Coronavirus enables elite universities to pull off the ultimate scam?

by philg

“Stanford cancels in-person classes due to coronavirus”:

In-person classes at Stanford University will be canceled beginning March 9th, as a faculty member has tested positive for coronavirus, and two students have self-isolated after “possible exposure.” Neither student has tested positive for the virus yet, according to a statement from the university, but Stanford provost Persis Drell said late Friday that the university will move some classes online “to the extent feasible.”

First the big research universities figured out that they could charge more than $50,000 per year in tuition for in-person classes taught by graduate students with a tenuous hold on the English language. Now they’ve figured out that they can charge $50,000 per year without having to deliver in-person classes at all!

How about our local universities here in Boston? Our class at Harvard Medical School has been moved online. The result is a terrible loss of efficiency. Helping small teams with SQL queries via Webex takes about 3X longer compared to wandering around a room and being able to look at the same physical screen. The core undergrad and graduate classes are Harvard are going to be moved online starting on March 23, after Spring Break is over (and students are being asked not to come back to campus). MIT is following a similar protocol (WCVB).

Meanwhile, despite coronavirus, the big issues of our day are still waiting to be resolved by our brightest minds. A poster cluster in Harvard Yard, afternoon of March 10, 2020:

My favorite poster above is the “when it all goes wrong” in an election context poster. Presumably this is defined by the wrong candidate winning and one learns that in a course titled “Bad things Deplorables do when you forget to take away their right to vote.”

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Doctor at a big hospital in Massachusetts cannot order a coronavirus test

by philg

A friend is a physician at a Boston-area hospital with nearly $1 billion in annual revenue and more than 250 beds.

This evening I asked what he would do if a patient came in with the full slate of obvious coronavirus symptoms. “If his condition is critical, I can admit him,” Doctor Friend said, “but I can’t order a coronavirus test. In fact, the hospital has been trying to get the word out to people not to come to the hospital if they want a test.”

How is that possible? “We can’t do a coronavirus test in-house,” he responded. “I’ve heard that Quest is gearing up and will have millions of tests available soon. Once they’re ready, we can order tests through Quest.”

If a doctor in a big hospital in a big city cannot order a test, how can we have any confidence in what we’re told are the latest infection numbers for the U.S.? How can anyone know how many of our neighbors are infected with coronavirus and how many simply have a bad cold or a mild flu?

Separately, I ran into a friend who runs a small pharmacy with his brother. “Our sales are up 30 percent,” he said. “Mostly cleaning products, hand sanitizer,and so forth. We were able to buy some alcohol at twice the usual price and then we marked it up to $8, but now we’re sold out of almost everything.” Is any of this stuff useful to an average consumer? If the family doesn’t have coronavirus, what is the value in sanitizing everything? If a family member does have coronavirus, what is the value in cleaning up after the fact? “Unless you have new people coming into your household every day,” he replied, “I don’t see what difference it would make versus just washing your hands on returning home. But it makes people feel good to do something.”

He did not think that this round of coronavirus would turn out to be significant. He thought that it would, like the flu, kill some older people and then disappear for the summer.

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Investing in the time of plague?

by philg

Thought experiment: What stocks will go up in response to the coronavirus plague?

One idea: Comcast and similar cable TV stocks. If people are stuck at home they won’t mind paying for premium channels and will be less likely to cut the cord.

Second idea: airlines and hotel stocks. “Buy on bad news” is the theory here.

Readers: better ideas?

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Thomas Edison and electronic voting

by philg

Another day, another batch of primary elections. (How are the candidates doing? Is it obvious at this point that Biden (“the senile puppet,” as an immigrant friend puts it) will win everything?)

I recently finished Edison by Edmund Morris. It turned out that, like the Iowa Democrats, Thomas Edison thought that tabulating votes was a problem in search of a tech solution:

Working nights at Western Union, and by day literally under Williams’s roof in a third-floor attic, Edison invented and made half a dozen devices, including a stock ticker, a fire alarm, and a facsimile telegraph printer (“which I intend to use for Transmitting Chinese Characters”). He executed his first successful patent application on 13 October [1868; age 21] for an electrochemical vote recorder, whittling the submission model himself from pieces of hardwood. “To become a good inventor, you must first know how to use a jackknife.” It was a clever device—too clever to be commercial, as he soon found out. Designed to speed up the laborious process of vote counting in legislative bodies, it took signals of “aye” or “nay” from electric switches on every desk and imprinted them on a roll of chemically prepared paper, in each case identifying the signal with the legislator’s name. At the same time it separately tabulated the votes on an indicator dial. Edison’s dream of seeing his “recordograph” clicking and spinning in the chambers of Congress dissolved when he heard that speedy voting was the last thing politicos wanted in the passage of bills. They needed time to lobby one another in medias res. Edison resolved that hereafter he would invent only things that people wanted to use.

Since at least 1868, then, we have been inventing better machines for counting American votes, but nobody has worked on inventing better Americans!

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China will close its borders to Americans soon?

by philg

Right now we’ve tried to close our border with China. The US State Department says don’t go there. Airline flights have been cut back.

Yet what if the widely mocked Chinese government turns out to have been the only example of taking effective measures to stop the virus from spreading? China will soon be free of coronavirus while a pandemic rages in most of the world’s countries (thinly populated Finland escaped the 1348 Black Death, but they’ve already suffered from COVID-19).

A Japanese friend based in Shanghai told me that the Chinese are beginning to establish quarantines for visitors arriving from South Korea and Japan (confirmed via Reuters). When do they say that Americans aren’t welcome or have to be in a dog kennel for two weeks?

