J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 15

BioNTech 90% Effective Messenger RNA COVID Vaccine?

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0aP8gr2_cfSeHzTQEw9OVC6hg

Little additional information seems to be available at this moment:

Pfizer and BioNTech (2020-11-09): Announce Vaccine Candidate Against COVID-19 Achieved Success in First Interim Analysis from Phase 3 Study https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201109005539/en/: ���Vaccine candidate was found to be more than 90% effective in preventing COVID-19 in participants without evidence of prior SARS-CoV-2 infection in the first interim efficacy analysis. Analysis evaluated 94 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in trial participants. Study enrolled 43,538 participants, with 42% having diverse backgrounds, and no serious safety concerns have been observed; Safety and additional efficacy data continue to be collected. Submission for Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) planned for soon after the required safety milestone is achieved, which is currently expected to occur in the third week of November. Clinical trial to continue through to final analysis at 164 confirmed cases in order to collect further data and characterize the vaccine candidate���s performance against other study endpoints���

Bojan Pancevski & Jared S. Hopkins (2020-10-22): How Pfizer Partner BioNTech Became a Leader in Coronavirus Vaccine Race https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-pfizer-partner-biontech-became-a-leader-in-coronavirus-vaccine-race-11603359015: ���MAINZ, Germany���On a Friday in late January, Ugur Sahin received an email with bad news: A new study of a deadly new coronavirus in China suggested it was more infectious than previously believed. The outbreak, he believed, had the potential to grow into a pandemic. The following Monday, the German scientist and chief executive of biotech firm BioNTech SE summoned his board to announce that the company, which had been developing next-generation cancer treatments, would start work on a Covid-19 vaccine. Human trials would need to start by April, he added, in case Europe and the U.S. had to go into lockdowns. Ugur Sahin, co-founder and chief executive of BioNTech, led the company to focus on coronavirus research early in the pandemic. While much of the world was still oblivious to the danger, BioNTech was scrambling, Dr. Sahin told The Wall Street Journal earlier this month���

BioNTech: '���Our vaccine consists of a short segment of��� messenger RNA��� provid[ing] instructions for a human cell to make a harmless version of a target protein,��� which activates the body���s immune response against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. We expect that our vaccination approach will stimulate the immune system to generate protective antibodies. This means the immune systems learns how to recognize the SARS-CoV-2 virus upon exposure and prevent subsequent infection. Unlike other vaccines, mRNA vaccines do not contain the virus itself and therefore pose no risk of infection���

.#coronavirus #noted #2020-11-09

COVID Extrapolations: As of 2020-11-06

It gives me no pleasure that my simple national model of coronavirus cases���project cases back three weeks from deaths, and then extrapolate case growth out from confirmed case growth and from the number of cases per test���is running dead-on:

I forecast a week ago that we would have 6641 deaths in the seven days ending Th 2020-11-05.
We had 6805 deaths.
The model is now predicting that we will see 12893 deaths in the seven days ending on Thanksgiving: Th 2020-11-26.
And if our current inferred last-three-weeks R=1.24 were to continue, we would have 3,671,728 new cases in the seven days ending on Thanksgiving.

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0bCYYctIKV9_4ICVqtSe5qItQ

.#covid #forecasting #2020-11-06

I Really Do Think Joe & Kamala Have Got This Under Control

That is all...

.#notetoself #orangehairedbaboons #politics #2020-11-04

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0D0_rT8gYqxxO6pPSRIbgR2Uw

https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/11/i-really-do-think-joe-kamala-have-got-this-under-control.html

Today Is a Good Day to Vote!

That is all.

.#democracy #highlighted #moralresponsibility #notetoself #2020-11-03

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0EpBm0bWnhgI-rQlGI2HhA05A

https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/11/today-is-a-good-day-to-vote.html

9.2.0. Intro Video: Glorious Post-WWII Years in the Global North: Equitable Growth & Inclusion: Econ 115

Interactive Video: https://share.mmhmm.app/ed6bb654a1bb406394e149ce53ecbbd4

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0veWFCQ04v48yvwHSZVb2i6kA

https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/econ-115-module9-intro-video-2.0-11.00.pptx

https://share.mmhmm.app/ed6bb654a1bb406394e149ce53ecbbd4

1268 words

11:00 minutes

.#economicgrowth #economichistory #highlighted #slouchingtowardsutopia #socialdemocracy #thirtygloriousyears #2020-11-03

Introductory Video for Fall 2020 Instantiation of Econ 115 Module 9: Post-WWII Glorious Years of Equitable Growth & Inclusion in the Global North

econ-115-9.2.0-module-intro-video-11.00-2020-10-28

https://share.mmhmm.app/ed6bb654a1bb4...

