Vaccination Arithmetic

A good deal of the current discussion of vaccination takes it for granted that it is in almost everyone's interest to get vaccinated, hence that failure to get vaccinated is evidence of false beliefs or irrational behavior. To see why this is not true for everyone, it is worth looking at some numbers.

According to the CDC, the estimated infection fatality rate is 0.05 percent for 18-to-49-year-olds. I start my calculations with someone who is certain to get infected and has a life expectancy of thirty years. Thirty years is 262,800 hours, so the reduction in life expectancy is .0005x262,800=131 hours.

If you believe your chance of getting infected is only .1, not unreasonable if you regard the current wave as the last of the epidemic, that reduces it to 13 hours. If you are 25, which according to one source gives an IFR of .01, that takes it down to less than three hours. Saving that may not be worth the time and trouble of two injections, a likely few days of not very serious side effects and some small risk of more substantial side effects. The same is more true for younger ages or people in particularly good health.

It may be objected that a .1 probability of getting infected is unreasonably low, but that depends what you believe about vaccine effectiveness. If you are optimistic about vaccines, you should expect the current wave to be the last serious one. If you are pessimistic about vaccines, the risk of infection is much higher but the benefit of vaccination lower.

It may also be objected that I am looking only at death. I don't have, I don't think anyone has, good data on long term effects of getting Covid and recovering. The short term effects range from zero for asymptomatic infection to several weeks in the hospital for almost lethal infection. Including that would reduce the number of people for whom vaccination is not a clear benefit but not, I think, to zero. 

And, on the other side, I am ignoring people who have already had Covid, hence have protection comparable to, perhaps better than, that provided by vaccination. Vaccination apparently increases the protection, but not by much. The CDC estimates  that about a third of the population have had symptomatic Covid, so that is a large group for which the benefit should be reduced by at least an order of magnitude.

I am 76, so a similar calculation implies that I should be vaccinated, and I am. But I do not agree with the claim that everyone should obviously be vaccinated as well.

All of this is in terms of the self-interest of the individual. Vaccination also reduces the spread of the disease, benefiting others, although by how much is not clear. That is an additional argument for getting vaccinated but one whose size is harder to estimate.

Am I Irrational

 A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

— Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

In a number of ways my views and acts are difficult to explain as rational. I will list them:

1. As an economist, I believe in division of labor and the benefits of specialization and yet I find Heinlein’s ideal, quoted above, persuasive. I would like to be that sort of person. To the extent that I am — I think I can claim at least thirteen items on his list — I am proud of it.

2. I recently attended a social event, a dinner for forty or fifty people in the host’s home, with catered food. That felt wrong to me. When we host such events, as we occasionally do, almost all of the food, aside from any nibbles brought by the guests, is cooked by me and my family.

3. At this point in my life I am comfortably well off, yet I still make an effort to save money in small ways. We buy flour from Costco in 25 pound bags, pay attention to prices in the grocery store. I look at the right side of the menu as well as the left when deciding what to order. If we eat out, it is usually at relatively inexpensive ethnic restaurants. Looking for a new one, we ignore anything whose online description is $$$. I could afford to fly business class but never do, save for a few times when someone else was paying for it.

4. We do a lot of things in-house that it would arguably make more sense to do through the market. I build our bookcases in my basement workshop. If a button comes off a shirt or a pants seam comes out or the knee of my jeans wears through, my wife fixes it. At any reasonable per hour value for her time, it would usually be cheaper to hire the work out, perhaps to replace the jeans — I get mine from Haband, not L L Bean. But we don’t.

Arguably this is all irrational behavior, perhaps behavior that made sense at an earlier and poorer stage of life, retained through habit.

But perhaps not.

I am comfortably well off at present, but my income reaches me through an elaborate set of social, legal, and political mechanisms and the world is an uncertain place. Quite a lot of Americans who were comfortably well off in 1928 were no longer so in 1930. The same was true a fortiori for French aristocrats in the late 18^th century, Russian in the early 20^th. Even short of stock market collapse or revolution, there are multiple ways in which I could suddenly find myself in a much worse situation, such as a fraud at my broker’s that emptied my portfolio. Any money saved today through habits of thrift would vanish along with everything else, but the habits would not. Even if I am safe through my lifetime, my children extend my concern decades further, and their pattern of life will be in part modeled on mine.

