You might be interested in the saga of Surgisphere, recounted by Catherine Offord at The Scientist or how a small company with a web site drove global policy and created a scandal that has repercussions right down to the present.

I think this story has a number of morals. First, politicians and public figures, generally, should not be promoting drugs. I don’t even think that prescription drugs should be advertised on television but that’s another subject. Second and more importantly, the bitter divide in our politics is hurting people. I don’t believe that electing Joe Biden to the presidency will make the divide less bitter. I think the only way to lower the temperature is to change the incentives but too many people are making too much money the way things are for that to happen so it will only get worse.

I pointed this out nearly 50 years ago. I’m glad that others are finally getting around to it. Replacing U. S. use of fossil fuels with wind power would have serious environmental impact of its own, as James Taylor observes at RealClearEnergy:

Harvard University scientists who are concerned about global warming published in 2018 a study in which they examined the impact of a wind-turbine economy on America’s open spaces. According to the study, replacing conventional energy with wind turbines would require covering one-third of America’s lands with wind turbines.

No, that is not a misprint. According to the Harvard report, wind turbines would have to blanket fully one-third of America’s lands to replace conventional energy.

Moreover, the scientists found that a large-scale placement of wind turbines would increase U.S. temperatures, as the warming impact of turbines impeding air circulation would outweigh any cooling effect of lower carbon dioxide emissions.

Now, a fair counterclaim is that no one is proposing that we offset fossil fuels with windpower alone—generally, they’re talking about solar and wind. Solar power is no free lunch, either. Deploying it at the scale required fully to replace fossil fuels would have serious environmental impact, too. Not to mention the air, water, and soil pollution that would be produced by processing rare earth elements at the scale required. Putting that processing out of sight, say, in China does not change its ability to pollute.

My point here is not to be a “climate denier” but to point out that policy is hard. Anything deployed at scale is going to have environmental impact. I think the energy future is a diverse one with roles for solar, wind, nuclear, and fossil fuels.

In a piece at City Journal Rafael A. Mangual comments on the death of Breonna Taylor:

The publicly available evidence in Taylor’s case (so far) supports four assertions: that police officers had the legal right to enter Breonna Taylor’s home; that it was reasonable for Walker to believe the apartment was being broken into, and that he therefore had the legal right to fire at the officers before realizing who they were; that police had the legal right to return fire; and that none of the parties involved committed a crime with respect to the shootings of Taylor and Mattingly. The last of these is the main point of contention for police critics, who see the failure to prosecute police for shooting Taylor as emblematic of a pattern: blacks get killed by police without anyone being held accountable.

While no criminal charges have been filed against officers for Taylor’s death, Louisville has settled a wrongful-death suit filed by Taylor’s family for $12 million. That obviously can’t ease the pain of Taylor’s grieving family; but the payout undermines the claim that agents of the state can kill with legal impunity. The settlement also contradicts suggestions that Taylor’s family wouldn’t be able to sue thanks to the controversial doctrine of qualified immunity, which exempts government officials operating in a discretionary capacity from being sued, unless they were acting in some egregiously unconstitutional manner.

I’ve read a number of media reports and opinion pieces on the incident. Perhaps it has been reported and I neglected to see it but one of the things I’m missing from the accounts is what was the probable cause that caused the judge to issue the search warrant that ultimately led to police killing Ms. Taylor? It seems to me that’s very relevant.

Let me take the temperature here. What factors led to the death of Breonna Taylor?

1. Policy failure
2. “Individual missteps” by the police
3. “Individual missteps” by Ms. Taylor and her associates
4. Malice on the part of the police
5. Poor judgment on Ms. Taylor’s part
6. Excessive fear on the part of the police
7. Excessive fear on the part of Ms. Taylor’s associates
8. I don’t have enough information to tell.
9. Other

It seems to me that your answers are practically a litmus test on your political views.

