In her most recent Washington Post column Megan McArdle expresses optimism about the future of American cities:

Hell is other people, wrote Sartre, and especially on the crosstown bus. They’re hellacious indeed with a deadly virus running around. Such inconveniences drove the middle class out in mid-century, hastened by rising crime and, yes, the riots. Why shouldn’t we expect to see a second exodus now, when software is making it easier than ever to work where you please?

In the short run, perhaps we will; San Francisco rents dropped nearly 10 percent in May, after tech giants announced that they’d be making their work-from-home arrangements permanent. But of course, falling prices make cities more attractive despite declining amenities; that’s why people stayed in Detroit even when the jobs left.

Nor are the problems of the cities quite as dire as they were in the 1960s. Zoom simply isn’t as revolutionary as the automobile. The car was better than the buggy on almost every dimension. But Zoom strips out vital social cues and skips the casual conversations at the office coffee pot that can spark new ideas or solutions to old problems. It might ultimately augment smaller offices; it is unlikely to substitute for them entirely.

Nonetheless, some will no doubt pick up and leave for the immediate future. But eventually the viral threat will most likely fade, either because we all got a vaccine or because we all got covid-19. Would-be rusticators will remember that you still cannot easily drink a cocktail, find a mate, groom a sales prospect or eat a meal over Zoom. And then cities will grow again, as they have over the millennia, despite even more daunting threats than covid-19 or abusive cops: because what’s there isn’t anywhere else except, maybe, in another city.

That suggests that I make some predictions about the aftermath of this annus horribilis:

• Cities whose populations have been declining like Chicago, St. Louis, and Detroit will see the declines accelerate.
• Cities whose populations have increased due to greater numbers of immigrants like New York and Los Angeles will see declines.
• The operating costs of cities will increase sharply while revenues decrease.
• 2020 has been what the insurance biz calls a “capital event”. Some insurances companies will not survive and will be acquired by other, larger companies.
• The stockholders of large publicly-held companies will not be eager to invest in declining cities. That includes grocery chains, drugstore chains, and big box stores, many of which have been looted during the recent upheavals.
• For some who’ve lost their jobs during the lockdowns unemployment will become permanent.
• For some remote work-from-home will become permanent. That will tend to reduce the value of office space, real estate values, and taxes that can be realized from real estate.
• Most sit-down restaurants will not be able to survive with legally mandated social distancing. Or on carry out alone. That will have a run-on effect on property taxes.

Said another way COVID-19, government fecklessness, mass demonstrations, looting, and uncertainty will accelerate pre-existing conditions.

Over the last half century archaeologists have learned an enormous amount about the Maya civilization. They preserved their history with a writing system that has only recently been recognized as a writing system and deciphered. They had sophisticated mathematics and astronomy as well as complex systems of trade and law.

By and large their cities were not destroyed by war or famine or environmental change. The people just walked away leaving empty cities. They just walked away.

It takes the editors of the New York Times five paragraphs before they reach the real sticking point in reopening public primary and secondary schools. The gravest problem isn’t protecting children or assuaging the concerns of parents. Here it is:

Teachers’ unions are rightly worried for the safety of their members. Apprehension is running especially high among school employees over 65, an age group of people especially vulnerable to coronavirus infection. An analysis by John Bailey of the American Enterprise Institute shows that 18 percent of teachers and 27 percent of principals fall into the high-risk age category. Districts might end up offering buyouts for some their most vulnerable employees — and finding roles outside of schools for the others. This could create a staff shortage at precisely the time when districts are trying to lower the risk of spreading infection by cutting class size and staggering schedules to limit population density in school buildings.

Elected officials have deepened people’s anxiety over these problems by fixating more on resurrecting bars and restaurants than on schools. Over and over again, we’ve witnessed a laissez-faire approach to reopening that lets each locality go its own way. In some places, discussions on reopening schools is being carried out behind closed doors or without consulting parents’ groups that clearly should have been involved from the beginning. In still other places, officials are whistling right past this volatile issue, mouthing vague platitudes about wearing masks and allowing a little more space among children’s desks.

I do not believe there is a solution to this problem so long as the matter is viewed from the standpoint of eliminating risk rather than managing it or mitigating it. IMO that has been the persistent problem since March. Our public institutions are only willing to accept absolutist strategies.

Even should the easing of lockdowns proceed without the feared surges in new cases of COVID-19, that will not resolve the problem for the teachers’ unions. I’ve already proposed a strategy for managing the risk. I recognize that it flies in the face of the seniority system sacrosanct among teachers’ unions.

