Although David Brooks describes his latest New York Times column as analyzing the five crises the United States is in that is actually an exaggeration. The crises are:

• “we are losing the fight against Covid-19”
• “white Americans, are undergoing a rapid education on the burdens African-Americans carry every day”
• “we’re in the middle of a political realignment”
• “a quasi-religion is seeking control of America’s cultural institutions”
• “we could be on the verge of a prolonged economic depression”

but he devotes most of his column to the fourth. Let’s consider the other four briefly.

Are we actually “losing the fight against Covid-19”? I know that the number of cases in California, Texas, and Florida as well as other Southern and Southwestern states is increasing. Wasn’t that the objective of the lockdowns? I. e. to time-shift the incidence of the cases of COVID-19 until local health care systems were better prepared to handle them? The mortality due to COVID-19 in the named states remains a small fraction of that in New York, New Jersey, and other Northeastern states greatly affected by the disease. So long as that stays the case isn’t the increase in incidence a mark of success rather than failure?

There are bound to be some facilities that will have more cases than they can handle but I would think that is different from a health care system failure. Please correct me on this.

On the second issue maybe I’m inured to this. I spent my first ten years in a neighborhood that was becoming black, I was reared in part by black women, I had black classmates in primary school and high school, worked with a black crew in which I was the only white (I wasn’t the boss but the lowliest of the low), I had black friends and acquaintances in college, black neighbors now. None of “the burdens African-Americans carry every day” is news to me. My own view is that in the 1970s there was a window of opportunity during which we might have healed the wounds created by slavery and Jim Crow but instead we chose to import tens of millions of workers from Mexico and Central America while expanding trade with Japan, South Korea, and China. Now our original sin is intractable. The Hispanic “persons of color” will become white with astonishing swiftness while blacks will remain in the same situation they have been for decades with less power and a weaker argument than ever before.

On the third I think I would say

1. We’re not in the middle. We are nearing the end. The realignment happened while Mr. Brooks was looking the other way.
2. Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched.

while on the fifth I have written at length. I think we have a window of opportunity during which we might correct the mistakes we have been making over the period of the last half century. It’s a shame that there are no political leaders with the vision to seize that opportunity but are much more interested in micromanaging the behavior of their fellow citizens while grabbing as much wealth and power for themselves as they can.

The fourth issue is what has been referred to by some as “social justice warriors”. Contrary to Mr. Brooks, I think they are simple rent-seekers and were described by Tom Wolfe 50 years ago in his essay Mau-mauing the Flak Catchers. Just say “no”.

This one paragraph from an article in the New York Daily News by Michael Hendrix neatly summarizes a problem I have been pointing out for some time not just for New York but for Chicago and other major cities:

The city’s budget is overwhelmingly dependent on the 5% of New York’s wealthiest who left the city starting this March, and the danger is that many will stay away. Their incomes account for the great majority of the city’s income tax revenue, their shopping stabilizes its sales taxes, and their housing in well-to-do parts of the city help pay its property taxes. The typical high-earning New Yorker pays as much in income tax as 196 median-earning New Yorkers combined.

Combine lower than expected income tax revenues, lower occupancy rates both for apartment and commercial space, and lower sales tax revenue and it’s a bit hard to see how the cities will pay their bills. New York is in a far better position to secure a federal bailout than Chicago is. After all it’s gotten a federal bailout about once a generation since the end of World War II. New Yorkers have become accustomed to it. Not so Chicago.

The point here is that there is a risk associated with becoming overly dependent for tax revenue on the wealthiest tax payers. They are also the most portable.

I simultaneously agree and disagree with the editors of the Washington Post:

As much as we often approve of bipartisanship, another round of direct payments is not necessarily the best use of our political leaders’ limited capacity for compromise. The cost, as such, is not the problem, though the Democratic House’s proposed second round would be larger than the first one; deficit considerations are secondary in this crisis. Rather, the issue is efficacy — bang for the buck — both in terms of protecting the most vulnerable and in terms of enabling economic growth. By those standards, it’s not optimal to deliver billions of dollars in aid to tens of millions of people who have not lost their jobs, when the Federal Reserve estimates that the bulk of unemployment is concentrated in households earning under $40,000. As for spending and economic stimulus, many recipients will treat a second payment as a one-shot windfall to be saved, just as they did with the first.

