed) and socialists like you and Bernie Sanders can both be Democrats you might remember that Bernie Sanders isn’t a Democrat. He just caucuses with them to enhance his own influence. My view is that it’s a scandal and an outrage that the DNC let Bernie Sanders run for the Democratic nomination for president at all.

Finally, I find it simply flabbergasting that people who profess to be liberals or progressives have adopted views of race proclaimed by the very most racist within my lifetime. Maybe I’m weird but I don’t see either Barack Obama or Kamala Harris as black. And claiming you can identify as black produces travesties like blue-eyed blondes of Scandinavian descent claiming to be black.

Read the article and tell me what you think.

I thought you might be interested in the remarks of Illinois Gov. Pritzker’s chief medical advisor regarding who is contracting COVID-19 and who is dying of it. From NBC Chicago:

Illinois Department of Public Health Director Dr. Ngozi Ezike said Tuesday that in analyzing the data every day and over time, the largest number of coronavirus cases in the state are in the age group of 20 to 29 years old.

“We look at the numbers daily, weekly, monthly, wave one to wave two, right now we see that the largest number of cases, if you divide them up by groups, the largest number of cases are in the 20 to 29 year olds,” Ezike said in an interview.

“But when you see the individuals that are dying, it’s highest in the 80 and above, next highest 70 and above, next highest 60 and above, right in order down the line,” she continued. “So we know that though the primary group that’s getting infected is the 20-somethings, it does spread from there and get to our more vulnerable citizens in the state.”

What exactly are those 20-somethings doing to see such high transmission of the coronavirus? Living, Ezike said.

“They’re living, they are gathering, you know, they’re working, they’re dining,” she said. “Everything that they’re doing is an opportunity for spread.”

Said another way young people going about their ordinary lives, doing the things they’re doing ordinarily causes them to contract the disease which spreads from them to the elderly who die.

To be honest I think a finer breakdown would be helpful. I don’t believe, for example, that people in their 20s visit their great-grandparents a lot. I’m skeptical that everyone in each of those age cohorts is equally susceptible to the disease or to dying.