In the world as it now is, most things I want done can be done better and cheaper by someone else, hence it pays to specialize, earn money doing what I am good at, use that money to get other things through the market. That mechanism makes possible for modern-day people a standard of living enormously higher than a self-sufficient homesteading household could produce with its own labor.

The world is an uncertain place. As long as I am alive and without serious injury I have my mind, my hands, my skills. In an uncertain future, there might come a time when I had no access to a market — perhaps not for a day, a month, or, in an extreme case of societal collapse, a lifetime. Modern Americans have lived in a safe world for a very long time, but past performance, as they say, is no guarantee of future returns. There might come a time when I could no longer support myself by teaching, writing, speaking, perhaps a time when I would need to flee my country and find other ways of making a living. Safer not to be a one trick pony.

I conclude that while it makes sense to do most things through the market — I do not grow my own wheat and grind it for flour or spin and weave my own cloth — there is much to be said for maintaining a range of skills, the sort of range Heinlein describes if not his exact list. Just in case.

Insofar as being to some degree a generalist is prudent, it is admirable. Insofar as it is admirable, it is something one feels good about, wishes to demonstrate.  By, for example, feeding forty people out of your kitchen or building your own bookcases.

 

Writing a Novel Backwards

About twenty years ago I wrote Harald, my first novel, started a sequel, decided to work on an unrelated novel instead, wrote a sequel to that, planned a third book in the series. When that project stalled I decided to go back to the abandoned sequel and try to complete it. 

At which point it occurred to me that there was something I should do first. Harald has an implicit backstory, a history of the lands and people before the story starts. To produce a second novel in the same setting I should know that history. 

It was my first novel and it had not occurred to me while writing it that I needed to work out the timeline implied by things characters said, scenes they remembered, bits of dreams. Solving that problem, reconstructing the backstory from fragments of information, felt like historical research — except that the history being researched was fictional. World building, in my experience, feels more like discovery than invention.

I started by going through the book collecting everything in it that had implications for events before the book started, then worked out how to make all of it as nearly consistent as I could manage. It was fun, so I decided to write a blog post about it. 

For example ...

Central to the story is the repeated attempt by an aggressive empire to annex the kingdom of Kaerlia, where most of it happens, four invasions before the book starts, three more during it. Comments by characters imply that the first invasion was  twenty years before the start of the story. Or twenty-five. Or thirty. If I had spotted the inconsistencies before the book was published, as I should have, I would have reduced the disagreements to a more realistic year or two. Since I didn't, I needed to decide what the right number was, interpret the others as careless mistakes. To decide which number to pick ...

My protagonist's grandson appears to be about twelve or thirteen when the story starts. If I assume he was born when his father was eighteen, which is as young as seems plausible, his father would have been conceived about thirty-one years before the story starts. It is clear from details in the text that Harald was not yet married to Gerda at the time of his first battle, probably not for a year or two after, so that battle must have been at least thirty-two years before the story starts. It ended a failed invasion of the empire by the kingdom, so it seems plausible that the first invasion the other way would have been a few years later, putting it about thirty years before the story starts. That also fits the fact that my protagonist, a young adult in his first battle, appears in the book at about the age I was when I wrote it, somewhere in his fifties.

So the first invasion was thirty years before the story starts. Problem solved.

What about the fourth? There are three passages that could all be references to the same battle. One describes Artos, an  important secondary character, as the junior legion commander in a defeated imperial army. By the time we see him he has become the most prominent commander in the empire, which should have taken at least a few years. Another passage implies the death in battle of a woman whose daughter, a young adult, describes someone as sounding like her mother. The context is archery practice, which suggests that she was at least seven or eight before her mother died, which puts the battle she died in at most ten years before the story starts. 

I conclude that all three passages are references to the battle that ended the fourth invasion and that it happened between five and ten years before the opening scene of the book.

Why, for the sequel, do I need the dates of failed invasions? I do not know all the reasons, since I have not written it yet, but I expect parts of the story to involve Belkhan, an imperial province with a history of rebellion. The most recent rising was set off by the Imperial defeat at the end of Harald, which makes it plausible that earlier rebellions were similarly linked to earlier defeats. My objective is to make the whole story, two books, perhaps eventually three, feel like a consistent picture, one where things fit together. 