I’ve got to admit that talk of ignoring a soaring deficit makes me queasy. Cost doesn’t matter until it does and I think it’s terribly risky to be shaking confidence in the dollar. I mean I have lived through multiple major wars, a presidential assassination, our cities burning multiple times, a major terrorist attack on our shores, a serious recession, three pandemics, and the loss of esteem on the part of nearly every institution (federal, local, and state governments; the White House; the Supreme Court; churches; big companies; the media) other than the military. I don’t know what distresses me more: the loss of esteem by so many institutions or that we still hold the military in high regard. I don’t want to have to face hyperinflation, too.

Here’s their prescription:

Far better to focus on higher priorities: generous unemployment benefits, adjusted to include appropriate incentives to take jobs as they become available; a refined sequel to the Paycheck Protection Program for small businesses; and substantial aid for state and local governments. Consideration should also be given to a bonus of some kind to low-wage essential workers, who have remained on the job throughout the pandemic, in some cases ironically earning less than what laid-off counterparts in similar but nonessential work received from unemployment insurance.

I agree wholeheartedly that the next economic stimulus should be much more targeted than the Cares Act. I’m just not sure of their target.

I think that we have been presented with a rare opportunity to rebuild the economy on a more solid footing, less dependent on financial institutions and with the opportunities shared more broadly. That window of opportunity won’t stay open forever. Carpe diem. Shouldn’t we be more focused on creating jobs for those who are out of work that ensuring that they’re comfortable in unemployment?

In his latest Washington Post column Fareed Zakaria says that China (read: Xi) is bungling its foreign policy:

As the United States has faltered in its handling of the coronavirus pandemic, many experts have warned that China is using the situation to enhance its influence across the world. This is part of a familiar pattern in which the United States has worried that its competitors or adversaries were 10 feet tall and growing. But in fact, a striking feature of the recent international landscape has been China’s strategic blunders.

He then produces a long list of things the Chinese have done—the border conflict with India; sinking or harassing Vietnamese, Malaysia, and Japan; cyberattacks directed at Australia; confrontational language—as evidence. Is that bungling?

More than 150 years ago Lord Palmerston famously said of England “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.” China, too, has eternal interests and I would claim that when it pursues them it is not “bungling”.

China’s interests are broadly irredentist, not just in terms of territory but in terms of stature. They want Chinese territory at its greatest extent, not just Hong Kong and Taiwan but parts of Russia, Korea, Nepal, India, Burma, and Vietnam as well, along with being seen as the uncontested, pre-eminent country in the world. When viewed through that prism, the actions fit together into a coherent whole. They are reclaiming their territory (India) or redressing failures of obeisance (Australia). Far from being “bungling” they’re completely consistent and successful.

What I think that Mr. Zakaria sees as bungling is failing to pursue his idealistic internationalist view of foreign policy. Sadly, the world remains full of self-interested countries, determinedly pursuing their eternal interests.

I was pretty shocked at David Leonhardt’s latest New York Times column. Could it possibly true that black men have made no progress in wages over the period of the last 70 years?

Government statistics suggest that the earnings gap between black and white men is substantially smaller than it was 75 years ago. It shrunk in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s and has remained largely stable since then.

But these statistics are misleading. A more comprehensive look at the data, based on academic research, shows that the black-white wage gap is roughly as large today as it was in 1950.

Let’s cut to the chase and jump to his recommendations:

This history also points to some of the likely solutions for closing the racial wage gap. An end to mass incarceration would help. So would policies that attempt to reverse decades of government-encouraged racism — especially in housing. But it’s possible that nothing would have a bigger impact than policies that lifted the pay of all working-class families, across races.

“Black people are concentrated in low-paying jobs if they have jobs,” Ms. Derenoncourt said. “This has been one of the most egregious forms of inequality over the last 40 years: There has been almost no wage growth for the bottom half of the wage distribution.”

I think there’s simultaneously more and less to his observations than meets the eye. There was a dramatic drop in earnings among black men in 2007. All of his charts stop at 2014. By 2014 there had been little recovery since 2007. Then, just as the gap was beginning to narrow, came the lockdowns.

The culprits are the usual suspects: our lousy immigration and trade policies and the financialization of the economy. No solution however well intentioned will resolve this problem without correcting the errors of the last 30 years. Education you say? It might help a bit if the on-time graduation rate of young black men were not below 80%.