For decades our foreign policy has largely benefited a fairly small segment of the U. S. population. In a piece at the Carnegie Endowment on how a foreign policy that works for more Americans might be crafted I found this paragraph both the most likely and the saddest:

For decades, U.S. foreign policy has operated in a relatively isolated sphere. National security strategists and foreign policy planners have articulated national interests and set the direction of U.S. policy largely through the prism of security and geopolitical competition. That remains a critical perspective, especially at a time when geopolitical competition with China, Russia, and other regional powers is on the rise. But with so many Americans now struggling to sustain a middle-class standard of living, threats to the nation’s long-term prosperity and to middle-class security demand a wider prism—informed by a deeper understanding of domestic economic and social issues and their complex interaction with foreign policy decisions. That is not an easy shift to make. It will take better interagency coordination, interdisciplinary expertise, and some policy imagination. It will also require the contributions of a new generation of foreign policy professionals who break free of the mold cast during the Cold War and its immediate aftermath.

I think it would also help if those crafting our foreign policy had fewer conflicts of interest. It’s darned hard to benefit most of us when the main objectives of foreign policy become maintaining the wealth and status of those doing the crafting. Keep in mind that, whatever the Constitution or other laws say, U. S. foreign policy is an emergent phenomenon, created from the actions of thousands of diplomats, scholars, and business leaders.

I think that Holman Jenkins did a pretty good job of summarizing the situation with respect to COVID-19 in his most recent Wall Street Journal column:

Mr. Trump, at 74, is at higher risk for a bad outcome than a 30-year-old would be. But most 74-year-olds survive Covid and many never have debilitating symptoms. Our media are prone to hysteria, oversimplification and fetishizing random things—case-fatality rates, masks, etc. Reporters and editors have a distorted single-variable mentality. Covid is deadly in a small percentage of cases, currently estimated at between 0.1% and 0.41%, especially among older people in ill health. The major urgency always arose from too many cases happening at the same time and endangering our ability to provide care.

Presently, new cases of COVID-19 and new deaths due to the disease are declining in all of the most populous states. New York and New Jersey remain the states with the highest number of deaths per million population and it appears unlikely at this point that those positions will be challenged. The states with the largest number of cases of COVID-19 per million population are also those with the highest proportion of black, Hispanic, and Native American populations.

I think the pandemic is far from over. In one sense it will never be over since it’s quite likely that SARS-CoV-2 will remain endemic within the population. Physicians are treating the disease more effectively than they were six months ago and, indeed, it seems quite unlikely that COVID-19 will overwhelm the health care system. Here in Illinois about 8% ICU beds are occupied by COVID-19 patients while about 5% of hospital beds are occupied by COVID-19 patients with plenty of beds available. Individual locations could find their resources strained. That’s why a system that could provide resources where they’re most needed quickly would be nice but that’s not the system we have. The U. S. is second only to China, a country with three times our population, in the number of tests that have been conducted although many countries have conducted more tests relative to their population than either China or the U. S. The Faeroe Islands have conducted more than twice as many tests as we have relative to its population. I see a correlation between being a relatively small island and high percentage of tests administered more than anything else. I remain skeptical that the method we have used for testing and contact tracing will do anything whatever to reduce new cases or mortality.

Although I don’t believe the pandemic is over, I think there’s a good case to be made that the emergency is over. We’ll see what happens in the winter months.

There is the kernel of an idea in the latest editorial in the Washington Post but, unfortunately, the editors fail to root through the chaff provided by their own preconceived notions to find it:

Restoring opportunity requires growth, but new information suggests achieving it will be more challenging after the pandemic, too. The Congressional Budget Office’s latest long-term economic forecast, released Sept. 21, posits annual average output growth of just 1.6 percent a year over the next three decades. For comparison, average growth in the first decade of this century, which included the Great Recession, was 1.9 percent annually. The CBO attributes this to projected slower growth in two key variables, the size of the working-age population and output per worker. The pandemic is expected to deliver a double demographic shock as both the birth and immigration rates fall, and it will take years to return to previous trends, if at all.