As of 1945, there was not that many grounds for optimism, as far as the world economy and the world political economy were concerned.

The greater totalitarianism had been squashed. The lesser was flourishing. It used the blood of the Russian people spilled fighting Nazism over 1941 to 1945 as a powerful source of legitimating energy���never mind the active and eager collaboration of Stalin and his acolytes with Hitler whenever it had seemed to be to their even momentary advantage.

Market economies continued to fail to deliver Polanyian rights. Their ability to even deliver economic growth at all had been cast in the grave doubt by the Great Depression. As for democratic parliamentary politics���it could still be easily dismissed as a swamp that needed to be drained.

Yet 1940-1980 saw the victory and secure establishment of the market-heavy mixed economy as an engine for delivering unprecedented economic growth in the global north. It also saw the overwhelming victory of parliamentary democracy as a system that could generate good economic management and also increasing human freedom. And it saw the world system deliver independence and somewhat increasing prosperity, if neither democracy nor economic convergence, to the global south.

In the G7 nations, 1870 to 1913 had delivered average measured real-income growth of 1.4% per year, albeit unequally distributed.

That fell over 1913 to 1938 to 0.7% per year.

But then 1938 to 1973 saw growth at 3.0% per year, catching up to and leaping ahead of what a continuation of pre-1913 trends would have forecast.

Why did things go so right? And why, given that things went so right up through the 1970s, was that system of mixed-economy social democracy rejected for one of neoliberalism after 1980?

Some of it was that Keynes was at least half right, and his technical and technocratic adjustments to economic management did a great deal of good.

Some of it was that the disasters of 1913 to 1938 and the disaster on the other side of the iron curtain that was really-existing socialism that might move west���and east���concentrated everybody���s mind on making an imperfect system work.

Some of it was that the backlog of potential innovations undeployed over 1913 to 1938 made growth easy

Much of it was that with strong and equitable growth the market economies��� failure to vindicate Polanyian rights no longer seemed so salient

Some of it was that social insurance systems did, to some extent, manage to vindicate Polanyian rights

And much of it was that the plutocrats and the rightists had lost their nerve, after the disasters that their attempts to suppress labor organizations and political majorities had generated

But why then did things fall apart in 1980?

Keep that question in the back of your minds.

In addition to strong economic growth that was equitable, in the sense of being divided across economic classes rather than hogged by one, there was the increase in human freedom.

The equitable growth of 1938 to 1980 stopped afterwards in the age of neoliberalism. But the forward march of inclusion has continued.

Inclusion of people as first-class citizens. Who are the first-class citizens of the civilization that we define as the one in which the Anglo-Saxon language is the lingua franca���the tongue spoken by free people? At the start, in the days of Leader Elf-Wisdom of the west branch of the knife-guys���King Alfred of Wessex���it was his own landholding trained-warrior male-Saxon thains. But even in Alfred���s day, he was reaching to include others, and not just other branches of the Saxon tribe. Alfred called his expanded kingdom ���England���, after the name of the neighboring tribe of the Angles that he wanted to include as well.

And as history passes it becomes the English, and then the British���but, remember, the WOGS���the worthy oriental gentlemen���begin as soon as you cross the English Channel and set foot on the European continent at the port of Calais.

There are still those who hold to that. England, if not Great Britain, is still in its majority in support of its ruler Boris Johnson. Boris at least claims to believe that the most important thing is to keep England pure from European pollution. (You are not supposed to remember his full name: Alexander Boris de Pfefle Johnson. Alexander is Greek. Boris is Russian. The de is French. The Pfeffel is German. The Johnson is Welsh, half Keltic, not fully Saxon. If you trace his male line of descent, it goes back not to the Saxons or the Vikings but rather a Turkish nomads who came boiling out of Kazakhstan in days gone bye.)

But I digress.