The tragedy is that those hurt most by lengthy school shutdowns are those who need schools the most, particularly black and Hispanic children and children with special needs. Oh, well. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.

I have watched the video of an elderly protester being shoved by police in Buffalo at least a dozen times. After being shoved, the man struck his head and was rather obviously seriously injured. I want to offer some observations in bullet form.

• The use of force by the police was excessive.
• The first rule of self-defense is to avoid situations in which you may need to defend yourself.
• Revolution is a young man’s game.
• When you obstruct or impede police officers, you are no longer merely demonstrating. You are engaging in civil disobedience. One of the key aspects of Gandhian civil disobedience, long forgotten or ignored, is that it also requires that you be prepared for the consequences of that disobedience and willing to accept them.
• When police approach you keep your hands in plain sight. Absolutely, positively do nothing that the police officers may construe as reaching for their belts. All police training of which I have ever heard trains police officers to consider that a deadly threat.

In reaction to the Buffalo shove the police officers were suspended and charged with assault. In solidarity the entire 57 officer membership of Buffalo’s Emergency Response Team resigned.

Were they right or wrong?

There are some people who are predicting confidently that the Minneapolis City Council will vote to abolish the Minneapolis Police Department.

Here’s my question. Minneapolis tort law allows individuals to sue Minnesota public officials for damages due to either actions or omissions in the performance of their official duties. There is no sovereign immunity there. Would abolishing the Minneapolis Police Department expose members of the Minneapolis City Council to suit if citizens or businesses in Minneapolis are injured by lawbreakers?

Update

NBC reports that a majority of the Minneapolis City Council has agreed (whatever that means) to disband the Minneapolis Police Department:

A majority of the Minneapolis City Council agreed Sunday to dismantle the city’s police department after the in-custody killing of George Floyd, a council member said.

In a tweet, Alondra Cano, who represents the city’s ninth ward, said the department isn’t “reformable.”

“We’re dismantling our police department,” Councilman Jeremiah Ellison said.

Speaking during a community meeting earlier, council President Lisa Bender called the city’s relationship with the department “toxic” and vowed to “recreate systems of public safety that actually keep us safe.”

“Our efforts at incremental reform have failed — period,” she said. “Our commitment is to do what’s necessary to keep every single member of our community safe and to tell the truth that Minneapolis police are not doing that.”

Nine of the city’s 12 council members have agreed to the move, NBC affiliate KARE reported. Cano said the majority is veto-proof.

I’m sure this will work out well. Let’s hope for the best.

I look at old movies with a very different eye than most. For example, I am always deeply interested in the set decoration and costuming and I know what I’m looking at.

But another little practice or pastime I exercise is that whenever I watch a movie made in the 1930s, I look for my cousin, particularly in party or nightclub scenes. Any scene in which people are dancing in fancy dress. You see, between 1930 and 1937 he was in almost 200 movies as an extra, generally in scenes like the ones I described, before he got his first named part. That is a heckuva long apprenticeship.

The movies he appeared in as an extra included Top Hat, Swing Time, The Great Ziegfield, A Star Is Born, Captains Courageous, and Saratoga, just to name a few. Going on from that to become a pretty big star in movies of the 40s and 50s as well as early television is kind of a remarkable development.

Sadly, I look very little like him although two of my siblings do a bit. I’m not tall, rangy, I don’t have reddish-blonde hair, and I don’t look nearly as good in a tux. Ah well, perhaps in another life.

STAT has convened a panel of experts on infectious disease, epidemiology, and pandemic preparedness to solicit their views on how, looking forward, we might “avoid the mistakes, poor decisions, and incompetence of this spring”. Here are their recommendations, summarized from the link above:

• Prioritize early warnings
• Pay attention to small numbers
• Act fast
• Act fast strategically
• Do a way better job in minority and high-poverty communities

Rather than fisking that list, I would only challenge them to do one thing. In advance produce a cast-iron method of distinguishing between statistical anomalies and the earliest phases of exponential growth. I can imagine the vague outlines of a realtime reporting system fed organically from data that providers actually have incentives to produce on a timely basis but only the vaguest outlines. Otherwise I have no idea of how that might be done.

I found Chris Wallace’s interview of master bond trader Mohammed El-Erian on Fox News Sunday (the only thing I watch routinely on Fox News) quite interesting. I’ll publish a link should one become available.

I found his reaction to the good employment numbers in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s Employment Situation Report, released last Friday, about right. It’s too early to tell whether the bounce was a sign of a quick economic recovery, a fluke, or cooking the books. I don’t believe that last.