The silver lining is that there is no necessary contradiction between policies to spur growth and policies to share the fruits more equitably. Education and training, for example, enable individuals to earn more, even as they promote overall productivity. Resources to invest in them can come from higher taxes on top earners. As travel restrictions end — along with the Trump administration and its crude anti-immigration mind-set, we hope — the United States should increase immigration and reorient more of it toward fulfilling unmet labor-force needs.

Like American democracy, American capitalism has, on balance, been a force for human progress in the past. But, like our political system, the economy needs reform and modernization to thrive in the future.

I agree with the premises: our economy needs reform and modernization. I disagree with the few suggestions the editors provide (education and immigration). Let’s consider a few things.

Education and training could improve productivity but, unfortunately, governments are chronically incapable of providing that. Look at the history of job training programs in the U. S. The reason is simple: they are inevitably strongly predisposed to look backwards, preparing people for jobs that do not or will not exist. Additional subsidies of our educational system have the same problem. Just to provide one example every year America’s colleges and universities graduate more journalism majors than there are people working in journalism. Rather obviously, that is vanity training not job training. If you want to train people for the jobs of the future, you will need to rely more strongly on companies to provide it but companies no longer provide education or training as they once did. Early in my career my employers would pay the full freight for my going back to school part-time. Why did that stop? The answer is outsourcing. Today companies hire to suit. They send out to an Accenture, Tata, Infosys, or Wipro which will provide them a stack of resumes of people with exactly the education and training they require. That they are unable to evaluate or validate the resumes is rarely considered or that there are cultural issues underpinning productivity as well as credentials.

Consolidation is another problem. Companies have cultures which is to say they have self-imposed blinders. Today’s major companies are bigger than ever before and there are fewer of them. Being acquired by a major company is frequently the business plan for start-ups and there are fewer start-ups today than in the past.

Our economy has become far too reliant on minimum age, low wage, or sub-minimum wage employees. That is a consequence of our immigration system. Massive illegal immigration has resulted in a huge supply of such workers. So has sponsorship and our family reunification policies.

Resilience and redundancy are two of the reforms our economy needs but no company will ever invest in such things. Too much effect on the bottom line. There are two ways we could produce resilience and redundancy: a lot more companies competing with each other or specific government regulations requiring such things.

The ideological battle between anarcho-capitalist and progressives results in our economy being less dynamic, have lower productivity and lower wages, be less resilient, and less redundant than might otherwise be the case. Anarcho-capitalists imagine that individuals and businesses will produce those themselves if merely given the freedom to do so. Progressives imagine that politicians and governments are much more competent and honest than they actually are. They’re both wrong.

I think that Francis Wilkinson is onto something in his most recent Bloomberg column but he hasn’t taken his reasoning far enough. Whether you call it the “professional class” as he does or the “creative class” or something else, that group is largely supporting the Democratic Party not only with their votes but financially and with their influence on the society.

Democrats, meanwhile, are increasingly reliant on what Thomas Piketty has called a “Brahmin” class of cultural and information workers. In his 1988 book “Honest Graft,” Brooks Jackson chronicled the nearly indiscriminate pursuit by then-Representative Tony Coelho of corporate funds for Democratic coffers. With labor unions in steep decline, Coelho led Democrats in shifting their attention to where the money was — the corporate sector. The funding shift accompanied the rise of market-oriented, corporate-friendly, neoliberalism in the party.

Today, party finances are ever more reliant on high-education professionals in cities and suburbs. From Jan. 1, 2019 to Aug. 31, 2020, the Federal Election Commission lists the top five professions for ActBlue donors as attorney, teacher, physician, professor and engineer. For WinRed, the newer, less successful, GOP competitor to ActBlue, the top five occupations (other than retired or not employed) are CEO, owner, sales, physician and president.

concluding

Indeed, they are funding their party as if life itself depends on it. Those funds can accelerate powerful changes already driven by demographics and pent-up demands for equality, justice and opportunity (or what Trump derisively calls “socialism”). The lopsided flow of money, however, will exert a powerful influence on the party’s direction. The Democratic appetite for change appears expansive. The contours of suburban comfort zones may yet prove more limited.