From male, British, and upper-class, the set of ���gentlemen��� expands. It expands to include the middle-class males who have good manners. And then Anglo-Saxon is expanded to include by courtesy others of Northern European stock who walk the walk. By the time of Teddy Roosevelt it is anyone white, or mostly white, who is willing to behave like a male Anglo-Saxon Puritan���children of the Mayflower by adoption as well as by birth. And Teddy Roosevelt still believed in the Republican parties historical obligation for the freedom and uplift of African-Americans. He was swimming against the tide of the American power structure of his day. But he was swimming.

And working class people are people.

And women became people too.

Next: America is a Protestant nation.

With the coming of World War II and the strong need to rally everyone against Nazism, and then with the coming of the age of social democracy, the progress of full inclusion speeds up.

Then: America is a Christian nation. Then: America is a Judeo-Christian nation. Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower says: ���It is very important that an American have a strong faith and I don���t care what���.

Jimmy Carter as president in the 1960s talks about the ���Abrahamic��� faiths, bringing Muslims into the religious circle of inclusion. But that does not seem to stick.

Women become full people. Freedom is redefined so that your freedom does not include the right to discriminate against African-Americans in public accommodations. Who people love or choose to be in their private lives becomes ���not your business��� as well.

But Senator Rand Paul still believes in his heart of hearts that it does. Only the fact that it is not electorally wise to say that out loud, even in Kentucky, keeps him quiet now. And every year Fox News and company try to remove the Judeo- from ���Judeo-Christian nation��� and roll back inclusion by demanding an end to the ���war on Christmas���.

We know where we are supposed to be now: equal opportunity as a goal, rather than a joke; tolerance and celebration of our diversity because trapping yourself in one point of view is going to makes you stupid and narrow.

We are not there yet.

The cultural DNA of the global north today is still roughly 50% from the North-Atlantic Anglo-Saxons of the Victorian era.

But this is a civilization in which people are less limited by what their parents happenned to look like and be than any previous one.

A story to inspire. But not a story to make us comfortable about where we are right now.

1268 words 11.00 minutes

Hoisted from the Archives: Peter Beinart Is a Mensch

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0ugNwDAAs8Zu19wBofFWovw1Q

https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/peter-beinart-mensch-2020-11-01.pptx

2020-11-01

Should I say that it is very curious than none of the other alumni from the Old New Republic���none of them���measure up to even the relatively low bar set by Peter Beinart: that of having a meeting to discuss the problem?

Or should I say that it is not very curious at all?

Do note that Michael Kelly���s war on Al Gore was unprofessional. Do note a great deal about Michael Kelly was unprofessional, including his insane cheerleading for the Iraq War, which he helped spark and in which he died���

Hoisted from the Archives: Peter Beinart Is a Mensch (Words I Did Not Think I Would Have Occasion to Say Department) https://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/11/must-read-the-lead-makes-me-think-peter-beinart-was-a-real-idiot-and-he-is-very-very-late-to-the-party-for-so.html: Must-Read: The lead makes me think: "Peter Beinart was a real idiot, and he is very very late to the party." For somebody to be such a moron as not to realize that people that Marty Peretz, Leon Wieseltier, Andrew Sullivan, and others were scorning as under qualified affirmative action hires had harder rows to hoe than he did���that almost beggars belief.

Nevertheless, in the words of Viktor Laszlo: "Welcome to the fight!":

Peter Beinart: REFLECTIONS OF AN AFFIRMATIVE-ACTION BABY: "In 1991... Stephen Carter wrote... Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby.... Little did I realize that the book���s title applied to me...

...Two years after Carter published his book, I joined the New Republic as a summer intern. I was thrilled. I had been reading the magazine since high school, and idolized its most prominent writers: Michael Kinsley, Hendrik Hertzberg, Andrew Sullivan, Michael Lewis, Michael Kelly, and, yes, Leon Wieseltier, who last month was accused of sexual misconduct by more than a dozen of his former colleagues. If someone had made TNR writers into baseball cards, by age 15 I would have had a complete set.... I���d spent years mimicking TNR.... I had the right sort of clips.... As a white man graduating from an Ivy League school, I also had the right sort of identity. It was difficult to disentangle the two. And I didn���t really try.... because the magazine afforded me extraordinary opportunity. Soon, I was not only working alongside people I revered, I was being given the chance to ascend to their level....