He also expressed concern that the good news would stymie additional economic stimulus. He expressed particular interest in a package that included retraining for those whose jobs have vanished as a consequence of the lockdowns. Intrigued, I waited in vain for his plan for retraining the millions of cooks, waiters, and busboys in the restaurant industry as bond traders.

There was an excellent point in his remarks, however, which deserve more explicit expression. The next few months present an opportunity, without parallel in our lifetimes, for influencing what the post-lockdown economy will look like. I’ve already said what I think it should look like. I think that the federal government should do everything in its power to shorten supply chains to make our economy more resilient in the face of crises like the one we’ve experienced for the last three months. U. S. companies need fewer suppliers in China or who depend on other suppliers in China and a lot more in Mexico, Canada, and, yes, the United States. Carefully crafted subsidies will help that happen. Continuing income subsidies on the other hand will encourage a return to a reliance on China.

I wish that Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi would put aside partisan and ideological objectives in favor of a quickly designed plan for shaping the post-lockdown economy in a way that would benefit all Americans and particularly American workers rather than favored constituencies. I’m under no illusion that’s likely to happen. I wish that Mr. El-Erian had expressed himself on which he thought was better: a rancorous partisan battle over whose constituents would receive handouts from a bigger, better “stimulus” package or no stimulus package at all but I wait for that in vain as well.

I’m sorry to say that I found the Atlantic Council’s Ian Brzezinski’s thoughts on the role of NATO in China strategy mostly pabulum. I had hoped for more. In summary his main bullet points are:

• The Alliance should offer to establish a NATO-China Council.
• Second, NATO should deepen its engagement with its Pacific partners, Australia, New Zealand, the Republic of Korea, Japan, and Mongolia.
• Third, the Alliance should establish in the Indo-Pacific, perhaps in one of the region’s partner countries, a Center of Excellence (COE) and integrate officers and NCOs from selected partners into the Alliance’s Command Structure.
• The Alliance should also establish a small military headquarters element in the Indo-Pacific region

Do you see what I mean? Conspicuous by their absence are any recognition that the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was bombed by NATO or that the establishing of the “no-fly zone” in Libya that led to Moammar Qaddafi’s ouster, resulting in a decade of chaos in that country, was a NATO operation. Under the circumstances wouldn’t China inevitably see Mr. Brzezinski’s proposals as nakedly hostile?

My own prescription would simultaneously be more and less. I don’t think that NATO as such should have any posture with respect to China. That’s beyond its scope unless China has established a military presence on the Atlantic while I wasn’t looking.

I wish the members of the European Union that, at least as long as the country is ruled by the Chinese Communist Party, China’s goals will be hostile to theirs. They should heed the advice that who sups with the devil should use a long spoon, keeping a discreet distance from China in all things and most especially trade.

What I think they will do is that while European leaders recognize the threat that China presents to them and their interests, they will be glad to cozy up to China, hoping that when push comes to shove the U. S. will protect them, even while condemning the U. S. for its truculent attitude.

Remember that much-publicized and clucked about party at Lake of the Ozarks. The Post-Dispatch reports that despite the dire prediction it does not seem to have produced additional cases of COVID-19:

ST. LOUIS — The large crowds of people at the Lake of the Ozarks over Memorial Day weekend have not led to any more reported cases of COVID-19, Missouri’s top health official health department said Wednesday.

“The answer, to our knowledge, is no,” Dr. Randall Williams, director of the Department of Health and Senior Services, said when asked whether more cases have come from the gatherings, photos of which showed throngs of people close together without wearing masks.

Williams answered questions during a daily news briefing in Jefferson City hosted by Missouri Gov. Mike Parson to address civil unrest and efforts to contain the coronavirus.

Pictures and videos of the lake crowds had prompted concern among the public and health officials.

One person, a Boone County resident, tested positive last week and likely was infectious while among the crowds. That is according to the Camden County Health Department, which has jurisdiction over much of the Lake of the Ozarks region.

These results are consistent with those following the, again, highly publicized and clucked about spring break parties in Florida. It seems to me that the simplest explanation is that SARS-CoV-2 just isn’t transmitted out-of-doors very easily.

The statewide percentage of SARS-CoV-2 tests with positive results is 6.5%, probably more a consequence of increased testing than of anything else. Over the last month the statewide hospitalizations for COVID-19 have decreased by 40%. I don’t know whether that’s a consequence of fewer serious cases, changing standards for hospital admission for COVID-19, an increased reluctance to seek medical assistance for COVID-19, something else, or all of the above.