My main points in this somewhat odd blog post are:

1. I should have done all of this before publishing the novel. So should you if you are writing a novel.

2. But  doing it backwards was fun.

My European Speaking Trip (yet again)

It appears that the U.K. will start accepting U.S. vaccinations in a few days, so I am again planning a European speaking trip, probably starting in about a month. I expect it will either start or end in London, since it's an easy city to get to from the U.S. and I usually have at least two speaking invitations there. I usually spend two weeks on a trip. 

My standard terms are expenses; I have no objection to an honorarium but don't require one. Mostly I want an interesting audience in an interesting place. I am only interested in countries that accept U.S. vaccination or don't require vaccination.

P.S. I have  decided to postpone the trip, given that infection rates are going up in the US and UK and the amount of protection against Delta provided by vaccination seems uncertain.

A Delta Conjecture

Infection rates in the U.K. went steeply up and are now going steeply down. There was a similar but somewhat more gradual pattern earlier in India, where Delta first appeared, and I believe in some other countries. That suggests the possibility that a small minority of the population is very vulnerable to Delta. When it first appears it runs rapidly through that minority, then starts to fall when enough of them have either died of it or recovered and become mostly immune.

Further anecdotal evidence comes from a friend whose father and daughter both recently had breakthrough cases, got Covid in spite of being fully vaccinated. That suggests that vulnerability may be genetic. The obvious test would be to see if infections cluster by families more this time than in previous rounds of Covid infection.

How to Lie While Telling the Truth: This Time on Vaccination Effectiveness

I have had two previous posts on people using a true statement to mislead, one on religion, one on the effects of climate change. This is the third.

99% of COVID deaths are now of unvaccinated people, experts say

And, from a different story:

More than 99% of recent deaths were among the unvaccinated, infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci said earlier this month on NBC's Meet the Press,

Such claims struck me as implausible. The estimated effectiveness of the vaccines used in the U.S. is about 95%. Since a majority of adults, and a large majority of those most vulnerable, are vaccinated, one would expect more than 5% of those dying to be vaccinated. It might be somewhat lower if more of the unvaccinated are located in areas with higher than average infection rates but it would be surprising if it was that much lower.

The solution appears part way down the story under the headline:

In Texas, 99.5% of people who died from COVID from February through July 14 weren't vaccinated,

As of the beginning of February very few people had been vaccinated and deaths were running about ten times their current level. A calculation for a period starting then can be expected to greatly overestimate the current ratio of unvaccinated to vaccinated deaths. Another story I came across was for a period starting in December.

What the current ratio is I don't know — possibly no one does. Fauci's claim is about the past month, but an AP news story giving the same figure he did (.8%) added:

The CDC itself has not estimated what percentage of hospitalizations and deaths are in fully vaccinated people, citing limitations in the data.

Among them: Only about 45 states report breakthrough infections, and some are more aggressive than others in looking for such cases. So the data probably understates such infections, CDC officials said.

Reading the stories, the consistent theme is the need for more people to get vaccinated. I agree that it would be a good thing if more people got vaccinated, but not that the truth should be stretched to get them to do it.

I don't have current statistics for the ratio of vaccinated to unvaccinated deaths — probably nobody does, judging by the CDC quote — but I note that, according to a recent news story, 20% of recent infections in the LA area are of fully vaccinated persons. The story includes:

Dr. Barbara Ferrer, the department's director, told the Los Angeles Times that if you get COVID-19 after vaccination, "your chances of both ending up in the hospital, ending up in an ICU, ending up intubated are much less than the chances of that happening if you're somebody who is unvaccinated."

According to the published information on vaccine effectiveness, however, protection against hospitalization is about 94%, about the same figure I have seen for protection against infection. I do not know what the figures are for probability of dying. That's a sufficiently rare event so that we probably don't have good data on it from the trials.

A Europe Trip in August

The U.K. has announced that it is opening up on July 19th, so I have started planning my next speaking trip, tentatively for the second half of August. Suggestions and invitations are welcome. As a general rule, I am willing to speak anywhere that will pay my expenses and provide an interesting audience. Honorarium optional. I will probably end the trip in London, since the U.K. is the most likely place to present Covid problems, and a delay at the end of a trip is less of a problem than at the beginning.

P.S. It has been pointed out to me that the U.K., at this point, is only accepting evidence of vaccination by the NHS, so I would still have to quarantine. Also, the situation in the EU is less clear than I thought — I'm not sure they accept US vaccination certificates. So it isn't clear when I will be able to take the trip.