In his latest New York Times column Tom Friedman expresses concern about the upcoming messy “divorce” between China and the United States:

But while China may think it has nothing to fear and much to gain from a Trump victory over Joe Biden, the real U.S.-China story should be cause for alarm in Beijing.

The real story is that China’s standing in America today is lower than at any time since Tiananmen Square in 1989. The real story is that if China was to buy a few more beans and Boeings from America, that would not fix Beijing’s problems here. The real question the Chinese should be asking themselves is not who will be America’s next president, but rather: “Who in China lost America?”

Because the real story is that the U.S. and China are heading for a divorce.

As you might expect from Mr. Friedman it will be a “no fault divorce” or, more precisely, a “both parties are at fault divorce”. China’s “overreaching”, as he puts it, is a matter of record. But it’s our fault that we “underperformed”:

But if China has increasingly overreached, America has increasingly underperformed.

It is not just that China reportedly has fewer than 5,000 COVID-19 deaths and America has over 120,000 — and the virus started there. It is not just that it takes about 22 hours on Amtrak to go from New York to Chicago, while it takes 4.5 hours to take the bullet train from Beijing to Shanghai, slightly farther apart. It’s not just that the pandemic has accelerated China’s transformation to a cashless, digital society.

It’s that we have reduced investments in the true sources of our strength — infrastructure, education, government-funded scientific research, immigration and the right rules to incentivize productive investment and prevent excessive risk-taking. And we have stopped leveraging our greatest advantage over China — that we have allies who share our values and China only has customers who fear its wrath.

If we got together with our allies, we could collectively influence China to accept new rules on trade and COVID-19 and a range of other issues. But Trump refused to do so, making everything a bilateral deal or a fight with Xi. So now China is offering sweetheart deals to U.S. and other foreign companies to come into or stay in China, and its market is now so big, few companies can resist.

I don’t believe I have ever seen such a strenuous attempt at comparing apples and oranges. How in the world do you compare mortality statistics from a closed society like China’s to those in an open one like ours? Especially when China counts COVID-19 cases differently than we do? Additionally, even the Chinese authorities have been saying lately that the strain of COVID-19 that the U. S. has been facing is different from the one they faced back in 2019.

Or this one:

It is not just that it takes about 22 hours on Amtrak to go from New York to Chicago, while it takes 4.5 hours to take the bullet train from Beijing to Shanghai

Do you know anyone who’s traveled from New York to Chicago by rail in this century? Me, neither. It would take a real train nut to do so. Emphasizing air transport for passengers and highway travel for freight is a decision we made a half century ago. Just for the record it takes about two and a half hours to fly from New York to Chicago and about 12 hours to drive there (compared with about 13 hours to drive from Beijing to Shanghai).

And are these:

infrastructure, education, government-funded scientific research, immigration and the right rules to incentivize productive investment and prevent excessive risk-taking

really the “true sources of our strength”? I would be more likely to point to a stable currency, the rule of law, a large internal market, and confidence in the fairness of the system, all of which are under attack. But even if his list were true there are problems with his views.

We already spend more on infrastructure, education, and scientific research in absolute dollars than any other country in the world. Our government spending as a percentage of GDP may be less on these things than some other countries but when you add public and private you get a different picture.

Take education for example. Our governments at all levels spend about 4% of GDP on primary, secondary, and tertiary education which puts us in about the middle of the pack among OECD countries. But when you add private spending to the mix, it puts us over 6% which is more than most other countries. And, of course, that’s as a percentage of a much higher GDP. It’s basically the same story as with roads or our military. Not only do we spend more, we spend more than most other countries put together. We’re just not getting value for what we spend.

And our issues with our “allies” preceded Trump by decades. We have clients and competitors but very, very few genuine allies.

I have thought our marriage of convenience with China has been a bad idea for decades. And, yes, it will be a costly and painful but necessary breakup. You know what they say. Marry in haste…

A much larger study is needed before we should take this report too seriously but it’s certainly intriguing. UPI reports on treating COVID-19 using colchicine:

The medication, called colchicine, is an anti-inflammatory taken as a pill. It’s long been prescribed for gout, a form of arthritis, and its history goes back centuries. The drug was first sourced from the autumn crocus flower.

Doctors also sometimes use colchicine to treat pericarditis, where the sac around the heart becomes inflamed.

Now, a team of Greek researchers reporting Wednesday in JAMA Network Open said their small trial suggests colchicine may indeed help curb severe COVID-19.