We are not the only country for which it is true. It is true of many if not most countries: the “professional class” is largely dependent for its incomes on government spending.

The challenge that produces for modern economies was recognized more than a half century ago by economist Joseph Schumpeter who also recognized that the “intellectual class” as he called it was likely to destroy the very system on which it depends for its livelihood. Such a system cannot succeed; it is a form of perpetual motion as I have pointed out numerous times before most pointedly in my observations about the cat and rat farm.

It is also a contributing factor to the income and wealth inequality that has developed in the U. S. over the last 50 years. Too frequently Democrats espouse a very funny kind of socialism in which vast amounts are devoted to paying professionals in the hope that the services they provide for the poor will make the poor better off. It may or may not but benefiting the poor by providing services for them does not improve income or wealth inequality.

At Vox.com Dylan Scott underscores a point I have been making here for some time:

According to the APM Research Lab, as of mid-September, “1 in 1,020 Black Americans has died (or 97.9 deaths per 100,000).” More than 200,000 Americans are confirmed dead from Covid-19, and a disproportionate number of them are Black. It’s that simple. (Biden’s statement that 1 in 500 could die by the end of the year without swift action would appear to reflect the estimates that the US death toll could grow to 400,000 by January 1.)

There are several reasons why. Black Americans have disproportionately higher rates of preexisting conditions, including heart disease and cancer, which are associated with more deaths and hospitalizations from Covid-19. Black Americans are also more likely to work in jobs that are considered “essential,” which requires them to go into work and risk exposure to the coronavirus.

Housing segregation has also led to Black Americans having less access to clean water and created many longstanding health disparities. Race, place, income, and health, as should be obvious by now, are inextricably linked. And the health consequences of these inequities have been especially evident during the pandemic, as David Williams, a professor of public health and sociology at Harvard, wrote in a May 2020 editorial for JAMA

Economic status matters profoundly for reducing the risk of exposure to SARS-CoV-2. Lower-income and minority workers are overrepresented among essential service workers who must work outside the home when shelter-in-place directives are given. Many must travel to work on buses and subways.

But the bottom line is, due to both systemic racism and factors particular to Covid-19 and the accompanying economic crisis, Black Americans have died at disproportionately high rates during the pandemic.

I think it’s actually even worse than that which a network analysis, something I think has been sorely lacking during this pandemic, would show. I strongly suspect that practically every black person living in New York City, Newark, New Haven, Hartford, Chicago and many other cities with greater than 20% black population knows someone, possibly a close relative, who has died of COVID-19. That produces stresses which have serious implications.

At Reason.com Peter Suderman (married to Megan McArdle) produces the best characterization of the “debate” I’ve read so far: “imagine if Statler and Waldorf performed a Samuel Beckett play while high”. After an analysis of the tremendously confusing and misleading statements of both candidates on health care he laments:

What are we supposed to make of this? What is anyone supposed to learn? How can you have better public policy, more effective governance, ideological disputes, arguments that matter when discussions are conducted like this? There are serious issues at stake, and serious discussions to be had about the government’s role in health care. This is exhausting and unproductive.

But it’s precisely what you’d expect when two people who are functionally illiterate but skilled in conveying public images on television square off in the spectacle that presidential debates have become.

Note: “functionally illiterate” does not mean that you cannot read. It means that you do not derive information through reading which I believe is a fair characterization of both President Trump and VP Joe Biden. Every day most of the people I encounter are functionally illiterate. That would be difficult for a person like me who prefers to communicate in writing if I weren’t also a convincing performer. I am my parents’ son: my dad was an attorney and my mom a vaudeville performer.