Noah Smith on Adam Smith

In his substack Noahpinion, Noah Smith offers five quotes from The Wealth of Nations in order to show that Adam Smith was not really a wicked conservative (true) but a modern progressive (false), opposed to property and inequality and supporting progressive taxation. To support the latter claim, Noah offers:

It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.

If Noah had actually read the book he is quoting he would know that Smith starts his discussion of taxation with a series of maxims, of which the first is:

The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state.

Tax burden in proportion to revenue is a flat tax. The context of Noah's quote is a discussion of a tax on the rent of houses, where the fact that it falls more than proportionally on the rich is a disadvantage but not a decisive one. Saying something is “not very unreasonable” does not imply it is desirable.

Another quote Noah offers to show that Adam shares the views of a modern progressive is:

Wherever there is great property there is great inequality. For one very rich man there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many.

Noah interprets this as “Adam Smith decries the existence of inequality and poverty, blames property rights for this inequality …”

In fact, the passage continues:

The affluence of the rich excites the indignation of the poor, who are often both driven by want, and prompted by envy, to invade his possessions. It is only under the shelter of the civil magistrate that the owner of that valuable property, which is acquired by the labour of many years, or perhaps of many successive generations, can sleep a single night in security.

...Where there is no property, or at least none that exceeds the value of two or three days' labour, civil government is not so necessary.

Smith isn’t decrying the existence of inequality, he is arguing that the existence of inequality makes government necessary to protect property.

A third quote:

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”

Noah does not quote the next two sentences:

It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies, much less to render them necessary.

Smith isn’t arguing for antitrust law, he is arguing against government doing things that encourage cartel formation, the 18^th century equivalent of the 20^th century cartelization of the airlines by the CAB.

Noah’s conclusion:

Adam Smith decries the existence of inequality and poverty, blames property rights for this inequality, advocates progressive taxation as a remedy, and is innately suspicious of profit. He sounds more like Thomas Piketty than Milton Friedman.

It is true that Smith, like most people, decries poverty. All of the rest of the sentence is false. Adam Smith was an 18^th century radical who supported laissez-faire in large part because he thought it resulted in less poverty than the alternative, not the 21^st century progressive of Noah Smith’s imagination.

The important lesson from this is the danger of believing things you want to believe on the basis of quotations selected by people who share your views. To have written what he did after actually reading The Wealth of Nations Noah would have to be deliberately dishonest, which, so far as I can tell, he is not. He is, however, saying things in public which he has no good reason to believe are true — and are not.

This not the first, nor the second, time that I have found someone complaining that other people misrepresent Adam Smith while himself doing do.

Is the Infection Rate in Santa Clara County Zero?

According to the Santa Clara County Covid-19 Cases Dashboard, new infections are running about 25 to 30 a day. According to the testing dashboard, the test positivity rate is 0.5%. Checking online for the false positive rate from the most reliable of the tests, I get a range of estimates which includes 0.5%. So we don't actually know from the test results whether anyone at all is currently infected.

When I first noticed that, I checked the death rate from the same source. It was running at about 17 deaths from Covid a week, which suggested that there were still infections. This morning, however, when I looked at the same dashboard, the death rate (7 day average) was shown as about 3. It wasn't a drop over time but a sharp change in the number given for past weeks, the same weeks that had shown a death rate of about 17 as of two days ago. 

My first guess was that they had for some reason replaced per week figures with per day figures and not bothered to tell anyone. But then someone pointed me at a recent news story reporting that the county had concluded it had been over reporting deaths and had just reduced its estimate for total Covid deaths by 22%. The reduction from 17 to 3 is a lot more than 22%, but the rate of actual Covid deaths is much lower than it was a few months ago so the ratio of mistakenly identified Covid deaths to actual deaths might be much higher — if, for instance, they tested everyone who died, using a test that had a significant false positive rate, and counted anyone who died with Covid as having died of Covid — as, according to the article, they had been doing.

An infection rate near zero with apparent deaths and infections almost all false positives fits the pattern of a rapid decrease in both deaths and infections down to a low level, followed by a roughly constant level of both thereafter. The rapid decrease implies a reproduction rate below 1, which should have meant a continued fall. 

So perhaps it stopped falling because it got to zero.

European Speaking Trip: The UK Problem

As I recently mentioned, I would like to travel in Europe this summer and give talks, having interrupted such a trip last March because of the pandemic. I usually start my trips in London, both because there are convenient flights to there and because I can usually arrange for two or three talks in the UK. Also, London has some of my favorite museums.