At some level, I knew the answer. White men from fancy schools advanced quickly at the New Republic because that���s who the owner and editor in chief, Marty Peretz, liked surrounding himself with. He ignored women almost entirely. There were barely any African Americans on staff.... TNR published an excerpt of Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein���s book, The Bell Curve.... Marty felt a particular hostility to affirmative action. The irony���which I didn���t dwell on at the time���was that the magazine was itself a hothouse of racial and sexual preference... never stated formally.... To borrow Ta-Nehisi Coates���s metaphor, my race, gender, and class provided me a ���tailwind.��� I was running hard. But without that tailwind, it���s unlikely I would have become the magazine���s editor at age 28....

Carter['s]... affirmative action... remedied historic injustices. Mine perpetuated them.... Affirmative action enabled... Wieseltier���s sexual harassment... Leon���s sexual harassment reinforced... affirmative action. Men ran the magazine, and Leon���s behavior helped keep it that way. To ascend at TNR, you had to be a prot��g�� of either Marty or Leon���s... writing things they considered smart. For women, by contrast, mentorship was far trickier. Marty wasn���t an option. Leon was, but his mentorship often involved sexualization. If you accepted it, you gained a supporter but compromised yourself. If you spurned it, you became invisible to the magazine���s two most powerful men.

I���d like to say that when I became editor, I fundamentally changed all this. But I did not.... Had I challenged that culture more emphatically, I would probably not have become editor in the first place.... A series of moral compromises. From my time as a junior editor, I was handed pieces to edit���generally written or commissioned by Marty���that made sweeping, hostile generalizations about Palestinians, Arabs, or Muslims. I would cut as much as I felt I could get away with, and soften or nuance the rest. But I didn���t refuse to edit the pieces at all, since that would have imperiled my relationship with my mentors. (In fact, when I began writing more critically about Israeli policy after leaving the magazine, my relationships with both Marty and Leon swiftly declined.)...

When Marty fired Michael Kelly (who later became editor of The Atlantic), in part because Kelly was critical of Marty���s friend and former student, Al Gore, I considered resigning. But I feared I���d never find another job I enjoyed as much. Two years later, I was editor myself.... Those concessions created the template for my response to my former colleague Sarah Wildman when, in 2002, she told me about Leon���s inappropriate sexual advances. I believed her.... I also knew that I lacked authority over Leon.... So I called Marty���who spent most of his time in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and New York���and asked him to come to Washington to tell Leon that his behavior was unacceptable. (Marty has told Vox that I never reported the incident to him and that he doesn���t ���remember Sarah Wildman.��� Leon did not respond to my request for comment.)

Marty, Leon, and I met at the Willard Hotel. When I confronted him, Leon���who had a gift for intimidation���reacted ferociously. ���Is this some kind of intervention?��� he roared. Marty didn���t push back. That was it.... I could have threatened to resign.... I might have shifted the power dynamic, and forced Marty into taking some action that punished Leon and validated Sarah, which might have begun to erode the impunity that made Leon���s behavior possible. But I did not. By 2002, I had already made a series of moral compromises in order to stay at TNR, and in ways I didn���t fully realize, each laid the foundation for the next.

I don���t know know whether my experience is typical of men who are complicit in institutions that tolerate sexual harassment. What I do know is that the affirmative action I enjoyed, and the sexual harassment Sarah suffered, were connected. I was given extraordinary opportunity at TNR, in large measure, because talented women like Sarah Wildman were not. In this regard, I suspect, I have something in common with the supporters of Donald Trump. It���s not pleasant to realize that the bygone age you romanticize���the age when America was still great���was great for you, or people like you, because others were denied a fair shot....

A lot of white American men look at Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton, and mass immigration, and the global competition for jobs, and the taking down of Confederate monuments, and even the revolt against sexual harassment, and fear all this means there will be less left for them. And they experience these attacks on their privilege as a desecration of the natural order, an attack on institutions that benefitted them, and to which they felt deep loyalty in return���

.#hoistedfromthearchives #journamalism #2020-11-01

Note to Self: Michael Kinsley

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0H6tSh1b1PeoKbJdZu5sSLDsg

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/29/opinion/sunday/we-asked-people-to-say-something-nice-about-trump-heres-what-we-heard.html