The trial involved 105 Greek patients hospitalized in April with COVID-19. Besides receiving standard antibiotics and antivirals (but not remdesivir), half of the participants got daily doses of colchicine for up to three weeks, while the other half did not.

The results “suggest a significant clinical benefit from colchicine in patients hospitalized with COVID-19,” according to the team led by Dr. Spyridon Deftereos, a cardiologist at Attikon Hospital in Attiki, Greece.

Specifically, while the condition of seven of 50 patients who didn’t get colchicine “clinically deteriorated” to a severe stage (for example, requiring mechanical ventilation to survive), this was true for just one of the 55 patients who did receive colchicine, the researchers said.

My guess is that we’re going to find a long list of medications, old as well as new, that have a marginal effect on COVID-19.

In the particular case of colchicine, there is considerable experience with and it’s cheap.

There are two conflicting narratives about why Senate Democrats have blocked the police reform bill introduced in the Senate by South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott. Sen. Scott expresses one of those narratives, quoted here at RealClearPolitics:

“The actual problem is not what is being offered. It is who is offering it. Took me a long time to figure out the most obvious thing in the room. It’s not they what,” Scott said.

“What I missed in this issue is that the stereotyping of Republicans is just as toxic and poison to the outcomes of the most vulnerable communities in this nation. That’s the issue. When Speaker Pelosi says one of the most heinous things I can imagine: that the Republicans are actually trying to cover up murder, the murder of Feorge Floyd with our legislation, that’s not politics. That’s not a game to win. That’s you lose. You will sooner or later lose. But immediately every kid around the nation that heard that nonsense lost that moment.”

while the other is expressed in this piece at Vox.com by Li Zhou in a quote from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer along with Sens. Kamala Harris and Cory Booker:

Senate Democrats have officially rejected Republicans’ police reform bill, tanking the legislation, which needed 60 votes to advance, in a 55-45 vote on Wednesday. In a letter earlier this week, Democrats noted that the bill — which does little to ensure legal accountability in cases of police misconduct — fell far short of the policies they’re interested in implementing.

“This bill is not salvageable and we need bipartisan talks to get to a constructive starting point,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sens. Kamala Harris and Cory Booker said in the letter. For now, the two parties have yet to make inroads on a compromise: The House is set to pass Democrats’ police reform bill on Thursday, but Republicans in the Senate have already dismissed it.

I suspect there’s a kernel of truth in both narratives and I’m in no position to adjudicate between them. It looks to me as though there were a compromise to be had here by strengthening the Senate bill and stripping some of the excess from the House bill but that can only be true if there’s a compromise to be had. Not only are the two parties at daggers drawn at this point but it’s an election year. Compromise is always hard to reach in an election year.

I’d like to commend two contrasting columns from the Wall Street Journal to your attention. In the first William Galston gives some shape to the reforms to policing he thinks are needed:

ome of these changes will require federal legislation. And here again the American people have spoken clearly, across party lines. A ban on chokeholds and strangleholds is supported by 68% of all Americans and 52% of Republicans, according to the Kaiser poll. Requiring police to give a verbal warning, when possible, before shooting at a civilian is favored by 89% of Americans, including 83% of Republicans. More than three-quarters of Americans, and more than 6 in 10 Republicans, favor requiring states to release officers’ disciplinary records, a measure that might have saved George Floyd’s life.

Most Americans want to create stronger incentives for police to do the right thing—and to pay a price when they don’t. A remarkable 95% would require police to intervene against, and report, the excessive use of force by fellow officers, a measure that could help tear down the “wall of silence” protecting wrongdoers from scrutiny.

Seventy-three percent of Americans, including 55% of Republicans, favor allowing individuals to sue police officers when they believe excessive force has been used against them. Given this consensus, legislators should be able to reach agreement on the court-created doctrine of qualified immunity, which makes it hard to hold officers accountable when they violate constitutional rights.

Mr. Graham, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has opened the door to this discussion. “We don’t want to deter people from going into law enforcement,” he says. “But we do want to have a sense of accountability. And to the extent that qualified immunity fosters a sense of ‘It’s really not my problem,’ let’s take a look at it.” Although President Trump has reportedly called this issue a “red line,” Senate Republicans shouldn’t allow him to preclude its consideration.