At the moment, however, an American traveling to the UK must, among other things, spend several days in quarantine, which I am reluctant to do, and the current lockdown rules make a talk undoable, at least indoors. I had been hoping that would change in time for a mid-July talk, one of my invitations being to Georgia for an event happening then. So far, however, the travel restrictions seem to be staying on and the increasing infection rate in the UK makes the lockdown likely to continue. One possibility would be to skip the UK, but it probably makes more sense to plan on a later trip. I note that Georgia currently has much higher infection rates and Covid death rates than the other countries I plan to visit.

Comments welcome, especially from anyone better informed than I am about the present and likely future situation in the UK.

Climate and Exploitative Taxation

The Tiebout model holds that competition for residents among local governments forces each to provide the optimal level of local public goods. One limitation to the argument is that although an individual can take his labor and his capital out of a locality whose government charges him more than the value it provides, his land remains behind.

Model a local government as a dictatorship in order to explore the non-political constraints it faces. Assume all citizens are identical. The optimal level of local public goods costs $10,000 per capita to produce. An adjacent polity currently produces that level of services at that price in taxes, as per Tibout.

The dictator sets taxes at $11,000 per capita, spends $10,000 producing the optimal level of local public goods, pockets the rest. Citizens start to leave. As they leave, the value of fixed resources, land and houses, goes down. They continue leaving until the cost of selling their house and land at a low price and replacing them at a higher price in the adjacent polity just balances the advantage of paying a thousand dollars less a year in taxes. There is then a new equilibrium with a smaller population and higher taxes. A local dictator who is selfish and rational will adjust the tax rate to maximize his revenue while still providing the optimal level of local public goods, since providing more or less would, once population had adjusted, leave him poorer.

The implication of this model is that the greater the value of living in the territory of a local government, taxes and services aside, the higher the level of exploitative taxation we should expect. If living in California instead of Nevada is worth $10,000 a year, California can afford to charge $10,000 more in taxes net of the value of services before citizens start to leave for Nevada. This looks like an explanation for why California, with a notoriously attractive climate, also has notoriously high taxes.

California, of course, is not a dictatorship. To fit the model more closely to reality, assume special interests within the polity, such as organized public employees, have effectively captured control of revenue. The threat of teacher strikes or police strikes or sanitation strikes can be used to push wages and pensions above the market level, transferring the excess tax revenue to the public employees. From an accounting standpoint there is no exploitative taxation, since the cost of the services provided, including the cost of those wages and pensions, absorbs all of the tax revenue.

This line of argument was suggested to me by an online discussion of what the disadvantages were of living in a low tax state where one participant wrote:

Whenever I've fisked the stats on such things all I've been able to see is that it is much worse to be a public employee in states without income tax. Schools don't seem to be worse, but being a teacher is worse, as an example.

One implication of the model is that there should be a correlation between the level of taxes in a state or local government and the natural advantages of its location. To test that implication, find or calculate an estimate of the natural advantages of different locations, taxes and services aside, and see if it correlates with level of taxes.

[Complaints about the formatting of this post should go to blogger.com not to me. All of the body of the post was set to the same font and font size.]

A European Speaking Trip this Summer?

In March of last year I cut short a speaking trip and flew home because of the pandemic. It now looks as though things should be mostly over in another few months, so I am considering another trip, probably in July or August. Hopefully it would include Ljubljana, an interesting city that was to be the next stop on my trip. Probably London, possibly Prague, possibly Budapest if the pandemic is under control in Hungary by then. Possibly other places. 

Anyone interested?

When I Was Young

In the process of working on my current book, I came across three different talks that I gave at various times in the past. Two are webbed videos, one a debate with George Smith on whether economics or philosophy was the proper basis for libertarianism, one a talk I gave on problems with libertarianism. I have converted both to text for the book — here and here. I have cleaned up the computer generated text of my talk and my half of the debate, have not yet succeeded in getting in touch with George to get him to clean up his half. 

Both talks were at an event held in 1981 — we all look much younger. The third and oldest is a recording of the initial speeches in a debate I had with Tom Hayden, a prominent leftist, in 1977. I found it interesting mostly for the different arguments I was using at the time. The recording (my part starts at 15:03) and a text transcription of my half of it are both webbed. 

Comments welcome.