2020-11-01

The last thing I read or ever will read by Michael Kinsley. It was July 29, 2017. I gave my Kinsley books away to the library after this. Perhaps that was the wrong thing to do... Michael Kinsley (2017-07-29): We Asked People to Say Something Nice About Trump. Here���s What We Heard https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/29/opinion/sunday/we-asked-people-to-say-something-nice-about-trump-heres-what-we-heard.html: ���Yes, it���s true that Hillary Clinton got more votes, but he got the votes of more than 62 million people.... The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and other establishment outlets have been brazenly, laughably hostile to Mr. Trump, in their news pages as well as their opinion sections. Maybe this hostility is justified. In fact, I think it probably is. But that doesn���t justify reaching out to twist stories or looking for the anti-Trump angle. Nor does it justify the open hoping���if not assuming���that something will come along to rid us of this turbulent hotelier. Impeachment is supposed to be an occasional tragic necessity, not just another tool for replacing the results of an election.... There has been endless vilification of the guy and speculation about how we might get rid of him.... Earlier this year, The New York Times allowed me to ask its readers, ���Is there nothing nice you can say about the man who, after all, is our president?���... An alarming number of readers demanded that their subscriptions be canceled because this one pro-Trump article appeared in a daily sea of antagonism to him. Should it really count as pro-Trump to say, well, he���s done this one good thing among all the bad things?���

.#journamalism #moralresponsibility #notetoself #2020-11-01

Wolf: US Global Role at Stake���Noted

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0hyYd_ySdCyLyX4IseQV6_I4A

https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/noted-wolf-global-role-2020-10-31.pptx

2020-10-31

Martin Wolf: US Global Role at Stake in This Election https://www.ft.com/content/61e731be-dc67-476a-bdd8-eab4e4d34007: ���This US election is the most important since 1932, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt became president in the depths of the Depression. With much trial and error, FDR saved democracy, at home and abroad���

...The re-election of Donald Trump would undo much, if not all, of that legacy. Yet his defeat would not end the danger. If that is to happen, American politics has to be transformed.

This election is so important, because the US plays a unique role in the world. It has long been the paramount model of a functioning liberal democracy, leader of the countries that share these values and an essential player in resolving any big global challenge. The re-election of Mr Trump would signify a rejection of all three roles.... FDR...

In his State of the Union address of 6 January 1941, he committed the US to promoting four freedoms: freedom of speech; freedom of worship; freedom from want; and freedom from fear. These were not idle vows. Over the ensuing half century, the world experienced a great spread of democracy and reduction in poverty. Neither would have happened without the institutions the US created, the habit of co-operation it promoted and the prosperity it spread....

Constructive and competent leadership by a democratic US is needed more than ever.... Mr Trump cannot lead such a US. His defeat would not, however, end the threat of US retreat. His party would again do everything it can to thwart a Democratic administration. The strategy of ���pluto-populism������the marriage of solipsistic wealth to white middle-class rage���would persist, with the help of the Supreme Court. Whatever happens in the election, the US role in the world will remain in question���

.#noted #2020-10-31

Wolf: Long Economic COVID���Noted

Martin Wolf: The Threat of Long Economic Covid Looms https://www.ft.com/content/f9a0c784-712e-4bf9-b994-55f8d63316d9: ���Covid-19 has left many patients with debilitating symptoms after the initial infection has cleared. This is ���long Covid���. What is true of health is likely to be true of the economy, too���. To meet the threat of a ���long economic Covid���, policymakers must avoid repeating the mistake of withdrawing support too soon, as they did after the 2008 financial crisis. This danger is real, even if there remains much uncertainty about how the crisis will unfold���. We know that many businesses have been hurt, as demand for their output collapsed or they were locked down. The second waves of the disease now crashing on to many economies will make this worse.... But we also know that things could have been far worse. The world economy has benefited from extraordinary support from central banks and governments.... We know, nevertheless, that what has already happened is going to leave deep scars. The longer the pandemic continues, the bigger those scars will be.... Fiscal policy has to play a central role, as it alone can provide the necessary targeted support... Governments have to spend. But, over time, they must shift their focus from rescue to sustainable growth. If, ultimately, taxes have to rise, they must fall on the winners. This is a political necessity. It is also right���

.#noted #2020-10-30

Trump: In California, You Have a Special Mask...���Noted

Donald Trump: 'In California https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1321548174427852801, you have a special mask. You cannot under any circumstances take it off. You have to eat through the mask. Right, right, Charlie? It's a very complex mechanism. And they don't realize those germs, they go through it like nothing���

.#noted #2020-10-30



.#noted #2020-10-30