While federal legislation should reform policing, it shouldn’t punish the police, who are trying to do their jobs under difficult conditions. For example, my Brookings Institution colleague Rashawn Ray has proposed housing subsidies to enable more officers to live within the communities they serve. His research also finds that many officers have excessive workloads, forcing them to make high-stakes decisions while not at their best. Reducing workloads and providing housing subsidies would cost money, diminishing the potential savings from transferring some current police functions to mental-health professionals and other social services.

Police feel besieged on all sides. Federal legislators should extend an olive branch by incorporating the Protect and Serve Act into compromise legislation. This bill, which would make targeting law-enforcement officers for violent attack a federal crime, is co-sponsored by Florida Rep. Val Demings, reportedly on the shortlist to be Joe Biden’s running mate.

Whatever may be done at the federal level, much of the burden of rebuilding the relationship between police and African-American communities will fall on states and localities. There’s an obvious place to start, by curtailing the practices that serve as daily irritants and foster a sense of injustice. These include stop-and-frisk, traffic stops for minor infractions such as broken taillights, and arrests for marijuana possession, which already has been decriminalized or legalized in 26 states and the District of Columbia.

Some of those are commonsensical; other fantastical. For example, in many cases subsidies will do nothing to encourage police officers to live in the communities they serve. Here in Chicago, living within the city limits has been required of all city employees including not just police officers but firefighters and teachers as well. The reason that more police officers don’t live in Austin, Garfield Park, or Englewood is not because they can’t afford to. It’s because they don’t want to. They are too dangerous and crime-infested.

In the other column by Jason L. Riley, Mr. Riley presents evidence contradicting the narrative of an epidemic of police violence:

The criminologist Barry Latzer has noted that the homicide rate for black men fell by 18% in the 1940s and another 22% in the 1950s. It’s probably not a coincidence that black poverty declined by 40 percentage points over the same period, and black incomes grew at faster rates that white incomes. Safer neighborhoods help facilitate upward economic mobility, which is something that the “defund the police” crowd might keep in mind.

In the second half of the 20th century, these trends reversed. In the 1960s, violent crime rates doubled, and they continued to increase sharply until the early 1990s, when better policing and more incarceration helped bring crime under control. In his 2007 book, “The Great American Crime Decline,” Franklin Zimring describes violent crime as a “regressive tax whereby the poor pay much more” and observes that “because both victims and offenders are concentrated among the same disadvantaged populations, a major crime decline might produce a double benefit—fewer victims as well as fewer offenders arrested and punished for serious crimes.” Between 1990 and 2016 the overall homicide rate fell by 34%, and among black men it fell by 40%. Had the black homicide rate remained at 1990 levels through that period, tens of thousands of black men wouldn’t be alive today.

In response to the racial hysteria over Floyd’s death, the Democratic House and Republican Senate are hashing out a “policing reform” bill for the president to sign. This is being done out of political expediency, not necessity. There is no epidemic of black suspects dying in police custody, and a few viral videos don’t prove otherwise. Yes, cops sometimes abuse their authority, and firing bad ones can be much too difficult. But states and localities can address those issues more effectively than a one-size-fits-all fix from Washington. Moreover, Republicans should be wary of allowing liberal activists to speak for the public. We’ve known for years that groups like Black Lives Matter are out of step with most blacks, let alone most of the country.

In a 2015 Gallup poll taken after Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Mo., a majority of black respondents said police treat them fairly, and far more blacks (38%) than whites (18%) said they “want a greater police presence in their local communities.” Another Gallup survey, published last year, asked black and Hispanic residents of low-income neighborhoods about policing and found that these groups “aren’t averse to law enforcement—in fact, they are particularly concerned about crime in their neighborhoods.” Fifty-nine percent of both blacks and Hispanics said that “they would like the police to spend more time in their area than they currently do, making them more likely than white residents (50%) to respond this way.”

Democrats and Republicans seem to agree that more-uniform data collection among police agencies would be a good thing. They’re right, but it’s no guarantee that the media will report the additional data or put it in context. We have plenty of data right now. Police shootings have fallen precipitously since the 1970s. Upward of 95% of black homicides in the U.S. don’t involve law enforcement. Empirical studies have found no racial bias in police use of deadly force, and that the racial disparities that do exist stem from racial differences in criminal behavior. The problem isn’t a shortage of data but a race-based narrative that is immune to any data that challenge it.

Although the empirical evidence does not support the claim of an epidemic of police violence there is, indeed, an epidemic going on. It’s an epidemic of ignorance, hatred, and destruction which will do more to harm black people than police violence is presently doing.