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Black Death lesson: immigration will discourage women from working

by philg

“The Black Death: The World’s Most Devastating Plague” by Dorsey Armstrong, a professor at Purdue, includes a great lecture on economics. One of the effects of a reduction in population was a rise in wages. Market-clearing wages turned out to be high enough to induce women to work in much larger numbers than previously. This, in turn, was one reason it took hundreds of years for the European population to return to pre-Plague levels. Working women would elect to delay having children and would have fewer total children.

Via immigration and children of recent immigrants, the U.S. has been expanding its population, the reverse of what happened during the Black Death. Simultaneously, Americans are decrying (a) stagnant wages for the working class, (b) the lack of women in the workforce, and (c) the wages paid, specifically, to those who identify as women. (One definite difference between the Middle Ages and today is the percentage of the population that can qualify to be placed in the “women” category!)

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Immigrants are not on welfare…

by philg

… but there will be a epidemic of coronavirus in the U.S. if the millions of immigrants who can’t afford health care at U.S. rates are denied health insurance welfare (Medicaid).

“Washington’s Ferguson, 17 other state AGs protest immigrant ‘public charge’ changes during coronavirus outbreak” (Seattle Times):

Ferguson and the others asked the administration Friday to stop implementing the new version of a rule that allows some immigrants to be denied green cards if they’re deemed likely to be dependent on the government, based on life circumstances such as having received public benefits, including Medicaid in certain cases.

The Washington attorney general sent a letter to U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Citizenship and Immigrant Services officials, arguing the new “public charge” rule is undermining efforts to limit the spread of COVID-19 by deterring immigrants from using medical benefits or applying for them, according to the attorney general’s office.

The same folks and the same media regularly inform us that immigrants are the hard-working engine of the U.S. economy and an insignificant number are collecting welfare benefits, such as Medicaid.

“17 attorneys general ask administration to delay public charge rule during coronavirus outbreak” (CNN):

“DHS received warnings of the potentially devastating effects of the Rule if its implementation were to coincide with the outbreak of a highly communicable disease — a scenario exactly like the one confronting our communities with the COVID-19 public health emergency,” the letter says. “Your agency completely failed to consider such legitimate concerns.”

“DHS openly concedes the Rule could lead to ‘increased prevalence of communicable diseases,’ disenrollment from public programs, and increased use of emergency rooms as a primary method of health care,” it says. “Washington State has already had ten deaths attributable to COVID-19. The State is doing everything in its power to limit the spread of the disease and prevent additional fatalities.”

Ferguson says states, cities, and counties are “undertaking similarly dramatic efforts to limit the spread of the disease and mitigate its harmful effects” and deterring immigrants from using medical benefits “undermines and frustrates our public health professionals’ efforts, putting our communities and residents at unnecessary risk.”

From CNN in 2018, “Stephen Miller’s detestable assault on citizenship”:

The most troubling aspect about Miller’s proposal is that it plays into biases about immigrants — that they are all on welfare, that they are gaming the system, that they are a burden on the country. In fact, a 2013 Cato Institute study noted that poor immigrants use public benefits at a lower rate than poor native-born citizens.

So… an insignificant number of immigrants marching toward citizenship are on welfare, but if this insignificant number does not get Medicaid, native-born Americans will be felled like pine trees in a Georgia paper forest.

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Popularity of Bernie Sanders proves that Marx was right?

by philg

Karl Marx remains one of the most referenced and taught authors in Academia today. The best that one has been able to say about him was that he was a great historian and sociologist, but a failure as a prophet. It was supposed to be a rich industrialized country that turned socialist and, ultimately, communist, not a relatively poor and just-beginning-to-industrialize country such as Russia. (the Bolsheviks got a big boost from Germany, though, which may have distorted the natural course of history)

What if the socialist governments that returned to a market system, e.g., in Russia and China, were not evidence that Marx was wrong, but only that the particular countries that had adopted socialism weren’t rich enough?

The U.S. right now is in an unprecedented position of material prosperity. Americans on welfare today have a far higher material standard of living than did middle class Americans in Marx’s time. Suppose that Bernie wins the primary elections and then at least wins the popular vote in November. Wouldn’t that be evidence that Marx was right? Once a country is rich enough, the working class citizens will demand socialism and many of the elites will go along with this.

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Is the death rate from the Diamond Princess a reasonable worst-case estimate for the coronavirus death rate in the U.S.?

by philg

Apologies for the macabre subject, but with everyone freaking out about the coronavirus, I’m wondering if it makes sense to step back and ask why the Diamond Princess wasn’t a worst-case scenario. The ship held 3,700 people. The virus spread all around the ship before anyone knew what was going on. Then everyone on board was kept on board, all breathing from the same ventilation system, eating food from the same kitchen (almost surely prepared by at least some workers who had the virus, but didn’t know it). Out of 3,700 passengers and crew, 6 have died (Business Insider).

That’s a death rate of 1/6th of 1 percent (0.16 percent), and concentrated among people whose immune systems were weakened due to other factors (i.e., people who might have died a year later from the flu).

The U.S. overall is not more crowded than a cruise ship. Why should we expect more than 0.16 percent of Americans to die when this is all over? That’s unfortunate, of course, and a huge number when multiplied by 330 million: 535,000. But it is not an economy-ending or country-ending number. And, since our country is not in fact as densely populated as a cruise ship, the real number might be far less than this upper bound. It might be closer to the 80,000 who died from the flu in 2017-2018 (source). And there might not be that many additional deaths because the same people who get killed by the flu are also susceptible to COVID-19.

One factor that could explain how the death rate could be higher: as the disease spreads, hospitals and other health care resources will be spread thin. But, on the other hand, knowledge about how to treat the infection will improve. If these two factors cancel out, we’re back to the Diamond Princess being the worst-case scenario. Finally, consider that the cruise ship demographic is older and more fragile than the general population.

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